Slate eBook Club - Best of 2003

by Slate. com

  And though the association between the goose-step and authoritarian regimes is permanently sealed in the collective cultural consciousness, the march today is mostly viewed as an obsolescent remnant of a maniacal past. "Since World War II," writes William McNeill, author of Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, "widespread revulsion against everything associated with the Nazis has discredited mass muscular manifestations of political attachments." Except in North Korea, apparently.

  Where there isn't revulsion, there's humor. Years of sarcastic derision—both in the popular culture at large and by comedians such as Mel Brooks and ex-Monty Python cast member John Cleese—have ultimately relegated the goose-step to the realm of the ridiculous. In his short-lived but still beloved mid-'70s British sitcom Fawlty Towers, Cleese played Basil Fawlty, proprietor of a hotel where, in one classic episode, a group of Germans has come to stay. "Don't mention the war!" becomes Fawlty's ruling mantra as he tries to accommodate his guests. But of course he can't do anything but mention it, and at one point even finds himself goose-stepping around the dining room, turning a method of propaganda into a punch line.

  "Every twelve years, give or take this moment"

  By Dionisio Martínez

  Posted Tuesday, June 10, 2003, at 7:26 AM PT

  Every twelve years, give or take this moment, there are horses within

  reach—wild, nameless horses like beasts before the flood, their hoof-

  beats provoking the disheveled winds to mark an unremarkable spot

  where the lesser roads became the plain; it's not a stampede or the swish

  of a drummer's brushes or even imaginary breathing; it begins like

  a story, which is to say: it begins by disappointing. Paper horses cut

  out of comic books, their riders calling out their own names from what's

  left of them on what's left of the pages. Each of the rooms in the house

  is swept according to tradition, dust neatly piled in the center. It is some-

  times possible from this vantage point to see the difference between

  wholeness and a semblance of wholeness, to understand the duties of a

  bystander when dark grass rises through sheets of ice. One horse carved

  out of wood too green for burning—in a nod to innocence, when it was

  possible not to pay attention to detail: Is a child drawn to the intricacies

  of the saddle, or is there an innate compulsion to ride bareback? We carve

  the past as we see it, and our vision is, at best, no more reliable than

  TV reception avoiding sunspots. There's always memory, of course—that

  rented room paid in full before we move back in: if the horse were

  hollow, we'd be thinking of places we know precious little about; we

  would climb inside and wait for orders; we are willing to be that small.

  Elegy for the Saint of Letting Small Fish Go

  By Eliot Khalil Wilson

  Posted Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2003, at 10:05 AM PT

  I. You too might step into a puddle of fire,

  or splash through a stream of glowing lava

  where only moments before you were barefoot

  in your kitchen after a late night of too much wine

  and, nearly naked, frying bacon at the stove.

  A burn like this is a different thing the doctor said

  and I can believe it. I was a different thing.

  I was a man with an unquenchable oil well fire on his feet

  that would blaze up as the medicine ebbed.

  And the skin curled over, brown-red,

  too much like the meat I was cooking in the pan that I dropped

  —an irony not lost on even the youngest of nurses

  drinking and bacon don't mix

  she kidded as I healed.

  Yet had my wounds burned like Vulcan's forge

  they'd be a distant fire in light of the child

  behind the glass in the opposite bed.

  II. Where were you saints when the fire first licked his hands?

  Hadn't he in living prayed to you?

  I want the saint of ice cream trucks

  to turn off the carnival, climb down, and explain it all—

  account for all the betrayers—

  The saints of reachable branches and bank envelope lollipops,

  the saints of his mother's cool arms, of new basketball shoes, and professional wrestling.

  The saints of tree forts, pocket knives, and stadium food.

  The saints of waffles and eyebrows and box turtles.

  The saint of jam.

  The saint of his own bed.

  Where were you saints of wheelies and rodeo clowns and rockets?

  III. I was at home when the sepsis took him

  and they wheeled him to that all-light room

  and when they covered his face.

  Yet I had seen his grafts and debridements,

  the twice daily baths and dressings,

  and the shock at that last turn of gauze

  —how the fire bit at his summer legs and arms—

  black skin, blacker still, and red.

  I was there to see the lost mother

  who would live in fire for the child she had known.

  There to see all who entered shake their heads

  as if wondering as I wondered

  how so small a thing can carry such pain

  —pain that pushed through the morphine push—

  —pain that conquered even those numbing Nordic gods—

  Vicodin, Ativan, and Tylox.

  It is not my place.

  He was not my child,

  and I could never speak to him,

  but hold him out of the fire.

  I would not have him burned again.

  Give him back to rocking water,

  to pendulum down through the fingers of the sun.

  Let the ocean run his veins and heart—

  full, then empty, then full again.

  Or return him to the folding ground,

  face up to the sky.

  A boon for dreamlessness,

  this petty thief of time.

  Not a Poem About Driving at Night

  By Erika Meitner

  Posted Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2003, at 8:55 AM PT

  Light production is associated with the survival of a species,

  but the insect crawling across my dash seems uneventful—

  looks so much like a roach that without hesitation, I kill it.

  I don't realize what I've done until my scrap of parking ticket

  begins to glow phosphorescent green, specks trailing like radar,

  like bridge lights or necklace beads over the odometer.

  When I die the Buddha will ask questions. Because of this error

  I will be reincarnated smaller. Murderous girl, what is the speed of light?

  What if I were winged and luminous? Could I shatter like a constellation

  across the night sky? Could my body light a path through darkness?

  All summer fireflies filled the field behind our house with morse code,

  with patterns. Blinking to mate, you said. Male flashing spontaneously in flight.

  Love is scientific—we glow, shudder, rest once they come to us.

  I think of you steadily farther away, not thinking of me, thinking of me,

  getting up from the couch and shutting the lights,

  feeling your way along the familiar wall to bed.

  Remember my head in the crevice of your armpit,

  my ear suctioned to your chest? Something feeds the fire,

  then it goes out. They blink, I blink;

  red tips to their wings, and no song.

  The Not-So-Wild Thing

  What lessons is Maurice Sendak's Brundibar really teaching?

  By Ann Hulbert

  Posted Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2003, at 10:55 AM PT

  When Maurice Sendak publi
shed Where the Wild Things Are 40 years ago, both fans and detractors called him a Wild Thing. Until then, he'd been best known as the illustrator of Else Holmelund Minarik's Little Bear books, which launched Harper & Row's "I Can Read" line in 1957. But here was Sendak making mischief of one kind and another in a picture book all his own as the 1960s got under way. Gone was the tractable (and adorable) cub who had lured baby boomers like me into reading by themselves. Gone, too, was the attentive mother of those stories, so deft in dealing with her furry 5-year-old's fledgling efforts to define his identity. Instead Sendak had conjured up a hellion in a wolf suit (Max is a classic 4-year-old) whose fed-up mother sends him to bed without dinner. And Sendak had created a centerfold of cavorting monsters—a rumpus he dared to let loose on a younger read-aloud crowd.

  Librarians issued warnings—"It is not a book to be left where a sensitive child might come upon it at twilight," one worried—and Sendak won the much-coveted Caldecott Award for the book in 1964. He couldn't have asked for a better ticket out of the tame confines of what he has derided as "Kiddiebookland." Joining Dr. Seuss (whose antic The Cat in the Hat debuted the same year as Little Bear), Sendak acquired the status of an "agent of revolution and liberation," as Tony Kushner puts it in the forthcoming Art of Maurice Sendak.

  In fact, Sendak is something arguably more subversive than that: an agent of sublimation. From Little Bear (and before) on through his collaboration with Kushner on his new picture book, Brundibar, Sendak stands out in postwar children's literature as America's most imaginative spokesman for, as Freud would say, the reality principle. Mischief-maker though he is, Max lays down the law to the wild things; he parrots his bossy mother as he rebukes the beasts. Meanwhile, she's plainly cooling down offstage; on the last page, she has his supper set out for him in his bedroom. Sendak's is a spiky parable about the struggle for self-control, and it speaks to big readers and small listeners alike. It's a far cry from the chaos the Cat in the Hat wreaks while the kids watch aghast and their mother is off doing who knows what.

  I don't mean to slight the gift for delving into kids' dream lives that has become Sendak's signature. Those yellow-eyed wild things, the surreal cityscapes of In the Night Kitchen (1970), the hooded goblins of Outside Over There (1981), the weird underworld of We Are All in the Dumps With Jack and Guy (1993): His pictures, and also his texts, bring to life what Bruno Bettelheim called the "id pressures"—the nightmarish fears, grandiose desires, anger—that buffet children.

  At the same time, Sendak's books have the power to remind adults that we can still be baffled by such primal urges ourselves—especially when we're dealing with our children, whose deep need to rely on us, and defy us, is enough to unnerve and sometimes enrage any parent. His monsters and animals—who often serve as stand-ins for those inner forces and outer influences that kids have to contend with—aren't really so alien; you can't help feeling there's a big human inside the shaggy forms. And though the trademark Sendak child has the impish look of an upstart, there's also a curiously ancient, Old World aura about almost all of them. An implicit message emerges again and again in his books: The road to maturity entails a long struggle to master unruly impulses and appetites and acquire a moral imagination. It's a message Sendak seems to have become increasingly convinced we grown-ups need to hear as much as kids do.

  Or maybe even more than kids do. In Brundibar, which Sendak has pronounced his "crowning achievement, my last great collaboration," he has teamed up with his baby-boomer acolyte Kushner to burst out of the nursery and into history with his most overtly didactic drama yet. Brundibar, as its adult readers will know from the flap copy, is based on a Czech opera created in 1938 by a Jewish composer. An allegory of resistance to Hitler, it was staged 55 times by children in the Terezin concentration camp—with the approval of Nazi officials. They recognized the propaganda value of permitting, and even publicizing, a kiddie performance about two penniless siblings who go in search of milk for their sick mother and discover there's strength, and wealth and health, in numbers.

  Kushner and Sendak in turn mine the opera and its grim history for these dark ironies—and for lessons for our own time, too. The setting is Old Town Prague, portrayed in bright drawings in Sendak's "fat" folk-art style. (The artist has described his eclectic, yet completely distinctive, repertory as consisting of "a fine style, a fat style, a fairly slim style, and an extremely stout style.") His fans old and young can pore over what amounts to a reprise of his classic scenes and figures, some given new twists (a growling Little Bear!). Sendak has also dreamed up several garish new ogres (with truly awful tongues and in the case of the Hitlerian organ grinder, Brundibar, a telltale mustache).

  Meanwhile, Kushner, the gay socialist playwright who brought us Angels in America, imports some more up-to-date polemics into the text. Into the mouths of the little sibling narrators, he's slipped not just an indictment of Hitlerian tyranny but a criticism of capitalist selfishness, greed, and clamorous competition—an outcry against our consumerist, post-Columbine era. The children's pleas for help are drowned out by the "teeth-chattery bone rattley horrible song" of the hurdy-gurdy man Brundibar, who's showered with gold by grown-ups too busy "buying buying busy buying" to attend to the youthful woe.

  But the siblings (with the help of animals) rally a chorus of townschildren. A haunting ballad about the brevity of blissful mother-baby bonding melts the mercenary hearts of the adults, who join the kids in a communal assault on Brundibar. Never one to pass up an internal rhyme, Kushner has him getting "thumped and bumped and squished and vanquished." Brother and sister bring milk home to save mommy, proclaiming as they go that you need only "be brave and bullies will behave!" The authors arm the townsfolk large and small with banners proclaiming "our friends make us strong" and "the wicked never win."

  Sendak and Kushner have come up with a story that might almost pass muster with William Bennett—except, of course, that in their telling the moralizing isn't dispensed from above. The preachers and teachers here are children, summoning big wild things to heel. Certainly no one can accuse these authors of indulging in dreams of infantile transgression. But Sendak fans might be forgiven for wondering whether in striving to face the bleakest reality, he has succumbed for the first time ever to sentimentality.

  The Storyteller's New Clothes

  A new translation of Hans Christian Andersen.

  By Adam Kirsch

  Posted Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2003, at 8:17 AM PT

  Beloved writers are like lenient jailers—they let their creations sneak off the page and roam at large through our imagination. Most writers are lucky to grant such freedom to one character, a Sherlock Holmes or a Huck Finn; the greatest, like Dickens or Shakespeare, leave behind a whole family. But an even rarer achievement is to invent characters so inevitable, so primal that they seem never to have had an author at all. Surely no one person sitting at a desk created the Little Match Girl, Thumbelina, the Ugly Duckling?

  Of course, all of these characters—along with such stories as "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Snow Queen," and "The Red Shoes"—were either invented or given their definitive form by Hans Christian Andersen. But Andersen is almost never thought of as a literary artist, like his contemporaries Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Flaubert. He is usually grouped instead with the Brothers Grimm, who did not invent their folk tales but recorded them; or else he is reduced to a cliché, a kindly uncle surrounded by tots, as in the classic movie with Danny Kaye.

  But a new edition of Andersen's most famous tales, translated by Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank, means to change all that. The Franks declare their intention to treat Andersen as he is treated in his native Denmark: as a sophisticated modern writer, to be read and studied as seriously as his fellow Copenhagener, and one-time reviewer, Søren Kierkegaard. They translate Andersen's Danish into idiomatic contemporary English, capturing his deliberate colloquialism. More strikingly, they provide each of the 22 stories with footnotes, demonstrating their roots in Andersen's own li
fe. In many ways the book itself strains against their scholarship—it is a luxurious, oversized volume, featuring 19th-century illustrations, obviously meant to be read to children at bedtime. In this setting, the Franks' introduction—which by Page 4 is analyzing Andersen's masturbation habits—seems oddly adult.

  Yet the tension between the adult and the childlike, the literary and the folk, drove Andersen's stories from the beginning. His ambition was not to bring joy to children but to become a famous artist. "I covet honor and glory in the same way as the miser covets gold," he admitted. While Andersen's novels, plays, and travel-writing gained him a certain reputation in Denmark, it was not until 1835, when he published Tales Told for Children, that he achieved international celebrity. His first stories were retellings of folk tales heard in childhood. Soon, however, he put the form of the fairy tale at the service of an intensely personal and modern kind of fiction.

  Part of that modernity has to do with style. In the famous opening of "The Snow Queen," Andersen uses a broken narration that both imitates traditional storytelling and looks forward to stream of consciousness. "All right, let's get started! When we're at the end of the story, we'll know more than we do now, because there was an evil troll, one of the worst—it was the devil." There is an echo here of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, just as "Auntie Toothache"—framed as the journal of a student tormented by toothaches—anticipates the frantic unreliable narrator of Knut Hamsun's Hunger. And a post-Freudian age has no trouble understanding Andersen's sexually fraught, surreal metaphors, as in "The Red Shoes":