Neil Serven

I was in the second grade when Reading Rainbow premiered. I want to say that the first episode had the magician Harry Blackstone as a guest, but I’m not certain about that and the Internet doesn’t know.

My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Lemme, was not only into reading, she was into rainbows, so naturally she was a champion of the show. I remember when Bill Cosby did the reading for Arthur’s Eyes, which was the first book featured on the show that I had already read. (It’s required when you have glasses at age seven.)

Now LeVar Burton wants to bring Reading Rainbow back, and the host has launched a Kickstarter toward that end.

Because Generation X loves projecting its childhood staples on millennials, lest every awesome thing be lost to history, it took a mere 12 hours for Reading Rainbow to reach its million-dollar goal. It is now trying to reach $5 million within thirty-five days. “With the additional money,” says Alex Knapp at Forbes, “the company [RRKidz] aims to get not only on the web, but also to Android, game consoles, smartphones, and other streaming devices.”

The bridge across technologies would seem to be an obvious requirement for any media project in the twenty-first century. The new challenge, then, might not be instilling in children a love of storytelling via the written word but how to do so when the modern digital paradigm does all it can to tempt readers away from the confines of straight linear narrative. There is a delay in gratification when you read a book–that’s part of its social contract–and its enjoyment demands an uninterrupted streaming of engagement. And Reading Rainbow, as hard as it tries, cannot be anything other than a passive experience, one that teaches us less to enjoy reading than to enjoy being read to. (Adults have a similar relationship with NPR’s Selected Shorts). What the show cannot do is put books in kids’ hands and turn on the itch to dig deeper to find bliss.

But I’m glad it’s here to try.

Oh my God, I’ve lived a very simple life! You can say, Oh yes, at thirteen this happened to me and at fourteen . . . But those are facts. But the facts can obscure the truth, what it really felt like. Every human being has paid the earth to grow up. Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial costs—anybody can have that—I mean in truth. That’s what I write. What it really is like. I’m just telling a very simple story.

–Maya Angelou, from The Art of Fiction No. 119

As Short Story Month wraps up, Powell’s celebrates by naming its Short List of Best Short Story Collections of the 21^st Century (So Far), with thirty-one titles making the cut. Among them are veterans like George Saunders, Alice Munro, and Lorrie Moore, alongside rising stars such as Adam Levin (Hot Pink) and Kyle Minor (Praying Drunk).

The idea of a public intellectual belongs to a far-gone era, but the unusual emergence of Thomas Piketty’s treatise Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and the viral celebrity that has been attained by its author, has Sam Tanenhaus placing him alongside so-called rock stars from previous decades: Susan Sontag, Allan Bloom, Christopher Lasch, Francis Fukuyama, Samantha Power. (It is interesting that, even though Piketty is French, hotshot European thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Bernard-Henri Lévy go unmentioned in the article.)

Sontag embraced the role more willingly than the others:

As Ms. Sontag worked through the long history of outlaw art, she made herself, and her reactions, part of the story. “I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it,” she wrote. “That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can.”

That she talked about it in the pages of Partisan Review, a bastion of somber high seriousness, compounded the allure. So did Ms. Sontag’s dramatic good looks and sleek black-clad figure. Eventually she would impersonate herself in Woody Allen’s “Zelig” and pose for Annie Leibovitz. To this day, no intellectual has so elegantly played the role she actually lived.

The channels for such personalities have been winnowed. Hollywood would never welcome them back, and if it did, they would resist the irony that requires them to play along. We do not have The Dick Cavett Show anymore, are unlikely to see televised feuds in the Mailer-vs.-Vidal vein. Nobody watches C-SPAN2. The Daily Show and its companion programs try to do what they can without spitting into the soup. As we are finding out by this year’s slew of cancelled university commencement speeches, the free market rewards self-congratulation–for which there will never be an attrition of demand–and not the challenging of assumptions.

Likewise, Piketty’s ascent comes at a time when the public has been starving for someone to use their heft to smack around the job-creator myth and send it back to its lair. It is valuable that he has put into words what many laypeople have been thinking, and arming them with new arguments for the kitchen table, but it’s not going to help discourse on any level if that is the only reason people are reading his book.

If Piketty has a rival for celebrity, it might be Evgeny Morozov, whose writing does not eschew discomfort, but rather explores the dark tunnels of human interaction in the age of social media and offers well-intended caution about what the Internet promises versus what it delivers.

In the book Mr. Morozov puts quotation marks around every reference to “the Internet,” and with that tic he makes a larger point: readers should stop and question everything they have been taught about technology, including that the Internet exists.

Without such skepticism, Mr. Morozov and his supporters say, the public easily succumbs to the slick promises and catchwords of online entrepreneurs or TED talks — “open” or “generative” or “transparent” or “participatory.” And those words lead to real beliefs, with real consequences, he argues — for example, that privacy is just an archaic notion, or that information “wants to be free.”

On this Mother’s Day, Nadxieli Nieto’s Tumblr project Literary Mothers collects the testaments of eleven writers on the female authors who inspired them and their work.

Featured in the first batch: Matt Bell on Christine Schutt; Ashley Farmer on Joan Didion; Alexander Chasin on Andrea Dworkin, Audre Lorde, and Monique Wittig; Nadxieli Nieto on Nikki Giovanni; Amber Sparks on Isak Dinesen; Deb Olin Unferth on Gertrude Stein; Scott Cheshire on Kay Ryan; Porochista Khakpour on Can Xue; Lincoln Michel on Flannery O’Connor; Kelly Luce on Lois Lowry; Alissa Nutting on Lynda Barry; Erika Anderson on Cheryl Strayed.

I like Luce’s anecdote of acquiring The Giver through an act of shoplifting, and Farmer’s explanation how, through Didion, she opened herself to the idea of writing to discover what you know:

Didion has also said that writing is an aggressive, hostile thing—that you’re imposing your ideas on another person, that there’s so much “I” in it. But to me, writing to discover what you know is quite the opposite. It’s a call to humility. It’s the promise that writing can make us more human, more aware, more ourselves than we were before.

The project will remain open to new submissions, at least for the moment.

A memory: I’m 9 years old or thereabouts, at a yard sale with my mother. I come across a library-bound hardcover edition of something called The False Inspector Dew, by Peter Lovesey. I decide I have to have it.

My mother accedes. Never mind that the cover shows a man assailing a woman, his hand over her mouth, pearl necklace whipping around her neck. It comes at a time when I’m reading mysteries during idle hours at school—Encyclopedia Brown, Hardy Boys, only I keep skipping to the solutions at the end—and while this is obviously a step up in maturity, maybe the challenge is worth it.

I try the book but never finish it. It gets donated or tossed. But I remember the gaspy, sneering first page, the earliest demonstration I would discover of campy noir:

SS MAURETANIA. 9 SEPT 1921.

REFERENCE SUSPICIOUS DEATH ON BOARD HAVE INVITED CHIEF INSPECTOR DEW OF SCOTLAND YARD TO INVESTIGATE.

A. H. ROSTRON, CAPTAIN.

Chief Inspector Dew. The Commissioner remembered Dew. He was the man who had pulled in Dr Crippen. That was back in 1910. He was damned sure Dew had quit the force the same year.

He picked up a pencil. Under the message he wrote:

What’s this tomfoolery? Comedians are your department.    

Smiling to himself, he addressed it to his deputy.

The Deputy Commissioner was at Waterloo that day with Charlie Chaplin. Two hundred constables with arms linked were standing in support. Chaplin had come back to London after nine years in America. He had gone there as a member of the Karno troupe of music hall comedians. He was returning as one of the world’s most famous men. Thousands had gathered at the station.

When the train steamed in, the Deputy Commissioner and his senior men raced towards the compartment reserved for Chaplin. They seized him like a prisoner and hustled him along the platform. Beyond the barrier where the crowd was waiting, the blue line stood firm. Chaplin was funneled into a waiting limousine. Few people saw him.

Today I scored a Soho Press paperback edition of The False Inspector Dew on the front table of World Eye Bookstore for $3.

Utica was halfway between home and Niagara Falls. A five-day trip shortened to four because funds were drying up. Highway signs and trailers with curtains in the windows and buffalos and cacti painted on the sides, license plates from as far away as Saskatchewan. Your parents were able to get a room for a discount rate at the same Best Western you stayed in on the way there, and the pinball machine still showed you as having the second-place high score even though your brother Jason had hit your hand on purpose when you were toggling in your initials so they came out as SAA.

The May issue of Pithead Chapel is live and I’m pleased to have a new story, “Baby Elephant Walk,” a tale of steak houses and summer vacation and brothers and tourist kitsch.

Thanks to editor Keith Rebec and fiction editor Ashley Strosnider.

Light reading this month, between baseball season starting and other things.

John Updike Review, Spring 2013. Even though this issue is a year old, and my membership to the John Updike Society has lapsed, it was good to catch up on the JUR in light of the release of Adam Begley’s biography of the writer this month. There are two articles here that I particularly enjoyed. Vidya Ravi, a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge, writes about the theme of houses, structure and shelter in Updike’s 1968 novel, Couples. It starts with the observation that its protagonist, Piet Hanema, is an architect, and is a refreshing and comprehensive take on a novel that is too casually dismissed, I feel, as one of Updike’s forays into eyebrow-waggling suburban titillation. I was also glad to see Donald J. Grenier write about the subject of Updike as a “reluctant critic,” one whose training in visual art and New Yorker pedigree molded him into a reader who could dutifully evaluate the work of others as fair efforts of art without the itch of projection that too often guided his peers.

Book of Clouds, Chloe Aridjis. Second read. The first read was back when the book came out, in 2009, but all I could remember was the sublime way it evoked the best work of W.G. Sebald (Austerlitz, The Rings of Saturn). And yet, I couldn’t remember was what it was about. I worried that I might have been projecting too much on the book, so I read it again. The sense of euphoria I remember feeling came back quickly.

Aridjis is well-traveled: born in New York, raised in the Netherlands and Mexico City, schooled at Oxford and now living in London. It is obvious, from the descriptions in Book of Clouds, that she has spent a lot of time in Berlin as well.

The heroine of Book of Clouds is a young Mexican woman, Tatiana, who gets a job as a research assistant for an elderly historian named Weiss in his home. Mostly her work consists of transcribing the old man’s audio notes. Tatiana has no real connection to Berlin; she regards the voice announcing stops on the train as one of her few friends, but in wandering about the city, and listening to Weiss’s remembrances, she becomes haunted by its corners. At the beginning of the book she has convinced herself she has seen Adolf Hitler, still alive and disguised as a woman. She begins dating a young man she meets through her work and at one point, during a party, gets lost in the darkness of an underground bowling alley that had likely been used by the Gestapo.

Book of Clouds taps into the same ostalgie that gave us Good-Bye Lenin (a film I was inspired to re-watch after reading this book) and other works looking back at the years after the wall came down, a scramble to preserve in memory the many quotidian elements of East German life that disappeared in startlingly short time. Another book to which it might be compared is one that came later, Teju Cole’s Open City, another novel often felt to be influenced by Sebald. But the resemblances take different routes: Cole’s is about a perambulator, Aridjis’s about a man trying to tell his story through memory and history; and yet both books, almost coincidentally, feature random assaults committed on the protagonists near the end.

Quite Early One Morning, Dylan Thomas. This is a collection of miscellaneous writings, published by New Directions, that I bought along with a book of Thomas’ poetry. The writings include reviews, essays, some fiction, but I was most interested in what Thomas writes about Wales, which he describes in the title essay, as well as “Reminisces of Childhood,” “Holiday Memory,” and “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Describing a “sea-town” (likely Swansea, where he grew up) in “Quite Early One Morning”:

The sun lit the sea-town, not as a whole—from topmost down—reproving zinc-roofed chapel to empty but for rats and whispers grey warehouse on the harbour, but in separate bright pieces. There, the quay shouldering out, nobody on it now but the gulls and the capstans like small men in tubular trousers. Here, the roof of the police station, black as a helmet, dry as a summons, sober as Sunday. There, the splashed church, with a cloud in the shape of a bell poised above it, ready to drift and ring. Here the chimneys of the pink-washed pub, the pub that was waiting for Saturday night as an overjolly girl waits for sailors.

The town was not yet awake. The milkman lay still, lost in the clangour and music of his Welsh-spoken dreams, the wish-fulfilled tenor voices more powerful than Caruso’s, sweeter than Ben Davies’s, thrilling past Cloth Hall and Manchester House up to the frosty hills.

The town was not yet awake. Babies in upper bedrooms of salt-white houses dangling over water, or of bow-windowed villas squatting prim in neatly treed but unsteady hill-streets, worried the light with their half-in-sleep cries. Miscellaneous retired sea-captains emerged for a second from deeper waves than ever tossed their boats, then drowned again, going down, down into a perhaps Mediterranean-blue cabin of sleep, rocked to the sea-beat of their ears. Landladies, shawled and bloused and aproned with sleep in the curtained, bombazine-black of their once spare rooms, remembered their loves, their bills, their visitors, dead, decamped, or buried in English deserts until the trumpet of next expensive August roused them again to the world of holiday rain, dismal cliff and sand seen through the weeping windows of front parlours, tasselled table-cloths, stuffed pheasants, ferns in pots, fading photographs of the bearded and censorious dead, autograph albums with a lock of limp and colourless beribboned hair lolling out between the thick black boards.

It is weird and disconcerting to see Louis Menand, my favorite critic and New Yorker writer, review the new biography of John Updike, my favorite novelist (and former New Yorker writer). It is like when your teacher runs into your mother at the grocery store. I’m not sure I want them in the same room. Or walking the same planet. I don’t want one using my trust in our reader-writer relationship to influence how I perceive the other.

Ah: but here we are. And somehow it feels a bit of a relief that Menand’s review does not contain much that I didn’t already know. If anything, it lacks the devilish connections that make his writing most enjoyable. Menand’s excitements have mainly lain in post-war, Cold War-themed arts and letters; he writes best on subjects where art bleeds into history and the worldwide political zeitgeist informs culture. Compared to these subjects, Updike has always felt to me safe, white, provincial, reliably consistent, and not very interested in trying to damage neighborhoods or becoming part of the social conversation.

Even as well as the Rabbit books work around real-life news events as centers of metaphor—the moon landing as extraorbital rocketing into unknown heights, the Lockerbie bombing in the same novel the lead character’s heart explodes—they have never felt, to me, as though they were trying to redigest the world we were living in and give us back something new to be angry about. They were a view through the eyes of an adult male American character whose early success had left him slanted, entitled, anxious, and quickening to outrun something catching up to him. Couples and Rabbit Redux say a lot about the sixties, but do not try to leave us with any impression about the moral ambiguities of the sixties. Updike’s near-caricature of Skeeter in Rabbit Redux is not a comment about black nationalism; it is an example of how the comfortable white middle-class fits a frighteningly exotic and challenging segment of the world (justifiably angry minorities) safely into a nook than can be reconciled with the rest of its easy assumptions.

Hermione Lee, who reviewed Begley’s book for The New York Review of Books, has a literary biographer’s pedigree (her subjects include Woolf, Cather, and Wharton). She picks up on Begley’s key observation in the first chapter, that Updike’s authenticity comes from writing about things comfortably close to home: his family, his schoolboy crushes, and Berks County, Pennsylvania.

And it is the ordinary, banal things that Updike tenderly cherished and made fresh on the page. As he said of himself, and as Begley rightly emphasizes, he is the artist of middleness, ordinariness, in-betweenness, who famously wanted “to give the mundane its beautiful due.” For over half a century—even though his own life moved far away from “middleness”—he transformed everyday America into lavishly eloquent and observant language. This—even more than his virtuoso writing about sex, his close readings of adultery and husbandly guilt, his tracking of American social politics, his philosophizing on time and the universe—is his great signature tune.

Menand’s, on the other hand, finds counter-examples to the claim that Updike hewed to the ordinary:

From early in his career, Updike was accused of being a naïve, plain-vanilla realist, uninterested in the formal experimentation that was going on in the literary world around him. But “The Poorhouse Fair” is a futurist novel; the protagonist in “The Centaur” is a schoolteacher with the head of a man and the body of a horse; “Rabbit, Run” was written in the historical present, which, in 1959, the year he finished the novel, had rarely been used in fiction. Symbolism, allegory, and myth run through all his novels, even “Couples,” a novel that looks like a soap opera (or a parody of a soap opera).

Updike’s ambitious autobiographical poem, “Midpoint,” experiments with verse form, mixed media, and typography. He wrote novels about supernatural beings; he invented stories about Africa and Brazil and sixteenth-century Denmark. He was never just a chronicler of suburban mores.

Not mentioned, but in the same category: witches (twice), science fiction, Islamic fundamentalism, the New York ab-ex art scene.

I have only just started Begley’s book. It won’t be a dense read, but I have decided to re-read the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy simultaneously, to see if there is anything new from the Brewer universe that jumps out at me while the muse that inspired it lies close at hand. This feels like a project meant to be exacted carefully. I’ll be taking my time.

Tributes to Gabriel García Márquez will flow in for a while, but the loudest ones may already reside in the innumerable writers he influenced. He gave Latin American writers the courage and guile to take on the tyrants and dark epochs of their homelands, the hot caverns of the past, and perhaps most crucially, the yearning for a stable sense of identity amid backdrops of upheaval, migration, and disunity.

Michiko Kakutani writes in her appreciation:

In the end, it’s not politics, but time and memory and love that stand at the heart of Mr. García Márquez’s work. How the histories of continents and nations and families often loop back on themselves; how time past shapes time present; how passion can alter the trajectory of a life — these are the melodies that thread their way persistently through his fiction, reverberating in novel after novel, story after story. In later works, like the stories in “Strange Pilgrims” and the novella “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” Mr. García Márquez wrote about older characters, falling under the shadow of mortality, but then, death had long been a focal point in his work, going back to his early novella “Leaf Storm,” and on through novels like “The Autumn of the Patriarch.”

García Márquez’s dreamscapes offer a grasp at controllable logic in a universe of institutional unfairness. On the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, Edwidge Danticat defends García Márquez’s method, nowadays applied with the neat, approachable label “magical realism”:

I am often surprised when people talk about the total implausibility of the events in García Márquez’s fiction. Having been born and lived in a deeply spiritual and extraordinarily resourceful part of the Caribbean, a lot of what might seem magical to others often seems quite plausible to me.

Of course a woman can live inside her cat, as the character Eva does, in García Márquez’s 1948 short story “Eva Is Inside Her Cat.” Doesn’t everyone have an aunt who’s done that? And remember that neighbor who died but kept growing in his coffin, as in the 1947 story “The Third Resignation”? What seems implausible to me is a lifetime of absolute normalcy, a world in which there are no invasions, occupations, or wars, no poverty or dictators, no earthquakes or cholera.