How on earth can we understand the news, reported this week in The Sun, that at least a dozen Michael Jackson fans have committed suicide since his death? It’s easy to scoff, it’s easy to point to past histories of mental illness. But neither of these responses really get at the sorrow of these grieving fans. Perhaps the best means of comprehending the Michael Jackson suicides—and his legacy in general—is through the lens of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, which itself inspired a wave of suicides across Europe.
What does the King of Pop have in common with the main character of an 18th century German novel? Quite a lot, in fact. Jackson redefined fame and life in the public eye; while Werther was one of the most influential fictional characters in literary history. Goethe’s book spawned an international spectacle unlike anything seen previously. All over Europe, young men and women were struck with “Werther fever.” They wore his trademark blue tail coat and yellow vest, they used eau de Werther, and they committed suicide with the book clutched in their hands. In the words of Theodore Sarbin: “Werther, a fictional character in a novel, had been transfigured to become a model for living and dying.” The popularity of Werther can be attributed to a number of factors, but the most important was his sentimental view of the world. Take for example, Werther’s letter to his friend Wilhelm:
When I pass through the same gate, and walk along the same road which first conducted me to Charlotte, my heart sinks within me at the change that has since taken place. All, all, is altered! No sentiment, no pulsation of my heart, is the same. My sensations are such as would occur to some departed prince whose spirit should return to visit the superb palace which he had built in happy times, adorned with costly magnificence, and left to a beloved son, but whose glory he should find departed, and its halls deserted and in ruins.
This excessive sensitivity, the feeling that the world is just too much too bear, is an essential component of Michael Jackson’s lyrics as well. Compare Werther’s letter to the lyrics of the Michael Jackson song “Childhood,” which he wrote and composed himself:
I’m searching for the world that I
Come from
‘Cause I’ve been looking around
In the lost and found of my heart…
No one understands me
They view it as such strange eccentricities…
Unlike Werther, Jackson’s sentimentality extended outwards also, encompassing the sum total of suffering in the world. This universal empathy is evident in the lyrics of “Earth Song,” which Jackson also wrote and composed himself.
What have we done to the world
Look what we’ve done
…
Did you ever stop to notice
All the children dead from war
Did you ever stop to notice
The crying Earth, the weeping shores?
While it is hard to imagine taking one’s life over the death of a pop star, Michael Jackson clearly meant a great deal to a great many people. Comparing his fans to the fans of Werther might help us better understand his legacy in general, and what he meant to those who were compelled by his death to take their own lives. As Goethe wrote in his preface to The Sorrows of Young Werther: “Thou, good soul, who sufferest the same distress as he endured once, draw comfort from his sorrows; and let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion.”
Thus, not only are we readers and writers oftentimes taking out one another’s laundry, but also we periodically end up, as it were, wearing one another’s pants. Sometimes we do this unconsciously (which we politely euphemize as Influence: a laudable thing denoting wide reading and artistic ecumenicalism), and sometimes calculatingly (which we call Plagiarism: the redheaded stepchild of literature, the specter that haunts high-school compositions, the cancer that parasites the bowels of literary whilst making many an author’s—and virtually every rapper’s—career). And then there’s the sticky phenomenon of “subconscious plagiarism,” of which we’re all guilty (by virtue of being human), and of which George Harrison is, in many ways, the poster boy.
[Stephen E.] Ambrose’s troubles began on Jan. 4, 2002, when Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard published an article showing that several phrases, sentences, and extended passages in Ambrose’s most recent best seller, The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany, had been lifted from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, a 1995 book by University of Pennsylvania historian Thomas Childers. Ambrose had mentioned Childers’s book in footnotes but had failed to place the copied passages in quotation marks. Instead, he usually changed a few words.
3. Morris Freedman, a onetime classmate of Charlie Van Doren, questioned how terrible it really was for Van Doren to have participated in the fixed “Twenty One” TV quiz show in “The Fall of Charlie Van Doren” in our Winter 1997 issue.
But come on. We now live intimately with a mix of the actual and the contrived. Baseball continues to prevail, more or less, after a range of behind-the-scenes scandals. On some campuses, plagiarism is tolerated or has been redefined to seem negligible. “Fictionalized” reportage has become a respectable new genre even if we may be shocked by something so crass as Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer Prize winning deception.
4. Back in our Summer 1994 issue, Morris Freedman explained how the very concept of plagiarism first arose, in “The Persistence of Plagiarism, the Riddle of Originality,” before he came to the conclusion that plagiarism is rightly a moral offense.
What is at stake in indifference to plagiarism is our sense of the purity, of the separateness, of each created work from all other created works. The plagiarist pollutes the universe of achievement. He wants us to give his stolen object our stamp, our respect as his property. At best he makes an alloy of what should be pristine. At worst he soils, despoils, the idea of original creation. He is worse than the censor, who, in killing a book, Milton said, kills reason itself. The plagiarist kills a man’s soul, denying him recognition of his self, his offspring.
I walked into my neighborhood Borders last Friday—I love that my neighborhood store is the one on the corner of Michigan Ave in downtown Chicago—intending to purchase a book. One book. A hardcover, yes, so a bit of an indulgence for my student budget, but I had my 40% off coupon so I thought I’d be okay. I should have known better. Turning my inner bibliophile loose in a four-story bookstore is an invitation for disaster. And, true to form, I did not walk out with one book: I walked out with five.
“So what happened?” I asked myself on the walk home, feeling a little guilty (but not very) as the weight of the bag hanging from my arm reminded me of just how much I was going to enjoy every page of my guilty pleasures. Why are books my Achilles heel when I don’t buy anything else on an impulse, even items I love with equal intensity like shoes and dark chocolate and music for my iPod? Because those other things don’t come with blurbs on the back.
People who love to read are always looking for that next great find, as the marketing department at every major publishing house knows. Don’t we pick up books and read the synopses on the back while hoping for a story so compelling we can’t put it down? This is the joy of language and this is why we read. (As an aside, is this not also why we write, to try and evoke that “ahhhh” moment of bliss in someone else?) The people who sell books are onto us, and I’ve just realized I’m a sucker.
Take extra books number one and two. Winter in Madrid, by CJ Sansom. I was on the fence until I flipped it over and spotted this comment: “If you like…Carlos Ruiz Zafon, you’ll love this.” Since the book I had entered the store to purchase was Ruiz Zafon’s second novel—one I had waited two years to read in English after struggling through the Spanish version last summer—well, anything referring to The Shadow of the Wind was something I was going to buy. And apparently, someone else knew that too: within two minutes, with a reference to the same author, I had also added Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon to my pile.
Then I spotted another title that looked interesting: Interred With Their Bones, by Jennifer Lee Carrell. “A lively intellectual romp for Shakespeare lovers,” the back said. How many people can say they’ve actually read the complete works of Shakespeare from start to finish? I couldn’t say no. At this point, I should have had the good sense to flee to the cash register, but then I stumbled across The Ten-Year Nap, by Meg Wolitzer. With back-cover allusions to Tom Wolfe, Philip Roth, and John Updike I found my arm acting of its own accord.
The only saving grace was the blurb on the back of the book I put back. I can’t remember the title now, but it sounded good initially, at least until I saw the one-liner of praise on the back. “Fabulous!” declared a writer of fluffy historical sap. I shoved the book back on the shelf with a little more force than was necessary, and that clunk snapped me out of my purchasing daze.
There will always be more books on the shelves. Five is enough, I thought. But I couldn’t help but crack a small smile. Because, let’s face it: Five is only enough for now.
In a recent essay in n+1, Benjamin Kunkel, in a wide-ranging consideration of technology’s effects on contemporary culture and daily life, writes that the internet and its products feel forced upon us. For anyone who goes online daily—and increasingly that is most of us—there is a never-ending barrage of e-mail, articles of note (for their vulgarity or supposed profundity), amusing videos, invitations, profiles, photos, blog posts, news feeds, figurative “gifts,” and the like—and most of it is free, available to be guzzled down with a click. It is nigh impossible to simply dip into the internet; the irony is that if you have any awareness of how to navigate it, this endless stream of content, digital companions, and e-communiques becomes more numerous and oppressive, its depths cavernous and alluring, rather than simpler and streamlined.
What does it take to separate us from these omnipresent digital phenomena, and will that separation one day be impossible, when gadgets, screens, and Wi-Fi are everywhere? Even now, the term “going off the grid” is often used as a jesting hypothetical, something done by eccentrics and believers in an impending apocalypse. As a regular feature of electronic social discourse, waiting a day or two to answer an e-mail requires an explanation, if not an apology. “You don’t have a 3G-enabled phone with e-mail?” my friend asked me a few months ago (an eternity, in technological terms). He was joking, of course, but there was also some truth there, a frustrating and niggling feeling that with my once-cutting-edge Motorola, I was somehow missing out. To my irritation, it took a moment to focus, pull back, and realize that no, I didn’t need that.
Kunkel is correct that self-discipline is one of the great casualties of the internet age, but as thinking, independent beings, we only have ourselves to blame, and it is up each individual to recover what might be lost. Not every technology is inherently neutral—consider Monsanto’s “Terminator” seeds—but our laptops and e-mail clearly are. “No one is stopping you from stopping yourself,” Kunkel writes. “It’s just that many users of digital communications technology can’t stop. An inability to log off is hardly the most destructive habit you could acquire, but it seems unlikely there is any more widespread compulsion among the professional middle-class and their children than lingering online.”
The fear, as Kunkel attests, is that our willpower is inadequate, that, like in Infinite Jest or other visions of death-by-technology (it is no coincidence that many of these scenarios are found in books), we cannot resist our own creations. Technology is our reflecting pool, and each one of us is a potential Narcissus—isn’t a social networking profile or a YouTube video gone viral proof of such? What else to account for my Facebook friend, someone I barely know in fact, who has more than 2,200 pictures of herself online? The victims of this mania are—we are variously told—genuine emotional connection, privacy, attention spans, novel reading, and serious culture.
But not everyone is like this. Not everyone is as interconnected and digitally astute as those described in the previous paragraph, though a recent poll shows that only 14 percent of American adults don’t use a cell phone or the internet. Yet if we don’t consider the demographic, financial, and even geographic elements of the technology gap, we risk succumbing to the solipsism commonly attributed to our culture. After all, many of the elderly or the poor aren’t regular computer users. A kid living in poverty in East L.A. or East Timor may not have access to a cell phone or internet-connected computer, though he might have a library card or a few books (hence some of the recent arguments that widespread adoption of e-readers could impinge on book access for the poor). However, the hopes of the digital age—and those techno-evangelists who abet it, from Steve Jobs’s iPhone to President Obama’s plan to bring broadband to rural communities—are tied up, at least in part, in leveling this technological gap. Perhaps it’s not spoken of much because the proliferation of high technology seems assured; or, on the other hand, we may simply neglect those who don’t have the means to connect. Because if you’re not online today, can you be part of the conversation?
In the course of reading Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, $26.99), for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources. These instances were identified after a cursory investigation, after I checked by hand several dozen suspect passages in the whole of the 274-page book. This was not an exhaustive search, since I don’t have access to an electronic version of the book. Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia. Anderson is the author of the best-selling 2006 book The Long Tail and is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. The official publication date for Free is July 7.
Examples of the passages in question follow. The words and phrases that are found in both Free and the apparent original source are highlighted. Note that narrowest possible criteria are employed here, with only identical words highlighted; Anderson’s substitution of the word “on” for “about,” for instance, would result in no highlighting of that word. (Click on an image thumbnail to see the full-sized version.)
“Free Lunch”
Occupying the bulk of pages 41–42, Anderson here explains the origin of the phrase “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” writing about the nineteenth- century phenomenon of saloons offering free lunches with the purchase of alcohol. The great majority of this text exists phrase for phrase on the Wikipedia entry “Free Lunch,” including a block quote and several quotes from contemporary newspaper accounts.
Much of the text in question—though not all of it—was originally written by Wikipedia contributor Dpbsmith (Dan Smith) between November 19 and November 26, 2006.
Transcription errors are present in most of the quotes and citations within this Wikipedia entry, a result of contributors making mistakes while entering information from nineteenth-century newspaper articles. Those errors have been reproduced verbatim in Free. That includes citing an 1875 New York Times article as having been published in 1872 and omitting words and phrases from quotations. (Disclosure: I contributed to this Wikipedia entry two years ago, but my tiny modification is not included within Free.)
“Usury”
On page 37 Anderson explains the Catholic Church’s historical stance on usury, with 65 consecutive words—the great majority of the description—that are identical to the Wikipedia entry titled “Usury.” The passage in question was originally written by Wikipedia contributor “Ewawer” on March 24, 2008.
“Benjamin T. Babbitt”
Little-known soap marketer Benjamin Babbitt is described on pages 42–43 in language that is nearly identical to that contained within the “Benjamin T. Babbitt” Wikipedia entry. This passage was written by Wikipedia contributor “Josette” (Josette Pieniazek) on September 9, 2008.
“Learning Curve”
Anderson explains the concept of a learning curve on page 82, using language substantially identical to that in the “Experience curve effects” Wikipedia entry. Much of this text was originally written by “MyDogAteGodsHat” (Paul Gallienne) on September 19, 2003, though it has undergone significant revision in the past six years at the hands of many different contributors.
“There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch”
Here Anderson explains the economic concept that there is no such thing as a free lunch, using phrases that are virtually identical to those that appear on the “TANSTAAFL” Wikipedia entry.
This is an instance of text within Free that is strikingly similar to already-published text from a source other than Wikipedia. This explanation of salt (on pages 50-51) as a once-valuable commodity is found in a work originally published on Professor Petr Beckmann’s “Access to Energy” bulletin board system, and now archived on a website dedicated to his work. This essay is undated, with no author noted, but the BBS ceased to exist in 1993, so the work is certainly from prior to that date and probably written by Beckmann.
“Bakelite Logo”
Another example of text that appears in a non-Wikipedia source, this brief passage is also found in Heather Rogers’s Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (New Press, $23.95), published in 2005. The book was excerpted by The Brooklyn Rail the same year with the title “A Brief History of Plastic.” It is found on page 51 of Free.
Though reproducing words or original ideas from any uncredited source is widely defined as plagiarism, using text from Wikipedia presents an even more significant problem than reproducing traditional copyrighted text. Under Wikipedia’s Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, Anderson would be required to credit all contributors to the quoted passages, license his modifications under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, note that the original work has been modified, and provide the text of or a link to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Anderson has not done any of these things in Free.
Anderson responded personally to a request for comments about how this unattributed text came to appear in his book, providing the following remarks by e-mail:
All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources…
This all came about once we collapsed the notes into the copy. I had the original sources footnoted, but once we lost the footnotes at the 11th hour, I went through the document and redid all the attributions, in three groups:
Long passages of direct quotes (indent, with source)
Intellectual debts, phrases and other credit due (author credited inline, as with Michael Pollan)
In the case of source material without an individual author to credit (as in the case of Wikipedia), do a write-through.
Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. As you’ll note, these are mostly on the margins of the book’s focus, mostly on historical asides, but that’s no excuse. I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that was not directly sourced.
I think what we’ll do is publish those notes after all, online as they should have been to begin with. That way the links are live and we don’t have to wrestle with how to freeze them in time, which is what threw me in the first place.
Look for a full review of Free in the Fall issue of VQR.
5:15 p.m. update: Hyperion has provided us with the following statement.
We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson’s response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book.
Hyperion says that they intend to have the notes online by the time that the book is published.
As a little girl watching Perry Mason re-runs, Sonia Sotomayor could not have imagined the scrutiny that would one day be leveled at her entire judicial record. Yet even though she is on track to become one of a very elite group of nine, she is by no means alone in her love of a good legal thriller. Stories about lawyers and the law are a part of our entertainment culture from Perry Mason and the endless re-runs of Law and Order (duh, duh) to the novels of John Grisham and Scott Turow. And who can forget Jack Nicholson’s iconic, dramatic “you can’t handle the truth!” in the court scene from A Few Good Men?
However, despite popular perceptions of the trial process, this most central feature of the American legal system is actually slowly disappearing. In his new book The Death of the American Trial, Northwestern Law Professor Robert Burns examines the decline of trial law in both civil and criminal courts. In 2002, a mere 2% of federal civil suits were decided in trial while 40 years ago that number was several times higher at 12%. The statistics for criminal cases follow the same trend: 3%, down from 9% in the 1970s. High-profile lawsuits with a controversial verdict—the OJ Simpson trial, for example—may have affected social perceptions about the value of decisions delivered by jury, but as Burns demonstrates in his book, the trial is actually a fundamental component of American democracy. How to balance realism and idealism, practicality and justice, adherence to principles but a keen understanding of the significance of context? For a century, this balance has been reflected in the trial, the link between the ordinary citizens who make up the jury pool and the select few who are ultimately considered for Supreme Court appointments.
Jury duty summons aren’t universally welcomed, but as a federal judge quoted by Burns reminds us, “the jury is the canary in the mineshaft; if it goes, if our people lose their inherited right to do justice in court, other democratic institutions will lose breath too.” We live in a world, especially recently, in which the morning news serves as a constant reminder that democratic elections and confidence in the just arbitration of legal complaints is not something that can ever be taken for granted. Closer to home, our elected legislators are in the process of sifting through a career’s worth of legal decisions as an application for membership on the highest court in the land. The 20th century has left us with a legacy of famous trials and Supreme Court verdicts that have shaped our history as a country. As we move into the 21st century with even greater challenges ahead, let us hope that this part of our legal system does not come to exist only in television reruns.
No one book could ever hope to encompass an entire country, let alone one as complex and multi-faceted as Iran. But if you read these four, you’ll be on your way to understanding the home to 66 million people, eight major ethnic groups, seven languages, five religions, and thousands of years of history.
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
A graphic memoir in two parts, Persepolis traces the childhood and adolescence of a upper-class Tehrani girl whose life is thrown into turmoil by the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Drawn in an exquisitely simple style, the book juxtaposes repressive ayatollahs and the loneliness of exile with other more prosaic concerns, such as body hair removal and Iranian aerobics.
Shahnameh, Ferdowsi
Literally “The Book of Kings,” Shahnameh chronicles the myth and history of Persian civilization up to the introduction of Islam. Comprised of more than 60,000 rhyming couplets, the book is a cornerstone of Persian culture and literature. It’s also an important reminder that Iran traces its heritage back long before Islam to the days of Alexander the Great. If you don’t want to read all 60,000 couplets, the story of Rostam and Sohrab is as beautiful and heart-breaking as anything in any language.
The Shia Revival, Vali Nasr
It is impossible to understand Iran’s place in the Middle East without understanding the Shia revival. Although significant numbers of Shia live in Lebanon, Iraq, and the Gulf states, Iran is the only Shia majority country in the world. In The Shia Revival, Nasr argues that the ascendance of Iran and the fall of Saddam Hussein has given rise to a Shia Crescent that will reshape the Middle East and the world.
Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas
The 1979 revolution in Iran sparked a huge wave of emigration to Europe, other parts of the Middle East, and the United States, particularly Southern California. According to the Iranian Research Group at MIT, there are more than 500,000 Iranian-Americans living in the United States. Funny in Farsi is a lighthearted memoir about family and the cross-cultural misunderstandings that arise growing up Iranian-American on the beaches of California.
The back covers of our early issues were generally given to advertisements. Scribner’s Magazine, Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, and Southern Railway System (now Norfolk Southern) were all advertisers, though frequently it was used to promote VQR’s own books-by-mail service, by which we sold the reviewed tomes to subscribers who lived far from any bookstores. And so it remained for decades, with a single exception. The back cover of our July 1926 issue is filled with two columns of narrow type that read as follows:
“Why not write an editorial for the back-cover?” the managing editor suggested. “It would be better than an ad and—”
“I know,” the editor sympathized, “but what am I to say? The place is so public!”
“You might drool a bit about your troubles and your aims.”
“But what’s the use?” the editor disconsolately muttered, half to himself. “If the Quarterly doesn’t stand for the ‘aims,’ somebody’s dumb, and the troubles will not bear discussing.”
“Well, you see,” the busy man began, “I’ve been telling ‘em in my ads that a hundred million people in America would be bored by The Virginia Quarterly Review. Of course I expected them all to decide that they weren’t in that gang. But it may be working the other way. Here you’re getting all these letters to swell your head, but I’m not getting enough subscriptions to swell my list. Maybe if you said how much James Branch Cabell liked that last number, or quoted what Archibald Henderson wrote, or what Dr. Edwin Mims said in his ‘Advancing South’ about it; or all that Dr. Joseph Collins or Charles Wharton Stork—”
“Wait a bit: don’t go so fast!” pleaded the weary proof-reader. “I thought we decided not to say fine things about ourselves in our own pages. You remember the brick-bats came your way when you said how ‘we are advertised by our loving friends.’”
“We weren’t talking about my brickbats but yours, Mr. Editor.” The man of business looked glum.
“Mine! A single issue, Green-Room and all, wouldn’t hold them. First there are the poets: in the last week two correspondents have hinted that if I had to print the verse I did print, then in self-defense I should turn to them for salvation.”
“Pretty bad digs, I admit,” chuckled the relieved manager. “But had you no come-back?”
“Plenty, if it was worth it. One anthologist chose six out of eight poems from one number of the Quarterly. Then there was that letter protesting against printing so much verse: you remember who wrote it. He admitted ours was as good as that in any magazine he read.”
“That doesn’t help the box-office,” the man of one idea objected. “Where you accept one poem you turn down a hundred—every author a potential subscriber, if—”
“I know,” went on the editor, “but I’m telling my troubles now. There are the ‘high-brow’ complaints.”
“The what? That sounds like copy for a new patent medicine.
“It’s the second most familiar panacea,” groaned the editor. “‘If I could understand your articles,’ one reader confessed, ‘I’m sure I’d like them. But I must be up to your average reader and I don’t often know what it’s all about. If you want subscribers why don’t you get stories that somebody wants to read? Now there’s that Waldo Frank—’ But I broke in on him then to say that William McFee ranked the book that Mr. Frank’s Quarterly papers went into as the best book of the year.”
“What did your man say to that?” The business man was sympathetic.
“Oh, he just asked, ‘Who is McFee?’ Then there’s the other sort of fellow who complains that the Quarterly isn’t scholarly enough. ‘Now,’ said one professor the other day, ‘that thing of Hamilton’s “These Things Doth the Lord Hate”—it was darn good stuff to read but I wouldn’t call that a dignified piece of constructive political writing.’”
“You could answer that; couldn’t you?”
“Yes, I said, ‘Neither would I.’”
“But what did you mean by your worst grouch?” (The business office has a lingo all its own.)
“That! Localism and nationalism; conservatism and radicalism. One reader writes, ‘I like your Review better than any magazine I see, but why call it Virginia?” It has no more about Virginia and the South than most other magazines. I think you ought to have certainly two articles each issue on strictly Virginian or at least Southern topics.’ Then I see an old friend from Philadelphia. ‘Fine work you’re doing on the Quarterly,’ says; ‘only one criticism—atmosphere too Southern and too Democratic.’ Next a fine old gentleman of the Best Traditions sweetly but firmly suggests that this or that in the Quarterly was a sin against the Past and a week later The Baltimore Sun invites my attention to North Carolina for a lesson in real liberalism. So there you are: what’s an editor of any magazine in the South to do? He can’t please everybody.”
“I see, I see,” broke in the business manager, whose lunch hour comes an hour earlier than the editor’s. “You’re right, old man: follow your own eyes. Maybe, after all, the ten million people in the United States who would not be bored by the Virginia Quarterly will find it out. Who knows? Who knows?”
No doubt there’s a story here—an ad cancelled at the last moment, restlessness setting in with the second year of the publication—but we don’t have the faintest idea of what it is. But it is interesting to learn that some of the quandaries that face us today haven’t changed in 83 years.
What to read during summer? For some reason, this change in seasons begets a flurry of reading lists, usually composed of lighter fare, as if reading is somehow more suited to a balmy beach or park than to a comfortable bed or pillow-strewn couch. No matter your venue, once the equinox strikes (if you’re going by the astronomical start of summer), step away from this blog and do some reading. Here’s a collection of various summer reading lists and activities to keep you going until autumn.
The internet has provided the foundation for some marvelous reading and writing communities, such as the annual National Novel Writing Month. This summer’s breakout digital literary event—if such a distinction can now be created and granted—may be Infinite Summer, in which participants from around the world commit to reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and discussing the experience together. The site features links, guides to DFW’s work, discussions, commentary, and much more, so order a copy of this 1,000-page monster and get going.
In its May 31 issue, the NYTBR went with a categorized approach to summer reading recommendations: gardening, cookbooks, travel, and visual books. They also featured several other reviews of books, both fiction and nonfiction, about typical summer fare, like baseball, food, and travel (bicycles and road trips). The entire “Summer Reading” issue is available online.
The Los Angeles Times has a well-curated list of 60 titles being published throughout the summer. The synopses are brief, but with the wide selection offered here, you’re bound to find enough to satiate you.
This weekend, amidst continuing debates over the effectiveness of President Obama’s speech to the Muslim world and the myriad problems facing the country at this time, marks the 65th anniversary of D-Day. As in previous years, the date will be marked by ceremonies around the world, with the dwindling population of WWII veterans in attendance at some of these events, aged specters signifying a time when wars, if bloodier but as tragic as any today, seemed to have defined purposes and goals, contemptible though they may have been. I have never been one to mark such anniversaries, but I will be taking a journey into the heart of America and Americana, as I attend, with my grandfather (a WWII veteran, though not of the Normandy landings), a D-Day commemoration at the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas.
It will be a strange experience for me, I being a mid-20s writer likely surrounded by an cadre of elderly folks who vividly remember the day in question, but have little knowledge of, say, what a blog is. It may seem to be an inappropriate comparison to draw, but consider that for people like my grandfather, who has never used a computer, the late 00s are an increasingly alienating age; it’s a time defined by technology that promises interconnectedness but often has no room for someone like him, a would-be technological immigrant, unable to speak the language, who has decided that, in the unknown number of years remaining for him, the barrier of entry is not worth the trouble. And so we will spend the weekend steeped in the past, surely a worthy endeavor but also wistfully sad. Because how many years are left for commemorations like this? How much longer until all who bore witness are gone or incapable of remembering? Will my second-hand knowledge be worth anything? And does that knowledge add to the preciousness of these dwindling years, or does it produce a feeling of something slipping beyond our grasp?
At one job I held not long after graduating from college, several of my co-workers asked each other when World War II was. They had no idea and that lack of knowledge didn’t matter to them. They may have thought it was simple ephemera, fodder for Jeopardy or a session of bar trivia, but really nothing reflective of knowledge or intelligence—much less a connection with the world’s formative, painful history that, to this day, affects broad swaths of geopolitics. The man who asked the question didn’t turn to his computer to Google “WWII” and find out the answer. Instead he asked aloud, as if there were no harm in not knowing, but only because—I could tell from his voice—there was little point in knowing, no profit in it. I prefer not to advocate shame as a motivator, but if only he thought there had been something to gain, that to learn something from those who were there is fleeting and irreplaceable. We won’t have such opportunities soon, and no number of YouTube clips can be more than glossy simulacra.
In the course of reading Chris Anderson’s new book, 
However, despite popular perceptions of the trial process, this most central feature of the American legal system is actually slowly disappearing. In his new book 
No one book could ever hope to encompass an entire country, let alone one as complex and multi-faceted as Iran. But if you read these four, you’ll be on your way to understanding the home to 66 million people, eight major ethnic groups, seven languages, five religions, and thousands of years of history.
The Virginia Quarterly Review