Of Books and Bicycles

One of my book groups is reading Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story, and I found it an engrossing read, although I do wonder how much we will find to say about it.  We’ll say things like, “wow, that was a great story” and “wasn’t it well-written?” and “can you believe how brave those people were?” and I’m not sure where we will go from there.  Maybe I’m wrong, we’ll see, but this book seems to find its power in narrative rather than in ideas, and ideas give you more to say in a discussion.

Anyway, it is a very powerful narrative.  The book tells the story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, the zookeeper and the zookeeper’s wife of the title, who are in charge of the Warsaw zoo during World War II.  They survive the initial attack on Warsaw by the Germans and then witness the atrocities committed against the Jews in the city, first the imprisonment of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and then their transportation to the death camps to be murdered.  Jan quickly becomes involved in the Polish resistance movement, taking risks whenever he can to undermine the German forces and to help save people’s lives.  Antonina manages their home, which she turns into a underground way station for escaping Jews and other people whose lives were at risk.  They often had crowds of people in their home, hiding during the day and moving around only at night.  Jan would smuggle people out of the ghetto and bring them to Antonina, who would then hide them and make sure the Germans who frequently patrolled the area never knew they were there.  Jan and Antonina — and many other people Ackerman describes — put their lives at risk countless times to help others.

Ackerman herself stays well in the background through most of the book, discussing herself directly only briefly toward the end to describe meeting some of the people involved in the story.  Rather than intruding herself into the narrative, she keeps the focus on her subjects, letting them take center stage.  This is a wise move, as the story needs no embellishment or authorial commentary and can stand very powerfully on its own.

In addition to telling the story of Jan and Antonina, Ackerman also describes the history of European zoos and the debates that were waged at the time, about, for example, whether animals should be expected to adapt to their new zoo environment as best as they can or whether zookeepers should try to create habitats as close to their natural ones as possible.  Ackerman also recounts the fascinating history of Nazi ideas about animals, in particular their attempts to recover extinct breeds of animals that they believed best represented Aryan culture.  By back-breeding — mating animals who held traits characteristic of extinct breeds in order eventually to recover those breeds — Nazis hoped to create an animal culture that mirrored their ideal human one.  They wanted pure-bred animals, particularly ones like wild horses and bison that demonstrated traits they valued — wildness, ferocity, and courage.  Just as they hoped to strip the world of human diversity, so they were devoted to a natural world that reflected their beliefs about racial and genetic purity.  It’s an ugly, not to mention unscientific, picture.  German scientists took advantage of their access to the Warsaw zoo to help advance their projects, and Jan and Antonina had to see many of their animals killed or carted off to Germany.  The story of human suffering the book tells is intensely moving, but animal suffering has its place too, and Ackerman’s descriptions of terrified, confused animals who didn’t understand what was happening to them were hard to read.

Ackerman’s writing is beautiful; it doesn’t draw undue attention to itself, but it does capture the landscapes and people and emotions of the story wonderfully well.  I have been planning on reading Ackerman’s Natural History of the Senses at some point, and The Zookeeper’s Wife is confirmation that I should do so as soon as possible.

I finished David Foster Wallace’s collection of essays Consider the Lobster last night, and am ready to pick up more of his work soon.  In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been raving about this book for a while now, which you can read about here, here, and here.

The last essay in the collection is a memorable one.  It’s called “Host,” and is about the conservative talk radio host John Ziegler who, at the time the essay was written, had a show at the Southern California radio station KFI.  The essay describes the environment in which Ziegler works, the ways his show gets put together, the kind of person and talk show personality Ziegler is, the state of contemporary talk radio, and the state of conservativism in America.  The essay does what a great essay should do — it tells a good story, combines personal narrative with larger social/political/cultural issues, and has something smart to say.  One of the points (among many, many others) Wallace makes is that conservatives dominate the radio talk show world because they tend to have a simpler, more straightforward black and white view of the world which is easier to talk about and easier to understand and therefore makes better radio.  Liberals are more inclined to be nuanced and about shades of grey, and that’s just not as exciting.

What makes the essay memorable, though, is the way this liberal nuance and shades-of-grey type of thought is represented in the essay itself.  Instead of using footnotes, which all the other essays in the collection have in abundance, Wallace puts what might be footnote material in boxes that are scattered across the pages, with arrows that point from the word that would normally have a footnote next to it to the appropriate box.  Sometimes there are arrows leading you from one box to another, and sometimes to another one after that.  There isn’t a page in the essay that is laid out in the usual way, with one interrupted block of text; instead, each page has at least one inset box with accompanying arrow.  Many of these boxes begin with labels such as “Editorial material” or “Rather less editorial than it might be” or “Informative + Editorial” or “Just the sort of paralytic dithering that makes the moral clarity of ‘we’re better than they are’ so appealing.”

So as you read, your eye gets drawn across the page in unusual ways, and as you work your way toward the end of a sentence, your progress is interrupted by this box and that box — by a clarification or an elaboration or an objection or a complication — and you find yourself in a jumble of ideas that is as exciting as it can be disorienting.  What is all becomes, I think, is a representation of complicated thought, a picture of a mind working its way through a maze of ideas.  It’s kind of the anti-talk radio.  (I see, interestingly enough, that there is an audio version of this essay collection available, but it’s abridged, and I don’t know if it includes this essay.  I do wonder how anyone would read it and what it would be like to listen to it.)

At first I found this layout distracting and I wasn’t sure I would like it, but as I got further in the essay, I got into the rhythm of moving back and forth from the main text to the boxes.  What reading this essay requires is the ability to hold a bunch of stuff in your head at once, because if you read all the boxes that accompany each sentence, it can take a very long time to get from the beginning to the end of each one.  Sometimes you have to read the equivalent of a page or so of boxed text to get to the end of one single sentence.  This can be mentally taxing, but it’s also exciting.  You could even say it’s stimulating — a word that happens to be very important for John Ziegler and his talk show world.  Ziegler’s goal is to be as stimulating as possible, to get his listeners so riled up they won’t move away from their radios and may even be inspired to call in to the show.  But while Ziegler wants to stimulate your emotions, particularly feelings of anger and outrage, Wallace would much rather stimulate your brain.

Writing an essay like this is dangerous — it’s easy to dismiss as gimicky and contrived.  But I think it works.  It’s clear that Wallace is appalled by much of what he sees in the talk radio world, but the essay doesn’t critique it directly.  Instead, he lets the evidence speak for itself, and he lets the organization of the essay speak for itself too — and what it says is that careful, nuanced, layered thought is a very good thing.

I’m sorry to say I was disappointed by Kenko’s Essays in Idleness. I loved the book’s prologue, which I’ve quoted on my sidebar, and I had high hopes that I would enjoy reading Kenko’s “nonsensical thoughts,” but too often I found them inscrutable, dull, or annoying.

I couldn’t help but compare Kenko’s work (from the 14th century) to Sei Shonagon’s earlier (10th century) Pillow Book, and find it lacking.  Everyone else makes this comparison too, or at least the writer of the introduction to my edition did, and Kenko himself had Shonagon in mind when he wrote his work.  The writers are doing something similar — they both record their observations of society, their thoughts about political and religious figures, the interesting gossip they have heard.  But Shonagon is witty in a way that Kenko is not, and her occasional mean spiritedness is highly entertaining, while Kenko is more inclined to be serious and a little stuffy.  Shonagon has her odd moments too, but the rest of the work more than made up for those.

I am glad I read Kenko, however, if only for a glimpse into a society radically different from ours.  Kenko was a Buddhist priest, and many of his essays touch on Buddhist beliefs such as the impermanence of all things and the pain caused by attachment to the material world.  Some of the better essays describe the beauty to be found in impermanence and imperfection:

Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless?  To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring — these are even more deeply moving.  Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration.  Are poems written on such themes as “Going to view the cherry blossoms only to find they had scattered” or “On being prevented from visiting the blossoms” inferior to those on “Seeing the blossoms”?  People commonly regret that the cherry blossoms scatter or that the moon sinks in the sky, and this is natural; but only an exceptionally insensitive man would say, “This branch and that branch have lost their blossoms.  There is nothing worth seeing now.”

I would have liked the book more had there been more passages like the above, and fewer about, say, the uselessness of women.  But even harder to deal with than the misogyny, which is part of the culture, after all, is that so many of the essays simply don’t make sense to me.  They too often tell stories the significance of which I don’t grasp, and I’m left shrugging my shoulders and thinking that it must have meant something to people at the time.  Perhaps I could have found an edition with better notes that would fill in some of the information I’m missing, so this could simply be an editorial problem, but I fared better in this respect with The Pillow Book, which also didn’t have extensive notes.

But then there are essays like this one (“essay” isn’t the right word, since the passage is so short, but it will have to do), quoted in full:

A certain hermit once said, “There is one thing that even I, who have no worldly entanglements, would be sorry to give up, the beauty of the sky.”  I can understand why he should have felt that way.

And I can understand this too.  Reading a book that is so far removed from our day and time as to be completely incomprehensible would make no sense, but there is surely a value in reading a book that has its beautiful moments but its bizarre and disorienting ones too.  Even if I sometimes got frustrated at what I wasn’t following, I was aware at getting a glimpse into a world far from mine, and I’m glad I could experience that.  There has to be a reason, after all, that this book remains in print and that people still read it.

I may end up writing about a lot of the essays in David Foster Wallace’s collection Consider the Lobster; at the very least, I’ve come across another fabulous essay I want to tell you about.  It’s called “Up, Simba” and is about John McCain’s run for the Republican nomination for president in 2000.  It’s an interesting essay in and of itself, but it takes on a new significance after what happened in this year’s campaign.  Knowing what’s in store for McCain in the future makes reading this essay from 2000 a complicated experience.

Wallace covers a week of McCain’s 2000 campaign, from February 7 – 13, which is the week right after he won the New Hampshire primary and just before he lost South Carolina.  McCain and Bush had promised each other they wouldn’t go negative, but during this week those promises get shot to hell — Bush makes the first negative move, McCain retaliates with something harsher, Bush accuses him of breaking his promise, and pretty soon the campaigns are negative through and through.

Wallace gets to follow along and watch all this happen close up; while McCain and his team ride around in the Straight Talk Express, members of the press travel in buses called Bullshit I and Bullshit 2, and it’s here that Wallace observes the reporters and tech people as they file their reports and keep the press machinery running.  It’s a great story he tells, a fun inside look at just how horrid the campaign trail is, with its repetitiveness, its frequent dullness, and its awful food and few opportunities to sleep.

It was Rolling Stone who asked Wallace to write about the campaign, so Wallace shapes the essay for young people, wondering as he writes why young people are so disengaged from politics.  He argues that it has to do with their anger and sadness at being lied to, compounded by the fact that not only are they lied to by politicians, but are also lied to by the media on a constant basis, and so they see no reason to believe anybody about anything.  There are also no real leaders, people who can inspire them in a genuine way to care about anything beyond their own lives.

The basis of the essay is Wallace’s question about whether McCain might possibly be such an inspirational leader himself.  This question isn’t answered — it’s more of a puzzle Wallace works at through the entire piece and doesn’t quite solve — but it seems like a possibility to him, given McCain’s reputation for forthrightness, and also given his heroic actions in Vietnam, which Wallace recounts in chilling detail.  It’s seems just possible that McCain might be the kind of candidate who can also be an anti-candidate, someone who runs for office but insists on doing it in his own unconventional way and who challenges the basis on which most campaigns are run.  Wallace is tempted to believe in McCain … but he has niggling doubts too, doubts about whether actions that seem honest and even impulsive aren’t really calculating and cold.

So, knowing what we now know about how McCain ran his campaign this time around, you can see how this essay has morphed into an entirely different thing.  Instead of being an essay about possibility (however briefly held — McCain’s 2000 campaign was just about over when Wallace wrote the essay), it becomes something much sadder.  Whatever it was that made McCain decide to run such a nasty campaign this past fall, that campaign seems like a betrayal of the earlier version of McCain who at least could possibly have been an inspirational and transformative figure (I’m setting party politics aside here — obviously he’s not going to be inspiring if you don’t agree with his policies).  It’s hard to imagine the 2008 version of McCain making anybody even a little less cynical about politics.  But maybe after all the 2000 version of McCain was just as capable of running a nasty campaign as he was this past fall, and maybe he tried to take the high road back then for tactical reasons rather than out of conviction.  It’s impossible to tell.

If anybody these days seems capable of taking some of the cynicism out of politics, of course, that would be Obama.  It remains to be seen how Obama’s presidency will work out, but I can’t help but hope that he really will be — will continue to be — the kind of inspirational figure Wallace was looking for.  It makes me wish Wallace had had the chance to follow Obama and write brilliantly about him too.