Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Starring Justin Timberlake as the Labor Theory of Value

Over at the Paris Review Daily, I consider the Marxian principles in the new Andrew Niccol movie In Time.

A few early, expensive comments by the novel about the other talent in the room

I recently read a stack of Elizabeth Taylor's novels, in preparation for writing an introduction to her novel A Game of Hide-and-Seek, to be reprinted as an NYRB Classic in February. In one of her later novels, In a Summer Season, published in 1961, there is a description of the advent of television into an upper-middle-class British household, which strikes me as an early attempt by the novel to reckon with its new rival. I wonder if anyone has made a collection of such scenes.

The book's heroine is named Kate. Her adult son Tom lives with her, as does her second husband, Dermot, and an aunt named Ethel who tries to keep out of everyone's way. The two men are to a certain extent allied against Kate in not-quite-reputable habits of leisure. Their unseemly alliance culminates in Tom's purchase of a television set.

"Why can't you read a book instead?" Kate asked [Tom]. She disdained such ways of passing time, not realising that she very seldom read herself these days and was just off for an evening in the pub with Dermot. Tom kept the television set in his bedroom and he and Dermot liked to sit there with curtains drawn against the sunshine, watching cowboy films. "Too good an evening to waste out of doors," Dermot would say, taking a last glimpse out of the bedroom window while the set was warming up—Ethel's dog lying on the hot gravel down there, a column of gnats dancing in the shaft of light under some trees and high above the trees some cirrus clouds paling and dissolving. "Right!" Tom would say, drawing up two uncomfortable bedroom chairs. On the screen, rods of light ran blindingly into one another, the picture steadied until they were able to see a packet of soap powder capering on tiny legs, singing a ditty. It then took a dive into a washing-machine, and a head of jostling bubbles, singing too, rose up.

The scene visible through the window is quiet enough to lend itself to a meditative description; the screen, by contrast, is too loud to meet with anything but sarcasm. But even more telling is the perfidy of Ethel, who means to resist but isn't strong enough to.

Sometimes Ethel joined them, looking in with a trivial excuse, begging them not to stir and lingering to watch, but as if her attention was only momentarily caught. After hovering for a while, she gradually merged into the shadowy background and was forgotten, until at last, with sick-bed caution, she tiptoed away. Like hares before a serpent, Tom and Dermot sat rigid and in silence. From time to time, their hands groped on the floor for their glasses of light ale, their cigarettes burnt to their fingers.

A chapter or so later, after deprecating the television in a gossipy letter to a friend, Ethel is mesmerized by a broadcast of Swan Lake on ice.

First impressions versus second thoughts

Over at the New Yorker's Book Bench, I try to explain why I signed the Occupy Writers petition.

Penguin will publish my novel in 2013

I'm very happy to announce that Penguin will be publishing my novel Necessary Errors as a paperback original in 2013. My editor will be Allison Lorentzen; the deal was negotiated by Sarah Chalfant of the Wylie Agency.

The title comes from a phrase in an Auden poem. I haven't yet quite risen to the challenge of saying what the novel is about; when asked, I murmur, "Youth," and gesture vaguely and wistfully upward. But it's probably too soon to say more to the world at large anyway. More news in a year or so!

Emerson on Occupy Wall Street

It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. They hold themselves aloof: they feel the disproportion between their faculties and the work offered them, and they prefer to ramble in the country and perish of ennui, to the degradation of such charities and such ambitions as the city can propose to them. They are striking work, and crying out for somewhat worthy to do! . . .

Society, to be sure, does not like this very well; it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declareth all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate. Meantime, this retirement does not proceed from any whim on the part of these separators; but if any one will take pains to talk with them, he will find that this part is chosen both from temperament and from principle; with some unwillingness, too, and as a choice of the less of two evils; for these persons are not by nature melancholy, sour, and unsocial,—they are not stockish or brute,—but joyous; susceptible, affectionate; they have even more than others a great wish to be loved. . . .

These exacting children advertise us of our wants. There is no compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this one compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely exact, and if they only stand fast in this watchtower, and persist in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man.

From "The Transcendentalist, a Lecture Read at the Masonic Temple, Boston, January, 1842."

"As if the thing in doing were more dear / Than being done"

Over at the Paris Review Daily, I have an essay up about the mixed feelings that a writer is subject to when it's time to let go of a book.

Visiting Liberty Plaza

To spend one's days and nights in a New York City park is expensive. At a minimum, one gives up running hot water, protection from rain and cold, convenient access to a bathroom, and most forms of privacy. I've done no more than visit the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park, whose older name of Liberty Plaza the protesters have reclaimed, and I imagine that the ones who actually spend the night there know who each other are. Maybe the willingness to lose safety and comfort are proof, in one another's eyes, of a level of commitment. Maybe the loss underwrites a trust in one another that makes possible the group's persistent faith in the ideals of openness and democracy.

During my two visits, I wasn't wearing my reporter's cap, and I'm not much of a joiner. That left me the role of tourist. When I visited on Thursday, September 29, haphazard eavesdropping seemed to pick up repeatedly the earnest, necessary, and tedious conversations typical of groups of people trying to decide how to make decisions—conversations that tend to become especially byzantine in groups suspicious of hierarchies. But the openheartedness with which people were giving themselves to these tedious conversations was winning, and the protesters' physical innovations to group interaction were ingenious and looked fun. Since electric amplification is forbidden in the park, the protesters have adopted what they call "the people's mike": at the end of every phrase, a speaker pauses while audience members who were able to hear him repeat the phrase for the benefit of audience members who couldn't. Lest this practice render listeners too fawningly imitative, audience members all the while talk back to the speaker through a variety of silent, waggling gestures: jazz hands pointing upward signify approval, a pinched forefinger and thumb suggest that the speaker cut his message short, and so on. Watching this new semiotics, I found myself wondering, Why haven't people been doing this all along? It's as if it took the Facebook generation to make the most of human presence. People of every description were photographing, filming, and recording. Policemen stood around the periphery, gazing into the crowds, apparently looking for alcohol, which the protesters have forsworn, and tents, which city law forbids. The multiplicity of surveillance triggered a little paranoia in me, and I wondered what sort of databases my visage might be appearing in.

When I visited again today, Tuesday, October 4, the food table looked better stocked, but the sleeping area looked more bedraggled. The photographers, meanwhile, seemed more benign; I watched a young man interview a protester on video, and when she asked, at the end, who he worked for, he explained that the video was just for his Facebook page; he added that he was from Tennessee. Whereas, on my earlier visit, strangers had greeted me and asked what I might be able to contribute, today the people who struck up conversations with me seemed to have more-focused agendas. A woman dressed as Marie Antoinette tried to sign me up for wind-powered electricity. A camera crew for Al Jazeera asked me to pretend to be reading an issue of the protesters' newspaper, the Occupy Wall Street Journal, for the sake of some B-roll that they were shooting. I actually did want to read it, and the outreach table had given away all its copies, so I pretended. The camera guys were willing to let me keep the prop.

Is this the revolution? I haven't gone to a march yet, and haven't yet attended the protesters' twice-daily town meeting, which they call General Assembly, so I'm hardly in a position to say. Some critics have pointed out that the finance companies once associated with Wall Street are now for the most part headquartered in midtown, but the criticism seems to miss the point: Wall Street, as a location, is a symbol. The location of Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, is peculiarly literal. The protest is happening in a particular place; online, one may observe it happening, but one can't virtually participate; it isn't clear whether the improvised infrastructure could be transferred to another location, let alone seeded to many locations.

Other critics have objected that the protesters don't seem to know what they want—an objection harder to dismiss. Indeed, the Adbusters poster that launched the movement asked the koan-like question, "What Is Our One Demand?" Similarly, the "Declaration of the Occupation," which the New York General Assembly adopted unanimously on September 29, lists grievances but proposes no remedies—or rather, no specific remedies; it does exhort people to "create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone." But details matter in politics; it's only through negotiation of details that compromises can be reached. Moods—even good moods—pass, and New York City is going to get colder before it gets warmer. Before winter comes, I hope the protesters find a way to disperse their movement without dissipating it.