“A Better Way to Think About the Genre Debate” by Joshua Rothman for the NewYorker.com
Too much writing about contemporary literature is historically shallow, taking for granted the supremacy of the realistic novel. In this lively and much-needed corrective, Rothman resuscitates the work of Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye to illustrate the ways that pre-modernist genres like the romance and the confession are reasserting themselves in forms as diverse as science fiction and memoir.
“Find Your Beach” by Zadie Smith, for the New York Review of Books
Only a writer of genius like Smith can excavate the soul of a city — today’s Manhattan — by staring out her window at a billboard ad for beer. A tour de force.A Pay Phone Rings in Far Rockaway
In Far Rockaway, Queens, on an unseasonably warm night in December 1997, the pay phone just beneath my hotel window rings and the apple-cheeked hoodlum with a gold chain around his neck who has been swinging his forty ounce in a brown paper bag and talking tough gets a tap on the shoulder, it’s his father on the line, and the father lets him have it, berates him for not doing his homework, for neglecting his studies, for staying out late with his good-for-nothing American friends, for not being aware of the sacrifices, for being an oblivious punk, and he orders the boy to get back home right away, to which the boy, who had been so tough, his voice ringing through the street that dead ended into the beach, responds with pleading and begging to be allowed to stay out a bit later, because he has already done his homework, which then switches to a plea to sleep over at his friend’s place, the veracity of which I cannot determine, is there a friend in his group and if so which one of the guys would it be, or is there a girl, it’s all unclear because up to that point I had not realized how young the boy was, and that he must have parents worried about him from whom he would have to ask permission to sleep over, and I suddenly need to get out of that room and take a walk, and five minutes later, when I turn and look back from a block away, released from the fleabag hotel room I had rented for the purpose of blackmailing myself into finishing something which I no longer wanted to look at, I can see, from that distance, the boy as he speaks into the phone, spotlit by a streetlamp, the scene framed by twinkling Christmas lights, my memory having blurred the edges into the shape of a cameo as though memory itself were an effect on an iPhone, his slouched shoulders and the way the nape of his neck telegraphs a beseeching, almost whipped quality, and find it to be quite touching, he was so rigid and now he is so pliant, and furthermore as much as my sympathies are with the boy I am grateful to him, too, on behalf of his father, because I have a feeling that this tough 14-year-old is probably the last guy on earth that the father can make tremble like this, and I am witnessing a moment of perfect equilibrium in which the boy is still absorbing the punishing wrath of his once badass father, who he is still imbibing, and is in the process of becoming that same badass himself, even as he still absorbs the anger of the diminished father, now immigrated to the shithole of freedom called America where he doesn’t speak the language, but damn it if he is going to let his son go native and forget where he came from, which brings me to the strangest thing about the whole scene, which is that although I am absolutely certain of the veracity of every syllable I have reported, and each phrase is as vivid to me as that boy’s body language as he pleaded and practically wept into the pay phone, the forty ounce in the brown paper bag still in his hand now more comical than menacing, no longer testifying to his independence but to the length of his fall from the grace of invincibility to his current beseeching state which, now, as a father, I can see is also a state of grace, a kind we are always too eager to give up, though I never really had to give it up, because I never had a father to yell at me when I was 14, and if he had lived that long I wouldn’t have had to speak to him in German, his native language, because my father spoke English just fine, while the tough kid in Far Rockaway was talking to his father in Russian the whole time. And I don’t speak Russian.
Thomas Beller’s books include “Seduction Theory,” “The Sleep-Over Artist” and, most recently, “J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist.” He teaches at Tulane University.
“The Books We Talk About (and Those We Don’t)” by Tim Parks, for the New York Review of Books
Parks’ blog posts about the reading (and writing) life are always worthwhile, but some are more shapely than others. This one, about the mysterious process by which some books become a widespread topic of conversation while others, just as good if not better, don’t, is particularly sharp and perceptive.
No, but for instance, sharks travel about 50 to 70 kilometers a day. And they typically don’t swim in circles — they go up or down a coastline. The fact is also that humans are a biological failure for sharks: what they get out of biting us is too low to make up for the energy it takes to do it, so there’s no reason for them to do it. Most shark bites are defensive.
And so there’s no evidence of any great white shark ever biting any one person more than once. There’s one case of a shark in Egypt that was responsible for more than one bite, but that wasn’t because it had a taste for human flesh, it was because the snorkelers were going out and feeding the shark fish from bags hidden behind their backs. They kept essentially training the shark, and so it got a taste for fish — not a taste for humans — and then a group of snorkelers went to the area without any fish, and several of them got bitten in the back, because it was looking for the fish. So that’s the closest that we’ve come to it. But it’s a total hokum movie myth.
You take issue with a lot of the misconceptions about sharks that came out of “Jaws,” and this idea that they’re vicious attackers. Could you tell me a bit about your effort to get the press to stop calling shark attacks “shark attacks.”
One of the things that makes the Jaws Effect so effective is just saying the phrase “shark attack.” The issue is that, first, a government only has to say there have been so many shark attacks in order to trigger a policy window, right? “There have been six shark attacks, something has to be done.” I did this paper with Bob Hueter of the Marine Lab in Sarasota that found that 38 percent of reported shark attacks in Sydney in the last 30 years had no injury whatsoever. There have been five of them in the last two years in the United States, where kayakers were bumped by sharks and it was reported as an attack — it just happened off the coast of California a month ago. These events are called “perceptually contemporaneous”: it’s like if I said to you, your cousin was the victim of a home invasion. You’ve got a picture in your head of them being tied to a chair in the basement of the house — there’s a real picture of what a home invasion looks like; they didn’t just come to steal your DVD player. And “shark attack” is the same kind of phrase, where it’s vivid and it gives a certain kind of image. But 87 percent of shark bites are non-fatal, 40 percent of reported shark attacks have no injury whatsoever. Not all shark attacks are created equal.
In my research, I was seeing the way politicians, specifically, use this, like with the kayaker at Cottesloe Beach. So I went to a group of scientists, the largest group of shark scientists in the world, and I said, “Am I crazy?” Because in Australia, for the first 30 years they were called “shark accidents.” The whole thing was invented, and then it’s used by politicians even when there’s no injury at all. I’m not saying that sharks don’t attack. I’m saying the rate at which that ends up happening is so small, we’re blowing it way out of proportion and it has political implications — especially when you have a movie like “Jaws” that give you a certain picture of a certain kind of event.
“A Better Way to Think About the Genre Debate” by Joshua Rothman for the NewYorker.com
Too much writing about contemporary literature is historically shallow, taking for granted the supremacy of the realistic novel. In this lively and much-needed corrective, Rothman resuscitates the work of Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye to illustrate the ways that pre-modernist genres like the romance and the confession are reasserting themselves in forms as diverse as science fiction and memoir.
“Find Your Beach” by Zadie Smith, for the New York Review of Books
Only a writer of genius like Smith can excavate the soul of a city — today’s Manhattan — by staring out her window at a billboard ad for beer. A tour de force.A Pay Phone Rings in Far Rockaway
In Far Rockaway, Queens, on an unseasonably warm night in December 1997, the pay phone just beneath my hotel window rings and the apple-cheeked hoodlum with a gold chain around his neck who has been swinging his forty ounce in a brown paper bag and talking tough gets a tap on the shoulder, it’s his father on the line, and the father lets him have it, berates him for not doing his homework, for neglecting his studies, for staying out late with his good-for-nothing American friends, for not being aware of the sacrifices, for being an oblivious punk, and he orders the boy to get back home right away, to which the boy, who had been so tough, his voice ringing through the street that dead ended into the beach, responds with pleading and begging to be allowed to stay out a bit later, because he has already done his homework, which then switches to a plea to sleep over at his friend’s place, the veracity of which I cannot determine, is there a friend in his group and if so which one of the guys would it be, or is there a girl, it’s all unclear because up to that point I had not realized how young the boy was, and that he must have parents worried about him from whom he would have to ask permission to sleep over, and I suddenly need to get out of that room and take a walk, and five minutes later, when I turn and look back from a block away, released from the fleabag hotel room I had rented for the purpose of blackmailing myself into finishing something which I no longer wanted to look at, I can see, from that distance, the boy as he speaks into the phone, spotlit by a streetlamp, the scene framed by twinkling Christmas lights, my memory having blurred the edges into the shape of a cameo as though memory itself were an effect on an iPhone, his slouched shoulders and the way the nape of his neck telegraphs a beseeching, almost whipped quality, and find it to be quite touching, he was so rigid and now he is so pliant, and furthermore as much as my sympathies are with the boy I am grateful to him, too, on behalf of his father, because I have a feeling that this tough 14-year-old is probably the last guy on earth that the father can make tremble like this, and I am witnessing a moment of perfect equilibrium in which the boy is still absorbing the punishing wrath of his once badass father, who he is still imbibing, and is in the process of becoming that same badass himself, even as he still absorbs the anger of the diminished father, now immigrated to the shithole of freedom called America where he doesn’t speak the language, but damn it if he is going to let his son go native and forget where he came from, which brings me to the strangest thing about the whole scene, which is that although I am absolutely certain of the veracity of every syllable I have reported, and each phrase is as vivid to me as that boy’s body language as he pleaded and practically wept into the pay phone, the forty ounce in the brown paper bag still in his hand now more comical than menacing, no longer testifying to his independence but to the length of his fall from the grace of invincibility to his current beseeching state which, now, as a father, I can see is also a state of grace, a kind we are always too eager to give up, though I never really had to give it up, because I never had a father to yell at me when I was 14, and if he had lived that long I wouldn’t have had to speak to him in German, his native language, because my father spoke English just fine, while the tough kid in Far Rockaway was talking to his father in Russian the whole time. And I don’t speak Russian.
Thomas Beller’s books include “Seduction Theory,” “The Sleep-Over Artist” and, most recently, “J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist.” He teaches at Tulane University.
“The Books We Talk About (and Those We Don’t)” by Tim Parks, for the New York Review of Books
Parks’ blog posts about the reading (and writing) life are always worthwhile, but some are more shapely than others. This one, about the mysterious process by which some books become a widespread topic of conversation while others, just as good if not better, don’t, is particularly sharp and perceptive.
No, but for instance, sharks travel about 50 to 70 kilometers a day. And they typically don’t swim in circles — they go up or down a coastline. The fact is also that humans are a biological failure for sharks: what they get out of biting us is too low to make up for the energy it takes to do it, so there’s no reason for them to do it. Most shark bites are defensive.
And so there’s no evidence of any great white shark ever biting any one person more than once. There’s one case of a shark in Egypt that was responsible for more than one bite, but that wasn’t because it had a taste for human flesh, it was because the snorkelers were going out and feeding the shark fish from bags hidden behind their backs. They kept essentially training the shark, and so it got a taste for fish — not a taste for humans — and then a group of snorkelers went to the area without any fish, and several of them got bitten in the back, because it was looking for the fish. So that’s the closest that we’ve come to it. But it’s a total hokum movie myth.
You take issue with a lot of the misconceptions about sharks that came out of “Jaws,” and this idea that they’re vicious attackers. Could you tell me a bit about your effort to get the press to stop calling shark attacks “shark attacks.”
One of the things that makes the Jaws Effect so effective is just saying the phrase “shark attack.” The issue is that, first, a government only has to say there have been so many shark attacks in order to trigger a policy window, right? “There have been six shark attacks, something has to be done.” I did this paper with Bob Hueter of the Marine Lab in Sarasota that found that 38 percent of reported shark attacks in Sydney in the last 30 years had no injury whatsoever. There have been five of them in the last two years in the United States, where kayakers were bumped by sharks and it was reported as an attack — it just happened off the coast of California a month ago. These events are called “perceptually contemporaneous”: it’s like if I said to you, your cousin was the victim of a home invasion. You’ve got a picture in your head of them being tied to a chair in the basement of the house — there’s a real picture of what a home invasion looks like; they didn’t just come to steal your DVD player. And “shark attack” is the same kind of phrase, where it’s vivid and it gives a certain kind of image. But 87 percent of shark bites are non-fatal, 40 percent of reported shark attacks have no injury whatsoever. Not all shark attacks are created equal.
In my research, I was seeing the way politicians, specifically, use this, like with the kayaker at Cottesloe Beach. So I went to a group of scientists, the largest group of shark scientists in the world, and I said, “Am I crazy?” Because in Australia, for the first 30 years they were called “shark accidents.” The whole thing was invented, and then it’s used by politicians even when there’s no injury at all. I’m not saying that sharks don’t attack. I’m saying the rate at which that ends up happening is so small, we’re blowing it way out of proportion and it has political implications — especially when you have a movie like “Jaws” that give you a certain picture of a certain kind of event.
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