Michael Gruber's Blog, page 6
November 16, 2012
Beautiful Losers
I finished reading Beautiful Losers, a novel Leonard Cohen wrote in 1964, and I have to say I'm glad he didn't quit his day job. It's a period piece, a message from the heart of the 60s, a little Henry Miller, a little James Joyce, a little William Burroughs, a young man's novel and of course it's mainly about sex. It concerns three people, a French Canadian man, a English ditto and an Indian woman. All are having sexual relationships with one another, and this triangle is overlain on the story of Kateri Tekakwatha, the Lily of the Mohawk, who was just recently canonized by the Church. The Kateri story at least is coherent and beautifully told in intense, poetic language. It's an epic story and well documented by the ever-assiduous Jesuits who converted her. The connection between the three people humping one another in 1964 and St. K. is a little obscure but as we all knew well back then, everything is connected!
For one example, the first person miraculously cured by the saintly Mohawk was a Captain Du Luth. Later, a city in Minnesota was named after him. And who was born in that city exactly 260 years after Kateri died, and who made his debut record the very year that Cohen published his book? Bob Dylan! Coincidence? I don't think so!
For one example, the first person miraculously cured by the saintly Mohawk was a Captain Du Luth. Later, a city in Minnesota was named after him. And who was born in that city exactly 260 years after Kateri died, and who made his debut record the very year that Cohen published his book? Bob Dylan! Coincidence? I don't think so!
Sandy
I've been contemplating recently the astounding fragility of contemporary society. One walks through the streets of New York on an ordinary day and the place seems geological in its permanence: the great buildings, the ordered streets, the lights and amenities. And then a little wind, and little water and it becomes barely habitable. New York seems to have done a remarkable job of cleaning up after Sandy, although the City's confidence appears to have been shaken. Leaders are now discussing spending real money on surge protection and many have drawn an association between the damage and global warming.
I still find it odd that the people who make a living from fossil fuels have fought so hard to trash the science on which the theory of global warming is based and how strongly so many people throughout the world have been able ignore a fairly simple set of well-established facts. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and the more of it that gets into the atmosphere the warmer the planet will be. That's as solid as anything in science. The problems come with determining how much CO2 is attributable to us, what the planet will do with it, what the immediate results of the proliferation will be, as well as the timing of such results. We rely on models for this information and the models are subject to some error. What does not appear to be subject to error are the brute facts that the earth is getting warmer because of human activity.
It may be that this phenomenon will not yield to the normal political process. People throughout the world want cheap power and the life that cheap power provides and they will continue, I believe, to burn coal and oil at present and even increasing scales--in China and India, for example--until the whole thing plays out. It could get very bad indeed. We had the big Asian tsunamis and Katrina and various earthquakes over the past decades, but we have no experience with a world in which weather-related disasters are a constant. People in immense numbers may move away from the shore, and since probably a third of the world's people live in coastal regions, along with many of the world's great cities, it is not a pretty picture. No one really can get this into their heads, which is why our policy apparatus is paralyzed, not that we have the sort of world-spanning authority we would need to cope with a planetary-scale event. The earth is one, but the world is not, as we used to say in the sustainable development movement.
There is one cure for global warming that requires no intergovernmental cooperation, however, and that is nuclear war and the nuclear winter that will result from it. Is there a more frightening concept?
Absent that, I suspect that this will be one of the epochal changes and will affect humanity like the Neolithic, the Agricultural and the Industrial Revolutions did. For one thing, I don't see how national sovereignty can survive in its present form. In fact, maybe the last act of sovereign nations will be to cooperate to stop global warming from doing its worst.
I still find it odd that the people who make a living from fossil fuels have fought so hard to trash the science on which the theory of global warming is based and how strongly so many people throughout the world have been able ignore a fairly simple set of well-established facts. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and the more of it that gets into the atmosphere the warmer the planet will be. That's as solid as anything in science. The problems come with determining how much CO2 is attributable to us, what the planet will do with it, what the immediate results of the proliferation will be, as well as the timing of such results. We rely on models for this information and the models are subject to some error. What does not appear to be subject to error are the brute facts that the earth is getting warmer because of human activity.
It may be that this phenomenon will not yield to the normal political process. People throughout the world want cheap power and the life that cheap power provides and they will continue, I believe, to burn coal and oil at present and even increasing scales--in China and India, for example--until the whole thing plays out. It could get very bad indeed. We had the big Asian tsunamis and Katrina and various earthquakes over the past decades, but we have no experience with a world in which weather-related disasters are a constant. People in immense numbers may move away from the shore, and since probably a third of the world's people live in coastal regions, along with many of the world's great cities, it is not a pretty picture. No one really can get this into their heads, which is why our policy apparatus is paralyzed, not that we have the sort of world-spanning authority we would need to cope with a planetary-scale event. The earth is one, but the world is not, as we used to say in the sustainable development movement.
There is one cure for global warming that requires no intergovernmental cooperation, however, and that is nuclear war and the nuclear winter that will result from it. Is there a more frightening concept?
Absent that, I suspect that this will be one of the epochal changes and will affect humanity like the Neolithic, the Agricultural and the Industrial Revolutions did. For one thing, I don't see how national sovereignty can survive in its present form. In fact, maybe the last act of sovereign nations will be to cooperate to stop global warming from doing its worst.
November 2, 2012
psychopaths: Gone Girl
How thriller writers love the psychopath! There is hardly a thriller that does not have one of these folks chewing the carpet and spreading woe, and aren't we glad when the hero consigns him or her to an imaginative end? I suppose psychopathy must be considered a disability(though perhaps one not covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act) yet in thrillers psychopaths are always brilliantly competent. They're been to medical school, they're scientists, politicians, captains of industry, they're capable of fiendish planning, perfectionist in attack and escape, covering all possibilities, confounding the hero who is trying to catch them.
But in real life, the psychopath is characterized not only by lack of empathy and manipulation but also by impulsiveness and lack of self-control. The limited empathy of psychopaths, which is what makes them so cruel and manipulative, also leads to mistakes. They can only read people up to a point, and so are prone to errors of judgement. They have grandiose conceptions of themselves, which also works against self-discipline, and gets them into trouble, from which they try to extricate themselves via increasingly implausible lies. There are a lot of psychopaths in prison for incredibly stupid crimes. It's also an uncomfortable mode of life, which is why so many of them self-medicate with booze or drugs. Psychopaths may be cold to the sufferings of others, but they are not without suffering themselves. On the up-side, psychopaths are typically fearless and aggressively bold. Some psychopaths even lack the normal startle reflex, and this indeed has been used as a diagnostic sign. Psychopathy is poorly understood. We suppose that there are successful psychopaths, but virtually all the psychological study of these people has been carried out on prisoners. Characterization of the successful psychopath is largely an enterprise of fiction.
I started thinking along these lines because I've just finished reading Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, which features a woman described as a psychopath. Ms. Flynn, by the way, is a terrific writer, with a flair for describing character and delineating class. Her prose is taut and witty; she understands how to move a story along. In her story, Amy, the psychopath, is a beautiful, wealthy woman who marries Nick, a small-town boy making it as a magazine writer in New York. They live a happy gilded life based on the fraudulent personas they invent, but financial disaster ensues and they move to Nick's home town in Missouri, where the action of the book largely occurs. Not to insert a spoiler, but the matter of the plot is that Amy, distressed by an affair Nick has begun, concocts her own disappearance, along with an elaborate plot that implicates Nick as her murderer. She wants him jailed and executed.
I found the book acutely disturbing, because it is both well-written and utterly false. This is the problem with being a good writer. If a hopeless hack like famed author Dan Brown writes poppycock it is no loss; when a good writer does, you wonder why, I mean besides the lure of gold. Ms. Flynn writes a strong plot because she is not afraid to make her stand clear: that love is a fraud, that it is all manipulation and persona wrangling, that self-giving is a lie. The only couple depicted as loving is Amy's parents, and their mutual obsession produced their monster of a daughter. It's the most misanthropic take on the human condition in popular fiction since Patricia Highsmith, another fraudulent presentation of psychopathy.
Now, thrillers are supposed to be preposterous, and we are willing to suspend disbelief in return for the thrill--that's the tawdry deal we make with the reader. But there are limits. The decent, chivalrous private eye is a lie, but we accept it, because we can at least imagine that there could be such a person. But the masterfully plotting psychopath, who fools everyone and gets away with it is out of bounds, at least for me. It'd be like a multiple amputee winning Olympic gold in gymnastics. A psychopath might yank a girl off the street on impulse and rape and murder her and he might be able to do this a lot (Ted Bundy, e.g.) but psychopaths never devise plots that would baffle Hercule Poirot. The very impulsiveness that makes them dangerous always trips them up.
And in fact, the whole genre of whodunits is based on the obvious notion that the more complexity in a plot, the more things can go wrong, because no one is perfect, even (and especially even) perfectionists. The detective always notices the misaligned wine bottle, the unwound clock, the gun in the wrong hand. And, to demonstrate the point, in devising her unbreakable scam for Amy, Ms. Flynn leaves holes you could drive a tank through and has to defuse them with hand-waving.
One of the functions of the thriller in popular culture is to focus our fear of the generalized evil in the world upon one person--the villain--who is defeated. When the villain is not defeated, as in Highsmith or the Hannibal Lechter books, the thriller becomes a sick joke, a bath in ordure. There is a vogue for this kind of book in France--think of Céline or Houellebecq--in which the clothing of an excellent style is hung on a rotten corpse. Gone Girl is such a book and if you like that sort of thing, you will like this too. I feel badly, however, for the poor, traduced psychopaths.
But in real life, the psychopath is characterized not only by lack of empathy and manipulation but also by impulsiveness and lack of self-control. The limited empathy of psychopaths, which is what makes them so cruel and manipulative, also leads to mistakes. They can only read people up to a point, and so are prone to errors of judgement. They have grandiose conceptions of themselves, which also works against self-discipline, and gets them into trouble, from which they try to extricate themselves via increasingly implausible lies. There are a lot of psychopaths in prison for incredibly stupid crimes. It's also an uncomfortable mode of life, which is why so many of them self-medicate with booze or drugs. Psychopaths may be cold to the sufferings of others, but they are not without suffering themselves. On the up-side, psychopaths are typically fearless and aggressively bold. Some psychopaths even lack the normal startle reflex, and this indeed has been used as a diagnostic sign. Psychopathy is poorly understood. We suppose that there are successful psychopaths, but virtually all the psychological study of these people has been carried out on prisoners. Characterization of the successful psychopath is largely an enterprise of fiction.
I started thinking along these lines because I've just finished reading Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, which features a woman described as a psychopath. Ms. Flynn, by the way, is a terrific writer, with a flair for describing character and delineating class. Her prose is taut and witty; she understands how to move a story along. In her story, Amy, the psychopath, is a beautiful, wealthy woman who marries Nick, a small-town boy making it as a magazine writer in New York. They live a happy gilded life based on the fraudulent personas they invent, but financial disaster ensues and they move to Nick's home town in Missouri, where the action of the book largely occurs. Not to insert a spoiler, but the matter of the plot is that Amy, distressed by an affair Nick has begun, concocts her own disappearance, along with an elaborate plot that implicates Nick as her murderer. She wants him jailed and executed.
I found the book acutely disturbing, because it is both well-written and utterly false. This is the problem with being a good writer. If a hopeless hack like famed author Dan Brown writes poppycock it is no loss; when a good writer does, you wonder why, I mean besides the lure of gold. Ms. Flynn writes a strong plot because she is not afraid to make her stand clear: that love is a fraud, that it is all manipulation and persona wrangling, that self-giving is a lie. The only couple depicted as loving is Amy's parents, and their mutual obsession produced their monster of a daughter. It's the most misanthropic take on the human condition in popular fiction since Patricia Highsmith, another fraudulent presentation of psychopathy.
Now, thrillers are supposed to be preposterous, and we are willing to suspend disbelief in return for the thrill--that's the tawdry deal we make with the reader. But there are limits. The decent, chivalrous private eye is a lie, but we accept it, because we can at least imagine that there could be such a person. But the masterfully plotting psychopath, who fools everyone and gets away with it is out of bounds, at least for me. It'd be like a multiple amputee winning Olympic gold in gymnastics. A psychopath might yank a girl off the street on impulse and rape and murder her and he might be able to do this a lot (Ted Bundy, e.g.) but psychopaths never devise plots that would baffle Hercule Poirot. The very impulsiveness that makes them dangerous always trips them up.
And in fact, the whole genre of whodunits is based on the obvious notion that the more complexity in a plot, the more things can go wrong, because no one is perfect, even (and especially even) perfectionists. The detective always notices the misaligned wine bottle, the unwound clock, the gun in the wrong hand. And, to demonstrate the point, in devising her unbreakable scam for Amy, Ms. Flynn leaves holes you could drive a tank through and has to defuse them with hand-waving.
One of the functions of the thriller in popular culture is to focus our fear of the generalized evil in the world upon one person--the villain--who is defeated. When the villain is not defeated, as in Highsmith or the Hannibal Lechter books, the thriller becomes a sick joke, a bath in ordure. There is a vogue for this kind of book in France--think of Céline or Houellebecq--in which the clothing of an excellent style is hung on a rotten corpse. Gone Girl is such a book and if you like that sort of thing, you will like this too. I feel badly, however, for the poor, traduced psychopaths.
