Is it possible for me to hate Christopher Hitchens any more?

I don't think so. I don't know if it's general tone, or just how consistently I find his arguments to be smug, privileged, nonsense, but there's nothing more irritating to me than his Monday columns at Slate.

Today's is no exception. A defense of John Updike, which, okay, I'm totally in favor of attempts to defend people who had bad reputations you think they were unjustified in gaining. But what is Hitchen's excuse for Updike's perceived misogyny and racism?

And yet perhaps not so incongruous for a man of wry and reserved delicacy and elegance who would prefer very slightly to be wrong on account of the right reservations than right because of the wrong ones.

What.The.Hell does that even mean? Hitchens spends the column giving examples of Updike's sexism and racism, then suggesting maybe he wasn't as bad as he seemed and maybe he got better over time because you know he had African American grand kids? (eye roll. how can someone with black relatives be RACIST?!).

Of course he wasn't really a WASP to begin with—there can't be a more essentially Dutch name than Updike—but he added with typical diffidence that two of his children had married Africans and that he now had some genuinely "African-American" grandchildren. He appeared highly diverted and pleased by this thought, and I notice that the first edition of his memoir Self-Consciousness, containing that original anti-'60s essay, is dedicated "To my grandsons John Abloff Cobblah and Michael Kwame Ntiri Cobblah." These names, which I would guess to be Ashanti/Ghanaian, make one wonder if President Barack Obama missed an opportunity, and we all missed an experience, in not inviting the whole Updike clan to be present while one of the country's finest writers could still give us an "invocation."

God, it's so shallow. Thinking of those African-sounding names makes him think Updike should've been at Obama's inauguration? How sentimental, Chris.

Hitchens is a rich, straight white guy whose ethos consists of something like "Give me political incorrectness or give me death." I take it doing the "right thing" for the "wrong reservation" is giving into political correctness. Hitchens never defines what the hell these "right reservations" were.

I just hate it. Why can't he just come out and say whatever it is he wants to say? Clearly he wants to say, "Updike was a racist, but that was before he loved any people of color. I'm glad he didn't give in and simply start respecting people of color just because it was the politically correct thing to do."

The only thing Hitchens is really able to hold against Updike is--get this--that Updike didn't think the U.S. was justified in attacking foreign countries for the attacks of 9/11. Yes, our beloved war monger laments, how could this maverick "be so wavering and so neutral when a true crisis came along."

Why do I keep reading these columns? I'm a masochist...

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American Pastoral

I've finished reading Philip Roth's novel American Pastoral (1998). I'm relieved in some ways that it's over. The novel is beautifully written, psychologically and emotionally complex, and filled with fascinating characters who are drawn with such sympathy that the reader cannot forget them. But the novel is also a dark, taxing trip through a family tragedy, at times plunging the reader into stream-of consciousness despair from which it seems we will never emerge.

The novel’s main event is a political one: the bombing of a small-town post office by a sixteen-year-old girl, in militant protest of the Vietnam war. One person is killed, and the young girl – who disappears into hiding - becomes known as the Rimrock Bomber.

American Pastoral is the story of her father. He is Swede Levov, the firstborn son of a Jewish glove-factory owner, whose athletic achievements, physical beauty, and austere personality made him a legend in his wartime high school days in Newark. Swede grows up to take over his father’s glove business, marry Dawn Dwyer (an Irish Catholic and a former Miss New Jersey), and move to a beautiful stone house in the New Jersey countryside. The birth and life of his daughter Merry is a source of idyllic joy for both Swede and Dawn.

But the Vietnam War seems to change everything, and Merry is quickly swept up in the radical anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist movement. As Swede listens to his daughter rip his bourgeois lifestyle to shreds, their conversations seem like a typical father-daughter clash of generational values. He believes she’s an unthinking participant in some kind of youth culture; he believes it’s a phase that she’ll pass through. She believes he’s the one who’s not thinking. But because of the fatal bombing that follows, these conversations become an epic struggle for Merry’s heart and sanity.

The bombing – which explodes not only the local post office, but also Swede’s understanding of himself, his family, and everyone around him – seems like the novel’s apocalypse. But others follow. The Newark race riots destroy the city; Dawn is institutionalized for the shock and grief of what happened to her daughter; and Swede is terrorized by a woman claiming to be living with Merry. The novel is a portrait of a chaotic era, seen through the eyes of a man whose entire previous existence never prepared him for anything like this. Swede’s stream-of-consciousness often surfaces and goes on for pages, full of tragic questions: Where did this daughter come from? How did they produce her? What happened to her? Where is she? Is anything what it seems?

Roth treats issues of religion, class, and gender with such sensitivity that it’s hard to capture the scope of his work here. He does a nuanced job discussing Dawn’s experiences as Miss New Jersey: the way she feels forced to hide it, the way she must do something – anything – so that people will understand she is more than an ex-beauty queen. His treatment of the Newark race riots is quick but vivid, and includes the voices of Swede’s father, who angrily refuses to sympathize with black Newark residents he employs. In particular, Swede and Dawn’s experience of moving to Old Rimrock – where, as a Jew and a Catholic from working-class backgrounds, they face some Wasp scrutiny – is a sharp and important aspect of the novel. After all, the membership status they’ve struggled for is the very status that their daughter violently, vehemently rejects.

What happens to Merry after her disappearance – grotesque, violent, incomprehensible – seems explicitly designed to show Swede the darkest, ugliest side of the human experience. For the reader, it’s not easy to watch, but Swede’s struggle to understand is worth participating in.

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Fox News conversation turns weirdly tragic

A couple of Fox News pundits have their undies in a bundle about Sarah Palin's photograph on the cover of Newsweek. It's a close-up, full-page photo of Palin's face -- which some people claim is deliberately unretouched. I really don't care to speculate about what "flaws" they're referring to. There are some small lines and wrinkles under her eyes, and some slightly blotchy color variation in her makeup.

Yes, it's a cheap attempt by Fox News to generate a little partisan drama. But as a public moment in the women-and-beauty discussion, it's fascinating. In the clip, three female pundits discuss Palin's photograph: a stunning, Barbie-like anchorwoman, a skinny brunette GOP analyst, and a slightly overweight, exasperated-looking woman from American University. As they bat back and forth the question of Palin's right to look perfect on the cover of Newsweek, one can't help but think of the pressures to be beautiful that they themselves are under - particularly as women who appear frequently, or even daily, on television. The media has told us repeatedly that many women look at Sarah Palin and see themselves. Apparently, these women looked at Sarah Palin's closeup and saw their worst career nightmare.

GOP analyst Andrea Tantaros practically bares her soul here. She makes her own insecurity - and that of all women - another talking point:

Julia, this is mortifying ... this is mortifying. Any woman who would look at this cover, or if this were me, or if this were you - if this camera would zoom in on me right now, the viewers, I can tell you right now, it ain't pretty. And I tell you what, I'd be pretty upset. Any woman who would see this cover would be shocked and horrified.

Does this remind anyone of certain passages from Gulliver's Travels? Jonathan Swift's novel, adored in high school literature classrooms, is known for deep misogyny, particularly in his depiction of women's bodies and bodily functions. In one large section of the text, Gulliver is a miniature man living in a world of giants. And the breasts of giant women, seen from this zoomed-in angle, are described with categorical disgust. He sees every ugly freckle, crevice, discoloration, and hair. And Gulliver says he's never seen anything so "monstrous" as the up-close breast of his caretaker.

But, uh that was Jonathan Swift, hating on women's bodies in 1726. Centuries later, are we still telling women that the most mortifying, horrifying, shocking thing that can happen to them would be the revelation that they have pores, wrinkles, and facial imperfections? Andrea Tantaros is revealing more than her disdain for Newsweek. She's revealing disdain for her physical self, and by extension, ours.

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Not exactly dead white guy stuff, but another artsy interruption nonetheless

As a product of the American West, and a confessed biophiliac, I have something of a soft spot for naturalist artists from the West and Southwest. While many people are probably passingly familiar with the brilliant Edward Abbey, and I too love his writings, no naturalist seems to speak to me and my experiences in the West more than Terry Tempest Williams, a Utahn, a naturalist, and a gifted poet and essayist.

Williams was on my local NPR affiliate's morning talk show Radio West this week, talking about her new book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World. Even listening to her on the radio was lovely enough to almost lull me to a pleasant sleep at my cubicle (and I don't just mean when she was giving readings directly from the book), so I went to the nearest bookstore afterward to see if I couldn't pick up a copy for myself. Well, lame ass Borders that it is, did not yet have the book. So instead, I walked away with Williams' most highly acclaimed book to date, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place.

Here's the back-of-the-book blurb:

In the spring of 1983, Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. Tht same spring, Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and with it the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had to come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual grace, resulting in a work that seems certain to become a classic in the literatures of women, nature, and grieving.

Yeah, I know, how can we possibly resist? The product between the covers doesn't disappoint. It's just beautiful and painful and then beautiful again.

The light begins to deepen. It is sunset. I open the shutters, so Mother can see the clouds. I return to her bedside. She takes my hand and whispers, "Will you give me a blessing?"

In Mormon religion, formal blessings of healing are given by men through the Priesthood of God. Women have no outward authority. But within the secrecy of sisterhood we have always bestowed benisons upon our families.

Mother sits up. I lay my hands upon her head and in the privacy of women, we pray.

***

It's the Fourth of July, and the family decides to celebrate in the Tetons. Mother says she is sick of lying in bed and needs a change of scenery. I wonder how far she can push herself.

Brooke and I, with Mother and Dad, hike to Taggart Lake.

The Taggart-Bradley fire of last fall has opened up the country. It is a garden of wildflowers with fireweed, spirea, harebell, lupine, and heart-leaf arnica shimmering against the charred bark of lodgepole pines.

I have never been aware of the creek's path until now. It feels good to be someplace lush. The salt desert is too stark for me now because my interior is bare.

We reach the lake, only a mile and a half away, but each step for Mother is a triumph of will. She rests on her favorite boulder, a piece of granite I have known since childhood. She leans into the shade of the woods and closes her eyes.

"This feels so good," she says as the wind circles her. "It feels so good to be cool. I feel like I'm burning up inside."

A western tanager, red, yellow, and black, flies to the low branch of a lodgepole.

"Look, Mother! A tanager!" I hand her my binoculars.

"You look for me..." she says.

***

I am retreating into the Wasatch Mountains. I cannot travel west to Great Salt Lake. It is too exposed, too wicked, and too hot with one-hundred degree temperatures. The granite of Big Cottonwood Canyon invigorates me as I hike from Brighton to Lake Catherine. Glacier lilies blanket the meadows. Usually they are gone by now. I pick one and press it between the pages of my journal.

"For mother--" I say to myself, rationalizing my act, when I know it is for me.

Hiking the narrow trial up the steep slope massages my lungs. I breathe deeply. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

I climb up the last pass and break down into the cirque. My lungs and legs feel strong. I hve the lake to myself. My ears begin to throb with the altitude. My eyes water in the wind. I take off my rucksack, pull out my windbreaker and lunch. I can see the rock I am going to sit on. I hike down a little further and settle in.

Peeling an orange is a good thing to do in the mountains. It slows down. You bite into the tart rind, pull it back with your teeth and then let your fingers undress the citrus. Nothing else exists beyond or before this task. The naked fruit is in your hands waiitng for sections to be separated. Halves. Quarters. And then the delicacy of breaking the orange down to its smallest smile.

I lay out these ten sections on the flat granite rock I am sitting on. The sun threatens to dry them. But I wait for the birds. Within minutes, Clark's nutcrackers and gray jays join me. I suck on oranges as the mountains begin to work on me.

This is why I always return. This is why I can always go home.

It's all I can do to make myself stop excerpting at some point, and not just go straight on to transcribe the entire thing for you to read. If you want more TTW, check out one of my favorite of her essays, which you can read for free here at her site.

There are a few things I can name about what I love about (and so maybe this is a justifiable "interruption" in a way) this kind of writing: 1-The high standard of justice naturalists hold themselves and our world to. 2-The recognition that community and relationships--not just with other humans but with the world and with non-human creatures--are important to achieving that justice and peace. And 3-The escapism from capitalist relationships, the ability of naturalists to connect people and animals and nature to one another independent of capital and profit. Sure, they eventually have to climb down from the mountain and go back to the exploitation, but I still think this sort of escapism can play an important role even by envisioning for us another way of living and coexisting.

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