Reactions to real horror

Various writers chime in on the Virginia Tech shootings.

• Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post:

First is the peculiar nature of the gun violence. Cho, it seems, wasn't a sniper, a marksman. He wasn't shooting carefully, at a distance. He wasn't, one can assume, aiming. He was shooting very much like Chow in the Woo pictures, with a gun in each hand, as witnesses state, up close, very fast. Woo saw gunfights in musical terms: His primary conceit was the shootout as dance number, with great attention paid to choreography, the movement of both actors within the frame. He loved to send his shooters flying through the air in surprising ways, far more poetically than in any real-life scenario. He frequently diverted to slow motion and he specialized in shooting not merely to kill, but to riddle -- his shooters often blast their opponents five and six times. Perhaps all that was at play in Cho's mind as well.

• A. O. Scott in The New York Times:

From this near-certainty Mr. Hunter makes a short trip to the assertion that during his rampage Mr. Cho “was shooting a John Woo movie in his head.” Evidence for this speculation is found in Mr. Woo’s fondness for two-fisted gunmanship, which Mr. Hunter credits him with introducing into movies, and also in a scene from “The Killer” that Mr. Hunter finds “strikingly similar to what must have happened Monday.”

It is hard to say what all this proves, other than that Mr. Hunter has no peer when it comes to wielding the conditional tense on deadline. He does not suggest that Mr. Woo is to blame for Mr. Cho’s actions. But his article does conjure a story line — the loner in his room watching ultraviolent movies on DVD, gathering inspiration for his own real-life action movie — that has unmistakable and familiar implications. Like guns, it seems, certain movies in the wrong hands can pose a threat to public safety.

This may be true, but only to the extent that a disturbed mind is apt to seek external confirmation of its own disturbance. It seems somewhat fair to conclude that Mr. Hunter, in linking Mr. Cho’s rampage to Mr. Woo’s films, was simply trying to make a guess as to the features of the killer’s mental world.

• Finally, Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly:

For most creative people, the imagination serves as an excretory channel for violence: We visualize what we will never actually do (James Patterson, for instance, a nice man who has all too often worked the street that my old friend George used to work). Cho doesn't strike me as in the least creative, however. Dude was crazy. Dude was, in the memorable phrasing of Nikki Giovanni, ''just mean.'' Essentially there's no story here, except for a paranoid a--hole who went DEFCON-1. He may have been inspired by Columbine, but only because he was too dim to think up such a scenario on his own.

A voice from the wind

• Neely Tucker profiles Nuruddin Farah in The Washington Post.

He's lived in Europe and America, always in pursuit of the meaning in fiction, and always just below the radar line of international fame. He speaks English, Italian, Amharic, Arabic and Somali. He tried a stint as a Hollywood screenwriter 30 years ago, an adventure that left him a collapsed film project and not enough money for a plane ticket back to Africa. "I haven't been back to L.A. since."

But mainly, he sits alone in a rented apartment he uses for a writing studio in Cape Town and maps out novels. He works from 8:30 a.m. till 4 p.m., on the theory that it's the hours and discipline that matter. Going for a word count encourages hasty work to fill a quota, he figures.

He writes about women. There was Ebla, fleeing an arranged marriage in his first novel, "From a Crooked Rib." It's still in print after 37 years. Most recently, there is Cambara, a Somali living in Canada who returns to Mogadishu, in "Knots." (Publishers Weekly, in giving it a starred review, dubbed it "mesmerizing.")

In between was "Maps," named one of the best 100 African books of the 20th century (a category encompassing fiction, nonfiction, plays, poems, children's books, the works), winning the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1998 (and a $50,000 award, one of the richest in world lit) and becoming that rarest of things, a full-time creative writer.

Loss of a learned one

• Anthony Shadid details the life and death of Iraqi bookseller Mohammed Hayawi in The Washington Post.

A fascinating article about an intriguing man, worth reading if only to shed much-needed light on the wealth of culture and learning that the Iraq occupation does nothing but threaten.

Mutanabi Street always seemed to tell a story of Iraq.

Its maze of bookshops and stationery stores, housed in elegant Ottoman architecture, was named for one of the Arab world's greatest poets, a 10th-century sage whose haughtiness was matched only by his skill. The street was anchored by the Shahbandar Cafe, where antique water pipes were stacked in rows three deep. On the walls inside were pictures of Iraq's history: portraits of the bare-chested 1936 wrestling team, King Faisal's court after World War I and the funeral of King Ghazi in 1939.

In its heyday, this street embodied a generation-old saying: Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, Baghdad reads. But under the U.N. sanctions that followed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, isolating it from the world, its stores were lined with magazines 20 years old, obsolete textbooks and dust-covered religious tomes that seemed more for show than for sale. It became a dreary flea market for used books, as vendors sold off their private collections in an attempt to get by, and Hayawi and his brothers eked out a living by selling religious texts, works of history for university curricula, and course work in English, what he called a passport.

In the months after the invasion, Mutanabi Street revived into an intellectual free-for-all. There were titles by Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, a brilliant theologian killed, as the story goes, when Saddam's executioners drove nails into his forehead. Shiite iconography -- of living ayatollahs and 7th-century saints marching to their deaths -- was everywhere. Nearby were new issues of FHM and Maxim, their covers adorned with scantily clad women. On rickety stands were compact discs of Osama bin Laden's messages selling for the equivalent of 50 cents. Down the street were pamphlets of the venerable Communist Party. As one of the booksellers once said, quoting a line of poetry by Mutanabi, "With so much noise, you need 10 fingers to plug your ears."

A caseworker with a cult following

• David Montgomery contributes a fascinating profile of a DC-area writer named Mark Opsasnick in The Washington Post.
  

This is what it's all about:

It is as if the prescribed geography of his existence, and the predictability of his routines, set him free. They allow him to plunge deeper into his subjects than anyone else. What he is after is the bedrock, the gritty essence that made a place different from any other place, before the great cultural sameness began settling over the land.

"He is just totally obsessed, as am I, with documenting the denizens, the vibe, the atmosphere," say filmmaker Jeff Krulik, a fellow Prince Georgian who made "Heavy Metal Parking Lot."

"When things get bulldozed, there's a facade job, all of a sudden when things are cleaned up and made to look nice and nobody has the appreciation . . . [he] verifies and validates that it existed."

Friends have watched Opsasnick's metamorphosis into a bard of the obscure with a that's-just-Mark acceptance.

"He likes dates and names and stuff, and he just remembers them," says Julie Ward, a friend who's a licensing management systems analyst at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "Once he gets interested in something, he just goes to town."

Take the amateur men's basketball team he formed in the early 1990s. Characteristically, Opsasnick wasn't content with pickup games in some high school gym. The players were stunned to find themselves going on the road to play Harvard, Providence, Holy Cross, Xavier. "Once he starts digging into something, he goes all the way to the top," says Ken Adrian, who coached the team and now is athletic director at Neuse Baptist Christian School in Raleigh, N.C.

To do this research, he haunts libraries and historical societies, performing such prodigiously tedious feats as reading every edition of the Prince George's Post from 1932 to 1984, and every entertainment section of the Washington Daily News from 1950 to 1971. He chats up old-timers in bars and records hundreds of hours of interviews.

Lately he's been giving bookstore readings, to an audience of nearly 50 in Kensington, more than 100 in Alexandria. He wears a beatnik beret he picked up at that Rehoboth Kmart. Bands play Doors tunes while he signs books.

He has a routine for preparing for the readings. He writes his speech on notecards. Then every evening for a week he walks from his house to the woods by Greenbelt Lake.

There, he stands on a log and lectures to the squirrels about the Lizard King as the sun goes down.

Breaking the spell

• Reviews of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon are rolling in.

I find it interesting that these reviews are only now starting to appear in the usual publications, especially since it was published back in February. I read the majority of this book a few months back (delighting as I did so in the irony that I'd checked it out from a public library in the buckle of the Bible Belt), so take my comments with the appropriate grain(s) of salt.

Both of the heavy-hitter-type reviews I've come across tend to have the greatest amount of criticism for Dennett's method, as opposed to his message. First up is Freeman Dyson's review in The New York Review of Books:

I see no way to draw up a balance sheet, to weigh the good done by religion against the evil and decide which is greater by some impartial process. My own prejudice, looking at religion from the inside, leads me to conclude that the good vastly outweighs the evil. In many places in the United States, with widening gaps between rich and poor, churches and synagogues are almost the only institutions that bind people together into communities. In church or in synagogue, people from different walks of life work together in youth groups or adult education groups, making music or teaching children, collecting money for charitable causes, and taking care of each other when sickness or disaster strikes. Without religion, the life of the country would be greatly impoverished. I know nothing at first hand about Islam, but by all accounts the mosques in Islamic countries, and to some extent in America too, play a similar role in holding communities together and taking care of widows and orphans.

Dennett, looking at religion from the outside, comes to the opposite conclusion. He sees the extreme religious sects that are breeding grounds for gangs of young terrorists and murderers, with the mass of ordinary believers giving them moral support by failing to turn them in to the police. He sees religion as an attractive nuisance in the legal sense, meaning a structure that attracts children and young people and exposes them to dangerous ideas and criminal temptations, like an unfenced swimming pool or an unlocked gun room. My view of religion and Dennett's are equally true and equally prejudiced. I see religion as a precious and ancient part of our human heritage. Dennett sees it as a load of superfluous mental baggage which we should be glad to discard.

A much less well-reasoned stance comes from Jack Miles in The Washington Post:

"Breaking the Spell" puts this reader in mind of a night at the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles when, it is said, somebody slipped the drummer Joe La Barbara a note saying that the famous British jazz critic Leonard Feather had arrived. "Oh, goood," La Barbara said. "Now we can begin." Daniel Dennett is to the scientific study of religion what Leonard Feather was to that night at the Bakery: He has a great deal to say, and his opinions are always worth hearing, but the band has been smokin' longer than he seems to realize.

Let's get this out of the way: I am not, and have never been, a spiritual person. I'm a thick-skulled literalist in that respect. The idea of getting to go to Disneyland and hang out with Voltaire and Hemingway once I die is a nice one, but come now, let's be adults here. Deciding whether or not the role of religion in others' everyday lives is or is not a good thing requires a level of intelligence and knowledge that I simply do not possess; I don't have the answers.

I tended to agree with Dennett's main points in Breaking the Spell, and I agree also with Dyson and, to a lesser extent, Miles' points about the flaws in Dennett's approach. Miles, in particular, seems to be most put off by Dennett's at-times-combative approach. I would argue, however, that with the prevalence of religiously-inspired violence not just in today's world but throughout history, a bit of combativeness on the part of the opposition is as valid a weapon as any. (Miles even goes so far as to position, in all apparent seriousness, Howard Stern as "America's most influential single atheist," an assertion so laughably ludicrous in the context of his argument that it makes the rest of his essay almost unreadable.)

Many people who share a more atheistic mindset are fond of repeating the observation that more people have died in the name of their god or religion than for any other reason. This is true, but you might also consider that when you get down to it, there's no real demarcation between religion, politics and philosophy. They're all systems of thought, designed by men, in the altruistic hope that if everything was done this way, and not that way, then everything that happens tomorrow will be better than what happened yesterday. Either way you slice it, it all comes down to which ideas you're willing to ignore, and which ones you're ready to die for. Belief in a god is much the same thing as faith in a political leader, or reliance upon the speeches and/or writings of a great thinker; you're looking to someone else for guidance.

It seemed to me that the main thrust of Dennett's argument was that religion has always been a man-made coping mechanism, one that evolves out of different cultures and mutates accordingly into many different forms. The notion that religion is man-made is, of course, threatening to those that grow up with the belief that there are beings greater than us, beyond the scope of our understanding. Scientists and atheists who attack the notions of religion are often ridiculed for being "cold" to the possibilities of spirituality, by opponents who turn a deaf ear to the logic and rationality of hard science. If nothing matters, if we all are just random specks floatin' about in a big void, then what's the point? It's far more comforting to think that you're working towards some sort of greater good than to consider the alternative.

Like I said, I don't have the answers, and this topic is far bigger and more complex than a mere blog entry could ever encapsulate. But Dennett's book is at least getting people talking, and with the dominance of religiously-motivated leaders of governments around the globe (including our own), this is a discussion that should stay at the forefront.

Closing thought:

"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states this has already happened." - Douglas Adams

Just let it ring

• Neely Tucker digs up some gems on Bill Watterson at the Washington Post.

Half a warm appreciation of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, the other half shedding a little more light on its reclusive creator. Best bit: Watterson refusing to take a call from Steven Spielberg.

• Karl Ritter recaps the recent brouhaha over the Nobel Prize on the Associated Press newswire.
  

So Knut Ahnlund doesn't particularly care for Elfriede Jelinek's work. Fine. But ask yourself, now: what's the point of the Nobel Prize in the first place? Like any award, it's just an invitation to a club. Clubs belong in junior high school and awards don't change a damn thing.

• Old news: "Sleeping on it" works. (from 2004)

I suppose it never hurts to be reminded of this. Once you hit the wall, you can either sit there and cry about it or just come back to it later. I suggest the latter.