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.

Listmania strikes again

• The New York Times tallies up the votes for "the best works of American fiction in the last 25 years."

The winners: Beloved by Toni Morrison, Underworld by Don DeLillo, American Pastoral by Philip Roth, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and John Updike's four-book "Rabbit" series.

Let's see, I've read Underworld and American Pastoral (and both are extraordinary), and maybe one or two of Updike's Rabbit Engstrom books (which I liked less than some of his other works, like In the Beauty of the Lillies and The Witches of Eastwick). Beloved has sat on my shelf for years, tempting me, but I've put off reading it mostly because it seems more like homework than anything else; something I should read as opposed to something I want to read.

What struck me most was the dominance of Philip Roth in the runners-up, five strong including Operation Shylock, a book which drove me up the wall. I can understand Roth's reputation, especially amongst the urban literati types that made up the panel of judges, but come now, he's not the only top-notch writer out there. Personally, I would have bumped DeLillo's White Noise into the top position; Underworld is great and all, but White Noise, to me, is far more focused, precise and effective. (Meghan O'Rourke has a great piece at Slate that discusses the lack of "small" novels in the Times' list of winners & nominees.)

One good thing about these lists is that they can turn you on to books and authors that have never crossed your radar before; I'd never heard of Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale before, for example. Another attribute is that they can get discussions going about the many deserving writers that didn't make the cut; some that came immediately to mind when scanning the list included, among others, Thomas Pynchon, Stanley Elkin, John Barth, William T. Vollmann, Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon, T. C. Boyle and Jonathan Lethem, who've all published some great works in the last quarter-century (and that's just for starters). The flipside, however, is that listmaking is a double-edged sword, buttressing already-established writers' reputations while shoving others even further towards the fringes. Instead of making a list that's all about everyone's idea of "the best," why not try putting together a list focusing on the most underappreciated works of American literature in the last 25 years?

Are the selections safe choices? Maybe, maybe not. Times critic A. O. Scott wrote an excellent companion essay to the list which illustrated its inherent pitfalls and made a number of prescient points about the state of American literature. I'll end this with Scott's thoughts on the general thrust of the selections:

We - Americans, writers, American writers - seem often to be a tribe of mavericks dreaming of consensus. Our mythical book is the one that will somehow include everything, at once reflecting and by some linguistic magic dissolving our intractable divisions and stubborn imperfections. The American literary tradition is relatively young, and it stands in perpetual doubt of its own coherence and adequacy - even, you might say, of its own existence. Such anxiety fosters large, even utopian ambitions. A big country demands big books. To ask for the best work of American fiction, therefore, is not simply - or not really - to ask for the most beautifully written or the most enjoyable to read. We all have our personal favorites, but I suspect that something other than individual taste underwrites most of the choices here. The best works of fiction, according to our tally, appear to be those that successfully assume a burden of cultural importance. They attempt not just the exploration of particular imaginary people and places, but also the illumination of epochs, communities, of the nation itself. America is not only their setting, but also their subject.

Still believe in that happy ending?

An interesting insight from New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, from Slate's "Movie Club 2005":

But I want to get right to the large topic that hovers between Jonathan's and David's posts—the question of how movies can (or should) engage pressing and controversial political and social concerns, and the related question of how these engagements should be judged. It seems to me that there is a disproportionate belief in the power of movies to influence opinion—"Fahrenheit 9/11" was going to decide the election; "Brokeback Mountain" will roll back the homophobic tide; "The Chronicles of Narnia" will bring news of the Gospels to a new generation of children, etc.—and an accompanying eagerness to dismiss them when they fail, as of course they do, at least in the short, measurable term. This cycle of overvaluation and rejection reflects an unresolved cultural ambivalence, especially among educated people, about movies as an art form and (therefore) as a vehicle for thinking about matters other than art. The scale and power of film is such that it can never apparently be trusted or valued without some component of anxiety, the expression of which often takes the form of condescension. We spend a lot of time complaining about the triviality of movies, and then, when they turn serious, we complain about that. They get the historical facts wrong; they traffic in overwrought conspiracy theories or unconvincing happy endings; they manipulate rather than enlighten; they're not as smart as we are.