Time Magazine: 100 best Novels

TIME Magazine's 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present

I've read 23 of them, and I'm glad that most of them made it, although I'm not quite sure about Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. I'm glad that William Faulkner and Graham Greene each got two novels on the list. And there's a few that I'd really like to read in the near future, among them: Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays and maybe something by Saul Bellow.

Also worth reading are the original reviews of many of these books. Some of them, such as Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, were at first reviled. Others were immediately recognized as masterworks. My favorite, however, is the 1966 review of The Lord of the Rings, which describes what was evidently a major Tolkien craze on college campuses:

The hobbit habit seems to be almost as catching as LSD. On many U.S. campuses, buttons declaring FRODO LIVES and GO GO GANDALF—frequently written in Elvish script—are almost as common as football letters. Tolkien fans customarily greet each other with a hobbity kind of greeting ("May the hair on your toes grow ever longer"), toss fragments of hobbit language into their ordinary talk. One favorite word is mathom, meaning something one saves but doesn't need, as in "I've just got to get rid of all these mathoms." Permanently hooked Ringworms frequently memorize long passages from the trilogy and learn how to write Tengwar or Certar, two peculiar and ancient-looking scripts that Tolkien invented on behalf of his mythical creatures. The most ardent readers of all are likely to join the nation's fast-growing Tolkien Society of America, which publishes magazines containing learned disquisitions on the elaborate genealogies and intricate rules of grammar that the author attached as appendices to the trilogy.

The Undemocratic High Church

I went to this morning's 9:00 service at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue. It was a step out of reality, into some other, older world. Perhaps it was a taste of what Tolkien's hobbits felt upon their arrival in Rivendell. The church itself is a beautiful Gothic building, dark and immediate when compared with the light, wide-open glory of St. Patrick's Cathedral, just a few blocks away. Upon entering St. Thomas, one sees at the far end of the sanctuary a solid wall of beautiful statuary: Christ Jesus surrounded by the saints.

The service used the old, beautiful language of pre-modern liturgy. There was a small choir, consisting of little kids with angelic voices. But the musicians were mostly hidden from view; organ music flew out and over from the chancel. An acolyte swung the incense at the offering: something I had heard about but never before seen. And taking the Eucharist there was unforgettable. As we processed up the aisles toward the alter, I felt ever smaller and ever more unworthy. Kneeling only feet from the back wall, I had to crane my neck to glimpse the statue of Jesus high over my head. I took the wafer and wine, prayed, and made my way back to my seat, blinking my eyes and holding my face in my hands.

In short, this was the opposite of all the seeker-sensitive services I have ever attended. The recent Willow Creek revelations - that market research and focus groups somehow failed to yield authentic discipleship - almost seem to belong to a different planet. Indeed, after the service, I found myself reluctant to walk back out to Fifth Avenue, which is again styling itself as Christmastown, USA. So-called contemporary services, on the other hand, always seem to be of one mind with consumerism.

But a high-church mentality is also somewhat opposed to the democratic spirit itself, or at least to its overly individualistic manifestations. At St. Thomas there are vestiges of the old aristocratic culture, not in the sense that anyone is excluded, but in the sense that there is an emphasis on order and beauty, and there is a King at the center of all things. It's an ancient conception of authority: power derived, not from the people, but from above.

I suppose there's not much of a political point to this, except to say that we in a democracy probably need a few undemocratic institutions to help us along. When we know something of the alternatives, we can better evaluate our own democracy. Modern democracy, as well as several Protestant denominations, are rooted in opposition to this sort of aristocratic spirit. I'm not qualified to remark on the theological implications of this opposition, but I will say that encountering the old world can be refreshing to the soul of the beleaguered and wandering democrat.

Listening Plans

I've been using Pandora and last.fm to find new music. So, for no particular reason, here is a short list of musicians whose albums I will buy as soon as I have a large amount of money and nothing else to spend it on, which is to say, several years from now. It's all the exact same kind of thing, I suppose.

-Bonnie "Prince" Billy
-Richard Buckner
-Smog
-Iron & Wine

This is how I turn into even more of a boring indie-folkster.

Mr. McCaughan Goes to Washington

Have you heard of Mac McCaughan? He's a hero.

Mr. McCaughan spent the 1990s as the frontman of Superchunk, a rock band from Chapel Hill. At the same time, he helped found and build Merge Records. Merge began by releasing albums by Superchunk and some friends of the band. Over the years, some of their bands got pretty famous: Merge handled big releases for Neutral Milk Hotel, Spoon, M Ward, and The Arcade Fire, among others.

Do you know these bands? Spoon and The Arcade Fire both had top-ten albums on the Billboard charts this year. But you probably didn't heard them on the radio; they don't get much play.

Anyway, the Senate Commerce Committee invited Mr. McCaughan to talk about non-commercial radio at a hearing on "The Future of Radio". And his argument made sense to me.

Low-power, college, NPR and other non-commercial broadcasting enterprises are extremely important today, especially as local information and entertainment options become scarcer. Commercial radio is about aggregating the largest possible number of listeners in a targeted demographic. Community-based radio is about serving its audiences. It has the unique power and the desire to be a conduit for news and culture, and is essential to the diversity that defines cultural life in this country.

Commercial radio is an entirely artificial market. The government takes a narrow slice of bandwidth and allows people apply for licenses to use it. "Deregulation" of the airwaves is not a free-market measure. The government can easily price small operations out of business. But this is emphatically not in the public interest. It's not just music that suffers when the large conglomerates take a larger market share. Local news, opinion, sports, and culture also suffer.

This may be a moot point, as broadband wireless may soon enable people to listen to internet stations. But as long as the government has control of the available bandwidth, it needs to make room for the little guy.

The Rambler

I needed a break, so I stopped by the magazine store on 35th Street. I suppose my idea was to look for something with a CD in it, so I could find some new music (I've become hermetic in my tastes). Nothing looked interesting; everything was glossy and popular. You can't sell a magazine about unpopular bands, but that's what I wanted.

So I went back to the magazines about writing. And I saw the Rambler.

Last year, it caught my eye because it featured an article by a professor I knew in Chapel Hill. Sure enough, it's published in my favorite University town.

The November/December issue's cover shows a woman with an upside-down umbrella leaking rain on her. And the magazine isn't about much more than that. It's got articles about small things: old stories, food, fatigue, airplanes. No commentary on current events, no policy articles, no strategic national institutions. There are some very pretty photographs. It's evocative of real life, which is what we have left after our ambitions are spent, on the other side of dreams, when we can see the work of our hands and tell others how it came to be.

You strive, strive, strive, and need a break. Here is a place for small stories, inconsequential to big missions, but absolutely necessary to the good life.

Global Warming as a Noble Lie

In The Republic, Plato's Socrates argues that the citizens of his city-in-speech will never accept the class system that they need unless they are made to believe a myth about its origins. The founders of the city know that the story is false as can be, but they can’t allow the citizens to question the established order. In other words, sometimes you need a whopper of lie to get things done.

Could global warming be such a lie? It depends on what one means by “global warming.” If you say that human activity has changed the composition of the earth’s environment, and that this could potentially have unforeseen consequences, then there’s no argument. But if you say you know exactly what those consequences will be, then we have a problem.

As far as I can tell, the scientists know exactly what is going on. They know that very few systems are more complex or unpredictable than the weather, and they have done an excellent job showing that the earth’s atmosphere has indeed changed over time, going through both long and short cycles of heat and cold. A good scientist knows that mathematical models are approximations, often useful, but certainly prone to error.

These models are the source of all predictions of increasing global temperature, changing weather patters, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and, finally, the submerging of Manhattan. All of these models must account for a staggering array of variables; they must balance effects that may work against each other – for example, the warming of the air and the melting of the ice caps both would simultaneously heat and cool the ocean. That’s a simplified example, but it illustrates the difficulty in any kind of prediction. And we don’t even know what would be happening to the environment even if humans never existed.

So all our predictions are in some way contingent. If one model proves to be accurate over time, then perhaps we could really start to trust it. For now, though, we should all be aware that something gets completely lost between the scientific papers and the headlines.

Why, then, are there so few vocal dissenters in the science community? Why don’t more scientists speak out against the blatant misinterpretation of their work?

Because the poisoning of our atmosphere is a real problem, but nobody will care unless there’s a catastrophic consequence around the corner. The real case – that we are making radical changes to our environment which may or may not be irreparable – would never be listened to by a population that is just fine with a national debt up in the trillions and a creakingly damaged social security system. Who cares if it might go wrong? No, to get anything done, you have to be able to show that there’s an impending crisis: in other words, people will die unless we do something.

So maybe global warming is a noble lie. We let the media trumpet its disaster-movie version of the truth, hoping that it will spur some kind of change.

But for those of us who aren’t comfortable with lies, no matter how noble their purpose, there is no other course besides a deep reexamination of our culture’s consumption mentality. And that, my friends, is a topic for another time.