Daniel Handler and Tom Perrotta
Our Long National Idyll
By Tom Perrotta
Posted Thursday, Oct. 12, 2000, at 6:04 PM ETDan--
I got home from a peaceful day's work--I'm working with another writer on a TV pilot based on my short story collection, Bad Haircut--only to discover that all hell's broken out in the Middle East. Terrorism, mob violence, warplanes on the warpath. It's hard to think about music and book titles, but even harder to wrap my mind around the killing, to believe it's really happening.
We've been spoiled since the end of the Cold War. Unthinkable prosperity for lots of us, technological advances that finally caught up to some of our futuristic fantasies, very few outside threats, no demands on most of us for any sort of sacrifices. It's almost like we lost the language that makes sacrifice possible. I imagine we're the only country that's ever existed that thought we could have a massive war without any casualties on our side. I don't know if today's turmoil is the start of something big or just one awful day in a series that will soon peter out, but it does make me wonder how we're going to respond when something does happen--and it will, inevitably--to disturb our long national idyll. Boy, are we gonna be cranky.
Enough of this, though. I have to get my kids to the playground before it gets dark.
Tom
Our Long National Idyll
By Tom Perrotta
Posted Thursday, Oct. 12, 2000, at 6:04 PM ETDaniel Handler wrote his novels The Basic Eight
and Watch Your Mouth
, and five books for children under the name Lemony Snicket, on a desk that was recently destroyed by Mayflower Transit. Tom Perrotta is the author of four books of fiction, including Election
and, most recently, Joe College
(click here to buy Handler's books and here to buy Perotta's). Reader Comments from The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: There were a few nods to politics--EF went through the motions on Bush and intelligence here, and we liked Sally's discussion of the political status of someone she didn't know, below (does Josh Thaler know of his starring role in this week's Breakfast Table?)--but the topic that really interested the Fray was space travel versus literature. Ted Alper would trade all the postwar novels for a few more good pictures of Mars, and similar contributions are featured below. Will no-one come and defend the novel? PWC says the important Clinton is De Witt Clinton, while Sally--a real asset to The Fray--also turns her eye on rock'n'roll here.]
Nothing in the history of the world has compared with the moon landing; not novels, not poetry, not Bach's fugues, nothing. And when we reach Mars, nothing up until then will have compared with that. When has the novel ever enlightened humanity to the degree that science and philosophy have? If it took Mailer half his life to understand how ephemeral his accomplishments were, then he really is a conceited little imp. All his books are larded with attempts at self-promotion; even his best, Armies of the Night, props up musty ideas about History and falsely comprehended Existentialism. While Mailer was hogging the stage, the greatest novelist of post-war America, William Gaddis, was keeping to himself. Pynchon, too. And in 1995, a pseudonymous writer named Evan Dara wrote The Lost Scrapbook, the best novel of the nineties. These are writers who truly know how marginal their accomplishments are next to the feats of rocketry and electronics that actually change humanity (there's something to be said for anonymity). Mailer, like Clinton, will leave a legacy that's inversely proportional to the amount of time he's spend worrying about his legacy
--Simon Parker
(To reply, click
here.)
Actually, Mailer said that it was the "Revenge of the Squares"--that while all the protestor types thought they were doing something new and world-changing, all those guys with the pocket protectors and slide rules had actually gone and done it.
Naturally, the first thing those people did when they got political power was to make sure that nothing like it would ever happen again. Since they controlled the political purse-strings, they could do that. To their dismay, all they did was shift developments to areas that they understood even less and could control hardly at all, such as biotech and the Internet. The joke's on them. Had the government built moon colonies, it would have had something impressive to do, for which it would have been (for a while at least) essential. But as soon as it retreated from space, the federal government became less popular, and less relevant, until we reached the point of the last couple of Presidential elections, where the candidates are running for school board and sucking up to Oprah.
And Toni Morrison, an authorial talent comparable with the Apollo landing? Are you serious?
--A.G.Android
(To reply, click
here.)
On Tuesday you mentioned "a high-school friend with terrifying intelligence but also a wry wit and a wise sense of perspective." Nobody like that is going to run for office.
Josh Thaler (and not knowing Josh, I apologize for my ill-informed assumptions. If I'm wrong) has no interest in the kind of dirty, decrepit politics that seems to be required these days to get near public office. I'm sure Josh knows that once he's sold his soul to get in there, he'll be in some big powerful lobby's pocket and won't be able to do anything anyway.
It seems like the only people who bother to get into this game these days are people whose main objective is (and I hate this phrase) navel-gazing. There are no more Jefferson Smiths (were there ever any?). I can't imagine anyone with a heart and a brain, not to mention perspective, choosing to subject themselves to such torture in the service of such a dubious cause.
I can't think of any way the so-called "public" could show its distaste for the nasty turn politics has taken. Come November you still have to vote for the guy you hate less. But here we are; unless we change the system somehow, the only people we're going to see running for office are reptiles.
--Sally
(To reply, click
here.)
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Reader Comments from The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: There were a few nods to politics--EF went through the motions on Bush and intelligence here, and we liked Sally's discussion of the political status of someone she didn't know, below (does Josh Thaler know of his starring role in this week's Breakfast Table?)--but the topic that really interested the Fray was space travel versus literature. Ted Alper would trade all the postwar novels for a few more good pictures of Mars, and similar contributions are featured below. Will no-one come and defend the novel? PWC says the important Clinton is De Witt Clinton, while Sally--a real asset to The Fray--also turns her eye on rock'n'roll here.]
Nothing in the history of the world has compared with the moon landing; not novels, not poetry, not Bach's fugues, nothing. And when we reach Mars, nothing up until then will have compared with that. When has the novel ever enlightened humanity to the degree that science and philosophy have? If it took Mailer half his life to understand how ephemeral his accomplishments were, then he really is a conceited little imp. All his books are larded with attempts at self-promotion; even his best, Armies of the Night, props up musty ideas about History and falsely comprehended Existentialism. While Mailer was hogging the stage, the greatest novelist of post-war America, William Gaddis, was keeping to himself. Pynchon, too. And in 1995, a pseudonymous writer named Evan Dara wrote The Lost Scrapbook, the best novel of the nineties. These are writers who truly know how marginal their accomplishments are next to the feats of rocketry and electronics that actually change humanity (there's something to be said for anonymity). Mailer, like Clinton, will leave a legacy that's inversely proportional to the amount of time he's spend worrying about his legacy
--Simon Parker
(To reply, click here.)
Actually, Mailer said that it was the "Revenge of the Squares"--that while all the protestor types thought they were doing something new and world-changing, all those guys with the pocket protectors and slide rules had actually gone and done it.
Naturally, the first thing those people did when they got political power was to make sure that nothing like it would ever happen again. Since they controlled the political purse-strings, they could do that. To their dismay, all they did was shift developments to areas that they understood even less and could control hardly at all, such as biotech and the Internet. The joke's on them. Had the government built moon colonies, it would have had something impressive to do, for which it would have been (for a while at least) essential. But as soon as it retreated from space, the federal government became less popular, and less relevant, until we reached the point of the last couple of Presidential elections, where the candidates are running for school board and sucking up to Oprah.
And Toni Morrison, an authorial talent comparable with the Apollo landing? Are you serious?
--A.G.Android
(To reply, click here.)
On Tuesday you mentioned "a high-school friend with terrifying intelligence but also a wry wit and a wise sense of perspective." Nobody like that is going to run for office.
Josh Thaler (and not knowing Josh, I apologize for my ill-informed assumptions. If I'm wrong) has no interest in the kind of dirty, decrepit politics that seems to be required these days to get near public office. I'm sure Josh knows that once he's sold his soul to get in there, he'll be in some big powerful lobby's pocket and won't be able to do anything anyway.
It seems like the only people who bother to get into this game these days are people whose main objective is (and I hate this phrase) navel-gazing. There are no more Jefferson Smiths (were there ever any?). I can't imagine anyone with a heart and a brain, not to mention perspective, choosing to subject themselves to such torture in the service of such a dubious cause.
I can't think of any way the so-called "public" could show its distaste for the nasty turn politics has taken. Come November you still have to vote for the guy you hate less. But here we are; unless we change the system somehow, the only people we're going to see running for office are reptiles.
--Sally
(To reply, click here.)