Persuasion

The article about Camus in the April 9 issue of the New Yorker (which is unfortunately only online for subscribers) contains this quotation from Camus:

We have witnessed lying, humiliation, killing, deportation, and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves, and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction.

How does one talk to those who are so sure of themselves that they never doubt the validity of their actions, no matter what the content of those actions may be? If you perceive someone as being so full of certainty and completely unwilling/unable to be skeptical about their own beliefs, then perhaps the only thing to do is not to talk to them, but to talk to others who are not as uncertain, to help them avoid being persuaded by abstract certainties that lead to "lying, humiliation, killing, deportation, and torture."

Still, it would be nice if the people in power were not engaged in those activities quite so unreservedly.

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Near the end of the article, Adam Gopnik paraphrases Camus's position on place as follows: No human being is more indigenous to a place than any other. This rootless cosmopolitan applauds such a point, but Camus's basis for it is quite convincing: his mother may have been a French colonist in Algeria, but she worked as a cleaning lady; she had none of the privileges of the colonial. And Camus, born and raised in Algeria, was as Algerian as anyone else born and raised there.

Gopnik on Magic

Magicians are, in their relations with one another, both extremely generous and extremely jealous. Just as chefs know that recipes are of little value in themselves, magicians know that learning the method is only the beginning of doing the trick. What they call “the real work” isn’t the method, which anyone can learn from a book (and, anyway, all decent magicians know roughly how most tricks are done), but the whole of the handling and timing and theatrics of the effect, which are passed along from magician to magician and from generation to generation. The real work is the complete activity, the accumulated practice, the total summing up of tradition and ideas. The real work is what makes a magic effect magical. (Adam Gopnik, "The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life," The New Yorker, March 17, 2008)

Of course, I really should have commented on this back in March or April, but this article is not as timely as the Hilary Clinton article in the same issue of The New Yorker!

Anyway, this was an excellent article by Adam Gopnik on magicians and how they understand what they do, and it was full of passages like this that seem to touch on the magic of other arts as well, including poetry. The "real work" is what separates the great magicians from the decent ones, and one could argue that it is a similar "real work" of "handling and timing and theatrics" that makes a great poet.

And that "real work" involves not just the timing of the individual performance (read, the individual poem), but a sense of "the complete activity, the accumulated practice, the total summing up of tradition and ideas"—that is, an understanding of what magic (or poetry) has already done, and what one's own contribution to that activity, that practice, that tradition, and its ideas is.

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In the process of looking up that article, I discovered that one of my all-time favorite New Yorker profiles is also online: this one about the magician and actor Ricky Jay, from 1993. Now if only they had the David Mamet profile online, too (and there's a connection here, since Jay was in at least two of Mamet's movies, "The Spanish Prisoner" and "House of Games").

"Man is the animal who dreams. And when he dreams, he dreams of money." (Ricky Jay in "The Spanish Prisoner")

Puppy

The inimitable George Saunders had an exceptional short story, "Puppy," in the New Yorker a few issues ago (May 28, 2007).

I don't know of any other writer who so vividly captures the shame and other painful emotions of the insecurities of social class, especially of those who have to work low-level jobs just to scrape by. Check out "Civil War Land in Bad Decline" or "Pastoralia."

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The same issue has a memorable article by Adam Gopnik on Abraham Lincoln's last words, "Angels and Ages."

"Civilization is an agreement to keep people from shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre, but the moments we call historical occur when there is a fire in a crowded theatre; and then we all try to remember afterward when we heard it, and if we ever really smelled smoke, and who went first, and what they said."