Recent Articles The American Prospect - articles by author en Korean Lit Comes to America <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p align="left"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><span class="dropcap">I</span>f, as an American, you visit a globalized megacity like Seoul, you’ll find plenty that feels familiar. Take chain bookstores: There’s bad lighting, as many smartphone accessories for sale as books, and sneaky customer habits. “I check out the covers,” says Claire, a young South Korean who’s showing me around. “If I like one, I go back to my apartment and buy it online.”</span></p> <p>Claire and I are ambling through the Kyobo Book Center in Seoul’s Gangnam district. Gangnam, of course, is the place PSY raps about in “Gangnam Style,” a song that sends up his country’s materialism and wealth. Gangnam is home to Samsung’s corporate headquarters, the city’s neon-saturated nightlife, and outposts for the top international brands, all spread out on a grid of spacious boulevards. It’s the polished, cosmopolitan Korea.</p> <p>What feels less familiar—more messy and alive—is the rest of the city. The streets twist and taper in a never-ending game of chicken, motorcycles versus taxis. The architecture seems to come in only two options, gray apartment tower and squat villa, with most of it dating to the period after the Korean War when Seoul grew so quickly it needed buildings finished more than it needed them pretty. The city’s oldest residents shuffle proudly along, smaller than their compatriots, a reminder of just how recently life in Korea was defined by deficit rather than surplus. Young people scurry to their hagwons, or afterschool tutoring centers. The billboards and ads chatter in a delightful Konglish. The phrase that sticks with me comes from Skin Food, a popular cosmetics chain: “Beauty food for urban sweety.”</p> <p>In Gangnam, the signs are more precise. “Welcome to Gangnam, Global City.” Its branch of the Kyobo Book Center occupies the basement of a striking brick-and-glass skyscraper. Claire, who, like many 20-something Koreans in Seoul, dresses in a style best described as sexed-up Harry Potter, points me to a section with table after table of test-prep books. “Korean parents make it so Korean students don’t even have time to read,” she says. “They study English, mostly.”</p> <p>Claire perfected her English while attending college in Canada—that’s also where she Westernized her name—and now she works at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, a government-run agency everyone calls LTI Korea. But as she shows me more of the bookstore, even it starts to feel strange and new. The employees wear lavish uniforms, a sort of flight-attendant ensemble with indigo sweaters and sparkly gold ties. On the best-seller wall sits a big stack of copies of <em>Lolita</em>. For years, Vladimir Nabokov’s novel had languished in a prim Korean translation that relied on ambiguity and euphemism. Now a new edition has restored the original’s squirming detail, and Lolita is selling like crazy.</p> <p>The country still pines for its own world-famous writer. No Korean has ever won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but Ko Un, a former Buddhist monk who’s the country’s best-known poet, has been rumored as a finalist in the last few years. Each October, in the days leading up to the announcement, reporters camp outside his house. Koreans care about the Nobel for two reasons: first, because they’re anxious about how the world perceives them; and second, because they’re so good at exporting other kinds of culture. The country pumps out syrupy K-pop songs, violent cinema, and soapy, smash-hit TV. One of its most popular shows in the last decade, <em>Dae Jang Geum</em>, is a drama set in the 16th century about a female physician to the king. According to one rumor I heard, the show counted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad among its superfans, and once, when Iran and South Korea were negotiating a meeting, Ahmadinejad issued a demand that he meet the show’s heroine. She happened to be traveling, so South Korea suggested her popular co-star. Iran sent its vice president instead.</p> <p>In 2006, <em>The New Yorker</em> published poetry by Ko Un, and translations of two younger writers, the experimental Kim Young-ha and the realist Shin Kyung-Sook, have done well here. Shin’s <em>Please Look After Mom</em>, a novel about a family’s guilt after its tradition-minded mother goes missing, even hit <em>The New York Times</em> best-seller list, prompting excited coverage in Korean newspapers. This fall, Dalkey Archive Press has teamed up with LTI Korea to publish the Library of Korean Literature, a series of 25 newly translated works and the most comprehensive introduction so far to Korean literature. Still, when it comes to American recognition, Korea has a ways to go. Charles Montgomery, a California native who’s now a professor in Seoul and the proprietor of a lively literary blog, puts it this way: “Imagine, we’re drinking martinis with a bunch of educated people, and I say, ‘Who is your favorite Japanese author?’ You can say one of ten names. ‘Who is your favorite French author?’ One of ten names.” Montgomery continues: “But ‘Who is your favorite Korean author?’ Everyone will run to refill their drinks.”</p> <p> </p> <p><span class="dropcap">I</span>t’s easy to forget, standing in Gangnam today, that a few decades ago the district was mostly rice paddies and that South Korea was poor and devastated, a nation with staggering depth to its grief. Korea sits between China and Japan, and throughout the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910) it battled with both. Still, it remained independent until 1910, when Japan finally colonized its neighbor. Over the next 35 years, the Japanese practiced a bloody and repressive imperialism. Then came the Korean War, in which millions of Koreans died or were cleaved from their families. Then came a series of dictators, notably General Park Chung Hee, who jump-started South Korea’s economy (before it was a tech giant, the country was a steel giant thanks to state-run plants like POSCO) even as he imprisoned and executed his own people.</p> <p>Perhaps the hardest thing to comprehend is just how compressed all this was. In Korea, the kind of issues historians debate in monographs—capitalism versus communism, industry versus agriculture—can be debated whenever a family sits down to a meal, with each generation drawing on its own discrete experiences.</p> <p>The other thing to remember is Korea’s tradition of collectivism. Grounded in Confucianism, it elevates family, community, and society in what Bruce Cumings, in his excellent <em>Korea’s Place in the Sun</em>, calls “hierarchy without shame.” The conformity that flows from this is often overstated. On Seoul’s subway, which is so efficient it drives Western visitors to nearly combust with envy, I watched a surly, thoroughly pierced young man board a car to no reaction. But when, at the next stop, a mother with two small children got on, he sprang up and offered her his seat.</p> <p>So much in modern Korea mixes fragmenting tragedy with centripetal tradition. That includes modern Korean literature. The country had always esteemed its poets and scholars. At Seoul’s Changdeokgung Palace, you can still find an artificial stream curving through trees and pavilions. There, the Joseon kings and their courtiers would release a cup of wine into the water. Whoever it floated to had to drink it, then compose a poem on the spot. If he failed, he had to drink three more cups.</p> <p>Under Japanese rule, however, Korea’s writers turned to novels and short stories, with Yi Kwang-su’s <em>The Heartless </em>(1917) generally seen as the key book. It’s a bit like Robinson Crusoe in this respect—tough to pin down as the earliest but easy to see as a turning point. Yi belonged to a wave of thinkers and writers who’d watched their country collapse. Now they wanted to embrace Western ideas like educational reform and marrying for love.</p> <p><em>The Heartless</em> dramatizes those ideas through a love triangle between a representative Korean man, a traditional woman, and a more Westernized woman. In other words, it barely dramatizes them at all, with Yi prioritizing his causes over his characters and imagery. The writers who followed chose new causes—some calling for further change, others lamenting what had been lost—but they joined Yi in producing a largely didactic body of literature. Ko Un, for example, has described one strain of his work as “anti-government, politically resistant poetry.” But consider his life: a teenager who watched the Korean War ravage his home, a dissident whom dictators threw into prison and beat until his eardrum ruptured. How could he write poetry that was not political?</p> <p>Today, an author like Kim Young-ha can produce a dark and playful novel like <em>I Have the Right to Destroy Myself</em>, which has been translated into multiple languages. But he is an exception. Many writers are still exploring the country’s recent history, and most hew to the rules and habits of its literary system. “[It’s] absolutely Korean and absolutely Confucian,” says Charles Montgomery. “It’s a series of tests.” The biggest one is the battalion of new-author contests run by Seoul’s newspapers and journals. In South Korea, it’s virtually impossible to be an author—to publish—until you win one of these annual contests and make a formal debut. So would-be writers avoid genre lit (there’s little science fiction in this, the most wired of nations) and strive to satisfy the older critics who often judge the contests. “Once you’re past that step,” Montgomery says, “you’re in the same world of finding agents to represent you, and trying to find publishers, and working in a world where people don’t read that much anymore.”</p> <p>The tests never really stop. Even established writers aim for bigger prizes like the Yi Sang Literary Award. In 2004, Kim Young-ha won several of these awards—“what they call his golden year,” Montgomery says. That’s perhaps the only way to transform one’s career in a small literary scene that’s getting smaller. (Last year, even including e-books, the amount the average household spent on books hit its lowest point ever.) But it keeps authors focused on their own country. “Very few Korean writers,” Montgomery says, “have international success as a goal as they write or publish.”</p> <p> </p> <p><span class="dropcap">Y</span>et the rest of Korea frets that its promotion and translation trail China’s and Japan’s, two countries that have won literary Nobels. “We can’t just wait for a translation expert to simply pop out,” a professor told <em>The Korea Times</em> in 2000. “We have to concentrate on training young talents into an elite force.”</p> <p>That’s a pretty good description of what’s happening at LTI Korea. The institute, which reports to South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, has an annual budget of 8.1 billion won (or more than $7 million). Its headquarters, a five-story building near the Han River, in a quieter part of Gangnam, feels less like a literary salon than a disciplined office. In addition to its translation academy, LTI Korea provides generous grants and support staff to translators (that’s Claire’s job); pays for Korean authors to go on international book tours and take residencies at places like the University of Iowa; and runs booths at book fairs like the one in Frankfurt.</p> <p>Kim Seong-kon is the president of LTI Korea, and on the same day I visit the Book Center, I interview him in his fifth-floor office. He’s wearing a cardigan and a pinstriped suit, a snazzy blend of professor and preppy Korean. It makes sense given that Kim has taught at universities around the world, including Harvard and Oxford. Now, as we sit across from each other in leather chairs, he tells me about his two-part plan for breaking Korea’s authors into the American market.</p> <p>The first part centers on the authors. “We do have splendid writers,” Kim says. But many haven’t updated their techniques or subjects since the postcolonial period. “The scope of their literary world is so confined,” he says. Kim wants them to reconsider the reasons they write—not for a local audience but a global one. “They should constantly read other foreign writers,” he says, “so they can learn what the main issues and concerns are among famous international writers.” Korean literature needs more irony, more ambiguity, more experimentation. “You have to embrace contradictions,” Kim says.</p> <p>Once Korean authors settle on more universal themes—“universal” has become a buzzword at LTI Korea—they can add in some Korean flourishes. Kim checks off models like Orhan Pamuk, Umberto Eco, even Dan Brown. “You can adopt similar themes that Dan Brown uses in his fiction,” he says, “but the background can be uniquely Korean—an ancient Korean kingdom, for example.”</p> <p>In the middle of our interview, a photographer pops in. Kim quietly slides to the chair next to me—a visit from an American journalist, it seems, merits a photo op. When the photographer finishes, Kim turns to the second part of his plan. For years, LTI Korea relied on local critics to choose what would be translated and offered to Western publishers. “They do not care about the universality of Korean literature,” Kim says. Instead, they chose more traditional fiction. “When we try to market that particular work overseas, it’s not working,” Kim says. “Foreign publishers do not like it, and foreign readers do not find it appealing.”</p> <p>So Kim has created a new policy where foreign publishers are consulted first on what books LTI Korea will subsidize. A good example is the Library of Korean Literature and Dalkey Archive Press. After Dalkey’s publisher, John O’Brien, approached Kim, they worked together to select the books and cover the series’ estimated $750,000 cost. O’Brien traveled to Seoul and pushed for more experimental fiction—the sort of thing Kim wanted to encourage anyway. At the same time, Dalkey has promised to keep a range of titles in print, offering readers unprecedented access to Korea’s literary history. “You can see Korea’s literature from a bird’s-eye view,” Kim says.</p> <p>The Library of Korean Literature is just the start. “We can have both the universality and also the uniquely Korean cultural heritage,” Kim says. “It’s only a matter of time until a South Korean writer receives the Nobel Prize.”</p> <p> </p> <p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he Library of Korean Literature’s first ten titles appear this November, with the rest arriving next year. Already, the initial batch offers that bird’s-eye view. A Western reader can start with <em>The Soil</em>, another novel by Yi Kwang-su first published as a serial in 1932. But there’s also <em>When Adam Opens His Eyes</em> (1990), the Jang Jung-il novel that stirred up a scandal with its explicit descriptions of straight and gay sex. Yet reading the old next to the new, I was surprised to find myself thinking something Kim might not want to hear—namely, that the titles moving me the most were the ones most steeped in tradition.</p> <p>Take Kim Won-il’s <em>The House with a Sunken Courtyard</em> (1989). The novel begins at the end of the Korean War when Gilnam, a young boy and stand-in for the author, whose family was ripped apart by the conflict, drops out of school to help his mother. “You are the eldest son in this family with no father,” she reminds him in one of the novel’s many laborious monologues. Gilnam starts selling newspapers to help cover food and rent. In a house packed with 26 people, he squeezes into a single room with his mother and three siblings. Like other refugees, the family has moved so often the residences blur together. Gilnam remembers this one by its courtyard.</p> <p>Kim’s characters tend to be archetypes—the drunken head of house, the military deserter on the lam, the kind-hearted prostitute servicing American soldiers. There’s not much plot beyond Gilnam selling newspapers in the city, where he always seems to run into those characters and their hard, lesson-filled lives. The prose can seem impossibly arid. (Here’s how Gilnam describes his father leaving: “My father defected to the North alone because he had lost contact with us. That turned out to be a permanent separation.”) Yet <em>The House with a Sunken Courtyard</em> remains powerful because of its relentless detail. Gilnam’s mother sews for the prostitutes, but it doesn’t pay much. Her youngest son, born just as war breaks out, eats so little that “blue veins showed on his protruding belly.” During the winter, the family’s indoor drinking water freezes. They burn their kerosene lamp only when the mother faces a sewing deadline or the daughter needs to study.</p> <p>Kim also reveals the house—a hanok, or traditional Korean residence with a stately gateway and a carefully tiled roof—to be a fascinating and contradictory place. The current owner’s great-grandfather built it at the end of the Joseon dynasty; his father worked for the Japanese. But now, Kim writes, “from between the tiles of the roof, weeds grew.” In the courtyard, the many renters must build an outdoor toilet and cook their meals. Yet when the owner’s haughty wife goes out, wearing expensive traditional outfits, the people pause and smile: “There goes our lady.” The novel may contain one of world literature’s more on-the-nose endings. (The hanok is torn down and replaced by a “Western-style house.”) Still, it subtly critiques the residents’ fealty to their lady and animates a historical moment and mind-set in ways a work of nonfiction never could.</p> <p>It’s hard to imagine a bigger contrast than the one between Kim and Lee Ki-ho, a younger writer whose spare style and absurd humor recall Donald Barthelme or Kurt Vonnegut. In Lee’s haunting <em>At Least We Can Apologize</em> (2009), the narrator is an unnamed adult who’s been institutionalized by his family. Along with Si-bong, a mysterious character who crops up in many of Lee’s works (sort of his Kilgore Trout), he spends his days swallowing unnamed pills and packing up crate after crate of socks.</p> <p>When the institution shuts down, the men find themselves free but aimless. Lee generates plenty of laughs through the pair’s simplicity, gullibility, and astounding deference. “He asked us if we had ever worked in a convenience store before,” the narrator says of someone interviewing them for a job. “Si-bong and I answered at the same time: ‘We’ve done a lot of packing.’”</p> <p>Eventually, the two turn to their other skill set. Each day at the institution, a pair of porn-addled guards beats them for fun. One day, the narrator realizes the guards will go easier on him when he invents and confesses to various crimes. “We always started with the confessions,” the narrator explains. “That was on account of our being beaten less for confessing than for not confessing.” Now, outside the institution, he and Si-bong launch a personal service apologizing for other people’s offenses. In their passivity, the characters and their clients seem to reflect the inflexibility of South Korea’s many hierarchies.</p> <p>Or maybe not. Lee keeps his novel fable-ish and detail-free, and its satire will resonate anywhere that’s plagued by office drudgery and technological speedup. One of Lee’s running gags is that his two heroes repeatedly (and proudly) refer to themselves as “pillars of the institution,” and the first time I read it, I thought back to another monologue from <em>The House with a Sunken Courtyard</em>. There, Gilnam’s mother demands he become “the pillar of our family.” But Kim’s novel is about Korea. Lee’s novel could be about anywhere.</p> <p> </p> <p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he first time Charles Montgomery met Kim Young-ha, he asked the novelist why South Korea approached the rest of the literary world with its mix of diligent production and top-down control. “He pulled out his iPad, just because he wanted to show it off,” Montgomery says with a smile. Then Kim drew a diagram—a big block he labeled “the POSCO strategy,” after the company, and a bunch of smaller blocks streaming from it. “He said, ‘You have to understand that Korea has had all its success based on a model where we create something that is supported by the government and we pump out units,’” Montgomery recalls.</p> <p>It’s true that South Korea’s industries are famous less for their innovation than for their ability to imitate and improve. (Even Samsung’s name, which means “three stars,” is a tight homage to Japan’s Mitsubishi, which means “three diamonds.”) It’s also true that, historically, Korea’s authors have loved and drawn on Western literature. Yi Kwang-su even wrote an essay titled “Tolstoy and I.”</p> <p>But I worry that Korea’s methodical desire for international success could one day endanger authors who deserve it. A novel like <em>The House with a Sunken Courtyard</em> may seem strange to Western readers, but there is power in that strangeness. South Korea and its people continue to change and fracture at a remarkable speed. That change can create much for us to learn. It also creates much to write about.</p> </div></div></div> Wed, 13 Nov 2013 13:39:52 +0000 219188 at Craig Fehrman Country Noir <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"></span></p> <div class="image image-large"> <div class="field-image"><img src="" alt="" title="" /></div> <div class="field field-name-field-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even">Flickr/Matt Carman</div> </div> </div> </div> <p></p> <p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><span class="dropcap">O</span>ne spring morning two years ago, a woman left her house—a small white one, its porch overrun by toys and exercise equipment—and dropped off her kids at the Sunman Elementary School. Sunman is a tiny town that spreads across the flat farmland of Southern Indiana. State Road 101 is the main drag, and the woman drove down it, past the IGA with its twin gas pumps, past the Family Dollar, past a bar named Louie’s, until she reached home. </span></p> <p>Stanley Short, her estranged husband, was waiting inside. When she entered, Short hit her on the head with a hammer, then bound her to a bed with zip ties and duct tape. He cut her shirt off with a carpet knife and raped her.</p> <p>After several hours the woman came up with an excuse for why they needed to leave. If she didn’t pay the electricity bill, the utility would shut off her power. With Short in the passenger seat, she headed back out on 101 until she spotted a group of men talking outside the Sunman Auction House. The woman swerved into the parking lot and then ran from the car screaming. Short dashed away too, into the nearby woods, but the state police tracked him down. A jury convicted Short of rape, battery, and criminal confinement, among other charges, and he is now serving a 60-year prison sentence.</p> <p>If you live outside the listening range of WRBI, Sunman’s local country station, you’ve probably never heard of Short. I grew up in Indiana, two towns over from Sunman; even then I only learned about the case after a friend filed several terrifying updates on Facebook. Still, the episode came back to me while I was reading Frank Bill’s 2011 debut story collection, <em>Crimes in Southern Indiana.</em> Stanley Short—tattooed, goateed, cruel—would have fit right in with Bill’s desperate characters. </p> <p>There’s a long tradition of shotguns and spare-prose fiction depicting America’s working class, and right now the Midwest is having a literary moment. Dennis Lehane, who anchors his crime novels in Boston, once told an interviewer that “in Greek tragedy they fall from great heights. In noir they fall from the curb.” In books by a small but growing number of authors—besides Bill, Donald Ray Pollock (Ohio), Bonnie Jo Campbell (Michigan), Alan Heathcock (Illinois)—there are no curbs. The roads are gravel and dirt, but the people still find a way to fall.</p> <p>This makes for more than just good noir. Sometimes the rural Midwest, and rural America more generally, can seem to drown in don’t-bother-locking-the-doors nostalgia. The frustrations of groups like the Tea Party suggest that, in many ways, this near mythology remains as powerful inside the region as out. Against this ideal, consider Bill’s new novel, <em>Donnybrook</em>, whose title refers to a three-day bare-knuckle fighting tournament held every August on former farmland. Fans come to watch, gamble, inhale, imbibe—“like a Dead concert with fists,” a mostly toothless meth head calls it. It’s not so easy to be nostalgic about that. </p> <p> </p> <p><span class="dropcap">F</span>rank Bill writes about a particular slice of the Midwest: not the midsize cities, the university towns, or even the places you can glimpse from the interstate but the isolated communities, where the water tower and feed mill remain the two tallest structures.</p> <p>Some of the region’s stronger communal traits still hold. I grew up in the same sprawling gray farmhouse my grandfather was born in, for instance—his mother gave birth to him in the front room, where we kept my sister’s piano—and while that kind of rootedness has become rarer in other parts of the country, it’s still pretty standard in Southern Indiana. </p> <p>Still, plenty has changed, for economic but also other reasons. After World War II, interstate highways opened, and new bypasses rerouted life away from cloistered downtowns. Later, manufacturing began to dry up, and local farms became attached to corporate monoliths. Kids who went to college never came back; those who stayed watched their self-reliant communities turn into commuter towns or unemployment zones. I’ve always felt these shifts brought some good with the bad. It’s sad to see boarded-up movie theaters in Sunman-size locales, but a multiplex offers ten times the choice, even if it’s an hour-long drive to the city. </p> <p>Either way, these shifts have caused some of the region’s traditions to curdle. According to FBI statistics, the Midwest is the only region where murder rates are still increasing; proportionately, across the country, communities with fewer than 10,000 residents have seen the biggest increase of all. This goes a long way toward explaining the death, brawls, and abuse that saturate Frank Bill’s books. </p> <p><em>Donnybrook</em>’s antiheroes, Chainsaw Angus and his sister Liz, make their living off meth. They’re not exactly Walter White, the chemistry whiz who cooks in a “superlab” on <em>Breaking Bad</em>: They squat in rotting farmhouses, blacking out the windows with garbage bags and working on hot plates and camping stoves. Like White, though, they have turned to drugs as a second career. Angus had inherited his father’s logging operation, but a downturn in construction (and a nasty chainsaw injury) put him out of business. Angus does better as a meth cook, until Liz betrays him, stealing a rucksack stuffed with product and heading to the Donnybrook to sell it. Angus chases after her. So do an aging deputy sheriff, a Chinese debt collector, and a semi-noble boxer from Kentucky, bumping into and bloodying each other along the way. </p> <p>Bill writes in a simple, direct style. Short chapters split into short sections. Short sentences, too, with just-right regional touches. A bar deploys empty spools of electrical wire as tables; the Kentucky boxer gets around in a “primered Ford Galaxy”; the wife of a gun shop owner spends her days eating “fried chicken livers breaded with her mother’s secret recipe and watch[ing] the Home Shopping Network on satellite.” Liz and Angus sell their meth during shift changes at the local parts factory, which makes sense. Rural areas rarely enjoy full-blown auto factories, settling instead for supply-chain plants that churn out components like glove boxes or headlights.</p> <p>Still, with Bill it always comes back to violence. His gift for inventive depravity—the debt collector uses fishing hooks in an acupuncture torture session—is undeniable. Even the minor bits of action get tender loving care. This might sound very Hollywood but the gore feels more like a video game. Bill doesn’t linger on the gunman grabbing his weapon or taking aim. He traces the bullet dismembering the body—the moment when, in a game, the pixels rip, explode, or mist. “Angus raised the .45 to Flat’s ash-smudged face,” reads a typical passage. “Pulled the trigger. Red parted white. Flat lost his shape, fell to the earth.”</p> <p><em>Donnybrook</em> has not so much a plot as loose scenes of capering after the meth. At one point, the deputy sheriff discovers a husband and wife cooking inside their fumy trailer. The woman wears a rayon nightgown, the man a filthy too-small T-shirt. Three children are there, too, sitting on “a red vinyl front seat pulled from a ’77 Monte Carlo.” This isn’t even a key location—no other characters pass through—but that just makes it feel more representative of <em>Donnybrook</em>’s world. This is a bleak, bleak book.</p> <p> </p> <p><span class="dropcap">I</span>t’s significant that both Bill and the senior statesman of the genre, Donald Ray Pollock of Ohio, have more than distant memories of a hometown childhood to draw on. Both men have spent most of their lives in the places they write about—including decades working there like anyone else. Each grew up in the southern part of his state, where the “Midwest” owes as much to the South as it does to, say, the Great Lakes, and both have kept notebooks on the job in a factory where they scribbled down co-workers’ harrowing stories. </p> <p>Bill’s roots in Indiana—and in the historic town of Corydon—run deep: a grandfather who worked 100 acres of farmland; a father who returned from Vietnam to log nights at the local VFW; and Bill, who grew up a mild hell-raiser, then settled down to a job at a paint-additive factory. He didn’t try fiction until he was nearly 30, when he saw <em>Fight Club</em>, the 1999 film in which Brad Pitt’s character organizes a series of brutal underground fights. Bill loved the movie so much he sought out the book, and Chuck Palahniuk’s novel converted him into a reader who relied on the Internet’s algorithmic suggestions for what to devour next. I can’t decide whether to admire Bill’s drive or to despair at a literary culture that doesn’t do more to reach people like him. </p> <p>The same arc applies roughly to Pollock’s life, except that while Bill started waking up to write at 3:30 A.M., Pollock started writing in the afternoons, after his shift at a paper mill. At 45, Pollock had stumbled through a midlife crisis and decided to try fiction. Nine years later, his collection of stories, named <em>Knockemstiff</em> after the town he grew up in, caught the fancy of NPR and <em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em>. “Knockemstiff had a reputation for being a really rough place,” Pollock told the <em>Times</em> in 2008. “I took that and cranked it up a few amps.” As a writer’s manifesto, that’s pretty elliptical. Still, I think Pollock and Bill share the goal of telling a less romantic story about their region. It’s no accident that Pollock sets his novel, <em>The Devil All the Time</em>, in the 1950s—because, he implies, there was never a golden Midwestern era. </p> <p>In a book like<em> Fight Club</em>, people beat each other up so that Chuck Palahniuk can talk masculinity and consumerism. In Pollock’s and Bill’s work, they beat each other up because it happens like that sometimes. We associate the term “naturalism” with century-old authors like Stephen Crane, who began with a simple question. What happens when human beings are turned loose in an overwhelming new environment like the modern city? The answer tended to be grim. “Environment is a tremendous thing in the world,” Crane used to inscribe in copies of his novel <em>Maggie: A Girl of the Streets</em>, “and frequently shapes lives regardless.” </p> <p>Given the terse style of these Midwestern writers, I suspect they’d chop modifiers like “frequently” and “regardless.” Still, their purpose remains the same. What happens when human beings are turned loose in an environment that’s not new so much as eroded? Late in <em>Donnybrook</em>, Angus explains, “That ruck belongs to me. No one else. I cooked it. I earned it. It’s mine.” Pollock and Bill make sure plenty of their characters echo this view. You earn (or, in what amounts to the same thing, take) whatever you can. What happens, in a few cases at least, is a man like Chainsaw Angus.</p> <p> </p> <p><span class="dropcap">D</span>onnybrook is less polished and less satisfying than <em>Crimes in Southern Indiana</em>. Bill seems to care more about saying something cold-blooded or Raymond Carver–cool than about providing clear descriptions. There are lazy repetitions (calling Liz’s décolletage “sugar-cookie-pale”—then, one paragraph later, noting her “powdered-donut-colored flesh”). While<em> Crimes in Southern Indiana </em>features several female characters, in <em>Donnybrook</em> the women get only minor roles, except for Liz, whose defining trait is looking good in a concert T-shirt.</p> <p>But a larger shortcoming exists in both of Bill’s books and in the fiction of Pollock and these other working-class authors. There’s a strange absence of interiority or motive in these works. Reading them, one rarely knows why anyone does anything.</p> <p>While Pollock, the best stylist in this group, gets justly praised for his chops, the back-cover blurbs for many of these books often strain for some metaphor about how you’d best read wearing a pair of brass knuckles. Pollock himself resorts to the hard sell. Here’s a blurb he wrote for Bill: “Hits as hard as an ax handle to the side of the head after you’ve eaten a live rattlesnake for breakfast.”</p> <p>But what if these novels offered more? What if, in addition to jobs and trailers, they showed us what it’s like to live there? What it’s like <em>not</em> to be able to leave? </p> <p>Maybe the lack of psychology reveals an unconscious prejudice—a belief that deep characters and complicated thoughts exist everywhere but here. I’ve found myself thinking about the people you rarely encounter in Pollock’s and Bill’s books: schoolteachers, store clerks, or anyone remotely like an elderly woman I know in Sunman. A friend of my family’s, this woman has lived a sad and wonderful life—married at 14, a grandmother in her thirties, she watched her husband flip a four-wheeler in their yard and end up paralyzed. I remember when the church we both went to moved Wednesday-night services to her house, so her husband could still attend, and I remember how I never saw her complain.</p> <p>One of my favorite things about the rural Midwest—and also one of my least favorite—is how, thanks to the way families stay in one place, even as their luck shifts or fades, you end up with people and their histories all mixed together—stuck together, over time. That old lady in Sunman could easily have been the brutal Stanley Short’s neighbor. In Pollock’s and Bill’s world of grotesques, she and her resilience, worry, and hope are nowhere to be found.</p> </div></div></div> Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:07:34 +0000 217518 at Craig Fehrman Drawn to the Mud <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><b>Poisoning The Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and The Rise Of Washington's Scandal Culture</b>, <i>By Mark Feldstein, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 461 pages, $30.00</i> </p> <p><b>How To Become A Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior</b>, <i>By Laura Kipnis, Metropolitan Books, 208 pages, $24.00</i> </p> <p>In 1967, the jury for the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting unanimously recommended that the award go to the muckraking columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson for their expose of the financial chicanery of Thomas Dodd, a powerful senior Democratic senator. The prize instead went to two <i>Wall Street Journal</i> reporters for a story about gambling and organized crime that the members of the jury had not even read. </p> <p>The reversal by the Pulitzer advisory board created a scandal on top of a scandal. <i>Newsweek</i>, <i>The New York Times</i>, and the Associated Press all ran down the suspicious details, starting with the fact that the <i>Journal</i> had submitted its winning story in a different category (local as opposed to national reporting). Did Pearson and Anderson lose the Pulitzer because of their reputation for employing ethically fuzzy methods? Or did they lose it because the advisory board looked down on them as practitioners of the crude arts of scandal-mongering and sensationalism?</p> <p>Scandal itself has a mixed reputation, sometimes tainting the journalists who uncover it even as their exposes earn them fame and fortune. Although Pearson and Anderson were denied the honor of a Pulitzer, they had other consolations. Published in 600 newspapers, their column, "Washington Merry-Go-Round," reached 40 million readers, and the Dodd scoop became the anchor for a best-selling book of theirs, <i>The Case Against Congress</i>. The Dodd story would be Pearson's last big scoop -- he died in 1969 -- but Anderson took over "Washington Merry-Go-Round" alone, growing its audience to 70 million and augmenting it with stints on radio and television, lectures, newsletters, and more books. By the time the Watergate scandal broke, Anderson had become the most famous investigative journalist in America.</p> <p>Anderson is little remembered today, and it is his misfortune that the new book about his remarkable career and achievements, <i>Poisoning the Press</i> by Mark Feldstein, also exposes the full range of his failings. Feldstein details Anderson's reliance on bugging, bribes, and extortion and describes Anderson's work as "a blend of courageous reporting and cheap shots." Many of these cheap shots came in the form of sexual smear campaigns -- at one point, Anderson sent his legmen to look through J. Edgar Hoover's trash for any hints of homosexuality, while at other times Anderson was content to make up charges. Feldstein's careful tracking of this period's homophobia adds a fascinating layer to this book. </p> <p>The book's focus, however, is the intertwined story of Anderson and Richard Nixon, two men who seem to have deserved each other. Both arrived in Washington in 1947 -- Nixon as a congressman, Anderson as a lowly legman to Pearson -- and, although they met face-to-face only a few times over the next 25 years, they became mutually obsessed. Anderson played a part in almost every important Nixon scandal, starting with his discovery of the "personal slush fund" that led to Nixon's "Checkers" speech. The columnist reveled in this role. Early in Nixon's presidency, for example, Anderson bragged on TV that someone in the White House was regularly sending him the president's memos. "I can assure you that if the President knew who was leaking," Anderson said, "he would be fired tomorrow." According to Feldstein, Nixon said of Anderson, "I believe him. What are we going to do about it?" Nixon's staff ended up analyzing dozens of "Merry-Go-Round" columns in an effort to locate the leak. A week later, Anderson chuckled about their efforts in print and then published another secret document.</p> <p>While this was a minor moment -- later, Anderson would uncover Nixon stories big enough to win (and keep) a Pulitzer -- it illustrates the paranoia and gamesmanship that defined their relationship. It also illustrates Feldstein's remarkable reporting. A book like his could easily lapse into the mode of a transaction ledger. (February 1972: Anderson uncovers ITT memo claiming the global conglomerate's $400,000 donation to the Republican Party convinced Nixon to approve ITT's mega-merger; March 1972: Nixon's staff accuses Anderson of "stealing" said memo, drafts list of aggressive questions for his Senate hearing.) But Feldstein is a clear, brisk writer with the good sense to sprinkle in lots of quotations from contemporary sources. And what sources he has: Feldstein conducted more than 200 interviews, filed open-records requests with 50 agencies, and reviewed hours of White House tapes. The only thing he didn't -- or couldn't -- do was convince Nixon aides Chuck Colson and G. Gordon Liddy to talk.</p> <p>What is a scandal -- and what can become one? In <i>How to Become a Scandal</i>, Laura Kipnis claims that "we lack any real <i>theory</i> of scandal." John B. Thompson, the author of <i>Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age</i>, and Ari Adut, the author of <i>On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art</i>, would find this judgment a little uncharitable. Still, Kipnis has her own ideas on the subject, even if they amount to less of a theory than Thompson or Adut offers. </p> <p>Thompson, Adut, and Kipnis would all agree that a scandal requires three things: a transgression against community norms; the exposure of that transgression; and publicly expressed outrage. Where Kipnis breaks new ground is on scandal's motivations. "Scandals are like an <i>anti</i>-civics lesson," she writes, "there to remind us of that smidge of ungovernability lodged deep at the human core which periodically breaks loose and throws everything into havoc." Scandals need us -- they require that we forget how commonplace transgressions are. And we need scandals -- they serve as rituals of "social purification" and occasions for debate of a society's "open secrets."</p> <p>In <i>Against Love</i>, the book that established her as a cultural critic, Kipnis makes the same point, arguing that the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal let Americans air collective anxieties over traditional marriage. Unfortunately, none of the four case studies in her new book reaches the level of insight of her previous one. In <i>Scandal</i>, Kipnis returns to Monicagate, this time to psychoanalyze Linda Tripp. While she does make some interesting points -- our process for public humiliation stands as the modern equivalent to stoning, and, in Tripp's case, it was only intensified by her looks -- Kipnis spends far more time rehashing the public record than deepening our understanding of scandal. As the book moves along, Kipnis' narrative-to-new-idea ratio continues to slip. She avoids taking on the big questions or at least ones big enough to brace a theory of scandal.</p> <p>Watergate not only destroyed Nixon's political career; according to Feldstein, it also "destroyed Anderson's muckraking monopoly." As he lost influence, Anderson turned to pure tabloid journalism with regular segments on <i>Inside Edition</i> and a column for the <i>National Star</i>. Still, Anderson's influence on post-Watergate investigators seems indisputable, if also overlooked. Thompson's and Adut's books both include lengthy discussions of Watergate, but neither mentions Anderson. The media were following Anderson's lead when they became more focused on uncovering scandal, often about the private lives of public figures. This is what Feldstein means when he claims that Anderson and Nixon led to "the rise of Washington's modern scandal culture." </p> <p>But <i>Poisoning the Press</i>, for all its strengths, doesn't develop this idea thoroughly. By focusing on Anderson and Nixon, Feldstein fails to give a broad enough view of the stories that Anderson and Pearson investigated, leaving some basic questions unanswered, such as: What was the ratio between real news and insinuation in "Washington Merry-Go-Round"? Feldstein also skimps on the cultural history needed to establish the before and the after of Anderson's influence. He includes many examples of Anderson's homosexual smears but very little on the mainstream media's reluctance to cover such stories as anything other than "moral charges." Feldstein never even mentions the Pulitzer that Anderson and Pearson were denied. </p> <p>That omission is unfortunate because Pulitzer-gate remains one of the more instructive episodes from Anderson's career. Scandal is shaped not only by what news circulates but also by how it circulates and by whom. It might seem to have its perennial categories -- sex, drugs, and alcohol, corruption, fraud -- but in our world, scandal cannot be understood apart from the forces that drive (or limit) the media. </p> <p>Anderson and Pearson exhaustively documented Dodd trading favors for campaign contributions and using those contributions for private expenses, but this reporting wasn't enough to overcome their column's place in the media ecology. This pattern should feel familiar. For a media outlet, scandal is still a better way to earn readers than respect. When the <i>National Enquirer</i> broke the news of John Edwards' love child, the Pulitzer board resisted the <i>Enquirer</i>'s prize nomination submission. There's a case for denying the <i>Enquirer</i> a shot at a Pulitzer, just as there was for denying a prize to Anderson and Pearson. The same impulse, however, led the mainstream media to make the mistake of ignoring the <i>Enquirer</i>'s reporting for months. As many people who once supported Edwards now have to admit, the tabloids sometimes do have important news to tell us. We may not like what scandal has done to politics, but we have to pay attention.</p> </div></div></div> Fri, 05 Nov 2010 18:05:10 +0000 148983 at Craig Fehrman Ghost Stories <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>In October 2007 -- the same month that Random House emerged from a four-day auction with a $9 million deal for Tony Blair's memoirs -- Robert Harris published his sixth novel, <i>The Ghost</i>. It centers on a cynical, self-aware ghostwriter who must finish the memoirs of a former British prime minister. The PM, thanks to war crimes, waterboarding, and other timely plot points, is laying low in America, but Harris spends more time skewering publishers than politicians. He did his homework, interviewing real ghostwriters and pulling epigraphs from a handbook by "Britain's foremost ghostwriter," and his novel makes for some biting (if predictable) satire. No wonder Harris told National Public Radio, on the last day of his rather busy October, that he "just really was interested in this phenomenon of the ghostwriter." </p> <p>The main thing that interested NPR, and the novel's reviewers, though, was playing connect-the-characters with the Blair administration. <i>The Ghost</i> certainly allows for this reading, and Harris handled the attention with the skill of someone who'd been expecting it, smirking and demurring his way through round after round of sales-boosting interviews. </p> <p>Now it's happening again -- this time to the recently released film version of Harris' novel, adapted by Harris and director Roman Polanski and retitled <i>The Ghost Writer</i>. Polanski doesn't ease up on the publishing industry -- that he casts Jim Belushi as the publisher's CEO should tell you everything you need to know -- but, yet again, context has overpowered conceit. Last year, after decades on the lam, Polanski was arrested on charges of having "unlawful sexual intercourse" with a young girl in 1977. He managed to finish <i>The Ghost Writer</i> under house arrest, but the contours of its reception were set. (How many reviews start with something like: "A horrible crime, a scandalized public figure, the specter of extradition -- no, it's not Roman Polanski's life, it's his latest movie"? I'll take the over.) </p> <p>In both book and film, it seems, Harris' inquiry into the ontology of ghostwriting never stood a chance. But that's just as well since, on both sides of the Atlantic, people stopped worrying about ghostwriting a long time ago. </p> <p></p><center>***</center> <p>George Washington's most famous speech, the Farewell Address (1796), wasn't actually a speech -- it appeared, over the course of a few weeks, in almost every American newspaper. The address wasn't Washington's, either. Alexander Hamilton, with assists from Washington and James Madison, did most of the writing. </p> <p>In the years after Washington's death, readers continued to assume that the first president alone had written the Farewell Address. By 1810, though, Hamilton's authorship was being noted in private letters and public gossip -- a legitimate piece of Antebellum undernews. Hamilton's wife, Eliza, desperately wanted to reveal her husband's role in writing the address and, in doing so, to rehabilitate his reputation, but Hamilton's executor refused to give her the draft that proved his authorship. So she sued him, at which point newspapers began speculating about the author of the address. Jefferson, Madison, even the Historical Society of Pennsylvania weighed in, and the debate persisted for decades. The prominent Philadelphia lawyer Horace Binney admitted in 1859 that the public, with its "deep and undivided reverence" for Washington, "was unwilling to learn, that, even on an occasion of ceremony, he had worn any vesture but his own." </p> <p>Madison worried the Farewell Address would "lose the charm of the name subscribed to it," but he also knew that Washington made "no secret to some that he occasionally availed himself of the friendship of others" -- others, that is, who could write. The affair didn't stop American politicians from turning to ghostwriters. Early examples remain fairly infrequent and often anonymous, but this had less to do with the fear of scandal than with the fact that the political world simply produced less prose. </p> <p>This had all started to change by the election of Warren Harding, the first president to employ a full-time ghostwriter. Judson Welliver wrote Harding's speeches, which H. L. Mencken famously compared to "a string of wet sponges," undetected. (Elsewhere, Mencken called Welliver "a journalist of the highest skill.") Yet within a few years, <i>Time</i> magazine could clearly detail Welliver's duties as a ghostwriter to Harding and, later, to Calvin Coolidge. The <i>Time</i> article focuses mostly on Welliver's successors, including F. Stuart Crawford, who "went under a cloud when it was found that the Coolidge addresses, when dealing with geography and other indisputable facts, followed with a striking literalness the text of the <i>International Encyclopaedia</i>." </p> <p>While Coolidge decided to proceed without a full-time ghostwriter, he would be the last president to do so. This is not to say that future presidents were ready to relinquish their shot at projecting a Washington--like image of solitary genius. Franklin D. Roosevelt pioneered the ghostwriting-by-committee approach -- historians still argue about which aide coined the "new deal" phrase -- but, for his first inaugural, he looked to one man: Raymond Moley. Moley typed up a draft and, the next night, revised it with Roosevelt, watching as the president-elect copied it onto a legal pad. When they finished, Moley threw his initial text into the fireplace and said, "This is your speech now." But FDR took him too literally, adding, a month later, this note to his handwritten draft: "The Inaugural Address as written at Hyde Park on Monday, February 27, 1933. I started in about 9.00 P.M. and ended at 1.30 A.M." The note makes no mention of Moley, and historians continued recounting FDR's lonely night until Moley cleared things up in his own memoir. </p> <p>Moley wrote several memoirs, in fact -- and, among FDR's ghostwriters, he was not alone in this. As books like Charles Michelson's <i>The Ghost Talks </i>(1944) became best-sellers, they indicated that ghostwriting had moved solidly into the mainstream. There were a few surly outliers like Walter Lippman, who argued that "no one can write an authentic speech for another man; it is as impossible as writing his love letters for him or saying his prayers for him." But most politicians, media types, and, above all, voters found themselves with more or less modern attitudes toward ghostwriting. In 1952, American University started offering a course in ghostwriting, and it wasn't too long before <i>The Washington Post</i> was subjecting the "boyish" James Fallows, Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter, to the same puff profiles it now does to Obama's top scribe, Jon Favreau. </p> <p>Speeches are one thing, but audiences tend to hold books -- even political books -- to higher standards. The division between these categories, however, has never been precise. Before today's clearly defined campaign biographies and manifestos, the most popular way to kick off a campaign was with a collection of speeches, previously ghostwritten, now compiled by anonymous aides. The rise of ghostwritten books also parallels the rise of ghostwritten speeches. James Buchanan, a terrible president but a titan in the untold history of presidential autobiography, had an assistant write his memoirs from dictation in 1867. (Buchanan died before they could finish.) By 1927, when the Authors' League held a meeting on ghostwritten celebrity books, the consensus was that "the public was at one time completely credulous on the point. Now it seems unlikely that it believes in any of the noted athletes, singers or politicians who break out in print." </p> <p>For readers, in other words, a political book's impact matters more than its authorship -- and nowhere was this clearer than during the postwar period, which saw a series of popular political books, all best-sellers, all instrumental in shaping their authors' careers. Dwight Eisenhower's <i>Crusade in Europe</i> (1948), Barry Goldwater's <i>Conscience of a Conservative</i> (1960), and Richard Nixon's <i>Six Crises</i> (1962) relied on ghostwriters to varying degrees; no one cared. Jimmy Carter wrote <i>Why Not the Best?</i> (1975) without any help; no one cared about that, either. </p> <p>In the midst of all this, of course, came John F. Kennedy's <i>Profiles in Courage </i>(1956). And while Kennedy's authorship- -- -or, more accurately, Ted Sorensen's authorship -- became controversial, it was the book's Pulitzer Prize that catalyzed the backlash. The problem wasn't ghostwriting; it was award-winning ghostwriting. <i>Profiles in Courage</i> was, from the beginning, both a political boon and a popular success, with a serialization in <i>The New York Times Magazine </i>and, a mere two weeks after its release, a television-adaptation deal. But the sniping at Kennedy's authorship didn't start, in print, at least, until after -- a mere <i>eight days</i> after -- he won the Pulitzer on May 7, 1957. Even Drew Pearson, the political columnist who dragged the issue onto the national stage, framed his accusation in terms of the award: "Jack Kennedy," Pearson said on ABC's <i>The Mike Wallace Interview</i>, "is the only man in history that I know who won a Pulitzer Prize on a book which was ghostwritten for him." </p> <p>While Pearson couldn't recall his name on air, Sorensen used ghostwriting to acquire his own degree of celebrity. (Sorensen also used it to get revenge: He wrote the retraction Pearson had to read on the next week's show.) It makes sense that many successful writers have ghostwritten political books and speeches- -- -and that even more have used ghostwriting as a step toward broader success. Let's put an end to the absurdly resilient rumor that Mark Twain ghostwrote Ulysses S. Grant's <i>Memoirs</i>, then note that the ghostwriting ranks have included George Bancroft (he wrote speeches for James Polk and Andrew Johnson), Archibald MacLeish and Robert Sherwood (FDR), Doris Kearns Goodwin and John Steinbeck (Lyndon Johnson), William Safire and Pat Buchanan (Nixon), Hendrik Hertzberg and Chris Matthews (Carter), Thomas Mallon (Dan Quayle) -- and Walter Lippmann, who prayed and loved on behalf of both Woodrow Wilson and JFK. </p> <p></p><center>***</center> <p>In our own age, ghostwriting has matured into a decorous, rule-bound discipline -- lawyers and polite society both recognize the difference between a book's "writer" and its "author," and one can draw similar (though less precise) distinctions between byline language choices like "and," "as told to," or "with." If specific ghostwriters get noticed, it is only as an extension of their client. Indeed, most recent attempts to scandalize ghostwriting reflect partisan motives or divisive personalities more than any underlying anxieties about ghostwriting. When Hillary Clinton opted not to thank her ghostwriter in the acknowledgments of <i>It Takes a Village</i> (1996), it became a mini crisis; when Howard Dean repeated her mistake in <i>Winning Back America</i> (2003), only <i>Newsweek</i> noticed. </p> <p>This selective outrage helps to explain the bizarrely detailed accusations, launched by right-wing bloggers late in the 2008 election, that Barack Obama's <i>Dreams from My Father</i> (1995) was ghostwritten by Bill Ayers. In fact, the Obama-Ayers example perfectly illustrates the state of ghostwriting today: Only the most partisan readers can muster (or manufacture) any anger about it. If the bloggers were truly concerned about the demise of political discourse, they might have compared <i>Dreams</i> to the muzzled style of <i>The Audacity of Hope </i>(2006) -- and to the latter's acknowledgments page, which nods to a whole focus group's worth of political allies, including Favreau. </p> <p>The bloggers were never concerned about this -- nobody is. It's too late to save Harris and Polanski from the collective shrug that greets ghostwriting. But what about Blair? His autobiography, <i>The Journey</i>, arrives this September, and he and Random House insist he's writing it without any help. Someone should get him a subscription to <i>The London Review of Books</i>, in which a recent review laid into the new historical book written by Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, for making mistakes "a competent ghost-writer might have avoided." At least, the reviewer snarked, "our new prime minister should be able to fend off any doubts about authorship." </p> </div></div></div> Sun, 28 Mar 2010 20:38:19 +0000 148565 at Craig Fehrman