Ninety thousand eight hundred and eight reasons to universalize healthcare

Date of Visit	Provider	Total Charges
2/9/12	ST DAVIDS HLTHCARE PARTNERSHIP	$76.00
2/9/12	HARRIS S ROSE MD PLLC	$199.00
2/9/12	CLINICAL PATHOLOGY LABORATORIES	$134.50
11/17/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$235.00
11/11/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$285.00
11/7/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$230.00
11/4/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$254.00
10/31/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$180.00
10/26/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$180.00
10/21/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$235.00
10/17/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$189.00
10/14/11	UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN	$35.00
10/11/11	UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN	$10.00
10/10/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$235.00
10/7/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$275.00
9/28/11	ST DAVIDS HLTHCARE PARTNERSHIP	$76.00
9/28/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$32.00
8/24/11	ST DAVIDS HLTHCARE PARTNERSHIP	$76.00
8/24/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$32.00
8/15/11	A M HOME DIAGNOSTICS INC	$45.00
8/15/11	CTMF INC	$199.00
8/14/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$32.00
8/14/11	CAPITOL ANESTHESIOLOGY ASSN	$1,343.30
8/14/11	CTMF INC	$200.00
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$137.50
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$37.00
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$137.50
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$32.00
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$32.00
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$32.00
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$137.50
8/13/11	SETON HEALTHCARE	$74,678.00
8/13/11	HARRIS S ROSE MD PLLC	$4,277.00
8/13/11	SETON HEALTHCARE	$897.00
8/13/11	AUSTIN PATHOLOGY ASSOCIATES	$182.35
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$41.00
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$357.50
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$130.00
8/13/11	CTMF INC	$539.00
8/13/11	B & M AMBULANCE SERVICE INC	$4,373.33
	Total	$90,808.48

An email excerpt (but one I didn't want to lose)

To my brother, or more generally, to anyone who has not yet met his first Darin:

My point in the previous email was to ask you for specificities.  Could you give me an example of a specific sentence, paragraph, passage, or piece of dialogue that suffers from a lack of nuance, i.e., that does not "mirror the inherent contradictions and ambivalence in [our thoughts]"?   This may be harder than you think.

"Darin got on the bus."

By most measures, this is is an innocuous, workmanlike sentence, with a single subject and object, and nothing else.  But it conceals a great deal.  For instance, the proper noun "Darin" brings up different images in different readers. To you, who are possibly yet to meet your first Darin, fictional (Darin isn't a very common a name in novels) or real, it is a placeholder for a person with no attributes. I hazard that the image in your head is one of a vaguely Caucasian man, perhaps long-nosed, a briefcase in his right hand, and wearing a tie.  For me, on the other hand, who knows two real people and one author named "Darin", a Darin-image is necessarily more amalgamated.  I see a man long of hair, flat of face, his stay-at-home t-shirt still stained with the cat droppings he tried to clean up in the afternoon.   We have already diverged in our interpretations of this sentence, and we haven't even gotten to the word "bus" (to which a similar hermeneutic treatment can be applied) yet.
All this may seem obvious to you.  In fact, you may claim that this is exactly the opposite of what you had in mind.  You may say: the shortest passages are the most ambiguous, and the longer a passage, and its accompanying description, the easier, and thus less rewarding, it is to imagine the object of the description.  But this is a specious argument.  A long passage is not inherently easier to place than a shorter one.  

"He wore ill-fitting clothes.  He had on a fake gold watch.  His lips wore a brownish hue, as though recently parted by a cigarette.  His face was mottled, it was obvious, by a recent accident.  He was missing his front teeth. Out of his pocket stuck a damp-deformed carton of Colgate Total.  His maroon gumboots were soaked through."

This, by any standards, is a bit of an itemization.  You may claim it belongs to the category of descriptions that leave little to the imagination.  But surely there is enough here to imagine!  As in the Darin example, each noun introduces shades of meaning, introduces images, that depend on the reader that apprehends them.  More importantly, the person being described here, unlike Darin, can be placed in a certain stratum of society---the man of few means---and this fact is itself enough to propel it beyond any accusations of dutiful thoroughness.   

Given, then, that there is always a great deal to imagine, that a passage always introduces more possibilities than it closes off, the question is not: Does a passage leave much or little to the imagination? but rather: What does this passage leave to the imagination? Different schools of fiction (I assume here that we're talking about fiction;  non-fiction is a whole other ballgame) answer this question in different ways.   The minimalists would stick to the Darin-like  sentences, which they seem to admire a great deal.  

"He looked very dead.  It was raining. I liked him as well as anyone I ever knew." (A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway)

The point of this kind of writing, apart from "the mere ratification of male taciturnity" it embodies, is to hint at a world just beneath the fictional surface, one pierced only at critical junctures by the fiction itself.   In theory, they leave a lot to the imagination. In practice, the amount to be imagined, if not managed properly, can overshadow the fiction, until everything comes to seem distended rather than pregnant with portent.  For this reason (and others, of course), minimalism is difficult to master, and only certain kinds of writers (not to mention readers) are suited for it.  

I myself prefer the opposite of minimalism:  

"They looked out, frowning into the sun, at what was left of a High Victorian garden, a wide round pond with a disused fountain of crumbling tritons, like angry, pock-marked babies, at its centre; the water had dropped to show the weed-covered pipe that fed it. The surrounding parterres had all been put to grass ten years before, when help had become a hopeless problem; though here and there a curved seat or a sundial or an unkillable old rose made a puzzled allusion to the plan it had once been part of." (The Spell, Alan Hollinghurst) 

In such writing, the writer is interested in parading the depth of his own imagination; in proving that he is better at imagining things than you are.   He too, leaves things to your imagination; but what he leaves is rather ordinary and can be deferred endlessly, until the end of the novel is met.  It is not an oversimplification to say that most novels can be located in a spectrum between minimalism and abundance.

Being not a review of Fortress of Solitude

I'm being blown apart by Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude.  I haven't finished it yet, so I can't say it's best novel I've read in the past few years, but so far, a fifth of the way through, it's already taught me more about technique than possibly any other novel, The Line of Beauty excluded.  I have a strange, almost paternal reaction to critiques of it: the review by William Skidelsky in the London Review of Books, for instance, may be interesting enough in its structural observations, but it makes very little of the endless mastery of ventriloquism on display in every single sentence in that book.   On the flip side, we have the useless reviews by any number of newspapers; either (on this side of the Atlantic) mindlessly congratulatory or (on the other side) vague but mostly positive. No one seems to have done justice to the purely belletristic pleasures of the novel, and, once I'm done reading it---PhD be damned---I intend to do exactly that.    

Robert Gottlieb the great editor on Joseph H. the great writer

GOTTLIEB

Joe Heller and I have always been on exactly the same wavelength editorially, and the most extraordinary proof of this came up when we were working on Something Happened. It’s a deeply disturbing book about a very conflicted man—a man who is consumed with anxiety and all kinds of serious moral problems—and his name was Bill Slocum. Well, we went through the whole book, and divided it up into chapters and all the rest of it, and at the end of the process I said, Joe, this is going to sound crazy to you but this guy is not a Bill. He said, Oh really, what do you think he is? I said, He’s a Bob. And Joe looked at me and said, Hewas a Bob, and I changed his name to Bill because I thought you would be offended if I made him a Bob. I said, Oh no, I don’t think he’s anything like me, it’s just that this character is a Bob. So we changed it back. It was absolutely amazing. How did it happen? I don’t know. I suppose our convoluted, neurotic, New York Jewish minds work the same way.

Being not a review of The Flame Alphabet

Some preliminary thoughts on Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet: (twenty pages in, but never too soon to make a prejudiced, half-baked, ill-considered judgment of what may well be a fucking awesome novel.)

1) Not another goddamn story about Jewish identity! Enough already! We've heard from you guys. We fucking keep hearing from you guys. Why not (for a change) stop being selfconscious about your historicality, or lack thereof, and make a sincere bid for ahistoricality? Huh?

2) The novel's main selling point is also its conceit (surprise, surprise):  Far into the future, or perhaps right now in an alternate reality, adults are getting sick; they're dying off.  The culprit appears to be language, or, more specifically, language as spoken by children; children who, at least initially, are unwitting about the havoc they wreak on their unsuspecting progenitors.  I haven't read enough of the novel to see what Marcus makes of this premise, but I foresee some purely technical problems.  

First of all: the good anti-utopian novel usually comes with a lot of politio-socio-cultural baggage, which it must (at least initially) conceal, and which sloughs off gradually, revealing itself for what it is: a contentious and polemical little parasite hosted by an otherwise lovable story.  In such novels, the hook is the plot; the social commentary is just along for the ride, and by the time you notice it's there, it's too late: you find out the Amazon Used Book seller from whom you bought the book has a shitty return policy. 

Marcus is having none of this. He's brandishing his symbolic sword---with which he will no doubt cut a swath through the modern novel, or at least corrupt and dated conceptions of it---he's brandishing that sexy katana in the plain light of day. He's using that little beast to slice plotwise through the novel.  And he's letting you catch him in the act. Is this calculated, a bit of the notorious Marcus swagger?  Or is it just him saying: "Wait till you hear the idea for my new novel. It's just like Contagion, except---drum roll...---the disease is language! Language, do you see, Heidi! It's brilliant!" 

The second problem is obvious: Isn't it ironic that a novel about the death of language, or, equivalently, the massacring of people by language, can only be communicated through language? Isn't there something unseemly about this irony?  I'm sure Marcus is aware of this, and I'm sure there's some phenomenally brilliant cultural studies point to be made about exactly such a dichotomy, but I'm not sure if it belongs in this, or indeed, any novel.   

Third, an aesthetic consideration.   There's something brain-fartesque about having to read pleonasms, especially bombastic ones.  I will not list any of Marcus's here, but suffice it to say that the bodily degeneration Marcus needs to describe to describe the disease of language is affecting enough without having to resort to comma-separated lists each of whose adjectives neighbors the last in meaning as well as sound. 

3) The back cover lists praise for the novel by J. Safran Foer (the author, and lately the auteur, of  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), by Tom McCarthy (of C fame) and Michael Chabon.  What that last man had to say about The Flame Alphabet  is interesting for its own sake: 

Echoes of Ballard's insanely sane narrators, echoes of Kafka's terrible gift for metaphor, echoes of David Lynch, William Burroughs, Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz and Mary Shelley: a world of echoes and re-echoes---I mean our world---out of which the sanely insane genius of Ben Marcus somehow manages to wrest something new and unheard of.  And yet as I read The Flame Alphabet, late into the night, feverishly turning the pages, I felt myself, increasingly, in the presence of the classic. 

Start with that  adverbial adjective: "insanely sane". What does it even mean?  What qualities in the world begin dully as sane ones, and are then somehow animated by being insanely so?  The word "sane" can be used as a compliment or a pejorative; in the former case, "insanely" can only water sanity down, and in the latter, heighten its pejorative effect.  "Insanely sane" is no handsome tuple of complicity. It speaks, if at all, of writerly weariness.

Then we have all the egregious name dropping, the roll calling.  I imagine Chabon, taken somewhat by his late sleepless and febrile night, setting out to write the sentence, realizing that he'd have to bring an original name to the otherwise predictable list, crossing out, say, Pynchon from the list of Possible Brilliant Writers, hitting on David Lynch, whose Mulholland Drive he'd had the pleasure of only recently watching, patting himself on the back, then hitting on Robert Walser and Mary Shelley, and rewarding himself with a long day's rest. He'd earned it, after all.

And then there's that last sentence.  If you forget for a moment the cliched and almost certainly untrue and in any case irrelevant image of Chabon's staying up till late to finish this novel---what is he, a fifty-something reading an airport bodice-ripper?----if you forget, and perhaps forgive this, what of: "[...] felt myself, increasingly, in the presence of the classic." The classic?  The only one?  Maybe he meant "the classic", as in the archetypal classic.  Or maybe he meant "the classic", as in "the exemplar of its kind"; this is classic Realism; this is classic primate behavior; this is classic Mitt.  Whatever it's meaning, never has a piece of prose so transparently in thrall to its audience been so transparently opaque.  It's blurb writing at its worst; or, (if you're in an uncharitable mood), classic Chabon.