Reviews of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead have generally left me cold — even the ones not written by James Wood. But I’m slowly being won over by the excerpts. In this one, from the review in the January 15th issue of the Economist, the Reverend John Ames considers how we might look upon our earthly existence from a position in heaven:

I can’t believe that we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

New to my blog over the past week:

* New to the blogroll: Beatrix, the book review satellite of Beatrice.com; Matilda, Ozzie-oriented book news; and Polish Writing, about which I can only say: where have you been all my life? I’ve also added Tito Perez’s Proust Reading Group, with whom I’ll be reading ISOLT for the next, say, year or so.

* New to the events list (partial): Peter Dawkins (Feb 2), whose theories on the authorship of Shakespeare’s works are endorsed by everyone from The Globe’s Mark Rylance to The Globe’s Mark Rylance; The Black American Culture panel (Feb 2), part of CPL’s current exhibition of photographs, letters, and memorabilia from 20th Century black writers in Chicago; another reading by Aleksandar Hemon (Apr 12), this one up at Northwestern; and Kazuo Ishiguro (Apr 22), promoting his new book Never Let Me Go.

* New to the “more events” list: I added the web site for the Center for the Writing Arts at Northwestern. Don’t know why I didn’t have this before.

ADDITION 2/3: In the Tribune today, Dawn Turner Trice writes about the Organization for Black American Culture, whose surviving members will take part in the panel I mention above.

Before 2004 vanishes from our consciousness entirely — and it already sounds like a long time ago, doesn’t it? — someone should point out what an exceptional year it was for Chicago-related fiction. Almost every month brought a new title with a Chicago author, a Chicago setting, or both:

JANUARY—Shawn Shiflett, Hidden Place
FEBRUARY—Barth Landor, A Week in Winter
MARCH—John McNally, Book of Ralph
APRIL—Elizabeth Berg, The Art of Mending
MAY—Dan Chaon, You Remind Me of Me
JUNE—Adam Langer, Crossing California
JULY—Ward Just, An Unfinished Season
AUGUST—Harry Mark Petrakis, The Orchards of Ithaca
SEPTEMBER—Joe Meno, Hairstyles of the Damned
OCTOBER—Janet Desaulniers, What You’ve Been Missing
NOVEMBER—Roddy Doyle, Oh Play That Thing

In April 2005, both the Langer and the Chaon come out in paperback, so you’ll get a second excuse to read them if you haven’t read them already. But hey, why not read them all?

A few literary items from the local papers over the weekend:

* In the Sun-Times, Roger K. Miller revisits MacKinlay Kantor’s 1955 novel Andersonville. “[It] continues to surpass challengers as they come along, like Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, if for no other reasons than its immense scope and superior evocation of the times.

* In the Tribune, Steven G. Kellman looks at This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life, by Carlos Fuentes, translated from Spanish by Kristina Cordero. “This I Believe is alphabetized analysis — 42 short essays, about six pages each, arranged according to the first letter of their one-word titles. Like Milosz’s ABC’s, the abecedarian assemblage that poet Czeslaw Milosz published in 2001, Fuentes’ book is organized by letter not logic, so that ‘Education’ immediately follows ‘Death,’ and all thoughts lead to ‘Zurich.’” But I was just as interested to learn that Kellman has a bio of Henry Roth coming out in August from Norton.

* Also in the Trib, Rebecca L. Ford reviews Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendship, by Emily Bernard. Bernard invites writers she admires “to reflect upon their particular experiences with interracial friendships.” Bernard’s last book was the wonderful Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964.

Shortly after the artist Agnes Martin died last month, I went to see an exhibition of her paintings and was struck by the following passage in the exhibition program:

The innocuous reasons Martin gave for leaving New York — such as that urban renewal initiatives spelled the demise of her studio — are not incredible. But there are also suggestions that she was fleeing a love affair gone wrong. With the abstinent life she seems to have chosen after returning West, Martin would come to deride “passion” and “lust” as “not real,” and as unworthy because “exhaustible” emotions.
“Agnes Martin: On and Off the Grid,” Anna C. Chave, November 2004

I’m not sure why this caught my eye; maybe it was just the confident contrariness of Martin’s “not real,” as if saying it would make it so. Whatever the reason, last week I came upon this dissenting opinion, in paraphrase from the poet C. P. Cavafy:

Cavafy’s historic vision derived from his sense of the world as a kind of theater, in which the most dramatically potent elements are immaterial: cultural pride and sexual passion. Such deep-seated emotions, however self-deceiving, he saw as gifts; and gifts that, because they etch themselves into memory, endure to teach the evanescence of everything else.
“Under water (review of Alexandria by Michael Haag),” John Rodenbeck, January 7, 2005

Because all the cool kids are doing it: here are the books stacked on the floor of my office right now, omitting business and technology.

Dump this book while you still can!, Marcel Bénabou,
Why I have not written any of my books, Marcel Bénabou
Out of my head, Didier van Cauwelaert
Streets in their own ink, Stuart Dybek
Women as lovers, Elfriede Jelinek
Cooler by the lake, Larry Heinemann
Paco’s story, Larry Heinemann
Hash, Torgny Lindgren
Swann’s way, Marcel Proust
Proust’s binoculars; a study of memory time, and recognition in A la recherche du temp perdu, Roger Shattuck
Marcel Proust, Roger Shattuck
Proust’s way: a field guide to In search of lost time, Roger Shattuck
De Kooning: An American Master, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
Seoul, Robert Storey

And here are the books I have on request at the library.

Korea, Martin Robinson
Fascination, William Boyd
The swimmer, Zsuzsa Bánk
Wrong about Japan: a father’s journey with his son, Peter Carey
Wild grass: three stories of change in modern China, Ian Johnson

Robert Burns — who called himself Robin, Rab, Rab Mossgiel, Rab the Rhymer, and Robert, but never Rabbie or Robbie — was born on this day in 1759 in Ayrshire, Scotland.

A few years ago I saw the Burns statue in The Domain, which is sort of the Central Park of Sydney. Only a few days later, I happened across a similar monument in Milwaukee. Which caused me to reflect: how many of these darn things are there? Well, more than a few. In fact, Burns probably claims more public statuary than any poet in history:

Adelaide, Australia
Albany, New York
Barre, Vermont
Chicago, Illinois
Dunedin, New Zealand
Edmonton, Alberta
Fredericton, New Brunswick
Halifax, Nova Scotia
London, England
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Montreal, Quebec
New York, New York
Quincy, Massachusetts
San Francisco, California
Sydney, Australia
Toronto, Ontario
Vancouver, British Columbia
Windsor, Ontario

Scotland, all by itself, has a list nearly half as long:

Alloway, Scotland
Dumfries, Scotland
Glasgow, Scotland
Irvine, Scotland
Kilmarnock, Scotland
Leith, Scotland
Maybole, Scotland
Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland
Sirling, Scotland

Friends, when we get together for our Burns Supper tonight at the Duke of Perth, I ask only this: Can we have just one year where we don’t argue about the kilts?

MYTH: We should not wear the Kilt at Burns Suppers.
TRUTH: This fallacy has arisen because Burns never wore a kilt. It was an outlawed form of dress after the Jacobite Rebellion. However Burns was a fervent Scot and wrote about the injustice dealt out to John Highlandman. Burns understood the prevalent view that John Highlandman’s crime was to wear highland dress and be loyal to his clan. This resulted in him being deported. The establishment had decreed that it was illegal to wear a uniform signifying membership of a proscribed clan, carry a weapon and be disloyal to the crown. All through Burns’s works he revived an interest in Scottish traditions and also in human rights. Highland Dress is also mentioned in “Charlie He’s my Darling.” Let us have no more nonsense on this subject and, for those who want to, let us all wear the kilt with pride and with honour.

(Addition, 5/31/10: Wikipedia has since done the job with admirable comprehensiveness!)

A fascinating piece by Mark Scheffler in today’s Crain’s Chicago Business, titled “Genius grants don’t pay off in literature,” concludes that the MacArthur Foundation isn’t getting a reasonable return on its investment in literary artists:

As part of a program widely known as genius grants, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation most years gives one or more authors $500,000, hoping financial freedom will help the writers produce their best work.

Surveying book reviews, author profiles and the opinions of literary scholars, Crain’s determined that 88% of the MacArthur recipients wrote their greatest works before being recognized by the Chicago-based foundation. The sheer number of books produced by the writers declined, too, after their MacArthur awards.

With regard to productivity, Scheffler doesn’t hesitate to separate the dogs from the darlings, as they say on Wall Street. Among the former are Sandra Cisneros (one book in 11 years), Norman Manea (two books in 12), Octavia Butler (one book in 9), and Bette Howland (zero books in 10). Darlings include Richard Powers (six books in 16 years).

MacArthur program director Daniel Socolow delivers this ringing defense of his fellows: “I haven’t seen anything from anyone that has led me to be disappointed,” Mr. Socolow says, “primarily because I haven’t followed (the recipients) too closely.”

In the end, Scheffler finds fault not with the grantees but with the grantor. The nominating system, he notes, has long been called into question. What’s more, “Writers are mostly chosen too late in their careers, average age 48, and well after the literary establishment has recognized them for excellence.”

Elsewhere he notes, “The lack of curiosity and follow-up [at MacArthur] flies in the face of current philanthropic practice. Charities, more and more, are seeking to measure the results of their giving and to make adjustments to increase its effectiveness, adopting a more disciplined, businesslike approach.”

Somehow I missed this over the weekend, but Moorishgirl comes to the rescue. On NPR’s Weekend Edition, Scott Simon did a terrific segment on local boy Joe Meno and his novel, Hairstyles of the Damned. Apparently the novel, published by Akashic Books’ Chicago-based Punk Planet imprint, has sold more than 20,000 copies and is now in its third printing. How cool.

Nothing in the Sun-Times of literary note this weekend, but a few items in the Trib:

* Mike Dorning provides an update on the NEA’s Operation Homecoming. “Writing from soldiers and their families is being collected in an archive for future historians, and the best work is to be published in an anthology due out next year. Already, the NEA has received more than 750 entries in advance of a March 31 deadline for submissions.”

* Manya A. Brachear remembers Carlos Cortez, Chicago poet, muralist, and graphic artist, who died last week at 81.

* James Smethurt says Emily Raboteau’s “engaging” debut novel, The Professor’s Daughter, “takes up the fundamental American obsession with racial categorization and acknowledges the claims that the history of such categorization makes on the individual.”

* Michael Upchurch compares Tom Bissell’s recent books. “[T]he nonfiction of Chasing the Sea, first published in 2003 and recently issued in paperback, is broadly, diligently informative. But it’s the fiction of the new book God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories that mercilessly, masterfully nails its target.”