Ken Burns
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Charles Petersen

To vacation like a king, in a land no king can own, is nonetheless to expose the poverty of everyday democratic life. A trip to the parks becomes a Cinderella tale with no prince but rather a long drive home at the end. As one of Burns' favorite rangers declares, "Transcendent experience is commonplace in Yosemite … And where else can you get an experience like that?" 

Rebecca Solnit
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Nikil Saval

For a book so concerned with empathy and altruism, A Paradise Built in Hell is filled with enemies. They appear most often in the form of spectral masses, which, like the "extraordinary communities" in disasters, suddenly emerge to defend the status quo: congealed privilege and hypercapitalist exploitation. What Solnit admires is what we might call "the people," as in the Spanish pueblo or Mandarin renmin—those authentically popular but hitherto disenfranchised groups in whose name the revolution will be made—while the phantom bad groups are "the media, public opinion, and the bureaucrats and politicians," who show up on cue to disrupt the "people's" carnivalesque utopia.

Stieg Larsson
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Ian MacDougall

There are so many corrupt men who hate women in every corner of Larsson's Sweden that to present them all in a concise manner would be impossible. They range from editors of major dailies to the members of Scandinavia's ubiquitous biker gangs to police to lawyers to medical doctors to criminal masterminds right out of a Roger Moore-era James Bond film. The one thing that unites this mélange of women-hating crooks is that the welfare state sponsors or at least supports their crimes. The state itself is the greatest villain.

Norwegian Novels
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Silje Bekeng

There are a few obvious reasons why rural society (or lack of society) takes up so much space in our literature. The literary magazine Avsagd Hagle once did a tongue-in-cheek analysis of contemporary Norwegian poetry and found a surprisingly high frequency of the words "hand,""bird," and "tree." The reason, the editors argued, must be that poets are sitting at their desks, alternately staring at their own hands, the trees outside their windows, and the birds in the trees.

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"I have gone to the forest."
—Knut Hamsun

"Many people think they can take the welfare state with them in the suitcase when they leave home. … We are not a travel agency or an insurance company."
—Jonas Gahr Støre, Norway's Foreign Minister

Norwegians are said to be born with skis on their feet—ready from birth for a life in harmony with the inhospitable Nordic nature.

Maybe my mother was lacking some important vitamin during the pregnancy. No skis accompanied me into this world. Instead of seeking the woods and mountains like a true Norwegian—"There is no bad weather, only poor clothing!" as we say—I came to prefer asphalt under my feet, the safety of skyscrapers, and the soft breeze from passing subway cars, deep underground. I am allergic to trees.

But I didn't miss out on the other thing Norwegians are born with: citizenship in the world's most generous and equitable welfare state.

This is about what happens when rich, well-traveled, and well-educated children from a tiny Viking country covered in forest grow up and try to write fiction.

Rebecca Solnit. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Viking. August 2009.

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, surely one of the best books of the past decade, was, on the face of it, a biography of a photographer. Muybridge famously proved, with the use of multiple cameras and sensitive electrical triggers, that horses in full gallop at times have all four feet off the ground. His sequenced, detailed equestrian photographs, along with his equally important work on men and women walking and performing ordinary tasks and his panoramas of San Francisco, effected a virtual sea-change in human perception. Not until Muybridge could people see what they looked like as beings in continuous action, and it was for this reason that he has repeatedly been seen as a prefiguration of the cinema.

Solnit’s genius was to see Muybridge not only as a seminal photographer, but as a confluence of all the lurching, multidirectional motions of the United States in the late 19th century. Muybridge, Solnit told us, hailed from the epicenter of fin-de-siecle modernity, which was not, as one might expect, New York or Paris, but California. Wherever the old world was giving way to the new, Muybridge was there: he lived in boomtown San Francisco; he photographed Yosemite Valley and the US war against the indigenous Modoc people; Leland Stanford, railroad magnate and founder of the university bearing his name, owned the horse whose gallop Muybridge made famous. Solnit followed the trails of information with deliberate guilelessness, and the book that resulted is one that seems to be recreating the very birth of modern life. Railroads were annihilating time and space, while nature photographs testified to the landscapes they plowed over; old relationships to land and local space were forcibly overturned by new relations of property and class. Marx and Engels’ rich ambivalence in their paean to bourgeois modernity in the Manifesto (“all that is solid melts into air”) was not only the attitude behind the book, but its aesthetics as well: much like Marx and Engels, Solnit has an incantatory style of prose, one that involves repetition of key phrases and long, swiftly unfurling sentences intended to recapture what the emergence of modernity felt like. Read More

 

“I hope they like each other,” someone says behind me.

“They’ll like each other by the end,” says another.

“They’d better, or there won’t be a repeat.” says the first.

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Stieg Larsson. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. (Trans. Reg Keeland.) Knopf. September 2008.

Stieg Larsson. The Girl Who Played with Fire. (Trans. Reg Keeland.) Knopf. July 2009.

Stieg Larsson. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. (Trans. Reg Keeland.) Knopf. May 2010.

To read the 1,802 pages of the Swedish crime novelist Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy is to be told that, for all their perceived virtue, the institutions of social democracy are a farce. In Larsson's books, American readers will find the Sweden they expect: the welfare-state comforts, Volvo security, and Ikea practicality for which the country is known. But they will also find a country they didn't expect. In this Sweden, the country's well-polished façade belies a broken apparatus of government whose rusty flywheels are little more than the playthings of crooks. The doctors are crooked. The bureaucrats are crooked. The newspapermen are crooked. The industrialists and businessmen, laid bare by merciless transparency laws, are nevertheless crooked. The police and the prosecutors are crooked. And the criminals, of course, are crooked, though not always: it's often the case that criminal acts committed by do-gooders in the name of justice—from petty larceny to massive bank fraud—are the only means by which to overcome the comprehensive failure of the world's most comprehensive welfare system.

In Larsson's trilogy it's also the case that most, if not all, of these crooks hate women. The first volume's Swedish title is Män Som Hatar Kvinnor—in English, Men Who Hate Women—a title international publishers chose to tone down. (The French put the problem in the past tense, Men Who Didn't Love Women.) Sweden may have attained heights of gender equality only dreamed of in other parts of the world but, if we're to believe Larsson, that apparent moral superiority is merely cosmetic, concealing pervasive misogyny at every level of society.

These are Larsson's twin themes: the failure of the welfare state to do right by its people and the failure of men to do right by women.

Ken Burns. The National Parks: America's Best Idea. PBS. October 2009.

Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan. The National Parks: America's Best Idea, An Illustrated History. Knopf. October 2009. 

The first thing that struck me when opening the massive coffee table book that Ken Burns compiled to accompany his most recent documentary—this one about the national parks, the latest entry in America's Greatest Hits—was not the sheer size but rather the comparative puniness of the park system. The expectation in the American West, when looking at a map of public and private lands, is one of apparent socialism: the closest this country gets, at least on paper, to the appropriation of property by the people. The numbers are well known: 85 percent of Nevada is owned by the federal government, 57 percent of Utah, 50 percent of Idaho, even 45 percent of California. The national parks, outside of Alaska, where they play a fundamentally different role, comprise only six percent of federal lands. This seems to make sense: the parks are supposed to be "exceptional." But for a system that Burns considers an extension of the claim that "all men are created equal," the question remains—an exception to what? Read More

Yesterday was a special day for hockey fans. Never before in the sport's history had so much talent played on the same day on the same rink. Over twelve hours, the six best hockey teams in the world played three games—Czech Republic vs. Russia, USA vs. Canada, Finland vs. Sweden—each one an arch-rivalry as well as a rematch of the last three gold-medal games.

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In the weeks leading up to the final round of the 2010 Chilean presidential elections, Eduardo Frei, the candidate for the center-left Concertación coalition, ran a political advertisement in which an invisible hand scribbled words such as "ass" and "go to hell" on a white ballot. A sober voiceover stated: "You may be angry and you may think there's no way out, but submitting a blank or annulled ballot is a vote for the Right." Similar ads concluded with a pencil sharply crossing the line next to Frei's name, as if reminding viewers of the proper way to mark a ballot. The underlying sentiment was equal parts desperation and exhaustion, as the coalition that has governed Chile for twenty years was reduced to begging voters not to graffiti their ballots. Read More

It was at another conference some twenty-eight years ago, just before the moderator's opening remarks, that the Rome-born architect and theorist Bruno Zevi pushed back from the roundtable and rose from his seat to declare, "I denounce the presence at this symposium of the fascist Philip Johnson." The audience at Harvard's Graduate School of Design shifted nervously in their chairs. Zevi was referring to the events of fifty year prior, when Johnson had left the directorship of the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art to write a series of glowing dispatches from the parade grounds at Nuremberg. On his return, Johnson followed this adventure with a trip in a Chrysler touring car through the American Mid-West, on a mission to establish National Socialism in the US.              

Of course, the conference-goers were aware of all this. Johnson's politics in the period 1933-1939 had been—remain—the subject of as much speculation and opprobrium among Johnson's peers as of evasion and oblique apology on the part of Johnson himself; no rapt auto da fé of Zevi's that morning was likely to elicit any further contrition from the accused, nor reveal anything not already known to most of the audience. But it wasn't supposed to. For Zevi, it had been a kind of ritual, a formality of opposition that legalized his participation in the Cambridge panel under the provisions of his own conscience. Having performed it, he sat down, and the symposium resumed as scheduled. Nothing more was said about it by either party. Read More