“In her slowly rising head were two black holes. Prospero saw in his mind a doll that had terrified him when he was a child. The eyes had rattled in the china skull. Now the woman’s voice, mechanical and heavy: “Why don’t you sleep? Go to sleep.” Her mouth opened wide, impossibly wide, and then the whole face stretched and writhed and yawned in the faint light.”

I’m reminded of nothing so much as the distorted, creepily out-of-proportion mouths so popular in modern horror movies. Click here to view an example from The Ring, but only if you want to see something creepy. There must be some others: I feel like I’ve seen a lot of horror movies recently where significant scare or at least startle value arises from the way someone’s mouth just… keeps… opening. The Ring example isn’t quite what I was picturing. Maybe someone can suggest some more titles.

Perhaps needless to say, I will be waiting to suggest this book to Coen until at least fifth grade.

“L.B. Namier once said that “the crowning attainment of historical study” is to achieve “an intuitive sense of how things do not happen.” It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him.

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only in the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

Hey, I found the essay on-line, supposedly the version that was originally published in Harper’s in 1964. (I suppose it’s possible that there might be differences between that version and the version published in the reissued book I’m reading, so my apologies for any discrepancies.)

Even barrel organ players? IS NOTHING SACRED?

(Quoted from The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which quotes it from an 1835 tract by S.F.B. Morse, who probably should have stuck to dots and dashes.)

Part of what I’m enjoying about Hofstadter is the way he does not seem to be out to get anyone or any party, but is simply describing and thinking about the way people behave. In this, there is something reminiscent of Joan Didion’s political writing.

Here’s what he means by “paranoid style” (hint: he’s not actually diagnosing anyone as paranoid).

“I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. …

He gives an example from 1963 that sounds like it could be from last week:

“Shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy, a great deal of publicity was given to a bill … to tighten federal controls over the sale of firearms through the mail …. Now there are arguments against the … bill which, however unpersuasive one may find them, have the color of conventional political reasoning. But one [person] opposed it with what might be considered representative paranoid arguments, insisting that it was “a further attempt by a subversive power to make us part of one world socialistic government” and it threatened to “create chaos” that would help “our enemies” sieze power.”

I like the reminder that reasonable people can disagree about such a bill, but unreasonable people will also make themselves heard, so it’s important not to lump the former in with the latter. In any political disagreement, there are those who—thought they hold a contrary viewpoint to yours about some specific issue—are still in touch with the reality of the situation, and so may be counted on to be reasonable in the discussion and might be willing to compromise on a solution.

The “paranoid”—as Hofstadter defines them—might not be.

“Of course, the term “paranoid style” is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than for good. But nothing entirely prevents a sound program or a sound issue from being advocated in the paranoid style, and it is admittedly impossible to settle the merits of an argument because we think we hear in its presentation the characteristic paranoid accents. Style has to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content.” [my emphasis]

Keeping this in mind, I’m going to do my best to remember that what counts is the content of ideas, not what “team” they come from.

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get around to reading Richard Hofstadter.

Hofstadter was a historian who wrote a book called The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which takes its title from an essay that began its life as a lecture delivered at Oxford University in 1963.

Sean Wilentz, another historian and writer who has penned the introduction to a recent reissue of Hofstadter’s book, describes the essay, and the book that contains it, as “a study of political cranks and zealots,” which seems to sum it up nicely.

One of the thrills of reading great fiction from ages past is to experience the pleasure of knowing that other human beings have felt the same way you do about life, love, and all the rest of it, even in entirely different times and settings. Though Hofstadter’s book is nonfiction, I’m experiencing something similar as I read his careful, measured observations. They are observations of specific times, specific events, but his reflections and analysis feel timeless.

It’s reassuring and illuminating to learn, for example, that the phenomenon of radicals pretending to be conservatives (i.e., people who want to change much more than they want to preserve about the nature of this country) has been a fairly constant one throughout American history. (Having typed that sentence, I pause to wonder what it is about that fact that I find reassuring; I suppose it’s the implication that our politics are no weirder today than in the past, and therefore that today’s weirdness is not necessarily a sign of the impending collapse of the American experiment. Well, here’s hoping, anyway.)

The title essay, published in the early 1960s, treats with what Hofstadter saw as the “pseudo-conservative revolt” that manifested in such forms as McCarthyism, the John Birch Society (ascendant again, in case you hadn’t heard), the nullificatory response of so many people to Supreme Court decisions that began in the modern era with certain rulings on civil rights, and so forth. But his more general descriptions of “the paranoid style” (which, to be fair, exists on the right and the left) feel as if they were written this morning; this seems a truly useful book for anyone interested in the current shape of American politics.

I’m not very far in to the book yet, but this is from Hofstadter’s introduction, in the course of an explanation of why—at the time he was writing—so many observers of American politics were starting to move away from “an older conception of politics” as primarily concerned with the rationalistic question “who gets what, when, how?”:

“The findings of public-opinion polls have made us far less confident than we used to be that the public responds to the issues as they are debated, and more aware that it reacts to them chiefly when they become the object of striking symbolic acts or memorable statements, or are taken up by public figures who themselves have a symbolic appeal. …

People respond, in short, to the great drama of the public scene. But this drama, as it is set before them and as they perceive it, is not identical with questions involving material interests and the possession of power. Even those who exercise power are not immune to the content of the drama. In any case, they are forced to deal, as an element in their calculations, with the emotional life of the masses, which is not something that they can altogether create or manipulate, but something that they must cope with. The political contest itself is deeply affected by the way in which it is perceived and felt.”

Sound familiar?

I think I’m going to enjoy this.

“Laredo, Texas, is set to become the largest U.S. city without a bookstore. The B. Dalton in the Mall del Norte, owned by parent company Barnes & Noble, is slated to close next month. When it does, it will leave the city’s close to 250,000 residents without a single bookstore.”

I saw Steve’s obituary in today’s Missoulian ; he apparently died almost two weeks ago. “Friends said he was in fragile health,” writes the anonymous obituarist, and I must say this was evident to me when he and I last worked together.

It’s sad to see the death of any friend, but it’s even sadder to learn only from his obituary what an interesting life he led: prolific writer and collector of pulp and Western fiction, screenwriter on two Roger Corman movies, magazine columnist.

In a day job “as a transmitter technician in Missoula, he snowmobiled weekly to the summit of Television Mountain…” Perhaps those weekly trips whetted his appetite for “the first known sled descent of Mount Jumbo,” described as “a half-mile ‘luge run’”; regular Outside contributor Peter Stark helped him “survey, clear, bank and ice the run.”

The accomplishment of the “luge run” seems all the more impressive for the fact that Steve was apparently not a natural athlete. His fellow softball players on the local rec-league team “Montana Review of Books” dubbed him “Merc, short for Mercury, because he reminded none of his teammates of the fleet Roman god.” But that didn’t stop him from eventually becoming “an adept all-around waterman, especially an able and enthusiastic — if not artistic — rafter and kayaker.”

As for writing: “Though well-versed in the Great Works, his real literary love was pulp fiction”; a writer of the stuff himself, he was in “the ‘her body would make a bishop put his foot through a stained-glass window’ school.” Further, “he believed that the point of fiction was to entertain…” and once observed that “big-time stylists impress me like big-time bus drivers.”

Oh, and: “He could finish the New York Times crossword puzzle before you could uncap your pen.”

I hope my obituary is half as interesting. So long, Steve, I’m glad we met.

• Silver Swan, by Benjamin Black
• The Lemur, by Benjamin Black
• March Violets, by Phillip Kerr
• The Child in Time, by Ian McEwan

I was put onto Benjamin Black and Phillip Kerr by Ron Rosenbaum, who writes in Slate that recent works by these two authors were among several books that have “restored pleasure to reading” for him. (He mentioned a third such author, Henry Chang; I realize now that I forgot to look for Chang’s books on this trip to the library, an oversight I’ll have to correct). Writes Rosenbaum:

“What these books have in common, of course, is that they are formally genre novels, literally detective stories… yet they surpass both in artistry and pleasure every highly praised sophomoric attempt at literary fiction I’ve thrown against the wall in the past few years.”

Well, of course I don’t know what’s bounced off Rosenbaum’s wall lately, but I do often find myself longing for the finely wrought plot. Especially mysteries: if I could write mysteries, I would happily do nothing else, so it’s always a pleasure to encounter new authors who do it well.*

Speaking of good plotting, I read all about Ian McEwan in his recent New Yorker profile and realized that there were a few titles of his I’d never yet gotten to. I’m saving Saturday for now, but I checked out Child Out of Time because it seemed most likely to have the mystery-like suspense and nerve-wracking atmosphere of other early works of his, like Black Dogs or The Cement Garden.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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*I should note that March Violets was not the title of the book that sent Rosenbaum into such raptures, but it is the start of a trilogy featuring the same character, so I thought I’d start there.