In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and the Research this guy did about Hitler's Berlin

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I am wary of authors who constantly tell their audience how much research they did for their work. Authors who do that make me suspicious, and thus when I am reading through their books I disturst their authority. If they need to reassure me that, yes, this thing is true, he knows it, he researched it, then something is wrong. If the author was truly confident in the legitimacy of his work, there would be no need for all of this bombardment.

In "In the Garden of Beasts," Erik Larson is more enamored with how much research he, himself, the author, the big-man-in-the-library, did for this work rather than in telling the actual story. There's no doubt he did a lot of research--he tells you enough times--which is, on its own, quite admirable. But I would rather read the story and then flip to the back, only then discovering the vast amount of citations and sources that backs the work.

Larson, on the other hand, uses his research as the only interesting part of his authorship. His end note, "Among Monsters," talks about how difficult it was for his state of mind to do all of that darned research on that vile man we all love to hate, Hitler. I have no sympathy for Larson, because no one held a gun to his head and told him to stare at the cover of "Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris," by Ian Kershaw. We all know how horrific the Holocaust was. We all know how terrible Hitler was. You are not special in your feelings, Larson.

This all struck me before I noticed Larson's static prose, and boring rendering of Dodd and his daughter Martha. The subtitle is a lie, since the book is not about the Dodd family at all, with the mother and son effectively disappearing after they are introduced, until their deaths at the end. I felt no connection to these characters, and found the book itself to be more of a list of parties they attended, sad letters they wrote and things they whined about. Which is why the end baffled me.

Larson heralds Dodd as "a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in a land of gathering darkness." (Pg 356) Wait... what? Throughout his diplomacy Dodd is characterized more as a bumbling academic, anti-semitic and incredibly sulky. As a character who comes back to America to give speeches about the horror of the early Nazi regime, he has the possibility to become a fairly deep and complex character, if only Larson had taken that opportunity and ran with it. Instead, there is no life in any of the characters. There is barely any life to this book at all.

The book should have ended with the massacre in 1934. Larson spends so much time wallowing in 1933 that the episode in 1934 is essentially the end of the story. He then speeds through the last 3 years of Dodd's ambassadorship so suddenly that for the last 70 or so pages I didn't know at what point in time the events were happening. It was almost as if Larson either had tired of the subject (like how I felt at the end) or had rushed to meet some sort of deadline. Whichever was the case, the book is a dud. I begrudgingly gave it that second star on account of all that research that Larson reassures us he most decidedly did do.


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From the Desk of an Intern: The Life of Trees

The fourth week of my internship was a short one. I was entertaining a visiting friend and little could be done until I visited the Library of Congress to undergo training for organizing the files for the American Scholar. Like the week before, I perused old issues of the Scholar. This time, however, I also went through old tear-sheets--unbound books, essentially--and got rid of any unnecessary copies. The amount of paper I went through was astounding.

Many organizations, even if they don't directly deal with books and other literary works, probably use an exorbitant amount of paper. Technophiles and environmentalists alike may use this as an argument for the digitalization of everything. I am not sure if I truly agree with this, but what I do know was how wonderful it was to sift through water-stained copies of the Scholar from 1960. I loved seeing the handwritten notes of editors-past on old tear-sheets. Even the difference in paper quality from 1990 to 2006 was amazing to me.

Maybe it does kill trees, but it keeps the heart of progress alive.

From the Desk of an Intern: Publishing Through the Ages

It's been said the publishing world is a dying industry. With the rise of the Internet, free-flowing information and the younger generation's ineptitude of the concept of plagiarism, it's no wonder.

Or is it?

I have no doubt the publishing industry is changing, but I do not think it is dying. Rather, it is more evolving than anything else. Maybe publishing is pushing its way from a sea of tear-sheets and reams of paper onto the malleable dirt of the Internet. Okay, may that's not the best metaphor, but the publishing industry has been in the process of evolution since day one.

This past week, June 13, I've been reading through the archives of the American Scholar as research for their new tumblr. Steve, the business manager suggested I go through and find the issues the "famous" authors, like Albert Einstein or Natalie Angier, wrote in. I ended up coming across Jacques Barzun first, a man I have never heard of before. His work was first published in the 40s and I found his work well into the 60s. He wrote on many topics, from political commentary to philosophy. And yet, his words, written over 50 years ago, are still able to ring true today.

It was then I found the Autumn 2001 issue in which a man named Andre Bernard compiled a chrestomathy of the best work from the 70 years the magazine has been in existence. At the bottom of all 8 pages is a list of all significant authors from each decade starting in the 30s, when the journal was first published. W. E. B. DuBois, Alduous Huxley, Ralph Ellison, even R. Buckminster Fuller... the list goes on.

What this says to me about the publishing industry is that there is always something to publish. In regards to the American Scholar, there is always someone striving to better oneself as well as humanity. Twitter and Facebook allow information to reach people instantaneously. Such a barrage of data loses any semblance of quality-control. A sparkling gem can be as easily access as a pile of ash... but much harder to find. Anyone can publish anything online these days. I think the publishing industry--the real publishing industry--will still exist as a sort of filter, a suggestion to those tired of wading through the muck. And even then, that filter will always depend on who holds the most money.

But there is something else to be said about humanity. Paul Shorey said in the first issue of the American Scholar, Winter 1932: "The man of educated sensibilities, whether conservative or radical, pays a big price for the blessing of democracy in widest commonalty spread." Maybe we are all paying a price for the blessing of the Internet.

From the Desk of an Intern: Filing for Excellence

Week two of my internship was a soft introduction to the wonderful, filing-filled world of the intern. It just so happened that the week I started was the week the summer issue for the American Scholar finished. We had only just received the shipment of shiny new magazines that first Friday, and because of this, everyone was in a "down time" before the frenzy of the next issue.

Mainly this meant people resigned to the colds their adrenaline-filled bodies had been resisting for the past month or two, so workers either called in sick or sat glumly at their desks amid a pile of kleenex. My boss, the Editor, was only in twice that week, although that was because he was taking time to work on his new book. Suffice it is to say, the office was eerily quiet. My days were spent apprehensively wandering around the office, asking the survivors of the summer issue if they needed help on anything. After many sheepish smiles and shaking heads, one of the managing editors said, "well, you could work on alphabetizing the authors, or do the index for this year--if you really want to."

Oh man did I ever!

To be honest, I even enjoyed the work ad tedium. It gave me a chance to let my mind wander over story ideas and snappy quips for this blog. Not to mention I could work on proper typing techniques, something I cheated profusely at in grade school. After the first day of wrist pains, I knew I had to do things a little bit differently. Lesson one in working at an office: do things correctly out of the consequence of pain.

Something even better about the work, though, was that I could take breaks and read submissions from "the slush pile," as it's called. As I breezed through alphabetizing author papers and started on compiling the index, the slush pile piqued my curiosity more and more, until I gave in and abandoned the mental chants of archiving for what appeared to be a more interesting use of my time.

I found the slush pile, meaning unsolicited manuscripts, quite endearing, humorous and even inspirational, oddly enough. There is a reason it's called the slush pile; you slog through an awful lot of the stuff, hoping to find something...anything worthwhile. It's an adventurous hike, if not always fruitful. I admit to thinking, "oh wow, I can write better than this!" after finishing a few of the submissions, some of which were written by Ph.D-wielding doctors and lawyers and society's crem-de-la-crem.

Most of the submissions in the slush pile are travel accounts of "white Americans visiting a foreign/exotic place," or blatant pleas of self-promotion in the form of exerpts or reviews of so-and-so's new book. There is a lot of uncited and unresearched journalism. Fiction pops up every now and then. I even came across the staple "dog story"--a major faux pas of any new writer. I enjoyed myself selfishly, relishing in the schadenfreude that these older writers had fallen into pitfalls I, myself had fallen into years ago. Many of these pitfalls I now know how to avoid (hopefully), but here are people, supposedly the smartest in the world, who are still tripping over them. I thought maybe, just maybe, I can make it out there.

Once the ego-boosting elitism sudsided, I began to really look into some of the better-crafted stories. What made them stand out from the rest of the slush? What made me recognize their aptitude but ultimately write a resounding "no" atop the cover letter? Because I had the time on my hands and didn't need to sift through all of them within a two-month deadline (which was not met most of the time, as the editors told me with a sigh) I could pry the works apart and sift through the inner cogs and wires. When I found the stone bolts, I imagined the steel ones I could replace them with.

One story told of a woman who had a pseudo-religious experience in a decorated church in Spain inspired me to write a story of a man contemplating aesthetics, and why some works of art are considered greater than others. Another submission made me think of two intellectuals physically fighting over a metaphysical idea. The wide range of topics and subjects revealed a vast lake of creativity I had a hard time diving into at WAC. I do not mean to denounce the college when I say this; Chestertown is a great place for learning and studying, for really bearing down and examining the exact technicalities of writing and encourages a personal assessment of what "excellence" means.

In fact, I probably would not have had much confidence in determining what makes a "good" story had I not taken numerous writing classes at the college. Had I been a freshman before I took this internship, I would have been eaten alive for sure, not by my co-workers, but by my own competence. The wide variety of classes I have taken for the past three years allowed me to assemble this knowledge into the ability to assess the quality of a genre I'm not wholly familiar with: non-fiction.

The American Scholar is made up of mostly non-fiction including, as the name implies, academic essays, but also real-life accounts of adventure, book reviews, on-going studies of contemporary culture and a lot of long-form journalism. There is poetry and fiction too, of course, but these are recent additions to the magazine.

I know I am taking a lot of liberties in this post, maybe even to the extent of sounding arrogant. What would I know? I'm just an intern, sitting here typing out the names of successful writers with established names. I don't even have a bachelor's degree yet. Hell, I even admitted to not knowing a whole heck of a lot about the stories that are supposedly slush.

But maybe it's not so far-fetched. The American Scholar gets its name from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who gave a speech of the same name at Harvard in 1837. That's quite some time ago, and yet people here at the scholar and across the world are living up to Emerson's ideals, to his models of "independent-thinking, self-knowledge, and a commitment to the affairs of the world." That's not something a Ph.D can get you any more than traveling to Africa will. They can help, but it is about the experience of life, of self-awareness, of living the ideals you want to see in the world. It is about excellence.

From the Desk of an Intern: No AC in DC

My internship at the American Scholar began with an end. Two ends, in fact. On my first day with the literary journal, there was an office retirement party thrown for the two senior editors who were leaving by the end of June. People congregated around the catered buffet and chuckled into their glasses of champagne. Smartly dressed men and women from the executive committee of Phi Beta Kappa revolved around the room. The low hum of smalltalk eventually dissapated when Bob Wilson, the Editor-in-Chief and my boss, stood up to give a glowing speech about the combined 70 years Jeanie and Sandra had put into the Scholar. Everyone applauded, and a few coughed to hide their sentimentality.

I felt like an intruder.

Despite the fact that everyone was friendly and open, I felt like I was impeding upon everyone's intimate and vulnerable moment. Amid tears and bittersweet smiles, nearly everyone extended their hand to me, curious about this strange girl nearly 20 years younger than most of them. I became very aware of the juxtaposition between the farwell of two women everyone knew quite well, and the introduction of this nervous sweaty intern.

My anxiety and sweatiness hadn't worn off from that morning, when I had scrambled into the office half an hour late, getting lost in the whirling streets of D.C. in 95 degree weather. My boss, worried, told the men working at the Argentinian Embassy next door to keep an eye out for me. During the rest of the day, the A.C. hadn't been functional either. I must have been quite an interesting conglomeration of bodily functions to see and smell. Thankfully, no one seemed to noticed, or were at least polite enough not to mention it.

After that interesting start to the week, I was thrown head-first into the interning life. My boss assigned me two research projects and as the week worn on, I learned bits and pieces of information about the filing and organizing work I would eventually be doing. If I did everything I needed, there was even a possibility I would get to read submissions and give input about them. My heart skipped a beat at that last part--me, a lowly intern, would actually be able to give my opinion of official submissions by professors and lawyers and professional writers from all over the world? My thoughts would, if only marginally, be taken seriously?

That's when I knew I had the coolest internship out there.

rE-view: A History of Experimental Film and Video

*Note: I'm not sure what's up with goodreads or blogspot, but I can't find how to format my reviews as they were before, so things are a little different now.

3/5

As someone who has little experience in artistic film-making and even less knowledge about it, A.L. Rees's A History of Experimental Film and Video is an encyclopedic account of just that: the history of experimental film and video.

It begins with a short preface about the aims of the book, a lengthy introduction defining what, exactly, "avant-garde" is throughout history. The book is then split into two parts, the first starting with the creation of the camera and photography and its development in America. In the second part, after a cunning segue, "A History" focuses on the film scene in Britain and the UK with the occasional mention of a German or French artist. It ends with a look at "contemporary" film-artists today, going as recent as 1998 (and with an original copyright date of 1999, that was fairly contemporary).

An obvious amount of effort and research was put into this volume, with a massive bibliography and over 150 end-notes. "A History" is, as I mentioned before, encyclopedic. As difficult as it is to write about such a complex visual medium, Rees is fairly effective. He or she is able to describe the events of films as well as critically analyze them. However, there are times when Rees's account may be as confusing as the film itself, and without access to the film or video, it is hard to tell. The plates were a help visually, but it would have been nice to have them dispersed throughout the text instead of in an insert. Since they were printed on the same type of paper as the text and in black and white--at in my 2008 print edition--there is no reason not to do this.

The language and style had high diction which, at times, toed the line between academic and arrogance. Lines like "the weight of cultural critique or rupture is therefore axially shifted from the mainstream to the marginal avant-gardes which haunt the fringes of conventional modernism" (93) are more ornamental than necessary, and "[the] concern poetic myth and illumination was displaced onto the formal place of light and colour, away from fictional diegetic space and the singular narrative subject" (67) encouraged my mind to wander. Despite the incredible amount of information laid out, it was sometimes overshadowed by the language.

Overall the book is comprehensive and, as far as textbooks go, pretty engaging. The distracting language and poor layout are setbacks, but I encourage anyone who is interested in or a student of film to read this book.

This is the Beginning of the Rest of My Life

There is always something refreshing about coming back to school from a break. Despite the fact that my Spring Break was neither relaxing nor warm, I've come home feeling energized, ready to work and ready to learn. The weather is warming up, and blades of green are poking up through the brown.

Today I have gotten things done I should have done months ago. Things are piling up around me, but I am not panicking, although I am shaking (which may be because I drank too much coffee today). I met with my interim adviser today, and told him about my internship with the American Scholar magazine this summer. The 15-minute appointment turned into a 20-minute discussion about the future of printing, the future of journalism, and my own future. Everything began to sink in: I will be living in D.C. this summer, and I will be working at a real magazine, in the real world. No more college coddling; I'm playing with the big boys now.

To be honest, I'm terrified.

I feel incredibly grateful to be given such a wonderful opportunity, but I'm worried something might happen and the whole thing will fall through. That may partially be my paranoia, but it may also partially be the fact that I have never played this high in the rankings before. My biggest question to myself is: Can I handle it?

Of course I am afraid I will fail. That's just how I am. But I also feel rejuvenated, powerful, like I am taking the first steps toward a life I can't imagine but know is there. The feeling is quite foreign to me.

rE-view: Politically Correct Bedtime Stories

Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: Modern Tales for Our Life & Times by James Finn Garner

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a hilarious little collection of re-told fairy tales. In his versions, Garner points out the "negative" cultural influences in each original story, such as sexism, class distinction based on wealth and other numerous stereotypes. The results are highly entertaining and contain new morals that are more relevant to today's audiences.



Patriarchal influence and the oppression of women are present in nearly all of the old fairy tales, something Garner explicitly points out. Stories that normally end in marriage (as the only means of "success" for a woman) are changed entirely. These include Rumpelstiltskin, Rapunzel and Cinderella.



However, some of the changes Garner makes are not entirely positive. A few of the stories, like Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs, use violent and murderous tactics to resolve problems. While some people may find these new versions "immoral," (and probably cringe that their sacred bedtime stories were messed with...) I feel the need to point out that the originals were not entirely "moral" either. I think Garner does this not only to point out the offensive messages in the original tales, but also to show how ridiculous it can be to be obsessed about being "politically correct." The Three Goats Gruff displays this theme the best.



Garner's collection is fun and interesting, and points out the flaws in both antiquated and modern viewpoints. I think he is trying to tell his audience to simply try and be a good person and live a good life. Otherwise we'll all end up paranoid we've offended someone just by existing.



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Dear Kevin,

Author's Note: This poem was written in response to a poetry collection by Kevin A. Gonzalez called "Cultural Studies." The collection was both aggravating and inspiring, thus the hard but tender feel I was going for. It is only a draft.

Dear Kevin,

I suppose all of your pain makes it okay to be a prick? But that’s no way to start a poem, is it? I’ve already filled all of the question mark cups allowed—soon the bartenders in my workshop will cut me off. Drinking words is a tired metaphor we both still serve. Let’s move on to places—I’ll sip New Glarus, you can savor San Juan.

An ampersand is just a child curled up & hugging his knees. I am that child & you—you are nestling in its curves, nursing your mitt hand which I’m sure all of those women-poets told you was much too small for baseball. But it’s stylish to be vegetarian—it’s even more stylish to make fun of vegetarians.

Dear Kevin, it is okay to be afraid. Ghosts are merely rain-soaked jackets we have sloughed off too early. Yours is molding on the beaches of Puerto Rico & mine is frozen in the ravines of Wisconsin. We are all someplace-people. We all come from hate-filled question marks. We all have coat-covered ampersands shivering inside our chest cavities.

First, I should have been a chemist.
Then, a politician.
Now, an environmental engineer.
I should have been many things.