. A Doctor’s Born for a Purpose Part 1: I went to…

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A Doctor’s Born for a Purpose

Part 1: I went to the market to realize my soul

I was delighted to hear that the Turkish Novelist Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel prize for literature. I read his novel Snow a couple of years ago, right after my first trip to Turkey, and I am currently reading My Name is Red. I especially liked Snow. In that book, Pamuk creates a unique world for the reader, a snow-bound city of mystery and nostalgia in eastern Turkey. All great fiction establishes a kind of sublime world of subjective objectivity—a set-apart reflection of the so-called real world that individual readers relate to on the level of personal experience. Great books are fine items.

Pamuk, Turkey’s most popular novelist, has been in the news this year because of his recent arrest in Turkey on charges of insulting Turkish identity. The charges, which were dropped, arose from comments Pamuk made during a radio interview about the Armenian genocide, an atrocity that the Turkish state denies happened. Pamuk has been quite outspoken about the country’s need to come to terms with its relatively recent (20th century) past. But he is not a “political” writer. His books–and the Swedish Academy acknowledged this in announcing Pamuk’s award on Thursday–are an evocation of the soul of Turkey and of the amazing city of Istanbul. Unavoidably, the books explore the historic and current tension between Islam and the West. Pamuk, however, dismissed all questions about politics in interviews this week. “I think less than people think I do about politics,” he told The New York Times. “I care about writing. I am essentially a literary man who has fallen into a political situation.”

From what I’ve read of his work, I would say that Pamuk is not simply trying to dodge the subject and stay out of trouble. Pamuk, who is lecturing for a semester at Columbia University in New York, seems genuinely aggravated by questions about politics. In a National Public Radio interview yesterday evening, he got kind of nasty about it. I don’t blame him.

The Swedish Academy specifically states that politics has nothing to do with the award of the Nobel Prize in literature, and, even with last year’s award to Harold Pinter, I believe the Academy has yet to compromise that principle. With very few exception (see third item in today’s post), any conscious attempt to mix politics and art is doomed to failure, because the result is always politics. Scissors cut paper, rock smashes scissors, and politics compromises art. High school literature courses in the U.S. may have morphed into politically-correct world culture seminars, but the Nobel Prize for literature is still uncorrupted.

Part 2: On the route of the 19 bus…

Greil Marcus is such a bad writer that his work makes me read bad. I so expect to get knotted-up in his overwrought prose that I begin to see words that aren’t there and other words disguised in an offhand manner as words that they are not. Then I begin to write like him. Nonetheless, I’m slogging through his new book, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. I love his premise.

Marcus aptly views the United States in an Old Testiment context. It is a country based on a couple of documents that define freedom and certain rights that no worldly power can grant or take from us. These documents establish a covenant between their principles and the people. For years, Marcus argues, prophetic politicians and civic leaders—Marcus likens them to Amos in the Bible—pointed to breaches of the covenant, the most prominent being slavery, and warned of the dire consequences. The political line pretty much ended with Lincoln, who may have overstated his case in Marcus’ estimate. That left the artist, who has also played prophet in America, to reveal our transgressions and show us their inevitable end result.

Marcus looks closely in the book at the novelist Philip Roth, the filmmaker David Lynch, and the musician David Thomas of Pere Ubu. I am not extremely knowledgeable about Thomas, but I know how hard Roth and Lynch work to pull us out of our complacency and show us the horror—the ant war in the grass under our white picket fence next to the severed ear—that we should be focused on.

The Shape of Things to Come starts, as it must, with literary foreshadowing and reaction to September 11, 2001. The book touches, of course, on Bob Dylan, whose album Love and Theft was released on that very day. The record features a song called High Water (For Charlie Patton), which isn’t necessarily about a flood.

So, I will soldier through The Shape of Things to Come, paying attention to the words that aren’t there and unmasking those disguised. Could be Marcus is on to something.

Part 3: Then find a job at a paper

When I am not reading Orhan Pamuk or Greil Marcus—which is 99.3% of the time—I spend many hours watching rock ‘n’ roll documentaries. There are some good ones. This week I saw a great one called “Let’s Rock Again.” It’s about ex-Clash front man Joe Strummer trying to get his new band, The Mescaleros, off the ground in 2001, about a year before he died.

This was surprisingly hard work for a big star. We see Strummer standing on the boardwalk at Atlantic City handing out handscrawled fliers for his show at some Trump casino that night. He drops by a New Jersey classic rock radio station unannounced and tries to get in. He’s on the speakerphone at the front door: “Hi, my name is Joe Strummer and I have a rock ‘n’ roll band that’s playing tonight.” They finally let him in—yes the station manager has heard of him and has coincidentally cued up a Clash song, “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” a few songs ahead in the set he’s airing. “Well, now that’s serendipity,” says Strummer, obviously delighted that they let him in. He politely asks if they wouldn’t mind playing a song from the new Mescaleros CD and if they’d plug the Atlantic City gig.

Strummer was an extremely thoughtful guy. His observations throughout the film about the beauty and importance of experiencing the trip “from hero to zero,” as he puts it, are clearheaded and honest. He established himself as a rocker of the working class hero variety—despite his being the only member of the Clash raised in a middle class British family (his father was in the forgein service). And the Clash were an overtly political band. Strummer and bassist Paul Simenon grew up in various parts of the world, and the band coalesced in a rather tough neighborhood of London–under the shadow of the famous Westway elevated motorway. They had records with names like, Know Your Rights, and White Man in Hammersmith Palais. They incorporated all kinds of world music and covered songs like Bobby Fuller’s I Fought the Law (And the Law Won) and Junior Murvin’s Police and Thieves. Strummer, who died of a congenital heart condition in December, 2002, before “Let’s Rock Again” was released, would have balked at the tag, but he was essentially a Marxist.

Yes, the Clash put music and politics together and came out with music. And their politics made a difference to me and my friends. Terry Gross, on her NPR interview show, Fresh Air, once asked Strummer if he thought any of The Clash’s political statements were naïve in hindsight. It is the only post-Clash interview in which I’ve heard Strummer answer somebody rudely. In short, he did not think so. (Here is the best radio interview I’ve heard with Joe Strummer. It’s an hour-long show beginning with a lot of the Clash’s source music. A DJ named Hova on WFMU in Jersey City hosts.)

Watching “Let’s Rock Again,” I realized that Strummer was an artist who, like Pamuk, found himself in a political situation. He also had an incredible work ethic. Watching him slog through the tour with a kind of wistful optimism, satisfied with who he is fifteen years after the Clash disbanded, I was inspired to work harder, to create, and to trust my own voice…to be uncompromising in the quest for life. To water the houseplants, feed the hamster, take care of friends. To hug the kids.

Like any really good Marxist, Strummer was also a humanist. A humanist who rocked!