2666: The Part About the Critics

I can identify with Claire of Kiss a Cloud on dreams. I don't usually have nightmares, but one book, following a three-hour reading marathon, did have me waking up the next day going WTF was that??? What exactly transpired in the nightmare inspired by Dan Simmons's The Terror eludes my memory, but I remember it as more violent than disturbing. "Disturbing" is definitely what characterizes the dream sequences in the first book of Roberto Bolaño's 2666, "The Part About the Critics." Claire says her own nightmares arose from a Stephen King phase and that she has since sworn off horror novels and movies. As someone who does read and watch horror (and I do recommend The Terror, by the way, because Dan Simmons is a serious genius), I found that statement funny! 2666 is shaping up to be by far one of the most disquieting books I have ever read.

Although I had planned on reading 2666 eventually, I was inspired to do so now by a challenge I had read about on the Nonsuch Book blog in which participants were to cover one book of 2666 per month. It is being hosted by Claire and Steph of Steph and Tony Investigate! and will run until September. They have both laid out a series of questions for other readers to think about.

From Claire:

How effectively did you click with Bolaño's writing? Did you feel it was overly descriptive?

I loved his writing style! I didn't think it was overly descriptive at all. It felt very immediate, if that makes any sense.

Do you believe Archimboldi is real or a pseudonym? Could he be Mrs. Bubis?

No, I definitely think he's real, although just what he is, I have no idea. Is he human? An idea? Or something . . . metaphysical? The plot of 2666 is so vague and I'm not far into it yet, so I really have no idea what could end up happening.

How do you see the development of the critics' friendship and their involvement among one another?

That part was rather odd. Steph wrote that she was uneasy about what she perceived to be Bolaño's sexism - like Liz Norton simply functioned as the recipient of the male critics' sexual release. And it bugged me right from the start that her personality is described as less ambitious and more emotionally-driven. But the four critics - Norton, her lovers Pelletier and Espinoza, and the Italian Morini - never come across as well-developed characters with distinct personalities, which I think Bolaño did deliberately. The violence they commit, the sexuality they display, and their collective obsession with Archimboldi are what compose them as human beings. Like Steph, I believe there was some irony intended here - kind of a satire on sexism, base instinct, and the "progressive" academic.

Do you think that Pelletier and Espinoza's violent act towards the taxi driver is a foreshadow of things to come?

Possibly. It demonstrated what the two of them are capable of. Of course, it's not like the taxi driver was entirely innocent. You can't verbally assault a strange woman in the presence of two men she has a relationship with and not expect to get your ass kicked. But the violence sure was excessive. Afterwords Pelletier and Espinoza wondered if their actions had expressed a subconscious xenophobia (the taxi driver was Pakistani). Again, I wonder if that was more satire directed at the caricature (beloved of conservatives) of the oh-so-liberal professor.

What sort of feelings did the dreams evoke in you? Were you able to catch all the symbolisms?

Symbolism? Nah, I just though the dreams were really cool and creepy. Especially Norton's nightmare involving the two mirrors in her hotel room. Whoa!

Did the ending answer some of your questions? Do you feel that this can be a standalone novel or not?

If this had been a stand-alone novel, it would have felt very incomplete. So they're still in that depressing city in the desert? And - ?

How eager or how hesitant are you to move on to the next books?

VERY eager! Where is it going? What does it all mean???

From Steph:

Did you feel this section could stand alone as its own published work?

Again, no.

What did you like best about this section? What did you like least?

I liked the overall creepiness and suspense. I actually can't think of anything I didn't like!

Any surprises for you as a reader thus far?

I had no idea what to expect from 2666. Judging from the cover art, I knew it was going to be intense. So I guess it matches my expectations so far.

Hazard a guess and tell me what you think Bolaño’s getting at in Part One.

There was so much madness and violence and general unrest going on beneath the surface. It feels like something is simmering. When you juxtapose those dark elements alongside all the talk of art and literature, it definitely feels like Bolaño is making a statement on the relationship between creation and destruction. Salman Rushdie explored similar themes, albeit in a very different manner, in his 2003 novel Fury. (Henry Miller tackled this as well in The Tropic of Cancer, but I can't stand that guy.) In Rushdie's words (also quoted in my Miller post):

Life is fury. . . Fury – sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal – drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! . . .This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise – the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from fucking limb.

How have you responded to Bolaño’s take on sexuality and violence? Do you feel the cab scene was an isolated incident or does it foreshadow things to come?

I think he links sex and violence as twin/dual aspects of human passion. The two can build one one another or one can inspire the other.

Can anyone make sense of the numerous dream sequences for me?

Nope. Sorry.

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Larry of OF Blog of the Fallen is currently reading 2666 in its original Spanish. In my initial post about Claire and Steph's challenge, he left a comment wondering how the "direct rawness of [Bolaño's] Spanish prose will appear in translation." Unfortunately, despite my penchant for international literature, I remain sadly monolingual, so I really can't compare the Spanish Bolaño wrote in to the English I am reading him in. But Larry's right in that there is a real rawness to 2666, and I don't think it is entirely a result of the prose. The subject matter is also very visceral: there's the destructive nature of human passion (be it love, sex, or art - all acts of creation - or the violence arising from them) laid out in full force alongside the haunting images found in the darkest dreams and a background mystery involving hundreds of murdered women in a dusty Mexican border town. A painter cuts off his hand for the sake of his work and goes insane. Four literary critics are so obsessed with a reclusive German writer that they will travel halfway around the world for him like some lovesick hero in a bombastic romance novel. Although there clearly is a plot (at least, to "The Part About the Critics"; I don't know about the rest), the story still feels rather vague and meandering. So far 2666 is shaping up to be a novel of ideas and sensations, and I love it. And onward!

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Update: Check out this great post on "The Part About the Critics" from Gavin of Page247, another read-along participant. She picks up on a few things I hadn’t considered, such as the critics’ isolation in their own little tower of academia with its conferences and scholarly quarrels, and how violence and madness still seep in through the fortress walls.

Sunday Salon

Something Awful's Comedy Goldmine has a page entitled "Failures of humanity witnessed at amusement parks."

My family went on an outing yesterday to Darien Lake Theme Park & Resort (formerly a Six Flags). It must've been a Field Trip Day or something, because the average age there was about 17. I went to the Guessing Game booth (a person guesses your age within two years or you get a prize) and was told I was 29! I'm 23! I guess being surrounded by so many tweens and teens warped the guy's perspective. . . But the most memorable part was a singular act of stupidity witnessed while waiting in line for the Mind Eraser, the last ride we went on. This dumb broad threw a fit because her seven-year-old son was too short to go the ride. Now I expected her to be thrown the hell outta there (security was called) but instead some pushover of a supervisor let the two of them on! Now anyone who has been on a rollercoaster will agree that they can be tough on the body. The Mind Eraser is New York State's only suspended looping coaster. It reaches a maximum speed of 49 miles an hour and a maximum height of 109 feet. Your feet are left free (they had cubbies for people to put their shoes in). I couldn't find any information about the g-forces at work, but I'm sure they were considerable.



In other words: height requirements exist for a reason. For the life of me, I cannot imagine how anyone can have such disregard for their child's safety or how any self-respecting employee can leave both himself and his place of work so open to liability. Failures of humanity indeed. "You want a portrait of America," a friend of mine once said, "go to an amusement park." Sad but true. I had heard about the obesity epidemic, but Darien Lake was the first time I actually recognized it.

But anyway.

I was too tired to begin my 2666 post last night. I am reading it as part of a challenge hosted by Claire and Steph & Tony. Roberto Bolaño's epic work is made up of five books that he completed shortly before his death in 2003, which were meant to be published separately. They have been put out as one ginormous novel instead, and although some people would disagree with his estate's decision, having read the first one ("The Part About the Critics"), I'm not sure how it could have worked as a stand-alone. I will be posting my thoughts later today. But suffice to say: I thoroughly enjoyed it and plan to continue reading it at a faster rate than one book per month.

I am also reading Joanna Scott's Follow Me, albeit sporadically. I've gotten a little further, but my opinion thus far hasn't changed: beautiful prose, decent plot, somewhat annoying characters. My mother, however, abandoned it around page 100, citing what she perceived to be Sally's irritating stupidity. I don't know - she's only a teen, remember. And she obviously has a lot of emotional strength and self-reliance, which I find admirable, even as her immaturity leads her to make some dumb decisions. I also feel that I should make the disclaimer that Follow Me really isn't the type of book I usually read, but Joanna Scott was one of my professors in college. I know I've mentioned that several times, but it's so cool being able to read a novel by someone who taught you. But other readers more familiar with this style of fiction will probably have a different take on it than I do. I've seen it around the literary blogosphere and a lot of my fellow bloggers seem to have enjoyed it.

(Oh, and we won prizes at Darien Lake too! A stuffed clownfish, two smaller stuffed clownfish in blue and red, a stuffed pink beaver, a cloth flower, three bouncy balls, and a giant inflatable hammer. Well, winning stuff is fun, but what the heck are we supposed to do with it now???)

Coming up: I still have hundreds of pages of An American Tragedy left, as well as Herman Hesse's Demian.

The Crimes of Paris (A Review)

"Montmartre is the dwelling-place of the most curious collection of poets, painters, sculptors, bar-keepers, vagabonds, girls of the street, models, apaches, scoundrels in the world - the most gifted and the most degraded (and there is not always a very sharp line dividing them). Montmartre is the most remarkable mixture of gaiety, strenuous work, poetry and mockery, artistic sense and irreligion." - a 1913 Englishman on a notorious neighborhood in Paris

The publisher's description makes it sound as though Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler's The Crimes of Paris focuses solely on the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre on August 21, 1911. That singular instance of blasphemy against high art is indeed a major part of the Hooblers' book. But it is also only one aspect of a well-researched and highly entertaining portrayal of the city that truly defined the modernist spirit during its glorious Belle Époque ("Beautiful Era"). One critic aptly describes The Crimes of Paris as "part fast-paced thriller and part social history," and although I certainly agree, I would define it more as "surrealist history." Far from being a dry recitation of facts, The Crimes of Paris is a strikingly atmospheric work that straddles the line between non-fiction and pure storytelling, as it skillfully evokes a world of blatant immorality, heartbreaking beauty, dangerous politics, and, above all, a love of sensation.

Disclaimer: I knew I'd enjoy this book before I even read it. I adore this time period (roughly 1890-1930), especially the radical art that broke with centuries of tradition and, later on, the poignant literature that flowered in the disillusionment of the Great War (think Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," and the ash heaps and razzle-dazzle of The Great Gatsby.) Just in terms of art, the Modernist era was, in the words of one my professors, the greatest burst of human creativity since the Renaissance. And it was Paris that was the epicenter of this incredible shift in Western thought, as advances science and technology were felt in all aspects of society and the arts (for example, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which posits that all time exists simultaneously, or the automobile and speed and personal mobility). The basic premise of The Crimes of Paris is that crime also evolved rapidly during the Belle Époque and criminal investigation was forced to keep up. Now today we're all used to seeing car chases in movies, the Hooblers remind us, but in 1911, "no one had yet conceived the idea of escaping a robbery via automobile." But even in a world that often sympathized with the devil (in French culture, thieves and murderers have long been celebrated as anti-heroes), brilliant detectives such as Eugène François Vidocq and Alphonse Bertillon still gained public respect thanks in no small part to their prominent place in the sensational exploits of Paris's villains.

It also comes as no surprise that Bertillon's philosophy, written on the wall of his classroom, could have come from the mind of any Modernist painter or photographer: "The eye sees in each thing only what it is looking for, and it looks for what is already an idea in the mind." (Refer to my last post, about Alfred Stieglitz.)

While the mystery of the missing Mona Lisa and the other crime narratives made for fun reading, what I enjoyed most about The Crimes of Paris was the portrait painted of a city at the height of its artistic, scientific, literary, and intellectual powers, even as it deliberately broke the boundaries of good taste in places like Montmartre's Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, beloved of the Parisian intelligentsia, that "brought incredible realism to grotesque special effects, regaling audiences with stabbings, ax murders, gouged-out eyes, torture, acid throwing, amputations, mutilation, and rape." You have the avant-garde underworld, anarchists, various murderers and miscreants, and, above all, the efforts of the oft-despised law enforcement agencies to bring order in a society were "all that is solid melts in the air." The grand result is a weird juxtaposition of the most contradictory elements, from the respectable bourgeoisie to the bomb-throwers to the most outrageous painters and poets. Paris in the Belle Époque was a weird and wonderful place and I wonder if we'll ever see anything like it again (or maybe we did at the height of the sixties in places like San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood). But by 1914, World War I had broken out and the Belle Époque had come to an end amidst the worst carnage in history (up to that point). Anyone who has seen the musical Chicago, however, knows that celebrity-criminals are hardly unique to France; nor have they ever faded into the mists of history. The Crimes of Paris is an excellent book for both the scholar and the casual reader, and the latter is sure to learn quite a bit about art, intellectual, and social history.

Note: a prominent "character" in The Crimes of Paris is a ne'er-do-well anarchist named Victor Serge. Although the Hooblers did an excellent job covering his infamous life in France, they nevertheless do not tell you his full story. By the mid-forties, World War II and the excesses of Stalinism had left Serge thoroughly disenchanted with "revolution" and political violence. By then he was living in exile in Mexico, where he was continuously hounded by Stalinist agents. It was during this time, shortly before his death, that he penned an astonishing and powerful novel called Unforgiving Years, which I couldn't recommend strongly enough. Read it.

Not-So-Wordless Wednesday

Before I get to my review of The Crimes of Paris, I would like you to compare two photos from Alfred Stieglitz, the man who introduced Modernist art to the United States in the 1900s. Here is A Good Joke, taken in 1887:

Technically good, but rather conventional, don't you think? According to Helen Gee in her book Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession: Pictorialism to Modernism, 1902-1917 (Trenton: New Jersey State Museum, 1978), Stieglitz's early photos "lack the sophisticated design of his later prints, [although] there is an intensity of observation and of effort that sets them apart from the work of the typical amateur, which they resemble at first glance." A Good Joke certainly possesses a picturesque harmony that evokes the enduring culture of Europe and its old-world charm (as opposed to American "newness" and mobility). Therefore, in terms of aesthetics, A Good Joke is very much an artistic composition. At the same time, however, the loose and familiar aggregation of children, the natural postures, and the easygoing mood clearly suggests a genuine spontaneity, as though Stieglitz just walked up and snapped the photo. It is a simple picture, yet one layered with enough visual and cultural appeal to render it a genuine work of art and not another tourist snapshot.

Now look at this one: The Steerage (subject of another Wordless Wednesday) from 1917:

One of Stieglitz's associates, Marius de Zayas, had written an article in 1913 for Stieglitz's New York magazine Camera Work in which he distinguished between ordinary photography and artistic photography, stating that "in the former, man tries to get at that objectivity of Form which generates the different conceptions that man has of Form, while the second uses the objectivity of Form to express a preconceived idea in order to convey an emotion." A photographer captures the image of something that exists in the external physical world. An artist, on the other hand, will use the camera to first represent the objectivity of the subject and then attach to it "a system of representation" that somehow signifies something personal and subjective arising from within. In Stieglitz's own words:

"There were men and women and children on the lower deck of the steerage. There was a narrow stairway leading to the upper deck of the steerage, a small deck right on the bow of the steamer.

"To the left was an inclining funnel and from the upper steerage deck there was fastened a gangway bridge that was glistening in its freshly painted state. It was rather long, white, and during the trip remained untouched by anyone.

"On the upper deck, looking over the railing, there was a young man with a straw hat. The shape of the hat was round. He was watching the men and women and children on the lower steerage deck…A round straw hat, the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right, the white drawbridge with its railing made of circular chains – white suspenders crossing on the back of a man in the steerage below, round shapes of iron machinery, a mast cutting into the sky, making a triangular shape…I saw shapes related to each other. I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life."

"This photographer is working in the same spirit as I am," Picasso declared upon seeing The Steerage. It was this same emphasis on subjectivity and personal interpretation, as opposed to the traditional focus on the objective, that came to characterize modernism in art, literature, and life. (You may recall from my review of A Fierce Discontent, that the American Progressive movement, which was eventually challenged by the modernist spirit, was all about external environment.) In this manner, modernism signified a major departure from the course of Western intellectual, creative, and scientific thought.

Coming up: The Crimes of Paris and a new look at criminal investigation

Teaser Tuesdays

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two "teaser" sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from. That way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
• Please avoid spoilers!

2666 (Book 1: The Part About the Critics) by Roberto Bolaño
Page 29 - They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him, partly because Archimboldi was always far away, partly because the deeper they went into his work, the more it devoured its explorers. In a word: in Sankt Pauli and later at Mrs. Bubis's house, hung with photographs of the late Mr. Bubis and his writers, Pelletier and Espinoza understood that what they wanted to make was love, not war.

Follow Me by Joanna Scott
Page 113 - She didn't want to go home. She had no home of her own and was fighting a swell of desperation when Mole asked in a whisper, "You want to learn to drive?"

A Fierce Discontent (An Overview)

The Progressive Era is best described, albeit in a fantastical manner, by Edward Bellamy's socialist utopian novel Looking Backward, 2000-1887, in which protagonist Julian West is "mesmerized" one night in the present day (1887), only to wake up 117 years later. The United States he left, plagued by class conflict and other throes of industrialization, has been transformed into a grand and orderly nation where benevolent collectivism has taken the place of ruthless individualism. No longer do the poor languish in overcrowded tenements and dead-end factory jobs; nor the rich spend their days sunk in decadence and opulence. America is a middle-class paradise where universal cooperation ensures everyone the same standard of living and access to goods, leisure, and education.

Also conspicuously absent is any sense of cultural or racial diversity - the only African-American ever to appear is one of Julian's 1887 servants. Although Bellamy generally fails to give any sense of setting whatsoever (like The Da Vinci Code, Looking Backward is one of those books that are both explosively popular and head-bangingly awful), the overall impression given of the year 2000 is best described as "steamrolled." Bellamy's implication is that the main source of conflict is diversity - diversity of race, ethnicity, culture, income, and self-interest. In Bellamy's imagined future, all competing cooperations have since merged into one OmniCorp (my word), a business development with parallels in the evolution of his fictional society. Progressivism, the social movement rapidly taking form at the time of Bellamy's writing, was a wholly middle-class phenomenon that, witnessing the strife that seemed to be tearing the country apart, sought to remake farmers, the urban poor, immigrants, and the wealthy upper tenth in its own image of restraint and respectability. Describing Chautauqua, an adult education movement that combined intellectual pursuit with recreation in 1896, Henry James recalled it as "Utopia" and

[T]he realization - on a small, simple scale of course - of all the ideals for which our civilization has been striving: security, intelligence, humanity, and order. . . You have no zymotic diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police. You have culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and bled and striven for under the name of civilization for centuries.

In short, he concluded, Chautauqua was a "middle-class paradise." In reality, James couldn't stand it and found that he preferred the grittiness of the real world, but to thousands of other middle-class Americans, squeezed as they were between the warring rich and poor, Chautauqua was the model for what they wanted all of America to be. Despite its broad program of reform and activism - from the control of big business to the amelioration of poverty, from a restructuring of gender relations and the disciplining of leisure and pleasure, from child labor to education - the progressives were nevertheless united by a post-millennial sense of cultural transformation. Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) covers this tumultuous time in American history when "the middle class had enough influence to start its own revolution."

Though not the sole catalyst of the Progressive movement, class conflict certainly provided one of its primary motivations. McGerr opens his books with, appropriately, the scandalous event that was Cornelia Bradley-Martin's notorious costume ball held in the winter of 1897, during what would be known until the 1930s as the "Great Depression." Bradley-Martin had hoped to eclipse Alva Vanderbilt's famous ball of 1883. What she got instead, however, was publicity of the worst sort: the press vehemently attacked her for her ostentatiousness as thousands across the country were suffering. The resulting backlash forced Cornelia and her family into voluntary exile in Europe. The Bradley-Martin affair ultimately exemplified why the progressives feared and mistrusted the upper class. The elites' emphasis on extreme individualism stood in contrast to the progressive's new ideals of "association."

The working class, meanwhile, which was also composed heavily of recent immigrants, stressed mutualism. Drawing from the biography of Rahel Golub, a Russian Jew who arrived in New York City in 1892, McGerr describes how the other women at the factory where she worked resented her productivity on the grounds that it raised the standards too high for all of them. Her family relied on her wages, and the crowded tenement where she lived afforded no privacy. Reading a Hebrew translation of David Copperfield came as a shock: "I turned to the first page of the story and read the heading of the chapter: 'I am born.' Something in these three little words appealed to me more than anything I had yet read. I could not have told why, but perhaps it was the simplicity and the intimate tone of the first person. I had not yet read anything written in the first person." A third class, the rapidly dwindling rural farmers, valued individualism just as the "upper ten" did, but, in addition to the sheer labor that went into nineteenth-century agriculture, their self-assertion was tempered by a firm belief in self-restraint, particularly with regards to consumerism. But by the 1890s, a new generation raised on farms was increasingly drawn to the excitement and temptations of urban life, raising concerns about the survival of an entire way of life. And while the poor were split along ethnic and racial lines, farmers of different crops had difficulty sympathizing with one another's predicaments, while affluent agriculturalists frequently looked down on sharecroppers and subsistence farmers.

Besides feeling caught between clashing classes, the middle class was facing issues of its own. The introduction of labor-saving devices and services (i.e. bakeries and laundries) left women with more leisure time. When combined with better educational opportunities, such as college, women found themselves with literally too much time on their hands, which led, inevitably, to reflections on their limited lot as homemakers. Husbands, meanwhile, found themselves alienated from their own families, as both long work hours and contradictory demands on their character (ruthless in the business world, gentle and kind at home) demanded a need for escape, like Julian West fleeing to his cellar in shame because he couldn't afford to build a home for his fiancée. (I'm not 100% sure, but I believe there is a similar situation in Japan today.) By the end of the 1880s, however, a "peace treaty" between the middle-class genders had been tacitly established, and which included a single standard of sexual behavior for both men and women (restraint), the rise of home economics, and a new demand for simplicity in design and consumption. The infamous Pullman Strike of 1894 finally drove home the new feelings and ideas the middle class had developed as Victorianism waned: that a formerly homogeneous nation was being pulled apart by class and culture. Traditional ideals such as individualism and limited government were now obsolete. Although Jane Addams's accomplishments were exceptional, the sentiments she articulated in her 1892 essay "The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements" were not:

We have in America a fast-growing number of cultivated young people who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties. They hear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way is provided for them to change it, and their uselessness hangs about them heavily. Huxley declares that the sense of usefulness is the severest shock which the human system can sustain, and that if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy of function. These young people have had advantages of college, of European travel, and of economic study, but they are sustaining this shock of inaction. They have pet phrases, and they tell you that the things that make us all alike are stronger than the things that make us different. They say that all men are united by needs and sympathies far more permanent and radical than anything that temporarily divides them and sets them in opposition to each other. If they affect art, they say that the decay in artistic expression is due to the decay in ethics, that art when shut away from the human interests and from the great mass of humanity is self-destructive. They tell their elders with all the bitterness of youth that if they expect success from them in business or politics or in whatever lines their ambition for them has run, they must let them consult all of humanity; that they must let them find out what the people want and how they want it. It is only the stronger young people, however, who formulate this. Many of them dissipate their energies in so-called enjoyment. Others not content with that, go on studying and go back to college for their second degrees; not that they are especially fond of study, but because they want something definite to do, and their powers have been trained in the direction of mental accumulation. Many are buried beneath this mental accumulation which lowered vitality and discontent. Walter Besant says they have had the vision that Peter had when he saw he great sheet let down from heaven, wherein was neither clean nor unclean. He calls it the sense of humanity. It is not philanthropy nor benevolence, but a thing fuller and wider than either of these.

Though acting out of genuine concern and empathy, the "radicalized center" increasingly saw itself as the model for other Americans to emulate. If environment had the single biggest impact on character, then perhaps the focus should be on changing people's settings. Despite their broad agenda, the progressives remained united in their overall goal to make other Americans more like them. To erode ethnic and lifestyle differences, they set up settlement houses in immigrant neighborhoods that included "Americanization" classes. They even attempted to weaken farmers' individualistic values through the Country Life program, which ranged from fact-finding and agricultural research to forming "people's clubs" in an effort to ease rural isolation. But for all Progressives' talk of association supplanting individualism, the vast majority of them did not embrace socialism, even as they strongly favored the reigning-in of "big business" as part of their strategy to reform the upper class. As regulation became popular, so did working class radicalism, leading to the rise of organizations such as International Workers of the World (the "Wobblies") and the Women's Trade Union League, as well as increasing the visibility of socialism and anarchism (though the latter was more pronounced in Europe).

There was actually a whole chapter on working class radicalism and the regulation of big corporations, but it was boring and I just skimmed through it. I'm more interested in social and intellectual history.

The progressives sought to remake childhood by setting up clubs and organized sports and pushing for legislation to make school attendance mandatory and child labor illegal. They also pushed for the creation of separate juvenile courts to try young offenders. Adult behavior was another cause for concern, particularly drinking (a favorite activity among the working class), divorce, and prostitution.

For all their good intentions, however, there was a darker side to the progressives' driving need for reform and regulation (I mean, beyond the obvious "control issues"). Segregation, or "Jim Crow," was in many respects a natural development in a society that was becoming more accepting of regulation, and yet was still mired in age-old racial strife even as it grew more diverse with each passing day. The progressive buzzword "association" meant bringing together different groups of people, but certain limitations remained. Some differences simply could not be erased. While not as vehemently racist as large segments of white America were at the time, the progressives still feared social conflict. When dealing with white immigrants, farmers, and laborers, this could be averted by working to change urban and rural environments and thereby changing individuals; in the case of African-Americans, on the other hand, this meant "protecting" them from the fury of reactionary whites. The progressives openly abhorred lynching and lawless mob violence, and felt that African-Americans could best improve themselves behind a sort of "legal shield" that would also placate conservative whites. But ultimately, "[s]egregation was a failure of imagination and nerve," McGerr concludes, ". . .Willing to believe that a kind of 'paradise' might really be attainable some day, progressives showed little fear in dealing with problems of gender, class, and economy - but not of race." In Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, corruption has been eliminated by both restricting the vote to society's "honorary members" and also through simple good breeding: by the year 2000, only the "better sorts" of humanity have reproduced. This may seem contradictory coming from a man so concerned with the struggles of the poor, but in reality, much of the progressive platform was strikingly undemocratic. Although McGerr only touches on it briefly, many of the Eastern and Southern European immigrants were also believed to be "racially inferior." Matthew Fry Jacobson's book Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) discusses in detail the rise of the pseudo-science of "eugenics" which would one day deeply influence Nazi ideology.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, progressivism had become mainstream enough for former President Theodore Roosevelt to form his own National Progressive party and run for a third term. McGerr actually sees World War I as the progressives' flash of glory before collapsing forever in the social malaise that followed the War to End All Wars. Even before Americans' disillusionment with the progressives' overreaching attempts to enforce patriotism and drastically enlarge the federal government, the new forces of what McGerr calls "liberation" were undermining the progressives' optimistic faith in humanity's ability to improve. Freud, for example, helped advance new notions of the primal subconscious that defied all attempts at civilization. New pasttimes and forms of entertainment - cars, films, dancing, Coney Island - encouraged personal release and individual self-expression (particularly in the new Modernist art), both of which ran counter to the progressive program. (Ironically, McGerr notes, the progressives themselves had contributed to this new sexual openness with their public attacks on prostitution and other "vice.") Although the horrors of World War I had sounded the definite death knell for the Progressive Era, the new forces of the modernism in art, music, literature, and society would doubtlessly have defeated sooner or later even without that singular calamity.

I enjoyed reading A Fierce Discontent. Although McGerr's book is aimed at an academic audience, it is well-written, highly readable, and graced by the occasional touch of humor. It has appeal for both casual readers and scholars, and I strongly recommend it as a classroom text for undergraduates. I do, however, dispute his claim that progressivism was a purely domestic movement that had no international aims. While I'm no expert on the subject, I believe the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I was very much a progressive document. And since the modernism that threatened progressivism had its origins in Europe (and plays a major role in Thomas and Dorothy Hoobler's The Crimes of Paris, which I plan on reviewing next), I would have liked to have seen more discussion of the Progressive Movement abroad, if there was one. If it was uniquely American, then what made it so? But what I liked most was how McGerr explored the contradictions inherent to the Progressive Movement, such as segregation and the need for control, and how that contrasted with individualism so ingrained in both American culture and the recognizeably modern world that emerged with the dawn of the twentieth century. Again, this was a movement enamored with control and utopianism, and there is simply no way to sustain that kind of momentum. It certainly sheds light on popular liberalism today (the "audacity of hope"), which illustrates precisely why the study of history is so important to understanding the present.

In short: a great companion book for The Crimes of Paris, as reading the two together dramatically reveals the disparity between progressivism and modernism.

Summer Reading

I found this meme on Claire's blog Kiss a Cloud. Just in time for Memorial Day!

Do your reading habits change over the summer? Do you choose lighter fare?

Nope. I read what I've always read, even on vacation. The only difference is maybe I'll chose books that are less scary, depressing, etc. Maybe I'll read more Star Trek books.

What do you enjoy to take to the beach, for example?

I haven't been to the beach in forever! How sad is that?

What is the ultimate summer book?

Margeurite Duras's The Sailor from Gibraltar, definitely. Esther Tusquet's The Same Sea as Every Summer can be kind of weighty, but it's still beautifully written with an otherworldly feel to it.

What are your favourite travel guides - official or unofficial?

I don't really read travel guides, but I like the books Lonely Planet has come out with. I remember their intro the DC guide was especially well-done and evocative.

Where do you vacation? Any places you recommend or even don't recommend?

My vacations in recent years have been minimal, with the exception of a Thanksgiving trip to Puerto Rice when I was sixteen and a trip to Mexico (Mexico City, Tasco, Acapulco) with my school's Travel Club the following year. I would love to visit Greece, southern Italy, and Paris. I'd also like to see the island Rab, since every single work of Croatian literature I've read takes place there! (I'm not kidding. Isn't there a mainland Croatia?)

I know some people love going to the Adirondacks, but having actually lived there, I can't stand the place!

Sunday Salon

Yes, I know: my blog has been sorely neglected as of late. I actually do have a post I've been working on for the past few days that I plan to have up by either today or tomorrow (though it might be dated retroactively), and then I plan on getting to reviewing The Crimes of Paris, 2666, and Follow Me.

You may recall from my previous Sunday Salon that I returned to my alma mater last weekend for the graduation of some of my friends. (Good Lord, it's really been one whole year since I myself graduated!) When I arrived, most of my old floor (it's a "special interest" floor - kind of like a coed fraternity) was at a picnic in a park two miles away. I was wearing four-inch heels but I wanted to see everyone so I walked! (Not as big a deal as you'd think - I do everything in heels, and these were platforms, not stilettos.) Being back felt very surreal. I was in school from the time I was five to age twenty-two. I loved college and wish I was still there, instead of sitting at home doing nothing except work as a legal secretary in a city I hate. I thought I was too young to feel nostalgia, but recalling my own graduation and how exciting it was forced me to really look back on the past year, at the months of unemployment, the ensuing months of working part-time for minimum wage ringing groceries, and only now getting a full-time job that's basically dead-end and paying only $9 an hour.

Fucking economy. "Oh trust me," one of my friends told me, "no one is hopeful. We know it's bad out there." Well no kidding.

I didn't attend any of the department ceremonies, although I did crash the English and History receptions to see some of my old professors. And speaking of old professors. . .

This is Follow Me by Joanna Scott, who I had for International Fiction my senior year. (Yes, I did get an A!) It's been a big hit among my fellow book bloggers, so when I saw it in the Faculty Authors section, you know I had to snatch it up! (I knew that there are other writers named Joanna Scott, so I wasn't 100% sure it was the same person at first.) Alas, Professor Scott was not at the English reception. She was giving an honorary degree at another school. So next time I'm in town I'll make sure to stop by and have her autograph it. At the moment, however, I do have mixed feelings about the story so far. To begin with, Follow Me is not the type of book I usually read - it has a very "Oprah's Book Club" feel to it. Yet on the other hand, Professor Scott's prose is beautifully done, and I've always contended that great prose can make up for a ho-hum plot. Unfortunately, I'm putting it on hiatus for the moment, as I have to get the first part of 2666 read by the end of May as part of the five-month reading challenge I'm taking part in.

I started reading Follow Me in my favorite room at the school library: a dark-hued scholarly-type place with thick leather couches, low lighting, wood paneling, and marble floors covered with antique area rugs.

The dorms closed Monday morning at nine, and by Sunday night most people had left. Our floor, never neat, remained an atrocious mess, even at 5:00am, when my taxi arrived to take me to the train station (for some reason, there were no trains available Sunday). The lounges were littered with God-knows-whose stuff, dishes and old food on the cheap folding tables, dust and dirt all over the floors, junk everywhere, overflowing trash cans, overflowing recycle bins (but at least we recycle), empty liquor bottles still packing the shelves; in the Core were boxes and boxes of dishes from the kitchen (which were prompty unpacked, since people apparently still needed to cook), a bicycle frame with no wheels (don't ask), random miscellaneous papers, and more junk people didn't want anymore. I slept on the couch in what had been the Video Game Lounge, now largely cleaned up except for the aforementioned dirt and debris, as well as a computer of unknown origin.

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights.
The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.

With most of my friends gone, The Crimes of Paris finished, and Follow Me getting tiresome, I was lacking in things to do. In one of the lounges was a plastic crate box full of books and magazines in which I found this:
With the exception of Twilight, I have never read a contemporary novel, written by a woman, more insulting to women than this. It was like one of those horrible things you witness and yet find that you just can't look away. Amanda Trimble's Singletini is the single most vapid work of fiction I have ever had the displeasure of reading. Any chick lit fan who wonders why people disparage her fave genre should look no further than Singletini. The main character, a borderline-alcoholic named Vic, is as shallow as a cheap plastic kiddie pool in some cookie-cutter suburban wasteland. The narration is first-person, and, I swear to God, every last one of Vic's thoughts and feelings revolved around drinking, dating, fashion, shopping, clubbing, and rich people. She was more manic than a bipolar patient amped on crystal meth. I mean, the story moves at this a crazy-fast pace that should be impossible without the protagonist eventually suffering severe burnout. Apparently Trimble comes from an advertising background, so I guess that makes sense, but writing a novel is not the same as writing catchy copy. Look, I know there is thoughtful chick lit out there, but this isn't it. I simply cannot believe this was written by a grown woman for grown women. Actually, I think Twilight was better-written and far more mature.

I finished Singletini in about an hour. It may be 352 pages, but that's 352 pages of pure fluff. I went back to the lounge I had taken it from, but the plastic crate was gone! I don't know if whoever's book it was had left or not, so I left it on the couch. It was a library book (not from our school's library), so I sure hope she found it. I would hate to be responsible for overdue fees, but maybe taking Singletini out of circulation isn't really such a bad thing. . .

But anyway, I have a full literary load on my hands right now. Happy reading everyone!

Wordless Wednesday

Alfred Stieglitz's Winter on Fifth Avenue, 1892

I know my blog has been neglected as of late, but I'll get back on track soon!

Teaser Tuesdays

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two "teaser" sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from. That way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
• Please avoid spoilers!

The Crimes of Paris by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler
Page 123 - Lacassagne decided to concentrate his examination on the bones and hair. The work was gruesome, for the pathologist did not have the advantage of refrigeration or latex gloves.

Follow Me by Joanna Scott
Page 149 - A brief, unseasonable thaw the following day made the house more tolerable. Sally put on an old denim dress she found in Gladdy's closet, something that probably had once belonged to the daughter, and she hauled in wood from a dingy woodpile behind the garage.

Yes, I know, these are books a lot of book bloggers have been reading and reviewing. But The Crimes of Paris I won in a giveaway, and Joanna Scott was one of my professors in college! (For International Fiction - we read Kafka, Gordimer, García Márquez, Calvino, Woolf, and Borges.) I got her book from my alma mater's bookstore (in the "Faculty Authors" section) and intended to have her autograph it during the English graduation reception. Unfortunately, it turned out she was at another school giving out an honorary degree! Grrrrr!

New Books!

A little late in the day, I know, but my train left at 5:42 in the morning, got back at 8, and then I had to go straight from the train station to work. I am finally home for the first time since Saturday afternoon.

But anyway, here is Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler's The Crimes of Paris, which I won in two bloggy giveaways! One was in April and the other was a couple of weeks ago. I don't know if I'm only getting one book or if I'll end up with two. I didn't even mean to enter the second one. I just commented on his post and got automatically entered!

This is Roberto Bolaño's 2666. I ordered it from Amazon for the reading challenge I'll be participating in.

I am currently three-quarters of the way through The Crimes of Paris. I should have it finished tonight. But first I'll be posting about Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent.

Sunday Salon

I wish I was in college again!

This is going to be another short post, unfortunately, and a badly-illustrated one too, since I am using someone else's computer and I don't want to be saving pictures to his hard drive. I have returned to my old college dorm for my friends' graduation. It's only been a year, but I feel like I never left. Everyone is so happy. I wish I could tell them all about how, following my graduation exactly one year ago today, I spent four months unemployed, another four months working part-time for minimum wage in a grocery store in a low-income area having to constantly explain no you can't get that on WIC anymore, and then, finally, getting a full-time position as a legal secretary three weeks ago. I hate this economy.

But I am very pleased to announce my acquisition of Follow Me, a novel by my old English professor Joanna Scott! Although it's not the type of book I usually read, it's been a big hit among my fellow book bloggers and I am very eager to begin it. Hopefully I can get Professor Scott to autograph it today, if she isn't too mobbed by graduates at the English reception. (I had her for Contemporary International Literature.)

I am currently three-quarters of the way through Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement, 1870-1920. After finishing that, I plan to move on immediately to Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler's The Crimes of Paris. Then I have a Hermann Hesse novella to breeze through, and then I'll get to the Scott book. So my reading for the next few weeks is pretty much set.

I'm not about to hog someone else's computer, so I'll sign off now.

WIN!

I finally had a LOLdog I made make it to the homepage! I was inspired by this picture of a selfish cat.

Wordless Wednesday

I saw shapes related to each other. I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life.

Alfred Stieglitz's The Steerage (1907), considered one of defining photographs of the Modernist art movement.

Click here for more Wordless Wednesday.

Teaser Tuesdays

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two "teaser" sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from. That way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
• Please avoid spoilers!

A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement, 1870-1920 by Michael McGerr
Page 263 - The birth control movement, along with the popularization of Freud and Ellis and the erotic focus of commercial amusements, signaled a transformation of sexual values and practices in the United States in the 1910s and after. The immediate extent of that transformation should not be exaggerated.

Sunday Salon

Having finished Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, I found myself facing a literary void. I mean, I had nothing new to read. So I returned to An American Tragedy, which is actually starting to pick up, and to Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement, which actually covers the time period in which An American Tragedy takes place. I did go to Barnes & Noble yesterday, where I purchased Herman Hesse's Demian, so I'll be reading that shortly.

Sorry I don't have much to say. This week was an uneventful one for reading.

Star Trek (A Movie Review and Discussion)

Directed by J.J. Abrams
Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Leonard Nimoy, Eric Bana, Karl Urban, John Cho, Zoe Saldana, Anton Yelchin, Simon Pegg
Rated PG-13

So I went and saw the new Star Trek movie today.

I am a huge fan of Star Trek. I haven't written about it much on this blog, other than to review a couple of books (here and here), discuss Peter David, and share the insanity that is BorgSpace. Although I've enjoyed the Star Wars films on a purely entertainment basis, Star Trek, though occasionally every bit as corny as George Lucas's galactic melodrama, has always had more of point to it. Yes, it can be cheesy, but, as Dana Stevens's review on Slate puts it:

Star Trek's vision of the future, as guided by creator Gene Roddenberry, was also a relic of its time, the age of NASA and the Cold War and Kruschev pounding his shoe on a podium at the United States. The show's faith in diplomacy and technology as tools for not just global but universal peace might seem touchingly dated in our post-9/11 age of stateless jihad, loose nukes, and omnipresent danger. Yet in a weird way, Star Trek's cheerfully square naiveté makes it the perfect film for our first summer of (slimly) renewed hope. It's a blockbuster for the Obama age, when smarts and idealism are cool again. In fact, can't you picture our president—levelheaded, biracial, implacably smart—on the bridge in a blue shirt and pointy ears?

However, much as I love Trek, I've also always found Roddenberry's future to be self-contradictory and even downright disturbing at times. For one thing, he was an ardent atheist who saw religion as something mankind would "grow out of," and yet the effects of humanity's "first contact" with an alien species strongly resemble that of a religious conversion (i.e. being "born again"), as the Truth ("We're not alone!") sets everyone free and leads to war, poverty, and disease being banished from Earth within fifty years. (Edward Bellamy described a similar phenomena in his classic socialist utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887. Quite frankly, some of the criticisms I had of that book can easily be applied to Star Trek as well.) "Religion in Star Trek," an article on the fan site Ex Astris Scientia, pretty outlines everything wrong with this scenario of a strictly humanistic future. Also a tad creepy is Roddenberry's own unwavering faith in his own vision. The Next Generation episode "Conspiracy" was originally meant to be about a military coup within Starfleet, but Roddenberry refused to accept that the Federation was anything less than a "perfect" government and that mankind had not "evolved" beyond such things.

One of the Federation's biggest enemies - if not the biggest - is the Borg Collective, a hive mind composed of billions of mindless cyborgs who were abducted from other species and forcibly "assimilated." (And their ships are giant cubes. How awesome is that?) Starfleet officers have spoken eloquently about the horror of losing your self-will and being absorbed into a massive juggernaut. "In their collective state," Captain Picard is quoted as saying, "the Borg are utterly without mercy, driven by one will alone: the will to conquer. They are beyond redemption, beyond reason." But really, the Borg are more ironic than anything else. The Borg's goal is "perfection," which they define as a smoothly functioning monolithic whole made up of legions of individuals who have been artificially enhanced to achieve physical and intellectual heights undreamed of by purely organic beings. Freedom is irrelevant. Self-determination is irrelevant. An alarming vision to be sure; one that calls to mind George Orwell's 1984 ("There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science." "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.") But Star Trek in general is about "perfected" humans who seem to all belong to the same atheistic, pseudo-socialist Americanized culture. The point is repeatedly made that they are more "evolved" than we currently are, which unfortunately does not preclude an arrogant, patronizing attitude. ("We no longer slaughter animals for food," Commander Riker sniffs to an alien ambassador in a first-season Next Generation episode.) Oh well, Starfleet often assure itself after dealings with a particularly troublesome race, they just haven't reached our advanced stage of society yet - give'em another few centuries. As a result of their "perfected" state of being, it frequently seems that all human beings in the Star Trek universe just naturally share the exact same values and have all arrived at the exact same conclusions regarding science, religion, tolerance, and multiculturalism. (On a side note: I remember reading somewhere that the reason Paradise Lost is such a revered literary work is because, quite frankly, its easy to identify with Satan in all his stubborness and egotism. God is just too damn thunderingly perfect - you know, like Roddenberry's humans and the Borg.)

(Now, to be fair, there have been attempts to address this conundrum following Roddenberry's death. The Voyager character Commander Chakotay is a Mayan Indian, whose people had since left Earth in response to the increasing homogenization of humanity. Voyager and Deep Space Nine also featured the Maquis, a terrorist group composed primarily of rogue Starfleet officers who took issue with a Federation-Cardassian treaty.)

So Star Trek is overly idealistic. But is that really such a bad thing? During the Star Trek 30th anniversary celebration, Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, described how she was considering quitting the show, when Martin Luther King reminded her of how radical it truly was that she was a black woman on the bridge of a starship. (In fact, Uhura's pride in her African heritage was frequently demonstrated on the original series.) The episode "Plato's Stepchildren" even featured TV's first interracial kiss, between Kirk and Uhura under the influence of powerful telepaths. In the words of the blogger angry asian man: "What's also really cool about this new Trek movie is its diverse, inclusive vision of humanity in the future. It takes a lot of manpower to traverse the final frontier, and lots of Asian faces are peppered throughout Starfleet in the movie." Yes, it can be heavy-handed, but Star Trek's message of growth and acceptance is an undeniably powerful one. According to a Boston Globe article:

This is an odd, unsettling time in America. Disarray is everywhere, and long-accepted narratives are being questioned. It's a time not unlike the late 1960s, the tumultuous age when the original "Star Trek" first set its sights on the future.

"Stories survive partly because they remind us of what we know and partly because they call us back to what we consider significant," Robert Fulford writes in "The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture."

Viewed through that prism, the return of "Star Trek" to the American canon in the jumbled, dark days of 2009 -- post-"Blade Runner," post-"Terminator," post-"Cloverfield," even -- makes eminent sense. It's a coherent universe that functions as a roadmap back to sane times.

One of its better-known fans might even call it, say, the audacity of hope.

Of course, no franchise is perfect. But one can make a strong case for the timeless and universal relevancy of Star Trek. There's a reason it continued to resonate after the original series was canceled. There's a reason it has survived countless makeovers and interpretations. No matter what external shape it has taken, the message has always remained intact. The fact that the utopian genre has persisted for five hundred years now clearly demonstrates an innate human drive for improvement. We've all dreamed of a better place, and of knowledge and learning. And that is what Star Trek is all about - a future where humanity has been able to move beyond the problems that have plagued it forever (war, disease, crime, poverty) and refocus all its energies on exploring the final frontier.

Now as far as the new film goes - I liked it. It's an enjoyable ride that is definitely a whole lot more fun than traditional Trek has tended to be. It almost doesn't feel like Star Trek - far from the exalted and "evolved" Starfleet officers of the past, Star Trek 2009 is strikingly lighthearted and has a very "real" feel to it. Back to my Paradise Lost aside: you can identify with these people. They feel like people you know. But, on the flip side, I can imagine some of the die-hard folks taking issue with J.J Abrams's buoyant, action-packed interpretation.

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

I also appreciated how Abrams didn't even try to match canon and came up with that "alternative timeline" deal instead. Of course, Star Trek is always contradicting itself, but at least here Abrams has come up with an actual explanation for it. He's also conveniently given himself more freedom to do what he wants with the franchise, now that he no longer has to worry about the in-universe future.



And just to show how a traditional Star Trek film works: here is Star Trek: First Contact, the 1996 movie about the Borg's invasion of Earth.