VENGEFUL PHILANTHROPY
from New Yorker

One afternoon a few weeks ago, Jennifer Philbin, a writer for “The O.C.,” was driving her BMW in heavy traffic on Wilshire Boulevard, in Los Angeles, when she passed the remnants of an accident. She turned to look and promptly ran into the car in front of her—a Saab wagon. She and the Saab’s driver, a man in his late forties, pulled over to assess the damage. There didn’t seem to be any; she had hardly been moving. Nonetheless, the man insisted on summoning a police officer. Eventually, one came over from the other accident, examined the Saab’s bumper, and said, “I don’t really see anything here.” The driver of the Saab, citing possible “structural damage,” was adamant. The policeman filled out an accident report.

These particulars, and many that followed, came to light the other day, thanks to the efforts of Philbin’s fiancé, Michael Schur, a twenty-nine-year-old Harvard graduate and a writer for the NBC sitcom “The Office,” who converted his indignation over the fender bender into a campaign both to embarrass the Saab driver and to raise money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. In two mass e-mails, and then on a blog, he dissected the incident and its moral implications, striving to turn his inner Larry David into an inner Augustine, or, at least, an inner Oprah.

Schur’s involvement began several days after the accident, when Saab Guy, as Schur christened him, called Philbin to report that there was a crease in his bumper’s plastic cover and that it would cost $836.96 to fix. This news prompted Schur to commandeer the phone and demand digital photos.

The man responded, according to Schur, “It really isn’t the kind of thing that shows up in a photograph.”

So instead Schur paid a visit to the garage at Saab Guy’s office. (“It might not surprise you to find out that the man is a lawyer,” Schur’s e-mail said.) Together, the two men inspected the car. “I kid you not,” Schur wrote. “You have to be within six inches of the bumper to see the ‘crease.’ ”

Saab Guy told Schur, “Look, I could live with it, but I just don’t want to.” Schur pointed out that petty accident claims contribute to skyrocketing insurance rates.

“I don’t care about insurance rates,” the lawyer replied.

“You should care,” Schur said. “You’re a resident of this city, and it’s a huge problem.” Schur then thought of something about which the lawyer should care even more. He proposed, on the spot, to contribute the $836.96 to the Red Cross in Saab Guy’s name, to help provide relief to the victims of Katrina. The lawyer didn’t seem interested. He wanted his bumper fixed. But Schur kept after him. Finally, the lawyer said, “O.K., I’ll think about it.”

Schur went to meet some friends, who agreed that a creased bumper, when measured against a calamity like Katrina, was trivial indeed, and they, too, immediately pledged donations in Saab Guy’s name. Within an hour, Schur had raised $1,936, which inspired him to try for more. He wrote his first mass e-mail, asking for donations to the “Mike Schur Saab Guy Katrina Fund” from people who’d already given on behalf of the hurricane’s victims, from those who had not, or from those who merely, as he wrote, “just want to see Saab Guy shamed like the jerk he is.” If Saab Guy agreed to the arrangement, the donations would be made in his name. If he didn’t, the donations could be made under “Saab Guy Is an Asshole.” The e-mail shot out into the world. Within hours, friends, and friends of friends, had pledged nearly twelve thousand dollars. “This is the greatest thing ever,” Schur wrote. By the next day, the haul was up to thirty thousand.

But then came the qualms. Since launching the campaign, Schur and Philbin had occasionally looked at each other and said, “Why do I feel bad?” Of the hundreds of responses they received, only a few were negative, but one of those, from someone they didn’t know, put into words their sense of unease. Their campaign, the e-mailer wrote, was “extremely distasteful,” not only because they were exploiting the tragedy of Katrina but because Saab Guy had every right to his money, since his car had been damaged and he had been hit from behind. Schur and Philbin stayed up until 2 a.m. working over the ethical implications. Schur wondered, “Well, I drive a thirty-four-thousand-dollar Acura TL. Who am I to tell people that they should donate to charity?” He asked himself whether he should sell his watch, buy a cheap one, and donate the difference. “It’s a slippery slope,” he said.

The next morning, Schur found himself paralyzed by, and luxuriating in, his misgivings. Vengeful philanthropy: it was a category unto itself. He spent a couple of hours cold-calling ethics professors around the country. A consensus emerged that the problem lay in the desire to induce shame. Charity was good, but spite was not. He worked up the courage to call Saab Guy again, and he reiterated his offer, adding that some friends of his had also pledged money. “I don’t want to say he ignored it, but he kept going on with his thought process,” Schur recalled. “He did say, though, that he’d been thinking about whether he was being petty.” Saab Guy didn’t ask Schur how much had been pledged, and Schur didn’t go out of his way to tell him. Nor did Schur mention the sprawl of his campaign, the blog, or the fact that a charitable enterprise had been launched under the banner “Saab Guy Is an Asshole.”

At any rate, Saab Guy made a counteroffer: “What if I take some part of your money and give it to charity and use some part of it to fix my bumper?”

Schur said, “That sounds great,” and sent him a check for the full amount, restoring what Schur called “a fairly delicate balance in the universe.”

“It’s possible he thinks of me as a morally high-handed little snotnosed jerk who tried to tell him what to do with his money,” Schur reflected. “It’s also possible that he thinks the next time someone bumps into him he shouldn’t care as much.”

Neither, really. “He was a very thoughtful, nice young man,” Saab Guy said last Friday. He called the affair a “non-issue,” and noted that Schur’s check was still sitting next to his phone, uncashed. “I’m actually still trying to figure out whether to just send it back.”



MUSIC

Neutral Milk Hotel
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
[Merge; 1998; r: Domino; 2005]
Rating: 10.0
from pitchforkmedia.com

So, then, seven years later Domino reissues In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the arguments can begin anew. I've talked about this album with a lot of people, including Pitchfork readers and music writers, and while it is loved in the indie world like few others, a small but still significant number despise it. Aeroplane doesn't have the near-consensus of top-shelf 90s rock artifacts like, say, Loveless, OK Computer, or Slanted and Enchanted. These records are varied, of course, different in many ways. But in one key respect Aeroplane stands apart: This album is not cool.

Shortly after the release of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Puncture magazine had a cover story on Neutral Milk Hotel. In it Mangum told of the influence on the record of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. He explained that shortly after releasing On Avery Island he read the book for the first time, and found himself completely overwhelmed with sadness and grief. Back in 1998 this admission made my jaw drop. What the hell? A guy in a rock band saying he was emotionally devastated by a book everyone else in America read for a middle-school assignment? I felt embarrassed for him at first, but then, the more I thought about it and the more I heard the record, I was awed. Mangum's honesty on this point, translated directly to his music, turned out to be a source of great power.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a personal album but not in the way you expect. It's not biography. It's a record of images, associations, and threads; no single word describes it so well as the beautiful and overused "kaleidoscope." It has the cracked logic of a dream, beginning with "King of Carrot Flowers Part 1". The easiest song on the record to like on first listen, it quietly introduces the listener to the to the album's world, Mangum singing in a muted voice closer to where he left off with the more restrained On Avery Island (through most of Aeroplane he sounds like he's running out of time and struggling to get everything said). The first four words are so important: "When you were young..." Like every perceptive artist trafficking in memory, Mangum knows dark surrealism to be the language of childhood. At a certain age the leap from kitchen utensils jammed into dad's shoulder to feet encircled by holy rattlesnakes is nothing. A cock of the head; a squint, maybe.

Inside this dream it all begins in the body. Moments of trauma, joy, shame-- here they're all experienced first as physical sensation. A flash of awkward intimacy is recalled as "now how I remember you/ how I would push my fingers through your mouth/ to make those muscles move." Sometimes I hear this line and chuckle. I think of Steve Martin in The Jerk, licking Bernadette Peters' entire face as a sign of affection. Mangum here reflects the age when biological drives outpace the knowledge of what to do with them, a time you're seeing sex in everything ("semen stains the mountaintops") or that sex can be awkward and unintentionally painful ("fingers in the notches of your spine" is not what one usually hopes for in the dark). Obsessed as it is with the textures of the flesh and the physical self as an emotional antenna, listening to Aeroplane sometimes seems to involve more than just your ears.

Then there's the record's disorienting relationship to time. The instrumentation seems plucked randomly from different years in the 20th century: singing saws, Salvation Army horn arrangements, banjo, accordion, pipes. Lyrical references to technology are hard to fix. Anne Frank's lifespan from 1929 to 1945 is perhaps the record's historical center, but the perspective jumps back and forth over centuries, with images and figures sucked from their own age and squirted out somewhere else. When "The King of Carrot Flowers Part 3" mentions "a synthetic flying machine" our minds leap to something like Leonardo da Vinci's 15th Century drawings of his helicopter prototype. The image in "Two-Headed Boy" of a mutant child trapped in a jar of formaldehyde is pulled from Dr. Moreau's industrial age island. The radio play powered by pre-electric pulleys and weights, the nuclear holocaust in the title track. What's it all about? Mangum offers an explanation for these jarring leaps in a line about Anne Frank in "Oh Comely," where he sings, "I know they buried her body with others/ her sister and mother and 500 families/ and will she remember me 50 years later/ I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine." If you can move through time, see, nothing ever really dies.

Seven years it's been, and whether Mangum has had personal trouble or somehow lost his way with music, it's not unreasonable to think that we've heard the last from Neutral Milk Hotel. I hope he does, but he may never pick up the guitar he set down after "Two-Headed Boy Part Two." Even so, we have this album and another very good one, and that to me is serious riches. Amazing to think how it started, how at the core of it all was guts. I keep thinking of "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding," and one of Dylan's truest lines: "If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine." Aeroplane is what happens when you have that knowledge and still take the risk.



OTHER

After 43 years and $568 billion in foreign aid to the continent, Africa remains trapped in economic stagnation. What’s wrong?

MELVILLE

His World and Work
By Andrew Delbanco
Knopf. 415 pp. $30
review from washingtonpost.com

The life and afterlife of Herman Melville (1819-1891) present the greatest illustration in American literature, perhaps in world literature, of the Psalm "The same stone which the builders refused is become the head-stone." After the popular success of Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), which led to the young Melville being dubbed "the man who lived among cannibals," he embarked on a literary career that went gradually, then precipitously, downhill. By the time he was 40 he had essentially abandoned fiction altogether, tried publishing poetry with comparable success (i.e., none), and finally resigned himself -- he was, after all, married, with four children and debts -- to spending the rest of his life as a customs inspector for the city of New York. When he died, the newspaper obituary misprinted his name as "Henry Melville."

His work was never entirely forgotten, though he was chiefly regarded as a writer of sea stories (Joseph Conrad, another specialist in "the watery part of the world," didn't think much of them). And then in the 1920s a Melville revival unexpectedly kicked into gear. In 1921, Raymond Weaver brought out the first biography ( Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic ); in 1923, D.H. Lawrence devoted more pages to Melville in his dithyrambic Studies in Classic American Literature than to any other writer ("a deep, great artist"); in 1924, the rediscovered Billy Budd was published; and by the 1930s the poet Charles Olson had begun to track down the dispersed volumes of Melville's library in New York's used bookshops. More and ever more scholarly work appeared as teachers and critics of every theoretical bent discovered an oceanic textual richness and complexity in his masterpiece, Moby-Dick (1851). After World War II the suspicion, then conviction grew ever stronger that Melville's titanic meditation on Good and Evil, and almost everything else (except romantic love), just might be that elusive White Whale of our literature, the great American novel.

For anyone who cares about writing (or any of the arts), Melville's story is obviously both dispiriting and consoling. It is also a story that Andrew Delbanco tells surpassingly well.

Not that he hasn't had help in re-creating the writer's world. During the past 10 or 15 years we have seen no shortage of Melvillean biography, from the scholarly life's work of Hershel Parker (two daunting volumes) to the very brief Penguin volume (155 pages) by Elizabeth Hardwick. For the general reader, though, Delbanco offers a more satisfying book than either of these. First of all, this academic writes with exceptional clarity and wit (he possesses a taste for subtle, hardly noticeable wordplay). He also displays a masterly ability to summarize a book or an argument and is generous in acknowledging the scholarship of others. He periodically underscores the continued relevance of Melville's complex themes -- man's ambiguous relationship to Nature, the persistence of social and racial inequities, America's imperialistic sense of manifest destiny, the shiftiness of sexuality -- and yet he doesn't belabor the obvious or thump any tubs. This Columbia professor also surprises by including a page from a Mad magazine parody of Moby-Dick , a Gahan Wilson cartoon of Captain Ahab, and an exchange about Billy Budd (as a homosexual text) from an episode of "The Sopranos." When Delbanco writes about New York City and its importance to Melville's work, he reveals his own unambiguous but not unambivalent love for his hometown.

In short, it would be hard to imagine a more inviting overview of Melville for our time. I've admired Delbanco's work before, in particular, Required Reading , though that was essentially a collection of brief essays. This full-length study points up even more forcefully the truth of that earlier book's subtitle -- "Why Our American Classics Matter Now" -- by focusing on one major author. The result is humane and relevant scholarship at its best.

In little more than a decade -- between his mid-twenties and late-thirties -- Herman Melville produced eight or nine novels (at least one never published and now lost) and a half-dozen or so short stories. He could write with surprising speed, which may explain in part why so many of his books are rambling, disjointed, phantasmagoric, sententious and often boring. Aside from Melville scholars, who ever looks into Mardi or Israel Potter ? In recent years Pierre: or the Ambiguities has gained its champions (many critics view its incest motif as a mask for Melville's possible homosexuality), while The Confidence-Man almost seems a post-modern meditation on the slipperiness of identity. Melville's poetry has been championed too, especially by Robert Penn Warren. I myself remember when "On the Slain Collegians" was widely read -- back in 1970, shortly after the killings at Kent State.

In truth, though, only four works live for us today, but what works they are! Moby-Dick , of course, but also Billy Budd , which Thomas Mann called "the most beautiful story in the world" and wished he could have written (which isn't surprising since Billy in his beauty and innocence could be the slightly more weather-beaten cousin of Tadzio in Death in Venice ). Recall the story's basic plot: A handsome and guileless young seaman is falsely accused of sedition by a ship's master-at arms; in the captain's cabin Billy, after a moment of stuttering frustration, lashes out at the evil Claggart and his single blow inadvertently kills the officer, while the sympathetic Captain Vere looks on in dismay.

From this scenario Melville constructs a drama of moral (and interpretative) complexity the equal of Sophocles' Antigone . Billy Budd is, for all its gnarled and even rebarbative syntax, astonishingly moving, as it takes up such ethical heartbreakers as the fate of purity and innocence in a fallen world, the conflicts between duty and desire, legality and human compassion, and the saintly example of unqualified forgiveness. No surprise that E.M. Forster made it the libretto for that rare thing, an almost equally great and moving work of art in another medium, Benjamin Britten's opera "Billy Budd."

Sailing ships offer a confined space, almost a stage, upon which to examine the human condition. But so do business offices. Long ago, Borges recognized in Melville a precursor of Kafka, especially in the great short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853), that tale of the mousy clerk who one day, when asked to perform a simple clerical task, quietly says, "I would prefer not to." The result is an unforgettable account of existential loneliness and of our failure to connect with the less fortunate among us, but also a study in the (all too contemporary) frustration resulting when people in power, people of goodwill who view themselves as "civilized" or as upholders of propriety and tradition, must suddenly confront those who adamantly refuse to recognize their values, their authority.

Bartleby chooses a kind of civil disobedience in the face of the inhumane, but in "Benito Cereno" (1855) Melville takes this silence, this dumb-show recalcitrance, even further: He reveals what Delbanco calls "the mirroring relations between oppressor and oppressed." In this haunting masterpiece, a Capt. Delano comes to the aid of an obviously distressed slave ship, where he meets its Spanish captain and his black man-servant Babo. He is particularly impressed by the devotion demonstrated by Babo for his master -- the black man never leaves Don Benito's side. Nonetheless, the obtuse Delano feels that something on board the San Dominick isn't quite right. Today's reader will guess the truth long before he does: that the slaves have taken over the ship, and that Babo controls the captain, not the other way round.

This is, then, one of the first major works of American fiction to address the question of slavery and racial injustice, and Melville adumbrates much of our literature's exploration of this unhappy theme. Ralph Ellison, for example, took the epigraph for Invisible Man from this story:

" 'You are saved,' cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; 'you are saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?' 'The negro.' "

Readers will note that I have said nothing very much about Moby-Dick . But what can anyone say? Its quietly portentous first sentence is as famous as any in world literature ("Call me Ishmael"), and some of Ahab's monologues, like the one beginning "Is Ahab Ahab?," achieve an eloquence rivaling that of the Bible and Shakespeare. There are longueurs, but even in the midst of tedious cetological lore, one comes across such disturbing passages as that in which the Pequod's sailors squeeze and squeeze and squeeze handfuls of white spermacetti. Then there are the marvelous portraits of the crew -- the black cabin boy Pip, who goes mad and loses his sense of self, the well-meaning but weak Starbuck, the mysterious harpooners Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo. There are the haunting encounters with other ships, especially the Rachel "searching for her lost children." And throughout there is philosophizing that at times rises to a kind of prose poetry:

"All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in a whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side."

In Melville's lifetime few recognized or even suspected the writer's exceptional genius -- but Nathaniel Hawthorne came close, and the two men established a long-lasting friendship. After their first encounters, the writer of Polynesian adventures went back to his romantic tale about "Whale Fishery" and, in Delbanco's words, "tore it up from within." Melville deepened and amplified his novel, enlarged it in every sense, with the obvious hope of joining what he called, in an essay on Hawthorne, that fraternity where "genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round." With wonderful appropriateness, then, the author of The Scarlet Letter -- which appeared in 1850 -- became the dedicatee of the following year's Moby-Dick .

In the end, perhaps the most important use of literary biography is to send us back to a writer's books with increased understanding and renewed excitement. This Andrew Delbanco certainly does for Herman Melville. We are his beneficiaries.



LYRICS

When the Ship Comes In
Bob Dylan

Oh the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin'.
Like the stillness in the wind
'Fore the hurricane begins,
The hour when the ship comes in.

Oh the seas will split
And the ship will hit
And the sands on the shoreline will be shaking.
Then the tide will sound
And the wind will pound
And the morning will be breaking.

Oh the fishes will laugh
As they swim out of the path
And the seagulls they'll be smiling.
And the rocks on the sand
Will proudly stand,
The hour that the ship comes in.

And the words that are used
For to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they're spoken.
For the chains of the sea
Will have busted in the night
And will be buried at the bottom of the ocean.

A song will lift
As the mainsail shifts
And the boat drifts on to the shoreline.
And the sun will respect
Every face on the deck,
The hour that the ship comes in.

Then the sands will roll
Out a carpet of gold
For your weary toes to be a-touchin'.
And the ship's wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin'.

Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they'll jerk from their beds and think they're dreamin'.
But they'll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it's for real,
The hour when the ship comes in.

Then they'll raise their hands,
Sayin' we'll meet all your demands,
But we'll shout from the bow your days are numbered.
And like Pharaoh's tribe,
They'll be drownded in the tide,
And like Goliath, they'll be conquered.



It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding
Bob Dylan

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying.

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool's gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.

Temptation's page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover
That you'd just be
One more person crying.

So don't fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It's alright, Ma, I'm only sighing.

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don't hate nothing at all
Except hatred.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have
To stand naked.

An' though the rules of the road have been lodged
It's only people's games that you got to dodge
And it's alright, Ma, I can make it.

Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you're the one
That can do what's never been done
That can win what's never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks
They really found you.

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit to satisfy
Insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not fergit
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to.

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.

While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him.

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society's pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he's in.

But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it's alright, Ma, if I can't please him.

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony.

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer's pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death's honesty
Won't fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes
Must get lonely.

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards
False gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
What else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine
But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only.