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How is Edgard Allan Poe’s body of work after 200 years fairing in our educational system? According to sci-fi/horror author Nick Mamatas, what he sees is as jaundiced as the man himself was.

A quick Google search is illuminating. On the wiki for the classes of one MsCKelly, we can read the sort of Poe-related assignment kids are made to suffer through:

Students will research information and discuss their thoughts on whether Edgar Allen [sic!] Poe died from Alcoholism or Rabies. [capital letters sic] Students must include a minimum of three posts with thoughts and ideas that are supported and linked to website resources. At least one post must be your informed position on the discussion topic and at least one of your posts must be to refute another classmate’s stance based on a post that they contributed to the discussion topic.

In a better world, grade-schoolers would be excited to argue over alcoholism or rabies all night long, but the bright kids must have trouble taking seriously an assignment with the author’s name misspelled, the ridiculous demand for “thoughts and ideas” in a Web post, and the notion that Poe’s death was the result of one of only two possible causes. The average student will just resent having to look stuff up.

He continues.

So how should we read Poe? In our banal little classrooms, we’ve all read his stories for multiple-choice questions about theme, or as a reflection of “our society” (our society? include me out!), or as a biography arrayed in a patchwork of prose and poems. But we should read Poe for the sheer bloody-minded pleasure of knowing the truth: Some motherfuckers just have it comin’.

By stating the obvious–that there are varieties of experience that stray far outside the coloring lines–Mamatas is making the classic appeal to art for art’s sake and so bemoaning the attempt to whitewash that literature which frequents darker quadrants. In a sentence: The problem is in confusing the metaphor that Poe is as American as apple pie to Poe is as wholesome as apple pie.

In the last November issue of the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith reviews two novels from 2008. The title of her article is “Two Paths for the Novel,” one being an uncertain detour (Remainder) the other a well-lit thoroughfare, (Netherland) of modern fiction.

Netherland is written as Lyrical Realism, and the only one Barnes & Noble had in stock. Remainder by Tom McCarthy is a rejection of the first and a challenge to the second. Smith admits as much: “When we write about lyrical Realism our great tool is the quote, so richly patterned. But Remainder is not filled with pretty quotes; it works by accumulation and repetition,” This is precisely what I found shocking in Remainder, its absence of lyrical prose. And now that I recognize it, a style-flirtation with purple prose, uniquely worded clichés-endemic in much of what I read.

Remainder can be repetitious, wearing its reader down with seemingly mundane trivialities. And yet you keep reading because you expect-and a few times expect to call the author’s bluff-a huge pay-off, perhaps a carefully crafted plot twist and some profound revelation on the main character’s part. What we get is a protagonist waking from an injury-induced coma. A large sum of hush money. His strongly sensing inauthenticity in everyone, himself included. The entire novel has him reconstructing scenes and reenacting events, real and imagined, repetitively, until they become almost real to him. There is no background story and, save for near the end, very little in the way of explanation. Satirically, brain damage sets him off in this quixotic search of authenticity. And so Remainder provides us with an excellent novel-long proof of argument by way of failed experiment.

This story brought to mind aspects of the “Theatre of the Absurd,” evoking Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus. Smith notes this as well. But this is a geeked-out topic du jour for artists. It seems significant that nobody in this novel appears to care or understand what the main character is attempting-even the other actors/enactors?!

Smith links the protagonist’s preoccupation with authenticity to white male insecurity over inauthenticity: “The frustrated sense of having come to the authenticity party exactly a century late!” (Note how she begins with psychoanalytical hand-waving-”A flashback-inclined Freudian”-a sign of insecurity many literary academics have, or should have, in regard to their field.) What am I to do but grimace and bear this historical contingency that has me as white educated male considered by many exempt from generating anything authentic, or, more so, even recognizing it in others. N’est-ce pas?

Forced to face our alleged insecurities might make for an uncomfortable read. What’s humorous is Smith’s statement that these two novels concern themselves not with the Platonic ideal but its antithesis: debris, refuse garbage, the remainder. For these white males, authors and protagonists alike, there is sanctuary among, and authenticity in Dorian Grey’s “rotting flesh- assemblage hanging in his attic.” So this is where the search for authenticity leads us. But does this really differ from that all too familiar quest for the unique and novel when confronted with existential angst, that pioneering spirit lauded among male Brits of previous centuries? Am I just satisfying impotently an ancestral need?

Smith says, view the world like the post-colonialist writer V.S. Naipaul: “…such an attitude is often mistaken for linguistic or philosophical nihilism, but its true strength comes from a rigorous attention to the damaged and the partial, the absent and the unspeakable.” That’s as close as anyone gets to authenticity. Inhabit the literary world of those we subjugated as our forefathers did at the spatial level, which is a cliché. It is their world and so we must finally colonize.

My main grievance with Remainder is a technical one, something Zadie Smith overlooks, the significance of the “short councillor” as a contrivance. This character is equivalent to a movie using interior monologue to lay out for the audience the protagonist’s motivation. The “short councillor” broke down that “Realist” agreement between author and reader, as if, late in the story, McCarthy second-guessed his application and decided to confess. Maybe it is a case of coming full circle from avante-garde to hack writing.

For further reading on authenticity by McCarthy read his joint manifesto.

Nature

Your inbox, Mr President

Christine Todd Whitman

Former administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Clarify who will speak for the President on environmental matters.

It is clear from everything he has said, that President-elect Barack Obama considers environment and energy issues to be at the top of his agenda. The importance of the commitments he has made cannot be understated and all of them have to be considered in light of the current economic crisis that we are facing.

In terms of key policy matters, the administration must decide how far the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should go on meeting the Supreme Court’s decision that the EPA has the legal right to regulate carbon dioxide. Although congressional legislation setting a limit on carbon emissions and establishing a trading system or carbon tax would be the best way to move forward, that is unlikely given both the complexity of the issue and the other challenges facing the new Congress.

An early indication of how aggressively the administration will move forwards will be their decision on whether to allow the EPA to grant California a waiver so the state can enforce stricter vehicle-emission standards than those required by the federal government — the state’s proposal is a 30% decrease in emissions by 2016. At least 16 other states are anxious to join California, citing the US Clean Air Act, although car-makers in Detroit have fought the regulation vigorously, and successfully, until now.

The Obama administration will also want to look at all the pending regulations moved out in the last few months of the Bush administration, such as those on New Source review — governing when power-plant facilities must install pollution-control technologies — and drilling in wilderness areas. In analyzing these regulations and ensuring both that the work that led to them was complete and that the regulations represent policy supported by the new administration, the incoming appointees would do well to listen carefully to career staff. Such staff are knowledgeable and, for the most part, interested more in a policy agenda than a political one.

Additionally, Obama needs to clarify who will be determining environmental policy — the EPA, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) or the newly created energy tsar Carol Browner. Environment and energy are inextricably linked and, although there is always need for administration-wide coordination, it must be clearly delineated as to who speaks for the president on these issues. Too many voices create confusion and allow issues to fall between the cracks. Although President George W. Bush originally told me that the EPA would be the administration’s representative on the environment, subsequent actions by the vice-president and the CEQ proved otherwise. In fact, towards the end of my tenure at the EPA I was told in no uncertain terms that when the CEQ spoke, it was speaking for the president even if on an issue that the EPA felt needed more work. Although I believe that the EPA administrator should be the voice of environmental policy, the president must ultimately decide — and that delineation should be clear and consistent throughout the administration’s term.

Finally, the Obama administration needs to be clear on its directives and expectations for the EPA. Morale is low for a host of reasons, not the least of which is because environment was not a priority for the Bush administration. The mood will get worse if staff and appointees feel that they are not part of the crucial discussion and that all decisions are coming from the White House. Incoming administrator Lisa Jackson will find at the EPA many highly talented people whose skills, ideas and extensive institutional knowledge should be cultivated. There are some tremendous public servants there and their contributions should be welcomed and encouraged.