From Theodore Dalrymple’s Not With A Bang But A Whimper: The Politics & Culture of Decline:

The state has become a vast and intricate system of patronage, whose influence few can entirely escape. It is essentially corporatist: the central government, avid for power, sets itself up as an authority on everything and claims to omnicompetent both morally and in practice; and by means of taxation, licensing, regulation and bureaucracy, it destroys the independence of all organisations that intervene between it and the individual citizen. If it can draw enough citizens into dependence on it, the central government can remain in power, if not forever, then for a very long time, at least until a crisis or cataclysm forces change.

At the very end of the chain of patronage . . . is the underclass who (to change the metaphor slightly) form the scavengers or bottom-feeders of the whole corporatist ecosystem. Impoverished and degraded as they might be, they are nonetheless essential to the whole system, for their existence provides an ideological proof of the necessity of providential government in the first place, as well as justifying many employment opportunities in themselves. . . . [L]arge numbers of people corrupted to the very fibre of their being by having been deprived of responsibility, purpose and self-respect, void of hope and fear alike, living in as near to purgatory as anywhere in modern society can come.

Amen, Mr Dalrymple.

From The Score, the wonderful Richard Stark (aka Donald E Westlake) delivers another brutal truth:

You can steal in this country, you can rape and murder, you can bribe public officials, you can pollute the morals of the young, you can burn your place of business down for the insurance money, you can do almost anything you want, and if you act with just a little caution and common sense you’ll never even be indicted. But if you don’t pay your income tax . . . you will go to jail.

The Millions converses with an online book thief:

I do not pretend that uploading or downloading unpurchased electronic books is morally correct, but I do think it is more of a grey area than some of your readers may. . . .

I think that regular people will never feel very guilty “stealing” from a faceless corporation, or to a lesser extent, a multi-millionaire like [Stephen] King. . . .

One thing that will definitely not change anyone’s mind or inspire them to stop are polemics from people like Mark Helprin and Harlan Ellison—attitudes like that ensure that all of their works are available online all of the time.

No matter how many excuses this thief offers, he has none for stealing

I also find it particularly wretched that this thief considers himself the final arbiter of how much money Stephen King should make from writing. What unbelievable arrogance.

From The Outfit, the wonderful Richard Stark (aka Donald E Westlake) delivers the Truth:

Salsa was a tall, smooth-muscled man of thirty-seven, an illegal immigrant, whose youth had been thrown away on a passionate concern for a brand of politics currently in strong disfavor in the United States. In his middle twenties, he had suddenly awakened to the Truth of Self-interest, which he now realized was a far more important and valid Truth than any Political Truth ever invented. He further realized this was the hidden Truth upon which most of the leaders he had blindly followed based their actions. They had claimed to be struggling selflessly for a better world and Salsa had been young enough to believe them and to try to help them actively. He had actually been struggling selflessly for a better world until he had realized that most of the men he’d been following were struggling mainly for a world which would be better for themselves. From them on, when faced by a man who claimed he was struggling for a better world, Salsa invariably thought, “Better for whom, Brother?”

Happy new year. And let’s make this the year we trust no one who claims to be struggling for a better world.

The husband-and-wife translation team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky on what draws us back to Russian novelists’ work over and over again:

I think there’s the phrase “the accursed questions” attributed to Dostoyevsky: What is the meaning of life, the existence of God, the mystery of death, the big metaphysical spiritual questions? Those questions were central to Russian literature in the 19th and 20th centuries in a way that they had all but ceased to be in Western European literature. The Russians were engaged in portraying a fully human destiny rather than one dictated by class, social position, personal ambition and so on—which is a vision similar to what we find first of all in Homer, as well as Dante and Shakespeare.  We thirst for that vision and are grateful to find it in the great Russians. The aliveness of Tolstoy’s heroes may come ultimately from the same wholeness of vision, which is not generalized and abstract, but deep in detail.

I had the pleasure of reading Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation of War and Peace this year and I thank them for bringing “the accursed questions”—those we should be contemplating every day—to such wonderful life in my native language.

The wonderful Charles McCarry from his “To The Reader” note at the end of Shelley’s Heart on the novel (one of my loves) and politics (one of my hates):

In fiction as in life, people do not always reveal the whole truth about themselves on first encounter, and the novel, like the Congress of the United States, makes its own rules, by which it abides at its own convenience.

Critic and literary historian DG Myers writes that “McCarry may be the best political novelist that the United States has ever produced.” I agree. His pen is as lethal as any sword. Thanks to Overlook Press for not overlooking McCarry.

The NY Times’ Dwight Garner on Paul Bowles and The Sheltering Sky:

Rereading “The Sheltering Sky” today is to be reminded of its dark, largely sublimated power; from its first pages the novel is like a pile of kindling to which a match is about to be applied. Bowles’s sun-baked prose, while never showy, is consistently and ruthlessly evocative. North African vegetation is described as “a tortured scrub of hard shells and stiff hairy spines that covered the earth like an excrescence of hatred.”

I’ve reread The Sheltering Sky more times than I can remember—more times, I imagine, than any other novel—and despite its darkness (or perhaps because of it) Bowles’s post-war novel of yanquis adrift in North Africa remains one of my favourites, top ten. For many writers, “darkness” is merely gratuitous, a vanity; for Bowles, darkness was the only way he could honestly examine lives:

If I stress the various facets of unhappiness, it is because I believe unhappiness should be studied very carefully . . . You must watch your universe as it cracks above your head.

With a worldview like that, you’ll never be let down.