1) Consumer/Mom Literature: Written mostly for and by women concerning the options available for DI as well as first-hand accounts from women who have experienced it. This is, by far, the largest sub-genre and the easiest material to come by, readily available at your local Barnes and Noble. As you might imagine these books are almost 100% in favor of all RTs and their area of concern is not so much whether or not these practices are ethical but rather focus on what the best methods, techniques and approaches for getting pregnant, and how best to manage the future child in the absence of a father and how to break the news to the future child that they are donor offspring. Much to this sub-genre's credit, the authors seem to be almost unanimously against keeping the DI procedure secret from the child. While many of these books do give ample historical context to DI (some even go so far as to discuss the eugenic implications of the procedure) these books are, for the most part, like any other consumer literature – they are buyer's guides that treat the mother-to-be like a consumer and the child-to-be like a product to be appropriately priced and researched before purchased. Frankly, I found many of these books to be quite alienating. But there are a few that I thought were fairly comprehensive in their perspective:
On Our Own, Melissa Ludtke
Single Mothers By Choice, Jane Mattes
Having Your Baby By Donor Insemination, Elizabeth Noble
2) Medical/Bioethical Literature: Mostly written by and for doctors and/or academics concerning the ethical decisions and ramifications of DI within the larger context of RTs. Besides the fact that these books are harder to come by, more expensive and more difficult to understand than the aforementioned Consumer-Mom literature[1] these books are concerned with the way DI and other RTs contrast with what we as a culture have long considered to be normal and how best to deal with the schism between the new normal and old normal.[2]
For instance, Brent Waters, in his book Reproductive Technologies asks the million dollar question: If medicine is now displacing marriage as the principle institution ordering procreation – how do we begin to understand the ethical framework from which modern medicine arose? To answer this very difficult, very relevant question, Waters says:
…contemporary medicine is practiced against the backdrop of a Western philosophical crisis. With the collapse of Christendom and the Enlightenment’s failure to fill the void, Western societies lack consensus on a normative practice of medicine. Thus an ‘anonymous perspective of reason’ is needed in which no religious or moral orthodoxy is imposed or privileged. A secular framework of moral deliberation encompassing a pluralistic world is required, necessitating a neutral mode of public moral discourse. The role of the moral philosopher in general, and the bioethicist in particular, is not to judge the truth of conflicting claims but to develop credible options among a diverse population. They map the terrain of contending values, identifying procedures for resolving conflict…Although a secular bioethic must acknowledge a wide spectrum of moral convictions, freedom is the dominant value….
Freedom. Never has the word flapped so lonely in the wind. Freedom of choice. Freedom to be oneself. Freedom from the other. But if everyone is free in their own realm of biotechnological decision-making what happens to community, neighborhood, belonging, togetherness? Now that men and women no longer need each other for reproduction what does a man see when he looks at a woman? What does a woman see when she looks at a man? What do we think about when we think about ourselves?
I got really into this subgenre. I couldn’t stop. These books are academic, slow going and, really, kind of far out. I found that reading several of these books in a row is like huffing glue: brief high-highs interspersed with fat black patches of nothing. Let me just say: these books are interesting (theoretically) but I wouldn’t want to live in a world ruled by scientists or bioethicists. Remember the technocratic dystopia described in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? Well, you know where I’m going with this.
Good stuff:
Ethics of New Reproductive Technologies, Jonathan Glover
The Future of Human Reproduction, ed. John Harris and Soren Holm
The Artificial Family, donors R. Snowden and G.D. Mitchell[3]
A Question of Life: The Warnock Report, Mary Warnock
Reproductive Technology: Towards a theology of Procreative Stewardship, Ethics of New Reproductive Technologies, Brent Waters
3) Philosophical Literature: Most of the philosophical literature here does not refer to DI by name but rather to the nature of human reproduction in the age of science and, in particular, how this effects being, conciousness, one's existential perspective and whether or not such an existential perspective even still exists. This is yet an even smaller sub-genre than the previous two, depending on what philosophical texts you want to drag into the conversation. One book from thus sub-genre stood out from all the rest: Jurgen Habermas's The Future of Human Nature, published in 2003, in which he examines the difference between the “grown” and the “made.” He asks, “…whether the instrumentalization of human nature [the made][4] changes the ethical self-understanding of the species in such a way that we may no longer see ourselves as ethically free and morally equal beings guided by norms and reasons.”
In other words, by “making” new human beings via technology we are essentially giving birth to a new existential or extra-existential or even non-existential perspective, a people for whom we "naturally" conceived humans can't possibly apply our "normative" ethical framework. It would be like critiquing a film based on television standards.
By the way, whenever the subject comes up in conversation, I tell people I am a “product” of donor insemination. Several of my friends have commented that this is a rather cold or unfeeling self-description but I do believe it’s apt.
Useful references:
The Human Condition, Hannah Artendt
Secrets, Sissela Bok
The Future of Human Nature, Jurgen Habermas
The Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger
The Republic, Plato
4) The Literature of Eugenics: It turns out that Francis Galton and the history of Eugenics is the story within the story, as it were, concerning DI.[5] I believe this story gives adequate context to the questions and practical applications facing DI today. Needless to say, I was surprised by what I found and I’m guessing you will be too.
Did you know, in the early 20th Century, the United States had a comprehensive sterilization program in 26 states in which the “ lower tenth” - those determined to be stupid, poor, ugly - were legally forced into sterilization in an effort to improve the race? Did you know, in the early 20th Century, the U.S. and U.K. eugenics programs were far more advanced than their Nazi counterparts and were in fact the models upon which Nazi Germany based their eugenics program? Did you know that American, British and Nazi German scientists worked hand-in-hand in cooperative eugenics programs, both here and in Germany, and were forced to separate only after the United States entered the war in 1941? Did you know that it was only at the end of World War II, when word of the Nazi concentration camps (a direct result of their eugenics program) spread around the world, that all the western nations closed the doors on their own eugenics programs, afraid of being associated with the Holocaust? And did you know that, at the end of World War II, the West's eugenics programs were not, in fact, "closed" but were merely transformed into what we now call genetics?[6]
Yeah, I didn’t either. It might be the great untold story of the 20th century.
War Against the Weak, Edwin Black
Better For All the World, Harry Bruinius
The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea, Elof Axel Carlson
Essays in Eugenics, Francis Galton
5) DI Offspring Literature: Besides a handful of articles and blog posts[7], would you believe there’s almost nothing whatsoever written from the perspective of a man or woman created by DI? Nothing. I'm sure the secrecy and shame that has long surrounded the practice has something to do with it. I heard about a young woman, a product of DI, who, several years ago, supposedly wrote a memoir in the ‘90s condemning the practice. She was taken on Larry King Live and hailed by Pat Robertson and other Religious Righters as evidence that donor insemination and all other RTs are unholy, unnatural, etc. But, after much research, I was unable to find this young woman’s name, her book, or her supposed appearance on Larry King.
[1] Think of the difference between Variety and People magazine: one caters to the industry insider and one caters to the consumer.
[2] When they say normal they typically mean Christian; many of these books inevitably (and understandably) talk about Man’s relationship to God and whether or not Man is supplanting God’s infinite wisdom and procreative decisions with Science.
[3] Incidentally, the only book I came across written by a donor.
[4] The brackets are mine.
[5] For my dollar anyway.
[6] All of this and much much more can be found at Edwin Black’s mind-boggling War Against the Weak.
[7] The most comprehensive blog is PCVAI (People Conceived Via Artificial Insemination) at yahoo, but you have to be a donor offspring to gain access.
Chinua Achebe: The one time I attended church at Bard I saw Chinua Achebe and his entire family in the congregation. They were fantastic: friendly, smiling, comfortable to be around. I liked him and his family instantly. Several months later, I was walking across campus early one morning. No one was out. I could see, in the distance, further down the trail, a man on a wheelchair. As we slowly approached one another, and as we got close enough so I could make out his face, I could see that the man in the wheelchair was none other than famed Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. "Good morning," he said, smiling brightly at me. "Good morning," I replied. Let me just say this man has a remarkable smile, a truly benevolent smile - without a doubt the greatest and most endearing smile of any author I've ever met. Perhaps because of my positive (though brief) interactions with Achebe and his family, I decided in the summer of 2003 to read through Achebe's entire body of work. I made it through Things Fall Apart, A Man of the People, Home and Exile (essays) and Hope and Impedements (essays) before I met a woman and spent the rest of the summer not reading. Let me just say: for being an uber-canonized novel that practically every child on the planet is required to read, Things Fall Apart is the real deal. It's fantastic. And I still think about some of the essays in Hope and Impedements.
Out of Egypt but I have a signed copy that he addressed to my grandmother that said (and I'm paraphrasing): "To Velva, Whose grandson, Shawn, will soon be a successful author." There's a scene in In Search of Lost Time where a published, known author of the day visits Marcel at his parent's home and signs a copy of one of his books to Proust's grandmother saying her grandson is going to be a great literary talent, etc., in an attempt to assuage her anxiety that Marcel was wasting his life away. I thought it was a sweet gesture by Andre and it meant a lot to my grandmother.
John Ashbery: I'd never met a Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award winner before. But what are awards, anyway? More importantly, I'd never met an author while I was - at that precise moment - reading through their entire body of work. The summer before taking Ashbery's poetry workshop I read all of his books. Wakefulness had just come out and I was savoring every poem, reading each one three or four times. I loved them all. I was entranced. So, before John walked into our classroom that first morning, I was genuinely nervous. For what, I'm not so sure. When he appeared, ambling his way through the door - lumpy, crooked, feeble - I was struck by how human he seemed. I remember his big nose. I was struck with the physicality of the man which makes sense now, in hindsight...if you only know an author from their words, they becomes an ancillary character in the mind of the reader - a fantasy component of the work itself. When I finally got over the fact that John Ashbery was, actually, a real person I was able to enjoy his very sweet, humble, friendly countenance. 
r. He was a little man. This was only a few years before his death. It was in Switzerland at the European Graduate School (deserving of a post all its own). At the time, I was a big fan of his work. I'd been reading through many of his books: America, Simulacrum and Simulation, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, among others. He was the first and only post-structuralist French theorist I ever shared a conversation with and I have to say - I don't know if it's coincidence or what - but after I had dinner with him I never took French post-structuralist theory seriously again. Ever. Haven't read one word. The moral: Be careful which authors you meet. The meeting will alter you and it's impossible to know how.
Thomas Beller: A tall man, like myself. You know, having attended many literary parties and get-togethers I've discovered that A) Writers, editors and literary people, in general, are shorter than your average cross section of society and B) are likely to resent taller, larger people because of it. This was originally very suprising to me. In my naivete, many years ago, I believed that people dedicated to the Literary Cause, etc., would naturally be, oh, I don't know, intelligent, sophisticated, enlightened...Anyway, meeting Thomas Beller, author, editor of Open City, was a breath of fresh air. It was the first time in my life a writer/editor apporached me at a party BECAUSE of my height, happy to meet me, curious to know I was, what I was working on. I originally discovered Beller via David Berman's Actual Air, a (dare I say) seminal poetry collection that Open City published several years ago. I later read How To Be a Man Beller's incredibly likable collection of autobiographical essays.
y course with her at the abovementioned European Graduate School and I was genuinely impressed not just with her intellect but with her willingness and desire to connect with every person in the room. I just thought she had a really useful, multi-purpose intellect. She was funny, smart, down-to-earth one minute and almost entirely impossible to understand the next. I loved it! One night, she delivered a 45-minute lecture on Obituaries and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (there's no way I'll be able to recap it or do it justice here but, trust me, it was very interesting). At the end Butler was viciously and personally attacked by EGS's head, Wolfgang Schirmacher (deserving a post all his own), and Butler courageously defended herself, then grabbed her jacket and fled when she realized Schirmacher had gone off the deep end (I've never seen anything quite like it). All of us immediately left the building to accompany her as she walked down that long, dark Swiss mountain. We all went to a pub afterwards and drank beer after beer laughing about the incident. I've never seen the difference between the European and American philosophical traditions made so blatantly apparent. Much respect to Judith Butler.
David James Duncan: More than any other writer I've ever met or read (with the possible exception of - who else? - Ernest Hemingway) David James Duncan made me want to become a writer. He came to my high school during my junior year, read part of his, then, newly published novel The Brothers K, then sat-in during my English class, basically explaining to us what his day-to-day life was like as a writer and stay-at-home dad. I just thought: that's it. That's the life I want. He seemed like a really laid-back, thoughtful, cool guy. And not a bad writer at all. I read The Brothers K not long after I met him making it, not only the longest book I had ever read at the time(656 p.), but the first work of fiction that left me simultaneously empty AND full when I finished it, sobbing like a little baby.
perience as Rolling Stone political correspondent as this: “Jan Wenner wanted me to be Hunter S. Thompson.” And then he shrugged, like, What the fuck are you gonna do? This is not a man who seemed particularly interested in teaching a class-full of graduate students, most of whom would probably not go on to become actual practicing writers. I can’t say that I blame him. Also, I’ve never read anything he’s written – but his books do look good…
Thomas Frank: Author of What's the Matter With Kansas? an intelligent examination of how the republican party had managed to convince middle-American, blue collar, traditionally democratic-leaning voters to vote republican and, essentially against their own best interests. My friend Margaret had an interview scheduled with him for a magazine and - knowing that I'm a daffy political junky - invited me along for the ride. We saw him give a riveting reading at Skylight Books in Los Feliz, a reading that actually provoked thoughtful, earnest dialogue between, not just audience members and author, but between audience members (imagine that!) Afterwards, me, Margaret, Frank and an old friend of his got a drink down the street. This was in 2003 just before Bush's re-election. Frank was livid about the cable news talk-show's dismissal of he and his book and seemed genuinely distraught, not just by the overall political climate of the country, but by the mainstream press's unwillingness to listen to him. Six months later Bush defeated John Kerry (much to the liberal news media's suprise) and suddenly Thomas Frank was on all the cable shows and his book was being talked about as "prescient," etc. His literary fortune really took a positive turn thanks to Bush. 
Steve Katz: One of my favorites. I met Steve at the University of Colorado at Boulder as an undergraduate and we immediately took to one another. It was in a meeting in his office when he told me I could/should become a writer. I was 19 and when he told me this it changed everything. I recently ran into Steve in Powell’s in Portland. I walked to the B section, looking to see if any of the new Thomas Bernhard re-issues had come out (they still haven’t) and there was a man standing right there in my spot looking through Bernhard. We stood side-by-side for a moment, wrestling for space, and then I looked over and saw that it was Steve. My mom and I went out to dinner with he and two of his grandchildren a few nights later at a real Chinese restaurant way out in deep north Portland. For those of you who don’t know: this is the guy who wrote The Exagerations of Peter Prince, one of the coolest, funniest “experimental” works of fiction I’ve ever read. Also, his smile rivals Achebe's.
gh without a single negative or critical comment. Did you know Robert Kelly was once as large as a house? Literally. Yeah, I guess everyone knows that. Uhm…did you know he’s written about five hundred books? Yeah, everybody knows that too. Hmm…did you know he’s quite the ladies man…with teenage college girls? Um, yeah…I guess that’s common knowledge. Also, he speaks with a British accent even though he's from New York and hasn’t left the state once in the last 60 years. Hm. Alright, next!
Sam Lipsyte: Thomas Beller introduced me to Sam Lipsyte at a party as Sam
Mark Strand: I was kind of excited to meet Mark Strand. He came to read at Calarts and at the gathering afterwards his girlfriend at the time (the phenomenal Maureen X) introduced us. He’s almost as tall as me and handsome in a Clint Eastwood-meets-J.M. Coetzee sort of way. And also, Dark Harbor continues to be pretty great.
apartment many years after I was his student at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He once tried to sleep with my girlfriend when - under the pretense that he wanted to meet her to offer a reviewing job with his journal The American Book Review. Ron eventually died from an extremely cruel and rare degenerative muscle disease called IBM and he told my girlfriend during their “meeting” that he would soon lose the ability to have sex and that this was his last opportunity to make love with a young, beautiful woman, etc. She told me she respectfully declined but, you know, who knows? When I found out I was very angry and I never respected him again as much as I originally did. I really looked up to him. But, I continued to work for him anyway, part-time, for the next several years. In the end, none of it mattered. I was deeply moved by his courage and daily optimism in the face of death and that horrible, debilitating disease. On a side note, Ron’s office overlooked the World Trade Center. Two weeks after 9/11 I was granted entry into the area - which had been sealed off to everyone except military personnel and homeowners - and I got to see, through Ron’s window, that smoldering, nightmarish, black pit. You know, it’s funny. I never once thought to take a picture. But I didn’t need to. I’ll never forget that.
Kurt Vonnegut: I’m usually anti-book signings (and anti-autograph collecting, in general) but when I saw in the paper that Kurt Vonnegut was coming to the Tattered Cover in Denver I had to go. I couldn’t not go. I mean, Kurt Vonnegut. I bought a copy of Cat’s Cradle, waited in line and, when I got to the front, said: “Good morning, Mr. Vonnegut.” I figured it’d be the only time in my life when I could actually say that. And I was right. He looked at me and then through me. It didn’t really seem like he wanted to be there. That or he’d had enough of 19-year old boys fawning over him. I can imagine that probably gets old. Like, two decades ago.
er Conservative member of Parliament whose 
book As the Crow Flies was, at 800 pages, the longest novel I'd e
ver read - though
, actually, come to think of it, it might still be the longest novel I've ever read...). But you know what? All of these book are really good. I would happily re-read any of them. They may not be thought of as Literary or whatever (I mean, Tintin, obviously has cultural cache) but who cares? They're awesome.
thing changed when my mom sent me to a private school in eighth grade where
books like Phoenix Force were, shall we say, totally looked down on. At 
school I started reading books like Catcher In the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, Night. And I hated these books. I thought they were SO boring. Sure, there are prostitutes in Catcher..., a cold-blooded hanging in Mockingbird..., a shocking murder in Mice..., and Nazis in Night, but when you're used to your protagonist mowing down a roomful of masked Colombian drug-lords with an Uzi (in the first scene), the reading experience just isn't the same.
It took me a couple years to get into capital "L" Literature. It wasn't until my sophomore year in high school when we read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Sun Also Rises (and then a year or two later when we read Death of a Salesman and Denis Johnson's Jesus Son) when I started tuning into "serious" literature. I have to credit my sophomore English teacher for turning me towards Literature and away from supermarket reading (this is the same English teacher, by the way, who one day told me that Jeffrey Archer was vacation reading for old women and who, incidentally, was charged with statutory rape years later, causing him to flee to his native Ireland, never having cleared his name...but I digress). I wonder what would have happened if I kept reading those violent action/adventure books and was never introduced to "real" writing? Would I still be a writer today? What kind of writer would I be? Would I be dead? Would I have joined the armed forces?
Several years ago my friend Stuart decided to read Richard Ford's The Sportswriter on a whim. His whim was that he and Ford share the same birthday, February 16th (my birthday happens to be the next day). Stuart (himself a writer) thought that he might enjoy the writing since he a Ford are both Aquarians. Anyway, Stuart loved the book, thought it was hilarious, and immediately read through Ford's trilogy The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land telling me whenever possible that I should read them too, that I would love them. He was right. I was never able to get into John Updike's Rabbit series or even Philip Roth's Zuckerman series. I tried. I love the idea of a literary serial with a single protagonist whom you grow with, watch change. But, honest to god, I never found Updike's prose captivating in any way. Am I missing something? And Roth...well...I don't know. I should be into Philip Roth. I mean, on paper, it would just seem to make sense: Dark, humorous Jewish author seeks same in reader. Portnoy's Complaint is hilarious no doubt but that's the only novel of his I could finish. You know, I think it's one thing to spend an hour an a half with a neurotic Woody Allen character or a half hour with Larry David, but to spend, what, a dozen hours or more with one of Roth's characters who tend to be a hundred times less likable or accessible than the former? No thanks.
Joyce, Feb. 2: Vastly overrated. I mean, I understand his historical significance, his innovations within Modern Literature, etc. but I never, never, NEVER think to myself, "Gosh, I really feel like reading some James Joyce right now." Never. And I honestly think that should be relavent criteria for whether or not an author's work is good or attractive rather than just historically significant.
, Feb. 5: The best Aquarian writer, in my opinion. Several years ago on my previous stint living in Portland I was single, I was teaching and I had a really stripped down life. I spent my evenings lying in bed doing one of three things: Looking through L.L. Bean catalogs, watching all of David Cronenberg's films and reading all of J.M. Coetzee's books (this is an unbelievably fantastic threesome by the way, I strongly recommend it to the twenty-something bachelor on the verge of depression). Anywho, is there a better contemporary writer than Coetzee? I don't think there is. In my mind he's the Michael Jordan of his generation. He took the torch of "best writer of his generation" from Beckett (whom he wrote his doctoral thesis on) and expanded on Beckett's reductionist vocabulary in the most compelling, intelligent way. His stretch of work from '99-'07: Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man, and Diary of a Bad Year is, I think, unparalleled by any contemporary writer. In fact, can you think of a writer with a better eight year stretch of four novels? When I first read Disgrace I thought it was the best, most engaging novel I'd read since Lolita for the first time. But when I read Elizabeth Costello for the second (and then a third time) I realized that's his best book, and maybe the best novel written in my lifetime (it deserves a post of its own). All I have to say is: what will he do next?
the American canon (of course, who knows how much of his speeches and proclaimations were written by Lincoln himself and how much was written by speechwriters, associates, etc. but for the sake of argument...).
Room of One's Own, in particular, is an elegant statement that, I think, will continue to speak to readers for a long, long time to come.
most vocal Republican leader (with a forthcoming HBO mini-series about him) this seems like a good time to remind everyone about Joan Didion's excellent October 5, 2006 portrait of Dick Cheney published in The New York Review of Books:
ion dies?" I mean, who else comes even close to doing the kind of work that she's produced over the last several decades? Who are we left with? Harper's magazine? Frank Rich? Keith Olberman? As John McEnroe says, "You can not be serious!"
