REVIEW: THE HUMAN SCALE
While there's certainly been a rise in cultural interest with true crime--the podcast Serial perhaps being the nitro that really shot this current trend upwards--poet and journalist Michael Lista reminds the readers of The Human Scale that a fascination with the worst of ourselves is nothing new. "It only takes until the fourth chapter of Genesis before the plot veers noir," he writes, "and Adam and Eve's son Cain takes his brother on that gloomy walk." So while crime ranks among the oldest topics, critics of the current movement usually take umbrage with the cost of this current everywhereness. To what extent does telling about the profound dirt that we do to each other sensationalize and trivialize and even glamourize--maybe even perpetuate--these crimes? Francois Turffaut quoteably declared "Every film about war ends up being pro-war" and something to this tune is, I think, what bothers some about both the genre and its popularity.
I don't disagree with these misgivings, and I don't believe Lista does either. In his introduction to ten pieces of "Murder, Mischief and Other Selected Mayhems" written over the past decade, he weighs the professional, literary, and moral implications of this career he fell a little ass-backwards into. (Lista has two books of poetry, a collection of criticism, and probably more than a few enemies still from his time as poetry critic for the National Post.) Something must have gone very terribly wrong in your life or the life of someone close to you if you hear from Lista these days, and that's not a reality he takes lightly. As a journalist, he's declared his M.O. upfront. It's right there in the title.
The "human scale" has its roots in the Italian phrase "la misura d'uomo," which describes "a sort of golden ratio that proportions every aspect of the world by the relationship it has with humanness." "Justice itself is still done by humans," Lista writes, "with all the sail and ballast that attends us. What one man means to another when he decides to sabotage his life by ending a life; what the judge who presides over the trial thinks of the act; what the reporter who recasts it as a story divines from the details. Everything is measured on the human scale--sliding, slippery, apprehended by the same instrument it's set to measure. The only way to weigh anyone you're writing about, on either side of the libra, is using the human scale: close enough to their window to see their wallpaper, their furniture, their face, their heart."
While of course there would be nothing to report on without some core act of criminality, the crimes aren't the point of The Human Scale. Rather, something going horribly wrong is the impetus to look at those involved. It's a reason to show to places he'd otherwise not go, and speak to people he doesn't know from Abel. Lista's reportage of these incidents is far from sensational. Instead, there's something almost banal about the crimes in these stories. Not banal in the sense of boring or unimportant, but banal in the way that most aspects of human life have a way of taking on a humdrum pallor. As adaptive as we are, the unthinkable can so quickly become thinkable, whether you're on the giving or receiving end of something life altering. It's Lista's understanding and handling of the profound humanness that sets these stories apart from, and perhaps a little above, "true crime."