Kate Sherrod blogs in prose! Absolutely partial opinions on films, books, television, comics and games that catch my attention. May be timely and current, may not. Ware spoilers.
My home only celebrated its centennial as a U.S. state when I was 20 years old, so it's quite a thing to contemplate a land with over 5,000 years of recorded, settled history. So for me to read Bartle Bull's extensive and exhaustive history of Iraq was to regard our planet's oldest civilization from one of its youngest.
Then, too, while I am slightly knowledgeable or in a few cases fairly so about certain periods of the region's long history -- chiefly the Sumerian and Alexandrian eras -- I've been largely ignorant of great swaths of it between then and my first personal awareness of Iraq, when the modern nation fought a war against Iran in my childhood. And, of course, when my college campus erupted in "No Blood for Oil" protests when the U.S. took it upon itself to rescue tiny little Kuwait from its big, bad neighbor.
And then when the second President Bush and his ilk maneuvered us into "finishing" the fight the first one didn't, of course.
And I've read the Koran (in an English translation, of course; I have the merest smattering of Arabic, chiefly picked up while studying Urdu in grad school when I should have been doing my actual course work) long ago, always meaning to read it again sometime as a more mature and better informed adult, but my grasp of the origins and nature of, say, the Sunni/Shia schism was tenuous at best.
It's always bugged me, this barely-more-than ignorance of mine, so when I saw Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000 Year History of Iraq available on Netgalley, I gladly grabbed it, thinking it would serve my purpose well.
I had underestimated just how well it would serve, though. Or how compulsively readable it would be. Bull, I knew, is chiefly a journalist, rather than a historian, so I expected a better than average narrative out of this book, but what I got was a truly exceptional as well as informative read! There's something that feels very illuminating about a history that takes in all of the great figures, all the different peoples and cultures, who had an impact on this part of the world, in a single big narrative, Ur to Babylon to Baghdad.
There's a section where Bull makes a choice I find peculiar, though. When it comes time to discuss the Ottoman Empire, sometime opponent of the then-Persian/Iranian powers that held most of Iraq and sometimes that power itself, he chooses to do so thorough the lens of one Ogier de Busbecq, the Hapsburg Empire's marginalized ambassador to the Ottoman court of Suleiman the Magnificent. Heretofore mostly devoid of explicitly European perspectives in favor of sources much closer to the experience of the actual denizens of Iraq and its many conquerors, it seems weird to me to do so at this point in history, where surely a modern scholar has access to more direct sources about life in this fascinating period, especially since Busbecq never visited Iraq. But I am just a humble blogger who's never been anywhere, so who am I to pick this nit?
Except it happens again in later chapters, which are more about European archaeologists digging up the ruins of cities we visited earlier in this history. This is less jarring since it is through their efforts that anyone even knows a lot of what we do about places like Mosul and Nineveh, and this figures like Sir Austen Henry Layard are quite legitimately figures in Iraqi history. But Busbecq?
Anyway...
After years kicking his heels in Constantinople, Layard finally gets funding for a proper dig in what was then Ottoman-controlled Iraq.What Layard encounters as he approaches the likely site of the ancient, Old Testament city of Nimrud is very much the kind of information I hoped to find in these pages:
"The tiny party alit in the gloaming and made their way on foot to the local village. It was empty, deserted, a "heap of ruins," without even the dogs that Layard was used to seeing in Arab villages. Then, through "the entrance to a miserable hovel," Layard saw the glow of a small fire.
Inside the ruined house was a sight typical of the devastated country around. An Arab family - a father, three wizened wives, some half-naked children, and "one or two mangy greyhounds" - had taken shelter in the abandoned village. When Layard entered, the family cowered, thinking he and his party were "Osmanlis." Seeing that the newcomers were not Turks but Europeans, the Arabs relaxed. Layard heard their story from the father. "Plundered by the pasha," their sedentary tribe had dispersed across the countryside. This family had taken refuge alone in the abandoned village.
One man's archaeological site is another man's refuge, and the father of the family becomes the nucleus of the European's workforce. How very colonial.
And so begins a long history of locals being employed to dig up amazing artifacts, possibly the work of their own ancestors' hands, to be exported to fill Western Museums and private collections (Hi, Hobby Lobby).*
As I've said, this is an exhaustive work of historical writing, including biographical details of figures from Cyrus the Great through Alexander the Great through Suleiman the Magnificent and King Faisal I of (first) Syria and (later) Iraq in plenty of context. This may be more than most readers are looking for, who want to understand the modern nation of Iraq and its ancient ancestor states a bit better, but I suspect that most readers will not notice that while they're reading. I found no point in this book when I got exhausted and wanted to know how much further I had to go, for instance.
This was a particularly illuminating read in concert with Emmanuel Carrere's V13, in which some of the West's sins with regard to this region of the world were forcibly brought home to roost, meaning this is also an excellent book to which to refer when trying actually to understand "why they hate us" or how Islam can both claim to be a religion of peace and inspire brutal terrorism; indeed, it is the best exploration of many of the divides and schisms in that religion that I have yet found.
Bartle Bull has done us all a great service in producing this outstanding book.
*Of course, it is only due to this colonial extraction that I have ever been able to look at such things with my own eyes at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
With its vast, 400+ year, scope and its long, scholarly title, Our History is the Future may seem like it's going to be a dry and academic study, but it's actually one of the most readable and emotionally affecting books of its kind I've ever encountered, full of candid interviews (wherever possible) with witnesses to and participants in, not only the protest named in the title, but the entire history of interactions between the Indigenous peoples of North America's Great Plains region and the waves and waves of mostly white settler colonists who came to take their land and water, kill them and their non-human relatives (especially the bison herds), infect them with diseases, sell them guns and alcohol, condescend and proselytize to and massacre them. So in addition to the scenes most of us saw on television in 2016, at which Estes (a member of the Oceti Sakowin nation who recently and proudly sent a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The guy speaking on behalf of the Seven Council Fires? That means the Oceti Sakowin, which most of us know as the Sioux) was present, he also has much to share about the original contact, conflict and forced migrations that characterized most of the 19th century, the United States unending history of breaking treaties with Indigenous peoples, the Ghost Dance, lesser known efforts to enforce or insist on treaty rights in the early 20th century, the humongous negative impact of the Army Corps of Engineers' post-World War II Pick-Sloan plan that created several large reservoirs in the Dakotas but flooded out thousands of acres of productive Indigenous lands that were helping to feed several reservations' worth of people, and yes, both battles at Wounded Knee, in 1890 and in 1973.
He also saves a whole chapter for something that many of us -- me, for example -- never knew a thing about: continuing efforts to achieve international recognition of North American Indigenous sovereignty via the United Nations and through shared programs of solidarity with Palestinians, South American Indigenous Groups, and other ethnic and cultural minorities striving to regain or retain their rights all over the world. Estes pays special attention here with the Oceti Sakowin and other groups' joint efforts with the Palestinians -- many Palestinian activists have acted as Water Protectors since the #NoDAPL actions started, partly in reciprocation for North American Indigenous help with Palestinian protest actions over the years. As this book was published before the current genocidal war between Israel and Hamas that is killing Palestinians right and left every day, the current tragedies are not mentioned here but are impossible not to think about and weep over through every page of this chapter. I wonder if there are Oceti Sakowin or other peoples over there trying to help the Palestinians right now; I'm sure some are out there lending their voices to protests against the killing.
Indigenous Resistance is not a one-time event. It continually asks: What proliferates in the absence of empire? Thus, it defines freedom not as the absence of settler colonialism, but as the amplified presence of Indigenous life and just relations with human and non-human relatives, and with the earth.
Estes isn't nearly as interested in documenting the United States' (and some of Canada's) crimes against Indigenous peoples, though, as he is in telling the stories of those who tried to stop them, both well known ones like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull but also Moving Buffalo Robe Woman and Deskaheh and Madonna Thunder Hawk. There is much more pride in Estes' tellings than there is sorrow.
I always pick up a volume of Michael Lewis' special brand of financial crisis literature expecting a whole lot of anger, a whole lot of despair, and a whole lot of edification about just how messed up our System of the World* really is. As I've mentioned before, it's kind of a sickness of mine. I can't stop reading about it, but to no end other than to raise my blood pressure, it would seem, because what can I do about it? I'm not an investor and never will be. I've been a politician and don't ever want to do time in that barrel again. And since my arms and hands went to hell, I don't even write much anymore. But still, these books.
But then comes Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, and what's special about it is all there after the colon in the title. For while of course this book lays out in gruesome detail yet another way in which the world of high finance is designed to screw over the little guy, right alongside its anatomy of a giant scam is the story of a handful of very smart and very strange guys who not only figured out how it all worked, but figured out a way to fix the problem and actually put their plan in motion and created a whole new stock exchange built on the principles of fairness to the investor.
The problem these Flash Boys tackled is the kind of thing that should make any decent person's blood boil: with the computerization of all of the world's stock markets came a myriad of opportunities to rig the game against not just the ordinary Joe Blow investor throwing a few thousand dollars around trying to get rich, but also against all of the even more ordinary Joe Blow workers whose pension funds are being thrown around Wall Street, too. And of course those opportunities were not overlooked.
It's all to do with High Frequency Traders (HFTs), many of whom invested ungodly amounts of money in high speed data connections to the stock markets and to investment banks' dark pools, and in computer server placement as physically close to the machines that actually run these as possible, because this allowed them to engage in front-running. When their software bots saw someone buying shares in a particular stock, they triggered other software bots to buy up all of that stock that was available in fractions of a second before the original schlub's order was fulfilled, and thus to drive the price of that stock up a little, and make the schlub pay more for the stock than he should have, to the slight profit of the HFT. Thousands and thousands of times a day. Meaning ungodly amounts of money was transferred from small time investors, hobbyists, pension funds, hedge funds, what have you, to these HFTs, making an incredibly handsome return on their ungodly investment in fiber optic cable, land easements, construction fees and server real estate. Yeah, I know. And it gets worse, because this was all made possible by some newish Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rulings. That were, of course, made by members who have worked in and later tend to go back to jobs in the big investment banks, etc. Foxes, henhouse....
But so, most of Lewis' books that I've read so far have been concerned chiefly with financial villains, and this book certainly felt like another one of those for quite a while. I was hunting up my pitchfork and rounding up some torch-bearers (this was before Charlottesville, OK?) and ready to go knocking on doors in New Jersey, if not Manhattan itself.
But that's not who Lewis' Flash Boys are. The Flash Boys are Brad Katsuyama, once an obscure employee of the Royal Bank of Canada, and the team he put together to figure out why his trades had suddenly become impossible, and then to try to figure out how big the scheme was, and lastly to design and build a stock market that leveled the playing field again. I could almost cheer them as heroes, but in doing so, I'd be celebrating something that in itself still makes me mad, because this is what regulators are supposed to do, except over the years we've cut back on regulators' power, numbers (as in staffing), scope and compensation, all assuring that the revolving door between the public and private sectors of Wall Street keeps spinning faster than Karl Marx does in his grave. How many Brad Katsuyamas has this world produced, this man who would rather figure out a problem and fix it than figure out a problem and profit handsomely from it?
At bottom, Flash Boys is a pretty good detective story, unraveling and explaining very well a very complex and bewildering scheme in a way that gave me a nice strong illusion that I sort of understand it now, but am still powerless to do anything about it except vaguely cheer for Katsuyama and continue to nurse a major hate-on for Wall Street, even as I know that most of what makes my life possible is inextricably tied to its machinations, for good or ill.
Dammit.
*To borrow Isaac Newton's phrase by way of Neal Stephenson.
Travel writing is really time travel writing, an attempt to capture place and time in a form that can be shared with those of us who weren't there, who never can be there, who missed our chance. That this has always been the case is the chief, melancholy lesson to be learned from Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue*, a collection of essays from Paul Bowles' extensive travels through the "non-Christian" world as it was in the mid-20th century.
In most cases, Bowles got there before globalization, before electricity and modern communications and other technology changed local lives forever in Sri Lanka (still called Ceylon when he was there), North Africa, South America*, the Middle East. Or he was there just as the changes were starting, as in southern India when he observes a pair of government officials pulling up at his hotel with a keyring on which is the only existing key to the box that turns on the hotel's electricity, which is on only for the duration of the officials' lunch before it is shut off again. Which lunch Bowles declines to observe because he has rushed up to his room to enjoy 15 minutes with the fan on because southern India is really, really stiflingly hot and breezeless, even near the sea.
But of course it's in North Africa, where his most famous fiction is set, that Bowles is most interesting, and most aware of his secret status as a time traveler, or at least a person in some way at war with time as he tries to capture the feel of a place:
"...Writing about any part of Africa is a little like trying to draw a picture of a roller coaster in motion. You can say: It was thus and so, or, it is becoming this or that, but you risk making a misstatement if you say categorically that anything is, because likely as not you will open tomorrow's newspaper to discover that it has changed."
Hardly only North Africa, am I right? Hardly just in the 1960s, am I right? Plus ça change...
The best part of the collection is Bowles' musical mission through Morocco, "The Rif, To Music" in which he recounts his efforts, along with a few very interesting friends, to capture the unique music of several tribes before it gets contaminated by globalism. A sample of what he captured can be found here. There's more at the Libary of Congress' website, I think, but the government shutdown has made that impossible to verify. I shall be seeking it out, though!
Also notable is "Baptism of Solitude", in which Bowles confronts the immense silence of the Sahara desert, and which has left me with a tremendous longing to watch again Werner Herzog's extraordinary Fata Morgana, which thank goodness I own:
Now you probably want to as well, no?
I have a biography of Bowles on tap for later this winter, and plan to investigate his own musical compositions soon as well. Fascinating, fascinating man. But if one is really interested in this guy, on whom the character of Tom Frost in the film adaptation of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (if not the book, exactly; it's been so long since I read that I can't remember if Tom Frost is explicitly named in the book) is based, this essay collection highlighting his strange love for the discomforts and inconveniences of travel, his pursuit of music and his awe at the variety his world still had to offer, is an indispensable read.
*The title is drawn from some wacky lines of poet Edward Lear's, meant to evoke the sense of genuine difference and novelty which travelers, if not tourists, usually seek when going abroad.
**Wherein he teaches us that "All Parrots Speak" and if that essay doesn't charm your socks off, you probably weren't wearing any.
I'm tempted, this time around, to just share all the passages I highlighted, but that would just be lazy, and would probably somehow confirm some of you in your stereotyping of older single women as selfish and flippant and useless and whatnot. Heh.
For yea, I am one of those, unashamedly in my 40s and not only unmarried but uninterested in changing that, and I've been the target of every single (heh) one of the crappy remarks, employment practices, interrogations and dismissals Bella DePaulo calls out as a sneaky form of prejudice she names "singleism." But I did not turn to Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After for a categorical list of injustices to get steamed up over, nor did DePaulo intend the book as any kind of call to arms (though she does devote a chapter towards the end to imagining, maybe a little wistfully, what an America that did not discriminate against the never-married, the divorced or the widowed might look like); that last bit of the subtitle, in white lettering on the cover, is key. For while we do get a laundry list of ways in which daily, if not hourly, encounters with "smug marrieds" can be emotionally and psychologically draining, in which popular media (fictional and "reality") dismisses categorically the idea that choosing not to hunt down a spouse is in any way valid (or possible), in which the government denies singles the right to designate a beneficiary for their Social Security checks in the event of their deaths but lets widowed spouses keep on getting paid for life, in which businesses routinely demand that singles pay extra to subsidize their cheaper-per-person couples rates for travel and dining and entertainment, in which employers assume that just because one is not married one is always free to work the extra hours or take the unwanted business trip (and not only that, but really owes it to married co-workers not to tear them away from their all-important families) -- that is not, by a long shot, all that we get.
What we also get is someone who doesn't take media reports of half-assed scientific studies at face value (DePaulo is herself a scientist). She looks at the data herself, shows it to us, and in the process debunks most of the popular mythology that says marriage is better for one. For instance, she finds in study after study purporting to "prove" that married people are happier and healthier that the data was "cheated" -- those happy healthy people who got counted as married were only the ones who were still married. All those divorced and widowed people got clumped in with the never-marrieds, and, let's be honest, dragged our numbers way down. When the data was broken into four, rather than two, categories (still-married, never-married, divorced, widowed) the still-marrieds come out on top, but by a negligible margin (and, interestingly, in one study that did not, as most of these do, look at just a single snapshot of time but instead over a good long period of subjects' lives, on average those "still marrieds" had started out marginally happier to begin with). Who's next happiest? Oh, look, the never marrieds. But all those "how to find a spouse" and "case for marriage" and "single people suck" crusaders rarely, if ever, mention that.
And, too, the book is loaded with anecdotes about unmarried lives, with or without children, which positively brim with unrecognized quality of life -- Condoleeza Rice's, for instance; David Souter's (the book was written before Elena Kagan joined the Supreme Court, but I bet she is a part of DePaulo's pantheon now!); Ralph Nader's; Barbara Walters'. What would our world have been like without them taking on the demanding and challenging roles they did?* And how do you think it feels in interview after interview to always be asked (usually by a "smug married" journo) if it doesn't all feel kind of hollow without a special someone to share it with? And if the high-achieving single in the hot seat says something along the lines of "anything but hollow" well, he or she is just in denial or doesn't understand what he or she is missing, and probably isn't mature enough anyway.
Unsaid, most of the time, is that hey, the married person doesn't understand what he or she is missing, either.
But so, once again, I'm part of the choir being preached to, here. I am sometimes lonely, I'll admit, but it's not the lack of a spouse I feel so much as the lack of intimate friends in close proximity; the city in which I live is a profoundly heartlandish one, in which life is centered around the spouse and kids and offers little to those without them but doing time in a bar, and I've had difficulty establishing relationships in which I'm anything more than a casual once-in-a-while pal, someone to see a movie with once or twice a year but otherwise on whom it's perfectly okay to cancel last-minute because hey, I didn't have to hire a babysitter or whaever. I have wonderful friendships all over the world, even in other parts of Wyoming, but the city where my job is considers non-marrieds like me to be all but lepers, and that's even before it's discovered that I'm "not even trying." Which, contrary to smug married belief, does not mean I've given up; just that I've never really considered OMGGOTTAFINDAHUSBAAAAAAAND just for the sake of HAVINGAHUSBAAAAAAND to be much of a priority. Should I actually find someone who makes me want to give up my single life, that's fine, but I find the idea that I should devote my time and energy to finding someone who wants to shackle me to be patently absurd. To say nothing of finding someone who wants to knock me up; that's easy (and anyway, there's such a thing as Zero Population Growth, in which I fervently believe and furthermore believe I should practice what I preach).
Someone, and I'm pretty sure it was Theodore Sturgeon in his wonderful novel Godbody, once observed that people who hate being alone do not consider themselves good company. I first read that book when I was a teenager, and I think I probably took this message (one of the many many wonderful and wise things Sturgeon shared in that and his other writing) very much to heart; I have cultivated myself to be good company for myself -- and I have also developed a talent for enjoying strangers -- some of my favorite memories are of random conversations in airport bars or on trains or in line at a coffee bar or walking my dog. I seem very good at reading people and finding common ground with them, enough to make them smile for a moment or a few hours. Would I have this talent, I wonder, if I'd spent most of my life hunting down and then focusing to the exclusion of everyone else on a husband who must be, by contemporary dogma, "my everything" (and will expect that of me in return)?
Would I have the time and attention to spend on my friends' children when they need a break from being someone's spawn or student and just want to be a person for a little while? Or just need a little help with some science homework?
And this is not even mentioning the online relationships I've established, many of which go back decades, that I value deeply.
Is there a tinge of whining to DePaulo's book, as some have complained? Yes. But she is very careful not to even appear to equate singleism with all of the serious civil rights/discrimination issues that have beset us as a society (racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc), and seems more interested in teasing out why treating singles as they so often get treated is still okay (perhaps the last remaining prejudice it's still okay to have, though fat shaming is still awfully common even among people who consider themselves enlightened and tolerant), and what the cumulative effects of these subtle annoyances and expectations might be over a life time -- and how remarkable and awesome it is that single people manage to be happy anyway. It takes more guts and fortitude, she says, to be single in a "matrimaniacal" society than to do the expected, conformist thing and get married. Which, now I just want to race home to my worrying (still married) (to each other) parents (both their daughters are now gleefully in their 40s and unattached) and crow to them about how their lack of grandchildren and sons-in-law is actually proof of how awesome they were in raising us; we both grew up self-sufficient, brave, strong, capable and emotionally mature enough to enjoy life without the need for A PARTNER. And anyway, from a ZPG standpoint, our family is already in the red (our cousins have not only replaced themselves, but the two of us, too, and one more to spare).
But so anyway, the next time you see a couple of early middle aged broads yucking it up at a riverside diner or in the local hot springs or having coffee and none of us happens to be wearing a ring on that finger, maybe withhold your certainty and judgment -- and your humblebragging pity -- for a moment. There are lots of ways to live a life. And lots more ways to be happy than just sharing a bed with somebody for a few decades. But if you must make a faux-friendly remark about it, be prepared to be patronized back in return. Poor little marrieds, like Linuses and their blankies, will they ever grow up? We don't really want to bust out rhetoric like that, but push us and we just might.
Go, Bella, go!
*DePaulo has some somewhat tart remarks about some what-might-have-beens that the choice to put spouse above country/public sphere duty prevented, namely: President Colin Powell.
It is one of the disaster's paradoxes, but the Zone's evacuation put a stop to industrialization, deforestation, cultivation and other human intrusions, making it one of Ukraine's environmentally cleanest regions - except for the radioactivity - Mary Mycio in Wormwood Forest
Reading Mary Mycio's Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl may be likened to spending several hours listening to the Talking Heads' hit song "Nothing But Flowers" over and over again, but that would be selling the experience a bit short.
I had no idea, before reading this book, that so many people had equated the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant with the biblical Book of Revelations. I was 16 at the time it happened, eyeball deep in Michael Moorcock and Piers Anthony and Jack L. Chalker and research for Lincoln-Douglas debates on the topic of: "Resolved: that the United States is morally bound to promote democracy in other countries." So I felt badly about the disaster, worried about the fallout, but didn't have time for the wingnuts.
I still don't, but I do find interesting the biblical/botanical coincidence that led to so many people, including, apparently, Ronald Reagan, to equate the accident with a Sign of the Apocalypse. The Russian name "Chernobyl" (actually "Chornobyl") is widely translated to mean "Wormwood" which is the colloquial English name for a plant common to that part of the Ukraine/Belorus/Russia, and also for the star that will shine like a torch at the beginning of the bibical apocalypse. But the plant we know as Wormwood is one they call Pollyn, Artemsia absinthium (so named because it is the source of the thujone that supposedly makes absinthe more than just another green liqueur), is not the plant they know as Chernobyl. That's Artemisia vulgaris, a related but less noxious plant that we know as Mugwort. Ain't the devil just in the details?
Wormwood Forest is full of interesting little nuggets like that as it describes how the natural world has overtaken and overgrown former towns like Pripyat, which town first came to my attention last year when I saw the film Land of Oblivion, set there 25 years after the disaster as stubborn former residents start coming home despite government warnings not to. And there are similarities to that film; the author's guide is a woman who lived there before the disaster, her memories haunting the account of Mycio's visit with a botanist at her side (Land of Oblivion's main character was a woman whose wedding day was the day of the accident, and whose bridegroom died in the first wave of emergency response efforts, and who comes to work, decades later, as a guide for foreign disaster tourists). Since that film affected me deeply, this book, which I believe was a primary inspiration for the film if I am remembering the director's Q&A after the screening I saw, too, bestowed chills along with its fascination and surprises.
Wormwood Forest explores not only Pripyat (actually it doesn't spend that much time there) but the town of Chornobyl, where some 2500 people, tour guides, maintenance workers (it takes a lot of minute and patient work to, for instance, keep pine saplings from growing on top of landfills full of radioactive debris and equipment sealed in clay to prevent leaks; tree roots would crack the clay and release the radiation back into the world) live on a rotating temporary basis; the Red Forest, where winds brought some of the most intense radiation and killed the trees, turning them red, now home to plenty of green "radiomorphic" ones that show bizarre growth patterns (the name Red Forest has stuck, though, and denotes one of the most radioactive places on the planet); villages where lawless squatters live in defiance of the government ban on permanent human habitation, who might take a fancy to attacking explorers like Mycio and her companions; the hidden cemetery of the small village of Novoshepelyechi, where oak trees show a higher incidence of Crown Gall disease than anyplace else and Mycio contemplates the hyphae of fungi thriving there, and how far those hyphae might carry radionucleotides because fungi can be pretty big, under the soil... and that's just in the Ukraine. And it was Belarus, now home to a thriving and diverse population of aquatic birds, that got the most radiation, possibly due to cloud seeding sending particles down in rainfall before they could reach Moscow.
Nor is it just plants and fungi that are now calling the Exclusion Zone (or the somewhat more poetically translated "Zone of Alienation") home. Moose and red deer (that North Americans call elk) and roe deer and wild boars are plentiful, and two endangered species, the European bison and the Przewalski's horse, have both been introduced there and are thriving, largely because human activity has all but ceased there.
And there are more surprises, like the news that actually, as far as insects that could survive after nuclear disaster go, cockroaches are pretty wimpy. And that you don't find a lot of mutant animals like the famous eight-legged pony that appeared on the cover of Time magazine, because in the wild, mutated animals mostly don't survive; a bunch of partially albino swallows, for example, aren't doing too well in the Darwinian sweepstakes because they can't attract mates.
Some people are doubtless going to find this book rough going. There is a lot of science, of almost every kind - nuclear physics, chemistry, classical physics, biology, biochemistry, geology, hydrology, anthropology, botany, mycology, soil science, heck, even astronomy if you want to count the odd mention of the biblical Wormwood star. And it's densely presented, this science; where other authors might (as I kind of wish Mycio had done) choose to define radiological and other terms in a handy glossary, Mycio informs the lay reader via digressions in the middle of her anecdotal narratives, a tic I occasionally found intrusive when she was in the middle of describing, e.g., weirdly growing pines in the Red Forest. I would urge those readers who do find the science daunting to stick with it, though; around and through the rads and curies and Grays and becquerels is a realm of strange beauty, wonder, tragedy and terror, a glimpse of another world existing within our own that stands as a warning to us all while still showing a small glimmer of hope.
Though not so much hope that we should continue ripping atoms apart willy nilly just to power our hair dryers and server farms. I was never a big nuclear power fan before (having grown up in the age of Three Mile Island, glimpsed smugly from afar in a way that only a hydroelectric power customer can) reading this, and I watched Fukushima** with as much horror as anybody, but now, now that I know, for instance, that particles of radioactive isotopes as cesium and strontium mimic nutrients that pretty much all life uses to build and maintain itself (cesium mimics potassium and strontium, calcium), there to sit inside of plant and animal and fungal bodies for years emitting alpha and beta and gamma rays that tear bodies apart slowly from the inside, and that they just keep circulating through the food chain for, in some cases, unimaginably long spans of time, well, I'm really not a fan of nuclear power now.
*I remember being shocked at all the houses and public buildings Land of Oblivion depicted, with large and healthy birch trees growing right in the middle of former living rooms and offices and storefronts. It didn't seem like 25 years was long enough for that kind of growth. Shows what I know about botany. Which is a severe failing on my part, especially given how much I know about and love insects and fungi!
**Which wasn't as bad, we're told, as Chernobyl was, but still plenty bad, thank you very much.
"History must have a dustbin, or History will be a dustbin, a giantic, sprawling garbage heap." - Simon Reynolds in Retromania
Well, Mr. Reynolds, you surprised me. I tucked in to Retromania expecting a nice, long, curmudgeonly rant, about how pop finally has eaten itself, but what I got was a history lesson as much as anything, and a case made for the notion that pop has been eating itself all along.
I must admit I felt as though I was clinging on to the tail end of Reynolds' arguments with my fingernails through much of this book. I've heard of maybe half of the bands he mentions, and have actually heard the music of maybe a third of said bands. This is a book that could have benefitted from the very technology that he somewhat decries; I would have loved to be able to just click on a band name and play some samples. As it was, I found myself throwing down the Kindle and taking up the laptop to hit Blip.fm or YouTube to get an idea of what he was talking about. Which was very educational, but also very inconvenient.
I thought, too, that 496 pages was rather a lot to spend with any writer who was basically telling me something I already kind of knew: that popular music has largely stopped trying for the fresh and new and has instead gone the way of sartorial fashion, raiding its closets and collections for old stuff that can be tweaked and reworked a bit and presented as something hot and new. What I hadn't counted on, though, was Reynolds' thorough and thoughtful approach to figuring out why and how that had come to be.
A lot of the usual culprits come up, of course: the quest to step out of or stand athwart the mainstream (just because the Music Industry says this is what I should like now doesn't mean I have to), the advent of Mp3s and digital music players that mash everything up and level out the playing field (it's fun to hear a brand new Magnetic Fields Track one minute and Cleoma Breaux and Joe Falcon the next; no music ever goes away just because it's old, now), in general the sheer weight of the past of recorded music (the Industry's decades-long strategy of throwing up everything to see what would stick means there is a hell of a lot of old music still around on vinyl, just waiting to see a turntable again), and of course the roots of nostalgia and that longing for times that seemed free and full of possibility instead of fettered with responsibility, infirmity and age.
But of course the music that makes you feel that way again is different for every age group, isn't it? Because that's just an accident of what was popular when you were young -- or, in many later cases, what wasn't popular. I still run screaming from a bar if I hear too many hair metal songs in a row, because to me, that's the music of my oppressors, most often heard from the trunk of a car or the interior of some frasshat upperclassman's locker. I clung to my parents' music, to Andy Williams and Pete Seeger and Johnny Cash and the Kingston Trio, stuff that is now regarded as timeless and classic and is all but revered but in the '80s was considered worse than passe.
Your mileage may vary.
Where Reynolds really gets interesting on this subject, though, is when he takes up the idea of "curation." Curation is a much-used term these days. All the hip kids are doing it. You're probably doing it, if you have a blog or a YouTube page or are a DJ on something like Blip.fm. And it's being done at the highest levels by people with real resources, too, of course. The people who plan all those revival and reunion tours, the brain trust behind the "I Love the ___" shows, the issuers of B-side compilations and deep track collections marketed to those who want to think of themselves as real connoisseurs of style X or period Y. It's all very interesting, because, of course, rock 'n' roll started out as deliberately primitive and barbarous, a Whitmanesque yawp, cacophonous and sexy and loud and parent-frightening, the very antithesis of highbrow. But somewhere along the way, the people who loved it weren't satisfied with things as they were and wanted to get highbrow, and by the time that impulse was born, there was plenty of raw material over which to paw and put down or praise, to classify and connect into geneaologies, to resurrect and revive...
...And the thing is, with so much recorded music out there in the world*, still perfectly playable, and with so many would-be experts and appraisers out there, too, for every single that only got pressed one time in a run of a dozen copies that no one originally wanted, there is somewhere a small tribe of people who will, if given a chance, drone on at one for hours about how it is the greatest record ever and how only the elect can appreciate it.
And, as Reynolds points out, some form of this has been going on for pretty much as long as there has been recorded music. People latch on to something and won't let it go, or dig up something old from the dustbin and since it's new to them they don't think it's retro if they borrow from it for something of their own.
That's the key right there, I think: everything, however old, is always new to somebody.** And sometimes that somebody is very brave to stick to his or her original enjoyment and enthusiasm in the face of the many who can't wait to jump in on the party and tell him or her that the music they've just found is stale or used up or just plain bad. And every once in a while, that somebody finds a way to make their old find feel new for other people, usually people who are younger than the ones who yawn and say "been there, done that, bought the tee shirt."
But has pop, or rock'n'roll, ever been for the kind of people who are capable of saying that?
Meanwhile, there is more old music in the world than there ever has been before. Every day there is more. And maybe it's like a teetering stack: to put something new on top, one has to make the effort to climb up past all the old stuff at the bottom, in the middle, near the top. And maybe not everyone has the energy to make that effort.
And then of course there are those who insist that originality is overrated anyway. My parents are kind of like that: both of them still insist on finding it bewildering when we speak of "a Clash song" or "a Cure song" or (my sister, lord love her) "a Quarterflash song". They're just songs, Mom and Dad have told us, again and again. When they were young, singers and bands played each other's songs all the time. If a song was good, lots of people wanted to perform it.
Now people talk about covers and samples, some sneeringly, some adoringly. My parents would just say again, if a song is good, lots of people want to perform it.
If a style is good, lots of people want to get in on it. And in this day and age, doing so is easier than ever. It's almost easier than not doing so. People might not even realize what time machines their iPods, their CD or vinyl or (me!) cassette collections are. It's all music that we like, which is why we have it. And maybe the only thing it all has in common is that we like it.
So is it "retro" or "nostalgia" or is it just the recognition that music is music, whenever it was made?
So yeah, I have some problems with Reynolds, though I lack his staggering erudition on the subject of pop to go toe to toe with him, I am sure. But as you'll see from the second footnote below, I have rather a longer view of musical history than he does. At least I suspect so.
But he does have a point about the fin de siecle nature of the 21st century so far. The petroleum economy is running out of steam, but its impact on our climate and health is only beginning to be felt. A lot of the systems our ancestors built for running the world have proven to be less robust and trustworthy than we thought (though if one insists on kicking all the pins out from under them *cough* Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan *cough* should one be surprised when they collapse?). The space program that inspired so much innovation in high and pop culture has also gone into decline, as Reynolds does rather eloquently describe. The future's brightness probably still requires us to wear shades, but that brightness is proving to be glare off the deserts we're creating. In such a time, how innovative do you feel like being?
Especially when there's still all that old music out there that you haven't listened to yet, just a click away...
*There is, too, an elephant in Reynolds' room, I think: the Baby Boomers. Now, Reynolds was born in 1963 (and thinks, not out of narcissism or so he claims, that that's the year that rock'n'roll really got started as something that could be considered art, blah blah blah ma gavta la nata), which makes him one of the early Gen Xers but, well, he's a lot closer to those Boomers than I am. He remembers the Moon Landing, which I only experienced a gleam in Dad's eye (or more likely Mom's), at any rate. And he does go on, Reynolds does, about how much innovation the '60s and '70s saw, musically. Well, of course it did. There were more young people than ever before, then, all wanting to define themselves against their biological and musical ancestors as much as possible. There was a critical mass, then, that may never happen again. And it's just possible that all the possibilities that rock had to offer all got explored at once, then. Every permutation imaginable is on a 45 somewhere. So of course everything afterwords looks derivative. Add to this discussion the fact that the Boomers have categorically refused to let go of popular culture -- it was for them, not my parents, that "oldies radio" became the unstoppable hose truck that it is -- and thus have forced both their immediate successors (us Xers) and their own children to grow up in their musical shadow, listening to their records and constant reminiscences and assertions that we're nothing compared to their greatness and is it any surprise that most musicians today sound a lot like those of decades past?
**I'm as guilty of this as anyone. In the '90s I lived in Boston and jumped into the "third wave" ska revival with both dancing feet. I never went as deep as some of my friends, who were constantly striving to outdo each other with rare finds from flea markets and record stores, where Skatalites 45s seemed to have been seeded just in time to part these new young fans from their money; competing, too, in pedantry about old two-tone bands and how they didn't need the subtitles to understand the dialogue in "The Harder They Come." I got bored with that pretty quickly, though, because at one trip to a cool old record shop that I'm sure no longer exists in the gentrified replacement for Cambridge's Central Square, I found and fell in love with... are you ready for this?
Byzantine secular classical music.
I swear I wasn't trying to outdo anyone, be the most retro or anything like that. I just thought it was the most amazing, haunting, beautiful, sexy and strange music I had ever heard. I still do. I listen to these discs of Christocoulos Halaris' interpretations (oh you should see the liner notes, all about the reconstruction and musicological effort that was undergone to produce these recordings. I've never managed to read all the way through them. I'm not a musicologist. I just want to hear the tunes) all the time, probably more than any other music I own or have access to. In a world where the latter category consists of everything, ever, now, that's saying something.
I'm still waiting for some mad genius to come along and bust some of these moves in something "new" and "fresh." Of course, there's always Arab hip-hop until then.
But see, I've just pretty much proved all of Reynolds' points, haven't I?
Books like this one come to me as gifts from people who love me and wish me well, and this fills me with gratitude. I read them thinking of the person or persons who made the effort to bring them to my attention, and treasure that moment of connection, that transit of a spark from mind to mind, that brought me to read these lovely and loving words.
Last year, several months after my friend Gregory Wright presented me with a copy, I took up Sakyong Mipham's Turning Your Mind into an Ally; decades ago, my mother brought Marcus Aurelius to my attention, and his Meditations have become regular reading for me (though perhaps not as regular as I'd like). While The Miracle of Mindfulness (title aside*) reminds me a bit of both of these, it's very much its own thing, and a wonderful, graceful, restful thing it is.
Originally written in the form of a long letter, this book could easily just be regarded as an artifact of its time and circumstance: written by a Vietnamese Buddhist monk to another in 1974, while war still ravaged their country and was tearing our own apart as well -- it could be, but that would require a tremendous kind of effort that simply absorbing this book does not demand. Because this book is really just a love letter, in somewhat the same way Ted Sturgeon's Godbody** is a love letter. I may not believe in a god or non-material spirit that loves, me, but I believe that Thich Nhat Hanh loves me, not because he's met or befriended me personally in any way, but because I am part of the universe in which he dwells and he wishes that universe well, wishes it and us peace, and wants to share with us how he achieves that.
The Miracle of Mindfulness is also a meditation manual in a much more practical way than Turning Your Mind into an Ally is. There is instruction to be had here, for newcomers to the practice and for people who have been trying for a long time; for them it may serve as much as a fresh and refreshing reminder of what we've been told before but hasn't sunk in as well as we might have thought.
For me the miracle has simply been having this book at my disposal these last weeks. They've been deeply difficult ones, full of grief and loss and funerals and failure. During such times it's all too easy to lose sight of goals and perspective, to dwell on suffering and exclude any possibility of joy. I have done so. But, because I have learned from Mipham and again from Hanh to notice when I'm doing so and make myself stop, to turn my focus and my energies elsewhere, I am, I hope, coming through these times with more grace and, I hope, too, ability to help others through it (especially my family), or at least not to make it worse. Mostly.
It's a work in progress. It always is. But it's good to take up something like The Miracle of Mindfulness, to engage it and do the work it asks of one, or at least try some of it (myself, I've been washing a lot of dishes as mindfully as possible, noticing the miracles of water heated by the burning of gas that was once prehistoric plants and animals, watching the action of plant-based surfactants on grease, thinking of the person who crocheted the dishcloth [I know her personally, watched her making it with a half-smile on her face in quiet moments], feeling the water on my hands and arms, setting the dishes gently in the drainer) every once in a while and help that progress along a little bit.
Thank you Greg, thank you Mipham, thank you Hanh, thank you Christopher.
*I have a lot of dear friends who push a lot of books on me that have the word "miracle" in the title, and most of them are full of pseudoscience and marketing talk, and so I have a conditioned raise-one-eyebrow response to any such titles now.
**This might just be a function of when and how I came across it, but Godbody is quite possibly the most important book in my life.
I have a lot of ill-contained rage against car culture, and it all came simmering to the surface as I read Chapter 7 of Edward L. Glaeser's incredibly thought-provoking Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier. This is partly, of course, because I have city envy, though it's largely my own fault.*
I like a walkable city with an interesting downtown area. My love for Toronto, for instance, is extraordinarily well-documented. A place like that has everything I look for -- dining (especially foreign food), people with whom to play games, people doing interesting things on the street, neat graffiti and other artistry, and sidewalks by which I may easily access all of this and more without burning an ounce of gasoline in either my own or anyone else's vehicle (yes, sometimes this involves a lot of walking and very sore feet, but I consider that a more than reasonable exchange, and it's exceedingly enjoyable exercise; I'm the only one in my workplace who actually loses weight on vacation), or in any way increasing my or the city I'm visiting's carbon footprint. All of these things, Glaeser argues, are products of urban density -- for density brings about proximity of one artist or inventor to another, brings about economies of scale that allow ordinary people to enjoy what only the very wealthy could before the rise of the modern city, brings about opportunity (which is why cities attract the poor; they have a better chance of not staying poor if they come to a city and try).
And yes, density can also bring about crowding, slums, crime, poor sanitation and other public health concerns, but these urban ills can be self-remedying ones because they're occurring in cities, where concentrations of economic power, talent, labor and creativity can be harnessed to solve them, as happened in, e.g. 19th Century New York, London, and Paris, three fine examples of cities that thought their way out of these problems and are now, for the most part, very pleasant -- but very expensive -- places to pass some time.**
And the expense is where my real rage comes in. Because most of North America's and Europe's historically walkable cities have artificially depressed the supply of housing in those downtown areas by legislating against height and density, only the very rich can now afford to live there at all comfortably; they are become, in a phrase I encountered again and again in this book (which, sad to say, is something of a repetitive book at times), "boutique cities."
I am a middle class person; moreover, I am a single woman of a "certain" age which means that I am likely to remain a middle class person (unless I backslide, which is entirely likely in the current economic climate, especially if I choose at this stage in life to move away from the town in which I find myself living -- to, in effect, start all over again). I am unlikely to suddenly manifest skills that are in such high demand that I can command six or seven figures a year***, nor am I at a stage in my life where I am likely to choose (or be welcomed in choosing) to cram myself into a tiny apartment with six or seven twentysomethings.So, as things stand now, I'm starting to fear that I am stuck out in the suburbs, exurbs or pretend cities that have grown up around the car.
So yeah, I have city envy.
But so, I didn't realize how much city envy I had until I read this book, because even when Glaeser talks about the crime and poverty and disease and crappy housing that make so many of the cities in the developing world hells on earth circa 2012, he also points out how New York and London and Paris were once like that, and how Kinshasa and Mumbai and Rio can do it, too, and may even do it better with the examples of those cities before them (i.e., maybe they won't make the same mistakes that turned these into boutique cities along the way).
Of course, that's where Glaeser may lose some people, because, as he points out, New York and London and Paris would still be hell-holes without the deliberate and somewhat heavy-handed use of state power. New York, for instance, tried a private water service first, and got boondoggles and very little utility from guys who were more interested in empire building than in public service. And Paris owes most of its charm to Napoleon III's indulgence of one man's dreams (that one man being Baron Georges Eugene Haussman).
I must add, lest I mislead people, that my rage is mostly self-directed and is only tangential to the reading of this book, which is, after all, an optimistic one. Perhaps, indeed, it's overly so: Glaeser's vision for a possible American future requires, among other things, the embrace of congestion charges and higher gasoline taxes to discourage car use, the reduction if not elimination for the home mortgage interest deduction (that encourages suburban sprawl by encouraging not only home ownership but the accrual of ever-greater debt to buy ever more expensive houses that, let's face it, do not increase an iota in quality commensurate with increases in price, do they? Which means this extremely popular and entrenched bit of tax law helps drive home prices higher), and, least likely of all, an end to the endemic syndrome of NIMBYism.
Even more controversially, Glaeser calls out a lot of environmental and historic preservation legislation as bad policy that gets bad results. In Glaeser's world, the popular slogan of "think globally, act locally" gets it all wrong: focusing on saving one wetlands (or, for that matter, one block full of mediocre but old buildings) doesn't really help the planet or the locality, because it just sends the builders and their money somewhere else. And often, in the case of those opposing newer, taller buildings in old established cities as of those opposing new development in attractive areas like coastal California, where it gets sent is to place like Houston, or more specifically, to exurban Houston, where sprawl is keenly encouraged by a lack of restrictions on development and the people who wind up living there have to drive to work, to school, to shop, to eat out -- and have to use amazing amounts of electricity to keep their homes livable because Houston in the summer is a sweltering nightmare without air conditioning. So whether you believe in climate change or not, whether you believe in peak oil or not, whether you believe in suburb as bland conformist hell or not... there is probably something regrettable in the greater scheme of things that offsets, if not worsens, the impact of your saving a pond or three-story apartment building.
As he ponders all this, though, his glasses get a little too rosy. One of his arguments about America, for instance, involves coastal California, climatically ideal for 21st century human habitation, becoming a lot more densely populated than it is -- compact and tall rather than more sprawl, naturally -- which raised my eyebrows because he seemed to be glossing over the problem of how thirsty such cities can't help but be: lots of people need lots of water. Oh, he says at one point, but they could have enough water if all of that irrigated agriculture going on in California were put to a stop and that water diverted to urban/municipal use. This only sounds reasonable, I suspect, to people who haven't paid attention to the realities of western water; the rivers that currently supply all that agricultural and municipal water in California and the rest of the arid southwestern half of the sun belt are grossly over-allocated and no longer even reach the ocean; there might not be enough even if all that agriculture were suddenly to stop. And by the way, how likely is that, anyway?
Still, it's nice to read a book like this and dream, just as it's nice to wonder what the American west would be like if those who drew its state and county boundaries had listened to John Wesley Powell instead of to the Union Pacific Railroad and the cattle barons. Or to imagine what Rust Belt cities like Detroit might have been right now if their leaders had focused on developing human capital (a favorite argument of Glaeser's: cities are made of people, not buildings) instead of adding more infrastructure to an area that already had too much.****
At bottom, this book, more than anything I've read this year and probably last year, too, made me think, about my own choices, about public policy, about consequences, intended and un-, about, overall, if it's time to move. Because even though I commute by bike as much as possible and walk to the grocery store (which, mercifully, is just across the street but how much does it suck that it's a five-lane street so poorly patrolled that cars routinely roar by at 50-60 mph) and never eat out or go downtown, sitting around alone in my little house, however attractive and roomy it may be, is no way to spend the rest of my life. I need people.
Preferably, people who have an idea of a good time that does not begin and end with a bar fight.
*I spent about ten years living on the U.S.'s east coast, most of it in lushly green rural areas that weren't much more densely populated than I was used to, but a few in Boston (with lots of vacations to New York). I finally got homesick at 27, though, and wanted to see what living in Wyoming was like as an adult, so moved back, and then never managed to plan my way back out of here. Eventually I had to leave the tiny town where I grew up and later served as a member of the city council and the water and sewer boards but had no gainful employment and move to Cheyenne, which is Wyoming's state capital but is basically a big suburb with no urban area of which to be sub. Which means I own a car and have to drive pretty much everywhere and I'm as many hours' driving from the idyllic mountain/river scenes of my rural childhood as I am from the amenities of the nearest real city (Denver).YUCK.
**They are also the three cities focused on in a most entertaining (unless one is very squeamish) documentary series produced last year by the BBC called Filthy Cities. And hurrah for the BBC, for you can watch them on YouTube for free. Here's London, Paris and New York. Enjoy!
***And yes, a lot of this is because I am unwilling to go back to college and get yet another bachelor's degree. I already have one, in the liberal arts, which is supposed to make me ready for anything but really makes me employable only in diminishing fields which do not allow me to make an actual living, which is why I currently hold a job for which only a high school diploma is required (although a lot of other specific and mostly innate talents are also required). And no, my unwillingness to get another degree is not because of the work or time involved (I acquire and hone new skills all the time, though free resources like MIT Open Courseware, but I have not yet heard of an employer who will treat that as a credential. When one does, I'm stylin'), but because of the expense. College cost enough the first time, even with scholarships, back in the late 80s/early 90s. Now? I'd be paying back student loans for the rest of my life, all on a gamble that whatever "employment ready" field I chose would still be one with a decent job market that would let me earn income to pay back those loans. Stank!
****I wonder what Glaeser would think of the crazy optimistic art/development/whatever project that is Detroit's Loveland.
Though the event is not actually depicted or described in Seeds of Revolt, the specter of Russian uber-novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky's arrest, mock execution and sentence to Siberia looms large over this first of Joseph Frank's five-volume biography of the man. This should not be a spoiler for anyone; this fact and its timing (1849) are quite possibly the best-known and most-talked-about biographical detail in all Dostoevskiana, mentioned in every introduction, foreward, sketch and essay I've ever seen about the man. I might say it's as impossible not to know Dostoevsky was sent to Siberia as it is not to know that he wrote The Brothers Karamozov and Crime and Punishment, but then I run the risk of wandering into bless-me-what-do-they-teach-at-these-schools-ism.
What is not generally known to the casual Dostoevsky fan (which is what I would call myself; I certainly could not hold forth with Michael at Pink's for any length of time*) is the details of why and how this pivotal event came to happen. Enter the redoubtable Joseph Frank, whose staggering work I learned of, as is probably the case with everyone in my cliques and circles, through an essay by the late and much-lamented David Foster Wallace.** And before you ask, yes, I plan to read the other four volumes, for having completed this one I find myself a much less casual Dostoevsky fan and a Frank fan as well.
Frank could definitely go toe-to-toe with Michael at Pink's, and wouldn't even have to serve up a hot dog to keep the ordinary punter's attention while he did so.
As I said, the arrest looms large over this account, ominous and always feeling just around the corner even as Doestoevsky grows up with his strict father, suffers through military school, attracts the praise and attention of the great critic Vissarion Belinsky with his first novel Poor Folk (which I have yet to read but now very much want to) and then falls out with him, takes up other, nicer friends and watches them move away, writes, writes and writes and always wrings his hands over the plight of the enslaved peasantry of Russia (among whom he had had mostly happy formative experiences as a boy on his family's little estate) -- and then meets Petrashevsky, he of the circle accused of subversion and revolution and all sorts of other things that autocratic regimes do not like.
Frank's painstaking examination of the Petrashevsky circle -- a very informal salon in which members of the intelligentsia gathered of a Friday night to talk Socialist ideas, religion, politics and, occasionally, literature -- frankly gave me the chills, not so much because of what happened to them per se, or how they conducted themselves or what they talked about as what they resembled: they resembled Twitter, if not the entire internet. Everybody got a chance to spout off or argue, there was rarely a set agenda, anyone who wanted to could participate (within limits, of course, in St. Petersburg of the 1840s, of course), anyone could get sucked in and, potentially (and later actually), everyone could become tarred with the same brush. So when some members started up a secret society with the aim of actually staging a revolution in Russia, everybody got busted.
Back then, of course, the government had to work hard at it, to infiltrate the circle with an actual person hanging out at actual gatherings at specific times; nowadays, we've turned everything inside-out, having our conversations in full public view, asynchronously, trusting the First Amendment and the odd pseudonymous identity and that those in power won't confuse rhetoric with intent. This may be very foolish of us. Especially as things like NDAA have been allowed to happen. I do not fear being mock-shot or sent to Siberia, but I do fear an internet fettered and stunted by corporate/government interests, or being cut off from it and thus my world. I fear falling into the prison of my own flesh.***
Such are the dark thoughts a good Dostoevsky biography can inspire. And this one is very, very good. And, as I said, I'm itching to get my hands on the other four volumes.
And I'll be sleeping with one eye open, and tweeting with a little more concern (though I'm sure I already damned myself long ago out of my own typing fingers. I've always been free with my opinions, and have paid the price for this before when they were misconstrued, misunderstood, or just unpopular. Dostoevsky was not a revolutionary or even much of a socialist, Frank says, but if you got him going defending literature that wasn't written purely as a dialectical tool for social reform, or, worse, on the plight of the peasantry, then he could potentially wind up out in the streets screaming and waving a red flag. As a friend of mine once observed, some people have buttons to push, others have a whole keyboard. Unca Fyodor had perhaps a modestly sized keyboard; mine is vast and varied).
But what of it, Orson Welles might ask. Go on singing.
*Wink wink at Unca Harlan Ellison, the modern writer of whom I was most reminded as I read this biography of Unca Fyodor. Go watch the YouTube video I linked to above, or better yet, get your hands on a copy of Angry Candy, far and away my favorite of his short story collections and the one containing the amusing and awesome "Prince Myshkin and Hold the Relish."
**Which appears in his last essay collection Consider the Lobster, if you're wondering. I could not find a link to the complete text online. The book is worth acquiring or at least reading, though, and not just for the Frank/Dostoevsky piece!
Turkey is quite an interesting place, but as is the case with so many interesting places, at the rate I'm going I'll never manage to visit there. Hence my occasional random indulgence in some armchair travel.
Usually I put myself in the hands of someone I know and respect -- Robert D. Kaplan, say, or Paul Theroux. So how did I find these two odd, hipstery Oregonians for travel companions?
Funny you should ask. Really, it's George R.R. Martin's fault.
Ever notice that when you're up reading way, way, WAY past your bedtime that sometimes the print gets a bit blurry, even after you've tuned your Kindle's typeface setting to "legally blind"? It's the sort of thing that only happens when the book is very good indeed, as A Game of Thrones is, and so it did. As I read of the adventures of its many characters, somehow the name of Arya Stark swam into view as Freya Stark, and this reminded me that I had yet to read any of that remarkable woman's work. I had always meant to, though.
Ah, but as yet, Amazon really doesn't have any of her own writing available for the Kindle, which is where and how all my impulse book-buying takes place. A biography of her, yes (at an "agency model" price well above the normal $9.99, meaning I shunned it on principle. They can charge me more for a Kindle book when it is fully shareable on MY terms, not riddled with DRM, etc.), but by her? Tumbleweeds and cricket sounds.
But tossed in amidst the by/for/about Freya Stark Kindle offerings was Tea and Bee's Milk, a charming title, modestly priced and modern, and my impulsiveness clicked in.
What did I get for my $5.99 American? A mixed bag, but mostly of good things.
Karen and Ray Gilden are, as I said, Oregonians, hailing from the Portland/Eugene area, and come across in their book as people who would not be out of place in a sketch from the TV show Portlandia and its gentle satire of the earnest and often smug denizens of that part of the country. Ray is a bicycle fetishist, for instance; Karen a bit too fond of pointing out how off the beaten track they went when they decided to sell the house, ditch the kids and parents and spend a year doing nothing in Turkey.
Of course I'm a little jealous of the pair of them. That's only natural. I also dream, just a bit, of doing so myself, and maybe even writing a book about it. If/when I do so, though, I can't go to Göcek, Turkey, because it was in the process of becoming "touristy" even before the Gildens got there, and is now even better known for their having written about it. And of course an important part of hipster travel is being able to decry how the place you've discovered is being spoiled by its being discovered by others (but never oneself, oh no). Oh, those terrible others. But not us, of course. Everyone told us we were lovely, and we have no reason to disagree.
Eye-rolling aside, this book is much longer on charm than it is on smugness. Both Karen and Ray are talented writers and have a gift for highlighting the humor to be found in ordinary challenges like operating a Turkish washing machine, finding some oil to keep a bicycle in good repair in a tiny Turkish village, and figuring out when the ferry to Kos is actually going to leave. They also take a most amusing turn as restaurant reviewers for a newsletter they had once thought of starting and sending home to family and friends (but were soon too happily relaxed to continue with and so only published one issue). Their stories of meals here and there made my mouth water even as I smiled at the wit which which they described their settings and circumstances.
Like Troika before it, this was a short read but a pleasant one. As it will probably be the closest I get to a low-key Mediterranean idyll, I consider the brief time I spent swimming, biking and lazing about with the Gildens to have been well spent. Though I hope they never come Saratoga, WY, where I grew up, motto: "If you're in a hurry, you're in the wrong town." We already have enough tourists complaining that it's getting touristy.
I'm not going to spend too much time on this one, because I've already lost over a week.
Too Good to be True is actually quite a good title for this overlong, overwritten, under-edited book, while it's subtitle "The Rise and Fall of Bernie Madoff" is not. Sure, this one is very informative on the subject of Madoff and his phony hedge fund Ponzi scheme, in its way, but it does not follow a smooth narrative curve like that "rise and fall" bit implies. Instead, one is treated to a very lightly edited pile of pages in which a handful of sentences make verbatim appearances over and over again (yes, it would seem I've stumbled onto the nonfiction equivalent of A Feast for Crows) and in which "paragraph*" simply refers to "a group of sentences that have nothing much to do with each other but are arranged to look like what ordinary users and readers of English might consider to be a paragraph with the use of random indenting." Ditto "chapters." Ugh.
This should have been a fascinating read for me. I love charlatans; one of my favorite films of all time is Orson Welles' F for Fake,, in which Welles riffs elegantly and amusingly on the famous art forger Elmyr de Hory, his biographer Clifford Irving (who went on to commit his own tremendous hoax, a complete fake biography of Howard Hughes) and Welles' own "War of the Worlds" prank. Stories of forgeries and cons delight me even if they often also make me angry, as Madoff's stupefying stunt most certainly did.
But instead, I could barely finish this book, and might not have were I not already quite behind on reading 100 books this year, eyeball deep in a literary example of the sunk cost fallacy. As it was, I required lots of breaks from it in the forms of some other, far more engaging and delightful, books I'll be blogging about here soon.
Madoff is definitely a man who deserves a place alongside Elmyr and Irving and their fellows in the pantheon of fakers. The financial swindle he achieved -- and his success in keeping the details forever out of our purview by pleading guilty from the outset and denying us the discoveries of a jury trial -- is the largest ever, and might still have been going on had not the housing/sub-prime bubble collapsed in 2008, triggering a run on his faux hedge fun by all of his investors (well, at least all of those who knew they were his investors, for, one thing I learned from this book, a lot of people who had invested in other "instruments" actually had their money hoovered up by the Madoff machine, for he was paying a lot of hot shots a lot of money to funnel investment into his phony fund) that yanked the apex of his pyramid right down when even his hoary originals, who had happily been collecting phony dividends for decades, started asking for their principal back.
Which is to say that Madoff did it exactly right. He built a reputation as a whiz-kid and a man of probity, computerizing markets before most people even knew that a mouse was not a microphone and cozying up to the financial industry's regulators when most people were still regarding them as tiresome foes instead of the willing partners Madoff and Greenspan and that whole despicable crew seduced them into being. At the height of his influence, Madoff was the man who taught all the new green lawyers starting their careers at the Securities and Exchange Commission (knowing they need only put in a handful of years before they could leap to the private sector and make the big money, the corrupt cops turning pro as criminals) how Wall Street works! He chose his prey well, too, avoiding those who knew how hedge funds actually worked and how to read a balance sheet and zeroing in, instead, on socialites who could be trusted never to run the numbers or ask how his amazing strategy worked or ask to see evidence that their money was being used to buy stocks at all, every man and woman of them an Emperor parading naked through Manhattan and Palm Springs and London and Paris, believing they were modeling exclusive designs (for part of Madoff's secret was implying always that not everyone was cool enough to invest with him, so that being offered the opportunity to fork over your cash to fund his yacht-intensive lifestyle was a sought-after privilege!).
See? Fascinating. But I chose the wrong book about it, and now am so sick of the subject that I'm disinclined to hunt down a good one. Boo!
Somewhere out there in Twitterland, close to 2000 followers of mine are probably going to cheer as one to learn that I've finished reading this book. I've been spouting off about it at odd intervals for a week or more.
I was worse as I made my way last year through Sharlet's prior book on the shadowy "Christian"* fundamentalist group known variously as "the Family" or "The Fellowship", The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, a book I read with all the lights on, the way we always talk about reading genuinely scary horror novels. I said then and I'll stand by it now: Jeff Sharlet writes damned scary books.
Right away I've betrayed myself as a secularist and a rebel. I'm a fan of fully informed juries, workers' rights, the need for government to protect the people against force and fraud and the right of every nutjob with a voice and a magic marker (or, in this day and age, a keyboard, a few fingers and an internet connection) to spout off his views, however crazy or distasteful or true or saddening. I think Jenny McCarthy is nuts, but I won't advocate forcing her to shut up about vaccines. I think Fred Phelps is a sue-happy fraud and provocateur who makes a very good living off of baiting people who cannot stand to listen to the crap he spews that I don't even believe he believes. And I think freedom of religion is in the Bill of Rights for a very, very good reason. Lots of them, actually. Ditto all the other stuff that's in there.
So really, there is no reason for me to keep on reading Sharlet on the Family except for the same reasons that people keep reading Stephen King books or watching Friday the 13th remakes: it's a weird, fun little thrill to stare for a while at what scares you. It's entertainment in an activating, emotionally jarring way.
That said, I still find this second book of his on the subject to pale in comparison to the first. Where The Family exposed a secret history and named names, C Street... well, C Street mostly just calls out the same villains some more. That's not to say it's The Family 2: Electric Boogaloo: Sharlet's foray into the nation of Uganda and the story behind its infamous "death penalty for homosexuals" bill is shocking all by itself in all its painstaking detail, though it does drag on a bit (OMG, Jeff, we get it! Ugandan legislator Bahati and dictator Musevini aren't fundamentalists themselves so much as sucking up to the Family to get what they want). He spends a fair amount of time exposing how evangelism/fundamentalism has all but taken over a huge chunk of the United States' armed forces (especially the U.S. Air Force, but that's not news to anyone who knows any flyboys or pays attention to where they come from: the USAF Academy and James Dobson's Focus on the Family are both based, along with megachurches galore, in Colorado Springs, CO, surely a strong candidate for the capital city of Jesusland if ever there were one). And of course the scandals around Mark Sanford and Jim Ensign and Chip Pickering get a good airing out once again, with a chillingly amusing "what might have been" look at Sanford's future had his brothers in the Family chosen to continue keeping his naughty secrets.
But the real value of this book lies in Sharlet's interlineal commentary, his turns of phrase in summing up the scenes and backgrounds he's describing, for which he's taken off the gloves considerably more of a degree than we saw in The Family, here pointing out that the group takes a very different lesson from the story of David and Bathsheba than the rabbis or even the original Calvinists teach**, there holding forth on "the paradox of humility as authority that's inherent in the term 'servant leader'" as "the essence of the fundamentalist threat to democracy: not brute force but seduction... the promise of support and intimacy in return for power"... and wow of wows, can you tell I love the highlight function of my Kindle, which lets me highlight/mark thumping great blocks of text that strike me as especially important or meaningful or true without damaging my book?
And that's what Sharlet is good for. He provides fantastic talking points. It's important to always remember that when my Senior U.S. Senator (Mike Enzi) talks about his prayer group in Washington, D.C., he's talking about people who admire Hitler and Stalin and Ho Chi Minh as examples of men who changed the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their “brothers" and who supported dictators like Suharto and Ferdinand Marcos because they value access to power over holding leaders accountable for the fantastically un-Christian atrocities they commit with it. It's important to me to arm myself against the kinds of arguments that lead to the world of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, which, until I read The Family, I had always named as the scariest book I'd ever read ("In the days of anarchy it was 'freedom to.' Now you're being given 'freedom from.' Don't underrate it" says Aunt Lydia -- in the movie, flatly and chillingly delivered by the perfectly cast Victoria Tennant so as to give any democracy-loving uppity female of tender years a lifetime of nightmares).
But not everyone, in this day and age, has the time for reading that I have, and if you're one of those whose opportunities are limited, who really needs to read just one serious book on this subject, that book should be The Family. If you've time for another, read Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy (which, in devoting a great deal of its length to decrying the financialization of America's economy sounds a lot like a prediction of the current completely dumbass economic crisis we're experiencing now). And if you've time for a third, have a look at C Street.
And keep a flashlight handy.
*I put scare quotes around "Christian" here because I find the "screw the weak and minister to the strong so they can maybe someday get around to taking care of the weak like good daddies" ethos of the Family to be about the least Christian mindset imaginable.
**"The chosen politician does not take credit for his success, he does not suppose that it was his virtue that led the people to elect him. He is just another sinner. But God wants to use him, as He used David. 'God appoints specific leaders to fulfil a mission; He doesn't hold a popular vote,' writes John C. Maxwell, a management guru on C Street's Prayer Breakfast circuit, in a Bible study titled Leadership: Deliberate Selection vs. Democratic Election. The other side of such humility is the abdication of responsibility. Once chosen for leadership isn't accountable for his own actions."
is, and so it did. As I read of the adventures of its many characters, somehow the name of Arya Stark swam into view as Freya Stark, and this reminded me that I had yet to read any of that remarkable woman's work. I had always meant to, though.
, in which Welles riffs elegantly and amusingly on the famous art forger 
C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy