An Odyssey

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

Daniel Mendelsohn (2018, Vintage)

Daniel Mendelsohn is a critic and classics scholar. You can't be surprised that he begins this book with a proem, an explanation of what the book is about; he has to cite the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid to explain what a proem is, and why he needs one. We learn that when he was teaching at Bard College one spring term, he offered a freshman seminar on the Odyssey, and his father asked to audit it. "At ten past ten each Friday morning, he would take a seat among the freshmen who were enrolled in the course, seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds not even a quarter his age, and join in the discussion of this old poem, an epic about long journeys and long marriages and what it means to yearn for home."

The Odyssey is the ideal vessel for this journey they make together; the father is a retired scientist, teacher, and autodidact who, it turns out, had studied Latin in his schooldays; but only through Ovid, not scaling the heights of Virgil. But he will trek in from Long Island and up the Hudson, spending the night with his son to make the trip a little less arduous. The two of them will even spend ten days of the next summer on a Mediterranean cruise retracing Odysseus's voyage from Troy to Ithaca. "'Retracing the Odyssey' was an 'educational' cruise, and although he was contemptuous of anything that struck him as a needless luxury–cruises and sightseeing and vacations–my father was a great believer in education."

So this will be the story of a literary journey, and a physical journey, and a journey of understanding between the two men. Mendelsohn is at pains to explain that Homer's storytelling is as full of twists and turns as the journey itself. The technical term is 'ring composition', and it refers to the practice of putting digressions about the past or the future in places where they explain the current action, sometimes at great length. "As complex as it is to describe this technique, the associative spirals that are its hallmark in fact re-create the way we tell stories in everyday life, looping from one tale to another as we seek to clarify and explain the story with which we started, which is the story to which, eventually, we will return–even if it is sometimes the case that we need to be nudged, to be reminded to get back to our starting point." You have to trust that the narrator has control of the direction of the story, the way a captain knows where his ship is, even when the passengers don't.

In a very satisfying way, Mendelsohn is exemplifying everything he's telling us about. He states his major themes and names his characters in his proem, as Homer and Virgil did in theirs. As the class proceeds, week by week, through the Odyssey, he describes the action of the story, and how the class responds to it. His father, who had thought he'd sit quietly, turns out to have definite opinions. Why, he wonders, is Odysseus considered such a hero, when he lost the entire contingent of twelve ships and their men, and staggered home alone after twenty years? As it happens, the first four books of the epic are not about Odysseus at all; he's still imprisoned by Calypso. They're about his son, Telemachus, who was a small child when the Greeks forces were assembled to besiege Troy.

Telemachus has his own voyages to make, and much to learn. Mendelsohn says, "With his unpredictable swings between endearing swagger and utter cluelessness, the Telemachus of the first few books of the Odyssey can remind you of a college freshman." At the same time that we're meeting the (suitably anonymized) freshmen in the seminar, we're getting more of a look at Mendelsohn and his father. The relationship between them is unfolding, and is being set in context of the rest of the family. Mendelsohn, a gay man, has two sons with a friend, and spends most weekends with them in New Jersey. His father grew up in the Bronx, during the Great Depression, which gave him a certain pugnacious prejudice in favor of the little guy. He grew up to be a New York Mets fan, scorning the Yankees for 'buying their success.' And perhaps Telemachus, with the goddess Athena's consistent support, has it too easy...

I'd certainly recommend this book as a companion to a rereading of the Odyssey, but I enjoyed some of its other dimensions even more. We get a glimpse of philology, the 'science' of word origins, and we see a classroom from a skilled teacher's point of view. I especially enjoyed the way Mendelsohn circles around his story like a skilled artist working a sketch up to a finished painting. Done ineptly, ring composition is kind of maddening, but in this case, it's delightful. The proem can tell you what's going to happen, but you still have to read through to find out why it happens, and what it all means. 

 

 

Any Good Books, November 2022

 

You Never Forget Your First

 You Never Forget Your First: a Biography of George Washington

Alexis Coe (2020, Viking)

People have been writing admiringly about George Washington since before he died; it's reasonable to wonder what can usefully be added to the shelf. You Never Forget Your First stands out for several reasons.

First, it's concise. The text is just a little over two hundred pages; the notes and index add only another fifty-five. Alexis Coe read Joseph Ellis, Richard Brookhiser, Ron Chernow, and all the rest of the doorstops with studiously dull titles: "George Washington: A Biography. George Washington: A Life. George Washington: a President....With titles this stodgy, presidential biographies will always appear as if they are for men of a certain age, intended to be purchased on Presidents' or Father's Day."`

Second, as the title suggests, it's refreshingly cheeky. For instance, Coe dubs the (invariably male) authors of the standard biographies 'the Thigh Men', because they seem so attached to Washington's physical stature and prowess. Their books frequently feature covers with a head-to-toe portrait of Washington, showing his manly thighs.

By no coincidence, perhaps, they are at pains to make some explanation of the fact that Washington had no children of his own. In all likelihood, if he was sterile, it followed from some illness in his early life. In fact, Coe says, "Washington's lack of heirs gave him a distinct political advantage; it comforted people to know that he had no bloodline to preserve, no power-hungry scion to worry about." He clearly had a paternal relationship to his wife Martha's two young children. Martha's son Jacky left four children, two of whom George and Martha took in, in turn. And, after all, he is reputed to have fathered a whole country; what more do you want?

As Washington's first significant female biographer in many decades, Coe makes some corrections to the character of his mother, Mary. Coe cites –in a handy chart!–Chernow's many descriptions of her as shrewish, anxious, and demanding. "For the Thigh Men, Mary's histrionics begin when she declines to enlist her fourteen-year-old son in the navy and continue to the very ends with her griping about elder care."

Considering both the actual epistolary evidence at hand, and Mary's economic and social circumstances, Coe gives us a much fuller view. Her husband died when George, her eldest, was only eleven, so a certain anxiety might be justified; to keep and raise small children, and see her daughter married well, was not an easy job. It was also one she'd have precious little help with, unless she chose to marry again. Her objection to making George a midshipman was that it was more likely to thwart his career than to advance it, and in that she was quite right.

Instead, he learned surveying, in which his horsemanship and his head for math were great advantages. It gave him a chance to see new land first and bid on it early. He sought a position in the Virginia militia. "Despite having no military experience, he worked his connections and ultimately got the job–along with its annual salary of one hundred pounds." He made a name for himself in the French and Indian War of the 1750's - indeed, he partly precipitated it, by killing a French diplomat with whom he was meant to be negotiating.

He moved from the Virginia militia to the British army, serving with Brigadier General Edward Braddock in the Ohio territories, and becoming a hero in the battle of Fort Duquesne–which the French actually won. Still, there were clearly limits to how far a colonial subject could advance in the British forces; he resigned his commission and went back to his land. He married Martha (and her fortune) in 1759, and enjoyed a good decade as a gentleman farmer at Mount Vernon, keeping horses and dogs, and raising cattle, fowl, and bees. (He liked butter and honey with his breakfast hoecakes.)

Coe does not let us forget that Washington's wealth depended on enslaved people. Coe describes their miserable housing, their poor diet, and their general mistreatment, often by way of ironic contrast with Washington's revolutionary zeal for liberty. In his will, Washington directed Martha to free his slave, which she duly did in 1801, shortly before she died. Her own slaves, however, she willed back to her grandchildren. Coe has a heart-breaking breakdown, again in chart form, of the known families who were broken up by this development.

You could certainly give this book to a Dad; you could also give it to a feisty or bookish teenager. (If it's banned from school libraries, it will be for all the best reasons.) But we can all stand a fresh look at Washington's special skills, in diplomacy and espionage even more than in battle. We owe him a lot, all in all. 

 

Any Good Books, December 2022

 

Four Thousand Weeks

 

Any Good Books, October 2022

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Oliver Burkeman (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2021)

If you would scorn yourself for reading a self-help book, you can perfectly well consider Four Thousand Weeks to be a work of philosophy. We'll be consulting Epictetus, after all, and Heidegger on the matter of optimizing ourselves, and our use of time. If, on the other hand, the thought of reading a philosophy book makes you a little twitchy, think of it as self-help. Oliver Burkeman has substantial credentials as an expert on time management tips and tricks. When Burke was writing a column about productivity, he had a forum for his personal obsession with systems and to-do lists; he knows what he's talking about here. 

 

But his purpose here is to remind us of something else: the fix is in. We are not ever going to Get Everything Done, and what would we do if we did? "Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster." All the fancy notebooks and apps he loved served as a smokescreen against the knowledge that busyness, like an empty in-box, generates busyness. Unless you're doing something about it, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. "Far from getting things done, you'll be creating new things to do." If you suspect that this problem has gotten worse in our lifetimes, you're right. If you're connected enough to be reading this, the world unleashes a tide of possibility on your virtual doorstep every day, or potentially every minute; deciding what to pay attention to (or not) is a substantial job in its own right. How will you stay on top of everything, when 'everything' increases exponentially? 

 

The answer is counter-intuitive, or countercultural, or perhaps both: "Once you truly understand that you're guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven't experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for–and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most."

 

After all, there was every chance (but one) that you would never have been born, to see four thousand weeks, or even a hundred. So while our lives are clearly finite, with respect to infinite time and space, they are magnificently vast compared to nothingness. Yet, choices must be made: we don't actually control the future, but we do get some choice about the present. So, says Burkeman, pay yourself first. "If you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you're just going to have to start doing it." 

 

Another principle of freedom through limitation: limit your work in progress. The ideal number of irons in the fire might be three, the short list of items you're going to finish (or mindfully abandon) before putting anything else in the queue. This brings the scope of your work better in line with the finitude of the day, as well as helping you focus on what part of a larger task is really the next right thing; and you can learn a lot from noticing which items never make it onto the list. It may be that you're never going to read Moby-Dick, or learn to knit. 

 

We can influence the future with choices like that, but Burkeman is at pains to point out that we never fully control it. Good news, though: "The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one–which means you have permission to stop engaging in it. The future just isn't the sort of thing you get to order around like that..." Being anxious about it is, therefore, a waste of time in the present, which is actually where we live. There's nowhere else. 

 

Don't be anxious about that, either! To treat being in the moment as yet another goal is to miss the point. "[T]he attempt to be here now feels not so much relaxing as rather strenuous–and it turns out that trying to have the most intense possible present-moment experience is a surefire way to fail." Perhaps a better way to view it is that we should sometimes do things for their own sake. Going for a walk on a chilly day, hanging out with a friend, or noodling on the guitar can't win you any points in the scorekeeping of life, but they may be valuable for their own sake.

 

As a measure of value, you could do worse: seek out the things that are worth the time they take. Relish the sacrifices you make in the service of joy, fun, or companionship. You only get one life, but if you do it right, one is enough.

Three Books on Race

White Fragility: Why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism

Robin Diangelo (Beacon Press, 2018)

 

You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories about Racism

Amber Ruffin & Lacey Lamar (Grand Central Publishing, 2021)

 

Don't Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body

Savala Nolan (Simon & Schuster, 2021)

 

I'm reviewing three books this month, just for the Goldilocks fun of it.

Robin Diangelo is, among other things, a diversity trainer. That is, she goes into workplaces to educate people–white people– about racism; and she almost always meets resistance. White Fragility is about what that resistance is made of. Consider:

(1) You are a terrible person because you're a racist.

(2) You were socialized in a pervasive and pernicious social system that benefits you as a white person, and that system is invisible to you.

Again and again, Diangelo has spoken with people who hear (2) and react as though she had said (1). Nobody wants to be guilty of racism, and we guard ourselves against overtly demonstrating it; but not using openly racist language is much too low a bar. If we get to the point of acknowledging that the system has been helping us all our lives, what are we supposed to do about it? We can't go back and make FDR include people of color in the New Deal, even if the Southern senators of the day would have let him. What's really possible? For one thing, we can educate ourselves; and for another, we can work on letting go of the fragility that makes any possible feedback feel like a direct attack on our character.

On the whole, though, I don't recommend White Fragility as a reading experience, unless you are already accustomed to the way sociologists write. Diangelo has good reason for speaking in generalizations, but as a consequence, her writing doesn't offer enough personal stories to make enjoyable reading. It's Too Hard.

By contrast, Amber Ruffin and her older sister, Lacey Lamar, have gone all the way Soft. This book would actually be a pretty good place to start the study suggested by White Fragility. Ruffin has a successful career writing comedy, notably on Late Night with Seth Meyers, where she occasionally appears alongside the host. Her position as the only Black woman in the room has yielded her a whole lot of material, but in this book, she's focused on her sister's life in Omaha, where they grew up. It's true, you'll never believe what happens to Lacey.

Lacey asks the price of some luxury good, and is told, not the price, but "You can't afford it." Clothing, furniture, a watch, it doesn't matter: she's Black, so she's automatically poor. She attends a seminar or a fund-raiser: the door-keeper argues with her instead of finding her name on the list. As a teen, she gets harassed by JC Penney security so often, she knows their secret knock. They once tried to pick her up when she hadn't even been in their store. Amber wants us to know this: "When you hear these stories and think, None of these stories are okay, you are right. And when you hear these stories and think, Dang, that's hilarious, you are right. They're both."

Savala Nolan writes essays from the in-between spaces of race, economic circumstance, and body composition. She's a light-skinned Black woman with a law degree, descended from both enslaved people and enslavers; she's gained and lost large amounts of weight all her life.

Let me give Don't Let It Get You Down the last word: "Black is as ingenious, resourceful, dexterous, and inventive as a double agent. Black people of all hues, geographies, dispositions, and beliefs can see each other, can switch codes, can perform and improv, and, just as women know something about gender that is often a mystery to men, Black people know more about whiteness–its inner workings; its underbelly; its face without makeup, tabloid style; the wrappers and trinkets at the bottom of its purse; its longings and emptiness–than whiteness may ever know about itself."

Just Right. 

 

 

Any Good Books, September 2022

 

If Then

If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

Jill Lepore (Liveright, 2020)

The Simulmatics Corporation existed for only eleven years, from 1959 to 1970; it absorbed large amounts of money from the Democratic Party and the Defense Department, but at the end, its 'automatic simulation' business went abruptly out of fashion, and it dissolved in bankruptcy. Yet this shoestring operation was involved, or implicated, in several of the most significant developments of the decade. "It's as if Simulmatics had left behind not a narrative of the decade but a box of punch cards waiting to be decoded, a cryptic chronicle of the unmaking of American politics."

The computer image is perfectly apt, because the first big project the corporation undertook was to build a computer model of the American electorate, for purposes of testing out Democratic positions for the 1960 election. Using Gallup and Roper polls from the preceding decade, they sorted the voters into 480 types, by gender, race, religion, party, and economic circumstance; these types could then be correlated with voting results from the same years. They made their first report to the Adlai Stevenson campaign, emphasizing the importance of black voters in the election, and suggesting that the party "could succeed in winning back black voters who'd defected to the GOP only by taking a stronger position on civil rights. It might not have seemed to require a team of behavioral scientists, an IBM 704, and $65,000 to make this case, but, arguably, it had."

The Democrats were in transition from the age of Adlai Stevenson, a reluctant candidate who could be nominated only in a party convention, to the age of Kennedy, whose advantage came from aggressive campaigning in the primaries. When Kennedy took the nomination, Simulmatics followed. They "recommended that Kennedy confront the religious issue head-on, not to avert criticism but to incite it." By making the issue salient, Kennedy could draw the sympathy of other religious minorities. Again, you might not have needed a simulation to see this, and there's no way to know what difference it really made.

It is hard to remember what a novelty this use of computers was. (Simulmatics didn't actually own a computer yet; they rented time on one of the few big IBM machines in New York City.) Was it cheating, in some way? Unethical, or just too clever by half? But from that day to this, the capacity to predict, and target, voter behavior has increased at the same dizzying rate as computer speed itself.

The Simulmatics Corporation was actually a group of men with widely varying personal assets: Ed Greenfield was an advertising man, handsome and charming–"and like all ad men, he sold nothing so well as himself." Eugene Burdick was a political theorist, with a successful career in fiction on the side; Ithiel de Sola Pool was a quantitative behavioral scientist who had worked in the Pentagon. There was a computer wizard, Alex Berstein, and a mathematical genius called Wild Bill McPhee. Lepore lets us into their backgrounds, their marriages, and the other places their work took them.

For Ithiel de Sola Pool, that was Vietnam. The Pentagon hired Simulmatics to try to quantify the winning of hearts and minds. Pool was a dedicated anti-communist, but the project was farcical from the start. The behavioral scientists were asking the wrong questions, by means of bewildered translators, of people who had no reason to trust them. Seldom has 'garbage in, garbage out' been a more appropriate image.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and General William Westmoreland, assisted by the RAND corporation, had established a way of thinking based on numbers and more numbers. "Vietnam would be the test of McNamara's policy, and of RAND and Simulmatics' behavioral science: decision by numbers, knowledge without humanity, the future in figures. It would fail. It would also endure. In the twenty-first century, it would organize daily life, politics, war, commerce. Everything."

This book is not comforting, but it sure does explain a lot. It's bad news, but good information.

The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon

The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened 

Bill McKibben (Henry Holt and Company, 2022) 

       Bill McKibben moved to Lexington, Massachusetts in 1970, when he was ten. In their thirty-thousand-dollar house on Middle Street, their family of four represented the archetype of the American Dream. The town of Lexington also makes a pretty fair proxy for American suburbia, though its place in colonial and revolutionary history adds a dimension that McKibben uses to advantage in his story. He's not primarily engaged in memoir, but what he does have to say explains a lot about his career as a journalist and activist. 

        He was a teenage journalist, covering the 1978 gas crisis for the local suburban paper, before he ever got to the Harvard Crimson, and subsequently the New Yorker. "Along with gas station owners, I also got to interview the number three man in the country's energy department. John Deutch was an MIT professor, and in between Washington stints he lived in Lexington, so I talked with him the week before his boss, President Carter, was to give a nationwide address on energy conservation." Jimmy Carter had at least some grasp of how the country needed to reinvent itself in response to changing ecological conditions, but he lost the election to a sunny, confident huckster whose attitude toward such matters was 'nothing to see here.' Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House, and Ronald Reagan took them down. 

         Another job McKibben held in high school was being a tour guide on the Lexington Battle Green, purveying tales of long-ago glory for tips from tourists. The patriotism he felt on the Green has only grown, though it's been complicated by more thought about who was left out of the stories. "If the American origin story that you're telling over and over involves a small force of ill-trained men who, feeling oppressed, decide to take on the greatest empire in the world–well, that story leaves you believing that dissent can be patriotic, that American history is ultimately the story of the underdog, that a sense of shared community and a willingness to sacrifice for it defines who we are." 

          McKibben got an early taste of such willingness on Memorial Day weekend of 1971, when Vietnam War protesters, led by a young John Kerry, came to town. A group following Paul Revere's ride in reverse broke Lexington's curfew by camping out in the middle of town; the police rounded up 458 protesters, of whom more than a third were local townspeople, including McKibben's father. He got out in the morning, and they all went to church, but he did put himself on the line, as his son has done many times since, protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline and the like. 

       That same year, as he learned while researching this book, Lexington's citizens voted to overturn a rezoning proposal for a townhouse development that would have provided some housing for lower-income families. In the pulpits, and in the letters pages of the paper, Lexingtonians were all for diversity and inclusion; in the privacy of the voting booth, they were for protecting property values. And why not? They had great schools, a fine library, sports teams and station wagons, all the comforts of home. Partly because of the young Bill McKibben, in fact, they had an award-winning high school debate team, among all the other stepping stones to brand-name college educations. 

          The repercussions of this kind of thinking, spread over the intervening decades, have only increased the gap between the haves and the have-nots. That three-bedroom house on Middle Street is worth well over a million dollars today; but if you never had the chance to buy in in the sixties, what good is that to you? A substantial part of the difference, of course, is a residue of racial red-lining from the middle of the century, and all the doors closed to Black veterans who should have been able to use GI benefits to improve their lot in life. McKibben imagines what a compensatory wealth transfer would look like. 

          One big change in our adult lifetimes is the decline of main-line Protestant denominations and the rise of independent evangelical churches. McKibben has seen it for a long time: he wrote an article for the Crimson about Jim Bakker and his PTL Club, with a predictable degree of mockery; but he did find the people there both sincere and kind. Evangelicalism, he says, may just be part of a larger story of growing hyper-individualism in our time. The youth group trips he used to take, to paint houses and–literally–sing Kumbaya, pointed to a form of religion that was about more than saving individual souls. Perhaps it still could be. The last chapter is a call for people born under Truman and Eisenhower to give something real back. "But older people also have something beyond their kids and grandkids to think about. We also have the chance to partially redeem some sense of our history as Americans, and, for those to whom it matters, as Christians."

 

Any Good Books, July 2022 

Until That Good Day

Until That Good Day

Marjorie Kemper (2003, St. Martin's Press)

     "The coffin was in the living room." What a promising way to start a story! The time is 1928; the place, Myrtle, Louisiana. Five-year-old Vivian is old enough, and perspicacious enough, to spot the paradox of putting the dead in the living room. Her father is a traveling man, peddling groceries to small shops in tiny towns from Mississippi to Arkansas, so Vivian and her eight year old sister Clara move into their grandmother's quiet, gloomy house. In another year, Grandmother Washington, too, is dead, and John Washington goes looking for a wife. When he tells his children he's found one, they respond in character: "Clara wore a sweet little smile on her face the way she might have worn a flower in her hair. Vivian studied the rug and kicked her heels against the base of the sofa. Hard, enjoying the thudding sound it made."

      Antoinette Malone is not someone who could ever replace his first wife, Della, in John's heart. She is young, tiny, beautiful, vain, and stupid. She doesn't much care to be a step-mother, so John sends Clara to a convent school in New Orleans, and Vivian to live with his wife's family. "As time passed, John, without knowing that he did it, began to think of Vivian as a Malone. That this hurt and dismayed his daughter past all reckoning, John was too busy with his own life and with Antoinette and their frenetic new life together to notice."

      Life at the Malones has its compensations for Vivian. Mrs. Malone, the mother of eight, is warm and welcoming. Her widowed father lives under the stairs in some sort of broom closet. " 'He's no trouble,' Mrs. Malone often said of her father, and he wasn't; a heavy drinker and an inveterate gambler, he came home only to sleep off a bender or to hide from his creditors." Vivian finds him soothing, his taciturnity a relief from the chaos of the household. The youngest Malone, Willie, is Vivian's age. He's fragile and pale, and given to sick headaches, but the two form the bond common to outcasts and observers. Clara, meanwhile, develops a crush on Maureen Malone, who is blonde and beautiful, and plays the piano like an angel.

     Antoinette is happy spending John's money, and they build a new house across town from the Malones, so the girls can come live with her and John, awkward as that might be. Mama Malone helps her daughter hire live-in help, in the person of Emmy Clegern. Antoinette has a horror of black people–they threaten her in her dreams–but Emmy, with her twisted lip, should at least be safe from John's wandering eye, in case he has one. She has no idea that in Sylvan, Louisiana, "an island bounded on three sides by cotton, and on the fourth by piney woods," John has a mistress. Odessa is a young black woman who'd like to move far beyond Sylvan; John's gift of his mother's phonograph set lets her take the first steps, immersing herself in Madame Butterfly.

     It's not too hard for John Washington to keep his secrets, because he's always been a traveler. "His territory was his true home, and not even Della, on her best day, had been able to compete with it. Nowadays, the tiny Antoinette disappeared from his mind seconds after he got behind the wheel." Life in Myrtle comes with costs and entanglements, but the road, "particularly in the mornings, stretched out before John Washington like the promise of Life Everlasting."

     While he's gone, Antoinette is "thrown back on her own resources. Of which she had very few. She had no close friends and no outside interests save her house and her clothes–and subordinate to these, John." So, like her grandmother before her, she spends a lot of time sleeping. Emmy keeps Clara and Vivian quiet when they come in from school, because Antoinette is quite erratic–possibly crazy–when she's roused unexpectedly.

     Marjorie Kemper's treatment of this unstable situation is utterly artful, combining compassion and knowingness. I'm reminded of Flannery O'Connor, quoting a neighbor to whom she had shown some of her stories: “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do." Probably the more apt comparison, though, would be Eudora Welty. She'd have recognized Myrtle, and the need to occasionally leave Myrtle for New Orleans; and she'd have appreciated the transition from what actually happens to what the town will say about it in later years, and what it will forget.

     One of my pre-readers asked the very reasonable question of why I'm reviewing a novel, which I don't usually do. That is to say, why this one? I first noticed Marjorie Kemper for a story in The Sun, "At Prayer Level," which has stuck with me. She's no longer with us, but I'm seeking out her other work, and it's all rewarding. A God-like narrator who has compassion for the wise and the foolish, the drunkard and the little child, somehow gives me hope.

https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/415/at-prayer-level

Any Good Books, email 1 June 2022

Pastrix & Accidental Saints

Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint (Jericho Books, 2013)

Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People (Convergent Books, 2015)

Nadia Bolz-Weber

Nadia Bolz-Weber seems like an unlikely star among Lutheran pastors. By her own account, she's a cynic with anger issues and a foul mouth, who devoted her early adult life to drugs, booze, and tattoos. She's now in great demand as a speaker and preacher, and the author of two very popular memoirs. She's also the founding pastor of a Lutheran mission church called House for All Sinners and Saints, in Denver, Colorado.

Pastrix starts with a precocious twelve-year-old Nadia in Sunday School, discovering that she knew more about the Bible than her teacher; in the Church of Christ, this was not a woman's place, and she soon smart-mouthed herself right out of the denomination. She was left with an image of God as punitive, angry, and judgmental, consumed with drawing lines between saints and sinners. "It did not seem to me, even back then, that God's grace or the radical love of Jesus was what united people in the Church of Christ; it was their ability to be good. Or at least their ability to appear good. And not everyone can pull that off."

When Nadia walked away from striving to appear good, she opened Pandora's box: cursing, listening to punk rock, smoking pot, drinking, dropping out of college, living in a commune, and hanging out with Wiccan lesbians. At the end of 1991, however, she was pulled aside from the path of alcoholic destruction: "It was as if God abruptly, even rudely, interrupted my life." God preferred that she not be dead by thirty, because he (so to speak) had another plan for her life, in which she would recognize grace, and feel compelled to talk about it.

Four years into sobriety, she met the man who would become her husband, who was studying in a Lutheran seminary. That sounds like more of God's handiwork, because the Lutheran church offered her a completely different picture of how God sees the world, and what we're supposed to do about it.

The most obvious difference was the liturgy, a structure of themes and variations shared through centuries of tradition and practice. From week to week, some prayers are the same, and others change with the seasons, from Advent through Christmas, Epiphany, Lent and Easter. Following those same seasons, scripture readings span a three year cycle, a lectionary, observed in common by Catholics, Anglicans, and several Protestant denominations. This discipline is somehow just as liberating as it constraining. We don't have to figure out how to pray from scratch, or get stuck in the favorite Bible verses of our local preacher.

The other benefit of liturgy is that it requires community. It might be possible to be spiritual all by yourself, but you can't be religious. Bolz-Weber says, in Accidental Saints, "Spiritual feels individual and escapist. But to be religious (despite all the negative associations with that word) is to be human in the midst of other humans who are as equally messed up and obnoxious and forgiven as ourselves." That's what makes them qualified to share our joys, hear our confessions, and offer us God's forgiveness.

My favorite story in Accidental Saints is about the time Bolz-Weber agreed to give a talk to a national gathering of Lutheran youth. This was outside her comfort zone, since her regular congregants are nearly all adults, and she was nervous about how uncool she'd doubtless appear. On the plane, she sat next to a girl with pink bangs, in whose surly shyness she recognized her own teenage self. Suddenly, even in the unreal environment of the Superdome, it was simple: "I told them that this is a God who has always used imperfect people, that this is a God who walked among us and who ate with all the wrong people and kissed lepers...I told them that this God has never made sense."

But she made sense that night to a multitude of teenagers, and she does to me, too.

 

Email, Any Good Books, May 1 2022

Orwell's Roses

Orwell's Roses

Rebecca Solnit (Viking, 2021)

I'm always drawn to books that serve as portals to the Infinite Library, and this one is a classic. Delightful in its own right, it would also serve well as a companion to a book club or an adult education class reading George Orwell. Orwell's Roses is lightly biographical, but far more than that; Rebecca Solnit is the contemporary writer who can actually match and follow Orwell's range of interests, small and large, botanical and political.

I read Orwell in high school, like most people perhaps, and some of the essays still linger in mind: "Such, such were the joys," an essay about the misery of his school days, being crammed with facts for the entrance exams to Eton; "Shooting an Elephant," about serving in Burma as a colonial policeman; and "Politics and the English Language," surely still a guide to the wiles of propaganda. But now I'd want to read Homage to Catalonia alongside other people's war stories, and side by side with Animal Farm, to find out how Trotsky figures in both.

Orwell planted the roses of the title in 1936. Later the same year, he went to Spain to fight on the Loyalist side against Franco, an experience that deeply informed him as a thinker and a writer. Ten years later, he wrote about the roses and their outsized return on investment: "One of the fruit trees and one of the rose bushes died, but the rest are all flourishing. The sum total is five fruit trees, seven roses and two gooseberry bushes, all for twelve and sixpence."

Solnit was actually looking for those trees when she stopped, on her way from London to Cambridge, in the tiny Hertfordshire village of Wallington, to which Orwell and his wife moved in 1936. The trees are gone, but two of the roses still bear flowers. Solnit felt a 'joyous exaltation' to stand in their presence and realize that "this man most famous for his prescient scrutiny of totalitarianism and propaganda, for facing unpleasant facts, for a spare prose style and an unyielding political vision, had planted roses." As she will discover, and demonstrate, Orwell lets nature and beauty into his writing, even at its grimmest.

In the 1940's, many of his essays were published in Tribune, a socialist weekly. Then as now, the political Left had a puritanical, ascetic streak, which Orwell resisted head on: "...is it politically reprehensible...to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird's song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is no doubt that many people think so." At the heart of such idiosyncratic, personal pleasures lies a fundamental sense of liberty. There must always be things, however small and transient, that no one can take away from us; many of the best of them were not given to us by people in the first place.

At the same time, Solnit is looking into the largest possible distances and spans of time. What trees are still standing that your grandparents might have planted? No, go back to the Sequoias of Solnit's native California, standing for thousands of years. No, go back to the Carboniferous period, three hundred million years ago, when the sunlight was captured that would become the coal and oil deposits we've been burning for the past three hundred years.

And, much as Orwell reported on the northern coal mines in The Road to Wigan Pier, Solnit goes to Colombia to look into the industrial growing of roses for the North American market. How did you think those millions of dozens of roses got to all the local florists for Mothers' Day? It's a far cry from picking up a few plants at Woolworth's.

Still, at least as far back as 1910, 'Bread and Roses' have been paired as necessities of life worth fighting for. "Bread fed the body, roses fed something subtler: not just hearts, but imaginations, psyches, senses, identities. It was a pretty slogan but a fierce argument that more than survival and bodily well-being were needed and were being demanded as a right." Orwell may not have known the slogan, but he was evidently in full sympathy with what it stands for. In one of his greatest essays, "Why I Write," he says this: "So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information." What a worthy ambition!

 

 

Any Good Books, April 2022, by email

 

One Summer: America, 1927

One Summer: America, 1927

Bill Bryson (2013, Doubleday)

     Any moment can be a historic moment, of course, and the world is always changing; but it's pretty hard to beat Bill Bryson's choice of 1927 as the year that changed everything. It would also be pretty hard to beat Bryson's gift for drawing characters and spinning narratives out of the American scene of the time. Giants walked the earth - Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Al Capone, and, probably first of all, Charles A. Lindbergh.

     At 7:52 on May 20, Lindbergh took off from a muddy runway at Roosevelt Field on Long Island, barely clearing the telephone wires in his path. 33 hours, 30 minutes, and 29.8 seconds later, he touched down at Le Bourget, outside of Paris, France. "In that instant, a pulse of joy swept around the earth. Within minutes the whole of America knew he was safe in Paris." He had flown by dead reckoning through the night, in a cloth-skinned plane with no way of looking out the front. It was a truly brilliant feat of aviation. The degree of fame that came with the feat was unprecedented, too. The boyish twenty-five-year old from a modest Minnesota background was suddenly unable to do anything or go anywhere without an adoring crowd turning up.

     One reason that was true was that radio had established a foothold in the United States, thanks in large part to a man named David Sarnoff, who saw the possibilities of the medium and helped to found the National Broadcasting Company. Sarnoff also grasped that hearing advertisements was a price audiences did not particularly mind paying; NBC sold ten million dollars worth of advertising in its second year on the air, and continued to dominate the business through the Depression, as newspapers failed on every side.

     The automotive industry was also hitting its stride, which would change the American landscape profoundly. Henry Ford gets a chapter, full of glorious eccentricity and questionable business sense. By 1927, Chrysler and General Motors were stealing a march on Ford, but he had already made his mark by bringing cars within the reach of ordinary working people, permitting them to move out of cities.

     The Twenties were a violent time, more than we now remember. Prohibition, of course, made criminals of citizens, and heroes of criminals. Anarchists planted bombs, sometimes blowing themselves up in the process. Nicolo Sacco and Bart Vanzetti were executed in 1927 for a robbery that took place in 1920, or perhaps for being immigrants with dangerously radical friends; historians haven't quite made up their minds. The Ku Klux Klan enforced not just segregation, but subjugation. "The Klan hated everybody, but it did so in ways strategically contrived to reflect regional biases, so that it focused on Catholics and Jews in the Midwest, Orientals and Catholics in the Far West, Jews and southern Europeans in the East, and blacks everywhere."

     Those biases were found in more respectable circles as well, in the form of a eugenics movement that bore the imprimatur of scientists from the leading universities. In the spring of 1927, by a vote of 8-1, the U.S. Supreme Court permitted a woman to be sterilized on the grounds of being feeble-minded. Scientific theories about the superiority of northern Europeans over Jews, southern and eastern Europeans, Asians and Africans were as spurious as they were self-interested, but they influenced housing segregation in the U.S., and encouraged the Nazis in some of their most deranged practices.

      For all that, the mood of this book is cheerful, and occasionally joyful. Babe Ruth's mighty bat brought delight to thousands; the golden age of the movies was just getting started; and Charles Lindbergh may have had a miserable time being thrust into the limelight, but his achievement made America feel like anything was possible.

 

 

Any Good Books, 1 March 2022

 

Empire of Pain

 Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

Patrick Radden Keefe (2021, Doubleday)

    Isaac and Sophie Sackler, hard-working eastern European immigrants to Brooklyn, achieved a version of the American dream: they had three sons who grew up to be doctors. Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond would also leave lasting marks on the pharmaceutical industry, and, through their extravagant philanthropy, on museums and educational institutions across the world. There is, however, a movement afoot to take their names off of some of those edifices, because their name has finally been associated with the dangerous drugs they sold, to the detriment of millions.

  The eldest Sackler brother, Arthur, had a truly remarkable degree of entrepreneurial energy. Even in high school, he edited publications and hustled for advertising sales, delivered flowers, and had a paper route; when his plate was full, he enlisted his brothers to step into his old jobs. One of his most profitable sidelines, by the time he got to medical school, was copywriting for a drug company. In 1942, he joined the William Douglas McAdams agency, which specialized in pharmaceutical advertising; within five years, he bought the founder out, and was running the show. His clients were among the first to send out dozens, then hundreds, of sales reps, bringing free lunches and official-looking medical literature into doctors' offices, in the interest of persuading them to prescribe a particular drug by brand name.

   Always in search of synergy, Arthur also started a weekly newspaper called the Medical Tribune. "The whole purpose was to reach physicians and to influence them ('educate' them, Arthur would insist), so the Medical Tribune was subsidized by pharma ads and distributed for free." In his capacity as advertising guru for companies like Pfizer (Terramycin) and Hoffman-La Roche (Librium and Valium), he was his own best customer. He was also a secret partner in an ostensibly competitive ad agency, run by a friend who had once worked for him; it was a simpler way to handle competing products without a visible conflict of interest. And he bought a small drug company, Purdue Frederick, naming his brothers as equal partners.

    He needed Mortimer and Raymond to run that business as his own interest strayed into collecting Asian art, becoming a large force in the market; he had a special arrangement with the Metropolitan Museum to store as well as to display parts of his collection, and he gave them a wing to put an Egyptian temple in. Meanwhile, Purdue plodded along selling Betadine antiseptic and Senakot laxative. It was considered a minor part of Arthur's estate when he died in 1987, and his heirs were happy to sell their share to the younger brothers.

    By then Mortimer's daughter Kathe and Raymond's son Richard had found places in the company, and were moving it into the pain relief business. An English subsidiary had invented a way to coat tablets so that morphine could be dispensed by mouth, because the coating released the drug over time. Purdue released MS Contin in the United States, and it did very well, but it still had the scary reputation of morphine, considered a last resort drug. Richard Sackler pushed the R&D department for a new formulation that could both renew the patent exclusivity of the Contin coating, and gain acceptance for the wider world of pain sufferers. OxyContin was the time-release form of oxycodone, a chemical cousin of morphine and heroin, and it met those criteria very well. Though stronger than morphine, it was perceived as an ordinary painkiller, familiar from Percocet and Percodan pills. OxyContin came in much larger doses, however, marketed to last twelve hours.

   Real life was not so tidy. In many patients, the pills wore off in eight or ten hours; and the protective coating could be readily defeated by cutting or crushing the pills, leading to an immediate rush. In either case, withdrawal symptoms were miserable, and constantly on the verge of returning. An epidemic was born, as the Sacklers could very well have seen from their own sales figures, had they been willing to. As with Arthur Sackler and Valium, they tended to blame addicts for some character flaw, rather than considering the drugs themselves addictive. They probably didn't see themselves as addicted to the billions in profits, either.

   Patrick Radden Keefe has done a beautiful job of telling this harrowing story. He's got citations for every detail and anecdote, and they're stitched together very naturally. A friend I mentioned it to said the book sounded depressing, and I couldn't quite explain why it isn't. Maddening, maybe, and horrifying, but the misery of the victims is not the focus of the story. No, this book is about the shamelessness of the Sacklers: "They could produce a rehearsed simulacrum of human empathy, but they seemed incapable of comprehending their own role in the story, and impervious to any genuine moral epiphany." Lord have mercy.

 

 

Any Good Books, February 2022 by emair 2/1/22

 

Behind the Magic Curtain

Behind the Magic Curtain: Secrets, Spies, and Unsung White Allies of Birmingham's Civil Rights Days

T. K. Thorne (NewSouth Books, 2021)

There was no chance I wouldn't want to read Behind the Magic Curtain: Birmingham's history has always held a fascination for me, particularly the story of the years when I lived there but was too young to follow the world-changing events. In addition to familiar mayors, bishops, and department store owners, the book is full of people I knew growing up there, including friends of my parents or the parents of my friends.

I'm sorry I can't report better of it as a reading experience. It's clearly the product of extensive research, but the notes and quotes don't necessarily add up to a satisfying narrative, any more than a stack of boards make a house. There may actually be too many characters, some of whom are brought in for a single anecdote, then forgotten. Given that, a better final editorial pass would have been a big improvement, as would a more sedulous indexing job. (How do you quote Bear Bryant in the text, and omit him in the index?)

There is a central character, however, and I didn't know about him before. Tom Lankford was the police beat reporter for the Birmingham News, reporting to Vincent Townsend, Sr., the general manager and assistant to the publisher. Townsend assigned Lankford, just a couple of years out of journalism school, to shadow Eugene "Bull" Connor and the Birmingham Police Department. This put him in a position to exchange favors with City Hall staff and police officers at all levels, and T. K. Thorne is not loath to admit that some of what he did fell outside the bounds of journalistic ethics. His first loyalty was to Townsend, but information flowed in nonstandard ways; he used hidden microphones and taping systems to find out about both the Ku Klux Klan and the civil rights leaders, often to the benefit of the police or Bull Connor. Lankford was on the spot when the Freedom Riders arrived at Birmingham's Trailways bus station, avoiding a Klan beating only because one of their number (who was an FBI spy, to boot) recognized him as "Bull's boy."

The whole story features strange bedfellows, and people who could have been allies but weren't. On the Black side, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth had lawsuits and protests going before Martin Luther King ever came to town, only to have King getting the lion's share of attention in 1963. Thorne reprints the Birmingham Ministers' Letters of January and April of 1963, to which King's Letter from the Birmingham Jail was a response; she assumes the reader knows or can look up King's letter. In the climate of violence caused by White supremacists, the pastors, bishops, and one rabbi were offering utterly insufficient solutions for their Black neighbors: "When rights are consistently denied, a cause should be pressed in the courts and in negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets." Even this was enough to stir up protests from their white parishioners, and they were utterly wounded when King said he needed much more, much sooner.

The other development in the spring of 1963 was an electoral impasse. The preceding November, voters had narrowly endorsed a change of governance from a system with three commissioners – Bull Connor was one of these – to a mayor and city council system. The mayoral election of March fifth resulted in a runoff between Bull Connor and Albert Boutwell; on April second, Connor lost, and refused to accept the results. The next day, Black students from Miles College began a program of sit-ins and boycotts directly challenging segregation. It was to be a long and raucous summer of marches, to the consternation of White moderates. David Vann, a lawyer who would later be mayor, said, "This is the most cruel and vicious thing that has ever happened in Birmingham." Well, no, sir, there were beatings, bullets, and bombs you could put up against it, if you really wanted to talk about cruelty.

The inconvenient timing of the protests was part of the point, not least because the Black leadership reckoned correctly that Bull Connor would not respond with moderation. Police dogs and fire hoses wielded on national television against schoolchildren would have more impact in Washington, D.C., than all the lawsuits and committee meetings of the preceding years. The September bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which notoriously killed four young girls, would make more of a difference to the consciences of White Birmingham. There was still a very long way to go.

Other books that I liked better:

https://anygoodbooks-mixedreviews.blogspot.com/search/label/Diane%20McWhorter

https://anygoodbooks-mixedreviews.blogspot.com/search/label/Hank%20Klibanoff

 

Any Good Books, January 2022

published by email 1/1/22