Let Me Tell You What I Mean

 Let Me Tell You What I Mean

Joan Didion (Vintage, 2021)

        Some writers, and I think Joan Didion is one of them, ought never to go out of print. Let Me Tell You What I Mean is a collection of essays otherwise uncollected; this is less like the cutting room floor than a release of studio tapes of a classic band, fooling around and finding their greatness.

        I don’t exactly mean fooling around, of course. These essays were professional work, half of them written for the Saturday Evening Post, which was still published every other week in the nineteen-sixties. She’s always an economical writer, and these two-thousand-word pieces make every word pay.

        One of her subjects, here as always, is California. “A Trip to Xanadu” brings us to the Hearst castle, visible from Highway 1 as a vision to enchant children. “San Simeon was, moreover, exactly the castle a child would build, if a child had $220 million and could spend $40 million of it on a castle: a sand castle, an implausibility, a place swimming in warm golden light and theatrical mists, a pleasure dome decreed by a man who insisted, out of the one dark fear we all know about, that all the surfaces be gay and brilliant and playful.” The castle was given to the state, and kept up as one more rich man’s estate, with civil-service guides who are “treasuries of fact: 2,144 rose bushes in Mr. Hearst’s gardens, 5,400 volumes in Mr. Hearst’s private library…” but on the whole, she thinks, seeing the distant castle in the sky may have been the more satisfying experience.

        Her uncanny knowingness about the world we live in shows up in “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice.” Writing in 1968 about the 1952 experience of not getting into Stanford, she thinks “it must be more difficult for children I know now, children whose lives from the age of two or three are a series of perilously programmed steps, each of which must be successfully negotiated in order to avoid just such a letter as mine from one or another of the Rixford K. Snyders of the world.” Lord have mercy, those children are, at least, the grandparents of the current swarm of seventeen-year-olds chasing that brass ring, and the odds have only gotten worse. (Didion herself took a few junior college classes, and went on to Berkeley the next year; no harm done.)

        As you might expect, she writes about writing in a most matter-of-fact yet illuminating way. In her twenties, she worked at Vogue, writing the pretty copy for the pretty photographs. “It is easy to make light of this kind of ‘writing,’ and I mention it specifically because I do not make light of it at all: it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words, a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page.” It was a kind of boot camp, working not just by the inch but by the character. “All this was tonic, particularly to someone who had labored for some years under the delusion that to set two sentences side by side was to risk having the result compared widely and unfavorably to The Golden Bowl.”

        I made two discoveries while working on this: that my library, through the Libby app, can get me five or six other collections of Didion’s work as e-books; and that the venerable Saturday Evening Post still exists. It’s now published six times a year by a non-profit corporation, which also offers a website with the complete archives—sign me up!

        From the land of week-old snow, stay warm, my friends.

Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine

Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine

Gail Honeyman (2017; Penguin, 2018)

      I was raised with this lesson in perspective, presented as a model of the three persons of the nominative case: “She is neurotic; You are tetchy; I am perfectly all right, thank you very much.” That’s what I expected from the title, and this novel delivers. Eleanor Oliphant (Ms.), is judgmental and persnickety, and a thoroughly unreliable narrator. This can mainly be blamed on her mother, who was pretty damned unreliable herself, but also a fount of snobbish views and advice.

     The effect is comic, on the whole, especially when the contradiction pays off immediately. Eleanor is obviously the weirdest person in her office, but that fact is not part of her world view. “Their laughter seemed to have turned into low whispering now. It never ceases to amaze me, the things they find interesting, amusing or unusual. I can only assume they’ve led very sheltered lives.” Well, that’s as may be, but it’s pretty rich coming from someone who has never had a guest in her flat, or gone out to a pub with a friend.

     The story unfolds very deliberately, so I’m wary of spoilers, but there are some dark flashes right from the start. Her employment history, for instance: “Bob, the owner, took me on not long after the office opened. I suppose he felt sorry for me. I had a degree in Classics and no work experience to speak of, and I turned up for the interview with a black eye, a couple of missing teeth and a broken arm.” Wait, what? That’s a different kind of rom com.

      Yet Eleanor is having something of a revitalization moment, a handsome local singer having caught her eye. She goes so far as to buy a home computer in order to cyber-stalk him. She’s not really focusing on how unlikely it is that such a one will choose a twenty-nine-year-old spinster with ancient scars on her face, even supposing she can arrange a chance meeting. It’s also rather unlikely that he is as charming as he is handsome, though time will tell.

     Meanwhile, Raymond, the new IT guy at work, has gotten Eleanor involved with a stranger, a man they called an ambulance for when he collapsed in the street. Raymond has the helpful instincts, and the cell phone, that she lacks; somehow he coaches her through hospital visits, and the social overtures the man’s family makes. She’s still muttering to herself about his wearing trainers all the time, and his casual texting habits, but she really needs a friend, and she accidentally finds a great one.

      Eleanor Oliphant, for all her quirks, is a sympathetic character. I think we can relate to her suspicion of the unknown, and her pleasure at softening to it. She has a friend in Raymond partly because he’s good at friendship, but also because she’s so peculiarly herself. Really, it gives me hope.

 

 

 

 

Any Good Books, August 2025

 

The Shakespeare Wars

 

Any Good Books, July 2025

The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascos, Palace Coups

Ron Rosenbaum (2006, Random House Paperback 2008)

        In 1970, Ron Rosenbaum was a young journalist, somewhat by accident. He had intended to get a graduate degree in English Literature from Yale, but was put off by the prevailing academic preference for abstraction, to the point of meaninglessness. He didn’t know much about Shakespeare, or have a theory about how it should be played, but he chanced to visit Stratford on Avon, and see the Peter Brook staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “I count it one of the greatest blessings of [my] life to have been there for that moment. I’d never experienced anything of such radiant clarity. To say it was ‘electrifying’ does not capture the effect; it was more like being struck by lightning.”

     William Shakespeare stands head and shoulders above the rest of English literature in the sheer amount that has been written about him and his work, especially in comparison to how little is actually known. (The Bible surpasses him, no doubt, but I can’t think of anything else.) We don’t know, and probably can’t, which edition comes closest to what he actually wrote. We have the canonical first Folio, published in 1623, when Shakespeare had been dead for seven years. There are also two Quarto versions, of which the second, from 1604, is considered the ‘good’ one. In the case of Hamlet, “while the Good Quarto has some 3,700 lines, the Bad Quarto has just 2,200 lines, many of them sounding like bad imitations of Shakespeare.”

     By what evidence, on what grounds, would you decide which Hamlet was the ‘real Hamlet’, the most genuinely Shakespearean? Is the flesh in Hamlet’s soliloquy “too, too ‘sullied’, or ‘solid’?” Or perhaps ‘sallied’? That’s a relatively well-known example, but they go on and on, and choices must be made. The number of man-years devoted to comparative editions is staggering, whether they are printed on facing pages, or enfolded, so that you can choose your own edition as you tiptoe through the variants. In case this isn’t complicated enough, the late-20th century Everyman edition undoes the prevailing modernization of spelling, uncovering more gems in the process.

     All this, before you ever get to what is seen on the stage, or, for that matter, the screen. “Drop everything, race to your video store and pick up a VHS or a DVD of Olivier’s Richard III.” (I shouldn’t joke about that – it’s not his fault I’m reading the book fifteen years late.) What you lose in reducing a play to the small screen, you gain in the closeups, and in the chance to see some of the greats doing great work.

     He’s persuaded by the movement to go back to treating the five-foot iambic line as the essential unit, and pausing between them, always; of course this only works if the pause is treated as the jumping off point for the next line, as though the actor is figuring out what to say next. One thing’s certain: if the actors don’t really understand what they’re saying, the audience won’t either.

     Rosenbaum treats all this as much more than a reporting job; I like a book in which the author is so soaked in his material. I could wish he’d had a more aggressive copy editor, and occasionally I got to his point before he did; no matter, they were generally interesting points in the end. I’m sure I’ll remember this book the next time Olivier’s Richard III gets to Turner Classic Movies.

Recitatif

Recitatif: A Story

Toni Morrison (1983. Knopf edition, with a forward by Zadie Smith, 2022.)

Toni Morrison’s only short story is the story of two girls, misplaced in an orphanage when they are eight years old. “We didn’t like each other all that much at first, but nobody else wanted to play with us because we weren’t real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were dumped.” Roberta’s mother is sick, and our narrator Twyla’s mother dances all night. So they’re put in a room together, and St. Bonny’s generally ignores them, with a little light bullying thrown in.

They are also outsiders because one is white and one is black. Morrison is deliberate about not saying which is which. She can reasonably assume that an American reader will immediately start looking for clues. (Zadie Smith’s introduction cites a study which shows that we all expect Twyla to be of our own race, at least at first.) This aspect of the story tends to become an abyss: the more we look into it, the more it looks back.

Morrison knows very well where the signifiers lie. She’s artful about their hair, their clothing, their taste in food. Which child is more likely illiterate? Which one gets excited about pink scallops on her Easter socks? What will happen when the sick mother and the dancing mother both come for Easter? Roberta’s mother brings a big lunch, and Twyla’s can’t manage it–is either of those situations racially marked?

The St. Bonny’s sojourn is just about four months for each of them, but they will meet again. When they’re about twenty, Twyla is a waitress at a Howard Johnson on the New York Thruway, and Roberta is on her way to see Hendrix. That’s too big a chasm to cross, but a dozen years later, their next meeting will lead to commiseration over coffee.

Roberta recognizes Twyla this time, in a grocery store in Newburgh. Roberta has married a rich man, while Twyla’s married to a fireman. Now they’ve come far enough to remember being dumped together in a safely distant way: “Maybe it was the thing itself. Just being there, together. Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew–how not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed.” Does this make them friends? I think that’s another open question. Could it? Should it?

 

Email, Any Good Books, June 2025

 

Ricordo’s Dream

 

Ricordo’s Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray

Nat Dyer (2025, Bristol University Press)

      In my second year of college, I spent considerable time in the company of economics students. One day I asked one of them to give me the ten-minute version of the introductory course. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Day one, Markets. Assume perfect information, and perfectly rational actors.’ ‘Okay,’ said I, ‘does it make any difference that neither of those things exists in real life?’ ‘Not really,’ he said, ‘we're just modeling.’ As it turns out, I was right to be suspicious. An awful lot of academic and professional economics rests on premises as illusory as those, and it makes a difference.

       In 1817, David Ricardo published a seminal work of economic theory, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Only Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, from forty years earlier, held anything like its influence on the next several decades of economic thinking. For thirty years, Ricardo had been a brilliant stock broker on London's exchange, before retiring to theorize in rural comfort. His friends included thinkers like Thomas Malthus and James Mill, whose son, John Stuart Mill, would build on Ricardo's work.

       The first four chapters of Ricardo's Dream delve into a famous theory of his, still cited today. In essays about international trade, he put forward the idea of 'comparative advantage', on a simplified model of two countries (England and Portugal) and two commodities (wine and cloth.) Using hypothetical man-hour numbers and some algebraic sleight of hand, Ricardo proved (so to speak) that England should produce cloth and ship it to Portugal. The Portuguese, in turn, should concentrate on wine-making, notwithstanding that they could likely produce their own cloth more cheaply. The example was salient because of the Methuen Treaty of 1703, which had formalized just such a relationship, so that England began consuming port instead of French wine, and the mills of northern England found a reliable market in Portugal.

      There’s quite an interesting story behind that story. First, the numbers in the equation were completely invented by Ricardo, as he freely admitted. Second, using man-hours only, without reference to wages or other costs of production, very likely introduced other errors; imagine a model that used miles per gallon as the sole factor in the cost of car ownership. Third, it’s a bad example of free trade in the global economy, because Portugal was not actually on an equal footing with England, for military and political reasons having to do with England’s long-running contest with France.

       Fourth, to consider only those two nations is to miss a major piece of the story: what were the Portuguese doing with all that cloth? They were trading it on the west coast of Africa for slaves, who were sent to Brazil to work in gold mines. The gold they produced made its way to England, to make up the trade balance between wine and cloth, amounting to many millions of pounds over the eighteenth century. All this is omitted from Ricardo’s deft little straw-man equation.

      Economics did become a more practical affair between the mid-nineteenth century and the Second World War. The middle chapters of the book name a few economists who were not averse to building theories on actual evidence; sometimes they even included the role of the government in business and economic life.

       Regrettably, I think, the past fifty years have seen a pronounced swing in the other direction, toward mathematical models that have taken on a life of their own. In particular, modern financial markets operate on the assumption that “market prices reflect instantly all available present and future information about the assets traded, allowing calculating traders to allocate money to the best and most efficient purposes. The only genuinely new information is that which cannot be predicted and is, therefore, by definition random, leading to limited price fluctuations.” Wouldn’t that be a nice safe world? It’s just not the one we live in, as nineteen-year-old me suspected.

        There’s an awful lot of dumb economic news these days. I found this book an entertaining way to get some perspective on it, even when it’s alarming to think about. If all we do–if all we can do–is extrapolate from what has come before, our predictive powers will never be that great.

 

 

Any Good Books, April/May 2025

 

Jackson, 1964

Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America

Calvin Trillin (Random House, 2016)

        Calvin Trillin spent his late twenties on the ‘seg beat’; first for Time’s Atlanta Bureau in 1960-61, then for the New Yorker, “in the days when race and the South were thought of as basically the same story by national magazines.” He covered sit-in movements, school desegregation in all sorts of places, voting drives and Freedom Rides. This collection of his New Yorker pieces brings them back as he originally wrote them, give or take a few redundancies.

       The South, of course, is not the only place with racial tensions: he also reports from Seattle, Newark, and Oshkosh. In New Orleans, there’s the black Mardi Gras parade, featuring King Zulu in a grass skirt, black-and-white face, and coconuts, though perhaps fewer stops at taverns than had one been the norm. Whether this is tradition, parody, good clean fun, or heinous racism, seems to be in the eye of the beholder.

       New Orleans is of particular interest because it has so many gradations of race. A piece from 1986 goes into the story of a woman who discovered that her birth certificate listed both of her parents as ‘colored.’ It’s not the sort of error, if such it was, that the responsible bureaucrat was willing to remedy with the stroke of a pen. Jack Westholz represented the vital records office, where “it was taken for granted that certain families had a traceable amount of black blood, and that it was up to the vital-records office to tell them apart. When it came to tracing traceable amounts, nobody ever accused the vital-records office of bureaucratic lethargy.” This is characteristically dry Trillin prose: the strain of the ridiculous is allowed to speak for itself. The matter didn’t make it to the United States Supreme Court, but not for lack of trying.

      When it comes to weird racial math, Boston holds up its end. The parking garage for the John Hancock tower had an awkwardly large restaurant space on its ground floor, which in 1976 was a discotheque known as Whimsey’s. Black people were not exactly barred from going to Whimsey’s, but they sometimes had trouble getting in – does anyone actually have three photo IDs? (When someone actually showed up with three, the bemused doorman let her in.) The Boston Licensing Board heard from enough unrelated complainants to suspend Whimsey’s license for a few days, which surely made absolutely no difference in the grand scheme of Boston’s racial troubles in the nineteen seventies.

      The title essay goes deep into the Mississippi Summer Project, as it’s coordinated by the Council of Federated Organizations. “As it happens, COFO is, for all practical purposes, a project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ...so the style-setters are the staff members of SNCC, which may once have been a coat-and-tie organization but is no longer.” By 1964, it’s an overalls-and-blue-workshirts organization, befitting its efforts in the poorest, most rural parts of the state; this also reflects the fact that coats and ties are not good for sleeping on the floor, when needs must. Trillin is following James Forman, the executive secretary of SNCC, and Robert Moses, who directs the Summer Project; they’re working on literacy education and voter registration, but somehow, much more than that. Moses says, “People say, ‘Why are you doing this? or ‘Why are you starting with this aspect? or ‘Where can this approach ever get you?’And we say, ‘What else would you have us do?’”

      From the state side, public school desegregation is seen as inevitable, “and about all that the last session of the legislature could think of to do about it was to provide tuition grants for those who wanted to attend private segregated schools.” How’s that! for an offhand remark with a very long tail. In 1995, he wrote about the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission’s trove of records, and the lawsuits trying to open them up. The lawsuits themselves pried loose some colorful secrets: “It is now known, for instance, that an early black applicant to the University of Southern Mississippi who was convicted of several crimes and thrown into prison was framed; an alternative plan was to murder him.”

      Calvin Trillin has produced many light-hearted books on eating, presidential foibles, and his late beloved wife, Alice. I would happily read him writing the phone book, so to speak; but on a subject so subtle and so complex, so tragic and so nonsensical, as race in America, his powers are at their best. 

 

Any Good Books, March 2025 by email

 

Pappyland

 

Any Good Books, February 2025

Pappyland: a Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

Wright Thompson (2020, Penguin Press)

 

         If you’re going to write a book about Kentucky, you might as well start at Churchill Downs, preferably during Derby Week, a quintessentially American meetingplace of genteel tradition and upstart gaucherie. “This new-money Derby attracts people who seem desperate for the lifestyle. The Day-trippers wear gangster suits and outlandish patterns and hats inappropriate to the latitude, temperature, or setting. It’s amateur hour. They hold their liquor like ninth graders.” (Ouch!) Behind the Derby where folks go to see and be seen, to gamble and drink, lie rivers of money, most of it new; and deep streams of knowledge about horses and their generations. Bringing in a Derby winner takes art, science, and very good luck.

 

         But Wright Thompson was there to write about bourbon, the other great heritage of old Kentucky. He was meeting up with one Julian P. Van Winkle III, a third-generation purveyor of fine bourbon; this is a generational story about both of them. 

 

         Whiskey’s been around since before Kentucky was a state. “Without modern supply chains, and because they were living on the edge of civilization, the farmers still couldn’t monetize all of their crop before it rotted…Soon whiskey was traded as a currency, avoiding government notes and any taxes associated with them, which is why the IRS has long been obsessed with chasing down moonshiners and bootleggers. To Kentuckians, that is a federal war on working rural families, no matter what it’s called in Washington. That’s corn and wheat, not rye.”

 

              The face of the original Julian Van Winkle appears on bottles of very fine bourbon. Pappy Van Winkle was a pioneer of the business, in a couple of ways: he was on the spot at the close of Prohibition to start producing whiskey as quickly as possible; and he was one of the first producers to use locally grown wheat. (Most bourbon, then as now, contains some rye, which is grown in the cooler climes of Pennsylvania and New York; as long as the mash bill –“the list of grains that get combined to create the mash that is the foundation for whiskey”–is more than fifty percent corn, it’s still bourbon.) 

 

             The result, in Pappy’s case, was legendary, but the next generation hit hard times for the bourbon business. The 1960’s, when the second generation took over, saw vodka and other spirits become dominant. In 1972, the family’s brands wound up being sold to a larger business, and so fell prey to a very common kind of short-term thinking. They didn’t know what they had. But whiskey, like race horses, is not a short-term business. It’s a long-term investment from fermentation, to distillation, to aging and bottling. And it’s never a sure thing.

 

             Julian III is on a mission to make bourbon as good as his grandfather’s, and he’s one of the few people in the world who could do it, because he remembers how it tastes. He has a partner doing the actual distilling, but he’ll get the last word. Thompson accompanies him around the state, into the past, looking into his and his family’s history. Along the way, naturally, a lot of whiskey is drunk, and a lot of stories are shared. It all sounds delicious.

 

                “It’s funny: when you start to learn about bourbon, you imagine it as an art, and the more you learn, the more you discover it’s a science. But there comes a point when even the experts dissemble and shrug and admit they don’t actually know how all those factors work together and interplay, and that’s when you start to see it as art again.”

Nature’s Mutiny

 Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present

Philipp Blom (German original, 2017; English translation by the author, Liveright, 2019)

     “A two-degree [Celsius] drop in annual mean temperature translates into almost three weeks of lost growing time, meaning that crops were very much slower to ripen, and sometimes failed to ripen at all.” From the 1560’s until the end of the following century, a period known as the Little Ice Age, unusual weather disrupted the patterns of agricultural and economic life that had obtained in Europe for the preceding thousand years. Some summers were hot and dry, while others seemed to barely come at all. Some winters were so frigid that the Thames bore thick enough ice to be used as a sort of fairground.

 

      This was a worldwide phenomenon. “There were reports of population collapse due to famine in Ming-period China, as well as murderous winters in North America and paltry harvests in India…” Philipp Blom concentrates on Europe’s history for a few obvious reasons. For one thing, we have the most complete records there, not only from individual diarists, but from business records, like those from vineyards that recorded the dates of the harvests and the amounts of the yields. Second, Blom is at home in German and English, but the contemporary Chinese or South American records would have come to him only heavily mediated.

 

     There’s certainly more than enough to say about Europe! The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe saw profound changes in how people lived. Recurrent crop failures strained local economies, both at the level of the hand-to-mouth peasant, and up the ladder, where the landowner couldn’t raise enough surplus from his tenants to pay his own obligations to the central government. At the same time, the local common space in which a peasant family could keep a cow or pig began to be seized by landowners, who found sheep or cattle easier and more profitable to manage than human beings. The feudal system, in which people were tied to a small geographic area and the social station they were born into, gave way to life in industrial towns or flourishing cities.

 

      To that broadly well-known story, Blom adds some captivating details. You may recall that the Spanish Armada of 1588 failed to invade and conquer Elizabethan England, despite mustering 130 ships and over ten thousand sailors and soldiers. In the English Channel, the Spanish ships were harassed and damaged by the English fleet, and threatened by its fireships, to avoid which many cut their anchors and fled. At last, they headed north, sailing the long way around the British Isles–only to encounter an arctic storm, with hurricane-force winds, on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. Only half of the ships limped back to Spain; the soldiers and crews were weak with illness and starvation.

   

       That military force was the largest seen in centuries, but it would not remain so. Modern weapons and modern tactics were developed together. “A victorious campaign, or even the capacity to deter potential invaders, required not only vast armies and fleets but also experts trained to control the complex logistics, constructions, tactics, supplies, and accounts, as well as vast amounts of treasure. Perhaps war really is the father of all things.” That is, modern warfare necessitated modern economics, in the form of mercantilism: an emerging middle class learned to manage tariffs, trade balances, and colonial administration.

 

     In the late sixteenth century, the Little Ice Age was seen as a religious problem, to be met with prayer, and desperate measures like witch-burning. Voltaire, Descartes, and their contemporaries would turn Europe toward rationality and the Enlightenment; Blom also introduces some other thinkers, largely written out of Enlightenment history, who might offer us alternatives to materialism and mercantilism, in case our current attempts attempts at dominating nature don’t work out so well.

 

    I recommend Nature’s Mutiny, though perhaps not as beach or casual reading; the writing is rich and dense, befitting its origin in German. Even if I don’t start ordering books from the twenty-page bibliography, I think I’ll be chewing on it for a while.

 

Any Good Books, January 2025 by email

 

The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

 The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

Wright Thompson (Penguin Press, 2024)

Journalist Wright Thompson hails from the Mississippi Delta, from the privileged land-owning class. In the early days of the Covid pandemic, he went home to live for a while, and found his next subject, indeed, his next obsession: the barn where Emmett Till was tortured and killed on the morning of August 28, 1955. Thompson didn’t grow up hearing anything about that event, though it happened twenty-three miles from his boyhood home. But then, he didn’t encounter the concept of lynching till he was seventeen.

The Barn is partly about maps. “The barn sits on the southwest quarter of Section 2, Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw Meridian.” This numbering comes from a scheme of Thomas Jefferson’s, to lay a grid across the whole country. This particular six by six mile township was home to one of the fathers of Jim Crow, and to Fannie Lou Hamer, who later worked to overthrow it. Confederate guerrilla chief Nathan Bedford Forrest traversed it while it was still thick with woods, the rich topsoil not yet put to commercial use. The mapping scheme enabled the acreage to be a commodity traded in Chicago and New York, somewhat in the manner of swampland in Florida. Wright follows the ownership of the land through various corporations, reaching all the way to Manchester, England, a global capital of textile production.

Wright deals in timelines, too. One reason the barn is important is that the narrative of Emmett Till’s last few days had a great gap in it. On Wednesday, August 24^th, Emmett and his cousins visited the Bryants' store in Money, where Emmett had fatefully whistled at Carolyn Bryant, who was working behind the counter; he was in the store with her for barely a minute, so some of the story she later told was clearly a lie. In the early hours of Sunday morning, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, entered the home of Till’s great-uncle and made off with him, but what happened next disappeared from the record. The barn on the Drew-Ruleville Road was then in the possession of another Milam brother; witnesses saw a green and white truck arrive, full of men, and heard Till’s cries of anguish.

Wright’s timeline extends forward: “The police arrested J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant for the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till. For a few news cycles the story got presented, even locally, as a pretty clear case of good versus evil, until the partisan political machine recast it as a battle between the NAACP and Mississippi white people.” Witnesses were intimidated, or taken offstage by putting them in jail under other names; those who did show up to say what they saw could never live in Mississippi again. After their acquittal, Milam and Bryant sold their story to Look magazine, in a version heavily influenced by the language of the defense lawyers.

Some of Wright’s companions in his research are activists who have been working to make the barn a place of memory. “The barn will not allow you to live free of the image of a tortured child. That, it turns out, is its curse but also its blessing. It will not let you go. Why was Emmett Till murdered? One cannot see the barn without being faced with that question.”

The last surviving people who knew him also want us to remember their friend Bobo, a funny, lively boy on the verge of manhood, who loved his mother. Mamie Till Mobley’s anger at his loss lit a fire under the civil rights movement, in ways that would not be stopped.

The Barn is a very fine piece of narrative journalism, and an even finer work of history. Wait for the paperback if you must, but read it.

 

Any Good Books, 

2 December 2024

 

This is your mind on Plants

This is Your Mind on Plants

Michael Pollan (Penguin Books, 2021)

       “The drug war’s simplistic account of what drugs do and are, as well as its insistence on lumping them all together under a single meaningless rubric, has for too long prevented us from thinking clearly about the meaning and potential of these very different substances. The legal status of this or that molecule is one of the least interesting thing about it.” Michael Pollan gives us a book in three essays about psychoactive substances, and our biological, social, historical, and legal relationships with them.

 

        The first essay is about opium. I clearly remember reading the original in Harper’s Magazine, more than 25 years ago. I’m glad to see it again, in a more complete form; in the1997 publication, Pollan censored his account of actually trying a tea made from the pods. The essay is partly about the determination of the US Drug Enforcement Agency to prevent citizens from discovering how easy it would be to obtain household supplies of opioids; in fact, the flowering plants found in our gardens are not botanically different from the dreaded opium poppies of Afghanistan and Turkey. 

 

         It’s also about Pollan’s awareness of the DEA, and the potentially serious consequences that could have befallen him. Those hinged on some constitutionally and philosophically knotty questions. How would the DEA determine that he had ‘knowingly’ or ‘intentionally’ planted the flowers to use them as drugs? Of course, confessing in a nationally published magazine might be considered something of a dead giveaway; but by now, the statute has run. As it turns out, of course, the opiates that were really destroying American lives were the pharmaceutically enhanced plagues of OxyContin and its ilk.

 

          The third essay concerns other mind-altering substances: those derived from cactus plants, such as peyote and mescaline. Pollan’s quest for information and experience was seriously disrupted by the start of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. It’s not impossible to use psychedelics alone, but the story he was after had more to do with the way indigenous people use them, at the intersection of religion and psychology. There’s politics, too; should the use of peyote be restricted to religious observances, and hence to indigenous people? Can white people use it without wrecking it, ecologically or socially?

 

           The middle essay is not about use of a drug, but about abstention: caffeine is one of the most widely used psychoactive materials, though one of the latest to come along. Coffee and tea reached London in the 1650s. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the arrival of caffeine in Europe changed...everything.” However hyperbolic that sounds, Pollan makes his case: “Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible whole new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too.” 

 

          This was the chapter in which I took the most interest, since I’m as implicated as the 90% of adults who use at least some caffeine; we always know when the next dose is due, and where we’re going to get it. How much of my brain power is owed to the magic stuff, and what would happen if the sleep deficit ever came due?

 

         Be that as it may, it’s always a pleasure to linger with Michael Pollan over a cup of tea, both for the sharp writing and for the wide-ranging view. 

 

 

Any Good Books, November 2024

 

A Stranger in the Kingdom

 

A Stranger in the Kingdom

Howard Frank Mosher (1989, Mariner edition 2002)

The late Howard Frank Mosher had a fine long career as chronicler of a fictionalized Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. You may think of downstate Vermont as rural and remote already, but the upper corner tucked between the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Green Mountains of Vermont is significantly more so. Mosher populates his background history with indigenous people, escaped survivors of the Underground Railroad, the occasional Gypsy, and six or so generations of the Kinneson family. 

 

Kingdom County would be renowned, if anyone had ever heard of it, for deer hunting and fly fishing. In spring, when the mayflies hatch, the county judge “had been observed wearing waders in court under his judicial robes in order not to waste precious seconds getting onto his beloved river.” Mosher has a tender appreciation for such seasonal details; his meadows bloom with the flowers in their turn.

 

For this book, our narrator is thirteen-year-old James Kinneson. His father, Charles, is owner and editor of the local weekly paper; his brother, Charlie, is a feisty young lawyer in town. The Charleses are hard-headed and prone to argument “...over history and literature, politics and religion, current events and what they were pleased to call ‘the King’s English...” It’s their habit to put young Jimmy in the middle, yelling their points at him for the other’s benefit. Since Jimmy adores them both, it’s vexing, but it’s an amusing narrative device.

 

Into this bucolic backcountry comes the church’s new minister for the United Protestant Church of Kingdom Common, “one Walter Andrews from Montreal, Canada, a former chaplain in the Royal Canadian Air Force.” The Rev. Mr. Andrews is the first minister the church has contrived to call in two years, since the previous incumbent’s unfortunate experience at the local cock fights. Mr. Andrews is extremely well educated and well spoken; he’s also black, which is a subject of considerable interest around Kingdom Common. He brings his son, Nathan, who’s a few years ahead of Jimmy in school. They form a friendship of sorts, but Jimmy knows that Nathan would rather be back in Montreal, even if it meant moving back in with his grandmother. He’s not destined to fall in love with trout fishing.

 

The other new face in town that summer is Claire LaRiviere, a young woman who left Montreal after answering an ad for a housekeeper, placed by the senior Charles Kinneson’s disreputable cousins. Such a position is not a workable plan in any way, and Claire doesn’t have the money to get to Hollywood, which is her dream, so she winds up taking refuge in the minister’s house. That’s a touchy situation, and meat and drink for every gossip in town (none of whom, naturally, offer to take Claire in.)

 

She comes to a tragic end, and Walter Andrews is accused of killing her. Charles, Jr., puts on his best Perry Mason defense, including a large dash of good luck in his witnesses. Walter and Nathan leave town, leaving young James with a story for the ages. He will grow up to take over the newspaper, but he’s a novelist at heart.

 

This is a magnificently old-fashioned book, which tells of a time we can never otherwise come back to. The people are the ordinary run of scoundrels and saints, in interesting ways. I’m glad I’ll have a few more chances to visit Kingdom Common, if Thriftbooks doesn’t let me down.

Any Good Books, October 2024 by email

Tabula Rasa

 

Any Good Books, September 2024

Tabula Rasa

John McPhee (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)

        If you (somehow) don't already know John McPhee's work, this is perhaps not the book to start with. If you do, consider it a tasty lagniappe to his very substantial career. Some of his thirty-odd books are on single subjects (Oranges!) that outgrew their origins as New Yorker pieces; others are collections of such pieces. Tabula Rasa could be thought of as a collection of bits and bobs swept up from the cutting room floor, but if a man who was born in 1931 wants an ‘old people project’ to help him live a while longer, I say he's entitled. The stories about why certain stories didn’t pan out are pretty interesting in themselves. And lest it sound too valedictory, a friend advised him, "just call it 'Volume One.'"

 

        One thing McPhee is well known for is writing about science, making the intersection of geography and geology more interesting than I’d ever have thought possible. There’s method in it: “In writing about science, one is always aware that the reader may know a good deal more about the science than the writer does, or a good deal less, and that both categories of reader are always going to be there, in some ratio or other. So, as I’m suggesting, you look for ways to put things that would inform the unknowledgeable while not irritating the knowledgeable.”

 

         Another favorite subject is Princeton, the University and the town. He spent a cheerful childhood there; his father was a staff doctor, so he and his friends made the whole college their playhouse. Looking back even farther, he revisits the history of a squabble between Woodrow Wilson, in his role as President of the University, and one Andrew Fleming West, Dean of the Graduate School. “The basic issue had to do with the construction of residential quarters for graduate students...People took sides, thought became anger, and bitterness developed that went much deeper than the question that began it.” In the 1950s, when McPhee was an undergraduate, there were still people who could give him a first-hand account, though it sounds like he never found an unbiased one. In 1910, Wilson lost the battle to a timely bequest that favored West’s position; he resigned his office and went into politics, and the rest is history. 

          McPhee has now taught writing at Princeton since 1975, two spring semesters out of three. “In the teaching semesters, I wrote nothing of my own. It was like crop rotation. I was fallow.” He teaches a small group, including a good deal of individual instruction: “We sit side by side looking down at printouts, which are covered with notes, marginalia, transpositions, nouveau commas, purged commas, structural revolutions, and low hanging redundancies that I, pretending to be an editor, am offering in the spirit of suggestion.” He forebears, in general, to write about his students and their work, but he makes an exception for the spring of 2020, when the university closed, on the third Wednesday of March. He had to figure out Zoom and .pdfs, which not every eighty-nine-year-old would have attempted. But since the sophomore students suddenly had nothing but time, the results are dazzling.

 

         Some subjects seem to come out of nowhere. McPhee couldn’t pull together an article about Meredith Willson, the Music Man man, but the residue is this gorgeous sentence: “As a composer, Willson was so prestidigitational that the trombone march and one of the love songs (“Goodnight My Someone”) were so different in texture and tempo that you blinked once or twice before realizing that they were the same tune.” Nice! And I bet it has you humming.

The Color of Law

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Richard Rothstein (2017, Liveright)

       I can recommend this book as a deeply comprehensive history; as a reading experience, however, it’s not for the faint of heart. It’s the history of de jure segregation in the United States, which extended for a solid hundred years after the end of the Civil War. Black people were denied equal access to both public and privately built housing; this occurred all across the country, in cities and (especially) suburbs. Sometimes the mechanisms were local, such as private covenants and local ordinances; at least as often, the Federal government put its giant thumb on the scale.

     Richard Rothstein argues that this was both illegal and unconstitutional, the entire time it was happening. The Thirteenth Amendment, when it abolished slavery, empowered Congress to enforce abolition. “In 1866, Congress enforced the abolition of slavery by passing a Civil Rights Act, prohibiting actions that it deemed perpetuated the characteristics of slavery. Actions that made African Americans second-class citizens, such as racial discrimination in housing, were included in the ban.” One hundred and two years would go by before the Supreme Court would uphold a claim based on that law.

      What could make more of a statement of second-class citizenship than a declaration that having you in a neighborhood made the whole area less ‘desirable’? The idea that racially integrated neighborhoods were less ‘harmonious’ actually had a deeply perverse effect: the more people lived in segregated enclaves, the less likely they were to feel neighborly toward one another, guaranteeing an inharmonious cast to many future interactions. The idea that Black people entering a neighborhood would lower property values was not a mere superstition, but a self-reinforcing mechanism: if mortgages were available at all, they came at higher rates. Worse yet, Federal lending insurance wasn’t available in Black neighborhoods, so people bought property on contracts that gave them no equity at all till they made the last payment.

       Just as Social Security was rigged to omit people whose occupations were domestic or agricultural, so the G.I. Bill made offers to returning servicemen that only white men could take advantage of. The suburban building boom was accompanied by propaganda about how much your family would benefit from your own little acreage, but everybody knew that only some people could enjoy it. When governments built housing directly, sometimes demolishing mixed neighborhoods for the land, the projects were nearly always designated for one race or the other; you get one guess about which ones came with parks, playgrounds, and swimming pools.

       Rothstein’s writing is clear and comprehensive; he makes a dry, airtight case. The result is a book I wanted to throw across the room many times per chapter. The cycle of poverty begins right here, with the inability to build generational wealth in home equity, in contrast to every Levittown family whose investment provided college tuition and home down payments for their children, and their children’s children. The mortgage interest deduction is an entitlement, pouring billions of dollars into the pockets of suburbanites. School investments followed property values, with predictable results. And if a neighborhood was already undesirable, why not site waste dumps and dirty industry there too? You can’t wonder why the children who grow up there have asthma and lead poisoning far out of proportion to their numbers.

      It didn’t need to be that way. 

 

 

 

Any Good Books, August 2024