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.