Books I Read - July 2020

July was my first month of not working at Seeking Alpha in nearly eight years, and my wife went home to the states for the summer a week into the month. So, I had a lot of reading time. Here's what I got into in July, including more on my Memphis fascination, a couple curiously set books, and an American classic.

1. Molly Caldwell Crosby, The American Plague (History)

This falls into the Memphis category. The plague is yellow fever, and Crosby begins her story with the 1878 yellow fever outbreak in Memphis, before moving to Cuba in 1900, when Walter Reed and his team proved that yellow fever spread through mosquitos, both a controversial finding and one they found in a controversial manner.

Crosby's research is very solid, and I like how many details she provides on her process in the notes at the end of the book. She is transparent about when she has to add in shades of color to flesh out the narrative, and she does a good job explaining the scientific elements of the narrative, including how researchers disagreed over yellow fever's spread and how they resolved those disagreements.

The narrative itself didn't grab me as much as I expected, perhaps due to the limited degree of detail available in the source material. Once the story gets to Cuba, it gains momentum as we fall into an epidemiological whodunit.

The applicability to 2020, whether in the scientific process and the errors made or, say, when Memphians argue over whether or not to impose a quarantine, is top of mind and obviously relevant. I didn't choose to read the book for that reason, but it provided for a mirror of sorts. It was not reassuring either for the current environment or a hypothetical new yellow fever outbreak.

2.Tendai Huchu, The Maestro, The Magistrate, and The Mathematician (novel)

My wife ordered this and read it and liked it, so I was next to get it. The story is set in Edinburgh and follows the lives of three men who emigrated from Zimbabwe, and the action is in the mid to late '00s. The magistrate is a former judge who finds himself considered less qualified for work in Scotland, and also dislocated from his place in his family and community; the mathematician is a hotshot 20-something from a wealthy background and who trades commodities and stocks and drives fast cars; and the maestro is a loner who buries himself in his books, almost literally.

I liked the characters quite a bit, especially the first two I mentioned above. Both the Edinburgh setting and the look into the Zimbabwean emigre community were strengths of the book as well. Huchu could have spent more time on these characters - I would have been happy with a book just about the Magistrate, and didn't think the Maestro added much to the story. The plot was enjoyable, though the twist at the end felt a little unearned and thus not impactful. All in all a pleasant read. We both giggled at this section:

He envied the brave souls on Amazon, the dissenters hiding behind anonymous avatars, who gave War and Peace one star and told Tolstoy to go stuff it - too long, too slow, too many characters, what's with all the digressions, just get on with the story, Nikolayevich. One Casey Jones had asked if Tolstoy was taking the Mickey. Ms Jones wrote: I could not believe how many words there are in this book! It is just full of them. She felt it could have been a tenth of the size, and went on to say she had read The Count of Monte Cristo, which was a lot more readable. On a forum like that, Ms Jones was assailed by Tolstoyans, one of whom suggested she read Bridget Jones's Diary instead. But the fact remained that she was a brave nonconformist, one of the precious few.

3.Kiese Laymon, Long Division (novel)

I will probably need to read this book to fully absorb it. The plot is a time travel story set in a small town in Mississippi, where Citoyen Coldson tries to rescue girls from the future and his grandfather from the past, while also sparring with his friendly rival LaVander Peeler in the "Can You Use That Word in a Sentence" competition. It's a funny book, and the echoes of injustice in Mississippi from 1964 to 1985 to 2013 are well drawn and land harder amidst all the humor.

It could be the time travel and the loops that make this a confusing book, but I had more trouble tracking the characters' motivation. I think that's mostly because most of the characters were teenagers, and teenagers' motivations change three times a day, but I also may have rushed my reading of the book. I will revisit, because I think it's worth it.

4. Holly George-Warren, A Man Called Destruction (Biography)

I have a basic theory on biographies. There are two types of biographies. First there are the first round of biographies, which come either when someone is near the end of their life - Sylvie Simmons' I'm Your Man about Leonard Cohen, e.g. - or shortly after they died, where the people who knew the subject are still around to talk about and provide context on his/her life. And then there are the biographies that are done at more of a remove, to place the subject in historical context. Both types are important, and the best biographies can bridge the gap between the two, and it's just a basic theory.

Holly George-Warren's biography on Alex Chilton is squarely in the first group, with all the good and some of the bad that can come with that. The good is that it is exhaustively reported, including interviews with almost everyone alive who knew Chilton, it seems. I'm not a Big Star junkie or anything, so this shouldn't be a surprise, but I learned a lot about both Chilton and the late 60s-80s, as well as Memphis (now you see why I read this!), and that is a credit to the work. I also thought the author did a very good job analyzing the music that Chilton produced over the years, and hit the right balance of how much to analyze the music vs. how much to tell about Chilton himself. I would have loved harder examples of how he became such a great rhythm guitarist, but that is certainly a smaller thing to point out.

The issues that come with a first round biography are reflected here. The story could have been shaped better; the author compiled so many facts but then rattled them off without a clear flow at times. For example, there were about 3-4 chapters that ended with 'this was the moment Alex realized he needed to clean himself up', but then his debauchery continued in the next chapter. I don't think the book should have been shorter, but there was a stop-start feel to his post Big Star, pre content in New Orleans days.

George-Warren knew Chilton, and her warm feelings for him slip into the story, even if she doesn't reveal her relationship with him until the epilogue. That's fine on its own, but her writing was very hands off about Chilton's numerous problems. It's a biography, not a moral stage, but among the things that went unexplored was his habit of pursuing high school girls well into his 20s, Wooderson style; his committing domestic violence; his homophobic and anti-Semitic behavior; and just his generally being kind of a dick, even when he finally cleaned up his drug and drinking habits. I know the author doesn't have to spoonfeed us, we can react our own way to Chilton's behavior, but there was something a little too clinical for my taste about how she presented his flaws.

For all that, I really enjoyed reading the book and love compelling biographies in general. Any recommended biographies that bridge those two categories I mentioned above?

         

5.Robert Penn Warren, All The King’s Men (novel)

I took a two-trimester seminar on the Civil War in my senior year of high school. The first trimester covered the history of the war, and the second focused on the literature that emerged from it. It was a sign that I was missing the deeper passion for the classroom at the time that, on the first day of class, one of the two teachers co-teaching the course said something like, 'when we say Civil War history, we don't mean studying the battles or being a Civil War buff or anything,' and I felt called out. It was a bigger sign when, in the literature segment, I turned in a paper titled "Beloved: A Civil War Novel". That was an assignment where our teachers 'anonymously' reviewed each student's paper in front of the whole class, to give an idea of what they were looking for, and I put anonymously in quotes because when they got to mine and pointed out how dumb it was, I burst out laughing and couldn't regain my composure for the entirety of their review. I passed, but not with flying colors, let's say.

But the class stuck with me, evidently. I haven't read any Toni Morrison since, but I have The Bluest Eye sitting behind my desk; I remember how difficult Faulkner was, and the last line of "Absalom, Absalom" - "Why do you hate the South?" "I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!" - bewilders me to this day. I went to school in North Carolina and spent a month in New Orleans in my 20s and have been reading about the Delta and about the South recently and over the years.

One of the first books we read in that seminar, though I can't remember which trimester, was Robert Penn Warren's The Legacy of The Civil War. Beyond the fact of reading it, that book did not stick with me in any way. But it introduced me to Warren and to All The King's Men, which was showing up on all the best novels of the 20th century at the time. And, almost twenty years later, I got to the book.

All The King's Men is usually billed as the story of Huey Long. Long was a populist Louisiana politician who rose to the Governor's office and then to the U.S. Senate. His policy views were left wing - he was a critic of FDR from the left - but his politics were a very 'ends justify the means' approach, and some call him an example of a 30's dictator in the U.S., ruling Louisiana via patronage and political muscle. Warren is on the record as protesting this comparison, but I read that as a protest along the lines of 'don't literally interpret every plot twist as derived from Long's life, and don't presume my views and the narrator's align, or anything else.' It's hard to track the rise of Willie Stark, the stand-in for Long, and not think of the real thing.

That said, I don't think the story of Willie Stark/Huey Long is the core of the book. Or maybe, Stark's rise/fall is the engine that keeps the book going, but it's not the key narrative. Politics are like the weather, elemental and eternal, but out of a normal person's control to a large degree. Instead, we can react to politics, prepare for politics, make choices with politics around us, and we can either do honor to ourselves or not.

All The King's Men is set in the '20s and '30s in Louisiana, and I would argue it's the story of Jack Burden more than Willie Stark. Burden is a journalist from an upper-class family who becomes Stark's right-hand man, his get things done type - digging up dirt on rivals, persuading people to go along with 'the Boss', as he and most people call Stark, and so on. Burden is a compelling character, though full of flaws - he's a racist, if milder than some of the other characters, and black people are relegated to the sides of the stage throughout, dismissed and held in vague contempt (with the n word showing up on page 1); he's a misogynist, not able to accord women their fullness of motivation and character, even down to his mother and the woman he loves. Those are perhaps legacies of the time, but more specific to him is that he is aimless, a spoiled romantic who, having lost his hopes in this world is not interested in taking the reins on anything, which leaves him flirting with nihilism and ok with the 'ends justify the means' approach the Boss espouses. His facing up to what is goodness, what is his role and agency in the world, and how should he use his time and privilege (he's a man who never really needs to work, since his mother has money to share at most points in the book), is the true conflict of the book. Stark's end is foreseeable if you read up on the history, but also more of a typical tragic arc, hubris and reaching for the stars and doing all he could because his time was short and so on.

Into that mix, Warren introduces a number of entertaining or paragon-esque side characters. There's Sadie Burke, the secretary/fixer who believes she's the one who pulled all the strings to get the Boss into the governor's mansion, with a chip on her shoulder from having a smallpox scarred face; Tiny Duffy, a large political crony who becomes Lieutenant Governor because the Boss thinks he can handle him best at close range; Adam Stanton, the noble leading doctor leaving in a relative hovel, who bangs away at the piano to relieve his moral stress; and Sugar Boy, the Boss's driver who is slow to form a word but quick with a gun and lightning fast with a car. That's just a sampling, and they're all worth considering for how they react to Stark, how they exist in a world where he is the dominating, oxygen inhaling force. The tension between Stark and Stanton, for example, the closest to polar opposites that this book offers, at least in one axis, throws down the moral gauntlet for us all, while making clear we'll all stumble one way or another.

The book called to mind two main touchpoints for me - Citizen Kane, which came out a few years before All The King's Men, and which similarly follows an ambitious quasi-tyrant in his rise to fame and power and then his downfall. In this case, the longing for the rosebud, for the moment when everything went awry, is for Jack Burden to feel, and he has a more complex relationship with the past and with Anne Stanton, Adam's sister (both of them children of a famed governor who embodied high-minded uncaring towards the people that Stark stood in, well, stark contrast to), his dreamed of paramour turned confidant.

The book is also of a scope with the great Russian novels, and hits positively Dostoevskian notes. For example, when Stark is closing the agreement for Adam Stanton to head his new hospital, Stark's dreamed of pure end to all his wrangling about:

"Yeah, one more thing. But look here, Doc - you know Hugh Miller?"

"Yes," Adam said, "yes, I know him."

"Well, he was in with me - yeah, Attorney General - and he resigned. And you know why?" But he went on without waiting for the answer. "He resigned because he wanted to keep his little hands clean. He wanted the bricks but he just didn't know somebody has to paddle in the mud to make 'em. He was like somebody that just loves beefsteak but just can't bear to go to a slaughter pen because there are some bad, rough men down there who aren't animal lovers and who ought to be reported to the S.P.C.A. Well, he resigned."

I watched Adam's face. It was white and stony, as though carved out of some slick stone. He was like a man braced to hear what the jury foreman was going to say. Or what the doctor was going to say. Adam must have seen a lot of faces like that in his time. He must have had to look into them and tell them what he had to tell.

"Yeah," the Boss said, "he resigned. He was one of those guys wants everything and wants everything two ways at once. You know the kind, Doc?"

He flicked a look over at Adam, like a man flicking a fly over by the willows in the trout stream. But there wasn't any strike.

"Yeah, old Hugh - he never learned that you can't have everything. That you can have mighty little. And you never have anything you don't make. Just because he inherited a little money and the name Miller he thought you could have everything. Yeah, and he wanted the one last damned thing you can't inherit. And you know what it is?" He stared at Adam's face.

"What?" Adam said, after a long pause.

"Goodness. Yeah, just plain, simple goodness. Well you can't inherit that from anybody. You got to make it, Doc. If you want it. And you got to make it out of badness. Badness. And you know why, Doc?" He raised his bulk up in the broken-down wreck of an overstuffed chair he was in, and leaned forward, his hands on his knees, his elbows cocked out, his head out-thrust and the hair coming down to his eyes, and stared into Adam's face. "Out of badness," he repeated. "And you know why? Because there isn't anything else to make it out of." Then sinking back into the wreck, he asked softly, "Did you know that, Doc?"

Adam didn't say a word.

It could be Kirillov or Shatov ranting in Demons, or even Stavrogin at the monastery. Well, except for a couple things. First, Warren writes with the quintessential American self-centeredness, not for the author himself but for the characters. This hero plunging into the muck sensation is our country's biggest addition to the world canon, perhaps epitomized here by Jack Burden's sudden trip to Long Beach, California, when his personal and professional lives cross in just the wrong way.

And related to that, Warren writes the hell out of this story. At times it verges on too much, on a degree of detail that you imagine has died in our century, where it feels like he's not quite showing off but like Tolstoy above, a little too slow. It feels to me a little like Grapes of Wrath, where Steinbeck alternated plot chapters with descriptive setting chapters, except Warren writes in 10 long chapters so the pages and formats meld together. But it's also beautiful writing, and I'd rather he write it full than miss out on these moments. You can get a taste of it in the above, the simile about flyfishing for trout.

I'm hardly the first to draw a connection between Russian writing and Southern US writing. A class I could have taken freshman year but did not talked about the parallels between either the Soviet Union and the south or the Soviet Union and the African-American south, or maybe just between the stereotype of the babushka and of the mammy, and I would love to learn where that class was going. I do know Carson McCullers loved the Russian novelists and had a bit of Chekhov to her approach. Writing all this, my grasp on American literature feels incomplete, my analytical ability rusty.

But reading a book like this re-sparks that desire and passion.

My July 2020 Podcast Playlist

I've been spending more time on podcasts. In doing so, I've continued to find different approaches and formats for podcasting, which is one of the exciting aspects of the medium in general. It's still new enough that there are fewer rules and more styles. There are commonalities and there are 'standards', but also a lot of room to innovate.

As I listen to more podcasts I want to share what I'm listening to and to review those podcasts. I'll highlight what I think is unique I wanted to review a few of the podcasts I've listened to this month. Some of them play up a more standard approach really well, and some show the variety available in podcasting.

Feist - Pleasure Studies

Feist! I know Feist as a performer. I listened to her when Mushaboom became a thing, when her guesting on a Kings of Convenience record almost swallowed it up, saw her in New York as the start of my one all-nighter in the city as a new college grad. I started listening to Pleasure, her most recent album, a year or two after it came out, but I put it on a lot. It was an accompaniment on these lockdown spring nights on the terrace, Pleasure and then a couple Mountain Goats records, straining towards or idling under the skies and trying to stop the wondering.

I came across Pleasure Studies in one of Apple's podcast app promo carousels, scanned the titles, saw they echoed the titles on her album, and thought 'oh, cool! Not so far from what we're doing on our podcast, going through an album track by track.'

So I subscribed to it, and saw that the episodes were all a year old. And I put on the trailer, and it took me a minute to realize I was listening to the trailer and not a preview for a different podcast. Because instead of Feist's voice, it was a number of voices, beginning to tell their story. Then it clicked - that was what the podcast was.

Pleasure Studies has nine episodes. All are under a half hour, and the shortest is 13 minutes and change. Feist introduces each episode's theme - the title is a track on Pleasure or in one case a 7'' with an additional phrase: "Young Up: Aspirational Bragging Rights," e.g. She then gives way to 3-4 guests, usually, who tell their stories that connect to that theme. Young Up is about people ignoring their age, and is among the lighter episodes I've listened to so far (I'm six episodes through), and introduces us to the grindmother. "I'm Not Running Away" was about facing challenges whether related to fear, immigration status, or gender. "Lost Dreams" is pretty self explanatory and, in its way, brutal.

The format is like stage monologues, it feels like the theater. One imagines Feist strolling on, saying her piece, and then walking off, leaving each of the speakers in a different part on the stage, with the spotlight shining on them in alternating fashion. It's not light listening or entertaining in the way a good conversational podcast is, but it's fascinating and thought provoking.

Feist is still and always the best.

Strong Songs

Since I'm co-hosting a music podcast, and will do more of it, I've been looking to see what else is out there. My co-host Mike Taylor turned me on to Strong Songs. I've listened to two episodes so far - host Kirk Hamilton's breakdown of Sufjan Stevens's "Chicago", and then his episode on Jeff Buckley's "Last Goodbye".

They're really good.

Kirk does a few things especially well. He conveys excitement for the music. He cares a lot for these songs (and I presume, the others he's unlocked), which makes it easy for the listener to get excited. I was already big fans of these songs, and I will eventually pick out an episode about a song I don't know well to see if this can bridge the gap for me.

Kirk also teaches the listener about the music, and in a way that requires little or no musical knowledge but also doesn't dumb things down. I believe he made reference to being a music teacher, and he comes across as the smart band teacher who can relate to you and help you go beyond the notes to a better understanding. 

Lastly, he really makes sure the music is incorporated into the episode, so you can listen and appreciate the music while also getting his commentary.

The discussions take a little bit of wind-up to get past, but once beyond that his breakdowns are really enjoyable. I can quibble on a couple things because it's fun to do so - how do you talk about Stevens's lyrics and not mention his religiosity; and the strings on Last Goodbye have a South Asian element to them, what is that? But those are all in the realm of things to talk about, not musts.

In college I saw School of Rock, and there's that scene where Jack Black is breaking out the history of rock, the family tree of all its different branches. I always wanted to take a class on something like that. Then there's the idea of getting into the songs themselves and understanding what makes them work, both to add tools to a songwriting arsenal I dreamed of using and to just enjoy them more. I actually took a songwriter's class, with a one Robert Zimmerman (not the one who changed his name to Dylan), and it was useful. But this podcast goes way beyond that.

Also, the man loves a good shaker to open up the musical space. You have to give him that.

Boomtown

One of my other obsessions is finding podcasts about places. Something that can convey what it's like to be from a place, to live in a place, what makes it tick and hum, what makes it special or different, worth seeing or worth knowing about.

I started listening to Boomtown without necessarily looking for that - I thought it might be a good story about the oil sector. And it is. But what I think makes it more worth hanging onto is the personal perspective Christian Wallace, the host, brings to it. He's from west Texas, he's worked on an oil rig (pronounced oll rig, apparently the accent out there), and he cares about the industry even as he's aware of the problems with oil and fracking.

Storytelling podcasts are the hardest to pull off, and not only did he and his team pull this off, they did it in a different way. This wasn't a serial story, with one narrative that brings things to a boil. Instead, the podcast goes into different corners of the oil patch - how tough it is to work there, how dangerous it is, what the sex economy surrounding an oil camp looks like, what the economics look like, and so on.

The podcast was released over the winter, right before oil collapsed once and then again amidst the covid-19 issues. So the timing for talking about a boom was ironic, though the show is laced with both the downside of a boom and the inevitability that every boom begets the next bust.

But the economics were the less interesting part of this to me, since I spend more time in that part of the internet anyway. Learning about the issues in West Texas and hearing from people, that was what stuck with me from this show.

Servant of Pod

Nicholas Quah has been writing the Hot Pod newsletter, a podcast industry write-up, for a while, and I've been reading it for a year or two, all told. He is immersed in podcasting, and I've learned a lot reading him, including some good recommendations - Welcome to LA is another great place-centered podcast, e.g.

His new podcast, Servant of Pod, builds on the newsletter format. He interviews podcast people of all sorts - people who make podcast music, leading hosts, industry types - and they're just good conversations. One thing interesting to me is that the theme music and the way he goes in and out of ads reminds me more of public radio than podcasting, though usually by the end of his interviews things have loosened up and fallen into the podcast flow.

There Goes The Neighborhood Miami

One more place podcast. I found this when digging through the listings on Apple, I think. It's a three-part series - again, an example of a slightly different format - and I wish it was longer. A few different hosts - Kai Wright, Nadege Green, and Christopher Johnson - take us through Liberty City and Little Haiti. The angle is on how gentrification and pushing around minorities has gone in different directions, with the interstate displacing one population and now the irony that these neighborhoods are on the high ground, and thus more attractive as Miami sinks into the ocean.

I don't know why certain cities attract me - New Orleans, Detroit, Memphis in the US e.g., - and others haven't grabbed my eye, including Miami. But hearing more about the history of the place has reminded me that there's a lot more to the city than South Beach. Some post pandemic day, I'll have to visit.

Land of The Giants

And we end up in the business world, with Vox Media's Land of the Giants. I have been listening to season 2, which covers Netflix's rise and current position. Peter Kafka and Rani Molla got a lot of great interviews with Netflix execs, industry experts, and directors, and they frame the story well. The consumer voice is missing, but I'm not sure how you would represent that here.

What I like most about the series is that it has fun with the narrative, and doesn't treat it as overly dour, titans of the industry sort of stuff. Business reporting is sometimes overly serious, exalting towards its subjects, or else scathing. This show praises Netflix where need be, but also points out where they got lucky and has fun with the story. This is about entertainment and media, and there's a lot of fortune and sliding doors that has come into effect.

So far in listening I've learned about the company's rise, been impressed with their focus and their fortune, and enjoyed the narration meanwhile.