As For The Political Situation

We’re a little more than a week past the election. Over 153M votes have been counted, and there's a decent chunk left. The electoral decision is final, though the minimum viable coup President Trump and his supporters are a/b testing has dragged out the anxiety of the last few days/weeks/months/years. We will never be free of that anxiety, but the election provided both a step forward and an opportunity for a reckoning. There are many details and nuances yet to be fleshed out about voting patterns and the people’s preferences, but I think we’re far enough along to pull together some thoughts, as I tried to do almost four years ago.

Before proceeding, here are my limited credentials and priors: I have a liberal arts background – History/Econ undergrad, Diplomacy/Conflict Resolution Master’s program – and have mostly lived in liberal communities, whether in Massachusetts growing up, in college in North Carolina's Research Triangle, or in expat communities in Europe and Israel. I’ve always voted Democrat, and am pretty far left socially. With respect to markets and finances, I was closer to the Obama/Clinton viewpoint, e.g. free trade is good, budgets should at least bend towards balancing. That stance has shifted left in part as a reaction to Trump’s 2016 victory and how I interpreted it. I voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primary and was very excited to do so. I donated more than I ever have to campaigns this year, and I phone banked for an unsuccessful House campaign once, my first time doing so. The last two relevant background points: I don’t use social media to talk about politics much, and my mindset as a person is to find compromise and something that works so we can move forward.

The Politicians 

So, how to react to this election? I start with the President. Donald Trump deserves none of our empathy. He began his original presidential run with ugly rhetoric, building on a rise in politics that seized on racist rumors about his predecessor and that was littered with non-stop insults, a rise that itself was built on a lifetime of masquerading as a successful businessman. Even someone who had granted him the benefit of the doubt four years ago, buying that he might grow into the role of being President of the United States, was met with his first week in office – an inauguration speech decrying American Carnage, lies from his administration about how many people were there, and a travel ban of people from predominantly Muslim countries – a week proving that benefit of the doubt was wasted. He had previously discarded the respect owed to a president in his barrages against President Obama, and the idea that he would be entitled to a better reception after the way he behaved, well, I get that we all hold our views but that one is wrong.

Elected Republican officials deserve no more of our empathy. Their behavior during our slow-moving farce of a constitutional crisis fits in line with the behavioral pattern of the last 4-5 years. Condoning, looking past, not hearing, or outright supporting the President’s behavior, for whatever the reason; I expect partisanship in the US, I’m not surprised by the behavior, but it’s still irredeemable. The few timid exceptions prove the rule and are hardly worth mentioning. Principles and norms no longer belong in our political discourse, it seems.

The most obvious examples of two-faced behavior are budget deficits – which Republicans forgot about for the last four years after hammering on about them the six years prior, and which they have already begun to rediscover – and the Supreme Court and the Garland v. Barrett antics. The takeaway should be that Democrats will have to play just as tough in Congress and elsewhere, but without the Senate I’m not sure how much that matters. There are asymmetries that weaken the Democrat position, none bigger than the core incentives: Republicans are invested in less governance, Democrats in good governance. And as Leon Neyfakh put it, Republicans are not afraid of being hypocrites, just of losing. 

The political tactics are among the less interesting implications of this election. They were going to be the same in any Biden victory, and the dictatorial tractor pull may have the positive effect of causing any remaining scales to fall from the Democrats’ eyes about whether a traditional bonhomie can be achieved. The Spanish term for polarization is crispación, and things are going to remain pretty crisp for the years to come.

The People

But what of the 72M+ Americans who voted for President Trump? The failed repudiation of Trumpism, of the past four years, the fact that even though President-Elect Biden won what in these days might amount to a landslide, it was still an election decided by five-digit numbers, by several tense days?

I start with the premise that we can’t write off the 47% the way Mitt Romney did. This was a high-turnout election, and while I understand that the on the ground work in Georgia, in Arizona, in Midwestern cities was exceptional, and should not have been exceptional, I still don’t know how many more votes there are out there from people who didn’t vote. It also seems wrong fundamentally to write off so many people; you start at a disadvantage if you never think about the other side. Again, I like to find compromises.

That’s not to ignore that tons of voters hold views that are antithetical to what I believe in, and that they are never going to be won nor worth the time. There are people who not only identified with President Trump, and not only disliked the Democrat platform, but identified with the full explicit and implied MAGA agenda. I don’t know what the playbook is there.

My dad is at least partly in this category. He voted for Trump both times. He likes that Trump talks shit to reporters. He has always voted Republican, and still views the Democrats as more aberrational than anything Trump is. I remember pleading with him to vote for Gary Johnson in 2016, and not getting anywhere. He probably enjoyed voting for Trump more than for Romney or McCain or either Bush. It’s one of the reasons I think the ‘there will be more competent authoritarians’ line is not quite right; Trump forged a connection with his voters, a real one that a Mike Pence or a Tom Cotton seems unlikely to do. It’s a connection that I believe is built on a bullshit marketing image, but it’s a real connection nevertheless.

There are people, I believe, who voted for President Trump or the Republican party who do not endorse his worst views and who do not explicitly identify with him. They may dislike the Democrats more, they may have focused on the economy at the expense of everything else – and mind you, the idea that Trump was the better pick for the economy to me because he ran a deficit-fueled 2-3% GDP growing economy with relatively low interest rates is, to me, nuts, but the perception is what it is. In any case, there is a part of the populace that enjoys spiting the left and 'political correctness' or, these days, wokeness to the point that they can overlook whatever it is they might dislike about the right.

How to reach them? I’m not sure. What I see from people who are in the middle and who did vote for Biden but with their nose held or picking Republicans down ballot, is 1) economic self-interest and 2) fatigue with the piety they see from the left. I don’t mean to use piety as an accusation. But there is a sense that you have to be for the entire platform or you’re no good, and a sense that if you make a false step, you’ll get hounded. A lot of this is the online conversation, and I don't know how much this feeling of fatigue and spite resonates at large, but I think it's one of the bigger opportunities. (After writing this, I listened to Kara Swisher's podcast with John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor, and he used the word 'nuance' to make what a similar argument).

The message of the Democrat’s platform resonates when the associations are removed, as seen in public opinion polls about individual issues, or in things like the Florida referendum on minimum wage. There are also arguments to address economic self-interest – I would make the case that higher taxes to help fund programs that will address inequality will pay huge dividends for the rich as well as the rest of the country over the next 50 years, e.g. Just as there are ways to open up to people who only agree with part of the game plan.

The challenge is that there are so many deal-breaking issues. You can't compromise on climate change given the Earth isn’t really part of the negotiations. We can't ask people to continue to neglect our ongoing scars of foundational racial injustice. Our dumb (in all senses) approach towards immigration destroys the one exceptional competitive advantage America has had over the decades, and I’m not really sure what compromise can be struck there.

And yet, there needs to be work done with some of those 72M+, to build a more durable constituency (at least until the electoral college is overturned, the Senate made more representative, the courts reformed, and all redistricting done by nonpartisan commissions; all of which, good luck, President Biden). The flipping of Georgia and Arizona is inspiring precisely because they support that ground can be won, both in persuading median voters and turning out more voters. Educating, taking policies out of identification and into common ground, making the case for how things can be better, those seem to me still feasible, even if they’re the stuff of old-school, door-to-door politicking.

All of this is not to say that Democrats should play to the middle. I think the last four years have shown identity and emotion overtake rational assessments of policy and competency when we are voting or aligning ourselves politically. Tapping into that emotion includes solving real problems, not developing incremental ideas to placate sensibilities. Certainly not in a climate where neither side is predisposed to compromise. 

It’s hard for me to watch someone like Katie Porter or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez speak in Congressional hearings and not be impressed, and not think they’re the future of the left. They are unabashedly progressive, but they do the work and they translate their policies into real human concerns. As far as I recall, Stacey Abrams is more centrist than those two women but she is similarly inspiring. I was in Athens, GA for a wedding in May 2018, and other wedding guests spoke about her as a hero. (There is some irony in the bounty of well-deserved praise she is getting now after the weird and negative response some people had to her openly wanting to be VP this summer).  

The Legacy

There have been some positive outcomes from the past four years, and I believe those outcomes prepare us for the next four. The first is increased political engagement. I’m more engaged than ever before, as I mentioned, and am setting a personal goal to contribute in some way to the ground-level politicking in the next 2-4 years. I’m hardly alone, and both the % of eligible voters and what you see on the web and in the real world is a testament to that. That’s a good thing – democracy should reflect an engaged society. I hope the intensity of our engagement goes down in the Biden era – and again, this snowball of a coup effort makes it hard to take one’s foot of the gas – but consistent engagement should be a hallmark of our society, the same way it was in De Tocqueville’s famed observation of (a significantly less democratic) America in the 19th century.

The flipside, of course, is that the other side is engaged. In a neutral sense, good, politics are better as a reflection of the country they take place in. But the politics that were reflected in this election were not good – and I’m sure Trump’s voters would agree, just from the opposite stance. The positive element out of all this? Any last illusions of American exceptionalism should have faded. This tension is an enduring fact of life in America, a core point of our history. I can argue that 2020 is actually a more just, more positive climate for the U.S. than almost any time in our history – the increasingly unlivable climate itself notwithstanding, of course – but it certainly doesn’t feel that way. My point is not to sell you a bill of goods about today, but to echo what Anna Lind-Guzik has been saying for the last 4+ years, what Monica Hesse wrote here, what Jelani Cobb wrote here, what Maria Hinojosa wrote here. America is not an exception, and it never really has been, it’s just been more powerful. A clear-eyed understanding will allow us to fight towards that ever greater union.

(My three points in favor of American exceptionalism would be that we have integrated immigrants better than any large country, that we have oceans to protect us from serious economic/military rivals, and that capitalism has provided a framework, however rapacious, to exploit our natural and human resources over time to economic growth. These do not add up to a ‘better’ model, and our current policies towards climate change and immigration have eroded two of those pillars). 

2016's Echoes

I’m reminded of the feeling four years ago, when Trump won. Of hearing how my wife’s colleagues were sleepwalking in the school hallway, furious and groggy at the same time. Of going out with friends that Friday to commiserate, and finding out Leonard Cohen died too. Of having dinner with a good friend that Saturday, and hearing she was going to leave Bulgaria that year, which meant almost everyone we cared about was leaving, so we were going to be too. There were a lot of feelings that week. Elections, like Olympic Games and the World Cup, provide a global landmark, a snapshot that captures our state of mind more than normal weeks do.

I remember most of all meeting with my friend and Bulgarian teacher, Silva, at a café a day or two after the election. We had a lesson, but at this point our lessons were mostly just us talking. We started by rehashing how could this have happened – I believed the polls, I believed 538, and I put more weight on 70% than 30%. “How did this happen?” Silva asked me, and I didn’t know how to answer.

But then, she said, “now you know what the rest of the world is like.” 

Well, here we are. What are we going to do about it?

Leftover Notes

1) One trend I do not like on Twitter is tweeting to express your disapproval for other people tweeting about things. Specifically, people who tweet to say ‘stop tweeting about politics’ or ‘why do people keep tweeting about politics?’ These people seem to tweet more about politics than the people who actually tweet about it, and to express their disapproval for other people’s interests.

Now, I don’t tweet about politics much. I find Twitter and social media bad places to talk about complicated or identity driven things. But I also don’t give a shit about college football, or even people talking about their stocks going up or down day after day without adding analysis. The thing is, the internet is wonderful for choosing what you consume. It’s not like being in the US and running into cable news everywhere you go (one of the true blessings of living abroad). Muting works. Just don’t engage!

This sticks in my craw because the implication is that politics isn’t important enough to be talked about on Twitter. Which, if politics aren’t important for you, I mean, congratulations. But it’s worth acknowledging that for a lot of people, national politics actually matter, whether they be refugees and immigrants or people still fighting for rights or just people who actually need federal government support to get by. You don’t have to even agree with them that it matters. You can just let them tweet or whatever they do in peace.

2) I don’t have a strong take on the polling miss. I think Zeynep Tufnecki got it more or less right, which is that the polling-based models provide such a wide range of possible outcomes that they don’t actually provide real answers, and so their utility for every-other year events is limited. I will be taking less stock of them in the future, having given them my full attention this year even after 2016 (after all, 2018 played out pretty well). 

I respect how transparent Nate Silver/538 and a lot of the other polling aggregators/modelers are. They are public and they walk through their thought process regularly. Silver is overly defensive of his ‘mistakes’, and his last post read to me a little bit like ‘don’t listen to us so much’, which is right but also presumably against his self-interest. But whatever his Twitter persona, I find the criticism a little unfair; they do their work openly, it’s interesting, and the quantitative approach has value. For example, the quants’ analysis of the likely votes once the election ended and we were waiting for ballots to be counted was fairly accurate and informative. This went double once the various axes emerged for individual locations, Jon Ralston in Nevada being the top of mind example.

3) On the flipside, I should confess that I viewed the Trafalgars of the world, whether pollsters or people on twitter who picked the sort of red map where Minnesota would flip, a little unfairly. I viewed the incentives as slanted – people on the left, still scarred by 2016, would be in the mood to hedge every prediction, while those on the right, emboldened by a fluke event, would misunderstand why they were right in 2016. I don’t know why this matters, but it riled me up. I considered them bad faith actors.

The election was a good reminder that nobody knows everything, and that the range of outcomes should keep us all humble. They are just as likely to be trying to figure out what will happen in the election as anybody else. The stock market too is full of people trying to figure things out, and some of them are full of it and others or not. The market gives more regular feedback on whether you're right or wrong, but predictions about the future are hard no matter what.

That said, at least one or two of those self-styled pundits have blamed their getting it wrong on fraud, so maybe I was right after all about their bad faith.

4) Lastly, I think this election was a good reminder that Twitter isn’t real life. The people who talk about politics on Twitter are hyper engaged, and while they may be expanding the Overton window or foreshadowing where a given party is headed, they also might just be extremely online people. Twitter is an addicting and often informative service, and it’s a way for people to connect with others in their field. But expecting the conversation on Twitter to map to the offline world is a stretch, and perhaps an even bigger stretch when the President migrates to Parler (whether before Twitter bans him or after, tbd). My conclusions from my piece four years ago still hold up, even if a pandemic makes it ever harder to live offline.

The Books I Read September & October 2020

I got involved in a one-off project in September and October that kept me from updating this here blog. I enjoy keeping the blog going, and so I’m pleased to resume at least the monthly book reviews (with the monthly podcast reviews going up on my Shortman Studios blog later this week). I also have some election thoughts to share by the end of the week.

I read seven books over the last two months, and they are presented here in mostly no order, except the book I want to talk about most is last. Here goes.

1.    Larry McMurty, Lonesome Dove

I’m not usually a Western reader, and I was 5 or 6 when the acclaimed miniseries aired on TV. I may have heard this over the years, but I only read it after Christian Wallace mentioned it on Boomtown, a podcast I talked about here. Something in the way he evoked the geography of West Texas, which he said was reflected in Lonesome Dove, made me want to try the book.

Without a true western background – I probably read some stuff as a kid, including O. Henry stories – I didn’t have much in the field to compare Lonesome Dove to, so instead it really reminded me of Lord of the Rings. An epic journey with a motley, mostly male crew, moving through hardships, with bit and then key characters suffering tragedy, and a sweeping landscape behind it all. The biggest contrast is that the ambiguity here is sharper, with no character really better off than they were when the journey started, or at least without suffering meaningful damage; my memory of Lord of the Rings is a slightly more pat finish, at least for Pippin and Merry.

The story was hard to put down – I read it over vacation and kept postponing when I turned out the lights to read another chapter. McMurty wrote the characters well, and their personality comes out on the page quickly. They also react to events in realistic ways throughout, even if it can be surprising or frustrating at times. I liked it more than the miniseries – Amy and I watched it afterwards – and the length of the book gave it space to stretch out. At the same time, when I learned that there were three more books in the series and other TV productions, I had no interest in reading more. One book was enough with these characters, in this world.

The one note I have beyond that is the treatment of women and minority characters. I’m willing to extend some consideration to, say, Moby Dick for being well behind modern perspectives. Lonesome Dove was written in the 80s, and it’s ok about some things – the women are fairly round characters, even if they are confined to very few roles in the frontier society, which I can buy. I should acknowledge my own latent bias, perhaps; I thought Pea Eye was Black along with Deets, and I probably just mis-read the beginning and then lumped him in with Deets. In any case, the Mexican and Black characters were a bit of the ‘magic minority’ type or else cranks. Not a terrible job, but noticeable. I found the Native American characters to be the flattest, though a) one was the villain of the book, and b) perhaps that was coming from the perspective of the main characters, former Texas Rangers who fought the Native Americans.

2.    Samantha Schwieblin, Distancia de Rescate

Samantha Schwieblin has gotten some coverage in English-language press. Amy ordered this book – called Fever Dream in English – and I gave it a try. It’s a weird book but worth reading.

This is a horror story. Amanda, a mother from the city, is on her deathbed in a small Argentinean town, talking to David, the son of a woman she met in that town. That effect – the story is told in a conversation between the two, with Amanda trying to find the link back to where her problems started and to find out what happened to her daughter – is very disorienting, and propulsive.

It’s one of those books where I read in Spanish and feel like I missed something as far as the nuts and bolts of what happened, but not because of the language, but rather the way the book was written. I think this is one of those inscrutable books that doesn’t get wound up in the full explanation. It was good, nevertheless.

3.    Nina Simone, I Put A Spell On You (Memoir)

I’ve been thinking about Nina Simone a lot for the past few years, and read two biographies about her along with watching the Netflix documentary. I overlooked her memoir, purposefully, because I guess I had heard that it wasn’t accurate. Which is a strange reason to skip a memoir – the biographies and documentary already provide enough context, so reading the memoir isn’t about the accuracy, it’s about the feelings from the author. That’s how I overcame that initial hesitation.

The book is a weird one all the same. It is accurate, I believe, in conveying Nina’s mindset – her frustrations, her excitement, the slights she suffered, and so on. But there’s a disjointedness and a distance to the writing. She has a co-writer, Stephen Cleary, and at times perhaps that layers on the disconnect. The book also races towards its finish, more or less overlooking the 80s, which wasn’t her best decade but was the most recent as of the writing.

It’s still a firsthand story of the civil rights period, of her artistic career, of growing up in the segregated south, and it’s still Nina Simone. It’s worth the read. And I think anyone who has followed Nina Simone’s work and story before will understand that disjointed, weird feeling. It’s a part of her story, too.

4.    Dasa Drndic, Trieste

Trieste is an Italian city close to the border with Slovenia, and a stone’s throw from Croatia. I’ve never been, but the city has been in my mind for a long time. It’s one of those European cities that has traded hands and passed between empires and countries for centuries, with many overlapping identities and stories contained therein, like a Thessaloniki or an Istanbul or a Dubrovnik. Jessa Crispin wrote about it in the Dead Ladies’ Project, for example. We thought about squeezing in a trip there when we visited Venice in 2013, but it wasn’t practical. I spent a few years writing an (unpublished) novel set in Rijeka, some 75 kilometers away.

Dasa Drndic has also been on my mind for some time, though a shorter period. She is a Croatian novelist and spent much of her life in Rijeka, dying in 2017. Trieste is one of her three books which have been translated to English, and it’s a thumper. The story is about Haya Tedeschi, an old women in Gorizia, on the Italian side of the border with Slovenia. She is Jewish – the last name means ‘German’ in Italian – and she was born in between the world wars. Her father assimilated to the point where he was a fascist, and somehow from moving around – to Naples, perhaps further from the Nazis, and then to occupied Albania – the family escaped persecution. Except that when they moved back to Italy before the end of the war, she fell in love with a Nazi, had a child with him, and that child was abducted before the war ended.

It’s a fascinating book, weaving in testimonials from Holocaust victims and from Nazi trials. Drndic lists the names of 9000 or so Jews who were deported from Italy during the war. The spotlight on Trieste, not to my mind one of the principal settings of the war or the Holocaust, She weaves in Borges and Eliot quotes into the book. And this delivers heft – it’s true that the 50 pages of names aren’t meant to be read straight through, perhaps, but it adds to the punch of the book. Like when reading Angelika Schrobsdorff’s book, I’m reminded of the ease with which we adapt to the reality around us, or even more the ease with which we deny that reality, find a way to think ourselves different.

The way she ties the plot back together towards the end for some reason doesn’t move me as much, but that doesn’t reduce the impact. Reading history and historically oriented fiction is a great way to regain context for our times, and this is a good one.

5.    Jay Fingers, Orange Mound

One of the last of my Memphis-inspired book purchases for now. This is a novel about Ant, an aspiring chef who is trying to leave the drug trade behind, and all the struggles that ensue. It’s a lighter read, comic though with dark twists (including the ending), and enjoyable. The characters are well drawn, and it’s a very digestible book. Another angle on Memphis. I don’t have a lot to say about the book, but was glad to have read it.

6.    Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House (Memoir)

I’m not sure if any book is really hyped these days, but I have been hearing about or coming across Sarah Broom’s memoir for a while. Or maybe Amazon knew to recommend it to me after I read Jesmyn Ward’s Sing the Bones. Or both. Anyway, it’s an acclaimed book and it’s set in New Orleans and so I read it.

Broom is a precise writer, and her family story – starting from her grandmother and moving through generations in New Orleans, including a generation and a half or so worth of siblings before she is born – is epic. Not because they go on to change the world, or even because the family is full of strife or drama, but because any family story on a long enough timeline and told well enough becomes epic.

The yellow house is the shotgun house she grew up in, that her parents owned (her father dying when she was six months old) in New Orleans East, an almost cordoned off part of New Orleans, on the other side of the canals from the main parts of the city. I loved her calling her block the short side of Wilson Avenue, and her adding of the history of New Orleans East as a promising development gone neglected to her own story.

As with just about any modern New Orleans story, there is a Katrina section; the book is broken into ‘Movements’, and this one is titled Water. It’s the turning point in the book, moving from her family’s past and her childhood through young adulthood to an extended continuous present tense. The family members still in New Orleans – she has 11 siblings, and six of them and her mother and ailing grandmother are in the city – flee to various corners of the south and west of the United States while she tries to connect with everyone from New York, where she lives. And that exodus proves to be permanent for all but her mother and two of her brothers, and beyond permanent for her grandmother, who dies a month after Katrina hits.

And yet, it pushes her to try to live in New Orleans again. Well, first it sends her to Burundi, a chapter I found really interesting, both because there are echoes of the life abroad I’ve led and of what I saw in Rwanda on a two-week visit, and because it was such a different experience for her in countless ways. Then it sends her to New Orleans for a first try, where she works as Mayor Ray Nagin’s speechwriter, though that doesn’t last long.

She tries again a few years later, renting out an apartment in the French Quarter, rediscovering New Orleans from the inside out, posting up in the heart of the glamorized, touristified New Orleans, the only part most people know. She talked about the frustration she faced when locals asked her where she was from, said she didn’t sound like she was from New Orleans. She talked about trying to find archival footage of her father marching in parades, the father she never knew, and how her mother corrected her when she thought she had spotted him.

There are sad moments throughout the memoir, and it’s a melancholy story overall. There is also a lot of beautiful notes on her relationships with her family, especially her older brothers Carl and Michael. I don’t have such a large family, but I can imagine that when you’re the youngest of 12, your relationships with the other 11 develop in irregular fashion, closer to some than others. I don’t know what makes me underline that, but it seems to me to exemplify the success of Broom’s writing, a success that builds momentum over the course of the book. Worth the hype, in the end.

7.    Walter Johnson, Broken Heart of America (History)

There’s a meme that went around Twitter earlier this year, about what radicalized you. Like most things, some of the comments were serious, some were surprising but cutting, and a lot were jokes.

The phrase, the idea came back to me when reading Broken Heart of America. I’ve read a decent amount of history this year; Rising Tide, Common Ground, Beale Street Dynasty; and politically infused non-fiction or fiction, like Bluest Eye or Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, and even the memoirs I mentioned above. And of course there’s been a ton of writing ranging from Adam Serwer’s work to what Anna Lind-Guzik has done, and podcasts from Fiasco to Latino USA to Nice White Parents that has exposed more and more of our historical challenges to me, that has made it clear how constant those challenges have been.

Broken Heart of America takes a specific lens – St. Louis’ history – to tie together Native American removal, Black oppression, white supremacy, activism, and the struggle that emerges from that. It shows how the 1848 revolutions led to a burgeoning socialist community in St. Louis (via Germans, which is also how I imagine Milwaukee came to elect three different socialist mayors, at least in part). It shows how Abraham Lincoln was afraid to free Blacks prematurely in the Civil War. And it pulls us through to Ferguson and the police brutality and subsequent protest movement.

I found it very well written, a fluid narrative that was not impinged but aided by how well footnoted and documented it was. You could argue that Johnson writes a touch polemically, but I think he backs it up time and again. Specifically, he makes the argument that capitalism underpins much of this brutality and violence, that the logic of property ownership above all perpetuates our nation’s problems. That was the argument that was most challenging and eye-opening to me; I’ve long felt capitalism to be one of the answers to the ‘best system after you’ve tried everything else’ riddles, and I suppose I still do, but Johnson demonstrates again and again how its driving logic often reinforces or even causes some of our fundamental societal ills.  

To return to my earlier list, I’ve read a lot of great history books as well. I thought Rising Tide was fantastic, and Common Ground right behind it. Broken Heart of America is up on that tier as well, and very much worth reading.

Books I Read - August 2020

 I was hoping to write a little more regularly on here, but the one write-up I geared for the blog came out poorly so I need to work on it more. I'm hoping to finish the following posts before the end of the month:

• Ibiza visit
• Being outside the US in Summer 2020
• North of Spain visit

But we'll see. My podcasts post will be available here tomorrow. I decided to post it directly on the work blog.

Ok, enough notes for myself and my few readers. Here's what I read in August.

1. Stuart Berman, This Book is Broken (History), 

Broken Social Scene has been a source of periodic fascination for me since I got into music and heard about the band in college. I have seen them perform three times in two different countries - Boston in 2005, a small town in Spain in 2008, New Orleans in 2011 - and got to interview them at the Spain show. I have them in my mind sort of the way William Miller has Stillwater in Almost Famous, a band half a generation older than him through which he comes to understand music more widely. I didn't have any sense of disillusionment with Broken Social Scene, but they existed on a border between bigger-than-life rock stars and dudes (alas, mostly dudes) who you could see were full of shit but enjoyed anyway. It's been a long time since I've seen them, obviously, and I'm not following them uber closely, but it was a real joy to buy their most recent record, Hug of Thunder, even if it sounded like a new spin on the same record they had made three times before.

We're in a period of 00's nostalgia, and I am contributing to that with the first (and soon to be second) season of A Positive Jam, and that second season brought me to this book. Stuart Berman was living in Toronto as Broken Social Scene emerged, and knew the band as a friend, so he has good access to the many people involved. He took on the book as an oral history, with brief introductions leading to each of the chapters.

I'm a fan, so I like the subject. I also remember in my interview with the band, a year before this came out, a couple of the members pointed out that it was way too early to publish a retrospective on the band, one that dishes on their personal secrets (someone made a joke about how you should only talk about who's sleeping with who when you're old and unattractive). And I think, despite fascination that I and probably hundreds of other people had with the band, there's not quite enough here to stand for a full book. There aren't great revelations, and any revelations would not have mattered widely enough to be worth airing. It's a step above of a fanzine, and I liked it, but it's hard to recommend if you're not into the band, and even if you are, you probably remember a lot of this (the arrest of producer Dave Newfield in New York in 2005, I forgot about that until re-reading this, but yeah, that was an event at the time). 

The question that prompts for me is whether this would have been better written, say, now, where there's that nostalgia element and some of these things are forgotten. I doubt it from a commercial element - there probably wouldn't be the wider interest in this now. From an informational and artistic perspective, it's interesting to wonder about.

(Also, I have a huge blind spot in not being Canadian or in Canada's cultural milieu. So caveat lector).

2.    Preston Lauterbach, Beale Street Dynasty (History)

I believe this is the last of my Memphis specific books for the year. It focuses on the legendary Beale Street, but less so the music that emerged from there than the culture that allowed that music to emerge. The subject is the Church family dynasty, the Church family being Bob Church and Bob Church Jr.. They were a Black family, and their fortune was built on real estate around Beale Street, including bars, brothels, housing, and eventually a bank. The time period was the second half of the 18th century and the first third of the 20th, and the insight on what Black people had to go through in liberated, post-Civil War Memphis (and Memphis does appear to be relatively better than a lot of the country of the time). 

I expected and would have liked to hear more about the music itself, but that most likely reflects my own lack of due diligence about what this book would cover. Like a few of the other histories I’ve read this year, it felt like he had to stretch his materials to pull together a cohesive story, but this flowed reasonably well and had a thesis on which it delivered. 

3.    Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the Street (Biography)

In last month's post, I proposed a theory on biographies being either first biographies that compile all there is to know about a subject from primary sources, or second biographies that are more analytical and distant from the subject itself. 

This book, a biography of Jane Jacobs, is a pretty good exemplar of what the first biography should look like. The sourcing is good and exhaustive, including letters, interviews with family and friends, and a thorough accounting of Jacobs's life and career, especially before Death and Life of American Cities came out. The picture is a little glossy, but there may be fewer skeletons in the close for Jacobs to be criticized with. Kanigel does call out the more legitimate criticisms that Jacobs received, including her blindspots on race and class and the gentrifying effect that her preferred city policies could have.

 The writing itself felt 'hearty' to me, as if being read by an official mid-20th century broadcaster, with the mid-Atlantic neutral accent. And I think there was more room for 'ok, what does Jacobs mean now and where have her followers or critics taken city studies from her base?' but that may be appropriate for a different sort of book, rather than the stuff of biographies.

4.    Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (fiction)

I mentioned last time my poor effort in reading Toni Morrison's Beloved in high school. The Bluest Eye is my first effort to correct for that oversight. It's an effective story about how the weight of difficulty and history and disadvantage can crush someone’s spirits and hopes even before they become an adult. The interpolating histories of the Breedlove family members', how even the most villainous characters had a burden behind them, had context to them.

It was interesting reading the foreword/afterword where Morrison comments on how she fell short, and her comments are fair, but I think she did better at conveying her point than the foreword/afterword might lead one to believe. They were also helpful at giving a window into her craft, and how she approached the theme of the story, why she made the choices she did, and what she hoped to achieve. This felt like a first novel in the sense that it was given a narrow scope, but it wasn't the typical bildungsroman that many authors begin their career with. 

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.