Percival Everett is quite unlike anyone else. Just like the university course in this novel given by a professor named Percival Everett, this book is Percival Everett is quite unlike anyone else. Just like the university course in this novel given by a professor named Percival Everett, this book is nonsense. A black man who looks like Sidney Poitier is named Not Sidney Poitier, which leads to some absurdist conversations. Not Sidney is rich as Croesus, or rather, as rich as Ted Turner of CNN fame, which allows him to do pretty much whatever he wants. But what does he want?
As with all Percival Everett books, this is worth reading just to see where his mind is going...we can all see his mind is going, but if you want to know where, check this out.
And please. Go see the film American Fiction. It is the film version of Erasure. I am looking forward to seeing it next week....more
This novel doesn’t read now the way it did to me as a younger reader. Deeply explicatory of the ways people arrange their brains to suit the facts thaThis novel doesn’t read now the way it did to me as a younger reader. Deeply explicatory of the ways people arrange their brains to suit the facts that show them in the best light, it is a cynical book but not a cruel one. This is the way people act, moral or not, so we’d best take that feature into account when facing criminal charges.
First published on a fortnightly basis as a 27-part serialization in Rolling Stone magazine in 1984, this first novel of Tom Wolfe was later published, with revisions, by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 1987. With the book publication, Mr. Wolfe became a cause célèbre. He’d been disappointed with the reaction of the public to the magazine serialization and that earlier effort seems to have been almost lost to history:
It felt all the more ironic given the book’s title. The first vanities bonfire happened in Florence, Italy in 1497 when supporters of friar Girolamo Savonarola publicly burned what they considered vain objects – books, art, music, anything deemed immoral. It’s easy to see Wolfe playing the part of Savonarola, eradicating all evidence of his early attempts at fiction.
Considering Bonfire was Wolfe’s first novel, it was a marvel of description, capturing the technicolor of the Wall Street bond market, the holding pen in the Bronx Criminal Courts Building, as well as the well-padded offices of Reverend Bacon, the profitable nonprofit savant.
The language is the thing to enjoy here. Plot is not this book’s strong suit. I read with real admiration Wolfe’s description of a crime victim, shot dead in the back of a Cadillac: “The victim was a fat man with his hands on his legs, just above his knees, as if he were about to hitch up his pants to keep them from being stretched by his kneecaps.”
Somehow that description blew me away. The next sentence, how the rear window of the Cadillac looked like someone had thrown a pizza against it, confirmed that the victim himself had, in fact, been blown away.
Wolfe claimed in a couple places that there was truth in the saying that “A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.” That’s his own ‘saying’ and the first time I read it I laughed. When I read it again, I wondered…I don’t think that is true anymore, fifty years later.
So, I am still scratching my head over the title. I am inclined to agree with another reader who has pointed out this is probably less of a bonfire of the vanities than a celebration of them, but perhaps the title refers to the main character, Sherman (Shuhmun) McCoy.
Sherman McCoy, whose name recalls the ‘real thing,’ is in fact, ‘the real McCoy’ insofar as he is a man untouched by human drama to this point in his life. Raised in wealth and working in bonds, he has hardly had occasion to consider what a ‘bump in the road’ might mean to the ordinary man on the street.
In the beginning, McCoy is fearful and respectful, still, of law enforcement and legal matters in general though gradually one can perceive his discernment increasing as time—and his opportunities for incarceration—go on. Perhaps the title is not meant as anything other than the notion that the innocence of man, in the larger and smaller senses, is set alight every day in urban America, were we only aware....more
Couldn't manage it, though I tried...twice. What didn't work here? At first I thought it could be the sexuality angle, and then questioned that notionCouldn't manage it, though I tried...twice. What didn't work here? At first I thought it could be the sexuality angle, and then questioned that notion. How quickly we have assimilated the notion that some great proportion of our population have sexual interest in different people than we originally thought...and how little we care.
But it isn't that, because I can be interested in the lives and struggles of plenty of people with whom I share little. I mean, after all, the protagonist is struggling in middle age. Who can't relate to that?
I just found it insufferably boring. Nothing he said sparked any interest in me until he related the story of the cerulean blue suit with the fuschia lining. Now, had he elaborated that, and written back to the tailor & ordered more suits, in several different combinations, and enjoyed wearing them...now that could get me on board.
He was going to travel the world! This should thrill me! except that we had to take Less along for the ride....more
Scottish writer Andrew O'Hagan is a difficult man to dismiss. Here he tells three stories based around computers and two strange Australians and makesScottish writer Andrew O'Hagan is a difficult man to dismiss. Here he tells three stories based around computers and two strange Australians and makes something weird and wild and kind of spectacular. The first story, "Ghosting," regards the time he was asked to interview for the opportunity to possibly ghostwrite Julian Assange's biography. O'Hagan is distant, observant, and precise, early on telling us
"It was interesting to see how he parried with some notion of himself as a public figure, as a rock star, really, when all the activists I've ever known tend to see themselves as marginal and possibly eccentric figures. Assange referred a number of times to the fact that people were in love with him, but I couldn't see the coolness, the charisma he took for granted."
Assange comes across as a paranoid narcissist, deeply confused about his role and his life, about what he does and how he wants to be remembered. O'Hagan put the time in, listening and writing, and comes away burned.
The second story, "The Invention of Ronald Pinn," feels dangerous. O'Hagan takes on the identity of a young lad who'd died young, Ronnie Pinn, so that he could enter the Deep Web and see how it operated. O'Hagan's invented Pinn
"tended toward certain enterprises of his own volition...[including] with secretive experts about drugs and false documents and guns...The 'people' now moderating the Dark Web don't care about the old codes of citizenship and they don't recognize the laws of society. They don't believe that governments or currencies or historical narratives are automatically legitimate, or event that the personalities who appear to run the world are who they say they are. The average hacker believes most executives to be functionaries of a machine they can't understand."
When O'Hagan finally gives up the online ruse, he finds Pinn lingers longer in cyberspace, and in his psyche, than he'd anticipated.
The final essay, "The Satoshi Affair," was originally published in LRB a year or so ago. It is a very long, totally immersive essay about the possible originators of Bitcoin, and what the currency will mean for revolutionizing business and banking. If you haven't read much about the subject, this is a good place to start. Don't worry if some of it slips by without your understanding. I have a feeling we're all going feel that way for quite awhile.
O'Hagan is special. You won't be wasting your time, reading about his fascinating interface with the world....more
Has an Irishman written the Great American Novel? The question is not theoretical; Sebastian Barry’s latest novel is the fourth time he has been longlHas an Irishman written the Great American Novel? The question is not theoretical; Sebastian Barry’s latest novel is the fourth time he has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The novel is his seventh, but it is Barry’s long experience writing for the theatre—thirteen plays already—that lends excitement to this work. After the years of excellent effort, suddenly Thomas Thomasina McNulty springs full-grown from Barry’s well-tilled field. The extraordinary success of this gem of a novel set in 1850’s America is all about preparedness and inspiration.
The novel is not long but is fluent and unstrained; it makes big statements about human existence, war, love, about what we want, and what we get. It is remarkable how squarely Barry lands in the middle of the American debate so clamorous around us now, about race, diversity, sexuality, what we fight for and who fights for us—questions we’ve never satisfactorily answered, and so they are back again.
Barry gives us humor in a horribly violent world, surprising and delighting us with his deadpan delivery. His diverse cast of characters are reliant on one another, all viewed through the eyes of an Irishman who’d suffered such terrible deprivations as a child that man’s cruelty never surprised him. What did surprise him was that we could find a way to love, to happiness, despite our sorrows.
In the early pages Thomas McNulty meets John Cole under a hedge in a rainstorm. John Cole is a few years older, but both the orphaned young boys is a wild thing, having ‘growed' in the school of hard knocks. Uncanny judges of character, they almost instantly decide they stand a better chance together in the rough-and-tumble than alone and set off on a series of adventures. The pace of the novel is swift. When I go back to find a memorable passage, I am shocked at how quickly events unfolded, and how quickly I am deeply involved.
The language is one of the novel's wonders. Barry doesn’t try to hide his brogue, but uses it: a stranger in a strange land. That distance and perspective allows Thomas to make comment upon what is commonly observed
"Everything bad gets shot in America, says John Cole, and everything good too."
and
"I know I can rely on the kindness of folk along the way. The ones that don’t try to rob me will feed me. That how it is in America."
The novel constantly surprises: when the boys answer the ad hung awry on a saloon door in a broken-down Kansas town, “Clean Boys Wanted,” we prepare for the worst. Within pages we are jolly and laughing, then agonized and pained, then back again, our emotions rocketing despite the tamped-down telling. Our initial sense of extreme danger never really leaves us, but serves to prepare us for the Indian wars, those pitiful, personal slaughters, and the Civil War, which comes soon enough.
The most remarkable bits of this novel, the sense of a shared humanity within a wide diversity, seemed so natural and obvious and wonderful we wanted to crawl under that umbrella and shelter there. These fierce fighting men fought for each other rather than for an ideal. Their early lives were so precarious they’d formed alliances across race, religion, national origin when they were treated fair. “Don’t tell me a Irish is an example of civilised humanity…you‘re talking to two when you talk to one Irishman.”
And then there is the notion of time, if it is perceived at all by youth: “Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending…” By the end of the novel, the characters do indeed perceive time: “I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now.” We have been changed, too, because we also perceive time, and sorrow and pain and those things that constitute joy. We have lived his life, and ours, too.
Barry gets so much right about the America he describes: the sun coming up earlier and earlier as one travels east, the desert-but-not-desert plains land, the generosity and occasional cooperation between the Indian tribes and the army come to dispatch them, the crazy deep thoughtless racism. But what made me catch my breath with wonder was the naturalness of the union between Thomasina McNulty and John Cole and the fierceness of the love these two army men had for an orphaned, laughing, high-spirited, bright star of an Indian girl they called Winona.
Barry understands absolutely that our diversity makes us stronger, better men. Leave the pinched and hateful exclusion of differentness to sectarian tribes, fighting for the old days. We know what the old days were like. We can do better. I haven’t read all the Man Booker longlist yet, but most, and this is at the top of my list. It is a treasure.
I had access to the Viking Penguin hardcopy of this novel--I'm still surprised at how small it is, given the expansive nature of the story--but I also had the audio from Hoopla. I needed both: the pace of the novel is swift, and may cause us to read faster than we ought. Barry writes poetically, which by rights should slow us down. The Blackstone Audio production, though read quickly by Aidan Kelly, allows us to catch things we will have missed in print and vice versa. At several stages in this novel, crises impel us forward. As we rush to see what happens, we may miss the beauty. Don't miss the beauty. Books like these are so very rare....more
Alan Alda is something of an institution at this point. He has parlayed his fame as an actor on a long-running well-written TV serial, M*A*S*H, into dAlan Alda is something of an institution at this point. He has parlayed his fame as an actor on a long-running well-written TV serial, M*A*S*H, into doing whatever takes his fancy. Good for him. He was never extensively schooled in science but he loved it, pursued it, made a new kind of career out of having scientists explain their secrets to him on film.
In a way it is out of this experience that this opportunity to explain communication came to him: how do we know the other side in a conversation actually understands what we are saying? One can imagine the numerous ways we would want to verify the other side 'got the message' in the way we meant them to. Alda uses the example of a doctor explaining a terminal diagnosis to a patient, getting no reaction, and then querying the patient: Why didn't you ask more questions? The patient hadn't understood what the doctor was saying...hadn't known he had just said 'get your affairs in order.'
Alda explains that the skill to notice how much the other in a conversation is comprehending is a learned skill. We can improve. He suggests that one way to do this is through improvisation exercises that require one to mirror (exactly reproduce in real time) the movements of another. One must watch, empathize, involve oneself deeply in the other's experience in order to do this. Mimicking doesn't mean one feels all the things the other does, but one gets closer to their experience.
That seems to be about it. There are lots of stories, etc. but he is more interested in his results than I am. Reminds us that advancement in these fields is painfully slow. I'm glad he is doing what interests him. I listened to the audio, produced by Penguin Random House and read by the author. He was able to put his emphases in where he wanted them, and was able to convey his interest in the subject to us, but I grew weary before the end, at the end of one lab experiment he'd designed (with neuroscientists) and financed, thinking...oh, yes, I remember those science experiments that never seemed to go anywhere. But, as he says, even the negative of a result tells us something... ...more
This is an appropriate time to take another look at Jerusalem, and Guy Delisle’s book can explain to you the in and outs of what U.S. President Trump This is an appropriate time to take another look at Jerusalem, and Guy Delisle’s book can explain to you the in and outs of what U.S. President Trump is seeing while he is visiting.
Guy Delisle is a graphic artist who accompanies his wife, a Médecins Sans Frontières physician, to hotspots around the world. While in the past he has been able to work as an artist while overseas on assignment, every posting is different, and the one in Jerusalem did not lend itself as easily to sketching outside, teaching in universities, giving shows on his work, and concentrating on finishing his drawings in a systematic way.
The very thing that makes Delisle effective in his role as graphic artist and stay-at-home husband and dad also makes him a frustrating on-the-ground observer. He is almost resolutely non-partisan and non-political. When bombs start to fly in Operation Cast Lead over the holiday period Dec 27, 2008-January 16, 2009 he tells what he heard from his position at home, but he wasn’t interested in being an observer. He also wasn’t interested in interviewing settlers in Hebron when he was asked to do graphic reportage there.
By the end, however, I could see the value in his distanced, uninvolved view. He drew what he observed, without much editorializing. He drew the extreme care some security guards took in checkpoint and airport security work, the difficulties Palestinians had in getting around, working, living, and planning for the future, he drew the wall, and the odd situation of Palestinians being pushed of their homes by settlers in the West Bank. The denial from the Israeli state sounds like the U.S. finding ways around giving African Americans voting rights, or rights to decent education.
Delisle saw the sights Jerusalem had to offer, always on the lookout for interesting or peaceful places to bring his wife and children, or somewhere he could work uninterrupted. Eight months into a twelve-month tour the pastor of a Lutheran church Augusta Victoria, on the Mount of Olives, offered Delisle a room in which to work. It was quiet and the only distractions were Delisle’s own thoughts, and a large organ which sent vibrations through his space. He found that he’d accustomed himself to grabbing the in-between moments in his hectic daily life, and the peacefulness of the church paradoxically made it more difficult for him to complete his projects.
Delisle spent many frames drawing the wall: “It’s graphically interesting,” he would explain. The wall through Jerusalem cut Palestinians off, in some cases, from their school, from their work, from their own land. What I particularly liked was his dividing the chapters by months of the year. Some months had considerable drama, but others reflected his dawning understanding about the situation and his learning to make up his own mind about what might be excusable behavior and what seemed like taking advantage.
Throughout the black-and-white book, a map of Israel with the West Bank and Gaza drawn in chartreuse served to remind Delisle and readers that the amount of space allocated to Palestinians in Israel is very small, and Israeli settlers are pushing them away even still. The violent tactics and language the settlers use, the virulent criticism heaped upon the government and activists by the press, can be shocking to those of us who are not used to such extreme positions. “The vast majority of Israelis vigorously disapprove of the extreme behavior of the Hebron settlers.” It is hard not to respond with derision to statements like these, and it is hard to see that restraint is working to underline the urgency of the situation for Palestinians.
The currents of daily life are portrayed effectively by the end of this thick graphic novel (336 pages), and Delisle’s tone and lack of interest serve his purposes well. Despite his occasional missteps (when discussing Hasidic Jews, for instance), his intentional ignorance gives us and him the opportunity to look at the situation anew.
”And the truly surprising end of the story is this: Just six months after he escaped, André showed up at Doctors Without Borders and asked for a new assignment. He stayed on with them for another 20 years.”
Think it's probably best I don't rate this because it didn't work for me at all. I'd never heard of Bell before, and I couldn't figure out why I was sThink it's probably best I don't rate this because it didn't work for me at all. I'd never heard of Bell before, and I couldn't figure out why I was spending time listening to him. He taught me something: I'd never heard of Cisgender before, though his explanation flew by before I caught it. It means "denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex." Seems like we're doing an awful lot of talk about one's personal sexual life these days...I'm not at all sure it improves the conversation.
Anyway, Bell writes for a TV show called United Shades of America which sounds like something I would like, but...I don't know if Bell was trying to be funny in this memoir, but nothing he said struck me as funny. Anyway, the more listening we do when someone speaks about race is all to the good....more
Thomas Frank makes a good deal of sense if one can listen long enough to hear his thesis. But he is his own worst enemy, providing story after statistThomas Frank makes a good deal of sense if one can listen long enough to hear his thesis. But he is his own worst enemy, providing story after statistic to describe Kansas voting for conservatives against their own best interests. His arguments are extreme and unsettling. You’d think Kansas was the most unholy place on earth with pollution, unemployment, and immigrant slave labor, but actually conservatives have only slowly been crushing the lifeblood out of the state. This last election voted 60%-40% for Trump.
20% is a lot of votes, but there are still reasonable people in the state. After all, Kathryn Sibelius, Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, was elected governor of Kansas in the year just before this book came out. I am reading this now because I was lately introduced to a YouTube clip of Frank talking about his new book Listen, Liberal. I had the same reaction to him in person as I did in print. This book could have been an excellent essay without all the pyrotechnics.
I note Frank said then
"Ask a liberal pundit what ails the red states, what has induced them to work so strenuously against their own economic interests, to vote Republican...and he will probably tell you it's all because of racism.
There are undeniably a great number of places where this...[is] true, but Kansas is not one of them."
Interesting. Where did that come from, more than halfway through his book-length argument, the first mention of race. Why raise it at all? I wonder what he would say now, knowing what we all do about Kansas and their not-race problem....more
Lena Dunham is still the woman you met in the first season of Girls. These journal entries were made in 2006 when she was in college at Oberlin in OhiLena Dunham is still the woman you met in the first season of Girls. These journal entries were made in 2006 when she was in college at Oberlin in Ohio. Many times the entries are not even complete sentences; they are mostly markers for absurd situations or behaviors. All that Lena Dunham is now is evident in those sentence fragments: her lacerating humor, her lack of modesty, her clear intelligence, and her fierce refusal to put makeup on the human condition.
She is offering these fragments to the world in order to show other young women and men that from which inspiration flows. They are fragments that capture a zeitgeist, a moment in the life of a college student…the time the unsexy boy wrapped his arm around you in the car, or the lover with the meaty thighs, or the time your girlfriend carried you over the snowy field on her back. Dunham is the same person…never sure how she is going to get all the people out of her apartment, sleeping everyday from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., so inventive in her imagination one is ever off-balance in her company.
2006 was the year Dunham began making short videos around the theme of sexual enlightenment, extracurricular to her school work. One could say none, or all, of the ideas recorded in her journal that year surfaced in her art. She records awkward moments, moments of pleasure and of pain, moments of humiliation. Moments she can use to see a situation, a person, a scene. Theoretically, one could use these scraps to spark an idea, or to remember a character you’d like to describe more fully.
It’s interesting, but it is probably not for the lay person. It’s really for creatives. The audio for this is read by the author, produced by Penguin Random House. It worked well for me. I understand the written journal is available as an ebook only. ...more
We may not be in a post racial society but I tell you what: when funky, funny Phoebe can tell us what white people do that makes her crazy, and why shWe may not be in a post racial society but I tell you what: when funky, funny Phoebe can tell us what white people do that makes her crazy, and why she doesn’t want to be anybody’s token black friend, I think we’ve moved the needle since the last century. I remember the first time an African man told me that the only pictures he’d had taken in his years of graduate school were those taken by a Singaporean man who knew how to get the camera to register his skin color and expression. Robinson says something similar here: maybe it’s best if we first acknowledge a color difference before we declare it doesn’t matter.
Robinson does plenty of things in this “breakout book deal” but the thing that drew me in was the chance to learn, unfiltered, how black women had such dope-fantastic hair while white folk have to make do with boring thin stuff that flies away and looks pretty much the same everyday, no matter what we do to it. I first learned a little about the time and energy and money serious black hair coiffeurs require in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah, but now I think I get it. And no, I don’t think anyone should have to do this so that other folks will love them more. It is, however, an art form, another art form that black folk have created, perfected, and strutted.
Shonda Rhimes, in her book Year of Yes, tells us as a teen she tried to get her hair looking like Diana Ross every morning before classes. Oh girl…I did the same thing with some magazine model or other whose look was so far from mine that a million years of evolution wouldn’t have changed that difference between us. It is definitely not worth the effort. And the “creamy crack” or “crack cream” (break me up, girl!) sounds positively dangerous. Forget it immediately. Get a wig if you want to toss straight hair so much and definitely don’t subject yourself to chemical burns. Come on. If that is what’s required, f- them. I wouldn’t do it. Who the heck is calling the shots here?
When Robinson describes a bedroom scene where the woman is wearing an elastic do-rag to protect her afro and she insists that a real man would still get a boner regardless, I laughed all right. But then it occurred to me that is the definition of drop-dead sexy: strong and sexy, when black womanhood doesn’t even need to fling her hair around to get to home base. She commands the stage. I’m impressed. Personally, I’d kill for the simplicity of a close crop and call it quits. But I ain’t no Phoebe Robinson.
Jessica Williams, Phoebe’s “werk wife,” writes the introduction to this book. Williams was a writer/correspondent on The Daily Show and now the two perform standup at various locations in Brooklyn and work a podcast (WYNC) called 2 Dope Queens. Robinson had a vision of where she wanted to go and to that end began a blog called Blaria in 2014. When the Robinson and Williams standup routine started to take off, a new piece in the NYT tried to keep track. Robinson also has a talk-show style podcast she started last year called Sooo Many White Guys. She's angling for Oprah's job, and I think she's becoming a worthy successor. She certainly has drive.
If the material is sometimes juvenile, well, juvenile can be funny. There is one thing that may eventually limit the range of the women, though: all their references for jokes relate to TV or movies. When it works, it’s very good indeed, but not everyone is so deep into popular culture, or have looked at it with such seriousness and depth of understanding. It is fascinating to watch Robinson deconstruct an old movie like a college professor does a piece of literature, but then our mind starts thinking…what else can this woman do that would be—less fun, maybe—but more important?
Then I remember what she is doing, desensitizing race relations, telling white folk what bothers black folk, sharing some intimacies and some vulnerabilities, and I realize she is doing exactly what she needs to be doing right now, and she is doing it funny, she is doing it sexy, she is doing it in braids, in long soft curls, in dreads, and in a bust-'em afro. She’s strong, she’s sexy, she’s outspoken, and she’s unstoppable now. I’m a fan.
This work is all kinds of novel. Chilean novelist Zambra really puts us through our paces by making us actually participate in the process of his fictThis work is all kinds of novel. Chilean novelist Zambra really puts us through our paces by making us actually participate in the process of his fiction. He gives us choices on how to finish his sentences. He starts simply enough, asking us to decide which word has no relation to the words given. The structure of the book copies the Verbal section of the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test, required of all applicants to university in Chile. Our minds race with the possibilities he’s given us, and we can be as cynical and hard-eyed or hilarious and droll as any teenager in marking the answers and thinking of our own.
Next comes “Sentence Order,” and the test-maker is acting like a disaffected teenager himself, his sentences starting out short and perhaps only a little sarcastic, progressing to longer sentences that sound bitter and angry, to his last question featuring a page of sentences we are meant to order, including words like “pain,” and “tumor” and “going from the general to the specific,” and mentioning General Pinochet for the first time.
The section marked “Sentence Completion” is pretty easy because the test-maker does not give us as many choices as he might have. He seems almost to be steering us. We can’t just think up answers…he is strong-arming us to conclusions as a result of his sentences. We chafe a little under his direction.
In the penultimate section, “Sentence Elimination,” we start getting the feel of the potentiality in this form. Zambia here reminds me of a famous Chekhov monologue called “The Evils of Tobacco.” In that monologue, a distinguished educator who has been asked to give a speech on tobacco veers off topic into the state of his health, what he likes to eat, and how he despairs of his wife. Our test-maker in “Sentence Elimination” starts with short sentences, though they are already evocative, and gradually starts talking about family, a hated father, government eliminations, and other soul-baring terrors. We forget which sentence to eliminate.
The final section, “Reading Comprehension,” evokes Saramago. Remember in All the Names Saramago created a government functionary who was supposed to do a boring job filing the names of all the folks who died? That bureaucrat started getting creative, investigating the deaths instead of just filing them away. Well, here our test-maker quite loses his detachment and begins a long confession on how he learned to cheat on tests and how it brought his cheating classmates together…only to further disclose how his classmates lived, loved, played…You get the picture. In the final questions to test comprehension, we see that he has lost all objectivity and is telling us instead what he has learned.
Bravo, Zambra. The form fulfills its potential. Translated, by Megan McDowell. ...more
”…when I did what I did, I wasn’t thinking about inalienable rights, the proud history of our people. I did what worked, and since when did a little s
”…when I did what I did, I wasn’t thinking about inalienable rights, the proud history of our people. I did what worked, and since when did a little slavery and segregation ever hurt anybody, and if so, so fucking be it.”
My copy of this novel is spiked with tabs marking something deeply insightful, stabbingly funny, or needing revisiting. There is simply too much to point to: Beatty must have been saving up observations about race relations in America to get so much into this relatively short novel. He never tells us why his fictional California town is named Dickens—it can’t be about the author—but I think it has to do with a classic American imprecation “Go to [the] Dickens!” though I am certainly willing to be challenged on this supposition. Dickens is also used as an exclamatory “What the dickens!” standing in for “What the F@*k!” in marginally polite white dialogue, and perhaps even in the L’il Rascals film archives, though I am going to have to check on that.
”They won’t admit it, but every black person thinks they’re better than every other black person.”
Beatty’s narrator, Bonbon Me, is the sellout. He just doesn’t seem to get the “black” thing. He identifies as human first, black second. Beatty doesn’t target black folk alone. Everyone is skewered in this wild ride through a Los Angeles southwest suburb that still has farm zoning, allowing families to live among livestock, chickens, cotton, watermelon, and weed. A proud descendant of the Kentucky family called Mee and one whose forefather subsequently dropped the extraneous “e,” our narrator Bonbon Me has a case before the Supreme Court, a “screw-faced” black Justice, about his ownership of a slave in the present day. That alleged slave, Hominy Jenkins, literally declaimed his status one day to our narrator as a result of Me still having agricultural interests and therefore probably needing a slave. Hominy moved in. What could Me do?
Well, shortly after rapacious real estate developers convinced officials to remove signs demarking the township of Dickens, Me made and put up new signs and drew a white line around the streets and houses comprising Dickens and re-segregated: “No Whites Allowed.” One may be curious why he would do this, since the town was already black, but he felt he was saving something, making a point. They can’t just muscle in and erase a town…a culture…a people. That’s not fairness. People actually do care if you are white, brown, black or yellow. Sellout Bonbon had mused for some that if the black community in Dickens just took “their racial blinders off for one second, they’d realize [Dickens] was no longer black but predominantly Latino.” So he was just making Dickens “equal” by excluding whites. It’s not discrimination exactly. It’s equality.
”The Supreme Court is where the country takes out its dick and tits and decides who’s going to get fucked and who’s getting a taste of mother’s milk. It’s constitutional pornography in there…and what…about obscenity? I know it when I see it…Me vs. the United States of America demands a more fundamental examination of what we mean by ‘separate,’ by ‘equal,’ by ‘black.’"
Beatty demurs when critics point out his work as a satire. It isn’t, he says. It’s reportage. The material in this book is, in fact, observable in everyday America.
”Black people don’t even talk about race. Nothing’s attributable to color anymore. It’s all ‘mitigating circumstances.’ The only people discussing ‘race’ with any insight and courage are loud middle-aged white men…well-read open-minded white kids…a few freelance journalists in Detroit…”
Author interviews with Beatty are some of the most uncomfortable I have ever heard or read. Beatty stutters and avoids, sometimes flat out refuses to entertain a question. (Examples: Boston NPR Onpoint, and Ebony.) He clearly doesn’t like talking about “what his book means.” He wants his book to start the conversation. We’re supposed to be telling him what it means…to us…as individuals rather than as a class. He says often in interviews, “I am uncomfortable talking about this.” He does not appear to be uncomfortable writing about what he sees and what he thinks about what he sees, so folks interested in making him a spokesperson for black people will have to turn to his writing. But there aren’t answers there, either, really. It is just raw material for the discussion we are all meant to have.
In a reading Beatty gave at Politics & Prose, the Washington, D.C. bookstore, Beatty told the audience that he teaches a writing course at Columbia University and one of his students said to him, “I feel sorry for you guys” as though the race issue were finished, and is nothing now compared with yesterday. Beatty was shocked. It reminded me of young, upwardly mobile women saying they don’t experience sexism today.
Me, I incline towards Ta-Nehisi Coates’ June 2014 Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.” Not that money will fix anything. It is the discussion about reparations that might fix something. Nigerian novelist Chris Abani, in a riveting conversation with American novelist Walter Mosley, says "America has had a unique relationship with blackness that, say, Europe really hasn’t had. As much as people like to pretend, slavery isn’t really over." ...more
Matt Parker is a comedian who does stand-up math. Or he is a mathematician doing stand-up comedy…I forget which lifestyle definition attracted me to hMatt Parker is a comedian who does stand-up math. Or he is a mathematician doing stand-up comedy…I forget which lifestyle definition attracted me to his routines on YouTube: some are complicated enough to make you forget to laugh…unless, that is, you are already in on the math basics he is sharing. I learned about Parker’s new book from the mathematician Ben Babcock, whose website reviews recently-published science fiction, among other things. I was impressed with his assessment that “this is DIY math at its finest”-- impressed enough, after looking at it myself, to buy copies for my teenaged nephews.
Besides that, in the YouTube clip I saw, Parker is wearing maths paraphernalia like a “smooth geometric t-shirt” sold by DESIGNBYHÜMANS that is über-cool for mathheads. I like to encourage thinking and innovation of any kind.
Parker doesn’t neglect important relevant applications of mathematics: how to cut a pizza equally with crust or without, how best to keep your headphone wires from tangling, how to tie your shoes (!) the maths way…in other words, ways to learn and test math principles using everyday objects…or your classroom full of students. It actually does sound fun, which I guess is the point. Babcock, who I mention above, makes it clear that one really understands maths by doing math, which is perhaps even more to the point. ...more
Neely writes genre fiction that is quite unlike any other out there: crime without the cops, mystery without a clue, and the romance of a strong, opinNeely writes genre fiction that is quite unlike any other out there: crime without the cops, mystery without a clue, and the romance of a strong, opinionated woman. It is beautiful and flawed and very real. Neely has an agenda, yes she does, but it’s revelatory to hear her concerns. She talks it all out on the page, so we get the picture from where she’s standing. She is fun but thoughtful; playful, but looks straight in the eye of some edgy situations. I mean, maybe you’ve thought about what to do when your neighbor is being beaten by her husband inside her house, loud enough for all the world to hear. Day after day. Well, Blanche comes up with a solution that worked pretty well and it didn’t involve a weapon of mass destruction or murder. Blanche constantly surprises us.
This mystery novel, #4 of the Blanche White series, brings Blanche down to North Carolina from Boston. Her sister’s son and daughter who are in her care, Malik and Taifa, are children no longer and are off for summer work in Vermont and Maine. Blanche is going to help her best friend, Ardell, with her catering business during the bicentennial celebrations in Farleigh, her hometown. Blanche had left behind in her hometown both a former lover, now married, and her rapist, so the pleasure of her homecoming was mitigated somewhat by what she might uncover hidden in her psyche. Besides, her Mom was as armored against intimacy as always, and never seemed to listen, even though she was getting older and needed more assistance than ever to keep everything in working order.
Nothing about this novel was ordinary. Almost every page expressed some real truth or revelation. Neely must have decided at some point she might be polite in company but she was going to write what she thought people ought to know. Thank god for it. Thank god for her. You don’t have to adhere to her beliefs, but by golly, she’s going to tell you what she thinks. She might even give some of us the words to articulate our own defense for a course of action we wanted to take but for one reason or another, felt unable. She makes a lot of sense. Blanche is an example to us.
As a mystery, the novel works very well. The denouement is guaranteed to blow you out of the water. As we begin, we imagine this novel might just be another opportunity to spend time with Blanche and hear her wisecracks on everything from real food to what men like. Nothing wrong with that! But Neely is too sophisticated and wise to just give us what we think we want: she’s gonna surprise us with something we can learn from, delighting us at the same time she is instructing us.
Blanche makes mistakes--really big, life-and-death mistakes--in this novel, all the while sounding like she has things pretty much under control. But we all have done that, haven’t we? Just as we think we’ve learned a few lessons and can dish it out, life and people surprise us. Neely makes us think. She teaches us how to think.
As the train from Boston to North Carolina makes it way south, Blanche slips into patios, anticipating her homecoming. It feels perfectly natural, though we know Blanche of Boston looking after teens is less lenient with herself. We want to relax, too, and hear the real Blanche fooling with Ardell, or romancing her new love interest, Thelvin.
The following quote is classic Neely:
”When the children were small and using up every moment when she wasn’t working for money, she’d soothed herself with a one-day-they’ll be grown fantasy. Now that they were practically grown, instead of trying to convince them to be careful of strangers, pick up their toys, and eat their okra. She was urging them to use condoms, to avoid hard drugs, and to become their very best selves. Different topics, more stressful topics. Who started that bullshit about parenting getting easier as the children got older? What parenting lost in intensity it picked up in worriation.
Or this:
”[Blanche] made up her own spiritual practice, including reverence for her Ancestors and the planet, and seeking energy from trees and healing from the sea. Some things she’d learned from African, Afro-Caribbean, Native American, and Asian ways of having a spiritual life, but she always added her personal twist. Until she’d come up with her own rituals she’d been hungry for ways to demonstrate her belief that there was more to life than she could see—ways that didn’t require her being a member of the Christian or the Muslim or any other religion that had played a part in African slavery. She also had no time for any religions that said she needed a priest or priestess to act as a go-between or worshipped a god called He. She was her own priest and goddess.”
The Blanche White series has four books. Each of them is special in its own way. Originally published in the 1990s by Penguin Books, they are now published in eBook format by Brash Books and can be bought wherever books are sold. Neely’s voice is extraordinary and outside the usual genre categorizations. The Blanche books are a little mystery, a little crime, a little romance, a little social commentary, and altogether unique. ...more
It’s a war out there. And this book is about war crimes. The kind that happen when failed painters take jobs as development agents for the arts departIt’s a war out there. And this book is about war crimes. The kind that happen when failed painters take jobs as development agents for the arts departments of mediocre universities, sucking up to successful wealth-creators to support the drug habits of university arts brats who produce drek. But the tap of money from wealthy donors was running dry, and our failed painter Milo Burke was now a failed development agent.
Milo’s last big “ask” was to Mr. Ramadathan who had mortgaged his electronics store so that his son could “craft affecting screenplays [not even a film!] about an emotionally distant, workaholic immigrant’s quest for the American dream.” It had meant a trip to Mr. Ramadathan’s dusty showroom in an outer borough where only used video game consoles and an old floor fan were on display.
I adored this beginning to Lipsyte’s deeply funny and intentional novel, highlighting as it does a reality of sorts behind the absurd “asks” of college development offices, and the wildly improbable and inappropriate demands of many university students in today’s America.
Lipsyte’s narrator, Milo Burke, is hovering very close to the edge of despair. Despite his confusion and frustration over the strange things people do and say and how we live, Milo is not a cynical man. He loves his wife and son, and wants nothing more than to be able to provide for them. He worries about being a good dad to Bernie, his lumberjack-mouthed preschooler with a foreskin fixation.
A neighbor Milo liked
“could pull off the role of loving and attentive parent with a lit cigarette in his mouth..or in his stubby fingers, which he’d hold with such care away from his daughter’s braids when she charged over to collapse on his lap and file howling grievance against her brother’s style of playhouse play… He was a throwback papa…horseshit of course, but it warmed the cheap parts of me.”
That man died with his entire family, “wiped out by a beverage truck on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway” one day, leaving Milo musing that man never had to worry about being a shitty father, leaving debts because of his cancer from cigarette smoking. But Milo still had to worry about being a shitty father because he was alive. Milo was envious of a dead man, an unrepentant cigarette smoker.
Antihero Milo hits up his own mother for a decent-sized contribution, whether to his rent fund or his college-fund, we are unsure.
Mother: "How much?" Milo: "Ten thousand." Mother: "Absolutely not...the system’s rigged for white men and you still can’t tap in..." Milo: "Okay, you wrinkled old spidercunt, have it your way."
I have to say, literature that gives me great swear words is always a draw. Shakespeare did it, Lipsyte does it.
Milo doesn’t believe in cockamamie conspiracy theories, nor those that say happiness might have something to do with acceptance and love. It’s all part of the trick, the scam to get us to believe that our rage and resentment is our own problem: something we might need to deal with because we look f—ing ridiculous blaming anything outside of ourselves for not seizing every opportunity to find our sources of happiness and love and fulfillment in the wealthiest, if not the greatest, country on earth. A war within; a war without.
Lipsyte keeps the metaphor about war working when he introduces a story about a home invasion featuring Milo and his college buddies, one of whom is his next big “ask,” the interweb magnate Purdy. But Purdy, like all big potential donors, has an “ask” of his own before he concedes to any kind of “give.”
Purdy’s illegitimate son Don is an actual soldier, returned from Iraq, without his legs. He has two new ones, made of titanium, but generally speaking, he did not come off the better for that exchange. He is still angry. He is angry because of the insipid American culture he sees around him, his sacrifice made flesh. Don manages his rage another way from what we know Milo will do. He had different training.
I came on this book because I had a long car trip coming up; I flipped through the mostly ghastly offerings at my local audio library and came across this title. Sam Lipsyte’s name rang a distant bell but I couldn’t remember why. I looked him up on Goodreads to make sure I wasn’t going to get a romance (you know, like “The Proposal”) and saw a very queer video interview that made me sure I was going to borrow this book. I present it to you here: (Goodreaders: go to The Ask bookpage and choose the top video with Mark Savras [guy in blue shirt] with the author.)
Mark Savras is an author and the man behind the blog The Elegant Variation. That blog never really changed very much while I listed it on my own blog for a year or so-—hoping, perhaps, to catch reflected glory. A Milo move, I think now. I watched this darn video clip a couple of times to make sure I didn’t misinterpret what I thought I saw. Savras was really out to lunch, wasn’t he? A little like our boy Milo?
Milo, looking at his hands: “I stared at my own hands: soft, expressive things, gifted even, like specially bred, lovingly shaved gerbils.”
I listened to this Macmillan Audiobook brilliantly read by the author. I am quite sure Lipsyte is the only one who could have read this with the tone it needed to reflect the true confusion and pathos of our antihero, Milo. I saw an Audiofile review complaining the listener had to “pay attention every moment” which seems a queer kind of criticism to me. The audio won a Listen Up Award and a Publisher’s Weekly Award. It is available for Whispersync on Audible.com and I would recommend that choice: you will want to go back and see his jokes in print—he is very funny. And check out that Isaac Babel reference. I plan to. ...more
Petri wrote something smart-funny lately that I read in one of any number of news outlets (maybe it was the Washington Post), so I decided to look at Petri wrote something smart-funny lately that I read in one of any number of news outlets (maybe it was the Washington Post), so I decided to look at this book. Awkward about describes it. Sort of teeny-boppery foolishness. Wasn't impressed, except for the amount of time she must have spent on it. Anyway, she is funnier now, I'm happy to report, and has a column in the WP....more
Just before I began this book I learned that Rabih is a man’s name, a Middle-Eastern man’s name. It means, alternatively, “spring,” or “winner.” I wonJust before I began this book I learned that Rabih is a man’s name, a Middle-Eastern man’s name. It means, alternatively, “spring,” or “winner.” I wondered what kind of Middle Eastern man felt he could write a book about the internal life of an aging widow. And now I know. It would be a man who reads.
This is a book about loneliness and connection. Aaliya, a name meaning “the exalted one,” is a translator. That is, she spends her time translating into Arabic books written in English or French. Some of the books she translates are translations of translations. Her entire life since her early divorce from an impotent husband has been consumed with this endeavor, one book a year, sharing the work of literature’s greats. She stacks her translations in cartons in the reading room of her apartment in Beirut, unpublished. She is seventy-two years old.
Not long into listening to the voice from the head of this old woman I began to feel this was the indispensable book: a book I needed to read again and again, to study, to enjoy as refreshment, as instruction, as revelation, sentences changing shade and emphasis depending on the angle of the sun, on the time of year, on the colors in the room in which I sat. Too many sentences needed remarking upon, too many references needed thorough investigation to let it go with only one reading. This was the woman, who by dint of translating the “greats,” had honed her instinct for the critical moment, the real thing, the human condition.
This book about a desperate woman living alone, growing old and infirm in a city riven by dissention and war, is ultimately redemptive, optimistic. It feels like a blessing, a balm. It feels like the sun on a cool day, or a cool breeze when the temperature rockets. It is literature.
”There are two types of people in this world: people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don’t.”
Ulinich does something extraordinary here by combining her storytelling and drawing skills to create an absorbing graphic novel featuring the drama ofUlinich does something extraordinary here by combining her storytelling and drawing skills to create an absorbing graphic novel featuring the drama of an adult woman searching for love. This is not ordinary entertainment, but instead a realistic and riveting examination of the vicissitudes of finding love and keeping it.
Lena Finkle is the twice-divorced mother of two who is about to get herself involved in an inter-continental relationship with a married man. When a friend wisely suggests Lena get more experience with men before she jumps into another unsuitable relationship, Lena forays into the world of online dating. Lena’s trenchant observations about her stumbling first steps in this direction are cringe-worthy best friend talk, admitting confusion, bad choices, and failure. To top it off, Lena has a homunculus on her shoulder making snide asides and expressing the observations Lena’s less rational side needs to hear.
There is an energy in this novel that derives from the combination of cartoonish drawings and the wrenching real-life agony of misplaced and unrequited love. References to the online dating site OkCupid lower the tone; comparisons of Lena’s work as a novelist with Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Anton Chekov heighten the tension. It is an absurdist romp with heartbreaking consequences, and yes, this is indeed a sort of classic literature filled with naked vulnerability and deep intelligence. There is movement, introspection, growth, and understanding.
The central character, a Russian, a Jew, and a mother, has all the strengths and weaknesses of those categories we use for shorthand. Lena denies her Jewish background (“I fail the faith test in God”) at the same time she pulls out her angst for us to contemplate. “Oh my God, I’m turning into a Russian wife!” she exclaims when she instinctively over-cares for her sick lover. In the next line she denies being slotted into that category: “I will never, ever be a Russian wife!” She is practical and loving as a mother, and also claims to be “impersonating a mother” when her love affair goes sideways. She tosses her homunculus into the gutter: “Your knee-jerk skepticism, your materialist rationality, and your stupid irony—what use are they to me now?”
Buying a pair of shoes might set off a flood of introspection, self-criticism, and a peering into the larger society: “buying a pair of red shoes wouldn’t constitute a punishable offense, but would certainly invite questions…which would load the shoes with too much significance to ever actually wear…which is why married people in Brooklyn are stuck in horrible moccasins and fleece sweaters they buy online…” The Scottish philosopher-lawyer-author Alexander McCall Smith couldn’t have said it better.
The man she chose to learn from was not the perfect man: he was a device for making her more self-aware and accepting. Lena wanted to ignore her homunculus and friend Yvonne who told her not to close her eyes to the bright yellow caution tape in his conversation. Lena needed to be able to see, to listen to her homunculus even when she didn’t want to. Finally, understanding dawns.
“No one ever really arrives. We just nudge each other along muddy ruts of suffering, occasionally peeking over the edges of our ruts in search of a better way.”
The name of Ulinich’s central character, Lena Finkle, is derived from two references that situate the character in the absurdist canon. Lena Dunham’s droll movie, Tiny Furniture, about a college graduate moving back into her mother’s apartment in the City, has an unforgettable scene about the struggle for intimacy—in a street-side construction pipe. This same hilarious and breathtakingly painful description of the nakedness of one’s need is keenly described in drawings and thought bubbles by Ulinich.
The second reference is derived from Bernard Malamud’s story, “Magic Barrel,” in which a man, Leo Finkle, asks for help from a matchmaker in finding a mate. Leo Finkle is a rabbinical student doing what was expected of him until one day he realized he had no faith! This set off a depression which led him to a “panicked grasping” of a young woman which he called “love.”
I can’t recommend this novel more highly. Its dark humor and anguished understanding ties into some of the great literature of the 19th and 20th centuries but in a format that is finally coming into its own in the 21st century. The graphic novel format is uniquely suited to Ulinich’s skills. As always when an author manages a breathtaking high-wire act, I wonder if it can be replicated. But no matter, enjoy this one for what it is—an astonishing and absorbing example of high-intensity literature for our time. Many kudos to Ulinich for reminding us of Malamud's delicious little story once again....more
Junior Bender is a burglar. That’s a fact. What keeps it from being a hard, cold fact is Bender’s heart. Bender has a set of codes by which he lives aJunior Bender is a burglar. That’s a fact. What keeps it from being a hard, cold fact is Bender’s heart. Bender has a set of codes by which he lives and a set of rules given him by his mentor, Herbie, by which he works. One of those rules “was to delay as long as possible the moment the mark realizes his stuff has been boosted.” That means not taking everything, nor making a mess. Another rule is not to take anything the mark can’t live without.
When Bender finds himself holding a matching set of brooches that prove to be irreplaceable, their pricelessness makes him less pleased than uneasy. And Herbie his mentor is dead--not just dead, but tortured. Bender wants to know why, and who was responsible.
Los Angeles is central to the action in this series, and Hallinan goes right for the nub of a characterization, be it cities or people. When entering a house, for instance, he might toss off a comment about the front lawn looking recently replaced:
“Judging from the eye-ringing emerald hue of the lawn, the grass had never endured a dry minute since it was planted, about forty-five minutes ago. There are two schools of thought associated with good lawns: the British approach, which says you simply plant it and roll it for several centuries, and the Los Angeles nouveau-riche view, which says you just put in a new one whenever the old one gets a little ratty.”
And this:
’I went into the kitchen and filled a very nice Baccarat glass with ice water and carried it into the big living room, with its art deco windows that faced east toward downtown. The window framed only a fragment of the usual view, since the top floors of our relatively small collection of skyscrapers disappeared abruptly into a line of yellow-brown smog as hard and sharp as the stripe on a shirt.”
Hallinan has a real knack for and sensitivity in portraying girls and women as whole beings. In this novel he has two new fourteen-year-old computer savants who already have a productive history of online theft from various state coffers. Bender recruits them to assist him in his search for Herbie’s killer, though he has twinges of conscience about it. One senses his deep compassion…for himself, but also for the girls. When one of them throws her popsicle stick out the window of his moving vehicle, he has to talk himself out of stopping to pick it up. He imagines becoming their mentor, now that his own has passed. It’s actually kind of frightening, though of all the mentors these girls could possibly meet, Junior Bender might be considered the finest still breathing.
Hallinan has an instinctive ability to dots his i’s and cross his t’s (important in mystery and thriller-writing) and still move the action along in character-revealing scenes. His creation of the lovely Ting Ting, a slim-waisted martial arts bisexual that captures the hearts of bruisers and wasters, is not just an aside to the action…I argue it is the action. These characters have their basis in life, though perhaps not in lives we often encounter. Either Hallinan runs into folks like these on a regular basis, or they are all running around his head...pretty wild, even for southern California.
In his Afterword, Hallinan admits that he “had to kill off a few” characters he’d created earlier in the series because they were cluttering up the scenery, such that readers wanted them in every installment. Imagine creating such rich characterizations that we feel peripheral characters are neglected when we don’t see them.
Hallinan has a fluency born of long and deep reading, and constant writing. His other series featuring Poke Rafferty are set in Thailand, which is where I first discovered his unerring eye for what I call “the tell”: uncovering the (sometimes laughable, sometimes painful) characteristic of a place or a person that may define it, and that we recognize in our heart-of-hearts as true. My use of heart-of-hearts is not cliché. Hallinan has more “heart” than any other thriller/mystery writer I know. He and his characters seem to actively practice the Zen Buddhist (?) No Asshole Rule. And characters call each other on transgressions.
Reading Hallinan is just fun and because of that, it reminds me of the Don Winslowmystery series about surfing. I mean, really, can crime be more fun than hanging out with these guys? Junior Bender is such a softie, we don’t like to think of him actually killing people, though he does in this one. He carries a gun after all. It’s not just for show.
I received an advance copy of this title through Netgalley from Soho Publishers in exchange for an honest review. ...more
Loading...
