James is brilliantTry to reimagine The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with the “slave,” Jim, as narrator. Now he is known as James, and he is learned.
James is brilliantly realized. James speaks standard American English, but when around white people his talk becomes an ungrammatical slave vernacular. This vernacular, of course, is not a vernacular. It’s a mask James’s and his fellows in wretchedness put on to hide their intelligence from whitey. The device is not only funny, but it subverts almost every word here.
There are moving insights into the myriad brutalisms of slavery — and the sick white rationale for them. That’s good. We need to be reminded that for slaves there was no absolutely no recourse to rule of law. They were accosted for anything and everything: including imagined slights. For God help the slave who should even for an instant imply intellectual superiority to his or her “owner.”
The writing is lighter than air. It moves from wry amusement to harrowing action and back again within the space of a sentence or two. I’m especially impressed by Everett’s narrative zip. He has an enviable facility for brief sections and chapters. Each has its little narrative task —string them together for addictive narrative thrust.
The minstrelsy part has multilevel irony. On hearing him sing in a blacksmith's shop James is bought by a white minstrelsy troupe. He is the dressed in suit and tie and painted with blackface. So he is a black man painted in blackface so he can appear like a white man painted in blackface and sing for whites. As a black man he would not be allowed to perform with white men (in blackface).
To enliven my flimsy description of this excellent novel, I’ve included a link to the true story of Leonard Black, a Maryland-based “slave” who fled to Canada in 1837....more
—Brilliant and exciting. A literary thriller but not a novel of action, more a contemplative thriller. The description is super vivid (48 fps), and th—Brilliant and exciting. A literary thriller but not a novel of action, more a contemplative thriller. The description is super vivid (48 fps), and the images pop.
—The novel starts well if you like the unrelievedly dark, as I do. McCarthy is word drunk in the best sort if way. His characters so far are all working stiffs. (A nice break from the billionaire greed so prevalent these days.) From this black background emerges some funny stuff too. Just absolutely hilarious passages usually voiced by Bobby's friends. Novel proceeds mostly as dialog.
—One scene is of a cool day on the Gulf within view of the coast. Bobby Western sits in the cabin of a tender drinking tea; he wears a wet suit. A private jet lies forty feet below the surface in Gulf waters. The Oiler is already down there cutting the door open with acetylene. Western puts on his diving equipment, tanks, fins, mouthpiece and jumps in. Western arrives just as the Oiler opens the aircraft's door. Inside are well-dressed corpses, a few wearing stylish Italian shoes; seven strapped in passengers, and two pilots. After a cursory examination Western and the Oiler go up to the tender whereupon all manner of questions arise about where the jet came from: who the passengers might be, why the plane has been under for what seems like three days, etc.
—We know the sister, Alice, through flashbacks. Her hallucinations are not chronological. In the scene at the start of the book she is older and planning her suicide. The language of her prime hallucination, The Thalidomide Kid is very high flown. (You may remember another Kid from Blood Meridian.) In a later sequences she's younger and still in school, In these scenes The Kid speaks more or less like everyone else. I wondered about that and it hit me — this is supposition at this point — that when the sister is older, and on the verge of self-destruction, she is crazier and thus her hallucinations are more disturbing, the Kid's lingo so absurdly rich, which may be why she plans to die by her own hand.
In another section, in what seems like an homage to the poet John Berryman, a character from his The Dream Songs, Mr. Bones, springs from those poems to entertain Alice. You might say the author was indulging in magic realism until you learn that the sister is in fact discussing her hallucinations with two note takers, presumably shrinks.
—Text sometimes dips quite startlingly into the Joycean, the Beckettian. This is a novel of at times intense narrative pleasures. Some Hemingway like passages too especially as Bobby walks around the streets of New Orleans, eats, sleeps, wakes up in the dead of night when it's not so easy to be hard boiled about things as it is during the day.
"In his dreams of her she wore at times a smile he tried to remember and she would say to him almost in a chant words he could scarcely follow. He knew that her lovely face would soon exist nowhere save in his memories and in his dreams and soon after that nowhere at all. She came in half nude trailing sarsenet or . . . or she would push back the cowl of her robe and her blonde hair would fall about her face as she bent to him where he lay in the damp and clammy sheets and whisper to him I'd have been your shadowlane, the keeper of that house alone wherein your soul is safe. And all the while a clangor like the labor of a foundry and dark figures in silhouette about the alchemic fires, the ash and the smoke. The floor lay littered with the stillborn forms of their efforts and still they labored on, the raw half-sentient mud quivering red in the autoclave. In that dusky penetralium they press about the crucible shoving and gibbering while the deep heresiarch dark in his folded cloak urges them on in their efforts. And then what thing unspeakable is this raised dripping up through crust and calyx from what hellish marinade. He woke sweating and switched on the bedlamp and swung his feet to the floor and sat with his face in his hands. Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?" (p. 184)
—Turns out that one of the jet's passengers is missing. Well, how could that be? Didn't we see Oiler cut the door open? How could have anyone gotten out? We don't know who the passenger is or where he or she has gone. But strange men looking like G-men arrive at Bobby's rental late one night and begin questioning about the wreck. This is when he learns a passenger is missing. He moves out that night into a suicide's room above a bar. He feels more than knows he's being followed. Then one day his money in the bank is attached by the IRS, despite the fact that he owes no taxes. He hires a detective...
— I find the JFK content boring. It's like an unwelcome condensation out of Oswald's Tale. Fortunately the digression is brief. But don't let that dissuade you. See my first paragraph....more
The feuilletons are interesting. Most were written during Walser's late twenties and early thirties in Berlin. If they pale they do so because of a reThe feuilletons are interesting. Most were written during Walser's late twenties and early thirties in Berlin. If they pale they do so because of a relentless Berlin boosterism. In fairness, one must say that this is what Berlin's newspapers editors buying and the always impecunious Walser found himself able to supply. Even "The Little Berliner" suffers from this obsession, but that story, written in the voice of a twelve-year-old girl, is more assured and tonally solid and seems to transcend the feuilleton formula. The story is so good in fact that it put me in mind of Walser's four fine novels, and his wonderful Selected Stories, the volume introduced by Susan Sontag. Otherwise the book is a bit of historical and biographical piece work. Essential for the Walser completist, but not the place to start reading him....more
**spoiler alert** A superb biography. It will fascinate Walserians, but its appeal is broader than that. This astonishing artist's struggle to work an**spoiler alert** A superb biography. It will fascinate Walserians, but its appeal is broader than that. This astonishing artist's struggle to work and remain afloat financially is moving, but when he fails, for in his day that's how he saw himself, it's heartbreaking.
Experiencing aural hallucinations, he checks himself into an asylum at the behest of his sister. Eventually he is diagnosed with schizophrenia, which isn't the disease as we know it today, but more of a catch-all diagnosis. Most importantly, though he stopped riding in 1933.
After his death in the 1956 they found shoeboxes full of what are known now as micro, scripts.
If you haven't read Robert Walser I eagerly suggest you start with the Selected Stories, the one introduced by Susan Sontag. Author Bernofsky's recent translations of The Tanners and The Assistant are also indispensible.
"Kafka was still thinking about his work in October 1917 when he wrote in his diary that Walser reminded him of Dickens in his 'blurring employment of abstract metaphors.'" (p. 155)
"'This Robert Walser,' Hesse writes, 'who has already played a good deal of delicate chamber music, strikes even purer, sweeter, more buoyant notes in this new little book [Poet's Life] than in the earlier ones. If writers like Walser were among the leading minds, there would be no war. If he had one hundred thousand readers, the world would be better.'" (p. 199)
"Walser's 'very human kind of playfulness' and his 'uncommon command of language' 'one could fall in love' with it, [Robert] Musil said. . . . Musil found Walser sui generis, inimitable, his work 'not a suitable foundation for a literary genre.'" (p. 170)
"Alice Munro confesses to not having been there for her small children and knowing that they suffered for it. 'When my oldest daughter was about two, she'd come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other. ...' " (p. 113)
If this is your subject matter—if you are someone who doesn't want children—this might be a terrific read for you, as it was for me....more
Compelling. Declining birth rates it turns out are not so much about the choices women make as it is about the socioeconomic context in which those deCompelling. Declining birth rates it turns out are not so much about the choices women make as it is about the socioeconomic context in which those decisions are made.
The author writes about how before the American Revolution there was a greater sense of community that made it possible for children to live amid large extended families. This made it easier on biological parents while allowing those with no children a chance to mother.
But we lost this strength largely because of the myth of frontier individualism. We pulled away from community. So caregiving shrank to the size of today's nuclear family. Many today still view the nuclear family as the epitome of family. In truth, the author writes, the nuclear family actually represents a diminishment of the outsize child rearing capacities of far larger, now no longer extant community-based extended families.
With those extended families no longer in existence, the author believes we have to support women by way of government programs. The European Community already does some of these things. The failure of the U.S. Congress to extend the Child Tax Credit is a good example of our own national failure to do so.
"The child tax credit (CTC) was a monthly payment of $250 or $300 per child that was given to eligible families in 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan Act. . . According to research by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, the CTC lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty in 2021, reducing the child poverty rate from 9.7% to 5.2%. . . [Conversely] without the CTC [when Congress failed to renew it] the child poverty rate rose sharply to 12.4% in 2022, an increase of 41% from December 2021 to January 2022. This means that 3.7 million more children fell below the poverty line." (Source: Conversation with Bing, 1/10/2024)
Add to this example our lack of daycare, Medicare cuts, food stamp cuts, school lunch programs cuts, afterschool programs cuts, etc. — and you begin to glimpse why the decision not to have children is being made by so many women. I pulled the following quote from today's NYT: "Note that more than eight million children will be left out of a new federal food assistance program for needy families . . . because they live in one of the 15 states [whose] governors . . . refuse to participate."
There is simply no support system such as existed when large, extended families were prominent. Right now we have only NGOs or states to provide relief. But as the author says.
"Over the past two centuries . . . we jettisoned expansive ideas of kinship, isolated parents, disinvested from communities, and replaced community care with a kind of care that individuals have to pay for. . . . [But] that's not to say we couldn't rebuild systems of community support if we wanted to, or that we lack examples of how we might do it." (p. 70)...more
It's good to know something of Mahayana Buddhists' worldview. Turns out their afterlife is far more phantasmagoric than that of its monotheistic countIt's good to know something of Mahayana Buddhists' worldview. Turns out their afterlife is far more phantasmagoric than that of its monotheistic counterparts. Like the latter's soul though, the Mahayana Buddhists believe in a form of post-death consciousness called mind. The Tibetan Book of the Dead has been available to me for years, but I've never made sense of it. As usual, author Chödrön distills the complexity down to a few cogent chapters. That's a gift I prize. I think Chödrön's best text for those new to Buddhism is Start Where You Are. Let me also suggest Suzuki Roshi's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind....more
I. B. Singer's first novel. It was first serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward in the late 1940s. This English translation appeared in 1950. Singer'sI. B. Singer's first novel. It was first serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward in the late 1940s. This English translation appeared in 1950. Singer's style is reminiscent of Tolstoy, but not in slavish imitation. He's unique.
Heading an enormous cast is the old man Meshulam Moskat. Richer than Croesus and in his 80s, he has just returned from taking the waters at Carlsbad with a 3rd wife. It's some years before World War 1. Moskat has put his children in charge of collecting his rents — and he hates them for being dependent upon him. He is a horrible, bitter, egomaniacal old fuck. And yet he's the head of this huge clan who gather around him thinking about their inheritance. But the joke is on them because he dies without a will. The greedy scramble afterward is not pretty.
A theme in The Family Moskat is the split between religious (Hassidim) and secular (assimilated) Jews. Asa Heshel, grandson of a prominent rural rabbi, reads Spinoza and comes to Warsaw for further study. A daughter being pressured into an arranged marriage, Hadassah, runs away from the family home with Heshel. Their flight to Switzerland fails. Hadassah is returned to her scandalized family by the police after several days in prison. Heschel, stuck in Switzerland, marries the wrong woman.
An extraordinarily strong sense of community arises from persecution. When Marilynn Robinson writes about Christian folks, or when Naguib Mahfouz writes his Muslim characters, there is no similar sense of danger because they are writing about largely unmixed societies.
One of my favorite things about Singer's novels is his deep knowledge about the rituals and traditions of Judaism. Not surprising, I suppose, when you learn he came from a family of rabbis. You get both the cultural richness and the petty vindictiveness and everything between. Here we are in a Polish prayerhouse before World War I:
"They came to the antechamber, stopping to wash their hands at the copper urn, and went into the prayerhouse. A candle flickered in the Menorah. The pillars that enclosed the reader's stand threw elongated shadows. The shelves around the walls were packed with books. Some of the students were still bent over the tables, reading in the dim light. Worshippers paced back and forth, softly chanting. A youth swayed fervently in a corner. Near the Ark was a framed inscription in red: 'God is always before me.' On the cornice of the Ark two carved gilded lions held up the Tablets of the Law. There was a heavy odor that seemed to Asa Heshel to be compounded of candle wax, dust, fast days, and eternity. He stood silent." (p. 237)
I love it when the characters are walking around pre-war Warsaw, and the reader gets all this description of a city that for the most part no longer exists: the neighborhoods, streets, buildings, public parks and street life. The following is from the scene in which Hadassah runs away from her family and her arranged marriage to be with her true love, Asa Heshel.
"The evening was coming on when they left the coffee house. They passed the prison at the corner of Nalevki and Dluga and went along Rymarska Street and the Platz Bankovy. On the Iron Gate Square the street lamps were already burning. A cold wind came from the direction of the Saxon Gardens. Tramcars rolled along. Crowds of people thronged the market stalls. Hadassah held Asa Heshel's arm tightly as though afraid she might lose him. Farther along, at the bazaars, stall-keepers presided over mounds of butter, huge Swiss cheeses, bundles of mushrooms, troughs of oysters and fish. The torchlights were already ablaze. They passed a slaughterhouse. Floodlights blazed in the building. Porters with hoses were swishing water on the stone floor. Slaughterers stood near blood-filled granite vats, slitting the necks of ducks, geese, and hens. Fowl cackled deafeningly. The wings of a rooster, its throat just slit, fluttered violently. Hadassah pulled at Asa Heshel's sleeve, her face deathly white. A little farther on, in the fish market, stood tubs, barrels, and troughs. In the stale-smelling water, carp, pike, and tench swam about. Beggars sang in quavering voices, cripples stretched out stumps of arms. Away from the glare of the lights inside, the darkness of the court was intensified." (p. 158)
I know of no other novel that shows us so plainly what we have lost. The rabbis and elders fear the Jewish way of life will soon be destroyed. They are correct, but their downfall will not be effected by the Most High as a punishment for secularization, rather it will be carried out by Nazis about to enter the scene.
The characters are so vibrantly realized. There are scenes of great religiosity in which the core of the characters never wanes. One Sabbath scene is pure ecstatic joy. This scene marks the return of Asa Heshel to Warsaw after five years of war. He was in the Czar's army and lived through the Bolshevik Revolution. Asa travels from house to house and is greeted with a Sabbath celebration in each. I wish I could better describe the sheer scope of the book, both its big-heartedness and its moments of gravity, but that's beyond me. That said, this excellent novel is not Singer's best. It has a tendency toward melodrama, sometimes very amusing melodrama — Singer had a gift for humor — but grave moments of doubt and personal danger too.
This is interesting and worthwhile. It's more academic than I would like, but it's mercifully brief. Apparently the term Anthropocene has to be defineThis is interesting and worthwhile. It's more academic than I would like, but it's mercifully brief. Apparently the term Anthropocene has to be defined in geological terms. That is, how does the purported new period manifest itself in rocks? Geologic time. These quotes give a sense of the tone.
"Paul Crutzen had tied the Anthropocene to the late 18th century and the Industrial Revolution, with combustion of fossil fuels causing an initial uptick in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations above those typical of the Holocene. Will Steffen, building on this earlier proposal, came to argue for the mid-20th century as the main point of onset for the Anthropocene marked by the 'Great Acceleration' in human activities around that time. And geologist Bill Ruddiman even suggested that the Anthropocene might be recognized thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution as the result of widespread land clearing fo agriculture, causing releases of carbon dioxide and methane, and potentially global climate change. All of these proposals offered the prospect for an Anthropocene GSSP [Global Boundary Stratotype Sections and Points], and yet from a pragmatic, stratigraphic, point of view, only one proposal presented a relatively straightforward, unambiguous, basis for a global, isochronous, stratigraphic marker: the spread of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing, beginning with the Trinity Test of 1945." (p. 51)
This can seem a bit erudite at first, but eventually the reader is drawn into the urgency of the problem. And it's a monster.
"Atmospheric carbon dioxide has always varied substantially over time. Nevertheless, anthropogenic changes in carbon dioxide concentrations are well beyond their geologically recent natural range of variability . . . Today's levels of carbon dioxide (>400 ppm) are almost certainly higher than they have been at any time for the past 4 million years or even longer. Rates of atmospheric temperature change are also exceptionally rapid, and are accelerating together with rates of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions since 1950." (p. 66)...more
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