What I'm Reading

year in review, part II

Additions, remarks, and odd things I learned this year:

Harvey Milk was essentially an old-style ethnic politician, just with sexual orientation as his organizing principle. Loved the film, but what Milk skimps on is how much hardball Harvey could and did play--there were a lot of gay dollars around SF in the 70s, and he knew what to do with them to win political representation, union jobs, and a seat or two at the table. He also was a Goldwater Republican who in some ways never really changed his political colors. (Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street)

Max Allan Collins gets to write too many novels for Hard Case Crime. I like pulp as much as the next person, I really believe that, but he writes the same damn thing every time. Almost exactly. I think this is taking the whole verisimilitude bit too far.

Gloria Steinem took CIA money as a student activist in the 50s, as did Richard Wright and Nina Simone. A bunch of former Communists put on the payroll, though, were pretty unsatisfactory employees, as they took the agency's money and continued on a campaign of factionalism and plunder of anyone who did not share their exact strain of beliefs. (Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer)

being a 19th-century criminal was really not fun: talk about nasty, brutish, and short. And once you talked to the cops, you were pretty much dead meat on the street. And the prisons were even worse. (Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket's Tale) Also, running a gang is hard, particularly as regards the question of punishment and deterrence--how hard do you discipline people? when do you need to lay down the law, and when can you outsource? when do you just let things go? (Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day)

Jacob Riis pretty much invented the multimedia presentation, touring with his photos of NYC slums in the 1890s, and made a pretty good career of it as well (Yochelson and Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis)

Thomas Jefferson was attacked as a dangerous atheist, and John Adams as a religious fundamentalist who would turn the US into a theocracy in the election of 1800 (Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe)

you can tell how hard farm people in the 30s worked by their recipes, which all seem to call for massive amounts of soaking and cooking in cream. Either that, or they were all really fat and this has been excised from photos (Kalish, Little Heathens)

intellectual stunt-journalism books are harder to pull off than it looks: Jacobs' The Know-It-All, where he reads the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, is funny most of the way through, but can someone with a Brown BA really be as ignorant as Jacobs sometimes shows himself to be?or is that part of the shtick? Shea's Reading the OED, where he, well, reads the entire OED, is basically a bunch of odd words with a few pages of OK rumination dressing them up. He sounds like a nice guy, but it's a thin book. Honestly, Ken Jennings' autobiography/apologia/trivia-nerd defense, Brainiac, which is far better than it has any right to be, remains the cream of the crop for me.

you can draw some interesting homologies between dominant modes of social experience and sports--football, with all of its regimentation and military lingo, was of particular cultural centrality in the 60s and 70s, when those experiences had formed a central part of the lives of many Americans (Mandelbaum, The Meaning of Sports)

people were making waterboarding jokes, in a satirical context, 100 years ago, given that the tactic was being used in the Philippines--and thus it must have resided at least somewhere in the collective consciousness. What happened in the interim? (Crosby, Captain Jinks, Hero: from the NYT review, Aug. 30, 1902: "A good American sitting among his broken idols and ruefully rubbing the welts and bruises his patriotism receives from the bastinado which Mr. Ernest Crosby wields in Captain Jinks, Hero, may, nevertheless, find balm in the thought that he wrote it in six weeks -- as his publisher announces.")

the Inquisition pretty much invented every tactic of spy agencies and tribunals, including agents provocateurs, going after financial assets, forcing accused people to denounce others to survive, and using secret evidence (Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual)

someone could make a great movie about Venice Beach around 1980-81, when steroids were making their way into bodybuilding culture with what can only be called great bursts of energy. The whole revolution of everyone and everything around Arnold, and the shady dudes prescribing everywhere the informed eye knew to look, would be one of the cooler and mostly unexplored subcultures to put on the screen (Assael, Steroid Nation; see also the excellent documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster*)

Abraham Lincoln came into office with no knowledge of military affairs, so, in order to prevent his generals from steamrolling him, he gave himself a crash course in military history. George McClellan, who had graduated from West Point at 20 ranked #2 in the class (the famous class of '46 that also included Stonewall Jackson, Pickett, and 20 other Civil War generals), had had so many experiences of early success that all he would do was sit around and whine about how Lincoln never gave him enough troops. Reason #50 why Lincoln rocks. (McPherson, Tried by War) When McClellan ran as a Peace Democrat in 1864, he was actually more pro-war than some in his party, who were openly rooting for a Confederate victory; there were significant disturbances and attacks on military recruiters in places like Ohio (home of exiled congressman Clement Vallandingham), which does at least make me both defend and worry about the kinds of civil-liberties measures Lincoln chose to win the war (Weber, Copperheads)

it's far too easy to buy your way into college. When I read about, say, the Olsen twins or whoever going to NYU, I thought, well, maybe they're actually smart. Or maybe not, since there are all sorts of loopholes to let dumb children of the rich and powerful, or famous people with no particular academic distinction, into prestigious schools, no matter how horrid their academic records. This has been going on overtly for most of the century, and semi-covertly for the past 15 years. Duke has more or less leaped two levels in reputation over the past 30 years on the backs of such development admits (Golden, The Price of Admission; Karabel, The Chosen)

it is not so dangerous to attend soccer matches in England now, partly because you can't buy tickets to matches unless you have a previous history of ticket-buying. Also, there are lots of police stationed everywhere, and a lot of the louts have been priced out. (Culpepper, Bloody Confused!)

bleah

Well, we've all been flattened by some hellacious virus Isaac picked up at school. He got over it in about a week; us, not so much. (Personal record, I think: taught one class last Thursday, then went home, at kids' not entirely selfless insistence, unable to speak intelligibly or walk very fast, and spent next 20 hours in bed.) But the worst thing about being sick, apart from being sick, is that I just have no garbage lying around to read; I have more or less broken myself of the habit, which is sort of sad. So do I want to dip into an 850-page survey of 1830s America? perhaps the journals of an Israeli peace activist working amidst settlers and Hamas activists? Hmm. Or maybe that quick survey of American racial progress that ties its success to political progress rather than to the courts?

Nope, I wanted some mysteries. But even there, once I'd inhaled my latest Hard Case deliveries (love their shtick, but they're letting Max Allan Collins do too much, since he's a mediocrity in the most elemental sense of the world--not a memorable sentence, image, or character; just this endless bland competence--this one rips off, or, OK, alludes to, I, the Jury and The Maltese Falcon and was out of mind before I finished), I had to read a literate mystery, too. So I started Michael Gruber's Tropic of Night, about which, damn. Siberian sorcerors, anthropological theory about how limited our understanding of reality might be, African religions and their diasporic expression in Haiti and Cuba, spirit possession, the American racial paradox, Ralph Ellison...it's all in here, so much so I'm shocked John Leonard didn't do one of his free-associative Pollock splatters all over it. Of course, it's 457 pages, and I'm so sleepy (teach a class or two, collapse at desk, trundle home and so to bed, at least until one of us needs to get up and tend to the boy, who's wonderfully chipper) that I'm moving waaay slow. But, damn.

Too bad you never see any pull-quote reviews like that on books' front covers.

Bolano, The Savage Detectives

So I finally made my way through it. Took about 4 days. Time well spent. I recommend some of the good reviews out there to help make sense of the book: Alex Abramovich in Bookforum; Daniel Zalewski in The New Yorker; Scott Esposito's in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The book's love of dust and gritty reality, combined with the games, reminds me of the non-magic realist parts of Garcia Marquez (the density of Autumn of the Patriarch, for instance), of Munoz Molina (most of whose stuff doesn't seem to have been translated yet); of Javier Marias. All of which is odd, since only GGM is a "Latin American writer," yet I haven't seen a review make that point yet. Which may be testimony to just how much there is in this book: not just a main story that gets fractured into several other genres (road novel, mystery, science fiction, African adventure) and main characters who never actually narrate but get narrated, but a whole raft of other stories and lives that spin off from the main line. The reviews point out that other of Bolano's novels actually DO spin off other stories from this one, which makes me want to read them as well. This feels like a kind of masterspring of literature (is that a word?) as a whole, a raft of stories about art, politics, commitment, and the pain of trying to figure out where you're going once you hit 21. Probably the most challenging and rewarding book I read this summer.

African books

Boy, where to begin? Read Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone, which everyone loves. You certainly can't fault him for a) being really handsome and nice-looking (eg he looks like a sweet person), nor could any sane human do anything but lionize him for b) surviving that insane world in Sierra Leone. He's off to a dance competition, age 11 or so, with friends at the book's start, and he never sees his family again. Eventually he gets forced into the government's army, which was only notionally different from the RUF soldiers chopping off hands nationwide, hopped up on drugs (brown brown, a mix of cocaine and gunpowder, sounds particularly nasty), and shooting anything that moved. He's there for an unknown time (2-3 years?), then is taken off to a government-run facility, it seems, with some NGO aid. At 16, he's talking to the UN about his experiences, in a conference of children from around the world. It's...OK, it's a pretty powerful story, but it's not, to me, great literature. Good literature, maybe. I did really like Tony D'Souza's Whiteman, a fictionalized account of his time in Ivory Coast that shows deep and enormous respect for the culture there--it reminds me of the anthropologist Nigel Barley's time in Cameroon in its uncondescending vision of a different culture's social and spiritual beliefs. Yet D'Souza never lets himself off the hook, either, which makes the book at once an energetic celebration of some limited kinds of cross-cultural intermixing and an honest look at the limits of a/any white visitor shielded by money and privilege from the long-term confinements of such a place. But my favorite so far is Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, about African refugees in Washington, DC. It's not just a great African novel but a great immigrant novel, about all the things you leave behind both when you immigrate and when you're an immigrant--dreams, hopes, culture, past, stories--and there's one piercing moment, when the narrator sees one of his friends at work as a waiter and immediately feels a sense of violation that makes them both wish he hadn't. One of my favorite books so far this year.

I also read What is the What and enjoyed it, but am trying to recover from/process/decide what I think of Lee Siegel's demolition job in the New Republic.

Foden, Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure

A little disappointing. I loved Foden's Uganda book, The Last King of Scotland, now made into a gruelingly funny, and then just grueling film. (Worth downloading: African roots version of "Me and Bobby McGee," by Angela Kalule.) This is about a basically unbelievable sidenote to history in which a clump of Brits dragged two small boats (the titular Mimi and Toutou, small, fast motorboats with biggish guns emplaced on them) up across Africa to Lake Tanganyika in 1915, then proceeded to sink 2 much-larger German ships, thereby opening the lake up to British/Belgian access and advances. I guess; after much huffing and puffing about the consequences of this incident, Foden never really gets into whether it made any difference at all. Given the inconsequence of the African theater in WWI, I would guess not. The leader of the expedition, a puntilious incompetent, liar, and braggart named Godfrey Spicer-Simson, is astounding in his endlessly mockable pretensions, but there's not really that much here. They drag the boats uphill and downhill, and up and down, and over and under. Bugs attack them. Snakes sometimes. The Brits mostly behave fairly well, though usually with a little racism. Then the actual battle, which was actually two separate incidents that were pretty short. Later, the battle was sort of a partial inspiration for The African Queen, or at least informed it in certain ways.

That's pretty much it, though Foden does some very nice storytelling aboard the twice-sunk, twice-raised German ship that Mimi and Toutou never faced off against--it's now a crammed passenger liner. It feels like a good long magazine article padded and padded into a book.

Fountain, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

Has drawn some comparisons with Greene and Conrad, which I guess are fair. But there's really nothing more like this than Swofford's Jarhead, to my mind--an honestly questing vision of how strange the American encounter with the world can be these days, and how oddly complicated. In my favorite story, a grad student studying birds gets caught by Marxist rebels in Colombia and oddly attracted to their cause in theory, if only he could believe that they believe in it (in some ways, he's far more radical in principle than they); plus there's a great joke about grad-student jobs and a nicely ironic ending about endangered species vs. big business. I also liked the one about the US Ranger who gets initiated into voodoo in Haiti and the one about the do-gooder with the stash of diamonds in Sierra Leone. Lots of moral ambiguity without paralysis here, along with overindulgence in the word "raked." But he's definitely a writer to watch; he's gone beyond Greene's general sense of moral/intellectual/aesthetic paralysis in the third world to something more aching, complex, and ironic.

travel books, and books on travel books

Dug into the never-never land of travel books in the top right corner of the bookshelf, and pulled out a bunch. Still have Patrick Leigh Fermor's classics about walking across Europe in the 30s, now reissued by NYRB books, to read. (Side note: NYRB books has this excellent link where you can suggest books for them to reprint. Told them John Lardner's boxing book should be. Would be really fun if it were.) So the two Fermor books are still on the pile. Did read Paul Fussell's brilliant Abroad, about British literary travel between the wars. Absolutely bursting with great ideas, among them that the passport was itself a kind of experienced modernism, incarnating as it did on a mass level the perceptual difference between you and a picture of you. Fussell's point is really about "travel" as compared to "exploration" (heading out into the wilderness) and "tourism," which bracket it, and there were large numbers of youngish Euro guys, mostly upper-middle-class, heading off for everywhere and discovering it, themselves, and a prose style whose aesthetic commonalities with Pound, Eliot, etc. he convincingly draws.

He also made me want to read Graham Greene's book about wandering West Africa, which I wasn't sure if I owned or not. Among many others, some of which I had. He dismisses Richard Halliburton's once-famous Royal Road to Romance, the publishing sensation of 1925, as both larkish and possibly made up. Have scored a copy from still-tottering Acorn Books, I read it. It's certainly astonishing in spots; by p.17, Halliburton has graduated from Princeton and climbed the Matterhorn. He then sneaks up Gibraltar, hits the Hindu Kush, sneaks into the Taj Mahal, where he spends the night, climbs Mt. Fuji, gets attacked by pirates off Macao, spends a week in Bali, and a whole lot of time eluding the railway inspectors in India, where he never has enough money. Some of it is troublingly racist, where he berates the poor men who have the temerity to ask him for his first-class fare and sneers about their fear in the face of the white man. But a lot of it is just astonishingly fun, and I can imagine thousands of youngsters tearing right off to do the same. Is it true? Subject for further research.

Fussell, of course, has some great quotations to back all of that up, among them a hilarious line from Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, which I then proceeded to read for the third, I think, time. Again, Waugh is a snob and a pig and a racist, but you sort of have to either ignore that and get on with it or not read him.  (Fussell makes the point that EW [what an apposite set of initials!] carefully drew his travel books to be much warmer and far less sneering than he inevitably was in personal life, where nearly everyone who had the ill manners to run across him or worse, dine with him, was "beastly," "an ordeal," etc.)  But Scoop is justly famous, as much for the Brit-tabloid drama he mocks so adeptly as for the war-correspondent mania he skewers from the inside. (Hapless William Boot, the meek nature writer for the Beast, is sent off by the imperious publisher in place of his distant cousin John, a Waugh self-portrait, and ends up with the story of a lifetime in East Africa due to his unwillingness to leave town when everyone else does. Read it. Read it twice.) Apropos of Waugh, see this excellent review as well of his collected travel books, which I may need to get.

And then I finally, finally got through the book Fussell's enthusiasm got reprinted, Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana.  He says it's a modernist masterpiece.  I found it a waspishly funny travel book with wonderful architectural perceptions and a dry wit, but not something that struck me as so complete a work of literary art as Fussell thought. Should probably reread him to see what he says. As a modern-day complement, read Jeffrey Tayler's contemporary Angry Wind, about crossing Muslim West Africa. Had loved his Congo book, where he madly canoes down the river alone and lives. This one is pretty disturbing: Tayler speaks fluent Arabic, and he shows us a world in many ways little changed from 1000 or so years ago, where the cultural gap is simply enormous. People keep quoting the Qur'an at him, claiming it says this and that, and he's read it and says, no it doesn't, and they sail on. One Nigerian tells him that Al Gore must have been behind 9/11, because he was the losing candidate, and any loser in an election who was worth his salt would do the same here. He shows you how hard the process of cross-cultural understanding really is these days, which seems actually a step beyond what Fussell is discussing--those were the days, when the point of the journey really was some sort of white male Protestant (mostly, except for Greene and Waugh, whose Catholics-are-being mistreated travel books, Fussell rightly observes, stink. Though surely Greene's The Power and the Glory is also a worthwhile result of such preoccupations) self-discovery.
Here, what we find is how many other people out there have very little interest in or time for those kinds of infatuations.

Iweala, Beasts of No Nation

Oof. Title's from a Fela song, in a novel about child soldiers in an ur-West African nation. It's about exactly as horrifying as any of the real books I've read were (How De Body?, In the Land of Magic Soldiers), but with the added kick, or punch, of making you sympathize with the poor kid as he's pushed into murder and general wandering with a gun or stick. Iweala doesn't push you too far--the kid doesn't get drugged all the time, and he never packs an AK--but his disordered pidgin and generally surreal vision of the world are powerful and humane: little Agu is never a monster no matter how bad his world, and the final line nails you to your chair.

Hartley, The Zanzibar Chest

An astonishing story, as much about the legacies of colonialism (not all bad, the way Hartley tells it)  as about the horrific things modern-day journalists see in Africa. Hartley was in Mogadishu in 1993, in Rwanda in 1994, and in East Africa throughout the late 80s, with a brief delay in Serbia (he describes their language, amusingly, as sounding like it was spoken by Goblins); he grew up in Kenya, son of a colonial official who went native, and his stories of his father's doings are full of that sort of local color you kind of aren't sure you believe still existed in the 20th century--battles over an insult to someone's slave, guns fired inches over the heads of people on horseback, almost medieval ways of thinking and being. His father's friend went native in Yemen, converting to Islam and marrying a local woman, then divorcing her and never seeing her again when recalled. Later he would die in a stupid and pointless attempt to extend British hegemony, which they dropped two decades later anyway. And then we jump to in the blood and muck of 1990s African politics, when old hatreds got recycled and revivified, and everything fell apart. He loved it, though, and the book is as much a paean to the affecting weirdnesses of the continent (or at least its central Eastern part) as it as a mourning of the dreams of 40 years ago.