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!)

Year in review 2008

Faithful reader E.G., whom I ran into on the street pretty much in front of the house, asks if in fact I have read anything since October. Well, yes. So, to get back on the horse, here we go:

books read last year: 210
minutes of exercise: 21,260 (took the last week-and-a-half of the year mostly off, so I missed my compulsive goal of an hour a day by 640 minutes, or a mere 1 min. 45 seconds per day).
Evidence that I am not alone in this comes from my gym, which has installed these crazy bikes that have courses you can race on and even a lame game where you ride through dragons. You can create a login and then track all of your progress (average mph, calories, distance ridden) and graph it against everyone who's registered, break down the data by age and sex, club, bike type, and region. So there--I am clearly not the only one. If they had something like GTA on there, except you had to pedal your car, I would be Lance Armstrong.

Actually, not--they give you the mph rating at which you're pedaling, and I've been up to about 27, but not for long (did 1 mile in 2:26, which works out to 24.65 mph). I think the guys on the Tour de France regularly pedal at like 30+, for hours. According to this, in 2005 Lance Armstrong averaged 25.82 mph over 86 hours, with a top speed of 35.54 mph (that's an average, too, which means he did this for more than an hour) for a 41.85-mile time trial. Dang. Still, it would kick butt if you could ride around and shoot things.  Since you have to, you know, stay on the course, that has cut down on my reading a bit. But it's more fun than I would have expected.

Anyway. Best however many of the year, in fiction:
Gruber, Tropic of Night--African shamans and folklore, taken seriously and exported to Miami, where they enrich the tropical stew. Reminds me of those paranormal George C. Chesbro mysteries I ate up as a teenager. Pretty dang literate, and suspenseful. His last book made it into trade pb, which is a nice step up.
Faust, Money Shot--the best hard-boiled mystery I've ever read set in the world of porn. Also the only hard-boiled mystery I've ever read set in the world of porn.
Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas--funny and compassionate, in an odd way: even his Nazis are compulsive writers who submit their work to endless contests, found minor journals no one reads, create weird personal mythologies that only other obsessives follow, and carry on with little compunction about their horrendous beliefs. Bought 2666 the day it came out and am stuck on p. 60 or so, but will get back in there slugging soon.
Gaiman, American Gods--mythology, confidence games, gods fighting, a prison novel, end-times prophecy: pretty much every genre there is mashed together, and it all works astonishingly well as a story; you don't just sit there and admire how well he mixes it all. A heck of a trick.
Park, Personal Days--or Ferris, And Then We Came to the End, both of which concern politics, office politics, and relationships, and how weird work is in general. Hard to separate what exactly happens in each, though Ferris's collective narrator captures something scarily essential about office culture
Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude--WWII fought out within the confines of an English rooming-house. Dry, hilarious, mean. Particularly recommended to Eoin.
O'Neill, Netherland--Gatsby as a post-9/11 West Indian named Chuck Ramakissoon, and cricket as a grand metaphor for about 15 things. Which reminded me that I know two people who are actually really interested in cricket, and who showed me cricket videos on YouTube.
Hemon, The Lazarus Project--history and the usual hilarious black-comic Balkan self-loathing, mixed in with photos and a reimagined story about an immigrant killed by Chicago's police chief for what may have been anarchism or just simple confusion. What Everything Is Illuminated should have been. (Reminds me of the people I got stuck next to on the flight back from NY--out-of-the-catalogue twentysomethings: he had the hobbit beard, sagged pants, chain wallet, hoodie, and she was reading, yes, Everything Is Illuminated. Couldn't tell if they were friends with benefits, just friends, a couple, or what. Ah, these young people.)
Gran, Dope--mean, twisty, bleak little female-centered noir set in 50s NYC. Lives up to the Jim Thompson comparisons by reviewers.
Bloom, Away--who knew she had it in her? After writing some great New Yorker fiction (not exactly an insult, but definitely a genre), Bloom here presents a brutal, unsentimentally funny, vivid take on Jewish NY in the 1920s, along with a semi-tall tale about a real-life woman who tried to walk to Siberia to get her child back. A powerhouse of a story, told with color and a drive I had no clue she could muster.

In nonfiction:

Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York--and boy, did they. I think I'm supposed to call this "delicious," which may presume a higher interest in antique society gossip than you or I possess. (Also makes me ponder the continued career of Louis Auchincloss, who seems to turn out a small, elegant, [and totally uninteresting to me] novel every year or so about latter-day NYC WASPs. I guess someone reads them--maybe the adult version of whoever reads Gossip Girl novels? I begged one from a student--"I won't be your enabler," she protested, before giving in to my whining--and my soul felt maimed afterward. I tried Twilight, too, but the first page was so horrid that I couldn't do it. Susan kinda liked all four, though, so your mileage may vary.)
Dalrymple, The Last Mughal--vivid, thoughtful, wonderful look at the 1857 mutiny through the eyes of actual Indians as well as Brits, with a full ration of savagery and imperial brutalism. Later, it turns out that someone we knew is a descendant of the Mughals and had read the book, which was awesome. She also loves (and even slightly prefers) his White Mughals, which I got about a quarter of the way through but will pick up again in deference to Priya.
Faust, This Republic of Suffering--about how the Civil War instituted an entire new regime dedicated to managing suffering, which relates not just to the world of emotions but to refrigeration, cemeteries, and pensions. A powerful and resonant book. Also, Dray, Capitol Men, about the impossibly courageous African-American politicians who made Barack Obama possible.
Mendelsohn, The Lost--another of those people I would be if I were way smarter. Mendelsohn traces the members of his family lost in the Holocaust while also considering the story of Genesis as a way of understanding why the world is and people exist in the first place. Paul R. suggested that he was probably sleeping with all of his translators, too. If so, more power to him.
Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire--calls the entire course of the Vietnam War, in about 1963. Also some amazing stuff about how hard the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses strove to get him silenced or pulled from the country.
Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure--or Mayer, The Dark Side; or Lichtblau, Bush's Law; or Filkins, The Forever War--at some point, I got tired of all the malfeasance (couldn't read the Cheney biog, though Lisa R-S recommended it), but before that, got as much chapter-and-verse as I needed. Filkins' take on the war rewrites Herr's Dispatches in ways that are chilling, immediate, and horrific; he really shoves your face in what it's like to be older and under fire and protected only by massively-armed 20-year-olds. It's not a good feeling.
Perlstein, Before the Storm--the definitive Barry Goldwater book, I'm sure, and one not weighed down by the overly large historical claims made in Nixonland, which I think is a little too much a politics-junkie's book: every story gets told (admittedly, some of them great, as when Jack Germond jokes that George Romney, Mitt's dad, is such a maladroit communicator that "the Governor later clarified" is a key on his typewriter), whether or not it ultimately mattered, and I think the result mistakes overheated rhetoric for real political commitments. What's now particularly interesting to me about the Goldwater book is what it will show in 10 years. If the republic actually elects President Palin (the Repubs, Perlstein points out at length in both books, were essentially written off by political scientists as a permanent minority party after LBJ crushed Goldwater in 1964), then it's going to be really, really scarily relevant. I'm rooting for historical curiosity instead.
Fatsis, A Few Seconds of Panic--it really sucks to play pro football in a lot of ways, and the players grasp most of them. In a surprising way, a great book about a modern American workplace. Also mentions born-again kicker Jason Elam's Christian thriller Monday Night Jihad, which I saw at JFK airport and briefly considered reading. But I read Left Behind, and that was crap (though I am still rather a large fan of LB II the film; III sucked, even with Lou Gossett), and I'd rather someone with those politics not get my money. (Sounds more decent than you'd expect, though. From the PW review: "Rich details about life as an NFL player invigorate the story; the details become problematic when the story gets wordy (as in one long and unnecessary chapter toward the end of the book). Although the final [...] plot twist is too easy, unexpected humor helps leaven the serious themes, and the sparks of romance that fly between Riley and an American Muslim woman will pique readers' interest.")
Page, The City's End--several hundred years of fantasies of the end of NYC. Amazing a) how many people have wanted it destroyed b) how hopeful these visions can be for a new future. Introduced me to a fascinating WEB DuBois story about the racial possibilities of the city's end that I'd never known of. (Here's an interesting review in an SF mag.)
Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague--poor old EC comics, beaten down by the forces of, well, the usual. A great bit of comics history, enlivened in particular by interviews with those who did the burning as well as those who got burned. Plus that great bit from Gaines' congressional testimony:
            Mr. BEASER. There would be no limit actually to what you put in the magazines?

            Mr. GAINES. Only within the bounds of good taste.

            Mr. BEASER. Your own good taste and salability?

            Mr. GAINES. Yes.

            Senator KEFAUVER. Here is your May 22 issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman's head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?

            Mr. GAINES. Yes, sir; I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.

            Senator KEFAUVER. You have blood coming out of her mouth.  

            Mr. GAINES. A little.

read my uncle's book!

And read this interview with him. Buy the book!

Herf, The Jewish Enemy

Oy, is all I can say. Simply by reading Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda before and during WWII, Herf shows just how consistently and dully nutty the whole enterprise was. Which we knew. But the sheer irrationality of the thing is just mind-boggling: year after year, week after week, day after day of "the Jews control everything," "the Jews have declared war on us and will stop laughing," "they started the war," even in the face of what the leadership knew was really going on, which was ordered kept out of the papers. The Jews, the Jews, the Jews: they controlled FDR and Churchill and Stalin, and even Stalin's having them shot and purged was actually evidence of their perfidious hold on the world. Plus, endless discussions of how to resolve the supposed paradox of Communists and capitalists working together to oppose the blameless Germans, each time announced with this thrill of discovery: guess who's behind it! It actually grows a little boring in the middle, which may be by design. After all, getting the world this backward requires a fairly endless system of reinforcement to prevent you from thinking, so we have six years of more or less the same three or four revelations. But only rarely does Herf let the mask slip, pointing out how odd it was to hear Goering explain that in some 1943 conversation Hitler had suddenly made something clear to him, when of course it was the same crap he'd heard for 20 years. Does this mean that everyday people read this and believed it, or that they numbly passed it by and had simply abandoned the habit?

Proof of what you can find on the web every day, I suppose: the inability of too many people to change or learn a thing.

Bolano, Nazi Literature in the Americas

If he writes it, I'll read it. Still, the ways he gets published here are a little confusing. As one other review points out, the publication order in this country is a little off, so this one comes out AFTER a lot of his later stuff, including a later novel, Distant Star, that expands this book's last chapter into a short novel.

It's no stretch to say that he turns all of his fascists, Nazis, and traditionalists into Bolano characters--they're uncomprising avant-garde poets, stubborn pulp fictioneers, scrubs from the provinces trying to eke out a win in yet another of those minor literary contests Bolnao so loves...indistinguishable from his heroes in The Savage Detectives or similar figures in the stories in Last Evenings on Earth, which raises the question of what we do (and what he's doing) with such misdirected artistic urges. (Because he's really not mocking them, any more than he mocks any of his other marginal artistic types: maybe a little chiding, but mostly love and shared values.) Surely, as such an engagé writer, Bolano doesn't believe that politics are immaterial; precisely the opposite. So then the imagination of an entire cosmos of such writers has about it something of the odor of...charity, in that he grants the sincerity, though monstrous wrongness, of their beliefs? ...of belated struggles with history, in an attempt to understand what happened in Latin America in the 60s and 70s, how such appalling ideas got smuggled South and then reanimated?...a political sense that BECAUSE extreme right-wing ideas partake so much of fantasy both personal and collective, we need to understand and counteract, or counterprogram, those same urges?

I'm not sure he's worked this out yet. His main character in Distant Star, a sort of concrete poet of torture, more powerfully poses the whole question of art in a dictatorship. These seem more like gestures, attempts in the direction of understanding the whole corpus of ideas rather than the kind of finished, if ambivalent, artistic manifesto we see presented in, say, The Savage Detectives.

Still, it's not a bad introduction to his aesthetic, which strikes me as absolutely unique--can't think of a single writer with his stupefying imagination and capacity for narrative play (almost every one of his novels seems to be arguing, why can't every book contain as many styles and models as you want? note that, for instance, Distant Star throws in TWO utterly superfluous locked-room mysteries in its final pages, for no other reason than that he felt like it), flair for, and love of, so many genres in enormous detail (one of his pulpsters sounds like H.P. Lovecraft, another writes these bizarre post-apocalyptic macho gunplay fantasies that recall the grocery-store Mack Bolan thrillers, particularly well analyzed in James W. Gibson's Warrior Dreams), all combined with a relentlessly avant-garde sense of literature and an earthy grounding in bodies and sweat. Definitely worth a read, if not reaching the greatness of his best stuff so far.

2666, when are you coming out? I need you.

Reynolds, The Curtain Rises

Found in a super-dusty used bookstore in Milwaukee when I was there with Dan. With original cover, too, and only $7.

Continuing the whole obscure-WW2-journalism thing, here the redoubtable Reynolds goes to North Africa, Russia, and Italy, meeting with British generals and the troops and going ashore soon after some sort of scary German rocket attack on the ships off the coast of Italy. Somewhere between 1943 and 1967 or so, the old hard-bitten journo style, wherein one spends enormous time cataloguing one's drinking and explaining in this sort of official WPA-folksy tone how the boys are just here to do a job, went out of fashion. You read Vietnam reportage and there's really none of this; I don't know if there was some sort of revolt against it or new kinds of guys started doing war coverage. (Some of the political-reporting books I've read suggest that most reporters until the 60s and 70s were lightly educated and thus not very accurate, as well as prone to bad writing of the folksy sort. Though you'd think that this would make them better able to relate to the wide variety of soldiers in WWII, the enormous majority of whom, as with most Americans, had not been to college or even outside their home towns, and unlike the college-educated types [Halberstam went to Harvard, for instance] who would presumably be more distanced from the average US soldier in Vietnam--which would logically make for better WWII reporting. Huh. Suppose I should look into Prochnau's Once Upon a Distant War and see what he says. And also read my 4 volumes of Liebling on the war, since I love Liebling and his war correspondence is highly rated by almost everyone.)

Anyway, so Reynolds here gives us some timely stuff about how tenuous the Italian invasion was, and some not-so-right stuff, as when he does a whole chapter about Stalin (tough, basically a good guy [hmm. Wonder if anyone has done a book on the US press' coverage of Stalin? I know the 1943 film Mission to Moscow, based on the reminiscences of US Ambassador Joseph Davies, got its makers blacklisted, even though at the time we were making nice with Uncle Joe. But is there a more general survey of how reporters looked at him and talked about censorship, which Reynolds does a little of here and very often in his other books? and how much was dictated from the top, or even from the government, and how much was honest self-deception, or even real conviction?], can hold his liquor), the Katyn massacre and how Goebbels blames Stalin and some fools believe him. Oops.

But the things that really stick with me are the tone, which feels like it's causing the 60s as it's being written, and the conclusion. Everyone just does their best and works hard to do the right thing without making a big deal about it; inspiring, yes, but true? And how did that compare to what people did when they got home? I can't help thinking that this created a whole generation of silent dads whose kids were begging them for any crumb of anything about what they'd been through, and the whole code was not to talk about it, unless maybe you were shooting at something. (Speaking of which, this is fascinating: you can actually hear Reynolds doing a 1942 radio program about a spy in the Canadian maritimes. [He comes in around 1:30.] Sonorous, deliberate, Middle-Atlantic--"'Sandy Smith': no, it's not a fictitious name. It's as real as the family that wears [weahhs] it, rather proudly"--much like that famous "The March of Time!" narrator from the period. Kinda makes me wonder when that tone, or the whole Walter Winchell tone, went out of favor. At what point did they become essentially a parody of authority or feverish excitement? The 60s?) So reading the book is like watching an incipient generational clash slouching toward, uh, everywhere in America to be born.

The second thing is the title, which--in 1943!--says that America has to pull together, stop criticizing the President and backbiting, and really fight this war. Kind of amazing and sobering to me to recall how much dissent and FDR-hatred there really was, and how much the war felt like a stretch and a precarious balance at home. Nobody then thought of this "greatest generation" idea...

The other particularly perspicacious piece from this time is Alistair Cooke's American Home Front, 1941-42. He tours the country after Pearl Harbor, notes how out-of-control the kids already are (five years before juvenile delinquency became a national panic), talks to workers at Kaiser's plants in Richmond and auto workers in Detroit, remarks--again--on the quantity of contempt for FDR among elites in NYC, and in general picks up on all sorts of trends that would not become visible to most for the next ten or twenty years.

Reynolds, In Command of History

I'm reading a lot of Dad books lately. Not MY Dad--I can't imagine him finding any of these topcs interesting--but many somebodies' Dads, the sort of stuff that the History Book Club and History Channel treat as "history": wars and Nazis and battles. Most of my students tell me their dads have books like this on the shelf--though one did say her dad plays first-person shooters and World of Warcraft (mom won't let him have a PlayStation, which totally bites), which kinda made me want to hang out with him. This was sitting on my to-read shelf for about a year, and finally got around to it. It's about how Churchill composed and published his monumental history of WWII, including everything from how the titles got chosen to how much he paid the copyeditor. Not to mention how much money he wangled Life magazine into laying out for his "working vacations" where he did in fact write more, or dictate more, or sort of lay out the memoranda end-to-end more, but with this enormous entourage such that the trips cost something like $8000 in 1950 money, which is somewhere between 10-15 times as much now, depending on how you calculate it. The odd thing about the book is that, despite its quotations of the abudant praise the volumes received, it doesn't make them sound that enticing, frankly: makes clear that they were basically memos changed from first- to third-person, mixed with stuff cribbed from, say, Samuel Eliot Morison's massive history of the US Navy in WWII, and the occasional nice narrative bit that WC himself contributed. But a lot of it was written by his hired guns--assorted miltary historians and younger Cambridge dons, overseen by cabinet officers--"in the style of" Churchill, whose cadences they apparently got down quite well. The real spectacle here is watching WC narrate and suffer the British empire's sunset; it's not just being passed by the Americans (it's sort of painful to see him deal with the fact that most American politicians didn't care that much what he thought of the country, since they knew they were in the driver's seat), but the whole wealth of newly-empowered people to deal with: pacify the Aussies, take out some weird insults to Gandhi, whose restlessness irritated him when Britain expects every man to do his duty, etc. So he's trying to construct his story to put himself at the center of world history even as he IS coming back to the center of British political history, but also as the center of world history is clearly and unmistakably flowing away from those politics in the very stories he's telling. It opens a fascinating window into these books that's political, cultural, personal, and world-historical at once. Someone should do the same for Nixon. Not that your average history-channel viewer cares--the book doesn't even seem to be available in pb in this country.

Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

At first I thought of that Monty Python skit where everybody is Superman, except for Bicycle Repairman, who's thus a superhero. 'Cause here, they're all JEWISH! Cops, criminals, everybody. But of course there's more to it than that; Chabon does his alternate history proud (Jews get a sorta homeland in Alaska during WWII, Zionists are driven into the sea, the A-bomb gets dropped on Berlin in 1946, and there's some war in Cuba), and he finds a secret Jewish heart in the hard-boiled genre. Hasids are the hard-core gangstas here, and the one fixer who makes it way up in the FBI is as compromised a politico as you could want. But it's not just the robust reimagining that got me: Chabon got me thinking about the whole Jewish presence in the hb genre. Offhand, I recall almost nothing. There's Joel Cairo, greasy "Levantine" in The Maltese Falcon, but for the life of me I can't recall a single Jewish major character of any sort in Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald. Though Spenser's girlfriend Susan Silverman is of course Jewish, it's interesting to think about this absence registers the social/emotional political splits between the world of Jewish lit (mostly lefty and realist in the 30s and 40s, when the classics were being written) and that of detective fiction, which was in many ways equally lefty, pulpy, and realist--and somehow unremittingly goyish. You had the high-lit tradition of Kafka, most famously, whose detective-fiction implications have been pursued by Auster's New York Trilogy, but Chabon seems to me the first to really think well about how Yiddishkeit might be connected to and illuminated by all of these tropes. (As he points out in this interesting interview with the good people at Nextbook, stylistically and culturally, everyone here owes Isaac Babel a debt.) All sorts of in-jokes here, from people living on S. Ansky Street and Ringelblum to calling cell phones "shofars" and my favorite, a cheapo department-store chain called Big Macher. I enjoyed it thoroughly and was gratified to see that he didn't condescend to the genre and overwrite, which I suppose the Lovecraft homage in Werewolves in Their Youth should already have clued me in to. Philip Roth, where's your detective novel?

Speaking of which, read Brian Wiprud's other two novels in a day. OK, but not as fabulously zany as the taxidermy novels. I see that he has a new one with his taxidermist character coming out later this month, so I will surely ingest that.

Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler

One of what Susan calls my Call It Sleep books--something I've been meaning to read for years, sometimes, and finally did. (I was stuck on page 107 of Henry Roth's novel for about 3 years before finally finishing it and then reading all of his late-life stuff as well. It's an astonishing novel. You should read it.) Anyway, I taught a class on Dictatorship for 4 years and never managed actually to open this one. Eventually did after reading some more journalism from 1930s Germany. First I'd read Buried by the Times, Laurel Leff's fascinating and exhaustively detailed study of how precisely the NYT downplayed, underestimated, and simply ignored news of the holocaust. (She gets into minutiae like who staffed the varous bureaus--some of them Nazi sympathizers--in Europe, how the news got communicated from Europe to NYC, and even who staffed the evening desks and how that might have affected the paper's slant on what it got.) From there I ordered a couple of books covering the period that she footnoted: Frederick Oechsner's This Is the Enemy and Louis Lochner's What About Germany? (see also this 1945 piece from Time). What's particularly unsettling in both is their straightforward contacts with Hitler and various other Nazis in the 1930s: there's amazing stuff about how they ran press conferences, and the mere notion of American journalists heading over to some small office to conduct interviews with the hottest new right-wing politician is, at this remove, sort of mind-boggling.

Anyway, they led me back to Rosenbaum, whom I've just dignified with the fantasy-me label: if I were a lot smarter, I'd like to be him. (Lawrence Weschler, my other candidate for fantasy improved brain and achievements, does more art-crit better than I could even fantasize doing. Sorry.) The beginning of the book is a little slow, as Rosenbaum worries somewhat repetitively at the question underlying the often-wild biographical speculations about his early life of whether or not Hitler was normal: we get that the issue is whether or not he's like us, or we like him, and we're not sure which possibility is more horrific (that we could be Hitleresque in the furthest reaches of our evil, or that we couldn't). But then he moves on to the various interpreters, including a damning look at Claude Lanzmann, who comes across as the worst kind of French intellectual bully, and a troubling one at George Steiner, before ending with a somewhat eccentric take on Lucy S. Dawidowicz, whose work he likes, despite its obviously speculative nature, for its...extremity? clarity of argument? It's not entirely clear why he ends where he does, except that Dawidowciz's he-always-meant-it, from-1918-on argument is easy to follow and does seem to pick up on some trends others missed. Still, that could be said of most good interpretations here. On the whole, it's a powerful, disturbing, and extraordinarily smart book, and I'm glad to have finally made it through.

Next on the CIS list: Pynchon's Mason & Dixon.

St. John, From the Land of Silent People

It was the most vivid excerpt in the Library of America's Reporting World War II volume, so I figured I'd check out the whole book. It's quite powerful and harrowing: St. John, whom a little web research revealed was considered "too old" to be a war correspondent (he was a mere lad of 39 when WWII started for the US), was in Yugoslavia when things broke down, and he spends most of the book fleeing down and into the Mediterranean. Also points out that Serbs and Croats hate each other and that one side, purely out of spite, is going to side with the Nazis; that there were unfounded rumors of massive British aid while the armies broke apart and melted away; that it's really hard to sail your boat across open seas for more than a week with little food and no navigational skill. Among many other things. Also that war is horrific and that riding in a stuffed-to-the-gills train while a Messerschmitt strafes you is no fun at all. It very much lived up to what I'd read before.

Interestingly, St. John, who died in 2003 at the age of 101, had an amazing life after this. He wrote 22 or 23 books, depending on your source, and got red-baited and blacklisted for his next book, The Silent People Speak, which apparently was overreliant on Communist sources. He then became a vigorous Zionist who wrote a bunch of books on early Israel (including a bio of Ben-Gurion, who called him "our goysiche Zionist") and another one on Malan's South Africa, which I bought.