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by Bill Carter
First, the obligatory mea culpa that absolutely nobody cares about: I did not become functionally illiterate late last summer, but I did fail to diligently record my reading habits here for a good string of months. I'm hoping to kickstart the habit again. I know some folks (used to) read this, but I actually have kept up with this blog largely for my own purposes, and I'm annoyed with myself for having to hang onto the bookmarks and scrap paper where I loyally jotted notes on books I read for half a year and never posted about.
Now, the reason why I had my local library dredge this up from the reserve stacks should be obvious, right? Like a lot of people who didn't actually watch late night TV shows, but enjoy drama and spectacular public screwups, I was totally riveted by the NBC scheduling/Leno vs Conan shitfight last month.* Back when the Leno/Letterman thing played out I didn't follow the events very closely, but still had a very deeply-held opinion on the matter. Letterman all the way. I didn't watch much of late night TV shows back then, either, but I'd seen enough of each man to know who my sympathies lay with. Reading this book didn't change my opinion one bit** but I did find myself reinterpreting the events from a perspective that was totally alien to me back when it actually happened: Office politics. I'm serious!
An oft-repeated bit of "How To Be Great At Your Job" advice is that an unwritten part of every job description is "Make things easier for your boss." There are some people who get that advice and think "Yeah, that's a great idea!" and they go out and do it, just like they join the party-planning committee. There are some people who get that advice and think that it seems like cheating, to say nothing of weirdly sycophantic and gross, and do not even attend committee-planned parties. Person #1, obviously, has a lot in common with Jay Leno. When he was the permanent guest host of the Tonight Show, he did things like visit affiliates to shake hands, suck up, cut ribbons, and tell jokes at local charity car washes. He showed up whenever and wherever he was asked to be by NBC. (It should be noted that he did this stuff largely on the advice of his then-manager, who nearly torpedoed him once he actually got the Tonight Show, but that's a whole 'nother story.) Basically, he busted ass, and a lot of that ass-busting was not in service of being better at his job per se (though he does a lot of that too - performing standup on weekends, never taking vacation - all that "I ONLY SLEEP FOUR HOURS A NIGHT" obnoxiousness) but at stuff that would put his bosses (NBC, the affiliates) on his side. Letterman worked his ass off too, but he worked his ass off at his actual job, and often did things that actively antagonized his bosses. As a fellow Person #2, I feel like I know where Letterman may have been coming from (though I am probably both not as talented as him and I hope not as hostile to my employers). The consensus at the time was that Letterman was better at the job itself: funnier, a more practiced TV host, a "natural broadcaster" as many TV execs quoted in the book put it. But they gave the promotion to Leno anyway, and a big part of why is all that "Make things easier for your boss" stuff. It's not the only reason, but it definitely mattered, and may have been what made the difference.
If we're being honest, I've never had a job where I worked absolutely as hard as I possibly could have. I've worked hard, really hard sometimes, but I'd always rather be not working if there's a choice, and unlike Jay Leno, I do take vacations. Long ones. I don't check my work email while I'm on those vacations either. Say me and my colleague, both equally successful, are up for the Tonight Show hosting gig. I'm successful because I'm just good, and he's successful because he spends like ten hours a night working on his monologue and fine-tuning it based on poll results and demographic info from Nielsen, but the results are identical. (It's a hypothetical. Work with me.) There are people who think it's a 'duh' decision, and that I should get the job. There are also people who think it's a 'duh' decision and that my colleague should get the job. Though I still think Jay Leno is a creep who might be a sociopath and is definitely not that funny, it's true that there's something to be said for the people who work their guts out for you and don't take breaks to watch Lady Gaga videos on YouTube and aren't lying when they say in interviews that their 'flaw' is perfectionism and maybe aren't that talented in the strictest sense, but still get stuff done because they don't stop until it's done, and done well. I'm just never going to be one of them, which is why I'll always be on Team Letterman, except when he's doing it with his female staff because that's actually creepy too.
* Wow, only last month. Does that feel to anyone else like that was forever ago? I did move a couple days after Conan's final show, which may have something to do with the antediluvian feel of it fo rme.
** It did, funnily enough, make me a wee bit less sympathetic towards Conan O'Brien, just because he seems to have had a pretty charmed existence. I kinda didn't appreciate someone with that kind of fairy tale backstory telling me that he really hates it when people are cynical. I understand why he"s not cynical, but I didn't get plucked from virtual obscurity at 29 to host a TV show even though I had no on-camera experince under my belt just because my boss was Lorne Michaels and I seemed likeable.
by Barton Gellman
Dick Cheney is kind of a genius and a total creep. Not least because his goon David Addington comes off worse in this book than Cheney does.
After chapters and chapters of over-reaching scheming creepy genius horrorshow, Gellman tries to soothe his readers by explaining how eventually Cheney got put back in his place, sort of, and gets all pollyanna-ish about things always reverting to the natural order, even for creepy geniuses. I AM NOT REASSURED, BARTON GELLMAN.
by David Maraniss
This book had been hanging out on my to-read list for a couple of years at least, until last month, when I bought a plane ticket to Vietnam in November. Of all the reasons I have for visiting that country, the explicit this-is-a-country-that-was-at-war-with-m
The book uses a sort of synecdoche to, ostensibly, describe the sweep and scope of the entire war-and-anti-war movement of the 60s and early 70s, but it does so somewhat imperfectly. The coincidence of a shocking ambush of American troops in Vietnam and the violent turn in a student protest in Madison, Wisconsin occurring over the same few days must have surely been an irresistible hook for Maraniss, who was a student at UW Madison at the time, but that particular ambush, and that particular protest don't quite transcend themselves, and the book really ends up as more of a day-in-the-life narrative than anything else. Narration switches back and forth between Madison and the Long Nguyen Secret Zone, with occasional interludes in Washington, DC, for hand-wringing on the part of LBJ and even-briefer insights into the other side of the military battle. A couple of nice moments tie these narratives together, but only one of them doesn't seem like a reach (see notes for specifics) - the others barely rise above simple coincidence. Because the rough outline of events is pretty well-established early on, the only bit of narrative suspense is a grim guessing game: Who Will Die? Who Will Be Beaten By Cops? Who Will Have Nightmares Until He Dies?
I thought that I would find the student protest side of the narrative more engaging, because it would be a bit more familiar to me. As it turned out, the Vietnam passages were so much larger in scope and the stakes were so much higher there that I ended up speeding through the stateside sections. Hell, the '67 Dow protests don't even go down as the most violent war protest-related event on the Madison campus. And while the battle in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone doesn't ring many bells, either, it did involve people actually dying. Madison had a lot of bloody scalp wounds and an undergrad cutting a flag off its rigging. No contest, really. 1967 also was this strange flexion point where you had full-on hippie idiocy in bloom (a group of experimental mimes were prominent players in Madison) but revolutionary rhetoric and slightly thuggish protest aims were awfully common too. I can take overcooked revolutionary rhetoric and I can deal with mime, but putting them together is a little much. The soldiers also have going for them the entire apparatus of the US military presence in Vietnam - details like the number of eggs cooked at once for a single meal (122 dozen, p. 8) onboard a transport ship the USNS General John Pope (which had its own newspaper, with a permanent staff of 12 - the Pope Pourri, p. 9) carrying soldiers to, well, you know. Or the number of ice cream plants built in Vietnam to feed American troops (more than 40, p. 212). A sit-in turned ugly just can't compete with that. That said, the pages I noted were almost all about funny and/or snotty student antics, and less about death and mayhem in battle. There's perhaps a lesson there about the types of stories that move us, and the lure of stock tropes (there's a grunt named, no kidding, Sikorski in the group of soldiers Maraniss writes about).
Notes!
p. 20 Salt was among the most precious rations Triet carried. It was meant for cooking, but he used it for another purpose. At the end of the day he wrapped a piece of cloth around the tip of a stick and soaked it in salted water. This became his leech-removing prod for the next morning; the salt would make leeches jump from his feet. Instead of salt for flavoring, Triet and his squad often used the ash from charcoal to flavor their meals, which usually consisted of pressed rice along with greens they had picked along the way. (I wish there was more from the perspective of Vietcong soldiers.)
Dick and Lynne Cheney were on the Madison campus during the protest, both grad students at the time. The way Maraniss describes their attitude is kind of sickening in light of Dick's later career:
p. 110 To Soglin and his political cohorts Vietnam had become the dominant organizing issue of their lives, but to many studients at Wisconsin it was merely a distraction. They might be mildly for the war, but more than that they wanted nothing to do with it. Richard B. Cheney counted himself in that group...If Cheney had no "moral or philosophical objections" to the draft, neither did he feel the slightest tinge of guilt about not serving. He was, as he put it later, "working my buns off" as a political aide and then full-time graduate student. (Well that's just swell, Dick.)
p. 132 Bill Sewell...played poker twice a month in a faculty game called the Probability Seminar.
p. 249 The Viet Cong had even coined a phrase to describe the cacophony of fire they usually received from the Big Red Brothers. They called it "New Zealand music," a poetic allusion to the atonal sounds of the Maori people, some of whom were in Vietnam fighting in alliance with the Americans. (No idea that Maori fought in Vietnam!)
p. 349 That would be the San Francisco Mime Troupe, following through on the promise director Ron Davis had made the night before at the end of the performance at the Union Theater. "See you at the demonstration," he had told the audience, and here they were, all but Peter (Coyote) Cohon, who missed it, as he explained later, "having overslept after a bawdy night with an undergraduate Valkyrie who was not about to let me go until I had decimated every ideological misconception and physical tension she had accumulated since birth."
p. 370 Lynne Cheney, the English doctoral student who also taught freshman composition, and her husband, Dick Cheney, the political science graduate student, could not recall later precisely where they were as the Dow protest unfolded that day, but they retained a strong memory of seeing, and being revolted by, the antics of the mimes.
p. 375 When he saw one officer wind up as though he were going to strike a young woman, Cipperly "grabbed him, like hockey players do." It turned out to be Jerry Gritsmacher, with whom Cipperly had gone to Catholic grade school and high school.
"Jerry, what are you doing?" Cipperly asked.
"Jack, what are you doing?" the officer responded.
p. 385 A young woman rushed toward them and snapped, "[District Attorney Jim] Boll, you suck cock!"
"No, I deny that," Boll responded. [Political reporter John Patrick] Hunter broke into a laugh.
On p. 403, LBJ considers the demands of the North Vietnamese - that there will be no negotiations with America unless all bombing ceases, though no actual promise of negotiation is made if that condition is met. Thirty pages later, on p. 433, the chancellor of UW Madison ponders a similar dilemma: student protestors refuse to leave an occupied building unless the University throws Dow off campus, but does not promise to end their protest if the University complies. This parallel is really thought-provoking, and the one moment when the promise of the book's premise paid off a little.
The key things to know:
This is a novel written in blank verse.
This is a novel about werewolves.
This is a novel that is so much better and imaginative than you would ever guess knowing those two things. Really.
I was telling someone not too long ago that fiction is a little tricky for me these days - when I like it, I like it much more than even the best nonfiction, but it's difficult to find fiction that I actually like, and I've had a run lately of getting deep into novels and just giving up on them. It's annoying and frustrating, and I've mostly been reading nonfiction as a result. I had to go all the way back to Generation Loss to find another novel I liked this much, and that was almost a year and a half ago. Like Generation Loss, this was a LargeHeartedBoy Book Notes pick, and Barlow's playlist for his book is a good taste of his style and, well, taste.
There have been plenty of modernist slick takes on vampires, but I don't think I've ever read or seen a deconstruction-reconstruction of the werewolf mythos. It's usually: Get Bit. Go Crazy. Get Shot. If we're bothering to humanize our werewolves, the best they get is a bit of guilty anguish before the inevitable suicide-tinged bloody death. Barlow's werewolves own suits and real estate, play competitive bridge (the psychic connection between members of a pack is a strategic advantage), scheme and flatter, form packs and plot against each other and, when they feel like it, play housepet for unsuspecting humans. All against a decidedly un-Hollywood human-scale version of LA with a remarkably large number of stray dogs. Our protagonist? A dog catcher who likes to feed his charges tacos on the sly. As you may guess, he gets mixed up in the doings of local werewolf packs. There is, unsurprisingly, a girl involved, aloof and mysterious and irresistable to all. Aspects of the plot, a sort of semi-mystery, are not unfamiliar, but the mix of narrative tropes (Will Barlow take a turn toward gangland-turf-war cliche here, or will troubled-woman-with-a-past dominate this chapter?) keeps things engaging and enjoyable. I tore through the book, which reads at about the pace of an equivalent-length prose novel, over a single longish plane flight and it's going on the 'save for savoring' shelf of books that I look forward to re-reading, but not so often (I hope) that I ever get sick of them. Not bad for an ad guy's first novel.
Notes!
In high school 3rd-year Latin, we spent the year translating The Aeneid. I had a magical moment when I realized my translation of the first like "I sing of arms and the man" was actually properly made, and oh, right, this is a poem. Barlow begins his novel with this line: "Let's sing about the man there," and it's basically perfect. (p. 3)
Even when there's some very obvious use of textbook poetic devices, the language is very light. On p. 8, there's a repeated refrain used twice after stanzas describing occasions when wolves have slipped up: "Press say gangs/People wail on television" ending with a variation on "And life goes on." I mention this to say that though for the most part the use of verse tends to hover in the background rather than take center stage, it does occasionally step forward in a, well, poetic way.
p. 39 A woman becomes a werewolf for the first time - this is a nice moment that emphasizes how un-animal the wolves are, even in their canine form. These are classy werewolves. Careful. Thoughtful:
Unconscious on the floor
twitching and morphing,
she could not see
the silent wolf
lapping up the spilled blood
in a quiet and diligent manner.
The last line, admittedly, is a little tell-not-show-y, but drop it off and see how that stanza reads. It's a little heavy-handed, but it works.
p. 75
Anthony in love is unlikely
in its grace.
Like a drunk with a magic trick.
There's no reason it should work,
but it does.
p. 117
...three of her dogs once
trapped and killed an alligator,
marinating its tough meat with papaya juice
Come sunset, they grilled it on the campfire with fish tacos...
p. 175 (this is a long bit, but I love it.)
This is a violent city
and I don't mean rape and bloodshed.
I mean the existence of every ounce of it.
This entire vast urbanity was bludgeoned from the earth,
torn and wrought,
piece by piece. A thousand bricks here.
A thousand tiles there.
The concrete and steel girders
all bitten out of the soil and the rock.
Then, of course, it's brought here,
to the desert, to death itself.
Not to mention the water, oh yes, the water
pilfered from hundreds of miles away,
where birds and tree roots awoke one bleak day
reaching for moisture once easily known
and now finding only empty dust,
because that moisture's all been pulled here, to be with us
shimmering in the sweat of porn stars
cleaning the endless stream of dirty cars
washing the hands of plastic surgeons
after they've performed
yet another critically important implant.
p. 206
She drags the dog into the garage.
Then the delivery girl.
She kneels by their sides.
She looks at the clock.
It's early. But there's so much to do.
Her racing pulse won't slow down.
She looks around for garbage bags and a butcher knife
before deciding that
devouring it all is probably the best way.
But first she'd better wash up the mess.
p. 210 This couplet is its own stanza.
Knowing someone isn't coming back
doesn't mean you won't stop waiting.
I first consciously became aware of this book, originally a two-part New Yorker piece, while listening to a Salon podcast about the 4-year-old art prodigy Marla Olmstead and the filmmaker who made a documentary about her that stops just shy of calling Olmstead's paintings a hoax. In discussing how the project evolved as his suspicions about the authenticity of the paintings grew, the filmmaker, Amir Bar-Lev, cited the relevance of Malcolm's work. I listened to the podcast on a BART platform, far from the internet and my public library's online catalog, so it just went into the great mental circular file (ie, it was forgotten). Later when, for reasons forgotten, I was revisiting my hate-on for Dave Eggers, Malcolm got name-checked again. This time my curiosity coincided with internet access, so I followed through and requested a library copy.
Though it was very much before my time, I have intense affection for the era when journalists were considered somewhat unseemly: working class hacks one-and-all; a perpetual thorn in the side of anyone who attracted their attention; practitioners of yellow sensationalism. Saintly muckrakers! So, any argument that acknowledges both the necessity of journalism and its inherent seediness is a relatively friendly one. I'd rather that subjects despise their treatment at the hands of journalists than fawn over it - that way lies revolting displays like George Bush crawling around under a desk looking for WMD while the entire DC press corps, in their bow ties and evening gowns, enjoying their Correspondents Dinner, titters knowingly. Malcolm, acknowledges the inherent dilemma of journalism: that reporters require access to subjects to do their job, but should probably be alienating those subjects pretty consistently if they're doing their jobs properly. Then she takes that acknowledgment a few giant steps of argument further. You might even say she takes it right off a cliff.
Here's how she kicks things off:
"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." On the very next page is an analogy to the Milgram Experiment. Which is to say there's not a lot of "on the other hand" here.
The hook is the story of a journalist/true crime author named Joe McGinniss who was sued by the subject of one of his books (the titular Murderer, Jeffrey MacDonald) for breach of contract after McGinniss published an account of MacDonald's trial that to MacDonald's surprise, apparently, was extremely unsympathetic. (MacDonald was convincted and sentenced to three consecutive life sentences for the murders of his pregnant wife and two young daughters. He initially blamed it on hippies who chanted "Acid is groovy" throughout the crime - yeah, really.) Because McGinniss and MacDonald had made an agreement to share the advance and proceeds from the book project (which, I think, makes calling McGinniss a journalist in this context a bit of a stretch), and both parties had signed a contract in which MacDonald waived his right to assert defamation of character..."provided that the essential integrity of my life story is maintained." That bit of vagueness was what MacDonald's lawsuit hung on, and it took him pretty far - all the way to a hung jury and, eventually, a settlement for more than $300,000. McGinniss didn't do himself any favors by maintaining a more-than-friendly correspondence with MacDonald after the murder trial ended in which he was disingenuous at best about his feelings for his subject. MacDonald seems to have considered McGinniss a good friend, while McGinniss wrote to his editor that MacDonald's surface charms would make an effective device for drawing in a reader until the trap of MacDonald's true monstrosity could be sprung. Generally, McGinniss comes across like a big sleaze, and MacDonald weirdly sensitive about his reputation for a guy serving a life sentence. You want to wash your hands of the whole mess and wish the two men shared accomodation in hell.
Malcolm, though, takes it as a case study - a classic example of the way journalists seduce their subjects before exploiting and discarding them, draping the whole tawdry mess in the mantle of the First Amendment, The Public's Right To Know or, if you're feeling snooty, Truth. She's at once both reverential toward and contemptuous of her own profession, and has some rather odd ideas about how it ought to be practiced. On p. 156, for instance, is a weird argument about how tape recording interviews somehow makes the resulting journalism less truthful. (Malcolm does not get into a tortured explication of the difference between Fact and Truth, but it's clear her allegiances as a journalist lie with the latter. This might be the root of her problem.) She does, ultimately, make a halfway convincing argument that the wronged party in this narrative is the guy who stabbed and bludgeoned to death his own family, and that is testament to Malcolm's rhetorical skills. She's not that good though, and I came to my conclusion before even learning about why Malcolm may have a particularly forceful opinion on the matter of the proper dynamic between journalist and subject.
Because do you know who else has been sued by a subject who felt misrepresented in print? Yup, Janet Malcolm. It's not nearly as tawdry as the McGinniss/MacDonald story, but Malcolm still comes across pretty badly relative to her (preening, unlikeable - and newly famous-ish again for being vegan - subject). Certainly bad enough that you sense she lacks the necessary measure of distance from this particular subject, though Malcolm explicitly denies this in her text. It's a nice text, though - here's a bit of it that I found totally unconvincing, but awfully lyrical: "The notion that my account of this case is a thinly veiled account of my own experience of being sued buy a subject not only is wrong but betrays a curious naivete about the psychology of journalists. The dominant and most dee-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his robe. Not for him the strenuous athleticism - which is the novelist's daily task - of laying out his deepest griefs and shames before the world. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemenaly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others." I don't often read journalism that conveys such a strong sense of the journalist's own feelings in an ostensibly "straight" piece. The whole "We would never expose ourselves, we journalists" stuff rang awfully hollow.
A worthwhile read, sure, perhaps in part because it is not entirely successful.
Notes!
p. 20 The subject is Scheherazade. He live in fear of being found uninteresting, and many of the strange things that subjects say to writers - things of almost suicidal rashness - they say out of their desperate need to keep the writer's attention riveted.
p. 34 (From one of McGinniss' letters to MacDonald) Also, I'm glad you didn't kill yourself, because that sure would have been a bummer for the book... (There's nobody to like in this whole mess.)
p. 45 With the flaming sword he had been handed in the form of McGinniss's letters, he had no trouble playing the role of avenging angel. "It is a case about a false friend," he dramatically announced in his opening statement. Waht he did not articulate...is the...ironic parallel between the methods of trial lawyers and of journalists. The devastating narrative that Bostwick spun out of McGinniss's heedless epistolary chatter was like the narrative that a journalist spins out of a subject's careless talk during an interview.
p. 126 A document arrives, I glance at it, see wrods like "bloody syringe," "blue threads," "left chest puncture," "unidentified fingerprints," "Kimberly's urine," and add it to the pile. I know I cannot learn anything about MacDonald's guilt or innocence from this material. (Malcolm is referring here to the evidence from the murder case and trial. Uhhhhh.)
p. 151 It is an unnerving experience to pick up the venerable newspaper you ahve read all your adult life, whose veracity you have never had any reason to doubt, and read something about yourself that you know to be untrue. (This struck me as impossibly naive - is that just what it was like in the 80s? Somehow I doubt it.)
I'm not the only one who had a strong visceral reaction to Malcolm's writing (while not, interestingly enough, her central thesis). It got plenty of attention upon the publication of the New Yorker articles and again a year later when the book was published. The Journalist and the Murderer remains one of the most noteworthy works of her long career. (Dave Eggers totally read this article, I'd guess, which is why he's so cagey about submitting to interviews in the first place. Neil LaBute might have too, but he's a little too scatterbrained to be as mindful as Eggers.)
Also, Malcolm really likes the Gossip Girl books. She does not like the TV show. This is another matter on which we disagree.
by David Damrosch
I just read an academic swashbuckler! Like The Historian or Club Dumas but for realsies!
My knowledge of Near Eastern history is embarrassingly thin. I managed to remember a lot of the key terms (Fertile Crescent! Cuneiform-means-wedge-shaped! The Epic of Gilgamesh!) but little of the substance, and I was a little concerned that Damrosch's book would assume a lot of prior knowledge that I lacked. To a certain extent that's true - I could have done myself a favor by brushing up on the succession of empires in the region if nothing else - but part of what made this book really enjoyable for me is the way Damrosch uses the epic as a theme for a sort of historical/academic travelogue. Essentialy the entire book serves to provide a context for the Epic as a cultural and historical artifact, and as such it becomes a really engaging gateway drug for all sorts of semi-related fields: archaeology, Near Eastern history, Biblical history, British Museum Victorian-era squabbling, you name it! It's not a long book, but it's very detailed in all the right places. Quoted letters and other primary materials have a real contemporary and immediate feel to them, though the background is all Imperial Exoticism.
Damrosch begins with the story of George Smith, an unlikely archaeologist who discovered fragments of a copy of Gilgamesh in a massive cache of tablets in the British Museum. Smith was essentially self-taught, and worked his way into the British Museum by showing up on lunch breaks from his job as an engraver and volunteering his labor in the Assyriology department, which was new and in no position to be picky. Damrosch sets the scene for his discovery in a very engaging way: "Smith was working at a long table piled with tablets, in a second-floor room overlooking the bare branches of the plane trees in Russell Square. He could read the tiny cuneiform markings only when enough light came through the tall windows. Fearful of fire, the museum's trustees had refused to allow gas lighting in the museum...On days of dense London fog - frequent in the fall and winter - the museum would close and the entire staff would be sent home. So it must have been a fairly clear day when George Smith came upon a piece of tablet whose lines referred to a flood storm, a ship caught on a mountain, and a bird sent in search of dry land." (p. 10) Damrosch follows Smith's career from this point to its (sad) end, and then moves smoothly back in time a few decades to describe the initial excavation of the tablets Smith identified, and the life of yet another remarkable figure, Hormuzd Rassam, the man who discovered the library of Ashurbanipal where the tablets had been buried. Rassam, alone among his 19th-Century peers in archaeology, was actually a native of the Middle East, ethnically Syrian and Iraqi, and born to a Chaldena Christian family in Mosul, then under Ottoman control. As a young man, Rassam established a professional relationship and genuine friendship with a prominent archaeologist named Henry Layard. Layard smoothed the way for Rassam both socially and professionally, and he had both a distinguished career in archaeology and diplomacy and a lifetime of condescension and shabby treatment at the hands of Europeans who never quite managed to recognize his accomplishments and status as a "gentleman." In particular, E. A. Wallis Budge, of the British Museum, who I knew of primiarly from Dover editions of his writing on Egyptian hieroglyphics and Book of the Dead, comes off like a real dick.
Here, Damrosch moves backward in time again, to the era of the Assyrian empire, when the library that housed the Epic was constructed. He describes the Assyrian court culture, paying particular attention to the scribes who would have written many of the library's tablets:
As one student lamented, in Sumerian, in a Babylonian school text:
The door monitor said, "Why did you go out with out my say-so?" and he beat me.
The water monitor said, "Why did you help yourself to water without my say-so?" and he beat me.
The Sumerian monitor said, "You spoke in Akkadian!" and he beat me.
My teacher said, "Your handwriting is not at all good!" and he beat me." p. 167
He also sketches biographies of the kings Esarhaddon and his son Ashurbanipal, as both archetypes of Assyrian royalty and standout figures in that tradition. Esarhaddon, for example, was illiterate, relying on scribes and readers. This was perfectly typical for someone in his position, but his son was literate, in multiple languages, including one (Sumerian) that was dead, and Damrosch speculates that this may have been at Esarhaddon's bidding. As king, after establishing himself as a formidable military ruler, Ashurbanipal made a survey of Mesopotamian libraries, acquiring personal copies of every work he could find, and commissioning original works to honor himself. One of them, of course, was the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, already more than a thousand years old at this point (it has been dated to roughtly the 18th Century BCE. p. 199) As was typical at the time, Ashurbanipal's kingdom eventually fell in battle. His library was sacked, and its ruins stayed buried under the palace foundations for 2,500 years.
At this point, I was thinking that maybe I should try to find a good summary of the epic before finishing the book - Damrosch must've thought the same thing, because the very next chapter is a summary/literary analysis of the poem itself. Thanks, David! The chapter also includes more historical detail (a shortage of hardwood in the region meant that "Mesopotamian kings regularly described quests for high-grade lumber as among the greatest exploits of their bold careers." p. 208) and background on the various forms of polytheistic religion of the era. (Ishtar comes on to the semi-divine Gilgamesh at one point in the epic and he spurns her decisively: "You are an oven door that [melts] ice, a half-door that keeps out neither breeze nor blast, a palace that crushes down valiant warriors, an elephant who devours its own covering, pitch that blackens the hands of its bearer, a waterskin that soaks its bearer throught...limestone that buckles out the stone wall, a battering ram that destroys the enemy, a shoe that bites its owner's foot!" p. 214-5 (I shortanded this in my notes as "Ishtar: you nasty!" and wondered, in light of that last shoe image, about the origins of vagina dentata.)
The final chapter is a gloss on the question of the "real" Gilgamesh; there's some circumstantial evidence that the character is based on a real monarch, and certainly the city Uruk, Gilgamesh's home did exist, but there's so little in the way of verifiable evidence that any bit of knowledge can hardly be considered historical evidence. There are other epics, more historical than literary, that do mention Gilgamesh by name, and other hints, but I'm not exactly going to lose sleep over this, and the book proper ends with a bit of a whimper. Damrosch may have recognized this himself, because there's also a lively epilogue discussing Gilgamesh as a cultural figure in contemporary works, including a novel by Saddam Hussein, which "One commentor has dubbed...a leading work in a new genre, 'dic-lit' - writing by dictators." p. 265
Notes!
...the Daily Telegraph promptly put up the sum of a thousand guineas to fund Smith's expedition...It was a nice touch to set the figure in guineas, rather than in their functional equivalent, pounds sterling. The guinea had been a gold coin worth twenty-one shillings (one more than a pound), but it hadn't been minted for sixty years; the term had survived to price luxury goods, often including books. Arnold's thousand guineas thus suggested the tablets' cultural value as much as the direct cost of recovering them. p. 34 (I always wondered about this!)
From the very start of the century, archaeological expoloration had been closely bound up with the romance - and the politics - of imperial exploration and conquest. The French had taken an early lead in this enterprise when Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, taking with him a committee of 167 scholars and scientists to survey the country and its antiquities; the famous Rosetta stone, key to the decipherment of hieroglyphics, had been unearthed during Napoleon's three-year adventure in Egypt. He had then been driven out by a combined Ottoman and British force, and it was a matter of British cultural pride that the Rosetta stone itself now resided in the British Museum. p. 34-5
...the English missionaries - sent out by the London Society for the Conversion of the Jews - had written injudiciously of Theodore [king of Abyssinia - Ethiopia today] in a book and in letters home. One letter referred to the king as "His savage Majesty," a phrase that sounded even worse when - inadvertently or maliciously - it was translated for Theodore as "King of Wild Beasts." p. 117
The companies were commanded by seasoned British officers, many of them sporting formidable outworks of facial hair. p. 126
...he brought four hundred miles of telegraph wire, with poles to string it up - a system that worked only sporadically, as the wires were often snapped by ababoons, who liked to climb the poles and swing from the wires by their tails. p. 127
In his quest for guidance on governance, Ashurbanipal collected the masterworks of the culture he could never dominate. After Ashurbanipal, seeking to erase his great works from memory, the Babylonian invaders unwittingly preserved their own literature in the ruins of their hated enemy's palace. And then, across Mesopotamia, two thousand years of literary heritage slowly melted away, under later waves of conquest and throught the general transience of human attention to the past. The authors of The Epic of Gilgamesh would fully appreciate the irony that Ashurbanipal's library preserved their verses for posterity precisely through its cataclysmic destruction. p. 196-7
by Yrsa Sigurdardottir
Yeesh. So, three reasons why I read this:
1. It was in the pile of reviewer copies Andy brought home from the bookstore, and having too many unread books feel like a moral failing.
2. I'm going to Iceland later this month, and thought it would be fun to read a novel that referenced a place I've been reading about lately.
3. I'm haunted by this map that someone posted a few months ago showing all the countries she's read books from. Her map was intimidating as hell, but now my map has Iceland colored in, which is nice for me.
It's nice for me, because there wasn't much else this book had going for it. Which was surprising. Before I started it, I imagined that Iceland, especially wintertime Iceland (or even summertime Iceland, handled properly, a la Insomnia) would be a fantastic setting for a creepy atmospheric murder mystery. I'm sure it would be, but not in this book - what little sense of Iceland as a place I got was confined to Reykjavik's bedroom communities and the Borg Hotel, which I will not be staying at because it's too expensive. The book was more like a by-the-numbers murder mystery that happened to take place in Iceland. Even a lot of the shocking reveals were surprisingly dull, though that may be just because I'm not entirely unfamiliar with extreme body modification and related stupidity, and I went through a phase a couple years ago where I read a bunch about the Robin Hood Hills murders and what real satanic ritual murder looks like.* There's some effort made to suit the central crime to the setting - the murder victim is a grad student studying Icelandic witchcraft hysteria and the process of discovery involves a lot of Iceland's history and relationship with the rest of Scandinavia, but it just doesn't add up to a very satisfying whole, which is a drag because the other way to create a satisfying mystery story, making your detective character a really engaging one, was a total wash too. Sigurdardottir, the back cover tells me, is a trained civil engineer, and it took noticing that fact for me to realize that this is totally a book written against a blueprint. It does everything it's supposed to, but still comes off as terribly artless. The prose of the English translation is also somewhat clumsy, but I'm not inclined to blame the translator. There doesn't seem to have been much that could have gotten lost, you know?
But hey, the to-read pile is a little shorter.
* Hint: It's way over the top, largely because it's almost totally imaginary.
I don't think I've read a Margaret Atwood book since I was in college, and I'm not really sure why, since I've liked every one of hers I've read. This one, bonus, was the first Booker Prize winner I can remember liking in a long time. Me and the Booker don't get along for some reason. More importantly, I have a new vacation go-to writer. One of my many minute neuroses is this concern over the quality of the books I bring with me when I travel, especially if I'm going somewhere that doesn't have a good number of English language book stores. Vacation books have got to be highbrow enough to not embarrass me (and I'm a snob about this crap[1]) but not so challenging that they're difficult to get into a few pages at a time in really distracting environments. I tend to read a higher proportion of fiction when I travel than when I'm at home, and I try to read stuff that I'm guaranteed to like in advance. John Irving's a good vacation read, so is Elmore Leonard, and though you might not think so given the fractured narrative of this book (but come on, we've all see Memento by now, right?), The Blind Assassin is too.
Part of what probably led me to avoid this book was the weird tendency to shoehorn Margaret Atwood into science fiction - I've never thought of her as really belonging to that genre, even the books like The Handmaid's Tale that everyone automatically lumps into it. This one got touted as sci-fi, and it makes no sense to me. If anything, Atwood is kind of a chick-lit writer, with her female protagonists and domestic concerns, but really she just writes plain old literary fiction, often about A Special Womanly Sadness [2]. There's three layers to the story, and the narrative moves between them. Only one, under the most generous of definitions, could be considered genre storytelling, and it's the story within the novel within the Atwood novel. So, layer #1 is present-day, narrated by an elderly woman in the first person. She relates the story of her life, and that of her younger sister who died decades earlier and was a writer, occasionally through newspaper articles or other artifacts. Layer #2 is excerpts of the younger sister's novel, published posthumously to great acclaim and a certain amount of controversy. Layer #3 is within the younger sister's novel, whose two major characters meet in secret to tell each other a story - that story takes place on another planet, but you could be forgiven for forgetting that, since it very quickly becomes more thriller-y and heavy on courtly intrigue. All three layers inform each other, and it's difficult for me to say whether some of the Shocking! Revelations! of the later half of the book are meant to be as telegraphed as they seemed to me, but guessing in advance where things were headed (on several levels) didn't keep me from enjoying the way Atwood plotted those things out. Doesn't hurt that Iris, the narrator, is kind of a mean old lady. I like mean old ladies, and aspire to be one some day.
Also, not for nothing, the cover is gorgeous, well suited to the novel's setting - mostly the first half of the 20th Century, and emphatically (as with much of Atwood) Canadian. Wikipedia tells me that a lot of Canadian history is used as backdrop or context for some of the events in the novel, but I wouldn't know. It also gives away a lot of the major plot developments, for what that's worth. I'll hang onto this book, rather than return it to the office take-one-leave-one shelf, and probably keep it near my small collection of highly-rereadable guys-do-not-like-this stuff like The Time-Traveler's Wife.
[1] Turns out my #2 book on this last trip was a poor choice for the occasion, and I swapped it for the only English book in the leave-one-take-one pile at the place I stayed in Marrakech: A David Baldacci novel called The Camel Club.[3] The guy next to me on the flight home, a history professor picking through conference papers, turned to me and said "I've heard that one's good, do you like it?" and I just handed it to him, offering to trade it for whatever monograph he had on him. He didn't think I was serious.
[2] Hat tip to Troy Patterson. I'm going to be stealing that line for a loooong time.
[3] You will never see a post here about that book, but I will say that it made my plane's hours-long delay in Casablanca go by faster than it would have otherwise.
by Thomas L. Friedman
Before anyone asks, I read this book on a cross-continental flight in December. It was the only thing I had to read in my carry-on, and it was a fast read. Under other circumstances, yeah, I'd have stopped reading long before the end of the book. Okay? Now for the shit-talk.
Duh.
I don't mean to be flip, but really. I've had a lot of colleagues recommend this book to me, or express surprise when I say I haven't read it, but it took me actually reading it to realize that all of those colleagues are baby boomers for whom things like the mechanics of social software and open-source collaboration need to be explained. Fucking baby boomers. To be fair, some of the 'duh' factor may be a result of the book's success, and the acceptance of its premise as conventional wisdom. I kept testing myself while reading: Did I know x in 2005, when the first edition was published? (I read "Release 3.0" - the fact that Friedman doesn't understand that he's issuing point releases is a good gauge of how shallow his knowledge really is.) Often the answer was yes, and without benefit of Friedman's jaunts to Bengaluru (Friedman still calls it Bangalore - bad boy!) and Iraq (the lucky duck!) to understand globalization firsthand.* The "Ain't Google amazing?!" gee-whizzing is particularly grating and dripping with unnecessary exclamation points. Did you know that a popular search engine query is "Sex"? Seriously! (p. 177) And yes, Friedman went all the way to Mountain View to find this out. For people who found this book jolting: I'm sorry. Seriously. You're the reason Friedman occasionally calls exciting stuff 'scary' and spells out acronyms like PDA. I always wondered why the market for business book summaries existed - it seemed like a bloodless and weird thing to do to books that are already pretty bare-bones and bloodless. Now I know. Of course, in this book, the anecdotes are actually the best parts of the book, mostly because that's all the book really is - Friedman's big-picture generalizations are about as deep as his title. His grasp of economics is vaguely weak, and he's straight-up stupid on politics. I can't remember the last time I was so embarrassed by my own reading material - even those Twilight books had irony value.
So, here's the good parts, both the genuine, and the so-bad-they're...:
Buildup of fiber optic infrastructure in dot-com boom years and subsequent bankruptcy of Global Crossing created the cheap bandwidth that made outsourcing work to India feasible for the first time. Rural broadband and municipal wifi what's up? Obama, you know you want to do it. It'll be this century's TVA!
p. 173 UPS is the largest private user of wireless technology in the world, as its drivers alone make over one million phone calls a day in the process of picking up and delivering packages...
p. 195 Friedman talks about his visit to NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese cell company. I heard about this shit in March of 2002, though, to be fair, I did have to travel to Japan to do it. Anyway, EAT MY DUST FRIEDMAN!
The entirety of Chapter 3, "The Triple Convergence" is filler, and the filler has filler in it. Here are three examples:
p. 201 A torturous passage describing what it was like to realize for the first time that people were checking in for Southwest flights online. In 2004. Friedman describes how he berated himself for being so behind the times, while antisocial assholes like me spent years waiting for airlines to get with the program and make it happen.
203 Friedman does not understand the difference between vertical and horizontal integration. I'm not kidding.
205 Friendman thinks you need to be told what big-box retail stores are. THANKS, TOM.
231 He wants people to tell their kids about all this. Because there's no way kids know about it. Nope.
235-6 From the first stirrings of capitalism, people have imagined the possibility of the world as a perfect market - unimpeded by protectionist pressures, disparate legal systems, cultural and linguistic differences, or ideological disagreement. But this vision has always bumped up against the world as it actually is. - full of sources of friction and inefficiency. Some obstacles to a frictionless global market are truly sources of waste and lost opportunities. But some of these inefficiencies are institutions, habits, cultures and traditions that people cherish precisely because they reflect nonmarket values like social cohesion, religious faith and national pride...That is why the debate about capitalism has been, from the very beginning, about which frictions, barriers and boundaries are mere sources of waste and inefficiency, and which are sources of identity and belonging that we should try to protect. (I liked this point. No mocking here!)
255 I stored many chapters of this book in my AOL account, feeling it would be safest in cyberspace. (I wrote in my notes "AOL. Good lord." Remember when you got made fun of for using AOL? In 1996?)
304 "...the concept of modeling - and I am not talking about Cindy Crawford." HOKEY AND DATED!
315 Just think back to when you were a kid and you got your first fire truck or doll or doctor's kit or astronaut's helmet, and you told everyone you wanted to be a fireman or a fashion model or a doctor or an astronaut when you grew up. That innocent passion for a certain job, without knowing the salary or the working hours or the preparation required, is what you need to get back in touch with. To put it simply: You need to rediscover your inner fire truck. We all have one, and when you find it, you'll know. (Okay, this is a cute and memorable image, sexism notwithstanding.)
420 Did Friedman rip off Richard "Creative Class" Florida or vice-versa? I don't care enough to find out, but I'll pose the question.
474 Vanilla just won't put food on the table anymore. "You have to offer something totally unique," said Greer. "You need to be able to make Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough..." Friedman's quoting somebody here, but someone should tell that person that every goddamn ice cream maker in America sells cookie dough ice cream now. It actually helps illustrate the point! I don't know why this annoyed me so much, but it did.
516 A month before my visit to Paris, I was in San Francisco. I was standing at an intersection waiting to cross the street when a man jogging and wearing an iPod came up next to me. As soon as the light turned green he sprinted into the crosswalk. But a woman driving a car - running a yellow light - almost hit him before she hit the brakes. She was holding a cell phone to her right ear and driving with her left hand. I thought to myself "I've just witnessed the first postmodern local news story," WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, TOM? Seriously, does he have any idea what he's saying? Could he define the word "postmodern"? Use it in a sentence? THIS BOOK IS SO ANNOYING.
518 I call it "the Age of Interruption" because it really is an age of constant interruption... THANKS FOR CLEARING THAT UP.
521 Friedman says, in so many words, that not everybody deserves a voice. Some of them don't deserve it because they're not good spellers, or because they're uneducated. Yeah, for realsies. WHAT AN INCREDIBLE DOUCHE.
526 He doesn't like the blogosphere because it's a self-selecting echo chamber and can be mean-spirited. THAT'S WHY I ONLY WATCH FOX NEWS AND LISTEN TO RUSH LIMBAUGH!
549 [America got belligerent in the aftermath of 9/11] As that happened, people in the world began to say, "Now we really want a vote in how America wields its power" - and in many ways the whole Iraq war debate was a surrogate debate about that. WHAT? NO, SERIOUSLY, WHAT?!
565 Friedman realizes that wherever Osama bin Laden is, he's got internet access. This shocks the hell out of him. Friedman takes literally the trope that bin Laden is hiding out in an actual cave somewhere.
591 Jared Diamond's book Collapse is a 'classic.' UHHHHHH. I actually like Diamond's writing, but Guns, Germs and Steel got way better reviews.
Worst thing about this book? I returned it late to the library, so I actually paid money to read it. THOMAS FRIEDMAN, I WANT MY TEN CENTS BACK, YOU HACK.
Matt Taibbi takes this book apart way better than I do. He is truly an inspiration, and not just because he read Friedman's newer book, too.
* Hint: If you have to travel somewhere to understand this, you're already behind the curve. I "got" it in the big-picture sense the first time someone in Russia added me as a LJ friend. But Friedman really outs himself as a fuddy-duddy when he does that thing that print-reared journalists can never seem to resist doing - around p. 500 he drops in a totally jarring chapter railing against all the communication technology he's just been rhapsodizing over: it's crappy, it's ruining civilization, and an "uncensored" internet isn't necessarily a good thing. WHAT. THE. FUCK, Tom?
by Anderson Cooper
Reading this book will, at the very least, stop you from wondering why Anderson Cooper's prematurely gray. It's impolite to ask (and, in case you didn't know, Cooper's a Vanderbilt: WASP to the core) and he doesn't say, but my guess is that this book was made possible only through many years of heavy therapy. Indeed, parts of the book read like something that might be assigned by a therapist. I could bust on Cooper for going to Rwanda on vacation to see the genocide museum, but he does that himself in the text of the book, so what's the point? I will take the time to bust on him for, in his recording of the audiobook,* reciting some dialogue spoken by his Sri Lankan fixer in the aftermath of the Christmas Day tsunami in the tackiest-ass Apu-from-the-Simpsons accent I've ever heard. Anderson, you should know better than that. None of the other people Cooper quotes get such shabby treatment, but the sour note lingers.
In general the book is best considered as something relatively lightweight - a celebrity memoir, albeit one probably actually written by its credited author, in the rough shape of a bildungsroman. The plot is, more or less, The Making Of A Journalist, climaxing with Cooper's infamous dressing-down of Mary Landrieu on CNN for her blase back-patting in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Scratch the surface and it becomes something weirder and more troubling, a juxtaposition of genuine large-scale horror and tragedy (Katrina, famine in Niger, the Iraq war) with personal traumas (his father's death, his brother's suicide) that somehow detract from each other. An uncharitable reading, one encouraged by the book in parts, is that Cooper's career has been little more than an extended episode of self-actualization in which Cooper seeks out atrocities as a way to distract himself from his own neuroses, or give himself a little perspective. Cooper comes off like a more high-minded Elizabeth Eat Pray Love Gilbert, using the lives and very real struggles of people and countries all over the world as a means to a very personal (and arguably selfish) end.** I wonder if Cooper's done himself a bit of a disservice in this book, or if he's just really good at suppressing all the weird neuroticism in service of being professional. For his sake, I hope it's the former, because nobody deserves to be so damn tormented.
Perhaps what's strangest about this book is that it makes Cooper come across as someone much more overly serious than he seems on television, but in a really bad way. I tend to think of Cooper as a newsbabe, someone whose looks and personality have contributed to his success, andhe seems at his best when he's playing a bit of a bimbo, begging Donna Brazile to be his boo or shooting the shit with Kelly Ripa about the cost of duvets at ABC. When he's at his best as a journalist (and he is good), he doesn't do any of that shit, and he's good at covering under-reported stories, especially on humanitarian issues. I have to think that the bimbo stuff serves as a bit of a come-on to people who wouldn't otherwise pay as much attention - it certainly works for me. And, you know, it's always nicer to imagine that likeable people are basically happy and with-it, because nobody likes a depressed news anchor when news is already plenty depressing.
* Pretty sure I've done this before - I'm not a heavy audiobook listener, but I always rip a few titles before long overseas vacations. I managed to get through this book before my MP3 player died on me a few days into a two week visit to Morocco last November, so from now on I'm going to remember how cold it was on the platform at the Casa Voyageurs train station when I watch AC360 in a hotel room.
** I'm particularly sensitive to this phenomenon right now, for what it's worth. I watched "The Visitor" and "Hideous Kinky" in the last month, and just yesterday stumbled across the blog of a woman who seems to have found meaning in her life courtesy of foreign people on a three-month backpacking trip through Europe (yawn).
by Joe Bageant
This was one of my I-don't-want-to-pay-attention-to-the-ele
Bageant is something of a rara avis – his family is from deep in redneck country (Winchester, VA, which is, one presumes, "real" despite being in the far north of the state – everyone knows that shit gets real when you can spit over the border with West Virginia) and he's the guy who got educated, got exposed to the world, got some social capital, got a handle on modulating his accent where necessary, but didn't run completely away from his family and history. A really crude way to describe the book is to say that it's an attempt to explain why poor white people keep voting Republican, something like What's the Matter With Kansas by an insider, but that's an oversimplification, and Bageant is less concerned with partisan politics than matters of class conflict and how they inform partisan politics. His book reads a bit like a cultural travelogue with Bageant as guide, translator and interlocutor, introducing his blue state tour group to unfamiliar perspectives on jobs you can get without a college degree (they suck), homes you can afford on those jobs (they suck) and, in perhaps the most illuminating chapter, an exploration of what the 2nd Amendment really means to people who learn to shoot guns around the time they learn to read (if they learn to read at all). Another great chapter talks about how important poor working-class kids are to the military machine, using the sad story of Lynndie England as a model. Though the chapters don't hang together perfectly as a book, it's a perfectly serviceable collection of essays on the intersection of class and culture conflict in contemporary America. It only goes off the rails a bit in the last chapter, a sort of I-did-a-lot-of-psychedelics-once screed against social-political complacency, consumer culture and I'm not sure what else. It sours the ending of the book, but it's totally in keeping with Bageant's more informal writing (he's blogging, of course.)
I think it's a fairly significant book, despite its faults, because it addresses some things that are simply not discussed in American politics. We occasionally talk about class, but mostly in a racialized way where being poor tends to be conflated with being black and the systemic prejudices that disenfranchize poor people* generally are mischaracterized as simple institutional racism, or in a context where only the concerns of middle class people get real attention. Bageant does a nice job of humanizing an American subculture that, when it is acknowledged at all, is mostly just fodder for mockery and demonization.
* I totally typed that at first as "poop people." I'm such a hater.
by Alan M. Dershowitz
I love the shit out of the film of this book, partly because I love the shit out of both Jeremy Irons and Ron Silver's Brooklyn accent, but I didn't get around to reading it until just after the recent death of Sunny von Bulow after close to thirty years of coma-hood. And I probably wouldn't have read it even then if I hadn't had Alan Dershowitz, who teaches at Harvard, as a semi-regular customer when I worked at a coffee shop in Cambridge. For the record, as a customer he's totally cool, and as anyone who has worked retail knows, how somebody treats the people who fetch shoes in his size from a back room or make him a salad is a pretty useful gague of character. If I recally correctly, he tipped generously but not ostentatiously.
I would not have read this book at publication and though it could make a good film, but Dershowitz actually does a pretty good job of turning a fairly dense and lengthy legal process into an engaging story and the structure of his narrative is pretty much the same as that of the film. He does this in a drier way than the film, but the structure is similar - lay things out the way they were described at Claus von Bulow's first trial,* then use his involvement in the case as the device for introducing all of the complications and inconsistencies that he discovered and used to argue successfully for a new trial, which resulted in acquittal for von Bulow. The movie has this one scene at the end that sort of fuzzes things up again, on the guilt-vs-innocence question, because Jeremy Irons is always more fun when he's playing semi-bastards, but Dershowitz makes it clear in the book that unlike many of the people he defends, he thinks Claus was innocent.
The movie focuses mostly on the did-he-do-it angle, but the book has an additional level that I found really fascinating. (Full disclosure: I have studied for, but never taken, the LSAT, so grain of salt.) There's a lot of discussion about legal strategy and the mechanics of creating a legal defense for a trial, or motion for appeal, right down to the logistics of getting documents typed and in the proper format (this part, now, is mostly interesting for historical purposes, since one of the things that gives Dershowitz conniptions is the problems with getting a document copied, which is probably the last thing on any legal team's mind these days. There's a lot about the mechanics of criminal trials, and the thinking that goes into certain rules of evidence and legal procedures, and the writing is well-directed at a generalized audience so it's surprisingly readable for such dry stuff. Though the same could be said for nearly every nonfiction work I read, I learned a lot from this book, which is a good thing, since I just got a fucking summons for jury duty a couple of weeks ago.
by Gary Rivlin
It will surprise exactly no one to learn that I, an educated urban whitey who can walk to two different Whole Foods grocery stores from my apartment, have deep long-standing love for This American Life. My childhood in Chicago just makes that love more intense, and sometimes when I'm feeling a little wistful, I'll go listen to the episode that includes a segment recorded at my high school, during rehearsals for a play I worked on. Having seen that segment come together first-hand was a nice introduction to the way narrative documentary works, which is something I should have kept in mind before deciding to read this book, which was kind of a slog, albeit one peppered with enough OMG AWESOME anecdotes to keep me from bailing out.* Because I decided to read this book after listening, for the umpteenth time, to an episode about Harold Washington, who was Chicago's mayor when I was a little kid. He died in office, just after winning a second term, and has since become something of a legend. Gary Rivlin features in the episode, and this book is mentioned as a source. It wasn't what I expected, and it suffers by comparison with the radio show, even though it's probably a more truthful record. Damn that narrativization!
First, I was anticipating something that used biography as a prism for exploring the subject of the subtitle. Sounds reasonable, right? Well, there's a few problems with that. First is Harold Washington's very private personal life. Though this book was written several years after Washington's death, anything that even hints at Washington's non-political side is muffled in off-the-record paraphrasing and anonymous sources. He never married, didn't have friends per se (people close to him were invariably involved in his campaigns and administration, or peers in movement politics), and seemed to really only be passionate about politics, so there doesn't seem to have been much there there. I remember that there was always suspicion that Washington was gay, and I think part of that is that he was as buttoned-up about his romantic life as a closeted gay man would have been. Even after his death, this book keeps the names of Washington's lovers off the record. So, that's one narrative hook out the window - a straight biography would be as engaging as a resume. Rivlin could have pushed Washington into the background, and made the book a story about the end of the Daley machine era, but there's about umpty-million books about that subject, and the truth is that the Harold Washington era can probably best be described as part of a mere interregnum between the era of Richard J. Daley and his son, the current mayor, Richard M. Daley (who ran against Washington in 1983, and has held the office since 1989). So much for that angle. It could be a book about the larger story of black participation in electoral politics, but that's clearly not Rivlin's area of expertise, and Chicago is, as many people in the book point out, a thing unto itself as far as racial politics go. (Martin Luther King, Jr. once delivered a sermon on the South Side called "The Strange Negroes in Chicago" (p. 20).) What Rivlin ended up doing was a hodgepodge of all three approaches, but the final result never really gels into something that makes for a good story, and his book, fairly or not, suffers tremendously in comparison with the Story Uber Alles approach of Ira Glass and company.
Another distraction is Rivlin's perspective as a member of the Chicago media. He covered the Washington administration for the Chicago Reader, the local independent weekly and self-appointed watchdog for the two big daily papers. Rivlin's book reads at times like a critique of the media than an examination of a city's political climate. Part of this is due to the fact that he seems to have needed to rely a lot on contemporary coverage in lieu of first-person sources, but part of it also seems intended to right some wrongs and set the record straight years after the fact. This dovetails a bit with one other relative strength of the radio show over the book: The radio show includes a lot of John Q. Voting Public clips and quotes, while Rivlin includes nearly none, relying on voting stats and other, broader, means to describe the way race affected city politics. No stack of numbers could ever be as immediate and jarring as the tape of a radio call-in show in which a polite, well-spoken caller asks if Washington will be replacing all the City Hall elevators with vines if he's elected. Picture, thousand words, sure, but some words are worth more than others. In any case, Rivlin spends a lot of time picking apart Tribune and Sun-Times coverage of events during Washington's tenure, and it's kind of overkill at times, especially when it's in the service of exposing the subtle racism at work in the newsrooms of the day (which were very un-representative of the racial makeup of the city).
That said, the book is a useful companion piece in some ways because of its clinical approach. While the radio show borders on hagiography, Rivlin makes it clear that Washington was (all together now) all too human, and describes in sometimes painful detail how difficult it was to assemble a coalition that could win a citywide election in the first place, let alone keep it together in the face of so many competing interests. Washington seems to have fallen out with many of the people he worked with, which may be part of why Rivlin seems to have had so few sources to work with who could speak to the whole Washington era. Funnily enough, some of the people who sing his praises to the sky in the recorded-in-1997 radio show had major public falling-outs (fallings-out? How the fuck do you pluralize that?) that were clearly still sore spots when Rivlin wrote his book, which was published in 1992. Ineed, at times, reading the book, it's hard to understand why anybody wanted Washington to be mayor in the first place, and what made him so successful as a politican. There's a ton of anecdotes about how Washington was this tremendous slob who always wore clothes with stains or wrinkles on them, but very little about the rhetorical flash and charisma that even I remember, and I was nine years old when Washington died.
As I mentioned, the radio show was recorded in 1997, for the 10th anniversary of Washington's death. The version available online was a re-cut broadcast for the twentieth anniversary, and nods in the the direction of Barack Obama, who has said part of his motivation to move to Chicago in the 80s was the example of Harold Washington, and his then-fledgling presidential campaign. It's yet another nice prism that, I imagine, Gwen Ifill explores a bit in her new book. She better, anyway. I could probably find a TOC online to check for myself, but I'm having more fun watching YouTube clips of Washington - he's got one of those he-could-read-the-phone-book voices that I'd recognize anywhere, and his love for fancy words (chicanery!) (abhorred!) is awfully endearing.
* The previous two elections had offered unique opportunities for Chicago's Republican party, but they failed to take advantage of either. In the 1977 special election held to elect a replacement for Daley, only a last-minute scramble by party fathers staved off the embarrassment of a professional clown named Ray "Spanky" Wardingly winning the nomination. p. 170
Byrne herself was not above naked racial ploys. As mayor, Byrne initiated a monthly publication called City Edition. There were two versions of the February, 1983 City Edition. The one passed out to south and west side residents ran page-one articles about black history month and the appointment of a black woman to head the library. There was no mention of black history month in the City Edition passed around predominantly-white communities and news of the library appointment was relegate dto page three. Blacks graced the front page of the black-oriented edition, and whites the front page of the other. Both editions, however, referred to Byrne's "One Chicago" vision. p. 153
For my own reference, here's an op/ed piece for the Washington Post by a Tribune writer named Leanita McClain who is discussed briefly in the book. McClain later committed suicide.
http://condor.depaul.edu/~chicago/primar
...alderman saying to each other "You asshole," or "You little pipsqueak"--all came to be part of the political landscape. Even a brief shoving match between seatmates, a major news story in almost any other city, was not even that day's top local political story. p. 233
His old associate, Kit Duffy, spoke with Washington just after a visit to the Taste of Chicago - an annual all-week eating festival in Grant Park downtown. "There were a million people down there, most fo them white, and they loved me," Duffy quoted Washington as saying. "He was like a little kid over the phone, thrilled that there were all thse white folks downtown and he was having a good time with them." Another time Washington told Duffy about an evening spent barhopping with Congressman Dan Rostenkowski. He had such a good time visiting Polish bars on the northwest side, he told her, "I think I'll try Italians next." p. 277
Sometime in mid-October I made a conscious effort to take a step back from minute-to-minute news and blogger fusillade covering the presidential election. I was still totally obsessed with American politics, but I wanted to take the long view, both as a way to calm my nerves, and also as inoculation against the possibility of the vote going in a direction I didn't want to see. Around the same time, Sarah Vowell came to Boston to promote her latest book. I tried to get into a reading in Brookline, but Sarah's a popular girl, it seems, and the room was overfull before I even arrived. Instead of hearing her read, I consoled myself with a pumpkin kibby sandwich from Shawarma King and The Partly Cloudy Patriot from the library. It worked out more than okay. I know Vowell mostly from This American Life - I hadn't actually read any of her books before this one, though some of the pieces in this collection either started as or evolved from radio pieces - so her speaking voice is inescapable when reading her writing. I happen to not particularly enjoy the sound and tempo of her literal voice, but really like her rhetorical voice, which is obviously more front and center on the page than on the radio. And this particular book, something of a love letter to America, warts and all, was pretty much exactly what I was looking for.
For a long time I shied away from the concept of patriotism, cowed a little by "love it or leave it" accusations and the knowledge that my moments of greatest love for my country came mostly in my most naive and ignorant years (the '84 Olympics stick out - I was six, and barely aware that the show was rigged and the whole thing was a Cold War proxy). I was pretty sure I loved my country (basically because I have a pretty great life, one that would have been very different in the countries where my great-grandparents, all of them immigrants to America, had been born) but I never thought it was a perfect place that lived up to its ideals and ambitions. Sarah Vowell embodies both of these feelings - patriotism and ambivalence over the subject of that love, to a greater degree than I do, and the essays in this book mostly skip around between paeans to classic bits of Americana like the underground cafeteria in the Carlsbad Caverns and nods to the nastiest moments in this country's history (Trail of Tears, anyone?) It's all wry, and funny, and basically entirely familiar and comforting. It distracted me from election news for about two and a half days. Now that the election's over, I've got a couple more of Vowell's books on reserve at the library.
This is book is 900 pages long, and I read all 900 of those pages because I liked the first sentence so much: "A white Pomeranian named Fluffy flew out of a fifth-floor window in Panna, which was a brand-new building with the painter's scaffolding still around it." The second sentence is just as good: "Fluffy screamed in her little lap-dog voice all the way down, like a little white kettle losing steam, bounced off the bonnet of a Cielo, and skidded to a halt near the rank of schoolgirls waiting for the St. Mary's Convent bus." (I love alliteration!)
I'm sorry to say that the 899 pages that follow do not manage to live up to the impossible promise of those sentences, though the delightful formality of the prose is consistently maintained. The going is slowed down a little by Chandra's liberal use of Hindi words and phrases - there's a handy-dandy totally NOT exhaustive glossary in the back, so lots of flipping pages around - but it's stilla pretty speedy read, given its length. And the glossary is undeniably useful. On p. 5, I learned the word "gaandu," or "ass-fucker," as in "Love is a murdering gaandu." On p. 15, I was introduced to the concept of "OBC" – "Other Backward Caste." I happened to finish reading it just as my boyfriend, at the urging of his boss, watched all the Apu films, and thinking back to the Salman Rushdie books I never finished and that one four-hour long Bollywood take on ET that I watched start-to-finish all hopped-up on Chai, I'm starting to think that maybe India's economy is growing as fast as it is because Indians have managed to not totally destroy their national attention span with rapid-cut editing and Twitter. Only a theory.
So, as befitting its length, this is one of those telescope books – moving backwards and forwards in time, through the airspace of a massive city (Mumbai) and into the homes and offices of a huge cast of characters (in addition to the glossary, there's a useful who's-who), and up and down the structures of power through the course of a police investigation into the inexplicable suicide of a flamboyant gangster. There is, as you may assume, a very large and complicated possible conspiracy afoot, and Our Hero, Sartaj Singh, whose unofficial last name is TheonlySikhontheMumbaiPoliceForce, is, uh, Our Hero, charged with suit-wearing government types with Figuring Shit Out. So, basically, we've got a cop story/mystery/life-of-the-city narrative, and it works on all those levels quite well, though not perfectly. There are periodic rather heavy-handed references to the size/character/feel of the city, but they're a bit clumsy and unnecessary. This last sentence of this passage follows up a nice observation and kills the shit out of it:
A shaded walkway led to the cold room...The windows were closed against the heat, against the throbbing of the sun, and the air inside the entryway was engorged with the ripe, round exhalations from the two rows of bodies stacked against the walls, in sheets on double racks. The sheets were damp and the ground below the racks was slimy, slick...
'Arre, saab,' the attendant with the novel said, 'Wait until the air-conditioners break again. Then you'll really smell something.'
'Wait until it rains and the leaks start coming through the walls,' the other one said with large satisfaction. They you'll really have fun.'
There is a certain pleasure we take in thinking about how bad it gets, Sartaj thought, and the imaging how it will inevitably get worse. And still we survive, the city stumbles on.
The story is, as stories of this type tend to be, mostly buildup, and the last-act revelations aren't quite as spectacular as they'd need to be to match the energy of the rising action, but certainly satisfying, and pretty well-played. I read a library copy (great cover) and gave my mom the paperback (different great cover) for her birthday.
p. 17 Majid was stroking his moustache, which was a flamboyant handlebar like his army father's. He maintained it with faithful indulgence, with foreign unguents and delicate pruning, in the face of all mockery.
p. 145 Mutual interest was the lubricating oil that ran the great and small machinery of the world, and Sartaj would use it to send criminals skidding into captivity...It was foolish tho expect success, but Sartaj couldn't help savouring the anticipation. He would find the killers, he would catch them, he would win: the thought of victory sparkled in his chest like a tiny burn, and he took energy from it all day. (This totally reminded me of Homicide.)
p. 225 Evergreen Valley was three massive buildings in a rectangular compound edged by small two-storey houses. The only green Sartaj could see were a few patchy hedges scattered at odd angles between the buildings.
p. 281 'You watch. One heavy rain and trains will stop. This chutiya central line, if ten schoolboys stand in a row and piss on the tracks, bhenchod service is disrupted.'
by Stephenie Meyer
WEAK! I'm not in the habit of beating myself up for reading the occasional piece of literary junk food, but by the fourth book, I was a little embarrassed to be still reading. Meyer's simpering passive "heroine" is less than useless, and probably the only thing that made the whole exercise worthwhile was being able to check out the incredibly bitchy recaps scattered around the internet and being able to understand first-person how truly revolting all the middle-aged mom love for Edward Cullen and/or Robert Pattinson really is.
Seriously, thought? This shit is awful and not beningly awful. It's not-so-crypto-Mormon awful, and maybe the most convincing argument I've ever found for the notion that media can warp young minds. The thought of impressionable tweener girls reading these books and dreaming of meeting boys that they will want to bag on college for, marry at 18, and get knocked-up by on their honeymoons (Oops! Spoiler!) just grosses me out. Many many other people have spent a lot of time picking out every single anti-feminist aspect of these books, and I don't really care enough to add much to the fray, but trust me when I say EW.
Also, Little, Brown and/or Meyer's agent Jodi Reamer (!) needs to hire some goddamn proofreaders. I saw "moats" of dust in Twilight and this sentence in Breaking Dawn: "Nor is the mind reader is exactly necessary."
All together now: Aaawww!
One more time for the cheap seats: Aaaaaawwwwww!!!
Not only is Hairstyles of the Damned a coming-of-age book set during the years that coincided with my own coming-of-age, it's set in Chicago, albeit at the opposite end of the city and, culturally, a million miles away from where I lived and hung out. Still: Aaawww! There's not much to the book, it's mostly character sketches and largely-linear go-nowhere vignettes. What there is is a sort of direct line to the heart, to the tangle of emotions and gestures that comprise adolescence for all but the most self-assured among us. (The cover, while eye-catching and evocative, is clearly of someone so much cooler than any of the characters on the inside pages that it was jarring to look at once I'd finished the book.) It reads, in a lot of ways, like an awkward younger sibling to Don DeGrazia's American Skin, also a very-rooted-in-its-time-and-place novel of Chicago alt-adolescence (DeGrazia and Meno are colleagues at Columbia College in Chicago). DeGrazia writes about runaways and gutter punks bouncing at
I remember one of the first long conversations that I had with this kid in high school who's still a friend of mine. He was part of the Manic Panic and Doc Marten crowd that I wanted very badly to be a part of, and I was incredibly intimidated by him for years. He was a couple years older than me, quiet in a way that I read as self-confident rather than shy, and seemed to know about every band on earth. So, he tells me that he finds this other girl, a tight-lipped senior who was the living embodiment of that early 90s alternagirl - black angled bob, oxblood Docs, effortless thrift store style - amazingly attracting and totally intimidating. That feeling of thinking everyone else has it totally figured out and the insult that would hurt the most is poseur? That weird social scene where kids in Iron Maiden shared cigarettes in the park after school with kids who went to raves on weekends?* That's the sweet spot Joe Meno has hit, here, and aw, man does he knock it over the fences.
Meno's acknowledgment page has this (his first novel was published by HarperCollins, but he got semi-dicked over by commercial publishers after that):
"You suck it: Judith Regan. Badly. And all you other bad publishing corporations. Be ready, the end is nigh."
Hell yeah, Joe. (Just, uh, please spare my publishing company. We're not as bad as Judith Regan, and I like being employed. Thx!)
Notes:
I sat on my bed and I wondered what the hell I was doing and what I should do and then I got the greatest idea ever:
I'd make Gretchen a mix-tape. And then she'd fall for me. And then she would fall for me. (p. 47)
The songs Brian picks, painstakingly? So un-cool, hard as he tries. So sincere. You always wondered when you got a mix if it had been a one-shot deal, or if multiple attempts had been recorded and recorded over on that same tape. Do it too often and you can hear it, a fuzziness to the tape that sounds like an undercurrent of emotion. I miss making mix tapes, but I'm glad they're not the standard anymore, because I had way more time in high school to spend on that kind of thing. I made awesome mixes, by the way. Still do.
This one's for my dad, who still thinks the word Berwyn is automatically funny: I had watched it a few times when I was really young, with my dad, when it played on the late Saturday night horror show, Son of Svenghoulie [sic], this local program that ran old black-and-white movies every Saturday night. That was our thing, dad and me. We would watch these monster movies every Saturday night and how long ago had that been? (p. 66)
I was like this whole new person, not just because of my hair and clothes and not just because of the music I was listening to - people around me were treating me different, some people just coming up and talking to me for no reason. It was kind of fucking weird, you know, how I hadn't ever noticed it before, that it was all about how you fucking looked. (p. 210)
"Do-it-Yourself," Gretchen said. "It like means they stand for something, you know. They're not like fucking Guns N' Roses."
"Guns N' Roses stands for shit," I said.
"What?"
"I dunno. Having fun and everything." (p. 229)
This is very near the end of the book. I can't believe how long it took me to figure this out when I was a kid. To my credit, there was no Hot Topic then:
"Just because you have blue hair and fucked-up clothes doesn't mean you're better than everyone else. Because you know what? You're just conforming to someone else's code. Even though you don't wear khakis or sweaters or whatever, but to me all you guys look the same. You think you're so individualistic but you're not. You guys - you and Kim and alll the rest - you're like anti-snob snobs. But you're just as mean as the preppy kids. You're all just as fucking lame." (p. 259. Triumphal fist pump!)
Downloadable excerpt, and a great NPR interview.
* In one of my yearbooks there's a great picture of a stage crew kid (default extra-curricular for those who wore all-black outfits anyway) and a cheerleader playing hacky sack together. High school was like that for me - lions with lambs. IT WAS A MAGICAL TIME.
While I was reading this play, when people asked about it, I'd say "It won, I dunno, a Pulitzer or a Tony - something." Actually, it won both, and nobody recognized it. To be honest, I might not have been aware of it either if I hadn't visited New York back in March and poked around a little to see what was playing on Broadway. Maybe one of my friends who's still plugged in to the theater world would have urged me to read it. In any case, though I couldn't get a ticket to see it in New York, I did make a note to read the script at the very least, and keep an eye out for a touring production.
One of the most memorable theater experiences of my life was a Steppenwolf revival of Sam Shepard's "Buried Child" directed by Gary Sinise. I wanted to go because I liked Sam Shepard's plays, but also because Ethan Hawke was in it, and I was a teenaged girl at the time. Turns out that Ethan Hawke was the least of the actors onstage that night, blown away by the rest of the cast, most notably James "The Manager in Major League" Gammon and Ted "Buffalo Bill" Levine. It was a sort of histrionic staging, full of scenery-chewing and scenes played for maximum creep effect, and I loved it. I associate Shepard with Steppenwolf for that play, and for the stories about their "True West" which opened with John Malkovich pounding a beer onstage and then crossing to piss in a sink. "August," too began its life at Steppenwolf, transplanted nearly the entire cast to New York, and got universal raves. I loved the play too, but couldn't get "Buried Child" out of my mind the entire time I was reading it, and am surprised how few people have noted the bright line between the two. It includes the Steppenwolf connection, but there's so many other similarities. Both plays are domestic tragedies played, in parts as comedy, with an aging addict at the center of an operatically dysfunctional family. The arrival of a prodigal family member at a rural Midwestern homestead is the/a catalyst for each story. Tawdry easy-to-guess secrets are revealed, forced into the open by a claustrophobic set, the interior of a house that occupies the entire stage. So while I really enjoyed the play, I came away from it thinking that all the acclaim seems to have somehow missed the mark. It's not like "Buried Child" is an obscure play - hell, it won the Pulitzer too (and most of the web pages that mention both plays are lists of winners by year.) Is Broadway just that bereft of straight drama that the most exciting thing to land there in years is, in many ways, an unoriginal retread? Oh, hey, Jim "Roland Pryzbylewski" True-Frost, who took over from Ethan Hawke when "Buried Child" went to New York, is in "August..." too! I love Prezbo!
So, did that stop me from enjoying the play? Adoring it? Shit no, it just preoccupied me constantly, and gave me a convenient hook for this entry. Here's one reason for the love, from p. 78:
Barbara: Be a father! Help me!
Bill: I am her father, goddamn it!--
Barbara: Her father in absentia, her father in name only!--
Bill: I have not forsook my responsibilities!--
Barbara: It's "forsaken," big shot!
Bill: Actually, "forsook" is also an acceptable usage!--
Barbara: Oh, "forsook" you and the horse you rode in on!
And this, p. 100-101:
Barbara: "Greatest Generation," my ass. Are they really considering all the generations? Maybe there are some generations from the Iron Age that could compete. And what makes them so great anyway? Because they were poor and hated Nazis? Who doesn't fucking hate Nazis?! You remember when we checked her in the psych ward, that stunt she pulled?
Ivy: Which time?
Karen: I wasn't there.
Barbara: Big speech, she's getting clean, this sacrifice she's making for her family, and--
Ivy: Right, she's let her family down but now she wants to prove she's a good family member--
Barbara: She smuggled Darvocet into the psych ward...in her vagina. There's your Greatest Generation for you. She made this speech to us while she was clenching a bottle of pills in her cooch, for God's sake.
Karen: God, I've never heard that story.
Ivy: Did you just say "cooch"?
(The woman who currently plays the not-so-Great mom is a goddamn dynamo, by the way.)
Letts also wrote "Bug" which got turned into a movie that I refused to watch, and not just because Ashley Judd was in it.
by Kristen Laine
This is another review copy I scored last summer, but unlike Tested, it's a really good book, both as a look into a little-understood subculture (Seriously, I had no fucking idea) and a wider gloss on middle-class Midwestern life (again, no fucking idea, despite the fact that I grew up in the Midwest, in a middle-class family). Some back jacket copy draws a comparison to Friday Night Lights and I think it's apt. Here it's marching band rather than football that preoccupies a town, but the community involvement and passion, huge expectations shouldered by kids, and hogging of school resources by one prestige activity are immediately familiar. I also found myself comparing it to Cross-X, another high school subculture exploration. Music, like debate and unlike football, actually has demonstrable educational value (music education has been proven over and over again to be enormously beneficial to overall academic performance, especially for young kids, though Laine doesn't really discuss this much.) Laine, a high school musician herself, shadowed the staff and students of Concord Community High School in Elkhart, Indiana for six months, and writes about the band as a whole as well as a large handful of individual students, as they seek to repeat a state championship season and, you know, live their lives. This last consideration is not anywhere the least, especially late in the season when graduation for some and major life changes for others loom. As a conceit it's far from novel, but I spent hours after finishing the book watching YouTube videos of Concord's old performances, trying to recognize the pieces of music and choreography that I'd read about, and even now, a couple months removed from the reading, thinking about one of the students in particular occasionally, wondering what his future holds.
I'd put it on a shelf with the two books I already mentioned, but maybe also with What's the Matter With Kansas, because when Laine widens her scope to take in the Elkhart community, the town's history as a center for musical instrument manufacturing and boom times beginning with the post-Civil War era when, Laine writes "...the country was mad for brass bands..." and lasting well into the next century. For a good length of time, Elkhart was a model of Midwestern virtues and values, but has lately felt the influence of globalized manufacturing and higher rates of crime and drug use (what's up, meth?). Religion has grown more important to people in Elkhart as well. Indeed, one set of band parents find their children a little peculiar in their devoutness:
Chris and Jeff could think back to their years at Elkhart High School and recall the "Michigan lunches' - forays across the state line, only a few miles north of the high school, that took advantage of the twin circumstances of a drinking age of eighteen in Michigan and an open campus in Elkhart - and the thinly veiled drug use and cigarette smoking, and the winking acceptance by adults. Now, their children were reading the Bible every day, attending Christian youth groups one or two nights a week, and praying before school with their friends. (p. 81)Laine was in Elkhart during the fall of 2004, and though the books is clearly not about politics per se, her depiction of the town and its residents contextualizes the deep red of the Indiana outline on the 2004 electoral map. Here's one way to get a sense of Elkhart: One student's got a relative who is a very successful jazz drummer. Laine notes that he played behind a number of singers, including Rosemary Clooney, and that he was, at the time, "playing a 1950s version of himself in a film being put together by Rosemary Clooney's nephew." (p. 130) Yeah, there's a place in America where George Clooney is still just Rosemary's nephew.
by Ted Anthony
Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend
by Scott Reynolds Nelson
Both of these books are kin to Stagger Lee, and all three books make really enjoyable contrasts and companion pieces to each other. They're all "story of a song" books, historicizing pretty durable pieces of American folklore either in the form of the songs themselves, or the stories tha gave rise to them, but each takes a slightly different approach to its song, and each has unique strengths. Stagger Lee concentrates on what the song's imagery and themese have meant to a larger culture, and is noteworthy for its form, both as a graphic novel and as a narrative - it tells the best story of the three. Chasing the Rising Sun charts the song's ubiquity, and does the most exhaustive work of documenting the various forms the title song has taken. It's less concerned with settling the question of where the song came from (Brothel? Pub? Who cares, have you heard the version by the klezmer band?). And Steel Drivin' Man, which is really focused on the events that informed the song, is a remarkable piece of history that does what neither of the other books could: Grounds a piece of cultural ephemera in its historical origins. I think I might have found Rising Sun a little slight if I had read Nelson's book first, but luckily I didn't, so can honestly say that I loved the shit out of both books, and not just because both of them namecheck the Snakefarm album that I really like. They also all shout each other's songs, which is nice (p. 112 of John Henry reproduces the lyrics to a version of Stagger Lee and Rising Sun mentions John Henry a handful of times).
Chasing the Rising Sun reads in some ways like the logical end result of those little "projects" that can often preoccupy serious music fans and habitual mix-makers.* Ted Anthony doesn't bother to hide the fact that this project is less about semiotics and history than plain old geeking out. Though he dismisses some of the wackier historical theories (establishing pretty clearly, for instance, that the song is American in origin) and talks a bit about a Rising Sun Hotel that did actually exist in New Orleans, he mostly just wants to talk about the many many versions of the song that have been recorded and all the super-obscure versions he's visited super-obscure record stores to hear. Also talk a little shit about Bob Dylan, whose version might rest on the arrangement of someone who went uncredited. And, to his credit, this is plenty engaging. A lot of anecdotes like this: "Just after [Josh] White died, in 1969, Oscar Brand was in Italy with his son. They happened upon a piazza, where a Scandinavian man was sitting. He had a guitar and was singing 'House of the Rising Sun.' brand mentioned to his son that 'Josh sang that.' Suddenly, the man noticed the two passersby. 'The guy just kind of woke up and said, "Josh?" I said, "Yes, I knew him." The guy just let loose a line of Norwegian excitement,' Brand recalls. 'It was as if I had touched God on my travels.'" (p. 82) Anthony does take pains to state pretty definitively that the first recording of the song dates to 1933, edging out the more well-known 1937 version collected in Kentucky by Alan Lomax, but for the most part is not interested in nailing down particulars. Part of this is by design: he treats the song as an infinitely mutable thing with no "definitive" arrangement or lyrics and argues that its mutability and ubiquity are what ultimately define it. He even makes a good case for the most cheeseball kitsch perversion of something we prefer to think of as "authentic:" "[The song] began as a narrow, specific piece of a particular culture, then spread and became more emblematic. The only reason for its dissemination was its commodification: So many performers adulterated it, changed it around, shaped it to their own circumstances that it grew into something modern....The measure of authenticity is time....Each representation of American culture, even those that seem crass and commercial, is of us. Trying to figure out which ones are oversimplifications and which are productive parts of the cultural collage like the one that produced 'House of the Rising Sun' is one of the major challenges of our era." (p. 125) He restates the point on p. 183: "One page on the internet, put up by a guy who calls himself Doc Doc, offers a MIDI version of an old arangement of the song. 'House of the Rising Sun: By Everyone,' he says. By everyone. That's it exactly. Each group of musicians made it their own, brought their own set of experiences to the table. 'The only difference was they didn't sit down with a grandfather and get it face to face,' Peggy Bulger says. 'People have been thinking forever that folklore is going to die. It's living culture, and culture is not dead. It keeps evolving. Mass culture today is folk culture.'"
Here's a random: "Charles Giteau," the James A. Garfield presidential assassination ballad. (p. 91) Never heard of it. Lyrics are here.
As a segue, here's a particularly funny line in which Anthony sums up some hand-waving to explain his decision to use the first recorded version of "Rising Sun" as a starting point, rather than dig deeper:
This is what mass culture and recorded sound do. Maybe, for example, there once really was a John Henry, a steel-driving man who died with a hammer in his hand. But we're not sure, and the legend, the song, has become more real than the reality. If Lead Belly had lived a century earlier, he might well have been remembered as a foggy myth because stories in the folk tradition were preserved as tall tales - the very kind that Lead Belly himself liked to tell so much. (p. 78)
Scott Reynolds Nelson has a message for Ted Anthony. He says "Face!" It's a little unfair to compare a hobbyist/journalist with an honest-to-gosh historian, though, and I'd be lying if I wasn't astonished by how far Nelson went in filling in the history behind "John Henry. (And Anthony would probably do a better job of tracking down every version of the song ever recorded - on p. 2 Nelson notes that "almost two hundred recorded versions" of the song, which seems like a drastic underestimation to me.) But I didn't spend too much time fussing over the similarities and differences between these two books once I got a chapter or so into Steel Drivin' Man, once Nelson's narrative of discovery kicked in. Nelson happens to have a deep knowledge of the history of railroads in the United States, and in particular the post-Civil War southern rush to build out rail networks to compete with the existing infrastructure of the north. Owing to the poverty of the region, shortcuts like convict labor were routinely used, and Nelson makes a pretty convincing case for the existence of an actual John Henry: convict (railroaded, no pun intended, by a racist legal system, sentenced to life for petty theft), laborer, working to drill pilot holes for demolition teams carving the Lewis tunnel in Virginia alongside newly-invented finicky inefficient steam drills (hand labor had the clear advantage there, though it was the work of many men that "beat" the drills), and victim, probably of silicosis after inhaling fine particles of dust while working in the tunnel. Henry was leased out to the railroad company that killed him by the Virginia Penitentiary in Richmond. One of the conditions of the lease was designed to ensure that the railroad company didn't allow prisoners to escape - heavy fines were levied if every man who left the prison was not returned. Mostly corpses returned, and were buried, yes, in sandy soil, within view of Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad tracks. That last line of the song? "They took John Henry to the graveyard, and they buried him in the sand. And every locomotive comes a-roaring by says 'There lies a steel-drivin' man" Perhaps the most poetic image in the song is no fiction or myth at all. My mind: Blown. Nelson adapted the narrative into a children's book, too! Gotta check that out.
I had a harder time swallowing this passage, though I guess it's as good an explanation as any:
Sometimes it was the hammer man who sang, telling his partner with his rhythm and lyrics when the next blow would come. Other times a third man would sing for hammer man and shaker. Between blows the shaker would work his magic, either rocking or rolling. Many hammer songs echoed the work process, describing the rolling that the partner, or "buddy," did with the drill...Here in the mines and work camps of Southern railroads the phrase "rock and roll" was born. (p. 76)I wrote "Why the South is fucked" in my notes regarding this:
Public schools, most erected after the war, were quickly impoverished...Every state institution shrank to pay the railroad debt and keep state taxes low, pulling black and white Southerners in a downward spiral. Penitentiaries filled to the bursting point. Public schools were not mandatory, and literacy was low. State health boards hardly existed. Thus after the South's revolution, the old folkways reemerged. Mules, chickens and bare feet tracked bacteria into houses; hookwork and pellagra thrived in the guts of Southerners, black and white, leaving children chronically undernourished. (p. 100)Random interesting trivia:
Their profession went backto the 1840s at least, when "musician" was the largest profession among free blacks in Northern cities, accountin for nearly 20 percent of professional black men. (p. 121)* I once made a mix made up entirely of songs that used one or both of two different drum samples. Because I had the internet available to me, this was not as difficult a task as it may seem. The downside was how insanely time-consuming it was just listening to all the songs that were contenders.
