Aside from James Baldwin's Another Country, I began reading Edward Snowden's book Permanent Record, a present from my godfather, and published earlier this year.
It is written in a philosophical vein at the beginning and perhaps two thirds of the way into the book, when Snowden writes his meditations on privacy and the American Constitution and the role of whistleblowers, etc. I take a little longer to disentangle the phrase, but usually I welcome it. There's also a clear-eyed assessment or two of the Bush era that is refreshing to read in retrospect.
It is as edifying as it is dumbfounding to read a person my age making so much effort to think of things and take responsibility for ethical dilemmas in his work. I don't think it's easy to look beyond one's tasks and beyond the context of one's workplace and end-of-month paycheque.
As Snowden's computer-obsessed childhood and teenagerhood in the 80s and 90s, his family, his rather abstracted approach to coping with the demands of school, and his flight from community college into a technological career, unfold earlier in the book, my amazement is hardly lessened. I'm not a libertarian nor was I ever a fan of a badly-defined 'War on Terror.' It's also true that I'm not prone to 'gaming the system,' preferring to negotiate the school and work world according to the rules. But the lack of that shared experience didn't weaken the feeling that he is like most of the people I know, for example me, who grew up in the 1980s and 90s and had some exposure to technology. So it is astonishing that he did strike out on his own path.
Whether I'm over-inclined to praise the book or not, I liked how the 'secondary characters' are sketched — whether by Snowden himself, at the prompting of his editor, or through the pen of a ghostwriter. Snowden's father, for example, or his then-girlfriend, now-wife; a handful of details about his wife already suggests people whom I've known, and I can imagine a personality half-way between reality and analogical figures. Snowden mentioned in his introduction that he tried to respect the privacy of the people around him while writing, but the portraiture has not become too vague.
I hadn't heard before, likely due to ignorance, that the Arab Spring had been an indirect factor in Snowden's decision to publish details of the mass surveillance programme. The extent to which private companies have been running American foreign and domestic security — this is one of Snowden's complaints — was also unknown.
In a way the book helps reduce the guilt I've tended to feel toward Edward Snowden. After all, he went through a great moral conflict, when the public for whom he did it — at least I speak for myself — trots along in ignorance. Even his photographic portrait on the book cover looks faintly martyred in expression, and it's no wonder. The book does help bring closer to the reader the aspects that bothered him of the American intelligence community's mass surveillance programmes, in a way that the press articles might not have, so one feels less ill-informed.
As for his elucidation of the techniques of the modern American intelligence community, I am not certain whether I am comfortable 'spying' on the CIA and the NSA and defence contractors as the public may do while reading Snowden's book — sometimes it feels as if he has shrunken the reader to the size of a mouse and taken us along in his pocket into the buildings at Fort Meade, a top-secret facility in Hawaii, etc., where he worked. He makes it pretty clear that the people who work in these buildings are individuals with their own quirks, needs, strengths and weaknesses. Even if Permanent Record feels like a rare opportunity to examine the people who examine us, and it is kind of gripping, and Snowden makes pretty clear that security and the protection of secrets can be incredibly lax within the agencies, I also feel ashamed about my snooping instinct.
Anyway, not having finished the book yet, this is only a half-informed review. As for the technological details, I cannot tell whether a reader who knows something about hacking or system administration or other things will find their curiosity appeased, or be disappointed that it has been reduced to a more lay-reader-friendly version.
*
Besides, I've been making progress in the physics textbook about particle detectors: Teilchen-Detektoren by Otto Claus Allkofer, from the 1970s or 80s.
I couldn't tell you the difference between a fog chamber, a spark chamber, and a scintillation detector easily, or specify which detects neutrons, muons or electrons.
But it is thrilling enough to imagine that if I had a physics background, the prose and structure are straightforward and well-reflected enough that maybe — just maybe — it would be a pretty helpful reference work.
And I'm also wondering if this is relevant to my father's work.
*
Lastly, I have begun reading an e-book version of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, hoping that this will help me begin to read up on computer science for my own career.
Saturday, December 07, 2019
Sunday, December 01, 2019
December 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next
The Guardian, January 5, 2019
In November I read Another Country by James Baldwin, a fictional book about a group of friends in New York City (and in France) who are making or breaking careers for themselves in creative fields: writing, acting, and music. The friends also navigate the boundaries between the black and white communities in New York, and between heterosexuality and homosexuality, American conservatism and liberalism.
In general Baldwin's writing seems contemporary: He feels pretty unjudgmental. His curiosity about many kinds of environments and conflicts, economic class as well as race and gender, is what I'd call "intersectionality." (Even if Kimberlé Crenshaw invented the term intersectionality after Baldwin's death.) And I like that he's interested in misogyny and gender double standards, for example, without seeming to be bored-but-dutiful about it.
As for gay life in the United States (and France), historically and contemporarily, I'm not an expert on it. That has not impeded me from forming opinions that are hopefully not stupid:
Baldwin doesn't seem to spend much time depicting the guilt and morality that are built up around gayness in modern American and European political discourse — maybe because e.g. Greenwich Village was not necessarily a Catholic or Baptist hotspot — in Another Country.
He presents sexual orientation as a 'threat' to traditional and mistaken ideas of masculinity and to traditional power relationships, rather than to morality. He writes about times and places where homosexuality was seen as weakness, and where a few men who were straight, or closeted, raped other men.
But when Baldwin writes about genuine same-sex relationships, between freely consenting adults, these are a mixture of romance and friendship with sex, exactly as the hetero relationships he writes about are. I think that this mixture is another aspect of bisexuality and gayness — that being bisexual or gay is no more 'sexual' than being straight — that often takes a long time for homophobic or half-informed people to grasp.
One worries that being this rational filter between prejudice and reality required a large sacrifice of time, thought and effort on Baldwin's part, but I have to confess I'm glad he was.
*
 |
| "Brooklyn Bridge and New York City skyline" Photo by Irving Underhill, 1911 via Wikimedia Commons |
As for gay life in the United States (and France), historically and contemporarily, I'm not an expert on it. That has not impeded me from forming opinions that are hopefully not stupid:
Baldwin doesn't seem to spend much time depicting the guilt and morality that are built up around gayness in modern American and European political discourse — maybe because e.g. Greenwich Village was not necessarily a Catholic or Baptist hotspot — in Another Country.
He presents sexual orientation as a 'threat' to traditional and mistaken ideas of masculinity and to traditional power relationships, rather than to morality. He writes about times and places where homosexuality was seen as weakness, and where a few men who were straight, or closeted, raped other men.
But when Baldwin writes about genuine same-sex relationships, between freely consenting adults, these are a mixture of romance and friendship with sex, exactly as the hetero relationships he writes about are. I think that this mixture is another aspect of bisexuality and gayness — that being bisexual or gay is no more 'sexual' than being straight — that often takes a long time for homophobic or half-informed people to grasp.
One worries that being this rational filter between prejudice and reality required a large sacrifice of time, thought and effort on Baldwin's part, but I have to confess I'm glad he was.
*
I guess that Baldwin's other prose might be more Gesamtkunstwerk-y than Another Country. It was written over a long time with painful effort. Also, there are so many sex scenes! awkward to read in public transit. But I liked it nonetheless.
Sunday, November 03, 2019
November 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next
2019 in books: what you'll be reading this year
The Guardian, January 5, 2019
In October I finished reading Regards from the Dead Princess — the semi-fiction/semi-biography that French journalist Kenizé Mourad wrote about her mother in the 1980s.
Her mother was born into the Sultan's family at the end of the Ottoman Empire, thrown into new lives and places as a princess in India after marriage, and emigrée in Lebanon and Paris, at different periods in her life. She died of an infection during the Second World War when Mourad was a toddler.
Her purpose is, I guess, to paint a picture of her mother and her mother's life in her mind. At the same time she flexes her journalistic scope and personal fascination for 'the Orient' in the historical and geographic details. We hear all about Atatürk and Indian Independence and the German Occupation of Paris, and about what Istanbul and Lucknow and France looked like in those times.
I do think Mourad has the tendency to call a spade — not a spade, but a pearl-handled cake lift. (To re-use a phrase I've read elsewhere.) Her style, or perhaps the style of the translation into English, is reasonably purple.
Her cast of characters also has a tinge of soap opera and to be honest (as a result of her upbringing) I think the heroine tends to depend on or exploit people, or feel victimized by them alternately. Mourad classifies her figures into characters into villains whom the heroine dislikes, villains whom the heroine likes, and heroes who are in the heroine's good graces and heroes who have fallen from their pedestals — for being villainous, or for thwarting the Princess in a more trivial way. Needless to say I find this approach to human nature risky because it can be self-centered and amoral.
*
I imagine that the book is an apt reflection of the Princess Diana era:
A fragile-looking, gently-reared, very young aristocratic woman is expected to realize the dreams of at least half her gender.
People believe that these dreams must and will be fulfilled for her,
— precisely because she earns them through her beauty and public benevolence.
But then she reveals herself to be unexpectedly — or expectedly, to any half-skeptical person — unhappy.
***
I reread Elizabeth Acevedo's earlier novel for teenagers, The Poet X, in paper form. The poems felt strikingly personal and fresh, and I appreciated that they were not an equal length, tone or subject. They adapted to their scenarios, were wisely brief where brevity was wit, set a brisk narrative pace, and were well-ripened.
With the Fire on High, which I've finished listening to, offers a (relatively) invigoratingly rebellious look at school, gender double standards, and figuring out how to shift to working/college life. It in my view praises an ideal of personal autonomy in aspects besides the freedom from family expectations that Acevedo championed in The Poet X.
I hope that many teenagers have a chance to read these books, because they might 'find themselves' in the pages. While teenage pregnancy, social backlash to pregnancy, or a burning desire to become a chef were not part of my life, for example, I doubt this would have prevented me from feeling understood and encouraged by With the Fire on High.
*
The Pages Choisies from Arthur Rimbaud's works that Larousse published in the 1950s, with notes by Etiemble, was a counterbalance to the edition that I'd read by Claude-Edmonde Magny. It is more risqué and adversarial, and it does not airbrush over Rimbaud's faults. I thought it was not a fair approach, however, because Etiemble seemed unfairly prejudiced. As always, I barely grasped Rimbaud's poems themselves, but since Etiemble refused to agree with the widely accepted ways to read and interpret them, I felt like I was no worse off than anyone else in having no interpretation.
After reading Rimbaud, I wavered between reading more Another Country by James Baldwin; or beginning to read an abridged edition of Souvenirs de la jeunesse et de l'enfance by Ernest Renan, or Vol de nuit by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
*
I decided on Renan, because his writing and biography were new territory to me. Born into what I think is the middle class in the early 19th century in Brittany, he was intended to become a priest, and worked his way through lesser and greater religious schools and reached Saint-Sulpice in Paris.
But instead of being a priest, he broke off his theological education and became a historian and a society figure, and he contributed articles (like the ones that compose his Souvenirs) to the famous Revue des deux mondes. He broke the heart of priests who educated him by leaving the path of God, publicly. One of these priests apparently only published one book in his lifetime: a refutation of Renan's writings.
But he says that the priests who taught him inculcated a good moral example that left traces anyway. He turned away from the Church due to contradictions within Catholic church dogma (and its pretense that 19th-century rules sprang from the time of Jesus and St. Paul, rather than from hundreds of years of Vatican wheelings and dealings), as well as due to historical and philosophical counter-evidence. It was not due to lurid harassment or abuse, which I'd rather feared.
His tale of schoolmate Noémi 'interested' me from my amateur feminist critic's standpoint. I temporarily agreed with Sherlock Holmes's ideas regarding the heliocentric solar system — there are just things one doesn't need to hear, or hearing them they should be forgotten so as to free up the precious brain cells that are wasted on them. For example: "Très tôt, le goût des jeunes filles fut vif en moi." ('Very soon, I had a lively taste for young girls.') made me reach for the metaphorical brain bleach; it sounds lewd. Hopefully I'm just mistranslating it.
Maybe his priestly training gave Renan a weird concept of female minds. Maybe other reasons did. Whatever the reason, and despite the fact that he was married, I think he might have been better at analyzing the inner lives and talents of Antarctic penguins.
Translated in 1897 by Mynors Bright, here Renan is describing the girls whom he knew before he entered a men-only theological school at the age of 15:
The Guardian, January 5, 2019
In October I finished reading Regards from the Dead Princess — the semi-fiction/semi-biography that French journalist Kenizé Mourad wrote about her mother in the 1980s.
Her mother was born into the Sultan's family at the end of the Ottoman Empire, thrown into new lives and places as a princess in India after marriage, and emigrée in Lebanon and Paris, at different periods in her life. She died of an infection during the Second World War when Mourad was a toddler.
Her purpose is, I guess, to paint a picture of her mother and her mother's life in her mind. At the same time she flexes her journalistic scope and personal fascination for 'the Orient' in the historical and geographic details. We hear all about Atatürk and Indian Independence and the German Occupation of Paris, and about what Istanbul and Lucknow and France looked like in those times.
I do think Mourad has the tendency to call a spade — not a spade, but a pearl-handled cake lift. (To re-use a phrase I've read elsewhere.) Her style, or perhaps the style of the translation into English, is reasonably purple.
Her cast of characters also has a tinge of soap opera and to be honest (as a result of her upbringing) I think the heroine tends to depend on or exploit people, or feel victimized by them alternately. Mourad classifies her figures into characters into villains whom the heroine dislikes, villains whom the heroine likes, and heroes who are in the heroine's good graces and heroes who have fallen from their pedestals — for being villainous, or for thwarting the Princess in a more trivial way. Needless to say I find this approach to human nature risky because it can be self-centered and amoral.
*
I imagine that the book is an apt reflection of the Princess Diana era:
A fragile-looking, gently-reared, very young aristocratic woman is expected to realize the dreams of at least half her gender.
People believe that these dreams must and will be fulfilled for her,
— precisely because she earns them through her beauty and public benevolence.
But then she reveals herself to be unexpectedly — or expectedly, to any half-skeptical person — unhappy.
***
I reread Elizabeth Acevedo's earlier novel for teenagers, The Poet X, in paper form. The poems felt strikingly personal and fresh, and I appreciated that they were not an equal length, tone or subject. They adapted to their scenarios, were wisely brief where brevity was wit, set a brisk narrative pace, and were well-ripened.
With the Fire on High, which I've finished listening to, offers a (relatively) invigoratingly rebellious look at school, gender double standards, and figuring out how to shift to working/college life. It in my view praises an ideal of personal autonomy in aspects besides the freedom from family expectations that Acevedo championed in The Poet X.
I hope that many teenagers have a chance to read these books, because they might 'find themselves' in the pages. While teenage pregnancy, social backlash to pregnancy, or a burning desire to become a chef were not part of my life, for example, I doubt this would have prevented me from feeling understood and encouraged by With the Fire on High.
*
The Pages Choisies from Arthur Rimbaud's works that Larousse published in the 1950s, with notes by Etiemble, was a counterbalance to the edition that I'd read by Claude-Edmonde Magny. It is more risqué and adversarial, and it does not airbrush over Rimbaud's faults. I thought it was not a fair approach, however, because Etiemble seemed unfairly prejudiced. As always, I barely grasped Rimbaud's poems themselves, but since Etiemble refused to agree with the widely accepted ways to read and interpret them, I felt like I was no worse off than anyone else in having no interpretation.
After reading Rimbaud, I wavered between reading more Another Country by James Baldwin; or beginning to read an abridged edition of Souvenirs de la jeunesse et de l'enfance by Ernest Renan, or Vol de nuit by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
*
 |
| "Portrait of Renan in his Study" via |
But instead of being a priest, he broke off his theological education and became a historian and a society figure, and he contributed articles (like the ones that compose his Souvenirs) to the famous Revue des deux mondes. He broke the heart of priests who educated him by leaving the path of God, publicly. One of these priests apparently only published one book in his lifetime: a refutation of Renan's writings.
But he says that the priests who taught him inculcated a good moral example that left traces anyway. He turned away from the Church due to contradictions within Catholic church dogma (and its pretense that 19th-century rules sprang from the time of Jesus and St. Paul, rather than from hundreds of years of Vatican wheelings and dealings), as well as due to historical and philosophical counter-evidence. It was not due to lurid harassment or abuse, which I'd rather feared.
His tale of schoolmate Noémi 'interested' me from my amateur feminist critic's standpoint. I temporarily agreed with Sherlock Holmes's ideas regarding the heliocentric solar system — there are just things one doesn't need to hear, or hearing them they should be forgotten so as to free up the precious brain cells that are wasted on them. For example: "Très tôt, le goût des jeunes filles fut vif en moi." ('Very soon, I had a lively taste for young girls.') made me reach for the metaphorical brain bleach; it sounds lewd. Hopefully I'm just mistranslating it.
Maybe his priestly training gave Renan a weird concept of female minds. Maybe other reasons did. Whatever the reason, and despite the fact that he was married, I think he might have been better at analyzing the inner lives and talents of Antarctic penguins.
Translated in 1897 by Mynors Bright, here Renan is describing the girls whom he knew before he entered a men-only theological school at the age of 15:
The vague idea which attracted me to the[ girls] was, I think, that men are at liberty to do many things which women cannot, and the latter consequently had, in my eyes, the charm of being weak and beautiful creatures, subject in their daily life to rules of conduct which they did not attempt to override. All those whom I had known were the pattern of modesty. The first feeling which stirred in me was one of pity, so to speak, coupled with the idea of assisting them in their becoming resignation, of liking them for their reserve, and making it easier for them. I quite felt my own intellectual superiority; but even at that early age, I felt that the woman who is very beautiful or very good, solves completely the problem of which we, with all our hard-headedness, make such a hash. We are mere children or pedants compared to her. I as yet understood this only vaguely, though I saw clearly enough that beauty is so great a gift that talent, genius, and even virtue are nothing when weighed in the balance with it; so that the woman who is really beautiful has the right to hold herself superior to everybody and everything, inasmuch as she combines not in a creation outside of herself, but in her very person, as in a Myrrhine vase, all the qualities which genius painfully endeavours to reproduce.
[Bright's translation is here at Wikisource.
The original is here.]
To be fair, there were many weird ideas about women and their role in society at the time. Without searching for it, I came across this in Wikipedia just now:
To be fair, there were many weird ideas about women and their role in society at the time. Without searching for it, I came across this in Wikipedia just now:
Camille Saint-Saëns wrote of Holmès in the journal Harmonie et Mélodie: "Like children, women have no idea of obstacles, and their willpower breaks all barriers. Mademoiselle Holmès is a woman, an extremist."
["Augusta Holmès", Wikipedia]
***
As for modern books: Carmen Maria Machado, the author, is about to release In the Dream House: A Memoir, a new book that uses elements from other genres like horror to portray her relationship with a psychologically abusive woman.
As for anniversaries, the Guardian has mentioned that French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes will have dreamt his 'night of three dreams' 400 years ago on November 10th. Also, that George Eliot's 200th birthday will fall on the 22nd. Perhaps it's a good time to tackle the Discourse on the Method or Middlemarch...
***
As for modern books: Carmen Maria Machado, the author, is about to release In the Dream House: A Memoir, a new book that uses elements from other genres like horror to portray her relationship with a psychologically abusive woman.
As for anniversaries, the Guardian has mentioned that French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes will have dreamt his 'night of three dreams' 400 years ago on November 10th. Also, that George Eliot's 200th birthday will fall on the 22nd. Perhaps it's a good time to tackle the Discourse on the Method or Middlemarch...
Saturday, October 05, 2019
October 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next
2019 in books: what you'll be reading this year
The Guardian, January 5, 2019
In October there are also new books that any reader who keeps up with the scene can hardly avoid hearing about. Zadie Smith is presenting fresh and perennial short stories in a volume called Grand Union, John Le Carré is publishing the spy novel Agent Running in the Field as mentioned in September, and Philip Pullman is adding The Secret Commonwealth to his Golden Compass books.
In the US, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey have written the book She Said about researching and publishing their news articles about film producer Harvey Weinstein's harassment and abuse.
(A Washington Post article about the rough interview with Bob Woodward at the book launch in Washington, D.C. is here.)
*
Meanwhile, I am planning to finish listening to With the Fire on High (the young adult book about a Philadelphia high school student who dreams of becoming a professional chef) by Elizabeth Acevedo, and finish reading Regards from the Dead Princess by Kenizé Mourad.
After that, to read more of Another Country by James Baldwin and Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson in the new English-language translation, and a Larousse paperback volume of Pages choisies by Arthur Rimbaud.
In Berlin's Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus, I've spotted Ayesha At Last, which I've been curious about for a while. It is a romance novel inspired by Pride and Prejudice. It was written in the setting of present-day Toronto, by Uzma Jalaluddin. Its Austenite and Canadian elements draw me, and I'm interested in Muslim life in modern North American and European cities. But I haven't bought it yet.
At the Kulturkaufhaus, I bought Ronja Rövardottar by Astrid Lindgren, to reward my efforts in learning Swedish on Duolingo. But I suspect that a competent dictionary is needed.
Then I've begun regularly reading O megalos peripatos tou Petrou, by Alki Zei. (It's a classic Greek children's story, written in the 1970s and set in 1940s Greece during the Second World War. Despite its subject matter, it is also rather funny.) My Greek colleague is helping by reading it together with me on Thursday afternoons. She has been explaining, for example, the historical context and vocabulary.
Lastly, I want to read more of Ta-Nehisi Coates's essay backlist.
In short, there will be no lack of books to read in October.
The Guardian, January 5, 2019
In October there are also new books that any reader who keeps up with the scene can hardly avoid hearing about. Zadie Smith is presenting fresh and perennial short stories in a volume called Grand Union, John Le Carré is publishing the spy novel Agent Running in the Field as mentioned in September, and Philip Pullman is adding The Secret Commonwealth to his Golden Compass books.
In the US, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey have written the book She Said about researching and publishing their news articles about film producer Harvey Weinstein's harassment and abuse.
(A Washington Post article about the rough interview with Bob Woodward at the book launch in Washington, D.C. is here.)
*
Meanwhile, I am planning to finish listening to With the Fire on High (the young adult book about a Philadelphia high school student who dreams of becoming a professional chef) by Elizabeth Acevedo, and finish reading Regards from the Dead Princess by Kenizé Mourad.
After that, to read more of Another Country by James Baldwin and Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson in the new English-language translation, and a Larousse paperback volume of Pages choisies by Arthur Rimbaud.
In Berlin's Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus, I've spotted Ayesha At Last, which I've been curious about for a while. It is a romance novel inspired by Pride and Prejudice. It was written in the setting of present-day Toronto, by Uzma Jalaluddin. Its Austenite and Canadian elements draw me, and I'm interested in Muslim life in modern North American and European cities. But I haven't bought it yet.
At the Kulturkaufhaus, I bought Ronja Rövardottar by Astrid Lindgren, to reward my efforts in learning Swedish on Duolingo. But I suspect that a competent dictionary is needed.
Then I've begun regularly reading O megalos peripatos tou Petrou, by Alki Zei. (It's a classic Greek children's story, written in the 1970s and set in 1940s Greece during the Second World War. Despite its subject matter, it is also rather funny.) My Greek colleague is helping by reading it together with me on Thursday afternoons. She has been explaining, for example, the historical context and vocabulary.
Lastly, I want to read more of Ta-Nehisi Coates's essay backlist.
In short, there will be no lack of books to read in October.
Friday, September 20, 2019
Faust in Copenhagen: A Physicist Revisits a Turning Point in Quantum Theory
In 1932 a group of physicists from around Europe met at Niels Bohr's institute in the Blegdamsvej in Copenhagen, in the final year before Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany. (Quite a few of the physicists, like Max Born and Lise Meitner and Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck were based in Germany, as Göttingen and Leipzig and Berlin were important physics addresses at the time). It was also the last period of innocence before their work would lead to nuclear weapons.
Aside from discussing the emergence of the neutron and the neutrino, which resolved important questions about the atom and changed the face of physics forever, they were also entertained by a theatrical parody of Goethe's Faust. One of them caricatured Paul Ehrenfest as Faust, another Niels Bohr as the Lord, a third Wolfgang Pauli as Mephisto, etc., and a Danish woman played a neutrino as Gretchen.
In the late 1920s and early 30s, Germany was no longer associated as strongly with the Kaiser-era imperialist and jingoist tendencies that undermined the moral stature of the German scientific communities during World War I.
(Scientists like Fritz Haber, Ernst Haeckl, Max Planck, and Wilhelm Roentgen, composer Engelbert Humperdinck, artist Max Liebermann, and literary figures like Gerhart Hauptmann, signed a 1914 letter proclaiming amongst other things, in a mischaracterization of the invasion of Belgium, that:
Gino Segrè, a physicist who worked at CERN and Berkeley and taught at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a book about the Copenhagen Conferences and physicists' progress in and around 1932, that 'year of miracles': Faust in Copenhagen (2007).
Bohr and Bohr's guests face almost no adverse judgment from Segrè's pen, in my opinion.
I don't know if the author was forbearing because he reveres these figures so greatly — his physicist uncle also met and knew a few of them; or because he is a rarely optimistic critic of human nature. Or perhaps he was worried about receiving angry reactions, or about betraying the understandings on the basis of which he obtained his material.
Aside from discussing the emergence of the neutron and the neutrino, which resolved important questions about the atom and changed the face of physics forever, they were also entertained by a theatrical parody of Goethe's Faust. One of them caricatured Paul Ehrenfest as Faust, another Niels Bohr as the Lord, a third Wolfgang Pauli as Mephisto, etc., and a Danish woman played a neutrino as Gretchen.
In the late 1920s and early 30s, Germany was no longer associated as strongly with the Kaiser-era imperialist and jingoist tendencies that undermined the moral stature of the German scientific communities during World War I.
(Scientists like Fritz Haber, Ernst Haeckl, Max Planck, and Wilhelm Roentgen, composer Engelbert Humperdinck, artist Max Liebermann, and literary figures like Gerhart Hauptmann, signed a 1914 letter proclaiming amongst other things, in a mischaracterization of the invasion of Belgium, that:
It is not true that our troops treated Louvain brutally. Furious inhabitants having treacherously fallen upon them in their quarters, our troops with aching hearts were obliged to fire a part of the town as a punishment. The greatest part of Louvain has been preserved. The famous Town Hall stands quite intact; for at great self-sacrifice our soldiers saved it from destruction by the flames.("Manifesto of the Ninety-Three" [Wikipedia] (Retrieved September 19, 2019))
Gino Segrè, a physicist who worked at CERN and Berkeley and taught at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a book about the Copenhagen Conferences and physicists' progress in and around 1932, that 'year of miracles': Faust in Copenhagen (2007).
Bohr and Bohr's guests face almost no adverse judgment from Segrè's pen, in my opinion.
I don't know if the author was forbearing because he reveres these figures so greatly — his physicist uncle also met and knew a few of them; or because he is a rarely optimistic critic of human nature. Or perhaps he was worried about receiving angry reactions, or about betraying the understandings on the basis of which he obtained his material.
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
September 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next
It would be a grim and exacting reader who would not be excited about the new books that are appearing this month and the next.
***
Notably, 34 years after Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood has revisited her fictional land of Gilead (the dystopic society in which women are treated as chattel) and written a sequel: The Testaments.
It has been published with great fanfare — for example a Booker Prize nomination.
Here is one of the reviews: "The Testaments by Margaret Atwood review – hints of a happy ending" [Guardian/Observer], by Julie Myerson (September 15, 2019)
*
Salman Rushdie has released a new novel, Quichotte, that parodies the state of the United States with the tale of Don Quixote as a parallel.
*
Ta-Nehisi Coates has written Water Dancer, a magical-realist novel about slavery, which will come out on September 24th. I've already read an excerpt, based on which I think it struggles to come out of the shadow of Toni Morrison or George Saunders (at least, Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo), and that imagination is needed to trust that the prose is like anyone's internal monologue, either in the 1800s or now:
***
Notably, 34 years after Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood has revisited her fictional land of Gilead (the dystopic society in which women are treated as chattel) and written a sequel: The Testaments.
It has been published with great fanfare — for example a Booker Prize nomination.
Here is one of the reviews: "The Testaments by Margaret Atwood review – hints of a happy ending" [Guardian/Observer], by Julie Myerson (September 15, 2019)
*
Salman Rushdie has released a new novel, Quichotte, that parodies the state of the United States with the tale of Don Quixote as a parallel.
*
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| From Penguin RandomHouse |
I yanked at the reins but it was too late. We barreled right through and what happened next shook forever my sense of a cosmic order.It's a degree of abstraction that most people could not spare brainpower or time for in the first-person narrator's situation. Except if they have taken so many creative writing courses that it is now encoded in their DNA. (Also, I doubt that many 19th-century people would have used the phrase 'cosmic order,' although after searching Google Books I did find it used in a scholarly article from 1882.)
Sunday, July 28, 2019
July/August 2019: What We'll Be Reading Next, Part II
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| "The swimming venue of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin." by A. Levers, dated 2008 via Wikimedia Commons |
Yusra and her older sister Sara stayed in Turkey briefly, riding in a bus to the shore near Lesbos. Then, after a smuggler swan-dove overboard and abandoned a boat full of refugees with a motor that had stopped functioning and that lay too low in the water underneath their weight, they were stranded for hours near the Greek island without being able to reach it. To keep the boat from sinking, some of the refugees slipped overboard and held onto ropes, and nudged the prow of the boat so that it was pointed toward the Greek shore even if they could not propel the heavy vessel themselves. Yusra emphasizes that Sara was in the water as well as she was. What is more, a few fellow refugees also slipped overboard even though — unlike the Mardini sisters — they could not swim at all.
The journey from Lesbos (the boat was saved) through Hungary and Austria is a long story in which the generosity and the venality of strangers is absurdly intermingled. There is the degrading treatment and the brutality with which refugees' money is exploited even by 'respectable' authorities and individuals: money taken for substandard lodgings, tickets sold for trains which people are never permitted to take, beatings in Bulgarian forest escape routes by 'law and order,' etc. Even so, Yusra Mardini points out that those who could afford to travel over Greece into Europe were the lucky ones; those with no money at all are stranded in Turkey or Lebanon. There are also, by way of contrast, gifts of clothing, the offer of an Orthodox church as a night shelter, and other practical assistance. It is strange how all of these actions are natural to humanity, and it is a sign of strength that Yusra's head and heart seem to have accepted these contradictions without bitterness.
When Angela Merkel expressed the wish to handle asylum claims for all Syrian refugees in 2015, Germany became a comparatively welcoming country. Indeed Yusra saw cheering crowds at the station as she arrived across its borders. And yet life here was not perfect.
Mardini remembered the war trauma and was still losing friends who had stayed behind; and Berlin was not nearly as pretty or familiar as Damascus. Then her parents and her youngest sister hoped that German government policy would reunite them; then they were forced to abandon that hope at least temporarily. In the end they risked their necks smuggling themselves into Germany as well; they fortunately succeeded. Then her sister Sara performed the endless waiting for asylum claim processing at the LaGeSo in Berlin (the State Office for Health and Social Issues), which was one of many trials prepared by the German bureaucracy. Add the fact that the housing schemes, for instance, for refugees were at times negligent or even inhumane. Also, she did not want to accept charity all the time.
I'm worried that rejecting the label 'refugee' as Mardini does undermines the cause, although it's cheeky of me to speculate at all. While the press is undoubtedly wrong in finding Syrian refugees more presentable than, let's say, Sudanese refugees, I don't know if it helps to make flight respectable for anyone, if 'refugee' seems to remain to the end of this book as a degrading term for weak dependents rather than as a neutral term for individuals who seek to stay in another country because their own government will not protect them.
Her book is also about media frenzies. It starts with one or two interviews with reporters who bump into her while she's still traveling between the shore of Lesbos and the outskirts of Berlin, and who find to their delight that she speaks English. Some of these journalists use their skills and experience to assist her journey through the Balkans, which seems justified even if I'm uptight enough to worry about journalistic objectivity. But later, when Yusra is considered for the Olympics, other journalists bombard her and her German swimming coach with interview requests, waylay her so that she is afraid to leave her housing for fear of missing her morning training, ask impertinent and hurtful questions of her sister and, after hounding Yusra for the boat story for the thousandth time, then misrepresent the story so that she tows the boat to shore like Skippy the heroic dolphin. Yusra was just 17 years old when she took the boat from Turkey to Greece and, whether she inspires people or not, perhaps adults can find a spokesperson in a more ethical and thoughtful way, preserving something of her private sphere and respecting her age and her family.
Butterfly is aimed, I'd guess, at teenagers. But I enjoyed it as an adult. From a literary standpoint, the boilerplate descriptions of people (I think at least two different people have 'open faces' and others are helpfully described by hair colour) and the first-person, present-tense narration are bound to shock the snooty critic inside me. As for the narrator — Lameece Issaq — besides rendering the Arabic names perfectly, or so I assume, she does a brilliant job of the German language. She only mangles LaGeSo (lah-GAY-zoh) and Sonnenallee (ZON-nen uh-LAY), the street that is famous as a hotspot of Arabic-speaking Berliners; and I'd say that her sometimes boastful, upbeat athlete's tone, not out of place when describing the Olympic triumphs of Michael Phelps in the swimming lanes, is at times just a bit out of place when describing war.
Note: I was led to listen to this book by Emma Watson's "Our Shared Shelf" book club on Goodreads.
July/August 2019: What We'll Be Reading Next
Quick, illogical assumptions motivate me to state that I have not been terribly keen on any books that were published in July or are to be published in August.
Instead I have finished older books. Die Russland-Expedition: Von der Newa bis zum Altai, Humboldt's travels in Russia, winding up in a border station to China, then returning past German settlements founded by Catherine the Great, past Astrakhan, and through the Caspian Sea, braving an outbreak of anthrax and innumerable mosquitoes, were picturesquely set forth in later travelogues by Gustav Rose (a science professor who was a fellow traveller) and in Humboldt's letters.
The letters are not saintly, in my view. Humboldt writes to Count von Cancrin, the Russian government minister who granted his journey, in tones at times confident and friendly, at other times servile and toadying. His views in these letters are much more blissful than his views in letters to his brother and friends. His euphoria about Russian military victories against the Ottoman Empire also seems a little bloodthirsty now. I did roll my eyes a little at Humboldt's worries that he might be nominated for a prestigious position back in Berlin, which two hundred years later I'd characterize as a 'First World Problem.' Also, it's easier to sympathize with the mosquito problem, than with his boredom at being greeted by lengthy dinners and eager delegations wherever he goes.
AT ANY RATE, journeying and surveying the natural world through Siberia and back, experiencing a lifelong dream, Alexander von Humboldt was an emissary of the Russian government. Not only was it paying him a fabulous sum and gratifying a wish; it was also organizing transport with a lavish hand — teams of horses that were frequently changed out, etc., and military escorts, transported him over thousands of miles with an ease uncharacteristic of the times — and shelter.
Instead I have finished older books. Die Russland-Expedition: Von der Newa bis zum Altai, Humboldt's travels in Russia, winding up in a border station to China, then returning past German settlements founded by Catherine the Great, past Astrakhan, and through the Caspian Sea, braving an outbreak of anthrax and innumerable mosquitoes, were picturesquely set forth in later travelogues by Gustav Rose (a science professor who was a fellow traveller) and in Humboldt's letters.
The letters are not saintly, in my view. Humboldt writes to Count von Cancrin, the Russian government minister who granted his journey, in tones at times confident and friendly, at other times servile and toadying. His views in these letters are much more blissful than his views in letters to his brother and friends. His euphoria about Russian military victories against the Ottoman Empire also seems a little bloodthirsty now. I did roll my eyes a little at Humboldt's worries that he might be nominated for a prestigious position back in Berlin, which two hundred years later I'd characterize as a 'First World Problem.' Also, it's easier to sympathize with the mosquito problem, than with his boredom at being greeted by lengthy dinners and eager delegations wherever he goes.
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| Астрахань Городская клиническая больница №2 имени братьев Губиных (1838) via Wikimedia Commons |
AT ANY RATE, journeying and surveying the natural world through Siberia and back, experiencing a lifelong dream, Alexander von Humboldt was an emissary of the Russian government. Not only was it paying him a fabulous sum and gratifying a wish; it was also organizing transport with a lavish hand — teams of horses that were frequently changed out, etc., and military escorts, transported him over thousands of miles with an ease uncharacteristic of the times — and shelter.
Sunday, June 09, 2019
Grimm Fairy Tales: The Star Talers
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| "Illustration of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale 'The Star Money'" (1862) by Ludwig Richter (1803-1884) via Wikimedia Commons |
GROWING UP amongst the dark firs and bristling blackberry bushes, fragrant lilacs and apple trees, and the distant rushing of the wind in the hill where my family lived in Canada, I became immersed in the world of Grimm fairy tales. I would sit in the attic, where my siblings and I slept like contented nestlings as the nightlight shone from underneath the window, and imagine a fairy tale in old Europe with the help of Ludwig Richter's illustrations (frogs, ancient leafy trees, wells and courts and birds whose species were unfamiliar beyond the Atlantic) from the early 1860s. We had an expurgated edition that did not have all of the tales and was in modern High German, no regional German dialects as far as I recall.
I read, for example, The Star Money, "Die Sterntaler." It is as brief and as simply-cut as its heroine's shirt, because the Grimm brother who wrote it down was sketching a mere memory of the tale's plot.
It presents a main character and nameless wayfarers: a parentless figure who wanders through the world, who sees the woes of fellow-travellers and has the means to 'fix' them — so she does.
***
Es war einmal ein armes, kleines Mädchen, dem war Vater und Mutter gestorben, es hatte kein Haus mehr in dem es wohnen, und kein Bett mehr, in dem es schlafen konnte, und nichts mehr auf der Welt, als die Kleider, die es auf dem Leib trug, und ein Stückchen Brod in der Hand, das ihm ein Mitleidiger geschenkt hatte; es war aber gar fromm und gut. Da ging es hinaus, und unterwegs begegnete ihm ein armer Mann, der bat es so sehr um etwas zu essen, da gab es ihm das Stück Brod; dann ging es weiter, da kam ein Kind, und sagte: „es friert mich so an meinem Kopf, schenk mir doch etwas, das ich darum binde,“ da thät es seine Mütze ab und gab sie dem Kind. Und als es noch ein bischen gegangen war, da kam wieder ein Kind, und hatte kein Leibchen an, da gab es ihm seins; und noch weiter, da bat eins um ein Röcklein, das gab es auch von sich hin, endlich kam es in Wald, und es war schon dunkel geworden, da kam noch eins und bat um ein Hemdlein, und das fromme Mädchen dachte: es ist dunkele Nacht, da kannst du wohl dein Hemd weggeben, und gab es hin. Da fielen auf einmal die Sterne vom Himmel und waren lauter harte, blanke Thaler, und ob es gleich sein Hemdlein weggegeben, hatte es doch eins an, aber vom allerfeinsten Linnen, da sammelte es sich die Thaler hinein und ward reich für sein Lebtag.THE FAIRY TALE is read as an allegory about the Christian's notion of charitable deeds.*
* See "Allegorie" in the Wikipedia article here.
It is a tale that, to my leftist mind, epitomizes the absurdity of the world before modern social security, where a girl could be abandoned by society and yet be forced by her conscience to rectify the world's inequality out of her slender means.
To the proto-feminist part of my mind, it is impressive that the tale's reward for kindness is financial independence at nobody else's expense rather than, let's say, a husband.
But I have to add: from a non-cynical, religious standpoint, the insistence that a kind gesture to meet the needs of others is never in vain and never unappreciated by God is touching, although it is implausible and difficult to realize.
*
There was once a poor, little girl. Her father and mother had died, she had no house left to live in, no bed to sleep in, and nothing in the world other than the clothes she wore on her body and a piece of bread in her hand, which a pitying person had given her. But she was pious and good. She went away then, and along the way she met a poor man who begged so much for something to eat that she gave him the piece of bread. Then she went further, and a child came, and it said, "I am so cold where my head is, please give me something that I can bind around it." So she took off her cap and gave it to the child. And when she had gone a little further, a child came again and had no jacket, so she gave it hers; and still further, a child begged for a frock and she also gave it hers. Finally she reached a forest, and it had already become dark. Another child came and begged her for a shirt, and the pious girl thought: 'It is dark night, so you may as well give your shirt,' and so she gave it. All at once the stars fell from the sky and were many hard, shining coins. And although she had given away her shirt, she had one on after all but this time it was made of the finest linen. So she gathered all of her coins into it and was wealthy for the rest of her life.
(Free translation, based in part on Margaret Hunt's version.)
"Das arme Mädchen (1812)" [Wikisource - in German]
"Grimm's Household Tales, Volume 2/The Star Money" [Wikisource]
"Die Sterntaler" [Wikipedia - in German]
"Star Money" [Wikipedia]
June 2019 In Books: What We'll Be Reading Next
In June, I haven't found many book appearances that greatly interest me, although it is absurd to say so. So I have been keeping my nose between pages of past works.
***
American Street appeared in 2017. It is a young adult book about a teenage girl whose mother wants the two of them to emigrate to the United States. The mother is held back at the airport and transported to New Jersey to be detained by US border authorities, for a long while without being able to talk with her daughter. Fabiola Toussaint, the heroine, flies on to Detroit, where her aunt Jo and her three girl cousins accept her into their home.
Even her traumatic memories of the earthquake, gangs, and foreign interference, don't prevent Fabiola from recognizing that Haiti was perhaps a better, more homelike environment than America. She holds on fondly to her memories, the cooking, the language, and the voodoo beliefs and practices that her mother taught her. But she becomes familiar with America without antagonism. Fabiola speaks English instead of Creole at the behest of her aunt and tries to make a place for herself in the school that her cousins also attend.
American luxuries like plush carpets and new clothing, she had lived happily without before. They also lose their lustre when domestic violence, debt, and drug dealing are attached. The crime-fuelled American Dream hasn't brought joy to her aunt's family. Her aunt's husband is long dead, the bond between daughters and mother fraught; Fabiola begins to cook communal meals because no one else is doing it, for example, and I seem to remember that Aunt Jo struggles with addictions locked into her own room while her daughters pursue their own interests. Also, the teenager worries about what her relatives do to keep their lifestyle.
I felt that Fabiola's tale is targeted against American immigration policy. That indeed seems like a worthwhile target. But I think that the last few chapters manage to pack a remarkable multitude of plot — also, that the separation of a child from a parent is not very like the way it presented itself in my own life, i.e. extremely disorientating and weird, or as a deep and severe shock. But I guess we each have our own way of experiencing things, so perhaps it does not mean that the book is not as true-to-life in its dramatic moments as it feels very true in its nostalgia for a (second) home country and its ambivalence toward the mythology of the American Dream (I'm projecting here, because I don't recall the phrase 'American Dream' being used or criticized directly).
***
The British feminist publisher Virago has tapped into the spirit of turning to classics during the 'silly season' of summer by — in May, not June — re-releasing a set of novels in colourfully patterned paperback editions by Hannah Wood and Yehrin Tong.
So I began reading Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. The author grew up in Florida, studied anthropology in the era of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, and became famous as a (periodically rediscovered) novelist who wrote pioneeringly about African-American life. Written in the 1930s about a woman and her fate at the hands of the three men with whom she lives at three different stages of her life, Wikipedia reveals that this novel will not be a cheerful read.
***
I also need to read a brace of books that I found while browsing the shelves at the Kulturkaufhaus:
Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun
Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
After reading the first paragraph or two of a German translation (I think in the Piper Verlag) that's in the bookshelves of a library near the family apartment, I was really pleased with Halldór Laxness's Iceland's Bell and decided that I must read it too.
And I came home from an antiquarian bookshop with Helga Schalkhäuser's Riccardo Muti: Begegnungen und Gespräche, which at a glance looks like a distressingly hero-worshipping portrait of the Italian conductor, lord of La Scala opera house.
***
Meanwhile, I've read the rest of Ronald W. Clark's Einstein biography. Then I visited the street, Haberlandstraße, in a Jewish quarter of Berlin, where Einstein lived as a professor until he fled to the US in the mid-1930s, and where he and his wife Elsa invited guests in the 1920s.
Also, the biography led me to the American journalist Lincoln Barnett's 1940s lay-reader book on the Theory of Special Relativity, Theory of General Relativity, and the unified field theory: The Universe and Dr. Einstein. Heinz Haber's Gefangen in Raum und Zeit came next; it reminded me a bit of Voltaire's tale Micromégas. Now I'm reading Teilchen-Detektoren, a survey of different particle detectors (radioactive particles, electromagnetic waves) that were around in 1971. It is written for Physics students, so I expect to have a headache or two.
But progress is also being made in Alexander von Humboldt's Russian journeys.
***
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| From Balzer + Bray (Harper Collins imprint) |
American Street appeared in 2017. It is a young adult book about a teenage girl whose mother wants the two of them to emigrate to the United States. The mother is held back at the airport and transported to New Jersey to be detained by US border authorities, for a long while without being able to talk with her daughter. Fabiola Toussaint, the heroine, flies on to Detroit, where her aunt Jo and her three girl cousins accept her into their home.
Even her traumatic memories of the earthquake, gangs, and foreign interference, don't prevent Fabiola from recognizing that Haiti was perhaps a better, more homelike environment than America. She holds on fondly to her memories, the cooking, the language, and the voodoo beliefs and practices that her mother taught her. But she becomes familiar with America without antagonism. Fabiola speaks English instead of Creole at the behest of her aunt and tries to make a place for herself in the school that her cousins also attend.
American luxuries like plush carpets and new clothing, she had lived happily without before. They also lose their lustre when domestic violence, debt, and drug dealing are attached. The crime-fuelled American Dream hasn't brought joy to her aunt's family. Her aunt's husband is long dead, the bond between daughters and mother fraught; Fabiola begins to cook communal meals because no one else is doing it, for example, and I seem to remember that Aunt Jo struggles with addictions locked into her own room while her daughters pursue their own interests. Also, the teenager worries about what her relatives do to keep their lifestyle.
I felt that Fabiola's tale is targeted against American immigration policy. That indeed seems like a worthwhile target. But I think that the last few chapters manage to pack a remarkable multitude of plot — also, that the separation of a child from a parent is not very like the way it presented itself in my own life, i.e. extremely disorientating and weird, or as a deep and severe shock. But I guess we each have our own way of experiencing things, so perhaps it does not mean that the book is not as true-to-life in its dramatic moments as it feels very true in its nostalgia for a (second) home country and its ambivalence toward the mythology of the American Dream (I'm projecting here, because I don't recall the phrase 'American Dream' being used or criticized directly).
***
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| From Virago |
The British feminist publisher Virago has tapped into the spirit of turning to classics during the 'silly season' of summer by — in May, not June — re-releasing a set of novels in colourfully patterned paperback editions by Hannah Wood and Yehrin Tong.
So I began reading Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. The author grew up in Florida, studied anthropology in the era of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, and became famous as a (periodically rediscovered) novelist who wrote pioneeringly about African-American life. Written in the 1930s about a woman and her fate at the hands of the three men with whom she lives at three different stages of her life, Wikipedia reveals that this novel will not be a cheerful read.
***
I also need to read a brace of books that I found while browsing the shelves at the Kulturkaufhaus:
Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun
Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
After reading the first paragraph or two of a German translation (I think in the Piper Verlag) that's in the bookshelves of a library near the family apartment, I was really pleased with Halldór Laxness's Iceland's Bell and decided that I must read it too.
There was a time, it says in books, that the Icelandic people had only one national treasure: a bell.Laxness is good, my mother said when I mentioned this to her, but a bit grim.
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| "Church in Mosfells valley, Iceland" July 2005, by M. Morgner via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 license) |
***
Meanwhile, I've read the rest of Ronald W. Clark's Einstein biography. Then I visited the street, Haberlandstraße, in a Jewish quarter of Berlin, where Einstein lived as a professor until he fled to the US in the mid-1930s, and where he and his wife Elsa invited guests in the 1920s.
Also, the biography led me to the American journalist Lincoln Barnett's 1940s lay-reader book on the Theory of Special Relativity, Theory of General Relativity, and the unified field theory: The Universe and Dr. Einstein. Heinz Haber's Gefangen in Raum und Zeit came next; it reminded me a bit of Voltaire's tale Micromégas. Now I'm reading Teilchen-Detektoren, a survey of different particle detectors (radioactive particles, electromagnetic waves) that were around in 1971. It is written for Physics students, so I expect to have a headache or two.
But progress is also being made in Alexander von Humboldt's Russian journeys.
Friday, May 24, 2019
In Brief: Aldous Huxley on the Uninformed Citizenry
From a foreword that Aldous Huxley wrote to A Brave New World, years after the book was first published in 1932:
"Great is the truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr Churchill calls an 'iron curtain' between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals."
Sunday, May 05, 2019
May 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next
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| Illustration from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by W. W. Denslow via Wikimedia Commons |
"2019 in books: what you'll be reading this year"
The Guardian,
Saturday, January 5, 2019
May 6th will be the 100th anniversary of the death of L. Frank Baum, the American children's author who wrote the Wizard of Oz books, mentions The Guardian. We still have perhaps two-thirds of the series in our bookshelves, so I might take a look at them again.
Walt Whitman, the poet who foisted upon us (indirectly) the film Dead Poets' Society and who inspired much other art by writing Leaves of Grass, was born 200 years ago on May 31st.
As far as new books appearing this month, I feel drawn to the reprint of Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky, edited by Bryan Karetnyk, that Penguin Classics will be releasing tomorrow. Also, having enjoyed a New York-centred novel for teenagers, The Poet X, read on an audiobook by the author, Elizabeth Acevedo, I'm looking forward to With the Fire on High.
***
The Poet X (2018), which I read on the recommendation of a colleague, is a series of fictional autobiographical poems written by a Dominican daughter of a Catholic family. Xiomara's passion for writing, her growing skepticism of the Catholic religion of her upbringing, and her anxiousness to break free from the rigid repression of her mother's household to venture further in both writing and in a relationship with a boy classmate, drive her away from her old life.
If I were to have read all the verse that I listened to per audiobook in a paper book, it might have felt weaker, because the print lacks the momentum and the authenticity that the author's voice gave it.
The heart of the book is slam poetry anyway, however, so it naturally lends itself best to a spoken performance.
Skimming through the Amazon preview, however, I see that even in printed form it is already pithy:
My parents probably wanted a girl who would sit in the pewsIn terms of other Young Adult books I've listened to these past few months, I felt that Angie Thomas's On the Come Up and The Hate U Give — because they see the fictional southern American suburban "ghetto" of Garden Heights in a more detailed and encompassing way than Acevedo's Bronx — were more ambitious than Acevedo's book. But the principal characters in The Poet X are well and ably sketched, although the marginal 'extras' are a bit of a lost opportunity. For example:
wearing pretty florals and a soft smile.
They got combat boots and a mouth silent
until it's sharp as an island machete.
Shake my head as even the drug dealers posted up
near the building smile more in the summer, their hard scowls
softening into glue-eyed stares in the direction
of the girls in summer dresses and short shorts
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| via Amazon.com |
We'll know which hobbies and childhood plans are stored on the other side of the line that separates law from law-breaking, where the dealers' ethical boundaries lie, where the balance is between joy at a generous income and distaste at its origin, what their family, friends, and neighbours think of their dealing, and what happens to the neighbourhood.
In Acevedo's book, as far as I recall the only thing we know is that they're sleazy and physically threatening. All of this is no reflection on her writing, because she might be just faithfully writing what she knew. But it is a little sad that given a complex neighbourhood, the depiction of its humanity does not extend further, and that the world is separated into the proverbial sheep and the goats.
I like logical prose and understated self-description and careful similes, so the poetry is often wasted on me. For example,
Jesus feels like a friendThis doesn't seem like an apt comparison to me, if I'm being fastidious.
I've had my whole childhood
who has suddenly become brand-new;
who invites himself over too often, who texts me too much.
I think that Acevedo's book is also firmly anchored in a conservative world where well-inclined teachers are authorities to appeal to and imitate, and one can leave poverty by 'obeying the rules.' In Thomas's books, the teachers can be good or bad, but in both cases certainly don't know everything. Also, she's likelier to think that 'the rules' suck or don't work. On Friday, American politician Ilhan Omar Twitter-posted a quotation from Malcolm X:
I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.
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| via Amazon |
*
To switch from The Poet X to On the Come Up, On the Come Up also worried me for different reasons. It seems to accept the instant celebrity that dominates the internet age; I'd have expected Angie Thomas to turn against that.
Bri, On the Come Up's protagonist, has worked to become a rapper for years, filling notebooks with her verse. I guess she has therefore earned the confidence to put her rap forward on YouTube and on the radio, and to seek a record deal. But it surprises me a great deal that the adult professionals didn't require her to do more training, or to receive more input from mentors or other professionals, so that her career would be more solidly grounded and versatile.
Besides, I suspect that instant fame — which Bri experiences — is so psychologically damaging that I can't imagine why it is still tolerated. Reality TV stars, parents of a murdered child, high school students who survived a bullet, someone who was in an internet meme — all of these people face a remorseless artillery of publicity and comment, which surely amounts to psychological torture and journalistic malpractice. Thomas might have experience with this herself, because she rose to fame meteorically once The Hate U Give was appreciated and accepted for publication; although she is not as young as her heroine, she was not yet 30 at that time. But the main criticism of fame she offers in On the Come Up is that words can be twisted against a rapper (or author), to allege horrible or at least dangerous messages that were never intended. This can lead to violence by people who see such messages where none exist, and to personal and professional reprisals against the unfortunate rapper or author.
But, to end the carping criticism, Thomas's and Acevedo's books spotlight a part of the American experience I rarely see described with such a ring of truth and of affectionate, firsthand knowledge. That is why I'm pleased about Acevedo's new book, mentioned above, which is about teenage pregnancy and will appear on May 7th; and pleased about Thomas's remarks on Twitter that she is working on a new novel.
***
Friday, March 29, 2019
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People - (Very) Rough Notes
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, by Reni Eddo-Lodge. Bloomsbury published it in Britain in 2017, it became a bit of a trans-Atlantic phenomenon, I read it because it was mentioned in Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf book club, and now it has come out in a German-language translation. To celebrate, the German publisher Tropen Verlag held a book presentation event here in Berlin. I attended it on Wednesday, March 27th. The book is about racial bias in Britain and about how difficult it is for a black person to speak about racism, even with liberal people, because she or he will encounter so much resistance and misplaced guilt.
Apologies for the postmodernist presentation of these notes. In the end, I felt that it was the most direct and truthful representation of the event that I could muster; any attempt to string them together seemed to dump in more after-the-fact analysis that I can't be sure is accurate.
***
- 7 p.m.
- Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus, Friedrichstraße 90, in Berlin Mitte
- Friedrichstraße overground S-Bahn station, restaurants with glass façades, tourists, lights, after dark
- people milling about around islands of books segmented into genres, with stairs leading between 4 levels (5 including the café)
- stage in basement café (Kulturbühne?): capacity 200, overfilled
- overspill crowd in front of large video screen with good sound waiting to be let into basement, then realizing that we'd just be watching the screen, as previously announced on Facebook
- a portly older man in a suit grumbling that the high number of attendees was not good for security
- at least 2 ushers
- people sitting on the floor or standing in front of the screen
- young woman apologizing to friends for not joining them on time - she'd needed to finish work
- plurality of demographic likely young women, but plenty of young men and older men and women; no children except perhaps a baby that occasionally wailed
- at elevators and entrance to the English language books section, with vertical garden behind the screen
- Reni Eddo-Lodge sitting down with an elderly white German lady for the interview
- interviewer lists all the prizes the author had won, mentions that she had written a blog post and that it had gone viral (author later mentions that her blog was linked to Twitter, and it was the Twitter post that went viral and led to many people thanking her for saying what they'd been thinking)
- asks what was the conversation that was the breaking point and led to the book
- author replies that if one reads the chapter about all the frustrating conversations she had while being active in feminist circles, one would understand what led her to write it
- interviewer mentions that back in 1995 there was already a discussion about the repression of black voices in the feminist discourse (around a certain prize?)
- mention of author never having been taught about the British slave trade in school, just hearing about it in an elective course at university
- interviewer asks about author feeling isolated at university (a characterization the author takes issue with but that the interviewer insists is in the book) and wonders where the other black women were - they both talk about the bias that leads to there being very few black women in teaching roles at universities ('Let's say they shouldn't all get on the same airplane,' joked Reni Eddo-Lodge, before saying that there are about 20 [if I heard correctly])
- author stresses that she is not calling individual white people racists; she is saying that black people are disadvantaged by a system that people may not be conscious of. Black schoolchildren may be marked down by their teachers, for example, but this does not mean that the teachers are evil. It just means that they have a subconscious bias
- interviewer asks whether author felt frustrated that she had to use such violent language in her blog post to get her point across - author says that she does not feel her language was violent, perhaps "striking" [Note: reminded me of 'Angry Black Woman' stereotype, criticized e.g. by Audre Lorde in her 1981 speech "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism".]
Apologies for the postmodernist presentation of these notes. In the end, I felt that it was the most direct and truthful representation of the event that I could muster; any attempt to string them together seemed to dump in more after-the-fact analysis that I can't be sure is accurate.
***
- 7 p.m.
- Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus, Friedrichstraße 90, in Berlin Mitte
- Friedrichstraße overground S-Bahn station, restaurants with glass façades, tourists, lights, after dark
- people milling about around islands of books segmented into genres, with stairs leading between 4 levels (5 including the café)
- stage in basement café (Kulturbühne?): capacity 200, overfilled
- overspill crowd in front of large video screen with good sound waiting to be let into basement, then realizing that we'd just be watching the screen, as previously announced on Facebook
- a portly older man in a suit grumbling that the high number of attendees was not good for security
- at least 2 ushers
- people sitting on the floor or standing in front of the screen
- young woman apologizing to friends for not joining them on time - she'd needed to finish work
- plurality of demographic likely young women, but plenty of young men and older men and women; no children except perhaps a baby that occasionally wailed
- at elevators and entrance to the English language books section, with vertical garden behind the screen
 |
| Image from Tropen Verlag [Klett-Cotta] |
- Reni Eddo-Lodge sitting down with an elderly white German lady for the interview
- interviewer lists all the prizes the author had won, mentions that she had written a blog post and that it had gone viral (author later mentions that her blog was linked to Twitter, and it was the Twitter post that went viral and led to many people thanking her for saying what they'd been thinking)
- asks what was the conversation that was the breaking point and led to the book
- author replies that if one reads the chapter about all the frustrating conversations she had while being active in feminist circles, one would understand what led her to write it
- interviewer mentions that back in 1995 there was already a discussion about the repression of black voices in the feminist discourse (around a certain prize?)
- mention of author never having been taught about the British slave trade in school, just hearing about it in an elective course at university
- interviewer asks about author feeling isolated at university (a characterization the author takes issue with but that the interviewer insists is in the book) and wonders where the other black women were - they both talk about the bias that leads to there being very few black women in teaching roles at universities ('Let's say they shouldn't all get on the same airplane,' joked Reni Eddo-Lodge, before saying that there are about 20 [if I heard correctly])
- author stresses that she is not calling individual white people racists; she is saying that black people are disadvantaged by a system that people may not be conscious of. Black schoolchildren may be marked down by their teachers, for example, but this does not mean that the teachers are evil. It just means that they have a subconscious bias
- interviewer asks whether author felt frustrated that she had to use such violent language in her blog post to get her point across - author says that she does not feel her language was violent, perhaps "striking" [Note: reminded me of 'Angry Black Woman' stereotype, criticized e.g. by Audre Lorde in her 1981 speech "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism".]
Sunday, March 24, 2019
Marie Curie Through Her Daughter's Eyes
Madame Curie
by Ève Curie, transl. Vincent Sheean
Radium Girls
by Kate Moore
Simon & Schuster UK
2016
(E-Book: 480 pp.)
***
In the poor household of a teacher, a mother who had died of tuberculosis as her children were still young, and five children, in Varsovian houses in a Poland considered as a property of the Tsar's Russia, Marie Curie grew up in conditions that were unlikely for a Nobel Laureate. Women could not study at the official universities in Poland in the 1880s, and the academic culture was stifled by Russian political control.
Even as Marie grew older, poverty vexed her as well as the lack of academic opportunity. Her family had made ends meet by renting out rooms to boarders, and through the teaching salary of the father. But the four remaining children (the eldest child died from a childhood illness) soon had to earn wages to educate, feed and shelter themselves.
Marie became a governess. Her job in the Polish countryside ended badly as she and the older brother of her charges fell in love; they were forbidden to marry by the young man's parents, and although she kept earning money there until there was another job for her, she felt her own intellectual development and self-education becoming sluggish. She fell into what I suspect was a depression. Marie had decided with her elder sister Bronisława (Bronya for short) that Bronya would study in Paris, that Marie would send her money that she could spare from her own expenses and her father's, and that as soon as enough money had gathered, the younger sister would study at the Sorbonne. At present she was just at the stage of earning and sending money.
But at last it happened. Paris brought Marie Skłodowska the ability to study as much as she wanted. She earned the best grades of anyone in her classes at the Sorbonne, I think. She also met Pierre Curie, when she was looking for more resources for her research. It was, it seems, the happiest period of her life in unpromising circumstances. Her apartment was dreadful and so unheated that one winter she piled all her clothing and even a chair over herself so that she could sleep; she barely ate anything and became ill; and she wore the same clothing for ages. Apparently Pierre Curie was her soulmate in this aspect too — appalling self-neglect, but also their idealistic and disinterested love of science, seemed to draw them together — and it seems charming, even if this reader at least spent many pages of Madame Curie (the biography first published in 1938 by her daughter Ève) trying to mentally reach through time to tell them to 'Eat something nourishing, for the love of God!'
It's difficult not to become misty-eyed at the portrait of the Curies' romance. It was at first complicated to keep the relationship going as Marie Sklodovska, loyal to Poland and very worried about her father, doubted whether to really marry a French citizen and bind herself to building a life that would keep her away from Warsaw and her family. But Pierre Curie's determination pulled them through, and Marie Curie never seems to have regretted it, although later in life she was — her daughter tells us — a cynic about love.
Pierre Curie liked going on endless walks without any predetermined goal, and Marie Curie enjoyed rambling and loved gardening until she died. So they shared a fondness of nature, too. Their honeymoon sounds beautiful and characteristic: they went on a bicycle tour (I wonder if bicycles were still enormous pennyfarthings in the 1890s?) through the French countryside. It turned out that their families got along well, too. There had been a de facto reunion around the time of the wedding, and Marie had finally been able to see relatives whom she had left behind in Poland, and with whom she'd only been able to talk by letter.
When the married pair returned from their honeymoon, they hoped in vain for a large, weatherproof laboratory space, as well as equipment and any paid staff. Their lab environment was so dusty, etc. that it had been contaminating their materials. It was worse for the Curies because they hated self-advertising and they were bad at actively snaffling paid positions and honours that would finance a better laboratory. Also, intrigues and academic politics ran against them. Prejudices existed against women and foreigners like Marie Curie. The French Academy of Sciences voted against admitting the Curies, and the Sorbonne dragged its heels for years before it finally offered Pierre Curie a professorship and refused even a little longer to pay for a laboratory or laboratory assistants. So, although the École Normale Supérieure was friendlier, offering Pierre a cheap laboratory and offering Marie employment, often the Curies had to finance their own research as they could.
Marie Curie chose to write her doctoral thesis about uranium, specifically an effect that Henri Becquerel had observed, i.e. that it can create black prints on photographic paper even though it isn't phosphorescent.
by Ève Curie, transl. Vincent Sheean
Radium Girls
by Kate Moore
Simon & Schuster UK
2016
(E-Book: 480 pp.)
***
In the poor household of a teacher, a mother who had died of tuberculosis as her children were still young, and five children, in Varsovian houses in a Poland considered as a property of the Tsar's Russia, Marie Curie grew up in conditions that were unlikely for a Nobel Laureate. Women could not study at the official universities in Poland in the 1880s, and the academic culture was stifled by Russian political control.
 |
| Warsaw: Orthodox Church (1890-1900) "Postcard showing a 19th century view of the Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity in Warsaw. Today the church serves as the Field Cathedral of the Polish Army." Marie Curie lost her faith after her mother and one of her sisters died, early in her life. via Wikimedia Commons |
Marie became a governess. Her job in the Polish countryside ended badly as she and the older brother of her charges fell in love; they were forbidden to marry by the young man's parents, and although she kept earning money there until there was another job for her, she felt her own intellectual development and self-education becoming sluggish. She fell into what I suspect was a depression. Marie had decided with her elder sister Bronisława (Bronya for short) that Bronya would study in Paris, that Marie would send her money that she could spare from her own expenses and her father's, and that as soon as enough money had gathered, the younger sister would study at the Sorbonne. At present she was just at the stage of earning and sending money.
But at last it happened. Paris brought Marie Skłodowska the ability to study as much as she wanted. She earned the best grades of anyone in her classes at the Sorbonne, I think. She also met Pierre Curie, when she was looking for more resources for her research. It was, it seems, the happiest period of her life in unpromising circumstances. Her apartment was dreadful and so unheated that one winter she piled all her clothing and even a chair over herself so that she could sleep; she barely ate anything and became ill; and she wore the same clothing for ages. Apparently Pierre Curie was her soulmate in this aspect too — appalling self-neglect, but also their idealistic and disinterested love of science, seemed to draw them together — and it seems charming, even if this reader at least spent many pages of Madame Curie (the biography first published in 1938 by her daughter Ève) trying to mentally reach through time to tell them to 'Eat something nourishing, for the love of God!'
It's difficult not to become misty-eyed at the portrait of the Curies' romance. It was at first complicated to keep the relationship going as Marie Sklodovska, loyal to Poland and very worried about her father, doubted whether to really marry a French citizen and bind herself to building a life that would keep her away from Warsaw and her family. But Pierre Curie's determination pulled them through, and Marie Curie never seems to have regretted it, although later in life she was — her daughter tells us — a cynic about love.
Pierre Curie liked going on endless walks without any predetermined goal, and Marie Curie enjoyed rambling and loved gardening until she died. So they shared a fondness of nature, too. Their honeymoon sounds beautiful and characteristic: they went on a bicycle tour (I wonder if bicycles were still enormous pennyfarthings in the 1890s?) through the French countryside. It turned out that their families got along well, too. There had been a de facto reunion around the time of the wedding, and Marie had finally been able to see relatives whom she had left behind in Poland, and with whom she'd only been able to talk by letter.
When the married pair returned from their honeymoon, they hoped in vain for a large, weatherproof laboratory space, as well as equipment and any paid staff. Their lab environment was so dusty, etc. that it had been contaminating their materials. It was worse for the Curies because they hated self-advertising and they were bad at actively snaffling paid positions and honours that would finance a better laboratory. Also, intrigues and academic politics ran against them. Prejudices existed against women and foreigners like Marie Curie. The French Academy of Sciences voted against admitting the Curies, and the Sorbonne dragged its heels for years before it finally offered Pierre Curie a professorship and refused even a little longer to pay for a laboratory or laboratory assistants. So, although the École Normale Supérieure was friendlier, offering Pierre a cheap laboratory and offering Marie employment, often the Curies had to finance their own research as they could.
 |
| "Rue Lhomond, Paris, 1913" The street on which the Curies' 'cheap laboratory' stood. From the Bibliothèque nationale de France via Wikimedia Commons |
Marie Curie chose to write her doctoral thesis about uranium, specifically an effect that Henri Becquerel had observed, i.e. that it can create black prints on photographic paper even though it isn't phosphorescent.
Friday, February 01, 2019
February 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next
"2019 in books: what you'll be reading this year"
The Guardian,
Saturday, January 5, 2019
John Ruskin, the Victorian art theorist, entered the world on February 8, 1819, but I confess I likely will not be reading any of his essays.
On February 5th, I'm looking forward to Angie Thomas's — she is an American, too, but Mississippian and born in 1988 — book On the Come Up. It's apparently the story of a teenager who wants to become a rapper. Thomas's last book The Hate U Give — the winner of many prizes and the basis of a Hollywood film — has a tense and immediate prose that can appeal to an adult reader just as much as to a younger millennial, which is why I think I might like On the Come Up.
“On the Come Up by Angie Thomas review – another YA hit”
Patrice Lawrence (January 30, 2019) [Guardian, online]
On February 21st, Penguin UK is coming out with a collection of Toni Morrison's essays and speeches, including her eulogy of James Baldwin, and it's called Mouth Full of Blood. (Demosthenes' stones seem more comfortable to me, where filling mouths is concerned.)
***
RETURNING to children's literature, Penguin UK is publishing an illustrated digest of Charles Darwin's important work On the Origin of Species, on February 19th. Designed in serene, bright saffron-yellow, greens, pale turquoise and senna by Sabina Radeva, the flora and fauna are presented in familiar and soothing forms.
LASTLY, the German publisher C.H. Beck is printing Alexander von Humboldt's accounts of his expedition to Russia in the year 1829 — fifteen years after the Napoleonic Wars.
Von Humboldt's accounts of travelling along the Amazon in the early 19th century were a pleasant read. So I am looking forward to Die Russland-Expedition: Von der Newa bis zum Altai.
[Note: C.H. Beck released it last week, so it does not count as a February book, properly speaking.]
***
The Guardian,
Saturday, January 5, 2019
John Ruskin, the Victorian art theorist, entered the world on February 8, 1819, but I confess I likely will not be reading any of his essays.
 |
| "John Ruskin" (1853/4) by John Everett Millais Oil on canvas, in the Ashmolean Museum via Wikimedia Commons |
TO CROSS into the American realm of letters, I've been pleased that James Baldwin has had a posthumous renaissance these past few years, or that perhaps he's never faded from view. A New Yorker originally, a public figure, black, gay — his writings, and his perspective on racism and his debates with people like the conservative William F. Buckley, are much-quoted even now. He lived and wrote at the height of the American civil rights movement, born in Harlem in 1924 and dying at the age of 63 in southern France — the country he had moved to after the Second World War.
He was, perhaps, not a raging optimist. Here's a Friday quotation, taken from Another Country (quoted in Goodreads here):
He was, perhaps, not a raging optimist. Here's a Friday quotation, taken from Another Country (quoted in Goodreads here):
"People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy."Baldwin's book If Beale Street Could Talk has just been adapted into a film, which was released in the US last year by Barry Jenkins. (It appears in the Guardian's article because in Britain the film is coming out later, on February 8.)
On February 5th, I'm looking forward to Angie Thomas's — she is an American, too, but Mississippian and born in 1988 — book On the Come Up. It's apparently the story of a teenager who wants to become a rapper. Thomas's last book The Hate U Give — the winner of many prizes and the basis of a Hollywood film — has a tense and immediate prose that can appeal to an adult reader just as much as to a younger millennial, which is why I think I might like On the Come Up.
“On the Come Up by Angie Thomas review – another YA hit”
Patrice Lawrence (January 30, 2019) [Guardian, online]
 |
| via Penguin.co.uk |
On February 21st, Penguin UK is coming out with a collection of Toni Morrison's essays and speeches, including her eulogy of James Baldwin, and it's called Mouth Full of Blood. (Demosthenes' stones seem more comfortable to me, where filling mouths is concerned.)
***
RETURNING to children's literature, Penguin UK is publishing an illustrated digest of Charles Darwin's important work On the Origin of Species, on February 19th. Designed in serene, bright saffron-yellow, greens, pale turquoise and senna by Sabina Radeva, the flora and fauna are presented in familiar and soothing forms.
 |
| via C.H. Beck |
LASTLY, the German publisher C.H. Beck is printing Alexander von Humboldt's accounts of his expedition to Russia in the year 1829 — fifteen years after the Napoleonic Wars.
Von Humboldt's accounts of travelling along the Amazon in the early 19th century were a pleasant read. So I am looking forward to Die Russland-Expedition: Von der Newa bis zum Altai.
[Note: C.H. Beck released it last week, so it does not count as a February book, properly speaking.]
***
Saturday, January 26, 2019
The Generation After Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde,
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
(Tantor Audio, 2016)
Brittney Cooper,
Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
(MacMillan Audio, 2018)
Rebecca Traister,
Good and Mad: How Women's Anger Is Reshaping America
(Simon + Schuster Audio, 2018)
Brittney Cooper,
Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
(MacMillan Audio, 2018)
Rebecca Traister,
Good and Mad: How Women's Anger Is Reshaping America
(Simon + Schuster Audio, 2018)
 |
| "Women's March - Washington DC 2017" by S Pakhrin, Jan. 20, 2017 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0 Licence) |
Last year I joined the Our Shared Shelf reader group on Goodreads. It is an ambassadorial project that Emma Watson, who is famous for her acting work but has also undertaken women's rights work for the United Nations, began to help fulfill her UN role.
For November and December, the reader group discussed three works by American women: Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger by Rebecca Traister, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Dr. Brittney Cooper, and Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde.
Sunday, January 20, 2019
New York Review of Books, Digest: Dec./Jan. 2018/9
A few gems appeared in the Letters to the Editor section this month, and I most enjoyed this exploration of the modern terrain of American masculinity in the workplace:
A GENTLEMAN READER, who must have Arno Breker and Futurist statues of masculine physiques littered around his domicile, has written in to remark:
"Nor," he asserts
Moreover, unemployment, imprisonment and homelessness do not present an ideal masculine existence either.
So her proposed social welfare programmes (and 'androgynous' work training) might be the lesser evils. (pp. 93-4)
"One Hundred Years of Destruction"
(by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, pp. 74, 80-81])
Wheatcroft's article is very painful to read. After he touches on the unscrupulous projects of the British government using the RAF in early 19th-century colonialist warfare, he analyzes the RAF in World War II.
He argues the weaknesses of preferring the Air Force, instead of land- or sea-based forces, in overall British strategy. (Was it the best use of metal, factory labour, etc.? Was it the most effective?)
He frowns on Sir Winston Churchill and high-ranking officers who ordered the RAF to harass and slaughter about 400,000 people in aerial bombing of cities:
[Patricia Storace's article, "Sing, Goddess" about Pat Barker's novel The Silence of the Girls and Madeline Miller's Circe, both set in Homeric Greece, and about the brutal woman's lot in an Archaic, men-dominated world (e.g. during war-time), was similarly painful. (pp. 65-66, 68]
"Founding Frenemies" by T.H. Breen winds up in a near-"twist ending." The article at first appears to be about U.S. President John Adams's abrasive demeanour and his unexpected friendship with Thomas Jefferson. Then, at the end, it becomes apparent that the pleasantly idle nostalgia-trip to late 18th-century America is no such thing, after all... (pp. 68, 70-71)
***
[All articles, including the quotations above, are from the New York Review of Books, Vol. LXV, No. 20, December 20, 2018 - January 16, 2019]
~"What Men Want" - An Exchange
On "Male Trouble"
(the article by Arlie Russell Hochschild, in the NYRB [Oct. 11, 2018]) ~
Hochschild's article [. . .] does not ultimately come to grips with the impact of losing the physical connection to work found, as she describes, in coal mines, assembly lines, oil rigs, and steel mills.After he has pooh-poohed the idea of funding drug treatments, education bursaries, etc. for industrial workers who are losing their jobs in the United States, the letter-writer declares that these measures would not address the underlying "alienation" and "lack of a viable livelihood."
"Nor," he asserts
does retraining for androgynous jobs, like coding, that men supposedly "badly want" (how does she know?).Arlie Russell Hochschild asserts, in her reply to the letter, that Appalachian miners and factory workers might miss "high wages and camaraderie" after they lose their jobs. They do not appear to be nostalgic about the repetitive/hazardous labour.
Moreover, unemployment, imprisonment and homelessness do not present an ideal masculine existence either.
So her proposed social welfare programmes (and 'androgynous' work training) might be the lesser evils. (pp. 93-4)
***
"One Hundred Years of Destruction"
(by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, pp. 74, 80-81])
Wheatcroft's article is very painful to read. After he touches on the unscrupulous projects of the British government using the RAF in early 19th-century colonialist warfare, he analyzes the RAF in World War II.
He argues the weaknesses of preferring the Air Force, instead of land- or sea-based forces, in overall British strategy. (Was it the best use of metal, factory labour, etc.? Was it the most effective?)
He frowns on Sir Winston Churchill and high-ranking officers who ordered the RAF to harass and slaughter about 400,000 people in aerial bombing of cities:
"It was quite a feat to kill 400,000 civilians while barely affecting the German war economy."The RAF pilots, too, died at an intense rate;
"Out of almost 125,000 who flew on active service, an awe-inspiring 55,573 were killed."The peril of this article is, I think, that a veteran, or the descendants of a veteran, might read this and feel personally attacked. The author does try to qualify his assertions, and perhaps indirectly acknowledges that a good conscience was one of the casualties of war for many people (who are open to crises of conscience).
*
[Patricia Storace's article, "Sing, Goddess" about Pat Barker's novel The Silence of the Girls and Madeline Miller's Circe, both set in Homeric Greece, and about the brutal woman's lot in an Archaic, men-dominated world (e.g. during war-time), was similarly painful. (pp. 65-66, 68]
***
"Founding Frenemies" by T.H. Breen winds up in a near-"twist ending." The article at first appears to be about U.S. President John Adams's abrasive demeanour and his unexpected friendship with Thomas Jefferson. Then, at the end, it becomes apparent that the pleasantly idle nostalgia-trip to late 18th-century America is no such thing, after all... (pp. 68, 70-71)
***
[All articles, including the quotations above, are from the New York Review of Books, Vol. LXV, No. 20, December 20, 2018 - January 16, 2019]
Sunday, January 13, 2019
In Memory: John Burningham
I grew up with the pictures of the British children's book writer and illustrator John Burningham, who has died on January 4th this year. So I wanted to post a brief tribute, albeit a lazy one that links to articles by those who sometimes did know him personally:
"Remembering John Burningham"
Penguin UK, January 9, 2019
(Penguin Random House were his publishers.)
"John Burningham, children's author and illustrator, dies aged 82"
Alison Flood, Guardian.co.uk, January 7, 2019
"Helen Oxenbury and John Burningham win top books honour"
Interview by Alison Flood, Guardian.co.uk, February 8, 2018
In a recent interview for the Guardian, together with his wife Helen Oxenbury, the author had said,
***
"Obituary: John Burningham"
By Shannon Maughan, Publishers Weekly, January 10, 2019
"Remembering John Burningham"
Penguin UK, January 9, 2019
(Penguin Random House were his publishers.)
With much sadness, the family of John Burningham, author and illustrator of countless much-loved children’s books including Mr Gumpy’s Outing, Avocado Baby and Borka, confirm that he passed away on Friday 4 January, aged 82.The article quotes a long-ago tribute from Maurice Sendak, which the American illustrator had written for a book published in 2009 when both men were still alive:
"Your work, John, is stunning, luscious, sexy, hilarious and mysterious and frequently just plain nuts."*
 |
| John Burningham: Behind the Scenes Jonathan Cape, 2009 via Goodreads |
Alison Flood, Guardian.co.uk, January 7, 2019
"Helen Oxenbury and John Burningham win top books honour"
Interview by Alison Flood, Guardian.co.uk, February 8, 2018
In a recent interview for the Guardian, together with his wife Helen Oxenbury, the author had said,
Children are not less intelligent, they're just less experienced, and there is this rather silly attitude that can be adopted, that 'Oh it's for children, it's got to be pink coloured cakes or lots of pattern everywhere, that's what they'll like', and they’re bored.He and Helen Oxenbury had agreed that old age should not be an impediment to continuing their work:
"I'm very fortunate that I've got good eyesight and I haven't got a trembly hand, so I shall get on with it" [...]Burningham insisted. Also,
[T]he pair said that winning a lifetime achievement award did not mean they would be hanging up their paintbrushes. “I am horrible, aren’t I, John, if I’m not working?” said Oxenbury. “Dreadful,” said Burningham. “So I have to carry on,” said Oxenbury.
***
"Obituary: John Burningham"
By Shannon Maughan, Publishers Weekly, January 10, 2019
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