A Memoir of Two Presidential Offices, and More

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s was published this year by the American presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was already a familiar name, and nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award in the Memoir genre.

Doris Kearns Goodwin at a BooksExpo in 2018
Photograph attributed to Rhododendrites
via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

It is a memoir of a kind I've never read before:

In the house where the Goodwins — now in their 70s and 80s — are living in Concord, Massachusetts, they were storing boxes of documents from Richard Goodwin's (the husband's) career in the 1960s. (Doris Kearns Goodwin explored documents of her own life as well, explained during the earlier chapters of the book.)

The Goodwins open the boxes and explore these, often reading documents out loud to each other, as a special book project.

The historian interweaves, into the history, their affectionate banter, reminiscences, and years-long debates over the respective and competing virtues of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as the couple's nostalgia for the 1960s. (She does have a partial eye, and you can make up your own mind how many of her defenses of Johnson, for example, make sense.)

But Doris Kearns Goodwin and Richard N. Goodwin have a far from ordinary perspective on federal politics in the 1960s:

Richard Goodwin was a junior speechwriter for John F. Kennedy under Ted Sorensen, later a self-appointed Latin America expert. Then, after Kennedy's assassination, he wrote speeches and led messaging amongst other projects for Johnson's Great Society.

Finally, he tried to help Robert F. Kennedy and, at other times, Eugene McCarthy, win the presidency — helping both of them for the sake of thwarting the Vietnam War, but also helping Robert F. Kennedy due to their personal friendship.

Doris Kearns Goodwin was a White House fellow during Johnson's presidency, and later helped write his autobiography; she also writes about experiencing the 60s as a socially conscious Ivy League college student.

Bryan Cranston reads letters her husband wrote in his young years, and the Kennedys and Johnson speak in historical excerpts, in the audio recording. Although the audiobook was over 14 hours long, it did not feel that way: Doris Kearns Goodwin's narration, as well as the special additions, were engrossing.

The ending is extremely touching.

*

Ideal accompaniment: videos from the LBJ Presidential Library's account on YouTube, e.g. archived live-streamed videos from the 2014 Civil Rights Summit.

***

Cover of Becoming,
via Wikipedia

Another recently finished memoir:

Becoming (2018), by former First Lady Michelle Obama, has been reviewed often elsewhere.

It's enough to say that the accolades for her memoir about her childhood, Ivy League education, professional career, marriage, and life as the First Lady are justified.

It is comforting, as President Joe Biden's presidency nears its close and the next administration approaches, to see life in the White House from the perspective of a human, idealistic, thoughtful tenant.

***

Lastly, I have begun Jonathan Blitzer's far-ranging book on the history and polemics of migration at the US-Mexico border: Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here (2024). It was recommended by Barack Obama in summer, then nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award.

The American journalist's epic work is not always easy to read, because of its subject matter. It describes, for example, arbitrary killings and torture in El Salvador, from the 1930s to the present.

Around the World in 32 Countries: Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History

Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History
Lawrence E.Y. Mbogoni
Dar-es-Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota, 2013

Because it has been clear lately that my reading hasn't been representative of the world's populations, I've begun a new project. For the 32 most populous countries of the world, according to a count for the year 2000, I want to read 1 book per 20 million inhabitants.

First, the countries whose population was estimated at 38 million to 58 million in 2000:
Tanzania, Poland, Argentina, Spain, Colombia, South Africa, South Korea, Ukraine, Myanmar, Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy.

It has been easy to find Tanzanian books on an online book subscription website, and I've nudged colleagues to recommend Polish books.

"Kibo on Mt Kilimanjaro" ca. 2007
"This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73
and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kibo_Mt._Kilimanjaro_5.JPG
under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license."

First, a brief introduction to Tanzania:
***

Number of languages: 126
Official Main languages: Swahili and English; "Approximately 10 per cent of Tanzanians speak Swahili as a first language, and up to 90 per cent speak it as a second language"

Modern-day state formation year: 1964
Tanganyika and the Zanzibar Archipelago merge to form the United Republic of Tanzania
Colonial 'overlords': Germany, Britain

Tanzania is also home of the African continent's highest mountain:

"Eastern ice field in Mt Kilimanjaro" ca. 2007
"This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73
and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern_icefield_Mt._Kilimanjaro.JPG
under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license."

Capital city: Dodoma
Surface area: 947,303 km2 (larger than Nigeria and smaller than Egypt)

Currency: Tanzanian shilingi (shilling)
Driving side: left

Main exports to these countries: India, Vietnam, South Africa, Switzerland, China
Main imports from these countries: India, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, China, United Arab Emirates
Crops that are food: maize, cassava, sweet potatoes, beans, bananas, rice, millet
Cash crops, food or not food: sugar, cotton, cashew nuts, tobacco, coffee, sisal, tea
Main meat products: beef, lamb, chicken, pork

***

Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History is an academic book, published in Dar-es-Salaam, by a professor of history at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Aside from teaching at an American university, he also taught at the University of Dar-es-Salaam.

Although the words 'academic book' may strike fear into one's heart if one associates it with the hundreds of pages of dry or waffling prose that one is forced to read as a student, Lawrence E.Y. Mbogoni's style is pithy and fluent. His choice of anecdotes is also striking and often funny.

He does not write about Tanzanian prehistory — famous after archaeological excavations at Oldupai Gorge — or much of the years of Muslim influence and Arab rule until he treats Zanzibar in the late 1800s through the 1960s at the end of the book.

He writes of the British society in the early 20th century. Unlike neighbouring Kenya, the former German colony of Tanganyika fell to the share of the British government mainly after World War I. His, and later Her, Majesty's Government paid salaries to local chiefs, and had a small administration besides. The remaining European contingent was, for example, big game hunters or gold miners who had come to reap the natural resources of the country; doctors; etc. There were few British people who came systematically as settlers.

I was surprised that the 'fool's paradise' of modern-day Tanzania for British government workers and visitors in the early 1900s, and the 'Happy Valley' expatriate society of Kenya that Ngugi wa Thiong'o lampooned in Wrestling with the Devil, sound so similar.

To borrow from Dr. Mbogoni's turns of phrase and to attempt to put his portraits in a nutshell: a British newcomer to Tanzania could listen to the radio, or become a naturalist. If these hobbies weren't to the Briton's taste, the newcomer could drink liquor — whisky, gin, beer, ... the list goes on — and run into debt, to try to cope with homesickness and tedium.

This colonial (mis)rule rather proves the essential ridiculousness of colonialist ideology even from a European standpoint.

Kipling wrote in his famous poem (1899),

Take up the White Man's burden—
    Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
    To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
    On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
    Half devil and half child.

[...]

Take up the White Man's burden—
    Have done with childish days—
The lightly profferred laurel,
    The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
    Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
    The judgment of your peers!

The question is why this 'heavy harness' and 'thankless years' were ever thought necessary by anyone — except for financial motives.

At any rate, I am perhaps 1/6th of the way through the book; the next part is about elephant-hunting.

"Kibo on Mt Kilimanjaro" ca. 2007
"This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73
and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kibo_Mt._Kilimanjaro_1.JPG
under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license."

***

Additional information taken from:
List of countries by population in 2000 [Wikipedia]
Languages of Tanzania [Wikipedia]
Tanzania [Wikipedia]
Lawrence E.Y. Mbogoni [African Books Collective]
Kipling quoted from: The White Man's Burden [Wikipedia]

Letters of an Indian Judge to an English Gentlewoman

Apologies for any factual inaccuracies in my review. I don't know much of the history of India.

These letters first appeared in 1937. They are one side of a correspondence between a young Cambridge graduate who works in the civil service for the British government in India and then gradually rises in the ranks to become a judge, and the English wife of an army officer.

"Cambridge. Gonville and Caius College, Senate House and University Library"
ca. 1870-85
via Wikimedia Commons

Whether they are genuine is another question, and in any case they have a certain charm along the lines of Montesquieu's Persian Letters or Voltaire's Candide. Cambridge, it seems, is this book's El Dorado, in a tongue-in-cheek way. The writing is briefly kept but pithy, and it ranges from describing the personalities in a town when the British ruled Burma, to the street life of Paris during the later interwar years.

In the judge, Aravind Nehra's, view, even before Indian Independence — which looms over the whole book but never happens, as it occurred in 1947, ten years after the book came out —, 'the centre cannot hold,' and British administration is ineffective in India.

Local traditions like folk medicine persist, despite all that British educational systems and law and medical establishments can do, in the rendering of the judge. Also, the staff that are sent out from Britain to India are disenchanted with their roles and unwilling to 'civilize' further. (They no longer have that fervour to convert the heathen that is disconcerting to read fictionally in, for example, Jane Eyre. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing it's hard to tell, but likely from a historical perspective it's a good thing.) The administrators are more eager to make a living, because civil service appointments in India are well paid, than to administer wisely.

March 2020 In Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

The Mirror and the Light has not yet landed in the family bookshelves, but it is certain that this epic third part of Hilary Mantel's generally epic trilogy about Thomas Cromwell will appear there sooner or later after it was published last week.

***

I've read Stephen Moss's book, Mrs Moreau's Warbler, lately. Published in 2018, it weaves his personal experiences of bird-watching as a child and as an adult, with a general-knowledge work about the history of bird names.

A few bird names in Britain, like 'swan,' reached the island after past invasions of Vikings and Picts and Angles. One name, 'goose,' reaches longer back and further geographically, into the Indo-European realm.

Folk names became common in Britain, and sometimes their etymology takes a while to disentangle, like 'redstart.'

In the 17th century, 'scientific' names in Latin began to appear. In the 18th century, these names were standardized by Linnaeus and others. Then, and later, a few standardizations or 'fixes' took hold; others didn't. Also, 'bird' no longer meant a small creature, e.g. what we'd now call a 'baby bird'; it replaced the word 'fowl' as what we understand now to be a 'bird.'

Then, in the 19th century, scientists gave names to the birds whom they (')discovered(') in honour of fellow scientists — it was felt to be infra dignitas to name a bird after one's self — or family members like Mrs. Moreau.

In the 20th century, killing birds and stuffing them as specimens went out of fashion. Now, birdwatchers rely on binoculars and on birdsong instead of rifle scopes, but it took a long while to get there.

Moss writes modestly and the trivia seem weighty enough.

But I wish Moss had written more about Australian aborigines', Native American and other peoples' understanding of birds. He knows it is there but does not or cannot provide many details. He also does not reflect how bad British and other European colonialization often was, either, or at least not sharply enough to suit me.

For example, when he speaks of English as a useful lingua franca, I think of children in Canada who were kidnapped from their First Nations families by the government and raised as 'good Christians' speaking only English. They were punished if they did speak the languages they had spoken from birth.

Besides, I think that colonialization or European adventurers are responsible for a few bird extinctions — the dodo, the great auk and the passenger pigeon.

There's William Blake's weird phrase, "Where man is not, nature is barren." In modern times, it must surely be inverted: "Where man is, nature is barren." Nature, human and otherwise, often thrives better when we are not there, eager to 'appreciate' it.

***

In between I read lighter fare: a German celebrity journalist's recounting of the early years of Riccardo Muti as a conductor, from lesser-known Italian figure to an internationally renowned conductor at the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, concerts at the Salzburg Festival, and finally La Scala.

Her insistence on comparing Muti to other great conductors like Herbert Karajan and Arturo Toscanini, to his face, was one example of sycophancy that made me wince.

Besides, she often repeated that Muti's love of having pasta regularly is a sign of how much he loves his southern Italian roots, for example, but I often failed to find any great or original insight in her observations. (My mother also likes having pasta regularly, and she's a lifelong German citizen.) She tamely echoed Muti's own self-analysis.

And she was profusely grateful that Muti didn't turn into a grandiose mini-giant who 'forgot' he'd ever met her the moment he was named to La Scala. To me, that underlines the theory that she was keeping the wrong company and that her standards are too low. To her, it was positive proof of how uncomplicated and grounded he (in her eyes) was.

I think she was shrewd about her journalist's industry and his music industry, however. And I had the feeling that she embarrassed herself and the sisterhood for pragmatic reasons, when she insisted on how dreamy women found Muti. (Who was very much married, with three children; so the journalist had to toe a careful line, which she did.) She knew the 'angle' that her editors wanted her to use to lure in readers.

I kind of, figuratively, laugh-cried at her journalist's lifestyle back in the 1980s and 90s ... luxury hotels, prime seats at the opera, travel from Germany to Italy with a photographer, conversations with Brooke Shields and Jim Jarmusch in New York ... Times have changed, I imagine. These accommodations and tickets would likely be paid for by an agent or promoter, and belong to a quid pro quo!

In the end I warmed to the book.

But the author's attempts to diplomatically avoid saying in her postscript that the book ends here because classical music celebrities are passé in the eyes of magazine editors so she never interviewed the man again, are still a bit disastrous. I've also found that sometimes when I try to be really weaselly and clever about something, I'm dreadfully transparent... it might be less insulting to everyone's intelligence to just drop it.

I won't mention the author's name, after admittedly maligning her, because I've likely done her an injustice.

***

Now I am reading The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane. Macfarlane spans a far broader arc than Moss, and I think manages to bind the scale of 19th century fiction to nature writing in the modern world. He pays homage to Henry David Thoreau but has his own writing style and distinct subject matter. In brief, 'I understand the hype.' But I don't feel competent to review the book without reading a lot more of it.

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:

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.

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.

***

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).

***

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.

"Church in Mosfells valley, Iceland"
July 2005, by M. Morgner
via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 license)

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.

May 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

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 pews
wearing pretty florals and a soft smile.
They got combat boots and a mouth silent
until it's sharp as an island machete.

In 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:

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

via Amazon.com

In On the Come Up or The Hate U Give, we're likely to be told about what the dealers' families are like, why they're selling drugs, who has the dealers under their thumb and how likely the dealers are to escape from gang affiliations and this livelihood if they want to escape.

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 friend
I've had my whole childhood
who has suddenly become brand-new;
who invites himself over too often, who texts me too much.

This doesn't seem like an apt comparison to me, if I'm being fastidious.

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.

via Amazon

Thomas mentions Malcolm X in The Hate U Give, and I think she'd approve of this quotation. She also seems to believe, refreshingly, that teenagers even at 16 have the right to chart their own paths and morality independently of the adults (relatives or non-relatives) in their environment. I was worried about Acevedo's book because — in contrast to my own experience, at least — the relationship with the mother seemed so toxic that I wasn't sure if it was redeemable; but Xiomara's path forward still lay closely bound with her family, although the author does not condemn her impulse to flee them for a while.

*

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.

***

January 2019 In Books: What We'll Be Reading

"2019 in books: what you'll be reading this year"
The Guardian,
Saturday, January 5, 2019

January

This Guardian article reminds me that I have read nothing by JD Salinger except The Catcher in the Rye when it was in the school curriculum; nor have I read anything by Colette, Philip Roth, or Germaine Greer.

In the rain and frost, this is the time to tend the couch indoors, catch up on modern classics, and celebrate new film adaptations, centenaries and other anniversaries — ideally...

Matthias-Claudius-Kirche Oldenfelde Denkmal
Photograph: An-d, April 7, 2013
via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 License)

The books I feel I should be buying and reading:

*

Blessing

"Clara Zetkin (left) and
Rosa Luxemburg in their way to the SPD Congress.
Magdeburg, 1910"
via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

Ernst Piper
Rosa Luxemburg
January 3, 2019
[Publisher's link]

"Das Leben spielt mit mir ein ewiges Haschen. Mir scheint es immer, dass es nicht in mir, nicht dort ist, wo ich bin, sondern irgendwo weit." — Rosa Luxemburg, letter to Luise Kautsky (September 1904, Zwickau), cit. in Rosa Luxemburg

A look at the life of the German Marxist political figure of the First World War and Weimar Republic era, a Swiss-educated university graduate born in Russian-occupied Poland, fierce fighter for her beliefs at a time where even many socialists weakly threw their support behind the Kaiser's military projects. She was murdered and thrown into the Spree River in Berlin, apparently with the knowledge of the German chancellor, in 1919 after the Spartacist Revolt.

[Amazon] (Source of the quotation above.
Google Translate renders her words as 'Life plays with me forever. It always seems to me that it is not in me, not where I am, but somewhere far away.' I think that the first sentence could also read: 'Life is playing an eternal game of "catch" with me.')

*

DTV
Daniel W. Wilson
Der faustische Pakt: Goethe und die Goethe-Gesellschaft im Dritten Reich
January 3, 2019
[Publisher's link]

"Aufklärer, Weltbürger, Pazifist, 'Judenfreund', Freimaurer" oder "Gegenaufklärer, Nationalist, Kriegsbefürworter, 'Judenfeind' und Geheimbundgegner"? — 'Enlightener, Cosmopolitan, Friend to Jews, Freemason,' or 'Counter-Enlightener, Nationalist, War-Supporter, Foe of Jews, and Opponent of Secret Societies'?

"So sehr wir heute überzeugt sind, dass das Bild des humanistischen Goethe das richtige ist, müssen wir ernsthaft fragen, was es mit dem sogenannten 'Deutschen Goethe' auf sich hat. Schließlich handelt es sich bei den Verfechtern des 'braunen' Goethebildes nicht immer um ungebildete Fanatiker, sondern oft um intelligente Menschen, die Goethes Leben und Werk sehr gut kannten." — Daniel W. Wilson in Der faustische Pakt

Insights into Johann Wolfgang Goethe's legacy — also, the influential Gesellschaft (society) that was founded in his honour posthumously — as an ambiguous instrument of German right-wing nationalists during the 1920s and 30s.

Although Goethe was made into a figurehead of German literary respectability after his death, his attitude toward Napoleon's occupation of Weimar and other states during the early 19th century was neither resistant nor francophobic enough to be apt to appeal to the Nazis.

But — taking (for example) anti-Semitic remarks and actions that were scattered in between his more tolerant moments — he was far from the lofty literary god as which some people treat him.

[Amazon] (Source of the quotation above.
Google Translate: "As much as we are convinced today that the image of the humanist Goethe is the right one, we must seriously ask what the so-called 'German Goethe' is all about. After all, the advocates of the 'brown' Goethe picture are not always uneducated fanatics, but often intelligent people who knew Goethe's life and work very well.")

See also:
"Super Goethe" by Ferdinand Mount [online here]
New York Review of Books
December 21, 2017

Joseph Roth and Poland After World War I

"Boot und Transportfuhrwerk im winterlichen Galizien" (1914-1918)
By the K.u.k. Kriegspressequartier, Lichtbildstelle - Wien
In the Austrian National Library
via Wikimedia Commons

IN THE MID-1920s, in a Europe that was as battered as ever by the First World War, Joseph Roth (who later wrote The Radetzky March) was earning his bread as a foreign correspondent for German newspapers. One such periodical was the Frankfurter Zeitung, mouthpiece for leftist circles in the Weimar Republic that was later shut down by the Nazis, only to resurrect itself after the Second World War as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Roth himself was far to the left, inclined to socialism, and he took the pen name 'Red Joseph' for the purposes of his political journalism. Also, his views and position in Weimar Germany were determined by other elements: he was a Jewish native of Galicia, now Poland, who had served (after years of reluctance) in the imperial army on the German side, and who indulged in an odd allegiance to the abolished monarchy, which he celebrated in part of his work.

His newspaper assignment was to travel in Poland, in Ukraine, and in a Russia that had been living under a Leninist system since 1917. (Later he would travel to Albania, Yugoslavia, the Saar region of Germany that had rejoined the country by referendum, Poland, and Italy.) Vladimir Lenin himself had just died in 1924. And Joseph Roth's perspective was, of course, directed by his life experiences. He had no prejudices against the coexistence of the plethora of European minorities. These were intended, per the ideals of the League of Nations, to form their own states by virtue of the ideal of self-determination, but they lived too intertwined with each other for it to be simple to draw a border map humanely. In that respect there is no warning in his writings of the German nationalism that already existed at the time, and certainly not of the Nazism. His stance toward the Russian government was staunchly optimistic, at first, and he was looking forward to seeing Leninist solutions to widespread problems of undereducation, poverty, sickness, and lack of dignity for the poor in a classist society. He also tinges his reporting with his strong adherence to religion.

He took a long time to send dispatches back, because he kept gathering more and more material before he put his pen to paper. I believe that one can easily notice from the quality and nature of his writing when the well of inspiration was overflowing and when it ran almost dry.* He also had a magisterial way of writing — he never mentions specific interviewees or quotes anybody, it seems; everything is noted from an infinite upwelling of knowledge, except where it throws a tangent into his intermittent analysis. In the course of his travels, he was assailed not by his surprisingly complacent interlocutors (they did not seem to be holding onto the grievances of the war, although it was uncanny for him to revisit some places where he had once been the invader), but by pests like bedbugs. Aside from physical afflictions like these, there is a peculiar untouchability in his reporter's persona, as if he were a sleepwalker through Galicia and the Soviet Union.

But he ended his travels by thinking that his socialist ideas were not being realized in every respect, and his optimism crashes every now and then in the reports. He also found, everywhere, the detritus of the war.

***

Excerpts from his reporting in Poland:

"Lemberg, die Stadt."

Es ist eine große Vermessenheit, Städte beschreiben zu wollen. [. . .] Städte verbergen viel und offenbaren viel, jede ist eine Einheit, jede eine Vielheit, jede hat mehr Zeit, als ein Berichterstatter, als ein Mensch, als eine Gruppe, als eine Nation.

and

Nationale und sprachliche Einheitlichkeit kann eine Stärke sein, nationale und sprachliche Vielfältigkeit ist es immer.

(November 22, 1924)

***

"Die Krüppel."

In Lemberg wurde der berühmte polnische Invalide begraben, über dessen demonstrativen, heroischen Selbstmord alle Zeitungen der Welt berichtet hatten. Dieser Invalide sprach in einer Versammlung seiner Kameraden über die gemeinsame Not, schloß mit einem Hochruf auf die polnische Republik und schoß sich eine Kugel durch den Kopf.

*

Wir haben Massengräber gesehen, verschimmelte Hände, ragend aus zugeschütteten Gruben, Oberschenkel an Drahtverhauen und abgetrennte Schädeldecken neben Latrinen. Wer aber weiß, wie Ruinen aussehen, die sich bewegen[. . .]? Wer hat schon gehende Krankenhäuser gesehen, eine Völkerwanderung der Stümpfe, eine Prozession der Überreste?

So war dieser Leichenzug.

"Karl I. in Galizien während der Gegenoffensive, die von Mitte Juli 1917 bis Anfang August andauerte. Hier trifft er am 22. Juli in Busk ein. Gemeinsam mit dem Generalobersten Böhm Ermolli schreitet Karl das Ehrenspalier ab"
(~ King Karl I in Galicia during the counteroffensive, which lasted from mid-July 1917 to the beginning of August. Here he arrives on July 22nd in Busk. With Colonel-General Böhm Ermolli, he paces down the honour guard.)
By the K.u.k. Kriegspressequartier, Lichtbildstelle - Wien
In the Austrian National Library
via Wikimedia Commons

*

[. . .] und über dem Leichenzug, knapp vor dem Knaben im weißen Hemd, der das mattschimmernde Metallkreuz trug, segelte eine dunkelblaue Wolke, zackig, wuchtig und schwer, und streckte vorne einen Zipfel aus, wie einen zerfetzten Zeigefinger, um den Krüppeln den Weg nach dem Friedhof zu weisen.

(November 23, 1924)

***

St. Zitakapelle in Dobrowlany, Galizien (1917)
By the K.u.k. Kriegspressequartier, Lichtbildstelle - Wien
In the Austrian National Library
via Wikimedia Commons

***

Translations (amateurish, with help from Google Translate):
Lemberg [Lviv], the City
It is a great presumptuousness to want to portray a city. [. . .] Cities reveal much and conceal much, each is a unity, each is a plurality, each has more time than a reporter, than a human being, than a group, than a nation.
National and linguistic unity may be a strength; national and linguistic diversity is always one.

The Cripples
In Lemberg was buried the famous Polish invalid of whose demonstrative and heroic suicide all the newspapers in the world had reported. This invalid spoke in an assembly of his comrades about their common need, ended with a paean to the Polish republic, and shot a bullet through his brain.
We have seen mass graves, moldy hands, stretching out of filled-in pits, thighs on wire barriers and severed skulls beside latrines. But who knows what ruins look like that move? Who has seen walking hospitals before, a mass migration of stumps, a parade of remains?
This funeral procession was that.
And above the funeral procession, barely in advance of the lad in a white shirt who bore the dimly shining metal cross, sailed a dark blue cloud, ragged, massive and heavy, and stretched in front of itself a tip like a torn forefinger, to point the cripples along the way to the cemetery.

***

Sources:
Reisen in die Ukraine und nach Russland, by Joseph Roth. Jan Bürger, ed. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2015
Joseph Roth (Wikipedia - English)
Frankfurter Zeitung (Wikipedia - English)
Joseph Roth (Wikipedia - German)

* After rereading Jan Bürger's afterword in the edition that I have, it strikes me that perhaps I am misinterpreting. Roth apparently rarely thought he was out of material or inspiration:

"1926 gestand er den Redakteuren der Frankfurter Zeitung fast zwei Monate nach Ankunft in der Sowjetunion, dass er bis dahin noch gar nichts habe schreiben können. Dies habe mit der Überfülle und Intensität der neuen Eindrücke zu tun."

Easter in Swedish: Noisy Village of Astrid Lindgren

"Bullerbü (Bullerbyn), eigentlich Sevedstorp"
Photograph by Manuela Hoffmann
August 9th, 2009. On Flickr.
License: (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Listening in on a television programme about her World War II diaries,* I was surprised to realize that Swedish children's author Astrid Lindgren wrote her books against the background, as it were, of the Second World War.

Lindgren experienced the war on Sweden's 'home front' — and war indirectly, through her work and naturally through her relations. She was married then and at that time her husband was, of course, in the military. Trained as a secretary, she spent her time reading, i.e. censoring, German-language letters for Sweden's special intelligence service.

I guess that she was eager for 'pastures new' after the war. Because then she spent her time planting and tending — like a garden — literary worlds for children. These worlds were, by and large, freed from the cruelty and indeed any great influence of elders. Pippi Longstocking is doubtless her famous protagonist, now. But I have liked reading Ronia, the Robber's Daughter (Ronja rövardotter), Mio My Son (Mio, min Mio)** and Alla vi barn i Bullerbyn — The Children of Noisy Village — too.

***

AFTERWARD we were going to hunt for the Easter eggs filled with candy which Mommy had hidden. Every Easter Karl and Bill and I each get a large egg filled with lots and lots of candy. But this year Mommy said that if we would be satisfied with eggs that were a little smaller, she would buy some for Britta and Anna and Olaf too. Then we could give them as a surprise at our party. Of course we wanted to do this. It was hard to find the eggs, Mommy had hidden them so cleverly. Mine was in the cupboard where we keep the pots and pans. It was made of silver with little flowers. Inside there was a little chicken made of almond paste, and lots of candy.

***

The Children of Noisy Village
By Astrid Lindgren
Illustrations by Ilon Wiklund.
Translation by Florence Lamborn.
New York: Penguin, 1988 (124 pp.)
For children five years and up, I think. Puffin: "8-12."

* "Kriegstagebücher von Astrid Lindgren" [Radio Berlin Brandenburg: Stilbruch]
K. Wenzel et al. (October 15th, 2015)
[Note: The video is online — presumably just in Germany — until October 15th, 2016.]

** In this book the background of World War II was material, I imagine. It is sombre.

*

More information:
"Astrid Lindgren's second world war diaries published in Sweden" [Guardian], by Alison Flood (May 13, 2015)

I also consulted "Wir Kinder aus Bullerbü", "The Six Bullerby Children," and "Astrid Lindgren" on Wikipedia.

Little Bear's Visit

One of the staples of early childhood literature in the English tongue, which perseveres into the current generation and across country borders as my experience in a Berliner bookshop proves, is the Little Bear series by the American, Else Holmelund Minarik.

"Top of Zürich on Uetliberg Uto Kulm (Switzerland)",
January 10, 2010
By Roland zh
A random yet atmospheric picture of bears which is meant to invoke topical beariness whilst not clashing with our mental recollection  of Sendakian beariness. The cover of Little Bear's Visit, with Sendak's bear, can be found at Google Books.
Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Accompanied by the illustrations of Maurice Sendak, it has a gentility, a warmth and serenity which are heartening. In the sparing use of colour in the illustrations and of verbiage in the text, it is an endorsing example of the modernist tendency to pare away fuss and feathers. In this case it achieves, in the end, a truthful-feeling simplicity.

***

Enemy Books: Her Father's Daughter

Part of a series: "I thought it would be nice to begin featuring books which I cannot stand for whichever reason. (...) But the main point of an Enemy Books series is to invite readers to leave a comment to describe the beauties which they find in the work. (Even if the Enemy Book blog post in question is months old.)" — "suggestions for a next enemy book" are also welcome. But while the idea is generally for kinder readers to point out the good sides of the book in the comments beneath, perhaps that is not possible this time! Edit: What is the most awful book you have encountered?

This time the 'enemy book' is not a notably familiar one, but Her Father's Daughter (by Gene Stratton-Porter) is sensationally awful and bears the distinction of instantly coming to mind when I think about the worst book I have ever read.

Its young heroes cast in an early gung-ho, conventional Hardy Boys/Bobbsey Twins tradition, its plot outrageous, its events absurd, the most distinctively horrid element in it is still its author's hatred of the Japanese.

Set in California, it is about a fatherless young American woman, Linda Strong, who realizes that there is Something Wrong about a Japanese pupil in her friend Donald Whiting's high school senior class. The classmate is, in fact, a middle-aged man pretending to be an 18-year-old so that he may spy on his country of residence. I was going to write more about her racial theory but it's so upsetting that I'd rather not. Aside from these semipolitical threads in her work, the author's ideas on human psychology and nouveau riches and other phenomena are generally strange, so there is a great deal of bemusement to go around.

***

Completeness of Ordeal: Could not finish, at first. But I skimmed through all of it for this post, and it's corking reading if done ironically.
Birthdate of Enmity: ca. 2008.
Likelihood That Enmity Is Justified: on sociopolitical grounds, 100%

***

Evidence, Pro-Enmity:

[Linda:] "There is nothing in California I am afraid of except a Jap, and I am afraid of them, not potentially, not on account of what all of us know they are planning in the backs of their heads for the future, but right here and now, personally and physically. Don't antagonize Oka Sayye. Don't be too precipitate about what you're trying to do. Try to make it appear that you're developing ideas for the interest and edification of the whole class. Don't incur his personal enmity. Use tact."

[Donald:] "You think I am afraid of that little jiu-jitsu?" he scoffed. "I can lick him with one hand."

*

Master Drawings III: Noctes Ambrosianae

After the tranquillity of Turner's Tintern Abbey, Noctes Ambrosianae enters an entirely different realm. Painted in a gloom of darkness, it is a picture of expressionist spectators, whose leering is either a Hogarthian, rebuking portrait of the prurient mob; a modern variation on the demons in the background of a Renaissance-era Hades or the rabble who attack Christ once his life is about to end; or a prescient envisioning of a radical feminist's Male Gaze. Or, it can simply be an audience whose expressions are partly peacefully concentrated and partly mobile in reaction to the dramatic plot on a stage. 'What are they watching?' is a question which seems in some ways beside the point; demeaning and greedy, or absorbing, spectacles are not entirely rare and the artist's mass psychology might apply as well to any.

The painter was Walter Richard Sickert, whose long life evenly bisected itself into the late 19th century and early 20th century, beginning in Munich and ending in Bath. He was very young when his family left Germany and he was educated in England - in King's College School, which has among its alumni Charles Dickens's son, Leopold de Rothschild, Dante Gabriel Rossetti . . . and a band member from Mumford and Sons. He dabbled in acting, then finally launched himself into art, passing through impressionistic and expressionistic phases — in my opinion he tried to be Turner here, Lucian Freud (or is that vice versa) there, possibly Toulouse-Lautrec there, etc., though rarely at a slavish level of imitation — and in general being considered as an avant-gardist.

Writers have conjectured that he was Jack the Ripper. Firstly the voracious speculation on said murderer seems tawdry, and secondly I doubt the plausibility (albeit in the absence of evidence pro or contra) of the Sickert surmise. In Sickert's defence the Wikipedia article turns the suggestions against him on their heads; it describes how his prolific affairs and fascination with crime like Jack the Ripper's seem to have inspired sympathy and indignation at the vulnerability of prostitutes' existences in him, which he also expressed in his work. He was, at any rate, on excellent terms with Winston Churchill; this is perhaps a sign of final respectability.


"Walter Sickert" [Wikipedia]
"King's College School" [Ibid.]
N.B.: Due to copyright I am not posting an illustration of Noctes Ambrosianae here.

***

IN 1934 Virginia Woolf published Walter Sickert: A Conversation in London.[N.B. In some countries, probably including mine — I'm crossing my fingers that this heavy quoting from it is fair use —, it is not copyright-free yet.] It is not a conversation with Sickert but rather a dinner party conversation between various observers about him; and their reflections delve into his use of colour, his approach to fleshing out characters and their situations, general parallels between the thematically ambitious and socially conscious painter and the thematically ambitious and socially conscious novelist, and class problems.

***

Illustration: Southwark Fair (1733-34), by William Hogarth
It is intended to be a cheerful scene, at least according to an early 19th century tome in which it appears and which states, "it is sufficient to remark that it presents us with an endless collection of spirited and laughable characters, in which is strikingly portrayed the character of the times." [via Wikimedia Commons]

An Avian Abattoir in Covent Garden

With thanks to the commenter angelinterceptor of the Guardian website, from the article "Royal Ascot's dress code aims to banish the commoner within" by Sarah Ditum (June 19, 2012). A quick web search revealed that this is one of George Bernard Shaw's letters to the Times of London.

***

July 3, 1905

Sir,

THE OPERA management of Covent Garden regulates the dress of its male patrons. When is it going to do the same to the women?