A Thoreau Thought for Easter

It may be a passage from the end of an essay by Henry David Thoreau that I have not fully read ("Walking," from the 1850s). It may be describing a scene that Thoreau saw in November. It may also be a bit of a mishmash between ancient Greek and 19th-century American Christian religion.

Springtime (early 1920s), by Ugo Flamiani
via Wikimedia Commons

But I think that this sprig of nature philosophy still feels timely, as I enter the Easter weekend:

We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn.

The essay — although Thoreau had read it aloud in lecture halls before — was first printed shortly after his death, in 1862.

***

Source: Essays and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Will H. Dircks, ed.
     London: Walter Scott Press

August 2022 in Books: What I'm Reading

It's a colossus and I'm still running back and forth between its legs like a Brutus (to attempt a poor Shakespeare allusion). But gradually I'm tackling the audiobook recording of Robert A. Caro's memoir of Lyndon B. Johnson during his vice presidency under John F. Kennedy: The Passage of Power.

If it were a Columbo television crime show episode, I'd say at once that Johnson was the mastermind who organized Kennedy's assassination. Jealousy, enmity, rivalry, and humiliation teem in the pages.

It's hard to regard Kennedy's presidency as a saintly Camelot, or to consider even Robert F. Kennedy as a kindly figure, if one reads about the dynamics behind the scenes. That said, no individual actions of the Kennedys stick in my memory as criminal; the Kennedys generally just seem sort of mean. (Well, all right, I think the patriarch was genuinely a 'piece of work.') Johnson himself, however, practically built his career on electoral fraud and political crimes.

"Photo portrait of Lyndon B. Johnson
as U.S. Senator for Texas
and Majority Leader"
(1950s)
via Wikimedia Commons
Public domain

So it does feel as if one scratched the surface of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. and found it — and by extension the entire presidency and democratic system — to be made not so much of stone, as of paper-mâché formed to look like stone.

And of course the other paradox: despite the emotional and moral hollowness that marked parts of their political lives, Kennedy, Johnson, and others, achieved genuine, lasting good. — And before Kennedy's political career, [as mentioned in a past blog post] his rescue of his fellow sailors in a torpedo boat in World War II really is the stuff of superheroes, and makes for a thrilling adventure in Caro's prose.

It's also astonishing how many significant historical details are no longer known, now that the former President and Vice-President have died.

The most significant detail, perhaps:

Did Kennedy offer the vice presidency to Johnson assuming, after their fierce primary battle and mutual hatred, that Johnson would reject the offer? Or was it in fact a purposeful, strategic move to enable Kennedy to win more votes than Richard Nixon's Republicans in the South?

***

New cover of Touch the Dragon
From the Turnstone Press

Karen Connelly's Touch the Dragon (1994) was given to me by my paternal grandfather when I was a teenager.

The author went to Thailand on a student exchange when she was seventeen years old. It was the 1980s. She was a Canadian who didn't know much of the language, but she is taught partly by immersion and partly in a school.

In brilliant prose, Connelly describes daily life from the glamourous to the not-so-glamourous. She writes frankly of the mental discomfort of adjusting to what feels like a diametrically opposed new reality, and dishes about the dissolution of her relationship with a boyfriend back in Canada.

It's affectionately, immersively written. Connelly's sarcastic, worldly-wise voice as an author recalling her younger self is pitch-perfect — but I think that one or two snap judgments that seem insensitive, like calling music at a festival 'horrific,' could also have been edited away without weakening the book.

***

Otto Hahn's autobiography, Mein Leben, is not a famous book. But from reading it I have been converted from someone who knows that he was a famous German scientist, to an admirer of him personally.

He is generously precise about his life, starting in a lower-middle-class family in Frankfurt am Main, through his university years and his escapades e.g. in duelling fraternities, and his various youthful loves and losses.... And that's as far as I've gotten. His life certainly did not end in the early 1900s, and later chapters will likely detail his attitudes toward the two World Wars, and the Cold War.

Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer has come out in theaters, tracing the role and reaction of a different scientist to knowledge pursued for the sake of military applications. It would be interesting to compare the different works.

On Shaping Poetry: Audre Lorde

Cover of Sister Outsider
Audre Lorde
Crossing Press, 1984
via Wikimedia Commons, Fair use

The American professor/essayist/poet/feminist Audre Lorde's useful advice about 'finding' a poem:

I was revising too much instead of writing new poems.

[...] poetry is not Play-Doh. You can’t take a poem and keep reforming it. It is itself, and you have to know how to cut it. And if there’s something else you want to say, that’s fine.

From an interview with Adrienne Rich, 1979, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (audiobook, narrated by Robin Eller). Read in 2019.

December 2021 in Books: What I'm Reading

THIS MORNING I read "Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes" (1922) from The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter. Published reluctantly when the author-and-illustrator was losing her eyesight, she gently rewrites famous rhymes like "This Little Piggy."

"We have a little garden"
Illustration of Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes
by Beatrix Potter

She also illustrates a poem from her friend Louie Choyce:

We love our little garden
And tend it with such care,
You will not find a faded leaf
Or blighted blossom there.

[Tip: You can find the entire book on Wikisource. ]

***

Turning to adult literature of the 21st century:

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett felt like a page-turner after a while. Set in the 1950s through 1990s, if I remember correctly, it follows two twin women who were born in the segregation-era United States.

I enjoyed the back and forth between the different generations of Vignes women.

My only gripe? At times I wished I were reading James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, or another 20th century author instead; sometimes a 21st century perspective blurs the experiences of the 20th too much.

*

In a predictable coincidence, the Jimmy Carter biography His Very Best sheds another light on racism in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

His campaign to become Governor of Georgia profited greatly by what a few people ca. 2016 have called 'racial anxiety.'

But Carter upended expectations when, in his inaugural speech, he declared his support of racial integration.

*

In between I have been reading more of Assia Djebar's Les femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement.

Then I have begun reading Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue. Set during the recession of 2008-2009,  its main characters are a family of Cameroonian immigrants to the United States.

In an audiobook recording, I'm also listening to Cherie Dimaline's Empire of Wild. Published in 2020, it is a novel about a Métis community in Canada, in which a wife looks for her lost husband.

***

This past week, Barack Obama has posted his end-of-year lists of his favourite songs, books and films of 2021. A few authors are old-timers, like Jonathan Franzen, Colson Whitehead, and Kazuo Ishiguro; others are relative newcomers like Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Dawnie Walton. The lyrics of a few of the songs are also worth looking at, in their own literary right.

August 2021 In Books: What I'm Reading

Earlier this month I finished Jutta Person's Esel, a thin German-language volume of cultural history about donkeys and anthropomorphic interpretations of them by everyone from Roman satirists through Christian theologians to German romantics. My uncle M. gave it to me as a birthday present last year because donkeys are my favourite animals. Now another birthday gift, Paul Auster's 4321, is lined up to read next.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, and Nigerian writer Akwaeke Emezi's The Death of Vivek Oji, are also read, and although both were undoubtedly good, I won't write reviews at present because they'd be too half-baked.

Cover of A Hundred Million Years and a Day
via Gallic Books/Belgravia Books

In a big geographical leap, I've moved to reading A Hundred Million Years and a Day, a French hit novel that is set at various times in the first half of the 20th century, It is written from the perspective of a solitary, dry-souled ivory tower paleontologist — written by Jean-Baptiste Andrea and translated sublimely and award-winningly by Sam Taylor. Perhaps because my French literary frame of reference is small, the atmosphere and the setting remind me of Marcel Pagnol and the spare style reminds me of Le grand Meaulnes. It's also well thought out; sometimes time-hopping in books is so tediously confusing that I want to gouge out my eyes, but here the back and forth — as the details are filled in — adds genuine suspense.

***

The book I'm most enthusiastic right now because it makes me happy is Dancing Man: A Broadway Choreographer's Journey by Bob Avian and Tom Santopietro. A basic knowledge of musicals or of mid-20th century film is enough to make its revelations understandable.

The aim of the authors is to tell us exactly what we want to know: each chapter is grouped quite tightly around a specific musical. Fortunately the gossip is generous and not mean-spirited. We hear that Jerome Robbins, a god of sorts among choreographers, was tremendously unpleasant; but we are also told that this was because he was unhappy.

In general Avian (from whose perspective the book is written) and Santopietro express modern views. Avian, in his eighties, makes little attempt to present a great man's (or woman's) sadism as ideal or even as a useful evil. He presents it as a flaw, but as a flaw whose owner still deserves sympathy.

I love the old-fashioned turns of phrase in the book, too, however: 'great gal', or "[... q]uicker than you can say “West Side Story,” Audrey set her cap for Michael and snagged him."

It feels twee or reductive to call Avian delightful, but the adjective comes to mind anyway.

The authors are friendly raconteurs, as we see not just there, but also when they wink at the audience with sentences like this vignette from an unsuccessful play production:

Act Two contained a King Lear ballet—yes, you read that right—and I was completely at sea.

Avian also mentions his experience of 1960s drug culture in a characteristically wholesome way:

I tried pot for the first time and thought, “Hmm, this sure is a lot of fun. And creative.”

He died in January this year, as I was startled to learn when reading his Wikipedia biography.

Readers who want memoirists to disembowel their private lives might find this book not for them, but fans of Broadway, or of 20th century American film star history, and perhaps also fans of New York City's social history in general, will probably love this. National Public Radio included it in their list of the best books of 2020.

*

"Tony award-winning Broadway choreographer Bob Avian dies aged 83" by Adrian Horton (January 22, 2021) [Guardian]

***

As part of my research into the history of the earliest decades of the 20th century, I have also jumped into the World War I chapters of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell's Autobiography. Published well after that War, when the Cold War was still on, it is like the oak in Jean de la Fontaine's fable — not in that its roots touch on the realm of the dead, but rather that its roots touch on the realm of Victoria and an era of absolute British aristocratic privilege that seems utterly absurd now.

I first read the autobiography when I was a teenager struggling with my own opposition to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. He was briefly an imaginary posthumous mentor.

And now — even as I wince at his views on relationships during the passages about Lady Constance Malleson, Katherine Mansfield and Lady Ottoline Morrell; even as I find him overprivileged in one passage, and mindbogglingly out of touch in another; and even though I don't admire his catty moments — in general it feels like his intelligence, his wonderful turns of phrase, and his dedication are not in doubt. And his insights on political and social celebrities are also great, if partial, gossip.

Cover of Why Men Fight (1917)
via Wikimedia Commons

Here is a passage where he has been imprisoned due to his activism against the First World War, in a rather posh prison division thanks to the intervention of former British prime minister Arthur Balfour:

I found prison in many ways quite agreeable. [...] I wrote a book, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy [...] and began the work for Analysis of Mind. I was rather interested in my fellow-prisoners, who seemed to me in no way morally inferior to the rest of the population, though they were on the whole slightly below the usual level of intelligence, as was shown by their having been caught.

(Russell, Bertrand. Autobiography. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1978. p. 256)

*

I'm also reading Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker, about a large midcentury American family that included a high number of sons with schizophrenia. I am struggling with it. As a takedown of the conformist 1950s ideal of domestic bliss, or of the unalloyed joys of military service and being in a military family, I think Hidden Valley Road is the most effective.

I would like it better if the family could have written their own history. It's not much fun of reading their lives as a psychological literature exercise. From my amateur armchair perspective, I like it better when we acknowledge that we can follow some of the thought patterns of the more conspicuously mentally ill, for example.

I've known people who are genuinely healthy in mind, like the psychological equivalent of an amazingly athletic person. In most cases I would say, however, that we are participants in, and not observers of, the human battle for logic, reason and proportionate emotional reactions. If we don't acknowledge that, it's unhealthy for ourselves and harmful to others.

January 2021 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

First of all, it feels appropriate to pay tribute to Jan Morris. An adventure-loving journalist and non-fiction author who broke the news of the ascension of Mount Everest in 1953, foe of political correctness and friend of many who admired her, host to pilgrimages to her rural home long into her old age, and a transgender woman in the public eye many decades before anti-trans bigotry became controversial, she died in Wales in November 2020. 

It feels strange to single out just one of the thousands of witty and insightful passages that she wrote for a good half century, but one that stuck with me was quoted by Jonathan Kandell, writing for the New York Times, in his obituary. Kandell summarized that "The more she was treated as a woman," (Jan Morris presented as a woman beginning in the 1970s) "the more she behaved — in her own estimation — as a woman."

“If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming,” she wrote. “If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.” She added, “I discovered that even now men prefer women to be less informed, less able, less talkative, and certainly less self-centered than they are themselves; so I generally obliged them."

(Like Jane Austen's quotation in Northanger Abbey: "The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author;—and to her treatment of the subject I will only add in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire any thing more in woman than ignorance.")

Here is another passage, from a Tumblr blog for her book Contact! (2012):

I shared a taxi one day with a lady in a blue silk turban, who was visiting Washington and was about to meet her daughter for lunch at a Hot Shoppe. [...] it was as we passed the Capitol itself, and were deploring the state of the world in general, that she spoke the words I best remember: ‘I sometimes wonder, oh, what kind of a world are we bringing our children into, when you have to pay a quarter for a doughnut?’

Twenty-five cents for a doughnut.  Even Americans bleed.

*

Regarding daily reading, I am still hoping that sooner or later it will be safe to commute to the office again. In that case, The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane will shoot to the top of the list as the customary S-Bahn reading.

In January, the author of The Hate U Give and On the Come Up will release another book for young readers, Concrete Rose. It goes back in time to visit the early life of the father of the girl who was the heroine of The Hate U Give, and how he breaks free from a gang. While she was still writing it, Angie Thomas touted it on Twitter as her best book yet; so I am looking forward.

In the meantime, I am reading a whimsical and intelligent book about donkeys and humans, Esel (2013) by Jutta Person, in German. My godfather gave it to me for my birthday because I have a well-known weakness for donkeys. It comes in a nice grey hardcover binding, from an independent publisher: Matthes & Seitz Berlin!

Besides, more books from the NPR best books of 2020 list are tempting me to read them:

Cover of Blacktop Wasteland, via Flatiron Books

Blacktop Wasteland (Flatiron Books, 2020) is a crime novel by S. A. Cosby, about a car mechanic in the southern US who is drawn into petty crime against his will. What really 'sells' the book for me is the way that Adam Lazarre-White narrates the audiobook and the suspenseful writing. Lazarre-White brings detail and life to the phrases, lending a little softening and gentler pace to the terser prose, which has a masculinely direct and clear-cut 'voice.' It's also a tribute to Cosby's literary judgment that I don't object to his metaphors (which in my view often descend into cliché or kitsch in prose) in for example this passage:

Seconds ticked by and Beauregard felt a hollow opening blossom in his chest. He could see the gears working in Warren’s head and for a moment he thought he was gonna pass. But Beauregard knew he wouldn’t. How could he? He had talked himself into a corner and his pride wouldn’t let him back down.

[Update: I didn't finish this novel because it quickly became too graphically violent for me, but literarily it still seemed great.]

Eat a Peach, a popular 2020 memoir by David Chang, was on NPR's list. It inspired me to look at Chang's other books. Momofuku, where the New York Times food writer Peter Meehan helped with the text, is of course a cookbook and was written in an appropriately chef-like, profane and macho style in 2009. Its biographical introduction traces the Korean-American chef's early years cooking in the US, then his journey to Japan where he yearns to learn the art of the ramen noodle, and back to New York City. There Chang opens up a no-frills restaurant featuring, mostly, noodles. His later restaurants were popular enough that I heard of them by following New York media in the early 2000s. Eat a Peach sheds a deeper, troubled perspective on the life that is lightly sketched in Momofuku.

More information: "Momofuku (restaurants)" [Wikipedia]

***

Barack Obama's A Promised Land needs no introduction. I bought a large hardcover edition at Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus here in Berlin; and I am glad to have made the 'investment' because the book is so insightful, humorous, and re-readable. It also requires no advertising: it was stacked everywhere on the ground floor even of this bookshop across the Atlantic.

Cover of Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You
via NPR

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America is an earlier work (2016) by Ibram X. Kendi, an American professor and anti-racism-expert who survived a stage 4 cancer to become a bestselling author and spokesperson against racism with the May 2020 resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the public eye. It has also been adapted for children in a new book collaboration with Jason Reynolds. How to Be an Antiracist (2019) — a book that argues that it is more helpful to be actively antiracist, than to simply declare one's self free of racism and hope for the best — was also especially popular in 2020.

Lastly, I began listening to an audiobook of an English translation of Cho Nam-Joo's novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982. It is written in the third person, in straightforward, deadpan sentences. The titular character is a young mother who begins to fall apart in a perturbing, at times darkly funny, but understandable way, because of all of the pressures that are put on her by a sexist and generally dismissive social environment.

December 2020 In Books: What We'll Be Reading Next, Part I

Early this month, the website for National Public Radio published a list of top books for 2020 par excellence. I took it as a very, very long series of reading prompts, and below are some of the results:

***

A few books were interesting but I decided to skip reading the rest of the book after reading the introduction. (Also because this leaves me with a better chance of finishing over a hundred others...)

Later: My Life at the Edge of the World is a memoir of a time when the author, Paul Lisicky, took up a position as a fellow in the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, further away from his family. It was in the early 1990s and AIDS was breaking out, and even before then the author (and his mother, perhaps exaggeratedly so) was conscious of his social vulnerability as a gay man.

It is about family drama as well as the author's individual life. It's also not light reading: molestation, suicide, and marital disagreements already appear in the introduction. [And, to be very clear: I only read the introduction, so the rest of this review should be taken with a grain of salt.] So I'd suggest that perhaps the memoir is best suited for readers who will find the depiction of this kind of dysfunction cathartic or interesting, rather than unsettling or too personal.

For example, he writes how his mother has, to a degree, given up on life. Rather than die by suicide, which would be too dramatic for her, she ekes out her existence in a half-life:

Not making new friends, not allowing herself to be known, eating too much ice cream, no exercise, watching daytime talk shows that don’t even capture her attention. Life as pure endurance instead of the hard, hard work of finding interests that refresh and nourish her.

It's an interesting line of thought, not far from Henry David Thoreau's "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." I'm sure the mother was asked for her consent to have her inner life described in the book. Is this a topic that should be published for the entertainment of the masses, however, or is this a topic that you can talk about over dinner to close personal friends? I'd go with the latter.

In any case he's indubitably an excellent writer and I'm surprised I hadn't heard of him before; perhaps he's a writer's writer whom one hears about more in professional circles. He's also published a memoir before, The Narrow Door.

Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
Paul Lisicky
Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2020

Cover of Later, via Graywolf Press

*

Travelling from the coast of New England to the southern US, a collection of humoristic short stories about working- and middle-class Americans by George Singleton also looked really good; it was a little bawdy.

You can find three of his stories on the website of the Atlantic Monthly here to get an idea.

You Want More: Selected Short Stories of George Singleton is published by the independent Hub City Press.

***

Cover of Alien Oceans, via Princeton University Press

In the end, I've been reading two books. The first is this, published by Princeton University Press:

Alien Oceans: The Search For Life In The Depths of Space

Written by a Californian professor with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, this non-fiction book explores the ideas we have of oceans on other planets or moons.

Kevin Hand begins by telling anecdotes of the time when, as a graduate student, he took a submarine to the ocean floor in the company of Hollywood film director James Cameron. But the rest of the book so far is unsensational, and like a nice undergraduate lecture series.

He takes us from one moon in the orbit of Saturn to the other, and I was thrilled to learn that there are ice volcanoes (cryovolcanoes) on moons like Enceladus, and that such a small moon (500 km in diameter, I think) was already visible to scientists in the 18th century. Besides there are introductions to spectroscopy and a few other staples of astrophysics methodology.

Any person with a Grade 10 level of science, and no great inhibitions or feud against science, can follow it, I think. Even better: despite my analogy to undergraduate lectures, there is no need to do tests, tutorials, or lab work. The analogies — like the metal detector in airport security — are committed to and well spaced apart, so I didn't feel the bored bewilderment that I did when I read an Einstein biography that bombarded me with one analogy for special relativity after the other.

I could imagine a few post-graduates or professors in Chemistry or Physics wanting to thump their heads on their desks if they read Alien Oceans, because sacrifices of accuracy have been made to help general readers understand scientific concepts. But because these professional peers are not the target audience, they'd have to go out of their way to inflict this pain on themselves.

Enceladus, a moon of Saturn (Oct. 28, 2015)
"NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this view as it neared icy Enceladus
for its closest-ever dive past the moon's active south polar region."
via Wikimedia Commons

On another note: As a humanities student, I have met examples of the Ivory Tower Ego. When I was at UBC, a professor had released a bestselling book that was turned into a documentary film. It's unfair to say this as I only saw the man once; but when he strode through the streets with his briefcase and took the bus along with hoi polloi, I felt it was with a strikingly self-conscious air. Not to mention a few other professors who also evidently saw themselves as mini-celebrities of the lecture hall, on far slighter grounds.

But in Alien Oceans, Hand portrays a collaborative research world in which long-term effort and sound thinking are as important as flashy brilliance. He honours Cassini and other NASA excursions for providing the data for scientists to work with. He mentions to which researchers (sometimes his friends) we owe which findings. And he forebears from saying anything ostentatiously modest about 'standing on the shoulders of giants.'

In general I like feeling that Alien Oceans mirrors the atmosphere that I sometimes felt when my father was working in physics or biology departments: real contentment in sharing knowledge with each other and asking each other for advice, and patiently putting in (lab) time day after day to figure out the puzzles they have set themselves.

(I am listening to the audiobook, so am not going to say anything about the prose as prose.)

Canada Reads 2020: Radicalized, by Cory Doctorow

Last week, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation held its annual Canada Reads competition. The stand-up comedian Ali Hassan hosted the show again, and five jurors were assembled to judge the candidates for this year. Each of them championed a book of their choice.

Akil Augustine is a basketball commentator on the NBA championships who grew up in Scarborough,  a formerly independent city that was merged into Toronto in 1998.

He chose, as the book that he wanted to convince all of Canada to read, Radicalized: short stories published by the Canadian-British author, internet freedom advocate, and technological blogger Cory Doctorow in 2019.

Radicalized is 'of the moment.' It addresses pandemics even though it was published before the coronavirus spread in Europe and North America, and it addresses the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality even though it was published before George Floyd's murder made these subjects leap to everyone's mind again in June. It also addresses the intimate role that large technological companies like Facebook monopolize in daily life.

But as Doctorow is not just Canadian — he lives in the United States, and his stories are set in the United States — Augustine's fellow jurors argued that Radicalized did not have a Canadian focus.

There are parallels of the US to Canada and other countries. As Augustine said, Black Lives Matter and police brutality are not just American questions, and he used his presence on Canada Reads to draw attention to anti-racist activism in Canada. There are also clear differences, of course.

But Akil Augustine's arguments that the coronavirus pandemic and the role of social media companies are international issues and as such should be taken to heart as Canadian issues as well, were rejected by the roundtable on Canada Reads.

A few fellow jurors also felt that the competition has a social function and not just a literary role: they preferred to publicize books from authors whose national background, romantic/sexual orientation, and gender are less traditionally advantaged in the publishing industry.

To quote his publisher, Doctorow's Radicalized embraces these four tales:

Unauthorized Bread is a tale of immigration, the toxicity of economic and technological stratification, and the young and downtrodden fighting against all odds to survive and prosper.

In Model Minority, a Superman-like figure attempts to rectifiy the corruption of the police forces he long erroneously thought protected the defenseless...only to find his efforts adversely affecting their victims.

Radicalized is a story of a darkweb-enforced violent uprising against insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife's terminal cancer.

The fourth story, Masque of the Red Death, harkens back to Doctorow's Walkaway, taking on issues of survivalism versus community.

Radicalized: Four Tales of Our Present Moment [MacMillan]
Cory Doctorow [Wikipedia] 

Cory Doctorow at ORGCon 2012
Attributed to D. Morris, March 2012
via Wikimedia Commons (License: CC-BY-2.0)

Excerpt from "Unauthorized Bread":

“The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread. She held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs-up emoji, but instead, it showed her the head-scratching face and made a soft brrt. She waved the bread again. Brrt.

“Come on.” Brrt.

She turned the toaster off and on. Then she unplugged it, counted to ten, and plugged it in. Then she menued through the screens until she found RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULT, waited three minutes, and punched her Wi-Fi password in again.”

January 2020 in Books: What (I'll) Be Reading Next, Part 2

Zora Neale Hurston, Eatonville, FL
Photograph c. 1940, in the State Library and Archives of Florida
via Wikimedia Commons

UNWISELY I am working at reading farther into the Teilchen-detektoren book about physics, the biography Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Ο μεγάλος περίπατος του Πέτρου by Alki Zei, Cavafy's poems and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, at once. Yet, for inexplicable reasons, the impulse hit to begin reading even more books.

Therefore I'm rereading Anne of the Island, which is one of the sequels to the early 20th-century Canadian children's book Anne of Green Gables. And, more ambitiously, reading the 17th-century French drama Bajazet by Jean Racine for the first time. I don't even know what that play is about, because I'm still reading biographical introductory material and don't want to 'peek ahead.' Of course that makes it more fun: exploring old literature as if it were new and just hatched from the egg is exciting and (hopefully) rewarding.

The Three Escapes of
Hannah Arendt
by Ken Krimstein
Bloomsbury, via
Amazon.com

Lastly, godfather M. gave me a graphic novel about Hannah Arendt: The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt by Ken Krimstein. After Marjane Satrapi's memoir of life during the political revolutions in Iran during the second half of the 20th century, Persepolis, it's the second graphic novel I've ever read. It was published by Bloomsbury in 2018. And I'm glad to have a starting point to approach the philosopher. My mother has read her work and it sounded like not to read it is to miss timely and relevant perspectives.

*

Also, I am re-reading North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. Its existence is, of course, not a great secret amongst fans of classics and literary romance.

North and South, ©BBC (2004)

The BBC adaptation of 2004 has lent it a broader, happy and active readership. Also, on YouTube one can probably still find an older adaptation where Patrick Stewart, predating his Star Trek captainship, strides through the scenes as the tradesman hero.

Amongst the author's other works, Wives and Daughters was depressing and 'domestically claustrophobic' as far as I recall, as well as unfinished. I don't feel like rereading Ruth or Cranford, and I never read Mary Barton or the life of Charlotte Brontë. In short, North and South is my favourite Gaskell work.

*

Note Regarding Process: Last year these 'monthly round-up' blog posts appeared with the heading "What We'll Be Reading Next." But this month, new publications are not likely to be discussed and it would be silly to imply that other people must read the same older publications that I am, so I've chosen to use the first person singular instead.

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.

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.

*

From Penguin RandomHouse

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:

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.)

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.

***

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)

"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.

Edgar Allan Poe's Masque of the Red Death

The Masque (1842), even where it does not describe everything, draws in the way many successful stories do upon a common human treasury of archetypal fears or secondhand experiences. Like the reign of Caligula, which lasted three years but whose fame reaches us nearly two thousand years later, it feels far longer than it truly was.

It begins without compromise:

THE "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal —the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains [. . .] were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

The prince Prospero shuts himself and his court away from the pestilence.

The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death."

He succeeds for around half a year. But his unwise interior decoration schemes already foreshadow doom:

Now in no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum, amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or depended from the roof. [. . . ] But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite to each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire that protected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. [. . .] But in the western or black chamber the effect of the fire-light that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme [. . .]

Also, the seventh apartment has been furnished with a clock. It rather bluntly suggests that time is running out.

AT THE time of the tale, the Prince holds a grand party for a thousand of his dearest friends, and proposes a masquerade, leading to a savagely chaotic scene:

There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm --much of what has been since seen in "Hernani." There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions.

But then the clock strikes midnight, and a new guest arrives at the party:

The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood --and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.

***

The Wikipedia article warns against reading deeper meanings or messages into this story, and indeed — like part of the novel, Castle of Otranto, that is supposed to be Poe's inspiration — it might well be a mere recounting of a nightmare, or of a waking fantasy.

But I think it appeals also because it evidently sparks ideas that it never literally describes. Above all I like the span across times and places of the story. It is akin in spirit to the memento mori of the Middle Ages, the morbid skull in Hans Holbein the Younger's painting of the Ambassadors as well as Shakespeare's Hamlet, and rumination on the 'wages of sin' by figures as heterogeneous as American preachers and William Hogarth.

The lavish colours and wealth might be a reference to the Catholic Church, too — the gilding of inner corruption. But I'm thinking that mainly due to this week's lavish party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in honour of the Catholic Church's influence on high fashion.

*

This tale, like his works generally, is even more striking against the background of Edgar Allan Poe's own life's story, I think. He certainly saw enough death and led a gruelling Dickensian life: in Boston and Virginia as a neglected or badly raised child*, over gambling tables as a youth, in and out of the enlisted army ranks and West Point (if I understand correctly, at least he never saw war), through the early deaths of his mother, brother Henry and wife Virginia from illnesses, etc. And there was his alcohol abuse.

***

* Worthy of the Child-Rearing Horrors hall of fame:
"the infant Edgar was farmed out first to grandparents and later to a nurse who dosed him and an infant sister with laudanum and gin."
From: "Eulogy for a master" by Hilary Spurling, in The Observer (January 27, 2008)

The Masque of the Red Death (Wikipedia)
Edgar Allan Poe (Wikipedia)

Illustration: From Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham (1867–1939). Via Wikipedia

Masque of the Red Death quotations taken from The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe on the website of the University of Virginia.

Poppies, in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Study of Poppies, by John Constable
via V + A Museum website

They walked along listening to the singing of the bright-colored birds and looking at the lovely flowers which now became so thick that the ground was carpeted with them. There were big yellow and white and blue and purple blossoms, besides great clusters of scarlet poppies, which were so brilliant in color they almost dazzled Dorothy's eyes.

"Aren't they beautiful?" the girl asked, as she breathed in the spicy scent of the flowers.

- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum (1900)

The Wizard of Oz is familiar enough through the 1939 film with Judy Garland that an introduction to it is likely unneeded. Instead, then, I have taken this excerpt. In the Hollywood version, the flowers have been enchanted by the Wicked Witch of the West; in this version, the fragrance of the poppies in themselves is a sedative. When reading this chapter, I wondered, if in 1900, laudanum was still used as a medicine even for children. (Wikipedia: American patent medicine manufacturers were first required to list opium content in 1906; preparations of coca leaf and preparations of opium were roundly restricted by the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act in 1914, and Britain and France formulated their own similar restrictions a few years later.)

Illustration: Made in Great Britain, ca. 1832.
Maker: John Constable, born 1776 - died 1837. Oil on paper with a brown ground. Given to the Victoria and Albert museum by Isabel Constable. Museum number: 329-1888.

In honour of the exhibition: Constable: The Making of a Master, in the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK), from September 20th, 2014 to January 11th, 2014. More information here.

Laudanum and Harrison Narcotics Tax Act [Wikipedia]
Text quoted from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (New York: Alfred A. Knopf — Everyman's Library, 1992), p. 68

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 V: Cain and Abel

The fifth part of a series, exploring literature which springs to mind when looking at works in the Master Drawings exhibition which is running in England from May 25 to August 18, 2013. This time the arts-and-literature pair is Francisco Goya's Cain and Abel and an American author's "Woodman, Spare That Tree!" The painting is not apparently much written about, though I was able to read* that it was created around 1817-20, and not much photographed. So other paintings will have to suffice for this blog post.

To begin, a potted biography of the artist:

Goya's earliest paintings, like La cometa from 1777 or 1778, are residue of the Rococo era in their peaceful boisterousness, but his style changed considerably and with conviction. Not as successful as he had hoped at first, he lived and worked in Italy as well as in Spain; then he gained recognition in the 1780s and at last became a court painter in 1789. Despite his comfortable situation he was clearly by no means complacent; according to the wisdom of Wikipedia, "His portraits are notable for their disinclination to flatter, and in the case of Charles IV of Spain and His Family, the lack of visual diplomacy is remarkable.[Footnote: Licht, Fred: Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art, page 68. (...)]." Around 1793 he lost his hearing and this seems to have been a watershed for the mounting darkness in his artistic efforts, too. With the turmoil of politics and armed conflict as Spanish subjects became fodder to the juggernaut of the Napoleonic Wars in 1807 and until 1814, war scenes began to be a focus. Even before that he had drawn tortuous scenes of prisoners. Nevertheless he had continued as a painter under the French occupation — though one of his projects at the end of these years was a uniformed oil-on-mahogany of Wellington — and harboured some sympathies for the Revolution; and apparently relations to the royal family were lastingly strained. He died in the year 1828 in Bordeaux.

Illustration: Colossus by Francisco de Goya (1746–1828)
(Painted 1808-1810, oil on canvas, 116 × 105 cm; in the Museo del Prado [via Wikimedia Commons])

ON the one hand,