I have been on a zigging and zagging tear of reading. I realized maybe I should document it this time around.
1. In the past week, I've finished Bless Me, Ultima (1972), a novel from Rudolfo Anaya, which The Wife had read before me. We decided we would read it together to help us further understand the culture of neuevos Mexicanos. We both loved this novel, which combined a simple, yet very elegant style of writing--as the narrator is an elementary school boy in 1940s New Mexico--and a profound meditation in the way non-intellectual people see the world around them. There are people of the land and wanderers who see the land as a place where people are tied down, and there is always a tension between them. We see people poor and barely poor who believe their lives are controlled by mystical forces, whether the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Virgin Mary, Jesus, or spirits in the form of a fish. We also see violence, cruelty, and a punishment culture that combines with macho culture to produce misery and death. We also see acts of kindness that create the stuff of miracles, and how a loving family maneuvers through poverty, war, and other challenges beyond their control.
What we each found surprising was Anaya wrote this book at the dawn of the 1970s, and was talking about the 1940s New Mexico. Yet, the narrative echoes and reverberates deeply into what we have observed among people who grew up and currently live in this State today. There is a resignation here that things won't and cannot change. There is a relative lack of self-esteem among people in this State, something I never perceived when living in New Jersey or California. New Yorkers, for example, often love to put down Jerseyans, but Jerseyans, as a mass of people, never agreed. We'd say, "Oh yeah, f you and the horse you rode in on. Fuggedaboudit!" (Cue Johnny Pizzerelli's more kind, yet still confident "New Jersey song" here). In California, the culture tells us every day there is always a new dawn, and the gloomy clouds of the morning clear and the bright sunshine will envelop us with a natural optimism about the future, no matter how bad our day actually happens to be. Here, in New Mexico, with nearly 300 days of sunshine and similar weather to Southern California, the feudalism which still undergirds much of the State's economy re-enforces a philosophy of "mañana" (waiting until tomorrow what can be done today) and sense of futility that no matter what one does, the forces around us are too powerful and will stop any positive change. What we see is not Renaissance thinking, which focused people on the future, and on pushing forward, but Middle Ages thinking, which is static, unchanging, and controlled by forces that seem or are mystical. Bless Me, Ultima is about survival and managing to grow within that milieu. It is a book The Wife and I highly recommend, for its elegant prose and beautiful storytelling, even if you live in Alaska, Kansas, or New Jersey.
As a final note about the book, I must say, when I put the book down after finishing the last page, I wanted to know where this child was today. And honestly, I could not picture him in any clear way. That is not a failure on the part of the author, but the author's triumph. For the book helps us understand, in an indirect way, how powerful economic forces in our society hold down the poor and near poor to a point that even a thoughtful child can be ground up like so much meat, not even knowing anything about those forces, and instead assuming a mystical reason for the challenges and difficulties they face on a daily basis. The Wife and I see poor children in the school where The Wife works, and we see first-hand how the school-to-prison pipeline functions. And we have become more political active here because we see up close what needs to change--and we know here, at least, we do not need as much money to spend to meet and engage with politicians. We have brought New Jersey "in your face" and California "optimism" to the State, and I think we have made some difference...but hope to make more.
2. On to other reading....I finished Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington (1921), after finally finding it in a used bookstore, and finding an edition which had readable print. It allowed me to complete Tarkington's culture of American capitalism trilogy, which Tarkington called his "Growth" trilogy (The three are The Turmoil (1915), The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams). Ironically, Adams was the most loved among the three, but over the decades, The Magnificent Ambersons has properly eclipsed it, while Adams is more remembered only among film buffs for the 1930s film adaptation. The Turmoil has completely disappeared from any literary consciousness, which is a shame, as it does have literary and sociological value. But let's talk about Alice Adams. It is a book about a twenty-something young woman from an economically declining middle class family. The book opens with us learning about Alice's father, who has had a nervous breakdown, after thankless work for a decent-seeming, but ultimately callous boss. Alice, too witty and sharp for her own good in terms of meeting a man, is finding it more and more difficult to fit in the upper middle class, and upper class society she once was able to do as a younger woman in high school. Alice's mother pushes Alice's father to not return to the job he had, and instead start his own business--taking an idea for a new kind of glue the father had developed in his early years at the company, but which the company never used. I thought immediately at that narrative point--Uh-oh, work for hire! Don't do it! And I then thought, does Tarkington understand this? The answer is, Oh yes Tarkington does understand this. And very well. For Tarkington's understanding of the growing American corporate economic system, and the culture which it engenders in consumerism, in a grasping sort of set of personalities, is incisive, deep, and creatively described.
The Magnificent Ambersons is often seen as a book about the fall of a family that had made money in the 1880s but was losing by the time of World War I. It is correctly recognized as the story of the hubris of a young neo-aristocrat who realizes, only too late, his sense of superiority derives from the money his family has, not him as an individual. Tarkington's book is a great explicator of how we are social constructs, even as we see ourselves as "individuals." But what makes The Magnificent Ambersons so presently powerful is in the counter narrative within that story, which is about the next wave of entrepreneurs, the motor car entrepreneur and magnates. Tarkington's story shows he deeply understood--in 1918!--how cars would profoundly affect our culture. The novel, through the narrative, shows how diabolical car culture will become for communities, for their role in causing massive pollution, and how the advent of cars will change the way people deal with each other, not only for good, but for bad. It is as if Tarkington had read the first fifty pages of Jane Holtz Kay's brilliant, Asphalt Nation (1998) and put Kay's wisdom into a novel's narrative. Tarkington may even be called an environmentalist novelist. For example, Tarkington's description of what corporate capitalist development was doing to the environment for those living in Indianapolis in The Turmoil, described in the first few pages of that novel--which I greatly enjoyed--is remarkable.
The Magnificent Ambersons is often seen as a book about the fall of a family that had made money in the 1880s but was losing by the time of World War I. It is correctly recognized as the story of the hubris of a young neo-aristocrat who realizes, only too late, his sense of superiority derives from the money his family has, not him as an individual. Tarkington's book is a great explicator of how we are social constructs, even as we see ourselves as "individuals." But what makes The Magnificent Ambersons so presently powerful is in the counter narrative within that story, which is about the next wave of entrepreneurs, the motor car entrepreneur and magnates. Tarkington's story shows he deeply understood--in 1918!--how cars would profoundly affect our culture. The novel, through the narrative, shows how diabolical car culture will become for communities, for their role in causing massive pollution, and how the advent of cars will change the way people deal with each other, not only for good, but for bad. It is as if Tarkington had read the first fifty pages of Jane Holtz Kay's brilliant, Asphalt Nation (1998) and put Kay's wisdom into a novel's narrative. Tarkington may even be called an environmentalist novelist. For example, Tarkington's description of what corporate capitalist development was doing to the environment for those living in Indianapolis in The Turmoil, described in the first few pages of that novel--which I greatly enjoyed--is remarkable.
So why is Tarkington not read? Well, two reasons, one ridiculous and one absolutely correct. The ridiculous reason is the English literature academy, for the past 70 years, has rejected social realism to a point where social realism is either put down for not being truly "literature" or worse, "bad" literature--unless the social realism is about racism or some prejudice, and the writer is of the oppressed "racial" or "ethnic" background (cue Toni Morrison, whose prose I find unreadable, or Philip Roth, whose writing is flat and never gives you any sense of place unless you are already come into the text knowing the place). It is why the literary academy doesn't want young people to read Sinclair Lewis, who, to me, remains our nation's Dickens.
Tarkington is also not read because he mars his narratives with a casual and sometimes overt racism we can no longer afford to ignore. The irony is Tarkington himself was what was then considered a "liberal" about matters of race, and probably would have considered himself "anti-racist." Yet, when black characters appear in his novels, they are in subordinate roles for the most part, and speak with "When Ah's gets to Hebbin, I'm gwina eat watey-melon all the day long!" And one hopes to find the narration will save him, for Tarkington is writing about Indiana society, which was horribly racist (Here is a photo of a lynching which many of us have seen; but it did not occur in the South. It was in Indiana). In The Magnificent Ambersons, in The Turmoil, in The Conquest of Canaan (1905) especially (where the lead character takes on the racist father of the girl he loves, and recognizes that a major part of what he doesn't like about the father is the father's racism), the narrator at least barely critiques that racism or is anti-racist. In Alice Adams, written in the early years of the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan became a "respectable" organization, and casual racism was seen as genteel and a positive attribute, the narrator does not save us. Instead, the narrator re-enforces the characters' racism. This all made me feel less sorry for Alice Adams and her family.* It made me recoil at their utter cluelessness when they try and continually fail to impress richer white people. It made me say, "Don't you people get it? You are not the victims in the society in which you live. It's bad enough you don't want to change the class biases, just get into the upper class. What makes you odious is your racism and your blindness to what is right in front of you!" Yes, there is a scene in the book where a black maid speaks her mind about the low pay, and refuses to do a good job for poor pay. But it is more in the context of a joke--Ha-ha, the family can't afford to pay a good, obedient maid, and this is their comeuppance. I was thinking by the end, This book would be perfect for young Americans to read today as it shows how many of us so want to be with the rich people in a way that was not true thirty years ago. But the racism needs to be removed so that the main point Tarkington was writing the novel for, which is an attack on the culture corporate capitalism was engendering in American society, may be properly understood.
Tarkington was a unique novelist compared to other American novelists of the past 150 years. Tarkington served in the Indiana legislature, and was a Republican who typified genteel conservatism. His uncle was an early governor in California, and was related to a Chicago mayor. See Wiki for a decent summary of his life and work that is nonetheless marred by never mentioning the racism in the novels. I very much lament Tarkington is not welcome in America's literary academy, but I have decided what needs to be done is a re-editing of Tarkington's novels because the racism can be removed without doing damage to his work. From what I know of him, he would understand, and possibly be delighted.
* This was personally disconcerting because Tarkington's first novel, The Gentleman from Indiana (1899), is about a young man from an Ivy League school who moves to Indiana to become a journalist and ends up owning a newspaper that goes to battle against "The White Caps" (which is clearly the Klan). But even in that first novel, while Tarkington shows the Klan to be bad, they are shown to be a menace is to the community, with the menace to African-Americans barely mentioned at all. It is a strange missing note in an otherwise gritty, fast-paced novel.
3. I am finishing Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's The Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014). It is fascinating, horrific, and yet profoundly moving reading. I thought I knew the history of the settler European-American genocide of Native Americans, and I did, but this narrative is what is so powerful. Reading this will be a shock to most Euro-Americans, and a consciousness raising for those of non-European heritage. As I am completing this book, I emotionally want to take our house keys, drive down the road to the Pueblo of Sandia Indians, and say, "Here. Take back this property. So very sorry...." One caveat for me is this is not as scholarly a book as one may expect, and that may be its strength for regular readers. What I mean is that, if one carefully reads her footnotes, only about ten books are cited with continued consistency through the first half of the book, though there are much more diverse sources in the second half. Plus, the bibliography identifies a couple of hundred other books and documentary sources. Still, the books upon which she relies are extraordinary works of history, and what Dunbar-Ortiz does is put them into a deeply thoughtful and incisive narrative that literally overlays the Parkman-Turner Overdrive narratives which may be summarized in this song from Kansas, Song for America. There was no virgin land. There was not only a relative few people here before "we" got here. We learn from this narrative how the Natives had cultivated and farmed the land in the east and upper central west, and how Native Americans in the southwest lived relatively stable lives and even built what we would recognize as relatively high rise buildings. The manner in which Native Americans developed what we would call American federalist political ideals centuries before Montesquieu is beautifully explained. The work is short on the way in which Native Americans fought each other, even brutally, but that is for another book, I suppose. From this narrative, we learn how the settler-colonialists, almost from the start, were into replacing the people who lived here, and it was relentless. It is as if Zod came to Earth, with a multitude from Krypton, to kill and then replace humans on the planet, which was sort of the premise behind Superman: Man of Steel (2013). Yes, "we" are that bad. And if you are already soured on General and then President Andrew Jackson, this book will complete that sourness.
Oh, this is all so one-sided, I can hear people say. Well, yes, it is. But what is remarkable is how this book pushes back the overwhelming assumptions we have made in our settler-colonial narrative. It, again, literally fits over our usual narrative and provides a deeper understanding of who we are, how we got here, and how what we see today is a continuation of what has gone before. For me, as I come face to face with Native Americans who can trace back their ancestry for hundreds of years--while I cannot get past 1880--and who feel a part of the land in a way I do not and perhaps cannot, this has been another educational book for me as I settle (pun intended) into New Mexico. Still, for those in other States, this is a remarkable book to read, and it is one that is illuminating, engrossing, and paradigm changing.
4. I just finished Yanis Varoufakis' Talking to My Daughter About the Economy, or How Capitalism Works--And How it Fails (2017). As many who know me know, I want Varoufakis to be president of the planet. He is an amazingly broad and detailed mind, and has tremendous understanding of global economics, world history and politics, all while deeply in touch with popular culture. I had bought this book for The Daughter this summer, but not living with her, I could not get the lit-major to read it. When The Wife and I moved The Daughter into her dorm at UCLA last week, I took the book back to read it myself--so I could determine whether I could justify pushing her to read it later. I read this book in less than a week, as it is just under 200 pages of medium sized book print, and I have to say it is marvelous. Varoufakis does great a job, in a primer type of book, in explaining world economics, and showing how money is a social construct that is almost always political. He answers both libertarians and those who disdain political economy in a way that is amusing and, despite its primer structure, profound. My criticism, for example, of Murray Rothbard's magisterial A History of Money and Banking in the United States (2002) is its belief that money has overriding objective value. The information Rothbard provides is astonishing and truly enlightening, but his narrative prose shows he misses the forest for the trees. Varoufakis' book, again in primer mode, and with analogies to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Star Trek, and films such as The Matrix and V for Vendetta, demolishes that belief. Money and banking are almost always political, and that is why, in the end, Varoufakis echoes Naomi Klein and others who say the issue for the rest of this century is democratizing economic decision-making. For Varoufakis, the issue is restoration of what he recognizes as experiential value and to not reduce everything to exchange value. He shows, with real examples, with theories applied to everyday occurrences, and with again an understanding of how pop culture stories may help us navigate our modern world, why this is a project for millennials and digital kids to pursue. Varoufakis' daughter is a few years younger than The Daughter, and I can bet his daughter yawned at the prospect of reading this, too. But now that I have read it, I am going to push this on her for a summer read next summer. It will inoculate The Daughter even further than her own training at UMF (University of Mitchell Freedman) against libertarian nostrums. :)
If someone asked me, who living today would I most like to meet, it would be Yanis Varoufakis. He is, for me, truly remarkable. He is an incarnation of Alexander Hamilton, but, due to the high development of international banking over two centuries, he is the bankers' bete noir. And because of that, Varoufakis ends up more like Rousseau--brilliant and able to move in and among the elite, but someone not trusted by the elite, and therefore unable to directly influence and change current policy. Varoufakis keeps fighting, though. One way he keeps fighting, besides writing books and articles, and appearing at various forums, is his promotion of his new organization, DiEM25, which seeks to reform the EU, not destroy it, and not to "leave" it. Here is Varoufakis with British Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, in August 2018. Varoufakis recognizes the need for people to culturally want to protect their borders, but he sees economic integration as the key to world people's salvation, environmentally and for other creatures, and not merely for human well being.
5. I read A.B. Yehoshua's The Lover last month, and it was, as usual for me, a wonderful, thoughtful, and poignant experience. Yehoshua writes for those in middle age, and he is truly a Faulkner for Israeli and Jewish readers. He shows the burden of what may properly be called Israel's version of settler colonialism within the story of individual lives. This particular novel takes place in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Within the plot lines, Yehoshua traverses the way in which Arabs and Jews live with each other, even as there is terrorism and colonialism intertwined within the larger society. A nation of oppressed victims fighting each other, and living with each other. I then immediately read another early novel from Yehoshua, Mr. Mani, which was a less enjoyable novel. It is a multi generational novel that shows in a creative way how oppressed families move from place to place, and how the trouble is never really left behind. I think the book sounds better to me now that I have described it, but I found the prose did not sparkle the way it has for me in other Yehoshua novels. Still, I think younger people may like this novel and The Lover because, in far more than his later novels, here his young people speak loudly and clearly, and often drive important parts of the narratives.
I am thinking there are other books I've read in the past two months, but I think this is more than enough navel gazing literary endeavoring for now.
