Currently reading: an 80s classic and more

Jay McInerny, Bright Lights Big City
You approach this one with some trepidation. Somewhere in the back of your head, you have the idea that you don't like the author, possibly by association: he didn't like DFW, right? (He wrote a pretty favorable review of Infinite Jest, so that's not it.) Maybe he was too nice to DFW? He might've been part of that clique of overrated writers from Bennington, who wrote ponderous tomes of dubious quality, like American Psycho or The Secret History? (He was not.) Maybe you remember him from your parents' bookshelves, and associate him with fads of the 80s? In any event, you know his book is about a writer (strike one) in NYC (strike two) who does a lot of coke (strike three) in the 80s (strike four. What sport are we playing?). And you will refrain from saying anything about the author's weird narrative conceit, which reminds you unfavorably of novels of that period (The Mezzanine) that try too hard to be clever. You know it's going to be a big book, and a slog, but you figure you should be open to trying new things.

What you find is not a big book, but a small one. You expect bombast but it's a fairly reasonable catalogue of actual human emotions. The parts that seem overwrought--the drugs, the poor treatment of women--come to have an explanation in the twist, and the twist feels earned and, for once, as though it provides a sort of reasoning for the personal dissolution taking place in the book. The novel indulges in some misogyny but, unusually, lets the women involved have some amount of agency and dignity. You find it to be a hard book to hate, and leave yourself open to the possibility it might even be a book you love.

Hilary Leitcher, Temporary
As a reader I have begun to come around to the idea that the success of a novel depends on whether it does the thing it sets out to do. I have lately been putting whether I like said novel to the side as a relatively uninteresting question--I should probably write on this at some point. I Who Have Never Known Men was not a novel I particularly liked but largely because it seemed to need to violate its own rules to keep the plot moving along--it perhaps somewhat lacked the courage of its convictions. Temporary sticks to its guns: there's little to no explanation of the process by which one becomes a Temporary and the metaphysical turn that comes late when it becomes clear what it means to be allowed to become Permanent moves it perhaps into fairy tale or myth. It's not an unpleasant read, playing out like a longer version of a Cesar Aira conceit, though I will confess to being somewhat unclear at the end about What It All Meant; but perhaps, like a Cesar Aira story, the narrative is itself its own justification for being.

Currently reading: just checking in edition

Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries
It took almost a year and 1200 pages, but I've finally begun to lose track of the minor characters. There's been a shift for the last 200 pages--no dead characters coming back to talk with the narrator--and so we're left with a teenager's recollections of what 1946 was like. The recollections, like all of ours, are a mix of things she saw and noticed at the time with the addition of things she knows to have been true, and as a result a bit of the focus is lost. The stakes are also unclear: preparing for and surviving war are comprehensible; the outcome of municipal elections do not have as clear stakes. (I think the implication of all this business is that the Soviets are attempting to get the East Germans to do what they want without explicitly instructing them, for the resonances with Prague in '68, but this has not developed yet.)

George Eliot, Middlemarch
The one-chapter-a-day-to-finish-in-three-months system has, as predicted, allowed me to get past secondhand embarrassment at Dorothea's poor decision-making, but it has alas reminded me of all the other young people also making poor decisions. But it's a good reminder that Eliot has the authorial and narrative presence that so many other narrated novels (movies, tv shows) wish they had but do not. If it weren't for the length and density of the books, Eliot would be a perfect author for the stereotypical gen z reader: she will tell you exactly what she thinks about everything.

Heinrich Böll, Collected Stories
The "literature of the rubble" is as advertised, painting what one feels to be a accurate portrait of what it must have been like to live as a former soldier of a defeated and shamed nation, and manages to do so without incurring any sympathy at all for the people who more or less knew what they were doing. The Train Was on Time does what it says on the tin, and while it has a certain thinness, it is a novella, and so effective as long as you're not expecting a novel. But the literature of the rubble gives way to just plain literature, and the success or failure of the stories depends on whether the hook is any good--metier is no help.

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks
Over time, you read enough novels and you can pick up the themes--so this is another multi-generational story of familial decline that is meant to throw light onto Germany's decline as a country and empire. I liked Doktor Faustus but was a bit cooler toward The Magic Mountain, so I guess we'll see.

Watchmen

Alan Moore, Watchmen
It is a hard book to think about clearly, in the first place because it originates a number of tropes that then entered the world and have been done many times, both better and worse. In the second place, the sheer volume of edgy superheroes makes it difficult to evaluate fairly. I grew tired of superheroes around 2012, it's been a rough decade plus.

I thought pretty well of it halfway through, and was disappointed at the end in a way hard to pinpoint. It was good when the characters were whirring and there was one clear overarching narrative, but then Rorschach gets unmasked and it becomes about too many different things, none of which get full enough attention. But even when something does get full attention, it doesn't get enough development--there might be something to be said for the dynamics of abuse and affection, but it's not said, or the ways parents and children recreate generational trauma, but that's not said either.

But no, the real problem is the ending: a giant squid-alien is teleported to Manhattan and kills half the people, and we are to believe that this somehow brings the world together? And that the cynical heroes are willing to accept the lie of it? 

If you are a certain kind of white person (not exclusively American, cf the Beatles' "Revolution") who made in through the 80s and 90s and 00s, you may well have practiced or continue to practice a politics of nostalgia and cynicism: there once was a time we were united as a people, but we are not now; there once was a time we never had to think about politics, everyone just got along with their neighbors; people who talk about changing things for the better, especially through the government, are best treated derisively because don't you know this is just how things are and it's foolish to try and change them? And thereby the treatment of all of one's life in public as a kind of status positioning game, where you win by caring the least.

And at the bottom, that's what seems to be going on in Watchmen. It acts and looks like cynicism born of experience and trying to hold itself above the fray, but really it's just a baseline contempt for people and a belief in their stupidity. (Ah, but don't you see it's a meta-commentary on people who look to superheroes for their moral clarity, forgetting they're just people and as stupid and brutal as anyone else? Sure, but why write a comic book about it?) It tries to position itself with a certain level of sophistication, but at bottom it's childish and naive; it relies on the reader to supply ideas and context that just aren't there.

And the truth of the matter for me is that even as the world seems increasingly grim, my general faith in and interest in people remains high, and perhaps even increases. I can find plenty of both of those made in correct proportions. Heck, there's even a superhero made just for this attitude: his name's Superman.

On AI

A long time ago the Wirecutter used to review some piece of tech--smart tvs, maybe?--and would note that of course they came with inconvenient ads and surveillance. First it would show up in reviews as a valid concern to be addressed seriously, and then it was treated with some well-of-course-what-did-you-expect handwaving, and eventually it moved to "objecting to your tv trying to learn as much as possible about you is stupid, stop complaining about it" before being dropped entirely. Of course you must put up with surveillance, what else are you going to do? So now my tv tries to collect data on me, it will occasionally freeze and restart itself while I am watching it, and occasionally the buttons on the remote won't do anything at all. A very clear step back that I guess people pretend not to notice because of some nominal convenience?

There's a certain amount of AI hype that feels exactly like this. Of course people are going to use it, of course people aren't going to look too closely at what it outputs, of course the only way to get an answer to your question is to do a bunch of matrix algebra and waste amazing amounts of power and water. There are some obvious responses--if you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?--but it's extending even beyond this. I had an interview recently with a company that wanted their HR function to create AI agents to coach managers, and considered making these to be one of its highest priorities. If you work in HR you know there's a baseline contempt for everyone else in the company that is shocking, bordering in some cases on active hatred, but this seems one step further: I do not even want to pretend like I'm putting in the effort to fake writing something that you won't read; I will not interact with you and I want you to know that. The entire thing feels hostile to being human.

The inevitability of it is pitched to make you feel like resistance is useless, but there's still (for now) a world out there and still some merit in knowing about it and how to live in it. I'm not a doomsayer and I'm not predicting a tech apocalypse, but you might be better off having options about what you can do in the future.

A Pride Month Meditation

In the summer of 1998, I was frequently followed by a truck filled with half a dozen slightly older teenagers who would harass me and yell homophobic slurs at me. Once a week or slightly more often, they'd follow me as I walked for 10 or 15 minutes, cross sides of the road to yell at me more closely, or buzz around the neighborhood to try and surprise me. They may have explicitly threatened me--I have lost distinct memory here in the mists of time--but the threat of violence, even if implicit, was understood.

I had a paper route, but the logistics of the paper meant I worked in another part of my neighborhood and had about a mile to walk between my house and my route. This was in general a good thing, a lot of unstructured time in the afternoons and weekend mornings where nobody expected anything of me. It also made me an easy target, since I would be walking the same way to the same place every day.

It was also not the first time any of this had happened: I was a thin teenager with long hair, a sibilant 's', and no girlfriend; it was the 90s, and casual homophobia was acceptable where I lived.

And it was the summer of 1998: the murder of James Byrd had happened, and Matthew Shepard's murder wasn't too far off in the future. It's hard to explain how it was that a certain level of violence was in the air, and if it wasn't exactly condoned no one was going to try too hard to prevent it. I was certainly aware that a violent kid looking for ideas on how to make trouble could find them easily enough.

I made plans about the easiest way to get away, how far into a block I'd have to run to be able to hide, what I'd do if it was a combination of truck and foot pursuit. I rationalized that they were all talk, or in any event not drunk, or in any event not likely to hurt me to the point of killing me. I always had a constant, low-level doubt that I was exaggerating the threat I was actually under, the twisted logic that I should put up with the risk because [reasoning unclear], and this made the whole situation worse and harder to think about clearly.

And those plans and rationalizations worked to the extent that I could go on. Some part of my brain mused that the fact that I was very (painfully, boringly) straight would make my death ironic; it would not save me.

***

My education in political theory and philosophy, and the fights between various Christian sects, taught me to respect first principles. It has never been a matter of love. In college I took a seminar in which the professor tried to demonstrate how one could go from the law of non-contradiction to a full epistemology and theory of knowledge. I have no recollection whether he succeeded or failed. In theology, partisans love to argue the historical origins of things and have their own shifting definitions of what constitute the fontes to which we are to ad. In political theory, everybody loves a system that is somewhat impervious to reality.

In the realm of human rights, first principles were always important. In far too many books I read on the subject, getting first principles right mattered so that you could then move onto the most pressing of political and moral issues, establishing that abortion should be illegal or legal. More seriously, first principles are a way of getting out of the dilemma human rights present: no government or people is going to accept all of them, as a practical political matter. So you must choose amongst them, establish your choice to be the correct one, and do your best to ignore the rest. First principles help immensely, and there are more than enough of them to serve whatever purposes you need.

Never mind that no one actually starts at first principles and reasons from them. Everyone starts with their subjective opinions and reasons back to the first principles that establish them; some people erase their footprints from the sand as they go so that they can pretend it's a surprise when they wind up back where they started. I disliked these people most of all.

Experience is subjective. It is messy. It does not admit of only one interpretation. We have know way to establish the truth of it. With enough time and too little documentation, we can write ourselves a false past. (cf Christa Wolf in City of Angels, who managed to forget that she was a Stasi informant for years. I believe her when she says she forgot it. I'd try to forget it, too.)

And for a long time, I was embarrassed that my support of LGBT+ rights only came about because of something that happened to me. I should've had a better, purer start. I'm not even gay! It felt like stolen valor to have this experience, to have had it and to shake it off and enter the realm of the comfortably heterosexual. Sometimes I could even pretend like it hadn't even happened.

But the truth is that I know what it's like to be harassed and threatened because of your sexual orientation. I felt real fear, if only for a little bit. I cannot pretend not to know it. I'm sure my erstwhile tormentors have forgotten it (I know they have: one of them tried to friend me on facebook years ago and included a friendly message), but I never will. 

And everything else builds around that.

***

For a long time I've carried that experience in my heart and mind. Not being entirely sure you're safe. Not knowing how much danger you're in. It creates in me a very strong reaction to not want anyone else to have to experience that, and a rising desire to protect other people like the first very strong feeling I had on becoming a father--a realm of tenderness and care inside, a hard shell to fight off any threats from outside. 

For awhile, it seemed like this energy was unneeded, the tide was rising, people were moving toward broad acceptance to let other people do with their lives as they wanted. On small, personal issues I could keep things aligned: no, you don't treat your brother any differently if he's gay, what kind of person would you be if you did? yes, you knew your friend was a lesbian when you befriended her, it's wrong to stop now because she doesn't wide to hide that anymore. Long before the official view realigned, I would move away from people for whom these things were a question at all. 

My opinion changed in large part by watching a calculated act of political cowardice and recognizing it for what it was: Obama declining to endorse gay marriage in 2012, when an amendment banning it was up for a vote in North Carolina, a state Obama wanted very much to win again. It was obvious that he supported gay marriage as a general proposition, and only cold political calculus would lead him to do otherwise. I voted against the amendment even though it won, and from then on I marched to the left on that issue.

Well, the tide seems like it might be receding. I have not too much interest in whether it is or not. But it's time for me to stand publicly for the things I believe in: the essential dignity of all persons, their right to make their own choices about their lives and bodies, the right everyone has to live free from the fear that someone else wants to hurt or kill them for any of those choices. The world can be a scary place but I will not allow it to harden me, the place where I am will be safe.

Recent reading

Willa Cather, My Ántonia
Just an absolutely beautiful book, and beautifully written. It might require a certain midwesternness to appreciate, but the wandering, the gradually unfolding intellectual life, the sweetness of regret and memory, all of it very, very good.
And of course one off-note, very racist chapter with a visiting black piano player. I think it was intended to be beautiful, too, but the question remains--how can the author have been so sensitive to the small but meaningful differences between people, Bohemian and Austrian, city and country, destined to be married and destined to be single--and no curiosity at all about someone because of their skin color? As long as I live I will never understand it.

Joseph Heller, Catch-22
A book I read in maybe 8th grade? I remembered Major Major Major, that I found it humorous, and pretty much nothing else. Its twist is not really much of one, in the end--Yossarian is traumatized when he cannot cleanly hide the reality of war and death and never recovers. There is something about this happening to an American, and in The Good War, too: there's an active and longstanding European literature on the horrors of war, but not much of an American one.
The humor is, as it happens, a bit of a gimmick: not just the perverse incentives of people who fight wars, but the structure of the paragraphs, so many smash cuts between "x will never happen, I swear it!" and "alright, x is going to happen".
I begrudge this book not at all--at the time I first read it the subject matter was beyond me, and now that I know the subject matter better, I am beyond it. But not a bad first place to begin. Especially if the goal is to gradually introduce to the average reader the idea that America might be wrong about some things, and perhaps that there is a level of violence that is never justified.

A small note on parenting

I've never understood parents who long for or miss the days when their kids were little. Leaving aside the complexities of caring for small children, they turn into such interesting people!

Sly and The Family Stone

In contrast to the Beach Boys, Sly and the Family Stone were often reduced to a singles act but produced at least two classic albums, Stand! and There's a Riot Goin' On. Their superstar-making performance at Woodstock, below, is the rare 60s performance that's as good as advertised, and it becomes clear that some of those earlier singles, like "M'Lady" here, are poorly served by the studio format. And this is to say nothing of "Hot Fun In the Summertime", still a personal favorite, and "Thank You". Even in the 70s, as Sly's ability to consistently turn out music declines, his albums are full of good-to-great music (another personal favorite: "If You Want Me to Stay"). 

Not unlike Brian Wilson, drug problems and mental health problems curtailed the most active phase of his career, but there's still a wide catalogue to pull from.