Final thoughts on Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries, a year in the making

Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries

1. A friend advised me years ago not to read this book. We were discussing her undergraduate degree, which was in German Language and Literature, and my budding interest in the German language. She described it, not incorrectly, as a pretty uninteresting book that goes on and on and spends more time than you might expect simply reporting the contents of that day's New York Times.

2. This might be the first time I have identified with the older characters rather than the point-of-view one. Some of it is a factor of how the story is told: Cresspahl, the father and then grandfather, is younger than I am when the 1930s portion of the story begins. The fact that he ends up older than me is just the linear passage of time. But it's also because his dilemma is a little more relevant to me: he sees clearly in the early 1930s that Germany will involve itself in another war and pretty clearly not long after that that Germany will lose, and begins planning for it. "Preparing your family for a near-term potentially catastrophic future" is not an idle place to find one's mind these days. 

It was harder to see, initially, that Gesine is doing the same thing with her daughter: in the face of the relentless U.S. propaganda machine, she tries to move Marie into seeing that there's not so much difference between how communist governments handle their people and how the US handles its people; you can stave off a problem for today, even for a long time, but not forever.

3. I did, in the end, learn about the circumstances of how Cresspahl died and how Marie's father became her father (handled circumspectly, as one might expect in a mother talking to their child), but darned if it wasn't in the last 30 pages of 1600.

4. I liked it.

5. The goal of reading this book was to do something very different than I normally do: the book is a series of daily entries over a year, and I read each day in order on the relevant day. (Plus or minus some time for traveling.) I have read many books in many different ways, but this was a first, spending over a year in continuous effort and not letting myself go further ahead. The book leaves a tremendous wake that multiple other novels at the same time do not really fill. I could do this once, I did it, I will never do its like again.

On Dirty Hands and thought experiments more generally

I will admit I have always found the central argument of Michael Walzer's "Political Action: On Dirty Hands" to be compelling. Morality and ethics are different, though related. One can be in a situation where there are no morally acceptable options available; one must still choose. I accept the criticism of ticking time bomb scenarios that they do not occur in real life, that torture in particular is not a reliable route to information. Indeed, the difficulty with most dirty hands scenarios is that people will, inevitably, try to make their decision into not-a-dilemma: there was really only one thing to be done, so it must be ethically and morally right, so there is no need for guilt or bad conscience. 

Over the summer I did a World War II study with my eldest child, and we ran across an example here, beginning at 47:30, about the bombing of Cleves, described by the person who ordered it. It's a pretty straightforward scenario: order the bombing of Cleves and ensure support for the Allied crossing of the Rhine (but also destroy an ancient city and certainly condemn hundreds or thousands of people to death), or decline to order it and let your own troops be killed by enemy soldiers who continue to occupy the well-defensed high ground. In the short excerpt he describes the decision, which seemed easy, and the after-effects that are still with him 20 years later: nightmares, and the feeling of being a murderer. 

Which is to say: the point of dirty hands is that you end up with dirty hands. You are free to do something immoral under duress, but the cost of is forever feeling guilty about something you cannot take back or undo (and you feel guilty because you are guilty). If you refuse, or are unable, to feel bad about what you've done, dirty hands can't apply.

Reading updates

I have completely turned over the books I've been reading. I suppose I will have more to say on Anniversaries, a book I spent over a year reading, but not right now. The new lineup:

Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol. 2

...and God help me, I will finish Buddenbrooks before I run out of renewals at the library. Thomas Mann, king of novels I like in theory but kind of dislike in practice (cf. The Magic Mountain, but especially Doktor Faustus, a novel which very much should have been my jam but left me with little afterlife except a yearlong exploration of Beethoven piano sonatas).

...we are mostly back on our famous European novels bullshit; the Proust is an attempt to up my reading pace and actually finish the series; the Weiss is entirely about the difficulty of climbing up a sheer wall of text with perhaps four or five paragraph breaks over 300+ pages.

Poetry seems to have fizzled out for the moment, though I do think there's something to be said for returning to some things previously experienced at too high a tempo--I come back to, say, Emily Dickinson and Sujata Bhatt for a reason, might as well see what's new there five years on. Drama too--I have a long list from Bluesky of contemporary American plays worth diving into, but finding any of them in print is difficult, much less anything written by those authors. But I will eventually find a solution there, as I often do.

The pendulum is due to swing back to Japan, I think: more has come out in translation and it'll be worth it to revisit what I have read in order to identify gaps. But for now it's still Hot Austrian Summer (I held off on Elfriede Jelinek's Women as Lovers because it Had A Gimmick, but alas, it was good. Unfortunately all of her other translated novels seem to be...unpalatable.).

A question, to be taken seriously: is this all just inner emigration?

Vegas

Because we have family there, I have ended up spending a lot of time over the last few years in Vegas. I don't gamble and have adopted the attitude of the locals so I avoid the Strip. Against all odds, I find the city to have a certain undeniable charm.

1. Yes, the existence of Vegas at its current size is an affront to God and a sign of the hubris of man. Stipulated. It's in the middle of the desert, for one. Spend enough time in various American deserts and you'll recognize some differences: Phoenix is similar, but is such an eerie red that an incoming flight does feel, briefly, like you might be landing on Mars. Vegas is just brown. The city had water use issues before the current ones, and a flight in from the east lets you see just how depleted Lake Mead is for yourself. It's not that no one should live there, just many fewer people than currently do.

On the other hand, "an affront to God and a sign of the hubris of man" is a reasonable description of a lot of places humans live. Berlin and Washington DC are both built on swamps; New Orleans and the Netherlands (and lots of other places) are infill, reclaimed land, and elaborate systems to keep water away from places technically below sea level; Miami in a lot of places is poorly built on a sinking foundation; we inhabit lots of places too cold or too hot to survive without extensive environmental manipulation; most cities now are designed around cars. The disadvantage of Vegas here is that it is new so it's considerably harder to pretend it has always been this way.

2. It also has the problems inherent to any growing city in the US, specifically that horizontal growth will continue for as long as there's money to fund it, and money can always be found for horizontal growth. Vegas sprawls out. But I've seen actual uninhabitable desert turned into planned communities far away from Phoenix for people craving the exurb lifestyle (like, across the street is miles of desert and a railway in the distance), and here in NC we have been trading out forest for subdivisions since I arrived 20+ years ago. (10 years ago, we briefly looked at a house that backed up on a forest adjacent to a major road; I told the realtor I liked the house but was worried that the land would eventually be developed; he told me it was too hilly and too close to a flood plane to ever be developed; it is now a subdivision.) 

3. Even with all this, the city has a certain charm I find hard to deny: it has streets in a grid-like orientation, it has endless strip malls and subdivisions each of which were certainly intended to be as far into the desert as anyone would go; I am there at most twice a year and every time it's a little different because of the construction. So tooling around the city reminds me, fondly, of my misspent youth riding around all day in cars with my friends. So much of it is No Place, but my hometown was a No Place, too, and I love it still.

The mountains and nature areas are real, substantial, and interesting; all those strip malls contain a wide variety of world cuisines to support various populations that have made Vegas home; the city loves a diner (LA-style, with varying levels of Mexican or Mexican-American authenticity). Many of these benefits are more theoretical than actualized; the family will put up with a long afternoon at the bird sanctuary or lion habitat but not go hiking in the mountains; palates are limited and so, therefore, are dining options; but they remain there all the same--Lotus of Siam will be there waiting for us when the time is right, and so will Red Rock Canyon.

On Not Having Opinions

Changes in my political and aesthetic worldview were already underway, but the thing that ended up doing a lot of the work was something I adopted for unrelated reasons: I stopped having (or at least expressing) opinions on things I hadn't experienced firsthand. The urge to have a take on everything can be strong, and once you have a take it might as well be a strong one, and in this way one can easily end up with opinions whose strength far outstrips one's experience or the merits. Deciding to stop had two positive outcomes: in the short term, I found less motivation to have opinions on things that didn't interest me (I have no opinions on any comic book movie since the first Avengers because I have seen none of them); in the longer term, it provides some fresh areas to revisit when I do feel like developing an opinion (I still do not like the Beatles, but I reconfirm that opinion after listening to them, not out of the air). It's a lot harder to be a reactionary when you have to confront the thing you're reacting against and consider it on its own terms.

I will admit in frankness that I just don't get it

..."it' in this case being Radiohead's entire output from Kid A on. There's no real reason why I shouldn't: I like plenty of bands and musicians with questionable vocal quality (lookin' at you, Bob Dylan); I too like Krautrock, Can especially; I like riff-heavy multi-guitar work (I have *opinions* on At Fillmore East); I like odd time signatures, dissonance and emphasis on rhythmic elements (thank you, Bitches' Brew); I don't even mind the overt political elements (hi, R.E.M.). But overall it comes off as try-hard and inauthentic in a way I can't quite put my finger on.

Speaking of popular things I did not like as a bit at first but then became an actual opinion: still don't like the Beatles. Bailed halfway through Let It Be, unable to continue any further. A fine band to like at the age of 12, but probably one to eventually grow out of.

"I got a Community notification for this?"

Community, seasons 5 and 6

Times I have given up on Community, a show that is A Lot for good and ill:

1. Original run: the season 4 episode set in "Pierce's mansion" which is clearly a lightly decorated version of the main community college set.
2. Original run: the season 5 "MeowMeow Beans" episode; also the weird G.I. Joe parody.
3. In 2020, desperate for literally anything to watch: probably somewhere around "Pillows and Blankets"

I would not have guessed that this show had it in itself to produce a relatively normal, much less good, final episode, but it did. The relatively younger adults are all set free to go and find themselves in the world, and the relatively older adults, all mostly friendless kind-of failures, find some others to understand and appreciate them. It's not happiness, but it's direction and stability. It could be worse.

(The comp for the last episode, for me, is the finale of You're the Worst, a show that was good for one season, okay for another, and then got and stayed kind of bad until somehow nailing the appropriate tone and content for an ending.)