Dan
This is a great, dazzling book. I would recommend it to anyone. It was my first experience with Borges and when I was finished I ordered another book of his.
I grabbed this book for free at the Book Thing knowing nothing about it. I was looking to learn more about education as a secondary teacher. Interestingly, Russell spends most of the book discussing principles for early childhood and the forming of character. This made it for me a book much more about parenting than about teaching. He has a lot of insights but some of it is rather particular to England in the 1920s for a person with sufficient means to employ maids and chefs, and send their children to boarding schools. You also see elements that are badly out of date (possibly most jarringly the positive use of the word “eugenics”). If you can get past these moments there are a lot of things I found valuable.
I'm skeptical of attempts to cut out the middleman of an editor by releasing an “author's cut” (aka an early unfinished draft) of a work with an established reputation like Look Homeward Angel. So I read LHA in its more common version, but afterwards checked this out from the library out of curiosity, and read the prologue and skimmed some of the rest. I'm not going to reread the whole thing, but if I had it to do over my sense is that I may have enjoyed this version more, if some of the cuts in the 20s were out of concern for contemporary sensitivities on sex and religion. The editors of this version are being a little self serving by saying their own work is superior to the originally published one, but alas, they may be right.
At the same time when I read LHA I never wished for it to be longer. Approach with caution, I guess. From having also read Proust, my sense is that Wolfe falls short of the same sort of project (but kudos to his ambition, at least), and suffers today from being less readable than Hemingway, Steinbeck, or Fitzgerald, and in comparison with the greater body of work of Faulkner, but also generally from how Americans today don't read a lot of literary books, period (including myself). And while occasionally the descriptions of “Niggertown” read like Wolfe merely describing the scene of his own childhood with a clear eye, on plenty of other occasions the racist ugliness is quite clearly Wolfe's own.
I would not go to any real amount of effort to find a copy of this but I suppose it is interesting as one of the first “graphic novels.”
A comprehensive review of the work of my favorite director. I spent a lot of 2019 going through his films. I have seen almost all of the ones that were filmed with sound. A lot of the silent films are lost. If you are curious, Good Morning is a good place to start.
I read the unabridged 1,266 page version of the book, as somewhat of a challenge to myself. I'm not writing my thoughts on it unless someone wants to pay me to, because they go all over the place.
This book answers a lot of questions I had about Maryland before, during, and after the Civil War. I went into it knowing some things about how it wasn't really allowed to join the Confederacy by force. The military occupied parts of the state and Lincoln put people in jail, like the mayor of Baltimore, until the secessionists gave up (also, many of them went south and joined the confederate army, which adds one person to the army there but takes away a person clamoring for secession back home). Geographically if you have the president and the congress in Washington, you can't have them surrounded on all sides by enemy territory, and with the Potomac in the way, Virginia is less important than Maryland (although troops very quickly occupied Arlington, including Robert E. Lee's house, so that nobody could fire on Washington from there, and that's why eventually you have a national cemetery built there).
A bunch of questions remain though. Why did Maryland have the largest free black population in the country from 1810-1860? In what ways was Maryland a slave society comparable to the deeper south, or what made it unique? How did slavery come to an end in Maryland?
I had taken a tour a few years ago of the Hampton site outside of Towson and had imagined that Baltimore County was a place where large-scale slave operations like Hampton were common, but according to Fields that was a strong exception. Northern Maryland was much more commonly free black labor, white labor (including immigrants), and slavery where it existed was on average one slave per owner, not large plantations. This book goes into heavy detail about what types of crops were being made where. That's important to help understand why conditions were the way they were in different parts of the state, dividing it into thirds: north, south, and the eastern shore, with different crops and industries and therefore different types of labor.
I have long been interested in Reconstruction, and Maryland only got a half assed sort of Reconstruction, even as a former slave state, because it was a Union state, thus not subject to the military post-war occupation of the confederacy as directed at first by Congress over the objections of Andrew Johnson, then through the Grant presidency. Fields tells that story. I look forward to using this to the extent I'm able, in history classes I teach in the state.
If you are interested in the beginnings of integration in Baltimore, in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, this is an important book. It's too simple to conceive of the “Civil Rights Movement” as something that mainly took place in the 60s and then ended, although perhaps not by readers who would take the time to look into a work like this one. I for one as a Baltimore resident was interested in the particulars of how, say, the municipal golf courses in the city of Baltimore came to be desegregated.
Great woodcut drawings, although the story in the later Ward woodcut novels becomes increasingly obscure
This is a book that focuses more on the military service itself (as it acknowledges) and less on the broader picture than I would have preferred. In that way it can be a little slow because a lot of the military service that black troops performed was fatigue duty. Fatigue duty may not be as interesting as other responsibilities, either for the troops themselves at the time or for you to read about, but it's necessary to have a functioning military. The truth is that the United States won the Civil War when it did because black men served in the military and slaves fled to Union lines and assisted their armies, and refused to help the Confederate war effort. The confederate economy needed its slaves to survive and it died when enough of those slaves both refused to help and helped their enemies. The best articulation of this dynamic came from W.E.B. Du Bois in chapters 4 and 5 of Black Reconstruction.
If you want to know the particulars of what specific black regiments were doing during the war, this is a very interesting, detailed read, and perhaps the extensive bibliography will point you in other directions that will be fun to follow.
Sure the intelligence agencies lied to them, but there is a ton of juicy material here, and the basic facts of the story are plausible while also very odd. See previous review of giant Bugliosi tome for my overall thoughts there.
A miserably dishonest, contemptible book, where a sitting governor congratulates himself for how good a job he has done facing down the COVID-19 global pandemic. To hit bookshelves in July 2020, he leaves things at “In early May, the COVID numbers were finally beginning to plateau in Maryland.” THE END!
Stay tuned for a longer piece about this book and more to be published somewhere off GoodReads.
Casino is one of my favorite films in part because it takes a complicated hidden world (the Las Vegas casinos, sportsbooks, the mob) and takes you inside how they operate. The book of course only goes further into these things.
Difficult to read because of the heavy dialect, but the stories are entertaining. It's interesting to see the frame stories where Chesnutt presents himself as a white northern interpreter of these tales.
I loved this book for its honesty and willingness to explore its ideas without fear of sounding ridiculous. For example: How does a husband adapt to his wife's rape and trauma in terms of his own desires for her and the threat he himself may pose to her for violence, sexual or otherwise? How can a liberal minded white woman react to her assault by an unidentified black man without demonizing any black man passing by on the street?
It explains so well why so many victims of rape wish to remain anonymous and decline to press charges (if the option is even available to them), in part because they wish to maintain their identity as non-victims to their friends, families, and the wider world. For so many, the wounds remain internal and we are unknowingly surrounded by sufferers of sexual violence and living in places where it has happened.
I can understand why some of the book's willingness to risk being off-putting might succeed with some readers at being so. From my perspective as someone who has not personally been assaulted, it was helpful to have a reporter from the same perspective exploring how one attack rippled out through the lives of his wife, children, friends, and community. There are many levels of privilege (a white family, living in Hyde Park, summers in Vermont) and thankfully they are discussed with openness and self-consciousness, with understanding of how sexual violence, violence, poverty exist elsewhere (public housing in Chicago; Bosnia).
Kalven and Evans did not ultimately flee the city. The reason I heard of him and his book (which is from 1999, 11 years after the assault) was because he was part of the successful agitation to have the dash-cam video of the police murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald released to the public in 2015.
This is a very nice compilation volume if you are interested in early to mid 20th century woodcut novels. I think this was my favorite of the Lynd Ward ones I've read (although Gods Man has the advantage of being a very simple story to follow; here the art is better, and I kind of like the quality the more complicated ones have of not being easily translatable into words), and the Patri and Hyde ones are also excellent (the Masereel one seems more primitive but it was clearly influential on the rest), and there are thoughtful short essays accompanying the selection.
A childhood Dahl fan, after catching a sampling of Dahl's adult short stories as a young adult and particularly the two concerning Uncle Oswald (“The Visitor” and “Bitch”) which are both lousy, I was never motivated to read the Oswald novel. (Oswald seems to have gotten his name–at least in print–not long after the JFK assassination, if you want to read anything into that.) After reading the recent NYRB essay about Dahl's life and works, I thought I might as well get this one from the library and give it a quick run through. I also knew some details of the main plot, Oswald's scheme to retrieve, cold-store, and then sell the sperm of famous men, and that one of the men was Marcel Proust. So as a Proust fan I was curious what Dahl's portrayal of him would be.
It turns out that it is not as shitty as his worst work, but pretty close. Some of it is amusing. The best level on which the book works is as the story of an extremely stupid caper. Unfortunately the caper is rather simple to pull off, and more or less occurs the same way with every individual they steal the sperm from. Dahl (or his editor) seems to realize this and starts skipping through them quickly instead of fully narrating them all.
Dahl seems to be fascinated with the idea of a chemical that could cause a man to uncontrollably rape the nearest woman, and to think that this concept contains a lot of comedic potential, as a prank played on the very stuffiest, most respectable of men. In “Bitch” this is a perfume and in the Oswald novel it is an ingested powder. In this comic universe, arousal works on a scale something like a dog's supposed bite threshold; pass the threshold of too much arousal and one simply proceeds to violent rape. One gets a hint of Dahl's sexual inclinations when he has Oswald the lothario relate his preference to only sleep with a woman once, in a bender-like fashion, and then part ways sexually forever, no matter how satisfying the one experience was. Dahl seems to not contemplate (or at least doesn't have his narrator Oswald do so) that the arousal-rape powder is a gender-flipped portrayal of a date rape drug, replacing numbness/incapacity with uncontrollable sexual aggression, but that the mission in effect still involves a woman going around and raping George Bernard Shaw, Sigmund Freud, etc., any time she gives the man the drug.
There is some effort made at historical plausibility. It seems like the year of the caper, 1919, was chosen to allow Dahl to include his thoughts about as many Great Men of the early 20th century as possible (obviously it couldn't have taken place during the war); Proust died in 1922, Puccini in 1924, etc., Renoir in late 1919 itself. To quibble with some aspects of the Proust chapter, it portrays him as anti-Semitic (at best debatable; Proust himself was half Jewish by lineage and writes at length about anti Semitism and the Dreyfus affair within his novel), and Oswald is knowledgable about his writing about homosexuality, which he didn't really pursue until the fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time, published in 1921 and 1922, the year he died.
I didn't read this when it was assigned in 11th grade English, too preoccupied with how “smart” I was for managing to get by in grade school while not doing the work. In college I read Tender is the Night and enjoyed it and still never picked up Gatsby, while knowing the story. Now at age 30, Nick's age in 1922, I went on a hike in Virginia and decided to take along a book that would not weigh very much. I'm impressed by how much it diverged from how much I “knew” about it from class discussion, plot summaries, and friends' descriptions of seeing the Luhrmann film.
I read three of these four stories previously in a different compilation, none of which was very good. Switcheroo tries to back out of being nothing but an extended rape fantasy with its “twist” but doesn't really succeed. The only one I hadnt read was The Last Act and when I grabbed this from the library after reading the recent NYRB essay on Dahl I thought I might as well read it to be thorough. It's bad.
A lot of essays I read have a vaguely superficial feeling to them, like the writer is on the right track, but didn't pursue it far enough before publishing. Tolentino is a writer with whom you feel, oh, she went there. The few occasions when she doesn't (her parents' legal troubles, Hillary Clinton) stick out because she's doing it the rest of the time. She is especially strong when writing about the internet, social media, and sexual violence.
This is a highly recommended read if you are a nonbeliever who nevertheless has ever felt some amount of disappointment at the supernatural stories of the church of your youth not being true, or are somewhat baffled and disturbed by the idea of your permanent death (or that of your loved ones), having only known your own consciousness, even if it's comprehensible that you didn't exist before you were born, and eternal life doesn't really make sense. The only of the mid 2000s public atheists I really enjoyed was Christopher Hitchens, and even he I think fell well short of the “well, now what?” question. This book isn't really in dialogue with him as much as the entire history of philosophy, which can occasionally read as sort of pompous (e.g., “I unlock a new understanding of Marx's theory of value,” etc.), but goes along with his thesis. Marx already wrote his books. It is our privilege as those living afterwards to not have to reinvent the wheel. Our task as the people who are alive now is to take the ideas, the causes forward.
Some questions he takes a rather detailed look at. When we evince a desire to not die, what might “eternal life” or “infinity” actually look like? (I love the Who's song “Heaven and Hell” which describes the cartoon version in an unironic way: “On top of the sky is a place where you go if you've done nothing wrong, And down in the ground is a place where you go if you've been a bad boy.” ... of course this book goes well past that idea.) Is there any way that it could ever make sense to us? He says no; in his term it is “unintelligible” and undesirable. Not for nothing does the Twilight Zone present hell as a place where you always win at cards. Moreover the logic even makes the idea of being a God an undesirable thing (“An infinite being cannot value anything and cannot lead a spiritual life, since nothing is urgent and nothing is at stake”), which fit with some portrayals in the Bible (messing around with Job because he's bored?) or in Homer (the rather silly scenes in the Iliad of some of the gods attempting to fight on the battlefield have much less dignity than the battles between the mortals, and their immortality is what makes it so silly) and much other literary portrayal of gods. The finite life we have is not just the hand we've been dealt, so take it and don't complain, but rather necessary for meaning.
Once you get past that, how should we live, either as individuals (not really possible in a pure sense, he argues–even a person who chooses to live alone in the woods has a social understanding of their isolation ... but you do have to make choices about what to care about and commit yourself to. Ed Tom in “No Country for Old Men” describes this as “A man would have to put his soul at hazard.”) or as a society? And through a very careful logical structure, Hagglund arrives at democratic socialism, not as a better political program than another in the way that blueberries are better than blackberries, but as a true prerequisite for every person to be able to live their own life in freedom.
I have long considered myself a socialist, but I hadn't gone so far as to ever read the likes of Marx or Hegel, both of which struck me if only by reputation as too recondite to be useful primary texts for a broader political understanding for non specialists or any sort of practical organizing of and with one's fellow citizens. (I did read Marx's thing about religion as “the opium of the people” and skimmed my way through the Communist Manifesto in college, but that's it, I believe.) Hagglund does a nice job of explicating Marx and Hegel and many others and in using their ideas to build from. I don't know if this means I will ever run out and read the Phenomenology of Spirit, but it's more likely than it was last month. I would like some more practical ideas about how to bring about democratic socialism, but part of Hagglund's point is that it has to be democratic. Neither he or anyone else can swoop in with the best plan and force it upon anyone else.
Combining this with “The Jakarta Method,” another recent read, part of the landscape of fascists and capitalists we see in 2021 is a legacy of the mass murder and repression of would-be socialists and communists in the 20th century. Simply put, what did the western states encourage to grow and multiply and what did they work to weed out? (possibly with more success than we can really even understand, because we can only have a very dim and unfalsifiable sense of all the things that didn't happen as a result.) Hagglund perceptively notes, writing of Martin Luther King, “the murder of King belongs to a number of murders of socialist organizers in the 1960s.” It makes sense that if democracy is socialist, that the response of the capitalists and fascists is increasingly going to be to attack democracy itself. https://popula.com/2020/12/09/yes-democracy-is-socialism/ It makes comprehensible the growth of the reactionary right to be more openly white supremacist and to seek to wield power through minority rule and violence. Will the response to a regrowth of socialists in the 21st century be more 1960s-scale mass murder, or worse? I suppose we'll see. We live in interesting times!
The trends we're on aren't good. Credit to him for not pretending there are easy solutions, but this is a masterful diagnosis.