Backland

Kings

I’ve just finished the Books of Kings in Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible. This consists primarily of brief accounts of kings who get murdered and supplanted by other kings who get murdered and supplanted (few die natural deaths). Intermixed with these are the strange stories of Elijah and Elisha, prophets quite different from others since they perform miracles (and lots of them). These stories are full of oddities: at one point a large group of boys taunts Elisha so he has a bear kill them all. Others served as models for the tales of Jesus, including a clear precursor to the Lazarus story. On top of all this are the repetitive Deuteronomistic judgments: every king who came to a bad end was worshiping idols, which seems to be the number-one sin among kings. The book gives a picture of hundreds of years of wars between Israel, Judah, and their various foes, but neither the military nor the succession battles are given much color or interest. Life seems to be nothing but betrayals, combats, and assassinations, with the occasional miracle thrown in.

The Books of Samuel (and more Henry James)

In the Bible, the two books of Samuel are primarily devoted to the stories of Kings Saul and David. They can be a bit opaque; at first reading, it’s often quite difficult to ascertain what exactly is going on.

In 1999, Robert Alter retranslated them, appending the first few chapters of the first book of Kings, and published the whole as The David Story: A Translation with Commentary. That has recently been republished in the The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary. Rarely have I read a more revelatory translation of anything (though I also recently was astonished by Brook Ziporyn’s new, beautifully nuanced, and very thorough translation of Laotse’s Daodejing).

The story is told in the footnotes. They elucidate the meaning behind the characters’ words and actions, and show how the ancient Hebrew does so as well. Alter calls the book Shakespearean in its epic scope and portraits of men in power, and he’s right to do so. Samuel comes off not as a great prophet but a deeply flawed man, David as a cagey politician, Saul as a bit of a fool who becomes mastered by jealousy. I don’t know where else one could find a comparison of the dying David to a mafioso.

At the very end of the book (1 Kings 2:46), Alter writes, “This seemingly formulaic notice at the very end of the story is a last touch of genius by that unblinking observer of the savage realm of politics who is the author of the David story: Solomon’s power is now firmly established. . . . [T]he immediately preceding actions undertaken so decisively and so shrewdly by the young king involve the ruthless elimination of all potential enemies. The solid foundations of the throne have been hewn by the sharp daggers of the king’s henchmen.”

The authors and editors of the book, even though they remain anonymous, also come alive in the translation: we watch as they incorporate earlier writings or add new ones, as they stay true to the actual events or elaborate on them, as they put forward different ideas about God, fate, and man’s power.

I’ve also been reading more Henry James stories. “Covering End” is so embarrassingly awful I couldn’t finish it: it’s an adaptation of a play he wrote, with stale characters and plot, and maddeningly contrived. “In the Cage” is a wonderful story about an unnamed but extremely sharp young woman who works in a Mayfair post office with the telegrams of the rich while suffering from poverty; she’s one of the most compelling characters in any James story, and I wanted her to be the subject of an entire book.

War and Turpentine

I finished reading (actually, listening to) Stefan Hertsman’s novel War and Turpentine yesterday. Although it is billed as a novel, that seems to simply be a label that allows the author some creative license; the book is actually a personal and lightly fictionalized biography of his grandfather, much of it based on the latter’s unpublished memoirs.

Urbain Martien (1891–1981) was a Flemish soldier in World War I and an amateur painter. He went through a horrific childhood of poverty, working as a teenager in iron foundries; his father, a painter, inspired him with the urge to paint, and taught him to revere the painters of the past; he served in the Belgian army throughout the Great War, and the most gripping parts of this novel describe—in first person and excruciating detail—his torturous experiences in the trenches facing the Germans; and he had a great love affair from which he never recovered, and whose consequences were all but devastating.

It is rare to find a biography of a man whose life was altogether inconsequential in the larger sphere of things. Hertsman interpolates much of his own life into the book, describing his search for his great-grandfather’s paintings, for instance, and his own interactions with his grandfather through the years, most of which are steeped in his own guilt. He unobtrusively embellishes biographical details with dreams and private moments. The book has its flaws: bland generalizations are proffered from time to time, and the tone is almost uniformly sombre. But it gave me a window into the lived experience in Europe before, during, and after World War I, and introduced me to a different way of combining biography, memoir, and fiction.

Judges

The Bible’s book of Judges contains two utterly remarkable sections. One is the story of Samson, which is well-known, but the other consists of the last five chapters and is likely the most disheartening chronicle in the Bible. I reread Robert Alter’s remarkable translation and notes this month, and found them greatly illuminating.

Chapters 17 and 18 concern a man named Micah who steals his mother’s silver. She curses the thief, not knowing that it’s her own son. He confesses and gives back the silver. She tries to take back the curse and tells Micah to make a household god out of some of the silver. To minister to this god, Micah hires a young Levite from Bethlehem as his priest, and the man is like a son to him. Micah says, “Now I know that the Lord will deal well with me, for the Levite has become my priest.” Meanwhile, the Danites, a tribe of Jews, are looking for a new place to live, and five of their warriors spend the night at Micah’s. They recognize the Levite from somewhere and he tells them that their mission will be successful. The Danites find a city, Laish, which they feel they can conquer. So they go back to their tribe and bring 600 warriors. On their way to Laish, they stop at Micah’s house again and steal his silver god and convince the Levite priest to come with them. Micah runs after them with some of his friends, but the warriors tell him to be quiet and go home or else they’ll be killed. So Micah goes home, the warriors conquer Laish (“a quiet and secure people”), kill them all, and burn down the town. Finally they set up Micah’s statue in their new town.

Nobody comes off well in this tale. Micah is a thief and idolator, his mother is two-faced, his priest is a vagabond and a traitor, the Danites are thieves and killers. But this tale is only a prelude to the next.

Chapters 19 through 21 concern another Levite, also unnamed. His wife “plays the whore” with him and goes to her father’s house for four months. He comes to his father-in-law’s house and is entreated to stay for a while before he goes back home. After a few nights he decides to journey home with his wife, servant, and donkeys. On their way the sun sets and the servant suggests that they spend the night in Gibeah, a town of Benjaminites. So they go to the town square, but nobody wants to take them in. Finally an old man, not a Benjaminite, offers them his house and food and bed. They go in and have a good time, but soon the townsmen are pounding on the door, demanding the Levite, whom they intend to sodomize. The host tells the men not to do such a “scurrilous thing” and offers them his own virgin daughter and the man’s wife instead. “Rape them and do to them whatever you want. But to this man do not do this scurrilous act.” The townsmen refuse the host’s offer. So the Levite takes his own wife and hands her to the men so that they’ll leave him alone. They gang-rape her all night and leave her at the door. In the morning the man opens the door, intending to go, not even thinking about his wife. But he sees her on the doorstep and says, “Get up, and let us go.” She doesn’t answer. So he takes her on his donkey and goes back home. We do not learn until much later that she is dead. When he gets home, he cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends them through all the territory of Judah.

The Israelites hold a great assembly to discuss what to do about this, and the Levite appears and tells his story, leaving out the details of his own culpability: he says that the Gibeah townsmen wanted to kill him and raped his wife, not that they wanted to rape him and he gave them his wife instead. So the Israelites muster a huge army and attack the Benjaminites, who fight back successfully, killing 40,000 men in two days. On the third day of battle, the tides turn and the Israelites are successful, killing 25,000 Benjaminites. Only 600 Benjaminites remain.

The Israelites again hold an assembly and are terribly concerned that one of the twelve tribes has been all but wiped out and that they had made a vow before the battles that none of them would give their daughters to a Benjaminite. So they go to Gibeah and kill everyone there except the virgin girls, whom they give to the remaining Benjaminites. But there aren’t enough of those. So they tell the Benjaminites to go to Shiloh, where there’s a festival to the Lord, and tell them to snatch up the girls when they come out to dance. This is what the Benjaminites do, and there the book ends.

This tale of mass rape and slaughter is the most repulsive in the entire bible. As in the preceding tale, nobody comes off well. The women are voiceless victims; the men are rapists and murderers.

These tales set us up for the next book, Samuel, in which the Israelites say they need a king. “In those days,” the book of Judges concludes, “there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes.” Without a strong authority, these tales suggest, idolatry, thievery, rape, revenge, and slaughter will become endemic.

But there are other implications too. As Nick Tosches once said, “humanity’s most distinguishing trait [is] inhumanity.” Men are not noble beings, kind at heart and forgiving. The view here is Hobbesian avant la lettre. Hobbes wrote that the natural state of mankind was bellum omnium contra omnes, war of all against all: “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

In October, a band of Hamas warriors/terrorists/ideologues/youth raped and slaughtered hundreds of Israeli civilians. In retaliation, Netanyahu ordered the IDF to eliminate Hamas, and in doing so they slaughtered thousands of women and children in Gaza. All this brought to my mind the end of the book of Judges. Too many people in the US want to take sides: either Israel or the Palestinians are in the right. But the Bible does not offer us this option. God absents himself from the scene here and the judges are in short supply.

Swann's Way (and Joshua)

I recently reread Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time (this title is an accurate translation of Á la recherche du temps perdu, but the book was formerly called in English Remembrance of Things Past, a title I can’t get out of my head). In the close-to-forty years since I last read it, the text has changed somewhat: then I read Terence Kilmartin’s version of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation, and now I read a masterful revision of that by D. J. Enright.

The book is in three parts: “Combray,” “Swann in Love,” and “Place Names · The Name.” In the first and third parts the nameless narrator muses on his youth, first in Combray, a fictional town not far from Paris, and then in Paris itself. The second part is devoted to recounting the amours of Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy, and is the only lengthy part of the entire seven-volume novel in which the narrator is absent.

There is a shocking ellipsis after “Swann in Love.” At the end of that part, Swann falls out of love. “Just as, before kissing Odette for the first time, he had sought to imprint upon his memory the face that for so long had been familiar before it was altered by the additional memory of their kiss, so he could have wished—in thought at least—to have been able to bid farewell, while she still existed, to the Odette who had aroused his love and jealousy, to the Odette who had caused him to suffer, and whom now he would never see again. He was mistaken. He was destined to see her once again, a few weeks later. It was while he was asleep, in the twilight of a dream.” The clear implication here is that Swann would never see Odette again. “Swann in Love” ends with Swann’s own thoughts: “To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!” The episode seems to be over.

In “Combray” are some mentions of Swann’s wife, but we are not given her name. Because she is clearly disreputable, we are led to assume, in most of “Swann in Love,” that Mme Swann is actually Odette de Crécy, and that eventually she was able to persuade Swann to marry her, but we are not told so outright. The end of “Swann in Love” seems to put that idea out of the question: the Mlle Swann we’ve been reading about in “Combray” must be someone else, since Swann fell out of love with Odette and never saw her again.

But in the third part, it becomes suddenly clear (in a remarkable passage that quotes a conversation between a “pair of strollers,” almost an aside) that Mlle Swann is in fact Odette de Crécy. How did it happen that she became Swann’s wife when he had definitively fallen out of love with her, when, or so we are told, he would never see “the Odette who had aroused his love and jealousy” again? Proust gives us no idea. It is the most astonishing ellipsis.

Yet the novel is full of such ellipses. Transformations happen throughout but all too often we find out about them almost accidentally and without knowing how they came about. This is part of Proust’s genius: he casually shocks you with parenthetical revelations.

But there’s so much more than this here. The beauty of the prose is breathtaking (for instance, the several pages devoted to the Bois de Boulogne in autumn), the meditations on lost opportunities are moving, the social scenes are hilarious, and what it means to be in love is limned so painfully well.

I also read Joshua, the first book of the Prophets, in Robert Alter’s brilliant translation. This was not a rewarding experience: the book is half military conquests and half land assignments, with little of human interest.

Songs and photos of 2023

2023 was a good year for silly pop songs. I've compiled a playlist which you can access either on Spotify or YouTube.

I also took a lot of photos in 2023. The best of them are here. If you press the little screen icon on the top right you can view them as a slideshow.

 

The Iliad

Imagining a world in which a god has sex with another in order to make him forget to intervene in humans’ lives was not easy for me. I’d heard of divine intervention before, but this tale took it to a new extreme. The intimacy between gods and humans reminded me of that between superheros and mortals in comic books, but far richer.

I know that an epic poem is not the same thing as a novel, but it seemed very much like one: its range is confined to a single months-long episode during the Trojan War; the characters are vivid and lifelike, flawed and human (even the gods), each with a distinct voice; reading it inspires real compassion for them; and, of course, it has plenty of sex and violence.

The battle scenes can drag, and are detailed to the point of disgust, but that’s war, isn’t it? And they’re spiced with the gods’ frequently comedic interventions. I was especially taken with the river’s attack on Achilles: it is so disgusted by his slaughter of the Trojans that it chases him across dry land and almost swallows him up.

I remember how enchanted I was with Kleist’s play Penthesilea when I read it some twenty-five or thirty years ago; I wrote a paper on it. Achilles plays a large role in that play, and The Iliad reminded me of it. I should go back and reread it now . . .

(I listened to Robert Fitzgerald’s translation read by Dan Stevens.)

Alter's Five Books of Moses

I’m continuing to read very long books; the latest is Robert Alter’s translation of The Five Books of Moses, including all his footnotes and introductions.

Of course, I’d read almost all of this material before, though in other translations and piecemeal. Reading it all at once in Alter’s translation was revelatory. It clarified for me the way different parts of the Torah were written by different people at different times, and how frequently the pieces don’t fit together very well. Genesis was by far my favorite of the books and Leviticus my least. The end of Exodus, all of Leviticus, and parts of Numbers espouse an extremely rigid and rule-bound worldview. I’ve long understood that the plethora of rules that govern religious Jews help make every aspect of their lives sacred, and I have nothing against such an aim. But from a literary standpoint they’re stultifying.

Alter makes clear how much the Deuteronomist recast the previous four books and illuminates the rhetorical tools he employed. The insertion of extremely ancient songs near the end of Deuteronomy is all the more striking because of this, and those songs are very beautifully translated. It was also revelatory to me how much longer and more extreme the Deuteronomic curses are than the blessings, and how well they limn the psychological effects of prolonged persecution.

I should have written an entry after I finished each book rather than only one at the end of the five; I currently have a clearer grasp of the last of the five, Deuteronomy, than the earlier ones, since it’s the one I read most recently.

Continuing the long-books practice, I’m currently immersed in Swann’s Way (a reread) and The Iliad and will start reading/rereading the various books of the bible collectively labeled The Prophets, as well as finishing the rest of Henry James’s stories.

The Turn of the Screw

I’ve been reading more Henry James stories, and “The Turn of the Screw” once again captured me. I first read it many years ago and it struck me forcefully that the ghosts were likely seen only by the (nameless) governess, who frightens the children with her hallucinations. The untrustworthy/unscrupulous narrator is a staple of James’s fiction, with “The Aspern Papers” being an especially brilliant example, but rarely is one as deserving of pity as in this instance. Rereading the story now, I was struck by the instances in which she seems to have her hallucinations confirmed—for example, her identification of the male ghost as Peter Quint is affirmed and enabled by the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, who actually knew him—and wondered if I’d taken a wrong turn. But there are good explanations for these instances if one wants to follow the governess-as-neurotic line. After rereading the story, I turned to the Norton companion to it, which includes an absolutely marvellous essay by Harold C. Goddard written in the 1920s but not published until 1957, “A Pre-Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw,” and another fascinating one from 1963 called “The Turn of the Screw and Alice James” by Oscar Cargill. After reading them, I cannot doubt that James intended the story to be read both as a straightforward ghost/horror story about supremely innocent children corrupted by evil spirits and as a story about a young woman who so loses her bearings as to imagine that the children she idealizes have been corrupted by evil spirits. One must keep in mind that James wrote this story immediately after writing What Maisie Knew, in which a child retains her goodness throughout her lengthy exposure to supremely immoral adults. It seems more logical for James to continue to portray children as innocent beings whom adults don’t understand than as entirely corrupted by evil but appearing pure and innocent all the while. And the fact that the children never give any evidence of having seen the ghosts seems to indicate that James never really saw them in his story either.

 

The Books of Jacob

The Books of Jacob is a thousand-page novel by Olga Tokarczuk, for which she won the Nobel Prize a few years ago, centered around the story of Jacob Frank, a Jew who led a messianic movement in Central Europe in the mid-eighteenth century. Spanning over fifty years, it follows a wide range of religious figures, both Christian and Jewish, as they grapple with a cult that is by turns bewilderingly strange and all too familiar. Some of the story is told through the journal entries of Jacob Frank’s evangelist, Nahman of Busk; some in letters; some through the eyes of a woman who swallows an amulet and then never dies, instead becoming quasi-omniscient. But most of it is more straightforward third-person, though very fragmented: scenes rarely develop at great length. Tokarczuk’s research seems phenomenally deep, and despite the fact that she isn’t Jewish, this feels like a very Jewish book. I found it charming, illuminating, and involving, full of rich characters and ideas. Tokarczuk’s previous book, Flights, did not impress me at all; I’m glad I read this one as well.

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

David Treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is a history of American Indians that focuses primarily on the years after 1890—the year of the Wounded Knee massacre, and the year in which Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee essentially concluded. It’s positioned as a corrective to that book, one that emphasizes the continuing richness of Indian life rather than its downfall and defeat. It’s successful in doing so. Continually interesting, Treuer offers fresh takes on historical events and interweaves stories of contemporary Indians with historical accounts.

“We are so used to telling the stories of our lives,” Treuer writes, “and those of our tribes, as a tragedy, as a necessarily diminishing line—once we were great, once we ruled everything, and now we rule nothing, now we are merely ghosts that haunt the American mind—that we deprive ourselves of the very life we yearn for. . . . I have tried to catch us not in the act of dying but, rather, in the radical act of living.”

This reminds me of Zora Neale Hurston’s words about playing the victim. Hurston put those words into practice, though, in a very different way from Treuer. She mainly elided black suffering. Treuer does something different: the tragedies are recounted, but are balanced with the real lives, the occasional triumphs, the striving, the plentiful instances of dignity, the inventiveness that Indians always showed in the face of their foes.

The story is also one of geographical dislocation and relocation, of finding a new home and making it an old home, or of returning to an old home and making it new. The resourcefulness on display in this book is astonishing. But Treuer doesn’t sugarcoat anything; resourcefulness can fail or go wrong as easily as it can succeed. Treuer paints a more rounded picture of AIM and its legacy than anything else I’ve read on the subject, and is evenhanded when it comes to outlaws like Russell Means and Leonard Peltier.

The conventional image of the American Indian man is one of a brave, a warrior, a fighter. That image persists in the imagination of both whites and Indians themselves, and that fighting spirit can be admirable. It has also been historically necessary for survival, since without it Indians would have essentially disappeared through death, attrition, and assimilation. But to constantly fight takes its toll, physically and mentally. There are other ways for Indians to be, and Treuer illuminates those along with the fighting ways. In doing so, he makes no claims to being comprehensive, but nonetheless provides readers with the best portrait of American Indian life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that I have read or can imagine reading.

You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays by Zora Neale Hurston, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Genevieve West

I’ve been waiting for this book for over a dozen years. I couldn’t figure out why such a prominent writer’s collected essays had never been published when her stories, letters, plays, and folklore had all been assembled in book form.

Well, now I know. Hurston was a great essayist for many years, and then she started writing truly terrible work. Collecting her essays would expose readers to the terrible ones along with the great ones. And that is precisely what has happened.

Up until the mid-1940s, Hurston turned out one good essay after another. As far as I know, her best are in this volume. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” is perhaps the most brilliant, published in 1928. “Characteristics of Negro Expression” lays out Hurston’s ideas on what makes black communication unique. “Art and Such” is a sharp exploration of the history of African American art and writing.

But most of the later essays are shockingly repulsive—and poorly written. After Hurston’s greatest work had been pilloried by black male writers like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes, and after she’d been falsely accused of child abuse by her Harlem neighbors, she essentially became a Southern conservative. “Mourner’s Bench: Why the Negro Won’t Buy Communism” (1951) is full-blooded McCarthyism. “Court Order Can’t Make Races Mix” (1955) and “Which Way the NAACP” (1957) object vehemently to desegregation and the fight for justice for African Americans. “The Lost Keys of Glory” (1947), an argument that women should accept their subservience, is one of the most sexist things I’ve ever read. Her satire in these essays has changed from sharp to shopworn. There’s a good reason only one of these (“Mourner’s Bench”) was published during Zora’s lifetime.

*

In compiling and publishing You Don’t Know Us Negroes, the editors made some rather odd decisions.

First, the essays are not in chronological order but instead are organized by subject. As you read each one, you have no clue when it was written or for what publication—for that you have to turn to the back of the book. Essays are usually occasional—why obscure the occasion?

Nowhere is the selection process explained. What was excluded? The book doesn’t tell us, so I did my own research. Excluded are most but not all of the following: her book reviews, contributions to Nancy Cunard’s Negro: An Anthology, contributions to the Florida Writer’s Project, and pieces she wrote about Cudjo Lewis. Also excluded are “Mr. Schomburg’s Library” (1922), “The Eatonville Anthology” (1926), and “Self-Association as Negro Policy” (1955); the encyclopedia entries she wrote; four late-1950s essays published in the Fort Pierce Chronicle; and more than a dozen unpublished essays. Why were they excluded? Some of them are available in other books, but as for the others, I cannot begin to tell you.

And then there are the endnotes, which are difficult to use (there are no page references) and mostly useless. I’ll quote a few here in their entirety. “Louis XIV (1638–1715) was king of France from 1643–1715.” (If you’re going to use “from” you have to use “to,” not a dash.) “John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) and Henry Ford (1863–1947) were very wealthy business magnates and industrialists.” “Venus is the Roman goddess of love, beauty, and sex.” “Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879–1962) was a Canadian explorer and archaeologist.” (This refers to his mention in an essay about Fannie Hurst; not mentioned is that he was also Hurst’s lover.) I won’t bother quoting the one identifying Abraham Lincoln.

The introduction provides valuable critical apparatus, and is essential reading in order to understand much of the book’s content. But if you’ve forgotten what you’ve read there, by the time you get to the book’s last section, devoted to Hurston’s extensive coverage of a murder trial, you’ll be lost. The context is vital, and it just isn’t there.

*

But these are relatively unimportant faults compared with the great boon of having Hurston’s greatest essays collected in a book. Some of the wisdom that has meant the most to me is here: “The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.” “I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” 

Victimhood as a pattern of thought and even a way of life may be more popular now than ever before. No matter your color, sex, or creed, you can easily find a group who will support your claims to being a victim of another color, sex, or creed. The entire western world seems to have succumbed to the culture of grievance. White men complain of being stripped of power by black women, and vice versa. Even white male billionaires feel persecuted.

Hurston’s essays are the ultimate antidote to this way of thought. “Sometimes,” she wrote in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” “I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company! It’s beyond me.” “We do not hate white people,” she wrote in “Mourner’s Bench.” “We certainly have no wish and desire to kill off the pink-toed rascals. Even if they were not useful as they are, we’d keep ’em for pets.” Self-pity, for Zora, was an unforgivable sin. She roundly condemned black writers who concentrated on their people’s suffering. In the book’s title essay, which is previously unpublished, she writes, “Negro writers have set out to prove that we can pout. With slight exception the novels have been sociological. At the lowest, a prolonged wail on the tragedy of being a Negro . . . A forlorn pacing of a cage barred by racial hatred.” “Art and Such” portrays a black poet who wants to write “a song to the morning” but can’t because “the one subject for a Negro” is “the Race and its sufferings.” Instead, he writes about a lynching. Zora wasn’t shy about treating racial injustice herself, as her three essays for Negro Digest make plain (“My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience”; “Crazy for This Democracy,” a sarcastic attack on US imperialism and Jim Crow laws; and “What White Publishers Won’t Print”). But she didn’t complain: she brought out her oyster knife.

 

More Henry James stories

It may seem like my reading has slowed to a crawl, and indeed I’m reading far less than I used to. I need to change that somehow. Part of the problem is that I don’t write about books that I start and then abandon, and there have been a few of those lately.

Since I last wrote about books, I’ve been reading primarily Henry James short stories. Most of them are charming. “Greville Fane” is very short and one of the wittiest things I’ve ever read: every sentence is a gem. “Sir Dominick Ferrand” is silly but fun, and “The Death of the Lion” is a good satire about fame.

One of the major plot points in James stories is the death or near-death of a heartbroken young woman. This figures prominently in “The Visits,” “The Wheel of Time,” and at least a dozen earlier stories. Did women frequently die of heartbreak in the nineteenth century? One never hears about it these days. There’s suicide, yes, but “She succumbed to illness after a romantic disappointment” is no longer a plot point at all. Has the world altered in some fundamental way or did James just make all these deaths up because they were convenient? (ChatGPT Plus says it’s the latter.)

The most disappointing of the stories I read recently are probably “Sir Edmund Orme” and “Owen Wingrave” (both ghost stories) and “The Pupil.” The latter ends with a cheap cheat: Morgan dies at the moment of his liberation. All the questions James has posed—the source of the Moreens’ livelihood, Pemberton’s prospects, Morgan’s future—go unanswered. James loved to end his stories with an improvident death.

The best of the stories I’ve read recently is definitely “The Middle Years.” Rarely have I read such a profound meditation on the writing life. It really stands apart from James’s other stories: it seems more deeply felt—and warmer.

My Favorite Pop Songs Released in 2022

Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0QtFRvge0eXyldeZFxSvO8?si=1fce4f4484264a4e

YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4HU4MWMlWQ3eShpGSHPV4izRXwL5oGeN

“About Damn Time” by Lizzo. Disco amalgam, fusion, or rip-off? Does it matter?

“Alaska” by Camilo x Grupo Firme went to #1 but you wouldn’t know if you didn’t listen to Mexican radio. Thankfully there’s plenty in Chicago.

“All That’s Left of Me Is You” by Vulfpeck would be a good song to teach your kids.

“Anti-Glory” by Horsegirl is so much better than “Anti-Hero.” A Chicago band gives us the Joy Division tribute of the year.

“As It Was” by Harry Styles was inescapable this year, deservedly.

“Bad Habit” by Steve Lacy. Do not get confused between the geeky-sounding lo-fi singer Steve Lacy and the dead saxophone giant Steve Lacy.

“Belize” by Danger Mouse & Black Thought is also MF Doom’s latest posthumous release.

“Billie Toppy” by Men I Trust. Judging from the two singles this Montreal band released this year, their next album might be their best.

“Cuff It” by Beyoncé. See “About Damn Time,” above.

“Don’t Love Me” by Ne-Yo. False modesty, but awfully pretty.

“La Fama” by Rosalía haunts me, but her album, Motomami, is far sillier than its predecessor, El mal querer.

“Frankenstein” by Rina Sawayama. She wants to be his Frankenstein but doesn’t want to be a monster anymore. Or maybe she just wants to be Katy Perry.

“Gorilla” by Little Simz. “Be very specific when you talk on who the best is. How can I address this? Basically, the rest is almost like to me what a stain to a vest is. You ain’t drop nothin’ in my eyes I’m impressed with.”

“Headspace” by Sharon Van Etten, which needs to be played extremely loud, is the most intense song on this list. Even after listening it to more times than any other song on this playlist, it still gives me chills.

“Hey Me, Hey Mama” by Sierra Ferrell transforms Ray LaMontagne’s boring number into something untamable.

“Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” by Matthias Goerne with Daniil Trifonov was written by Robert Schumann in 1840. I love its silences. And, yes, this is a (devastating) pop song.

“It’s Too Late” by Lucy Dacus makes Carole King’s song deadlier.

“Just So You Remember” by Pusha T samples the apocalyptic antiwar “Six Day War” (1971) by the forgotten British band Colonel Bagshot. That song, named after an Israeli war, was probably dug up for Pusha by a prominent anti-Semitic producer before he went completely off the rails. It’s complicated.

“Kill Bill” by SZA may be the murder ballad of the year.

“Light Switch” by Charlie Puth. For how the song was written, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=SkdQvOXuX78.

“Midnight Sun” by Nilüfer Yanya. The magic of unintelligible enunciation.

“Moderation” by Cate Le Bon kind of updates Television’s “Elevation.”

“Modern Love Stories” by Beach House is the disorienting finale of a symphonic record, Once Twice Melody.

“Munch (Feelin’ U)” by Ice Spice. Bronx drill by a 22-year-old.

“Nothing” by Gladie nicely revives the Superchunk approach.

“One Way or Every N***a with a Budget” by Saba ends way too soon.

“Oxygen” by Emeli Sandé. She never moved me much until this song came out.

“Please Do Not Lean” by Daniel Caesar is “an introduction to the sound and tone of the next chapter in my career.” I can’t wait.

“Point Me Toward the Real” by Ezra Furman. If she’s the lo-fi transgender Springsteen, then All of Us Flames is her Darkness on the Edge of Town. But it’s better.

“Quiet” by Camila Cabello isn’t very but doesn’t need to be.

“Rich Spirit” by Kendrick Lamar is jawdroppingly brilliant and not as difficult as much of Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.

“Rotten” by Porridge Radio. The aftereffects of COVID-19 may include the taste of apples changing and people telling you to exercise more often.

“Santa Clara” by Benjamin Biolay, featuring Clara Luciani. Another good one from 2022 is “Les joues roses,” with a charming video. Also go back to 2020 and listen to the first four songs on Grand Prix. Then go back to 2001 and listen to his first and best album, Rose Kennedy.

“Selfish Soul” by Sudan Archives asks: wtf do I do with my hair?

“Ser de ti” by Silvana Estrada is from Marchita, my favorite album of the decade (so far).

“A Sign” by Sam Gendel and Antonia Cytrynowicz. Cytrynowicz is twelve years old. Gendel would be her uncle if he married his partner.

“Something in the Orange” by Zach Bryan. It was nice to hear something as raw as this on country radio.

“Sorry” by Röyksopp was written and sung, nakedly, by Jamie Irrepressible.

“Stay Away (From Me)” by Madison McFerrin. If this turns out to be the direction vocal jazz takes this decade, I’ll be happy.

“This Is Why” by Paramore. Even after listening to this a lot, I’m afraid I still don’t know why.

“Tití me preguntó” by Bad Bunny kind of takes on Kid Creole’s “I’m a Wonderful Thing.”

“Tongue & Cheek” by Tommy Newport. Is he the new Chris Stamey?

“Welke Rose” by Christian Gerhaher with the Kammerorchester Basel under Heinz Hollinger is from Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck’s song cycle Elegie, written precisely one hundred years ago. It’s full of creepy but tender songs like this one.

“When You’re Gone” by Shawn Mendes. How does a vain pretty-boy superstar make a song so seemingly heartfelt, so pure and effective? By breaking up with Camila Cabello, I guess.

“Who by Fire” by PJ Harvey and Tim Phillips makes Leonard Cohen’s song deadlier.

“Ya llegué” by French Horn Rebellion, Cimafunk, and Stalking Gia. The most galvanic concert I saw this year was Cimafunk at Millennium Park.

“You Will Never Work in Television Again” by the Smile. Radiohead carries on!

The best photos I took in 2022

I've been taking photos in two long-running "albums." The first is called "Nothing to See Here," and consists of black-and-white photos of nothing in particular. This year I took a lot of photos of Bloomington, Indiana for that album. Here are a few:

Here are some more photos from that album taken in Chicago's South Side:


I've also been taking color photos for a different album called "Through an Open Window" . . . Here are a couple from Chicago.

I took some photos in Queretaro, Mexico, for that album, but the camera setting wasn't as high-res as it should have been, so I'll probably toss these. But they're good photos anyway.

A Handful of Dust

What a strange book! This, Evelyn Waugh’s fourth novel—and a great improvement over the ridiculousness of his first—came well before Brideshead Revisited, his seventh, and seems to have been influenced by Hemingway in its matter-of-factness and brevity, its focus on caprice and its disregard for grief. Tragedies are dismissed, natives are subhuman, characters are built up and carefully delineated only to be extinguished in the most absurd ways. The novel is a series of barely compatible set pieces whose varying lengths put them at odds with each other and frustrate not only the flow of the novel but the ability to get much meaning from it. All the characters suffer from a disregard for each other, especially Brenda Last, whose indifference towards her husband and son verge on incredible. This is almost certainly the last Waugh novel I’ll read. It was fun, engrossing, unique, and unpredictable, with chuckles and food for thought. But it left a rather bad taste in my mouth.

Two tales by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad’s short novel (or long tale) The Shadow-Line is, in its way, a coming-of-age story disguised as a dead-man’s-curse story. The unnamed narrator begins callow, uncaring, abominably rude, intolerant, and impatient; he ends up considerate, forbearing, and full of feeling for his fellow men. This transformation goes unnoticed by himself and by most of the men around him, though one man catches on at the end.

Conrad was a gripping writer. It’s difficult to pause during one of his books. “The Secret Sharer,” a short story, held me in its cross-hairs. Both tales are about young ship captains facing evil beings in Southeast Asia. But in “The Secret Sharer,” the being is the narrator’s doppelgänger, and the narrator ends up saving the man’s life at the risk of those of his shipmates. What does he do to his own in the process? That’s left to conjecture. It’s unsettling.

The atmosphere in both tales is one of fever, quite literally in The Shadow-Line. It is the atmosphere Conrad evoked the best—a kind of haze in which all actions and beings seem strange, abnormal, outsize or undersize, extraordinary, intense. When reading Conrad I feel as though I were listening to a masterful performance of a pianist for whom every note is filled with the tense anticipation of the next one.

Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited’s primary characters are all ruled either by regret over what has been spoiled or hatred of what was once loved, which sometimes amount to the same thing. It’s the story of a man who falls in love with another man and then with his sister, but for Waugh there’s no real sexual difference between them, and he pulls that off with such elan that it’s as if all the sexual differences and identities we’ve been raised with never existed and we could all choose men and women freely. Money is almost as ineffable in the novel: few people work and few people really have to work; money just flows in as needed. I don’t know what to make of such a world, intermingled as it is with the real world of England in the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps in high society that was actually the way it was back then. At any rate, the fact that sex and money cause very few problems for anyone allows us to focus on the issues that do: love, art, nostalgia, religion, family. And the profundity of Brideshead Revisited lies in its implications concerning those. I found the end of the book—particularly Lord Marchmane’s and Julia’s last scenes—a bit of a cheat, though if I were Catholic maybe I wouldn’t. I’ve never been partial to divine intervention, even when it goes awry. But Charles remains a non-believer, allowing fellow non-believers like me to share his skepticism. Anyway, the conclusion is not entirely conclusive.

Ali & Maigret

Jonathan Eig’s Ali is well-researched, compact, clear, balanced, and quite moving. But Muhammad Ali comes across at times as selfish and stupid, a far cry from the hero he appeared to be. Eig is not afraid to point out what Ali didn’t do, what roads he didn’t take, what opportunities he let slip by. One could, perversely, view Ali’s life as a series of bad choices: to leave Malcolm X in favor of Elijah Muhammad, to have Herbert Muhammad and Don King manage his affairs, to have sex with as many women as possible, not to get involved in the civil rights movement, to back Ronald Reagan, to fight long after he should have retired, to let himself be a human punching bag both in his training and his bouts. At the end, Ali still emerges a great sportsman, a great guy, and a great fighter for his race and his beliefs. But his flaws are more glaring than I’d ever thought.

Speaking of flaws, I read my first Georges Simenon novel, Maigret Sets a Trap, and was terribly disappointed. The novel is about a serial killer who murders women in Montmartre; when he is found, he turns out to be an effeminate interior decorator overly attached to his mother and wife who, in Maigret’s view, kills because he needs to prove his manhood. Homophobic, full of clichés, pompous, and silly, it makes me wonder why Simenon is so revered.

The Idiot

I found Dostoevsky’s big mess of a novel a delight, despite its numerous flaws, which include a narrator who is sometimes omniscient and sometimes can’t tell what’s going on, preachiness, a central character who is exasperatingly holy in his goodness and innocence, a paucity of visual scene-setting, and preposterous situations; a delight because of how unpredictable the characters are, how much life they have, and how they interact, contradicting themselves all the time. Apparently Dostoevsky himself, while writing, had no idea what his characters would do next, and was continuously surprised by them. The Idiot was Dostoevsky’s favorite of his novels, and it’s mine as well. It was also Proust’s favorite novel, period. This may seem surprising, but it’s not hard to see echoes of The Idiot in the last two or three books of In Search of Lost Time, when so many of the characters reverse themselves or fall prey to their whims and excesses of character, or in the way Proust’s writing about his struggles with asthma reflect Dostoevsky’s writing about his struggles with epilepsy: both impart their illnesses to their protagonists, who wander about the world in wide-eyed wonder, apart and alone, indecisive, yet feeling more deeply than others.

"The Lesson of the Master"

In Henry James’s “The Lesson of the Master,” a choice is given: the satisfaction of intellectual or personal passion. Both cannot ever be satisfied. Intellectual success depends on solitude and deprivation; personal success (marriage, children, money) can only be obtained by sacrificing intellectual success. (Along the way James offers a perfect description of a writer’s room, a room designed to produce writing, though not necessarily good writing: a large, windowless room lined with books, with a glass ceiling and a red rug from the door to the standing desk, along which the writer paces until the mot juste comes, upon which he writes it down and then continues pacing, without sitting, for three precisely-timed hours a day.) I do not know if James himself believed in this opposition or simply presented it as a plot point. Nor do I know if I myself believe in it. I am a writer and my best work (Zora and Langston) did not come out of personal deprivation but was in fact immensely aided by my marriage and children, despite my neglect of them for some of the months in which I was engaged in it. But perhaps I might have written something altogether better had I been isolated and deprived, as Paul Overt is in “The Lesson of the Master” when he produces his best work. If one studies how the great writers have produced their great works, what does one find? Inconsistency. Some of them do it in the full flourish of youth, and their best books are those that were written in their thirties (Herman Melville). Some of them do it in the wisdom of their age, and their best books are written in their sixties (Penelope Fitzgerald). Some do it in odd hours stolen from their family and jobs; others do it in concentrated leisure periods. Some do it in years and some in weeks. (Some of my favorite novels, like The Charterhouse of Parma and Their Eyes Were Watching God, were composed in weeks; I assume “The Lesson of the Master” was as well.) All this gives the lie to James’s “Lesson.” Ah, but the plot of the story is the thing—and a great plot it is indeed, involving two writers in love with the same woman . . .

I have read many other of James’s stories over the last few months, some of them very fine and some of them less so, but this was the only one that inspired me to write.

“The Path of Duty,” “The Aspern Papers,” and Austerlitz

The first two are mid-period Henry James stories narrated by despicable people. The unnamed narrator of “The Path of Duty” is a priggish woman who goes to some length to interfere in an affair in which she has no business, and destroys the happiness of several people in the process. The narrator of “The Aspern Papers” is an unscrupulous biographer who goes to pitiless lengths to get hold of some private papers. Austerlitz is an exceedingly strange novel by W. G. Sebald in which the narrator is vague and confused about what he himself experiences but remembers every word spoken by his friend Jacques Austerlitz. It was odd reading Austerlitz after “The Aspern Papers” because they both concern a vain search for documents that will reveal something about a dead man. The works of James and Sebald are full of ghosts, even if they’re not literal ghosts—the dead haunt their characters and, in Austerlitz, the characters even haunt the dead (“the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead”). James’s London and Venice, Sebald’s Antwerp and Wales and Paris, are all dispiriting places, overburdened with memories and lost opportunities. As for my judgments, “The Aspern Papers” was the first thing by James that I read, very long ago, and it converted me quite quickly; I still feel it’s one of his best works, and rank “The Path of Duty” equally high. Austerlitz, on the other hand, is more attenuated, odder, and muddier than The Emigrants, and feels a bit like a retread of the earlier work.

The Best Photos I Took in 2021

25 Songs Released in 2021 that Rocked My Boat

(Spotify playlist here; Youtube playlist here.)

In alphabetical order:

“Atlantic” by the Weather Station. “I should really know better than to read the headlines.” You said it.

“Boomerang” by Yebba. Move over, Adele. When it comes to white soul, Yebba has you beat hands down. Plus she’s from Arkansas instead of Tottenham.

“Chaise Longue” by Wet Leg. The funniest song of the year. Plus it makes me jump up and down.

“The Dress” by Dijon. From a terrific record, Absolutely. To me, he’s the perfect combination of Frank Ocean, Bon Iver, and D’Angelo.

“Fuera la liga” by Los 4. Best percussion of 2021? Best cackle too?

“Go Your Way” by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss. Usually I don’t like their versions of other people’s songs as much as I like the originals. And Anne Briggs’s original is great. But this version is even better because it’s not trying to be.

“Keep an Eye on Dan” by ABBA. I had pretty low expectations for Voyage. But it’s not bad. This is my favorite track: the total opposite of “Does Your Mother Know.”

“Kiss Me More” by Doja Cat featuring SZA. What Prince’s “Kiss” was to 1986, this song is to 2021.

“Leave the Door Open” by Silk Sonic. A gorgeous update of the Gamble-Huff aesthetic courtesy of Anderson .Paak and Bruno Mars.

“Like I Used To” by Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen. I love this single, even if it’s overproduced and the mix is muddy and it attempts to be magisterial (rather than casual) and ageless (rather than contemporary) and it doesn’t really mean anything. But I’m just a sucker for practically anything Van Etten does.

“Marchita” by Silvana Estrada. This unfathomably talented Mexican singer and songwriter released a good handful of singles this year, and they’re all fantastic. It was very hard to choose just one. If you like this, also check out “Tristeza” and “La corriente,” at least.

“Muba” by Jupiter & Okwess. Their latest album, Na Kozonga, doesn’t hold a candle to their last two. But this song is the exception.

“Mundo Nuevo” by Alex Cuba & Lila Downs. I can see this becoming a folk song in fifty years.

“No Difference” by Hand Habits. A number of unhappy American women are singing about their unhappy lives over indie-soundtrack music, often with slightly ominous swooshy noises behind muffled guitars and drums, to widespread acclaim. Out of the miles of this product, this is the only song that really appealed to me this year. It’s probably all the popopos and oohs.

“Point and Kill” by Little Simz with Obongjayar. I have to say I like Obongjayar’s part better than Little Simz’s (she has a tendency to be obvious), but anyway, when the horns come in I just swoon.

“Rainforest” by Noname. A pretty valiant attempt to wrap up the entire world’s problems in under three minutes.

“Red Room” by Hiatus Kaiyote. Wait—this band is Australian?

“Rise to Ashes” by Amon Tobin. Tobin has long been my favorite EDMian—probably because he’s so maximalist—and this is his best single in years.

“Rómpelo” by Cimafunk. This man makes me so happy. And isn’t it great to have Lupe Fiasco back? El alimento is my dance album of the year.

“Same Size Shoe” by serpentwithfeet. Ah, the ecstasy of finding the perfect match. Love the trumpets!

“Starlight” by Yola. 2021 was a great year for traditional soul singles, and this is one of the best.

“Swan Song” by Lindsey Buckingham. Yet another mean song about Stevie—keeping the feud alive for forty-seven years and counting.

“Velur” by Zoé. It sounds just like New Order at first, but soon it becomes this delirious pop confection, made even more delirious by the unknowability of the word velur.

“Why Don’t You Touch Me” by Leon Bridges. This guy just gets better and better, and for me this is the most devastating soul single since Frank Ocean’s “Swim Good.” The B-side, “Motorbike,” is great too.

“Witchoo” by Durand Jones & the Indications. A band from my hometown (Bloomington, Indiana)! And they’re disco too!

Some More Stories by Henry James

I recently read seven more Henry James stories (some of them are as long as novels), and I wanted to remark on three of them.

“The Siege of London” is one of James’s more perfect productions, detailing the rise of Nancy Beck, or Mrs. Headway, to the British aristocracy. Not quite a prefiguration of Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber, it nonetheless offers some of the same thrills—of seeing a low-born and not terribly virtuous woman achieve the highest levels of social status. But it’s more about its heroine’s various adversaries and helpmeets in all their hypocrisy and confusion than about the heroine herself.

“The Author of ‘Beltraffio’” is Henry James almost at his worst. James was never terribly convincing when dealing with monstrosity, and this tale of filicide is entirely unconvincing, especially since it’s framed by a tale of monstrous (though not as monstrous!) sycophancy that never comes to any point. Does the grating naivety of Ambient’s American admirer (the narrator) make Ambient’s wife any more or less understandable or believable? The peculiar mixture of gothic and fan fiction here seems deliberately shallow.

“Georgina’s Reasons” has been dismissed by most James scholars as a minor or flawed work, but for me it is one of his most compelling. Unlike most of James’s work of this era, it has an entirely American cast and is set firmly in the past; it concerns a heartless woman (Georgina) and a naval officer (Raymond) whom Georgina traps into making a promise that he cannot shake. But James wants the reader to read between the lines. Georgina is certainly a villain, but is motivated not by hatred but by a sense of honor, a sense which Raymond shares; the way she stands up for herself near the end of the book is not damning, but triumphant. And Raymond’s final act in the story is almost as monstrous as Georgina’s. Honor prevents them both from doing the right thing, very much like what the eponymous heroine of What Maisie Knew does in the end. Profoundly disturbing, “Georgina’s Reasons” is a truly neglected masterpiece.

Three Books

Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York is a gargantuan biography (over 1300 pages; over 66 hours if you listen to the audiobook, as I did) of a gargantuan man. Robert Moses’s achievements were mind-boggling in their scale and scope, but so was his arrogance, deceit, and contempt. Caro lays out both sides like a lawyer—or an investigative journalist—might, and it’s a damning picture. Rarely is Moses sympathetic; never is he boring. Many parts of the book are tendentious, but Caro makes even the most arcane aspects of urban planning fascinating. I wanted to read The Power Broker because I fancy myself a biographer, and Caro has a reputation as one of the best of the breed; I’d read The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power and found it wonderful. In both books, it’s striking how often Caro departs from strict chronology in order to develop his themes. For example, Caro devotes a section entirely to Moses’s brother rather than placing the relationship in various parts of the book as they fit chronologically. That’s not an approach I’m ready to take, but it works well for Caro.

Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is show-offy, glib, and puerile, like so many books written by American writers my age. But I didn’t want to stop reading it because it’s also entertaining, clever, and warm, with fascinating characters and a lively, twisty plot.

My good friend Ethan Michaeli has written his second book, Twelve Tribes: Promise and Peril in the New Israel. After reading an advance copy, I offered him the following blurb: “Marshaling an extraordinarily extensive network—from Palestinians to Haredim, from teenagers to nonagenarians, from kibbutzniks to businesswomen, from organizers to bystanders—Ethan Michaeli here proves himself an insightful guide through the many facets of today’s Israel. Quietly and cheerfully nudging both his interviewees and his readers, he gets at the truth—not only that there are no easy answers, but also that there are so many complicated ones.” The book gave me a great deal of pleasure.

Henry James Stories, Part One

I’ve been immersing myself in Henry James stories, going in chronological order, skipping only the most obscure. I’ve now plowed through 21 of them, from “A Landscape Painter” to “A Bundle of Letters.” I have 75 more to go, a great many of which I’ve read before.

These early James stories are full of contrivances, such as the chance meetings in “Daisy Miller” and the abrupt deaths caused by heartbreak or sudden joy. At least half the stories end with a missed opportunity, but possibly they all do in one way or another. His characters are mostly either wealthy or clever, rarely both and rarely neither. Nobody ever actually has sex.

“An International Episode” is definitely my favorite of the lot, and the only one I’d highly recommend. It starts out as the story of two British visitors to New York, but takes a few interesting twists. It’s full of wit; its description of New York and Newport in the August heat is peerless; and its resolution is very satisfying, especially as it springs from the very nature of the characters involved rather than from some coincidence.

On the other hand, “Theodolinde,” which was later renamed “Rose-Agathe,” is definitely one of the worst stories I’ve ever read: contrived, arch, show-offy, and corny.

As a result of this reading, my opinion of James has taken a turn for the worse. I’m sure it’ll improve, however, as I start rereading his later masterpieces.

Chromos and Other Books

Felipe Alfau’s second and last novel, Chromos, was written in 1948 but not published until 1990. Instead, it sat in a drawer until an editor from a small press in Chicago republished Alfau’s first novel, Locos, written in 1928 and first published in 1936, and asked him if he had written anything else. Alfau, who was born in 1902, immigrated to New York from Barcelona as a teenager and wrote in English, but Chromos is all about Spaniards, most of them New York immigrants like himself. It’s an astonishing novel, erudite and discursive, playful and passionate, concerning a group of friends (“Americaniards”) and the stories and ideas and culture they share, and about half of it consists of quotations from those stories and ideas, including speculations about the fourth dimension and copious excerpts from a trashy, overheated, badly written, unfinished novel that takes place in Madrid. That novel contains Chromos’s only vestige of a plot, but it’s more like a collection of absurd stories centered around one extended family. I’ve never read anything quite like Chromos; but I guess I could say that about most of the other things I read.

Speaking of which, I also recently read Edwin Lefèvre’s 1923 Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Rob Kenner’s just-published The Marathon Don’t Stop: The Life and Times of Nipsey Hussle, and about six hundred pages of Henry James’s early short stories (all pre–“Daisy Miller”). All were, like Chromos, fascinating, if flawed; I’ll probably write something about the James stories soon.

Pedro Páramo

Juan Rulfo was a Mexican traveling salesman who was fired in 1952, at the age of 35. He turned to short-story writing for a year or two, and then wrote a short novel called Pedro Páramo, which was published in 1955. He never published anything else during his long lifetime (he died in 1986), instead devoting himself to editing indigenous writings.

The novel didn’t sell very well at first, but it was discovered by Gabriel García Marquez, among others, after a few years, and is now well known as one of the great Latin American novels. My English-language edition has a foreword by Susan Sontag. García Marquez claimed to have practically memorized it, and it was the key influence on his breakthrough novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Although only 124 pages long, the novel has a rich panoply of characters, most of whom are ghosts, and a variety of narrators, perspectives, and authorial voices. It’s a disorienting book, and I had to read most sections twice or three times in order to place them within the whole. If you read it, jot down the names of each character and a few notes about them, because they all come back at some point.

The book is exquisite and vivid, but as bleak and death-obsessed as any I’ve ever read. Many of the characters are in purgatory, and the setting (a town called Comala) is hell on earth, where the distinctions between life and death have broken down. It is not a book I would recommend, nor one I will turn back to. Perhaps it is just too Catholic for my Jewish tastes: one of the reasons so many of the characters are in purgatory is that the local priest refuses to forgive their sins. The book never lost my interest, but its despair was overwhelming.

In saying that, I’m equating death and despair; for Rulfo, though, death isn’t bad. It’s actually quite interesting and frequently beautiful. To be overwhelmed by death, as one is when one reads this book, may be a pleasurable sensation for some. Just not for me.

The Hare

The Hare is the second novel by César Aira I’ve read, the first being El divorcio, which I wrote about here. It concerns a British naturalist who comes to Argentina in the late nineteenth century to research a legendary hare and ends up living with the indigenous people on the pampas. Unlike the silent, wise, and calm Indians we usually read about, these tribes are garrulous, silly, prone to misunderstandings, and constantly fighting. The novel seems as aimless and half-crazy as the Indians, but Aira wraps it all up brilliantly in the end. It’s all tongue-in-cheek, thus impossible to take seriously. It’s also head-scratchingly odd.

Anna Karenina

I just reread Anna Karenina, having recently read Tolstoy’s previous novel, War and Peace. In one respect Anna Karenina is an improvement on the earlier book: the female characters are richer, more complex.

The flaws in both books lie in their endings. Anna Karenina opens with Oblonsky, Anna’s brother; in the end he is completely absent, and one has no idea how he reacted to his sister’s horrifying death. Both endings are preachy, as if a story were incomplete without a morality lesson to wrap it up.

Reading Tolstoy helps illuminate much of the Strugatsky Brothers’ work for me. They seem to have worked within a Tolstoian tradition, particularly in their masterpiece The Doomed City, which has a comparatively large cast of characters, all prone to impulsive behavior; shifting points of view; complex politics of power; and even a kind of sermon at the end. But it’s not only the Strugatskys. It seems that in most of the Russian books I’ve read, characters yield to impulse more quickly, contradict themselves more frequently, than in books from other nations. On the other hand, the same is true of Stendhal’s and Voltaire’s characters . . .

15 Excellent Songs Released in 2020

Mickey Guyton, “Black Like Me.” The country anthem of the year?

Arlo Parks, “Eugene.” An honest reckoning with a friendship gone sour? I love the high bass line.

Jessie Ware, “Spotlight.” Were the Pet Shop Boys involved with this? Or is it a case of theft? Either way, it’s transcendent.

Two Fingers, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” A soundtrack to protest from EDM genius Amon Tobin.

Steve Earle, “Devil Put the Coal in the Ground.” At first I thought this was a folk song.

Bad Bunny x Sech, “Ignorantes.” There’s a reason Bad Bunny is the most popular artist on Earth. I’m not sure what it is.

Kiko Dinucci, “Veneno” (feat. Ogi). A tribute to Tom Zé?

Bob Dylan, “My Own Version of You.” A tribute to Frankenstein? His deepest, funniest song in a decade.

Ela Minus, “dominique.” The ultimate covid-19 lockdown song?

21 Savage x Metro Boomin, “Slidin.” I have nothing to say about this song. I guess it leaves me speechless.

Dua Lipa & Angèle, “Fever.” The ultimate covid-19 hospitalized song?

Jay Wood, “Champagne.” “Put the planet on my back for the aesthetic bitch I’m Atlas.” It’s damn hard to listen to this song only once.

Luke Howard Trio, “Shame/Shame (Reprise).” Who would have thought Australian minimalist jazz could be so intense?

Suzanne Santo, “Fall for That” (feat. Gary Clark, Jr.). How many syllables does “won’t” have? And how does she do that with her voice?

Waxahatchee, “St. Cloud.” The ultimate covid-19 death song? Is my guitar even in tune?

Here's the Spotify playlist.

Moonglow

Michael Chabon’s Moonglow is an impeccably written adventure story about a man who resembles (and is called) his grandfather, full of plot twists and vivid set-pieces. It’s an enjoyable read, yet it failed to satisfy me—it felt slight—and I’m still trying to figure out why. (A friend who has also read it felt the same way.)

Perhaps it’s because it wasn’t messy enough. Everything is nicely packaged, carefully worked out, with few loose ends or blurred edges.

Or perhaps it’s that it seemed self-satisfied; I could almost hear Chabon congratulating himself on his work.

Or perhaps it’s that the narrator is colorless, happy to be telling the story and hiding whatever deeper feelings he might have about it.

Or perhaps it’s that I never really felt, on a deep level, the pain of Chabon’s grandmother, the confusion of his grandfather, the feelings of abandonment of his mother. And perhaps that’s because Chabon gave no sign of feeling them himself.

How does a writer really inhabit his or her characters? I’m not sure. But from the evidence of this book, I don’t think Chabon is either.

Tristram Shandy

I finished Tristram Shandy only to find out that the author didn’t. Laurence Sterne died after publishing nine volumes. If he had lived, he doubtless would have written a tenth and an eleventh. I’m disappointed—I was looking forward to some sort of conclusion.

But silly me. That would have been incongruous. The book has no beginning—well, actually, most of the book is its beginning—or middle, really, so how could it have an end?

So much has already been written about Tristram Shandy that I’m not sure what I can add. And really, what can you say about a shaggy dog (or cock-and-bull) story? In which the supposed protagonist/narrator is unborn for half the book and disappears from the other half? In which every plot point is twisted by indirection, ellipses, and digression? In which there’s no moral, no point, no message that’s not rendered ridiculous?

I could say that the characters are rich and unforgettable; yes, at least Sterne gives us that much. And that the book is tremendously funny.

At one point Tristram’s father, who has spent many hours translating the writing of Slawkenbergius on the subject of noses, is talking on the subject at length to his brother Toby:

’Tis a pity, said my father, that truth can only be on one side, brother Toby,——considering what ingenuity these learned men have all shewn in their solution of noses.——Can noses be dissolved? replied my uncle Toby.——

Yes, I’m a sucker for puns.

Like Don Quixote and Jacques le fataliste, Tristram Shandy is a masterpiece of vacillation, a book that explodes the very idea of the novel, a book of digressions, absurdities, and great tenderness. I dare say I prefer Don Quixote and Jacques le fataliste—I found Tristram a bit daunting by comparison, for Sterne takes the joke farther than anyone else has. I’m very glad to have read it, though—and very glad to have concluded reading it too.

Zikhron dvarim

In 1977, Yaakov Shabtai published a novel in Israel called Zikhron dvarim, which means A Memory of Things. If you took the English mistranslation of Proust’s title À la recherche du temps perdu, Remembrance of Things Past, and translated that as concisely as possible into Hebrew, you’d probably get Zikhron dvarim. The novel is Proustian in many ways: the sentences are long and intricate; paragraphs go on for pages (in fact, Zikhron dvarim consists of one unbroken paragraph); the central characters are idle and irresolute; one of the principal subjects is decay and degeneration; the cast of characters is vast (over a hundred in Zikhron dvarim); time is fluid and keeps slipping between past, present, and future as the novel unfolds; Judaism and metaphysics are both central preoccupations. When the novel appeared in an English translation in 1985, four years after the author’s death of a heart attack at the age of 47, it was entitled Past Continuous, perhaps once again an oblique reference to Proust’s masterwork, and the single paragraph was broken up into numerous ones.

It’s hard to know how to read a work like Past Continuous. Do you break it up into arbitrary fifty-odd-page chunks and read it over a few weeks (as I did) or do you attempt to read it straight through, taking only as many breaks as necessary for doing the more mundane things in life (sleeping, eating, working, cleaning, cooking, exercise, e-mails, family time, and so on—though one could argue that those things are no more mundane than the act of reading)? I wish I had taken the latter course, as the breaks I took made it hard to remember some of the characters, and even some of the important events. I think it would have been a richer experience had I allowed myself to be immersed in the novel’s strange meander, characterized by sentences that flow from one character to another, from one time period to another, without a break (reminding me of both José Saramago and Edward P. Jones).

The novel centers around three unhappy, indecisive men, best friends, whose relationships with women are terrible. Goldman is divorced and has little interest in them; Caesar is also divorced and is what we might call a sex addict; Israel has remained unmarried and, while usually extraordinarily calm, gets uncommunicative, angry, and unreasonable when he’s with his lover. I found all three annoying, but the novel is also about their families, whose dysfunctions and stories are rich and strange.

When Past Continuous was first published, it was hailed as a masterpiece and seemed to be a work of major and lasting importance. Now it is little read, at least here. I don’t know why. Perhaps the vogue for novels about indecisive men (like the protagonists of Saul Bellow’s, John Updike’s, and Philip Roth’s works) has waned; perhaps the long sentences and lack of a clear plot are forbidding; perhaps it’s because the novel seems disengaged from political or social issues; perhaps it’s because it’s yet another Israeli novel without a single Arab character, and therefore feels insular; perhaps it’s because it makes so many demands upon the reader while offering no advice, redemption, or beautiful prose. Or perhaps Proustian books simply no longer appeal . . .

Old Filth

Jane Gardam’s novel Old Filth concerns the life of a Raj orphan (a British person who was born in India and was sent back to England alone) who grows up to be a respected barrister in Hong Kong. It reminded me of Penelope Fitzgerald’s work, with eccentric characters doing unexpected things, abrupt shifts in perspective, a distanced tone, and witty, crisp dialogue. But it has some minor weaknesses that Fitzgerald’s novels don’t have: coincidental meetings of old acquaintances; a dark crime that happens early but that we don’t find out about until the end; and an overemphasis on the contrast between how the central character’s history is viewed and what it really is—in other words, conventional plot devices. Without those, the novel would have been leaner yet richer.

Independence Day 2020

Never have I seen such chaos in the United States as at this moment. Right now in Chicago everyone is setting off their own fireworks instead of gathering to view the city's (which have been canceled), and it seems like there's nothing to guide anyone any more. In a way, it's liberating: under a huge harvest moon, with dozens of fireflies flickering, we're all setting off our own explosives. We need rules to guide us, but now we have to make up our own rules, on the fly. All the states are making their own rules too--whoever could have imagined a Fourth of July in which New York has banned Floridians entry to their state? On July 4, 1776, America declared independence from King George III; on July 4, 2020, it seems that America has declared independence from everything else.

When everyone sets off their own explosives, fear and bravado reinforce each other. The conflicts we're facing aren't going away, and there won't be a coming together until the death spiral stops and the government falls. If that doesn't happen, heaven help us. Until then, let's celebrate the fact that we've gotten a good glimpse of what freedom can bring.

Why I Hate Flannery O'Connor

The New Yorker just published Paul Elie’s excellent piece on Flannery O’Connor’s racism. I won’t suggest that we stop reading a writer only because she once confessed, “I don’t like negroes. They all give me a pain.” Or that her black characters are alternately lazy, stupid, and killers (see her final story, “Judgement Day,” for example). There are too many other reasons to stop reading Flannery O’Connor.

First, her characters do not have normal human relationships. There are no friendships between them, no falling in love, no warm familial interactions. They feel no sympathy for each other. A writer who fails to grapple with the nature of human connections is not a great writer.

Second, her characters are grotesques, freaks. She holds them at arm’s length and treats them with contempt. She once wrote, “it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.” This aesthetic revolts me. I like reading about freaks as human beings, not as “figures for our essential displacement.”

Third, she makes facile uses of violence and revelation. Rather than emerging as the outcome of a human relationship, violence and revelation are easy ways for her to end a story or chapter with a hard-hitting punch. It’s brutalism.

Take these things all together: racism, lack of warmth, contempt, facile violence, unearned revelations, brutality masquerading as insight into the human condition. What do you get?

Leave literature out of it. What you get is fascism.

I won’t claim that Flannery O’Connor was a fascist or that reading her stories will turn you into one. But it’s time to stop calling her one of the great American writers and to recognize, instead, that she was one of the most pernicious. It’s time we stop teaching her stories to aspiring writers and to English students in high schools and colleges and teach them Zora Neale Hurston stories instead. I can’t think of two American storytellers more opposed to each other aesthetically, morally, and stylistically. They both take as their subject the poor people of the South, but their characters seem to be of different species.

Did O’Connor ever read Hurston, or Hurston ever read O’Connor? I doubt it. Both would have been horrified and disgusted.

O’Connor’s casual racism is not a flaw in the character of a great writer, but is entirely in keeping with her sensibility, aesthetics, and worldview. It should be the last nail in her reputation’s coffin.

Soul Survivor

Soul Survivor by Jimmy McDonough is a biography of soul singer Al Green; but Al Green is, unfortunately, as incomprehensible a figure as one can find in popular music. The book excels when it comes to music and musicians; its central figure, though, remains a cipher.

I’ve known Jimmy since I was eighteen, and his tastes in music, film, and writing were formative for me. I’ve always admired him, and had the pleasure of working on two of his best books, The Ghastly One and Shakey. This book, like his others, is full of sharp observations, wry turns of phrase, and rich tales about minor characters. Jimmy has a knack for illuminating the dark side of his subjects. All of that makes Soul Survivor a great read, despite the hole at its center.

But Al is something else. He seems incapable of sustaining a relationship with anyone—his musicians, his girlfriends, his wives—for more than a few months. Perhaps he has never had a real friend. He is unloved, unlovable, and unable to love—and this for a man who wrote and sang “L-O-V-E” and Al Green Is Love. He abuses women. He’s insanely homophobic. He refuses to pay people who work for him. (One of my favorite lines in the book is: “When asked about Al’s philosophy when it comes to money, [producer] Paul [Zaleski] simply replied, ‘It’s mine. It’s all mine.’”) And he won’t let anyone get close to him. Al Green Gets Next to You? It’s an illusion.

Yet he can tear your heart out when he sings. I am so grateful to this book for turning me on to some of the live clips of Al Green on YouTube, particularly this one. Sometimes I think God sends his spirit down to inhabit the most unworthy of vessels.

Nothing to See Here

I’ve embarked on a new photographic project called Nothing to See Here. In a way, I’m attempting to do for Chicago’s South Side what Eugène Atget did for Paris a century ago. But I'm also doing something a little more radical. I’m avoiding pictorialism as much as I can. If something strikes me as wow, that would make a great photo, I won’t take it. Instead I take pictures of what doesn't particularly strike me and see if the pictures strike me afterwards.

Here is a small sample of the images I've made. If you hover your pointer over one, you'll see where and when I took it; if you click on it, you'll get a large version.

A Personalized Autobiography and Some Notes to Oneself

My father, Milton Taylor, recently completed writing his autobiography and called it A 20th-Century (Jewish) Life: From Shepherd to Professor of Virology. (You can download it here.) Reading my own father’s memoir was very different from reading a memoir by someone I don’t know. For one thing, I’m in the book. For another, it was written for me—and for others whom he knows—not for a broad public. So it’s a personal communication rather than a general one, like a letter in a way.

My father has led an interesting life. He was born and raised a Glaswegian Jew, but dropped out of high school to join a Zionist Socialist youth movement and lived for a few years on a communal farm in England, where he was a shepherd. He emigrated to Israel, worked as a shepherd there, served in the army, then met my mother; they decided to go to the US, where my father would study poultry husbandry. After a year in New York City, he went to Cornell on an Ag School scholarship, where he became interested in microbiology and virology. He went on to become a professor. When I was born my parents were still planning to move back to Israel, which is why I have a Hebrew name and my first language was Hebrew. But the jobs were better in the States.

My father has a very direct way of writing. One of my favorite things about the book is how straightforwardly he regrets his mistakes and how clear-eyed he is about the past. For example, “When it came time to decide on a post-doctoral career, I chose to move into animal virology. Whether I went into the correct lab is something I often think about. I had wanted to join the lab of Renato Dulbecco at La Jolla. Charley, my advisor, persuaded me not to do so. He possibly thought the Dulbecco lab was too high-powered and that I was not up to it. His argument was that it was a large lab and I would not get personal attention from Dr. Dulbecco. I regret this decision to this day.” Or this, on being part of the Jewish youth movement in Glasgow: “When I think about it now, all of this seems very strange, growing up in Scotland and singing songs about water and work. I loved the singing although I did not know the words, just a jumble of sounds, and the dancing was fun. I suppose this was part of the indoctrination. Communal singing became an important part of life in Israel, reflecting in many cases nostalgia for times that never were and places long lost.” The book is full of sharp observations like that.

It seems appropriate that the next book I turned to was Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer, which I read for the second time. Bresson was a French filmmaker who never used professional actors and avoided theatricality and pretense. There’s probably less chewing of the scenery in his films than in anyone else’s (unless you count Au hasard Balthazar, which is about a donkey who literally chews quite a bit of scenery). His films made a huge impression on me when I saw them in my twenties, though now some of them seem a bit stiff. His Notes are simply notes he made for his own use as he was directing, little bits of general wisdom. It seems almost as if my father, unknowingly, was following Bresson’s maxims as he wrote his book. Here are a few:

Don't run after poetry. It penetrates unaided through the ellipses.

Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.

To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.

It is the flattest and dullest parts that have in the end the most life.

Two simplicities. The bad: simplicity as starting-point, sought too soon. The good: simplicity as end-product, recompense for years of effort.

Neither beautify nor uglify. Do not denature.

Production of emotion determined by a resistance to emotion.

Lewis Nordan

Lewis Nordan’s first two books, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair (1983) and The All-Girl Football Team (1986), were short-story collections that largely hung together like the chapters of a good novel or the songs on a good album do. The first was wide-ranging, polished, and very grotesque, while the second focused mainly on a teenage boy named Sugar in small-town Mississippi. They’re not perfect books: the first opens with a sickeningly detailed embalming and the second includes a misguided Faulkner parody. But they’re otherwise quite marvelous. (The two books were later combined into one called Sugar Among the Freaks, which included fifteen out of their eighteen stories, leaving out the aforementioned stories that I didn’t like and also one pretty good one, “The Copper Balloons.”) Nordan’s characters were apt to go crazy and flip back to normal in the space of a sentence, and he knew how to poke fun at American small-town life. He wasn’t afraid of surrealism, but kept his stories grounded in recognizable minutiae and complex characters, who often reappear in different stories. His was a world of “freaks,” ranging from quadriplegics to flying roosters, and normalcy in his stories is only there to provide contrast to the predominant freakishness of life. Nordan borrowed freely from Mark Twain and Flannery O’Connor, but retained an original vision; his stories are gloriously ridiculous.

State of Wonder

When I read Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth close to two years ago, I was floored. A wise and vivid exploration of an extended family, it was the kind of book I had wanted to read, a book that explored the relationships of real-seeming people to the same depth that Tolstoy and Balzac had. So I eagerly read her next book, The Dutch House, as soon as it came out. Then, just now, I went back and read her previous novel, State of Wonder.

But State of Wonder is a silly book, and gives little hint of what Patchett would soon be capable of. The characters are all subordinate to the plot, and the plot is outlandish. The book is about—spoiler alert!—a woman who goes to a remote village in the Amazon to see a researcher who has more or less disappeared; both are employed by a pharmaceutical company. Patchett sets up a Heart of Darkness–like premise and then abandons it halfway through—which is a good thing, because it couldn’t have been sustained any longer. The research being done in the Amazon centers around—and I can’t believe I’m about to write this—a group of trees, moths, and mushrooms whose symbiosis results in an edible bark that not only delays menopause indefinitely but also prevents malaria. This struck me as almost as ridiculous as Avatar. The book reeks of exoticism.

From the little I’ve heard, Patchett’s earlier novels are just as gimmicky as State of Wonder. The Dutch House wasn’t at all. Perhaps she has made a turn in her career, and her future output will be more along the lines of her last two books. I hope so.

Fragments

I recently read Brooks Haxton’s translation of Heraclitus’s Fragments. I had also read Guy Davenport’s translation. Haxton’s translation may be, of all the translations I’ve looked at, perhaps the least straightforward, the least literal. Yet it has its virtues. Some of the fragments are pithier than in other translations, and wittier too. On the whole I prefer Davenport’s. But it would be nice to have a compendium of, say, five different translations of each fragment.

Heraclitus was a Greek philosopher who wrote about the mutability of all things. Because Ancient Greek is so different from today’s English, and because all that we have left of his great work is a jumble of brief fragments, the gems one finds in one translation don’t exist in another.

Here are a few of my favorite quotations in both Davenport’s and Haxton’s words. The translation I prefer I’ve put in italics.

The dead body is useless even as manure (Davenport). Corpses, like night soil, get carted off (Haxton).

Everything becomes fire, and from fire everything is born (Davenport). All things change to fire, and fire exhausted falls back into things (Haxton).

Gods become men; men become gods, the one living the death of the other, the other dying the life of the one (Davenport). Gods live past our meager death. We die past their ceaseless living (Haxton).

History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man's power in the world (Davenport). Time is a game played beautifully by children (Haxton).

If everything were smoke, all perception would be by smell (Davenport). If everything were turned to smoke, the nose would be the seat of judgment (Haxton).

In searching out the truth, be ready for the unexpected, for it is difficult to find and puzzling when you find it (Davenport). Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way is an impasse (Haxton).

The most beautiful order of the world is still a random gathering of things insignificant in themselves (Davenport). (I can’t find the equivalent in Haxton’s translation.)

There is a new sun for every day (Davenport). The sun is new again, all day (Haxton).

The unseen design of things is more harmonious than the seen (Davenport). The harmony past knowing sounds more deeply than the known (Haxton). Hidden connections are stronger than obvious ones (I'm not sure who translated this, but it's very close to a number of others I've read; perhaps I did it myself).

Blindness

In José Saramago’s Blindness, a mysterious epidemic of white blindness plagues the population. The book follows a group of nameless characters through the traumas of internment and isolation, hunger and filth.

We have become used to dystopias and horror stories, not to mention the terrors of the concentration camps and the Gulag, and the bloody abuses of power in South America and Africa. Blindness is of a piece with all those in its nightmarishness, in the helplessness and everyday heroism (and pettiness) of its characters. But it’s also a funny book, funny in the inimitable Saramago way, in which the chatty and the grotesque become two sides of the same coin.

I liked the other Saramago books I’ve read, especially Death with Interruptions, better than Blindness. What bothered me most was the central premise—that robbed of sight, mankind would degenerate into an almost subhuman mob. To his credit, Saramago does not seem to agree with Erasmus’s proverb “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”—the equivalent of the one-eyed man in Blindness is a helper, not a ruler. But blindness is and has always been quite common, and the helplessness it engenders in this book did not ring true to me, did not square with the books I’ve read about real blind people. Hieronymus Dandinus wrote, “Blind men never blush,” and I wrote, “Only in the land of the blind will no one pursue a blind man.” Taking one of those as the basis for an allegorical novel would have been, in my view, more interesting than the allegory here, where blindness is simply a plague.

Putas asesinas

Roberto Bolaño wrote three books of short stories: Llamadas telefónicas (Phone Calls), Putas asesinas (Murdering Whores), and the posthumously published El gaucho insufrible (The Insufferable Gaucho). For reasons unknown to me, half the stories in the first two books were published in English as Last Evenings on Earth and the other half as The Return. I just finished reading the English versions of the stories in Putas asesinas and have only read a few of those in Llamadas telefónicas.

The collection includes two stories I would characterize as masterpieces: “El Ojo Silva” (“Mauricio ‘The Eye’ Silva”) and “Últimos atardeceres en la tierra” (“Last Evenings on Earth”). All the stories are sordid, as one would guess from the book’s title. Two of them center on mysterious and quiet dark-skinned people with supernatural powers. One would have thought such tropes had gone out of favor by the time this book was written (between 1997 and 2001). “Buba” is about an African soccer player who uses blood and incantations to score goals and “Dentista” features an impoverished and incommunicative sixteen-year-old indigenous Mexican boy who writes amazing fiction in secret; “Buba” is silly and disgusting, but “Dentista” is compelling and strange. One of the stories in Llamadas telefónicas, “Joanna Silvestri,” is narrated by a female porn star and is surprisingly tender—and disturbing as hell.

Bolaño’s stories leave a bad taste in one’s mouth. They’re fascinating and rich and hard to put down, and I love the way they’re told. But his obsession with sleaze and brutality wears thin.

That said, I want to reread the stories I liked best some day soon.

Lost Children Archive

Valeria Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive (2019) is unlike anything I’ve ever read. The narrator is on a road trip from New York to the Southwest with her husband and two children and is worried about where they’ll end up and about what the US is doing to immigrant children. The first half is slow going—humdrum, overthought and overdetermined, a little tendentious. Annoyingly, the narrator name-drops all the books she’s consulted while withholding the names of her children (“the boy,” “the girl”), husband, and self; she refuses to give the reader details about her or her husband’s upbringing, and supplies both of them with dream jobs that could never have existed. Then, suddenly, halfway through, everything changes, and the novel takes off—wild, ungrounded, unexpected—and turns into a glorious mess, an exhilarating read, a cutting loose in every sense. And nothing has prepared us for it, making it even more liberating. Contradictions multiply—in voice, persona, space and time. There’s a book within the book that starts as one thing and ends up as something else altogether; but there’s incompatibility everywhere you turn. The first half could have been cut by half, but the second half makes it all worthwhile.

My Favorite Songs of 2019

(Here's the Spotify playlist.)

In alphabetical order:

“Borderline” by Tame Impala is the latest release from a hopelessly nerdy Australian pop star who sounds like a mid-eighties version of the BeeGees with a sense of rhythm cribbed from a metronome. But hey, I have a real soft spot for ultra-bland disco.

“Con altura” by Rosalía with J. Balvin and El Guincho was a runaway hit in Spain this year but didn’t cross over much. I wonder why singles are getting shorter and shorter.

“Dumebi” by Rema is, I believe, representative of the irresistible hip-hop coming out of Nigeria now. Also see “Jealous,” below.

“History Repeats” by Brittany Howard captures perfectly the historical situation we’re in: “History repeats and we defeat ourselves” indeed.

“Jealous” by Fireboy DML, another Nigerian hit, is uncommonly pretty.

“Kwe ngienda” by Jupiter & Okwess successfully continues this Congolese band’s struggle to be the most dynamic rock band on earth. It’s about a crocodile.

“Miles” by Jamila Woods is an insightful musical portrait. One of my favorite things about it is how far behind the beat the bass plays. (By the way, I don’t get why all the musicians on this track—and on most of Woods’ Legacy! Legacy!—go uncredited. Strange for an album that’s about empowerment.)

“Nerve!” by Anna Wise has the most brilliant, goofy, and oddball production of any single this year.

“No One’s Easy to Love” by Sharon Van Etten may sound alienating and retrofuturist, but I find it impossible to shake. It’s from my favorite album of the year, Remind Me Tomorrow.

“Not” by Big Thief is not an absolute triumph of negativity. It’s just an absolute triumph.

“Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X with Billy Ray Cyrus proves that hip-hop’s and country’s primary obsession is exactly the same: not the conflict between the real and the fake, but the synergy between them.

“Redoma” by BaianaSystem with Samba de Lata de Tijuaçú, with its chorus of “Não cai” (don’t fall), is an appropriate anthem in this year of Johnson and Bolsonaro.

“Rooting for You” by Alessia Cara is just a summertime fun song.

“See You in Snow” by Eris Drew is another wonder (after last year’s “Hold Me”) by an almost invisible Chicago deejay who specializes in delightful sounds.

“Song 31” by Noname with Phoelix takes Chicago hip hop to another plane.

“Sun Come Down” by Chance the Rapper, another great Chicago hip hop track, is one of several wedding-related highlights from The Big Day.

“Three Different Hat Sizes” by Amon Tobin is from one of the richest and strangest albums of the year, the totally drumless Fear in a Handful of Dust (the title is taken from Eliot’s “The Waste Land”).

“Voy” by Nella is about displacement—an appropriate single for a singer from a country (Venezuala) experiencing massive emigration; ineffably sad, it lilts nonetheless.

My Favorite Albums of the Decade, Part Three

This is the third and last post I'm devoting to my favorite albums of the decade 2010-2019. The first two are here and here.

Sufjan Stevens’s Carrie and Lowell (2015) just might be the most beautiful pop record I’ve ever heard. Drumless, with airy overdubbed vocal harmonies floating above piano, guitar, and synthesizer, it’s tear-inducing death-soaked ear candy. The lyrics are elliptical, evocative, peculiar (“There’s blood on that blade / Fuck me I’m falling apart / My assassin like Casper the ghost / There’s no shade in the shadow of the cross”); the melodies are to die for. The album is supposed to be about Stevens’s grief after his mother died, but it could be about anything, and I don’t really want to know. I’d rather let lines like “So can we pretend / Sweetly before the mystery ends?” or “If history speaks of two baby teeth / I’m painting the hills blue and red” carry their own weight. This kind of album often induces obsession; I might be too old for that, but maybe not.

Heavy and warped, Sharon Van Etten’s Remind Me Tomorrow (2019) sounds like nothing else she has done: awash in analog synth and piano with nary a guitar in sight. It’s also more mature than her earlier work, and reminds me of one of my favorite albums of the 2000s, PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea: both of them are solidly New York records made by independent women trying to balance family/love with work. It’s worthwhile reading Van Etten’s well-written press release here. But it doesn’t give you a sense of what the album is like. It’s Halloween music, really, spooky without trying too hard, unearthly and love-soaked and even bluesy. I didn’t like it at first, but I’ve been listening to it over and over since it came out in January and I still haven’t plumbed its depths.

Bringing the coolness of jazz and bossa nova to contemporary r&b and latin music, Kali Uchis’s Isolation (2018) is a glass full of ice cubes on a sunny beach. Uchis, whose real name is Karly-Marina Loaiza, grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, though she also spent many years in Pereira, Colombia, where her parents were from; she released her first mixtape at the age of eighteen, and Isolation came out when she was twenty-four. With guests as diverse as Jorja Smith, Kevin Parker (Tame Impala), Reykon “El Líder,” and Tyler, the Creator, Isolation is damn catchy, sounds like a dream, and retains a hard center while melting in your ears. Impossible to pigeonhole and impossible to sit still to, this is one of those pure pop records that’s both frustratingly opaque (who is Uchis? where’s the center here? what is she getting at and where is it getting her?) and genuine (her reserve, her defiance, her engaging humor—it’s no put-on). And you can’t forget the music—how did she unify this thing with a dozen different producers, ranging from Sounwave to Thundercat, from Gorillaz to the Rude Boyz? Well, there’s her voice and her melodies, I guess, but there’s something else too, that I can only call her soul.

Suspended Sentences

Patrick Modiano’s Suspended Sentences consists of three interconnected novellas originally published in French in the 1980s and ’90s. They’re about disappearances and intractable mysteries; they’re moody and vague, yet filled with concrete places and people. In a Paris of shadows and memories, improbable chance meetings are juxtaposed with seemingly real lists of garages and wanted men, or elements of autobiography, or imaginary encounters with actual historical figures. In each novella the narrator is searching in vain for something lost; in each, time is fragmented and chronology so broken as to be beyond repair. The works are deliberately elusive, fleeting; reading them is like catching glimpses of another world from a train window.