Ok, so I was able impose on some friends to do some heavy lifting…see previous post. However I could not leave this dustbin of history without a few digressive remarks, putatively about words and literature and my current existential crisis.
The Noam Chomsky Collection (Haymarket Books)
But before I get to my own favorites of the past year, I want to give notice and recognition to The Complete Works of Primo Levi, Haymarket Books’s Chomsky Collection, Greg Grandin’s In the Shadow of Kissinger and Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg by Kate Evans, edited by Paul Buhle. While I have long held that using the superlative ‘best’ as well as a number of other puerile superlatives (hottest, must read, coolest.most excellent), I have no problem assigning the rubric ‘important’ to a book. And the four titles mentioned above are prime examples of the tomes that must be considered important books among those that were published last year.
Primo Levi in the house of the maternal family( Luzzati family), photo by Giorgio Miserendino
Better minds and more rigorous writers (like James Wood) have exposited on Levi:
Primo Levi did not consider it heroic to have survived eleven months in Auschwitz. Like other witnesses of the concentration camps, he lamented that the best had perished and the worst had survived. But we who have survived relatively little find it hard to believe him. How could it be anything but heroic to have entered Hell and not been swallowed up? To have witnessed it with such delicate lucidity, such reserves of irony and even equanimity? Our incomprehension and our admiration combine to simplify the writer into a needily sincere amalgam: hero, saint, witness, redeemer. Thus his account of life in Auschwitz, “If This Is a Man” (1947), whose title is deliberately tentative and tremulous, was rewrapped, by his American publisher, in the heartier, how-to-ish banner “Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity.” That edition praises the text as “a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit,” though Levi often emphasized how quickly and efficiently the camps could destroy the human spirit. Another survivor, the writer Jean Améry, mistaking comprehension for concession, disapprovingly called Levi “the pardoner,” though Levi repeatedly argued that he was interested in justice, not in indiscriminate forgiveness. A German official who had encountered Levi in the camp laboratory found in “If This Is a Man” an “overcoming of Judaism, a fulfillment of the Christian precept to love one’s enemies, and a testimony of faith in Man.” And when Levi committed suicide, on April 11, 1987, many seemed to feel that the writer had somehow reneged on his own heroism.
If only the lamentations of the left leaning and socially progressive spent more (some) time paying to the crystalline observations of Noam Chomsky.
From Red Rosa
Red Rosa by Kate Evans, edited by Paul Buhle
If I recall correctly German socialist thought dancing was as important as revolution. Kudos to Verso,Evans and Buhle for recognizing that attention must be paid…
In the Shadow of Kissinger by Greg Grandin
There has never been a time when so many publicly(indicted and) recognized war criminals have pranced around the United States with impunity. The most evil of these criminals is Henry (“Dr. Strangelove”)Kissinger. The late lamented Christopher Hitchens amused with his rhetorical flourish The Trial of Henry Kissinger:
His own lonely impunity is rank: it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to persist then we shall shamefully vindicate the ancient philosopher Anacharsis, who maintained that laws were like cobwebs: strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong. In the name of innumerable victims, known and unknown, it is time for justice to take a hand. (p. XI)
My 2001 conversation with Hitchens here yielded this
Robert Birnbaum: The Trial of Henry Kissinger originated with two serialized articles that appeared in Harper’s Magazine. Did your writing the pieces on Kissinger originate with you looking for a place to publish them or with Lewis Lapham [Harper’s editor] encouraging you to write them?
Christopher Hitchens: Well, I have been, for more than two decades, determined to write a book about Henry Kissinger, and I chose to start doing it properly last year…to collect all the material I already had, in one place and work it up. Because of the Pinochet trial and because of the Milosevic warrant, I thought that this changed the context. The first person to whom I mentioned this project was Lewis Lapham at Harper’s Magazine, who said, “Do it now. We’ll print it.” I barely had time to say, “Are you serious?” He said, “Get on with, too. It’s high time.” So, I knew I had a receptive editor, and I suspected I could probably expand it into a book as well. I wrote it for Harper’s, and then I updated it a bit, added a certain amount, and then it was published by Verso. I’m very much in Lewis Lapham’s debt because it’s the first time Harper’s has ever, he tells me, run two successive issues.
RB: Barbara Ehrenreich says when she had a discussion with Lapham about the article(s) that led to Nickel and Dimed, “an insane little smile” came across his face when the question of who would do them [came up] and he said, “You.” When you were having the conversation, did something like that happen?
CH: No, it was more like a peremptory gesture saying, “Why haven’t you done it already? Do it now, we’ll print it.” Then it was followed by a number of nudging calls to say, “Have you done it yet?” keeping me up to the mark. It’s nice to know that you have demand in that way. I’ll tell you something interesting. Neither he nor Rick MacArthur, the publisher, who jointly took the decision to put it two months running on the front page and promote it and so on, imagined that it would sell at all. They thought they ought to do it. They thought it was high time someone did do it. But they didn’t think of it as a commercial proposition. As it happens, the magazine almost sold out of the newsstands both times. Which is quite rare for a monthly.
Greg Grandin’s indictment of Herr Professor Kissinger has the force of rigorous attention to the documentary record (some of you will recognize this as what used to be called ‘history’)
Far from the calculating practitioner of Realpolitik that even his most ardent detractors tend to imagine, the Kissinger that emerges from Grandin’s book is compulsively drawn towards action for its own sake. Over the course of his career as national security advisor, secretary of state, and, later, elite global consultant, Kissinger “institutionalized a self-fulfilling logic of intervention” and established a working “template for how to justify tomorrow’s action while ignoring yesterday’s catastrophe.”
“At every single one of America’s postwar turning points,” writes Grandin, “moments of crisis when men of goodwill began to express doubts about American power, Kissinger broke in the opposite direction.” America almost invariably broke with him.
So here are my favorite real paper and ink books of the last 300 or so days…
House of the Rising Sun: A Novel by James Lee Burke
House of the Rising Sun: A Novel by James Lee Burke
Crow Fair: Stories by Thomas McGuane
Crow Fair: Stories by Thomas McGuane
Sweet Caress by William Boyd
Sweet Caress by William Boyd
City on Fire: A novel by Garth Risk Hallberg
City on Fire: A novel by Garth Risk Hallberg
A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me: Stories and a novella by David Gates
A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me: Stories and a novella by David Gates
Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years by Thomas Mallon
Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years– by Thomas Mallon
The Lower Quarter: A Novel by Elise Blackwell
The Lower Quarter: A Novel by Elise Blackwell
No God But Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States by Stephen Chambers
No God But Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States
by Stephen Chambers
Disposable Futures: Violence in the Age of the Spectacle HENRY GIROUX (Co-authored with Brad Evans).
Disposable Futures: Violence in the Age of the Spectacle HENRY GIROUX (Co-authored with Brad Evans).
Above the Water fall: A Novel by Ron Rash
Above the Water fall: A Novel by Ron Rash
A Free State: A Novel by Tom Piazza
A Free State: A Novel by Tom Piazza
American Meteor by Norman Lock
American Meteor by Norman Lock
The Cartel by Don WInslow
The Cartel: A novel by Don Winslow
Gutshot: Stories by Amelia Gray
Gutshot by Amelia Gray
The Kind Worth Killing: A Novel by Peter Swanson
The Kind Worth Killing: A Novel by Peter Swanson
The Whites: A Novel by Richard Price , Harry Brandt
The Whites: A Novel by Richard Price , Harry Brandt
The Small Backs of Children: A Novel by Lidia Yuknavitch
The Small Backs of Children: A Novel by Lidia Yuknavitch
A Spool of Blue Thread: A novel by Anne Tyler
A Spool of Blue Thread: A novel by Anne Tyler
The Lady from Zagreb by Philip Kerr
The Lady from Zagreb (A Bernie Gunther Novel) by Philip Kerr
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy
In the Shadow of Kissinger by Greg Grandin
Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman by Greg Grandin
Isn’t anyone sick of the ceaseless shit-stream of lists of ‘best’, ‘hottest’, ‘coolest’ ‘781 must- projectile hurled into the ether by an ever growing horde of people with opinions, one of which is that their opinion will be valuable to the rest of the world? Really, how many of these inventories qualify as even useful.
If however you have an interest these predictable journalistic devices the literary website Large Hearted Boy offers an assiduously collected list of lists (which it has been offering annually for eight years)
And, so it was a pleasure and a relief to encounter that literary flower of Cambridge, Katherine Powers’s astute criterion —as in Favorite Books of 2015. In keeping with the spirit of Ms Power’s offering, I canvassed a number of friends and acquaintances for news of their own favorites of 2015*
George Scialabba
One of the great unheralded (except in Cambridge Massachusetts) English speaking public intellectuals.Here’s his website. And here is George’s psychiatric (diagnosis: depression) medical record as published in the Baffler. And of course you will want to read my conversation with George at this very journal.*
The Demise of Virtue in a Virtual America by David Bosworth
David Bosworth, The Demise of Virtue in a Virtual Age
The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford
Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head
The Age of Acquiescence by Steve Fraser
Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence
Love Hotel by Jane Unrue
Jane Unrue, Love Hotel
What Kind of Creatures Are We? by Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky, What Kind of Creatures Are We?
*And keep an eye out for a new collection from that guy with the funny Wop name … George Scialabba, I think … called Low Dishonest Decades: Essays and Reviews, 1980-2015, coming in February from Pressed Wafer.
Howard Dinin
If Howard is not a man for all seasons, he certainly is one for many. A skilled photographer, gourmand and cook, he is also a man of many carefully chosen words. But most importantly he is a great and generous friend, advisor and IT consultant. Howard is working on a project ( that I am not at liberty to discuss) which should I will bring to your attention in the fullness of time.Stay tuned.
I operate on the presumption, long since proven to my satisfaction, that any book worth reading, whatever the subject, is always about something greater than itself—usually falling under the rubric of either cosmology, epistemology, or ontology.
Loathe as I am to admit to reading fiction any longer, accepting the risk of appearing deliberately to be hipper than thou by doing so, the fact is, always admitted sheepishly, that I do read fiction. But I read a great deal of all else of the genera of literary forms. And by literary, I hasten to add, I don’t mean any snot-nosed distinction between what is always someone else’s notion of what is high and what is low; rather it may be what is words alone, or what is words accompanied, like a piece of chamber music, by other sensory instruments, usually sounds and images, but what you will when you come right down to it.
Here’s what amounts to a potpourri of the stack being in descending order from the current date, as it has accumulated. You may conclude that I have read at least some of each, and completed one or another, if not recently, then at least long enough ago that it was time for another intimate re-acquaintance. If the book looks worn or misshapen, it’s for a reason.
I’ve quickly snapped the covers for Brother Birnbaum as I was headed out the door, laden with luggage and food and a sack or two filled with the impedimenta of a gadgeteer/flaneur/photographe on holiday.
The physical books depicted will have to wait for my return, but not a small number are also in residence in e-form on a tablet which rarely leaves my possession.
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa
Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa
Photography by Ian Jeffrey
Photography by Ian Jeffrey
The Other Paris by Luc Sante
The Other Paris by Luc Sante
Two Towns in Provence by MFK Fisher
Two Towns in Provence by MFK Fisher
Portraits by John Berger
Portraits by John Berger
The Difficulty of Being a Dog by Roger Grenier
The Difficulty of Being a Dog by Roger Grenier
Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir by Truman Capote
Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir by Truman Capote
Zone: Selected Poems by Guilluame Apollinaire
Zone: Selected Poems by Guilluame Apollinaire
Submission by Michel Houellebecq
Submission by Michel Houellebecq
The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
FIN
Paul Buhle.
As is frequently the case I became aware of, and filled in, a large gap in my cultural literacy, as I chanced to become aware of Paul Buhle— that happenstance stemming from noting his collaboration with Howard Zinn to create A People’s History of American Empire— a graphic recapitulation of Zinn’s magnum opus.
A People’s History of American Empire by Howard Zinn and Paul Buhle
From that useful discovery I found out that Buhle is a former member of the sixties era radical organization Students for a Democratic Society and a devotee of Marxist and cricket scholar, CLR James. He is the author/editor of nearly thirty books, among them: Images of American Radicalism, Marxism in the United States, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story behind America’s Favorite Movies, The Encyclopedia of the American Left, The Immigrant Left in the United States, The New Left Revisited,Insurgent Images: The Agitprop Murals of Mike Alewitz,From the Lower Eastside to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture. Che Guevara, a Graphic Biography, Wobblies! A Graphic history of the Industrial Workers of the World Jews and American Comics and Bohemians. Paul was kind enough to take the time to offer some suggestions…
Paul Buhle
Odd Angles of Literary 2015
These are some of the favorites that would otherwise hide themselves under my desk or in the attic. They deserve readers.
Crime Does Not Pay by OR: Dark Horse Books,
Crime Does Not Pay, Volume 4. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, from 2013 first edition. 217pp, color, $49.99.
These are the pleasures of sin, straight out of the middle to later 1940s as War Comics lose their charm and crime comics, with mobsters, molls (in “headlight” tight sweaters) and assorted victims get plugged full of lead thanks to this best seller of the era. Most oddly, publisher Lev Gleason had been a near-communist supporter of the Spanish Civil War’s Abe Lincoln Battalion, publisher of a short-lived slick lefty magazine and of a more successful knockoff of Reader’s Digest. He found his faithful readers in bloodthirsty teenagers. Actually the stories are lively and the art by some of the best, including bizarre figures like Bob Wood, alcoholic and murderer, just like his characters.
La Lucha Drawn and Written by Joe Sack,
La Lucha: the Story of :Lucha Castro and Human Rights in Mexico. Drawn and Written by Joe Sack, edited by Adam Shapiro, with a Preface by Lucha Castro. New York and London: Verso, 2015,96p, $16.95.
A Spanish Association for Human Rights project centering upon a true heroine in the world South of the Border, notably Chihuahua, more like the underworld where violence is a daily occurrence and violence against women. The art is soft-expressionist, suitable to murder and impunity from arrest, “disappearances” with no seeming resolution and heroic efforts at popular resistance. The happy ending promised US authorities by the Calderon government only brings more death and misery. Read, learn, wince.
Flashed: Sudden Stories in Comics and Prose. Edited by Josh Neufeld and Sari Wilson.
Flashed: Sudden Stories in Comics and Prose. Edited by Josh Neufeld and Sari Wilson. Indianapolis: Pressgang, 2016, $15?
This is one of the most unusual comics ever to find itself in my mailbox. Neufeld, an erstwhile collaborator with Harvey Pekar and acclaimed comic artist of post-flood New Orleans, joins editorial partner, novelist Sari Wilson, and many artistic-literary partners in trying to push fictional or semi-fictional prose and comic art against each other. A two-pager by Lynda Barry would, alone, make this book worth seeing. Perhaps the remainder is best seen as young people experimenting. I had difficulty following these brief and varied efforts, but appreciate the effort.##
Steve Fagin [photo: Robert Birnbaum]
Steve Fagin
Frankly I believe it should be sufficient to point out that Steve and I have been friends since high school in Chicago (Mather, Class of 1964). And that once a year Steve comes up to Boston from Manhattan and we visit Fenway Park. However, I do feel compelled to note he was a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California at San Diego. His videos include The Machine That Killed Bad People, Zero Degrees Latitude, Virtual Play, Memorial Day (Observed), The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel and TropiCola which focused on contemporary Cuba. Also, he is the subject of the bookTalkin’ With Your Mouth Full: Conversations With the Videos of Steve Fagin.
Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full edited by Steve Fagin
A Noah’s Ark of 10 2015 favs
Theater
Phoebe Fox, Russell Tovey, Mark Strong, Nicola Walker, and Michael Gould star in Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, directed by Ivo van Hove
1) View From the Bridge @ the Lyceum
Van Hove does Miller
a super saturated rendition squeezes blood from a turnip of a play and reminds one that the over wrought , well done, can turn melodrama into great tragedy
A scene from Elevator Repair Service’s The Sound and The Fury
2) The Sound and Fury @ The Public theatre
Elevator Repair Service does Faulkner
Understanding , in certain cases , can be greatly overestimated. Being lost and confused only brings into focus the desperate ,hopeless idiocy of these terminally handicapped Faulkner babbling things .
Sports
1) Anderson defeats Murray 4th round of U.S. Open @ Armstrong Stadium
There is nothing better than the 4th round of the U.S. Open with upwards of 6 matches in a single venue . The intimate Armstrong Stadium with both temperature and humidity in the 90s is ectasy(SUMMER IN THE CITY)
2) Duel in the Sun,
deGrom outpitches Greinke as the first place Mets end Greinke’s 45 + scoreless innings streak and beat the Deserter Dodgers @ CitiField
LOVE,Love, love those pitchers
Movies
Films unlikely to win audience awards@ New York Film Festival
Film festivals have been kinda ruined by the audience award. The point of a festival should not be to pander but to challenge. I hate Sundance, I hate Sundance, I hate Sundance
J’taime Cet obscur objet du désir
!) Guy Madden’s Forbidden Room
2)Apichatpong Weerasethakul ‘s Cemetery of Splendour
Opera
More and less Kentridge
1)Kentridge’s Refuse the Hour at BAM
The first 21st century opera I have liked and liked it AND HOW. If forced to choose I liked the music by Phillip Miller better than the text and ART by Kendridge , but cannot squabble with the overall effect…WOW
2)Berg’s Lulu directed by Kentridge at the Met
Well, as I suspected I thought the Berg music , described by some “clever person “as Schoenberg and Mahler played at the same time, worked less well with the visuals of Kendridge than his spectacular version of Shostokovitch’s brilliant the Nose , but that was some hard act to follow. I’m sure many would squabble with my preference for Shostokovitch over Berg , but I think few would argue that Kentridge’s schtick works better with Shostokovitch than Berg
BOOKS
Sidewalks by Valerie Luselli’
1)Valerie Luselli’s Sidewalks , but not her rave reviewed The Story of My Teeth. I find Story of My Teeth derivative, but perhaps both books are and I just prefer the antecedents to her essays in Sidewalks? Put another way, Sidewalks feels like a book written by an old person, Teeth by someone very young.
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
2)The Leopard: A Novel by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
I kinda cheated on this because I put it on my list every year and by the by I defy you to tell me a better book movie combo that the di Lampedusa novel and the Visconti movie
Peter Guralnick If you ended up in this way station you would , at the least. be familiar with Guralnick’s seminal two-volume biographical essay on Elvis Presley. But me not being a Presley admirer I didn’t come to Peter’s work until his excellent exposition of Chicago musician Sam Cooke’s (“A Change is Gonna Come”)life in Dream Boogie. I reconnected with Peter in conversatio with him on his latest opus devoted to the life of rock and rill pioneer Sam Philips( Elvis Presley, Howling Wolf, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, BB King and more. Soon to see the light of day will be that conversation…
Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson
Hemingway’s Boat – Paul Hendrickson
The digression (always) rules. Like Tristram Shandy and Footsteps by Richard Holmes, this is to be cherished both for its cunning narrative strategy and for the firm truths that reside at its center.
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Lowland – Jhumpa Lahiri
Compact, emotionally and politically expansive, and broadly, tragically humanistic in the choices and resolutions that it tentatively offers.
The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary
The Horse’s Mouth – Joyce Cary
I’m not sure how many times I’ve read this, or seen the movie (written by, and starring, Alec Guinness), but I am savoring it all the more this time more for its Blakeian essence and unabashedly romantic celebration of freedom.
The Hollywood Trilogy by Don Carpenter
I had read a bunch of Don Carpenter novels, including The Class of ’49 and his celebrated down-and-out classic, Hard Rain Falling, but nothing prepared me for the rambunctiousness of these three novels. (Well, maybe his posthumously published Friday at Enrico’s…) I guess I should have paid more attention to his biography. I mean, he did write the script for Payday, starring the inimitable Rip Torn as Hank Williams?/Waylon Jennings? the ultimate archetype of a falling star.
A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
A God in Ruins – Kate Atkinson
Sprightly, exploratory (better time-travel than The Man in the High Castle) but fundamentally rooted in the human equation, with deeply etched portraits that stay with you forever. Very much like her earlier Life After Life and her wonderful Jackson Brodie detective novels.
Dogs of Winter
by Kem Nunn
Mythic – and real. Great (melo) drama, probably the pinnacle of his surf-noir novels. Just as The Power of the Dog (what’s with all these dogs?) may be Don Winslow’s cartel peak. But in each case there’s so much more.
The Neapolitan Trilogy by Elena Ferrante
The Neapolitan Trilogy – Elena Ferrante
I haven’t gotten to the fourth yet, but I can’t wait. It’s as if the Patterson, New Jersey of William Carlos Williams had been transported to Naples.
Citizen Vince by Jess Walter
Citizen Vince – Jess Walter
Another great novel from a writer who defies categorization. Every one of his books is altogether different – every one is accomplished in its own right. (But start with Beautiful Ruins if you’re looking for sheer delight.)This is a re-read. I can’t believe how much – well, delight – I missed the first time around.
Three Junes by Julia Glass
Three Junes – Julia Glass
This was another re-read, I think prompted by her latest, And the Dark Sacred Night, and leading me back to all of her other interconnected books, with their thoughtful (and likeable) characters and depiction of a familiar and frequently interior world that you can go back and visit again and again.
Inherent Vice by P.T. Anderson
The Master by P.T. Anderson
Inherent Vice and The Master – P.T. Anderson
Like all of his films, great, detailed, and fundamentally uncategorizable literary landscapes. There Will Be Blood? Come on.
Carried Away by Alice Munro
Carried Away – Alice Munro
The tops. I read it every year. Every reading yields new levels of meaning and mystery. I can think of no one who can suggest all the manifold and contradictory dimensions of a world (in a short story!) like Alice Munro.
Richard Hoffman Although I think I was a Facebook friend of Richard’s I did not meet the poet/essayist/college mentor/social activist until we sat together before, during and after attending Professor Jabari Assim’s
surreal court hearing for a preposterous traffic violation (look it up in the Boston area newspapers) in my current hometown of Newton, Massachusetts. As with Peter Guralnick, you can look forward a lengthy unexpurgated conversation between 2 alta kackers (me and Richard). Look out, World.
You fill find here a recent essay by Richard Hoffman.
I’m going to chicken out when it comes to contemporaries whom I know, and especially colleagues; if I missed somebody I’d feel bad. Between my students’ writing, the reading I do for my literature classes, the work of my colleagues I try to stay up with, contest judging, reading ARCs for possible blurbs, there’s time for only a few of the growing stack next to my chair. However, among those who made it from that stack to a more permanent berth on my shelves are the following:
Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon
Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon. This hybrid of memoir and cultural commentary was recommended to me by bookseller Matt Pieknik when I read at McNally Jackson in NYC. He had read my Love & Fury and thought that Eribon and I were covering similar ground. He was right. I love the book because he isn’t afraid to throw over, revise, outgrow, his former thinking. He is a biographer of Foucault, a respected French avante-intellectual, but with the death of his father the long bungee cord of his parentage pulls him back to Reims and his working class family. He sifts through complex questions of loyalty and identity and the political consequences of the left’s near abandonment of working people. It’s just a terrific book.
Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shariar Mandanipour.
Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shariar Mandanipour. I am acquianted with Mandanipour through PEN New England. (He’s teaching now at Tufts.) This is what it is like to live as a literary person under the boot of authoritarian censors. The thing is, this book is a hoot! It’s a novel, like Catch-22, that renders its condemnations by illuminating not merely the cruelty of such a system, but its utter absurdity, all the while keeping in view the tragic price people must pay for resisting. A brilliant, inventive, laugh your ass off and get scared at the same time book.
The Violence of Organized Forgetting by Henry A. Giroux
The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine by Henry A. Giroux. For a deep cultural, economic, and political analysis of our current inability to act in our own best interests, Giroux has no equal. Maybe being Canadian helps him; maybe he can see the mess clearly by looking over the backyard fence. People may be familiar with him in his role as a political commentator on the web at Truthout.
The Last Interview: James Baldwin
The Last Interview: James Baldwin. Melville House Publishing brought together four substantial interviews with Baldwin here, including his last, with Quincy Troupe in France in 1987, the year Baldwin died. I think it is amazing how much Baldwin in conversation sounds like Baldwin in his essays: his voice is his voice. It makes me wonder how writing and speaking influence one another throughout a writer’s life. There’s clearly some kind of feedback loop. Both his talk and his essays are a perfect balance of the spontaneous and the carefully considered. His presence, his integrity, his anger, warmth, humor, and defiant wholeness knock me out. It’s something to aspire to, I can tell you that.
Something Crosses My Mind by Wang Xiaoni
I read a lot of poetry, but I know a lot of poets and as I said above, I’ll not name any of my friends or colleagues. Maybe I’ll stick to work in translation. One book I’ve enjoyed immensely is called Something Crosses My Mind by the contemporary Chinese poet Wang Xiaoni, translated by Eleanor Goodman. She writes of contemporary China in a way that de-exoticizes it for a western reader, there is enough of the observational (think Frank O’Hara,) the classical, and the epigrammatic, plus something that is the poet’s own, to make this a book of poems to read slowly, each one several times, for their resonance, their beauty, and their ability to reveal themselves a bit more with each reading.
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Sobbing Superpower by Tadeusz Rozewicz
Light Everywhere by Cees Nooteboom
Each Day Catches Fire by Bitite Vinklers.
I’ve also enjoyed reading the selected poems of the Polish poet Tadeusz Rozewicz, Sobbing Superpower; Light Everywhere by the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, who is known more as a novelist in the west (translated by Joanna Trzeciak), and I’ve just finished a remarkable little book of poems by the Latvian poet Imants Ziedonis, Each Day Catches Fire, translated by Bitite Vinklers. I became aware of this poet when I read on a bill with Vinklers for The Manhattan Review. He is unique in that he writes, literally, fabulous poems, but ones that always begin and end in the real world. Many of his poems are short bursts of prose, and many of them manage to talk about writing under censorship without, of course, writing about living under censorship. More than that though, they are a delight. In one poem he writes, “Along with the moths tonight, love runs into the windowpane./ (‘Turn off the light, or we’ll have no peace.’)”
(Citizen 7083921848)
Thomas Wickersham Thomas is the event maestro at the hallowed independent bookstore, Brookline Booksmith.I came to know of him through his mother Joan who mentioned him in a conversation I had with her upon the occasion of her wonderful story collection,The News from Spain. Thomas has been astute enough to invite me to chat with David Gates and Don Winslow during their appearances at Booksmith last summer.
Below are nine of my favorite books published or reissued in 2015 and a tenth bonus pick from the past. The books are in no particular order and the list could change tomorrow.
The Cartel by Don Winslow
I had impossibly high hopes for this sequel to one of my all-time-favorites, The Power of the Dog. Winslow miraculously delivered. Together, these two books are a stunning documentation of the 40+ year history of the Mexican-American drug conflict. Injected with political urgency while while remaining a page-turning thriller, The Cartel is epic in scope, yet heartbreakingly intimate. This is not a crime novel- it is a tale of war.
The Whites by Harry Brandt
Richard Price (writing as Harry Brandt)- The Whites
I draw a distinction between mysteries with a police protagonist and “cop novels.” While there is a mystery at its heart, The Whites ranks with Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choirboys and Kent Anderson’s Night Dogs as one of the finest cop novels I’ve ever read. Its stark naturalistic world of Night Watch policing is a living breathing nightmare land. Cops guzzle energy drinks and take selfies with murder victims. Evil is not the enemy so much as the absurdity of the streets.
GBH by Ted Lewis
Ted Lewis- GBH (Originally published in the U.K. in 1980. First U.S. printing 2015.)
I read GBH exactly one year ago, almost to the day, and it has haunted me since. It is the story of a gangster in hiding. There are no nice people in this book. There are no happy endings. And yet, there is an intoxicating quality to the alternating storylines of terror and gloom. A cold sheen of glamor clings to the pervasive danger.
Fat City by Leonard Gardner
Leonard Gardner- Fat City (Originally published in 1970, but reissued by NYRB in 2015)
Nominated for the National Book Award against Slaughterhouse Five and Them when it was first released in 1970, Fat City was woefully out-of-print for years. Nominally a boxing novel, it’s truly a book about desperation and hope. Again and again it captures the disconcerting emotions you didn’t realize you had. The best prose I read all year
The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America by Colin Quinn
Colin Quinn- The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America
Based on his experiences growing up in ethnically-mixed Brooklyn, Colin Quinn tells the history of New York City through personal stories rich with laughs and rife with self-effacing humiliations. The Coloring Book is a memoir of one comedian’s formation, a celebration of what makes us different, and an ode to the life and death of American cities.
Peter Swanson- The Kind Worth Killing
A diabolically twisted web of double crosses that echoes Strangers on a Train. Sinister, but packed with sly irony, it is the most queasily enjoyable and ingeniously plotted thriller I read all year.
Those We Left Behind by Stuart Neville
Stuart Neville- Those We Left Behind
Stuart Neville has become a master at tackling psychological trauma. As an avid reader of crime fiction I am aware of my complicity in what is essentially violence for entertainment. For me, the “cozies” (The Kitty Who Painted a Poisoned Pie at the Beach) are in worse taste than graphically realistic police procedurals. Stuart Neville is by no means preachy or dry, but he doesn’t let you forget the cost of violence on victims. Reading Neville is the last time that a book literally made me miss my train stop.
Gang of Lovers by Massimo Carlotto
Massimo Carlotto- Gang of Lovers
Massimo Carlotto is my favorite writer going for straight crime fiction. His Alligator series echoes many of the tropes of modern Private Eye novels. You have the melancholy music-loving heavy-drinking detective aided by his two friends: the techie and the honorable triggerman. Yet there is still a jarring unpredictability and lack of morality to the books, no doubt greatly influenced by Carlotto’s own wrongful imprisonment for murder. The Alligator series is a fine place to start (though Gang of Lovers is a direct sequel of sorts to Bandit Love), but The Goodbye Kiss and At the End of a Dull Day are the Carlotto masterpieces.
A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar-
Lavie Tidhar- A Man Lies Dreaming (comes out in March 2016 in the U.S. but already released in Britain)
A Man Lies Dreaming is the most audacious perversion of the private eye novel ever written. Alternate history, revenge fantasy, or sorrowful daydream; each element of this book brilliantly forms a whole as mysterious for its structure as its plot. Approach it with as little foreknowledge as possible and never forget.
The Sluts by Dennis Cooper-
Bonus: Dennis Cooper- The Sluts (published in 2004, but on this list as the only book in 2015 that I read in one night)
* editor’s note—I forswore heavy-handed editing and graphic consistency, except to attempt to eliminate most ,if not all, graphic and grammatical infelicities. To paraphrase Voltaire, “Perfection is the Enemy of the Good.” And m st the time the Good is the best that I can do.
In addition to Halloween and Columbus Day, I find Thanksgiving an abhorrent holiday, a celebration of the false notions that Europeans and Native Americans could and would live in harmony and comity ever after. We know better. Or some of us do.
Genocide by Other Means: U.S. Army Slaughtered Buffalo in Plains Indian Wars .
So while the refugee population (330 million) of that exceptional nation its inhabitants like to call the United States of America (I prefer Gore Vidal and Emminem’s The United States of Amnesia) gobbles down the traditional high caloric deluge (one of such would probably would be sufficient to feed a village in Haiti or MesoAmerica) and watch young men and felons (check out the SEC football team rosters)beat out each others brains, all the while preparing for the hysteria and mania of the ineptly named Black Friday,let me offer a different path—perhaps one on the way to enlightenment.
I remain hopeful.
I am sending notice of three books that have found their way to me because of that hope
War is Beautiful by David Shields
I have been following David Shields’s work* a good, long while now —his transmogrification from novelist to literary zealot**(see Reality Hunger and Fakes) has been an engaging development. His new opus is a riveting and unsettling look at one of the pillars of US main stream media, War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict*** Shield’s explains
David Hickey introduces the book:
…Shields analyzed over a decade’s worth of front-page war photographs from the New York Times and came to a shocking conclusion: the photo-editing process of the “paper of record,” by way of pretty, heroic, and lavishly aesthetic image selection, pulls the wool over the eyes of we its readers; with this discovery Shields forces us to face not only the media’s complicity in dubious and catastrophic military campaigns but our own as well. This powerful media mouthpiece, the mighty Times, far from being a check on governmental power, is in reality a massive amplifier for its dark forces by virtue of the way it aestheticizes warfare. Anyone baffled by the willful American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan can’t help but see in this book how eagerly and invariably the Times led the way in making the case for these wars through the manipulation of its visuals. Shields forces the reader to weigh the consequences of our own passivity in the face of these images’ opiatic numbing…
For decades, upon opening the New York Times every morning and contemplating the front page, I was entranced by the war photographs. My attraction to the photographs evolved into a mixture of rapture, bafflement, and repulsion. Over time I realized that these photos glorified war through an unrelenting parade of beautiful images whose function is to sanctify the accompanying descriptions of battle, death, destruction, and displacement. I didn’t completely trust my intuition, so over the last year I went back and reviewed New York Times front pages from the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 until the present. When I gathered together hundreds and hundreds of images, I found my original take corroborated: the governing ethos was unmistakably one that glamorized war and the sacrifices made in the service of war.
After U.S. troops left Iraq, former Times Baghdad bureau chief John F. Burns wrote in a Times war blog: “America, for all its mistakes—- including, as so many believe, the decision to invade in the first place—- will at least have the comfort of knowing that it did pretty much all it could do, within the limits of popular acceptance in blood and treasure, to open the way for a better Iraqi future.” President Lyndon Johnson said about Viet Nam, “I can’t fight this war without the support of the New York Times.” A Times war photograph is worth a thousand mirrors.
Art is an ordering of nature and artifact. The Times uses its front-page war photographs to convey that a chaotic world is ultimately under control, encased within amber. In so doing, the paper of record promotes its institutional power as protector of death-dealing democracy and curator of Western civilization. Who is culpable? We all are; our collective psyche and memory are inscribed in these photographs. Behind these sublime, destructive, illuminated images are hundreds of thousands of unobserved, anonymous war deaths; this book is witness to a graveyard of horrendous beauty.
You may be unaware of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, a collection of more than 10,000 contemptible collectible. David Pilgrim’s Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice corrects that gap in our cultural literacy:
The items are offensive and they were meant to be offensive. The items in the Jim Crow Museum served to dehumanize Blacks and legitimized patterns of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation. Using racist objects as teaching tools seems counterintuitive—and, quite frankly, needlessly risky. Many Americans are already apprehensive discussing race relations, especially in settings where their ideas are challenged. The museum and this book exist to help overcome our collective trepidation and reluctance to talk about race
Historian Paul Buhle’s ouevre is impressive and he adds to it with his editing hand of Kate Evans’s Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg a revolutionary socialist theorist and activist was a German Jew who opposed the the First World War (as many others on the left did not) and thus was imprisoned and eventually murdered in 1919. There is not a lot of attention paid in our brave new free market, globalist world (there was a 1986 film Rosa Luxemburg by Margarethe von Trotta)
to dissident thinkers and activists which makes this wonderful tome all the more valuable. Here is a more complete sample from Red Rosa
Now if you are especially ambitious and concerned you might go to the fountain head of revisionist US History , Howard Zinn’s The People’s History.
* 2002 Identitytheory conversation with David Shields
**my most recent conversation with David at the LA Review of Books
***in which the author explains why he no longer reads The New York Times
If you have landed on this sceptered isle serendipitously the name George Scialabba may not mean anything to you but even occasional visitors will know of my great admiration for George (see my recent chat with him)—thus I am happy to pass on the news of George Scialabba day in Cambridge and star-studded attached to that celebration
* * *
Arianna Huffington is right up there with the short-fingered vulgarian who has turned the presidential primary season into a bad reality TV show, as someone who is its easy to dislike. The ever vigilant Jim Romenesko files this item. Veteran journalist Lauren Lipton responds to a query from Huff Post’s research editor;
I have worked my entire career as a professional journalist….I am very, very good at what I do.
Unfortunately, your boss’s predatory business practices have deeply undercut the ability of all reporters, writers and editors to make any kind of living wage. The rapacious Ms. Huffington seems to believe that journalism skills are worth nothing, and that my beleaguered colleagues and I should be thrilled to help her make hundreds of millions of dollars in return for “exposure.”
If Ms. Huffington would like to know how I uncovered that particular statistic, she is free to hire me and pay me for my time and expertise.
Masks of Anarchy by
Historian Paul Buhle‘s body of work is impressive. Here he introduces Michael Demson’s Masks of Anarchy: The Story of a Radical Poem from Percy Shelley to the Triangle Factory Fire. providing a useful survey of comic art:
…the first decade of the new millennium has seen more significant developments in comic art than any time since the first comic strips appeared, in the dailies of the 1890s. Now, of course, comics as well as their artists and readers are found all over the globe, both in print and on the Internet. From a visual standpoint, today’s comics are inspired and shaped by a contemporary readership that is not only substantially larger than in the past, but also arguably more aesthetically sophisticated than its predecessors in the “reading” of the comics.
Comics have now become a full-blown field of scholarly inquiry, as numerous scholarly journals and books have vanished in their earlier forms to be replaced by electronic versions, and as comics scholars themselves gain status in the universities. This marks either a fitting irony or a kind of fulfillment of the art form.
The field of comic art, always subject to volatile market conditions and very often to a boom-and-bust pattern, with surges followed by collapse, has advanced so unpredictably that almost nothing seems far in the past….
A People’s History of American Empire by Paul Buhle and Howard Zinn
* * *
Keystone Kops— This might be funny but the police killed a dog…
Jez Burrow does some clever shit with the dictionary
Gaza
Whatever your geo-political view(s) on the debacle known as Gaza, there must be somethingthat can be done about this
How much does the rubber on a MLB pitcher’s mound weigh?
Melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition we now call depression. The fact that our language has changed, without the earlier word disappearing completely, indicates that we are still able to make use of both. Like most synonyms, melancholy and depression are not in fact synonymous, but slips of the tongue in a language we’re still learning. We keep trying to specify our experience of mental suffering, but all our new words constellate instead of consolidate meaning. In the essay collectionUnder the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag writes about her intellectual heroes, who all suffer solitude, ill temper, existential distress and creative block. They all breathe black air. According to her diagnostic model, they are all “melancholics.” Sontag doesn’t use the word depression in the company of her role models, but elsewhere she draws what seems like an easy distinction: “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” But what are the charms of melancholy?
***
Here’s the Associated Press on the coming inhabitability of Gaza and here is Agence France-Presse
News is seeping into view ahead of the December release of the film Concussion that perhaps the controversial story line was toned down (to please the NFL?)The film is based on Jeanne Marie Laskas’s book Concussion:
Concussion by Jean Marie Laskas
…is the of Dr. Bennet Omalu, the pathologist who made one of the most significant medical discoveries of the twenty-first century, a discovery that challenges the existence of America’s favorite sport and puts Omalu in the crosshairs of football’s most powerful corporation: the NFL.
In September of 2002, in a dingy morgue in downtown Pittsburgh, a young forensic neuropathologist named Bennet Omalu picked up a scalpel and made a discovery that would rattle America in ways he never intended. Omalu was new to America, chasing the dream, a deeply spiritual man escaping the wounds of civil war in Nigeria. The body on the slab in front of him belonged to a fifty-year-old named Mike Webster—aka “Iron Mike”—a Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, one of the greatest to ever play the game. After retiring in 1990, Webster had suffered a dizzyingly steep decline. Toward the end of his life, he was living out of his van, Tasering himself to relieve his chronic pain, and fixing his rotting teeth with Super Glue. How did this happen? Omalu asked himself. How did a young man like Mike Webster end up like this? The search for answers would change Omalu’s life forever and put him in the crosshairs of one of the most powerful corporations in America: the National Football League. What Omalu discovered in Mike Webster’s brain—proof that his mental deterioration was no accident, but a disease, caused by relentless blows to the head, that could affect everyone playing the game—was the one truth the NFL would do anything to keep secret.
Clearly, the controversial subject (only controversial because it pits commerce vs science) of brain damage and football will be thrashed out into the foreseeable future and a good starting point for thinking about it is the Frontline special, League of Denial (from which, by the way, the NFL’s stenographer ESPN withdrew its participation).
Recently I noted (in the cursory manner to which I am accustomed) Teju Cole’s commentary on a Rene’ Burri photo. Over at Howard Dinen’s 1standarddeviation.com, Dinin engages in a informed and illustrated exchange with another photography enthusiast
The big news is that Japan won the Little League World Series (which is a legitimate world competition, unlike some misnomered World Series to which we can point) but we should (and will) note a charming display of sportsmanship from the Chinese Taipei/Uganda (next big beisbol powerhouse) game.
RIP Oliver Saks ” poet laureate of medicine”*, whom millions knew as the physician played by actor Robin Williams in the 1990 film “Awakenings”
The box office hit documentary Amy is not the only recent memorial to MS. Winehouse. Two (so called) art exhibits in San Francisco, A Family Portrait and You Know I’m No Good
Hockey tradition comes to baseball when Edwin Encarnacion hits his third dinger of the game in Toronto
Jim Harrison and Dalai Labrador Rosie [photo: Robert Birnbaum circa 2004]
From Jim Harrison’s Songs of Unreason
When young I read that during the Philippine War
we shot six hundred Indians in a wide pit. It didn’t seem fair.
During my entire life I’ve been helpless
in this matter. I even dream about it.
***
In summer I walk the dogs at dawn
before the rattlesnakes awake. In cold weather
I walk the dogs at dawn out of habit.
In the pastures we find many oval deer beds
of crushed grass. Their bodies are their homes.
***
I left this mangy little
three-legged bear two big fish
on a stump. He ate them at night
and at dawn slept like a god
leaning against the stump
in a chorus of birds.
***
The fly on the window is not a distant crow
in the sky. We’re forced into these decisions.
People are forever marrying the wrong people
and the children of the world suffer.
Their dreams hang in the skies out of reach.
Vin Scully has been calling baseball games as long as I have been alive—he’s coming back for one more year
ALEX COX is the director who among other films made Repo Man, Walker (for which Joe Strummer did the soundtrack),Sid and Nancy. I recently received a this note, “Robert: This is what old filmmakers do when they show us the barn…”
Alan Watt observes
The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the “I” out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate “I” or mind can be found.
To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.
Eleven days before George Scialabba is feted in Cambridge and other parts of the known world
I grew up in Chicago, which, being located in a state called Illinois, celebrated Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on February 12th. I have always found it curious that it is Illinois and not Kentucky(his actual birthplace) that claims for itself the rubric “Land of Lincoln”. And I have been told, though it may be apocryphal, that the only reason for the penny’s existence is the State of Illinois’s insistence.
Be that as it may, apparently in other parts of the country regard for the Great Emancipator has diminished —so that he must now share a car sales holiday with the father of our country,George Washington—Presidents’s Day. So it goes. In any case , I believe I have learned about as much as I need to know about Lincoln, having availed myself of Gore Vidal’s novel of the same name.In fact, let me venture (to the sure fire opprobrium of some of my more judicious friends) to opine that reading Vidal’s fictional history of of the USA offers a better insight into the real story than the usual academic texts.
Angels and Apes by Adam Gopnik
Recently Adam Gopnik fabricated Angels and Apes, a clever book based on the coincidence of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin’s birthdays.What I recall from my reading of that tome is that books on Lincoln rival in number those of Jesus Christ. (the popularity of Lincoln books obviously an easy path to publication, I considered marshaling my considerable historical research skills to create a book about Lincoln’s dog.)
Lincoln by Gore Vidal
Lincoln A novel by Gore Vidal ( Random House/ 1984)
Lincoln’s Body by Richard Wightman Fox
Lincoln’s Body: A Cultural History by Richard Wightman Fox ( W. W. Norton )
“Lincoln’s Body explores how a president ungainly in body and downright “ugly” of aspect came to mean so much to us.”
President Lincoln Assassinated!!: The Firsthand Story of the Murder, Manhunt, by Harold Holzer
President Lincoln Assassinated!!: The Firsthand Story of the Murder, Manhunt, by Harold Holzer (A Special Publication of The Library of America)
This enormous story is told in more than eighty original documents—eyewitness reports, medical records, trial transcripts, newspaper articles, speeches, letters, diary entries, and poems—by more than seventy-five participants and observers, including the assassin John Wilkes Booth and Boston Corbett, the soldier who shot him. Also included eulogies by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, and Benjamin Disraeli and poetry by Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Julia Ward Howe two speeches by Frederick Douglass—one of them never before published—reveal
Mourning Lincoln by Martha Hodes
Mourning Lincoln by Martha Hodes(Yale University Press)
“Hodes brings to life a key moment of national uncertainty and confusion, when competing visions of America’s future proved irreconcilable and hopes for racial justice in the aftermath of the Civil War slipped from the nation’s grasp. Hodes masterfully brings the tragedy of Lincoln’s assassination alive in human terms—terms that continue to stagger and rivet us one hundred and fifty years after the event they so strikingly describe.”
Lincoln for Beginners by Paul Buhle
Lincoln For Beginners by Paul Buhle and Sharon Rudahl (For Beginners)
Looking at Paul Buhle’s bibliography reveals a rich assortment of picture history books—FDR and the New Deal For Beginners, A People’s History of American Empire with Howard Zinn, Wobblies!: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World. The Beats: A Graphic History, Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History. And my favorite Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form In this tome, Buhle attempts to simplify the who Lincoln was out of a morass of historiography
Lincoln’s Greatest Case by Brian McGinnty
Lincoln’s Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America by Brian McGinty( Liveright)
In May 6, 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton barreled into a pillar of the Rock Island Bridge—the first railroad bridge ever to span the Mississippi River. Soon after, the newly constructed vessel erupted into flames and sank in the river below, taking much of the bridge with it.This case, Hurd et al. v. The Railroad Bridge Company,as presented by Lincoln scholarBrian McGinty is viewed as the most consequential trial in Lincoln’s career as a lawyer.
What I did not know anything about in Lincoln’s history
The Conspirator by Robert Redford
was the tragic case of Mary Surratt who was the lone female charged, found guilty and hung as a co-conspirator in the assassination trial of Abraham Lincoln. Robert Redford’s 2010 film,The Conspirator,makes Secretary of War Edward Stanton the villain as he pressures for a conviction. Fine performance by Robin Penn.
Currently reading Guantánamo Diaryby Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Larry Siems (Little Brown)
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast
This is a good time for cartoonists and graphic memoirists—Alison Bechdel receives a MacArthur Fellowship and Roz Chast is nominated for this year’s National book Award in non fiction for Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury). Roz Chast should need no introduction for people who still read but in case she has escaped your notice, Chast grew up in Brooklyn, attended the Rhode Island School of Design and has been publishing cartoons in the New Yorker for over three decades. As well a broad spectrum of other publications— Scientific American, the Harvard Business Review, Redbook, and Mother Jones. She also has a number of books under her belt including my favorite Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons of Roz Chast, 1978-2006 and What I Hate A to Z.
Roz and I sat down in post modern coffee place in May and chatted about this and that, mostly her new opus,Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?. Or more specifically the ordeal she presents in that book—the burdens and responsibilities of taking of aging and declining parents. Its a harrowing subject and in what is her inimitable manner Roz Chast handles with appropriate humor and alacrity. We talk about other stuff also as you will discover if you continue to read.
Theories of Everything by Roz Chast
RB: When you meet people for the first time and they ask you what you do what do you say?
RC: I am a cartoonist.
RB: You’re a cartoonist?
RC: Yeah.
RB: Huh.
RC: Hmm.
RB: Do you accept other names for what you do?
RC: Um, I am Queen of all the Romanians.
RB: (laughs) Cartoonist seems to be an oversimplification of what you do.
RC: (Make high pitched sound)
RB: How about picture story teller?
RZ: I think that’s what a cartoonist is.
RB: Right. But I think most people think of ‘cartoons’ as in Sunday funnies.
RC: Huh. Well I don’t know—it seems like there are so many different types of cartooning now. With graphic novels and Sunday funnies and animations ,that there is no reason to assume, unless somebody asks you to clarify what type of cartoonist you are,Z that somebody would just be talking about comic strips.
RB: What kind of cartoonist are you?
RC: Um, I draw cartoons for the New Yorker magazine.
RB: That’s where much of your work appears—is that what defines you as a cartoonist? Are you a funny cartoonist?
RC: I hope so.
RB: An intricate and detailed cartoonist?
RC: I like detail a lot. I hope I am funny. I try.
What I Hate : A to Z by Ros Chast
RB: Was the New Yorker the first place you were published?
RC: No, (you mean professionally) the first place was in Christopher Street Magazine in New York. And then I sold cartoons for a while to the Village Voice and the National Lampoon.
RB: Who chose the art for the Village Voice?
RC: I worked with a man named Guy Trebay.
RB: You were in the same publication as Jules Feiffer.
RC: Yes.
Roz Chast [photo: Robert Birnbaum]
RB: Did you feel good about that?
RC: Oh, God yes.
RB: Was that your aspiration to be a cartoonist?
RC: Yeah, yeah. (chuckles).
RB: Is your work looked upon differently then when you first began?
RC: Uh, I don’t know. I mean I think— (pause) I don’t know. I really am not tuned into that.
RB:Are you interviewed often?
RC: When I have a book come out.
RB: What kind of media interview you?
RC: I just did an interview with Terri Gross. And I talked to someone from the a relatively local paper called the Hartford Courant.
RB: It still exists?
RC: Yeah, it still exists—on paper. Its amazing. And I did a big interview in the NY Times—
RB: —In the Styles section.
RC: Actually it was the Home and Garden section. Now you know what my house looks like.
RB: Do you use modern technology to make your drawings?
RC: I draw with pen and ink on paper. I use a scanner to send the drawings hither and dither. I love Photoshop. But the first drawings are always on paper. I like the quiet of it and it’s what I am used to.
RB: Are there electronic versions of your books?
RC: Apparently there are. I have not seen them (both laugh).
RB: You are not concerned about those?
RC: I have an Ipad and I sometimes read books on it. But there’s pluses and minuses. The pluses are that you can look up a word you don’t know in a second. But I have actually heard that the electronic version of this book has a couple of glitches.
RB: I expected him to be adverse to digitizing his book and he is not. He gets into it and he oversees the e book presentation. He begins his work in a digital application.
RC: One of those Wacomb tablets or something. Yeah. I like paper, I guess.
RB: There is that obnoxious banality, “old school”. Reading books instead of screens. I ind myself being a bit defensive when publishers send me to Net Galley or want to send me a PDF. I feel like it lowers the status of something denigrates it on screen
RC: It depends on the device. I had a Kindle for a while and I didn’t like it. I wound up giving it to a friend. When I got an Ipad, reading on the Ipad was such an analog of a book, a couple of times I actually tried to turn the page. My hand went to the corner of the screen and I thought, “Ah, they’ve got me.” They got, me you know?
RB: If have been told that with a Kindle there is a monotony of presentation—people had difficulty distinguishing what books they had read.
RC: The device I have is smaller and the Ipad is a little closer to the size of a book. For an oldie kind of person it resembles a book more, in some way. That being said, there is something about a book that is great because when I am reading the Ipad it’s partly my problem of having a flea-like attention span. So I am reading and suddenly they talk about some action taking place in Bolivia and its like, ”I should look up Bolivia. I should look it up.” And then I find myself of just going down the rabbit hole —like salt flats in Bolivia and then I have to look up ‘gauchos’, and suddenly I am thinking about covered wagons. And I am like a million miles away.
RB: When one publishes on the Web, there is a great temptation to embed lots of hot links in the text.
RC: So your reading experience can become more fragmented—kind of a collage or something.
RB: The drawings toward the end of the book were really moving—the death studies. A big departure from the rest of the art in the book. Were they hard to do?
RC: Do you mean were the drawings hard to do. Or was it hard to include them in the book?
RB: Creating images of your dead parents?
RC: There were aspects of it that were very emotional —the drawings at the end are of my mother and my father’s decline was steeper. And also my mother was still there. When he went it was pretty quick. My mother’s passing was very lingering and there were months where she was just lying in bed —we didn’t talk. We barely talked—
RB; That’s a very emotionally exhausting—I am not sure what the right word is. I went through the same experience. I remember reading this harrowing article by Michael Wolff in New York Magazine about his own experience with declining parents.
RC: I didn’t read that.
RB: It was pretty grim —he talked about so-called assisted living and associated issues.
RC: Oh, I would love to read that. I’ll look it up.
RB: It presents a huge problem for people and I think that’s when if you haven’t already, you become an adult.
RC: Yeah, yeah. You certainly learn more about what this all entails. I knew nothing about it. And my parents knew nothing about it. I would really like to read that article because I thought assisted living would help more.
RB: We tried that with my parents and they hated it. And part of it was they felt it was a waste of their hard earned money.
RC: They were more aware then my parents then. I handled all of the money and all of the bills. So they just didn’t know.
RB: That was only one of many things that bothered my parents.
RC: It was really weird. They were really just out of their element. But at least at the beginning they had each other. Then after my father died it was juts my mother .And it wasn’t always great. Some of the people weren’t so nice. My mother didn’t really want to make new friends—it must get really hard. I mean, what the point. I don’t know. Meals on wheels was great. That really helped a lot. But it was really hard. Its not easy in this—maybe there is no place where it is really good to grow old.
RB: Oh yeah, Central America or Italy. Where extended families care for their elders—there is a respect for the family
RC: Not here.
RB: I wonder how successful ‘assisted living ‘ is in other places? It’s an idea that’s a product of a dehumanized society.
RZ:Z:I am kind of with you but at that point what was I going to do? My parents were in Brooklyn, in this 4 room apartment. My father had senile dementia. My mother was falling. I was living up in Connecticut. I had no other siblings or relatives that lived close by. I had neighbors that checked in on them but it was getting very scary. And at the end there was really not an alternative. Even if they had had somebody come to live with them, which would have been really hard. A major adjustment. I didn’t feel comfortable with that because I lived so far away. What of that person were, like a jerk? Who didn’t really take care of them. What if they sat there and yakked on the phone all day t their friends and now my parents have a stranger in the apartment yakking all day?
RB: It certainly takes a special kind of person to take care of needy elderly people.
Roz Chast [photo:Robert Birnbaum]
RC: Yeah
RB: So, is this a cartoon book?
RC: It’s a cartoon story book, kind of. It’s a graphic memoir. It has text, it has photographs and cartoons. It has some cartoons that I did well before all of this started. That I did at the time—because I submit weekly groups of cartoons to the New Yorker and there’s several cartoons in there that I had submitted as cartoons that were turned down—
RB: Mankoff turned your stuff down?
RC: Oh sure. Every cartoonist—you’re being facetious—you know how it works. Well, like there are two cartoons in the book that —one is 9/11/2001 and one is 9/12 /2001, those were both done after the trade centers were destroyed and they were really conversations I had with my parents and that was what I really wanted to do—
RB: That process doesn’t seem to me to be satisfying? He doesn’t really say much. You have been doing it since 1978. How many cartoons have you submitted to them?
RC: I haven’t really done the complete math but a lot.
RB: What do you do with the originals?
RC: I have file cabinets.
RB: How many?
RC: I have two big ones and then there are boxes of really, really old stuff. Its part of what we all do.
RC: I am going to have a show at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich. This summer, actually.
RB What’s that like?
RC: I have been in group shows but this is the first time I have had my own. I am kind of excited.I mean we show cartoons. I also do these Psanka eggs
Roz Chast’s Psanka eggs
RB: Huh?
RC: They are like Ukranian Easter eggs. You have probably seen them. They are very elaborately detailed . They are not painted. They are dyed. So yiu draw with wax. Its like a batique. I do the traditional technique with my designs—people and stuff.
RB: Have you done bed clothing or a tea kettle?
RC: (laughs) Bed clothing, no but have done dishes and cups.
RB: One-offs , you don’t have a line?
RC: I did . I had this dream to do plates. I hd this vision—
RB: You could be like Mara Kalman and her late husband Tibor. They had a lot of design products.
RC: Oh yeah. Oh sure. Oh my god.
RB: Are you friendly with other cartoonists?
RZ: Yeah, I am probably closest to the people who came in to the New Yorker around the same time I did. Those are the people I know the best—Jack Ziegler. Michael Crawford, uh—
Roz Chast baseball [photo: Robert Birnbaum]
RB: Do you all meet every week?
RC: We used to. But then people moved or had children, like me. Now we email a lot.
RB: It strikes me that there are so many Jewish cartoonists. [When anti Semites complain about the word being controlled by Jewish bankers and brokers, they never mention cartoonists]
RC: Yeah, I guess.
RB: In fact historian Paul Buhle has published a book , Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form. Have you noted any reason why so many of the chosen people are cartoonists?
RC: I can’t think of anything. (laughs)
RB: Did that even ever cross your mind?
RC: I ‘ve noticed that there are a lot of left handed cartoonists.
RB: Are you?
RC: Yeah.
RB: Does this book take a weight off of your shoulders?
RC: This is going sound really awful but when my mother died, I felt like that was a great weight off my shoulders. And the book ,uh,(long pause) what I mainly was emotionally involved in with the book was that I wanted it to be a good book. And so it’s a great weight off my soldiers that I feel like I told it the best way that I could and I that I worked hard on it. And that it resonates with people. But the experiences —I didn’t write the book to bitch about my childhood or something. I feel like either save it for the shrink or use it whatever. It’s a weight off my shoulders in that I feel like this is the book that I wanted to write.
RB: In what section do bookstores place your books.
RC: With cartoons.
RB: I have seen them located in ‘Humor’.
RC: I don’t know where this one—this is funny but its not. It’s a story and writing. Its not even like a typical graphic memoir or novel.
RB: Well, that’s good. I imagine you done thousands of cartoons and a dozen books. How do you decide to do a book?
RC: I guess I —(pauses) I start to get this sort of idea of a book. (giggles) That was really complicated and articulate, wasn’t it? I don’t know—with this book I can’t remember exactly the day or moment when I thought, ”I am going to make a book about this.” It started to fall together in a certain way —
RB: Did you mentally scan images that yiu have done and maybe think if I add this and this I have a narrative?
RC: With this book I definitely felt a narrative thing.I did one book about parents and children Childproof: Cartoons About Parents and Children when my kids were little and I was so involved in that whole world—like from when they are born, what kind of stupid mobile you are going to put over their crib that is going to increase their intelligence. This was definitely a first kid toy. After the second kid , its like, “Here look at this, whatever.’
RB: (laughs)
RC: You see these very complicate mobile and its like $55 and you think, “First time parent, they really believe in these things Yeah, uh huh.”
RB: I am impressed with how sharp your humor is without it being mean or harsh. Its brilliant stuff. I hope that doesn’t embarrass you.
RC: Yeah, like suddenly she is looking over there (laughs). Yeah, I guess I am not a big fan of humor that—some mean humor I am totally for but I don’t like it when it makes fun go people who already have a burden. You can make fun f the beautiful rich movie star_ I know they have feelings but hey, they are on top of the pyramid.
RB: What’s next for you?
RC: This is sort of finished and I have other projects that I am working on—
RB: But you’re touring to support this book—
RZ: Its great and I am excite and I want to talk about it also enormously distracting and there is a part of me that just wants to crawl bacl in to my hole and think about my next project. You know its not a timely thing but in some of this hub bub —
RB: How’s flying these days?
RC: I used to be really afraid to fly.
RB: Besides that.
RC: I am kind of almost used to it, plus my son lives on the WestCoast so I get to see him. Which is kind of like the carrot. A big carrot for me.
RB: In the olden days a child wouldn’t have moved so far away from their parents.
RC: I know. But I am excited for him too.
RB: What does he do?
RC: He doing website stuff. He’s a web host and designs websites. He was a philosophy major.
RB: I was too.
RC: You know then— when people hear that you have to beat people away from your door with a stick.
RB: (laughs) Right.
RC: The job offers just come. And all the philosophy shops, its like the latest thing.
RB: Its hard to turn the big money down.
RC: It is —people are just throwing it at you.
RB: What kind of philosophy—did he smoke Gaulloise and wear a beret?
Recording ends
Roz Chast [photo: Robert Birnbaum] copyright 2014
Currently reading How I Stopped Being a Jew by Shlomo Sand (Verso Books)
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