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Philip Roth

​ Read: 06/20

​I purchased this book at the same time as The Plague, and whereas Camus’s book took me weeks to read, I finished The Plot Against America within a week. For one thing, the subject, though certainly disquieting, was nowhere near as disturbing to me as The Plague.

​I’ve read both American Pastoral and The Human Stain, and the latter of which I found slightly repellant with regard to its depiction of sexuality. (I wonder if I would feel the same way now?) Regardless, The Plot Against America, told from a young boy’s (Philip Roth) rather precocious perspective is nevertheless untrammeled by the more seedy evocations present in The Human Stain.

What struck me throughout the book was the deftness with which Roth weaves a fictional narrative into the fabric of a well-known history. His capacity, for example, to credibly make the arguments against Roosevelt and against the familiar history of the lead up to WWII, now enshrined as history often is as inevitable for better or worse, is remarkable. He forces us to answer the question for ourselves, especially in light of our ill-advised adventures in the Middle East kicked off by the Bush administration, would we want to go to war? Is it worth it? Can we stomach death in the near term for future security, or do we do as my favorite Oblique Strategy suggests, “Do nothing for a as long as possible”?

Another aspect of the novel that resonates especially in these days of protests and riots that are being staged not only in America as a result of a brutal, yet nonchalant murder of a black man by a police office, but all around the world. The pandemic and years, indeed centuries, of ill treatment of blacks by whites, be it explicit racism or the no less pernicious systemic racism that permeates this and other countries has brought us this moment of justified outrage.

In the last week or so the US Supreme Court has judged that the Civil Rights act of the early 60’s extends to provide employment protections for the LGBTQ people living in our society. What amazes me is that even now in the 21st century, we’re still worried about, still fretting over adult human beings whose sexuality, a complicated and subtle matter at the very least, differs from a long-held historical norm. Some of us behave as if it is just too terrible to imagine two men or two women loving each other. Some would claim rights and deny others these very same rights as though they were not equal under the law… and certainly not equal in the eyes of God.

In The Plot Against America, the Roth family in Newark, NJ have to face the awful situation of finding themselves living in an America where the president may very well be an anti-semite. This is played very subtly by Roth. As a brief aside, I have heard that the TV show based on the book is not very good… and I can imagine why. Certain narratives are meant to be read. Knowing the thoughts of the boy, seeing the world through his eyes, the details and the nuances are what make the book worth reading. I doubt the screen can adequately depict these shadings (though I have not seen it, nor am likely too).

The Rabbi Bengelsdorf is a fascinatingly infuriating character. His smug charm cloys as he makes his way into the inner circle of the Lindbergh administration, making excuses and rationalizations and then marrying into the Roth family (Bess’s sister, Evelyn).

And it is to Evelyn that young Philip appeals when he learns that his family is due to be uprooted and moved to Danville, KY (of all places) in accordance with the Office of American Absorption. He begs her to use her influence to spare them, and tries to offer as surrogate the Wishnow family (who meet a terrible fate as the novel crescendoes).

Lindbergh disappears. His VP takes over. 122 Jews are killed. Sandy (brother/artist) and Herman (father) are sent on a quest through the heart of racist, anti-semitic America to try to rescue Seldon Wishnow… as the threat of war with Canada looms.

Heather Cox Richardson

​ Read: 06/2020

​ Having been born and spent my childhood within a mile or so of the boyhood home of General Stonewall Jackson (Jackson’s Mill), I feel I’ve been rather steeped in, if not a Confederate, but certainly a Republican mind-set for most of my life. In fact, I was a registered Republican until just last year, whereupon the advent of the bestial Trump and his slouching toward Washington D.C. precipitated my official migration to the left, not that I’d ever voted for a Republican before then. Democratic candidates had always appealed to me, but up until the presidency of George W. Bush, Republicans hadn’t repulsed me.

​ Now, I am sorry to say, a certain strain certainly does.

​ As we live through this moment of pandemic and witness the emergence of the Black Lives Matter phenomenon (on the heels of the MeToo movement), it was viscerally compelling to follow Richardson’s argument tracking from Goldwater campaign back to the Civil War to end up back in our own disjointed times with the same underlying ideologies at play.

​ At the heart of the book lies a conceit that white, propertied men should be the ones to make decisions with regard to society. In effect, they are first among “equals,” and as long as that premise goes observed and unchallenged, then government will run according to God’s plan. “Government was not designed to promote equality of opportunity by guaranteeing equality before the law. Rather such meddling interfererd with the ability of a few to arrange society as they saw fit; they, and they alone, truly junderstood what was best for everyone.” (p. 200)

​ It’s an ugly notion, one at odds with the ideals of our founding documents, but this… I would say belief, but belief is too weak a word, this certainty, this hubristic principle to which men lay claim has been apparent, celebrated, and bought into as an a priori power for thousands of years, and I have witnessed it first hand all of my life in my own family. My female cousins were expected to do the dishes. I was exempt. Who was I, as a boy, to question this divine order? Why it would be sacrilege to question such a clear manifestation of God’s will. Man was created in the image of his Maker, and woman was created from the rib of man. Clear enough.

​What shocks is the recollection of a civil war fought on American soil. A war fought not for some notion of “states rights” but for the rights of some people to enslave other people and call them property. Our nation barely survived that conflict, costing a total somewhere between 650,000 and 850,000 lives.

​ By the beginning of that war, the government had expanded its territory into what we now recognize as the United States, and Richardson argues that the ideology of the South, though defeated in 1865, drifted westward, transitioning from the ideal of the yeoman farmer to the rugged, mythical cowboy, who only wanted freedom and had no need of oppressive government rules to curtail the expression of his will. As former slaves were denigrated as lazy, now regular Americans could be compared with the cowboy and found to be wanting and weak, looking for handouts. (p. 111)

​ She digs a bit into the history of William Cody, “Buffalo Bill,” and here she crosses paths with Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland. Buffalo Bill is a performer but also an icon. He embodies the myth of cowboy, the fantasy of the cowboy, but that image is sufficient to influence the popular imagination, and then an historian by the name of Frederick Jackson Turner delivers a paper in 1893 at the Chicago Fair (“White City”) wherein he formulates the invention of the “western individualist.”

​ Individualism is masculine. Men don’t need help.They don’t need to collaborate. They need space and freedom to do as they please.

The Plague (1948)

Albert Camus

Read: 06/20

It is strange to find oneself in the midst of a pandemic and to feel compelled to read Camus’s The Plague. Upon receiving my copy in the mail, that night I settled into bed thinking I would begin reading it, only to find within the first few pages the image of the dying rat, with blood spurting from its mouth, too much to bear so soon before sleep. I recall switching to “Heart of Darkness,” which was not much of an improvement (and since then in addition to reading The Plague I have balanced my literary diet with Stella Gibbon’s Cold Comfort Farm, a book that amuses rather than appalls).

Still, notwithstanding the travails of Camus’s work, The Plague is worth reading, and especially at this time when the coronavirus has slouched forth onto the global stage and, at this point, claimed over one hundred thousand American lives (a number of whom no doubt died as a direct result of our current president’s inability to countenance and react to objective reality). What is most striking about the book is how closely it reflects our own experience. Over and over again ideas and scenes that could be drawn from contemporary pages of the New York Times or the nightly televised news reports: officials unwilling to refer to the illness descending on Oran as plague for fear of unnecessarily exciting the ruble, the necessity of lockdown, those who chafe under lockdown and protest the injustice of it all, and, of course, those who find it within themselves to stand up to and selflessly combat the epidemic.

One of my favorite scenes early in the novel is the sermon by Father Paneloux wherein he pronounces from his elevated pulpit, “For plague is the flail of God and His world his threshing floor, and implacably will he thresh out His harvest until the wheat is separated from the chaff.” Father Paneloux will go on to preach a second sermon later on with somewhat less apocalyptic tones, and with greater sense of humility, but also posing the perplexing claim wondering whether a priest should ever summon a doctor.

We often find Dr. Bernard Rieux (ultimately the narrator of the tale), quite unlike the Father, wondering about notions and situations to which his final answer ultimately is that he does not know. His is a dogged presence, exhausted and yet determined to do his job in the face of horrendous odds. I think midway through the novel he states very clearly if not the major theme of the book certainly one of them, and that is, “there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency.” He goes on to state that that is the only means of fighting a plague — common decency.

Enduring this pandemic of 2020, I’ve seen that in large measure that this seems to be true. We see healthcare workers dealing with sickness and death with stalwart professionalism, but we also see them regaled as heroes. I think a photo of a nurse with a placard clarified a suspicion I had with regard for this mantle. It simply said something like, “Don’t call me a hero to make me a martyr.” Our media is quick to celebrate slogans and shortcuts, but The Plague doesn’t.

It is a short book but a difficult read. It depicts scenes of awful sadness, like the awful death of M. Othon’s son, which was as difficult a passage to read as I’ve come across in some time, but then the terrible sadness of Othon returning to the quarantine camp after release to work because it kept him nearer his son.

I think perhaps the most profound line in the book comes in Part 2, which echoes Rieux’s view on heroism. Tarrou has set up teams to go about cleaning and disenfecting the town as an effort, but Rieux (or the narrator at this point) refuses to aggrandize this work, rather he considers doing so would cast the rest of humanity in a dim light, as though “callousness and apathy are the general rule.” He then follows with the line in question, “The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much hard as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; however, that isn’t the real point. […] the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.”

I find, at this time, “the ignorance that fancies it knows everything” resonates with our situation as our own protestors deny the existence of the virus, decry our public health officals and nefarious and shadow actors in the so-called “deep state,” and refuse to wear masks because they compromise their freedoms.

Common decency indeed.

06.18.20

Just a little jam that you might enjoy… I certainly enjoyed playing it. One of those moments when the barriers sort of fall away.

I wish I could remember the jam track I was playing to… fantastic. Will give attribution when I figure it out.

Click to see a one-take video (messy playing, messy studio and all that).

>>>>>> Jazzy B <<<<<

Not finished. The reviews are mixed. Hard core folks aren’t going to like it, and I’ll admit I was a little confused by her liberal admixture from the book of Genesis in the first chapter, but all in all I find her writing to be interesting on a topic in which I am interested. It’s not the hardest of science, but it is a pleasant read… at least thus far.

Watson’s account of the discovery of the structure of DNA.

Though the online book-buying world has many advantages, the one thing it lacks is serendipity. That moment when, looking for one book, you stumble upon another, pick it up and forgot what you were looking for in the first place. Such was the case of Watson’s book. And I checked it out fully thinking that it would most likely be a bit of a bore, only to find Watson’s sense of humor and trenchant commentary in regard to the practitioners of science (scientists, if you like) are often narrow-minded and dull-witted. At times he’s sexist. Yes. Does that detract from the narrative. In my opinion, not in the least. He captures the time and that time in his own life wonderfully.

David Foster Wallace. I’ve only read a bit of his fiction, short stories, never venturing into the deeper waters of Infinite Jest, but when I saw this book on the library shelf I thought I had to give it a try. Not quite finished with it, but I doubt math (especially math at the level of transfinite sets) could be handled more eloquently than by DFW.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen is a good book by a good writer, but it’s not as good as “The Corrections.” The humor is missing, and there are some stretches where the characters sort of sprawl out and inhabit a vast space of their own boredom, spilling over a bit into mine. There is something about it all that failed to capture me. Perhaps the Berglands were just a little too over-wrought… a little too crafted in their perfections pre-destined to fail. Not necessarily predictable, but like I say, just kind of boring, and no matter what crisis they faced I never felt invested in their lives.  I

That said, I think it’s worth a read and at some level I enjoyed it. Though the humor doesn’t match “The Corrections,” Walter Bergland’s melt-down is worth the read, and at a certain level I think Franzen pretty well outlines the zeitgeist, and boredom may be a huge part of our times — not necessarily boredom in and of itself, but that which I read about in the papers and on the web… a void that desires meaning, value, and to be entertained.

Another by David Mitchell… again his command of the subject combined with the nuance of detail make this an immersive experience.

I am unmoved, however, by the cover art.