England Made Me (1935) is Graham Greene’s second novel, also released in the states as Shipwrecked, though neither title makes obvious sense to me. GrEngland Made Me (1935) is Graham Greene’s second novel, also released in the states as Shipwrecked, though neither title makes obvious sense to me. Greene’s book is a kind of castigation of global capitalism and the British class system, featuring a twin, Kate, and her brother Anthony. Kate works for (and sleeps with) one of the richest people in Europe, Krogh, who is planning on moving into the American market even as the foundation of his empire seems shaky.
Greene had reviewed George Soloveytchik’s The Financier: The Life of Ivar Kreuger for the Spectator in March 1933, and based the character of Krogh novel on Krueger, setting his story in Stockholm, with lots of visiting English tourists and ex-pats such as Kate and Anthony, and a slimy journalist Minty, following Krogh around for “breaking news.”
Well, in sort of noir fashion, everyone is deeply flawed and unlikable in this book. Minty will write gossip on Krogh for any rag, if the price is right. He’s a graduate of a posh school, Harrow, and has a run-down apt, and has broken his last tea cup. Anthony is a serial liar, to rival our own Santos. Anthony would lie about the weather if you were both looking at it together.
“Anthony can’t open his mouth without lying.”
Kate sleeps with Krogh though the only person she loves is her loser/liar brother, about whom there are undertones of incestuous attraction. The book’s first line has Kate waiting for Anthony in a pub: “She might have been waiting for a lover.” They see themselves sometimes as an "old married couple."
Anthony doesn’t like it that darling sis Kate sleeps with Krogh, and Kate hates the shabby English woman, Loo, that Anthony sleeps with. No love here to be seen. Krogh is only good at money; paranoid about public opinion, not good at relationships. There's a critique in here of his architectural and artistic tastelessness.
Also in noir fashion, Greene is so hard on his characters it borders often on satire. How could a liar such as Anthony get to be the bodyguard for Krogh? He shoots well in shooting galleries at carnivals. He’s Kate’s brother, sure, but what a terrible bodyguard. It’s almost predictable he’ll reveal Krogh’s “short-term loans” scam secrets to Minty. And, uh, pay for it, instead of getting paid.
I liked the opening, but this is a decidedly “minor’ novel of Greene, which is to say it is still good, written by one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. He plays around with stream-of-consciousness writing, memory writing, too: “Anthony, near Marseilles, father dying, the electric light burning until seven in the morning, under a heavy sky, the nurse reading, the kettle boiling. . .” He’s always oxymoronically aphoristic: “Those we love we forget; it’s the ones we left behind that we endlessly remember.” ...more
PS below after I read Saunders's analysis of the story.
“Master and Man” by Leo Tolstoy is the fourth Russian story featured in George Saunders’s mastePS below after I read Saunders's analysis of the story.
“Master and Man” by Leo Tolstoy is the fourth Russian story featured in George Saunders’s master class book on writing and reading, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. I am reading and reviewing each of the stories separately, and then “going to class” to see what Saunders--one of the greatest living short story writers and a great teacher--has to teach me about it.
So you all know of Tolstoy, even if you have never read one of his two masterpiece novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, which you should do, I say. He was a progressive reformer and was a moralist, a Christian with sort of Eastern religious leanings. A proponent of nonviolence who influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King. A vegetarian farmer and landowner. And one of the world’s greatest writers ever. I also have admired many of his short stories, but don’t recall having read this one. Which at my age doesn't mean I haven't!
“Master and Man” is a longish story that mainly involves two people--the wealthy landowner and "master" Vasili and his servant, serf Nikita. Vasili loves acquiring wealth and possessions, and insists on going out in a raging storm, accompanied by his servant, on a sled pulled by his horse, Mukhorty, to beat his competitors to make the best offer for a stand of woods, against all advice.
The whole story is a problematic ride into an increasingly terrible storm where (spoiler alert) almost predictable disaster ensues. Along the way we come to see that Nikita is far more reasonable and calm than his master. He’s the better “man” by far, but he does what he is told, just as does the horse, because Vasili is the “master.” So in this trip they get lost--whiteout storm--and repeatedly. They find an inn in a small town and are thus given a chance to stay there over night, but Vasili insists on going on, stupidly, selfishly. Then they get stuck, and decide to just huddle together and try to last the night in the blizzard with no shelter, something that neither the horse nor Nikita reasonably expect they can accomplish. Nor do we see it as possible.
But a (moral) transformation takes place in Vasili after he, freezing to death, tries to take off alone on the horse, but the horse circles back to the sled where Nikita is now also freezing to death. Suddenly Vasili, seeing Nikita at death’s door, decides to lie down over Nikita, whose life he saves.
“. . . Nikita was lying under him and he had got warm and was alive, and it seemed to him that he was Nikita and Nikita was he, and that he was not himself but he was in Nikita.”
In a lesser writer this climax might have proved to be a sentimental and moralistic moment, but I say Tolstoy earns genuine emotion with this transformation. You read it and tell me. He accomplishes the sense of authenticity by being mostly descriptive in the story, not making many moralistic pronouncements on the action. Oh, he is quietly critical of Vasili’s materialism, the greed that leads to the tragedy, but in this moment he reveals what true selflessness can be. Vasili just does it. People can change, Tolstoy asserts. Do I believe it, in these hard-hearted times? Tolstoy makes me believe it.
So it’s a kind of adventure story about the recklessness of rich and arrogant people ignoring the very real threat of the brutality of the natural world, as in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire," though London was no moralist; he’s just a realist who shows you human stupidity in the face of imminent danger, and I like his brutal lack of sentimentality. Tolstoy, a farmer, knows the brutality of nature, too, but he adds a spiritual dimension I also like very much. Maybe the title refers to God as the true “master” of man in the story. Or nature--that storm--as the true master of man who only thinks he can do anything he wants with his environment.
PS: I just read Saunders's wonderful 25 page analysis of why this story is so good. At one point he calls attention to four separate times we see frozen clothes on a clothesline, each time more ominous, each time a louder fire alarm portent of disaster. And Sanders's own explanation off why the transformation works and is believable he says more clearly than me, of course, that he does not talk about it, he just shows it.
Saunders thinks that one section of the story, that transformation, is one of the best things he has ever read and so I reread it now, slowly, and agree. He also notes a "quibble" he has with the fact that Nikita never gets to reflect later on Vasili and that night. He thinks it is class-ist of Tolstoy not to give Nikita the same interiority as he gave to Vasily. I was persuaded by that. A small mistake. But I still loved the story....more
"Tickets, Please" is a 1919 short story by D. H. Lawrence set in his native Nottingham during WWI. As in most places, the war created jobs for women, "Tickets, Please" is a 1919 short story by D. H. Lawrence set in his native Nottingham during WWI. As in most places, the war created jobs for women, such as working on the trams, and thus changed their relationship to power in certain ways. And Lawrence wrote about sexual desire, too, of course. What was it like for women and girls to be interested in men and with so few men around? Competition! One popular (that is, available) guy has his pick of the crowd. He likes Annie, but the temptations to others is great, so he plays the field, hurting her. The fact of his popularity makes him arrogant and callous, but she still saw a tender, vulnerable side to him. Grow up, man, and see the one who loves you for your better self!
We one point the girls being get together and try to force the guy to choose who it is he will marry, and in the process they get very angry--"Choose! Choose! Choose!" and they beat him up. When he finally blurts out "Annie," she turns him down--there's your lesson, philandering jerk--and they all walk away.
But there's some lingering gender tensions. They didn't just beat him up, they had been (still are?) very attracted to him, and insist that they choose one of them. . . then teach him a lesson. But they are still living in the real world for women in a small rural town in England a hundred years ago; the last line reveals they are still girls of their time. not suffragettes:
"The girls continued in silence to dress their hair and adjust their clothing, as if he had never existed."
Some people think this is funny, a light comedy, but it feels too violent and angry and passionate to me to be read for mere laughs. They have their power in putting him in his place, in part fueled by their changed societal working status.
Some people interpret this story as sexist and even misogynist, a critique of what women seem to have attained for their move toward "equality" with men: Dangerous, hard-working conditions in the industrial north, and violent revenge. I disagree, I think it is an endorsement of strong women, but it is unique to me in this period in having women beat up this guy. I like it, had never read it....more
There may well be some spoilers for you in this review.
Luster, the first novel by Raven Leilani, is short, with a first-person, black, 23-year-old naThere may well be some spoilers for you in this review.
Luster, the first novel by Raven Leilani, is short, with a first-person, black, 23-year-old narrator, Edie, who immediately grabs your attention:
“I have not had much success with men. This is not a statement of self-pity. This is just a statement of the facts. Here’s a fact: I have great breasts, which have warped my spine. More facts: my salary is very low. I have trouble making friends, and men lose interest in me when I talk. It always goes well initially, but then I talk too explicitly about my ovarian torison or rent. Eric is different.”
Eric is 46, white, married, and has adopted a black girl, Akila, but of course Edie doesn’t know much about him at first. He’s not like most guys her age, he’s an adult, who makes a living and is caring and knows his way around a (female) body. That’s enough for her at first.
“It’s not that I want exactly this, to have a husband or home security system that, for the length of our marriage, never goes off. It’s that there are gray, anonymous hours like this. Hours when I am desperate, when I am ravenous, when I know how a star becomes a void.”
Some of you have mentioned the sex positivity in this book, by which I think is meant that she likes to have sex and talk openly about it. And hey, Eric is in an “open marriage” and at one point Edie actually meets his wife of 13 years, Rebecca, at their wedding anniversary party! And one thing leads to another, they need help with their adopted (black) daughter Akila, so Edie actually moves in, though this is not the way Eric wants Edie.
Edie is quite likable and engaging and insightful at times as a storyteller of her own life, but she is also a kind of early twenties train wreck of a decision-maker. Let me see a show of hands here: Should she sleep with married Eric, who is by all accounts sort of sad, not a really remarkably great guy, and then move in to his house at his wife’s request??! What, no one? Well, I am sure those of you who are into “polyamory” will tell me I am narrow-minded, that this can work if everyone is happy, monogamy being a cruel joke, and so on, but I have not seen open marriages where someone hasn’t gotten hurt. This may just be me, though.
But no, Edie at some later point in the book admits it herself, that her sleeping with many men has not led to happiness:
“I think of how keenly I've been wrong. I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men.”
But she stays in part for Akila, and because she was fired, is broke. Precarity. That’s what this book is about, and she’s all the more in a precarious position because she is black, which she realizes acutely when Akila and Edie come home from a movie and are confronted by the cops in this suburban Jersey neighborhood. This is by now a familiar moment in life and literature, the moment where a smart and interesting and articulate black woman most fully realizes she is black and not white and that that fact actually matters.
Oh, Edie's mother has committed suicide; her Dad is dead, too, but here she has moved from Chicago to NYC, is working in publishing as one of the few people of color in the office, meets a lot of guys, has a lot of fun, and then THIS GUY, who has money and treats her well! The wife, well, the wife seems to be kinda okay with it all! But as I said, she gets fired, can’t get another job, and she is stuck in this house, and then the cops humiliate them, rough them up. It’s The Hate U Give, it’s Tara Reid’s Such a Fun Age, and yeah, it's that one moment where everything changes, and we can see just how precarious her existence is as a black woman.
“I know that the moment between when a black boy is upright and capable of speech and when he is prostrate in his own blood is almost imperceptible, due in great part to the tacit conversation that is happening beyond him, that has happened before him, and that resists his effort to enter it before it concludes.”
This is powerful, as this young person begins to get some insight into herself. And she’s an artist, or wants to be, so she can better see and be seen:
“I’ve made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading that occasionally finds its way, often insufficiently, into paint. And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I’m gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here.”
This is a raw book to read, about class and race and being a woman and sex, as gently reflective as Edie can be at times:
“He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead.”
Whew, this is a good book, you'll read it right through. I have someone in my family in a different kind of crisis as I write this, with just as bad decision-making and just as scary implications, so I also read it through that lens, which made it harder for me to read....more
"The point is you can’t be too greedy." --The 45th President of the United States of America, and the quotation that frames this book
This is Willy Vlau"The point is you can’t be too greedy." --The 45th President of the United States of America, and the quotation that frames this book
This is Willy Vlautin's sixth novel, but my first experience reading him, though I also have owned The Free since it came out. I'll read that soon, too, after reading this book, but The Night Always Comes is one beautifully written book about human misery, about how working class folks cope or fail to in the twenty-first century. We're in rapidly gentrifying Portland, and our main character is Lynette, who royally screwed up her life a few years ago, but she has since been working a crappy job to save the down payment for a house for her, her developmentally disabled brother Kenny, and her mother, who has just basically given up as they are about to sign the lease. She's 57, has only ever worn clothes purchased at Goodwill, and she has just had it. She does what some people in despair do when they have a bit of money saved; she buys a car she can't really afford instead of buying the house. Buying a house--I was reminded of Loraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and how that symbolizes the American Dream for so many people.
Housing prices have quadrupled in Portland in something like the past twenty years, so you need to be almost rich to own even a decent house, and this house they want was never a decent house, but it can be theirs. Lynette, in addition to working her low-paying day job, some years ago began working for an escort service--sleeping with rich men for a thousand dollars a night, building up a pot of some 80,000 dollars. You say you wouldn't do something like that? I have a developmentally delayed son who just turned 25--I won't say what I would or would not do to make sure he is safe when I die. But things get particularly desperate for Lynette when her mother appears to back out of signing a lease for the crappy, broken down house they could have bought for a quarter of the price twenty years ago. Lynette gets even more desperate as she gets involved with a range of also desperate and now violent people. Everyone in the book is desperate and we don't know what the limits are for what they might do to make enough money to live on.
The Night Always Comes is a standard noir title for this twenty-first century noir portrait of economic inequality and despair for our times. There are no laughs in it, and almost all misery, but also some grim admiration and sympathy for Lynette and some other people in this book. You think you wouldn't "go there," seeing what some of these people will do for money? How close have you been to homelessness and sleepless anxiety about money? How close would just one experience of serious illness, or adult care needs (such as Kenny) given our crappy health care system, bring you to desperate acts? We see Lynette's long history of suicidal depression and bad decisions and being dumped on has always been tied to money in some way, and Vlautin helps us see that there, but for the grace of God, or luck, go any of us.
And money sets us against each other rather than brings us together to fight for a common good. Vlautin tells us a story of late-capitalism, in all its ugliness and cruelty, eating us alive. A powerful, sad book, beautifully written, in the rich vein of noir writing from Dostoevsky onward.
PS: If I had to nitpick, I'd say I was thrown off in the first third of the book by all the backstory revealed exclusively in dialogue. It's telling the story rather than showing it, among characters that go into detail about stuff they have all known for years. Do people complain about the past with each other? Sure, but not quite in this kind of detailed, articulate way, especially among folks that are riding a kind of persistent anguish. But I got over those early concerns and it doesn't happen so much later. It's powerful, over all....more
I’ve been listening to fine detective novels by Henning Mankell when I run because, though I like them quite a bit, I am glad that I rarely feel as ifI’ve been listening to fine detective novels by Henning Mankell when I run because, though I like them quite a bit, I am glad that I rarely feel as if I had to stop and highlight a word or phrase. The story is often enough for me. But debut novel Saltwater, by Jessica Andrews, is all (in the first half or so, at least) about language, words, words, words, visceral language, sharply described issues of home, and while very little surprising happens in the way of plot, everything happens to make the world of her mother and father and little brother Josh come alive, through the sounds and smells of Sunderland, where Andrews herself grew up, then more briefly in London where her main character Lucy goes off to school, and finally, even more briefly at her departed Grandfather's cottage in Donegal. When I feel like I want to highlight or underline a sentence in almost every paragraph as I did in the first several pages of this book, I can't just listen to the book as I do with detective novels. I need to slow down as the book slows down and cherish the words as it does.
This is a first person coming-of-age story of Lucy, who becomes curious at a young age at how “language might capture emotions.” There's the few words of grief as her loving but alcoholic father fails to return for months at a time. She marvels at the way two or three words from a boy might suddenly paralyze her with desire. Then there are the times when she experiences the inexpressible, when words are not enough, no matter how she reaches for them.
Many of the words return again and again to her body, as she grows, and her body in relation to her mother’s body, as that is the central relationship in the book.
“It begins with our bodies. Skin on skin. My body burst from yours.”
Sound becomes important, too. Her much younger brother Josh is born with a heart defect and is also profoundly deaf; so when they fit him with a cochlear implant Ma makes up for all the boy has missed that the house is full of sounds: all manner of whirly toys, laughing clowns, and rock rainfalls (pebbles in a glass tube that when turned upside down sound like rainfall).
Saltwater is about a young girl’s evolving identity in relation to place, class and the body. It’s about women and limitation (Ma, who is left home with Josh when alcoholic Dad leaves home all the time), women and possibility (Lucy, off to London and school and reading and writing), about disability (Josh) and on every page, class, as Lucy and her working-class family are clearly not the posh folks with whom she goes to school. And home, which for her will always be the north, never the south and the big city.
“. . . all this north deep in my soul,"
“. . . that safe, yellow space of bedtimes and steamy kitchens.”
The narrative is fairly straightforward, and nothing really dramatic happens externally in Lucy's life, but internally, where identity happens, things come alive. The story is more told than shown, in reflection, in memory, with little dialogue, and with some chapters running only one or two sentences. The writing is lyrical and sometimes as fresh as a slap or warm as a hug. As I said, I especially liked in Sunderland when the images and language are sharp and sometimes surprising, as when Lucy is pre-teen-- “Girls with orange cheeks in push-up bras brushed past us, smelling of the future”--as things happened more slowly, but as things get a little faster, as in London, the language seems less sharp. That makes sense because London is not deeply visceral for her in the way Sunderland or Donegal are.
There are many boys in the pretty and clever Lucy’s life,
“I want it and I do not want it. I want to be visible and I want to be invisible, or perhaps I want to be visible to some people and not to others.”
And she is in London, in the pubs with a lot of these guys, all these bodies, but they are all forgettable, as the central body and soul in her life is her mother:
“I would forever be in her orbit, moving towards her and pulling away while she quietly controlled the tides, anchoring me to something.”
This is a really fine book about a working-class girl growing up to be a woman, in the place she needs to be grounded....more
I had been reading Chekhov’s major plays—now doesn't that sound elegant and literary?—and thought I needed something inelegant and unliterary to folloI had been reading Chekhov’s major plays—now doesn't that sound elegant and literary?—and thought I needed something inelegant and unliterary to follow it up, and found something on audiobooks I hadn’t read before, from Charles Bukowski, a collection of stories, and it is obvious at a glance that the two writers are very different—what do we know about Buk? Wine, women, horseracing, boxing, brutality, usually funny, often obscene, stripped-down prose that is decidedly unpretentious, straightforward—but I have to say, just having read Uncle Vanya, with its panoply of unhappy people, some of whom are drunken philandering men, I begin to see Anton and Charles as distant brothers at a century’s distance.
Both are realists, associated with a sometimes bleak/comic existentialist approach. True, Buk is profane at times, crass, sometimes offensive, but in Hot Water Music the main point is to explore honestly the world of the down and out. Bukowski talks simply and profoundly about the underbelly of the working class without raising judgement. Oh, he's hard on the rich and pretentious, but not about the poor.
Chekhov also sided with the working class and wrote in largely straightforward, unadorned fashion. And like Bukowski Chekhov also describe the world without judging anything in it unless those things are boring or pompous. I have enjoyed more Factotum, Pulp, Ham on Rye, and Post Office, longer works, but I like the art in some of the Henry Chinaski stories here. It is true that the collective focus of these stories is on booze, writing, and sex, and there's a kind of sameness, but one of his characters responds to this criticism:
"You seem to write about sex a lot." "Yeah, what do you expect me to write about? The stock market? Who wants to read about that?!"
The more absurd stories such as “You Kissed Lilly” and “I Love You, Albert,” are silly fun but admirably shaped. Some of the clever—and yes, ultimately literary—ones to check out are “The Upward Bird,” “Beer at the Corner Bar,” “The Death of the Father II,” and “Head Job,” which is actually from the perspective of a woman (!). Okay, Chekhov did a better job depicting women than Bukowski, I’ll give you that, but I’ll say Chekhov’s strongest characters generally also tend to be men, not women. So, brothers from different planets? Just a th0ught....more
I love this poem about the drunken Charles Bukowski, written by Raymond Carver, depicting (fictional?) Buk speaking to a bunch of creative writing stuI love this poem about the drunken Charles Bukowski, written by Raymond Carver, depicting (fictional?) Buk speaking to a bunch of creative writing students, in “You Don’t Know What Love Is”:
A “factotum” describes someone who does a range of "low-level" (meaning low-paid) work. This short novel I listened to, which makes it a bit like a guy telling you his life story while drinking you under the table (oh, he always could, and even now, years gone, could probably still do it). I was driving while listening to it, and not drinking as I was driving, for your information, thanks. The story is really a prequel to Ham and Rye, which was about the early years of Henry Chinaski, Bukowksi’s mostly (I am told) autobiographical main character. If Ham on Rye is about Chinaski's lost youth, Buk's second one features Chinaski's lost twenties about booze, terrible jobs, women, and drunken brawls. Because of the title, there might be a greater focus here on all the soul-killing, mind-numbing jobs he worked to pay for flophouse rent and booze, almost all of them from which he was fired, sometimes after only a day.
In one job, he got paid by a bar owner 5 bucks and all the shots of whiskey he could drink to clean a total of six window blinds, which as it turns out took him all day, and in the end required—because he was of course drunk—the help of all his fellow bar patrons, for whom he used the five bucks to buy a round (this was the fifties, when five bucks could actually almost buy a bar full of patrons a round; well, almost. In the end he had to put $8.50 on the tab he owed the bartender).
Bukowski also worked at Sears FIVE different times during this period, fired each time for stealing and various other infractions. Usually for not showing up for work while he was on a three-day bender with some girl, or healing from some fight. Hey, I worked at Sears, in the stockroom, for a year or so! Boring job, in which I hid out and read books during long evening shifts. Did I ever sneak in a bottle of wine for me and my fellow misery-suffering-warehouse rats? I seem to recall I may have done this once or twice, but you ain't a priest, and this ain't no confessional booth.
Factotum doesn’t quite have the innocence of Ham and Rye, when he actually just lusted after various girls and women, when he was just a kid. In this book he actually has a lot of sex, some of it funny, all of it described in gloriously vulgar detail, though finally, as with the jobs, it’s really mostly misery, all the time. He’s going nowhere fast. And it feels like the well-told raucous romp of a million alcoholics. And a guy who is during this time often an unapologetic asshole. I think you could ask any of the women he was “with” during this period for their view of him and it would not be positive (though when they were drinking with him, at least, I am sure they had fun).
But can I turn away and stop listening? Nope. Bukowski will be hilarious for some, and too offensive for many, but he sure can tell a story. The poverty and squalor of Factotum is not quite as fun as it was in Ham and Rye, but at his best, Bukowski is worth the offense, imho:
“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
Who in working class America cannot raise a glass to that? In the end, Bukowski reveals himself in all his assholism to be in the company of other great and painful stories of the ravages of booze, such as Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, or any Kerouac, or Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Bukowski almost convinces you that the pursuit of drunkenness as a way of coping with reality is a kind of spiritual pursuit:
“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery—isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”
Factotum is not for everyone, I warn you, or welcome you, depending on your love of the tales of the down and out....more
I have at this point read the first two issues of Matt Kindt's new series about a trailer park "kingdom" in the American west, grasslands. A group of I have at this point read the first two issues of Matt Kindt's new series about a trailer park "kingdom" in the American west, grasslands. A group of people who are very poor, the underclass, with guns. An outsider has been caught trespassing on the Grass Kingdom’s territory, that include a bunch of mobile homes and trashed-out buildings. It's not sci fi (so far), it's a realistic setting, focused in part on poverty, and the believers of a kind of white people's right wing libertarianism. And a missing woman. So, is this Twin Peaks? The Oregon militia? Western ranchers taking on the govamint? The land has a violent history. We get glimpses of centuries of violence in this location. A bit of a mystery so far, and I'm in.
Robert, one of three brothers, the leader of the group--the king--is grieving the loss of his wife and daughter, both possibly from drowning. A woman, Maria, comes out of the water, Robert takes her in. Is he delusional? Is this his daughter?! Things are up in the air, and the pacing is slow and steady, but that's good, in Kindt I Trust, and Tyler Jenkins's artwork fits Kindt's usual approach, with very nice watercolors. I've actually read the first two issues, and in the second we get some backstory when Robert tells the story of his wife and daughter to Maria. . ....more
“It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain l“It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.”
“The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.” ― George Orwell
So obviously Orwell is known principally for his anti-totalitarian novels Animal Farm and 1984, but the roots of his democratic socialism were formed early, and this memoir helps us track its origins. Down and Out is about people in poverty. And it’s insightful and humane and beautifully written and often funny. Sometimes hilarious. The great challenge in a political story is to figure out how to also entertain, but Orwell’s memoir of his years in poverty in Paris and London serves up its fun in stories of fellow tramps and dishwashers who suffer and find crazy ways to survive. It also pleases in Orwell’s love of language; his pages on swearing are hilarious, and his political insights about poverty are wonderful.
“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”
My principal interest in this book is in its inquiry into poverty, and how he goes about it. It’s in one sense a research project, narrative inquiry, from a personal point of view; or it’s sort of an auto-ethnography, Orwell sharing his own experience of this life peppered with portraits of people he hung out with and worked with. As opposed to statistics, Orwell’s stories help you more completely understand what it really means to be destitute and hungry and overworked. For the time he was down and out in Paris and London he was a dishwasher, a writer, a tramp, living on the streets, living in flophouses, despised, scrabbling for food, drink, tobacco, with little hope of connections with women (because he had no money!). And in the time he described, very few women and children were on the street compared to men.
Here’s a long section of his analysis of beggars from the book:
“It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary 'working' men. They are a race apart--outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Workingmen 'work', beggars do not 'work'; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not 'earn' his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic 'earns' his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.
Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no ESSENTIAL difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course--but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout--in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.
Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?--for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.” ―Orwell
“We Had Our Bitter Cheer And Sweet Sorrow We Lost A Lot Today We Get It Back Tomorrow I Hear The Sound Of Wheels I Know The Rainbow's End I See Lights In A “We Had Our Bitter Cheer And Sweet Sorrow We Lost A Lot Today We Get It Back Tomorrow I Hear The Sound Of Wheels I Know The Rainbow's End I See Lights In A Fat City I Feel Love Again”--Round of Blues, Shawn Colvin
Fat City: “a place or condition of prosperity, comfort, success, etc. With a new house and a better-paying job, she's in Fat City”--Collins
I’m not particularly into boxing, though I recall times when I watched live on tv several fights such as the Sonny Liston-Cassius Clay (Muhammed Ali) bouts of the sixties (see below for some film highlights). I turned to this because I knew it was seen as a “writer’s” book (a clinic on a certain kind of writing), and so enjoyed listening to this book and its preface by Denis Johnson, who claims it was his biggest influence. Fat City, by Leonard Gardner, was published to critical acclaim in 1969 and was his only published novel, though he was also able to write the screenplay for the film John Huston directed, starring Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges and Susan Tyrrell, so that’s more than most writers accomplish in a lifetime.
The story follows a couple boxers and a manager and some women (kind of) attached to them in the sixties in Stockton, California, where Gardner grew up, but it’s really more about being “down and out in Stockton” (i.e., poor; see Orwell on London and Paris about this subject) than boxing.
“He felt the guilt of inaction, of simply waiting while his life went to waste. No one was worth the gift of his life, no one could possibly be worth that. It belonged to him alone, and he did not deserve it either, because he was letting it waste. It was getting away from him and he made no effort to stop it. He did not know how.”
Boxers barely surviving a brutal life for little money, picking onions during the day, breaking relationships with alcohol at night.
“. . . they succumbed to whatever in them was the weakest, and often it was nothing he could even define."
Think John Fante, Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver territory. Working class struggles to survive, desperation, inertia, mistakes, bleak realism or noir with spare powerful lean prose. A short novel, with sentences like muscular jabs at times.
Sex/relationships are central. Billy Tully’s wife left him and nothing gets better for him with multiple serial loveless encounters. He misses her and cant get over it; maybe she'll take him back if he just works a little harder and becomes a successful boxer?
“All I need's a fight and a woman. Then I'm set. I get the fight I'll get the money. I get the money I'll get the woman. There's some women that love you for yourself, but that don't last long.”
The other boxer, Ernie Munger, suddenly gets jealous of his new wife’s former lover. Insecurity, anything that undermines his sense of masculinity, and everything goes to hell, meaning: Booze. These guys do need love but the women can't see how to give it to them as they are. The men can't accept that love for what it is.
Sound too bleak for you? Okay, I said it was a book for writers more than mainstream readers, probably. But that writing is often gorgeous:
“The sky darkened, the liquid singing of the blackbirds diminished and ceased, mud hens swam back to shore, climbed up the banks and huddled in the willows. The lights of a farm came on in the brown distance where patches of tule fog lay on the barren muddy fields. A wind came with the darkness, rattling the license plate, and a low, honking flight of geese passed.”
Ultimately Gardner cares for these men and doesn't judge them too harshly, without also excusing them. It's a humane book, about endless hope in the face of despair.
"Mr. Algren, boy, you are good."-- Ernest Hemingway
Walk on the Wild Side is set in Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of depression-era New Orleans. With its depictions of an array of prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers, it is wild, but also warm, passionate, edgy, angry, funny. He wrote it soon after hanging out there for a time, and, “I've stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since." Algren never feels like he is slumming. He’s with these people all the way.
Walk on the Wild Side is the story of Dove Linkhorn, a wild and naïve and cocky 16-year-old from a small Texas town who finds his way to New Orleans. The book predates and probably highly influenced books with out-of-control wild characters such as Heller’s Catch 22 and Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest. Oh, and almost anything by Kerouac, Bukowski, or Pynchon. I read it in part because I had recently read Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, which it would be grouped with, as well. Tacks back and forth between black humor and despair, with tolerance for all manner of individuals, a kind of moral map for democracy. Like Whitman, visceral.
“To this lopsided shambles owned by this unlicensed ghost, this speakeasy spook who had been alive once but died in the crash and was now only haunting the thirties, came trudging, some uphill and some down, all those who could not admit that the money was spent, the dream was over; the magic done. They still wore the clothes they wore before 1929 and no one knew when they might buy clothes again.”
"Never Come Morning " is my favorite Algren (so far), but this is very good. Hilarious and sad, lyrically melancholy. I listened to it on audiotape, which made the rich language come alive.
Algren summed his book up best: "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind."...more
I have read a few of the Chicagoan Nelson Algren texts--most notably the bleakly beautiful Never Come Morning--but I had read this novel for which he I have read a few of the Chicagoan Nelson Algren texts--most notably the bleakly beautiful Never Come Morning--but I had read this novel for which he received his most recognition, which also received the first National Book Award in 1950. It is basically a portrait of the underside of Chicago that he knew and loved well, the world of booze and short cons and heroin and coke addiction, of gambling and brothels and bars and baseball.
The main character referred to in the title is Francis Majcinek, known as "Frankie Machine,” a card dealer and drummer with the “golden arm” that also was a place where he injected morphine. He got addicted in WWII to this painkiller as his leg was filled with shrapnel.
“He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls...”
The story takes place in postwar downtown Chicago, 1946-48, after which Algren returned from the war, intending to write a war novel. What do we know about this period? Baby-making (baby boomers got their start then), middle class whie picket fences and economic renewal, in the post war happy-days-are -here-again. But as Algren makes clear, this city’s underclass was still very much struggling.
Frankie is married to Sophie, who is wheel-chair bound after a drunken accident caused by Frankie, though some of her struggle with walking could be psychological. Frankie’s sidekick in crime is Sparrow, a thief, who is his accomplice when he accidentally kills a guy. Frankie also has an affair with Molly, when things head even more “south.” The novel ends with a poem, an ode to Frankie. That’s a kind of quick summary of what happens.
The main focus of the book is Chicago’s down and out, sprinkled with contemporary music and a sort of gutter lyricism that shows his sympathy and passion for the people he meets on the streets. The dialogue is pitch perfect, showing a range of ethnicities in a variety of places from bars to strip clubs to jail to cramped apartments.
Hemingway said of the book, “Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful. . . Mr. Algren, boy, you are good.”
Tough guy, muscular poetry that favors the lost, the gone, the disenfranchised.
This is what Hem means:
“If Jesus Christ treated me like you do, I’d drive in the nails myself.”
“For way down there, in a shot glass's false bottom, everything was bound to turn out fine after all.”
“I couldn't buy the lice off a sick cat," the cabbie answered from the very depths of self-deprecation.”
“Then the wooden benches along the walls, where so many outcasts had slept, would be lit by a sort of slow, clocked lightning til the bulb steadied and fastened its tiny feral fury upon the center of the room like a single sullen and manic eye. To burn on there with a steady hate. Til morning wearied and dimmed it away to nothing more than some sort of little old lost gray child of a district-station moon, all its hatred spent.”
Leonard Cohen’s “Stranger Song,” which features some of the novel in it:
"It gives an educator no pleasure to present the materials in this volume"—Ivar Berg, Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery
What seems to be a"It gives an educator no pleasure to present the materials in this volume"—Ivar Berg, Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery
What seems to be a consistent statement from politicians, journalists and many educational leaders is that the way to change the world is through education. Education has traditionally been seen as "the great equalizer" but as Marsh points out, there is a wider gap than ever between the rich and the poor, so we know that schools have NOT in fact made the country more equal. Sure, it is quite possible (though less likely because of the massive crisis in student debt) that college graduates will make more money than high school graduates, but given the cost of higher ed, and the crisis in the trades (schools have become almost exclusively college prep institutions for EVERYONE, so no one is encouraged to become an electrician or auto mechanic), this is no loner guaranteed.
I have been a teacher all of my life but learned early on that schooling as an institution is largely a sorting mechanism for the reproduction of society (see work by Bourdieu, Passeron, and so on), though I know there are terrific individual schools everywhere with revolutionary/social justice foundations, and there are terrific individual teachers in every school that do wonders with their students. I have never thought schools would save society; I think learning can be an amazing thing, of course, though that doesn't have to happen in school.
So, I never believed that we could "teach and learn our way out of inequality," but I like Marsh's feisty, provocative and entertaining book that takes on one of the central beliefs in this society.