Bruce Chatwin, an outstanding biography that is pretty long (600 pages) given the relative brevity of the subject's life, but which rarely seems padded -- the relative recentness of the subect's passing meant that most of his family and social circle were still alive, which meant that multiple perspectives could be offered on most of the narrative . . a fact which itself could cause the book to drag, but which doesn't because author Nicholas Shakespeare has some pretty serious skills as a biographer, both in terms of research and in terms of building a narrative. Extremely useful to me because I start teaching Chatwin's The Songlines next week.
I guess I am on a sci fi kick, just finished Leviathan Wakes, book 1 of The Expanse series, and started number 2!
Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, a book which I had mistakenly assumed to be a first person story about traveling the country in a van, a sort of Walden on Wheels, but which is actually an extended piece of journalism that explores the lives of people who live in vans, RVs, trailers, etc. and support themselves doing itinerant jobs that are pretty ********ing brutal (like holiday warehouse works at amazon, picking sugar beets, etc); which is surprising given that most of these people are older, ranging from mid fifties to their eighties, but who were seriously let down by the American dream (a lot of them lost everything, including their retirement savings, in the 2008 bust), which is now a "major motion picture" starring Frances McDormand, but which works really well as a book written by Jessica Bruder, who in the three years it took her to write the book spent close to a year living in a van and doing the sorts of jobs her subjects did, which she found pretty damn hard, and she was 37-40 when she investigated this particular American subculture.
My favorite book of 2017. Just stunningly insightful and the film does a fantastic job of capturing the depth of the book.
The RIse and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road the the Sexual Revolution, which I'm reading to consider for my first year comp class wherein I tend to assign a work of cultural criticism or two: I like that this book uses the under-appreciated cultural critic Philip Rieff, but . . . well, it would be more convincing if it didn't just assume that the modern world is bad just . . . well, BECAUSE . . . and the passage on identity and identity politics could be better. . . I mean, Francis Fukuyama's book on identity is significantly better, which tells me that Carl Trueman's book isn't going to make it on my syllabus that's the "thumbs down" emoji?????? Where's that poop emoji when you need it?
Just finished: Jean Stafford -- The Catherine Wheel Just started: Octavia E. Butler -- Bloodchild and Other Stories (plus the remainder of Butler's stories and essays)
The Omni-Americans: Black Experience and American Culture, a terrific book analyzing the "folklore of white supremacy" to argue the position that shouldn't be too controversial, that Black people are Americans who not only belong here, but have also made the culture better, too. Written by novelist and Albert Murray (who when he was an undergraduate at Tuskegee read his way through the canon on the novel, from Cervantes and Henry Fielding to contemporary literature, which in his day was Faulkner and Hemingway, who at one point noticed that all the books had most recently been checked out by the same guy, an upperclassman named Ralph Waldo Ellison, who went on to write a couple great books.
I missed Black History Month by a few weeks this year. Outside of a weird proclivity for insinuating affairs with various starlets of the 1920s-40s, the authors do a great job at digging up a ton of details about the grandson of a slave who ran away from home (Columbus, GA) when he was 12 and ended up spending most of his life in France. Bullard did everything from box with Jack Johnson to own a club where Josephine Baker performed and people like Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were regular guests, while also becoming a member of the French Foreign Legion, becoming the first African American fighter pilot, and amassing 15 medals from the French military for his roles in both WWI and WWII. Not bad for a guy whose last bit of fame included working as an elevator operator at Rockefeller Center and being a guest on the fairly new Today Show where millions got to learn about him for the first time.
Parts of the book are a bit dated in that he is specifically responding not just to "the folklore of white supremacy" but also Black separatist politics of the late 60s, which he argues are tacitly accepting some of the assumptions of white supremacy (namely that Black people can't be real Americans). But his take on history and on literary and cultural matters are pretty damn interesting. And when he's score-settling an argument that has been long forgotten... it's time to skim a little.
Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter. A dark Pacific Northwest book about two criminals, one white, one black. Published by New York Review of Books. It's a rainy day where I am.
A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment, a book critical of many attempts to focus first year writing classes on too-narrow understandings of "anti-racism" because many of those approaches turn out to be, in the thinking of author and my one-time grad school classmate Erec Smith infantilizing and, ultimately, disempowering. So Erec proposes a different approach that acknowledges the depth and breadth of racism in America, but which ultimately gives students better tools for thinking about it and dealing with it. Damn glad this book was in the library, since it's $90. The soon to be released paperback is cheaper, and will probably be assigned in grad schools across the country, unless some of Erec's detractors have their way.
Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero - William Thackeray Second read. I liked it more the first time. But Becky Sharp is still a great character: "Revenge may be wicked, but it's natural."
Given the number of mistakes in the text (which will be repaired in the paperback), if I didn't know the guy, I'd assume it was a typo, too.
This certainly had a lot of words in it. Peterson is fascinating to me. He's at times an exceptional therapist and researcher all the way down to an egoist who can't turn away from any amount of fame coming his way. 12 rules kind of follows that same pattern. Some of the rules are great from start to finish. Some have good parts with too much fluff. One or two of them are just him bloviating unendingly about a topic that he literally never ties into the supposed main point of the rule. I have no idea how this has inspired an army of young men to try and grow up, since I'm sure most of them don't understand 75% or more of what he's saying, but kudos on somehow becoming famous.
Here's a great essay on him from the English website Unherd.com Women already have a Jordan Peterson - UnHerd The the author Sarah Ditum, saves the best for last... IMO.... The TL;DR version is, "he's a life-style guru for young men the way Oprah or Gwyneyth Paltrow or Maria Kondo are for women." Oh yes, and order is “masculine” (“symbolically”, he hedges, unconvincingly), while chaos is “presented imaginatively as feminine”. There isn’t, it should be noted, any particular reason for this gendering: it’s just the way Peterson has decided things should be. And even though he claims to be seeking a “balance” of these two principles, it’s hard to get around the fact that the book is subtitled An Antidote to Chaos. I mean, no one ever recommended an antidote to something they thought was good. This is where — however much he might pirouette around it — the sexism of Peterson’s worldview comes through, because if men are order and women are chaos, and order needs to dominate chaos, there’s a pretty obvious conclusion for sexual politics. When he really gets into his stride, you’ll find him describing “the terror young men feel towards attractive women, who are nature itself,” which I guess means that if you’re a woman and he thinks you’re fit, you might as well be soil, so who knows what’s a compliment anymore. For some of Peterson’s fanbase, the sexism is surely the point. But I wonder whether there are others for whom this relentless assertion of masculine authority (bathos or camp? You decide) is more condiment than main dish, making palatable the fact that Peterson is actually quite a feminised figure. Think about it: who else can fill stadiums by telling people to sort out their drawers or learn self-respect? Who else shills eating plans? Peterson doesn’t have an obvious female counterpart because there are so many of them that none could gain his preeminence: Oprah, Gwyneth, Marie Kondo. Being a lifestyle guru is woman’s work, even if you are a man and you throw around some gratuitous Jung. Young men don’t want to hear “tidy your room and grow up and how will you ever get a nice girlfriend if you slouch around like that?” from their mothers, but they’ll pay to take it from Peterson — so long as he wraps it in some just-so stories about lobster hierarchy. His insistence on “taking responsibility” reminds me of nothing so much as me going Full Matriarch and chasing some teenagers down a tram stop, waving the litter they’d dropped. For his fans, Jordan Peterson is their mum: she might have some odd beliefs and go in for faddy diets, but at bottom, doesn’t she just love them and want what’s best for them.
That's interesting. He's more credentialed than the female counterparts, but the correlation is there whenever he drifts outside of his actual area of expertise. It's also fascinating that much of his fanbase is fairly conservative and right leaning politically when he's clearly classically liberal on most issues. I honestly don't get the level of adoration he receives, but I'll probably also read his newest book to see if anything has really changed.
Enjoying this series immensely. It's been fun to see the differences in the book and the show so far, and both are excellent.
In Praise of Walking: The New Science of How We Walk and Why it's Good For Us a book that focuses on the brain science behind our bipedal mobility by Irish neurologist Shane O'Mara, which was okay, but I'm glad I got it from a library.
I just finished reading this. I found it a bit disappointing but with translated works I never know whether to blame the story or the translator.
About 100 pages left, which I need to finish ASAP as it is due back at the library! It is really really really good
Albert Murray -- From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity I took the library's version (cover above) with me on vacation. This work is part of LOA's collection of Murray's non-fiction.
In Praise of Paths: Walking Through Time and Nature, another book about how great walking is by a guy who, thanks to adult-onset epilepsy, had to become a fulltime pedestrian, so the author Torbjorn Ekelund starts walking all over his native Norway, which seems to have a ton of paths/trails interlaced through the country. Found this through the library, too, but if I see this one for sale, I'll buy it.