reading/rereading

Inspired by the character (?) Michael Parkinson, who appears on page 5 and disappears on page 7, I turn the collar on a dressy shirt.

The Center for Teaching summer book club selection this year is Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, recently reprinted in a 20th anniversary edition (I have heard of but never read it).

So far, not a great fan of Palmer, who is too much of an essayist if humanist for me, and too devoted to large-group discussion (and its accompanying tightly regulated behaviors and postures).

A trip to Spain calls for reading a book I should’ve read a million years ago—why didn’t I? I think I knew the Orwell of Animal Farm and 1984, and shooting an elephant, and I never liked the way people cite “Politics and the English Language”... lots of reasons I figured I had heard enough from Orwell, until now.

Photo: The Rambla side street where Orwell witnesses “Anarchist youths” exchanging shots with someone in an octagonal tower at the beginning of the May 1937 street fighting in Barcelona.

So finally I turn to Homage to Catalonia, which I found fascinating, depressing, inspiring, and enlightening.

Some elements that struck me: his analysis of the position that the Spanish Civil War was about democracy vs. fascism, which I know well from reading American Communists. Orwell argues this emanates from a Soviet-directed Popular Front strategy oriented at suppressing national revolutions — basically, allying with and protecting capitalist states in order to defend and consolidate the power of Soviet “state socialism.” Usually arguments about Party intrigues tire me, I admit.

We are here partly to investigate the legacy of Anarchists in Barcelona, and Orwell does not deeply describe them, although he describes vividly the impact of anarchism on the culture of the city. And he is clearly symmpathetic: “The Anarchists were the opposite of the majority of so-called revolutionaries in so much that though their principles were rather vague their hatred of privilege and injustice was perfectly genuine.”

My team leader also noted that this is a book about journalism, and Orwell has a muted outrage regarding the herding tendencies of the press, writing at a distance from events and too credulous of manipulative claims of various parties.

Re-reading Linda Nilson’s Specifications Grading (2015). I have been thinking a lot about Asao Inoue’s model of “contract grading” and as I try out different implementations of it, I start to think that Nilson may have answers for some of the rough patches.

The Ghost Road, Pat Barker’s 1995 Booker winner, the 41st of 99 books. First sentence: “In the deck-chairs all along the front the bald pink knees of Bradford businessmen nuzzled the sun.”

My favorite Booker so far, or at least one of the top three, is Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, rebranded as Schindler’s List after the Spielberg movie came out. Is it a surprise that this one was closest to nonfiction? 

Allied bicycle infantry (photo from National Archives of Scotland) -- though no bicycles are mentioned (as of page 229) in Barker’s The Ghost Road.

I’m perplexed by the line between “fiction” and “non” -- I wrote a dissertation on realism but that didn’t clear anything up. Is that historical figure or that geographical place mentioned in The English Patient a real person or place (I meant to write a post about this but didn’t get to it)? Is that welding technique described in Falling Free a real welding technique?

Nonfiction writers must modulate their level of certainty: this we know pretty much for sure; for this there is some good evidence but also some conflicting evidence; this other thing seems plausible... 

Novelists don’t seem to do that -- characters may be uncertain, narrators may be unreliable (in which case they are basically characters). But is the novelist ever uncertain?

Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch (Pulitzer winner in 1995 and thus the 40th of 99 books) seems to belong to a modern school of nonfiction. Which may be why I am reading a twentieth anniversary reprint—not the case with any of the others on the list!

Like many of the earlier Pulitzers, it has lots of detail in a subject that, at first glance, might not interest so many general readers. It has footnotes and maps. And illustrations of barnacles.

With the 99 books project, a couple new policies were enacted. 

First policy: I read only one book at a time—no more teetering stack of half-read books on the bedside table, some languishing there for years. Admittedly I am not adhering to this rule with the utmost rigor.

Second policy: I always read books that people give me as gifts. I don’t always read the email they send me, but I’ll read a book. This policy actually predates the 99 books project by some years and began with a surprising holiday gift from my step-mother: Douglas Hunter’s Half Moon: Henry Hudson and the Voyage that Redrew the Map of the New World (2009).

Which brings me to my current detour: Peter Frase’s Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (2016), given by a student, who read it on the recommendation of a professor.

Not very far into the book, which I admit I was not much looking forward to, comes this remarkable paragraph:

In his three-hour meditation on the representation of Los Angeles in movies, Los Angeles Plays Itself, film scholar Thom Anderson suggests that ”if we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities, perhaps we can appreciate fiction films for the documentary revelations.” This book tries to incorporate that insight.

Frase is just trying to say that he will imagine possible futures with the help of science fiction novels, but I was so stunned and delighted to see my favorite film cited as a model that I gained the momentum necessary to cover the remaining 127 pages.

Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late (1994) won the Booker in 1994. Written in Glaswegian “dialect,” it’s the inner monologue of a kind of introspective dumbass everyman as he undergoes a Job-like series of trails and reversals, mainly at the hands of implacable state bureaucracies ostensibly created to help him (the police, social services, health care).

I admit, I put it down after 133 pages, fatigued by the monotony of protagonist Sammy’s predicament -- which I think is part of the point of the point. There is a contrast between Sammy’s lively inner life and the lonely drudgery of bus-taking, line-waiting, and petty humiliation by authorities; it’s kind of a Cléo de cinq à sept but much longer and with a sexist loudmouth as protagonist.

In 1990, Glasgow had been declared the “cultural capital of Europe.” Perhaps this book is Kelman’s answer. 

In the 99 books project I only look up info on books that I don’t finish. I looked up this one, and was dismayed to find that its selection for the Booker was controversial. Some conservatives and snobs opposed the book -- some, apparently, because it has a lot of bad words in it (Kingsley Amis deployed the tired argument that using “fuck” is a crutch that impoverishes language -- it only took my 20 pages to toss aside his Booker winner, so whatever). A judge on the Booker panel opined, “Frankly, it’s crap.” I don’t agree with these fools. But I don’t want to ride the bus with ol’ Sammy for another 200 pages either.

In 1736, wealthy rice plantation owner Elias Ball buys an enslaved woman from a slave ship arriving in Charleston, South Carolina. He calls her “Angola Amy.”

Some 250 years later, Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family and sixth great-grandson of Elias Ball, says to Georgianna Richardson, fifth great-granddaughter of Amy, “What my family did you your family, long ago, was a crime. One reason I came is to try to answer for that crime” (160).

As I read Ball’s book I’m thinking a lot about my own family. My great-great-great grandfather, Franklin Fell (1814-1897) did not own enslaved people. He was a Philadelphia Quaker who converted to Episcopalianism following the death of a cherished infant daughter. The Quakers were early and strong opponents of slavery.

But people in Franklin Fell’s generation of Americans—particularly wealthy people, like him—did own slaves. 

Each of us has 32 biological great-great-great-grandparents. Most of mine were adults at the time of the Civil War, and 24 of them lived in the US. Eight of them lived in US states where slavery was legal. Thus they (and their ancestors) had the opportunity, at least, to own other humans. Almost certainly some of them did. Did my great-great-great-grandfather John Penn Hunt (1789-1849) of Oxford, North Carolina?

Dan Ariely’s Payoff: The Hidden Logic that Shapes Our Motivations (2016). 

Reading this for a Seeley Center for Teaching Excellence reading circle. I picked it sight unseen, and perhaps wouldn’t have picked it if I had read some of the early sentences, such as the first sentence: “We are the CEOs of our own lives.”

Although written, I think for a business/managerial audience, the book nonetheless has 100 messages for teachers. For example:

We tend to overestimate the “transactional” model in trying to motivate others. 

We can de-motivate people efficiently by simply ignoring their efforts.

When people put effort into something, they tend to identify with their work and feel a sense of ownership

Reading Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family (a National Book Award winner from 1997 — maybe I should have chosen that award instead of the Pulitzer for nonfiction). This is a detour from 99 Books. I see James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late (the 1994 Booker) staring at me from across the table.

Looking for descendants of people enslaved by his ancestors on the rice plantations of South Carolina, Ball retells the history of slavery through the documentation left behind by his family.

Then this morning over coffee I read the script of a radio broadcast from June 5, 1944. The announcer made the following point:

Leftover post from Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb (Pulitzer in 1994):

Remnick describes the upheavals of 1989 in Europe: “To live anywhere between Boon and Moscow in 1989 was to be witness to a year-long political fantasy” (241). Remnick and his wife have gone to Prague to relax and visit friends over Thanksgiving weekend. instead they witness hundreds of thousands of people in the street, bringing down the Communist regime.

Remnick reads Havel’s prison letters while in Prague, including this one:

Finishing Lenin’s Tomb (#64). Poor Gorby in disgrace. By the early 90s I was in grad school and not paying attention to global affairs, so much of the final chapter was news to me.

For some reason, the vandal who highlighted a few words in an early chapter also selected 10 or 12 lines on pages 526-527, how delightful.

On the second-to-last page, the author asks Yakovlev about how Gorbachev became Party general secretary so easily in 1985, with his plans for reform and all. Yakovlev’s reply:

Edward Ball dives into the history of his slave-owning ancestors. He finds that they have left a massive paper trail.

At 530 pages, Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb is below average for Pulitzers between 1983 and 1994.

More than two months, I think, into Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb (Pulitzer of 1994 and thus #64 of 99 books countdown). 

Now reading about the rise of the right and the disintegration of Gorbachev’s agenda in 1991. Curious account of Aleksander Nevzorov, the “right wing’s video warrior.” Remnick writes: “As a journalist, he was equal parts Geraldo Rivera and propaganda minister, a master of the basest instincts of schlock and vengeance” (393).

Holiday travel, no way I was going to lug Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb around with me. It’s 576 pages in hardback, actually probably near the mean for Pulitzer General Nonfiction page length. But for now, Lenin is on hiatus at page 310. 

Substituted Greg Bear’s Moving Mars, winner of the Nebula in 1995 and thus number 58 in the 99 books countdown. 

Insert here the inevitable comparisons between Robinson’s Red Mars (Nebula 1994) and Bear’s Moving Mars. Probably usenet was alight with flames on this issue back in ‘94.