After I decided to move to Barcelona, Spain in order to study Spanish for a year I Bought a copy of Don Quixote in it’s original language. My intention in so doing was habitual, I enjoy reading the national literature of a country in the place it was produced. I learned that for this work, however, I was not up to the challenge. There was simply too much to see and all my free time was devoted to my young bride-to-be. Four years later I was anxious to re-read or really to start reading it in this fine edition that I got off eBay.
Now as any person with literary inclinations is sure to tell you, Don Quixote is often cited as the first modern novel and is also often named by writers as one of the best novels ever written. Though one may not have read the book, still one knows some of the details – a mad, older man considers himself a knight and then goes on a number of misadventures that includes battle with a windmill. The image of Quixote either with Sancho Panza is iconic, so much so that a good friend of mine even has a tattoo of them on their arm. These generalities aside, having just read the first part, I can understand why. Though with some reservations.
In a more conscious manner than Madame Bovary, Quixote is fixated upon literature. In his case it is not romance novels but tales of knight-errantry and the defunct even-at-the- time-the-book-was-written code of chivalry. Such books have, as those around him often say, warped his mind. This is not the limit of the role of literature in the novel – for throughout there are discussions between Don Quixote and other interlocutors on the values of chivalric literature. Don Quixote sees them as estimable, obviously, while those around him largely do not. They dislike them and it’s effect on him so much that at one point they burn a large portion of Quixote’s library.
One of the components of the book that I enjoyed was its use of multiple forms of writing. Be they letters or, as is more common, poetry and tales told in verse, the novel wends through a number of lives that Don Quixote touches and those that are literary productions. The last poem written by a shepherd that committed suicide over unrequited love, a didactic tale left at an inn by an old boarder the warns about the dangers of tempting virtue, and the tragic story of an offended lover wandering the countryside are just three of the many stories within the work. A majority of these tales of tragedy, however, lead to comedic – both in the telling of them as well as the improbable situations that emerge soon after their vocalization. Another literary element of the book that I liked is it’s meta-awareness. The character debate on what make a book meritorious in such a way that I felt as if Cervantes was laughing when writing it. Some of the lines within the presage purportedly written by the Censor for Spanish Books are hilarious.
For me the book really started to get going around 180 or so pages in. I was a little worried that the book was a paper version of Citizen Cane – something that is oft cited as an innovative stylistically but which has, to me, not aged well. Thankfully I was wrong. Shortly after this point the number of minor encounters introduced in this section starts to mesh together within the plot of Quixote and Panza. Characters that were thought to be passing figures take on a larger role, which allows for greater continuity as lacking them we have only the madmen Sancho Panza and Don Quixote bumping around aimlessly in misadventure. I also found the overwhelming number of quotes of chivalrous tales to be a bit overwhelming – but I can understand that at the time that it was printed his audience would be more informed of this. All in all I have so far enjoyed the book greatly and look forward to reading the second half.
My feelings towards poetry in general are, to put it simply, complex. Or maybe it’s not as I can crudely word my view as such: “I once loved poetry and considered myself as a poet but now I do not love it or claim that title.” More specifically, there are a number of poets that I think are quite worthwhile of people’s attention but in general I find myself aligned with Henry Miller’s criticism of modern poetry in The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud:
“Our [modern] poets are jealous of the name but show no disposition to accept the responsibilities of their office. They have not proved themselves poets; they are writing not for a world which hangs on their every word but for one another. They justify their impotence by deliberately making themselves unintelligible. They are locked in their glorified little ego; they hold themselves aloof from the world of fear of being shattered at the first contact. They are not even personal, when one gets right down to it, for if they were we might understand their torment and their delirium, such as it is. They have made themselves as abstract as the problems of the physicist. Theirs is a womblike yearning for a world of pure poetry in which the effort to communicate is reduced to zero.”
That said, I must admit that besides the poems shared in a writing group I was in two years ago that I did find worthwhile, I haven’t read any published poetry over the past several years written by anyone in the past twenty years because of my general ambivalence to it. I recognize that there are likely a number of modern poets quite worthy of public attention, however my awareness of this axiom has not been such that it is strong enough to circumvent my desire to avoid having to go through so much chaff to find a few grains of wheat. As such my literary diet has prioritized fiction and non-fiction.
A recent exception to this course is the collection of poems entitled Dead Horse by Niina Pollari. Given the long introduction to this book review – which normally jumps right in to the matter at hand – I will now place at the beginning what I normally state at the end and write that I think that this book is one of those pieces of wheat, it is one of those worthy publications of poetry. I will also add in the interest of full disclosure before reviewing this collection of poems – as if this medium were an investment program on television and I were a financial analyst offering advice on what to buy to build your stock portfolio (which in a way is was I am now doing) – that Niina is one of the two great loves that I have had in my life and that for a brief but bright period half my lifetime ago she was my creative inspiration and collaborationist. All this said, to the Dead Horse!
One of the aspects of the book that I like is the sly humor throughout the poems. There are a number of witty phrasings and lines that never seem to make a poem seem trite or cheap. For instance there is the poem I Love The Phone. This piece reflects how it is that phone connectivity has become a means for self-evaluating people’s worth to others, how people’s nervous anticipation of the vibrating ring of phones has them almost like Pavlov’s dogs and how the digital trail left by it is more valuable as it is tangible. Rather than spouting a jeremiad against this technological entrainment of the body to the logic of the machine – she closes with:
And when the archaeologists find me they can see all the times
That people called or texted
And they can say to themselves
“She was very beloved”
In a way that is humorous, she is able to point out with this that one day our anxieties about such cyborgization of the self will seem without cause and be the new normal. As someone who has seen in their lifetime long notes expressing interest in a person from being cute and endearing to something indicative of some sort of mental disorder, I can both understand, relate and appreciate what will inevitably be the datedness of our thoughts in a few years.
This is not the only instance of technological apparatuses impinging upon the person in Pollari’s poetry (a phrase I crafted as such simply because I found the sound of it sonorous). At the high end of technical development, Niina references a computer in To The Specialists that is sat in front of for “13, 14 hours a day”. While surfing the web for work, it re-forges her spine her spine such that she must see a laborer referenced in the title. At the low end of technical development, she references a home – a.k.a. the safe for the self – in Self-Love is Important that she has stayed in for a for prolonged period of time and this disconnection from nature leads to the consumption of psycho-stimulants (coffee and wine) that leaves a feeling of self loathing only negated by the intellectual recognition that she mush love herself. Lest I get too lost in following certain themes throughout, let me go back to the place my train of thought left before making the above connections.
There’s humor and connection to each not only within the aforementioned individual poems, but throughout – hence their categorization into Bones, Blood and Money in the table of contents. For instance in Nature Poem she states that “Nature bores me / The way a thing I don’t understand bores me / Like when I looked up an article about plagiarism…” and then in the next poem, To The Bone, she states “Please don’t stare, I don’t feel good / I lifted that line out of a teenager’s blog”. The juxtaposition here has an immediate comic effect. The apparent contradiction is not, however, just humorous but insightful as in the latter alluded to work is the sentiment that though people exist as types their manifestation of them is always novel just as songs lyrics may at times sound trite, their meaning changes based upon the context in which they are said or sung. It’s this understated dark humor and depth of perception that made me enjoy the book so much.
For instance in Personal Pain, Pollari recounts a minor operation and a number of other instances in which she experienced physical pain – be it the piercing of a tattoo needle or that of a safety pin. Having spoken with a number of people in the tattoo and suspension scene I know that her assessment of the original stinging sensation referred to in the poem is as she says in the last stanza:
The pain was not transcendent
As much as I would have liked for it to be
Wanting transcendence through pain is a deep wish I always have
I know I am not alone there
All of the other poems are worth reflecting on in greater detail. I feel like I may be speaking insufficiently about them, however I also want to encourage your to experience them for yourself. If you’d like to read other’s comments about a few more passages, there’s this and also this. Suffice it to say, I’ve read and re-read the collection a few times not and continue to find it engaging. That said – to be honest I must admit there are a few moments when I struggled to understand certain poetic choices – for instance in No Emergency why she chooses to break up of stanzas certain stanzas – as well as the meaning of a few of the images and transitions. I think it’s more likely that I’ve grown accustomed to a certain type of writing style and so sometimes buck the small amount of labor that goes into a deep reading. I’m happy to accept these mysteries now and look forward to solving them later.
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You can follow Niina’s work here and read a poem of Niina’s that is not included in Dead Horse here.
Also check out this response to Dead Horse called You’re Not the Only One from Night Redacted by Chelsea Hodson.
And then there is this book-video-preview-i-don’t-know-what-to-call-it-thing:
Shortly after reading The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward E. Baptist a friend that knew I was reading it sent me a link to a Huffington Post article stating that Ta-Nehisi Coates had suggested it as one of the critical books for understanding the early experiences of Africans and their masters in America. I was pleased to learn that something that I’d chosen to read was part of the critical zeitgeist that had more American’s interrogating the relationship between white and black American life, though found myself at times writhing in my reading chair due to the depredations that enslavers enacted upon their “investments”. This is because while Baptist illustrates the multi-faceted and evolving qualities of American slavery in a aesthetically and rhetorically compellingly manner, there is a discomfort emerges from the experiences of individual slaves that demonstrate a morally corrupt political regime that transformed lives into mere economic calculations on a bottom line. Such discomforting emotions are not, however, to be avoided but are to be confronted if one is to gain a greater appreciation of the realities that informed our contemporary society.
The book opens with vivid descriptions of the coffles driven by the “Georgia men” from the Chesapeake area to the South and West of the U.S. states as well as the territories not yet officially integrated into the federal system. By limning the relationship between center and periphery, a foundational concept within dependency theory, Baptist shows how the slave-owners were able to pressure and persuade their northern political counterparts through a number of means in order to get a power disproportionate to their population size within the Federal government. Key to understanding this is the legal designation of black both as 3/5 of a person and also a property that is wholly subject to the desired of the owners.
This quantification of laborers into abstractions of works had a number of intentions. It sought to erase not only the familial connections by separating family members but also the skills that those slaves in the Chesapeake region had accumulated. In the some of the northern regions those slaves that were skilled in the trades were able to make a more bearable life for themselves, however once in the south and west they became radically alienated. One’s skill as a carpenter, after all, has little use for picking the tiny white pieces of cotton. Incentives for working were almost wholly absent and instead corporeal discipline of a different sort from the North was the norm. Such abstraction was not merely for the purposes of work in the fields but also work in the bedroom. Female slaves increasingly came to be prized for their physical attractiveness and the degree of resistance they put towards males sexual advances.
Illustrated on a bar graph, one can see the productivity rates per slave rising over time as a result of the increasingly violent “whipping machine” at a rate equal to our higher than workers in the industrial north. Increasingly larger capital slave-holders displaced smaller ones. A bubble in the slave market as well as problems selling cotton goods due to the Boxer rebellion caused massive economic disruption and depression. Seeking to flee their creditors, a large number of those that once had “Alabama fever” took their capital investments with them to Texas. While the fact that Atlantic slave trade and dispossession of native lands was the primary impetus for the rise of industrial capitalism is something that has been long established by historians and political economists, this fact is often ignored or unknown amongst the general population. Though Baptist is primarily concerned with the slavery experience, his sections of comparative analysis as to the purported efficiencies of it compared to the inchoate northern industries is useful in explaining how the Southern slave-owning elite were able to become so rich and influential despite their being almost unanimously condemned as cruel and awful people within polite society outside of the South.
The chapter on the transformation of slavery from simple single ownership to financial instruments I found to be exceptionally fascinating. Requiring credit to obtain lands and slaves, intermediary firms would create bonds that were based on slave’s future labors and sell them on the international market. Thus while slavery was illegal in Europe, the capital of Capital, financial firms still implicated the purchasers of them into the nexus of Atlantic slavery. Such individuals weren’t the only ones that facilitated the slave trade and the trade in slave extracted goods. A number of states, specifically Louisiana was influenced by the slave-owning elite to sell bonds for the creation of cotton transportation infrastructure that would be paid for if need be by all and not just the slave-owning citizens.
These items are mentioned as it is meant to present a counter-narrative to the largely Southern antebellum historiography that presented slavery as paternalistic and the northern historiography that presented it as ineffective and irrational. There are many more aspects of Southern slavery and it’s relationship to the industrializing North – be it ideological, financial, etc. – that Baptist goes into that are worth touching upon. I would, however, simply suggest that those interested read the book as it is excellent. And with that said, I’m interested in any books or articles that deal with the manner in which these experiences had on the epigenetic effects of the African-American traumatic experiences. If you know of something please email me. Also, for those interested in reading Eric Foner, one of my favorite American historians, review of the book should read this article on New York Times website.
Continuing my study of Junot Diaz I read This Is How You Lose Her, which is a collection of nine short stories set in New Jersey in the Dominican Republic. I read it over two days, finding much of what I loved about The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as well as much of what I disliked about it. I, unlike Maureen Corrigan, liked the style. However like her I had difficulty in finding myself drawn to these characters. More below.
While I am in wholehearted agreement that Diaz’s style is unique and compelling, I say this as someone that doesn’t read a large amount of modern novelists, preferring at this moment the classics of world literature. That caveat given, I find the pacing, the internal dialogue, and the terminology to be compelling. Unfortunately I believe that here the insertion of Spanish here to be much less sensible than that in Wao. It seems without rhyme or reason, perhaps merely to remind the lazy reader that the narrator is from a Spanish-speaking country. This takes away a little for me, but is no big deal.
Another of the aspects that I liked of the collection is that Yunior, a character from Wao, features in a number of these shorts. Through them Diaz provides a fragmented but insightful backstory. Using Oscar’s terms, however, it’s a number of flashbacks instead of a Star Wars Prequel – meaning that we get glimpses of insight that appear to this read more as an accumulation of stories about someone rather than the story of someone. This may seem like a minor issue of semantics, but it is not. Let me delve into this some more as it relates to Yunior and the other characters.
The dislocating pressures wrought by migration, poverty, anomie, alienation and how they make maintaining a strong family and upright individual identity difficult is made clear and visceral through Diaz’s prose. The longing for a better life and willingness to endure painful humiliations because of it is masterfully wrought. The manner in which Diaz depicts his characters faith that once their goals are achieved happiness will be obtained is brilliant and furthered by their subsequent turn to dissatisfactions with the new conditions. These general commentaries on the fleeting nature of the preconditions to human happiness is not the issues. Neither is it the prose that I find problematic. It’s the characters themselves. As I’ve said in my review of Wao, while I am able to follow a narrator with which I don’t have a strong identification with – I am prone to be less sympathetic to them. There is very little in the way of laudable personality traits or character development in the tales and rather than showing deep insight they all seem to have a debilitating lack of self-knowledge and a blinding ignorance on to handle the issues that faces and oppresses them them.
Now after reading a work that I enjoy I typically review critical literature on it. Lacking access as I do right now to online databases I’m limited to Google, but despite this I found this article by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. Being a Hispanic Studies and Literature scholar, she is able to comment upon feelings that the stories evoked in me with greater insight. One of the comments that relates to the above that Paravisini-Gebert made that I resonated with is on this. Comparing Diaz to another Hispanic author (that I am now interested in reading), she states the following:
“If Down These Mean Streets was a book of searing accusation against those forces in American society that con¬demned some ethnic minorities to alienation, discrimination, and disil¬lusionment, it was also a book that assumed that these conditions could be altered through political action and consciousness-raising. There is no such faith in concerted community action in Drown; there is, as a matter of fact, little semblance of a community – in the sense of groups living lives of multileveled communication with each other. There are friends and neighbors who come across each other from time to time in these tales, but they merge and separate, like the proverbial ships that pass in the night, leaving little in their wake. James Woods, in his review for the New Republic, accurately points to the stories “skillfully” catching Diaz’s characters “in their own glue of confusion, unable or unwilling to change anything.”
Now I recognize that a flawed character is part and parcel of the world and literature. A number of my favorite books – The Thief’s Journal, the characters that fill Dostoyevsky and Henry Miller’s oeuvres – as well as the sociopathic characters that I enjoy from the Golden Age of TV have such flaws. These are all, however, drawn together within a greater narrative that gives their tales some greater meaning. While this particular problem I see with the collection could be seen as a problem of art form of short stories itself, counterfactuals exist in Borges, Kafka, Tolstoy and others. Yes these character’s are all “realistic,” but just because they are real doesn’t mean they are worth of our attention. All that said, I feel in closing that I must state that despite my politico-aesthetic criticisms, the book reads well and will likely be read long into the future. I could certainly see myself, like a number of my friends that are in the creative writing profession, use this to teach style from.
Lastly, for those that want to read one of the selections gratis, I would suggest The Cheaters Guide to Love. Reading it I was taken aback at how eerily similar to some of my own experiences in my early 20s and I think it is the strongest work in the collection.
Ghost Map is one of the best works of popular history that I have ever read. I loved it without qualifications and have already recommended it to several people. The style, the pacing, the everything is a homerun and my students that have read it have all found it enjoyable if at times a little difficult.
As the book states in the opening, it is largely the tale of four protagonists: John Snow – a pioneering surgeon and medical researcher; Henry Whitehead – a priest; the city of London itself and the cholera bacterium. Spoiler alert: the story is easily summed up in a few sentences. A cholera outbreak occurs in London at a time when people believe that such illnesses are passed around by bad smells and there is no real infrastructure to removed human and animal waste products from cities. A talented and ambitious but humble medical researcher named John Snow starts to investigate and with the help of a local priest familiar with those affected and armed with information garnished from new practices of governmental record keeping is able to determine from when the cholera outbreak came and to provide a thorough but at the time unrecognized refutation of the miasma theory of cholera dissemination. It’s the attention to detail that he gives these characters, the depth he goes to explain the rationale for functioning of practices and creatures that doesn’t seem overwhelm the reader, the contextualization of the various obstacles faced and the underlying exegesis of some of the concepts of historical materialism that made it such an engaging read. I knew that this would be somewhat the case as the book opens with a quote by Walter Benjamin from the Theses on the Philosophy of History regarding Klee’s Angelus Novus. However I was presently surprised by how much of this was described in relationship to these four protagonists.
Johnson carefully documents how the class system existent at the time and the low level of scientific knowledge played a huge role in the perpetuation of a false medical paradigms that contributed to both degrading attitudes and the delay of infrastructural development needed to address the preconditions for cholera and other diseases spread. There is an irony that hints at comedy in such disdain, for despite the bourgeoisie hatred for the “lower classes” whose labor created the capital that they enjoyed such feelings of superiority for some in the nicer communities are leveled when they too contract it. Related to this is the miasma theory of disease. Johnson cleverly shows all the holes in the theory and shows how this relates to the elite classes own prejudices much as scientific racism was an outgrowth of the conditions of American slavery.
The sections on cholera were insightful without getting too deep within scientific jargon while those on Dr. John Snow and Henry Whitehead were both compelling. In the YouTube videos that I perused for use in the classroom unrelated to the author the former is highlighted while the latter largely goes unreported. Even then Snow is depicted as an abstraction rather than a person whose motives and actions were far outside the norm of his epoch. John Snow’s devotion to finding this at no profit to him self and how in fact it causes him to face ridicule from a large number of medical professionals at his time, shows how heroic he was. Such circumstances make for good reflections on the nature of the modern hero.
Despite the book being so good, I found that some of my students whose first language isn’t English had major difficulties with the text. Understandable as while “big” concepts were well described in simple language, they had to spend a lot of time looking up words. I think it’s a good practice for students to keep a running list of the words that they use and think that this would be a great interdisciplinary text to use with science lessons.
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America by Gerald Horne presents the argument that the predominant rationale for the Founding Father’s mobilization for a war of independence was because it allowed what would become the United States to maintain slavery. While this sort of historical reading flies in the face of a number of inherited and taught assumptions on the fight for Colonial self-governance, Horne present a rather compelling case for the American Revolution being a “counter-revolution” or the armed mobilization of a dominant class that feel threatened.
The threats from within and without the slowly expanding colonial borders made the elites and settlers constantly fear a wide variety of political actors. There were the nearly ever-present concerns of Native Americas attacking over the dispossession they were facing. There were also the Latin countries, France and Spain, which laid claim to large and desirable swathes of land and would harass people in or near it. There were the slaves as well, who would sometimes escape. However as more time passed the American elite increasingly viewed the U.K. as both a hamper to their development and an unjust master. In regards to the former, England sought to maintain their agreements with indigenous tribes and forego Western expansion. Regarding the latter, England felt compelled to tax the colonies after having just exhausted it’s treasury fighting the Seven Years War to maintain hegemony, obtain concessions and protect it’s colonies.
While the closing off of westward expansion – a notion antithetical to a slave economy – and the increased taxation to pay for defensive wars that maintain territorial sovereignty – necessary to trade’s continuation may seem like small, bitter pills to swallow. These conditions helped the slave-owning elite increasingly see themselves in terms of the master/slave dialectic with themselves on the less unattractive side. Those owners of chattel slaves came to view Britain not as the country’s progenitor, protector, and benevolent master – not to mention a cultural aspiration – but a hurdle to the type of creative destruction that would rapidly accelerate the accumulation of domestic capital.
Compounding these problems were the spread of rebellious slaves. Following numerous uprisings in the Caribbean due to the unforgiving ratios of slaves to masters on the islands, slaves with a knowledge of poisons and rebellion were offloaded into the continent. Pacifying the Caribbean became so difficult that her Majesty’s forces had to entered into agreement with the Maroon leadership in Jamaica in order to maintain a modicum of peace. Such practices smelled of weakness and, to the slave-owners, offered a dangerous precedent.
As Colonials increasing felt that dictates given them were onerous they broke them, trading with whomever and resisting taxes. All this happened while British troops increasingly faced Africans armed by the Spanish and French. This created a problem for the British – how to successfully defend their claims without recourse to doing the same, i.e. arming Africans while at the same time preventing their colonialists from revolting?
The fear that the capital abducted from Africa in the form of slaves would not just be negated by even turned against them became an increasingly real threat.
While this began from just the enemy nations, it soon became a possibility from Britain. Faced with a legal ruling in England that made slavery illegal within her shores was frightening enough. The sudden emancipation of slaves would not only mean the dissolution of the single-most heavily invested commodity in the Colonies but would also mean generalized economic downturn due to secondary industries becoming effected.
Compounding this concern were several pronouncements by representatives of the Crown, such as Lord Dunmore, that suggested they would arm Africans in order to wage a war against the unruly “americans” if they continued to be unruly towards their duty to return the funds spent by London to ensure the Catholic/Native/Negro alliance did not disrupt resource extraction to serve the Manchester looms.
It’s this conflation of interests and contradictions that would lead to the Counter-Revolution of 1776. While the rhetoric of the revolution was universal, it was clear that the continuation of slavery and the up to 1600% profits of it was one of the driving forces of the Declaration. While I found the book to be at times a little redundant – the short closing argument of the book I think presents a correct appraisal of the works context for leftist political activists in that it calls into question the heritage – legal and economic – of the U.S. in such a way as to bring suspicion to it’s emancipatory character. This book, in fact, shows that while there were some greater benefits to this type of society than others formed long ago in Europe, it is hardly the model for the world that ought to be admired and that there is still much work to be done.
If you’d like to hear a variation of the above description of his work from the man himself I’d suggest watching this interview with Amy Goodman. The thrust of the back and forth addresses many of the points that I raise above.
Americanos focuses solely on Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, unlike the other books I was considering that also include descriptions of developments in North America, I found it’s tight treatment of the various developments in the inchoate Latin American nations and their relationships to events in Europe more reading level appropriate to my students than the others. I wouldn’t say that it’s a simpler book, but that those not somewhat versed in political economy might miss the nuances described therein.
Following the American and French Revolutions criollos, who would later become americanos, began to feel that they had the tide of historical development on their side and thus a greater opportunity to greater press their claims for greater participation within the colonial governments and to liberalize trade relationship for greater personal profit.
Organized political action against the monarchy, however, was very limited due to the might of Spanish force and as there was little consensus as to how exactly this would occur. Following the invasion of Spain by France during the Peninsular War, the capture of the Spanish king Carlos IV, the ascension of Joseph Bonaparte to the throne, the formation of the Cadiz Cortes and Britain’s increased desire to establish enduring trading relationships with Latin America negated the traditional glues holding the colonies in thrall to Spain. Whereas previously those that had advocated for home rule were considered seditious, now one could make the same argument under what Chasteen calls the “Mask of Fernando” and attract supporters. After all, the self-elected bureaucratic body that was claiming to be the inheritor to the Spanish monarchy didn’t have the military personnel to protect themselves much less assert themselves across the ocean. While it was still dangerous to propagandize for a Republican model of government, a political orientation that was seen as French and thus unpalatable, those behind this mask were increasingly whipping up a nativist sentiment against “foreign” rule that though primarily elitist in its goals was populist in rhetoric.
Chasteen excels here at illustrating the cultural realities and historical situatedness and contradictions that the criollos and europeos faced and how circumstances across the ocean could rapidly change things in Latin America. National and regional developments were causing alliances to harden, split, pivot and reformulate with new political actors. Chasteen describes these shifts from the standpoint of the various Viceroyalties with great attention to the experiences of those leading them. Hidalgo, Morelos, San Martin, Simon Bolivar failures and success all lead to new conditions in a landscape of accelerating conflict and desire to eject the penninsulares/europes from power. Chasteen goes into extensive detail about Simon Rodriguez and his relationship to Simon Bolivar. From this vantage point the French inspiration for these conflicts comes to greater light.
While there are recurrent descriptions of the various forces and rhetorical tropes guiding the interests and actions of those seeking to overthrow the colonial yoke (and replace it with a neo-colonial one based upon raw goods exportation) I liked that Chasteen waited until the last chapter to have a thorough multi-page analysis of all of these social upheavals. Merely hinting at it in the prologue, here he goes into greater detail about the problems with importing the “Western” political values in Latin America. The previously only lightly touched upon nature of the state formation in these places is expounded upon (even deeper analysis can be found here) as well as the problematics of founding nations that are imagined predominantly by the elites and not the masses of workers.
Another aspect I liked about the book was how helpful it is to assisting students unfamiliar with the historical terms of political economy and those that have difficulty visualizing people. There is a directory of the people at the beginning that also contains pictures of those that are available in the front. My students expressed to me that this helped them picture the personages acting on the world historical stage with greater clarity. There is also a glossary in the back that contains definitions of the various racial caste terms and socio-economic terms used by the Spanish in the new world, i.e. encomienda, pardo, cabildo, etc. Also worth noting is that the book is well suited for viewing with the filmThe Liberator.
While I normally avoid mass-market history books, as it’d been assigned to one of the IB classes I was assigned to teach the year before I read The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis. What can I say about it that wasn’t already written in this eight pageNew York Review of Books article that gives it the proper criticism that it deserves? Not much, really. As Tony Judt notes, it’s aligned with the type of liberal triumphalism that Francis Fukuyama and others used to crow about prior to the numerous crises which liberal capitalist societies have experienced since 2008. It’s not just that the subsequent crises make the tone of capitalist banner-waving seem quaint but that the tone and outlines of historical development is idealistic to a fault, disturbingly uneven in it’s treatment of events and naïve.
How so naïve? Well, for one there are now a number of research articles (1, 2, 3) that attest to the fact that it was only a result of the Soviet state’s existence that workers in the West were able to obtain the gains that they did and that as soon as Socialism/Communism was no longer an ideological threat the attacks against workers rights and wages were accelerated. Additionally element of naivety is the fact that a number of major social repressions that occurred in the U.S.A. and other countries for ideological purposes is not, seemingly, worthy of mention. The numerous domestic Red Scares with the help of the FBI and the liquidations of Communist Party members abroad that were accomplished with the help of the CIA do not even get a footnote in Gaddis’ book. While the overthrow of Guatemala, Iran and Chile are mentioned the first two are glossed over as excesses excused by zealousness to protect those regions from Soviet influence while the last one is justified.
Additionally naïve is the manner in which, as Judt points out, Gaddis depicts the manner with which power operates in the United States. On page 168 he states, “The idea that their leaders might lie was new to the American people.” as if prior to the Cold War was a halcyon age wherein American politicians always kept their word. Not only that Gaddis frames such a claim such that it was the fault of the Soviets to cause such dissimulation. If only those people over there weren’t so evil and untrustworthy, he seems to state, then American politicians would never stoop to such behavior.
The lack of political economy in explaining material conditions of the combatant nations is also disturbing. It’s absence means that instead of macroeconomic issues creating social pressures and changes it is simply the whims of major actors that determined the direction and pace of historical development. The Soviet Union’s demise is due to moral failings of godless Communists rather than other historical, secular circumstances. This is not to say that Gaddis ignores political economy completely – but he does not do so in a way that is genuinely comparative. What this means is that while he will mention the large number of Russians killed fighting the Nazi’s during World War Two, the effects of this and the destruction of a large number of factories in Nazi Occupied countries that would soon fall under the influence of Stalin have almost no effect on the country’s ability to manufacture goods for the international marketplace. Because of this and a number of other omissions the criticism he makes – that the Soviet’s simply produced poor quality goods – lose some of the bite. While such a criticism is deserving – it is unfortunately lacking a full depiction in a political-economy constellation and thus the moralistic imprecations that follow which laud liberal capitalism.
In the end Gaddis’s view of the Cold War does not include the perspective of any people of any country affected by police or military conflict with the exception of those regions that sought to rebuff encroaching or existent Soviet influence. It is thus the perfect book for Americans looking to legitimize the notion that they won a moralistic war and that they can kick up their feet knowing that America is the epitome of ethical goodness.
I saw a copy of Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon in FedEx while printing out the notes on my novel that my editor had sent me and it felt like serendipity. This combined with my just having reviewed notes that I’d taken following a series of job interviews where I learned that the question most asked of me is: “What is your creative process?”
I think for any sort of creative oriented position one ought to be able to clearly explicate one’s creative process, however so much depends on what’s being creative.
In short, the Ten Commandments to sharing like an artist are as follows:
You Don’t Have To Be A Genius.
Think Process, Not Product.
Share Something Small Every Day.
Open Up Your Cabinet Of Curiosities.
Tell Good Stories.
Teach What You Know.
Don’t Turn Into Human Spam.
Learn To Take A Punch.
Sell Out.
Stick Around.
In length, the 202 pages of the book expand on these ideas in a compelling manner. That there are a number of insightful quotes by successful creatives to help drive this home along with a number of examples. One of the aspects of the book that I particularly liked was how the excessive focus on only a few elements of the creative process can help lead to a failure to live up to one’s potential. Being aware of this aspects and acting in accordance with it unleashes a lot of creative possibilities.
For myself, after reading this book I decided to start sharing some of my process about creating Unraveling rather than commenting on a number of images related to the story as well as providing background information along the lines of a Cambridge Companion to Literature. Sharing this process allows one to get greater fellowship, feedback or even patronage.
Two of my favorite concepts the book delves into is the idea of “scenius” and of creation as curation. Regarding the former, which Kleon states originates from Brian Eno, it’s pointed out that it is only through interacting with many people that a fertile “ecology of talent” is created. This can be in the form of consuming a variety of works but is mores evident in the interactions over the internet and in person wherein ideas get flushed out, aesthetic choices get analyzed and critiqued, and those that are also enthusiastic about what you are share in their joy over the exchange of work. When I think of the latter, curation as creation, in relation to my own work I recognize this as a direct mirror of my own process. Unraveling is unashamedly influenced by a number of novels, television series, movies thatI’ve read as well as non-fiction material from the newspapers, academic tomes and other sources.
Part of the reason why I was attracted to getting an Experimental Humanities degree at NYU was indeed a reaction to the perspective that the various subjects in school ought to be studied in isolation from one another. This does not mean I think that there ought to be no specialization, but that at a number of levels it’s important to recognize the totality of human knowledge and the benefits that accrue if not in the academic field than in life in general by being more of a generalist.
Inside Image from Show Your Work Related to Sharing Process
I got a little off topic there so then let me say in closing that I highly recommend this book as while it’s not pathbreaking contribution to the various DIY Inspiration/Creative Self Help books it’s a very timely and well written work that I think will become a touchstone for a number of creatives, like myself, who see in these types of mass-market tomes a type of professional/personal development.
The number of people I know that love American Gods is staggering. The many positive reviews I’d heard by word of mouth should have been enough for me to read it shortly after it’s initial publication. When I further consider the impact that Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman series, recently collected and bound into two attractive hardcover books Volume 1 and Volume 2 available here, had on me it should have been a no brainer. The Sandman was, after all, the first true graphic novel that I read and was one that captivated me over the summer my sophomore year of high school so much that I read it twice in succession. Seven years later, when Gaiman published another graphic novel within that universe I even drove two hours to have him sign my copy. Despite this it is only now, thirteen years after it’s publication and shortly before it’s adaptation for TV, that I finally got around to reading it. As I’ve been getting most of my books lately, I picked up a used copy from the library and started it in the guest room of my grandmother’s air-conditionless mobile home 2 weeks before the official start of summer.
I’d completed the book in under a week and have been since struggling with how to properly categorize my experience of the book. As an American-style road-trip quest with supernatural elements, Gaiman’s stated intention, he hits the mark. Shadow’s release from prison and subsequent adventure amongst American Gods certainly hit all the major plot points required of the genre. There are the grifts, high-stakes confrontations, deadly debts that require payment, evasion of more powerful forces and enough encounters with strange people and gods that keep the pace of the book at a steady pace. Gaiman even does a good job of making the few respites of action look on the surface to be just that and nothing else. But as could be expected in this magical world underlying the façade of people’s lives, nothing is coincidental. Of the two aspects of the book that left me uneasy one is major and one is minor.
The paucity of tarrying with the more profound aspects of this magical world is the major issue that leaves me feeling slightly off about the book. I recognize that this is in part a result of my reading it while very aware of my own desires for a certain style of literary intervention. As such I felt that my hopes and desires took away from some of my pleasure in reading the book. At certain plot or narrative points I just awaited some sort of deeper exposition into the nature of belief, worship, offerings, fate, etc. that while sometimes raised were never dealt with in great detail.
What do I mean? Well ideally I could reference some of the conference papers that I heard at the 2009 NEMLA Conference in Boston, but I cannot. Putting it into a few short sentences, however, I’d say that the deeper edification possible for the reader within the book is just weak. Partially it is because Shadow, who clearly is special but we don’t know why until he is revealed to be the son of Odin-Allfather and thus a half-god, doesn’t represent an Everyman character by any stretch of the imagination. His initial struggle is in coming to terms with the death of his cheating wife (who then comes back to life as a progressively rotting corpse and functions as a Deus Ex-Machina at times so convenient to the continuation of the story as to be unbelievable even in a fantastical world) then learning submission to the wishes for his for-most-of-the-book unknown father, then coming to accept the magical as something that nearly everyone but himself cannot recognize but surely exists. Not that these are enough, per se, to take away from my enjoyment. I guess what I was missing was more along the lines of an individual that felt himself in more awe of the world around him and which could thus create reflections akin to those in a non-fiction work like The Power of Myth, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Myths to Live By or other works by Joseph Campbell. Having read all of these books shortly after Sandman I thought them wonderful compliments and feel that a story like Gaiman’s would have been made better for such reflections.
The second issue that I had with the book is the now dated nature of some of the new God characters. Media and technology are singular. As the struggles to maintain readership/viewership via traditional media outlets over the past 15 years have shown, this is no longer the case. Additionally, some of the descriptions of the gods are somewhat insulting, stereotypes at the time. This itself doesn’t bother me too much – Gods are after all often the human pinnacle of certain human qualities made divine – however in today’s landscape they appear somewhat dated. I’m sure that this won’t be an issue in the TV adaptation, but it was a minor burr when reading. All in all I did enjoy the book, even if I did find Shadow’s internal struggle to drag at times and at some points to be unrealistic.
