Recent Reading

America, America by Ethan Canin
I loved the first part of this book. I admire the ability of writers to successfully pull off the unrealiable narrative. We don't distrust the narrator because we think he is lying, we distrust him because of his naivete. And so I loved this romp into class differences and the guilty pleasure our young working class kid gets with his chance to rub elbows with the rich and famous. And we understand his ability to detach himself from his own realization that the only reason the workers are given attention is because the unions can deliver votes. Yet, we are left disappointed by the failure of our narrator to recognize his gullibility. I found it hard to believe that someone so accustomed to analysis could so completely miss the clues live had given him. So, although I admire the class consciousness of this novel, I despair of the way our hero makes excuses for the ruling classes.

Dark House by Theresa Monsour
This author has moved to another pseudonym and her books are out of print. I found this used book at a local store. It is the third of third and final novel in a trilogy focused on St. Paul homicide detective Paris Murphy. Serene Ransom is a fascinating villain. Crazy cat lady, child molester, academic. Of course! I have a sense that the earlier books provided an interesting back-story for Murphy, but I'll have to search the used bookstores to find out, it seems.

Blind Rage by Terri Persons
Terri Persons is the next pseudonym used by the woman who wrote as Theresa Monsour. This series wanders into the currently fashionable psychic field of crime fiction. Our heroine, Bernadette Saint Clare, is able to see through the eyes of murderers. Yet her vision has serious limitations and has caused her to draw erroneous conclusions. It's an interesting way to portray esp: useful sometimes, but often misleading. It makes us questions the very concept of "hunches" and "gut reactions". I read the first in the series, Blind Spot and liked it enough to pick up the second book on a recent bookstore expedition. Saint Clare's visitors from beyond the grave are fascinating, infuriating and their powers are mystifying. But it's a fun read and I'm willing to take the ride.

Black Bolshevik by Harry Haywood
Reading this with one of my book groups. We read the first half of the book for our first meeting last Sunday. I didn't make it all the way through. I am fascinating by the discussion of black nationalism and how the Communist Party position diverged from the more popular Marcus Garvey "back to Africa" movement. I have a lot to learn about the discussion and don't feel as if I understand it from reading this book. Haywood spends lots of time attacking sectarianism in a very sectarian way, which makes this book difficult and fascinating. It is fascinating when it shows the "correct" political thinking doesn't mean much if an activist is not connected with the actual struggles going on here and now. We activists have a tendency to build utopian structures that fundamentally miss the realities of the people we claim to support. I look forward to reading the second half of this fascinating portrayal of an American communist activist.

An Equal Music

I just finished reading this novel by Vikram Seth. I can't even remember what prompted me to buy it. The novel's central character is a musician, Michael Holme, who plays second violin in a classical quartet. He has loved and lost and attempts to retrieve the lost love of another musician, Julia McNicholl.

First, I must admit that the main character was totally unlikable to me. Selfish, obsessed, inconsiderate and absurd, he makes a mountain of his love affair and fails to understand or even remotely understand the person who is Julia. He's like a stalker, forever obsessed with the way she affects him, rather than the person she is. I found him contemptible. I found her weak and barely forgivable.

And yet, there is an understanding of musicians and their obsession with their instrument that makes this novel worth reading. The real love story is between Michael and the violin he plays, a gift from a patroness who has known him since childhood.

Also, this book deals with class. Michael is the son of a butcher, a man unlikely to become a world-class musician. It is only through the patronage of a local aristocrat, that Michael is able to access this world of musicianship.

And this is where the book goes wrong. You cannot transform a working class child into a self-absorded bourgeois twit without some explanation. There is none. What is it that gives this manchild his massive ego? What makes him so completely insensitive to Julia's reality. How is he able to elevate his lover for her to a mythic Utopia without the least consideration or her reality or his?

I can see writing a novel like this that makes clear the extreme selfishness of Michael and his blindness to reality. But this is not the book Seth has written.

How unfair this book is to the reality of love and living with another human being. How dismissive of Julia's husband and child.

Rails & Ties

Watched this movie, Rails & Ties on cable today. It's about a woman who drives her car onto the railroad tracks to commit suicide with her adolescent son in the passenger seat. He survives, she does not. But what sets this film apart is that we get swept up into the world of the train engineer, played by Kevin Bacon, who has to decide whether to hit the emergency brake, thus endangering his passengers, or to slow, but keep going, thus killing the people in the car.

So, right, bummer of a movie concept. Tear-jerker, no doubt.

But what surprised me is that the engineer, a working-class man who is proud of his skills, becomes a focus of this story.

When does this happen in pop culture? When does a working person become integral to the plot? When does his life become important, valuable and respected?

Although the movie is implausible and tugs at the heart-strings, there is some honest portrayal of people who love, but are hurting. There is honesty in the pretense of family when none actually exists, followed by the true sense of family that doesn't follow modern stereotypes.

I know some people will not like this movie. I think the opportunity to see loving people trying, and sometimes failing, to show their love for one another is fascinating and worth seeing.

Ha Ha Ha!

This image was posted on reddit, apparently because it is hilarious:



I suppose it is funny in a self-referential way. Generally, I love self-reference. Here is one of my favorite self-referential limericks (from Scientific American magazine years ago):

There was a young man from Japan,
Whose limericks never would scan.
When someone asked why,
He said with a sigh,
"It's because I always try to get as many words into the last line as I possibly can."

Ba dum bum.

So, this silly little image got me thinking. The vast majority of workers deal with inanimate machines every day. The only folks who think they may some day have a career that does not involve dealing with one inanimate machine or another, are those folks who plan to become bosses, capitalist, exploiters, etc. The rest of us are going to be slogging away at one thing or another, facing idiotic machines and unreasonable requests and doing the best that we can to get by.

Recently, I got involved in a heated discussion in which I called someone out on their classism. The person I called out said she couldn't possibly be classist because she had no money. She completely missed the point. Classism is the idea that your work life would involve doing something other than working with inanimate machines. Classism is when you tell somebody that everybody else understands and agrees on something and that if you don't, you are fundamentally flawed. Classism is when you can seriously look someone in the face and say that being smart is more important than getting a degree or degrees from a university.

Classism is a lot of other things, too. Which I've written about before. To pretend that classism is solely about how many digits are in your bank account is ignorant. I am happy that we are learning more about how to respond when being called on our racism, our homophobia, our anti-trans assumptions, our anti-crip assumptions.

I am unhappy that this knowledge does not apply to classism. So back to the work of an activist. More on this to come.