Recent Reading

I was sad to read of the passing of Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022). He always seemed like a decent chap, despite the words of those who blamed him for the turmoil that resulted from the dissolution of the Soviet Onion, that enforced, Russian-led Union also known as Empire.

Had the world's most powerful black market been more humanist, Russia might not have emerged as the shit show we know it for today. But markets don't have consciences; they have BIAs. Important to remember that Russian grudges run deep, and the sins of German (Nazi) grandfathers (see Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem) are alive and well in Russians my age -- the very people who hold political and economic power in Russia today. 

In an earlier post I mentioned Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow (2016). Readers will recall 1921 as the year the book's protagonist, The Count, was placed under house arrest at Moscow's Metropole Hotel. Earlier than that (a couple years ago), I posted a couple pieces on Isadora Duncan's autobiography My Life (1928), where the year 1921 figures prominently.

Here's a passage from the last page of My Life:

"In the spring of the year 1921 I received the following telegram from the Soviet Government: 

'The Russian Government alone can understand you. Come to us; we will make your school.'

"From whence did this message come? From Hell? No -- but the nearest place to it. What stood for Hell in Europe -- from the Soviet Government of Moscow. And looking round my empty house, void of my Archangel, of Hope, and of Love, I answered:

'Yes, I will come to Russia, and I will teach your children, on one condition -- that you give me a studio and the wherewithal to work.'"

Driving Men Mad (1995)

Project Reading Widely is now in its fifth year. The results have been conclusive. Now more than ever has my focus never been sharper. Two passive sentences in a row (the last one idiotic) and I remain ... unconvinced ... of the urgency ... of anything.

Elise Levine is a writer a few years older than me, but we started out together in the '90s, when no one knew what that decade was -- and no, we'd never met. But there (Finally, I thought to myself) at the Sally Anne at East 12th was a copy of Driving Men Mad (1995), and I inhaled it in a couple days.

Everything moves quickly in the stories of Driving Men Mad. There is no lingering, no sustained rumination, for Levine's is an amphetamine tendency that was (or wasn't?) popular among younger writers back then (she was not yet "a Canadian Lorrie Moore," as her current publisher claims her to be).

Of all the stories, "Retiring" might be my favourite, a choice that would be impossible if I'd read it when it first came out. The story is set in that modern 9-5 village known as the department store, on the eve of a Cosmetics clerk's retirement.

My advice to younger prose writers today is to write prose, not fiction. And if speculative fiction is not your bag, write about life as you imagine it might be when you're on the verge of retirement from a job and a national pension plan that will, by then, no longer exist.

Debussy (1936; revised edition, 1951)

Any biography on a classical composer will include mention of a patron (or patroness, if the patron is a she and the biographer is Edward Lockspeiser). Tchaikovsky's patroness was Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of the founder of the Russian Empire Railway and a competent musician (pianist) in her own right. In 1880 she took up the eighteen-year-old Claude Debussy, whom she introduces to the archived world in a letter from Interlaken:

"Two days ago a young pianist arrived from Paris, where he just graduated at the Conservatoire with the first prize [in score-reading] in the class of M. Marmontel. I engaged him for the summer to give lessons to the children, accompany Julia's singing and play four hands with myself. This young man plays well, his technique is brilliant, but he lacks any personal expression. He is yet too young, says he's twenty, but looks sixteen." (24)

The Last Sunday in August

The last Sunday in August is one of those days of which there are a handful spread out over the year. These are my Je Ne Sais Quoi Days, so capitalized because they are occasions, like Christmas or Hanukkah or Eid Al-Fitr.

What is it about this day? Returning to school was a big part of it. Did I like school? For the most part, yes. But the feelings I had upon returning -- they were complicated in ways that took me years to appreciate.

It's important to sit with what we find complicated. We are lucky to be aware of our feelings. Not lined up beside each other, but marbled. For me, the last Sunday in August is a mixture of dread (for what's coming) and relief (for what's about to end). A Baudelairian condition. 

Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) 2

 

A few months ago, while on a break between events held at the North Shore's Cap 5 Reserve, I stopped into Edgemont Village's 32 Books & Gallery to poke around, see what's new. Rachel Cusk's Second Place was newish, and I bought it, though not before flipping through the Globe & Mail Western Arts Correspondent Marsha Lederman's brand new Kiss the Red Stairs: the Holocaust, Once Removed, a memoir that tells of her parents' stories of the Holocaust and the intergenerational trauma that resulted from it.

When the name Fred Herzog (1930-2019) flashed by, I stopped and flipped back to where it might begin and read forward from there, to the turn of phrase that set off Lederman ten years before when, during her 2011 Globe & Mail interview with the photographer who chronicled Vancouver street life over the last half of the 20th century (in colour, no less), Herzog spoke the words "so-called Holocaust," a comment that "stayed with" Lederman ("I struggled with its meaning for many months"), the implication being that Herzog was an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier. (For the full story on Lederman's reflection on this interview, click here.) 

Is it fair to say that the use of "so-called" before any noun is to cast doubt on the truth of that noun? Maybe today it is, given that the truth is often more an impediment than an asset to those in pain (from the SJWs to DJT and his supporters). Hard to remember there was a time when "so-called" acknowledged a noun that was understood by those other than oneself. One of the greatest chroniclers of the Holocaust -- an event that took the lives of upwards of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis -- was the Jewish scholar Hannah Arendt, whose Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) is essential reading to anyone attempting to anything write on the subject. Had Lederman read Arendt's book she would have seen this, on Page 39 of the Penguin edition:

"Nothing's as hot when you eat it as when its being cooked" -- a proverb that was then on the lips of many Jews as well. They lived in a fool's paradise, in which, for a few years, even Streicher spoke of a "legal solution" of the Jewish Problem. It took the organized pogroms of November, 1938, the so-called Kristallnacht or Night of Broken Glass, when seventy-five hundred Jewish shop windows were broken, all synagogues went up in flames, and twenty thousand Jewish men were taken off to concentration camps, to expel them from it."

Rapacious Capitalist Listening to a Buffalo's Ass (2016)

The CBC has reported that a 2012 City of Edmonton commissioned public art work will be crated and stored because city officials are concerned it could be "misinterpreted" as a "celebration of colonialism." The work, entitled Rapacious Capitalist Listening to a Buffalo's Ass, was made by artist Rodney Graham and designed to stand outside the Stantec Tower.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)

I've been searching for a book that might speak to some of the anxieties attending our current moment. I am speaking of the movements of -- and towards -- social justice in all spheres of life and the platforms upon which these movements rest and wrestle. So far the book that comes closest is Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil, a book I knew of but had never looked at until recently.

Among the revelations: a proposition that has the need for justice greater than the laws that are said to deliver it. The staging ground is the Western court, and the lead character (Adolph Eichmann) has been positioned in such a way that "his" trial is not simply about the determination of his guilt but the attempt by the new-born state of Israel (led by David Ben-Gurion) to extinguish the anti-semiticism that helped to bring that state into being.

A crude reduction, but that also seems to be what Arendt is taking aim at: not the means by which things happen, but the ends.