"Are we paying for Vietnam now by seeing our children become monsters?" (May Sarton, 11/18/1974)

"If we had imagined what we were doing in Vietnam it would have had to be stopped. But the images of old women holding shattered babies or of babies screaming ended by passing before our eyes but never penetrating to consciousness where they could be experienced. Are we paying for Vietnam now by seeing our children become monsters?"

-- May Sarton, in The House by the Sea,
journal entry for November 18, 1974

by Ken

Thanks to a book-club meeting I'll be attending tonight -- after missing a bunch of monthly sessions, mostly because of serial schedule conflicts, but more recently because of soem book choices I wanted no part of -- I've been introduced to an intriguing (and enormously prolific) writer who wasn't previously known to me even by name, but who's gotten my attention to the extent that yesterday I hit the public library and snagged four more of her books. And no sooner had I started reading one than it quickly delivered some thoughts so striking that I needed to throw them out here.

The writer is the Belgian-born American poet-novelist-essayist-memoirist May Sarton (more formally Eleanore Marie Sarton; 1912-1995), and tonight's book-club subject is her Journal of a Solitude (published in 1973), her second volume of personal journaling, this one spanning the year from September 1970 to September 1971, about her life in the small New Hampshire town of Nelson, where she'd then been living for a dozen years. The earlier part of her life in Nelson had been journalized in Plant Dreaming Deep (1968), to which Journal of a Solitude was in fact intended as a corrective. She felt now that in Plant Dreaming Deep she felt she had unintentionally romanticized her solitary life in Nelson (she never married, and was living alone) into something that was being taken by readers as a blissful, even heroic rural idyll, whereas the reality was vastly more complex.

So she set out to provide a more balanced view of an existence that was a constant struggle with physical and mental hardships while she continued to try to discover what would make her life genuinely meaningful and how she might need to change -- in the year when she turned 59! By this time she had already published eight volumes of poetry and 13 novels, with another of each coming out during the year covered by Journal of a Solitude. By the end of the book she had also submitted to her publisher, right on schedule, a selection of new poems to make up a new volume of poetry to be published for her 60th birthday, in 1972. And this is still without counting her nonfiction books -- not just Plant Dreaming Deep but I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Auobiography (1959).

None of these books, individually or collectively, had made Sarton a commercially big-time writer, a subect she talked about on a number of occasions in Journal of a Solitude. Nevertheless, even without major media support her books had won her a scattered but heavily invested readership, of people who somehow found their way to her writing and found it resonant. She's quite aware that book publishing is changing, in ways that aren't likely to be friendly to a writer of her scale. As publication of the new novel, Kinds of Love, approaches, she's horrified to learn from her publisher that its fate will be known in the first week, based on the number of bookseller reorders.

The fact remains, though, that her publisher continued to publish her; before she finished, there would be more than half a dozen more poetry volumes, six more novels, and ten more nonfiction books -- and that's with the debilitating stroke she suffered in 1990. And the further fact remains that between her writing and a schedule of lectures, readings, and other public appearances, she managed to support a hardly luxurious but reasonably tolerable independent lifestyle.

"Despite the quality of some of her many novels and poems," the author's Wikipedia entry argues,

May Sarton's best and most enduring work probably lies in her journals and memoirs, particularly Plant Dreaming Deep (about her early years at Nelson, ca. 1958-68), Journal of a Solitude (1972-1973, often considered her best), The House by the Sea (1974-1976), Recovering (1978-1979) and At Seventy (1982-1983). In these fragile, rambling and honest accounts of her solitary life, she deals with such issues as aging, isolation, solitude, friendship, love and relationships, lesbianism, self-doubt, success and failure, envy, gratitude for life's simple pleasures, love of nature (particularly of flowers), the changing seasons, spirituality and, importantly, the constant struggles of a creative life.

TO ILLUSTRATE HOW STRONGLY I WAS
GRABBED BY JOURNAL OF A SOLITUDE --

I found myself with a powerful hankering to know, on the simplest "plot" level, what happened next. During the year covered by Journal of a Solitude, for example, Sarton announces a decision to sell her house in New Hampshire to move into a house she would be renting from friends on the coast of Maine, though even as she reports this, she explains that it will take her fully two years to be able to disengage from Nelson. Which left me wondering, did she make this move? And how did it work out? Which is why The House by the Sea was one of the Sarton books I checked out of the library today -- it sounded like it might be a sequel of sorts.

Which indeed it turns out to be. Yes, in fact Sarton did make the big move, in May 1976, and in the book's Preface and early entries she gives every indication that she genuinely loves her new House by the Sea. At the same time, she makes it clear that the "how did it work out?" question is wildly complex. For one thing, we learn that those two final years in Nelson, which as noted had always been part of her plan, turned out to be "hell." Moreover, it turned out that in Maine she was easily enough found by spirit-challenging troubles of all sizes and shapes, not least the deaths or slippings-away of a slew of people who had played major roles in her life.

While it took Sarton a year and a half of her new life in Maine to be ready even to begin the new journal, once she did, there on the page, as ever, are her relentless powers of observation and her unyielding commitment to the adequately examined life. Deer-hunting season, for example, is for her "the season of dread." In the entry for November 18, she reports encountering, on the property owned by the friends who are her landlords, "a sinister-looking man with a shotgun," who seems undeterred when he's told that this land is posted, declaring that he'll go far enough into the woods that it isn't posted.

I know that people need their deer for meat this autumn of soaring prices, but it is hard to describe the fear and horror I felt seeing that shotgun. Anything that moves is in danger. More than the immediate dread, I felt fierce revolt against guns in general and so many people every day who become murderers as if by accident because they have this tremendous power to kill in their hands -- a man loses his temper and "bang! bang!" his wife falls dead or his child. How can we accept such a state of affairs? How have we allowed the gun manufacturers to hold us at bay? After all the assassinations and daily "incidents" there is still no gun law. It is almost unbelievable. [This, remember, is in November 1974. -- Ed.]

In the perfect silence this morning, not a wave breaking and the ocean absolutely flat and blue, at any moment peace will be shattered by a terrifying explosion. . . .

"Yet," Sarton writes, "this deer hunting is legitimate."

What is far more sinister is the number of children in New York City, fourteen and fiftenn, who hunt down old women, exactly as though they were animals, following the human track to its lair, then killing for a few dollars or a TV set. What have we done to our children that such indifference is possible? A total disconnection between the act and the human terror and despair involved? . . .

How to make these boys, so detached from and beyond humanity, come into their humanness? Do they have bad dreams afterward? In their sleep do they become human again? It is anomie carried to its farthest limit, the moment when lawlessness has crept into the inmost person and that person is totally detached.

IS WHAT WE HAVE HERE A FAILURE OF IMAGINATION?

Now Sarton comes to what seems to me her most striking idea, one I've spent a fair amount of energy groping toward: that the true deficiency here is one of imagination.

War does it. My Lai does it. [Can we assume that all DWT readers know what "My Lai" was? -- Ed.] But we are in a period where torture is taken for granted almost everywhere [remember: November 1974 -- Ed.], and where the so-called civilized peoples must go on eating candy and drinking whiskey while millions die of hunger [ditto -- Ed.]. So one has to extrapolate the morally indifferent boys to the whole ethos in which they live. And at the root of it all is the lack of imagination. If we had imagined what we were doing in Vietnam it would have had to be stopped. But the images of old women holding shattered babies or of babies screaming ended by passing before our eyes but never penetrating to consciousness where they could be experienced. Are we paying for Vietnam now by seeing our children become monsters? [Emphasis added. -- Ed.]

I am more and more convinced that in the life of civilizations as in the lives of individuals too much matter that cannot be digested, too much experience that has not been imagined and probed and understood, ends in total rejection of everything -- ends in anomie. The structures break down and there is nothing to "hold onto."

It is understandable that at such times religious fanatics arise and the fundamentalists rise up in fury. [Yikes! Again: November 1974! -- Ed.] Hatred rather than love dominates.

Just one more point here, one that relates to a phenomenon Sarton has already reported, in the first entry in this new journal, dated November 13, where she notes her inability to begin the new journal at any point during the first year and a half she has been living in Maine.

Perhaps sometihng cracked open in Europe (I went over for a month in mid-October); for the first time I can play records, and poems are shooting up. For two years I have not been able to listen to music because opening that door had become too painful after the hell of the last two years in Nelson.

Back now to November 18 and the breakdown of society she has been writing about.

How does one handle it? The greatest danger, as I see it in myself, is the danger of withdrawal into private worlds. We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with money or affluence -- nature, the arts, human love. Maybe that is why the pandas in the London zoo brought me back to poetry for the first time in two years.

Sarton's readers wrote her a lot, and she felt the need to take their letters seriously. Clearing her desk was a constant struggle.

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Book Watch: "The Pleasures of Reading Stephen King" have a lot to do with the kind of writing he's set out to do

As much as any writer who's ever written, Stephen King knows how to grab and hold readers' attention and keep them coming back for more -- and he keeps on giving them their money's worth.

by Ken

On Friday I began looking at "George Plimpton, Stephen King, and how it can help us readers to know what category of writing we're reading," with the caveat: "I'm not going to tell you "how it can help us readers to know what category of writing we're reading." Rather I'm advancing -- or, more accurately, baldly asserting -- that it can help us readers to know what category of writing we're reading," harking back to my post last Sunday, "The splendid piece on John le Carré is part of an embarrassment of riches in the new NYRB" -- specifically, referring to Nathaniel Rich's piece on Nathaniel Rich's piece on the reissue of George Plimpton's sports-adventure entertainments (Web page free to subscribers only) and to Tim Parks's "The Pleasures of Reading Stephen King" (also free to subscribers only).

We got as far as establishing (at least my rendering of) Nathaniel Rich's argument that, despite George Plimpton's own use of the term "participatory journalism," his adventures behind the scenes of all those sports weren't really any kind of "journalism," which probably wouldn't have much interested this Harvard- and Cambridge-educated literary patrician, but were comic entertainments (as perhaps befit this former president of the Harvard Lampoon) in which readers were invited to share the jolly company of George Plimpton. Still to come is a story of genre-bending of a different sort, the distinction establishes -- in reading Stephen King's now-completed Bill Hodges Trilogy (the novels Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch, which, as I summarized it, "tell the story of that retired police detective's arduous, dogged pursuit of an especially nefarious malefactor" -- "the distance between genre writing and literature."

Again, let me stress that the difference isn't between "good" or "bad" books; in both cases, the essayists make clear their admiration for and enjoyment of the books under consideration. The distinction lies in the kinds of writing the authors consciously set out to deliver to readers, tempering the kind of expectations we bring to the writing, thereby opening ourselves to particular kinds of pleasure.

I should note that Parks (whom I've been describing as a "novelist-translator-essayist"; he's a terrific British-born writer who has long been resident in Italy and is now associate professor of literature and translation at IULM University in Milan(, in making his case necessarily goes into a fair amount of detail about the plots of the three books, which I'm going to do as little as possible. In fact, I read as little of that as possible. After all, some of us might yet want to read the books. Again, I understand why Parks felt it necessary to do this, to establish what the heck he's talking about. I just don't want to spoil it for any of us. Here's how the concluding book, published in June, is characterized on Stephen King.com:

End of Watch is the spectacular finale to the New York Times bestselling trilogy that began with Mr. Mercedes (winner of the Edgar Award) and Finders Keepers -- In End of Watch, the diabolical “Mercedes Killer” drives his enemies to suicide, and if Bill Hodges and Holly Gibney don’t figure out a way to stop him, they’ll be victims themselves.

In his piece, Parks does some harking back of his own, and it resonates for me, because John Leonard was a wonderful writer, with whom a felt a considerable affinity.

“You have to admire a man,” wrote John Leonard reviewing Stephen King in these pages in 2002, who treats “scaring the bejesus out of us” as if it were “a domestic art.”

"But," Parks asks, "is King really scary?"

Not in this trilogy. Not for me. And I’m hardly immune from being scared by fiction. Reading Hardy’s Jude the Obscure I remember as a terrifying experience. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground was another book that made me extremely anxious. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Per Petterson’s Siberia, and Peter Stamm’s short stories have all had me extremely fearful for the well-being of their characters.

And horrific as the evil manifested in the Bill Hodges Trilogy is, Parks argues, extreme fear for the well-being of the characters is something that doesn't happen, thanks to "the all too evident mechanisms of genre."

How many times has [King] written the scene where a character we supposed had been killed wakes up again? Or where our hero doesn’t notice that he is being watched? Or where he or she is physically challenged but nevertheless overcomes endless obstacles to save the day at the last moment?

Rhetorically, all is portentous and emphatic—“it’s always darkest before the dawn”; “payback is a bitch, and the bitch is back”—but the sheer repetition of familiar tropes prevents any real intensity from building up. From the moment we appreciate that only minor figures will be dispatched, we are at ease. “Blood and brains fly in a fan and decorate the doorframe with gaud,” we are told, but if they are not the blood and brains of someone who matters we are unimpressed.

"Yet King’s success and popularity are beyond question," Parks writes -- he's "one of the most widely translated authors the world over, reputed to have sold more than 350 million books."

So what is it exactly that people are enjoying? Could it be that King is deliberately preventing us from taking his stories too much to heart? It would make perfect sense, after all, for people not to want to be genuinely scared by a book, but rather, as it were, to play with being scared.

In contrasting the work of a number of unquestioned writers of "literature," Parks writes:

[A] moment’s reflection on our emotional response to these different authors immediately reaffirms the distance between genre writing and literature. One is anxious reading Jude the Obscure, or Disgrace, because one quickly senses that the authors are so intensely engaged in following through their characters’ dilemmas and predicaments that they would not hesitate to have things end badly if that is where their genius leads. There is no easy division into good and evil and no feeling that order need necessarily be returned to the world in the closing pages.

There's an intriguing case in point in the work of Georges Simenon, best known to most of us as the creator of the great deteciive Maigretbut in fact, Parks says, "one of the few novelists who have triumphed in both genre and literary fiction."

[W]hile I admire his Dirty Snow as a terrifying study in nihilism (Brady Hartsfield [the archfiend of King's Bill Hodges Trilogy] doesn’t come close) it is certainly much easier to settle down with a Maigret, precisely because, at a deep level, with Maigret as with Hodges, nothing much will be allowed to happen. Our hero will remain an indisputably good person; he will not let us down.

And on to the working out of King's Bill Hodges Trilogy. Parks writes of "the childish exuberance" of the villainous action, "a comic-strip exuberance," "that both keeps us reading and excludes our taking the work too seriously." (Spoiler alert: Watch out here, reader. I've had to leave in some serious spoilers.)

And it is this mood that will bring us to the point that is the real payoff for the reader in these novels; we good folks, who always feel a little guilty when we do something mean, can relish the utter destruction of our utterly evil enemy without any qualms or misgivings. “Look who wins, Detective Hodges,” cries a triumphant Brady, who has now taken up permanent residence in the body of his neurologist and has Hodges and Holly at his gun-toting mercy.

But the reader knows it is not true. The reader knows that very soon we will be the ones exulting as the villain is crushed into the dirt. Sure enough, in the inevitable melee, Holly, who has never used or held a weapon before and was committed to never doing so, happily fires off a Victory revolver she’s grabbed from the floor. How wonderful guns are when we are firing them at a man who deserves to die, when we can kill without feeling guilty. Game over, Brady.

In the end, Parks writes, in fact in an end note, King reminds readers of his philanthropic ventures and gives us the phone number of the National Suicide Prevention Hotline phone number, "just in case."

But it’s hardly necessary. The reader closes the book feeling immensely reassured.

If you know how to really do it, it's not a bad way to sell books. And I don't think many of King's zillions of book buyers have ever felt cheated.

I'm not actually much of a Stephen King reader, or even watcher of Stephen King-derived movies (a separate can of worms, I suppose), but I do read a certain amount of detective fiction, and I'm certainly a gluttonous devourer of mystery-type TV stories -- and I think the parameters Tim Parks has set out here do have a lot to do with the appeal of the genre for me.

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Book Watch: George Plimpton, Stephen King, and how it can help us readers to know what category of writing we're reading

Little Brown has reissued, in a common series format, seven books by George Plimpton which fall more or less in the category of what the author called "participatory journalism."

by Ken

Don't be fooled by the post title. I'm not going to tell you "how it can help us readers to know what category of writing we're reading." Rather I'm advancing -- or, more accurately, baldly asserting -- that it can help us readers to know what category of writing we're reading.

The post-title reference to George Plimpton and Stephen King will alert some readers -- those of the strangely all-reading and all-remembering sort -- that we're harking back to my Sunday post, "The splendid piece on John le Carré is part of an embarrassment of riches in the new NYRB." Among those riches were, "on the pop-cultural front":

• novelist-translator-essayist Tim Parks on "The Pleasures of Reading Stephen King" (free to subscribers only)

• Nathaniel Rich on "The George Plimpton Story" (free to subscribers only), reviewing the serial-form reissue, with added commentaries, of Plimpton's books of what he dubbed, probably intentionally misleadingly, "participatory journalism"

At that time I had read Rich's piece, but not yet Parks's, which focuses on King's now-completed Bill Hodges Trilogy, the three novels -- Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch -- that tell the story of that retired police detective's arduous, dogged pursuit of an especially nefarious malefactor. It turns out that both the Rich and the Parks essays involve major issues of what we might call, probably not very helpfully, "genrization."

Both reviewers clearly enjoyed the books and admire the authors in question, but for both a significant part of the pleasure derived derives from understanding what sort of writing those authors were undertaking. In George Plimpton's case, for example, while the writer himself did use the term "participatory journalism," he himself expressed qualms about it. Nathaniel Rich wants it understood from the outset that the "journalism" part of the label is wrong.

Plimpton was only a journalist in the sense that James Thurber was an illustrator and Robert Benchley a newspaper columnist. He went places, spoke to people, and wrote down his observations, but the reporting wasn’t the point. What was the point? The storytelling, the humanity, the comedy.

It was an odd match to begin with," Rich writes. "For a writer of Plimpton’s background, journalism ranked on the literary hierarchy somewhere below light verse and pulp westerns."

In George, Being George, Charles Michener, Plimpton’s editor at The New Yorker, explained:

Journalists were from a rougher background. They tended not to be Ivy League, white-shoe boys, which George was certainly the epitome of. When I came into that world, I was at Yale and people would say, “Why do you want to be a journalist? It’s sleazy. That isn’t for people like you.”

Journalism was not to be taken seriously, but comedy writing was even more of a joke. What was the president of the Harvard Lampoon, class of 1948, to do?

What this patrician New Englander did, post-Harvard, was go on to earn a master's degree in English, then move to Paris and found the Paris Quarterly, an elite literary magazine if there ever was one, which he edited for the 50 years till his death in 2003. As Rich, recalls, though, in the early years of Sports Illustrated, which Henry Luce had founded "with the hope of targeting men of leisure," "the editors had as much interest in hunting, boating, and polo as in the major spectator sports," and the magazine recruited writers like William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Budd Schulberg, James T. Farrell,and John P. Marquand. So it wasn't much of a stretch to tap Plimpton for the piece that eventually grew into the 1961 book that is now republished as Out of My League: The Classic Account of an Amateur's Ordeal in Professional Baseball.

Clearly Plimpton and the assorted editors who collaborated on the subsequent sports-themed magazine and book projects understood that he was on to something. And while it wasn't journalism, it was certainly participatory.

[A]ll of Plimpton’s books were participatory in the sense that he is always tangibly present, his sensibility -- beguiling, lyrical, charming, deeply funny -- singing from every paragraph. The joy of these books comes less from sharing the company of Muhammad Ali or Alex Karras than -- a point lost on his many imitators -- from sharing the company of George Plimpton.

And the author was carefully about staging the character of "George Plimpton" whose company readers were invited to share, a sort of false-Everyman caricature of himself. A striking example is his physical misrepresentation of himself. Rich notes, "The threat of severe bodily injury offers the highest dramatic stakes, which is to say, the best comedy," and tells us:

To heighten the danger Plimpton plays up his physical fragility and ineptitude. He describes himself in Paper Lion as built “very lean and thin, along the lines of a stick,” in Shadow Box “rather like a bird of the stiltlike, wader variety -- the avocets, limpkins, and herons,” in Open Net as “the quintessential ectomorph.” He skates across the rink in his goalie equipment “with the ponderous gait of a dowager coming down a church aisle.” Plimpton was, in fact, a born athlete -- [Philip] Roth ["in the extended appreciation of Plimpton that appears in Exit Ghost"] remembers touch football games “in which George threw spirals as accurate as any a pass receiver could hope for in any league.”

Rich has a great deal more to say about this group of books (including some caveats about exactly which of Plimpton's books were included in the series), which I'll leave you to discover for yourself. I think it's only fair, though, to make clear that for him the books hold up.

[S]ports memoirs, like humor collections, rarely outlive their authors, but Plimpton’s books have aged gracefully and even matured. Today they have the additional (and unintended) appeal of vivid history, bearing witness to a mythical era that, as Rick Reilly writes in his foreword to The Bogey Man, “historians classify as ‘Before Insurance Lawyers Ruined Everything.’” (Journalists might classify it as Before Fact-Checkers Ruined Everything.)

TO BE CONTINUED SUNDAY, WITH PHILIP ROTH

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Can a book mostly bulk-bought by political hypesters to inflate "sales" qualify as a "best-seller"?

Plus: The irony of superliar Rafael "Ted from
Alberta" Cruz titling a book A Time For Truth

Daily Kos caption: "A Time For Lies?"

"This fake 'popularity' of conservative books is evidenced by the fact that 4 out of the 5 'bestsellers' in 2013 were by conservative opinion makers.

"Really? If 4 out of 5 of the most popular books are about conservative ideas then why did 5,204,364 more people vote for Democrats in the last 3 Nationwide Senate elections?"

-- HealOurCountry, in the above-linked Daily Kos post

by Ken

Remember when we were force-marched into a discussion of the meaning of "is"? Well, now hordes of lying right-wing imbeciles are up in arms because the NY Times suddenly got a tad persnicketty about the meaning of a "book sale," in the sense of "the sale of a book."

In a better world, it wouldn't matter.

Probably in our minds when we think of a "book sale," we think of somebody who wants a book and plunks down cash or a credit card to take ownership of it. And consequently we would assume that a "best-seller list" would consist of the books for which this person-buys-book-he/she-wants" transaction happened the largest number of times. Let buyers buy all the books they want and do with them what they will -- it's nobody else's business.

Ours isn't, unfortunately, that better world. In our world, it turns out that there are times when it really does matter how we define a book sale. Like when we're counting them up.

Now certainly books bought as gifts count. If Uncle Oswald decides to buy copies of Fly-Tying for Dummies for all 25 relations and friends on his Christmas list, that's pretty much the moral equivalent of those 25 lucky recipients going out and buying the books for themselves, even if 23 or 24 of the actual recipients never open their copies and limit their involvement with it to making snarky comments about Uncle Oswald on the phone with other recipients.

But what if agenda-driven organizations buy up thousands of copies, their agenda being to notch those "book sales,"  to count toward hoped-for best-sellerdom? And what if, far from being aberrant cases of overenthusiastic boosterism, this is a standard way of selling books with a certain political agenda?

In case you weren't aware, this is exactly how our book-publishing industry has been functioning for ages now. I know I wasn't always aware. I remember being surprised and puzzled when I first heard about the lofty sales figures for many highly ideological right-wing tomes. Who knew there were so many right-wing readers tearing through all those books?

I learned that there really weren't.

For a host of right-wing individuals and foundations, the propaganda value of racking up high "sales" for their titles, and in particular of having best-seller lists dominated by such titles, is well worth the cost of buying up vast quantities of books that are subsequently given away, used as paperweights or doorstops, or simply trashed. The purpose of buying those books was never to have anyone read them but simply to have those book sales on the books, as it were.

(Certainly book publishers weren't complaining, at least not the ones who publish the kinds of books that are the beneficiaries of this right-wing institutional largesse -- and those bulk sales must be a lot cheaper to process and ship, even if they're made at hiked-up discounts, than real book sales, to actual readers, or rather to vendors who hope to sell the books to actual readers.)

This was set out elegantly by Daily Kos's HealOurCountry in a Saturday post called "The NY Times stops letting Conservatives cheat. Maybe Liberals will make the Bestseller List now."

People have been ignoring the NY Times bestseller list for years.

This is because the books are cooked. The numbers are fudged. The fix is in. And it's not being done by the Times.

It's being done by the publishers.

Have you ever noticed that books written by conservative pundits make the bestseller list their very first week out? How books by Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reily seem to be on the bestseller list before they're even released?

In a long, long overdue move the Times has finally stood up for itself and said no, at least this one time.

What they said no to is a an old and well known method of rigging the bestseller lists by having conservative think tanks and other organizations buy up books written by conservative authors. These groups buy books by the pallet, sometimes by the truck load, in order artificially drive up the numbers, pushing books that spout conservative ideas and liberal hating hysteria to the top of the bestseller lists.

This is why conservative books and ideas seem to be so "popular". It may look like books that tout conservative ideas are popular but, in truth, very few people are buying them. It's just that the few who do buy them by the truckload.

So where do all these books go? They're given away. They're given away to donors, volunteers and anyone else who will have them, even if they only use them for doorstops.

They're given to people because the only way to get people to read them is to give them away. Think that's an exaggeration? I'll tell you what, head on over to your nearest used book store. You'll find the shelves overflowing with shiny new copies of books by Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Charles Krouthammer and many, many more conservative pundits. This is because the people who had them never wanted them in the first place.

NOW THIS ISN'T EXACTLY NEWS

At least not for people with some slight familiarity with the economics of the book-publishing industry. For people who didn't know about this racket, this is an excellent teachable moment, but that still doesn't explain why we're suddenly talking about it.

It's because, as referenced in HealOurCountry's post title, the NY Times last week had a sudden "no más" moment, in the case of Rafael "Ted from Alberta" Cruz's new stomach-turner, the ironically titled A Time for Truth. (In the world of Ted from Alberta, one of the most dishonest people on the planet, the time for truth would seem to be "never!") Not surprisingly, the Right-Wing Noise Machine went bonkers. The noisemakers, once again either too stupid to know the truth or too dishonest to tell it (another instance of the eternal right-wing "Are they dopes or liars?" conundrum), went into screeching High Hysteria. Here's HealOurCountry again:

In what could be described as a bold move, "The New York Times decided this week not to place Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-TX) book on its bestseller list, leaving some conservatives convinced that the paper unfairly targeted the presidential candidate." (Talking Points Memo: Conservatives Cry Foul As Cruz's Book Doesn't Make NYT Bestseller List)

"A Time For Truth" sold more copies than 18 of the 20 books that appeared on the bestseller list this week", Politico reported in its article N.Y. Times keeps Cruz off bestseller list.

Later, the Talking Points Memo article goes on to say:

"In the case of this book, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence was that sales were limited to strategic bulk purchases," Murphy wrote in an email, according to Politico.

Given that Cruz's book sold so many copies and that the Times has previously included books written by Republican politicians and candidates on its bestseller list, conservatives on Thursday night were outraged.

Conservatives were outraged that a conservative politician was not allowed to get away with cheating his way onto the bestseller list? Let me see if I can feign shock and surprise...

Nope, can't do it.

Well, it was a good try, HOC!

Before signing off, I just want to take a closer look at the Times's explanation for its surprising treatment of Ted from Alberta's book,, as provided to Politico by the "Murphy" we encountered above.

Here's what appeared in the original post, which went up Thursday evening at 5:53pm:

"We have uniform standards that we apply to our best seller list, which includes an analysis of book sales that goes beyond simply the number of books sold," Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy explained when asked about the omission. "This book didn't meet that standard this week."

Asked to specify those standards, Murphy replied: "Our goal is that the list reflect authentic best sellers, so we look at and analyze not just numbers, but patterns of sales for every book."

At 9:42pm an update was added:

Murphy emailed late Thursday night to further clarify the reasoning behind the Times decision.

"In the case of this book, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence was that sales were limited to strategic bulk purchases," she wrote.

Ah! Thank you, Eileen, that's certainly clearer. Naturally the number of right-wingers who have the very limited intelligence necesssary to understand this and the honesty to acknowledge it is pretty limited. Nevertheless, I have to second HealOurCountry's hope that the NYT "will stand fast and not give in to the screaming mob."

Say, Mark Zuckerberg, what be these mysterious devices you've discovered called . . . um, "books"?

In case you're keeping count, as of when I looked this evening, "Mariel Feliciano and 123,347 others like[d] this."

by Ken

I know, I know, you're thinking it's both obvious and childish to be the umpteenth, or umpteen thousandth, person to jump ugly on Facebook guru, and therefore media wizard, Mark Zuckerberg for writing, in a January 2 Facebook post:

My challenge for 2015 is to read a new book every other week -- with an emphasis on learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies. . . .

I'm excited for my reading challenge. I've found reading books very intellectually fulfilling. Books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today. I'm looking forward to shifting more of my media diet towards reading books.

But the way I see it, there's no way Mark can possibly be ridiculed enough. I can't even imagine what it might mean to say that he has been "ridiculed enough."

So thanks for the invite, Mark, but no, I don't thinking I'll be signing on to your "A Year of Books" page. Especially with that polite but stern caution about only participating in the discussions if we've actually read the books and have relevant points to add. This is probably wise, especially considering that there are people out here who got through years and years of schooling (K-A.B., for example) reading hardly any of the books we were supposed to. I can see why you would want to moderate the group to keep it focused. Don't you just hate an unfocused group?

Don't get me wrong, though. I'm a big fan of "relevant points." I hope your group rustles some up. And generally speaking I hope that you have a great year with your year in books, and that you get all the good ones read, as I gather that for 2016 you'll be moving on to your next "challenge," just like how when you finished 2013 and that year's challenge of meeting a new person every day. (I hope meeting those 365 people worked out.)

As to the ridicule you'll be soaking up, I hope it will be focused too. Like I thought Matthew Iglesias was off to a good start, with a snappy title on his Vox post: "Mark Zuckerberg discovers that books are pretty great." Ooh, snap, Matty! But would you believe that before long Matty is telling us what book he's currently reading? (No, I'm not going to tell you. That's his news. Find out about it on his page.) And rattling on about how he "actually find[s] the internet to be an indispensable companion to non-fiction reading" blah-blah-blah, something about the two Sicilies.

Okay, here's my deal. You send me a buck, I'll tell you what book (books, actually) I'm reading. Some of them I actually finish, but if you want to know about that, that'll cost you another buck.

Matty does rally to note that "Matt Zeitlin notes that the Zuckerberg endorsement has sent The End of Power rocketing up the Amazon charts as the book has 'shot up over 44,000 places on Amazon's ranking of book sales' since the Facebook founder's post." (Way to go, Mark! You don't suppose he has a commission deal with Amazon, do you?)

When it comes to laying it on our Mark, our friend Alexandra Petri at washingtonpost.com seems to me really "carrying the water," as Rush Limbaugh might say. Here's what Alexandra had to say in her post, "After learning about books, Mark Zuckerberg discovers other exciting technologies":

Based on this response, I tried introducing Zuckerberg to other Shocking Innovations:

Print Newspapers: “I’ve found these to be an incredible experience. How to describe them? They’re like a newsfeed, but with much less time devoted to the ice bucket challenge. No pictures of people’s babies or salads, which took a little getting used to, but I really enjoyed the classifieds, which were like a printout of Craigslist submitted entirely by older people. All in all, it’s a manageable amount of reading that really adds to your info diet and even forces you into contact with foreign news. Can’t wait to explore this more.”

The Sky: “It’s like your desktop background, but with a less saturated blue. I’m excited to interface with it further.”

Human Faces: “These things are incredible. They’re like emoticons whose meaning is not always instantly clear! I am eager to explore these in much greater depth.”

Frozen Food: “This amazed me because it was good for a long time, not like farm-to-table, which you have to eat right away. Also, if you want a food that is not currently in season, you can have it. Who thinks these things up?”

Cats: “These offer advantages over the GIFs and pictures of cats that we so commonly see on the Internet because you can have them with you all the time and they offer a whole range of expressions, as well as an almost human-like companionship. I look forward to engaging more with these incredible devices as the year continues.”

Pictures: “So far, I have enjoyed engaging with these quaint physical objects that depict or represent other objects! You can carry these around with you and display them on walls.”

Walls: “These things are real game-changers right here. They protect against sleet, rain, and hail, and they also offer flat surfaces on which you can post or hang things. What a great notion.”

Telephones: “You just hear a human voice, uninterrupted, and that can be a very powerful thing.”

“All in all, these are some disruptive innovations,” Zuckerberg concluded.

Yes, that's how to do it, Alexandra!



I'm just throwing out a guess here, but would this by any chance be a chart of a galaxy far, far away?

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It's not as if Democrats have lacked for strong, articulate guidance as to what they could and should be telling the American public

The most intellectually rigorous of the progressive messaging theorists, George Lakoff, has brought out a new-for-2014 version of his classic Don't Think of an Elephant!

by Ken

I've plunked the new edition of George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant! atop this post because my copy arrived in the mail today. It came from Democracy for America, in return for a contribution, which I didn't mind making, since as far as I know DFA is one progressive group that hasn't backtracked on its principles and still actually stands for something I can subscribe to.

With the days and hours counting down to Election Day, I'm feeling bad for having mostly sat this campaign out. After trying -- partly humorously and partly not -- to wash my hands of it ("Throwing in the towel on the 2014 campaign, and while we're at it the 2016 campaign as well"), I backtracked ("Sure I kid about this infernal election, but of course there's a lot at stake"), but still focused on the rage-filling descent of the Right into a world of unbroken lies, delusions, and obfuscations.

I'm not sure, though, that I really got to the depth of my frustration, which has to do with this famous polarization we hear so much about now. It's pretty much the defining characteristic of U.S. electoral politics at the moment: polarization. It's reflected in most of the down-to-the-wire coverage of the campaign, with so many races looking to be determined by close margins. The conventional wisdom is that in so many states and congressional districts those polarized voters know, have known for ages, who they want to win, the only question now being who'll actually be moved to vote. It's a turnout election, we're told -- who does a better job of getting out their vote.

And I suppose this is all true. But the polarization is based on lies. Sure, there's a far from negligible portion of the electorate that really and truly favors having government serve as the agent of the oligarchical elites -- consisting not just of the actual predators (and predator wannabes) but the people who see themselves as hangers-on of the predators. Similarly, there are people who sincerely believe the craziest ideological inanity pouring forth from the mouth of the Religious Rightists and whoring sociopaths like Sen. Rafael "Ted from Alberta" Cruz.

But an awful lot of those right-leaning votes having been manipulated by a decades-long campaign of stupidifying, fear-mongering, and general thuggery. They aren't really represented by the right-wing hoodlums many of them will be voting for. If people were voting their true interests, we shouldn't be anywhere near political gridlock.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party, which might have taken the lead in pushing back against the lies of the Right. A lot of Democrats can't, and a lot of others wouldn't if they could, because what they believe isn't all that different from their Republican opponents.

The disastrous last midterm election is on the minds of a lot of political types, and for good reason. And the precedent isn't encouraging. With that in mind, I've been looking back at a post I put up on September 1, 2010, "Can 2010 electoral disaster be averted? Drew Westen and Mike Lux weigh in." It all has a creepily familiar ring, the principal difference being that we're now four years further along in the Obama presidency, and much of what Drew Westen and Mike Lux were warning that the president need to either strongly disown or wind up owning is now presidential baggage.

At the top of the post I put this brief quote from a then-new Alternet post by Drew Westen, "What Created the Populist Explosion and How Democrats Can Avoid the Shrapnel in November."

I wished I could have quoted the whole piece, but here's some of what I did offer. Drew wrote:

[T]here were red flags already by the end of Obama's first week in office that led me to offer the following advice to the new administration: Tell the story of how we got in this mess or you'll own it. Tell a coherent story about deficit spending. Re-brand government because there's only one story out there now (Reagan's), and it's not one that supports a progressive agenda. Never let attacks go unanswered, because doing so only emboldens your opposition and leads the public to believe that you have no answers to them. And if you throw a bipartisan party and no one comes, don't throw another one. All of what followed has been as predictable as it has been unfortunate.

I continued:

"The question today," Drew writes, "is whether Democrats can channel the populist anger we are seeing around the country this late in the game. The answer is that we'd better try." And he insists, based on message-testing he's done recently, that

there is little question that if Democrats and progressives from center to left simply say what they believe in ways that are evocative, values-driven, and speak to people's worries and anger, many stand a good chance of surviving November, particularly when their opponents have nothing to say other than warmed-over rhetoric about cutting taxes to millionaires and multinationals and fiscal restraint except where it cuts into profits of their campaign contributors.

He's just as insistent, though, that "actions speak louder than words, and Americans want to see action," and it isn't too late for Democrats to go on the offensive against obstructionist Republicans on a whole series of issues, on each of which "a strong populist message trounces anything the other side can say."

But Democrats need to play offense. They need to take up-or-down votes on bill after bill, including those they expect the other side to block, knowing that every one of those votes has the leverage of a campaign ad behind it. They need to change the narrative from what sounds to the average American like a whiny and impotent one -- "the Republicans won't let us do it" -- to a narrative of strength in numbers shared with their constituents. And they need to make every election a choice between two well-articulated approaches to governance -- and to offer their articulation of both sides' positions and values.

Which, he says, leads to a final point:

What Democrats have needed to offer the American people is a clear narrative about what and who led our country to the mess in which we find ourselves today and a clear vision of what and who will lead us out. That narrative would have laid a roadmap for our elected officials and voters alike, rather than making each legislative issue a seemingly discrete turn onto a dirt road. That narrative might have included -- and should include today -- some key elements: that if the economy is tumbling, it's the role of leadership and government to stop the free-fall; that if Wall Street is gambling with our financial security, our homes, and our jobs, true leaders do not sit back helplessly and wax eloquent about the free market, they take away the dice; that if the private sector can't create jobs for people who want to work, then we'll put Americans back to work rebuilding our roads, bridges, and schools; that if Big Oil is preventing us from competing with China's wind and solar energy programs, then we'll eliminate the tax breaks that lead to dysfunctional investments in 19th century fuels and have a public-private partnership with companies that will create the clean, safe fuels of the 21st century and the millions of good American jobs that will follow.

In my September 2010 post I also looked at a piece Mike Lux had written for OpenLeft, "Weirdest political cycle ever?, in which, I wrote, he staked out this position: "This has been a pretty weird political cycle, and I'm starting to wonder whether it is the strangest ever. . . . The weirdness I am referring to is this odd sense I have that both parties are trying so hard to lose."

I continued:

"What's a Democrat to do," he asks, "in this weird and awful political environment?" Allowing that every race is individual, he offers four overall prescriptions, for which you should really read the explanations in his post:

1. Get out every last Democratic base voter you can.
2. Show independence from Obama, but not in a way that undermines the Democratic brand and turns off base voters.
3. Show your anger at the special interests, but also have a substitute plan for improving things.
4. Be specific in going after waste in government.

And he sums up the situation thusly:

In spite of the Republican extremists being nominated, this is going to be an incredibly tough year to be a Democrat on the ballot. We are going to lose a lot of seats in both houses of Congress and downballot as well. But if Democrats turn out their base voters, take on the big banks and insurers and oil companies, and show they are focused on fighting for the middle class, they can hold their losses to a minimum.

And as I've noted at the top of this post, George Lakoff has given us a new version of his classic book Don't Think of an Elephant!. As I mentioned, I just got my copy today. Reading George has never been easy for me, but I have to think he once again has indispensable messages for us. The problem is, a lot of the people who should have been reading it haven't been -- and a lot of them don't really believe in the messages he would like to help them articulate.

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Book Watch: In the course of a 6000-mile trans-Eurasian horseback journey, a technological time warp changes lives

Central Mongolia is where Tim began his 6000-mile westward horseback journey across the steppe to the Danube. With both Russia to the north and the Chinese "autonomous" province of Xinjiang to the south closed to a foreigner in 2004, he continued into giant Kazakhstan, the second-largest of the former Soviet republics (after Russia). There he met Bakhetbek, a Kazakh born near the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi who had fled back to ancestral Kazakhstan because of anti-Kazakh violence (the murder of his brothers) tolerated, if not actually encouraged, by the Chinese regime. Bakhetbek's wife reveals to Tim that her husband learned only a year before that he still had a niece alive and living in Urumqi.

by Ken

Basically, I was drawn to Tim Cope's On the Trail of Genghis Khan -- the story of his 6000-mile horseback odyssey from Mongolia to the Danube, begun in the fall of 2004 when the Australian adventurer was several months shy of his 26th birthday -- because I thought it might plug a geographical gap in my mental geography, the vast Eurasian steppe sprawling more or less between Siberia to the north and the rest of central and southern Asia to the south.

Oh, I had no expectation of the book making me an expert on the subject, just giving me, well, something to occupy that space a little more specific than sheer blankness. In other words, the sort of thing that Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia for the gaping expanse of taiga (that is taiga, right? of course giving way to tundra farther north -- I have a sort of general notion about the geographical entities steppe, taiga, and tundra, but they're not exactly crystal clear in my head) to the north). It gave me some places and people to fill in what had been not much more than a map blur with a sprinkling of familiar place names.

To be sure, I'm learning (and probably soon forgetting) a lot about the many ethnic groups -- starting with the Mongols to the east -- who over the millennia have practiced the nomadic way of living across the enormous expanse of the once-largely-borderless steppe. Tim himself was fascinated, or more likely obsessed, by the nomadic way of living, built around herding animals over these inhospitable lands, living a pack-up-and-go life based on horse transport. (It was, after all, in what is now northern Kazakhstan that men are thought to have first domesticated horses, somewhere between 3700 and 3100 BC.) But, not surprisingly, the journey -- and therefore the book -- engages Tim on a host of levels.

I came to this anecdote I have to share. It comes in the second leg of Tim's trip, in today's Kazakhstan. In Mongolia Tim had had the company of a girlfriend, Kathrin, but according to plan she then headed back to Germanys to take up a new job, leaving Tim to travel alone -- or, early on, in the company of a guide. At this point, he's traveling with Aset, a Kazakh villager, and a puppy belonging to Aset's young cerebral-palsy-afflicted son which Aset has insisted on bringing along. (When they part, Aset insisst that Tim take Tigon with him for companionship.) In terrible weather they have been given shelter by Bakhetbek, a 50-something Kazakh householder who promptly passes a test of Aset's (p. 129)

Aset pulled me aside. "Trust him and watch carefully -- a sign of a Kazakh host who respects his guests is that he will feed the guest's dog before his own."

True to Aset's words, Bakhetbek fed our ribs-on-legs dog a pot of lamb innards and stale bread, sinking his boots into his own dogs when they tried to join in.

The next day Tim wakes up to find that they're snowbound. "What I had assumed to be bright sunshine through the small window of our window was the glare of a snowdrift creeping up the windows." Which gives him a chance to get to know the family better. From pp. 131-32:

Bakhetbek had been born near Urumqi in China's Xinjiang province, and fled to Kazakhstan after his brothers were murdered in the 1960s. Later, his nephews, who remained behind, were also murdered. At his wife's gentle prod, Bakhetbek began telling his story himself, hesitantly, but was swiftly overcome with emotion.

"They killed us simply because we are Kazkahs," he said. "Back then, and even now, Chinese authorities don't protect Kazakhs. Actually, it was probably the police who did the murdering."

There was a bitter irony in Bakhetbek's return to Kazakhstan that he was well aware of. His own grandparents had originally fled to China among two hundred thousand others when the Russian imperial army violently quashed the 1916 Kazakh uprising. At the same time, though, Bakhetbek acknowledged that the tragedy of his family had been the experience of his ancestors through the ages -- whenever the Kazakhs found themselves under oppression or attack, they would historically flee to Chinese Turkmenistan, Sibera, and other parts of Central Asia, only to find themselves under another oppressive regime.

After telling his story, Bakhetbek looked spent, but there was a sparkle in his wife's eye. "Actually . . ." She looked over at her husband. "We still have one relative alive in China. She is Bakhetbek's niece, and she is studying in Urumqi. She wrote to us one year ago, but we have never met. She gave us a phone number, but we have never been able to call."

It was dark by the time everyone assembled outside in winter coats and fur hats. I pointed the satellite phone aerial to the sky and experimented with a few prefixes until the call went through. A woman answered. After a brief initial silence, all of Bakhetbek's family members took turns talking, struggling to hold back tears but smiling.

The occasion called for a feast, and after the phone calls it was all hands on deck. Bakehtbek's brother, who due to his bald head was nicknamed "the Kazakh Gorbachev," raced to get a sheep. In an outbuilding the men gathered with cupped hands to say a prayer before its throat was cut. Had I been of the Muslim faith, I would have been asked to bless the sheep, since traditionally guests were required to ask permission from the animal's spirit to partake of its flesh.

Late into the night we sat around gorging on meat and being plied with vodka. A dombra, the traditional two-stringed mandolin of the Kazakhs, was passed around. When Bakhetbek played there was a fire in his eyes, and he sat with his back even straighter and prouder than usual. Strong fingers moved instinctively up and down the instrument's neck. In Kazakh they say a good player can make the dombra sing. I was sure I could hear the beating hooves of horses. It was as if a stoic, unfaltering rhythm prevailed through the harsh realities of life and the land. I looked across to Aset, who was welling up with pride. The last beat ended, and Bakhetbek looked at me. His eyes arched into crescents; from the tears spread into the many channels of his weathered face and disappeared.

Kazakhs believe that when a guest walks through the front door, luck flies in through the window. It is a good omen: the sheep will give birth to twin lambs in the spring. Looking back on this occasion, the magic of this belief was embodied by my meeting with Bakhetbek.

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Book Watch: This cool New York summer reading list might work just as well for non-New Yorkers

by Ken

Especially with a holiday weekend coming up, some of us may have turned our thoughts to getting some reading done.

Summer reading lists have become a publishing tradition, based on the apparent assumption that people who don't read many books the rest of the year suddenly turn bookworm in summer, or perhaps that summer readers are looking for a different kind of reading. Depending on who's doing the listing, I sometimes give a quick glance. (I always feel like I'm way behind on my reading, so this is likely to make me feel worse, and you can't put a price on that.) Generally, though, I don't pay a lot of attention, partly because in my confused life I don't have seasons, exactly. Oh, there are times when it's hotter outside, and times when it's colder, and it's always well to dress more or accordingly when going out, but otherwise I mostly need to know what month it is in order to make out my rent check.

I don't know what first made me look at this summer book list, "8 Books That Capture New York City in Summertime," courtesy of DNAinfo New York's Margaret Kelly. What's so nice about the list isn't just that Margaret has come up with a wildly wonderful assortment of kinds of books, though she certainly has, but that she has gathered together material that is so wonderfully specific about place and time. To the extent that she's able to offer suggestions of where to read, or at least start reading, each of her selections.

"Many writers have described what it's like to be in New York City during the summer," she writes. "The time of year is perfect to find a shady space in a park and lose yourself in a novel about the city you're in."

Which might make you think that the list would be of use only to New Yorkers. But I think this very specificity of place should make these books intriguing summerscapes for readers everywhere. After all, one of a good writer's jobs is to draw the reader into the place he/she is imagining. In fact, I think the "where to read it" suggestions are so evocative that I'm going to include them all in the list of Margaret's eight suggested titles. Then we'll look at one or maybe two of her description-explanations of her choices.

The Group, by Mary McCarthy

Where to read it: The book opens in Stuyvesant Square by St. George’s Church in Gramercy — follow in the footsteps of the group and find this charming, out-of-the-way spot.

The Subway Chronicles: Scenes from Life in New York, edited by Jacquelin Cangro

Where to read it: Does it need to be said? There's no better place to read this book than on the subway train car or station platform.

Native Speaker, by Chang-rae Lee

Where to read it: Find a bench by the water in Flushing Meadow Park, then head to a Korean barbecue restaurant on Northern Boulevard for kalbi or bulgogi.

Brown Girl, Brownstones, by Paule Marshall

Where to read it: Find a spot in the shade at Selena's beloved Fulton Park, near Chauncey Street.

Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart

Where to read it: Shteyngart's dystopian love story is best begun on Cedar Hill in Central Park, where Eunice and Gary find respite "amidst the brilliant greenery" on a mid-June day.

The Tenants of Moonbloom, by Edward Lewis Wallant

Where to read it: To fuel your imagination about the source of the noises coming from upstairs, read it late at night in your apartment when it's hot and you can't sleep.

Kafka Was the Rage, by Anatole Broyard

Where to read it: Absorb Broyard's memories of a bygone bohemia from a bar on Jones Street or the reading room of the Jefferson Market Library, 425 6th Ave.

The Chosen, by Chaim Potok

Where to read it: Begin this Jewish-American classic at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, a Morningside Heights cafe where students talk philosophy and Wi-Fi is not available.

Here's what Margaret has to say about Mary McCarthy's The Group:

The fall of privileged postgrads is a perennial New York story, and fans of a certain HBO series may relate to the girls of "The Group," McCarthy’s best-selling semi-autobiographical novel about six Vassar roommates, class of 1933.

In McCarthy's narrative, the young women take turns explaining their adventures in terms drawn from their liberal arts education: Libby's conflict with a boss makes for what she considers "a fascinating exercise in narrative point of view," and Dottie's date reminds her of "the summer solstice, when maids had given up their treasure to fructify the crops."

Endlessly erudite, but rarely self-aware, the hapless graduates face surprisingly modern misadventures from Madison Avenue to the mental health unit at Cornell Medical Center.

And here's what she has to say about Edward Lewis Wallant's The Tenants of Moonbloom:

In Edward Lewis Wallant's posthumously published 2003 novel, New York rent collector Norman Moonbloom introduces us to a highly eccentric — but perfectly believable — collection of tenants sharing a Manhattan building.

In between his collections, Moonbloom recalls scattered moments from his childhood: strawberry ice cream on New Year's Eve and "a summer night as huge as heaven."

Okay, well maybe one more. Here's Margaret on Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker:

This 1996 debut novel introduces us to Henry Park, a spy who works for mysterious clients collecting intelligence on local politicians — including John Kwang, a Korean-American city councilman with mayoral ambitions.

Lee describes a summer when New York "seemed too dangerous...the street so dog mad with heat, untempered, literally streaming with possibilities, none of them good."

An espionage thriller set in contemporary Queens, Native Speaker is deepened by themes of assimilation and betrayal: "My ugly immigrant's truth," Lee has Park say, "is that I have exploited my own."

I've already got a massive ongoing pile of Books to Read, but I have to say, I'm tempted by a number of these selections. Thanks, Margaret!

Happy reading!

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Book Watch: New from the people who brought us "Inside the Apple" -- "Footprints in New York"

An 1847 view up Wall Streeet to the third (and currrent) Trinity Church, completed just the year before, distributed as last week's "Postcard Thursday" offering from the Inside the Apple blog. [Click to enlarge.]

by Ken

Last week's "Postcard Thursday" e-mail from the Inside the Apple team of Michelle and James Nevius (viewable as a blogpost here) had special significance for me, even though we were told that it's "not, technically, a postcard." The closer-up view at right gives some feeling of what it looks like today. It's a streetscape I haunt virtually every day, and two of the 1847 view's most conspicuous features still stand in forms not wildly different from what's depicted here. The view enlarges surprisingly well; I've tacked it up, with the relevant text, on the outside of my cubicle at work.

Looking west up Wall Street we see the then-new third Trinity Church, designed by Richard Upjohn, the one that still stands today -- and as you begin to investigate the history of New York City, you quickly discover that it's woven around Trinity Church, the breathing heart of Episcopal New York, which is to say the spiritual home of NYC money.

(The first Trinity, built in 1698, was destroyed in the great fire of 1776, which destroyed so much of the New York City of that time, still huddled at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. The second Trinity, built in 1788-90, "was torn down after being weakened by severe snows during the winter of 1838–39," per Wikipedia.)

The building with the flag on top is what we know as Federal Hall National Memorial, the successor to the building, the actual Federal Hall, where George Washington was inaugurated. Since I work half a block away, and my gym in fact is right next door to FHNM, I can vouch for the fact that FHNM is a site beloved of tourists, in even the raunchiest weather, partly because diagonally opposite it is the site of the New York Stock Exchange.

Behind FHNM (as we're viewing it), Nassau Street runs to the right (north) and Broad Street runs to the left (south). The area has been associated with stock trading at least since May 17, 1792, when 24 stockbrokerrs gathered outside 68 Wall Street, farther east, under a buttonwood tree, and signed the Buttonwood Agreement, which laid the groundwork for the New York Stock and Exchange Board, later shortened to just the New York Stock Exchange. The site at the southwest corner of Wall and Broad Streets now houses a cluster of NYSE buildings, including the landmark 1903 headquarters at 18 Broad Street.

Since I work in the adjoining building, 20 Broad, and in fact my gym is in the building directly to the east of FHNM, this 1947 view has had me mesmerized it since the Inside the Apple team of Michelle and James Nevius circulated it last week. Their "Postcard Thursday" offerings are one of the highlights of my week, and you never know what may turn up on the Inside the Apple blog.

Michelle and James's Inside the Apple is one of the great books about New York City, breaking down many of the city's historic areas geographically but telling their story historically, since the history of any site is the story of the people who lived, worked, and/or played there over time -- in most cases many layers of time, since nearly every part of the city has been undergoing change almost from the very beginning. (There are splendid links to tie people and places together.)

I wrote about Inside the Apple on July 3, 2011, after I had the considerable pleasure of doing one of the Neviuses' occasional public walking tours (most of their tours are arranged directly with clients) -- this one with James, of "Revolutionary New York." As I wrote at the time: "In an introductory note, Michelle and James explain":

The goal of Inside the Apple is to give you a different pathway into the city's long and rich history. While there are many books that focus on New York's notable events and famous people, ours is instead organized around the places where those events took place. By grounding the narrative in sites that you can see and visit, we provide concrete, tangible, connections between the city of today and its intriguing past.

People have long tried to answer the question: What makes New York unique? We feel the answer is deceptively simple: more than any other American city, it is primarily experienced on foot. . . .

I BRING THIS ALL UP TODAY . . .

. . . because today I got my pre-ordered copy of Michelle and James's new book, Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers, which they've been previewing on the Inside the Apple blog for months. The new book is a further step in connecting the geography of the city with the stories of the people who have been connected to places.

James and Michelle "en route to Paris"

As Michelle and James explain in the preface:

The concept of this book is simple: We wanted to build a time machine.

Since our grasp of particle physics is weak, we decided on the next best thing, to tell the story of New York City by having each chapter transport the reader to a distinct historical era, from the Dutch village of New Amsterdam to the modern city of skyscrapers that's been built along the very streets the city's Dutch founders once walked.

As our goal is to, literally, walk in the footsteps of the New Yorkers who've come before us, each chapter is linked to a person (or, sometimes, a group of people) whose story is emblematic of that era. Some people -- like Edgar Allan Poe and Abraham Lincoln -- are universally famous. Others, such as Gertrude Tredwell or Stephen DeLancey, will only be famliar to a few. But all of them played an important role in the story of the city.


New York is so chock-full of intriguing sites that it's a historian's dream. We've been leading walking tours of the city for nearly fifteen years, and in that time we've searched out forgotten byways and journeyed to unexpected corners of the city. It's those places -- from the city's oldest house to a small synagogue on a stretch of Broadway that most people don't even know exists -- that paint a vivid portrait of New York. We talk about famous sites in these pages too, but we hope when you're reading about some of the more off-the-beaten-path sites, you may want to seek them out yourself.

The greatest joy of leading tours is the moment when a client -- often someone for whom history has always been dry recitations of names, dates, and battles -- makes that real, personal connection with the city of the past. It can happen in unexpected places -- a walk down the streets of Little Italy can evoke childhood memories. Examining gun placements in the old fort in Battery Park can suddenly illuminate the importance of the War of 1812 to someone who'd never before been able to get a handle on it. Simply walking from Battery Park to Soho -- the same path that Alexander Hamilton walked during the Revolution with his artillery company -- can do more to reveal the contours of the war for American independence than any textbook. It's our hope that the New York stories in these pages will uncover some of those hidden histories, too.

You can buy the book from your regular bookseller or via this link on the Inside the Apple website. For information about receiving Inside the Apple updates, or to contact Michelle and James, go to this webpage. Or subscribe to the e-mail list by simply sending an e-mail to info@insidetheapple.net with the word "SUBSCRIBE" in the subject line.

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