Politics Then and Now

Finished Chernow's Alexander Hamilton, all 738 pages and probably drained a pen dry with all my underlining.  What possibly to quote from all the wonderful historical facts, superb writing, and thorough documentary of a great American.

This blog knows how frequently I revert to biographies when all else fails to appeal to me.  My favorite ones were Robert Moses Power Broker and Caro's multi-volume biography of LBJ.  Add Hamilton to the list.

Why oh why was American history not taught in grade school using Hamilton's accomplishments as the focal point?  Who determined that generals winning battles and presidents were the only key figures?  Are children too naive to understand the importance of banking, trade, a free press or the importance of being a chief adviser?  Especially here in New York ... the book reads like a primer on local history, Schuyler Mansion, Schuylerville, the Battle of Saratoga and the importance of NYC in the late 1700s.

It also assures us all that State politics started off badly with governorship of George Clinton and a legislature whose members were all out for themselves since day one.  And then of course, there is Aaron Burr.  (I will "get extra credit" for reading this over the summer by capping off the season going to Cooperstown's Fenimore Art Museum to see a special exhibit of the Burr Hamilton letters.)

So, essentially, I picked Hamilton not only because I missed out on seeing Lin on Broadway, but because I wanted to get some perspective of USA elections vis a vis the current farce and to measure this life story against others and study why an author chooses biography as a medium.  These goals will limit my choice of quotes.

On how to write (also an issue when having to review governmental documents prepared by subordinates) "...Hamilton churned out twenty-one straight essays in a two-month period.  On two occasions, he published five essays in a single week and published six in one spectacular week when writing on taxation.  Hamilton's mind always worked with preternatural speed ... His papers show that, Mozart-like, he could transpose complex thoughts onto paper with few revisions.  At other times, he tinkered with the prose but generally did not alter the logical progression of his thoughts.  He wrote with the speed of a beautifully organized mind ... it is important to note that virtually all of his important work was journalism, prompted by topical issues and written in the midst of controversy ... His eloquence seemed to require opposition to give it its full force.  But his topical writing has endured because he plumbed timeless principles behind contemporary events."  Would that newspapers today were so erudite and that candidates articulated governing theory instead of knee jerk appeal to daily crises.

And on to politics "Hamilton wanted to lead the electorate and provide expert opinion instead of consulting popular opinion.  He took tough, uncompromising stands and gloried in abstruse ideas in a political culture that pined for greater simplicity.  Alexander Hamilton triumphed as a doer and a thinker, not as a leader of the average voter.  He was simply too unashamedly brainy to appeal to the masses.  Hamilton ... regularly violated what became the first commandment of American politics:  thou shalt always be optimistic when addressing the electorate."  Other founding fathers do not fare so well in Chernow's book; on the same page as these quotes come from, he describes Jefferson as "a virtuoso of the sunny phrase and hopeful themes that became staples of American politics."  (HOPE ... everything old is new again.)  And of JQ Adams saying Jefferson had been "pimping to the popular passions."  BTY, Adams comes out as a political scaredy cat, running off to Massachusetts whenever any hot issue or controversy presented it self.  He and Abigail seem to be spoiled blue bloods.

Really my book is so underlined that I am hard pressed to single out what I liked the best.  The above two citations were easy only because I wrote the page numbers on the title page.  This volume, along with the next blog book I will review, will be packed off tomorrow to head to Houston where the library reserve length for Hamilton was last at 17 weeks!  This should be required reading.  Thank God will remain on US currency.

Summer Reading

Well, I quit book club after how many years?  How many awful books?  And have dedicated myself to read books by the pound.  Started with The Emperor of Maladies.  Loved it.  For anyone who has plowed through most of these postings, I do like reading about the history of scientific discoveries, primarily those related to the field of biology.  Reading about all the brilliant, curious, never-give-up scientists and dedicated oncologists researching and treating cancers was inspiring and made me delve deeply into an assessment of whether I would have ever had the patience, diligence, almost compulsion to take up those kinds of careers.  I marvel at their brilliance and as as importantly, I marvel at how well Siddhartha writes.  People with a similar ability to simplify but yet intrigue young minds to science is what is needed in education today, not a brand commercial for STEM.

Towards the end of the book where Siddhartha gets into the cellular chemistry of the diseases I almost felt like Alice in Wonderland, displaced by how minute the triggers and remedies could  be.  Looking for a suitable analogy, I felt my mind could only wrap around 1,000 pieces of a jig saw puzzle.  But shortly, I credited myself with zeroing in on the features of each of the 1,000 pieces ... their "ins and outs," their nuanced colors, any latent patterns in placing them across a vertical or horizontal cut.  I still don't think I could ever be a biochemist though.

Of course you can't read a book like this disinterestedly if you are a cancer "survivor" or currently know people undergoing treatment.  At least the science had reached an acceptable level of attack when I first had cancer in 2001.  Reading about the discovery of tamoxifin and Taxol was reassuring; reading about the various nuances of leukemia grounded me a bit more in my friends symptoms, from the disease as well as the medications.

As a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, I guess I am late to reading such a good book.  I planned on giving my paperback copy to one of my team whose mother was being operated on last week but she had bought a copy.  And of course, when I mentioned it to my older son, he had not only read it but watched the PBS adaptation.  (Is there anything he hasn't read?)

So on to my next hefty volume, Chernow's Alexander Hamilton.  If I can't get Broadway tickets, I'll read the "libretto."

Am I doomed to once a month posting?

Guess so, because I got three biographies from the library and had to renew them to avoid fines, although two will go back tomorrow:  Backing Into Forward by Jules Feiffer and Chinaberry Sidewalks by Rodney Crowell.  The third, I will eventually get to.

I expect the laugh continuously with the Feiffer, not.  As I planned out what to write about it, I thought how appropriate he was to use car gears to describe his life.  However, the book is in idle.

Once again, as with too many of the biographies I have selected recently, I am planted in another NYC Jewish neighborhood in the 40s and 50s.  I get it, I get it.  (And add to that, Bernie Sanders.)  I loved Feiffer's cartoons in Playboy.  (When I mentioned him to my husband, he said, who .... guess guys really only looked at the boobs.)  I loved Feiffer even more as the illustrator of The Phantom Toolbooth.  But the book, meh.

Contrast that with Chinaberry Sidewalks.  No idea who Rodney Crowell was/is and he had me both laughing out loud and crying.  I picked it up only because the flap said it was about growing up in Houston.  It is a bit like the best parts of The Boy Kings of Texas, and like that book, has a few low points, especially his teenage years and years of figuring out girls and sex, and then Crowell like the boy kings, gets into 60s drug culture.

So I ponder ... what is an  autobiography?  How much of an un-analyzed diary?  Shouldn't the author comment on his experience with some hindsight and growth?  How much is too much information or does the reader have to be introduced to the sins of the author, when no lessons or growth are recorded?  Is a life well-lived only the one that gives that person a chance to write about it?

All things considered, I still prefer autobiographies to biographies.  While the latter are more interpretative and assessing, they lack the "in my brain this is what I thought we were all doing," that a memoir provides.  I want to change the genre.  I want to be a biographer of my life, trying to reassess what I did then by what I know now.

More Tana French

Sometimes, it is easy to revert to the pre-teen I was decades ago when I sat at the dining room table, occasionally looking outside to see what was never going on in the back yard, and devoured Nancy Drew books.  I tried to read everything else that Tana French has written over the past few weeks.  What I like about her approach to murder mysteries are (1) they're set in and around Dublin and she gets in idiomatic speech right; (2) she weaves in cultural family imprinting, highly Catholic and clannish; (3) all of her lead inspectors have almost fatal flaws ...  she does not make them infallible superheroes of truth and justice and the Irish way; and (4) her stories interweave Ireland's economic highs and lows as factors and influences in the personalities, outlooks and motives of all her characters.

So I plodded on through books over 400 pages each:  Broken Harbor, Faithful Place, and The Likeness.  And then came to a screeching halt with The Secret Place.  And what is so off-putting about this one?  It's the girls.  Set in St. Kilda's school, the Garda is going back to a year old case, the death of a teenage boy from a neighboring school found on Kilda's campus.  The case reopens when the daughter of the investigator in Faithful Place reports that an unknown classmate knows more about the crime.  I just tried to find the quote where Tana has the ranking investigator characterize the female students because she wrote exactly how the story struck me:  a dozen or so catty 15 or 16 year olds, only marginally different from each other, in such minor ways that the reader does not care.  As a result of this blob of girls, no person emerges as a focal point.  It is like reading one of those socially correct books that junior high teachers think teenagers need to read.  Well, adults don't.  Being set in a school does not help to delineate a crystal-clear place and time like the decaying yuppie wanna be neighbor along the coast in Broken Harbor, or the Southie style old neighborhood in Faithful Place, or the forced fixer upper in The Likeness.  All of Tana's award-winning fortes of a great author have been abandoned in this effort.  Hope she returns to her old ways.

The rains will keep me out of my garden and impel me to the library as I return unfinished The Secret Place and seek out more challenging things to read.

In the Woods by Tana French

Doubling down on my plans to stick to award winners:  here is In the Woods, Tana French's 2007 mystery debut that won the Edgar.  This was a paperback that my daughter-in-law left here in July and I let it sit on my bedside table, thinking it was going to be some rehash of the Broadway play Into the Woods.  So when the weather was bad and I was too fagged out to even make it to the library on a Saturday, I picked it up.

And it was difficult to put it down, even given other pressing deadlines like tax filings.  429 pages long ... how many other mystery writers have that much of plot twists to master.  One villain did emerge clearly after page 300 or so, but my then I was so caught up in the detective team, their personal prior lives, and how that past biased their investigations.

And did I mention it is set outside Dublin?  Just enough turns of phrase and idioms to make you know it is Irish but enough contemporary world issues that it still came off as current and timeless.  (See I am still thinking like Heaney, having finished that short shrift blog in the last half hour.)

So I am analyzing the plot for its poetry in taking the intensely personal and making it resonate universally.  Here is the murder of a child being investigated by a man who assumed another name and identity after his two best friends disappeared in the same "wood."  As I am beset by having my staff and collaborators sign conflict of interest forms before the analyze information or negotiate with organizations, I question whether the real intent is to swear one won't profit from their assignments when it is impossible not to be influenced by what you know, the background and experience  you bring to your desk, the very talents and past I pay highly for.

While investigating political corruption and  suspected child abuse, French depicts another poignant subplot, paralleling the relationship between Rob (the surviving child of the 1984 crime), his partner Cassie and the newbie in the detective room, Sam, and that blissful childhood of Rob, with Jaime and Peter.  Those three children at 12 were living an idyll, children on the cusp of boarding school; the three policemen have a similar care free equality in looking into the crime.  Yet Rob cannot see the investigation leading to a parallel breakup of camaraderie.  Rob's past is recreated in his withdrawal and trauma suppressed in the new investigation.  Cassie can't successfully express her own earlier sufferings and studies to inform and convince the rest of the team.

The story makes cops human, well intended, yet still capable of well intentioned oversights.  This is a mystery I will leave with my retired friend and book club founder as soon as possible, mystery junkie like myself.  I will immediately go on the Net to see if the library has French's other books.

The Redress of Poetry by Seamus Heaney

Well, more than I month since I wrote, but have done some reading, not enough but all I have the energy to do after challenging days with the new bureau.

So here is the best book I've read all year, maybe longer.  Finishing up my delving into Heaney's works, I tackled his Literature Nobel Prize, a series of ten lectures at Oxford, The Redress of Poetry.  Wow.  Maybe the rest of my year should be devoted to prize winning books.

Flat out, Heaney composes as beautifully in prose as poetry.  He makes me think about how much I miss reading for structure, voice, and intent instead of plot.  He makes me break out old high school literary magazines when we were challenged to tackle a particular meter, style, voice or some little used challenging device and like eager Catholic teenagers in the mid '60s, we did.  I can only quote verbatim and at length because these sections are not only thought provoking but exquisite.

"... Plato's world of ideal forms also provides the court of appeal through which poetic imagination seeks to redress whatever is wrong or exacerbating in the prevailing conditions .. whereas poets are typically more concerned to conjure with their own and their readers' sense of what is possilbe or desirable, or indeed imaginable ... It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality ... This redresssing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential ... denied or threatened by circumstances."

"...where the co-ordinates of the imagined thing correspond to and allow us to contemplate the complex burden of our own experience..."

"... reminded of a remark once by an Irish diplomat with regard to the wording of a certain document, "This ... is a minor point of major importance."  In a similar way, the successful outcome of any work of art depends upon the seemingly effortlessness and surefingeredness with which such minor points are both established and despatched."

Some of Heaney's lectures focus on one or more poets, Marlowe, Wilde, Hopkins, but he always elevates his interpretation of them into something like this when he writes about his early love to Dylan Thomas: "...Thomas had gradually come to represent a longed-for prelapsarian wholeness, a state of the art where the song of the autistic and the acostic were extenive and coterminous, where the song of the self was effortlessly choral and its scale was a perfect measure and match for the world it sang it."

Heaney does quote entire poems or whole sections to make his points on how readily a poet creates redress.  His lecture that I read at the same time I was reading The Dawning Moon of the Mind, a translation of pyramid hieroglyphics,a chapter entitled Joy or Night about man's understanding of life and death, included all of Yeats' The Man and the Echo, that drew a marginal note of WOW.  I never heard of much less read Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court, written in 1780 and still echoed loudly in the demeanor of the Irish women I encountered beyond the pale 200 years later.

I am passing this book on to my most literate book club members and then leaving on the shelves within easy reach to reread almost like seasonal psalms.

Don't Count this One: Utopia Parkway the Life and Work of Joseph Cornell

The is a review of a book that instead of not being able to put down is a book that I must admit I cannot bring myself to pick up.  It is already several weeks overdue at the library so I feel I must write something and bring the damn thing back and pay the fine tomorrow.

Now I do not fancy myself to be an art critic and my limited undergraduate electives in American Art History (and my subsequent not accepting my offer for a graduate program at U Delaware/Winterthur) certainly does not qualify me as understanding any American artist after 1900.  I never heard of Joseph Cornell and took out the book primarily because of my silly six degrees of separation meandering when I saw it was Utopia Parkway (heavens prevail I actually never have to go to Queens).

So what did Joseph Cornell do?  He made boxes of trinkets with some surreal or esoteric theme, like a tribute to female movie stars or ballerinas, chock block full of pieces of tutus and sequins and old playbills.  Apparently back in the days of Dali and Duchamp, he was regarded as a valid if somewhat lesser star, NYC gallery shows and all that.  But mostly in the smaller, back rooms where is boxes where shown almost as trinkets and appropriate holiday gifts.

Cornell was an underemployed adult, living in Queens with his mother, scavenging remnants and old books to make his three D collages in the basement.  His work comes across as a miniaturist, a collector and because the author Deborah Solomon writes what appears to be the seminal biography of a little remembered artist, I made me question the merit of my own hobbies:  why do I obsess in perfect rooms for my multitude of doll houses, especially when I am the only female within miles of our family members?  Why did I spend years needle pointing both sides of pillows?  I know I am a crafter and do not intend to display my efforts (even though Monday I am bringing the only needlepoint I made ever to win a first place to hang in the new office space) (hey, office art is pretty awful anyway and I have not budget for amenities).

But to validate as higher are a medium that never moved beyond a niche genre in an almost 400 page book with another 25 pages of bibliographic notes was too much of a time investment for little return.  I made a valiant effort to get to page 178.  Why does the library keep calling me for its return ... who else could possible have put it on hold?

I have to juxtapose Utopia Parkway against Interlock because I cannot expand my mental concept of art to include highly personal trinket boxes and political corruption flow charts.  Call me a bore, call me someone who does not get modern art.  I don't.  I just had a flashback to Hammagrael and I going to the Skidmore Tang museum this summer to look at 1980s hard edge acrylics.  Now, I admit I took a class in hard edge acrylics and anyone with a roll of blue painters' tape can try it out themselves.  But these newer medium do not inspire, do not reveal lofty human questions.

Sorry, readers.  I will search for another "C."