1. Here is what Jan Morris couldn’t have said in Conundrum, perhaps because the culture wasn’t there yet; though her book remains a courageous onNotes
1. Here is what Jan Morris couldn’t have said in Conundrum, perhaps because the culture wasn’t there yet; though her book remains a courageous one.
2. The author describes an explosion of gender dysphoria after a lifetime of suppression of same — and even after that doubts persist. This makes for astonishing reading.
3. Lucy Sante is of my generation, so her allusions to various cultural touchstones are very familiar.
4. Her depictions of her virulently Catholic mother will set your hair on fire.
5. Her review of her crushes on girls and her family’s pathetic dysfunction seems more like tempered evisceration than mere background. Who’s the TMI Frenchman who lays it out warts and all? Lehrer, I think.
What a zoo both in terms of the court’s jurisdiction and defense evidence excluded. The biggest deal was Gen. MacArthur’s immunity for Emperor HirohitWhat a zoo both in terms of the court’s jurisdiction and defense evidence excluded. The biggest deal was Gen. MacArthur’s immunity for Emperor Hirohito — in the interests of smoothing the way of the Occupation — who was IMV complicit well beyond a reasonable doubt. Here are some bits:
"Japanese officials systematically incinerated documents for the war crimes trials that would surely follow one of the grandest efforts at evidence tampering in legal history.
"In June 1945, Foreign Ministry officials began burning secret documents in anticipation of an Allied ground invasion, expanding their efforts in August. First to go up in flames were papers about China, then the Soviet Union and then the Axis. . . Protecting the throne, the Army Ministry had the troops burn imperial rescripts or anything written by Emperor Hirohito." (p. 112)
——
"For a Japanese [civilian] audience saturated with wartime propaganda, [Prosecutor] Keenan's horrifying tales — Australian prisoners being worked to death as slave labor building a railway through the Burmese and Thai jungles, Chinese civilians coerced to build military installations in Manchuria and then killed for secrecy, Australian nurses massacred off Sumatra — were fresh and shocking. So was the claim that the slaughters at Nanjing, Manila, and elsewhere were part of a systematic policy of atrocity warfare. Belying Imperial Japanese claims that its soldiers had fought honorably, Keenan contended that "identical measures were constantly employed throughout the areas of Japanese occupation to torture prisoners of war and civilians, such as the 'water-cure,' 'electric shock treatment,' 'hanging upside down, prying fingernails, and body beatings.'" (p.203)
——
Japan’s popularity as a reclaimer of European colonial possessions was popular with downtrodden natives. In other books I've read this barely gets a mention. The story of Subhas Chandra Bose's collaboration with Japan, as a means of freeing India from the British yoke, was entirely new to me.
"The war came home fast in Bengal. With nearby Burma falling into Japanese hands, Japanese bombers struck at Calcutta and southeast Bengal. As many as eight hundred thousand terrified people streamed out of Calcutta, about a third of the city's total population. There were rumors of an imminent Japanese invasion, a prospect welcomed by many Bengalis. Alarmed by growing sympathy for Japan among Bengalis, the British colonial authorities rushed to spread propaganda about Japan's imperialism and atrocities in China, Malaya, and Burma, as well as censoring or harassing Indian newspapers which spread what the British considered antiwar propaganda." (p. 217)
——
Since China had no institutions assigned to evidence gathering, when it came time for them to try their enemies in Tokyo, they could produce no compelling documentation. The result was that many defendants — like Hirohito's uncle Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, in part responsible for the Rape of Nanjing — were never tried. Fourteen years of Japanese war crimes in China, tens of millions of dead, and men like Asaka walked free.
"Beyond Nanjing, though, the evidence was far less comprehensive, often lacking corroboration or specifics. Nor did these statements show orders from commanders or link the war crimes to any of the defendants. This was the realization of [Chinese judge] Mei Ruao's fears about insufficient evidence gathered by the debilitated authorities of the Republic of China. In Nanjing, the prosecution put forward a compendium that could only be denied by fanatics; for the rest of China, while clearly there had been widespread horrors, the particulars were more debatable, sometimes unsuitable for conviction beyond a reasonable doubt." (p. 269)
When one defendant was questioned by prosecutors about events at Nanjing:
“Did the Japanese officer know that at one time some one thousand five hundred refugees were marched out of the Safety Zone and shot, their bodies thrown into a pond? ‘I never heard of such a matter up to now,’ replied the officer. ‘I believe that it is possibly not true.’ Did you investigate the more than one thousand Chinese civilians taken to the banks of the Yangzi River and machine-gunned? ‘No,’ said the witness. Did you know about Chinese policemen taken out and shot? ‘I don't think there was any such incident.’ Did you advise Japanese troops that they could search out former Chinese soldiers who had thrown away their weapons and shoot them? ‘I don't think there was any such case.’ Did you not know this was being done systematically by Japanese officers? ‘I never heard about that matter.’ (p. 395)
——
“The defense's first major historical task was rebutting accusations of aggression in Manchuria. Rather than challenging the prosecution evidence from internal Japanese cables and the testimony of three former prime ministers, the defense instead concentrated on vindicating Japan's colonial claims to Manchuria.
“The Japanese people, the defense asserted, believed that they had a moral right to Manchuria as a lifeline against the threatening Soviet Union. Manchuria, an American defense lawyer noted with jarring candor, became ‘an indispensable source’ of raw materials for Japan—a point which could equally well have been made by the prosecution. The Japanese residing in Manchuria, the defense said, were attacked by thieving bandits, with the Chinese government powerless to restore order.
“Relying on an official Japanese investigation, the defense accused Chinese troops of blowing up the South Manchuria Railway at Mukden. Yet the Japanese investigators, who arrived several days later, had no more compelling evidence for Chinese responsibility than the presence of the corpses of three Chinese men in army uniforms in the vicinity. On behalf of the judges, Webb asked if the Japanese investigators had checked the tags of the dead to identify them as Chinese soldiers, and was disgruntled when told that the Japanese had not.” (p. 367)
——
“Grim as the litany of war crimes before the judges was, the United States was secretly covering up what it knew about some of Japan's most shocking atrocities.
“Hidden away outside the frigid northeastern city of Harbin in occupied Manchuria, the Japanese army had since 1936 operated a top secret unit for human experiments with bacteriological warfare. In its hellish work, Unit 731 had killed some two thousand Chinese and Manchurian prisoners, as well as launching attacks on several Chinese cities. . . .
“In 1940 and 1941, with approval from Japan's army, Ishii's team flew a small airplane low over the Chinese cities of Quzhou, Ningbo, Jinhua, and Changde, spraying plague-ridden fleas and grains. Soon plague broke out in all the cities except Jinhua. In 1942, Ishii's teams used germ bombs and spray to support the conventional warfare of the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign. Some 250,000 Chinese civilians died in that onslaught . . . . Japan also set up a secret facility in occupied Singapore to do biowarfare experiments on humans, as well as centers in China and Burma.” (p. 383)
These atrocities remind me of what Robert Jay Lifton wrote about in The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. The Japanese like the Nazis also had a belief in the purity of their blood. In fact,there was no difference between them and the Chinese; it was the absurd fear of the other again.
——
The idea that the Allies should have implicated themselves for the firebombing and atomic bombing of Japanese cities is preposterous. This wasn’t a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“The inherent one-sidedness of the judgment was painfully apparent when it came to the Japanese execution of captured American bomber crews. To the American people, this was a well-publicized war crime; to the Japanese command, it was a fitting punishment for Americans who had themselves committed a war crime. Wholly taking the American side of that argument, the judgment dodged the hard question of why aerial bombardment of Japanese cities should not be reckoned a war crime.” (p. 544)...more
"I still felt, that ache about which there is nothing eFirst love.
"the terrible time of being young." —John Logan
The gay sex here seems deëroticized.
"I still felt, that ache about which there is nothing erotic, or not for me. I know there are men who like it, who go to great lengths to find others who will hurt them in exactly this way, though I've never been able to fathom the pleasure they take from it." (p. 38)...more
The magnitude and scope of the tragedy here is astonishing. That's the reason to read it. The science writing after p. 160 or so, increasing as one goThe magnitude and scope of the tragedy here is astonishing. That's the reason to read it. The science writing after p. 160 or so, increasing as one goes deeper, I found the most interesting part of the book. I wish there had been more.
As a stylistic document, it's not impressive. I have been thinking of V.S. Naipaul and Oliver Sacks — each of whom wrote nonfiction with admirable style. You don't get that here. This is a transfer of information, flatly. Moreover, I think the characterizations, to the extent that they exist, are facile.
Imagine you're Catholic, white and married. It's the 1960s and you have twelve children. Slowly, one by one, six of the children — all sons — become schizophrenic. And this in an era when nothing is known about the disease, when there are many theories but little consensus.
As the sons slowly unhinge, the parents — Mimi and Don — repress or deny everything. In many cases they blame it on something else. As when Jim's wife tells them of his psychotic breakdown, and they blame it on trouble in her marriage. The lengths to which the parents will go to evade stigma will set your hair on fire.
Being of a certain age, I can remember exactly where I was while this family was suffering each of its Aeschylean vicissitudes. That alignment gives immediacy to the narrative.
The affected brothers include Donald, Jim, Peter, Brian, Matt and Joe Galvin. Brian, quietly prescribed Navane some time before, suddenly kills himself and his girlfriend with a shotgun in Lodi, California. It's 1973.
These parents spent most of their time in denial. They produced 12 children and were by necessity hands off when it came to upbringing. The boys especially, left to their own devices, went hog wild. The father, Don, was away from the house whenever possible, an absent father. Now he has a stroke.
"Don had always thought that the sick boys ought to leave and get treatment outside the home. 'God helps those who help themselves,' he would say; if the boys were unwilling there was nothing else anyone could do. . . All of Don's old arguments—that Mimi had been babying the boys; that he believed in the school of hard knocks; that those self-help books he gave the boys were all about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps—would never work [for Mimi] again. Now that the worst had happened. . . ." (p. 132)
Twelve children with virtually no parental support or network! What were they thinking? They weren't farmers producing workers for agriculture, in which huge families were common. They were middle-class suburbanites. In the end, I found it too long. ...more
As always with historical fiction, there's the nagging sense the characters know too much. That is, that they have a 21st-century based cumulative hisAs always with historical fiction, there's the nagging sense the characters know too much. That is, that they have a 21st-century based cumulative historical knowledge. No one could have been so well informed in their day as these characters. It's implausible because it foregrounds the artifice. So for me the esthetic generally is problematic. I think you can tell my ideal mode is realism. On the other hand, it's well written, which feels contradictory. Why spend so much time on a bauble? It's like when I admire a singer's pipes, but not his/her material....more
I never use the word love with regard to novels, but here it's necessary. This is an absolutely astonishing book. Every page possesses new wonders andI never use the word love with regard to novels, but here it's necessary. This is an absolutely astonishing book. Every page possesses new wonders and great literary pleasure. Philip Roth called it O'Brien's "masterpiece." High praise methinks. It's the most rewarding book I've read so far this year — except perhaps for Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry, also an Irish writer. BTW, O'Brien wrote this one while in her eighties....more
James is brilliantTry to reimagine The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with the “slave,” Jim, as narrator. Now he is known as James, and he is learned.
James is brilliantly realized. James speaks standard American English, but when around white people his talk becomes an ungrammatical slave vernacular. This vernacular, of course, is not a vernacular. It’s a mask James’s and his fellows in wretchedness put on to hide their intelligence from whitey. The device is not only funny, but it subverts almost every word here.
There are moving insights into the myriad brutalisms of slavery — and the sick white rationale for them. That’s good. We need to be reminded that for slaves there was no absolutely no recourse to rule of law. They were accosted for anything and everything: including imagined slights. For God help the slave who should even for an instant imply intellectual superiority to his or her “owner.”
The writing is lighter than air. It moves from wry amusement to harrowing action and back again within the space of a sentence or two. I’m especially impressed by Everett’s narrative zip. He has an enviable facility for brief sections and chapters. Each has its little narrative task —string them together for addictive narrative thrust.
The minstrelsy part has multilevel irony. On hearing him sing in a blacksmith's shop James is bought by a white minstrelsy troupe. He is the dressed in suit and tie and painted with blackface. So he is a black man painted in blackface so he can appear like a white man painted in blackface and sing for whites. As a black man he would not be allowed to perform with white men (in blackface).
To enliven my flimsy description of this excellent novel, I’ve included a link to the true story of Leonard Black, a Maryland-based “slave” who fled to Canada in 1837....more
—Brilliant and exciting. A literary thriller but not a novel of action, more a contemplative thriller. The description is super vivid (48 fps), and th—Brilliant and exciting. A literary thriller but not a novel of action, more a contemplative thriller. The description is super vivid (48 fps), and the images pop.
—The novel starts well if you like the unrelievedly dark, as I do. McCarthy is word drunk in the best sort if way. His characters so far are all working stiffs. (A nice break from the billionaire greed so prevalent these days.) From this black background emerges some funny stuff too. Just absolutely hilarious passages usually voiced by Bobby's friends. Novel proceeds mostly as dialog.
—One scene is of a cool day on the Gulf within view of the coast. Bobby Western sits in the cabin of a tender drinking tea; he wears a wet suit. A private jet lies forty feet below the surface in Gulf waters. The Oiler is already down there cutting the door open with acetylene. Western puts on his diving equipment, tanks, fins, mouthpiece and jumps in. Western arrives just as the Oiler opens the aircraft's door. Inside are well-dressed corpses, a few wearing stylish Italian shoes; seven strapped in passengers, and two pilots. After a cursory examination Western and the Oiler go up to the tender whereupon all manner of questions arise about where the jet came from: who the passengers might be, why the plane has been under for what seems like three days, etc.
—We know the sister, Alice, through flashbacks. Her hallucinations are not chronological. In the scene at the start of the book she is older and planning her suicide. The language of her prime hallucination, The Thalidomide Kid is very high flown. (You may remember another Kid from Blood Meridian.) In a later sequences she's younger and still in school, In these scenes The Kid speaks more or less like everyone else. I wondered about that and it hit me — this is supposition at this point — that when the sister is older, and on the verge of self-destruction, she is crazier and thus her hallucinations are more disturbing, the Kid's lingo so absurdly rich, which may be why she plans to die by her own hand.
In another section, in what seems like an homage to the poet John Berryman, a character from his The Dream Songs, Mr. Bones, springs from those poems to entertain Alice. You might say the author was indulging in magic realism until you learn that the sister is in fact discussing her hallucinations with two note takers, presumably shrinks.
—Text sometimes dips quite startlingly into the Joycean, the Beckettian. This is a novel of at times intense narrative pleasures. Some Hemingway like passages too especially as Bobby walks around the streets of New Orleans, eats, sleeps, wakes up in the dead of night when it's not so easy to be hard boiled about things as it is during the day.
"In his dreams of her she wore at times a smile he tried to remember and she would say to him almost in a chant words he could scarcely follow. He knew that her lovely face would soon exist nowhere save in his memories and in his dreams and soon after that nowhere at all. She came in half nude trailing sarsenet or . . . or she would push back the cowl of her robe and her blonde hair would fall about her face as she bent to him where he lay in the damp and clammy sheets and whisper to him I'd have been your shadowlane, the keeper of that house alone wherein your soul is safe. And all the while a clangor like the labor of a foundry and dark figures in silhouette about the alchemic fires, the ash and the smoke. The floor lay littered with the stillborn forms of their efforts and still they labored on, the raw half-sentient mud quivering red in the autoclave. In that dusky penetralium they press about the crucible shoving and gibbering while the deep heresiarch dark in his folded cloak urges them on in their efforts. And then what thing unspeakable is this raised dripping up through crust and calyx from what hellish marinade. He woke sweating and switched on the bedlamp and swung his feet to the floor and sat with his face in his hands. Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?" (p. 184)
—Turns out that one of the jet's passengers is missing. Well, how could that be? Didn't we see Oiler cut the door open? How could have anyone gotten out? We don't know who the passenger is or where he or she has gone. But strange men looking like G-men arrive at Bobby's rental late one night and begin questioning about the wreck. This is when he learns a passenger is missing. He moves out that night into a suicide's room above a bar. He feels more than knows he's being followed. Then one day his money in the bank is attached by the IRS, despite the fact that he owes no taxes. He hires a detective...
— I find the JFK content boring. It's like an unwelcome condensation out of Oswald's Tale. Fortunately the digression is brief. But don't let that dissuade you. See my first paragraph....more
**spoiler alert** A superb biography. It will fascinate Walserians, but its appeal is broader than that. This astonishing artist's struggle to work an**spoiler alert** A superb biography. It will fascinate Walserians, but its appeal is broader than that. This astonishing artist's struggle to work and remain afloat financially is moving, but when he fails, for in his day that's how he saw himself, it's heartbreaking.
Experiencing aural hallucinations, he checks himself into an asylum at the behest of his sister. Eventually he is diagnosed with schizophrenia, which isn't the disease as we know it today, but more of a catch-all diagnosis. Most importantly, though he stopped riding in 1933.
After his death in the 1956 they found shoeboxes full of what are known now as micro, scripts.
If you haven't read Robert Walser I eagerly suggest you start with the Selected Stories, the one introduced by Susan Sontag. Author Bernofsky's recent translations of The Tanners and The Assistant are also indispensible.
"Kafka was still thinking about his work in October 1917 when he wrote in his diary that Walser reminded him of Dickens in his 'blurring employment of abstract metaphors.'" (p. 155)
"'This Robert Walser,' Hesse writes, 'who has already played a good deal of delicate chamber music, strikes even purer, sweeter, more buoyant notes in this new little book [Poet's Life] than in the earlier ones. If writers like Walser were among the leading minds, there would be no war. If he had one hundred thousand readers, the world would be better.'" (p. 199)
"Walser's 'very human kind of playfulness' and his 'uncommon command of language' 'one could fall in love' with it, [Robert] Musil said. . . . Musil found Walser sui generis, inimitable, his work 'not a suitable foundation for a literary genre.'" (p. 170)
"Alice Munro confesses to not having been there for her small children and knowing that they suffered for it. 'When my oldest daughter was about two, she'd come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other. ...' " (p. 113)
If this is your subject matter—if you are someone who doesn't want children—this might be a terrific read for you, as it was for me....more
Compelling. Declining birth rates it turns out are not so much about the choices women make as it is about the socioeconomic context in which those deCompelling. Declining birth rates it turns out are not so much about the choices women make as it is about the socioeconomic context in which those decisions are made.
The author writes about how before the American Revolution there was a greater sense of community that made it possible for children to live amid large extended families. This made it easier on biological parents while allowing those with no children a chance to mother.
But we lost this strength largely because of the myth of frontier individualism. We pulled away from community. So caregiving shrank to the size of today's nuclear family. Many today still view the nuclear family as the epitome of family. In truth, the author writes, the nuclear family actually represents a diminishment of the outsize child rearing capacities of far larger, now no longer extant community-based extended families.
With those extended families no longer in existence, the author believes we have to support women by way of government programs. The European Community already does some of these things. The failure of the U.S. Congress to extend the Child Tax Credit is a good example of our own national failure to do so.
"The child tax credit (CTC) was a monthly payment of $250 or $300 per child that was given to eligible families in 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan Act. . . According to research by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, the CTC lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty in 2021, reducing the child poverty rate from 9.7% to 5.2%. . . [Conversely] without the CTC [when Congress failed to renew it] the child poverty rate rose sharply to 12.4% in 2022, an increase of 41% from December 2021 to January 2022. This means that 3.7 million more children fell below the poverty line." (Source: Conversation with Bing, 1/10/2024)
Add to this example our lack of daycare, Medicare cuts, food stamp cuts, school lunch programs cuts, afterschool programs cuts, etc. — and you begin to glimpse why the decision not to have children is being made by so many women. I pulled the following quote from today's NYT: "Note that more than eight million children will be left out of a new federal food assistance program for needy families . . . because they live in one of the 15 states [whose] governors . . . refuse to participate."
There is simply no support system such as existed when large, extended families were prominent. Right now we have only NGOs or states to provide relief. But as the author says.
"Over the past two centuries . . . we jettisoned expansive ideas of kinship, isolated parents, disinvested from communities, and replaced community care with a kind of care that individuals have to pay for. . . . [But] that's not to say we couldn't rebuild systems of community support if we wanted to, or that we lack examples of how we might do it." (p. 70)...more
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