June 2019

A List: between books
B List: between books
C List: Perlstein--Invisible Bridge...………………………….530/810


For the A list I am actually trying to translate a few pages of The Republic. When I began this list 25 years ago there was a provision, the idea being that I would eventually learn all of the major European literary languages, that specially excerpted passages within the test would be subjected to a second reading in the original language of the author. As is often the case, after starting out I'll say all right, I have gotten weary and am just plowing through the phrases and tenses that are completely unrecognizable to me. In Greek my remembered vocabulary just is not big enough at this point to do a passable job on this, I have to look up almost every other word, and I never mastered all of the little enclitics and other small common words. Yet since I did once study it and still have all of the lexicons and grammars, I feel obligated whenever it comes up to go through the motions of trying to read it. I also do this for (in declining order of reading competence) French, German, Norwegian/Swedish, Italian, Latin, and Spanish books that come up. I have given up trying to read anything in Russian and Hebrew, in which tongues I have no foundation whatsoever, nor any Asian language that may chance to come up--a handful of Chinese and Arabic poems have appeared on the list. It is admittedly for the most part a pointless exercise.


I am working on my next report for the B-list.


There is still some interesting stuff in the Perlstein but I'm not sure it needs to be as long as it is. There is a real book in there, and perhaps this is a matter of where the author's true understanding or expertise lies, but a good deal of the information thrown at the reader in this book seems tangential and doesn't hit the mark. One thing I am stunned by in recent pages was how inept security was at the highest levels of government in 1975 compared to how fanatical and thorough everyone with anything to protect is about it now. While having two potential gun-toting assassins get within point blank range of Gerald Ford, who was the president at the time, within the span of a couple of weeks, is crazy enough, my favorite story is the one about how the presidential limousine crashed into a teenager driving a Buick at an intersection in Connecticut because the Secret Service people "forgot to close the road off." People's brains were evidently not focused on extreme policing, at least in everyday life, in that era. It doesn't seem now like such a terribly hard thing to get a grasp on.


I am a little distracted right now because I have two old cars, both of which should be replaced but I am going to try to get away with replacing just one at the moment. As somebody on the internet might say, and in fact just said today, perhaps I should worry about doing something to stand up to the United States government in the name of all the people it is continually raining death on and keeping in disgraceful poverty around the world instead of thinking about acquiring another environment-destroying machine to transport unconscionable quantities of meat around in. Can you imagine what everyone would say if I suddenly stopped being me and became an impassioned activist?

I haven't been overseas in 18 years. I would like to go somewhere. Nice and the Riviera, I have got into my mind as being a good trip. Crowded, but I've never been there and there is plenty to do. I spent half an hour trying to find a picture but I couldn't find quite the thing I wanted so I am giving up. 

May 2019

A List: Rousseau--Confessions...……………………….628/683
B List: Lew Wallace--Ben-Hur………………………....137/488
C List: Rick Perlstein--The Invisible Bridge...……….....378/810

I am a few days late with this month's post. I tried to rush it through last night but it was such a mess even compared to this that I decided to hold it back another day.

This is the fourth update where I am reading Rousseau. Of course I did go on vacation twice. The Confessions is on the B-list too, though not until Vol. XVII (I'm on Vol. III now, so at my current pace I will be getting to it again in about 28 years). In the later parts of the book I am starting to have trouble keeping all of Rousseau's aristocratic friends, and former friends, straight. Having had some of these issues myself, I felt his pain in the parts where he related his kidney stone and bladder problems, and was especially attentive to his account of having a probe inserted into him in 1760, which I had not realized was already being done at that time, and could not have been pleasant.

Doubtless because of the famously gargantuan film adaptation, I anticipated Ben-Hur being one of those enormous 1,000+ page books, so I was surprised to realize that it is not in fact exceptionally long, though the expository parts of it really are written for an audience whose ideas of entertainment and stimulation would be listening to a two hour sermon in the Midwest in 1880. Ben-Hur does not actually appear in the story as a character until about 90 pages in, and Jesus Christ, who I take to be the other main character, is finally born around page 70 after a long introductory section featuring the wise men trekking across the desert, the journey of Joseph and Mary, a discursion on the shepherd(ic?) life in ancient times, etc. Reading the descriptive passages requires a lot of concentration that even I find hard to summon up in the present year, and needless to say it is impossible for me to read more than a paragraph or two at night without falling asleep straightaway. That said I do still like it. When I have the time and level of alertness to immerse myself in it for thirty minutes or an hour it truly puts me in a state of consciousness reminiscent of my pre-online life, which I miss badly much of the time.

The Perlstein book I took back to the library over my vacation and got it out again when I came home. Nixon is gone now and currently I am in the midst of a long recap of Ronald Reagan's Hollywood career and the beginnings of his shift to politics during the post-war Hollywood blacklist era, which I am not finding all that interesting. I like the parts where I am either reminded or learn something new about either how insane the 70s were or how smart people thought about things like the economy or education or how society should be organized, which in many instances is very different from how smart people think about those things now. The author's weak point is that he is an utterly conventional modern liberal, and therefore invariably takes a condescending attitude whenever the subject involves the white working class or Ronald Reagan's mental capacity, and a respectful one when the subject is minorities or immigrants or feminism. These are doubtless on the whole correct, and certainly they are safe, perspectives to adopt, but only liking/being enthusiastic for the approved parts of American history and culture and uniformly, without any apparent inner conflict, disliking the unapproved parts, do not make for very interesting reading.  I'll still be on this book in June so maybe I will try to go into my thoughts on this more.

This is the time of year when I finally am able to get back out and read on the porch again, but so far I have only managed to do this once. April 14th could have been the first day out, as it was in the 70s, but that was a Sunday and my wife loaded us all up with so many spring cleaning-like tasks that I was not able to slip out with my book on that day. Then from the 23rd to the 27th I was down in Pennsylvania and Maryland, but the 28th after I got home was still warm in New Hampshire and that is the day I sat out. Since then the weather has not been very warm, at least in the mornings when I am home it's still in the 40s and 50s, and most of the days it has rained as well. So I still haven't really gotten into porch-reading mode yet.

When I was in Philadelphia I met a new woman. It had been a few years since I had encountered anyone who stirred these kind of unforced love-like feelings in me, and I thought that maybe that part of my life had finally passed. But I guess it hasn't. Her name is Kate, and she is from Phoenixville, which I guess counts as a suburb of Philadelphia, though it's about 30 miles out of town. I've come across a number of people from this town over the years. I don't remember ever having actually been there, though it isn't far from where I used to live. So far it is true I only know her through television, though thanks to the power of the internet there are years of archival footage of her as well as a new upload nearly every day to keep my passion strong.

By the way, she is like 37 or 38, so she is pretty mature, especially for me, but she retains some girlish qualities while being an overall serious person, which is what I really like. This black outfit is my favorite item from her wardrobe that I have seen so far.


     

Les Charmettes, home of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Is Rick Perlstein a soyboy?

Tony Orlando and Betty Ford doing the bump

Warning: I may be closing all my posts for the foreseeable future with a Kate Bilo picture, until my love cools. That might take a while.

April 2019

"A" List: Rousseau--Confessions.................................................................421/683
"B" List: John Hersey--A Bell For Adano....................................................132/269
"C" List: Rick Perlstein--The Invisible Bridge...............................................98/810


A trifecta of white male authors this month. That sometimes happens. Perlstein at least is alive and Rousseau is a foreign language author, which I would think rescues the set from absolute irrelevance.


We are up to the point in Rousseau's life where he is continually falling out with his friends and with respectable society in general and one begins to get a sense of where the reputation he had in some quarters as being insane originated. The book gives a very thorough portrait of a true bohemian existence, with its unusual domestic arrangements, deep engagement with, in this case, musical and literary composition, and frankness about sexual matters, including boyhood memories of priests exposing themselves while ejaculating, the five children he fathered with his mistress and (famously in philosophical circles) persuaded her to give up to an orphanage, and, perhaps most peculiarly, a story about an eleven or twelve year old girl that he and a friend "bought" with the idea of nurturing her to become a shared mistress, though he says that when the time came several years later to bring this plan to its fruition, he was unable to follow through with it. I have generally found this book engaging. It has entered a little bit of a lull currently as he has removed himself from Paris to the countryside and is recapping his various disputes with now remote enemies, but there is the possibility it will pick up again.


The very long Perlstein book is concerned with the transition in the Republican party between the downfall of Richard Nixon in the early 1970s and the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan during the 1976 primary campaign, which he very narrowly lost to the sitting president, setting the stage for his epochal triumph four years after that, though the meat of the book appears to leave off after '76. I was a very little child during this period, and have no memory of the Nixon presidency and just a little of the 1976 election, though I do remember people around me talking about how ridiculous it was that anybody thought Ronald Reagan could be president, so that when he was elected in a landslide in 1980 the result was a great shock to my 10 year old self. So far the stuff about Reagan (of whom Perlstein, as a representative, I gather, of the educated urban liberal class, is no admirer), at the point I have reached still the governor of California, is the most interesting part of the book. It sounds like he was a more outwardly genial version of Trump in his ability to say things that were completely nonsensical or outrageous to sophisticates that were great hits with the general public. On one occasion as governor Reagan sent the National Guard to Berkeley or one of the University of California campuses to quell a protest that was getting out of hand, stating that, "If there has to be a bloodbath, let's get it over with. Appeasement is not the answer." The media apparently considered that he had committed political suicide. In truth of course, this sent his poll numbers through the roof.


While the narrative, at least as I understand it, is that Ronald Reagan's policies in the 1980s were the main impetus resulting in the destruction of large swathes of the former American middle class, I do have to wonder in reading this whether that was something he actively wished for, or was an inadvertent result because of changes in the nature of the economy, etc, which precluded bringing back much of the world of his memory/imagination. He was from a very ordinary Midwestern background himself, and it seems that more than any politician I can think of he genuinely loved all of that kitschy Americana stuff--football games, college social life, amateur theatricals, Hollywood, cowboys and Indians. It was reported by his son that when the former leader of the free world descended into dementia, he would (to the incredulity of the author Perlstein), instead of denouncing Brezhnev or even reciting lines from Bedtime for Bonzo, say things like "there's a game today...they're waiting for me" which sounds completely believable to me. Anyway, I do believe his vision of America was one where people who at least shared his vision and positive attitude would infallibly prosper. Maybe he would say that these people actually are still prospering, and all of the failures and junkies and homeless people need to get with the program. Actually he probably would say that.


Running out of time...one more thing...I've always known that conservatives hate "Hanoi" Jane Fonda for her Vietnam era activities, but I didn't realize what she (actually) said on television at the time. Wow. I will say one thing, to be able to say something like that in the environment that existed at the time shows, to me, a level of security in one's citizenship and membership in the polity that I don't see in the same way now, unless, ironically, it is from 1st and 2nd generation immigrants, and black Americans.


No pictures again this month. I ran out of time.