Legacy of Conquest – 5/5 Stars
Not the most exciting audiobook I could have listened to, but a very worthwhile overview of not only American Western history but also historiography of the field too. Patricia Limerick was at the time a historian working in a Western American university. She tells a story of a colleague getting a job with a Southern university and he declares that he should learn a little Southern history to supplement his expertise. She asks him if he learned Western history before taking this current job, but it’s taken as a joke.
This little moment works to illustrate a few facets of received wisdom of Western history:
*Frederick Jackson Turner is all ye need to know.
*Teach the myths.
*It all ended in 1890s, but also was never super important in the first place
*Remember to remember the Alamo, but also Wounded Knee and any other battles.
* Make sure to ignore Native American history as much as needed/possible.
This book then decides to do two main things: 1) poke a big hole in the basic assumptions about both Western history but also the mythologies surrounding it 2) acknowledge and cite repeatedly where previous scholars have already said as much, but been ignored.
One of the funniest moments is where she describes reactions to the books a) false because untrue! but b) unoriginal because we already said all that!
The book itself spends a lot of time with political documents, legal histories, land disputes, town charters and the like. It’s deeply fascinating, if a little dry, but worth the time.
(phot: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1012690.The_Legacy_of_Conquest?ref=nav_sb_ss_3_17)
You are Not a Stranger Here – 4/5 Stars
Archy and Mehitabel – 4/5 Stars
A truly wonderful book that got more and more wonderful as I read on. The book is a series of poems, originally published in columns beginning in 1915 or so. Archy, our poet, is a hobo cockroach who types his poems out in the newspaper offices of Don Marquis, who does the honor of publishing them for him. Archy can’t capitalize letters because he types by jumping on the keys and laying his full weight into the action, so it takes some time as you can imagine. In general, he writes about life on these streets of New York in the early 20th century. But he spends a lot of time with Mehitabel, telling her story. Mehitabel is an alley cat, a lady, on her last of nine lives. She believes not only that she might have been Cleopatra in the past, but also that she should live life out loud, to the fullest. Even if in this case the fullest might mean shacking up with the worst Tom in the neighborhood, and having some kittens.
Both Archy in his wisdom and Mehitabel in his joie de vivre live fully in this kind of amazing collection.
“a spider and a fly
i heard a spider
and a fly arguing
wait said the fly
do not eat me
i serve a great purpose
in the world
you will have to
show me said the spider
i scurry around
gutters and sewers
and garbage cans
said the fly and gather
up the germs of
typhoid influenza
and pneumonia on my feet
and wings
then i carry these germs
into households of men
and give them diseases
all the people who
have lived the right
sort of life recover
from the diseases
and the old soaks who
have weakened their systems
with liquor and iniquity
succumb it is my mission
to help rid the world
of these wicked persons
i am a vessel of righteousness
scattering seeds of justice
and serving the noblest uses
it is true said the spider
that you are more
useful in a plodding
material sort of way
than i am but i do not
serve the utilitarian deities
i serve the gods of beauty
look at the gossamer webs
i weave they float in the sun
like filaments of song
if you get what i mean
i do not work at anything
i play all the time
i am busy with the stuff
of enchantment and the materials
of fairyland my works
transcend utility
i am the artist
a creator and demi god
it is ridiculous to suppose
that i should be denied
the food i need in order
to continue to create
beauty i tell you
plainly mister fly it is all
damned nonsense for that food
to rear up on its hind legs
and say it should not be eaten
you have convinced me
said the fly say no more
and shutting all his eyes
he prepared himself for dinner
and yet he said i could
have made out a case
for myself too if i had
had a better line of talk
of course you could said the spider
clutching a sirloin from him
but the end would have been
just the same if neither of
us had spoken at all
boss i am afraid that what
the spider said is true
and it gives me to think
furiously upon the futility
of literature
archy”
― Archy and Mehitabel
Forever Flowing – 3/5 Stars
I tend to find Vasily Grossman books very interesting and well-rendered, and also exhausting, and not always in a good way. This book is like a book length (though short by Grossman standards) version of the Norm Macdonald “Moth joke”. It’s Russian, it’s Soviet, and it’s unhumorous and dour as it gets.
Also out of nowhere, you get about 60 pages of Soviety history, completely athwart to the rest of the narrative. Which is a little strange.
“Don’t you remember how you once answered a question of mine? Me – I shall never forget your words. Those words of yours opened my eyes; they brought me the light of day. I asked you how the Germans could send Jewish children to die in the gas chambers. How, I asked, could they live with themselves after that? Was there really no judgement passed on them by man or God? And you said: Only one judgement is passed on the executioner – he ceases to be a human being. Through looking on his victim as less than human, he becomes his own executioner, he executes the human being inside himself. But the victim – no matter what the executioner does to kill him – remains a human being forever. Remember now?”
“I used to think freedom was freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience. But freedom is the whole life of everyone. Here is what it amounts to: you have to have the right to sow what you wish to, to make shoes or coats, to bake into bread the flour ground from the grain you have sown, and to sell it or not sell it as you wish; for the lathe operator, the steelworker, and the artist it’s a matter of being able to live as you wish and work as you wish and not as they order you to. And in our country there is no freedom – not for those who write books nor for those who sow grain nor for those who make shoes.” (Grossman, p. 99) He noted that “In people’s day-to-day struggle to live, in the extreme efforts workers put forth to earn an extra ruble through moonlighting, in the collective farmers’ battle for bread and potatoes as the one and only fruit of their labor, he [Ivan Grigoryevich] could sense more than the desire to live better, to fill one’s children’s stomachs and to clothe them. In the battle for the right to make shoes, to knit sweaters, in the struggle to plant what one wished, was manifested the natural, indestructible striving toward freedom inherent in human nature. He had seen this very same struggle in the people in camp. Freedom, it seemed, was immortal on both sides of the barbed wire.” (Grossman, p. 110)”
Winter Counts – 3/5 Stars
This is a book that I liked, but that had a couple of significant issues that limited my enjoyment. The novel begins with our narrator, Virgil, confronting a drunk in the parking lot. He’s been accused of molesting children around reservation (Lakota nation) and it’s been worried that the inability for tribal police to handle felonies (by law) will mean that the lack of concrete evidence etc will allow this guy to go free. So Virgil is there to beat him into submission. It works. He’s pretty good at this kind of thing, which is nice because he hasn’t been great at a lot of things. He does some protection, some vigilante work, and some detective work. Two events wind together to create the narrative push for the novel: he’s hired to chase the course of heroin on the reservation and his nephew overdoses (he survives). The book then works to solve this central mystery.
Two main issues arise in the book. One, who is this book for? There’s an audience problem here. I don’t mean that the book isn’t a story worth telling, but it’s not clear who this book is written for. The audience is almost never asked to work at much. There’s a LOT of things explained in this book, as part of Virgil’s narrative. These are things about history and politics that Virgil knows without question, but I suppose the audience needs to know. But rather than letting a reference or an allusion sit, the book explains and explains and explain the full accounting. Second, the book is marred with some bad tropes/cliches, and other overwritten stuff. These issues are connected. It’s a book with a lot to say, but it says too much of it and doesn’t let more of it go implied or suggested.
Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number – 5/5 Stars
This last fact might also be his only salvation, as his connection to Israel makes him more difficult to disappear. The memoir tells his story, while also taking on the story of Argentina from the 1940s-1970s, a story that is complicated in event, but not entirely in fact. It’s a remarkably brave book and we’re for that, but it’s also a lucky book. There’s no particular reason he should have survived this imprisonment.