Both Flesh and Not by David Foster Wallace

This collection could probably more accurately be called “David Foster Wallace Writes About Things”. It is truly for the die-hard fan who can’t read enough DFW and has resorted to looking at pictures of old books he took notes in and restaurant napkins with scribbles on them. They may have even sunk to watching/reading “Though of Course You End Up Finding Yourself”. The desperation in Wallace’s readers that make publishing this collection so lucrative is a testament to DFW as a writer, but none of the pieces here are Wallace’s best. In fact, they are far from. Which is to say, they are still good. Many are fun, some are arduous and academic, one is absolutely terrible, and they all cover a range of topics that keep the casual non-fiction reader on their toes. If you’re at the point in your career as a David Foster Wallace reader when you find you absolutely need to read something new, pick up “Both Flesh and Not”. If you’ve yet to read his entire collection, save this one for later.

Also, as a sort of side note, I could not have read the last essay of this collection at a better time (“Just Asking” pub. The Atlantic). Trump recently made the truly unAmerican decision to ban immigrants/refugees from certain countries with predominantly Muslim faith. The essay is very short and worth quoting in its entirety at such a time:

“Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”? (Lincoln) In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?

In the absence of such a conversation, can we trust our elected leaders to value and protect the American idea as they act to secure the homeland? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, PATRIOT Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?”

My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Karl Ove Knausgaard delivers a long, meticulous, and surprisingly enthralling read in his autobiographical series My Struggle. Part 1 opens with some fun reveries on death and dying before launching into tales of Kanusgaard’s childhood. These are a series of somehow (assuming you’re a white male) relatable stories that range from elementary school to early college. There are a lot of things in these passages for people to enjoy; the painful attempts at starting a band in middle school, the pathetic attempts at fitting in and the misguided importance placed on doing so, the looming presence of a stern father and the growing resentment that follows. Many of us have gone through at least some of these things and, for reasons I cannot really explain, there is a tremendous amount of pleasure to be found in reading them recounted in extreme detail.

This is where My Struggle begins to dwell in the realm of fiction. It isn’t just an autobiography, what makes it a fictional account lies in the story’s minutia. Knausgaard doesn’t rely on charged drama or even all that much human interaction to carry the action of his fiction. What he decides to embellish are the details. This doesn’t require a killer memory and surreal perception skills like one might think. The real skill employed here is imagination. There is no real way of telling whether Knausgaard can really tell what embarrassment felt like, the color of things, the texture, whether he sneezed and at what moment in the conversation. I know I can’t recall many of these things in my own life, but nor could I necessarily imagine myself doing so. That could be because I don’t have the range of imagination Knausgaard allows himself to employ in the retelling. Dwelling with him in these past moments though, is cathartic and rewarding. As a reader I don’t know if I’ve ever really been anywhere like this in a book, even the most detailed fiction leaves out what Knausgaard so essentially and effortlessly captures.

The second half of part one takes a darker turn as Knausgaard comes face to face with a tragedy. I won’t spoil anything, but the detail in emotion intensifies, not in clarity but in scope. We can’t see why Knausgaard feels the way he does or does the things he does, but he is more interested in transporting his reader to the scene rather than the trappings of his psyche. When the book is finished and Knausgaard’s riff on death from the beginning of the novel comes to a close, the reader is greeted with a deep sense of satisfaction reserved for the most beloved of literary classics. I’ll be picking up Book 2.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

“It’s illegal to yell ‘FIRE’ in a crowded theater, right?”
“It is”
“Well, I’ve whispered racism in a post-racial world”

It is very possible that there will never be a better time to read Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. Since America elected a crypto-fascist clown for president you might have asked yourself, more than a few times, how it was possible democracy could do this to us. A professional entertainer whose ascendancy to fame and fortune includes everything from reality TV and professional wrestling to conspiracy theory propagation and, now, rust belt populism is the most powerful man in the world. Everyone, even people who voted for the guy, probably even he himself, is trying to reconcile the sheer possibility that this could even happen. Well, enter Paul Beatty.

Beatty breaks out his war chest - irony, irreverence, allusion, and satire - to tell the unlikely tale of Bonbon; an inner-city African American farmer who proves that there is no transcending race or racial history in America. But Bonbon is no activist, he’s the sellout, the way he proves America is still a nation of white supremacy despite a black president is by segregating the local buses and schools, literally redlining the city in, and owning a slave. If you’re thinking to yourself that this seems too ridiculous or cartoonish, you’re not wrong, but Beatty isn’t banking on you being wrong. With every ridiculous undertaking Bonbon embarks on the idea that America can simply sweep centuries of oppression under the rug becomes the more ridiculous premise.

Bonbon’s motive for rubbing America’s nose in its egregious acts is not even a righteous one, it’s more simple; get Dickens back on the map. Dickens was his ‘hood’ in California and it was so gentrified and resettled by surrounding fancy neighborhoods that it eventually lost its name and standing as a city. The idea here is that America isn’t post-racial, it just hides its ghettos (I’ll likely never hear the words “Detroit is coming back”quite the same way). The racism comes naturally; people respect the segregation on the buss and in the schools (graduation rates are up/violent crime is down), the literal red line in the city give them a sense of spacial identity, and even slavery is amicable. The ease with which America can slip back into these institutions is proof that it hasn’t moved past race, was indeed designed to function on the very idea of racial supremacy. The resulting read is somehow both hilarious and eye opening.

Beatty employs satire at an important time. It is important to lampoon the idea that because we have a black president we are living in a post racial society. It is especially so, given that his predecessor has the full endorsement of the KKK and refused to rent property to black people. This ridiculous time calls for over the top examples and Beatty has the chops to do it. All the usual praise of the great satirists apply: he is biting, deep, funny, and rhythmic. Yet Beatty also rights with an essence that has been absent since Twain himself. America has potentially never needed a racial satirist more than in our coming age of Trump. Ditch your copy of Puddin’ Head Wilson or Huck Finn, pick up The Sellout now.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Steinbeck considers East of Eden his “other big book” in an obvious reference to his other masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath. He could be referring to the physical size of the books themselves, or their popularity, or even the concepts conveyed inside them and he would be speaking accurately. But what does it mean to be a big Steinbeck book? There are bigger, more popular, and books that are far more deep than East of Eden; what makes it still worth reading? Well, the answer is simple; size does matter.

We contemporary Americans are now vastly interested in the rise and fall of American families. Look at what we watch on TV, our favorite shows went from the portrayal of the day to day goings on of an amicable family in a sitcom to a thriller/drama epic about how one family’s quest for power and the subsequent drama could tear it to pieces. If the general public were more interested in literary pursuits not a library in town could keep East of Eden on the shelves. This could explain why the book was so popular, it’s a very entertaining read. Steinbeck documents the rise and fall of the Trask family; Cyrus and Alice, their kids Adam and Charles, and Adam’s kids Aaron and Caleb. The ensuing drama is that of biblical proportions, a rehash of some of our most juicy original sins. What’s not to love?

Well, frankly, the book is long. It is 300 pages of a story, two pages of intense philosophical/theological discussion, and then 300 pages of another story - which, in a way, is the continuation of the first - to determine whether the theoretical musings of the two page discussion would play out in real time. So yeah, there is about 300 pages of backstory before your conflict is even set up. Albeit, it is very entertaining, conflict filled, backstory and Steinbeck is a famously great writer. His meticulous documentation of landscape and his ability write about key and emotionally harrowing events with such restraint is masterful, artistic, and downright awe inspiring. It also makes you wonder if he couldn’t have done more with less. I’m not one to hark on a book for being too long, but there comes a point where the phrase “unnecessarily long” becomes accurate. I think that point is when an otherwise immensely talented writer begins filling white space with sentimentality.

Steinbeck shouldn’t have had room for sentiment given the size of the ideas he was fleshing out in East of Eden. The question here is whether we are doomed to repeat the sins of our fathers (and mothers, but this book was published in 1952 so women were either unimportantly pure or evil). Adam and Eve as well as Cain and Able take the place of the bolder and the hill in the myth of Sisyphus. Is the bolder going to roll down the hill because of gravity and/or the will of the gods? Or do our descendants have a choice, can they willingly decide to shirk the rules of science or the will of God and end the cycle of sin they have been given. Well, about halfway through East of Eden, Steinbeck is going to point blank lay this argument out to you masked as dialogue and then at the end he’s going to tell you the answer. Why? I don’t know and I wish he hadn’t.

Even still, despite Steinbeck’s best efforts, East of Eden is essential reading. The characters of Lee and Samuel Hamilton are rare crafted gems, the Salinas Valley comes alive, and Steinbeck can be ranked with Shakespeare as a master of merging form and content. In addition to wild entertainment this book offers a study in narrative composition you won’t realize you’re internalizing until you have tears in your eyes at the end.

ReWriting the Rules of the American Economy by Joseph Stiglitz

When the 2008 financial crisis struck, Noam Chomsky, influential leftist intellectual extraordinaire (and arguably a dying breed), recommend the United States government enlist Joseph Stiglitz to help drive the recovery as, at the very least, an ideological consultant. Even though the government uncharacteristically ignored the recommendation, the American public should most certainly not. Especially the American left. We should be paying very close attention to what Stiglitz is saying, what he’s doing, and probably what he’ll eventually be screaming.

ReWriting the Rules of the American Economy is by no means the best thing I’ve read by Stiglitz. It lacks the depth found in The Price of Inequality and doesn’t have the bite of any of his Great Divide essays, but it does something far more important than deep exploration or evisceration, something crucial; it better frames the debate.

Essentially, ReWriting the Rules could be seen as a smarter, more concise, but less accessible version of Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism. Like Reich, it is easy to picture Stiglitz getting exhausted in the endless debate over the free market vs the size of government and, also like Reich, thinking it doesn’t matter. The idea is we need to rewrite the rules so the government works for all Americans, not just some. Once you see the debate this way it is difficult to see it any other way.

Which is good! Stiglitz offers up some great ideas here and it is particularly important for the left now because he’s puts to rest some debates you can currently see raging between the left and the far left, mostly in the wake of Sanders V Clinton. Trade deals for instance; Stiglitz doesn’t like the TPP because it undercuts labor and the idea of transparency in trade. At the same time, he wants America to engage in trade because you can’t have the sort of wealth distribution policies he wants if America’s wealth accumulation is stymied by aggressive protectionism. His compromise? Get a regulatory body (the FTC?), or make one, to regulate business participation in trade deals; making sure they are following a series of rules on the environment, human rights, and labor rights - both at home and abroad - in order to take advantage of free and protected capital flow between nations. Who on the left would not agree with this? Exactly.

The only very real and very frustrating part of this book is the layout. Broken into two parts (three if you count the introduction) titled “The Current Rules” and “ReWriting the Rules”, Stiglitz fractures his problems and proposed solutions in a such a way that makes ReWriting the Rules a less coherent and engaging read.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of potential in ReWriting the Rules of the American Economy to be an ideological unifier of the left, as though Stiglitz is offering his consultancy and all we need to do is pick up his book and start taking his advice.

Free Will by Sam Harris

The Oxford English Dictionary of Philosophy seems to allude to the fact that the world of philosophy, for the most part, doesn’t really believe in free will. The school of thought that chocks free will up to an illusion is Determinism and apparently it is seen as a given. The only two schools that are  allegedly held to challenge determinism are compatibilism and libertarianism (not to be confused with the political party, thinking, etc). Not only are these two schools relatively unpopular, they don’t even appear to believe in free will; they seem more concerned with the implications of responsibility. This, at best, maintains that free will is a useful illusion, but an illusion all the same.

It is the general, I-don’t-give-a-rip-about-academic-philosophy-public that perpetuates the specious illusion of free will. It is Sam Harris’ job in his essay, aptly titled Free Will, to dispel the beloved illusion. By my incredibly ammature standard he can only do this by making an argument people can follow, allaying any fears about the implications of dropping the illusion, and by writing a book people will generally want to read.

Harris’ compelling argument consists of applying a very simple question to all things we perceive as free will; “where is the freedom in that?”. Basically if we can’t account for our desires, urges, fears, and reactions, we cannot attribute what follows from them as free will. It can be a hard leap to make; I want to believe that I chose to read this book, but I can’t differentiate between what prompted me to and what would have prompted me not to. So where was I free to make a choice? Breaking it down to the simple application of a question makes the argument relevant and useful when considering what you’re subjected to in day to day life. This allows you to maintain control despite not really being ‘in control’. As Harris puts it; “you do not control the storm, you are not lost in the storm, you are the storm”.

Many people might posit that without, at the very least, the illusion of free will we might become listless or immoral. Here Harris’ job gets easier. Free will is an illusion without which we can become more aware of what we are, products of the physical world - our surroundings, our physiology, our biology, our instincts etc etc (there are infinite possibilities which I don’t doubt is why the illusion of choice laid out before us persists). By manipulating the physical world or having it manipulated for us we can still lead fulfilling lives full of awareness, understanding, and action*.

For example, let’s say you have a problem with eating too many Zebra Cakes at one time. If you imagine this is your choice and simply a matter of resisting the wrong choice (eating Zebra Cakes) and making the right choice (not) then there is no doubt you will still have a problem with Zebra Cakes. This is because you cannot control your desire for Zebra Cakes, you cannot control the chemical effect they have on you, and you cannot control your desire to want one after the other (among, again, an infinite number of possibilities beyond your control that determine your actions). There are some days that you don’t eat too many Zebra Cakes and seemingly resist the need to eat many at one time. It is here the illusion gets dangerous; you are falsely attributing any number of things beyond your control to will power. It isn’t as though you made your urge go away, it just didn’t trump, say, your fear that your wife would leave you if you didn’t kick this Zebra Cake habit, or the way your lunch digested, or an infinite of number of possibilities that simply reduced your desire or trumped it.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter, if you keep subjecting yourself to that what you desire, you’re going to give in. Every. Time.

Let’s strip the illusion away. You know beyond a doubt, despite an unexplainable good day every so often, that you are going to gorge the shit out of Zebra Cakes if they are at home whether or not you like it. You cannot make your desire for Zebra Cakes simply go away, so after reading Sam Harris’ book Free Will you realize you have to make the Zebra Cakes go away. This requires both awareness - where is your urge for the ZCs the strongest? When does it seem to diminish? What are you doing when hunger strikes? -  and action; you realize you have no craving for Zebra Cakes at the store so you don’t buy them OR you do have a craving for Zebra Cakes at the store so you go to a store that doesn’t have them or you go to the store with someone who can stop you from buying them. This level of awareness and action, likely not present when you believe you can willfully make the right choice, seems to be exactly what people are afraid will disappear should the illusion of free will shatter.

(*Two side notes here: None of that was Harris’ example, he does a far better and more concise job of declawing the implications of abolishing the illusion of free will. By action I don’t mean you have free will, you’re spurred to action by your lack of belief in free will - or at least your capacity to stop eating Zebra Cakes - and/or fear and/or frustration and/or dumb luck. If you follow your action to where it came from there is no way it was free will, but hey, it’s better than just laboring under the idea things beyond your control are just going to magically disappear one day!)

Honestly the hardest thing Harris will have to contend with in his argument is writing a book people will want to read and be receptive to. Scratch that, there is really nothing he can do to make people respective to this idea, people love free will. What he can do is what he did;  Harris kept the book simple, kept it very short, and he left out (apart from an absolutely chilling intro to the essay) any controversial examples. The only problem is that Harris is a controversial figure. Conservatives tend to hate him because he is an atheist or because he doesn’t believe all people on food stamps are snakes, but liberals tend to hate him because he isn’t a cultural relativist and probably comes off as islamophobic when he uses data to point out that a lot of modern Muslims think it’s still OK to throw gay people off of roofs.

Well...he tried anyway. If nothing else, and there is a lot else, Free Will is a fun read and gets you thinking. Even if you can’t follow Harris’ logic or think he sounds like a douche at times, it is still immensely important to think about free will and what we subject our subconscious to, being that it often affects our conscious actions. It is impossible to read this and think it is devoid of any truth, plus it --

You know what? Forget it. You’ll either have the urge to read Free Will or you won’t, but it isn't like you really have choice in the matter...

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

In college I wrote my capstone course’s final paper on Angela Carter’s Night at the Circus because I was enthralled by the idea of Magical Realism. The class was a Contemporary British Lit course and my professor, a true diamond in the small Midwestern college rough, assigned a lot of contemporary magical realism. As good as the class was I noticed that Rushdie was nowhere in sight. When I finally did pick up Rushdie’s the Satanic Verses it was for two distinct reasons and I was disappointed on both fronts. The first was because I hadn’t read much (if any) magical realism since taking said college course four years ago and the second was because the book’s reputation for controversy makes it seem like a relevant read in light of current events.

The Satanic Verses seems to be a series of dreams, or reincarnations, mythic retelling psych, or visions, or any/all of the above. I am not informed enough a reader to catch what is allusion, what is allegory, what is satire, and what are just purely imaginative riffs on reality. I know enough to discern that all of this is present, entertaining, and thought provoking but I also know that I’m missing something crucial. The allure of magical realism is that it pulls the energy and vibrant connotations behind mythology or theology and amalgamates them with modern themes grounded in realism, things like race or socioeconomics. The problem is I know next to nothing about Islam and did not read actively enough - which is to say I wasn’t googling for relevance every time I had an inclining to - in order to catch the connotations or implications that come from evoking its culture and traditions. This both is and is not Rushdie’s fault. Obviously I could have learned more about the topic at hand, the issue is that I was not inspired to. I think this is partly because Rushdie also belongs in the Hysterical Realism category. Those in this category - coined by James Woods who included DF Wallace, Zadie Smith, Rudie, and a few of their contemporaries - I’ve found are guilty of, at times, introducing armies of characters that stand to serve on the author’s whim. Maybe there is a particular societal indictment they wish to make on, say, police brutality. In the case of Rushdie, he created a character, complete with a cartoonish backstory, that perfectly illustrated talking points on the subject. The resulting character was too ridiculous to be real and too convenient to really be all that magical. The end result was that I was bored of these characters and didn’t care enough about them to inspire a more active read.

 This translates directly into the second reason for my disappointment. It’s no secret that Rushdie received death threats emanating from the Ayatollah in Iran for this particular novel. In my experience it seems that some critical readers in the western world approach this book looking for an obvious and scathing criticism of Islam, or at least the beginnings of an argument. I, for one, am guilty of this. But Rushdie is a talented fiction writer, he exists in the world of representation and language as a craft, not telling one what to think. If it seems like a specious reason to be disappointed in a work of fiction that’s because it is. At the same time, Rushdie did receive death threats and had to go into hiding. While the Satanic Verses is irreverent, often lampooning the religion and the very idea that we can so conveniently make ancient ideas compatible with modern society, it is hardly groundbreaking as far as ideology is concerned. So what Rushdie was really threatened over was ability to write fiction, an ability you’d have to appreciate in order to find merit in the reputation preceding the death threat. This would have been the case had Rushdie’s merging of form and content really resonated with me, which it regrettably didn’t.

Of course, all of this is a huge injustice to Salman Rushdie and the Satanic Verses. Rushdie is a tremendously gifted fiction writer; his lyrical style can dance effortlessly from humor to tragedy and craft some of the most beautiful and fantastical passages I’ve ever read. All of which says nothing of his and his book’s obvious influence in some of my favorite authors, from Zadie Smith to Junot Diaz. The problem was the Satanic Verses did not scratch a particular itch. I think that if I had read Rushdie in the classroom with any number of resources at my disposal I would have written my college capstone course’s final paper on it instead of…well...this.