The Real House Guys of St. Petersburg

 

Books like Crime and Punishment make me genuinely despair that Americans don't read anymore. When I was in high school, I was a disaffected youth; didn't apply myself, didn't feel I had a real identity, and was just perpetually angry about something I could never put my finger on. As a side note, I think young men experience this all over American suburbs and today it's called "the male loneliness epidemic". 

Then a friend of mine handed me a book by Fyodor Dostoevsky and said "Here, read. Open your mind". My interaction with reading at that moment in time was books read in school and Harry Potter. The book I was handed was Notes from Underground. I can't profess to have understood the book well, but I could resonate with the anger, the helplessness, the desire to both hide and shine. I was obsessed with Dostoevsky from that point forward. 

I next read Crime and Punishment, and while I enjoyed it, I unfortunately took all the wrong lessons. Raskolnikov seemed cool. I liked the idea of being a vain, smart guy. 

(Hope everyone I knew at that time can forgive me for being insufferable, it was high school. I've read a lot since then, and that's far from who I am today.)

At any rate, Crime and Punishment is just a parade of men who are massive pieces of shit., socially isolated men. There are womanizers, charlatans, life-ruining alcoholic fathers, murderers, and pedophiles. All of them leaving behind a trail of disabused women. And leading the parade is Raskolnikov, a murderer who fancies himself Napoleon because he killed an old pawnbroker and her sister.

In the context of the modern Male Loneliness epidemic, it's hard to really square whether it's comforting that being consumed by vice and anger in Men is an age-old problem or even more concerning. Dostoevsky is pretty hostile to the idea that one's environment causes moral decay (the character who holds this view, Lebeziantnikov, is hilariously lampooned, although despite his foolishness might actually be one of the few decent guys in the novel), he seems to believe there is something dark in the heart of every man that needs taming.

And while I think he's wrong, his characters are painted with such vivid dimensions in order to demonstrate his point, I almost don't care. From the way they look, their mannerisms, their convictions, or lack of, it's so well constructed and entertaining. The clashes the characters have are brutally real; they oscillate between awkward and painful to heartwarming and life-affirming. 

Also, the book is funny as hell. It's witty and clever and Dostoevsky can stick it to his constructed assholes in satisfying ways that avoids cartoonishness.

I would explain plot elements to my wife, and she coined the phrase "the real house guys of St. Petersburg". It really is that fun. All of the above is why I think it is tragic that classics like this, with books in general, have fallen out of style. There really is a rich experience and modern parallels to be seen here. If a pissed off high school me hadn't resonated with the deep anger in this book and make me seek out social interaction I'd be a totally different man. I wish more young people could experience the same.

This is a Community Spiel

I have a very literarily inclined friend who, when I told I was rereading Infinite Jest this year, told me to keep him abreast of my thoughts. He was curious how it held up in one's thirties, so much of the novel seems connected to his twenties. I shared a lot of these concerns going into the book for the second time. 

That said, the first time I read the book, about 10 years ago, I remember it made an impact. I was in my mid-twenties then; I had just started a career and was navigating post-college adulthood.  But I also remember Infinite Jest being almost too ridiculous, and I didn't resonate as much with the themes of addiction or social isolation.  My introduction to DFW was actually the Pale King, which I would actually argue is better suited for that stage of your life, even as incomplete as it is (so is your life in your mid-twenties).

Having re-read the book now at 35 I can say that The Infinite Jest is not only the perfect book to read in your thirties, it's actually the perfect book to read in the ridiculousness of now.

At 35 I feel the power of technology has largely been focused on ravaging my attention span and social battery life. My family and I are beset by a constant barrage of hedonism: food designed to be overly addictive, portable screens designed to be maximumally engaged with, a market economy built around, as Bo Burnham once astutely put it; "colonizing your attention span and every second of your life". 

Inifinite Jest is set in a not-so-distant future and focuses on a couple of congruent plot lines that revolve around the aftermath of an estranged Tennis Academy owning filmmaker creating an Entertainment Cartridge so entertaining that it renders the viewer (literally) terminally addicted to viewing it. The novel explores both the mico/personal/familial level and the macro/geopolitical level of such a creation. This might seem like a hamfisted comment on technology, and it is, but the more dystopian your society gets, the more obvious dystopian literature becomes.

David Foster Wallace could not, in 1996 when he wrote Infinite Jest, predict the age of big data or smartphones or Instagram Reels. It's impossible to stress how little it matters that he got the exact technologies correct and how unbelievably impressive it is that he was able to capture what it's capable of. 

Instead of predicting streaming, the world of Infinite Jest has entertainment cartridges that people plug into their massive telephone screens to port in a broadcast. It's remarkably similar to streaming on a smartphone for something written in 1996. 

The Entertainment is the name of the cartridge that forcibly addicts its viewers. I think the reason DFW gets away with the thematic obviousness is that the book loves to fuck with you in its form. Like the fact that it's 1100 pages long and has 200 pages of footnotes that make you flip away from the main text on a side quest. DFW knows the reader is a distracted animal. Sometimes, he likes to punish you with a highly technical, chemistry term heavy history of DMT, other times, he likes to bash you in the head with an obvious truth like you're seven years old. All of these things make finishing the book an accomplishment. 

There are other modern things it's worth noting only for the fun of it. Telephone calls in the world of Infinite Jest have been replaced by video calls, leading to people with sickening self-consciousness all the time. Sounds familiar? There is a footnote on grocery delivery services where you order groceries off your phone. There is a passage about a counter-culture to standing and bearing live witness to things. Again, the overall capture from the technology here is the effects on people, but it is funny when he gets the actual existence of the technology right as well. 

In the midst of reading, I would come across things like this video of a teacher talking about how all the kids in her class "behave like addicts" because they're given a neverending feed of dopamine from their cellphones and then go through withdrawals in school: https://www.instagram.com/teachermisery/reel/DHwe2f8SeLL/  

These things really hit home after DFW hits you with the real societal ramifications to overstimulation, to isolating large swaths of the (if not the entire) population in their "customized screens...a floating no-space world of personal spectation". 10 years ago I remember feeling the macro-societal plot in the Infinite Jest too cartoonish, but a decade later, our former-reality star president is threatening to buy Greenland and to annex Canada - which is a literal plot point in this book! There is a new organization run by a billionaire and named after a cryptocurrency scam that is gutting the public sector with reckless abandon right now. Suddenly, Infinite Jest's fictional government department of "Unspecificed Services" is no longer ridiculous. 

It could be that our infinite distractibility drives isolation; it's easier to be in front of your little viewing monitor perfectly calibrated to cater to the chemistry in your brain than to deal with people, even loved ones. This feeling should be immeasurably recognizable in anyone who comes home after a long day at work and reaches for their smartphone or video game controller rather than interacting with their family. 

It is then that the intense isolation brings the dark irony to life. The more isolated we become the less we care about the people around us and what happens to them. We are living in the societal implication of all of this, which is why Infinite Jest feels so important now. All of this is In The Book.

DFW does offer an answer too, but as is usually the case with great fiction authors (see my review on Ministry for the Future), it misses the mark.  Weaved throughout Inifinite Jest is "a community spiel"; whether it's the Tennis Academy boys and their tight friendships getting them through the grueling sports and academia regimen or the addicts in the book's halfway house finding community and getting clean through AA. The only way to seemingly beat back the hedonistic onslaught is to ground yourself in the people around you despite how difficult and arduous it is. 

Do not get me wrong; this is a beautiful message and one that everyone should take seriously and try to emulate. This is important. But there is a distinct lack of villains in Infinite Jest. Things like hyper-powerful drugs, addictive technologies and foods seem just immutable, like they just exist in the world from out of nowhere. Outside the book, the villains abound. Capitalism and the profit-seekers the system breeds are the ones who are unleashing these things. Social media companies employ some of the greatest scientific minds to figure out how to attract your eyes to the screen; scientists at huge food and drug conglomerates are figuring out how to make you maximally addicted to their product. Even now that weed is legal, its potency and desirability are being worked on. Vapes, porn, junk food, social media, energy drinks, the addictiveness of these things is visited upon us for a profit and it is truly ruining our lives, planet, culture, and probably the fabric of society.  

Not only does DFW explicitly leave these things out of a book that would seem to have plenty of room for them, but he also gives several explications as to why he is doing so explicitly. The most forward is when several characters attend an AA meeting and someone speaking tries to give an explanation as to why they are an addict, why they have the "disease";

"the talk's tone of self pity itself is less offensive than the subcurrent of explanation, an appeal to exterior Cause that can slide, in the addictive mind, so insidiously into Excuse that any causattribution is in Boston AA feared, shunned, punished by empathetic distress. The Why of the disease is a labyrinth it is strongly suggested all boycott the Boston AA in here that protects against a return to Out There is not about explaining what caused your disease. It's about a goofily simple practical recipe for how to remember you've got the disease day by day and how to treat the disease day by day, how to keep the seductive ghost of a bliss long absconded from baiting you and hooking you."

This is repeatedly implied, but the other favorite is the group that protagonist Hal stumbles upon thinking he is going to an AA meeting; the group is really one that entirely focuses on the reasons for one's afflictions. I would spoil the portrayal of the people in this meeting, but let's just say DFW is not kind to this idea and what it does to a person. 

There is almost a Petersonian, Rules-to-Life aspect to that belief. That it doesn't actually matter where any of our problems come from and only matters how you get through it. This doesn't necessarily diminish the importance of DFW's work; I would give the advice inherent in this book to anyone freely, and in fact, try to live it in my own life. However, I think it is important to both understand where these afflictions derive and take an activist approach to dismantling the forces that are raining them down. Even if it is only in artistic expression. 

So in the end, yes, if you're in your thirties and alive right now, Inifinite Jest holds up. In fact you would be doing yourself a favor by forcing yourself to read it. I feel like DFW wrote this book knowing every person who finished it is a victory over The Entertainment as it exists in the real world. That's two wins for me. 

 For pure DFW philosophical literary magic, turn to Page 203.

The Lost Boys Never Grow Up

 

Review of What is the What by Dave Eggers.

It's important to read books like this. Let's talk about why. 

What is the What by Dave Eggers tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, an immigrant from Sudan to the US. According to the novel's introduction, Achak sought out an author through a friend to help tell his story as a novel and Eggers answered the call.

That summary will carry with it a whole host of assumptions, many of which flooded my head while reading the intro; is this going to be an incredibly contrived bootstrap story following a tale of some otherized sense of individually experienced hardships delivered by a white guy's pen?

Spoiler; it wasn't. Assuming so ended up being a massive disservice to Eggers who, whatever one may feel about him, knows how to curate and tell stories.What is the What isn't a story about hardship it is a story of unbelievable horrors. Eggers doesn't revel in the details as though he were there, he crafts Achak's cruel and violent experiences with a simplicity that is haunting and critical to the way they impact the reader. 

Take the horrifying scene in which an airplane bombs the group of "Lost Boys", a group of children displaced and forced to march across Sudan by the civil war;

"But the plane returned a few minutes later, and soon after, there was a whistle. Dut screamed to us that we needed to run but did not tell us where. We ran in a hundred directions and two boys chose the wrong direction. They ran for the shelter of a large tree and this is where the bomb struck."

Achak's childhood story of displacement from his home is a non-stop barrage of atrocities that should sicken the privileged American reader. Watching his family and loved ones butchered or sold into slavery, his village burn, walking for miles and miles with thousands of other Lost Boys, seeing his peers eaten by lions and collapse dead from exhaustion. The violence visited upon little kids, rendered in the simplistic but profound way Eggers chooses to expound in it is heartwrenching and stomach-churning.  

We're also given Achak's life chronicled in two different refugee camps, all told from his current perspective as an immigrant to the US. His life in America is equally as important as his violence-steeped childhood. While it isn't the bulk of the novel, we're told the story of Achak's life as he undergoes some of our favorite and almost uniquely American burdens, made all the more... burdensome by the fact that he is an immigrant. 

The atrocities of war and violence make an interesting juxtaposition to Achak's life in America. Here he is obviously free from many of the ravages of a civil war, a government actively trying to kill him, and can more or less experience the great abundance of things like food and running water in our nation.

However we do see Achak suffer from gun violence (his apartment is broken into by armed burglars and he's severely pistol-whipped by one), systematic indifference (the police do little to nothing when they finally respond hours later), health injustice (the emergency room makes him wait over 24 hours to see a doctor, he has no health insurance with which to pay), discrimination (he's treated poorly because of his race and his status as an immigrant from Africa), domestic violence (the woman he loves is killed by a man she was supposed to be married to), exploitation (he's underpaid and overworked at every job he's had), and more, less categorical shit is heaped on too (he can't seem to get into a university out of his dead end community college because of his age). We also hear of his many cohorts who were also moved from the refugee camp to the states succumbing to gambling addictions, dying in fist fights, falling to drink, etc. 

This is not the typical tale of a striving immigrant bootstrapping his way to greatness in the greatest of all nations after fleeing his "shithole country" (Trump's words not mine). This is the very real story, both in part and on the whole, of what millions of refugees and immigrants experience every day on this planet. War or famine or state violence, usually spurred in some large or small way by the United States, followed by incredible suffering or death. Those that make it to the US are then confronted with the many contradictions of life here; vast wealth and innovation and fame and healthcare and bureaucratic efficiencies and order all on wonderful global display but entirely inaccessible to them. 

So why is this important to read? Because Donald Trump is president again. Because we're about to see migrants being whipped by border patrol on horseback again. Because this country never stopped putting "kids in cages". Because we're going to see more boats sinking in the Red Sea. Because we're bankrolling Israel's genocide. Because it is important to consider the mountain of corpses we wake up on top of every morning to live our precious, normal lives. 

The Hope is Just a Logo

 “Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children” - Sitting Bull

In full authorial disclosure, after I read The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells I was so wracked with fear and anxiety that I had to put the whole Kids Today project on hold. Wells wrote such a believable and horrific future for my children and their children that I could only describe having what I assume is a panic attack (never had one!). I dove into fiction for a bit but remembered I had saved Naomi Klein’s On Fire to hopefully spark some hope for the future.

The point of reading Klein is that she doesn’t just have one of the sharpest visions and world views for a future without suffering in a capitalist-fueled climate nightmare, but also a vision for how we get there. This is something that I have rarely found climate texts reconciling with. I thought Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future depicted one of the best possible outcomes, but his visualization for how to get there was completely unimaginative and mostly nonsensical. I think the key difference is Klein is an activist and therefore can more easily conceptualize the movements she is a part of making meaningful change at scale.

Hence I cracked open On Fire hoping to be given, if not some degree of hope for the future of the planet, at least a blueprint, something I could potentially build on in my local community. I couldn’t have predicted that I would be finishing this book at a confusing time; just one week before the 2024 presidential election, in which Donald “Drill-Baby-Drill” Trump was elected.

I’m not here to hash out the autopsy on the Kamala Harris campaign and how it failed to mount a meaningful rivalry with the Trump campaign. However, one component I was paying attention to in the aftermath was the plethora of young people, described mostly as despondent, who either didn’t vote, didn’t vote for Kamala Harris, or actually voted for Trump. I’m not alone in noticing there are armies of young people who seem to have nothing to believe in.

One of the reasons I’m On-The-Left is I firmly believe in the possibility for a better world; one not dependent on the capital class of owners and their whims, but of true redistributive power and justice. It’s worth considering if Klein and other ambassadors On The Left are winning the battle not just of ideas, but of movements. It’s possible, as I often feel, to be completely convinced and yet utterly lost.

Klein’s On Fire is a series of essays and speeches that “tracks [her] own attempt to probe a different set of barriers - some economic, some ideological, but others related to the deep stories about the right of certain people to dominate land and the people living closest to it”. She collapses her many arguments and movements into “the Green New Deal”, projecting on it a “kind of response that might succeed in toppling those narratives and economic interests, responses that weave seemingly disparate crises into a common story of civilizational transformation.”

Maybe it’s because I was so frantically searching the text for something to pin my hope on, but I seemed to miss the concreteness of what exactly we need to be working towards. And I really hate to make this critique of Klein, she’s one of the best, but exactly because she is one of the best she so exemplifies the problem the left has of acting and inspiring action in turn.

I think because it’s a movement largely buoyed by academics, there is a real problem dealing out an outline of things we can be doing right now. This can best be demonstrated by walking the litany of dos and don’ts that Klein explores in this book.

To Klein, the climate crisis is a larger culmination of the ravages of capitalism, which also means it is tied to other problems with the same roots; things like private healthcare, privatization, imperialism, racism, sexism, exploitation…the list is endless. This means the most obvious solution is the Green New Deal; a set of policy proposals aimed at transforming the very fabric of society to be BOTH greener and more equitable (the caps are important). There is the jobs guarantee program that will be launched to build green infrastructure, single-payer healthcare, and other welfare and government programs that are designed to grow the economy and green the economy for everyone. She is ecstatic to point out the new “bloc of politicians in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere ready to translate the urgency of the climate crisis into policy and connect the dots of the multiple crises of our time”.

So voting and coalescing for political power and advancing policies, that’s something to get behind, right? Not exactly. The heart of many of these essays isn’t an argument for any given policy within the Green New Deal, her blueprint is for a movement focused “not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—this time, embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance and cooperation rather than hierarchy.” Her issues with simply advancing big government policies is “an ecological crisis that has its roots in the overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by improving the efficiency of our economies but by reducing the amount of material stuff we produce and consume”. It can’t just be what she calls climate Keynesianism, because then we run the risk that “the salaries from all the good green jobs it creates [are] immediately poured into high-consumer lifestyles that inadvertently end up increasing emissions—a scenario where everyone has a good job and lots of disposable income and it all gets spent on throwaway crap imported from China destined for the landfill.”

Klein understands that “shifting cultural values is a tall order”, and it certainly can’t be done simply by voting and advancing policies. So then maybe we should first start working to change our culture; producing art and having difficult conversations to move people to consume less. Perhaps that would have a cascading, trickle-up effect where we can then fight for those major policies in the GND.

However, Klein critiques this as well. Saying making changes as consumers and individual activists, even changing those habits and organizing in our “neighborhood or town” is simply “acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small” and abandoning the “structural changes, the policy and legal work, to others.”

This is why being leftist is maddening. I never know what to DO when I read shit like this. The ideas make so much sense but the articulation of getting there; whether it’s labor unions, or electoralism, or dual power, or whatever it all feels already defeated, utterly impossible. When I read Klein’s stand-out line in this book; “It is true that we have to do it all. That we have to change everything. But you personally do not have to do everything.” it’s almost impossible for me not to translate this into “you personally do not have to do anything”.

When Klein speaks of her strong emotions when she thinks about “the tremendous intergenerational theft underway” or the “sheer panic about the extreme weather we have already locked in for these kids” or the “sadness about what they won’t ever know growing up in a mass extinction” I am right there with her.

And this election brings with it another level of despair. Trump is going to visit untold cruelties onto populations this nation has deemed sacrificial. My privilege will protect me and my children for a long time I’m sure, many people with that same privilege made the calculation that their immediate ability to consume; buy cheap gas for their big cars and have cheap things and access to cheaper take-out and the ability to watch their 401k go up infinitely was more important to them than whatever longterm effects will be wrought upon the planet. Because the only thing to believe in is the terrifying and crushing reality of preserving your own comfort and the comfort of your family right now.

So no, there is not a lot of hope in this book. There isn’t really a lot of hope anywhere. The only liferaft of hope is that people will see “the light” and that a great many more people are seeing it than I thought. There is a great refrain in a Malcolm X speech where he implores his audience to “never let them tell you how many of YOU there are”. Even after a disastrous election, I took a lot of hope from my friend Matt’s recent piece where he wrote that “a vote, like a poll, is a snapshot in time and does not represent any sort of commitment, nor is it a particularly meaningful political act.” I cannot simply believe this mass of people who voted for Trump or didn’t vote because they could only believe in the material reality in front of their face are wholly lost to the cause.

As far as what we can all be doing once we have seen the light, this seems to be, as cynical as it sounds, something we need to figure out on our own. But if Klein’s thesis that all the issues of our time are threaded by the climate crises - and I am compelled to believe she is correct - then working toward any issue is as effective as any other. Basically, if you don’t know what to do, just do something.

A Whole Different Self

 

It's easy to feel stuck when you're in your 30s. I think the luster of your career has largely worn off as you realize you're going to spend the majority of your time working and not making meaningful relationships with other people or even the world around you more broadly. It's also the beginning of your "mid-life" and you are likely coming to the realization that all of what you are going to be is the result not only of choices you have already made but of millions of choices that were made even before you were born. 

It's a helpless feeling, I've been there myself and I've seen many of my peers there. This is part of what made the Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami such an interesting book to me. It chronicles a 30-year-old man named Mr. Okada in Japan at an interesting time. He has recently quit his administrative job after feeling the uselessness of it becoming too unbearable, his wife is becoming estranged as she continues engaging in her professional life and eventually disappears altogether (hardly a spoiler it's on the back cover summary), and his cat has gone missing. 

Murakami is writing an existential novel and it's interesting - although I'll be honest it gets a little tedious - to see Okada written like Meursault from The Stranger. He seems listless; barely looking for work, certainly not looking for the cat like his wife asked him, and a good portion of the beginning pages is just detailing what Okada makes for breakfast. 

There is a prevalent theme of water in the novel, both physical manifestations of it like at the bottom of wells (there is quite a bit of time spent in the bottom of wells) as well as meta-physical representations of life flowing all around us, a connecting force to us in the past, a flow of decisions that culminate in your current life and the life taking place before you. Okada knows that the Japanese occupation of Mongolia in WWII has a lot to do with the current blockage his life is undergoing and we are treated to some truly horrific - albeit brilliantly written - vignettes about various characters in that time. 

Clairvoyance is a partner theme throughout the Windup Bird Chronicle, the idea being that life modeling the flow of water means some people are able to look forward and see the immutable future. Those who learn their future like the WWII veteran Mr. Mamiya are unable to change the course of the water and lead meaningless lives as a result, again stuck in middle-aged fear of life's mundanity. We follow Okada as he attempts to make the sort of drastic decisions needed to change the events of his life, a journey that takes him in the past, down possible other futures and the various tributaries, swamps, and rivulets that his path may take him. It's worth noting that the novel's villain is someone who can control the flow very well, rising in his political and academic career; cast as a completely vile and insufferable person. 

World War II makes an interesting generational juxtaposition as well. I'm not very certain about the cultural view 1980s (when the novel is set) Japan has towards World War II, but if it's anything like the US, and there are some things in this novel that imply this is the case, then WWII is the last generation of men who did anything great. In my country, we call this generation the Greatest Generation. Japan obviously committed some striking atrocities during the time, but atrocities were also brought upon them by the Soviets and of course the US. The horrors explored in this novel are among its best-written parts, punctuating reminders through an otherwise pretty languid story of the horrific violence that came before.

These vignettes are something this novel desperately needed. I think the sort of "lost in translation" lost guy in his 30s who meets a manic pixie dreamgirl who prompts him to take control of his life is really overwrought and pretty outdated. I'm sure if I read this 25 years ago I would have thought it was great, but I think we're past that now. Largely because I'd like to think we're past the point of thinking that women - and especially young girls - are not props for the self-discovery journey of very sad men. However the war scenes are vivid enough to cancel out some of the more annoying dream sequences, the tale of Mr. Mamiya is so haunting and reviling that it removes any stain from the Wind Up Bird Chronicle that would mark it as a cute novel. In fact, I would argue this makes the novel worth reading at all.