The books I read in 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic has touched tens of millions of people around the world. For us, it precluded the usual work and travel schedules and kept us here at home, where I've probably spent more time in 2020 then the past two or three years combined. 

Bizarrely and for all the wrong reasons, at long last I've had ample time to read. In turn, all this reading has constituted a massive brainfood overload, and I'll make no attempt to summarize the following.

However, at this precise moment in time, here are the three books from 2020 that made the deepest impression. 

Capital and Ideology, by Thomas Piketty 

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson    

War and War, a novel by László Krasznahorkai

  
These were consumed in a frenetic period from late July through November; as the mass insanity engendered by the presidential campaign intensified, so did my need to sept aside and try to make sense of it. After Krasznahorkai's deeply affecting novel, I plunged into non-fiction until the election was concluded. 

Then, turning back to fiction, I learned a final lesson: when your neighborhood is descending into crazed madness, Broch's novel The Sleepwalkers cannot provide the slightest measure of escapist relief. 

But four novels by Kurt Vonnegut in one calendar year might be trying to tell me something, too. 

So it goes; here they are. A final note: 2020 was the year New Albanians said goodbye to Destinations Booksellers. It was a refuge amid the Gahanist mediocrity hereabouts, and will be missed. 

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Books of 2020 (chronologically in reverse order)

31. Cat’s Cradle, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut

30. Finding Bix: The Life and Afterlife of a Jazz Legend, by Brendan Wolfe

29. The Sleepwalkers, a novel by Hermann Broch

28. Encounter, a collection of essays by Milan Kundera

27. Capital and Ideology, by Thomas Piketty

26. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

25. Jailbird, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut

24. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson

23. Capitalism & Disability, selected writings by Marta Russell

22. Backlash: What happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America, by George Yancy

21. Towards the One & Only Metaphor, a novel by Miklos Szentkuthy

20. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future, by James S. Shapiro

19. Craft: An Argument, by Pete Brown

18. War and War, a novel by László Krasznahorkai

17. Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, translated by Matvei Yankelevich

16. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, by Frederick Lewis Allen

15. Mother Night, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut

14. Which Fork Do I Use with My Bourbon?, by Peggy Noe Stevens and Susan Reigler

13. How We Eat with Our Eyes and Think with Our Stomachs, by Melanie Mühl and Diana von Kopp

12. Bliss Was It in Bohemia, a novel by Michel Viewegh

11. An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, by Elizabeth David

10. Russian Cosmism, edited by Boris Groys

9. The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World, by Christy Campbell

8. Bluebeard, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut

7. The Ghosts of My Life, by Mark Fisher

6. Capitalist Realism, by Mark Fisher

5. Mysteries of the Middle Ages: And the Beginnings of the Modern World, by Thomas Cahill

4. The Prague Cemetery, a novel by Umberto Eco

3. Bavarian Helles, by Horst Dornbusch

2. Strong Towns, by Charles Marohn

1. The Tragedy of Liberation, by Frank Dikkotter

Revisiting Neil Postman's bet on Huxley over Orwell.

My old friend John Campbell posted on Facebook: "Aldous Huxley was right, not George Orwell."

Before repeating John's quoted passage from Neil Postman's 1985 book, here is Postman's son Andrew to explain it, courtesy of The Guardian in 2017.

My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World

...The central argument of Amusing Ourselves is simple: there were two landmark dystopian novels written by brilliant British cultural critics – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – and we Americans had mistakenly feared and obsessed over the vision portrayed in the latter book (an information-censoring, movement-restricting, individuality-emaciating state) rather than the former (a technology-sedating, consumption-engorging, instant-gratifying bubble).

Neil Postman, from Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

Books: "Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism," by Kristen R. Ghodsee.

Prague, 1989.

This isn't Kristen R. Ghodsee's first appearance at NA Confidential. See this post from 2017: Women, sex, socialism and Slavenka Drakulić's How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed.

Today's article appeared at Jacobin about a year later, and the topic still fascinates me.

No Scrubs ... an interview, by Meagan Day, with Kristen R. Ghodsee (Jacobin)

In her new book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee recounts a popular joke that’s told in many East European languages:

In the middle of the night a woman screams and jumps out of bed, eyes filled with terror. Her startled husband watches her rush into the bathroom and open the medicine cabinet. She then dashes to the kitchen and inspects the inside of the refrigerator. Finally she flings open a window and gazes out onto the street below their apartment. She takes a deep breath and returns to bed.

“What’s wrong with you?” her husband says. “What happened?”

“I had a terrible nightmare,” she says. “I dreamed that we had the medicine we needed, that our refrigerator was full of food, and that the streets outside were safe and clean.”

“How is that a nightmare?”

The woman shakes her head and shudders. “I thought the Communists were back in power.”

Hundreds of millions of living Eastern Europeans, including many who abhorred the political reality behind the Iron Curtain, report that their basic standard of living was higher under authoritarian socialism than under contemporary free-market capitalism. Taking a cue from them, Ghodsee’s book starts from the premise that some aspects of life were better under twentieth-century state socialism than they are today, even as others were worse. Appreciating the bad parts doesn’t require ignoring the good parts, her thinking goes. One can acknowledge simultaneously the horrors of the secret police and the comforts of a strong social safety net.

One of the most positive features of state socialism, Ghodsee argues, is that it gave women economic independence from men ...

Suzanne Moore reviewed the book in 2018 at The Guardian.

... This zippy little book argues that not only is unregulated capitalism bad in itself, it is also disproportionately bad for women.

The US academic Kristen Ghodsee has lived in several eastern European countries so she doesn’t wear rose-tinted spectacles, acknowledging that Albania and Romania have always been awful places for women, but she seeks with great brio and nuance to lay out what some socialist states achieved for women.

At heart this is about what happens when women are no longer economically dependent on men and childcare is collectivised ...

ON THE AVENUES: Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger.

Dearest readers,

At the beginning of 2020, I resolved to play it completely straight and rededicate this weekly column to the proposition that it might be freed from reruns -- for the most part.

I might on occasion incorporate bits of previous writing, or quote myself, but no more cutting and pasting entire past columns -- however much I rationalize that you urgently need to be reading them for a second or third time.

I'm happy to report that I made it all the way from New Year's Day to June 4, and have produced 20-odd columns of fresh material. However, this week I'm struggling, and the block is odd given there is no shortage of available topics. But maybe abundance is the problem, and there's too much to sort through.

Speaking from the perspective of my polemical workbench, the first two months of the year were spent detoxing from daily doses of local political discourse -- or what passes for it in intellectually constipated New Gahania. A new study from the Pew Research Center suggests I've successfully stuck to the terms of the sabbatical 86.7% of the time. 

In March came our moment in medical history, the coronavirus pandemic -- and yes, it was real and remains so quite outside the denials so many of you have chosen to embrace. The attendant dislocations of COVID have been challenging, although the dictates of karma urge me to refrain from complaining when our household vantage point is one of good personal health.

The past two to three weeks have been about America's periodic avoidance of an honest reckoning with history as it pertains to Black Lives Matter(ing). I'll support just about any movement aimed at anti-racism, anti-fascism and anti-robberbaroncapitalism, but at the moment, as an old white guy myself, I'd hate to be lumped in with Bumbling Bill Hanson's elder hostel of white male newspaper columnists pontificating about race from their pulpits in Otisco.   

Oh, and I forgot that it's also an election year. Roughly 1,000 years ago, Bernie Sanders was still in the race and we had a modicum of choice to defeat The Donald. Now we have the sort of Democratic candidate that Squire Adam would fill buckets drooling over. So much for "hope."

Obviously I might be writing about any of these trends, but somewhat curiously there seems to be little for me to add to the ongoing discussion. Maybe the essence of this writer's bottled-up blockage is persistent anger -- at the ongoing and still unspeakably bizarre Gahan personality cult, at the science-denying narcissists unable to look past the tip of their noses, and at the unreconstructed racists reminding me of the prevalence of sheer American dumbassery.

Writing isn't easy when you're angry, or at least it isn't for me. A measure of detachment is necessary, and I haven't been able to manage it lately. Stream-of-consciousness rants are possible, and have been deployed before, but the older I get, the more hesitant I am to undertake them. They're like running a marathon, and absolutely wear me out.

Accordingly, there's is a sizable element of fatigue, and I need to push through it. Let's begin right here.

Knowing that writing more often for pay (a novel concept for me, indeed) would factor into the 2020 workload, I began in January by reducing NA Confidential blog's output (again), from three daily posts to two; probably owing to the six-month or more sabbatical from the rhetoric on behalf of the anti-Gahan resistance, this has resulted in a marked decline in reader interest.

So be it. 

I'm trying to write about beer as often as possible at the Pints&union blog in hopes of keeping a few balls (or beer bongs) hanging in the air until our likely reopening in July -- and don't quote me on what this return will look like, because it isn't yet clear. All I can say is that a new era will dawn, soon.

At Food & Dining Magazine, faced with no real possibility of publishing a summer print edition, we resolved instead to build up the web site and release as much original content as possible on that platform. A share of this surge falls to me, some to others in our stable of excellent writers; either way it takes time to implement, and my learning curve in terms of being a "digital editor" hasn't yet flattened.

I'm not breaking rocks or putting up hay, although at times this year my brain has needed a break.

---

With the traditional restorative activity of travel taken off the table this year by the virus, relaxation has come through the Forever Nostalgia Project: digitizing slides, negatives and photos of past European journeys, of which there have been 40. Around 1995 I abandoned slide film for the most part and went to regular printed photos. By 2005, digital was the norm. Here are the year's results, some of which are being shared at my Facebook page.

1985, the first trip to Europe
1991-92, the Slovak teaching sojourn
1993, Germany, Denmark, points east, etc
1994, Switzerland, Albania and Pamplona (Spain)
1997, Czech Republic and Germany
2003, Main/Tauber/Altmuhl/Danube (rivers) bicycling, Frankfurt to Vienna

In addition, there were a few odds and ends stateside. At any rate, quite a lot of images are left to scan (at least 14 European visits), and they will take years to finish ... but hey, we all need hobbies.

One real-world manifestation of nostalgia about the 2003 bicycling trip is a determination to get our bikes back in working condition. They're at the shop now. Soon, after seven years out of the saddle, there'll be a comeback. It will not resemble the halcyon days of the 2000 - 2008; commuting and the occasional Greenway should be enough.

Reading is a good diversion, too. Here are the year's books to date, in reverse chronological order. My favorites are marked with an asterisk.

*Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, by Frederick Lewis Allen
Which Fork Do I Use with My Bourbon? by Peggy Noe Stevens and Susan Reigler
How We Eat with Our Eyes and Think with Our Stomachs, by Melanie Mühl and Diana von Kopp
*Bliss Was It in Bohemia, a novel by Michel Viewegh
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, by Elizabeth David
Russian Cosmism, edited by Boris Groys
*The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World, by Christy Campbell
Bluebeard, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut
The Ghosts of My Life, by Mark Fisher
Capitalist Realism, by Mark Fisher
Mysteries of the Middle Ages: And the Beginnings of the Modern World, by Thomas Cahill
*The Prague Cemetery, a novel by Umberto Eco
Bavarian Helles, by Horst Dornbusch
Strong Towns, by Charles Marohn
The Tragedy of Liberation, by Frank Dikkotter

Awaiting its tenure on the night stand is the annual blockbuster summertime novel, as calculated to simmer my brain in its own juices. I've never made it all the way through Ulysses, by James Joyce. Is this finally the year?

Musically, it hasn't been a great six months for The Kind of Music Roger Likes. I'm buying fewer CDs of new music, but listening to each of them more closely than before. If you can't go wide, go deep. Here they are, organized in two-month increments. Why? I can't remember.

Album releases 2020, May and June
Blossoms … Foolish Loving Spaces
Ocean Alley … Lonely Diamond
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever … Sideways to New Italy
*Sleaford Mods … All That Glue
Sparks … A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip
*The 1975 … Notes on a Conditional Form
The Used … Heartwork

Album releases 2020, March and April
Grouplove … Healer
*Rookie … Rookie

Album releases 2020, January and February
*Courteeners … More. Again. Forever.
*Titus Andronicus … An Obelisk (2019)
*White Reaper … You Deserve Love (2019)
Wussy … What Heaven Is Like (2018)

Movies and television?

C'mon, regulars readers should know better. However, we've been working our way through the ageless Rumpole of the Bailey canon and a few other British dramas. My memory is shaky, and I may have watched the Downton Abbey movie. If so, I plead excessive gin.

Ah, yes. Drinking, another of my self-defense mechanisms.

It has been strange in this regard, and no one is likely to believe me, but as a guesstimate, I've consumed perhaps half the alcohol in 2020 as I would have swallowed normally.

It isn't clear to me why, although one possible explanation is that I dislike being constantly self-incapacitated during an unprecedented public health crisis, all the while surrounded by sniveling racists, reckless drivers, Trump-co-vidiots, masturbatory nihilists and various other bad actors.

Facing up to my deep-seated anger while keeping relatively sober? Now THAT'S a tall order, and yet I've tried every other way. Maybe playing against type really is best. Fools give you reasons ... wise men never try.

R

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Recent columns:

June 4: ON THE AVENUES: There, there. People are dying, so you may have to wait until 2021 for your pork chop sandwich.

May 28: ON THE AVENUES: The late, great Lee Kelly -- by Matt Nash.

May 21: ON THE AVENUES: Godlessness in defense of heathens, infidels, idolaters, atheists, non-theists, irreligious people, agnostics, skeptics, heretics and apostates.

May 14: ON THE AVENUES: Food is my friend, but please, I'm no foodie.

"The tradition of open-air, secondhand and antiquarian bookselling in Paris."

Personal collection, 1985.

Paris is synonymous with books. One might say "the arts" in general, though as a reader and admirer of the post-WWI generation of American expats in the French capital, it's always about words first for me.

The efforts of current mayor Anne Hidalgo to reduce the number of cars in the Paris city center can only enhance traditions like these outdoor book stalls.

The Bouquinistes of Paris (Atlas Obscura)

The tradition of open-air, secondhand and antiquarian bookselling in Paris dates back to the Renaissance.

 ... In 1762, the word bouquiniste first appeared in an edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, then simply meaning “bookseller.” It was later used to exclusively denote the antiquarian booksellers of Paris. During the French Revolution, editorial production dropped dramatically except for newspapers and brochures. Bouquinistes were warmly embraced during the revolution by aristocrats and the clergy, who yearned to read and acquire antique books for their collections. Under the reign of Napoleon I, the docks were embellished, and the Bouquinistes’s area of operation spread from the Quai Voltaire to the Pont Saint-Michel along the banks of the Seine.

And, for good measure, a famous Parisian bookstore of the more conventional bricks 'n' mortar variety.

ON THE AVENUES: Hemingway in a time of mercifully silent thunder.

It would be churlish and quite possibly childish of me to point out that after carefully considering all the episodes of Thunder Over Louisville occurring these past few seemingly endless decades, as always filled to the brim with superfluous noise and inanity, I’ve decided the one last Saturday was absolutely, positively my favorite … well, at least since 1988, when we were too busy gazing at Barry Bingham's surreal Falls Fountain to notice there weren't any pre-Derby pyrotechnics.

Tact isn’t my strong suit, so I’ll say it anyway: best Thunder ever. 

Officially this exercise in mass garishness has been moved to August, helpfully enabling far higher levels of drunken heatstroke as a corollary of wretched hard seltzer and salmonella-laced potato salad. Of course if social distancing is still being maintained, we’ll be compelled to stretch the crowd along the riverbank at least from Bethlehem to New Amsterdam, and this would be highly amusing.

But if Oktoberfest in Munich already has been canceled owing to the coronavirus, how can we even be sure there’ll be a Kentucky Derby in early September? Granted, Bavaria isn’t Buechel even if both of them have Bosnian connections.

I know many of you enjoy Louisville’s springtime slate of fireworks, warplanes, horse pimps and mint-borne despoliation of perfectly fine bourbon. Yes, I understand all about the economy, and your precious portfolios; a certain number of us must die so Trump might live, just as with Pinochet and Idi Amin.

Still, the prevailing peace and quiet amid the pandemic suits me just fine, and if we’re lucky, a returning black bear will defecate in the parking lot by the hotel atop Summit Springs.

Now THAT would be public art. Can someone send a drone and get the photo on Instagram?

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Speaking of failed states, as we grow old and our brains begin unraveling, a strange sort of free association comes to grip vast tracts of our subconscious.

People, images and occurrences long forgotten suddenly are disgorged, to be examined while scratching one’s noggin and muttering, WTF?

Last week in my inner world this randomness turned to books. Out of nowhere the thought came to me that I’ve been unfaithful to Ernest Hemingway, which is to say it hasn’t seemed necessary for a very long time to revisit Papa’s seminal works, even though he might well have been my single most important formative influence during the period between college graduation and the first voyage to Europe in 1985 -- apart from Arthur Frommer, of course.

I dimly remember that around the year 2000 someone gifted me with a collection of Hemingway’s short stories, and I read a few of them. Prior to that, perhaps the last time I’d read one of his novels was the late 1980s.

So, why would Hemingway come bobbing back to the surface after all this time?

Because Josh Turner brought up Hemingway during a barroom chat two months ago, and I’m guessing the seed was planted then, requiring time to slowly gestate.

Lately I’ve also been thinking quite a lot/far too much about Europe, or more precisely, the likelihood of COVID mandating an enforced absence from the continent this year. In 1985, prior to treading the soil, everything I knew about Europe came to me from secondary sources, whether classes, books, movies or television. Back then Hemingway was an inspiration to a youthful traveler. He had gone THERE and done THAT.

Papa was a Midwesterner like me, raised in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. He’d gone to Europe seeking adventure, and found plenty, first as a volunteer ambulance attendant in Italy during the Great War, then as a newspaper correspondent amid troubled times afterward. He married and the couple headed for Paris to live among the expatriate writer, artists and musicians during the roaring twenties.

Subsequently the English-speaking world learned about Spanish bullfighting culture from none other than Hemingway, the American who somehow instinctively grasped it. Later he experienced the Spanish Civil War up close, and rode with American troops following the D-Day landings.

Even without obvious historical touchstones like these, there were Hemingway’s many compelling descriptions of eating and drinking, like this passage randomly plucked from A Moveable Feast:

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

Think so? Oysters and alcohol always dispel the emptiness for me. Crusty bread and salami work, too.

By the time my plane touched down in Luxembourg in 1985, I’d read most of Hemingway’s novels and a good many of his short stories, as well as a collection of his newspaper dispatches and at least two biographies. It took until 2005, but we made it to the family house and museum in Oak Park.

Perhaps someday his homes in Key West and Cuba will be crossed off the bucket list, too, although at the present time let’s not talk about travel. It makes me wistful, which urges me to drink.

---

There always were other components of the Hemingway ethos that I found less salutary. Fishing and hunting never did much for me, and for all his endless talk of rugged male values, the writer himself could be shrill, vain, bullying and a backstabber.

The fact that the late Hemingway -- he committed suicide in 1961, perhaps as a result of instability brought on by brain injuries similar to those afflicting contemporary football players -- remained very much alive as a writer well into the 1980s probably is a result of school curriculums of the era based on white American male writers.

This is far less the case today, which is good.

At this point in time there is little use attempting to salvage Hemingway’s cloddish and destructive personal peccadillos, which have been explored at length during the period of my own lifetime. He was as he was. Maybe I’ve also moved on, although his authority at a certain time in my life remains indisputable.

When I began thinking about Hemingway last week, the first of his books to come to me wasn’t The Sun Also Rises or For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was Across the River and Into the Trees, a poorly selling novel from 1950, prior to Papa rallying to produce The Old Man and the Sea, arguably the finest distillation of his artistic credo sans bombast, and a final triumph.

While not as dire as the reviews at the time suggest, Across the River and into the Trees surely is not Hemingway’s best effort. Married to his fourth wife at the time, and ardently (embarrassingly?) pursuing an Italian girl less than half his age, the author decided to base the novel’s plot on his own fevered imagination.

In an autobiographical sense, it wasn’t pretty, and yet there are moments of evocative description of people and places.

The novel is set in Northern Italy, in and around Venice, and near the battlefront where Hemingway served during WWI. This also is very close to Trieste, where we gloriously vacationed last winter, surely accounting for my selective recall about a book I last bothered opening some 35 years ago.

Bizarrely it still is there, lodged in a hidden cranium nook, waiting for something to extract it, or, as in the current period, subject to weirdness and whim ensuing from a societal template almost none of us have ever experienced.

I conclude with this thought from Papa.

All I must do now was stay sound and good in my head until morning when I would start to work again.

If only it might be that simple.

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Recent columns:

April 16: ON THE AVENUES: Bunker mentalities, bunker abnormalities; bunker dreams, bunker screams.

April 9: ON THE AVENUES: #VoteEwwNoMatterWho, or when being realistic means being radical.

April 2: ON THE AVENUES: Pandemic, pornographic, pecksniffian. Just three random words until the booze kicks in.

March 26: ON THE AVENUES: It's a tad premature to sing the healing game.

"America won the cold war. What went wrong?"

Tear down the (Berlin) wall, 1991.

The writer Andrew Bacevich:

"Globalisation was meant to create wealth, but many Americans complain of inequality; military dominance sucked the country into never-ending wars that sacrificed the children of lower-income families (but, for the most part, no one else’s); the pursuit of fulfilment led to the withering of duty and a selfish, atomised society; and the supremacy of the presidency became a recipe for voters’ disappointment."

Which book should I buy? I'm leaning toward Bacevich's.

(He) warns that, although Mr Trump offered no definition of post-cold-war America, just a rejection, there is no going back. That is a lesson for Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, who gives the sense that going back is what he would most like to do.

As with the coronavirus ...

The victor’s curse: America won the cold war. What went wrong? at The Economist

Three contrasting books examine a superpower’s malaise

• Do Morals Matter? By Joseph Nye. Oxford University Press; 268 pages; $24.95 and £18.99.
• The Abandonment of the West. By Michael Kimmage. Basic Books; 368 pages; $32 and £25.
• The Age of Illusions. By Andrew Bacevich. Metropolitan Books; 239 pages; $27.

The United States, Andrew Bacevich writes near the start of his account of post-cold-war America, is like the man who won the Mega Millions lottery: his unimagined windfall holds the potential for disaster. Things are not quite that bad. But almost three decades after America watched the Soviet Union fall apart, victory feels like a disappointment.

The end of the cold war established America as the most powerful country in history. Its armed forces were unmatched and its governing philosophy seemingly had no rival. Yet it has struggled either to prevail against illiterate tribesmen and tinpot dictators or to get to grips with a newly assertive Russia and a rising China. In a pandemic its allies might have expected America to co-ordinate a planet-wide response. Instead, it has turned inward. Just as startlingly, America itself fell prey to bitterness and division, culminating in the presidency of a man who won office by rejecting many of the values which had helped bring about that original victory.

This is the sombre backdrop for three very different books about America’s place in the world. Joseph Nye, a former dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, looks at how presidents have struggled to embody their country’s moral leadership. Michael Kimmage, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, teases out the contradictions in the idea of an American-led “West”. And Mr Bacevich, a professor emeritus at Boston University, depicts the construction (and then, he argues, the demolition) of a post-cold-war doctrine of American power.

None of these books is the last word on an important question. But each offers tantalising insights into how victory soured ...

HISTORY: Yuri Slezkine's The House of Government and the making of the Soviet ruling class.

It's been a year and a half since I read The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, by Yuri Slezkine, described by its publisher as "the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction.” I found it interesting, indeed, and it inspired an educational digression about various palaces (see below).

Yesterday out of nowhere came a lengthy essay at Jacobin about Slezkine's book ("The Making of the Soviet Ruling Class"), written by Kevin Murphy: "(He) teaches Russian history at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory won the 2005 Deutscher Memorial Prize."

This essay isn't for everyone, but if you're interested in early Soviet history, it's informative.

A Flawed Masterwork

The House of Government is the most contradictory, eclectic study of the Russian Revolution ever published. Brilliant, captivating, and often heart-wrenching, in many ways it is social history at its very best. Some of Yuri Slezkine’s harshest academic critics, who have only published obscure dust-collecting volumes, should realize that nothing comparable has been published in half a century. Slezkine should be commended for dedicating so many years of his life to producing an indispensable read for every serious student of the Russian Revolution.

But we also need to be honest about its flaws. The House of Government is a conceptual dumpster fire, framing what could easily have been an epic masterpiece into a predictable story that we’ve heard so many times before by putting forward a “continuity” thesis that relies upon a plethora of factual errors and omissions. Readers who can tune out the often exasperating analysis and treat it as unfortunate background noise will enjoy the ride.

Murphy uses a word we don't see every day.

As a prosopographical study of how an important part of the party apparatus converted itself into a new ruling class, The House of Government fills a huge gap in the history of Stalinism, even if the author himself doesn’t view it in such terms.

Prosopography defined: "A description of a person's social and family connections, career, etc., or a collection of such descriptions."

Slezkine's book and Murphy's essay both make for heavy reading, but I'm glad I did. There'll never be a time like that again ... will there?

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I suppose we'll have to settle for ... bottom left.

May 8, 2018

Time does not fly when you're reading cornerstone-sized tomes, but in the middle of Week Seven, there's light at the end of a humongous arched entryway in the building ostensibly being profiled: The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, by Yuri Slezkine.

Sorry, CM Barksdale: the book's about the people living in the colossal structure, not the bricks and mortar itself. In 1931, at roughly the same time this building was completed, the church down the way was demolished to make way for progress, Stalinist-style.

Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

 ... The original church, built during the 19th century, took more than 40 years to build, and was the scene of the 1882 world premiere of the 1812 Overture composed by Tchaikovsky. It was destroyed in 1931 on the order of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The demolition was supposed to make way for a colossal Palace of the Soviets to house the country's legislature, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Construction started in 1937 but was halted in 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union during World War II. Its steel frame was disassembled the following year, and the Palace was never built.

It never happened, and it was left to the Genius of the Carpathians, ill-fated Romanian despot Nicolae Ceaușescu, to erect the biggest damn Commie building of all -- not cloud-piercing skyscraper, but the Palace of the Parliament (formerly House of the Republic).

Stalin may not have gotten his Soviet palace, but Ceaușescu got his, good and hard after a show trial (template: Koba).

Why Joseph Stalin Never Got His Soviet Palace, by William O'Connor (The Daily Beast)

... The final designs for the palace were terrifying. The structure was a pyramidal skyscraper made up of seven ascending concentric cylinders. Each of those hulking cylinders was to “be decorated with allegorical sculptures of heroes of the Soviet epoch.”

Crowning this monstrosity was no less than a 328-foot statue of the deceased Vladimir Lenin.

Work on the Palace began in 1938, with the government spending roughly $18.9 million to get it started. The Soviets declared that it would open on Nov. 7, 1942, the 25th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, leading even The New York Times to snicker and write, “The building cannot possibly be completed by that date.”

The base of the building was to be 460 feet in diameter. It would be filled with offices, museums, restaurants, and a main hall with a capacity of 20,000.

It was also to have 148 elevators and 62 escalators. According to Time there would also be a library with 500,000 books.

The base was to be made of marble and granite, the rest of the building clad in a purple-red tufa (a type of limestone) from the Caucasus, and the statue would be made of aluminum or chrome steel.

Due to its height up in the clouds, engineers “estimated that on only ninety days out of the year will the head of the Lenin statue be clearly visible from the ground.”

The foundations were completed and the steel frame for the lower levels put in place, but alas, WWII got in the way. In 1942 the steel frame was dismantled to provide steel for the Red Army and more urgent infrastructure projects.

As a point of comparison, note that a 328-foot tall statue of Jeff Gahan would be taller than Riverview Tower, which is merely ≈ 190 feet.

BOOKS: Capitalist Realism, by Mark Fisher.

I may have to read it twice. Why has it taken me so long? Many thanks to Jon.

Here's a bit about the late Mark Fisher. He committed suicide in 2017.

MARK FISHER’S “K-PUNK” AND THE FUTURES THAT HAVE NEVER ARRIVED, by Hua Hsu (The New Yorker)

If there was a single theme around which K-Punk’s eclectic energies organized, it was the future. Specifically: What happened to it? Fisher feared that we were losing our ability to conceptualize a tomorrow that was radically different from our present.

K-Punk attracted an avid readership, and, in 2009, Fisher published “Capitalist Realism,” a slim, powerful book about “the widespread acceptance that there is no alternative to capitalism.” Fisher saw signs of exhausted resignation in everything from the faces of his students to grim Hollywood movies set in the near-future (“Children of Men,” “Wall-E”) to “Supernanny,” a British reality show about parents unable to rein in their misbehaving kids. Fisher was interested not only in the political causes and cultural expressions of this exhaustion but in its emotional dimensions, too: the feelings of sadness or despondency that seem increasingly common across the political spectrum.

Here's the reading tally for January and February.

• Capitalist Realism, by Mark Fisher
• Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe, by Thomas Cahill
• The Prague Cemetery, a novel by Umberto Eco
• Bavarian Helles (the beer style), by Horst Dornbusch
• Strong Towns, by Charles Marohn
• The Tragedy of Liberation, by Frank Dikkotter

Recommended COVID-19 reading: "The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History," by John Barry.

In 2005, just as the 7th edition of Gravity Head started (today's is #22), I came down with pneumonia. The book already on my nightstand became accompaniment to a period of forced convalescence: The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, by John Barry.

Arguably this wasn't the ideal choice given the circumstances, but Barry's account of the deadly influenza pandemic's arrival at the end of World War I was and remains riveting reading. I consider it one of the most influential books I've ever read.

ON THE AVENUES: The 32 most influential books in my life.

There's also a solid American Experience documentary called "Influenza 2018," released in 1998.

Returning to Barry’s book, the opening chapters are given over to the author’s recounting of the history and development of medical science. In essence, at the dawn of the 20th century medicine had changed little for 2,000 years owing to a generalized reluctance to apply scientific methods to the theory and practice of it.

Medicine remained an obstinate realm of quackery, of humors, miasmas, and the interference of theology with science -- you know, as Donald Trump and Mike Pence still view it.

Eventually technology provided instruments such as the microscope, and daring pioneers proposed to link biology and chemistry to a potential doctor’s educational qualifications, but for the most part these innovations were ignored and the bleeding and mustard plasters continued with the full approval of society’s movers and shakers.

In fact, 19th-century American medical schools were an unvarnished joke, accepting anyone able to afford tuition irrespective of educational background. Poorly educated and barely trained doctors became increasingly discredited in America, while in Europe, researchers like Pasteur and Koch raced ahead with crucial scientific discoveries with vast implications for the future.

The balance only began to shift when a small and determined group of visionaries took advantage of a huge bequest and created Johns Hopkins as the first research university in the United States, patterning it on European lines.

Author Barry points out that these founders of Johns Hopkins proceeded with their organizational work as though in a vacuum, because American medicine’s degradation at the time was so complete that they could draw on no foundation or local experience for such an endeavor. Instead, they modeled Johns Hopkins on Europe’s research universities … and succeeded in the end.

By persevering, Barry notes, these visionaries created “a revolution from nothing.”

Following is the full text of a 2004 review by Peter Palese of Barry's classic book by The Journal of Clinical Investigation, as cited at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

---

John M. Barry. The great influenza The epic story of the deadliest plague in history.

(2004)

The great influenza: the epic story of the deadliest plague in history is a great book. It is well conceived, well researched, and extremely well written. The appropriate audience goes beyond the interested physician, scientist, or medical student. The book will also appeal to history buffs, who will be fascinated by the dangerous mix of politics, war, and pestilence presented here. In the first third of the book, the word “influenza” rarely appears, because author John M. Barry is painting the landscape of science, medicine, and politics in the pre-World War I era. What comes to life in these pages is the sad state of US science and medicine at the time. For example, admission to US medical schools was dependent not on academic achievement, but rather on whether the applicant would pay the tuition. This changed with the Flexner Report, published in 1910 by Abraham Flexner, and with the establishment of such institutions as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, ably led by Simon Flexner (brother of Abraham). As highlighted by Barry, the other major change leading to the modern era of American medicine was the founding of Johns Hopkins Medical School at the very end of the 19th century, with William Welch as the legendary force behind it. For anyone who has had the opportunity to interact with Johns Hopkins University, this introductory chapter in Barry’s book is mandatory reading.

The writing is facile and gripping at the same time, and the author does an extraordinarily good job of creating a fluent narrative from historical research. Even when Barry describes the replication of the influenza virus in the cell, the writing is easily comprehensible and convincing. He creates numerous wonderful images, such as likening the translation of a messenger RNA to reading Braille. When it comes to the actual influenza pandemic of 1918, Barry does a brilliant job. The facts of this extraordinary event are well presented and discussed. The reader is given the diverse data on the number of people who died during this pandemic; descriptions of those who did the analysis and the basis for arriving at the different numbers allow the reader to decide for him- or herself what the best estimates are. A conservative — and the most convincing — estimate is 50 million. In the context of the present world population of six billion, compared with two billion in 1918, this would translate into 150 million deaths today.

The political and military scene of 1917 as described by Barry is equally fascinating. Despite major scientific and public health advances, many of the influenza casualties resulted from uninformed and misguided decisions by military and political leaders. Hiram Johnson is quoted as saying, “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” This statement certainly remains true some eighty years later. When Barry recounts the suspicion that “German agents . . . from submarines” are suspected of having brought influenza to the United States, we can see that propaganda is not new either. Barry raises the frightening possibility that President Wilson was weakened by influenza in April 1919 and that this caused him to give in to the demands by the European allies, which resulted in the unfortunate outcome of the negotiations at Versailles.

The book is particularly powerful when it describes the actual disease and its effect on the population. The outbreak in Philadelphia must have been horrendous, with 4,597 influenza deaths in a single week. The effects of influenza in other parts of the world are described as equally harrowing. Barry quotes a report about an Alaskan village in which “ . . . it was quite impossible to estimate the number of dead as the starving dogs had dug their way into many huts and devoured the dead . . . ”

A few good things did come from this devastating pandemic. A restructuring of the country’s public health system had its beginning as a direct result of the events of 1918, and efforts were made to push for the establishment of the NIH, which became a reality about ten years later.

Overall, this book is engrossing reading, with plenty of relevance for our own time, which is threatened by natural (and/or deliberately released) emerging pathogens. It is a question not of if, but of when we will be faced with another epidemic of this magnitude. On the last page of the book, Victor Vaughan is quoted on the 1918 influenza pandemic: “Civilization could have disappeared within a few more weeks.”

ON THE AVENUES: Alas, New Albany is less of a place without a bookstore.

Hi, I'm Nawbany's village iconoclast. In my spare time I write sentences and drink lots of beer. 

The onetime PBS anchorman Jim Lehrer died on January 23, and when I heard the sad news, my thoughts raced back to those many occasions during the decade of the 1980s, working evenings at the long departed Scoreboard Liquors, and doing something that almost never happens with me nowadays: watching the evening news via television.

Whenever I spot a package store clerk with eyes glued to an iPhone or laptop, I think back to my entertainment options on slow business nights: a minuscule black and white television set with shabby rabbit ears, from which many a McNeil-Lehrer News Hour was observed. I probably should have been sweeping or stocking, anyway.

The city of New Albany had cable television back then, having handed the keys to the city to the first enterprising operator who stepped forward with hands extended, much as the nation’s railroads once fleeced the federal government for right-of-way privileges extending to the earth’s core in on direction and the moon in the other.

However there was no way Scoreboard’s owners would ever have paid for something quite that frivolous, although store manager Lloyd “Duck” Cunningham gladly would have watched Cubs day games if WGN were available.

In other news, there were sporadic attempts to have the morning’s Courier-Journal delivered to Scoreboard, although these usually came to nothing because the newspapers would so often get stolen. Seems journalism was subject to thievery even when the Binghams practiced it (until 1986, at least).

Given that I usually worked two jobs, time for me was scarce. To make it down from the Knobs a little early for work at Scoreboard meant having the chance to walk a block to the library and catch up on magazines, then in 1988 came a job at Data Courier in Louisville, where I abstracted magazine articles, exponentially expanding my available options to self-educate.

This experience genuinely changed my life, and while the public library remained a go-to-when-could, now there were some publications of sufficient obscurity to require a visit to the IU Southeast library for perusal.

By this time Scoreboard had moved to the corner of Spring and Beharrell Avenue on the other end of town, and I was living in Floyds Knobs with two good friends. We plumped for cable, which in practice meant sports, MTV and CNN. My library visits waned; there wasn’t much time to read, anyway. My social life was active, which is to say I drank far too much.

The overarching point to this opening digression today is that I’ve always placed supreme importance in being informed, by whatever means it takes. Almost certainly to a degree these channels of journalistic expression 30 or more years ago were biased and tainted. It would be foolish to argue otherwise.

Still, it is increasingly hard to imagine they were any worse than the befuddling cacophony greeting me each morning as I try to learn exactly what’s going on in the world. It's as if we cannot possibly know -- which benefits the oligarchs nicely, don't you think?

---

Fast-forwarding 15 eventful (read: exceedingly rough) years, and seemingly as many personal lifetimes, and suddenly it was 2004. There’d be another dozen years to unfold before my NABC tenure concluded, and Diana and I had purchased a house on Spring Street, where we still live.

As for the time of which I'm about to speak, I’m guessing it was October, as I’d just returned from what proved to be the finale of my side gig as European motorcoach beer tour operator.

Diana and I decided to attend an open house at the Moser Tannery, then fully intact and only a short period removed from daily operation. It had been purchased by Al Goodman, who envisioned a museum of tanning among other uses for the buildings, as well as an ecological preserve for the Loop Island wetlands behind them.

Frankly, I didn’t know the natural area even existed. In 2020, it’s the only part of Al’s dream to come to fruition, because sadly, only a few months after the open house, a heavy snow caused the roof to collapse onto the amazing century-old hide tanning bays, completely destroying them.

Subsequently Al couldn’t leverage his plans into existence, and eventually what was left was scooped up by the opportunistic city, which acquiesced in the neglect of the remaining structures until they were torched by arsonists in what might be Jeff Gahan’s most cynical and purposefully scripted moral failure ever.

Ah, but I’m digressing into a previous existence. Apologies, Andrew.

If for no other reason, the open house at Moser Tannery in October of 2004 was memorable because I met Randy Smith for the very first time. I already knew his wife Ann Baumgartle from our time as students at IU Southeast. They informed us of something we hadn’t heard: Destinations Booksellers was soon to open at 604 East Spring Street, a mere five blocks from our house.

Know that in 2004, the downtown food and dining revolution had yet to be launched. The embryo came in 2006 with the advent of Bistro New Albany, which by all rights should be memorialized by a plaque at Brooklyn and The Butcher, which now occupies the space.

Maybe today’s Develop New Albany can work on that if they the governing committee runs out of groveling, self-congratulatory photo-ops.

However, we got by. In late 2004 there was plenty of great beer and pizza at NABC on Grant Line Road, a short bicycle ride from our home. The library remained a reasonable ten minute walk, and providentially, just down the street was a bookstore.

Finally New Albany threatened to become livable.

At its inception in 2004, Destinations Booksellers was New Albany’s first full-service bookstore since 1947. Two years before this, our original brewery at Sportstime and Rich O’s was the first in New Albany since 1935. Whether any of this helped Randy and I to become friends is questionable, but it strikes me as significant in the sense of shared visions.

NABC expanded downtown to Bank Street Brewhouse in 2009, and contracted back to the mother ship in 2019. I left the business for good in 2018. As most blog readers already know, Destinations Booksellers has spent the past two weeks winding down and now has ceased operations after almost 16 years in business, making way for a soon-to-come food service tenant, leaving Randy and Ann to be landlords.

They’re not going anywhere. Neither are we, and yet already I feel the absence of their bookstore. In spite of all the many electronic and technological advances governing the way we interpret the world, receive news and fundamentally communicate, books remain sacred objects to me.

A bookstore, the public library, our private library where there’s no space to put any more books because there are so damn many books … well, these are the churches and chapels for an unrepentant atheist, humanist and rationalist.

I’m grateful for Randy and Ann for Destinations Booksellers. 15-plus years is a great run for any business, and New Albany isn’t exactly the sort of milieu that celebrates “book learning.”

Of course this city wasn’t much for snooty imported (and later craft) beers, either, but I started evangelizing about better beer all the way back in 1983, and had 20 years to prepare the market before we began brewing our own. Aspiration takes time and patience to nurture, and probably most often in life, the seedling fails to reach its full growth potential.

When it does, those are the special times.

Randy and Ann are our friends, and I’ve richly enjoyed the hours I’ve spent browsing at Destinations, attending the civic events held there (like pubs, bookstores need to be community centers), and chewing the fat with the proprietor.

To be honest, it made me proud as a New Albanian that New Albany had its own bookstore. It may be gone, but I won’t forget it. Maybe someday the city as a whole can be the sort of information-friendly learning zone like that room at 604 East Spring was from 2004 through 2020.

Unlikely, but a boy can still dream.

---

Recent columns:

January 30: ON THE AVENUES: Dear Holocaust deniers: If you don't like this post, unfriend me now.

January 23: ON THE AVENUES: Running over the same old ground.

January 16: ON THE AVENUES: I won’t belong to any Dry January that would have me as a member.

January 9: ON THE AVENUES: Elusive sounds of silence.

BOOKS: What makes a dictator, anyway?

Maybe I've been mistaken, and Jeff Gahan really isn't a tinhorn small-pond dictator after all.

As analyst Adam Gopnik plausibly suggests:

What if language is exactly what the ogres have mastered, and bad people tend to have a better command of language than good ones, who are often tongue-tied in the face of the world’s complexities? What if the tragedies of tyranny were, in the first instance, tragedies of eloquence misapplied—of language used for evil ends, but used well? ... (after all) the worst dictators tend to be the most enthusiastic readers and writers.

So much for my previous theories, seeing as Gahan won't ever be confused with a reader or a writer. Perhaps "mob boss" works better.

Meanwhile Gopnik reviews Frank Dikötter’s new book, How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century, also discussing The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy, a recent book by Daniel Kalder.

THE FIELD GUIDE TO TYRANNY, by Adam Gopnik (New Yorker)

Dictators tend to share the same ugly manner because all seek the same effect: not charm but intimidation.

... Each dictator’s life is offered with neat, mordant compression. Dikötter’s originality is that he counts crimes against civilization alongside crimes against humanity. Stalin is indicted for having more than 1.5 million people interrogated, tortured, and, in many cases, executed. (“At the campaign’s height in 1937 and 1938 the execution rate was roughly a thousand per day,” Dikötter writes.) But Stalin is also held responsible for a nightmarish cultural degradation that occurred at the same time—the insistence on replacing art with political instruction, and with the cult of the Leader, whose name was stamped on every possible surface. As one German historian notes, you could praise Stalin “during a meeting in the Stalin House of Culture of the Stalin Factory on Stalin Square in the city of Stalinsk.” This black comedy of egotism could be found even among neo-Stalinist dictators of far later date. In 1985, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Romania’s Communist leader, ordered up such television programs as “The Nicolae Ceauşescu Era” and “Science During the Nicolae Ceauşescu Epoch.” By law, his portrait was featured at the beginning of every textbook.

If you have a half-hour to listen (and can access The Economist), this podcast is worth your time.

The Economist Asks: What makes a dictator?

This week we speak to Frank Dikötter, a professor at the university of Hong Kong and author of “How to be a dictator”

THE 20TH CENTURY has become known as the “age of dictatorship”, for the horrors perpetrated by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and other despots from Chile to Cambodia. Anne McElvoy asks Frank Dikötter, a historian and professor at the university of Hong Kong, how these men rose to power and why some survived while others were brought down. They debate the limits of authoritarian power today, including China’s ability to act in Hong Kong. And what makes a true dictator—or is there something a bit dictatorial in everyone?

To conclude, my attention was directed to Dikötter by virtue of reading one of his books earlier this month. It was valuable to do so, although not necessarily a pleasurable experience.

BOOKS: The Tragedy of Liberation, an account of China's revolutionary insanity, by Frank Dikötter.

The books I read in 2019.

One year ago I resolved to spend more time in 2019 engaged in reading, not from a Kindle or similarly soul-numbing modern electronic gadget, but old-school and tactile.

Mission (perhaps surprisingly) accomplished.

I wouldn't know how to go about choosing a favorite from among the books listed below. "Light" reading is largely alien to me, and generally I'm not seeking to be "entertained" in any conventional sense.  There are exceptions, although in large measure I read to learn. 

Having said this, and conceding that seven of these books pertain in greater or smaller measure to the European locales we recently toured (Croatia, Slovenia and particularly Trieste), it seems clear that the latter half of 2019 was a tantamount to a university course on the history of these areas.

No credit hours will be awarded, but those aren't necessary to learn something, and I did -- and Pynchon's Vineland was, yes, very entertaining.

Back in August, I also got around to updating a list.

ON THE AVENUES: The 32 most influential books in my life.

---

2019 Reading List

Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, a novel by James Joyce

James Joyce and Italo Svevo: The Story of a Friendship, by Stanley Price

Yugoslavia, My Fatherland, a novel by Goran Vojnovic

The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, by Mark Kurlansky

Sicilian Summer, a travelogue by Brian Johnston

Stalingrad, a novel by Vassily Grossman

Comrade Baron: A Journey through the Vanishing World of the Transylvanian Aristocracy, by Jaap Scholten

Confessions of Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience), a novel by Italo Svevo

Slovenia – Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture, by Jason Blake

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, travel/history by Jan Morris

Vineland, a novel by Thomas Pynchon

Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, non-fiction by Louis Sell

Baudolino, a novel by Umberto Eco

Dreamers, a fact-based novel by Volker Weidermann

Baseball in a River Town, local history by Justin Endres

Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece, a travelogue by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Avignon Quintet, five novels by Lawrence Durrell

• Monsieur (1974)

• Livia (1978)

• Constance (1982)

• Sebastian (1983)

• Quinx (1985)

12 Days of Slovenia & Trieste (Part 10): "In Trieste, words feature more prominently than art."

James Joyce and Italo Svevo:
The story of a friendship.

Earlier this year I did something I very rarely do and reread a novel: Zeno's Conscience, by Italo Svevo (real name Aron Ettore Schmitz, 1861-1928), a Triestine businessman, writer and favorite son. It was a wise decision on my part, and an enjoyable experience.

In addition to Stanley Price's chronicle (above), I chose Yugoslavia, My Fatherland by Goran Vojnovic as my trip texts. As noted so many times previously, "pleasure" travel in the conventional sense is a concept I simply can't fathom. An opportunity to go anywhere, especially overseas, is a time for learning. In this sense, a place like Trieste is a fastball down the middle of the plate.

A Trip to Trieste: Italy’s Most Beautifully Haunting City, by Tara Isabella Burton (Wall Street Journal)

A heady and historic stew of many influences, Trieste is a languid, literary place like no other

BLENDING INTO THE smoky stone edifice of Caffè Stella Polare, a tiny plaque, barely 3 inches across, announces that this is a caffè filosofico, a salon of sorts for philosophical debate. Next to it, another sign marks the popular lunch spot as a stop on the literary “Italo Svevo Itinerary,” for devotees of that titan of Italian modernism. Sharing the wall, a portrait of James Joyce is accompanied by a quote from the writer: “I came here habitually.”

Italy is justly famous for its visual splendor: gilded angels, riotously bright frescoes, sunrise-colored facades. But in Trieste, a port city of latticed alleyways and hushed boulevards just a 20-minute drive from the Slovene border, words feature more prominently than art.

In Trieste, Svevo wrote “Zeno’s Conscience,” his best-known novel, which was published in 1923. His statue stands at the edge of the Medieval old town, in a piazza that is filled most weekends with antique dealers. Joyce, who lived in Trieste for close to a decade and wrote most of “Dubliners” and all of “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” there, also gets a statue, on a narrow bridge crossing the city’s Grand Canal. Sir Richard Francis Burton and Jan Morris are among other noted writers who have felt the city’s pull.

Trieste has been called the ultimate nowhere-place: officially part of several successive countries and empires through the ages, yet spiritually bound to none of them. Many of the 200,000 Triestine, I came to learn, do not see themselves as truly Italian. They belong to Trieste, and Trieste alone ...

“What are the best Urban Planning Books Of All-Time?”

Not one of the nine books. 

I'll willingly concede that I've read only two of the nine (Jeff Speck and Janette Sadik-Khan). It gives me something to aim for in the coming year, although I've already promised JT that we'd read Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Charles L. Marohn) in December.

The introduction follows.

You'll have to follow the link to see the list.

THE BEST URBAN PLANNING BOOKS OF ALL-TIME

“What are the best Urban Planning Books Of All-Time?” We looked at 186 of the top Urban Planning books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!

The top 9 titles, all appearing on 3 or more “Best Urban Planning” book lists, are ranked below by how many lists they appear on. The remaining 175+ titles, as well as the lists we used are in alphabetical order at the bottom of the page.

Also, see our list on The Best Books About Living In The City.

Happy Scrolling!

ON THE AVENUES: The 32 most influential books in my life.

It is said that the average American spends five hours each day watching television in one or the other of its multi-tentacled current forms. It's harder to calculate the number of movies we consume in a year, but adding another hour to the daily TV calculation probably covers it.

These numbers completely baffle me. No wonder civic discourse has met toilet's bottom. It's just incomprehensible, and if I dwell on it for too long, I'm afraid to leave the house. After all, zombies are venerated for a reason.

I watch almost no television, and possibly as few as a half-dozen movies a year. Documentaries and educational programming are my weaknesses, and if they're lumped in with musical performances, my combined total might account for an hour each year. I've missed so much; thank you, Jeeebus.

To me, the vast majority of programs designated as "entertainment" aren't. They're either violent or stupid, and frequently both. Naturally there are exceptions, but since Americans are surrounded by violence and stupidity on a daily basis, why waste all that valuable time proving what I can see already by glancing out the door?

That's not entertaining at all, at least to me. You? By all means, carry on. I'm not seeking a ban, just expressing voluminous personal befuddlement.

But what about sports? Roger, you like sports, right? Surely there's a point of communion with the masses over wings and hard seltzer at the sports bar.

Indeed, the essence of the games still appeals to me. However, as a collective entity, they constitute a tail wagging the dog. I'll catch a game here and there, and stay abreast by glancing at the standings and reading the sports pages on-line. In short, I'd rather read about sports than kill four hours nightly watching athletes play them.

The same goes for news. Having come to detest marketing, advertising and the insulting dumbing-down of topics that genuinely matter to me, any exposure to television news is like taking a bath in poison ivy juice, so I have to be careful and place limits on the throbbing pain.

During those five or six daily hours when everyone else is watching television or movies, I'm writing, reading, listening to music or indulging in conversation. There's nothing elitist or condescending about these habits. They're who I am and what I do. Self-actualization means marching to your own rhythm section, so long as it isn't hurtful to others. Just ask New Albany's woeful mayor: I'm utterly harmless.

Consequently, one of the most important lessons I’ve absorbed during my first half-century-plus-nine on Planet Earth is this: I reserve the right not to answer the question you ask me, but to respond in perfect candor to the query I’d rather hear.

When challenged on social media back in the summer of 2014 to name my top ten most influential books, I immediately decided to select 25 and post them here at the blog. I've since revised and updated the list a time or two, and remain cognizant that it isn't easy to maintain a sense of perspective when so much about the notion of "influential" is dependent on time and distance.

However,  five years seems ample to undertake a reappraisal, so the list has been allowed to grow again with the addition of two novels and two works of non-fiction. The books are arranged alphabetically, not by magnitude of influence, which is a judgment I couldn’t possibly make. Oddly, there aren’t any books about music.

Perhaps I’ve been too busy listening to remember them.

---

FICTION

2666, by Roberto Bolaño
These words by reviewer Richard Gwyn in 2009 might be the best one paragraph capsule: "To attempt a summary of 2666 seems almost an impertinence. To begin with, it is five discrete but subtly interlinked novels, and within each Bolaño follows a strategy reminiscent of the films of David Lynch. He provides numerous trails and digressions which may or may not have relevance to any expected outcome but which, cumulatively, keep the reader pinioned inside its shifting structure: something akin to a monumental pressure-cooker, in which what is being cooked are the internal organs of the late 20th century."

It's been four years and my head's still spinning.

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
Not because of the mentally unbalanced author, her bizarre message or the self-indulgent politics it spawned, but because my high school senior literature teacher ordered me to read it in two weeks flat after I joked that Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations wasn’t sufficiently challenging. Point taken, Bob Youngblood (R.I.P.) -- point very much taken. It won’t happen again.

A Book of Memories, by Péter Nádas.
An intricate novel that tells three love stories, with an undercurrent of Communism’s effect on human relationships. To this day, I can’t explain this book’s hold on me. It's just one of those inexplicable grips.

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
Interwoven stories illustrating universality, masterfully executed, and barely nudging out the same writer’s more recent novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
This hands-down classic New Orleans comic novel never gets old. Closing in on 40 years later, I laugh aloud whenever passing a hot dog cart, glimpsing a pirate or reading the name Boethius.

Dracula, by Bram Stoker
Traditions of Transylvanian folklore meet straitlaced Anglo conventions, as explained through letters, diaries and logs combining to define the vampire genre as we know it today.

Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
What happens when the imaginary Templars-meet-occult conspiracy proves to be all too real? This novel ties it all together.

Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
Ostensibly a novel about rockets as WWII comes to a close, although that doesn’t come anywhere close to describing the quirkiness of the ride.

Jerusalem, by Alan Moore
Can the center point of human history -- nay, the cosmos as a whole -- be anchored to an otherise drab spot smack dab in the middle of Northampton England? Past and future; alive, dead and in that little known third category, Moore's characters inhabit a story I was determined from to outset to dislike. Now my eyes get wet just thinking about it. 

The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
Beautifully rendered story, written as darkness neared, and perhaps the ultimate expression of Papa’s lean prose style. Truly not a word is wasted.

The Pope's Rhinoceros, by Lawrence Norfolk
In the early 1500s, a scheme is hatched to influence the Pope with the gift of a rhinoceros. The author's descriptions of daily life in Rome are classic reminders of why we shouldn't trust epic historical films casting actors with nice white teeth.

Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry
The doomed, self-destructive consul Geoffrey Firmin stumbles drunkenly through his last day on earth, amid the tumult of the Day of the Dead, in the shadow of two Mexican volcanoes.

NON-FICTION

And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts
Profoundly moving journalistic account of the onset of AIDS, but moreover, a book that helped me to understand lots of issues we weren't taught in school. An eye-opener to the real world.

Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee
For me to be enamored by a book about geology is unfathomable. But there it is. Tectonic plates, anyone? Deep time? The utility of interstate dynamiting?

Atheism: The Case Against God, by George H. Smith
The Bible insofar as my introduction to atheism was concerned; an otherwise unknown and forgotten book that I fortuitously spotted at the NA-FC public library in 1979, reinforcing what I already knew was true. Even as a child theism didn't make any sense to me.

Ball Four, by Jim Bouton
Groundbreaking, ribald baseball expose, which I’ve been joyfully quoting from for more than 40 years. Bouton died in 2019, but his achievement lives on.

Betty Crocker’s International Cookbook (1980 edition)
Once I’d been to Europe, there was a problem; Louisville didn’t have as many ethnic eateries then as now, and I was enamored of certain European menu items. The solution was here, and it got me back into the kitchen.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty
The odds of an impossibly dense exposition about economics making this list suggest a tremendous long shot. Piketty's argument: an ever greater concentration of wealth occurs when the rate of return on capital (interest, rents, etc) is greater than the rate of long term economic growth; this heightened concentration of wealth creates inequality and accompanying social and economic problems. Or, in other words, what we already knew -- with lots and lots of charts.

The Civil War: A Narrative, by Shelby Foote
I’ve read perhaps 200 books about the American Civil War, and at one time, Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac trilogy would have been the most influential, but Foote currently wins out. Factual storytelling at its finest.

Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, by Nick Tosches
Yes, it is possible to chart the entire 20th-century history of American pop culture, and a good deal of non-pop culture history, through an examination of the life of entertainer Dean Martin.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, by Barbara Tuchman
A chronicle of the late Middle Ages (plague, crusades and schism), woven around the tumultuous life of a French nobleman.

Europe on $25-A-Day, by Arthur Frommer (1985 edition)
The Bible insofar as my introduction to budget travel was concerned. Armed with the plausible theories contained therein, I swapped a seven-day jaunt for a three-month baptism, and still had a C-note left over upon returning home.

The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order, 1905-1922, by Edmond Taylor
Written in 1963, I discovered the book in 1979, and it contributed immeasurably to my fascination with the European empires that collapsed during and after the Great War.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72, by Hunter S. Thompson
In which the author suffers a nervous breakdown, but somehow manages an enduring explanation of the ways modern American electoral politics work.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, by John Barry
I originally read this account of the deadly influenza outbreak at the end of World War I while laid up with pneumonia, which is not a course I recommend.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
The only sports team of any kind possessing my allegiance is the Oakland Athletics, and while Lewis’s book ostensibly is about a Billy Beane’s (A’s general manager) winning strategies, it’s really about the art of winning any unfair game, baseball or otherwise.

Prejudices: The Complete Series, by H.L. Mencken
The Bible insofar as my introduction to polemics was concerned. For my money, Mencken is the greatest expository writer America has produced.

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, by Tony Judt
It’s no more than a history of the whole continent since WWII, both west and east, and while this might not seem significant, just try to find another like it.

Selected Essays, by Samuel Johnson
The late Dr. Richard Brengle introduced me to Samuel Johnson in an expository writing class at IU Southeast, and it was the exact moment I knew I’d never be a novelist or a poet. I’m an essayist, period.

Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
In essence, the pursuit of pleasure through trendy substances, beginning with the spice trade, irrevocably modified the social order in Europe.

Thomas Cook European Timetable 
Known as the "Bible of train travel," 1,526 monthly editions were published over a 140-year period until 2013 (I'm told it has been revived). For a youthful Europhile trip-planner, the timetable provided hours of daydreaming about routes, sights and experiences to come, as well as reliving visits already made.

The Uses of the Past, by Herbert J. Muller
Beautifully written essays on the lessons of history, offered by an Indiana University professor (1905-1980). In 1985, I made a special effort to travel to Istanbul for the express purpose of visiting the Hagia Sophia, precisely because of Muller’s description of the church.

The World Guide to Beer/The New World Guide to Beer, by Michael Jackson
The Bible insofar as my introduction to better beer was concerned. Jackson invented contemporary beer writing, and since his death, there have been no challengers to his pre-eminence.

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Recent columns:

August 15: ON THE AVENUES: Breakfast is better with those gorgeous little herrings.

August 8: ON THE AVENUES: Unless you open your eyes, “resistance” is an empty gesture.

August 1: ON THE AVENUES: The whys and wherefores can drive a man to drink; our lives just ARE, and that's that.

July 25: ON THE AVENUES: Until philosophers become kings, beer and food work just fine.