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

BOOKS: George Yancy's Backlash.

Let's take a brief break from music to mention recent reading.

I've made reference to George Yancy's Backlash on more than one occasion of late. Following is a link to coverage from 2018, when the book was published.

Is white America ready to confront its racism? Philosopher George Yancy says we need a 'crisis', by Alex Blasdel (The Guardian)

In his new book, philosopher George Yancy uncovers just how unprepared even well-meaning whites are for a courageous conversation about race

George Yancy’s new book, Backlash, grew out of Dear White America, a piece on the pervasiveness of white racism that he wrote for the New York Times’ philosophy column, The Stone. After the piece was published on Christmas Eve 2015, Yancy received an extraordinary number of responses from white readers, many of whom were aggressively defensive and included racist epithets and threats of physical violence. Backlash extends the argument made in Dear White America, and turns personal and philosophic lenses on the vile responses it received.

This is a key passage.

When you talk about “whiteness” in the letter and book, what do you mean?

Whiteness is a structural, ideological, embodied, epistemological and phenomenological mode of being – and it is predicated upon its distance from and negation of blackness. This is what so many white people forget or refuse to see: their being racialized as white and socially and psychologically marked as privileged has problematic implications for my being black.

Whiteness is what I call the “transcendental norm”, which means that whiteness goes unmarked. As unmarked, white people are able to live their identities as unraced, as simply human, as persons. And this obfuscates the ways in which their lives depend upon various affordances that black people and people of color don’t possess.

White racism is thus a continuum, one that includes the KKK, the loving white Christian and the antiracist white. Even good, moral white people, those who have black friends, friends of color, married to people of color, fight for racial justice and so on, don’t escape white racist injustice against black people and people of color; they all continue to be implicated within structures of white privilege and to embody, whether they realize it or not, society’s racist sensibilities. White people possess white privilege or white immunity from racial disease. And because of this, others of us, black people and people of color, reap the social, political and existential pains of that racialized social skin.

As yet, I'm at a stage of listening, studying and thinking. Epiphanies are rare, and it strikes me as acceptable to take my time and absorb these many lessons. Bear with me.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Who's Gonna Drive You Home? Gravity Head's 22nd bacchanal begins on February 28.

Gravity Head XXII (okay, right on; not the Super Bowl, so "the 22nd running") returns to the NABC Pizzeria & Public House on Friday, February 28.

As far as I know it's the usual 7:00 a.m. kickoff with breakfast and I'm weighing if I should go. After all, Bobby Knight returned to Assembly Hall.

The last Gravity Head with which I had any active participation was 2015, and yes, it's strange to think it's been five whole years. I've gone over a time or two on opening weekend Saturday, and my favorite moment was when Eric Gray saw me coming and immediately poured a Pilsner Urquell.

The following was published last year as "I'd stop drinking, but I'm no quitter (the 2019 Gravity Head remix)." It's a stream-of-consciousness collage, and I'll buff and polish a wee bit for 2020.

One part will be retained, but with this explanation: While I've resolved to cease attending meetings apart from cases of extreme emergency, if compelled, only martinis might possibly serve as preparation. 

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Before the drinking starts, let’s consider a ship leaving the dock and making for open water. We experienced this first-hand in 2016 aboard a big Baltic ferry, leaving Tallinn for Helsinki in the morning and returning at dusk the same day.

In darkness of night the specific sensation might be described as lights fading, but by daylight it is the gradual disappearance of land as the ship moves away from shore. Depending on the weather and the strength of one’s eyesight, there comes a split second when land no longer is visible. It’s a melancholy feeling, like the place itself has ceased to exist apart from a lingering imagination of it.

From this point forward, until the next port of call begins slowly to materialize past the bow, the journey becomes synonymous with the undulating rhythm of the sea.

Similarly, most aspects of business ownership consuming my daily existence for a quarter-century -- the good, the bad, the drunk and the sublime -- have dissolved entirely into those distant invisible headlands. Now it’s just the rocking of the waves, and pondering what it all meant.

These days it seems like another person's life.

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Col. Sherman T. Potter: I gather you drink.
Captain“Hawkeye” Pierce: Only to excess.

In the Western cultural tradition, there are numerous examples of the seasoned drinker as a sodden protagonist, at times an inspiring and compelling figure -- perhaps even a heroic one, as with Norm Peterson on Cheers -- although bar owner Sam Malone was a reformed alcoholic, as was the real-life Nicholas Colosanto, who played the bartender Coach on the popular show.

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, although it occurs to me some of you might not want to go here, finding this topic distasteful. At the same time, it would be pointless of me to deny or to disavow a career in beverage alcohol, or to suggest that it was only a job.

Trust me; my work wasn't left atop a desk at the office.

I drink very differently now than before, and far less overall, but drinking's still a conscious lifestyle choice. So it goes. I don't drive while intoxicated, and command all drinkers to be responsible.

Back to these fictional drinkers, who in my view reflect an existential aspect of the human condition. To be succinct, what else remains to be said, done or alibied when life’s fundamentally surreal futility strikes you as inescapable, and is best addressed and assuaged by peering through the bottom of a lifted glass, one deftly drained only seconds ago?

The cultural milieu of alcoholic beverages in places like India, Bolivia or Ghana remains a mystery to me, although it is clear that the pursuit of intoxicants is a universal human condition throughout the world. Certain European and American archetypes endure to entertain and enlighten, from Falstaff in olden times to Bukowski in ours, as buttressed by diverse personalities such as W.C. Fields, Dean Martin and Dudley Moore’s Arthur.

I've always been a reader of books. In the American literary oeuvre, one must push past cautionary tales of prohibitionist finger-wagging during the lamentably fevered Carrie Nation period of our national existence, straight to the dawn of the modern period occurring just after the Great War. Inhibitions fell prey to an all-encompassing, collective thirst enabled by the villainous Volstead Act, and brutal realism finally forced its way out of societal straitjackets.

Imbibing in print became great again.

It may have been Ernest Hemingway who first incorporated the drinker’s lifestyle as integral backdrop, seen most strikingly in his groundbreaking novel, The Sun Also Rises. Youthful, disaffected, expatriated Americans find solace in adult beverages at all hours of the day, even when they should be diligently working to appease the Puritanical prerequisites of capitalism and families back home.

The acerbic commentator Dorothy Parker emerged from this period, Scotch in hand. Equilibrium came with Repeal, and America scarcely skipped a beat, quickly eschewing Scott and Zelda for Reefer Madness and later, Timothy Leary. However, this is beyond the scope of today's examination.

Malcolm Lowry was an Englishman heavily influenced by the New World, and he captured the bibulous essence in the person of Geoffrey Firmin, otherwise known as the Consul, in Under the Volcano. Firmin is a defeated man on the Day of the Dead, utterly adrift during his final hours on earth, navigating the streets of a dusty Mexican provincial town in search of celestial meaning and settling instead for bottles of mezcal hidden in the shrubbery, as well as an infamous midday jolt of aftershave.

When seeking literary inspiration across the pond, a personal favorite is J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, chronicling the antics of supposed student Sebastian Dangerfield, a profligate American carousing, drinking, roaring and whoring in Ireland. For more of the same, Anglo-style, consult Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and know that in his prime, the very real Amis fully imitated his art.

On the continent, Czech playwright-turned-statesman Vaclav Havel’s two-person play, Audience, posits an artistic, city-dwelling enemy of the totalitarian state abruptly sent as punishment to the hinterlands and a term as manual laborer in a brewery. He must endure the ramblings of his boss, who cannot refrain from sampling the fermented wares and hilariously sinks into inebriation while haplessly pretending to interrogate the urban exile.

The doctor in László Krasznahorkai’s novel Satantango desperately tries to ration his enabling pálinka (and fails) as he observes the disintegration of the dysfunctional collective farm, and in the first-person narrative of The Drinker, by Hans Fallada, the hapless Herr Sommer will swallow just about anything as he abruptly transitions from sobriety to alcoholism, and eventually to insanity -- but schnapps is the preferred lubricant of his alarmingly precipitous decline.

For something approximating a philosophical rationale for the drinker’s lifestyle choice, we must turn to Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities and the bombastic figure of Mr. Traba, a retired Lutheran pastor in heavily Catholic (and Communist) Poland.

Mr. Traba’s daily doses of vodka are the pretext for a fateful decision. It is 1963, and he has decided to erase his life’s numerous frustrations by committing a final, exclamatory act: Assassinating Comrade Gomulka, the unimaginative and degraded Communist tyrant. As the tragicomic final moment draws near, the perpetually intoxicated Mr. Traba addresses his companions:

Of course, there were moments in my wasted life when I got the audacious idea in my head to gain mastery of some earthly skill other than drinking, but upon reflection I rejected all these ideas. I drank all my life, and drinking was my work and my rest, my love and my hobby. Drinking was my art, my concert, and my artfully written sonnet. Drinking was my cognition, my description, my synthesis, and my analysis.

Only amateurs, laymen and graphomaniacs assert that you drink in order to soften the monstrosity of the world and to dull unbearable sensitivity. On the contrary, you drink in order to deepen pain and to heighten sensitivity. Especially in a case like mine: when there is nothing but drinking, it is necessary to make an art of drinking, it is necessary to reach the heart of the matter through drinking, and the heart of the matter is death.

When I first read the testimony of Pilch’s extraordinary character, I finally understood the contemporary reality of which all New Albanians boasting consciousness and a pulse must eventually grapple.

Even today, it is virtually impossible to attend a public meeting in this town without recourse to strong drink.

---

Meanwhile, an ancestral imperative creeps into the narrative.

When Gravity Head launches at NABC's Pizzeria & Public House, as it will again on Friday, February 28, the familiar space and time continuum is briefly altered. Normal routines appear Byzantine by comparison. Life’s infinite horizons narrow. One reverts to existence by the hour, or minute by minute. Passing through the looking glass is perfectly boring by comparison.

As for the fest’s actual commencement, once the opening bell sounds there is a collective observance of Dr. Sidney Freedman’s immortal dictum:

“Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice - pull down your pants and slide on the ice.”

Why do I continue to mention Gravity Head even after my final, much belated exit in 2018 from the company I helped found?

It's simple, because once upon a time Gravity Head was my idea. The 2020 edition will be the 22nd such gathering, and I'm unrepentantly proud of my creation. Of course Gravity Head no longer is about me, assuming it ever really was. It always took the entire workplace village to pull it off, and I imagine this remains true.

Besides, gravity’s the law. It’s bigger than you and me.

Gravity Head’s opening day has become somewhat of a chaotic scrum, and a singular tradition all its own. Folks seem content with the interior logic occurring at the fest’s beginning, but this isn’t what every celebrant looks forward to experiencing each year.

Rather, there’ll inevitably be a quiet Tuesday night on the second or third week, with a handful of friends, and leisurely, contemplative sipping of one or two quality libations, spiced with conversation. These are the precious moments that lead to feelings of timelessness.

And without timelessness, beer is far less interesting to me. Will I attend this year? Not sure, and it doesn't matter. Have fun if you do, and be responsible.

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These days I'm working in the beer trade at Pints&union in downtown New Albany. It's been 14 years since our presumed civic revitalization began with the establishment of Bistro New Albany -- a pivotal if short-lived eatery and watering hole. It operated where Brooklyn & The Butcher is located today.

Amid the prevailing Gahanian personality cult of the present, the pendulum has swung all the way back to alcohol as the best available means to deepen pain and heighten sensitivity. Dissipation may be a masochistic coping mechanism to counter the Disney-fried dictatorship, but it has the benefit of reminding us of how little the base culture of obliviousness has changed in all this time.

My favorite way of defining dissipation is this: “Unrestrained indulgence in physical pleasures, especially alcohol.”

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been an aficionado of dissipation, albeit in the manner of a willful, controlled narrative. In the hands of lesser mortals, dissipation can be harmful, but there are times when it proceeds from conscious calculation in the face of savage, visceral, conditioned responses, as when a glance at the calendar confirms that it’s a first Monday or third Thursday, and the occasion for another New Albany common council meeting.

(Given that attendance at fix-forever-in Redevelopment Commission meetings would require sedation by an anesthesiologist, let’s not even go there ... literally as well as figuratively.)

Considering the implications of meeting attendance, you find yourself thinking about how those impossibly brief final hours should be spent before history rudely repeats itself as tragedy, farce or vaudeville’s worst ventriloquist routines. Will you smoke a cigarette, have a last supper, and leave a testament for posterity?

Better to have a stiff drink, relax and enjoy the inevitable. Dissipation suddenly ceases to be a pejorative term thrown your way by the kill-joys and health fascists, and comes to more closely resemble what Hemingway, a true giant of the dissipative genre, once described as a “means of sovereign action.”

Papa was talking about a bottle of liquor, which could be consumed, used to crack skulls or rendered into a Molotov cocktail, sometimes all at once. Until recently, I stuck to a regimen of Progressive Pints somewhere downtown before ambling down to the City-County Building and taking in the floor show.

But times change, and medicine's effectiveness changes with them. Lately the prescription has come full circle, all the way back to the improvised still in the Swamp at the 4077th.

It may or may not have been gin, but there can be no doubt that it was the right stuff.

Hawkeye Pierce: Let’s make a pact about drinking.
Trapper John McIntyre: All right.
Hawkeye Pierce: Let’s never stop.

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

This is a hard, unrelenting book to read. Many thanks to my friend Jon for providing the opportunity to do so.

The official blurb:

“The Chinese Communist party refers to its victory in 1949 as a ‘liberation.’ In China the story of liberation and the revolution that followed is not one of peace, liberty, and justice. It is first and foremost a story of calculated terror and systematic violence.” So begins Frank Dikötter’s stunning and revelatory chronicle of Mao Zedong’s ascension and campaign to transform the Chinese into what the party called New People.

The broad outline of the tale Dikötter recounts is known to us, but beyond the numbing statistics he is greatly skilled at weaving the memories of survivors. 

What drives Frank Dikötter, chronicler of China’s insanity?

For the past decade, Dikötter’s research in China’s archives has given him extraordinary insight into what was happening not just at the top, but at ground level. He’s had access to many personal accounts and reminiscences: he calls his overview of the People’s Republic of China the “People’s Trilogy”. What does such long-term immersion do to the head of such a writer?

There's a very interesting passage on page 179 of my text, amid the chapter detailing the relationship of the Chinese educated elites and intelligentsia to Chairman Mao during the post-war period of communist consolidation.

But most decided to 'march at the head and lead,' in the chairman's words.If they wanted a job under the new regime, they had little choice but to become willing accomplices -- whether through opportunism, idealism or sheer pragmatism. Many did so with relish. 

It's almost as if they were auditioning for board seats at NAHA.

The Tragedy of Liberation by Frank Dikötter – review, by Rana Mitter (The Guardian)

An excellent, angry book that details the violence inflicted on Chinese peasants during Mao's so-called 'benevolent' years

 ... One suggestion that Dikötter makes is a comparison of Mao's China with the post-1945 Eastern European regimes that appeared genuine but were in fact puppets of Stalin. However, although Stalin was a mentor, as well as a dysfunctional ally for Mao, the PRC was an indigenous Chinese product. Mao's revolution, and its monstrosities, were products of forces that came from within China: social inequality, the war with Japan, and a political culture of violence. Other factors also affected the behaviour of China's leaders, such as the country's relative isolation from the world economy, about which it could do little in the face of American sanctions. None of these factors remotely excuses the horrors that are chronicled meticulously here, but they do provide a context.

However, even if the book is likely to spark debates about the nature of the socio-economic crisis stimulated by the PRC's policies, few will be able to deny the human suffering brought about in the name of the new society and described by the author with brutal clarity. It has often been the contention of those who find democracy messy that dirigiste rule can be an improvement (Hayek, who condemned serfdom of one sort, was quite tolerant of various other forms: he described apartheid as "civilisation of a sort" and argued that a "liberal dictator" was sometimes better than a democracy).

Nobody who reads about the cost of the establishment of the PRC in Dikötter's humane and lucid prose will find much sympathy for the authoritarian case. This excellent book is horrific but essential reading for all who want to understand the darkness that lies at the heart of one of the world's most important revolutions.

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.

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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)

BOOKS: Goran Vojnovic's novel Yugoslavia, My Fatherland is a must-read.

Marshall Tito's post-WWII Yugoslavia ("Land of the South Slavs") experiment called for the reboot of a shabby pre-war monarchy into a non-aligned socialist federal state that would take numerous nationalities professing three major religions -- Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Macedonians, Croats, Hungarians, Montenegrins, Serbs, and Slovenes -- and cast them somewhat forcibly into a melting pot, meanwhile doling out just enough regional autonomy to keep the area's numerous historical demons at bay until economic modernization (supposed worker control of economic enterprises within the socialist framework) proceeded to such an extent that these evils of the past would fade away amid a new identification as Yugoslavs.

For a while, and to an extent, this program succeeded. The second global war was particularly devastating for Yugoslavia, which was founded at the conclusion of the Great War (WWI), with little time to regroup before another period of sustained violence began. An array of Yugoslav partisan groups fought the Germans as well as each other, and in many respects a civil war raged alongside the larger international struggle.

Tito's faction emerged from the chaos, and because the Red Army was not needed to liberate Yugoslavia, Tito was given the leeway to steer his own path. Scores were settled, and by 1948 the necessary postwar rebuilding afforded an interregnum.

In retrospect, it seems clear that while the Yugoslav police state was softer than those required to maintain order in the East Bloc, the country's economic reforms never really became substantive apart from propaganda value. Tito was a gifted juggler, but after he died in 1980 economic stagnation pried the lid off the socialist contract, and federalism became a means of exiting Yugoslavia rather than the way to keep nationalism contained beneath the broader umbrella.

Serbia's Slobodan Milošević came to be blamed by the outside world for his out-sized role in the horror to follow. A more sober reading of the record doesn't absolve Milošević; rather, it places his power-mongering in proper context of similar opportunism on the part of his brethren. The victims inevitably were the powerless.

The preceding provides background for this novel by Goran Vojnovic, which I read while we were in Croatia and Slovenia, which declared independence simultaneously in 1991 and provided the pretext for civil war's renewal in obsolete Yugoslavia. Slovenia slipped away with little bloodshed, primarily because there wasn't a Serb minority for Milošević's goal of annexation. There was such a minority in Croatia, and consequently that's where the real atrocities first unfolded, later shifting to Bosnia and Kosovo.

Ultimately Vojnovic's narrative is concerned with fate. Are we as humans destined to endlessly perpetuate the worst aspects of our natures, or can we step away from them? The author has created a character, Vladan Borojevic, who learns enough to formulate this question about fate. It remains unclear whether there's an answer, for him or any of us.

I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking understanding of what happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. For a more detailed rendering of the geopolitical factors, check out Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, by the retired American diplomat Louis Sell, which I read earlier this year.

Yugoslavia, My Fatherland by Goran Vojnovic: Balkan brilliance, by Eileen Battersby (Irish Times)

At last comes a work which will be required reading within and beyond the Balkans

Having spent years grieving for his father who went to war and never came back, Vladan Borojevic, the narrator, appears to have become an adult, estranged from Dusha, his silent mother, and life in general.

His father’s death was reduced to a curt announcement made by a widow who had already disengaged herself from her son, the narrator, and eventually married again to begin another family. Vladan, in a relationship with a bright young microbiologist, drifts along, fixing coffee machines and when he thinks of it, attending lectures for a degree he is half-interested in. One day he decides to Google his dead father and is shocked by the findings.

James Joyce's (and John Huston's) The Dead “is the greatest Christmas story."

Probably I read James Joyce's Dubliners during college or shortly thereafter. It is a compelling collection of short stories completed by Joyce during his pre-WWI residency in Trieste, and published in 1914.

For me Dubliners is a must-read, and I plan to make it a re-read during the coming weeks. Also, a re-watch; somewhere in a box secreted in our house's dusty nooks you'll find a video cassette of The Dead, John Huston's final film. The Dead is a long story, perhaps a novella, and Huston's adaptation is a short film, although no less compelling for its brevity.

The Economist's pseudonymous columnist plainly gets it, and so should we all: "The festive season has summoned every weeping ghost." So it will remain for me, always.

Forget “A Christmas Carol” — “The Dead” is the greatest Christmas story, by Prospero (The Economist)

James Joyce’s captivating tale is one of love, loss and loneliness

ALMOST EVERYONE who watches television in Ireland will have seen a Christmas commercial for Guinness—first aired in 2004—in which snowflakes drop softly over a variety of Irish landscapes. Although the writer got no credit from the advertising agency, this panorama of longing and nostalgia draws on James Joyce’s short story “The Dead”. Joyce’s tale concludes (freakishly, in purely meteorological terms) with snowfall “general all over Ireland”. His snow unites past and present, memory and desire, as it blankets “all the living and the dead”.

“The Dead” is among the finest short stories in the English language. Astonishingly, it came from the pen of an impoverished and insecure 25-year-old language teacher in Trieste. In that Italian city, ruled then like the Dublin he had left by a haughty imperial power (Austro-Hungary rather than Great Britain), the self-exiled Joyce lived and wrote. He sought for years to find a reliable publisher for the collection eventually released, in 1914, as “Dubliners”. Written in 1907, “The Dead” displays all the virtuosity of an author who can already do anything he wants in conventional fiction. Like Pablo Picasso, his near-contemporary, Joyce would soon break all the rules of the art he had so precociously mastered.

For more than a century, readers have loved “The Dead” for its bittersweet melancholy and its mingled threads of festivity and mourning. It inspired John Huston’s film of 1987, the great actor-director’s poignant swansong ...

As for Huston's adaptation, this from film critic Pauline Kael:

"Huston directed the movie, at eighty, from a wheelchair, jumping up to look through the camera, with oxygen tubes trailing from his nose to a portable generator; most of the time, he had to watch the actors on a video monitor outside the set and use a microphone to speak to the crew. Yet he went into dramatic areas that he'd never gone into before - funny, warm family scenes that might be thought completely out of his range. Huston never before blended his actors so intuitively, so musically."

Not dumbing down: "Wendell Berry’s lifelong dissent."

2011, Louisville Loves Mountains.

On Sunday I launched these words into the social media abyss.

It dawns on me that what I detest most of all on a consistent lifelong basis is the process of “dumbing down,” whether it’s society, business, politics, beer, whatever. Note that I’m not speaking of ignorance; it’s willful stupidity, which is like kryptonite to me. Jeeebus, I hate it so. Rant over. I’m going to hide somewhere in the house, read a book and LEARN SOMETHING just for spite.

I'm already reading a novel (Stalingrad, by Vassily Grossman). Then I saw this book review, which is an extended essay about Wendell Berry.

A Shared Place, by Jedediah Britton-Purdy (The Nation)

Wendell Berry’s lifelong dissent.

ESSAYS, 1969–1990, by Wendell Berry; Jack Shoemaker, ed.
ESSAYS, 1993–2017, by Wendell Berry; Jack Shoemaker, ed.

At a time when political conflict runs deep and erects high walls, the Kentucky essayist, novelist, and poet Wendell Berry maintains an arresting mix of admirers. Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal in 2011. The following year, the socialist-feminist writer and editor Sarah Leonard published a friendly interview with him in Dissent. Yet he also gets respectful attention in the pages of The American Conservative and First Things, a right-leaning, traditionalist Christian journal.

More recently, The New Yorker ran an introduction to Berry’s thought distilled from a series of conversations, stretching over several years, with the critic Amanda Petrusich. In these conversations, Berry patiently explains why he doesn’t call himself a socialist or a conservative and recounts the mostly unchanged creed underlying his nearly six decades of writing and activism. Over the years, he has called himself an agrarian, a pacifist, and a Christian—albeit of an eccentric kind. He has written against all forms of violence and destruction—of land, communities, and human beings—and argued that the modern American way of life is a skein of violence. He is an anti-capitalist moralist and a writer of praise for what he admires: the quiet, mostly uncelebrated labor and affection that keep the world whole and might still redeem it. He is also an acerbic critic of what he dislikes, particularly modern individualism, and his emphasis on family and marriage and his ambivalence toward abortion mark him as an outsider to the left ...

The Good Soldier Švejk, and why "dimwittedness -- genuine or feigned -- is a vaccine against epidemics of madness that grip nations."

By artist Josef Lada, from the linked article.

Ignore the essay's title and forget progressive or regressive shadings, because this isn't about modern political definitions. Švejk is universal, because idiocy is everywhere -- on all sides, in each nook and every cranny.

I, too, have been fixated on Švejk for a very long time. Way back in the beginning of Rich O's Public House I borrowed Švejk's face from an illustration in one of Michael "Beer hunter" Jackson's books and used it to adorn the beer list. Švejk was never far from my own thoughts during those sessions in traditional Prague pubs during my communist-era travels.

That's why I say Švejk Day surely is a promotion Pints&union should consider staging annually. The Pilsner Urquell awaits, and Chef Dalton can conjure the pork.

This needs to happen. In the interim, this is a classic essay about an equally timeless fictional creation. I can't hope to summarize it, so I'll merely show you the way.

Why Every Progressive Should Read The Good Soldier Švejk (Literary Hub)

Paul Goldberg on How to Stay Sane in a World Besieged by Idiocy

A copy of The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War—a classic comedy by Jaroslav Hašek, a countryman, contemporary and peer of Franz Kafka—is never far from my desk.

I leaf through it, check out the ditties, drink in the cartoony illustrations, get a bolus of inspiration from a page or two.

Huck Finn defines America. Eugene Onegin defines Russia. Josef Švejk, a professional dog thief and, literally, a certified dimwit who stumbles through World War I, is the quintessential Czech. As it serves up bawdy tales and run-on non-sequiturs, this novel accomplishes much more than to define a nation.

It defines the idiocy of war and the men who wage it, and not just the Great War, but all war. And not just the idiocy of war, but idiocy itself—the big “I.”

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.

---

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.

BOOKS: Zeno's Conscience and Comrade Baron.

Confessions of Zeno, these days properly rendered in English as Zeno's Conscience, is a novel written by Italo Svevo (a pen name), a businessman of Italian, German and Jewish ancestry, who for most of his adult life lived in Trieste. The city was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the time, but since the conclusion of World War I it has been Italian.

Svevo labored in obscurity as a writer until his friendship with James Joyce, a pre-war resident of Trieste who tutored English there, bore fruit at war's end. Joyce touted Zeno to his literary acquaintances in France, and their support brought overdue recognition to Svevo.

The central character in the novel is Zeno Cosini, a fiftyish Trieste businessman who has recorded remembrances of his life at the behest of his psychiatrist. We learn of his upbringing, unbreakable smoking habit, relations with father, the courtship of his wife, relations with his mistress, and business ties with a brother-in law. Zeno is a well-meaning but unreliable narrator. The single best review I've found of Zeno's Conscience is by James Woods at the London Review of Books. It's well worth your time.

The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno (to give it its familiar English title), which first appeared in 1923. Italo Svevo’s novel belongs recognisably to the comic tradition of Don Quixote and The Good Soldier Svejk, a comedy defined by Schopenhauer (a great influence on Svevo) as residing in the incongruity between our concepts and objective reality. Both Quixote and Zeno are fantasists, the former antique, religious and chivalric, the latter modern, secular and bourgeois. Quixote wants to serve the world, to set it to rights, and fails in the task; Zeno wants only to serve himself, and largely succeeds, though not by trying. Quixote wills, and fails magnificently; Zeno waits, and succeeds farcically.

Confessions of Zeno moves between moral correction and tragic pathos, between the bracing spectacle of vanity and the sad prospect of an imprisoned self acting as if it were free.

In short, Zeno is a highly modern man.

Zeno continually assumes that he can control the terms of his freedom – which we can see are merely the terms of his imprisonment.

So very familiar.

I'd read this novel before, some twenty years ago, and decided to revisit it owing to our upcoming visit to Trieste in late fall. I recalled much of the narrative, though by no means all. However the final chapter was a genuine gut punch, of which I remembered very little.

This chapter is written by Zeno as a diary and a postscript, a few years after the bulk of the narrative. It is 1915 and Italy finally has switched sides from Germany and Austria-Hungary to the Allies (the UK, France and Russia), with the country's prime war aim the seizure of territories precisely like that of Trieste and environs.

Zeno becomes enmeshed in the local outbreak of war, at first almost comically, then with an almost dignified acceptance, concluding with an observation about mankind's propensity to pursue destruction that comes very close to summarizing the entirety of the time elapsing on this planet since Svevo composed the words, through the present day.

Next up for me is non-fiction: Comrade Baron: A Journey through the Vanishing World of the Transylvanian Aristocracy. As one reviewer notes, "Comrade Baron is a highly personalized defense of aristocracy."

A Dutch journalist arrives in Budapest just after the fall of communism, meets and marries a Hungarian countess with roots in Transylvania (prior to WWII an almost feudal domain of Hungary, with the Hungarians atop the ethnic jumble, and since then a part of Romania) and becomes fascinated by the now vanished Hungarian nobility.

My first and only visit to Transylvania (and Bucharest) came in 1997, and was duly transformative. I'll concede to giving no thought whatever during the visit to the plight of the landed aristocracy and their vanished way of life.

The book should be an interesting supplement. 

ON THE AVENUES: Trieste, New Albany and the meaning of nowhere.

"Melancholy is Trieste’s chief rapture. In almost everything I read about this city, by writers down the centuries, melancholy is evoked. It is not a stabbing sort of disconsolation, the sort that makes you pine for death (Although Trieste’s suicide rate, as a matter of fact, is notoriously high.) In my own experience it is more like our Welsh hiraeth, expressing itself in bitter-sweetness and a yearning for we know not what."
-- Jan Morris

Somewhere around 17 or 18 years ago I read Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, "a meditation on the crossroads city of Trieste" by the Welsh journalist and writer Jan Morris (born in 1926 and still very much with us).

Trieste is an Italian city bordering Croatia and Slovenia, on a finger of land on the northern shores of the Adriatic Sea. Once, it rivaled Hong Kong as a great commercial port, a crucial outpost of the Hapsburg Empire where Italians, Slavs, and Austrians met to do business. Trieste’s cosmopolitan character kept it from being dominated by any one religion. The city is pleasant visually, but was too commercial ever to become a center for art or architecture. Morris argues, in essence, that Trieste is a good place but not a great one: the food is excellent but not ethnically distinct, and the people themselves are gravely courteous, but undistinguished. Trieste is almost nationless, thus its appeal to exiles like Morris, who has traveled the world in search of an identity.

The key words for me are cosmopolitan, nationless, exiles and identity.

Actually I'd been in Trieste once, very briefly, passing through the city from points west in route to Slovenia, then a constituent element of communist Yugoslavia. I allowed nowhere near enough time in Trieste to indulge my quirky Hapsburg fetish, evidently so eager to cross the border to Ljubljana that I didn't take a single photograph.

Perhaps I purchased Morris' book fifteen years later as a form of exculpatory penance, or some type of rearview mirror perspective. I can't really comment because quite little from the book lodged in my memory, perhaps because I drank quite a lot back then.

Consequently I've just finished rereading it, which is something I seldom do. Self-interest is my primary rationale, seeing as we'll be visiting Trieste in November, but at the same time a determined Europhile's work is never done. Happily, significant portions of the narrative came back to me during the second reading.

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere pleases and instructs both as meditation and memoir. Morris first came to Trieste in the Queen's service at the end of WWII and became enamored of the area. She wrote the book while in her eighth decade, taking stock of the city's changing fortunes; what Trieste had meant to her, and how both writer and city had aged, changed and in some cases stayed the same.

The book is history, travelogue and social commentary all at once, canvassing Illyrians, Austrians, Italians, Slovenes and Jews; long-term expatriate resident James Joyce's fondness for whorehouses and ill-fated Emperor Maximilian's unfortunate career choice in Mexico; Karst limestone topography, native Bora winds, the Glagolitic (old Slavic) alphabet and young Sigmund Freud's failure to determine how eels copulate; mediocre opera, excellent coffee and various movable landmarks; and not to exclude robust viewpoints about racism and nationalism (unsurprisingly she's decidedly against them).

Morris herself offers a summary.

“There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones. They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots, but are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to believe that its natural capital is Trieste.”

That's incredible. Morris has not ever visited New Albany, and yet she knows exactly what it feels like to exist here amid the reign of the mediocre charlatans.

---

The city of Trieste and its many faces through the years obviously move the aging author deeply, as informed by her personal experiences, and this is why a 25-year-old simply cannot write a book like this. Youth is capable of combustion, stamina and other great feats, but it cannot conjure elegiac prose like this, finely book-ended with melancholy on one side and and as-yet undiminished joy for living on the other.

Threading this expository needle can be done only with age and accumulated wisdom, and in like fashion I read Morris' book the first time when I was in my early forties, still far too green to grasp it. Now at (almost) 59 years of age the tone cuts deeper. As an example, Morris as veteran travel writer confides that she has undertaken to look at Trieste in the same way she'd look into a mirror, which is what travel is all about in the first place.

Morris quotes Wallace Stevens.

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or heard or felt came not but from myself

So it has been, with her and with me. She then returns to the concept of exile, applying it to our journey into old age.

For years I felt myself an exile from normality, and now I feel myself one of those exiles from time. The past is a foreign country, but so is old age, and as you enter it you feel you are treading unknown territory, leaving your own land behind. You’ve never been here before. The clothes people wear, the idioms they use, their pronunciation, their assumptions, tastes, humours, loyalties all become the more alien the older you get. The countryside changes. The policeman are children. Even hypochondria, the Trieste disease, is not what it was, for that interesting pain in the ear-lobe may not now be imaginary at all, but some obscure senile reality.

Chronologically a mere fifteen years separate me from Morris's age at the time she wrote Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, and yet at no point in my life have I felt emotions like these as keenly, whether pertaining to mirrors, exile, melancholy, uncertainty or plain bewilderment about why I'm here and what it's all supposed to mean.

It's actually not a debilitating frame of mine, just introspective. My head is clear, and there has been no temptation to climb back into multiple bottles. Yet the Welsh concept of hiraeth, this bittersweet yearning for an indefinable something referenced by Morris, nips constantly these days at my conscious existence.

Round and round we go, and where it stops -- well, we already know.

---

Only as a postscript, here's a bit more about Jan Morris. Perhaps she knows better than most of us what the search for self-identity really means.

Jan Morris, CBE, FRSL (born 2 October 1926) is a Welsh historian, author and travel writer. She is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968–1978), a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City. A trans woman, she was published under her birth name, James, until 1972, when she had sex reassignment after transitioning from living as male to living as female.

Morris has joked that in spite of a successful career in journalism and dozens of books, her obituaries will be headlined “Sex-change author dies.” Wikipedia continues:

In 1949, Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter; they had five children together, including the poet and musician Twm Morys. One of their children died in infancy. Morris began a sex change in 1964. In 1972, Morris travelled to Morocco to undergo sex reassignment surgery, performed by surgeon Georges Burou, because doctors in Britain refused to allow the procedure unless Morris and Tuckniss divorced, something Morris was not prepared to do at the time. They divorced later, but remained together and on 14 May 2008 were legally reunited when they formally entered into a civil partnership. Morris detailed her transition in Conundrum (1974), her first book under her new name, and one of the first autobiographies to discuss a personal gender reassignment.

Tuckniss,now suffering from dementia, has said that she always knew about Jan, even when Jan was James; it was merely something to be gotten through together. The raw power of a 70-year-long love story like this has even am inveterate Grinch like me reaching for the hankies when he reads the last line.

At the same time that Jan was transitioning from male to female, she was also moving from being thoroughly English (Oxford, the army, the Times) to thoroughly Welsh. Jan and Elizabeth bought a big house in the far north-west of Wales, where they still live, and Jan began to embrace a Welsh republicanism that has become one of the great passions of her life. When Jan and Elizabeth die, they will be buried together on an island in a stream near their home, beneath a stone bearing an inscription in both English and Welsh that says: “Here lie two friends, at the end of one life.”

“Here lie two friends, at the end of one life.”

We should all be as fortunate.

---

Recent columns:

July 4: ON THE AVENUES: The 2019 remix, "You want some fries with your redevelopment?"

June 27: ON THE AVENUES: Mourning (and alcohol) in America, circa 1984.

June 18: ON THE AVENUES: Let's lift our voices for another verse of "Talking Seventh Inning Blues."

May 28: ON THE AVENUES: Challenges are forever, but downtown New Albany's food and drink purveyors keep on keeping on.

Close to a half-year's reading list.

The book I cracked open last night is about as "escapist" as I ever get as it pertains to reading: Vineland, Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel about "washed-up 60s radicals." Mostly as a post-it note to myself, here's the reading list to date in 2019.

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

Baudolino, a novel by Umberto Eco

Dreamers, a factually-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)

ON THE AVENUES: I'd stop drinking, but I'm no quitter (the 2019 Gravity Head remix).

ON THE AVENUES: I'd stop drinking, but I'm no quitter (the 2019 Gravity Head remix).

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

---

Today's column artfully combines excerpts from previous ramblings.

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Before the drinking starts, let’s consider a ship leaving the dock and making for open water. We experienced this first-hand in 2016 aboard a big Baltic ferry, leaving Tallinn for Helsinki in the morning and returning at dusk the same day.

In darkness of night the specific sensation might be described as lights fading, but by daylight it is the gradual disappearance of land as the ship moves away from shore. Depending on the weather and the strength of one’s eyesight, there comes a split second when land no longer is visible. It’s a melancholy feeling, like the place itself has ceased to exist apart from a lingering imagination of it.

From this point forward, until the next port of call begins slowly to materialize past the bow, the journey becomes synonymous with the undulating rhythm of the sea.

Similarly, most aspects of business ownership consuming my daily existence for a quarter-century -- the good, the bad, the drunk and the sublime -- have dissolved entirely into those distant invisible headlands. Now it’s just the rocking of the waves, and pondering what it all meant.

These days it seems like another person's life.

---

Col. Sherman T. Potter: I gather you drink.
Captain“Hawkeye” Pierce: Only to excess.

In the Western cultural tradition, there are numerous examples of the seasoned drinker as a sodden protagonist, at times an inspiring and compelling figure -- perhaps even a heroic one, as with Norm Peterson on Cheers -- although bar owner Sam Malone was a reformed alcoholic, as was the real-life Nicholas Colosanto, who played the bartender Coach on the popular show.

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, although it occurs to me some of you might not want to go here, finding this topic distasteful. At the same time, it would be pointless of me to deny or to disavow a career in beverage alcohol, or to suggest that it was only a job.

Trust me; my work wasn't left atop a desk at the office.

I drink very differently now than before, and far less overall, but drinking's still a conscious lifestyle choice. So it goes. I don't drive while intoxicated, and command all drinkers to be responsible.

Back to these fictional drinkers, who in my view reflect an existential aspect of the human condition. To be succinct, what else remains to be said, done or alibied when life’s fundamentally surreal futility strikes you as inescapable, and is best addressed and assuaged by peering through the bottom of a lifted glass, one deftly drained only seconds ago?

The cultural milieu of alcoholic beverages in places like India, Bolivia or Ghana remains a mystery to me, although it is clear that the pursuit of intoxicants is a universal human condition throughout the world. Certain European and American archetypes endure to entertain and enlighten, from Falstaff in olden times to Bukowski in ours, as buttressed by diverse personalities such as W.C. Fields, Dean Martin and Dudley Moore’s Arthur.

I've always been a reader of books. In the American literary oeuvre, one must push past cautionary tales of prohibitionist finger-wagging during the lamentably fevered Carrie Nation period of our national existence, straight to the dawn of the modern period occurring just after the Great War. Inhibitions fell prey to an all-encompassing, collective thirst enabled by the villainous Volstead Act, and brutal realism finally forced its way out of societal straitjackets.

Imbibing in print became great again.

It may have been Ernest Hemingway who first incorporated the drinker’s lifestyle as integral backdrop, seen most strikingly in his groundbreaking novel, The Sun Also Rises. Youthful, disaffected, expatriated Americans find solace in adult beverages at all hours of the day, even when they should be diligently working to appease the Puritanical prerequisites of capitalism and families back home.

The acerbic commentator Dorothy Parker emerged from this period, Scotch in hand. Equilibrium came with Repeal, and America scarcely skipped a beat, quickly eschewing Scott and Zelda for Reefer Madness and later, Timothy Leary. However, this is beyond the scope of today's examination.

Malcolm Lowry was an Englishman heavily influenced by the New World, and he captured the bibulous essence in the person of Geoffrey Firmin, otherwise known as the Consul, in Under the Volcano. Firmin is a defeated man on the Day of the Dead, utterly adrift during his final hours on earth, navigating the streets of a dusty Mexican provincial town in search of celestial meaning and settling instead for bottles of mezcal hidden in the shrubbery, as well as an infamous midday jolt of aftershave.

When seeking literary inspiration across the pond, a personal favorite is J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, chronicling the antics of supposed student Sebastian Dangerfield, a profligate American carousing, drinking, roaring and whoring in Ireland. For more of the same, Anglo-style, consult Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and know that in his prime, the very real Amis fully imitated his art.

On the continent, Czech playwright-turned-statesman Vaclav Havel’s two-person play, Audience, posits an artistic, city-dwelling enemy of the totalitarian state abruptly sent as punishment to the hinterlands and a term as manual laborer in a brewery. He must endure the ramblings of his boss, who cannot refrain from sampling the fermented wares and hilariously sinks into inebriation while haplessly pretending to interrogate the urban exile.

The doctor in László Krasznahorkai’s novel Satantango desperately tries to ration his enabling pálinka (and fails) as he observes the disintegration of the dysfunctional collective farm, and in the first-person narrative of The Drinker, by Hans Fallada, the hapless Herr Sommer will swallow just about anything as he abruptly transitions from sobriety to alcoholism, and eventually to insanity -- but schnapps is the preferred lubricant of his alarmingly precipitous decline.

For something approximating a philosophical rationale for the drinker’s lifestyle choice, we must turn to Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities and the bombastic figure of Mr. Traba, a retired Lutheran pastor in heavily Catholic (and Communist) Poland.

Mr. Traba’s daily doses of vodka are the pretext for a fateful decision. It is 1963, and he has decided to erase his life’s numerous frustrations by committing a final, exclamatory act: Assassinating Comrade Gomulka, the unimaginative and degraded Communist tyrant. As the tragicomic final moment draws near, the perpetually intoxicated Mr. Traba addresses his companions:

Of course, there were moments in my wasted life when I got the audacious idea in my head to gain mastery of some earthly skill other than drinking, but upon reflection I rejected all these ideas. I drank all my life, and drinking was my work and my rest, my love and my hobby. Drinking was my art, my concert, and my artfully written sonnet. Drinking was my cognition, my description, my synthesis, and my analysis.

Only amateurs, laymen and graphomaniacs assert that you drink in order to soften the monstrosity of the world and to dull unbearable sensitivity. On the contrary, you drink in order to deepen pain and to heighten sensitivity. Especially in a case like mine: when there is nothing but drinking, it is necessary to make an art of drinking, it is necessary to reach the heart of the matter through drinking, and the heart of the matter is death.

When I first read the testimony of Pilch’s extraordinary character, I finally understood the contemporary reality of which all New Albanians boasting consciousness and a pulse must eventually grapple.

Even today, it is virtually impossible to attend a public meeting in this town without recourse to strong drink.

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Meanwhile, an ancestral imperative creeps into the narrative.

When Gravity Head launches at NABC's Pizzeria & Public House, as it will again this Friday, February 22, the familiar space and time continuum is briefly altered. Normal routines appear Byzantine by comparison. Life’s infinite horizons narrow. One reverts to existence by the hour, or minute by minute. Passing through the looking glass is perfectly boring by comparison.

As for the fest’s actual commencement, once the opening bell sounds there is a collective observance of Dr. Sidney Freedman’s immortal dictum:

“Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice - pull down your pants and slide on the ice.”

Why do I continue to mention Gravity Head even after my final, much belated exit in 2018 from the company I helped found?

It's simple, because once upon a time Gravity Head was my idea. The 2019 edition will be the 21st such gathering, and I'm proud of my creation. Of course Gravity Head no longer is about me, assuming it ever really was. It always took the entire workplace village to pull it off, and I imagine this remains true.

Besides, gravity’s the law. It’s bigger than you and me.

Gravity Head’s opening day has become somewhat of a chaotic scrum, and a singular tradition all its own. Folks seem content with the interior logic occurring at the fest’s beginning, but this isn’t what every celebrant looks forward to experiencing each year.

Rather, there’ll inevitably be a quiet Tuesday night on the second or third week, with a handful of friends, and leisurely, contemplative sipping of one or two quality libations, spiced with conversation. These are the precious moments that lead to feelings of timelessness.

And without timelessness, beer is far less interesting to me. Will I attend this year? Not sure, and it doesn't matter. Have fun if you do, and be responsible.

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These days I'm working in the beer trade at Pints&union in downtown New Albany. It's been 13 years since our presumed civic revitalization began with the establishment of Bistro New Albany -- a pivotal if short-lived eatery and watering hole. It operated where Brooklyn & The Butcher is located today.

Amid the prevailing Gahanian personality cult of the present, the pendulum has swung all the way back to alcohol as the best available means to deepen pain and heighten sensitivity. Dissipation may be a masochistic coping mechanism to counter the Disney-fried dictatorship, but it has the benefit of reminding us of how little the base culture of obliviousness has changed in all this time.

My favorite way of defining dissipation is this: “Unrestrained indulgence in physical pleasures, especially alcohol.”

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been an aficionado of dissipation, albeit in the manner of a willful, controlled narrative. In the hands of lesser mortals, dissipation can be harmful, but there are times when it proceeds from conscious calculation in the face of savage, visceral, conditioned responses, as when a glance at the calendar confirms that it’s a first Monday or third Thursday, and the occasion for another New Albany common council meeting.

(Given that attendance at fix-forever-in Redevelopment Commission meetings would require sedation by an anesthesiologist, let’s not even go there ... literally as well as figuratively.)

Considering the implications of meeting attendance, you find yourself thinking about how those impossibly brief final hours should be spent before history rudely repeats itself as tragedy, farce or vaudeville’s worst ventriloquist routines. Will you smoke a cigarette, have a last supper, and leave a testament for posterity?

Better to have a stiff drink, relax and enjoy the inevitable. Dissipation suddenly ceases to be a pejorative term thrown your way by the kill-joys and health fascists, and comes to more closely resemble what Hemingway, a true giant of the dissipative genre, once described as a “means of sovereign action.”

Papa was talking about a bottle of liquor, which could be consumed, used to crack skulls or rendered into a Molotov cocktail, sometimes all at once. Until recently, I stuck to a regimen of Progressive Pints somewhere downtown before ambling down to the City-County Building and taking in the floor show.

But times change, and medicine's effectiveness changes with them. Lately the prescription has come full circle, all the way back to the improvised still in the Swamp at the 4077th.

It may or may not have been gin, but there can be no doubt that it was the right stuff.

Hawkeye Pierce: Let’s make a pact about drinking.
Trapper John McIntyre: All right.
Hawkeye Pierce: Let’s never stop.

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Recent columns:

February 12: ON THE AVENUES: If it's about learning and knowledge, then by definition it's a Gahan Free Zone. You're welcome.

February 5: ON THE AVENUES: Our mayor hates non-elected boards -- except when they're his own, which is why "hypocrisy" is spelled G-A-H-A-N.

January 29: ON THE AVENUES: How has the 3rd district councilman fared since this question from 2015: "Et tu, Greg Phipps?"

January 22: ON THE AVENUES: Democrats should judge city council incumbents in districts 2, 3, 4 and 5 by their regressive deeds, not their progressive words.