Chad Comello

Category: Posts

  • Favorite Films of 2016

    According to my records I watched 83 films in 2016, 33 of which came out this year. As is the case with my reading, I’m in a “watch as much as I can” zone because I love movies and there’s so much great stuff and there are too many movies and I’ll never have this amount of free time once I have kids. So here are my favorite films from 2016, ranked.

    Arrival. I’m a total sucker for stories like this and Lost, Interstellar, Midnight Special, Gravity, Take Shelter, Contact and other deeply humane tales masquerading as sci-fi that make you think just as much as they make you want to hug someone. Though the geopolitical element to the story waded a little too close to didactic for me, I was nevertheless absorbed from the first minute, even if I’m still trying to figure everything out. Found myself surprised by the quality of Jeremy Renner’s performance, unsurprised by Amy Adams’s, and wishing Forest Whitaker had more to do.

    Moonlight. I got the feeling there were two hidden acts before the beginning of the film, showing the childhood and adolescence of Mahershala Ali’s crack dealer before he crossed paths with young Chiron, who’s starting on his own journey through a troubled life. Time is a flat circle.

    Everybody Wants Some!! With its likable cast, meandering dialogue, and lived-in plotless feel, it’s the middle sibling between Linklater’s Dazed and Confused and Before trilogy, all of which seem to take place in the same film universe where everyone’s a peripatetic philosopher and life happens in the ordinary moments between the usual milestones. More thoughts here.

    Hell or High Water. “Tangled Up in Blue” by Bob Dylan: “But me, I’m still on the road / Headin’ for another joint / We always did feel the same / We just saw it from a different point of view / Tangled up in blue.” Lots of tangling up in this movie, for good and ill. Family, money, friendship, death, the future. Mutual haunting. And what is a haunting but a tangle with the past? That last shot tho.

    Kubo and the Two Strings. Haven’t seen much love for this in the year-end lists, which is baffling. In sumptuous stop-motion animation, a cohesive fable plays out with a cast of characters who range from terrifying. Though in patches during the second act the interaction among the makeshift traveling posse borders on cloying, the larger arc of Kubo and his family and what it shows us about memory and creation is incredibly affecting.

    The Wave. It’s Jaws plus The Impossible plus that New Yorker article about the earthquake that’s gonna destroy the Pacific Northwest one day. Dug it! More thoughts on this deliciously tense low-budget Norwegian thriller that doesn’t look low-budget at all here.

    The Fits. That finale!

    Hail, Caesar! Liked this pretty much immediately. Full of hilariously deadpan Coen Bros Touches™ like David Krumholtz yelling things in the background of the communist gathering. I only wish we could have spent more time with the rotating cast of capital-c Characters I’ve come to expect from the Coens. Like Frances McDormand’s film editor: can their next movie be just about her? This could easily be the origin of a Marvel-esque cinematic universe.

    Midnight Special. From idea to execution, this Jeff Nichols joint is inspired in every sense: as homage to Spielbergian themes of family and destiny, as a sci-fi fable with the courage of restraint, and as an auteurist vision that doesn’t always shine scene to scene but adds up to something effulgent when it matters. Review here.

    Captain America: Civil War. Finally, a Spider-Man who actually looks like he’s in high school! That, along with ever more compelling character studies of Steve Rogers and Tony Stark, made this latest episode of The Marvel Cinematic Universe Show worth watching. Full review here.

    Other favorites: The Lobster, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, The Innocents, La La Land, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, Last Days in the Desert

    Haven’t yet seen: Silence, Toni Erdmann, Manchester by the Sea, Certain Women

  • Favorite Books of 2016

    According to my records I read more than ever in 2016. Partially this was due to starting as a book reviewer for two library trade journals, thus increasing the volume of pages coming my way. But I also made more time overall for reading, because I love it and I work at a library and there are too many books out there and I’ll never have this amount of free time once I have kids. So here are my top 10 books from 2016, ranked:

    When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

    I don’t cry while reading books. I didn’t cry while reading this one, but I came close. Written in the final months of Kalanithi’s life, it’s the story of the young neurosurgeon’s career intertwined with his struggle against his lung cancer diagnosis. Kalanithi had a master’s in literature along with his medical training and it shows; linking left- and right-brain thinking, he builds upon his close familiarity with morality with a deep, probing search for meaning.

    Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

    Jahren, whose father was a scientist and mother loved literature, embodies both worlds in this memoir that contrasts her journey as a struggling biologist with the lives of the trees she studies. So much wisdom, humor, and hard-won experience in this book. I copied many sentences for future reference and inspiration. Would make a good pairing with When Breath Becomes Air.

    Before the Fall by Noah Hawley

    I tend to read more nonfiction than novels, so I try to make the fiction I read worth the time. This thriller certainly was. From the deadbeat Doug to the nefarious blowhard pundit Bill to the troubled Charlie to even the maybe-hero Scott (not Gus: Gus was cool), Hawley nestles illustrations of masculinity’s destructive toxicity within a well-crafted, slow-boiling whodunit that’s also a superb character study.

    Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard

    Another stranger than fiction historical yarn from the author of Destiny of the Republic. If you only know Winston Churchill from World War II, check out this wild chapter of his younger life when he was an ambitious, vainglorious scion of British nobility who was captured as a war correspondent in the Boer War.

    Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul by James McBride

    From the author of a personal favorite The Good Lord Bird comes this impressionistic portrait of the Godfather of Soul’s rise and fall. McBride eschews the typical conventions of biography in favor of a more journalistic approach, interviewing Brown’s loved ones and others who knew him well to compose a rich tapestry of a complicated man.

    But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

    Went long on this one when I read it. (See also: Filmspotting’s episode featuring Klosterman and the Top 5 Movies Future Historians Will Remember.)

    The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture by Glen Weldon

    Not at all a comics person, so I appreciated this very thorough yet propulsive history of Batman since his inception in 1939. Since I listened to the audiobook I can’t speak to how Weldon’s voice comes through on the page, but in my ear it was amazing. Any listeners of Pop Culture Happy Hour will greatly enjoy this as a kind of extended, uncut Gleniana—my favorite part being his adoption of Comic Book Guy’s voice whenever he quotes the overheated prose of indignant nerds.

    Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Workshop by Nick Offerman

    Trademark Offerman: delicious prose, self-deprecating humor, child-like glee, and a humble appreciation for just being there, so to speak. It’s a beautiful book, mixing bountiful wood-porn photos, short essays, and step-by-step instructions for a variety of projects, one or two of which I’d like to attempt. But really, it’s worth it for the “Best Way to Fell A Tree” comic alone.

    Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

    Johnson is a master storyteller, weaving disparate elements together into a rich and seamless tapestry of technology and human history. That the book also has its own companion podcast of the same name is fitting, as his writing is just as pleasing to the ears as it is on the page. It’s a great book for all curious readers but especially for the history-averse, who will enjoy the fast pace, topical diversity, and abundant trivia. (See also: Johnson’s How We Got to Now.)

    When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future by Abby Smith Rumsey

    One of the first books I reviewed for Library Journal, and the first starred review I gave. You know a book is good when it discusses the Sumerian cuneiform, ancient Greek mnemonics, Gutenberg’s press, Thomas Jefferson’s personal library, and the Internet Archive.

    Favorite non-2016 books I read this year:

    Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots by Rod Dreher

    Amidst the remains of the modern GOP, I hope this book is salvaged from the rubble and becomes a foundational text for revival. Review here.

    The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers by Tom Standage

    Standage points out that a Victorian transported to the twenty-first century would not be terribly bewildered by the Internet, given how similar it is to the telegraph. (Though the space shuttle would probably blow their minds.) Though eventually eclipsed by the telephone, the telegraph was the first and arguably one of the biggest sudden technological leaps we’ve experienced. Time and space instantly shrunk; information that used to travel at the speed of the horse suddenly arrived instantaneously, and the new industry’s standards would continue to inform new technologies, including the new Internet. There are so many particular times and topics we today know little about, simply due to the steady march of time and new technology. Niche history books like this one perform a great service in looking back and illuminating what came before us in a digestible and fascinating story.

    The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia by Michael Booth

    Read this for research before visiting Scandinavia this last summer. Proud to be one-eighth Finnish and Norwegian! Booth’s baffled British perspective nevertheless finds a lot to admire in the Nordic Way. See also: Anu Partanen’s The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life and Debunking Utopia: Exposing the Myth of Nordic Socialism by Nima Sanandaji.

    The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

    As good as advertised.

    Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches by S.C. Gwynne

    Excepting the unfortunate overuse of italics for emphasis, which made many lines seem like political ad narration, this book was amazing. Gwynne’s prose is so muscular it’s like every paragraph is a pushup. How does Quanah Parker not have an HBO miniseries about him yet? If all you know about the Comanche is from The Searchers, check this one out immediately, followed by Glenn Frankel’s The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend.

  • ’16 Going On ’17

    Here at the end of all things 2016, let’s look back on the resolutions I made last year at this time, shall we?

    Podcast less. I started the year with 21 podcasts in my feed, and currently have… 32. In my defense, I was much quicker to delete episodes this year, many of the podcasts publish infrequently, and some of them I’m on a trial run with. I also have been listening to more audiobooks. But the spirit of the goal was to have more time when I’m not listening to anything. So this one’s a work in progress, and probably a goal for 2017.

    Reflect more. Though I have the free time to continue to plow through books and movies, I think I’ve done a better job writing about the ones that spark thoughts in me and allowing myself to not read or watch something.

    Write more. My goal was to write 52 posts for the year, one for each week. Though I didn’t have at least one a week, I ended 2016 with 67 posts. I probably could have done more, but as this is a strictly At Whim enterprise, I’m not too concerned about quotas.

    Overall I think I actually did pretty good! Keeping the goals simple, attainable, and somewhat measurable certainly helped.

    2017 Goals

    Complete a woodworking project. This is something I’ve been pondering for a while. I’ve yet to find the plans for something I want to make, but this is a big one for this year: to put my hands to use on a tangible and practical project. We need a new bookshelf, so I was thinking about that. Any suggestions?

    Run a race. Like woodworking, running in an official race is something I’ve thought would be a nice thing to do but have never pulled the trigger. But I’ve come to realize if I ever plan on completing things, I need concrete deadlines to make them happen. A specific race of a specific length will help me in this, I hope.

    Improve my Spanish. I’ve had a decent grasp of it at various points in my life—in high school when I was in classes, during a summer stay in Guatemala, during a post-college stay in Colombia—but I’ve never gotten close to fluent. Short of an immersion program or living in a Latin American country, don’t know if I’ll ever be, but I’d like to get closer. And since it’ll only get harder as I get older, there’s no day but today.

  • Reader In Chief

    As a reader, librarian, and citizen, I’m going to miss this “reader in chief,” as John McMurtrie of the San Francisco Chronicle calls him:

    As is amply manifest in his writing, Obama is someone who has done a lot of thinking about his place in the world, his upbringing, his uniquely American story. And, as president, he has proved himself to be just as reflective, viewing the world, as he says, in shades of gray, with nuance — qualities enhanced by a lifetime of reading.

    It’s been really nice having a president who not only knows who Marilynne Robinson and Ta-Nehisi Coates are, but can have intelligent, in-depth conversations with her and him. (It’s also really nice to have a new Librarian of Congress now, rather than next year or beyond. Don’t want to think about who PEOTUS would have nominated.)

    And what of Obama’s successor? McMurtie:

    Despite all the books that bear his name, the next president, in fact, seems to care very little about books. He tweets obsessively, at all hours, about the most trivial matters, yet he claims he doesn’t have the time to read.

    “I’m always busy doing a lot,” he told the Washington Post in July. “Now I’m more busy, I guess, than ever before.”

    When asked by Megyn Kelly of Fox News to name the last book he read, he answered, “I read passages, I read areas, chapters. I don’t have the time.”

    God help us all.

  • Gentleman Boss

    “His political experience had been restricted almost exclusively to one state, and his knowledge of national and international affairs was limited to what any reasonably curious New Yorker might cull from local newspapers.”

    “His nomination had been entirely unexpected, and was commonly interpreted as a device for placating the most opprobrious forces within the GOP.”

    “His presidency was almost unanimously dreaded. There were those, however, who contended that he would change dramatically once he found himself in the White House.”

    “It is out of this mess of filth that he will go to the Presidential chair.”

    “It was a common saying of that time among those who knew him best, ‘Chet Arthur President of the United States. Good God.’”

    Oh, you thought I might be referring to our incoming forty-fifth president? Good guess. But these quotes were instead written about Chester A. Arthur, our twenty-first president and the subject of the latest presidential biography I decided to tackle: Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur by Thomas Reeves.

    Why Arthur? I remember reading in Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic, which is about the assassination of James Garfield, about how as Garfield’s vice president and successor, Arthur was considered a corrupt spoilsman, a GOP hack subject to the whims of nefarious party strongmen. He’d never held public office before being named vice president as a consolation prize for his wing of the Republican Party. He was New York’s quartermaster general during the Civil War but otherwise hadn’t served in the military. His sudden ascension to the presidency was greeted with a mix of dread and low expectations, and yet when he became president he managed to surprise everyone with his dedication to reform and respectability.

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    Hope, then, is why Arthur and why now. After the 2016 election I wanted to learn more about the man whose presidency made a good many people scoff and wring their hands in despair, yet who proved them wrong by being better than he had been—or at least clearing the low bar that was set for him.

    The comparison only goes so far. Arthur practiced law, was involved in GOP politics politics for years, and proved a capable and well-regarded quartermaster during the war. He wasn’t the moral vacuum his 2016 successor is, though he also didn’t leave much time for family and was an unabashed beneficiary of the privileges his positions afforded. If anything the current president-elect compares just as much to Arthur’s successor, Grover Cleveland, who fathered an illegitimate child, had hired a convict as a “substitute” in the Civil War, and was “supposed to have enjoyed hanging two criminals” while serving as sheriff in Buffalo.

    (Hints of Obama surfaced too: Arthur was accused by rivals of being foreign-born, first in Ireland, then later in Canada, and thus ineligible for the presidency. He also had to retake the oath of office after having first done it with a New York state judge at 2 a.m. the morning after Garfield died.)

    More an exhaustive overview of Gilded Age politics than an Arthur biography, the book often felt like Reeves was more interested in tariff debates and who got appointed to which middling position than in talking about Arthur, who admittedly isn’t the most rousing historical subject. It felt a lot longer than it was, though it did drop some interesting Arthur Nuggets™ like:

    • He was one of a few first-generation presidents: Jackson, Buchanan, and Obama’s fathers and Jefferson, Wilson, and Hoover’s mothers were foreign-born
    • He spoke at the capstone ceremony of the finally completed Washington Monument in December 1884, which had been under construction since 1848
    • His younger sister Mary served as First Lady because his wife had died before he entered office

    As Reeves writes, the presidency during the Gilded Age did not have the power it now has. Congress controlled the political movement of the day; the president was a vetoer and just kept the federal machine running by filling positions with supporters and other eager office-seekers. There also weren’t the cascading foreign crises we’re used to presidents having to manage today. “From Appomattox to the sinking of the Maine,” Reeves writes, “the nation was preoccupied with its own internal developments.” Moreover, Arthur didn’t really want the job. He was forced into it and surprised everyone with how he handled it.

    Someone who understood this at the time was Julia Sand, a young disabled woman from New Jersey who began writing to Arthur after Garfield was shot to encourage him and offer unsolicited political counsel. She knew Arthur’s reputation, but eloquently implored him to overcome it:

    Rise to the emergency. Disappoint our fears. Force the nation to have faith in you. Show from the first that you have none but the purest aims. It may be difficult at once to inspire confidence, but persevere. In time—when you have given reason for it—the country will love & trust you. … It is for you to choose whether your record shall be written in black or in gold.

    Let’s hope this history repeats itself.

  • A Frozen Hell

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    “Finland alone, in danger of death—superb, sublime Finland—shows what free men can do.” —Winston Churchill

    And Trotter, the author of the superb book A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40, shows what fine historians can do. Not sure how I found this book, but after visiting Finland last summer I wanted to learn more about the history of my distant ancestors. When this one popped up on Goodreads and had a good rating, I checked it out from the library, and am glad I did.

    Like the “Phony War” of mainland Europe, which was playing out at the same time, the Winter War was a kind of prelude to the main events that would devastate the rest of the hemisphere. Trotter posits that Stalin didn’t actually want to go to war with Finland. Considering Russia’s close relations with Finland in the past and seeing Germany’s advance through Europe, Stalin saw Finland’s value as a buffer between Russia and Scandinavia, and thought his demands for some of Finland’s Baltic islands reasonable.

    But Finland thought otherwise. After the rejection of Stalin’s ultimatum and a “who shot first?” controversy (it was Russia, who then claimed it was Finland to publicly justify their preemptive belligerence—they were expelled from the League of Nations for it) the Winter War was off and running. Or rather, lumbering. Though equipped with far more soldiers, artillery, tanks, and supplies, the Russians were an unwieldly force in unfamiliar terrain, making them easy targets for the dug-in Finns, who were well-acquianted with the snowy forests and much better prepared for the frigid siege. The Red Army had also been gutted of its senior officers and commanders thanks to Stalin’s “Great Purge” of the late 1930s, so it was partially a self-inflicted debilitation.

    The Finns’ homefield advantage made sabotage and survival the keys to survival. The Finnish commander Mannerheim didn’t even expect total victory, knowing the disparity of men and munitions was against the Finns; “the most honorable annihilation” was what he expected. After a long battle of attrition between two armies unprepared for sustained combat—and a Russian surge months after they expected to win once Stalin was sufficiently fed up with the incompetence—that’s what they got.

    But even on so brutal a battlefield, there were some funny moments:

    Propaganda efforts by both sides were amateurish and negligible in effect. During the so-called January lull in the Isthmus fighting, the Russians began using loudspeaker trucks to broadcast propaganda programs toward Finnish lines. The Finns started looking forward to them, since the music was refreshing and the Red artillery had orders to cease firing during the playing of Kuusinen’s speeches so the Finns would not miss a word. The Finns used these interludes to “make a break for the head.”

    The Finns also weren’t very impressed with the paper the propaganda was printed on:

    Leaflets by the million were airdropped all over Finland, promising an improved standard of living. They were printed on such grossly inferior paper stock that the Finns, many of whom knew a thing or two about the paper industry, disdained to use them in their latrines. In the leaflets Finnish workers were promised an eight-hour day, something they had already enjoyed, by law, for the past twenty years.

    Also thought it was funny how even on the frontlines the Finns wouldn’t be denied their saunas:

    For many of the encircled Soviet troops, just staying alive, for one more hour or one more day, was an ordeal comparable to combat. Freezing, hungry, crusted with their own filth (while the besieging Finns, a thousand meters away, might be enjoying a sauna-bath), for them the central forest was truly a snow-white hell.

    The war ended once the Soviets changed tactics and were finally able to overwhelm the exhausted Finnish troops. Though Finland had to cede some land, Stalin’s dream of annexing Finland as a whole wasn’t to be, and Finland would remain the only Baltic state to remain independent from the Soviet Union. Hostilities would renew three months later in the Continuation War, which coincided with Operation Barbarossa and would see Finland fighting with Nazi Germany as “co-belligerents” against Russia. The enemy of their enemy was their friend, I guess.

    Like many a military history, A Frozen Hell often gets too far into the weeds of troop formations and movements for my taste. But it shines when focusing on the grander strategies and diplomatic endeavors of the belligerents, and especially the ground-level experience of the men in the trenches. Highly recommended. (See my full notes from the book.)

  • Refer Madness: Future Scientist?

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    Refer Madness spotlights strange, intriguing, or otherwise noteworthy questions I encounter at the library reference desk.

    A mom was looking for her middle-school daughter’s next book. She said her daughter had loved The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and “all the Holocaust stuff.” But she wanted her to discover some real people as well. My first thought was the young adult version of Unbroken, but the library didn’t have that one. I asked if she liked creepy stuff and graphic novels, because then Emily Carroll’s Through the Woods might hit the spot. (Nope: “We showed her The Sixth Sense — big mistake.”) But she took it for herself, because she loved creepy stuff.

    Then, right before the mother was checking out, I remembered we had Rachel Ignotofsky’s beautifully illustrated Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World on the New Nonfiction shelf. Real women, nonfiction, easy read. I gave it to the mother and hoped for the best.

    In my dreams the girl reads it and has her mind blown by the badass women throughout science history, leading her to a career in science wherein she invents something that saves my life a few decades from now. Or she reads the first page, gets bored and discards it. Such is the way of things in readers advisory.

  • So Far Advanced

    Here’s a funny bit in an otherwise unfunny but fascinating book called A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940. After Finland refused Stalin’s ultimatum, Russia initiated war and installed a puppet Finnish government that signed the “treaty” Stalin had wanted:

    The body of the treaty went on cheerfully to grant Stalin every concession he had ever asked of the Finns, with some additional items thrown in for good measure. In return, the whole Finnish land mass was magically rejoined with Soviet Karelia to form “The People’s Republic of Finland.” Broadcasts were soon made in the name of this new government, telling the captive proletariat of “plutocratic Finland” about all the wonderful reforms that would be promulgated after the Red Army had finished liberating them. Kuusinen promised that he would break up all the great landowners’ estates; he also promised the workers an eight-hour day. The workers were not impressed. The eight-hour day had been legislated in Finland twenty-five years earlier, and the government’s land reform program was so far advanced by 1939 that there were only a few hundred estates left in all Finland that measured more than 300 acres. Kuusinen had certainly kept up with things.

    Never change, Finland.

  • Refer Madness: Playing Favorites

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    Refer Madness spotlights strange, intriguing, or otherwise noteworthy questions I encounter at the library reference desk.

    Every librarian has favorite patrons. Like parents we aren’t supposed to admit it, but it’s true. My favorites have developed because of how nice they are, for their interesting requests, or for their particular outlook on life. One of my favorites is an older woman, a regular, who is delightfully candid about the books she reads and, I’m discovering, shares my taste in reading.

    She had Ann Patchett’s new book Commonwealth in hand to check out, and I said I heard it was good. “Yeah, I don’t know, we’ll see,” she said. She wasn’t fond of Ian McEwan’s Nutshell: “The baby in the womb? How dumb was that!” Her favorites this year have been When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, and Before the Fall by Noah Hawley, which we bonded over. “So much people read is just trash,” she told me. “It’s nice to be on the same wavelength with someone.” I agreed and wished her luck with Commonwealth.

    This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for patrons like her.

  • Innocents & Wonder

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    Synchronicity strikes again.

    I recently watched Anne Fontaine’s The Innocents, a new film set in post-WWII Poland focused on Mathilde, a young French Red Cross nurse compelled to help a convent of Polish nuns with a dark secret. I watched it while in the midst of Emma Donoghue’s new novel The Wonder, which is also told from the perspective of a nurse, Lib Wright, a Florence Nightingale apprentice in nineteenth-century rural Ireland who is sent to observe and care for a girl purported to have survived without food for months, only on “manna from heaven.”

    Both Mathilde and Lib are reluctant recruits to their missions. Mathilde is beseeched by a desperate nun; Lib is in it for the paycheck and the desire to debunk the farce of the “miracle girl” with ruthless scientific empiricism. They allow their biases and prejudices—Mathilde’s annoyance with the sisters’ rigid piety and Lib’s anti-Irish condescension—to color their encounters with their patients, which creates tension initially but also allows for surprising connections.

    I encourage you to seek both of these works out not only because they are worth the experience, but because both are stories about women, made by women. They each do have interesting male supporting characters (the journalist Bryne in The Wonder and the Jewish doctor Samuel in The Innocents have what could be considered a conflict of interest in helping Mathilde and Lib, respectively, which is what makes their involvement so compelling), but they are above all focused on the lives of women, without calling attention to this focus. They are simply great stories deftly told.

  • Souvenirs, redux

    It’s fall outside, of orange and red.

  • Who I’m With

    Just over a year ago, I was lying on a hotel bed in Peoria, Illinois, after a day of attending sessions at a library conference, and planned to finish off my evening reading. But instead I turned on the TV (always a big mistake) and was immediately thrust into the Select Committee on Benghazi’s marathon grilling of Hillary Clinton. Watching the final two hours of this grotesque circus, I realized then that I was seeing the future.

    Clinton, congenitally unable to be honest yet enduring the pressure with aplomb, battling a Republican Congress, congenitally unable to be sane. I knew then that the “Learn Nothing, Do Nothing” Republicans would hound her, right or (mostly) wrong, to infinity and beyond. I also knew then that Clinton would be our next president.

    Back in March I was fairly determined not to vote for either Clinton or Trump and laid out my reasons why. I stand by them now, but wished circumstances had remained the same. In the seven months since I wrote that, the primaries concluded, leaving us with the most unqualified presidential candidate the republic has yet seen. One who, since the general election began, has proven that point over and over and over again.

    So I voted for Hillary Clinton. I’m not happy about it, but I’m also OK with voting for the first female president and one who is at least attached to reality. It’s cold comfort for what will be in store these next four years, which won’t be pretty, but will be a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

    UPDATE: Welp, guess not.

  • Thousands

    Tonight I was standing in a private room of a restaurant for a party when a middle-aged Asian woman in a kimono entered the room and approached me. She was holding a stack of leaflets and shoved one in front of me.

    “I’d like to talk to you about who to vote for on Tuesday,” she said.

    “Actually, I voted last week,” I said.

    Disappointed, she continued. “OK, well, who did you vote for?”

    “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “But who did you want me to vote for?”

    “Trump!” she said, quite pleased.

    “There’s no way,” I replied.

    She folded her arms and in an animated fashion, as if she’d prepared for this, said, “Really? Give me one reason why not.”

    “I have thousands,” I said.

    And at this, she turned away and walked out of the room, disappearing back into the restaurant.

    Because other people around me saw me talking to this woman, I can confirm that she was not in fact an apparition or my imagination run amok. But it does make me wonder: was she the extent of the Trump campaign’s ground game in Illinois?

  • The sunrise, it comes to me

    A poem

    The sunrise, it comes to me
    A rippled grace bound for the trees.
    Coming and coming, it comes,
    sent from the yonder colors, that are
    billowed in atmosphere.
    What is otherwise clear must contend
    with a cloudy obstruction that
    gets the best view of all:
    A panopticon dawn,
    but for me, the mere morning.

    The melange, elemental
    in joining sky and water into one ink,
    spilling.
    Blue-blue to blue-grey to
    a hazy picture of contentment.
    Sit we, contented, and hope for
    another.

    A flock—
    ovular,
    murmurating—
    emerges from nothing into black embodiment.
    Sky-writing by wing,
    collectively they greet the shore southward—
    and, by my view, into the ghosted sun.

    They fight with the wind;
    it gives them strength.

  • 160 Years Later

    Reading Robert Strauss’s Worst. President. Ever.: James Buchanan, the POTUS Rating Game, and the Legacy of the Least of the Lesser Presidents, which quotes this passage from Robert Merry’s Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians:

    Long before he became president, Buchanan demonstrated that he lacked the character required for strong presidential leadership. His weakness wasn’t grubby venality; he had made a tidy fortune as an effective Pennsylvania lawyer before going into politics, and he felt no need to seek financial gain through public office. Rather, Buchanan was a man of no fixed principles and no consistent political or personal loyalties. With ease he could flit from one position to an opposing one without so much as an explanation to those left behind. Any contorted rationalization could justify in his mind whatever actions he considered in his interest at any time. And, while he took pride in his personal incorruptibility, he was not above corrupting others in pursuit of his policy aims.

    Funny how the man elected to the presidency in 1856 can sound so similar to one who’s running for the same position 160 years later.

  • The Strangers I Met

    “When you talk to strangers,” writes Kio Stark, author of the TED Talk turned book When Strangers Meet: How People You Don’t Know Can Transform You, “you make beautiful and surprising interruptions in the expected narrative of your daily life. You shift perspective. You form momentary, meaningful connections. You find questions whose answers you thought you knew. You reject the ideas that make us so suspicious of each other.”

    We’re especially susceptible to these interactions when traveling, when we’re out of our comfort zone and into the unknown of a new place. That was the case for me last week, when I was visiting a previously unknown place for a few days with my wife. Though I hadn’t yet read When Strangers Meet, I knew it was on hold for me at the library for when I got back, so just the idea of talking to strangers pervaded my time there:

    1. Two of my Uber drivers were very laconic, but two weren’t. We asked Latanya about the craziest rides she’s done: she said she once delivered fried Oreos to someone 12 miles away, which got us talking about the insanity of fried Oreos. And as Edward drove us to the train station, I noticed he had a “Morehouse Alum ’69” badge hanging from his rearview mirror. I said I knew Dr. King went there and asked him what it was like.

    2. It was an unusually cold morning for this southern town, and as I walked down the street a twenty-something dude walking with his friends ducked into a building entrance for just a moment to get out of the biting wind. He reemerged apace with me, huddled and ill-clothed for the temperature, and said “Damn it’s cold.” I said I was from Chicago and was used to it. He showed me the rabbit’s foot he kept on his belt and was stroking just to keep his hands warm. “What you up to?” he asked. Just walking, I said, and asked what he did for a living. He paused and said with a chuckle he makes beats. Anything online? I asked. He said no, then asked if I had a phone number. I laughed uncomfortably. Email? “Yeah,” I said with another chuckle. “Why?” He didn’t say anything, but was still smiling goofily. I told him I was off to find a Dunkin’ Donuts and we parted ways.

    3. I stopped in the main library branch to look around, as is tradition when in a new place. I approached the reference desk and asked the librarians for recommendations of places to see and food to eat. With that oft-reported southern hospitality, they rattled off several sights and restaurants that we ended up going to.

    4. Our flight home was overbooked. We weren’t in a rush to get back home, so we took the airline’s offer of generous flight credit, a free hotel stay, and another flight in the morning. We walked out to the hotel shuttle station where dozens of people were shivering in the surprising night cold and waiting for their shuttle. A woman next to us asked if our flight had been canceled. We told her about the deal and she said she and her boyfriend had done the same thing. She asked what we’d been doing there. Business and pleasure. They were really friendly and were going to the same hotel, but once we got onto the crowded shuttle we didn’t talk again.

  • Hugging, No Learning

    nflcommissionerrogergoodellnflpaexecutivepm_kzo1u0u3l
    NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith in 2011 at the ceremony for the new CBA.

    I remember back during the 2011 NFL lockout, a Packers.com columnist kept writing to the fans not to get invested in the heated rhetoric between the players and owners, because once an agreement was reached—and it would be reached—the representatives of the players and the owners would be hugging on stage, all would be well again, and the fans who’d so adamantly taken sides would be wondering why they invested so much energy and partisan passion into a PR battle. And sure enough, a new CBA was reached, football started on time, and all those months of tit-for-tat suddenly seemed far less serious than diehard fans would have believed.

    I was reminded of that time and feeling while listening to David Axelrod’s conversation with Karl Rove on Axelrod’s podcast. As the two chief political operatives for the campaigns of Barack Obama and George W. Bush, they are each other’s political opposite and rival, representing the ideologies of the two primary political parties in the United States. And here they are, chatting about life and politics like old college chums. If you didn’t know which party they worked for you might not even know they were opponents.

    So when the fire-breathers on either side of the aisle get fired up on cable news or talk radio, excoriating the Other Guys for the sin of not agreeing with them or even viewing them as downright evil, I get to wondering if they’re just being played for suckers.

    If Karl Rove and David Axelrod—the guys whose job it is to convince voters in strong terms that the other guy is absolutely wrong and must be stopped—if they can sit and have a laugh together, why can’t the people whose votes they seek?

    If Trump toady Sean Hannity can hang out at a baseball game with Keith Olbermann, his arch media rival for a time, or harass Megyn Kelly—also a Fox News commentator—on Twitter and then literally hug it out, why don’t Hannity’s wound-up followers see through the pablum he’s peddling for views?

    Sports and politics are similar in that they involve intense gamesmanship, strategy, and a struggle of power and will and performance in a high-pressure environment. Obama even compared politics to football in a chat with Jerry Seinfeld. So why is it NFL players can play the game intensely, trying desperately to defeat their opponent, but still converge on the field after the game for hugs and handshakes and prayer circles? And why can’t voters?

    The easy answer is that sports don’t matter, ultimately. They matter to the players, whose livelihoods are affected by their performance. But when a fan turns off the TV after a game, his life is the exact same as it was when the game began. Conversely, politics do matter. People’s lives are affected by legislation and the action or inaction of leaders.

    But I don’t think it has to be that simple.

    If voters and pundits actually cared about winning—i.e. getting legislature through Congress or changing their opponents’ minds—they wouldn’t demonize the people whose votes will be needed in order to achieve that desired victory.

    If voters and pundits actually cared about winning, they should read and view things outside of their ideological media echo chamber to better understand why some people have different opinions.

    But it seems like people just want to act angry. Settle scores. Humiliate whoever their Other is. And all the while the TV networks, talk radio, the NFL, or whoever has something to gain from outrage, rakes in enough revenue through clicks, ads, and eyeballs to self-justify, rinse, and repeat.

    I’m not doubting the sincerity of those with strongly held beliefs, or those who go public with them. In a democracy, that should be encouraged. I only wish to avoid the scorched earth that comes of it, because I, speaking for those of us who aren’t holding the flamethrowers, am not interested in getting burned by someone who doesn’t know how the game is played.

  • Refer Madness: The Terminator of Ghent

    rm

    Refer Madness spotlights strange, intriguing, or otherwise noteworthy questions I encounter at the library reference desk.

    A gentleman called the desk with a pretty simple question: What was the release date of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines? Because of my prodigious ability to remember useless trivia (film-related especially), I knew it was 2003. But he wanted the specific release date, which IMDb told me was July 2. I thought that would be the end of the call, but it… wasn’t.

    Here is the sequence of questions that followed:

    • Who was the lead actress in Rise of the Machines? (Kristanna Loken)
    • How old is she? (36)
    • What is her hometown? (Ghent, New York)
    • What is the per capita income of Ghent, NY ($37,643 in 2014) [Thanks, U.S. Census!]
    • What is Ghent’s percentage of white people? (94.5%)
    • What is Ghent’s percentage of black people? (1.6%)
    • What is the release date of Terminator Genisys? (July 1, 2015)
    • What is Ghent’s poverty level? (5.4%)

    The thing I couldn’t figure out while answering these questions was whether this line of inquiry was pre-determined or if he started winging it after the first one. I got the sense he was pulling questions from a list since our back-and-forth moved along at a steady clip. But if that was the case, why bounce around between the Terminator movies and Ghent, NY? If he planned the jump between the two topics, by way of Kristanna Loken, why the sudden incursion of Terminator Genisys?

    UPDATE: He called back an hour later with more. Still on a Terminator kick, he wanted to know:

    • Who was the female lead of the first two Terminators? (Linda Hamilton)
    • Is she still alive? (Yes)
    • Where is she from? (Salisbury, Maryland)
    • Where is that? (Between Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic)
    • What has she done lately? (Most recent movie is A Sunday Horse)
    • What is that film about? (“After a near-fatal accident, on a horse the experts thought was nothing special, a determined rider from the wrong side of the tracks defies all the odds to pursue her dreams of winning a national jumping championship.”)

    Yep, he’s definitely just winging these.