book notes – Chad Comello

On Paper Trails and Typewriting Females

I just finished reading Cameron Blevins’ new book Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West, which I learned a lot from (see my full notes and quotes from the book below).

One thing that popped out to me was the role of women in the Post Office’s workforce. Women made up two-thirds of all Post Office employees by the end of the 1870s, with the Post Office itself accounting for 75% of all federal civilian employees at the time. This made it a vital source of work for women early in the movement for women’s suffrage.

Their chief work was within the Topographer’s Office, which produced maps of postal routes. The layout and drawing of the maps was done by men (it was actually called “gentlemen’s work”). But the “ladies’ work” of coloring the routes according to frequency of delivery was arguably just as if not more important, because it added the dimension of time to the otherwise inert graphics and kept the maps up to date and therefore useful.

This wasn’t easy given the constantly changing routes and limitations of paper. As Blevins put it: “These women were, in effect, trying to paint a still life while someone kept rearranging the fruit.”

All this was on my mind when I saw Richard Polt’s Instagram post for International Typewriter Day.

I’m not sure how much typewriters factored into the work of the female “colorists” given its graphical nature, but the people’s machine without a doubt contributed to the societal sea change happening concurrently as women marched first into offices and then, eventually, the voting booth.

Anyway, I recommend Paper Trails primarily for history nerds—specifically 19th century America. The academic writing is refreshingly accessible and peppered with illustrative graphs throughout. I’m happy to file it under my “technically first” series of books about how innovative technologies came into being.

Notes & Quotes

(more…)

June 23, 2021 3 Comments

The Ghost Map

When I learned Steven Johnson (my favorite author) has a new book out, it prompted me to finally read one of his previous books that’s been on my list for a while.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World was a timely read, for obvious reasons. Though cholera is a different beast than COVID (“Imagine if every time you experienced a slight upset stomach you knew that there was an entirely reasonable chance you’d be dead in forty-eight hours”), its effect in this story and throughout history shows us both how far science has come since the Victorian Age and how vulnerable we remain to infectious diseases.

What I love most about this book—even beyond the historical factoids and masterful storytelling you can expect from any Johnson joint—is that it’s basically a murder mystery, with cholera as the microbial serial killer and an unlikely detective duo of a doctor and a priest hunting it during a deadly epidemic in the crowded, putrid London of the 1850s.

Call it an epidemiological thriller. Probably not much competition in that sub-genre, but Johnson made the most of it.

Quotes

I like Johnson’s description of London at the time:

an industrial-era city with an Elizabethan-era waste-removal system as perceived by a Pleistocene-era brain.

On the topography of progress:

The river of intellectual progress is not defined purely by the steady flow of good ideas begetting better ones; it follows the topography that has been carved out for it by external factors.

On great intellectual breakthroughs:

It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton’s famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.

On miasma theory and the “sociology of error”:

It’s not just that the authorities of the day were wrong about miasma; it’s the tenacious, unquestioning way they went about being wrong. …
How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline—the sociology of error.

June 16, 2021 1 Comment

A mind for winter

As above…

…snow below:

Before the recent heat wave started melting the abundant snow, I was able to enjoy a moment in the snowfall with Mr. Two Year Old, which is where I grabbed the clips above. I’m so glad he loved it as much as I did.

Anytime I’m able to dwell in idyllic winter weather I think of Adam Gopnik’s Winter: Five Windows on the Season, which I read back in 2014. I’m always on the lookout for quotes and books that capture the alluring spirit of winter and why I love it so much, and that book definitely delivered.

But I realized I hadn’t actually taken any notes from it, so I did something I rarely do: I reread a book. Admittedly it was less a full reread and more a skimming for the best quotes, but I’m glad I did because there was lots I failed to note and appreciate the first time.

I included my favorite quotes below, but before that I also want to highlight an excerpt from a poem Gopnik himself quotes—1794’s “The Winter Evening” by English poet William Cowper:

Oh Winter! ruler of th’ inverted year,
Thy scatter’d hair with sleet like ashes fill’d,
Thy breath congeal’d upon thy lips, thy cheeks
Fring’d with a beard made white with other snows
Than those of age; thy forehead wrapt in clouds,
A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne
A sliding car, indebted to no wheels,
But urg’d by storms along its slipp’ry way;
I love thee, all unlovely as thou seem’st,
And dreaded as thou art! …
I crown thee King of intimate delights,
Fire-side enjoyments, home-born happiness,
And all the comforts that the lowly roof
Of undisturb’d retirement, and the hours
Of long uninterrupted evening, know.

Quotes

A mind of winter, a mind for winter, not sensing the season as a loss of warmth and light, and with them hope of life and divinity, but ready to respond to it as a positive, and even purifying presence of something else—the beautiful and peaceful, yes, but also the mysterious, the strange, the sublime.
Winter’s persona changes with our perception of safety from it. … The romance of winter is possible only when we have a warm, secure indoors to retreat to, and winter becomes a season to look at as much as one to live through.
In the past two hundred years we have turned winter from something to survive to something to survey, from a thing to be afraid of to a thing to be aware of.
The iceberg becomes representative of the ultimate common mystery of the mind—what you don’t see is what counts most—and the snowflake becomes a representation of the radical individualism of each person.
The final truth about snowflakes is that they become more individual as they fall; that, buffeted by wind and time, they are translated, as if by magic, into ever stranger and more complex patterns, until at last they touch earth. Then, like us, they melt.
We celebrate continuity and want to renew it; we recognize that continuity has its discontents, and want to reverse it. (re: reversal festivals and renewal feasts)
The reason we should be engaged with material life is that our abundance can lead us to acts of altruism.
That’s the complex inheritance of modern Christmas. Our recuperative winter is one in which renewal and reversal, anxiety and abundance, epiphany and uneasiness are knotted together.
The earth does renew itself; we don’t. And so we want to connect our human cycle of mere growth and decay, where winter holds no spring, to the natural cycle of renewal. We can’t do it, of course, but we can’t stop trying.
The symbolism of the modern, ambivalent, anxiety-ridden, double-faced Christmas is winter symbolism. We need the warmth in order to enter the cold, and at Christmas we need the cold in order to reassert the warmth, need the imagery of the bleak midwinter in order to invoke the star above the stable. If the world has globalized Christmas, Christmas has winterized the world. And so the empire of the winter holiday extends from one end of this continent to another.
It is necessary to assert snow in order to evoke sunshine, to make a theatre of winter in order to promise spring, to chill the Baby in order to let him do his thing, to submit to helplessness and winter in order to evoke power and new light.
If we didn’t remember winter in spring, it wouldn’t be as lovely; if we didn’t think of spring in winter, or search winter to find some new emotion of its own to make up for the absent ones, half of the keyboard of life would be missing. We would be playing life with no flats or sharps, on a piano with no black keys.
Winter stress makes summer sweetness—and the stress of warm times makes us long for the strange sweetness of cold ones.
Stress makes sweetness, and snow and ice are the frosting of loss.
That feeling that only the thinnest of membranes, the simple pane of glass separating the onlooker—the poet or the painter or the ordinary child—from the threat beyond is one that has receded from our immediate experience.
But instead we give the coldness names, we write it poetry, we play it music, we experience it as a personality—and this is and remains the act of humanism. Armed with that hope, we see not waste and cold but light and mystery and wonder and something called January. We see not stilled atoms in a senseless world. We see winter.
Winter is the white page on which we write our hearts.

March 1, 2021 Add Comment

Psychedelics and the glow of truth

Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, one of my favorite narrative nonfiction books, tells the story of four common plants and the human impulses they satisfy: the apple (sweetness), the tulip (beauty), marijuana (intoxication), and the potato (control).

His new book is How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics. Probably because I’ve never done psychedelics (or even smoked pot), I was eager to learn about them from a reputable and investigative source with an open mind. Pollan explores the history of psychedelics, how they were used in clinical trials in the 1950s before Timothy Leary and the damned dirty hippies ruined them for everyone (my words), and how modern science is discovering their powerful affects on the brain and mental health.

He also explores them firsthand, in two supervised experiences with LSD. He writes:

I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight… Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities — call them spirits if you like — other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin.

That division between the ego, the rest of human consciousness, and nature is fascinating, and something we so easily forget is constructed rather than inherent. Pollan writes how, basically, babies are tripping all the time, because their brains haven’t developed to the point of knowing the difference between the ego and the rest of existence. All is one with them, as their minds are constantly open and learning, without the well-worn neural pathways and rigid thinking of adult brains.

Sounds like hippy-dippy pabulum? You’re right. As Pollan writes about the power of ineffability in psychedelic experiences, that’s the point:

Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable. Emotions arrive in all their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and, especially, the pitiless glare of irony. Platitudes that wouldn’t seem out of place on a Hallmark card glow with the force of revealed truth.

“Italicizing the prose of ordinary experience” and “glow with the force of revealed truth” or revelation are beautiful, vivid metaphors, and metaphors are all we really have when describing the ineffable. Just read the Old Testament for proof.

I’m still not planning on doing psychedelics—books and movies are still my go-to mind-expanding drugs—but I’m grateful for Pollan’s work on deepening our understanding of them.

August 24, 2018 2 Comments

And John Tyler too

When I realized I had yet to read a presidential biography this year, I decided to tackle one that was more obscure and therefore more likely to be shorter. For some reason, tenth president John Tyler came to mind.

I opted for John Tyler by Gary May, part of the American Presidents series of short books. I try to avoid that series because all the books are intentionally short—this one was 150 pages—and I want to feel like I’ve earned (i.e. suffered through enough pages of) every biography, you know? But I decided to cut myself some slack on this one, and I’m now 18 presidents down with 26 to go.

Tyler Who?

John Tyler proved more interesting than I expected. All I knew of him, besides “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”, was that he was the first president to ascend to the office due to his predecessor’s death (pour one out for William Henry “31 Days in Office” Harrison) and that he was a slaveholder who eventually served in the Confederacy.

He was also the youngest president (at 51) to take the oath at the time, had 15 kids between two wives (and two of his grandsons are still alive), was the first president to get married while in office, and the first to decline to seek a second term.

He also facilitated the annexation of Texas, which helped cause the Civil War. So there’s that.

One of the more intriguing episodes was when he resigned from U.S. Senate in 1836. He did it in protest of a resolution to expunge the censure of Andrew Jackson, which he’d earned from his conduct related to the rechartering of the Bank of the United States. Though a longtime Democrat, Tyler was even more strongly for states rights and therefore against Jackson’s despotism and expansion of executive power. So much so that he preferred resignation over acquiescence to federal overreach.

This also meant he was often politically homeless. Take a look at his political party affiliation history:

Democratic-Republican (1811–1828)
Democratic (1828–1834)
Whig (1834–1841)
None (1841–1844)
Democratic-Republican (1844)
None (1844–1862)

Notice he wasn’t affiliated with any party during his 1841-1844 presidential term. That’s because after vetoing several Whig bills (his own party, mind you) for being unconstitutional, which triggered mass resignations from his own cabinet (orchestrated by ol’ Henry Clay), the Whigs expelled Tyler from the party. He spent the rest of his administration a free agent, exerting the little influence he had on his two primary presidential passions: annexing Texas and vetoing as many bills as possible.

Tyler’s story ended just as the country’s took a dark turn. In February 1861 he was sent as a private citizen to the Peace Conference of 1861, a last-ditch effort I’d never heard of to negotiate a compromise over slavery. It failed, obviously, but it wasn’t long before Tyler was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives. He died before the first session began, thus denying him the opportunity of living to be the only U.S. president to formally give the finger to his erstwhile nation.

(Is that my Yankee showing?)

As a committed one-termer with a handful of goals (Texas and vetoes), Tyler reminds me of his presidential successor, James Polk, who got to fight the war with Mexico that Tyler’s backroom deal-making instigated. And this book fills in yet another gap in this era of forgotten presidents between Jackson and Lincoln. “And Tyler too” is about right.

Book Notes & Quotes

At 51 he was the youngest president to take the oath at the time
Tyler’s father was Virginia governor and friend of Jefferson during Revolution
Attended College of William & Mary, then law school by 19 and Virginia House of Delegates in 1811
In spring 1813 his father died, he married Letitia, and joined militia but didn’t see action
Elected to Congress in 1816 at 26
Clay’s “American System” inspired by dismal performance in War of 1812, but states rights advocate Tyler voted against
Appointed to committee investigating Second Bank of the United States role in 1818’s “bank mania” of speculation and corruption; report was critical but bank survived
Voted against Missouri Compromise of 1820, which pushed him to not seek re-election
Law and farming bored him, so he won spot in Virginia legislature at 33, then became Virginia governor at 35
Virginia senator John Randolph lost favor, so Tyler selected for Senate in 1827
Hated John Quincy Adams and feared Andrew Jackson; in 1824 went Adams and 1828 Jackson
Went against Jackson’s despotism in nullification crisis and Bank controversy, despite supporting states rights
Resigned from Senate in 1836 in protest of resolution to expunge censure of Jackson’s behavior in Bank controversy
Despised the word “national” and what it represented
Whigs in 1840 had no official platform so as not to tear apart fragile coalition
Clay clashed with Harrison assuming he’d be subservient to Congress
Tyler brought 8 kids to White House, had son as secretary
Wife Letitia had stroke in 1839 and was invalid; daughter in law and actress Priscilla Cooper acted as First Lady
Clay, angling for 1844, put Third Bank of United States up for vote but Tyler vetoed
Whig activist Philip Hone called Tyler’s message “the quintessence of twaddle”
Second veto of bank triggered Cabinet resignations (orchestrated by Clay) save Daniel Webster; Clay assumed Tyler would resign but instead he found independent Whigs to serve
Whigs expelled Tyler from party after 1841 special session
Letitia died in 1842
Skirmish with Britain in 1830s at Maine/New Brunswick border dispute led to Webster-Ashburton treaty, border resolutions, and slave trade compromises
Sent first envoy to China to open for U.S. trade
Ardent expansionist who wanted to annex Texas, but slavery held it up
In February 1844 was cruising Potomac on new steam-powered USS Princeton when “Peacemaker” cannon exploded; Tyler and fiancée Julia below but casualties and carnage above, including Julia’s father
Calhoun “never happier than when he was philosophizing on behalf of slavery”
Antislavery Democratic senator leaked Texas annexation treaty; solely hinges on slavery in election year
Created his own Democratic-Republican party to act as spoiler; promised to bow out if assured by Polk that Texas would be annexed
Married Julia in June 1844 in secret; first presidential wedding in office; 30 years older than her
Funds to improve White House denied by Congress, so Julia’s mother contributed
First president to decline to seek second term
Signed Texas annexation resolution on March 1
Had 15 kids between two wives
1848 election split by Free Soil Party nominee Van Buren, and combined with Mexican war spoils states led to Compromise of 1850, which Tyler supported with Clay
Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and attempt at arming slaves tilted Tyler toward secession
Even in early 1861 was looking for ways to prevent disunion: participated in “peace convention” in DC but turned when proposed amendment would limit slavery and when Lincoln signaled war
Oversaw transfer of Confederate capital from Montgomery to Richmond, and served in Confederate House of Representatives briefly before death in January 1861
Asserted presidential power in era when Congress tried to weaken it; used veto vigorously, showed power even without congressional support or personal charisma
Improved Britain/American relations through Webster-Ashburton treaty, opened relations with China through Treaty of Wanghia, annexed Texas
Helped create “imperial presidency” through secret service contingency funds, guarding certain records, dispatching forces
Belief he was heir to Virginian presidents dynasty led to reckless pursuit of Texas, which led to Civil War

July 9, 2018 2 Comments

Quisling: What’s in a name?

In July 2016 I visited the Norway Resistance Museum in Oslo, which told the story of Norway’s occupation by the Nazis during World War II. A name that kept popping up throughout the museum was Vikdun Quisling, the Norwegian politician who collaborated with Hitler and seized control of Norway’s government during the occupation.

I wanted to know more about the man who put himself in that position. What compelled him? What happened in an occupied country during World War II? And how did his name instantly and internationally become synonymous with “traitor”?

Luckily there’s a book on him: Quisling: A Study in Treachery by Hans Fredrick Dahl. It’s definitely niche history—I had to get one of the few library copies via interlibrary loan—but as a part-Norwegian World War II buff this happened to be right up my alley.

The crux of this story is that Quisling honestly believed he was doing the right thing. Highly intellectual, aloof, and humorless, he dreamt of establishing Universism—his homegrown philosophy combining Lutheranism and science—as the “new world religion”, with Norway as the homeland of the supreme Nordic race. In that respect, along with his anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism, his eventual partnership with Hitler made perfect sense.

Once the Nazis occupied Norway, and its King and legislature had fled London with the other governments-in-exile, Quisling and his National Union party quickly filled the power vacuum, working with their Nazi occupiers to establish a fascistic, one-party authoritarian state.

But being an occupied country that officially was neither at peace nor at war with Germany stymied Quisling’s ambitions for a “new order” in Norway. (The goal of this new order? To stamp out the “destructive principles of the French Revolution: representation, dialogue, and collegiality”.) And since Hitler refused to discuss peace terms until the Axis had won the war, Quisling in his quasi-legitimate government was left to tussle with his German commissars from above and the Norwegian resistance movement from below.

Throughout it all, Quisling remained naively optimistic about leading an independent Norway into his utopian future. Even when Germany capitulated and the war was over, he assumed he’d take part in a peaceful transition back to the old Norwegian government. Instead, he was arrested, tried, and executed by firing squad at the Akershus Fortress, which, in a delightful irony, now houses the aforementioned Norway Resistance Museum.

Dahl’s book is admirably thorough, so most people will probably prefer the Wikipedia summary of his life story to a 400-page book elucidating the same. But I’m glad for such an in-depth study of a tragic figure at a crucial historical moment.

(And for the realization that one of the few spots the Quisling name lives on is in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, at the super-cool looking Quisling Clinic, which was founded by Quisling’s cousins.)

Notes & Quotes from the book

At military academy Quisling scored highest average examination in 100 years
Held high regard for Soviet organizational skills, if critical of Bolshevik policies
Skills were more organizational and staff-bound rather than executive and creative
Developed theory of Universism, which combined Christianity with modern natural sciences, especially physics
Original manuscript over 2,000 pages; final 700-page version from 1920s; dense and ambitious but not good
Dreamt of establishing Universism as ‘new world religion’, Norway as homeland of Nordic race; like “a combination of the United Nations and the Catholic Church”
Became a scholar of Soviet Union, studied Russian, and was appointed military attaché of Norwegian legation in Petrograd in 1918
Present during Terror, and sent back reports that were widely read including by the King, before he was forced home
Book about Russia shot him to fame in Norway, and began slide toward fascism; founded movement aimed at overthrowing Marxism, enhancing Nordic race
Defense minister of new Agrarian Party, then new National Union (NS) party
Little sense of irony, not much humor, crippling shyness, aloof, but highly respected for his mind
Knew Norway wouldn’t be able to remain neutral in war due to its strategic significance and low defense spending
Urged cooperation between British naval hegemony and German continental ambitions
His growing anti-semitism signaled ideological sympathy with Hitler; thanked him for having “saved Europe from Bolshevism and Jewish domination”
Thought Hitler was wrong to sign pact with Stalin given how advanced Germany already was, and knew Red Army was weakened by purges so wouldn’t be able to conquer Finland
Envisioned Germany would topple Soviet government and reestablish nation-states with German capital
Met with Hitler December 1939 while reported Britain to use Norway as transit country to aid Finland; Quisling offered loyalty from his party
Preferred neutrality but didn’t think it possible, so would act in Germany’s interest to prevent British establishment
Hitler saw value to occupying Norway before Britain could
Naval skirmishes between Germany and Britain in April: King and government relocated, but Quisling characterized as fleeing and initiated coup
Quisling hoped for legal appointment understanding from King, but King refused to accept man twice beaten at the polls
Wide campaign to get rid of Quisling as he sought legitimacy
Hitler supportive at first but then in setting up “government commission” put Quisling in reserve; when commission failed Hitler sent Terboven to command Norway occupation
Miscalculated public’s feelings and sense of morality
Quisling name almost immediately became international byword for traitor
Curried Hitler’s favor as they strategized voting in new occupation government; became prime minister due to his warning of Britain
Quisling’s “New Order” in Norway stamped out “destructive principles of the French Revolution: representation, dialogue, and collegiality”
Unresolved whether Norway and Germany were at war or peace; Quisling wanted full NS government to provide legitimacy and eventually got it, though with Reichskommissar
Sincerely believed he was doing the right thing for Norway and eventual Nordic dominance
Oslo University source of strong anti-NS “Home Front” resistance, along with prominent bishop Berggrav, who had tried to broker peace in Berlin and London
Photos of “Fører Quisling” everywhere, became authoritarian state sans functioning legislature and King
Quisling sought to limit NS membership despite one-party rule to strengthen quality
Edict to make youth service in NS Youth Organization compulsory backfired, as did new teachers corporation; when backed by bishops, revolt began
Mass teacher resignations followed by large-scale arrests
Lobbied Hitler for peace treaty but was denied and remained occupied country, also lost direct contact with Hitler
Had different ideas of future than Hitler, whose world domination plans were more improvisatory
Began rounding up and registering Jews in 1942
Hitler refused to negotiate peace because then other occupied countries would want it, and Quisling’s dreams of Norwegian supremacy dashed
After Hitler died, naively assumed there would be peaceful transition of power back to exiled government
Arrested May 8; said he knew suicide would be easiest but wanted to “let history reach its own verdict”; thought he’d be deified
Quisling Clinic in Madison founded by cousins in interwar years; otherwise name has disappeared

March 31, 2018 Add Comment

How to ‘Win Bigly’? Have no shame

Until about two years ago I knew Scott Adams only as the Dilbert guy. But once he started accurately predicting Donald Trump’s unconventional political path using the lenses of persuasion and hypnotism, gaining critics along the way but scoring on predictions over and over when most everyone else was aghast at Trump’s successes, I figured his new book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter was worth the read.

Turns out it was worth it, if only for an understanding of some of the concepts undergirding the chaos that Trump inspires. He calls Trump a “Master Persuader” using “weapons-grade” techniques to flummox opponents and win admirers. Whether it’s his constant Twitter attacks—”It tells people that being his friend is better than being his critic,” says Adams—or his bombastic hyperbole about The Wall—being intentionally inaccurate but “directionally” true will win supporters and fluster opponents—Adams detects and explains what he sees as the method behind the madness. (The “Persuasion Tips” peppered throughout the book are applicable far beyond politics.)

He repeatedly claims his interest in this subject stems not from his politics but from his lifelong interest in persuasion techniques. (His other chief interest? Scott Adams.) It seems true to an extent, but Adams loses some of that nonpartisan credibility by the end of the book when he’s openly cheering for a Trump win.

Despite his compelling arguments, I knew there was another key element to the Trump story. I couldn’t pinpoint it until I recalled a passage from Jon Ronson’s excellent book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, about Max Mosley, a race car driver and son of a prominent British Nazi who was outed by a tabloid for his seemingly Nazi-themed sex party. Ronson’s book is about the people whose lives were upended when their behavior went viral. But Mosley survived his scandal relatively unscathed. Why?

Like me, [Mosley had] been thinking a lot about what it was about him that had helped him to stave off even the most modest public shaming. And now, he wrote, he thought he had the answer. It was simply that he had refused to feel ashamed. “As soon as the victim steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed,” he said, “the whole thing crumbles.”

A-ha, I thought. That’s it: no shame. That’s the key to Trump not only surviving scandal after scandal, but surviving all the way to the presidency. A normal politician running for president probably wouldn’t have lasted long after insulting John McCain’s war record or calling Mexican immigrants rapists. But he thrived.

(This also explains the vociferous #Resistance to all things Trump. He doesn’t conform to the commonly held assumptions about political behavior, so like a new viral strain or zombie he just refuses to (politically) die. That makes him particularly vexing and infuriating as an opponent.)

Adams basically confirms this shame theory: “I don’t feel shame or embarrassment like normal people. I wasn’t always this way. It’s a learned skill.” No wonder he understands Trump so well! Beyond their persuasion prowess, both men are rich New Yorkers with robust egos but no inner filters. Such a skill set helped build the Trump brand in the business world, and it’s now reshaping politics, the presidency, and the world.

Though reliving the 2016 election through this book won’t sound fun for most people, I recommend it. Adams has written a kind of Rosetta Stone for a less examined aspect of The Trumpening, and I think that’s very valuable and illuminating regardless of your political beliefs.

Notes & Quotes

Political commentators without business experience were at a disadvantage when trying to interpret Trump
Encourages readers to remain skeptical of his book
Trump’s hyperbole “weapons-grade persuasion”: i.e. large opening offer
Trump matches emotional state and priorities of supporters
Not factually true but emotionally and directionally true
Campaign policies are “more persuasion than policy”
“When Trump’s critics accused him of laziness, ignorance, and cruel intentions, I saw a skilled persuader who knew what mattered and what didn’t.”
Adams has a similar “talent stack” as Trump: hypnotist, New Yorker, rich, doesn’t feel shame: “I don’t feel shame or embarrassment like normal people. I wasn’t always this way. It’s a learned skill.”
“Intentional wrongness” paired with something that’s “directionally accurate”, like Trump’s Wall, is powerful persuasion
Errors suck up attention and energy
Persuasion tip #4: “The things that you think about the most will irrationally rise in importance in your mind.”
“A good general rule is that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts.”
Persuasion tip #8: “People are more influenced by the direction of things than the current state of things.”
Trump is actually thick-skinned, having endured a lifetime of criticism
Trump’s constant counterattacking is good persuasion: “It tells people that being his friend is better than being his critic.”
A good response to someone’s poor action or words: “Is that the person you want to be?” Higher-Ground Maneuver
Says “Fairness is an argument for idiots and children.” [WTF?]
Trump’s slogans, branding, nicknames were successful because they were “sticky”, simple, and unusual for politics

February 6, 2018 1 Comment

Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era

Got Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era as an unexpected Christmas gift from my dad. Given our shared appreciation for and history in the Northwoods of Wisconsin (though not in lumberjacking or songcatching unfortunately), this was a delightful read. It’s partly a reprint of Franz Rickaby’s 1926 collection Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy and partly essays about Rickaby himself, folk songs of the lumberjack era in the late 19th and early 20th century Upper Midwest, and the tradition of capturing that folklore. Over 60 songs are included, with introductory notes, full lyrics, and even music notations.

The editors’ sources and bibliography were fun to explore for related books and albums of regional folk songs. Favorites include Northwoods Songs and Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946. (I’m also eager to track down Finnish American Songs and Tunes, from Mines, Lumber Camps, and Workers’ Halls and, just for kicks, the albums Down Home Dairyland by James Leary and A Finnish American Christmas by Koivun Kaiku.)

What was really fun to read was Rickaby’s original introductory text. People don’t write like this anymore:

Meanwhile, the shanty-boy came into his own. Up and down and across the country he roamed—here today, there tomorrow; chopping, skidding, rolling, hauling, driving great logs that the snarling saws might be fed. The free life called him, the thunder of falling majesties intoxicated him. Amid this stately presence, along these avenues of “endless upward reaches,” he rudely trampled the whiteness of the earth. His axe bit deep as it shouted, and his saw-blade sang in the brittle air. The soft aroma of the woods at peace sharpened to an acrid redolence, acute, insistent—the cry of wounded pine. The great crests trembled, tottered, and thundered to the earth in a blinding swirl of needles and snow-dust, and the sun and sky at last looked in. The conqueror shouted as the proud tops came crashing down, though the places made vacant and bare meant nothing to him. Long hours of hard labor, simple fare, and primitive accommodations hardened him; the constant presence of danger rendered him resourceful, self-reliant, agile. It was as if the physical strength and bold vitality, the regal aloofness of the fallen giants, flowed in full tide into him and he thus came to know neither weariness nor fear. Neither Life nor Death was his master. He loved, hated, worked, played, earned, spent, fought, and sang—and even in his singing was a law unto himself.

And yet, Rickaby acknowledges the excesses of the Lumberjack Era:

The lumber industry still moves on. In the East, the North, the South, and the far West the trees still fall; for men must still have lumber, even more than ever. But it is now a cold and calculated process, with careful emphasis on selection, salvage, and by-product. The riot of wasteful harvest is no more: the unexpected vision of impending want, of imminent ugly barrenness, has quenched the thrill of destruction. The nation, having allowed the candle to be burned at both ends, tardily awakes to the necessity of conservation, a sort of cold gray “morning after.” Such a morning has its good and holy uses; but whatever forms of exultation may finally come of it, it must be noted that song is not one of its immediate possessions.

He marks the turn of the century, once the lumber business was industrialized along with everything else, as the turning point for lumberjack songs as well:

It was evident that some grim chance was taking place, killing the song in the hearts of workers, not only in the forests, but abroad in the world as well. Instead of singing, they read or talked or plotted; or if they did sing, the song was no longer of themselves. The complexion of the shanty crews changed. Where once had been the free-moving wit, the clear ringing voice of the Irishman, the Scotsman, the French-Canadian, there appeared in greater numbers the stolid Indian, the quiet, slow-moving, more purposeful Scandinavian.

Rickaby identifies three traits most common to “bona-fide singers of shanty-song”:

“Intense application to the matter at hand”, meaning they were very focused on singing, sometimes even closing their eyes;
A willingness to sing;
A habit of dropping to a speaking voice on the last words of a song, sometimes “talking” the entire last line to indicate the song is finished.

Besides those commonalities, every rendition of every song could be slightly different depending on who sang it and how he made it his own. I look forward to trying to make some of these old folk songs my own too.

January 17, 2018 Add Comment

Man’s Search for Responsibility

Finally got around to reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. In one part he talks about a hypothetical “Statue of Responsibility”:

Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

Clever, I thought when I read it. But when I was researching Frankl after reading the book, I learned the Statue of Responsibility is (becoming) a real thing:

I like how it flips Liberty’s arm motif. There isn’t a permanent site for it yet, but I hope it comes together.

Some other quotes from the book I enjoyed:

“For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.”
“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.”
“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”
Prisoners looking at sunset: “How beautiful the world could be.”
“Self-actualization is possible only possible as a side effect of self-transcendence.”

January 9, 2018 Add Comment

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

Don’t do drugs, kids. But do give it up for whoever thought of the perfect double entendre title and cover for Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drug Use in the Third Reich.

This topic is definitely not something I’ve heard about in the history books, as they say, so perhaps it’s fitting that Ohler is not a historian but a novelist and journalist. His writing style is much more vivid and conjectural than what you’d expect from a typical history book, yet it’s still rooted in the historical record, which makes it all the more riveting. Who knew that the same German scientist who invented Aspirin also discovered heroin? And that the Nazis’ infamous blitzkrieg that toppled France was aided by the entire army being hopped up on meth?

Add to this the (more well-known) fact that Hitler was a morphine, cocaine, and oxycodone addict and needed several injections a day of vitamins, uppers, and animal proteins to keep going. This would explain his volatile mood swings, insatiable megalomania, and disconnection from reality toward the end. It would also explain why he was a terrible military strategist but an excellent demagogue and tyrant.

It doesn’t mean, however, as Ohler is clear to point out, that the drugs turned him into someone he wasn’t. The “pharmacological barricade” he erected around himself in his final years only ossified what was already there:

His drug use did not impinge on his freedom to make decisions. Hitler was always the master of his sense, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He acted always in an alert and cold-blooded way. Within his system, based from the beginning on intoxication and a flight from reality, he acted systematically and with terrible consistency to the end. He was anything but insane.

Highly recommended fast-paced, unorthodox history of a degenerate time and place.

Some informal book notes:

Serturner derived morphine from thickened sap of opium poppies in 1805
Merck began selling in 1827, and after injections invented in 1850 was used in Civil War
Drinks containing morphine and cocaine available at drugstores
Hoffman, chemist at Bayer Company, synthesized Aspirin from willow bark and heroin, a derivative of morphine
With small operations and low overhead, business boomed especially in Germany, with high stock of engineers, chemists, and education system
Germany lost colonial sources of stimulants after Versailles, so had to produce synthetic ones and soon became global leader
The Nazis “hated drugs because they wanted to be a drug themselves”; stigmatized and severely punished drug use after 1933
Hitler mythologized as anti-drug teetotaler without personal needs
Strict anti-drug measures used to deepen surveillance state and prevent addicts from marrying so as not to reproduce faulty genes
Jews depicted as pathogen or disease poisoning the Reich needing to be exterminated
Celebrity doctor Morell pioneered use of vitamins mixed with stimulants; Hitler made him personal physician
Inspired by US’s amphetamine Benzedrine at Berlin Olympic games, pharmacist Hauschild synthesized new methamphetamine Pervitin, like adrenalin but gentler and longer lasting
Meth’s long lasting effects kill nerve cells, and once it runs out the hormones take weeks to resupply, leading to lack of drive and joylessness
Pervitin became widely used, assumed safe; marketed as slimming agent because it curbed appetite (meth chocolates: “Hildebrand chocolates always delight”)
Appeasement wouldn’t work because Hitler, a morphine addict, always needed more
Morell revived Czech president Emil Hacha, who had a heart attack before signing papers of capitulation, so he could sign them
According to studies Pervitin kept people from sleeping but didn’t make them cleverer, so it was considered ideal for soldiers
Blitzkrieg in France fueled by meth, including Rommel; French and British unprepared for constant attack
Propagated idea that Germans were superior beings reinforced by meth’s symptom of arrogance
Hitler’s inferiority complex made him distrust success of smarter generals
Luftwaffe’s Göring a morphine addict and felt victory shouldn’t be left to army, so convinced Hitler to halt Dunkirk advance
“Gröfaz” German soldiers’ derogatory acronym for Nazi propaganda’s term for Hitler as “greatest commander of all time”
Morell created new vitamin combo Vitamultin, which had unremarkable elements but was marketed solely to Hitler and generals; when Luftwaffe medical chief rejected them Morell got Goring to fire him
Word about Pervitin spread in late 1940 and Reich health fuhrer Conti fought to have it eradicated under Reich opium law, but war needs made it essential
Pervitin of no use on Russian front, which was attritional
Hitler had “severed relations with geopolitical reality” by declaring war with US; out of touch in bunker
Mid-1943 started taking Eukodal (oxycodone), twice as powerful as morphine, created euphoric state higher than heroin
Hitler was doped up for Valkyrie explosion so didn’t have pain despite busted ear drums and splinters
Giesing, ear nose throat specialist summoned after Valkyrie in July 1944, prescribed cocaine, which “erases self-doubt and encourages megalomania”
Hitler consented to full-body examination to get more cocaine from reluctant Giesing
Erected “pharmacological barricade” around himself, within “deluded totalitarian system”
“His drug use did not impinge on his freedom to make decisions. Hitler was always the master of his sense, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He acted always in an alert and cold-blooded way. Within his system, based from the beginning on intoxication and a flight from reality, he acted systematically and with terrible consistency to the end. He was anything but insane.”
Used death camp prisoners to test new endurance pills and cocaine-spiked gum, kept awake and marching
Started running out of supplies and withdrawing in early 1945

July 25, 2017 Add Comment

The Vanishing American Adult

I can’t believe it. I think I may have just found a Republican U.S. senator I’d actually vote for.

I’m as surprised as anyone that I read, let alone greatly enjoyed, Ben Sasse’s The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance by Ben Sasse, Republican (but, phew, #NeverTrump) senator from Nebraska. I really think the only reason I picked it up was because Sasse’s face isn’t on the cover. If it were, it would look like every other politician’s memoir and therefore a waste of time.

But this isn’t that, not by a long shot. Sasse, a Ph.D in history and former college president, was troubled by the lack of certain skills and self-sufficiency in his college’s incoming freshman classes. He doesn’t use the term, but it’s those darn Millennials he’s talking about. Though the book does give off the slightest aroma of Kids These Days and Back In My Day, I’m inclined to endure it because Sasse is largely right.

Part I examines education, which Sasse sees as the root of the current coming-of-age crisis. He’s not a fan of John Dewey, who crusaded to make schooling the central influence on children, rather than make it something that was supplemental to the education children should receive at home. (No surprise that the Sasses homeschool their kids.) But he’s right about the self-perpetuating nature of bureaucracy and how it runs counter to good education:

Unfortunately, centralized education and bureaucrats tend to see every failure as a product of still not enough centralized bureaucracy. Most of these experts are blind to the possibility that perhaps we are still trying to spoon-feed young adults who we should instead nudge to travel and to read, to work and to become the kind of students to ask questions before being handed a three-point formulaic answer.

One man’s boilerplate Republican talking point is another’s sensible conservative approach to an evident problem.

Beyond the school walls, Sasse sees a conglomeration of factors that have led to the current coming of age crisis: too much medication, screen time, video games, and porn; living with parents too long and getting married later; too much helicopter parenting and intellectual sheltering and not enough religion. One can debate each of these to death, but taken together it’s a potent cocktail for Peter Panism.

Part II gets into the practicalities of cultivating self-discipline and good character and how they can foster a healthy transition to adulthood: avoid age segregation, work hard, consume less, travel, and read a lot. Basic stuff, right? Sasse dives into each of them. As a librarian I was especially tickled by the chapter on reading: Sasse has developed his own “essential reading” library that is impressive in its scope and depth, and even inspired me to pick up The Iliad in my ongoing quest to fill in the gaps of my public education.

I don’t foresee any more books by politicians on my reading horizon, so I’m glad I lucked out with this one.

Some Quotes

Production > consumption:

Consumption is not the key to happiness; production is. Meaningful work—that actually serves and benefits a neighbor, thereby making a real difference in the world—contributes to long-term happiness and well-being. Consumption just consumes.

Self-sufficiency > permanent dependency:

Allowing our culture to devolve from one that encourages self-sufficiency into one that indulges permanent dependency is to tolerate a disengagement of the soul akin to permanent training wheels. Letting the next generation believe someone else will solve their problems imperils not only them but our whole society.

Aging > perpetual adolescence:

We latch onto evidence hinting that aging can be put off, perhaps indefinitely. It’s no surprise then that our young today inherit a fear of growing up and growing old, and a near allergy to confronting honestly the only certainty in life besides taxes. …

Denying meaningful rites of passage and obscuring the distinction between childhood and adulthood cheats the generation coming of age of something vital. Lowering expectations, cushioning all blows, and tolerating aimlessness not only hurts them, it also deprives their neighbors, who desperately need their engagement.

June 29, 2017 2 Comments

A Frozen Hell

“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.

December 17, 2016 1 Comment

But What If We’re Wrong?

I read Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur a few years back and remember liking it, but also don’t remember much about it. So when I saw he had a new one out called But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking about the Present As If It Were the Past, I jumped at the chance to read him again.

The book’s title also serves as the thesis statement, and it’s one I fully support and think about all the time, probably to a fault. Constantly assuming I could be wrong about anything can be crippling at times, lead to endless perseverating and second-guessing. It is also empowering and relieving: I can rest assured knowing that I am not my ideas, that my identity is not tied to how tightly I cling to beliefs or how many I convert to my causes.

In But What If We’re Wrong? Klosterman turns this same duality into high cultural criticism. Like a home inspector in search of weak spots, he wends through contemporary issues in sports, politics, science, and history to interrogate the conclusions we’ve turned into self-evident assumptions. Do we have gravity all wrong? Will the NFL be around in thirty years? Are Americans too obsessed with freedom? Removed from his commentary these questions look like clickbaity headlines, but they are worth prodding within the purview of Klosterman’s thesis.

To start off my highlights, there are benefits to assuming you might be wrong:

There are intrinsic benefits to constantly probing the possibility that our assumptions about the future might be wrong: humility and wonder. It’s good to view reality as beyond our understanding, because it is. And it’s exciting to imagine the prospect of a reality that cannot be imagined, because that’s as close to pansophical omniscience as we will ever come. If you aspire to be truly open-minded, you can’t just try to see the other side of an argument. That’s not enough. You have to go all the way.

This is exactly right. Humility and wonder are two sides of the same coin: to be incurious and doggedly certain is to be prideful. It also means you’ll be a pain to be around:

I don’t think the notion of people living under the misguided premise that they’re right is often dangerous. Most day-to-day issues are minor, the passage of time will dictate who was right and who was wrong, and the future will sort out the past. It is, however, socially detrimental. It hijacks conversation and aborts ideas. It engenders a delusion of simplicity that benefits people with inflexible minds. It makes the experience of living in a society slightly worse than it should be.

He digs into the current obsession with the “You’re Doing It Wrong” style of commentary, which seeks to replace one idea or style of thinking with a new one, despite the fact that they are not mutually exclusive. It’s not the new idea that’s the problem; it’s the need for someone to insist New Way Desirable, Old Way Undesirable with a disturbing disregard for the possibility that two ways can exist at once.

“I realize certain modes of thinking can become outdated,” Klosterman writes. “But outdated modes are essential to understanding outdated times, which are the only times that exist.” New does not equal better. This is essential to understand when studying history, or when trying to look at today through the eyes of the distant future.

We’re all outdated—we just don’t know it yet:

We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we’ve learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it’s that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).

Or, as Ben Folds puts it in the song “Bastard”:

You get smaller as the world gets big
The more you know you know you don’t know shit
“The whiz man” will never fit you like “the whiz kid” did
So why you gotta act like you know when you don’t know?
It’s okay if you don’t know everything

I love those lyrics. It’s applicable in so many situations (especially in an election year), but it’s most applicable to that “smaller, deeper” part of our minds that transcends our earthen fallibility. It’s the kind of thing I imagine a monk learns once he reaches nirvana. Then again, maybe it’s something most of us learn as we age.

I do think Klosterman goes too far out on a limb here about the use of math:

We are not the first society to conclude that our version of reality is objectively true. But we could be the first society to express that belief and is never contradicted, because we might be the first society to really get there. We might be the last society, because—now—we translate absolutely everything into math. And math is an obdurate bitch.

Reconcile this sentiment with what he writes later about sports analytics:

The problem with sports analytics is not that they are flawed; the problem is that they are accurate, to the benefit of almost no one. It’s being right for the sake of being right, in a context where there was never any downside to being wrong.

His point about analytics, basically, is that they are overkill in sports, which as spontaneous, low-stakes entertainment should be enjoyed rather than dissected. Yes, math gives us a certain comfort about our certainty about things. But to think we’ve reached the pinnacle of civilized thought simply because we turn everything into numbers directly contradicts the whole point of this book. C’mon, Chuck, don’t go soft on uncertainty now!

(If I can add another quibble: the book is rife with a pet peeve of mine. It’s when counterpoints start with “Now,”—as in I’m making an assertion. Now, I understand why some would disagree. This drives me bonkers. In absolutely every instance the Now is unnecessary, yet the book is full of them. </rant>)

The preface insists the book is not a collection of essays, probably because that’s what most readers are used to from Klosterman. He’s right in a way; the chapters depend on and link to each other more than a usual collection of essays. But it also felt like a large merry-go-around that you can jump onto at any point and still enjoy the ride. And I really did. It would make a nice companion to James Gleick’s forthcoming book Time Travel: A History (which I reviewed for Library Journal), another omnivorous and stimulating conversation on a topic you didn’t realize you wanted to consider.

August 3, 2016 6 Comments

The Shepherd’s Life

Really enjoyed James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life: Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape, a memoir of a sheep farmer told season by season. I followed his Twitter account for a while and enjoyed the seeming simplicity the stream of sheep pics depicted. Reading this memoir, however, disabused me of any assumptions I’d made about the life of a shepherd.

Rebanks tells of growing up in a farming family, hating school and the anti-farming condescension that came with it. He covers a lot of interesting aspects of the profession that has run in Rebanks’ family for centuries: training sheepdogs, the long-range strategy required for successful breeding, the arduous sheep birthing process (“Imagine a couple of adults looking after several hundred newborn babies and toddlers in a large park”), the disturbing yet oddly endearing way orphaned lambs are paired with ewes whose own lambs had died, and the unexpected legacy of Beatrix Potter in his region.

But this isn’t a kindly pastoral. The region of the Lake District in northern England, made famous by the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, is tough terrain at any time, let alone during the long, cold, glum slog of winter, which the hardy sheep can endure but only with help from the equally tough expert farmers. Though lauding its natural beauty, Rebanks openly resents the tourist-attracting romanticization of the region and the at-large decline of his profession and way of life.

Neither does he spare the gory details of life with livestock. It’s hard, sweaty, demanding, low-paying, seemingly never-ending work. Yet even when, almost in spite of himself, Rebanks attends Oxford (his account of which drips with wry bemusement), he tends to his farm work on weekends and holidays and sticks with it even when the possibilities of the “outside world” beckon.

I’d like to think Rebanks has read or at least heard of Wendell Berry, whose writing on farming, community, and modern life echoed in my head as I read The Shepherd’s Life. Odds are Rebanks would feel at home in Berry’s pseudo-fictional community of Port William, and Berry in the Lake District. Both men deploy a simple yet vigorous writing style, the occasional flourish surrounded by spacious prose — not unlike the rural landscapes they inhabit.

Formally educated or not, Rebanks makes good use of the local dialect. Words like heaf, croft, heather, tup, fells, beck, ghyll, and shearling look and sound positively British, and help to ground us in the turf right alongside the sheep. (Check out the names of the fells — my favorite: Barf.) I also liked the book’s four-seasons structure, which, like two other nature books I love (A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold and The Singing Wilderness by Sigurd Olson), gives readers the energizing feeling of spending a year on the ground with a wise, seasoned guide.

“It’s bloody marvelous,” H Is For Hawk author Helen Macdonald blurbed on the book’s cover. From one nature writer to another, she was right. Check this one out.

Some Quotes

On what he learned from a terrible experience in school:

This crappy, mean, broken-down school took five years of my life. I’d be mad, but for the fact that it taught me more about who I was than anything else I have ever done. It also made me think that modern life is rubbish for so many people. How few choices it gives them. How it lays out in front of them a future that bores most of them so much they can’t wait to get smashed out of their heads each weekend. How little most people are believed in, and how much it asks of so many people for so little in return.

On physical work:

Later I would understand that modern people the world over are obsessed with the importance of ‘going somewhere’ and ‘doing something’ with your life. The implication is an idea I have come to hate, that staying local and doing physical work doesn’t count for much.

On the pull of the landscape:

The landscape is our home and we rarely stray long from it, or endure anywhere else for long before returning. This may seem like a lack of imagination or adventure, but I don’t care. I love this place; for me it is the beginning and the end of everything, and everywhere else feels like nowhere.

On how city life can shortchange us:

I sometimes think we are so independently minded because we had seen just enough of the wider world to know we liked our own old ways and independence best. My grandfather went as far afield as Paris for a trip to an agricultural fair once. He knew what cities had to offer, but also had a sense that they would leave you uprooted, anonymous, and pushed about by the world you lived in, rather than having some freedom and control. The potential wealth on offer counted for little or nothing set against the sense of belonging and purpose that existed at home.

On functional beauty:

My grandfather had an eye for things that were beautiful, like a sunset, but he would explain it in mostly functional terms, not abstract aesthetic ones. He seemed to love the landscape around him with a passion, but his relationship with it was more like a long tough marriage than a fleeting holiday love affair. His work bound him to the land, regardless of weather or the seasons. When he observed something like a spring sunset, it carried the full meaning of someone who had earned the right to comment, having suffered six months of wind, snow, and rain to get to that point. He clearly thought such things beautiful, but that beauty was full of real functional implications—namely the end of winter or better weather to come.

Photo above from James Rebanks’ Twitter account @herdyshepherd1.

February 1, 2016 1 Comment

The Meaning of the Library

A few interesting tidbits from The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History (ed. Alice Crawford)…

In “The Renaissance Library and the Challenge of Print” by Andrew Pettegree, we learn the library was not always a hushed, solemn place:

The Renaissance library was a noisy place—a place for conversation and display, rather than for study and contemplation. It was only in the seventeenth century, with these new institutional collections, that the library began its long descent into silence, emerging as that new phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the library as mausoleum, a silent repository of countless unread books, its principal purpose the protection of books from the ravages of human contact.

More from Pettegree on the book as object:

The book survives because it is an object of technological genius, refined through two millennia since the Romans decided that there must be a better way of storing information than on scrolls of papyrus. The invention of printing was a critical moment of evolution, but the shape of the physical artifact was already determined, and remarkably similar to the books we own today.

In “The Library in Fiction”, Marina Warner surveys the landscape of the library in imagination, using the Epic of Gilgamesh as a case study of a cultural vessel that is at once telling a story and a story in itself:

[Gilgamesh] calls attention to itself as a written artifact, set down in stone, as described in [its] first paragraph. This self-reflectiveness reveals a crucial quality in the character of the fictive: it has always aspired, since these beginnings of literature, to monumentality. It has designs on eternity and, in order to achieve them, must turn itself from the verbal into the graphic, from the narrated story told once upon a time by someone who has since died into an object deposited for those who come after to find and read.

The library, then, emerges as a safe harbor,

an archive, enshrining those fugitive, mobile, airy webs of words that make up stories, and its existence—its survival—provides the necessary warranty for the work’s value and its imperishability. Without the library to preserve its creations, the imagination is mortal, like its protagonists.

To this point: Wendell Berry writes about the dichotomy of boomer vs. sticker, terms he borrowed from Wallace Stegner, who wrote that boomers are “those who pillage and run,” who want “to make a killing and end up on Easy Street”—whereas stickers are “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.” Unlike boomers, who are often motivated by greed, stickers, Berry writes, “are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.”

Your local public library’s great asset is that it doesn’t go anywhere. It’s a sticker. It’s not—or at least shouldn’t be—out to make a buck before getting out of Dodge. (I can’t imagine how that would even be possible given how dependent public libraries are on property taxes and patron usage.) It’s on that corner, that street, always. You just have to use it.

July 30, 2015 Add Comment

Notes on Shady Characters

Keith Houston’s 2013 book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks is like catnip for word nerds. It’s rife with historical trivia about the more uncommon punctuation marks that have littered language history, including the pilcrow (¶), dagger (†), and interrobang (‽). It also provides background on the symbols we seen all the time, like the hash sign (#) or the ampersand (@). Intrigued? Of course you are! Learn more at shadycharacters.co.uk and read on for some notes I took while reading the book. Caution: extreme geekery ahead.

— Boustrophedon (adj. & adv.): from left to right and right to left in alternating lines (from Greek “as an ox turns in plowing”)

— Komma, kolon, and periodos were initially dots denoting short, medium, and long pauses

— The pilcrow (¶) started as a C (from the Roman capitulum, meaning “chapters”) that was filled in with a vertical line by medieval scribes

— The word pilcrow originated as the Greek paragraphos, which became pelagraphe, which became pelagreffe, whose Middle English pylcrafte turned into pilcrow.

— Alternative names for the interrobang (‽): exclamaquest (which is my favorite), interrapoint, exclarogative

— lb (for “pound”) came from the Roman libra, meaning scales or balances

— oz (for “ounce”) came from medieval Italian onza, meaning twelfth of a Roman pound

— lb with tilde above it (which was used to show a contraction), when written in haste, looked like the hash sign (#); combined with Latin pondo it became the “pound sign”

— The ampersand (@) started as Pompeian graffiti, later becoming part of the alphabet: “X, Y, Z, and per se (by itself) and” – i.e. “ampersand”

— The dagger (†), called obelos (Greek for “roasting spit”) was originally a straight line that marked superfluous lines in a text

— The asterisk (*) (from Greek asteriskos for “little star”) was used for marking genuine lines in Bible translation as opposed to added or mistranslated one

— The em dash (—) was used to censor names or curses, so “dash” became its own epithet

— Exclamation points on early typewriters were made with a period and apostrophe

— There were such things as the commash ,— and semicolash :— but they have faded from use

— Double hyphen (- -) instead of em dash was standard on typewriters; practice proliferated with spread of comics

August 5, 2014