I have learned, and continue to learn, much of what I know about writing from the long list of writers who have sat down for an Art Of Fiction interview for The Paris Review. Frankly, I subscribe to the quarterly for these interviews. The whole journal is wonderful, but I would not subscribe if this feature were dropped.

TPR also greatly expands my vocabulary. In the first paragraph, alone, I had to look up three words to be sure I truly understood their meaning.

These novels, with their giant accretions of language, global ­erudition (he’s as familiar with the classics of Buddhist philosophy as he is with the European intellectual tradition), obsessive characters, and rain-sodden landscapes, might give an impression of hardened late-modernist hauteur, but they are also pointillist, elegant, and delicately funny.

I’m always interested in what writers have influenced the subjects of the interviews.

ADAM THIRLWELL: Let’s talk about your beginning as a writer.

LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI: I thought that real life, true life was elsewhere. Along with The Castle by Franz Kafka, my bible for a while was Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.

Of course, Krasznahorkai has to make what I now have come to believe is the obligatory reference to Feodor Dostoyevsky.

AT: What kind of jobs were you doing?

LK: I was a miner for a while. That was almost comical—the real miners had to cover for me. Then I became a director of various culture houses in villages far from Budapest. Every village had a culture house where people could read the classics. This library was all they had in their everyday lives. And on Fridays or Saturdays, the director of the culture house organized a music party, or something like it, which was very good for young people. I was the director for six very small villages, which meant I always moved between them. It was a great job. I loved it because I was very far from my bourgeois family.

What else? I was night watchman for three hundred cows. That was my favorite—a byre in no man’s land. There was no village, no city, no town nearby. I was a watchman for a few months, maybe. A poor life with Under the Volcano in one pocket and Dostoyevsky in the other.

And of course, in these Wanderjahre, I began to drink. There was a tradition in Hungarian literature that true geniuses were total drunks. And I was a crazed drunk, too. But then came a moment when I was sitting with a group of Hungarian writers who were sadly agreeing that this was inevitable, that any Hungarian genius had to be a crazed drunk. I refused to accept this and made a bet—for twelve bottles of champagne—that I would never drink again.

AT: And you haven’t?

LK: And I haven’t.

I suppose there are those who can, but I’m a writer who cannot write if I’m not sober. And yes, I’ve tried. The mandatory Dostoyevsky reference is not enough.

AT: And Dostoyevsky?

LK: Yes. Dostoyevsky played a very important role for me—because of his ­heroes, not because of his style or his stories. Do you remember the narrator of “White Nights”? The main character is a little bit like Myshkin in The Idiot, a pre-Myshkin figure. I was a fanatical fan of this narrator and later of Myshkin—of their defenselessness. A defenseless, angelic figure. In every novel I’ve written you can find such a figure—like Estike in Satantango or Valuska in Melancholy, who are wounded by the world. They don’t deserve these wounds, and I love them because they believe in a universe where everything is wonderful, including human existence, and I honor very much the fact that they are believers. But their way of thinking about the universe, about the world, this belief in innocence, is not possible for me.

For me, we belong more to the world of animals. We are animals, we are just the animals who won. Yet we live in a highly anthropomorphic world—we believe we live in a human world in which there is a part for animals, for plants, for stones. This is not the truth.

Then back to Kafka.

AT: No, tell me more.

LK: Franz Kafka is a person. He’s Franz Kafka, with his life story, with his books. But K. is there, in a heavenly space in the universe, and perhaps some characters from my novels live there, too. For example, Irimiás and the doctor from Satantango or Mr. Eszter and Valuska from Melancholy> or, from my new novel, the Baron. They are absolute—they live. They exist in the eternal place.

Can you argue that Myshkin is only fictional? Of course. But it’s not the truth. Myshkin may have entered reality through someone else, through Dostoyevsky, but now, for us, he is a real person. Every character in so-called eternal fiction came through ordinary people. This is a secret process, but I’m entirely sure that it’s true. For example, a few years after I had written Satantango, I was in a bar, and somebody tapped my shoulder. It was Halics from Satantango. Really! I’m not joking! That’s why I’ve become more careful about what I write. For example, the original text of War and War was quite different from the version I published. The first hundred pages originally dealt with Korin’s self-destruction, but I was afraid that I would meet him in that condition later on and wouldn’t be able to help him. I was afraid of the possibility that he might never leave his small town. That’s why I chose to get him out of there—with his wish to go just once, at the end of his life, to the center of the world. I hadn’t decided that this would be New York, but that was how I freed myself of the story where he lived forever in this provincial place. [Emphasis mine, JH]

In rapid succession Krasznahorkai makes these observations:

LK: We don’t have any idea what the universe is. Wise people have always told us that this is proof you shouldn’t think, because thinking leads you nowhere. You just build over this huge construction of misunderstanding, which is culture. The history of culture is the history of the misunderstandings of great thinkers. So we always have to go back to zero and begin differently. And maybe in that way you have a chance not to understand but at least not to have further misunderstandings. Because this is the other side of this question—Am I really so brave to cancel all human culture? To stop admiring the beauty in human production? It’s very difficult to say no.

AT: You still write novels, though.

LK: Yes, but maybe that’s a mistake. I respect our culture. I respect high ­human articulation in every form. But the root of this culture is false. And if we do nothing, everything continues anyway. And maybe this is the most ­important thing. Everything must go on without any thinking about essences, about what it is, and other such questions.

AT: As if writing, and every art form, should become a ritual without a theology?

LK: Maybe it’s possible to think of writing as a ritual to be performed—­something repeated, word after word, sentence after sentence. Not in the sense of the classic avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century, like Dada, say, which led great artists nowhere because they neglected content and that was, poor geniuses, their mistake. But if you think of writing as a ritual you perform, and if you are able to see yourself at the same time, that you are down there on Earth and you write word after word after word .?.?. and then you have a book. You stop. You close the book. And you open another one, with empty pages. And you write again, write again, write again. [Emphasis mine, JH] Word after word. Sentence after sentence. Close the book. The next one .?.?. This is a ritual. Maybe it’s not how you think of your writing, but maybe it is what you do.

But this is the point at which we should remember our readers. Because readers need, I hope, our writings. And in this small space—where we write books, novels, poems—there is also a place for our readers. This sympathy, this feeling is very important—finding a common essence between writers, who create form, and readers, who need what we do. This also makes some sense of this small space, which from the higher level we see is absolute nonsense. So maybe the universe is full of small spaces—each with their own time, essence, characters, creation, events, and so on. Different ideas of time for different spaces. Just as we are here, in the universe, inside our small human space.

Then another new word: Our original name was Korin, a Jewish name. With this name, he would never have survived. My grandfather was very wise, and he changed our name to Krasznahorkai. Krasznahorkai was an irredentist name.

In the penultimate exchange that I marked, Krasznahorkai circles back to ritual.

AT: …the sculptor and the restorer are the same thing. And when someone is a true poet, it means they know that the word has power, and they can use words. If you have that ability, you only need to deal with technical questions.

AT: So you mean, the only true artistic questions are questions of technique?

LK: An artist has only one task—to continue a ritual. And ritual is a pure technique.

And finally:

LK: Do you remember what Buddha told us about the circle?

AT: No.

LK: If you follow a circle, after a while you will understand that a circle doesn’t exist. It’s simply a point that doesn’t exist. There is a big difference between the infinite and the uncountable finite. After all, what do you think happens when the Sufi dancer dissolves into nothing?

I don’t know what happens, but I have watched the it happen at The Cleveland Museum of Art on some 18 years ago. While not the venue I witnessed, the performance is the same. Watch the master stage right dissolve.

Finally, for today, two bits of poetry. First, from Aeternitas by Szilárd Borbély:

The Eternal is flawless,
like the in-
decipherable Secret
of the Perfect Crime.

And last, a single word—retronym—found in Self-Reliance by Maureen N. McLane:

become self-driving car
is a retronym. Everybody’s
autobiography too. We share

Ain’t American amazing…?

One of the great advantage of reading literary journals such as The Paris Review is that you may read works by writers you’ve never heard of. In my case this is far more likely that the average reader and I’m always delighted when I discover someone new. This was the case in No. 225 when I read Diaries, a selection from Welsh writer and historian Jan Morris.

Morris kept her diary for 188 days and published her observations and thoughts in In My Mind’s Eye: A Thought Diary Here are the bits [all emphasis mine, JH] that caught my attention:

DAY 33: Do we not know them—the dedicated teachers without pupils, the ­builders without orders, the lawyer without a brief, the shopkeeper without a shop, the doctor without a patient? Of course many of them enjoy worthwhile retirements, with family responsibilities or creative hobbies, but it seems to me that only one intangible, religious faith apart, can be relied upon to see us happily through our last years. It is Art, which is infinite in itself, which can be creative or comforting, active or passive, which comes from nowhere, which goes everywhere, which is omniscient, which is laughter and pity and puzzle and beauty, which is equally available to all of us, practitioners or recipients, and which can satisfy all our senses while the going is good.

And…

DAY 79: Wordsworth, bless his heart, seemed to conclude that if there is a God, Nature is the breath of it, and Art its language. If so, then one of the divine messengers must surely be the Poet, even when he writes in blank verse, and in three hundred pages of iambic pentameter.

Capital ‘A’ Art is an elusive concept. A Socrates Café that I took part in for some 10 years—and facilitated for eight—once spent an evening attempting to distinguish between Art and art. We failed. Ultimately we much accept that art is what we say.

DAY 113: When I got home I sought out a poem I vaguely remembered by Thomas Hardy. It begins very gloomily, concerning the poet’s lugubrious thoughts about the miserable state of everything, but toward the end of the piece
he is cheered up by the ecstatic sunset song of an “aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small.”

It was just one word in the poem that I sought out this evening. Hardy tells us that the poor old bird, so gaunt and frail, “flings” his soul against the prevailing gloom.

That’s my thrush! There’s another aspect of irony—its magical instructions! Stop moping about, Jan, said I, as I put the book back, and get flinging!

The idea of a command to get flinging just made me smile.

DAY 16: As it nears the end of its career, to be replaced by cleaner, more environmentalist successors, I would like here and now, with a poisonous black burst from my exhaust and a vulgar toot upon my horn, to express my gratitude to the internal combustion engine, which did some dreadful things in its time and is leaving some dire legacies behind, but which has given me and countless million others, Toads and all, the freedom of the open road.

Amein.

DAY 153: But lo! Look! The sun comes out, and after a quick breakfast I sit down at my desk to switch the computer on; and after exercising my fingers like a pianist, as I always do as a matter of form, I find myself settling down with all the old delight to the day’s composition.

What shall I write about today, dear friends? Good or bad, virile or senile, there’s no life like the writer’s life. Bugger that pedant!

Love and laughs to everyone, JAN

I would dearly love to see a video of those expercises. And, finally…

DAY 163:

Try I will; no harm in trying:
                        Wonder ’tis how little mirth
Keeps the bones of man from lying
                        On the bed of earth”

’Tis late to hearken, late to smile,
                        But better late than never:
I shall have lived a little while
                        Before I die for ever

From A.?E. Housman, lad—who else?

I’m uncertain where I wish to begin with Norris. Suggestions anyone?

The first work of fiction in No. 225 is Wayétu Moore’s Gbessa. Beyond the short story itself, what always interests me are the turn of phrases that a writer uses. For instance: baroque drummers (p. 35) taken from :

Khati grabbed the frame, hoisting her body until she saw the baroque drummers outside. Salt and dust stained the drummers’ palms. The Ol’ Pas marched around the drummers as their necks sunk into robed shoulders.

Or, pendulum swinging (p. 39) found in:

It seemed to everyone that she had decided to spend the rest of her days alone, pendulum swinging in an old hammock in the back of her house.

Or, snailed (p. 47) as used here:

She snailed ­toward the back door of her house.

And willowing (p. 51) which she inserts into:

And when loneliness exhausted her soul, when her echoes grew tired of keeping her company and she cried, the trees wept for her also, willowing back and forth during breezeless afternoons.

Finally, there is this proverb: Fengbe, keh kamba beh. Fengbe, kemu beh. (p. 50) translated in:

She returned to the cave and sat wondering what action to take. Nothing came to mind but an appeal for more tears, and she lay there as the sun, tired of looking for her, went down. Fengbe, keh kamba beh. Fengbe, kemu beh—We have nothing but we have God. We have nothing but we have each other. She sang until her voice swallowed the moonlight and the shrill sounds of the forest, and she opened her eyes in the morning with a stain of tears on her face.

More tomorrow…

Bonus No. 1: How Would A President Sherrod Brown Run The Democratic Party? Like A Corporate Clown Act.

The New Yorker republished All Rivers, a 1963 short story by Amos Oz in its 14 January issue without comment. Oz died on 28 December of last year. His obituary in The Guardian began: A child of European Jewry, the Israeli writer Amos Oz, who has died aged 79, became the father of a Hebrew literature where the personal and the public overlapped.

I don’t know his work, but I liked the story and here are the passages that spoke to me starting with this parenthetical:

(You see, I’m getting mixed up again: What I did in the Army came before what I told Tova, obviously. And what I told Tova now also belongs to the past, and just now I promised to tell in the future what I’ve already told in the past. Strange, how it’s almost impossible to write or say anything without distortion or, to put it plainly, without telling lies.) [emphasis mine, JH]

Yes, that’s true. We are not stenographers. Our brains make speaking or writing absolute truth nearly impossible. We should not pretend otherwise and pretending that we’re pseudo Vulcans cripples our humanity. Oz touches that in this next passage.

Girls. Sometimes they come to my room in a group, bringing cakes with them, and I pour the drinks. It was I who introduced to Tel Tomer the custom of drinking a glass of liquor on winter nights. This caused a lot of gossip, but earned me some praise as well. I tell these girls about life in the Army. It sometimes happens that one of them stays behind after the others have gone, and sometimes in the morning I receive a nice compliment. All these dalliances are short and superficial because, actually, there’s no burning passion in me. And if one of them starts blubbering, that’s always and invariably the beginning of the end; tears I can’t stand. Everything can be explained quietly, and you should try to persuade with logic. If you can’t raise sensible arguments, then what use is weeping? [Emphasis mine.]

Oz dives deeper into this theme in these two paragraphs.

Memory distorts everything.

Really, it was nothing. She with her coughing, I with my nausea and fascination. All the other details have attached themselves to my memory and they give me no peace, though it makes no difference if they were there or if they weren’t: the sounds of the city, the smell of the sea on the wind, the smell of sweat. A thin and unshaved man who came in to buy cigarettes and, as he was going out, told us with a silly grin that we should hurry, hurry, time was passing and it wouldn’t come back. And a little girl who came in and tugged at the Hungarian waitress’s sleeve and kept telling her, “You’ve got to come quickly. Helena says she’s going away once and for all.” And the flies that I’d killed, still dead and redundant, on the tablecloth.

All these details add nothing and subtract nothing. The story needs to move forward, but memory doesn’t move forward; it moves backward, from the end to the beginning, like a crab, like someone waking up from a nightmare and trying to remember what it was, and going back from the nightmare to the unimportant details that preceded it, to try to reconstruct how the dream began, and how it reached the point where fear woke him up.

Finally, this line made me smile: All the old women in deck chairs stretched out their turtle necks and looked at me in Yiddish. You either get that image or you don’t. I can’t think of a sensible explanation.

The factual captured me in Jerome Groopman’s review of Nine Pints by Rose George, beginning here:

George charts the distance that our blood (as her title suggests, we contain, on average, between nine and eleven pints of it) travels in the body every day: some twelve thousand miles, “three times the distance from my front door to Novosibirsk.” Our network of veins, arteries, and capillaries is about sixty thousand miles long—“twice the circumference of the earth and more.”

I did the math. To travel some 12,000 miles in 24 hours, our life’s current is rushing at 500 mph., faster than a commercial jet liner and far, far faster than the water from a fire hose, which makes me wonder if The New Yorker threw another celebrity fact checker into the breach. So, I fact checked the fact check and found that the actual velocity of our blood is about walking speed—3-4 mph.

The story may be factual, but clearly Groopman failed to make his point here clear. Whenever I find an error (or poor writing) of this magnitude—should 12,000 have been 120?—I’m forced to question the rest of a piece, but I kept going.

As a reader might expect, humanity’s historic attitudes on menstruation was a topic.

In some cultures, blood loss is perceived as a danger not only to the individual but also to the larger community. George journeys to a remote Hindu village in western Nepal, where she finds Radha, a sixteen-year-old chau, which means “untouchable menstruating woman” in the local dialect. During her period, Radha can’t enter her family’s house or her temple, and she can’t touch other women, lest they be polluted. If she so much as consumes buffalo milk or butter, the buffalo themselves will get sick and stop producing milk. She can be fed only boiled rice, thrown by her little sister onto a plate from a safe distance, “the way you would feed a dog.”

Customs that denigrate women during menses are widespread. George notes that our word “taboo” is believed to derive from one of two Polynesian words: tapua, which means “menstruation,” or tabu, which means “apart.” Not long ago, in America, it was thought that “the curse” could cause women to spoil meat if they came in contact with it. But menstrual blood is not always seen as harmful, and menstrual segregation at its most benevolent can take the form of communality. Some three hundred miles northwest of where Radha lives, near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, menstruating Kalasha women “retire to a prestigious structure called the bashali, where women hang out, have fun, and sleep entwined,” George writes. “In this reading of menstrual seclusion, the woman is prized for her blood, because it means fertility and power.”

There is more, but I’ll leave you to read the rest and finish with this factoid:

People who say they like their steak “bloody” are actually responding to myoglobin, a red-pigmented protein that stores oxygen in muscle and brightens when exposed to air.

I knew that one, but I noted it because I wanted to share it with one of my students.

When President Donald John Trump named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III—who, not incidentally brought along Stephen Miller—we thought the bar was on the ground. Ralph Nader thinks the bar is lying in a trench so that William Barr, Attorney General under President George Herbert Walker Bush, can enjoy an encore performance.

Nader, in Bar Barr or Regret this Dictatorial Attorney General, writes:

Many Senate Democrats are throwing in the towel on the nomination of William Barr for Trump’s Attorney General (a prospect assured by Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, declaring his personal vote against Barr). Let’s ask why?

One would think that Senate Democrats would be appalled at Barr’s long-time unyielding conduct and writings asserting that the President can start any wars he wants even if Congress votes against it! An example of this is the constitutionally undeclared criminal invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush. Barr was also George H.W. Bush’s Attorney General and has been a long-time defender of executive branch lawlessness.

One would think that Barr’s insupportable drive for more corporate prisons and more mass incarceration would upset these Senators.

One would think that Barr’s view of the separation of powers, which has meant separating Congress from its constitutional powers and handing them over to the “unitary presidency,” would alarm these Senators. (Didn’t James Madison believe that Congress would jealously guard its authority vis-à-vis any new emergence of a modern King Continue Reading »

So, as a break from James Baldwin, I’m riffing through my notes on the 14 January The New Yorker. First up is the lead piece in that issues The Talk Of The Town where Margret Talbot explains why House Democrats should not react to our President but rather, writing in The House Democrats’ Best Path Forward, Talbot suggests that:

…the most effective way to counter the Administration’s frantic, unmoored agenda-setting, while also motivating voters for 2020—will be to pursue ambitious ideas. These could include the once utopian-sounding Medicare for All; a Green New Deal, to combat climate change while creating jobs; a national fifteen-dollar minimum wage; and a Voting Rights Advancement Act, to revive some of the protections that the Supreme Court eradicated in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder.

I agree. Moving on to ancient Greek, Mary Norris—heralded as The Comma Queen—has a piece, Greek To Me, on the pleasures of a different alphabet. My knowledge of the Greek alphabet is restricted to a bit of physics, maths and Greek life on campus. I enjoyed all of Norris’ deep dive, but this bit of editing trivia caught my attention as a writer.

In the early eighties, when I was working as a sort of scribe in the collating department of The New Yorker, the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, would sometimes pencil an X with a circle around it in the margin of a galley proof to indicate a query that he wanted us to carry over to the next version of the piece. The query might be important, but he did not yet have enough information to address it. We scribes would circle it in blue and copy it onto the next day’s proof, to remind Mr. Shawn to ask the author about it. If the collator put the query directly into the piece, or if the editor tried to make a fix without being sure what the author meant, there was a danger of corrupting the text.

More than a little inside baseball I admit, but I still smiled. Moving on, Norris introduced me to the part of speech I had never hear of: The Particle. She writes:

It was enthralling to see the meaning emerge, to observe the subtle uses of tense and aspect and mood, and feel the force of the small, indefinable, not strictly necessary words that linguists dryly call “function words” and which are known in Greek grammar as particles.

Particles help make a language a language. They give it currency and connect you to the person you’re speaking with. English is loaded with particles, words and expressions that float up constantly in speech: like, totally, so, you know, O.K., really, actually, honestly, literally, in fact, at least, I mean, quite, of course, after all, hey, sure enough . . . know what I mean? Just sayin’. Some people deplore the extra words as loose and repetitive, and complain that kids today are lazy and inarticulate and are destroying the beauty of the language. But we have relied on such little words since antiquity. Reading Plato’s Apology in my second semester of Elementary Greek, I was amazed at how much nuance these syllables give to Socrates’ speech—they act like nudges, pokes, facial expressions.

I wrote my own bit of marginalia here: Particles are the Emojis of Ancient Greece.

Have you ever noticed that when you learn a new word that you seem to notice it used again and again? I have. Such is the case with Orangery. I first came across the word earlier this week in reading David Blight’s Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom. I next came across the word in Jake Halpern’s The French Burglar Who Pulled Off His Generation’s Biggest Art Heist where he writes:

One day, when he was sixteen, he was strolling through the Jardin des Tuileries when he noticed people lining up outside what appeared to be a greenhouse. It was the Musée de l’Orangerie, a structure that was built, in 1852, to shelter orange trees, and which now houses Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.

I do love how that works. Later in the piece—which was also featured on The New Yorker Radio Hour—Halpern inserts this little factoid:

Tomic, who was sentenced to eight years, was far more collected as he left the courtroom. Many observers felt certain that he knew exactly where the paintings were. Franck Johannès, of Le Monde, told me, “Legally, nothing can be done, even if Tomic knows the truth. It is up to the prosecution to prove that he lied. In France, one has the right to lie at one’s trial. There is no offense of perjury.” [emphasis mine, JH]

In the Trump Era I think that Elisabeth Zerofsky’s Viktor Orbán’s Far-Right Vision for Europe is a must read. (There are many reason for Americans to read her piece, not the least of which is that Steve Bannon plays a role in the narrative.) Then there’s George Soros.

Under Kádár, Bibó was a place where dissenting ideas were somewhat protected. One source of its freedom was the support of an unlikely figure: George Soros, the Hungarian-American financier, who, in 1984, set up a foundation to promote democratic activity in Hungary. Soros had made a fortune at his hedge fund, Quantum, by predicting systemic instabilities, and he thought that Hungary’s regime was near collapse. As Soros told The New Yorker in 1995, the ideas of what he called the “open society” were meant to counter both Communist dictatorship and the nationalism that he feared would reappear after Communism fell.

Soros visited [Bibó István College, a school in Budapest that opened in 1983] in 1985. Gábor Fodor, Orbán’s roommate at Bibó, recalled that Soros said, “This is what I want to support. They have the best upcoming young generation. They are very clever, they are full of energy, they want change.” Fodor, Orbán, and some of their friends founded the Alliance of Young Democrats, or Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége, the reformist youth organization that became Fidesz.

You’ll have to read the whole piece to understand who all the players are, but this bit made me spew my coffee:

Scheppele has shown how Fidesz gerrymandered districts and introduced election laws that distorted proportional representation. In 2014, the Party received fewer votes than it had in 2002 and 2006, when it lost elections, but it ended up with a supermajority in parliament. Scheppele used the term “constitutional coup” to describe Orbán’s regime. “It’s absolutely ingenious,” she said.

Do you see where this is going? No? Then consider this:

Around ninety per cent of Hungarian media is now owned or controlled by people with personal connections to Orbán or his party, and eighty per cent of Hungarians who listen to the radio or watch television hear only news that comes from the government. When investigative journalists in Hungary unearthed the Matolcsy scandal, most Hungarians never heard anything about it.

Just how familiar are you with Sinclair? Or, for that matter Paul Joseph Goebbels? He couldn’t have written a better soundbite for Orbán than this:

Members of Fidesz categorically deny that their campaign against Soros is anti-Semitic. But, Orbán said, “we must fight against an opponent who is different from us. Their faces are not visible, but are hidden from view. They do not fight directly, but by stealth. They are not honorable, but unprincipled. They are not national, but international. They do not believe in work, but speculate with money. They have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs.”

And then there’s this explanation that would warm the heart of our vice president and his homophobic spouse:

Orbán offered a critique of Western liberalism: he believed that the idea that one could do whatever one wanted as long as it didn’t infringe on the freedoms of others had resulted not in justice but in the strong dominating the weak. “The Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community that must be organized,” he said. “And so, in this sense, the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.”

Four years later, Orbán had refined his idea. “There is an alternative to liberal democracy: it is called Christian democracy,” he said at this summer’s gathering. “And we must show that the liberal élite can be replaced with a Christian-democratic élite.” Orbán offered some clarification. “Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture,” he said. “Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration.”

And the only way to fight liberal democracy and an international problem is, of course, build a wall fence.

One morning, I took a train south across the flat countryside to Szeged, a university town of cheerful Habsburg architecture. Following the Treaty of Trianon, which, after the First World War, divided up the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Szeged found itself at the intersection of Hungary, Romania, and Serbia. Now the town center is about twenty minutes from the thirteen-foot-tall electric razor-wire fence that runs along the Hungarian border with Serbia. The fence, which is monitored by drones and by soldiers, is equipped with heat sensors and loudspeakers that issue grave warnings in English, Arabic, and Farsi that attempting to cross the border is a crime. [Emphasis mine.]

That’s a lot. Tomorrow I’ll highlight the late Amos Oz’s All Rivers and Jerome Groopman’s critic of Nine Pints by Rose George.

Bonus No. 1: The New Yorker Radio Hour is now in my weekly rotation. (You can also catch the show on WCPN at 10 a.m. on Saturdays.)

So, yesterday I decided to split this post about James Baldwin’s 1984 The Paris Review interview for The Art Of Fiction No. 78. There is so much there and I felt that a week might go by before I felt ready to hit the publish button. I, that is Elgrably, loops back to the idea of when does a writer know that the work is right? Elgrably asks:

ELGRABLY: When do you know something is the way you want it?

BALDWIN: I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful. You know it’s finished when you can’t do anything more to it, though it’s never exactly the way you want it. In fact, the hardest thing I ever wrote was that suicide scene in Another Country. I always knew that Rufus had to commit suicide very early on, because that was the key to the book. But I kept putting it off. It had to do, of course, with reliving the suicide of my friend who jumped off the bridge. Also, it was very dangerous to do from the technical point of view because this central character dies in the first hundred pages, with a couple of hundred pages to go. The point up to the suicide is like a long prologue, and it is the only light on Ida. You never go into her mind, but I had to make you see what is happening to this girl by making you feel the blow of her brother’s death—the key to her relationship with everybody. She tries to make everybody pay for it. You cannot do that, life is not like that, you only destroy yourself.

ELGRABLY: Is that the way a book starts for you, though? Something like that?

BALDWIN: Probably that way for everybody: something that irritates you and won’t let you go. That’s the anguish of it. Do this book, or die. You have to go through that.

ELGRABLY: Does it purge you in any way?

BALDWIN: I’m not so sure about that. For me it’s like a journey, and the only thing you know is that if when the book is over, you are prepared to continue—you haven’t cheated.

ELGRABLY: What would cheating be?

ELGRABLY: Avoiding. Lying.

I think a lot of writers cheat today, specially script writers. They’re under pressure and, fuck, it’s not Shakespeare, so get the pages done, collect your pay and dive into the next episode or feature. I think that is true for even the best shows. Rarely do I see a movie or a television series that doesn’t have plot holes that can swallow a Winnebago. I can count on one hand the shows where the writing was so tight that I didn’t edit as I was watching. (That doesn’t mean that the scripts were perfect. No writing is ever perfect. But the writing was so good as to make any slips forgivable, even forgettable. Elgrably continues, making the shift as Baldwin jumps to nonfiction, to essays:

ELGRABLY: So there is a compulsion to get it out?

BALDWIN: Oh yes, to get it out and get it right. The word I’m using is compulsion. And it is true of the essay as well.

ELGRABLY: But the essay is a little bit simpler, isn’t it, because you’re angry about something which you can put your finger on . . .

BALDWIN: An essay is not simpler, though it may seem so. An essay is essentially an argument. The writer’s point of view in an essay is always absolutely clear. The writer is trying to make the readers see something, trying to convince them of something. In a novel or a play you’re trying to show them something. The risks, in any case, are exactly the same.

I’m struggling just now trying to think of writers who write both fiction and essays and manage, somehow, to not have their fiction read like an essay and their essays not read like a novel. As I immerse myself in Baldwin, this is one of the aspects of him as a writer that I want to explore. Elgrably next asks about minor characters.

ELGRABLY: It’s frequently been noted that you are a master of minor characters. How do you respond to that?

BALDWIN: Well, minor characters are the subtext, illustrations of whatever it is you’re trying to convey. I was always struck by the minor characters in Dostoyevsky and Dickens. The minor characters have a certain freedom which the major ones don’t. They can make comments, they can move, yet they haven’t got the same weight, or intensity.

ELGRABLY: You mean to say their actions are less accountable?

BALDWIN: Oh no, if you fuck up a minor character you fuck up a major one. They are more a part of the decor—a kind of Greek chorus. They carry the tension in a much more explicit way than the majors.

Ah, once again The Russians! If I were to go back through my notes from The Art Of Fiction pieces I’ve read over the years I think I would that nearly all, if not all, of the writers interviewed at some point mention The Russians. I haven’t taken a survey, but in my memory Fyodor Dostoyevsky is the most often mentioned.

In writing minor characters the struggle, for me, is to not make them plot devices. While I don’t dive as deeply into their history, motivations, character as deeply as I do with major characters, I’ve found that once a minor character walks onto my stage, I am drawn to know more about them than I will ever explicitly reveal on the page.

Elgrably next question that grabbed my attention is one that is also common in these interviews, but remains a vital point of inquiry: What does the writer read?

ELGRABLY: I’m going to presage my own question. Most of the novelists I’ve spoken to claim they read exceedingly fewer contemporary novels, but find themselves drawn to plays, history, memoirs, biographies, and poetry. I believe this is true for you as well.

BALDWIN: In my case it is due to the fact that I’m always doing some kind of research. And yes, I read many plays and a lot of poetry as a kind of apprenticeship. You are fascinated, I am fascinated by a certain optic—a process of seeing things. Reading Emily Dickinson, for example, and others who are quite far removed from one’s ostensible daily concerns, or obligations. They are freer, for that moment, than you are partly because they are dead. They may also be a source of strength. Contemporary novels are part of a universe in which you have a certain role and a certain responsibility. And, of course, an unavoidable curiosity.

Elgrapbly waits a measure, appears to go down another path, but then circles back to Baldwin’s mention of Emily Dickinson:

ELGRABLY: What is it about Emily Dickinson that moves you?

BALDWIN: Her use of language, certainly. Her solitude, as well, and the style of that solitude. There is something very moving and in the best sense funny. She isn’t solemn. If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous. That is the turn of the screw. That solitude is practically insurmountable. Years ago I thought to be famous would be a kind of ten-day wonder,and then I could go right back to life as usual. But people treat you differently before you realize it. You see it in the wonder and the worry of your intimates. On the other side of that is a great responsibility.

Baldwin’s response to this next question might seem to a non-writer (or a new writer) to be self-effacing, but I found his words to be spot on.

ELGRABLY: As a writer, are there any particular battles you feel you’ve won?

BALDWIN: The battle of becoming a writer at all! “I’m going to be a great writer when I grow up,” I used to tell my mother when I was a little boy. And I’m still going to be a great writer when I grow up.

ELGRABLY: What do you tell younger writers who come to you with the usual desperate question: How do I become a writer?

BALDWIN: Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

ELGRABLY: Can you discern talent in someone?

BALDWIN: Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

ELGRABLY: Would you suggest that a young writer from a minority consecrate himself to that minority, or is his first obligation his own self-realization as a writer?

BALDWIN: Your self and your people are indistinguishable from each other, really, in spite of the quarrels you may have, and your people are all people.

This question caught me by surprise and I was deeply interested—given my current project, in Baldwin’s response.

ELGRABLY: Do you think that now blacks and whites can write about each other, honestly and convincingly?

BALDWIN: Yes, though I have no overwhelming evidence in hand. But I think of the impact of spokespersons like Toni Morrison and other younger writers. I believe what one has to do as a black American is to take white history, or history as written by whites, and claim it all—including Shakespeare.

This is how Elgrably chose to end piece:

ELGRABLY: How does it strike you that in many circles James Baldwin is known as a prophetic writer?

BALDWIN: I don’t try to be prophetic, as I don’t sit down to write literature. It is simply this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, “I don’t look like that.” And Picasso replied, “You will.” And he was right.

We do what we do and, if we’re very, very lucky, someone notices.

The work is, always and forever, The Work.

At the risk of turning Have Coffee Will Write into Have James Baldwin Will Write I decided to go back and see what Baldwin might have had to say in The Paris Review. Jordan Elgrably traveled to Paris and Baldwin’s poutres-and-stone villa in St. Paul de Vence for The Art Of Fiction No. 78, which was published in the Spring, 1984, issue of the quarterly.

From the beginning—Issue 1, 1953, with E.M. Forster, the Art of Fiction has mostly stayed true to the implied mission: to talk with an author about how they write, but there is always a bit of personal and professional discussion that, for me, while interesting, is not what I’m reading for. In Baldwin’s case there is also the political and the historical which I was intensely fascinated by and which anyone should read, but that is for another post. So, with that caveat, here is what piqued my attention in the dialogue between Baldwin and Elgrably.

ELGRABLY: Do you have a reader in your mind when you write?

BALDWIN: No, you can’t have that.

ELGRABLY: So it’s quite unlike preaching?

BALDWIN: Entirely. The two roles are completely unattached. When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what you’re talking about. When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

ELGRABLY: Is that one of the reasons you decided to be a writer—to find out about yourself?

BALDWIN: I’m not sure I decided. It was that or nothing, since in my own mind I was the father of my family. That’s not quite the way they saw it, but still I was the oldest brother, and I took it very seriously, I had to set an example. I couldn’t allow anything to happen to me because what then would happen to them? I could have become a junkie. On the roads I traveled and the streets I ran, anything could have happened to a boy like me—in New York. Sleeping on rooftops and in the subways. Until this day I’m terrified of the public toilet. In any case… my father died, and I sat down and figured out what I had to do.

Repeatedly in these Art Of Fiction interviews (and elsewhere when I read writers’ thoughts) I see this trying to find out what you don’t know meme, which runs counter to the advice given by so many to neophytes directing them to write what you know. Perhaps writing what you know is akin to learning your scales before tackling The Moonlight Sonata, but I think writers should be honest that writing what you know will only take the newbie a few steps, perhaps as far as the first turning, on their journey to becoming a writer.

ELGRABLY: If you felt that it was a white man’s world, what made you think that there was any point in writing? And why is writing a white man’s world?

BALDWIN: Because they own the business. Well, in retrospect, what it came down to was that I would not allow myself to be defined by other people, white or black. It was beneath me to blame anybody for what happened to me. What happened to me was my responsibility. I didn’t want any pity. “Leave me alone, I’ll figure it out.” I was very wounded and I was very dangerous because you become what you hate. It’s what happened to my father and I didn’t want it to happen to me. His hatred was suppressed and turned against himself. He couldn’t let it out—he could only let it out in the house with rage, and I found it happening to myself as well. And after my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So—Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.

Having the courage—or the ignorance—to make such a leap (one I was never able to bring myself to do) is stunning. That, perhaps, may be one of the hallmarks of greatness.

Elgrably circles back to where the words comes from and Baldwin clarifies the links between life experiences and the written word.

ELGRABLY: Wasn’t it after your first two novels, which were in many ways extremely personal, that you introduced more of the political and sociological counterpoint (evident in your essays) into Another Country?

BALDWIN: From my point of view it does not quite work that way, making attempts to be merely personal or to bring in a larger scope. No one knows how he writes his book. Go Tell It on the Mountain was about my relationship to my father and to the church, which is the same thing really. It was an attempt to exorcise something, to find out what happened to my father, what happened to all of us, what had happened to me—to John—and how we were to move from one place to another. Of course it seems rather personal, but the book is not about John, the book is not about me.

ELGRABLY: “One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience,” you’ve said.

BALDWIN: Yes, and yet one’s own experience is not necessarily one’s twenty-four-hour reality. Everything happens to you, which is what Whitman means when he says in his poem “Heroes,” “I am the man, I suffered, I was there.” It depends on what you mean by experience.

Experience is the only filter we have. To discover what we wish to know we must peer down the tunnel of what we believe we do know, and sometimes the view is blocked and we must deal with what we have. Baldwin touches on that when talks about finishing a work.

ELGRABLY: Are you, or do you remain, very close to your characters?

BALDWIN: I don’t know if I feel close to them, now. After a time you find, however, that your characters are lost to you, making it quite impossible for you to judge them. When you’ve finished a novel it means, “The train stops here, you have to get off here.” You never get the book you wanted, you settle for the book you get. I’ve always felt that when a book ended there was something I didn’t see, and usually when I remark the discovery it’s too late to do anything about it.

ELGRABLY: This occurs once it has already been published?

BALDWIN: No, no, it happens when you are right here at the table. The publication date is something else again. It’s out of your hands, then. What happens here is that you realize if you try to redo something, you may wreck everything else. But, if a book has brought you from one place to another, so that you see something you didn’t see before, you’ve arrived at another point. This then is one’s consolation, and you know that you must now proceed elsewhere.

I think this is a problem for artists—knowing when to stop. I remember reading about Leonardo da Vinci’s obsession with La Gioconda (what we call The Mona Lisa). He carried the painting with him for more than 20 years, adding and subtracting from the work between other projects. (Or, perhaps, the other way round.) I also think that writers’ who come from journalism, where deadlines count, have an advantage. We know that a piece is not perfect, is not done, but that the words are as done as they are ever going to be. Having your editor rip the page from your typewriter can be an amazingly clarifying experience.

This post is a perfect example of that. I have been working on it for four days now and I’m only about halfway through Baldwin’s interview. So, time to rip the paper out of the platen and move on. More tomorrow.

Bonus No. 1: In Episode Three of The Paris Review Podcast—beginning at timemark 4:56—LeVar Burton, reading as James Baldwin, recreates portions of the 1984 interview.

Bonus No. 2: You can find all of James Baldwin’s writings in his bibliography.

James Baldwin is boring into my brain and I don’t know why. This is more than just you notice what you pay attention to. Baldwin first appeared on Have Coffee Will Write back in 2007 when I posted this quote: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world…

Baldwin got nods here from Elmore Leonard in 2010, David Bowie in 2013, Toni Morrison in 2015, Matt Taibbi in 2016, Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2017; drumbeats, the bird pecking at the window, telling me to wake up, pay attention.

Then, that the end of last year, the message got really, really loud with posts on 181114, 181120 (where I wrote in a footnote: So many books, so little time, but I do need to read Baldwin.) and 181213 followed by my reading of Letter from a Region in My Mind. Finally I came to last week where I wrote about Baldwin’s 1962 essay: As Much Truth As One Can Bear where I added a bonus link to Coates’, Is James Baldwin America’s Greatest Essayist?

In 2013, Coates began:

I finished The Fire Next Time on a plane to Greenville, South Carolina. I am here to give a talk tonight about the legacy of the Civil War. I probably should not have read Baldwin before coming into the backyard of John Calhoun and Pitchfork Ben Tillman. I’m all on fire and resolved to bring some of that fire forth tonight. I have come to places like this before. I have never shrunk from speaking my piece, but I dislike making people directly uncomfortable and have a tendency in person to complicate things that I know are not complicated at all. I am resolving to move away from that. Manners have their place. I should not conflate them with cowardice.

I want to thank everyone who pointed me toward how much Baldwin really does embrace love. I am remembering what I, myself, loved about him as a young man. I came to college a total Malcolmite. I kind of still am. But Baldwin was among a set of influences that talked me out of my younger self. He is tough to pin down, because he understands the anger in black people, he feels it himself, and fears it. There is something of the atheist about him, though he does not directly say it. His encounters with racism leave him on the edge of violence and hatred, but The Fire Next Time is all about why one should walk back, all about why you should never judge yourself by the standards of the owner of the boot presently on your neck.

That is how Baldwin got me. He revealed to me that black nationalism is, itself, a kind of philosophical integration. If you listen to any of Malcolm’s speeches they sound like they are straight out of the Enlightenment, and Malcolm himself uses the American revolution and the nationalism of whites around the globe as a model. Baldwin’s reply is not to interrogate black nationalism in isolation, but to interrogate nationalism—and the nation—itself. He hates the hypocrisy and self-congratulation of white liberals and though he loves hard, though he deeply understands that race is a creation, he is never blinded by love:

The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes—I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether—is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often.

So much and he’s only some 800 words into the piece.

Morrison forevermore rightly bound Coates and Baldwin together in 2015. Go. Read the rest of Coates’ article and then, as I’m doing, pick one of Baldwin’s books—I’m starting with The Fire Next Time—and keep on reading.

Bonus: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Barry Jenkins talk James Baldwin.

A year ago I wrote five posts—180107, 18011, 180127, 180211 and 180219—about the prose stylings and philosophies of James Lee Burke as found in his novel Robicheaux: A Novel. Dave Robicheaux is back in Burke’s latest: The New Iberia Blues and he takes his skills and thoughts up a notch.

This first bit reminded me of a joke my father told me:

What’s the difference between a redneck and a good ol’ boy? On Sundays, a redneck drives around in his pickup, drinking longnecks and tossing the empties out the window. A good ol’ boy, now, drives around in his pickup drinking longnecks and drops the empties in a litter bag.

My father, being an ‘Eer, knew plenty of both types. He had one friend, a real good ol’ boy, who was as racist and misogynist as they came, but who would stop on a dark country road to help a motorist in distress with all the care and kindness you can imagine, regardless of who that person was or what group might claim them.

These are the subtleties that too many in politics dismiss and doing so had a profound effect in 2016. An important lesson I learned from a wise school psychologist was that if you know one person in Category X, then you know one person in that category. With humans, extrapolation is seldom safe.

With that caveat, meet Alex Devereaux:

Unless you are familiar with the nature of Southern white trash, you will not understand the following: They are a genetically produced breed whose commonality is a state of mind and not related to the social class to which they belong. Economics has nothing to do with the origins of their behavior. You cannot change them. They glory in violence and cruelty and brag on their ignorance, and would have no problem manning the ovens at Auschwitz. That’s not hyperbole. When I looked in Axel’s eyes, I knew my slap across his face had been a slap across his soul and that one day I would pay for it. p. 78

I’d give you 10-1 that Mr. Devereaux is eagerly anticipating his wall.

This next bit deserves to be a meme.

There are lessons you learn in the military or jail or any other institutional situation where survival is dependent on your ability to think more clearly than your enemies or the people around you. Here are a few admonitions from the bottom of the food chain. They can be interpreted literally or metaphorically, depending upon the situation.

1) Don’t silhouette on a hill.

2) Get rid of your jewelry, particularly civilian junk. Ostentation can put you in a box.

3) Don’t make enemies with anyone in records.

4) Don’t threaten anyone who knows your location when you don’t know his.

5) Never piss off the people who prepare or serve your food.

6) Be aware that secretaries and clerks run the world and own rubber stamps that can turn your life into a broken pay toilet.

7) Never sass a hack or a drill sergeant or any dull-witted white Southerner who has authority over others.

8) Grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives the bad guys up the wall.

9) Get the right people on your side. Who would you rather have covering your back in a back-alley brawl, an academic liberal or a hobnailed redneck?

10) Never buy into the acronym FEAR (fuck everything and run). Swallow your blood and don’t let other know you’re hurt. If that doesn’t work, spit it in their faces.

11) Even in the most desperate of situations, stay away from the Herd. Situating yourself between loud oinking sounds and the trough is a surefire way to get trampled to death.

12) Burn this list before anyone catches you with it. P. 171-2

As I read Dave’s admonitions, my mind went back a couple of days to the Friar Richard Rohr (via Oliver Burkeman) and Living in Deep Time.

What Burke (through Dave) is talking about here is his understanding of the rules for being a Man. Dave Robicheaux is a former U.S. Army officer who served in Vietnam where he learned, was initiated into, I’m sure, many of his 12 points. Rohr, as best as I can tell, did not share those experience, nor did he stack time, but he understands from his 14 years as a prison chaplain, the importance of mature men initiating young men and what happens when they not.

In his interview with Krista Tippett, Rohr talks about what he calls father hunger, and the great damage done when no initiation takes place.

Tippett: You used the language of “father hunger.”

Rohr: Yeah, father hunger. It’s driving so many things in our culture, even this whole corporate world of the younger male’s need to please the big daddy and get his pat on the back or his promotion.

Tippett: …in some place you describe someone speaking to you about this father hunger and kind of in the middle of their life and realizing, calling it, saying they realized it was a chasm, a canyon, the emptiness and pain left of a relationship with the father that wasn’t there. And the mystery that we can get very old, and that can still be with us. That this is not something that you just outgrow.

Rohr: Yeah, I’ve had men older than me weep with me, still wanting a daddy, because they never had a father figure. It’s heartbreaking, really.

Tippett: You say something that I just want to understand, where you say that “when positive masculine energy is not modeled from father to son, it creates a vacuum in the souls of men, and into that vacuum demons pour.” And you say among other things, they seem to lose the ability to know how to read situations and people correctly. Why is that? Obviously, that can be crippling professionally, personally, but why—what is that connection?

Rohr: Here’s the answer that comes to mind now. I don’t know if it’s the best one. But young men who haven’t been validated by an older male—because we look to our same-sex parent for validation—and when dad doesn’t tell me I’m a man or a good man or acceptable son, I think your first 30 years of life are so frantic, you don’t have time to read inner emotions. Your emotional life—there’s no subtlety to it, there’s no nuance, there’s no freedom, there’s no grace, there’s no time.

I often see it in airports. In 46 years, I was on the road, and you’d see these people rushing through airports, neither looking to right or left, like a deer caught in the headlights. When you’re a deer caught in the headlights, trying to survive, I don’t think you develop an inner world. Do you understand? It’s just the whole life is externalized, and the soul is not born. And that’s why, again, suffering for so many becomes the only path because it’s the only thing strong enough to lead you into the world of grief, for example, or sadness or pain. And those tend to be the holes in the soul that awaken the inner world.

And so an important part of every initiation rite was grief work, letting men get in touch with their unfinished hurt and begin to talk about it with other men. That’s when the floodgates opened, and all of this success that they shined with externally they finally could admit was all a charade. Everything changed after that.

Listening to Rohr, I began to think back to a conversation I had with a friend maybe five years ago or so about the concept of failure to launch. Probably 75 percent of my students are young men who are struggling academically, who have been suspended or expelled (most typically for fighting) and a few who are on parole. I’ve made a difference with a few—and have the thank you cards to remind me—but not enough. When I think of retirement I think of the ones I won’t have a chance with. That’s part of what keeps me going.

Blame the Benedictines. At least that’s the case that Jeremy Rifkin made in his 1989 book Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History. Before the Benedictines neatly divided the day into eight prayer periods: Matins or Vigils, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline all we had to mark our days was sunrise, noon and sunset.

The Benedictines got all anal and we began our descent to clocks, chronometers, time zones digital watches and nanoseconds.

There is another way. A natural way. A way of returning to sunrise, noon and sunset. A way for feeling the rhythm of moon, sun and stars. A way of tracking phases of our moon. A way of dividing our annual circuit around the sun beginning with Winter Solstice, passing through Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, Autumnal Equinox and inevitably back to Winter Solstice.

Linda Geddes, writing in her long read:Why we should be watching the sun, not the clock, for The Guardian, begins to make her case this way:

The tourism brochure for the German spa town of Bad Kissingen features a photograph of a young woman on its cover. Dressed in white shorts and a pink vest, the woman is perched peacefully on a sunny rock overlooking a river, reading a handwritten journal. Emblazoned on the top left of the page is the slogan Entdecke die Zeit–Discover Time.

Not a time to discover, but rather to literally discover time. What a lovely thought.

Located in the sparsely populated region of Lower Franconia in Bavaria, Bad Kissingen was once a fashionable resort for the European aristocracy and bourgeoisie. They came for rest and relaxation; soaking up the classical architecture and fragrant rose gardens, and taking the mineral-rich waters, which were reputed to cure all manner of ills. Today, Bad Kissingen has rebranded itself as the world’s first ChronoCity–a place where internal time is as important as external time, and sleep is sacrosanct.

Most of us are not free to choose our work or school hours; we have little control over the lighting in our public spaces and external environment; and we are even forced to reprogramme our internal clock twice a year because of daylight saving time. The question that the idea of the “ChronoCity” raises is what changes could society make to better accommodate our body clocks?

I want to live there. I think that is a bit of what Henry David Thoreau lived during his two years on the shore of Walden Pond.

Becoming a ChronoCity makes a lot more sense for Cleveland than nattering on about becoming the Blockchain Capital.

Take your time. Read the rest. Set your own pace. Hear your own drummer.

President Donald John Trump actually tied a real record today and appears to be ready to coasting past that record and setting a real one for himself, his administration and the United States of America. Today we entered Day 21 of the government shut down, matching the record set during President William Jefferson Clinton’s first term in office.

George Packer, writing in The Suicide of a Great Democracy for The Atlantic, looks at the shutdown through the lens of our 16th president. Packer ledes:

A constant theme runs throughout Lincoln’s writings, from his years as a young Illinois politician to the last great speeches of his life: the supreme value of self-government. Everything depended on this idea, “our ancient faith,” which itself was “absolutely and eternally right.” But its endurance was never guaranteed. From the start of his career, Lincoln foresaw how American democracy might end—not through foreign conquest, but by our own fading attachment to its institutions. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher,” he said in 1838. “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

President Abraham Lincoln’s central message was that we can only defeat ourselves, no power from the outside can lay us low. Packer continues:

During the Civil War, the government never shut down—not even when the capital was threatened by Confederate troops. A shutdown would have undermined the foundation of Lincoln’s cause, which was the ability of free people to rule themselves. The paralysis and dysfunction would have told the world that the government he led was no longer fully devoted to the cause for which other Americans had given the last full measure of devotion. A shutdown would have looked like the beginning of the end that Lincoln always knew was possible.

As a nation we are exactly where Trump wants us. We are all contestants on his greatest reality show, all eyes focused on the man behind the desk, waiting for his pronouncements. Packer concludes:

It makes sense that Donald Trump is indifferent to the paralysis of the government he leads, and that he welcomes a shutdown of months or even years. If shutdowns become routine, if politicians view the government in which they serve as a disposable tool, if we’re no longer capable of governing ourselves, this only reflects Trump’s contemptuous attitude toward democracy itself. Shuttered museums, federal workers who can’t pay their bills, national parks with stinking toilets: This is what Trump thinks of American republicanism. This is what the suicide of a great democracy looks like.

President Trump isn’t suicidal. He believes, correctly in my assessment, that his wealth will shield him from the harsh realities of a government shutdown in much the same way that his empire will allow him, and his family, to weather the ravishes of global warming as the rising Atlantic sucks Mar-a-Lago under the waves. (You know he has the best insurance policy.)

What is the simplest, most basic image that everyone has of the fall of the Roman empire? Nero playing his lyre as Rome burned. Few people can tell you anything else about the man born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus or even have any idea of when he lived (37-68 CE), but his name is second only to that of Julius Caesar our memory.

Frankly America, our president doesn’t give a damn for anyone or anything except himself. He will be happy tweet while America burns.

There is no greater stain on our nation’s character than the 87 years of slavery institutionalized in our Constitution and the century of Jim Crow laws passed following the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Five years of Black Lives Matter remind us that, to quote William Faulkner, The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

While the Confederate States of America certainly seceded from the United States of America—an act not prohibited by our constitution—to preserve their slaves and their wealth, the United States did not, regardless of what you learned in American History class, go to war to end slavery. The U.S. went to war to guarantee that the cotton would continue to flow to the northern textile mill. The industrial north could not allow the cotton to go to competitors in England. (A sidenote to the story is that Americans had used industrial espionage to steal British technology to build those New England mills.)

No clearer indication that slavery was never the issue for the North can be found by looking at recruiting posters and editorials at the time encouraging the enlistment of individuals and the forming of companies and regiments. Men were encouraged to enlist to fight to preserve the Union, not to free the slaves.

I first began to understand this as an undergraduate at Ohio University during President Ronald Wilson Reagan’s first administration when I was introduced to an economic analysis of the American Civil War in Karl Marx And The Civil War edited by. (Tim Russo recently recommended a version of the book edited by Andrew Zimmerman.)

All of this introduction to The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done from On The Media. (The show first aired on 1 June 2018, but was repeated in an encore broadcast—where I heard it—on 28 December.)

On The Media teased the show this way:

After World War II, Germany and the Allied powers took pains to make sure that its citizens would never forget the country’s dark history. But in America, much of our past remains hidden or rewritten. This week, Brooke visits Montgomery, Alabama, home to The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a new museum and memorial created by the Equal Justice Initiative that aim to bring America’s history of segregation and racial terror to the forefront. [In Part 1.] Brooke talks to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Bryan Stevenson about what inspired him to create The Legacy Museum and memorial and to historian Sir Richard Evans about the denazification process in Germany after World War II. [In Part 2.] Brooke visits The Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice. [In Part 3.] Brooke speaks again with Bryan Stevenson about his own history and America’s ongoing struggle to confront our racist past and present.

As we peer into 2019 and the challenges we face as a nation, I can’t think of a better introduction to what lies ahead.

Bonus No. 1: Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations.
Bonus No. 2: Listen (via Oliver Burkeman) to Richard Rohr, Living in Deep Time.

I know that Ralph Nader can have a bit of a downer reputation when the topic of discussion involves corporations and the people who guide then every day, but occasionally he will point out people and organizations that show vision. In Southwest Airlines Herb Kelleher–One of a Kind!, he honors one such individual. Nader writes:

When Herb Kelleher, the joyous, fun-loving Founder and retired CEO of Southwest Airlines soared past permissible flight levels for passenger aircraft on his way to heaven last week, the accolades in the exuberant obituaries were also sky-high.

Listen to former American Airlines CEO Bob Crandall: “He was a man of great imagination. He was a man of diligence. He paid careful attention to the details. And he was a man of integrity. I think we will look back on Herb Kelleher as an example of the kind of people who ought to be our leaders.”

Herb (everyone called him Herb), was much more than a super-successful creator of a low-fare, no-frills, high-pay, unionized, constantly profitable airline (since 1973) that never laid off any workers, with consistently high customer-approval ratings, and the most solid financial stability in a boom-bust, managed industry. In overturning the stagnant, brusque ways of the industry, he challenged his industry, with four Boeing 737s in 1971 flying between Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston, and overcame a cartel-like industry. After beating back numerous lawsuits by other airlines trying to stop his Continue Reading »

In the mid-90’s I helped to launch Crain Communication’s Waste News. In the same Akron office was the staff of Plastics News. When that publication launched in 1989, it used the famous clip from the 1967 film, The Graduate, where Mr. McGuire (Walter Brooke) gives Ben Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) a bit of career advice encapsulated in a single word: Plastics

While that might have worked out well for Ben, more than 50 years later, plastics have not worked out all that well for Earth for two reasons: first, plastics are made from fossil fuels, the central culprit in global warming and climate change; and second, plastic, while technically recyclable, present a terrific load on our waste disposal capabilities.

The revelation that Texas-sized islands of plastic have formed in our oceans has heightened awareness, but industry, with billions of dollars invested in the continued production, is doing little of real significance to provide meaningful solutions.

Nosheen Iqbal, writing in Life without plastic: pioneer families show how it’s done, for The Observer, how only consumer pressure has any hope of forcing industry to change. She ledes:

Bettina Maidment hasn’t emptied the kitchen bin since the beginning of November. The time before that was in August. “You can reduce your rubbish a lot,” she insists, pointing to her recycling and food compost bins. “I have two kids and they’re pretty anti-plastic–I am their mother after all–but it is do-able.”

Maidment, 38, is the founder of Plastic Free Hackney, a campaign to rid the east London borough of single-use plastic and has been serious about committing her family to plastic-free, zero-waste living for two years now. First to go was milk cartons. “That was an easy switch, we got a milkman.”

Starting from my 10 years in scouting—bobcat to eagle—I’ve thought of myself as an environmentalist on many levels, but I didn’t really get deeply involved with solid-waste and recycling issues until I became an inaugural citizen member of Cleveland Heights’ plan to roll out a curbside recycling plan in the late ’80s. That gig led me to a post as editor of Recycling Today’s Municipal Edition (and later executive editor of GIE’s Recycling Media Group) and finally to senior editor at Waste News.

From that I experience I learned that recycling is a big part of the problem. Not that recycling is bad. It isn’t. But most people—and certainly most manufacturers—want us to focus on the third arrow, recycle, in the chasing-arrows symbol and ignore the first, and far more important, two: reduce and reuse. They want us to ignore the first two because they can’t make money, in fact they lose money, when we don’t.

Beginning with the new year (but not as a resolution) I began sorting out all the plastics that North Royalton does not take as recyclable into a separate bin. Yesterday when I took out the trash, there was a single, half-filled, 13-gallon bag of garbage and my recycling bin was only about 1/4 full. On a typical week, there are four or five bags of garbage. Not including all non-recyclable plastics: polyvinyl chloride, No. 3; low-density polyethylene, No. 4 (my single largest category); polypropylene, No. 5; polystyrene, No. 6; and all-the-other stuff, No. 7, made the difference. Clearly I’ve sucked of late at reducing.

Iqbal continues:

As public anger grows over the environmental impact of single-use plastic, trying to live plastic-free and more sustainably has become a mainstream concept. “There was a huge uptick in the conversation after Blue Planet about how to reduce plastic use and it remains, by quite a margin, the single biggest topic area people call us for,” says Julian Kirby, lead campaigner on plastics at Friends of the Earth. “In my experience, the amount of public concern for this environmental issue is unprecedented,” he says. “It’s been phenomenal.”

Maidment admits that her gradual awareness of the amount of plastic and litter in the street has become an obsession. Now, everything that can be is reused, recycled, bought on eBay or sourced from a charity shop. The family have had their second “buy nothing new” Christmas. Maidment’s husband works as an engineer in sustainable design but she didn’t tell him about her project at the beginning.

“My interest was piqued online and I saw how other people were doing it and slowly started reducing my waste.” She opened an Instagram account to document the process of going plastic-free. “It was very much a secret at first–I thought people would think I was mad–but I couldn’t reconcile the idea that so much of what we buy is designed to be thrown away. It’s insanity.”

Yes it is, but it’s actually worse: it’s suicidal it’s planetcidal.

Bonus No. 1: Watch Katharine Hayhoe’s Global Weirding videos.

I found James Baldwin’s 14 January 1962 New York Times essay—bearing the kicker To Speak Out About The World As It Is, Says James Baldwin, Is The Writer’s Job—via a piece in The New Yorker. I am woefully ignorant of the vast majority of Baldwin’s works, but, as I tell my students, ignorance is easily correct through learning.He may be, see below, our greatest essayist.

Baldwin, in As Much Truth As One Can Bear, presents a path for his contemporaries in American letters. He writes:

Hindsight allows us to say that this boyish and romantic and inflated book [For Whom The Bell Tolls] marks Hemingway’s abdication from the effort to understand the many-sided evil that is in the world. This is exactly the same thing as saying that he somehow gave up the effort to become a great novelist.

I myself believe that this is the effort every novelist must make, in spite of the fact that the odds are ludicrously against him, and that he can never, after all, know. In my mind, the effort to become a great novelist simply involves attempting to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more. It is an effort which, by its very nature—remembering that men write the books, that time passes and energy flags, and safety beckons—is obviously doomed to failure. “Success” is an American word which cannot conceivably, unless it is defined in an extremely severe, ironical, and painful way, have any place in the vocabulary of any artist.

There is much more in the essay, but these passages leapt out at me:

The question is this: How is an American to become a man? And this is precisely the same thing as asking: How is America to become a nation?

snip

The younger American writers, then, to whom we shall, one day, be most indebted—and I shall name no names, make no prophecies—are precisely those writers who are compelled to take it upon themselves to describe us to ourselves as we now are.

snip

The trouble is deeper than we wished to think: the trouble is in us. And we will never remake those cities, or conquer our cruel and unbearable human isolation—we will never establish human communities—until we stare our ghastly failure in the face.

snip

Societies are never able to examine, to overhaul themselves: this effort must be made by that yeast which every society cunningly and unfailingly secretes. This ferment, this disturbance, is the responsibility, and the necessity, of writers. It is, alas, the truth that to be an American writer today means mounting an unending attack on all that Americans believe themselves to hold sacred. It means fighting an astute and agile guerrilla warfare with that American complacency which so inadequately masks the American panic.

snip

Obviously, one must dismiss any hopes one may ever have had of winning a popularity contest. And one must take upon oneself the right to be entirely wrong—and accept penalties, for penalties there will certainly be, even here.

“We work in the dark,” said Henry James, “we do what we can, our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

And finally, this conclusion:

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced. The principal fact that we must now face, and that a handful of writers are trying to dramatize, is that the time has now come for us to turn our backs forever on the big two-hearted river.

As a writer, I ponder how what Baldwin wrote before my 6th year applies to me in my 63rd.

Bonus No. 1: How James Baldwin’s Writings About Love Evolved. and
Bonus No. 2: Is James Baldwin America’s Greatest Essayist?

America, for reasons we do not need to discuss, did not have a good year in 2018. We’ve had far worse, of course, but we lived through this one and, well, this was personal, on our watch. We could take Bluto’s advice, but there is also the need cocoon a bit. To seek a little poor little bunny comfort. Comfort food will make us fatter, but how about comfort culture?

Weekend Edition’s Scott Simon invited Linda Holmes and Stephen Thompson, the hosts of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour to talk about how we find our comfort culture. Simon begins:

SIMON: When I think of comfort food, I think of guacamole or cheesecake – not and – or cheesecake. But what about comfort food to feed your soul, your feelings? We’re talking about pop culture comfort food – the books, TV shows, movies, podcasts, board games that get us through dark and lonely winters. Who better to tell us about their favorite pop culture comfort food than Linda Holmes and Stephen Thompson? They are the hosts of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. I’m so glad both of you could be with us. Thanks very much. And help us with the definition.

THOMPSON: Pop culture comfort food is what you consume in order to feel better. It is the cultural medicine of TV shows that you can binge watch to kind of settle your blood, music that calms you down.

HOLMES: That’s a very good definition. Mine is more selfish in that pop culture comfort food is what I take in when I don’t want to hold up my part of the artistic bargain.

The whole five minutes is a good time investment, but this was the exchange that caught my attention:

SIMON: So what are your—some other examples?

HOLMES: Well, one example that I always give is a game that you can play semi mindlessly. So one that I really like on my Nintendo Switch is I play Stardew Valley in which you build yourself a farm. And you plant some parsnips. And they come up. And you take them to the store. And you sell them. And you plant some more plants. And you water your plants. And that’s the game.

SIMON: Aren’t there trade tariffs or something like that that you can…

HOLMES: There really aren’t. You just have to make sure that you go to the store when it’s open.

SIMON: Yeah. Stephen?

THOMPSON: It’s very hard for me to find something that everyone in my family can agree on. For comfort food, my girlfriend would watch The West Wing. My son would watch old seasons of Survivor. My daughter would watch grizzly horror movies.

Ah, The West Wing. That is my comfort culture. Particularly since we started calling Donald John Trump Mr. President. Over the winter break I watched all seven seasons for the umpteenth time just to enjoy the fantasy of what it could be like if adults were in the White House. There are many great moments in the show, but none quite so great as the time fictional President Josiah Edward Bartlet taught a lesson to Dr. Jenna Jacobs (standing in for Laura Catherine Schlessinger) about the Christian bible and White House protocol.

Bonus No. 1: The West Wing could also be incredibly educational.
Bonus No. 2: In 2001, Charlie Rose interviewed Sorkin and four of the cast members of The West Wing.
Bonus No. 3: There is chance that the cast of The West Wing could be coming back.

I understand the broad strokes of Brexit, but I haven’t really gotten down into the weeds. There is an aspect of the story, however, that I haven’t thought of before—and now can’t unthink—revealed by Nick Cohen writing in Brexiters ache to dish out a severe spanking, whether we like it or not for The Guardian. Cohen ledes:

Wide-eyed foreigners long ago concluded that masochism was le vice anglais. Impressed by the volume of Victorian spanking pornography, the Italian critic Mario Praz wrote in the 1930s: “It seems to be an assured fact that sexual flagellation has been practised in England with greater frequency than elsewhere.” Or as a successful lawyer once declared on the theme: “Most people probably think S&M–spanking, bondage, whipping, role play like doctors and nurses, sheikhs and harems, guards and prisoners – is harmless and private and even funny.”

The next graph, however, was, please excuse the euphemism, the money shot.

The late Christopher Hitchens, who claimed with pride that Margaret Thatcher once “smote me on the rear with a rolled-up parliamentary order paper”, explained it thus: “There is almost no English surname, however ancient and dignified, that cannot be instantly improved by the prefix ‘Spanker’.”

After I read that my mind snapped back this side of the pond and to ponder the significance of Stephanie Gregory Clifford wielding an inaugural copy of Trump magazine in her encounter with President Donald John Trump. (Then there is that special relationship between Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan which has to make you wonder.)

Trump’s ancestry, of course, is German, not British, but then the Germans have more than there share of national kink.

Don’t let Cohen’s lede get you off track, however. He has a very serious angle on all this.

The values of the spanker have triumphed. As long as adults consent, most believe no one should complain. Less harmless, private or funny, is the more dominant (in all senses of the word) national trait of proclaiming the cleansing power of suffering as long as the suffering is endured by others. “Sado-monetarism”, as my colleague Bill Keegan called it in the 1980s, as Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe cut government spending and whacked up interest rates at the height of a recession. The millions who lost their jobs in Scotland and Wales, the Midlands and the north of England were not consenting adults as they were not on the whole Tory voters.

The story today’s right tells about Thatcher reflects none of this asymmetry of suffering. She was the outsider, it runs, who defied the experts; in her case, 364 economists wrote to the Times in 1981 to warn, quite accurately, that her policies would “deepen the depression, erode the industrial base of our economy and threaten its social and political stability”.

She went on to prove the pain was really a pleasure by conquering inflation, destroying the unions and restoring British greatness. The essential question of who received the pain and who escaped it is forgotten, assuming that today’s Thatcher admirers registered it in the first place.

The same regions that suffered most in the 1980s will be hit hardest by Brexit.

Just as the pro-Trump parts of these United states—like Lordstown, Ohio; Hazard, Kentucky or Indianapolis—will be hit by the economic chaos wracked by our presidents economic snake pit formerly know as the oval office.

I think the first literary hoax that I remember was 1983 discovery of Adolf Hitler’s diaries. Since then, I’ve been aware of several other literary and journalistic hoaxes, many of which are discussed in Louis Menand’s Faking It: Literary Hoaxes and the Ethics of Authorship published in the 10 December issue of The New Yorker.

As a writer, the final three graphs of Menand’s piece grabbed me.

If we pick up a novel about life in the barrio, or a book by a Tibetan monk, or an avant-garde literary magazine, we know what we expect to find. We are complicit in the attempt to get us to believe because we already want to believe. Writing is a weak medium. It has to rely on readers bringing a lot of preconceptions to the encounter, which is why it is so easily exploited.

Does this mean it’s all a game? Yes, in a sense. Literature is a game with language, and hoaxing alerts us to the fact that the rules are not written down anywhere—in the same way that someone who goes barefoot to a wedding alerts us to the fact that there are actually no regulations governing these things. Those acts draw our attention to the thinness of the social fabric by tearing a little piece of it. Literary hoaxes appeal to critics and theorists because they expose the fragility of the norms of reading.

If it is a game, then, does it really matter who wrote it? The old literature-professor response was that authorship, like identity, is a construction, and so it doesn’t. The response of what Miller calls “the new identitarians” is that we should not accept representations of experiences that the author could not have known, and so it does. Both arguments are provocations. They should get us thinking about what we mean by things like authenticity and identity. What they should not do is prevent us from reading.

Yes, this is a game. I’m currently attempting to write a novel about people living Charleston, South Carolina between 1865 and 1867. I’m a sixty-something male of mixed European descent attempting to get into the heads of men and women of both European and African ancestry who themselves are wrapping their heads around our four most horrendous years of war. More than 150 years later, how can I accurately do that from where I stand?

I can’t, but I can peer into the past to answer a contemporary question from a historical perspective that more than a few of my friends and acquaintances have put to me over the years. Their question—you’ll have to read the book—hinges on a sentiment articulated by Samuel Johnson and recorded in the 1791 book Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell. Johnson said:

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.

Until people began approaching me with questions raised by my own 11 years in the Navy and Army I would have said that quote had no relevance—especially in the wake of the Vietnam War—to my contemporaries. I since learned, however, that I would have been wrong.

I’ve only made one resolution for 2019 and as of today, I’ve stuck with it. Three down, 362 to go. (More later on precisely what the resolution is, but this year I’ve decided to not pile on and make a resolution I can fulfill first thing in the morning and then not feel any guilt for the rest of the day. The Guardian, however, if filled with helpful New Year hints.

Last evening I read Vybarr Cregan-Reid’s piece—Why exercise alone won’t save us, a Guardian long read—and found probably 95 percent barely skimable. Not because it was not informative or well written, but because I just didn’t find much I didn’t already know. Then I hit the blue zones, of which Cregan-Reid writes”

…the fittest and healthiest people on the planet have never been to a gym. These people, who report high levels of wellbeing and live extraordinarily long lives, inhabit what have been called “blue zones”–areas where lifestyles lead to peculiar longevity. The term was coined by two demographers, Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain, who, while collecting data on clusters of centenarians on the island of Sardinia, identified places of especially high longevity on their map with a blue felt-tip pen. Because clusters of long-lived people are often found in geographically remote places (also including parts of Okinawa, Costa Rica and Greece), jackpot genes seem like a strong candidate to explain their longevity. But a famous study of Danish twins has concluded that a long life seems to be only “moderately heritable”. Over the years, many studies have looked at the lifestyles of people in “blue zones” and found that a number of their customs and habits contribute to a long life (everything from a sense of belonging and purpose to not smoking, or eating a predominantly plant-based diet). In the list of contributory factors, there is a noticeable absence of exercise.

I travelled to Sardinia to meet Pes and find out more about his work. He has a vested interest in longevity. His great uncle was a supercentenarian (living beyond 110). The years that Pes is interested in finding out more about are the good ones, not those spent with 24-hour care in a nursing home (there are also none of these in Sardinia’s blue zones). A trial by a group of gerontologists based at Boston University reported that 10% of supercentenarians made it to the final three months of their lives without being troubled by major age-related diseases.

In my conversation with Pes, he repeatedly stressed that while diet and environment are important components of longevity, being sedentary is the enemy, and sustained, low-level activity is the key that research by him and others has uncovered: not the intense kinds of activity we tend to associate with exercise, but energy expended throughout the day. The supercentenarians he has worked with all walked several miles each day throughout their working lives. They never spent much time, if any, seated at desks.

Pes has recently been studying workers in one of the island’s regions of longevity, Seulo (population around 1,000). He discovered one group of women who had spent their working lives seated, but nonetheless reached a great age. They had been working treadles (pedal-powered sewing machines), which meant they had regularly burned sufficient calories to derive the longevity benefits of remaining active. (Lowndes’ Gymnasticon, which works like a treadle, is starting to look a little less ridiculous as a solution for sedentary workers.)

For all the trillions invested in healthcare year on year, there are regions in high-income nations (such as the UK and the US) where life expectancy is still as low as it was in the mid-60s. In Tower Hamlets, one of the poorer parts of London, men can only expect an average of 61 years of good health–and women just 56.

So far, researchers agree that sustained periods of low-level activity seem to work well. Aiming for 10,000 steps a day is a good idea, but 15,000 better resembles the distances likely covered by our prehistoric ancestors, and indeed by those Sardinian centenarians.

For those of us who can’t move to Sardinia and become a shepherd, a review published in the Lancet in 2016 found that “high levels of moderate-intensity physical activity (ie, about 60-75 min per day) seem to eliminate the increased risk of death associated with high sitting time”.

The trade-off here is whether we want to use all the conveniences and expire shortly after we qualify for Social Security, or eschew those conveniences and resort to some form of the exercise, the work really, performed by our ancestors and live past the 100-year mark.

When I lived in urban Cleveland Heights, such work was easy. In rural North Royalton, the challenge is far trickier. I could walk to the grocery store (4.5 miles and 90 minutes away) or the library (3.3 miles and 71 minutes away), but I would lose two hours and 21 minutes from my day in the latter case and a full three hours in the former. The time exchange is a tricky one.

Writers have a history of taking long walks to get the creative juices flowing. Charles Dickens roamed the nocturnal streets of London when in the grip of his insomnia. Charles Darwin had a regular track he followed each day and Henry David Thoreau seldom sat around his cabin in the woods but ranged far and wide around Walden Pond and yes, walked back to the village for Sunday dinners and to give his mother his laundry.

This is Cregan-Reid’s central message: we’ll live longer at 5 miles per hour than we will at 50.

Cue Simon and Garfunkel…

Running around on errands this morning and listening to discussions about the current government shutdown on WCPN, I thought a great deal about how 536 elected officials—435 Representatives, 100 Senators and one President are seriously in need of a strong parental figure to ground them all in their rooms until they eat the vegetables.

If I were that parent and had singular power I would restrict all 536 politicians to their offices and a designated hotel—one without the name of a sitting president on the building—until the crafted, agreed upon, passed and saw signed into law a comprehensive two-year federal budget that covered absolutely all regular and foreseeable expenditures for the operation of our federal government.

Until that task—arguably their most vital charge—not at single politician would be allowed to conduct any other business. Full stop. No fund raising, no junkets, no parties, no meeting with constituents, no press conferences and, most importantly, no breaks. This confinement would extend until the final budget bill was signed into law by President Donald John Trump.

We The People are that parent and the time has come, in short, to LOCK THEM UP!

Ralph Nader takes a kinder, gentler tack on Washington, but he has the right idea. Nader, in
“It’s Your Congress, People!” Make it work for you!, explains:

Congress is the Constitutionally delegated repository of the sovereign authority of the people (the Constitution which starts with “We the People,” not “We the Congress!”). Most of the changes, reforms, and improvements desired by a majority of people have to go through Congress. Incentives for change often start with Congressional elections or grass-roots organizing. But sooner or later, change has to go through the gates of our national legislature on Capitol Hill.

This point is so obvious that it is astonishing so many reformers fail to regularly hammer home that we must intensely focus on Congress.

Just 535 humans (Senators and Representatives) need your votes far more than they need fat cat campaign contributions.

Guess what the following twelve redirections or changes have in Continue Reading »