In the Dream House

 In the Dream House is a beautiful memoir by Carmen Maria Machado. It is about an abusive relationship. But this doesn't describe the beauty of Machado's language. She writes in short, evocative sections, each a poetic and crystal clear encapsulation of emotional dynamics. I felt incredible sympathy for her. I will read more by this writer.

A Colony in a Nation

A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes is an excellent long-form essay on race and policing in our era. It provides a historical analysis, making an analogy between how lower income urban communities of color are separated from the middle class mainstream and how this boundary is enforced by the government through order maintenance policing. In a relatively short book, Chris Hayes explores these problems with nuance and compassion. He makes what is at heart a moral argument without being heavy handed at all.

Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

Last fall I read Rachel Maddow's book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, about US military operations since Vietnam. This is not a topic I know much about or have ever shown particular interest in. I read it because of how much I like the perspective on contemporary politics that she offers on her show.

I loved this book! It was informative and kind of mind boggling. She describes the policy shifts over the years that have expanded executive power and moved the country toward privatization (without, I think, using the term "neoliberal", thankfully). Drift is chronological, from one war or military action over the other, and for someone of my generation it was fascinating to review events that I lived through. I remember the Gulf War and Bosnia. I had opinions about that at the time. But the truth is,  I wasn't paying that much attention. So it awakened an awareness of my own lived past. And gave me perspective on events that are happening right now.

Drift has a clearly articulated argument about the way American wars have drifted out of a central place in our political or social discourses. This argument is laid out through really quite incredible writing. Her sentences are very well crafted, and this strain of history is told with a sense of humor, employing colorful examples and surprising detail. In addition, in spite of the grim and disturbing subject matter, Maddow conveys a sense of the absurd, a kind of agog delight in the audacity of political actors and the often strange unfolding events. Because of this, in addition to being informative, it was also very much an enjoyable read

Between the World and Me

Over the summer I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' beautiful letter to his son. A meditation on race and the experiences of being black in the US, Between the World and Me insightfully and painfully conveys the impact and enduring suffering of racism. It is written in simple yet exquisite prose, and is a quiet, intimate read that made me feel closer to Coates as well as changed by story he tells.

I loved Calypso, David Sedaris' most recent collection of essays. Most of them I had read in recent years, or months, in The New Yorker. It was great reading them all together. I have noticed, particularly with this collection, that he has gotten darker. Aging and death and aspects of human suffering are more in the foreground than in earlier ones, as he and his family shift into the next phases of life. I feel like I've grown up, and old, with him, that he and his siblings and parents are part of my family.

Everybody Lies

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are is such a lame book. It would work as a New Yorker article, but there is just not enough in there for a book. It is about how big data of our online behavior can reveal things that traditional data used and gathered by social scientists cannot get at. It's interesting, yes. But after a few examples you get the point.

I read this at night before going to bed and it worked for that purpose. There were noteworthy tidbits of facts and insights but unfortunately I have already forgotten them all.

My Seinfeld Year

While immersed in reruns of Seinfeld, I read Fred Stoller's short Kindle memoir, My Seinfeld Year, about working on the show. He writes in a straightforward, somewhat complaining way, and I couldn't tell at times if he was saying things for laughs or if he was serious. If serious, he came across as a little too bitter and self-pitying. I really like the loser-ish aspect of his on screen persona, but didn't think it worked so well in writing. I was interested in the different anecdotes about working on the show, and was a bit disappointed, although not at all surprised, to learn that Larry David is an asshole.

American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes, and Trial of Patty Hearst

Jeffery Toobin's book about Patty Hearst is fascinating. Incredibly detailed and well-researched, it is also a page-turner.

I knew so little about this story -- I only knew it as an example of Stockholm syndrome (which Toobin shows is not a thing, and even if it were, this case is not an example of it). Toobin's American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst puts the strange events in the historical context of the 70s, where middle class young people were setting off bombs right and left -- there were far more terrorist incidents then than there have been since 9/11. He provides rich information about the members of the Symbionese Liberation Army -- their backgrounds, and characters, and love lives -- as well as the six months Patty spent with most of them, and her year as a fugitive. I had no idea she was involved in so much violence, but I also did not understand the violence and rage of that decade.

Toobin provides information about the all the players, other than the radicals, so you have a strong sense of the emotion of the drama: Patty's parents, her fiance (who fled the kidnapping immediately), a number of detectives, etc.

The most powerful part is the Afterward. I was so immersed in the detailed, blow-by-blow account of the main action in the 70s, that when he pulls back and jumps into the present I was jolted by the sense of the passage of time, of the history I have lived through, of how different the world is now.

Sedaris: When You Are Engulfed In Flames & Naked

This was a Sedaris summer for me. I read both collections, When You Are Engulfed In Flames and Naked. I really love his essays and can't imagine reading too many of them.  So many laugh out loud moments within well-structured and often complex narratives. The situations are often quite fascinating, in a micro way, and his observations can be astute. I love reading about his childhood and family -- particularly his mother, about his years during and after college, and his travels and life with Hugh. I feel like I know him.

I read Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls a couple of years ago, which I think is his most recent collection. I can't wait for the next one.

Not My Father's Son

Not My Father's Son is a memoir by the wonderful actor Alan Cumming. He was invited to participate in a reality show that traces a celebrities roots, and in his case it was going to research the life and mysterious death of his maternal grandfather. At the same time, he learns that he may not be his father's biological son. These two events prompt him to recall his childhood and the extreme physical and emotional abuse from his father that terrorized and traumatized him and his brother.

The story is interesting, but the writing was not good enough. Cumming kept attempting to build suspense and would over describe the series of intense emotions he went through during the period of filming the show. This became distracting.

Even if the writing were more elegant, I don't know if there's enough here for a whole book. A long, well-structured magazine article would be perfect.

Holidays on Ice

I love David Sedaris. Holidays on Ice is a collection of his holiday-related fiction and essays, a number of which I have read before.

I was not that into the fictional pieces, but I loved the essays. "SantaLand Diaries" is a classic about the time he spent working as an elf in Macy's Santa environment. "Dinah, the Christmas Whore" is great. When I first read "Jesus Shaves" I was on the floor laughing, and it's still great on a second read, as is "Six to Eight Black Men".

The Argonauts

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson is a lovely, intelligent, deeply thoughtful, exploration of love, identity, relationships, the body, and motherhood. Drawing on theory and literature, Nelson engages in a critical, beautifully written "memoir" of her romantic relationship with a queer artist and their family-making. Her deep reading of various texts is intimate, and one thing that emerges from The Argonauts is how significant writing can be to our meaningful understanding of ourselves and our world.

Everybody Poops 410 Pounds a Year

I just read Everybody Poops 410 Pounds a Year, written by Deuce Flanagan and illustrated by David R Dudley.

This book provides a shitload of information about shit. Almost everything you ever wanted to know about the subject (it did leave a few questions unanswered).

Some things to think about "Before the automobile, NYC was so overrun by horses and pack animals that during the winter the streets were covered in five feet of ice-packed manure." I just can't get over how much the world must have stunk before modern plumbing!

How did people deal?

The illustrations in this book really work well with the text. They are amusing and also informative.

Bluets

I read Maggie Nelson's astonishing and lovely Bluets in one sitting on the dreary rainy cold Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Bluets is what I give thanks for. A sweet, smart and sorrowful book. It is a true gift.

Deep and precise reflections on the color blue merge with the experience of personal romantic loss and the writing process in a way that comes together as a glimmering memoir and exploration of human experience. Suffering. Desire. Memory. 

Some entries:

"203. I remember, in the eighties, when crack first hit the scene, hearing all kinds of horror stories about how if you smoked it even once, the memory of its unbelievable high would live on in your system forever, and you would thus never again be able to be content without it. I have no idea if this is true, but I will admit that it scared me off the drug. In the years since, I have sometimes found myself wondering if the same principle applies in other realms -- if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just to have seen or felt it. In which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse? How to recover?"

"228. My injured friend is now able to write letters via voice-recognition software to keep her friends abreast of changes in her condition, of which there have been many. 'My life can change, does change,' she asserts -- and it has, and does, often in astonishing ways. Nonetheless, near the end of these letters, she includes a short paragraph that acknowledges her ongoing physical pain, and her intense grief for all she has lost, a grief she describes as bottomless. 'If I did not write of the difficulties under which I labor, I would fear to be misrepresenting the grinding reality of quadriplegia and spinal cord injury,' she says. "So here it is, the paragraph that roundly asserts that I continue to suffer.'"

Not That Kind of Girl

I SO much enjoyed reading Lena Dunham's Not That Kind of Girl. I am a huge fan of hers -- think she has a unique perspective, an off-beat sense of humor, an intelligent sensibility, and an ability to mix and match vulnerability and confidence.

Not That Kind of Girl is a memoir of her childhood in New York, college years, and post-college activities prior to Tiny Furniture (which I also loved). It is presented in the form of distinct essays, but flows well as a whole.

There is a large section devoted to misadventures with the opposite sex. These segments are highly amusing, and also poignant, as the younger Dunham fumbles through her attempts to navigate what passes for "romance" in the 21st Century. There was a lot I could relate to from my own youth. In fact, I find Dunham in general to be very relatable, even though we are generations apart.

The writing throughout is masterful, with wonderful little asides and turns of phrase that continually tickled me. She is a great humorist. I particularly enjoyed the anecdotes about her quirky childhood, and her budding neurosis. It was touching to see this child plagued with anxieties turn to her parents and caregivers numerous times, as she clearly grew up largely feeling safe and loved by those around her.

I wanted to highlight many, many parts of the book. Here is one of the few I chose to highlight (for the sake of brevity I am not sharing a brilliant and touching few paragraphs on her fear of death)"

Looking back on her college years, during which she was a bit lost and alienated: "If I had known how much I would miss these sensations I might have experienced them differently, recognizing their shabby glamour, respected the ticking clock that defined this entire experience. I would have put aside my resentment, dropped my defenses. I might have a basic understanding of European history or economics. More abstractly, I might feel I had been somewhere, open and porous and hungry to learn. Because being a student was an enviable identity and one I can only reclaim by attending community college late in life for a bookmaking class or something"

A Queer and Pleasant Danger

I just finished reading Kate Bornstein's A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today. And I'm wiping tears from my eyes. This memoir is kind of a fun romp -- Bornstein's prose is breezy and her tone conversational. She experiences many loves and much pleasure, and recounts many adventures. But ultimately she is reaching out to her daughter and grandchildren with whom she can't have contact because they still belong to the Church of Scientology. A Queer and Pleasant Danger is really written to them, with the hopes of connecting.

There are so many interesting elements to this story, from her conventional middle-class suburban upbringing to joining the Scientologists in the 70s where she became top ranked and worked for years on a ship. I confess that although I enjoyed her writing here, I found this part to be kind of puzzling. I just had a hard time relating to what lead her to join the Church, and I find nautical stuff in general kind of alienating and baffling.

After leaving the church, "Al" Bornstein begins to find his way to becoming Kate. And from there she becomes more creatively engaged with writing and performance art in San Francisco and Seattle. During this time she happily explores her sexuality as a trans lesbian masochist. She writes Gender Outlaw and emerges as a significant part of the queer community.

There is a lot of sex and a lot of love in this book, and although it is certain from parts of the narrative that there was real suffering through many stages of her life, what I came away with was a sense of joy. I felt like I read the memoir of someone who lived and lives fully, generously, honestly and without regret. I hope her daughter and granddaughter get a chance to meet her.

Diary of Young Girl

I just finished Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl. It is crushing. Devastating.

She writes of her family's two years in hiding with an other family and an another man, 8 people altogether. During that time she and her writing matures, and she reflects on many serious subjects, such as character (internal and external identity), love, politics, human nature, loneliness, and youth. Throughout the diary are many descriptions of the bickering and difficult dynamics between those in the "Secret Annex". I found these passages deeply moving -- not only was mundane life going on, but you know that underneath the squabbles and tensions was a profound fear. They were all terrified.

Anne Frank's writing is clear as a bell, and she was clearly a talented and precocious teenager.

The diary ends abruptly, as the Annex was raided and all 8 of them were taken to concentration camps. Only Anne's father, Otto, survived. In spite of "knowing the ending", I was shocked and grief-stricken.

Also very intense was the tremendous care the Frank's and Van Daam's received from their helpers. These Dutch citizens were truly heroes.

Actual Innocence

Actual Innocence: When Justice Goes Wrong and How to Make it Right, by Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer, is a disturbing read. Telling the stories of numerous men who were wrongfully convicted, it breaks down the nightmarish phenomenon into a handful of significant problems in our criminal justice system. The book gets its heart from the personal cases which highlight the Kafkaesque horror endured by each innocent man. But the strength of Actual Innocence is in the analysis of these cases and the way the writers explain the problematic nature of eyewitness testimony, jailhouse informants, false confessions, poor defense lawyering, prosecutorial and police misconduct, weak science, and fraudulent experts.

Two of the writers are founders of the Innocence Project which uses DNA testing to exonerate people (when appropriate evidence is available). The emergence of this technology has exposed the injustices in the system and has made it clear how broken it can be. Writing in 2003: "Since the first edition of this book went to press at the end of 1999, DNA tests have freed one innocent person from prison or death row every eighteen days -- at this writing, twenty people in the last year. That rate could easily have been one or two people going free every day if biological evidence had not been lost or destroyed in thousands of cases or if more prisoners enjoyed access to DNA testing."

Gentrification of the Mind

Tonight, in one sitting, I read Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination by Sarah Schulman. It was impossible to put down this important and compelling work. Part memoir of the AIDS crisis and ACT UP, part socio-economic history of the last 50 years in New York City, part elegy, part urgent treatise on the need for accountability, Gentrification of the Mind read to me as personal wake up call:

I was eating a $25 piece of fish at the bar of a restaurant in Park Slope when I started reading it on my kindle. This initially and casually struck me as "ironic", but as I read on I was forced to reflect on the complexities of my position. Irony is too often mobilized as a way of dismissing -- not confronting -- uncomfortable realities. And Gentrification of the Mind makes it painfully and poignantly clear how important it is to be uncomfortable and to resist social, political, emotional, intellectual, sexual, and artistic complacency.

The relationships between the AIDS crisis, the transformation of NYC in the 80s and 90s, and the loss of artistically vital communities, are eloquently drawn through details of personal and public tragedy. The lives and deaths of Schulman's friends, and their connection with the larger changes in American culture, such as widespread homogenization of neighborhoods and the professionalization of the arts, are narrated with deep thoughtfulness and sharp intelligent reflection.

This very thought-provoking work literally brought me to tears. Although it concludes optimistically looking toward the future, Gentrification of the Mind affected me in a very personal way, as I looked back at my own trajectory as a queer native New Yorker and former poet throughout these decades. I think the important thing is not to knee-jerk indulge in nostalgia, but to hold myself accountable for the ways in which I've become comfortable with my own internal gentrification.

I Wear the Black Hat

I just finished I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined), Chuck Klosterman's engaging collection of essays.

Examining what makes us think of some people as especially bad -- as "villains", Klosterman analyzes moments in recent cultural history in wonderfully clever ways. From Sandusky to Linda Tripp to OJ Simpson to Perez Hilton -- why do we see these people as particularly villainous? This is not a lesson in morality; it is more subtle than that, and much more interesting.

Because I am out of it pop-culture-wise these days, I was relieved that many of the incidents and people he discussed were prominent in the 90s. But, even if he was discussing sports figures of whom I know nothing, his writing was so enjoyable and his ideas were so presented so eloquently that familiarity with the point of reference was not always necessary. I Wear the Black Hat is both thought-provoking and entertaining. My favorite combo.

I was disappointed that he didn't address the movie Megamind, which chronicles the existential crisis of a super-villain deprived of his arch enemy. I would love to read Klosterman's review of that movie. As it is, I will definitely be reading more of him in the future.