The Wednesday Turns

[evelyn_b]

What I've Finished Reading

Incorrigable cyberoptimist that I am, I couldn't have been better catered to by Megan Phelps-Roper's Unfollow if it was knitted specially for me out of my own most self-indulgent daydreams by a swarm of benevolent algorithms. Phelps-Roper grew up in Topeka's Westboro Baptist Church, a tiny splinter sect made up of abusive showboating rage pastor Fred Phelps and his family, took to Twitter at a young age to spread the message of God's wrath among the reprobates, made friends in spite of herself, and eventually left the church as a result. It's a generous, hopeful book.

What I'm Reading Now

Maybe Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist is better understood as "a document" than as a work of literature. What do I mean by that? I mean I find myself implicitly trusting the sincerity and earnestness of Alexander Berkman simply because he's such a godawful writer. Like Wolf Hall, Prison Memoirs is done in "immersive" present tense, and the consciousness into which you are dropped, in the chapters describing Berkman's abortive attempt to kill anti-labor steel boss Henry Clay Frick and thereby (somehow) spark a revolution among The People, is that of an absolute wanker.

I pace the floor in agitation over the conversation with my fellow-prisoners. Why can't they understand the motives that prompted my act? Their manner of pitying condescension is aggravating [. . .] My remark that the probable consequences to myself are not to be weighed in the scale against the welfare of the People, they had met with a smile of derision, suggestive of doubt as to my sanity. It is, of course, consoling to reflect that neither of these men can properly be said to represent The People. The negro is a very inferior type of laborer; and the other-- he is a bourgeois, "in business." He is not worth while. Besides, he confessed that it his third offense. He is a common criminal, not an honest producer. But that tall man -- the Homestead steelworker whom the negro pointed out to me -- oh, he will understand: he is of the real People.

[Spoiler: he also doesn't understand].

I'd guess that I have a little more baseline sympathy for Berkman than the average American just because I first met him in the pages of Emma Goldman's autobiography Living My Life, as an ardent young man throwing his whole self into the radical act of eating an enormous steak at a restaurant before his money runs out again. Goldman has a knack for the telling detail that Berkman (so far) lacks.

Quichotte is giving me the same problem I had with The Golden House. Whenever the narration goes into a glorious garbage-island Rushdie fugue about, say, the many kinds of snoring to be heard through the walls of a seedy motel, my patience is endless and my indulgence joyful; when he does the same thing about some currently circulating op-ed hot topic, like "political and cultural fragmentation in America" it just makes me tired. I realize tarted-up op-eds have been part of Rushdie's M.O. from the beginning, it's just that I used to get a lot fewer of the references. Familiarity breeds nitpicking. I don't feel much like blaming either of us, though. It's hard to be contemporary.

That doesn't mean I'm not also enjoying Quichotte, whose characters include an imaginary son, wished into existence by his would-be father, who doesn't yet realize that he is also a fiction, and the "real" author of both.

What's Next

Some boring stuff! Some James Baldwin! Also this Three-Body Problem sequel that I absolutely don't feel like reading.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

Some boring stuff! Some James Baldwin! Also this Three-Body Problem sequel that I absolutely don't feel like reading.

Good luck?

[evelyn_b]

Thanks? Sorry to be so grumpy here, I just keep forgetting I'm supposed to get the sequel, then remembering again suddenly.

[thisbluespirit]

You are the last person I think of as being grumpy here! You are always humorous in your dislike and probably more fair than many of them deserve. ♥

Also, when I was a children's librarian and involved in book awards and things, there were books I had to read for both, and that feeling with the dratted author you didn't like even though, yes, ok, they're fine and you can see why people think they're good, brings out ANOTHER 400+ page thing and you ARE going to have to read the damn thing. Again. So when a book club lands on something you had cheerfully decided you did not need in your life, it's very unfair. You are entitled to grumble.

[evelyn_b]

and that feeling with the dratted author you didn't like even though, yes, ok, they're fine and you can see why people think they're good, brings out ANOTHER 400+ page thing and you ARE going to have to read the damn thing.

Oh no! :O

[thisbluespirit]

I'll never forgive Lian Hearn!

[liadt]

'Boring stuff' Oh noes!

The people never understand!

[evelyn_b]

The People don't know what's good for them! All they care about is making money and doing crimes and leaving the hard work of revolutionary vanguarding to out-of-town randos. :( Even the strikers lack the vision to understand the stirring call to action that is busting into a guy's office and shooting him in the earlobe by mistake. They're just annoyed because now the crackdown is going to be worse.

The boring stuff isn't necessarily that boring to me; I just have a lot of miscellaneous small books and magazines in the reading queue that I doubt I'll have much to say about here.

[liadt]

Yes, it's hard to write about things that are perfectly decent. Enjoy your sedate reading!

[osprey_archer]

That Berkman selection is hilarious, although clearly unintentionally. Is the real reason that anarchy never took off in America the fact that anarchists are so godawful earnest that non-anarchists can't take them seriously?

More seriously, it sounds like I should give Berkman a miss and go straight to Emma Goldman instead.

Do you have a specific James Baldwin book in mind for your next reading?

[evelyn_b]

YES, it's If Beale Street Could Talk, which I bought a while ago. I'm looking forward to it!

I've been assured that Berkman is eventually going to calm down and start appreciating the humanity of his fellow prisoners, which will be an improvement even if it doesn't improve his prose. But I can definitely recommend Living My Life; Goldman is as strident as Berkman but more readable and specific - you get a lot of the texture of daily life in a number of different underrepresented social environments.

Anarchists are gonna anarch, but I don't know if I can say they had more earnest idiots per dozen than the average political movement. Berkman grew up idolizing the Russian Nihilists and daydreaming about bombs with the help of Chernyshevsky's polemical novel What Is To Be Done? and plenty of people wanted him off their side. There was a lot of acrimony around whether to condemn Berkman's act or defend it. That's how Emma Goldman ended up whipping her ex-bf Johann Most in the face with a horsewhip at one of his lectures.

What really wrecked the old-school American left was probably at least partly the success of the Bolsheviks. It gave the Red Scare crowd an excuse to crack down, but it also sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the room for anyone who wasn't CPUSA, and manufactured new acrimonious splitting opportunities every time the USSR did something inexcusable. And a lot of people just didn't want to hear criticism of the brand-new baby utopia in Russia; Emma Goldman complains about how the only people inviting her to speak about her Russian disillusionment were monarchists. The anarchists kind of got crunched up in a giant geopolitical nutcracker along with a bunch of other people who wanted a new world But Not Like This.

(Berkman's still an idiot, though)

(disclaimer: I am not a historian)

[osprey_archer]

OMG, please tell me that Goldman writes about horsewhipping Johann Most in the face in her memoirs. I realize that these leftists were more or less fringe groups, but all the same, when people talk about how politics used to be more civil... horsewhips, my dudes! They horsewhipped each other in the oldest days!

[evelyn_b]

Of course she does!

There's also some poly drama you might enjoy.

To be fair to norms of the past, no one thought it was normal to run up and start whipping a guy because of his alleged perfidity. But you're probably right to think of "civility in politics" as more of an occasional aspiration than a universal norm of long standing.

[lirazel]

Contemporary memoirs aren't really my ~thing~ but Unfollow sounds like something I need to check out. Thank you!

Omg, that excerpt is excruciating, wow, Berkman, you're really the worst.

I don't feel much like blaming either of us, though. It's hard to be contemporary.

What a glorious pair of sentences.

[evelyn_b]

You should! I'm not usually into contemporary memoirs, either, but this one never made me think, "Why are you telling me this?" To be fair, this is partly because it told me a lot of stuff that I wanted to hear. But I think even if you factor out my immense relief at reading a story about the internet that isn't "Look how the internet is destroying our ability to communicate by making us all communicate wrong," it's still very much worth reading. Phelps-Roper's love for her estranged family is palpable and heartbreaking.

Berkman will continue to be a bad writer, but I hope now that he's settled into prison, he'll ease away from his cardboard-cutout picture of non-Berkman humanity.

[lirazel]

Oh, goodness, we really do need to be reminded of the good the internet can do right now. And I know this sounds like hyperbole, but I feel like her story is a (much more extreme) version of my own. Like: raised in a religious bubble with a lot of very wrong messages, escaped via the friends I made on the internet. Obviously my family weren't the kind of fundamentalists the Westboro people are, but I can still relate.

[evelyn_b]

Definitely! I think it's the more extreme version of a lot of people's stories.