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The Wednesday Turns
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.
[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.
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.
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