My Beautiful Despair: The Philosophy of Kim Kierkegaardashian by Kim KierkegaardashianMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
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Tuesday, September 29, 2020
Review: My Beautiful Despair: The Philosophy of Kim Kierkegaardashian
My Beautiful Despair: The Philosophy of Kim Kierkegaardashian by Kim KierkegaardashianMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
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Friday, September 25, 2020
Review: A History of Eastern Europe
A History of Eastern Europe by Vejas Gabriel LiuleviciusMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I picked this one up because I’ve dealt with some of the pressures of recent tensions by diving into deep family history. I believe I have identified my four-times great-grandfather as a merchant or public official who moved to the Bukovina region of modern-day Romania when that region came under Hapsburg empirical control in the 1780s or ’90s. In a slight way, I feel as if I’ve come to know him (and many of the 800-900 descendants I’ve uncovered with the help of various cousins) so I hoped that this series of lectures would give me a fuller context for his world.
There are parts here that do answer my particular question, and I did pay special attention to the Hapsburg’s 18th century expansion and the rising and falling fortunes of the Romanian state. As happens with a lot of things, though, I wound up getting drawn into things I didn’t expect.
Liulevicius is an academic, as am I, and he’s a skilled lecturer. I think he could probably use a little polish in the way he delivers a joke, but I am confident there are some (OK many dozens) who’d say the same about me. And his jokes are relevant since they represent a sustained way that Soviet-bloc citizens dealt with the gap between the reality they experienced and the propaganda the state produced.
Liulevicius’s themes are broad and flexible, but they do help orient the details of his account. He opens with the question of whether there really is a place called “Eastern Europe,” noting that many people within the region understand themselves as drawn more to Western or, at times, Russian influence.
We see states and empires rise and then fall. We see a hunger for mobility across the region, one that the two-generation reign of the USSR could slow but not stop.
In the way of good classes, this gives a deeper sense of its subject, and I feel more at home in the geography and cultures of the nations and peoples he describes.
If I started this as part of an escape from the tensions of the moment, though, I found myself getting drawn back to some of what I didn’t want to be thinking about.
Above all, I was struck by the persistent memory that the conservatives of my adolescence and young adulthood defined themselves by recollections of these conflicts. From Goldwater through McCain, the abiding fear was of Soviet power, of the power of an Eastern Europe that tried to influence us through subtle and direct ways.
One hard-to-understand feature of Trumpism – which may or may not be conservatism – is its acquiescence to Russian and authoritarian interests. We now have a President whose interests align uncomfortably with Putin’s, and no one on the right seems troubled by that.
There’s a strangeness in all that, a reminder that, as Liulevicius says, the ferment of Eastern Europe has a way of shaping the rest of the world. Whether we like it or not, Putin – whose authority comes in large measure through Russia’s ability to influence the region – has had much to do with bringing Trump to power and with challenging many of the institutional structures of the United States.
Anyway, thanks to Liulevicius for a stimulating class even though it gave me less on my Romanian ancestors than I hoped and then, for further insult, made it all the tougher to stay in my escapist mode.
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Monday, September 21, 2020
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
Thursday, September 10, 2020
Review: Gilded Needles
Gilded Needles by Michael McDowellMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I nearly gave up on this one at the start, but I’m glad I kept at it.
The first few pages make clear that this is saturated with great atmosphere. It’s set near the legendarily bloody Five Points area of New York in the gilded age (as the title references in nice double-entendre fashion), and it’s an era I know fairly well from my own gangster researches. McDowell brings it to life with details that give a sense of the corruption and decay of the place.
And yet, ugh, it’s all exposition early. For a time I felt as if I were reading something from an encyclopedia. We’ll get introduced to a character and get a full backstory. Then another character and another backstory. I felt as if I should have been taking notes.
To be fair, in retrospect, I see a lot more sophistication to the method. I think McDowell is trying to push against conventional narrative and the sympathies it engenders. He keeps us at arm’s length from the characters for the same reason he immerses so fully in the Five Points world. He’s working to unsettle us, to take us to a chilling place.
Still, it’s tough sledding for a bit, but the great setting helps get you through it.
As the novel moves along, though, we get exposed to more of a traditional narrative. The at-first separate characters begin to affect each other across a web of the city, and the results get increasingly compelling. I went from thinking I’d drop it to racing through to the end.
Along the way, we get, first, a thoughtful critique of class. The upright, moralistic Judge Stallworth can’t conceive that Lena, our Five Points fence, and her family have the intellectual wherewithal to plot revenge over his sentencing and killing three of their number. He’s so caught up in an unarticulated social Darwinism that he doesn’t see them as fully human.
Meanwhile, McDowell never lets Lena and her family become objects of pity. For one, they don’t pity themselves. For another, they’re still repugnant in a lot of ways. They’re cruel, and [VEILED SPOILER:] what they do to the judge’s grandchildren is chilling.
Even more impressively, I think we get a novel that refuses to let us settle into comfortable story. It’s clumsy – even if intended – opening chapters estrange us as do the troubling doings of the later sections. Everyone is ugly either internally, externally, or both. We can’t readily sympathize with anyone – except maybe Helen, though even she is a bit much in her becoming consumed by the effort to help the poor whom her grandfather scorns.
Instead, we’re left with a Victorian-era sense of a world that’s dark whether it exposes its underbelly or lives in utter denial of it.
In any case, unusual as this is, it grew on me the more I read it. I’m glad I hung on to the end, and I recommend it.
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Thursday, September 3, 2020
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