Percival Everett, James ***

Let me start by admitting that I'm not a fan of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and recall very few of its plot points. I generally don't care for picaresque novels and didn't find the comic elements humorous.

James tells the same story from the point of view of the runaway slave Jim. The gimmick is that Jim is extremely well educated and merely plays the fool for the benefit of his white oppressors. The first few chapters show Jim teaching young black children "the correct incorrect grammar" for the "slave filter," and several plot developments involve white folks being confused when they hear a slave speak "proper" English.

It is not surprising that James focuses on language given that the vernacular is the most notable aspect of Twain's book and of Everett's earlier book Erasure (filmed as American Fiction). 

Everett leans too heavily on his themes. Not only can Jim read and write, he is inexplicably well educated. He has a dream in which he argues with Voltaire about natural versus civil liberties, and has visions of John Locke. When alone, the slaves have explicit conversations about their predicament. At the same time, Everett skims past the adventures, such as when Huck and Jim explore a house that comes floating down the river.

The story comes alive once it deviates from Huckleberry Finn. The ironic humor, the action, and the intensity all increase during the period when Huck and Jim are separated. When they are reunited, it is Jim who drives the action, not Huck. The final chapters are completely different in both incident and tone: Huckleberry Finn ends with controversial chapters that "devolve into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy" (says Ernest Hemingway); James ends with violence and righteous anger.

Tyler Mahan Coe, Cocaine & Rhinestones ****

Cocaine & Rhinestones is a podcast about the history of country music. This book, adapted from its second season, centers on the tragic stories of George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Or, rather, it uses their story as the main through-line for a wide-ranging exploration of country music and beyond. 

I enjoyed Coe's discursive style and was especially impressed with his insights into the art and business of country music: the meaning and development of "the Nashville Sound," the marketing of recordings in the era of regional distribution, the changing role of producers, the importance of artists' personas, the line between country and pop.

Many fans believe that the "& Western" part of the genre Country & Western is a reference to western swing. It's not. It's a reference to western music, or at least Hollywood's version of western music, performed by singing actors in Western movies, a.k.a. "horse operas," the biggest of which were given exponentially larger marketing budgets than the entire country music division of any record label at the time.

I appreciated Coe's firm convictions about the quality of the songs and his willingness to call bullshit on significant parts of the official narrative.

I was mostly fine with the totally tangential interpolations about pinball machines, bullfighting, the age of chivalry, and so on. Coe generally brought an interesting perspective to the subjects, and they provided a break from the relentless misery of George and Tammy's lives.

I found a 500+ track Spotify playlist that provided easy access to the referenced music. My favorite discoveries were not tracks from George or Tammy. Cocaine & Rhinestones is the second music book I've loved in the past month despite not being a huge fan of the artists in focus. I would have liked the book to have photos – of Nudie suits, for example, or of Jones' evolving haircuts – but I suppose podcasts don't have photos either.

By the way, the proper pronunciation of "Wynette" is win-net not why-net. 

Justin Torres, Blackouts ***

Much of Blackouts consists of a conversation between two gay men as one of them lays dying at a rundown hotel somewhere in the American Southwest. They swap stories about their lives and about the creation of the (real-life) landmark study from the 1950s Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. The study began as a collection of personal stories from gay individuals which were distorted into moralistic medical generalizations, and the men try to recover the original history.

The title Blackouts refers to the way in which gay history and gay identity are filtered through omissions and distortions. The book introduced me to the genre of erasure poetry, in which a poet creates new poetry by erasing words from a preexisting text. Was the new poem immanent in the original? 

I was impressed by Torres' innovative approach to the subject and the mysterious Inland Empire vibe he achieves. However, I was mostly unmoved, probably because the characters' concerns are remote from my own.

I loved this tender vignette which captures something essential about interpersonal communication:

The father pulls the child through the crowd; the state fair. ... The child squeezes his father's hand a little tighter, and the father automatically turns back and looks down, as if the child had tapped him on the shoulder, or as if the father were a puppet and the box pulled his string. For some reason, the discovery of this form of silent communication between himself and his father delights him, and so he begins playing a little experiment, every now and then giving a little squeeze, as if he were startled and in search of comfort, and sure enough, each time the father turns his face, looks down at the boy with slight concern, until finally he snaps, What is it? What's the problem? What's wrong with you? The child has no answer. The child realizes then that the father has all along been desperately looking for something, or someone. We are lost, the boy realizes.

Wolfgang Streeck, Taking Back Control? *** 1/2

I heard about the German political economist Wolfgang Streeck in a New York Times opinion piece with the humble title "This Maverick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time." The thesis of his new book Taking Back Control? is that governments, led by the United States, have ceded management of the world economy to a neoliberal free-market technocracy, thereby preventing the state from performing one of its most important functions, "the protection of its citizens from capitalism's risks and adverse side effects." The resurgence of nationalist populism represents attempts to bring people's economic destiny back under democratic control.

In Streeck's account, the post-war system of managing the world economy (Bretton Woods, Keynes) began to falter in the 1970s resulting in "stagflation." The United States started promoting neoliberal globalization, which really took off after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The United States of America pushed for a worldwide return to the fundamental principles of economic liberalism, becoming increasingly disinclined to allow its client states to pursue different national economic and social policies… Its new objective was to convert the world into a field of expansion for the American version of capitalism... It amounted to using the United States' international power to open up the world… to its giant domestic companies.

In this neoliberal regime, responsibility for managing economic matters goes to specialist international organizations like the WTO and the IMF, working with politically independent central banks. Theoretically, this setup removes politics from the proper management of the economy, replacing it with rule-based global governance by experts. In reality, economic management is never politically neutral; neoliberalism simply removes it from democratic political control.

Democratic politics dissociated itself from political economy by preventing itself from discretionary intervention into market opportunities and outcomes... Democracy was redefined from a regime for egalitarian correction of market outcomes into a practice of public deliberation among citizens guided by 'post-material' middle-class social values... All the new social policy could and would do was to urge workers at risk to take more responsibility for themselves, as the state now had to provide for international economic competitiveness rather than social equality.

Neoliberalism failed to deliver on its promise of ever-expanding prosperity, even before the twin blows of COVID and the war in Ukraine finished it off. We don't yet have a replacement model.

A theory, related to the increase in inequality and the incapacity or unwillingness of governments to combat it through either tax or wage policy, is that low interest rates after all did have inflationary effects, not in markets for goods or labor but in asset markets.

To replace the resulting gap in demand and avoid social unrest, but also to help the financial sector grow to be the lead sector of a de-industrializing political economy, financial markets were de-regulated, such that even low- and non-income earners could take on debt as a substitute for income from work and social benefits. In principle, this amounted to a relocation of debt from public to private, in analogy to the privitization of public services… Public debt declined while private household debt increased.

Taking Back Control? provides a productive way to think about recent political economic history. I was particularly intrigued by Streeck's insights about the financialization (and de-industrialization) of the United States economy. He notes, for example, that "public debt [has] declined while private household debt increased; ... this amounted to a relocation of debt from public to private, in analogy to the privatization of public services."

The first half of the book (diagnosis of the situation) was more compelling than the second half (which advocates for small states rather than large ones). The prose is academic, its jargon exacerbated by being translated from the German. ("I aim to merge a political theory of the state with a political-economic theory of capitalism and capitalist development, on terms that are not functionalist, not economically deterministic....")

Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo **** 1/2

Time's Echo is a work of history centered on four composers who wrote major works responding to the cataclysm of World War II and the Holocaust: Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten. The author's thesis is that music transmits complex emotions across time, and that

musical memorials are therefore more meaningful and enduring than stone monuments or new church railings.

I approached the book with some trepidation. Books relating to the Holocaust tend to be uncomfortably impassioned, and the prose in the introduction tended toward the abstract phraseology of Continental philosophy ("Yet it is not just we who remember music. Music also remembers us."). I needn't have worried, though: Eichler manages to stay grounded in realistic detail despite the enormity of the subject and the non-representational nature of music.

Eichler effectively describes how contemporary events and attitudes shaped the music and the audience response to it. I especially appreciated how he shows the meaning of a piece of music seeping in from the Zeitgeist rather than flowing from the composer's explicit intension. For example, he explains how important music is to the German identity and how intertwined were Jewish contributions to that sense of self.

The book presents a clear case for the importance of art in our responding to the world around us. Time's Echo often reads like a particularly comprehensive chapter of Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise, a book that continues to rise in my esteem due to how often I think about it. Both books are filled with incidents and episodes that enrich their musicological analysis. My favorite episode in Time's Echo is the world premiere of Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw performed by the amateur Albuquerque Civic Symphony Orchestra. I am also inspired to visit Coventry Cathedral, whose destruction inspired Britten's War Requiem, and to learn more about the European exile community in Los Angeles during the war.

The only thing standing in the way of a full five-star rating is that I am not moved by the music in focus (Strauss' Metamorphosen, Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, Shostakovich's "Babi Yar" Symphony, and Britten's War Requiem). The only affecting piece that I discovered was Shostakovich's Piano Trio #2.

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper ***

This enjoyable book is a compendium of musings on the various uses of notebooks. Sketchpads, ships' logs, business ledgers, common-place books, zibaldoni, travel journals, recipe collections, artist/scientist notebooks, diaries. Allen believes that the advent of paper notebooks in the 14th or 15th century enabled new forms of thought; in particular, he believes that notebooks made possible the artistic innovations of the Renaissance.

The subtitle shines a light on the use of notebooks as an extension of our thinking, but many of the included examples show different purposes, such as aides-memoire, contemporaneous record keeping, and social connection. Allen establishes the value of notebooks to the historian more convincingly than he shows their value as tools for self discovery. Expressive writing (like in diaries) is a surprisingly recent development, as is the detailed ship's log. (The log of Magellan's circumnavigation, for example, is notably sparse.)

My favorite sections of the book were those describing the notebooks of specific people, such as the Venetian Michael Rhodes (1434), Adriaen Coenen the King of the Herring (1570), Leonardo da Vinci (1519), and Charles Darwin (1837).

I picked up this book hoping to be inspired to maintain my own notebook(s). There is a chapter that extols the health benefits of writing about your feelings and the psychological benefits of thinking on paper. I didn't find myself inspired. Although after retirement, I may try Julia Cameron's "morning pages" exercise from The Artist's Way (write three pages of stream-of-consciousness each morning).

Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings ****

A Brief History of Seven Killings is a kaleidoscopic epic about rival posses in 1970s Jamaica and the wider forces that fueled their violence. It is not brief (686 pages) and features countless killings. The story covers a couple of decades, but it swirls around one central event: the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in December 1976.

Numerous characters take turns as narrators. Their distinct voices and points of view are the best thing about the book. Many of them use Jamaican patois, with a few explicitly calling out the differences between American and Jamaican slang. The sense of time and place is strong. When we're introduced to the CIA section chief in Kingston, for example, he vividly describes the knock-off fast food restaurant King Burger: Home of the Whamperer. One stylistic decision I found distracting was always referring to Bob Marley as The Singer. It felt like an abstraction in the midst of palpable concrete details.

The story takes place over four time periods: 1976, 1979, 1985, and 1991. The portion in 1970s Jamaica is far stronger with its Cold War politics and local color. When the story moves to 1980s America, it simplifies into a story about the drug trade and loses its distinctive flavor. The narrative voices start to all sound the same; for example, I had a hard time telling the two gay characters apart even though one was a Jamaican and the other was a white guy from Chicago.