A Promised Land by Barack Obama
A Promise Land by Barack Obama
I listened to all twenty-one hours of Barack Obama reading the first volume of his presidential memoirs which covers begins with his childhood and ends with the killing of Osama bin Laden.
The first part of the book devotes a lot of time to Obama’s desire to make an impact, his frustration that each move he makes to try to have it ends up feeling fruitless, and how his increasing ambition takes a toll on his relationship with his wife and children. This culminates with his run for the presidency.
The second part of the book largely takes the form of Obama run through a laundry list of various incidents and situations that he dealt with during his first term in office from Afghanistan, the global financial crisis, birtherism, and so on and on.
Each incident is recounted through a series of anecdotes, check-ins with how his family seems to be doing, descriptions unrelated events happening around the same time (presumably meant to give “a day in the life of the President” feel to things), and insights into Obama’s thinking during the time period.
While he doesn’t explicitly state this anywhere, one gets the sense as these recounting add up that Obama felt a consistent sense of frustration with the lack of good options available to him and the unfairness of his critics. The circumstance of the financial crisis boxed in what options were reasonably available to him, the Republicans growing obstructionism and nativism (driven by its voters in response to the election of a Black President) made the kind of bi-partisan politics that he wanted to practice and ran on impossible to achieve largely, and undoing the unilateral quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan created by the Bush administration (along with the sense of unquestioned authority that the administration had fostered in the military and intelligence communities after 9-11) proved more difficult than he imagined.
I have always appreciated Obama’s persistent sense of optimism, good humor, and pragmatic approach to politics and policy. While his legacy is not without its blemishes, I did find it helpful to review it from his perspective and with the considerations of the multiple messes that he inherited, much as Biden has inherited a number of messes from the Trump Era.
I especially appreciated the way that this memoir persistently humanizes the players involved with crafting and negotiating legislation and running the federal government and military. Remembering the human, the imperfect, in those even in places of power is something that is not easy.
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (Peter Pomerantsev)
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev
A gonzo journalism account of early 21st-century Russia told by a documentary-television producer working in Russia during the time period for a television producer largely creating Russian versions of popular Western television.
Peter mixes general social commentary with journalistic portraits of friends that he makes during his time there (ranging from club girls looking to land a “Forbes” to street mafia members turned novelists to a local business owner caught in a proxy battle between government officials).
Peter paints a portrait of a Russia that is “some sort of postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends.” He is in a position to understand, to a degree, the way that the media landscape is a battlefield of what he refers to as “political engineers” who use a “new type of Kremlin propaganda, less about arguing against the West with a counter-model as in the Cold War, more about slipping inside its language to play and taunt it from inside.”
This propaganda is everywhere in the media including in the bad ports of western sitcoms. It’s not clear to what extent people truly believe it and to what extent it’s understood that everyone must act as if it was true. Peter highlights a billboard advertisement as exemplary of this phenomenon:
Got up in the style of a Nazi poster, it shows two Germanic-looking youths against a glorious alpine mountain over the slogan “Life is Getting Better.” It would be wrong to say the ad is humorous, but it’s not quite serious, either. It’s sort of both. It’s saying this is the society we live in (a dictatorship), but we’re just playing at it (we can make jokes about it), but playing in a serious way (we’re making money playing it and won’t let anyone subvert its rules).
[…]
The flip side of this triumphant cynicism […] is despair.
I find Peter’s account a compelling portrait of this culture of mish-mashed contradictions where the rules are constantly shifting but no one’s allowed to talk about it. His portrait is not a desperate one, which I think helps. He shows how many people, including himself for a time, are thriving in this environment rather than showing a scene of total misery and repression (although he certainly points to its existence in sections).
The gonzo component helps as throughout the book one is able to see him as in the mix, someone who is also profiting from the vast swathes of money being thrown around in the post-Soviet Moscow. The details from his life (like being worried about having enough money to bribe someone when many of his labyrinth of identity papers has expired) help make the world’s day-to-day experience more real.
jeen-yuhs (part 3)
jeen-yuhs (part 3)
While Part 1 + 2 benefited greatly from the kind of fly-on-the-wall inside access that Coodie (the primary filmer) had to Kanye’s struggles to achieve that first taste of mainstream success, Part 3 loses that, largely, and spends a lot of time compiling media footage and offering commentary.
Coodie reunites with Kanye to a limited extent after the release of Life of Pablo and there is some limited more verité footage from the period between 2016-2020, though the amount of it is somewhat limited and tends to not be quite as compelling.
At several points in the final leg of the film, Coodie repeatedly turns off the camera because he finds it somewhat unethical to be filming Kanye’s rambling monologues that seem to originate from a place of mental instability.
Perhaps the most noteworthy segment, for me, is a scene in which Kanye is listening to Tucker Carlson talk about the media’s perception that Kanye “is going insane” being a result of his espousing of Christian values like being against abortion. He seems to wholeheartedly agree with Tucker’s assessment.
Scenes like this one suggest that Kanye’s turn to religion is very serious for him, but also work in some way as a stand in for how any number of Trump supporters regardless of race can come to see themselves as laughed out of the public square by a media elite who have no use for their traditional values, the losers of a culture war who are looking for a champion to charge into battle on their behalf.
While I am not attempting to be an apologist for either Trump or Kanye, I do think that there is a lesson to be learned from this moment regarding the dangers of being dismissive of people’s fundamentally held beliefs and attempts to tightly constraint the limits of acceptable speech. It’s easy to be cynical about someone like Kanye and view his every move as a form of publicity stunt, but the final act of this documentary perhaps tries to first and foremost remind us that he is also a person… and that no amount of success can wipe away the human capacity for grief, frustration, and alienation.
I suppose that at some level what I’m trying to say is that we should seek to understand first rather than to judge first when someone says or does something that is offensive to us. I’m not saying it’s easy, nor am I saying that anyone should be faulted for being unable or even unwilling to do so (goes against the entire premise of my argument, in fact). I’m saying though that perhaps it’s worth holding as an aspiration, one that might do more to change the toxicity of our culture than almost anything else.
Living Nations, Living Words (ed. Joy Harjo)
Living Nations, Living Worlds
An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry
Collected by Joy Harjo, 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate
I didn’t know until the last few years that the Poet Laureate was actually selected by the Library of Congress. Seems like a much better selection process than having politicians decide these things (as happens in Oregon as far as I can tell).
I mention this, in part, in case anyone was wondering how the first Native Poet Laureate was appointed during the Trump presidency.
This collection of poetry is a book form of a project that Joy pursued mapping Native poets from across the country.
I always think of anthologies like this as a way of discovering new voices first and foremost, and so I will provide below a list of links to more information about my favorite newly discovered poets from this collection.
Louise Erdrich (I was already familiar with Louise’s novel-writing but discovered here that she also was a poet)
Natalie Diaz (I have had a hold on her book Post-Colonial Love Poem at the library for a few months)
jeen-yuhs (part 2)
jeen-yuhs (part 2)
Part 2 pretty much begins with Kanye getting into a car accident in LA almost directly after being signed to Roc-a-Fella records. The accident breaks his jaw in multiple locations and breaks whatever interest Roc-a-Fella had in releasing his album.
…so he keeps making beats to pay the bills and scampers to record The College Dropout without any institutional support, using borrowed studio time from friends and colleagues.
There’s a scene of them going into MTV after hours to work on the equipment there to produce the video for “Through the Wire” which Kanye pays for out of pocket.
Kanye forgoes recommended surgery in order to keep pushing to take advantage of this make-it-or-break-it moment.
He self-releases the video for “Through the Wire,” and it blows up and tops the MTV charts for weeks. Suddenly, Roc-a-Fella is interested again, and we end this chapter with him winning a Grammy.
Watching the “Through the Wire” video again, I can see how the first two parts of jeen-yuhs are effectively a three-hour version of what the video distilled into three minutes. The fly-on-the-wall style continues to be remarkable, showing recording sessions, initial reactions, etc. to what would ultimately become an album that has sold over four million copies in the United States alone. It’s not hard to see that Kanye made this a reality through a kind of confident determination that none of the many obstacles in his path could deter.
I am very curious to see what kind of access and footage awaits in part 3 once Kanye has reached a kind of superstar level of success.
Liar’s Circus (Carl Hoffman)
Liar’s Circus by Carl Hoffman
There’s a lot that this book has in common with Dignity, in that the Carl goes around talking to folks in places where Trump voters tend to hang out (VFW, diners, church groups, etc.). He also makes it a point to be one of the first in line to each of the rallies that he attends and befriends several other regular early birds.
My top takeaway was his connection of Trump’s rallies to religious revival movements, and the degree to which participants (including to some degree the author himself) experience a kind of ecstatic state from the power of the lighting, sound, and demonization that are consistent throughout Trump’s rallies.
I found the bits where Carl compares Trump rallies to other “dangerous” environments that he’s covered as a journalist somewhat tedious and unnecessary.
Still, it’s a short read and probably worth it for anyone curious about the feeling of these rallies and profiles the particular type of people who attend them repeatedly.
Sky Burial (Dana Levin)
Sky Burial by Dana Levin
This poem, Spring, is representative of everything good about this book:
SPRING
Forensic Anthropology Center, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
1
The sun, in shafts and spades.
Through the pine and birches, little breeze setting off
the leaves—
Their gold green increase.
Pollen to the air, its colonial dream
of a new imperium of trees—
Snap against the wrist-skin.
And then you press down on the tongue with your gloved thumb
to let the honeybee show you the way.
2
The dark tunnel paths from light to light.
Flay the face and scoop out the eyes—you’ll see.
3
Bees in a cloud round your hand.
Egg-herder, you smell
synonymous with treasure—
Shining a light at the back of the throat
blowflies
in liquid pearls
the bees murder to eat—
And all at the lips and nose a yellow dust, pollen
they have
delivered—
You scrape it into a little sack.
4
Ripple and snap.
Bend to the O of the rigored mouth—listen:
Plastic bags, like souls, caught in trees.
5
What to harvest
from the sloughed-off suits of the dead.
Like seashells cupping the ghost-tongue of the sea,
their black mouths speak—
You crouch to the hum with a bag and a blade. You
the god it sways.
jeen-yuhs (part 1)
jeen-yuhs (1)
despite the problems with kanye (which are many-storied), it is an objectively amazing thing to have had a filmmaker following him around NYC and Chicago right before and during the time in which he ended up getting a record deal and crafting his first album.
cinema verité is the dominant mode throughout—the camera a witness and also an audience against which Kanye develops a media persona.
While I am generally skeptical of literally everything that Netflix does (television and films algorithmically optimized to be addictive), sometimes the giant wads of cash that they have to throw around result in something amazing, which I believe to be the case here.
Full judgement to be reserved till I reach the end.
Dignity (Chris Arnade)
Dignity by Chris Arnade
First of all, it’s very odd that Amazon’s image for this book has it sitting on a weathered table. This is compounded by the book itself which features blurbs from J.D. Vance (now a Republican candidate for Senate), Elizabeth Bruenig, Patrick J. Deneen, Angela Nagle (author of Kill All the Normies), and Tom Cotton (who wrote a NYT Op-Ed advocating for Trump to use the military to quash BLM protests last summer).
It’s essentially a work of gonzo photojournalism. Chris travels the country going to McDonalds, strip mall churches, bodegas, corner stores, bars, VFW, etc. in search of the “back row” of the United States He then takes pictures and riffs on themes that emerge from the stories of the people he talks to. The gist of his position is that the “front row” of the US has disdain for the lives of the “left behind” from the NAFTA era of trade liberalization and manufacturing decline.
All the dualism is really rather tiring, and this certainly comes withing the ballpark of poverty porn. Despite these setbacks and a racial analysis that is… intentionally understated, I appreciate the empathy and respect in this book. I also think it was good for me to have a chance to reflect on my own alienation from some of my roots and disdain that I might have once and sometime still feel for things like religion or fast-food chains.
The photography is not particularly interesting or impressive for the most part, and, in fact, I found all the shots of needles/people shooting up to be in poor taste in the context of this book.
3 Sections (Vijay Seshardi)
3 Sections by Vijay Seshardi
Despite the title, this book has no defined sections. It does have one poem, Nursing Home, divided into three sections which mirrors the book in a way:
A short, stanza-ed poem.
A longer prose section.
A medium length sequence of lines with no stanza breaks.
These are the three forms employed in the book (including a long prose entry about Pacific Ocean fishing out of the Pacific Northwest where the narrator of that section grew up).
I copied down some lines and language that particularly caught my eyes and/or ears:
the retrospective, maskless rage of inception.
How few, how paltry few, of all the beautiful apparitions pulverized to earth
were resurrected as a tulip or a rose.
the ah-weary-of-time sunflower
Don’t even get me started on our co-workers,
whose sinuosities are instinct with a prevaricating design;
or on the subway in the sand;
or on the reason why I forget what I should remember
and remember what I should forget;
or on the flamingos that dart like sparrows
and soar and dive and congregate
in this our city, birdless until now since time began.
A shimmering, as in a mirage. A darkening, as in an aftermath.
A white light, then a red light, then a black light,
and then the meaning I mean, the meaning, and its meaning,
which I am just about to grasp.
Governments are falling as we speak.
Brain scans done on her show
her perisylvian pathways and declivities
choked by cities,
microscopic mercurial cities
made from her memories
the penciled-in figure on the painted-over mural of time
Another National Book Award winner that impressed (I’ve been working my way through the winners for Poetry in the last decade-ish).
Encanto
Encanto
A Disney musical about intergenerational trauma, healing, and the power of family and community.
The songs are written by Lin-Manuel Miranda which you probably already know means that they are extremely good. If you don’t, please familiarize yourself with Hamilton. I’ve included a video below of my favorite song.
With movies like this coming out from Disney, I can understand why people who explicitly subscribe to the premise of white supremacy believe that they are losing the culture war and need to fight back.
It’s only been five years since Coco came out. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released in 1937, so that’s 85 years of white princesses. It’s exciting to think about what a potential difference that wide-spread releases of films representing diverse cultures in a way that is not completely whitewashed could have for kids growing up now, even if it is long overdue.
Disney isn’t making these films to win brownie points though. Clearly consumer desire for these stories has made it profitable for them, and it’s probably worth celebrating the fact that a diverse set of audiences believe that these stories are important and relevant for them.
The day before we watch this film, I randomly listened to the Top 100 World Charts on Apple Music and this song was in the top ten:
Ozark Season 4 (Part 1)
I spent a lot of my life living in relationship to the Ozark Mountains that give this show its name. The etymology of the name remains ambiguous. We know that it comes from the phrase “aux arcs", but there seems to be some disagreement as to what, exactly, that phrase means. One interpretation on Wikipedia is that “aux arcs is an abbreviation of aux arcs-en-ciel, French for ‘toward the rainbows.’” Wendy and Marty are forever chasing rainbows but end up juggling more and more knives.
I’ve watched a lot of shows about money, power, and corruption recently, and I know that I’m not alone. Sometimes I am baffled by how people can watch House of Cards (not one of the shows that I’ve watched), Succession, Ozark, etc. and then turn around and be baffled by the Q phenomenon.
Interesting and Appropriate Developments in This Season
The FBI is more interested in having an informant who can help them seize cash from the cartels than to actually stop the flow of drugs into the United States… which is a totally rational move given that the latter is probably an unachievable goal.
An opioid magnate makes a generous donation to a foundation in order to facilitate the flow of cartel heroin into their possession with a clean paper trail. I’ve always wondered if there was a connection between Afghanistan and the opioid epidemic.
Wendy appears to be having a Lady MacBeth moment as a result of killing her own brother who was on the verge of betraying them.
The Steal (Matt Bowden + Matthew Teague)
The Steal by Mark Bowden + Matthew Teague
In-depth reporting on very specific stories of local players during the interregnum. These are all stories of Republicans, both those who want to “Stop the Steal” who are portrayed, unfortunately, as one-dimensional lunatic; this probably sells more books because the target audience here would prefer to think of them as lunatics than closely examine their lives. More on this when I write about Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America.
All that being said, I found it to be an interesting look at how people in key decision-making positions in each swing state (Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia) responded to the pressures of Trump and his loyalists.
If you wanted a reason to worry about who is running for local government positions that monitor or otherwise administer elections, then this would not be a bad thing to read.
And if you live in a swing state, please run for these positions or help someone who is already doing so that does not believe the Big Lie.
Anti-Social (Andrew Marantz)
Anti-Social by Andrew Marantz
When this book first came out back in 2019, I remember immediately putting a hold on the library for it. I heard several interviews with Andrew and read several reviews of the book. Before I got to it though, I had one of my periodic fallings-out with a given subject matter (aka Big Tech) and decisions that I needed to diversify my intake.
I was correct in my assumption at that time that this book wouldn’t have anything new to say about Big Tech (it doesn’t and the section where he talks about tech is by far the least interesting section).
What’s amazing about this book is all the scenes in which he interviews, hangs out with, or talks to the families of some of notable figures that constitute parts of the “alt right”, including Mike Cenovich.
What I found myself continually thinking is how easy it would have been for me to have become a story from this book myself. Many of the figures begin on the postmodern counterculture left (reading Adbusters, joining Bernie-mania, etc.), and this book echos Angela Nagel’s ideas about the ways in which the alt-right is a continuation of parts of the 60’s counterculture that people like myself grew up absorbing.
I participated in a lot of early internet troll culture myself since I spent a lot of time in on-line chatrooms and forums which were generally ruled by it during the period between 1998-2011 when I was active in those spaces.
I found it particularly useful though to understand how that culture has been weaponized to push cultural discourse, using “humor” as a way to normalize things that would otherwise be unacceptable to even bring up. I’ve certainly been disturbed by the way I’ve witnessed people wishing death upon each other throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and what that could mean for the future.
King Richard
Every Friday is “Movie Night” in our household, and last Friday at my partner, Jen’s, suggestion we watched King Richard. I can certainly recommend that anyone who has a burgeoning young athlete (as we do) in the house check it out.
The film is generally everything you would expect from a biopic about Venus and Serena Williams starring Will Smith. What’s probably the most intriguing about their story is that he pulls them completely out of the limelight and from any competition for a number of years just as they’re starting to attract attention in the Tennis world, basically to avoid the burn out and destructiveness that fame can have on young people who aren’t prepared for it and what it brings.
The film also pinnacles with Venus Williams losing a match and having to remember how amazing that she was even able to hold her own at all in the match considering she was in her first pro tournament and playing against the number one ranked player in the world.
I did some ratings before, but I think that I won’t do them anymore.
Transient Kingdom (Yaa Gyasi)
A child of Ghanaian immigrants struggles with her faith in the light of her brother’s heroin overdose and her mother’s subsequent depression and withdrawal from the world.
(Listened to as an Audiobook)
A child of Ghanaian immigrants struggles with her faith in the light of her brother’s heroin overdose and her mother’s subsequent depression and withdrawal from the world.
Giftý (the protagonist) works as a neuroscientist studying addiction or (as she refers to it) reward seeking behavior, and the novel is narrated from her perspective in the presence with flashbacks to the past including journal entries that she wrote to God at a young age.
The faith vs. science question comes up a lot, primarily through Giftý’s internal narrative combined with somewhat stilted conversations that as time progresses, she increasingly avoids.
I don’t know that the book had anything to tell me that was news to me, but it was skillfully written and enjoyable to listen to. I’m not sure if I would have finished it as a book or not but listening to a novel is a different experience as my attention sometimes waivers in and out of the narrative (although certainly I have encountered audiobooks where this happens less).
I will also say that the narrator was the same as the narrator for Miss Metropolitan (a superior novel that I listened to previously) which has me starting to wonder if this narrator reads the majority of novels by black women authors who don’t read their own work?
Rating: 🫀🧠🧠🫀🐭🐭
How to Be Drawn (Terrance Hayes)
After I got about halfway through this book of poems, I bought two of Terrance Hayes’ books (including one that I had previously read during a sonnet-craze a few years back, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin) and put a hold on the rest at the library, so there will be more Terrance to come in this space.
After I got about halfway through this book of poems, I bought two of Terrance Hayes’ books (including one that I had previously read during a sonnet-craze a few years back, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin) and put a hold on the rest at the library, so there will be more Terrance to come in this space.
Some unusual forms poems take in this book:
A logic problem.
Five lines in response to each chapter of an 1871 book on the “Right Development of the Moral and Mental Capacities [..] of the Juvenile Mind.”
A crime report.
Instructions for a Seance with Vladmirs
Some Maps to Indicate Pittsburgh
…but much of the book is traditional free verse that occasionally laps into something that is a type of form, including frequent repetition of words like:
Othello. (Was Othello a Negro?) Don’t you lie
about who you are sometimes and then realize
the lie is true? You are blind to your power, Brother
Bastard, like the king who wanders his kingdom
searching for the king. And that’s okay.
No one will tell you you are king.
No one really wants a king anyway.
There’s something also about the line breaks, the momentum and movement of them that speaks to me, and I want to learn from. More on that perhaps when I finish the next book.
Rating: 📢📢📢📢📢📢
DMZ Colony (Don Mee Choi)
DMZ Colony alternately straddles and zig-zags across the line between lyric, journalism, translation, found poetry, and concrete poetry.
I’ve been consistently surprised by how formally experimental some of the recent National Book Award winners have been in the poetry category, including this book.
DMZ Colony alternately straddles and zig-zags across the line between lyric, journalism, translation, found poetry, and concrete poetry. The name pretty well conveys the subject matter, but it’s worth mentioning that this book addresses the brutality of both North and South Korea with an eye particularly on the post war period.
The lack of clarity between what is direct accounts given poetic treatment and the imagination of the author taking off from interviews/found documents is unclear, which IMO, gives this book a lot of its force.
I put a hold on Don Mee Choi’s The Morning News is Exciting at the library, so more to come on her work.
Rating: 🔥🌟☄️🌟☄️🌟🔥