Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This book was recommended by one of my kids. Since I do try to read stuff they like, I gave this one a shot, despite the fact that it is not a genre that I read. 

 

Specifically, this book is a YA romance. And also historical fiction. I should add that it is a lesbian romance involving a Chinese-American girl, and set in 1950s San Francisco, during the height of the Red Scare - and the Lavender Scare. 

 

Actually, though, I found myself enjoying the book. Sure, it’s high school, so big emotions and not always the most subtle writing. But it did have well-researched cultural details, some historical characters, and the author’s own family history as inspiration. I would rate it as better than average. 

 

The author clearly did her research about everything from the deportation of one of the Chinese-American founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to the gay nightlife of San Francisco in the 1950s. 

 

The story is about Lily Hu, 17 year old high school senior, with aspirations to join JPL and design rockets. No, this isn’t unrealistic: women were involved with JPL from the start, and were the original computer programmers. In the notes at the end, the author gives the historical background for the various elements of the book. 

 

Lily falls in love with a white girl, Kath, who goes with her to the Telegraph Club, a fictional lesbian bar patterned after historical gay bars of the time. 

 

This leads to a series of events, from Lily’s falling-out with her longtime friend Shirley (who is, in the way of high school queen bees, a bit possessive) to her outing to her traditional family. 

 

I kind of hesitate to give more of the plot than that, because it’s that kind of a book: you want to read it to find out what happens. 

 

There are a plethora of fascinating characters. The high school kids don’t fit easy stereotypes, and all seem normally insecure and struggling to figure out who they are and what they want their futures to be. 

 

There are a number of members of the local lesbian community, from male impersonator Tommy Andrews (based on a real-life person), to other young women who gravitate toward the safe spaces in a hostile culture. The impersonation thing was apparently popular for a while - and was done by heterosexual people as well, before it eventually became associated with LGBTQ culture. 

 

The adults in Lily’s family aren’t great, I will admit, but they also aren’t villains or caricatures. They are all-too-typical traditional parents who don’t want to admit they have a “deviant” child. Kind of like my own parents, unfortunately. The aunt, while she doesn’t really understand, does appear to be more helpful. 

 

The book also weaves in the line that Chinese-Americans had to walk in that difficult era. The first race-based immigration restriction was the Chinese Exclusion Act. Then, during World War Two, the Chinese were our allies. But after the communists won the civil war, Chinese-Americans were viewed with suspicion. In fact, the co-founder of JPL was deported, then became the “father of Chinese rocketry.” It’s a sad and sordid history.

 

Within the book, the casual racism, even within the LGBTQ community, is explored in what I thought was a thoughtful way. Again, people are complicated, and have blind spots. 

 

I also enjoyed the various places in San Francisco. I recently got to see the ruins of the Sutro Baths and read about that history. At the time the book was set, these were in decline, but not gone. The author captured a certain feel of the city and the time setting quite well. 

 

The book also deserves credit for avoiding anachronisms. All too often, particularly in YA literature, modern terms, modern ways of thinking, and modern perspectives are imported into older times, making the characters feel unrealistic. 

 

Not so in this book. Lo carefully uses the phrases, the ideas, the internal drama, that actually work for the 1950s. Again, she spent time reading writings from the LGBTQ community of the time, which really helped with her feel. It was totally believable that a traditionally raised Chinese-American girl would struggle with her sexuality and find herself drawn to an underground community the way the book describes it. 

 

In this sense, too, the book is a reminder that LGBTQ people have always existed, in every time, place, and culture. In some of those, they were able to live as themselves without persecution, in others, not so much. 

 

There is a bit of relatively minor (and again, realistic) sex in the book, that feels very much like the kind of tentative exploration kids of that age would do. The buildup is also very realistic, very sweet, and wholesome - almost naive in the way so many of us were at that age.

 

There are some minor weaknesses to the book, at least for me. These are common to YA literature in general, of course. Some of the emotional stuff was a bit simplistic. I’m not really into the high school drama stuff, so a few parts felt like they lagged. But I am going to put these down to me, not any actual flaw to the book. Looking back, it really is well written for the genre. 

 

I want to mention one particular line, just because of its personal connection to me. Lily has fled from her home, and ended up with Lana, Tommy’s partner. 

 

Ultimately, there is the problem of what the way forward will be with Lily’s parents. Lana has an insight that I think is excellent. 

 

“She’s having a hard time right now because you’re not what she expected. But we’re never what our parents expected. They have to learn that lesson.”

 

That is the crux of things. And yes, I can honestly say that my kids aren’t what I expected too. The question for all of us parents is what we do with that fact. Will we learn the lesson, and love our children for who they are, not what we imagined they would be? 

 

Or, like my parents chose to do with me (and my wife and kids), keep trying to “fix” the “defective” child? 

 

The book ends without a real resolution to this issue - it is about a specific time in Lily’s life, not her entire story. We have to guess at whether Lily and her parents will come to an understanding or not. There is a hint that her father might be open to it, but it is less clear about her mother. 

 

I wasn’t able to find much online about the author’s own experiences, other than what she shares in the book. Her grandmother was white, and her grandparents got stuck in China for decades after the communist revolution. She was born in China, but came to the US as a child. 

 

Malinda wasn’t her given name, but one she personally chose as a child after she found Americans couldn’t pronounce her Chinese name. 

 

She is lesbian, married to a woman, but nothing I have been able to find indicates whether her parents or other relatives are accepting of her - she talks a lot more about their insistence she get a “real job” rather than write than about her sexuality. I know that for most LGBTQ people, even now, family tends to be complicated. My hope is for my own kids that they know they are accepted and embraced for who they are, not who I imagined they would be. 

 

One final thought: this book is top five for challenged and banned books in school, so if you like to seek out the books that the bigots hate, this is a great choice. 

 

Oh, and Lo has an interesting blog, which you might check out as well. 

Tilt by Emma Pattee

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This book was our selection for this month for the Literary Lush Book Club. While ordinarily, I like discovering books I would not otherwise have read, I will say that I hated this book, for reasons this post will make clear. 

Tilt is a book about two things. First, the narrative story, which is that of a large earthquake near Portland, which strands the very pregnant protagonist in an IKEA, and her subsequent wanderings in the day after the event. The other thing, which is what I think the author really wanted the book to be about, was her ambivalence about pregnancy, motherhood, and the father of the child. 

 

Which, okay, I guess. If that were it, I would just have said, “this isn’t my kind of book,” and moved on. I have read a number of books like that, which didn’t do it for me, but for which I can just admit that, like, say, Brittany Spears, I just don’t find interesting. 

 

But this book wasn’t merely not my thing, it was genuinely problematic in a very real and a very moral way. It commits (in my opinion) the serious literary crime of portraying humans as acting in ways that humans do not in fact act. But more troublingly, the author chose to indulge in lazy stereotypes that, despite not actually saying it out loud, constitute racist and classist dog whistles. This then contributes to certain phobias and fantasies that middle class white people tend to have about minorities and impoverished people: that they are “animals” just waiting for a disaster to rip the veneer of civilization off, and then they will loot and steal and mug and do violence just for shits and giggles. 

 

Which is literally not what humans do - including poor people and people of color.

 

I find this particularly offensive because I have literally lived through a significant earthquake (the Whittier Narrows quake) while living in a primarily minority, working class neighborhood. So I have seen first hand how people respond. And it isn’t at all what this book portrays. 

 

But why listen to me? Maybe take the time to read Rebecca Solnit’s excellent and well researched book on disasters, A Paradise Built in Hell. 

 

The bottom line is that there are two competing phenomena during disasters:

 

Most humans pull together during disasters, creating mutual communities of aid. In fact, ordinary people tend to do better than organizations at rescuing people, feeding people, and otherwise getting stuff done. 

 

This is my experience as well. And it is well documented. But so also is the other one:

 

Along with this cooperation tends to come what Solnit calls “elite panic.” That is, those who benefit from the status quo feel threatened by their loss of power and privilege, and tend to do really horrible things. 

 

To quote Solnit here:

 

“[F]ear of social disorder; fear of poor, minorities, and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; willingness to resort to deadly force; and actions taken on the basis of rumor.”  

 

And that is exactly what this fucking book does: it blithers on and pushes the narrative of elite panic: the fear of social disorder, fear of the poor, fear of minorities, obsession with looting and property crime, a bizarrely violent scene that not only makes no sense but feels like a fantasy come to life. 

 

Now, to be clear, the author quite obviously tries to avoid looking racist and classist. Few characters are even described at all - we have no idea what anyone looks like. She creates “plausible deniability" by never saying the looters and the teenaged gang members are minorities or poor. 

 

Instead, she just lets the dog whistle work. Clearly nobody is envisioning white collar white people looting televisions. Clearly nobody is envisioning the teenagers as preppies. We all know what she is talking about because it is already culturally engrained. 

 

And, for those of us who have visited Portland (which is the whitest large city in the US for historical reasons) and can thus picture where the protagonist is wandering (there is a map in the book too if you need), it is obvious that she is walking through parts of the city that suffer from poverty and the lingering effects of segregation and redlining. No seriously, go check out the book’s map and compare it to the historical redlining map for Portland. 

 

This book is a master class on how to say “scary black people” without actually saying it. 

 

I personally believe that authors, editors, and publishers have moral duties to society and to the more vulnerable members of that society. 

 

The crux of this is to avoid doing harm. Whenever an author indulges in harmful stereotypes, it harms those who belong to those stereotyped groups. This is well known and generally understood. 

 

For example, if a writer were to openly write female characters as incompetent, unintelligent, and needing male supervision, it would be quickly flagged as inappropriate. Likewise, if open “lazy negro” tropes, or “slant-eyed orientals,” or “poor people are stupid” or other equally lazy and harmful social prejudices were to be used, I believe they would have been flagged and removed. 

 

The author gets away with it in this case because she avoids open identification of groups, and relies on stereotypes which have unfortunately become part of our cultural background. 

 

That doesn’t make this okay, in any way. In fact, it is more insidious, because it feeds prejudices that are not always acknowledged - or admitted. 

 

In this case, by feeding the stereotypes that poor people - particularly people of color - will go feral and loot during disasters, the author perpetuates our racist and classist botched responses to disasters, causing significant human suffering for the most vulnerable in our society.

 

So, for me, this book isn’t merely bad literature, but it is bad morality, and as such, I do not recommend bothering with this book. 

 

That said, let me get into things a bit more. 

 

Even without the dog whistles, I have a lot of issues with the book. As I noted, very few people in this book behave in a recognizably human manner. Honestly, the poor IKEA worker, the young woman, is the one person that made sense to me. My wife noted that in real life, she could well have been Black. It turns out eventually that she isn’t, but a retail job, young child, etc., well…at minimum, she is the kind of low income, working class person that would plausibly be helpful in a disaster.

 

Here is the thing: normal humans act in predictable ways in a disaster like this. 

 

We first check to see if we are intact, or at least intact enough. We get ourselves free of encumbrances, stop bleeding if we can. After we take care of ourselves, we work to help others around us, make sure others are okay and help them if not. If we are home, we start with others in the household, then check our neighbors.

 

The IKEA worker does exactly that. 

 

We would typically next check things we were taught, like looking for gas leaks or other unsafe conditions, help rescue those around us if needed.

 

Once the triage is complete, and only then, would we move location. And, if we move, it would be typically to go home. 

 

In fact, as someone who lives in earthquake country, most of us have had this discussion. If safe, go home and meet there. If not, then plant your butt and wait where you are. In no case should one wander around. 

 

The protagonist (and probably by extension, the author) are the kinds of people that us rational and prepared sorts would have to force to behave rationally and not hurt themselves. Seriously. Gah. 

 

Again, here the IKEA worker is the lone normal person. She solves the immediate issues around her, then goes to get her kid. 

 

Here, though, we have yet another unrealistic scene. By this time, several hours after the quake, we have people wandering around. In real life, there would have been a rescue of any possible survivors. To the extent possible and necessary, that building would have been pulled apart brick by brick to get at any survivors. No need for one woman - the sole rational human in the book - to do a solo rescue. 

 

In contrast to a rational, normal person, the protagonist first goes to her husband’s place of work. Why? Surely he would have gone home, not stayed there. 

 

My guess is that she did so because the plot required that the protagonist find out her husband lied to her, so we needed a scene. That’s bad writing. No plot should require the characters to act irrationally. 

 

And then, after that, she goes wandering off again. Presumably, if her husband were alive (and he probably isn’t), he would go home. So she should have just gone home. (Again, who raised the author? Did her parents not have a disaster plan at all?)

 

But no, we have a 9 months pregnant woman wandering all over the city. 

 

And that then leads to the weird ending, with a feral birth scene, and god only knows what all the author intended to convey. I mean, I am trying to imagine any pregnant woman I have known who would decide - while in labor - to abandon the shelter of an intact house, which probably has food and supplies of some sort that could be of use - and ends up giving birth in a park instead. 

 

It was this scene, I think, that convinced me that the whole book was really about the protagonist’s ambivalence about pregnancy, motherhood, and her partner, and all the rest was just scenery for that inner drama. 

 

Which, not my thing. And it certainly didn’t require promoting all that elite panic along the way. 

 

Oh, and I have to also mention one more bizarre and unrealistic thing before I forget:

 

Within hours of the earthquake, the military is on scene. Now, there is a military base nearby, so yeah, maybe they go out there with the cops and first responders. 

 

But somehow, they have parked two tanks blocking a bridge. 

 

What the fuck? 

 

Why would they bring tanks out? There is no invasion to stop, and presumably they don’t intend to just open fire on their own civilians. 

 

There are two actually plausible scenarios. 

 

The bad one is that the military did what it did after Katrina, and go out with weapons to “stop the looting” because scary black people, etc. But not with tanks! They are expensive to run, and don’t do well on already damaged roads. Instead, they would be in their regular vehicles for transporting people. 

 

The better case, though, is that the military is actually pretty damn good at the logistics of getting food and water to people. And in Portland, it is entirely likely that that is what would have happened. 

 

Likewise, I am not ready to throw the Portland police department under the bus here, and assume that they would be unwilling to help with the rescues along with the fire department - which definitely would be working on helping.

 

But even if there was the desire, how the hell do you teleport a couple of tanks? The roads are damaged, and regular vehicles are having issues - in practice, this would mean roads blocked by immobile vehicles, which is actually a nightmare for tanks. They just aren’t good at urban warfare, let alone urban rescue. 

 

Seriously, what editor let that scene stay in? This is bad writing and bad editing. 

 

So what would an actually realistic book have looked like? 

 

Well, maybe we could have learned about the rescue efforts at the IKEA. We also know the protagonist’s arm was hurt - but that seems to go away in the second half of the book? In any case, that would have been part of the triage - is she okay? 

 

Then, after the dust settled, a normal person would have noticed her pregnancy, and asked about how she would get home. Or about temporary shelter from the heat until then. Because that’s what normal humans do. 

 

Perhaps she would have just walked home, waited for her husband or news about him. 

 

When she went into labor (which maybe doesn’t happen if she doesn’t panic-walk around the city), she might have sought assistance from a neighbor. Does she even know any of them? I mean, there are probably nurses or assistants living in her building, statistically speaking. 

 

Even someone like me might have been some help - I have been present at the births of my five kids, am married to a nurse, and pay attention. I would have known the basics: assuming no dire emergency issue, make sure baby is breathing, give baby skin-to-skin contact with mom to keep warm, no hurry on the cord cutting, get mom some food and water. 

 

Eventually, we might have learned something interesting, like whether her husband is alive or not. And the name of the baby. 

 

Instead, we got this mess of a book, which feels like an uncomfortable exploration of the protagonist’s fears, dysfunctions, and bigotries, at the expense of any sense of human realism, with a big dose of dog whistles, and an annoying degree of navel gazing. 

 

Save yourself the time, and read a better book instead. I strongly recommend A Paradise Built in Hell - it has a chapter on the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which is truly eye-opening as to how humans actually function - and also one on hurricane Katrina, which illustrates the human suffering caused by the kind of delusional bigotry the author puts on display in Tilt.

 

My advice to the author would be that perhaps she needs to actually spend some time with people outside her white collar white people world. Maybe hang out in a working class minority neighborhood, where mutuality is far more common than in her own world. It might help her write realistic humans next time. 

 

***

 

“But what about the LA Riots???”

 

I am tempted to snark here about the difference between a natural disaster and a human-caused disaster - in this case a gross miscarriage of justice. But the thing is, natural disasters often become human-caused disasters. So the line is blurry.

 

What I will say is that if you cannot tell the difference between an earthquake and systemic police brutality, you might need to educate yourself. If you cannot tell the difference between a hurricane and the systemic injustice of poverty, de facto segregation, and racialized government response that followed, well, again, you need to educate yourself. 

 

I lived through the LA Riots, by the way. You can read about that in my long footnote to this post. They were scary, to be sure, as a white person. Too many, though, seem to have taken the wrong lessons from the experience, even people like the author, who I would suspect from other elements in the book considers herself a good liberal. 

The Robber Bridegroom by Eudora Welty

Source of book: I own this

 

I am a part of a group of three (mostly online) friends who read books together. This is the most recent choice. 

 

I suggested reading something by Eudora Welty, because neither of my friends had. We ended up picking this one because it sounded interesting and because I hadn’t read it. 

In retrospect, this is such a different book from any of the other Welty books I have read that I think it may have given the wrong impression.

 

The Robber Bridegroom is based loosely on a Grimm story, with the setting changed to the deep South of a couple centuries ago. It incorporates elements from other fairy tales - the darker ones - so those familiar with Grimm and Andersen and others will undoubtedly find plenty that is familiar. There is also a definite reference to the Cupid and Psyche myth - something another member noted. 

 

This is, notably, quite different from Welty’s usual fare, which is contemporary Southern realism. (See my list at the end of this post.) 

 

Also different, in my view, is that this story seems to use a lot more stereotypes of African Americans and Native Americans than her other works. As one of our other members pointed out, these characters seem to fill the role of dwarves or fairies or other mythical beings in the story. I also noticed that at least the black stereotypes come from the characters themselves - we only get the white perspective.

 

Welty takes the fairy tale inspiration, and combines it with the “tall tale” tradition which is a notable American contribution to folk stories. Think Paul Bunyan and the various creations of Mark Twain and Bret Harte and others. This melding of genres actually works really well, in my opinion. 

 

Another thing Welty does is borrow a few historical figures for characters. Mike Fink was a legendary riverboat pilot, who, like many historical Americans such as Daniel Boone, became as much a legend as a real person. Little Harp also was a real person, and was as nasty as he is in the story. 

 

Given the source material, it is inevitable that a story like this have some uncomfortable elements. As in the Cupid and Psyche story, rape culture is taken for granted. A man or a god “ravishes” an innocent maiden, who later falls in love with him - and that is plenty icky. And yet, the story continues to fascinate us for many reasons, and every retelling - including the wonderful C. S. Lewis version - finds a different and fresh take.

 

In this book, the moral universe is…complicated. Are there any heroes? We take for granted that Jamie Lockhart, the robber bridegroom, is a hero because he saves Rosamund from her abusive stepmother and neglectful father, despite his rape and general dishonesty. 

 

We forgive Clement for his neglectful parenting because he claims to love his daughter. We condemn Salome for being a cruel stepmother. 

 

And yet, none of these really fits an obvious definition of good or evil if you think closely. Even Salome has been saddled with a child that isn’t hers, who her husband favors over her. And she knows she is unattractive and was married for reasons that had nothing to do with love. 

 

This is the thing with fairy tales, though: if you start thinking more deeply, the surface meaning is rarely the only point. 

 

Overall, an interesting story, but one flawed by the stereotypes. It is definitely worth reading, but not particularly representative of Welty’s usual writing. 

 

I did note one line that was memorable. Goat, a feeble-minded young man who works for Salome with the hope of helping get his sisters married off somehow, is put to work spying on Rosamond. He sees the bandit (Jamie in disguise) force Rosamond to remove her clothing, then ride off with them. 

 

But at the final point, seeing Rosamond separated from her clothes, he had had to make his mind up which to follow, and he had decided upon the clothes. It was evident that the clothes had cost money, and Rosamond had not, and he was influenced by the bandit’s choice in the matter as well. 

 

Now that is classic Welty snark. 

 

For those who haven’t discovered Welty, or want to read more, here are the other books I have written about:

 

A Curtain of Green (short story collection)

The Wide Net (short story collection)

The Optimist’s Daughter (Pulitzer Prize-winning novel)

Authority by Andrea Long Chu

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I saw this book on display at City Lights in San Francisco on a recent trip there, and, while I decided to get a few other books that were harder to find anywhere else, I did make a note of this one, and borrowed it from my library when I got back. 

 

First, this book is not to be confused with another book of the same name, the middle book of the Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer. (That series is good, by the way.)

 

Rather than really strange science fiction, this book is non-fiction, a collection of essays by the author, many previously published in various magazines. 

Chu is a critic. Not specifically a literary critic or television critic or movie critic, but perhaps a bit of all of the above. And she takes the job every bit as seriously as the great critics of the past. 

 

The central essay, which the title is drawn from, explores the question of authority. How does the critic become an authority? Where does that authority come from? And what is the point of that authority? 

 

The other essays are quite a mix. There are personal ones, about topics that she cares about, or herself. There are essays about books and movies and music and people and so on. 

 

Some of these were quite fascinating to me: the one on Phantom of the Opera by itself was worth the time spent reading the book. Others were a bit foreign, being about media that I had not experienced and probably wouldn’t find that interesting. The cultural ones were superb, in my opinion. And actually, it’s all good, compelling writing, even when about topics that didn’t particularly interest me. 

 

Chu is a transgender woman, and what she describes as a “mixed Asian” - an admittedly imperfect term for the child of an Asian-American and a white American. As a particular essay (on mixed Asian literature) notes, this is in a significant way, a culture of its own, with unique challenges given the nuances of American racial castes and the strength of Asian culture even within America. 

 

She pulls no punches, by the way. She is not out there to make either fascist right wingers or weak-livered liberals feel good. Human rights are not debatable, and one of the main points she keeps returning to is that critics need to make moral and political judgments if they wish to have any credibility. This idea that art is separate from politics is a fantasy - and I wholeheartedly agree with that assessment. 

 

With that, I will dive into my favorite passages and lines. 

 

In the opening essay (new for the book), “Criticism in a Crisis,” Chu notes the bizarre time in which we find ourselves, when the state of Israel, run by a corrupt war criminal, and engaged in an obvious genocide, seems to be specially protected from criticism by those who should know better. She calls out the offenders by name, as well as those who found themselves disinvited for stating the obvious. 

 

So there I was, trying to think about this fabled crisis in criticism, when a set of real-world crises - concerning the rights of nations and the claims of the soul - became impossible to ignore. I hope the war on Gaza will have done for my generation of writers what the Vietnam War did for earlier generations: that is, it will have shot a beam of moral clarity through a complacent intelligentsia. For what a war like this asks the left-wing critic to do is to distinguish between a political crisis with clear actors and material stakes, on the one hand, and the self-aggrandizing existential crisis that criticism is always going through, on the other. 

 

To prove her case that this existential crisis in criticism is perennial, she first gives a whole series of quotes that sound like they were written yesterday. And then gives the attributions, which date back to Samuel Johnson in the 18th Century and span the entire time through the present. Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot, among many others, are sources. 

 

I do care a lot about this, in no small part because some of what I do on this blog is criticism. Not all of it. And I don’t intend all of it to be that. But I do take what I do seriously, and imagine that I have something to contribute to the culture. 

 

The author points out that the real problem facing criticism isn’t some supposed lack of authority (that never really existed anyway), but a more mundane one. 

 

It is true that of the criticism being published today, a little is excellent, a little more is adequate, and the lion’s share is a dog’s breakfast. But bad criticism is bad not because it has been deflowered by political ideology but for all the typical reasons that writing is bad: it is poorly paid, hastily edited, and written mostly by freelancers with so little in the way of financial security, development opportunities, or access to good health care that they may go their entire careers without finding out whether or not they are genuinely untalented. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the advice lobbed their way - that the critic should write with wit, have a sense of tradition, strive to be truthful but prepare to be wrong - is basically identical to the stock advice doled out to all writers. Whatever one makes of it, I see little point in rehearsing it. Here is some better advice: pay people. 

 

Next, she addresses this idea that politics (and thus morality) has no place in criticism. 

 

When I say that the critic must have values, I mean this in both senses of the phrase: the critic cannot help but have moral and political beliefs, and therefore he must give serious thought to what he actually believes. Anyone who claims to have no horse in the great derby of American political life is either lying or misinformed about himself; either way, the public has a right to know which horse is his. 

 

I hope that my readers have no doubt about which horse is mine in the context of American politics. 

 

As I mentioned, many of the things mentioned in these essays are not things I have read or are familiar with. Chu is a millennial, and a younger one. (Born 1992) She also came of age in a different subculture than I did - at once more literary and less fundamentalist - and her subsequent experience as a transgender person of color is certainly different than my cishet white Evangelical experience. 

 

The first essay is all about the books of Hanya Yanagihara, who I had never heard of, and, after this essay, have zero desire to read. Definitely not my vibe. 

 

However, there is a line so excellent in this essay, that it crystalized a complaint my wife and I have had about a certain genre of modern literary fiction that we had called “trauma fiction.” 

 

Chu calls this the “trauma plot” - “fiction that uses a traumatic backstory as a shortcut to narrative.”

 

Hell yes. Exactly. Who needs a good narrative? Who needs nuanced characters? Just traumatize the hell out of everyone instead! 

 

Later in the essay, she describes the way the author keeps a character alive for 800 pages before killing him: “This is not sadism; it is Munchausen by proxy.” 

 

Damn, that’s a great way to put it. 

 

I mentioned how much I loved “The Opera Ghost.” I both like Phantom for its music while acknowledging its rather inane plot. And Chu explores why that is, from Lloyd Webber’s determination to return musical supremacy over plot to the opera genre (see: Cosi Fan Tutti) to the way blockbuster musicals are marketed. 

 

Thus, the essay covers a tremendous amount of ground, from classical opera to Rodgers and Hammerstein, to Sondheim, to the present. It’s just fantastic. (Also great is the Terry Pratchett spoof of Phantom that I read on the same trip as this book.) 

 

One of the best passages is about Richard Rodgers, who had two great collaborations: first with Lorenz Hart, then with Oscar Hammerstein II. 

 

In his earlier partnership with lyricist Lorenz Hart, Rodgers had written the melodies first, crafting sparkling tunes for forgettable plays, whereas with Hammerstein, the words had come first, requiring a more mature Rodgers to compose music with a clear dramatic purpose in mind. The former duo produced classic songs; only the latter produced classic musicals.

 

To be clear, I love a lot of Rodgers and Hart songs. But nobody does their musicals anymore. 

 

There are a number of essays that talk about the experience of being a transgender woman, and a lesbian woman. I thought these were fascinating both because of the thoughtful discussion and the great stories of Chu in her youth, when she was seen as an effeminate boy. “On Liking Woman” talks about everything from TERFs to the classic man-hating political-lesbian manifesto by Valerie Solanas. (I haven’t read it yet, but unlike Andrea Dworkin, Solanas genuinely hated men - that’s the real “man-hating feminist” OG.)

 

Anyway, my favorite part is her discussion of the fact that desire and love cannot be forced into political boxes. 

 

Political lesbianism is founded on the belief that even desire becomes pliable at high enough temperatures. For Jeffreys and her comrades, lesbianism was not an innate identity, but an act of political will. This was a world in which biology was not destiny, a world where being a lesbian was about what got you woke, not wet.

…

That trans lesbians should be pedestaled as some kind of feminist vanguard is a notion as untenable as it is attractive. In defending it, I would be neglecting what I take to be the true lesson of political lesbianism as a failed project: that nothing good comes of forcing desire to conform to political principle. You could sooner give a cat a bath. 

 

I will say, I found the various essays on TV shows and television generally to be fun and often amusing. 

 

In “Bad TV,” there is a snarky bit about how the popularity of television took off in the 50s and 60s.

 

By the midsixties, Herbert Marcuse was suggesting that the masses would rather chance nuclear annihilation than be deprived of television. 

 

I watch very little TV, so I never got this vibe, but clearly my grandparents’ generation was like this, with the TV constantly on. 

 

Another part of this essay looks at the near-universal horribleness of men in showbusiness, particularly on television. 

 

It’s a twist we should have seen from miles away. It turns out that the men on TV act like the men on TV.

 

“China Brain” is mostly about the author’s attempts to cure a depressive episode using TMS. It is told in a weird third-person manner, but is also pretty funny. Chu has a great sense of humor about it. 

 

I won’t get into all of it, but the description of the Chinese Room thought experiment is so spot-on when it comes to the myth (and deceptive marketing) of “Artificial Intelligence” - something that may be artificial but is certainly not intelligence, and will never be in its current form as a predictive text machine. 

 

Another essay that I thought was fantastic was “Psycho Analysis,” which is all about dickwad author Brett Easton Ellis. And no, I haven’t read American Psycho, and have zero interest in doing so. 

 

But god Ellis is due for a takedown, and the more brutal the better. He seems to embody the worst of white male boomerhood, toxic masculinity, and rape culture all in one. And his self-absorbed memoir, White sounds like a steaming pile of shit. 

 

For years now, Bret Easton Ellis has been accused of being a racist and a misogynist, and these things are true; but like most things that are true of Bret Easton Ellis, they are also very boring.

The thesis of White is that American culture has entered a period of steep, perhaps irreversible decline, and social media and millennials are to blame. This is ridiculous, not because social media hasn’t changed things tremendously, but because such claims are invariably rooted in a childish nostalgia for an uncomplicated mode of human communication that has never, in fact, existed. One supposes that the last freethinking men of ancient Sumer, lamenting that cuneiform had ruined their political discourse, must have longed for the good old days of throwing rocks at each other’s heads.

 

And yes, this is exactly how I feel about white Boomer nostalgia for something that never existed - they just didn’t have to look outside their own navels and see how other people experienced life, because they were (and to some degree still are) cocooned in their own privilege. 

 

Oh, and don’t think only men get their comeuppance in this book. Joey Soloway also gets an epic takedown. How about this as an opening? 

 

As a lightweight behind-the-scenes look at a critically acclaimed television series, Joey Soloway’s new memoir, She Wants It: Desire, Power and Toppling the Patriarchy is just south of worth purchasing at the airport.

 

Ouch.

 

As a book about desire, power, or toppling the patriarchy, it is incompetent, defensive, and astonishingly clueless.

 

Ah, this seems promising.

 

It is an unwitting portrait of a rich Los Angeles creative type with a child’s knack for exploiting the sympathies of others, a person whose deep fear of doing the wrong thing was regularly outmatched by an even deeper distaste for doing the right thing. The nicest thing that can be said of this oblivious, self-absorbed, unimportant book is that it proves, once and for all, that trans people are fully, regrettably human.

 

Yeah, that’s just the start… Another gem:

 

If the circumstances of their shiny new gender are, shall we say, suspect - the cisgender creator of a television show about trans issues, long criticized for presuming to speak for trans people, comes out as trans themselves - all we need remember is that being trans because you want the attention doesn’t make you “not really” trans; it just makes you annoying. 

 

The essay, “Authority,” is placed in the middle of the book, perhaps an indication of its centrality to the collection. And it really is a doozy - one of the best things on criticism I have ever read, honestly. It covers centuries of history, philosophy, and literature. I can’t even summarize it, but there are some lines…

 

We may also ask the critic for charisma, for sophistication, for a fine way with words, and above all for the ability to make art intelligible while preserving its integrity. She must be able to turn the meaning of a whole Hitchcock picture into a tiny reel of microfilm that we may slip furtively into our pockets. At the same time, we are not content to let the critic offer her mere opinion, since we are perfectly capable of those ourselves, nor do we wish for her to reminisce, however artfully, on her impressions of the work. We are not asking for another aesthetic experience; we are asking for a judgment. Here is where the trouble starts. For the critic may be witty or insightful or engaging or well-read or widely admired or a true virtuoso - but what she will never be is decidedly right. It is not possible, we are forced to admit, to prove the excellence of a novel or a painting through empirical evidence or logical argument; if it were, we could leave the business of evaluating art to the art historians and neuroscientists and politicians. (God knows they are eager to weigh in!)

 

One of the writers Chu cites is Kant, who has a rather fascinating take on the issue:

 

“Always assume that beauty has a rational explanation, but never pretend to know what it is.”

 

That sounds about right. 

 

And this bit is also great, talking about John Crowe Ransome:

 

“A poem is, so to speak, a democratic state,” he wrote in an 1941 essay, “whereas a prose discourse - mathematical, scientific, ethical, or practical and vernacular - is a totalitarian state.” By this he meant that the ostensible content of a poem could easily be paraphrased into assertive prose, which was totalitarian because it had no goal but to maximize efficiency. (One imagines Hamlet beginning his famous soliloquy by announcing, “I am considering suicide.”) 

 

Another great passage:

 

Why do we ask the critic to have authority? It is not out of a romantic desire to improve our understanding of art; nor is it because we wish to be subjected to the tyranny of someone else’s opinion. It is because we are inheritors of a history, one in which the critic has consistently been understood as embodying a key political figure: in the eighteenth century, an enlightened king; in the nineteenth, a free citizen; in the twentieth, a state bureaucrat. Implicit in this scheme is a belief that there is something inescapably political about what the critic does - that every act of judgment tests one’s ability as a member of society to submit voluntarily to the authority of the law. 

 

The ending is worth quoting as well. 

 

This is good news: if authority has always been at risk of disappearing from criticism, then we shall not have much to miss. But we will have to reckon with our longing for authority: our nostalgia, which is the opposite of historical sense; and our idealism, which is the opposite of the future. Nothing may be more dangerous, in criticism or in politics, than the revanchist desire to restore a form of authority that, if we are being honest, never existed in the first place. The great enemy is not the king of France, whose bloody head has been rolling through the streets for as long as anyone can remember. The enemy, my friends, is Napoleon. 

 

Next up is “Holier Than Thou,” which is mostly about a very weird short story by Ottessa Moshfegh, about a feudal lord who thought that the divine light shined from his rectum. The story itself sounds darkly funny, but the phenomenon in real life is anything but. (Butt?) The opening of the essay captures it all:

 

If you have ever worked with one, you’ll know that assholes don’t respond well to input. 

 

Isn’t that the truth?

 

There is more, however. The essay looks at and challenges the idea that art exists in some sort of vacuum, and that it is a moral good in and of itself to have morally problematic characters in books. Mind you, this is not an argument for censorship, but instead a note that art too can be evaluated on a moral basis. 

 

In reality, it is very easy to oppose the banning of a book like Lolita while also pointing out that the author of American Psycho is a sundowning reactionary. 

 

And Chu calls out Moshfegh for seeing the threat of censorship coming, not from murderous corporations or right wing politicians, but some vague “political agenda” embodied in online criticism. 

 

The substance of that agenda is easy to guess - social justice, both real and imagined - but what Moshfegh really means is what most successful artists mean when they speak vaguely about the value of art: the absolute indignity of being told what to do. 

 

I haven’t watched any of Yellowstone, but I have to say that the essay about it was really interesting. I wrote down a couple of lines from it, because they seem to me to be useful and helpful. 

 

First is the passage where Beth, who is essentially the most amoral character. And she ends up misquoting and misunderstanding Nietzsche and his ideas about good and evil. 

 

I wrote a bit about Nietzsche and his villainization in the Fundie subculture I grew up in, and how like many philosophers, he can function as an inkblot test - what you see in him says a lot about you. 

 

Chu gives the gist and the actual quote, and they have had me thinking a lot about this. My parents and so many others who follow religious and political charlatans perfectly embody what Nietzsche called “slave morality.” They have chosen to outsource their morality, and end up embracing tribalism as the only moral value that matters. 

 

Aside from being terrible dialogue, this is a basic misunderstanding of Nietzsche. For that philosopher, good and evil were labels created by people who, too weak to form their own values, define themselves by condemning the values of others.

 

Hell yes. That is exactly my experience with Fundamentalism. 

 

“While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says NO to what is ‘outside,’ what is ‘different,’ what is ‘not itself.”

 

That is exactly it. My parents’ “morality” seems these days to consist entirely of tribalism - people, ideas, culture, art that is not “us” is considered “evil.” Even when that includes their own children and grandchildren. 

 

Another line also caught my eye. 

 

The truly maddening thing about Yellowstone is the endless pantomime of inherited necessity, as if generations of attempted land theft have purified the ranchers into historical automata. Of course, the Duttons can make choices; they just choose not to. But the kind of freedom that John Dutton III truly admires, the kind that Beth Dutton embodies, is not the freedom to make decisions - that is, ethical freedom - but rather the freedom to act as if one’s decisions have all been made in advance. There are no nobler savages than the Duttons, whom their gods have not saddled with the inconvenience of a psychology. They are titanic nothings; they are ideas with guns.

 

Sigh. Yep. My parents. MAGA. The entire right-wing disaster. Nobody wants the terrible burden of owning their own decisions. They just have their ideology and some guns, and everyone else gets to suffer. 

 

There is so much more in this book - I skipped over at least three quarters of the essays. I am considering adding it to my own library collection, because I think I may want to reference it at times. 

 

It is definitely worth picking up, particularly if you care about art, literature, ethics, culture, or even just want to see what the young people are thinking about. Chu writes superbly - including proper and creative use of colons and semicolons, which always warms my heart - and has a clarity of thought that is refreshing. 

 

Maskerade by Terry Pratchett

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

If you love opera or musical theater, you will find this book particularly hilarious. But even if you don’t, it is a fun story and full of the usual Terry Pratchett humor and satire. 

 

This book is in the “Witches” series within Discworld, and assumes that you are familiar with the main characters, as well as with the history of the Lancre coven. You don’t need to read the previous books to enjoy this one, but it helps to have done so. 

 

As a quick update as to where we are, after the events of Wyrd Sisters, the riff on Shakespeare (and Hamlet in particular), the handwriting is on the wall, so to speak. The new king of Lancre, Verence II (formerly the jester - it’s a long story…) clearly has the hots for young witch Magrat Garlick, despite her flat chest, and, even though it takes two more books, he has finally succeeded in marrying her. 

 

This leaves the coven down one witch - they need three: the maiden, the mother, and…the other one. With Magrat gone, they have no maiden, just a mother (Nanny Ogg), and…the other one (Granny Weatherwax.) 

 

So, Nanny and Granny are off to recruit a candidate. 

 

In this case, that is Agnes Nitt, a young woman from Lancre, who has decided to take her amazing singing voice to Ankh-Morpork intending to make it as an opera star. 

 

The problem? Agnes is, shall we say, Wagnerian, in an era when Wagner and large women are decidedly out of style. She can sing, but cannot look the part, even after she changes her name to Perdita. 

 

From there on out, the book becomes mostly a parody of Phantom of the Opera, while also parodying all things opera and all things musical theater. There are so many Easter Eggs, excellent puns, and references that it is impossible to catch them all in real time. 

 

Fortunately, the Discworld Wiki has a good summary. And yes, this means that Salieri and Michael Crawford are hidden in the story. And Lon Chaney and Meatloaf. 

 

And also that Pratchett manages to combine The Joy of Cooking AND The Joy of Sex into one title written by Nanny Ogg. 

 

I won’t even begin to list all of the parodies of classical operas and blockbuster musicals - the titles are hilarious. 

 

I also cannot, unfortunately, spoil the ending, which is a pretty brilliant bit of farce and theater in-jokes. 

 

Overall, this is a most excellent story, and a lot of fun. 

 

The one bit that is a bit awkward are the various fat jokes inherent in the plot. I can’t really complain about the “it ain’t over until the fat lady sings” reference, but a few of the references to Agnes seem a bit unkind these few decades later. 

 

To be fair to Pratchett, Agnes is the hero of this book, and he, for the most part makes an argument for talent over appearance, even as he acknowledges that the business takes the opposite approach. 

 

So, mixed bag here. Because Agnes is such a great character, and because Pratchett stands up for her throughout, I choose to overlook the fact that he couldn’t resist a good joke, even if it goes against our current sensibilities.

 

I might mention some cameo appearances in this book. The usual characters of the Watch get to bumble their way through an investigation. Not only Death, but the Death of Rats get some good likes, or at least squeaks. And Nanny’s vile cat, Greebo, plays a significant role in the plot, which is always hilarious.

 

Amid all of the hilarity, though, Pratchett gets to explore some more serious themes. 

 

What is the role of art in the human experience? Why are we so attracted to stories that are a bit ludicrous or even silly? Why does spectacle thrill us so much? How is fiction such an effective vehicle for communicating truth?

 

In addition, Pratchett asks us about our social preference for thin, small, and blonde women. Why do they always get to be the heroine? Why do we consider fuller figured or older women to be sidekicks rather than main characters? Can they even be main characters in their own lives?

 

Or how about some other questions? Are we all just playing parts on the stage of life, or can we be who we truly are? 

 

Unfortunately, I couldn’t write down quotes while I was driving, so I had to go back and search the interwebs for them. Here are a few good ones I was able to locate:

 

‘Are you offering to teach me something?’

‘Teach?  No,’ said Granny.  ‘Ain’t got the patience for teaching.  But I might let you learn.’ 

 

A psychiatrist, dealing with a man who fears he is being followed by a large and terrible monster, will endeavour to convince him that monsters don't exist. Granny Weatherwax would simply give him a chair to stand on and a very heavy stick. 

 

This one reminds me so much of MAGA:

 

People who would not believe a High Priest if he said the sky was blue, and was able to produce signed affidavits to this effect from his white-haired old mother and three Vestal virgins, would trust just about anything whispered darkly behind their hand by a complete stranger in a pub. 

 

And related:

 

His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few people. 

 

The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters.

 

Nanny Ogg was basically a law-abiding person when she had no reason to break the law, and therefore had that kind of person’s attitude to law-enforcement officers, which was one of deep and permanent distrust. 

 

'Money don't buy happiness, Gytha.'

'I only wanted to rent it for a few weeks.' 

 

She was a good witch.  That was her role in life.  That was the burden she had to bear.  Good and Evil were quite superfluous when you’d grown up with a highly developed sense of Right and Wrong. 

 

Nanny rather liked the theatrical world.  It was its own kind of magic.  That was why Esme disliked it, she reckoned.  It was the magic of illusions and misdirection and foolery, and that was fine by Nanny Ogg, because you couldn’t be married three times without a little fooling. 

 

‘There’s your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like “Oh oh oh, I am dyin’, oh, I am dyin’, oh, oh, oh, that’s what I’m doin’” and there’s your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes “Beer!  Beer!  Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!” although sometimes they drink champagne instead.  That’s basically all of opera, reely.’

‘What?  Either dyin’ or drinkin’ beer?’

‘Basically, yes,’ said Nanny, contriving to suggest that this was the whole gamut of human experience.

‘And that’s opera?’

‘We-ll…there might be some other stuff.  But mostly it’s stout or stabbin’.’ 

 

‘Honestly, Salzella ... what is the difference between opera and madness?’

‘Is this a trick question?’

‘No!’

‘Then I’d say: better scenery.’ 

 

‘I’m Mrs Ogg,’ said Nanny Ogg.

The man looked her up and down.

‘Oh yes?  Can you identify yourself?’

‘Certainly.  I’d know me anywhere.’ 

 

'I must catch up on my sleep.'

'Don't worry, I shouldn't think it's had time to get far away,' said Nanny. 

 

No one had asked her, before she was born, whether she’d want a lovely personality or whether she’d prefer, say, a miserable personality but a body that could take size 9 in dresses. Instead, people would take pains to tell her that beauty was only skin-deep, as if a man ever fell for an attractive pair of kidneys.   

 

The people of Lancre thought that marriage was a very serious step that ought to be done properly, so they practiced quite a lot. 

 

Bonnie Quarney had been gathering nuts in May with William Simple, and it was only because she'd thought ahead and taken a little advice from Nanny that she wouldn't be bearing fruit in February. 

 

People who didn’t need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn’t need people. 

 

I’m sure I have forgotten even more. So you will just have to read the book and wonder how Pratchett could contain such an endless abundance of hilarious lines. 

 

I will never stop encouraging people to read Terry Pratchett. I think he is an underrated author, all too often relegated to “fantasy” rather than being recognized as a superb satirist and thoughtful writer on the deep issues of life.

 

***

 

Here is the complete Pratchett list from my blog:

 

Rincewind:

 

The Colour of Magic

The Light Fantastic

Sourcery

Faust Eric

Unseen Academicals

 

Tiffany Aching:

 

The Wee Free Men

A Hat Full of Sky

Wintersmith

I Shall Wear Midnight

 

Witches:

 

Equal Rites

Wyrd Sisters

Witches Abroad

 

Watch:

 

Guards! Guards! (Stupid abridged edition, which is an abomination unto Nuggan and everyone else.)

 

Industrial Revolution:

 

The Truth

Monstrous Regiment

Making Money

Raising Steam

 

Death:

 

Reaper Man

 

Ancient Civilizations:

 

Small Gods

Pyramids

 

Non-Discworld:

 

The Carpet People

Dodger

Dragons at Crumbling Castle

Good Omens (with Neil Gaiman)

Nation