Books on the nightstand: "The Unwinding"

     "Books on the night stand" is a heading for a page at the side of this blog where I sometimes write about books I'm reading.
      But times change. And I had to pause whether I could include the book I've been -- well, not "reading," certainly.  And "enjoying" doesn't fit either, it's too sobering. I suppose "listening to," since it's a book on tape, well, except it's on CD ....
    The hell with it. The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer is a haunting, timely epic look at how America got where it is today. To add an extra twist, I was about to drive down to Wayne County in January to talk to the residents there about their overwhelming support for Donald Trump in advance of his inauguration. 
       Packer is a staff writer at the New Yorker, and The Unwinding his 2013 panoramic portrait of what went wrong in the United States over the past 40 years, an crumbling of social, economic, governmental, moral and intellectual bedrock that has left us unmoored and stumbling toward whatever fate -- or doom -- awaits us.  The growing partisanship, cynicism and dysfunction of politicians, their increasing domination by big money interests, the missed opportunity of the banking and real estate collapse of 2009, when the government bailed out the banks and the mortgage lenders but failed to put in controls that might prevent the next crisis. Obama comes off as colluding with the very people he should have sent to jail.
    The book is a bravura act of reportage—a factual version of John Dos Passos' 1930s classic trilogy U.S.A —with a big cast of characters: Tammy Thomas, an African American factory worker in Youngstown, Ohio who becomes a social activist. Dean Price, a North Carolina truck stop owner who gets into bio-diesel. Jeff Connaughton, an ambitious aide to Joe Biden — the future vice president is portrayed as a shallow ambitious phony, one of many famous people salted throughout who, like Napoleon in War and Peace, add glitter and spice up the narrative. Names like Jay-Z and Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell and Alice Waters pop up. I savored the damning portrait of Newt Gingrich, whose bare-fisted tactics hurried American decline, as well as that of new gilded age tycoon Sam Walton. I'm not sure why Raymond Carver is there, but I welcomed him too. Some I was barely familiar with, like Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire now supporting Trump.
    This is the first non-fiction book I've listened to on an audiobook, and one with so many characters poses some challenges, at least at the beginning. But I've found it also makes me eager to get into the car. The trip to Wayne County gave me a richer sense of the people supporting Trump -- not idiots, certainly, but people with limited range of interests focused on a particular set of local issues.  In one of those echoes that would look trite in fiction, the audiobook I grabbed almost randomly off the library shelf to listen on the way down also expanded and echoed what I'd find when I go there. If we learn one thing from the Right, contempt is easy. Understanding is hard, and anyone trying to figure out how we got in this mess would do themselves well to read it..
    Since audio book readers often get overlooked, I have to give props to award-winning veteran reader Bob Fass, who delivers these tales of suffering with an appealing dry evenness.
    As I was listening to the book, I also found myself thinking about how hearing a book is different than reading it. So it was more perfect timing that I happened upon The Untold Story of the Talking Book, by Matthew Rubery, (Harvard University Press: 2016) drawn by its clean and appealing cover. I've just read the introduction, but am intrigued both by the tidbits of information he assembles—Saint Augustine was dumbfounded to find his teacher, Saint Ambrose, reading silently to himself—and the larger questions Rubery raises:

     What exactly is the relationship between spoken and printed texts? How  does the experience of listening to books compare to that of reading them? What influence does a book's narrator have over its reception? What methods of close listening are appropriate to such narratives? What new formal possibilities are opened up by sound technology? 

     We think of the shifting sands of technology as being something new. But even before the public had heard Edison's phonograph, the press was speculating it might mean the death of books, or their radical transformation, as who would read the words themselves when skilled elocutionists could do it for you?
     I wrote a little about the history of audiobooks three years ago, when Audible brought out my memoir Drunkard in audio form. But I haven't gotten into The Untold Story of the Talking Book far enough to give it more of a full treatment than this. You'll have to wait for a couple weeks. In the meantime, this book actually will be resting on my nightstand.

Why would anyone WANT Trump to visit Chicago?

 

     What's wrong with people?
     I'm reading all this speculation about Oprah Winfrey being maybe interested in running for president. Conversation seems to revolve around her views. Is she sincere? Is it a joke? And the logic seems to be, heck, experience doesn't count for anything, obviously, since Donald Trump was elected president. So why not Oprah? She's a big rich star too!
     Those people are missing the point, entirely. Yes, Trump won. But based on the chaos of his first six weeks of his administration, and the unqualified clown/zealots he's stuffing his cabinet with, his election isn't a template for more of the same. It's a grim cautionary tale, a reminder that while the popular mania might turn on expertise in general and politicians in particular, that electing a president based on lack of government experience is like choosing a surgeon based on scant medical knowledge. Oh, he can put on green scrubs and a paper mask and look the part. And maybe fool some people who judge by appearances. But stick him in front of an open chest cavity and he just stands there, gawping.
     Which is sorta what Trump is doing now.
     The only actual accomplishment Trump can point to is giving himself an "A." The rest is bluster. Which is not the bad part. The bad part is that some people believe him. They assume, he's so smug, so certain, so rich, he must be succeeding, since he says he is. Except he's not. We just aren't used to somebody lying so consistently, so thoroughly. It throws us.
     Yes, there are similarities. Like Trump, Oprah is a giant airship of inflamed ego. The materialism run amok? The close-your-eyes-follow-me-and-your-dreams-will-come-true magical thinking?

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God's substitute for happiness

 Mariusz Kwiecien, as Eugene Onegin, and Ana Maria Martinez as Tatiana
 (Photo by Todd Rosenberg, Lyric Opera of Chicago)

     So I blew off my responsibilities Wednesday afternoon and caught the matinee of "Eugene Onegin" at the Lyric, because seeing "Carmen" for the second time this season Tuesday night obviously didn't satisfying my opera jones for the week. 
    Well, actually, I was told that if I missed it, I would be sorry, and that was correct. Beautiful, strong voices, enigmatic sets. True, I'm more a Bizet man than a Tchaikovsky man—give me the big rolling punches of "Carmen" more than the dolorous loveliness of "Eugene Onegin." But it worked.
   Yes, "Eugene Onegin" is not heavy on plot. He's a scoundrel. One sister is in love with him, writes a letter and is rebuffed, he woos the other sister at a dance, cheezing off her suitor, his best friend. There's a duel -- which means, with all the dueling in "Hamilton," if I can find one more dueling production this season, that would constitute a trend.
    Trying to justify going, I told myself I wasn't just playing hooky, but working, building my base of knowledge regarding opera, always useful when covering Chicago's pressing urban problems. And I was pleased to recognize not one but two performers from previous work: Ana Maria Martinez, who was in "Don Giovani" (sort of carving out a singing-against-the-bad-boy niche for herself) and Iowa's pride, Katharine Goeldner, whom you might remember as stepping into the lead role the last time the Lyric did "Carmen," in 2010/2011 (or, more likely, not. But I sure remember it).
    At intermission the group behind me started debating what language the singers of "Eugene Onegin" might be using. I let them go on but, when resolution didn't seem at hand, Finally, I broke my rule against butting into other people's conversations. 
    "It's Russian," I said, half turning in my seat.
     "It doesn't sound like Russian," a man objected.
     "I studied Russian in college," I said, evenly. "They're speaking Russian words. 'Ya lubloo ti da,' 'Yes, I love you.'" 
    They were still skeptical—this person claiming knowledge on the subject they obviously lacked any experience in whatsoever didn't count. Then one located some corroboration in the the program. "It says 'Russian,'' one lady read, and they were satisfied. 
    Well, you don't go to the opera to socialize with other patrons. It never works out well. Although, heading up the aisle at the same intermission, an 85-year-old woman grabbed my arm and suddenly I was escorting her on my arm. She was apologetic, and I said No, this is exactly how my mother gets around. 
    "Though you really should use a cane," I said, delivering the same lecture I give to my mom at every opportunity. She said she has a man who lives with her and helps her, but he also had to tend to her husband, and couldn't make the four-hour investment going to the opera entailed. I was about to quote Blanche DuBois on the kindness of strangers, but we were in the lobby and she broke free and was gone.
     Not a lot of intellectual challenge going on with "Eugene Onegin." Although. Early on, when two rustically-dressed women are peeling potatoes against a vast orange background with five tall thin birch trees cutting up the stage, one snatch of song was translated as, "Routine brings comfort from distress. God's substitute for happiness."
    Well, that's something to chew on. Damning, yes. I guess to be happy you have to seduce your pal's beloved then kill him in a duel.  Frankly, I'd rather make coffee and walk the dog every single day. Without giving away the ending, I have to say I was one of the few patrons, if not the only patron in the history of music, to laugh out loud, big grin on my face, as poor Eugene was left, miserable and alone in the center of the empty stage, decrying his woe. I had that reaction because I was suddenly thinking of a particular die-hard bachelor friend and wishing he were sitting next to me so I could elbow him in the ribs and say, "Something to look forward to, eh?" And I have to say, as the lights came up, and I jumped to make the 5:25, I was pretty darn happy, even though I was catching the same train I always do.

The Riverwalk: Promenade, jogging path, ramp to a penal colony on Mars

     Oddly, the two things I most meant to say when I set out to write this — how Rahm Emanuel, when he first took office, said he wanted to revitalize the river front, and how the river forms an artificial coast, giving a sweeping vista of skyline — didn't make it through cutting this for size. 

     Sure, Rich Daley wrecked the finances of the city and left behind a ruined economic shell. But Millennium Park, man that's something. And the Bean! I just love the Bean.
     And yes, our current mayor, Rahm Emanuel, doesn't have a clue what to do about the violence convulsing our city. But he did build the Riverwalk, and it's nice.
     Last month, the Riverwalk opened its latest stretch from the Franklin Bridge to Lake Street and that, coupled with the February warm weather seemed to demand an in-depth journalistic investigation.
    One afternoon last week, I crossed the river on the Orleans Bridge, turned right, strode down the concrete ramp, took a hard left, walking to the base of the Lake Street Bridge. I paused, fired up a Rocky Patel, and started to stroll, err, probe.
   I would like to report that the new ramp is a cleverly designed modernistic fantasy of concrete and metalwork. But it's not. It looks like the entrance chute to a penal colony on Mars, a spew of naked concrete and chain link fence. That's the bad news; the good news is, it may not done yet, at least according to the an architect's rendition I noticed in city materials. I phoned the mayor's press office, several times, over a period of days, and emailed, trying to get clarification. They're working on it.

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       I paused to listen to musician Sean Black on the Riverwalk. This is his song, "The One." 

On the nightstand: "The Remains of the Day"

    The state of the country being what it is, it seems increasingly essential to have a good book nearby to lose myself in as need be, or at least to look forward to losing myself in, a respite from the daily stirring of the pot that our president finds useful to keep the public distracted from what he has already done.
     A good friend recommended Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, The Remains of the Day, and I hurried to the library to pick it up.
     The story is a week in the life of Stevens, the aging veteran butler at Darlington Hall, as he drives to Cornwall to meet the manor's long-ago housekeeper, Miss Kenton, now married, though perhaps not happily. It's after World War II, and much has changed—his longtime employer, Lord Darlington, died three years earlier, and was recently replaced by an upstart American businessman, Mr. Farraday. He motors along in his boss's elegant Ford, musing on the past, various revered butlers he has known, his father's decline. 
     The central joy of the book is the tone, the voice, Mr. Stevens always restrained observations on the nature of "dignity," his failed attempts to engage in banter with his new boss.
   Passing a signpost for Murssden, the home of Giffen and Company, makers of "dark candles of polish," a technical innovation "which came to push the polishing of silver to the position of central importance it still by and large maintains today," Stevens sets off on several pages on the importance of well-buffed silver, the highlight being:
    "I recall also watching Mr George Bernard Shaw, the renowned playwright, at dinner one evening, examining closely the dessert spoon before him, holding it up to the light and comparing its surface to that of a nearby platter, quite oblivious to the company around him."
     Either you get that or you don't. The book is one slow reveal, and the less said, the better. The ending also offers up a steaming dollop of philosophy that I know I'll value as the darkness gathers. Or try to anyway.  
    Though the peril of escaping from the daily headlines in a book is that the news follows you there. I don't think I'm revealing too much to say as The Remains of the Day clicks along like a hall clock, Lord Darlington's politics don't hold up well. In the mid-1930s, Lord Darlington comes under the sway of British fascists, leading to this:

     "I've been doing a great deal of thinking, Stevens. A great deal of thinking. And I've reached my conclusion. We cannot have Jews on the staff here at Darlington Hall."
     "Sir?"
     "It's for the good of this house, Stevens. In the interests of the guests we have staying here. I've looked into this carefully, Stevens, and I'm letting you know my conclusion.
     "Very well, sir."
     "Tell me, Stevens, we have a few on the staff at the moment, don't we? Jews, I mean."
     "I believe two of the present staff members would fall into that category, sir."
     "Ah."
     His lordship paused for a moment, staring out of this window.
     "Of course, you'l have to let them go."
     "I beg your pardon, sir?"
     "It's regrettable, Stevens, but we have no choice. There's the safety and well-being of my guests to consider. Let me assure you, I've looked into this matter and thought it through thoroughly. It's in all our best interests."

     That word—"safety"—just glowed on the page. Sound familiar? Though now we'd say "security" and the parties that our best interests demand be kept at a distance are now Muslims. But the logic, or rather, the illogic, is exactly the same.

Mark Giangreco busted for groping at the Twitter orgy

     One of the great things about working at the Sun-Times: not many meetings.
     Well, I'm sure somebody has meetings. I glimpse them through doorways as I'm hurrying out of the building.
     Occasionally I get sucked into a meeting, like one a few weeks ago explaining the importance of doing what I've done for years -- use social media, post to Facebook, Tweet stuff. We were reminded once again that we are no longer newspaper reporters, but "digital storytellers." I gazed at the phrase mournfully. They've been repeating that for years. What does it even mean? Digital storytellers. It has a whiff of kindergarten, of a robotic Mr. Rogers with a lightbulb nose and an LED red cardigan tinnily reading The Little Engine That Could to an audience of mechanical puppets. Is that our job now?
     I was forming a comment along those lines, when I thought better. Shutting up is an art form.  But I felt the need to say something, for the reason most people speak at meetings -- to hear myself talk.
     "Do you think we could get some guidelines for Twitter?" I asked, reminding my boss that Twitter is a minefield we're expected to skip across several times a day.

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Charles Dickens, served by slaves in America

Charles Dickens delivering a lecture

     Sunday. If I have to write another word on Trump, my head will explode. Heck, if I have to write another word about ANYTHING my head will explode. So ... with that in mind ... well...ah hell. It's still February, right? Still Black History Month? Since the idea of Charles Dickens encountering slaves in America will be a surprise to many, I'm dredging up this column from nearly a decade ago. I almost trimmed the opening bit about Lincoln on, as well as the closing snapshot of the boys. But I figure, heck, maybe there are people out there who feel like absorbing the whole thing. This is from back when the column took a whole page, was broken into parts, and ended with a joke. 

OPENING SHOT 

     Tomorrow is Abraham Lincoln's birthday -- an official holiday in Illinois. His 199th birthday, in fact, which means we can begin dreading next year, when our greatest and most overexposed president receives a big dose of relentless kitsch and blind hero worship. Myself, I wish we could honor Lincoln with something even a little significant -- say, by dropping the bothersome and useless Lincoln penny -- but it won't happen, not while we can busy ourselves in empty praise.
     Remember that Lincoln is great because he remains relevant, as an inspiration and guide. While all of our presidential candidates were genuflecting, more or less, before the religious wings of their party, I couldn't help but think of how Lincoln handled a similar situation. Lincoln was never baptized and did not belong to any church, a personal choice that would bar him from the presidency today but was merely a stumbling block in the more enlightened world of the mid-1800s.
     When he first ran for Congress, in 1846, Lincoln was called an "infidel" and a "scoffer of Christianity." He did something unimaginable today -- he didn't run to join a church, didn't gather the press and get baptized. He admitted the situation. "That I am not a member of any Christian church is true," he wrote in a handbill.
     Back when Barack Obama was telling the world he is not, not, not a Muslim, I kept waiting for him to take a page from Lincoln and add, "And what if I were? Are Muslims barred from high office in America? And if we think that being Muslim is a slur that makes a person unelectable -- too many Americans obviously do -- aren't we surrendering to the very hatred that our nation supposedly stands solidly against?"
     If he said that, I missed it. A reminder that praise of Lincoln and exhortations to moral courage are easy. Following Lincoln's example is hard.

INTERESTING BLACK HISTORY MONTH

     My beef with Black History Month is it implies that somehow black history is outside and separate from American history. It isn't. Black history is American history, and vice versa. That said, people of all races are so generally ignorant of everything that has gone before them, any artifice that helps fill the gaping void is to be welcomed.
     The problem is that most Black History Month efforts are directed at children -- as if they're the only ones who require a vague idea of the past -- and thus we get the same tales every year: George Washington Carver and the peanut; Martin Luther King and his dream.
     What about something for those who've mastered the basics? There is, for instance, the question of how outsiders viewed our system of slavery. Charles Dickens, at 30 the most famous author in Britain, came to America in 1842 to tour the new republic, visiting prisons and insane asylums and textile mills. He never made it to nine-year-old Chicago, settling for St. Louis instead. Dickens was a keen observer, repulsed by the ubiquitous American habit of chewing tobacco and experiencing a wave of guilt when, on his way to Washington to meet President Tyler, he found himself in a slave state. Dickens writes:
     "We stopped to dine at Baltimore, and being now in Maryland, were waited on, for the first time, by slaves. The sensation of exacting any service from human creatures who are bought and sold, and being, for at the time, a party as it were to their condition, is not an enviable one. The institution exists, perhaps, in its least repulsive and most mitigated form in such a town as this; but it is slavery; and though I was, with respect to it, an innocent man, its presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach."

WATCH WHEN YOU CROSS THE STREET!

     So my wife is taking a class downtown, which puts her on the 7:12 into the city a few mornings a week, which means I get to make the boys their lunches.
     No big deal -- heat up the Beefaroni, spoon it into a Thermos, slather the peanut butter on bread. The surprise came when I went to put the younger boy's lunch into his backpack. There was a mass of jammed papers -- balled up, crumpled, like a small animal had made a nest out of them.
     "Ummm, are your papers supposed to be like this?" I asked.
     He beamed with pride, and said that he is famed as the messiest boy in the fifth grade. "It's my legend," he explained. "It used to be Philip, but now it's me."
     "And this was decided," I asked weakly, "by general acclamation?"
     But he was gone, wheeling his backpack down the sidewalk. I watched him go, wondering if this was yet another crisis that demanded Immediate Parental Action. Well, perhaps these are returned papers -- I assume if he handed in crumpled-up balls there would be repercussions. We never had backpacks when I was a lad -- we carried our books and jammed our papers into our desks, which, now that I think of it, were not exactly pristine zones of order.
     So maybe it's OK. As far as parenting goes, my general rule is, if something seems unimportant, ignore it. I can't very well make a speech about the need for neatness. Not until I clean up my own office first.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE . . .

     Lincoln of course was famous for his folksy wit. He loved to tell stories and jokes, and certain lines went down in history, such as his supposed retort -- he later denied it -- when told that his most-successful general, Ulysses S. Grant, was a drunkard: "Tell me what brand of whiskey he drinks. I want to send a barrel of it to my other generals."
     Lincoln once said of a general far more timid than Grant:
     "It is called the Army of the Potomac, but it is only McClellan's bodyguard . . . . If McClellan is not using the army, I should like to borrow it for a while."
           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 11, 2008