Hey, it's short. I can read the whole thing! Happy Holidays.

What I saw looking up after reading the first article (Hari Kunzru)
Lake Pontchartrain and the Causeway

This post is experimental, and perhaps a bit too self-indulgent. Like an “experimental” performance at Sidebar NOLA. Check it out. I clicked on Vol. 2 (Johnny Vidacovich and Mahmoud Chouki) and am staying with it (very cool), but the livestream video had me clicking out quite early on. What I’m saying is: I am putting this on the blog. It’s raw, experimental. OK, enough of my excuses. 

Here’s the post: (reflections on reading a magazine) 

When I heard about Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel, The Ministry For the Future, I felt certain that I had to find a way to read it. The way-finding can be interesting, and that’s the problem. Too interesting (the way-finding, that is). Earlier this week, I had my folding bike with me when I dropped our behemoth car off at the Toyota dealer for servicing. Carol and I had been pulling a trailer all across the country, and so we needed a large vehicle, and these must be tended to. Unfolding the bike, I looked out at a sunshiny day and just a few miles along the bike path on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain to Barnes and Noble, my source for magazines. 

That place was busy, seemed like non-pandemic times in there except that people only had half a face showing. Wandering around the magazine racks, I became convinced that some special information was waiting for me within the pages of The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The Believer. After a while, my plan to choose one of the three fell away and I bought them all. End-of-year splurge, and all the better to very significantly delay my reading of an actual book, such as Robinson’s new one. Of course, I have lots of podcasts to use as delaying elements as well. In fact, one of those (The Ezra Klein Show) is how I found out about the book, which Ezra claimed as his “most important book of the year”. Robinson is a veteran Sci-Fi author who was born a month after me in 1952. He has written 20 books and this latest one is described as one of the most powerful and original books on climate change ever written. His work has been praised (coincidentally in The Atlantic) as "the gold-standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing." His writing tends to include heroic scientists, a category of human that we’ve all been needing this year. I have finally obtained a copy of The Ministry For the Future, but have yet to start reading it, except for the first sentence: “It was getting hotter”. 

Instead, I read the January 2021 issue of Harper’s cover to cover. I want to be a reader of Rebecca Solnit books,  but magazines and other distractions keep me from completing actual books she has written. Happily for me, she was one of two rotating writers for a monthly essay column in Harper’s called Easy Chair. Back in the old times, when I would find myself in an airport several times a year, I would relish my trips to the magazine stand. If Rebecca was the  Harper's Easy Chair writer for that month, I would always buy a copy. I love her take on things. I once attended a talk by The Rebecca’s (Solnit and Snedecker), authors of Unfathomable City, A New Orleans Atlas, published in 2013. The two authors have essays that are presented along with maps with bizarre juxtapositions. Map 11 is Hot and Steamy, Selling Seafood, Selling Sex. Here’s the map legend: Seafood sites, Former seafood sites, Advocacy groups, Sex sites, Former sex sites, Advocacy groups, Sex work zones, and Former sex work zones. I want to return to this book, it’s really a great concept and works perfectly for this city (I think Solnit was involved with ones for San Francisco and New York City as well). 

The January Harper’s features an essay by Hari Kunzru, who will be rotating in the Easy Chair columnist position with Thomas Chatterton Williams. It’s called Complexity, and deals with Kunzru’s take on the phenomenon of widespread belief in QAnon, the conspiracy theory. It turns out that Kunzru has been following these types of movements for years and has some interesting things to say about this. He ultimately calls for some humility on the part of humans. Apropos of conspiracy theorists interpreting everything in terms of a knowable system of deception, he says: "We need to learn to step aside from our unearned position as the measure of all things. And in another sense we will need to learn to step back in, to relinquish our illusion of separateness from the world, to give up our ironic distance and dive into the flow". 

I next read Harper’s Index, a page-long list of random metrics presented without comment: “Portion of U.S, adults who consume news on YouTube: ¼”. And “Percentage of YouTube channels that are oriented around a single person: 44”. An essay by KarlOve Knausgaard was next, which I went back to a second time and even now, I am wondering what it was about (I think it’s our angle on things, individually and sometimes Zeitgeisted-ly). But I did enjoy his pointing out that there is a great contrast between Homer’s The Odyssey, which is “a book of transformations, leaving an impression of an unfinished world”, and the Book of Leviticus which is “solely concerned with laying down boundaries, establishing categories, defining and identifying the relationship of culture to nature, telling us what things belong together and what things absolutely do not”. At the end of the piece, Knausgaard notes that “every one of us creates our own world and our own identity, however obscurely, this being the task given to us at birth”. OK, then! 

A short piece from the August 2020 parole hearing for Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon 40 years ago on December 8. After the doorman at the Dakota took his gun, Chapman opened the book he was holding, The Catcher in the Rye, and started reading. I did not know that. I did not know the meaning of the title of the book. What a crazy way, on the 40th anniversary of John’s death, to learn about it, because Chapman’s parole commissioner read the passage back to Chapman at the hearing. That’s just wild. Catcher Gone Awry. 

“Pour Decisions” relates how a restaurant decided to fess up to mixing up the wine order for 2 tables: one ordering a $2000 bottle of Rothschild, and the other the cheapest, an $18 bottle of pinot noir. The restaurant owner, called by the manager at home, decided to tell both parties the truth. Had he not done so, human expectations and the power of suggestion would have taken care of it, no complaints! Or maybe these were just simply poorly trained palates! Next was a short story translated from the Danish, about the thoughts and perceptions of a woman in the apparent last moments of her life. 

And then a very long personal story by the writer Ann Patchett, called These Precious Days. She relates events leading to her 2017 meeting with a woman who turns out to eventually spend many days with Ann and her husband Karl at their Nashville home. I like reading Ann Patchett’s essays because she is very open and self-revealing about her very interesting life. As I am a hack and very occasional writer, it’s of interest to me also when she talks about how she does it. So far, Patchett’s novels (I think she has 7) are all on my “haven’t read” list, but in addition to this piece in the magazine, I read her second non-fiction book, a collection of essays called This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Her Harper’s essay ends as follows: “Tell me how the story ends. It doesn’t. It will. It hasn’t yet.” 

The next piece is called “Letter From Kyiv” and is about the Ukrainian extremist militias. I now have the gloomy knowledge that things are much more dire in that country than I had realized. But who knows, times change. 

The Gate of Heaven is Everywhere; Among the Contemplatives dealing with mysticism in modern Christianity, and features the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. The author of this piece, Fred Bahnson, says that “The Christian mystics sought an intense experience of inwardness glaringly absent in American Christianity today.” I would point out that Buddhism, at least the Zen and Insight traditions that emphasize mindfulness and meditation, are becoming more popular in this country. No doubt some seek to fill that glaring absence with meditative practice, jumping ship from the religion of their youth altogether. 

I think I have a short attention span. I have an orientation toward starting, beginning, discovering, newness. I think that’s it. I might be thinking too much, certainly I’ve been told that as perhaps we all have: “don’t over-think it”. And yet, I really do want to read books. That’s something you can do and can report on for credit. It’s harder to get credit for reading magazines, although I have tried to plead the case for credit here. If I were to say “I just read Hari Kunzru’s new novel, The Red Pill”, that would be sufficient. I could go on to say “it’s title comes from the Red Pill in the movie The Matrix, and that might be enough for you to get a sense of it, along with my further comments such as “I loved it” or whatever. I would automatically get credit for reading the book, and might be the instigator of your reading it as well. But if, instead of the somewhat lengthy reporting I’ve done here, I were to say “I just read the January 2021 issue of Harper’s”, there’s nothing brief to say that would convey it, and no credit would be issued. And yet, value is certainly there. 

These short pieces can be riveting and damn good. As Ann Patchett points out, published short stories are almost all good. She reasons that once a writer is into a long novel, she’s going to press on and finish it come hell or high water, due to the commitment she’s made. It might not have turned out as good as she thought, but dammit, it’s getting published! Not so with short stories, the crappy ones just get tossed and the writer starts all over. Seems to make sense, although with my proclivities toward non-fiction and essays, my experience with stories is limited. I had read every article in the magazine, but still the story (The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken) was unread. It’s about the journey of a woman and her 10 year old son that involves Vikings, Legos, and steadying oneself with the ballast of an old watch in your pocket. I wanted to skip reading it, but felt the need for completeness, and I had Ms. Patchett’s theory about why I stood to gain. I’m not a literary critic, but I know that discussing it with fellow readers (or learning that others hated it and quit after the first couple of paragraphs) would be much fun and would enrich my life.  In fact, I encourage you to give it a go and let me know what you think!

As the editor Christopher Beha pointed out in his introduction to this issue, “the magazine’s long-held affinity for fiction writers feels particularly appropriate in this moment, not because we are owed a little break from reality, but because there are moments when reality is best approached by way of the imagination”. I am expecting good things in 2021. I hope you are too. Of course, we’ll get a mix and there will be challenges and who knows, but we’ll take them all together. If you are reading this, we undoubtedly will be experiencing things in some fashion or another together in the coming year. Cheers, and all the best. As one of my meditation teachers Jude Rozhon taught us to say when doing the Buddhist practice of Lovingkindness: 

May you be happy and peaceful. 

May you be healthy and strong. 

May you be safe and free. 

May you be curious and confident. (I added that one) 

May you be able to care for yourself with ease and joy.

The author looking east across City Park in New Orleans, late afternoon

Jon, Sam, Carol (all with weird expressions) in The Time Of Covid
Thanksgiving, 2020