‘Illiberalism’s history is America’s history’

“American illiberalism is deeply rooted in our past and fed by practices, relationships and sensibilities that have been close to the surface, even when they haven’t exploded into view,” writes Steven Hahn in a NYT column that condenses the arguments from Illiberal America, which I reviewed a couple days ago. America, as William S. Burroughs

April 2024 reading

“Even as they are in some ways the greatest beneficiaries of democracy’s distribution of influences, rural whites are the least committed to our system,” writes Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman in White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, a history whose self-explanatory title indicts a system in which, say, Wyoming’s legislative representation matters as

March 2024 reading

] My memory fails to find a moment of comparable sexual boldness than a scene in The Wings of the Dove where the blandly desirable Merton Densher orders his betrothed Kate Croy to come upstairs to his Venice hotel room — and The Wings of the Dove is a Henry James novel. Written at the

February 2024 reading

A rebuke to ersatz leftists like me who still think they can rattle the walls of an impregnable system, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) supports its title thesis by telling the stories of men and women born in imperial systems who created grassroots movements in Cape Verde and

Walking and reading

One of the last of the twentieth American formalist poets — a lot of adjectives to live down — Anthony Hecht wrote “A Hill,” “The Book of Yolek,” and a half dozen major poems whose lattice-like rhyme schemes don’t embalm their subjects. Too many draughts of his vintage will deaden my responses, I’ve found. Why

January 2024 reading

Two remarkable memoirs stood out during a busy month. Crisp but running over with feeling, A Childhood evokes a time and a place. A boy who grows up on a Georgia farm circa 1935 learns to use every part of an animal. This reader learned how to scale (as opposed to skin!) a hog, care

Looking in vain for American maturity: Martin Luther King, Jr. in 2024

Rightism like capitalism absorbs the rhetoric of contrary forces. From 2021:

“What if today’s the day that somebody shoots up the school?”

I’d bookmarked a Washington Post story about the effect of Florida’s book bans on Escambia County’s teachers and students. I leave it to readers; determine whether the sources exaggerate their dilemmas.

What I read in 2023

Sleeplessness is for me a cherished state, to be desired at almost any cost; there is nothing for me as invigorating as the early morning shedding of the shadowy half-consciousness of a night’s loss, reacquainting myself with what I might have lost completely a few hours earlier. I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of

Knowing and not knowing: ‘Eileen’ and ‘Monster’

These films work to some degree as coming-of-age stories. These characters deal with a wisdom hardly wanted and an object of desire to whom they’re not conditioned to respond. I wish Eileen was a better film, while Monster represents a recovery for Hirokazu Kore-eda after Broker.

November 2023 reading

I liked the cut of Foster Hirsch’s jib when he cocked an eyebrow at Katherine Hepburn’s achievements. “But oh, she could be hard to take,” he moans in his wonderful Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher–Television,

‘American Fiction’ is a tart but rote skewing of white liberal pieties

At the nadir of his commercial success, Henry James wrote a short story called “The Next Time,” about a cult novelist whose attempts to write a best-seller become increasingly pathetic (James called the collection in which “The Next Time” appeared Embarrassments). American Fiction concerns itself with Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, who out of career desperation publishes