Sam Baker Hello World Holiday Letter
The Sam Telegram
Issue 1: Hello World Holiday Letter
Welcome
Hi everyone, this is Sam Baker. Welcome to my personal newsletter, further installments of which will be emailed out, several times a year, to anyone who wants them. The back catalog will be available on the internet.
If you're reading this within days of its publication, you may be a family member or old friend whom I've subscribed. I hope this finds you well, and maybe inspires you to write back with your news. Please feel free to convert this to a one-off Holiday Letter, by unsubscribing! The button for doing so should be at the end of this missive, after the "About this Newsletter" section that further describes how I imagine this newsletter will work. Or if you've arrived here from Facebook or by some other route, to get more installments you may need to hit the "subscribe" button at the end.
Now, let's just dive into ... what?
Diary
What's been going on since ... when? Where to begin? Who am I, and why am I here? Some self-description seems in order--and should be consistent enough with holiday-letter style reportage ;)
So you know me. I am Sam, and I live in Austin, Texas, with: my spouse, whom I'll dub RAR, in case these newsletters are googleable; our daughters--hmm--let's call them BRB, age 5, and TJ, age 3; and, more often than not, with my son LPB, who is 16. Who else is "in the pod" with us? There's LPB's mother, whom the girls call "Aunty Jess"; there's Brooke, a kind woman whom we've hired to look after the little girls four days a week, and instruct them in science and fairy lore; and ... that's it, really. That's the bubble. There are a few friends with whom we zoom occasionally, or visit with awkwardly across a yard--maybe you're one of them. There's LPB's friend Lucan, whose family and ours has agreed that they can hang out with each other. My colleagues and students whom I see on Zoom or on email. The neighbors to whom we wave, here in the Mueller subdivision, an echt Texas development built earlier this century east of the Freeway, where the city airport had once been.
And so how are we, in what the girls call these "funny times"? Ours seems a relatively painless quarantine existence. None of us have gotten the virus, as far as we know. We did lose my uncle Dan, who, while he was living in a nursing home in Virginia, was still quite lively and to whom I had been hoping to introduce RAR sometime when we were back in the state where she grew up. We've had lots of friends and family friends come down with the virus but thankfully so far they seem to have pulled through alright. We miss conviviality, and travel, but at least we can commune with our ... community, walking around with the girls, enjoying other people's gardens and stoop decorations, wandering out into the nearby prairie xeriscape park, bicycling past even newer construction, or playing on the jungle gym frame I put together for our yard.
BRB has had to start kindergarten from home, via an iPad, but it hasn't been a bad experience so far. She does seem to be learning, and it is nice having her around to see her learn, and for TJ to be able to play with her and pick up tricks, like counting and dancing. BRB has begun playing the cello in earnest, taking "driveway lessons" from a wonderful local teacher, who has also started TJ holding and tapping on a super-cute "box cello" made from cardboard and duct tape.
LPB is essentially missing out on his junior year of high school, which feels like a tremendous sacrifice. Still, he is making good marks in his Zoom classes, and managing to not be too bitter about foregoing what could have been a great year of basketball competition. He's channeling a lot of energy into learning to drive, and may have his license by the end of this month! We're hoping it becomes practical to go visit colleges this summer.
RAR has forged ahead with Stranger's Guide, the magazine she publishes, redoing its business plan on the fly to deemphasize special events and look to partnerships instead as a revenue source that can supplement subscriptions to support the staff of six she employs. It is exciting, if at times stressful, to live with a small business through a crisis like this. Increasingly often, we've been bundling up the girls and heading for RAR's late grandparents' house in Waco, which luckily for us is still in the family, vacant and furnished. There we page through old books, eat donuts from Shipley's, and walk streets with no sidewalks.
We did escape Texas altogether fthis fall to set up in Virginia with RAR's parents for a very enjoyable six weeks. They are well, as are my parents and their partners, whom we've been visiting with via Zoom and FaceTime when we can, including for epic virtual 80th birthday parties for both my father and mother. My mother's husband the doctor just got vaccinated for Covid--I hope the rest of us follow in his footsteps soon!
What about my work? I'll say more about what I'm up to in later installments: the teaching, the research, the reading, the writing. Lately, I've been concentrating on just more fully immersing myself in what I read and write. Indeed, part of the idea of this newsletter is to help me leverage more satisfaction from reading widely, finishing books, and capturing thoughts about what I read for a fit audience, though few. It's nice to write on a shorter time horizon, and to a more immediate readership, than I do when I'm working on an academic project.
Books
So here's a couple of paragraphs about a book I read a few months ago--Jessica Mitford's Hons and Rebels, originally published in 196o and reissued early this century by the New York Review of Books Press with a (decent) forward by Christopher Hitchens. If only Publishers Weekly and Kirkus had allowed me so many words in my youthful apprenticeship as a book reviewer! (Some of those old reviews may appear linked here in future issues of this newsletter.)
Intrigued by twentieth-century British literature as I am these days, I’ve meant for some time to sort out the Mitford sisters one from another. Jessica Mitford’s memoir of her childhood and elopement, which RAR had left lying around, seemed a good place to start, and appropriate reading, to boot, for a moment (let’s hope it's not an era) of revived fascism. I knew the memoir was a classic, but, I was startled by how effective, and affecting, I found it. (I’m not ashamed to say I shed a tear when Mitford finally adverted to her first husband’s death in the war—having leant, up to that point, on a tacit assumption the reader knew of his fate—in a footnote that drops just before the narrative’s conclusion.) The broad story is well known. Six aristocratic sisters, Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica (a.k.a. Decca) and Deborah (“Debo” for short), born between 1904 and 1920, are raised in semi-seclusion on an Oxfordshire estate. Two become aristocratic wives, as might have been expected. (Pam’s eventual status as an open secret “you-know-what-bian”—Jessica’s phrase—might seem in that context nothing more than an eccentricity; Deborah’s placidity, a pause perpetuating the family’s celebrity to new generations.) Two become writers, Nancy penning Love in a Cold Climate and other popular works of liiterary fiction, Jessica The American Way of Death, additional activist journalism, and the memoir at hand. Two became notorious fascists: Diana wedding Oswald Mosley; Unity ingratiating herself into Hitler’s inner circle, before botching a suicide attempt on the eve of war and returning to England an invalid.
In her memoir, Mitford scrupulously recounts her sisters’ poor choices while situating them within the mores of their time and class. The “Red Sheep” of the family, as she styles herself (she was forbidden that phrase for her title by her publisher Victor Gollancz), Mitford, besotted as a teen with mail-order Stalinism, escapes her stultifying family home, abetted by her second cousin Esmond Romilly, whom she soon marries. After they flee abroad, Romilly, a baby left-wing journalist, sets himself up as a correspondent, first in Civil-War-riven Spain and then in America, and Mitford likewise apprentices herself to journalism. The book bestows insights from its first pages, which vividly evoke the stultifying overhang of Victorian culture into the modern era, epitomized by the deadening presence in the girls’ childhood drawing room of an uncle’s self-published massive compendium of his decades of letters to the editor of the Times of London. Mitford shudderingly conveys the moral decay of Britain's imperial aristocracy, which she depicts, in all its silly banality, as more evidently continuous with fascism than I, for all my reading in Arendt, had ever quite understood it to be. (I suppose I should revisit Remains of the Day.) When Mitford arrives at evoking the still-familiar lifestyle enjoyed by writers in their twenties in bohemian thirties London, it comes as a breath of fresh air. I felt like I recognized from personal memory the collective, if not collectivist, life of the mind she commemorates, and I suppose that subculture persisted at least until the end of the century, when the internet subjected it to a hostile takeover.
Aperçus
I envision a regular section, in this newsletter, for meaningful realizations such as I would just tweet out, if I had more than a few followers and hadn't set up my tweets to auto-erase within days lest anyone actually read them.
First off, in the Holiday Letter vein: I'm increasingly taken with the idea that a decade (unlike a life, which begins at zero) starts with the year ending in one: probably because, from that point of view, 2020 achieves the increasingly bleak two thousand teens, and thus we enter a new era this week.
Also, developing the themes of Mitfords and bleak times, here is what many will think a minor revelation (or no revelation at all), yet however one that forces a major revision to the understanding of one of the ur-texts of my youth.
Those of you who listened to "New Wave" music in the late 70s and 80s will remember Elvis Costello's acerbically tender power ballad "Party Girl." And all of you long ago put it together that the song is perfectly consistent with the politiics-and-passion conceit of the Armed Forces album, originally entitled Emotional Fascism? You got that the Party Girl is (like Jessica Mitford, for example) both a party girl, and a Communist Party Girl? This insight even leads the annotations on the Genius website. But y'all are way ahead of me, because I only just figured this out! Or maybe I had simply long since forgotten it.
Music
I've mostly been listening to Tom T. Hall and John Prine--I expect I'll write something about Hall in a forthcoming newsletter--and to Dolly Parton. And Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. I'm planning soon to systematically listen to Taylor Swift, at least the most recent albums, since next year I hope to teach a class entitled "Folklore." Meanwhile, while in Virginia I watched a long documentary about ABBA, which is which steeled me, on the drive back to Texas from Virginia, to listen though to the 40th anniversary edition of Armed Forces, with its ABBA-inspired arrangements. I so burned out on Elvis Costello as a teenager that I can rarely return to his oeuvre but I did quite enjoy this visit to a past vision of our dystopian future--"Accidents Will Happen."
More Books
This return to the Elvis Costello corpus was timely given that my friend Ivan Kreilkamp has just now published a monograph, A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread, about Jennifer Egan's classic novel of (post-)punk life, which I am now reading, um, for the first time, the better to enjoy Ivan's book, not that I don't often read works of literary criticism about books I haven't read. (I've always imagined that Costello's "Goon Squad" features in the book somehow, as it is the most famous punk song on the theme.) More about Egan, and thence Kreilkamp on Egan, anon! For now I can say that, a few chapters in, I am developing a formula for the novel that works up its penchant for slashes. "Smile yes/no; stop/go; go on: the Goon Squad." But I'm only just getting straight that the novel is called "A Visit from" and not "Welcome to" "the Goon Squad," it's just baby steps for me so far with this material.
Interpolated Reverie
The past. Well now, let me tell you about the past. The past is filled with--silent joys and broken toys. Laughing girls and teasing boys. Was I ever in love? I called it love. I mean, it felt like love. There were moments when; well: there were moments when.
It is amazing to me that song only peaked at #59 on the Billboard Top 100 Chart.
Old Pictures
About This Newsletter
If you stay subscribed, you'll get more of these newsletters, and can unsubscribe anytime. (I won't notice.) If you unsubscribe and want to catch up, you can do so if you've saved this email, or bookmarked the archive url above, or found the address on Facebook, or requested it from a mutual relative or friend. (A main motive of mine here is to disentangle my social network from Facebook. While I'm not opposed in principle to social media, and still hold out the utopian hope that some future platform will mediate us properly, I too fear Facebook has become a doomsday machine and so I want to circulate my updates, share my thoughts, and celebrate my tastes some other way.)
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What I'll have over here, meanwhile, will be a miscellany of updates, thoughts, pictures, and links, set out under headings that will remain more or less consistent. I hope you've enjoyed this first issue and that you'll stay on the list to receive more! And please feel free to reply to me at samtelegram@mailcan.com to tell me what you'd like me to write about, or to tell me about what's happening with you. I'm not good at keeping in touch at the best of times, much less with two little kids during a crisis, but that makes me all the happier to hear from others, and I hope you feel the same way ;)
xox
Sam