The Reading List - January 23rd 2021
Happy belated New Year, everyone!
I hope that all of you were able to take time to reflect on the past year and make some goals for this one. For my part, I'm probably going to keep saying "this year" until everyone I know is vaccinated.
Here are the books from December - I hope that something here catches your interest.
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
"Putting a great dish on the table is our way of celebrating the wonders of form we humans can create from this matter, this quantity of sacrificed life."
Michael Pollan's 'natural history of four meals' explores the American food industry and its alternatives in a distinctly Dantesque fashion. We begin in the abyssal depths of corn monoculture and fast food, browse through the frustrated reforms of big organic, walk along the grassy path of a mountain prophet, and hunt in the forest for still-wild gifts of nature. Pollan introduces us to his Virgils and to a host of literary and agrarian context in each realm. This book deepened my passion for cooking, and gave me new insight and attention for ingredients, seasonality, terroire, and quality.
The Island Within by Richard Nelson
"The mountain's face is constantly transformed, but there is no struggle against age, no decrepitude or senescence; and in its vanishing there will be no death. A mountain wears its time like a crown."
Richard Nelson was an American anthropologist and outdoorsman, and this book retells a series of his most meaningful visits to an untamed southwest Alaskan island. His memories are suffused by an abiding, infectious appreciation for life in all its forms and challenges - by 'making his presence a question' for the seasons, for the weather, for time itself, for the raw gifts of existence. It is also a haunting, honest attempt to make sense of the duality of life and the hardships and heartbreaks that we all experience. Why do we love people (and places) most when we cannot go to them? Why is our species willing to despoil the earth and then move on? Will Americans ever spend enough time in one place, any place, to make it meaningful? Nelson's writing is animated by a complete willingness to immerse himself in experience and to give up security elsewhere for exposure to the things he loves. This collection is a clarion call against complacency, of intellect, senses or soul.
Recommended by: Michael Pollan's Omnivores chapter on hunting references an essay called 'The Gift of Deer', which comprises the finale of this book.
"Let beliefs fade fast and frequently, if you wish institutions to remain the same. The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself."
This slim volume is an intellectual autobiography of Chesterton's own discovery of the virtues of 'Orthodoxy'. By Orthodoxy he mostly means Christianity (he was an Anglican at the time), but sometimes he seems to mean tradition in general, or vaguely atavistic conservative politics. I found that Chesterton can be withering on the attack, especially when he is being playful - if such a word can be ascribed to a man of his... heft. Yet he is often vague and allusive when defining his own positions, or explaining how the outcomes of his sorties against modernity really buttress his religious convictions.
The best essays in this book attack the leap of faith underlying pure materialism, the bad faith of pessimism, the ominous value-neutrality of desiring Progress, the enervation of intellectuals under the influence of changing ideals. Chesterton can be pleasant company even after a century, but 'Orthodoxy' conceals an unseriousness about politics and theology below its deft skewerings of contemporary ideologies.
Bonus: one of Christopher Hitchens's final pieces was a review of a Chesterton biography, which deals nicely with the broader sweep of his politics and 'paradoxes'.
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian by Wallace Stegner
"As a government scientist, Major Powell was not now defying ignorance. He was taking on vested interests and the vested prejudices by which they maintained themselves."
Wallace Stegner is one of the more thoroughly forgotten masters of twentieth-century American letters, and a particularly welcome member of my personal pantheon. He is the best novelist of the West that I have read - His 1973 [[Angle of Repose]], a story of the ambitions, dreams, loneliness, and frustrations of the Gilded Age West, and a beautiful portrait of a relationship besides, is a masterpiece. This earlier work of history proves he is an equally erudite and skilled historian, recreating the life of explorer, geologist, ethnologist, and influential government scientist John Wesley Powell, from his civil war career to the first descent of the Colorado, from the Plateau Province to the halls of power in Washington. Powell was a man who knew the West as intimately as anyone ever has, and saw, long before others admitted it, that "the West" is only united in one thing: lack of water. Stegner illustrates, with equal parts awe and despair, how prophetic and how firmly defeated his prescriptions for the arid country have proven.
The 100th Meridian runs from the Canadian Plains to West Texas, invisibly changing the constraints that govern life in 2/5ths of the continental United States. From this isotherm to the Sierra Nevadas, no region receives more than 20 inches of average annual rainfall; and below that amount, agriculture will fail without irrigation. Stegner retells how this Great American Desert was laughed away by fantastically optimistic western politicians, cynical railroad boosters, Jeffersonian political philosophers, and men around the world desperate to believe that a better life could be built somewhere else. He shows how these pushers and optimists condemned two generations and more of westerners to heartache, failure, and disappointment, before anything like Powell's plans were implemented by the Bureau of Reclamation. He shows here, in the harsh light of the high desert, what a mean-spirited farce the real West makes of the cult of Western rugged individualism.
Lakota America by Pekka Hamalainen
"Their ascendancy - call it kinetic empire - rested not on inviolate territorial control but on a horse-powered capacity to connect and exploit key strategic nodes - river valleys, prime hunting grounds, corn-yielding native villages, trading posts, Paha Sapa - which allowed them to control resources without controlling people."
Pekka Hamalainen's approach to revisionist history of the American West is enticingly simple: trace the fortunes of one particular Indigeneous people and tell their story. Place the high emotions of colorful anecdotes in cultural context; examine the conflicts which arose between alien cultures without equal respect for each's interests; do not allow any historical commonplaces (doomed way of life, primitive peoples) to color the narrative.
In his first book, Comanche Empire, he shows how that numerically small but intensely motivated nation made themselves the nexus of American, Spanish, Mexican, Texan, and Indigeneous trade, power, and territorial access for over a century. In Lakota America, he recounts the even more meteoric rise of the Seven Fires from humble Western Great Lakes people to the domineering lords of the Northern Great Plains.
To do so he lays out the constraints and conditions that could create relative opportunities and catastrophes for these peoples - the population vacuums of an Iroquois war, the brief merging of the gun and horse technological frontiers, the spread of various disease epidemics, and many others. He also has an eye for the ways that their culture shapeshifted but did not collapse through all of these challenges. In the final part of this book, discussing the actions of the US Army leading to Little Bighorn and, 14 years later, Wounded Knee, Pekka shows the chosen tragedy that the United States imposed, believing it to be inevitable.
This is a moving work of historical scholarship and re-imagination. Hamalainen is able to suspend our lazy symbolic readings of that era and re-infuse the Lakota people with contingency, agency and personhood. It is, once again, a revelation.
Bonus: I was also struck by some of the ways that we 'moderns' instinctually misinterpret numbers when we think about the past - we can sit among our hundreds of millions and struggle to comprehend the survival of a tribe that numbered 'only' about thirty thousand, but at that time they outnumbered the US Army who fought them.
Bonus II: here is a historical incident I'd never heard any inkling of: in the 1830s the US Congress passed an act and sent a mission to inoculate Plains Indians against smallpox
Other periods that this made me want to research (please drop me a recommendation if you have any): US-Mormon relations, pre-American explorers and trappers in the West, the Sioux uprising in Minnesota during the Civil War, the removal of Indians from California, the War of 1812 (especially in Canada), Jackson and his subordinates in the Southeastern Indian wars
The Poem of Force by Simone Weil
"By its very blindness, destiny establishes a kind of justice... the strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor are the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this."
Simone Weil was a French mystic and writer in the early twentieth century - she died young during WW2. In this essay she explores Homer's Iliad as the poem of Force, 'that x which turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.' Written during the escalating tensions at the beginning of the second world war, this work is deeply informed by Weil's pacifism. She repudiated her position of total neutrality shortly afterwards and spent the short remainder of her life working tirelessly for the Free French movement during the day and writing at night. Like her pacifism, I think her equanimity about all uses of force go too far; nonetheless, this essay remains a fascinating work of literary reevaluation. Weil considers the relationships between major characters of the Iliad through the lens of Force - who holds it, how do they use it, how does it use them. In her conception, force passes through men, changes their fortunes and takes their lives, without seeming to leave any wisdom: "The victor of moment feels himself invincible, even though, only a few hours before, he may have experienced defeat; he forgets to treat victory as a transitory thing."
My edition of this essay was paired with another reflection on the Iliad by Rachel Bespaloff, which is equally good. She has a grander perception than Weil of the role of tragedy, fate and violence in human affairs, and a less stringent, martyr-like sensibility of the proper good of man: "Achilles's heroism is not so breathtaking as his discontent, his marvelous ingratitude. The sport of war, the joys of pillage, the luxury of rage, the glitter of empty triumphs and mad enterprises - all these things are Achilles. Without Achilles, men would have peace; without Achilles, they would sleep on, frozen with boredom, till the planet itself grew cold."
Recommended by: Alan Jacobs in Year of Our Lord 1943
The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing
"It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. How can one know he will be able to create another to enable him to go on living?"
Doris Lessing’s debut novel is set in the arid, sun-drenched South Rhodesia of her youth. As a novel, it is unsatisfying on most levels as no character overcomes their psychological situation in this book. Yet as a piece of social observation and criticism, it is superb. The plot is driven by Mary Turner’s choice of a husband, her almost casual whipping of a laborer, and ensuing psychodrama; but the real story is of the dehumanization of a white woman by the reality of Force and the color bar.
Social organization, to enforce and profit by the color bar, is the real god of white Rhodesia. Every aspect of political power is attuned to its maintenance: "She had behind her the police, the courts, the jails; he, nothing but patience." Every aspect of society is demanded for its upkeep: "Slater had been shocked out of self-interest. It was not even pity for Dick that moved him. He was obeying the dictate of the first law of white South Africa, which is: 'thou shalt not let your fellow whites sink below a certain point." Failing to keep up the ties of class, to live large and proud regardless of financial circumstance, is felt as keenly than outright revolt - to live frugally or otherwise show a lack of appropriate hateur for your race, is to “let your side down”. Not least impressive in this novel is Lessing’s use of an ironic, half-assimilated outsider to provide a Nick Carraway-like perspective on the entire affair: an aspiring but uncorrupted white Rhodesian being schooled in what it is like to ‘get used to the country’ at the same speed as the reader.
Bonus: I love this video of a Doris Lessing learning that she's won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
That's the list! Thank you for reading. If you have a friend who you think would enjoy this, please feel free to forward it along.
Alex
These books, and those from previous lists, can be viewed or purchased here.
To check out my other writing, have a look at https://alexandermcauliffe.com
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