Melancholy Among the Cluster Flies

This summer, in an effort to save myself the expense, time, and worry, I tried to see if I could wait out the entire season without ever fixing the air conditioner in my new living space, which had been busted ever since I moved in. One of the many glorious benefits of living alone is that you can try out experiments of this sort that would be intolerable to any cohabitants -- as well as engage in the kinds of adaptation strategies that might appear odd or unacceptable to any other representatives of human society.

For a good stretch of the summer, therefore, I slept in the basement, where it was slightly cooler. (The only downside to this was my lack of blinds in the lower level -- the windows of which are about chest-level with passers-by outside -- which made for some awkward moments of near-eye contact in the morning.) For even longer, I kept all the windows open. And I nearly made it through the whole accursed three months, I tell you -- helped along by the fact that I was traveling for a good portion of it.

NAFTA, Enclosures, and the Essence of Development

Now that NAFTA is being renegotiated -- or at least, rechristened -- in part by a U.S. president who has threatened to build a wall to keep out some of that agreement's multitudinous victims (and who is threatening to upset these negotiations if Mexico does not violate international law by denying access to Central American asylum seekers at its southern border) --  this is perhaps the season to look back and remember the destruction that NAFTA has sowed in Mexico over the last two decades -- how it is linked to the very mass migration that Trump is trying to stymie -- and how this relates in turn to the broader global patterns of dispossession that lie at the heart of neoliberal capitalism.

The effects of NAFTA on U.S. manufacturing have been generally, if vaguely, acknowledged in this country -- even by the aforementioned mercurially "populist" occupant of the oval office (who, as has been observed, has said a great many things). Far less understood in this country is its more ruinous impact on Mexican agriculture.

Errata and Marginalia 003: Florence King

From the first printed lines on of Florence King's Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye, I knew I was in the presence of a kindred spirit. Not, exactly, that we have a great deal in common. She considered herself to be -- or, at least, by the mercenary divisions of print publications, got categorized as -- some sort of conservative. More precisely, as she puts it, "to the right of Baby Doc." The most precise sense in which this is so, however, is at times difficult to pinpoint, as Phyllis Schlafly, Fundamentalist Christians, and the "God 'n' Country Club" all come in for a skewering at her hands -- backed up, as in all the best wit, by a wholly earnest loathing.

Ultimately, if someone has found a way to be a 1980s right-winger while also being a sexually non-conforming bisexual despiser of family values and children, a one-time writer of pornographic "historical" bodice-rippers set in fifth century Christendom, a prophet of the "spinster" lifestyle (read: confirmed bachelorette), and a self-declared "monarchist," you know you are in the company of a sufficiently dedicated eccentric that you can forgive any and all faults -- indeed, can celebrate the faults as essential to the virtues.

Errata and Marginalia 002: Athill

*See below for explanation of this series*

All my life, I have genuinely and unforcedly enjoyed no writers so much as those who happen to be sarcastic, coldly ironical, bleakly sardonic British people. So much so that I am occasionally seized with panic at the thought that I may one day run out of them. After all, how many can there have been, in recorded history?

I take some comfort in the fact that, despite my stated preference, I have not yet chipped the merest shaving from the mordant iceberg that is Ivy Compton-Burnett. I seem, by a kind of subconscious prompting, to be saving her for later. When I know I will need it. Irony is a dish best served cold.

Errata and Marginalia 001: Hoban

I started doing these over at a different short-lived blog of mine, but since I might as well accept the fact by this point that Six Foot Turkey is the only authorial home for me -- the final and comprehensive repository of my personality -- I think I'll move the series here, as well as add the latest entry. So, here it is, entry one:

***

Phoebe Hoban’s Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (London: Quartet Books, 2015 paperback ed., 2008 second ed., 1998 original): Great, great book. In need of a final proofreader. I offer my services free of charge.

Black Water (1992) by Joyce Carol Oates: A Review

Or, "Edward Kennedy Saved from Drowning"

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Gore Vidal once declared, in a famous bit of nastiness, that the "three saddest words in the English language" are "Joyce Carol Oates." And for all the Senator's grandson could have some real sad-sack moments himself, there is something witheringly apt in the put-down. The underlying idea of Black Water -- Oates' 1992 novella about the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 involving Senator Ted Kennedy and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne (and the only Oates novel I have thus far in life attempted) -- does seem faintly philistine. Romans à clef about well-known political scandals are not likely to have much of a shelf-life (though they say some of Vidal's writings, in fairness, may not have aged much better).

David Foster Wallace's Math Book, Part I

What would possess me, of all people, to read a book about math, of all things -- even one written by David Foster Wallace? I will leave you suspended over the cliff-face of this question, while I provide some exposition to our thrilling tale. Let me reconstruct the tortured chain of madness that led me to this point.

You may recall, dear readers, that I suffered this past spring and summer from an eruption of an old malady -- my penchant for daydreaming up alternative futures for myself -- oftentimes, ones so alien to my present that they would constitute the creation of whole new personhoods, whole new lives -- even in the midst of living my own. It is the sort of habit that led me in college, every few months, to declare an increasingly improbable major. Archaeology, linguistics, premed...

Damage (1991) by Josephine Hart: A Review

Josephine Hart's Damage (New York: Open Road, 1991) is a novel of astonishing emotional power. Short enough to be read in a single day's confinement to an airplane traveling from Boston to Alaska (the circumstances in which I happened to consume it), it also lends itself well to these cramped conditions-- one's trapped existence on the plane making one feel all the more keenly the doomed claustrophobia of the protagonist, imprisoned by his own deceptions.

In outline an account of a politician who destroys his family and career through an affair with his son's fiancée, this is really not a story about public scandal, but of private disgrace. The fact that the main character happens to be a Tory MP is perhaps conditioned less by any essential role this plays in the novel's plot than the author's own connections to high Conservative circles.