Kate's Queen City Notes

Blundering through Cincinnati, laughing all the way

Tag Archives: reading


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100 Books While 40: Interpreter of Maladies

Title: Interpreter of Maladies
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Published: 1999

What a lovely read. At our very best we are inconsistent in our dazzling displays of love and joy and humble in our weakness and quirks. Lahiri deftly reveals how just minutes of interaction can change the trajectory of one life while leaves no impression on another. The same three sentences for one is all and the other nothing.

These stories are so gorgeous. They tell stories of Indian immigrants as they negotiate their past and their futures. But more broadly they speak of how the landscape of our lives is painted in what we share with others rather than what we earn.

Read it. It’t lovely. It’s joyful, wistful, heartbreaking, funny, sweet, sad, sublime. It’s life.


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100 Book While 40: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Title: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Author: Michael Lewis
Published: 2003

We aren’t logical. Take a gander at this list. If there’s one thing this list should make plain, it’s that we often have gaps in judgement.

Baseball is a big money business. And it’s one that provides ample statistical data. And yet, this book narrates the challenges analysts had in getting baseball insiders to accept that the data tells a more accurate story than men who have spent a lifetime scouting for new players.

This idea, our failure to think logically, and our failure to acknowledge it, started swimming around my head after 9/11. While that was a terrible event, I grew puzzled that not only were citizens of the largest cities fearful of a terrorist attack but those from the most remote and sparsely populated areas were equally distressed. They weren’t just mildly concerned either. The entire population was so scared that they willingly sent even more Americans to die on bits of desert that figure in their lives in no tangible way what so ever. Not only were they behind putting our soldiers in harms way, but they also supported the extravagant 4-6 trillion dollar price tag to support this military action.

Just as a point of reference, the national debt is currently clocking in around 19 trillion. So, the wars account for about a quarter of that. With just the costs of the Iraq War alone we could have paid off half of every American’s mortgage. We could have given every American child access to preschool 40 times over. We could have installed a national light rail system 8 times over (for more shit would could have done check this page).

In retrospect, I can’t say what Americans envisioned as the outcome of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, but I am supposing living with ISIS wasn’t it. Yet even now I am hearing an alarming number of Americans advocating for more military action in the Middle East. Did we learn nothing? The apparent answer is yes.

One constant from September 11th 2001 until now is our fear. Today Americans are just as scared that they will be victims of terrorist attacks as they were then. And yet, the probability of dying in a terrorist attack is stunningly remote. We are talking on the level of lightening strike or becoming shark bait here. Yet here were are, a significant number of us want to bomb Syria.

This problem with our inability to be logical? The founders were aware, even while we continue to seem blissfully ignorant of it. The judicial branch is there to prevent the tyranny of the majority. AKA, you guys can be stupid, and not just a few of you, but MOST of you at once. Plus, there’s this from a fascinating article in The Atlantic.

The Framers worried about demagogic excess and populist caprice, so they created buffers and gatekeepers between voters and the government. Only one chamber, the House of Representatives, would be directly elected. A radical who wanted to get into the Senate would need to get past the state legislature, which selected senators; a usurper who wanted to seize the presidency would need to get past the Electoral College, a convocation of elders who chose the president; and so on.

In baseball, the data eventually won. But when I am watching Trump at the RNC tell America that we are all in danger, I am dubious of data’s power here. In the case of baseball, there are clear and expensive consequences to ignoring the data. In politics, although the consequences are even more expensive, the relationship of cause and effect is cloudy.


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100 Books While 40: Lolita

Book: Lolita
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Published: 1955

All the window dressing in the form of gorgeous prose cannot make up for the hideous plot of this book. I feel myself in a state of revulsion and appreciation at every page. It’s exhausting.

Humbert Humbert falls in love with a child, Lolita. After several self-serving actions he becomes the child’s guardian and begins an incestuous relationship with her. Eventually, she leaves him for another older man. They reconnect at some point in the future after she’s nearly an adult and married to someone close to her age. They die around the same time.

Who she is apart from the object of Humbert’s desire is never revealed. Unsavory as this was, I realized that female characters in many movies hew to exactly this role. The role is a vehicle for one of the protagonists object of desire. The revulsion I experience with the book is one that I’m just inured to in movies and TV with a minor addition of a few years.

Seeing Ghostbusters this weekend was more moving than I was expecting. Seeing four women eating, working, and kicking ass with no romantic interests felt uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable because it’s novel.

The source of my disgust isn’t the gorgeous prose and unsavory subject matter. It’s not the age of Lolita and how lecherous Humbert is. It’s that nearly all female characters are essentially Lolitas with some years, and that I am seeing that more profoundly than before.


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100 Books While 40: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Book: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
Author: Laura Hillenbrand
Published: 2014

How many times can someone starve? I am just wondering, because Louis Zamporini starts off his trip to the Japanese POW camp at less than one hundred pounds. And yet he loses another 20 pounds at least 5 or 6 times before is rescue. By my calculation Zamporini, while there are many remarkable things about the man, shockingly survived a weight of zero pounds.

Added to his miraculous weight loss, he also survived brushes with death. He barely survived it when his first plane was shot up. He barely survived when the plane nearly crashed due to holes shot through the gas tank. He barely survived when they crash landed on the deck of a air craft carrier. He barely survived when his next plan was shot down. He released his ankle in the wreckage nearly missing drowning. In his barely conscience haze after surfacing he managed to swim after and capture two life boats. He barely survived dehydration. He barely survived starvation. He barely survived insanity while lost at see. He barely survived being shot at by a Japanese plane. He barely survived circling sharks. He barely survived circling sharks attacking simultaneously with a different Japanese plane. He barely survived drowning or becoming shark food when the life rafts where shot through with bullets.  We aren’t even into the Japanese prison camp yet.

When I finally put the book down, I noticed that my empathy account was overdrawn by decades. The last twenty pages giddily wrap up the book with Louis’s conversion to Christianity, as though this is some remedy for the last 980 pages of smothering misery. It was not.

The unabridged version of this book could be improved with a thesaurus. Really, it could have used more imaginative prose. Really really, the unabridged version could have not existed at all. Or maybe someone with less talent for turning a fascinating story and an honorable man into a book painful to slog through should have authored it.


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100 Books While 40: Kitchen Confidential

Book: Kitchen Confidential
Author: Anthony Bourdain
Published: 2000

I miss the predictable rhythms of the restaurant business and the way they are made new by human quirks and foibles. Each dinner rush is the same plot just carried out by a new cast of characters. The peculiar composition of the waitstaff and the customers combine in endless ways to make each night have its own degree of efficiency and tone.

My first serving experience wrenched open my eyes to this world in unceremonious fashion. On my first day at The Old Spaghetti Factory, I got my apron, my first server book, and my first look at people, the kitchen staff to be specific, doing lines of coke. After inviting me into his office, the walk in, for my first interview, the chef invited me to have a line and to stay the fuck out of his way.

At a wide-eyed twenty, I was terrified and fascinated. And although I didn’t yet know it, that introduction to the service industry was most appropriate. Later in the evening I would have all of my family lineage insulted in a kaleidoscope of four-letter words capable of peeling the grease soaked beige paint over the grill as I learned what getting in his way meant.

The rest of the wait staff was only slightly less abusive. One of the servers appraised me one eyebrow slightly raised and flatly gave me a week and started organizing bets. In that same service I watched this same server make one of the other new hires cry over her failure to accomplish a task as basic as brewing coffee. That hire lasted until exactly that moment causing a shuffling of cash between the staff.

In that first week, I had only dreams of basic survival and reworking my budget in some way to give me time to look for a new job. But rent was due and I had no alternatives. So I did my best to work hard and avoid attracting attention.

It was somewhere in week three or four that the waitstaff bothered to learn my name. And although I initially assumed this was part of the hazing, I learned with experience that it’s more a reflection of how quickly people get and lose service jobs. At least half of the new hires would not last out their first month. With a staff of 60 people who are always in flux, it’s just a matter of economy to wait the newbies out until they’ve self sorted.

And in another month I would be thinking the rest of the staff part of my family, a weird boozy, occasionally abusive family. They would turn into the people I would call to bail me out or pick me up from the hospital. They would at once hug me fiercely and refuse to suffer a spec of my bullshit. And together we would survive the most asinine and generous extremes of customer behavior.

Kitchen Confidential had me reliving every insane, beautiful moment. I loved it. Bourdain refers to his kitchen staff as a band of pirates, this is the most apt description I have ever encountered for the weirdos who are attracted to restaurant work. They are people who for various reasons are not cut out for cubicles.

Some of them are ex-cons and don’t have access to the white collar world. Others are night owls and the discontented who eschew the confines of the nine to five. Still more are following a poorly paying passion and find waiting the most efficient way to supplement their income. Still more are steeped in gin, tattooed, and just too odd to be day walkers.

I miss that alternate reality. This book let me feel at home there once more. It reminded me that although I like what my nine to five affords me my heart belongs with the pirates.


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100 Books While 40: Little House on the Prairie

Title: Little House on the Prairie
Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder
Published: 1935

It was that Indians didn’t have a concept of land ownership that brought them to living huddled on reservations. This one thing encouraged white people to believe they were entitled to it and drove the Native people to shrug as pioneers erected their fences and structures.

The word entitlement has been seeing a lot of mileage recently. In the 80’s it was often used to deride welfare recipients. It’s been used more recently to describe the way that men behave around other people’s bodies and how they touch them with or without consent. It’s been used to describe millennials and what they expect to have.

Here’s the thing to focus on when that word is trotted out. Who has the power? Because it seems that word is used to both point to or obscure who has it. In sexual assault cases, the man involved usually has it. Welfare recipients have little to no power in the 80’s or otherwise. Here the word misdirects what would otherwise be legitimate income inequality concerns toward those with the least responsibility and power. When directed at millennials, it often functions the same. A generation of people who got full time jobs with benefits and enough income to buy a house at 21 level this at a group of new workers who will have none of those things.

The book is remarkably kind to the Native Americans, and yet completely unconscious of the land grab that was actually taking place. They rationalized that the natives weren’t using it. But I think by using it they meant farming it like they do. The natives were using it, just in a different way.

Who had the power? The people with the most guns then. Now it’s little more subtle but still pretty easy to sort out.

The remainder was an interesting look at pioneer living. Holy Moses was that rough. The next time I feel like whining about… well, almost any niggling thing in my cush life, I will swallow that feeling right down.

Here’s a link to my book list.


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100 Books While 40: Silent Spring

Title: Silent Spring
Author: Rachel Carson
Published: 1962

People with lady parts cannot science. That was the defense chemical companies launched against Rachel Carson. She’s a hysterical woman.

Rachel Carson documents the link between pesticides and bee die offs. She documents the link between pesticides and cancer. She documents the link between estrogen mimicking chemicals and lady parts cancer. This was all based on research from the 50’s.

And where are we now? Are we judicious about our use of chemicals on our food and in our water? Have we been considerate of the blunt force trauma we inflict on ecosystems when we introduce foreign chemicals and medications.

Well. There’s organic food, I suppose. There’s also a medical system that is raking in billions and billions of dollars on treating cancer. Cancer prevention doesn’t line pockets nearly as well. There’s Monsanto pumping lobbyists full of cash to buy politicians and government agents. And there’s the 80 percent of our antibiotics that are pumped into our livestock.

What had changed? We were busy making sure chemical companies made money in the 50’s. After years of data collection we still are busy making sure chemical companies make money now. Women’s words were discounted then. And women’s agency is discounted now, as evidenced by the Turner rape sentencing. What has changed?


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100 Books While 40: The Phantom Tollbooth

Title: The Phantom Tollbooth
Author: Norton Juster
Published: 1961

The world is full of beautiful, unexpected things, but they can only be seen by those who are looking. Everyday the sun rises and sets and dusts the sky with blues, purples, and oranges. And each season bestows these daily displays with subtle changes.

It’s the easiest thing to mortgage the current moment in favor for some distant future or to mourn what has passed and fail to enjoy the present. It requires effort to be here now.

Milo is awakened to a world of possibilities when a tollbooth turns up and opens him to wonder and curiosity. And every day we can make this choice. We don’t need a tollbooth.


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100 Books While 40: The Shining

Title: The Shining
Author: Stephen King
Published: 1977

I love a good story teller. And Stephen King is exactly that. Seeing this book on the list was like seeing water in the desert, because this book was sandwiched between Silent Spring and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. You know, a little light reading.

Every childhood home is capable of generating emotions and thoughts from those who came to know the world in it. The high school football stadium brings the warmth of past successes or the bitterness of past failures. Places have power and character. We know it in our lives and in our fiction. In Sex And The City New York is just as much a character as Carry Bradshaw.

This is one of Stephen King’s powers as an author. He’s capable of reaching into the places we cannot put words and tell us something of ourselves. In this case, we all respond to inanimate objects like old friends or terrible enemies.

The Overlook housed every kind of excess. All the people who have been blessed with money only to learn that real human connection remains beyond dollars and cents. And the location’s disease leech into all who inhabit it, including the young family that minds the grounds over the winter.

SPOILERS ARE ABOUT TO HAPPEN SO STOP READING NOW!!

I loved Kubrick’s take on this book. I was surprised by deviations that Kubrick made from the book. The creepy little girls beckoning to Danny were all of Kubrick’s invention. And all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy was Kubrick’s addition. As much as I enjoyed the book, I am convinced that Kubrick felt the sinister soul of this story more than the author himself.

Read the book. Watch the movie. Both or either.


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1984 or 2016?

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength – 1984 George Orwell

Permanent war as a means to distract the populace from their own dire economic situation? Hey war on terror, I see you over there. Pervasive surveillance of most human interaction? Ah, yes warrant-less wiretapping. Manipulating language to obscure the truth? This is in essence Reagan admitting to his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. Try to find it in there… go on…

Orwell suggests that a lack of privacy and choice equal a lack of freedom. The word freedom is thrown around in our politicians’ speeches and our media. Typically it is either in a self-congratulatory manner or as a trigger for fear mongering (Obama’s taking our guns!). But if freedom is choice, I would argue most of us don’t have it. And with warrant-less wire tapping and drones, I think it obvious we lost privacy years back.

Every day in America everyone who isn’t rich or on state assistance is waking, commuting, working, commuting, consuming and sleeping. The exact hours allocated to each of these activities varies, but the general structure is true for almost all of us. Is that what freedom looks like? I know almost no one who enjoys their commute. But they need the job, because they need a roof over their heads and thus need the commute.

I think it apt to replace freedom with consumer choice. Because that’s actually what we have. We get to choose if a Jeep better represents us or a Dodge. We get to choose if we like Tide better than Gain. We choose to watch (consume) Mad Men or Breaking Bad, The Ravens or The Bengals. It’s these trivial things that we’ve mistaken for freedom.

And as we zombie-walk to the 2016 elections, I reflect yet again on choice, or in this instance the illusion of choice. The media will do it’s best to ratchet up the drama as though who we elect has dramatic consequences. But what will most likely be true is as follows:

  • Both nominees will support using most of our discretionary budget for defense
  • Both nominees will change little to nothing about our general monetary policy
    • More trickle down economics
    • Continued absurd reliance on wall street AKA giant casino
    • Continued trade policy that favors exports expanding the collapse of the middle class
  • Continued monetary support for Israel
  • Continued drone strikes where ever the war on terror is deemed on any given day
  • No one will touch the trusts that exist in multiple American markets (Telecom companies, the constantly merging insurance companies, and the to-big-to-fail banks)

That list above effects every American in multiple ways. Trade policy to a large degree determines the availability of decent-paying unskilled jobs. For those of us who manage to have a retirement fund, wall street bankers are currently gambling with them. Shoving most of our discretionary spending to defense takes money away from other things, like you know, fixing our crumbling infrastructure, supporting colleges, and keeping track of what ever the fuck they were doing at the EPA office in Flint. But… go ahead and tell me again how the gays (the whole whopping 5% of the population we command) getting married is destroying everyone’s life. And quite literally, this will/is one of the things the media will go hysterical over.

Orwell botched this part. He suggests that Big Brother is able to achieve complete control of Oceana via socialism. Big Brother crucifies the capitalists, and the society that enabled them to live off the labor of the rest of the population. Orwell was so close to the real truth, which is that power only seeks to further itself and will do so regardless of the prevailing economic system. This is why 1984 will be relevant well into the future.