Thursday, December 31, 2015

the last book I ever read (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan, excerpt ten)

from Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan:

Rural Southeast Asia, in its intense tropicality, bore a superficial resemblance to rural Polynesia. But the differences between the two regions were far more pronounced. Vast civilizations had risen here on the surplus created by rice-based agriculture. Hundreds of millions of people lived and jostled here, in incomprehensibly complex caste societies. I took to interviewing people, semiformally—it was an odd thing to do, with no particular project in mind, but I was curious and they often seemed pleased to be asked—about their family histories, income, prospects, hopes. A rice farmer near Jogjakarta, who was a retired army captain, gave me a detailed account of his career, his farm’s operating expenses, his oldest son’s progress at university. Across nearly every story I heard, however, a thick veil fell around the period of 1965-55, when more than half a million Indonesians were killed in massacres led by the military and Islamic clerics. The main targets had been communists and alleged communists, but ethnic Chinese and Christians had also died or been dispossessed en masse. The Suharto dictatorship that emerged from the bloodbath was still in power, and the massacres were suppressed history, not taught in schools or publicly discussed. A pedal-taxi driver in Padang, a port city in western Sumatra, told me quietly about spending years in prison as a suspected leftist. He had been a professor before the great purge. He liked Americans, but the American government, he said, had aided and applauded the killing.



Wednesday, December 30, 2015

the last book I ever read (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan, excerpt nine)

from Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan:

Bryan turned thirty while we were camped there. He only told me about it later. I was a bit stunned. It seemed like such a strange keep. Or maybe “secret” was the wrong word. It was just silence, really, a form of privacy, a refusal of some obvious, conventional sentiment, and as such, very Bryan. For all the intensity of our friendship, and despite our now constant companionship, I always felt, in some basic way, shut out. Was it me in particular, or the world in general, that he seemed to keep his guard up against habitually? The old-school masculinity that so many people, including me, found attractive carried with it no small loneliness. Then Bryan double-surprised me by saying that he could not think of a better way to spend his thirtieth birthday: surfing good waves at an unmapped spot in the South Seas, gone from the known world.



Tuesday, December 29, 2015

the last book I ever read (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan, excerpt eight)

from Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan:

“It looks good,” Bryan said. “You look like a really liberal priest.”

He was talking about my beard, which had become increasingly scruffy. But of course he was talking about more than that, I thought. We were starting to get on each other’s nerves. Moving through unfamiliar worlds, we carried a world together, full of shared understandings, into which we could retreat. But it was crowded in there, with two big egos jostling. We were so dependent on each other, so constantly together, that any little different chafed and inflamed. I found myself copying into my journal a passage from Anna Karenina about Oblonsky and Levin and their strained friendship. Was Bryan smiling ironically at me? I thought so, and I took little gibes like that priest remark too much to heart.



Monday, December 28, 2015

the last book I ever read (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan, excerpt seven)

from Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan:

Our neighbors at Kobatake’s were a rowdy, dope-smoking crew, prone to skateboarding in the hall, loud music, and louder sex. They seemed to be constantly playing Sly and the Family Stone; I would never enjoy the band’s albums again. I embarrassed Caryn by frequently flying out of our room, book in hand, to glare at noisy debauchees. Actually, I didn’t now then that she was embarrassed. She only told me years later. She even showed me her journal, and there I am, “our fervent scholar” sticking my “crazed head out in the hall” and causing her “endless chagrin.” I didn’t mind being disliked, but she did—yet another inconvenient point I didn’t trouble to notice.



Sunday, December 27, 2015

the last book I ever read (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan, excerpt six)

from Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan:

I took to surfing Harbor Mouth in the black of night, after work. The tide had to be high, and the swell good-sized, and a moon could help. Even so, it was a fairly insane thing to do. It was basically surfing blind. And I usually wasn’t the only one trying to do it. But I thought I knew the break so well, after a while, that I could feel—from the shadows, from the pull of the current—where to be, which way to go, what to do. I was often wrong, and spent a great deal of time hunting for my lost board in the shallows. That was the reason it had to be high tide. The lagoon inside Harbor Mouth was broad and shallow, with sharp coral covered with cruel sea urchins. In daylight I knew the little rivulets in the reef that one could float down, eyes open underwater, chest full of air for maximum floatation, skimming over the purple urchin spines, even at lower tides, in pursuit of a lost board. At night, however, one could see nothing underwater. And a search for the faint glistening ellipse of one’s board, bobbing in the lagoon among all the bathtub chop dancing in the glare from the seafront streetlights, could take a while different type of eternity from the one glimpsed in the tube. Giving up was not an option, though. I had only one board, and I always found it.



Saturday, December 26, 2015

the last book I ever read (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan, excerpt five)

from Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan:

I did go out for the track team, strangely, in the tenth grade, competing as a pole vaulter. Vaulters formed a little team within the team. The coaches knew little about vaulting, and were not about to risk their necks trying to demonstrate good technique. So we basically taught ourselves. We were excused from the grueling fitness drills the rest of the team performed, and our practices, we were often told, bore an unfortunate resemblance to long, lazy bull sessions. It was something about the vast amounts of lounging we did on the big foam-filled turquoise cushions that served as pits. Vaulting was a glory sport in those days, and vaulters were considered prima donnas. In fact, the flashy, antiauthoritarian vaulters were suspiciously regarded, often with reason, by the coaches and their more loyal athletes as Thoreau-reading, dope-smoking, John Carlos-loving hippies. I loved vaulting—the smooth upward snap and twist when you got the pole-plant right (not the rule with me), the never-long-enough moment when you threw back your arms, flicking the pole back the way you came, at the apex of the vault. But I did not go out for track again the next year.



Thursday, December 24, 2015

the last book I ever read (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan, excerpt four)

from Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan:

Steve Painter also helped turn me toward surfing. His interest was unrelated to the old-school involvement with the ocean of people like the Beckets—or, for that matter, the Kaulukukuis. It derived instead from the fad that had swept America a few years before—the Gidget movies and their spin-offs, surf music, surf fashion. Large numbers of kids on both coasts had bought boards and started surfing. Magazines, particularly Surfer, had become the main conduit of the surf subculture’s self-celebration, and Painter and his junior-high friends read the mags avidly and talked, with increasing authority, in the new language they found there. Everything was “bitchen” or “boss” and anyone they didn’t esteem was a “kook” (an insult usually reserved for an incompetent surfer—the term derives from kuk, a Hawaiian word for excrement).



Wednesday, December 23, 2015

the last book I ever read (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan, excerpt three)

from Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan:

I made it over the set, which had four or five waves. It was a close enough thing that I went airborne over the top of at least one, and was drenched with offshore spray by each of them, and I was shaken to the core by the sound of the waves detonating a few yards behind me. I was convinced that if I had been caught inside, I would have died. This conviction was a first for me. This was the fear line that made surfing different, here underscored extra-heavily. I felt like Pip, the cabin boy in Moby-Dick who falls overboard and is rescued but loses his mind, undone by visions of the ocean’s infinite malice and indifference. I paddled far, far around the Rice Bowl reef, on the Tonggs side, light-headed, humiliated, back to shore.



Tuesday, December 22, 2015

the last book I ever read (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan, excerpt two)

from Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan:

But surfing always had this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sports I know. You could do it with friends, but when the waves got big, or you got into trouble, there never seemed to be anyone around.

Everything out there was disturbingly interlaced with everything else. Waves were the playing field. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wilderness—a dynamic, indifferent world. At thirteen, I had mostly stopped believing in God, but that was a new development, and it had left a hole in my world, a feeling that I’d been abandoned. The ocean was like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure.



Monday, December 21, 2015

the last book I ever read (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan, excerpt one)

from Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan:

I had been surfing for three years by the time my father got the job that took us to Hawaii. He had been working, mostly as an assistant director, in series television—Dr. Kildare, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Now he was the production manager on a new series, a half-hour musical variety show based on a local radio program, Hawaii Calls. The idea was to shoot Don Ho singing in a glass-bottomed boat, a calypso band by a waterfall, hula girls dancing while a volcano spewed, and call it a show. “It won’t be the Hawaiian Amateur Hour,” my father said. “But close.”



Sunday, December 20, 2015

the last book I ever read (A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara, excerpt twelve)

from A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara:

Also that week, the things you like anyway seem, in their very existence, to be worthy of celebration: the candied-walnut vendor on Crosby Street who always returns your wave as you jog past him; the falafel sandwich with extra pickled radish from the truck down the block that you woke up craving one night in London; the apartment itself, with its sunlight that lopes from one end to the other in the course of a day, with your things and food and bed and shower and smells.



Saturday, December 19, 2015

the last book I ever read (A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara, excerpt eleven)

from A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara:

He thinks it is a good sign that the film Willem is shooting in London now is, as Kit would say, a gay film. “Normally I’d say not to,” Kit told Willem. “But it’s too good a script to pass up.” The film is titled The Poisoned Apple, and is about the last few years of Alan Turing’s life, after he was arrested for indecency and was chemically castrated. He idolized Turing, of course—all mathematicians did—and had been moved almost to tears by the script. “You have to do it, Willem,” he had said.



Friday, December 18, 2015

the last book I ever read (A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara, excerpt ten)

from A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara:

He remembered a conversation he’d had with Robin when he had been preparing to shoot The Odyssey and was rereading it and The Iliad, neither of which he had looked at since he was a freshman in college. This was when they had first begun dating, and were both still trying to impress each other, when a sort of giddiness was derived from deferring to the other’s expertise. “What’re the most overrated lines from the poem?” he’d asked, and Robin had rolled her eyes and recited: “’We have still not reached the end of our trials. One more labor lies in store—boundless, laden with danger, great and long, and I must brave it out from start to finish.’” She made some retching noises. “So obvious. And somehow, that’s been co-opted by every losing football team in the country as their pregame rallying cry,” she added, and he’d laughed. She looked at him, slyly. “You played football,” she said. “I’ll be those’re your favorite lines as well.”

“Absolutely not,” he’d said, in mock outrage. This was part of their game that wasn’t always a game: he was the dumb actor, the dumber jock, and she was the smart girl who went out with him and taught him what he didn’t know.



Thursday, December 17, 2015

the last book I ever read (A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara, excerpt nine)

from A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara:

It was August; the city was empty. Malcolm was in Sweden on holiday with Sophie; Richard was in Capri; Rhodes was in Maine; Andy was on Shelter Island (“Remember,” he’d said before he left, as he always said before a long vacation, “I’m just two hours away; you need me, and I catch the next ferry back”). He couldn’t bear to be around Harold, whom he couldn’t see without being reminded of his debasement; he called and told him he had too much work to go to Truro. Instead he spontaneously bought a ticket to Paris and spent the long, lonely Labor Day weekend there, wandering the streets by himself. He didn’t contact anyone he knew there—not Citizen, who was working for a French bank, or Isidore, his upstairs neighbor from Hereford Street, who was teaching there, or Phaedra, who had taken a job as the director of a satellite of a New York gallery—they wouldn’t have been in the city anyway.



Wednesday, December 16, 2015

the last book I ever read (A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara, excerpt eight)

from A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara:

They start walking south, first veering east from Broadway so they won’t have to cross through Times Square. Willem’s hair has been colored dark for his next role, and he has a beard, so he’s not instantly recognizable, but neither of them want to get stuck in a scrum of tourists.

This is the last time he will see Willem for what will likely be more than six months. On Tuesday, he leaves for Cyprus to begin work on The Iliad and The Odyssey; he will play Odysseus in both. The two films will be shot consecutively and released consecutively, but they will have the same cast and the same director, too. The shoot will take him all across southern Europe and northern Africa before moving to Australia, where some of the battle scenes are being shot, and because the pace is so intense and the distances he has to travel so far, it’s unclear whether he’ll have much time, if any, to come home on breaks. It is the most elaborate and ambitious shoot Willem has been on, and he is nervous. “It’s going to be incredible, Willem,” he reassures him.



Tuesday, December 15, 2015

the last book I ever read (A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara, excerpt seven)

from A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara:

It’s often the most naturally intelligent students who have the most difficult time in their first year—law school, particularly the first year of law school, is really not a place where creativity, abstract thought, and imagination are rewarded. In this way, I often think—based upon what I’ve heard, not what I know firsthand—that it’s a bit like art school.



Monday, December 14, 2015

the last book I ever read (A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara, excerpt six)

from A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara:

We had met in New York, where I was in law school and she was in medical school, and after graduating, I got a clerkship in Boston, and she (one year older than I) started her internship. She was training to be an oncologist. I had been admiring of that, of course, because of what it suggested: there is nothing more soothing than a woman who wants to heal, whom you imagine bent maternally over a patient, her lab coat white as clouds. But Liesl didn’t want to be admired: she was interested in oncology because it was one of the harder disciplines, because it was thought to be more cerebral. She and her fellow oncological interns had scorn for the radiologists (too mercenary), the cardiologist (too puffed-up and pleased with themselves), the pediatricians (too sentimental), and especially the surgeons (unspeakably arrogant) and the dermatologists (beneath comment, although they of course worked with them frequently). They liked the anesthesiologists (weird and geeky and fastidious, and prone to addiction), the pathologists (even more cerebral than they), and—well, that was about it. Sometimes a group of them would come over to our house, and would linger after dinner discussing cases and studies, while their partners—lawyers and historians and writers and lesser scientists—were ignored until we slunk off to the living room to discuss the various trivial, less-interesting things with which we occupied our days.



Sunday, December 13, 2015

the last book I ever read (A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara, excerpt five)

from A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara:

After the judge left, he would grin across the room at Thomas, who would raise his eyes upward in a gesture of helplessness and apology. Thomas was a conservative, too, but “a thinking conservative,” he’d remind him, “and the fact that I ever have to make that distinction is f*cking depressing.

He and Thomas had started clerking for the judge the same year, and when he had been approached by the judge’s informal search committee—really, his Business Associations professor, with whom the judge was old friends—the spring of his second year of law school, it had been Harold who had encouraged him to apply. Sullivan was known among his fellow circuit court judges for always hiring one clerk whose political views diverged from his own, the more wildly, the better. (His last liberal law clerk had gone on to work for a Hawaiian rights sovereignty group that advocated for the islands’ secession from the United States, a career move that had sent the judge into a fit of apopletic self-satisfaction.)



Saturday, December 12, 2015

the last book I ever read (A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara, excerpt four)

from A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara:

Aside from their stage-door visits, it felt like he never saw Willem these days, and for all Willem talked about how lazy he was, it seemed he was constantly at work, or trying to work: three years ago, on his twenty-ninth birthday, he had sworn that he was going to quit Ortolan before he turned thirty, and two weeks before his thirtieth birthday, the two of them had been in the apartment, squashed into their newly partitioned living room, Willem worrying about whether he could actually afford to leave his job, when he got a call, the call he had been waiting for for years. The play that had resulted from that call had been enough of a success, and had gotten Willem enough attention, to allow him to quit Ortolan for good thirteen months later: just one year past his self-imposed deadline. He had gone to see Willem’s play—a family drama called The Malamud Theorem, about a literature professor in the early throes of dementia, and his estranged son, a physicist—five times, twice with Malcolm and JB, and once with Harold and Julia, who were in town for the weekend, and each time he managed to forget that it was his old friend, his roommate, onstage, and at curtain call, he had felt both proud and wistful, as if the stage’s very elevation announced Willem’s ascendancy to some other realm of life, one not easily accessible to him.



Friday, December 11, 2015

the last book I ever read (A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara, excerpt three)

from A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara:

He liked to pretend he was one of them, but he knew he was not. Sometimes there would be Haitians on the train, and he—his hearing, suddenly wolflike, distinguishing from the murmur around him the slurpy, singy sound of their Creole—would find himself looking toward them, to the two men with round faces like his father’s, or to the two women with soft snubbed noses like his mother’s. He always hoped that he might be presented with a completely organic reason to speak to them—maybe they’d be arguing about directions somewhere, and he might be able to insert himself and provide the answer—but there never was. Sometimes they would let their eyes scan across the seats, still talking to each other, and he would tense, ready his face to smile, but they never seemed to recognize him as one of their own.

Which he wasn’t, of course. Even he knew he had more in common with Asian Henry Young, with Malcolm, with Willem, or even with Jude, than he had with them. Just look at him: at Court Square he disembarked and walked the three blocks to the former bottle factory where he now shared studio space with three other people. Did real Haitians have studio space? Would it even occur to real Haitians to leave their large rent-free apartment, where they could have theoretically carved out their own corner to paint and doodle, only to get on a subway and travel half an hour (think how much work could be accomplished in those thirty minutes!) to a sunny dirty space? No, of course not. To conceive of such a luxury, you needed an American mind.



Thursday, December 10, 2015

the last book I ever read (A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara, excerpt two)

from A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara:

At five p.m. every weekday and at eleven a.m. every weekend, JB got on the subway and headed for his studio in Long Island City. The weekday journey was his favorite: He’d board at Canal and watch the train fill and empty at each stop with an ever-shifting mix of different peoples and ethnicities, the car’s population reconstituting itself every ten blocks or so into provocative and improbable constellations of Poles, Chinese, Koreans, Senegalese; Senegalese, Dominicans, Indians, Pakistanis; Pakistanis, Irish, Salvadorans, Mexicans; Mexicans, Sri Lankans, Nigerians, and Tibetans—the only thing uniting them being their newness to America and their identical expressions of exhaustion, that blend of determination and resignation that only the immigrant possesses.



Wednesday, December 9, 2015

the last book I ever read (A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara, excerpt one)

from A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara:

As they walked downtown, JB complained. So far, he had concentrated most of his seductive energies on a senior editor named Dean, who they all called DeeAnn. They had been at a party, the three of them, held at one of the junior editor’s parents’ apartment in the Dakota, in which art-hung room bled into art-hung room. As JB talked with his coworkers in the kitchen, Malcolm and Willem had walked through the apartment together (Where had Jude been that night? Working, probably), looking at a series of Edward Burtynskys hanging in the guest bedroom, a suite of water towers by the Bechers mounted in four rows of five over the desk in the den, an enormous Gursky floating above the half bookcases in the library, and, in the master bedroom, an entire wall of Diane Arbuses, covering the space so thoroughly that only a few centimeters of blank wall remained at the top and bottom. They had been admiring a picture of two sweet-faced girls with Down syndrome playing for the camera in their too-tight, too-childish bathing suits, when Dean had approached them. He was a tall man, but he had a small, gopher, pockmarked face that made him appear feral and untrustworthy.

They introduced themselves, explained that they were here because they were JB’s friends. Dean told them that he was one of the senior editors at the magazine, and that he handled all the arts coverage.

“Ah,” Willem said, careful not to look at Malcolm, whom he did not trust not to react. JB had told them that he had targeted the arts editor as his potential mark; this must be him.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Dean asked them, waving a hand at the Arbuses.

“Never,” Willem said. “I love Diane Arbus.”

Dean stiffened, and his little features seemed to gather themselves into a knot in the center of his little face. “It’s DeeAnn.”

“What?”

“DeeAnn. You pronounce her name ‘DeeAnn.’”



Tuesday, December 8, 2015

the last book I ever read (Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, excerpt eleven)

from Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell:

Nowadays, Lafayette is a place, not a person. Lafayette is a boulevard in Phoenix, a Pennsylvania college, and a bridge across the Mississippi in St. Paul. It’s the Alabama birthplace of boxer Joe Louis and three different towns in Wisconsin—four if Fayette counts. If so, then it’s also Fayette County, which the Chicken Ranch, better known as the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, put on the map. It is without question Lafayette, Indiana, where the founders of both C-SPAN and Guns N’ Roses were born.

When I bumped into an old neighbor whilst visiting my Montana hometown, she asked me what I was working on, and I answered a book about Lafayette. So she inquired if I would be spending a lot of time in Louisiana. I was confused, wondering if she forgot that Thomas Jefferson decided against his initial impulse of appointing Lafayette as the former French colony’s first governor after the Louisiana Purchase. Then I realized that the city of Lafayette, Louisiana, must be her go-to Lafayette-labeled noun—even though from Montana it’s actually a closer drive to Lafayette, Utah, not to mention the ones in Oregon, California, Kansas, and Colorado. So I explained that I meant Lafayette the French teenager who crossed the Atlantic on his own dime to volunteer to fight with George Washington in the Revolutionary War. Therefore, I said, I was more likely to visit Pennsylvania, where he got shot. She nevertheless professed her fondness for zydeco.



Monday, December 7, 2015

the last book I ever read (Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, excerpt ten)

from Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell:

It’s how I originally got onto the topic of Lafayette in the first place. Representative Ginny Brown-Waite of Florida sponsored a bill called the American Heroes Repatriation Act of 2003. Intended to finance digging up the remains of U.S. war casualties buried in French cemeteries and reinterring them over here, the bill went nowhere. “The remains of our brave servicemen should be buried in patriotic soil, not in a country that has turned its back on the United States and on the memory of Americans who fought and died there,” Brown-Waite told the New York Times. “It’s almost as if the French have forgotten what those thousands of white crosses at Normandy represent.”

Not long after reading that, I happened to be in the Berkshire Mountains to attend a wedding and stopped in at Arrowhead, the house where Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick. I was struck by a tiny silk dress in a glass display case, said to be what Melville’s wife, Elizabeth Knapp Shaw Melville, was wearing as a two-year-old in 1824 when she was presented to the Marquis de Lafayette on his visit to Boston. That was when I started researching Lafayette’s return to America. If the French had forgotten America’s help in World War II—and they had not; they just opposed a preemptive war in the Middle East based on faulty intelligence that most Americans would end up regretting anyway—it seemed obvious that Americans had forgotten France’s help in our war for independence in general and the national obsession with Lafayette in particular. A fixation symbolized by a family hanging on to a little girl’s dress for generations because she was wearing it when she met him, an event Elizabeth Melville herself probably had no memory of.



Sunday, December 6, 2015

the last book I ever read (Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, excerpt nine)

from Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell:

On July 6, more than four thousand forces of the French Royal Army arrived from Rhode Island at Washington’s camp on the Hudson, poised to help the Americans invade some still-to-be-determined British stronghold.

As if stepping out of a Tchaikovsky ballet directed by Wes Anderson, the French soldiers wore plumed black hats and white on white, brightening their snowy leggings and jackets with pops of color on their lapels—their sometimes pink lapels. As opposed to their earthier allies, who were dressed, if they were dressed, in ripped and rotting homespun like zombie Tom Joads. Baron Ludwig von Closen, one of Rochambeau’s staff officers, pitied the Continentals: “It is really painful to see these brave men, almost naked.”



Saturday, December 5, 2015

the last book I ever read (Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, excerpt eight)

from Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell:

“My knowledge of his personal courage led me to expect that he would decide to blow his brains out,” Lafayette wrote of Benedict Arnold. No such luck. In fact, the newly minted British brigadier general was alive and well and commanding a Loyalist regiment in Portsmouth, Virginia. Washington ordered Lafayette to lead a division of New England and New Jersey light infantrymen to meet up with General Steuben in Virginia and, with the help of French forces sailing down from Newport, corner the traitor, then hang him.

The lack of funds made the trek south with twelve hundred men, many of them shoeless, extra arduous. Lafayette’s most annoying qualities—being a single-minded suck-up prone to histrionic correspondence—made him a first-rate advocate for his men. He charmed one city after another out of food and supplies. In Philadelphia he talked the new French ambassador into springing for flour and pork and convinced a bankrupt Congress to cough up some rum money.



Friday, December 4, 2015

the last book I ever read (Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, excerpt seven)

from Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell:

D’Estaing’s timidity could be explained by simple lack of experience, especially when he was compared with Black Dick Howe, the human sea shanty he was up against. The older brother of the recently departed commander in chief General Sir William, Admiral Lord Richard Howe joined the Royal Navy at thirteen. Andrew O’Shaughnessy writes in The Men Who Lost America, “Howe pioneered the naval code of practice for amphibious warfare, in which the navy transported and gave logistical support to the army in beachhead landings.” Theory and practice—Howe was the whole package. Despite the superior size and firepower of the French fleet, d’Estaing would have been insane not to dread him.

D’Estaing hailed from Lafayette’s birthplace, Auvergne—a landlocked province that did not scream maritime potential. The presence of his fellow Auvergnat seemed to amplify Lafayette’s homesickness, perhaps reminding him of Britain’s role in his fatherless boyhood at Chavaniac. He egged on d’Estaing: “May you defeat them, sink them to the bottom, lay them as low as they have been insolent; may you begin the great work of their destruction by which we shall trample upon their nation; may you prove to them at their expense what a Frenchman, and a Frenchman from Auvergne, can do.”



Thursday, December 3, 2015

the last book I ever read (Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, excerpt six)

from Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell:

Lee had recently been returned to the Continentals at Valley Forge through a prisoner exchange. He was, technically, Washington’s second in command. The two had served together in the French and Indian War. An Englishman hailing from Cheshire, Lee spent nearly twenty years as an officer in His Majesty’s army before retiring and settling in Virginia in 1773. The more experienced Lee had expected the Continental Congress to appoint him commander in chief of the Continental Army back in ’75. He never really got over Washington getting the job instead. In 1776 Washington had one of the Continentals’ Hudson River forts renamed after him, which is how the city of Fort Lee, New Jersey, got its name.



Wednesday, December 2, 2015

the last book I ever read (Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, excerpt five)

from Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell:

Franklin, knowing how much courtesy mattered at court, flattered the king, “If all monarchies were governed by the principle which are in your heart, Sire, republics would never be formed.”

I reread the previous tricky sentence at least thirty-eight times, and I still can’t decide if Franklin actually meant it, considering the principles in Louis XVI’s heart had more to do with sticking it to the British for snatching Quebec from his grandfather. What is obvious is that the patriots lucked out having a cagey old pro like Franklin doing their bidding chez Louis. What a relief that our first official diplomat knew a thing or two about being diplomatic, considering that back home Steuben was lecturing the inexperienced recruits at Valley Forge about how that pointy knife thing attached to their musket barrels was more than just a skewer to barbecue kebabs.



Tuesday, December 1, 2015

the last book I ever read (Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, excerpt four)

from Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell:

Oddly enough, the most historically detailed presentation during the festivities is the Penn’s Woods Puppet Theater’s presentation of Lafayette’s biography in puppetry form. Sitting on hay bales with the under-ten set, I am impressed with how many facts they cram in. The Lafayette puppet, who has a high-pitched Monsieur Bill sort of voice, steps on the Marie Antoinette puppet’s feet on the dance floor at Versailles, listens to the Duke of Gloucester puppet talk smack about his brother George III, abandons his puppet wife, gets bitten by mosquitos in South Carolina, fights in the revolution, and becomes, according to the Washington puppet, “the son I never had.” All pretty accurate except for when the Beast of Gévaudan puppet lip-synchs “If I Only Had a Brain” from The Wizard of Oz, which is a crowd-pleaser thanks to its absence of fifes.



Monday, November 30, 2015

the last book I ever read (Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, excerpt three)

from Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell:

Maybe it’s because I’m a nonbeliever who used to work in radio, but the one Quaker meeting I had been to, at Arch Street Friends in Philadelphia, was like listening to a whole lot of room tone. I sat there for two hours and no one said a thing. Or rather I thought it had been two hours when in fact I lasted precisely fourteen minutes. Not because it was boring, but because it was the opposite of boring—tense, in fact. At one point I crossed my legs and the sound of denim on denim was so loud, my knees seemed to be plugged into some imaginary amp. Which did make me appreciate how growing up in this hushed Quaker atmosphere could make a person denounce war for purely acoustic reasons. If the noise of one antsy visitor squirming in her seat was that jarring, how evil must actual gunfire sound? In the meeting, I found myself wishing for something interesting to listen to that might also drown out the ambient sneezes, as well as something we could all look at to avoid the awkward eye contact. I left when I realized that sort of communal spiritual experience does exist. It’s called the movies.



Sunday, November 29, 2015

the last book I ever read (Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, excerpt two)

from Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell:

Just as he was dead-on about the eventual stability of America’s postwar government and the dangers of colonial powers ignoring colonists’ understandable desire for independence, Turgot turned out to be correct regarding this chilling prophecy: “War we ought to shun as the greatest of evils, since it will render impossible for a very long time, and perhaps forever, the reform which is absolutely necessary for the prosperity of the State and for the relief of the people.”

In other words, every cent the French government spent on guns for the Americans was another centime it would not have to spend on butter for the starving peasants who would one day storm Versailles.



Saturday, November 28, 2015

the last book I ever read (Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, excerpt one)

from Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell:

The thing that drew me to Lafayette as a subject—that he was that rare object of agreement in the ironically named United States—kept me coming back to why that made him unique. Namely, that we the people have never agreed on much of anything. Other than a bipartisan consensus on barbecue and Meryl Streep, plus that time in 1942 when everyone from Bing Crosby to Oregonian schoolchildren heeded FDR’s call to scrounge up rubbed for the war effort, disunity is the through line in the national plot—not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people’s privilege. And thanks to Lafayette and his cohorts in Washington’s army, plus the king of France and his navy, not to mention the founding dreamers who clearly did not think through what happens every time one citizen’s pursuit of happiness infuriates his neighbors, getting on each other’s nerves is our right.



Tuesday, November 24, 2015

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt ten)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

The train curved toward them from a distance, almost the same shade of gray as the darkened air it moved through, and a number of cars flashed past before it shrieked to a stop. There didn’t appear to be a quiet car, as far as Denny could tell. He boarded through the nearest door and chose the first empty seat, next to a teenage boy in a leather jacket, because he knew he had no hope of sitting by himself. First he heaved his luggage into the overhead rack, and only then did he ask, “This seat taken?” The boy shrugged and looked away from him, out the window. Denny dropped into his seat and slipped his ticket from his inside breast pocket.

Always that “Ahh” feeling when you settle into place, finally. Always followed, in a matter of minutes, by “How soon can I get out of here?” But for now, he felt completely, gratefully at rest.



Monday, November 23, 2015

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt nine)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

Years ago, when the children were small, Abby had started a tradition of hanging a row of ghosts down the length of the front porch every October. There were six of them. Their heads were made of white rubber balls tied up in gauzy white cheesecloth, which trailed nearly to the floor and wafted in the slightest breeze. The whole front of the house took on a misty, floating look. On Halloween the trick-or-treaters would have to bat their way through diaphanous veils, the older ones laughing but the younger ones on the edge of panic, particularly if the night was windy and the cheesecloth was lifting and writhing and wrapping itself around them.



Sunday, November 22, 2015

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt eight)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

Sawyer Road took so long to show up, he started worrying he had passed it. He could have sworn it was closer. He crossed to the other side of the pavement so he’d be sure not to miss it, although the other side was low-growth fields and he would be easier to spot there. He heard a fluttering overhead and then the hoot of an owl, which for some reason struck him as comforting.

Much, much later than he had expected, he came across the narrow pale band of Sawyer Road and he turned onto it. The gravel was vicious, but he had stopped bothering to mince as he walked. He trudged heavily, obstinately, taking a peculiar pleasure in the thought that the soles of his feet must be cut to ribbons.



Saturday, November 21, 2015

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt seven)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

“Well, I tell Redcliffe, I say, ‘Whatever you do in life, do your best. I don’t care if it’s hauling trash, you do it the best it’s ever been done,’ I say. ‘Take pride in it.’ Getting fired? It’s a black mark on your record forever. It’ll hang around to haunt you.”



Friday, November 20, 2015

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt six)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

Mr. Whitshank was holding forth on Billie Holiday. She had died a couple of days before and Mr. Whitshank couldn’t see why people were so cut up about it. “Always sounded to me like she couldn’t hold on to a note,” he said. “Her voice would go slippy-slidey and sometimes she’d mislay the tune.” He had a way of rotating his face slowly from one side of the table to the other as he spoke, so as to include all his listeners. Abby felt like some sort of disciple hanging on her master’s every word, which she suspected was his purpose. Then she altered her vision—she was good at that—and imagined she was sitting at a table of threshers or corn pickers or such, one of those old-time harvest gatherings, and this cheered her up. When she had a home of her own, she wanted it to be just as expansive and welcoming as the Whitshanks’, with strays dropping by for meals and young people talking on the porch. Her parents’ house felt so close; the Whitshanks’ house felt open. No thanks to Mr. Whitshank. But wasn’t that always the way? It was the woman who set the tone.



Thursday, November 19, 2015

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt five)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

“I guess Merrick must be feeling kind of tense these days,” Abby said after a moment.

“Oh, no, that’s just how she is,” Mrs. Whitshank said cheerfully. She had finished slicing the okra. She stirred the slices around in the milk, using a slotted spoon. “She was a snippy little girl and now she’s a snippy big girl,” she said. “Nothing much I can do about it.” She began transferring the okra slices to the cornmeal mixture. “Sometimes,” she said, “it seems to me there’s just these certain types of people that come around and around in our lives, know what I mean? Easy types and hard types; we run into them over and over. Merrick’s always put me in mind of my granny Inman. Disapproving kind of woman; tongue like a rasp. She never did think much of me. You, now, you’re a sympathizer, same as my aunt Louise.”

“Oh,” Abby said. “Yes, I see what you’re saying. It’s kind of like reincarnation.”

Mrs. Whitshank said, “Well …”



Wednesday, November 18, 2015

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt four)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

Red told his sons that he’d heard somewhere that after a man’s wife dies, he should switch to her side of the bed. Then he’d be less likely to reach out for her in the night by mistake. “I’ve been experimenting with that,” he told them.

“How’s it working?” Denny asked.

“Not so very well, so far. Seems like even when I’m asleep, I keep remembering she’s not there.”



Tuesday, November 17, 2015

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt three)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

This porch was not just long but deep—the depth of a smallish living room. In her early years here, when she was a gung-ho young housewife, she had ordered an entire suite of wicker furniture varnished the same honey-gold as the swing—a low table, a settee, and two armchairs—and arranged them in a circular “conversational group” at one end of the porch. But nobody wanted to sit facing away from the street, and so gradually the chairs had migrated to either side of the settee and people once again sat in a straight line gazing outward, not at each other, like passengers on a steamship deck. Abby thought that summed up her role in this family. She had her notions, her ideas of how things ought to be, but everyone proceeded as he or she liked, regardless.



Monday, November 16, 2015

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt two)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they’d felt all those years?



Sunday, November 15, 2015

the last book I ever read (Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, excerpt one)

from A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel by Anne Tyler:

She jumped up from the bed and started pacing back and forth, up and down the Persian runner that was worn nearly white in the middle from all the times she had paced it before. This was an attractive room, spacious and well designed, but it had the comfortably shabby air of a place whose inhabitants had long ago stopped seeing it.



Saturday, November 14, 2015

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt fourteen)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

After Eleanor Ward refused to show his aluminum sculptures in 1959, Noguchi remained determined to exhibit this body of work. New York’s prestigious Knoedler Gallery offered to show them in spring 1961. To get his sculptures ready, Noguchi decided to take them to Troy, Ohio, to have them anodized. When Priscilla heard about his plan she said, “IF you are driving West, I’m going with you.” Noguchi tried to dissuade her but Priscilla could think of nothing better than to accompany the man she loved on a road trip, and eventually persuaded him. Noguchi wrapped his aluminum sculptures carefully and packed them into a rented truck. Priscilla remembers he wore a beret and drove too fast on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He was not a good driver. A trooper stopped them, but he turned out to be a Nisei, so after a bit of conversation he let Noguchi off with a warning. The next fracas happened when they arrived at the motel where they would spend the night and Noguchi, forgetting that he was driving a truck, drove right into the building’s overhang. Priscilla played peacemaker with the angry motel owner.



Friday, November 13, 2015

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt thirteen)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

The creation of a studio/dwelling at 33-38 Tenth Street in Long Island City, Queens, became for Noguchi a central preoccupation in the early 1960s. To turn the factory into a studio with living quarters he had the help of Yukio Madokoro, a skilled carpenter from Japan, and of a young sculptor named Nobu Shiraishi. “The three of us started in the dead of winter to build within the anonymous space my own environment, free of whatever there was outside.” With cement block walls they divided the eighty-by-forty-foot area into three sections: a place to work, a place for storage, and a place to live. Downstairs there was a living room and kitchen with Noguchi-designed tables and a simple foam rubber sofa with bolsters. In the bathroom he installed a traditional Japanese wooden tub. A flight of stairs led to a bedroom that Noguchi arranged in Japanese style with shoji screens (fitted with fiberglass instead of paper) and a low bed. At the foot of the stairs was a tsukubai, or stone basin, for washing ands, and, level with the floor, a flat stone carved to look like the sole of a foot. This was the designated spot where guests took off their shoes and put on Japanese sandals before mounting the stairs. Noguchi’s new space was, he said, “A workshop with living quarter . . . not exactly a home.”



Thursday, November 12, 2015

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt twelve)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

Although Noguchi and Yamaguchi were very much in love, there were problems. The way they lived was Noguchi’s choice: “I was placed in a different world that I did not know at all,” wrote Yamaguchi, “and I tried to absorb everything about it.” Both were fiercely intense and stubborn. And there were cultural disparities. From her point of view, Noguchi was very much an American. “When we lived together there was a distinct difference between East and West, a big culture gap . . . little differences on the surface made a crack in our feelings and that crack grew.” Noguchi did not speak much Japanese and Yamaguchi spoke little English. “It was,” she said, “difficult to give nuances of meaning. Noguchi was very strict with himself, with his friends, and of course with his wife.” Noguchi insisted that they wear kimonos and he forbade Yamaguchi to cut her hair. “When we lived together in Rosanjin’s farmhouse even the shoes that we wore had to be in accord with the tone of the house. The shoes were Zori, sandals made of wood and straw. They were very rough and they didn’t fit my feet. My skin peeled off and I bled when I wore them but he did not allow me to wear any other shoes.” Once when Yamaguchi came home from working in Tokyo wearing a pair of pink plastic sandals, Noguchi flew into a rage. “What is this?” he cried, and, Yamaguchi recalled, “without listening to my explanation, he threw my sandals away in the rice field. Art and life—he did not tolerate anything that did not match with his aesthetic . . . It was hard for me to become a work of Isamu.” Noguchi was always telling the Japanese not to imitate Western culture. And here was his wife wearing plastic sandals—the epitome of tacky American commercialism. According to Yamaguchi’s brother-in-law, Hiroi, the episode of the plastic sandals was the crack that eventually split Noguchi and Yamaguchi apart.



Wednesday, November 11, 2015

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt eleven)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

Adding to Noguchi’s unhappiness was the suicide of Arshile Gorky in July 1948. Gorky had achieved a measure of critical success after being taken on by the Julien Levy Gallery in 1945, putting behind him the two disasters that befell him in 1946: cancer and the studio fire. Feeling that time might be short, Gorky worked harder than ever in the summer of 1947. He was like a phoenix, friends said. But he exhausted himself, painting day and night, and by the fall he too was at an artistic impasse. His depression was black. His marriage faltered. In June 1948 Gorky discovered that Agnes had had an affair with his close friend Matta. He was convinced that she would leave him. When his neck was broken in a car accident and his right arm was temporarily paralyzed, he feared he would not be able to paint again. In mid-July, frightened that Gorky might harm her or her children, Agnes took their two daughters and went to Virginia to stay with her parents.

The day after Agnes left, Noguchi was awakened by Gorky’s voice calling from his MacDougal Alley studio’s garden gate: “Isamu! Isamu! Isamu!” Half awake, Noguchi thought he was dreaming, but “the calling came again like a song.” Noguchi went to open the gate and found Gorky in tears. He was holding a papier-mâché bird that he had intended to give to a friend, but he’d gone to the friend’s house and, according to Gorky, the friend would not open the door. “Nobody loves me,” he told Noguchi. “He felt that people who had pretended to be his friends were not his friends. He felt that he had been completely abandoned, betrayed by his friends, his wife, this one and the other, that people were laughing at him and they had no further use for him because he had this operation.” Perhaps Noguchi projected his own feeling of having been taken up by society but never really belonging to it. “I thought he had come to me as a fellow immigrant out of his past.”



Tuesday, November 10, 2015

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt ten)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

Appalachian Spring, the last of Graham’s dances based on American themes, is about a young pioneering couple taking possession of a newly built house in the mountains of Pennsylvania. “New land, new house, new life; a testament to the American settler, a folk theater,” was Noguchi’s summary. His set consisted of a spare structure of wooden poles that stood for the framework of a rudimentary house, a canvas panel painted to look like a clapboard wall, a tree stump, a log fence, and a semiabstract rocking chair placed on a raised area that stood for a porch. “I attempted through the elimination of all non-essentials to arrive at an essence of the stark pioneer spirit, that essence which flows out to permeate the stage. It is empty but full at the same time. It is like Shaker furniture.” Graham recalled that to show Noguchi what she wanted for Appalachian Spring she took him to the Museum of Modern Art to see Giacometti’s 1932 Palace at Four a.m. “He was not very happy about going, but we went. And he understood immediately the quality of space I was looking for.”



Monday, November 9, 2015

the last book I ever read (Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera, excerpt nine)

from Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera:

The military finally authorized Noguchi’s release from Poston on November 2, 1942. A week later Noguchi wrote to Ailes: “It’s taken me three months to get this permit to go out, so now I have a furlough and you will be seeing me for a while at least . . . We will have a lot to talk about and I will tell you what I have gone through . . . it’s so indescribable, the life here, so removed from the reality of New York . . . I feel like Rip Van Winkle.”

The camp director issued Noguchi a thirty-day furlough on November 12. Noguchi never went back. That night he got in his station wagon and drove to Salt Lake City, where he stopped to see John Lafarge and Larry Tajiri, managing editor of Pacific Citizen, the official publication of the Japanese American Citizens League. He then moved on to Chicago and to Wisconsin to visit Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s summer home near Spring Green. He had invited Wright to visit Poston and Wright had written a letter recommending Noguchi’s release. “I went there to thank him. And his place was swarming with conscientious objectors. He read me excerpts from the books that he was writing. One of them was his esteem for this German philosopher called Heidegger, who was accused of bring friendly to the Nazis. But he didn’t care. Frank Lloyd Wright was a man who did not give a shit, because he felt that he was an American.”