Nothing Like the Sun

I recently finished re-reading Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!, which turned out to be as powerfully immersive an experience as my first reading of the novel, over twenty years ago:

While Faulkner's prose is notoriously demanding, even obscure, I've always been drawn to its baroque music and sensuousness, as well as the ways in which his stories deal with time, personal and historical memory, and perspective. Faulkner's brand of modernist Southern Gothic moreover appeals to my moody cast of mind, historical preoccupations, and taste for poetic prose. (Personal nostalgia for humid summer scenes of wistaria, mimosa, willow, and fireflies no doubt plays a role, too.)

And Absalom! Absalom! represents Faulkner at his most demanding, obscure, baroque, and Gothic--an echo chamber of unreliable narrators and stories-within-stories, reconstructing the unscrupulous rise and Homeric fall of a family and a social system. (The expression 'eats its own young' frequently comes to mind.)

The most significant differences in my reaction to this story the second time through:

1) It's interesting that Faulkner (here and elsewhere) most readily engages with the South's legacies of slavery and segregation through mixed-race characters who "pass" for white, whereas the inner lives of visibly nonwhite characters seem inaccessible to him;

2) I feel more strongly than ever about how I want to respond to Quentin Compson's outburst about the South, at the end: I want to ask him "How could you not?! What the hell else are you doing in freezing your ass off in Massachusetts, regaling your Canadian roommate with stories of how Sophoclean it all was?"

A conversation with a co-worker prompted me to start re-reading Faulkner's Light in August a couple of weeks ago, a novel I had first attempted (and rapidly given up on) before college.

Light in August is reputedly one of Faulkner's more accessible novels--and an important one. Less formally experimental than The Sound and Fury, As I Lay Dying, or Absalom, Absalom!, the book nonetheless wrestles with equally weighty themes: the legacies of racial and religious communalism and bigotry in the early twentieth-century American Southeast. ( Jim Crow, John Calvin, and Joe Christmas )

I didn't expect Bill Maher's Religulous to be much more than a surly, occasionally funny rant, given the comedian's usually scathing, satirical approach to every kind of subject. I didn't feel a burning need to see the film during its theatrical run, and only rented the video out of extreme boredom, a few weeks ago.

( satirical low-hanging fruit, quixotic goals )

Michael Dobbs' re-examination of the Cuban missile crisis gets beyond the mythology surrounding Kennedy and Krushchev's 1962 confrontation. He reveals how dangerously wrong leaders in Washington and Moscow sometimes were about one another, and how events were sometimes driven by bit players rather than premiers and presidents. A confused U2 pilot veers dangerously off-course, provoking Soviet air defenses. Another U2 is shot down over Cuba on the orders of a local Soviet commander. CIA-backed saboteurs continue to act on the island. An exhausted, angry Soviet sub captain contemplates launching a nuclear torpedo against American blockade ships. U.S. generals demand an invasion of Cuba. Soviet forces on the island deploy tactical nuclear weapons for just such an eventuality. In an act of what could at best be described as extreme brinkmanship, Cuban leaders advocate a nuclear first strike on the U.S. Messages between the superpower capitals move at a snail's pace--via telegraph, courier, and translator--and are frequently misunderstood. On both sides, nuclear command and control often turns out to be more theoretical than real. You come away with the sense that we're all extremely lucky that 1962's superpower crisis didn't in fact escalate further, faster, and that people on both sides had the sense to back down before events completely escaped their control.

The libertarian habit of seeming to claim a monopoly on "reason" or "rationality" can be irritating. But one supposes that heightened self-confidence represents a sort of prerequisite for playing on that team ...

Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello provides an illuminating glimpse into interracial sexual and familial relationships in Jefferson's Virginia. Interracial sex and mixed-race people were apparently common under slavery, but the relationships were illicit and whites preferred not to talk about how all of those mixed people got there. Sometimes "Auntie" really was a white planter's aunt; which meant that she was also some other white man's daughter, another white's half-sister, etc. But that didn't necessarily change the legal or social caste relationship between them one iota.

The Hemings family's mixed background and their ties to powerful whites like Jefferson sometimes mitigated their lower-caste status, and even enabled a few to escape from it. But slavery still circumscribed whatever breathing room they won for themselves: privileged dependence on individual whites (as with Sally Hemings' concubinage); working-class status if they managed to be legally freed; fugitive status if they just ran away; and "passing" (with all the denial and sacrifice and probable guilt that implied) for those who skin tone belied the African part of their heritage.

As one reviewer put it, Gordon-Reed's work demonstrates how Southern history is a lot more like Absalom! Absalom! than Gone with the Wind.

That said, I share the disappointment others have expressed about where Gordon-Reed chooses to leave things. I would like to have known a lot more about the eventual fates of the Hemingses--free and unfree--in the years after Jefferson's death and the dissolution of Monticello.

• 12:58 Brunch: Couple @ next table arguing re palatability of pork #
• 13:02 He: pork "objectively" better than chkn, bf. #
• 13:04 She: "have 2 disagree." #
• 13:09 Me 2 her (when he steps out 4 cig): my sympathies. #
• 13:11 Her (laughing): seems 2 mean a lot 2 him. #
• 13:13 Me: Evidently. #

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• 04:19 Got up freakishly early (stress). #
• 05:30 Up, ready, may as well go 2 work. #
• 05:34 Sleepless in ... Gah! #
• 05:38 Eerily quiet, few lights, lil traffic, no other pedestrians #
• 06:22 Brkfst @ taco truck ... Different. #
• 15:27 Leaving work "early" 9.5 hrs later ... #
• 17:13 Called my fav niece, caught up on diaz gossip. #
• 18:36 Hon-bau ... Mmm ... #
• 18:59 Friday night excitement: me, book, bed. #

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Ironically, despite dramatic Republican defeats in two consecutive Congressional elections, the party's loss of the White House, and its current minority status both in and out of government, a trio of Republican senators have emerged as the 111th Congress' key power brokers: Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter. For the foreseeable future, the fortunes of both the Obama Administration and Congress' Democratic majority are going to be tied to their ability to woo members of this troika.

( Polarization, the Filibuster, and the Power of the Swing Vote )

Happily, last fall's election ceded the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats the initiative, empowering them to shape the agenda for the U.S. government for the coming years. But three Republican senators will serve as gatekeepers, checking Democratic initiatives and defining the limits of what they can do--at least until the 2010 Congressional elections, at which point that balance of power may shift, again (if, for example, retiring Sen. Judd Gregg's seat is claimed by a Democrat). Of course, there's no guarantee that it will, or that the shift will be in Democrats' favor.

So for every really significant change the Administration seeks, the question becomes, which Republican senator can be persuaded to defect and support it? And which parts of Obama's legislative agenda will get past the Senate's new gatekeepers--i.e., Collins, Snowe, and Specter? In civil rights, energy/the environment, health care policy, national security, etc?

• 18:14 Listening 2 social distortion @ cafe mecca. #

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I've just finished brewing the seasons' first batch of coquito. I decided to vary the recipe a little bit, using coconut rum instead of the usual white (sugarcane and molasses) variety. I then also added generous portions of vanilla extract, cloves, and nutmeg. I was thinking that the overall effect would be to make the alcohol content subtler, sneakier. But when I sampled the mixture, it seemed to lack an edge. So I threw in some white rum on top of the coconut stuff. That seems to be working pretty nicely.

The finished product is now cooling in the fridge.

In late December 2008, Seattle experienced an unaccustomed outbreak of actual winter. Panic ensued: school closures, bus & flight cancellations, some scary accidents.

There was also a lot of urban tobogganing and cross-country skiing.

( It looked like this )

• 14:00 Freak winter weather has stranded in seattle 4 holidays. #
• 14:04 Im about ready 2 give up on loudtwitter. #

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People in the Puget Sound area aren't accustomed to what others in the Northern U.S. would consider routine winter weather--i.e., temperatures that hover below freezing for weeks on end, snow that actually accumulates on the ground and stays there for more than a few hours, icy roadways. Longtime area residents tell me that they haven't seen this kind of weather since before their grown kids were born. And the city of Seattle in particular doesn't seem well-situated to cope with such conditions: much of Seattle proper is spread out over steep hills, and the city understandably lacks the snow- and ice-removal infrastructure of a predictably wintry Boston or Chicago.
( Inside the Emerald City Snow Globe )
( No Exit )
( Breaking the Bad News )

Meanwhile, I'm stranded here in this snow-globe of a city with the week off and no firm plans. For those of you who may be similarly situated, do you think you'd be up for a little "Stranded in Seattle" holiday get-together? Possibly with my homemade coquito (basically, Puerto Rican eggnog) on the menu? My place is small, but I might be able to put together something. Alternatively, I could bring a very large thermos of coquito to your holiday event ...

Also: I'm always up for trips to the movie theater (assuming they're open ...), might be into some sort outdoor winter activity ...

Courtesy of cakeface:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you've read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

( My Read & Unread )

And that's all I've got to say about that.

Happy Birthday, dlasky!

Be sure to raise a glass sometime today (if you may safely do so ...) to the 1933 ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, which repealed Prohibition.

My favorite meme is going around again. It's been awhile, and I really enjoy this one, so let's give it another whirl:

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, (even if we don't speak often or ever) please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory of you and me.

It can be anything you want - good or bad - BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE.

When you're finished, post this little paragraph in your LJ and see what your friends come up with.

I find that my head is crowded with images of Mumbai, today, culled not so much from the past few days' news footage of gunmen and burning luxury hotels as from Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, which I finally got around to seeing last night:

Boyle's camera drinks in Mumbai's cityscape, panning across sprawling shantytowns and up the scaffolds of burgeoning skyscrapers, racing down crowded streets and alleyways after subjects who are constantly on the run, scrambling to survive. As the film's title suggests, scenes of unimaginable deprivation are juxtaposed with sudden boomtown wealth, horrific brutality with unexpected triumphs. Throughout, Boyle's storyline is animated by a Dickensian redemptive morality, and an exuberance that nods ever so slightly in the direction of Bollywood--the city's native cinematic style.

Slumdog Millionaire has to be the most exhilerating experience I've had at the movies in a long, long while. There are elements especially early in the film that require a strong stomach, but the film's emotional payoff is more than worth it.

I keep thinking about how this week's terrorist assaults on Mumbai seemed to sum up and build upon the global jihadist movement's grievances, targets, and methods. Real care seems to have been taken to hit all of the movement's "Great Satans", to inflict spectacular violence in new ways, and attract more prolonged international attention: ( Mass Murder, Publicity, and Provocation )