Reviews - hypnagogicfun

Richard Rodriguez’s Path

The journey of a real intellectual – a thinker who asks hard questions and does not settle for easy resolutions – can often be lonely and difficult. It is also what makes their writing so important. Most of us do not query as deeply and we often do not like the answers we find.

Richard Rodriguez is a true intellectual. Extraordinarily gifted, he is a frequent critic and presence in the popular media. In his 1983 autobiography, Hunger of Memory, he charts his life from Sacramento, California, the child of Mexican laborers, to Stanford University. He did further graduate study in English at Columbia University and in London.

Rodriguez is extremely thoughtful about the quality of language and words. He is unsparing in describing the difficulty of his choices. This is no rags-to-riches feel good memoir. Instead, Rodriguez gives a hard account of the costs of forsaking one’s native culture for academic pursuits. He is no fan of affirmative action. He thinks little of bilingual education. Rodriguez is old school in every sense of the term. For good reason, this is a classic and challenging immigrant narrative.

David Potash

January 9, 2017 Reviews

Costly Prize

Daniel Yergin writes big histories. Trained at Yale and Cambridge, his first book was Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State. Way back in my Master’s program at NYU, I took a course from McGeorge Bundy, former National Security Advisor to Presidents Kennedy and President Johnson. One of the recommended books in Bundy’s course was Yergin’s Shattered Peace. I remember talking with Bundy about it. He did not place a ton of stock in the wisdom of any singular historian. However, he thought well of Yergin. Bundy greatly enjoyed asking students difficult questions about historical narratives. He liked to challenge us to think hard and critically about any thesis of explanation, anything that might render a complicated history simply or neatly. In other words, beware of summation – but if you have the facts (and Yergin did – at least in Bundy’s eyes), then feel free to go ahead with the big narrative.

Those memories and more were with me when I recently read Yergin’s well-known epic on the oil industry, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. It won a Pulitzer in 1992 and Yergin has issued slightly updated versions. A documentary about it was produced in the mid-1990s. It was a book I had known about. The suggestion of a colleagues, along with the rise of the leadership of the oil and gas industry in the Trump administration, was just the catalyst needed to tackle this massive work. It turned out as grand, exciting and troublesome as I anticipated. It also remains extraordinarily relevant to foreign policy and economics today.

Yergin takes the long view of oil’s history. No, he doesn’t start with the chemistry, And while we are on complaints, the book is short on maps. It would benefit, too, from more charts and tables. Yergin begins with two parallel nineteenth century historical narratives: oil exploration and production in the US, and oil exploration and production in Europe and Asia. It is not an easy device, but he handles the multiple international strands with skill.

Few historians are able to write as clearly, critically and effectively as Yergin. It is popular history that is carefully sourced and argued. He focuses on key individuals, sketches them quickly (and always with a few telling anecdotes or eccentricities), and frames the larger narrative through the actions and conflicts of a few. It is “great man” history – but Yergin is under no illusions that there are great men. They are smart, ambitious, greedy and comfortable with risk. They are in perpetual conflict: with nature, with market forces, with governments, and with each other. They are also, by definition, successful and important.

Yergin moves steadily through the 19^th and 20^th century, focusing consistently on the exploration, transportation, refining and sale of oil. His heart is with the wildcatters and the empire builders. By the post-WWII years we read about those that put together gas stations for sales, but Yergin has less enthusiasm for trends in marketing oil or its impact on the economy. In contrast, the global financiers, shippers, explorers and leaders – those are the men (and they are 99% men) – that are the heart of his history.

Read in a different light, The Prize is a helpful counter-narrative to other more well-known historical treatments of the past 150 years. Historians tend to cluster in camps. The Marxists look to the means of production. Some see race. Others focus on the rise of nationalism. Yergin looks at the big picture through the lens of energy, primarily oil. There’s much to recommend in this analysis.

Japanese expansion in Asia was shaped in great part by the island’s ability to capture and exploit oil. The Great War was driven by energy needs and competition for expansion. The US’s rise to a global economic power was powered in great part by America’s tremendous national resources – in particular, its oil. US relations with Mexico, as well as Venezuela, was again shaped by oil. The battles of World War II, Yergin notes, were again and again determined by a military’s ability to capture and use energy – oil.

The strands all come together in Yergin’s discussion of the colonization and exploitation of the middle east. It is distressing – with a great sense of foreboding – to see the fault lines being developed in the early part of the 1900s and then play out again and again. Shia against Sunni, Saudi Arabia against Persia/Iran, and all the ways that western powers fought to gain oil and economic advantage. Yergin’s long history gives a foundation and context that makes the wars of the past 10 years all the more understandable. Unfortunately, the history also points to no new possible resolutions.

This is not easy history. It is sprawling, messy, and consistently about conflict. There are few heroes. There may be great men, but missing is generosity, kindness, altruism or much hope for our better halves. Victory is often gained by those that have the most – or those that are willing to lose the most in order to prevail. It offers little by way of mankind thinking differently about energy or how best to use it. It also goes far in explaining much of our current problems – political, economic, international and environment. It is history as conflict. Yergin is completely up front about his agenda. There is good reason that he titled this book The Prize.

David Potash

January 5, 2017 Reviews

Going For The Gold

Lost in the critical cultural landscape? Adrift among competing theories? Reset your compass – most roads lead to Pierre Bourdieu. It doesn’t matter whether you think of him as a philosopher, sociologist, or French intellectual – his concepts outline the opaque and provide a consistently helpful path to understanding.

James English’s The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value is a case in point. It’s a very clever book. English, a professor of English and Director of the Humanities Center at Penn, turned an inquisitive and slightly cynical eye on the world of literary prizes in this book. Stressing the explosion of cultural awards and prizes over the past century, English hopes to make sense of the interplay of different kinds capital among competing “worlds” of understanding. That may sound very theoretical – and English does love playing with theory – but the narrative nimbly avoids the abstract and obtuse.

The bulk of the book is about literary prizes and awards. The visual and performing arts are discussed, but English’s great love is for the written word. He marks the contours of the garden of cultural production, situating the prize or award as the site of judgment and currency. Works that win prizes gain cultural capital. The prize often is monetary – capital – and its award changes the work’s value in a cultural and economic realms. Books that win awards sell more copies. The process of judging and awarding tames the “messiness” of artistic or cultural production. They render the creative digestible. This is an economic study of a different sort of economy.

English looks at awards and prizes from many angles. The physical nature of the award falls under his microscope, as do the public events: the short list, the naming, and the acceptance speech. He considers the awards as sport and as a means of cultural national norming. He also has a humorous go at alternative awards and their inverse economy. Why do we spend time considering awards for bad fiction or acting? The book consistently asks the reader to reconsider the entire world of awards and prizes.

The book’s argument, however, is also constrained by slippery nature of awards themselves. Often the product of circumstance or caprice, each has its own history, its own story. An author would really have to focus if the aim of the study was to make more powerful and compelling arguments. English, though, is not all that interested in settling down. He enjoys the topic and the space that it offers. Awards in movies or music are different from literary awards. Televised awards, whose function, it would seem, to generate viewers and revenue, have a somewhat different set of priorities than those that would adorn a book with a shiny sticker. English moves lightly past these distinctions.

Also missing from the work are the rise of cultural arts fairs. Art – flat, 3-D and time-based, have a somewhat different field of expertise and economic system than literature. They gather cultural capital from where they are sold, who purchased them, and how much was paid. The Basel or Miami Art Fair can bestow prestige in ways that a book or humanities fair cannot. A book’s cultural capital is developed in very different economies. To be fair, however, English wrote the book several years ago and draws attention to the ever-increasing number of ways that cultural production is judged and granted “value.”

So we have all that on one side of the ledger, and on the other half is a thoughtful, provocative and informed looked at the accumulation of cultural capital in the literary sphere. While I am not sure of what unit of measure is best employed, it does tally a positive balance, worthy of your consideration. But whether I would award it a prize . . . .

David Potash

December 15, 2016 Reviews

Gotham Art

Ever read a well-reviewed book and simply have it not click? You may like the topic and think highly of the author – but still, the book just refused to engage with you. Reading it becomes a chore and a source of frustration. It isn’t just that the book isn’t working. More troublesome is a worrisome sense of personal shortcoming – or at least that is what I feel. It has to be me, the reader, and not the book. Or maybe I just read too much into reading.

That, in a nutshell, is what happened to me with Jed Perl’s New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century. Perl is a well-known art critic. I do not always agree with him, but I’ve read his pieces in the popular press and have been impressed. He produces a new book every few years, too, and they are usually well-received.

As for the New York City art scene, I am an engaged fan – historically and in terms of contemporary art. From the work of Samuel Morse in the early 1800s through PS1 in recent years, New York City has been a hive of artistic creativity. It has been a particularly important site for collaboration and competition for certain groups of artists at set times. The Ashcan School in the early years of the 1900s, Harlem in the 1920s, and the modernists after World War II stand out as exemplary case studies of the power of Gotham to shape artists and the art world. I’ve read, visited, viewed, talked and learned about art in NYC for many years. I picked up New Art City with high hopes.

Unfortunately, I could not make the book work for me. Perhaps it was the black and white illustrations of colorful and vibrant art. It might have been the encyclopedic nature of the tome: everyone who painted in NYC from WWII until the mid-1960s gets a mention, a paragraph or a chapter. Maybe it was an absence of any real discussion of what was going on in the city at the time: the changing physical landscape, the vitality of so many other forms of creative expression: music, dance, theater, and popular culture. It could stem from Perl’s linkage and comparisons of artist to artist from a critic’s perspective. I, however, wonder if the call and response was real (my instinct is that it is often the creation of critics). If Hans Hoffman truly was the gatekeeper to mid-century art, was it due to his teaching, his talking, or his work? Or it might be the lack of a clear reason to bounce from artist to artist to artist.

In the end, I stopped caring as artist after artist and painting after painting found its way into the narrative. Was everyone really rebelling against the abstract expressionists? Was de Kooning that charismatic? The island might serve as a good organizing principle for a book or exhibit, but that does not make it compelling. Even as I like Hoffman, de Kooning, Pollack, and so many others discussed here, New Art City just is not my cup of tea. And having giving the book time and consideration, I am also sure it’s not just me.

David Potash

November 29, 2016 Reviews, Things someone who grew up in NJ might write

A New Familiar Story

The hardships of the immigrant experience to America in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The isolation of life in the upper midwest. The lure, threat and promise of the big city. Patriarchy, misogyny, violence. Bigotry in World War I. Second and third generation immigrants families. These are recognizeable themes in American literature.

Familiar themes, though, do not have to limit a novel’s scope or imagination.

Michelle Hoover’s Bottomland is about the disappearance of two daughters from the German family homestead in rural Iowa in the early part of the twentieth century. Hoover tells the story in five chapters, each from a character’s perspective. She plays with time, with narrative veracity, and with the plot. It unfolds in bits and pieces. Hoover, though, is not interested in writing a thriller or mystery. Tension is used in service of broader themes, particularly those of interpersonal connection and agency. The prose is marked by an austere clarity – even when the picture is foggy and described by an unreliable narrator.

Bottomland is a thoughtful and well-written novel. It is also surprisingly relevant to contemporary life. Pick your immigrant group, imagination the perspective of one with little agency in a world with few or no guarantees, add a bit of cross-cultural tension – and it all rings as familiar. Hoover has crafted a clever and thoughtful book.

I wonder if novelists will be looking at Somalian immigrants in Minnesota or Syrian immigrants in Michigan twenty years hence. If they do – and do it well as Bottomland – I will read and learn.

David Potash

November 17, 2016 Reviews

Emigration & Immigration: Mexico and the United States

Alexandra Delano, a professor at the New School, grounds her book Mexico and Its Diaspora in the United States: Policies of Emigration Since 1848 in history, foreign policy and the domestic politics of both nations. What sets this book apart, though, is that Delano assigns primacy to the Mexican government in analyzing the flow of Mexicans to the United States. Delano has a strong command of a wide range of scholarship and methodologies. In her hands, policy analysis and foreign policy is a surprisingly helpful lens with which to study emigration and immigration. The result is a comprehensive, compelling, and an insightful overview to a complicated international dynamic.

This is not a book for those new to immigration or Mexican-American history. It moves quickly over a lot of material, information and arguments. Delano writes to those have some understanding of the terrain and seek deeper and more sophisticated awareness of policy shifts and turns. Her underlying thesis examines the implications of the gradual transformation of Mexico into a more active and intentional player with United States. Delano is fully cognizant of the asymmetrical relationship. She notes, though, that Mexico’s willingness to engage – particularly from the 1990s and NAFTA – have had profound consequences on US-Mexico relations.

I found her investigation of IME (Institute for Mexicans Abroad) and the Matricula Consular – a card issued by Mexican consulates to Mexicans living in the US – to be especially informative. These policy efforts by the Mexican government to protect citizens’ rights, no matter where they live, to have an important role in understanding the immigrant experience. Emigration and immigration policies are critical. They have political ramifications, too, for both countries.

Mexico and Its Diaspora in the United States is a welcome addition to the studies of Mexican American relations and the flow of people across the border.

David Potash

November 15, 2016 Reviews

The Wilds of Western Massachusetts

No one accidentally finds their way to MASS MoCA. A sprawling massive complex dedicated to contemporary art, MASS MoCA is in North Adams, Massachusetts, on the Hoosic River valley in western Berkshire County. North Adams has the smallest population of any city in Massachusetts. If 2,000 people leave, it becomes a town. North Adams is just over an hour’s drive from Albany and nearly three hours from Boston. In five minutes you can be in Vermont. North Adams was originally a mill town and in the twentieth century, Sprague Electric was the area’s largest employer. After it shuttered, a collaborative effort and much politicking led to the creation of MASS MoCA on its former site. It is a museum of great scale. It sits alone in a city that hopes to capture tourists and their dollars.

My trips to Mass Moca usually start from Boston, driving north and then west on Route 2. The land is hilly and by the tiny hamlet of Florida, MA, we’re in the Hoosic range. It is eastern mountains and the flora shifts accordingly. The woods are denser and colder. Steven King knows these woods, not Henry David Thoreau. After ascending the Whitcomb Summit – and there’s a nice spot to pull over and take a photo – route 2 heads downhill in a series of swoops, curves, and cutbacks. A true hairpin curve slows the traffic to a crawl. Over the shoulder you can make out North Adams, which stands out defiantly amid the hills and woods. The transformation of this site was facilitated by detailed As-built surveys, which played a crucial role in the museum’s development. Also, the assistances of shot blasting services were essential in preparing the site for its transformation into a contemporary art museum.

These shifts, from light to dark, from friendly to threatening, and from planned to dramatic, set the stage for my last visit Mass Moca and the powerful work of Alex Da Corte. His exhibit, Free Roses, closed in September. Now it only exists online, in print, and in the minds of those of us fortunate to see it in person. It lingers. Da Corte has the ability to take the known and make it strange, the humorous and make it unsettling – and to do it with style and a light touch.

Da Corte works with vibrant colors, familiar objects, humor and a strong taste of the Gothic. Free Roses contained new pieces and as-is-a-wet-hoagie older workers. The overall installation took advantage of the tremendous space of the galleries. Da Corte was thoughtful about lighting, flooring, and how pieces were situated. Spanning multiple rooms, the exhibit a carnival of creepy, provocative and gaudy, if not cheerful. It collectively gave me a sense of other worldness. Additionally, the resin flooring painters UK added an extra layer of depth and texture to the exhibition space. In particular, the choice of industrial flooring near me added an intriguing juxtaposition to the vibrant and surreal atmosphere Da Corte created. Also, with the use of energy-efficient insulation in the installation not only contributed to a more sustainable environment but also enhanced the overall aesthetic of the exhibit.

He is young – born in 1980 – and prolific. Da Corte gets the appeal of pop. He uses it to catch the eye and then subvert. Take a look at the wet hoagie (John Bernardo/Courtesy of Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery, New York). It is monumental and ridiculous, tasty and ready for critical analysis. Da Corte exercises a strong sense of play in his pieces, challenging symbolism and formalism with a wink or a critique.

When playful, it made me smile. When more ominous – a large series of pieces based on the poet Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell – it was disturbing. Da Corte works with neon, video, and animatronics. The robotic dog walking in a circle and the toy swans swimming endlessly in a loop were just kitschy enough to draw me in and then bother. He photographs, paints and curates. His work is accessible – disarmingly so – and haunting. It brought me wonder and just enough unease to remind me that the exhibit sits, like MASS MoCA, in a special place protected against a much less friendly world.

David Potash

October 27, 2016 Reviews

Immigration Dreamers

Eileen Truax’s Dreamers: An Immigrant Generation’s Fight For Their American Dream is a journalist’s account of life for undocumented people in the age of the Dream Act (DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Truax hails from Mexico and lives in the US. She is well-versed in the small and large challenges of living in two different countries with different cultures. Her aim in this book is to give human faces and stories to the young men and women affected directly by DACA. She humanizes, explains and contextualizes the stories of those who are struggling in challenging times.

Consciously avoiding statistics and policy analysis (and there are places in the text that call out for further explication), Truax gives ten narrative histories. She writes about young men and women, their homes, their families and their friends. Their communities are described as are their clothing and appearance. Sympathy and understanding drives the text. Truax wants us to see these people as people who are as “American” as any neighbor, classmate, co-worker or colleague.

It is an effective strategy to generate emotions and sympathy. There is much to like about these young men and women. The anchor of the stories are those who are open about their lack of documentation. These courageous souls have decided to make their cause public and be active to seek seeking legislative and executive support. Truax helps us to understand just how terrifying this must feel. The book’s cover says “Undocumented Unafraid” – but these people are afraid, and with good cause.

Emotions and sympathy can aid in understanding policy consequences but they are not necessarily the best way to create solutions or to craft better policy. Immigration is notoriously complicated to reform. Politics, history, economics, national security, and race are woven throughout any discussion of policy. Not acknowledging the harder complicating forces does little to advance the discussion. There were ample places in the histories, too, where Truax could have provided anchors to the stories and given the reader themes and direction. The role of education, for example, or how the experience was both empowering and demeaning. Much more could have been done with the material.

Truax’s book gives voice to those that may not be comfortable coming forward. It is here that I think her contribution is most effective. Policy and laws have real impacts on real lives. The consequences of ill-considered policy can be devastating. To earn and maintain our trust, our government and our laws must be fair, equitable and just. Humanizing our immigration policy and practice, as Truax does in this volume, helps to set a high bar for meaningful reform. One hopes that it is not just a dream.

David Potash

October 26, 2016 American Culture Today, Reviews

Surprised Stranger in a Strange Land

One of my favorite movie scenes is from the 1939 Alfred Hitchcock thriller, The 39 Steps. Our hero, Richard Hannay (ably played by a dashing Robert Donat), is fleeing from police and spies. He darts into an auditorium, where he is mistaken for the featured speaker and led to the dais. Hundreds of eyes are upon him and the crowd grows restless. Without knowing the topic or the audience, Hannay launches into an impassioned speech, stringing together platitudes and general observations. He senses what the crowd wants and they are charmed. Hannay wins their support, just as he is whisked away by the police.

I thought of Hannay-Donat often while reading Rachel Dewoskin’s memoir, Foreign Babes in Beijing. It is a very entertaining book, well-told, with a most improbable story line. Dewoskin plays a role – American woman in Beijing – in her daily life and on television. She is committed to the role, but at the same time she knows that she is living a performance.

Dewoskin is the daughter of a well-known American sinologist. She spent much of her childhood traveling in China, and after graduating from college, decided to take a job in Beijing working for an American public relations firm. She knew little about PR, but at age twenty-one, she wanted to see something new. China in the early 1990s, just as it was opening up new economic opportunities to the west, was an ideal opportunity for an American with Chinese language skills. Dewoskin started work, found a place to live, and began to explore and keep a journal.

She describes her day-to-day work existence with engaged bemusement and humor, particularly as she worked diligently in trying to figure things out. China can be a terrifically difficult culture to navigate, and at that period, she was a pioneer. Very little made sense. Every interaction, especially with friends and colleagues, was influenced by culture and protocol. Only through the benefit of time did she realize her errors and false assumptions. The language posed constant challenges. She notes often that she was never quite sure she understood what others were saying. Adding to it, just about everyone can be a bit of a fool in their early 20s.

Propelling an interesting journey into the absurd, a man she met at a party encouraged Dewoskin to audition for a role on Chinese television. Dewoskin had acted in college so thought of it as a bit of lark. Much to her surprise, she was cast as a lead in the soap opera “Foreign Babes in Beijing.” Playing the role of Jiexi, a sexy American who is able to snare a Chinese man, Dewoskin became a star and an unwitting vehicle by which Chinese culture worked through issues of western women. The soap was a multi-year smash. Overall viewership was more than 600 million.

After several years of acting, making friends and growing up, her adventures invariable come to an end. Dewoskin made her way back to the United States. Several years later, her notebooks became the source of this book. She is now a writer.

Dewoskin does not make grand sweeping arguments in Foreign Babes. Nor does she try to prove points about Chinese culture. Instead, she describes and recounts with a keen appreciation of people and detail. She is smart and thoughtful. The result is a very interesting account of an intelligent and resourceful woman doing something unexpected in a foreign world that she struggles to understand. It’s an apt description of many immigrant stories – only this one is told from a different perspective.

David Potash

September 20, 2016 Curiouser and Curiouser, Reviews

Detroit’s History

On a recent road trip I had the opportunity to drive through Detroit. It had been almost twenty years since I last visited the city. I found it impossible to explore the city without engaging critically. The poverty and depopulation were striking. What happened? Was it culture or policy? How much did deindustrialization play? Poor leadership? Where were the buildings, houses and people? My imagination couldn’t stop wondering about what used to inhabit the open spaces.

There are more than a few books and websites capturing images of Detroit’s ruins. Poverty tourism, though, is not the same thing as historical analysis. To understand Detroit, I strongly recommend Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. It is an outstanding work, thought-provoking and comprehensive, well-deserving of its many prizes.

More traditional accounts of Detroit’s decline focus on the 1960s, the city’s riots, and white flight. Sugrue persuasively argues that the origins of the city’s troubles were present much earlier. He makes clear that the cause was not an inevitable result of market forces or the result of the breakdown of urban families. Sugrue has no truck with blaming the poor for being poor. Instead, he outlines how urban inequality is facilitated by mapping racial inequality on the city’s geography. It is played out in housing, in education, in healthcare, in employment, in crime, and in opportunity. “To a great extent in postwar America, geography is destiny,” Sugrue writes.

The book is organized into three large sections. In “Arsenal,” the economics and politics of the immediate post-war years in described. Sugrue focuses on the battles over segregation and integration. The city is large and featured many single family homes. White citizens of Detroit fought in the courts and in the streets to protect all-white neighborhoods. Blacks were forced into smaller areas with inferior and expensive housing stocks. Federal redlining through the FHA exacerbated segregation and pressure. Local electoral politics made things even worse, as white conservative politicians ran on race. Middle-class and working-class support for New Deal democratic liberalism collapsed in an onslaught of racism.

“Rust,” the second section, examines the difference between black and white Americans sometimes working in the same factories but always living differently in very different parts of the city. The last section, “Fire,” tracks the neighborhood associations and organizations that actively worked against integration and the civil rights of blacks. When Detroit erupted in riots and flames in 1967, we have a clear sense of the causes.

Collectively, Sugrue spells out how race and racism ate away at the possibility of integration and shared class interests, as well as the development of a healthy city. These sped Detroit’s economic collapse, which added to white flight. Things went from bad to worse in the ensuing years, as the tax base for the city shrank and the needs of its poor inhabitants increased. It is an extremely depressing story.

Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013. The city has seen economic development in its downtown, but vast parts of the city are economic, educational, and socially depressed. Michigan’s unemployment rate in February, 2016 was 4.8% – in Detroit it is 11%. While there is money and hope in Detroit’s suburbs and the state as a whole, and a small movement in downtown, it is difficult to be optimistic about the city’s future. Racism casts a very long shadow.

David Potash

September 13, 2016 Reviews

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