JANUARY 2021/PANDEMIC READS

Coffee in a good mug always goes well with early-morning reading.

In 2020, I had some extra time on my hands, which resulted in me reading 118 books over the course of the year, over 20 in December alone. That high December number can be accounted for by the generous two-week Christmas vacation most employed people in Germany enjoy and also, by me hurting my back, which resulted in my waking, repeatedly, at 4am, unable to remain lying down any longer. Instead, I haunted the barely lit kitchen, coffee mug in one hand, book in the other, and read while roving. Suffice it to say, I have become very good at reading and walking at the same time, though I wouldn’t trust myself to try this outside, the reason being that bumping into the couch is one thing, bumping into a car traveling 30-40/kph is another.

Then came the end of the year, and around the same time, thanks to some deep heat treatments at my doctor’s office and a lot of kineseotape, my back healed up and sleeping to, say, 6 or even 7am became possible once more. Sleep is really wonderful, I have to say, and suddenly I found myself with less time to read. AND THEN on January 6, 2021, I watched on live TV as the Capitol Building in Washington DC was breached by right-wing insurrectionists, and the next week, next two weeks, who knows how long after that, involved me spending most of my free time watching CNN International or refreshing the NYT feed on my smartphone. I only read six books.

Probably my favorite was When No One Is Watching, Alyssa Cole’s gentrification-based thriller, which I thought was very-well plotted, totally engaging, sometimes even funny, and always pointed.

I also enjoyed Fee Griffin’s poetry collection, For Work/For TV, winner of the inaugural Amsterdam Book Prize from Versal Editions.

In terms of German-language reading, NSU: Der Terror von Rechts und das Versagen des Staates by journalist and professor Tanjev Schultz was a sobering, eye-opening read. You may be able to make out the title for yourself, but if not, here’s a rough translation. NSU [National Socialist Underground]: Right-Wing Terrorism and the Failure of the State, and that about says it all. The book details not only the crimes of a (possibly) small group of Neo-Nazi terrorists who, among other things, murdered 9 Germans of Turkish or Greek heritage, plus one police officer, but also the blisteringly awful ways in which German authorities, bolstered by un- or maybe even conscious biases, failed to even consider that the perpetrators could be right-wing extremists (as opposed to members of Turkish organized crime organizations) and thus missed numerous chances to apprehend the suspects. There’s also a lot about how various German crime-solving authorities failed to work together and the book goes into detail about how paid informants work in Germany, which is kind of mind-blowing, in that a lot of times, those informants are very well-paid and a lot of that money just goes back into supporting their criminal and/or deeply racist activities. Throughout my read, I found myself wondering what parallels could be drawn to how the threat of right-wing terrorism took a backseat to the threat of Islamist terrorism in the US after 9/11. (For the record, 9/11 also played a role in how German authorities viewed terrorism.)

Finally, sometimes I read books that I am pretty sure I will disagree with, at least in part, mostly because I would like to see for myself. I’d heard some negative things about Phoebe Maltz Bovy and her understanding of the concept of privilege, so I read The Perils of “Privilege”: Why Injustice Can’t Be Solved by Accusing Others of Advantage. My first thought is that marketing can be misleading. Putting the word privilege in quotation marks in the title does, in my view, make it sound like the author might be about to argue that it doesn’t exist, which is not the case. (Even though that’s not what double quotation marks mean, that reading would be more justified if the title read ‘privilege’ in single quotes. But…I think that distinction probably gets lost.)

I ended up having a lot of thoughts about this book. And a lot of questions. Some of the author’s arguments made sense on first reading, though email discussions with a friend helped clarify a few things for me. One argument Maltz Bovy uses to strengthen her argument that privilege isn’t the right rubric through which to work toward achieving social justice is that what often gets referred to as privilege, for example, white privilege in the case of Dylan Roof being treated humanely by law enforcement officers after murdering nine Black churchgoers, is framed as the beneficent of that so-called privilege receiving something extra. Whereas in actuality, Eric Garner’s rights were violated because of racism when he was murdered for the infinitesimal crime of selling loose cigarettes. Not to mention the countless Black individuals whose rights are violated, to the point of being murdered by police officers, when committing no crime at all. This did make a lot of sense to me, most particularly because of how this argument centers racism as the mechanism working in the background. My friend, however, pointed out that it’s worth holding in mind how the concept of privilege (in this example, again, white privilege) is wrapped up in how some of us (white people) more reasonably can expect to be treated humanely in our dealings with the criminal justice system.

What I have also been thinking a lot about is Maltz Bovy’s argument that asking people to check their privilege has, in a pragmatic sense, not brought about a more just world, a conclusion I would in general concur with. The conclusion she draws from that, though, is that we should therefore divest from the concept of privilege altogether. Maltz Bovy also writes a lot about how asking people who are suffering to consider the various privileges they may simultaneously enjoy to be insensitive and unhelpful. I see her point, to a point, though mostly only in terms of timing. My friend, however, pointed out not only the value in being able to empathize with others even as we ourselves are suffering, but also how this experience of empathy can be the beginning of the process that leads to liberation for all (as opposed to only for ourselves). His point dovetails with my own experience of suffering, but that’s a long-ass story, maybe for a never-time.

In terms of my own thoughts on asking people to check their privilege, I know it is typical (or used to be typical) of American communication to begin what may be uncomfortable feedback for the listener with either a positive statement (impossible in many cases) or, at the very least, a statement of empathy. In my experience, beginning with that statement of empathy conveys to the other person that I hear them, decreases kneejerk defensiveness, and primes them to hear me. The idea that there are people who don’t deserve so much as a statement of empathy from me on account of the obliviousness or even –isms they may be spewing is tempting to grasp hold of sometimes, but as a white person whose position in life is not at the moment in any way precarious, I think in such instances I need to remind myself that there exist in this world Black and Jewish people who have befriended Klansmen and/or other white supremacists and that as a direct result of those friendships, those Klansmen and other white supremacists have divested from their racist and/or anti-Semitic views.

In the end, I found Maltz Bovy’s book worth a read in that the process of thinking about and discussing her arguments with others helped me to clarify my own views. Her book centers privilege checking in the context of online discussions, so it’s tempting to slide in here with a statement to the effect that in-person communication is more conducive to effecting actual change (which I think it genuinely is), but the internet is here to stay. Online is where we’re at. This is the world we live in now.

(In January, I also line-edited the rewrite of my novel and wrote a few poems, cooked a bunch, upped my zucchini-bread game, and worked out a bunch. I’m tired. Very underemployed right now for pandemic-related reasons, but I am determined to hold on to the idea of structure. Until next month, or so, with more reads.)

RED PILL by Hari Kunzru

(contains spoilers, but it’s not really that kind of book)

 Red Pill, the latest novel from Hari Kunzru, begins with the unnamed protagonist arriving in Berlin at what may truly be the world’s worst writing residency, catalogues his related spiral into madness, and ends with the election of Donald Trump. So it’s a fun book. Honestly, though, it’s some of the best writing on what feels like a manic episode that I have ever encountered.

But back to that writing residency. The Deuter Center, named after one of the titans of industry associated with Germany’s post-WWII economic miracle, prizes itself not so much on community but rather absolute transparency and openness. This translates to shared meals (okay so far, seems like most live-in arts communities do some version of this) and, way weirder, shared writing space. No cozy, private nook to sink into. No imagining the space in which you create as your own. Rather a room with utilitarian tables where all of the residents are expected to work, in plain view of each other.

Expected is a key word, because when the protagonist insists he will be much more comfortable, and thus more productive, in his room, he causes a rather large hullaballoo. Productive is another key word, because the powers that be at the Deuter Center have actually gamified the writing process. Residents receive reports detailing how much progress they have made. Keystrokes measured, files created, you name it. Residents, like our protagonist, who, for whatever reason fail to meet expectations, are told they may be asked to leave and threatened with the prospect of having to reimburse the the Deuter Center for any funds received. Our protagonist admits he may have overlooked these details in the fine print, but the whole setup feels, in a word, crazy making.

Indeed, this is what happens. The protagonist spirals into an out-of-control state in which he begins to obsess over Anton, an alt-right activist he meets at a party who dresses up his racism with faux-intellectual arguments and a shit ton of nihilism. One scene in an Imbiss with a few of this character’s equally racist friends is especially uncomfortable, all the more so because the protagonist is a man of color, a British national of Indian ethnicity.

Anton—though this may not be his real name—takes on a larger-than-life hold over the protagonist, and as a result, with a couple of plot points along the way, the protagonist ends up first in Paris instead of on his flight home to NYC (after being kicked out of the Deuter Center), and then in a cabin in a remote area of Scotland because he is convinced that Anton, who works in television, once filmed an advertisement there. This is where our protagonist is arrested and eventually, after spending time in a Scottish psychiatric ward, makes his way back to his worried wife and child.

The next thing we hear from our protagonist is that some time has passed and that he is now on meds, including an antipsychotic to prevent manic episodes. This is the only use of the word ‘manic’ in the book, which also steers clear of any of the familiar language of symptoms (‘racing thoughts,’ ‘pressured speech,’ ‘paranoia,’ ‘delusional thinking’) and instead, brilliantly in my view, simply details a thought process that is manic, one in which everything is connected and even small, probably insignificant details take on enormous weight. And yet the protagonist’s particular fears about the coming tide of the societal forces that will eventually lead to the election of Donald Trump, which more particularly lead him on his ever-more disorganized quest to follow Anton (in order to keep tabs on him in some way, thereby defending his own family from harm), feel perfectly reasonable. They make sense. In a way, the protagonist is not merely coming apart at the scenes, he is also a Cassandra.

This sets up a thoughtful critique of psychiatry, one that is certainly not original to our protagonist, but no less valuable because of that. If anything, it bears repeating, in fact, cannot be voiced often enough: “”My doctors were fundamentally servants of the status quo. Their work was predicated on the assumption that the world is bearable, and anyone who finds it otherwise should be coaxed or medicated into acceptance. But what if it isn’t? What if the reasonable reaction is endless horrified screaming?”

This is something I’ve thought a lot about over the years, though I suspect there are no easy answers. I suppose the truth is, the system and culture we live in really are sick, but in the meantime, we have to survive it, and it’s the people who genuinely can’t survive in the conditions they are handed that get labeled sick, and who are treated, at least in the West, according to the medical model of mental illness. Unfortunately, so much emphasis is placed on surviving that the underlying sickness, a society that is unjust, uncaring, and expects too much (or whose expectations are unreasonable from the get-go) never gets dismantled.

Capitalism, racism, misogyny, and homo- and transphobia all have a lot to answer for when it comes to mental illness (and I am no doubt leaving a number of factors out). Certainly, there are those who are chronically mentally ill, but a lot of other people, who, yes, may be in one way or another predisposed, become ill as a result of stress. For our protagonist, the final stress factor boils down to being subjected to a new environment where he is expected to produce at a certain level (and is monitored in invasive ways to ensure that he succeeds!) while at the same time is stripped of the conditions in which he can work. That’s not nothing. In fact, that’s a lot. Add a crumbling world order and his resulting fear for his family, and the resulting environment becomes a nest of vipers.

Books that get mental illness right and, along the way, also deliver a fair and compelling examination of both the conditions that lead to that illness as well as the circumstances and events leading away from the collapse don’t come around every day, and when they do, should be read and celebrated. In Red Tears, Hari Kunzru gets it right.

UNBEARABLE SPLENDOR by Sun Yung Shin

Unbearable Splendor by Sun Yung Shin

I have been thinking a lot about language and tongues, and the tongue we were born with thrust into a language we weren’t, and this is the context in which I picked up Unbearable Splendor by Sun Yung Shin on a recent Sunday. I read the essay collection, which discusses transnational adoption, cyborgs, Antigone, and a lot more in interrelated ways in several sittings throughout the day, not for the first time—I read the book shortly after it came out in 2016 in order to review it—but the first time purely as a reader seeking pleasure.

My take on the book in a nutshell is that we can read the adoptee, and more specifically the transnational adoptee, as a kind of cyborg, who is either possessed of a part from some other family, from some other country, but then transplanted into a new family in a new country, or as someone who is who they are but then takes on a new part upon the incident of being adopted. And that, more generally, states of being are sometimes in flux, even as we try to fix them. Maybe, even, in direct defiance of our trying to fix them.

That being said, just doing that, saying my take on the book, feels weird, and harkens back to my days as a book reviewer when I approached texts I read in the spirit of trying to find common threads running through collections. Certainly the threads are there, but this time around what I found, perhaps because I wasn’t thinking about synthesis or analysis or even, yes, trying to sound intelligent, was the utter joy of losing myself in astonishingly beautiful phrasings and the making (or perhaps recognition) of meaning more as the process of acknowledging the roots and tendrils easing their way through the rich earth of the text rather than what has, in my experience, sometimes felt like an act of brute force imposed by me, the reader-reviewer, upon the text from the vantage point of outside looking in.

This is not to say I find book reviews bad—I don’t, in fact I often read them and purchase books based upon what I read in reviews—or even that I don’t enjoy reading academic writing about literature—I do. Only that sometimes I don’t read to think but to lose myself. To evaporate into language, which at this point in the pandemic, when I have spoken barely a word of German to anyone in months (other than in basic transactions at the grocery store) and am feeling flustered and rusty (and embarrassed about my rustiness), has taken on added meaning.

Of language as home, or specifically, this language or that as home. Of what happens when we do not find ourselves at home. Of how many parts we are made of and how we do, or don’t, manage to exist as variable and varying entities. Ultimately, my communication style is relational, and I suppose reading can be relational too. So reading Unbearable Splendor becomes both a peek into a state of being utterly different than my own—that of a transnational adoptee from Korea—but also an invitation to ask myself:

Am I also a cyborg? Is my tongue a foreign part? Or at least the parts speaking German? What will it take to stop being a guest in a country where I am an immigrant? (“The Hospitality of Strangers,” which is one of my favorite essays in the collection, delves into the etymology of the word guest.) What will it take / is it possible to reorient the idea of home on the terrain of my tongue? By which I mean, specifically, the part that speaks, as opposed to the rest of my body that flops onto the couch like anyone else after a long day, or putters around the kitchen chopping vegetables for supper. I have a feeling I will spend the rest of my life trying to figure the answers out.

SIMPLE by Yotam Ottolenghi

Fishcake tacos with mango, lime and cumin yoghurt from SIMPLE by Yotam Ottolenghi.

I feel anxious. I make fishcake tacos. More precisely, Fishcake Tacos with Mango, Lime and Cumin Yoghurt. The recipe is from a cookbook I have recently acquired: Simple from Ottolenghi. The recipe is not simple, necessarily, but it is easy to prepare in steps. There are a number of steps. The big mistake I make is to forget to first toast and then pound the cumin seeds with a mortar and pestle. I tip the cumin, untoasted, unpounded, into the bowl of the food processor, along with the fish and other ingredients. Luckily, I do not make the same mistake with the cumin seeds for the yogurt sauce. In the end, my slip-up doesn’t seem to matter. The fishcake tacos are beyond delicious. The mango salsa dresses them perfectly. For a change, I am even able to find fresh coriander, one of the ingredients of the fishcakes, at the store. (I live in Germany. Fresh coriander is, unfortunately, never a given.) My husband declares he could eat these fishcake tacos every night for the rest of his life and not get tired of them.

º

I am anxious because of the sheer number of positive rejections I have gotten from literary magazines, including from a number of what could be termed high-level journals. Such rejections come in tiers. I have received standard positive rejections (we enjoyed your work), more encouraging positive rejections (we are very impressed by your work), and even more encouraging rejections, sometimes signed by one editor or another, sometimes not, sometimes including a few sentences about what the editors particularly enjoyed about my story, sometimes not. Always with an invitation to send more work. I am running out of work. I only have so many stories. I am not sure I can write more, at least not now. I have already set off on a different work-in-progress, one I don’t want to put on hold. Please, I think every time I receive one of these rejections. Just publish me already. Sadly, the rejections I receive from what might be termed lower-level journals often prove far less encouraging. I constantly ask myself where I belong.

º

For the fishcakes, I manage, for once, to pull of presentation as well as flavor. Instead of merely chopping the ingredients for the mango salsa, which is my natural impulse, I follow the recipe to a T and julienne each of the ingredients. I am not good at the julienne. It takes a lot of effort on my part to get the mango into thin strips instead of mashing it to a pulp on the cutting board. As it turns out, I would give my mango julienne a B-. In that it is not terrible, but it also doesn’t look like the firm, well-defined mango strips in the huge color photo accompanying the recipe. My mango julienne is definitely a little mushy. Maybe the mango I used was too ripe. I end up eating the rest of the mango—for once, I measure the ingredients by the gram, according to the recipe, before adding them to the salsa—here and now. I use a grapefruit spoon to scoop the soft mango flesh away from its skin. Juice runs down my chin.

º

Writing—or rather publishing—is not the only thing I feel anxious about, but it is easier to focus on than other things. So here goes. I would like to be read, to eventually have a collection of short stories out, or, even before that, to apply for an NEA grant in prose, but to do that, I need publications in literary journals first. It is despair that I feel when I think I will never be read, but it is less despair than when I think about California burning, or unsurvivable hurricanes, or climate change more generally, or the end of democracy in the United States, or the murder of Black Americans by the police, or Covid-19. More than once it has occurred to me that what I feel is survivor guilt. We moved to Germany in early 2015 for my husband’s job, before Donald Trump even announced his candidacy for President. I know I am lucky to be here, not least of all because Germany has had a far better response to Covid-19. But I don’t know how to process my feelings about what is happening back in the United States. I almost said back home, but Germany is also home. California used to be home, the Bay Area in fact, but I left years ago, before even the tech boom hit. I’ve never so much as experienced a wildfire. I decide I will submit to a few journals today, ones that have sent encouraging rejections in the past. Yes. I can do something about this anxiety.

º

Simple from Ottolenghi, who is actually Yotam Ottolenghi, an Israeli-British chef, is a large white hardcover. The cover is adorned with the shape of one large yellow lemon. The design is, yes, simple. The recipes are demarcated by codes. These codes indicate how the recipes are simple. (For example, they contain few ingredients, or they rely on pantry items, or they can be largely prepared ahead of time.) The fishcake tacos recipe is deemed simple in three categories according to the book’s metric: short on time; 10 ingredients or less; and make ahead. I wouldn’t exactly say making this recipe goes quickly, but it’s also true that I make the tortillas myself, which adds a significant amount of time to the preparation process. What the recipe isn’t, in any shape or form: complicated. At no point during the process do I lose my mind. (I once lost my mind cooking because I was trying to do too many things at once. A curry, and a raita, and a rice recipe instead of plain basmati rice, with no time to clean as I went.) But not here. First I make the fishcake batter. Then I form the fishcakes and put them in the fridge to firm up in the cold. After that I mix up the yoghurt sauce—remembering to toast and pound the cumin seeds first—and follow this with the mango salsa, all ingredients julienned. Because of how systematically I work, I am able to clean as I go. Chaos does not reign in my kitchen or my head. No. I push the chaos out.

º

I write this in the present tense, but of course I am not cooking and writing at the same time. Right now is actually the next morning, after breakfast. I am drinking coffee sweetened lightly with muscovado sugar, which was the closest thing I could find to brown sugar at the store yesterday. My cat has just jumped onto the desk and is trying to make himself comfortable. First, though, he gives me lots of head butts. Then he lies down on my arms. He, like cooking, is also a tonic combatting anxiety, although in his case, a little white fluffy one who purrs a lot rather than an act of creation broken down into manageable steps. Recipes are like that, I think. They are promises. Do this, this, and this and you will get one particular result. In other words, recipes are dependable. For now, I decide, this will have to be good enough.

DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD by Olga Tokarczuk

First off, this is a very exciting title. Amazon tells me the title comes from Blake, whose work figures into this story at a pretty high level. Whereas I read the German edition, Gesang der Fledermäuse (“Song of the Bats.) Though I really enjoyed the book, I almost feel cheated, because the English title, which looks like it is probably a translation of the original Polish one (Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych) is much, much better. German titling conventions—film, books, whatever—I don’t understand them. Often times the translated versions are unrecognizable from the originals.

Second, this book, and one more reason which I don’t feel like sharing, have convinced me to become a vegetarian again. The novel centers around Janina Duszejko, a sixty-ish woman who finds herself at the center of an odd series of crimes. Murders, namely, of hunters or other, in her mind, enemies of animals. She loves animals, in fact prefers them to people, which I think is something any shy person who has ever been to a party and instead of mingling has befriended the host’s dog or cat can understand. Janina herself used to have two dogs, who she refers in the book to as her girls, but they have disappeared. She believes the hunters killed them. As I read, I thought a lot about my own relationship to animals over the course of my life. Most specifically, my two cats, first dearly departed Stanley, and now Flocke. I would definitely call them friends. My little buddies. Mostly, though, I’ve been thinking about how I feel bad about the pigs.

I live in Germany. People here eat so much meat. Especially Schwein. Pigs to the left, pigs to the right. But I’ve heard that pigs are actually kind of smart. The animal activists that set up their informational tables in the pedestrian zones from time to time always feature pictures of cute pink pigs next to pictures of cute dogs and place the question: why is it okay to eat one and not the other? I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and about the horror certain Westerners display about dog-eating in more Eastern parts of the world, and how bizarrely hypocritical this is.

 I’ve also been thinking about lamb. Because over the past two years we’ve occasionally bought lamb to grill when we’ve gone shopping at the Turkish market. But when I was a kid, I could not, would not eat lamb for all the money in the world, and this was a huge point of contention with my parents. But what did they expect? They had given me a book, a story about a child named Jenny (of all names!) who had a lamb as a pet. I remember this book quite well. It was a Golden Book, for one thing. For another thing, Jenny gives her pet lamb a bath, then ties a ribbon around its neck and takes it with her to a birthday party. It’s a nice story. And then my parents expected me to eat lamb? Struggles over dinnertime are probably nothing new to any parent of small children, but it strikes me that if a child is refusing to eat because they are identifying with the dead animal on their plate, and are in fact horrified by its death, that is a sort of compassion that ought to be encouraged.

In Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Janina is odd, and strange, and maybe even quite unlikeable. Her constant letters to the police explaining her theory that it is in fact the local animals who have been—quite understandably, this is self-defense we’re talking about—murdering the hunters and other animal-enemies strike me as the kind of quasi-hysterical missives I myself would have a very difficult time taking even the slightest bit seriously if I were on the receiving end. Which is kind of what happens in the novel, but also kind of not.

This is the second Tokarczuk novel I’ve read, the first being Flights, and she is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers. Not sure what of hers I’ll read next. Die Jakobsbücher looks great, but I’ve noticed I sometimes have a problem reading historical novels in German because they contain a lot of nouns that are no longer used today. In other words, I have no problems understanding whatever actions are taking place, but I miss out a little bit when writers are describing the scene. But I may give it a try anyways. And just read a little slower than I usually would. As for Janina, I’m still thinking about some of the actions she takes, and about what my moral response is versus what it ought to be according to convention. And about what those conventions are and how much they matter. What is justice, truly?

As for me, I’m finally reconnecting to my childhood horror of the events that have to transpire in order to get meat onto my plate. I’ve gone back and forth on vegetarianism, but because I lacked any real conviction, it never stuck. When I was a child with no control over my own life, however, I had convicition and took the extraordinary step of spiriting meat from my plate and tossing it behind the radiator behind my chair at the table when my parents weren’t looking. Or hiding it somewhere in my bedroom when I was sent there to finish my plate. But now I’m an adult and get to think all I want about who gets to kill whom and why and what that means and how I will respond. That being said, hunting, which so horrifies Janina, isn’t high on my radar screen. But all those pigs (and cows, and lambs), bred for one thing, to end up at a butcher counter or shop, are. I feel bad about how long I didn’t feel bad. But I feel bad now. So hopefully, this time, vegetarianism will stick.