Editor’s Note: The Sun’s Reader at Large, a.k.a. David Goodman, dedicates his leisure to reading voraciously and eclectically about politics, government, society, culture and literature. Every two weeks or so, the Sun will post for your pleasure and edification the Reader’s digest (pun intended) of some of the best and most thought-provoking articles, books and podcasts that Goodman has recently enjoyed. Please note that the italicized text is quoted and that some of the linked articles may be in publications that impose a pay wall. Neither the Sierra County Sun nor the Reader at Large endorses all the views expressed in the featured books and articles.
LITERATURE
In the lecture he delivered as the recipient of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro said, “But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?”
In his new novel “Klara and the Sun,” Ishiguro delves into the realm of artificial intelligence and explores the possibility that the person asking those poignant questions may not be a person. The title character Klara is the Artificial Friend (or “AF”) to an adolescent girl. We see the strangeness of our world and our human flaws and foibles through her eyes. Inevitably, but believably, Klara raises the question whether robots can have the equivalent of feelings and emotions and whether they may be capable of behaving with greater humanity than humans. In her NPR review of the novel, Maureen Corrigan wrote that Ishiguro “is the master of slowly deepening our awareness of human failing, fragility and the inevitability of death — all that, even as he deepens our awareness of what temporary magic it is to be alive in the first place.”
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In the Summer 2021 issue of The Paris Review, one of my favorite New Yorker cartoonists Roz Chast is interviewed. She lampoons the second-class status that “fine artists” often inflict on cartoonists:
Cartoonists and craftspeople—we sit at the children’s table. Don’t get me started about a lot of what people call fine art. So much of it is horrible, horrible art school bullshit. “Kriddlenap’s twenty- by eighty-foot canvas, with its multitudinous chromatic biomorphic forms, condenses the picture plane into a totality of architectonic textured cacophony. The sixteen basketballs that tentatively adhere to the surface are an ironic nod to . . . .” On and on. Fucking hate it.
One of the things I love about her cartoons is the way in which she transforms angst and insecurity into humor. In the interview, she says:
But in general, making cartoons is a way of avoiding feelings of pointlessness and despair and still not being too upbeat.
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As so often happens, the most recent episode of the podcast “Backlisted” brought to my attention a writer of whom I had not previously heard and left me eager to read that writer’s works. In this case, the book is the novel “A Goat’s Song” by Dermot Healy. What most impressed the hosts and panelists was Healy’s deft capturing of both the personal and the political. The Independent wrote of the novel in 1994:
Healy interweaves a not quite documentary verisimilitude of landscape with the taut strands of the novel’s strident, yet cloistered, romance. His portrayal of the myths of Belfast and the West coast pierces through the stereotypes, while helping us to see clearly the justification for their existence.
In its obituary for Healy in 2014, The Guardian wrote:
Despite being lauded in Ireland, where A Fool’s Errand was shortlisted for the 2011 Irish Times poetry prize, Healy remained a bafflingly under-appreciated writer elsewhere. He wrote five works of fiction, including A Goat’s Song (1994), one of the great Irish novels of recent times, as well as several volumes of plays and poetry and an acclaimed memoir, The Bend for Home (1996). His fellow writer Pat McCabe described the latter book as “probably the finest memoir . . . written in Ireland in the last 50 years”, while Roddy Doyle once called Healy “Ireland’s finest living novelist”.
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
Diversity
In “Doing the Work at Work: What are companies desperat for diversity consultants actually buying?” (New York Magazine, May 26, 2021), Bridget Read provides an extensive and insightful account of the explosive growth in the diversity consulting business that the past year has generated.
Across the country, consultants in the diversity business felt that same whiplash of pandemic bust turning into protest boom. Practitioners who were collecting unemployment received calls from the CEOs of major corporations looking to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars publicly and fast.
One of her interesting insights:
As more money pours into the diversity industry, the products and services for sale are becoming ever more abstracted away from actual workers in pain.
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Corporate Political Donations
New York Times (NYT) column: “Corporate America Forgives the Sedition Caucus” (June 16, 2021) by Michelle Cottle
But as the election and pandemic traumas fade, corporate America is easing, quietly, back into the giving game. Lobbyists are suiting up. Fund-raising events are on the calendar. Wallets are reopening. It will take a while yet for the giving to return to its normal, obscene levels, but the trajectory is once more headed up—with the trend expected to accelerate in the coming months.
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The further Jan. 6 recedes from view, of course, the more that Corporate America will deem it less risky to donate than to not. As any savvy politician can tell you, the attention span of the American public is short. Without constant stoking, widespread outrage fades quickly—or is replaced by the next outrage. Just ask gun control
Israel
Washington Post (WP) article (June 13, 2021): “As Israel’s longest-serving leader, Netanyahu transformed his country—and left it more divided than ever” by Steve Hendrix
As Benjamin Netanyahu ends his tenure, following the parliament’s approval Sunday of a new governing coalition that excludes him, he is not only Israel’s longest-serving leader but also one of its most influential. He reoriented the country’s decades-old approach to peace and security, reshaped its economy and place in the world, and upended longtime legal norms and notions of civil discourse. To his supporters, Netanyahu, known by all as “Bibi,” leaves behind a booming economy, newfound international respect and a decade without bus bombings by Palestinian militants. To critics, he leaves a country more divided, less equitable and largely indifferent to peace with the Palestinians.
Supreme Court
WP column (June 15, 2021): “I’ve urged Supreme Court justices to stick around—but never to retire. Until now“by Ruth Marcus
Note to Justice Breyer: This is not Ted Kennedy’s Senate, where you worked as his chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee four decades ago. This is not the Senate that confirmed you 87–9 in 1994. Those kind of bipartisan votes on Supreme Court nominees are ancient history. That Senate is no more. “Talk to them” until you discover common ground—Kennedy’s approach for dealing with Republican colleagues, as Breyer related in a talk to students at the National Constitution Center last month—is great advice for high-schoolers learning to navigate the world. It doesn’t work with McConnell.
Alcohol
In the article “America Has a Drinking Problem” (The Atlantic, July/August 2021), Kate Julian examines recent trends in American consumption of alcohol in a large historical context. Here is how she frames the issue:
What most of us want to know, coming out of the pandemic, is this: Am I drinking too much? And: How much are other people drinking? And: Is alcohol actually that bad? . . .The answer to all these questions turns, to a surprising extent, not only on how much you drink, but on how and where and with whom you do it. But before we get to that, we need to consider a more basic question, one we rarely stop to ask: Why do we drink in the first place? By we, I mean Americans in 2021, but I also mean human beings for the past several millennia.
Self-Improvement
The Guardian column (6/16/21): “Did I use the pandemic for ‘self-improvement?’ Nope. And that’s fine“ by Jessa CrispinI always enjoy Jessa Crispin’s columns in The Guardian for their sharp prose and iconoclastic attitude. In this one, she deplores our pervasive and compulsive urge to turn everything into a prompt toward self-improvement.
There is something truly warped about the way American culture prioritizes growth and romanticizes hardship. Call it hustle culture, or manifest destiny, or the myth of the self-made man: we are incapable of just having a hard time. Cancer is your teacher, poverty is supposed to inspire ambition, a tragedy is just a teachable moment. A year spent in lockdown is an opportunity to pivot, to build wealth from the fear of others, to self-improve. There is nothing about you or your life that cannot be enhanced, monetized, upgraded, or learned from. And our culture believes strongly that if you are unwilling or unable to participate in this hysterical climb upward, you are undeserving of assistance or care.