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
I had long wanted to read Iris Murdoch‘s novel “The Sea, the Sea” and was finally prompted, in a circuitous way, to do so. I heard an interview of the philosopher Susan R. Wolf on a Phi Beta Kappa “Key Conversations” podcast. At the end of the interview, in recommending books that had influenced her, Wolf said, “For me, some of my greatest influences are Iris Murdoch, who is also a novelist. She has a little collection of three essays called “The Sovereignty of Good” that changed my philosophical life and worldview.” I had not known that Murdoch was a philosophy scholar, as well as a novelist. I read the first of the essays in that collection and was deeply impressed by her erudition and (not surprisingly) by the lucidity of her prose, even in dealing with some difficult concepts regarding morality and moral reasoning.
That prompted me to read “The Sea, The Sea,” which won the Booker Prize in 1978, and I am glad I did. The exceedingly unreliable narrator, Charles Arrowby, is a case study in self-deception and obsession, and he is a genius in rationalizing his own selfishness. He can perpetrate casual cruelty on those most devoted to him without apparent qualm. Murdoch makes him a maddening character, but never ceases to make the story a compelling one. Excerpts from the book cannot convey its power, but perhaps this excerpt from a June 2009 Guardian article, “The moral brilliance of Iris Murdoch” by Bidisha (the byline of this British broadcast critic) conveys the exceptional quality of her writing :
Murdoch was a genius. . . . She took on the most profound moral questions that we ordinary, flawed, troubled creatures grapple with: the battle between good and evil within ourselves and within society; the possibility of faith and the death of God; the occasionally delightful and playful, occasionally dangerous and destructive urges of erotic desire; the compulsions of amorous and intellectual obsession; artistic creativity and the artist’s ambition to create the one ultimate and universal work that addresses every moral dilemma with its overarching theory.
All that makes it sounds as though reading her work is like finding oneself in the middle of an endless Brothers Karamazov-like rumination. Yet lightly thrown over these huge issues were plots of a disarming playfulness, creativity and joy: realistically daft adults making buffoons of themselves, androgynous girls, tough but unimaginative women, happy dogs, tortured gay priests, angry clever bullies and power-holders, hypocritical husbands, melancholy wives. Murdoch’s characters are fallen, her world post-lapsarian, full of contingency and realistic illogic. Her characters act against their own happiness with frustrating frequency. But then, that is what people are like. They behave absurdly, yet Murdoch does not write absurdly. She examines human silliness with her own clever, tolerantly smiling seriousness.
* * *
In a recent New Yorker Fiction podcast, Ann Patchett reads Maile Meloy‘s story “The Proxy Marriage.” The story is beautiful and heart-warming without ever being clichéd or sappy. Not surprisingly, Ann Patchett’s discussion of it with New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman is almost as engaging as the story itself.
* * *
In August, I took a four-class course on the short fiction of Eudora Welty. We started by reading Welty’s stories “”Lily Daw and the Three Ladies” and “Why I Live at the P.O.”; for the second week, “Petrified Man” and “Curtain of Green”; for the third week, “The Wanderers” and “No Place for You, My Love”; and for the fourth, “Circe” and “Asphodel.”
Those stories showed her exceptional range as a storyteller. Each is distinctive, but all of them reflect Welty’s affection for her characters, however ordinary or strange. The course also touched on Welty’s photography—she was a photographer for the WPA—and its relationship to her writing. In 2009, the Smithsonian Magazine said 
of an exhibition of her photographs: “The pictures, made in Mississippi in the early to mid-1930s, show the rural poor and convey the want and worry of the Great Depression. But more than that, they show the photographer’s wide-ranging curiosity and unstinting empathy—which would mark her work as a writer, too.”
That article also quotes her own views of her photography career and its connection to her writing:
In her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, published in 1984, Welty paid respects to picture-taking by noting: “I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn’t hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture; and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it.”
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
“Conflict is Not Abuse” by Sarah Schulman
I had not heard of Schulman or this book until I heard political analyst Ezra Klein interview the writer-activist in his eponymous podcast recently. Shulman makes arguments that are thought-provoking and courageous in today’s environment.
My thesis is that at many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve. I will show how this dynamic, whether between two individuals, between groups of people, between governments and civilians, or between nations is a fundamental opportunity for either tragedy or peace. Conscious awareness of these political and emotional mechanisms gives us all a chance to face ourselves, to achieve recognition and understanding in order to avoid escalation towards unnecessary pain.
Reproductive rights
Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe elucidates the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to allow the Texas “heartbeat bill” abortion ban to go into effect in his column in the Guardian (9/2/21), “Roe v Wade died with barely a whimper. But that’s not all.”
For years, as the Supreme Court’s composition kept tilting right, reproductive rights have been squarely on the chopping block. Now they are on the auction block as well.
It wasn’t just Roe that died at midnight on 1 September with barely a whimper, let alone a bang. It was the principle that nobody’s constitutional rights should be put on sale for purchase by anyone who can find an informant or helper to turn in whoever might be trying to exercise those rights.
End of the war in Afghanistan
Since reading Robert Wright’s book “Why Buddhism is True” several years ago, I became an admirer of his ability to bring secular concepts of mindfulness and meditation to bear on contemporary issues. I subscribe to Wright’s Nonzero Newsletter, in which he recently reflected on the unlearned lessons that again emerged in the Afghanistan situation, “Afghanistan: 3 Unlearned Lessons” (8/30/21).
The speed with which the Afghan army collapsed this summer, and the ease with which the Taliban took city after city, caught pretty much every American official by surprise. That surprise shouldn’t surprise us, given that these officials had been getting feedback about the war that was, predictably, biased in a positive direction.
* * *
Unlearned Lesson #4: We should try really, really hard to avoid military interventions. This follows—not quite inexorably, but plausibly—from unlearned lessons 1, 2, and 3. If indeed (Lesson 1) the presence of foreign troops tends to energize and expand opposition; and if indeed (Lesson 3) this problem, along with other problems, is exacerbated by the difficulty of navigating ethnic and other social and political complexities—complexities that we tend to have only a dim comprehension of; and if indeed (Lesson 2) attempts to deepen that comprehension, and navigate these complexities, will be frustrated by the systematic corruption of relevant information—well, then maybe the odds against success are pretty steep. And since confirming how steep they are tends to get tons of people killed, maybe we should quit repeating that exercise.
Critical Race Theory
New York Times (7/5/21) “This Wave of Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws Is Un-American” by Kmele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley and Thomas Chatterton Williams. The authors are a cross-partisan group of thinkers who have written extensively about authoritarianism, liberalism and free speech.) Their thoughts shed light on this recent hot-button issue in our culture wars, which also seem to be never-ending wars.
These [anti=CRT] initiatives have been marketed as “anti-critical race theory” laws. We, the authors of this essay, have wide ideological divergences on the explicit targets of this legislation. Some of us are deeply influenced by the academic discipline of critical race theory and its critique of racist structures and admire the 1619 Project [the New York Times Magazine’s ongoing, long-form journalism project whose self-described aim is to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative.”] Some of us are skeptical of structural racist explanations and racial identity itself, and disagree with the mission and methodology of the 1619 Project. We span the ideological spectrum: a progressive, a moderate, a libertarian and a conservative. It is because of these differences that we here join together, as we are united in one overarching concern: the danger posed by these laws to liberal education.