Sunday Times-America’s really wild west
February 22, 2009
America’s really wild west
Stephen Amidon and his teenage son find a trail of bloody conflict in the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming
Sunday Times – Frank O’Hara
February 22, 2009
Frank O’Hara provides the poetry of Mad Men
Meditations in an Emergency, particularly Mayakovsky, by ‘New York’ writer is literary backdrop to TV series on advertising
New York Times – “My Children Made Me Do It”
February 8, 2009
My Children Made Me Do It
Greenfield, Mass.
MY father didn’t leave me much when he died.
Although he was at one time a fast-rising executive in a multinational company, a combination of corporate skullduggery and his own personal demons meant he had little in the bank when he died in 2001, a few days before his 70th birthday.
There was nothing for his four children except a small array of personal items, including a particularly sturdy hairbrush I was astute enough to claim. I still own it, in fact, and use it daily to tame my rapidly thinning hair, which is probably coming unglued due to worry about what sort of inheritance I will be able to provide my own four children.
I got to thinking about that brush when I read that a colleague of Tom Daschle had said that his tax woes — not to mention the lucrative private-sector temptations he gave into — may have stemmed from his desire to make enough money to lay a fat nest egg for his children.
It is hard to see how riding in a free limo benefits future generations, but even if I give Mr. Daschle the benefit of the doubt, I cannot help but note the paradox here. A man’s desire to provide his progeny with a big score has resulted in him saddling them with a very different sort of inheritance — a legacy of embarrassment.
Instead of being remembered as the savior of the nation’s health care system or even as just a middling health secretary, their father will now forever be known as the guy who hitched a ride with some private-equity hot rodders and then neglected to chip in for the gas. Most sons and daughters I know would gladly forgo a portion of their birthright in order to be invited to pool parties at the Obama White House and not to have a dad serving as fodder for late-night television wisecracks.
Inheritances can be tricky things. Even those given with the best of intentions can often go awry. Just ask King Lear. He simply wanted to turn Britain over to his daughters so he could enjoy the medieval equivalent of retirement in Boca Raton, but wound up starting a bloody civil war that brought ruin on his family.
On the other end of the ancestral give-and-take, there’s Richard Carstone, who appears in Dickens’s “Bleak House.” Richard was a nice enough boy who caused his own destruction by obsessively pursuing a share of a disputed legacy.
At the bottom of the barrel, there’s Bernard Madoff, who is reported to have planned to dispense a desk full of booty to his relatives to keep the family fortune one step ahead of the law. Sure, everybody wants to get a surprise bequest from their Uncle Bernie, but probably not if it comes with a co-conspirator rap attached.
Granted, it’s hard to spend much time worrying about setting something aside after a month in which the economy shed nearly 600,000 jobs. Most parents these days are too wrapped up in staying afloat to be able to capitalize their children’s futures.
Still, those moments when I contemplate how little I’ve socked away for my offspring cause me no small amount of anxiety. In fact, the one thing that is sure to get me thinking I should do something I really do not want to do — or perhaps even something I should not do — is the desire to endow my brood. All manner of behavior that would otherwise be considered contemptible seems to be justified in the name of inheritance. Saving for your loved ones, not patriotism, is apparently the last refuge of a scoundrel.
One way I manage this anxiety is to ponder those friends and colleagues who have been well provided for, and to wonder if I really want to leave that sort of feathered nest for my children. Because there is often something not quite right about these fortunate sons of the baby boom.
I am not talking about trust-fund brats who get arrested for throwing hissy fits on Sunset Boulevard. I’m speaking of those perfectly well-mannered folks whose parents left them enough to ensure they never have to lie awake at night worrying about college tuition or second mortgages.
The young family who can afford the brownstone without ever enduring cramped life in an apartment, the couple who are able to jet away on holiday while the rest of us sit in traffic on the way to the local beach, the household whose teenage children are never asked to help out — there is something missing here, the sense of accomplishment derived from patient effort. It is hard not to think that their parents have done them as much harm as good by installing an express escalator on the uphill sections of their lives.
Perhaps this skepticism is just my way of rationalizing an inability to provide my own children with an anxiety-free future. No one wants to struggle and worry; a little help is always appreciated. And in the end, it is up to each of us to figure out how much is enough to leave behind, and how much is too much.
For me, the answer lies with my father, who wound up dragging his weary bones around the country in a series of lousy jobs at a time in life when many of the men who had once worked under him were perfecting their golf swings.
One of the main reasons he continued to work so hard, I believe, is that he was mortified at the thought of being a burden to his grown children. Leaving behind an inheritance of debt would have been a disgrace, his own version of not paying taxes on a freebie.
He was, for all his faults, an honorable man. It was a quality that sometimes held him back, especially during the 1980s, when many of his colleagues were eviscerating their corporation to create the private fortunes that they would one day leave to their own children. My father refused all that because he was more concerned with maintaining his good name.
That sense of decency, his good name, is what he passed on to us. Looking at some of the shamelessly greedy men he worked with, it is an inheritance I am happy to have.
Though I’m also glad I got the brush.
Stephen Amidon is the author, most recently, of the novel “Security.”
Lawrence Hill – The Book of Negroes
February 7, 2009
The Sunday Times February 8, 2009
The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
Review by Stephen Amidon
Among the abundant evils brought about by the European trade in African slaves, one of the greatest was the systematic silencing of so many black voices. The erasure of native languages, coupled with strict laws against slaves learning to read and write, meant that generation upon generation of potential chroniclers of the African exodus were deprived of the means to narrate its history. Lawrence Hill’s expansive third novel is an attempt to remedy this crime. The Book of Negroes opens in 1745 in west Africa, where 11-year-old Aminata Diallo lives with her jeweller father and midwife mother. She is a bold, brilliant girl who dreams of becoming her village’s storyteller. “Perhaps, one day, I would be the only woman, and one of the only people in my entire village, to be able to…write in the gorgeous, flowing Arabic script.” Her idyllic life is shattered when she is captured by slave traders, who ship her to the New World on a hellish transport. After surviving a bloody onboard rebellion, she is carted off to a South Carolina indigo plantation, whose owner soon takes unwelcome notice of her. “Some say that I was once uncommonly beautiful,” Diallo later claims, “but I wouldn’t wish beauty on any woman who has not her own freedom, and who chooses not the hands that claim her.” Despite all manner of deprivation and tribulation, Diallo survives the eventful half-century to come. “I ain’t killable,” she matter-of-factly explains when a fellow slave remarks on her durability. Her journey takes her to revolutionary war-era New York City, to inhospitable Nova Scotia, and even back to Africa. She serves as a midwife for both blacks and whites, and also secretly learns to read and write English, skills that help her win her freedom – or at least a bastardised version of it – when the British hire her to write “The Book of Negroes”, a catalogue of all slaves eligible for release from bondage under the terms of a treaty signed with newly independent America. But no matter how heroically Diallo strives, cruel reminders that she is ultimately nothing more than property continue to batter her as she passes from actual enslavement to impotent liberation. She ends her long journey in London, where abolitionists led by William Wilberforce ask her to join their campaign against the slave trade. She quickly becomes a celebrity, earning a meeting with King George and Queen Charlotte, who is rumoured to have a touch of African blood herself. What is best about Hill’s novel is the author’s richly meticulous recreation of late 18th-century slave life, based largely on the actual Book of Negroes, which contains the names and brief histories of over 3,000 slaves who took refuge with the British. European cartographers thought Diallo’s native land so primordial that, in the words of Swift, they filled in their maps’ empty spaces with “elephants for want of towns”. In Hill’s rendering, however, Africa is held together by a sophisticated social fabric that is shredded by the slave trade. Ironically, it is America, with its malarial swamplands and pestilential cities, that is truly primitive, its savagery intensified by an economy that is mercilessly devoted to the bottom line. The slaves’ daily strategies for surviving this brutal system are finely detailed, whether they involve a folk remedy for smallpox, a wide-ranging underground news network called “the fishnet”, or an ingenious private language called Gullah. Given Hill’s historical integrity, it is ironic that his publishers in America, Australia and New Zealand should have blanched at using the actual title of a valuable historical document for his novel for fear that the archaic term “Negroes” would cause offence. They called it Someone Knows My Name instead – at least they didn’t name it The Book of African-Americans. If the novel has a fault, it is that the author is at times a bit too enamoured of his heroine, casting Diallo in such relentlessly heroic terms that she is in danger of becoming iconic rather than human. In its grand historical sweep, however, The Book of Negroes succeeds admirably in giving voice to a captive people who were for so long kept mute
Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill Doubleday £12.99 pp496
Susan Sontag – Sunday Times
February 1, 2009
Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-64 by Susan Sontag
