Uneasy Street

A Brief Book Review of Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman

“Start my day up on the roof / There's nothing like this type of view / Point the clicker at the tube / I prefer expensive news” - Frank Ocean, “Super Rich Kids” (2013)

“I don't want much, f***, I drove every car / Some nice cooked food, some nice clean drawers” - Jay-Z, “Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love)” (2001)

There’s an Onion headline I like—and which I’m going to butcher—that goes something like this: “Woman Seated at Bar Upset That Couple Nearby Arguing in Hushed Tones Instead of More Loudly So She Can Follow Along.” For those who have ever empathized with this hypothetical woman yearning for a stronger sip of tea, this book is for you. Rachel Sherman has done a remarkable job entering, describing, and deconstructing the lives of young affluent families in New York City. By “affluent” she means those in households making more than $250,000, and with more than $1 million in assets. (Most of the families she interviewed though had far more in both income and wealth.) For those reading these numbers and thinking, “That’s not that much in New York,” this book is also for you (if not perhaps about you). (Sherman reminds us that the median household income in New York is approximately $50,000 to $60,000.) She contends that one of the most reliable behaviors of the relatively well-off is to justify their status by contextualizing it in comparison to those with more or less. To explain this, Sherman introduces a useful framework: Her subjects are typically either upwardly oriented or downwardly oriented. These are not hard and fast categories, but flexible vantage points through which the affluent in America, whether it came through earned income or inherited wealth, try to legitimize their occupancy of privilege. Essentially those with an upward orientation think, “I’m a good person because of how I behave; there are people with more resources who behave worse.” Those with a downward orientation think, “I’m a good person because of how I behave; there are people with less than I have who I am kind towards on a regular basis.” An upward orientation tends to come along with a conservative or apolitical view of society. Conversely, a downward orientation tends to imply a liberal or progressive political bent.

Rather than being a straight forward book about the lifestyles of the rich and anonymous, Sherman, a feminist scholar at the New School focused on domestic labor, devotes the second half of the book to understanding the power dynamics in couples arising from differences in income, wealth, and how they value unpaid household labor. It’s all fascinating. Thankfully the couples being interviewed aren’t speaking in hushed tones. The conclusion Sherman guides us toward is troubling for anyone worried about inequality in American society: whether couples ethically negotiate with each other about the societal and domestic legitimacy of their income, wealth, and unpaid household contributions (e.g., “lifestyle labor”), this is usually muted once kids enter the picture. At this point couples begin making decisions that advantage their families irrespective of society at large. With children giving them new found reason for investing in themselves and (intentionally or unintentionally) perpetuating inequality (e.g. ‘schooling’), they tend to not spend time challenging structural and systemic biases that give them privilege in the first place. They also often take as a personal attack any conversations about solutions to inequality. If a reduction in equality is to come, Sherman leads us to believe that it seems unlikely without active government intervention and higher taxation. As one interviewee in the book says, “I was gonna be a revolutionary, and then I had that first massage.”

This book goes well with Matthew Desmond’s brilliant Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which focuses on the other end of the income and wealth spectrum, following some of the poorest families in Milwaukee trying to make ends meet and pay rent. As well as J. Paul Getty’s How to Be Rich (1965), which despite its title is not an instruction manual on earning wealth but a forceful meditation on the responsibilities of it. I’d also suggest Margo Jefferson’s Negroland (2015), which follows the author’s upbringing in a Black affluent enclave in Chicago of the 1950s and 1960s and the ways in which wealth and race mixed to amplify and trouble her life.

June 11, 2020

“All living is listening for a throat to open. The length of its silence shaping lives.” - Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)

Never before have tempest and tranquility coexisted so beautifully. Never before. In my life, perhaps never again.

What is the first thing you think of when you hear the name “George”? I think of my older brother George Z. Bakuli. Since he passed away six years ago, I think about him literally every single day. Every single day. I am blessed to have had him in my life. I am blessed to continue to have him in my thoughts. But the heartbreak lingers, especially with each passing year; the feeling grows of just how young he was when he died. Just 29 years old. Just beginning his life in so many ways.

When I think of George, I think of his social courage. His steady moral compass. His independence of mind. I think of his indomitable will. His loyalty to those he loved and who loved him. His pride in his Blackness, his ancestry, and his family. I think of his big smile; how he playfully lorded over me that, unlike me, he had a great smile without ever needing braces. How he encouraged me to stand up for myself and to never brook the opinion that I wasn’t capable. I think of how he knew, like I knew, that the odds were stacked against us; and how he encouraged me not to mind if pursuing my dreams or doing the right thing made other people feel uncomfortable about themselves, especially white people. I think of how every time after I achieved some big goal growing up, whether an A on an essay or victory in a school election, I would tell him, “Next time, y’all best bring kryptonite”. I think of how, many years later, just a few months before he passed, on New Year’s Eve, after midnight, he unexpectedly texted me, “Next time, y’all best bring kryptonite! That’s your saying. Don’t ever forget that!” I think of how grateful I was and am that he remembered and appreciated details from our lives. I think of his arena-sized laugh. I think of his beautiful energy and ambitions and hopes and dreams. I think of how those were cut short, at just 29 years old, because of mental illness. I think of how it was not his fault. I think of how he fought for his life and his dignity. I think of how the health care system failed him. I think of how his employers and human resources failed him. I think of how even six years after he died, too many people continue to use language that stigmatizes mental health, unaware or uninterested of words besides “crazy” or “insane” to describe something negative. I think about so very, very much.

Above all, though, when I think about George, I think about courage. I think about how before he got sick, his courage to live better was his greatest gift to me. I think about how courage is the real wellspring of any meaningful change in our lives, communities, and societies. Since he passed away, on his birthday, June 11th, I’ve tried to meditate on courage. I try to remind myself to live courageously. This year was no different. If anything, the reminders were heightened. Because when I think about “George,” I also think about George Floyd. Unlike my brother, I don’t know intimate details of Floyd’s life. He was a Black man too. He had energy and ambitions and dreams. He had people he loved and who loved him. He also died too soon. In many ways today he is a symbol. A symbol of so many Black lives unjustly ended. Whether at the protests I have joined or on social media, when I see all the glorious signs for him and Breonna Taylor and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and too many Black lives lost trying to say they mattered, I can’t help but think of my brother George, whose life mattered so much to me.

I’ve read a lot of late from white strangers, friends, and acquaintances about what they are doing to help make change happen and to prove that Black lives matter. They seek a better criminal justice system. Some even go further; they understand we will not have a better criminal justice system without other forms of justice, whether social, medical, or, above all, economic justice.  This will take stamina, resolve, and courage. They are signaling they are ready to actively join a fight so many of us have been battling every single day of our lives. When I think about courage, though, I can’t help but think how unaware or uninterested so many of these strangers, friends, and acquaintances seem to be to opportunities to be courageous in their daily lives. It seems so much easier for people to stand in solidarity with people they have never met, and will never meet, than people in their own lives and communities. Black people in their own lives and communities. I don’t have a lot of answers for how to improve criminal justice. But I have some thoughts around how to improve economic justice. Here are a few: 

Hire and retain Black people. Promote Black people. Fund Black people. Become a customer of a variety of Black businesses. Compensate Black people justly. Don’t steal Black people’s ideas and efforts and then erase their contributions. Don’t make excuses for, give special treatment to, or put on a pedestal non-Black people if you wouldn’t do likewise for Black people. Don’t penalize Black people for things you wouldn’t penalize others for. Don’t label Black people “angry” or “agitators” when they display the courage to specify their experiences as relates to being Black. Don’t gaslight Black people when they hold you accountable for your words, policies, and actions.

These aren’t hypotheticals. These are tangible choices in response to events I’ve both experienced and witnessed firsthand.

One thing in particular is critical: It’s not giving implicit special treatment to white people. I’ve seen over and over again white people say they are “acknowledging [their] privilege” and “learning to use [their] privilege well”. On the wide spectrum of say John Brown to Jefferson Davis, it is a gesture on the progressive side of things. But it is hardly enough. It just perpetuates in new ways the problems that got us here in the first place. I can’t help but think, “There’s no universal law that you should have privilege in the first place. How about a world in which white privilege doesn’t exist?” That seems to me a truly courageous idea and series of actions worth publicly speaking up about and fighting for. As a Black woman I work with said so well, “Rationalizing or compartmentalizing racism because it preserves privilege is a form of racism.” Rather than recognizing how good you have it undeservedly, and benevolently using that goodness for the benefit of Black people, how about a world in which you don’t undeservedly have it so good? Wouldn’t that be truly courageous?

Murakami

A Brief Book Review of Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami

Here’s the thing. I’ll keep it simple. Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore (2017) is a very, very long book. This tale of supernatural hauntings in mountainous rural Japan clocks in at about 730 pages. It feels long less because of its page length, though, and more because it drags at times. Like, a lot of times. I’d be lying if I said this book moved quickly. The first 300 pages move slower than a Republican congressman’s pulse in a Trump corruption scandal. Murakami gives us way too much detail. For example, with no meaningful relevance to the plot or character development, we learn, step-by-step, how a main character prepares omelets. We also learn how that character always starts the wash cycle for his laundry while he exercises, and how he starts the dry cycle when he’s finished lifting. Seriously. It’s surprising Murakami didn’t tell us whether the character also pretreats stains before each load, separates whites and colors, and uses a high-efficiency detergent... Thank god for editors. 

After a pretty slow first 300 pages, over the next 400+ pages, things take a turn into the world of magical realism, which is welcome. Though the unnecessary detail remains—at several points our lead wonders if he should check his tire pressure!—the pace happily quickens. The expanding complexity of metaphors and plot twists is welcome, and is often thrilling, funny, and inspiring. (I enjoyed the constant refrain, “Time is on your side.”) But the metaphors weren’t fully baked, the prose is often dry, and the interactions between the listless men and the two-dimensional women characters are often painful. (This obviously failed the Bechdel test.) 

If you can stomach the first 300 pages, you’ll meet a plot that feels a combination of Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”, Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Grey”, and James’ “The Turn of the Screw”. I can’t promise that you’ll think it’s worth it, though. I’m definitely no expert on Japan’s deep, rich history of writing. That said, I did study Japanese literature and history in college for four semesters. It gave me enough exposure to say with confidence that there is better from Murakami to choose from as well as other modern Japanese writers. Murakami has 17 other works of fiction; I’d say prioritize other (shorter) works first.

Housekeeping

A Brief Book Review of Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

I first encountered Marilynne Robinson through her wonderful novel “Gilead”. I followed this by reading an excellent collection of essays she wrote titled “When I Was a Child I Read Books”. After that I came across a stimulating conversation in the New York Review of Books between her and President Barack Obama, who while he was in office flew to her home in Iowa to speak with her. This is all to say that my encounters with Marilynne Robinson have all been distinct and pleasing experiences. “Housekeeping” is no different. This book is beautiful and terrific. The story is set in the Pacific northwest and is about family and sisterhood and loss and reemergence and memory and community and mental health and independence and so much more. It’s a lot. Robinson’s writing is so vivid, so thoughtful, and so biblical that I found myself rereading passages for the shear pleasure of soaking in her artistry. The best way to enjoy her writing is slowly. Even if you think you read quickly, her style forces you to slow down and sit with her characters and scenes and ideas. And for this she rewards the patient. Her writing crescendos in the most wonderful ways. Some favorite excerpts below:

“She did not speak to me, or look back. The absolute black of the sky dulled and dimmed and blanched slowly away, and finally half a dozen daubs of cloud, dull powder pink, sailed high in a pale-green sky, rust-red at the horizon. Venus shone a heatless planetary white among these parrot colors, and earth lay unregenerate so long that it seemed to me for once all these blandishments might fail. The birds of our world were black motes in that tropic.” (p. 117)

“I had seen two of the apple trees in my grandmother’s orchard die where they stood. One spring there were no leaves, but they stood there as if expectantly, their limbs almost to the ground, miming their perished fruitfulness. Every winter the orchard is flooded with snow, and every spring the waters are parted, death is undone, and every Lazarus rises, except these two. They have lost their bark and blanched white, and a wind will snap their bones, but if ever a leaf does appear, it should be no great wonder. It would be a small change, as it would be, say, for the moon to begin turning on its axis. It seemed to me that what perished need not also be lost. At Sylvie’s house, my grandmother’s house, so much of what I remembered I could hold in my hand—like a china cup, or a windfall apple, sour and cold from its affinity with deep earth, with only a trace of the perfume of its blossoming. Sylvie, I knew, felt the life of perished things.” (p. 124)

Simple News That Nature Told

A Brief Book Review of Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson

I was born in Nairobi, Kenya, but I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts. For six years—from the seventh grade through my senior year—during the academic year I took essentially the same route to and from school. Whether by bus or by car, I almost always traveled along Main Street. And on Main Street I would pass an imposing yellow brick building on a hill: the Dickinson Homestead. The Dickinson Homestead is the house the 19th century poet Emily Dickinson grew up in. There she spent much of her life and wrote most of her poetry. I would always pass the property with a measure of awe. I was aware a world-renowned poet had resided there, someone, to quote Fitzgerald, with “a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” Despite that abundance of sensitivity, Dickinson spent much of her life in seclusion; only ten of her poems were published during her lifetime, and even those were published anonymously and without her permission. Her presence in Amherst today is public and notable, a relatively recent mural of her right in the center of town. And yet, despite my awareness of her place in the history of American poetry, and despite the immediacy of seeing her home nearly every day for years, it was not until this month, years after leaving Amherst for Williams College and then New York, that I finally read her works. Friend, it was tremendous. At turns charming, inspiring, defiant, resigned, beautiful, and hopeful. But consistently thoughtful and vivid. There are 177 poems in this collection of Dickinson’s poetry. Scores of those poems I loved and will revisit again in more depth. An example of a favorite, right on the first page:

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,—
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

Dickinson reads like one of those American writers—Melville comes to mind—who seemed to know not only all the words in the English language, but also how to make good use of them. I think she made best use of her words on grief, whether in reflection or anticipation of it. This is important. We live in a country today that largely doesn’t know how to talk about death and loss. This is not without visible efforts on a mass scale. The highest grossing movie of all time, Avengers: End Game (2019), is squarely about grief, with therapy sessions and many scenes and conversations about healthy and unhealthy ways to cope with loss. Perhaps the most well-known athlete in the history of the world, Michael Jordan, took off two entire years from the sport of basketball at the height of his powers to grieve the death of his father. The most popular musicians celebrate fallen friends regularly in songs (Nas: “Rest in Peace, Ill Will”). And yet you probably unfortunately still hear too many stories of social groups and families that “just don’t talk about it.” In Dickinson’s poetry, we see someone unafraid to pick up and examine the most universal and troubling of human experiences. Here’s an example that evokes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s albatross:

Bereaved of all, I went abroad,
No less bereaved to be
Upon a new peninsula,—
The grave preceded me,
Obtained my lodgings ere myself,
And when I sought my bed,
The grave it was, reposed upon
The pillow for my head.
I waked, to find it first awake,
I rose,—it followed me;
I tried to drop it in the crowd,
To lose it in the sea,
In cups of artificial drowse
To sleep its shape away,—
The grave was finished, but the spade
Remained in memory.

Here’s another:

Softened by Time’s consummate plush,
How sleek the woe appears
That threatened childhood’s citadel
And undermined the years!
Bisected now by bleaker griefs,
We envy the despair
That threatened childhood’s citadel
So easy to repair.

Another one:

To fight aloud is very brave,
But gallanter, I know,
Who charge within the bosom,
The cavalry of woe.
Who win, and nations do not see,
Who fall, and none observe,
Whose dying eyes no country
Regards with patriot love.
We trust, in plumed procession,
For such the angels go,
Rank after rank, with even feet
And uniforms of snow.

Do yourself a favor and consider Emily Dickinson.

Surely, You're Joking

A Brief Book Review of Surely, You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman

It’s unexpectedly quite enjoyable to read a memoir of Richard Feynman so soon after reading a biography of Isaac Newton. It’s a study in contrasts. In James Gleick’s “Isaac Newton”, which I read a couple weeks ago, we meet an orphaned, hermetic, terminally intense, celibate, ultra-competitive mathematician, theologian, alchemist, and government minister. In Feynman—who won a Nobel Prize for physics more than 250 years after Sir Isaac invented calculus and modern physics—we meet a playful, bongo drumming, areligious, prank pulling, safe cracking modern man who hated most philosophy and had no patience for government bureaucracy. I could go on. The surface differences are legion. What’s similar about these two men, though, is their intense curiosity and independence, love of scientific experimentation, and exceptional ability to discover and explain natural phenomena. I read another Feynman memoir a couple of years ago titled “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” That was good. I remember being touched by Feynman’s relationship with his father, his reflections on the illness and death of his first wife, and his work in helping solve the mystery of the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion. But this memoir I enjoyed a lot more. You gain a more full (and entertaining) view of the man, from his days at MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, and CalTech, to life at Los Alamos helping create the nuclear bomb, to his time in Brazil, to shenanigans in Las Vegas, and so much more, especially about how to learn, practice, and teach science. The essays I liked the most were “He Fixes Radios by Thinking!”, “The Chief Research Chemist of the Metaplast Corporation”, “Monster Minds”, “A Different Box of Tools”, “Los Alamos from Below”, “Safecracker Meets Safecracker”, “Lucky Numbers”, “Judging Books by Their Covers”, “Found Out in Paris”, and “Cargo Cult Science”. Highly recommended.

Isaac Newton

A Brief Book Review of Isaac Newton by James Gleick

I really enjoyed this biography of Isaac Newton. The author, James Gleick, in his often lyrical style of writing, draws a portrait of Newton based on the correspondences and journals of the Englishman and other biographies of him. You will learn about the history of scientific thought for sure from this book. More interestingly, you will learn about Newton the man. And the man who emerges I was surprised to meet. Newton is obsessive. A secretive and celibate recluse, he is at all points focused and at work; at work on experimenting, measuring, studying, and describing nearly all things. He wrote millions of words in journals that never saw publication, such as his ironically named “Waste Book” in which he essentially invented calculus. Beyond natural philosophy, which was what we today call science, he is also unexpectedly obsessed with alchemy and theology, spending countless hours experimenting with metallurgy and studying biblical scholarship. What drives the plot of this biography, though, is less his intellectual passions and witnessing Newton’s developing “strength of mind”, and more his social battles. The Newton we meet is “unsocial”, “competitive”, and “ruthless” in besting contemporary thinkers of his day vying for the acclaim and giant-hood of which he thought himself singularly worthy. This aspect of his personality I had not known before. In his searing intellectual “duels” with Hooke and Leibniz we see Newton more fully. It seems only because of his faithful disciple Edmond Halley (the mathematician and astronomer famous for using Newton’s math to predict the path of a comet), is Newton coaxed out of his unsmiling seclusion into publishing his works and beginning to join society more fully. He eventually became Master of the Mint for England, in charge of printing coin for the kingdom. A position he held until his death and which made him a fortune he bequeathed to no one. A fascinating, well-crafted biography of a man, his time, and the world he wrought.