Links for March 12th
Ukraine, W.H. Auden and Bruegel, Eric Adams, direct-to-consumer business, oil, Doritos, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Hope you had a decent week amid the continued grimness abroad.
I wrote a little bit about the difficulties of assessing change (individual or otherwise) during these historical events of the last two years. For Thematic Unity, this photo above is from March 2020 on the Brooklyn Promenade.
Links
If you haven’t read the story of the family who was killed by Russian mortars and photographed, the Times then spoke with the father and husband of those killed, and it’s, as you can imagine, very sad, but really worth reading. Salwan Georges’ incredibly sad, striking photos of a couple saying goodbye at a train station are also worth looking at.
This New York Times scrolling feature through a W.H. Auden poem and the Bruegel painting it references is very diverting and calming, even if it’s about war actually.
You won’t read anything more entertaining, and vaguely trippy and disorienting while still getting into the question of what exactly is happening here, this week than Ruby Cramer’s profile of New York mayor Eric Adams.
Three business (or thereabouts) stories that I learned some new info from and found overall interesting:
a. Alex Kantrowitz explains why the Warby Parkers and AllBirds of the world have mostly fallen on hard times lately, for reasons I wasn’t expecting all of.
b. Doritos removed five chips from each bag because of inflation, and other similar facts (also featuring a few truly amazing quotes, such as, “We took just a little bit out of the bag so we can give you the same price and you can keep enjoying your chips”).
c. Robinson Meyer at the Atlantic delved into the realities of American energy independence and basically We Did It, But it hasn’t worked out exactly geopolitically as promised.
The Packers’ seamstress retired after 27 years, and they wrote up her career, including this great quote:
“[The players] know what they want, they know what they feel good in, and I have a theory that if you look good and feel good about what you have on, you'll feel better about everything.”
Light book commentary
Circling back on Roberto Bolaño, I did read 2666 over the holidays and earlier this year. Not quite finished when Bolaño died and semi-intended as five distinct novels: a story about a love triangle between European professors obsessed with a German author; a story about a depressed professor whom they meet in Mexico; a story about an American journalist and the depressed professor’s daughter; a story about the Mexican city much of the book takes place in, which has been overrun by rape and murder; and the story of the German author from Nazi Germany to the 1990s. It’s 1,000 pages; it’s definitely in the category of “you have to want to finish it,” and that involves getting through a 300-page section of grisly murders. (Though personally, while some of the rape/murder section was gratuitously graphic to the point of nausea, the American wasn’t totally believable as a character, and that part was the weak point to me.)
Anyway, the (unfortunately dark) thing that stood out to me most about this book: In the first half, when the murders keep coming up, Bolaño frames them a little mysteriously, with the suggestion that a serial killer has been involved — or that there might be something not quite true about it, or maybe even that the book will turn surrealist. When the murders section rolls around, though, what he makes gradually clear is that there’s no conspiracy. There might be a serial killer or two lurking on the edges, but the situation is this: a society on the make that does not care about young, poor women, and is filled with cops who don’t value women’s lives (with a few exceptions), and businesses (manufacturing or drugs) that don’t either, and politicians in with business or drugs or both, that treats people who raise objections as kooky or naive. That realistic perspective descends in a non-didactic way. This part also has the dual effect of setting off the first (excellent!) section of the book, like: How can anyone care about these European professors falling in and out of love when teenagers get murdered and left in the desert? That’s a real life feeling — but not one usually reflected well in fiction (since, unless you’re writing at this kind of 19th century scale, the novel form tends to require focus on a narrower set of individuals).
So that was 2666! On a lighter note, one of the exception cops was also the best character in the book (in my view), a quiet, thoughtful detective who falls hard for the director of a home for the mentally disabled, even if she can’t quite accept it and he can’t understand why.
A note on all this
Thanks for subscribing. Hope you enjoy. The goal here is just to offer up some links you may have missed, and maybe the occasional commentary on something in politics or a book I may have read that you, the reader, might enjoy. If you have thoughts on any of this, hit me up at katherinemillernyc@gmail.com or just tweet at me.