Category: Living

I used to think that War and Peace was the best novel ever written, but then I read Anna Karenina and was no longer so sure. 

Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina in the 1870s and he conceived the book as a literary riposte to John Stuart Mill’s advocacy of women’s equality.  Tolstoy was a great believer in marriage and large families – his wife gave birth to thirteen children – and notwithstanding his numerous casual sexual liaisons prior to his own wedding, including fathering a child with one of his serfs, his views on women’s role in society were deeply conservative.  His greatness as a novelist is in large part due to his ability to write sympathetically about characters whose behaviour he fundamentally disapproved of.  Most modern readers will find Anna’s choices defensible, her treatment by her husband deplorable, her social ostracism hypocritical, and her suicide tragic.  It is possible to admire the story without thereby partaking in Tolstoy’s moral disapprobation because his portrayal of Anna’s actions and their consequences present us with a credible and moving account of one of the great universal themes in human experience.  Whatever his personal views, Tolstoy describes his own society with precision and sensitivity, but without direct judgement.

On reflection, however, I still consider War and Peace the better book not least because in this earlier story Tolstoy’s array of characters were situated within a moment of dramatic social and political upheaval, as the Napoleonic armies swept east from Paris to Moscow.  In this case, we are treated not just to a series of descriptions of personal love and loss, of ambition and disappointment, of friendship and enmity, and of military heroism and incompetence, but also to a panoramic view of the Russian nation in turmoil.  This lengthy book is then brought to a bizarre conclusion by a diatribe by the author on the meaning of history, the chaos of war, and the fundamental error of according a role to “great men” in the achievement of social change.  War and Peace is a great novel – perhaps the greatest novel – precisely because Tolstoy does not just tell an interesting story with strong characters, good plot development, and a well-balanced narrative structure, but he also tells us many interesting and important things about life, by sprinkling liberally into the text many of his own eccentric opinions.  (This is also the reason why Cervantes, Melville, Joyce, Proust, and Musil are great novelists too).

Continue reading “Russia at war”

The passports have gone missing; in fact they’ve been gone long enough that I filled out the “permanent loss” form with the State Department. Not that it much matters just yet: flying internationally remains a bureaucratic nightmare constrained in particular by the lack of PCR tests available. So for winter break, the boy and I are doing yet another of our cross-country rail trips. We left Saturday early morning, with a car service to Boston South Station, then boarded Amtrak and headed towards New Orleans.

Quite a few readers of this blog probably will not have gone through the US in this way – a mixture of slow and fast, caught behind Norfolk Southern freight trains and then shooting along at 110 mph and then waiting for no reason for an hour at a station. But I must tempt you with the idea, especially if you can get off and explore every now and again. With that in mind, I thought I’d mention some of the hotspots.

Boston

Boston is popular with international tourists, because it feels vaguely like a midsized European provincial capital – Lyon, say, or maybe Antwerp. It has good museums and a lot of college students from around the world, giving it a cosmopolitan flair. The food is barely edible and you should pack sandwiches – in fact, stock up at Pret in Heathrow for the first few days, until you can get the concierge at your hotel to get you an actual good restaurant. People will tell you there are good burgers in Cambridge; they are lying. And the people who recommend pizza in Boston are about as trustworthy as futon salesmen. Move on.

Providence, Rhode Island

Providence’s downtown is a bleak wasteland of late 80s corporate architecture, intermixed with some 1920s art deco that no one really bothers to maintain. The presence of Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design make for a good couple of days of art, and surprisingly after visiting Boston, the seafood is edible. The train station is grim at all times of the year – they seem to have designed it to either be a sauna in the summer, or a wind tunnel in all other parts of the year. Get out quickly.

New Haven, Connecticut

I sincerely hope you didn’t eat in Boston, because New Haven has the best pizza in North America. It’s worth starving yourself for a couple days, spending a night, and ordering three or four pies and a couple bottles of red. Thin crust, coal fired ovens – delish. Check out Google and most of the places within a half dozen blocks of the Amtrak station are phenomenal. Avoid Friday and Saturday nights as Yale people will be there and they are best avoided, and weekdays between 5:45pm and 7:00pm because commuters from Manhattan – even in these endemic viral days – are on their way home and they loaded up on booze at Penn Station and may be gropey.

New York City

It’s still New York. God I miss going there regularly, and I can’t wait until the boy is old enough to go to museums and, maybe, the opera or a show. For now, though, even he likes the sushi and the pizza (not New Haven, but it’s a different theory, so what can you do) and the steakhouses and the hotels with room service. Pro tip: lots of hotels haven’t returned to room service yet. You can’t stay in New York and not do room service – unless you’re trying to capture some H.T. Hsiang starving communist author vibe, and I’m pretty sure he’d have done room service too, he just would have skipped on the tab in the morning out the service entrance. So make sure your hotel does room service, get the eggs benedict and bottle of champagne, and possibly a half of grapefruit.

Newark, New Jersey

For years, Newark smelled like vomit and coal smoke, but riding the train through this weekend, it now smells like cupcakes, I shit you not. Other people on the train, including the sleeping car attendant, were sort of marvelling at it as well. I’m going to assume it’s a trap laid by either the North Jersey Italian mob or the Jamaicans: just keep going.

Trenton, New Jersey

Trenton still smells like vomit and coal smoke.

Philadelphia

Philly deserves a good couple of days – there’s the Philadelphia Institute of Art, where yes, Rocky climbed the stairs and did that arms raised “top of the world” thing but their art collection is also top-notch, and if you like history, take a gander at where the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were hacked together and signed twelve or so years apart. I’ve not yet had a decent hotel stay here, and actually had my worst and most bizarre AirBnB stay ever in Philly. But the food is worth it – some of the best Italian food, both Italian Italian and Italian “red sauce” American you’ll ever eat; the sandwiches, not just the Philly Cheesesteaks but also the Italian pork; shockingly good vegan places – and since most places are BYOB, you save 50-100% on the wine markup you’d otherwise pay, which if you bring a few friends will pay for your shitty hotel room. It’s one of the least pleasant cities to walk around in anywhere (except Trenton, see above), so do yourself a favor and do Uber or Lyft. Also the subway system smells like vomit and ozone, so don’t use that.

Wilimington, Delaware

I’ve written at length in this space about the nature of human existence, and how most of it is now derived in a pure self-referential space. That is to say, the vast majority of us do not experience the world of physical, lived reality except as entirely intermediated by human constructions. And then there are the parts of that human intermediation which are themselves wholly self-referential: the law (laws exist only for human beings; they have literally no meaning whatsoever to anything other than us); money (it’s our exchange of value, and that value is completely foreign to every other species, geological feature, organic molecule, and quantum instance that we can ascertain); and culture and media.

I don’t know of any place that exists solely on that triuumvirate; almost every place that comes close then screws things up and actually does stuff with stuff, like manufactures stuff or ships it or wholesales it. But Wilmington exists solely for one reason: a very flexible set of business and finance laws, and the convenient location of the most active bankruptcy court in the world. No culture, mind you – I dare anyone to provide an example – but the movement of goods and services in the city exists solely to support the lawyers, bankers, and operations and administrative staff who operate that purely intangible, purely humanistic space.

I almost wish they ran a daily tour, where you could watch an hour or two of a Chapter 11 proceeding, then go to a law firm and, behind a one-way mirror and after signing a bunch of NDAs, watch a business arbitration hearing, then see the after-lunch sitting of the Chancery Court, and then sit in on one of the 75,000 or so consumer finance workers as they try to collect from a delinquent credit card borrower. It would be the purest expression of the modern world imaginable, all within an eight block walk of the train station.

The food isn’t remarkable in Wilmington, but my son tells me he saw an episode of “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives” where Guy Fieri went to a pretty good looking sandwich joint, so maybe there’s something.

Baltimore

I have a soft spot in my heart for Baltimore. When I was an undergrad at Georgetown, I had an internship on Capitol Hill, and my degenerate undergraduate internship friends and I would take the train to Baltimore to watch baseball and buy really bad weed. The city produced H.L. Mencken, along with Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain the inventor of American cynical gonzo satire. It brought us “The Wire” and thus apprenticed all of us in the art of removing copper piping from derelict housing while smacked out on black tar. If you can avoid getting mugged or shot, there are great crab places and one of the best aquariums on earth, if you like looking at seafood in addition to eating it. The traffic is awful in a way that only burned out white-flight American cities can pull off, with urban renewal clear-out expressways ending suddenly (due to funding being cutoff when Ford tried to “whip inflation now”) and forcing you to meander through bad neighborhoods before crossing an imaginary line and finding yourself in an upscale college area. Incidentally, this is also part of the charm in New Haven and Bridgeport, Connecticut; Newark and Trenton; and Wilmington – apologies for not mentioning it earlier.

I used to mark my progress on the Acela along the east coast as I left Baltimore station; on the left, there was about a quarter mile square area that was slowly being shot into Beirut status, and passing it to the south meant you had successfully finished travelling through the North East Corridor’s no-man’s land: a stretch from Bridgeport, Connecticut to the Baltimore slum which was an almost unbroken three and a half hour stretch of burned out and abandoned factories, industrial waste and litter, mixed with stretches of row houses that would have made Dickens weep. But this time, probably six years since I’d last taken the train by here and noticed – a lot of those houses and factories had been torn down; the ones that hadn’t were being renovated and had organic neighborhood farms plots in the back; and luxury condos, complete with a Five Guys and sushi and pet grooming at the retail level, were popping up.

Throw some money Baltimore’s way. Keep the car doors locked. Oh, and the train station is a shithole.

Washington DC

Even if you’ve never been here, you have an opinion. I went to school here for two years, and I’ve flown in and out a few dozen times over the intervening 30 years. It’s still a transient town; the ones who stick around are dodgy for a whole host of reasons, but the hardcore criminals seem to have migrated to Trenton. The Metro runs irregularly at best since Covid shut down government offices. Like hegemonic capitals everywhere other than London, the main boulevards and avenues are so far wider than human scale that it feels just idiotic to walk, but if you get off those paths of arrogant giants, Washington’s layout is Southern Antebellum, like Charleston or Savannah without the ocean breezes. Avoid it in summer.

Oh, the food is ridiculously good. You can thank the largest diplomatic corps of any city on earth for that.

Charlotte, North Carolina

NASCAR! And bankers!

Move on. If your train gets stuck here, maybe have Doordash deliver barbecue (in the Carolinas its pork and the sauce is vinegar based) to the station. But seriously, get out.

Greenville, South Carolina

Why this eclectic mix? Because we’ve been tracing the Cresent, one of the oldest continuously running long distance passenger lines in the US, the crown jewel of the Southern Railroad back in the day. Greenville is a nothing town now, but it used to be a junction point, a maintenance station, and regional center for manufacturing. All of this makes for something dreary and inland south now. Take a look around and breathe it in.

Atlanta, Georgia

I know Amtrak is a 70s relic, but come on people – come on Atlanta – spruce up the goddamn train station a bit. Squeezed in a glorified culvert next to where a 14 lane freeway divides into three, with a rotting flatbed car in a siding, a concrete low-level platform, and for our train at least, a 300 yard walk to a station whose architecture seemed to copy a local Social Security registration office, it makes you wonder whether Atlanta wants a train station at all – but apparently its people do, because half the train got off and was replaced almost person for person by new passengers.

There are things I love about Atlanta – Piedmont Park is one of the finest urban park spaces in North America; the people are ridiculously friendly; it’s diverse in a way that no other “diverse” city has ever struck me. To that point: it’s not cosmopolitan. It’s just diverse. People from around the world and the US move to Atlanta – of all races, religions, nationalities – and they all end up drinking too much Coca-Cola, tailgating for one of the many annoying local college sports teams, and eventually ending up with Type 2 Diabetes. Rural Blacks from Alabama, Muslim refugees from Afghanistan and Somalia, white frat boys from Clemson and Ohio State and Stanford, beautiful women, ugly old guys, you name it – and in five to seven years, they all need to check their A1C levels twice a day.

Don’t stay long.

Addiston, Alabama

The town has been losing population since the KKK tried to burn a bus filled with civil rights activists seeking to register Black voters in 1961. To its credit, in 1963, the town was the first in Alabama in which an all-white jury convicted a white man for killing a Black man. The town is melancholy in the extreme, but as the train pulled out to the west, the next town over is called Wellborn, and seems to be prosperous and happy. And all the people in the church parking lots, and at the ballfield, and in the grocery store parking lot as the train edged through town, were white. Obviously I can’t prove, on the basis of a quick socioeconomic comparison on what is not much more than drive-by research, that this was an example of flight and abandonment of civic responsibility by white people who feel a mix of guilt at racial violence and a core love of being racist, but I can certainly suggest that it’s almost certainly the case and accept, that in the unlikely event if I’m proven wrong, some sort of an apology would be in order.

Also, Addiston is home to the world’s second largest office chair.

Birmingham, Alabama

As the boy reminds me, this is named after Birmingham, England. It’s a carbon copy of Columbus, Ohio; Lexington, Kentucky; Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and a dozen other low-wage, high productivity manufacturing cities across the dustier bits of the Sunbelt. If you like Wal-Mart and very cheap poorly made cocktails, by all means, spend a few. Otherwise stay on the train.

Amtrak Crescent

Every Amtrak route is a little different, but the Crescent is capturing my heart. The guy who runs the bar car has an impenetrable Louisiana accent, but after I tipped him a few bucks every time I bought a hot dog for the boy, he brought me an extra bloody mary for free. The sleeping car attendant, Tiffany, is an absolute sweetheart, and arranged the two teddy bears and the stuffed dog on the beds in our roomette in a tasteful and thoughtful way – she even put one on my bunk. The bar car assistant is helpful, especially since he is able to translate what his boss the Cajun dude is saying. The conductor has the most perfect Southern Black voice: a deep tenor but not a baritone, and not so much a Southern accent as a lilt. Hearing him announce “Next stop is Tuscaloosa, and we do apologize for the delay” was like a cool drink on a warm day.

We’ve got a few hours left before we arrive in New Orleans – hopefully not too late, as I can tell the boy is getting tired. Not bored, mind you – he loves the train rides, the tidy quarters, the food, the train people, and the chance to have a lot more iPad game time than I’d ever allow at home. But he’s looking forward to a nice bed and a shower tonight, and actually, so am I. Especially since he’s a bit gassy from all the hot dogs.

Thirty years ago, I helped to run local election campaigns for the Labour Party in Hackney, the London borough where I still live.  There were no large sums of money involved and the technology deployed was very basic, principally pencils and sheets of paper on which were printed names and addresses.  Mostly the campaign was legwork, going door-to-door in the early evenings and at the weekends, speaking to potential voters, identifying those whom you judged most likely to support your party, and then persuading these good citizens to come out on polling day and mark their ballot papers for your candidates.   Turnout in London local elections is generally below half of the eligible electorate.  Boroughs are divided up into around twenty wards, and in mine, which had three Councillors, to get elected you needed around 1,000 to 1,200 votes.  Local politics can be just as hotly contested as national politics, and during election campaigns many of the candidates and activists would work long hours, fuelled by coffee and adrenaline, having convinced themselves that if our candidates were to win, a giant step would be taken towards achieving a happy socialist future; conversely, if the opposing party were to win, it would constitute a major triumph for the malevolent forces of reaction.  My role, as I understood it, was to remain calm and focus attention on the mundane task of ensuring that just over one thousand residents, who had been identified as sympathetic to Labour, knew the date the election was taking place, the location of the polling station, and the names of our candidates.

In 1993, one of our three Labour Ward Councillors was arrested and charged with fraud.  His crime was relatively trivial, claiming a couple of hundred pounds of expenses for travel to meetings that he had not attended, but British judges take the view that elected officials who defraud the public of its own money should be made an example and deserve full punishment for the crime.  He pleaded guilty at his trial and was sentenced to six months in prison.  He was forced to resign his seat.  I was then tasked with managing a tricky by-election campaign to try to retain the seat at a time when the local party’s reputation had been badly damaged.  Nonetheless, turnout at by-elections is often even lower than at the routine scheduled elections, and I was able to secure 757 votes for Labour’s new candidate, which was sufficient to win the seat once again, thereby launching the political career of the MP who is now the Chair of the Parliamentary Standards Committee.  After one more election cycle, my paid work commitments made it difficult for me to continue in my voluntary campaign manager role, and I passed on my responsibilities to others. 

Continue reading “On the level”

One of life’s great uncertainties is whether we will be remembered after our death, and if so by whom and in what way.  For most of us, the best we can hope is that friends and family will think kindly about us once we are gone.  To have made a positive impression upon and be well regarded by those who knew us best is no small thing.  For a few, records of whose words and deeds will be passed down to posterity, the expectation of lasting fame comes mixed with concern.  Will future generations remember them for the great things they achieved, or for some modest act with which they become associated?  Will future generations judge them more or less harshly than their contemporaries did?    Alfred (d. 899) the Saxon king of England, is now mostly remembered for allowing some cakes to burn, rather than his military victories, his legal and educational reforms, and his scholarship.  Richard (d. 1199), the Norman king of England, is celebrated today for his military prowess and piety, whereas the anti-Jewish riots which accompanied his coronation are largely forgotten.  Posthumous reputations are beyond the control of those to whom they attach.

Today, David Hume (d. 1776) is considered one of the pre-eminent British philosophers, whose work has greatly influenced not only the course of modern philosophy but also other important areas of social scientific study, notably psychology and economics.  During his lifetime, however, he was known primarily as an historian and essayist.  His History of England, published in six volumes, was widely discussed during his lifetime but not much today.  In a book published in 2008, the Hume scholar Annette Baier (d. 2012) wrote, I have been reading Hume now for sixty years, though it took retirement for me to really read his History of England.  Hume’s essays were also popular in his own day, ranging widely in length and subject matter, but mostly concerned with moral, political, and literary matters.  Last year, two hundred and eighty years after the first edition of the Essays was published, Oxford University Press issued the first, full critical edition – 1,200 pages in all – including a comprehensive account of the various published versions, with all revisions and deletions included.  Despite this new scholarly edition, they remain less familiar to most contemporary philosophers than Hume’s more overtly philosophical writings, which provoked widespread uninterest during his lifetime.

Continue reading “Death and taxes”

She sits, surrounded by an array of discarded objects, her head resting against her fist, her arm resting on her knee, her gaze resting on something, or someone, or maybe nothing in the far distance.  If she lived in the modern world, we might think that she was a bored student impatient for her studies to conclude so that her real life might begin; or a young traveller waiting for a much-delayed flight to a holiday destination; or, possibly, a refugee held in a temporary camp until the outcome of her appeal for permission to remain has been determined.  The young woman in question is, however, clearly not from our world.  Unlike most of us she has wings, and she shares her space with an undernourished dog and a dozing putto.  She sits – immobile – in a picture that was made in 1514. 

Albrecht Dürer’s engraving, Melencolia I, is on show at the National Gallery in London, as part of an exhibition that examines several major journeys the artist made during his working life.  I spent some time at the exhibition last weekend, my first visit to an art gallery this calendar year, and I enjoyed the chance to study the wide range of paintings, engravings, woodcuts, and drawings that have been assembled.  Central to the exhibition are a group of Dürer’s works that was either made or shown during his lengthy visit to what is now Belgium and the Netherlands, during 1520-21.  Antwerp competed with Venice (another city that Dürer visited) to be the preeminent port in Europe, and for a man with ambitions to sell his work to collectors all over the continent, it was an ideal place for him to showcase his skills as a draughtsman.  As well as painting works on commission, he was one of the first artists to seek commercial success through the distribution of multiple copies of woodblock prints and engravings, which were cheaper and easier to transport.  Melencolia I is one such work, and perhaps his best. The image is overly crowded for modern taste, but despite all the objects on view nothing much seems to be going on.  The picture is highly symbolic, but its meanings remain obscure.

Continue reading “Unpetrified”