The risks of relying on one photo to capture all of a person

At its most accomplished, photographic portraiture approaches the eloquence of oil painting in portraying human character, but when we allow snapshots or mediocre photographic portraits to represent us, we find they not only corrupt memory, they also have a troubling power to distort character and mislead posterity. Catch a person in an awkward moment, in a pose or expression that none of his friends would recognize, and this one mendacious photograph may well outlive all corrective testimony; people will study it for clues to the subject's character long after the death of the last person who could have told them how untrue it is. 

When only one photograph survives, its authority is unimpeachable, and we are in the position of jurors who have to decide a case based on one witness's unchallenged testimony. Within my own attic archives, I can think of a picture that, if it were the only surviving photograph of me, might provoke some descendant to write: "She was a pinched, humorless woman, evidently incapable of enjoying any worldly pleasures. It is tempting to think that the beauty celebrated in the photographs she took was a means of externalizing the rapture and wonder she obviously could not feel within herself.

Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2015), p. 308

Lessons in snobbishness last

I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English "education" fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school—I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet—but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 169 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

An ordinary person makes art

Ordinary art is what I am making. I am a regular person doggedly making ordinary art. But as Ted Orland and David Bayles point out in their book Art and Fear, "ordinary art" is the art that most of us, those of us not Proust or Mozart, actually make. If Proust-like genius were the prerequisite for art, then statistically speaking very little of it would exist. Art is seldom the result of true genius; rather, is it is the product of hard work and skills learned and tenaciously practiced by regular people. In my case, I practice my skills despite repeated failures and self-doubt so profound it can masquerade outwardly as conceit. It's not heroic in any way. To the contrary, it's plodding, obdurate effort. I make bad picture after bad picture week after week until the relief comes: the good new picture that offers benediction.

Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2015), p. 283

Prejudice against the reportedly smelly

That was what we were taught—the lower classes smell. And here, obviously, you are at an impassable barrier. For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling. Race-hatred, religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of intellect, even differences of moral code, can be got over; but physical repulsion cannot. You can have an affection for a murderer or a sodomite, but you cannot have an affection for a man whose breath stinks—habitually stinks, I mean. However well you may wish him, however much you may admire his mind and character, if his breath stinks he is horrible and in your heart of hearts you will hate him. It may not greatly matter if the average middle-class person is brought up to believe that the working classes are ignorant, lazy, drunken, boorish and dishonest; is it when he is brought up to believe that they are dirty that the harm is done.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 85 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

Hard to let go of anger and hurt where mom is concerned

Unfortunately, I am one of those women, and I know a lot of us, who somehow can't seem to get over our anger and hurt where our mothers are concerned, and who are determined to do better with our own daughters. We don't, of course. We fall into exactly the same patterns, or new ones equally damaging, and watch ourselves do it as helplessly as bystanders at a curbside shooting. Now, when I speak to similarly angry women whose mothers are still alive, I press upon them this advice: try again, and this time, listen better.

Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2015), p. 196

The irrational shame of unemployment

When I first saw unemployed men at close quarters, the thing that horrified and amazed me was to find that many of them were ashamed of being unemployed. I was very ignorant, but not so ignorant as to imagine that when the loss of foreign markets pushes two million men out of work, those two million are any more to blame than the people who draw blanks in the Calcutta Sweep. But at that time nobody cared to admit that unemployment was inevitable, because this meant admitting that it would probably continue. The middle classes were still talking about "lazy idle loafers on the dole" and saying that "these men could all find work if they wanted to," and naturally these opinions percolated to the working class themselves.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 85 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

Mining is HARD

The miner's job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on the flying trapeze or to win the Grand National. I am not a manual labourer and please God I never shall be one, but there are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At a pitch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner; the work would kill me in a few weeks.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), pp. 32-33 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

Tragedy Versus Merely Bad News

Taking a deep breath, George began. "Someone backing out of the driveway and running over their child is a tragedy. The Holocaust is a tragedy. People abusing their children is a tragedy. None of those things have to happen. But it's in the nature of things for people to get sick ad die, sometimes of cancer. And the outliers get it young. It's just statistics. Contrary to what you might believe, even I am nowhere near optimistic enough to believe that we can ever have a world in which there's no disease. That's the realm of science fiction.

"George, listen to me for once. James is dying. Don't you care?"

"I hear that he's dying, and of course I care. What kind of person do you think I am that I wouldn't care? I feel terrible that James is dying. I feel terrible for Marla and the girls. And you, I feel terrible for you too, because I know how much he means to you. And I feel terrible for me, because he's become a good friend. All our lives are going to change because of his death. But that's not a tragedy. Don't you see that?"

Nancy Pearl, George & Lizzie (New York: Touchstone, 2017), p. 270

The winners of the War on Drugs

The only winners of the War on Drugs are gun makers, gravediggers, and politicians.

John Washington, "Introduction," in Anabel Hernández, A Massacre in Mexico: The True Story Behind the Missing Forty-Three Students (John Washington trans.) (London: Verso, 2018), p. xvii

Two Styles of Readers

George thought of himself as being quite intelligent (he'd always gotten high scores on standardized tests), but he'd never been quick. He liked to read books slowly and carefully (he was virtually incapable of skimming), with frequent pauses to think about what he had just read; Lizzie devoured books, one after another, like a chain-smoker with her cigarettes. She was like a lightning streak across the sky, picking up and remembering odd and interesting facts about whatever interested her, and a lot did. George would never call Lizzie a deep thinker, but, boy, she was the ideal Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy! partner. George was frequently srprised at what Lizzie knew or didn't know. Perfectly ordinary facts like what latitude meant were beyond her, while the sort of minuscule details of someone's life—the name of Albert Einstein's first wife (it was Mileva Einstein-Maricé, George learned from Lizzie—were on the tip of her tongue.

Nancy Pearl, George & Lizzie (New York: Touchstone, 2017), p. 209

Lessons of Mexican Students' Disappearance

The disappearance of the forty-three students revealed the brutal reality of the Mexican state, which is rife with disappearances, murder, corruption, impunity, and the systematic use of torture by law enforcement agencies to lock up innocent people and protect the guilty.

Anabel Hernández, A Massacre in Mexico: The True Story Behind the Missing Forty-Three Students (John Washington trans.) (London: Verso, 2018), p. 243

Rough-Hewn Hygiene

"Don't you teach your children to wash after they use the toilet?" Grandma said. 

Dad shifted the truck into gear. As it rolled forward he waved and said, "I teach them not to piss on their hands.

Tara Westover, Educated (New York: Random House, 2018), p. 53

Reading Things You Can't Understand

In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who'd deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.

Tara Westover, Educated (New York: Random House, 2018), p. 62

Eleanor Roosevelt loved to write

Eleanor loved to write in a way that is not natural for writers. She ripped off sentences like unspooling a thread. She wrote letters to all of her loved ones, not only because she loved us, but because she loved the pen racing across the paper. She loved the appearance of her thoughts in blue ink on white paper. She could have had a bake-off with Anthony Trollope and come in first, most of the time.

Amy Bloom, White Houses (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018), p. 175 (voice of a fictionalized Lorena Hickok)

FDR's charm and coldness

He was the greatest president of my lifetime and he was a son of a bitch every day. Hischarm and cheer blinded you, made you deaf to your own thoughts, until all you could do was nod and smile, while the frost came down, killing you where you stood. He broke hearts and ambitions across his knee like bits of kindling, and then he dusted off his hands and said, Who's for cocktails?

Amy Bloom, White Houses (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018), p. 146 (voice of a fictionalized Lorena Hickok)

It's hard to see how others are even harder up

I had my nose rubbed in my own racialism so often, and so hard, by meeting colored people who were so much worse off and had been hard done by for so much longer. Negro men and women, working from can to can't, surrounded by a sea of hungry, wide-eyed children and at least one rail-thin, night-dark old lady in the corner, sitting like a seer in her one dress, all knowing that their suffering registered less, that their dead weighed less, that there was less chance they could climb out of this terrible canyon, and fewer people to reach for them as they did. I finally had to give it up and it hurt me, I tell you, to understand that the Hickoks of Bowdle, South Dakota, with shoes from a dead girl to wear on school days only and oatmeal for dinner, were lucky people.

Amy Bloom, White Houses (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018), p. 113 (voice of a fictionalized Lorena Hickok, sent to report on social conditions during the Great Depression)

Snowy weather helps James Madison with his legal studies

Following the eruption of Laki in Iceland, the winter of 1783-84 was very cold and snowy.

In Virginia, the Bill of Rights author James Madison tried to make light of the snows in a letter to Thomas Jefferson:

We have had a severer season and particularly a greater quantity of snow than is remembered to have distinguished any preceding winter. The effect of it on the price of grain and other provisions is much dreaded. It has been as yet so far favourable to me that I have pursued my intended course in law reading with fewer interruptions than I had presupposed.

Alexandra Witze & Jeff Kanipe, Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World (New York: Island Books, 2015), ch. 5, p. 110

Krakatau might have even affected Munch!

For months [in 1883] Krakatau's aerosols spread around the globe, reflecting sunlight and creating lurid colours in the sky, just as Tambora had done. The moon appeared blue at times, as did the sun. Sunsets were a spectacular marbling of red, gold, orange and other hues. In New York and Connecticut, people called the fire department because they thought the red glow on the horizon was from a conflagration. The fantastically coloured cloud bands in Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream might have been inspired by Krakatau-tinted skies that the artist had seen in Norway. Even Alfred Tennyson took a stab at describing the spectacle in his poem 'St. Telemachus': 'Had the fierce ashes of some fiery peak/ Been hurl'd so high they ranged about the globe?'

Alexandra Witze & Jeff Kanipe, Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World (New York: Island Books, 2015), ch. 3, p. 84

Downer of a Poem in the World Winter Following a Volcano

Not to be outdone [by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein], Lord Byron generated his own tale of gloom: the poem 'Darkness', which begins with these glum lines:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went — and came, and brought not day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation.

Byron goes on to depict ships rotting at sea, famine preying upon entrails, and dogs turning upon and eating their masters. Suffice it to say, 'Darkness' is a downer. But it accurately reflects the gloom that enveloped much of the world in 1816 — perhaps because of political unrest following the Napoleonic wars, but also in part because of the obscure volcano [Tambora] that had erupted in Indonesia.

Alexandra Witze & Jeff Kanipe, Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World (New York: Island Books, 2015), ch. 3, p. 79, Kindle loc 906

Not until the early twentieth century did scientists finally link the year without a summer to Tambora.

Id., p. 80, loc 928

Snoring can be a lovely sound

It is not a pleasant noise in itself, and I have often complained of it at other times, but just then it was like music to hear my friends snoring together so loud and peaceful in their sleep. The sea-cry of the watch, that beautiful "All's well," never fell more reassuringly on my ear.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883), ch. 27

(Spoiler alert: Jim was in for a nasty surprise.)

The difference between a book hoarder and the owner of a private library

I call [my father] from the car and ask him about his morning, tell him about mine.

"What kind of hoarder was she?" he asks. "Books and cats, mainly," I tell the man who loves his cats and who I know is now actively considering his extensive book collection.

"What's the difference between a private library and a book hoarder?" he wonders.

We are both silent before chuckling and answering in unison: "Feces."

But the difference is this phone call. And the others like it I could make. And how strong we are when we are loved.

Sarah Krasnostein, The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2017), p. 258, Kindle loc. 3586

I'm grateful to her too

Finally, I hope it goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: I am very grateful to Jane Austen, whose books have brought delight to many readers, including me.

Curtis Sittenfeld, Eligible (New York: Random House, 2016), p. 489

Why Would Chicago Have Cartoonists?

Chicago has a remarkable number of working cartoonists, maybe because it’s relatively inexpensive, or maybe because, as Ware more imaginatively suggested, “it’s halfway between New York City, where it’s about reading, and Los Angeles, where it’s about seeing.”

D. T. Max, "The Bleak Brilliance of Nick Drnaso's Graphic Novels," New Yorker (Jan. 21, 2019) (quoting Chris Ware)

So much work goes into disposable writing

Often, on the last day or two before an issue of Mascara shipped to the printer, Liz found herself in extremely frequent contact with her editor: A sentence needed to be added to reflect that the actress Liz had profiled had just entered rehab, or that the member of the women's national soccer team was now pregnant; the addition sentence meant that an equivalent number of words elsewhere in the article needed to be cut. Either in person in the office of Mascara or by text, email, or phone, Liz and her editor would communicate constantly, in an increasingly exhausted and loopy shorthand. And though by the time the article closed, Liz felt utterly sick of whatever it was about—few readers, she believed, had any idea of the amount of work that went into the casual reading experience they enjoyed while riding the subway or taking a bath—when it was all finished, Liz rather missed her editor and their urgent and knowing exchanges.

Curis Sittenfeld, Eligible (New York: Random House, 2016), p. 267