Specimen Days

Last month I went on a Walt Whitman walking tour that began in Fort Greene Park and proceeded to 99 Ryerson Street, the only surviving building of the dozen or so where Whitman lived at various times in Brooklyn. (The frame building, wedged into a row of similar houses, is one story higher now than when it was built, and is covered in yellow siding.) Greg Trupiano, who led the tour, spoke highly of Whitman’s memoir Specimen Days, so I read it later in my Library of America Whitman, along with the original edition of Leaves of Grass.

Specimen Days is a hodgepodge, but with interesting bits. It begins with reminiscences of growing up on Long Island, continues with an account of the wounded soldiers Whitman visited during the Civil War (some of the best material in the book), moves on to nature writing from then-bucolic Camden, New Jersey (maddening in its vague effusiveness if you compare it to the sharp-eyed observations of Thoreau), then concludes with thoughts on old age and some literary gossip, including visits to Emerson and Longfellow toward the end of their lives.

Whitman had a nodding acquaintance with President Lincoln, and a brief item called “No Good Portrait of Lincoln” reflects on his face.

Probably the reader has seen physiognomies (often old farmers, sea-captains, and such) that, behind their homeliness, or even ugliness, held superior points so subtle, yet so palpable, making the real life of their faces almost as impossible to depict as a wild perfume or fruit-taste, or a passionate tone of the living voice — and such was Lincoln’s face, the peculiar color, the lines of it, the eyes, mouth, expression. Of technical beauty it had nothing — but to the eye of a great artist it furnished a rare study, a feast and fascination. The current portraits are all failures — most of them caricatures.

On the same page is a description of the wasted prisoners just released from Andersonville and other Confederate POW camps. “The dead there are not to be pitied as much as some of the living that come from there — if they can be call’d living — many of them are mentally imbecile, and will never recuperate.”

The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman

Francisco Goldman is another author whom I checked out after seeing him at PEN. The Art of Political Murder is a nonfiction account of the murder of Bishop Gerardi in Guatemala City in 1998. Goldman reported the case on spec for The New Yorker, returning to Guatemala repeatedly over a number of years.

Gerardi was beaten to death on the grounds of the parish house of the church of San Sebastian (which was Goldman’s own church as a child). The killing came shortly after Gerardi released a massive report holding the former military regime responsible for the vast majority of the deaths of 200,000 Guatemalans in the country’s civil war.

The motive and the culprits might seem obvious, but complications quickly arose. Why should the bishop be killed after the report appeared and not before? Wouldn’t military killers have done the job more cleanly? And what about the strange behavior of Father Mario?

Goldman tells a complicated story in clean journalistic prose, though fairly close attention is needed to keep the movements and identities of the characters straight. (Helpful maps and lists are provided.) Though the killing and disappearance of witnesses are a recurring theme, Goldman doesn’t dwell much on the danger he is running himself. One exception comes when he receives a frightening phone call from the powerful Colonel Lima, one of the main suspects in the killing. The call is even more unsettling because static makes most of it undecipherable.

Knowing that I’d put myself on Colonel Lima’s radar make me uneasy, although I didn’t really think that anything was going to happen to me, an American citizen.... But when I came home at night I was frightened by the darkness of my room at the Spring, whose only window opened onto a small patio, and I worried about the flimsy lock on the door. Stuck in traffic on gray afternoons in late September, I’d feel overwhelmed by a very particular sadness, something that seemed to come from the unconscious memory of the street itself, of all the people who were driving or just walking to or from someplace — an office, a church, the movies, school — and must have had a last moment of panic or grief or resignation, realizing that there was no escape and that they would never get home.

The More You Watch, The Less You Know by Danny Schechter

I met Danny Schechter a while ago, at a screening of his funny and frightening movie In Debt We Trust that was sponsored by the community development organization NEDAP. It reminded me that I’d been meaning for a long time to read his book The More You Watch, The Less You Know, which was published in 1997.

The More You Watch is a memoir of Schechter’s life as a media maverick, with a strong emphasis — especially interesting to me — of his involvement in covering the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. It also contains a sharp analysis of how the news media, especially TV news, are failing the public. There’s a reason, for instance, why it’s taken so long for people to realize that if they’re broke and unemployed it’s not because of their personal failings.

A Harvard study has equated more TV watching with a drop in civic participation. One reason: Our powerful cultural industries shape the narratives by which ordinary Americans interpret their lives and outlooks. When those narratives never emphasize how ordinary people can change things, cynicism becomes rife in the public at large…

News programming reinforces this. A friend of mine reports for a Boston TV station that practices “user friendly news.” She told me, “In almost every newscast we treat viewers as consumers, not citizens. For example, we give people tips on what to do if you have a cold, but no information about the crisis in health care. All problems are privatized and individualized; people are encouraged to think and act only for themselves or their family, not as members of a group, a class, or something called society.”

Schechter’s data on the media is necessarily dated, but it’s illuminating to see just how bad things had become even before Bush’s first stolen election and the latest round of media consolidation. I can’t check this (the book has no index) but I believe that Fox News (which played such an important part in calling the 2000 election for Bush) is barely mentioned, and neither is the Internet. I would love to see Schechter separate his media critique from his memoir, update the facts, and publish a shorter, sharper book on how the media continue to make us dumber.

The Nimrod Flipout by Etgar Keret

I hadn’t heard of the Israeli writer Etgar Keret until I attended the session on short stories at this year’s PEN World Voices festival. He impressed me with his energy and his strong opinions on the state of the short story (including a wicked parody of the sort of New Yorker story in which nothing much happens but the sentences are beautiful). I picked up The Nimrod Flipout mostly because of a dinner-table rave from Bud Parr (though The Girl on the Fridge apparently doesn’t measure up to that one).

As I’d heard, Keret’s stories are very short. (“Dirt,” for instance, is barely a page long.) Many of them work like Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in that one strange thing happens and the routines of life adjust to that thing. Unlike Kafka, though, Keret is determinedly mundane in tone. (It’s doubtful that Kafka would ever write a story called “The Tits on an Eighteen-Year-Old.”) Most of his stories seem to be narrated by the same guy: a young Israeli, not too ambitious, who drinks and smokes quite a bit and whose emotional life is a bit flattened, perhaps by past trauma. But within these limitations, the stories manage to be funny, unsettling, and moving.

Despite what Keret said at PEN about his lack of interest in craft, some of the stories are neatly structured. “For Only 9.99 (Inc. Tax and Postage)” is an extended Jewish joke, and “Your Man” (one of my favorites) has the fatedness of Poe or the Brothers Grimm. But there are others, like “My Girlfriend’s Naked,” that simply offer something strange and the narrator’s ruminations over it.

My father, William B. Wisner

I’m sure one reason I’ve been preoccupied with family history recently is that my father has been seriously ill for the last few months. He passed away early on the morning of May 15, and my brothers and I were at his funeral mass on the 17th, where I spoke a few words.

An obituary appeared in the local papers, which mentioned the Hospice of St. Lawrence Valley, which helped look after him. The hospice workers provided much-needed support for Pop’s wife Marcia, kept Pop’s spirits up, and enabled him to stay at home and out of the hospital (which he hated). Donations would be put to good use.