Alex Kudera's Blog, page 33

Letter from Philadelphia

"My father grew up here and escaped. I ran back."

A Living Remedy

Nicole Chung's A Living Remedy is the next "American poverty" memoir to be embraced by every corporate media entity. A modified excerpt appears at The Atlantic, and in Esquire she recognizes that she most likely could have helped her parents a lot more if she hadn't chosen a writing career. It seems worth noting that among millions of Americans, helping parents is rarely considered; rather, it's a value left behind in the Old Worlds of multiple continents.

Philip Roth will never die

For Esquire, Erin Somers wrote about her "Wild Weekend at the Philip Roth Festival."

to know nothing

"After this last letter, everything changed. After this last letter, Vicente wanted only to know nothing; to know nothing about anything. To be brutally, absolutely ignorant of everything. He wanted to learn what it meant not to know. He wanted to live in darkness. He wanted not to know any more, but more than that, he wanted to no longer know. To no longer know anything. Not even the things he already knew. He no longer wanted to know anything about what was already past and about what might happen in the future. Not to his mother, or to his brother—nor to his wife or his children, or himself."
~~ from The Ghetto Within by Santiago H. Amigorena

reading update

READING UPDATE: I'm making good progress with Yukio Mishima's Life for Sale, but I put it down to read two satisfying magazine pieces this weekend: "The Novelists Whose Inventions Went Too Far" by D. T. Max and "The Melancholy Universe" by Laszlo F. Foldeyni. I'm also cheating on the Mishima with a new library book, The Ghetto Within by Santiago H. Amigorena.

Joseph Roth

"[Keiron] Pim had read one of Roth’s works years before — a book called The Wandering Jews, in which Roth returns to his Galician homeland to describe the 'wonder-rabbis' and the Jewish believers who flocked to them. As he began to read more, he seized on Roth’s urgency and intensity, which he compares to a 'double espresso.' He seized too on the way that Roth’s voice seems to reach across decades to pull readers into his vivid scenes, and on Roth’s renewed relevance as an outraged witness to the rise of tyranny. From exile, in 1934, Roth wrote, in a furious statement as applicable now as it was then: 'The epoch-making discovery of modern dictatorships is the invention of the loud lie, based on the psychologically correct assumption that people will believe a shout when they doubt speech.'"

Internet Archive

I already feel more archived and lent.

honorary white status

"Apartheid, for all its power, had fatal flaws baked in, starting with the fact that it never made any sense. Racism is not logical. Consider this: Chinese people were classified as black in South Africa. I don't mean they were running around acting black. They were still Chinese. But, unlike Indians, there weren't enough Chinese people to warrant devising a whole separate classification. Apartheid, despite its intricacies and precision, didn't know what to do with them, so the government said, 'Eh, we'll just call 'em black. It's simpler that way.

"Interestingly, at the same time, Japanese people were labeled as white. The reason for this was that the South African government wanted to establish good relations with the Japanese in order to import their fancy cars and electronics. So Japanese people were given honorary white status while Chinese people stayed black. I always like to imagine being a South African policeman who likely couldn't tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese but whose job was to make sure that people of the wrong color weren't doing the wrong thing. If he saw an Asian person sitting on a whites-only bench, what would he say?
"'Hey, get off that bench, you Chinaman!'
"'Excuse me, I'm Japanese.'
"'Oh, I apologize, sir. I didn't mean to be racist. Have a lovely afternoon.'"
~~ from  Born A Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood  by Trevor Noah

a most glamorous calling

"Raised by a single working mother who hardly had the time or emotional capacity for the youngest of four, my father grew up without much supervision. His older siblings Gayle and David were ten and eleven years old, respectively, and already out of the house by the time he reached elementary school. Ron, who was six years his senior, perpetuated the abuses he'd endured onto my father, boxing him into unconsciousness and slipping him tabs of acid when my father was only nine, just to see what would happen.
"A predictably troubled adolescence followed, culminating in his arrest, rehab, and a handful of relapses thereafter while he worked as an exterminator in his early twenties. It was his fortuitous move abroad that ultimately saved him. If this were my father's memoir, it'd probably be titled The Greatest Used Car Salesman in the World. More than thirty years later, nothing excites him more than talking about his years on the military base, working his way through the ranks of the company in Misawa, Heidelberg, and Seoul. For a man who came from nothing, life as a used car salesman abroad was a most glamorous calling."
~~ from  Crying in H Mart  by Michelle Zauner

#fridayreads

Buy here to support independent bookstores, and here for a reasonable total price outside of the United States and United Kingdom. Of course, there are other options. 

Whatever happened to that black "poem" tee-shirt?