2021 in Books

Here are the books I read in 2021, with favorites at the bottom.

Non-fiction

 

Two Years Before the Mast and Twenty-Four Years After by Richard Henry Dana

Dana’s American account of life at sea in the 1830s is notable for his destination – then then-largely-unknown California. He describes places like San Diego and San Francisco, a glimpse of the territory prior to the goldrush and settlement. This edition also has him revisit the land in 1860, which adds significant interest. That said, Dana’s main account runs about 50 pages too long.

 

Collection of Sand by Italo Calvino

The essays in this collection are all in reference to something we don’t get a chance to see: a museum exhibit, a book he’s reviewing, or his travels. A few are really great, and stand on their own. But the rest fall a bit short of my expectations for Calvino.

 

How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

Kendi is very good writer, who uses all the tools in his toolkit to get you to understand what racism and antiracism are. There are waves of statistics, logical reasoning, historical context, anecdote, biography, metaphor – all of which blend into a coherent vision. Not since I read De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex have I encountered such a well-constructed work designed to produce a sea change in thought and behavior. An instant classic.

 

Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett

Dennett approaches the phenomenon of religion from an evolutionary standpoint, asking why something with a significant investment has survived and thrived, couched in a memetic framework. An interesting survey of where things stand (or stood, in 2006) regarding the ideas and the need for more research.

 

Why Vegan? Eating Ethically by Peter Singer

A very slim collection of Singer’s thoughts on the ethics and global/climate impact of a meat-based diet. Well worth a read for anyone unfamiliar with the realities of slaughter or with an interest in utilitarianism.

 

Fiction

 

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

A modernist novel which stylistically blends Joyce’s prose with Pound’s obnoxious poetry. Difficult and various shades of dishonest, it attempts to elevate a tragedy in ways that just miss the mark. Lowry is a great master of scenery and character, but the plot doesn’t live up to its intended grandeur.

 

Selected Stories by Anton Chekhov

My Chekhov experience was limited to his plays, which I disliked, prior to trying this collection. As I’d been told, he turned out to be one of the finest short story authors I’ve ever encountered, with brilliant descriptions, characters, and plots. In this collection of 30 stories there were a few that weren’t memorable, but the majority were.

 

A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Singer was the final American Nobel Laureate I’d not read – and this collection was a nice way to get acquainted. His storytelling techniques gave a sense of place better than person, but I was happy to join him in a shtetl, in Tel Aviv, or on Riverside Drive, to accompany him on his tales.

 

Nana by Emile Zola

A few chapters in I told people that if I never read another account of a nineteenth century drawing room it might be too soon. That said, the overall moral of the tale (debauchery and vice will be punished in the end) was fairly boring. I can see why Zola is increasingly left out of the canon.

 

Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

A brick of a tome, Lavransdatter traces a woman’s life in medieval Norway, in the 1300s, from childhood to old age. Undset, who won the Nobel principally for the work, is to be commended for her command of style and description, and her rich portrayal of Lavransdatter’s inner life and thoughts. The persistent, explicit Catholic message, as always, leaves me wondering just how differently this woman’s life might have been if she didn’t wear that guilt and shame for having simply having been in love with a man…

 

The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy

An increasingly forgotten English Nobel Laureate, Galsworthy’s reputation rests upon this collected tome. The innovation seems to be that he approached the Victorian middle classes with irony, as we follow the unpleasant main character Soames through his destructive obsession to possess. Not a bad work, but really only worth reading if you’ve an interest in the end of Victorianism.

 

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

It’s not really fair of me to judge this book, because I picked it up not knowing it was a postmodern mystery, and those are two things which, if not done well, I find intensely unsatisfying. Pamuk’s narrative conceit, of shifting narrators each chapter, was, unfortunately rather tiresome by around 60 pages in – the characters still all sounded the same. Not until I was more than halfway through its 400 pages did it start to pick up, but it’s not an investment I can really recommend.

 

The Trial by Franz Kafka

I had higher expectations for this work – not surprisingly bureaucratic and legalese language is dull. It’s not a bad work, but I still preferred selected scenes and Kafka’s short works a bit more.

 

Herzog by Saul Bellow

My recollection is of enjoying Augie March, I think, but not really remembering it – I only recalled a feeling, and none of the plot or characters. So I decided to try out Herzog. This work seems doomed, due to a profusion of topical references, to age very badly. It’s philosophical musings border and sometimes cross into obnoxious pedantism (which the text itself acknowledges). It’ll be some time until I pick up Bellow again.

 

The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy

Sebastian Dangerfield is a piece of shit who beats women, neglects his child, starts fights in pubs, exposes himself in public and runs amok, and drinks. This is all supposed to be comical. His story is told in modernist prose, which doesn’t endear it.

 

Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke

A beautiful, astonishing, collection of ten poems – the epitome of the famed poet’s output and career. In gorgeous, evocative, language, Rilke shows us to an emotional and intellectual threshold.

 

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

Here’s a book I wanted to like this far more than I did – the last 150 pages were fairly insufferable. The premise was fine, if not great: a woman keeps different notebooks detailing different aspects of her life. By the time we get to the titular golden notebook, though, I had lost all interest, and actively disliked the characters and plot.

 

Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion

I came to this a Didion fan, but having never read her fiction, I was a little apprehensive. I was not disappointed – the story is fabulously written, and captures the Vegas – L.A. zeitgeist of the 1960s. Just the right length, Didion uses her prose well.

 

Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

This book is actually loathsome. Every. Single. Chapter. goes out of its way to be misogynistic. The hatred and venom towards women that suffuses the work is just gross, and central to the work and its message. That message is also breathtakingly stupid: Zorba steals, is an absent father and rampant misogynist, and murders – but it’s all fine, because he has joie de vivre! Nothing some dancing and wine can’t fix! Offensive, shallow, existentialism that hopefully will soon be removed from any serious discussions of 20^th century literature.

 

Ruined by Lynn Nottage

Having won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama – twice – Nottage has established herself among the premiere American playwrights of the early 21^st century, so I was eager to read her work. Ruined is a masterful work set in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, at a bar and brothel, whose main characters are the prostitutes who work there. At turns devastating and uplifting, a definite worthwhile read.

 

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

I’d enjoyed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a great deal – but upon reading Beckett’s Waiting for Godot felt retroactively cheated. So I was hesitant to engage Stoppard again. My wariness was for naught, as it happens, because Arcadia is a magnificent play (although, again, having read Byatt’s Possession earlier…). An excellent time-hopping story.

 

The Complete Poems by Emily Dickinson

After working my way through 1700 poems, I’m inclined to believe that she has around a score of great pieces, and maybe a hundred or so good works besides. But the ratio of quality to drivel and dross was unfortunate. If interested, find a ‘selected works’ instead of a complete.

 

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

I was a bit wary of reading another Morrison novel after ‘Beloved’, because how could anything else measure up? That said, ‘Solomon’ is a wonderful work, with nearly the same level of brilliant craft and quite possibly greater enjoyment. Worth reading for anyone familiar with her work, or wanting to be.

 

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

You know, I didn’t set out, 18 months ago, to only read novels about terrible husbands and self-pitying men, but jeez. Harry Angstrom is a very unpleasant asshole who pathetically clings onto his glory days of being a basketball star in high school while he lets his life unravel. Updike has a tremendous command of language – but why he used it for this story is a bit beyond me.

 

Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes

This slim epic tale – post-Homer but pre-Classical, tells of Jason and his crew of Argonauts as they sail for the golden fleece. The first two sections tell of their tribulations on the way to their destination, the third, and easily best, tells of Jason and Medea and securing the fleece, and a hurried fourth section relates their return home. Nice, if you’re interested in Greek myths, and your edition is annotated.

 

Top 5 6!

 

Arcadia

Play It As It Lays

How to Be an Antiracist

The Duino Elegies

Song of Solomon

Ruined

Moments

 Few moments in life are actually life- changing. The big ones you can usually count on one hand.

 

I was sitting in a conference room in the offices section of my school, when the head of the Lower School asked me if I wanted to stay. My grades were terrible, I had virtually no friends, and was generally unhappy from my parents’ divorce and emotional underdevelopment. I said I did want to stay, and for the next six or so years, until I graduated in eighth grade, that spur-of-the-moment, I-think-this-is-what-I’m-supposed-to-say answer defined my childhood through middle school. Upon graduating I still didn’t have any friends, and my grades were still lousy.

 

Out of precaution I’d applied to eight high schools, and got into maybe three or four, but only one gave enough financial aid. I went out and toured it – to save money we only wanted to tour the boarding schools I’d gotten into. It seemed like a nice enough place, but I was certainly wary. Once again, the answer was a default, what I was supposed to say. It turned out to be a good fit, as was my college choice, which happened in a fairly similar fashion, just opting for what seemed correct.

 

Of course, some important moments aren’t active choices. When I was offered my first teaching job it was due to total luck. Living in Boston it was nearing October – the school year had already begun, so I’d reluctantly started looking at barista jobs – any kind of work that would pay me. During a phone interview for a job in Reno, I was asked what I like to do for fun, and I replied travel; then I expanded to demonstrate how it made me a better history teacher. Using Turkey, and the Topkapi Palace, as my example, I got the job. The man I was talking to, it turned out, was Turkish. I had almost chosen to talk about Greece.

 

During that recession many of my jobs felt like good luck and fortune that kept me going. Eventually, after traveling both abroad and back to the east coast, I returned to California. The first year back, for spring break, we decided to road trip, as a family, to help bring back my stuff that was in Boston. Outside Little Rock we got in a terrible car crash. It would end up being one of the most important moments of my life – swerving to avoid a car that was merging into me. Once I’d gotten back to the Bay Area, I had a follow-up doctor’s appointment, and that appointment led to them discovering the lump in my thyroid.

 

Were it not for that crash, the lump may have gone undetected for years. I was treated that summer for mild hyperthyroidism, and from then on we always kept track of my thyroid, which ended up being a good thing, because a few years later my endocrinologist, in a routine thyroid ultrasound, found some lumps on my lymph nodes. It turns out I had thyroid cancer, which had spread to the adjacent nodes. I got a thyroidectomy, and a second treatment of radioactive iodine – as I’d done for the hyperthyroidism. Since thyroid cancer is asymptomatic, and usually found in older patients, that car crash set off a frankly incredible chain of events that may have saved my life.

 

In-between the hyperthyroidism and the cancer, though, was another transformative moment. One day, at a faculty appreciation luncheon, I was looking for a place to sit, and opted for a table of people I didn’t know – because there was a beautiful young woman there. We went on our first date not too long after, and a little over a year later we were living together, before eventually getting married. That wasn’t even the first time a seat at a table had proven providential – my main friend group in college was stumbled upon in the same way. By the time they’d all introduced themselves, I thought ‘Oh my god. I’m going to have to remember all of these peoples’ names.’ So I kept sitting with them, and years later the guy who’d sat at the head of the table was asked to be the officiant at our wedding.

 

The choices to stay at or attend a school, the fortunate job interview, sitting down at the right table, the car crash that led to a cancer diagnosis. Some of these moments radiated gravitas at the time (also true of many not noted, which at the time seemed life-altering, and turned out not to be). Others were totally accidental happenstance. Change any one and my life would have been radically different. I tend to have an abhorrence of arbitrariness, but I have to concede that much of my life’s path has been, if not entirely random, not far removed. As I continue my cancer treatment, it’s given me time to pause and take stock of these significant moments which have defined my life, but also in the light of their randomness, and the cosmic randomness that defines existence, to consider what it means to live.

Constitutional Convention

I often wish for a new Constitution - one which fixes the problems we're currently beset by. The original Constitutional Convention had only 55 delegates. If I were to create a new Constitutional Convention, endowed with the power to create a new American Constitution, here are the 55 people I would want to write it, by (rough) category:

 

Retired Politicians:

 

Barrack Obama, former President

Al Gore, former Vice President

David Souter, former Supreme Court Justice

Admiral Michael Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor

Julian Castro, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

Steven Chu, former Secretary of Energy

Janet Napolitano, former Secretary of Homeland Security

Samantha Power, former United Nations Ambassador, Administrator of the Agency of International Development

 

Current Politicians:

 

Kamala Harris, Vice President

Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court Justice

General Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense

Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior

Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Transportation

Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, United Nations Ambassador

Bernie Sanders, Senator of Vermont

Amy Klobuchar, Senator of Minnesota

Elizabeth Warren, Senator of Massachusetts

Tammy Duckworth, Senator of Illinois

Jay Inslee, Governor of Washington

Gretchen Whitmer, Governor of Michigan

Pedro Pierluisi, Governor of Puerto Rico

Ilhan Omar, Representative of Minnesota

Rashida Tlaib, Representative of Michigan

Leondra Kruger, Associate Justice

Michelle Wu, Mayor of Boston

 

Political Operatives and Theorists:

 

Stacey Abrams, voting rights activist

Lawrence Lessig, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard

Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter

Angela Davis, activist

Margaret Raymond, legal theorist

Madonna Thunder Hawk, activist

Jody Williams, activist

 

Labor and Nonprofit Leaders:

 

Liz Shuler, President of AFL-CIO

Cristina Jimenez Moreta, co-founder United We Dream

Teresa Romero, President of United Farm Workers

Alexis McGill Johnson, President of Planned Parenthood

Susan Herman, former President of the American Civil Liberties Union

Ben Jealous, former President of the NAACP

Deepak Bhargava, former director of Community Change

Van Jones, co-founder the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Green for All

Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the National Holocaust Museum

 

Historians, Economists, Authors, and Journalists:

 

Ezra Klein, founder of Vox

Bob Woodward, journalist and author

Ta-Nehisi Coates, journalist and author

Ibram X. Kendi, journalist and author

Danielle Citron, author

Monica Muñoz Martinez, historian

Kim Phillips-Fein, author

Jill Lepore, historian

Amory Lovins, economist

Paul Krugman, economist and author

David Card, economist

Esther Duflo, economist

Old Joe's Ghost Wears a Dress

I find it odd that more pundits haven’t called the crisis caused by Manchin and Sinema by the proper historical analogy: they are practicing Democratic McCarthyism.

 

In the U.S. we often reference previous history to describe current scandals. ‘Witch hunt’ hearkens not only the Red Scare, but also the Salem trials. ‘-Gate’ is used for all sorts of scandals, to connect them to the gravity of Nixon’s resignation. ‘Moon shot’, ‘Vietnam’, ‘Katrina’: we use all sorts of historical shorthand. So why aren’t people comparing Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to Senator Joe McCarthy?

 

When one Senator has outsized power, it’s a problem. We have an Executive Branch for that. In the Legislative Branch only the Speaker or Majority Leader should have outsized control the House and Senate. Breakaways muck up the whole works, as we have seen time and again. Manchin and Sinema are doing that now – refusing to use this moment to help the Democratic agenda, and blowing the best opportunity the Democrats have had since the 2010 Tea Party midterms to actually make big changes.

 

Why? No one knows. Sinema, in particular, has decided to be infuriating on this point, refusing to tell anyone what she wants, or why she is opposing the current legislative agenda of the Democratic Party.

 

“I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

 

How is that infamous quote, and its spotlight-seeking intention, not clearly the same bullshit that Sinema is doing? Get the attention – get everyone focused on her, and keep the attention. Force us to ask her what she wants or what she knows. It’s entirely loathsome, and is going to have devastating consequences if not stopped. When McCarthy wasn’t stopped, it led to years of crisis – McCarthy changed his ‘communist’ numbers frequently, including 57 and 81, and kept the press on tenterhooks. From this unofficial power came the dreadful, and historically shameful, trials.

 

Sinema and Manchin will have devastating consequences for the opposite reason: neither is likely to be in power in a few years, especially Sinema, who trails the other Democratic Senator in popularity in her home state. What Senators Manchin and Sinema have chosen to block are widely popular, and clearly beneficial, social programs. Paid family leave. Universal pre-K. Infrastructure hangs in the balance. Tackling climate change. Expanding Medicare to cover dental and vision.

 

Presumably, in the midterms, the Democrats will take a drubbing. That’s typical. That’s also only a year away, one year until Biden’s agenda is foiled in either the House, Senate, or both. (It could be offset by passing popular legislation, but that’ll only do so much.) It’s also a best-case scenario: what happens if one of the octogenarian Senators dies between now and next year?

 

So pressure is on to get this shit done. This isn’t even the emboldened agenda that some folks hoped for: the John Lewis Voting Rights Act seems unlikely to be passed, the end of the filibuster is inexplicably as distant as ever, the statehood of Puerto Rico and/or D.C seem to be non-starters.

 

Manchin and Sinema care as much about debt and the price tag as McCarthy cared about communism – not at all. They don’t give a damn. Democrats can disagree on things, and Manchin already sticks out with things like not supporting abortion rights. But not wanting to lift people out of poverty, and support working- and middle-class Americans? That’s what they’re blocking by refusing to sign on, and one would think it’s the very least to expect of a member of the Democratic Party. But Sinema and Manchin (who both voted down the minimum wage increase) clearly don’t give a damn about the people: just their campaign donors, the wealthy corporations, who will fight to keep them in power. In the spotlight.

 

As Ezra Klein pointed out in his insightful article in today’s Times, the Democrats are very unlikely to remain in power much longer, almost certainly not by 2022. If Manchin and Sinema screw this up they’ll convince a generation of voters that Democrats can’t get anything done even if they are in power – and they’ll be right. The Senators’ narcissism and need for attention is going to devastate this nation: the same disastrous way McCarthy’s did.

Adventures in Being and Time

Martin and Finn

 

There are two major works of philosophy in the 20^th century: Heidegger’s Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), published in 1927, and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, published in 1953. The first is the magnum opus of existentialism – a culmination of phenomenology (the study of experience and consciousness) and ontology (the study of being). The latter launched the field of language philosophy.

 

Of course, outside of these two massive fields, there were other philosophical trends. Postmodernism, represented by Foucault, and deconstructivism, represented by Derrida, both were important philosophical breakthroughs – but arguably both arose only because of Wittgenstein’s pivot to focus on language. (Other philosophers and movements certainly made breakthroughs in the 20^th century, in areas such as political philosophy with the important work of John Rawls.)

 

Heidegger’s existentialism is difficult – harder to access than either his 19^th century forerunners, such as Nietzsche, or his successors, such as Jean-Paul Sartre. Being and Time is an incredibly challenging work to read, but its general ideas, vastly oversimplified, are as follows:

 

We are Dasein – “being-in-the-world”. Dasein is an apparently unique experience to human beings: our existence presents problems of identity, as does our constant engagement with the world (including other people) around us. Our being is not distinct from our world in which we live – in which we are thrown into without any choice or initial understanding. How we make sense of our self, and how we make sense of our world, are therefore fundamentally linked. That is why we are “being-in-the-world”.

 

When we are living “authentically” we are confronting Dasein – but most of the time, it seems, we aren’t really engaged in such existential awareness. A nice example: I am walking down the street, and I notice a friend walking towards me. My mind goes to my experiences with this friend, memories, feelings, context. My mind is now “far away” from what is actually happening to me, walking down the street. I’m focused on someone further away, and on a time that maybe has passed or is yet to come. Our experience of the world, therefore, is infrequently focused on the here and now in such a way that supersedes other, more “distant” thoughts and concerns. If it were otherwise, and what was proximate to us demanded our attention here an now, think of the result: Seeing my friend approaching would not be as important, due to their lack of immediacy, as the socks on my feet, which are, after all, much closer to my experience in that moment!

 

But we don’t think about our socks in that scenario. And that is actually very interesting, and important – there is insight in that observation of how we experience the world, and what it means to be a human in this world.

 

Like other existentialists, Heidegger’s focus on being also is interested in death, and how our “beings-towards-death” is the source of meaning in our lives. My existence is not just defined by being thrown into this world, but also from the inescapable fact that I can’t stay forever – that I will die, and cease to exist.

 

*          *          *

 

When I read Being and Time in a philosophy course dedicated to the tome my senior year, I had a question, which I asked a few different times: “But what about children?”

 

As an adult I think Heidegger’s description of our lived experience is fairly spot-on, as shown in the sock story above. We walk through life with our minds on other things, rarely focused on our existence in the moment, in that place and time. Our experience of life is defined by our death. Being “thrown into” a world which we have to make sense of – that is very true, but also very much a focus of developmental psychology. I think Heidegger is right, that an in media res understanding is how we all must take the world around us. Yet a child’s understanding, and sense-making, of the world is fundamentally different from an adult’s. They experience life fundamentally differently, and, therefore, there must be an element of becoming, or developing into, Dasein.

 

I was, at the time, taking classes on child development and psychology, pursuant to my studies in education and in preparation for my career in teaching. Throughout college I took at least one philosophy course per term: Existentialism, Ancient Greek, Leibniz and Hume, Philosophy of Religion, Wittgenstein, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Theoretical Ethics, Logic, and Heidegger’s Being and Time. But the papers I was reading in psychology and child development were equally as fascinating. And, as Piaget had begun to realize, by the same time Heidegger was writing in the 1920s, children’s brains are not like ours. They do not make meaning the same way. Arguably, then, they are not Dasein – that Dasein is something we become with age. The meaning in a child’s life is not based on their appreciation of mortality. Children – quite often – do focus more on their socks than their approaching friend.

 

Philosophy, as far as I can tell, has typically avoided the ontology or metaphysics of childhood. Certainly, the big names, from Socrates to Descartes, Hegel to Rorty, didn’t seem to spend much time considering how children understand and make sense of the world. There are great exceptions – epistemology, studying how we know and make sense of the world – sometimes considered in the context of education, as seen in Plato and Rousseau.

 

Generally, though, the existentialists seemed unmoved by childhood – that state that, along with adolescence, encompasses roughly a quarter of the average life-span. Perhaps the psychologists, with their various theories of understanding, under the title ‘cognitive development’ – such as Piaget, Vygotsky, Montessori, Erikson, and the behaviorists – had taken care of all that.

 

This is a shame, because the lived experience of most people is of a sea change in our ability and means by which we make sense of our world. Our awareness of this process, deeply tied to awareness of our self and identity, and comprehension of what it means to exist, begins to really take hold in the years transitioning from childhood to adolescence. While we have a sense of our selves, and our world, prior to this time – one which has undergone numerous critical developments since our infancy – this age’s deepening sense of identity and vastly broadened horizons is, in some sense, the first tentative steps into Dasein.

 

And that experience, that is so fundamental to our lives and our existential experience, is why Adventure Time is one of the most important documents of recent popular culture.

 

 

*          *          *

 

In 2019, The New York Times made a list of the 20 best television dramas since The Sopranos. On that list: Lost, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Americans… and Adventure Time. From an excerpt of their reasoning:

 

“The story of Finn, a foundling in the magical and once-devastated Land of Ooo, “Adventure Time” evolved from a whimsical action-adventure into a sprawling story of abandoned children, surrogate families and self-discovery. It grew up as its protagonist did, teaching its viewers that while the battle of good against evil can be thrilling, it’s rarely simple. It had the vast, well-imagined cast of a saga like “Game of Thrones,” along with a stunning visual language and a through sense of empathy.

 

“If you still need convincing, let me direct you to the Season 4 episode “I Remember You,” which begins to reveal the back story of the series’ original mad villain, the Ice King. Once a mild-mannered human named Simon, he saved a young girl (now Marceline, the goth-punk vampire) by embracing a magic that took his sanity and memory. As Marceline pieces together the story and he grasps at the fragments of his past — a story with familiar echoes to anyone who’s seen a loved one fall to dementia — the episode’s 11 minutes build to an emotional climax, a villainous character reframed and given depth on the spot.

Surreal, wise and often heartbreaking, “Adventure Time” may look like kids’ stuff. (It is, in fact, outstanding kids’ stuff.) But under its confectionery surface lies the material of great drama. It’s a wonderland of broken, misfit toys learning to fix one another.”

 

All of that is true, but it buries the lead – “it grew up as its protagonist did”. And this is really interesting, because I know of only one other drama that charts that process of development as its focus: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. But, unlike the 2.5-hour 2014 film, Adventure time slows down, focusing on episodes of Finn’s development from the age of twelve to seventeen, those same key years of becoming Dasein.

 

Dramas rarely have ‘filler’ episodes – in which nothing happens that develops either plot or character. But Adventure Time is comfortable, and very clever, with this. Lived experience does not follow a narrative dramatic story arc – so neither does Adventure Time. Finn’s experiences are sometimes incredibly meaningful, and sometimes entirely pointless, and sometimes seemingly pointless, but meaningful later on. The show does this again and again – showing you things which they don’t explain, or hint at, or leave in the background until later. The importance of characters waxes and wanes, in often unpredictable ways. Think back to your own life: Five years ago, would you have predicted you’d be where you are now? That the people in your life would be the people who are important to you now? Were the major turning-points, in hindsight, identified by you at the time? Even in the final season there are seemingly pointless episodes, because of course there are! That’s how the course of life runs.

 

As Finn develops, his understanding mirrors ours, and how he makes sense of his world develops, too. As a tween he runs around and sees things as simple adventures – good and bad, scary and comforting – some things being too confusing for him to make sense of, so he doesn’t try (while we, the audience, start to learn to sock those elements away for later). As he ages, he starts to learn the history of his world, the history of the people around him, and his own place and story – just as we do. All the two-dimensional characters get fleshed out, and his horizons expand. His maturity drives the framing, narrative, and context – in this case what the animated world presents to us, as the viewer. Episodes from the later seasons would be totally out of place earlier on, because Finn, developmentally, wouldn't have experienced the world like that yet. The example given by the Times shows this: As Marcy and Ice King figure out their painful, complicated, past, Finn and Jake look on in bewilderment. The last lines have Jake ask: "What is going on in there?" To which Finn honestly replies: "I have no idea." But he will - when he is older.

 

*          *          *

 

Most shows geared to young people are age-specific. Daniel Tiger, Arthur, Transformers, Sesame Street, Yogi Bear, and so forth. Blue’s Clues and Dora the Explorer were designed for a certain audience, just as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Lizzy McGuire were. So often, the characters are ageless – or only progress a few years in time between start to finish, most commonly in shows geared to adolescents.

 

A show that aged appropriately with its characters, was, by itself, a major breakthrough. Further, Adventure Time covered new, interesting, developmental ground. For one of the first times ever, in popular culture, if not the first, it charted how we become aware of our existence as Dasein, and how that awareness evolves, doing so in a way that mirrors lived experience. It managed this insight with humor, drama, creativity, all while tossing in some truly intriguing philosophical concepts. As such, as the culture of our time is passed on, Adventure Time should be treated as a major artifact – a critically important document of how we as a culture in the early 21st century made sense of our being.

New Comedy - Bo Burnham: Inside

It’s not a novel thesis to say that mediums change content. But I wanted to examine that idea in the light of comedy performance.

 

Ignoring the vast realms of visual and written comedic works – for which, of course, the same thesis applies – formal performance comedy begins, I suppose, with theater. The works of Aristophanes are specifically linked to the theater medium, as seen best in The Clouds, when the play’s author walks on stage and argues with the audience.

 

For centuries, comedy performance was relegated to the stage, from Juvenal’s satires, to Italian opera buffa, to Oscar Wilde. All of this comedy was subsumed under the category ‘theater’ however. The only other performative comedy was comedy songs – a tradition that was anything but formal. While La Donna e Mobile may have enchanted Verdi’s audience, most comedic songs were more at home in taverns and were generally regarded as informal entertainment, not far removed from an American hootenanny.

 

Entering the 20^th century, radio and recording technology began to change all this, along with the advent of film. Comedy song, in particular, made a big leap, as you could now buy comedy records – initially humorous songs, and eventually 45s. Already by the 1920s artists were professionally recording the previously informal songs about moonshiners, cuckold husbands, and other classic tropes. Radio, meanwhile, is where the first situation comedies arose – consider Fibber McGee and Molly, which began broadcasting in 1935. A few years into the show there was the now-iconic audio joke of opening the hall closet, only to have the foley artist’s mountain of sounds fall out and bury the luckless door-opener. How many times has that joke been referenced in American comedy since?

 

A later, televised, version of the gag

 

Besides sitcoms, radio also provided more general radio shows. Les Paul and Mary Ford, by 1950, were recording musical comedy sketches, but this tradition goes back to the 1920s, and vaudeville. Burns and Allen had made comedy films since 1929 (notably Lambchops) and performed on the radio starting the same year, becoming regulars in the mid-30s.

 

George Burns and Gracie Allen bring their vaudeville routine to film in 1929

 

Vaudeville, basically, was where stand-up comedy started, alongside variety shows and revues, such as the Ziegfeld Follies. The growth of vaudeville was a decades-long process, from local concert halls in the mid-1800s to national fame by the turn-of-the-century. Some of these later comedians, like Burns and Allen, Eddie Cantor, WC Fields, Will Rogers, and the Marx Brothers, made the jump to the new formats, like film and radio. But film was already quickly developing its own rules. Movies were replacing comedy nickelodeon shorts, and silence didn’t lend itself to standup, anyway. Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Kops – these films were embracing what you could do with a camera, and were a far cry from the stand-up performances given on stage.

 

Television helped resuscitate stand-up comedy. Of course, sitcoms were copied from radio, but variety shows and late-night television emerged quickly, already in place by the 1940s. Hosts like Bob Hope and Milton Berle ushered in this new comedy, with proper late night, as a platform for standup, emerging in the 1950s. Here was the new comedy performance stage, presented in a way that worked well for introducing Borscht Belt humor to America. By the late 1950s standup had found a television home, and, with mass audiences, new cultural relevance and power.

 

Bob Hope roasting Frank Sinatra in 1950

 

Simmering in the background of all this was the continuing development of comedy songs. In 1948 the LP had been introduced, and so novelty songs gave way to full-length comedy albums, initially comprised of songs, such as Tom Lehrer’s Songs by Tom Lehrer in 1953. Spoken comedy followed, with the first live comedy album in 1958, recorded by Mort Sahl.

 

A song off of Lehrer’s full-length album

 

Soon comedy albums hit their stride – in the early 1960s comedians like Bob Newhart, Vaughn Meader, and Stan Freberg made popular full-length spoken comedy albums. Comedy songwriting, now blended with standup elements, continued with the works of performers like the Smothers Brothers – who eventually, like Newhart and the others, also jumped genres to television.

 

Newhart and Dean Martin in the 1960s. Standup comedians began working in the sitcom and sketch format that leant itself so well to television.

 

‘My Old Man’ parodied by the Smothers Brothers in the 1960s

 

Within these two mediums, LPs and television, standup comedy flourished for decades. Boundaries were pushed, counterculture embraced. Some acts were improvisational (Firesign Theater), some captured live audience energy (Steve Martin’s 'A Wild and Crazy Guy'), others were carefully rehearsed monologues. Richard Pryor, in the 1970s, presented the next big leap forward, with his concert movies. By the end of the decade HBO began making George Carlin standup specials. These merged into a form of standup performance that came to dominate the next twenty years.

 

A famous scene from Pryor’s 'Live on the Sunset Strip', 1982

 

By the 1980s radio was a largely defunct medium, but television soldiered on, providing late night as a standup haven. For comedy musicians, the MTV decade was a blessing – this was the era of Weird Al’s stardom with his parodies and parody music videos.

 

Eat It, 1984

 

The next big innovation, in terms of medium, was with the internet, although its role in performative comedy was actually fairly slow, given that audio and video were so demanding for 90s-era computers. Basically, then, it’s the advent of YouTube, in 2005, that ushers in a new era of comedy performance, blending video and film techniques to provide comedy material. That said, YouTube – which was great, not incidentally, great for comedy songs – remained mostly a skit and sketch venue.

 

2006 – ‘Shoes’ by Liam Kyle Sullivan. An early iconic YouTube song/skit.

 

So, too, with the other popular video apps that emphasized short bursts of observational humor: Vine from 2013-2016, and TikTok, which launched a year after Vine’s demise. Comedy and standup specials were still largely relegated to HBO and Comedy Central, but a new platform emerged from the internet to help, and help transform: Netflix.

 

In 2012 Netflix launched it’s first exclusive special, Bill Burr’s ‘You People Are All the Same’. Initially, Netflix was just a new home for concert-style comedy specials. But an older tradition of comedy began to merge with standup specials: the one-person show.

 

One-person shows have been around for ages, developing a niche in the world of theater. Hal Holbrook, famously, created Mark Twain Tonight! in 1954. Lily Tomlin found success in the 1980s with The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, written by Jane Wagner. In the 2010s comedians like Colin Quinn carried on the tradition, with shows like Long Story Short, written by Jerry Seinfeld. It was shown on HBO – a rare honor for these usually Broadway-bound performances.

 

An excerpt from 'Long Story Short', regarding Canada

 

The tradition, in theater, continues. Heidi Schreck’s Pulitzer-shortlisted 2017 play ‘What the Constitution Means to Me’ is a fine example: but on Netflix it began to merge more with comedy. 2017 also saw Hasan Minhaj release ‘Homecoming King’ which was part one-man show, and part comedy special.

 

From 'Homecoming King'

 

This was a banner year, because 2017 also saw the release of Hannah Gadsby’s ‘Nanette’ on Netflix. Here was what appeared to be a concert movie, but which took a wild turn into raw, vulnerable, performance. Gadsby pushed the boundaries of what a standup special was, just as Minhaj had, but in a very personal, very challenging way.

 

From 'Nanette'

 

These lines continued to blur when, in 2020, Dave Chapelle released ‘8:46’ directly to YouTube. Filmed during the pandemic, and shot outdoors, it’s hard to classify it as standard standup. There’s a lot of real rage and pain in the work. There are jokes, but they seem almost auxiliary. Here is a further step past ‘Nanette’ even, into the realm of personal struggle, anger, and hurt – while still being a performance that, on the surface, looks and sort of feels like standup.

 

Tackling these subjects isn’t new, of course. Pryor, Carlin, Hicks, CK – this sort of introspection mixed with commentary and tinged with anger and/or depression has been around a long time. But now it was as though the medium of a standup special was being used to monologue and chasten, to wake people up, or just to express their pain. (Gadsby addressed this in her 2020 show ‘Douglas’.) Clearly, standup comedy is in an unusual place.

 

Netflix/YouTube’s 8:46, in its entirety

 

And then along came Bo Burnham.

 

*     *     *

 

‘Bo Burnham: Inside’ is something new. In the Netflix special all the concert elements are stripped away – because he’s stuck inside. Just as we all were during the pandemic. Burnham has to deal with this new reality in a way that’s still a comedy special. Blending the emotional honesty and rawness of Gadsby and Chapelle, and the one-person show aspect in a non-traditional special, Burnham provides a truly remarkable experience. Seemingly cobbled together (but meticulously edited) over a period of more than a year we watch Burnham’s hair and beard grow, his adeptness with technology increase, his mental deterioration, his challenges confronted.

 

For fifteen months late night hosts have complained, like Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers, about doing a show without an audience. But for standup, this experience of loss provided a whole new field of material for Burnham to explore, which he does on ‘Inside’. Loneliness and isolation, the dark side of technology, mental health, the need for audience approval – all had been covered before in standup, in a joking way. That said, you can’t actually convey these concepts very well in front of an adoring, sold-out concert hall crowd. But stuck inside a room for a year you can. Burnham makes this clear right from the start, as he focuses on what it means to perform for just a camera lens. Each of these heavy themes now becomes all the more apparent due to our witnessing the actual lived experience of them. This isn’t standup storytelling – this is standup viewing.

 

I never had watched Burnham before, and had ignored his comedy career in the early 2010s. It’s a style of comedy that focuses on music – and the songs of ‘Inside’ are superb. This sounds like Tim Minchin’s best comedy music, only a little bit better, and deeper. The songs are where he parodies our times: sexting, Instagram, internet addiction, and so forth. The many interludes between songs show us the deterioration and struggle (although this is present in some of the songs as well). The final layer is a different type of parody, where he searingly makes fun of common videos – reaction videos, watching people do playthroughs on services like Twitch, and the like. All of these layers merge into an incredible document of our times.

 

Welcome to the Internet, from 'Inside'

 

Will this special, ‘Bo Burnham: Inside’ stand the test of time? Some of the great milestones of comedy are terribly dated now – relics that we watch or listen to as epitomizing a moment. Meader’s comedy LP ‘The First Family’ won the Grammy for Album of the Year – lampooning the Kennedys. After Dallas, his career, and his album’s fame, were over. Comedy that’s focused on the zeitgeist and trends has a short shelf-life. Lenny Bruce is too much of a hipster to watch today, as is the topical humor of Mort Sahl, or the increasingly-stale stoner jokes of Cheech and Chong.

 

Lenny Bruce being hip in 1965

 

Will Burnham’s references to sexting and YouTube ensure that his performance not last? I don’t know. But whether or not we’re watching ‘Inside’ in thirty years, it’s still a worthwhile special for right now. We all experienced ‘Inside’ to differing extents, during the pandemic. I think ‘Inside’ is likely to become the definitive statement on life during this particular moment in time, the strange, reflective, and deeply troubling, start of this new decade. And it is, undoubtedly, one of the more interesting developments in the long story of how medium changes content.

 

Let's end this tour with a lighter moment from the show

The Bad Husband Parade

Roughly a decade ago I read Middlemarch, and immediately understood, having just completed The Brothers Karamazov prior, Woolf’s famous description of Eliot’s novel, as “one of the few English novels for grownup people.” Really, the descriptor isn’t limited to the English, though – Middlemarch is one of the first grownup novels in any language. Karamazov was published later, and remains an enjoyable, but decidedly adolescent, work – full of the Sturm und Drang and heady philosophical ideals of youth. Having read it just before Middlemarch, the contrast between the two books couldn’t be more stark.

            There’s certainly a place for such works, and shelf space should be reserved for Karamazov and its brethren – the novels of Camus, Celine, Doblin, Kafka, and Orwell, among others. But certain books are best read before 30, and philosophical novels, and philosophy generally, should predominate in those intellectually formative years.

            However, since life doesn’t, in fact, end at 30, a different sort of novel has to sustain us for the majority of our lives, and, for those seeking serious intellectual stimulation (as opposed to “mere” entertainment), that brings us back to the novels for grownups, such as Middlemarch (or Woolf’s own works: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse).

            When I read Middlemarch, at 25, the character that jumped off the page was the noxious Casaubon. He was utterly loathsome, provoking the same response as Dickens’ Uriah Heep, but, even more revolting, dared to be a fully-fleshed character, and not a mere Dickensian caricature. Casaubon wasn’t a scraping sycophant, but instead a bitter, frustrated, jealous miser of love, whose last act before dying is to create a vicious will against his young wife, with the intent to shame and hurt her for the rest of her life.

            So it was, for the past decade, that Casaubon was my go-to for bad husbands in literature.

            Unintentionally, however, for the past six months, I’ve encountered a slough of terrible, fictional, husbands. Consequently I thought I’d consider them here, especially in light of the fact that, also during the past six months, I’ve gotten engaged. Good time to take stock.

            When I pick up a book I don’t want to know anything about it. Usually I read the first few sentences, and decide from there. Occasionally I’ll pick a work because I feel like it’s the right time, or prioritize a book I’m not interested in, but that’s on my shelf regardless. There’s an aspect of delayed gratification: I’m going to read this low-priority novel first, and then the one I really want after. That delayed gratification is how I came to The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford, which I was not excited for.

            To be fair, the main character in Ford’s novel, Frank Bascombe, is a divorcee, not a husband. Bascombe is intellectually dishonest, delusional, and a hypocrite who blames others for faults he is blind to in himself. Really, it’s not all that surprising he’s divorced. His myopic self-centeredness and hangdog self-pity make him tiresome and unpleasant company for a few hundred pages.

            After what I had assumed would be light fare, I polished off The Sportswriter, and moved to heavier, more enjoyable, stuff. Two of the heaviest novels I began to read were both by Nobel Laureates, and both bricks. Tackling these tomes would take months. Unwittingly, too, though, both would be examples of bad husbands in literature.

            First, Norwegian author Sigrid Undset wrote an 1100-page magnum opus called Kristin Lavransdatter. Set in Norway in the medieval 1300s, it’s a vast story of a woman’s life told in three parts: her youth, her middle age, and her autumn years and death. But the great challenge of her life (beyond the novel’s central themes regarding Catholic guilt and sin) is her husband, Erlend. Circumstances transpire to create a standoff between Kristin and her husband, and Erlend, in his stubbornness and selfishness, screws up everything about their life, wasting their chances for happiness. His hubris is his unrelenting convictions: at one point it nearly gets him killed, solely out of pride, while managing to lose his estates and wealth; at another juncture it leads to him losing his child; at a third his wife is dishonored and is going to be exiled or executed before he gives in, at the last moment, to try and save her.

            As Dorothea suffers Casaubon, Kristin suffers Erlend – with the primary difference that she, Kristin, deeply loves Erlend, and vice versa. But their affection for each other only makes Erlend’s stubbornness worse, denying them the happiness they could and should have had together. Near his death, when Erlend finally gives up his tiresome moral high ground and ends the standoff, his realization comes with the same sort of tragic insight as Alec Guinness’ Col. Nicholson, in The Bridge on the River Kwai, when he exclaims, “What have I done?” But, like Nicholson, it comes too late for Kristen and her husband.

            While I was reading that tale, I began a different novel, again, unwittingly continuing the Bad Husband Parade. This new entry was by British author John Galsworthy, namely his lengthy novel cycle The Forsyte Saga, for which he was specifically awarded his Nobel citation. Unlike Undset’s Kristin, however, with Galsworthy our main character is the bad husband in question, the despicable Soames.

            Galsworthy writes with irony, and clearly is no fonder of Soames than we are. The purpose of his work is to critique middle class Victorianism, and the petty bourgeois with their obsession over property. Soames takes property, and the mania of ownership, to a disgusting conclusion, namely the ownership of his wife, Irene. She separates from him after he rapes her, yet, a decade later, he feels as if he still owns her, and is owed a son. Spending time with Soames, who wanders around London in a miasma of middle-class propriety and self-righteousness makes you mighty glad to have been born long after Victoria’s reign.

            Three novels, then, in six months, all dealing with wretched husbands. After this Casaubon is no longer alone in my mind as the sine qua non of lousy spouses: he has become merely the central figure in a larger pantheon of terrible partners. Erlend, Soames, and Bascombe – the cause of their hubris varies with each. Soames suffers from an obsessive need to possess. Bascombe is blind to his own egotism, and instead considers himself humble and virtuous. Erlend is well aware of his faults, but too proud to sacrifice his ideals, spreading misery, heartache, and hardship.

            From this accidental survey embarked upon during my period of engagement, we’ve really only gained further examples of what most people have known all along: that all these bad husbands (and for that matter bad spouses of any gender) have the same problem, namely, selfishness. While in manifests in different forms with each, selfishness is the primary flaw for the jealous Casaubon just as it is for the possessive Soames. Inflated self-worth defines both Bascombe and Erlend. If there is a warning to be taken from the Bad Husband Parade, it is that, in any romantic partnership, you must put your relationship, and your partner, before yourself. Fail to do so, and, besides inviting predictable romantic unhappiness into your life, you will also find yourself defying the prudence and wisdom of the grownup writers.