David Dubinsky, Nelson Rockefeller, and Robert Wagner watch the 1959 Labor Day Parade in New York City; the cleric in the center is probably Francis Spellman, Cardinal of New York. Photo credit: Unknown photographer/Wikimedia Commons
I chose today’s illustration because it’s a reminder that there was a time, not too long ago, when a Democratic leader of one of the more radical unions in New York, a Democratic mayor, a Catholic prelate, and a Republican governor all honored American workers in each other’s company.
Can you imagine?
Although summer won’t be done for several weeks, mentally we have already made the turn into fall. The tomatoes are coming in like crazy, everyone who is supposed to be back at school is there, our white shoes and purses will be put away for the year tomorrow, and our thoughts turn to sweaters, football, and politics.
Labor Day marks the beginning of an intensified presidential campaign: Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald J. Trump, and several thousands candidates up and down the ballot have 63 days to make their case. You can help them do it: sign up to phone bank, canvass, poll watch, make small monthly or weekly donations, and take part in the democratic process in whatever way suits you.
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It’s going to be a crazy—and potentially historic—fall, and I look forward to being with you for all of it.
My 10 best summer reads (in alphabetical order):
Joseph Andras (trans. Simon Leser), Far Away the Southern Sky (Verso, 2024). A novella that imagines the life of Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh from the time he arrived in Paris at the end of World War I to his departure for the Soviet Union in 1925. Andras—a reclusive and radical French writer who refused the nation’s top literary prize because he doesn’t believe in literary competition—did copious research in French archives to try to uncover the story, weaving the narrative of historical discovery into the fictionalized story of Ho’s life. The book is also terrific for anyone teaching historiography or biography this year, because it raises so many questions about what can be known, and how one writes about gaps in knowledge about a subject.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise (Random House, 2024). Sometimes people publish the right book at just the right time. Brodesser-Akner’s book is about the outcome of a kidnapping, one that the matriarch of a wealthy Jewish family orders suppressed, and the rolling trauma that surfaces decades later as the victim’s children piece their memories together. But as it turns out, the kidnapping wasn’t the first trauma—or the only silence—in the family. Highly recommended for readers who also like Jonathan Franzen, and for those who want greater insight into why the past year has surfaced terrors that most living Americans have never experienced first, or even second, hand.
Cynthia Carr, Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar (FSG, 2024). Come for the Candy Darling, stay for an amazing cultural history of New York’s alternative theater world in the 1960s and 1970s. Candy Darling is a profoundly painful story about what it meant to be trans, prior to reliable health care, in the wake of Christine Jorgensen’s epic ascent to celebrity status. Carr’s careful distinction between what it meant to be transgender, transsexual, or a drag queen (categories that intersected artistically, but not as identities) is praiseworthy, as is her early meditation on pronouns in transgender biography. And just at the point in the book where I had decided Andy Warhol was a complete asshole (he made gobs of money off of women who were chronically homeless and impoverished), Carr turned me around just a little bit.
Mary V. Dearborn, Carson McCullers: A Life (Deckle Edge, 2024). I begin with a confession: for much of my life, I have found McCullers’ work almost unreadable, and I know this is probably my problem, not hers. Dearborn’s account of McCullers’s life, however, is fascinating and highly readable: she was clearly a genius; less clearly (but possibly) transgender, a topic Dearborn deals with deftly; and a raging alcoholic, a fact that most of her devoted friends were unwilling to admit. In a larger sense, Dearborn’s book is a fascinating portrait of literary Bohemia in post-war New York City, one in which gay people of the opposite sex married each other, often for love, and fashioned these relationships in ways that defied definition. Dearborn also does us the favor of not going on extended critical riffs about McCullers’ published writing. I realize that people in English departments have to do this to be taken seriously as scholars, but it is boring for the general reader, and it also makes literary biographies way too long.
Jennifer Doyle, Shadow of My Shadow (Duke University Press, 2024). Need we say more about the imperfections of Title IX procedures on college campuses? Well, apparently, yes. In this series of interconnected essays, Doyle describes being stalked by a graduate student, and the utter inability of the university to address it competently. She received endless amounts of bad advice from administrators, some of which came back to haunt her as the student (and eventually, a complicit faculty member who was himself charged with sexual harassment) invaded her privacy, counter-charged Doyle with harassment, and eventually choked off her writing voice for a period of years. But Doyle also shows how the university fails mentally ill students by treating spurious claims seriously, rather than intervening productively: this student needed help, and what she got was legal procedures that first had the effect of validating her claims, and then expelling her from the university.
Hil Malatino, Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). Malatino, is one of a number of young writers (Andrea Long Chu is another) who are tearing down the illusion that gender transition takes individuals from an unhappy place to a happy place. Instead, Malatino explores all the bad feelings that are supposed to be erased by a successful (whatever that means) arrival in one’s gender of choice: despair, despondency, dysphoria, and rage are a few of them. Malatino also earns my highest praise for a gender theorist: his work is complex, but it’s pleasurable to read, and he has an excellent sense of humor.
Tiya Miles, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People (Penguin Press, 2024). When it comes to elegant and well-researched historical writing, Miles is one of my great favorites. If I were teaching a course on biography, I might pair this with Andras (above), because Miles uses our cumulative knowledge about American slavery, the place of women in that institution, and most importantly, religion, to produce what is perhaps the most intellectually robust and highly readable biography of Tubman to date. As a bonus, Miles also weaves Tubman’s knowledge about the environment, and her disability (a blow to the head from an enslaver left her prone to epileptic episodes) into her story, suggesting new pathways for understanding women’s existence in, and resistance to, captivity.
Paul Renfro, The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2024: available for pre-order now.) Paid subscribers heard Neil Young and I discussing this book in last week’s video chat. In 1984, as a twelve-year-old hemophiliac, White was diagnosed with AIDS, but he became famous as an “innocent victim” who was nevertheless persecuted by his community. Renfro puts this story squarely in the context of both the Reagan administration’s neglect of gay, Haitian, and addicted victims of the disease, and politicians seizing on White to make a case for tolerance and for directing federal resources to prevention, treatment and a cure. Knowledgeable readers will not be surprised that these two stories about AIDS never reconcile; instead, Renfro makes a bigger argument about how misinformation, bigotry and fear spread, even prior to the internet; and how the creation of innocent victims inevitably points to the guilt of others.
Ari Richter, Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz: A Graphic Family Memoir of Trauma & Inheritance (Fantagraphics, 2024). There will be inevitable comparisons to Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986), but the two books are very different. While Richter explores the trajectory of his many ancestors through Nazi-dominated Europe, there are many of them—people who escaped, people who were sent to different death camps, people who were able to save some relatives—but not others. Like Brodesser-Akner, it was the right book at the right time: Richter looks at questions of national identity, the traces that antisemitic eliminationism left on his own body and soul, and the research and archiving practices that ultimately illuminate difficult, tangled histories.
Salmon Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Random House, 2024). Not a Rushdie fan, although I did read Joseph Anton (2013) his memoir of life underground after the 1989 fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. But I wanted to read this book, because I believe that writers should be defended, and I am currently so angry about the vilification of PENAmerica, and the targeting of its leadership, by pro-Palestinian activists. Eventually, Rushdie resumed his life, moved to New York—and then, was nearly assassinated by a young terrorist at a speaking event. This book details Rushdie’s near death, his long and painful return to health (minus an eye, which was destroyed in the attack. It’s also one of the best arguments against religious extremism I have yet read.
Short takes:
Wouldn’t it be nice if a President Kamala Harris had a Democratic Congress to work with? A district that may decide that is Pennsylvania’s 7th, where incumbent Susan Wild is fending off Republican challenger Ryan Mackenzie. One problem for Wild is her lack of visibility as the excitement over Harris subsumes awareness of other candidates. “Unmindful of any political contest beyond the race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, few people interviewed in Allentown, Easton, and Bethlehem last week could name the people running for Congress in their area,” Alfred Lubrano writes at The Philadelphia Inquirer. While McKenzie is an election denier, “Wild has sided with Biden on lowering prescription drug prices, expanding Medicare, supporting labor and education, and addressing the climate crisis. She’s introduced a bill to codify the right to in vitro fertilization nationwide. She was also reportedly one of the first members of Congress to suggest in private Democratic meetings that Biden drop out of the presidential race after a poor debate performance against Trump in June.” (September 2, 2024)
Why are Donald Trump’s charges that Harris is a Marxist, communist, and (add whatever other loony left term you know) not having an effect on voters? “For one thing, Harris isn’t—and never has been—a Marxist, and most voters appear to recognize that,” columnist Doyle McManus writes at The Los Angeles Times. But there’s another problem. “Campaign strategists from both parties say Trump’s attacks on Harris suffer from another flaw,” McManus continues. “They’re scattershot and unfocused. In addition to calling her both a communist and fascist, Trump has argued both that Harris is more liberal than Biden and that she would continue the president’s policies.” (September 2, 2024)
It’s hard to imagine how any sane world leader could imagine political survival as 40,000 civilian bodies piled up in a war zone and people captured and held hostage on his watch are tortured in captivity, and dying violent deaths, over a period of months. But here we are—and Israel is in the grip of its most potent protests ever after Israeli Defense Forces found six Jewish hostages, recently executed by Hamas, in a tunnel. “Why has Netanyahu foiled a deal?” Gershom Gorenberg writes for The New Republic. “The most common hypothesis among Israelis, it seems, is that he wants the war to continue because the public pressure for him to resign, or call elections, will increase dramatically when the shooting ends, reservists come home, and the bodies of more hostages are returned for burial. This is a logical explanation. But the truth is that we don’t know what’s going on in Netanyahu’s mind. He may truly believe he will achieve the `absolute victory’ over Hamas that he has promised. He may believe that Israel can and should occupy Gaza permanently.” But saving hostages is not, and has never been, a priority, and this represents a dramatic departure from past policies. (September 1, 2024)