If but the friend to friend right so friend — friend. It's a plan to me that somebody — — go back amen is slipped on the go back into Wednesday and — out more — what — ball but up. War you can make some good thank you should bring this report from Human Rights Watch lady and may be asking questions about death.
As well you might learn a lot more in my present as well but thank you for coming on this morning sharing and — it away and — — — — Do you — report. Yes what — report. Okay just what — but only eight weeks.
Don't we go from nobody knows why don't hate me —
Actually, the transcript sucks. There's a disclaimer down at the end that it is "automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate." Basically, Stephanopoulos allows Rodman to appear on This Week and say inane shit about North Korea like Kim Jong-un is a "friend" and then ends the segment with some condescending twaddle about how the next time Rodman goes there he should take along with him the most recent Human Rights Watch report about the country. The whole thing was shabby — from Rodman even being on there in the first place to the "face-saving" "balance" of theatrically pushing a photocopied report across the table.
After reading Nothing, it seems like a human rights violation to put the words "human rights" anywhere near the name "North Korea". That the country is repressive is one thing. That it tortures its citizens is another thing. That it is building a nuclear arsenal is yet another thing. But it's entirely horrifying when a government does all this stuff and then has the nerve to basically starve its own people. Actually, "basically" is too mealy mouthed a term to sneak in there: They are actually starving their own people. Nothing to Envy focuses on this last charming aspect of the regime by generating a composite of life in one particular North Korean city — not Pyongyang, which outsiders tend to know more about — through the stories of several defectors.
Put simply, life in North Korea, especially for those outside the capital or not in the army, is a paranoia-inducing, tree bark-eating, corn cob flour-making, tamponless struggle to simply stay alive. If North Korea were an HBO show, George Orwell could have been a creative consultant. And then there are the bizarre parts, like how every teacher has to pass an accordion test, leading to stuff like this:
The title is the kind of irony that is a gift from the English Department gods, gift- and shrink-wrapped and dumped in a writer's lap, the softest of balls lobbed up more meekly than an asthmatic clown's balloon: The only sparkles of color in a drab, colorless North Korean world (literally, not figuratively) are the propaganda signs that pop up along the way. One such sign praising the hereditarily dictating Kim Il-Jong and Kim Il-Sung says, "We will do as the party tells us. We have nothing to envy in the world." Thus, Nothing to Envy. It's sort of like that old saw that "when people say it's not about the money, it's always about the money" — if someone tries to make you believe you have nothing to envy, you probably have something to envy.
A phrase like "human tragedy" is similarly too weak for the 60-plus years of totalitarianism in North Korea. Where Nothing is hugely successful is showing the blunt-force terror and grueling drudgery of everyday life. She follows young people and older people. You can't help but think of your neighbor or your parents limping along. "Human toll" is almost a euphemism these days — at least you hear it so much that you kind of tune it out, like it's something you dump into a basket at one end of a bridge before a gate arm rises — but the human toll in North Korea is massive and unbelievably so: A large portion of its 24 million people are largely ignored, a large enough percentage is imprisoned in actual prison camps (not what Dennis Rodman confuses for run-of-the-mill prisons) and that's not even taking into account that the entire country is basically one big prison camp. Oh, and they want nuclear weapons.
How North Korea continues to exist should be amazing to anyone, but the horrible truth is that it's in no one's interest in Asia (or the world, probably) to just let it implode. Its neighbors, South Korea and China, would suddenly become unstable, taking the world's economy with it. For this reason, South Korea in particular, while basically very generous to refugees, isn't quite ready to welcome 24 million people into the fold. And as Envy shows, China actually works with the North Korean government to send refugees back. For stability's sake, the world seems content to let North Korea's citizens (literally) limp along. I already mentioned that they're building a nuclear arsenal but I don't think I mentioned that they also have 1.1 million active-duty soldiers (the U.S., as a comparison, has 1.4 million).
So basically, people suffer. And "suffer" is another shitty word: It sounds like something the vet would say before they put down the family dog.
Despite all this, people continue to have lives. Teenagers fall in love. Husbands hold out hope they can one day go have a nice sit-down dinner at a restaurant. Teachers continue to trust that they can make a difference. Doctors continue to believe they can follow their professional oath. And then one day none of that is possible and the world implode: The husband starves to death in a shack. Teachers lose most of their pupils. Doctors leave work to go forage for bark to eat. And that's when most of the subjects in Nothing escape out of the country.
On the one hand, Demick was forced into a hopeful narrative: North Korea is closed so tight, especially outside of Pyongyang, that it is impossible to write a story about everyday lives. By necessity, the story becomes about the extraordinary courage and bravery of the subjects in the book who have risked everything ("risked everything" being another dull, thoughtless phrase that is applied to everything from ruthless totalitarian regimes to five-card stud) to become free. It not only softens the blow but also makes for much jerking of tears.
The pressures on the North Koreans profiled in Nothing are huge: Man-made famine and starvation; brainwashing and deprogramming; the terror of being a refugee on the run. And then there's the other side: The book does a great job of showing the absurdity and heartache of living in a free country. For the most part the subjects in the book succeed — eventually, and not without another set of stresses and pressures.
One of Nothing's running storylines is about two teenagers in love. By way of a spoiler, I will report that there is a payoff to the time you put in along the way hearing about their furtive glances, chaste midnight walks and frustrating obstacles. Both end up leaving North Korea, and while you are right there waiting and hoping for a storybook ending — no matter how pat that would be — it never comes, which is actually even more poignant. Like so many teenagers, years later, after they are reunited in the south and life has moved on for both of them, neither can quite see what the big deal was with one another to begin with. It's not so much bittersweet as it is dull and perfectly normal. It is profoundly offensive to think of this human misery as a good movie, but it totally could be; the takeaway here — the Rhett Butler money shot — is roughly this: Freedom means a lot of things, not least of which being able to blow off text messages or gripe that ladies in their 30s just aren't as hot as they were when they were 18. It's powerful axiomatic stuff — sort of like how you can never trust a totalitarian regime.
North Korea may be a huge question mark, but relying on Vice and Dennis Rodman and probably George Stephanopoulos to establish that narrative for you is as depressing as a lot of things in the world. If nothing else, Demick's Nothing to Envy is solid penance for wasting mental space re-remembering the Carmen Electra years.
Of all the characters in Charlie LeDuff's Detroit: An American Autopsy, Detroit City Councilmember Monica Conyers is one of the best. LeDuff, who grew up in Detroit and returned to be a reporter for the Detroit News, features her throughout the book, as a sort of catch-all symbol of gross political negligence and tin-ear stupidity.
Conyers made a national name for herself after a verbal altercation with the city council president during a council meeting in which she called him "Shrek." I'm assuming it was based on his looks and not his character, because the character of Shrek actually seems like a pretty decent guy.
LeDuff then set up a meeting with Councilmember Monica Conyers and some eighth graders in a sort of public post-mortem about her calling the president of the Detroit city council "Shrek." The subtext is clear: When adults act like children, let's let children take the adults to task. It's funny, a stunt, and also something more at home on the Daily Show, which is kind of LeDuff's style, just minus the satire. Also, how does a newspaper get away with this? The video is here. You can see pertinent part of the video here. I can't embed it because they disabled the embedding feature. I'm not totally sure why.
One of the students does indeed take Conyers to task and Conyers, because she is apparently incapable of good political sense, proceeds to take the child to task. Suffice it to say, Conyers comes off like a huge moron. You can read about the event here, except that it's a Wall Street Journal link, so if you click it from here, you'll hit a paywall. If you Google the title, however, you should be able to access the story, which is titled "Detroit Politician Gets Lesson In Civility From a 13-Year-Old." I'm not totally sure I understand why it's somehow better for the Wall Street Journal to have people access stories behind a paywall via a search engine versus through, say, someone's email, but that's what they do.
Newspapers do a lot of stuff that is understandable only to people who work in newspapers. And with that, I just sort of effortlessly rolled out with the kind of knowing, faux-folksy aphorism that Charlie LeDuff likes to indulge in. I mean, I guess I understand the value of a soft paywall — maybe old people won't bother with Googling stuff and will just pay the subscription — but that kind of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other balance just gets in the way of a good story.
Which is kind of what I circle back to when I think about this particular incident: LeDuff agrees to meet Conyers at a cocktail lounge off of Eight Mile Road (you might remember "Eight Mile" from Eminem) because Conyers apparently can't prevent herself from repeating the negative. On the way he decides to stop off and visit the 13-year-old and her family. It's a great detail in a story, but it's too perfect. And it's too perfect in part because your gut tells you that he wanted to stop off on the way mostly because it's a detail that would make a good story. I can similarly see Aaron Sorkin "swinging by" the Lincoln Monument or, I don't know, Buzz Bissinger "happening upon" a high school football game: The detail flows seamlessly from head to steering wheel to eye to head to word processing program. And that's when writers become slightly sociopathic.
(As an aside, in the genre of non-fiction about dead or dying cities, Bissinger wrote his own about Philadelphia in the early 1990s, focusing on the achievements of Mayor Ed Rendell. This perspective makes Bissinger's A Prayer For the City seem much more hopeful. But there doesn't seem to be an Ed Rendell on the horizon for Detroit, and as Jen points out, Philadelphia always had advantages Detroit lacks: It's connected on the I-95 corridor with New York and DC, it has many universities, etc. Maybe it's the era — post-Iraq, post-whatever, people just think the world sucks shit — but Detroit — the book, not necessarily the city — is just a downer through and through.)
It's a small detail but it's something that for whatever reason I glommed onto. There's something about people who navigate their way through the world knowing that whatever they're doing would make for a good story. This of course happens all the time — if you're friendly with people who like to write, you'll hear them say it. And not just "this is good fodder" (look up the dictionary definition of "fodder" — it's illuminating), but making life decisions based on the output of said fodder (which, according to the definition would be the excrement of domesticated animals). I'm sure The Devil Wears Prada isn't the most egregious example of this but it feels like a watershed one that begat hundreds, if not thousands, of stupid fucking notions about what could become a book.
Which is all well and good (and with that, I just effortlessly rolled out a meaningless transition meant to soften the barb at the end of the last paragraph), but if you take a second to consider what these people are like in real life, they come off like zombies. If John Howard Griffin came into my store or if Gregory Peck sauntered into my country club, I'd be like, "fuck you." Because that stuff begat the asinine Quiñonesism we are left with today.
And, sure, are we all guilty of in some way wanting to convert personal reminisces to literary gold? If you write on the internet, of course. It's just people need to go back to being embarrassed and fucked up about it. Less Foer and more semen-slurping macaque.
So anyway, I digress (and with that, I just effortlessly rolled out a sorry-ass excuse for going wildly off topic).
I say all this in part because Detroit is good. The book, I mean, not the city. After reading the book, the conclusion you're left with is that Detroit (the city) should be converted to either farmland or a giant national historical park about America's industrial past. Or maybe just left to rot like portions of Auschwitz. LeDuff was on Bill Maher just after the book came out and Maher asked him if Detroit could come back. He said yes. But after reading the book, I'm not sure why.
Indeed (and with that, I just effortlessly rolled out the worst fucking conjunctive adverb in the history of conjunctive adverbs), some books are like that: Writers come up with a really provocative premise and then when they're interviewed about it, immediately back down. What I wanted Maher to follow up with — and he couldn't because part of the idiocy of interviewing anyone about a specific book is that the interview is (often by design) mostly unaware about what the book actually says — was, "Really? Because what other conclusion are you left with besides the city should be converted to either farmland or a giant national historical park about America's industrial past or maybe just left to rot like portions of Auschwitz?"
Look, Detroit is good because LeDuff is a gifted storyteller. But we use a phrase around here a lot with Jen, and that's "Irish It Up," as in, Meatball's default is to take a mostly correct story and make it much more entertaining. It's not just the Irish: Different ethnic groups do this, of course. On NPR they even have a term for it, which is "David Sedaris." The only thing about these stories is that in the back of your mind there's that nagging doubt that the lady on the subway actually yelled "Tequila! Cointreau!" to her unruly children (what, no "Triple Sec"? Let's make it happen!) (actually, I don't doubt this story — it's just all the other times she's Irished It Up that makes me second-guess it, even if just slightly).
And I'm not specifically second-guessing LeDuff, either. It's just that the consistent tone of Detroit is that of a guy sitting next to you at a bar; it's not that I don't believe you that the term "bullpen" comes from single women in Durham flirting with relief pitchers by throwing them Bull Durham Tobacco, it's just that I want to try to remember to Wikipedia it later. In a book it can be a little frustrating.
Sometimes the tone resembles a treatment for the show Hardcore Pawn. Like on page 78, after his meeting with Conyers: "Where the hell was I? . . . The sign outside said 'Detroit City Limits.'" I don't think I'm being a pretentious dickhead to note that it's not exceptional writing. What it is is a great ending to a story someone is telling you — because if LeDuff is sitting across from you, he delivers that line with whatever appropriate inflection, self-deprecation and whatever other tool a storyteller uses to deliver good line. When a reader reads that line, they might hear something different — Jack Webb as Sergeant Joe Friday, Leslie Nielsen, Kevin Bacon in JFK, The Fresh Prince, Garrison Keillor, their boring old Uncle Pete, whatever. I mean, I like that LeDuff writes like he talks. Sometimes it doesn't always translate though.
Ultimately (and with that I just effortlessly rolled out with another really lazy conjunctive adverb), I am in a position now where I must sum up my feelings about having read this book in the form of a conclusion, preferably a smartly written concise ending to what has stretched out for over a thousand words. Something along the lines of, Ultimately, Charlie LeDuff's Detroit: An American Autopsy proves not only can you come home again but you can parley the sad fate of your hometown into a tidy 286-page memoir replete with gritty first-hand accounts of borderline journalistic impropriety, scrotum-caressing politicians, and subprime chicanery, not to mention flirtations with and near-apologies for spousal abuse amidst a backdrop of urban disaster porn where, amazingly, no one has yet quit smoking.
Thank god for the British obsession with class and socioeconomic status, because it's the one thing that keeps John Fowles' The Collector from being scarier than you really want it to be.
I mean — and it could just be me — but it can be a teensy-weensy bit difficult to gear yourself up to read a story about a butterfly-collecting pervo-weirdo named Frederick who kidnaps a young art student, Miranda, and imprisons her in his basement. Truth be told, I tend to prefer stories where precocious young girls get raped by men dressed as birds. But the premise of The Collector is a little creepy.
Thankfully, there's a handy indictment of middle class British values ca. the early 1960s that makes it easier to see this bitch get chloroformed. And by "bitch getting chloroformed" I mean "chloroformed bitch" in the sense that the character of Miranda functions as an allegorical stand-in for middle class artistic aspiration and generalized professional-managerial banality. (See, I, unlike some people, can differentiate between an actual human and a mere allegorical one; when allegories are outlawed, only outlaws will use allegories.) That's at least part of what made the story easier to stomach — over and over Fowles' characters dance around the topic of class and who has it and who can't buy it, even after winning the lottery, as Frederick the Collector does.
There's some Big Idea about art in Collector that also makes it easy to stomach the creepiness — Frederick collects butterflies and likes photography, pursuits Miranda believes suck the life out of their subjects (with entomology, literally sucking the life out of the subject) — unlike painting or whatever she does. So there's some kind of thing going on there with that. What all this stuff — the class stuff and the art stuff — really succeeds at is undercutting the aspects of the book that the back cover trumpets: Its utility as a "psychological thriller," a "horror story" or a "haunting" book.
That said, however, Fowles is really good at keeping a reader a little bit off balance and queasy. In my experience, kidnappings — especially ones involving crazy people — generally go badly. And until the story's end, you keep hoping that these generally sensible people can pull back from the brink and reintegrate themselves in polite society — which itself is kind of a ridiculous, funny premise — like you want these nice, upstanding, good British people to pull away from craven, hideous sin and return to a world of clotted cream and baps, or some other really cute sounding word for foodstuffs.
There's a moment that captures this idea perfectly — I can't find it quickly enough — where Miranda tries reasoning with her captor that everything could be cool, that everyone can pack up and go home, everything could return to normal and no one would be the wiser if he just let her go then. It's funny and very British sounding and yet when you're reading it, you really, really want Frederick to take her up on the offer and let her go. That part is done really well.
I am getting ready to spoil an ending, at least as far as the suspenseful part of this book is concerned, so be warned . . . anyway, another part I liked about The Collector is how snooty Miranda is written, and how at the end there's a snide little coda where Frederick discovers his next "guest," and she is just a shopgirl — which is to say, in my mind, that Frederick never appreciated Miranda's great talent and culture, perhaps because it was only there in Miranda's mind; we assume she's a real "la-di-la" lady (as Frederick sneered at one point) but we only think so because she tells us so in her journal entries. It's smart that way.
Spencer, who chose The Collector, says that he read it for ninth grade English class. I think I read Nectar in a Sieve in ninth grade English class. Which is to say, Who teaches this book in ninth grade? (Well, here's a plug for teaching it in high school).
Also — I suppose I should add that this next part deserves a spoiler alert — Jen was wondering if you could really die after a month of no light. I had no idea, but I definitely worried for Miranda while she was stuck in the basement. I Googled it and it seemed like a remote possibility. It's not good, that's for sure, allegory or no.
