December 29, 2016--The Year In Reading

At the end of each year, the New York Times asks an assortment of creative people what they have been reading.

They get interesting responses from a cross-section of avid readers and writers from Junot Diaz to Margaret Atwood to Joseph Ellis. But also from a mix of non-literary types such as Bryan Cranston, Paul Simon, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Though maybe with Bob Dylan having won a Nobel, Paul Simon is not so easily categorizable.

Depending on one's own literary aspirations and pretensions you can peruse in wonder Salman Rushdie's top dozen of the cool and exotic or sneak a peek at what Kareem has on his bedside table.

I can't wait to pick up Abdul-Jabbar's recommended poems by Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. But I'm not racing to get Valeria Luiselli's, The Story of My Teeth, listed by Rushdie.

I know Salman, he's a friend, but really?

Writers can be very competitive. I should rephrase that--writers are very competitive and I am certain that all who were invited to participate took hours coming up with a list that would not only be (sort of) true but would interest--let me rephrase that--impress readers and even trump their colleagues' picks.

No one, for example, would consider listing All the Light We Cannot See, even though it won a Pulitzer and has lingered on the Times best sellers list for 131 weeks, or maybe All the Light would be actively ignored because of these achievements.

Nor would any writer wanting to show off his or her esoteric side or the global reach of their readings even hint at mentioning anything escapist from the likes of John Grisham, though it would be more honest to list some guilty-pleasure reading, which we know everyone occasionally engages in, as that would make strivers such as me feel better about sneaking off with something from James Patterson, which to limit judgmental looks I read with the dust jacket slipped off.

Instead in the Times' Year In Reading we have Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk listing Halldor Laxness' Independent People, set among Icelandic farmers, and essayist Mary Oliver taking note of the work of Patricia Fargnoli, New Hampshire's poet laureate.

Competitive myself, and something of a compulsive reader, if the Times as an inclusive gesture to its average readers was ever to ask me for my list, I already have it ready--

Moby Dick
Don Quixote
The Brothers Karamazov
The Iliad
Finnegan's Wake
Madame Bovary (in the original)
And Peter Balakian's poems, Ozone Journal, which, sorry, did win the Pulitzer.

Salman Rushdie

                               

June 17, 2015--Schmoozing With Congress

Again on Sunday, Maureen Dowd (who my 107-year-old mother calls Maureen Shroud) in the New York Times castigated Barack Obama for his unwillingness to deal directly with Congress. To work them, schmooze with them. How he has disdain for them, remains aloof, and thus is unable to get even widely-supported legislation passed, including last week to give him and future presidents more flexibility in Asian trade policy.

She wrote--

The president descended from the mountain for half an hour on Thursday evening, materializing at Nationals Park to schmooze with Democrats and Republicans at the annual congressional baseball game.

It was the first time he had deigned to drop by, and the murmur went up, "Jeez. Now? Really?" 

Obama has always resented the idea that it mattered for him to charm and knead and whip and hug and horse-trade his way to legislative victories, to lubricate the levers of government with personal loyalty. But, once more, he learned the hard way, it matters.

I am reading James Patterson's Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore, and a large section of it is devoted to Ronald Reagan and his presidency.

Reagan may not have been the sharpest tack but he was among the most effective presidents in getting his agenda enacted by Congress, even though during his eight years in office, for the most part, both houses were controlled by Democrats. Fiercely partisan ones at that. Tip O'Neill, for example, was Speaker of the House during Reagan's tenure and there was no stronger partisan than old Tip.

He disagreed with almost everything the president stood for, but made many deals with him when they met regularly at the White House after office hours, trading stories and sharing a bottle of fine Scotch.

No fan of Reagan, Patterson reports that during his first 100 days in office, even while recovering from a very serious assassination attempt, Reagan amazingly met 69 times with 467 members of Congress, in addition to lobbying many more on the phone.

No one yet has added up Obama's meetings with members of Congress, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that during his first six-and-a-half years as president he has had fewer than 69 meetings and met with and spoken personally with fewer than 100 members.

Patterson writes that--

Though Reagan rejected major changes in his [legislative] plans, his actions indicated . . .  that he was far from the inflexible ideologue that critics had described.

Yes, the tax cuts he enacted with bipartisan support added exponentially to the national debt, tripling between 1980 and 1989 from $914 billion to $2.7 trillion, in many ways he was a successful president--the economy improved and he proved adept at foreign policy, very much including getting along famously and doing serious business with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.

Clearly schmoozing works.