Why Portland's Public Toilets Succeeded Where Others Failed (2012)
45 by curtis | 32 comments on Hacker News.
Thursday, 28 February 2019
New top story on Hacker News: Red Flags in Software Developer Job Descriptions
Red Flags in Software Developer Job Descriptions
94 by webappsecperson | 88 comments on Hacker News.
94 by webappsecperson | 88 comments on Hacker News.
New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Fuzzbuzz (YC W19) – Fuzzing as a Service
Launch HN: Fuzzbuzz (YC W19) – Fuzzing as a Service
146 by evmunro | 76 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, We’re Everest, Andrei and Sabera, the founders behind Fuzzbuzz ( https://fuzzbuzz.io ) - a fuzzing as a service platform that makes fuzzing your code as easy as writing a unit test, and pushing to GitHub. Fuzzing is a type of software testing that generates & runs millions of tests per day on your code, and is great at finding edge cases & vulnerabilities that developers miss. It’s been used to find tens of thousands of critical bugs in open-source software ( https://ift.tt/2fW71Bd ), and is a great way to generate tests that cover a lot of code, without requiring your developers to think of every possibility. It achieves such great results by applying genetic algorithms to generate new tests from some initial examples, and using code coverage to track and report interesting test cases. Combining these two techniques with a bit of randomness, and running tests thousands of times every second has proven to be an incredibly effective automated bug finding technique. I was first introduced to fuzzing a couple years ago while working on the Clusterfuzz team at Google, where I built Clusterfuzz Tools v1 ( https://ift.tt/2jAJEvW ). I later built Maxfuzz ( https://ift.tt/2IG5rDY ), a set of tools that makes it easier to fuzz code in Docker containers, while on the Coinbase security team. As we learned more about fuzzing, we found ourselves wondering why very few teams outside of massive companies like Microsoft and Google were actively fuzzing their code - especially given the results (teams at Google that use fuzzing report that it finds 80% of their bugs, with the other 20% uncovered by normal tests, or in production). It turns out that many teams don’t want to invest the time and money needed to set up automated fuzzing infrastructure, and using fuzzing tools in an ad-hoc way on your own computer isn’t nearly as effective as continuously fuzzing your code on multiple dedicated CPUs. That’s where Fuzzbuzz comes in! We’ve built a platform that integrates with your existing GitHub workflow, and provide an open API for integrations with CI tools like Jenkins and TravisCI, so the latest version of your code is always being fuzzed. We manage the infrastructure, so you can fuzz your code on any number of CPUs with a single click. When bugs are found, we’ll notify you through Slack and create Jira tickets or GitHub Issues for you. We also solve many of the issues that crop up when fuzzing, such as bug deduplication, and elimination of false positives. Fuzzbuzz currently supports C, C++, Go and Python, with more languages like Java and Javascript on the way. Anyone can sign up for Fuzzbuzz and fuzz their code on 1 dedicated CPU, for free. We’ve noticed that the HN community has been increasingly interested in fuzzing, and we’re really looking forward to hearing your feedback! The entire purpose of Fuzzbuzz is to make fuzzing as easy as possible, so all criticism is welcome.
146 by evmunro | 76 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, We’re Everest, Andrei and Sabera, the founders behind Fuzzbuzz ( https://fuzzbuzz.io ) - a fuzzing as a service platform that makes fuzzing your code as easy as writing a unit test, and pushing to GitHub. Fuzzing is a type of software testing that generates & runs millions of tests per day on your code, and is great at finding edge cases & vulnerabilities that developers miss. It’s been used to find tens of thousands of critical bugs in open-source software ( https://ift.tt/2fW71Bd ), and is a great way to generate tests that cover a lot of code, without requiring your developers to think of every possibility. It achieves such great results by applying genetic algorithms to generate new tests from some initial examples, and using code coverage to track and report interesting test cases. Combining these two techniques with a bit of randomness, and running tests thousands of times every second has proven to be an incredibly effective automated bug finding technique. I was first introduced to fuzzing a couple years ago while working on the Clusterfuzz team at Google, where I built Clusterfuzz Tools v1 ( https://ift.tt/2jAJEvW ). I later built Maxfuzz ( https://ift.tt/2IG5rDY ), a set of tools that makes it easier to fuzz code in Docker containers, while on the Coinbase security team. As we learned more about fuzzing, we found ourselves wondering why very few teams outside of massive companies like Microsoft and Google were actively fuzzing their code - especially given the results (teams at Google that use fuzzing report that it finds 80% of their bugs, with the other 20% uncovered by normal tests, or in production). It turns out that many teams don’t want to invest the time and money needed to set up automated fuzzing infrastructure, and using fuzzing tools in an ad-hoc way on your own computer isn’t nearly as effective as continuously fuzzing your code on multiple dedicated CPUs. That’s where Fuzzbuzz comes in! We’ve built a platform that integrates with your existing GitHub workflow, and provide an open API for integrations with CI tools like Jenkins and TravisCI, so the latest version of your code is always being fuzzed. We manage the infrastructure, so you can fuzz your code on any number of CPUs with a single click. When bugs are found, we’ll notify you through Slack and create Jira tickets or GitHub Issues for you. We also solve many of the issues that crop up when fuzzing, such as bug deduplication, and elimination of false positives. Fuzzbuzz currently supports C, C++, Go and Python, with more languages like Java and Javascript on the way. Anyone can sign up for Fuzzbuzz and fuzz their code on 1 dedicated CPU, for free. We’ve noticed that the HN community has been increasingly interested in fuzzing, and we’re really looking forward to hearing your feedback! The entire purpose of Fuzzbuzz is to make fuzzing as easy as possible, so all criticism is welcome.
New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: How to be productive with big existing code base
Ask HN: How to be productive with big existing code base
134 by maheshs | 103 comments on Hacker News.
I have just started working with one of the client who have existing nodeJS code which they build in last 3 years. Is there any guiding principle which is beneficial while working with existing code base?
134 by maheshs | 103 comments on Hacker News.
I have just started working with one of the client who have existing nodeJS code which they build in last 3 years. Is there any guiding principle which is beneficial while working with existing code base?
The Enduring Appeal of Cancer Lit
IN 1964, when John Wayne referred to his lung cancer diagnosis, he called the disease the Big C. More than 20 years later, when Gilda Radner faced a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, she wrote in her memoir that no one wanted to use the word cancer, even as she was scheduled for surgery to remove it.
Over the last several decades, however, attitudes toward and treatment of cancer have changed. Survival rates for several types of cancer have improved dramatically. As I wrote in my own book Tumor, “Millions of people are living with or beyond cancer, carrying the diagnosis, sometimes carrying the disease, with them the rest of their lives.” In fact, there were an estimated 15.5 million cancer survivors living in the United States in 2016, according to the National Cancer Institute. A patient’s rights to privacy, information, and decision-making have expanded, as well. So patients and their families are more involved in the course of an illness. In addition, social media has blurred the boundary between private and public lives, so health information and illness anecdotes are being shared more openly.
One result of all this change seems to be more books about personal experiences with cancer — and readers are seeking out these cancer stories. In addition to best-selling cancer memoirs by patients — When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi in 2016, The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs last year, and the forthcoming The Unwinding of the Miracle by Julie Yip-Williams — readers are also immersing themselves in the heartrending stories of cancer from the perspectives of loved ones and caregivers. The most popular of these memoirs is likely Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed, who hiked hundreds of miles through her grief after her mother’s death from cancer. In Reading and Writing Cancer: How Words Heal, Susan Gubar notes, “[W]e reside in the midst of the development of the cancer canon.”
Already this year, readers have two memoirs by women whose mother is diagnosed with cancer: All the Wild Hungers by Karen Babine and Joy Enough by Sarah McColl. McColl opens her memoir with a simple declaration and question: “I loved my mother, and she died. Is that a story?” That’s a good question. I could rattle off the titles of a half-dozen cancer memoirs in which that’s the basic premise. Do we really need another version of this my-mother-has-cancer tale that I, too, have lived? Yes, because experiences with cancer and our losses are varied, as are our perspectives. The cancer canon has an expansive landscape to map.
Babine’s mother is diagnosed with a rare type of cancer diagnosed in only about 350 people a year in the United States, almost all of whom are children under the age of 10. I know of only one other memoir about rhabdomyosarcoma, The Girl with Nine Wigs by Sophie Van Der Stap, and the one person I know who had this cancer was four years old at diagnosis. Babine’s mother is 65, so her oncology team has to adapt treatment for a grandmother. Surgery comes nine days after diagnosis, and then Babine’s mother is deemed cancer-free. Though the tumor has been removed, Babine calls this terminology “a false sense of security.” Chemotherapy follows surgery, and the family begins living treatment to treatment and scan to scan. As many families know, there’s never a way to go back to the way things were before cancer. Even toward the end of All the Wild Hungers, Babine writes, “My mother has no detectable cancer, but we still worry about those cancer seeds, waiting in the stillness to replant themselves.”
McColl’s mother is diagnosed with a cancer recurrence: “This cancer was not excisable; it was embedded in her bones, had burrowed its way into the marrow, nested in her soft organs.” There’s no possibility of becoming cancer-free for Allison, and the decline that’s already underway changes the way the author sees her own life. “When my mother was sick,” McColl writes, “I began to realize the future would never arrive. […] We were always only ever here.” For many of us who’ve lived scan to scan with our mothers, McColl captures not only the distortion of time that cancer can produce but also the desire for the terminal future to be staved off indefinitely. Babine’s waiting in the stillness is also McColl’s here to which she must cling.
What I appreciate most about both these memoirs is the ways they explore one of the most devastating aspects of cancer: cachexia, or wasting. While not all cancer patients lose the desire or ability to eat and not all cancer patients lose weight and muscle mass, wasting is not unusual. If only I could get her to eat something, I thought numerous times when my mother was sick with pancreatic cancer. How happy I was when she suddenly had a taste for a fried egg, and then asked for another the next day. But there are no effective therapies to combat cancer-driven wasting; not even improved nutrition halts it. The National Cancer Institute calls it “metabolic mutiny.”
McColl notes that her mother, a former rower with dense back muscles, lost 22 pounds and aged 20 years in six months. “Now, her body was a stranger’s. Unable to stand upright, she curled over a walker.” The oncologist had advised McColl’s mother to try not to lose more weight. “Here’s what I heard: If she eats, she’ll live,” McColl writes. As for many families doing their best to care for the patient, “Not dying seemed like a matter of meals.”
McColl was the founding editor of Yahoo Food, and there’s a lot of food in this short book. Importantly, whatever McColl’s mother has a taste for becomes a morsel of hope for survival. Peanut butter was off the grocery list; fish, steak, and fried chicken remained appealing. McColl snuck extra butter and oil — calories — into various meals. When her mother asked for second helpings, McColl went to bed “fist-pumping in triumph.” But later, the author notices that her mother, who always said that the skin of a baked potato contained the vitamins, had left hers uneaten.
Babine’s memoir is even more overtly about food, cooking, shared meals, and her desire to nourish her mother. Early on, we meet Agnes, the “orange Le Creuset cast-iron skillet, size 23” on a holiday “before I lost myself in the food metaphors of cancer.” Penelope Pumpkin is a two-quart Le Creuset, and Minnie is a three-quart Descoware. For Babine, cooking fills “the need to do something.” Stirring cake batter, simmering broth, and chopping food into bits turns frustration “into something wonderful and useful.” She is cooking against cancer.
When all her mother wants is comfort food, Babine says, “I will feed her whatever she feels she can eat.” Of roasted russet potatoes on Saint Patrick’s Day, Babine writes, “You could make a meal out of this, you think as you tuck in, thinking also about the rare strength your mother has to sit at the table tonight. She has not been to the table in days.” Babine cannot blame her mother for wanting carbohydrates instead of protein, fiber, and vitamins. Despite an array of pots, pans, and culinary expertise, Babine comes to unsettling terms with the wasting of her mother’s body: “[M]ind over matter was a terrible lie. […] She couldn’t force herself to eat.”
In addition to their honesty about wasting, another strength of these two books is their emotional range. While both authors explore the deep love they have for their mothers (and that their mothers have for them), they also deftly discuss frustration. Babine’s anger is the color of her first cast-iron skillet: “I am so angry in these days, my world a flare of bright orange. Anger is a secondary emotion, they say, a reaction to fear or vulnerability or frustration or injustice, an active reaction, rather than passive, and I walk the halls of the house, my belly simmering with something less than rage.” Babine exudes a passion that is inseparable from action, an inability to make sense of the conundrums of cancer, and, in this instance, a long sentence that can barely contain all her emotion. She’s angry because she can’t reconcile the urgency of a debilitating six months of chemotherapy with the delays in chemo treatment that all-too-common low blood counts necessitate. She’s angry because her mother’s oncologist has poor bedside manner and the nurses are patronizing, though her parents don’t see these interactions the same way. She wants to trust the experts — her sister is a nurse — and appreciate her mother’s acceptance of these contradictions, but Babine admits, “I don’t. I really don’t.”
McColl, too, writes of her frustration: “My rage was stealth. Its arrival never surprised me since I could feel it there, quiet but ever present in my body.” For McColl, it is often strangers who set her off. “Women riled me — generations of them who walked together arm in arm through the parking lot of the zoo, who posted photos from a bright hospital room where there were more eager arms than could hold a swaddled new baby.”
In fact, babies become inextricably linked to cancer in both these books. McColl wants to become pregnant because that is “the logical continuation of a circle, the reassurance to both of us that as she died, something of us grew.” She imagines that becoming a mother herself is the closest she can come to understanding her mother from the inside and also to knowing a mother’s love from the other side of the relationship. In All the Wild Hungers, Babine writes of her sister’s pregnancy, comparing the size of a 14-week fetus to a lemon and the size of a newborn to a cabbage, the same size as her mother’s tumor. She notes that both cancer and a fetus are the same thing at the most basic level: cells dividing. In Tumor, I write, “Cells do what they do, and cancerous versions of cells do what they do even better.” Whether cancer accumulating or an embryo forming, cells are geared to reproduce, to grow in or into a body.
Despite grappling with these shared topics of wasting, rage, and babies, All the Wild Hungers and Joy Enough are very different books. All the Wild Hungers is composed, in both senses of the word, calm, and put together with care. The word compose comes from the Latin meaning to place together. Just as Babine meets her mother in the place that is cancer, this book is a place readers meet both women when their being together is both heightened and threatened.
Joy Enough is a divorce memoir even as it is a cancer memoir. Echoing the book’s opening, McColl writes much later, “I loved my husband, and then I didn’t. Is that a story?” The couple argues about how to love and how to live. The demise of McColl’s marriage echoes Meghan O’Rourke’s memoir about her mother’s cancer, in which the man she dates felt as if O’Rourke chose her mother over him. Cancer can wreak havoc on even the strongest relationships. McColl steps out on her marriage in more ways than one and calls her life at that point “cliché-ridden trash.” After her divorce and then her mother’s death, McColl quits her job and enters graduate school, which she admits is also a “two-year grief program.” Her memoir tells a broader, longer story than Babine’s, and a lot of resolution happens in the last 10 pages.
With cancer, grief often begins at diagnosis or during treatment, and that underlies much of the cancer canon. The word grief, like the word gravity, comes from the Latin word for heavy. All the Wild Hungers and Joy Enough are ultimately about the heaviness that cancer introduces into our lives, that reorients us toward potential or inevitable separation. These books, however, are also very much about what holds us to each other.
¤
Anna Leahy is the author of the nonfiction book Tumor and the poetry collection Aperture. See more at www.amleahy.com.
The post The Enduring Appeal of Cancer Lit appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.
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A Justice for All Seasons
Editor’s Note: The Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles currently hosts an exhibit dedicated to the life and work of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to sit on the high court, and for most of her tenure on the bench, its most liberal member (the exhibit runs until March 10). Recently, with the sponsorship of the Beverly Hills Bar Association, LARB contributor Stephen Rohde delivered the following talk about the contribution of Justice Ginsburg to the nation’s highest court.
¤
FAR BEYOND the typical “thank you” one routinely offers one’s hosts, I am especially grateful because this invitation prompted me to dig deep into the extraordinary life and career of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I read a lot about her. I read what she’s written on and off the bench. I have always felt a special bond with her since she taught at Columbia Law School, which I attended, and she was deeply involved with the ACLU, where I have been very active for decades. But in preparing for this talk, I learned so much more about her and expanded my view and appreciation of her as you will hear.
You are all in for a treat when you take the guided tour of this wonderful exhibit, which has been mounted here at the Skirball in recognition of the life and work of Justice Ginsburg. I do encourage you, at the end of the guided tour, to stay behind and spend more time dwelling on the surprising details of the life of this marvelous and influential American.
Fortunately, despite Fox & Friends premature Tribute Image broadcast on January 21, indicating that Justice Ginsburg had passed away, by all reports she is doing well and attending to court business, which anyone who cares about the Court and the Constitution hopes will continue for many, many years.
In just the last two years, two documentaries have been produced (one of which was just nominated for an Academy Award), this exhibit has been opened, the feature motion picture On the Basis of Sex has been released, and it has just been announced that Justice Ginsburg will be immortalized in the new Lego movie, complete with gavel and robe. Unprecedented and well-deserved attention is being paid to a sitting Supreme Court Justice. By and large, the focus has been on the revolutionary role which Ruth Bader Ginsburg has played — first as an advocate and then on the Supreme Court — in developing the solid constitutional foundation protecting the rights of gender equality — a term she is said to prefer over women’s rights.
But today, I want to briefly make the case that it does a disservice to the entire span and depth of Justice Ginsburg’s life and work to limit her legacy to gender equality or to reduce her career to a generic “notorious” liberal Justice. This in no way is intended to detract from her groundbreaking role in the historic revolution in gender equality, nor am I so naïve as to assume that her work in that regard is over, especially as Roe v. Wade and a women’s reproductive freedom are about to be challenged perhaps as never before. Let’s not forget that within a few weeks of the swearing in of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the state legislatures of West Virginia and Alabama passed amendments to their state constitutions that would outlaw abortions if Roe v. Wade is ever overturned. So Justice Ginsburg’s vote and the power of her intellectual force on the Court when it comes to a woman’s right to choose may be more important than ever.
My premise today, is that when one examines more deeply the values which Justice Ginsburg’s developed throughout her life and her entire body of work during her quarter century on the Court, you will agree that by any measure she is one of the greatest jurists in American history.
In addition to her powerful voice on the Court upholding gender equality, including her seminal majority opinion in the 1996 Virginia Military Institute case, she has written landmark majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions upholding the rights of people with mental disabilities to receive treatment in community-based settings, not isolated in an institution; Fourth Amendment rights against illegal searches and seizures requiring the suppression of evidence to prevent the government from profiting from its mistakes; voting rights; intellectual property rights; the right of activists to sue polluters; affirmative action using race-conscious admissions; and the citation of foreign and international law for its non-binding, persuasive force in discovering universal values. A full and complete examination of Justice Ginsburg’s record reveals the extraordinary breadth and depth of her judicial philosophy based on her belief in the dignity and value of every human being.
The origins of that judicial philosophy can be traced to an editorial she wrote at the age of 13 in her elementary school newspaper in Brooklyn, New York, in which she examined the “fine ideals and principles” contained in five great documents to which can be traced “all the benefits to humanity” — namely the Ten Commandments, Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the Declaration of Independence, and the Charter of the United Nations. You can examine this editorial in the exhibit you are about to visit.
Young Ruth Bader wrote:
It is vital that peace be assured, for now we have a weapon that can destroy the world. We children of public school age can do much to aid in the promotion of peace. We must try to train ourselves and those about us to live together with one another as good neighbors for this idea is embodied in the great new Charter of the United Nations. It is the only way to secure the world against future wars and maintain an everlasting peace.
Thirteen years old!
A few years later, her mentor at Cornell University, the eminent constitutional scholar and writer on civil liberties Robert Cushman, first encouraged her to go the law school. In the early 1950s, in the midst of McCarthyism, at first Ruth confessed she “just wanted to get good grades and become successful.” But Professor Cushman supervised her independent studies project and then hired her as his research assistant to document McCarthy’s assault on civil liberties. She recalled two lessons. “One is that we were betraying our most fundamental values, and, two, that legal skills could help make things better, could help to challenge what was going on.”
In 1953, in her senior year at Cornell, Ruth ventured into the realm of published legal argument. Two Cornell law students had written a letter to the editor of the Cornell Daily Sun expressing their support for Attorney General Herbert Brownell’s proposal to enact legislation allowing federal prosecutors to introduce wiretap evidence secured without a warrant in espionage cases.
In her comprehensive letter to the editor — which is also on display here at the Skirball — Ruth had the temerity to not only challenge the law students, but the Attorney General himself. She pointed out that “[w]hen attempts to prevent certain forms of behavior may place individual rights and liberties in peril, the criminal sanction should be saved as a last resort.”
She acknowledged that wiretapping may save government investigators time and effort, but at what cost? She quotes a police officer in India who once said: “It is far pleasanter to sit comfortably in the shade rubbing red pepper into a poor devil’s eyes than to go out in the sun hunting for evidence.”
She argued that “restraints on individual rights in the field of individual privacy, morality, and conscience can be a cure worse than the disease.” After making a series of arguments, she concluded with a measured clarity that would mark all her future writing in legal briefs and Supreme Court opinions: “The general good Mr. Brownell’s proposal is expected to accomplish seems to me to be outweighed by the general harm it may well do.”
In these early writings, one of her biographers has observed we see “certain hallmarks of her legal writing and thought” which would emerge in her legal arguments and judicial opinions: “[H]er care in choosing words, her wariness of politically motivated prosecution, her concern that shortcuts in the name of efficiency often reduce effectiveness in the long run, and her unswerving commitment to individual rights and the presumption of innocence.”
In February 2017, shortly after the inauguration of President Trump, Justice Ginsburg was asked in an interview, what she thought makes America great. Here is her answer: “The idea of our nation being receptive to all people, welcoming to all people.”
And that’s how she views the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the broad promises and principles set down in those founding documents. Justice Ginsburg has said that the Constitution is not “a document essentially frozen in time as of the date of its ratification.” Parting company with her good friend, the late Justice Antonin Scalia (with whom she shared a love of opera, but seemingly little else when it came to the law), Justice Ginsburg said: “I am not a partisan of that view.” US jurists, she said, “honor the Framers’ intent to ‘create a more perfect Union,’” and she quoted approvingly what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in an opinion in 1920:
When we are dealing with words […] [in] the Constitution of the United States, we must realize that they have called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. […] The case before us must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago.
Let me conclude by devoting a few minutes to the role in which Justice Ginsburg has increasingly found herself since the ascendency of the conservative majority on the Court, under Chief Justices William Rehnquist and John Roberts. During her 12 terms on the Rehnquist Court from 1993 to 2005, she wrote only seven dissents. But that has changed markedly during the Roberts Court.
Commenting on the second term of the Roberts Court, when Justice Ginsburg took the unusual step of reading aloud not one but two bench dissents, Linda Greenhouse, the veteran New York Times Supreme Court reporter, wrote in a front-page story that the current term will be remembered “as the time when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg found her voice, and used it.” By 2014, she had delivered a whopping 12 bench dissents, becoming the Roberts Court’s most frequent bench dissenter. This included a record four such dissents in the 2012–’13 term alone — more than any other Justice in a single term in almost 30 years.
Justice Ginsburg has written and spoken publicly about the important role dissenting opinions play on the Court. She believes an impressive dissent can lead the author of the majority opinion “to refine and clarify her initial circulation.” On occasion, “a dissent will be so persuasive that it attracts the votes necessary to become the opinion of the Court.”
Primarily, in writing her powerful and sometimes blistering dissents, Justice Ginsburg aligns herself with the views of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who in 1936 wrote that a “dissent in a court of last resort is an appeal […] to the intelligence of a future day, when a later decision may possibly correct the error into which the dissenting judge believes the court to have been betrayed.”
In 2000, in the highly controversial 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore, which installed George W. Bush as president, the majority held that there was no way to count all the votes in Florida within the timeline set forth in the federal code, despite the fact that the Court itself had halted all recounts three days prior to issuing its ruling, basically letting the clock run out before deciding it was too late. After describing the facts in detail, Justice Ginsburg wrote that “[i]n sum, the Court’s conclusion that a constitutionally adequate recount is impractical is a prophecy that the Court’s own judgment will not allow to be tested. Such an untested prophecy should not decide the Presidency of the United States.” And instead of the traditional closing, “I respectfully dissent,” Justice Ginsburg allowed her vehemence to show through. She simply wrote, “I dissent.”
In 2013, President Bush having by then appointed John Roberts as Chief Justice, the Court confronted the persistent issue of racially discriminatory voting regulations adopted by states with a history of discrimination in the case of Shelby County v. Holder. In another narrowly decided 5-4 ruling, the conservative majority held Section 4 of the historic Voting Rights Act (VRA) unconstitutional. Justice Ginsburg issued a stern dissent:
The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making. Quite the opposite. Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA. […] Congress approached the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA with great care and seriousness. The same cannot be said of the Court’s opinion today. The Court makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled. Instead, it relies on increases in voter registration and turnout as if that were the whole story. […] In my judgment, the Court errs egregiously by overriding Congress’s decision.
And one final example of a searing dissent written by Justice Ginsburg came in July 2014 in the case of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores. In yet another 5-4 decision, the conservative majority exempted a nationwide arts and crafts company named Hobby Lobby from providing full health insurance benefits, including contraception, to its female employees in light of the owner’s “sincerely held” religious beliefs against contraception.
Once again, Justice Ginsburg did not hold back. In her fierce and caustic dissent, she wrote that the
exemption sought by Hobby Lobby […] would […] deny legions of women who do not hold their employers’ beliefs access to contraceptive coverage that the ACA would otherwise secure. […] Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not so of for-profit corporations. Workers who sustain the operations of those corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community. […] Would the exemption […] extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah’s Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and vaccinations (Christian Scientists, among others)? […] Not much help there for the lower courts bound by today’s decision. […] Approving some religious claims while deeming others unworthy of accommodation could be ‘perceived as favoring one religion over another,’ the very ‘risk the Establishment Clause was designed to preclude.’ […] The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.
These short excerpts do not do justice to the full scope of Justice Ginsburg’s dissents, which are all scrupulously written with detailed citations to the factual record and painstaking analysis of the law and the Constitution. Her dissents genuinely appeal “to the intelligence of a future day, when a later decision may possibly correct the error into which” she believes “the court to have been betrayed.”
I hope I have said enough in the limited time we have had together to sketch out the broad sweep of Justice Ginsburg’s judicial philosophy based, in her own words, on “the idea of our nation being receptive to all people, welcoming to all people.” Built on her towering achievements in the field of gender equality and expanded across that entire spectrum of constitutional rights and liberties, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is truly a Justice for All Seasons.
¤
Stephen Rohde is a constitutional lawyer, lecturer, writer, and political activist.
The post A Justice for All Seasons appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.
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The Mexican Phoenix Rises: On “Sor Juana: Or, the Persistence of Pop”
WALKING AMONG the merchant stalls of St. Paul’s courtyard in 1650, you might chance upon something heretofore unseen in the world of letters: American poetry. Between smudged political broadsheets and yellowing quartos, a discerning reader might come across Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. From the cold black rock shoals of Ipswich and the snow-blanketed fields of Cambridge came a new poetry, where Bradstreet provided a lyrical declaration of independence, her personified character of New England chastising her mother whose “fearful sins, great cause there’s to lament.” Yet a year after Bradstreet’s volume was published, another woman who’d have the sobriquet “Tenth Muse” would be born in the former Aztec city of Tenochtitlán, long since reconfigured as the capital of the Habsburg Empire in the New World. While Bradstreet figures prominently in the creation myth of American letters, the Anglophone world does a disservice to that other poet born in Mexico, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the “illegitimate” daughter of a Spanish father and a Criollo mother. She would be known not just as the “Tenth Muse,” but also as the “Mexican Phoenix,” though she is most referred to by the name she took upon entering the sisterhood of Discalced Carmelite Nuns (later joining the Hieronymites).
That Bradstreet figures in our literary history as much as she does makes sense. Her conceits are metaphysically sophisticated, and Bradstreet’s plain-style lyricism prefigures the Augustan poetry of a century hence. If anything, an argument could be proffered that the wife of the sometimes-governor of Massachusetts Simon Bradstreet remains underappreciated still. However, the Genesis story that sees her as a poetic Eve inaugurating a felix culpa in the Eden of colonial Massachusetts is in large part due to the strange negotiations and ambiguities that have permeated the study of early American literature. When speaking of “Early American literature,” one must always be cognizant of how unclear the very words “early,” “American,” and “literature” can be.
A reader in London might have been surprised at this volume of verse from the colonies, with Bradstreet elevated alongside Calliope and Euterpe in the parliament of muses for the act of simply writing American poetry, but somebody in Barcelona or Madrid wouldn’t have had reason to be shocked. By the year that Bradstreet had written the first “American poetry,” the Spanish equivalent of our imagined 17th-century reader would already have had veritable libraries of American literature to contemplate. By 1650, New Spain had produced the picaresque novels of Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, the drama of Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, the studious histories of Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, the mestizo writing of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and Bernardo de Balbuena’s singing of “the famous Mexico,” for whom “there are not as many stars / in the sky, as flowers in her garland.” But New England had only Bradstreet.
When Massachusetts and Virginia were but a dozen or so small villages clinging to the Eastern Seaboard, the massive wooded continent stretching unfathomably behind them to the west, New Spain was already a civilization a century and a half old. Any accounting of early American literature does a disservice to the achievements of New Spain when with monolinguist obstinacy we perpetuate the fiction that American poetry is only first birthed by Bradstreet. The year that The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America was published, the population of Boston was roughly 2,000; by comparison, Mexico City’s numbers were approaching 350,000. By the time Bradstreet was writing, the muse had been springing up for 15 decades in warmer climates some 3,000 miles south.
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Sor Juana would distinguish herself as an exemplary Neoplatonist philosopher, nascent observational scientist, protofeminist, and, most of all, a baroque poet of profound complexity. According to her biographer Octavio Paz in his Sor Juana: Or, the Traps of Faith, she produced verse that would be unrivaled in the Western hemisphere until Dickinson and Whitman. Sor Juana, the poet who could write a dream vision about the very origins of dreams; Sor Juana, the nun who could cast aspersions on the entire scholastic edifice of Catholicism by writing to her bishop: “[W]hat wisdom may be ours if not the philosophies of the kitchen? […] Had Aristotle prepared victuals, he would have written more.”
Now as part of the University of Arizona Latinx Pop Culture series, Hispanist Ilan Stavans presents his short, impressionistic, individual meditation on the nun’s afterlives in Sor Juana: Or, the Persistence of Pop. Stavans’s brief volume is a mélange of different genres, drawing from academic criticism, chapbooks, graphic novels, and gallery compendium, so as to examine the contested poet who endures as “an archetype of the collective Mexican soul,” who “along with Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and Evita Peron […] is ubiquitous” in Latinx culture, and whose visage has graced the 1,000-peso note.
Critics from Stavans to Paz have claimed that Sor Juana is the catalyst that explains the “metamorphosis of the poetry of New Spain into the poetry of Mexico,” and this may well be true, but hers is also a verse which draws from esoteric currents of occult thought, from the Neoplatonism of the Renaissance Jesuit Athanasius Kircher to Aztec cosmology, and possibly Kabbalah. Sor Juana may be a “key intellectual figure in the journey of Latin America toward modernity,” but she is not an easy poet. A poetry of dreams and illusion, where the easiest interpretive cipher might as well be in Sor Juana’s own command to “stay, shadow of my elusive prize / image of enchantment I most want, / fair illusion for whom I joyfully die, / sweet fiction for whom I painfully live.”
Building upon the introduction he penned for the Penguin Classics Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Poems, Protest, and a Dream, edited by Margaret Sayers Peden, Stavans introduces readers to a woman who, in the crucible of Spanish monastic life, forged a poetic idiom for writing verse between the identities of Europe and America. Critics of Bradstreet, such as the poet Adrienne Rich, have noted that there isn’t much that is American about the Puritan writer (though I’ve contested that position elsewhere). No such similar claim could be made about Sor Juana, who dramatized the syncretism of Catholic and Aztec culture, and who when she was young wrote both Latin sonnets in praise of the Eucharist and poems in the indigenous Nahuatl language. The result is not just some of the most stunning literature produced in New Spain, but some of the most profound writing of the Spanish Renaissance.
English literature has nothing similar, for despite the inclusion of Bradstreet in anthologies of 17th-century English poetry, Sor Juana’s poetry would be as if John Milton was writing in Boston rather than London. The nun may be a poet of the colonial periphery, but she fully inhabited Spanish in a manner that no equivalent in the English colonies did. From Sor Juana’s pen came comedies and dramas, which among scores of letters, treatises, plays, and poems include the 1689 drama Loa to Divine Narcissus, an allegory about Mexico’s founding in which “the main characters are Occident, personified by a stately Indian wearing a crown, and America, a noble Indian woman,” as Stavans explains; Response to Sor Filotea, which Peden describes as “the first statement in our hemisphere to argue a woman’s right to study and teach and learn”; and “Primero sueño,” or “First Dream,” a mystical epic from 1692, which Sor Juana called but “a little trifle.” “First Dream” begins: “Pyramidal, funest, the earth / born shade to Heaven went forth, / of vain obelisks the aspiring point, / to scale the stars intent.” There’s something inscrutable about the poem, with its Egyptian architecture and its singularities; something personal and beautiful, too. Nothing quite like this exists in canonical English literature until the modernist avant-garde.
The poem is written as a dream vision, connecting Sor Juana to William Langland, John Bunyan, Dante, and so on. But “First Dream” has a distinction, as Paz notes: “[I]n Sor Juana’s dream there is […] no Virgil or Beatrice […] Thus, Sor Juana’s poem continues the ancient tradition of the soul’s voyage during a dream but at the same time, on an essential point, breaks with it.” Something idiosyncratic in Sor Juana’s poem, whereby the verse is not just representational, but actually “a dream about dreaming […] a dream about the possibilities of poetry,” as Stavans writes. Where Dante described his voyage through the afterlife in a symbolically comprehensible way, “First Dream” is conveyed as an actual dream — the sort of strange dream where you might forget who you are. The result bears more resemblance to surrealism than anything being produced at the same time in New England.
Sor Juana’s aesthetics are baroque, that hodgepodge maximalism which emerged from the contact zones of Counter-Reformation and colonialism. She might share with John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and especially George Herbert and Henry Vaughan an infatuation with “neologisms and other precious words” meant to point out language’s artificiality, as well as an obsession with “conceits and counterfeits, [with] theatricality and obsessive sophistication,” and with verbal puns that Stavans explains are “designed to call attention to the fragile line between reality and fantasy, between beauty and ugliness, and […] between faith and reason.” But ultimately nothing in English poetry, not even that of the metaphysical poets, quite compares to Sor Juana, for whom “appearances are deceitful and light and shadow are versions of each other,” as Stavans explains.
The metaphysical conceits of Donne or Herbert are solvable, ingenious mechanisms where the image of a compass or a flea is used to convey an unexpected message, but a message that is fundamentally clear. Her complexity isn’t even evocative of English’s only true baroque poet, the Catholic convert Richard Crashaw, perhaps nearing its most equal apogee with the nonconformist verse of Thomas Traherne. “First Dream,” by comparison to the metaphysical poets, describes:
[T]he Orb of that Goddess
who three times beautiful
with three lovely faces being sustains,
becoming only owner
of the air that streams from her
in the dense breath she exhales.
Donne’s poetry begs for interpretation, but Sor Juana’s for experience, or as the nun herself wrote in a letter: “[S]alvation lies more in the desiring than in the knowing.” In Sor Juana’s verse, the poem is the experience itself.
To read Sor Juana’s poetic idiom only through the lens of the baroque would be too limiting. Paz argues that “we must underscore Sor Juana’s absolute originality; nowhere in all of Spanish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is there anything like First Dream.” This, both Stavans and Paz would argue, is because Sor Juana is Mexican, an inheritor of a mestiza culture. “First Dream” could only be produced in a culture as thoroughly hybridized as colonial New Spain, the colonial capital of Mexico City built upon the very Aztec ruins of Tenochtitlán, the cathedral to the Virgin atop the Templo Mayor, Guadalupe contending with Ometecuhtli and OmecÃhuatl, the very streets haunted with the barely purged presence of their indigenous origins.
If the baroque is credibly a Catholic aesthetic born from the hybridized contact points between the European and the indigenous, then the differences in colonization between the English and the Spanish go a long way to explaining why no equivalent aesthetic developed in New England. When conquistadors traipsed across the deserts of New Spain, they largely came as single men; the religious dissenters of New England, rather, brought their families. The result of the former was the development of an actual mestiza culture of which there is no equivalent in the north. New Spain’s literary culture didn’t just have a century’s head start and a massive population, it also had a fusion of Aztec and Spanish culture. Sor Juana is the embodiment of that hybridization, and any understanding of her profound theological vision has to be read through the ruptures and dislocations of colonialism, and of existing between cultures.
The baroque presents a world aglow, a reality illuminated, where Sor Juana describes “the golden Sunlight [… sharing] with all things visible their hues, / and with this restoration makes / the exterior senses operate / more certainly, as daylight breaks / on the illumined World.” The baroque is the picture of the illumined World, beauty and ugliness alike pressed into a poetics saturated with meaning, to the point of grotesquerie. Stavans is correct that this is an aesthetic that must by necessity be formed between cultures, for it includes everything within its purview, contradictions and all, overdetermined with sheer abundance. “First Dream” is the very culmination of the baroque, as well as a poem which transcends it, because nascent within her writings is a rhetoric of individuality, interiority, and subjectivity that defined the century that followed hers.
Paz explains that in “First Dream” “the protagonist has no name, age, or gender: it is simply the human soul. […] Personality and individuality have been carefully excluded.” This is a mystical perspective — no doubt. But it also is one that claims an equality of experience. The origins of such a perspective come from Sor Juana’s being swaddled between Spain and Mexico, Europe and America. Perhaps between Christian and Jewish as well, as there is credible evidence that she (like a number of Hispanic Americans) comes from a converso background. Much of theological modernity derives from the stripped-down identity conversos had foisted upon them, which Sor Juana so nobly explores in “First Dream.” The Israeli philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel describes how, for conversos, “authentic religion had been deinstitutionalized and privatized,” so that now faith depended on the “inner heart as its almost sole support.”
For Yovel, our conception of the private individual is not born from Protestantism, but from the experience of converted Jews living by necessity between Christianity and Judaism. If this is true of Sor Juana, then her writings must be grouped alongside her contemporary, the Dutch philosopher Baruch de Spinoza, for both generated out of their converso heritage a new theological perspective that was the spiritual precursor for modernity. This religious perspective is the origin of her celebrated protofeminism. Despite the seeming anachronism of that term, when applied to Sor Juana’s thought it is appropriate, gesturing toward the eventual egalitarian rhetoric that drove future emancipatory movements. Sor Juana’s is a mystical democracy, and all the more radical because of it. The bishops of New Spain tried to silence Sor Juana’s voice, but her message has resonated from the pueblos and cathedrals of colonial Mexico, a message born from the universal predicament of exile, and thus the inheritance of all women and men.
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Not Just Russians, Not Just Jews: On New Works by Irina Reyn, Boris Fishman, and David Bezmozgis
WHILE THE MAJORITY of emigrants from the former Soviet Union are Jewish, they are frequently referred to as “Russians” in their adoptive countries. This is inaccurate, but it stands to reason. First, these ex-Soviet Jews are virtually all Russian speakers. And second, as products of an antireligious (officially) and antisemitic (in practice) society, they are mostly non-observant, and so they fail to fit neatly into non-Soviet notions of Jewishness. The growing bookshelf of stories, novels, and memoirs by writers who were born in the USSR and moved to North America centers the experience of ex-Soviet Jews as the principal group among Russian-speaking immigrants and a misunderstood group among American Jews.
But Russian-speaking Jews are not the only “Russians” among the immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Several new books published this winter — Irina Reyn’s novel Mother Country, Boris Fishman’s memoir Savage Feast, and David Bezmozgis’s short story collection Immigrant City — make a significant effort to center non-Jewish immigrants as well as characters, both Jewish and not, who remained in their home countries, including Ukraine, Latvia, Russia, and Belarus. Nearly two decades since Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook first signaled the arrival of ex-Soviet Jews in contemporary American fiction, today’s immigrant literature reflects a degree of settledness in the new geography. The time has come to measure the experience of typical American “Russians” against the stories of those whose migration to the West did not follow a path reserved specifically for Jews, or who never relocated in the first place.
Reyn’s Mother Country and Fishman’s Savage Feast focus on non-Jewish characters who maintain social allegiances and family obligations across two continents. Reyn’s novel presents a female migrant to the United States who leaves behind her daughter in post-Soviet Ukraine and finds employment in care work for Russian Jews. Fishman’s memoir recounts his family’s emigration from Minsk and uses recipes as windows onto geographical displacement, attempts at cultural assimilation, and relationships between family members, friends, and lovers. Even though the memoir focuses on Fishman’s evolving relationship to food and cooking, one of its stars is his grandfather’s Ukrainian domestic worker, a talented cook. Both books are largely set in Brooklyn, showing life in the Russian-speaking enclaves whose residents rarely get to visit Manhattan.
This is a setting that Reyn and Fishman have already described in vivid detail in their debut novels, What Happened to Anna K. and A Replacement Life. Reyn and Fishman are often grouped into an unofficial cohort of writers who consistently return to the theme of post-Soviet Jewish identity, including Shteyngart, Lara Vapnyar, Anya Ulinich, Sana Krasikov, and Ellen Litman. All of these writers have now gone beyond this theme to explore different historical eras, social contexts, and non-Jewish identities. They must now grapple with the fact that they are no longer dealing with “Russian” Jewish immigrant identities as a novelty subject. By foregrounding non-Jewish Ukrainian female home care workers, Reyn’s and Fishman’s new books engage with gendered migrant labor, offering nuanced portrayals of some of the dynamics between foreigners who share a Soviet past but belong to different cultures, waves, and types of migration. For political and economic reasons, Ukraine has been a reliable provider of migrant laborers, nicknamed zarobitchane, to Russia, Europe, and the United States. Not surprisingly, Ukrainian women primarily provide domestic services and it is the nature of this care work that Fishman and Reyn explore in their texts.
Psychological, sociopolitical, cultural, and economic aspects of gendered care are central to Mother Country. Nadia, the protagonist, is a fiftysomething single mother who supports a daughter living with diabetes in Rubizhne, a city in Eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk region. In one of her jobs, she is a Russian-speaking nanny to the young daughter of a Russian-Jewish woman named Regina. Regina, now an aspiring member of the creative class, herself came to the United States at a young age. Her identity as a one-time Russian-Jewish immigrant hinges on her daughter’s speaking Russian, but that is a skill neither she nor her American-born husband can nurture without Nadia’s services. And so Nadia becomes more than a nanny — she becomes a carrier of culture and a vital source of emotional support. After several years, Regina and Nadia find themselves “enmeshed together in a tight cocoon of love and fear and language confusion.”
Nadia’s proxy mothering is further complicated by the uncertainty of her own daughter’s immigration status. Years pass as Nadia takes care of another woman’s daughter, witnessing her milestones. In the meantime, her own child, Larissa, grows more resentful toward a mother who she feels has abandoned her. Larissa’s vulnerability as a person with diabetes in a country where patients have to pay cash for an ambulance and bring their own alcohol and gauze to the hospital breaks Nadia’s heart. She comes to see herself as a failed mother. The outbreak of war in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, and specifically the capture of Rubizhne by pro-Russia militants, further plunges Nadia into despondency, inspiring her to entertain desperate schemes to get her daughter out.
Stymied by her limited ability to speak English and to navigate American institutions, Nadia reaches out to Regina for help. But the now-established immigrant old-timer with solid language skills brushes her off. This lays bare the fundamental asymmetry of their relationship: Regina relies on Nadia’s linguistic skills but refuses to reciprocate. Even though both women find themselves flailing at motherhood, there is no mutual recognition. Regina cannot acknowledge her privileged position and Nadia cannot look past her envy of that privilege. Aside from her passing as an American, Regina’s biggest advantage is her ability to stay rooted, to have a geographical and national home for herself and her daughter. In contrast, Nadia is spread thin between her life in Brooklyn and Skype calls and texts, mostly unanswered, as well as news stories from war-torn Ukraine.
Reyn’s dramatization of this asymmetrical relationship between a nearly assimilated Russian-Jewish employer, dwelling in what the novel calls “la-la Brooklyn,” and a non-Jewish Ukrainian migrant worker in “deep Brooklyn,” an hour away by train, adds complexity to the landscape of post-Soviet immigrant literature. Contemporary Russian-American writing has traditionally highlighted the culture clash between Soviet emigrants and American Jews on the grounds of religion, politics, and class. By bringing out the subgroup dynamics of America’s Russian-speaking immigrants, Reyn subverts the tendency to present the community as monolithically “Russian.”
Memories of Soviet-era antisemitism and disagreements about the fate of Ukraine divide the residents of Russian-speaking enclaves. Readers glimpse this when Nadia returns to Brighton Beach, where she also takes care of an elderly Russian-Jewish immigrant dying from cancer, a duty she shares with another woman, a Ukrainian nationalist who demands that Nadia not speak Russian. Nadia cannot avoid being questioned about her political allegiances even though all she wants is to be apolitical, to find refuge with her daughter in America. Tragically, that humble goal exposes her to indignity and coercion. The relationship between Nadia and the Russian-Jewish man in her care allows Reyn to draw attention to domestic workers’ vulnerability to sexual exploitation, particularly if they lack citizenship.
Reyn captures another painful aspect of the migrant experience: being an obvious outsider and a target for manipulation doesn’t prevent one from also being invisible. Age, immigration status, and lack of cultural competence make Nadia easy to ignore. American men, women, and children often overlook her, unable to imagine her as a figure of authority — even Regina’s daughter views Nadia as someone who “could easily be erased.” Most fellow Russian-speaking immigrants cannot entertain the idea of her as a romantic partner. Even her Ukrainian daughter, shunning cultural obligations to obey parents, communicates with Nadia only on her own terms. Reyn fights against this invisibility of the migrant worker by embracing her heroine’s complexity: the traumas of her past, her revenge fantasies, her anthropological observations about Americans, Russian Jews like Regina, and Brooklyn’s gentrification. Nadia is also compelling because she is flawed. Though she resents Regina for ignoring her, she also infantilizes her, discounting her approach to parenting, questioning her cultural authenticity, and regarding her with pity rather than empathy. Indeed, Nadia and Regina have much in common. Reyn lets readers glimpse the potential for empathy and solidarity between two women who, for different reasons, cannot realize that potential.
While Reyn’s novel focuses on mother-daughter relationships, Fishman’s memoir is, in part, about the unlikely friendship between the author’s grandfather and Oksana, the Ukrainian woman assigned to his home through Medicare. Fictional versions of these characters appeared in Fishman’s A Replacement Life. The memoir explores in greater depth the relationship between the elderly ex-Soviet Jew and the non-Jewish woman who transforms his household. It also shows Oksana’s impact on the author, who wrestles with his identity as a one-time child immigrant simultaneously bound to and alienated from differing — at times conflicting — categories: Soviet, Belarusian, Russian, Jewish, and American.
Fishman’s entire immediate family seems to be undergoing an identity crisis that filters into their one-on-one interactions. “Sausage immigrants,” the standard nickname associated with Russian-speaking Jews for their desire to escape Soviet food lines and tendency to eat pork, is a particularly apt descriptor for the Fishman family’s amusingly impressive history of “black market” access to all manner of rare foodstuffs in the Soviet Union. But what they really hunger for is a sense of belonging in their adopted country. Though Oksana cannot satiate this hunger — nor is it in her job description to do so — she helps to bring the family together around dishes that remind them of their life in the USSR, a country that no longer exists.
Without Oksana’s cooking, Fishman’s connection with the old country frays at the edges, and, as the book progresses, so does his connection with his family. Boasting recipes for dishes that Fishman’s late grandmother and other relatives used to cook, the book gradually becomes a collection of Oksana’s kitchen wisdom. Fishman writes that Oksana “even make[s] potato latkes the way my grandmother made them.” The recipes that Fishman includes in his book refer to Oksana’s practice of cooking this or that dish as a kind of imprimatur, a stamp of authenticity without which the instructional content of the self-described “memoir with recipes” would scarcely work. Yet this stamp of authenticity relies on Fishman’s adept translations into the English of his intended readers, with an occasional recommendation of a substitutable ingredient for some of the more traditional and, occasionally, titular foodstuffs Oksana uses: “If rabbit is scarce where you are,” reads one note on Oksana’s recipe for sour cream-braised rabbit, “substitute chicken parts.”
Fishman skillfully avoids portraying Oksana, who has played a critical role in his life, as a matronly, obliging caregiver who exists for the purpose of serving his family. He depicts her with obvious affection and sensitivity, but also with some distance, perhaps as an acknowledgment of his lack of access to the inner life of a female migrant. Still, as readers, we see some of the difficulty of Oksana’s position, which requires juggling commitments in Ukraine and the United States. When depicting his travels to Ukraine together with Oksana, Fishman portrays a slice of the life she maintains in her mother country — her family, community, and apartment — which she has been able to transform thanks to her American wages. The scenes in Ukraine show Oksana as the insider and Fishman as the outsider in the proverbial “old country.” At the same time, this reversal of roles is narratively convenient: portraying Oksana on her home turf rather than in his grandfather’s Brooklyn kitchen increases her symbolic value as a keeper of recipes that can conjure up lost worlds and relationships at the heart of a book intended for American audiences.
Connections, sympathetic and cautious, also feature prominently in David Bezmozgis’s Immigrant City. The collection marks the writer’s first return to the short story form since his debut collection, Natasha (2004). And the protagonists of some of the new stories are, in fact, older versions of the characters we encountered a decade and a half ago. They are no longer the freshly minted immigrants in Toronto. Mark Berman, the child protagonist of many of the stories in Natasha, has a son of his own in “Childhood.” On his way to an appointment with a therapist to assess his son’s growing list of troubling behaviors, Mark looks back on his own boyhood: “Did he have even a single distinct memory of himself at eight? Everything before — what, twelve? — felt like a brown haze punctuated by bright spectra of embarrassment or shame.” These immigrants may have grown older, but they are by no means fully settled or comfortable in their lives. Indeed, the story lines in Immigrant City are perplexingly open-ended.
In the book’s longest story, “A New Gravestone for an Old Grave,” Bezmozgis explicitly compares the lives of these older, still unsettled immigrants against the lives of those people who never left their country of origin. Leon Shulman, who emigrated to Los Angeles from Riga and has retired after losing his eyesight to diabetes, sends his son Victor — a 30-year-old who earns $170,000 a year — on an errand back to Latvia. Leon’s only remaining friend in Riga, Sander, died before he was able to replace Leon’s father’s gravestone at the cemetery, and so Leon asks his son to complete the task. A tourist on his first return trip to the city of his birth, Victor is struck by his inability to notice or feel much besides the perfectly banal: “I was born here, and I’m evaluating the infrastructure.”
The full measure of the distance Victor traveled when he emigrated as a child is made clear when he meets Ilya, Sander’s son. Ilya, who tells Victor that he’d like to visit the United States some day, notes that his wife speaks good English, which she picked up while working for an American software company “owned by Russians from San Francisco, Jews who left here, like you, in the 1970s” and who “returned to take advantage of the smart programmers and the cheap labor.” As the relationship between the two men develops and Ilya attempts to manipulate Victor into a scheme that would allow the Latvian to move to America, it becomes clear to Victor that his father had manipulated, tricked, and pestered Sander into the task of replacing his grandfather’s tombstone. If Reyn’s and Fishman’s new work primarily investigates the unequal relationships between old-time immigrants and newcomers in America, Bezmozgis offers an intriguing study of a persistent imbalance of power between those that have emigrated and those who have stayed behind.
At the heart of all three books is the matter of how Russian-speaking Jews and non-Jews, as well as recent and more settled migrants, relate to each other. In the story “Little Rooster,” Bezmozgis stages an interaction between a non-Jewish woman of Latvian descent and an assimilated Russian-Jewish immigrant regarding his family’s long-lost secret, which she can unlock. When they meet, she confesses, “I came here to repay my family’s debt to your grandfather and to the Jewish people,” referring to Latvians’ collaboration with the Nazis. In Reyn’s novel and Fishman’s memoir, the ghosts of East European antisemitism also haunt relationships forged by Jews and non-Jews who meet “abroad.” Must Jews and non-Jews from the former Soviet Union settle scores via favor or care work? The old question of “what we owe to each other” is still central to the lives of Russian-speaking immigrants. As these new works by Reyn, Fishman, and Bezmozgis testify, the answer has only grown more complicated.
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Maggie Levantovskaya is a writer, editor, and professor based in the Bay Area.
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The Two Scapellatos in “The Made-Up Man”
JOSEPH SCAPELLATO IS an author at war with himself. Sometimes he is an absurdist imitative of master fabulators Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme. Sometimes he is a menacing, melancholy realist grippingly describing turbulent young manhood. Can the two Scapellatos coexist in the same work?
In the course of his debut, the 2017 story collection Big Lonesome, Scapellato the Absurdist evolves into Scapellato the Realist. Early on, the book features contorted, grotesque figures such as a 10-foot cowboy-horse hybrid, a sort of Western centaur, who meets characters who are generic types: “willful farm girl,” “young railroad baron,” “resentful transcendentalist poet.” A “white-hat cowboy” illustrates the shaky nature of heroism. An earthy “cow girl” born of a cow triggers confusion and elation among townsfolk. These are interesting exercises in archetype and imagination.
Then, as the stories progress, we increasingly encounter stretches of realism, although it sometimes remains in service to whimsical conceits. A rattler’s bite disrupts the free and easy hike of two grad students in “Snake Canyon.” In “Dead Dogs,” a forlorn fellow repeatedly brings his absent fiancée’s dog to a bar. Everyone there wants to tell him poignant, weird, or disgusting stories about their deceased pooches, and he buys them drinks in return. The narrator of “Company” reaches out to a disturbed sibling who is quickly unraveling during a walk in the Windy City. We glimpse in these stretches a rich, naturalistic imagination still a bit hesitant to come forward.
In his first novel, The Made-Up Man, Scapellato the Absurdist and Scapellato the Realist have a different relationship: instead of the former handing off to the latter, the Absurdist stalks the Realist throughout. Stanley, Scapellato’s sad, unmoored Chicago protagonist, has an Uncle Lech who is a rich, devious, Polish-born performance artist. As he haunts and harangues Stanley, Lech becomes the manifestation of Scapellato’s unrelenting Absurdist proclivities.
Stanley is a dropout from an archeological-anthropology graduate program who’s working construction jobs off and on. He and his fiancée, a smart, beautiful, winsome actress referred to only as T, are taking a break. It’s clear, though, that for her it’s very likely and sensibly a permanent break from Stanley’s fears of personal and professional commitment.
At loose ends, Stanley accepts a fat check from Lech to apartment-sit a property in Prague. Stanley does so in part because T will be there performing in a play and he vaguely hopes to reach some sort of resolution with her. He knows full well that the assignment is pretext for Lech to screw around with him body, mind, and soul, but he steels himself to ignore his uncle’s provocations.
Easier said than done. Lech is an effective offstage demon. He directs a small cast of roving maniacs for hire with shifting costumes, makeup, and genders to mess with Stanley’s belongings and break into his cyberlife. They storm his memories, regrets, loves, friendships, fears, and dysfunctional family history. They stir up his sense of futility and aimlessness. They scratch awake, with help from his chronic heavy drinking, his slumbering impulses toward anger and violence.
Stanley’s affliction is amplified by the sense that his family and friends, including T and her smarmy, cosmopolitan friend Manny, who stays with Stanley in Prague, are complicit in his increasingly maddening, degrading situation. Is this plausible or paranoid? Well, we have learned that Lech’s artistic instincts are at best perverse and at worst criminal.
Stanley’s beloved Aunt Abbey is an artist herself and a mentor to Stanley in his close-knit Polish-American family. The intellectual liberation she sees in Lech, whatever his dark side, is akin to the inspirational glow Stanley seems to seek in his relationship with T and elsewhere. Performance art provides a parallel to and metaphor for the performativity of identity, particularly as it pertains to Stanley’s efforts to figure out who he is in his relationship with T and what they could be together.
Lech’s performance-art hijinks bring a colorful craziness to the Chicago parts of the novel. Scapellato provides richly detailed accounts of Lech’s projects, which include a mock-legislative session in Lech and Abbey’s living room. Lech has turned the temperature up to hot-yoga levels, and the legislators gulp water until they systematically pee in their trousers and dresses. The incident, a pungent commentary on American democracy, is documented for later exhibition.
When Stanley gets to Prague, however, the performance art, so far an intriguingly torqued element of plot and characterization, is twisted too far. Lech as a mad artist in Chicago is just sick enough to feel true. Lech as a trans-oceanic Mephistopheles feels forced, an excuse to throw Kafkaesque machinations into play in the town associated with them.
The artifice is, of course, intentional, the authorial self-consciousness part of a meta-performance. The publisher casts The Made-Up Man as “a hilarious examination of art’s role in self-knowledge, a sinister send-up of self-deception,” and Scapellato underlines the pretense with numerous, often ponderous movie-scene-type chapter headings such as “Stanley Day-Trips to the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutna Hora” and “Stanley Recalls How T Planned His Surprise Birthday Party.”
But why does Scapellato distance us from the vivid characters he has worked so conscientiously to create? Did the author feel too vulnerably close to them? Maybe Scapellato the Realist worried that his characters were too workaday to dazzle in a competitive literary landscape and called in Scapellato the Absurdist to jazz things up. If so, that’s too bad, because in doing so the author sabotages himself.
The novel’s Lech aspect is bold but unsatisfying because the details of Stanley’s personal history are far more credible and compelling than the mayhem brought by the cruel uncle. The depictions of the other members of Stanley’s family are grounded and vibrant: the love-hate relationship between his tough-but-tender dad and temperamental mom, his brother’s quiet encouragement on dark days, the brusque paternal grandma from the old country. Stanley’s student life — the dreary, disappointing field work at a Midwestern excavation site; an ill-considered, booze-fueled pass at his faculty mentor — also feels palpable. And there are enough delicious mentions of Polish dumplings and sausages to make a hungry reader’s stomach growl.
Scapellato’s minimalist prose unspools in a hypnotic staccato that carries an impressive freight of mood and information. Here, for instance, Stanley recalls a friend confiding in him:
The summer after my first year of college I met up with Torrentelli at the Art Institute. As we walked through the at-the-time-brand-new Modern Wing he told me that he’d be transitioning to a woman — I’d had no idea — the therapy and the hormones and the surgeries, everything, he’d change his name from Antonio to Serenity. We sat on a bench by his favorite Dubuffet. I was the first person he’d told other than his nonna. I didn’t ask why, but he said, as if I had: “You’re not judgmental.”
Scapellato can also strike a refreshingly earnest, romantic tone, as he does when Stanley recalls his time with T. Here, Stanley remembers their first date: “She was tall and at ease and direct, playful but grounded. Her voice radiated ability — a power and a range that the moment didn’t require — all of which she kept in check with practiced self-control. It was like being in the presence of an off-duty superhero.”
Let us consider the possibility that, at its heart, The Made-Up Man was born not a literary black comedy but a romantic tragedy. Early in the novel, Stanley’s identity is ever so proximate: T, and love, are the keys he fumbles in trying to unlock it.
The Made-Up Man fumbles its identity in a similar way, by looking too far outside what feels like its true self. A bittersweet novel about a beer-swigging, volatile, heartsick late-twentysomething in limbo among workaday, academic, and bohemian worlds — would that be too cliché? Too pedestrian? Too similar to a hundred other lad-lit novels? Not in hands as capable and original as Scapellato’s. Not with his feel for the tense moment and the quirky detail. It needed no postmodern razzmatazz.
Whatever the topics of his future novels, here’s hoping Scapellato the Realist gives his workshop-redolent Absurdist doppelgänger the slip and trusts his keen eye and confident heart to tell the unadorned stories he needs to tell.
¤
Alexander C. Kafka is a journalist and photographer in Bethesda, Maryland.
The post The Two Scapellatos in “The Made-Up Man” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.
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Notes of an Undocumented Son
EARLY IN Jose Antonio Vargas’s moving new book, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, he reveals the thrill of seeing his byline on his first article for his high school newspaper. But it isn’t simply a young writer’s excitement at seeing his name in print for the first time; his byline is a powerful metaphor, representing an undocumented man’s struggle to be seen. It is tangible proof that he exists and is free to voice his opinions, despite the state’s prerogative to expel him from the country. Styled in the manner of James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, the book consists of short, accessible essays in which Vargas reveals the life experiences that led to his current status as a stateless statesman, a man Bill O’Reilly terms, “The most famous illegal in America.” Part memoir and part current events, history lesson, immigration primer, and cultural mirror, the book reveals the emotionally devastating toll that current immigration policies take on individuals who, often because of their parents’ decisions, find themselves without legal status in the United States.
The book is divided into three parts, titled “Lying,” “Passing,” and “Hiding,” all of which capture different stages of Vargas’s life as an undocumented immigrant. It begins with Vargas’s childhood in the Philippines. An only child of a single mother — his father abandoned the family early on — Vargas describes himself as a mama’s boy whose poverty required them to share a bed in a tiny apartment. When he was 12, his mother informed him of a plan to send him to the United States to live with his Lolo and Lola — his grandparents. His mother promised to join them within a few months, at most a year, and put him on a plane with a man she told him was his uncle. Yet, she does not travel to the United States. Due to decisions his Lolo made with the immigration papers, his mother is never able to join him legally. As Vargas explains, his Lolo was a legal permanent resident. As such, he could not legally petition to bring his unmarried child (Vargas’s mother) to the United States, so he listed her as unmarried. Later his Lolo worried about the false declaration and withdrew the petition. His mother attempted to secure a tourist visa, but because she was unemployed, the application was denied. What follows is Vargas’s decades-long separation from his mother.
In high school, when Vargas attempted to obtain a driver’s license, he presented his green card to a woman at the DMV only to learn that the card was phony. He returned home to his Lolo, who informed him that what the woman at the DMV counter said was true. He isn’t supposed to be in the United States. And, without legal status, he cannot obtain a driver’s license. (Several states, including California, now allow undocumented people to legally obtain driver’s licenses.) Moreover, the “uncle” who flew with him to the United States was a smuggler and the passport he used was fake. The strategy Lolo then presented to Vargas was that he should work under the table until he marries a US citizen, thereby legalizing his status — something Vargas is loath to do because he is gay.
The truth about his legal status shattered Vargas. He suddenly didn’t know who to trust or what was true. Thus the book enters the second phase, “Passing.” Except for a few trusted teachers and mentors, Vargas hid his undocumented status and attempted to pass as a citizen. He even declared it on forms when applying for jobs as a journalist, first with the San Francisco Chronicle and later with the Washington Post. It was while at the Washington Post that he ultimately bared his soul in a New York Times magazine article entitled, “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” a story that subsequently went viral.
If this story sounds familiar, it is. The material covers territory that this author has previously explored, first in the Times essay and subsequently in a film entitled Documented. But this book delves much deeper than his previous pieces. The beauty of memoir is that it allows writers to plumb emotional depths in ways that documentary films do not often do. Vargas digs into his psyche to reveal deep-rooted anxieties. For example, when he wins a Pulitzer in 2008, his first impulse is not to celebrate, but to worry about whether anyone will find out about his legal status. Readers also learn about his peripatetic lifestyle — how he constantly moves from empty apartment to empty apartment, unable to settle roots anywhere, perhaps to evade Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but perhaps also because he cannot stay anywhere long enough to face himself. The two decades of separation from his mother left him emotionally scarred, unable to form intimate relationships. Indeed, Vargas writes: “I’ve spent my entire adult life separated from Mama because of walls and borders, never fully realizing that I’ve been putting up walls and delineating borders in all my relationships […] I was always a complicated problem with no easy solution.”
It is this emotional exploration that provides the greatest insights in the book. Lying is corrosive and over time infects all aspects of life. Again, Vargas reveals the effect of legal status:
My relationships with people were shaped by the secrets I kept and the lies I had to tell; I feared that the more I shared of myself, the more people I would drag into my mess.
The lies I told to get jobs were exacerbated by the lies I told friends and coworkers about who I was, where I came from, what I could not do, and why.
Vargas’s life is a paradox. As a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and commentator on immigration issues, he now lives a semi-celebrity life. He is a frequent guest on talk shows and universities and accumulates enough travel points to travel first class. But he can never leave the United States. If he does, he cannot return legally. In many ways, Vargas’s life parallels that of James Baldwin’s. In the ’50s when Baldwin wrote Notes of a Native Son, he had already achieved literary acclaim. Yet, he still endured the indignities of Jim Crow. Baldwin and Vargas represent two enormously talented writers marginalized by American laws — in one case, the laws subjected people to segregation; in the other, the laws bar people from legally working and keep them in constant fear of deportation. These laws are anachronisms, no longer matching the realities of modern American society.
Vargas further connects the experiences of black people in the United States with those of Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and other marginalized groups who are oppressed by US laws. He suggests that America has invited undocumented people to come and work at low-level jobs — to trim lawns, babysit kids, and build houses.
Many argue that people such as Vargas are at fault for their own predicaments. And if they did not come with full knowledge, their parents are certainly culpable. They contend that immigrants should stand in line and obtain their status just like everyone else, like their grandparents did. To this, Vargas vehemently argues that there is no line. Over and over, he attempts to debunk the immigration myths that pundits blithely toss, providing statistics and facts that unfortunately continue to be ignored.
Vargas is correct. There is no line. There exists no way to legalize the majority of undocumented people in this country. If there were, people like Vargas would have applied. Moreover, as a nation, we are deeply divided about how we fix this problem. The current administration is eagerly deporting all undocumented people it finds in its path. Immigrant rights advocates want to provide some way of legalizing them. Such desire is elusive. Indeed, after Congress would not vote on comprehensive immigration reform, young immigrant rights activists convinced President Obama to at least provide administrative relief for young people who were brought here as children. Hence, the program entitled Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was born. Yet, when President Trump suggested granting a three-year temporary extension to young people with DACA, his conservative base called it an amnesty and refused to go along with it.
Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen is an important book for our time. As of this writing, the government has recently reopened after the longest shutdown in US history — all because of a debate over a wall between the United States and Mexico. At the same time, approximately 800,000 DACA recipients wait in limbo as the courts and executive branch battle the legality of the program. Add to those numbers the hundreds of thousands of individuals who the current administration has stripped of their Temporary Protected Status. These are people who have settled in the United States, established businesses and families here, who will now be asked to depart or be subject to deportation. And finally, there are the 11 million people who have never had legal status. Ultimately, this very personal memoir is about all of them, what has and will happen to them, their families, and their lives.
¤
Sara Campos is a writer, lawyer, and currently a program officer at the Grove Foundation.
The post Notes of an Undocumented Son appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.
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Adam Phillips: ‘Down Girl’
Kate Manne knows that a book about misogyny is going to be preaching to the converted, when the converted don’t necessarily know what or how they think; or indeed what to do with their doubts, not least their doubts about the ideology of virtue, about being on the side of the angels. Down Girl rightly insists that misogyny is so all-pervading and so alluring that we are more likely to take it for granted than we are to acknowledge it properly, or want to change it for something better. ‘What could possibly change any of this?’ Manne asks in the conclusion to her book, and it sounds like a cry from the heart.
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Diana Stone: Nightmares in Harare
Zimbabwe doesn’t need to be poor; that’s what’s so devastating. It has copious minerals, well-managed water resources, an educated and ambitious population, a safari park the size of Belgium, and some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. It’s poor in part because of theft on a grand scale: Zimbabwe is being looted by its own government. Small numbers of elite Zimbabweans feel entitled to wealth, and the only way for them to get as rich as they feel they should be is to plunder the parastatals and the public purse. Uncertainty about the current regime and how long it will survive makes for extreme myopia.
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David Bromwich: I met a Republican
The question remains whether the citizenry – between 35 and 40 per cent of eligible voters – who register across-the-board approval of Trump will accept the removal of a president solely on the grounds that his success was founded on corruption and he won the presidency with a conflict of interest between his business and his country. The word ‘collusion’, which has no legal status, has rooted itself in popular journalism to describe the putative co-operation between Trump and Russia, but the legal term ‘conspiracy’ has a sharper definition and a higher standard of proof. Democrats have made things easier for Trump by droning on about Putin, with the clear suggestion that a written or recorded bargain to subvert the election is waiting to be discovered. That would qualify as conspiracy. But such evidence is hardly likely to exist.
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Letters
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 41 No. 5 (7 March 2019)
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Table of contents
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 41 No. 5 (7 March 2019)
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Trump, North Korea's Kim Seek Path to Denuclearization
President Trump started a second day of high-stakes talks with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un by playing down the need for a rapid breakthrough on Pyongyang’s nuclear program.
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A Sports Hijab Has France Debating the Muslim Veil, Again
By ELIAN PELTIER and AURELIEN BREEDEN from NYT World https://ift.tt/2H7rG36
Huawei’s Cutest Fans in China? A Troupe of Dancing Children
By RAYMOND ZHONG from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/2XuNo7c
The Cutest Animal on Instagram Is Possibly in Your Trash Can
By GRAY CHAPMAN from NYT Style https://ift.tt/2TilY57
A New Editor, and a New Take on Brexit, for a Brawny London Tabloid
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM from NYT Business https://ift.tt/2UdgaqC
Michael Cohen, Kim Jong-un, Kashmir: Your Thursday Briefing
By PENN BULLOCK and MELINA DELKIC from NYT Briefing https://ift.tt/2UegBB6
What’s on TV Thursday: ‘Better Things’ and ‘The Guilty’
By GABE COHN from NYT Arts https://ift.tt/2EmarZ1
Beal, Wizards Roll to 125-116 Victory Over Nets
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS from NYT Sports https://ift.tt/2Udak8G
Trudeau’s Ex-Attorney General: ‘Veiled Threats’ Were Made to Drop Case
By IAN AUSTEN from NYT World https://ift.tt/2IHuDKp
Patient Shoots Doctor at Florida Veterans Affairs Hospital, Officials Say
By JULIA JACOBS and MATT STEVENS from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2EEhde9
Buoying Trump’s ‘Inflated’ Wealth: $4 Billion in ‘Brand Value,’ Cohen Says
By RUSS BUETTNER and SUSANNE CRAIG from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2NwHJZC
Cohen’s Testimony Is a Test for Both Parties in the Year Ahead
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2TkjCCB
White Man Who Shot Black Men After Hurricane Katrina Dies Days After Sentencing
By MATT STEVENS from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2IQ7upc
Quotation of the Day: Confessed Liar Meets With Ardent Partisans to Set the Record Straight
By Unknown Author from NYT Today’s Paper https://ift.tt/2Tg1ry9
Tampa Bay and Calgary Keep Streaks Alive by Beating Rangers and Devils
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS from NYT Sports https://ift.tt/2tGgTFh
Warriors Host Survivors of the Parkland School Shooting
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Fox News Breaking News Alert
Fox News Breaking News Alert
No agreement after second nuclear summit
02/27/19 11:12 PM
No agreement after second nuclear summit
02/27/19 11:12 PM
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