Author: Jennifer Graham

Porkopolis, by Alex Blanchette (246 pages, Duke University Press)

When Alex Blanchette first moved to “Porkopolis,” residents asked if he was pro-hog or anti-hog. “Neither,” he would say, with the earned detachment of an academic.

For you and me, the question comes down to this: are we pro-bacon or anti-bacon? The average American is said to eat 18 pounds of it every year, despite occasional exposure (thanks largely to PETA) to the horrors of factory farming.

But it is harder still to justify eating bacon and pork tenderloin after reading Blanchette’s clear-eyed account of the industrial pig. Begun as a doctoral dissertation, the book is about as far from a PETA diatribe as you can get; Blanchette applies a dispassionate eye to “concentrated animal feeding operations,” also known as CAFOs. He moved to an town he calls “Dixon,” home to a massive meat-processing operation that manages all facets of a hog’s life, from the artificial insemination of its mother, to the slitting of its throat, to its rendering and dispersal to not only our supermarket counters but largely unseen uses in our daily lives in gelatin. (“I cannot write this book — it is possible that I cannot type this sentence — without touching dead traces of industrial pigs,” Blanchette writes.

He was not there to sensationalize what goes within a plant that kills a hog every three seconds, about 7 million hogs every year, but to understand the ecosystem of such an operation: the hogs, yes, but also the 5,000 or so workers the company employs. To do so, he worked in the plant and became friendly with the workers and other residents of the town, as well as company officials. He enjoyed this extraordinary access and trust because they knew he was writing a scholarly book, one that presumably would not make much of a splash. And it will hold little appeal for the casual reader, dense as it is with footnotes and ten-dollar words.

But that’s unfortunate, because Porkopolis is an even-handed exploration of an issue usually dominated by extremes: the “People gotta eat,” “They’re just stupid animals” and “There wouldn’t be a Dixon without hogs” chorus on one side; the “murderous, animal abusers” chorus on the other.

In fact, the plant where Blanchette worked employed people who would sometimes try to smuggle a sick piglet out of the building in their coveralls so it wouldn’t be euthanized, and who would resuscitate a stillborn pig with their own mouth and cheer when the piglet took its first breath.

That said, they willingly take jobs that involve sitting on a sow’s back while she is artificially inseminated so she will have babies we will eat in six months. Those on assembly lines are subjected to physical trauma that seems similar to the suffering of the pigs, so much so that new hires are warned that they will endure a period of “breaking in,” which Blanchette calls “the agonizing process of molding the human body to the disassembly line’s machine-driven repetition.” The psychological toll of the work (some workers, for example, spend six days a week wiping blood and feces from pig intestines) seems secondary to its physical assaults.

It’s hard to write on the topic without separating the players into heroes and villains, Blancette says. “However, what remains is something perhaps more honest: how people in this town, like so many of us, struggle within and against things they are a constitutive part of but do not know how to change.”

That said, even Blanchette’s moral generosity and even-handed treatment of the pork industry cannot powder and perfume the everyday horrors contained within: the sow (sow, because she’s not allowed to be a mother) banging her head violently against a metal enclosure because she cannot nest, as is her instinct; the coolers in which deficient piglets are enclosed to be gassed. And regardless of benefit, the practice of feeding piglets plasma from older, slaughtered pigs is something that the average person eyeing a BLT would rather not contemplate.

In the end, Blanchette does seem to take a side, however softly. He rues the pig’s lost right to be “an inefficient creature,” its every cell sucked into a capitalist chute applauded for making use of every part of an animal. The planet is full of chicken carcasses, he explains. This fossil record of chickens, whose bodies we grotesquely modify for the right to enjoy six nuggets for a dollar, may one day be studied in conjunction with human dominance during the anthropocene.

But these future archeologists would find no pig skeletons preserved in amber. Like ethical hikers, we leave no trace. We are like mothers yelling at our children, “I gave you life, I can take it away.” Only by creating the need for factory farms with our excessive consumption, we really mean it. Blanchette may not have set out to write an argument for de-industrializing pigs, but he achieved it. B

BOOK NOTES
If you’ve already read How Not to Die Alone, don’t get too excited about Something to Live For, a new paperback by Richard Roper that was published this week.
It’s the same book.
How Not to Die Alone, Roper’s debut novel, came out in hardcover in May 2019. It was generally well-received. It garnered a “meh” number of ratings on Amazon (161) but got a thumbs-up in The New York Times and USA Today.
So why the new title?
It’s not unusual for a book to have a different title in the U.S. and the United Kingdom (e.g., Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone vs. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone). Less common is an American title that is changed when a book goes from hardcover to paperback.
As it turns out, we can blame the Brits and the pandemic.
Roper wrote recently on his website that How Not to Die Alone was the original title but while “the U.S. loved it,” it was considered too dark for the U.K. So it was released there as Something to Live For, which is the title of a song that is meaningful in the book.
But then 2020 swaggered in, and now How Not to Die Alone is too dark in Covidian America.
“And so, after all that, the book is now called Something to Live For everywhere,” Roper wrote on his blog. “Oh, apart from Sweden, and Germany, which both have different titles.”
Meanwhile, on Reddit (r/books), there rages a debate on whether paperbacks or hardbacks are better. What’s most interesting in the thread is how many people say they have been literally injured by hardback books, usually while reading in bed. The mentioned assailants: The Lord of the Rings (“nearly cleaved my head in two”), The Count of Monte Cristo (1,488 pages), Oathbringer (1,248 pages) and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (672 pages).
But this has to be the best answer: “I carried around a really thick hardcover book while I was in jail. Mostly because I was reading it but it was nice knowing that I had something that could hold up to some damage should something crazy have happened. Hardcover better.” Now you know.

Shakespeare for Squirrels, by Christopher Moore (William Morrow, 271 pages)

In one of the more memorable songs from the musical Something Rotten, a character named Nick Bottom seethes “God, I hate Shakespeare — He has no sense about the audience / he makes them feel so dumb / The (expletive) doesn’t care that my poor (expletive) is getting numb.”

The same could be said of Christopher’s Moore Shakespeare for Squirrels, only it wasn’t so funny.

The third in a series of comedies derived from Shakespeare’s plays, the novel is a raunchy retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, populated by characters that will be familiar to anyone who has seen what is considered to be the Bard of Avon’s most performed play.

The main characters were introduced in Moore’s 2009 novel Fool, a satirical take on King Lear, and later embellished in 2014’s The Serpent of Venice. They are Pocket, a court jester; Drool, his dimwit companion; and Jeff, a monkey. In the opening, they are near death, adrift in a boat, Drool so delirious from hunger that he is begging to lick the monkey. “Just one wee lick,” he pleads.

Lucky for the monkey, land appears, and the three crash onto the shores of 14th-century Athens and into the plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its fairies and players and royals, which in Moore’s hands are even more lewd and profane than Shakespeare wrote them. They are also somehow funnier. Shakespeare himself might have wished he had written this book.

Compare the dialogue of Shakespeare, when Nick Bottom’s transformation into a centaur with a donkey head is revealed — “O Bottom, thou art changed! What do I see on thee?” — with that of Moore: “Bottom,” said I. “Thou art transmogrified. How happened this change?”

A quick summary, with a necessary spoiler: Soon after landing in Greece, Pocket encounters the dying Robin Goodfellow (also known as the Puck), and is mistakenly apprehended as the killer. In order to save his own skin and that of his slow-witted but good-hearted companion Drool, he obeys twin royal commands to venture into the fairy-infested forest to find the true assassin.

With killer dialogue and exquisite timing, Moore is generous with the jokes, both Elizabethan and contemporary. (A frequent callback referring to Pocket’s diminutive size — “Not an elf” — is wickedly funny and seems to derive from the TV show The Good Place.)

Moore writes with his tongue firmly in cheek, when it is not exploring naughtier territory, as it frequently does. If the novel had to be assigned a rating by the Motion Picture Association of America, it would have had to fight for an R. As such, one of the novel’s failings is the sense that it was written by a teenage boy with a really high IQ. Which brings us to its other problem, foreseen by Nick Bottom in Something Rotten — Moore makes us feel so dumb.

Shakespeare for Squirrels demands much of its readers, and having seen A Midsummer’s Night Dream once 10 years ago doesn’t cut it. (Painfully, I can attest.) From the beginning, when our heroes are rescued by the fairy Cobweb, the casual reader is taunted by what he or she doesn’t know, never encountered or doesn’t remember. For a full 263 pages there is the sense that we are missing the best jokes. It’s full-on FOMO (fear of missing out) until we reach the afterword, when Moore explains how the book came about. Even then, people who are only conversant with a handful of Shakespeare’s 36 plays can get lost as he recounts the origins of Hippolyta, Theseus and Oberon.

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,” Shakespeare wrote in a line just as good as “though she be but little she is fierce.” The same can be said of Moore’s brain, which operates on a plane higher than that of the average reader and seems as conversant with Shakespeare as the typical American is with the McDonald’s menu. This doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy Shakespeare for Squirrels without having read the two previous installments, Fool and The Serpent of Venice. It can stand alone as a story, as even A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not required prerequisite reading.

But without this base of foreknowledge, reading Moore’s latest book is the literary equivalent of eating pistachios that haven’t been shelled. There is pleasure, yes, but it seems like an awful lot of work to get to it. The mental gymnastics required to get into the flow of the dialogue alone are exhausting on a midsummer afternoon. (“The fairies, I thought, surely they will offer some unexplored gem of myth that I can festoon with knob jokes!”)

That said, you will emerge from Shakespeare for Squirrels armed with a new collection of Shakespearean-style insults, which may alone be justification for your time, thou unctuous little hedgehog. (Said affectionately.) B

BOOK NOTES
As Americans gear up for a long weekend of quiet reading and deep thinking about democracy and its responsibilities, Project Gutenberg might come in handy.
The oldest digital library, it provides free access to more than 60,000 books that are in the public domain, so it’s a particularly good source for finding titles appropriate to the celebration of American independence. Here’s a sample of reading you can download onto your computer or ereader at gutenberg.org:
• The Memoirs, Correspondence and Miscellanies from the Papers of Thomas Jefferson(decidedly dry in places, but it’s always interesting to get a glimpse of personal letters of history’s giants).
• Speaking of which, there’s also Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams During the Revolution
• George Washington’s State of the Union Addresses (other early presidents are there, too).
• George Washington’s Rules of Civility (an adaptation of Richard Brookhiser’s Rules of Civility, which was said to greatly influence the first president)
• The Autobiography of Ben Franklin and Franklin’s The Way to Wealth, which may be the first American self-help book
• Sketches of Successful New Hampshire Men — this was issued in 1882 and has nothing to do with American independence. But how could we not? An excerpt: “Forty years ago, when Manchester, now the metropolis of New Hampshire, was little more than a wasting waterfall and an unpeopled plain, a few young men who had the sagacity to see, the courage to grapple with, and the strength to control the possibilities of the location, made it their home.” Thank God for that, eh?
• The Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (as well as his inaugural addresses)
• Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America
• G.K. Chesterton’s What I Saw in America
Of course, you could also just buy them, because in this day and age, there is no greater civic responsibility than shopping.

The Madwoman and the Roomba, by Sandra Tsing Loh (W.W. Norton, 276 pages)

Can we say that it’s a little more than ironic that a woman who found fame leaving the stifling prison that was a 20-year marriage is now rhapsodizing affectionately about the “domestic mayhem” that is her life?

But that is where Sandra Tsing Loh has arrived 11 years after the publication of her celebrated Atlantic piece titled “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” which was an explanation of why she ended her marriage and an invitation for other people to do the same.

A year earlier, she’d found fame and acclaim for Mother on Fire, an acerbically funny memoir of parenting, and many of her fans were surprised to find her ringless a year later, although it did much for her career. I tend to be stoutly judgmental about such things, but I’m willing to forgive a lot for a laugh, including “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” and another mildly disturbing Atlantic essay in which she said she wished her 91-year-old father would die. That’s probably a character flaw in me, which is why I like Loh even as she tramples on my fundamental values. She has plenty of her own, on public display in two books that portend a long-running series, 2014’s The Madwoman in the Volvo, My Year of Raging Hormones and now, The Madwoman and the Roomba, My Year of Domestic Mayhem.

There is a pleasant afternoon to be had envisioning what comes next: The Madwoman in the Face Mask? The Madwoman and the AARP? The Madwoman and the Depends? Loh (pronounced “low”) has built a devoted following, so it’s a safe bet that Roomba won’t be the last. Loh, who the New York Times once crowned a worthy contender for “publishers’ holy grail, ‘the female David Sedaris.’” Like Sedaris, she is reliably funny and specializes in understated comedy built around the adventures of a strange family that feels vaguely familiar but, under the microscope, is really nothing like yours. (How unlike yours? Her father, for starters, had a rock song written about him by a band named Boy Hits Car. The song contains the line “Mr. Loh’s not afraid to be naked.” There you go.)

But she imagines herself this red, white and blue everywoman, trying earnestly to be one of “us” rather than one of the dastardly “them,” all the while showing that she’s not really poor and struggling, but just seems to have too many stupidly rich friends. As a technique, this is generally opaque, and she wears peasant clothes well in one of the stronger chapters in the book, titled “Stanford Swimming.”

In the essay, Loh makes comic hash out of an evening spent with friends at a New York estate that “looks like a large villa you’d find in Europe, protected by lush non-native hedges.” The friends, of course, are “thems” and if you hadn’t already figured this out, you will when the wine comes out and the friends say, winsomely, that it isn’t expensive but was on the Zagat list of “great wines under $40.”

“Charlie and I raise eyebrows amusedly at each other. For us the price cap on a bottle of wine is eight dollars,” Loh writes. The next nine pages are essentially “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” had Mr. Smith been sardonic, an easy-going, fish-in-a-barrel takedown of people who have personal cooks and tennis courts and sons who win swimming scholarships to Stanford. Loh, in comparison, says that she’s not even sure her teenage daughters can swim, and they come to the table, one looking like an L.A. gang girl “edging into drag queen,” the other a “painfully thin” child evocative of Ichabod Crane who is “less eating her salad than worrying it.” She worries that when lacrosse is mentioned, her daughters will think the conversation is about sparkling water.

“Stanford Swimming” is one of the longer essays in a collection that ostensibly runs the length of a year, Loh’s 55th. As Madwoman in the Volvo was about menopause, it’s more difficult to define what Madwoman and the Roomba is about, other than maybe trying to pay off a tax bill born of an IRS audit detailed in a chapter called “A very Hindu audit.” It’s here, among other places, that Loh’s everywoman credentials seem just a tiny bit overstated, as she exclaims worriedly about the IRS challenging $25,000 in business expenses and says she only gets massages when Groupon is involved.

There is a lot of exclaiming in this book. There also are a worrisome number of exclamation marks, making it seem that a stern editor wasn’t one of those business expenses, and an overabundance of Loh’s trademark dashes, which she seems to use as a calling card and a stand-in for ellipses. Example from a bit of dialogue: “‘You cannot lumber after waiters like an extra from The Walking Dead, knocking over priceless Louis Quatorze art along the way —’”

It’s a small quibble, and maybe you love it, but David Sedaris doesn’t do it.

At the end of the year Loh’s father finally dies, and at first she seems to have all the remorse and grief that you would expect of someone who has been grousing for years about why he had the nerve to live so long, given the “giant money leakage of his care.”

There is an important conversation to be had about whether science is extending life for too long, and Loh’s most shocking statements may be more shrewd calculations than heartfelt emotions; her undergraduate degree, after all, was in physics. But the reader still has the right to be shocked when, upon going to her father’s house soon after his death, Loh decides to take a selfie with her father’s corpse. Is this a thing? If so, it would seem more the action of a millennial than a baby boomer “at the dropping tail of the boom.”

It’s hard, however, to dislike any writer who calls a mortuary professional a “Styx crosser” regardless of other offenses. A-

BOOK NOTES
Since The New York Times once said Sandra Tsing Loh (reviewed above) was a candidate to be “the female David Sedaris,” it seems appropriate to see who else has earned this honor, and more importantly, whether they’re in paperback so we can take them to the beach.

Sedaris, of course, is the sly humorist made famous in 1992 by an essay about playing one of Santa’s elves at Macy’s, the broadcast of which is now an NPR holiday tradition. His books, which include Me Talk Pretty One Day and Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, seethe with weapons-grade humor softened by a folksy tone and a surprising depth of wisdom and lived pain.

Why do we need a female Sedaris? Hard to say because there is no equivalent search for a male Anne Lamott.

But the contenders, according to Google, include not only Loh but these authors:
Lauren Weedman,Miss Fortune (Plume, 304 pages)
Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (Riverhead, 230 pages)
Susan Reinhardt, Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle (Grateful Steps, 384 pages)
Susan Jane Gilman, Hypocrite in a White, Pouffy Dress(Grand Central Publishing, 369 pages)
Faith Salie, Approval Junkie (Three Rivers Press, 288 pages)
Jen Lancaster, Bitter is the New Black, (Berkley, 416 pages)

To be fair, there are others, but some women seem to have given the title to themselves on their blogs. I make no guarantees as to how Sedarisian these women are, but note that Crosley has especially good reviews.

Or you could just wait for a new Sedaris book to come out. The New York Times recently reported that there are two in the queue, The Best Of Me, a collection of previously published essays, due out in the fall (pandemic willing), and Carnival of Snackeries, more selections from the diary he has kept for more than 40 years, scheduled next year.

What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, by Mark Doty (W.W. Norton, 288 pages)

Most everyone with a high school diploma has read Walt Whitman; if not the entirety of “Song of Myself,” then at least “I Hear America Singing” or “1861,” which seems even more prescient in the current arm’d year.

But for many Americans, Whitman fast receded after American Lit, and his iconic Leaves of Grass is best remembered for an infamous toilet scene in the AMC show Breaking Bad.

It seems a sorry fate to be forever associated with idle bathroom reading.

To the rescue rides Mark Doty, a poet and Rutgers University professor whose latest book is a searing and worshipful ode to Whitman, who he considers the first “truly American poet.” A gay man once married to a woman, Doty accepts as canon the widespread belief that Whitman was gay, saying that there is a “deeper level of scandal” that exists in Leaves of Grass, most visible to those familiar with same-sex longings.

Doty explores those longings — not only Whitman’s, but his own — in What is the Grass, which swells beyond the confines of conventional memoir to explore the importance of Whitman’s work and its surprising relevance to events of today. The book is a gorgeous contemplation of mystery and transcendence, and of the confluence of two men separated by a century and a half, but not by fact that one of them is long dead.

“The dead persist audibly in language,” Doty writes, displaying an admirable ability to take a truth that is plain and make its expression exquisite, like the difference between generic flour and King Arthur’s.

Whitman was a writer who, for much of his life, walked a pauper trail; at midlife, he was living in a small apartment in New York with his mother and five of his siblings. He essentially self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855; having worked in printing since the age of 13, he set some of the type for the initial 200 copies himself.

It was, Doty writes, a strange book of verse “at odds in format and content with essentially everything in print in its day.” Whitman’s name was not on the cover. There was no indication in the lackluster reception that one of those volumes would one day sell at auction for $305,000, as it did in 2014, or that future generations would say “its best pages breathe an air perennially new,” as Doty describes them.

Whitman was a splendid mass of contradictions; a man believed to have once spent an afternoon in the embrace of Oscar Wilde, he once denied being attracted to men when asked directly. He possessed, Doty writes, “a radiant sense of connection to the bodies of others,” yet was a “perpetual outsider.” Today, his sexuality is discussed in some circles with reluctance; it is an ethical conundrum whether to out the dead.

Doty, however, frankly discusses his own relationships, from the “painful comedy” of a marriage to a woman twice his age, to his explorations in sex clubs and more fulfilling long-term relationships. The stories, while frank, are not titillating or gratuitous; they are earnest disclosures of a seeker who wants to know why Whitman has so profoundly affected his life, and that of American literature.

While there is structural analysis of Whitman’s poems here, it is not the dry stuff of lectures, but the invitation of someone who deeply cares about a subject and wants the rest of the world to share his enthusiasm. In this he succeeds; a chapter in, and I’d gone looking for my own dusty copy of Leaves of Grass, a gift stiff from disuse.

While on one level a meditation on sexuality, What is the Grass is evidence of Whitman’s unifying theory, that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” In other words, Doty’s experience is not my own, nor was Whitman’s, but there exist other, more important, commonalities, such as reverence for beauty and nature and passion and books, the latter of which, Doty believes, collide at the intersection of soul and time.

“The dead are not lost, but in circulation,” Doty writes. Like the poet who haunts him, he celebrates the “self without boundaries” while paying homage to the pocked and needful bodies tethered to earth. Whitman, wherever his atoms, must be proud. It’s a masterful work worthy of its subject. A

BOOK NOTES

A few years ago, Time magazine reported that human beings now have the attention span of a goldfish, which can focus on something for about nine seconds without losing interest. That was quickly debunked by researchers who say that 10 to 15 minutes is more realistic.

And that is why the maximum length of a TED talk is 18 minutes, and why the ideal summer book should be not a novel or a 592-page White House memoir but a collection of essays or short stories.

When the heat sucks your energy like a bug zapper, there is pleasure in short bursts of reading equivalent to the time it takes to sip a frosty adult beverage. Consider these, which will not drain your energy or consume time better spent on the water or in the woods:

The Inner Coast: Essays, by Donovan Hohn: philosophical reflections on nature. Opening line: “I was, at age nine, a god of snails.” (W.W. Norton, 256 pages)

26 Marathons: What I Learned About Faith, Identity, Running and Life from My Marathon Career, by Meb Keflezigihi: inspiration from the long distance runner, Olympic athelete and Boston Marathon winner. Opening lines: “The first thing I see is the finish line behind me. For a moment I’m confused. Why am I lying on the ground with my head cradled in my hands?” (Rodale, 256 pages)

Nothing is Wrong and Here is Why, by Alexandra Petri: acerbic, partisan humor from a Washington Post columnist. Opening line: “You may feel that you understand what has been happening for the past four years, but I assure you, you do not.” (W.W. Norton, 240 pages)

The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2019, edited by Sy Montgomery. Honestly, anything in the “Best American Series” works, depending on your interests; there is also Best American Short Stories, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Mystery Stories, Sports Writing, Food Writing, Comics, Essays, and most intriguingly, “American Nonrequired Reading.”

But we’ll go with this one, edited by Montgomery, since she’s a Granite Stater. Her opening: “Several years ago I was invited to speak to kids and teens at the Boston March for Science. On a cold, rainy day in early April, I looked out at a sea of young faces framed by dripping umbrellas and the hoods of ponchos, and spoke to them about tree kangaroos.” (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 384 pages.)