Cocaine [An Unauthorized Biography]

Cocaine [An Unauthorized Biography]

Dominic Streatfeild

2001

England and USA

“Over 50 percent of all American crime over the last 75 years has been blamed on drugs, because drugs are the single most convenient scapegoat for a society that is unable to blame itself.”

            I didn’t need to read this book to know that individuals alone don’t create reality, but that systems made up of multitudes of individuals do. I did need to read the book, though, to learn the specifics behind one such system – that of the production, sale, and use of cocaine and, more specifically, the state of affairs in South America today because of it. I needed to know that because I’m going traveling in Colombia soon, and before I read this book I didn’t even know who Pablo Escobar was. I am much better informed now.

            Cocaine [An Unauthorized Biography] begins with the Incas, who found the leaf of the coca plant, chewed with an alkaloid to activate the stimulant, extremely useful in developing and sustaining their incredibly advanced civilization. From here the book goes on to document the lengthy history of cocaine in the West, from  its discovery by Freud, then other doctors as a “cure” for morphine addiction, to the birth of crack and the narco states in Colombia, Peru, and Beliz, and every step in between. At every point the author consults the primary sources – drug traffickers in the US, England, and South America, historians, doctors, and DEA agents. This is a biography in the fullest sense of the term, and cocaine has had a long life and varied life.

So what’s the takeaway of these 499 pages on cocaine? Mostly Streatfeild’s purpose is to inform, and at first I found his casual, intimate tone at odds with this ambition, but I soon came to understand why the author chose to relate his findings in such a personal, and often humorous, way: the results of his study are astounding, bizarre, horrific – in short, too much to bear alone. After reading the information Streatfeild collects, as well as what he experiences and observes while doing it, the reader finds that she, too, is now responsible for figuring out what it all means.

While Streatfeild withholds his judgment until the end of the book, the massive amount of suffering linked to the “success” of cocaine compels him to eventually take a stance. His thesis, inevitably, is that cocaine is not good for the world, but not for the reasons you think. Streatfeild is no anti-drugs crusader proselytizing about the “evils” of the drug. Instead, he argues that cocaine should be legalized, positing that if it was legal coke’s price would go down, thus lessening the allure of selling it and slaking the frenzy of corruption and violence that has in our time surrounded its production. The “war on drugs,” according to the author, has been misguided at best, idiotic and corrupt at worst. Streatfeild accuses the American government and international agencies of everything from “helping” poor South American farmers by offering loans with outrageous interest rates to switch from growing coca to far less lucrative crops, to dumping a species of fungus engineered to attack coca plants (but later found to mutate and attack other crops as well) on Peruvian coca fields, to, through the Contra scandal, effectively creating the crack “epidemic” in the US. He doesn’t make these accusations hastily or in anger and, once the evidence is presented, the reader, at least this one, finds it hard to disagree with him.  

If you want a simple story about how drugs are bad, drug dealers are evil, and the government has your best interests at heart, you should look elsewhere. If you want in-depth reportage that gets closer to the complicated nature of the reality of drugs and the "war" against them, then this book is for you.

The Chronology of Water, Yuknavitch

The Chronology of Water

Lidia Yuknavitch

USA

2010

At times I wanted to hate this book because it was a memoir that reminded me of me, and I didn’t get a book deal. And no one gave me an award. No, my dad didn’t abuse me, and my mom wasn’t an alcoholic, and I’m not a swimmer. But they did do some pretty messed up things to each other when I was a kid, my parents, and I was a basketball player, and I was an angry, drunk, numbed, death-seeking girl, too, just like Lidia Yuknavitch. But nobody gave me a book deal and I don’t write whole paragraphs that consist of nothing but “goddamn it” and if I did no one would give me an award for it.

I guarantee you.

I wanted to hate it because everybody loved it. And because I’ve loved women, too, you know. You’re not the only bisexual crazy girl out there. You’re not the only fucked up one. And I wanted to hate it because she claims that writing saved her, when half the time it feels like writing, this guilt I have about not-writing, or the shame I have about how bad the writing I do get down actually is, is what’s pushing me further towards the death-drive. How I would just chuck it all and forget about it if I could, if I thought there was anything else. And I wanted to hate it because it was sad and scary and tortured and not even in a pretty package like a novel, just all hanging out there, like real life.

I wanted to hate it but I couldn’t because of the truth and ache of it. Because of chapters like “Distilled,” where she relays the story of her second marriage in what amounts to one long sentence “distilling” the essence of an 11 year relationship, beauty, pleasure, and pain all mixed up in every phrase. And then, from the chapter “Conversion” onward, things get better. That’s when I started to really like it. Okay, I’ll be honest; that’s when I started sniveling with gratitude, sobbing into my roll of toilet paper while I sat outside on an unusually sunny day under a cloudless sky. Because I already know things are fucked up, that people are awful, that we do horrifying things to one another and to ourselves. I’m well versed in that, thank you. Didn’t need somebody else’s memoir to tell me that; I’ve got my own (unpublished) one all about it. What I wanted, what we all want, is the redemption. The moment things start to turn around. And that’s here too. Love, and peace, and “resuscitation.” If this author, this Yuknavitch woman, can accept that a new chance at life is what’s happening to her, maybe I can too. The hard part is it’s not something you accept once and then be done with; happiness – “learning to live on land,” as Yuknavitch puts it – is something you have to come to terms with again and again, every day, until you die, and maybe even after that.

So this book is a memoir, not a novel, and I’m okay with that now. I’m okay with the mess of it particularly because the overarching metaphor of water, swimming, drowning, and floating holds the thing together so, well, fluidly. It seems natural and obvious and perfect. Unlike life, and yet exactly like it, too.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, trans. Thurman

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Padma Sambhava

Translated  by Robert A.F. Thurman

Tibet

8^th or 9^th century

What did I think The Tibetan Book of the Dead would be like? Well, not like what it is, that’s for sure. Yet if I had to say in a general way what I thought before reading it I guess I expected it to disclose some secrets or insights about what happens when we die, and it definitely does do that. According to The Great Book of Natural Liberation Through Understanding in the Between, as it is known in Tibet, dying is extremely weird, scary, and dangerous. Unlike in Christianity, where it’s what you do before you die that determines what will happen in the in-between (and if you’re Protestant, like I was, then there are only two possibilities) in Tibetan Buddhism the real work of deciding the fate for your next life begins after you’re physical body is dead. That’s not to say that what you do before you die doesn’t matter; it does, but mostly because it either prepares you, or leaves you dangerously unprepared, for what comes after. 

Though Tibetan Buddhists believe that life is “boundless,” and that, since we do not come from nothing and therefore cannot become nothing, our lives must go on in some form, they are nonetheless quite worried about dying. Indeed, because the in-between stage, when a being passes from one life to another, is so fraught with choices, Tibetans are probably even more concerned about death than we are. Thurman tells us, “But the core of Buddha’s discovery was the essential reality of freedom – that underlying the lived reality of existence is the immediacy of total freedom, especially freedom from suffering, from bondage, from ignorance. This essential freedom can be realized by the human mind as its own deepest and most true condition. This realization makes it possible for freedom to prevail over the habitual suffering of personal experience. So the realized individual is thenceforth held apart from suffering; not held in anything, but held out of binding patterns” (14). The death point is one of the opportunities to separate oneself from suffering, but it is also a time and place where “binding patterns” are more comforting and tempting than ever before. Enlightenment realization doesn’t just happen. One has to condition herself in order for non-suffering to become reality. How to do that?

The Great Book of Natural Liberation has a few suggestions. The first, naturally, is to prepare for death during your life. This means, among other things, practicing personal mind control. “In order to create something, first you have to imagine it. And imagination can be extremely powerful in life-between reality,” as well as in this life (14). If one is practiced in imaginative meditation, then he will be better able to deal with the powerful images his mind presents to him in the in-between, and be more prepared to fend them off with calculated ideations of his own.

The second part of the book is the readings and prayers that the living read to the deceased person in order to help them navigate through the six realms of the in-between and make the best choices possible. “For at the death point every being, especially a human being, has the ideal opportunity to discover real freedom from addictive habits, delusive perceptions, and misleading conceptions. Therefore, in Tibetan culture it is considered important to help a loved one through the actual process of death, to avoid distracting and frightening places such as hospital emergency rooms, and to arrange circumstances where the assistants can stay with the body at least for some hours” (120). Though in our culture crying and showing our sadness over death is expected, in Tibetan and other Buddhist societies this type of behavior, at least around the dead person, is frowned upon because it distracts the deceased from the crucial work of navigating the in-between, and may make them cling to the life they’ve left, which is counter-productive in the quest for enlightenment or, if complete freedom cannot be attained, then the best possible rebirth in this or another realm.

The deceased needs her full concentration at the death point because as she traverses the in-between realms beautiful and terrifying images of deities, light, and demons will appear to her. What the prayers in the Book of Natural Liberation remind us is that all of these – pleasant and terrifying – are emanations of our own mind, and it is our reaction to them that will determine our next phase of being. One thing I found really interesting about the translation I read was that while the author described the images of the Buddhist deities and figures in precise detail, he also mentioned again and again that if one was from a different religious background then they should practice becoming comfortable with the gods, angels, and demons from their own tradition, as the images that will appear to you are those that are already in your mind.  So if you’re Christian you will want to spend time visualizing and becoming comfortable with the distressing imagery in the book of Revelations, as well as with the comforting spirit of Jesus Christ as, according to Thurman, these figures can help you find your way to a place of peace and liberation rather than fear, aversion, and clinging when you realize that they are merely images from inside you, and not real in any other way.

I’m very glad I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I feel I have a stronger understanding of Buddhism itself, and have plenty of new ideas about death to process. But I also recommend the book because its central message is one that is useful well before we die, and can be summed up in a single question which I would like to remember to ask myself, and answer honestly, when my mind begins to attack me in my waking, daily life: Is this (problem, image, fear, worry) real, or is it all in my head?

The Portrait of a Lady, James

The Portrait of a  Lady

Henry James

England 1881

“It appeared to Isabel that the unpleasant had been even too absent from her knowledge, for she had gathered from her acquaintance with literature that it was often a source of interest and even instruction.”

            I think I’m the only one who still reads/loves Henry James. Okay, maybe they still teach The Turn of the Screw in undergraduate courses (they did in mine, anyway) but I’ve yet to meet anyone else who loves the lengthier psychological novels as much as I do. I don’t know what it is, exactly. I guess I like the feeling of time travel, the sense that I’m sitting next to an English gentleman overlooking the sloping fields and tailored gardens of a country house, or, in the case of The Portrait, that I’m wandering among the ruins of Rome under the particular gleam of an Italian sun. Of course there’s also the fact of getting into someone else’s head that I like, and James’ psychoanalysis is so expansive. His omniscient narrator explores the mind not only of Isabel (the “Lady” in question), but also of her friends, family, and acquaintances over many years, so that by the end one feels that she understands these people better than they understand themselves. Why do people do the things they do? James wants to know, and so do I.

           

In The Portrait of a Lady James tells the story of Isabel Archer, a young American who travels to England to visit her aunt and uncle, and has her life inexorably altered by the events that happen there. The question under scrutiny, or one of them, at least, is what difference does money make to a young woman’s happiness? Her cousin Ralph, among other men, admires her sense of adventure and originality: “She was intelligent and generous; it was a fine free nature; but what was she going to do with herself? This question was irregular, for with most women one had no occasion to ask it. Most women did with themselves nothing at all; they waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish them with a destiny. Isabel’s originality was that she gave one an impression of having intentions of her own.” Realizing, however, that Isabel would not likely be able to fulfill her intentions, given that she was poor, Ralph convinces his dying father to leave the girl a fortune, thereby, he supposes, setting her free from the obligation of finding a husband.

The question now becomes what will make Isabel happy? The results of his social experiment, however, turn out to be not at all what Ralph imagined. Presumably free from the danger of being taken advantage of due to her poverty, Isabel is now “made use of” for her money. It’s a complicated story, the details of which don’t emerge until the end of the novel, but the upshot is that Isabel becomes so focused on not following society’s edicts that she swings in the opposite direction, marrying a poor man in order to set him “free.” The match turns out to be a bad one. Still, there remain plenty of opportunities for Isabel to rearrange her life to better suit her own happiness. She could follow the example of her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, for example, and live apart from her husband for most of the year. She could, the narrator and Isabel’s friends suggest, leave him altogether. She could accept the offers of other suitors who could also take care of her. But Isabel does none of this. It’s almost as if she has acquired a taste for the misery she never knew in her younger life. Suffering, for Isabel, seems to be the sign of a higher nature. It is Isabel’s desire to be free from the scrutiny and expectations of those who wish her well which holds her captive. It is, in essence, her own mind which causes her suffering. In this sense, the tale is as modern and relatable today as it ever was.

One wants Isabel to be a feminist heroine, but James does not allow that wish to be fulfilled. Even with plenty of avenues for escape, Isabel returns to her cruel husband and a life she appears to hate in Rome. So is there no hope for woman, according to James? Are we doomed, not only by societal circumstance, but by our own perverse natures? I don’t think so. In the guise of a secondary character, Isabel’s friend, Henrietta Stackpole, James suggests not. This lady, a traveling journalist, is a mix between Mrs. Touchett who, while completely in control of her own life, is too cold for Isabel’s tastes, and Isabel, who bends to her husband’s every whim. Henrietta is sensible yet caring. And though Isabel is disappointed by her friend’s eventual decision to marry an Englishman, it seems to me the most logical and happy marriage of all. But, of course, logic and happiness does not for a good novel make. And, by extension, perhaps not for the most interesting, or “original,” life, either.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Smiley

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

Jane Smiley

2005

USA

Way back in August, when I had hours on end to read and think and write in the sunshine, I started this blog. It’s also when I bought Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley. A huge, heavy, hardcover book, it probably cost well more than the $9.50 I paid for it when originally published, though I suspect it was never a bestseller, since the audience interested in reading about novels rather than actually reading novels is probably as large as the group that would recognize the reference in the title (to the poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens). For better or worse, I fit comfortably into both.

Smiley is a prolific novelist, and she does a fine job of writing about writing, too. Perhaps it will surprise you, but some great writers are not very good at talking about writing, while others who are not brilliant writers themselves can come up with incredible insights (a fact which is proven to me again and again in the peer review groups I make my students have). Each chapter explores some aspect of the novel, ranging from “What is a Novel?” to “Morality and the Novel” to “A Novel of Your Own.” I have been reading this book slowly, bit by bit and here and there, ever since August, which might suggest that I haven’t enjoyed it, though quite the opposite is true. Smiley’s analysis is full of insightful tidbits, which, in my opinion, are best savored slowly, preferably with beer.

My favorite chapter was #9, “The Circle of the Novel,” which I expected would be about the novel’s “friends,” and it kind of is, in a way. In this section Smiley plots different types of genres around the face of a clock – romance, travel, history, biography, tale, joke, gossip, diary/letter, confession, polemic, essay, and epic – in order to make the claim that the novel is a particularly unique form in that it samples from all, or at least several, of these different genres at once. Smiley concludes that the novels that strike us as “great” and enduring tend to sample liberally from all of them. I had never thought about it like that before, but now that I do, I have to agree.

What I could have done without in this and most of the other chapters is Smiley’s tendency to provide what seems to me more evidence than is really necessary to support her arguments. Given that the last section of the book offers thoughts and reviews (much like my project here) on the 100 novels she read in one year, I understand her desire to talk at length about them. But since her book is presented as more of a popular text than a scholarly one (to quote Smiley herself in Ch. 9, “Much of a reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief grows out of whether she and the author agree on what category or categories of discourse a text falls into”) it’s my opinion that keeping some of these discussions more theoretical by offering only a modicum of evidence might have been more appropriate. (It certainly would have made for a quicker reading experience).

All in all, though, I seriously appreciated this book. And even though I’m about to dress it back up in its dust jacket and set it on my brand-new, handmade bookshelf, I plan to open it up again and again as I, too, read the books Smiley’s read, and find myself wanting to hear someone else’s smart, thoughtful observations and thoughts about them.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Miller

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Donald Miller

USA

2009

“…we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life because we don’t want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgment. We don’t want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage.”

            The theme this month in my reading life seems to be one of optimism. I suppose that bodes well for a start to the new year, and it is certainly a welcome change from my MA subjects of study (Modernism and African American Lit are two of the things I love most in this world, but I wouldn’t say reading either is a particularly joyful experience). I don’t want to think of myself as inherently pessimistic, but sometimes my mind attacks me and tells me all kinds of terrible things,  like life is meaningless and we all die alone – especially you will die alone, Emily, and not, unfortunately, for a very, very long time. I recently assigned my students to read David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech to Kenyon University. In it he says that he understands why people who shoot themselves usually do it in the head; that’s the part that’s plaguing them – the “evil master,” he calls it. (I did not mention to the students that DFW committed suicide himself, later, but one of the more dedicated ones came up after class and expressed her surprise at having found that out. Does that make what he says about controlling your thinking any less valid? I don’t think so. It seems like just more evidence for his claim.) Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I understand Foster Wallace’s point, which is why I’ve become a Buddhist – so that I can learn to control my thinking and not be such a slave to my mental demons. It is also why it is something of a relief to read authors like Glass and Miller who believe that at the bottom of everything there is a fundamental connection between people, that the essence of the world is good not just in some mystical, veiled sense, but right here, now.

            Miller’s book is about what he learned while working with a couple of filmmakers to make a movie out of his memoir. If that makes you think this book is about the craft of writing, you are right. But what’s cool and unique about it is that Miller takes the lessons he learns about how to craft a good story – a good story has “a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it,” “good stories have good scenes” – and applies them to his life, so that the book is interesting not only for writers and artists, but for anyone who wants, as Miller thought-provokingly terms it, to “live a good story.” I do, I do! The only problem, for me, is that I want to write them, too.  

It’s fine to read Miller’s book as a regular person. It’s good to think about how to create more risk and meaning in our lives. But it’s harder to read it as a writer, and think about combining that role with being a person. The lessons Miller learns make me feel anxious and guilty, as well as inspired, because when I read them I find it difficult to control my mind, which is constantly telling me that I’m not doing enough. Not only am I not living a good story, but I’m not writing them, either. I understand that I have done some pretty awesome things, and I have even written a few things that I feel really proud of, but the fact remains that it is never not true that I could be doing more. I could get up earlier. I could stay up later. I could forgo the hangouts or the elaborate lesson plans. I could dedicate myself to my art. Whatever I do is never good enough for me. Is this my story? Miller says you can change your story, choose-you-own-adventure, so to speak. It’s all up to me.

Maybe there is some direction for me in the ending to the book, in the part where he gets to the hope that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Writing about a bike ride he took across the country, Miller says, “If a story sets our moral compass, my compass had changed from cynicism to hope. I didn’t believe the television pundits anymore. I didn’t believe people were by nature bad or my neighbor was my enemy. The America we see on television and read about in the newspapers isn’t the America we found as we pedaled across the country at fifteen miles per hour. We encountered no fear or tension. Instead, in small towns stitched together by back roads, we found kindness.” So maybe I need to concentrate, too, on turning my moral compass from cynicism to hope, and expect the reception of my private thoughts to be met with kindness and interest, rather than scorn and dismissal. My very smart fiancé always says that life gives you what you expect it to, and in fact I know someone who won the Powerball jackpot. He was already rich before that, and people kept asking him why he was even playing Powerball in the first place. You know what he said? He said that he kept playing because he thought he would win. Playing Powerball would be a lot easier than what I’m trying to do, but it probably wouldn’t make as good of a story.

           

           

The Whole World Over, Glass

The Whole World Over

Julia Glass

2006

USA

“The birds’ migration routes crisscrossed the map like a craze of telephone wires, swooping gracefully from one coast to another. The seemed almost to secure the world, all these well-traveled paths in the sky, the way ribbon or twine secures a precious gift.”

It’s fitting that I bought my copy of The Whole World Over on what amounted to a mini tour of the United States. My fiancé is in the process of interviewing for medical residency programs, and over the Christmas holiday I was lucky enough to be able to accompany him to some of them. On a lovely wander about Tucson, AZ, I picked up this novel, and it became my constant companion through flights to Madison, WI, New York City, and back home to Portland, OR. Even though, at over 500 pages, it’s by no means a short book, I was sad to see it, and my trip, come to an end.

            The novel starts out in the consciousness of baker, mother, and wife Greenie Duquette, who is in some sense the main but by no means the only character. Other chapters allow us into the psyches of Alan, Greenie’s husband, Walter, her friend, and Saga, a young woman with whom Alan builds an unlikely friendship. Amidst the many other appealing personalities populating the novel is the reticent but loveable Fenno McLeod from Glass’s equally excellent first novel, Three Junes. Greenie’s departure from New York City to New Mexico after taking a job as head cook in the governor’s mansion is the event that sets the book in motion, and while the differences between these two worlds are interesting in their own right, what’s really at stake here are the relationships between the characters and, in turn, their relationships with themselves.

            The ultimate pleasure of reading Glass’s novels lies in their richness of detail and the almost magical way she’s able to connect what seem like a million moving parts. The book Greenie reads to her son becomes the name of their dog, who Alan gets from Saga, who meets Walter at an important moment after becoming friends with Fenno… it sounds convoluted, but in Glass’s expert hands the interactions feel completely natural, an accurate depiction of the way things tie together in real life, the whole world over, as they do in the image of migratory bird routes on display in Fenno’s bookstore.

            In addition to exploring the haphazard but important ways we come to know each other, the novel is interested in how we come to know ourselves. Glass’s prose insists that this knowing cannot be separated from our knowledge of others, but the book also questions whether such influences can be detrimentally misleading or confusing. How can you know if what you feel is true? How can you know if you would be the same person you are now if you had not met the people you did? The answers to these questions have consequences, of course, not just for our own self-knowledge, but for how we’re able to maintain and benefit from our relationships with others. Love relationships (hetero and homosexual) are the primary focus here, but family bonds and varying degrees of friendship also get a good amount of stage time.

            The Whole World Over is staunchly realistic in the very best sense of the term: it emphasizes characterization and gives us a great deal of knowledge on both the internal and external forces motivating the characters’ thoughts and actions. The fact that Glass follows not just one, but four characters, adds greater depth to this effect. What’s particularly charming about the book is that though it portrays many unhappy scenarios, the overarching mood of is one of optimism and a belief that even though we are all coming and going, lost in our own internal hells of confusion and uncertainty, connection abounds. We are not alone and isolated at all, but attached to one another in ways we notice every day and in ways only a talented novelist can help us glimpse, and appreciate.