Crows & dragons & heroes
A roost in Vancouver, Barbara's best fiction list, and the Obama's new movie
BIRDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY
Counting crows
I WAS SO PLEASED when Tomasz Trzebiatowski selected this picture for his Photosnack last week. Alex Webb, Peter Turnley, Larry Fink, and other photographers I admire have appeared there. Tomasz is the editor of FRAMES, a gorgeous quarterly magazine of photography. The publication reflects his broad sensibility, from portraiture to surrealism to landscape, held together by a commitment to visual poetry and fine reproduction. He seems to avoid the identity-centered imagery that has become popular in Aperture and MFA programs, which strives for a kind of snap-shot authenticity and all but eschews formal composition and beauty.
I PHOTOGRAPHED these crows in the spring of 2019 on a trip my friend Tim and I took to Vancouver BC. We met up with a gifted young wildlife photographer, Liron Gertsman, who guided us to his favorite birding spots in the area. First stop was a roost of hundreds of Great Blue Herons, where the Bald Eagles that like to feed on them were circling. Next stop was George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary, where visitors can buy bags of seed at the gate. Birds that elude you in the wild walk right up to you for a handout. A juvenile Sandhill Crane landed so close that the best picture I got was a closeup of its wing feathers (which turned out well and was featured in my show last summer). The last stop was a surprise, a neighborhood of parking lots, office buildings and big-box stores where thousands of crows roost every evening. If there were such a thing as a visual cacophony, this would be it.
The challenge was finding a way to make sense of the huge murder of crows—yes, that’s what a group of them is called—compose shots, and hustle with your feet and camera settings against the fading light of the sun. I latched onto an office building with a grid of mirrors where the birds were landing and taking off in succession. I still get a kick out of figuring out how many crows are in the picture. (Try yourself if you like and put the answer in the comments.) That Tomasz picked this image from the hundreds on my web site is a testament to his practiced eye. Of my work, he writes:
Photographing birds is a skill of its own, and Kerry Tremain has not only built it over the years but has also developed quite a personal take on this popular photography genre.
Thank you to Tomasz and to Jon Kaplan for nominating me.
WHAT IS BARBARA THINKING?
My ten all-time favorite books of fiction
A WORK OF ART in my home is brilliantly entitled, “Some Books Are Better Remembered Than Reread.” A book we read decades ago can seem inert when reread today, while the one in our memory can cast a spell that sweetens with time. These are the books that most enraptured me at the time I first read them.
My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett. Before I could read, my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Kadja, read this aloud to me. Many aspects of the book—mothers who don’t understand, maps with helpful notes, the proper packing of suitcases—have featured prominently in my life. But the book was erased from memory until I spotted it in a Berkeley bookshop in my forties and finally read it for myself— and was entranced again. Now that I’m an old lady, I frequently give it to children.
Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. More dragons and maps? How embarrassing. But I must include it, as it meets my enrapturement criteria more completely than any other book. I consumed the trilogy in three days at age fourteen and I’ve reread it two more times since then. While my interest in Elvish and the speech of dwarves was transitory, Tolkien’s philology mania sparked a lifelong love for words and their derivations.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Discovered on an unattended bookshelf when I was nineteen, this book bridged the gap between Middle Earth and Planet Earth. His magic realism was perfect for someone who was both child and adult.
Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert. I read this novel in my late 20’s when I still harbored the fantasy that I could someday be a writer. Gustav’s prose showed me that a real writer requires an insight and craft far beyond my ken. He casts you deep inside Emma’s mind while retaining his cool, almost contemptuous, authorial voice. It’s the “c’est moi” of course—most of us have a contradictory mix of love and hate for ourselves.
Miguel Street by V.S.Naipaul. Speaking of contradictory feelings, here comes Sir Vidia. Naipaul makes you dizzy with admiration for his sentences and abjectly furious with what they say. This book proves Naipaul can be as charming and funny as Dickens, however dissimilar. And the dialogue in Miguel Street! He hears language in the mouths of its speakers in a complex, mid-century multi-racial Caribbean of his own devising.
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. I read this one hot off the press after I’d just taken a job working with Native American people in the Bay Area. Erdrich conveys the individual, familial, and communal life of her characters with Flaubert’s insight but none of his contempt. I recently unearthed a hand-drawn family tree I’d concocted years ago for her recurring characters and suddenly they swam into view: Lipsha, Marie, Eli, Nector, Zelda, and all the rest. Following Erdrich’s career over the years has been a thrill, but Love Medicine remains my favorite. It reminds me of a time when both she and I were young and those family trees were saplings.
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle. Another writer who understands the spoken word— one of my fiercest enthusiasms. How can he transport you into the mind of a ten year old kid living in 1960’s Dublin? You feel swept into Paddy’s world where his friends and his family are at eye level and welcome you.
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. This book kickstarted my love of audible books in the 1990’s, when I was a newly minted gardener. While aware that Styron was criticized as a white man telling a black man’s story, I wondered: weren't Garcia Marquez’s gypsies as real as his generals? Louise Erdrich’s white characters as believable as her Native ones? And in thirty years, I’ve rarely heard a reader as good as Wolfram Kandinsky (except perhaps Mrs. Kadja). Styron wrote the words. Kandinsky gave them voice—whether spoken by an enslaved Tidewater black man in the 1830’s, a wealthy white plantation owner, or a teenage mulatto girl.
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. Unlike some, I never read Ethan Frome in school and only discovered Wharton’s work in middle age. Among her wonderful novels, Frome stands out as a gem of concision. The melding of characterization and plot is otherworldly—sometimes even funny. Ethan’s wife’s favorite book is Kidney Troubles and Their Cure. How’s that for a nutshell sketch? The story and its tragic end rush toward you like that awful sled, making it plain that human fate is a grim business and your world can collapse in an instant.
Mating by Norman Rush. With due respect to Phillip Roth and Jonathon Franzen, how can our culture be obsessed with novels about men and women, ideas and eroticism, and yet undervalue Norman Rush? Set in Botswana in the 1990’s, Mating is about feminism, economics, talking, courtship, more talking, colonialism, and more talking. It’s hard enough to create characters with rich emotional lives, but nearly impossible to simultaneously give them rich intellectual ones. Rush thrusts you into the midst of heated, grown-up conversation that you don’t want to end. –Barbara Ramsey
Editor’s note: You are welcome to add, subtract, or make your own list in the comments section. Please do! To access them from email, click on the Comments button below.
FILM AND POLITICS
Rustin roulette
“BLACK, QUAKER, homosexual, pacifist, a labor organizer, a tactician, and a dandy.” Gerald Early’s review of a 2004 biography of Bayard Rustin conveys the complexities of the man who organized the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom in which his friend, Martin Luther King, Jr., called on Americans to share a new dream. The march to the March is the main subject of the new biopic, Rustin, produced by the Obamas. Colman Domingo is brilliant in the title role, convincingly conveying Ruskin’s energetic charisma.
Raised as a Quaker by his Pennsylvania grandparents, Rustin was a lifelong socialist in the Norman Thomas tradition and, despite brief membership in the Young Communist League in the late 1930s, a dedicated anti-communist. He was a war resister and peace activist who worked successfully with his mentor, labor leader A. Philip Randolph, to integrate the military. And though enemies derided him as a homosexual, and even friends worried that discovery of his sexuality would discredit the movement, he did not hide it and urged other gays to come out of the closet.
As a black, gay activist, Rustin would seem a perfect fit with today’s intersectional left, and the Obama film does little to dispel that impression. His main tormentors within the movement are Roy Wilkins, the moderate leader of the NAACP, played by Chris Rock, and the self-dealing Harlem congressman, Adam Clayton Powell, played by Jeffrey Wright. They want him expelled for his homosexuality. Rustin is rarely shown with white people except for a lover, Tom. In reality he was an integrationist who advocated and organized broad multiracial coalitions for economic justice. Some of his closest allies and friends were religious leaders, especially rabbis, and labor unionists, even as he fought to integrate the trade unions.1 United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther was a key partner in organizing the 1963 march.
Rustin’s insistence on building multiracial coalitions alienated former friends in the Civil Rights Movement when he opposed affirmative action, which he warned was a Nixonian scheme to split the civil rights and labor movements. He opposed black separatists, black power advocates, black nationalists, and Black Panthers.2 Rustin viewed black militants as fundamentally pessimistic about the radical change he sought. “They conclude that the only viable strategy is shock; above all, the hypocrisy of white liberals must be exposed,” he wrote. “These spokesmen are often described as the radicals of the movement, but they are really its moralists. They seek to change white hearts—by traumatizing them.”
OPPOSED TO VIOLENCE on principle, Rustin also saw it as a political dead end. Inspired by Gandhi, he traveled to India to learn about nonviolent civil resistance. and returned to school Martin Luther King, Jr. in its principles and methods. (In the film Rustin convinces King to dispose of a gun he kept in the house.) Together, they organized one of the largest and most consequential nonviolent protests in the nation’s history, leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, followed by the Voting Rights Act the next year. At that juncture, Rustin penned a controversial 1965 essay in Commentary arguing that the movement must turn from protest to politics.
Rustin wrote that integrating lunch counters and buses was low-hanging fruit compared to the radical social and economic reforms required for full equality. In Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964, he saw the potential for a realignment. Fueled by the energy of the Civil Rights Movement, he envisioned an emerging voting majority of “Negroes, trade unionists, liberals, and religious groups”—the same coalition that marched on Washington in 1963. Holding them together would be a massive program to improve education and provide better jobs.
Over his lifetime as a social activist and reformer, Rustin was beaten, jailed, arrested under California’s sodomy laws, sentenced to work on a chain gang, and vilified by Strom Thurmond on the floor of the Senate. Yet as Early argues in his review:
Suggesting that Rustin was a martyr is to misunderstand the richness and complexity of his life, and of the experience of being black and homosexual. Seeing his life as one of a double victimization is patronizing. His life and work are expressive affirmations, not sacrificial symbols. Rustin himself never voiced a view of himself as either a martyr or a victim. Instead, there is something about Rustin that suggests a soldier of fortune in the army of social reform, flamboyant, theatrical, egotistical, and deeply sincere.
Neither martyr nor victim, but hero, as the new film persuasively portrays. Rustin is Obama’s second major effort to cement Rustin’s legacy. The first was awarding him the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2013. He presented the posthumous award to his longtime partner, Walter Naegle.3
For more on Rustin’s views on coalition building, I recommend Richard Kahlenberg’s commentary on the film, What Bayard Rustin Could Teach Democrats Today.
Discussing the Rustin film in Quillette, Joshua Muravchik contrasts the legacies of Rustin and Malcom X, who is the subject of a new opera opening in New York, in Black Progress and Black Rage.
Naegle has been active in commemorating his late partner’s life and values as executive director of the Bayard Rustin Fund and through service on the board of the Bayard Rustin Center for Social Justice
Great piece on Ruskin, and enjoyed Barbara’s list and loved them all! Happy New Year and continued success!
Gee Kerry this is wonderful & Barbara’s list - stupendous. I would opine that Garcia’s best book is Love in the time of Cholera, & reading Erdrich from the beginning - a phenom really - America’s best story teller currently. Tracks & The Last Report from Little No Horse are Tour de force’s.
Thank you!
Libby Atkins