A poem for our times

For Kenneth and Miriam Patchen 

Al Young

Here 

I am cutting you 

these fresh healthy flowers 

from my sick bed 

where I toss with nickel illuminations. 

Time is a fever 

that burns in the pores 

consuming everything the mind creates. 

I send you 

this cool arrangement of dream blossoms 

these tender stems & shiny leaves 

while I shiver 

& detect in your own eyes 

of gentle remove 

a similar disgust with what has come 

to our fat cancerous land 

of the sensual circus 

& the disembodied broadcast wave, 

swallowing in sorrow 

to hear the old hatred 

& uncover selfishness 

rumbling back up from the bosoms of men 

out into the good open air. 

May these new flowers 

from the forest of my heart 

bring you a breath of the joy 

men must believe they are going to recover 

by moving again & again 

against one another. 

From The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press 2010)

Reading roundup

Happy New Year! 

Chain-Gang All-Stars
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

A thrilling read from start to finish, this near-future dystopia is Hunger Games for grown-ups, with plenty of racial justice politics thrown in. The plot, in which the masses of incarcerated are invited to participate in gladiatorial battles to the death for the slavering live and video mass audience, seems close enough to reality that it does not really shock. And presumably that is Adjei-Brenyah's point. The main characters are appealing and well-drawn, even if some of the parallel plots are underdeveloped. Occasional informational footnotes are well intended but seem gratuitous to me. 

I can't say I thought the novel was good enough to make the NYT Top 10 list, which it did, but then again I have not read much of the competition, so perhaps I should withhold judgment. The ending is satisfying and abrupt, and leaves enough hanging that a sequel seems inevitable... perhaps after a movie adaptation, which would probably be a blockbuster and would render its viewers as complicitous in the spectacle and the atrocity as the book does its readers.

Every Day is Mother's Day
Hilary Mantel

This was Mantel's first novel– a nasty piece of dark comedy, in the mode of Muriel Spark. Indeed, one of the main characters is a mentally challenged young woman named Muriel, perhaps in homage. Mantel was already very good, but not yet at the top of her game compared with triumphs like Fludd, let alone the Wolf Hall trilogy. Read this one when you are in the mood for some misanthropy.  

The New Animals
Pip Adam

Set in the fashion scene of Auckland, NZ, The New Animals meanders through a few hours in the lives of its not very interesting characters before taking a rather bizarre and unexpected turn in its last quarter. I'm not sure what to make of it, but I am pretty certain that I will not re-read it to figure it out. Your mileage may vary!

Would You Pay $1,800 for a Facial?

What makes you think I haven't, huh? 

Once I finally quit the New York Times, where will I turn?

Obviously to Dean Baker, who seems even more frustrated than I am at the nihilism of our "newspaper of record," which repeatedly feeds the (false) narratives that will help return fascist Trump to the White House. 

In keeping with its apparent commitment to ignore the data and insist homeownership is no longer possible, the New York Times ran yet another piece on how homeownership is becoming impossible for young people. The piece begins with the sad story of a young woman worried whether she and her spouse will ever be able to own a home....

It is unfortunate to hear about this nihilism. It would have been helpful to note that it does not correspond to the data. While homeownership rates have fallen back somewhat in the last few quarters, as a result of the sharp jump in mortgage rates, they are still above the pre-pandemic levels.

This is true across the board, including for young people. 

Progressivity

This article, based on a longer research paper, is interesting throughout. Working with an enormous database of distributional national accounts, the authors quantify the redistributive impacts of tax and transfer systems across countries. I repeat their key findings here: 

We establish five main findings:

1. Tax-and-transfer systems always reduce inequality, but with large variations.

2.About 90% of these variations are driven by transfers, while only 10% come from taxes.

3. Redistribution rises with development, but this is entirely due to transfers; tax progressivity is uncorrelated with per capita income.

4. Redistribution has increased in most world regions, except in Africa and Eastern Europe, where it has stagnated.

5. About 80% of variations in post-tax inequality are driven by differences in pre-tax inequality (predistribution), while 20% are driven by the direct effect of taxes and transfers (redistribution).

Some caveats are in order, some of which spring from somewhat arbitrary or at least contestable choices made in the classifications. First, they count "social insurance" payments such as social security as part of pre-tax incomes, and hence "predistribution." Second, conditional cash grants are counted as transfers; presumably this implies that "negative income tax" programs such as the earned income tax credit (EITC) are counted as part of the transfer system, not the tax system. And inevitably they have to make numerous simplifying assumptions about the incidence of taxes and transfers (who really pays?), etc.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway is the last: cross-country differences in the inequality of pre-tax income accounts for the lion's share of cross-country differences in post-tax inequality. Of course, predistribution includes lots of determinants, many of which are driven by government policies, such as educational systems. It would not seem to be a category error to think of educational equity as part of redistribution, rather than predistribution. 

Reading roundup

Slow couple of months for reading. 

Season of Migration to the North
Tayeb Salih

First published in 1966, this celebrated novel by the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih covers a range of topical themes, including most obviously colonialism, but also the (mis-)treatment of women in Sudanese and Western society. It is also rich and subtle in its descriptive language and its mysterious doppelgänger narrative. I can't compare it with the original Arabic, but judging from the results, Denys Johnson-Davies's translation is exquisite. Highly recommended.

The Eye of the Heron
Ursula K. LeGuin

Well, not really a heron, but that's what the human colonists have decided one of the creatures looks like on the planet they have colonized– some of them against their will. The story moves right along, and LeGuin covers many of her themes– gender, freedom, authoritarianism. The effectiveness and limits of non-violent collective action play a central role. The book also offers a pretty decent fictional illustration of the Domar serfdom model. 

Vagabonds
Hao Jingfang

Earth vs. Mars, ho hum. I stuck with this sci-fi snooze-fest far longer than I should have.

Art of the Chicken
Jacques Pépin 

I consider myself a pretty good cook, and others seem to agree. I learned some of what I know from observing Mom, who is a very good cook, but I would say Jacques Pépin deserves the most credit for my competence and confidence in the kitchen. His cooking shows always struck the right balance between taste, technique, intuition, quality ingredients, and charm. Speaking of charm, that would be the right term for Jacques's colorful paintings of chickens, which fill many of the pages of this book. Part memoir, part cookbook, the recipes are casual and assume that you have watched Jacques enough to know what to do with them. 

Fungi!

A good day yesterday for fungus in El Corte de Madera Creek Open Space Preserve... In order: shaggy manes, some kind of big agaricus, pumpernickel bagel on old-growth redwood, tafoni, grisette, blackening russula of some sort, ramaria (coral fungus), bolete, questionable stropharia, Amanita gemmata (?).

Felicity

Roughly concurrently with the run of the greatest TV show of all time, another show featured an "innocent" but determined young woman making her way in the world. We watched the pilot of Felicity last night, and I doubt I'll watch many more episodes. Dated, earnest, and not really my demographic. But judging from the pilot, the show was really pretty good. And Keri Russell was already amazing. You see the steeliness and intelligence that made her so good in The Americans. There is a lot going on behind that angular, elegant, pretty face– vulnerability, sure, but also arrogance, and suppressed anger.