Truman Capote - In Cold Blood

When this kicked off I thought it was way too glossy, All-American and colour-supplement feature essay-esque.  It seemed like every page was overfilled with Americana.  I thought it would be too saccharine to tolerate for long and stylistically too insubstantial to carry hundreds of pages.  Everything feels like a slightly overworked scene from a cliched movie.  In the end, even though neither the prose or the dialogue grew on me much, I enjoyed the book and read it quickly after starting.

Two things stood out to me as important.  First, the pace and construction of the narrative.  Secondly, the depth and breadth of the research carried out to place the crime in its context.  Capote is an expert sketcher of characters and scenes and piqued my interest in the idyllic family, the pair of crims and how the horrific murders were eventually traced back to them.  It’s true that by the end, I had had about enough of these sketches when he began to profile the various members of death row in Kansas in exactly the same manner.  At that stage it felt like watching too many episodes of a TV show about murderers.  However, rather than the quality of the individual pieces of prose, none of which were especially memorable to me, it was how they were assembled and the diversity of their perspectives that made the book good. Capote clearly did his research, or made up a lot of stuff, but the end effect is the same, he builds interest in the characters and how things happened the way they did.  Inevitably, the brutal murderers are somewhat humanised by their hardscrabble backgrounds.  Capote also seems to surmise that jail was more of a hindrance than a help to both men.  Nonetheless, they seem so ordinary, and the crime is so pointless, it’s almost impossible to believe things like this can happen regardless of the mitigating circumstances.  But in a world of billions of people, or about 2.5bn in 1950, all sorts of highly improbable things ended up happening.  I was left thinking that problems of inequality, both financial and emotional, can end in violent outcomes in a society that values money above everything else.  But when much of a person’s actions depend on their individual childhood experiences and relationships, as Capote strongly suggests, the problem seems gargantuan and almost impossible to influence in all but the most meagre ways.  

A question that played on my mind after reading the book was why people, myself included, enjoy this genre?  Do I want to learn about the killers so I can dismiss them as a deranged aberration?  Do I want to rationalise them and their actions so the crimes seem less inexplicable?  There’s a contradictory pull of familiarity and differentiation - ‘they’re just like me’ and ‘they’re nothing like me / how could they do that?’.  At some level, murders are interesting to humans because they’re reasonably rare and deal in stakes of life or death.  As with all disasters, there is a fascination with how things can go so badly wrong. Perhaps, we imagine we have known a rage that could be murderous or can imagine some provocation that might drive us there.  Even if that is the case, which is debatable, I feel very few people consider shooting people ‘in cold blood’.  Smith, who does the actual killing, knows it is wrong but seems incapable of feeling anything about it.  Seen from this angle, being a murderer seems like a rare medical condition.  An absence of empathy so gaping that you can’t feel anything about cutting a man’s throat or shooting a defenceless teenager in the face.  Capote explores how responsible the perpetrators should be held for their crimes and the morality of capital punishment in a precursory way.  It’s not the highlight of the book but it is an interesting subject worth introducing and considering beside the specific case of the murders.  The book does this often and well.  It asks a lot of questions without adopting a strong moral stance of its own.  In this sense, the book is bleak.  The book’s highlight for me was the pacing of the narrative and the mastery of the subject Capote has acquired.  Regardless of whether the story is true to life or embellished, Capote knows every aspect of it and in that way has created a little world in which he is an excellent master and guide.  It doesn’t matter much to me if some of the characters turn out to be actors.

I would definitely recommend this book even though the prose wasn’t that great.  The narrative is adroitly spun and I did care about some of the characters, especially the crims, even though Capote hams them all up quite heavily.  It pushes a lot of the right buttons in terms of intrigue.  In a way that makes you feel a bit guilty about it afterwards. 

 

Cathy Park Hong - Minor Feelings

I loved how acerbic the author was in describing her experiences and so-called ‘minor feelings’ about her racial identity. As a white reader, it can be easy to say, ‘oh, that’s no big deal’ or ‘you can’t get worked up about that’ and Hong does an excellent job of explaining how useless that approach is. A bit like telling a depressed person to cheer up. One thing was very clear from the book, Hong didn’t gain anything from ignoring these feelings and could only understand herself and her life by accepting their existence and validity. The book has the feeling of someone getting a lot off their chest.



Hong introduces the concept of ‘speaking nearby’ a subject in the book and it's a fitting description of this patchwork of reflections with no real narrative. Hong touches on her family history, her childhood, her reading, her writing or failure to write, speaking broken English and the art and biographies of her heroines in the process of speaking nearby the subject of race. Some of these passages were really brilliant and moving. For example, I loved her writing about the gruesome death of one of her favourite artists (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha) and whether the silence surrounding it was respectful or disrespectful. She handles the moral and philosophical niceties with delicacy and speaks with the authority of someone who has researched and considered the subject extensively and carefully. At the other end of the spectrum, adolescent tales about her psychotic friend stealing her poems at college don’t feel very nearby at all. Plus it feels kind of shitty to drag her mentally unstable former friend in public via her book; a fact she even acknowledges. Maybe it’s supposed to be warts and all but I still thought it was the worst part of the book.



I enjoyed Hong’s prose. It is pithy and easy to read while still being inventive and maintaining a distinctive voice. Of course, being the pedant that I am, there were some upsetting moments. I have no idea what a ‘pooched stomach’ is, a tummy that looks like a dog? The dictionary didn’t know either. I also couldn’t understand why the word ‘molecule’ is used about a sweet her father is eating - how could anyone eat anything in such invisible, microscopic quantities and why use such a technical term? She also used two of my least favourite phrases: 1) ‘thought experiment’ - it’s not an experiment because there’s no control and it means exactly the same as ‘think about’ but is pretentious and inaccurate 2) ‘late capitalism’ - should be ‘recent capitalism’ unless the date for the death of capitalism has been set and only Hong’s been told about it - sigh!



Hong is great at highlighting the white bias in media that I ordinarily wouldn’t be at all aware of. Why is everyone in a film like the remake of ‘Bladerunner’ white, including the enslaved children? However, when she started shredding ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ I did wonder if it was possible to be nostalgic about certain aspects of the more racist past without it being an overt endorsement of racism itself? A film about white kids at camp in New England during the 60s doesn’t seem racist to me just because it doesn’t have any people of colour in it. But maybe that’s just because I’m white and I like Wes Anderson. I was more interested when Hong notes that there are hardly any people of colour in any Wes Anderson films except for subservient subcontinental Indians. Her characterisation of him as a collector and the idea that collections are defined by what they leave out also fascinated me. But the specific criticism of ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ struck me as unfair.



Much as I love Hong’s anger and brutal critique of anyone and everything, sometimes I wondered if she’s at risk of fetishing her indignation. Sometimes I would read passages littered with the accusatory ‘you’ while thinking, ‘who is ‘you’ in this context?’. Probably, it’s the white man and I’m willfully misunderstanding it. But sometimes it feels like Hong likes nothing better than to get indignant with rage at a certain individual, situation, novel or film. Then again, sometimes her anger itself was revelatory. Like when her white friend starts crying after Hong gets racially abused on the subway. My natural reaction is to explain it away like it was a bad experience for everyone or perhaps her white friend is a sensitive and emotional person, who may have experienced traumas of their own that are being triggered by the violent shouting match. Either of those things could be true. But Hong’s anger makes her description lucid and conveys the visceral nature of her feelings. This was really helpful to me and taught me a lot. All told, there’s more good in Hong’s anger than bad. Her idea of refusing to be indebted really struck a chord with me. For all the talk of being grateful for life, it could also be said that life is rudely thrust upon a person and the idea of choosing to be born makes little sense to me as I am now. Childhood certainly mainly seems to be following orders for most of us. Who knows? In any case, Hong’s anger was a roaring furnace that powered the book and lit it up but sometimes it felt a bit out of control and threatened to consume everything else.



This was a well written book and taught me a lot about a subject I’m naturally ill-informed about. Parts of it were really wonderful but other bits felt boring and narcissistic.

Gino Segre - A Matter Of Degrees

 This was a lovely, engaging wee book that manages to make some arcane topics interesting and accessible to the lay reader.  It also gave me a fresh perspective on the world because I’ve never thought about it through such a rigidly temperature focussed lens and it was rewarding! Alongside distance and time, Segre sets up temperature as one of the fundamental modes of human measurement and gives the reader a whirlwind tour of a universe viewed through temperature.

This takes us all around and covers a fairly overwhelming list of topics and subjects including quantum physics, mammalian biology, the steam engine, deep sea diving and everything in between.  The author usually tries to focus on a personality and a discovery in order to break up the technical explanations and give some human interest to the text. But it is the ideas that he covers and the way he links them to philosophical questions about the history and future of humanity and the earth that made the book so interesting for me.  Indeed, even though some of the character sketches and potted histories are really good, there are too many of them and the format is too familiar for one to really stand out.  There is even the odd dud like the story about Einstein’s fridge design, which was curious, but felt off topic.  There were other sections where I wanted a stronger connection to the central theme and a couple where he lost me completely!  But, on the whole, the author’s passion for the subject and his gift for explaining its intricacies make it an enjoyable read.  The sections about photons, neutrinos, thermal vents on the ocean floor, the impact of asteroids, planetary movement, the earth’s temperature history and climate change were all very memorable and excellently explained.  Probably my favourite was a section on how life might have survived a global ice age deep under the sea where life exists using sulphides from thermal vents.

The book is very broad and introductory and sometimes it felt like the scope had been stretched too far or the material was too varied.  On the other hand, it introduced a lot of very interesting topics to me and gave plenty of ideas for further reading so it’s easy to forgive the odd section that rambles or tends towards the tangential.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable read, similar to ‘Stuff Matters’ by Mark Miodownik but replacing material science with temperature focussed physics!  Both gave me lots of new perspectives, probably partly because my scientific knowledge is shockingly poor, and had the feel of a specialist obsessive assessing a huge breadth of subjects through the narrower lens of their expertise.  Also ordered ‘The First Three Minutes’ by Steven Weinberg because of this book.