Books: Let the Great World Spin

In the weeks and months after author Colum McCann’s father-in-law returned from his harrowing ordeal escaping one of the Twin Towers and finding his way north from the destruction and rubble of the 9/11 attacks, McCann was struck by the sheer volume of personal stories and larger narratives intertwined in the events immediately before, during and after that day.

As he looked for a way he could possibly isolate and do justice to any of those stories to help make sense of the attacks and destruction, it struck him that there were just as many stories unfolding years and decades beforehand that could build a larger, deeper, more profound context illustrating the interconnectedness of lives and how they together collectively become the past that keeps the world spinning ever forward.

Soon after the Twin Towers were completed in the early 1970s, an aerialist named Philippe Petit managed the impossible feat of stringing a tightrope between the tops of the buildings in the dead of night and walking across it one morning, capturing the attention and fascination of every New Yorker on the ground below him. McCann uses this true-life event as the cultural linchpin for anchoring the fictional characters he brings to life in and around 1974, the year of Petit’s iconic stunt.

Each chapter in Let the Great World Spin is a stand-alone short story introducing a character, a friendship, a family, or an event that may be big or small: the childhoods of two Irish brothers who eventually emigrate to America, a woman regretting that she let her daughter follow her into a life of prostitution, a wealthy housewife in a grief support group, two relapsed addicts involved in a catastrophic car accident.

Some stories interact directly. Some characters pass by each other tangentially. Almost every character makes an appearance on the day of Petit’s walk.

Two characters over time establish themselves as the metaphoric twin towers linking all these lives … and when they eventually fall, they bring the lives and stories into an even more intricate orbit.

New York City itself is both a setting and a character driving these narratives through its distinct neighborhoods, segregated socioeconomics and vibrant melting-pot identity. The New Yorkers McCann creates and the lives (and occasional deaths) he guides them through are as disparate as they are fundamentally relatable, and through them—and the moments in history they occupy—he keeps their (and by extension our) worlds living, breathing, halting, progressing, collapsing, and always spinning from the past through the present and toward our collective uncertain future.

World Mental Health Day

Today is World Mental Health Day, an annual global event started in 1992 at the World Federation of Mental Health to promote awareness, education, understanding and advocacy for those of us suffering from mental disorders, the caregivers we sometimes desperately rely on, and the larger populations in which we live and often struggle to navigate every day of our lives.

In this spirit of awareness, education, understanding and advocacy, I'm offering here a view from inside the bipolar volcano hurricane that I wrote years ago as I was emerging from a distinctively catastrophic episode:

Sometimes being bipolar means waking up with your head covered in a gray wool blanket in the middle of a hot drenching rain and the weight of it is practically crippling but you know you're not depressed and you know you're not confused and you know you can breathe and you know you're invested in fighting your way out so you treat every blink and every word and every thought as fuel that sparks the next blink and the next word and the next thought and even though you're foggy and slow and maybe even late you're MOVING and no matter how long it takes and how hard you have to work just to achieve your minimum for now you know that it's just for now and you'll sooner than later find your way out of that hot wet scratchy gray wool blanket and you'll know from hard-fought experience that you may not have the power to make the rain go away but you have the tenacity and the fortitude to outlast it and find your clarity and focus again in the warm, restorative sunlight it was trying to hide from you and even though you're never entirely sure you know exactly what that unclouded sunlight feels like you'll always get close enough to know what you're fighting for and how to be stronger and smarter and even more certain of your indestructibility the next time.

Books: Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874

I was hoping that Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 would be a breathless page-turner about the human dramas of conflagrant destruction, abject suffering and triumph over adversity peppered with tantalizing details about old Chicago buildings and neighborhoods that I recognize. Instead it’s a hyperwonkish examination of class inequality, political grandstanding, religious imperialism (particularly the emergence of “scientific” relief that favored distributing blankets, food and financial aid to the religious and the “worthy” newly homeless rich over assisting the chronically poor and the working class who were technically able to support themselves despite the fact that there was little to no work available in the months after the fire) and the simmering intolerance toward (particularly German) immigrants in the fire’s aftermath. 

It does draw some perennial parallels to Republicans' straw-man obsession with “big” government in its discussions of Chicago’s post-fire laws against rebuilding with wood (which made rebuilding almost financially impossible for low- and middle-class fire victims) and its curiously detailed recounting of virulently sabbatical opposition to German-immigrant beer gardens serving alcohol on Sundays, which temporarily drove the mostly single-issue People’s Party into power over the status-quo Law and Order party of native-born religious privilege. 

The book does frequently refer to one concept that will amuse modern Chicago residents, though: the idea that fire victims “fled the city” northward to the neighboring community of Lake View.

Today is the anniversary of the 1871 Chicago Fire, which historians are not opposed to believing actually could have been started by a cow kicking over a lantern in Mrs. O'Leary's barn—though, to be fair, there are many other credible, though less historically charming, theories as to how the fire started. 

During the 15 years I lived in Chicago, I saw it as my civic duty to read and learn as much as I could about my city and its history. I was excited to start reading this book when I found it, but—as the above review I'd initially posted about it says—it turned out to be more of a lengthy essay on the cultural and sociopolitical Zeitgeist that framed the fire than on the timeline and geography of the unfolding inferno and the human-level experience of surviving it, which I would have found far more meaningful.

In any case, upwards of 300 people died and thousands were left homeless and impoverished 154 years ago today and tomorrow. I mark this day on my calendar every year so I'm reminded to think about who they might have been and the horrors they most certainly endured. And I encourage you to a moment today in their memory to celebrate what you have while you still have it.

Art: Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring, James Ensor

At first glance, James Ensor's 1891 Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring is perhaps a silly take on Halloween imagery. Or an homage to the memento mori ("remember that you [have to] die") traditions of Medieval and Renaissance art that placed skeletons, skulls and other symbols of mortality among the world and activities of the living. Or a metaphor for the last gasps of Impressionism and its emphasis on color and light at the expense of representational accuracy.

While the latter probably has a grain of truth to it—Impressionism in Europe had largely been killed by the emotional distortions and manipulations of Expressionism by 1891 (think of Edvard Munch's 1893 The Scream)—the skeletons and the pickled herring in Ensor's painting were more along the lines of prescient precursors to the illogicalities of Surrealism and the unorthodox silliness of the Avant-Garde.

And they were totally about his pettiness.

Ensor actually painted Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring in response to negative reviews of his work. In his world of distortions, illogicalities and silliness, the art critics are the skeletons (one with a few wisps of hair on his otherwise balding head, the other with an ostentatious hat that's failing to make him look important) and Ensor is the pickled herring. And the whole idea is bizarre and probably lost to everyone to whom it hasn't been explained.

Today, though, Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring is a relatively obscure work of dark humor with light-hearted imagery that starts 21st Century viewers down the path toward the increasingly spooky, scary traditions of modern Halloween. So enjoy its silliness now. And be sure to lock your doors and hide your pickled herring before the end of October.