Issue 8 | 5 Remarkable Passages from 'Gilead'.
Young the Giant, Lauren Groff, more smoked pork, and more.
Good evening. And welcome to December, the beginning of the end.
Here are five things I’ve been doing lately:
Celebrating Gilead;
Listening to Young the Giant;
Reviewing Robert Shiller;
Smoking Boston butt;
Reading Lauren Groff, Jill Lepore, and more.
1. Here are 5 remarkable passages from Gilead.
I wrote a while back, if you remember, that I was reading Gilead. Since I finished it, I’ve been unable and unwilling to stop thinking about it. I imagine I won’t for a while. I returned my copy to the shelf with a staccato of turned-down corners and waves of underlines. The story John Ames tells his son, about his life and hopes, gifts readers with hundreds of remarkable lines and passages. Here are five, in no particular order or priority, that stuck out to me.
To me it seems rather Christlike to be as unadorned as this place is, as little regarded.
…
It’s strange how you never quite get used to the world at night. I have seen moonlight strong enough to cast shadows any number of times. And the wind is the same wind, rustling the same leaves, night or day. When I was a young boy I used to get up before every dawn of the world to fetch water and firewood. It was a very different life then. I remember walking out into the dark and feeling as if the dark were a great, cool sea and the houses and the sheds and the woods were all adrift in it, just about to ease off their moorings. I always felt like an intruder then, and I still do, as if the darkness had a claim on everything, one that I violated just by stepping out my door. This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend. If there was ever a chance, it has passed. Strange to say, I feel a little that way about myself.
…
When I’m up here in my study with the radio on and some old book in my hands and it’s nighttime and the wind blows and the house creaks, I forget where I am, and it’s as though I’m back in hard times for a minute or two, and there’s a sweetness in the experience which I don’t understand. But that only enhances the value of it.
…
When I was a child I actually believed that the purpose of steeples was to attract lightning. I thought they must be meant to protect all the other houses and buildings, and that seemed very gallant to me.
…
Why do I love the thought of you old? That first twinge of arthritis in your knee is a thing I imagine with all the tenderness I felt when you showed me your loose tooth. Be diligent in your prayers, old man. I hope you will have seen more of the world than I ever got around to seeing—only myself to blame. And I hope you will have read some of my books. And God bless your eyes, and your hearing also, and of course your heart. I wish I could help you carry the weight of many years. But the Lord will have that fatherly satisfaction.
If you’re making your 2021 reading list, I can’t recommend Gilead highly enough.
2. It’s the anniversary of ‘Aaron rock.’ Take a look.
A buddy of mine bought us access to Young the Giant’s 10-year anniversary show, a streaming performance from the L.A. studio where the guys recorded their eponymous album. This video of “Guns Out” is from that show.
If you know me well, you know that Young the Giant is, like, my band. I’ve seen them on each of their tours — including a fortuitous first date at the Tabernacle in Atlanta with a girl who became my wife. I’ve written about their third album. I regularly sing “Cough Syrup” to my daughters at bedtime. At one of my old jobs, YTG got labeled “Aaron rock.”
They also released a remastered version of that first album.
3. What do facts have to do with decisions? Not much.
A few months ago, I wrote a little review of Robert Shiller’s Narrative Economics, which released in paperback this fall. I don’t think I’ve shared it in this newsletter, and it seems pertinent to several recurring notes in our society right now. Here’s an excerpt of my review:
We hear the same financial advice over and over. If you’re like me, you probably don’t think too much about the truthfulness of the advice.
We’re not alone. In his new book, Yale University economics professor Robert J. Shiller argues just that. The book, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events, suggests that a lack of attention to the way stories shape economies explains why economic prediction offers middling results — often with drastic effects on the people who comprise an economy.
Basically, Shiller argues that viral storylines, true or false, outlive and outreach even the best economic models. And if you fail to appreciate how these narratives shape economies, you fail to understand economics. That’s narrative economics.
I’m sure you can see how this phenomenon plays out in other areas of life.
4. And now, more words than you need about smoked pork.
I must apologize. Last month I mentioned that I planned to smoke a pork shoulder, a Boston butt, for Thanksgiving. But I only made mention and pasted it to the front of a snide comment about turkey. Some of you asked for more, so here’s more:
As traditions tend to do, ours started with no romance. Some 15 or 20 years ago, my uncle, my mom’s brother-in-law, got a smoker and started making pork for different family gatherings. I’m sure you can guess it took only a few bites for us — parents, cousins, siblings, aunts and uncles, friends — to recognize the pork’s superiority to turkey. And because it’s a little different, it’s a little more fun.
So as years passed, we kept adding smoked shoulder, pulled or chopped, to our holiday menus. Always at Thanksgiving. The bird stayed, but mainly for decoration. Other dishes came and went, too, but the Boston butt took a place reserved for classics. Greenbean casserole. Cranberry sauce. Pies. And, for us, smoked pork.
More years passed and the family dispersed. We added spouses, graciously, but you know how in-laws complicate holiday schedules. One-by-one, we moved away and apart. Children were born. The gatherings shrunk and went mobile, zig-zagging from Jacksonville to Louisville to Chicago to Orlando and so on. More children arrived, almost 20 by now. Some marriages didn’t last. One of us, my uncle’s son, died. And in the addition of cross-country travel and scrunched time, we kind of forgot about the barbecue.
When Hannah and I married, we decided to host Thanksgiving, and I set out to learn how to smoke a Boston butt. You have to start early if you’re planning a mid-day meal. That means I prep the meat with mustard and a dry rub about 24 hours ahead of cooking time, then start smoking a good 15 hours before we plan to eat it. The night before Thanksgiving, I get up every two or three hours to check the temperature and make adjustments. To love on it, as my uncle says.
Now I make a Boston butt each year for my own family and for the people who gather with us. My children only know of Thanksgivings featuring a platter of smokey pork.
The curious part is that I’m not necessarily a barbecue person. Not a big fan, at least. Barbecue in my world simply exists and sometimes I eat it. Like cobb salads or granola bars. I enjoy cooking it well enough, but I love seeing it on the table.
It nods to the weirdness of North Florida, a coastal place more in the flavor of South Georgia than South Florida. It evokes Thanksgivings past when the world was smaller and the gatherings bigger. It reminds me of my late cousin, Thomas. Chopped pork tastes better than turkey, no doubt. And it’d probably be worth the early hours just for the taste. It’s worth it for other reasons, too.
5. Here’s (some of) what I’ve been reading.
Fates and Furies. This one is long overdue, I know. I thought Lauren Groff’s Florida was the book of 2018. It was my book of 2018, anyway. Her command of my home state, of the flow and texture of the normal places in Florida, washes immediately and intimately over anyone who has lived in the state. I’d been passively looking for Fates since then, and I finally found it at a used bookstore last month.
These Truths. Here’s my pre-New Year’s resolution resolution. I’m reading this 960-page history of the United States by the end of 2020. These Truths reads engagingly, more than I expected. Sure, the material is interesting on its own, but it’s also familiar, which makes for difficult writing. Still, I’ve got centuries to go before December 31.
“The Wild, Rangy, Unclassifiable Delights of Joy Williams’s Fiction.” I mentioned A.O. Scott’s series of essays about American writers a while back. His third essay appeared last Sunday, you probably saw, and it’s about another Floridian writer. Joy Williams. It’s worth reading for the threads Scott tugs from her work. For example, this sentence (which also shows something of Scott’s own skill):
You can place her books on a shelf alongside, say, Raymond Carver or Karen Russell, Lauren Groff or Harry Crews, Kate Chopin or Nathaniel Hawthorne, and your ideas about them will change as tendrils of affinity snake from Williams’s pages into theirs.
Merry Christmas. I’ll see y’all in 2021.