One New York Life

In continuing my recent trend of finally getting around to books suggested by friends, occasional commenter and new mom Mazlynn suggested The Time Traveler’s Wife about a year ago and it kept getting bumped down the library list. In an unexpected twist, when I finally got it home, PLR saw it said “you’re reading that?”

“Yes,” I said. “[Mazlynn] suggested it. Why?”

“No reason, really. I’ve seen it on ‘you should read this’ lists in [a substantial list of girl magazines]. It’s just not something I would have thought you’d find.”

Uh-oh.

Spoiler bump here because the movie’s coming out soon.
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During my period of trying to read the entire Drizzt series, an ex-coworker recommended that I read A Game Of Thrones by George RR Martin to restore my sanity and faith in fantasy authors. What he didn’t mention was that the book was 800 pages long and was the first in a (planned) series of seven.

And here I thought I’d been actively avoiding gigantic series like the Wheel of Time.

It took me a really long time to get this book. I waited four months for it to come up on the library list. There were about 30 people waiting for 8 copies. Since books on waiting lists can’t be renewed, all of them come back late. When it finally arrived and I saw the epic size, it made more sense.

I’ll throw a spoiler bump here even though the book’s over 10 years old.

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My library queue is subdivided in to two lists — the PLR list and the TDL list. The PLR list is populated with Oprah-list books, chick-lit, and historic fiction. I usually only look at the books in passing but one of the blurbs on the back of The Story Of Edgar Sawtelle was from Stephen King. PLR didn’t have time for a 500-page monster since it came in the middle of tax season and the library doesn’t allow renewals for books on other people’s waiting lists. With the Stephen King endorsement, calling it one of the best books he’d ever read, and the fact she waited four months for it I thought someone should read it.

So, I don’t get to go literary geek on this blog very often — primarily because these columns take forever to write. I hate going through and vigorously looking for spelling mistakes and grammar gotchas. It took me almost three weeks to get happy with this post because I hate the idea of people finding this disregarding the entire content because I ended a sentence with a preposition… you know, because Latin turned out to be such a successful language. I even went so far as to have a friend do a proofread job for me. That, folks, is me being crazy — and this isn’t supposed to make me crazy.

I’ve also mostly avoided supposed “literary masterpieces” since leaving the major. Every snob world is exactly the same. The only difference is varying levels of disdain for people who don’t get it. In the literary world, the snooty disdain rivals film snobs. And, really, what literary snobs like is very predictable. First, the book has to be morose. Second, it has to contain at least 150 extra pages of descriptive language. Third, snobs who enjoy the book must tell people who don’t enjoy the book that they didn’t “get it” because that’s the only possible explanation for why the reader didn’t love the dripping brilliance. Fourth, it must be referred to as the “Great American Novel” in at least 38% of reviews, comments, and articles.

And now, the spoiler barrier. Bring a lunch, this is long.

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I think this book came to PLR via a co-worker. It’s not a genre normally on her reading list because it’s not 1) by a woman 2) about women 3) historic fiction or 4) Glamour. See No Evil by Robert Baer is an autobiographical account of an ex-CIA case officer writing about his time on the ground in the Middle East. The book is presented in its final draft form as it was presented to the CIA with the Agency’s redactions intact. It’s the source material on which 2005′s Syriana was based and is sold as a glimpse in to how the CIA operated in the 70s and 80s vs. how it currently operates. The publishing company certainly struck while the iron was hot, putting it out about 18 months after the September 11th attacks.

The lion’s share of this book deals with Baer’s own experience as a field agent in the CIA. He goes over how he recruited spies, how he met with them, and how he kept them safe. He takes the reader from the agency he joined — one that actively recruited agents with ties to the families of suicide bombers and terrorist leaders — to the agency we have today. An agency that doesn’t really believe in the gathering of intelligent via word-of-mouth, but instead with satellite imagery and computer networks. The problem, he points out, is that a satellite image can’t find a network of tunnels and a computer monitor can’t track not put on a network. Opponents of political correctness will have a field day with this book. The most egregious example being a passage where Baer describes taking over an informant contact from an agent who’s moved on. We find out the agent, on the US’s dime, spent all of her meetings trying to convince the informant to accept Jesus Christ as his lord and savior instead of debriefing him for information. When informed of this, the government tells Baer they can’t reprimand her because of the First Amendment.

The book takes a trip from interesting to disconcerting in final section. The final section deals mostly with the invasiveness of oil companies in the US Government. It tries to put in to context exactly how much money flows in to DC via oil companies and foreign governments and how it shapes policy. CIA operations that are stopped so they don’t tick off a royal family. Oil money donated to the Clinton campaign leading to suspended CIA investigations. Stuff that if read on the Internet would be dismissed as conspiracy theory nonsense. With a real, vetted source describing this stuff, it carries a frightening amount of weight.

Another somewhat disconcerting thing I took from the book — it turns out that federal government agencies really don’t get along together. It’s not something created by Hollywood for movie conflicts. This seems unbelievable. Why is the government divided in to the DEA, DOD, FBI, CIA, and DHS if none of them care to share information or work together? What’s the point? Why do we pay people in multiple agencies to work against each other? It’s a scary thought that the agencies tasked with preventing attacks and crime are actually as chaotic as 24 portrays them.

There is a quote from the book that has stayed with me. Baer is investigating a bombing in Saudi Arabia and his superior tells him he may have to stop because of Amoco’s interests in the region. Baer asks his superior: “Do you mean to tell me we have to stop an operation against a terrorist group — one perhaps responsible for killing five Americans in Saudi Arabia — to protect Amoco’s balance sheets?” That’s the theme from the last part of the book. Oil company wallets reach so deep in to Washington that it affects Washington’s ability to gather information. And that’s a very scary thing. And don’t think it starts and ends with the Bush family. The book touches on money trails that include the Clintons, Kennedys, and other deeply rooted in DC.

It would be easy to write this book off as a guy grinding an axe with an agency that passed him by. You could do that — and you might even be right — but what you find is that the agency probably shouldn’t have passed him by. He seems to simply want an agency with eyes on the ground gathering information from people. Not via coercion, but from the folks in these Middle Eastern countries who don’t really believe in blowing themselves up to make a point. Regardless of what fear-mongers would have you believe, they are out there.

Everyone should read this book. Seriously.

I got the tip to check out Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling via a review over on Bootleg’s site. And, much like with Watchmen, I’m going to take the easy way out and let Cam do the heavy lifting with his review.

One spot where I disagree with Cam’s review — Bret’s overbearing tone never gets to be too much for me. It seemed like he had his WWF reign in perspective. If it’s actually true that his merchandise was the top in international sales then I understand the creative control that he kept over his character. This fact (which I didn’t know until reading this book) really makes his whole “heel turn but only in America” storyline make way more sense then it did when it was happening. I do recall how the announcers continually framed him as a whiner for almost a year leading up to the turn. Now, a lot of it makes sense. I got played without even realizing it.

Now, that’s not to say Bret doesn’t come across insufferably full of himself. And, if you take a step back — how much of an asshole must Bret have been during his WWF days? No one in the history of wrestling books has ever had anything good to say about Shawn Michaels. Near as I can tell, everyone from management to locker room always hated Michaels — he refused to lose belts, was a pill-fiend, got beat up in bars for stealing girls, wrestled in drug hazes, retired for a year with a fake knee injury rather than put guys over, and just never put guys over in general. Shawn didn’t sell half the merchandise Bret did, was universally hated by most wrestling fans (even after his face turn) for being a pretty boy douche, and threw temper tantrums mid-match. And THIS was the guy Vince chose to back through the whole decade? How difficult must Bret have been to deal with? Did he just not suck up enough? Was he too over-bearing? How did Vince, within 2 years of giving this guy a 25-year contract, suddenly decide that he just couldn’t do it anymore? This is what fascinates me. And, as an aside, how much has these last five years after five years off saved Shawn Michaels’s legacy? If Shawn left forever after his match with Austin, Bret’s career would have probably been remembered as better. Instead, Shawn takes five years off and comes back when Hunter is at the height of power and is able to write his own ending. What did Bret do in a previous life? Rape nuns?

Bret isn’t exactly the world’s greatest writer, but he really does change the tone of the book properly from the beginning to end. In the beginning, when he’s talking about coming up through Stampede and traveling to Puerto Rico, his tone is hopeful. As he moves on through tragedy after tragedy and the business claims more and more lives, he becomes more bitter and beat down. His brother’s death, the reader can tell, killed wrestling for him.

As for the rest of his family — I need to read any book released by anyone in the Hart family or even tangentially related. The level of insanity in the Hart enclave is unspeakable. I had to put Diana Hart’s book on my list. Diana is such a horrible person that she conspired with the WWE to hurt Owen Hart’s wife Martha’s wrongful death suit against the WWF by stealing and faxing details of her team’s legal strategy to the WWE’s lawyers. Now, I work in the legal industry and I’m pretty sure that has to violate something or other. As for Bret’s wife… I don’t understand why he even married the woman, much less stayed with her. It comes across as he didn’t really want to get married and then never really enjoyed being married. It seemed like he found a person with an equal level of insane as the people in his own family.

If I had a complaint, I would have enjoyed a little more road stories and a little less about how everyone in the WWF locker room loved him. But then I might have missed out on the best Vince McMahon story — which was Bret outlining a plan for his match at Wrestlemania, Vince writing it down in a little book, and then returning a few days later to tell Bret about an awesome idea Vince had for Bret’s match at Wrestlemania. Vince rules.

All in all, one of the better wrestling books I’ve read since Foley 1 and a really good and honest biography overall.

In recent months, I’ve started trying to find out when my ancestors showed up in Upstate New York. My home town of Stillwater, NY is right on the Hudson River just north of Albany (not to be confused with the next town over, Mechanicville where I bought my townhouse. Just to the south in Waterford, the Champlain Canal (the canal that connected Lake Champlain, and thus Montreal, to New York City) empties in to the Erie Canal (the canal that connected the Great Lakes, and thus Chicago and Buffalo, to New York City). Around and to the north in Stillwater, Schuylerville, Bemis Heights, and Glens Falls is the site of the Battle of Saratoga. My town boasts the first and oldest continuously operating hydro-electric station in the country. At one point it housed the third largest railroad yard in the country, paper mills, and textile plants. These are a lot of words to say that it was, at one time, an important, vibrant part of the state. That time has gone — but at least it’s pretty easy to determine why people decided to settle there at some point.

Regardless, I’ve been able to track most of my ancestry except through my dad’s mother’s side. Her mother’s mother, mostly due to somewhat shoddy record keeping when womenfolk got married off, is something of a mystery. The more research I’ve done, the more I’ve realized that the jokes about me being related to everyone in my town are sketchily close to truth. My great-grandmother was one of about a dozen children. Further up the line on her mother’s side is a guy who had 17 sons… one of which had 19 sons. Further up the line on her father’s side is a family of 14 children, one of whom wound up owning most the land along the river where my high school is today.

While Googling some of these names, I found a mention of John Becker (one of the aforementioned children of gigantic families) in a book called The Hudson by Carl Carmer. Becker makes an appearance on one page as a little kid during the battles of Saratoga. And that’s how I came across this book.

I’ve had a hard time explaining this book to people. Near as I can tell, Carmer is somewhere in between a historian and a folklorist. The book seems to be written by taking historic records from people’s journals and letters, speaking to folks that remembered (or were told the story of) the events, and turning the whole thing in to a series of short stories outlining the history of society on the Hudson River. It starts with Indians traveling eastward because a prophecy bade them search out the “river that flows both ways” (the Hudson is affected by the tides so when it comes in, the water looks like it’s flowing up-river) to the “present day” 1930s when the book was written.

And one finds out rather quickly that the rich screwing the poor is a tradition as old as the state of New York. The original Dutch settlers took giant swaths of land via land grants. These people then parceled this land out to farmers. The manor lords would then charge the farmers rent for the right to farm this land. On top of a flat rent, they’d charge a portion of the farm’s profits and tithe of the farm’s goods. Since these manor lords owned almost all the river farmland, farmers generally had no choice. The manor lords are all names people from the state will recognize — their family names are on bridges, universities, towns and buildings all over the state. Van Rensselaer, Vanderbilt, Clinton, Fenimore, Beverwyck… all these names are of people who had the ability to throw people who fell behind on their tribute payments in to debtor prison. This ridiculous system lasted through the British take-over of the Dutch colonies and it was part of the reason used to spur river farmers in to rebellion against the British. Little did the farmers know that the feudal system would remain in place even after the Revolution was won.

If anything, it’s another bit of proof to my theory that everything in New York occurs through a complex series of favors dating back to the 1600s. All these recognizable names — men that are remembered as great philanthropists who helped found colleges and open houses for the arts — spent a solid portion of their lives demanding manor taxes from peasants and keeping this ridiculous system of laws in place using their considerable weight. This would all eventually lead to an insurrection against the state called the Tin Horn Rebellion, after which tenants were convicted of treason, which turned public opinion against the manor lords, which led to the election of a governor that abolished the manor system and pardoned those convicted in the Tin Horn Rebellion, which apparently then erased the history of the manor lords as asses. It’s pretty wicked, when you think about it — when people were upset with the government in the 1800s, mobs broke people out of prison who were unfairly imprisoned. People tarred and feathered tax collectors. The governor had the option of declaring a “state of rebellion.” Now… we bravely…. blog about stuff.

I do like that the book reads as fiction even though it is non-fiction. Reading 25 pages about a steamboat tragedy on the Hudson would be boring. Reading it written in the first person perspective from a guy on the boat is a little better. It also parcels out cool bits of knowledge wrapped up in prose. For instance, there are quite a few old houses in the northeast shaped like octagons. For a 40ish-year period in the late 1800, it was en vogue to build houses shaped like octagons. The original was built by 1840s version of Dr. Phil, a phrenologist named Fowler. Fowler’s Folly was built in Fishkill, NY — was considered one of the first purely American housing designs — and they started to pop up around the Northeast. One of these, built in 1858 by the aforementioned one of 17 sons who himself had 19 sons is in my town (pictured here on an 1889 map across the street from the church — those of you who’ve driven through Stillwater will recognize the fork as the one with the Mobil — and here from a news story in 2006. The “cute” carousel theme has, thankfully, disappeared). It was cool to get random upstate facts that I didn’t know.

My biggest complaint about the book was I expected it to deal more with river communities north of Albany. Instead, it dealt mostly with river communities south of Albany. It was much more about the fishing and steamboat industries in Hudson and Poughkeepsie than the northern communities. I suppose that whaling, fishing, and steamboat travel lends itself more to cute, folksy stories then do paper mills and industry, but more than two would have been nice.

I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone that wasn’t a local history nerd for Upstate New York, like myself. I’m interested in the topic and I had to renew it twice because it was slow going. If I give it credit for anything, it’s the further reading section which suggested many more books on more focused topics.