biographies – Koba English

Scars of Sweet Paradise

One of my all-time favorite singers is Janis Joplin, and like any other esteemed member of The 27 Club there is no shortage of biographies on her. Out of the three in my possession, Alice Echols‘ Scars of Sweet Paradise is my favorite for being incredibly thorough and grounding Joplin’s career in the wider social context of the times. (That said, I have vague aspirations of one day reading Janis: Her Life and Music by Holly George-Warren.) I read it once in high school and felt compelled to revisit it now.

An interesting book to read once at age 17 and again at 37. Two different sides of the 27 club.

It’s a well researched and well documented account of Joplin’s life, with numerous quotes and insights from all kinds of people who knew her, either personally or professionally. I think part of the reason she became one of my all-time favorites was because Echols’ biography immediately revealed someone who went through trials and tribulations not dissimilar from my own: either too precocious or too out of step to connect with her peers, deeply sensitive, struggling to escape the black hole of beauty standards. There was a lot for a teenager in the early 2000s to recognize in teenager life 40-odd years ago. Plus ça change.

There is very little editorializing from Echols, who treads a reasonable middle ground between often polarized camps: Janis as queer icon, Janis as feminist, Janis as promoting, purveying or appropriating Black culture. There’s also enough history and context presented that anyone interested in the fifties and sixties as historical periods would find a lot of value in it (though Echols’ subsequent general history books, such as Shaky Ground or Daring to be Bad, might be an even better bet). Certainly not a must-read biography for the general public but for anyone with the interest, it’s fantastic.

Becoming Beauvoir

This was actually my second read-through of Becoming Beauvoir. I alluded to it, briefly, in a summary on my vacation reading in Falun from 2021 but it deserves a bit more than a one-sentence summary.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote voluminously about her own life and had already been profiled in several biographies by the time Kate Kirkpatrick sat down to work on Becoming Beauvoir. Is there anything else one more biography could add?

Actually, yes. Kirkpatrick was able to draw on a great deal of previously unpublished or untranslated documentation and correspondence to shed light on relationships and ideas that for whatever reason Beauvoir herself had been less than forthcoming about in her own writing. Kirkpatrick’s stated thesis at the beginning is to rebut what she considers to be ad feminem attacks against Beauvoir: criticisms that boil down to “you’re just an unhappy woman” and “you’re just Sartre’s lapdog.” Thus the focus is on leveraging Beauvoir’s early student diaries and correspondence to show that she was puzzling over the same philosophical issues as Sartre before they ever met, or how she influenced him in these matters. Kirkpatrick also uses later correspondence (some of which not available until 2018) to highlight Beauvoir’s philosophical and ideological criticisms of Sartre and, despite the closeness of their relationship, her erotic and intellectual independence from him.

Kirkpatrick also takes up Beauvoir’s relationships with Bianca Lamblin, Natalie Sorokin, and Olga Kosakiewicz, perhaps as a means of allowing the deceased Beauvoir to respond to the allegations from all three women, pointing out that Beauvoir’s own correspondence indicates that she felt remorse over her (and Sartre’s) treatment of them. It would also seem a pretty glaring omission, all things considered, to not address them. And here we land in one of Beauvoir’s favorite topics: ambiguity. Kirkpatrick doesn’t give much space to the allegations from Lamblin, Sorokin, and Kosakiewicz. Is it because this is a biography of Beauvoir, and not them? Is it an attempt to gloss over abuse? How should we read that editorial decision in tandem with the total lack of reference to Beauvoir’s connection to the “Affaire de Versailles”? Then, larger questions: How would we read these relationships if Beauvoir were a man? How much moral commentary and judgment should a biographer provide on their subject?

I don’t know. I find Beauvoir’s ideas and writing compelling, and I’ll continue to engage with her ideas and take the best of them with me. In other words:

Vacation Reading

Happy spooky season, everyone! I kicked things off by renting a cabin in Falun for two weeks, where I did a lot of walking (in cemeteries, no less), a lot of reading, and a lot of sweating it out in my own private sauna. I don’t have all of my photos of the walking uploaded and cleaned up yet, and there’s not much to be said about the sauna, but I can go ahead and talk about the reading. Some of these books might be worth their own post, but for now I’ll just stick to bite-sized thoughts.

Parable of the Sower

I watched Sarah Zed’s underwhelming video on YA dystopias a week before I left, so the whole trend of YA dystopias was on my mind as I read this one. Parable of the Sower was published in 1993, several years before our current glut of YA, but by industry genre standards it would be slotted as a YA dystopia if it were published today. And yet, it’s clearly a very different (and much better) beast than The Hunger Games or Divergent or whatever else tried to ride that wave. Is it fair to put Parable of the Sower in the same category as them? From a quality and content standpoint, I would say of course not. But from a book-selling standpoint, there is no difference. ~~Consumerism is a cancer.~~

The History of White People

Extremely illuminating reading. My father’s side of the family came to the US around the turn of the twentieth century from villages that are in the south of current-day Poland, but there is absolutely no family lore about what it was like moving here, or about life or family back in The Old Country, or anything like that. (Making sense of the immigration documents is also a trip, just because territory was a bit up in the air at that point in time.) Painter’s research obviously can’t fill in the gaps of my own family’s history, but it gave me a broad sense of the historical context of their arrival in America, and a rough idea of what kind of prejudice and problems they might have run up against—something I’d never really reflected on before.

Beyond my own personal takeaways from the book, the examination of the construction of “white” as a middle class signifier and its gradual expansion over the years is a valuable piece of scholarship for understanding American society as a whole. The only downside is that The History of White People is over a decade old now, and reading a discussion of race and whiteness in 2021 that ends in a discussion of Barack Obama’s presidency rather than Donald Trump’s feels a bit…unresolved. GoodReads indicates that Painter’s most recent book is from 2018, but it’s a memoir rather than any kind of scholarly work. Hopefully she’ll put out an updated edition of The History of White People at some point.

Shards of Honor

This was an Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club pick. I don’t think anyone really enjoyed it all that much? For me, at least, there was too much romance and not enough sci-fi. Internet rumor mill pegs it as Star Trek fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off, and I believe it.

Becoming Beauvoir

An absolutely outstanding new biography of Simone de Beauvoir drawing on previously unavailable or untranslated material.

The Cyberiad

One of my philosophy professors taught a popular and engaging philosophy of the mind course, or maybe a couple variations on the idea, and one of the texts for it was The Mind’s I, an anthology that included a story from The Cyberiad. My particular iteration of the class didn’t use that book, but I browsed through a friend’s copy out of curiosity. Long story short, one of the selections I always thought was part of The Cyberiad wasn’t actually, so my introduction to Stanislaw Lem was actually Solaris.

So now I’ve finally read The Cyberiad for real. The English edition is an incredible feat of translation; it struck me as I read one of the first stories in it that one of the textbooks or more scholarly anthologies I’d read over the years had highlighted exactly this story so now I’ll have to try to do a little detective work to see what, exactly, they had to say about it.

Un hiver à Majorque

Still the same book as it was the other two times I read it this year. Unlike my previous attempt with the original French, this time I looked up every (or almost every) word I didn’t know and couldn’t figure out from context.

Book Review: Whistler’s Mother: Portrait of an Extraordinary Life

I make the best effort I can to read at least one non-fiction book every month. I think there is always benefit and enjoyment to be had in learning about the world around you (or, in the case of history books, the world before you), and it also is an important part of maintaining my chops as an editor, something like unofficial continuing professional development.

The cover "Whistler's Mother: Portrait of an Extranordinary Life." The title is set within the famous "Whistler's Mother" painting, to the left of the sitting woman. — Image courtesy Yale University Press

Author: Daniel E. Sutherland & Georgia Toutziari

My GoodReads rating: 3 stars

Average GoodReads rating: 3.33

Language scaling: C2+

Summary: The biography of Anna McNeill Whistler, mother of the modernist painter James McNeill Whistler and the woman in the portrait Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1., known colloquially as “Whistler’s Mother.”

Recommended audience: Those interested in art history, nineteenth century American history, or feminist history.

In-depth thoughts: Biographies are some of my favorite non-fiction to read, as they can help contextualize what historical events and epochs would have meant for the day-to-day lives of more or less ordinary people. Whistler’s Mother does just that. Even though the focus is ever on Anna McNeill Whistler, Sutherland and Toutziari seamlessly tie her life into larger events happening around her and show how she was immediately affected: outbreaks of influenza and cholera; the American Civil War; the railroad boom that led to the Panic of 1873; the reign of Tsar Nicholas.

Like other, more historical non-fiction I’ve received from NetGalley (The Radium Girls)*, there is an abundance of names and people to remember. Anna came from a large family and maintained a large social network (via copious letter-writing); as a result there is a large cast of secondary characters, as it were, to keep track of. This can be hard going in ebook or Kindle form, at least for me. On the other hand, it is as exhaustive and detailed a biography of an individual as you could possibly want. Unsurprising, then, that it’s from a university press (in this case, Yale). The result is hardly light reading and relies heavily on excerpts and quotes from Anna’s own correspondence. This is part of the reason I would grade the language as highly as I do: this is correspondence that is 150 years old, give or take a decade.

But for anyone with a committed interest in the subjects I mentioned earlier (art history, 19th century American history, or either of the two through a feminist lens), it may be a read that is worth the work.

*in exchange for this review