The Curmudeon's Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, ToughThinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life by Charles Murray

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal by Charles Murray about his book, The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead.  It intrigued me so I put the book on my Amazon wish list.  My parents gave it to me for my birthday.

This is a book that should be taught in every college and probably twelfth grade in high school.  Murray offers realism to today's entitled, sheltered youth.

It's a short book, I read it in a couple of sittings, and it's funny.  Murray is very witty.

But most importantly he's honest.  Here's what he has to say to the up and coming professionals who hope to get a job and promoted:

Most companies are run by white, middle-aged men (and women) and they are curmudgeons.  That means they are old fashioned and have old-fashioned values.  

So when you use the "F-word" in an  job interview (or twice in one young man's case), you're not going to get the job.

If you have visible tattoos or pierced ears (if you're a man), you're probably not going to get the job.

If you dress like a tramp (man or woman), you're not going to get the job.

If you do get the job and act as if menial work is beneath you, you roll your eyes at the boss or display no social skills (for instance, continue talking to friends in the hallway, oblivious of people trying to get past you), or dress as if you're going fishing, or dancing on bar tables, it's unlikely you'll be first choice to get the promotion, if it's ever offered to you.

Murray makes a caveat and says that none of this applies if you want to work in the entertainment industry or I.T. (Why I.T.?  I don't know.)

Here's the kicker and it's very important:  Because our contemporary American culture has made it taboo to even hint that what someone else is doing might be wrong, your curmudgeonly boss is never going to call you out on the behavior he despises.  But you're not going to get the job.  Or promoted.  You just won't know why.

That's why Murray has written this book.  So you can know beforehand what the person who holds that job in his hands is thinking.  Forewarned is forearmed.

Being a curmudgeon myself, I didn't need the above advice, it was just fun to read.  But Murray, who is a journalist, also devotes several chapters to writing skills.  As a writer, this part was especially helpful.

He also tells young people not to move so fast into the professional world right after college but rather get out of the sheltered bubble their parents have created for them and see the world.  This could mean joining the military, where a respect for authority-always a valuable trait-is instilled, or the peace corps, or travel and live some where that you have to learn another language and culture.

Finally, Murray finishes the book with an excellent chapter about religion.  He tells young people that he understands that the professors in college they came to respect and love were atheists.  His were, too.  But he doubts that any of them actually studied religion in depth and before they make opinions about something they should make sure they know what they are talking about.

Interestingly, Murray admits his own agnosticism has become shakier since his wife became a Quaker.

If you're a young person ready to go out and get that job.  Read this book.  If your a Curmudgeon like  me, read it to laugh and feel affirmed in your curmudgeonliness. There's a red squiggle under that last word so I must have invented it.  But it fits so it stays.

Maybe I'll write a book called The Art of Being Curmudgeonly.  I'm certainly qualified.

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson

A number of authors around the turn of the last century explored the complications of the race issue in America.  The question as to what constitutes race was not easily answered.  In Frederick Douglas' Up From Slavery,  he talks of a whole new race of people that were growing in number due to slave owners impregnating their slaves.  These children, Douglas contended, belonged to neither white nor black communities but were rejected by both.  He classified himself in this category because his own father, a slave owner, was white.

Nella Larsson, a prominent writer during the Harlem renaissance creates in her short story, Passing,  the tale a black woman who is light enough to be taken as white so decides to pass herself off as such.

    Even Mark Twain forced his readers to confront the problem in his novel, The Tragedy of Puddinhead Wilson.  In his story a slave girl has to care for both her own baby and that of her owner's because the man's wife died a week after she gave birth to their son.  The two baby boys are in fact half brothers, the man of the house having fathered them both.  We're given to understand that the slave, Roxana, is only about 1/32nd black herself so her son cannot be told apart from his half brother.  Roxana decides to switch the boys to give her son a chance at life and pretends the son born to her mistress is her own, and thus raises him as a slave.

I have always found these kind of stories fascinating and so it is with James Weldon Johnson's book, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.  In Johnson's story, which is a work of fiction in spite of the title,  the protagonist, who is never named-nor is anyone else in the book-recalls his upbringing in the north around the turn of the last century, after leaving the south while still a small boy.  He lives with only his mother, his father being at first unknown to him.

At first he doesn't see any difference between himself and his classmates at school.  He observes that there are black children at his school and they are looked down upon, even the ones that prove themselves exceptionally intelligent.  He feels pity for them, but looks down on them as well.

 One day his teacher asks all the white students to stand up to be counted.  He stands up as well.  The teacher tells him to sit back down, that she is only counting the white children.  This is the first time he is made to understand that he is not white.  He rushes home for an explanation.  His mother tearfully informs him that she was a servant in a prominent gentleman's house in Georgia and became pregnant by him.  Even though she is fair-complexioned, she is counted among the black race and so is he.

This alters the whole course of his life and how he views himself.  Even though his white friends continue to befriend him, his attitude changes towards the black students as he realizes he is, in fact, counted among them.

He chooses to join his own race and live among them.  He goes to Atlanta to go to college, but after losing all his money at a porter house, he moves to St. Augustine, Florida and gets work in a cigar making factory.  His time in the south allows him to make observations about the different classes of black people.  While he admits there is a criminal element in a certain segment of black society, he also observes that there is a respectable working class group and also a wealthy, highly educated community of black people as well.

The white people, according to him, refuse to acknowledge any sort of demographic among blacks, except the worst criminal class, a group that the other groups of blacks despise as well.

He makes a lot of money working in the cigar factory so he decides to take his savings and move to New York City.  There he becomes involved in the world of gambling and rag time music.  A world where white and black people mingle.  He eventually meets up with a white millionaire who takes him as a companion across Europe. 

 After spending a number of years in Europe he becomes overwhelmed with the desire to immerse himself in the black culture of the deep south so he leaves his friend and moves to Alabama.  Here he endeavors to preserve and celebrate black culture by collecting and publishing the stories, songs and poetry of the Southern black.

While living in Alabama, he witnesses a brutal lynching that resolves him to leave the south and his race forever.  He becomes determined to pass himself off as a white man for the remainder of his life.  He returns to the North where he meets and falls in love with a beautiful white woman.  She falls in love with him as well, but before he proposes he feels he must inform her of his actual race.  This takes a lot of courage on his part and when he finally confesses she breaks down and sobs.

This all seems very strange to us living a hundred years after the book was written.  I can't imagine living in a reality that learning that somebody was part 100th-something of a different race it would be such a trauma and impediment to my marrying them.

That is what I find to be valuable about this book.  It opens to us the attitudes towards the racial groups of a time past.  I have thought quite a bit about this, how someone can be so repulsed by someone for no other reason than the color of their skin.  Not even the color of his skin but the "race" he's supposedly from even though he's more white than black and his culture is for all practical purposes white as well.  It's easy to chalk it all up to how a person is raised and I know that has a lot to do with it, especially if one never questions the values they were imbued with while growing up.

But at the same time I know people who were raised in households that were as racist as the worst of them but did not allow themselves to be a product of their environment.  My father is one of them.  My dad was born and raised in the deep south but never in my entire life under his roof did I hear him utter a single racial slur.

Johnson originally published his book anonymously in 1912 for fear of public reaction.  Later in the 1920's at the height of the Harlem Renaissance his book was republished with his name.  

While written from a black person's point of view, his intended audience was white people.  No doubt he was trying to call attention to the absurdity of race distinction and the prejudices that produced it.

He is one of the founding fathers of the NAACP and wrote a number of poetry and songs, including God's Trombones and the Black national anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing.  Fluent in Spanish and French, he became the first African American, appointed by Theodore Roosevelt, to become a U.S. consulate to Venezuela and Nicaragua.

James Weldon Johnson

1871-1938

http://www.biography.com/people/james-weldon-johnson-9356013

http://www.jamesweldonjohnson.emory.edu/sub-james.htm

http://library.sc.edu/spcoll/amlit/johnson/johnson.html

http://www.theroot.com/views/america-forgot-james-weldon-johnson

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming by Rod Deher

Rod Deher grew up in St. Francisville, Louisiana along with his sister Ruthie.  Though they grew up in the same small, southern town, their lives turned out very differently.

  Ruthie was a daddy's girl who embraced the Southern culture, heritage and tradition of her family.  She was one hundred and ten percent Southern girl, part tomboy, part Southern Belle.  She loved to hunt and fish with her dad and was popular at school.  She was pretty, vivacious, outgoing and confident.  She became homecoming queen, like her mother, and married her high school sweet heart.

She and her husband, Mike, settled happily down to raise their three girls in the town they were raised in, Mike working at the local fire department, while Ruthie taught at the elementary school.

Rod  was different.  He thought deeply, he was philosophical, questioning everything.  Ruthie believed life was to be lived and enjoyed, not analyzed.  Rod's journey took him from rejecting his Methodist upbringing to becoming an atheist, to converting to Roman Catholicism before finally joining the Orthodox Church.  Ruthie never left her church, never thought much about it.  God was there, He took care of you and you prayed to Him.  There was nothing to question or think about.

A turning point for Rod came his freshman year in high school.  While on a class trip, the popular kids decided he was going to be their target.  The jocks cornered him in a hotel room and pinned him down, threatening to pull down his pants in front of the giggling cheerleaders.  He cried to the chaperones for help but they stepped over him and walked out of the room.  In the end they let him go without making good their threat but Rod returned from that trip realizing that he wasn't going to be accepted in their small town high school with it's cliques and bullying. Life became harsh for him and when a gifted and talented school opened up in another town he applied and was accepted.

Ruthie and his parents didn't understand why he would want to leave and viewed it as a rejection of their way of life and a betrayal to their family.  This barrier would exist as Rod graduated from college, became a journalist, and moved around the country to various metropolises such as New York, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C.

The division between Rod and Ruthie was especially palpable.  Ruthie made it clear she resented Rod with an openly hostile attitude towards him.  He found out later that she had even turned her children against him by bad mouthing him to them.  What she refused to make clear was why.  A true Southern Belle, she refused confrontation.  Sweep it under the carpet and pretend everything's just fine.  Except it wasn't and the gap between Ruthie and Rod widened.

This impasse might have carried on indefinitely if Ruthie hadn't come down with lung cancer.  By the time she finally went to an oncologist it was stage four and had spread to other parts of her body.  The doctors didn't give her more than a year to live but Ruthie didn't know it.  Her determination not to think about this as she did with anything unpleasant caused  her to refuse any information about the seriousness of her condition.  She said she wanted people to enjoy their time with her, not wait for her to die.

This is actually where the book starts to become interesting.  The first part more or less reads like a eulogy from someone trying to come to terms with someone they loved.  Rod starts to examine his reasons for leaving.  He tries to engage his sister in telling him why she had so much hostility against him.  She would never discuss it.  In the hospital he confronted her by saying if he had done anything to hurt her that he was sorry.  She brushed his words off with a wave of her hand and kissed him on the cheek.

Ruthie soon died, leaving Rod as much in the dark as ever.  His analytical nature forces him to turn the stones over and over.  On the one hand his sister was loving and caring.  Many students from poverty and minority backgrounds gave their testimony- how Ruthie believed in them and encouraged them, inspiring them to excel.  A couple of them left to become professionals in big cities in other parts of the country.

The entire town turned out for her funeral.  If there was a most popular girl in town, it was Ruthie.  This got Rod to thinking.  How many people would bother to turn up for his funeral?  The showering of love and support for his sister and family led him to the decision to move his family back to St. Francisville.

On his return he made some startling discoveries.  His dad was glad he had left.  In fact his father wished he had left when he was a young man.  It turns out Rod's paternal grandparents never accepted their daughter-in-law and treated both his father and his mother abominably.  He put up with it for years because he believed that you stayed with "your people" regardless of how cruel they were to you.

The other discovery was finding out the cause of Ruthie's anger toward him.  One of her close friends confided in him that it was actually his treatment of Ruthie when they were young that was never resolved.  Apparently he had been something of a bully to his sister, mercilessly teasing and harassing her.  It reached a point where she hit a wall and let it stay between her and her brother.

Too bad Ruthie didn't follow the Biblical mandate that if your brother has something against you, go and make it up with them before offering your gifts to God. (Matthew 5:22-24)  But Ruthie was good at not delving too deeply in anything.

Reading this book reminded me of all the Ruthie's I've known in my life.  It's almost as if they play a role.  Everything stays on the surface, no one is ever let inside.  It's a game of pretend that things are fine when they're not.  It's so destructive because no one is allowed to deal with issues that hurt and cause division.  Healing is never allowed to happen because no one is allowed to admit there's anything wrong.  And yet the hurt still comes out.  It's not as if Ruthie hid her resentment against her brother, she only refused to admit it was there.

I guess I find myself siding with Rod.  Of course he is the one telling the story and Ruthie isn't here to defend herself, but I also spend a lot of time thinking things over, questioning and arguing topics in my mind.  I don't understand how someone can be content to glide along the surface and never dive deeply into their life.

In the end Rod sees the pros and cons of both kinds of lifestyles.  People who stay home are surrounded by life time friends and family.  They always feel loved and are never alone.  Those who leave are subject to more isolation but they also experience the richness and variety of culture, people and places that can't be achieved when one never lives anywhere but one place. 

One choice offers a sense of belonging and familiarity, the other offers variety and an increased appreciation of life outside our own boxes.  One is narrow but the other can be lonely.  Especially if you're an outsider trying to break into the clique of one of those small towns.  I couldn't help thinking as Rod described his attraction to the family-like atmosphere of his home town that those family-like feelings don't always extend to people "not from 'round here."

I think Rod wrote this book not simply to memorialize his sister, but to work through his own journey and to find closure for his complicated relationship with his sister.

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is not an exciting read but it is a thought-provoking one, especially for those of us who have lived both the parochial and cosmopolitan life.  Or have had tempestuous relationships with family members.

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Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

 A carnival comes to town and two boys couldn't be more excited. They sneak out of bed in the middle of the night to watch the workers set everything up: the carousel, the house of mirrors, mazes...

 When the carnival opens, disturbing events transpire and it becomes apparent to the boys, William Holloway and Jim Nightshade, that Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town Illinois with a purpose more sinister than merely providing a week of innocent entertainment for the town's citizens.

When the carnival opens Jim and Will eagerly arrive at the grounds. They're the first in line to see the shows. But they soon realize that the shows are more costly than the price of the tickets.

The carousel is a wondrous device that can make a person older or younger depending on which way it turns. The House of Mirrors show people as they used to be, young, or as they yearn to be: beautiful. The Mazes draw a person in by their desires...The only problem with all of these adventures is that they give the adventurer exactly what they want. He or she then becomes imprisoned by the realization of their own fantasies, even sometimes dying for them.

Jim and Will also realize that it's not easy to escape Cooger or Dark even when they realize the dangers and try to get away. Dark is the tattooed man and his tattoos hold strange power over other people. They move and writhe, telling people's stories and sometimes determine the outcome.

Cooger is stranger yet because we can never truly understand what he is. He becomes old to entice Jim, who wants to leave his childhood behind, onto the Carousel.  He becomes young to tempt one of their teachers to enter the House of Mirrors.  He dies, but Dark tries to bring him back to life using the same method that was popular at the turn of the 19th century, with electrical chairs (also the inspiration for Mary Shelly's Frankenstein).

Jim and Will run away and hide, first in their homes, but as they realize they're being pursued by all sorts of creepy creatures, such as a blind witch in a hot air balloon who can sense their presence by clawing the air, they run to the library.  Most of the story happens at night which adds to the suspense.

In the library is Will's father. The library is Mr. Holloway's escape from his own fears and life-weariness. He spends many after hours there, reading. Will's father is old but experienced. He understands what is happening and, while striving to overcome his own weaknesses and secret desires, he helps the boys find the solution to overcoming the evil that is hunting them.

At first when reading Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, I wasn't sure what the author was trying to tell the reader. Was he sharing his worldview in metaphors? Or did he just want to create a story out of every boy's ( and girl's) dreams and nightmares?

After reading an essay by Bradbury in which he explains why he writes I now know the answer: Yes.

In the essay, Bradbury explains that all his stories are metaphors. He also describes his life as living one big fantasy. As a child he thrived off movies. By the time he was a teenager he had watched every silent film. By the time he was an adult he was watching thirteen to fifteen movies a week. His stories stem from an insatiable hunger to draw himself and others into fantastical worlds where he gets to make reality.

Bradbury is very much a humanist and the story's conclusion stems from a firm belief that, while acknowledging the existence of evil and human vulnerability, man does not need an outside source, such as God, to turn to. Man need only look inside himself to find an internal resistance to evil. 

  In his books, Bradbury reveals an almost prophetic perspicuity in understanding the dark side of human nature.  Yet he holds an unswerving faith in human goodness.  He fails to explain how an imperfect person can even know what is good without an outside Source providing a paradigm. Men aren't consistent or unified in their convictions concerning good and evil. Selfish desire can  have a corrupting influence on one's belief system.

Be that as it may, Something Wicked This Way Comes is a very enjoyable read. Bradbury's writing is fluid, poetical and rich in colorful imagery. He will always be one of my favorite writers.

I've never been to a haunted carnival such as Bradbury creates, but he certainly succeeds in making the reader feel as though he has.

Come to think of it, maybe I have in my dreams...      

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Other Bradbury reviews on the web site:

Farenheit 451

The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David McCullough

   

   David McCullough has written a brilliant chronicling of Americans who traveled to Paris in the 19^th century.  Before reading his book, I never realized how many famous Americans lived in Paris and how living there impacted their careers.

     In the 1830’s Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel Morse and John Fennimore Cooper kicked off the migration.  Call me ignorant, but I didn’t know that Morse was an artist.  He spent countless hours in the Louvre painting and receiving commissions stateside for his work.  Cooper wrote many of his most important novels there.  Holmes and many other American medical students studied medicine.

     The invention that Morse is most famous for, the telegraph and the code named after him, was conceived in Paris.  Later, P.T. Barnum and his famous Tom Thumb toured the city to great acclaim.  The pianist and composer Gottschalk spent many years performing in Paris.

     Other artists that came were John Singer Sargent, James McNeil Whistler and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.  Mary Cassatt, who became good friends with Edgar Degas, was the only American accepted into the Impressionist fold. 

     In addition to the artists, architects, and musicians, important politicians left their mark.  Elihu Washburne was the only international diplomat who stayed in Paris during the political upheaval and wars during the 1870’s.  He helped protect and provide for many native and foreign people caught in the crossfire. 

    We don’t just learn of the Americans’ accomplishments but of their lives:  how they spent their free time, the sort of friendships they made, their characters and personalities.

     McCullough does a meticulous job gathering notes, letters, and diaries.  His bibliography takes up almost a quarter of the book.  His writing is fluid and eloquent.  This is no dry recitation of facts but a vibrant, breathing, compilation of the different lives and events that shaped Paris and the Americans that lived there.  Reading The Greater Journey paints a vivid picture as rich and voluptuous as an oil painting by Cezanne.  One can see and experience a Paris of the past.  The only way anyone will be able to do so now.

    For anyone interested in history and how one culture is shaped by another, this book is highly recommended.

Further links:

Cleopatra: A Life

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