Feldman's Faves: July 24, 2023

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

It was great being away but I am also very happy to be back and to see all of you.

Too much has happened in the world to recap but I will say, I am becoming a little obsessed with the upcoming UFC cage match between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and am especially keen to see Musk’s patented “walrus move” in action – I’m not sure the word “ultimate” should apply here but what do I know.

Just a reminder for everyone to join today’s Zoom call with Ken at 11:30 am. It will be short but it is important.

No theme this week – just topics of interest.

DEMON COPPERHEAD By: Barbara Kingsolver – The Pulitzer Prize Committee was bang on when they awarded Barbara Kingsolver the award last year for Demon Copperhead. One of the best books I have ever read and by far my favourite of the year so far. In Demon Copperhead, Kingsolver retells the classic Dickens novel, David Copperfield, in modern day times in the poorest of poor parts of the USA, Appalachia country. As what seems to be common theme these days, this novel takes on the devastating impact that the opioid crisis has had on America, especially in its poorest parts. Demon is the hero and goes through absolute hell – losing both parents (one to drugs), abusive foster care situations and his own addiction. But along the way we discover that he has some real talents that help him survive – his art, his football talent (until he gets hurt) and his ability to survive. Many of his friends and family members do not – but through each hardship Demon comes out stronger. Kingslover has done an incredible job in creating some truly original characters who the reader really gets to know deeply. As one reviewer notes, “It’s a brave writer who takes on a retelling of Dickens, and of David Copperfield, the most personal of his novels, at that. And yet the American author Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead –which transposes this very English, quasi-autobiographical Bildungsroman to her own home territory of Appalachia – feels in many ways like the book she was born to write. The idealism and concern with social justice that are characteristic of Kingsolver’s worldview find their natural counterpart in Dickens’s impassioned social criticism. While the task of modernising his novel is complicated by the fact that mores have shifted so radically since the mid-19th century – “immorality”, AKA extramarital sex? Who cares? – the ferocious critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children is as pertinent as ever.

Kingsolver’s hero Damon Fields, known as Demon and nicknamed Copperhead for his red hair, is born to a drug-using teenage single mother in a trailer in Lee County, Virginia. Even in this deprived neighbourhood they stand out by being almost destitute, living between a coal camp “and a settlement people call Right Poor”. Since his mother is in and out of rehab, Demon is partly raised by the sprawling, warm-hearted Peggot clan. It’s all there in Dickens: the weak, infantile mother, ripe for abuse; the dead father and the disciplinarian boyfriend turned merciless stepfather; the bad odds against which no child stands a chance – and also the outsiders, some loving and others less so, who offer only a limited form of help. Dickens would have agreed wholeheartedly with Demon’s verdict that “a kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing”. If you’re familiar with David Copperfield, then the arc of Demon Copperhead will hold few surprises. Demon becomes a casualty of the “monster-truck mud rally of child services”: case workers who don’t read his file; foster parents who are only in it for the security cheque. Where David is packed off to gloomy Salem House, run by the sadistic Mr Creakle, Demon is quite literally farmed out to “this big old gray-looking house, like Amityville”, owned by a tobacco farmer called Crickson. While there he befriends two other boys, an unadulteratedly Dickensian Tommy Waddles – complete with his prototype’s habit of sketching skeletons – and the charismatic, pill-popping school quarterback Sterling Ford, known as Fast Forward for his prowess on the field. With his “pharm parties” and status as football aristocracy, Sterling is a seductive recasting of the poisonous “gentleman” by birth, James Steerforth.

After enduring being fostered by the pathologically insolvent McCobbs, Demon finds a home with Coach Winfield and his tomboy daughter Agnes, who goes by “Angus”. Under Winfield’s tutelage he becomes a rising school football star – until an injury nudges his recreational drug habit into full-blown opioid addiction. David’s struggle to find an emotional balance and a purpose in life becomes Demon’s battle to achieve sobriety and to transcend the failure of those around him “to see the worth of boys like me, beyond what work can be wrung out of us by a week’s end. Farm field, battlefield, football field.”

Kingsolver knows, as Demon says, that “a good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it”, and a large part of the pleasure lies in seeing what she does with her source material. As a narrator, Demon is every bit as likable and nuanced as David, and the humour and pathos of his voice are enhanced by a slangy southern spin. Elsewhere the update is less successful. Dickens’s Micawbers are feckless but mean well; Kingsolver’s McCobbs are merely exploitative. In an interlude that’s short on subtlety, they make Demon sleep in their laundry-cum-kennel, put him to work on a rubbish dump, even steal his wages. But Kingsolver’s real masterstroke is to draw a parallel between the “inborn power of attraction” that socially superior but toxic people like Steerforth have for David, and the quick fix that pills seem to offer Demon and almost everyone else in his dead-end world, including his waif-like girlfriend and fellow addict Dori and Mrs. Peggot’s granddaughter Emmy, who falls for Fast Forward’s charm. In David Copperfield, Agnes Wickfield – David’s “good angel” and second wife – is eminently sober, a word that has an entirely different connotation here. “Angus” Winfield not only has sobriety in the modern sense (she’s dead set against drugs of any kind), but also possesses the human qualities that the angelic Agnes singularly lacks. “There’s much to be said,” muses Damon, “for lying around with a person on beanbags, firing popcorn penalties at each other for offside fart violations.” Take that, Victorian Angel in the House. Angus is a living and appealing alternative, farts and all, to the Doris and Emmys in a way that Dickens’s Agnes never quite manages to be. David Copperfield wonders “whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life”. Demon Copperhead poses a different question: what is heroism, anyway? When you’re a child born into a life without choices, this powerful reworking suggests, being a hero sometimes consists simply of surviving against the odds.” Demon Copperhead is the book that I think you should all read. It is a classic story adopted to modern times written in a pitch perfect manner with characters that eat at your soul. Please consider adding it to your summer reading list. Here is a great review from the NYT Book Review - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/16/books/review/barbara-kingsolver-demon-copperhead.html

TED Talks Daily - The next global superpower isn't who you think | Ian Bremmer – When I was a young pup studying Political Science at McGill I remember learning that we had reached the ‘end of history” in that the Communist Empire had fallen and lost to the idea and ideals (and the power) of the US-led liberal democracy model and that the world had come to the final decision on how states ought be governed. This political framework was coupled with the view that globalization and economic interdependence was the way toward a world of perpetual peace. Well, things have changed since a little bit since then. The shift away from a unipolar (US led) world, open markets and a movement to universal democracy has become increasingly evident over time. In this PODCAST, brilliant thinker, Ian Bremmer describes the new world order and argues that the state power world in which we have all grown accustomed to is being challenged on many levels and most profoundly by the global digital powers. Bremmer argues that the challenge for power in the now and in the future is not based on traditional forms of power, but rather on who masters the digital world (and not only among states but as between the large tech firms and states). A very interesting and unexpected future indeed. Here is an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “ Who runs the world? Political scientist Ian Bremmer argues it's not as simple as it used to be. With some eye-opening questions about the nature of leadership, he asks us to consider the impact of the evolving global order and our choices as participants in the future of democracy.” https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ted-talks-daily/id160904630?i=1000617033242

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon