the candle burns down to its nub

Trumpocrasy by David Frum was the first book I read in February.  I had the privilege of hosting Frum at Politics and Prose, and before the event, I sat with him as he signed books in a thick red pen. I offered him a standard black, which he refused. "This book was written in blood!" he explained.

Frum is the man who coined the phrase "Axis of Evil" when he was George W's special adviser and speech writer. Trumpocrasy describes the chaos of Donald Trump's  administration, in which Frum sees reason to believe that "we are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered."

Unlike Michael Wolf's Fire and Fury, which is a gossipy book about an abhorrent and deeply unqualified man,  Frum's book focuses on Trump's policies - on his systematic unraveling of the Republic by degrading its national dialog; on how he has paralyzed the state by staffing his administration with self-seekers and incompetents; on how he has refused to fill key positions in the State Department... and so on. 

But yet we still dream, and Laura Wides Munoz The Making Of A Dream is about several dreamers coming of age, and the coming of age of a movement.  Also more hopeful and nuanced was Patrick Sharkey's Uneasy Peace about American cities, where the crime rate is lower than it's been for decades - but how if we look at the poorest segments in the population, we will see how over-policing has damaged and abandoned the most vulnerable segment of our urban populations.

 I had the opportunity to speak with both these authors at the bookstore, and found them intelligent and honest, well meaning, and yes, also pure somehow. It gave me hope for our times.

Last week I also met Vegas Tenold and read his book Everything You Love Will Burn. Tenold is a Norwegian socialist - a bald white guy who lives in Brooklyn, and he credits his Norwegian bald male whiteness with his success in infiltrating several alt right groups. He wants to understand what makes these people tick.

I cannot imagine anything more depressing than what he put himself through to write this book. That is, he devoted six years of weekends to hanging out with leaders of the KKK  and the likes of Matthew Heimbach, leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, whose text message on the morning of Trump's victory gave him a book title: "Wisconsin goes to Trump. Everything you love will burn! LOL smiley face."

It's the "LOL Smiley face" that  make this a message for our times. WTF!

February is cold and depressing and now it is over. Dogs are tracking mud into the house and the winds have been uncommonly high.  But I visited my wonderful family in  San Francisco and read  Barbarian Days by William Finnegan, about which I could certainly write more.  Except what I really want to write about is Embers by Sandor Marai, an extraordinary Hungarian novel only recently translated into English - and recommended to my book group by Alice, one of our most active members.

Embers was a high point of this month's reading to be sure. It's the story of memory and friendship and also the loss of friendship. Two old men meet for dinner in a Hungarian castle and look back on THE story that defined their lives - on their boyhood friendship and a relationship with a woman, on things unspoken, ruminated upon, deeply felt and experienced in echos. I understand that the literal translation of the original Hungarian title is "the candle burns down to its nub" - which while less poetic than "Embers" is an apt metaphor. Serious passion, even though relinquished, continues to burn into old age, extinguished only by death.

Things unspoken can still be articulated and I enjoy the peace and concentration of being back in the sculpture studio. I think I like myself better when I'm sculpting. Words don't always help, so I listen to the clay.