Augustus

Augustus, what do I want to say about you? The background about your family, where you came from, and the political climate in the first century BC are all wonderfully set up to explain how your rise was possible. That the portrait of you as a coddled mother’s-boy (that the folks over at Rome are apparently taking advantage of, I don’t have HBO, but that’s what I read on the internet) is maybe accurate but also incomplete because you are also steely and determined as hell to get what you want. That Livia, who will probably never be seen as anything other than evil because of history’s idea that powerful woman can’t be good — see Cleopatra, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Catherine the Great for three other examples — and because of her portrayal as a complete bitch in I, Claudius, was actually a good wife and counselor to you.

Basically, the book is a good history: it explains who Augustus is, his rise to power, his dependence on Julius Ceasar at the beginning, his war with Mark Anthony (and their political maneuvering to eventually fight each other make the current Iraq brouhaha look like peanuts), and what his life and family was like after he solidified his power. It gives enough detail to let you imagine what life was actually like, but never gets bogged down in it. Everyone comes across as real, not just as historical personas. Although he does have an annoying habit of fictionalizing a major event right at the start to draw you into the book — he did the same thing in Cicero. But that’s a small flaw in an otherwise excellent book.

Augustus: Recommended

Where I Was From

When I told you I was reading Where I Was From, I compared it to sitting around the kitchen table at my grandparents’ in Iowa, listening to stories. Only about California and someone else’s family. That feeling never went away. Not all of the stories about California are Joan Didion’s own family’s stories, but she tells them like they are.

What makes them sound that way? There’s an intimacy to it, no grand statements. There’s a plainness that somehow isn’t plain at all. Here’s a quote about people who migrated across the States to California:

Women who believed they could keep some token of their mother’s house (the rosewood chest, the flat silver) learned to jettison memory and keep moving. Sentiment, like grief and dissent, cost time… Independence Rock, west of Fort Laramie on the Sweetwater River, was so named because the traveler who had not reached that point by the Fourth of July, Independence Day, would not reach the Sierra Nevada before snow closed the passes.

She goes into great detail about what happened when people pushed on when they were too late, quoting the diaries of the people in the Donner party.

Ms Didion traces the history of California to the present day. She has wonderful stories about the state’s reliance on defense contracts, particularly aircraft companies like McDonnell-Douglas and Lockheed-Martin, and how that affects workers. She talks about how they’re able to buy houses and build communities as long as the federal government keeps awarding contracts to the big defense companies. But ultimately, they’re still blue-collar workers, and their skills may not transfer well to other positions when those contracts dry up.

It vaguely irks me that she calls them a “false ownership class,” like they shouldn’t have bought houses or nice things because they should have realized their positions were precarious because of those government contracts. But, I think, they were employed for twenty years. They had no reason to think those contracts were going anywhere…. I don’t know. It’s a hard problem and a small nitpick in the narrative.

The present day disappoints her. She laments that all of California is “becoming San Jose,” which, thanks. But I know what she means: she means that the small businesses and any local flavor are disappearing as everything gets homogenized. When we first walked into Alviso, it was a breath of fresh air because it didn’t look anything else like Silicon Valley: no chains, no advertising, not very many people, and it’s right on the Bay, so it’s gorgeous. Of course, it’s that way because it’s poor as hell*, so it hasn’t attracted developers. We’ve even been reluctant to tell people about it because we like it sparsely populated.

But does that mean that the people who do live there shouldn’t be allowed to make money? Sell their land? Develop it? The Good Old Days weren’t good for everyone. If you were that poor, would you want to stay that way? Probably not. She doesn’t examine that side of the argument; part of me thinks that if she still lived in California, she might. But she lives in New York now, and I suspect that changes her perspective.

Overall, I have to say that it’s worth reading, particularly if, like me, you’re both interested in California history and have no idea about it.

Where I Was From: Recommended

* Why, you ask, is it poor as hell if it’s on San Francisco Bay and beautiful? First, it’s part of a wetlands reclaimation project, so you can’t build on the waterfront. Second, it’s below the water level, and is kept dry via levies (the trail around SF Bay follows the tops of the levies). Third, there’s a dump nearby, so it doesn’t always smell as pretty as it looks.