Tuesday Evening at McNally Robinson: Damon Linker & "The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege"

Here is the post from Richard Grayson's MySpace blog for Thursday, September 6, 2007:

On Tuesday evening at 7 p.m., I was one of about forty people in the audience at the wonderful Manhattan McNally Robinson bookstore to listen to Damon Linker, author of The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege. It was part of their (new?) First Tuesday series, featuring authors of books about contemporary politics, which presumably will run until we vote for a new President on the first Tuesday of November 2008.

The crowd was considerably older than at many of the readings I've attended at McNally Robinson, most recently a really nice evening celebrating the second issue of the literary magazine The New York Tyrant a few weeks ago. (Unfortunately, I had to leave early, after watching a lot of young people eat cheese and wine and and listening to a haunting story, "The Ex-Father," read by the amazing fiction writer Brian Evenson.)

On Tuesday night, from where I sat in the back of the crowd, I could actually see a lot of gray heads. Anyway, Damon was fascinating as he discussed the thrust of his book, a study of the mostly Catholic theologians and ideologues who have provided much of the intellectual ammunition for the dominant religious right wing of the Republican party, who seemed to reach their zenith with the re-election of President Bush in 2004. (Recall how all the post-victory pundits mentioned "moral values.")

Damon began his talk with anecdote mentioning President Kennedy's address to the nation in October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, a time when nuclear war seemed possible and those of us in seventh grade at Meyer Levin Junior High in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, would say to each other at the end of every school day, "See you tomorrow -- if there is one." Even in that moment, JFK ended his speech simply: "Thank you and good night."

Damon contrasted that with President Bush's first address on the Friday after 9/11 during similar time of national crisis. Bush spoke not from the Oval Office as Kennedy did, but from the National Cathedral, and frequently invoked God, quoted St. Paul and other sections of the Bible and of course ended his speech with now seemingly obligatory closing line of Presidential TV talk: "God bless America."

Damon's book traces the changes as America went from a largely secular political culture to one infused with religion, though his work focuses on the ideas rather than the pure politics mastered by people like Karl Rove, who used the evangelical vote to win elections.

In particular, Damon looks at four conservative Catholic intellectuals, including his boss at the magazine First Things, where Damon worked for a number of years following a stint as a speechwriter for Mayor Giuliani. (He was forced to leave following an outcry caused by an article in which he spoke of wanting to be an active father to his newborn son, a position which the magazine's readers and staff felt went against the "Christian" notions of the rigid patriarchy of the "traditional" family.)

Damon's boss at the magazine was Father Richard John Neuhaus, who along with Michael Novak and other Catholic intellectuals, have largely provided the intellectual firepower behind the mostly Protestant evangelical right.

Interestingly, back in the early 1970s -- either 1970 or 1972 -- I worked for the very same guy. Back then he was Dick Neuhaus, a liberal Democrat, not a Roman Catholic priest but a Protestant minister to a mostly poor congregation here in Brooklyn near the neighborhood where I now live.

Neuhaus ran as a peace candidate against the longtime incumbent Congressman, John Rooney, a hawkish supporter of the Vietnam war. From his campaign headquarters in Brooklyn Heights, I'd fan out with other volunteers -- mostly college kids, old New York socialist types and liberal West Side young mothers -- to leaflet and canvas voters at the projects here in Williamsburg and in Bushwick. Neuhaus lost the primary.

Damon says that Neuhaus always wanted to change politics through religion, and when he failed to turn it more liberal -- like a number of those hungry for power -- he turned authoritarian, right-wing and ultra-conservative. Neuhaus has had many secret meetings with President Bush at the White House and apparently loves his grip on power.

I remember him as a slim, almost shy, idealistic young pastor with a passion for social justice. It's scary how some people can change.

Anyway, I can't wait to read The Theocons. Damon's answers to questions from the audience on Tuesday night were as interesting as his talk. He said the man we really have to be afraid of, one who could best continue and extend the religious right's hold on the White House is the affable former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who hasn't yet been able to get to the first tier of GOP presidential candidates.

Future talks in McNally Robinson's First Tuesday series look similarly interesting. Stay tuned.

Monday Night in Soho: Alison Rogers & "Diary of a Real Estate Rookie" at McNally Robinson

This report by Richard Grayson first appeared on Jeff Bryant's blog Syntax of Things (go there for the original links) on Monday, July 23, 2007:

New York is one of the most expensive cities to live in, but its many bookstores provide free entertainment nearly every night for those residents on a budget. Most bookstore readings and appearances begin between 6:30 and 7:30 p.m., and oldsters can get home in time to be in bed before The 10 O'Clock News ("Do you know where your ability to stay up late is?") and others can get out in time for real fun, when the night is still as young as they are -- just not so drugged up.

With the mammoth Harry Potter for Grownups party of Friday night now a memory, this evening at 7 p.m. Soho's McNally Robinson store featured an appearance by Alison Rogers, author of Diary of a Real Estate Rookie: My Year of Flipping, Selling, and Rebuilding and What I Learned (The Hard Way).

The book is based on the online column for the website InmanNews about her new career as a real estate agent that Rogers, the founder of the New York Post's real estate section, began after she "stormed off in a huff" after 20 years of being treated like, well, like someone who works for the News Corporation's crazed management. (Her book's dedication is "To Rupert Murdoch, whose refusal to pay me a decent wage launched me on the adventure of a lifetime.”)

So I guess you could call Diary of a Real Estate Rookie a "blook" -- except it seems more like a memoir with sidebars (i.e., when looking at apartments to buy, bring along a heavy book like Ulysses so you can drop it on the floor at an opportune moment and see how many howling dogs and crying babies you can flush out).

No doubt many in the crowd were there just for the Q & A to find out where the cheap condos are (try Little Rock) but some of us came for the pleasures of Rogers' prose:

I write weekly dispatches about my real estate adventures, which I had pitched as "trading in my Jimmy Choos for a hard hat," and this is the first time in four months life really feels that way. Hey, I'm in the belly of the flip. What's it like? Well, your intrepid heroine is playing a beam of light through a darkened house, and she sees ... crap everywhere. Abandoned mattresses, fast-food wrappings, in one case actual human waste where someone had squatted like a dog over a piece of plastic, and then wandered off again. I feel only drugs could have caused people to live like this. I had seen a crèche proudly displayed on someone's lawn the day before, and what stuck in my head was, "I wonder if conditions in the manger were this bad." At one point, my partner moves a refrigerator, and a yowl and a streak of escaping black-and-white fur revealed that he'd surprised a cat. Frankly, I was glad it wasn't some kind of gigantor rat.

Though some in the audience didn't quite get it -- and I suppose that Kaplan, Rogers' publisher, may not want them to -- after listening to several beautifully crafted entries that Rogers read tonight, I suspect the New York Observer was on the mark when it said that this is a book about real estate the way the NPR show Car Talk is about cars.

Not that you won't learn a good deal: as Publishers Weekly noted, "...the book doesn’t just rely on funny turns of phrase: it also provides plenty of working advice, including tips on handling lowball offers, staging the sale of a bohemian apartment and talking to your realtor. Those looking for some good information on the real estate industry in a book that doesn’t feel like homework will be hard-pressed for a better choice."

I learned, for example, why the $10,000-a-month end of the rental market is impervious to any downturn and why Sub-Zero and Mille appliances are de rigeur and that when one Manhattan luxury building provides cold storage for grocery deliveries, within weeks every other luxury building has a refrigerator/freezer in its lobby.

Alison Rogers is wry, thoughtful and often extremely funny: the epistolary entry that she read as her last excerpt, "Sorry I Hid Your Underwear," makes equal fun of sellers, buyers, agents and the author herself.

Oh, and there were enough struggling writers in the audience so that of course one asked where in the city struggling writers could afford to live. Alison Rogers noted that she used to enjoy hanging out with Neal Pollack and his wife, but that successful as Neal has been, they moved first to Philadelphia and then to Austin.

"So that doesn't bode well for you," she told the questioner, suggesting that struggling writers might want to band together with their equally struggling writer friends and explore neighborhoods outside New York -- and maybe outside New Jersey, and maybe even outside the whole Northeastern corridor. . .

Still, I have to admit to being disappointed that Rogers didn't show more skepticism about the New York market. Like everyone else here, she buys into the myth that New York is "different," that it's now like London or Tokyo, a place where the superrich from all over the globe want to live. Rogers says nearly all her clients are younger than she is (she's 40 and a newlywed): mostly corporate lawyers and hedge fund types.

Having lived most recently in two markets -- South Florida and Phoenix -- that became incredibly overheated and then crashed below ground, plus knowing that my friends who bought Manhattan co-ops in 1987 who had to sell them before 1992 often took a substantial loss, I'm skeptical that New York's real estate market is somehow invulnerable.

Still, given her diary's literate digressions -- whether musings on the deaths of two rather inept New Jersey cops or reflections on how her "flipping" failures affected her relationship with her new husband -- this isn't a book just for New Yorkers. Newsweek's anointment of Diary of a Real Estate Rookie as a "pick of the week" indicates that it's a book lots of people not currently facing foreclosure can enjoy.

Tuesday Evening in Soho: "About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope" at McNally Robinson

This was posted to Richard Grayson's MySpace blog on Tuesday, June 12, 2007:

Tonight I went to a great reading at the McNally Robinson bookstore in Soho. Several of my friends are contributors to this anthology, About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope, and they were among the six writers who read excerpts from their memoirs of miscarriage.

Editor Jessica Berger Gross read from the introduction and how she looked high and low for a book to help her after her own miscarriage -- there really wasn't one about women's experiences from their point of view, so she created one here.

Caroline Leavitt's excerpt dealt with her insensitive coworkers who said the most thoughtless things and her friend who came up with the perfect antidote; Andrea (Andi to me) Buchanan's, about the loss of her son's twin brother, and about the feeling of having a dead fetus as well as a living one inside her; Rachel Zucker (whom I know as poet-in-residence at Fordham, where I teach), her 12-day-old son wrapped around her, read about her miscarriage; my Readerville friend and fellow Rockawayite comic novelist Rochelle Jewell Shapiro read about the events leading up to hers, namely her courtship and marriage proposal by her husband Bernie (sitting next to me); and finally, Susan O'Doherty (to me, the one and only "Dear Dr. Sue") read about the aftermath of a twenty-year siege of miscarriages, the nearly unbelievable birth of her son Ben, now 12, who was eating a pumpkin scone with his father at the table beside mine.

We also had an interesting and productive discussion after the readings. Anyway, if you know anyone who's had a miscarriage or want to understand what women go through when they do have one (and why the absolute stupidest thing you can say is, "Some things weren't meant to be"), get About What Was Lost. And even if you're not that interested in the topic now, the writing is so good you will be once you get started.