$96,000 a year; retired teacher, no savings or pension

In the strange world we live in The Washington Post reports on the debt, hunger, and eviction of "households on the margins," and included examples concern an American who was earning $96,000 a year pre-pandemic as well as a retired English teacher who has no savings and no pension, living off a meager Social Security payment of $870 a month while housing a grandchild. I'm not sure that "the average American" is a reader of The Washington Post, but in a country where median household income is about $66,000 (combined pay of all workers in the household), and most people do not have fixed-income pensions to look forward to while imagining that most K-12 teachers are among the chosen few who will receive them, I suspect that readers would have trouble relating to these examples. Of course, we may be well past the point where "the average American" reads more than the headlines or attempts to analyze any information at all.

of course I would be among them

 "And yet it was so natural. I thought of all the upstarts, know-it-alls, teachers, critics and book reviewers that I would love to have seen herded on to a train to Mongolia to shovel pig shit and live in barns. But of course I would be among them. In China, an intellectual is usually just someone who does not do manual labor. And there we would all be, digging holes, as a punishment for being so boring. It was an awful fate, but it was easy to imagine how the policy had come about. Everyone in his life has wished at one time or another for someone he disliked to be trundled off to shovel shit—especially an uppity person who had never gotten his hands dirty. Mao carried this satisfying little fantasy to its nasty limit."

~~ from Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China by Paul Theroux

a hole in the floor about a foot across

"The toilet on the train looked as though a child had designed it, too. It was a hole in the floor about a foot across. Well, I had seen squat toilets before; but this one was traveling at about fifty miles an hour through the ice and snow of northern China. There was no pipe or baffle. If you looked down you saw ice streaking past. A gust of freezing air gushed out of the hole. Anyone fool enough to use this thing would be frostbitten on a part of the body that was seldom frostbitten. And yet the passengers trooped into this refrigerated bum-freezer. When they came out their eyes were tiny and their teeth were clenched, as though they had just been pinched very hard."

~~ from Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China by Paul Theroux

see the real thing

 "I went to bed thinking how China exists so distinctly in people's minds that it is hard to shake that fantasy loose and see the real thing." 

~~ from Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China by Paul Theroux

Letter from Chengdu

Peter Hessler returns to Sichuan Province, China.


difficult to read and impossible to write

 "I find it difficult to read and impossible to write with another person nearby. If the person is staring at me over a quart of jam and a crumbling load of bread, I am driven to distraction. So I did nothing but watch him because there was nothing but that to do. He was odd in another way: if I glanced out the window, so did he; if I went into the corridor, he followed; if I talked to the boy next door, whose father lay dying among empty champagne bottles, the zombie was at my heels and then peering over my shoulder. I couldn't rid myself of him—and I tried."

~~ from The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia by Paul Theroux

Faulkner and Bellow in Kyoto

"'So you concentrate on the classics?'

"'Yes, eight century, ninth century, also eleventh century.' He enumerated the works and put the [Henry] James away. He was, he said, a university professor. His name was Professor Toyama and he taught at one of the universities in Kyoto. He said I would like Kyoto. [William] Faulkner had liked Kyoto, and Saul Bellow—well, he had liked it too. 'Mr. Saul Bellow was not enjoying himself. Then we took him to a strip show. He liked it quite a lot!'"

~~ from The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia by Paul Theroux

Edward P. Jones in The Paris Review

This week, I found myself rereading The Paris Review interview with Edward P. Jones:

"We lived in eighteen different places by the time I was eighteen, but New York Avenue is the earliest place I can remember. It’s quite fancy now. Then we moved across the street, into a rooming house. My mother couldn’t read, and I remember she got a letter from the court, and she had to find a guy to read it, and it said that they were going to commit my brother. The phrasing at that time was 'feebleminded,' not 'retarded.' I can remember her crying. She had hard trouble with three kids, but just the idea of losing one . . ."

Two months since the riots, and still no "National Conversation"

"Residents of Chicago’s predominantly black South and West sides remarked that the looting appeared to begin at apparel stores like Foot Locker, and then branched out from there. Here’s how one man described the progression. Opportunistic 'looting' should generally be distinguished from the more ideologically-motivated 'rioting,' as those who 'looted' were generally locals (mostly but not exclusively blacks) who simply took advantage of an unprecedentedly chaotic situation to seize goods. Whereas 'riots' motivated by consciously insurrectionist ideology — consisting of arson attacks and other actions intended to maximize chaos — appear to have been largely instigated by left-wing activist whites. You could possibly group both activities under the banner of 'rioting,' but it’s worth drawing a distinction between these two different kinds of conduct which arise in a riot context."

~~ from "Two months since the riots, and still no 'National Conversation'" by Michael Tracey