Book Review: Jia Tolentino - Trick Mirror

The rise of Online as its own distinct space for writing, thinking, and living has presented as many challenges for writers as opportunities, in purely literary terms. It's often difficult for a lot of writers to use the weird, performative, enchanting-but-dispiriting nature of the internet as a platform for self-discovery without shading into navel-gazing. Is posting an inherently interesting act, or, equally plausibly, is it just a big waste of time that has an even lower probability of being interesting to hear about than someone's dreams? Tolentino neatly threads the dangerous needle of using the internet directly as a subject, managing to be in it but not of it, and never coming across as too self-absorbed even when she's trying to place her own life in the context of a world which often doesn't make any sense at all. She has a lot more to talk about than just the internet's effect on discourse and self-image, but whether she's discussing reality TV, Millennial-vintage scams, drugs and religion, or the many questions posed to contemporary feminism, she exactly captures that sense of coming up with a bunch of neat epiphanies and relating them to other people, with the resultant burst of pleasure when your thoughts finally strike a chord with someone else.

For me these essays seemed to group themselves into 2 loose clusters. One focuses on her personal life story. "The I in Internet" is a thoughtful analysis of why exactly the internet, which theoretically could be a nonstop delight to use, instead so frequently feels awful to use, particularly for writers like her who both hate and yet depend on it (as she says, "first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale."). "Reality TV Me" is both a rumination on her experience on one of those amazing trashy early-2000s reality TV shows, in hindsight one of our most enduring cultural innovations, and also a discussion of how your own view of yourself can be warped by exposure to the lure of celebrity. "Ecstacy" is about growing up in the hothouse environment of Houston evangelical Protestantism, surrounded by sex, drugs, and chopped and screwed hip hop, and what that's done to her own personal sense of enlightenment and creativity. "The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams" uses the peculiarly Millennial scam of FyreFest, which she appeared in a documentary on, as a particularly emblematic example of how young people's lives have been warped by an entire culture of scams: predatory banks in the financial crisis, onerous student debt for useless degrees, duplicitous social media and its emphasis on obsessive self-presentation, "girlboss" corporate feminism, openly fraudulent companies like Juicero or Theranos, "disruption" and the gig economy's creation of a new precariat, and of course Donald Trump, who if history is in any way just will eventually be as eponymous for scamming as Elbridge Gerry is for unfair redistricting.

The other essay constellation focuses on various facets of feminism in the modern era. "Always Be Optimizing" is about how capitalism intersects with the beauty arms race, as in the phenomenon of expensive, regimented fitness programs like barre, and the always-tricky politics of sex-positivity; I was frequently reminded of Virginia Postrel's excellent book Glamour. "Pure Heroines" explores the struggles of identifying with female characters in literature, with a particular focus on children's literature (I think one of the first things I ever read from her was her wonderful review of Gordon Korman's oeuvre in Jezebel; she has a real gift for putting into words exactly what makes certain books stick in your mind through the years). "The Cult of the Difficult Woman" tackles the profound ambivalence many women (and men too) feel about criticizing terrible women in a culture where misogyny is still potent; I was reminded of Molly Ivins' spectacular takedown of Camille Paglia in her piece "I Am the Cosmos". "I Thee Dread" involves her own complicated feelings about not being married to her long-term boyfriend, but her melange of sentiments will be very familiar to anyone who's been in a perfectly happy long-term relationship and had to field "so, when's the big day questions?", which of course are typically directed to women. The final essay, "We Come from Old Virginia", puts Sabrina Erdely's fraudulent Rolling Stone campus rape story at UVa, her alma mater, in the context of a culture of sexual assault which is all too real, and how it's possible for scumbags like Brett Kavanaugh to sail through life without any consequences at all while at the same time countless women face nothing but bad options for dealing with their own experiences in a society which treats each false accusation as the equal of countless accusations which never got made.

In the Introduction she mentions a throwaway line she once wrote that what women often seem to want from feminist websites is a "trick mirror that carries the illusion of flawlessness as well as the self-flagellating option of constantly finding fault." No one's perfect, but not an inch of the extra space she uses in these essays goes to waste.

Book Review: Ben Westhoff - Original Gangstas

The very day I finished this book, I read that Death Row Records had just been sold to Hasbro. Technically, Hasbro bought the parent Entertainment One megacorp that counted Death Row as part of its portfolio, but it's fun to imagine telling Suge Knight 20 years ago that his record label that produced some of the all-time hip hop classics would one day be owned by a toy company. Whether hip hop will eventually loom the largest in historical memory depends on how exactly the demographics of musical canonization shake out in the future, but even though hip hop didn't come from the West Coast, it's that sound that will be the main argument that the genre deserves as much respect as any other style of 20th century music. Westhoff is a bona fide superfan of the genre - a white guy from the Midwest, naturally, that often-derided but crucial fan constituency - who made it his mission to show how exactly LA's music scene went from living in the shadow of New York to setting the standard for what hip hop should sound like, and even more crucially what it should mean to the audience. He succeeds wonderfully, and even though everyone involved in that scene is now hawking endorsements for a living (Snoop being the ultimate example of the transformation from wanted criminal to universally beloved pitchman), Westhoff shows how they became megastars by translating frustration, rage, and rebellion into art.

Westhoff mostly focuses on N.W.A. personnel (Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, DOC), along with Snoop, Tupac, and some East Coast figures (Biggie, Puff Daddy) who moved between the two coasts, and he provides lots of context behind the albums, so it vastly improves on entertainment products like 2015's Straight Outta Compton by connecting more dots and providing more answers (though the real best exploration of hip hop remains Fear of a Black Hat). As charming as it might be for some to see bits of trivia like the "Bye, Felicia!" scene, most of the real story of every musical group is in the business negotiations with lawyers, labels, distributors, and every other necessary parasite. Artists make music for fun and personal fulfillment, but you can't make more than an album or two without getting paid, and so the tension between the art and the commerce sides of the music industry is overlaid on all of the other well-known drugs/crime/violence issues that plagued the West Coast scene. This means the book overlaps more with 2017's The Defiant Ones, which focuses on Dre and producer Jimmy Iovine. Iovine in particular was crucial to the band's success, as shown for example by his marketing strategy for The Chronic's first single "Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang":

"We can't get it played on the radio," Jimmy Iovine said the radio guys told him.
"It's 'Satisfaction,'" he retorted.
"Radio doesn't think so. They think it's a bunch of black guys cursing who want to kill everybody."
Iovine decided to create a minute-long commercial, consisting of nothing but the song. "Don't say who it is, and buy it on fifty stations, drive time. I want the program directors to hear it in their cars."

There are many interesting counterfactuals that Westhoff proposes:

Daily Beast writer Rich Goldstein pointed out that 1988 was a huge year for record sales, led by George Michael's Faith and the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, each of which sold over ten million copies. In those pre-internet days, there weren't very many places to hear about new music, and not many places to buy it. All of N.W.A's publicity was great, but that didn't matter if you couldn't actually consume their songs. "Had Straight Outta Compton been played on MTV, listened to on the radio, and been available for purchase in big-box retailers like Walmart, there is a good chance it would have eclipsed the Dirty Dancing soundtrack," Goldstein theorized.

And the saddest parts of the book are of course the discussions of the tragically brief and violent lives of many incredibly talented people, most notably Biggie and Tupac. All of the surviving members of N.W.A. lament how short their collaborative period was before it fell apart, and one can only imagine the works that they and the rest could have created if they hadn't hated each other:

Tupac claimed to have directly influenced Biggie's style. "I used to tell the nigga, 'If you want to make your money you have to rap for the bitches. Do not rap for the niggas,'" he said. "The bitches will buy your records, and the niggas want what the bitches want." As proof that Biggie had heeded his advice, Tupac cited the difference between the aggressive "Party and Bullshit" and softer Ready to Die hits tracks "Big Poppa," which appealed more to the ladies. Soon as he buy that wine, I just creep up from behind / And ask what your interests are, who you be with?

But as unfortunately truncated as many of their careers were, their surviving works are legendary, and books like Westhoff's are a testament to how brightly stars can shine in such a brief period.

Book Review: Anthony Bourdain - Kitchen Confidential

The New Yorker article "Don't Eat Before Reading This" that this book was based on turned 20 in April 2019, so it's interesting to read the book only now, yet still be able to see exactly why this guy became so famous. Food content is everywhere now - personal blogs, Yelp reviews, and impossibly lengthy SEO-optimized recipes for grilled cheese sandwiches - so it's hard to remember what it was like before the internet turned writing itself into fast food, but Bourdain's irreverent peek behind the kitchen curtains was genuinely novel at the time. Even now his writing is frequently spectacular: his keen and gossipy characterization, amusing but still affecting storytelling, and wry, appreciative voice all give a side of the restaurant industry that was not really seen 20 years ago and is still often underappreciated all the glamour and human interest that he would later make a career out of exposing viewers to on TV. It's a mix of memoir, philosophizing, career retrospective, apologia, and plain old complaining that he uses to make being a chef seem heroic and pathetic at a stroke, writing from the perspective of a man who has experienced the closely-linked extremes of crippling failure and stunning success, showing why restauranteur is such a fascinating profession in the aggregate yet any given chef is not to be trusted one bit.

I remember reading once that to get truly famous you have to excel at at least two different things and corner the market on the intersection of your talents. It seems like most chefs are not also good writers, let alone also good TV personalities, and likewise very few television hosts or authors are classically trained French chefs (as a sidenote, a lot of the French techniques and items he discusses are totally alien to me, although to be fair I'm not the kind of person who's making reservations at Dorsia - I mean Les Halles - very often). While I'll never have the opportunity to eat a meal that Bourdain cooked, if it was anything like his writing it would have been a real treat. He's good at making you think about your own food experiences: the opening chapter contains such a lovingly detailed description of learning to love oysters as a child on vacation in France that you can't help but think about great meals you've had, and right up until the end of the book he's raving about sushi he once had in a way that has actually changed how I view what I'm eating.

Sometimes his rule-breaking renegade shtick wears a bit thin over the course of the book - he really wants you to know that he's done a lot of drugs and seen a lot of misbehavior and lived a wild and crazy life, etc - but I don't begrudge him for getting as much mileage as he can out of his life story, and honestly, a lot of it is simple jealousy. The exact same questions about food authenticity apply to chef authenticity, and the same answer - just relax and enjoy what you're served - also applies. You can go a long way in America by playing the bad boy with a hidden soft side, and Bourdain's voice is just the perfect blend of wasn't-I-a-scoundrel and sincere passion for his craft, neatly balancing his (very) lengthy assurances about how much he loves dick jokes with more humanizing moments like his unashamed love letter to the bread one of his cooks makes. And his closing humility, where he reveals that everything he's said was just his own personal opinion, and just like there's no one right way to live there's no one right way to run a restaurant, cements him as surely one of the coolest people to evangelize the art of appreciating food. RIP.

Book Review: Tom Shippey - The Road to Middle-Earth

J. R. R. Tolkien was better at transporting readers into a living, breathing, fully-realized fictional reality than almost any other author who has ever lived. While for most readers the pleasure of the stories themselves is sufficient alone, more hardcore aficionados like myself want to see the deep roots of such a remarkable creation. How did he do it? Shippey's work delves deeply into Tolkien's inspirations, artistic obsessions, and creative process. It will greatly satisfy the sort of person who finds the LOTR appendices as interesting as the plot they've just finished. There's an infamous dropoff in readership from The Hobbit, to The Lord of the Rings, to The Silmarillion, and then to the likes of Unfinished Tales, but for the small group of fans who not only sympathize with but valorize Tolkien's decades of effort with his legendarium simply to create plausible settings for his artificial languages, this book provides an incredibly interesting account of how Tolkien's attitudes toward the power of words shaped his characters, stories, settings, and indeed his entire thematic repertoire. I thought I was a dedicated fan (although to my shame I have not read any of the 12 posthumous volumes of The History of Middle-Earth), but Shippey has read every one of Tolkien's works so many times that he enhanced my appreciation for the under-the-hood craftsmanship in the Tolkienverse more than I thought possible.

The short answer to "why is Tolkien so great?" is that he had a clear vision (or rather a series of visions), he made sure his plots and his themes lined up, and he put a ton of work into what for most authors would seem like irrelevant background details. Tolkien really loved a lot of old epic poetry that his fellow linguists were lukewarm about, but that turned out to provide excellent templates for modern stories even across the vast cultural gap between modern England and its millennium-old antecedents. Shippey doesn't use any film analogies, but as he was discussing how Tolkien studied Beowulf carefully in order to produce similar effects with his own works, I was reminded how a lot of the better genre films put modern material atop older structures in order to take advantage of people's love of both the familiar and the new. So, for example, successful science fiction films mix the genre with noir as in Blade Runner, with Westerns as in Star Trek, with samurai/swashbuckers as in Star Wars, etc. Tolkien used the format of the children's adventure story in the The Hobbit as a comforting framework for his "modern mythology", upgrading to a more adult literary style in The Lord of the Rings, and then dispensing entirely with contemporary narrative formats in his drafts for The Silmarillion, which would have been nearly impenetrable to lightweights and casuals even if he'd been able to finish it.

While Shippey does use Tolkien's own writings as primary sources, and his acknowledged inspirations as secondary material, the book is mainly concerned with tracing Tolkien's own attitudes towards his work; not merely wondering why Tolkien dedicated so much of his life to this fantasy world, but how he made it so convincing to others. The storytelling urge is nearly universal in young children, but most people's fantasies are not very interesting to other people, and nearly all of us eventually turn our mental narrative generation machinery over to more prosaic concerns due to the pressures of adulthood. One of the things that made Tolkien unique was his determination to maintain his creative processes for his whole life; there have of course been countless novelists in history, but Tolkien's novels stand apart from most other writers by his decision to ground them in linguistics, to most people perhaps the dullest soil possible to sprout a fantasy world from. Even his colleagues, who may have been fellow linguists but not true philologists ("philology" = "love of learning"), certainly did not appreciate languages aesthetically to the same degree, and were often skeptical or dismissive of the power of words, leaving Tolkien as one of the very few linguists who appreciated the ancient epic poetry as poetry. Shippey quotes a letter from Tolkien to his son Christopher:

Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true. An enquirer (among many) asked what (The Lord of the Rings) was all about, and whether it was an 'allegory.' And I said it was an effort to create a situation in which a common greeting would be elen síla lúmenn' omentielmo, and that the phrase long antedated the book. I never heard any more.

Even today, Tolkien's works seem to stand above the obligatory constellations of fanfiction that always surround seemingly similar media franchises like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. This is because fanfiction authors, even the most talented ones, naturally tend to focus on the appeal of the characters, and in Tolkien's works the interactions of the characters are only one of the things going on. The chapter "The Bourgeois Burglar" in particular is a fascinating exploration of just how hard Tolkien worked to ensure that the language and vocabulary of the hobbits, men, dwarves, and so on was congruent with their nature, which complemented the alternately comic and dramatic tone of their interactions with each other, and how the broader thematic concerns then are revealed by the plot in turn (see Adam Roberts' thoughtful review in the July 2017 Strange Horizons contrasting Tolkien's approach with that of with a modern author like Patrick Rothfuss). In the chapter "Interlacements and the Ring" Shippey extends this deep alignment to Tolkien's religious explorations, handled far more subtly here than in C. S. Lewis' otherwise comparable Narnia series. Is evil active or passive, Manichean or Boethian, a force unto itself or a mere turning away from the good? Is the Ring a pagan symbol, and the cosmology of Middle-Earth therefore heretical? Tolkien spent a huge amount of time ensuring that his creation worked consistently within itself and with the pre-Christian heroic motifs underneath it without openly contradicting Christian doctrine, to the extent possible. He was not immune to the problems of internal contradiction, which partially explains his immense difficulties finishing his later works, but perhaps any truly great work inevitably expands beyond the point where all its pieces can fully harmonize together. Just look at any of the more modern "epic" properties with teams of writers and all the money in the world, and Tolkien's accomplishments seem all the greater.

On the subject of consistency, one of the more unexpectedly moving chapters is "Visions and Revisions", when Shippey discusses the meaning that the story of Beren and Lúthien had to Tolkien. It's only one part of the Silmarillion, but Tolkien rewrote it so many times that even though it's hardly known, its story of a grand quest undertaken for a powerful yet ultimately doomed love was clearly more dear to him than any other part of his whole creation (Tolkien and his wife's gravestones read 'Beren' and 'Lúthien', respectively). This obsessive dedication made me think of other works that get compared to his, for example Wagner's operas, which Shippey doesn't discuss until the first appendix (as always with Tolkien, read the appendices!), and how idiosyncratic Tolkien's vision often was. Tolkien evidently did not think highly of Wagner as a dramatist, which somewhat surprised me, but it makes more sense when you realize that, as with all great artists, he hated basically everything, particularly artistic works seemingly very similar to his own:

Tolkien was irritated all his life by modern attempts to rewrite or interpret old material, almost all of which he thought led to failures of tone and spirit. Wagner is the most obvious example. People were always connecting The Lord of the Rings with Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Tolkien did not like it. 'Both rings were round', he snarled, 'and there the resemblance ceases' (Letters, p. 306). This is not entirely true. The motifs of the riddle-contest, the cleansing fire, the broken weapon preserved for an heir, all occur in both works, as of course does the theme of 'the lord of the Ring as the slave of the Ring', des Ringes Herr als des Ringes Knecht. But what upset Tolkien was the fact that Wagner was working, at second-hand, from material which he knew at first-hand, primarily the heroic poems of the Elder Edda and the later Middle High German Nibelungenlied. Once again he saw difference where other people saw similarity. Wagner was one of several authors with whom Tolkien had a relationship of intimate dislike: Shakespeare, Spenser, George MacDonald, Hans Christian Andersen. All, he thought, had got something very important not quite right. It is especially necessary, then, for followers of Tolkien to pick out the true from the heretical, and to avoid snatching at surface similarities.

Now, I personally love Wagner, and rank the Ring Cycle as an incredible artistic achievement, but Tolkien of course has a point about how he and all those other authors are not really playing the same game (though read George Orwell's "Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool" essay on Shakespeare to see how differently even great writers can rank artistic merit). This is another reason why I think comparisons of Tolkien to people like George Lucas, or (especially) George R. R. Martin can only go so far; Martin might have excellent points about flaws in Tolkien's models of political economy (the infamous "What was Aragorn's tax policy?") and so forth, but it's like comparing a Balzac novel to the Epic of Gilgamesh solely because they both have prostitutes in them. Shippey extends this point further in another book called Author of the Century, which I haven't read, but even if you don't agree with Shippey that Tolkien will eventually represent the entirety of 20th century literature the way that Shakespeare epitomizes the 16th, it's enough to note that Tolkien invented an entire literary genre just to give his mock-Welsh and faux-Finnish artificial languages a playground, and no one else has done anything even close since. Tanner Greer's essay "On the Tolkienic Hero" notes that Tolkien seems untouched by irony, and even though it seems strange that it took a fussy and incredibly opinionated academic, one who wrote entire poems about how misguided oak trees (his critics) couldn't understand the pure love of learning natural to birch trees (philologists like himself), to create one of the greatest adventure stories of all time, perhaps the only conclusion is that the genius and genesis of literature might remain as forever mysterious to us as the Undying Lands, or as the power of words themselves.

Book Review: Austin to ATX

Quite where the boundary is between love for your hometown and simple narcissism is I don't know, but while the majority of the market for this book is probably limited to hardcore Austin navel-gazers like myself, since it does not attempt to provide a Grand Unified Theory of why Austin made the transition from small/poor/weird to big/rich/cool while other cities did not, it's certainly the best general cultural history of Austin that I've read. Patoski has really done his homework, digging deep into the archives for informed historical context and then leavening that research with revealing interviews of luminaries like Lance Armstrong, Richard Linklater, Liz Lambert, and a bunch more. Austin has always seemed to me like a large small town where everyone was only a few degrees away from everyone else, so I got a lot of pleasure out of learning more about the incredible web of connections between the people who turned Austin into a hotspot in food, music, film, tech, and so on. If you live here, even if you only showed up yesterday, you're participating in one of the fastest demographic and economic transitions in modern American history, and while I freely admit that there's almost no Austin-themed book that's too self-indulgent for my tastes, I think even a non-Austinite could enjoy this, if only for Patoski's real affection for the city. That, and the fact that you could construct quite a few great playlists out of the musicians he discusses.

Each chapter is immensely absorbing and offers a lot to ponder, but several recurring themes finally converged in my mind during the antepenultimate chapter "Keeping Austin Weird (The Looky-Loos)", which discusses how tourism has become an essential part of Austin's economy, and the complex reactions that that shift has engendered among us locals in an era when it seems like the city has been changing faster than ever. Everywhere that draws large numbers of tourists, or "looky-loos", has a basic dilemma: visitors bring in a great deal of revenue for businesses, often far more than locals do, and so selling Austin-ness to willing non-Austinites is not only a perfectly valid economic strategy for many entrepreneurs, tourism might as well be synonymous with being a "real city". The more people have a good time in Austin, the better off Austin is for it. This also cements Austin's place as a tastemaker, and one of the best places in the country to be a fan, broadly defined (Alamo is a movie fan's theater, bands of the world flock to our music festivals, Whole Foods redefines grocery stores, etc). However, even if the concentrated benefits to businesses handily outweigh the cumulative congestion and infrastructure costs to the city at large as our enterprises rake in hundreds of million of dollars, the distribution can be sufficiently out of whack to breed resentment and anger among the natives.

These concerns about growth and equity are also tied into the diversity paradox, which Patoski doesn't explicitly identify but which I think longtime residents feel implicitly, and which is also probably inevitable in any city that makes the parochial-cosmopolitan transition. Put simply, cultural exchange with other cities makes Austin more diverse yet less special at the same time. As Austin gets more diverse by exchanging stuff with other cities, we also start to resemble those places ever more closely, until the things that made us distinct are now universal because diversity increases on a local level at the same time as it decreases on a local level. We import NYC pizza, Hawaiian poke joints, and San Diego burritos, and export breakfast tacos, barbecue, and outlaw country artists right back. We're just not quite as special anymore, to the extent that we ever were, and yet people continue to arrive, because as an economist will point out, specialization increases with the extent of the market, and so size and variety combine in a virtuous cycle even as there are seemingly ever fewer "authentic" local experiences, however you want to define that. It also goes without saying that much of this bounty hasn't trickled down to the less fortunate sectors of the city either, who find their influence shrinking as the rest of the city seemingly leaves them behind.

Austin is hardly the first city to experience these dynamics, and one can only imagine a resident of Venice, New Orleans, or Paris rolling their eyes at our quaint complaints that there's an inherent difficulty in keeping yourself unique while the world wanders slowly up the sidewalk in front of you trying to take too many selfies. But even if the irritation someone feels at a tourist treating their city like a big Instagram backdrop is only natural (the chapter opens with a discussion of the infamous "I love you so much" graffiti wall at Jo's, which frequently causes traffic backups that I have personally had to endure), that peeving is ultimately self-defeating. A steady stream of people is enlarging Austin from a small pond to a big pond, and what kind of awful fish tries to build a dam upstream just to monopolize a particular riparium? Who would be helped if someone had discouraged you, or your parents, from moving here? If, as Patoski so copiously documents, the "good old days" of Austin consistently seem to have been just about 20 years ago, then right now is as good as time as any to live here. "Weird" might not be glamorous to everyone, particularly in bumper sticker form, but evidently the spirit that the word represents continues to charm.

Lame marketing slogans aside, the city we live in was built by a parade of self-described misfits coming to Austin, finding that they were home, and then doing something cool that even people outside of Austin liked. Creativity is the only thing that has a permanent place here. To the extent that Austin continues to enable that same ability to flourish and grow it will have preserved its spirit, and likewise it will have failed to the extent that the modern slacker finds that here is no place to dream. Seen in that light, while Austin has in no way been perfect in its past, the explosive growth that surrounds us is just a continuation of the trend that began with our founding, and while we might not be heaven on earth, we're pretty damn great, and the the more like-minded people who fall in love with the hills, the springs, and the river that provide our habitat, the better the future will be for us all. Austin is the kind of city that inspires this kind of passionate prolixity that strikes outsiders as so tedious yet so bewitching, and while far be it from me to tell anyone else the "right way" to be an Austinite, a failure to welcome the future is one of the surest ways to be wrong.

Book Review: Melanie Haupt - Historic Austin Restaurants

Billed as a "cultural history of Austin through its restaurants", I was primed to like this book before even reading it, since I'm a big fan of both Austin's history and its modern food scene, and I agree with her entirely that food is one of the best entrypoints into a city, region, people, or society's culture there is. Haupt wrote this in 2013, but it's not out of date in any way that matters, and though sadly many of its more dire prophecies have been fulfilled since its 2013 publication (RIP Players and Hill's, at least for now), most of the restaurants that Haupt profiles are still alive and serving. Haupt currently writes restaurant reviews for the Chronicle, which makes sense, because her union of individual restaurant profiles, broader cultural connection, interviews with important Austinites, and discussion of what food meant to people blends both interesting reporting and thoughtful analysis. I once maintained a blog about Sixth Street similar to Haupt's one-time plan to blog about restaurants until she decided to repackage her project as this book, and so her work here was both fun to read on its own terms as well as a bit inspirational. You can read through the whole thing pretty quickly, but people who have grown up with these places, like me, will find many items of sociological interest in these stories, and lots to ponder.

The book is divided into five chapters corresponding to various eras of the city, although each jumps around a little in time in order to accommodate the vicissitudes of the restaurant industry and the nonlinear nature of trends. The first chapter wisely begins with Austin's creation as the capital city that no one but its founder wanted to exist. Back then the concept of a "restaurant scene" didn't really exist either - whatever jokes about I-35 traffic you'd like to make, the difficulty of travel in the poorly-paved village of the 1800s meant that dining out was pretty rare even if you didn't live that far away from downtown, especially if like most residents you weren't wealthy, and so instead dinner parties at individual homes played a more prominent role. It's fun to ponder the sociological consequences of their decline, as easier travel, more affordable restaurants, and changing social relations have combined to essentially eliminate the past cultural power of fancy home parties over meals. It's not a coincidence that many of the eateries that survive from that period were either former boardinghouses like Scholz (1881) or hotels like The Driskill (1886) (as a side note, hotel restaurants and bars innovate far less in food and drink than they used to - hotels used to invent dishes like eggs benedict or brownies, and drinks like the piña colada or the martini, but that has mostly ceased), so that was a big conduit for German and Czech immigrants to add their traditions of sausage and kolaches to early Austin cuisine.

Austin was still small in the early part of the 20th century up through Prohibition, so restaurants like The Tavern (1916), Dirty Martin's (1926), and Hut's (1939) often had fairly unadventurous menus. Austin wasn't very cosmopolitan, so outliers like Hoffbrau Steakhouse (1934), whose menu has actually gotten much simpler over time, could easily stand out, especially if their food was good. It's a truism that even though greater affluence drives wider tastes, cuisines are still fundamentally based around cheap staple dishes, so the steaks, burgers, and Southern cuisine that were perfected then still define many of the older Austin restaurants from that period like Hill's (1941), with Quality Seafood (1938) being the outlier as basically the only source of seafood in town. Even the surviving places from the postwar era, like Sandy's (1946), Mrs. Johnson's (1948), Nau's (1951), Dart Bowl (1958), or The Salt Lick (1969), are known for their consistency and unpretentiousness rather than their daring. This is also true of many of the Tex-Mex restaurants from that period like Cisco's (1948), Matt's El Rancho (1952), El Patio (1954), Joe's (1969), and Tamale House (1977), although to be fair, after the popularization of the breakfast taco I'd rest on my laurels too; that's the kind of thing you only need to do once to live forever. I enjoyed reading about Green Pastures (1946) - founder Mary Faulk Koock was the sister of John Henry Faulk, who lent his name to the old central library branch, and in addition to managing that restaurant, she wrote The Texas Cookbook in 1965 with James Beard, of food award fame. It was also neat to learn that integration pioneer Harry Akin, who ran Night Hawk Diner (1932) eventually became mayor in addition to his restaurants spawning not only the Frisco (1953 - 2018) but also Hoover's (1998).

The hippie through Slacker era was pretty good for Austin, as we slowly transformed from a sleepy state capital and college town into a thinkfluencer factory. Many of the cultural tropes that define Austin today - live music, a relaxed attitude, vegetarianism - crystallized during this period. Thus you have the well-known close symbiosis between the music of the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters and the food of Threadgill's (1979), but I had never known the personal connections between the well-known Austin all-hours restaurants: Kenny Carpenter opened the Omelettry in 1978 at its old location on Burnet (they moved east to Airport Boulevard in 2015), partnered with Kent Cole and Patricia Atkinson in 1979, and opened another location on Lake Austin that same year. Kent and Patricia divorced soon after, and in 1986 Kenny sold off his ownership. Cole immediately renamed the west location Magnolia Cafe and opened the South Congress location in 1988; meanwhile Patricia had remarried and opened a little joint called Kerbey Lane in 1980, which went on to dominate everything in its path (the similar romantic/business journey of Dan and Fran from founding Dan's in 1973 to their split in 1990 is interesting too). I've never been to Mother's (1980), and it was hardly the first vegetarian restaurant here, but Austin's image as a city firmly committed to vegetarianism/veganism with a local flavor has been indelibly fixed. The influence of Quack's (1983) on local coffeeshop culture presents an interesting counterpoint, however - could a more entrepreneurial Austin have produced a Starbucks? Would we have wanted to?

There isn't a neat line between the end of the cheap Slacker period and the beginning of the modern gentrification period (from Drag to Brag?), as plenty of high-end restaurants like Jeffrey's (1975), Fonda San Miguel (1975), Texas French Bread (1981), or Chez Nous (1982) opened in those halcyon days of impecunity, but one might say that the current era is defined as much by closings as by openings, at least in the popular consciousness. So the losses of Les Amis (1970 - 1997), Players (1981 - 2016), or Las Manitas (1981 - 2008), each a ringing death knell of "old Austin", loom as large in the discourse as the fact that never in Austin's history has it been easier to eat as well, with as great a variety, as today. Austin is more diverse than ever, which I think is a good thing, since new Austinites have brought a fresh perspective and quite frankly higher standards in many cases. Food trailers have opened a world of possibilities, and the success of Torchy's, East Side Kings, and Franklin is something to be proud of, since the seemingly daily openings of restaurants with new cuisines, and improved versions of old cuisines, are something that previous generations would only envy. Not to say that abundance hasn't brought Austin its own set of problems, but can you imagine going back to the pre-Franklin/Titaya's/Ramen Tatsu-Ya era? I do feel that restaurants like Uchi are not really made "for Austinites" in the same way that, say, Torchy's can fit into just about anyone's budget. Then again, it's not like The Driskill was meant for the common man when it opened (or even now) either, and often it's just a matter of time before a new blight becomes an old classic.

When I was growing up (I graduated high school in 2002), it felt like it was possible for the average Austinite to go everywhere in town and do essentially everything there was to do. I don't think that's the case anymore. A city of a million people is too large for anyone to have the kind of comprehensive experience of the city you could have in the 90s, and as the city's identity becomes larger than any one person's capacity, it means that you have to get used to the idea of multiple Austins, other cities outside your comprehension, coterminous with your own city but forever beyond your ability to reach. In some ways that makes the surviving restaurants of previous decades even more valuable, as they represent a shrinking pool of links to the past. The average lifespan of a restaurant is something like five years, so when you sit down at Dirty Martin's you have the rare privilege of participating in a ritual nearly a century old. However, each restaurant closing also brings home the idea of change and impermanence in a way that's important to learn, because you have to think of all the new rituals being formed all around you. Even though I fully shared the collective sense of loss as I stood in line for Player's on its last day in business, the next day I had the choice to eat at any of the new restaurants that had sprung up around it, any of which could become a future classic. The pancakes at Kerbey Lane are not as good as they were when I was a kid, but who knows, perhaps in 30 years someone will be complaining about how a now-beloved joint in the Domain has really gone downhill from back in the day when only real Austinites went there, not like all the outsiders these days.

Book Review: Jeffrey Kerr - Lamar's Folly

I'd previously read Seat of Empire, one of Kerr's several non-fiction works, which recounted the acrimonious debate between Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar over where the capital of the new nation of Texas was to be located. Happily for me, an Austinite, it ended up being here, but beyond the incredible wealth of historical detail Kerr revealed in that book lay a fascinating human story of a clash of personalities and ambitions - the grandiose visions of Lamar the poet for Texas to be its own sovereign empire stretching out to the Pacific, and the more hardheaded plans of Houston the politician for Texas to take its place alongside the other states as just another part of America. This novel is a (heavily) fictionalized exploration of that deep-seated personal enmity between the two men and conflict between different destinies for Texas. While I disagreed with several of Kerr's artistic decisions, I also read the whole thing straight through in a day; he is a skillful storyteller as well as an excellent historian.

Most of the novel is told in narrative form from the perspective of Edward Fontaine, a real person who was Lamar's personal secretary, and who also eventually built and became the pastor at the church that became St. David's Episcopal Church (which is where I had my christening!). There are also brief passages in each chapter from the perspective of his slave Jacob, another real person who founded several Baptist churches in Central Texas. In each chapter Edward recounts his relationship with Lamar, from their meeting during the battle of San Jacinto to their eventual parting after the end of Lamar's tenure as President of Texas, as Lamar does everything in his power, and a bit beyond, to forge Texas into an imperial nation while simultaneously feuding with Houston on both a political level and a personal one, as the less-charismatic Lamar is often upstaged by the more flamboyant Houston, with Jacob adding additional context and a non-Anglo perspective that's often an ironic counterpoint to Edward's version of events. Eventually Lamar's career is wrecked by the confluence of two scandals - his not-quite-legal dispatch of an ill-fated expedition to conquer Santa Fe and thus enrich and enlarge Texas, and the Kerr-invented affair he carries on with the wife of a blacksmith he sent along with it. The novel ends with both Edward and Jacob reflecting on Lamar's hubris, the confluence of personal tragedy and underlying character flaws that might have contributed to it, and nods toward their respective post-Lamar lives in a Texas where Houston's vision predominates (with the obvious exception of the location of the capital!), even though many Texans have unconsciously adopted Lamar's attitude of a Texas apart from the rest of the country.

I had very mixed feelings about the David-and-Bathsheba affair (surprisingly, no one in the novel mentions the obvious Biblical parallel) between Lamar and Mrs. Tucker that Kerr concocted for the novel, which plays a big role in Edward's gradual disillusionment with Lamar. It adds a very human element to Lamar's outsized personality, and is actually believable given Lamar's real-life tragic loss of his wife and brother, and it also gives its title a nice double meaning when combined with the ultimate disaster of the Santa Fe Expedition (interestingly, I learned in a KUT interview with Kerr that "Lamar's folly" was a real-life contemporaneous reference to a comically inadequate defensive palisade that Lamar had built around the Capitol; for some reason this is not referenced within the novel itself). However, I wasn't ever able to fully relax and just roll with it. Obviously just about anything is fair game when it comes to historical fiction, and Kerr does quite well with his other flourishes, but given that Lamar is the central axis around which the entire novel revolves, and the quality of his character most of all, I wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to take away from his affair, especially because Kerr doesn't really need it for any ruminations on "the perils of hubris" or "power inevitably corrupts" or "sin destroys even the mighty" or what have you. Imagine a historical fiction along the lines of the Broadway play Hamilton, except that Jefferson is also given an extra mistress for some reason and ends up fighting a duel of his own, or Steven Spielberg's movie Lincoln but Lincoln is given a fictitious brother fighting for the South. It just violated my suspension of disbelief, whereas Kerr's other liberties, such as not mentioning Edward's wife or side career as a politician himself, didn't for whatever reason. It's interesting that he didn't substantially alter Sam Houston, a much more sympathetic person, to the same degree.

But if that doesn't bother you, then otherwise this is quite good. Kerr very convincingly represents the way that secondhand reports and personal loyalties can forever taint your perceptions of someone, as Edward despises Houston solely due to loyalty to Lamar and the rumors of Houston's drinking and infidelities despite Houston's unfailing courtesy towards him. Jacob throughout provides a more level-headed perspective on the two men, continually preferring Houston due to his kindness towards slaves and Indians versus Lamar's more typical Southern white supremacist views (though there is one curious scene in the book where, just prior to a scouting expedition reaching the settlement of Waterloo, Jacob states that Lamar scalps an Indian he and Edward have both shot and offers the scalp to Edward, which is supposed to illustrate his dislike of Indians, though Edward does not mention the scalping at all; otherwise their two narrations agree entirely on actual events). Lamar's own personal transition from an opponent of the genocide of the Indians to a strong proponent is also given a firm grounding in his own character, and how his desire for Texas as he saw it to become a great nation led him to pursue whatever means necessary to make that happen, including dispatching the Santa Fe expedition despite Houston convincing the Texas Congress not to authorize it. And of course the initial battle over the location of the capital plays a large role in the book, although not the infamous Angelina Eberly cannon incident later on (in that same KUT interview with Kerr he reveals that Lamar was the only President of Texas inaugurated in Houston, and that Houston was the only President inaugurated in Austin; this historical irony also for some reason wasn't mentioned here and was not really emphasized in Seat of Empire either).

As a lover of Austin history in general and of Kerr's previous book in particular I was predisposed to like it, but anyone who enjoys Texas-themed historical fiction will enjoy it as well.

Book Review: Matt Taibbi - The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing

Great use of the serialized novel concept, even though I didn't read it until the whole thing had already been finished. Written as both a memoir and a Seven Habits of Highly Effective Drug Dealers by "Huey Carmichael" (yes, as in "P. Newton" and "Stokely"), an anonymous friend of Taibbi's, this literary treatment/extension of Biggie's famous "Ten Crack Commandments" offers the aspiring young criminal an interesting real-life account of the heady days of marijuana growing and distribution in the Wild West pre-legalization pre-corporate era, as well as, more relevantly, a bunch of practical advice on how not to get busted should you wish to continue running drugs outside the confines of the law. As he says, most drug dealers learn their jobs from movies, so it's neat to see a more detailed and practical set of guidelines than you can get from, say, watching New Jack City over and over again. While in literary terms it's not written with the gripping intensity of a classic like Clockers, the steady rotation of characters throughout the narrative, most notably his on-again/off-again girlfriend Courtney, gives the slow accumulations and rapid dissipations of his various drug empires a poignancy that a more clinical instruction manual would lack. Taibbi's forays into the criminal justice system in his previous books The Divide and I Can't Breathe were phenomenal, and this detour into the life of someone who neatly avoided that system is worth a pass as well.

Carmichael grew up "between two worlds", as they say, shuffling between upper class and working class communities in New Jersey in his youth. His leap to dealing was prompted by his discovery that he was good at it. Throughout the book he's clear-eyed about his place in America, particularly when he had a (fortunately) brief experience with prison. "I believe in money. So does America. Beyond that we don't have a relationship.... America and I, we were two ships that passed in the night. The mindless experience of prison was the only thing we ever shared." Since marijuana is on a seemingly inevitable march towards full legalization, one wonder how well these insights will translate to other drugs and future times. Would a non-fictional Scarface still offer useful lessons for someone running ecstasy? But on that subject, Carmichael made a great point about what the likely effects of legalization will be on the existing drug industry, particularly black people who don't have the access to capital it takes to get big: "People think racism in America is in a word or an image. It isn't. It's in money. The history of our country is that as soon as Black people find a way to build up anything, rich people find a way to take it. Doesn't matter if it's rock n' roll, rap, or subprime real estate. They buy it up and bust it from the inside. This country was founded on capitalism, and Black people were the first commodity sold on Wall Street. Now we'll be the first to be stripped of a business that we built, and in exchange some of us will get housing in Wall Street-backed private prisons."

Bleak stuff, and he's probably right. His complete list of rules, for the curious:

• Always have a job.
• Never let business partners know where you stay.
• Never trade minutes for years.
• Align incentives with potential antagonists.
• Minimize your risk.
• In every deal, at least double your money.
• Never write down anything you wouldn't want printed on the cover of the New York Times.
• Keep your face off the Internet.
• Deal with as few people as possible.
• No guns, but keep shooters.
• Always stay behind the white guy.
• Don't fuck with nobody else's girl, not even an enemy's.
• Always store in a place with a doorman.
• Always leave a dummy stash.
• Always get a pay lawyer. And get the best one there is.
• Always under-promise and over-deliver.
• Always keep your money neat.
• Patronize casinos.
• Trust the postal services.
• Try to work with people you know.
• If you can't afford a hotel room, I'm not doing business with you.
• No business at night.
• Be the last person in any group that walks into any space.
• When dealing with new people, Keep the purse small.
• A loss isn't a loss. It's a lesson.
• Always carry an Allen wrench.
• Embrace racial stereotypes.
• Every time you enter a state, change out your cars. Drive rentals but make sure you've got in-state plates as often as possible.
• Keep your business and your family separated.
• Dress like an off-duty Applebee's waiter.
• Always have a lawyer on retainer.
• Always pay the plug - unless you can't.
• Don't get attached.
• Treat your cash like kids, don't let it stay inside all day and get soft.
• I watch sixty seconds tick off on my watch before I say anything I might regret.
• Plan for the worst.
• If you talk long enough to hear yourself giving a speech, you're probably fucking something up.
• When you do any work, no matter how menial, always find out exactly how much you're worth. Because someone will always try to pay you less.
• In any big operation, don't weigh your foot soldiers down with too many different orders. Work hard to focus on a few simple goals.
• Always be willing to spend money for goodwill.
• Get your money and get out.
• Never count the next man's money.
• Never touch your savings.
• Never run from the front.

Book Review: John Stuart Mill - Autobiography

The autobiography is such an ancient genre, St. Augustine having written his Confessions in 400 AD, that its conventions were already pretty fixed by the time that Mill finally completed his shortly before his 1873 death. His contribution to the genre is right in line with what we expect: an overview of his life, his work, his relationship (note the singular), and his likely legacy, balancing between honest modesty and fair self-regard. It's notable not just merely because of who he was - pioneering radical, influential politician, prescient philosopher, one of the most enduringly useful of the great modern thinkers - but because of how he thought, and though each chapter is written in that dense, fractally-claused 19th century style, the precision, honesty, and clarity of his sentiments comes across regardless. His descriptions of his own crisis of confidence, his admiration for his wife, and his accounts of his role in some of the most important political and philosophical debates of his time are still worth reading today, because aside from the historical recollections, he works in several other genres as well: implicit child-raising guide, a model for self-education and rational thinking, a self-help book on depression, advice on how to reform the political system from inside, and even some relationship goals. I'd previously read Nicolas Capaldi's biography of him and it's not bad, but there's nothing like going back to the source. This is definitely worth a stop after reading Utilitarianism and On Liberty.

His account of his childhood is fascinating. His father James Mill decided to raise him as a sort of knowledge-seeking missile, giving him nothing but impossibly ambitious classical homework and barely letting him interact with other children. The contrast between the dry tone of Mill's description of his father's methods and the profoundly ambivalent effects it obviously had on him is striking: Ancient Greek lessons at 3 years old, Latin at 8, rhetoric and history philosophy, all with scholastic discipline and criticism that sounds nearly as bad as the infamous British boarding school punishments of the day, because although his father never beat him, imagine having your father yelling at you because your elocution when orating a speech by Demosthenes at age 12 was not quite up to par. 

I was a fairly bookish child, so a boyhood of not having to go to school and just reading all day doesn't sound so bad, and yet I doubt that force-feeding you child literature like that is useful. A 10 year-old's interpretation of Thucydides can only ever be so good, right? This steroidal homeschooling did produce one of the most famous philosophers of all time, but it's not a surprise that although he respected and admired his father, Mill calmly states that he didn't love him. He would later endorse government-funded (though not government-run) mandatory education in On Liberty, so this reluctance to endorse his own schooling method is pretty interesting. One can only wonder if he would approve of the "guided self-direction" of the Montessori method as being a happy medium between the austere Plato's Republic-style force-feeding of his youth and the often-inflexible public school system we have today, or what he thought of Rousseau's system in Emile.

Of course, there's only so much you can learn from your father, even if your father is himself a major philosopher, so it's fortunate that James Mill knew many of the leading philosophic lights of the day. Mill spends many pages talking about how his personal relationships with David Hume, David Ricardo, Jeremy Bentham, etc. as a child and young man influenced his later thinking. James Mill was an autodidact himself, perhaps he wanted to try to hurry up his son's enlightenment by giving him access to people who had already read all those books. In a way that's almost more interesting than his homeschooling background - if you deliberately unleashed your kid on your smartest friends and let them ask as many questions as they wanted and your friends would tolerate, how would that mentorship affect them? Bentham was the main influence, of course, but Mill came into contact with many people who already were or would later go on to be very significant (he himself would become godfather to Bertrand Russell), and Mill is very perceptive about what he took and what he rejected from his mentors. 

There's an inherent tension between trying to devise an authentic personal philosophy that's true to yourself, on one hand, and on the other to race ahead as fast as possible, to stand on the shoulders of giants by learning from other people as much and as quickly as possible. I think that's where judgment and discernment come in, because ultimately you need the ability to say no to people, to choose what's important from what you take in and discard the rest, and indeed one can take much of Mill's philosophy as instructive guidance on how to choose wisely, not just between ideas but between anything.

And yet we are not mere utilitarian calculating machines, as Mill illustrates with his account of his spiritual crisis at age 20. It's a fascinating account of how he found that he was unable to derive personal happiness purely by the maximize pleasure-minimize pain ethos that underlay his own philosophy. One day in the autumn of 1826, he wasn't feeling so great (it sounds sort of like one of those Sunday afternoons that Douglas Adams so memorably described as the long dark tea-time of the soul), and he started asking himself some tough questions:

In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, 'Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?' And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, 'No!' At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

There are a truly remarkable number of thought-provoking questions embedded in that paragraph that he answers explicitly or implicitly in the remainder of the chapter:

• Is it actually possible to find true happiness in abstract thought, in any degree? For anyone, or just some? Even if it was possible for you, would that happiness be sufficient? How do you balance the importance of your own "life of the mind" with the rest of your life?
• How does your own personal temperament affect your philosophy? Is something like utilitarianism more or less likely to be believed by happy people? Does switching (or reaffirming) belief systems really change your happiness in the long run, like feeling more confident in a nicer outfit? Can you think yourself sad?
• How important are our own beliefs about the world to you, not just your answers to "big questions" but even minor tastes and opinions? What would it mean if something you thought you really loved turned out to be empty, or flat wrong, or even actively negative to your ego?
• If you don't find joy in something's ultimate conclusion, can there be anything positive about any aspect of it at all? Can you go through the motions of something and be happy, or do you need to excise the whole thing, root and branch, and move on? Does being unhappy that something failed mean that there's still something valuable there, or is unhappiness synonymous with exhaustion?
• As we go through life, does it matter at what age we have big mental paradigm shifts? Is it better to have a crisis of faith when young so you can "course correct" more easily, later so that you don't have to live through as much disappointment, or are quandaries time-invariant? How much depends on the quandary, and how much depends on you as a person?
• When you fall down, how do you find what will pick you up? Is it better to just distract yourself until you feel better and go back to what you were doing, or deliberately start on a different path? What role do other people play?

Mill spent some time depressed, then picked himself back up, rebuilt his entire value system from the ground up, and then went on to become one of the most important philosophers in modern history. That's how it's done, folks! His discovery that happiness is often easier to find when you don't chase it too directly is hardly original, but given that it's a much easier maxim to hear than to actually live, you can hardly hear it repeated too frequently. How many goals have we chased in the idea that when we reach them we will finally be satisfied, only to find out that we needlessly caused ourselves and others unhappiness along the way to an empty and unfulfilling end? How many are we still chasing right now?

A more uplifting human interest point in his life story is his relationship with Harriet Taylor, the woman who would later become his wife. One of the downsides of being raised as a child prodigy apart from your peers by a humorless father who cares mostly about your ability to recite ancient Greek is that it's not great for your sex life. On the flip side, when he met Harriet that repression gave him an admirable devotion to her, sustained platonically at the beginning since she was married at the time and then not-so-platonically after the husband conveniently died and they could then get hitched. It's a good reminder that there's no one right way to go through life, and even if you've got baggage, or what you're doing seems scandalous (there's no evidence that Mill was ever a homewrecker, but really really close friendships with someone else's spouse are red flags in any era), it's possible to come out the other side happy and fulfilled. 

Not that anyone would recommend his path to happiness, probably least of all Mill himself, but in spite of their irrationality and generally low odds of success, I think "love finds a way" stories will always find an audience, since very few of us ever take the straight line to happiness. I am honestly jealous of his appreciation for his wife as a person and a philosophical companion who complemented him. As he says: "What was abstract and purely scientific was generally mine; the properly human element came from her: in all that concerned the application of philosophy to the exigencies of human society and progress, I was her pupil, alike in boldness of speculation and cautiousness of practical judgment." He doesn't spend too much time outlining his grief at her death after only 7 years of marriage, but he clearly missed her very deeply, both as a companion and as a fellow philosopher.

One thing that separates Mill from the overwhelming majority of philosophers both ancient and modern is that he was actually a member of the House of Commons for a time, and not merely a writer. Like Marx said, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it!" It's all well and good to sit down at your desk and construct a paper paradise, but actually rolling up your sleeves and participating in the ugly moral compromises that politics requires is very different, particularly in that pre-Marx era when advocates of socialism were basing much of their reform proposals on models of primitive communism, which were as much of a dangerous distraction in the Industrial Revolution as they are now. 

Unsurprisingly, his main issues were all related to fairness: universal suffrage, reducing corruption, and instituting proportional representation. He was unhappy that no one liked his proposal that the more educated be given more votes than the less educated, which sounds anti-egalitarian, but compared to the contemporary explicit bias towards property-owners or the modern implicit bias towards rural voters, it sounds downright reasonable. He was critical to the development of British Liberal Party, but was himself reluctant to fully embrace party labels, preferring to be his own man, and when it came down to tough choices, as it did for him when considering Gladstone's Reform Bill, he was a stick-to-your-guns kind of guy even at the potential cost of passage:

I had always declined being a member of the [Reform] League, on the avowed ground that I did not agree in its programme of manhood suffrage and the ballot: from the ballot I dissented entirely; and I could not consent to hoist the flag of manhood suffrage, even on the assurance that the exclusion of women was not intended to be implied; since if one goes beyond what can be immediately carried and professes to take one’s stand on a principle, one should go the whole length of the principle.

For the most part his views as expressed here only reinforce my idea of Mill as a thinker tirelessly trying to find the most logical way to systematize and thus extend morality. As a member of that unhappy tribe of non-socialist liberals, without the helpful guiding light of a dogma, many of his difficulties with his fellow legislators stemmed from his insistence at trying to universalize moral concepts in a system that encouraged parochialism. For example, during the US Civil War there was a real danger that the UK would support the Confederacy instead of the Union out of crass commercial interests (Karl Marx, then covering the war as a journalist for the New York Tribune, also correctly argued against this view at length), and for many British legislators, the Civil War really did seem like those "it was about states' rights" myths you still heard about sometimes: "There were men of high principle and unquestionable liberality of opinion who thought it a dispute about tariffs, or assimilated it to the cases in which they were accustomed to sympathise, of a people struggling for independence." 

His friend David Hume infamously said of logic: "We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." You can look at Mill's entire parliamentary career as a struggle to show that moral passion and the highest reasoning faculties are not in fact opposed, although judging by the fact that one of his best and most famous lines is still as relevant today as it was in 1861, his successes are tempered at best: "The Conservative party was, by the law of its constitution, necessarily the stupidest party. Now, I do not retract this assertion; but I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative."

The best Mill is his philosophical works, though his accounts of his practical experiences in his career are filled with fascinating little historical asides. For example, I never knew that Mill played such an important role in promoting acceptance of Lord Durham's recommendation for the 1840 unification of French and English Canada, which laid the foundation for modern Canada's creation in 1867 and become the template for the motherland's relationship to the other British colonies. His discussions with famous friends, his disputes with other leading lights, and his recollections of a long and productive life make certain elements of Utilitarianism and On Liberty make a lot more sense; I guess on some level our abstract mental systems of the world can never really be fully divorced from personal experience, and understanding where someone is coming from tells you a lot about where they're trying to go to. 

An autobiography might be as much mortification as inspiration, like George Orwell's line about how "A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats", but Mill had such an exceptionally eventful life that even with his characteristic modesty and understatement it's truly hard to see how he could have written a better or more useful book. His life was his work, and he did a ton of it.