Unmarxing Marx

A new book on Karl Marx, Marx, A Nineteenth Century Life, is out and it does well to present Marx as a "figure of the past," a real person, with real human instincts, rather than as Marx the eternal "prophet of the future."

Jonathan Sperber, an University of Missouri scholar, has done well to rescue Marx from the cobweb of iconism. 

An excerpt from a review of the book:

[...] It comes as a shock to realize that the ultimate leftist, the father of Communism itself, fits a recognizable pattern. It’s like discovering that Jesus Christ regularly organized bake sales at his local church. So inflated and elevated is the global image of Marx, whether revered as a revolutionary icon or reviled as the wellspring of Soviet totalitarianism, that it’s unsettling to encounter a genuine human being, a character one might come across today. If the Marx described by Sperber, a professor at the University of Missouri specializing in European history, were around in 2013, he would be a compulsive blogger, and picking Twitter fights with Andrew Sullivan and Naomi Klein.

Rise and fall

HBO will be airing an interesting documentary today, March 28, 2013: Emmy award winning Alexandra Pelosi's (Nancy Pelosi's daughter) Fall to Grace.

Pelosi's subject is James McGreevey, the ex-governor of New Jersey, who went through a rough and public divorce from his wife after he was charged with soliciting gay sex from an aide. Through all the rough and tumble of this very public process of exposure and perhaps a bit of a crucifixion on the side, McGreevey was re introduced to the world as a closeted gay male.

Today, McGreevey lives in Plainsfield, New Jersey, with his Australian mate Mark O'Donnell and is an Episcopalian with a degree in Divinity (he received that in his early 50's) and a career in social service:

As a recovery specialist who preaches the Gospel, Mr. McGreevey spends much of his time in the Hudson County Correctional Center in Kearny, N.J., working with women fighting addiction through the nonprofit organization Integrity House. His message: No matter how far you’ve fallen, redemption is within reach.

Pelosi claims she is interested in broken souls and deemed McGreevey to be one. She likes to look inside the lives of those who have fallen after having been in the limelight for a while. 

Indeed, as Pelosi says in her insightful interview, the fall of men and women are far worthier of attention than are the stories of their "rise." The "rise" stories are often formulaic and banal and they are also, with the benefit of hindsight, re constructed to make them inspirational.

The fall stories, on the other hand, are more human.

The title of the HBO documentary on McGreevey has a turn into a parable as well: For those who've read Leonard Kriegel's touching essay, "Falling into Life," will see a "fall" as redemption, or a freedom from certain invisible yet adamantine shackles that hold people back from experiencing their "real" lives--the one's reserved for them to achieve their full human potential.

Clearly, McGreevey's fall isn't the typical fall from the wheel of fortune, but a fall into what was reserved for him as a real and rightful place in this world--a gay man with a deep conscience and desire for social service.

Marilyn Monroe

A new biography of Marilyn Monroe is on the block: Lois Banner's The Passion and the Paradox.

A review of the book has three striking observations about Monroe:

1. There are multiple rumors of who Marilyn really was. I like this one best--she was both a dumb blonde and a bookworm who read Dostoyevsky.

2. Monroe justified promiscuity with the conviction that sex was "an act that brought friends closer together."

3. Marilyn had recurring visions of striding over a supine row of church congregants who peered up her skirt.

A biography of Superman

Biographies of fictional characters are rare, however, where comic action heroes are concerned, it is an eminent possibility.

Larry Tye has written a biography of Superman and part of the history of Clark Kent/Superman is also a history of the artistic evolution of the creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Siegel and Shuster, Tye writes, grew creatively along with the popularity of their hero. Starting as a typical fighter for social justice with a hardened body, Superman's "superness" grew with a "steady dreamlike magnification till:

His million-­decibel yell had enough intensity and pitch to topple tall buildings. What if a building fell on him? A tickle at most. His nostrils were super-acute. His typing was super-fast. . . . His gaze was intense enough to hypnotize a whole tribe of South American Indians at once. He could converse with a mermaid in her native tongue and beat a checkers expert his first time playing.