What I've been reading this week

09/02/24

Good evening! 

There wasn’t a newsletter last week because I hadn’t actually read much, which I’ll get into, and because sometimes I like to have a little break to remind myself that I can do that and it isn’t a crime.

Anyway, to make up for it let me tell you about something I learned this week. I have a daily calendar in work, which was bought for me by my friend Katy for Christmas, which has a fact on it every day because I love little facts. This week one of them was that in 1948, beavers living near Idaho’s Payette Lake had to be moved because people were building houses in the area and were getting annoyed by them. The terrain between the place they were being moved to and their current habitat was too dangerous to drive through, so the Idaho Department of Fish and Game had to put them in boxes and parachute them from aeroplanes. What makes it better is that it was well-documented and there are loads of pictures, such as this one:

Hope that made up for my short hiatus.

If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂 

My twitter/X is @jessf_white and my Instagram is @lunchpoems.

What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it

Last week I was in a bit of a reading slump, because Gavin Lambert’s Running Time (1982) had been so engrossing that nothing was scratching the itch.I picked up a few things and put them down,ultimately getting some headway with an advanced copy of Maria Bastarós’ Hungry For What, translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn, out in June from Daunt. I read a few stories in the collection but was quite bored with it as a whole, despite a couple of gems in there. I put it down at about the 70 page mark, and I’m unsure if I’ll pick it back up because I just didn’t feel too invested in it. It could have been because I was feeling a bit out of it from the very large, very visual-heavy novel I had just read, but it could also have been a bit dull. I did like how she dedicated it to her girlfriends though.

I then landed on something that may have ruined reading again for me, in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965). I’m not entirely sure what made me pick this -- it could have been that I wanted some non-fiction after so much fiction not doing it for me. It could have been completely random, as my choices very often are, and I’m glad about that because it’s genuinely one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever read. Capote called it a ‘nonfiction novel’, which is a more established genre in narrative nonfiction now, but I do think his description is better for his book specifically. I very often had to stop and remind myself that it was, in fact, nonfiction and was entirely unsurpised when I found out that the writing of it ‘nearly killed him.’ It’s one thing to write a successful novel, but to gather as much information as he did, put it in a legible order and then write it extremely well, and without seeming like it took great effort, is something else. 

In Cold Blood is about the murder of four members of the Clutter family by two ex-convicts, Perry and Dick. The Clutters are extremely well-respected in their small town of Holcomb, Kansas, as Herb Clutter is a wealthy and successful wheat farmer and a leading figure in the Methodist community. His wife is somewhat of a recluse, largely living in the upper-part of the house after having suffered from multiple ‘nervous attacks’ throughout her life. Nonetheless, she is treated respectfully by both her family and other people that come and go through the household and surrounding areas. Nancy is a popular, kindly teenager who is looked up to by many young girls, and the girlfriend of athlete Bobby Rupp. Her brother Kenyon is slightly more quiet and introverted, but both are well-liked in their school and achieve straight As. Their older sisters have moved away from home to marry, but they visit often. They are, in short, an all-American family of the post-war period, a concept that is brutally disrupted when they are found murdered one morning by Nancy’s friends who call on her.

From the beginning, we follow the lives of both the Clutters and their murderers, two angry men who celled together during five year stretches in Kansas state penitentiary. Perry is half Native-American, half-Irish, short, and is troubled by chronic pain in his legs from a motorcycle accident. He had a terrible upbringing, moving around the country with his alcoholic mother or emotionally-absent father -- whoever had decided to take him for a while -- spending spells of time in convents, where he was physically and mentally abused. Dick is a wily, enigmatic young man who is addicted to theft and is constantly trying to repress violent tendencies, as well as paedophilic urges. His upbringing was more steady than Perry’s, but his constant need for movement and fulfilling his immediate wants lead him down a destructive path of writing bad cheques and stealing. The details of the murders they commit are left for the end section of the text, so I won’t go over that -- but I will mention that this an example of Capote’s extremely well-wrought narrative in that he knows where to put what, for the best dramatic impact. (Something that not everyone can do well!)

What I thought about quite frequently while reading this was how much I hate the modern True Crime ‘industry’, which is saturated with podcasts, books and docu-series’ on the murders of people, without lending any real value to them as people. What is sought after is sensation, as well as a righteous sense that knowing about the horrific murder of somebody in another country is somehow a form of self-defence, because it makes the listener more aware of situations they could end up in (an argument I have seen peddled countless times, never convincingly). How then, am I comfortable reading something like this? The difference between In Cold Blood and a girlie narrating the details of a horrific crime while she records herself doing her makeup is quite stark, I would say. Capote lends an incredible amount of humanity to this story, so that it is no longer just a ‘story’ but something that happened, and had real consequences. The sub-heading of the novel is ‘A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences’ and I think much of what is around today doesn’t care or acknowledge that crime does indeed come with consequences, not only in the legal system, but in the well-being of the people who surrounded both the victims and the murderers. Perry’s sister is written about, as are Dick’s parents, and so are the detectives and the journalists and the fellow prisoners and Bobby and Nancy and Kenyon’s high school teachers. This acknowledgment that acts of violence have far-reaching effects is one of the text’s most successful elements, and it took much of the sensationalism out of the story. 

There was one part that I thought was quite ironic, when the inhabitants of the victim's town found out who had done the murders, and a sense of disappointment was described as being evident between them. For much of the investigation, many of Holcomb’s residents were suspicious of one another, believing that the murderers must have been known to the victims. The revelation that it was actually two people who were (seemingly) unconnected to either the family or to the community meant that some of the gossipy sheen was taken off of the case, which exposed how these things become more about the people who are looking on than the people who have actually been murdered. The insertion of the self is very often the appeal of true crime as it exists now (in how it becomes this noble thing, and how there is a sense of entitlement and a feeling that people have the ‘rights’ to know the ins and outs of a crime) and I felt that this was on display in this instance -- the Clutters’ community had evidently quite enjoyed their own fear, and felt cheated that the attack was by nobody that they knew. All in all, this is part of one of the overarching elements of the text, which is its confrontation of the question ‘how could somebody do this?’ by stating how, indeed, somebody could do this, while nodding to the fact that you can produce a whole epic, a whole thesis on something like this, but it still doesn’t quite answer the question, because a crime of this nature is nonsensical by nature. 

More next week!

Books on my radar

I don’t know lol!