Paisan!

Ancestry, antinatalism, Flanders red ales

If you’re in the Willamette Valley, I’m doing an event with Leah Sottile and Jesse Donaldson at Linfield College in McMinnville on 4/23, as part of their True Crime Speaker Series.

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In my ongoing quest to become the oldest 42-year-old in the world, this month I’ve been tracing my ancestry. I know how it sounds. I had good reasons. My mom’s mom, Grandma Nancy, the grandparent I knew best growing up, passed away. She’d been declining for some time, so it wasn’t a surprise. It sucks, but losing a grandparent at my age isn’t the kind of thing you can complain about.

She wanted her body donated. In order to finish the paperwork, I had to track down some basic biographical info, maiden names and addresses and divorces, the kind of stuff you should probably know about your family members, but also the kind of stuff that gets lost when the intervening generation has been dead for decades.

First I tried newspaper databases and public records searches, the sort of stuff I would’ve done in journalism classes in college, or occasionally for writing projects since. I struck out. So I did what any professional nonfiction writer would: sat at my desk one night, cracked a Miller Lite, and googled, how do I learn about my grandma? 

I wound up on ancestry.com. Holy shit. Public records are old news. They’ve privatized all the records. I entered a few names and dates for myself and my parents, and Ancestry told me everything I needed to know and more. This is not an advertisement, or a recommendation, necessarily; in fact, it was a little frightening. My dad’s high school yearbook photos were on there. The AI-assisted search function found French Canadian parish birth logs from 1684. Distant cousins had already tracked down the alternate spellings of our fourth great-grandmother’s maiden name. By the time my two-week trial ends I might be related to Charlemagne.

In some ways, it’s been yet another unsettling technological experience. For someone who still dimly remembers a time before the internet, the sheer amount of info a private for-profit website has on me seems wild. It was strangely comforting to learn that my ancestors were peasants: Irish and Italian immigrants, early settlers of Quebec, the hoi polloi of colonial Philadelphia. Tradesmen, auto workers, soldiers. Not the kind of people who saved documents or wrote things down; some of them didn’t know how to spell their names. Whatever stories they passed down orally got lost, and most of the people I could ask are dead. I never would have known any of this info without the website. I guess that’s worth the tradeoff of them having all this information—and of me giving them more—but there’s no way in hell I’m doing the DNA thing.

The other reason I wound up tracing my ancestry is that around the time my grandma died, I saw an Instagram post about someone who’d gotten their Italian dual citizenship by proving descent. I didn’t know that was possible. My grandma was Italian. I’ve been to Italy a few times and loved it. You see where this is going. 

I looked up her side of the family. Turns out Nancy wasn’t always named Nancy—Anna Maria just sounded too Italian. Her grandparents came over from a small town outside of Naples in 1899,¹ settled in Philly, had kids, and didn’t get naturalized until later. Because of jure sanguinis, that made their son, my great-grandfather, an Italian citizen by blood. Which in turn should make me eligible for dual citizenship, at least according to the info I could find online.

It would be a complicated and expensive process, which apparently can take years because so many other people are trying to get dual citizenship right now. But with any luck, sometime around 2030 I’ll be summering in my one-euro Italian villa in the countryside.

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As I’ve mentioned here before, I read David Benatar’s book on antinatalism soon after it came out. I thought his arguments were pretty compelling, but I’m not an antinatalist, mostly because the stance requires a degree of certainty I can’t muster. And I quickly learned not to discuss the topic, especially around people who have children or are planning to.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find this Harper’s essay. In the rare cases when antinatalism is acknowledged in popular culture, it’s usually as a punchline, an invitation to the sort of people who enjoy telling other people to kill themselves.²

The author of that article, Elizabeth Barber, does antinatalists the basic decency of taking them seriously, even if she doesn’t agree. More credit to her for that. It helps that she can really write, and is shrewd about using her personal experience in the piece. I was also a fan of her discussion of stepparenting, an experience I’d like to see more writing about, in the contexts of antinatalism and just in general.

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The inimitable Benjamin Dreyer—author of my favorite style guide, a book I keep on my writing desk and have given³ to many students—has started a Substack. It promises to delight.

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I first came across Jeb Loy Nichols’ work in last year’s Pushcart Prize anthology, a place where I often find good essayists I don’t already know. Recently I stumbled upon his music column. I don’t like much music writing, but his is great.

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Speaking of music writing, I also liked this review of the new(ish) Kanye album. It’s a hard and thankless task for the writer. Framing it with the 20th anniversary of College Dropout seems like the right way, maybe the only way, to approach Vultures.

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I mentioned a few months ago that I’d published an essay about my childhood trailers in River Teeth. In the months since, I’ve gotten more kind notes and emails about that piece than I ever have for an essay publication. The other day, a friend pointed me toward this podcast episode, where the editors say a lot of nice and generous things about my essay and others they’ve recently published. That essay discusses class in a way that literary magazines/editors/etc tend to resist, in my experience—a topic for another time—so it means a lot to me that River Teeth has been so supportive of it.

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I recently watched the documentary When We Were Kings, about the 1974 Ali/Foreman heavyweight championship fight in Zaire, aka The Rumble in the Jungle. The doc itself is from 1996, and while I liked it, it does feel dated. For one thing, it relies extensively on George Plimpton—a noted sportswriter as well as one of Truman Capote’s biographers— and Norman Mailer, both of whom covered the fight, and neither of whom covers himself in glory in these interviews.

Ali was done fighting by the time I was born. I remember seeing Foreman win the title in his forties, but he was a different boxer by then. Holyfield/Tyson 2, the infamous ear-biting fiasco that seems like it was the last big heavyweight fight, happened when I was 15. For someone my age, who knew boxing as a minor sport, Foreman mostly for his namesake grills, and Ali only in his debility, it was instructive to see their younger selves onscreen. It gave me a better sense of Ali’s—and boxing’s—massive cultural importance in the ’70s. It also made it very clear that young George Foreman was a problem in the ring.

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I don’t know much about many things, but beer is probably one of them. I’ll spare you the whole spiel about why, but, at the risk of becoming even more Oregon, I might start recommending beers here. This month it’s Rodenbach Classic. Sort of the Budweiser of Flanders red ales, a niche beer style that a lot of people like once they try it. It’s tart but not sour, fruity but not sweet. I think I might have visited the brewery long ago, on my bike beer tour of Belgium, but my memory of that is unsurprisingly hazy. It’s the kind of beer that’s great if you’re only drinking one.

1. On the ship pictured in this post’s header, the Trojan Prince, which was later sunk by a U-Boat.

2. This is the most common and the dumbest response. The fact that Benatar devotes an entire chapter to refuting it doesn’t seem to matter, because, as is usually the case, most people who get mad about that book haven’t read it.

3. I almost said gifted, but as I recall he advises against that word as a verb, and I tend to agree.