Last Week in Books: “Pandemonium describes a mode of organization.”
“Things might work out differently.”
Dear Reader,
“Late in the first book of Paradise Lost,” writes Alex Benham, “John Milton invents the word ‘Pandemonium.’ Milton gives the word to English as the name of Satan’s capital, a place where his demons gather amid the chaos to dream of a new order and found a new world. Where today the word has come to mean havoc and mayhem, Milton’s Pandemonium describes a mode of organization, an operation of imagination and planning that founds itself against the current order.” Benham gives this explanation of the word’s origin in the introduction to his review of Angela Mitropoulos’s new book about pandemic-capitalism, Pandemonium, and he lets the metaphor play out in his review’s conclusion:
What terrifies the current order is not just riots as such but the cause of their contagion... What terrifies the current order is pandemonium in its first, Miltonian meaning. What they fear above all else is a gathering of demons, a contagious assembly of debt and care, that crowds together, amid the chaos, to found a new world.
“Satan Presiding at the Infernal Council.” John Martin, 1824.
This brings to mind a couple things I saw on Twitter (ew, why) this week: 1) all the kerfuffle over Vicky Osterweil’s new book In Defense of Looting, which I think began when she gave an NPR interview that was high profile enough that the usual baffling mix of rightwing grifters and Democratic senators got wind of it and decided to Complain Online; and 2) a reply to a Prompt Tweet (terrible, why am I writing about this?), which I can’t find now because I have a memory like a sieve: the prompt was something like, What was a social movement that people were scared of because they believed it would change the order of things, and they were actually right to think that was so?, and the best answer was militant Protestantism, since it really did change quite a few things. Anyway, I’m not sure, now that I’m here, that I’m really going anywhere with this except to remark, unhelpfully, that chaos is not the same as disorder; that chaos is just an old order’s word for a new order. This is not particularly insightful, but hey, I’m not that smart, so it’s probably the best I can do. Read Milton if you want to hear something smart about order and chaos!
I was just googling (to try to think of something smart to say—again, I want to clear, nothing came of it) and found out that Milton’s publisher wanted him to give his book an intro explaining to normies why his epic poem didn’t rhyme, and this is what he wrote:
Rime being no necessary adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter…. This neglect then of Rime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be esteem’d as an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover’d to Heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.
Which is just… wow, like, the guy was under house arrest, and he was just absolutely roasting everyone! What a champ. New world order? More like new world owner! (Ugh.)
Stay safe,
Dana
Take heed before you hit that “share” button: The End of the World Review is still blocked by Facebook and Instagram. I’m thinking I won’t try to get this fixed anymore because it’s kind of funny.
1. “The Contagious Assembly” by Alex Benham, The New Inquiry
Alex Benham reviews Angela Mitropoulos’s Pandemonium: Proliferating Borders of Capital and the Pandemic Swerve, which examines how the pandemic has played out under capitalism.
…As the pandemic hit, however, it rapidly became apparent that the freedoms guaranteed by liberalism were not as expansive or extensive as their defenders liked to believe. The only sacrosanct rights, it turned out, were the rights that guaranteed the extraction of surplus and the preservation of property. Here, Mitropoulos highlights both Boris Johnson’s pursuit of “herd immunity” in Britain and the striking words of Kevin Hassett, the White House adviser who declared that “our human capital stock is ready to go back to work.”
…Much of the established knowledge of COVID-19 still draws on the devastating outbreaks of bovine coronavirus in the late 19th century, and the vast culls undertaken to control them… Ideas of natural selection, or even eugenics, are an easy partner to a concern for the inheritance of properties. This juxtaposition sets up Mitropoulos’s evisceration of the British government’s plan for herd immunity, which, if allowed to run its course, would have had more in common with a cull than with a control.
2. “The Burning House” by Marcia Chatelain, The Nation
Marcia Chatelain reviews Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, which “shows us how tens of thousands of Black people were manipulated by the federal government and unscrupulous bankers and real estate agents through a program of predatory lending that claimed to empower Black homeowners but ultimately pushed them into greater financial insecurity.”
The reenergized movement against anti-Black violence ignited by the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, among others, has inspired the reading public to turn to texts that can explain exactly how we got here. Reading lists abound with everything from histories of slavery to self-help guides on white privilege and allyship. Yet few engage with the histories of urban inequality and policing…
The nation’s rootedness in slavery and the way white Americans have galvanized the privileges afforded them are critical to understanding the problem of race in America, but so too is the history of housing and racism in American cities. Property and racial inequality have been bound up together so tightly and for so long that we often miss the relationship, and yet we cannot understand police brutality in the United States without it.
3. “Mark Twain’s Mind Waves” by Chantel Tattoli, The Paris Review
A lovely essay by Chantel Tattoli about friendship, Mark Twain, and mind waves (Twain was very convinced telepathy is real; also, maybe telepathy is sort of real).
…he wrote that “inventions, ideas, phrases, paragraphs, chapters, and even entire books” could all flow brain to brain. He said, resigned, “I often originate ideas in my mind but get almost all of them out of somebody else’s.” The inevitability of unintentional plagiarism bothered him. In November of 1907, Twain heard about a new story by George Bernard Shaw. It echoed in both style and substance one he’d composed seventeen years earlier—“hilarious and extravagant to the verge of impropriety,” and unread by anyone, because Livy would not let it print. Twain concluded that “Mr. Shaw must have gotten those incidents out of my head…”
4. “All at Sea” by Harris Feinsod, The Baffler
Harris Feinsod reviews Laleh Khalili’s Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, which “offers one of the most outstanding recent investigations into the hard-to-narrate infrastructure of modern ports and their place in the patterns of global conflict and commerce.”
Hard to glimpse behind the layers of security, Jabal Ali is Khalili’s white whale. Escaping regulatory scrutiny, it hosts the frictionless capital accumulation of some seven thousand corporate entities, most foreign, who rely on the docility of laborers from Nepal and elsewhere hemmed in by forced migration. In a recent interview with the ‘Everyday Analysis’ podcast, Khalili recounted that leaders of International Transport Workers’ Federation had encouraged her to look into Jabal Ali, justifiably concerned about the labor conditions there. She twice managed to call on the inaccessible port in her own travel by container ship…
5. “A Kind of Blueprint” by Mayukh Sen, The Nation
Mayukh Sen writes about the legacy of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the Korean-American author of the experimental novel Dictée, who was murdered just days after the book’s publication in 1982.
The writer Cathy Park Hong brought greater attention to Cha’s work with her recent essay collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(2020). In the book’s penultimate chapter, “Portrait of an Artist,” Hong puts Cha’s work and death in conversation, a necessary if morally thorny task. The careful avoidance of discussion of Cha’s death has stripped her art of agency, Hong argues, turning her into a symbol for aborted artistic promise. To rectify this, Hong pores over court records and speaks to John Cha and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s friend Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, who posits that Cha certainly would have been idolized more widely after her death if she had been a young white artist on the Upper West Side. Hong’s critical exercise ultimately illuminates Dictée, which, Hong writes, “made the immigrant’s discomfort with English into a possible form of expression.”
6. “Allen Ginsberg at the End of America” by Michael Schumacher, The Paris Review
The Paris Review has excerpted Michael Schumacher’s editor’s note for The Fall of America Journals, 1965–1971, a collection of the recordings made by Allen Ginsberg during the years he composed The Fall of America on a tape recorder gifted to him by Bob Dylan.
When Allen Ginsberg won the 1974 National Book Award for The Fall of America, the largest volume of poems he would ever publish (aside from his Collected Poems and Selected Poems), he gained a measure of formal acceptance long denied him by the literati. The Fall of America was nothing less than a staggering magnum opus, Ginsberg’s autobiographical journey through the United States as the country experienced one of the most turbulent periods in its history. As a very public figure—arguably, America’s best-known poet—Ginsberg seemed to be everywhere at once…
…Recording his thoughts on tape added a new, significant wrinkle to his writing: he no longer required a quiet place to sit and write, relying on his memory for detail and context; instead he was instantly recording his thoughts, even in the front seat of a van speeding down the highway.
7. “Performing Democracy” by Ratik Asokan, The Baffler
Ratik Asokan interviews David Levi Strauss, author of Co-Illusion: Dispatches From the End of Communication, “a kind of hybrid made up of seventy prose dispatches—some journalistic, others more imaginative—written over the course of the 2016 presidential election campaign. An art critic moonlighting as political sleuth, Strauss attends the Republican and Democratic conventions, drinking in the ‘exhilarating and terrifying’ spectacle they afford, in a troubled attempt to make sense of how the instruments of mass-media have deformed the U.S. electoral process.” Says Strauss:
My thinking on this subject is deeply influenced by Paul Virilio…
Much of Virilio’s thinking is informed by modern warfare and military research. He had contacts inside the French military; as he drew on their research, he realized that the speed at which weapons and attack systems, and especially optical-visual and surveillance systems (enabling you to see the whole battlefield), were developing in sophisticated ways was like nothing we had seen before. More importantly, he came to feel that this speed was not a neutral force. Speed has a politics.
Applying this to the context of news, it becomes clear that when the rate of delivery of information is increased, it diminishes the ability to evaluate and respond to it. One just goes with the flow. And images have become flow, now, rather than discrete entities. Disabling response mechanisms (and feedback) makes it possible to control masses of people, often with their enthusiastic consent. In this country, the U.S. military built the internet, and then gave it to the private, profit-driven system to continue the collection of private data. In this environment, speed enhances conformity.
8. “The Evolving Designs of US Voting Ballots” by Emily Wilson, Hyperallergic
More about U.S. elections! Emily Wilson reviews Alicia Yin Cheng’s This Is What Democracy Looked Like, a history of U.S. ballot design—“the first [book] of its kind,” according to Wilson.
In the early days of the paper ballot, at the start of the 1800s, each municipality had its own requirements, which were not systematically enforced. Early ballots were slips with just one name or handwritten. Voting was an open system, and in some places, party workers solicited voters, handing out “straight party” tickets, which could be put in ballot boxes with no selections made…
Cheng notes that between 1800 and 1850, the population of the US grew from 5.3 million to 23 million with immigrants arriving from Europe. Voting rights expanded as the requirements to own property were eased. But the design of the ballot reflects how some were included while others were not. For example, in the 1830s, the ornate typography and elaborate styles may have been meant to mislead voters who weren’t paying careful attention. Cheng writes that the volume of campaign material made regulation difficult, effectively leaving the parties in charge, or “the party foxes in charge of the electoral henhouse.”
9. “What We Know About Hurricanes” by Lyn Millner, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Lyn Millner reviews Eric Jay Dolin’s A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America's Hurricanes, which seems like a very comprehensive history of hurricanes, and there’s a lot of details to share from the review alone, but I’m sort of fixated on “the aftermath of an 1893 hurricane that hit New York City, when boys collected dead sparrows in Central Park to sell to restaurants.” This raises more questions than it answers, frankly!
10. “Hitler and the Holocaust” by Peter Fritzsche, The New York Times
Peter Fritzsche reviews the second volume of Volker Ullrich’s “skillfully conceived and utterly engrossing biography” of Hitler, Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945 (the sequel to Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939), which depicts Hitler as the primary mover of both the war and the Holocaust.
“Never Again.” Adolf Hitler repeated that slogan over and over. He did so from his first election campaigns in the 1920s until his final appeal to the German people urging them to resist Allied invaders in 1945. Familiar to us when we think about the Holocaust, Hitler’s words referred to German victims, however, not murdered Jews…
With this embattled worldview, Hitler led the revitalized Third Reich with the clear aim to pre-emptively and repeatedly strike at declared enemies in what he considered to be a remorseless struggle for existence. As he explained to the Nazi elite in April 1944, “Exterminate, so that you yourself will not be exterminated!” “Never Again” prepared the horrific scale of German violence in the years 1939-45.
11. “The Appointment” by Katharina Volckmer, Granta
It feels appropriate to follow that up with an excerpt from Katharina Volckmer’s novel The Appointment, which seems to be some sort of stream of consciousness satire about Hitler and sex. (I’ve only included the Hitler part, not the sex part, because I have a theory that more people unsubscribe from the newsletter when I talk about sex than violence.)
I know that this might not be the best moment to bring this up, Dr Seligman, but it just came to my mind that I once dreamt that I was Hitler. I feel embarrassed talking about it even now, but I really was him, overlooking a mass of fanatical followers, I delivered a speech from a balcony. Wearing the uniform with the funny, puffy legs, I could feel the little moustache on my upper lip, and my right hand was flying through the air as I mesmerised everyone with my voice. I don’t remember what exactly I was talking about – I think it had something to do with Mussolini and some absurd dream of expansion – but that doesn’t matter. What is fascism anyway but ideology for its own sake; it carries no message, and in the end the Italians beat us to it. I can’t walk for more than a hundred metres in this city without seeing the words pasta or espresso, and their ghastly flag is hanging from every corner. I never see the word sauerkraut anywhere. It was never feasible for us to hold down an empire for a thousand years with our deplorable cuisine; there are limits to what you can impose on people, and anyone would break free after a second serving of what we call food.
12. “An Alternative Common Sense” by Dylan J. Montanari, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Dylan J. Montanari reviews The Wreckage of Philosophy: Carlo Michelstaedter and the Limits of Bourgeois Thought, which “not only traces the contours of Michelstaedter’s intellectual development, but ‘thinks with’ and beyond Michelstaedter. The Wreckage of Philosophy is not just a work of scholarship, but a philosophical accomplishment in its own right.” I’ve been chewing on this (as extremely sophisticated people who read philosophy say) for a few days:
…consciousness conceals its own need for affirmation, its own existence as a kind of need or lack — it hides from itself the fact that it projects into the world the value that it claims to “find” there, thus justifying its own projections. This act of possessing the world is an integral activity for consciousness, something that confuses a subjective need for an objective feature of reality. The world becomes its own reward system insofar as each act of the will reinforces the idea that the world is not only something that can be possessed, but also the fantasy that it is actually “made” for our possession.
13. “Rainald Goetz’s ‘Rave’” by Shivani Radhakrishnan, Bomb
Shivani Radhakrishnan reviews Rainald Goetz’s Rave, originally published in 1998 and recently translated into English for the first time. This one is about sex, which, if you’re reading closely, means I’m already breaking my “no sex in the newsletter” rule that I just made in #11.
By the end, the book seems to self-destruct, a vision as much about rave culture’s dissolution as about the psyche’s. This takes place at the level of language: the auto-fictional narrator, Rainald, and his crew take up an anthem “Meet girls. Take drugs. Listen to music,” mostly in that order, but the book’s arc is hacked up excessively and deliberately. Snatches of prose intersect with dialogue, intertitles, and scenes strung out and interrupting themselves. The overall effect is a hazy sense of where you are (Berlin? Ibiza? New York?), what drugs you’re on at the moment (ketamine? coke? pills?), and who you’re fucking in which hotel room.
14. “On Albert Memmi” by Adam Shatz, The London Review of Books
Adam Shatz writes about the life of Albert Memmi, the Jewish-French-Tunisian author of the classics The Colonizer and the Colonized and The Pillar of Salt, who stood astride many identities and ultimately annoyed everyone. “‘Here is a French writer from Tunisia who is neither French nor Tunisian,’ Albert Camus wrote in his preface” to The Pillar of Salt.
‘He represents no one,’ Sartre wrote of Memmi in his preface to [The Colonizer and the Colonized], ‘but since he is everyone at once, he will prove to be the best of witnesses.’ Anticipating some of the themes of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, published four years later, Memmi described colonialism as a ‘diseased’ situation that ‘manufactures colonialists, just as it manufactures the colonised’, its ‘century hardened face ... nothing more than a mask under which it slowly smothers and dies’. Coloniser and colonised, he argued, were locked in an ‘implacable dependence’ that ‘fashioned their respective traits and dictated their behaviours’. Their conduct was contradictory to the point of being pathological.
15. “Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s ‘The Adventures of China Iron’” by Sam Carter, Music & Literature
Sam Carter reviews Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s The Adventures of China Iron, a novel derived “from characters and episodes found in José Hernández’s Martín Fierro,” an Argentinian epic poem published in the 1870s, and which attempts to invert the colonialism of its source material.
Where Hernández’s poem dedicates only a few lines to the china, or woman, who is the mother of Martín Fierro’s children, Cabezón Cámara hands her the reins for the entire narrative…
…“I wish you could see us,” she says on the novel’s last page, “but no one will. We know how to leave as if vanishing into thin air: imagine a people that disappears, a people whose colors, houses, dogs, clothes, cows and horses all gradually dissolve like a specter.”
16. “All of the Above” by Rachel Carroll, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Rachell Carroll reviews Srikanth Reddy’s new collection of poetry Underworld Lit, which seems, according to Carroll, to be asking the question “What is the justice system that could address the sheer scale of death in our modern era…?”
In a series of sequential prose poems, Reddy descends into not one, but several underworlds. Somehow the ballcourts of Xibalba (the Mayan Underworld) sit adjacent to the pyramids of ancient Egypt, which happen to be on the road to the celestial courts of the Qing dynasty. In each realm of the dead, the nightmarish mingles with the ludic as Reddy offers a trippy crash course in global literatures of the afterlife, including Dante’s Inferno, the Popol Vuh, The Egyptian Amduat, and Journey to the West.
17. “Erudite Poems That Playfully Rework the Conventions of Life Writing” by J. Peter Moore, Hyperallergic
More afterlife poetry! J. Peter Moore reviews Matthew Fink’s collection of poetry afterKleist. (Yes, this is a reference to Heinrich von Kleist, who wrote Michael Kohlhaas, because this is basically a Heinrich von Kleist fan account.)
This is an irreverent work of mannered excesses and tonal subtleties that takes the life and death of German writer Heinrich von Kleist as a starting point for a novelistic exploration of the gossipy underside of the Western literary canon. Two pages in and you’re already onto the pun of the title — that this is not a series of poems in the style of Kleist, nor is it a sober reflection on his life and works. Rather, the book lays out the world Kleist experiences after Kleist. It’s not exactly heaven, but something closer to that kitschy poster in your neighborhood bowling alley, where Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe play poker with Elvis and James Dean. Instead of pop cultural icons, this pantheon is peopled by a caricatured cast of deceased poets, from Emily Dickinson to James Brown — “Can I scream, Maceo / can I scream?” — in which Kleist is our guide.
18. “The Women Who Built an Alternative to Bloomsbury” by Scott Bradfield, The New Republic
Scott Bradfield reviews Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars, about the important place in literary history of London’s Mecklenburgh Square, “a ‘radical address’ that drew artists, writers, poets, and intellectuals, many of them women. Close to the British Museum Reading Room, and secluded from much of the clatter and stink of industrial London, it provided the sort of ‘furnished rooms’ that were variously described as ‘second-rate boarding houses’ or ‘high-class service flatlets.’ (‘I read and write at the British Museum,’ wrote Dorothy L. Sayers in her early days of work and research, ‘and have my meals and go to bed.’) And since women of the time weren’t entirely well treated by the universities and libraries (which were either resistant or actively opposed to the idea of women researchers and teachers), Mecklenburgh Square gave them a space to work and study.”
19. “Village of the Damned” by Gregory McNamee, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Gregory McNamee reviews Debi Cornwall’s Necessary Fictions, a book of photography that documents an exceptionally surreal space, “a dusty little Potemkin village at Fort Irwin National Training Center in the Mojave Desert… a kind of faux-caravanserai that’s as much Motel 6 as Samarkand.”
Fort Irwin is populated by distinctive tribes: not just the military’s fictional enemy they call “Atropians,” an ethnonym with echoes of utopia, but tribes made up of paid actors whose brief includes wearing “moulage,” or makeup stimulating wounds minor and horrific, all for a base pay of $22 an hour (with raises topping out at $33, and the possibility of working 84 hours a week).
The money is even better for the SSkRP, or Special Skilled Role Players, and FLS, or Foreign Language Speaking personnel, those capable of firing a weapon and/or driving a military vehicle and/or speaking Farsi, Dari, or Arabic, pretending to be insurgents for the edification of a third tribe: those soldiers, marines, National Guard members, and other personnel who are liable to be sent at any minute to places where the bullets are flying and bombs are going off.
20. “The Day Malcolm X Was Killed” by Les Payne, The New Yorker
An excerpt from the late Les Payne’s The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, which was completed by his daughter after his death in 2018.
Raheem approached Malcolm and covered him with his long camel-hair coat. Then he reached under Malcolm and found the weapon. “I lifted the gun and holster up and put it in my pocket,” he said. “People saw me doing this but didn’t know what I was doing.” Archival news footage captures the moment. It is likely that police were aware beforehand that Malcolm was armed and, by some accounts, may have expected a shoot-out between Muslim gunmen and the Black leader. Detectives for the Manhattan Attorney General’s office later interrogated Raheem, trying to find the pistol, and even searched his apartment for it. They narrowly missed the .38 Chief’s Special, which he had hidden. When they departed, Raheem ground the weapon into powder on a rigged emery wheel.
Cheated of being able to declare that Malcolm had been armed with an illegal weapon—a man who lived by the gun and died by it—authorities were left to solve the murder of a Black martyr they despised.
21. “Migration as Bio-Resilience” by John B. Washington, The Los Angeles Review of Books
John B. Washington reviews Sonia Shah’s The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, a book that argues that migration is an ecological necessity.
There are now more displaced humans than ever — around one percent of the total human population — and the climate crises together with humanity’s ceaseless creep are driving an increasing number of nonhuman species to search for more welcoming climes. That half of the story is popularly understood: the world is on the move. What is less often acknowledged, and what Shah convincingly fills out, is its biological necessity. “Migration’s ecological function extends beyond the survival of the migrant itself,” she writes. “Wild migrants build the botanical scaffolding of entire ecosystems.” Besides spreading pollen and seeds — upon which the survival of many plants depend — migrants also transport genes, thus bringing genetic diversity. Migration is not only a human fact but a biological one.
22. “On Percival Everett’s Almost Secret Experiment in a Novel in Threes” by David Lerner Schwartz, Lit Hub
David Lerner Schwartz reveals that Percival Everett’s latest novel Telephone was actually published in three different versions!
The biggest changes are what happens on the family’s vacation to Paris and how the novel ends. Books of course contain multitudes in that they contain characters who, like us, are contradictory, complex, and human in worlds so close to (or far from) our own. But here, depending on the version you’ve received, you’re getting a slightly different Zach, a slightly different story. In one version he’s perhaps more reticent, another more daydreaming, another more at odds, but these differences seem overall negligible. Across the versions, they average out to the same man, the same-ish experience. But to be wise to Telephone’s instantiations is to believe that perhaps somewhere else things might work out differently.
▼ ▼ ▼
You're back! Life is good again.