Dear Reader,
This week’s books newsletter is, ah, very late, so I’ve surrendered to the inevitable and called it Last Week in Books! It’s a little joke between me and my guilt.
I’m almost certainly running late because of all the Stardew Valley I played last weekend (finally caught a pufferfish, god help me it only took me five in-game years) but there was also the weeks-long, not-yet-over saga of my a/c breaking down and me needing to vacate the premises during the daytime for several days while the a/c guys came to work on it. It’s not something I imagine I would normally, in the Normal Times Which We Pretend Will Return But Never Will, bring up in a newsletter because it is very boring, but I’ve been preoccupied by a realization over the last few days (which is a thing that is maybe already obvious to everyone else and I’m a dope for thinking this is a novel idea) which is that everything, every boring little thing, like repair guys coming to work on something in your apartment, is now a matter of life and death. As in, the reason I am leaving my apartment when the repair guys come is to prevent death. We’re all actuaries now, calculating the possibility that death for ourselves and others could result from our most seemingly insignificant decisions.
X-Ray showing root canal of teeth, from the archives of Pearson Scott Foresman.
This is obviously an insight that occurred a long time ago to people who have been forced to be out in the world during the pandemic, unlike pampered me, who has been retired among my books and streaming services and farming video games and a/c, and so it’s probably dumb for me to even write about this. But it’s messing with my head, I guess, thinking of this kind of thing happening on a macro-level. At some point, no matter how reclusive you’ve been, the necessity of maintenance creeps in. We could have stopped society for six weeks and got a handle on the virus, but in the U.S. we whiffed it, and I worry that we can’t stop again, because the gears of society need too much oiling now, everything is all backed up! The work orders piling up, the machinery breaking down, tens of thousands mysterious lumps gone unscreened for cancer, the cavities digging into the pulps of a million teeth…
I watched Nashville for the first time last night. Of all the movies I’ve watched during the pandemic looking for something that felt resonant with “the current moment,” it was the one that hit home hardest. It ends, you probably know if you’ve heard anything about the movie, with an assassination at a campaign event, and as the victim is carried away, another character, who has been injured in the shooting, takes the mic and demands that the audience not acknowledge the tragedy that has just unfolded: “Y’all take it easy now. This isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville! They can't do this to us here in Nashville! Let’s show them what we’re made of. Come on everybody, sing! Somebody, sing!” And as all the film’s various wealthy characters quickly exit stage left, fleeing from the crowd, the hoi polloi end the show with an anesthetizing group sing-along of “It Don’t Worry Me,” the most anti-political song one could possibly dream up.
It’s got me thinking about how my mission with this micro-magazine is to talk about how some things do, in fact, worry me. And so I’ve decided I’ll be starting up another weekly round-up, this one of climate crisis reporting. (Still on the fence about whether I’m going to call it “This Week in Global Warming”.... wait who am I kidding I’m definitely calling it that.) I’ll probably send it out Friday, or Monday, or some other day. Once a week though, for sure. It’ll be just like this books newsletter but probably without this bad letter at the beginning, since I probably can’t conjure up the time to write 2 of these a week unless I quit Stardew Valley. And it will be for subscribers only, so if you want to get in on the ground floor, here’s a discounted subscription offer just for you, people who actually read this letter to the end.
Stay safe,
Dana
1. “That Elusive Thing” by Negar Azimi, Bookforum
Negar Azimi writes about Gary Indiana’s first novel Horse Crazy, which was reissued a couple of years ago, and which feels to Azimi like it might as well have been written today.
Someone once said we re-create the pictures we grew up with. When I picked up the recent reissue of Horse Crazy a few weeks ago I was knocked over by its uncanny and insistent echoing of our pandemic present. One of its lessons: The government will not save you. Another: It will fuck you over. Like the AIDS epidemic that preceded it, the virus among us, the one with the monarchical name, incubates fear and crystallizes difference. Sardined in narrow apartments and deprived of human touch, legions are lonely. Others, bereft of savings and health insurance, flail in pathos and precarity. Secure in their antiseptic privilege, the rich flock to islands and countryside compounds. That the coronavirus robs its victims of taste and smell feels like an ironic detail only Gary Indiana could have hallucinated.
2. “The Danielle Steel of Communism” by Jennifer Wilson, Lapham’s Quarterly
Jennifer Wilson writes about Russia’s first modern bestseller, The Keys of Happiness by Anastasia Verbitskaya, “a turn-of-the-century novelist, playwright, and publisher whose racy stories of women liberating themselves from men and capitalism were so widely read that the Russian literary establishment feared she would soon eclipse Tolstoy in popularity.”
The Keys to Happiness, a soapy depiction of the Russian political landscape in the lead-up to the Bolshevik Revolution, is a vexed mix of what was considered then to be radical feminism and reactionary currents such as anti-Semitism, eugenics, and orientalism. Occasionally it seems like Verbitskaya is using scenes of torrid passion to distract the reader from these political contradictions, but in reality the disturbing range of views presented in the novel was no doubt part of how it found so many audiences. To a modern-day reader, The Keys to Happiness feels fast-paced, messy, and dangerous; it can be called a breezy read only insofar that it makes you feel as if a strong wind is pushing you down a Greek mountain toward some tragic conclusion.
3. “The Dangerous and Untold Story of Paparazzi Work” by Vanessa Diaz, Lit Hub
A fascinating excerpt from Vanessa Diaz’s Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood, about social hierarchies within the celebrity reporting industry. After relating the story of Chris Guerra, a young freelancer who was struck by a car and killed after being told to walk into traffic by a police officer, Diaz writes:
That today’s Hollywood paparazzi are predominantly Latino men, including US-born Latinos and Latin American (im)migrants, is central to the nature of the public discourses around paparazzi. News articles refer to them as “untrained,” “corner-cutting,” “foreigners working on . . . questionable visas,” while online reader comments call them “bottom feeders” and “illegals” who should “be deported.” The field has become dominated by Latinos because formal barriers of entry do not exist for paparazzi work. This is their way into the Hollywood system, outside the hierarchies and elite spaces inhabited by others in the industry, such as celebrity reporters. e paparazzi’s informal labor and racially minoritized status position them as public scapegoats for what is wrong with celebrity media.
4. “Boundary Issues” by Crispin Long, Bookforum
Crispin Long reviews Paul B. Preciado’s An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing:
...he envisions, in a long introduction, a utopian world that has been freed from the restrictive structures of traditional gender and sexuality. The remainder of the book does not have quite as coherent a sensibility as its opening chapter: It’s a collection of essays he wrote from 2013 to 2018, mostly as a columnist at the French newspaper Libération. The columns are short and omnivorous, commenting breathlessly on the revolutionary spirit of the Athens neighborhood Exarcheia, or on the way testosterone alters his vocal cords, or on the neoliberal values of museum exhibitions in New York City, or on the Catalan independence movement, or on the rights of sex workers. As in his other writing, Preciado is spirited and dramatic. The game Candy Crush, he writes in one essay, is masturbatory in nature, the ultimate capitalist vessel for misplaced libidinal energy, but “the players never win anything: when they finish one level, it’s the screen that has the orgasm.”
In the end, though, Long is a bit down on the collection: “...one of the potential pitfalls of autotheory in general: the possibility that writers will misjudge the limitations of their own perspectives... to queer everything is to sap meaning from queerness.”
5. “Thinking Is a Sickness of the Eyes” by Tyler Malone, Poetry
&
6. “A Little Fellow with a Big Head” by Margaret Jull Costa, The Paris Review
&
7. “The Literary Life of Pessoa’s Alter Ego” by Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari, Lit Hub
Tyler Malone’s review of The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro, plus excerpted versions of the translator’s note and editors’ introduction, give a broad view of what exactly is going on with Alberto Caeiro, the greatest poet who never lived. As Malone writes, Caeiro “was born March 8, 1914, springing from the mind of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, seemingly fully formed, in the shape of a shepherd-poet. He began life as a gag: “I thought I would play a trick on [friend and fellow poet Mário de] Sá-Carneiro and invent a bucolic poet of a rather complicated kind,” Pessoa admitted.” Translator Margaret Jull Costa explains that in his lifetime Pessoa wrote under at least 136 different heteronyms: “Pessoa wrote of the heteronyms: ‘They are beings with a sort-of-life-of-their-own, with feelings I do not have, and opinions I do not accept. While their writings are not mine, they do also happen to be mine.’” And editors Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari write that when the friend whom Pessoa was teasing with his shepherd-poet heteronym committed suicide a couple years later, Pessoa transformed the character into “the young Master whose memory would be kept alive by a group of disciples… this second “posthumous” Caeiro was… discussed by Pessoa’s fictitious authors, António Mora, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos” and published in various literary reviews. One of Caeiro’s fictitious literary disciples wrote that the late Caeiro was influenced by — and was superior to — Whitman, while Pessoa himself, in his own criticism of the deceased master’s work, wrote that it was unlikely such an unrefined person had ever read Whitman! Backing up a little, Malone writes in his review:
It is telling that Caeiro, at least in Pessoa’s own self-mythology, merely “appeared.” He wasn’t sought or searched for; there was no irritable reaching. One of Pessoa’s dominant pre-Caeiro heteronyms was named Alexander Search—and the break from the search and Search, through Caeiro, is the invention of a new Pessoa. After writing those 30 Caeiro poems in a torrent of desubjectivized inspiration, Pessoa claimed he then immediately “wrote, again without stopping, the six poems constituting ‘Oblique Rain,’ by Fernando Pessoa.” He called this “the return of Fernando Pessoa / Alberto Caeiro to Fernando Pessoa himself” and “the reaction of Fernando Pessoa against his nonexistence as Alberto Caeiro.”
8. “Unknown Unknowns Come Sweeping In” by Geoff Nicholson, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Geoff Nicholson’s review of John Brian King’s Riviera: Photographs of Palm Springs meanders much farther afield than the photo book itself, through Nicholson’s memories of the city and the long history of spring breakers going wild, as well as into John Brian King’s odd career (“or maybe this isn’t such a strange CV for someone born in Los Angeles”), which includes a book he coedited in the ’90s that I just bought the last copy of on Alibris for $12:
…The first work of his that I ever became aware of was the 1990 publication AMOK Fourth Dispatch: Sourcebook of Extremes of Information in Print. King was co-editor of the book and also a partner in the AMOK bookstore in Silver Lake, the outfit that published it. The volume was in part a mail-order catalog and it was possible to order items from it, but in those pre-internet days, I think most people, myself included, thought of it as a reference book, a compendium, a database that could direct you to all kinds of fringe material and information, some of which we didn’t even know existed, and some of which we might have been happier not knowing about.
The publisher’s blurb gave a very fair description of the contents and aspirations:
“AMOK fingers the pulse of deviance — raw data in the form of: forensic medical texts and CIA torture manuals, behavior control techniques, biographies of serial killers and porno queens, fire and brimstone fundamentalist fulminations, Satanist manifestoes and Santeria spellbooks, nudist colony guidebooks and psychotronic film directories, human oddities picturebooks and UFO abduction accounts, riot control technologies…”
It was divided into sections such as “Control,” “Sleaze,” “Scratch and Sniff,” and “Mayhem.”
9. “Michael Heller, Constellations of Waking” by Eric Hoffman, Chicago Review
Eric Hoffman reviews Constellations of Waking, “Michael Heller’s libretto for composer Ellen Fishman Johnson’s opera concerning the life and work of Weimar philosopher, cultural theorist, and social critic Walter Benjamin, was first performed in Philadelphia in 2000,” and recently published by Dos Madres Press.
The origin of the text, Heller notes in his fascinating and insightful preface to the libretto’s publication in book form, was occasioned some four decades earlier. A twenty-something-year-old Heller living in Nerja, a small Andalusian village, in the late 1960s, was first introduced to the writings of the then little-known (at least in the United States) Benjamin. Benjamin’s cultural theory and criticism, a synthesis of Marxism, Frankfurt School social theory, and Jewish mysticism, were then making their first appearance in English translation with the 1969 UK publication of the posthumous collection Illuminations.
…What struck Heller about Benjamin was his “inability to commit his life wholly to any one of a number of social and political causes, or to settle on any philosophical world-view with certainty.” This kind of negative capability had considerable appeal to Heller: a young, itinerant poet, freshly arrived on European shores, who was then confronting other temporal uncertainties and—having just turned his back on an engineering career—a specific lack of commitments.
10. “Nisha Ramayya’s ‘States of the Body Produced by Love’” by Pratyusha, The White Review
Pratyusha reviews Nisha Ramayya’s States of the Body Produced by Love, a collection of poetry which “explores the Hindu goddess Parvati in her ten forms, the Mahāvidyās.” Writes Pratyusha:
…The poetry draws strength from this power; it repeatedly invokes the goddesses, praying to them, speaking them into the spaces of everyday life, of daily tragedies. Every avatar of the goddess is a separate tributary of reality: the material, the metaphysical, the mythological. These come to a confluence where every reality merges; the सम् रदशा, the smaradaśā, the ten states, hold space for every fissure. The ten states merge the material and mythological, making space, also, for divine solace. In ‘Joy of the Eyes’, she writes,
‘The first time that you see me, you will see me, without implication of time’
Alongside referencing historical and current events, the collection’s intricate exploration of Hindu mythology ruptures this ‘implication of time’. The book leaves me with chills: so much information, so many names and ślokams reverberating through my scalp.
11. “Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste’ Is an ‘Instant American Classic’ About Our Abiding Sin” by Dwight Garner, The New York Times
ICYMI, over at the Times Dwight Garner raves about Isabel Wilkerson’s latest, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent.
It’s an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away.
I told more than one person, as I moved through my days this past week, that I was reading one of the most powerful nonfiction books I’d ever encountered.
▼ ▼ ▼