“The progress of passion” / John Nixon 1792; etched by Isaac Cruikshanks. Print shows a sequence of scenes arranged in two rows starting, in upper left, with King George III dismissing Edward Thurlow and followed by a chain of events resulting from Thurlow's anger that affects family members, servants, the butcher, a dog, and finally a cat and a mouse.
Dear Reader,
I’ve been reading Michael Kohlhaas, which so far is basically 1500s John Wick: a cruel injustice is perpetrated against a guy (instead of his wife and then pet being murdered, it’s the reverse order — horse first, wife second) by an avaricious elite who is shielded from consequences by an insular aristocracy that rebuffs any attempt to censure one as a move against all. So the titular Michael Kohlhaas, like the titular John Wick, does the only logical thing in his fictional universe: he starts avenging himself against absolutely everybody involved. He not only enacts these retributions himself, but gathers up all his aggrieved countrymen to fight with him; he launches a revolution. (Have I cracked the plot of John Wick 4?)
I was thinking about Michael Kohlhaas and revolutionary provocations in general, mostly of the half-apocryphal sort — “let them eat cake,” “once vigorous measures…”, “power will go to the hands of rascals…”, etc — when I read a certain open letter yesterday. The general notion of the revolutionary provocation, which is a notion I’m basically making up right now I think, is that the ruling class feels compelled to state definitively that the people, in their expressions of a desire for certain betterments of their situation — bread to eat, political self-determination, an end to police brutality, as examples — are out of line, because embedded in their demands is an implicit criticism of the elites; and any criticism of the elites is out of line because, in the elite mindset, to admit even the mildest of mistakes of the ruling group as a whole (or the gravest mistakes of an individual within it, such as admitting that a professor said the n-word repeatedly while teaching a class at UCLA, one of the incidents which I believe is obliquely referred to in a certain open letter which I read yesterday) is considered a kind of heresy or violence against the ruling in-group. “Let them eat cake” because to admit that there is no bread would be a violence against the queen, and so on.
Reading Michael Kohlhaas in an earlier time in my life, I may have seen Kohlhaas’s predicament as proto-Kafka-esque: a bureaucratic quagmire with no recourse; a cruelty randomly enacted without any apparent purpose. But nowadays I’m more inclined to see the individuals at work on the other side of misery; not a “system” but a group of individuals who lowkey facilitate crimes. Individuals who pat each other on the back, give each other a leg up. What is a system but a group of individuals? What is the word “systemic” but an elision of individual responsibility? (And is there ever really a cruelty without purpose? In this country, prisons make a profit, one always has to remind oneself. It’s horribly possible that every cruelty has a purpose.)
Obviously both analyses, systemic and individual, are useful, but I am saying that I am tipping toward one rather than the other, nowadays. A tipping point, one could call it!
Which brings me back again to a certain open letter. “Folly is a child of power,” writes Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly, a book-length treatise on a specific kind of blunder that she terms “political folly” and defines as a moment when an entire ruling group for no apparent reason acts against their own self-interest, against all their instincts, provoking a backlash or downfall which they absolutely know is sure to come. Her examples are the American government’s escalation in Vietnam, the British parliament’s insistence on enforcing taxation in the American colonies, corrupt papal families of the Renaissance being profligate. The key thing about folly is that it is not something done by an individual ruler, but by a whole ruling class, despite ample data informing them that it is really pissing the people off.
I would argue, or perhaps hope, that America is in the midst of its own political folly — that the ruling elites have let predatory fascho-capitalism run amuck, impoverishing us all, incarcerating many, and now sickening us unto death, beyond any justifiable measure, beyond any point that could seem reasonable to most of the elite themselves, to the point where even they know there is certain to be a backlash.
As for the open letter: well, let’s be clear, these people are mostly just writers, lol. I don’t even know if they can be counted as an elite? I guess they are. They’re all certainly pretty rich (except some of the ones who were tricked into signing, probably). But what fascinates me is how they are echoing the argument of political folly. They are using it in their own little sphere, to defend themselves for having creepy transphobic obsessions, cruel economic theories, insane fascism-enabling op-eds, and so on — stances which, when written in elite magazines, certainly do shape elite sensibilities. But in the end, these writers are not themselves the powerful fools; they are merely the handmaidens of the fools. They are mirroring back at the real elite — their moneyed readers and investors — the logic of political folly: the elite dare not be criticized, for to admit the mistakes of the ruling group either singly or as a whole is to perform a great violence against the ruling group. They are playacting this argument on a smaller scale as a sort of cabaret for the actual elites. These signatories are not the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world; they are merely the people who dined with him.
In Michael Kohlhaas, it is not the perfidies and predations of a single aristocrat that make Michael Kohlhaas lose his shit, but the complicity of the entire ruling class. He is denied his day in court. Justice is not served. No justice, no peace, says Michael Kohlhaas, more or less; and, in response, the ruling class would rather provoke an entire revolution then let this one guy file a lawsuit against a rich jerk.
Stay safe out there,
Dana
1. “To Poets of Color Whose Work Has Been Called ‘Healing’” by Shayla Lawson, Lit Hub
In this riveting excerpt from her new book of essays This Is Major, poet Shayla Lawson makes a disturbing point about poetry. “Poetry is still the primary genre through which young people are introduced to writers of color,” Lawson’s essay begins. “This is no accident; this education is a gentrification of our resistance. Poetry is easy to gentrify because schools and colleges teach it as a genre where the critic knows more than the poet.” What a punch to the gut. Lawson continues:
Schools still teach Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel.” as “We Real Cool,” emphasizing its jazz inflections — and Langston Hughes’ legacy of blues poetry as “A Dream Deferred” — with no mention of both poets’ long history of prose interrogating America, or even the slightest mentioning of both poems’ dictive investigation of social class.
What white instructors typically emphasize, in these lessons, instead of distinct elements of lineage and prosody, is the way our poetry makes them feel — a healing.
Lawson goes on to delineate an insidious process by which white audiences, educators, and even mentors use Black poetry to assuage their own sense of guilt — or worse, to revel in it. Lawson ends with a galvanizing call to criticism! Dump poetry, the poet says; write essays.
White people never wanted poetry from me; they wanted my pain. For me, prose is a place where it is harder for my art to be distilled into another culture’s anachronistic “healing” because it is difficult for even the unskilled reader to say the genius they witness is their own. Although we poets are bringing to poetry all of our joy and anger and inquisition — a full interrogation of those who limit the capacity of our human selves — they don’t hear it. They’re lulled by the “music” of what came before us, writers who had to be more tricky and surreptitious, and they’ve found redemption in that poetry …
I encourage all of us who have been guided toward poetry in this particular way to switch to prose; specifically, essays. Essays precisely because of the difference in the word’s etymology: “essay” means something we have never been allowed to do, which is to try.
2. “Dennis Tedlock, The Olson Codex” by Edgar Garcia, Chicago Review
Edgar Garcia reviews Dennis Tedlock’s The Olson Codex, in which the late Tedlock, a scholar of Mayan language, examines the influence of Mayan hieroglyphics on the poetry of modernist American poet Charles Olson, who traveled to Yucatán in 1950 and wrote Mayan Letters (an “epistolary ethnography,” as Garcia calls it, that was originally a series of letters penned to Robert Creeley).
The Olson Codex, according to Garcia, is “the story of how the Mesoamerican worlds of Mexican antiquity … subsume and absorb, how they metonymize themselves in contemporary poetry through Olson.” Garcia elaborates:
In the introduction to his translation of the Popol Vuh — the K’iche’ Mayan story of creation, literally “the Book of the Mat” (i.e., seat of intersecting threads) — Tedlock … [writes] “At one end of the Popol Vuh the gods are preoccupied with the difficult task of making humans, and at the other end humans are preoccupied with the equally difficult task of finding traces of divine movement in their own deeds.” In folding Olson into such an accordion of time, Tedlock wished to express how Olson was already implicated in a more layered sense of time than standard rectilinear conceptions of history allow. In Yucatán Olson was moving through layers of Mayan mythistory that pressed on him and pulled him along …
This inversion of western notions of the mastery of the author over his subject becomes a pathway for stepping around the question of whether or not Olson was actually reading Mayan glyphs; whether he really was the scholar he made himself out to be.
[Tedlock] “reconstructed the corresponding stars, planetary positions, lunations, birds, beasts, deities, and divinatory readings” that surrounded Olson in the year that he spent in Yucatán — Tedlock suggests that perhaps it doesn’t matter what Olson understood of his object of inquiry. Perhaps, if we recognize the pulsing and encompassing life of this object, we can see how it implicates Olson without much troubling over Olson. Dennis and his wife, the anthropologist Barbara Tedlock, apprenticed in the art of K’iche’ Mayan daykeeping (ajk’in or ajq’ij), which is a kind of readership of mythistory: “daykeepers measure the rhythms of time, watch the skies, pay attention to dreams, and listen to the stories people tell about themselves, seeking clues to events that are hidden in the past or have yet to happen.” He brings this reading strategy to bear on Olson’s writing, finding in Olson’s descriptions of dreams and animals mirrors that reflect the Mayan gods ambling in the background, hearing in Olson’s words the echoes of divine movements.
What I like best about Garcia’s review is that it practices its own limited form of daykeeping — recounting the time of day and the weather at the beginning of new paragraphs: “I begin to write this with a hard thunderstorm of late May fulminating above me. Bursts of light make the hail as bright as mercury in the dark afternoon. There is a tornado warning in effect. Dennis would have liked this…”
3. “The Hidden Racism of Vaccine Testing” by Laura Stark, The New Republic
Laura Stark reviews Jill A. Fisher’s Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals, which “show[s] how systemic anti-Black racism in the United States maintains the clinical trials industry.”
The conventional wisdom is that people of color are underrepresented in clinical research because of well-justified mistrust of the medical establishment. They are also underrepresented because of federal law enacted, paradoxically, to protect vulnerable populations — particularly Black Americans — from medical exploitation, after public exposure of the horrific Tuskegee Syphilis Studies. (Women also tend to be underrepresented.) On this basic story line, there is no dispute. But while people of color are indeed underrepresented in research overall, Fisher shows that Black men are hugely overrepresented in the most dangerous phase of research, in which there is no possibility of medical benefit to the participants.
According to Stark, Fisher reveals a shadowy and, to me, wholly unknown world of privately run Phase I drug testing, in which disadvantaged men, mainly Black men, many of them “serial participants,” bear the brunt of the danger of drug trials in the U.S.
In Adverse Events, Fisher reports her discoveries traveling across the U.S. to go inside the “hidden world” of Phase I testing facilities. Fisher interviewed more than 200 healthy human subjects in Phase I trials and the staff who managed, castigated, and cared for them in six facilities evenly distributed across the East Coast, Midwest, and West Coast. She hung out for days or weeks in the facilities, which she and her interviewees described at different points as prisons, frat houses, and quirky cruise ships, depending on your tastes (meals catered by IHOP in a clinic with no kitchen, Jackass on TV). Either way, you could not easily get out. Phase I testing clinics are often lock-in, windowless, residential clinics. At security screening, along with outside food and illicit toiletries, staff confiscate anything with a camera. Think airport security, but worse.
4. “‘A Conflicted Cultural Force’: What It’s Like to Be Black in Publishing” by Concepción de León, Alexandra Alter, Elizabeth A. Harris, and Joumana Khatib, The New York Times
An important series of interviews with an author, a literary agent, a publicist, booksellers, editors, and others about what it’s like to be Black in the book industry.
“I think people have this false impression that this industry is great, it’s books, and people love to read and write. But you bring all the baggage of the systemic racism right through the door with you, whether you know it or not.” —Linda Duggins, senior director of publicity at Grand Central Publishing
5. “Imagining American Utopia” by Dayton Martindale, Boston Review
Dayton Martindale writes about Kim Stanley Robinson’s recently reissued Three Californias trilogy, written in the 1980s. Each book in the series imagines a different future California. In Pacific Edge, the final installment, “The year is 2012. The planet is warming; species are going extinct. Wars plague the globe, economic depression only further immiserates the poor, far-right parties are seizing on anti-refugee sentiment to win elections in Europe. A pandemic pours fuel on the fire of xenophobic policies, while justifying government crackdowns on activists. It feels … like the end of the world…” Wildly, that’s the description of the only book in the trilogy that imagines a utopian future; the other two, according to Maritndale, are just plain barbarism. Um, so maybe we’re on the right track? (I beg of you Mr. Kim Stanley Robinson to tell me we are on the right track.) The description is actually a flashback; the rest of Pacific Edge, writes Martindale, “offer[s] genuine guidance to the contemporary left, worth mining for ideas as we envision and fight for a Green New Deal.”
The novel’s political debates, in particular those between wildlife preservationists and human-oriented developers, are the sort that won’t go away even after capitalism and that demand attention by today’s advocates of environmental justice. (In fact, similar debates are already raging between, say, solar companies and desert conservationists.)
Martindale’s essay touches on the other books in the trilogy as well — the Trumpian politics of the first installment, which includes a surprise ’80s appearance of the phrase “make America great again,” are particularly fascinating to read about. How did you know, Mr. Kim Stanely Robinson!
6. “What Woodrow Wilson Did to Robert Smalls” by Aderson Bellegarde François, The New Republic
Aderson Bellegarde François writes about “the intersecting lives of three men: the twenty-eighth president of the United States, the author whose book became the basis for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, and the former slave who became a Civil War hero and one of the first Blacks to serve in Congress.” That is, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and the legendary Robert Smalls. François’s essay revolves around the casual cruelty of White supremacy:
Smalls was 75 years old when Wilson, who probably never met the man and would have considered it beneath his dignity to be in the same room with him, reached down from the Oval Office and, with a small act that is not even granted a footnote in most surveys of Wilson’s legacy, capsized the last years of a Black man whose generation made America free. That’s as good a synopsis of the reality of white supremacy as one may get.
7. “Sasha Geffen’s Glitter Up the Dark Is the Essential Companion to the Year in Music” by Justin Curto, Vulture
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8. “‘You Can Sing an Alternate Reality’: An Interview with Sasha Geffen” by Chris Randle, Hazlitt
Justin Curto reviews Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary, and Chris Randle interviews author Sasha Geffen. In his rapturous review, Curto writes:
[Geffen] lays out the argument they’ve been making for years … Music has long been a vessel for gender expression, subversion, and realization like no other art form. From the third-gender castrati singers of old Italian opera, to the Black lesbian women who invented the blues and laid the foundation for rock music, to Arca’s audacious gender experimentalism, the history of music transcends the gender binary — although, as Geffen writes, the construct “has never been whole” to begin with. “This alternate ribbon of time is not a parallel universe,” they caution. “It winds through recent and ancient history, as musician after musician has opened space to dance outside the roles they were prescribed at birth.”
And in a long interview with Randle, Geffen drops all kind of fascinating insights, such as:
Laurie Anderson, who I write about in the book … created a caricature of masculinity using vocoders and pitch-shifters, which was deployed to a subtle comedic effect. It’s a character that she uses a lot throughout the early ’80s to poke fun at the idea of competent masculinity, masculinity as the harbinger of the future and as the natural subject of America. The comic effect of roboticizing masculinity definitely appears there, like, how powerful can masculinity be if it’s so easily mimicked by something that’s not a man? And … I think more recently you see Dorian Electra working in a similar vein, where they’re doing office drag and singing through vocoder about being a “career boy.” Performing all these stereotypical male roles … The idea that masculinity is kind of inherently comic, because it’s so stilted and brittle, comes into play there. And robots are a good excuse to magnify that, because they’re so easy to break, and ill-fitting in the role of human in a similar way that men are.
9. “Where the Wild Ladies Are” by Julia Irion Martins, Full Stop
Julia Irion Martins reviews Matsuda Aoko’s Where the Wild Ladies Are, “a collection of interconnected, slightly spooky feminist retellings of Japanese folktales” with an anti-globalist bent.
Feminism is a constant theme, although the larger arc of the collection is that of “the company” — a mysterious enterprise connected to the spirit realm and run by Mr. Tei, a Chinese man who grew up in Japan and routinely shocks other characters with his fluent Japanese. “The company” workers, most of them women, and many of them ghosts, appear in several stories with the intention of teaching the living a gentle lesson (often about finding peace in independence — a lesson that in these stories is not exclusive to women) or to tout a spirit realm product, such as incense that allows you to see or speak to a deceased loved one…
It quickly becomes clear that Mr. Tei’s company is not a “normal” company. It is not a faceless and emotionally empty asset of late capitalism. Rather, his company peddles tradition and connection, a temporary escape from modernity. But tradition, in Matsuda’s collection, is not to be conflated with nostalgia. The incense and lanterns that the ghost-sellers hawk do not take characters to the “good old days” where women were forced into traditional and oppressive gender roles. Instead, the tradition suggested by Where the Wild Ladies Are seems associated with ancestral connection and anti-globalization.
10. “The Best and the Worst” by Elizabeth Hoover, Bomb
Elizabeth Hoover interviews Dennis E. Staples about This Town Sleeps, “an expectations-defying ghost story, murder mystery, and coming-of-age tale set on a fictional Native American reservation,” which begins with the resurrection of a playful ghost dog. Says Staples:
In Ojibwe, the word for spirit also means mysterious. So instead of a ghostly apparition it could also mean this thing you just can’t know. I resurrected the dog before I had any idea of what it might be. I thought it could be somewhat of a spirit animal — you know, in the “this is my spirit animal” sense of the word — where he was guiding Marion along but could also do that for other people. I always wanted this dog to lead us through the mystery and for us to chase it. But I didn’t want it to be like a really gross Pet Sematary kind of animal … I wanted that moment to be happy because the dog probably didn’t have a great life. It was just a stray.
11. “Searching for Consolation in Max Weber’s Work Ethic” by George Blaustein, The New Republic
George Blaustein writes about Charisma and Disenchantment, a newly translated edition of Max Weber’s “vocation lectures.”
Weber theorized the rise of capitalism, the state and its relationship to violence, the role of “charisma” in politics. Again and again he returned, as we still do, to the vocation — the calling — as both a crushing predicament and a noble aspiration. He died 100 years ago, in a later wave of the Spanish flu. It is poignant to read him now, in our own era of pandemic and cataclysm. It might offer consolation. Or it might fail to console…
One wonders what Weber would make of our era’s quarantines. What is a Zoom meeting but another communal experience of intense loneliness? Weber’s portrait of Calvinist isolation might ring a bell. Working from home traps us ever more firmly in the ideology or mystique of a calling. We might then take refuge in a secondary ethic, what we might call the iron cage of “fulfillment.” It is built on the ruins of the work ethic or, just as plausibly, it is the work ethic’s ironic apotheosis: secular salvation through sourdough.
It brings a sardonic pleasure to puncture the mental and emotional habits of a service economy in Weberian terms. But it doesn’t last. The so-called work ethic is no longer a spiritual contagion but a medical one, especially in America. Weber’s interpretation now offers little illumination and even less consolation. It is not some inner ethic that brings, say, Amazon’s workers to the hideously named “fulfillment centers”; it is a balder cruelty.
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