Dear Reader,
Coronavirus threatens…
Sense of security. Continued improvement. Outlook.
High school football. Tourist season at national parks. The model of urban mobility. The luster of superstar cities. The luster of superstar cities but there's a silver lining too.
Economy. Health system. Jobs. World.
Rebound. Recovery. Economic recovery. Auto industry recovery. Tourism recovery. U.S. jobs recovery. Path of airline recovery. World economy’s sputtering recovery.
His workers and his bottom line. Human health and oil.
To throw world’s biggest phone show into chaos. To disassemble the fall sports calendar. To collapse healthcare. To wipe out gender equality gains. To continue its spread in Michigan. To sap the momentum of the economic recovery. To halt US baseball season. To undo progress in AIDS fight. To exacerbate the ever-present humanitarian disaster in northwest Syria.
To hit Las Vegas where it hurts. To rain on Europe’s summer. To undercut Beijing’s efforts. To hobble the U.S. shale-oil boom for years. To derail San Diego’s plans to expand public transit. To wipe out California’s $21 billion surplus. To knock South Korea off 5G leadership perch.
To undermine the ability of protected areas to conserve tigers. To keep schools and day cares closed. To widen the education gap. To overwhelm cities’ social safety net. To plunge Congress into chaos. To flood courts with contract disputes. To shrink struggling US movie theater chains. To push hospitals to the brink in the coming weeks or months if left unchecked. To pose an unprecedented challenge to the 2020 elections. To hollow out Michigan’s $4.2 billion golf industry, but course owners see hope.
To take away Madness from March.
To derail those plans. To depress these numbers further. To take all the momentum away. To severely affect all the progress we’ve made. To make things worse. To make it worse. To get out of hand. To get out of control. To spiral out of control. To spiral out of control.
Fresh pain. Biggest shock in two decades. Fatal blow.
New states. More games. Four more races. Football season. MLB season. MLB season. MLB season. Tokyo Olympics. Food programs. Construction loans. Syrian rebel stronghold. Netanyahu’s hold on power. Paraguay’s success. Greek tourism. Israeli tourism. America’s nonprofits. Rio’s beloved beach days. NATO. Germany’s tradition-laden breweries. Putin’s global image. A Minnesota farm town’s economic engine. Chicago’s last remaining trading pits. Russia’s closed ‘nuclear cities’. The future of the barbecue joints, taco trucks, bánh mì shops, and country cafes that make up Texas cuisine. Detroit’s pipeline of Canadian nurses. China’s devotion to chopsticks and sharing food. St. Petersburg’s thriving vintage shopping scene. Qatar’s World Cup dreams. Saudi Arabia’s global ambitions. US military base operations in Europe. Efforts to contain HIV/AIDS in South Africa. The futures of 600 million South Asian children.
School budgets. Small businesses. Biodiversity. Internet opportunity for Native Americans. Momentum for electric vehicles. Press freedom around the world. Student votes in California. ‘Years of progress’ on climate issues. Other areas of scientific progress. Access to abortions and contraceptives. Tens of thousands of Venezuelan refugees in Brazil. Couple’s 50th anniversary plans. 500 year tradition at the Tower of London. Apple’s plans to produce more iPhones. Disney’s ‘Mulan’ release in China. GM truck production. Future of longtime ghost tour company.
Hospital capacity. Workers. To deplete Lebanon County EMS protective gear in less than a month.
Mom-to-be and baby. Mom-to-be and baby, but there’s a happy ending. A generation of black Americans. Inmate firefighting work crews. Camps. The seasonal farmworkers at the heart of America’s food supply. Food supply. Remote Indigenous communities in the Amazon. ‘Extraordinarily vulnerable’ homeless population. Autistic people living in group homes.
Our financial future. Economy. Economy. World economy. The global economy. Global economies - but here’s who’s hiring. Global economy but the US will contain the outbreak -- and thrive.
Everything. Everything from high-rise buildings and condos to retail and SEPTA in Philadelphia. The end game.
The lives of the people who are incarcerated, but also those who live and work in the surrounding community. Not just school administrators’ ability to bring kids into the classroom but also their latitude to keep teachers and assistants employed.
Global supply chains. The housing market. Growth. Growth of Brazilian mobile devices market. Rich people’s money. Our lives. Peace.
To flare up for a second time amid efforts to return to normality.
Stay safe out there,
Dana
1. “On Afropessimism” by Jesse McCarthy, The Los Angeles Review of Books
&
2. “The Argument of ‘Afropessimism’” by Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker
Vinson Cunningham and Jesse McCarthy review Frank B. Wilderson III’s Afropessimism. Both are unfavorable reviews, but taken together they give a comprehensive overview of the plot of Wilderson’s book — a kind of “auto-theory” memoir inspired by the work of Frantz Fanon — and of the intellectual lineage of this new “conversation” in academia. The reviewers argue with Wilderson’s conclusions, which amount to a rejection of solidarity between Black people and other oppressed groups and a belief that it would take “the end of the world” to end Black oppression, because it is more of a world-psychological force than a material one. In the end, I was neither convinced nor unconvinced: sometimes it is simply interesting to take in the nuances of a debate about which one does not know enough to make a judgment! (Ha little did you know, this newsletter is also my trial run for Persuasion.)
3. “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Chaturbator” by Adrian Nathan West, The Baffler
Adrian Nathan West gets annoyed by the inequities of the sex industry while reviewing two books that in West’s telling are more on the ‘sex work is empowering’ side of things, and while he makes good points, they also sound like good books to me: Isa Mazzei’s memoir Camgirl and Angela Jones’s Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry. Writes West, in total and understandable exasperation at the ‘sexual subversion industrial complex’:
In March, a few days before I came down with Covid-19, I was in London and saw an exhibit called Masculinities at the Barbican. High claims were made about the artworks featured, some more than fifty years old, and how they subverted ideas of race, gender, power, and representation. If this had been true, shouldn’t they be well and truly subverted by now? How long do we wait for a theoretical apparatus to produce results before we decide it’s reached its expiration date?
Once again I would like to point out that I am neither convinced nor unconvinced, and that therefore Persuasion should hire me because of how open I am to debate!
4. “Permanent War” by Robin D.G. Kelley, Bookforum
An essay by Robin D.G. Kelley excerpted from Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, edited by Christina Heatherton and Jordan T. Camp. Kelley writes (in a line of thinking which is, I now feel compelled to point out, since “debate” is becoming the terrible theme of this newsletter, contrary to the argument of Afropessimism) that there are obvious parallels between the overpolicing of African American communities and forms of colonial oppression around the world:
Our militarized culture places cops and soldiers on pedestals and frames their actions as “security” or as acts of self-defense. Police are in the streets to protect “citizens” from out-of control (Black and Brown) criminals. This is why in virtually every case involving an unarmed person shot by police, the victim is depicted as an assailant. Living under occupation means enduring a permanent war in which virtually all civilians are deemed combatants and collective punishment is the fabric of everyday life.
5. “The Baudelarian Horsewoman” by Susanna Forrest, The Paris Review
This is the fourth(!) installments of Susanna Forrest’s Paris Review series Écuryères, in which “she unearths the lost stories of the transgressive horsewomen of turn-of-the-century Paris”(!).
Most of the écuyères or horsewomen of the nineteenth-century circus left no trace of their own thoughts behind. Jenny de Rahden wrote a book. Whether she did it because she needed money or needed to put down her own side of the story after years of being spoken for in the European press—or both—is unknowable but she called it a roman or novel. I can’t tell how much of it is genuine. Jenny lived in an era before fact-checking and though her life was undoubtedly tragic, her style is sometimes melodramatic. “Does life really throw up these bizarreries, of which novelists and playwrights seem to possess the only secret?” she asks at one point. Perhaps calling it a novel gave her freedom to rewrite a messier past and fit it into more conventional romantic feminine tropes, rejecting the saltier stories written about circus horsewomen by male writers of the period.
6. “A Ghost Haunts the Tokyo Olympics” by JR Ramakrishnan, Electric Literature
JR Ramakrishnan interviews Yu Miri about her novel Tokyo Ueno Station, which tells the story of “the life of Kazu, a manual laborer from the country’s Fukushima prefecture… as he walks the afterlife, which turns out to be exactly the (homeless) life he left behind.” Says Yu:
The truth is, Tokyo Ueno Station is the fifth in my series of novels involving the Yamanote Line [a subway line in Tokyo]. In the first in the series, the short story “The Inner Loop of the Yamanote Line,” which was published in 2003, a woman who’s thinking about jumping in front of a Yamanote Line train goes into a bathroom in the station and masturbates, then gets on the train, gets off at another station and masturbates again. I depicted the destinationless impulses toward sex and death (eros and thanatos) of this protagonist who is shut out from life. And in this story, the protagonists of the four other novels in the series that I went on to write make their appearances.
I’ve depicted the directionless lives and deaths of characters whose diverse lives radiate out from the ticket gates of Yamanote Line stations, who get knocked out of life and, passing through the gates heading toward the center of the circle, find themselves standing on a precipice—the edge of the station platform….
The Yamanote Line is a loop line that runs around the center of the capital, Tokyo; it’s a double circle, actually. The circle that runs clockwise is on the outside and is called the “Outer Loop,” while the line that runs counterclockwise on the inside is the “Inner Loop.” At the center of this double circle, right in the middle of the donut hole, is the palace where the Emperor lives; it is surrounded by moats, a construction that makes it impossible to approach it or look inside.
7. “To Be the Poet of Troy” by Philip Metres, Lit Hub
Philip Metres interviews Mosab Abu Toha, a poet and founder of the Edward Said Library in the Gaza Strip. Says Mosab:
On a personal level, whenever there was an attack or rumors of an impending war, I would absorb myself in reading and writing or in following the news. Sometimes I thought of myself as a piece of breaking news on TV or the radio.
In 2018, a big explosion very close to our house shook the whole area. Some of my books on the shelf fell off and a small vase broke next to me while I was writing. This incident inspired me to write a poem. This is an excerpt:
Edward Said is out of place
again:
His books on my shelf
fall off on the broken glass.
[Palestine is also out of place:
Its map
falls off my wall.]
The books’ exile bleeds
of wars,
of continued estrangement.
8. “All the Sad Clowns” by Douglas Glover, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Douglas Glover writes about the sensational English-language publication history of Francis Carco’s 1925 novel Perversité, first translated by Jean Rhys, whose lover Ford Maddox Ford took all the credit!
The whole thing was a mess. Ford protested. Perhaps out of guilt (he did have a disagreeable habit of patronizing young female writers in more ways than one), he quietly paid Rhys the money she was owed for the work when Covici failed to pony up. But the relationship between Ford and Rhys soured (not the least because Stella Bowen refused to relinquish Ford). Rhys’s first novel, Quartet(1928), fictionalized the sordid details. A taste for portraying sordid scenes and misogyny was something Carco and Rhys shared. There is a legend that, years later, Ford and Rhys met by chance in a Paris bistro: she walked up to his table and slapped him.
9. “Pigs and Capital” by Troy Vettese, Boston Review
Troy Vettese reviews Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm and Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall. Of Porkopolis, Vettese writes, “is in many ways a meditation on seeing—or what we fail to see. Often we struggle to detect the meat industry’s traces, be they fecal particles suspended in the air or the porcine pathogens that suffuse the environs of ‘concentrated feeding animal operations’ (CAFOs), where thousands of animals are kept indoors for long periods to speed up production… It helps that the reader is guided by the all-seeing Blanchette, a sort of an inverted Virgil, leading the blind through a sanguine hell as he takes the reader through the various stages of pork production.” One of the more disturbing revelations:
The extreme division of labor in the meat industry is meant not only to squeeze an extra “penny per pound of pork,” but also to protect public health. A cordon sanitaire lies between and within firms. A single family cannot have members working in both the live and plant sides. Managers dread epidemics, called euphemistically “disease events”, which could be sparked by contamination picked up during a worker’s free time. “Microscopic particles of hog saliva, blood, feces, semen, or barn bacteria,” Blanchette explains, “might be lodged in workers’ ears, fingernails, and nostrils, despite worksite-mandated showering protocols.” By pushing pigs’ bodies to their limits, firms had created the conditions where their workers “sharing some wine or praying in a church pew” could become a matter of concern. Such elaborate protocols—and the focus on human error as the problem to be guarded against, rather than over-complexity of the system itself—reminds one of the precarious management of a nuclear power plant. At one point in the book Blanchette even cites Charles Perrow, the foremost theorist of nuclear accidents. And the pork industry’s epidemiological regimentation extends to white-collar workers, too. One slaughterhouse manager lamented that his colleagues on the live side were just names on a spreadsheet to him, just like the abstracted Herd itself.
Meanwhile Communist Pigs, writes Vettesse, “provides a fruitful countervailing narrative to Blanchette’s Porkopolis. East Germany’s industrialized pork industry, Fleischman reasons, shows that the factory farm was not the result of a specific economic system but rather a “modernist” impulse that spanned the Cold War divide. After all, the East German pork industry was plagued by toxic pig-shit lagoons and epidemics that bear more than a passing resemblance to what we see in present-day Iowa and North Carolina. In this way, Communist Pigs fits into the broader literature that studies how capitalist technologies were employed in a socialist context.”
10. “Race After Technology – Ruha Benjamin” by Omar Zahzah, Full Stop
Omar Zahzah reviews Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology, which “encourages us not to think of race in relation to technology, but race itself as a technology, a ‘means to sort, organize and design a social structure’…”
… Benjamin continues, “technically, people were the first robots,” a history that tech discourse has only further entrenched over the years, from a ‘50s advertisement in the US triumphantly hailing the advent of robots as the “return of slavery” to the much later DOS script referring to “Master” and “Slave” disks. Ontological categorizations of the ease, efficiency, and luxury that was to be realized by robots in particular and technology in general were thus inseparable from human enslavement.
11. “Stalin’s Bodyguard” by John Jeremiah Sullivan, The Paris Review
John Jeremiah Sullivan interviews Alex Halberstadt about his family memoir Young Heroes of the Soviet Union. Says Halberstadt:
My father stopped speaking to his father, my grandfather, Vassily Chernopisky, when I was born. There were many sound reasons for him to do this, but mainly he did it because he wanted nothing to do with what his father stood for, which was Stalinism and the power of the Soviet state. My grandfather had been an officer in the secret police for most of his life, and for thirteen years one of Stalin’s personal bodyguards. He was an absent and sometimes brutal father. He was also a gifted photographer, and a really great-looking man obsessed with clothes. When my mother and I left Moscow, when I was nine, we took with us one photo of Vassily and my grandmother Tamara. They are sitting near a lake; he’s wearing a fedora. For years, that was all the proof I had that my grandfather existed. I assumed that he had died sometime shortly after I was born. Then in 2004 my father got a call from a distant cousin who said that Vassily was alive and mentally still with it. That’s when I told you about him at that bar—I had just found out he was alive.
12. “Comedy of Heirs” by Eileen Myles, Bookforum
Eileen Myles writes about Tristram Shandy, which I always feel like I should have read by now, and which I feel even more like I should read now that Eileen Myles has told me how much of it is just dick jokes:
Young Shandy is inadvertently circumcised while pissing out a window (on the advice of a maid and then the sash fell), losing the tip of his dick. Tristram’s uncle Toby Shandy, a veteran of the Nine Years’ War, is perpetually playing war games on the Shandy estate with his underling Corporal Trim. Their enterprise is punctuated by the constant reiteration of the fact of Uncle Toby’s war wound to the groin. Catch his audience: “Yes, Madam, it was owing to a blow from a stone, broke off by a ball from the parapet of a hornwork at the siege of Namur, which struck full upon my uncle Toby’s groin. —Which way could that affect it? The story of that, Madam, is long and interesting;—but it would be running my history all upon heaps to give it you here.” And indeed we have hundreds of pages of what adds up to nothing more than eighteenth-century PTSD performed thoughtlessly and relentlessly.
During his travels to Europe, Tristram has escapades with women but nothing happens. As well as being an antinovel it’s an anti-romp. Diligently he turns pages out, and you really feel all those pages. Laurence Sterne was amply educated in the classics, and Tristram’s and his father’s utterances are predictably ornamentalized by a Greek quote or a Latin quote—there are footnotes galore in the original language. Reading it can feel like being in prison with someone or being in a very small apartment during a pandemic, but then you begin to play word games both near and afar, and at that pitch of closeness you find your heaven.
13. “No Fascist USA! – Hilary Moore and James Tracy” by Shane Burley, Full Stop
Shane Burley writes about Hilary Moore and James Tracy’s No Fascist USA!: The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements and speaks with its subjects, Lisa Roth and Linda Evans, who “formed the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee” in the 1980s “as a sort of radical wing (or alternative to) the anti-Klan organizing that was happening coast-to-coast… the Committee took a slightly different direction than the organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Klan Network (later the Center for Democratic Renewal). Instead their work was fueled by a series of conflicting impulses: to fight back against the violence presented by white nationalist organizing and to act on the convictions they had coming out of the New Left that white revolutionaries could best serve revolutionary ends by acting primarily in support of oppressed communities of color fighting for national liberation.”
14. “Always Dying, Yet Never Dead” by Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein interviews Francesco Boldizzoni, author of Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures Since Karl Marx, “a thorough history that… explains, as [Boldizzoni] writes, ‘how capitalism survives.’ Where did prophecies — like Keynes’s prediction in 1930 that we would be so affluent that we would no longer need to work — go wrong?” Says Boldizzoni:
Unlike traditional prophecy, of which one can find good examples in the Book of Revelation and medieval astrology, social forecasting relies exclusively on the observation of reality. It is based on the idea that there are regularities in human behavior, or principles governing historical development, from which projections into the future can be derived. It is no coincidence that this intellectual activity first emerged during the Enlightenment, an era of great faith in the power of reason and equally great confidence in progress. A confidence, we must say, that often proved to be misplaced.
15. “Dog Days in Postwar Paris: On Curzio Malaparte’s ‘Diary of a Foreigner in Paris’” by Robert Zaretsky, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Robert Zaretsky reviews a recently published translation of Curzio Malaparte’s curiously obtuse postwar diary, Diary of a Foreigner in Paris. You see, Malaparte was a barely reformed Italian fascist who fled retribution in his home country to hide out among… the Resistance intellectuals of Paris?
Most of Malaparte’s encounters in Paris… did not go well either. The Left Bank was not the best of places for a former Italian fascist to pass out calling cards. It was no secret that Malaparte was in Paris not to stroll its streets, but to avoid arrest or worse on the streets of Rome. What is surprising is not the cold shoulders Malaparte kept getting, but that he himself was at first surprised by this reception. His accounts of these many humiliations, which pockmark his diary, are mesmerizing. At times, it seems that the one thing Parisian intellectuals had in common was their distaste for this smooth-talking, shape-shifting Italian…
In 1948, Malaparte was at another dinner party — when not dining at Taillevent, our foreigner in Paris was doing the rounds of socialites — and met the author of the just-published The Plague. This encounter went no better than the one with Mauriac: Albert Camus was “seated on a sofa between two young women. I immediately noticed he was looking at me with hate.” Insisting he did not mind Camus’s hostility, Malaparte reflects: “It’s his business.” When the conversation turned to the trials of Mussolini’s cabinet ministers, Camus pronounced “that all these men, assassins, etc., should be shot.” Among the “etc.,” Malaparte concludes, was Malaparte himself: “I understood very well that Camus wanted to imply that I too should be shot.”
16. “Moina Pam Dick, ‘Moira of Edges, Moira the Tart’” by Jamie Staples, Chicago Review
Jamie Staples reviews Moira of Edges, Moira the Tart, “a 70-page poem… almost as inscrutable as is the poet who wrote it.”
“Dick… has previously published under the names Gregoire Pam Dick, Hildebrand Pam Dick, Mina Pam Dick, Misha Pam Dick…” and the poem’s inspiration, St. Mary of Egypt, “was a fifth-century sex worker, often refusing payment from her clients since pleasure itself was all she sought. Sleeping with sailors in exchange for passage, she crosses the Mediterranean from Alexandria to the Holy Land to seek out and seduce vulnerable pilgrims congregating for the Exaltation of the Cross. When she arrives at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, however, she encounters a mysterious force barring her entry. An icon of the Virgin Mary miraculously intercedes, exhorting her to discover a life of sanctity by losing herself in a vast desert across the Jordan River.”
Moira of Edges is a poem of commas becoming periods, of johns and Johns, and Jeans (but not really jeans), of rimming Rumis and swerving girlish dervishes, leading to Moira’s (or is it Moina’s?) version of conversion that is a little less con- and a little more cum: edging and edging, and edging ever closer to the abyss. This poem evacuates the content of words and meaning, folding and collapsing time and space, only to take the residual detritus and reintroduce it back into the swirling sublime: the nondimensional transcendent internally throbs with all of the stuff that it purports to leave behind. Moira and Moina struggle against (or alongside) each other, reincarnating the mystical void into the paradoxical identity of a harlot-saint.
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