This Week in Books: Down and Out on Twitter and Instagram
“The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.”
Dear Reader,
The biggest (and therefore of course dumbest) book thing to happen recently was Josh Hawley claiming in a twitter statement that it was “Orwellian” for Simon & Schuster to cancel his book after his failed coup attempt. (Dozens, if not hundreds, of people immediately and independently quote tweeted his statement to make the same exact joke: That it wasn’t Orwellian at all, because Orwell’s books got published.)
Hawley’s book’s “canceling” got caught up in, and mostly overshadowed by, the notably dense and grinding discourse that sprang up around the mass deplatforming of QAnon undertaken post-coup by all the major online media. The overall sentiment was naturally that a book canceling was a much smaller, less important event than an online media purge. But I’ve been dwelling on the similarities between the two. That is to say, I’ve been thinking of the positions of Simon & Schuster and Silicon Valley as roughly the same, rather than worlds apart. And it does feel to me like once you start to see all these grand publishing houses, online or off, as on the same page rather than a different one, the order of influence seems to kind of flow in reverse…
What I mean is, the grand psycho vision of an “apolitical” platform for the written word, where all views are expressed and everyone can say whatever they want (within certain parameters of decorum, like no porn or, I don’t know, no cannibalism), regardless of the views or opinions of the owners or employees of said publishing platform, could just as easily describe the giant conglomerate publishing houses of the late 20th and earliest 21st centuries as it does twitter dot com; and that the conglomeration of book publishing (and other media!) that happened decades before there was such a thing as social media may have in fact created a situation where people like Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg could come to envision themselves as “apolitical” publishers of a vast teeming mass of opinions.
I call it psycho because, to be clear, this is a ludicrous notion! That can’t be overstated enough. It’s one of those central tenets of modern life, American life especially, that is really important to take a step back from, I feel. (We live in a twilight world▼) I really feel certain that, if you look through the annals of history, it is a strange thing under the sun for people, even rich or powerful people, to publish opinions, or host forums, that they 100% do not agree with, for the sole purpose of making money (not as some sort of ratfuck, haha, which is a totally legit reason; kudos to the CIA for funding The Paris Review for all those years). It seems to me like the only explanation for every big corporate publisher having an in-house conservative imprint (and also distributing some pretty far left stuff, if we’re being honest with ourselves!) is the same explanation for a lot of this weird free speech ideology from the big social media platforms: the owner class, the elites or whatever you want to call them, have fully bought into the cult of “the end of history.” It’s ok now, the idea goes, to make money selling all kinds of political writing, because politics will no longer affect things. Politics is over; now there is only profit. Politics is just another monetizable pastime, like the MCU or sports.
“George Orwell in Hampstead, on the corner of Pond Street and South End Road, opposite the Royal Free Hospital. The bookshop has long gone.” Camden, Great Britain, 2007. Via Geograph.
This post-coup mass deplatforming/book canceling event could be a sign that some rich people in the world have come to realize that, if mobs are invading the Capitol, then history is not, in fact, over, and that politics may, in fact, affect them. But I don’t think so. I think when one has a strong worldview, every disproof is interpreted as a blip (as we all periodically learn from reading through threads of QAnon reaction screenshots!). I mean, fuck, Facebook published propaganda that caused an entire genocide in Myanamar, and it’s not like Zuckerberg suddenly went “gee maybe it’s not a good idea to run a giant printing press where everyone gets to self-publish. Maybe I’d rather work on something I believe in…” Because, simply put, the thing he believes in is that he doesn’t, professionally, believe in anything.
So, ah, where am I going with this. I guess I’m saying it’s possible to view the emergence and flourishing of QAnon and other election conspiracies as not fully attributable to the material conditions of the internet itself (“algorithms,” siloing, etc. — I think there are other pathways to radicalization that are still having an impact in that arena, like conservative talk radio) but as definitely attributable to the ideology of depoliticization which has infected the publishers themselves. It’s always possible, after all, to hire more mods. To make more rules. To redesign the site to change how it links and flows. To, lmao, not have a conservative imprint attached to your multibillion-dollar media empire. To actually inhabit a point of view and curate, like many media enterprises in this world still do! There is no reason for things to be organized the way they are except for large conglomerate and tech publishers’ insistence that politics is not their concern. That it does not concern them. That they are above it. That they have no politics. This must be so, after all, since it is the only logical interpretation of reality in which it is ethical for them to sell everything to everybody.
(The conception of sell everything to everybody as some sort of moral pinnacle, rather than an ethical pit, is also at work in both Jeff Bezos’s “everything store,” which started as a bookstore of all things but which is now duly understood to be a haven for knock-offs and useless trash as much as it is a modern marvel of distribution, as well as in Blackrock’s “own a little bit of everything” philosophy of investing, which is upending the reality of what the stock market even is in ways that I don’t totally grasp but I can tell have strong “neofeudalism” vibes.)
And just for the record here, I also agree with the alarmed people who are saying that these crackdowns are a sign of worse things to come, because I think that a much scarier thing to contemplate than elite depoliticization is these massive media empires, which have long been ideologically convinced of their own apoliticality and have grown in influence as arbiters of “civility” precisely because of their supposed apoliticality, now suddenly being put in a position where they must develop a politics — because, yeah, their sudden new “anti-extremism” politics will almost certainly be very bad! There’s for sure a strong possibility that it’s all just going to be social media crackdowns on environmentalists from here on out…
Something that helped refine my admittedly possibly vastly overdeveloped opinion on this matter is reading Bhakti Shringarpure’s essay “African Literature and Digital Culture” which is fascinating because it outlines the contours of such a different kind of internet: a site of endless literary experimentation, a place that is very much thought of as a platform for publishing. Shringarpure writes that the African digital world has been a step ahead in a great many innovations, from online literary conferences to online novels, and at the center of this big movement is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who has now published several books online before publishing them in print (to great commercial success, obviously, so, hmmmmm!). It seems like a genuine flourishing is going on — in particular, the proliferation of serialized novels and epistolary novels (did you know the main character of Americanah had a blog?) harkens back to a much earlier time in publishing history, giving the whole scene an especially idyllic glow. The contrast between Shringarpure’s upbeat account of African digital world and the popular conception of American digital world, which is as a total cesspit, is astonishing. (Not to say I am imagining that African digital space is somehow not plagued by the same problems ours is, haha, I think it’s more a matter of the difference of vision that I find interesting — to theorize the internet as a publishing platform, rather than some sort of “social” space or whatever the more dominant American model is, just immediately brings to mind such a different perspective on what its true function is...)
Plus, my reading this week included another reminder of the weirdly militant lack of a point of view endemic at the Big Five: Lila Shapiro’s investigation into how exactly the offensive, othering, bestselling monstrosity that is American Dirt (and all its attendant adulatory marketing) came into existence is chock-full of exactly the kind of weird truisms people tend to use to justify a bizarre level of depoliticization. Like, there’s a lot of talk about “meeting people where they’re at,” which is always a strange vibe, I think!
The question in publishing, one agent explained, is always: “Do you meet people where they are, or do you put something in front of them that you hope they move toward?” She continued, “To be realistic, to meet people where they are will sell more books.” A Latinx employee at Macmillan said the book had achieved “exactly what they meant for it to do.” “Publishers are not set up to be moral companies,” they said. “They are set up to sell books to readers.”
Stay safe,
Dana
1. “Billion-Dollar Book Companies Are Ripping Off Public Schools” by Maria Bustillos, The New Republic
Well, this makes me very mad. “Publishers are not set up to be moral companies,” indeed.
Billion-dollar companies like Follett and EBSCO are renting e-books to schools each year, rather than selling them permanent copies. By locking school districts into contracts that turn them into captive consumers, corporate tech providers are draining public education budgets that don’t have a penny to spare....
The Diary of Anne Frank, “a really important, classic piece of literature that social studies teachers have taught forever,” Woodcock said, “costs $27 per student for a 12-month subscription.”
…Paper books are much cheaper than e-books, and studies show that even the youngest readers prefer them. Some providers offer “library editions” with a lifetime guarantee. “So literally, like if a child wrecks it, I just send it back to them and they send me a brand-new book,” Woodcock said. “I’m only paying maybe $15 for that book, and it will last forever.” But the advance of technology in schools, coupled with the pandemic, mean that she has no choice but to pay up for e-books instead.
2. “No Safe Options” by Wen Stephenson, The Los Angeles Review of Books
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3. “Sabotage Can Be Done Softly” by Scott W. Stern, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Wen Stephenson interviews climate activist and scholar Andreas Malm; and Scott W. Stern reviews Malm’s How To [parody] a Pipeline, which is a book about how climate activists ought to [parody] pipelines.
Writes Stern in his review:
Malm finds support in a history that is unlikely to appear in afterschool specials or upbeat [Extinction Rebellion] literature — the bloody necessity of the Haitian Revolution, the righteous violence of John Brown’s raid, British suffragettes breaking windows and setting off bombs, American civil rights activists stockpiling guns, Iranian revolutionaries ambushing the Shah’s thugs, and the subaltern struggles that characterized decolonization from India to Algeria. “I called for non-violent protest for as long as it was effective,” goes one quotation Malm invokes from Nelson Mandela, who famously began blowing up power plants and military installations when nonviolence “no longer worked.”
…Confrontational tactics, he continues, would serve two purposes: discourage further investment in carbon extraction and demonstrate that the industry can be put out of business. Once again, Malm surveys lesser-known history — this time of fossil fuel infrastructure sabotage — and once again, it’s quite effective. Mandela’s partisans “considered oil supply an Achilles’ heel of apartheid” and so bombed Sasol plants, actions that “shattered the myth of white invulnerability,” writes one historian. Palestinian freedom fighters punctured or set fire to various pipelines throughout the 20th century, sometimes on a near-daily basis. Iraqis resisting American occupation executed nearly 200 attacks on pipelines; Kurdish and Egyptian and Houthi rebels, leftist guerillas in Colombia and Chechnya — all undertook similar tactics. Perhaps the “most extensive property destruction” occurred a generation ago in Nigeria: activists relentlessly resisted the oil companies ravaging the area, “moving swiftly on boats through the creeks and swamps to blow up pipelines, strike vessels, overpower offshore platforms, assault offices, kidnap oil employees.” The Nigerian resistance nearly caused Shell and Exxon to pull out of the region.
From the interview:
[Stephenson:] I’ve written about the Valve Turners, the nonviolent climate activists who manually shut down all four of the pipelines carrying tar sands oil from Canada to the US, in October 2016, without damaging anything other than the locks they broke with bolt cutters. And you write about the Catholic Worker activists who sabotaged the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2017, while conscientiously avoiding any physical harm to people. These are isolated examples, perhaps because damaging property in any way violates a taboo. Our society fetishizes private property. And yet, you write that “property will cost us the earth.”
[Malm:] I have to tell you, that sentence was actually formulated by my editor, who correctly saw this as the thrust of the argument. The essence of that statement, “property will cost us the earth,” is that if you think that the sanctity of private property stands above everything else, then you need to protect the sanctity of private property in fossil fuels, which means you’re all fine with ExxonMobil and all the rest of them going on exploring, producing, and selling fossil fuels — and then we’re finished!
4. “The Uneasy Afterlife of ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’” by Tom Bissell, The New Yorker
Here’s a follow-up to give you whiplash. Tom Bissell writes about the life of John Kennedy Toole and his posthumously published instant-classic The Confederacy of Dunces, which Bissell describes as “a rebuke of the socially committed novel. In many ways, it’s a warning about the lunacy of committing yourself to ‘the crucial problems of the times.’” (So, a book that advises the exact opposite of [parodying] pipelines.)
As Bissell tells us, the editor with whom Toole was corresponding before his suicide — Robert Gottlieb, then at Simon & Schuster — was “mystified” by the book’s satirical meandering, advising Toole that “there must be a point to everything you have in the book”; and, writing in the 1980s, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum (rightly) considered the book politically “reactionary” because of how it lampooned civil rights activism and feminism. Bissell finds both pleasure and pain in rereading the old conservative classic, but also, in light of recent developments, finds Dunces to not be as uncritical of conservatism as earlier assessments had determined it to be, since it features such a prescient parody:
For anyone contemplating the book today, the tendencies that Rosenbaum identified might be the most arresting thing about Toole’s novel, even more than its literary achievement, which despite the book’s longueurs remains considerable. As I soldiered on beside Ignatius, I was struck by the purity of the archetype that Toole had inadvertently created. You see, one of Ignatius’s greatest joys is going to the movie theatre and closely reading the credits: “Ignatius . . . noted that several of the actors, the composer, the director, the hair designer, and the assistant producer were all people whose efforts had offended him at various times in the past.” Once the film starts, Ignatius cries out, “What degenerate produced this abortion!” To make matters worse, Ignatius’s favorite superhero is Batman, who, he explains, “tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he’s found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.” And here is Ignatius at his most horrifyingly, presciently archetypal, watching a film starring an ingénue with whom he’s obsessed: “How dare she pretend to be a virgin. Look at her degenerate face. Rape her!”
Early in the novel, Ignatius tells us, “I am an anachronism. People realize this and resent it.” In 1968, Toole’s hero mystified one of the country’s finest editors of fiction. In 1980, he seemed harmless. Forty years later, this red-pilled malcontent calling for a theofascist revival seems something else entirely. Ignatius J. Reilly—the godfather of the Internet troll, the Abraham of neckbeards, the 4chan edgelord to rule them all—was no anachronism. He was a prediction.
5. “When Historical Fiction Is a Crime” by Kaya Genç, The New Republic
Kaya Genç reviews the jailed Turkish novelist Ahmet Altan’s Love in the Days of Rebellion, now available in English for the first time. It is the second volume in the author’s Ottoman Quartet, which Altan hopes to finish one day, if he can ever get access to a library again.
Ahmet Altan, one of Turkey’s most skillful historical novelists, lives in solitary confinement in a cell four meters long, at Silivri Prison, Europe’s largest penal facility. In I’ll Never See This World Again, his fifteenth book, and the first he wrote from prison, Altan recalled the passing comment of a judge who held the author’s fate in his hands: “If only you had stuck to writing novels and kept your nose out of political affairs.”
…But politics has been an abiding theme of his work since the mid-1970s, when he cut his teeth as a young reporter. For much of his career, eroticism and the intrigues of Turkish politics had vitalized Altan’s writings and helped make him a household name…
It was the Ottoman Quartet, an epic novel spanning the turbulent era between 1873, the year Sultan Abdülhamid II was enthroned, and 1915, when 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians died in an act of genocide, that earned Altan the distinction of a leading Turkish historical novelist, alongside younger authors Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak. The Quartet is Altan’s life’s work (he hopes to complete its last volume once he regains access to a library)... The saga’s first two volumes, Like a Sword Wound (1998) and Love in the Days of Rebellion (2001), now published in fine English translations by Yelda Türedi and Brendan Freely, probe Turkish historiography’s nationalist dichotomies between the autocratic Abdülhamid and progressive patriots who dethroned the Ottoman sultan. Altan’s Quartet shows that continuities, rather than ruptures, have defined the history of Turkish autocracy over the past century…
6. “Blurbed to Death” by Lila Shapiro, Vulture
Lila Shapiro investigates the American Dirt publishing saga.
…The company released a lengthy statement, acknowledging it had made “serious mistakes” while accusing its critics of the same. It attributed the cancellation of the tour to “threats of physical violence” and “concerns about safety.” (A Macmillan employee told me the company had never received or reviewed any threats but had heard from a handful of booksellers who said that they had.)
Many Macmillan employees found this statement more offensive than the first. “It made it seem like the people who were upset with her were dangerous, vicious savages,” a Latinx Macmillan employee said. One of the problems with the book itself “was a representation of Latinx people as vicious, dangerous savages,” the employee continued. That was “the worst message they could possibly send.”...
7. “African Literature and Digital Culture” by Bhakti Shringarpure, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Bhakti Shringarpure writes about how the African digital sphere is a scene of literary and publishing experimentation.
In the 21st century, digital literary culture originating from the African continent has exploded… Yet amid these transformations, African digital literary culture has not been given the credit it’s due for spearheading much of this revolution…
…Scholars have also been trying to tell this story for a long time… Nigerian scholar Shola Adenekan’s forthcoming book African Literature in the Digital Age will be a welcome addition to — and a much-needed corrective on — this history.
8. “The Prophet of Maximum Productivity” by Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Review of Books
“We are all Veblenians now” begins Kwame Anthony Appiah’s review of Charles Camic’s Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics, a new biography which puts the final nail in the coffin of what Appiah describes as a false, cliched conception of Veblen as an outsider, a “marginal man” out of step with his times. “We are all Veblenians now” to be sure — but we were also all Veblenians then, too.
…In chapter after chapter, [Camic] establishes the continuities between Veblen’s views and those of his professors and peers. Veblen is considered, for example, the progenitor of institutionalism in economics, which sees economic activity as shaped by evolving institutions and customs, rather than simply arising from the aggregation of rational, self-interested individuals. Yet Camic shows that many of Veblen’s instructors, at Hopkins, Yale, and Cornell, were saying much the same thing. Veblen’s evolutionary convictions—“Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” was the title of a 1898 paper—were similarly shared by his mentors and colleagues. Even the combination of these interests wasn’t distinctive; some of his most illustrious Chicago colleagues, Camic says, viewed social institutions and evolution as “interlocked concepts.”
And while we may be impressed by Veblen’s regular recourse to the ethnography of distant tribes, Camic notes that Clark, when Veblen was his student, was calling for political economy to be “built on a permanent foundation of anthropological fact.” As for Veblen’s iconoclastic pose and prose? “In the Age of Iconoclasm, mainstream academics were iconoclasts,” Camic writes, pointing out that his main instructors in graduate school all described themselves as rebels. Veblen wasn’t out of the swim of things; he was simply swimming faster and more forcefully than his peers… A Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899)... for most readers, was the great indictment of the Gilded Age; that’s how William Dean Howells approached it when he published the review that lofted it to fame…
9. “What We Can Learn About Activism Today in the Archives of Queer History” by Meerabelle Jesuthasan, The Nation
Meerabelle Jesuthasan reviews Cait McKinney’s Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies.
In 1979 a young woman called the Lesbian Switchboard, a hotline in New York City, and a volunteer picked up. The caller was lonely and wanted to know where she could meet other people like her—women attracted to other women. Another person called, and she was in an interracial relationship and was looking for a safe and open place to take her Black girlfriend on vacation. Another caller was a trans man who wanted to know where he could find a general practitioner. The volunteer, drawing on the hotline’s ethic of providing help without shame, judgment, or personal input, gave the callers the information or comfort that the person could. At the end of the calls, the volunteer logged the details in a ruled notebook, such as “18-yr. old ♀, isolated. Doesn’t have any lesbian friends. No connection with lesbian community. In Bklyn.” Over 30 years later, Cait McKinney picked up the call logs, stored among the many boxes and collections at the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) in New York City, and fit the pieces together…
10. “The Anti-Poetry of Salvador Villanueva” by Gustavo Rivera, Apogee
Gustavo Rivera writes about his translation of Salvador Villanueva’s Live Wire Poems. He had quite a time getting in contact with Villanueva:
I first came upon the poems of Salvador Villanueva, one of Puerto Rico’s most overlooked postmodernists, sometime around 2010 through a blog run by Neftalí Omar Núñez Santiago called Existencialismo Pop, while I lived in Gainesville, Florida, where I studied, worked, and was a part of the local creative scene. I began to scour the internet for his work, finding some samples here and there, sometimes unclear as to whether they were written about him or by him. It was all very intriguing. I couldn’t find any of his books online… I asked my mother, who still lives on the island, for help, and she was able to score a used copy of Corazon en huelga (2009) after asking various bookstores. (Thanks Ma! I love you!) I was eventually able to get his latest collection Jodido (2012) and contacted the emails available in the two collections just mentioned. One person responded, telling me this writer was somewhere in Arecibo. Once again, I reached out to my mother who spoke to a poet-friend of hers, Luis César Rivera, who eventually spoke to Alberto Martínez-Márquez, a poet who lives and teaches in Aguadilla. One day, Alberto happened to run into Villanueva’s wife, Alma, and told her that a young writer living in New York wanted to meet him to translate his work…
11. “Inexhaustible Precision” by Karl Ove Knausgaard, trans. Martin Aitken, The Point
In an essay excerpted from his collection In the Land of the Cyclops, Karl Ove Knausgaard reflects on what makes good art, the impetus behind literary criticism, “letting people enjoy things” (but he doesn’t call it that, thank god), etc. This anecdote about the reception of his first novel is hilarious, can you imagine??
Out of the World, as it was called, received a mix of good and bad reviews, all long since forgotten, apart from one that was so odd that I still think about it sometimes. What was particular about it was that it was literally a double review: first they published a very positive review, the critic making it clear that he really liked the novel. Then, and this is the odd part, that review was withdrawn the week after, the same critic now stating that he had been wrong, the book was not nearly as good as he had originally made out, in fact it was rather poor. It was as if he had felt himself caught out, that the book in some way had tricked him into thinking it was good when in fact it was not. In other words, he had been manipulated, duped by his first, superficial impression, his critical senses had been incapacitated, after which he must have realized, gradually or all at once, that there was nothing beneath the surface, certainly nothing as forceful as his first impressions had led him to believe.
12. “All the Führer’s Barons” by Karina Urbach, Literary Review
Karina Urbach reviews Stephan Malinowski’s Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance (trans. Jon Andrews).
…Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Hitler was exploited after 1945. German aristocrats claimed that they had never had anything to do with those ‘vulgar’ Nazis. The Stauffenberg plot and the subsequent imprisonment of many nobles made this claim plausible.
But is that the whole story? Over twenty years ago, Malinowski set out to answer this question. In the course of this, he became the leading historian of the German nobility, but also a target of the former ruling house, the Hohenzollerns. Malinowski’s findings on Crown Prince Wilhelm, the son of the last Hohenzollern emperor, especially his cooperation with the Nazis, are currently headline news in Germany and are keeping several law firms busy. The present head of the Hohenzollern family is demanding compensation from the German state for property confiscated by the Soviet authorities after the Second World War. However, to receive this compensation he has to prove that Wilhelm, his great-grandfather, did not help the Nazis in a ‘substantial’ way. Malinowski and the majority of German historians inconveniently argue that Wilhelm did just that…
13. “The People’s Novel” by Adam Kirsch, The New York Review of Books
Adam Kirsch writes about Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 1 and Volume 2.
Weiss was born in Germany in 1916, a year before the Russian Revolution, and over his lifetime he had seen its promise of liberation give way to terror and oppression, just like the French Revolution before it. For leftist intellectuals of his generation, the critical question was whether the Soviet experience had discredited the faith in revolution.
In Marat/Sade, Weiss is able to argue both sides of the question by splitting himself into two characters. In the end, however, Sade’s cynicism seems to triumph over Marat’s idealism…
The other work on which Weiss’s reputation principally rests couldn’t be more different from Marat/Sade, formally speaking. Yet The Aesthetics of Resistance, an enormous historical novel published in three volumes between 1975 and 1981, has at its core the same problem as the play: Is it possible to unite revolution and freedom, the common good and the individual imagination? The novel’s unnamed narrator, a young Communist with artistic ambitions, struggles mightily to serve both gods—to “match up,” in the words of one character, “the intensity of revolutionary artistic and political actions…the irony of the one with the seriousness, the sense of responsibility of the other.”
14. “Like a Pope, at the Edge of the Well” by Veronica Stigger, trans. Zoë Perry, The White Review
I’m really into these short stories by Veronica Stigger. (Uh, the last one is real doozy, so watch out.) They are translated by Zoë Perry, who according to the contributor’s note won an award for her translation of a novel by Stigger in 2016. But as far as I can tell, the novel was never published. So I have nothing to link to. Nothing to sell.
When Pedro realised that he’d been living for a decade in the city he’d chosen to call his own, there in that foreign country, and in all that time, he’d never once crossed the weathered, old Roman bridge, he decided he never would.
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