This Week in Books: “Going outside…was like stepping back into the good old days.”
“The adults…never miss a chance…to tell kids how great it’s going to be when the country gets back on its feet and good times come back.”
Dear Reader,
“So now we have some sense of what it’s like,” writes Bill McKibben in a review of Mark Lynas’s Our Final Warning, “a full-on global-scale crisis, one that disrupts everything. Normal life—shopping for food, holding a wedding, going to work, seeing your parents—shifts dramatically. The world feels different, with every assumption about safety and predictability upended. Will you have a job? Will you die?”
Detail from “Taking of the Warsaw Arsenal,” Marcin Zaleski, 1931.
It’s a sentiment that resonates terribly with the first couple dozen pages of Parable of the Sower, which I just started. I was drafted into reading it by some friends who “need someone to talk to about it,” and flattered as I was to be the go-to book-discusser in someone else’s life, it didn’t occur to me until I started reading that maybe they need to talk about it because it’s a little too relevant! “To the adults,” writes Butler, “going outside… was like stepping back into the good old days… They never miss a chance to relive the good old days or to tell kids how great it’s going to be when the country gets back on its feet and good times come back.” Butler’s adolescent narrator follows this up with a hard linebreak and a sarcastic “Yeah.”
Yeah.
In Chasing Chopin, excerpted recently on Lit Hub, Annik LaFarge writes about Chopin’s sorrow over being separated from everyone he loved during Poland’s November Uprising, when “friends rushed home to join the fight, but insisted he remain in exile.”
…Being separated from his family was, for Chopin, a type of death. Only a month after he left home, he described himself as “a corpse” and began using the metaphor of the crypt to convey his melancholia. “Graves behind me and beneath me, everywhere,” he wrote to a friend; “a gloomy harmony arose within me.”
In Stuttgart, his separation anxiety developed into a morbid, fantastical obsession with death. He imagined his family butchered, the woman he loved in the hands of the Muscovites… “seizing her, strangling her, murdering, killing.” In his notebook Chopin wondered: “is a corpse any worse than I? A corpse… knows nothing of father, mother or sisters… it cannot speak its own language to those around it.”
He was voiceless, homeless, and alone, “beyond ten frontiers” from friends and family, and to make matters worse his passport had expired and there was no safe way back to Poland. Stuttgart was an abyss; “I pour out my grief on the piano,” he confided to his diary.
Stay safe,
Dana
1. “130 Degrees” by Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books
Bill McKibben reviews Mark Lynas’s Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency.
Lynas is a British journalist and activist, and in 2007, in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate conference, he published a book titled Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. His new volume echoes that earlier work, which was by no means cheerful. But because scientists have spent the last decade dramatically increasing understanding of the Earth’s systems, and because our societies wasted that decade by pouring ever more carbon into the atmosphere, this book—impeccably sourced and careful to hew to the wide body of published research—is far, far darker. As Lynas says in his opening sentences, he had long assumed that we “could probably survive climate change. Now I am not so sure.”
…As we head past two degrees and into the realm of three, “we will stress our civilization towards the point of collapse.” A three-degree rise in temperature takes us to a level of global heat no human has ever experienced—you have to wind time back at least to the Pleistocene, three million years ago, before the Ice Ages… The record-setting heatwaves of 2019 “will be considered an unusually cool summer in the three-degree world”; over a billion people would live in zones of the planet “where it becomes impossible to safely work outside artificially cooled environments, even in the shade.”
2. “The Hidden Faces of Apartheid” by Bongani Kona, The Baffler
Bongani Kona reviews Jacob Dlamini’s The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police.
The Terrorist Album was the name given by the apartheid Security Police to the compendium of mugshots of people it considered enemies of the state; they began amassing thousands of these black-and-white photographs in the 1960s. Into its pages went novelists (Bessie Head) and trained combatants (Chris Hani), journalists (Eric Abraham) and academics (Ruth First): disparate individuals united by their opposition to the regime. Once identified as a terrorist, their photographs were indexed by factors including apartheid’s system of racial classification and placed in a 12 x 9-inch book, copies of which circulated covertly within corridors of the Security Police. “Right up to the end of apartheid in the early 1990s, the album was constantly in production,” Dlamini notes… It was “continually in the making as mug shots were added and subtracted, apartheid opponents arrested and killed.”
…The Terrorist Album played a starring role in apartheid’s terror regime, helping determine who was abducted, tortured, and killed by the state. Yet it remains a neglected object among scholars of contemporary South African history. It merits our attention, Dlamini writes, “because it speaks like no other relic from the apartheid past of the ambitions of South Africa’s Security Police to document every known enemy of the state.” Dlamini’s compelling study chronicles the entangled political and policing histories out of which the album “emerged as a tool of state power and surveillance.” The Terrorist Album enables us to look anew at the brutality and bureaucracy that marked apartheid policing.
3. “The Candy” by Robert(a) Marshall, n+1
In a wonderfully meandering essay, Robert(a) Marshall remembers another plague, witnessed from the vantage point of the basement of Scribner Bookstore on Fifth Avenue.
Yesterday, Natasha, who’s a stylist, sent me a video about how drinking hot water kills the virus. There are studies from Taiwan that show the efficacy of massive doses of vitamin C. But there are always studies that show the efficacy of massive doses of vitamin C. Yoshi, in 1984, told me the cause was poppers. So he stopped using poppers. Rafael hasn’t left his apartment in two months. Maybe this will turn out to have been ridiculous. Maybe it won’t. Maybe he’ll be the only one who survives. Who can say? No one, now. The present is not knowing.
I often worried, in the ’80s, about bleeding gums. I was too distracted to floss well. What if I was kissing someone and they too had bleeding gums? Eric tried urine therapy. The urine therapy group he was in was called Waters of Life. I know because I just googled it. This resource wasn’t available then. I’m not sure how much it helps now. America needs a class on epistemology. We say “find the facts” as if they were things, objects to be located, picked up. But they aren’t. They’re statements about things and events that all reasonable people agree to be true. But who’s reasonable?
4. “Reading the Planet’s Future in Hawai‘i’s April Rains” by Ligaya Mishan, Lit Hub
An essay by Ligaya Mishan, excerpted from Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World, edited by John Freeman.
In the evening it started to rain, pooling in the backyard until the earth couldn’t swallow it anymore and the grass went under, a jade gleam like a rice paddy. Then it started coming in, finding the weakness under the sliding doors, seeping and spilling so gently across the white tile of the living room, almost apologetically, because it had nowhere else to go.
In Hawai‘i, it rains almost every day, but for the most part gently, at the edges of waking life, early in the morning and again at night, what the weather reporters duly describe as passing windward and mauka (mountain) showers. When it does fall during the day, you can usually see it before you feel it, dark clouds massing in a corner as the rest of the sky stays that ridiculous blue, a color impossible to prove to anyone who doesn’t live here. It can feel like rain is a place apart, with borders; you can drive out of it in a minute—walk out of it, even, by simply crossing to the sunny side of the street.
5. “America’s ‘Mein Kampf’” by Anthony Mostrom, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Anthony Mostrom writes about the strange life and alarming posthumous influence of Francis Parker Yockey, a “postwar Nazi [...] of a literary bent” and author of Imperium, which “has inspired generations of far-right activists, antisemites, and racially motivated theoreticians (and a few politicians)… Without question the most influential antisemitic book since Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Imperium has remained in print for almost 60 years…”
While sitting alone in a quiet garden in Wiesbaden, Germany, in October 1946 amid the rubble of bombed-out streets, an unknown American named Francis Parker Yockey, who had recently been flown out by the US government to work as a review attorney for the War Crimes tribunals, jotted down in a notebook: “The ambition to rule souls is the strongest of all passions. Self-interest is the key to commonplace transactions. Where is the man who would not gladly be stabbed, if in exchange he could be Caesar?”
A strange sentiment, one would think, especially coming from an American hired to sift through the details of slaughter committed by a far more terrible dictator than Caesar. But Francis Parker Yockey’s mind was already fixed (or perhaps fixated) on certain high-stakes goals, and being hired for this particular job at Wiesbaden was part of the plan. Though he was brought onboard as part of the legal team whose job it was to pass judgment on accused “second-string” Nazi war criminals, Yockey (who was 29 at the time) came to Germany prepared to do something else entirely: to help the very Nazis he was hired to prosecute.
6. “After the Battle of Algiers” by Julia Pagnamenta, Bookforum
Julia Pagnamenta interviews Elaine Mokhtefi, author of Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers, which “captures the author’s experiences in Algeria after its liberation from French colonial rule; her interactions with figures there such as Frantz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, Timothy Leary, Ahmed Ben Bella, Jomo Kenyatta, and Eldridge Cleaver; and the presence of the Black Panthers in Algiers.” Says Mokhtefi:
As independence came, one million French settlers moved out of Algeria. There was a terrible need of teachers, of doctors, of technicians. All sorts of employees that the Algerian population could not cover. There were all sorts of countries that had supported Algerian independence that sent delegations of workers to help rebuild the country…
They came from everywhere. They came from Egypt, from Syria, from Iraq. They came from the Communist world. From the Soviet Union, from Bulgaria, from East Germany, from Yugoslavia, from Czechoslovakia, and from Hungary.
And they came too from France. Lots of French people who had supported Algerian independence and had fought against the politics of their government. For years they gave up jobs in France and came to live in Algeria. Later on, there was an agreement between France and Algeria where rather than do military service they could do service as “coopérants.” A lot of people fresh out of college came and took up jobs in Algeria.
There were all sorts of organizations of freedom fighters, of militants from South Africa, Namibia, Angola, and Mozambique. There was an office set up by French-speaking Canadians. There were delegations of all sorts set up in Algiers, even from Portugal and Spain in the time of Salazar and Franco. They were all there.
7. “Birds in Formation” by Nguyen Ngoc Tu, Words Without Borders
A short story by Nguyen Ngoc Tu, excerpted from the collection Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath, translated and edited by Quan Manh Ha and Joseph Babcock.
To Grandma, time was malleable. She couldn’t help mixing the present with the past. After a good sleep, she could wake up and suddenly be transported twenty years back in time. Unfortunately, I wasn’t old enough to do that. Otherwise, this ability would have allowed me to forget everything and live my life as it had been before that noonday lull in October. Before that was when my father had been a happy man, always smiling and being affectionate. He seemed always to remain calm, even when Vinh would start jumping up and down and teasing me like he wanted to box. Every morning, my father used to wake Vinh and me up and we’d run to a nearby park to kick a shuttlecock back and forth. That’s what our lives had been like. Then suddenly Grandma cried one day after a long nap…
8. “Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Cabinet of Wonders” by Howard A. Rodman, The Paris Review
The Paris Review has excerpted Howard A. Rodman’s introduction to No Room at the Morgue, originally published in 1973 and recently reissued; Rodman outlines the grim worldview of author Jean-Patrick Manchette.
For all of the gimlet-eyed precision with which Manchette observes human activity in the post-’68 landscape, he always gives us a character or two who behave well, and with empathy for their fellow beings. In Three to Kill it was Raguse, the kindly alpine recluse who takes in our protagonist. In No Room at the Morgue it’s the journalist Haymann, who helps Tarpon when he doesn’t really have to, and the upstairs neighbor, the elderly tailor Stanislavski, who has never harmed a soul, and suffers the consequences. Manchette uses these figures to cast in high relief the bad faith and worse behavior of the rest of us, caught in the convulsions of late, or one may say after-hours, capitalism.
The language he uses to depict these convulsions only heightens the terror and the absurdity—André Breton would surely recognize in Manchette a fellow practitioner of humeur noire. As Tarpon narrates, “I was making up theories in my head: Was Haymann an Israeli agent? And was it in fact Memphis Charles they’d tried to assassinate the other night? My theories were collapsing one by one, but I started constructing them all over again. At the same time, I was dreaming of steak frites. And it was getting mixed up in my theories. Béarnaise sauce was dripping down the faces of Palestinians. In my head, I mean. In my head.” Or, more offhandedly: “Memphis Charles had dragged the American who was still alive into the workshop and she was attaching him to the pipes. Life goes on, like the song says.”
9. “In the Belly of the Beast: How The Whale Encapsulates Modern Ecology” by Ferris Jabr, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Ferris Jabr reviews Rebecca Giggs’s Fathoms: The World in the Whale, “a profound meditation on the mutual devouring of humans and whales. It bends the familiar tale of Jonah into an ouroboros: whale swallowing human swallowing whale. Giggs explores how whales have permeated our lives and the many ways we have invaded and transformed theirs. Each chapter orbits a different aspect of this long and fraught relationship — commodification, pollution, voyeurism, adoration, mythology — swerving wherever Giggs’s extensive research and fervent curiosity take her. We learn of baleen corsets, cetacean taxidermy, cryptozoology, the history of whaling, whale songs hurtling through space, a beluga that tried to speak English, the purportedly therapeutic practice of bathing inside the body of a decomposing whale…”
10. “In the Fire of Activism” by Robert Greene II, The Nation
Robert Green II reviews Race Man, the selected writings of civil rights activist and legislator Julian Bond, edited by Michael G. Long.
That mix of felt urgency and anxious uncertainty about how much change could be made in American society would define Bond’s efforts for much of his career. His time in office, like his time as an activist, would be characterized by both his hopes for greater social equality and the continuing need to fight for such change when these hopes were too often thwarted. This tension was central to nearly all of his writing, much of which is now collected in a new book, Race Man, edited by the historian Michael G. Long.
Race Man captures the full output of Bond’s long and distinguished career, first as an activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, then as a member of the Georgia legislature (in the House and later in the Senate), then as a traveling academic who taught about his experiences in the social upheavals of the ’60s, and finally as a writer and aging lion of the civil rights movement still fighting to hold on to the ideals of his youth. Along the way, the book also makes clear a set of themes and quandaries that have troubled so much of the history of the American left: What is lost in the movement from protest to politics? How can lasting change be achieved in the face of unsatisfying compromise?
11. “The Helpless Outrage of the Anti-Trump Book” by Colin Dickey, The New Republic
Colin Dickey writes about the oppressive anti-politics of a rapidly proliferating genre: the anti-Trump book.
…it became the dominant mode of a certain kind of liberal approach to Donald Trump. There’s nothing you can do but sit back and wait it out. Stay tuned, but do nothing. This mindset has given rise to a peculiar subgenre of books on the Trump era: More or less disposable, they have come and gone on the New York Times bestseller list, each notching a few weeks before disappearing, resurfacing in a few months on the remainder table. The writing is characterized by a forgettable prose style occasionally punctuated by some kind of lofty, summative statement on history and/or truth or stirring calls to action. But rather than detail what that action might look like, they instead end up encouraging readers to do next to nothing…
On their own, any one of these books carries no more weight than a slight breeze. But the aggregate weight of them is staggering. From book to book, a common refrain emerges, a chorus of voices that gradually become a deafening white noise. Their real work, it turned out, was not to stop Trump or Trumpism but to comfort the troubled mind. In them, the reader could find two things: a tone whose purpose was to provide a psychological barrier from the distress caused by this administration and a reassuring paean to normalcy and the durability of institutions.
12. “Fifteenth-Century Cher” by Mairead Case, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Mairead Case interviews Robert Glück about his recently reissued novel Margery Kempe, originally published in 1994, which blends the author’s recollections of an obsessive love affair with 15th-century mystic Margery Kempe’s obsessive love for Jesus. Case writes that it is “a work that clarifies faith through abjection, obsession through desire, and romance through love. It believes in wonder, and a gender-fluid Christ. It is also composed of sentences perfect as crystals, especially for readers interested in the body and how we feel. (Some of my favorite death metal sentences in the world are here too, for example when Margery looks out of her own grave: ‘She raised her head — a skull that was already empty. He looked at the sockets hopefully. They heard a two-syllabled call followed by the muffled purr of rapidly beating wings’...).” Says Glück:
I did read Margery’s book many times, and the sentence in my book is a collaboration with her. [Colonel W.] Butler-Bowdon discovered her text in a country-house library in the 1930s and published it in 1940. He called her “poor Margery” in his preface, because he was disappointed by her vulgarity and the faults in her piety — the exact things that draw me to her.
Most of my story and emotional heat is given to Margery. Bob and L. are a frame, so you are invited to read through. That’s how I was able to tell my story. If I could have written more about Bob and L., I wouldn’t have needed Margery’s story, with its supernatural desire. I wanted her story to express my disastrous love for L., but also I wanted to leave her story alone. I hope it’s evident when I am telling her version and when I am projecting myself into it.
13. “Frédéric Chopin in Exile: The Making of a Romantic” by Annik LaFarge, Lit Hub
An excerpt from Annik LaFarge’s Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries, and a Half-Dozen Revolutions.
When the uprising began, Chopin’s friends rushed home to join the fight, but insisted he remain in exile and use his music to give voice to Poland’s struggle. Traveling the Continent, keeping in touch with friends and family through a regular stream of letters, he went to parties, dinners, plays, and operas. Then, as he wrote to a friend, he would return home around midnight, sit down, “play the piano, have a good cry, read, look at things, have a laugh, get into bed, blow out my candle and always dream about you all.”
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