This Week in Books: I’m Louise Gluck, who are you? Are you - unreconstructed - too?
How dreary - to be - a Laureate! How public - like a Frog -
Dear Reader,
Something very stupid happened recently in “book world”: Louise Gluck, American poet and Nobel Laureate, brought up a minstrel song in her Nobel Lecture. She also brought up William Blake’s “The Little Black Boy,” which is wild in and of itself, like if they’d given it to an American novelist who’d gotten up there on the world stage and waxed lyrical about Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
But I would also like to make sure that we all take note of the second “poem” Gluck brings up in her lecture, which is “Swanee River,” which, like I said above, is a literal minstrel song, in the sense of it was written for the minstrel stage. (And this is already a pretty razor-thin distinction I’m making because Uncle Tom’s Cabin of course went on to be adapted into the most popular minstrel show ever. I’m like Dante trying to rank levels of sin, at this point.) As in, when you google “Stephen Foster Swanee River,” you immediately get a youtube video of Al Jolson performing it in blackface!
I find this to be all very insane! It makes me feel insane! I think… and this is a big stretch… that maybe Gluck’s lecture is intending to slyly and subtly show the reader how Blake’s “good” art about how slavery is bad drew her away, as a child, from liking Foster’s “bad” art about how slavery is good (because eventually, in her anecdote, her childhood self ranks Blake’s poem as the better of the two)… but this is, I would like to think it goes without saying, utterly unreconstructed — the equivalent of saying that it was reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin that finally made you realize Birth of a Nation was bad.
And, to be clear, there is no indication that this is what Gluck means to say… I’m really doing too much legwork for her. In her own words:
I paced up and down the second bedroom in my grandmother’s house in Cedarhurst, a village on the south shore of Long Island, reciting, in my head as I preferred, not from my mouth, Blake’s unforgettable poem, and singing, also in my head, the haunting, desolate Foster song…
Blake was the winner of the competition. But I realized later how similar these two lyrics were; I was drawn, then as now, to the solitary human voice, raised in lament or longing. And the poets I returned to as I grew older were the poets in whose work I played, as the elected listener, a crucial role. Intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine. Not stadium poets. Not poets talking to themselves.
She is talking about a minstrel song. Just… just making sure you got that! A minstrel songwriter is one of the “poets I returned to as I grew older.” Ok, then! Yeah, sure, not a stadium poet at all, lmao, what??
There was a theory blooming on twitter that Gluck was trying to get canceled on purpose, because the ultimate thrust of the lecture is that she wishes she were still a private person and not a public persona (which is why after talking about the minstrel stuff she pivots to Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody! Who are you?”); and I acknowledge that the fact that she recently published a poem in the inaugural issue of Leon Wieseltier’s Liberties is not at odds with the portrait of a poet preoccupied by Our Culture of Cancellation. But if we’ve been reduced to the point where our great poets are mining for liberal tears in their Nobel Lectures, then perhaps it’s time to pack it in, as a society…
Truly, it feels like we, as a culture, are flying at unsustainable altitudes of parody. For instance, over at Vulture, Rebecca Alter made this quiz which is, incomprehensibly, difficult. I got 7 out of 11, and I was trying. That is not a passing grade, folks! The former president and the nepotism daughter of a comedian write in exactly the same register, folks!
After I failed the quiz, I had to firmly stop myself from diving into some sort of extreme late-night project where I tried to figure out whether the prose in The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant is nearly indistinguishable from that of a third-rate middlebrow humorist of the time, because that is simply not a question I will ever be qualified to answer. I can only hope there’s some historian out there who’s checking on it.
Well. Hmmm. I should probably go back and add the umlauts to all the Glucks, but you know what? I won’t.
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Oh, but let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about books. To be frank, the books have got me feeling a little odd. My head was turned by all sorts of strange poems and beautiful fictions this week. Amit Chaudhuri, Scholastique Mukasonga, Masande Ntshanga, Diane Williams… None of them seem happy. Or, they are all in revolutionary moods, which are unhappy with how things are, but happy at the thought of the coming insurrection, the radical break. Or… maybe that’s just the mood I am in……… Amit Chaudhuri, Scholastique Mukasonga, Masande Ntshanga, Diane Williams… Numbers 1 through 4 this week. When I read them, I felt like they wanted something from me…
Plus, Ben and I spent Christmas reading stories to each other from this rad spooky anthology, which taught me, among other things, that E. Nesbit was a socialist:
It’s been helpful to dwell on fear this Christmas, because my mood has been mainly a fearful one, and one hates to feel alone in one’s selfishness. In the face of mass illness, mass death, mass hunger, mass homelessness and mass displacement, I’m overwhelmed by worry for the people in my little circle.
Here’s what Algernon Blackwood says about fear in “The Kit-Bag,” a horror story about the cosmic danger of just trying to have a nice time on Christmas when you’re professionally complicit in the perpetuation of social inequities, which I read to Ben from the rad spooky anthology on Christmas Eve:
It is difficult to say exactly at what point fear begins, when the causes of that fear are not plainly before the eyes. Impressions gather on the surface of the mind, film by film, as ice gathers upon the surface of still water, but often so lightly that they claim no definite recognition from the consciousness. Then a point is reached where the accumulated impressions become a definite emotion, and the mind realises that something has happened.
Happy Holidays,
Dana
“The ghost - a Christmas frolic - le revenant.” Print shows a boy with a mannequin ghost holding a candle frightens several guests at an intimate party. John Massey Wright, London: Pub. by Hassell & Richards, 1814 Decr. 24.
1. “Two Poems” by Amit Chaudhuri, Granta
I read these two poems from Amit Chaudhuri’s Ramanujan (forthcoming in 2021 and not yet extant in the metadata of any online booksellers) and I had that flying feeling! You know, when the poems are very good, and you can feel how words are more than words, how they add up to a language, and how language is something that exists not just outside of you but inside of you, and you get very excited about it and pace around your room.
The subject of the not-yet-existing poetry collection is the life of the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, though the speaker is more like a present-day Chaudhuri.
Then, to phrase it dramatically, / I was told I might die. I’d never felt / more well or alive (mentally, / I’d never been as out of place as in Cambridge).
2. “Variations on a Few Sentences by Can Xue” by Scholastique Mukasonga, trans. Emma Ramadan, The Paris Review
An excerpt of Scholastique Mukasonga’s foreword to Can Xue’s Purple Perilla, which, rather than a biography or a critical analysis, is a set of three responses to the book it precedes: one poem and two fictions. The whole piece feels dangerous.
I’m overtaken with sudden rage. Brusquely I shut the computer. The eye of light goes out. I am completely alone without emails.
3. “i feel like my heritage is obstinate” by Masande Ntshanga, The Johannesburg Review
A poem from Masande Ntshanga’s Native Life in the Third Millennium.
i need to charm the dissident children of boston brahmins // i need to write her a book that’ll be taught at harvard.
4. “Tassel Rue” by Diane Williams, The London Review of Books
A new short story from the master.
If only I could have said often with clear conscience, ‘I’ll go – then I’ll be right back for just a minute and then you will never see me again –’ Something like that, on so many occasions, to some women ...
5. “The lying life of John le Carré” by Gavin Jacobson, The New Statesman
Gavin Jacobson writes about the life of John Le Carré.
Le Carré provided a recognisable portrait of himself in A Perfect Spy, his most autobiographical novel. The plot centres on Magnus Pym, a motherless spook, with a corrupt father called Rick. He also shares Le Carré’s contempt for American foreign policy and Britain’s fatal reverence for Washington. In A Perfect Spy, as well as Tinker, Tailor, it is the imperious designs of the United States, as opposed to Soviet communism, that represents the true threat to the world.
…Le Carré’s novels are about the moral price Britain has paid for its deference to its institutions and the elite who manage them. In The Secret Pilgrim (1990), Smiley gives a speech to young recruits to MI6 in which he reminds them that “the privately educated Englishman – and Englishwoman, if you will allow me – is the greatest dissembler on earth….Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully or find it harder to confess to you that he’s been a damned fool.”
6. “Naomi Long Madgett, Champion of Black Poets, Is Dead at 97” by Penelope Green, The New York Times
Penelope Green writes about the life of the late Naomi Long Madgett, poet and publisher.
…an accidental career… began in her Detroit basement when she couldn’t find the right press for her fourth book and decided to put it out herself. Lotus Press, her imprint, would go on to present, often for the first time, the work of Black writers like Herbert Woodward Martin, Dolores Kendrick, James A. Emanuel and Toi Derricotte.
Despite its literary prestige, Lotus Press stayed in Ms. Madgett’s basement, and for decades she ran it mostly by herself. (In its first years, she invented an editorial assistant and named her Connie Withers — a nod to her middle name, Cornelia, and her first married name, Witherspoon — to give the imprint corporate heft.)
7. “The Spike and Valley of Horror” by Jessica Guess & Stephen Graham Jones, The Rumpus
Jessica Guess interviews Stephen Graham Jones about his horror novel The Only Good Indians.
Jones: …back when I was, I don’t know, maybe five I’d guess, I had a stepdad who would take me out on the highway in his Trans-Am. I’d hold his beer for him, and we just go up and down the interstate super-fast. There’s this one place we’d go sometimes, this Caliche pit that is a big white hole in the ground where they mine out this chalky stuff they use for roadbeds. One day he took me there, and we were standing on the lip of this far drop, you know, like sixty feet. It was a deep, deep hole. Deep and wide. And he said, “Here, Stevie, hold my beer.” So, I hold his beer in two hands, and he said, “Watch this,” and he pivoted on one foot, and fell right off that cliff.
Rumpus: What?
Jones: Yeah, and I distinctly remember standing there holding up that big, tall beer and crying because I was alone. I didn’t know what to do. I needed somebody to be there and I didn’t know what had happened to him. I was terrified. And then a few minutes later he taps me on the shoulder and he’s laughing because about twelve feet down on that cliff face there was a ledge you can grab onto if you did it just right, and you could hand-walk over sideways and then climb up where it wasn’t so steep. So, he had pulled that joke on me. I think that rush of pure unadulterated terror, followed by relief, got programmed into me at that age. And I think that might be where I got turned on to horror. To the spike and the valley of horror, if that makes sense.
8. “Reality Under My Skin” by Lauren Oyler, Harper’s
Lauren Oyler reviews Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood, Youth, Dependency (trans. Tiina Nunnally & Michael Favala Goldman, alternately).
In recent years, the feminist project of uncovering “forgotten” female writers and artists has yielded—among other fruits—a steady stream of “rediscovered” mid-twentieth-century works that those of us prone to weltschmerz may find pleasantly, or painfully, “relatable,” to use a contemporary publicity standard. My favorites are those that fall into a genre I call, affectionately, “sad girls in Europe.” Experimental yet accessible, the books depict a female self fragmented by history, circumstance, and failing relationships that cannot be entirely chalked up to history or circumstance, and they’re written in prose that is consummately composed even as the protagonist’s life and mind are falling apart. Being sensitive does not mean being precious; it can produce a shaky resilience, and a ruthless clarity that illuminates the self as well as the rest of the world. Textual weirdness is dutifully contextualized: “For a long time I have been lonely, cold and miserable,” begins Anna Kavan’s story “Going Up in the World.” “I told Helen my story and she went home and cried,” goes the opening to Barbara Comyns’s novel Our Spoons Came from Woolworths…
…the “sad girls in Europe” have become a marketing cliché, elevated from the domain of steadfast bloggers and thoughtful small presses to the interest of major cultural institutions, as with the New York Times’s Overlooked obituary series, or the wildly Instagrammable 2018–19 Hilma af Klint show at the Guggenheim.
Is that bad? Not necessarily. But when great work finds a wider audience, it often finds more opportunities to be misinterpreted. To summarize a life as consisting of four marriages, alcohol and drug abuse, and death by suicide not only glamorizes hardship; it shines an ugly fluorescent light on the writing, washing out the aesthetic choices that render Ditlevsen’s representation of those experiences so affecting.
9. “June Jordan’s Vision of a Black Future” by Doreen St. Félix, Lit Hub
An essay by Doreen St. Félix excerpted from Black Futures, edited by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham.
Esquire published the plan under the headline “Instant Slum Clearance,” forgoing the text submitted by Jordan and Fuller. The magazine also removed Jordan’s name from the blueprint itself. It had been Jordan, then a young mother to her only son, Christopher, a resident of Harlem, a graduate of the architecture program at the American Academy of Rome, who approached the quixotic Fuller about collaborating on a solution to the crises of living in the nation’s invented Black slum. “My title had been ‘Skyrise for Harlem,’” Jordan wrote to Fuller after the publication of the article. “We conceived of this environmental redesign as a form of federal reparations to the ravaged people of Harlem.” It had been Jordan who had written to New York City’s commissioner of housing, figuring out just how deeply the city had shortchanged the Black families living in Harlem. The omission of her name from this radical proposition, and the proximity of her thinking to the thing that the thinking made, is exactly the Black creator’s cyclical condition: dispossessed, and always endeavoring to again own their creation.
10. “How Rural China Became an Engine for Global Consumer Capitalism” by A.Y. Li, The Nation
A.Y. Li reviews Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm.
Wang… visited a number of new businesses across China’s countryside during the past year to document the ways in which rural towns have become the engines of global consumer capitalism…
Wang… visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos…
11. “How the Specter of Islam Fueled European Colonization in the Americas” by Alan Mikhail, Lit Hub
An excerpt from Alan Mikhail’s God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World.
…when Columbus arrived in the Americas, fresh from the battle which marked Spain’s final defeat of the Muslim kingdom of Granada, he saw—or, more accurately, imagined—Muslims everywhere. Spanish conquistadors would claim to see mosques in Mexico, American Indians wearing “Moorish” clothing and performing “Moorish” dances, Turks invading New Spain from the Pacific, and West African slaves attempting to convert America’s indigenous peoples to Islam. Filtering their experiences in the Americas through the lens of their wars with Muslims, Europeans in the New World engaged in a new version of their very old Crusades, a new kind of Catholic jihad…
Throughout the 17th century and into the 18th, Europe remained far more concerned about the Ottomans and Islam than about the lands across the Atlantic. Remarkable, in fact, is the apparent lack of interest in the Americas among most Europeans. Spain’s Charles V, for example—the leader most responsible for his empire’s enormous expansion in the New World—uttered not a word about the Americas in his memoirs… Overall, between 1480 and 1609, Europe published four times more works about the Muslim world than about the Americas. This disparity only increased over the course of the 17th century.
…by the end of the 17th century, there were more enslaved Englishmen in North Africa than free ones in North America. “Conquerors in Virginia, they were slaves in Algiers,” as the scholar Nabil Matar nicely summarizes.
12. “What We Still Get Wrong About Alexander Hamilton” by Christian Parenti & Michael Busch, Boston Review
Michael Bush interviews Christian Parenti about his book Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder.
I wrote the book by mistake, because I stumbled upon Hamilton’s often name-checked but rarely discussed magnum opus, his 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures. At first the plan was to just republish the Report with an introduction. But that grew into this book.
As I read up on the Report it became clear that there were major omissions and misunderstandings about Hamilton’s political economy and its role in the course of U.S. economic development. Cast by most historians as the patron saint of free markets and financiers, Hamilton actually begins the Report with an attack on Adam Smith and laissez-faire economics. He then goes on to present a sweeping program of transformation-oriented economic planning. This is totally at odds with the mainstream story of American capitalism and Hamilton’s place within it. Most books on Hamilton do not address Hamilton’s vision of a planned economy.
13. “This Artist Posed As a Hungarian Billionaire Buyer to Get Into 25 New York Penthouses” by Christopher Bonanos & Andi Schmied, Curbed/New York Magazine
Christopher Bonanos interviews Andi Schmied, an artist and architect who “recast herself as a fictional, ultrawealthy Hungarian buyer to persuade real-estate agents to show her… sky-high luxury apartments, and then photographed the cityscape from all of them.” The photos will be collected in Private Views: A High-Rise Panorama of Manhattan.
I obviously built a persona, because my real persona would not be granted access. Basically the way it worked was I called up the first agency asking, “I would like to see this property.” And I had to respond immediately to whatever they asked. The first question — it’s funny what it was — was “can you give us the name of your husband?” This came back many, many times, this question.
…after a while I realized that it absolutely doesn’t matter what I wear: From their point of view, you’ve passed the access, and you can do anything — anything is believable. For example, all the pictures were taken with a film camera, which is [gestures broadly] this big. I’d just ask, “Can I take some pictures for my husband?” which is a very obvious and normal thing to do. There were a few agents who noticed that it was a film camera, not a digital camera, and those who noticed asked, “Oh, wow, is it film?” And I’d always say something like, “Oh, my grandfather gave it to me — to record all the special moments in my life.” And they’d just put me in this box of “artsy billionaire,” and would start to talk to me about MoMA’s latest collection. So anything goes.
14. “The Dream of the Swimming Pool” by James Delbourgo, The Los Angeles Review of Books
James Delbourgo dives into the deep history of swimming pool photography.
Coffee-table books about swimming pools are a surprisingly well-established genre. Lavish, glossy, and tempting, they’re almost like pop-up books — their images practically lunge at the reader, a medley of splashes and bodies. They don’t look particularly serious and seem to make the perfect winter gift, if you can withstand the tease of aquatic pleasure while it’s freezing, raining, or snowing outside.
The latest entry in this increasingly crowded field is Lou Stoppard’s Pools from the house of lavish itself, Rizzoli. Like the editor of most such books, Stoppard is light of touch and low of word count, including just a few choice paragraphs to accompany photographs that are intended to speak for themselves. But what are they saying? To distinguish this book from several similar ones, Rizzoli has wrapped the cover in a latex-like transparent blue sleeve. This slightly kinky touch makes the book appear to be submerged in water, beckoning the reader to dive in. Several of the pictures Stoppard includes have been reproduced before in recent books like Hatje Cantz’s stunning album of classic 20th-century images, The Swimming Pool in Photography (2018). Stoppard, however, juxtaposes canonical shots with pool photography from the present, allowing the reader to see how the cultural imagination of the swimming pool has evolved.
15. “The Hyena’s Laugh: I. U. Tarchetti and the Birth of Italian Gothic” by Lawrence Venuti, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Lawrence Venuti writes about the life and work of I. U. Tarchetti, an anarchist 19th century polemicist and translator who baited the bourgeoisie with his gothic tales.
…In December 1867, the editors of the Gazzettino Rosa, a newspaper that featured such radical contributors as the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, invited Tarchetti to submit a brief piece, and he obliged with a suitably scapigliato self-portrait:
“I would like to be a hyena, thrusting my way into graves, feeding on the bones of the dead. In this world, I see only skulls, thigh bones. If a woman kisses me, I feel nothing but cold; if she smiles at me, I see her teeth moving gumless, threatening to fall from her mouth; if she embraces me, I have only the sensation of a body clinging and heavy like clay. In the darkness, my lover would seem to me a corpse rising through some effect of magnetism, like Galvani’s frog, destined to drop abruptly under its own dead weight.”
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