Dear Reader,
A couple months ago, when I was still writing this newsletter for Longreads, I wrote that the everywhere-ness of the virus had not really sunk in yet; it was hard to remember that there was a connection between something terrible happening to my nana in Ohio and something terrible happening to my friend in Brooklyn. But I’ve been getting used to it I guess, and it seems like everyone else has too if the evolution of email etiquette is anything to go by. The melancholy “I hope you’ve been as well as possible” has replaced the already kind of melancholy “I hope you’ve been well” as the standard email opener, and “stay safe” is a new line of benediction that has emerged ahead of the more traditional valediction; or at least this is the case in my inbox. My correspondents’ collective expectations have measurably narrowed in just a few months, our sense of a common doom codified in workplace formalities.
Allegory of Rhetoric, Laurent de La Hyre, 1650. The caduceus, two snakes wrapped around a staff, an ancient symbol of travel and commerce, is used as a symbol throughout the medical field in the United States. “This confusion seems to be uniquely American and driven by commercialisation.”
But I’m not sure if it’s the same for everybody. My “milieu” (aka the people I email about my apocalypse magazine) is, possibly, already a notably melancholy one. I wonder how accountants begin their emails these days. (And this is the part of the newsletter where I inadvertently reveal that I have not been emailing any accountants about my magazine, undoubtedly a grave error.)
Hmmm I just asked my boyfriend if this has been going on in his emails as well; he said that it was for a while, but it’s all gone back to normal now; as though nothing is happening, even though everything is worse! Sounds like the cutting edge of the apocalypse is pretending it’s already over.
But let’s say, ah, for the sake of me continuing to have something to say about this, that this kind of attitude, this sense of “we’re all doomed together” (or, for the normies, “we’re all in this together”), this totalizing view has the potential to linger and expand; that a shared reality is materializing, one in which when I write to someone in a different time zone, a different country, I still say “I hope you’re doing as well as possible given the terrible circumstances” because I believe that these far away people and I are actually in the same circumstances. What happens in a world where people write things like that in their letters?
Anna Merlan wrote last week that “the strain of living in this particular time, with a dragging, devastating pandemic and a global uprising against police brutality and racial injustice, crashing together at the highest speed, has accelerated something that’s been going on for years.”What she was talking about was the rapid emergence of a sense of shared reality by every branch of the conspiracy theory family tree: these days, the anti-vaxxers are taking QAnon oaths, the UFO people are drinking anti-vaxxer bleach solutions, etc. So, even outside of my inbox, a big theme of 2020 does indeed seem to be new senses of shared reality — or shared unreality, as David Roth wrote yesterday:
It’s not nearly the same thing as getting used to it, but there is by now an identifiable rhythm to the Trump presidency…
Some of the unreality of everyday life in Trump’s America stems both from how unprecedented the movement against all this is and the latent threat arrayed against it from a state that can no longer really manage to do much but inflict harm. But there is also a clue as to how things slipped so devastatingly out of joint buried in Trump’s undignified and uninterrupted normality.
Roth goes on to identify a set of twin normalities wrapping around and supporting each other, like two snakes lacking a divine staff between them, as the support structure of our new shared unreality: Trump’s unbreakable routine of perpetual self-absorption, and the way in which his absolute vileness reveals to us the system must have been vile all along, that state vileness is normal.
The profound violence of the new/old normal can all be summed up, Roth shows, in Trump’s fondness for that phrase uttered exclusively by the toxic people in my life since time immemorial: “It is what it is.” To which I say, in the words of a great Chris Hemsworth meme: “Is it, though?”
Maybe it’s more like what it isn’t! Death, after all, is notable mainly as an absence of life. Danger as an absence of safety. Poverty as an absence of prosperity.
Ah, well, I don’t know. I feel worn out, thinking about the dialectics of our big slimy boy. The new normal is too normal for me. Check out the list below, and stay safe.
Dana
1. “On the Uses of History for Staying Alive” by Bathsheba Demuth, The Point
Bathsheba Demuth writes that on the eve of the pandemic’s tear across the globe, she was feeling lost in the muddle of archival research in Juneau, Alaska; she was reading about the history of life along the Yukon River, “about Yup’ik communities along the Yukon’s lower channel, and their distrust of the Russian Empire… About Gwich’in nations simultaneously trading with and thwarting the Hudson’s Bay Company… about the price of a good dog in Nulato and raw timber in Whitehorse,” about “people [who] grew up with stories of their friends, family, neighbors ‘who died from the influenza, and… were dropping so fast that they dug one hole and then buried 99 people in one grave.’” In a bid for clarity, she began reading Nietzsche’s On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (collected in Untimely Meditations) around the same time as news of COVID started to intensify. Demuth writes that colleagues dismissed her concerns about the possibility of a pandemic as paranoid, while elders she knows in the Arctic were able to quickly incorporate COVID into their worldview; what she and the elders shared around that time “was an informed imagination, the ability to conceive that much of what was normal—staying in hotels, shaking hands, air travel, open libraries—was provisional. An act of conjuring bounded by shards of what was known.”
A lack of imagination is a kind of incompetence. It is a reliance on a known script, fitting this fact into that expected outcome, rather than entertaining the possibility that February might look foreign by May. Nietzsche saw this social somnolence as the result of monumental history in excess, a kind of mindless fealty. In an archive, it leads to disinterest, to overlooking things or not looking at all. You have to get lost in the past to imagine the narrative of circumstances that leads to the present. It is a variation of what living in the Arctic taught me: play out from the particulars of the environment to the possibilities for change. Imagine that the turn of the wind to the north will bring snow: Where will you shelter, in the blizzard?
2. “Forget the Old Words” by Piper French, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Piper French reviews Patrick Chamoiseau’s French Guiana: Memory Traces of the Penal Colony, originally published in 1994 and appearing now for the first time in English.
There are official narratives — consecrated in colonial ledgers and history books — and there are the stories that people tell far from the ears of their colonizers. There are sites of cultural heritage, acknowledged and celebrated, and then there are the places, equally laden with symbolic weight, that no one wants to remember.
These distinctions preoccupy the Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, who coined a term to combat the official Memory-with-a-capital-M enshrined in French history and culture: “trace-mémoire,” or “memory trace.”…
…In Beloved, Toni Morrison proposed her own neologism: “rememory” — the legacy of trauma etched into black people’s minds and bodies, the past that can’t be still. Chamoiseau’s memory trace is a similar concept: a dynamic subaltern transmission of experience. It’s always there, if you know where to look.
3. “On the Social Power (and Limits) of Twitter Activism” by Genie Lauren, Lit Hub
In this excerpt from her foreword to #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, a book about the rise of internet activism by Sarah J. Jackson, Brooke Foucault Welles, and Moya Bailey, activist Genie Lauren recalls the early days of Twitter activism, when real-life social movements coalesced around hashtags, and the origins of Black Twitter.
When the #IranElection hashtag dominated Twitter’s global trending topics, it was the first time I had a front-row seat to a revolution. Suddenly, this platform, which previously had seemed rather pointless, allowed me to communicate directly with people on the ground in Iran, and I wanted to learn everything. I spent less time tweeting with fellow New Yorkers in my Twitter community and more time reading the minute-by-minute updates of protesters several time zones away. I had seriously lucked out, having a job that required me to be awake during times of peak #IranElection activity…
…My Twitter feed, made up of roughly 150 people, finally had a reason for being: to spread the word and unpack what it meant with the help of witnesses and experts. “What are you doing?” would soon become “What’s happening?”
4. “The Depression-Era Book That Wanted to Cancel the Rent” by Nora Caplan-Bricker, The New Yorker
Nora Caplan-Bricker writes that Catherine Bauer’s Modern Housing, first published in 1934 and recently reissued, and which “was a staple of college reading lists when [Jane] Jacobs lambasted [its] ‘city-destroying ideas’” in Death and Life of Great American Cities, “may have better anticipated the world we live in today” than Jacbos’s classic did.
Bauer disliked Moses’ ideas almost as much as Jacobs did. Jacobs presented a democratic vision of urban neighborhoods, in which self-governance naturally gave rise to good places to live; Bauer, by contrast, wanted the state to play the role of both developer and landlord. The planned communities of Bauer’s imagination were indeed designed to resist a form of change: the creeping increase of property values that put decent housing out of reach for many Americans. Jacobs had faith that the old buildings in places like Greenwich Village, as long as they were left standing, would remain affordable. Bauer [was] convinced the market would always compel people to pay too much for too little….
5. “Love Letters, Libertines, and Last Words During the French Revolution” by Edmund White, Lit Hub
Edmund White reviews several books about the lives of French aristocrats on the eve of the revolution, including Benedetta Craveri’s The Last Libertines, Andrew S. Curran’s Diderot: and the Art of Thinking Freely, and Last Letters: Prisons and Prisoners of the French Revolution edited by Olivier Blanc. White seems at first to insinuate that the purpose of his essay is to take inspiration from the aristocrats on how to live through a major social upheaval, which isn’t really the perspective I would personally choose if I were cosplaying the French Revolution, but we all have to be our authentic selves, (and also he’s probably joking… I think?), plus, I have as great a fondness for reading about the eccentric rich as the next person:
After Besenval has been released from prison by the Revolutionaries, he invites all his friends to a party he is too ill to attend. Finally he finds the strength to put on a white sheet and pretend to be his own ghost. Having scared his entire party, he goes to bed, smiling, and dies.
6. “The Great Germ War Cover-Up” by Daniel Immerwahr, The New Republic
I’m one of those people who likes Nicholson Baker for his obsessively researched nonfiction, not his sex novels. Human Smoke is one of my favorite books! Who even says that!?
In a review of Nicholson Baker’s latest book Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, Daniel Immerwahr writes:
Soon after Human Smoke, Baker turned to the Korean War, in which the United States faced persistent accusations of having used biological weapons. Baker researched the topic for nearly 10 years without reaching conclusions as firm as he would have liked. That is in large part because whenever he asked for the relevant documents from the government under the Freedom of Information Act, he received nothing. “Really, nothing.” Years went by, “presidents came and went,” and he continued to wait. Some requests were refused, others idled in bureaucratic limbo. On occasion, documents arrived but were slathered in redactions—“a devil’s checkerboard of blackouts.”
Immerwahr goes on to outline what we do know about US germ warfare, much of it as relayed by Baker:
“Let me just blurt out what I think happened with germs and insects during the Korean War,” Baker writes in a late chapter. “I believe that something real and infectious happened in the last, subzero months of 1950.” The masked commandos with feathers were spreading diseases…
7. “From ‘Natural History’” by Carlos Fonseca, Bomb
An excerpt from Carlos Fonseca’s novel Natural History.
One day I was at Giovanna’s and she read me a few lines of the subcomandante’s, poetic lines that told the story of a viceroy of India who dreams that his kingdom is destroyed. Terrified by cyclonic winds he believes he has foreseen, the viceroy sets about proving the dream wrong…
8. “Writing Africa’s Future in New Characters” by Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, Popula
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún writes about the Ńdébé Script, a new logographic script designed by visual artist and software engineer Lotanna Igwe-Odunze, which “addresses the tonal peculiarities of Nigerian languages, [is] pleasing to the eye, [and] which might carry the burden of our literary and academic aspirations.” It’s intended to replace the currently used modified Latin script, which creates major problems of comprehension in written Yorùbá and Igbo.
… dozens of tonal distinctions may alter the meaning of a single innocuous-looking Yorùbá sentence, e.g. “Baba mi ni oko nla”—from “Sorghum shook inside the big car” (bàbà mì ní ọkọ̀ ńlá) to “My father has a big penis” (bàbá mi ní okó ńlá) to “My bronze is a big farm” (bàbà mi ni oko ńlá)… People commonly complain that figuring out the implications of each mark on the letters slows down their reading….
9. “Colin Dickey on Aliens, Conspiracy Theories, and Other Strange Realms of The Unidentified” by Cheryl Eddy, io9
Cheryl Eddy interviews Colin Dickey, author of The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained. Says Dickey:
I realized the connecting threads of the things that ended up being in the book all coalesced around the idea of, I guess you could say, the wilderness. I think that if Ghostlandwas on some level a book about architecture, this book is more about borderlands and frontiers. So the way that those kind of manifest is, I was drawn to stories of Atlantis and Lemuria as these places that were perpetually off the edge of map that could never really be ever reached again…
It’s really interesting because at a certain point, you can’t believe in aliens without believing in the government keeping aliens from us—which is a bit unusual and not something you have with ghosts, or the Loch Ness Monster, or the Lost Continent of Atlantis. There’s a very specific relationship between government and aliens that I think is kind of unique and also a little bit unsettling.
10. “Storm in a Teacup” by Francis Wade, The Baffler
Francis Wade reviews Andrew B Liu’s Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India, which reexamines the birth of capitalism in the early modern period and finds many of capitalism’s earliest hallmarks to have materialized in India and China, a fact not often recognized.
As demand [for tea] from Europe continued to rise and the rivalry with Assam deepened, Chinese planters, Liu writes, “exhibited social dynamics that belong squarely within the modern history of capitalism.” With an obsessive fixation on productivity, they “measured the amount of time needed for each task, designed instructions to minimize wasted activity, and used a piece-wage system to provide employees with incentives to work as hard as their bodies allowed”…
The popular framing of capitalism’s origin story—that it began in northwest Europe and then spread to the rest of the world—doesn’t hold up against a closer, more textured examination of plantation life in south and east Asia. In recent decades, researchers have become aware, he writes, “of the degree to which the world market relies upon patterns of accumulation that defy the original models.” Tea production in that region tells a story of transnational competition birthing capitalisms far outside of northwest Europe.
11. “Disrupting Language Hierarchies: Talking with Judith Santopietro” by Claire Jimenez, The Rumpus
Claire Jimenez interviews Judith Santopietro, author of Tiawanaku. Poemas de la Madre Coqa/Poems from the Mother Coqa, a poetry collection which “[challenges] the ways in which the significance of the coqa leaf has been colonized.” Says Santopietro:
… Coqa leaf is an essential element of Andean cultures that have existed for millennia, and only recently has it been processed into cocaine for trafficking and profit, classified as a drug, and criminalized by Western cultures.
Bolivia is considered the world’s third-largest cultivator, and coqa leaf is on the CIA’s list of illicit drugs. In that regard, the consequences of these drug policies goes beyond those economic aspects that you mention; they pave the way to erase voices and Indigenous epistemologies: the diversity of wisdom, beliefs, languages, food, bodies and territories are exterminated. This brings to mind the recent case of Tata Domingo Choc Ché, a Maya-Q’eqchi’ spiritual healer tortured and murdered in Guatemala in June, 2020. In a country with more that forty-three percent Indigenous population, he was accused of practicing Mayan spirituality…
12. “On the School-to-Prison Pipeline, and Being Unable to Protect Those You Love” by Melissa Valentine, Lit Hub
An excerpt from Melissa Valentine’s memoir The Names of All the Flowers.
You can live on a hill. You can live on the good side of town. You can live among white people. You can even have white relatives. You can leave. You can return. You can have opportunity. You can be loved. But you will still be vulnerable.
13. “Recovering Queer Identities” by Samuel Huneke, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Samuel Huneke reviews Jen Manion’s Female Husbands: A Trans History, “a history of how female-assigned individuals successfully and happily lived as men, married as men, loved as men, and even died as men,” and a text which according to Hueneke efficiently walks a line between two opposing impulses in queer studies:
This dispute over whether it makes sense to troll through the past for queer ancestors was a foundational question for the early history of sexuality, creating a division between “essentialists” who argued sexual identities were transhistorical and “constructivists” who contended they were socially constructed over time. The dispute also struck at the relationship between queer history and activism, namely the question of to what extent is queer history one of recuperation, of discovering lost ancestors who might serve as a model for queer people in the 21st century?
… Female Husbands is a powerful work not only because Manion insists on taking the past on its own terms, but also because she refuses to tell her reader if she is reporting on a history that can be made legible to our 21st-century ideas….
14. “Shaking Up the Ethnographic Museum” by Edward M. Gómez, Hyperallergic
Edward M. Gómez reviews Clémentine Deliss’s The Metabolic Museum, a treatise by the former director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt about the need to reform so-called “ethnographic” museums.
… fetishizing the exotic has been the stock in trade of ethnographic museums ever since they began emerging in Europe centuries ago from cabinets of curiosities and industrial fairs, often showcasing booty brought back from colonial lands. The kind of hands-on interaction Deliss favors, she writes, “breathes presence back into the artifacts, restores consciousness to their unfinished status, and helps to heal the disposition of the institution.” When long-forgotten objects “become agents,” she notes, what she calls “remediation” of such artifacts can begin.
15. “What Our First Close Look at Mars Actually Revealed” by Sarah Stewart Johnson, Lit Hub
An excerpt from Sarah Stewart Johnson’s The Siren of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World, which narrates a particular moment which I had never given much thought to before: the day in 1965 when everyone was extremely disappointed to find out that the surface Mars was a wasteland.
Leighton began utilizing some electronic tricks to improve the quality, like erasing the clearly aberrant lines that arose from faulty scanning. But when he got to frame seven, he stopped in his tracks, struggling to believe what he saw. He called Jack James, the mission director, and the then project manager, Dan Schneiderman, into a small, secure room and showed them the tiny Polaroid of the video scope. It wasn’t at all what they had expected. They stared at the image in quiet disappointment. Eventually, Schneiderman uttered what they all knew to be true: “Jack, you and I have a twenty-minute jump on the rest of the lab to go out and look for new jobs”…
Stunned, the Mariner 4 team didn’t publicly release the images for days as they tried to understand the implications of what they were seeing. Finally, they scheduled a press conference. Lyndon Johnson, who had been following the spacecraft closely, hosted it at the White House….
Upon seeing the pictures, Lyndon Johnson sighed, “It may be—it may just be—that life as we know it . . . is more unique than many have thought.”
16. “A Czech Dreambook – Ludvík Vaculík” by Alexander Wells, Full Stop
Alexander Wells reviews A Czech Dreambook, “an experimental diary-turned-novel that contains over a year’s worth of near-daily journal entries,” penned by the “editor of samizdat literature” Ludvík Vaculík over the course of the year 1979, and recently published in English for the first time. The lede is awfully compelling:
Early in 1979, Ludvík Vaculík was in a pickle. The Czechoslovakian secret police (StB) were after him, he was over-committed to editing projects, and he had just pissed off all his dissident friends with an insensitive essay questioning their special “hero” status. He was overburdened with the demands of friends and family — including multiple affairs. And he had a terrible case of writer’s block.
18. “The Keynesian Revolution” by Jonathan Kirshner, The Boston Review
Jonathan Kirshner reviews Zachary D. Carter’s The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, which Kirshner writes is “insightfully grounded in three touchstones of Keynes’s life… the horrors of World War I, his intimate association with the Bloomsbury community of iconoclastic writers and artists (including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey), and the essential inseparability of economics from broader philosophical questions.”
19. “The Sky Is Blue with a Single Cloud” by Kuniko Tsurita, The Paris Review
A surreal excerpt from The Sky Is Blue with a Single Cloud, a new collection of work by the mid-century Japanese cartoonist Kuniko Tsurita. “In 1965, at age eighteen, while still in high school, she debuted in the legendary alt-manga monthly Garo, where she was the magazine’s first and only regular female contributor until the late seventies.”
20. “Meditations in an Emergency” by Jennifer Krasinski, Bookforum
During lockdown, Jennifer Krasinski has become engrossed by the writings of Hadewijch, a thirteenth-century beguine.
There are few biographical facts to perforate her extant texts, which total fourteen transcribed visions, sixty-one poems, and thirty-one letters, all collected in the 1980 volume Hadewijch: The Complete Works. Written in Middle Dutch, the vernacular of her time and place, all are ruminations on the pure, divine nature of minne, or love. She lived in Belgium as part of a caste of women who dedicated their lives to God but refrained from “taking the veil.” They did not marry, forsaking the running of households to form self-supporting communities. Hadewijch was head of hers until she was ousted for holding her peers to overly strict standards of faithful conduct. Even the threat of punishment and exile did not shake her faith in God’s will. As she wrote in a letter addressed to a beloved younger member of her group: “What happens to me, whether I am wandering in the country or put in prison—however it turns out, it is the work of Love.”
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