This Week in Books: Lawrence Wright, Nicholson Baker, and the Professionals’ Apocalypse
“The work is going very well, but it looks like the end of the world.”
Dear Reader,
This week I had this big idea, which was that I was going to read the two recent (recent-ish, they’re both from early January) massive longform accounts of covid from two of our greatest Book Guys, and I guess come to some conclusions.
On the one hand, dedicated Texas guy Lawrence Wright, author of several indispensable investigations of the inner workings of shadowy institutions, such as Going Clear and The Looming Tower, as well as several plays (and not incidentally a recent thriller about a pandemic), gave us a 40-page mega-account of the U.S. political response to the virus, called “The Plague Year”; on the other hand, dedicated Maine guy Nicholson Baker, author of several deeply-researched historical commentaries on violence and political power, such as Human Smoke and Baseless, as well as several erotic novels, gave us an alarming disquisition on the possibility that covid was engineered in a lab, called “The Lab Leak Hypothesis,” which caused a bit of a furor when it was published.
So. Now I’m supposed to tell you what my conclusions are, right… Well in the first place after hours of reading about covid I’ve managed to revive that panicky old feeling, which I thought I had finally moved beyond, that I have it right now. Stupid. I mean maybe, but who cares if I’ve got it, everyone’s got it…
“Professional jealousy.” William Leroy Jacobs, ca. 1902.
But, uh, setting that aside… I think that, going into it, I was expecting to come to the conclusion that Baker was “probably wrong but had given it a valiant effort” or something, but frankly, after reading his absurdly unsettling article, I’m pretty convinced that a lab leak was definitely possible; and now I feel stupid because I remember liking some tweet that was angry about Baker’s article because “you need to collect and research viruses in order to have vaccines ready to go when a new lethal virus emerges” or something like that — a point actually highlighted by Wright in his article, which includes the remarkable fact that the first U.S. vaccines took NIH researchers a mere three days to design due to knowledge acquired from years of virus-tinkering, which has all the feel of a heroic science moment until you read Baker’s article which points out that if tinkering gave us the vaccine, then tinkering could have also given us the virus, at which point the heroism of science and the hubris of science start to cancel each other out, collapsing in on one another like a star falling into its own black hole of a heart…
But that makes it sound like the two articles are at odds and really they aren’t. There’s actually a deep level of agreement here. I mean sure, both of these guys tell a story that’s similar to the kinds of stories they’ve told before: Wright’s is a story of bureaucratic small-mindedness verging on blindness, an inability to foresee the coming catastrophe, which reminds me a lot of his version of the events leading up to 9/11 in The Looming Tower; whereas Baker’s is a story of professional tunnel-vision verging on madness or even evil, a story that tracks with his recent work on Baseless, which tries to uncover the very covered up history of U.S. biological warfare.
In both versions of events — which again are not actually at odds at all, being accounts of very different aspects of the disaster — the professionals in charge of our institutions are good at the one very specialized thing they do, but incapable of seeing the implications beyond their little realm. Lawrence points to how there’s no leadership above the level of the technocrat. There’s no connectivity between institutions. Whereas Baker is saying something more like, there’s no oversight. No rules, no ethics. In both cases, it’s not that people are incompetent, it’s that they’re, like, completely checked out from the big picture. Perhaps even intentionally so, for reputational reasons — for professional gain.
There’s also agreement emanating from both pieces concerning what the correct solution would have been, of course; that is, managing the actually existing crisis, aka the highly contagious virus, with the methods that we know work — educating the public about hygiene and splurging on testing and PPE for everybody — instead of fixating on a million other things, like “the economy” (the bugbear of Wright’s account) or possible diseases hiding in remote bat caves. (Baker never really brings this up, but implicit in his critique is the unavoidable fact that the vast sums of money and — more importantly since money isn’t real lmao — institutional energy he identifies as having been spent on the harvesting and Frankenstein-like lethalizing of remote bat viruses could have been better spent on, say, replenishing the national stockpiles of PPE, on preparedness, etc. Even setting aside the possibility of a lab leak, you still come up against the fact that the vaccine won’t bring back the dead.)
Oh and both articles also make Fauci look pretty bad (companion reading: Sam Adler-Bell’s “Doctor Do-Little: The Case Against Anthony Fauci”). His badness is a prominent point of commonality in these two very different investigations. Maybe something to look into, going forward??
And, well, I also made a Valentine’s Day Reading List. Love books? Try out these love-books! (Sorry.)
Stay safe,
Dana
1. “The Hate You Live” by Hubert Adjei-Kontoh, Bookforum
Hubert Adjei-Kontoh writes about P. Lewis, whose work “roots through the detritus of the American state in order to display the vital messages he finds in the ruins.”
…Nate, long out of print but now available as an e-book, recently came to my attention when I read an Ishmael Reed interview. Reed was ranting about crime novelist Richard Price, author of Lush Life and Clockers. “His fake ghetto books have bought him a townhouse in Gramercy Park and a home on Staten Island while P. Lewis, author of Nate, one of the best African-American writers since Richard Wright, had to self-publish his book and sell his books in the subway.” I immediately purchased a Kindle edition of Nate from Jeff Bezos for about two dollars. Reed’s praise was not mere hyperbole…
Lewis’s first novel, Life of Death, published in 1993, was an unsparing satire about a Black dishwasher in Washington, DC. Though Life of Death received little critical attention—perhaps because it refused to offer hope for its characters—it established Lewis as a relentless portrayer of disenfranchised life, providing example after example of the ways that powerlessness leads people to annihilate each other. Regardless of color or gender, the cartoonish denizens of the novel’s Dummheit Cafe are ready to maul each other at the slightest provocation. To that end, they aren’t so different from the characters of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, and Lewis shares the Frenchman’s passion for elliptical barbs and outbursts mocking the futility of every character’s pursuit. Consider this passage in which the narrator must dismantle the innards of a dishwasher, moving his hands through the refuse—“lima beans, blood, string beans, broken plates, a few rotten teeth”—as he attempts to clean it: “It was all nauseating . . . the whole thing, all of it, from start to finish. The most dreadful thing was to get up in the morning thinking that I’d have to go through another day of it.”
2. “Car Guys” by Dan Albert, n+1
An essay by Dan Albert (author of a great book about the history of the car called Are We There Yet?) in which he questions whether there is “a line from the libertarian exuberance of the Cannonball Run to the political philosophy of the anti-masker.”
…For a more direct through line between car guy energy and today’s paranoid politics, we can turn to Matthew Crawford. Crawford earned a PhD in political science, denied the reality of climate science as executive director of the George C. Marshall Institute, and rose to fame with an autobiographical account of his transition from office worker to motorcycle mechanic. His 2009 bestseller Shop Class as Soulcraft argued that mechanics and tradesmen deserved more appreciation and support. Elites, he said, had made a religion out of promoting knowledge work at the expense of the nation’s soul. The book dropped shortly after President Obama announced new funding for community colleges and provided fodder for the penurious right-wing talking point that there are already too many kids in college.
In the Covid era, this putative gearhead has, ahem, unmasked his agenda. “The Dangers of Safetyism,” Crawford’s May 15 essay for the website Unherd, describes public health mandates as an elitist, big-government imposition of “social norms by fiat—whether that means using new pronouns or wearing surgical masks.” The pandemic has given “our ruling apparatus . . . a taste of extended emergency power” while the “Nation’s Newspaper of Record . . . fold[s] this emergency into the longstanding pseudo emergency of race.” Ostensibly about driving, his new book Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road makes clear exactly how its author feels about that “pseudo emergency.” Despite Crawford’s long DMV rap sheet, a car salesman trustingly hands him the keys to a four-hundred-horsepower Audi RS3 (0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds) for a test drive. “It’s nice to be white!” he quips…
3. “A Black Literary Trailblazer’s Solitary Death: Charles Saunders, 73” by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times
Neil Genzlinger writes about the late Charles Saunders, “a foundational figure in a literary genre known as sword and soul.”
He had begun writing speculative fiction in the 1970s and published his first novel, Imaro, in 1981. As a child he had been enthralled by the fantasies spun by white writers like Robert E. Howard, who created Conan the Barbarian, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, who created Tarzan, the white African figure embodied most famously on the screen by Johnny Weissmuller. But he came to recognize the racism inherent in such works. Imaro was the result.
“I think he was born when I watched a Tarzan movie and fantasized a Black man jumping up and beating the hell out of Johnny Weissmuller,” Mr. Saunders told the journal Black American Literature Forum in 1984.
4. “Four Poems” by Cameron Quan Louie, The Rumpus
Four poems excerpted from Cameron Quan Louie’s Apology Engine, which is due to be published by Gold Line Press this year.
I took offense at the way he spoke to himself through me, though I, too, love to sing a little louder in the shower if I know that someone’s listening in the next room.
5. “The Inland Sea” by Madeleine Watts, Guernica
An excerpt from Madeleine Watts’s novel The Inland Sea.
As I walked, I couldn’t help but take everything personally. Every billboard. Every flyer in the gutter. A woman on the street by the florist saw me and called her husband to hurry into their idling car, slamming the door shut. The car seemed to veer toward me. Every driver I saw had unreliable wrists. The man who owned the Italian deli watered the laneway potted plants with his back to me.
6. “Night as It Falls” by Jakuta Alikavazovic, trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman, Granta
An excerpt from Jakuta Alikavazovic’s novel Night as It Falls.
…He had cut off – or so he thought – all contact with his past, which he didn’t think of as a past so much as an incident, more than that, an accident. The first eighteen years of his life had given him a particular body, and this body had a particular relationship with space, with others. He sensed that he didn’t quite belong. At the outset, he had observed. And imitated. First the clothes, which he stole. Then the haircut, which he’d had to adopt a whole new language just to describe, to ask for. It was a challenge he had never faced before, as complex as an international expedition, the greatest of conquests. Finally, he mastered the delicate art of talking. But this drained him. Some nights in the dorms he stayed in his bedroom, in the dark. Listening to the noises in the hallway, and all the other students’ chatter made him seasick; and if someone knocked on his door, he wouldn’t answer, the idea that it might be a mistake horrifying him just as much as the idea that it might not.
7. “I’m going to put this in my fucking book” by Charlie Lee, Soft Punk
&
8. “Discovery” by Lauren Oyler, The Atlantic
There is a lot of Fake Accounts coverage to choose from but this interview at Soft Punk is cool… I was saying “yes! yes!” out loud while I read this… :
Charlie Lee: Well, speaking of that experience of social media as something sort of unnatural and overwhelming, one thing that comes up in the novel is not wanting to write a book that mimics being on Twitter. I’m curious about how you approached this: writing something that would sort of mimetically represent digital experience—there’s several scenes where all the drama exists in what the narrator is doing on a phone—without trying to represent that experience at the level of form.
Lauren Oyler: I mean, for one, I just thought that there weren't a lot of new books about the time that we’re living in that were written like the sort of novels I like to read. It’s not like those novels are so old—I’m not a Victorianist, I like 20th century literature almost exclusively. But the pleasures of reading a good paragraph are so rarely found anymore. I don’t want to be too cocky about my ability to pull off a good paragraph, but I did want to try, because I know that there must be people who also miss that, and would like that in some way. I was also thinking about the constant death knell of the novel, the idea that the novel needs to adapt or whatever. And actually, the novel is quite good for this, because you want to register an experience of a continuous time. There’s so much drama to be found on the phone, as you say, and there’s so much on social media that fits with the idea of a classical novel. So the idea that it just doesn’t work seemed to me totally ludicrous. That’s more or less what I was going for.
And the Atlantic excerpted it; here’s a bit of chapter 1:
My official position, if you were to ask me at a party or something, is that the popular turn to fatalism could be attributed to self-aggrandizement and an ignorance of history, history being characterized by the population’s quickness to declare apocalypse imminent despite its permanently delayed arrival. We don’t want to die, but we also don’t want to do anything challenging, such as what living requires, so the volubility with which certain doom was discussed made a tedious kind of sense. The end of the world would let us have our cake and eat it, too; we would have no choice but to die, our potential conveniently unrealizable due to our collapse. Until such time, the idea that everything was totally pointless now was seductive, particularly as a mantra you could take advantage of when it suited you and abandon when life started to feel alarming.
9. “My Eyes Are Infamously Greedy” by Leo Rubinfien, The New York Review of Books
Leo Rubinfien writes about the history of the photobook… and the history of books of photobooks… and I’m obsessed now… all I want are books that are catalogs of other books which I can never possess…
…since the 1990s enthusiasts of “photobooks” (as they are now widely called) have maintained that they are almost an art form of their own, and that many of the strongest have been Japanese. First editions of Kawada’s Chizu (Map, 1965) and Tomatsu’s 11:02 Nagasaki (1966)—two of Japan’s most affecting postwar works in any medium—cost thousands now in America and Europe, and many books of their period have been reissued again and again.
The term “photobook” once signified almost any volume in which photographs dominated text; the ones I sought, though, were of a subtype whose images, amplifying one another, were woven into an organic whole. Dense, complex, charged with authorial ambition and dramatic force, they could seem like collages spread over many pages, and made you feel that a photographer was rolling in his subject, not just looking at it. A superb example would reject familiar themes and work up a new poetic idea…
Recently, photobooks have prompted a whole shelf of compendia, including Andrew Roth’s The Book of 101 Books, Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s The Photobook: A History in three volumes, collections of Latin American and Dutch and Chinese work, Ivan Vartanian and Ryuichi Kaneko’s Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and 1970s, and, drawing heavily on the exemplary libraries of its authors, Manfred Heiting and Kaneko’s The Japanese Photobook, 1912–1990…
10. “Chemical Warfare’s Home Front” by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New York Review of Books
Elizabeth Kolbert reviews two new books about the “ghastly cycle[s]” of the “toxic age”: Frank A. von Hippel’s The Chemical Age, which is “interested in the ways people have solved problems with chemicals and, in the process, created new problems,” and François Jarrige & Thomas Le Roux’s The Contamination of the Earth, which (nearly the same, but framed differently) is “interested in the ways one set of dangerous chemicals replaces another in a recurring cycle.” Here’s one little disturbing anecdote that really resonates — I’m thinking I might start answering this way when people ask me how the magazine is going…
…Freon was a giant step forward for Frigidaire, but a great step back for planet earth. Released into the air, the compound made its way to the stratosphere, where it damaged the ozone layer, which protects the globe from ultraviolet radiation. The first scientist to appreciate the impact of CFCs on the stratosphere was F. Sherwood Rowland, a chemistry professor at the University of California Irvine. One night Rowland came home from his lab and told his wife, “The work is going very well, but it looks like the end of the world.”
11. “Poems in the Language of Death” by Mark Scroggins, Hyperallergic
Mark Scroggins assesses the full field of Paul Celan translations on the occasion of two new volumes from the translator Pierre Joris: Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry and Microliths They Are, Little Stones: Posthumous Prose.
…in Microliths, some 200 pages of posthumously assembled prose… [t]here are draft passages for narrative works (none of them get very far); some almost Beckettian dialogues from unfinished plays; and a fair collection of aphoristic passages… [A] pointed jab, echoing Adorno’s well-known statement “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” is Celan’s “Whoever mystifies after Auschwitz, shrouds all human misery.”
12. “The Insider Insights of ‘Detransition, Baby’” by Crispin Long, The New Yorker
Crispin Long reviews Torrey Peters’s novel Detransition, Baby.
Before she finished “Detransition, Baby,” [Peters] found a readership by self-publishing novellas about flawed trans women, selling them through her Web site as inexpensive paperbacks and name-your-own-price PDFs. In the backs of those books, an “About the Author” section stated that Peters had “concluded that the publishing industry doesn’t serve trans women.” The easiest way for a trans person to get a book deal, it is often grumbled among trans writers, is to sell a memoir that traffics in tidy arcs of self-empowerment, the sombre excavation of trauma, or both.
13. “Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera and Slave Empire by Padraic X Scanlan – review” by Fara Dabhoiwala, The Guardian
Fara Dabhoiwala reviews Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain and Padraic X Scanlan’s Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain.
In the endless catalogue of British imperial atrocities, the unprovoked invasion of Tibet in 1903 was a minor but fairly typical episode. Tibetans, explained the expedition’s cultural expert, were savages, “more like hideous gnomes than human beings”. Thousands of them were massacred defending their homeland, “knocked over like skittles” by the invaders’ state-of-the-art machine guns. “I got so sick of the slaughter that I ceased fire,” wrote a British lieutenant, “though the General’s order was to make as big a bag as possible.” As big a bag as possible – killing inferior people was a kind of blood sport.
And then the looting started. More than 400 mule-loads of precious manuscripts, jewels, religious treasures and artworks were plundered from Tibetan monasteries to enrich the British Museum and the Bodleian Library. Countless others were stolen by marauding troops. Sitting at home watching the BBC antiques show Flog It one quiet afternoon in the early 21st century, Sathnam Sanghera saw the delighted descendant of one of those soldiers make another killing – £140,000 for selling off the artefacts his grandfather had “come across” in the Himalayas.
14. “A Fervent Call to Protect ‘America’s Amazon’” by Lina Tran, Undark
Lina Tran reviews Ben Raines’s Saving America’s Amazon: The Threat to Our Nation’s Most Biodiverse River System.
Unique circumstances of climate and geology, Raines explains, underlie Alabama’s stunning biodiversity. Over the last 100 million years, North America underwent a series of ice ages, which carpeted the continent with glaciers. But the glaciers never reached the Southeast, sparing present-day Alabama. Ancient life persisted in this oasis and scored an evolutionary leg-up as new species continued to form. At the southern edge of the continent, Alabama skirts the ocean. Once, most of the state was underwater. Receding seas left rich deposits from the seafloor that nurture plant growth. (So abundant with marine fossils is Alabama that in the 1840s, farmers in Clarkesville often uncovered bones of the Basilosaurus, the 60-foot-long whale ancestor. Chairs made of their vertebrae were a local fad.)
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