This Week in Books: “Maybe I Just Got Mean”
“But I mustn’t discuss myself with myself because it leaves me with no duty towards living.”
Dear Reader,
Ben brought home a very aesthetical bookstack the other day, and not only was it pleasing to the eye and satisfying to the curator’s caprice (being a Dalkey–Yale/Margellos–McNally Editions tricolon, gorgeous), but was also, as we quickly realized when I spread out the haul on our table like a day’s catch upon the hearthstone, a clearly Freudian byproduct of some recent cravings Ben’s been having for the dread leaf tobacco. I did a photo shoot so you can see how smoky the final result is:
As for me I’ve just been reading pink and purple books—still not done with Hotel Splendide, partway through LOTE (I’m now one of these “have you read LOTE” people; I spoke those exact words just the other day!), just dipping into The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. I haven’t been reading very fast lately, which is if nothing else certainly a branding problem. There just doesn’t feel like enough time, but, as everyone knows because everyone has gone through this, there is time, I’m just spending it on the internet.
It’s sometimes still shocking to me how universal the internet-time-suck-problem or whatever we call it is, that even authors will cop to it. Like Anne Enright does in this essay on Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. She makes a very astute observation about the whole thing (after presenting a bit of brain science to the effect that “literary metaphor” activates the empathy nodules in the brain or what have you; she seemed as disinvested in uncovering the legitimacy of that claim as I am, because plainly it’s a great literary metaphor lol):
…Scrolling and swiping have increased our ability to survey large amounts of information, but they do not engage those areas of the reading brain where we imagine and are moved by the lives of others. We have, in neurological terms, an app for that and it is no longer being switched on.
I wonder, when I avoid the novels stacked by my chair, whether it is this involuntary act of empathy that I am resisting. We talk a lot about distraction, but maybe I just got mean.
As a palette cleanser from all this doomy gloomy thinking about the end of the (reading books) world, here’s the first paragraph of that Modiano book. It’s so Modiano. No one can do it like him. He is the best in the world, at writing a Modiano book. And I think that’s beautiful:
Bosmans recalled that a single word, “Chevreuse,” kept cropping up in the conversation. And that a song played constantly on the radio that autumn, sung by a certain Serge Latour. He’d heard it in the small, empty Vietnamese restaurant, one evening when he was with the woman he called Deathmask.
—Dana
1. “Hyperdrive” by Aditya Bahl, The Nation
Aditya Bahl reviews Will Alexander’s Refractive Africa (New Directions).
The embers of the Los Angeles uprising were still burning, in 1992, when Will Alexander published his short essay “Los Angeles: The Explosive Cimmerian Fish” in the pages of Sulfur… Aged 44 and with a lone pamphlet to his name… [Alexander] had been selling tickets at the LA Lakers box office for a living.
…Eliot Weinberger, a contributing editor at Sulfur, was so taken by Alexander’s baroque visions, as well as his obscurity (“he lives entirely outside the pobiz world of prizes, grants, readings, teaching positions”), that instead of sending 20 pages of his own writing, as solicited by Sulfur for the next issue, he chose to introduce Alexander and publish five of his poems…
…Refractive Africa is bookended by two long poems—the first is an homage to Amos Tutuola, the Nigerian Yoruban writer, and the second is an encomium to Malagasy modernist poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo. Neither Tutuola nor Rabearivelo was a surrealist proper. And yet both had mastered the fugitive art of “African anti-gravity,” the ability to “fly without pedestrian manacles.” Both were “psychic maroons.” Widely ostracized on account of their superior linguistic sorcery, neither has since been properly rehabilitated. Now, their ghosts stalk the margins of our postcolonial canons…
2. “The Faces of Victor Serge” by Ben Lerner, The New York Review of Books
Ben Lerner writes about Victor Serge and reviews his recently reissued novel Last Times (NYRB).
Fleeing across the rooftops of Petrograd in 1919, exchanging gunfire with the anti-Communist Whites, Serge “treasured an unforgettable vision of the city, seen at 3 am in all its magical paleness.” So much glows in Serge, so much vibrates. “Not a speck of matter,” he writes in his Notebooks, “not a fragment of space that doesn’t vibrate and live.”
Serge is… the laureate of the light in the dark, a writer sensitive to flashes of beauty (even when he’s fleeing across rooftops)—not because such fugitive moments are beyond politics (although they are beyond any party), but because they are its ground, the basis of his indefatigable sense of collective possibility: everything lives, everything vibrates. How vain the centuries of death.
3. “Trivial, Vulgar, and Exalted” by Paul J. Pastor, Los Angeles Review of Books
Paul J. Pastor reviews J. V. Cunningham’s recently reissued The Exclusions of a Rhyme (Wiseblood).
He published only a few hundred poems, most of them extremely short, all of them essentially perfect… In a 1939 essay, he wrote “Poetry is what looks like poetry, what sounds like poetry. It is metrical composition.” Free verse, in such a view, is an oxymoron. He made little effort to conceal his disdain for many of his fellow poets. In one poem addressed to them directly, “For My Contemporaries,” from 1942’s The Helmsman, he calls them “Ambitious boys / Whose big lines swell / With spiritual noise”...
4. “Eyes that Bite” by Anne Enright, London Review of Books
Anne Enright writes about Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
In 1993, when Morrison won the Nobel Prize, men (including one Nobel winner) asked me, ‘Is she that good?’ as though I might know this in some way they could not – I could read like a woman, perhaps…
In The Bluest Eye, when the girls go to Miss Bertha’s little candy store, they peep inside and see her ‘sitting behind the counter reading a Bible in a tube of sunlight’. So, all right, there is no comma here – Morrison’s editor, Robert Gottlieb, said he was always inserting commas into her sentences and she was always taking them out again – but it is not so distinctive as the word ‘tube’. Thirty-four years ago, I stopped reading, right here, to puzzle whether this should be a ‘cone’ of sunlight, why some other writer might call it a ‘needle’, and yet others (for whom we have little respect) a ‘ray’. Then, and now vividly again, I marvelled at the way she could pop fiction into three dimensions with such ease. She was ‘that good’.
5. “Cleveland, a Kleptocrat's Paradise” by Luke Goldstein, Cleveland Review of Books
Luke Goldstein interviews Casey Michel about American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History (St. Martin’s Press).
Kolomoisky’s cartoonish machinations would be almost beyond parody if they weren't so sinister. When business clients walked into his office, they would immediately see a large shark aquarium next to his desk. If the negotiations weren't going well, Kolomoisky would feed crabmeat to the sharks as an intimidation tactic…
Through his commercial bank, Kolomoisky defrauded millions of Ukrainians. He took their deposits, and transferred their sums into numerous shell companies, known as the Optima Network. He then parked the money through Middle American real estate and manufacturing plants, tapping the sites as rainy day funds and loan-recycling schemes to cover the books. In the process, he became the largest commercial real estate landowner in Cleveland.
6. “Sailing to Stamboul (August Kleinzahler's Late Style)” by Curtis Brown, Socrates on the Beach
Curtis Brown reviews August Kleinzahler’s Snow Approaching on the Hudson (FSG).
The giant HD plasma screen atop Chelsea Piers flashing red and green— stamped seal in a Sesshu broken ink scroll
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