This Week in Books: Mourning in America
“Make the moon look like a yellow man in a veil watching the troubled people.”
Dear Reader,
This week’s newsletter mourns in yellow. Aracelis Girmay quotes Lucille Clifton’s lament for Langston Hughes in the editor’s note for a new volume of Clifton’s selected poems:
“Yellow Clock, Rich’s miniature golf, Wyoming, Pennsylvania.” John Margolies, 1984.
And Joshua L. Freeman quotes Muyesser Abdul’ehed Hendan, a Uighur poet who lives in exile, in an essay about the Uighur poets he once knew who have disappeared and those who managed to evade the camp system.
There are tender, even happy, moments in the newsletter too, but they’re the ones that make me saddest (which surely indicates something unhealthy about my emotional responsiveness?); for instance, I can’t seem to get through Wesley McNair’s essay about Donald Hall’s decades-long friendship with his typist and assistant Kendel Currier without crying.
Perhaps friendship is just a sad subject for everybody these days. Lockdown pushes families together, and pulls friends apart.
Stay safe,
Dana
1. “Who Gets to Tell the Story of Wuhan’s Lockdown?” by Jaime Chu, The Nation
Jaime Chu writes that there are better alternatives to the novelist Fang Fang’s over-hyped Wuhan Diary, like 29-year-old activist and journalist Guo Jing’s Wuhan Lockdown Diary. Unlike Fang Fang, Guo actually walked around every day (when it was allowed), in order to document what she saw. “She speaks not as Guo but as a feminist social worker in Wuhan.” Fang Fang, on the other hand, stayed quarantined, and her diary is mostly recycled media. Chu gives a great example of the difference:
In February, in response to a highly publicized hair-shaving directive for female nurses to prepare them for duty—something that caused a feminist outcry online—Guo wrote:
“We talked about the female nurses from Gansu Province who were forced to have their hair cut; we also noticed that there was only one male nurse with short hair in the photo. Many female nurses were very unhappy when they had their hair cut; some even cried. Hair is not simply about looks; it also symbolizes one’s dignity. Is it necessary to cut off all their hair? Have all these women given their consent? Women’s bodies never truly belong to themselves. There are always people who feel more entitled to putting women’s bodies at their disposal.”
In Fang’s diary, the event is remembered this way: “Medical professionals have been lining up to volunteer; they are cutting their hair, some even shaving their heads completely, and saying goodbye to their friends and family to come here to help.”
2. “Listening for Ms. Lucille” by Aracelis Girmay, The Paris Review
In her editor’s note for How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton, excerpted in The Paris Review, Aracelis Girmay writes that “no one writes like Lucille Clifton, and yet, if it were possible to open a voice, like a suitcase, to see what it carries inside, I believe that within the voices of many contemporary U.S. poets are the poems of Lucille Clifton.”
“…repetitions of names and stories move across her work. Histories written in circles much like time and weather are recorded in the rings of a tree. It was toward such repetitions and echoes that I listened, and out of them I began to see the shape of How to Carry Water rendered with documentary, spiritual, and mystical sensibilities. Peter Conners, my editor and the publisher of BOA Editions, calls it ‘listening for Ms. Lucille.’ I tried to listen so close I even dreamed of her voice one January morning. It seems not mine to keep but something I should share with you: You’re always whole, she said. Except when you’re dreaming you’re a quarter open.”
3. “For Goodness’ Sake” by Lauren Oyler, Bookforum
“Anxieties about being a good person, surrounded by good people, pervade contemporary novels and criticism,” writes Lauren Oyler, “…It’s hard to be a writer under these conditions”—especially since, as she reminds us, writers have generally, historically, been considered pretty bad people. Oyler goes on to explain ways in which various popular novels have dealt with this pressure toward goodness, including narrative tricks and hyper self-awareness. As to the source of this new pressure, according to Oyler, it’s you, dear reader:
“If the author was once God, creating worlds over which he had total control, the reader has usurped this position. Under the terms of popular, social-media-inflected criticism, she is now judge and jury, examining works for their political content and assessing the moral goodness of the author in the process. The novels that have resulted feature writers who are wildly self-conscious about both the thing they spend all their time doing and what that says about the essence of their souls.”
4. “Donald Hall’s Amanuensis” by Wesley McNair, The Paris Review
This is painfully sweet. It made me cry a little. It’s the story of the poet Donald Hall and his longtime typist, assistant, and friend, Kendel Currier; it’s about how well they knew each other’s rhythms, how they influenced the course of each other’s lives in small ways that turned big with time, how they grew infirm together (Hall due to age, Currier because of her advancing MS). Ah, I was just looking through it for a pullquote and I cried again! You’ll have to find one on your own.
5. “This Is What Happens When Society ‘Has to Function’” by Madeline Leung Coleman, The Atlantic
Madeline Leung Coleman reviews Yun Ko-Eun’s novel The Disaster Tourist, which Leung Coleman writes feels terribly relevant in this moment in the U.S., when our “essential” workers are those deemed most expendable.
…first published in Korean in 2013, this tale of complicity and denial (reintroduced in a new English translation by Lizzie Buehler this summer) feels nauseatingly on point this year. Hurtling from a Seoul office building to a remote desert island in Southeast Asia, Yun’s late-capitalist satire makes the case that the identity we find through work is almost always shaped by how we have been exploited—or how we have exploited others.
The book follows the 30-something Seoul office worker Yona Ko, a tour coordinator at a travel company called Jungle. The company specializes in disaster tours—vacation packages to places ravaged by tsunamis, earthquakes, or poverty, where adventurous travelers can seek “moral lessons.” …When she tries to quit, her boss persuades her to take a new assignment instead: She has to go on one of the company’s least popular disaster tours, and make a full report on how to improve it. As it turns out, the only way to freshen up a disaster tour is with a new disaster… In this novel, unlike in life, the chief conspirators make no bones about what it will take to sell their idea: If they want this scheme to work, people will have to die.
6. “Lesbian Pulp Novels Made Me Feel Normal” by Jessica Xing, Electric Literature
Jessica Xing writes about stumbling onto an old lesbian pulp novel—Vin Parker’s Spring Fire, reissued in 2006—at the library as a kid, and how it made her feel not so alone.
…the books inside those salacious covers couldn’t actually validate gay life… “In order to shut up Senator McCarthy and all of the morality cops, they had to be punished… The Post Office would not deliver the books unless one of the women had committed suicide, gone nuts, or been killed.”
Spring Fire, for example, featured two women, Leda and Mitch, who genuinely loved each other, the wakings of gay consciousness. Then, all of a sudden, the story veers off course. They are discovered, Leda goes crazy and is institutionalized, and Mitch changes her name to Susan and goes to a doctor to become heterosexual. The conclusion was very clean: being gay was monstrous, and amoral.
Vin Packer (real name Marijane Meaker, as I later found out) hated the imposed ending so much that she wanted the book all but buried.: “I still cringe when I think about it. I never wanted it republished. It was too embarrassing,” she states in a new 2006 introduction.
7. “Vivian Stephens Helped Turn Romance Writing Into a Billion-Dollar Industry. Then She Got Pushed Out.” by Mimi Swartz, Texas Monthly
More pulp fiction news! Mimi Swartz profiles the retired romance editor Vivian Stephens, surveys the billion-dollar industry/community that is “Romancelandia,” and writes about the recent controversy over racism in the RWA (the trade organization Romance Writers of America).
…when you start delving into the history of the RWA, Stephens gets forgotten pretty quickly. She is remembered in some articles as the Black woman who was a founder of the organization, but then, in many accounts, she disappears. When the controversy erupted within the RWA last year, it was often mentioned, ironically, that the organization had been founded by a Black woman, as if that made the racial clash doubly hard to understand. But Stephens was never quoted in the articles, maybe because some people had heard that she didn’t like to talk about the RWA and so didn’t call, or because they didn’t know where she was or if, indeed, she was even alive. This sort of erasure is something Stephens has dealt with for as long as she can remember.
8. “Speech and Slavery in the West Indies” by Fara Dabhoiwala, The New York Review of Books
Fara Dabhoiwala synthesizes three recent books about slavery and rebellion in the West Indies: Miles Ogborn’s The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World, Vincent Brown’s Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, and Tom Zoellner’s Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire. There’s tons of interesting stuff here; for instance, summarizing Ogborn’s argument in The Freedom of Speech, Dabhoiwala writes that
…speech was central to the culture of enslavement. Spoken words were both representations and actions: their utterance was the most ubiquitous way in which the boundaries between liberty and bondage were constantly reinforced, negotiated, or contested. During the eighteenth century, “freedom of speech,” a concept previously associated only with parliamentary debates, came to be seen as foundational to all political liberty. For propertied, Protestant, white male Britons of this era, it was both an immensely potent new ideology and a constant practical marker of their superiority over others… The exact contours of this power to speak, to be heard, and to silence others were frequently disputed, both within the colonial population and across the different legal and political zones of empire, but that’s precisely because it was so central to the meaning of freedom.
And Dabhoiwala says that Brown’s Tacky’s Revolt
…transforms our understanding of the events of 1760 and 1761. It does so by expanding our sense of their scale and geography, and by developing the contemporary insight (expressed, for example, by Equiano and before him by John Locke) that slavery itself was always a state of war. Instead of a doomed local rising by desperate, enslaved victims, Brown sees something much more consequential: the “Coromantee War,” a serious military campaign led by experienced African fighters, part of an ongoing, transnational, interlocking network of wars that stretched across Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
9. “The Inside Story of the $8 Million Heist from the Carnegie Library” by Travis McDade, Smithsonian
Remember when this happened?? My boss at the time regularly bought used books for resale from Caliban Books in Pittsburgh, whose founder was arrested for fencing the stolen goods, so it was big news in my world! But anyway, it’s always worth revisiting THE BIGGEST BOOK HEIST OF ALL TIME if for no other reason than to dwell on how pitifully small the thief’s take was. If nothing has radicalized you yet, how about the fact that in America, you can pull THE BIGGEST BOOK HEIST OF ALL TIME and still be poor?
Priore and his wife, who worked as a children’s librarian, hardly had an opulent lifestyle; the couple lived in a modest apartment crowded with books. But they had four children, who attended private schools: St. Edmund’s Academy, the Ellis School and Duquesne University.
All indications suggest that he was perpetrating his crimes not to get rich but rather, as he told police, merely to stay “afloat.” For example, in the fall of 2015, Priore wrote an email to the Ellis School asking for an extension on tuition payments. “I am trying to juggle tuition payments for 4 kids,” he wrote. A few weeks later, he asked Duquesne officials to lift a hold on accounts assigned to two of his children, since he had made overdue tuition payments. In February 2016, Priore asked his landlord for an extension, falsely claiming his wife had missed work because of a heart attack. The rent was four months past due.
Although I’m not sure whether this massive crime turning out to be so unprofitable is a bigger own of the thief, American society, or books in general, to be honest.
10. “Double Lives” by Maya Cantu, The Los Angeles Review of Books
A long and fascinating essay about Thirteen Women in Films, an unfinished manuscript by the late Louise Brooks, a Hollywood starlet turned academic.
Brooks had been known for her profligacy in New York and Hollywood, where friends had nicknamed her Hellcat (“I like to drink and fuck,” she famously exclaimed). Exiled in the Weimar Republic Berlin evoked by Cabaret, in which Liza Minnelli took visual inspiration from Brooks, Pandora’s Box director G. W. Pabst chastised her: “Your life is exactly like Lulu’s, and you will end the same way.” Defying Pabst’s prophecy of doom, Brooks acquired an almost monastic discipline during her studies of film at the George Eastman House. Based in Rochester from 1956 to her death in 1985, Brooks developed into a prolific but fiercely self-critical writer who left behind volumes of unpublished notes, letters, and abandoned projects.
The most potentially impactful of these discarded works may have been Thirteen Women in Films, a book of essays on Hollywood icons including Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, and Clara Bow. Brooks’s conceptual groundwork and notes on Thirteen Women not only magnify her significant profile as a discerning feminist critic, but also frame her as a pioneer of star and celebrity studies. Over half a century later, the makers of Silent and Forgotten (2018), have picked up where Brooks left off, creating an inventive meta-documentary that borrows from Brooks’s own approach and is informed by her concept of the actress’s “double life.”
11. “The Enigma of Gloom” by Gerald Russello, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Gerald Russello reviews George Scialabba’s How To Be Depressed, “a slim memoir-cum-medical-journal that recounts his four-decade experience with depression.”
The physical or mental causes of depression still evade definitive analysis. But Scialabba argues that economic conditions can certainly exacerbate existing depression or trigger someone into a depressive episode. In one of its guises, depression makes people feel worthless, in both the cultural and economic senses. Unemployment can move someone from “the merely miserable” into actual, clinical depression…
Suffering exists, and will exist. Money, however, and our ability to use it to ameliorate that suffering, is not random and can be directed where it is needed. Better mental health services, or a wider social safety net, might have ameliorative effects on people balanced on the edge…
12. “The Everyday Inspiration for ‘Anna Karenina’” by Jennifer Wilson, The New Republic
Jennifer Wilson reviews Robert Blaisdell’s Creating Anna Karenina.
The work of a Tolstoy superfan rather than a Tolstoy scholar per se, Creating Anna Karenina is an informal and chatty effort to understand what Tolstoy was up to in the four years he spent composing the novel. As it turns out, Blaisdell tells us, he was drinking copious amounts of “koumiss” (fermented mare’s milk) to stave off tuberculosis, penning vociferous calls for agrarian reform, learning Ancient Greek with the help of a priest, and trying to find a governess to tend to his growing family…
It is a big stretch, and Blaisdell knows as much, but his book is more of a playful experiment than a strict study. In its study of the comings and goings of the Tolstoy household at the time of the novel’s composition, Creating Anna Karenina asks if one of the world’s greatest novels was in fact just as much a product of everyday minutia—like who stops by for a visit with what kind of gossip to tell—as it was the culmination of long-simmering ideas about morality and desire.
13. “How Politically Radical Women in 19th-Century France Were Made Into Misogynistic Caricatures” by Jill Richards, Lit Hub
An excerpt from Jill Richards’s The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes.
The women were ugly, to be sure, but not quite ugly enough, or not as ugly as one might have expected, a somewhat regretful Léonce Dupont recalled, in what would become a standard account of the fourth military tribunal of the Paris Commune, the first of the trials to be devoted to the female communards. Indeed, it seems that the five women produced by the court that day were quite a disappointment…
It wasn’t until the last week in May, when the French army invaded the city, that the fires were set, burning down the Tuileries Palace, the Richelieu library of the Louvre, the Hotel de Ville, and dozens of smaller buildings near the Rue Royale and the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. In the months that followed, these fires were attributed to the female communards, named pétroleuses.
14. “Uighur Poets on Repression and Exile” by Joshua L. Freeman, The New York Review of Books
Joshua L. Freeman writes about the disappearance of all the Uighur poets he once knew.
Uighur Poets on Repression and ExileAs renowned writers have vanished into the camps and prisons, their books have been pulled from store shelves. Publishing in Uighur, lively and diverse through late 2016, has been reduced in the last three years to a pitiful trickle of state-approved journals.
During several years working in Xinjiang as a Uighur-English translator, my favorite work usually involved poetry. I spent many hours in conversation with Uighur writers like Perhat Tursun, known for his edgy verse and his controversial novel The Art of Suicide; Idris Nurillah, a poet and translator who also ran a wine shop; and Shahip Abdusalam Nurbeg, a schoolteacher well known for his endlessly experimental poetry. Their company was as exciting as their work, in part because poetry is such a vibrant genre in Uighur society, as central to national identity as it is to self-expression. It is precisely because of poetry’s power in Uighur culture that these three poets, along with nearly every other prominent Uighur intellectual, disappeared more than two years ago into China’s internment camps.
15. “Interview with Ilya Kaminsky” by Joe Dunthorne, The White Review
Joe Dunthorne interview the poet Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, which “tells the story of a town, Vasenka, during a time of unrest when public gatherings are prohibited. Soldiers come to break up a crowd watching a puppet show in the central square. Petya, a deaf boy, is the only one who does not hear the army sergeant yelling ‘disperse immediately’ and he carries on laughing at the puppets. Moments later, he is killed. The gunshot becomes the last thing that the people of the town hear. From then on, the citizens refuse to acknowledge the sound of the occupying forces.” Says Kaminsky:
“I do believe that our intellectuals are in some ways responsible for what is happening right now in 2020: for not engaging with so many of our fellow countrymen. The end result is that the depth is taken away from the discourse. The discourse of ‘why am I on this planet’ is going to happen whether or not the intellectuals choose to participate in it. But depth of conversation might suffer should they choose not to participate. One sees that in the USA on a daily basis.”
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