This Week in Books: Profitable to All Concerned
I’m “deep down … eager to achieve life-changing money and power.”
Dear Reader,
I’m turning the money spigot back on next week. I’ve decided. But, I’ll be doing it a little differently this time around. Like before, the money I collect will partly be used to pay other writers to write for the mag. (And partly it will be used to compensate yours truly!) However, unlike before, I’m not going to put any of it behind a paywall. For now, I’m just going to send everything to everybody. (So, free subscribers will now also be sent interviews, reviews—all sorts of sporadic, scintillating stuff.) What will be paywalled is this… hold on, don’t panic… this books newsletter, but only after item number six. So, you get to read my weird thing that I write every week, plus items number one through six, all for free; then you will be gently prompted to pay (at a discounted rate, for now); but there will also always be a free trial option. So there will always be a roundabout way to read it for free.
I have no idea if there’s anyone out there distressed by the idea of not being able to read this thing to the end for free? But, you know, just covering all my bases. Also, I don’t know what $3 is to you, but if it’s too much, or if for one reason or another you can’t afford it, but are a superfan/completist who must read to the end without impairment lest you suffer terribly from the unbearable sense of lack, just email me at endworldreview@gmail.com and we’ll work it out. This is not a big deal. Nothing’s a big deal. I just do need to make a little money (slash I want to play at editor again, so you must fund me, you philanthropist, you! You patron of the arts!), so I’m going to mention it, repeatedly, every week, with a big red button.
Okay, so to be clear, I’m giving people time to unsubscribe if they want, and then payments will be turned on ahead of next week’s newsletter. If you want to subscribe, you can subscribe then. There will be a button. Don’t panic, the button will come to you. You don’t have to do anything yet.
I suppose I was in the mood to make money moves this week because it feels like almost everything I selected is about ca$h. Even the poetry is about money; about the shame of its purchase power. “...[H]undreds of feet below, a chalk line marks the moment we were all / doomed. We were done for. We were science fiction before science, / or fiction. One billion judgment days later, I’m alive and ashamed / of my purchases…,” laments Franny Choi. “Brush the crumbs from your cashmere / girl, what’s the point of feeling bad / all the time? Get soaked with it, / have the salted butter, the altar. / You are present, / return to the breath, / to the podcast,” advises Cecilia Knapp.
In an insider’s account (and, as reviewer Jon Skolnik writes, an unashamed celebration) of the world of private equity and all its accompanying cruelties, investor Sachin Khajuria “describes the Firm’s budding associates as being ‘deep down … eager to achieve life-changing money and power’”... and you know what? I’m feeling it! I’m there, baby. I’m with the ransomware gangs only halfway committed to not hacking hospitals; the movie studios indulging in a little propaganda, as a treat; the McKinsey consultants who cooked up the idea of Purdue Pharma–issued rebates for every CVS customer who overdosed (!!!)
In his his history of the origins of the American credit ratings system, Bruce G. Carruthers writes that “the Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review of January 1851 stated that the overall purpose of the new credit rating system was to ‘uphold, extend, and render safe and profitable to all concerned the great credit system, on which our country had thriven.’”
The End of the World Review is in total agreement with Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review. We assert that the overall purpose of the new email newsletter system is to uphold, extend, and render safe and profitable to all concerned the great blog system, on which our internet has thriven!! On which we have all thriven together.
—Dana
P.S. Spooky season is almost upon us. Check out my old list of horror books and the horror movies I’ll be watching.
1. “Disaster Means ‘Without a Star’” by Franny Choi, The Rumpus
A poem excerpted from Franny Choi’s collection The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco).
Sixty-six million years after the end of the world, I click purchase / on an emergency go-bag from Amazon.
2. “Three Poems” by Cecilia Knapp, Granta
Three poems excerpted from Cecilia Knapp’s collection Peach Pig (Corsair).
OK, you’re a guilty pig, / but walk down Broadway Market / with a £9 drink in a plastic cup. / Forget your dad working raw, / the insides of hospitals, it’s fine, / you’re one of these people now.
3. “The Mixed Metaphor” by Andrea Long Chu, Vulture
Andrea Long Chu surveys a genre she calls “the mixed-Asian novel,” taking aim along the way at Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts (Penguin) and Jay Caspian Kang’s The Loneliest Americans (Crown).
…It is a strange thing for fully Asian writers to look to mixed Asian people for relief from their racial anxieties when actual mixed-race Asians, who, it turns out, can write their own books, have little reassurance to offer. “I’ve always blamed my tendency to vacillate on my mixed ethnicity. Halved, I am neither here nor there, and my understanding of the relativity inherent in the world is built into my genes,” observes Jane Takagi-Little in Ruth Ozeki’s 1999 debut novel, My Year of Meats — an early instance of what we might call the “mixed Asian” novel. In recent years, this little genre has quietly bloomed, given life by a small cohort of novelists who write about characters that, like themselves, are of both white and East or Southeast Asian ancestry. (Accordingly, I’ll be using the imperfect shorthand mixed Asian to refer only to people of that particular ethnic makeup.) These novels are largely about unremarkable middle-class people without political or intellectual ambitions; what links these characters is not only a vague experience of racial non-belonging but also a gnawing uncertainty about how much this experience actually matters, even to themselves. Yet the mixed Asian novel has far more to teach us about Asian America today than Ng’s didacticism or Kang’s yawp does — precisely because it doesn’t have much to say about it at all. Asian America is not an idea for these authors but a sensation, a mild, chronic homesickness; indeed, to read the mixed Asian novel will be to ask ourselves if Asian America can be anything but a kind of heartache.
4. “Liz Kid” by Charlie Tyson, Bookforum
Charlie Tyson reviews Darryl Pinckney’s Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street (FSG), a memoir of his friendship with Elizabeth Hardwick.
…Hardwick… frequently bemoaned the banality of biography, a “scrofulous cottage industry” guilty of churning out bloated studies in pedestrian prose, whose practitioners, lacking in style or vision, fetishized the raw material of the archive like diggers in “previously looted pharaonic tombs.” Her favorite life studies were jagged and idiosyncratic: De Quincey on the Lake Poets, Henry James on Hawthorne. “The ‘inaccurate and incomplete’ memoirs so many scholars spend a lifetime irritably, nervously correcting,” she pronounced, “are among the treasures of our culture.” In like spirit, Pinckney has given us an introspective character study, freewheeling and impressionistic, in which he plays Boswell to Hardwick’s Johnson.
Boswell was, incidentally, one of Hardwick’s touchstones. Although she thought that his life of Johnson was a “miracle,” she expressed moral skepticism about his method of composition. There was something unsavory about besotted Bozzy inserting himself into literary history by grasping the great man’s coattails. “Dr. Johnson is treasured,” she remarked, “but odium attaches to his giddy memorialist.” Pinckney, who quotes this line, seems aware of the risk. After he accidently burns down his apartment on the Upper West Side, his journals damaged in the blaze, Hardwick comments tartly: “A happy event. Probably everything I ever said.”
5. “In Queer Horror Anthology ‘It Came From the Closet,’ Carmen Maria Machado Considers Jennifer’s Body” by Carmen Maria Machado, Autostraddle
In an essay excerpted from It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (Feminist Press), Carmen Maria Machado writes about the accusation of “queerbaiting” sometimes made against cult-classic horror film Jennifer’s Body.
I have a real soft spot for stories on conflicted, spectral, transient bisexuality. I always have. While many of my peers turned their nose up at Britney and Madonna and Christina’s kiss (staged for attention!) and Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” (fake-gay titillation!) and a million other queer media fragments of my Millennial late adolescence and early adulthood, I always found them somewhere on the spectrum between harmless and delightful; an exercise in reading between the lines that I suspect José Esteban Muñoz would understand. (Plus, “the taste of her cherry ChapStick” is just pure poetry.) I am sympathetic to the desire to name and shame queerbaiting — it is, after all, an attempt to protect queerness from dilution, from interlopers, from accusations of unseriousness — but every piece of present-day me bristles against it. Who established these terms? Why is it always bisexuals who seem to fall afoul of these rules? It always struck me as odd to think of public queerness in heterosexual terms, even for ostensibly progressive reasons.
…“We can understand queerness itself as being filled with the intention to be lost,” Muñoz wrote in Cruising Utopia. “To accept loss is to accept the way in which one’s queerness will always render one lost to a world of heterosexual imperatives, codes, and laws . . . [to] veer away from heterosexuality’s path.”
6. “Silver Screen Diplomacy” by Susan Blumberg-Kason, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Susan Blumberg-Kason reviews two new books about China and cinema: Erich Schwartzel’s Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy (Penguin) and Karen Ma’s China’s Millennial Digital Generation: Conversations with Balinghou (Post-1980s) Indie Filmmakers (Long River).
…while political tensions between the United States and China escalate, their film industries have never been friendlier… They seem to have found a way to satisfy their overlapping goals of making money…
7. “Masculinity Is the New Prey” by Adam Fleming Petty, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Adam Fleming Petty reviews Ander Monson’s Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession (Graywolf), a book about watching Predator 146 times.
…Monson doesn’t exactly say this, but I find that the insight Predator offers, in terms of killing this toxic masculinity, is that the masculine must incorporate the feminine to survive the hit. If Predator is a horror movie, and Dutch is the one who defeats the monster and makes it out alive, then he does so by becoming something other than a man. He becomes, in effect, a “final girl.”
Named by critic Carol Clover in her groundbreaking work Men, Women and Chain Saws, the final girl is the supreme figure of 1980s horror. She is Laurie Strode in Halloween; she is Ripley in Alien; she is Nancy Thompson in A Nightmare on Elm Street. The final girl confronts the monster and defeats him by drawing on her own inner strength and cunning, rather than strapping on the largest weapon available. This is precisely what Dutch does in the film’s climax. He eschews his guns to construct a series of obstacles to ensnare the Predator. The Predator ultimately is felled not by a speeding bullet but by a falling rock that Dutch has rigged on a cliff face. But perhaps the most telling example of Dutch’s feminization, his taking on of the final girl mantle, comes just before the climax. Dutch must reapply mud to his skin to keep the Predator from seeing him. Music comes on, and the scene goes into slow motion. Tenderly, painstakingly, Dutch applies the mud to his face. He is putting on makeup…
8. “The Grim Secrets of Private Equity” by Jon Skolnik, The New Republic
Jon Skolnik reviews Sachin Khajuria’s Two and Twenty: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win (Currency), a sympathetic portrayal of private equity, with all its attendant leveraged buyouts and mass layoffs and so on, which is of course inadvertently quite damning.
If the book is clear about one thing, it’s that private equity firms believe themselves to be incredibly valuable to society.
9. “Rate the Room” by Bruce G. Carruthers, Lapham’s Quarterly
An excerpt from Bruce G. Carruthers’ The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power, and Credit in America (Princeton), a history of the origins of the American credit ratings system. The first entity to attempt such a thing was the abolitionist Lewis Tappan’s Mercantile Agency, which rated merchants’ creditworthiness for the wholesalers from whom they acquired goods. The ratings were generated using a wide and semi-secret network of powerful local informants.
Building up the network of correspondents was key to enlarging the scope of the firm and enhancing the value of the information it provided to subscribers. In 1846 the agency had 679 correspondents around the country, and by 1851 there were some 2,000 (correspondents were less numerous in Southern states because of Tappan’s strong and public support for abolition). Correspondents were not directly employed by the agency, but it struck an informal deal with them: in exchange for information, the agency would steer collection work to correspondents. Eventually, agencies employed their own reporters, who would operate from a growing network of branch offices. The ability of these networks to gather information on a national scale was such that later in the nineteenth century the life insurance companies also sought out credit reporters as a source to obtain individual data about health risks.
10. “McKinsey Is a Consulting Powerhouse. But Is It a Force for Good?” by Sheelah Kolhatkar, The New York Times
Sheelah Kolhatkar reviews Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe’s When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm (Doubleday). As per Betteridge's law of headlines, the answer to the question in the article’s title is “no!!!”
… in 2017, the same year an estimated 47,000 people died from opioid-related overdoses in America, McKinsey suggested that Purdue consider offering “rebates” to drug distributors for every customer of theirs who overdosed.
11. “Who Owns the Internet?” by Evan Malmgren, The Nation
Evan Malmgren reviews Ben Tarnoff’s Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future (Verso).
Tarnoff commits a decent chunk of the book to defining terminology and questioning the “commonsense” metaphors that we use to discuss the Internet, in many cases suggesting alternatives while maintaining an abiding sense of the materialism inherent in the Internet. He argues that what we call “platforms” would be more accurately referred to as “virtual shopping malls”; that “the cloud” is an ethereal term masking a digital reproduction of the capitalist factory. In suggesting new vocabularies of the Internet, Tarnoff’s chief concern is translating apparent mysticism into the more concrete language of political economy. In doing so, his greatest strength is synthesis, presenting triple-distilled highlights and contributions from a broad range of thinkers, from Wendy Brown to Shoshana Zuboff.
12. “Inside the Ransomware Gangs That Extort Hospitals” by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden, New York Magazine
An excerpt adapted from Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden’s The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits’ Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime (FSG).
On a bleak St. Patrick’s Day in 2020, with holiday festivities canceled as COVID-19 swept across the U.S., Lawrence Abrams sent messages to ten of the largest ransomware gangs in the world. Stop attacking hospitals and other medical facilities for the duration of the pandemic, he pleaded. Too many lives were at stake.
13. “Xanadu’s Architect” by Martin Fuller, The New York Review of Books
Martin Fuller reviews two new books about Julia Morgan, “the prolific San Francisco Bay Area architect who completed more than seven hundred buildings” and who is best known for designing Hearst Castle (yes, the Citizen Kane one): Victoria Kastner’s Julia Morgan: An Intimate Biography of the Trailblazing Architect (Chronicle) and Julia Morgan: The Road to San Simeon: Visionary Architect of the California Renaissance (Laguna Art Museum/Rizzoli Electa), which has multiple contributors. My pull-quote doesn’t have much to do with the books but I thought it was magical:
Why architecture was regarded from time immemorial as an impenetrable men’s preserve is arguably a question as much for psychologists as sociologists. Whatever the answer, the sheer physicality of erecting structures far larger than any individual was thought to require a strong driving force, bodily as well as psychic, that women were believed to lack. The age-old secrets of the building trade in Europe were jealously guarded by masons’ guilds that kept architectural knowledge within systems of male kinship, a monopoly that vigilantly excluded outsiders. During the eighteenth century this closed-shop craft served as the model for Freemasonry, the Enlightenment confraternity that sought to become a force for social cohesion through nonsectarian ethical values affirmed with arcane rituals based on the stone layer’s methodology. The fact that women were not welcomed into this association, either, further reinforced the baseless notion that they were unequal to the task of building.
14. “Mourning Routine” by Sarah Jaffe, Bookforum
Sarah Jaffe interviews Namwali Serpell about her novel The Furrows (Hogarth).
“In Seven Modes of Uncertainty, part of what I was trying to figure out is why uncertainty was so painful for me in my life, but so rich and interesting to me in literature. A lot of what I’m probing there is the way that literature is experiential. You don’t just absorb information or facts about what happens, you’re also engaged in a temporal experience that moves you both emotionally and intellectually.
“My thinking about the purpose of literature as a critic helps bolster my impulses as a fiction writer. I’m trying to render an experience and move away—as much as possible—from a passive-reception model of the reading experience, where you’re just fed information. And that entails making the reader come forward and participate in the co-creation of the text. As Morrison puts it, you have to have gaps, spaces for the reader to step in.”
15. “A Poet Confronts the Violent History of El Salvador” by Danielle Mackey, The Nation
Danielle Mackey reviews Christopher Soto’s poetry collection Diaries of a Terrorist (Copper Canyon).
“We’ve read the credit report // & The U.S. fiscally sponsored the / Civil war in El Salvador // Where men had genitals cut off / Stuffed into their mouths // Their heads decapitated & placed / Between their legs // Tío saw all his friends // Students slumped / On chain-link fences // After marching outside the university / As a child // We never thought how difficult it must’ve been to / Pick the heads of daisies with us.”
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