This Week in Books: Resist the Beginnings, Consider the End
“The world changes a lot, all of the time, or it does not, ever. Split the difference.”
Dear Reader,
The president has covid. The president is going to the hospital. I started conceptualizing this newsletter yesterday; I imagined something written in what I told myself was going to be a sort of sophisticated, breezy gallows humor, but now I’m at a total loss as to what the tone of the moment should be. The man is so unsympathetic that him being sick actually takes the gallows out of the equation and leaves me with just the humor factor. This shit is hilarious, I’m dying, we’re all dying, he’s dying. Like, I have this feeling of, I can’t ever believe I was worried about these jokers doing a coup. It’s never been anything but a glorified stand-up routine. Give the man his Emmy, he finally deserves it.
“Gambling with death.” Bernhard Gillam, January 1883. Illustration shows, at center, a capitalist, sitting on money bags labeled “Insurance Money” and leaning against several papers labeled “New Policy,” gambling with the Grim Reaper, while all around them disasters are happening.
In other news, just because it’s what I was planning on talking about, more or less: I guess T.E.O.T.W.R. has been unbanned by Facebook and Instagram. They never responded to my claim or whatever, but all my posts (and other people’s FB/IG posts of the Review too, it would seem) reemerged from the void the week before last; they came back with as little fanfare as they’d gone, fresh as the day they’d been posted, giving me the uneasy insight that every post is forever. Anyway, if I were being generous I would say, just a glitch, no harm no foul. But of course, the same week that T.E.O.T.W.R. was unbanned, Facebook banned hundreds of environmental activists who “were involved in planning a communications blockade event against KKR & Co., the U.S. investment firm that’s majority funder of the destructive Coastal Link natural gas pipeline, which is set to cut through land controlled by Indigenous people without consent.” So perhaps my generosity is best reserved for companies that don’t steal so much goddamn money.
Ok. Ok. Now what. Looking at how I had decided to title this thing yesterday, and at the articles I’m leading with, I feel numb. It’s all very antifascist, all very “get ready for the putsch.” But this attitude feels sort of silly now? I wonder if by next week the urgency will be back. I think I’m just going to hit send now, before he kicks the bucket.
—Dana
@danasnitzky @endworldreview ig fb
1. “Killing millions from behind their desks” by Jonathan Kirsch, The Washington Post
Jonathan Kirsch reviews Dan Gretton’s I You We Them: Volume 1: Walking Into the World of the Desk Killer, an extended meditation on bureaucratic mass murderers, as in Eichmann-esque types, and a project which Kirsch writes has evolved beyond its scope — or, more accurately, comprehended the true horrifying extent of that scope. “[T]he work looms so large because it is much more than a history of bureaucratic crime. Rather, Gretton has written himself deeply and intimately into the work, which also serves as a poignant memoir; a travelogue that leads the reader through time and space, history and memory…”
“The reason I have been haunted by this concept for most of my adult life is not primarily because of events that happened sixty or seventy years ago — it is because the desk killers have always been with us, and today are more numerous than ever. You can find people killing from their desks and their computers in the military, but also in the civil service. They might be in the oil industry, armaments, pharmaceuticals, but you can also find them in finance, insurance, politics or law. They rarely intend to kill, or injure, but their actions, combined with the vast and diffuse reach of government and contemporary corporate power, result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and devastated lives.” —Dan Gretton
2. “They Thought They Were Free” by Jason Bade, Popula
Jason Bade excerpts several passages from Milton Mayer’s 1955 classic They Thought They Were Free, a book “of post-war interviews [that] sought to understand how ten ordinary, law-abiding Germans had become Nazis,” so as to highlight how jarringly similar Mayer’s observations feel to the ones you have been making in your head lately. Bade signs off with this sentiment from Mayer:
“Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice — ‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’”
3. “First Mothers” by Maisy Card, The Paris Review
Maisy Card recalls her many attempts over the years to write about the life of Queen Nanny of the Jamaican Maroons, citing the books she read as research, Michelle Cliff’s fictional account of her life, Abeng, and Karla Gottlieb’s biography The Mother of Us All. “Cliff’s Nanny never speaks. She never becomes a fully realized character. So I thought, I could do that. And then later I thought, Who am I to think I can write this?”
After college I worked at a public defender’s office doing fund-raising, but also paralegal tasks like answering letters from prisoners seeking a lawyer to handle their appeals. The letters were desperate and described a level of brutality that haunted me. One of the first letters was from a woman who said she was being raped by prison guards and punished for speaking out by being locked in a solitary housing unit. I started writing about Nanny as a way to counteract feelings of complete helplessness. I didn’t save any of my early drafts. I learned later that for me to connect to characters that I’m writing, I need to put a real piece of myself into each of them. But back then, I was writing about Nanny because she was everything that I wasn’t.
4. “The Creaky Old System” by Michael Kazin, The Nation
Michael Kazin reviews Alexander Keyssar’s Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?
…most Americans have seldom thought the Electoral College worth preserving. Surprisingly, the very men who drafted the Constitution also had their doubts. The ungainly apparatus got welded into the document as a compromise between those framers who wanted Congress to pick the president and those who wanted to leave it up to state governments. The system they came up with was nobody’s first choice.
…The premise of Keyssar’s book is an uncommon one for a historian to pursue. Few scholars spend their time seeking to explain something they wish had happened but never did. Even writers who probe the perennial question of why socialism never gained a mass following in the United States as it did in Europe still have a good deal to say about such topics as the popularity of Eugene V. Debs and the vital role played by Marxist radicals in the labor movement and the crusade for racial justice. But the centuries of fruitless effort inspired Keyssar to create a scholarly masterpiece. No other historian has so persuasively explained the utter failure to ditch or change a process that, as he puts it, “is ill understood by many Americans, bewildering to nearly everyone abroad, and [was] never imitated by another country or by any state of the United States. Many countries have struggled with the problem of electoral reform, but few, if any, have done so with such lack of success over so prolonged a period.” This is clearly not a book for anyone who believes the moral arc of politics is long but always bends toward justice.
5. “On Wild Salmon, Hockey Dreams and Life in the Saanich Homeland” by Sara Sinclair, Lit Hub
An interview with Blaine Wilson, a Tsartlip First Nation fisher and hunter, excerpted from How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America, edited by Sara Sinclair. Writes Sinclair: “I met Blaine through his sister, Tracy… Her face lit up as she described her brother as ‘a bear’ who lived off the land and said he was the only person of her generation she knows who truly does.”
My son Michael is twenty-eight, Austin turned nineteen, and Bobby, he’ll be eighteen this year. We live seasonally, hunting and fishing; everything comes seasonally to our lives here. Like now, in January, we’re going to clear the way for the new year; we’re going to physically get ready, strengthen up to go fishing in the springtime. It’s a really good time of year. We got about three boats that we like to go fishing on and once we start, we go for months, we’re never home. We just head out here and do some cod fishing. We head to the mainland and do some crabbing with our cousins, and then we do the Fraser River and we fish eulachon. And we fish spring salmon. And the sockeye’s really good when it happens. Then we fish the Goldstream River for chum salmon. We get fish from Port Alberni to Nanaimo to Duncan, Merritt, or Kamloops, and anywhere in between. We go to the mainland, and because we have prawns and clams, people we trade or sell to there ask, “Where’ve you guys been?” They want all of our fish because they don’t have the salty fish. That’s just a part of being from here. We prepare ourselves to get out there, to stay away from home, to be ready if it rains, for the winds. We have to be alert, to be ready to get out of the way of Mother Nature. We have to pay attention.
6. “One Weird Trick” by Jane Hu, Bookforum
Jane Hu reviews Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form.
As the book’s title implies, the gimmick is both an aesthetic judgment and a capitalist form. It is, moreover, an “ambivalent judgment” (is the gimmick art?) and a “compromised form” (does it even work?). While gimmicks come in many guises—whether a gadget, idea, or technique—what they all share is a capacity to elicit ugly feelings of unease and dubiousness about their actual efficacy and worth. Is the gimmick always a rip-off? “Gimmicks are fundamentally one thing,” Ngai explains, “overrated devices that strike us as working too little (labor-saving tricks) but as also working too hard (strained efforts to get our attention).” To see a gimmick is thus partly to see through it—and to see through it is to get an uncomfortable glimpse of how it produces what we take to be its intended effect.
When we categorize something as a gimmick, Ngai writes, we are always “registering an uncertainty about labor” that is ultimately an uncertainty about capitalist production. Karl Marx wrote that the capitalist division of labor is enacted “behind the backs” of its workers, but the transparently unworthy gimmick shines a light into this hidden process—eliciting judgments about labor, time, and value that our bosses would prefer remain unconscious.
7. “Re-Covered: An Unconventional South African Novel” by Lucy Scholes, The Paris Review
In the latest installment of her Re-Covered column, Lucy Scholes writes about the life of Noni Jabavu and her travel memoir Drawn in Color.
…the narrative is tightly structured around a central event: the trip home that Jabavu made, in March 1955, on the occasion of her brother Tengo’s murder. He was twenty-six years old and a medical student in the final year of his degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg when he was shot dead by gangsters. Jabavu attends the funeral, thereafter spending the requisite period of mourning in seclusion with her family, after which she travels north, to visit her married sister, who lives in Uganda with her husband and their baby and was unable to attend Tengo’s funeral. As various family members explain to Jabavu before sending her on her way, it’s her duty to help her sister “re-live every phase of our tragedy … It will be only if you, eldest of the umbilical cord, properly fulfil your function that your sister will find the peace that we have found through these traditional rites.”
8. “Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper – Diarmuid Hester” by Caren Beilin, Full Stop
You must read Caren Beilin’s essay about Diarmuid Hester’s Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper. It’s brilliant, not least of all because it made me realize that The Sluts is our greatest 9/11 novel.
…I’ve since really wanted to teach The Sluts (Cooper’s 2005 novel-complex of gay male escort reviews) in a class on 9/11 fiction I don’t really want to teach. Because all of these website reviews — speculations and possible reports on interactions with an elusive nothing-like twink named Brad — are written between June 2001 and May 2002. It’s like this huge thing happened that changed the world but you’d never know, everyone’s wondering about the whereabouts of Brad’s asshole. Which seemed to me to say, there are many centers. And the world changes a lot, all of the time, or it does not, ever. Split the difference.
9. “Inside the FBI’s File on Soviet Poet-Dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko” by Jacob Silverman, The New Republic
Jacob Silverman FOIA’d the FBI’s 400-page file on the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
In the fall of 1961, the counterintelligence agents of the FBI had one concern: how to use this poem, written by a star of Soviet literature who performed to packed stadiums in his home country, as a form of propaganda. To start, a translator in the FBI’s New York field office wrote his own translation of “Babi Yar,” and some agents put together some accompanying remarks praising the poet’s bravery and condemning the Soviet Union’s official antisemitism. The project was then pitched to FBI leadership in a memo written by an agent named F.J. Baumgardner who, among his later activities, produced FBI memos labeling Martin Luther King Jr. a degenerate communist.
“It is believed that this poem ‘Babi Yar’ can be utilized by the Bureau as an excellent psychological weapon to further highlight anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and to point out the lack of freedom of speech inside the Soviet Union,” Baumgardner wrote.
10. “Making the Case for Debt Abolition” by Alexis Clements, Hyperallergic
Alexis Clements reviews Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition, written by members of the Debt Collective.
…Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay aims less to be a comprehensive history and more an impassioned call to action. The authors highlight critical historical precedents for our indebted society, from Thomas Jefferson intentionally forcing indigenous people into unmanageable debts to enable the seizure of their land, to France’s “indemnity” payments imposed on Haiti after their successful rebellion against enslavement.
But there are two particularly impactful things that set this book apart. It’s clear from the outset that this is not a pre-pandemic book hoping for relevance in the post-pandemic world. This book is written in the present, highlighting everything the pandemic has revealed, from the amplification of inequality’s impact on people’s health and income, to the fact that “changing the rules that dictate our daily financial arrangements is possible after all, and it can happen with remarkable speed.”
Equally notable is the fluid clarity with which the authors connect student debt to those tied to healthcare, fraudulent mortgages, payday loans, and incarceration. They even draw in municipal and sovereign debts that overwhelmingly impact cities with large BIPOC populations and countries in the Global South.
11. “Admired and Abhorred” by Steven G. Kellman, American Scholar
Steven G. Kellman reviews Alex Ross’s Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music.
Whereas Thomas Mann saw in him “the greatest talent in the entire history of art,” Friedrich Nietzsche, once a fawning disciple and family intimate, asked: “Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches. He has made music sick.”
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