This Week in Books: Scary Literary Reviews 2
“There will be on Earth that place which human beings describe to the world of the spirits Hell.”
Dear Reader,
Introductory Note #1: The Sequel (Read Part 1)
Poolside in LA, a man dressed all in white reclines on a white lounge chair and reads from a white tablet. The pool is still, the sun is still, everything is very still; the scene may or may not be strangely muted; it’s unclear whether there ought to be a rumble of traffic; in the movies it never seems to be the case that there is any ambient noise whatsoever in LA, and who’s to say whether that is a lie.
After several minutes, the man reaches into his white tote and pulls out a white stylus, to make a note. He stops writing abruptly, hand still poised on the screen, when a sound disrupts the stillness; a wave in the water has sloshed against the sides of the pool. The man in white looks up and watches as another wave forms and crests before hitting the walls of the pool, a smaller wave radiating back towards the center as yet a third one forms. Calmly and efficiently the man puts away tablet and stylus, and walks to the pool’s edge, hands in pockets. He looks down, and sees — something — a shadow — at the bottom of the pool. Quietly, casually, the man in white watches the shadow grow; the waves get larger, washing over the man’s white moccasins, over the legs of his white lounge chair, soaking the bottom of his white tote where it hangs from the chair’s white back, surely ruining his white tablet. The editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books does not seem to mind the water; he smiles serenely as the form begins to rise from the depths: he suspects, but will soon have proof, that what is coming is The End of the W---------
Wood-inlay image representing chaos magnum, the "great gulf" (Luke 16:26). Intarsia in the choir of the Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo. Giovan Francesco Capoferri's work on a design by Lorenzo Lotto, c. 1524.
Meanwhile, on a bench in Washington Square Park, surrounded — but safely uncrowded — by masked strollers, a woman is reading the foreword of a book. She turns the page enthusiastically, more excited than ever to get to the main body of the text, tantalized by the famed writer’s introduction, which promises many splendors to come: unique forms, unusual perspectives, astonishing facts; when, to her disappointment, having rapidly reached the end of the foreword, she encounters an editor’s preface. Undeterred, the woman speeds through the preface, which rhapsodizes about the text’s beauty and speculates as to its meaning, only to arrive at a translator’s note. Undaunted, the woman keeps on reading at a breakneck pace, refusing to skim, unwilling to skip a single word: through the prologue, the introduction, the epigraph, the acknowledgements, the dedication, another foreword, more epigraphs, yet further notes of introduction, all tantalizing and promising and goading the poor reader onward. Night settles on the park. The masked strollers continue to keep their distance, and there are fewer of them than ever, and their masks have grown darker, the designs on them increasingly less cheerful, the patterns spiraling and arcane; the strollers now turn their heads toward the woman as they pass by; their eyes are invisible in the dark but, presumably, they are staring; the woman does not notice. With every turn of the page, the editorial assistant at The Paris Review is certain that the front matter will finally end, and that she will reach the first chapter. There is, however, one page that the otherwise meticulous reader skipped: the title page, where, were she to flip to it even now, she would read the words “The End of the W-----------”
Concurrently, in the high Rockies, overlooking a vast sea of conifers that bleed silver in the moonlight, a young freelancer who is on deadline to turn in a book review for High Country News is very silent. And, just to be sure, they will stay that way until morning.
That same evening, a man lost deep in thought wanders through the crumbling corridors of a prominent research university on the south side of Chicago. A recent shelter in place order means the man is flouting the law to be here, and yet he appears to walk aimlessly through the warren of rooms, anterooms, and hallways, the latter of which would be hardly wide enough for him to pass by another person without touching them, were he to encounter anyone else, which he does not. Curiously, when he enters the closet-sized classrooms and offices — whose mouldering carpets, installed during some indeterminate decade of the late twentieth century, are pulling away from the walls and whose rotten smell, when tread upon, add to the late–Gilded-Age complex’s rich scent, a warm mixture of asbestos, lead, and moisture — the man touches the walls and mutters, seeming to count, or perhaps to recite. After making a circuit of one room, the man exits and walks directly to another room, sometimes on the same floor, but other times several flights above or below, or in the next building. (The buildings are barely separated from one another in any meaningful way, architecturally, but have different names and house different departments in the humanities, the only field still proud to be taught in such unhealthful surroundings, while the sciences, arts, and all the rest reside in modern, airy behemoths across campus.) Back and forth the man traverses the buildings’ many claustrophobic corridors, up and down their many august staircases, the hardwood bannisters sharp with polish but the marble stairs sloping and smooth from more than a century of trudging, to which this lone loper is contributing his micromillimeter of erosion. And all throughout his long journey the man touches the walls at intervals, occasionally reaching up to the cornices or bending down to the skirting boards to lay a light hand, but always moving at the same steady pace through the empty, ancient-American university. As day turns to night, the lights do not turn on, and the man makes no move to turn any on.
Finally, at no outward signal but rather one that must have come from within his system of recitations, the man comes to a halt on a landing at the top of a stained-glass–lined flight of stairs (the moon is shining and the city is bright, so dim light filters through the colorful glass, casting gloomy patterns) and drops himself onto a black armchair installed beneath a massive black stone bust of Karl Marx that looks like it weighs at least half a ton yet is secured to the wall by no visible means, producing the uncomfortable illusion that the boulder-size head is floating above the small (by comparison) armchair. Tension is visibly released in the man’s body; he sinks into the armchair; he rests in the shadow of the bust of Marx. Then, slowly, perhaps reluctantly, he leans forward, one hand on the armrest; and he leans further forward still, the elbow of his other arm brought down to his knee; and he slowly completes the arc until he has bent almost fully in half, at which point he plunges one hand down in front of him, between his legs and below the seat of the armchair, where his hand scrabbles and scratches for a few panicked seconds and then pauses; and then pulls, yanking from where it had apparently been secured to the bottom of the armchair (loosely, as it was not too difficult to extract) a large rectangular item — a manuscript — which the man brings up and, leaning back, sets in his lap but does not look at; in fact he leans all the way back, tilts his head onto the back of the armchair and closes his eyes, his face disappearing into the shadow cast by the long chin of the black bust of Marx, hidden from the dim patterns cast by the stained glass, which seem to dance upon the manuscript in his lap as though the stars that cast the light were dancing; an effect, perhaps, of some nervous shaking of the man’s legs. But were the editor at the Chicago Review to look down and were his eyes able to pierce the gloom and were the stars or his legs to stop dancing, he would see written in a strange, archaic style on a yellow crumbling page the name of the thing he had summoned: “The End of the Wor----------”
Introductory Note #2: Normal
Well, well, well, I skipped another week of the books newsletter. Sorry, sorry, I feel like the tension is ratcheting up in my body? I feel convinced of multiple simultaneous realities (nothing meaningful is going to happen on election day; something meaningful — good — is going to happen on election day; something meaningful — bad — is going to happen on election day), and I don’t like that, not one bit, it makes it difficult to be alive! So anyway, I wrote a scary sequel to my cosmic horror lit review thing from way back when, I hope that appeases you, I hope you are appeased, I hope if you are an editor at Chicago Review you are not offended (that I have revealed the secret of the Summoning).
In the late 70s, “a mysterious group of spirits she called ‘the Ones’” informed the poet Lucille Clifton that “There will be on Earth that place which human beings describe to the world of the spirits Hell.” They added: “Now there is yet time but not very much,” which seems bad; and they went on to explain that “your generation Lucille is the beginning of the possibility and your girls generation is the middle etc.”
So, that’s not great.
Stay safe,
Dana
@danasnitzky @endworldreview ig fb
1. “Thom Gunn in New York” by Michael Nott, The London Review of Books
Michael Nott writes about Thom Gunn’s relationship with New York, ending with the death of his friend Allan Noseworthy of AIDS. It’s a lovely essay, full of joy. But I am a melancholy fool, so I’m sharing this part, which is something Gunn wrote in a letter after Noseworthy’s death:
I got more and more depressed in NY: it was very sad without poor Allan, who I usually stayed with. I went to see his neighbours and the man who rented his apartment: all his things were still there, including some quite valuable stuff and they didn’t know what to do with them, so I am writing to his brother. I did notice that he had kept every letter, it looked like, that had ever been written to him, so I located an enormous bundle by myself and dropped them in a dustbin outside. As a friend said who had to clear out Sylvia Plath’s flat after her suicide: ‘The dead leave everything behind.’ Don’t they just.
2. “Death’s Traffic Light Blinks Red” by Cathy Park Hong, The Paris Review
An excerpt from Cathy Park Hong’s preface to Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me, a new collection of poetry by Choi Seungja, “one of the most influential feminist poets in South Korea” and a prolific translator of works from German into Korean, “including Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, Max Picard’s The World of Silence, Paul Auster’s The Art of Hunger, and Erich Fromm’s The Art of Being.” Writes Hong:
Choi’s stripped-down poetry is breathtaking and frightening. Her poems are uncompromising because she will stare into the infinite dark tunnel of her solitude and not break that stare…
Writes Choi:
“That I am alive / is no more than an endless / rumor.”
3. “The Spirit Writing of Lucille Clifton” by Marina Magloire, The Paris Review
Marina Magloire writes about Lucille Clifton’s “trajectory as a self-described ‘two-headed woman,’” which “is a little-known part of her legacy.”
“Two-headed woman” is a traditional African American term used to describe women gifted with access to the spirit world as well as to the material world. Clifton’s unpublished spirit writing is housed at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University. These materials range from past life regressions to treatises on Black astrology to pages of unbroken cursive detailing the histories of Atlantis and Egypt…
In August and September of 1978, for example, Clifton received a series of dire warnings about the fate of the human world from a mysterious group of spirits she called “the Ones.” …[T]hey warned Clifton:
“If the world continues on its way without the possibility of God which is the same as saying without Light Love Truth then what does this mean? It means that perhaps a thousand years of mans life on this planet will be without Light Love Truth It is what we were saying indeed that there will be on Earth that place which human beings describe to the world of the spirits Hell Now there is yet time but not very much your generation Lucille is the beginning of the possibility and your girls generation is the middle etc.”
4. “Claude McKay in Our Time” by Eric Newman, The Los Angeles Review of Books
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5. "On the Waterfront” by Colin Grant, The New York Review of Books
“The publication earlier this year of McKay’s Romance in Marseille (Penguin Classics), an unpublished novel written in the late 1920s and early 1930s heretofore primarily known only to McKay scholars, was a long labor of love for editors Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell,” explains Eric Newman in the intro to his interview with Holcomb and Maxwell, who tell him that McKay “liked living between identities”:
…McKay was someone constitutionally dedicated to abandoning all the movements he was centrally involved with… So he’s central to that Renaissance in plowing new and fashionable ground, but he keeps one foot — sometimes literally two — outside of it. Geographically and personally, he migrated beyond range of the Harlem Renaissance…
He often acted as a political translator, for one thing, between Black radical traditions, a Black nationalism that emerges from the Caribbean, and the larger Comintern vision of anti-colonial, post-racial communism. McKay is a translator in the realm of 20th-century radical politics as he is affectively and aesthetically. As he’s writing Romance in Marseille, his position as a translator is becoming less and less tenable in everyday life. He’s sort of caught, this time, in the usually productive margins. He’s not even living in Tangier’s officially mixed International Zone, as Gary clarifies in his work: his house is just outside of it.
In his review of Romance in Marseille, Colin Grant writes that the book “failed to find a publisher” because it was risque. “Even McKay’s agent hesitated to promote a book that he saw would be rejected and considered obscene. McKay reworked, redrafted, and eventually abandoned it in the 1930s. For decades two hand-corrected typescripts languished in archives at Yale University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.”
Marseille was to prove fertile ground for McKay’s creativity. It led, the following year, to his first novel, Home to Harlem. Though it became a best seller, the book caused the revered critic and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois to recoil from its sexual explicitness, writing in The Crisis, “After the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.”
A decade later McKay’s Marseille sojourn provided models for the characters, and inspired the plot and theme, of what would become Romance in Marseille, a daring work of nostalgia, sex, and violence populated with pimps, prostitutes, and “bistro bandits” (barflies). Had the novel been published in McKay’s lifetime, it would surely have sent the editor of The Crisis back to his bathroom.
6. “William Gaddis’s Disorderly Inferno” by Joy Williams, The Paris Review
The Paris Review has excerpted Joy Williams’s foreword to William Gaddis’s J R, which was reissued by NYRB this month.
During all the years he worked on J R, he was dutifully laboring for a paycheck from the corporate machine—Kodak, Ford, IBM, Pfizer (“an operation of international piracy”)—writing ad copy and position papers, managing to stay employed though his efforts were sometimes found wanting. An executive chided one of his industry film scripts as “a little too profound and needed reshaping in a manner that would be informative at a shallower depth.” He knew the cant of marketing well and was ever alert to systems of speech, of persuasion, of obfuscation, seeing and portraying the American way of waste—the waste of nature, talent, energy, the waste that markets, systems, management demand for growth.
7. “The Group” by Apoorva Tadepalli, The Point
Apoorva Tadepalli revisists Mary McCarthy’s The Group.
…What makes it such an instructive “social novel” to read today is that it pays full attention to the material and social world where its characters live and carry out their days. This attention is not always approving, but neither is it—as critics like [Pauline] Kael believed—condescending or dismissive. The Vassar girls do not shy away from accepting the things—men, sex, money, a boss’s approval, a friend’s baby, a good cocktail party, nice wallpaper—that matter to them, yet their sometimes misguided interest in material gain, particularly when seen in the context of the years leading up to the war, coexists with the same interest in morality and self-knowledge that appears in McCarthy’s more critically acclaimed fiction…
Norine and her husband perform their politics with utmost seriousness; they remain together (despite her husband’s impotence) because they consider themselves a couple who “stand for something meaningful to other people.” The walls of their apartment are painted black, and there is dog hair and tobacco all over the floor, a dirty rug that is shedding, a soured dishcloth in the sink. Norine speaks “as if through a permanent cloud of cigarette smoke.” When she complains about her unhappiness and her marital problems, Helena suggests that she might try scrubbing the floors, boiling out the dish cloth, taking a bath and letting the dog out for some air (and most definitely changing his name from Nietzsche to Rover).“
Tell me something more basic,” Norine says. “You’re hipped on forms, while I’m concerned with meanings. … I grant you we ought to have toilet paper in the bathroom … But that won’t solve the important questions. Poor people don’t have toilet paper.” “I should have thought that one of your aims was to see that they did,” Helena retorts.
8. “The Obligation of Self-Discovery” by Vivian Gornick, Boston Review
I joked last time that I couldn’t believe Vivian Gornick was out here reviewing books at 85 for The New Republic, so then she reviewed one for Boston Review AND had an essay in the New York Review, as if to show me up; or, more likely, as if there is some sort of dire intensification of Vivian Gornick-ness happening to us. Next week there will be 4 articles by Vivian Gornick. The growth rate will be exponential. The deaths, as we know, will not peak until weeks after the leading indicators, but by then it will be too late to stop the spread.
So, so, so. Vivian Gornick has reviewed Judith G. Coffin’s Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir, and she liked it, so that’s one less body for the undertaker. It’s a collection and analysis of Beauvoir’s uniquely intense fan mail.
It was not only, or even mainly, The Second Sex that bound readers to Beauvoir for decades. More than anything it was the memoirs, following one upon another, that accounted for the remarkable loyalty thousands of women, and some men too, showered upon the gradual unfolding of a life lived almost entirely in the public eye, at the same time that its inner existence was continually laid bare and minutely reported upon. Fearless was the word most commonly associated with these books as, in every one of them, Beauvoir, good Existentialist that she was, wrote with astonishing frankness about sex, politics, and relationships. She recorded in remarkable detail, and with remarkable authenticity, everything she had thought or felt at any given moment…
Sex, Love, and Letters is a richly researched study based on Judith Coffin’s encounter with a batch of these letters that a sympathetic curator put into her hands one day while she was working on The Second Sex in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. As she writes in her introduction, “Nothing prepared me for the drama I found the first time I opened a folder of readers’ letters to Simone de Beauvoir. . . . What I found was an outpouring of projection, identification, expectation, disappointment, and passion.”
And here’s a fun tidbit, considering the article I shared ahead of this one: “…The Second Sex produced a storm of critical response, almost entirely negative… in the United States both Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt heaped high-class scorn on Beauvoir.”
9. “Slavery and Revenge” by John Kerrigan, The London Review of Books
John Kerrigan writes about how the literature of slavery is dominated by the plantation revenge plot, or what the historian James Walvin calls “plantocratic revenge.”
…As these violent dynamics found their way into Anglophone writing, they added to the stock of revenge plots that had dealt with questions of justice and liberty since Aeschylus and Euripides through Seneca to Shakespeare’s tragedy about the former slave Othello. Certainly the earliest texts that look extensively at the slave trade – Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko (1688) and Thomas Southerne’s stage adaptation of it (1695) – are structured by the motifs and conventions of revenge tragedy: resentment, conspiracy, delay, the grand soliloquy and, above all, tortured bodies.
Reflecting on the prominence of ‘the morbid and the tragic’ in his own work, the Guyanese poet David Dabydeen once said that ‘the plantation experience had severe and traumatic psychic impacts ... but overwhelmingly had to do with what is the very ground of our being, which is our body.’ This is an obvious reason slavery goes with revenge tragedy. The ‘human butchers’, in the words of Olaudah Equiano, writing in 1789, ‘who cut and mangle the slaves in a shocking manner on the most trifling occasions’, using the excuse of punishment to justify their sadism, might have learned their trade from Titus Andronicus. Plantocratic revenge continued the reduction of the African that began with capture and sale. Southerne asks for an onstage tableau with Oroonoko ‘upon his Back, his Legs and Arms stretcht out, and chain’d to the Ground’. His punishment for rebellion is an extension of the treatment of slaves on the Middle Passage. Behn’s prince, denied revenge against the planters, stabs and eviscerates himself, and is stitched up only so that his enemies can enjoy his execution. In high tragic fashion, he endures it with stoic indifference, smoking a pipe of tobacco. At the end of Southerne’s tragedy, there is a histrionic glance at the supernatural machinery of the genre, when Oroonoko, about to kill himself, stabs the governor of the colony in a confusing tangle of bodies and says that he will make a ghost of him.
…It has been said that in C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins (1938) Toussaint becomes a tragic hero because, like Hamlet elsewhere in James’s work, he is caught between two worlds: France and its monarchy as contrasted with Republican liberty. It is at least as important to notice that for James the Haitian Revolution was pulled between vengeful rebellion of the sort Oroonoko exemplifies and a forward-looking notion of politically directed violence from which revenge is at best a distraction. ‘Revenge has no place in politics,’ he contends at one point. His Toussaint resembles Hamlet because he resists taking revenge yet is caught up in events that deliver it and this eats into his soul. James tells us that Toussaint ‘abhorred the spirit of revenge and useless bloodshed of any kind’, yet he began an address to the slaves of Haiti with the words: ‘Brothers and friends ... I have undertaken vengeance.’
10. “E. McKnight Kauffer, a Commercial Artist With Ideals” by Caitlin Condell, Hyperallergic
An essay excerpted from E. McKnight Kauffer: The Artist in Advertising by Caitlin Condell and Emily M. Orr.
…From the outset of his career until his death, Kauffer championed the principle that a designer held a responsibility not only to his client but also to his public. A poster, he believed, was a work of art that served the dual purpose of informing people and aiding industry. It was an opportunity both to share important information and to introduce people to a new way of seeing. Kauffer’s genius lay in his ability to synthesize conventions of the avant-garde and to adapt them to the needs of a client and to respond to the public’s desire to be challenged. Although “E. McKnight Kauffer” was for a time a household name, it was not synonymous with one style but evocative of many. Kauffer constantly sought to metabolize what he saw in contemporary visual culture and make it relevant and new to an awaiting audience.
11. “The Lesbian Partnership That Changed Literature” by Emma Garman, The Paris Review
With a lede like this, I don’t know how you could not read this essay by Emma Garman, about Jane Heap and Margaret Caroline Anderson, the latter of whom is a new personal hero (once when she was depressed she decided the cure for her depression would be to launch “the most interesting magazine of all time”):
In the early thirties, for a certain clique of Left Bank–dwelling American lesbians, the place to be was not an expat haunt like the Café de Flore or Le Deux Magots. Nor was it Le Monocle, the wildly popular nightclub owned by tuxedoed butch Lulu du Montparnasse and named for the accessory worn to signal one’s orientation. According to the writer Solita Solano, the “only important thing in Paris” was a study group on the philosophies of the Greek-Armenian mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, held at Jane Heap’s apartment…
12. “One Weird Trick for Destroying the Digital Economy” by Marie Solis, The Nation
Marie Solis interviews Tim Hwang, author of Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet, which posits that “programmatic advertising,” the system which governs most of online advertising, is on the verge of collapse. As Solis puts it, “If enough people began to doubt the value of online ads, the whole thing would go bust.” Says, Hwang:
I spent a decade out in California before I came to New York. For a period of time I worked at Google and did public policy there, and then I worked in New York at Data & Society. So I’ve worked on both the data and corporate side of tech and its impact. I got really interested in trying to understand the infrastructure of the Internet and how it creates these huge companies with giant profit margins. The more I dug in, the more amazing it seemed to me that this is how we decided to fuel this huge economic engine. Around the same time I was also reading Too Big to Fail, Andrew Sorkin’s book on the financial crisis, and the two things started merging in my head.
13. “Oath” by Eileen Myles, The Paris Review
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14. “Summer. Gates of the Body.” by Galina Rymbu, Granta
The Paris Review excerpted Eileen Myles’s foreword to F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry, edited by Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky and Galina Rymbu; and Granta excerpted a poem by Galina Rymbu, which appears in the anthology.
Myles’s intro is enigmatic and flippant, diving into the mysteries headfirst, not really caring:
“Grass, intentions. Voices on the other side of the hedge. A lawnmower in the distance. Totally bourgeois. So what.”
Rymbu’s poem begins:
“why did she instagram the insides of a dead dog / mixed with sod, under a tree, is this the end already or not yet?”
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