This Week in Books: “Setting out in five hundred pages…
…an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes.”
Dear Reader,
I’m traveling to see family at the moment and I brought two books with me, and I thought they’d help me decompress from work, but it turns out they’re both about work, and they’re making me feel sort of stressed. The first of them, Hotel Splendide, a memoir by Ludwig Bemelmans (yes, of Madeline fame) about his time spent working as a waiter in a fancy hotel in New York in the 1920s, is just so pretty (it’s pink) that I had to get it (a new reissue from Pushkin Press, it’s French of flap but not deckled of edge, but that’s ok, god has granted me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change), and I’ve always loved work memoirs (I used to excerpt them all the time on Longreads, I was going to make a list of some work memoirs for you all and then I remembered I have already been doing this for some time) so given all these particulars I thought it would be good. Which, to be clear, it is. Bemelmans starts out his career at the “Hotel Splendide” as the busboy/assistant to a waiter who is specifically tasked with giving patrons a hard time—diners are only seated at his table if the maitre d’ never wants them to come back. It’s very funny but like I said I was stressing while thinking about providing intentionally bad customer service so I picked up my other book, which I acquired on the advice of a friend who is really into Swedish crime thrillers, a genre I have never dabbled in, so I told her to recommend me a good one for newbies, and she recommended Henning Mankell’s Faceless Killers. And I started reading it and it turns out poor Kurt Wallander is just absolutely stressing about work, he feels like all his coworkers at the police precinct are thwarting him. They are all betting on horses instead of working on solving the absurdly violent crime that just happened? I have no idea if this is mystery-relevant, I hope it’s just an frustrating detail about Kurt Wallander’s dysfunctional workplace that persists for the entire series.
I was going to bring LOTE, which I bought because of that extremely compelling have you read LOTE yet?? piece from a few weeks ago, but it’s printed on like archival quality paper or something, dense as hell, an absolute brick, Duke is preserving LOTE for the nuclear war bunker, I didn’t think I could carry it without misaligning myself. Plus, I’m pretty sure it’s also about work anyway. Grad student type work, adjunct work, something like that? You know it’s possible that all books are about work now that I really am thinking about it. It’s possible life in general is about work??
Anyway that’s my week in books. My brother is about to go build a fire so I gotta go.
—Dana
p.s. The Borges quote in the title of this post reminds me of something I heard about in a recent Behind the Bastards episode on Sam Bankman-Fried, also quoted in this Washington Post article, that had me kind of rooting for him tbh… He sounds like a disaffected book worker:
“I’m addicted to reading,” a journalist said to the erstwhile multibillionaire in a recently resurfaced interview. “Oh, yeah?” SBF replied. “I would never read a book.” … “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. … If you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
1. “Passion Doesn’t Pay the Bills” by Sophie Vershbow, Vulture
Sophie Vershbow reports on the HarperCollins strike.
“There’s no money on the table. That’s why we had to strike,” said Laura Harshberger, a senior production editor and union chair who sits on the negotiating committee. “Our proposal right now would only increase payroll by less than a million dollars in the first year. Management’s proposal is only $14,000.” In the third quarter of 2022, ending September 30, the company’s earnings were $39 million. The million dollars needed for 2023 payroll increases is less than a conservative imprint of HarperCollins (the company is owned by the megacorporation News Corp., owner of Fox News) paid for Jared Kushner’s 2022 book advance.
2. “‘Love and Rockets,’ a Series that Helped Redefine Comics, Turns 40” by Robert Ito, The New York Times
Robert Ito writes about Love and Rockets, a long-running comic by three brothers, Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez. (Volume one, for beginners who aren’t sure they’re ready for the $400 anniversary collection, is Maggie the Mechanic.)
This year, the series celebrates its 40th anniversary, a noteworthy accomplishment for any print publication, let alone an indie comic created far afield of the superhero mainstream. To mark the occasion, Fantagraphics is publishing Love and Rockets: The First Fifty, a collection of the comic book’s original run, which ran from 1982 to 1996…
From the beginning, Jaime and Gilbert have split the book in two, with each artist writing and drawing their own stories. Their older brother, Mario, has contributed sporadically to the series. The collection contains every issue in its entirety, including ads and letter pages, and features tales on everything from the female pro wrestling circuit ( “House of Raging Women”) to clueless first-world do-gooders abroad ( “An American in Palomar”).
3. “Nick Drnaso, Acting Class” by Lauren Collee, Chicago Review
Lauren Collee writes about Nick Drnaso’s Acting Class (Drawn & Quarterly).
…The visual economy of Drnaso’s work reflects the conditions within which his characters are attempting to survive. Toward the beginning of Acting Class, Lou adopts the role of a dog and has an elaborate fantasy in which he’s turned into a can of processed meat and eaten by his owner. Following Marx’s definition of a commodity as “congealed labour time,” the labor of Lou’s performance as an attentive animal companion has quite literally been liquified and congealed into an abstraction.
…The uncanny intimacy of Acting Class feels true to the cycles of self-exposure and self-commodification that characterize many people’s experiences of life on the internet. In some ways, reading Drnaso is similar to reading a transcript of text messages, his illustrations giving away none of the bodily information that might otherwise guide us toward a particular interpretation… In Drnaso as on the internet, extreme forms of disclosure coexist with extreme forms of withholding.
4. “An X-Ray of the Soul” by Lizzy Lerud, Poetry
Lizzy Lerud writes about When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke), a reissue of 1974’s Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica.
…Time magazine ran a glossy feature containing photographs of white state police troopers, their faces obscured by sleek gas masks, readying their weapons after five days of tense negotiations… Turning to the second page of Time, a photo showing the first four lines of Claude McKay’s sonnet “If We Must Die,” a handwritten copy in neatly slanting inked script, caught [Gwendolyn] Brooks’s eye.
The article identified the poem as an example of the political writings that men imprisoned at Attica passed among themselves, along with copies of books by Malcolm X and Bobby Seale… Brooks sent a withering letter to the editor: “Please tell the poetry specialist,” she wrote, “that his ‘find’ is a portion of one of the most famous poems ever written—known to Hitler, elementary school children to say nothing of Winston Churchill.”
5. “Where to Begin?” by JW McCormack, Sidecar
JW McCormack writes about the New Directions Storybooks. His favorite is Cesar Aira’s The Famous Magician, translated by Chris Andrews.
Meeting the titular figure at an outdoor market in Buenos Aires, a sixty-something writer who resembles Aira is offered the power to transmute sugar into gold if he gives up literature (‘a waste of time and dangerous for the purity of the soul’).
6. “Lyrics in Search of an Allegory” by Sunil Iyengar, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Sunil Iyengar reviews recent books by Rachel Hadas: Pandemic Almanac (Ragged Sky), Piece by Piece: Selected Prose (Paul Dry), and Love and Dread (Measure Press).
But I am breaking out of there: I leave the meeting, blank the screen, that tiny smudgy windowpane, and flee the confines of my square.
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