This Week in Books: “Short Stories Needed To Satisfy Postal Regulations”
“They were the wives of an ancient teddy bear, whom they called the Old One.”
Dear Reader,
Been paranoid lately of une grande faux pas—publishing a 12ft ladder link to the New Yorker on my substack—only to discover, to my astonishment, to my amazement, to my disquiet, that the New Yorker has published a 12ft ladder link to themselves, deep within their own magazine. What constitutes failure? I think, probably, not that. That is an anecdotal lede. A metaphor, for you to keep at the front of your mind, like a pearl on the tongue of a clam. Roll it and make it beautiful for me, would you.
The article is about Aubrey Beardsley, who ran two magazines, one feminist for women and one kind of erotically charged for men. I feel like I could do that, but in this day and age and with this target demo I’d make the erotic one for women and the feminist one for men, you know what I mean? We live in an unprecedented sexual era. He died at 26. I could not do that. Too late.
What constitutes failure? Dying young is a kind of failure, from a critical perspective. Failure to live long enough to fill up a whole proper biography. Then again! Beardsley’s commercial art was so ubiquitous that it defined an entire age. On the other hand! He wrote raunchy books that were never published unbowdlerized—the buzzword of the moment because of, what, Roald Dahl?? I refuse to look into this until next week—until just now. The same thing happened to Violette Leduc. Is that a kind of failure? To be so perverse but so good at it that they publish you but publish you wrong; they take out the gross parts and leave the smooth parts, like a circumcision or just any type of surgery whatsoever would work here, as a metaphor. “Be unremarkable,” advises Garth Miró. “(If you’re really lucky, you might even be hated.) Only then will our writing not be stolen by algorithms.” What constitutes failure? Well first of all, literary failure: it’s the only way not to get fed into the AI.
So as a strategy it has its perks. “Nothing succeeds like failure,” writes Matthew Redmond, in an entirely different context. No wait it’s sort of related. He’s saying: Coleridge’s constant sense of failure is what made him so good, because we like reading about failure, we like reading works burdened by their own sense of inadequacy. And more than anything we like plagiarism—Coleridge’s weirdo lit crit magnum opus Biographia Literaria was plagiarized to all hell and it was Thomas “the opium eater” de Quincey who ratted him out, wow that’s low.
We can’t all get as low as Coleridge. Some people have a moderate low. Helen Mirrlees wrote three novels and an epic poem, at least half of which I’ve seen called masterpieces, but then nothing else for decades and no one even bothered to tell her when they were reprinting her books because they didn’t notice she was still alive. But she just wasn’t into it anymore because her partner had died and I can see why, she must have missed this, because it sounds really good, to me:
In 1913, when Mirrlees was twenty-six and Jane Harrison sixty-three, they began to live together, and remained inseparable until Harrison’s death in 1928. No one really understood the relationship, though all saw that it was deeply intimate: The two women developed, for instance, a private mythology in which they were the wives of Harrison’s ancient teddy bear, whom they called the Old One.
So we’re not calling this failure, we’re calling this a reasonable decision to opt out. Or, we’re calling failure a creative strategy for continuing to live. If you think about it (I have no doubt you have thought about it) this newsletter is a failure. I write the part that I write because if I didn’t write it the rest would just be plagiarism. I’d be indistinguishable from those bots trawling the internet for prose and hewing their own magazines from the scraps, sending out mysterious pingbacks from the void. Who’s the AI now, eh. We’re always asking: is the bot better at being a human than the human. But never: is the human better at being a bot than the bot. What constitutes failure? I think I’d make a better AI than Bing.
Last week after I read that Walter Mosley interview where he mentioned Mickey Spillane, I knew I had seen something else to do with Mickey Spillane somewhere but I hadn’t saved it. But I was hooked on Spillane, after the Mosley interview. I wanted more Spillane. I demanded Spillane. Give me Spillane’s head on a platter, I commanded, Salomé-style. Well I found it again this week! And that’s a success, we’re calling that a success. “The Brooklyn native fell in with some writers supplying dialog and scenarios for the growing comic-book market,” writes Kevin Canfield, which is phrasing I really like. I love the idea of falling in with scenario suppliers, like it could happen to anyone. One of Spillane’s jobs was to write “‘filler’ short stories needed to satisfy postal regulations,” an incredible detail. They were doing the modern equivalent of trying to follow media mail regulations, I guess—they didn’t get the printed matter discount if the book was all pictures. Or the modern equivalent of how I have to write something original for this newsletter to get past your spam filters. So that I can pass as a non-bot. Prose for the postman. By “working under strict word-count constraints,” Spillane “forged a lean narrative voice” that made him so rich and famous he could write catty letters to whomever he wanted, and hang out with celebs, and be on Columbo one time. So that constitutes failure, I think: get good at writing by repeatedly writing something nobody is even meant to really read. Then keep writing just like that, in a way that is so bad it’s compelling. Sell millions of books. Fail straight up. Forge a lean narrative voice. Good thing I kept it short this week.
—Dana
1. “The Best Sex I’ve Ever Read: A Long-Censored Queer Tryst at Boarding School” by Carmen Maria Machado as told to Isle McElroy, Vulture
An excerpt from Violette Leduc’s Thérèse and Isabelle accompanied by commentary from Carmen Maria Machado.
“You don’t want to guide me,” I said, alone outside our universe of fantasy.
2. “Aubrey Beardsley’s Perverse Recipe for Success” by Colton Valentine, The New Yorker
Colton Valentine writes about Aubrey Beardsley, referring to Margaret Stetz’s exhibition catalog Aubrey Beardsley, 150 Years Young (Grolier) and Decadent Writings of Aubrey Beardsley (MHRA), edited by Sasha Dovzhyk and Simon Wilson.
Was Beardsley a gender radical or a reactionary? Part of his mystery is how his illustrations mean such different things in different contexts…. [A]n imperious, smoldering figure… might be read as a feminist or a femme fatale.
That disinterest put Beardsley at odds with his most notorious collaborator, Oscar Wilde. It is a particular irony of their relation that one of Wilde’s least remembered works—the overwrought play Salomé (1891)—elicited Beardsley’s most celebrated drawings. Masterpieces in asymmetric composition, they conjure a world where everything’s lewd and no one’s gender is clear. But the images’ priapic fauna and aqueous forms had little to do with the play’s coded language and byzantine atmosphere. As the writer Ada Leverson put it, “Oscar loved purple and gold, Aubrey put everything down in black and white.”
3. “A Novelist’s Reflections on Useful Fictions” by Alan Jacobs, The Hedgehog Review
Alan Jacobs writes about Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist.
[I]t is one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written… Mirrlees… seems to have asked herself what a fantasy novel would look like if it were set not in a medieval society but… a mercantile one.
The story Mirrlees tells centers on the inability of the senators of Dorimare to prevent smugglers from bringing intoxicating fairy fruit into their city. Thus the main arc of the story is, essentially, a drug war centered on a puzzlingly permeable border. Call it Narcos: Fairy Land Edition. But it is also a story of political intrigue; a cold-case murder mystery; and, above all I think, an extended meditation on the necessary fictions that inevitably sustain any political economy.
4. “The Children of California Shall Be Our Children” by Ben Beitler, Los Angeles Review of Books
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5. “Palo Alto, Disinterred” by Ryan Baesemann, Cleveland Review of Books
Ben Beitler reviews Malcolm Harris’ Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (Little, Brown) and Ryan Baesemann interviews Harris, clearly pre New York Time review (“I don't know if conservatives are going to take it so badly.”)
“[O]nly by understanding how we’re made use of can we start to distinguish our selves from our situations,” he writes. “How can you know what you want or feel or think — who you are — if you don’t know which way history’s marionette strings are tugging?”
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“…We blame Hoover for the depression, and then he's the guy Roosevelt beat to turn the country into Roosevelt Land. Except now, from a vantage point of the 21st century, we realize that we didn't live in Roosevelt Land very long. He died, and then Hoover outlived him. I was really interested to learn more about this period where Truman assumes the presidency after FDR's death, and turns to Hoover for help…
“Our control over post-war Japan ends up being one of the most important things in world history. And that's Hoover's boys doing that, with a whole bunch of other Hooverites that are sourced out of Stanford. They then come back and really do create Silicon Valley…”
6. “Islam Inc.” by Youssef Rakha, The London Magazine
An excerpt from Youssef Rakha’s story collection Emissaries (Barakunan).
I could tell you he went unhinged and chased me out with his gun. I could tell you he forced me to shoot up, whether heroin or something equally strong, then deposited my limp body on a street corner. I could even tell you we made love; first, he said, I needed to lose my homo virginity in preparation for the Moment of Reckoning. . . . In the state I was in, anything could’ve happened and I could’ve gone along with anything. But the truth is, after putting the pill in my breast pocket, I don’t remember a thing. There was a sense of being in a closed-off space in the middle of a war zone—as if we were in a subterranean nuclear bunker while the radiation cloud mushroomed, incandescent, right over our heads.
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