This Week in Books: “The Furniture of Human Culture”
“With the editors’ guidance and manipulation, PMC readers learned... a masculine managerial style that would help them rise in their professions.”
Dear Reader,
“What I think – and this is just from a magical point of view – is that effectively we are living amongst the dismembered fragments of magic.” So says Alan Moore in a long interview with Miles Ellingham about, among other things, the occult. The “wizard of Northampton” goes on to say:
Palaeolithic shamanism was the one-stop theory of everything. Most of the stuff that has come to be the furniture of human culture has its origins there. The shaman would have originated writing and depicting. The shaman would have used dance as part of their ritual function. They would have also been advising the leaders of the tribes. They would have been observing the cycles of the stars and the cycles of the seasons. They would have been pulling together the observations that would lead to science, lead to agriculture. But once civilization started, magic was gradually dismembered…
I think that if we were to reconnect magic and art as a starting point, because they’re practically the same thing anyway, make art the product of your magical experiments… then that would give magic an enormous sense of purpose and I think it would also lend art the vision that it seems to be lacking at present. A lot of modern art seems rather empty and hollow conceptualism that lacks any real vision or substance or power. A linking of magic and art would help both of those fields. Then, once you’ve done that, maybe linking art and science. There’s plenty of work already done in that regard.
I’ve seen artists who’ve taken enormous inspiration from the latest findings of science and scientists have become interested in the processes of art. They don’t have to be in opposition to each other. That might give science some of its morality back…
This resonates with Karen Heller’s report on the ever-larger print runs of Braiding Sweetgrass, written over a decade ago by the poet-scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer.
…The book is simultaneously meditative about the abundance of the natural world and bold in its call to action on “climate urgency.” Kimmerer asks readers to honor the Earth’s glories, restore rather than take, and reject an economy and culture rooted in acquiring more. She invites us to learn from plants and other species, nature’s teachers…
Sales of the book were on the rise when the pandemic began, a moment, Kimmerer says, “of values clarification for us all, of saying what really matters”...
“I was sensing, as an environmentalist, this great longing in the public, a longing to belong to a place,” Kimmerer says. “I think about how many people have no culture, have no ancestral home. ‘I don’t belong here’ is what I was hearing from people. That sense of not belonging here contributes to the way we treat the land.”
This “great longing in the public” has planted Braiding Sweetgrass on the New York Times bestseller list for 129 weeks.
A different kind of longing has rooted Colleen Hoover there too. Also born of the pandemic, Hoover’s success exceeds typical clichés of quantification. As Alexandra Alter writes in a recent profile,
[Hoover] holds six of the top 10 spots on The New York Times’s paperback fiction best-seller list, a stunning number of simultaneous best sellers from a single author. She has sold 8.6 million print books this year alone — more copies than the Bible, according to NPD BookScan.
There’s a tension in my list this week between these unlikely tales of stratospheric success and the far more quotidian stories of suppression and loss: the unmimeographed and forever lost editions of the Illustrated Feature Section (IFS), which was the section of Black newspapers in late 20s and early 30s that held all the genre fiction; the hundreds of Socialist newspapers that shuttered after being deemed “unmailable” by the Wilson administration; the progressive mainstream publishing houses that have been gutted by conglomeration: Pantheon in the 90s, and Metropolitan just the other day.
And of course that most suppressed of all men, Casanova. Jailed dozens of times, read by almost no one, canceled by every court in Europe, Casanova climbed the social ladder by peddling magical cures to rich widows and divining the future for the elite. As Clare Bucknell writes in her review of Leo Damrosch’s new biography of the man,
…His most lucrative conquest, in Paris, was of the wealthy Marquise d’Urfé, a middle-aged widow and obsessive amateur alchemist, who “already possessed,” as she believed, “the philosopher’s stone,” and told Casanova she could use it to be reincarnated with his help. Over the course of six years, he stole vast sums of money from her, cynically stringing out the reincarnation process as long as he could (not least because, according to the fiction he himself had invented, it would involve impregnating her three times).
Social mobility, especially rapid, unlikely movement up the ladder via sudden acquisitions of wealth or standing, is associated again and again in Casanova’s story with magic—an activity which, being inexplicable, is able to cut through established structures and conventions. The link he makes between mobility and a kind of magical thinking makes sense in the context of his feelings about traditional authority. Though skeptical by nature, he thrived, as Damrosch argues, in ancien régime milieus: he depended on hierarchies because they gave him something to scale, and on rules because, without them, there would be nothing to break.
A magician can be a shaman or a trickster, so it’s always good to figure which ahead of time, I guess, is the moral today, dear reader—before you get too deep into a pregnancy-reincarnation scheme.
—Dana
1. “The Joy of Genre” by Nathan Jefferson, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Nathan Jefferson reviews Brooks E. Hefner’s Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow (University of Minnesota).
…In these serials, Black pulp heroes could confront dangers familiar to their audience and overcome them in spectacular fashion, a far cry from the fatalism and tragedy of canonical highbrow fiction.
Many of these stories ran in a tabloid insert called the Illustrated Feature Section (IFS) that ran in Black newspapers across the country from 1928 to 1932. The insert… had a circulation of almost 200,000 at its peak, plus a significant pass-along rate… Despite its popularity at the time, the marginal status of the IFS and similar supplemental sections meant that many editions were not microfilmed or survive only in incomplete runs.
…James H. Hill’s Jacques Lenglet, for example, was a Senegalese flying ace who faced Germans in the World Wars as the Black Eagle, then fought Jim Crow segregation in the American South while serving as an “international agent.” …[F]or Black readers, Lenglet’s fight against the physically disfigured Nazi masterminds gives the lie to their claims of racial superiority, and bringing the fight against injustice home “turns the genre in on itself.”
2. “Haunted Resonance: An Interview With Alan Moore” by Miles Ellingham, The Quietus
Miles Ellingham interviews Alan Moore on the occasion of the publication of Moore’s short story collection Illuminations (Bloomsbury).
…On his 40th birthday, [Moore] declared himself a ‘ceremonial magician’ and turned to worshipping a second-century Roman snake god named Glycon. This formal shift to magic has come to define much of his work, particularly as so many of his creations seem to have conjured themselves into the real world. V’s Guy Fawkes mask, for example, became the face of anti-establishment movements like Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street while Alexandria Ocasio Cortez once quoted Watchmen’s masked anti-hero, Rorschach, as a warning to congressional colleagues, “I’m not locked up in here with YOU. You’re locked up in here with ME.”
3. “Crazy for You” by Erin Somers, Bookforum
Erin Somers reviews Kaitlyn Tiffany’s Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It (MCD/FSG).
…Tiffany fits One Direction fans within a lineage of girls being self-consciously weird about pop idols. She writes, “Though the criticism of fangirls is that they become tragically selfless and one-track-minded, the evidence available everywhere I look is that they become self-aware and creatively free.” Their affect is both ironic and sincere, both a bit and not. They’re joking, seriously. Their memes, described extensively in a chapter called “Deep-Frying,” take aim at their own fervor. To me, this ambivalence is the richest, most exciting, most fun approach to art. It’s also a common attitude on the internet, the fangirl’s natural habitat. You can care and not care at the same time. You don’t have to choose.
4. “Liberation Gospel” by Kevin Rogan, The Baffler
Kevin Rogan pans Jeremiah Moss’s Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York (Norton).
The book’s sum of pages and pages filled with alternating paragraphs of pop-theory schlock, psychological ruminations, and self-obsessed diary entries are all bent to the purpose of differentiating Moss from his class fellows by erecting a new schema in which lifestyle choice becomes the only relevant metric. Every mention of the “New People” is doubly revealing. It goes without saying that they are revolting creatures, the grinning progeny of this or the other venal and psychotic Vice President of Marketing or Managing Director or Analyst or whatever. But Moss is also revealed in his repeated inability to meaningfully separate himself from them, instead relying on recorded behaviors and psychological imputation to protest that he is fundamentally different. He isn’t. He lives in the same building, has the same type of job, the same proximity to a genteel life free of concerns over money or status. But, he says, they are devoted wholly to the “normative order,” and he is not.
…[W]hen Moss makes repeated trips to Occupy City Hall for the “free breakfast,” no amount of contemplation about how “humans are wired to equate food with love” or how his donation to pay off his tab is “transactional” and therefore unnecessary can elide the fact that he treated the occupation like a diner.
5. “The Thoughtful Prick” by Clare Bucknell, Harper’s
Clare Bucknell reviews Leo Damrosch’s Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova (Yale).
Casanova started writing his life at the point he felt he had stopped living it. Confined, by bad weather and old age, sometimes for months at a time, to the isolated castle in the forests of Bohemia where he spent his last thirteen years, he wrote almost unceasingly, organizing the messy drama of his exploits into a series of chapters and acts. His autobiography, Histoire de Ma Vie, which was left unfinished upon his death in 1798, stretches to more than three thousand pages in modern editions…
6. “The View From the Fiction of the ‘New Yorker’” by Nora Shaalan, Public Books
Nora Shaalan has conducted a study that quantifies regional representation in the New Yorker’s fiction section.
…Ireland boasts a granularity score of 1.875. The country is mentioned using 77 unique locations, placing it in the top five most diverse countries in the corpus. There are many plausible reasons why evocations of Ireland are both diverse and granular, but one striking detail stands out. Of the 176 stories that mention Ireland, 135 are by Irish writers—the likes of Edna O’Brien, Roddy Doyle, and William Trevor.
By comparison, of the 213 stories that mention China, only 10 are written by an author of Chinese descent. All 10 are by Yiyun Li.
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