This Week in Books: “The market of markets will one day be countryside.”
“The way things are now cannot be total, no matter how fervent any insistence that this is all we get.”
Dear Reader,
Well, I am going to add a big asterisk to my previous newsletter, in which I did righteously rail against corporate publishing and the New York Times (which just goes to show that I am truly an Iconoclastic Substacker now, hi boys) because I’ve been thinking that I ought to mention that small businesses and nonprofits are in fact not, by contrast, necessarily virtuous. Or, whatever virtue inheres in smallness is easily, and often, squandered by that breed of strange and petty tyrants that tend to seize power in the littlest, unmonitored corners of the world. You know, like at SPD (allegedly, parody, parody).
“Cabbage Market.” Vaclav Maly (1874–1935).
What else to say about this though? It feels familiar. I have heard of other workplaces in lit world that sound nearly as bad as this. Ah, I’ve heard of two that sound worse than this.
But, hear me out: what if we had a more robust social welfare system — free & universal health-, dental-, vision-care; free college; arts grants; a $20/hr minimum wage; free childcare; ultra extended vacations & leaves; no more deportations; no more police brutality; affordable housing; a little UBI, as a treat. I think that maybe, maybe with all that and more, the ability of mini-tyrannies to establish themselves and reign uncontested in lit world, in many worlds, would dissipate.
Because if people have more resources, they are less likely to feel intimidated. Down with the conditions of it all!
Make it so that when your boss tells you to clean his house, you can laugh at him and walk out! This is the only way forward.
I feel like all of America is run exactly like this. The jerkiest people rise to the top. But if we made society a smidge less barbaric, I don’t think it would be like that. I think the power of assholes diminishes when no one is vulnerable??
I’ve published two interviews on here that did the rounds of lit world. One with Anne Boyer, one with Lauren Oyler. (Both of them interviewed by Sam Jaffe Goldstein, who is the best.) Both of them said basically the same thing about What Is To Be Done About Literature. Said Lauren:
…It’s also a bigger problem than valiant editors can solve. Countries that have robust welfare systems, affordable healthcare, and support for the arts—they have much healthier literary cultures, and the two things are definitely related. If you live somewhere where you can feel comfortable quitting your job and writing your serious novel that may or may not make any money, the publicity frenzy has less power…
Said Anne:
…There is no such thing as a soulless world. Whatever you forgot to sell, whatever couldn’t be consumed or debased, whatever hides away, whatever can never be ground up into sellable particles of metadata, whatever exists in the relation of love against the relation of profit, whatever refuses a brand: this is the soul, the organ of refusal.
The way things are now cannot be total, no matter how fervent any insistence that this is all we get. Can a fucked up world make a non-fucked up literature? Probably not. Can we give up trying? No. Why not? Because of the very capacity of a “no,” of the soul itself, which humans possess together, contains within it the ingredient of the possible, including a possible literature and a possible world.
Ah, so yeah, just an idea, but perhaps we should change how we are doing things!
Stay safe,
Dana
1. “Marguerite Duras's ‘Me & Other Writing’ and ‘Duras/Godard Dialogues’” by Rachel Kushner, Artforum
Rachel Kushner reviews Me & Other Writing, a collection of Duras’s essays, and Duras/Godard Dialogues, a transcription of three conversations the two had after Duras refused to let Godard direct an adaption of The Lover.
Godard… riles her by mentioning Sartre, knowing Duras can’t stand him, and she takes the bait, calling Sartre “the Solzhenitsyn of a country without a gulag,” who produces “bulk writing” and isn’t vulgar—which is what she herself aspires to be. “All right, yes, but listen, you’re overdoing it,” Godard tells her. At one point, he says openly that the two of them “can’t talk to each other.” He says he prefers to listen to her and compares the experience of listening to her to listening to Ronald Reagan or Qaddafi.
2. “Death of a Poet” by Adewale Maja-Pearce, The Baffler
Adewale Maja-Pearce remembers the late J. P. Clark-Bekederemo. Maja-Pearce writes that he was working on an official biography of Clark until he discovered a compromising letter in the poet’s archives. When Clark passed away earlier this year, his lawsuit against Maja-Pearce over Maja-Pearce’s unofficially sanctioned biography was ongoing.
The idea for the book was mine and so I was a little surprised at the alacrity with which he jumped at the proposal, as if he had been waiting for me. Alas, we eventually fell out over a letter I found in the extensive archives he placed at my disposal, four filing cabinets crammed with papers going back to his primary school reports, many of them disintegrating in the high humidity, which forced me to spread them out in the sun, one batch at a time.
The letter, dated 23 May 1975, seemed innocuous enough at first sight. Writing to his London lawyer, Clark apologizes for his long silence over the Soyinka libel case… He then moves on “to something more cheerful and profitable,” to wit:
“…would your friends/clients like to bid for crude?”
3. “Flacks and Hacks” by Kaitlin Phillips, Bookforum
Kaitlin Phillips reviews Ben Widdicombe’s Gatecrasher: How I Helped the Rich Become Famous and Ruin the World.
The real allure in this book, for me, was less the celebrity gossip than the inside baseball about newspaper writers and the publicity firms they are so often at odds with…
Widdicombe dismisses the “sloppy taxonomy” that might lead lesser gatecrashers to moan about the “door bitch” guarding the velvet rope. She is, in fact, a “clipboard.” “After many years of diligent work” a clipboard can aspire “to the pinnacle of the profession. This is being a ‘headset.’” The terminology thrills: “There is a proud tradition in tabloid media of the ‘beat-up,’ meaning to blow a minor incident out of proportion in order to create the impression of a major scandal.” He clocks, as a young reporter, how much of fitting in is adopting a new vocabulary. (“Fashion people don’t wear pants. They wear ‘a pant.’”)
4. “Talk Less, Work More” by Namit Arora, The Baffler
Namit Arora reviews Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil’s India’s First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975-1977 and Gyan Prakash’s Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point.
The twenty-one months of Emergency that followed are regarded as the darkest chapter in independent India’s history. For those old enough to remember, the word recalls mass incarcerations without trial, a gagged press and propaganda, slum demolitions, and—most shockingly—the forced sterilizations of millions. Often cited as a cautionary tale in Indian political discourse, it is generally seen as an “exceptional” period from which India recovered admirably well, thanks in large part to the resilience of its democratic institutions and ethos.
Two new books powerfully challenge this consensus. In India’s First Dictatorship, Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil expose the chronic weaknesses in India’s democratic culture prior to the Emergency, revealing the role that other actors—businessmen, the middle class, even trade unionists and some communists—played in enabling Gandhi’s authoritarian rule. In Emergency Chronicles, Gyan Prakash considers how aspects of the modern Indian state, particularly its Constitution, enabled a demagogic takeover.
5. “Espionage at the Edge of Empire” by Benjamin Breen, The New Rambler
Benjamin Breen reviews Gregory Afinogenov’s Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power.
Several of the individual portraits in Spies and Scholars are so vivid that they read, at times, like extracts from stories by Gogol or Lermontov, darkly comic and imbued with a sneaky pathos. Take, for instance, what Afinogenov calls “the catastrophe” of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in eighteenth-century Beijing. The Russian staffers of the mission, Afinogenov writes, were “chosen involuntarily and haphazardly with a few months’ notice and in almost all cases dreamed of nothing more than to be allowed to return” to Russia (73). They lived in poverty, they “stewed in utter social isolation,” and “moreover, they were constantly drunk, a fact noted not only by hostile observers but by the missionaries themselves” (73). The diary of one missionary records such happenings as when two fellow missionaries, Larion and Feodot, “were disgustingly drunk and Larion bit Feodot’s hand,” or when “Iosaf the deacon…dragged my beard while the priest Ivan choked me.” Later, according to our forlorn diarist, the same priest “came to my cell and pissed in my tea” (75).
6. “‘Ready Player Two’ Is a Horror Story but Doesn’t Know It” by Laura Hudson, Slate
Laura Hudson’s review of Ready Player Two makes it sound like it is a spiritually unhealthy read, just an insane authoritarian fantasy — and I say this as someone who wrote a long essay a few weeks ago about how I am really into a children’s book series that is basically about a coup d’etat, who is looking forward to the Dune movie, who fundamentally enjoys monarch-centric narratives (though I do not watch The Crown, you guys are crazy for that one), and so on.
…From the perspective of anyone but Wade, Ready Player Two is a horror story that thinks it is a fantasy, narrated by a monster who thinks he is the hero.
Like any monarch who fancies himself a humanitarian, Wade is eager to tell us how vastly he has improved the lives of his subjects. “The ONI made the lives of impoverished people all around the world a lot more bearable—and enjoyable,” Wade says. “People didn’t mind subsisting on dried seaweed and soy protein when they could log on to the ONI-net and download a delicious five-course meal any time they pleased.” It would be fascinating to learn how Wade knows this, as we never see him interact with anyone outside of his tight coterie of equally rich friends, his employees, or the superfans who instantly drop to one knee when they meet him.
7. “Heresies of ‘Dune’” by Daniel Immerwahr, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Speaking of Dune, Daniel Immerwhar wrote this really excellent deep dive into Frank Herbert. The spice is really flowing in this one…
Young Herbert hunted and fished, and it was while out fishing that he met a man he called “Indian Henry” (almost certainly Henry Martin of the Hoh Tribe), who “semi-adopted” the boy, as Herbert told his son. For two years, Henry taught him how to live off the land. It was the start of a lifelong engagement with Native affairs. Herbert’s closest friend in adulthood was Howard Hansen, who grew up on the nearby Quileute reservation and had been trained by elders there as a repository for spiritual knowledge. Herbert would later draft two novels about Indigenous life in Western Washington.
It’s easy to imagine that this socialist-raised, Native American–sympathizing young man would become a leftist. But for Herbert, commune living and Indian Henry’s backwoods lessons firmed up a hostility to the federal government… Herbert became a Republican.
8. “Fort Everywhere” by Daniel Immerwahr, The Nation
Speaking of Daniel Immerwahr, here he is reviewing The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State.
Classifying military engagements can be tricky, but arguably there have been only two years in the past seven and a half decades—1977 and 1979—when the United States was not invading or fighting in some foreign country.
The question is why. Is it something deep-seated in the culture? Legislators in the pocket of the military-industrial complex? An out-of-control imperial presidency? Surely all have played a part. A revelatory new book by David Vine, The United States of War, names another crucial factor, one that is too often overlooked: military bases. Since its earliest years, the United States has operated bases in foreign lands. These have a way of inviting war, both by stoking resentment toward the United States and by encouraging US leaders to respond with force. As conflicts mount, the military builds more, leading to a vicious circle.
9. “An Island at the Crossroads” by Amelia Lester, The New York Review of Books
Speaking of U.S. military bases, Amelia Lester reviews Akemi Johnson’s Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the US Military Bases in Okinawa.
As Akemi Johnson writes in Night in the American Village, Japan’s so-called sympathy payments act as a financial incentive to keep thousands of members of the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps in Okinawa. Johnson, a fourth-generation Japanese-American, focuses on how women in Okinawa interact with American service members. She is interested not only in how American bases abroad affect local communities, but also how these satellite cities reveal truths about American culture. Spending time in Okinawa as a college student, Johnson writes, she “glimpsed an America I hadn’t seen before.”
10. “One Woman and Two Great Men” by Danielle Dutton, Chicago Review
This perfect short story from the great Danielle Dutton is about, ah, among other things, how Thomas de Quincey took authorial credit for his translation of Ehregott Andreas Wasianski’s memoir The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant.
…Kant had a strict habit, it turns out, of reading by candlelight until ten o’clock then removing his mind from exertion for one golden half hour, sure that a mind laden with study would be prone to wakefulness. So he simply sat. Until, having removed his mind for the requisite time, he would undress, lie down, and wrap himself in a blanket—cotton in summer, wool in autumn, then, as the air cooled, both of these together. Once Königsberg was in the fullest grip of winter, frost felling ancient oaks and small hills of snow on every pitched rooftop, he’d sensibly switch to eiderdown or, to hit the nail on the head, to a blanket of eiderdown ingeniously stuffed, in its upper third, with wool instead of feathers (a blanket, then, both padded and stuffed), with which he’d enfold his body—nesting more than covering, we’re told. Here’s how: first, he’d sit on the side of the bed and with an agile motion vault obliquely into his lair; next, he drew one corner of the bedclothes under his left shoulder and, passing it below his back, brought it round so as to rest under his right shoulder; fourthly, by a particular tour d’addresse, he operated on the opposite corner in similar fashion, finally contriving to roll the blanket around his entire person.
11. “Korea’s Tireless Patriot and Revolutionary” by E. Tammy Kim, The New York Review of Books
E. Tammy Kim writes about the soon-to-be-reissued Song of Arirang: The Story of a Korean Rebel Revolutionary in China, the memoir of the revolutionary Kim San as told to the journalist Helen Foster Snow, who wrote it under the pen name Nym Wales.
For much of the postwar period, members of a once large, diverse South Korean left wing espousing Marxist and anarchist views were viewed as North Korean sympathizers and targeted for elimination. In the late 1940s South Korean military forces, with the knowledge of the United States, killed as many as 60,000 civilians on Jeju, a southern island governed “by strong left-wing people’s committees,” according to the historian Bruce Cumings. The repression continued nationwide after the Korean War. But by the 1970s, a democracy movement called minjung (literally, “the people”) began to rise up against Rhee’s eventual successor, General Park Chung-hee. Minjung radicals, concentrated among factory workers and students, pressed for free speech and political representation. Thousands of citizens rallied and marched, through teargas and bullets, and defied curfews and state censors.
They also studied leftist literature, much of it written in English and Japanese. As Han Hong-koo, a minjung veteran and popular historian of modern Korea, told me in Seoul two years ago, reading in those days felt like a matter of life and death—and ideological calisthenics. Of all the books that gave him and his comrades access to a recent, radical past, the most important was Song of Arirang: The Story of a Korean Revolutionary in China, a memoir as told to the journalist Helen Foster Snow.
12. “The Rich, Literary Life of the Creator of America’s Favorite Girl Spy” by Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times
Liesl Schillinger reviews Leslie Brody’s Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy.
…Fans who yearned to know more about the author of these progressive perceptions met with an obstacle. Like Harriet, Fitzhugh liked to keep her own profile under wraps. She was interested in her perceptions of others, not in their perceptions of her. But in an expansive and revealing new biography, “Sometimes You Have to Lie,” Leslie Brody assembles the clues to the personal history that shaped Fitzhugh’s conscience and creative convictions. Brody, a biographer and playwright who adapted “Harriet the Spy” for the stage in 1988, has pored through correspondence, memoirs and court documents, and conducted dozens of interviews to reveal the trail that Fitzhugh left unmarked.
…As Brody follows Fitzhugh’s life, two main strands emerge: her dedication to her creative work and her remarkable relationships with friends, girlfriends and even one boyfriend, the artist Fabio Rieti, with whom she remained close even after she broke up with him, explaining, “I can’t abide a male human being in my bed.”
13. “Abolition from Below: On the Underground Railroad to México” by María Esther Hammack, The Los Angeles Review of Books
María Esther Hammack reviews Alice L Baumgartner’s South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War.
…Baumgartner’s work centers on Black flight across the Texas borderlands and the Gulf of Mexico, specifically in the period between the Texas Revolution and US emancipation. It traces the ways members of the Mexican government committed themselves to not only “putting the ‘peculiar institution’ on the path to ultimate extinction,” but also passing “laws that entitled enslaved people who escaped” to Mexico to liberty, legal protections, and even pathways to citizenship.
By the 1860s, Mexico was still actively fighting to stop the further expansion of chattel slavery as it had after the Texas Revolution and the Mexican-American War. Mexico openly supported the antislavery Republican Party in the United States and they sent Matias Romero, its chargé d’affaires, to Illinois immediately after Lincoln’s victory to convince him to stand with Mexico against the “egotistical and antihumanitarian” principles that had not only shrunk Mexico’s vast territory, but endangered the Union and both countries’ shared “principles of liberty and progress.”
14. “John Stanley’s ‘Little Lulu’” by Brandon Hicks, The Rumpus
Brandon Hicks writes about John Stanley’s iconic Little Lulu, the most recently reissued volume of which is The Fuzzithingus Poopi.
For the longest time, John Stanley’s Little Lulu was one of the best kept secrets in comics. Like Carl Barks’s Donald Duck, Lulu was considered significantly better than the reams of dull comic books based on licensed properties being printed throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
…This work has recently been collected in two volumes from Drawn & Quarterly. These two thick books (the first in a planned series), titled Working Girl and Fuzzithingus Poopi, collect Stanley’s earliest work on the title.
…Lulu, of course, is good-natured, creative, and strong-willed. Her confidence and determination have recently led her to be considered an early feminist icon of comics—a notion that is highlighted further by the series’ abominable co-star, Tubby.
15. “A Ghost In The Throat” by Emma Flynn, The Stinging Fly
Emma Flynn reviews Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s novel A Ghost in the Throat, a reconstruction of the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, “the author of the well-known 18th century poem, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoighaire.”
A caoineadh, or keen, is a lament for the dead, a deeply emotional vocal account of the person’s life, sung by the women of the family at the wake or graveside. Keening was as integral to the funeral process as the burying of the body, so it is interesting that it was under female jurisdiction given the inferior standing of women in society at the time. Caoineadhs were not deemed as valuable as writing, which belonged to the sphere of men, and so their survival relied on one generation of women passing down the story orally to the next. Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire is a robust and passionate lament for Ní Chonaill’s murdered husband which first made its way onto the page because of Norrie Singleton, a woman who, as Ní Ghríofa puts it, was “known by her encyclopaedic knowledge of song and story.”
16. “It’s the End of Humanity. Maybe It’s for the Best.” by Dustin Illingworth, The New York Times
Dustin Illingworth reviews Guido Morselli’s postapocalyptic novel Dissipatio H.G.: The Vanishing, written in 1973 and recently reissued by NYRB.
Caustic, lonely and obsessive, the novel offers a richly speculative portrait of early Anthropocene resignation. “The market of markets will one day be countryside,” the last man thinks. “With buttercups and chicory in flower.”
17. “The Mind, like the Night, Has a Thousand Eyes” by André Naffis-Sahely, Poetry
André Naffis-Sahely reviews Lawrence Joseph’s A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (“If ours is an age of anger, then Lawrence Joseph is our unacknowledged poet laureate”) and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s A Treatise on Stars and Empathy (“the texture of her admittedly cerebral, epistemological language is nonetheless intriguingly sensual—Berssenbrugge is never far from a romantic aside”).
“There is a God who hates us so much: / we are given ears to hear ribs kicked in, / we are given eyes to see eyes close / before a city that burns itself to death.”
“Your client vetoes a roof garden, often / because of money, or he likes to kiss you at dawn / and you want to sleep late.”
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