This Week in Books: The Subject Tonight Is Craft!
“Focused wholly on the construction of the perfect sentence that will encapsulate her disillusionment.”
Dear Reader,
Is there “a perfect sentence that will encapsulate [your] disillusionment”? Are you “striving to put words in just the right order, rewriting and rewriting until the prose is perfectly crafted”? Are you “not always writing a sentence to tell a story, exactly… but simply to be in the space of a sentence, to make things appear in it, to see what is possible”? If so, then boy have I got the newsletter for you! All we got are sentences, in this one! The subject tonight is craft!
Ok, well, I have zero thoughts about the “craft” debate, actually, but I enjoy reading a a nice and salty state-of-the-novel diatribe, as you all have surmised by now. So we got one or two of those, one or two of some other things, this and that…
You know, I’ve always been more of a paragraph person, myself. I read a very good one the other day in one of those New Directions Storybooks that just came out—Osamu Dazai’s Early Light. It was in the second story in the collection, whose name escapes me at the moment, but it begins with the narrator explaining, at great length, his thoughts on the height of Mt Fuji—he takes issue with how it’s always depicted by artists as being so very steep, when in actuality it is quite squat and flat. Except, he goes on to say, for that one time, that for him, it wasn’t. (I transcribe now from a photo I took of the paragraph, so that I could send it to someone and say “what a paragraph.”)
The one time Fuji looked really tall to me was when I saw it from Jukkoku Pass. That was good. At first, because it was cloudy, I couldn’t see the top, but I judged from the angle of the lower slopes and picked out a spot amid the clouds where I thought the peak probably was, only to find, when the sky began to clear, that I was way off. The bluish summit loomed up twice as high as I’d expected. I was not so much surprised as strangely tickled, and I cackled with laughter. I had to hand it to Fuji that time. When you come face to face with absolute reliability, you tend, first of all, to burst into silly laughter. You just come undone. It’s like—this is a funny way to put it, I know, but it’s like chuckling with relief after loosening your belt. Young men, if ever the one you love bursts out laughing the moment she sees you, you are to be congratulated. By no means must you reproach her. She has merely been overwhelmed by the absolute reliability she senses in you.
Now, for true paragraph-heads, that is A-grade stuff. Exquisite. How did he do it? How did we get from where we started to where we ended up? I couldn’t say.
—Dana
1. “A Bird Translates Silence” by Dennis Zhou, Poetry
Dennis Zhou reviews Wong May’s In the Same Light: 200 Tang Poems for Our Century (Song Cave).
…Very few collections… situate the Tang poets fully within their political and historical context, drawing out both the urgency and stakes of their verse. Many anthologies, such as Witter Bynner’s classic The Jade Mountain (1929), simply follow the model of Three Hundred Tang Poems (1763) compiled by the Qing scholar Sun Zhu, which for many decades remained the standard text. In the Same Light (The Song Cave, 2022), translated by the Chinese-Singaporean-Irish poet Wong May, does something different. Collecting 200 poems by 38 poets, Wong May promises to find parallels between their time and the present and, in so doing, update them “for our century”...
…In her tour de force of an accompanying essay—nearly 100 pages, part memory palace, part itinerary through Tang history—Wong May discusses everything from the genesis of her project, which came to her while she was ill in a Beijing hotel in 2016, and the biographies of her poets to her own background. A map spatially guides readers through her anthology, oriented like a museum floor—complete with display cabinets, curios, and a gift shop—and Wong May even includes a sidekick and tour guide in the form of a cartoon rhino who pops up regularly with helpful suggestions or snarky comments. (“Get moving!!”)... The collection would be worth acquiring for the essay alone.
2. “Contest or Conquest?” by Daniel Immerwahr, Harper’s
Daniel Immerwahr reviews Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America (Liveright).
…His abiding interest is… in Europeans’ inability to colonize North America. In his first two books, he explored notable peaks of Native power, as many recent histories do. But now, with Indigenous Continent, he stitches them into a sustained counterpoint to the conquest narrative. Five hundred years of North American history appear in his telling not as the story of colonization, but of a fierce and unsettled continent, bristling with possibility.
…In the land currently covered by the United States, colonizers encountered “dangerously decentralized” societies. The “genius of their political systems” was that they didn’t have hierarchies for Europeans to seize. “Too many of the Native Americans were nomads and hard to pin down.” Rather than winning a few battles or co-opting a few leaders, colonizers would have to take North America acre by acre.
…By Hämäläinen’s clock, it took some four hundred years from Christopher Columbus’s arrival before any colonizing power “subjugated a critical mass of Native Americans” in North America. That power was the United States, extensive in its reach yet late in its arrival. The country still hasn’t existed for even half the time that Europeans have been on the continent. “On an Indigenous timescale,” notes Hämäläinen, “the United States is a mere speck.”
3. “On Bruno Latour (1947–2022)” by Ava Kofman, n+1
Ava Kofman writes about Latour’s legacy.
Latour did for science something similar to what Tolstoy, one of his heroes, did for history—namely, reveal that its landmark theories and discoveries, like epochal wars and revolutions, far from being the work of a few great men, were actually the product of careful coordination between an abundance of human and non-human actors. “A crowd may move a mountain; a single man cannot,” Latour wrote in The Pasteurization of France (1984), his unconventional study of Louis Pasteur…
…His characterization of Pasteur—“playing on all of the professions he is always ahead of them, moving each of them by the combined force of others”—came to double as canny self-portraiture. Part of Latour’s genius was to absorb and synthesize disparate schools of thought—and to extend their grip on the world. He worked across genres (Nietzschean aphorisms, scientific articles, epistemological policiers), media (political surveys, one-act plays, web operas), and milieux (recent collaborators included curators, geologists, and clergy), enacting the very dissolution of disciplines that he championed.
…With his flat cap and trench coat, Latour was like a detective at a crime scene, asking questions about mundane objects, snapping pictures with his phone, and scrawling endless notes, often on his iPad. (He jokingly referred to his graphomania as “a disease, really.”) Yet unlike Inspector Maigret—or most academics of his stature, even—he enjoyed being surprised more than being right.
4. “How Toni Morrison Wrote Her Most Challenging Novel” by Morgan Parker, The New York Times
Morgan Parker writes about Toni Morrison’s Jazz.
Maybe that’s what makes the first paragraph of “Jazz” one of the most gorgeous and compelling in American literature. The fact that it wasn’t written or crafted so much as it escaped from its author, like breath from lungs.
…Sth — in the French translation of “Jazz,” it’s Tst — is both a sound and an invention, an exclamation and an expletive. It’s an incantation and an open door. Sth is the Black Head Nod, the soft smirk from the other Black girl at the party, the raised eyebrow and pursed lips of a knowing friend. Sth is “You already know” or “I see you, Sis.”
5. “On the Cult of Craftism” by GD Dess, The Millions
GD Dess writes about “craftism.”
In many ways, craftism has done to literature what Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management did to the factory floor. Taylor’s principles broke down, atomized and rationalized, the act of labor into its constituent parts so motion could be standardized and efficiency in the manufacture of commodities increased. Craftism has helped bring about the standardization of the production of literature (particularly in MFA programs) by popularizing a set of processes and techniques which have, by and large, set the specifications that a piece needs to meet in order to be accepted by agents, editors, and publishers.
For writers, what is perhaps more harmful is that craftism all too easily presents itself as a substitution for reading literature. Why bother to put in all that time reading and absorbing the great works in the Western canon, learning how to write by osmosis, when you can follow the precepts set down by experts? This lack of familiarity with the cannon has not gone unnoticed. As Elif Batuman has observed, “Contemporary fiction seldom refers to any of the literary developments of the past 20, 50 or a hundred years. It rarely refers to other books at all”…
6. “Writing as Living” by Connor Harrison, The Chicago Review of Books
Connor Harrison reviews Amina Cain's A Horse at Night: On Writing (Dorothy).
“After one gets out of the bath the feeling stays for a while,” she writes. “The same thing happens with reading, of course. When one closes a book it doesn’t mean the feeling of the book closes too.” Only 136 pages long, A Horse at Night makes reference to more than fifty other texts, sprinkling titles like breadcrumbs
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