This Week in Books: “The Unmitigated, Unbounded Hang”
“A certain portion of the stock isn’t really saleable because it keeps killing the customers who try to buy it.”
Dear Reader,
I did something unusual this week—a bunch of hanging out—and so I’m quite tired and run down, on account of the fact that I’m like, barely human, and can barely do what normal people do. Or that’s how it feels, from time to time. Times like this one, when I’m physically languishing because I hung out three separate times.
Ross Gay has written about the tyranny of time and the art of the hang out over at Poetry. (I didn’t include it in the list because I was like, is this really “about books”? But now, I find, I don’t care!)
We’re operating inside the religion of Capitalism, whose gospel is that there is not enough. Capitalism preaches the gospel of scarcity and, as such, demands we see scarcity everywhere. And if scarcity is nowhere to be found, it will be imposed. Among those imposed scarcities—of health, of food, of clean water, of adequate shelter, of comfort, of community, of meaning, of a future—is that of time. And to believe otherwise—in enough, say; in abundance, say; in gratitude, say; in the unmitigated, unbounded hang, say!—makes you blasphemous.
And he goes on to say that poems are basically a type of hang out, in that they stop capitalism’s clock.
Poems are made of lines, which are actually breaths, and so the poem’s rhythms, its time, is at the scale and pace and tempo of the body, the tempo of our bodies lit with our dying. And poems are communicated, ultimately, body to body, voice to ear, heart to heart. Even if those hearts are not next to one another, in space or time. It makes them so. All of which is to say a poem might bring time back to its bodily, its earthly proportions. Poetry might make nothing happen. Inside of which anything can happen, maybe most dangerously, our actual fealties, our actual devotions and obligations, which is to the most rambunctious, mongrel, inconceivable assemblage of each other we could imagine.
And I’m really trying to apply this logic to my books newsletter, right now, as I’m writing it, because I said I would turn the—how did I so crassly put it?—ah yes, “the money spigot” back on this week but oh my god I’m running so late and have just the most rambunctious assemblage laid out before me. Nothing to do with books, half of them, I swear. And all I did this week was hang. But we’re calm; we’re at peace; we’re not looking at the clock. We are just hanging out with the words. Let’s see.
Sana Khan has written captivatingly about a newsstand in the Village. (This one? Is also not about books. But, it is about magazines, and that feels like it counts. All I share in this thing is links to a bunch of magazines anyway! Might as well be “this week in magazines”! When you really think about it!)
Ali cocked his head and bragged, “I’m one of the gold mine locations, right? So everyone in this neighborhood is all about reading books and magazines.”
The customer raised an eyebrow and said, “It’s funny, I live in Harlem. I come all the way down here to see you guys.”
Ali thanked him, pivoted to me, and grandly declaimed, “You see this guy here, came from Harlem.” It struck me that his opportunistic rhetoric was rather American.
This excerpt from Oliver Darkshire‘s Once Upon a Tome (a memoir of the author’s time working in an antiquarian bookshop) (An actual bookshop! Ok, we’re locking on target now…) is a little spooky. It’s about haunted books.
As a bookseller, you grow used to encountering cursed tomes every now and then. The regrettable part is that no one you inform about this will hold your claim credible, and it’s very difficult to explain to your Accounts department, or the board of directors in their annual review, that a certain portion of the stock isn’t really saleable because it keeps killing the customers who try to buy it.
And this fun little horror story from Nathan Munn is very spooky (but without any sort of book tie-in whatsoever, so target is lost, totally lost) (but it is about hanging out, so) (we’re all just hanging out, we’re vibing, we’re being haunted by angry little girls with bleeding black eyes) (ok so I actually see it as the sort of companion to Gay’s essay, as a sort of warning about the dangers of the hang out under capitalism, because, for instance, you don’t know if you’re being totally betrayed into a haunted sublet by the guy you’re smoking with).
In the months that followed, Kurt would call me up now and then to score weed. I visited the apartment a few times, smoking with Kurt, keeping my eyes on the cabinets.
One time, after he’d been there a couple months, as we were passing a joint back and forth, he suddenly asked me: “Has anything weird ever happened to you in this place?”
Cautiously, I replied that some odd things may have happened when we were there, without getting specific. I asked him what he had experienced.
“It’s the weirdest thing,” he said. “Last week, the lights started turning themselves on and off. It went on for a while.” I listened and nodded, but kept my mouth shut.
—Dana
1. “What Can Novels Do?” by Alex Pabán Freed, Gawker
A very clarifying “state of the novel”–type essay, couched within a (rather negative) review of Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (Columbia).
Is it good to go to war with contemporary literature? It’s at least a genre. A fun place to start is Elif Batuman’s eminently spicy “Get a Real Degree,” but there are many other places you could look: from Becca Rothfeld we learn that contemporary fiction has a problem with social media-born, anxiously-enacted, moral scrupulousness; from Parul Sehgal we learn that contemporary fiction has a problem with simplified trauma plots; Jackson Arn tells us the contemporary essay has, among other things, a problem with routine ambivalence; and the editors at n+1 tell us the contemporary review has a problem with grouping works by their thematic problems… I’ve missed a few, but you get the idea: people like to go big.
Let’s try it out. The world’s structural problems require structural solutions: the novel’s pretty good at revealing the former and not really a part of the latter… Follow these thoughts to their logical conclusion, of course, and you’re probably wondering: what can the novel possibly do to help bring about the end of all exploitation? What can the novel do at all?
2. “Carolyn Rodgers: Loving on Black People” by Nikky Finney, Poetry
&
3. “Introduction” by Andrew Peart, Poetry
Two essays that were printed in a folio edition of Carolyn Marie Rodgers’s work, which was included (as an insert, I think?) in the latest issue of Poetry. The folio is called “Carolyn Marie Rodgers: What Beauty We Now Have.” Writes Peart:
In 1975 Rodgers broke through to the national mainstream. That year she released her collection How I Got Ovah: New and Selected Poems with Anchor/Doubleday, a large commercial press. The book would go on to become a National Book Award finalist…
However, by 1980, Rodgers herself was starting to fly under the radar. That year she made a decisive shift in her career and began publishing her poetry in small handmade chapbooks through her own Eden Press imprint. This independent operation would remain a cornerstone of her publishing activity for the rest of her life, and she’d never release a collection with a major publishing house again.
…In January 2006 Rodgers reported that flooding in a storage space had destroyed large parts of her personal archive. Along with other papers, several Eden Press titles authored by Rodgers and listed in her bios and bibliographies are now thought to be lost. But what remains of those poetry collections is a consummate—and largely unseen—body of work… This folio gathers poems from five of Rodgers’s Eden Press chapbooks…
Writes Finney:
There are new galaxies to be found if you are standing in the light and looking with the right kind of glass. I see Rodgers tapping herself out of polite society entrapments and making her way down to the original sea of herself.
4. “Classicist in Literature, Royalist in Politics, and Anglo-Catholic in Religion” by Amit Chaudhuri, n+1
Amit Chaudhuri spins a question about the usage of the word “classicist” in an oft-cited phrase from T.S. Eliot’s preface to a collection of his essays (For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order) into a reexamination of the intellectual roots of modernism!
To revisit the history of “impersonality,” “tranquility,” “concentration,” and even “classicism” as critical terms, one needs to look at brahman in the Upanishads and Gita; dhyan (“concentration” in Eliot’s sense; “thought” in D. H. Lawrence’s; diluted and gentrified to “mindfulness” in our time) in these two texts as well as in Buddhism; yoga (as a concept rather than a self-help exercise routine); ananda (“joy” or “bliss”); and, of course, shanti… We have to approach these concepts as critical terms that ask for our engagement and challenge our thinking, as they challenged the thinking of their contemporaries. We need to see the verses, lines, and practices in which they occur not as representative texts or traditions, but as wayward critical projects that never really became mainstream, but which resurfaced later in multiple idiosyncratic critical traditions, like the Bhakti and the Sufi, across constituencies, castes, and gender. Modernism is only the most recent of these resurfacings and engagements.
…It’s not “influence” I’m interested in, or the impact of “East” on “West”: that model of interpretation doesn’t illuminate this history. I’m… interested in how words with particular identities and backgrounds—“spirit,” “God,” “thought,” “tranquility”—take part, without comment, and perhaps without full knowledge, in a metamorphosis, a movement across meanings that leads not so much from the “West” to the “East” as, subtly and suggestively, away from the Enlightenment to a new emergence and sense of the “literary.”
5. “Lucky Guy” by Joshua Cohen, The New York Review of Books
Joshua Cohen reviews Jared Kushner’s memoir.
I’m not sure I buy Kushner’s claim that Ivanka chose conversion without being pressured, but that she went through with it is certainly a sign—of her love for him, or of how intensely she wanted to become someone else. Their alliance strikes me as the most significant rebellion the couple could muster: a mutual half-rebellion, which provided each of them with the distance they craved, whether consciously or not, from their respective tumultuous and boundaryless clans. Kushner’s portrayal of their coupledom reads like a relationship guide written by AI, a flashback montage starring sexless amnesiacs on date-night, chasing gentrification and tailed by paparazzi: “We’d…take cooking lessons at a local restaurant, or play shuffleboard at a new bar in a trendy neighborhood.”
6. “Andrea Dworkin’s Conviction” by Amia Srinivasan, The London Review of Books
Amia Srinivasan writes about Andrea Dworkin on the occasion of a new documentary film, My Name Is Andrea. Srinivasan also cites a recently edited collection of Dworkin’s work, Last Days at Hot Slit (Semiotext(e)).
…In the early 1970s, when Dworkin was fleeing her abusive ex, a feminist friend gave her the writings of early radical US feminists, including Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone, as well as Robin Morgan’s edited volume of women’s liberation movement literature, Sisterhood is Powerful. This prompted Dworkin to vow, she later recounted, to use ‘everything I knew, including from prostitution, to make the women’s movement stronger and better ... I’d give my life to the movement and for the movement.’...
It is Dworkin’s unalterable conviction that gives her prose its ringing, prophetic quality. Style was, for her, ultimately a political question, about finding a form of ‘prose more terrifying than rape, more abject than torture, more insistent and destabilising than battery, more desolate than prostitution, more invasive than incest, more filled with threat and aggression than pornography’.
…(In 1992, the Canadian Supreme Court, invoking the rationale developed by Dworkin and her anti-porn collaborator Catharine MacKinnon in their effort to make pornographers liable to civil suits, expanded Canada’s obscenity laws to criminalise pornography that was violent, degrading or dehumanising. Within months, Canadian police seized copies of Bad Attitude, a magazine of lesbian erotic fiction, from Canada’s first gay and lesbian bookstore, which was found guilty of criminal obscenity.)
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