This Week in Books: Troublesome and Modern Bondage
"Millions of investors are participating in the despoliation."
Dear Reader,
This week we have a lot of poets. “The tendency of rhyme, like that of desire, is to pull distant things together and force their boundaries to blur,” writes Kamran Javadizadeh in a review of Maggie Millner’s Couplets, an entire book of rhymes. Very good rhymes, based on the sample in the review.
The tendency of this book newsletter is, also, sometimes, to pull distant book reviews together and force their boundaries to blur. But tonight I’m at loose ends… I’m pulling on the strings and there’s no slack… I’m mixing various thread-type metaphors into one large knot.
But, there are a lot of poets. Poets and their pulling together of distant things… “Two factor authentication is a misnomer / there are three factors and the third is yourself / your desire to log in.” Those are lines that Dan Hogan quotes from Harry Reid’s Leave Me Alone in an enthusiastic review. Harry Reid’s poems don’t rhyme but they are funny. And isn’t that kind of the same thing?
There’s also José Rizal, the martyred rebel-poet, who hid an anagram of “freedom” in a novel (as reviewer Gina Apostol mentions) and died by firing squad with an illegible poem in his shoe; and S.J. Fowler, “a hero of London’s poetry scene” who, as reviewer Guy Stevenson puts it, has written a “strange, absurd, difficult book” about the British Museum at the end of the world, called Mueum. The novel’s “playfulness will transmit to readers who spend their lives thinking about this stuff,” writes Stevenson, “but might frustrate those who don’t: a messing around with story and meaning, a confusion of the mind, for what?”
For the fun of it I guess. Which isn’t a great answer. But poets are very funny. I mean, leaving the s out of museum, that is pretty funny.
—Dana
1. “The Eroticism of an IKEA Bed” by Kamran Javadizadeh, The New Yorker
Kamran Javadizadeh reviews Maggie Millner’s Couplets (FSG).
…The absence of rhyme in Milton’s poem confused enough readers that he was forced to append an explanatory note to its second edition, in which he claimed that “the jingling sound of like endings” was “but the Invention of a barbarous Age,” and that his aim was to liberate epic poetry “from the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.”
But what if bondage is what you want? “Everyone had the same Ikea bed,” Millner writes. “She tied my wrists to hers, above my head.”
2. “This is where the rat bastard poem comes in” by Dan Hogan, Overland
Dan Hogan reviews Harry Reid’s Leave Me Alone (Cordite Books, 2022).
…I was immediately reminded of the ‘ratbag poem’ as editorialised by Duncan Hose for Cordite back in 2013…: “Ratbag poems are immediately recognisable to the gatekeepers of good taste and accomplished craft; they are trashy, rude, slangy, ornery, tongue in cheek, drunken, stupid, libellous, scatological, infidel, counterfeit, profligate, Little Lord Fauntleroy, etc.”
How, then, to write the ratbag review? Works such as Reid’s stand out in a publishing landscape that is so Nielsen BookScan-pilled it is rare to find a book so thoroughly unserious and charmingly eviscerating in its approach to bagging the bullshit that comprises labouring under capitalism.
3. “Let the Knife Speak” by Gina Apostol, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Gina Apostol writes about José Rizal, author of Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.
Filipinos, who in my experience eat up world history as gossip, with a weirdly self-referential madcap irony, have fun inserting Rizal everywhere, like a global Forrest Gump, inventing toys, spawning Hitler’s mom, or serial-killing women on Primrose Hill — where, coincidentally, Rizal did live in the neighborhood of Jack the Ripper’s exploits, in Camden. In his actual life, when he returned from Europe to Manila in 1891, dressed in his dark overcoat and speaking his many tongues, he was rumored to be a German spy, an agent of the European intriguer Otto von Bismarck.
…[A]t Johns Hopkins, the lone foreigner in my graduate writing program, I went to a random history lecture about how Rizal was bowdlerized, an ironical artist turned into a mealy-mouthed prig, to fit Manila’s Americanized colonial culture. So said the visiting scholar, Benedict Anderson, a polymath himself, who praised above all Rizal’s irreverent, unsparing wit. Homesick, and chastised by the lecture of that Marxist Irishman, I began rereading Rizal’s novels, now translated with humor intact by Harold Augenbraum for Penguin Classics…
4. “Dazzling” by Chịkọdịlị Emelụmadụ, Granta
An excerpt from Chịkọdịlị Emelụmadụ’s Dazzling (Wildfire).
I feel like insulting her. I want to tell her the ancient and modern of her life. I saw it all.
5. “Black Genius Against the World” by Brooks E. Hefner, Public Books
An excerpt from Brooks E. Hefner’s introduction to George Schulyer’s Black Empire (Penguin Classics).
“Is the Black Internationale a true story?” wrote Bernice Brownlee of Wewoka, Oklahoma to the Pittsburgh Courier in 1937. She—and many other readers—wanted to know more about the newspaper’s new fictional serial: “The Black Internationale: Story of Black Genius Against the World.” Harry Louis Cannady of Avella, Pennsylvania, wrote, “Is the Black Internationale a true story? I was a member of the 367th Infantry regiment in the World War and if the Black Internationale is a real organization, I want to join it.”
…African American writer George S. Schuyler is famous for two especially controversial things: his biting 1931 Afrofuturist satire Black No More and his hard turn to the political right wing after World War II. Unfortunately, both of these have obscured something rather extraordinary: Schuyler was one of the most prolific African American writers of popular genre fiction in the first half of the 20th century. And he was, almost certainly, the most prolific writer of genre fiction about African Americans during this time.
6. “Fulgentius” by César Aira, Bomb
An excerpt from César Aira’s Fulgentius (New Directions), translated by Chris Andrews.
Day was breaking. A golden light was spreading in the east. Then it all turned crystal clear, and little lilac-colored clouds began to ride on the breezes. Next, the white and the green. In the distance, the Danubian Alps reared like formidable stone giants guarding the Pannonian plains. All the birds flew off in that direction. The mountains were like children, but nobody thought of mountains when they saw a child.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The End of the World Review to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.