Dear Reader,
Ok to start with I’m just plugging my friends’ music this week.
My friend Rat Deveaux’s quarantine metal band DOLDRUM put out a promo that absolutely shreds and makes my soul feel like it’s in a cosmic lockdown. I am floating above my body right now, listening to it. “Are you a man who knocks / at the doorways of the earth?”
My pal Alex’s band TROCHEE TROCHEE put out a new album and this single is perfect; a nice rolling ballad that seems like it could roll me all the way to California. (My favorite album of theirs is still 2019’s Norton Critical Edition … … … not just because of the name lmao.) “When Big Ol' California turns its eye on you, / There ain't nothing much you can do / Except hang around 'til it forgets you.”
And what about the books? Well, what about them! They are horrid and weigh oppressively on me. I’m like an eighth of the way into The Jakarta Method and feeling pretty anxious about how things are going… I have a feeling they aren’t going well! I’m pretty sure millions of people are going to die!
“The Death of Orpheus.” Detail from a silver kantharos, 420-410 BC. Part of the Vassil Bojkov collection, Sofia, Bulgaria.
I feel really dissociated from the New York Times 100 Notable this year. I don’t know, it’s weird, in the past I’ve felt like their list was useful — though mainly on the nonfiction side, to be honest; but this year I just really am not feeling any of it. I wouldn’t take specific issue with most of the books on the list, but overall it feels stale, lifeless, like it’s suffering from that malady Lauren Oyler diagnosed in her interview with Sam: a fatal overabundance of publicity. Like, these are the books the Big Four wanted us to read, and so the New York Times read them, and now they are the only books the Times is able to recommend to us. (The way the 100 Notable works is they only select books that they have reviewed over the course of the year. A classic example of hundreds of little decisions adding up to one big decision!)
It’s so insular. Claustrophobic. Ben manages a bookstore, and bookstores always try to guess what will be on some of these end-of-year lists so they can stock up ahead of time (because people really do shop off these lists). So he asked me for my suggestions for this year and I said The Jakarta Method; because The Jakarta Method is, without a doubt, the most talked about book of the year, from where I’m standing. The dictionary definition of “notable.” But guess what! It’s not on the list!
So, yeah, it’s sort of bratty, but I did the same thing: I selected the 100 most “notable” books that I featured this year. I honestly put 90% of it together before I looked at the Times 100, because I didn’t want to be influenced haha and I thought there’d be more crossover; and at the time I was just conceiving of my list as a little holiday shopping list, not any sort of a direct response to the Times. But now that it’s done and I’ve looked at the Times list, it feels like I can’t frame it in any other way than as an alternative to what they have wrought. So I renamed my cheesy “holiday gift guide” to “The End of the World Review’s 100 Notable Books of 2020.” Bratty! Please consider that maybe you shouldn’t reward me for acting out like this.
If you’re on the Times list don’t be mad, you’re doing ok! And anyway like I said I don’t know if there’s anything wrong with most of these books. But there’s something sinister afoot when 40% of the list is Penguin Random House imprints; even if they do publish like 40% of the books in America, I’m not sure that’s really how, uh, a list should work. Do we believe that 40% of production translates into 40% of notability, like notability is partitioned out on a per-book basis?
Ahhhhh and to be clear, (a catch! a catch!) The Jakarta Method was published by an imprint of one of the Big Four. (It is not, in fact, a Verso book, as we all keep collectively hallucinating it is.) So I don’t know where the point I’m trying to make really lies, to be honest; like, I don’t know where the line is, or what the line is…
Maybe there’s another aspect to the problem; because I just looked at The Washington Post 10 Best, which I’ve never paid much attention to, and to be honest it’s much more “normal” feeling. (It has Unworthy Republic on it, which was another one of my predictions for Ben that is shockingly not on the Times 100!) Maybe what’s happened is that this year’s Times list is just uniquely overpowered by the very particular preoccupations of the New York everloving Times. Like, look at this and tell me what’s going on right here, in this screenshot I took of the nonfiction list (lmao I wrote this last night, before they actually went and picked War as one of their top 10):
By the time I get through reading these three titles, I feel like my skull has a pair of calipers embracing it, measuring me for deviations. Does anyone else get that? Or, like I’m ready to write my monograph on how “the spirit of the West” is doing. Anybody else? Do you feel what I’m feeling?
Well, either way, happy Thanksgiving, give your whole family a big covid-less smooch from me.
Stay safe,
Dana
1. “Orpheus Revolving” by George Prochnik, n+1
An elegant piece of writing. George Prochnik writes about his phone conversations with his son Zach — a paramedic working in New York City — during the pandemic’s first peak. Prochnik weaves a metaphor around his son so tightly and carefully it’s as though it could be a shield, or a swaddling cloth, protecting his son from danger: Zach, a musician, becomes Orpheus journeying into the underworld, returning full of doubt and questioning the usefulness of art.
It became clear that the note of shock in Zach’s voice had two main sources. First, the recognition that in the view of the authorities he and his fellow medics were utterly expendable. Not only were they were not given adequate protective gear, my son watched as time after time over the course of his shift an ambulance would pull into the station and one of the two paramedics would come out of the cab manifestly ill, coughing and feverish. He or she would be sent home, while that individual’s partner—who’d been overwhelmingly exposed to the virus for who knew how many hours—was simply moved over to another ambulance…
“Most New Yorkers don’t realize,” he said, “that there’s this huge, very vulnerable population who use 911 for their regular health care. They don’t have insurance. They’re disadvantaged people, a lot of times with chronic conditions, hypertension, diabetes. So say some guy in his fifties calls us because he’s having heart palpitations—now he’s going to be exposed to the virus by the people who are supposed to be rescuing him…”
I think this was the point in that first conversation when my son’s voice began to sound like it was traveling down a long, long dim corridor to reach me…
[...]
In “Eurydice” the poet Arseniy Tarkovsky writes: “And I dream of a different soul / Dressed in other clothes: / Burning as it runs / From timidity to hope, / Spirituous and shadowless / Like fire it travels the earth, / Leaves lilac behind on the table / To be remembered by.”
Eurydice means “wide social justice” according to some classical scholars, while the name Orpheus may derive from a term for “the darkness of night.” In the etymological depths of his passion, we discern the yearning for an ideal that transcends any single object of desire, a notion which has also been put forward as a definition of art.
Orpheus with his lyre figured as the archetypal artist for millennia—the sweetness of his music so divine that it charmed the guardians of Hades and enabled him to retrieve his ideal from the obscure realm of the dead…
2. “Useful Books” by Jennifer Wilson, The Nation
Jennifer Wilson reviews Beth Blum’s The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature.
…as Blum shows, the genre actually originated in the literature of radical self-improvement societies and the collective do-it-yourself efforts of 19th century British anarchists and socialists. Long before the publication of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Abigail Van Buren’s “Dear Abby” columns, working people were reading manifestos like George Jacob Holyoake’s 1857 Self-Help by the People, which urged readers to acquire new skills so that they might be of better service to others.
As the genre moved away from these roots and embraced laissez-faire capitalism, Blum writes, it found an increasing number of detractors. The modernists, in particular, took great pains to distinguish their work from the genre, even mocking its instrumentalism with titles like Ezra Pound’s How to Read (1929). But for all of self-help’s faults, Blum wonders whether anything of value has been lost in the growing disdain for a practical literature that seeks to move us toward becoming better versions of ourselves.
3. “Should America Still Police the World?” by Daniel Immerwahr, The New Yorker
Daniel Immerwahr pans Robert Gates’s Exercise of Power (which is but one of the many inexplicable entries on the New York Times Notable 100 list that I didn’t even get around to marveling at in my intro) and favorably reviews conservative political scientist Patrick Porter’s The False Promise of Liberal Order for its realism, if not its values.
…It’s refreshing to see Gates cast a skeptical eye on received truths. Yet there is one political axiom he refuses to question: U.S. primacy. Peace and safety, in Gates’s final estimation, are not goods secured coöperatively by well-meaning countries. They depend, rather, “almost entirely on long-term American strength, engagement, and leadership.”
But why should this be? A justification is hard to make out, beyond Gates’s insistence that the United States is uniquely “on the side of liberty and human dignity.” And even that assertion fits oddly with his hard-bitten realism. U.S. Presidents should avoid intervening with force, Gates writes, unless there is “a threat to American vital interests.” If intervention is ultimately a question of interests, though, why should other countries have any faith that Washington is protecting the collective good? It’s like trusting a police chief who brags about sending out officers only when the department’s budget is on the line.
…In Porter’s view, the issue is not that policymakers like Gates are hypocritical; it’s that the very idea of a “liberal order” is contradictory… Porter, a realist in the classical tradition, is untroubled by [the U.S. holding itself above the law]. What bothers him is the “false promise” that hegemony can be benevolent—a delusion, he believes, that warps the world view of U.S. leaders… Seeing themselves as pure, they can explain opposition only by seeing the world as wicked: a sinkhole teeming with thugs…
4. “I Erase You. You Are Erased.” by Esther Allen, Poetry
Esther Allen reviews Poemas de amor / Love Poems, which is “the first major English-language translation of Idea Vilariño, one of Latin America’s most revered poets” and is “her best-known work.” There’s so much going on in this essay; nothing I choose to highlight could possibly capture all the information squeezed in here.
To be honest, I read this essay in a state of abject humiliation over the fact that this wildly popular and interesting poet is only being translated into English for the first time this year by *the University of Pittsburgh Press* (mad respect, no disrespect intended UPP!)… and meanwhile, Robert Gates is on the Times Notable 100 list… you know what I mean?… like, really, this is our real-life society? How much paper and grief would it have cost Random House to publish this one like 20 years ago? What a joke, man.
“Here / far away / I erase you. / You are erased.”
Hmmm oh maybe I’m seeing something here, a reason this one may have slipped by *everybody’s* radar:
In 1982, when a friend offered to nominate her for a Guggenheim Fellowship, she categorically refused. An artist has a responsibility to serve as an example, she said. A decade earlier she’d written a letter to the editor of the literary magazine Marcha criticizing those who accepted funding from the nation she referred to as “el imperio.” That money, she argued, was a vehicle of cultural penetration. In the early 1950s, she protested a military treaty Uruguay signed with the United States, and her collection Pobre mundo (1966) included “To Guatemala,” which referenced the aftermath of the CIA-backed coup that deposed Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954…
Guys, I’m only an eighth of the way into The Jakarta Method — imagine what I’m going to be like when I’m done!
5. “The Power Brokers” by David Treuer, The New York Review of Books
David Treuer reviews Pekka Hämäläinen’s Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power.
…Watching from the gallery of the Senate during deliberations about the bill was the Oglala Lakota war chief Red Cloud. Red Cloud had, several years earlier, led a coalition of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho bands in a series of battles against the United States and won. In the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, he had secured for his people a huge homeland: called the Great Sioux Reservation, it was 48,000 square miles and included not only the Black Hills for the Lakota, stretching from western South Dakota to Wyoming, but also “unceded” lands in North Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana, where “no white person or persons” was allowed to settle. This treaty effectively pushed the US out of the upper Great Plains, seriously jeopardizing the very idea of a transcontinental America…
This is a passing moment in Hämäläinen’s book, but it perfectly captures the strangeness of our shared but largely unknown and unexplored history: Red Cloud, one of the victorious leaders of a vibrant, violent, and relatively young Indian empire, watching the workings of imperial America, just as young and vibrant and violent. What Hämäläinen sets out to share with us is not merely a story of the rise and fall of the Lakota or, conversely, a story of the rise of American fortune and the erosion of its stated ideals. He situates the Lakota in relation to other tribes, to the United States, and to France, Britain, and Spain. The story he tells is of two countries, one Lakota and one American:
“In 1776 two nations were born in North America. One was conceived in Philadelphia, the other in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and they were separated by more than seventeen hundred miles. Exactly a century later those two nations would clash violently along the Little Bighorn River in what is today southern Montana.”
Like Romulus and Remus of Roman mythology, these twins—separately and together, in concord and strife—helped create our modern nation.
6. “An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country” by Elisa Taber, Words Without Borders
An apocalyptic sermon excerpted from Elisa Taber’s An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country, a lyrical telling of her ethnographic fieldwork in two neighboring communities in Paraguay, a Mennonite colony and a Nivaklé settlement.
The sky will refuse to seep water. The land will grow as hard as stone. Animals will bury themselves the way only reptiles do but will not reemerge to seek prey. The homes humans live in will be stripped of walls and ceilings, so torn cloth will be draped over what is left of the structures and it will not protect them.…
Before words merge with static and are subsumed by silence, Padre Pedro offers comfort in a warning: “Esto es el infierno. No pases el más allá acá.” (This is hell. Do not spend your afterlife here.)
7. “Ann Quin: Understated, Tragic Innovator of the British Novel” by Brian Evenson, Lit Hub
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8. “The Brilliance of Ann Quin” by Joshua Cohen, The Paris Review
On the occasion of the reissue of Ann Quin’s novel Three, The Paris Review has excerpted Josh Cohen’s introduction to this latest edition from And Other Stories; meanwhile Lit Hub has published an adaptation of Brian Evenson’s introduction to the 2001 Dalkey Archive reissue. Writes Evenson:
Heir to Virginia Woolf and Anna Kavan, Quin was one of the few British women writing in the 1960s to be recognized by her contemporaries as a major formal innovator. In her fiction, reality and fantasy leak into one another, selfhood is depicted as fractured and transitory, and style and technique serve as a catalyst to propel the reader into an affective encounter with the text…
After visits to a psychiatrist she pulled herself together sufficiently to become functional, for “the loneliness of going over the edge was worse than the absurdity of coping with day-to-day living.” Like Virginia Woolf, Quin struggled with mental illness for most of her adult life, and many speculate that her death, seemingly a suicide, was motivated by a belief that another breakdown was coming.
Writes Cohen:
Because Three is such a frank and personal book, I will speak frankly and personally myself: like Ann Quin, and like her characters, I, too, have had problems with monogamy and realism—those two fantasies, those twinned delusions, of How to Live and Reproduce Life (monogamy) and How to Represent Life and Reproduce Its Representations (realism).
In Three, Quin tries to find solutions for these problems, or at least tries to dramatize the search for solutions, and it’s notable that she goes about doing so in opposite ways. Through S, she expands her couple into a throuple, but does so in prose that insistently contracts, in a vicious condensation of third-person description, internal monologue, and “interior”—house-bound—dialogue, none of which is isolated by conventional typography or punctuation. Instead of Victorian quotation marks or even Bloomsburyian dashes indicating speech, instead of paragraphs indicating shifts in point of view, here we have a jumble, all the modalities of the novel form set side by side like a hoarder’s secondhand sitting-room furniture.
9. “When Democracy Ails, Magic Thrives” by Samuel Clowes Huneke, Boston Review
Samuel Clowes Huneke reviews Monica Black’s A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany, comparing the explosion of the supernatural in Post-WWII Germany to all this QAnon stuff:
Between 1947 and 1956, there were seventy-seven recorded trials that involved accusations of witchcraft in West Germany, a number that does not account for the scores more accusations of witchcraft that never ended up in court. At the time of West Germany’s founding in 1949, the new country’s newspapers and tabloids were full of reports of witches and medicine men roaming the countryside. Black asks readers to consider how it changes our perspective of the young German democracy—and its relationship to the Nazi past—if we treat these incidents not as fringe occurrences, but as moments when something true about its culture was revealed…
“Silence,” writes Black, “was what allowed a society riven by the knowledge that it contained all sorts of people—those who had worked to support the Nazis, those who had actively opposed them, and everyone in between—to rebuild a country together.” But the repression of one kind of memory, Black contends, is precisely what gave rise to another. “The past often slipped into view,” in the form of witches, wonder doctors, and miracle workers, “like a ghost that wants to remind the living that its work on earth is not done.”
…But for us Americans, it is difficult to arrive at the same conclusion. Magical thinking does not look like a release valve. Rather it looks like a way to turn on one another, to undermine our political, medical, and social systems. In the person of Donald Trump, and the Republican Party that enables him, such magical thinking is a tool for toppling the liberal, democratic order…
10. “How the Problem of ‘Waste’ Affects the Rural Poor” by Anna Clark, The New York Times
Anna Clark reviews Catherine Coleman Flowers’s Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret.
In Lowndes County, a swath of rural land between Selma and Montgomery, as many as 90 percent of households have failing or inadequate systems for managing wastewater. This is structural poverty, Flowers writes, and it’s hardly a localized problem. From rural Appalachia to the suburbs of St. Louis to Allensworth, the California town that was the state’s first to be founded by African-Americans, “Waste” follows Flowers as she discovers that the failure to invest in infrastructure is pervasive nationwide. The consequences are life-threatening, but often invisible to those who live and work in communities with more political clout. Such conditions appear to have reintroduced hookworm to the United States, a tropical parasite thought to be eradicated from the country with the advent of modern plumbing.
11. “One Hundred Years and a Day” by Tomoka Shibasaki, Granta
I’m obsessed with these two short stories from Tomoka Shibasaki’s collection One Hundred Years and a Day. The book doesn’t appear to be listed anywhere yet, so I assume the translation is a work in progress; but Polly Barton has also translated Shibasaki’s novel Spring Garden, if one were to take an interest.
“A little while later, the elder brother heard the younger brother’s latest single on the radio. Of everything he’d heard by him so far, this was the song he liked the best.”
12. “Thinking Outside the ‘Pico Box’” by Anthony Grafton, The New York Review of Books
Anthony Grafton reviews Brian P. Copenhaver’s Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory.
For generations, as Brian Copenhaver shows… historians have cited Pico’s speech as Exhibit A when making the case that in the Renaissance, humanity became conscious of its own creative powers. Textbooks on Western civilization and Renaissance history almost always cite it. Their authors refer to it as Pico’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” though he himself did not give it that title and used the term “dignity” only twice in it, neither time in connection with man. These textbooks juxtapose it with other creations of the same period that seem to embody a similar view of the beauty and power of humanity: Donatello’s bronze David, for example, or Brunelleschi’s dome for the Florentine cathedral. Often, a few lines from the speech appear in what Copenhaver nicely calls a “Pico Box”—an inset introduced by a headline that forecloses any question about what the text might mean: “Pico della Mirandola States the Renaissance Image of Man.”
The textbook summaries of what Pico said are highly labile. As edition succeeds edition, “the Renaissance Image of Man” becomes “the Renaissance image of mankind,” and that in turn becomes the image “of humanity.” But no new iteration is more concrete or meaningful than the version it replaces. The speech has “become a meme,” as Copenhaver writes: a pill-sized summary of the meaning of the Renaissance…
In this massive, lively, and learned book, [Copenhaver] carries out two tasks, one of demolition and one of construction. He explains how and why historians decided to put this Renaissance philosopher and his ideas not only in a box, but in the wrong one. And he reveals the real structure of Pico’s speech—which, he argues, has never been properly understood, chiefly because Pico wrote in a deliberately esoteric way.
13. “The End of the Plantocracy” by Pooja Bhatia, The London Review of Books
Pooja Bhatia reviews Julius S. Scott’s The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, Johnhenry Gonzalez’s Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti, and Sudhir Hazareesingh’s Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture. The backstory to the publication of Scott’s The Common Wind is disheartening:
The Common Wind… is based on Julius Scott’s 1986 doctoral dissertation. It didn’t find a publisher until 2018, by which time Scott was an emeritus lecturer at Michigan and had given up on his work reaching a wide audience. Photocopies – and, later, PDFs – of his thesis had circulated among historians like an ‘underground mixtape’. As the dissertation did the rounds, through at least two generations of professors and students, it helped define the emerging field of Atlantic world history.
Scott insisted on understanding ‘enslaved people as thinking people’. Then he tried to find out what they were thinking about…
And regarding Gonzalez’s Maroon Nation, Bhatia says that Gonzalez paints a less rosy picture of the “counter-plantation system” than has recently been the norm:
The… advantage of such plots was that they weren’t obvious to tax collectors, soldiers and others who might confiscate or tax some portion of the yield. The isolation of the hillside farms was already a disincentive. Those who could make the arduous trek to remote farms might not even know when they had arrived. Gonzalez calls this ‘cryptoculture’: ‘remote and shifting systems of farming designed to conceal crops and entire settlements’...
Unlike many chroniclers of Haiti’s revolutionary struggle, Gonzalez is not much interested in grand narratives of triumph and glory. The ex-slaves finally found freedom, but it was a parsimonious version, organised entirely around avoiding the attentions of the Black republic they’d helped to create...
14. “How Living Near Border Walls Affects Mental Health” by Jessica Wapner, Undark
An excerpt from Jessica Wapner’s Wall Disease: The Psychological Toll of Living Up Against a Border.
In 2016, researchers at Queen’s University Belfast reported their analysis of health record data on 1.3 million people to see whether living near a peace line in Northern Ireland affected their mental health. They found that people living near segregation barriers were 19 percent more likely to hold a prescription for antidepressant medication compared with those living farther away from these separators. Prescriptions for anti-anxiety medication were 39 percent more common among people living near a barrier compared with those living farther away. Interestingly, the researchers, led by epidemiologist Aideen Maguire, found that when deprivation — in other words, poverty — was taken out of the mix, the difference subsided. Segregation was likely to lead to lower socioeconomic status, which in turn was likely to lead to mental health issues.
15. “The Painter and the Painted” by Sophie Haigney, The Nation
Sophie Haigney reviews Celia Paul’s memoir Self-Portrait.
…The naked girl and the famous artist: It’s an old story and perhaps predictable arrangement of roles for Freud, the much older and more famous painter, and Paul, his beautiful younger lover; he paints and she sits for him. And yet. The concept of sitting occurs over and over again in Paul’s book, and these roles are not as static as Naked Girl With Egg might lead us to believe. Nor is sitting as simple as it might seem. “The act of sitting is not passive,” Paul writes, describing it, at times, as almost a form of intense meditation, one that requires its own kind of focus.
Self-Portrait might be read as a series of sittings over the course of a lifetime. Paul sits for Freud many times throughout their relationship, but he also sits for her. So do all of her sisters. When Paul is just starting out as a painter, her mother sits for her and cries because she feels like her daughter is treating her as an object. But as Paul’s career continues, sitting becomes something of a vocation for her mother; she takes the train twice a week to London to sit for her daughter in her studio. Time passes, the roles and the balance of power alter, and so the acts of sitting and painting change, too…
…In the prologue, Paul states that one reason she wrote this book was to tell the story of their relationship on her terms: “By writing about myself in my own words, I have made my life my own story. Lucian, particularly, is part of my story rather than, as is usually the case, me being portrayed as part of his.”
16. “Zombie Nightmare” by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Lit Hub
A poem excerpted from Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s collection of poetry Travesty Generator.
“I am surrounded by white people I’ve never met and they / keep turning on the lights. No, I say, the zombies will / know we are here. We want to watch TV they say. We want / to run the microwave. You fools, I say, they will come for / us. We want to watch TV, they say, and use the microwave.”
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