First I cannot stay awake and then insomnia and then up early. I do not know if this the steroid shot, or what.
Anyway, I am doing some reading in the wee wee hours (starting at 5 am) before heading down to McClure's. It is raining this morning, and I am kind of watching a movie, Excess Baggage, and going out feels inconvenient.
First:
Fiction
I signed up for the n + 1 newsletter; Baby was the featured short story. A bit of an eyeopener, as in maybe not the thing to read first thing in the morning, 27-year-old takes up stripping, meets a masochist, masochist leaves, life goes on. If fiction can take us elsewhere, lets us be tourists in another reality, then this story works - I suspect there are plenty of 20-somethings who nowadays have these lives where strangeness if relative. Maybe it has always been that way, here and elsewhere, wherever people are hanging onto the fringes. KH says we write more formally. This story makes me think so, it has the conversational style I see more and more in current short stories. The writer was Brittany Newell.
(The wind came through and knocked out the power. It is now down to a merely stiff breeze.)
Mindful Objects by Sandy Parsons won the 2022 ServiceScape Short Story Award. Probably should have started here. The story is a domestic story told from the POV of a robotic vacuum. I guess that also makes it speculative fiction. Charming, and a rather thought-provoking about tech and also the life of our relationships.
Still Life by Matthew Turner is from The London Magazine. So far, the best thing I have read today - a breakup story, the relationship as a narrative, the slow disintegration rather than the abrupt snap:
Whenever I walk past the building, I sometimes stop and sit on the wall outside the house opposite. Today, there are the silhouettes of a couple in the window of the house where we once lived, moving around awkwardly in silence as if they’re playing a part in an old fashioned movie. One of them opens the blind, another closes it. Later the blind opens half way, the window opens fully and someone looks down towards me. She appears behind him and draws him away, maybe to finish cooking dinner, maybe back to bed. I try to make myself believe I’ve never been inside the room and can’t even imagine what it must be like in there. That I can’t remember the slight difference in height between the bathroom and bedroom door, and the floorboard by the bed that made a cracking sound when you stepped on it. The way we thought rain dropping on the skylight sounded like pigeons fallings on the glass. Where I’m sitting on the wall, the shadow cast by the plane tree makes the streetlight above me turn on before it’s completely dark, and once the others follow suit, I know someone in that room will switch on the light.
Quillitte published an essay about the first (and for a very, very long time) the only Russian novel I ever read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich under the headline In From the Cold:
Ivan Denisovich, the very first of them, retains an unvarnished and savage authenticity—a clear eye and restraint, and above all, a determination to speak the truth in an aggressive empire ruled and propped up by deceit. It led to the trio of books that followed—The First Circle, Cancer Ward, The Gulag Archipelago—which gave you the sense of an almighty sensibility, with breadth and depth of experience, the rage to pass it on, and an almost bloody-minded determination, in the title of one of his best-known essays, to “live not by lies.” Given the events of this year in Russia and beyond, it is time for Solzhenitsyn-the-dissident’s exile to end, for the rehabilitation of that aspect of him to begin, and for the writer and his books—the earlier, more mutinous ones at any rate—to come shivering in from the cold.
And The Baffler discusses a novel I have come to think I need to read: Tristram Shandy. The Baffler essay is The Weak Novel , and while there is much for me to think about in this essay, I give you these as the most urgent:
Thus, the historical trajectory of the weak novel might be circular, even as weak novels engage with complex temporal forms. Nesting and hosting are common formal gestures to see in the weak novel because the weak novel does not revile digression or recursion. Think of Don Quixote (1605 and 1615), for example, in which the titular character learns, in the second book and to his great chagrin, of the existence of the first book of the novel. Given that the Don’s ridiculous actions and attitudes are themselves motivated by readings in chivalric literature, here we have a situation in which the delusions of a character are presented to the character through his participation in the very sort of artwork that caused these delusions in the first place. This novel additionally proposes that the time of fiction is—like the time described by quantum physics—by nature a time of loops, running in multiple locations and directions at once, such that a character could well read the very book that has brought said character into existence. If we hope to escape the messianic, apocalyptic, and artificial time of Christianity (a linear time that undergirds present-day visions of efficiency), we should be looking to fictions such as this, fictions that help us confront our notions of time and how we mete out description along temporal axes and media formats. We need visionary temporalities, and we need books that raise physical sensation to the level of event. One of the primary affordances of novelistic weakness is to make narrative structure more porous, mystical, inefficient, and vulnerable to confusion with plain “reality,” as such. In an age of news cycles and boom and bust, of the instrumentalization of every sphere of human life, we urgently need to escape from the false opposition of repetition and innovation, the mess of unthinking valorizations of progress. Similarly, the weak novel’s complex rendition of the line between the fictive and the real should be of interest to anyone concerned about disinformation and the ways in which realities are discursively constructed.
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I think that the weak novel is the paradigmatic site for such past-hope-but-nonetheless-crucial, possibly-pointless-yet-indispensable contemplative and experiential exercises. And the weak novel can offer us even more than this—as if this were not enough—because it is a mode of literature that can make us less credulous and more playful readers, readers at home with the notion that undecidability is a fundamental feature of linguistic articulation, if not life itself. As the literary theorist Barbara Johnson once observed, “There is politics precisely because there is undecidability.” Thus the weak novel is, at its core, a political art form, a mode of writing that continually reaffirms that the relationship between language and what exists remains eternally open to debate and revision. It is a spot too weak to be conclusively instrumentalized.
From The Brisbane Timess: Bestselling and brilliant: Murakami’s strange new book is full of wisdom:
There are parts of the book I could have done without, the prime offender being an essay about originality that spends a lot of time making the point that originality is contingent on time and context, complete with the predictable musical references.
But then five pages later, out of nowhere, there’s this: “if you want to express yourself as freely as you can, it’s probably best not to start out by asking ‘What am I seeking?’ Rather, it’s better to ask ‘Who would I be if I weren’t seeking anything?’ and then try to visualise that aspect of yourself.”
It’s surprising and practical, singular and strange, and this collection is studded with wisdom just like it.
Politics
New Senate rule stifles debate - that is the Indiana senate. Could this be the beginning of the Republicans insuring Indiana remains a one-party state?
Amidst the oath-taking and speech-making of Organization Day, the Indiana Senate changed a rule related to floor decorum that threatens to shut down debate in the chamber, especially the voice of the minority party.
To fully understand the new rule, let me give you an idea of how debates on controversial bills sometimes have gone up until now.
Generally, any legislator who speaks on a bill can be questioned about what he or she said at the microphone.
So, if a Senator supports or opposes a bill and states their position during debate another Senator can ask the first Senator to yield to questions. And then there is a back-and-forth between the two. Generally – but not always – it is Democrats in the minority asking questions.
A Senator can simply decline to take questions but there is some unwritten rule that it is disrespectful. I have only seen it happen a few times in more than 20 years.
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But under this new rule, many of those questions will no longer be allowed.
“During debate, members of the body may only question the author or sponsor who calls the question under debate, or the member yielded to by the author or sponsor to present the question under debate,” the rule reads.
What this means is Senators can no longer question everyone who comes to the microphone — even if they have made a false or confusing statement. Only the author or sponsor can be queried (or someone yielded to present the bill under a rare circumstance).
The problem is lots of Senators in the chamber have expertise on topics other than the author. Senators who are also trained lawyers regularly get up and offer their knowledge on bills. If they can answer a question, why limit that? Same with doctors or insurance agents or teachers.
The rule also reduces the amount of time allowed to speak. Before, a person speaking on a bill was limited to 30 minutes. But questions were not counted toward that. Now it will be a collective 30-minute limit.
I cannot recall a time when the Republicans did not control the Indiana Senate. Why this now?
The Nation published Should a Single Trump Judge Have the Power to Void Biden’s Policies? And tries to answer its questions:
The issue of whether judges should have this power came up during a heated oral argument at the Supreme Court this week. The case, United States v. Texas, involves an appeal of US District Judge Drew Tipton’s decision to “vacate” a rule issued by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Mayorkas ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to prioritize detaining undocumented immigrants who “pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security.” Tipton is a Trump appointee for the Southern District of Texas who is basically Stephen Miller with better hair. He vacated Mayorkas’s order, saying that the federal government cannot pick and choose which immigrants to detain but must detain all immigrants who are out of status.
Tipton’s order is legally dubious and practically unworkable. Courts have long held that the Executive Branch (of which the DHS is a part) retains a level of discretion on whom to prosecute and how. Prosecutors, for instance, can decide to focus on white-collar criminals instead of turnstile jumpers (or do the exact opposite when they’re cowards). Moreover, even if the DHS wanted to detain every single undocumented immigrant in this country, it couldn’t. The DHS and ICE have neither the labor force nor the detention space (nor the toothbrushes, apparently) to round up and process every undocumented immigrant, no matter how dearly white nationalists wish they could.
The Biden administration’s Department of Justice made all of these obvious arguments against Tipton’s order. Far more interesting, though, is another argument the DOJ made—an argument to curb the power of Tipton, and the legion of Trump judges just like him, to muck up the normal procession of laws in the future.
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When I try to remove myself from the partisanship inherent in how these orders play out, the corrupt alliance between Tipton and Paxton, and the old-school institutionalist concerns of Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Jackson, I’m still left with a big fat “I don’t know” on the essential question of whether district court judges should have the power to do this. “I want judges to enjoin federal agencies, if the judges are good” is not an intellectually defensible position, particularly once you accept the fact that Trump judges exist and will continue to wield power for some time. “I don’t want judges to be able to stop federal agencies from making rules” also seems woefully naive, given not just what Republicans do when they control the executive but also the fact that every president will try to push the limits of their power.
All I can say confidently and stridently is: A judiciary is only as good as the people running it, and right now we have some terrible people in charge. Left unchecked, Tipton will pull these juvenile rulings out of thin air, again and again. But left unchecked, another Republican administration will fully weaponize the executive agencies like the DHS and ICE.
The Nation also published Larry Krasner on What Will Actually Reduce Crime. The Republicans want to throw everyone in jail - it is forceful, it seems they are taking action - and this has not worked. So take a look at what a Democrat proposes, before the Republicans throw all of you into prison.
Book Riot continues its coverage of book censorship with The “Culture War” Designation is Journalistic Negligence: Book Censorship News, December 2, 2022:
A weakening journalism industry is one arm of the octopus which has allowed book bans and censorship to thrive in the current environment. It’s not just the loss of local news, though. Further contributing is the insistence of calling book censorship a matter of “culture war.”
Censorship is not, nor has it ever been, a culture war.
A “culture war” is what happens between two (or more) factions working to assert dominance for their belief system. Keeping to this part of the definition, censorship might fall under the umbrella of the term. But “culture war” describes more than a fringe movement — and to be clear, despite the power groups like Moms For Liberty, No Left Turn, and others have, they’re still fringe groups. “Culture war” happens when the issue at hand is one which there is a broad sense of disagreement on the topic socially. Book bans and censorship are fundamental principles encoded in the First Amendment rights of all Americans.
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Too few journalists have bothered pushing back against the rhetoric of these fringe groups and by framing their behavior as part of a “culture war,” they create malinformation about what’s actually happening. What these news outlets choose to share and how they frame it suggests that the right-wing push against the freedom to read is a much larger and more popular movement than it is through the designation of a culture war.
But the data is quite clear: this is not a society-level culture war. It’s a fringe movement funded by a lot of money and political connections, by adults who want to push their singular, white cis heterosexual patriarchal Christian nationalist norms on the next generation. The same next generation who is already seeing through their bullshit.
and The Controversy of The Rabbits’ Wedding by Garth Williams uses an old controversy to show the silliness, and the dangerousness, of our current book banning nut jobs.
Books
Time for reading away from the computer gets away from, so maybe in another 20 years I will get a chance to catch up on the lists below, but may you do better than me:
- Online "Best Books of 2022" Lists - December 2nd Update - Largehearted boy
- From The Saltire Society by way of The Literary Salon: The 2022 Shortlists For Scotland's National Book Awards Announced
- The Guardian's List (12/4/22): The best books of 2022
- From The Millions: What Kind of Angel: On Percy Shelley (I was never all that enthused with Shelley, poetry is a weak subject for me, but this essay has me thinking I ought to give him another shot.)
- From Granta: On Marguerite Duras. A French writer I only heard of after going to prison, and seems like she needs to be read.
- Dorthy Parker's Ashes has a new issue, The Writing Life. All looks too good not to read, and like the kid in the candy store, I cannot make up my mind where to start. Unlike that kid, I will put this off to later. My thinking is there are things to be learned here.
- I have read Jhumpa Lahiri, and I like reading her. Which is why I read her essay, Forbidden Notebooks: A Woman’s Right to Write, from The Paris Review. I can understand some of what follows, the diary being an interrogation; being a secret world, although I hide mine in plain sight.
The Italian title of Forbidden Notebook is Quaderno proibito—literally translated, “prohibited notebook.” Forbidden and prohibited may be interchangeable in English, but the latter lacks the romance that might soften the former (as in “forbidden love”), and connotes instead legal restrictions, interdictions, and punishment. The word prohibited comes from the Latin verb prohibere (its roots mean, essentially, “to hold away”), which was fundamental to legal terminology in Ancient Rome. It is the word de Céspedes chooses to describe Valeria’s notebook, and to interrogate, more broadly, a woman’s right, in postwar Italy, to express herself in writing, to have a voice, and to hold opinions and secrets that distinguish herself from her family.
The act of purchasing the eponymous notebook, along with the ongoing dilemma of how to conceal it, drives the tension as the novel opens. Having purchased it illegally and smuggled it home, Valeria hides it in various locations—in a sack of rags, an old trunk, an empty biscuit tin. But she always runs the risk of it being discovered by her husband and grown children, all of whom laugh at the mere idea that she might want to keep a diary.
Of course, as Rockwell says, such patterns in prizes are “sometimes flukes”, and it is not as if recognition of south Asian writers has sprung from nowhere. Last year, for example, Sri Lankan Anuk Arudpragasam was shortlisted for the Booker with A Passage North. But Manasi Subramaniam, the editor and publisher of the Indian editions of Karunatilaka’s and Shree’s books, thinks what is happening now is something bigger, “a reframing of the global south in the wider literary narrative”. She clarifies that several changes over the last few decades – “diasporic writing, brave independent publishers, a steady shifting of the gaze, translators who have quietly chipped away at excavation projects to expand our collective oeuvre” – have contributed to the current moment. Still, the work is slow, and often the weight rests on the shoulders of individuals and small presses.
Probably won't mean much over here - Americans have trouble enough reading Americans, let alone translated authors. The world is bigger than this country, and it may teach us about ourselves. Along these lines: Tsitsi Dangarembga, Anne Carson and Mary Gaitskill honoured by Royal Society of Literature.
Speaking of learning, and also from The Guardian: Top 10 dissenting life stories. Americans think dissent is watching Fox News, being dittoheads, when they are being turned into the very sheeple they vocally despise. We have a history of dissent here - Thoreau, the abolitionists, Eugene Debs - and a history of ignoring them. McCarthyism appears as the only opponent in America opposing Stalin when there was an anti-Communist Left. My PO wonders why I do not go apartment shopping; money and Henry David Thoreau tell me not to do so. I amazed my friend KH by refusing to get a car, my reasons were money and Henry David Thoreau. I do not need the stress of making and spending money engendered by an automobile revving up my tendencies for depression; following Thoreau's lead, I dissent from American consumerism.
I have not read Colm Tóibín, but think I should. The Guardian reviews him under A Guest at the Feast by Colm Tóibín review – words never fail him. (12/4/22).
The Guardian review, Marigold and Rose by Louise Glück review – the babies’ tale, makes me curious to see how Louise Glück pulls off the trick, but there is also this bit by the reviewer that I want to chew over:
...And for this consummate dive into the multiple possibilities of selfhood, we should be grateful.
Ah, here is a book review that should be read, and won't be: Chokepoint Capitalism review – art for sale. Apathy is an accurate description of what I have found since coming home. More apathy, might be truer, but I cannot from here distinguish my depression from reality before 2010.
In this provocative book, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow argue that, today, every working artist is a bond servant. Culture is the bait adverts are sold around, but artists see almost nothing of the billions Google, Facebook and Apple and make off their backs. We have entered a new era of “chokepoint capitalism”, in which businesses snake their way between audiences and creatives to harvest money that should rightfully belong to the artist.
An early chapter sketches the growth of Amazon, a relatively straightforward example of the phenomenon. First the company got publishers hooked on its site by offering them great rates. Once it became apparent they couldn’t survive without it, Amazon reduced their cut of the cover price. The image of the chokepoint that recurs throughout this book is an evocatively gruesome one. There is just one pipeline through which authors can access their readers, and Amazon is squeezing it, dictating exactly which books make it to the other side, and at what price.
The problem with most books that have “capitalism” in the title is that reading them tends to induce apathy. The word itself is deployed in an unspecific, almost fatalistic way, used as a catch-all explanation for a variety of modern ills: inequality, the housing crisis, cookies that track your search history on the internet. Instead of trying to comprehend the details of how Google came to control the ad market we make vague references to the algorithm. There is something strangely comforting about relinquishing your agency in this way: if the workings of the algorithm are too complicated for you to understand, you’re off the hook. Why bother trying to fight it?
What makes this book so refreshing, by contrast, is that it never lets its reader off the hook. The authors remind us, repeatedly, that our ignorance is being weaponised against us. If we don’t understand how big business established its chokehold over us, how will we ever be able to wriggle free of its grip? As such, the first half is devoted to explaining precisely how corporations gain the whip hand over artists in the main creative industries: publishing, screenwriting, news, radio and music....
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...There is something depressing about this (data-mining might not actually work, but Google will continue to sell your secrets for as long as advertisers keep buying them). But it’s liberating, too. We tend to think of big tech as an outsize, almost supernatural force, capable of building mind-control systems that can trick us into buying almost anything. One of the revelations of this book is that much of that power is illusory.
sch 12/4/22
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