SUMMER READS
Recently, after sending out a notice of an EXTRA! to our
readers, I received an email from one reader thanking me for a bit of news that was not about the YouKnowWhat-us. Indeed, for some time it seemed like there was nothing else in the news, not much else in the limited conversations we are able to have, or in the private and public expressions of yearning for touch, for something in our minds that approximates what was once called “normalcy.” Even with the "loosening" of lockdown in some places, the sting remains. But let’s get it over with. We will eschew DeFoe’s Journal of a Plague Year or Boccacio’s Decameron or Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of Cholera. All are worthy, but others have recommended recommended and recommended them. Nor will we suggest inspid fantasies for “escape” from the harsh realities impinging upon us. However, some oldies but goodies are not without consideration. Adelante! |
Now, I am an avowed fan of the “Beeb”—BBC, and in programme after programme, one sees presenters and interviewees on screen, in their homes, and/or standing alone on their “patch.” One such programme is a seasonal review of weather in the temperate zones, in the most recent case heralding the British spring. In this effort, programmers offer interesting tidbits about various natural phenomenon such as “wildlife,” ranging from invertebrates (“bugs” to you) to birds of all sorts, to delightful mammals like water voles (the inspiration for Water Rat in Wind in the Willows), and beavers. Rendered extinct by those who loved their pelts, newly reintroduced beavers are working long and hard to build dams which in turn, as naturalists have discovered, help with flood control in the UK's many rivers.
After musing on the birds, a presenter will pause for what he calls a “Mindfulness Moment.” Normally, mention of that sort of thing makes me shudder, recalling a waggish friend’s comment: “uh, oh—woo-woo!” However, what follows is a video featuring the sounds and sights of early morning on yet another wildlife enthusiast’s “patch.” Birdsong. The river rushing. A small stream gurgling. The wind rustling the leaves. Things that in that sought-after “normalcy” are often drowned out by traffic on the nearby highway, air traffic overhead, the hum of machinery, and so on.
What is it? about 50% reduction in world carbon dioxide omissions since so many places have locked down? No, we have not escaped the ravages of climate change, but that figure is a hint as to what an impact our busy modern life has had on our human habitat, not to mention the destruction of wildlife habitats and the boundaries between the wild and subdued ("domesticated"might be an exaggeration.) The consumption of animals sickened in factory farms. The tragic waste of life in the pursuit of profits over people. No guarantee that we will remember, though: you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink…
My recommendations, then, include visiting and revisiting work about our fraught (or 'un-fraught') relationship with the natural world. First, as we have broadly hinted in the illustration of its book cover,
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Then,
After musing on the birds, a presenter will pause for what he calls a “Mindfulness Moment.” Normally, mention of that sort of thing makes me shudder, recalling a waggish friend’s comment: “uh, oh—woo-woo!” However, what follows is a video featuring the sounds and sights of early morning on yet another wildlife enthusiast’s “patch.” Birdsong. The river rushing. A small stream gurgling. The wind rustling the leaves. Things that in that sought-after “normalcy” are often drowned out by traffic on the nearby highway, air traffic overhead, the hum of machinery, and so on.
What is it? about 50% reduction in world carbon dioxide omissions since so many places have locked down? No, we have not escaped the ravages of climate change, but that figure is a hint as to what an impact our busy modern life has had on our human habitat, not to mention the destruction of wildlife habitats and the boundaries between the wild and subdued ("domesticated"might be an exaggeration.) The consumption of animals sickened in factory farms. The tragic waste of life in the pursuit of profits over people. No guarantee that we will remember, though: you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink…
My recommendations, then, include visiting and revisiting work about our fraught (or 'un-fraught') relationship with the natural world. First, as we have broadly hinted in the illustration of its book cover,
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Then,
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake. I hadn't realized that this, too, takes place in the shadow of an epidemic. One might call it dystopian, but I reiterate the caveat that appeared in a New Yorker review when the book first came out:
a dystopian novel is not intended as a literal forecast, or even necessarily as a logical extension of our current world. It is simply, and not so simply, a bad dream of our present time, an exquisitely designed horror show in which things are changed from what we do know to a dream version of what we don’t. (Lorrie Moore, “Bioperversity,” May 12, 2003). Sound familiar? John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath. When American writers wrote about genuine social problems affecting our national community, something more than the angst of its dreary bourgeoisie. And why not revisit, Kenneth Graham's Wind in the Willows? It is, indeed, a book for all ages with a vocabulary that would challenge most younger readers today, but with a style that no amount of Disneyfication can hope to imitate. Water Rat and Mole's meeting with the great god Pan, alone, is worth the read Our master Memorialist, Chris Sawyer-Lauçanno, responded to our request for suggestions with alacrity, first noting his granddaughter, Imogene Pruitt-Spence’s, social distant rave about, Otessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Haruki Murakami's 1Q8 (Please note that several editions are quite pricey; time to visit your local library!) Sawyer-Lauçanno went on to add, "a book nobody but me and brother has ever read but for some reason seemed perfect for right now, with NYC in lockdown, is" the Molodovsky book below. Kadya Molodovsky (trans. Anita Norich), A Jewish Refugee in New York. Ling Ma, Severance, This among his plague suggestions"about having to work during a pandemic, [it] could have been written last month;" Then, "given the ongoing murder pandemic of black men by police, I propose one my daughter gave me a couple of years ago, and that is amazing," Technically, it is billed as having been written for teenagers, but children of all ages would do well to consider it. Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give. (Originally published in the UK, one can also order it from US sources.) |
Our friend, Ed Foster, of Talisman, has replied with a brief and intriguing list of "… my recent and current reading." The list is eclectic, with no particular nod to the pandemic or other prerequisites. We add a few comments PRN (as needed.) But first, speaking of the natural world, he notes the classic, Piet Oudolf & Henk Gerritsen, Planting the Natural Garden Then, |
Edward Kanterian, Wittgenstein
Glenn Chandler, The Sins of Jack Saul Alice Notley, For the Ride, about which should be noted that it is this visionary poet’s latest, a book length poem in which the protagonist, One, joins with others in fleeing a disaster via an ersatz Ark. They decide what must be saved are words. James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare (note that this can also be had in the form of an ebook.) No relation to the experience noted in Wind in the Willows, one anonymous reviewer of Hillman's book noted that "our gods have now become out diseases." Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (note that this book can also be had via Project Gutenberg) |
Poet and oft contributor, Dana Delibovi, responded with "only two, honestly remarkable" selections:
Dorianne Laux. Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems. Delibovi adds, "This book is the best of a life’s work. Beautifully curated, great poems."
Hilary Mantel’s now complete (as of 2020) trilogy of historical fiction focused on Thomas Cromwell: Wolf Hall; Bring up the Bodies; The Mirror and the Light. Delibovi notes, "Yes, these books are bestsellers, but unlike many bestsellers, they are amazingly good. Mantel is the most unsentimental and sharp writer there is. She’s the true north. In her prose, when heads roll in the court of Henry the 8th, you don’t cry for the victim—you grieve with solemnity for the folly of humankind." |
Sadly, our troubled times give us no respite from difficult news; and I must add this postscript. That does not mean a diminished afterthought. Rather, the fact of modernism as a predatory force bilking the planet of its natural resources—soiling our nest, as it were—and the peculiar way in which such thinking evolved is, I believe, intimately related to the way that we human beings exploit each other. Profit before the planet; profit before people.
Recent events with regard to the persistence of the US’ racial divide remind me that James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, published in 1963, should be required reading for every US citizen. Other than the fact that Baldwin is one of our great American writers, this book, which started as a letter to his nephew, is still timely. A new limited edition has been published with photographs of the Civil Rights era struggle.[1] For me, personally, the picture of the long line of persons making their way from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, the Old South’s capital, was both a slap in the face and an occasion for a surge of feelings, to this day some I cannot identify. I was there. Ever so briefly, I met Baldwin on that March. Enough to be overawed and speechless.
After the march, friends and I sat in our car, abandoned, on a dark, tree lined southern road en route back to Selma with our driver’s license taken by a stereotypically fat, southern cop. Harassment was clearly his objective: he had stopped us, making snide remarks (we were just kids, barely out of high school) to which we dared not respond, then suddenly speeding off, leaving us stranded. He returned 45 minutes later and took us to the police station, charging us with speeding—35 mph in a 45 mph speed zone. And when we got back to Brown’s Chapel in Selma, a young boy came racing in on our heels, “Someone’s been shot! Someone’s been shot!” The victim was Viola Liuzzo, a white woman and wife of a union leader in Detroit who had made the mistake of giving a black boy a ride back from the march. To this day, I am sure that that cop had a part in that murder.
All night, we turned off the lights in the house we were staying, courtesy of one of the black community in that little town; and, even then, should we cross the room in front of a window, we were under strict orders to duck because the Ku Klux Klan, resplendent in their cowardly white sheets, were shooting at people through the windows.
This is the next time, this is the fire next time, ablaze again, fueled by white supremacists, the sluggish to absent morals of those in power, and the cheapened “leadership” on the part of a narcissistic racist in the White House (and his caviling minions, lest we forget.) The sameness of it is also horrifying, save for one thing: as black actor Clarke Peters put it, because of the appalling video of the murder of George Floyd, “this time the whole world saw it.”
Read the book, dammit.
Oh, and, what is that expression, “it only hurts when I laugh”? Satire, bless us, oh how we
need it:
Recent events with regard to the persistence of the US’ racial divide remind me that James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, published in 1963, should be required reading for every US citizen. Other than the fact that Baldwin is one of our great American writers, this book, which started as a letter to his nephew, is still timely. A new limited edition has been published with photographs of the Civil Rights era struggle.[1] For me, personally, the picture of the long line of persons making their way from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, the Old South’s capital, was both a slap in the face and an occasion for a surge of feelings, to this day some I cannot identify. I was there. Ever so briefly, I met Baldwin on that March. Enough to be overawed and speechless.
After the march, friends and I sat in our car, abandoned, on a dark, tree lined southern road en route back to Selma with our driver’s license taken by a stereotypically fat, southern cop. Harassment was clearly his objective: he had stopped us, making snide remarks (we were just kids, barely out of high school) to which we dared not respond, then suddenly speeding off, leaving us stranded. He returned 45 minutes later and took us to the police station, charging us with speeding—35 mph in a 45 mph speed zone. And when we got back to Brown’s Chapel in Selma, a young boy came racing in on our heels, “Someone’s been shot! Someone’s been shot!” The victim was Viola Liuzzo, a white woman and wife of a union leader in Detroit who had made the mistake of giving a black boy a ride back from the march. To this day, I am sure that that cop had a part in that murder.
All night, we turned off the lights in the house we were staying, courtesy of one of the black community in that little town; and, even then, should we cross the room in front of a window, we were under strict orders to duck because the Ku Klux Klan, resplendent in their cowardly white sheets, were shooting at people through the windows.
This is the next time, this is the fire next time, ablaze again, fueled by white supremacists, the sluggish to absent morals of those in power, and the cheapened “leadership” on the part of a narcissistic racist in the White House (and his caviling minions, lest we forget.) The sameness of it is also horrifying, save for one thing: as black actor Clarke Peters put it, because of the appalling video of the murder of George Floyd, “this time the whole world saw it.”
Read the book, dammit.
Oh, and, what is that expression, “it only hurts when I laugh”? Satire, bless us, oh how we
need it:
There were many theories about the strange illness of the second Rule of the Free Republic of Aburĩria….
….But when did this anger take root? When snakes first appeared on the national scene? When water in the bowels of the earth turned bitter? Or when he visited America and failed to land an interview with Global Network News on its famous program Meet the Global Mighty? It is said that when he was told that he could not be granted even a minute on the air, he could hardly believe his ears or even understand what they were talking about, knowing that in his country he was always on TV; his every moment—eating, shitting, sneezing, or blowing his nose—captured on camera. Even his yawns were news because, whether triggered by boredom, fatigue, hunger, or thirst they were often followed by some national drama…. ….It was said that he was especially skillful in creating and nursing conflicts among Aburĩrian families, for scenes of sorrow were what assuaged him and made him sleep soundly. |
The above is from the very beginning of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s satirical novel, Wizard of the Crow, (2006), in which he chronicles—"sums up," in his words—Africa in the 20th century, its particular suffering as the result of European colonialism, for one. But what is striking about the above is the banality of its evil, if I may put it that way: i.e., all dictators are too similar. The media and its relation to the petty dictator of the fictionalized country of Aburĩria, the corrupt Christian church and financial institutions—yes, the way this plays out in Africa, but also does this not sound sickeningly familiar?
On another, and raucous, note, we remind readers that editor Eric Darton's Free City, will be out July 14th, reissued by Dalkey Archive Press, and more timely than ever in its "historical, political and absurdist elements." It is a tale of "L.", a seventeenth-century inventor caught in a precarious love triangle, even as his beloved northern European port town teeters on the brink of catastrophe." and it is "laced with bawdy humor and flights of the fantastical, [wherein] L. must balance the demands of his patron – a rapacious entrepreneur – against those of his sorceress lover. As L. attempts to avert calamity, he finds himself joined, literally out of the blue, by the most unlikely of allies." Preorder at Bookshop.org
- BGM |
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Now we have had an ongoing communication with City Lights Books, usually around their issuing some fine translations of Turkish writers, though they do much, much more. Though officially listed as fall to winter, why not support your independent bookstores and publishing venues and preorder now? We offer a link, sent to us, to their excellent catalog: https://issuu.com/citylightsbooks/docs/fall_2020_winter_2021_catalog_v1 Books include Tim Wise's Dispatches from the Race War, Caribbean Fragoza's Eat the Mouth the Feeds You, Featuring, and I quote, "Latinx, Chicans and immigrant women's voices..." and Todd Miller's Build Bridges, Not Walls.
[1] By Taschen. Sadly sold out and outrageously priced in the first place. Only if the profits went to some good cause, as opposed to into some corporate pockets could I sanction that. Ours links to a more modest edition.
[1] By Taschen. Sadly sold out and outrageously priced in the first place. Only if the profits went to some good cause, as opposed to into some corporate pockets could I sanction that. Ours links to a more modest edition.