Bastards of Young
Reading Log, Fall 2022
A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, by Anne Boyer. Kansas City native Anne Boyer has long been one of my very favorite writers, a fierce and brilliant poet and cultural critic with a keen, searching mind and a formidable command of vernaculars from the demotic to the recherche. This compact collection of essays, meditations, and fragments, from our heroes at Ugly Duckling Press, is a characteristic whirl of often funny, often bitter, and always provocative riffs on contemporary life, literature, poetry, illness, and precarity. A meditation on the art of the late Jo Spence, in particular, represents art criticism operating at an extraordinary level.
Bright Unbearable Reality, by Anna Badkhen. In this loosely connected collection of essays about history, myth, and science, Badkhen, who is a journalist and anthropologist, travels widely over the globe, collecting information about vanished societies and changing climates, as well as about the struggles of dispossessed migrants and indigenous tribes. An elegant, despairing book, poetic and analytic at once, about how “we keep careening toward catastrophe in our reckless pursuit of ambition, of some one more thing.”
I Fear My Pain Interests You, by Stephanie LaCava. I have spoken at some length with my friends and peers about how the older I get, the less interested in middlebrow literary fiction — lyrical naturalism, as Zadie Smith once termed it — I become. The antidote to this ennui is novels like I Fear My Pain Interests You, which present an entirely different but equally vexing set of challenges. LaCava’s novel is an intentionally airless, deadpan account of six months in the life of Margot, a dissolute young actress with a psychological condition that prevents her from feeling physical pain. The book’s utter lack of affect, with the young protagonist veering between numbness and sexual abjection, is its own kind of ferocity: an absolute refusal to bend to the emotional needs of a conventional reader. In conversation with Merve Emre at Greenlight Books in Brooklyn, in October, LaCava spoke of how the book depicts “an inversion of hysteria” enacted by “a character stripped of agency,” and the sense of the narrative being rooted in the sticky mud of post-Lacanian paralysis and nouveau roman gamesmanship feels like an authentic gesture, if only of refusal. A chilling and elegant triumph.
Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility, by Michel Leiris; translated by Richard Howard. A friend of mine tracks my reading via my Twitter feed, and has lately taken to berating me for my choices. He feels that I have been reading too much theory and contemporary nonfiction, a mistake when “you can find the same shit and more in the first 500 pages of David Copperfield.” He may be right, and yet …
Something strange happened to me during the pandemic. The isolation, combined with a devastating emotional matter that I would rather not discuss here, but that anyone with an Internet connection and thirty-five seconds of spare time would surely be able to decipher, occluded my normal curiosity and wide-ranging appetites into a narrow and blasted sallet. I have found that of late I return repeatedly to four different things, to wit: 1. cultural theory; 2. King Lear; 3. Sir Thomas Browne; 4. Puritan sermons. I cannot truly understand, let alone explain, this. Suffice it to say that my emotional temperature is such that, in moments when I am in extremis, when I am suffering, reading anything other than these four texts, or categories of texts, feels impossible, and that some thin but necessary kind of solace obtains only through them. This seems wildly improbable, but the phenomenon has by now proven so durable that it feels by now almost like a permanent feature of my mental landscape.
Which brings me to Michel Leiris and Manhood. This book, first published in French in 1946, is at times excruciatingly retrograde: relentlessly essentialist, full of dubious chauvinist attitudes, self-pitying, riddled with distasteful personal disclosures. It also meets some desire, for self-knowledge or identification, within me that I find difficult to qualify. When Leiris describes himself as
a man who gorged himself on pessimism, believing he would find in it the means to a dazzling and meteoric existence, loving his own despair until the day he realized — too late — that he could no longer emerge from it, and that he had thus fallen into the trap of his own enchantments.
it feels so apt and right that such passages were met with small, involuntary noises of agreement and recognition. Such are the operations of literature.
How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, by Nicholas Mirzoeff. I have been trying to anatomize my essentially lukewarm reaction to this accessible, if somewhat underpowered, introduction to the study of visual culture. I so often grouse loudly when I am overwhelmed by prose that is knotty or academic that it seems perverse to complain about this one being pedestrian. I coasted through it in three nights, but remain daunted by the contemporary world and its relentless epistemological paradoxes and conundra.
What Is Progress, by Aldo Schiavone; translated by Ann Goldstein. This almost-book-length essay from a distinguished Italian historian is sober-minded, elegant, wide-ranging, and wrong about almost everything. Schiavone’s account of “progress,” which I conceive of in a retrograde Matthew Arnold soft-liberalism kind of way — a troubled ghost from a forgotten past— melds evolutionary theory with technological millenarianism, thus neatly combining two of my least favorite things. The book is a particularly outrageous example of what used to be called “Whig history,” a relentless outpouring of flawed teleology and hubris. “History loves abrupt changes of pace, leaps, unexpected mutations,” Schiavone notes. Really? History loves things? Does it also love chocolate ice cream and the designated hitter rule? “The change we are about to experience,” he intones later, speaking of a Singularity-like end of evolution, “which is already announced by countless signs, is the greatest in the history of humanity.” Well, golly. I suppose one might admit of a grudging respect for Professor Schivaone’s absolute unwillingness to settle on, as topic for his book, the mere third- or fourth-greatest change in the history of humanity.
“Composition as Explanation,” by Gertrude Stein. An exordium for the towering madness that is The Making of Americans.
Heather, the Totality, by Matthew Weiner. Adequately handled mini-thriller from former Mad Men screenwriter Weiner. Really a short story puffed up to novella size: the typeface is so large that the book has the feel of a middle-grade reader. Meant to be a parable of privilege, violence, and paranoia, the book generates a modicum of heat and sports a trick ending that grades out as above average. I am unable to make any sense of the bizarre title.
