Closer to Free
Reading log; end of the year (decade? era? world?)
Dispatches, by Michael Herr. Like many people, I sense, I have occasionally had a hard time reading over the course of this disorienting and scarifying year, finding myself unable to bring my normally formidable reserves of concentration fully to bear on the matter at hand. At such times, I often turn, for relief, to re-reading books I have enjoyed in the past, which somehow feels mollifyingly easy and untaxing. Michael Herr’s intense, hallucinatory account of the Vietnam War, first published in 1977, might seem like odd comfort food in such a time as this, but comforting it was during a week not too far gone when I was badly unstrung by ambient anxiety, and worse.
Clean Hands, by Patrick Hoffman. Adequately executed thriller about a sophisticated high-tech blackmail scheme that veers between the law firms and back alleys of contemporary New York. The setup, in which a posse of crack private cops run down a stolen iPhone containing sensitive legal data, is a bravura sequence; nothing that follows is quite so tightly put together. This is a rare instance of a book I picked up on at a whim, via a “books in brief” recommendation from the New Yorker and the NYPL’s e-book repository.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson. My father’s pick for our annual meeting of the Men’s Book Club, which club comprises my father, my college roommate Dan Mayland, and me. This famous novel plays fugue-like variations on the central themes of the gothic genre, with insanity, death, reclusion, and a haunted house all in the mix. As cunning as it is, though, the novel can’t help feel to me somehow minor, in some fundamental way.
The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James. Valuable, if a bit of a churn at times. There are elements of James’s thinking that resonate strongly with me, but there are other elements of the project that don’t really imbricate with my own garbled, semi-gnostic, and highly idiosyncratic version of Lutheran Protestantism. The whole idea of making an anthropology-style survey of religious belief seems to me, on some level, faintly comic; James piles up lengthy testimonies of saints and mystics as if assuming that the validity or faith can be established via sheer bulk of anecdote. Very much an artifact of a can-do, roll-up-your-sleeves sort of cheerful progressive America. A salutary side effect is that reading it gets you, or at least me, at least thinking a little — in a gauzy, non-useful way — about the metaphysical concepts that transcend what James calls “the sand and grit of selfhood.”
The Superrationals, by Stephanie LaCava. I was kinda sorta enjoying this cool, oblique, amoral novel about a jet-setting art consultant, until I mentioned it to Hip Young Co-Worker. “She’s part of that Sarah Nicole Prickett Artforum set,” she replied dismissively, of the author, “who I used to be intimidated by. Natasha Stagg people.” Aaaaand … so much for The Superrationals.
Smiley’s People, by John Le Carre. The concluding volume of the so-called Karla Trilogy, which stands as a high-water mark in the history of the spy thriller. It does not reach the effulgent heights of its predecessors, lacking Tinker, Tailor’s peerless sense of institutional claustrophobia and Honourable Schoolboy’s sweep and dazzling setting, but it brings the saga to a very satisfying end indeed.
Equipment for Living, by Michael Robbins. This irritated me, which is puzzling, since Robbins is about my age and we share broadly similar topical interests and critical perspectives. Perhaps that’s it, though — coming up against a peer in this way triggers some kind of peevish, ego-based counter-reaction? Maybe I’m just jealous. The long essay on Frederick Seidel is some of the most tortuous, side-winding wrestling with the problem of moral agency in art that I can recall. Just say that the man’s a shit who writes some distinctive if seriously limited verse, and have done with it.
Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, by Alex Ross. I tried; reader, oh how I tried. I want so badly to be the kind of person who reads seven-hundred-page books about Wagner, but I found that I was forcing myself to pick it up every night, as though it were homework, and my life is both too short and too crowded for homework. Alex Ross has always struck me as a nice fellow, and he’s smart and knowledgeable, but the mass of information he has compiled has somehow got away from him, it seems to me, and the result is a prolix and disorganized slog. I felt obscurely vindicated in my abandonment by Jed Perl’s review in the NYRB; Perl says that Ross
didn’t need to discuss the plots and themes of quite so many novels, theatrical events, and movies in which Wagner’s operas make some sort of appearance … he piles up so much information and makes matters so complicated that a reader may end up wondering what exactly he’s getting at.
I must also say that I have sensed before the shadow of a profound disagreement with Ross’s approach to this matter of ethics and the historiography of classical music. Writing in the New Yorker in 2017 on a similar theme — the presence or non-presence of anti-Semitism in J. S. Bach’s choral works — he dismisses as “weak” the proposition that “any noxious views are mitigated, or even annulled, by the greatness of Bach’s music.” This alarms me; surely the greatness of the music is the only thing that can mitigate or annul such considerations? Why would we even be bothered otherwise?
American Humor: A Study of the National Character, by Constance Rourke. A brilliant and completely unclassifiable book, truly sui generis, and one I expect to return to with profit many times. First published in 1931, Rourke’s book is not so much an examination of humor like ha-ha humor so much as a typology of American archetypes as defined by history and literature. It has a truly keen feel for that ineffable weirdness of 19th-century America, for the “mimicry and travesty” of its storytellers and jokers, who “caught the scattered life of the time not realistically but with preposterous inflation.” The book is part anthropology, part literary history, part structural analysis, part cultural criticism, and 100% astonishing.
Glitch Feminism, by Legacy Russell. This dense and inventive manifesto announces the advent of a new kind of cyberfeminism, one that uses the concept of the technical glitch as an organizing principle for the resistance to the oppression of the gender binary. “A body that remains indecipherable within the binary assignment,” Russell writes, is glitching, and “this glitch is a form of refusal.” Russell goes on to develop various tenets of this digital ideology, such as “glitch is anti-body” and “glitch is remix,” largely through incisive analyses of the work of a range of contemporary queer artists and artists of color. This kind of thing, needless to say, operates at the upper reaches of my capabilities; nonetheless, occasional engagement with hyper-cerebral works of critical theory feels something, to me, akin to an obligation, as well as being a pleasure — and we need all of that we can get, these days.
