Fran Lebowitz on youth

Q:   Young people are often a target for you.

A:   I wouldn't say that I dislike the young.  I'm simply not a fan of naivete.  I mean, unless you have an erotic interest in them, what other interest could you have?  What are they going to possibly say that's of interest?  People ask me "aren't you interested in what they're thinking?"  What could they be thinking?  This is not a middle-aged, curmudgeonly attitude.  I didn't like people that age even when I was that age.

-- from Paris Review, Summer 1993

Guest, by Vikram Seth

I woke.  He mumbled things in the next bed.
I lay there for an hour or so.  At four
The alarm rang.  He got out of bed.  He wore
Nothing.  I felt his sleepy classic head
And long-limbed body stir my quiescent heart.
I'd thought that I was free.  Wrong from the start.
I found I loved him entirely instead.

There was no real hope.  "Guy loving guy?
Man, that's a weird trip- and not for me."
I accepted that.  But next day warily
We coiled to snap or spring.  Rash truth.  To lie
Still could have spared the trust; the warmth as well.
I left his room that day.  I try to tell
Myself this sorrow like this ink will dry.

-- from 12 Modern Indian Poets

from "11 Versos," Dionne Brand

From 11 Versos (Writer’s Trust of Canada Margaret Laurence Lecture May 2012)

Dionne Brand

Verso 7

Controversy, against the turn, against the furrow

I finally joined the Communist Party of Canada when it was almost at the end of its existence.  Party meetings were long bureaucratic procedures where many papers were read and intense eyes directed at the people who had encyclopedic brains full of Marx and history.  I joined the artists.  There were artists of all kinds in the club, we were writers and painters and actors, and there were even puppet-makers and comics.  These meetings were possibly the most boring meetings we ever attended.  None of us ever had a meeting perhaps to do anything that we did as artists.  There were photographers and musicians too and proofreaders, and bookshop owners.  And if we did have meetings they would never be this dreary.  The meetings were deadly, tedious meetings discussing things I can’t remember now.  I loved these meetings.  There was a conversation there that we never had to have about what we were doing.  In the muddy meetings there was clarity about our love.  The same love as Lorca and Neruda, Saramago and Carpentier.

A poet friend of mine, two in fact, who were not in the party asked me once why I was a Communist.  I was taken aback.  I said what else would I be?  They stoned me with Stalin, I pelted them with Sartre.  I said I’m a Communist because I’m not a capitalist.  They said this was simplistic.  I said yes but it’s clear.  It was an evening in Massachusetts, we were going to a reading, they said what had communism done for Black people, I said what had capitalism done, they brought up the pogroms, I brought up slavery.  They said but you’re Black, I said but you’re Black too.  They said these isms are only there to hoodwink Black people.  I said most likely but I had never thought of being anything else, for me it was simply logical, organic, I come from the working class.  One of them so annoyed with me asked was I going to call Gromyko to ask him what I could say that night.  I said you call Reagan, I’ll call Gromyko.  We went silent and walked diagonally separated toward the reading.  I read an erotic story about some teenage girls in love with their French-language mistress, we parted company, the diametric widened.

From Brick 90

Winter 2012

from A Game of Hide and Seek, Elizabeth Taylor

Now that evening had come she was more confident.  She could even believe that for everybody there is perhaps another person who will not fade on approach; with whom it might not be entirely like those fishes in tanks, crossing and re-crossing, weaving their way through the water, fearing only, it seems, to touch one another; gliding upwards and away instinctively when their paths threatened to meet.

Allen Ginsberg, Julie & me

(originally posted at onmilwaukee.com)


As I left the Union Theatre the other night after the LGBT Film Festival's presentation of "Howl," the mesmerizing love letter to poetry, free speech and Allen Ginsberg, I remembered that I'd once seen the man himself a few hundred yards away in the Union Ballroom.

He'd been invited to speak at Marquette, but at the last minute the invitation was pulled after pressure from philistines, so the reading was moved to UWM. Defiantly, hundreds of MU students marched up to the East Side to hear him, along with legions of UWM students and a scattering of high school hipsters.

It was 1967 and I was a junior at Riverside High School. Back then "East" was mainly a neighborhood school. Geography determined where you went, and the Riverside demographic pie split three ways:

1. Working class Black kids who generally lived east of 7th Street.
2. Working class white kids who generally lived east of the river to Maryland, and in what we later called Riverwest.
3. Middle (and higher) class kids, sons and daughters of professionals and intellectuals, who generally lived east of Maryland to the lake.

I was fairly anti-social in high school and I may not be the most reliable historian, but I believe these groups all got along reasonably well, with a fair amount of social leakage between them. In fact, Riverside in the late '60s was an excellent place to practice social mobility and to try on new identities. I was desperately sick of my given one.

Though I was solidly working class, my weird obsession with books and reading alienated me from my family at a young age. By 16, I aspired to brainy, more interesting "east of Maryland" status. But we lived in a flat on Bartlett, my father worked at Briggs & Stratton and there were no books or ideas in our home except the ones I smuggled in. I had a Milwaukee Sentinel paper route from age 12 and this gave me enough income to purchase a few accessories for my new avant garde life.

The antiwar and civil rights wave that was sweeping the nation also passed through Riverside. The epicenter was Julie Gibson, with whom I was deeply, secretly and hopelessly in love. Julie’s parents were English professors and published poets. They seemed caught between being outdated beatniks and premature hippies. At the time, I just thought of them as by far the most fascinating people in Milwaukee. Especially in comparison with my own parents.

Their home on the corner of Park and Maryland was a magnet for anarchists, writers, communists, activists and left-bankers of every sort. Julie’s mother Barbara was the opposite of my mother Betty in just about every way imaginable.

When called to the school because we refused to stop selling the underground newspaper, Kaleidoscope, on school grounds, or for passing out flyers accusing a despised gym teacher of being
a racist fascist or for a number of more Dadaist pranks, Mrs. Gibson would invariably side with us, and lecture the principal about the constitutional rights of students.

Mrs. Eklund, on the other hand, who had to take time off from her job at the La Rosa noodle factory on Holton Street, saw only incomprehensible mischief on the part of her son, and no violation of his rights. She was mystified by my new friends; to her it was as if I’d been invaded by body snatchers. The principal advised her that I had fallen under the influence of some bad actors. True, these were not juvenile delinquents, but the smartest kids in the school. It made no difference, they were troublemakers.

I shadowed Julie like a lovesick puppy, but I was always an extra in her show. Fiercely individual, she was in frequent hot water for her appearance -- one day a scandalously short skirt; the next, elaborately patterned old-womanish scarves and shawls covered with political buttons and armbands. Her tinkling chains, bells and rings made a little Julie soundtrack as she flowed through the halls between classes trailing clouds of patchouli.

She was passionate and political, and picked fights with teachers at every opportunity. The Vietnam War was a personal affront to Julie. A book had just been published by Doubleday called "Where is Vietnam: American Poets Respond," that included a grim entry from "Julie Gibson, age 14." It was
called "Typical Eve-of-Destruction-Type Poem Written by a Typically Frightened and Disgusted Person-to Him, to You, to Me and to Us." On the facing page was a poem by Allen Ginsberg.

Despite my somewhat marginal relationship to Julie-world, I spent a lot of time in it. There were afternoons we played hooky, hanging out in the Gibson’s living room, listening to Jefferson Airplane while her mother practiced yoga. There were lunch hours with fish sandwiches from East Side Foods or
French fries from Francesca’s. On one hilarious occasion Mrs. Gibson pretended to be my mother and called in sick for me so we could all attend an open housing rally.

Somehow the idea of asking Julie out on a date seemed too square, even if I hadn’t been shy to the point of catatonia. But there were times together that felt like dates, or potential ones. She’d say "You’re going to that be-in at Lake Park Sunday, right? Please say yes." I’d imagine us sort of floating through the park in a little private bubble, but instead we were quickly swarmed by the usual crowd of her other admirers.

Once we went to hear some folk singer she was excited about at the Avant Garde on Prospect. I ordered a plate of potato chips and two coffees but by the time they arrived we’d been joined by some college students she knew -- glib, smart, intimidating.

But despite all that, when she asked me one morning whether I wanted to go with her to hear Allen Ginsberg read at UWM, I agreed instantly. And imagined that this time it would be a date. "He’s staying at our house!" she noted. That should have been a warning. If the choice later that evening was to be between being entertained by Allen Ginsberg or John Eklund, I was in trouble.

I realized that I had nothing to wear to an Allen Ginsberg reading. Luckily, I had just done a round of collections from my paper route customers and had $30 in my pocket. I took a bus to Johnnie Walker’s on 3rd Street and selected a dark, oversize dress shirt with enormous white polka dots to go
with my burgundy bell bottoms and brown corduroy jacket. My parents were aghast as I left the house on the evening of the reading but my younger sister thought I looked cool.

We met at Julie’s house and waited for the Marquette marchers to come up Maryland. As they passed, we joined. We were alone for the rest of the walk, and when we got to the Ballroom the UWM students who were already seated gave the Marquette arrivals a rousing ovation. It seemed personal, like they were applauding Julie and me.

And Ginsberg? Oddly enough I barely remember anything about him. He looked a bit creepy. James Franco’s Ginsberg was a lot more adorable than Ginsberg’s Ginsberg. There were long poems that angrily bashed Lyndon Johnson. There were lots of theatrics -- incense, candles and chanting. There may
have been a squeezebox involved but I don’t remember whether Ginsberg played it. Julie watched it all in a kind of rapture. I watched her.

Afterward, as we stood outside the Union, friends of Julie and her parents gathered to talk. I tried to stay near her, which was easy at first when the interlopers were people I knew. But gradually the spreading cluster of grad students, professors and bohemians became mainly strangers, and somehow Julie slipped away. I was left standing with a group of people I didn’t know. Because I hadn’t really said hello I was too self-conscious to risk attention by saying goodbye and walking away. So I just
stood there silently for a very long time, listening to clever talk while becoming increasingly invisible.

Eventually, Allen Ginsberg emerged surrounded by an entourage, and our group drifted over to join that one. I turned west on Kenwood to walk home. It was nearly midnight and I had to do my route at 5 a.m.

Robert Walser on expectations

As for me, I'm valiantly studying French, go to work each morning, come home insane in the evening, expect letters, don't write any myself but still expect, every evening, at the very least three letters. They should be lying there when I open the door, white, dazzlingly white, with the dear stamps upon them, the sweet postmarks and all the rest. And when there aren't any, I get perfectly stupid and can't work, and then I say to myself quite sensibly: you never write any letters, but you expect them! You blockhead!

It isn't precisely that I expect letters, but now I'm always expecting something as dear, as tender as a letter. Every evening there ought to be some uplifting little surprise for me, just like a letter.

But one can live quite well without excitements, can't one, only one ought to be endowed with a bit less poesie and the like, should one not? What a babbler I am, am I not, am I not?

- Robert Walser, a letter to his sister, 1898, from Microscripts.

Act of Kindness

One blustery night during the winter of 1973 I was leaving a meeting at the Party office on W 26th street. This was during the time in which the Communist Party was under siege by Lyndon Larouche’s “Labor Committees.” They had singled out the Party for annihilation and suspected members were being assaulted on the street with baseball bats and numchucks.

In the tiny vestibule, one of the elderly volunteers who haunted the building was in the latter stages of steeling herself against the bitter wind. She had wrapped herself in several layers of clothing, and was struggling to tie a scarf around her neck. She moved slowly and with difficulty.

I didn’t recognize her, and I didn’t know whether she was one of the volunteers who actually worked- answering phones, stuffing envelopes, operating the mimeograph machine- or one of the legion of Party veterans who just enjoyed a chance to hang out all day in a comradely atmosphere. The latter would sit outside offices, trying to engage busy functionaries in conversation, like the old guys who hung around in barbershops without ever getting a haircut. But the Party always honored its own, and Gus Hall would never have stood for turning away these beloved old-timers.

“Would you walk this comrade to the bus stop?” someone asked me. I would. Her name was Rose and she said she’d been ‘working at the Center” since her husband died eight years ago. She took a bus down from the Bronx (why not the subway, I wondered) and left for the day only after being convinced that she wouldn’t be needed any more. She walked very slowly, and as we crept down 26th street toward 6th avenue I realized that she couldn’t see very well. I suddenly grasped how frail and vulnerable she was, and I wondered what I would do if we were jumped by Larouche thugs.

But the walk was uneventful. She talked about her work in the garment industry, and told a complicated story about how the union had once made a big mistake by electing a red-baiting secretary who “wrecked the Local.” I couldn’t tell whether these events had taken place recently, or decades ago, but the bitter injustice was vividly alive to her.

From time to time she asked me a question, mundane things along the lines of “What time is it?” The circumstances surrounding the comings and goings from the Center, even something as innocuous as “What brings you to New York?” or “Where are you from?” was not something into which a volunteer would inquire. And old timers, for all their insatiable quest for conversation, had little patience for idle chatter and social niceties. They had one big topical preoccupation: Their Story. And as far as Rose could tell I was just one more interchangeable young comrade who had kindly walked her to the bus stop.

I waited with her until the bus came. Once she was safely aboard, I walked uptown toward 43rd street, where I was to meet my friend Liz before another meeting. Snow was collecting in skittish little eddies, the cold was bone-chilling, and Rose had left my revolutionary credentials in tatters. I felt like a lame imposter.

Good Dog, Anne Carson

I was waiting for you to get to work
‘A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island’
Frank O’Hara

1 You know the second person in the history of the world
the Sun chose to speak to personally was Frank O’Hara, the
first was Orpheus [me]. You are my Sweetheart said the
Sun. He was sitting on the hood of his truck. Somehow it
was menacing. I hardly knew what to say. I got into the
truck that strange autumn light sharpening all glass and
harm my hands fell off. The Sun got in beside me took my
hands one by one blew into each finger filling it with a
kind of sound. Gave my hands back to me. That was the
beginning of my being interesting

2 I had originally an idea to record the sound of skirts
moving on legs on the runway this blank verse. She was a
model when I first of course no one runs on a runway
but the skirts the legs are like pumas. Desire she said is not
harmful til lips spill it then be careful

3 Tell you a story about the best poem I ever wrote the one I
lost. That page was terrific it slid out of a dream about the
littorals above Europe and me looking down as. As on oh
oceans I had all the answers I was an answer! I was high as
day arising and truth shot out of me like a lark. Years ago.
These are tears I do not use. I lost the page again and again
found it again and again every time I moved finally
captured it in a plastic sleeve put it on top of the TV. A
scrap of paper torn and brownish now some words just
stain. What does it mean the littorals above Europe I never
found out. I look at it fast sometimes Hoping

4 Like any couple we’d sat silent in restaurants staring
opposite ways our pockets stuffed with useless summer
money doesn’t mean we were a pissed palindrome

5 Like any couple don’t whistle I’m not your good dog she’d
say I’d say swimming at this hour you must be mad

6 My fifteen minutes in hell I scarcely remember. I know it
was cold. I saw uncreated things seeping here and there
with roots for ears they hadn’t heard a voice in centuries. I
sang a bit. The very ghosts shed tears (Daily Mirror). Eurydice
limped over. Lawyers arrived reciting conditions. Soon
we were off down the hall me admiring the acoustics
wondering could I get a gig and What’s the phone number
down here I said starting to turn poof shall we say a sad
mischance. All my skin cried back all my wings beat once
and that was that. The story that she said nothing but Who?
is a lie

7 One thing about hell is the echo is fabulous. No sound
studio on earth can give you a transverse magnetisation
leak of less than zero. I stood in the black trees transfixed
and pulsing and her stroking off down the lake so strangely
slow

8 I was. I lost. I sang. I knew. I ever hope for that strange
autumn light again with the good dog again with the
thousands of years. Scrap of [me] off Eurydice torn. Her
number I lost her lark I shot and she a pulse. History never
looks so possible as when leaving a heart spilt among the
stones crying Don’t read it again it was perfect

The Bus Driver-- Hedi Kaddour

What has gotten into the bus driver
Who has left his bus, who has sat down
On a curb on the Place de l'Opera
Where he slips into the ease of being
Nothing more than his own tears? The passersby
Who bend over such a shared and
Presentable sorrow would like him
To tell them that the wind used to know
How to come out of the woods toward a woman's dress,
Or that one day his brother said to him,
Even your shadow wants nothing to do with you.
His feet in a puddle, the bus driver
Can only repeat, This work is hard
And people aren't kind.

-- from A Walk in the City,
Treason (YUP 2010)
translated by Marilyn Hacker

A model short story sentence

The motorcycle increased his status, gave him weight, so that people began calling him Uncle and asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he knew absolutely nothing.

from "Nawabin Electrician" by Daniyal Mueenuddin
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

Making Scenes, Rachel Wetzsteon (1967-2009)

III.

Each view is threefold. There is the topmost
layer of things unequivocally seen: the man
in loud pants, the forlorn sidewalk cafe, and the
ever-present pigeon who gnaws a wrapper.
There is, beneath these things but glaring
as black at a wedding, a list of what they are not:
not a loved one spotted, not the locus
of a tryst, not a rare, significant seabird.
And onto these two pictures clamps a troublesome
third, through whose distorting surface
birds are half swan, half sparrow, and slumming kings
and their well-dressed subjects eat lunch together.
This last layer, a patchwork of givens and
engineering, shakes the first two until nothing is solid.

from Cat n' Mouse, Steven Millhauser

The cat understands that the mouse will always outwit him, but this tormenting knowledge serves only to inflame his desire to catch the mouse. He will never give up. His life, in relation to the mouse, is one long failure, a monotonous succession of unspeakable humiliations; his unhappiness is relieved only by moments of delusional hope, during which he believes, despite doubts supported by a lifetime of bitter experience, that at last he will succeed. Although he knows that he will never catch the mouse, who will forever escape into his mousehole a half inch ahead of the reaching claw, he also knows that only if he catches the mouse will his wretched life be justified. He will be transformed. Is it therefore his own life that he seeks, when he lies awake plotting against the mouse? Is it, when all is said and done, himself that he is chasing? The cat frowns and scratches his nose.

One dozen 2009 favorites

The three presses for whom I work- Harvard University Press, The MIT Press, and Yale University Press- published just over one thousand titles between them in 2009. Prompted by Tom Bielenberg at Micawber’s Books in St Paul, who wanted to know where my “annual holiday synopsis” is, I thought it would be fun (and easy) to create my personal best list from this year’s offerings.

Fun yes, easy no. As I thought about the books we’ve published this year, I was struck by what was missing: no makebooks trying to replicate last year’s fads; no vampires; no cheesy ghostwritten memoirs by crackpot politicians. In short, nothing to be embarrassed about representing.

Though I came up with a dozen standouts that I really loved, our publishing program as a whole is a thing of wonder: intellectually stimulating scholarship, rigorous standards, incredibly patient editors (one recent title was signed in the mid-seventies!), all aimed at the twin, sometimes mutually exclusive goals of pushing the research boundaries in the sciences and humanities, while making the results accessible to a general, well-informed readership.

We live in a time when the concept of holding a complex idea in one’s head is considered elitist, so representing these wonderful books often feels more like mission than job. The satisfaction in selling the works of big thinkers, with the hope that every potential new reader casts a small blow against those who would bring back the Dark Ages, is something booksellers and publishers have been doggedly doing since the Enlightenment. I can’t imagine a more important way to spend a working life.

But I digress. The books. Herewith my dozen favorites of the year from our lists, in no particular order. These are not necessarily the lead books or the tradeiest books or the most widely reviewed. They are just my favorites. And the other 990 authors I represented this year shouldn’t feel dissed, I was proud to push all of them.



Unpacking My Library: Architects and their Books asks what a person’s book collection says about the collector. The interviews with a dozen fascinating architects are great, but the real appeal of the book (helped along by the suave design) is that it’s so wonderfully snoopy. If you’re at a party in the home of a smart person, and you’re a wallflower like me, you may find yourself near the bookshelves, where there won’t be people. You scan the spines, studying them, head twisted painfully, while trying not to spill wine on the carpet. That’s the intimate, private experience afforded by this colorful little volume.

Continuing the eavesdropping theme, Talking with Sartre, edited and translated by John Gerassi, lets us in on some shockingly frank, never before published chit chat with the great man. Sartre’s godson and a family friend, Gerassi conducted hours of free-wheeling interviews between 1970 and 1974. There’s a lot of politics and history, but plenty of gossip and back-biting as well. One moment Sartre is on about DeGaulle (hated him) and the Algerian independence movement (for it), the next moment it’s on to mistresses and amphetamines (loved both).

With My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, Adina Hoffman changed the way I look at the world. What more can you ask from a book? Taha Muhammad Ali is a renowned Palestinian poet, too little known in the US but with rock star status in his homeland. Hoffman, an accomplished, fascinating writer and translator herself, has used Taha’s life as window into the Palestinian predicament, and the idea of living in exile in your own home. Powerful, beautifully written, more than one bookseller has compared it to Reading Lolita in Tehran.

In another great biography from the spring list, Steven Zipperstein’s Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion and the Furies of Writing uncovers the story of an all but forgotten Chicago writer, Isaac Rosenfeld. Saul Bellow’s best friend and gentle competitor, Rosenfeld died in the mid-fifties at 38. Beyond doing delayed justice to this great writer, Zipperstein really captures the wonderfully obsessive qualities of the writing life. Mesmerizing and contemplative, it reminded me of Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City.

A fantastic book about an artist I knew little about, Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh is a revelation. Hsieh is a practitioner of “durational work,” or “endurance art”- a genre that’s so new it doesn’t really have an agreed-upon name. His materials are time and his own body, and his practice consists of year-long physically demanding performance pieces, such as confining himself to a sealed cell and punching a time clock every hour on the hour (these obsessive documents go on for pages in the book). Or being tied by an eight-foot rope to Linda Montano, an artist who answered a classified ad, for one solid year. And so on. Scoffers have questioned whether this is art. That’s the point.

Hollis Frampton’s Circles of Confusion is one of the most highly sought after out of print titles (1983). Replacing and superseding that long unavailable collection, On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton is a seductive hodge-podge of essays, interviews, film-scores, and experimental pieces reminiscent of Borges and Beckett. An avant-garde filmmaker, photographer, and digital artist who died in 1984, Frampton was also a funny and inventive writer. Yvonne Rainer aptly called the book “Offbeat Ways to Think about Everything” I was initially drawn to him because he was an autodidact and a provocateur, but now I’m hooked on the work. Check out his (nostalgia) and other video clips on youtube.

Among the many other intellectual accomplishments of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was his notion that to know plants is to know the world. First published in 1790, his The Metamorphosis of Plants has influenced generations, and has never appeared in a more stunning edition. Photographer Gordon Miller re-shot plant specimens (mainly in the northwest) to match and illustrate Goethe’s numbered paragraphs. The book is a very desirable little physical object- paper over board, luscious color throughout. Even I, who know nothing from plants, was entranced.

Fascinating taxonomies like the Goethe are a signature MIT Press gift to the world, and here’s one of an entirely different sort: Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals. Photographer Christopher Payne noticed how many massive, abandoned mental institutions are still standing in nearly every state. These behemoths, little cities really, are often in a kind of limbo- too architecturally idiosyncratic for reuse, and yet too historic for demolition. He worked tirelessly to get permissions to enter and photograph these buildings, and he ended up spending six years in thirty states doing so. The result is a beautiful, moving, sometimes jaw-dropping, collection of images. And, as Oliver Sacks says in the introduction, “a tribute to a sort of public architecture that no longer exists.”

Though I have many bones to pick with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, they offer the kind of big thinking we so desperately need in Commonwealth, which completes the trilogy begun with Empire and followed by Multitude. (This one’s way more readable than those two.) The title refers to one of their pet themes, that wealth is something we hold not individually but in common. Indeed, the endless debate over “private” vs. “public” should be replaced with a focus on the common, they argue. With the collapse of both the private market economic model and the soviet statist one, H&N are looking for a third way, and every few pages I feel as if they’ve maybe found it. Our political discourse has gotten so cramped and narrow that it’s refreshing to come across writing that blasts out of that suffocating box.

I really enjoyed David Leavitt’s last novel, The Indian Clerk, the mysterious true life story of an Indian mathematician. Though nonfiction, Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor have also unraveled a historic math mystery in Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity. The news here is that the major math finding of the 20th century- the nature of infinity- owes its discovery to a mystical religious sect called the Name Worshippers. Along the way we have a big dose of Russian history and paranoid stalinist repression, interpersonal and nationalist competition among scientists, and yet another example of the strange historical dance between science and religion. It’s incredibly well-written, with a sort of Beautiful Mind vibe.

The need to hold an audience’s attention, according to Brian Boyd in On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction, is the fundamental problem facing all story-tellers. He takes this insight and uses it to show the evolutionary origins of art and story-telling. (Story-telling was important because through it we learned to think beyond the here and now.) Stories were not just an amusement, but honed our minds, fostered cooperation, and were a survival advantage. This is one of those books that crosses so many fields and disciplines that booksellers were constantly challenged about where to shelve it. But in the spirit of consilience, this is the best kind of thinking and the best kind of problem. Did I mention that fantastic jacket illustration?

Finally, I almost hesitate to mention A New Literary History of America since I’ve been singing its praises since April. (Yes, the daily emails got annoying, sorry about that) To recap: NLHA is a monumental, decades in the making stab at uniting American history and American literature. America was made by writing! Two hundred short original essays by contemporary hipsters (Sarah Vowell, Camille Paglia, Walter Moseley) explore specific literary moments that changed America. This is not not not some thick boring doorstop of a canon-smashing reference book. It is fun, it is alive, and it can be read in small digestible pieces. If you are up on your Walter Benjamin, it may remind you of Arcades Project, the quintessential “memory theater.”

from Your Face Tomorrow v3, Javier Marias p 204

Nostalgia, or missing some place or person, regardless of whether for reasons of absence or abandonment or death, is a very strange and contradictory business. At first, you think you can’t live without someone or far from someone, the initial grief is so intense and so constant that you experience it as a kind of endless sinking or an interminably advancing spear, because each moment of privation counts and weighs, you feel it and it chokes you, and all you want is for the hours of the day to pass, knowing that their passing will lead to nothing new, only to more waiting for more waiting. Each morning you open your eyes- if you’ve had the benefit of sleep which, while it doesn’t allow you to forget everything, does at least numb and confuse- thinking the same thought that oppressed you just before you closed them, for example, “she’s not here and she won’t be coming back,” (whether that means coming back to you or coming back from death) and you prepare yourself not to trudge through the day, because you’re not even capable of looking that far ahead or of differentiating one day from another, but through the next five minutes and then the next, and so you’ll continue from five minutes to five minutes, if not from minute to minute, becoming entangled in them all and, at most, trying to distract yourself for just two or three minutes from your consciousness or from your ponderous paralysis. If that happens, it has nothing to do with your will, but with some form of blessed chance: a curious item on the television news, the time it takes to begin or complete a crossword, an irritating or solicitous phone call from someone you can’t stand, the bottle that falls to the floor and obliges you to gather up the fragments so that you don’t cut yourself when out of your laziness you wander about barefoot, or the dire TV series that nonetheless amuses you- or that you simply took to straightaway- and to which you surrender yourself with inexplicable relief until the final credits roll, wishing another episode would start immediately and allow you to keep clinging on to that stupid thread of continuity. These are the found routines that sustain us, what remains of life, the foolish and the innocuous, that neither enthuses nor demands participation or effort, the padding that we despise when everything is fine and we’re busy and have no time to miss anyone, not even the dead (in fact, we use those busy times to shrug them off, although this only works for a short while, because the dead insist on staying dead and always come back later on, the pin price pressing into our chest and the lead upon our souls.)

Time passes, and at some ill-defined point…we raise our head and once more look around us, and although we see nothing particularly promising or attractive, nothing that can replace the person we long for and have lost, we begin to find it hard to sustain that longing and wonder if it was really such a loss. We’re filled by a retrospective laziness regarding the time when we loved or were devoted or got over-excited or anxious, and feel incapable of ever giving so much attention to anyone again, of trying to please them, of watching over their sleep and concealing from them what can be concealed or what might hurt them, and one finds enormous relief in that deep-rooted absence of alertness. “I was abandoned,” we think, “by my lover, by my friend, by my dead, so what, they all left, and the result was the same, I just had to get on with my own life. They’ll regret it in the end, because it’s nice to know that one is loved and sad to know one’s been forgotten, and now I’m forgetting them. I did what I could, I held firm, and still they drifted away.”

from Two Solitudes, Hugh MacLennon

A windy day is always a bad time to start figuring things out, especially if a man has been too much alone.

from The Tanners, Robert Walser

How strange: time marched right past all good intentions just as surely as past the bad qualities one hasn't yet overcome. There was something beautiful, accepting and forgiving in this passage of time. It swept past both the beggar and the president of the Republic, the strumpet and the lady of refinement. It made many things appear small and unimportant, for it alone represented the sublime and the grand. What could life's hustle and bustle signify, all those stirrings and strivings, compared to this loftiness that paid no heed to whether a person became a man or a simpleton, and found it a matter of indifference whether or not one desired what was right and good. (p 325)

A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore

"... in literature- perhaps as in life- one had to speak not of what the author intended but of what a story intended for itself."

"...Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time."

Sens-plastique, Malcolm de Chazal

Literary senility is marked by verbal spoilage, words spilling over into other words, writers changing accepted meanings because they can't invent the right new words they need, writers living by fresh experience with old habits, overworking the idiom until it turns completely flabby like a mayonnaise whipped until it collapses.

Heartbreak Glue

One Sunday in May 1972 I drove Fred Blair, the aged chairman of the Wisconsin Communist Party, to Madison. He’d been invited to speak to a group of academic leftist researchers about Wisconsin party history. He was flattered by the invitation but contemptuous of their strictly past-tense interest. Communists were endlessly fascinating to the new left, who condescendingly thought of them as political dinosaurs who had a crack at seizing state power in the thirties but blew it. Fred was bemused.

A dozen people were seated around a table in a meeting room at the Downtown Y. The format was open-ended question and answer. The session was taped. Initial questions were timid- where he grew up, how he became political, his many runs for public office. Then someone broke the ice with a question about whether the party’s support for the jailing of Trotskyites in the forties under the sedition laws in Minneapolis- which were later used to lock up CP leaders- was ill-considered. Fred would only concede that “mistakes were made,” and painted the Trotskyites as near fascists. Nobody was convinced.

More nuanced questions about Marxist principles and Leninist strategy came to predominate. There was a respectful atmosphere, eager students at the foot of some elder master. But Fred hated the “eminence grise” role, and ended the session by promoting an Angela Davis fund-raising car wash.

I thought the whole trip a waste of time, but he seemed energized. On the way back we stopped to buy a jug of rhine wine, which he loved to sip all day. A sign in the liquor store window said “Heartbreak Glue.”

Piecework

A self-important man is giving the six of us- newly hired second shift line workers at AO Smith- very detailed instructions. Dangerous-seeming machines and apparatuses whiz and percolate along a conveyor belt in a space the size of a couple football fields. Scowling, bored piece-workers are deployed strategically, it would seem, to somehow rein in these machines. They appear to be failing.

The man is using lots of gestures along with his verbal instructions because the deafening racket makes it impossible to hear a word he’s saying. We try to ask questions, but his sign language responses are only more confusing, and he's hard to see through our smeared plastic goggles. Not wanting to appear stupid on our first day, we are simultaneously trying to disguise our incomprehension, while hoping to glean some decipherable clue about what we are supposed to do next. He’s getting frustrated. He can’t really hear our screamed questions, and he screams back answers to questions we didn’t ask. We don’t hear these either.

At one point, his face light bulbs. He disappears for a moment, and returns with an "I am a genius" look and a handful of what he obviously thinks is the solution to a problem: earplugs. They look filthy and used, but we dutifully insert them into our ears. The machine roar is instantly reduced to a muffled hum. But his instructions are just as unintelligible as before, and we desperately try to read his lips, and each other’s, to figure out what’s going on.

Still, progress: as we work our way through the foundry, our small group dwindles as we are deposited, one by one, at the machine that will be ours for the night. Each is loud, greasy and massive, but there are a variety of shapes and apparent functions. Though the factory as a whole is manufacturing auto parts, no single piece of metal being processed by these machines seems to have any obvious relation to a car.

As the first few recruits are left at their stations, it becomes clear that not hearing a word the foreman said was not such a handicap after all. Within moments, our new co-workers on the piece work line wordlessly demonstrate the couple mindless, repetitive, back-breaking steps that will be our contribution to the finished automobile for the next eight hours. Minus twenty minutes for lunch, and two six minute breaks for the bathroom, which is a two minute walk from the line.

I am last. My machine is a very tall punch press, one of a long line of machines strewn along the line. Oddly shaped pieces of metal are moving slowly down the belt- though the lazy pace proves to be an illusion once I begin lifting them. My task is to pick up the object- eight crooked feet long, weighing about 30 pounds- and to insert it into the jaws of the behemoth. After pressing two large buttons, the only apparent controls, the giant mouth clamps shut and two new holes appear in the metal slab. (It used to take just one button but too many hands had been snapped off, so the union won this safety concession.) The final challenge is to replace the piece on the belt in a standing position, so that the next worker up the line can lift it with the least possible strain.

Nobody needs to know anything beyond how to work their particular piece- in fact, the less we know the better. Since we are paid by the piece, it seems obvious to us virgin industrial proletarians that the faster we work, the better for everyone. But within a couple hours, each of us is taken aside and given a short but firm seminar in the long term dangers of “speeding up the line.” This is the most important thing I learn in my AO Smith career.

At any rate, working too fast is not my problem. I never master the challenge of making those pieces stand up for the next guy. After six weeks of coming home after midnight, exhausted, ragged, like some escapee from Dante’s inferno, I quit. But I keep the steel-toed boots I’d been issued, a gift from AO Smith Corporation, and wear them to picket lines for the next ten years.