Jefferson Cowie, _Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power_

A TERRIFYINGLY ILLUMINATING book, and a winner of the Pulitzer for history to boot. By looking at just one county, Barbour County in southeastern Alabama, from about the time of statehood (1819) to late 1960s, Cowie explores how "freedom" in our political discourse has often amounted to "the freedom of white men to do whatever they want with the lives and property of non-whites" 

The four principal sections of the book take close looks at moments when the federal government tried to circumscribe the actions of the white men who ran Barbour County and, basically, failed. 

In the 1820s and 1830s, during the Andrew Jackson administration, a treaty put together by the federal government ceded the Creeks a large piece of territory in southeastern Alabama in return for their withdrawal from Georgia. White settlers had discovered, though, that the land in question was excellent for growing cotton, so they just moved in and started plantations, completely ignoring the treaty. Federal officials (including, bizarrely, Francis Scott Key) were sent to enforce federal law. No dice. The white settlers got the land.

Reconstruction: in a scene enacted all over the South in 1872, white men secretly brought firearms to the polling place and shot at the formerly enslaved, now newly enfranchised Black citizens who were trying to vote. Federal officials were sent, again, and protests made in Congress. Were the voting rights of the formerly enslaved restored? Umm, no.

End of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century: the state of Alabama discovers that a lot of revenue can be generated by using convict labor. The prisons fill up with convicts, enriching both the state and local  manufacturers. Federal officials try to stop this practice. Do they succeed? Nope.

Mid-1950s to mid-1960s: the civil rights movement galvanizes the country, leading to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Alabama governor George Wallace, native son of Barbour County, becomes notorious for leading the resistance to integration. Federal officials make some headway this time, and the federal legislation is enforced. Local officials, however, begin a decades-long project of whittling away at it. They have made a lot of progress.

The real looming shadow at the end of Cowie's book, though, is that George Wallace discovers that the political trick of marketing white supremacy as "freedom," as in "the freedom the founding fathers bequeathed us and that our patriots died for," is a hit all over the country. The Republican Party takes due note.

And that is why this important book is not just illuminating, but terrifyingly so. 

Brilliant book--not only energetically researched, but written with verve, some scenes (Election Day 1872, Wallace's one-on-one with LBJ) having a novelistic intensity.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, _The Blithedale Romance_

 WE KNOW ABOUT "dystopian" novels, of course, but Hawthorne's may be the earliest example of an adjacent phenomenon, the "anti-utopian" novel, in which some bold and idealistic experiment in reforming human society comes a cropper due to all-too-human venality, pettiness, and short-sightedness. The inspiration for the novel lay in Hawthorne's time at Brook Farm, an 1840s experiment in communal living partly inspired by the ideas of Charles Fourier (there were quite a few comparable experiments at the time). He ended up not much caring for it.

The novel is funny, in a satirical and somewhat ungenerous way, and has some brilliant writing. The most memorable character is Zenobia, who may be one of the first fictional depictions of an American feminist, apparently based in large part on Margaret Fuller. There's a tablespoon of spite in the portrait, I'd say, but she jumps off the page. She's certainly more interesting than Miles Coverdale, the Hawthorne-like narrator.

Literary works puncturing the balloon of human presumption have a long history. We could go back to Candide or Gulliver's Travels, not to mention Hamlet, the theology of John Calvin and the Book of Ecclesiastes. But circumstances change after the French Revolution, say, and the idea takes hold that humans can re-design their communities to make them more rational. Hawthorne's novel must be one of the earlier takedowns of that kind of overconfidence.

Modern inheritors--perhaps T. C. Boyle and Michel Houellebecq? And most campus novels, come to think of it, since they tend to contrast higher education's noble mission and its often shabby shortcomings. And definitely most writing program novels--Lan Samantha Chang's All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, Lucy Ives's Loudermilk, Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans...all descendants of The Blithedale Romance.

Robert Browning, _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society_

 I'VE BEEN READING Jonathan Beecher's Writers and Revolution, an engaging account of the effects of the revolution of 1848 on various writers (e.g., Marx and Flaubert), and in consequence occasionally thinking of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, or Napoleon III. His election as President in December 1848 was a thumping anti-climax to most of the high hopes of that year, and his coup d'etat of three years later killed off whatever lingered. 

He has his defenders, no doubt, but I get the impression he is mainly remembered as a hypocritical opportunist whose main appeal was his association with his uncle, the Napoleon who conquered Europe. His main electoral appeal, back before he cancelled the new constitution and made himself emperor, was to make France great again. He was president for four years then emperor for another eighteen.

Thinking of Napoleon III led me back to this (which I first read in 1987 or so)--a 2,155 line dramatic monologue about a deposed monarch who finds himself exiled in England and sits down with some attractive young woman to explain what happened. It was published as a book in 1871, by which time Napoleon III had, indeed, been deposed and driven into exile in England after France's defeat in the grande debâcle of the Franco-Prussion War. 

Turns out, though, that Browning wrote at least some of the poem in 1859 or so, before things ended so badly. At that time, his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning was still alive, and she was one of Napoleon III's more vocal English defenders. Browning was sometimes a defender, too, though not so keen a one. It may be significant that he did not publish the poem until after Elizabeth died.

So...is the portrait sympathetic or satirical? Readers disagree. I would say satirical--the speaker is engaged in a long and complicated self-justification, a bit like Browning's versions of Andrea del Sarto and Bishop Blougram, and his case for hewing to the middle-of-the-road, being neither this nor that, often sounds like an apologia for mediocrity. It sounds exactly like a hypocritical opportunist's defense of his hypocritical opportunism. 

But the beauty of the dramatic monologue is that the whole performance sounds credible, at points. Hohenstiel-Schwangau ("high-stick swan-place," apparently) has heard all the criticisms of his rule and has a point-by-point  rebuttal ready. All he was trying to do was save society.

Hard to imagine this poem ever finding a wide audience, but it really is a fascinating study of a certain kind of political "leadership."

Patricia Lockwood, “Diary”; Walter Benjamin, “One Way Street,” trans. Edmud Jephcott

AMONG THE MYSTERIES: since Patricia Lockwood is an American national treasure, why do I find her stuff in the London Review of Books more often than anywhere else? 

Every issue of the LRB devotes its final pages to a “Diary,” which is rarely an actual diary in these post-Alan Bennett times but usually a personal essay. Lockwood got the spot in the December 5, 2024 issue, and somehow spun a dramatically diverse array of topics into a beautifully integrated essay: The X-Files, Phineas Gage (the man who survived a tamping iron being shot through his head in 1823), the medical emergencies of some of her family members, the novels of E. M. Forster, and people convinced they have experienced an alien abduction. 

The United States has long needed a Walter Benjamin, and I am starting to think Lockwood could pull it off. She could certainly come up with a contemporary “One Way Street”— Benjamin’s 1928 compilation of wit, parody, observation, and analysis. Lockwood can be hilariously funny but also unbearably poignant; she always has a weather eye open on the zeitgeist and knows the deep truth of any historical moment lies in the apparently trivial. 

The first half of No One Is Talking about This has the “One Way Street” feel: confident and vulnerable at the same time, earnest and satirical at the same time, mercurial, breathless, brilliant. 

I wonder whether she has plans to collect her short pieces? I would read them all again.

Can One Read "A"-24?

 "A"-24 is the final section of Louis Zukofsky's magnificent (say I) and lengthy poem "A". It is much the longest section--240 pages in the edition I have, published by the University of California Press in 1978. What prompts the question of whether one can read it is not its length, however, but its form. It's a score for a musical piece, composed by his wife Celia, with five elements. 

One element, taken from various pieces G. F. Handel wrote for harpsichord,  is rendered in actual musical notation. The other four are excerpts from Zukofsky's writing, arranged in lines under the Handel harpsichord score and to be spoken in cadence with the Handel pieces. One line uses excerpts from Zukofsky's critical essays, a second draws on his play Arise, Arise, a third has passages from his fiction, and the fourth and final part is from "A" itself.

So "A"-24 could be read as one reads a score--only a score is not the music, exactly, but instructions for a performance. When musicians with the necessary competencies and the required instruments read the score and play it, that performance is what registers upon us as "music." So running one's eyes over the pages of "A"-24 does not seem to place the reader in the presence of "A"-24, if you see what I mean. 

I did read it, in a way, adopting the strategy of reading the critical essay line right through from beginning to end, then the play lines the same way, and so on with the other two...but I  lost the effect of simultaneity, of course, which seems to be a key condition of the form: that you are getting four sides of Zukofsky at once. In short, you cannot read "A"-24 and feel like you have, indeed, read it because you have to hear it.

But how in the world are you going to hear it? Rarely as Pericles, Zukofsky's favorite Shakesperean play, is performed, you may actually come across a performance during your lifetime, but what are the odds your local community theater will present "A"-24? According to Z-Site: A Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky (https://z-site.net/notes-to-a/a-24/), it "has been performed a number of times," but the most recent occasion they record was in 2009. 

PennSound has two recordings from 1978, featuring Steve Benson, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Kit Robinson, and Barrett Watten, with Bob Perelman on piano, and one can only be grateful they exist, but they are not of particularly high fidelity. Something captured with really good microphones and nice stereo separation would be helpful, so that you could follow (if you wanted) one of the lines the way one can follow (for example) the viola when hearing a string quartet. The 1978 recordings provide an often-pleasing and not unmusical babble, but one wishes for more definition in the sound.

I tried some home experiments, using an mp3 of the "Passecaille" from Handel's Harpichord Suite No. 7, but I can't say the results were what I hoped. Matching up the parts to the music was difficult because different performers take different approaches to playing Handel's repeats, so getting a performance that lined up exactly with Celia Zukofsky's score was a bridge too far.

A carefully recorded performance would certainly be a gift to Zukofsky-philes everywhere, and there must be at least a few thousand of us.

Sara Nicholson, _April_

 I PICKED UP this collection of poems (her third, I think) on the recommendation of a friend, and it's really good. I hope to review it for a more serious blog than this one, so I am not going to say much here, save that the book has a lot to do with saints and with poets. Both saints and poets can be major pains in  the tush, but often turn out to be reminding us about something important.

Alain Badiou, _Manifesto for Philosophy_, trans. Norman Madarasz

 FROM 1989–THIS translation was published ten years later. I wanted to look at this mainly because of Lacoue-Labarthe’s mentioning Badiou’s idea of “The Age of Poets” in Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, so I read only that chapter and two others, “Heidegger Viewed as Commonplace” and “Sutures,” skimming a bit elsewhere.

Let’s start with the “suture.” Badiou posits that philosophy has four conditions: (1) the poem, (2) the matheme, (3) the political, and (4) love. That is, it might explain things through analogy, parable, and metaphor (the poem), or through strictly logical statements (the matheme), while concerning itself with establishing a just and flourishing polity (the political) or the ideal grounds for relationships among persons (love)—that’s how I would gloss it, in any case. A “suture” occurs when the practice of philosophy identifies itself too narrowly, “delegates its functions” as Badiou puts it, to one of the four conditions. A suture works to the advantage of the condition but leads to the “suppression” of philosophy.

A suture to the matheme leads to, for example, logical positivism and a lot of what gets called “analytical” philosophy, which benefited the theoretical understanding of the natural sciences but did not much advance (Badious thinks) philosophy. A suture to the political leads to, for example, Marxism. A suture to the poem leads to Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger…a lot of the key figures from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

This was great for poetry—hence the Age of Poets in that same span. Badiou identifies seven by name: Hölderlin (“their prophet and anticipating vigil” from the early 19th century), then Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Georg Trakl, Fernando Pessoa, Osip Mandelstam, and Paul Celan.

Badiou (unfortunately, I think) does not explain why he picked these seven. I wouldn’t challenge any name on the list, but I was a bit cheesed at the omissions. Could we not put Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley alongside Hölderlin as distinguished precursors? How about Yeats and Eliot? Stevens? If English language poets are ineligible for some reason, why aren’t Rilke and Valéry on the list?

Oh, well. Moving on.

The suture to the poem was helpful in plucking loose the Descartes-to-Kant suture to the matheme. It’s a great move for poetry, opening up fruitful disturbances both in the notion of the Subject and in the notion of the Object. Unfortunately, this suture also produces Heidegger (the chapter “Heidegger Viewed as Commonplace” deals with the downsides of this development). Celan brings the Age of Poets to a close when he sees through this particular problem and shuts that traffic down.

Speaking just for myself, the suture to the poem sounds like a great idea. Philosophy produced by the suture to the matheme, by contrast, leaves me thinking, “is that all there is? Who cares?” On the other hand….Heidegger. Most of Heidegger seems powerfully right to me, but then I hit a toxic patch and think, God, please, no. 

I now think Lacoue-Labarthe’s book may have been looking for ways philosophy can stitch a suture or two into poetry without turning into an apology for totalitarianism.