Hermione Hoby, “Long Story”

I AM NOT familiar with Hoby, but this essay in the February 2 New Yorker caught my attention because I have long admired David Foster Wallace’s writing and also have an ongoing interest in the question of whether women readers find him worthwhile. 

I do know some who do, but a lot of women readers don’t. There are a few reasons for this. His depiction of women characters does not get high marks, or even passing marks, from everyone. But his biography may be the bigger problem. He admitted to watching a lot of porn (see “Big Red Son” in Consider the Lobster). After Infinite Jest, he took full advantage of the sexual opportunities that come with literary celebrity, according to biographer D. T. Max. According to Mary Karr, who would know, he made a scary boyfriend. I think too that a lot of writing-oriented young women got very, very tired of hearing from writing-oriented boyfriends that they really, really had to read Infinite Jest. There was no joke about guys enamored of Wallace in the 2023 Barbie movie, but there could well have been.

A high point of Wallace-resistance was Amy Hungerford’s essay/chapter “On Not Reading DFW,” from 2017 or so. Hungerford intensely disliked Infinite Jest without even having read it. Patricia Lockwood’s 2023 take in the LRB was more tempered but well short of an endorsement.

Hoby’s essay starts by discussing how Wallace-resistance has almost become the default position for writing-oriented women. Wallace’s reputation, she writes, is as “a byword for literary arrogance, a totem of masculine pretentiousness, a red flag if spotted on the shelves of a prospective partner, and reading matter routinely subjected to the word ‘performative’ in its most damning sense.” 

She dissents, carefully. Her piece is mainly about Infinite Jest, published thirty years ago this month, and she particularly notes the humanity and humility of the novel’s attention to 12-step culture, especially through the character of Don Gately. She even suggests the novel may be due for a “cultural feminization,” thanks to a new edition with a foreword by Michelle Zauner. (The tenth anniversary edition had a foreword from Dave Eggers, so the landscape has obviously changed a lot in the meantime.)

I hope she’s right. I guess we’ll see. 

Judith Butler, _Who's Afraid of Gender?_

READING JUDITH BUTLER in the early 1990s felt a bit like reading Derrida in the 1970s, in that neither writer seemed inclined to make concessions to the reader. The implied message: if you can't keep up, go home. By the nineties, though, Derrida's sense of an abiding audience led him to relax a little bit, to render his arguments a little easier of access. Butler, too, aware of having a sizeable potential audience, has for quite a few years now been willing to intervene in public questions with arguments that do not rely on the daunting apparatuses they used in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter. ("Is Judaism Zionism?" from 2011, can serve as an example.) 

Who's Afraid of Gender? counts as a public intervention, I would say, as it deals with topics being debated in courts and legislatures all across the country and all across the world; in fact, and unfortunately, it is even more urgently timely now than it was on its publication in 2024. The answer to the title's question is "a whole lot of people," including the Catholic Church, the Trump Administration, and certain British feminists, except they name their enemy not "gender" but "gender ideology." The battleground is sometimes sharply defined--public bathrooms, locker rooms, medical care for minors--but sometimes might include anyone and any topic found in the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, and sometimes might even include the desire to roll everything back to the days of the trad wife.

Butler's arguments are composed, rational, lawyerlike, their rhetoric temperate and judicious--which must have taken them some doing, for, as they point out, there is little that is rational or temperate or even evidence-based in the manifestoes of those trying to destroy "gender ideology" root and branch. As Butler emphasizes throughout, these culture warriors are battling a "toxic phantasm," an imaginary monster conjured out of their own fears and anxieties, a bogey that has nothing in common with actual LGBTQIA+ people.

But this leaves us with a tough question. Can the phantasmatic be countered with rationality, evidence, logic, as Butler is trying to do? Its sources may be more unconscious than that (as Amia Srinavasan has recently suggested in a London Review of Books essay, "The Impossible Patient"), something way down in the humid boiler room of the id. 

Butler gave us a psychoanalytic map to homophobic anxiety long ago in The Psychic Life of Power. Perhaps they are guessing that those who have declared war on "gender ideology" would not sit still for a psychoanalytic account of their own motives, and so are hoping to get a hearing with clear-light-of-day public accountability kinds of arguments. Will those be enough? One hopes so.

Percival Everett and James Kincaid, _A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond_

THIS IS A brilliant and funny epistolary novel composed by Everett and one of his colleagues at USC. The book is not what its title proclaims, exactly, but instead the correspondence kicked off when a junior staffer of the staunch segregationist South Carolina senator named in the title sends a book proposal to Simon and Schuster. It is never clear whether the junior staffer (to whom Everett and Kincaid give the pitch-perfect name Barton Wilkes) has actually consulted with Sen. Thurmond about this project, but he is relatively clear about the proposed book's trajectory, which will be to show that Blacks in the former Confederate states never had it so good as they did before the Supreme Court messed everything up with Brown v. the Board of Education, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The proposal makes the rounds at Simon and Schuster, the various letters and memos revealing a seething snakepit of office politics. Meanwhile, Wilkes keeps sending in tantalizing bits of what the Senator (supposedly) has in mind for the book and insinuating himself multifariously into said snakepit.

The proposal advances to the point where ghost writers are needed. Everett gets pulled in because a Black author will lend the project a certain credibility; Kincaid gets pulled in because...I don't know, the more the merrier, I guess. 

The personal crises of various editors and editorial assistants at Simon and Schuster mount up, Barton Wilkes egging them on the whole time. The tangled murk of the project gets murkier and more tangled and ever more overtly racist. Everett and Kincaid eventually take a special trip to South Carolina (where Everett in fact grew up and went to high school) to meet the senator himself.

Everett has a knack for being highly entertaining while honing very sharp satirical points, and that knack is fully on display in this one.

Joyelle McSweeney, _Death Styles_

 THIS BOOK CAME out of a deeply painful circumstance: a daughter born with a fatal medical condition that led to her death after just thirteen days. 

McSweeney chose an interesting set of constraints for these poems: to write every day, “to accept any inspiration presented to me,” and “to fully follow the flight of that inspiration for as far as it would take me.” Accordingly, each poem’s title is a date, with a subtitle indicating what inspiration chance presented, and some of them are several pages long.

As you might expect, McSweeney’s daughter’s death figures in the poems often: “Darling / I’m sorry you didn’t survive / reverse aubade / every time the sun rises / I want to crumple up / this whole heliocentric universe.” Her accepting the themes and images presented by chance adds an entirely unpredictable swirl to her grief, though, so the poems continually surprise. The krater (the bowl in which ancient Greeks mixed wine), the hooded merganser (a kind of of duck), Mary Magdalene, Leonard Cohen, Mary Shelley are among the dictated-by-chance elements that eerily blend, as if destined to, with McSweeney’s memories and grief.

This may be why the book feels more like actual grief than do books that focus more closely on the grief itself. Our losses occur in a world that does not pause for us—if we are lucky, some will afford us a little space and a little quiet, but meanwhile everything keeps inexorably rolling on. Even our own consciousness keeps inexorably rolling on. And McSweeney’s poems do have that headlong rush, that sense of onward movement pulling us along even when we feel emotionally paralyzed. And the onward movement may be the very thing we need. The “Death Styles” sequence concludes: “I refuse / to shut my eyes / because I was robbed / of something / by a god / and I’m going to/ to keep looking / till I find it.”

And a shout out to Nightboat Books and designer Kit Schluter for the beauty of this book as an object. Taller and narrower than most books, a bit like Atheneum volumes from the early 1970s, with a cover that looks like a woodcut or lino cut with subdued blue, green, red, and pink on a black background, the paper embossed or lightly textured somehow. The presentation of the poems blended seamlessly with the reading of them.

Quinn Slobodian, _Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right_

 TRUMP HAS NEVER seemed to have an ideology or political principles, exactly--he always seems to be winging it--but his administration and core supporters seem to have a vast array of ideologies, not all of which designed to be complementary. Having read books by Kristin Kobes du Mez and Matthew Taylor on Trump's Christian supporters, I had difficulty imagining what those supporters would talk about with the supporters Quinn Slobodian describes. But every coalition has its share of awkward conversations, I suppose.

Slobodian's book is short (176 pages of text) but dense (90 pages of notes and bibliography) and he is looking at the hard-core free market / Austrian school of economics / Mont Pelerin Society people involved in the rise of the right both here in the U.S. and in a good many other places. As opposed to the Buckley-led conservative fusionism that married neoliberal economics to religion, Slobodian argues, this group marries neoliberal economics to racist and eugenicist fantasies. This group--key figures, besides F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises themselves, include Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Charles Murray, Markus Krall, Peter Boehringer, Peter Brimelow, Samuel Francis, Richard Lynn, and Curtis Yarvin--celebrates one or more of what Slobidian calls the "hards": "hardwired culture, hard money, hard borders."

Hardwired culture: racial differences, as revealed by IQ testing, are hereditary and permanent, so white people are rightly in charge and should remain so.

Hard borders: because of "hardwired culture," letting in many non-white people will lead to social deterioration and disintegration.

Hard currency: back to the gold standard for national currency, please. But, failing that, all the smart cookies will be amassing gold as a hedge against the coming race-war apocalypse.

The folks circulating these ideas are, by and large, not at colleges and universities, but instead at foundations and think tanks that have been created to foster free-market-friendly thinking. The racist, eugenicist, xenophobic ideas are an add-on, apparently, but stir up mighty passions. 

If the people at major research universities and (say) the New Yorker and the New York Times are our broad-daylight intelligentsia, the people Slobodian writes about in this book are our in-the-shadows intelligentsia, mainly known to each other and to wide networks of website/podcast/newsletter subscribers. They are men of the underground, unlikely to break into the bestseller lists alongside Timothy Snyder and Jill Lepore, but often handsomely funded, shining stars in a dark firmament all their own. And they seem to have not a few disciples in  the Trump administration. 

So, when the Evangelical potentates meet the Mont Pelerin potentates, do they talk about the Rapture, or about Milton Friedman, or do they just talk about the Super Bowl?

Susan Howe, _Debths_

ONE COULD ORGANIZE a great course on American culture and literature around the books of Susan Howe, reading Mary Rowlandson in conjunction with Howe's Singularities, or Emily Dickinson in conjunction with My Emily Dickinson, and wrapping up with a field trip to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in conjunction with this one, Debths.

The tricky part would getting the students to engage with Howe's writing, which makes few concessions to ordinary readerly expectations. Debths, for instance, contains "Tom Tit Tot," a fifty-some-page poem created by collaging photocopied bits of old books (some legible, some not) into spiky clumps of text. 

The relatively more conventional poems would also discourage a reader unprepared to make an effort.

John Chipman Gray and the Rule Against Perpetuities

Something more ancient than what you remember or may not

remember moved me to lean on you. Because of all the dead.

I can't.

            My cry is in the frost.

John Chipman Gray is the Gray of the law firm Ropes and Gray and also a much cited authority on property law. He wrote an influential book about the limits of perpetuities, that is, efforts to legally bind how the people of the future can dispose of property...which is in a way what Isabella Stewart Gardner tried to do in creating her museum with the stipulation that it had to remain exactly as she arranged it...but can one really do that? Does that make the dead more powerful than the living, to the point that life starts shutting down "because of all the dead" hedging us in with their demands that things not change? Does "my cry is in the frost" evoke one of Howe's illustrious predecessors as a poet of New England, someone who might not even recognize Howe's poetry as poetry but is nonetheless part of the tradition that enables her work?

Howe's poetry opens up if you, the reader, work at it. But you do have to work at it.

Howe is someone whose work I respect and admire more than I enjoy, but I do respect and admire it.

César Vallejo, _Trilce_, trans. Rebecca Seiferle

 In January 1994 (if "AI Overview" is to be trusted) I attended a reading by the late Philip Levine at which, briefly interrupting the reading of his poems, he enthusiastically recommended the poetry of César Vallejo. Not long after that, I stumbled upon this volume (Sheep Meadow Press, 1992) in a wonderful local used book store (A Novel Idea, Lincoln, Nebraska) and promptly bought it. 

Then it remained on my shelf for slightly over three decades until I read Michael Hofmann's recent LRB review of Margaret Jull Costa's new translation of Vallejo (The Eternal Dice, New Directions) and thought, "hmm, don't I have a book of his already?" And there it was on the shelf, not far from a few Vargas Llosa novels, a supernova waiting for me to open it up. 

Well, Levine was right. I remember taking his recommendation to mean that Vallejo's poetry must be a bit like his own--straightforward, plain language, socially conscious--so I was taken by surprise by Vallejo's willingness to firebomb each and every convention: not just prosodic, but also syntactic, and even lexical (for instance, he made up the word "trilce," and no one is sure what it means). 

Vallejo is certainly aware of tradition, certainly aware of history, even pulling in some Quechua elements alongside the Spanish ones, but he is less interested in preservation than in recombining the pieces into something transformatively new. As Joyce left Ireland for the continent in order to write Ireland--"to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race"--Vallejo left Peru for Paris in order to write Peru. How Peruvian Vallejo's Peru is I cannot say--maybe the relationship is like that of Blake's "Albion" to England--but it's a lively place to contemplate.

And Trilce was published in 1922, the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land, two other great examples of the illuminating reconfiguration of a place, a history, and a culture by the writerly imagination.

It must be a good time for Vallejo-in-English, since we have not only the Jull Costa translation but another new one from NYRB Poets by William Rowe and Helen Dimos. It would be worth my while to read another translation, I think; Hofmann notes that translations vary widely, since the poems are very hard to pin down, and that no one translation can be definitive.

And I have reaffirmed respect for the critical judgements of Philip Levine. I should have known from his championing of Larry Levis that he was not the kind of poet who admires only work aesthetically comparable to his own. His celebration of Vallejo confirms it.