Trisha Low, _Socialist Realism_

 NOBODY'S FAULT BUT mine, but by the time I picked this up to read it, I had completely forgotten what led me to purchase it in the first place.

For one thing, it was in a poetry stack, so I had been assuming it was poetry, and that I had heard Low give a treading, or had read an enthusiastic review...but I was wrong. They book is not poetry, I had not heard her read, and I could find no review I was likely to have come across.

Well.

I started in on it anyway, and liked it well enough to finish. It is a hard book to describe, though. Very like a memoir (very like a whale) for long stretches, but includes several extended discussions of aesthetics and politics as well.

From the intersection of aesthetics and politics arises the book's interest in socialist realism, I would guess. Socialist realism was the officially approved aesthetic of the USSR in the 1930s--novels like Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered, paintings like those by Aleksandr Samokhalov of buff and attractive factory workers. I was under the impression that socialist realism had no cachet whatsoever, but perhaps it is overdue for an ironic appropriation á la Norman Rockwell.

What connects Low to socialist realism may be the utopian streak in it. Socialist realism sought to represent the Soviet Union as though its goal of socialism had already been achieved rather than being merely in process. It wished to depict in advance the brighter future that was assumed to be imminent. In other words, what looks in socialist realism like sheer dishonesty (cf. American advertising art of almost any era but particularly the 1950s) could be charitably seen as visionary.

It's a stretch, methinks. Still, finding something honorable in socialist realism is at least novel.

Low's book is also interesting on the topic of home. Her parents were from Hong Kong, but she spent her childhood in Singapore, then was educated in England and the United States. She now lives in the US, sometimes on one coast, sometimes on the other. Has she no home? Has she several? She is a poet who writes in prose, an experimentalist who feels affinity with RAPP. How does it feel to be without a home, relatively unknown, like a rolling stone? Not that bad, replies Trisha Low.