Maggie Nelson, _On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint_

WE HAVE THE ingredients for a cautionary tale here. No sooner does Maggie Nelson have a breakout, crossover hit with The Argonauts than she gets wrong-footed by the zeitgeist. 

Seeing as she wrote an eloquent apologia for transgressive art that abrades our sensibilities (The Art of Cruelty), it seems ironic the her arrival at literary celebrity coincided with the "stay in your lane" moment, with artists like Sam Durant and Dana Schutz getting stiff blowback for abrading sensibilities, and without the consolation of culture-hero standing that Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe got. 

Seeing as she has also written frankly about owning and pursuing our erotic desires (in The Argonauts, for example), it again seems ironic that her arrival at literary celebrity coincided with #MeToo and a kind of renaissance for Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.

At moments in On Freedom, she does not seem best pleased with these developments. In the first of the four essays, on art, one hears subtextual tongue-clucking when she writes, "Suggesting that certain pieces of art should be treated as acts of violence, or on par with the violent power of sovereignty, plays into the same arguments that have long been used to undermine art's legal protections." 

She brings in a similar guilt-by-resemblance charge in the second essay, on sex: "Even--or especially--when we are in pain, it's worth taking the time to make sure our pain is not partnering with our puritanism or punitiveness, as such partnering reinforces the flawed dichotomies of innocent/guilty, dangerous/non-dangerous, disposable/worthy, upon which the carceral state depends."

I don't know how many would find this persuasive. Probably a lot of people are quite reconciled to the carceral state's getting a hold of Harvey Weinstein.

The third essay, on drugs, has some interesting things to say about a good many literary expressions of drug experience. The fourth, on climate change...I don't know. Not her wheelhouse. 

I wonder if she will ever get back to doing things like Bluets and Jane? I hope so.

Emily Berry, _Stranger, Baby_

THE TITLE COULD be read as a response to the statement from Freud that stands as the book's epigraph--"The loss of a mother must be something very strange..."--but it is also a phrase in the poem "Everything Bad Is Permanent," where the phrase seems to be shorthand for a period when an infant is taken from its mother to be placed ion the care of another, before being left on its own:

Blank tearful retreat from mother
Mother, Baby. Stranger, Baby. Baby Alone.

A good deal of the book seems to be about losing a mother. It's not perfectly clear how recent or. how remote the loss was, whether it happened when the speaker was a child or an adult; the distinctive thing about the book is that the loss seems to be both recent and to have occurred in childhood. It's as though the adult can immediately gain access, in the here and now, to the feelings of the child, however many years have passed.

Stranger, Baby has a lot in common with Berry's first book, Dear Boy (see Loads of Learned Lumber for July 1, 2020): deadpan wit, formal versatility, a wide range of registers. The underground river of disquiet in it,  though, is wider and deeper.

Dash Shaw, _Discipline_

 A GRAPHIC NOVEL with virtually no dialogue--there are occasional excerpts from letters written out in longhand, but for the most part Discipline is unfussy line drawings arranged on the page without panels. Opening to a random page, you have the impression of opening someone's sketch book. 

Although the approach is spare, the story is nuanced.  Charles Cox is a young Quaker man in Indiana. When the American Civil War breaks out, he has to make the impossible choice between his faith's commitment to pacifism and its commitment to the abolition of slavery. Much to his family's dismay, he joins the  army and goes to war.

He doesn't have an easy war. His unit does set some slaves free, but he also sees friends die, gets wounded, and is taken prisoner. 

Back home, there are other kinds of problems. Charles's sister, Fanny, gets involved with a local man and becomes pregnant, but he will not marry her. The disgrace and humiliation she goes through are a painful domestic counterpoint to what Charles endures.

I'm not sure why this book is as moving as it is, but I think it has to do with the absence of dialogue. Take a general midwestern taciturnity and combine it with a faith that requires one speak only when the Lord moves one to speak, and a great deal is going to go unsaid. The pressure of the unsaid--even though the drawing too is understated, without expressionist exaggeration or unusual detail--is continually felt. Is the maintaining of such quiet in the face of such pain what the title refers to?