Valeria Luiselli, _Lost Children Archive_

HER THIRD NOVEL, her first written in English, and it is excellent. Three textual planes, we might say.

We have a married couple, two kids, on a Great American Car Trip from NYC to Arizona. We do not learn their names, apart from the native-inspired ones they give themselves during the trip: Pa Cochise, Lucky Arrow (the mother), Swift Feather (boy, ten, the father's son from a previous relationship), and Memphis (girl, five, the mother's daughter from a previous relationship). Both parents are sound documentarians (or documentarists, as one insists), the mother intent on getting to the southwest because she has become passionately invested in the plight of the refugee children entering the US from Mexico. The father, not native but an avid student of that history, wants to see where Geronimo lived. 

First textual plane: the mother's narration, in the foreground for the first two-thirds of the novel, focused sometimes on the kids, sometimes on the refugee children, and increasingly on her fracturing relationship with her husband. The mom is a reader, and her narration is aware of itself as a participant in  the Literary Road Trip tradition of Huck and Jim, Sal and Dean, Humbert and Lolita, but from the new perspective of wife and mother.

Second textual plane: a book the mother is reading, Elegies for Lost Children, by Elena Camposanto (but actually by Luiselli herself). The elegies are short texts that use phrases from Rilke, Pound, Eliot, et al. to depict with just a few highly lit details--a kind of chiaroscuro--a group of refugee children making their way north. These start popping up into the narrative about halfway through.

Third textual plane: When the family reaches Arizona, the ten-year-old boy and five-year-old girl light out on their own to make their way to a particular Apache site, Echo Canyon. Swift Feather, the boy, narrates these episodes, recording them into one of their mother's devices.

Why do the kids go off on their own? Luiselli very astutely leaves this open. Do they hope, by becoming refugees themselves, to become as interesting to their parents as the refugee children are? Do they feel like testing themselves the way the refugee children are being tested? do they see this as the only way they will be able to stay together since, if their parents separate, they will be separated too?

Luiselli keeps all these plates spinning skillfully, not only building up bestseller-style suspense (will the parents find the kids before they die in the desert as so many kids have?) but also, in the section titled "Echo Canyon," having the planes intersect in a way I never saw coming but that was transcendently moving.

Molly Worthen, _Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism_

EVERY ONCE IN a while I wander into an evangelical Christian bookstore, mainly because I have a hard time staying out of bookstores, and it is always a slightly eerie experience, like entering a parallel world. They tend to be organized like most bookstores—a biography section, current events over here, sexuality and relationships over there, self-help, classics, romances—but the shelves of those sections hold none of the titles and authors so ubiquitous elsewhere, and are instead loaded with titles and authors you will never find anywhere else. 

American Evangelical Christian culture is a world unto itself, one that borders on the USA the rest of us live in, but rarely overlaps with it. As a world unto itself, it has its own intellectual class, and Worthen’s book is a history of that class during the 20th century.

The idea of an evangelical intellectual may seem paradoxical, since intellectuals are supposed to be willing to re-examine periodically their assumptions, revise their conclusions when appropriate, and be open to new knowledge, while evangelicals famously regard certain questions as settled and eternally closed. For exactly that reason, as Worthen recounts, evangelical colleges and universities had to go a few rounds with accreditation agencies back in the day, and dialogue between secular intellectuals and evangelical intellectuals simply does not take place.

Evangelicals have their own explanations for this lack of communication, though. Worthen notes the seminal influence of Cornelius van Til and his idea of “presuppositionalism,” according to which secular intellectuals are much less objective, open-minded, and clear-headed than they think themselves, operating under assumptions they have so long ceased to examine that they are no longer cognizant of them, self-deluded in ways they can no longer see. It’s the secular intellectuals who have the blinders on, according to this view.

Worthen cleared out a good many other unexamined, cobwebbed spots in my conceptions about the evangelicals. They are not all right-wing, for one thing, although that is the preponderance lately. They have had some fruitful dialogue with Catholics, not just about abortion, but also about spiritual disciplines and practices. 

Worthen acknowledges that some extremely popular evangelical intellectuals, like Francis Schaeffer and Hal Lindsey (both of whom would have topped the NYT bestseller lists in the 1970s and 1980s had religious books been eligible), are under-informed and shallow compared to secular historians and mainstream scholars of religion. But she also wants us to know that Schaeffer and Lindsey (and LaHaye and Robertson and Falwell) are not the whole story. I don’t know whether Worthen is an evangelical herself—the final chapter has a certain exhortatory vertical lift that makes me think she may be—but she definitely left me thinking that this intellectual tradition is under-studied and probably under-valued by the rest of us.

Chris Nealon, _The Shore_ (2 of 2): The NWTI

A LINE ON p. 69 of Nealon's book of poems set me thinking.

But I know a dozen teenagers with better politics than Auden

Has Nealon hit upon a simple, linear way to describe the politics of canonical poets? We can simply judge how many teenagers within the range of acquaintance of, say, a college professor would have better politics than Poet X, or Poet Y, or Poet Z.

W. H. Auden would have a Nealon Woke Teenager Index, or NWTI, of 12. Robert Lowell would probably not do as well, perhaps in the forties or fifties--good on Vietnam, but that homophobic stanza in "Skunk Hour" is going to hurt him. 

Elizabeth Bishop might not do even as well as Lowell, given her somewhat scoffing attitude about the women's movement and her support for the 1960s military coup in Brazil. The minstrelsy/blackface imagery in Dream Songs could put John Berryman in the low one-hundreds.

Ezra Pound or W. B. Yeats would be in the high three figures, perhaps, eight hundred, nine hundred. We might have to establish an upper limit for those cases in which the poet has worse politics than any teenager one is likely to meet in the 2020s, like Pound or Yeats. Or Alexander Pope: "Whatever is, is right"? Okay, boomer.

Speaking of Pope, going deeper into the past could raise some interesting discussions. Shelley's revolutionary principles could get him down to eight or nine, even, lower than Auden, but his gender politics could ratchet him up to the thirties or forties. Charlotte Brontë's gender politics could bring her down to the teens, but Shirley's take on organized labor might put her in the nineties. Jane Austen might demonstrate a similar mobility. William Blake may be the only zero in the canon. 

Perhaps we need not even confine ourselves to literary figures. How many teenagers  does one know with better politics than Napoleon? Or Alexander Hamilton? What would Lincoln's NWTI be?

Chris Nealon, _The Shore_ (1/2)

SOME YEARS AGO, I read Christopher Nealon's Foundlings, a brilliant study of some instances of the LGBTQ sensibility breaking (or almost breaking) the surface of public culture in the decades before Stonewall. I only found out recently that Nealon is also a poet--he was one of the readers at a Zoom poetry reading I caught this spring. And a really good one, at that.

The Shore contains five poems, all of them a bit longer than average--ten to twenty pages. Part of the length is accounted for by Nealon's use of "one-line stanzas" (as I think he calls them in one of the poems), single lines standing all by themselves as a sort of moment of their own in a thought process--"Down into matter, flux, the green world" or "The whole taut net of the social order." This generates a fair amount of white space--some pages may have only ten or twelve lines--even allowing for that, though, the poems do feel like "long poems," taking their time, unfolding a thought, crossing it with another, then wait-a-minute-what-about-this, then touching on something from a lifetime of reading, then connecting an old memory.

The effect reminded me of the soliloquies of Henry VI or Richard II in Shakespeare's history plays. Nealon's poems have the same process of opening up of a thought, but are also similarly erudite (helps to know who Ascanius and Hocquenghem are, for example), lyrical ("a hint of lemon in the eucalyptus"), self-aware, willing to probe old wounds, also willing to test out new ideas--"branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain," as Keats says. 

When Henry and Richard give their major statements, they are both insiders and outsiders--royal, but deposed--abject and commanding the heights at the very same time. Nealon's exploration of queerness (throughout, but especially in "You Surround Me"), whiteness ("White Meadows") and the perils of our late capitalist moment (throughout, but especially "The Shore" and "Last Glimpse") have that self-aware clarity that Henry and Richard have when things have gone completely to hell, and might even persuade one that the insight gained is worth the cost of things having gone to hell.

Nealon also offers up a line I feel like commenting on at greater length--but that can gets its own post.

Sophia Rosenfeld, _Democracy and Truth: A Short History_

ROSENFELD PRESCIENTLY ADDRESSES a problem that has only grown more acute in the year-plus since this book appeared.

Democracy works best with an informed citizenry. When decisions depend on a majority vote, we hope that as many people as possible have as much of the relevant knowledge as they possibly can. That is why free speech, freedom of the press, and universal public education are democracy's indispensable  corollaries. 

However, many kinds of knowledge are such that relatively few people can master them. Particle physics, say. How hedge funds work. The philosophy of Wittgenstein. In these areas, we usually have to rely on experts  for what knowledge we have.

But can we trust experts? What if a majority of us think, no, we cannot trust experts, they are trying to manipulate us? 

Or--what if information is pouring out in such an unceasing, prolific fashion, 24/7, that we hardly know which expert to trust?

Thus, our ability to distinguish real knowledge from its deceitful simulacra, our ability to discern and then act in accordance with the truth, lies near the core of democracy, and that ability is always under a lot of stress. 

Rosenfeld is in one respects picking up on what Richard Hofstadter was addressing in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics, though a bit less polemically and with more contemporary examples. And contemporary examples abound all over the world these days, from Brazil to India to Hungary to right here in the good old USA. Climate change, COVID-19, and publicly-funded health care are all topics on which the experts can say one thing while Trump and his epigones say, "nah, that's all bullshit," and too often just enough people will prefer the blusterer to the experts.

Have to say, my very favorite part of Democracy and Truth is Rosenfeld's answer (pp. 140-46) to the many pundits who found in Trump's post-truth tactics a reverberation of various post-structuralist critiques of knowledge. With Derrida having died in 2004 and Foucault in 1984, you would think that these two would no longer be to blame for everything op-ed writers found to dislike in academia, but no...they remain popular targets for a certain kind of grouch who misses the  days of Lionel Trilling. Rosenfeld very convincingly points instead to the dropping of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and the subsequent rise of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News as the turning points, rather than Of Grammatology and Les mots and les choses.

Cathy Park Hong, _Dance Dance Revolution_

WITH MINOR FEELINGS making a splash, there is reason to hope that readers will be inspired to check out Hong's poetry. This one would certainly be worth your while.

Dance Dance Revolution is a poetry collection, but it has a novel-like premise. One of the book's voices is a historian (Korean father, American mother) who grew up in Africa (their father was with Doctors Without Borders). In the course of their research into the Kwangju massacre (a bloody government crackdown on a student protest that occurred in South Korea in 1980, comparable to Tlateleolco in Mexico or Tiananmen Square in China), the historian tracks down a woman was one of the inspirational figures in the protest, its La Pasionaria. This woman is now working as a tourist guide at some deluxe resort town, located in a desert and filled with replicas of world historical sites, something Las Vegas or Dubai.

Good so far? Okay. Dance Dance Revolution includes some passages from the historian's journal and his/her/their notes to some of the guide's discourses (the poems in Part V might be from the historian...I'm not sure), but the greater part of the book consists of poems in the voice of the guide. Some of these are about her present circumstances, some about her memories of Korea, of Kwangju, and of the Ginseng Colony, which seems to be a short-lived experiment in community that started up after Kwangju.

The guide's poems are in an extraordinary hybrid language that draws on the vocabulary and syntax of several different languages at once, sometimes even on different historical eras of the same language. Finnegans Wake is the only handy analogue, but Hong's language is quite distinct from Joyce's--fizzier, saltier, more staccato. Its music is its own.

Within this polyglot nova is a meditation on dissent and resistance. The book was published in 2007, but is set in 2016--presciently, I'm thinking, given that was the year so many folks had to start thinking hard again about dissent and resistance. With so many thousands pouring out in the streets again, this would be a great time for people to pick up Dance Dance Revolution.

Wesley Yang, _The Souls of Yellow Folk: Essays_

YANG’S TITLE MISLEADS slightly, I would say. The deliberate echo of the title of W. E. B. DuBois's famous analysis of the African American situation led me to think that Yang's book would be about the Asian American situation. Some of it is, but most of it is not.

The first three essays are, and they are very striking, especially the first, "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho," Yang's unforgettable response to the devastating school shooting at Virginia Tech. I read this piece in n+1 when it appeared, and it its the main reason I took a chance on the book. The essay takes you inside the experience of being an American minority as only a handful of essays do, and in this case it is an American minority that has gotten only sporadic attention and even today is still largely obscured by clichés and stereotypes. "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho" leads off the volume, and the two essays that follow it in Part One, "Paper Tigers" and "Eddie Huang Against the World," are only a subtle shade less intense. As a group, they are revelatory.

That's about it, though. The final three essays in  the book, which constitute Part Four, are about whiteness, Yang engaging somewhat skeptically with critical race theory but not touching much upon the issues raised in Part One. Parts Two and Three are simply general journalistic pieces. Part Two is four personality profiles (the one on Tony Judt I especially appreciated), and the three pieces in Part Three are about being an under-40 male sexual subject in the 21st century. Interesting stuff, well-reported and skillfully written, but not about the souls of yellow folk, really.

I may be missing a connection in Part Three--being a male Asian American in the 21st century may entail a certain anxiousness over one's sexual charisma, as presented in Adrian Tomine's graphic novel Shortcomings. That topic does not really come up explicitly in Part Three, though.

The Souls of Yellow Folk definitely works as an essay collection--don't get me wrong. But had the book been called The Face of Seung-Hui Cho and Other Essays I still would have purchased it, but would not have had that lingering aftertaste of disappointed expectations.