55 Voices for Democracy

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Wayne Koestenbaum’s Whirlwind of Wit & Wisdom

One surefire way to lift yourself out of the shelter-in-place doldrums is to engage with someone whose enthusiasm for life and literature is more infectious than any coronavirus. Wayne Koestenbaum joins Kate, Eric, and Daya to discuss his new collection of essays Figure it Out; what ensues is a conversation with exuberant inspirations at every turn. Share this one with your friends, it will renew their faith in living the literary life.
Also, Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings, returns to recommend two foreboding works of recent literature (as if to counterbalance Wayne’s optimism): C Pam Zhang’s novel How Much of These Hills is Gold; and Joyelle McSweeney’s new book of poetry Toxicon and Ariadne.

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“I Am Supposed to Look”: Linda Gregg’s Prolific Vision

BECAUSE POETRY IS so attuned to death, it is common practice to look back at a poet’s work when he or she has died and consider how they confronted their mortality. When Mary Oliver died, “The Summer Day” gained an almost divine incandescence, and when W. S. Merwin died in March, many returned to his poem “For the Anniversary of My Death.” Because poetry, in the simplest terms, interrogates what it means to exist, it necessarily asks what it means to die. “Poetry begins with elegy,” wrote Donald Hall.

For Linda Gregg, who passed away at the age of 76 in March, confronting death was merely an extension of the problems she found in confronting life. “I am content to live in silence / with the dead,” she wrote in one of her later poems, “Hearing the Gods.” Silence, in all its varying forms, was of utmost concern to Gregg: silence as the unseen or the invisible, as the unsaid or unsayable. This silence isn’t an empty void or lack of vitality but something akin to the “sound of the gods / in the sound of a grasshopper” or “the sliding of the dead / in a lizard’s tail.” Gregg didn’t resign herself to the incommunicability between living and dead but rather lived in awe of it.

Though her career was prolific, in recent years Gregg’s work seems to have faded into obscurity. Many factors have contributed to this growing anonymity: she lived abroad for a large portion of her early adulthood, never settling into any literary scene, and in later life she described herself as living reclusively in her New York City apartment. Her first collection wasn’t released until she was nearly 40 (a useful anecdote to remember when idolizing young writers), her second book, Alma, which J. D. McClatchy hailed as “austere, intense, afflicted,” is out of print and difficult to acquire, and she never released a complete collection of poems. But she did receive numerous accolades in her lifetime, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and the highest honors for poets from organizations like the Poetry Society of America, Poets & Writers, and PEN America. Gregg was also a transformative teacher, mentoring writers such as poet laureate Tracy K. Smith. Yet perhaps most potent of all has been the integration of her work into the cult-veneration of another poet, Jack Gilbert.

I first encountered Gregg, like many, through Gilbert’s poetry. I discovered Gilbert when I was an undergraduate, and it seemed to me then that everything he touched flourished into myth. Romance was central to his poetry, and a distinctively lucid and elegiac style gave each of his relationships a profound, striking solemnity. Among my friends in the English department, his lovers were as legendary as Beatrice or the Dark Lady. There was Gilbert and Gianna Gelmetti, his first love; Gilbert and Michiko Nogami, a sculptor who died tragically young; and, of course, Gilbert and Gregg, with whom he lived for many years in Greece and Denmark.

It was part of the lore surrounding this latter relationship that Gregg was also a writer, but it took me years to read Gregg’s poetry. This is one of the great shames of the timeworn link between Gilbert and Gregg — it conflates them and in many ways subsumes Gregg in Gilbert’s hagiography. There is no denying the huge insights that can be gained by considering the two in conjunction. Their lives were inexorably tied, even after their years-long romance ended. Gregg dedicated both her first and third collections to him and maintained a close relationship with Gilbert through his death in 2012, acting as his primary caretaker when he suffered from dementia in his final years. They both lived enigmatic, often impoverished, lives outside of the literary establishment and were each concerned with travel, desire, and the inner spirit in their work. Volumes could be written about their poetic dialogue: between Gregg’s Eurydice and Gilbert’s Orpheus, between their conceptions of fidelity and infidelity. It is lamentable that Gregg’s career may only be given due consideration on its own grounds after her death.

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The word that seems to appear most frequently when describing Gregg’s poetry is “spare.” In this sense, her work more closely resembles that of Louise Glück than Gilbert. Take her astonishing poem “The War,” which depicts with devastating clarity a group of men tormenting a scorpion:

The men gathered around, their open pocket knives
held shoulder high. The man picked up the scorpion
by the tail and put it on his friend who yelped,
jumping. The men laughed. The scorpion fell.
Another man picked it up and threw it lightly
against the wall. The scorpion fell and kept trying …

The lines are pure image; there isn’t a single metaphor in the entire poem. The reader experiences only the men’s bald violence, the scorpion’s suffering. But the most remarkable moment occurs in the final lines, when Gregg writes, “Somebody else picked up the scorpion and I told John / I was going. We went outside where there was nothing.” There could hardly be a starker denouement. A lesser poet might have had ended with a revelatory image, something formidable and evocative. But the choice of absence magnifies the brutality of the scene and suggests that the poet’s role is not to look for what is immediately extraordinary but to see the world unadulterated, to turn your eye even to silence and nothingness.

Gregg frequently said that seeing, especially seeing what one might not otherwise make an effort to see, was essential to her work. In the essay “The Art of Finding,” she recounts being astonished “in [her] teaching to find how many poets are nearly blind to the physical world.” She had students keep journals logging things they saw each day, and she discovered that all her students typically saw the world “artistically, deliberately, or not at all.” But for Gregg, poetry depended on a mode of seeing so incorporated into daily life that it became passive. This was the only way to truly be attuned to the material world. Once her students realized this, she recalls, “Their journals filled up with lovely things like, ‘the mirror with nothing reflected in it.’” Here, seeing par excellence requires an eye on the profoundly mundane, on the apoetical world. A mirror with nothing in it is just one more iteration of “outside where there was nothing.”

Another facet of this perception was an aversion to excess. As McClatchy wrote, Gregg was “a poet of essentials.” Seeing clearly meant identifying the rudiments of any given thing, whether it was the images undergirding a scene or the emotions and motives at play in a relationship. In “Heavy With Things and Flesh,” Gregg paints a rural scene with intensely concentrated details:

Wind in the heat. A woman
in her farmhouse talking
to someone outside. Along with
hobbled goats in the field.
At eight in the evening
a man in his heavy wooden boat
is repairing the holes in
the yellow net piled around him.
I came here exhausted in my heart.

The stringent descriptions generate a taut energy. We can sense the weight of the scene, the spiritual fatigue embodied in the physical stillness. Yet there is wonder hovering over each image, awe at the heaviness of being.

Despite Gregg’s spartan eye, her poetry was distinctly romantic, always oriented toward “what is found out about the heart and the spirit.” In a tribute to Gregg on Literary Hub, Timothy Liu tells a story, possibly apocryphal, of a reading where Stanley Kunitz introduced Gregg and Glück. In his opening, Kunitz described Glück’s work as “haunted by cemeteries,” while Gregg’s was “haunted by cemeteries … that were flowering.” Gregg’s attention to the inner life was informed by affliction as much as by blessing, but she was fundamentally awake to beauty.

Gregg often pointed to her youth in Marin County, surrounded by uninhabited mountains and tall trees, as a creative wellspring. At an early age, she became fascinated with the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. She explained at a 2015 talk at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival that Hopkins’s invocation in “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” to “give beauty back” became her creed. Hopkins provided her with a “special way of knowing the earth and experiencing God,” and as she grew up, she developed a devotion to “nature, the sacred, love, and poetry.”

Gregg has an almost ecstatic eye for the natural world: “Everything that is touched by light / loves the light. We the stubborn-as-grass, / we who reel at the taste of sap,” she writes in “Surrounded by Sheep and Low Ground.” At times, her study of love intersects with this study of nature, but Gregg’s own use of the word “love” is a bit of a misnomer. Her most striking poems, as McClatchy observed in his review of Alma, are more concerned with desire than with love, with the violence and lust intertwined with longing. Her first collection, Too Bright to See, centers on the dissolution of her relationship with Gilbert, and later collections like Chosen by the Lion contemplate her affair with, eventual marriage to, and divorce from John Brentlinger.

The poems in these collections are anguished, exultant, and damning. When I first read Too Bright to See, I felt slightly embarrassed by my adulation of Gilbert, whom she so incisively lays bare. Take these lines from “The Defeated”:

Waking up with you there awake
in the kitchen. It was like being alive twice.
I’ll try to tell you better when I am stronger.

What does the moth think when the skin begins to split?
Is the air an astonishing pain? I keep seeing the arms
bent. The legs smashed up against the breasts,
with her sex showing.

The poem oscillates from poignant nostalgia to a disturbing rumination on sexualized mutilation, intensifying the implications of the enigmatic line, “It was like being alive twice” (which also serves as the book’s epigraph). Tucked in between these lines is the rapturous image of a moth rent by hands or by flame, further complicating the stanza with a mysterious violence. Or consider the tamer closing to “Eurydice,” perhaps the most lyrical addition to the long line of feminist revisions of the Greek myth:

Now you whistle, putting together
the new words, learning the songs
to tell the others how far you traveled for me.
Singing of my desire to live. […]

I did not cry as much in the darkness
as I will when we part in the dimness,
near the opening which is the way in for you
and was the way out for me, my love.

The poem is devastating in a far different way than “The Defeated.” Eurydice’s voice is somber, almost demurely restrained, like the speaker in Li Bai’s “The River Merchant’s Wife.” But there is a tragic foreknowledge, an understanding that Eurydice will be left behind, that reveals the hypocrisies of the Orpheus figure. “I know you will not take me back,” she writes. “Will take me almost to the world, / but not out to house, color, leaves.” His efforts to retrieve her are not heroic but selfish, his songs are not charms but appropriations of her misery. By losing her, he gains a story to “tell the others” at the expense of her suffering. “Eurydice” indicts not only masculinity but also sentimental or exploitative art.

Sight is always central to such examinations, as Gregg strives to perceive desire as a whole, neither purely love and pleasure nor lust and betrayal. In “Chosen by the Lion,” she writes, “I am the one chosen by the lion at sundown / […] Yanked back to bushes and torn open […] / Taken as meat. Devoured as spirit by spirit / […] for me now there is only faith.” Desire is at once ravishing and sacred, corporeal and ethereal. Violence is desire’s secret, Gregg implies, and in particular violence perpetrated against women. And yet somewhere in that cruelty is a seed of faith, the possibility of something more beautiful, more like love.

There is a moment early in Too Bright to See when Gregg articulates the poetics that would define her career. Or, more in line with her own lexicon, she makes it visible. In “There She Is,” a speaker encounters a “specter” whose “hands are eaten off.” The haunting image of a handless, bloodied woman evokes Lavinia of Titus Andronicus. But while the Shakespearean character was violated by Tamora’s sons, in Gregg’s scene the woman is the agent of her own harm, eating herself to avoid the insidious “other pain” of consciousness. At first, the speaker resists confronting the mutilated woman, yearning for forgetfulness, but ultimately realizes,

I am supposed to look. I am not supposed
to turn away. I am supposed to see each detail
and all expression gone. My God, I think,
if paradise is to be here
it will have to include her.

In these final lines, Gregg enunciates her doctrine: the poet “is supposed to look” not just at the beautiful but also at the awful. It’s a strange vision of paradise, a beauty that encompasses ugliness — not pleasant but rather a state of pure consciousness. In paradise, you are wholly awake to the world, to the real. You can see it.

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Gabriel Fine is a writer and poet from Colorado currently living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in SPIN, Consequence of Sound, andWestword, among others, and he has poetry forthcoming from Image.

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Much More to Investigate

FROM THE OPENING PAGES of Miracle Creek, Angie Kim creates an intense atmosphere of foreboding and suspense, building swiftly to the event that triggers the rest of her debut novel, unraveling so many lives and lies.

Young Yoo, the wife of Pak Yoo, goes about her normal routine in Miracle Creek, Virginia, one August evening in 2008. Except her quotidian tasks are rather unusual: she and her husband offer hyperbaric oxygen therapy — also known as HBOT — in their barn, of all places. Their business, Miracle Submarine, provides a pressurized chamber where the air is filled with 100 percent oxygen. Her household routine is interrupted by a call from her husband, asking her to cover for him at post while their clients (patients) are sealed inside the chamber. He requests that she tell no one, and emphasizes that no one should ever know he stepped away.

In the six pages that open the novel — a section titled, rather ominously, “The Incident” — we are immersed in and share Young’s anxiety and discomfort with the lie as she mans the barn, then is forced to race to their modest home, next to the business, for essential batteries. We have a building dread about the six patients, three adults and three children, sealed inside the chamber.

As she heads quickly back, Young sees her daughter Mary running and then, “I see her, my Meh-hee, in that moment. Her body flings up like a rag doll and arcs through the air. Gracefully. Delicately. Just before she lands on the ground with a soft thud, I see her ponytail, bouncing high. The way it used to when she was a little girl, jumping rope.”

A tiny change in the routine, a tiny white lie, and everything is irrevocably altered.

The novel jumps a year ahead, now closely following Young’s appearance in court, as she watches the prosecution of a former client, Elizabeth Ward, for murder. Elizabeth’s son Henry and Elizabeth’s estranged friend Kitt Kozlowski died in the explosion at Miracle Submarine. As Young watches and the prosecution proceeds, Elizabeth is emotionless, without a tear or an apology.

How interesting, we think, we’ve found the villain. Will this now be an exploration of an emotionless defendant as in Camus’s Meursault from The Stranger?

Angie Kim has much, much more to investigate as the trial proceeds.

This novel is a stunner, emotionally packed, with separate characters delivering internal plot twists and turns. Part family drama, part trial drama, part culture war drama — digging into sensitive topics like parenthood, immigration, infertility, and alternative therapy — this novel is all secrets, secrets, secrets. In multiple narratives, we see events from different points of view as they unfold, or as they are recalled, or through statements and mental asides during testimony. It’s dense with story lines but never confusing; the reader turns pages eagerly, waiting, wondering what could possibly happen next and how it will all resolve.

One of the point-of-view characters is Matt, a white radiologist injured in the explosion. As we get to know his story, we find that his life is intertwined with the Yoos: his wife, Janine, is from one of the handful of Korean families in the area, and insisted he take these treatments a) to give the business an endorsement, coming from a medical professional, a doctor, and b) to treat his low sperm count. Matt is embarrassed and humiliated that Janine’s family, as investors in the enterprise, are now aware of his virility issues. During his testimony Matt thinks: “He could go on at length about it, how Janine staged it perfectly, inviting him to dinner at her parents’ house without one word about the Yoos or HBOT or, worst of all, Matt’s expected ‘contribution.’ A fucking ambush.”

One idea Kim explores, under-represented in popular culture, is the cost, psychic and spiritual, of leaving one’s homeland to pursue dreams or a “better” future in the United States. Kim does a marvelous job in excavating the emotional toll of this move on the three family members: Mary (formerly known as Meh-hee), Young, and Pak. For four years, Pak was a “wild goose” father, the Korean phrase for a man who sends his family abroad and flies to visit them once a year. While Pak waited for his visa to join his wife and daughter, Young sat in a tiny bullet-proof glass vault, working 16 hours a day, rarely seeing her daughter, never seeing the America outside of the convenience store. These are a few of the multiple painful sacrifices the Yoos endured to ensure Mary a better life. So much separation and sadness.

When Pak finally made it to the United States, he moved the family to Miracle Creek, a bucolic community an hour outside of Washington, DC. Young reflects:

It was funny how desperate she’d been to escape that gritty world, and yet she missed it now. Miracle Creek was insular, with longtime residents […] She thought they might be slow to warm, so she focused on befriending one family nearby who’d seemed especially nice. But over time, she realized: they weren’t nice; they were politely unfriendly. Young knew the type. Her own mother belonged to this breed of people […] Their stiff hyperpoliteness — the wife’s perpetual closed-lip smile, the husband’s ma’am at the beginning or end of every sentence — kept Young at a distance and reinforced her status as a stranger.

In addition to cultural isolation is the isolation within families, and in this novel the focus is on this immigrant family. Young recalls the misunderstandings that began in their courtship:

It had been in Pak’s village where they’d had their first fight […] What Pak didn’t understand was that she actually liked his village, the tranquility of escaping the chemical-scented smog and construction noises from every corner of Seoul as it remade itself for the Olympics […] “It’s hard to believe you come from a place like this.” Pak took it as belittling, as confirmation of his long-simmering belief that Young’s family (and, by extension, Young herself) regarded him as “beneath” her, when in fact Young meant it as a compliment, a tribute to his raising himself from squalor to the university.

The silences between this Young and Pak have unexpected repercussions for their lives in the United States.

Sacrifice as a parent is indeed a theme, as the parents of children with physical or mental challenges pay for their alternative medical treatment at Miracle Submarine. Listening to Matt’s testimony, so emotionally abbreviated from her own memories, Teresa thinks, “Having a special-needs child didn’t just change you; it transmuted you, transported you to a parallel world with an altered gravitational axis.” Three mothers are part of the patient group at the center of Miracle Creek: Teresa Santiago, who has a daughter with cerebral palsy; Kitt, a mother of five children including one with severe autism; and Elizabeth, the mother of a son with multiple challenges who showed remarkable improvement until his death. Elizabeth is a character who seems to shift dramatically, depending on the perspective: an incredibly dedicated and amazing caretaker, or outrageously neurotic, or maybe a stone-cold murderer. Elizabeth’s regimen to treat Henry’s OCD, ADD, anxiety, and sensory and autism spectrum disorders included eye-tracking exercises, emotion identification homework, speech therapy, neurofeedback, and the meticulous elimination of suspect food. Henry’s condition defined her entire life. Or was it a pathology she herself created?

Young muses, “[P]erhaps the newspapers were right. Perhaps Elizabeth had been desperate to get rid of her son, and now that he was dead, she finally had a measure of peace. Perhaps she had been a monster all along.”

As these mothers search to improve the lives of their children, they face a consistent onslaught of judgment and scrutiny, no matter that there is no one right way to raise a child with disability or illness. Elizabeth and Kitt argued with each other, Kitt far more lax in her food allergy approach, which incensed Elizabeth. A group of protestors — mothers of children with autism — gathered at Miracle Submarine, angry and outraged that families wouldn’t accept their children with autism precisely as they were. The protestors made threats while warning of the possibility of an HBOT fire — how far might their righteous indignation go?

As we learn more about each character, we find that everyone has secrets, and that most of them are lying, for their own murky reasons. Right up to the explosion so many people were secretly doing precisely what they shouldn’t have been doing — an illicit relationship, hidden business transactions, a dangerous cigarette, a private meeting in the woods. We begin to wonder: Whose lives will crumble under all the public testimony and scrutiny? And who really did cause the explosion?

Angie Kim gives the reader a supremely masterful unraveling in this tense, psychologically astute, emotionally riveting, suspense-filled literary thriller.

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Désirée Zamorano is the author of The Amado Women.

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The Beautiful and Brutal in Josip Novakovich’s “Honey in the Carcase”

THERE IS A SCENE in Josip Novakovich’s new short story collection Honey in the Carcase in which a drowning six-year-old narrator admires the play of light on the surface above his head. He has helped his siblings paddle an air raft into the Adriatic Sea despite not knowing how to swim. As he sinks toward the bottom, he feels more wonder than panic, noting, “The shimmering surface of the water was like melted lead, which I had melted from stolen lead pipes and poured into cups.”

Beauty and brutality mingle everywhere in the collection, which is set in the United States and in the author’s country of birth: Yugoslavia until 1991 and Croatia thereafter. The stories fall on either side of that divide and include narratives set during Tito’s Yugoslavia — communism “with a human face” — and the vicious wars that left more than 100,000 dead. Most of the book’s players are ordinary people: a Slavonian beekeeper with grown children, a student hitchhiker, two young brothers who attempt to outdo one another with their fibbing. Each is concerned with the Sisyphean task of getting through the day-to-day while making sense of the world around them.

The world is often so broken and devoid of reason that it makes sense only to the most reductive and dim-witted of Novakovich’s characters. The American man who sponsors a Bosnian refugee family, equally gleeful about the boost to his reputation and the tax breaks. The truck driver who picks up the student but cannot decide if his passenger is from Iran or “Yugoslavakia.” The paramilitary irregulars who allow a man and his dog through a checkpoint once, only to shoot the dog the next time.

A celebrated short story writer, novelist, and essayist who was a finalist for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize, Novakovich has explored similar territory before. These stories continue his fascination with the dislocation of exile, war’s absurdity, a world without logic in which certain patterns can yet be discerned, while further demonstrating his wit, his talent for the uncanny and absurd, and his fundamental empathy with all living things.

In “Honey in the Carcase,” Ivan Medvedich is a beekeeper who watches as Yugoslav forces lay waste to his surroundings. Shells fall, civilians are killed, and domesticated animals are slaughtered for fun. His brother presents him with a coffin, telling him cheerfully that this way he won’t be “dumped in a mass grave” if he is killed. When shrapnel wounds his wife and his sons evacuate, Ivan must decide whether to go with them. But he cannot bear to lose his home, “as though it was his skin.” More than that, he will not abandon the apiary he tends with loving care, concluding, “the invisible Godhead and his plan were revealed in bees.”

At great personal risk, he travels back and forth to bring the bees from the other side of the front line. When paramilitaries overrun his village, going house to house in search of survivors, the bees attack them, an act Ivan sees as an embodiment of his favorite verse of scripture, in which bees “get the better of the lions.” It is a small, momentary victory in an otherwise disfigured landscape.

This suggestion of David and Goliath, or karmic order in chaos, is echoed in “Wool,” one of the most arresting stories in the collection. Anna, the daughter of a mean and calculating drunk who accuses his wife of sleeping with the chimney sweep and beats his family on a regular basis, finds respite from her circumstances by caring for her beloved pet lamb. That the lamb will end up on a serving platter feels somehow inevitable given the cruelty of Anna’s situation. But Novakovich takes the tragedy a few steps further by fully mining the father’s glee in the act: he ties Anna to a chair for days until he forces her, at last, to eat her friend. When Anna turns the tables on her persecutor, it is a satisfying act of retribution that nonetheless leaves the reader wishing that her father, too, could end up on such a platter.

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Justice is the outcome in only a few of Novakovich’s stories. Most characters struggle to find their footing in situations both bleak and absurd. For some, the absurd can even represent a kind of redemption, and Novakovich unspools those stories with a healthy dose of his trademark gallows humor. Indeed, in a recent interview he declared, “Sometimes irony is all we have left — a kind of protest or painkiller.”

Novakovich has a clear appreciation for gray areas and things that fail to add up, and his most intelligent (and empathetic) characters understand that the world is a messy place. The collection’s dangerous figures don’t always carry guns or beat their families. Sometimes peril comes in their tendency to impose false order on a disorderly world.

In “Tumbleweed,” a graduate student hitchhiking to New York City gets a ride with an American man who regards his accent with immediate suspicion. The student has spent the summer working in oil fields trying to earn money, and for as long as the driver sees him as an immigrant laborer, their interplay stays relatively friendly. They drink and talk, and drink some more as they drive. When the man learns that his passenger attends Columbia University, however, he makes him get out in the middle of nowhere.

Their interaction is interesting — and artfully restrained — because while the driver proclaims disbelief that there would be a “pinko at Columbia,” his anger is clearly rooted in the Ivy League affiliation. The student “can’t do better than work as a worm” and, as an immigrant, must naturally be inferior. When this notion is challenged, it is like watching an operating system fail. The data goes in but makes no sense in an environment of binaries.

American exceptionalism is also a theme in “Charity Deductions,” whose protagonist sponsors a Muslim-Croat family fleeing the violence of the Bosnian war. Pleased that this act of charity enhances both his reputation and his tax picture, the main character nonetheless grows weary when his houseguests display “the kind of moodiness […] that probably led to the wars.” They smoke indoors and make long-distance telephone calls, but it is their moping — their very foreign sadness — that gets under his skin.

His is clearly a xenophobia for our times: dogged belief in the superiority of the American system with a self-congratulating veneer of Christian charity. “I believe in the concept of home,” he thinks. “Stay home. Visit briefly. Go home.”

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It is in his characters’ interactions with animals, and in his animal characters, that Novakovich shows some of humanity’s starkest shortcomings. In “Fritz: A Fable,” a German shepherd and a cat engage in violent conflict. When actual human war comes to their town, driving a wedge between former neighbors and, in the case of the narrator, between husband and wife, the cat and dog reach détente in an evident commentary on the shortsightedness of their human masters.

Likewise, the rat-narrator in “My Hairs Stood Up” decries the way he and his brethren have been demonized by humans. Taking refuge in the cavity of a cooling Thanksgiving turkey, he muses, “I don’t see any dissimilarities between us except that humans are bigger and, therefore, live in bigger holes. Their world is merely our world magnified.” The pandemonium that ensues when the rat is discovered echoes Ivan Medvedich’s favorite Bible verse about bees leaving “honey in the carcase” of the lion. The rat goes on to question whether humans are at all humane, citing their treatment of “vermin” and lab animals. As he points out, “I could have killed some of their old ones, but I haven’t done it. I was considerate and let them breathe on.”

In “Yahbo the Hawk,” the collection’s most moving and troubling story, a boy imprisons a young raptor in his attic, hoping to train it. Day after day, he attempts to bend the hawk to his will, but the animal only grows weaker:

[He perches] on the narrow ledge against the windowpanes, his beak open and uttering no sound, bewildered, perhaps not understanding what kind of air it was that would show you the wonders of your homeland and wouldn’t let you pass through, homeward.

The passage comes full circle to the drowning six-year-old looking through the glassy surface of the sea. It seems at once to represent exile and a world turned on its head. It is the civilian caught in the war zone and the child confronted by the bewildering cruelty of adults. Perhaps it is even the writer struggling to find the words.

Each day that the hawk spends confined to the attic is a day he does not learn to hunt, to fly, to fend for himself in the wild. When the boy decides that he must provide meat for the animal, he weeps at the task of killing a weasel and finally decides to let the hawk go. But he has waited too long, and two weeks later a forester reports seeing “a dead hawk with a dead weasel in its talons.”

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Courtney Angela Brkic’s work has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, The New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, the Utne Reader, and National Geographic. A Whiting Award winner and author of The First Rule of Swimming (2013), Stillness: and Other Stories (2003) and The Stone Fields (2004), she teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University. 

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Alabama’s Mortal Sounds

MY FATHER, who doesn’t tell me much, once told me that I was conceived on the night of an Alabama concert. Dates of conception can be difficult to pinpoint, so the strange precision of this recollection makes me trust it. Chances are my father would recall a concert — what reason would he have to make up something like that? Especially since he hated country music.

My father was from Cincinnati. He was big into classic rock, but even more than that, he was committed to Reds baseball. He worshipped Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, and Johnny Bench, and it strikes me now that the scruffy beauty that marked the on-field play of the Big Red Machine was, in some odd way, characteristic of his favorite bands, too.

He loved raunchy guitars, three-part harmony, hair. Let It Be–era Beatles, to be sure, but also Journey, Steely Dan, The Moody Blues. On Side A of my father’s life was Kansas’s “Carry On Wayward Son,” on Side B a four-minute Steven Stills guitar solo. His tastes were hardly highbrow, but his disdain for country music did have a latent cooler-than-thou about it. Unlike my mother, who had come of age in the hills north of Nashville, he was from the city, not the back porch. Did he even own a pair of blue jeans? To him, honkytonks and hay bales signified some fusty combination of the backward and the absurd. If he ever “drowned his troubles,” which is not a phrase I ever heard him utter, it was in work rather than the outlets endorsed in country songs: whiskey, women, the road.

Alabama, come to think of it, may have been the one country band he could stomach. Aesthetically at least, the path leading from Alabama to REO Speedwagon was straighter than, say, the path leading to Ernest Tubb. For starters, Alabama was a country band at a time when country bands tended to be stage props for solo acts — sideshows, in other words, to the main event.

In Nashville, if not in London and Los Angeles, the specter of the lonely troubadour still loomed. Sure, George Jones had a band, and Loretta Lynn did too, but when you thought of those performers you didn’t think about the band, the members of which tended to be loose configurations of available players. They were rarely if ever pictured on album covers, let alone listed on marquees. 

Country singers were roving gamblers (Kenny Rogers), runaway outlaws (Willie Nelson), tipsy jokesters (Roger Miller), highway vagabonds (Hank Snow), fed-up wives (Melba Montgomery). Sure, there was the occasional duo, but these tended to be siblings or spouses — in any case, opposing forces working out their differences in tandem. Country songs were a function of individuation. Country bands, on the other hand, eschewed the idiosyncratic in favor of something simultaneously more accessible and abstract, a dynamic that had been largely anathema to country music before Alabama. 

Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, folk-inspired songwriters such as Kris Kristofferson and Emmylou Harris had made intricate lyrics about the diamond absolutes a calling card of Nashville country. They paid deference to Bob Dylan, Kitty Wells, Camus. They cordoned off a corner for hippies in the honkytonk. With Alabama, however, lyrical derring-do and emotional complexity made way for mass appeal. Tone poems about rural poverty and romantic bankruptcy gave way to drum-driven, big-hook anthems. Alabama was more interested in making hits than making statements, and no country band ever made more hits. 

All told, Alabama sent 33 singles to the top of the country charts. To date, they have sold more than 70 million records. With their roisterous fiddle solos and Queen-style drum patterns, songs like “Tennessee River,” “Dixieland Delight,” and “Mountain Music” crossed over to pop radio. Alabama played The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. They got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1989, the Academy of Country Music named them the artist of the decade.

Among the hallmarks of Alabama’s drolly adrenal brand of country rock was an overt sensuality cribbed from disco and Muscle Shoals–style R&B. There’s a reason why Brad Paisley called his 2011 hit about making out in cars “Old Alabama.” No country act since Conway Twitty had sung so much about sex:

 I got something cooking
And I’m boiling way down deep 
While I’m hot and bothered
Why don’t you give me what I need 
— “Get It While It’s Hot,” 1977  

I want to come over
I want to love you tonight
I don’t care about the time
or who’s wrong or who’s right
— “I Wanna Come Over,” 1979 

Your body feels so gentle
and my passion rises high
You’re loving me so easy 
Your wish is my command
— “Feels So Right,” 1981

The lyrics, it must be said, read a lot more lurid than they sound. Whether singing about cheating or watching baseball from the bleachers, Randy Owen, Alabama’s log-stiff, lumberjack-looking front man, performed in the same husky, northern Alabama brogue. His talent was to make vulnerability seem invulnerable, carnality as anodyne as changing the oil in your car. He really could have been singing about anything. If Owen was able to chip away at certain Nashville taboos, it may have been because nobody really noticed.

In later years, Owen would record traditional gospel albums and give homage to country troubadours of old, and yet his legacy, at least in part, has to do with jettisoning guilt, which is to say existential struggle, from heartbreak music. In this way, Alabama departed from country’s Golden Age pantheon, for whom the tension between flesh and spirit, the stage and the confession booth, was vitally generative. The boys ushered Reagan-era narcissism into the mainstream. There was a nose-candy blear to their Panglossian MO.

For every foray into pop rock, however, Alabama was careful to give a nod to the country crowd. In “If You’re Gonna Play in Texas,” a number-one song from 1984, Owen and company seek a kind of forgiveness for losing touch with their roots, only to prove themselves keen students of Cajun music and Western swing. Jeff Cook’s fiddle solo, which comes sawing through the drumbeat at the 3:30 mark, references the Texas Playboys and Doug Kershaw while also nodding to “Cotton-Eyed Joe.”

Even at their most traditional, Alabama projected a contradictory breeziness. In “Jukebox in My Mind,” a number-one song from 1990, Owen likens heartache to an indwelling jukebox that dispenses painful memories at inauspicious times. Lyrically, the song is an interesting inversion of the Porter Wagoner classic “Turn the Jukebox Up Louder,” in which the narrator finds balm for his heartache in a rollicking country bar. The problem is that you can’t really imagine “Jukebox in My Mind” coming out of a jukebox. The slick harmonies and pungent drums water down the double shot. Plugged in, glossed up, and swelled to arena size, honkytonk music becomes inconceivable.

In a certain light, Alabama seemed versatile, while in another, they came across as disingenuous. Like the Eagles and the other Southern rock outfits after which they fashioned themselves, the band projected machismo on album covers and merch. Their official logo — a bulgy metallic rendering of the word Alabama — was the stuff of belt buckles and pickup truck grills. The other insignia with which they were synonymous was the Stars and Bars, an association from which, like Tom Petty and Lynyrd Skynyrd, they later distanced themselves.

If, at root, Alabama’s music was about sex and making music, their branding oozed white Southern pride. Occasionally the two came together. “And just like the South, girl,” Owen sings on “See the Embers, Feel the Flame,” as if providing the soundtrack to a postbellum bodice ripper, “we’re gonna rise again.”

I doubt my father had such lyrics in mind when he bought tickets to see Alabama on the night I was conceived. He may not have had any lyrics in mind at all. If my math is correct, the show would have taken place around my parents’ first anniversary. It’s possible that it was only the most convenient way of marking a year of marriage — an outing within striking distance (I think it took place at the fairgrounds downtown) that was nevertheless far enough out of their comfort zone to feel significant. Not predictable and not spontaneous either, it was the kind of date my mother, who has lived most of her life within a 10-mile radius of Nashville, would have appreciated.

Were they trying to get pregnant? Were they in their right minds? Alabama concerts, I gather, could be bacchanals. Just by breathing the ambient fumes, it’s likely that my parents, teetotalers both, would have gotten a little buzzed. At the time, they were living in a rental house on Hollywood Street, behind Ace Hardware. She taught kindergarten; he was working at a bank during the day, taking law-school classes in the evenings. If, in some ways, an Alabama concert seems like the unlikeliest place to imagine my parents, it may be that, after a year of trying to make a life together, the experience of listening to music in a big sea of people was what they needed to keep going. If so, they could hardly have chosen a better band than Alabama — a group whose music promised, more than empathy, more than catharsis, pure boot-stomping escapism, with a moderated Southern drawl.

By the time I became cognizant of country music, around the age of four or five, Alabama’s once-indomitable sound had begun to give way to a new wave of singer-songwriters and rootsy traditionalists: Steve Earle, Rosanne Cash, Dwight Yoakam, Dan Seals. As much as idiosyncratic albums such as Cash’s King’s Record Shop (1987) and Yoakam’s Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. (1986) were a rejection of Alabama’s everything-to-everybody approach, they also certified the band as a lingering force. The truth is that Alabama’s music had settled into the ether; by and by, their arena-country shtick had become as indispensable to country music as Hank Williams’s moan and Dolly Parton’s wigs. Country bands from the Dixie Chicks to Florida Georgia Line owe them a debt of gratitude.

But what, if anything, do I owe Alabama? It’s not as if the muffled lyrics in my parents’ heads somehow worked their way into my DNA. Music doesn’t have anything to do with the fusion of gametes. And yet such fusion is made possible, in part, by feeling — and the feeling, on that night at least, was influenced, perhaps even inspired, by Alabama’s high-flying country pop.

In “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” the poet Galway Kinnell writes about his son’s predilection for walking in on his parents. “[H]abit of memory,” Kinnell writes, draws the child back “to the ground of his making.” Was it habit of memory or something more superficial that led me to buy a ticket to see Alabama in concert when I was in college? The band, I learned from a poster in the student center, was playing the basketball arena right across the parking lot from my dorm. It was their farewell tour (they’ve since mounted a couple more). If I didn’t go, would I ever again have the chance?

Go I did, but I did not stay for long. Alabama just wasn’t my band, even though, to hear my father tell it, they’d been with me from the start. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel a little disloyal, but I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t feel a bit relieved. I walked back to the dorm in apparent silence, but silence, of course, is what the music fills. The jukebox in my mind skipped back and forth between “Mountain Music” and “Tennessee River” and “Feels So Right.” The mortal sounds, however indelible, are not nearly as catchy as country songs.

¤

Drew Bratcher was born in Nashville. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa. He lives in Chicagoland.

The post Alabama’s Mortal Sounds appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/30QT7G3

It Mattered That He Showed Up: On Pete Buttigieg’s “Shortest Way Home”

THOSE WHO DERIDE MILLENNIALS as lazy, selfish, and entitled would do well to consider Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Buttigieg has a résumé that would put most baby boomers to shame. Since graduating from Harvard, in 2004, he’s earned a Rhodes Scholarship; worked as a McKinsey consultant; served in Afghanistan with the US Navy; and won city-wide office with more than 70 percent of the vote. Twice.

Having just barely “attained to the Age of thirty five Years,” the threshold mandated in the Constitution, Buttigieg has now turned his ambitions to the White House. The results have been promising: a May 9 Monmouth poll puts Buttigieg third in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, behind only Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Nationally, too, Mayor Pete is building momentum — as of last week, Quinnipiac had him ahead of party stars like Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke. Everything can and will change, but it’s a credit to Buttigieg’s vision, intelligence, and thoughtfulness — and, certainly, his status as a white male — that he’s emerged, with such speed, from near-total obscurity to something like viability.

Does such a rise indicate Buttigieg has what it takes to unseat the aged cretin currently squatting in the Oval? I hesitate to guess. But whatever happens in 2020, Buttigieg appears poised to make a substantial contribution to American politics and public life — a fact evident not just from his galvanizing interviews and appearances, but also from his new memoir, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future. The book is clearly intended as a campaign document, and contains all the humanizing anecdotes and professional backstory typical of a political memoir. But Shortest Way Home is more than just a stump speech with a dust jacket. It’s a vivid and surprisingly lyrical portrait of a city and a man in transition — and an intellectual performance in which Buttigieg succeeds in making his play at the presidency seem entirely, thrillingly appropriate.

¤

Shortest Way Home begins in South Bend, current population 102,000. Once a model of Indiana affluence — the city made bicycles, dowels, mattresses, fishing tackle, and other all-American products — the city’s economy faltered in the 1960s following the closure of the Studebaker auto plant. By the time Buttigieg was a boy, in the mid-’80s, husks of empty factories were so integral a part of the landscape that they seemed practically invisible, like “part of the furniture,” Buttigieg writes.

At 18, Buttigieg moves to Cambridge for college, and after graduating magna cum laude, he embarks on a period of intense professional development. That these early chapters register as more than boastful career exposition — “I worked on the Kerry-Edwards campaign!” “I consulted on Canadian grocery pricing!” — is thanks to the wisdom and elegance of Buttigieg’s voice; indeed, the anti-generic crackle of the sentences made me wonder if Buttigieg had written the book without the services of a ghostwriter: war stories, he says, are “baked with facts but leavened with bullshit”; to visit Arlington Cemetery is to “confront the dictatorship of chance”; political ideology has nothing on “the simple, transitive effect of love.” This is more that just campaign copy — it’s real writing. (Perhaps we should expect nothing less from a man who says his favorite book is Ulysses.)

Buttigieg returns to South Bend in his late 20s, when he embarks on a run for state treasurer (he loses), and a subsequent run for mayor (he wins). Shortest Way Home loses some of its sparkle when Buttigieg takes office; even a writer of his talent can’t make sewer reform interesting. As if sensing this, Buttigieg mixes things up with a unique, present-tense chapter that follows him on a typical morning run through South Bend. It’s a nice device that puts Buttigieg’s writerly stylishness on full display, and communicates the obvious affection he feels for the particulars of his city — for the St. Joseph River, for the migratory geese, for something called “Stink Corner.” And it reveals a crucial piece of information we won’t fully understand until later in the book: here, we see Buttigieg getting out of bed with someone named Chasten. A man. His husband.

¤

Have I mentioned Buttigieg is gay? It’s a marker of just how drastically the politics around gay rights have evolved in the past decade that this fact isn’t considered immediately disqualifying in a presidential candidate. Buttigieg himself noted this shift in a recent interview: “When I got into elected office” — just seven years ago — “it was a given in my mind that you could either be out or you could be in office — not both.”

But Buttigieg has managed to do both, in Mike Pence’s Indiana of all places. After taking leave from his first term as mayor to serve in Afghanistan, Buttigieg returns home eager to be upfront about his sexuality: “Before going overseas,” he writes,

I had felt comfortable being more than one person, as we all sometimes must, according to the roles we are called to play. […] But something about exposure to danger impresses upon you that a life is not only fragile but single, with one beginning and one end. It heightens the desire for your life to make sense as a whole, not just from certain angles.

After telling his parents he’s gay, he writes an essay for the South Bend Tribune to take the news public. Notwithstanding a few internet trolls, some conservative constituents, and an anti-gay newspaper deliveryman who temporarily boycotts Buttigieg on his morning rounds, the reception is generally positive. Buttigieg goes on to win reelection with over 80 percent of the vote.

It’s hard to know what to make of this coming-out story, presented as it is like any of the other career moves chronicled in the book (in true Buttigieg fashion, he meets his future husband a mere two months after the Tribune essay runs). But of course coming out isn’t mere professional development. It’s a statement of identity, of desire, of difference. For many of us, it’s messy and complicated, and involves a certain amount of Sturm und Drang. Shame is a deep-rooted plant, insidious and hard to kill, and for all the ways homosexuality is now “acceptable” in parts of American public life, there’s no eliding this fact.

And yet, as Shortest Way Home would have it, Buttigieg appears immune to shame’s destructive power. Though he admits to the political risk of coming out, he makes no corresponding personal analysis. Is Buttigieg torn up about being gay? How does he come into an awareness of his sexuality? How does he square his desires with the teachings of his Catholic high school? We never find out, and skip straight to the happy ending — to the Norman Rockwell Christmases with in-laws who fill Buttigieg’s stocking with peanut butter cups and Slim Jims.

Buttigieg hinted at some degree of conflict in his coming-out essay when he wrote, “It took years of struggle and growth for me to recognize that [being gay is] just a fact of life, like having brown hair, and part of who I am.” He went even further in speech in April, calling his internal confusion “a kind of war”: “If you had offered me a pill to make me straight, I would have swallowed it before you had time to give me a sip of water,” he said. “If you had shown me exactly what it was inside me that made me gay, I would have cut it out with a knife.” This is strong, powerful stuff — but it’s wholly missing from Shortest Way Home. In its absence, this portion of the book feels like an evasion, a careful stepping-around on the rush home.

Certainly, most political memoirs are happy to avoid anything so complicated as the tempestuous, internal politics of personal sexuality. But Buttigieg’s book is so much better than most political memoirs, and its quality sharpens the reader’s appetite for true confession, for true disclosure. Every human being is a ball of contradiction, desire, and delusion, and watching a writer untangle this ball is one of the chief pleasures of memoir. It’s therefore a disappointment to see Buttigieg go mum on this front when he’s otherwise so forthcoming, at least by the standards of presidential candidates.

And yet, if this silence amounts to a literary failure, it also serves a useful political end: it makes Buttigieg seem all the more palatable to the millions of straight Americans whose support he may soon need. Refusing to write a tortured exegesis on the knotty process of sexual recognition serves to underscore an important point: gays — we’re just like you! It’s a point that already comes easily to Buttigieg, who projects a kind of gay respectability politics quite naturally. Buttigieg presents as more or less heterosexual: he loves the Dave Matthews Band; he speaks in a basso profundo; his worst fault, according to his husband, is his indifference to grocery store expiration dates. Buttigieg is no glitter-covered Cher devotee — though Cher herself is a fan — but a thoroughly unthreatening Middle American who happens to be married to a man.

Of course, this shouldn’t have to be the case: Buttigieg, or any other candidate, should be “allowed” to be as stereotypically gay as they like. But we’re kidding ourselves if we see Buttigieg’s capacity for heterosexual identification as anything but politically useful. Though it may be painful to acknowledge that Buttigieg’s capacity to “read” as straight serves him electorally, well, it does; and if Barack Obama was the right person to make portions of white America comfortable voting for a black man, perhaps Pete Buttigieg is equally well positioned to pull a similar feat with the country’s straight electorate. He’s the transitional figure we need.

¤

In 2012, following two unrelated shootings that occur at the same South Bend address, Buttigieg pays a solo visit to the street corner in attempt to get a feel for the place. Shortly after arriving, a group of locals appears; it turns out the mayor has “inadvertently crashed a kind of impromptu wake.”

A man asks Buttigieg if he wants to speak with one of the victim’s mothers. “Honestly, I didn’t,” he writes. “It’s not that I didn’t wish to comfort her or be helpful, it was just that I didn’t know how.”

Of course, he manages to come up with a boilerplate expression of sympathy. But despite the simplicity of Buttigieg’s words, the exchange goes on to mean a great deal to the woman: in the years following, when she or a relative runs into him around South Bend, they tell him so. As Buttigieg sees it, “What mattered to her was that I showed up. […] Not that I, Pete, was there, but the mayor was there — a walking symbol of the city, and therefore a signifier of the fact that the city cared about her loss.”

Yes, Buttigieg is a brilliant thinker. Yes, he supports a number of bold, thrilling proposals: Medicare “for all who want it,” the abolition of the Electoral College, aggressive climate action, DC statehood, Supreme Court reform, and so on. But Buttigieg is more than an intellect, more than a conveyor of policies. He’s also a symbol.

It matters that he’s gay, that he showed up. I imagine I speak for many other gay men when I try to communicate just how much this means to me, how deeply moving it is to see a television anchor, speaking of Buttigieg, use a phrase like “his husband” — all without batting an eye. There’s a revolution in those two words, and that they just might apply to a major-party nominee — a president — qualifies as a miracle.

Of course, Buttigieg remains a long shot. But for now I choose to linger in the possibility, in the hope, that he and his husband — his husband! — might yet go to the White House. That they, and we, might yet win.

¤

Harrison Hill’s writing has appeared in The Threepenny Review and American Theatre Magazine. He recently received his MFA from Columbia University, where he taught undergraduate writing.

The post It Mattered That He Showed Up: On Pete Buttigieg’s “Shortest Way Home” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/30YTEWu

Mayor Pete and the Millennial Paradox

ON A WET, GRAY, and horrible Midwest day last winter, I tried to explain the geographical logistics of my life to a childhood friend. I work two hours away from my partner, which means we have to lease two apartments. “But which one is home?” she asked.

Home? I flipped through an internal rolodex of the places life had thrown me, where I’d stayed long enough to have an address. Boston, where I was born. The desert east of Los Angeles, where the sun carved deep lines into my forehead and I learned what it means to call a sky “blue.” The San Francisco Bay Area. The Hudson Valley. Chicago’s South Side. The stretch of cornfields and manufacturing plants and wide-open prairie just beyond the farthest northern reaches of Chicagoland’s suburban sprawl. All of them were home at one point, and none of them are Home.

This feeling of geographic dislocation is not uncommon among millennials, a much-abused term that really just means “adults under 40.” Trends show that young adults, who joined the workforce in the post-crash economic malaise, are living closer to their parents than Gen Xers did at our age. But we can expect to change jobs more times than any previous generation, leaving us with unprecedented uncertainty about where we’ll live and for how long. We’re buying homes at a lower rate than our parents did, putting off marriage, and having fewer kids, later in life, or none at all. In short, as a generation we aren’t hitting the life milestones that tie you to a place and invite you, or force you, depending on your point of view, to put down roots.

In many ways, Pete Buttigieg (pronounced, with a guide he helpfully supplies, Buddha-judge) is just such a dislocated millennial. He grew up an “impatient millennial product of South Bend,” Indiana, and he got out for college, the first available opportunity. Buttigieg saw the gates thrown open to him — the wrought-iron gates at Harvard Yard, but also the less tangible ones that lay between a small-town, Midwest kid and a bigger, better, more important life. “All I had to do,” he writes in his campaign-ready memoir Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future, “was leave South Bend.”

But after graduation, Buttigieg spent 10 years winding his way back to the banks of the St. Joseph River, which flows west into South Bend’s center and there swings north, forming the southernmost bend that gives the city its name. He became the city’s youngest-ever mayor, renovating a turn-of-the-century “money pit” 500 feet from his parents’ house.

To be a millennial is to be defined by Before and After: before 9/11 and after, before the economic collapse and after, before Facebook existed and after it helped to swing an election, facilitate Brexit, and incite a genocide in Myanmar. Buttigieg’s millennialness, his sense of Before and After, pervades the book. “Being in your thirties today,” he writes, “means you have lived more or less half-and-half with Democratic and Republican presidencies, known twenty years of peace, and fifteen of war.” He is old enough to have his sixth-grade best friend’s phone number still burned into his brain, and young enough that he couldn’t tell you the number to the landline on his office desk. He is old enough to refer to his television as a “‘flat-screen TV,’ as if they sell any other kind,” and young enough to do most of his cultural consumption on other devices. He is old enough to have joined the military before the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and young enough to have married his husband, Chasten, in South Bend’s Episcopal Cathedral of Saint James in a ceremony sanctioned by both church and federal law.

Buttigieg is also old enough to be extraordinarily, terrifyingly accomplished. Shortest Way Home details a journey through Harvard, a Rhodes Scholarship, Oxford, McKinsey, the Navy Reserve officer corps, and two terms in the mayor’s office of a city of 100,000 people. And yet he’s young enough to understand that for many, modern adulthood feels newly, and exhaustingly, daunting. When Chasten wonders aloud whether the couple was in a position to responsibly take care of a dog, Buttigieg “pointed out that we didn’t even seem to be in a position to responsibly take care of cheese.”

Moments of Before and After serve as turning points in Buttigieg’s life and give the book its narrative arc. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, we reached what political scientist Francis Fukuyama called the “End of History,” when the last ideological alternative to liberalism had fallen. The Nazis and the communists defeated and the economy booming, the fate of the world seemed to be, finally and permanently, in capable American hands. Raised to expect a peaceful, prosperous, predictable future, America’s youth were pulled to the twin poles of apathy and irony — indeed, Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, featuring the hit “Ironic,” was the top pop album in 1996 — and the sticky-sweet sentimentality of Titanic and Britney Spears.

The notion that history had ended, that our generation wouldn’t be needed because the world would simply go on as it was, came to an end on a crisp Tuesday morning in September 2001, as Buttigieg lay face down on the bottom bunk in his Harvard dorm. A roommate shook him awake. “Hey, Peter, you’re going to want to see this.” Walking across Harvard’s campus later that morning, blinking up at the same eerily quiet, cerulean sky that dominates that day in my memory, Buttigieg remembers realizing “that the project of my generation had just been reassigned in some way.” Years later, the same spring Buttigieg graduated from Harvard, comedian Jon Stewart delivered that new assignment in a commencement address to William & Mary’s graduating class: “I don’t really know how to put this,” Stewart said, “so I’ll be blunt. We broke it. […] But here’s the good news. You fix this thing. You’re the next Greatest Generation, people.”

The decade and a half that followed, of war, economic turmoil, and political division, tore the United States apart at the seams. Those years led many to fetishize the past, demanding that we return to a moment — though it is not entirely clear which moment — that was greater than our current one. Those years also led Buttigieg back: back to the street he grew up on, and into the mayor’s office of a city defined by nostalgia over past greatness. South Bend’s fate had seemed sealed in 1963, when the Studebaker factory closed its doors and the city became “a company town without its company.” For the next five decades, the city slowly bled out, kept alive by the beating heart of Notre Dame on its eastern shoulder, but only barely. The population dropped by 30,000 and unemployment soared. South Bend is a place where it is possible to argue that the past was greater than the present.

Yet Buttigieg’s solution for South Bend — and the “model for America’s future,” promised in the book’s title — was not to be found in the past. “We don’t actually want to go back,” Buttigieg writes. “We just think we do, sometimes, when we feel more alert to losses than to gains.” And in training our focus backward, we ignore the people who would have fared so much worse in the past, Buttigieg among them. The revival South Bend saw under Mayor Pete’s tenure serves as the book’s central metaphor: the answer for us and the United States, as it was for Buttigieg and South Bend, is to return home and reclaim it, bringing it into the future rather than mourning its past.

Shortest Way Home is a story of changing minds by focusing on the local, the interpersonal, and the everyday. It is a seductive notion, especially filtered as it is through the good-natured humor and obvious love for his home city that animates Buttigieg’s prose. Yet a campaign memoir is a political proposal as much as it is a work of literature, and the narrative is at its thinnest where it draws the proposal’s contours. Buttigieg’s vision for an equitable society — which relies on John Rawls’s definition of justice, that “a society is fair if looks like something we would design before knowing how we would come into the world” — reads as vague and academic, notably out of keeping with the practical granularity of other examples of his governing philosophy: data-driven theories of pothole maintenance and snow plowing, and a careful weighing of the effect a switch to robotic garbage trucks would have on South Bend residents and sanitary workers alike.

Readers looking for radical politics or concrete solutions in the pages of Shortest Way Home may be disappointed. Buttigieg’s insistence on patience as our neighbors become accustomed to ideas like gay marriage may leave many cold, reasonably chafing at being told to wait until older conservatives come around to recognizing their full humanity. But the state of politics in 2019 might be such that simply framing inequality or discrimination as problems is enough of a relief that one need not have a solution in hand.

To read Shortest Way Home is to experience a profoundly millennial product, one that paints a starkly different reality and vision than the one on offer from boomers who currently have a death grip on the government’s reins. The economic crisis that coincided with millennials’ early adulthood shattered a foundational tenet of the American dream: that each of us controlled our own destiny. For the United States’s young adults, the path home that Buttigieg lays out — returning to a hometown and finding professional opportunity and social acceptance, or simply feeling enough stability and certainty to put down roots somewhere, anywhere — may well read like a path to the future.

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Peggy O’Donnell is a writer, historian, and non-TT faculty at the University of Chicago.

The post Mayor Pete and the Millennial Paradox appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2K8Mady

On “Manifesto”

TO CHANT WITHOUT restraint, without holding back: the frisson of collective surrender to a simple phrase which itself encapsulates a political project, however simplified — and it may be all the more enthralling for this simplification — is opposed to the linguistic complexity that marks most manifestos. The chant, authorless, opposes the manifesto, which rarely shakes its origin in the writing of an individual. The manifesto, at once the written program of an avant-garde movement and an example of its aesthetic and/or political urges, may aspire to the anonymity and urgency and mass oration of the chant, and yet, complex sometimes despite itself, the manifesto resists chanting.

Julian Rosefeldt’s collaboration with Cate Blanchett, Manifesto, is a video installation first exhibited at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in 2015; since then, the piece has been shown at about 21 venues from Auckland to Shanghai, and its world tour continues. A series of beautifully produced videos featuring performances in which Blanchett recites pieces of manifestos written by a wide variety of artists, Manifesto circulates as a “contemporary call to action.” Both the press release of Hauser & Wirth, the Los Angeles gallery where Manifesto had its West Coast premiere, and the back of the DVD package of the film use this phrase. It is hard, however, to know what action the piece calls on us to perform. I may simply have been insusceptible to this call, or I may have resisted it, or I may misunderstand what “action” means here. Or this may be the problem: that the “contemporary call to action” in the sphere of art does just this, provoking reflection on the relation between the possibilities of political speech in the present and the desired performative force of manifestos or calls to action ranging from The Communist Manifesto (1848) to Elaine Sturtevant’s Man is Double Man is Copy Man is Clone (2004). (The largest group of selected texts belongs to the interwar period in Europe, representing many of the avant-garde movements of that time.) A meditation and performance of manifestos without being one itself, Manifesto stages “thirteen collages of artists’ manifestos.” As Ed Dimendberg has pointed out in “Manifesto as Manifesto” (forthcoming in En Face & Beieinander: Festschrift for Richard Sieburth, 2019), Manifesto, unlike many other video installations in galleries, exists in a catholic variety of media forms: as a DVD in a package that emphasizes Blanchett as star; as a book, with the visual artist’s name and a photo of the actress on the cover, which gathers the texts of the “collages” along with essays; as a collection of streaming videos available on the artist’s website; and in the installation form that occupied two large galleries at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles from late October to early January: “Julian Rosefeldt. Manifesto,” to reproduce the oddly punctuated title given by the press release. This variety of modes of publication contrasts, for instance, with Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), which exists only as an installation and as a limited edition. Unlike The Clock, a comparably ambitious installation by an artist working with video, Manifesto is at once designed for display in intricately planned gallery spaces, and also available at any time, and to anyone, to watch online. Manifesto wants to be free.

Each form of publication of Manifesto raises its own questions: my focus here will be on the installation at Hauser & Wirth. Manifesto includes 13 channels: a prologue of four minutes and 12 videos of 10 minutes and 30 seconds each. At Hauser & Wirth, benches were set up in front of each of the 13 screens, and the sound was carefully focused, so that one could concentrate on each video separately. Yet a visitor was also always aware of sounds spilling over from other parts of the installation and, depending upon where one was sitting or standing, one might catch glimpses or even find oneself focusing on partial images from another screen. Further, in the form of installation, the various channels insist on their combination at regular intervals: Blanchett plays 12 characters, and about two-thirds of the way through each video, each character turns to face the viewer, all but unblinking, as if in a trance, centered in the frame, and each intones a passage from whatever manifesto she is speaking. That is, for a moment, the elaborately individuated characters Blanchett plays speak together. Collectively, however, the various voices combine into the sound of an alien robot chorus: high-pitched, recognizable as language but inarticulate — or, it may be, unarticulated because collective. The voices, that is, combine as a strange chant, as choral noise.

Manifesto gives the words of manifestos to embodied characters. As manifestos become soliloquies spoken by these characters and, quite often, speeches delivered as voice-overs, the piece at once disrupts one’s sense of these manifestos as discrete aesthetic and political statements and wrenches them from their original historical situations. Rosefeldt has called manifestos “seismographs of their time”: the piece asks what happens to these measurements of the shocks and tectonic shifts of one period when they are dislocated into utterly rich and yet bewildering worlds of another period or periods: a widow in mourning somewhere in Eastern Europe, it seems, delivers a Dada soliloquy as an address at the funeral of her husband; a Russian choreographer resembling Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard speaks passages from manifestos by Yvonne Rainer, George Maciunas, and Kurt Schwitters to an audience of ballet dancers dressed as sequined aliens with bulbous brainpans; a “conservative mother” speaks the words of Claes Oldenburg to her family gathered around an elaborate lunch table. The manifesto as pamphlet, produced to be broadcast to those with ears to hear, takes on a new, disorienting status as dialogue or soliloquy in dramatic situations into which the films throw the spectator without preliminary contextualization. The effect is at once one of decontextualization, as the manifestos have been ripped into fragments and removed from their historical situations, and of surreal or humorous or off-kilter recontextualization. These new contexts arise through dramatization and through the delegation of these texts to particularly and idiosyncratically embodied speakers, all of them played by Blanchett but otherwise remarkable for their collective discontinuity. There are sometimes what one might call establishing shots, but most often one still does now know where one is: this is a trading floor, this is a ruined factory, this is a cemetery, but where?

Manifesto dislocates manifestos written by artists addressing particular historical conjunctures, which produces an uncanny sense of historical continuities and contradictions. This or that manifesto, a historically specific moment of address — an artist’s or collective’s appeal to repair the world, or art, or the world through art, or art through the world — at once becomes contemporary and out of joint: the words of the manifestos variously “fit” the roles Blanchett plays and their settings seem utterly to contrast with these roles and where the performances happen. Most often, there is a kind of disorienting oscillation, as the words of the manifesto seem at once oddly to belong in these new contexts and violently to contrast with them. Manifesto plays with this dialectic of historical specificity and unmoored transmission further in producing scripts from collages of texts that themselves date from different periods: only one of the films takes all of its text from a single manifesto from a single year.

No single dynamic describes all of the films. As installed at Hauser & Wirth, the viewer first encountered Blanchett as a rugged, bearded, homeless man, accompanied by a dog, pushing a cart. The video begins with an aerial view of the ruins of an immense industrial complex, and slowly turns its focus to the homeless man walking through the complex. During this early sequence as the camera pans over the geometry of the vast desolated complex from the air, Blanchett, speaking clearly in a voice-over — in “her own” voice, it may be — intones the words of a text that begins:

Mankind is passing through the most profound crisis of its history. An old world is dying; a new one is being born. Capitalist civilization, which has dominated the economic, political, and cultural life of continents, is in the process of decay. It is now breeding new and more devastating wars. At this very moment the Far East seethes with military conflicts and preparations, which will have far-reaching consequences for the whole of humanity.

While the spectator at Hauser & Wirth could ask for an exhibition checklist — as I thought to do, on my first visit, only after having taken in all of the films — few listeners are likely to recognize each of the pieces of the collages. The films include no indications of the breaks between the texts Rosefeldt has collaged or sutured together, and in the darkened rooms of Hauser & Wirth there were no visible captions, titles, or anything at all to tell the audience that this passage, for instance, is an extract from the “Draft Manifesto of John Reed Clubs,” first published in New Masses in 1932. One does not need to know this provenance, however, in order to sense the contrast between the prophetic urgency of the text and the spectacular ruins of what was once a new world become old, its process of decay complete. That the factory itself appears to be the remains of a capitalist or a state socialist enterprise only adds to the sensation that this text, in its contemporary moment, predicted this ruin. This sense of an anachronistic joining of dramatic situation to the text of a manifesto is more striking in some of the films than others, but this effect of a simultaneous match and disjunction between these historical texts and the setting of the video is virtually always in play.

In an interview, Rosefeldt has stressed the importance that Blanchett delivers texts written mostly by men, with the exceptions of those by Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Olga Rozanova, Sturtevant, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles:

The main idea for Manifesto was not to illustrate the particular manifesto texts, but rather to allow Cate to embody the manifestos. Until the last third of the twentieth century there were only a few manifestos written by women artists. Most were written by men and they are just bursting with testosterone. So I thought it was thrilling to let them be spoken today by a woman.

Considering this gender disconnect as merely thrilling, however, sidesteps the way that embodiments within the piece are in fact peculiarly illustrative or peculiarly in contrast with the texts they speak. Rosefeldt imagines the installation as a set of drag performances: set pieces of masculine would-be aesthetic and political world-making incongruously embodied by Blanchett. The thrill of having a woman “embody” these texts, “just bursting with testosterone,” comes from our recognition that the rhetoric of these texts, whatever their sources and whatever our knowledge of those sources, is in some recognizable way a masculine idiom of an art world dominated by men and their voluble ambitions. For example, when a “tattooed punk,” to use the description of the press release, spits out manifestos by Manuel Maples Arce, Vicente Huidobro, and Naum Gabo, the repudiation of bourgeois traditions of art seems very much in character. Conversely, when a veiled widow at the very proper funeral of her husband delivers Dada manifestos about shitting on art to somber mourners gathered about his grave, the contrast between her scatological and comically deadpan aesthetic fury and the event depicted is central to the film’s frisson.

An impulse driving the writing of manifestos tended toward a desire for anonymity, toward the desire for a document to shed its author on the way to becoming the charter of collective speech and action, and yet the history of manifestos also suggests a need — a distinctly gendered need? — to assert authorship and authority. Martin Puchner suggests this need in Poetry of the Revolution, for example, when he discusses how the names of Marx and Engels became attached to the original anonymous Communist Manifesto. Yet, as the need for prestige seeps into the artist’s practice, the author function kicks in, and this so-called anonymity ultimately performs as an assertion of authorship and authority rather than as an expression of a unified collective. Certainly, Manifesto decouples these texts from their authors, at least for a while, at least until the visitor asks for the press release, or the reader looks through the book with the artist’s name on it. I emphasize this bibliographical point because the various media instantiations of Manifesto, as I mention above, do present authorship in various ways, and because it seems to me bizarre to suggest that Rosefeldt does not share authorship of this work with Blanchett. My thinking here was stimulated by a 2015 essay in Reverse Shot, for which Shonni Enelow argues that the collaboration between Juliette Binoche and Olivier Assayas in making Clouds of Sils Maria challenges conceptions of authorship. To say that Blanchett embodies manifestos, in other words, is also to suggest that she embodies Manifesto, rather than being a joint creator of it. One might ask, instead, how embodiment performs its own kind of authorship and authority, or how embodiment alienates the idea of authorship.

The “epilogue” to Manifesto takes place in a school. This sequence is at once among the most comic, the most self-reflexive, and the most moving. It is comic because the situation shows a schoolteacher explaining to a group of children that creativity is theft, self-reflexive because the texts concern filmmaking, and moving because of a slow-motion sequence in which the camera leaves the classroom and swoops down and children’s playground games are the background for Blanchett’s voice, in voice-over, reading a manifesto by Lebbeus Woods. She declares she is “at war with my time,” and the texts ends: “Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city.” Earlier, the teacher channels Jim Jarmusch: “Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.” Manifesto declares itself as a series of canny thefts. This sequence is also self-reflexive in foregrounding the moments of simultaneous speech across films as choral. This foregrounding happens explicitly in the context of the alienation of cinematic authorship. Blanchett as teacher, channeling Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme 95 manifesto and adlibbing a bit, sternly reminds her pupils: “And the director must not be credited — all right? It’s very important.” After scattered agreement with this admonition, the children collectively begin to chant an open “ah” sound, without melodic variation. This choral drone of children’s voices provides the backdrop for Blanchett’s turning frontally to the camera and continuing with a version of the manifesto, delivering her vow to refrain from personal taste, declaring that she is no longer an artist, that she will make films “at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.” (Manifesto does not note that von Trier and Vinterberg presented this declaration as a “vow of chastity.”)

In this moment, Blanchett at once “embodies” the manifesto by delivering it as a first-person declaration while the peculiar situation of this performance in the installation performs its effect of robotic anonymization. The combined sound of voices from the various screens is a wash of sound, a tone, a drone. To become collective speech is to become nonsense. This effect is specific to the instantiation of Manifesto in the gallery space: it is in this carefully curated world that performance produces a wash of sound out of a collage of chanted texts. The DVD version ends with a credit sequence in which something like this effect is achieved by layering the chanted sequences together. Within each film, however, the chanted texts are audible and there is no overlap. The force of the chanted combination of manifestos drowns out the specific content of any of them. Manifesto, in the end, may be about the fear of the loss of self and authorship that would come with the manifesto’s achievement of the performative force the genre desires.

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Martin Harries is professor of English at UC Irvine. The author of Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship, he is working on “Theater after Film,” a book about the impact of mass culture on postwar drama.

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My Friend Marshall

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED after the Village Voice published my rave review of Marshall Berman’s 1982 book, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. The author called me up, and within months we became such fast friends that, three decades later, I found myself delivering a eulogy that nabbed me the only Dissent byline of my career. Not that it was all that strange Marshall Berman called — he often telephoned people he knew slightly if at all, including me several times before then. And obviously there was nothing humorous about the sudden loss of a 72-year-old polymath whose intellectual fecundity was unimpaired by that dent in his skull, souvenir of the botched 1989 brain abscess operation his second wife browbeat the hospital into fixing. Nor, I should add, did my eulogy close an SRO funeral. That honor went to Marshall’s second son, Elijah Tax-Berman, a blunt 29-year-old I’d known since he left the incubator. His flow leaning Run-DMC, Eli nailed it. At the cemetery, he was still shoveling dirt into his father’s grave after the rest of us fell back.

Marshall’s call came during the crucial turning point of a life that was pretty tumultuous for someone who resided in one West End Avenue apartment and taught at one no-longer-free public university for all the time I knew him. Professionally, the turning point was a triumph. Although Marshall’s masterwork was assigned a supercilious pan in The New York Times Book Review, All That Is Solid enjoyed a trajectory more in keeping with the fondly skeptical daily Times review John Leonard ended with the perfect “I love this book and wish that I believed it.” Spurned in France and Germany but translated into many humbler tongues, the book made him a hero in Brazil, Norway, and other nations where socialism had a life. Personally, however, the turning point was a catastrophe: the December 1980 murder of Marshall’s five-year-old son Marc by his first wife, who threw the child out of their sixth-floor window and then jumped herself (he died and she didn’t). That, Marshall explained on the phone, was why he hadn’t called in a while.

This nightmare had been in the news and on the gossip networks, but I’d missed it, and having struggled for years to conceive a child with my wife, I was primed to listen. So, after an hour-plus of talk, we made a date to meet. Marshall was already on his way to marrying novelist Meredith Tax, who hit it off with my wife, and for several years the four of us enjoyed a wealth of movies, museum shows, and mutually prepared meals together. Culturally, Marshall usually set the agenda, and to reciprocate I made him rap mixtapes and hooked him up at the Village Voice, where over the years he wrote about Georg Lukács and Public Enemy, artists’ housing and “urbicide.” By 1985, Eli’s difficult birth and our daughter’s overdue adoption had put us into play-date mode, which continued after Meredith’s tumultuous side ended the marriage. Soon commenced a romance with not altogether untumultuous English teacher Shellie Sclan, who married Marshall in 1993. Play-date dynamics having evolved, we hung out less after Marshall’s third son, Danny Berman, was born in 1994. But whenever the phone rang late, my default surmise was that it was Marshall, tracking down a detail or raring to schmooze.

Emotional, enthusiastic, interested in everything, Marshall Berman had more to give intellectually than anyone I’ve ever met. His erudition was so vast and his recall so phenomenal that I came to depend on him for background on non-musical subjects; pre-Google, a local call would tell me what I needed to know, and unlike Wikipedia, Marshall was available for questions. As a Marxist humanist he was nominally to my left, but day-to-day our politics were congruent, and we were both committed family men who regularly discussed the pleasures and tsuris of that way of life. But deep though our friendship was, I never entered his world — an almost exclusively Jewish post-’60s left I couldn’t triangulate today except to say that it wasn’t altogether congruent with the board of Dissent, his intellectual home base. In a way, however, this degree of separation cemented our bond. Without Marshall I wouldn’t have read Goethe’s Elective Affinities as I theorized romantic monogamy; without me, he wouldn’t have heard It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back pre-release at the beach. And although he worked with many Voice editors, I was the one who assigned the 1995 Times Square piece that in 2006 flowered after much labor into Marshall’s third full-length book.

On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square is a wide-ranging, deep-diving, exhaustively researched meditation on the New York City nexus that kvells about the Broadway theater of Marshall’s youth while advocating for “mass culture,” his term, in all its bedazzling strut — his praise for a Benetton sign depicting six near-nude young models of cunningly varied racial identity could have been designed to put old lefties off their feed. It also celebrates many fictional and real-life women, most of them physically beautiful and/or materially powerful, while taking down both the vicious sexism of The Deuce and Laura Mulvey’s explicitly anhedonic attack on the male gaze with equal vigor. It thinks about sailors and developers, Sister Carrie and The Jazz Singer, Fancy Free and Taxi Driver. It has its gaffes, and in no way surpasses All That Is Solid — masterworks are by their nature unsurpassable. But its conceptual daring deserved much better than it got from the culturati.

Marshall was passionate about teaching, and CUNY too, but he was a writer first — a writer bent on giving pleasure and doing good. With sleep apnea among his many ailments, he wrote all the time — the morning of his death he was working on a book about Jerusalem and Athens, Paris and New York called The Romance of Public Space. And because he loved to write, he took on lots of shorter work, crafting essays, reviews, and lectures that consumed much of his literary energy. Eager to follow up All That Is Solid, he only came to terms with this compulsion when he dreamed up the rubric “adventures in Marxism,” the title under which Verso assembled 14 of his essays in 1999, proving to him that, to quote the introduction, “a writer could say something, without saying everything.” It led with a tale he’d longed to tell about his father, a garment-district schlepper turned Women’s Wear Daily reporter-salesman who suffered a second and fatal heart attack at 47, five years after the one that ensued when a partner absconded with the capital of a rag-trade magazine they’d co-founded. Before too long, Marshall explained, that trauma occasioned his immersion in Marx’s humanistic, then-obscure Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Suspending Isaac Babel and Studs Terkel as well as Walter Benjamin and To the Finland Station from its Marx hook, Adventures in Marxism is palpably conceived — as editors are always imploring, it “works as a book.” We’re fortunate it exists.

Marshall died 14 years after Adventures in Marxism, which worked as a book by excluding many essays that didn’t suit its concept. So it was inevitable that his widow, heir, and literary executor would plan a posthumous collection. But for emotional as well as financial reasons, Shellie Sclan needed to keep teaching; she had a son to get through SUNY Purchase and was working with Columbia to archive her late husband’s books and papers. So, having devised a tentative table of contents, she enlisted the help of Dissent editor David Marcus, who turned out to have his own ideas. Where Sclan’s selections began with the autobiographical introduction to Adventures in Marxism and included three more of its picks (one too many I’d say), eight of the 24 chapters in Modernism in the Streets: A Life and Times in Essays (2017) — a full third of it — also appear in the earlier book.

Modernism in the Streets is nonetheless a thorough, affecting, and intellectually powerful document — the Berman to read after All That Is Solid bowls you over. That it wasn’t reviewed anywhere near widely enough could reflect the hegemony of the “theory”-driven posthumanism Marshall opposed, which was one excuse. But the fact that the new book wasn’t all that new couldn’t have helped — nor its implicit assumption that the Marshall Berman whose legacy the posthumous volume was supposed to cement had barely evolved from the proper left intellectual who gave the world All That Is Solid, which claims high culture for progressive politics as if buttering up a Partisan Review it then leads onto the Cross Bronx Expressway. Marshall the tie-dyed hippie who wrote the 1974 Faust-meets-Mick-Jagger screed “Sympathy for the Devil” for New American Review was altogether absent. And if Sclan hadn’t advocated for Al Jolson, Marshall the omnivore who devoted years to On the Town would have too.

That said, however, the previously uncollected two-thirds is choice, including sanely visionary 1965 and 1971 political interventions published in Dissent and, yes, Partisan Review, a jaw-droppingly evenhanded 1975 Ramparts piece about All That Is Solid villain Robert Moses, and daringly down-to-earth ’00s essays about Jewish fabulist Franz Kafka, in his day job “one of the most creative bureaucrats of the century,” and Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, in Marshall’s view a fellow battler against “modernist anti-modernism” whose protagonists in Snow (2002) are a man and woman in love struggling for a life Marshall calls “unheroic, ordinary, ‘normal’” — a life he suggests is typified these days by interracial couples “schlepping their babies around in ultra-modern snugglies” “in all sorts of American places I and Pamuk have never heard of.”

In an introduction that warmly praises Marshall’s “humanist exuberance, his vision of a feeling Left,” editor Marcus judges the Pamuk essay one of Marshall’s “late classics.” But where Marcus applauds Pamuk for holding that “something about modern life seems to stop us from loving,” Marshall argues that the failure of Snow’s lovers to escape together to Germany’s promised land is an anomaly — a “last-minute plot intervention by the author” that reflects Pamuk the novelist’s belief that “stories of love crushed are more poignant than stories of love fulfilled.” Then he adds: “But there’s a difference between the logic of a story and the logic of history. At the start of the twenty-first century, our history may be more open than our literature.”

Accounting himself “troubled” by Berman’s failure to see that Snow “revealed the deeper sorrow of modern experience — our inability to connect with one another,” is Marcus himself expounding a “modernist anti-modernism”? I say this dead-in-the-water alienation bromide exemplifies it. Yet I do wonder why neither literary leftist mentions that the encompassing preoccupation of Snow is the impenetrable yet also poignant complexity of “Islamism.” And were he alive I’d yell at Marshall that that’s not a “plot intervention,” it’s the plot itself, where this particular meditation on the contradictions of Islam has always been going, and then point out to Marcus that this particular “one another” comprises two complex characters, one of them a porn-addicted cosmopolitan litterateur who rejected the Islam of his youth as a student and ended up far more fucked up about sex than the provincial divorcee he adores. But to take my take home I’d also mention that at the end of Modernism in the Streets, as Marcus is well aware, Shellie Sclan gets her own brief section, complete with an introduction that gives On the Town its props and then explains that Marshall’s summum will end with two selections from The Romance of Public Space: the published version of “Emerging from the Ruins,” the 2013 Lewis Mumford Lecture on Urbanism at CUNY that proved his final public address, and “The Bible and Public Space,” which he was still revising a few hours before a heart attack killed him instantly on September 11 of that year.

As someone who grew up on the King James Bible and reread Genesis plus commentary to review Robert Crumb’s 2010 version of that quintessentially foundational work, I hereby report that nowhere in my research did I encounter anything as comic or bemused as Marshall’s vision of it — certainly not in Crumb himself. Marshall takes every holy word at face value, yet he’s devoid of reverence — not to show off or shock, but because for him Genesis stands as one more philosophically redolent literary text ripe for interpretation. Hence Adam, Eve, and a guy named God are all characters in a confusing tale that, if you’ll recall, begins with two different versions of the Judeo-Christian creation myth. But it’s a love story nonetheless.

In an afterword to the 2010 British edition of All That Is Solid, Marshall writes:

One human right that seems to embarrass both academic and political writers, who often leave it out, but that real people know is crucial to living a good life in the modern world, is the right to love. I have written about love (see Gretchen and Faust in Chapter One, and see The Politics of Authenticity), but not enough; I will write about it now, in my old age.

In the Genesis essay, he begins to keep that promise. Among other things, Marshall observes that, once God has created Eve, he knows he’s got trouble on his hands, not because Eve is sure to eat that apple but because she’s competition — someone else for Adam to talk to. Why do Adam and Eve cover their genitals? Embarrassment? Maybe not. Maybe it’s because they’ve already figured out that the pull of that joystick and whoopee cushion are so powerful the couple could end up loving each other more than they love God. Which, given the pickle God’s put them in, may be all He deserves:

The couple’s survival seems to depend on knowledge. But what are they supposed to know? What are they not supposed to know? “Good and evil”? But isn’t God also saying that their knowledge itself is evil? How can they know what they shouldn’t know if they don’t already know it? Adam and Eve have a lot to work out. Can anybody help them? Probably not in any Jewish, Christian, or Islamic establishment.

Writing about Crime and Punishment once, I found myself irritated by the way Harold Bloom and his ilk dismissed the afterword, in which Raskolnikov is saved by his pure love for the prostitute Sonia. So naturally I called Marshall, and learned that he loved that ending too, at least until Raskolnikov went all Christlike on him. Soon we were talking about how poorly served romantic love has been in so-called serious discourse, and Marshall told me that he planned someday to write a book about it. And on the day he died, as he redefined the Garden of Eden instead, human beings’ propensity to love each other was nonetheless on his capacious mind.

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This essay originally appeared in the author’s Book Reports: A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading, published by Duke University Press on May 3, 2019.

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Robert Christgau is an American essayist and music journalist. He was the chief music critic for the Village Voice for four decades.

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