The Best American Poetry

"No truth to the rumor" at Columbia

We're grateful to Adela Quant (not her real name) who leaked this exchange of correspodence to us.

 

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To the Office of the President:

 

Don't you think that the university should discipline the masked hooligans who disrupt classes, occupy buildings, destroy property, injure staff, and make crude anti-Semitic slurs to intimidate Jewish students? Even the New York Times reports: Some Jewish Students Are Targeted as Protests Continue at Columbia." Not just Fox news. Did you know that Hamas files show it spies on ordinary Palestinians? Furthermore, the former co-president of a Columbia Barnard Sikh Group says she was forced out for being pro-Israel.  And now this. And now this. Are you in favor of Hamas?

Marvin Butler SAS '93
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Dear Marvin:

I am writing in response to your concern over recent events on campus. I want to assure you that your thoughts and concerns are being shared with University leadership. I appreciate that you feel passionately about this situation and feel strongly about the University. I hope the fact is not lost on you that my first three sentences all begin with "I" and yet there is no individual signatory.

 

There is no truth to the rumor that "recent events" and "this situation" are as they are portrayed. Consider the tendency of the media, or certain elements of it, to distort such events and to allow itself to be exploited by bad actors.  There is also no truth to the rumor that unabashedly pro-Hamas propagadists work actively on our campus. Despite our academic safeguards of free expresion even for those whose views are most odious, the rumor that Jewish students at Columbia are required to wear enlarged yellow stars made of cloth as opposed to making a clothes-optional choice as in the case of masks is false..

 

Secondly, polls show us 68% of you are aganst calling in the politce under any circumstances. 

 

Nor is there truth to the rumor that the university is changing its name to something less Occidental, less colonial, and more consonant with the values of what we used condescendingly to call the third world. As President Armstrong has stated, Columbia does not tolerate antisemitism, discrimination, harassment, or intimidation against members of our community. We have taken steps to heighten and clarify our disciplinary processes through the new Office of Institutional Equity, appointing a new Rules Administrator, and strengthening the capabilities of our Public Safety Office as we work in tandem with the NYPD and other law enforcement. As we move forward, our Campus Climate Collaborative and Task Force on Antisemitism continue to work to identify and assess how Jewish members of the Columbia community feel, review University policies, and propose methods to support Jewish people at Columbia. 

 

I hope this offers additional insightful context and further understanding of how Columbia is working to promote a culture of civility and empathy where everyone feels safe and respected. Your commitment to improving the campus community is vital as we persevere through challenging times, and your insight is essential.

 

Sincerely,

The Columbia University Alumni Relations  & Development Team

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Douglas Murray on Israel, Hamas and the Future of Democracy

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“Sometimes a flare goes up and you get to see exactly where everyone is standing.” – Douglas Murray

On October 7, a flare went up, and by October 8, it became clear exactly where Douglas Murray was standing – erupting into the world’s conversation about Hamas’ attack on Israel, pointedly, insistently and with utter moral clarity.

“If you don’t believe that Israel has the right to stop a group that has proposed repeatedly . . . that it wants to annihilate Israel . . ., then of course you don’t believe Israel has the right to live. You believe Israel has the right to die.”

Douglas Murray might not be Jewish. But, led by his guiding ethos that one truth can puncture a thousand lies, he is unwilling to accept the dishonest criticism being leveled at the Jewish state.

In his new book, On Democracies and Death Cults, the #1 international bestselling author and cultural commentator, reveals what he saw and learned reporting in Israel after October 7. Mr. Murray explains how many in the West are not only condemning Israel to perpetual attack but emboldening forces that seek to undermine democracy across the globe.

The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center welcomes Douglas Murray to discuss why the conflict is not the simplistic leftist tale of oppressor versus oppressed but a clash between a thriving multi-racial democracy that values life and a death cult bent on its destruction.

A prominent reporter whose work has taken him not only to Israel, Gaza and Lebanon, but to Iraq, North Korea, northern Nigeria and Ukraine, Douglas Murray is the author of eight books. Mr. Murray is Associate Editor of The Spectator and a prolific debater; he is also a columnist at the New York Post and frequently writes for The Sun, The Telegraph, National Review and The Free Press. Over the past year, he has written scores of dispatches from Israel and spoken widely about the conflict.

Murray will be in conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe, a 21st-century sage who is widely considered among the very best Jewish teachers in America. He has taught Torah to Hollywood stars, scandalized his colleagues by opining that the Exodus didn’t happen the way we’ve been taught, caused a major stir when he quit Harvard’s Antisemitism Advisory Group and wrote a best-selling book optioned for a movie by Warner Bros.

Monday, April 7       8:00 pm Eastern >>> 

Douglas Murray at Temple Emanu-El.

Losing it [getting it] over a non adhesive barricade tape [By Tracy Danison]

“Losing it” by Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King. Photo © Christian Altorfer

Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King get it just right with Losing it, their sound and dance performance exploring the experience of any war zone, thinking especially of the experience of the Gaza war and events on the West Bank. Losing it uses voice, synthesizer and about 30 feet of 3-inch wide green barricade tape stretched across a shallow stage. The performance succeeds as good esthetics and dance performance.

Potential exiles should keep it in mind as good dance performance.

In imagining how many ways a body can dance around a barricade tape, Samaa Wakim and  Samar Haddad King get at what ought to be a home truth: separation offers no solution to conflict (even if both individuals and groups can persist a long, long, long time in a state of extreme conflict and call it living).

Haddad King shapes performance space and Wakim does performer movement. There is a natural synchronization to the piece that points to what I think must be a friendship.

“Kingdom of Noise” came to mind from the first not very loud sounds of Losing it.

I had always thought “Kingdom of Noise” one of the many traditional epithets for Hell, like “Tophet” or “Tartarus”. Nope. It’s C.S. Lewis.

It’s hard to imagine Lewis deliberately saying something sensible, so, for me, from now on, it’s Haddad King what gives “Kingdom of Noise” the sense of Hell. With a couple of whistles and squawks, she manages to create a sound composition that actually provoked in me a remembered stink of diesel exhaust, heat and frightened people. It seems to have subjugated those who do not have such memories, too.

Within the Kingdom of Noise, Samaa Wakim, a very good dancer, performs the fullness of the the non adhesive barricade tape. In space: over and around, under, over it, touching it, pressing it, bulging it, but never getting too far from or too close to [it: facing reinforced concrete blockades with matching blast-resistant agent booths]. In gesture and style: small and careful, calculated shuffle: a calibrated equilibrist, taut, always aware that the tightrope is three inches wide and sharp on both edges [and keeping in mind the kid don’t get shot up like a Swiss cheese as she is slipping off and falling the foot and half to the ground].

“Losing it” by Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King. Photo © Christian Altorfer

Given the sturdy long-lastingness of the extruded polyester of barricade tape, Wakim could very well have been dancing with the first non adhesive barrier tape ever extruded. The thing was invented in the early 1960s, just in time to rope off the path of civil rights marches – that demand for inclusion as well as an end to Jim Crow exclusion that also raised up woman rights and generally, fairness.

Perhaps a sign of quantum entanglement, in the early 1960s, my Dad had rigged up a model silicon extruder in our basement; he was a processing engineer and very keen on staying hands-on.  Born in the sign of Cancer, it appears I am also a native of extrusion – like Wakim and Haddad King.

Watching Wakim turn and twist and pace so beautifully around the extruded non adhesive barricade tape, I realize that while Wakim and Haddad King have actually been born into it, non adhesive barricade tape and I have been, one way or another, cohabiting most of my adult life. Unfortunately, non adhesive barricade tape and I are unlikely to co-terminate: the ethic of separation seems to be growing from bloody strength to bloody strength.

Wakim has her barricade tape as green, as in “green line”, “Palestine-Israel”. I see that.

But, in some measure, thanks to the success of her and Haddad King’s piece, my non adhesive barricade tapes say things like “Whites Only”, “Economy Class”, “Other Passports”, “Police Line Do Not Cross”… And everybody obeys them unless somebody takes them down.

If, in the future, and think on this, if you please, a blazon is needed for our time, it could very well be “non adhesive barricade tape, per bend and bend sinister, embattled”.

Inclusion not separation is the thing we seem to want to fail at.

________

 

I saw Losing it by Samaa Wakim et Samar Haddad King as a feature of the Festival Faits d’Hiver at Théâtre de la Bastille on 7 February 2025. Co-created, choreographed and performed by

Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King, the 7 February performance featured lighting by Cord Haldun and Music  from Turathy (album Autostrad). Losing it was first produced in 2021 at Festival Theaterformen, Hanover, Germany, as part of the Goethe Institute’s 2019-2020 “Un|controlled Gestures” project.

"September 5": The Day That Terrorism Became a Global Spectator Sport

The Day That Terrorism Became a Global Spectator Sport ‘September 5’ is a gripping, disturbing and true-to-life depiction of ABC’s coverage of the Palestinian terror attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics reviewed for TABLET by Judith Miller https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/terrorism-a-global-spectator-sport

Nobody is getting off this train: interpreting “Qui Som”, a performance by Baro d’Evel [By Tracy Danison]

“Qui som” by Baro d'Evel. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Not too terribly long ago I was in a pretty fancy café on Paris' famous île Saint Louis. I fell into a chat with an American guy. He told me that France had a problem. That problem, this guy said, is in Saint Denis, a big suburban town to the north of the île Saint Louis.

From his chair, the guy portentously pointed as due north as he could.

I’m a smart-ass guy, sometimes, so I said, “The Monarchy”?

The basilica in Saint Denis, the city itself, is the burial ground of French royalty as well as the site of a lot of public housing for immigrants, mostly from former French colonies and current overseas territories, and since the 2024 Olympics, two, yes, I have written "two", public swimming pools for its lucky and remarkably stable population of 113,000. The tombstones in Saint Denis, by the way, go a ways towards showing that, even way way back, in the minds of its peoples “Europe” is a place that extends from Cape Finisterre on the Atlantic to that place somewhere above the Caspian Sea where people mistake oars for threshing sticks.

However, I asked my smart-aleck question because I grew up knowing that, because I’m so obviously what I am and he thus thinks that he can say any old word that begins with “n-“ around a guy like me that he could also confide some Azimovian “psychohistory” about “Islam” and “Western Civilization”.

Guys like him and me get our historiography from the Foundation series.

As I hoped, my smart-alecky question farted a little Hegelian doubt between us.

Politely resentful, the American guy-just-like-me, hesitated. I was able to get away.

You would think, though, heavily armed as we all are in our current head-long rush for some brand of Civilizational Apocalypse, Headstrong Ignorance himself would have begun to realize that, at the very least, the fault is not in the stars. Or that guys-like-me might do well to suspend the traditional belief that because a man can afford an over-priced cup of coffee, his fulminations can’t possibly be just plumb dumb or crazy.

But, no.

“Qui som” by Baro d'Evel. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Indeed, the players of the performance troupe Baro d’Evel from Catalonia brought the home truth here home to me a couple weeks back with their lively and hopeful piece Qui Som (“Who are we – Who we are”) at Maison de la Culture de Seine Saint Denis, Bobigny or MC93. As a fact, the theater is not all that far from where guys-like-me such the American psychohistorian above, are claiming that “Islam” is skulking around those old royal tombstones, muttering the Coran, if not snorting coke. Anyway, not working.

Qui Som put it this way: “Nobody is getting off this train”. The phrase is meant as a call to solidarity in the face of catastrophe, of course. But I understood it as more like the Army marching song: “Aint’ no use lookin’ down/ain’t no discharge on the ground/Ain’t no use in lookin’ back, Jody got your Cadillac!/Ain’t no use in goin’ home, Jody got your girl an’ gone! Airborne! Airborne! Airborne”. Pugnacious-sounding resignation to the orphan yonder with his gun.

I rather liked being a soldier and I liked Baro d’Evel and Qui Som but both a train I can’t get off and Jody running off with my girl leave me depressed.

Indeed, don’t get me wrong. Qui Som is a really good show. Well done, Baro d’Evel! Their shtick is good: a flustered MC with the ability to get on with the show in spite of messy slip ups into an imponderable slime and into a sea of plastic trash, of much disaster and missed opportunity… A cast able to turn clay pots into hats and those hats into masks and masks into…

Well, it seems, there is little bit of magic still in this world of autonomous fighting drones and precision strikes that kill hecatombs…

All hail the ancestor Vaudeville, the messiah of the modern era: where apocalypse can amuse as well as kill…

Qui Som ends with a marching band. Spectators are invited to join a dancing fête in the theater foyer. The Baro d’Evel troupe have it right. Everything is still possible. But.

Usually ready to hang around, especially at MC93, where the bar-cafeteria is really gemütlich, I instead slink away, take my bike, don’t bother with my wet poncho, fade into the pouring rain.

It comes down to this: what do you do when a body is not sure how to frame the answer because a body is not sure what the operative question is or even if there is an operative question?

And, then: Ain’t no use in lookin’ down, nobody is getting off this train until it gets to where it’s going.

__________

I saw “Qui Som”, created and directed by Camille Decourtye and Blaï Mateu Trias at the MC93, Maison de la Culture de Seine Saint Denis, Bobigny, 25 January 2025, performed by members of the troupe Baro d’Evel, including Lucia Bocanegra, Noëmie Bouissou, Camille Decourtye, Miguel Fiol, Dimitri Jourde, Chen-Wei Lee, Blaï Mateu Trias, Yolanda Sey, Julian Sicard, Marti Soler, Maria Carolina Vieira, Guillermo Weickert with participation of Luc Delafrênée and Yasmin Nahioul of the La petite troupe de la MC93.

“Ulysse” – Josette Baïz and the gifts of today’s un-classic ballet [By Tracy Danison]

“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

O! Muse! apart, the only words I remember from the Odyssey, blind Homer’s adventures of Ulysses after the destruction of Troy, is the epithet “rosy-fingered Dawn”.

I’ve been sweetly bouncing off it since I first heard it. Dawn’s long, flexed, pale-pink fingers on the pillow, her tapering index, a bit of red polish stuck to the nail, her, somehow, competent thumb, her closed mouth, somehow, smiling. A morning as calm as Dawn’s breathing, a world outside as easy as her body here inside with me, asleep.

The sense of bouncing sweetly off was my first experience as Josette Baïz’ child-performed version of acclaimed choreographer and dancer Jean-Claude Gallotta’s 1981 Ulysse unfolded on the stage at Carreau du Temple the other evening, a demonstrator part in the dance festival Faits d’Hiver’s 2025 memory and remembrance theme.

Ulysse is an – is, maybe, the – Ur-choreography of la nouvelle danse française (contemporary dance in France). Josette Baïz, like Gallotta, a winner of Jaque Chaurand’s Concours de Bagnolet (1982), was one of the original performers of the piece.

“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

In 1989, Baïz went to work with children in the immigrant-dominated north suburbs of Marseille and, in 1992, she founded the child-centered choreographic development Groupe Grenade, working with children from 6 to 18 on contemporary, urban and traditional dance. Groupe Grenade also did Ulysse in 2007.

A loose and refreshing ballet pour demain (“ballet for tomorrow”), as they said back then, Ulysse has everything a body loves in classic ballet: elegant arms stretching high, smoothly pumping legs, whirling, twirling, pointing, leaping eyes, fingers, fingers, breasts, bellies, knees to toes. Internal energies of body and mind made visible.

But Ulysse is and was (at the very least, one of the first examples of) un-classic ballet. Un-classic ballet is a movement-centered version of “modern dance”, a ballet pour demain, a nouvelle danse française, but is, especially, a “contemporary dance” that is, at its heart, an expression of an individual or group of individuals, on this occasion, on 24 January 2025, as we experienced it at Carreau du Temple, today’s dance.  

Contemporary dance fits with time differently than classic ballet. Ballet operates outside of time, is meant as the Platonic, the eternal, the perfect. Contemporary dance makes its own time; today’s dance is meant to be the flow of a moment, more or less, I reckon, à la Heraclitus.

“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

And, if hard to put into words, the difference between classic ballet and contemporary dance is a very real experience. If a circa 1877 Swan Lake fills a stage with the vision and emotion of a story, the 1981 Ulysse fills a space with movement and individual expression. If, like classic ballet, today’s dance – contemporary dance – is complex and challenging, contemporary dance is somebody’s real-body-to-somebody else’s-real body. Contemporary dance is intimate, intra-reactive, not, like classic ballet, gesture to gesture, not call and response. In contemporary dance, even synchronization is improvisation.

But most of all, as I sit watching Baïz’ child-danced Ulysse, I remember that contemporary dance is an avatar of the world people aspired to live in the “after 1968”. From memory, iconic slogans such as Sous les pavées, la plage and Il est interdit d’interdire, are calls for more expression: more equality, less authority, more pleasure.

The far-reaching culture initiatives of François Mitterand’s presidency, which began in 1981, including the unique (in the world, I believe) regional dance centers (CCN) set up in 1984, have socio-cultural complements in the abolition of the death penalty, the creation of a 39-hour workweek, higher minimum wages and enhanced income assistance; in what contemporary dance carries as an expression of culture.

“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

The long-drive for “child-centered learning” and against corporal punishment in schools took firm cultural and institutional shape in the 1980s. And, as I watch child-danced Ulysse, it is the social achievement  of that drive forward that I am seeing in it that gives me the deepest pleasure.

Disciplined, earnest, practiced and concentrated, the children of Baïz’ Groupe Grenade express themselves as childrenbetween 8 and 12 years old – that’s what they are, after all, children between 8 and 12 years old, not apprentices, learners.

Among them, not a trace of strain or suffering. No bared teeth, no fearful grimaces.

And, as I congratulate Josette Baïz on the performance, I reflect that her Groupe Grenade is still going strong and that over almost 40 years she must have had hundreds, even thousands of youngsters who have learned un-classic ballet, contemporary dance.

“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

And after learning, most of them have gone off to do other things elsewhere in society.

So, contemporary dance has given each one of the child dancers of Groupe Grenade, past and present, the experience of creating time, initiating, responding, synchronizing, improvising, expressing themself as themselves and as themselves. They’ve brought that experience, will bring that experience forward into the world.

Good news when there isn’t so much to go around.

Thanks, Josette Baïz, for the gift of children dancing as children.

_________

I saw Ulysse by Jean-Claude Gallotta, with original music by Henry Torgue & Serge Houppin, as adapted by Josette Baïz with assistance from Stéphanie Vial, Jeanne Vallauri, Sinath Ouk and Camille Cortez, on 24 January 2025 at Carreau du Temple. The piece was performed by members of Groupe Grenade, all between  8 and 13 years old, including Nour Belmekki, Jules Bertolo, Margaux Bourrel, Elena Chevereau, Ella Christophers, Manon Collins, Anatole Derieux, Marius Duseaux-Olive, Lilas Lautrey, Chiara Menard, Issam Ousseini, Antoine Palazzo, Olivia Rothschild, Salomé Rudloff, Maxence Siol, Lise-Marie Sumian, Sandro Villena. Claudine Ginestet was costumer, Lucas Borg handled sound and Erwann Collet did lighting and staging.

“ Ulysse de Jean Claude Gallotta” a study of the historic choreography by journalist Nathalie Yokel, part of the “Collection Chefs-d’oeuvre de la danse”, editor Philippe Verrièle, is available from publishers micadanses-Paris/Nouvelles Éditions Scala, Paris.

‘Hiccoughs’ and ‘Angelica’: Two newly discovered poems by Virginia Woolf [in the TLS]

In the current issue of the TLS (London's Times Literary Supplement), thewre is news tat will delight fans of Vuirginia Woolf:

 

‘Hiccoughs’ and ‘Angelica’

‘Hiccoughs’ and ‘Angelica’: Two newly discovered poems by Virginia Woolf

By Sophie Oliver

 

Virginia Woolf with her niece Angelica Bell, 1932|© Ramsey and Muspratt via Peter Lofts Photography

January 17, 2025

Read this issue

Two poems by Virginia Woolf have resurfaced. I found them tucked in the back of a folder of letters to her niece Angelica Bell in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Light verse, quickly drafted for her niece and nephew (Quentin Bell) in pencil on two sheets of the same grey-blue paper, “Angelica” and “Hiccoughs” delight in fantasy and invention. Their animal imagery and gentle satire aimed at children, sometimes revelling in sound over sense, place them in the tradition of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and Hilaire Belloc, and connect them to T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, written for his godchildren. The manuscripts join a handful of extant poems by this novelist, who as a young woman could not get on with poetry and as a mature author declared it “defunct”. This doggerel was not meant to revive it. Instead, like most of Woolf’s other known poems, it takes up poetry to do something; in this case to play, poke and charm, and to help with what Angelica thought was one of her aunt’s greatest gifts, creating intimacies with people.

Woolf’s earliest known poem is a quatrain written (c.1892) for the Hyde Park Gate News, the whimsical newspaper that she and her siblings produced. A mother looking after her sick son, as Woolf’s mother did for many in need, is compared to a predatory animal: “Like the vulture hovers / O’er the dieing horse / thinking ever thinking / that her boy is slowly sinking”. Already, at ten years old, Woolf understood the comic power of a perverse image and a dippy rhyme. “Ode written partly in prose on seeing the name of Cutbush above a butcher’s shop in Pentonville” (1934) is, as the immoderate title suggests, a narrative poem that exceeds the bounds of poetry. “Fantasy upon a Gentleman Who Converted His Impressions of a Private House into Cash” (1937), meanwhile, is a satire that uses occasional rhyme to skewer a journalist’s complacency (“his lack of attraction; his self-satisfaction”).

Equally, Woolf’s novels are full of poets and readers of poetry, from the Tennyson-quoting Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse to the pompous would-be poets Louis, Bernard and Neville in The Waves. She wrote original lyric poetry and dramatic verse for the pageant at the heart of her final book, Between the Acts. In fact, Woolf’s experimental achievement is sometimes said…

For more, see the Times Literary Supplement

Adam Bellow on his dad's "Mr. Sammler's Planet"

Adam Bellow [in SAPIR]
His Barbed Behind:  Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Its Critics
What my father’s 1970 novel tells us about today

“I am not a revolutionary. I have little respect for American revolutionaries as I know them, and I have known them quite well.”
                                                                             — Saul Bellow: Letters, p. 290

In 1970 my father, Saul Bellow [left], published Mr. Sammler’s Planet. His seventh novel, it came on the heels of major works that had long since established him as the preeminent American writer of his generation.

The book was immediately hailed as a triumph, reviewed and praised in every significant outlet. Here again, readers were told, were the signature marks of his method — gritty urban realism, a flawed and introspective intellectual protagonist, a gallery of eccentric characters based on real people in his life, a no-holds-barred exposure of Jewish family comedy, and (for the first time) direct engagement with the Holocaust, a theme he had previously treated only glancingly.

But it was also controversial — intensely so, and clearly by design. A direct intervention in the social and political debates of the time, it was seen as taking up conservative themes, particularly the bad effects of the sexual revolution and “black power” protest on American society and culture. Consequently, it was called “the first neoconservative novel” and lamented in liberal circles as a sign of the author’s deplorable “turn to the right.”

“Nowadays we tend to forget what a bombshell it was,” wrote the neoconservative art critic Hilton Kramer 25 years later. “In its refusal to conform to the left-wing pieties that had already swamped the academy, the media, and the whole cultural scene, it mocked what had swiftly become the conventional wisdom. Which, of course, was why the Left decried it.”

And decry it they did. Consider some of the adjectives applied to it: “harsh,” “aloof,” “judgmental,” “cold,” “contemptuous,” “didactic to a fault,” “rank and embittered,” “an austere, dismissive jeremiad,” “a howl of rage.” Saul’s ex-friend Alfred Kazin, once a major booster of his work, panned it as an expression of “punitive moral outrage.”

In short, the reaction was seismic, challenging readers on a deep level — especially members of the New York cultural elite who saw themselves reflected in its scathing critique of liberal hypocrisy. The critic Joseph Epstein was on to something when he remarked that the book seemed calculated “to offend whole categories of the reading public as well as most of the people who write about books.”

Why would the author’s son enter this literary minefield more than 50 years after the fact? Certainly it is daunting for one who is neither a writer or a critic, but a publisher, which is a very different animal. That said, I have a distinct advantage in being intimately acquainted with my father’s private thoughts. As much as anyone alive, I knew his mind. I have also in my career as an editor published many polarizing books — books that liberals considered “bad” and “dangerous.”

You can tell a lot about the state of ideological flux in this country from how people react to such a book, and Sammler, while not a political treatise, does make a political argument. To reappraise it today is therefore necessarily to ask, in a way we do not ask of other novels, not just whether it holds up as a work of fiction (which it obviously does), but whether its argument was right.

*

[Saul Bellow] remained a mainstream liberal, appalled by McCarthy, firmly committed to civil rights, and publicly opposed to the Vietnam War — even as he accepted an invitation from LBJ to attend a dinner at the White House for “leaders in the arts,” a choice for which he was severely criticized by literary friends such as Robert Lowell. At the same time he was uncomfortable with the more extreme antinomian aspects of the student revolt against the so-called white power structure and bourgeois morality.

Critics who prefer not to address the substantive reasons for this movement away from the Left tend to fall back on psychoanalysis. The argument here is that Saul became more “patriarchal” as he aged, shifting from the archetype of the son to that of the father who seeks, as his virility declines, to assert his authority in the face of a noisy, disrespectful challenge from the young. In this connection, much is made of an episode that occurred in May 1968 at San Francisco State, where Saul’s speech on the place of writers in the university was disrupted by an angry young man who called him an “effete old shit” with “dried up balls.” This incident, incorporated practically verbatim into Sammler, is cited in various biographies and memoirs to suggest that Sammler is “an old man’s book” and that Saul and his hero are one and the same. The scene takes up less than a page:

“Hey!” . . . A man in Levi’s, thick-bearded but possibly young, a figure of compact distortion, was standing shouting at him.

“Hey! Old Man!”

There is a brief exchange about something George Orwell had said:

“Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counterrevolutionary. It’s good that he died when he did. And what you are saying is shit.”

A commotion breaks out and Sammler is helped to withdraw by a sympathetic female student. Out on the street, the narration resumes:

[But] he was not so much personally offended by the event as struck by the will to offend. What a passion to be real. But real was also brutal. And the acceptance of excrement as a standard? How extraordinary! Youth? Together with the idea of sexual potency? All this confused sex-excrement-militancy, explosiveness, abusiveness, tooth-showing, Barbary-ape howling.

Saul was undoubtedly upset by this experience. But he had already voiced his jaundiced view of the student movement in the New York Times, writing that he was “wholly opposed to civil disobedience” and disliked “unreasonable rebelliousness and pointless defiance of authority.” Jews of his generation remembered how German universities in the ’30s had collapsed into fascism and plausibly feared it could happen again, here in the tolerant USA, amid the violent rejection of all civilized tradition and restraint. So there was clearly more involved for him than personal affront.

for the rest of this article, click here
from SAPIR
https://sapirjournal.org/university/2024/11/his-barbed-behind-mr-sammlers-planet-and-its-critics/?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=newsletter

ADAM BELLOW is the publisher of Wicked Son Books and the executive editor at Bombardier Books, imprints of Post Hill Press. He is the co-founder of the Jewish Literary Fund.

Godwin's Law [by Joe Lehman]

“As an online discussion or argument grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches.” So says Godwin's Law, coined by author Mike Godwin. It's like "six degrees of separation" applied to political conversations (or rants), all of which reach their apex with Hitler. I personally attest to the validity of Godwin’s Law applied not just to online arguments but to discussions between and among friends, whether in person or on the phone.

Case in point: I was riding in the passenger seat in a car with my friend  Diane in the driver’s seat. This was close to a decade ago. We were discussing an Iraq War veteran’s impassioned speech before her church group, where the embittered vet called into question the reasoning for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was, he contended, a grievous mistake. The speech did not go over well with the audience. The consensus was that it was an inappropriate choice of venue for the speech. Diane and I mulled over the incident. She said the vet should have chosen a venue more congenial to antiwar advocacy. I countered that an "acceptable" locale or event wouldn’t be playing host to the audience the vet was targeting . He had selected the church group for a reason.  If he had spoken at an official anti war rally, he would end up preaching to the choir. Therefore, I said, it was more politically effective to speak to people not predisposed to agree your position.. Diane blurted out, “Well, would you say that the things Hitler and the Nazis did were politically effective for them?” I said that from Hitler’s standpoint, he was very ‘effective’ in advancing his own agenda. Of course, the discussion deteriorated from then on.

Hitler remains the trigger word, the invitation to the ultimaate unsafe space, that the 20th century left us. I challenge everyone to comment about his or her own experiences dealing with Godwin’s Law in a discussion or argument you may have had in the past.

Sandrine Juglair and the real story behind snips, snails and puppy dog tails [By Tracy Danison]

DICKLOVE, dance performance by Sandrine Juglair. Photo © Aurélie Ruby

Roll over Judith Butler and tell Germaine Greer the news!

With her dance performance DICKLOVE, Sandrine Juglair, circus-trained choreographer and performer, in a little under an hour, performs all we know and all we need to know about performing gender. She entertains, to boot.

I’ve suspected it for a long time and Juglair’s performance confirmed it. Snips, snails and puppy dog tails are what make a boy. What makes a girl is mostly a boy in makeup through the cheap mirror of what a boy imagines as the perfect object of desire: sugar, spice and everything nice.

Somehow, before I saw it put into dance performance in DICKLOVE, I was still thinking gendering had a bit more to it than that. But, I realize, not. As with so many things that are a part of the ordinary routine of living, getting words around gendering takes so many words and so much time that one comes to think it must be complex: ex multiplicitate, profunditatem, from complexity, profundity.

Well-made dance performance such as Juglair’s gets a body beyond all the narrative bushwa.

DICKLOVE, dance performance by Sandrine Juglair. Photo © Aurélie Ruby

Just to state it out loud, the problem of gendering is in its consequences on individuals, not its signs. Its processes are just another story made up from tics and feints and so-called suspension of disbelief that put a gun to people’s heads according to exteriorized genitalia. The real reason critics of feminism claim the feints and tics are natural and observable is that understanding otherwise engages individual and social responsibility, all anathema to a real boy. Surely strutting and fretting a boy’s manly on his stage can be no vice!

As Juglair performs it, the key points of boy-ness or male gendered-ness or masculinity are broad at the shoulder, maybe a penis pouch, a certain crook to a leg that suggests a fighter’s crouch, tongue-tied-ness, a cigarette, brandished, a failure, an excuse, and a hero fantasy. All these cues and clichés are also found in Jimmy Dean’s Big Bad John(1961), the frisson of masculine heroism of which reminded me that to avoid unpleasant consequences, a boy bettermake the man or fake it well enough to pass. Not having been born in northern Ohio, Juglair has never heard Big Bad John. But, of course, like everybody else from everywhere, she has heard of it in some other, equally ubiquitous, and somehow unarguable, culture message. As a girl-kid budding athlete, she says, she instinctively let the boys win the races.

Juglair’s DICKLOVE got Karine and I talking about the ineffable appeal of Donald Trump. As unpleasant as that is, we also realized that “crouch-tongue-tied-ness-cigarette-brandished-failure-excuse-hero-fantasy” is meant to seduce the audience by exposing his, the Donald’s beating heart of boy-ness. To his followers, the threats, auto-exculpation and hero-fantasy that structure his speeches, feel right, are attractive, are catnip, to his followers.

 Indeed, the boy has made the man.

Juglair’s DICKLOVE is as fine a piece of performance as you’ll find.

______

We saw DICKLOVE by Juglair at Théâtre Silvia Monfort, Paris, on 3 October 2024, played by herself,  Sandrine Juglair, assisted by Claire Dosso, Aurélie Ruby, with costumes by Léa Gadbois-Lamer, sound by Lucas Barbier, lighting by Julie Méreau, assisted by Marie Roussel, set by Max Heraud, Etienne Charles and La Manufacture (Switzerland).

October 7 & after [by David Lehman]

October 7

If I were a general
expert at fighting the last war,
I would regard the coming invasion
with great trepidation.

If I were a cardinal
at the Vatican the night before,
would reject the explanation
after noble hesitation.

If I were to write a novel, I would call it
“Great Expectations,”
because I belong to an alien nation.

If I were to write a play, I would call it
“Great Temptations”
in praise of the saint who abandoned his station.

10 / 7 / 23;  from The NU Review, edited by Jordan Davis

October 7 is National Inner Beauty Day /  National Propane Day / and National Frappe Day

"We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it. " -- Bari Weiss

The 13 women who remain hostages are Romi Gonen, 24; Naama Levy, 20; Liri Albag, 19; Ofra Keider, 70; Shiri Bibas, 33; Inbar Hayman, 27; Emily Damari, 27; Karina Ariev, 20; Agam Berger, 20; Doron Steinbrecher, 31; Arbel Yehoud, 29; Daniella Gilboa, 20; and Judy Weinstein Haggai, 70.

By Michelle Boorstein

WASHINGTON POST

October 7, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

BALA CYNWYD, Pa. — American Jews are buying guns more often. They’re going to Shabbat dinners and synagogues more often. They’re debating about Israel and antisemitism — topics many had set to the side in recent decades — more often.

A year ago, Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel set off war in the Middle East. In the United States, the surprise assault and Israel’s countering invasion of the Gaza Strip prompted mass protests on city streets and at colleges across the nation. For many of the nation’s 7.5 million Jews, the year has led to concerns over whether they are securely woven into the fabric of American life. In the intense anger directed by protesters at the Jewish state and in some cases at Jews, many of the nearly three-dozen American Jews interviewed by The Washington Post saw antisemitism they thought had long ago subsided or at minimum wasn’t acceptable to voice.

About dance performance and “faraway countries”: Lithuania [by Tracy Danison]

Edgy, personal: “When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone” by Vilma Pitrinaite. Photo © Patrick Berger

Esthetically, Atelier de Paris most often chooses the intriguing performance over the done thing. Participating in the country-wide Season of Lithuania (and keeping an oar in culture exchange with east Europe over the long term) – featuring not just dance and performance but also visual arts –  is doing the right thing. With its emphasis on un-narrative and immediate experience, intimacy and diversity of expression, dance performance is a powerful tool for cultural dialogue. 

Atelier featured two premières by creators Lukas Karvelis, She dreamt of being washed away to the coast and Vilma Pitrinaitė, When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone, who have been in residence since last year. In addition, Atelier’s Open Studio conference featured WIP by choreographers Liza Baliasnaja, Greta Grinevičiūtė and Agnietė Lisčkinaitė, all active on the Lithuanian dance performance scene. 

Taken together, I couldn’t detect anything specifically “Lithuanian” about the work of these artists. But then, I think “nation” is a political framework built higgledy-piggledy around a human networking tic, something like the one that makes for that famous six degrees of separation or simultaneous language change and learning in widely separated groups. 

As individuals, then, all five, it seems to me, are focused on the now and future of dance performance and society generally. Even more perhaps than in France these days, “identity” suggests individual, not “national”, identity; “diversity” suggests gender and LGBTQ+ inclusion more than “culture” diversity.

For instance, both She dreamt of being washed away to the coast, which according to the play notes, references a national folktale, and When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone, which references the Ukraine liberation struggle, suggest an intersection of national and personal identities. But performance experience drives the reference out of mind. Karvelis’ piece is an absolutely absorbing performer tour de force of leg-work and balance. Pitrinaitė’s is pure contemporary danse d’auteur: edgy, emotional… personal, personifying. 

Presenting a new performance titled Chiaroscuro, on the social dynamics of fear, only Liza Baliasnaja’s biography – she has a Jewish heritage from parents who came from Russia to Lithuania at some point in the post-war period – suggests issues of national identity and belonging or historical trauma. Her broader issue is to explore how history, politics and social conditions shape contemporary identity; that certainly has resonance everywhere in the world, not just in her neck of the woods. 

Baliasnaja is currently working on the “shield/protector” aspect of a “victim-shield/protector-victimizer” nexus for multi-part choreography. Though she may be referencing Lithuania’s history, her concept applies pretty neatly to recent American experience of populist grievance movements and I expect the piece is meant to have a more or less universal application. Otherwise, Baliasnaja is an ardent promoter of her country’s contemporary dance scene, complete with the Europe and international connections the Season of Lithuania is looking to strengthen: she’s an alumna of Theresa de Keersmaeker’s P.A.R.T.S dance performance school and currently works from Cologne, Germany.

 

Hands-in-pocket performance: “She dreamt of being washed away to the coast” by Lukas-Karvelis. Photo © Svelniau

Describing herself as an independent contemporary dance performer and choreographer, and certainly very Lithuania-centered in education and work,  Agnietė Lisčkinaitė co-founded her BE COMPANY dance group with Greta Grinevičiūtė, a long-time friend and frequent work partner, also much present on the Lithuanian scene. Lisčkinaitė has been president of the Lithuania Contemporary Dance Association since 2020 and performs with the AIROS and Vilnius City Dance Theatre LOW AIR dance theaters. She is perhaps the most issues-oriented of the group, throwing herself into the local movements for gender and LGBTQ+ equality and democratic resistance in Belarus. 

Still, I would like to say that Lisčkinaitė’s concerns are extensions of her focus on dance performance rather than the other way around. From first to last her remarks had body movement and use at its core; at one point she asked us to reflect on how raising the arms affected our bodies and later asked if we had observed how often “arms-high” (or “hands-in-the-air”) figures in protest? 

Lisčkinaitė is performing Hands Up! at Théâtre de la Ville, ruminating the space between surrender and resistance in the same gesture and using it as a platform to ask how we should view protest: symbolic aggression or symbolic liberty?

The general universalist perspective of these artists, I think, finds its clearest expression in Greta Grinevičiūtė, who has a very ingenious approach to the experience and observation of the things of her immediate environment. 

As already noted, Grinevičiūtė’s very active on the Lithuanian dance performance scene: in addition to co-founding BE COMPANY troupe with Agnietė Lisčkinaitė, she produces contemporary dance and interdisciplinary performance, notably, with Vytis Jankauskas Dance Company and the AIROS theater and she’s one of a collective of active creators at Vilnius City Theatre Art and Science Laboratory. Her WIP, which stretches back to 2018, explores the construction of memory (both experiential and genetic/generational) in her work, which consists of a human object/subject (such as a “parent”) and an (associated? transitional?) object from ordinary life.

Dance for a washing machine and a mother, produced at the Vilnius Art and Science Laboratory in 2020, is the second part of a (so far) four-part project which began with Dance for a vacuum cleaner and a father and will include currently WIP-pieces  “Dance for and object and child” and “Dance for a cigarette and best friend”. Each piece envisions the sense and role of object/subject and object in “memory”. I suppose Grinevičiūtė should have got me thinking about a dance performer, but, instead, she got me thinking about musician Frank Zappa, his mix of erudite and ordinary and his interest in Erik Satie*: how does music fit into life, into the fabric of modern life? Zappa was one of those individuals who, by being themself, somehow represents everybody else. So is Greta Grinevičiūtė. 

 

Report on “Song of Self” and “Black Nail - Exorcism of Vladimir Putin” performance, Kyiv [By Tracy Danison]

Looking east across the summer theater stage, Syretsky Park, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024, 5:54 a.m. Photo © Tracy Danison

The morning of 15 August, the feast of the Assumption (of the mother to the father and son), at dawn, in the summer theater of Syretsky Park in Kyiv, Ukraine, I performed my Song of Self and Black Nail - Exorcism of Vladimir Putin.

The video is on my YouTube channel @TracyDanison beginning 24 August but you can also find it now on Instagram or Facebook. The written version of the poems figures below. Thanks for sharing Song and the Exorcism. Thanks for doing a Song of Self yourself. As for an exorcism, I can think of more than one – How does Sting put it? – “priest, poet or politician” that might benefit from an exorcism, can’t you?

The video recording is only a memento to an act of Real Presence, an artefact of a moment or place created in space and time by my performance and recorded by an imperfect technology. 

In an effort to get as much self into the words as possible, I used rapidity and hoped for spontaneity, hoped to give a glimpse of my a-temporal, a-spatial, existence-making, entanglement with Other, ideas and things: I wrote the poems, printed them and put them in my pocket.

Many tropes and words from poets and writers and thinkers I love fell into place as I tried to put my intentions on paper, so I put them in, just like that. For Black Nail, the poem that initiates the (1975) movie Seven Beauties by Lina Wertmüller, summed up for me pretty well that truth is irony. I was then quite distressed to learn of it:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

And, in those days, reading Germinal excited me so, I had to jump up and pace around every couple pages. I’ve realized since that nothing signifies something beyond words.

Oh, yeah.

Mirror field audio visual installation with television tower just behind. Babi Yar memorial site, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024. Photo © Tracy Danison

The evening I was writing Song of Self and Black Nail, the evening before I was to begin my train trip to Kyiv, my son, now partnered and a father himself, told me he’s been diagnosed with the same psychic disorder I had to put up with until recently.

He’s getting medicine for it, though.

And with that, I am consoled – thanks to time and the experience and the well-marinated thoughts and ideas contributed to me by Lina Wertmüller, Adrienne Rich, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Allen Ginsberg, Wallace Stevens and Shakespeare, among others too numerous to thank.

He told me just last night that he was going through a whole day feeling well: “Dad, I think it’s working”, he said.

Reading what are essentially drafts from printouts, I performed Song and recited Black Nail once, without rehearsal or revisions.

In the evening after my performance, there was a drone and missile attack on Kyiv.

There is a very big and important television tower in among the woods not too far off where I was staying. I saw a drone or some drones get shot out of the air, as it seemed, just outside the window. Maybe that tower was the target; there was, I am told, a hard fight for it during the battle for Kyiv. From what I saw, I think the defenders used some sort of Gatling gun against the drone/s. The building trembled when it/they exploded.

I conclude from this experience that, given that I got the proportion of toad’s tongue to virgin’s first menstrual blood correct, my Exorcism does not take immediate effect. 

I picked Syretsky Park at random, pointing a green space on the map when I got to Kyiv. Madame Google indicated it was within walking distance of where I was. The evening before I walked to the park to check it was open in early morning. The next day, I arrived at the park just before the break of day.

The Black Nail inside Moloch’s brain: Contemporary colorized photograph of a killing trench lodged in a shard of granite near the child memorial at the Babi Yar site, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024. Photo © Tracy Danison

I noticed the summer theater where I performed when I walked through the park gate.

Before going there for my performance, I did not know that Syretsky Park was just across the street from the Babi Yar memorial or that the park was the site of a camp for various captives from 1942 until the end of German occupation or even that the place is part of the physical and moral topography of what we call “Babi Yar”.

I chose Kyiv for the Song of Self and Black Nail because the war against Ukraine has been made into a war against those who believe, as I do, that each person is a person, equal in fact to all other persons, no conditions, no exceptions.

The world begins where self begins, I believe.

It was coincidence that I found myself at the Babi Yar site. The television tower that might have been the target of the coming evening’s drone attack is located there. Off the paths, there are signs of deadly fracas and firing positions. 

The Babi Yar memorial is made up of reminders that the thousands murdered there were, in the locution of the poet and Fugs’ co-founder Ed Sanders, a human being, individuals, persons. Their voices whisper on the wind, rustle and sigh in the bushes and boughs of the trees. Literally. Never forget, never forgotten.

Stanczyk, court jester, broods on the victory of Moscow, by Jan Matejko (1838-93), Warsaw Museum of Art. Photo © Tracy Danison

As I was walking up through the park, avoiding a crowd of oblivious joggers and dog walkers, I had a vision. I don’t remember if I had read the description somewhere before or how the vision came to me.

It is of a guy standing over a little pile of not-quite-dead-enough human being and, with a submachine gun, shooting into the pile, an idiot spattering himself with flesh and bone, spreading superfluous terror and suffering. As he goes a-murdering from pile to pile, in his mind, this guy is obsessively scrolling “I am a German. I am a German. I am a German”.

This awful vision reminded me that Black Nail, murder-love, begins with how a person believes they exist.

These days, wherever you go, there is much encouragement for this sad guy’s belief that being part of some group or movement lets him exist. In some form or another, I’ll be trying to take Real Presence on the road and do some counter-encouraging, including in Ukraine, a lot of whose people are, thanks to the anguish of cultural discontinuity and war and the efforts of Putin and his allies to conjure Black Nail, teetering on the edge of “ethno-national” hysteria.

By the way. “Firstest with the mostest” and fastest to the rightest place, Ukraine is set to win, and soon, the war that the neither the Germans, nor Swedes, nor Turks could do, confining Russia to the north and bringing down its empire for keeps. Russia’s defeat will almost certainly generate Babi-Yar-shaped moral and practical consequences. Dread them.

________________________________

Song of Self

Waking as like from a fretful dream,

Here I am!

There are You!

Here I am!

I celebrate myself.

Still air, wind, cool, heat, light, dark.

I celebrate a blade of grass, the head of a dandelion

I celebrate a sharp green blade of grass,

I mourn the frowsy fragile head of a dandelion

Up down this that, heart side, mind side, before, behind, yonder

And soon. Past and Present. Future Perfect.

And what I assume, You assume too.
For every atom belonging to Me, the same belongs to You.

And not quite.

Mud shapes according to its water.

In light dust may beguile different. Yet.

Be, the finale of me,

You, the disciple of me!

Me, the disciple of you!

We, the apostle of You.

Smile or Spit. Up to you.

We want is finale of seem

We be Imperators of ice cream

Call the roller of big cigars,

Girls that dawdle in such dress.

Boys that whip, those muscular ones.

And who remains take that bedsheet

And spread it so as to cover the mouth that is dumb.

I celebrate Me.

There. There is there.

That is. There.

A swell in a wave and a speck in the dust.

Plus B + I + [ ~≠U/speck and wave]   

Makes here, where I and You are.

Thus, plus I + [ ~≠U], a place, a door.

Before the door we are there.

Gone through the door, we are here after.

To maintain attitudes, hold your position
To die bravely on yonder hill

And much should blind you,
Much must evade you.

All. At the cost of a bedsheet

And You left behind.

Breathe in. Breathe out

What a song to sing!

Birds and flight. Fish and swim,

Look and sky.

See and horizon.

A fine song!

Sing this song and never go home

Sing this song and everywhere is home

Sing this song and there’s no home

Take note before we sing

We cannot know where we’ll go

Only that I will wind up here with You.

Celebrate me.

• Tracy Danison/13 August 2024

 

Black nail

You. Minds of my generation.

Those who believe Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man!

Russia. Listen. Vladimir. Listen.

Banqueted on sweet, sticky lies

Raise your eyes. Fine omens. Firefly signs.

Crackling Portents.

Curlicues of alchemical anatomy Nobody understands.

And Nobody was the fiction of a blind man. Now dead.

Those who believe Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man!

Your bright eyes fixed everywhere but on the Other

You knot stories babbled by babies in blindfolds

Truth is plain to see but too hard to say.

So say something, anything.

Santa Claus, Kris Kringle, Saint Nick! A young man!

Lord, Christ Christmas, Beejesus! A young man!

Say it again! Say it again! And again.

To win is to succeed.

And to lose?

An inspiring late night movie

 

Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man! Listen.

Vladimir.  Listen Russia.

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

When will we end the human war?

 

Listen! You have it all!

The power of the kingdoms. Like Binyamin says.

The murder, the pain, the stink of the dead.

All the bewildered motherless bitches with the thousand yard stare.

Fast-firing cannons, rocket bombs

And jellied gasoline and rattling guns

Tiny drones like dragonflies hurling potato mashers.

Thrilling. Exciting. Powerful. Emotional

Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man!

 

But. To succeed is not to win.

You have to win to win. Listen. Russia.

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.

I still haven’t told you what you must to win winning.

I’m addressing you.

Those who believe.

Santa Claus is Jesus Christ as an old fella!

 

To win, you’ve got to love it.

The Murder, the pain, the horror, I mean

The Moloch stink in Vlad’s nostril.

Santa Claus is Jesus Christ as an old fella!

 

Fill your libraries full of tears.

Look at yourself through the grave

You’ve got to love the stink, I mean.

Santa Claus is Jesus as an old fella!

 

Those who want to believe. Listen

Russia. Those who want to take off your clothes.

Listen. There is a narrow sliver of steel, a black nail

Just here, at heart’s gate.

 

Embossed along the barbed rim:

“who love murder in their heart

Die.”

Russia when will you be an angel?

Vladimir wants to touch it,

Press on it a bit

As if you really were a prisoner

And it were only your limp prick.

 

Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as young man

Kris Kringle is Beejesus as an older guy

Christ Christmas is Saint Nick in drag

Thursday falls next Tuesday

Russia. How can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

 

Russia, Vladimir is quite serious.

This is the impression I get from looking in the television set.   

Russia is this correct? Are you naked?

Is your prick limp ?

Quick. Reach out. Take my hand

Or die.

 

You have been told.

• Tracy Danison/13 August 2024

Real Presence in Kyiv 15 August 2024: for Equality, Freedom, Solidarity [By Tracy Danison]

Lounging, big as a hog, heavier than sin, and with the fatal primus stove, the cat called “Behemoth” from Mikhail Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita” on the porch of the house in old-town Kyiv where the author is said to have worked on it between 1928 and his death in 1940. Photo © Paul Tracy Danison

The negative reaction of certain friends – certain others have been supportive or neutral or just silent – to my upcoming performance-recitation Exorcism of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine on 15 August (The Best American Poetry, 26 April, 2024), as well as hurting my feelings, has rather surprised me. Crazy, dangerous, pointless, they’ve said. One was so angry, he refused to speak to me for several weeks.

The emoting, worried reasoning and confrontation is all very nice – I reckon it shows I’m loved or at least company good enough not to lose for a whim – but doing my theory of “Real Presence – or “Being With”, as I say for dance – is really important for making the world I live in, and, especially, for making the world I want to live in.

Here’s my apology to friends for doing what I want to do. You can use it as a model next time you need to, as we say, step out for fags.  

First off, physical danger. Kyiv isn’t Sarajevo 1992-96.

Even if the Russian Federation has a lot of the crazy-weird Republika Srpska about it and President Vladimir Putin has a lot of Srpska’s psycho-killer Radovan Karadzic in him, the ex-KGB counterintelligence colonel and romantic éminence grise in his own action-hero comic book and would-be Reichs Kanzler sans bottes ni moustache is not Srpska’s Columbia-educated psychiatrist-cum-Prime Minister trying out a half-baked archetype theory on live subjects. He can’t get close enough to knock it down with artillery, which is cheap.

Thanks to the expense of missiles, Kyiv 2024 nightmare scenario has more fever-dream dread than actual rocket bomb in the ambiance. Living it is more like living the inside of Winston Smith’s head after he’s been well worked over than anything else. Kyiv 2024 is awful in its own, special way because so much of it is fear and fear is so personal.

Come to think of it, the people of Kyiv, and of Ukraine, are being forced to cosplay the paranoid goop inside the heads of the likes of Putin, Karadzic, Alex Jones, Q or a 17-year-old whose Dad has bought him an AR-15. It’s the apocalypse: Welcome to the new age. Not so much deadly as scary.

As for pointlessly acting out my Real Presence/Being With theories in a scary place.

Well, off-hand, the idea of the performance seems to cheer up the people on the spot. That’s a lot of what I am wanting to do and most of what I can do.

Cheering up works for the neighbors, works for friends, why not people in Ukraine? As far as the country’s material needs and my competences and resources match up, I’ve got little to give. I’m no sharp-shooter, I can’t give the country an annual budget or guns or bombs, or do political action much beyond voting hard.

Moral support isn’t much, but it is mostly what I am, we are limited to here-below. Why not go for it when I can? And go for it with gusto?

Anyhow, doing little things – the things comfortable and rational middle-aged men and women friends call crazy, dangerous and pointless – does count on the cosmological significance scale; the silly old proverb about wanting a nail is actually up-to-date quantum mechanics. For want of my nutty, risky, senseless action, the world I imagine may or not n/ever be.

The minimal sense of agency in the little-things insight keeps me breathing; it kept Emerson from despairing; Whitman built an ontology on it and Thoreau, a way to live and a politics.

Because I have agency because I’m here is why I am calling my performance-recitation “Exorcism of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine on 15 August” Real Presence.

Real Presence will be in three parts – “Song of Self”, “Black Nail” and “Exorcism”. I’ll publish the version of it that comes on the day and post the video on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

The three-part organization of the piece reflects my belief that the initial consciousness of somewhere with somebody at sometime empowers the construct “Self”, I, and, thus, “Other”, You, and, in doing that, realizes “Belonging”, We, Ourselves.

Politically, this belief imagines out as a (non “Marxist”) society and culture based on “Equality, Freedom, Solidarity” over a society based on Freedom, Equality, Solidarity. That is, a personal, social and culture construct with moral equality of all persons rather than one based on legal, but not moral, equality of morally free citizens.

I think it’s the place of equality in the old slogan-syllogism of enlightenment politics that we’re fighting over today. Winning the war for the people of Ukraine – and it’s a political, not a military question – is the sharp end of the fight for existential, real equality.  

In my theory of art, Real Presence translates as striving to generate a state of “Being With”, conjuring the Imagination, the point where narrative begins or, rather, the un-narrative space where other scenarios may come to be.

I’ll be giving a seminar on Being With and, especially, on “Equality, Freedom, Solidarity: Experience, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman” following my performance of Real Presence. I’ll also be interviewing a woman fighter and an LGBTQ+ -oriented fighter on their experience of national conflict.

Finally, nodding to a photo of Vladimir Putin warmly squeezing the claw of a murderer on a recent front page of the Badische Zeitung, I invite each reader’s real presence, wherever that may be, between dawn and noon local time this coming Thursday, 15 August.

Russia strikes hospital: acceptance and lucidity

Kyiv, 8 July 2024. As we hurried across the “fruit tree park” toward shelter, my hostess remarks that Ukraine fired 30 rockets at Russia in the wake of the 40 fired by Russia earlier in the day. They were targeting a power station and a specialist hospital, the one with the aim of making people uncomfortable, the other with terrorizing and demoralizing in mind. Note that I call my hostess “hostess” because using her name might result in her murder. 

 

But  I realize suddenly that accepting the possibility that what is happening as tit for tat is to accept a premise that justifies the strikes - there’s cause and effect, which transforms Putin and company into rational actors.
But what rational actor would target a power plant to make people uncomfortable and a hospital for paralyzed children to terrorize and demoralize them?
Accepting the status of rational actor suggests that somewhere there’s a rational solution to all this murder. And there isn’t.

The people who are doing this are bullies, not rational actors. A rational actor has a goal and something to give in return. A bully accepts only a self-imposed minimal acceptable level of shittiness. The only way to stop a bully, as the non bullies all know from experience, is to make them stop.

Accepting Russia as a rational actor when it is a bully has all sorts of consequences for lucid thinking about this war. For one thing, it implies that this war is a ‘conflict’, where two “opposing sides” are trying to get something both want. This word obscures the fact that all the Ukraine side wants is to be left alone.
So, if it’s not strictly speaking a conflict and the only way to stop a bully is to make them stop, shouldn’t our effort be making them stop, not helping the Ukrainians to defend themselves in view of negotiations? There’s a difference. And thinking it over, the risks of nuclear war are probably less if we try stopping them.

Finally, accepting this war as a conflict between rational actors makes it easier to accept the consequences, not just the murder of paralyzed children but everything that comes with that - my hostess’ friend, an energetic 30 something with a son and a brother serving in the army since 2014, feels helpless and has a cynical view of humanity, it’s ability to do good and make the world better. She thinks this, although she spent the day on an emergency team taking care of the dead and wounded and organizing psychological help for survivors; she and friends have organized so that nobody’s kid is ever left alone. We are talking together in a Soviet era, “fruit tree” park: a gorgeously painted gazebo and small buildings in late art deco Bolshevik style. We are lopping, with hundreds of others, on sit-things ranging from benches to chairs to bean bags - all free and open to all comers… so maybe it might not be good idea for her to be believing things about her own life that are so removed from real experience (when we take war and mass murder from the equation of course) … We leave when the air raid sirens go off, it’s a hoof to the shelters…

Lionel Shriver's "J'Accuse": "PEN America Rewards Cowardice"

from THE FREE PRESS, May 1, 2024  https://www.thefp.com/p/lionel-shriver-pen-america-rewards

‘Real freedom of expression is too scary; we’d rather hide in a crowd whose keffiyeh-masked members all shout the same thing.’ (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Lionel Shriver: PEN America Rewards Cowardice

We live in a world where an organization established for the defense of free speech is expected to openly advocate for Hamas.

By Lionel Shriver

April 30, 2024

Another day, another opportunity for huffy, hypocritical “progressive” posturing. PEN America has now been forced to cancel its World Voices literary festival in New York and L.A., on the heels of also canceling its 2024 awards ceremony. Too many authors had withdrawn from both events to make going ahead with staging either practicable. The reason for so many writers flouncing from these programs? PEN’s failure to publicly denounce Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza. But you had probably guessed the point of indignation already, because as of October 2023, the Anglosphere’s far left has neatly pivoted from the infantilization of black people to the Palestinian cause with the coordinated grace of a synchronized swimmer.

To clarify: the purpose of PEN is to defend freedom of speech and to protect writers from political oppression and persecution. It makes perfect sense, therefore, that a significant cadre of its membership would seek to stifle freedom of speech and engage in political oppression and persecution. Or: we’re all for free speech so long as you say what we tell you. These folks are athletes. It requires considerable intellectual acrobatics for Writers Against the War on Gaza to regard the shutting down of events to advance free expression as “a win for free expression.” Presumably, the fact that a number of withdrawals from both occasions were motivated by fear of being attacked by a mob of pro-Palestinian zealots is also “a win for free expression.” PEN itself stated its concern “about any circumstance in which writers tell us they feel shut down, or that speaking their minds bears too much risk.”

PEN is, by its nature, a big tent. It represents not only Muslim writers but Jewish ones too, some of whom might just support the existence of Israel, might just regard Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza as justified, and might just find alliance with genuinely genocidal terrorists whose unembarrassed aim is to wipe Israel and the Jewish people off the map as a teeny tiny bit obnoxious. While one PEN member decries the nonprofit’s “both-sidesing,” the truth is that PEN has no business taking a position on this issue whatsoever.

Unfortunately, the left has successfully installed the expectation that, regardless of their established purpose, all institutions—companies, museums, theaters, universities, charities, you name it—must proclaim their fealty to the “right” (which is to say left) position on a host of inflammatory issues of the day. This hyper-politicization of entities that ought sensibly to remain politically neutral has been systematically debauching everything from the UK’s National Trust to its NHS, from Anheuser-Busch to the Chicago Art Museum. First, all such outfits were required to fly Black Lives Matter flags, then garishly incoherent Pride flags, and now these banners have all to be swapped out for Palestinian flags, never mind what constituency or customer base might be alienated by this gratuitously partisan branding. Thus, an organization established for the defense of free speech of every sort—including the overtly Zionist kind—is necessarily obliged to openly advocate for Hamas, a murderous, cheerfully antisemitic cult whose interest in free speech on its home turf would fit in a thimble.

Of course, PEN’s membership has form when it comes to hypocrisy. In 2015, under armed security, PEN awarded its Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Six writers withdrew from participating in the proceedings to protest the magazine’s ostensibly offensive printing of cartoons that depicted Muhammad. Yet funnily enough, what your average normal person found offensive was the vicious massacre of 12 of the publication’s employees, most of them journalists, for neglecting to adhere to one religion’s hysterical blasphemy laws in a secular country that famously celebrates liberté. Yet over 200 writers—including, to my astonishment, the likes of Joyce Carol Oates—signed an open letter to PEN criticizing the Charlie Hebdo award. For these authors, defense of free speech, promotion of tolerance, and opposition to violent political oppression—the very purpose of PEN—counted for nothing when weighed against any injury to the delicate feelings of fundamentalist Muslims.

Much has been written about the unholy, and in some ways, hilarious alliance developing between the progressive left and Islam (Lesbians for Palestine, etc.). But for Western writers to embrace a restrictive, prescriptive, and stifling culture isn’t merely ironic or comical; it’s self-defeating. One needn’t consult a professor of Middle Eastern studies to conclude that these fair-weather friends in Gaza may welcome useful idiocy, but the permissive ethos of the Anglo left is diametrically at odds with despotic Islamic theology. Moreover, for American writers to express increasingly shrill and little-disguised hostility to Jews is to disavow a substantial chunk of the country’s distinguished literary canon: Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, and Elie Wiesel just for starters.

But then, the past 15 years have demonstrated with depressing clarity that writers, along with artists of every stripe, aren’t special. Although our occupation is more at risk from censorship than most, we’re all too capable of perversely embracing suppressive viewpoints that violate our own interest. We’re paid not only to write but to think, yet we don’t think; we listen keenly for whatever tune is playing in our fellow travelers’ AirPods and whistle along. Apparently, we’re no more creative than the average bear, and as soon as the memo goes out, we’ll chant along with the kiddies camped at Columbia University, “from the river to the sea!” whatever that means. We’ll obediently switch out one cause for another whenever we’re told, as nimbly as using “find and replace” in Microsoft Word.

We’re cowards, conformists, and copycats. Real freedom of expression is too scary; we’d rather hide in a crowd whose keffiyeh-masked members all shout the same thing. PEN has a laudable history of advocating for writers who’ve been persecuted for their opinions in repressive polities—polities much like the contemporary United States. But too many of its members would have the nonprofit corrupt its global mission to protect free speech across the board so long as they can bully its leadership into pointless partisan posturing for progressives’ acrid flavor of the month.

Lionel Shriver is an author, journalist, and columnist for The Spectator. Her new book, Mania, is published by the Borough Press. This piece originally appeared in UnHerd.

A Call for real presence: Exorcise Putin's Black Nail, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024 [By Tracy Danison]

“The Mad King” – from “’Okolotok’, When Scary Tales Turn into Reality”. Photo courtesy 104 Paris © Yevheniia Laptii

In Russia, Vladimir Putin and his friends and followers have conjured the Black Nail – the murder idol. Joy in murder. They mean to spread it. 

Without your real presence, without exorcism, the murder idol will take root, in Russia, around the world.

That’s why I will be present in Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024 between dawn and noon.

Painters, performers, poets, philosophers, sculptors, dancers, bystanders and witnesses, those whose can only sit by and watch – it is time to move, dance, to be there with each other for our friends at war, for our shared vision of a better world, to exorcise the Black Nail.

Wherever you may be between dawn and noon on 15 August 2024, be with me, be with the spirit of poet Alan Ginsberg, who did this first, when it was needed in America. And, as Ginsberg was, be with the tradition of Walt Whitman, who sang liberty and served it, too. Be with the spirit of Isadora Duncan, who re-membered the sacred nature of dance and gifted it to the modern world. 

Putin's gang is not the first to conjure the Black Nail, but Putin is the first in my lifetime to have the power, means and will to drive it hard and deep into human hearts. 

The Black Nail goes beyond the joy of murder and the worship of its idol. Once in the heart, the Black Nail attacks what Dostoyevsky calls “Normal Life”, those things that make life easy and sweet in spite of everything, those things that prevent a war of all against all: fellow feeling, culture, reason, the ordinary integrity of mind, body and soul.

Putin needs the Black Nail now because fortune is turning against him. His fellow travelers, his agents provocateurs and his armies are failing. Normal Life puts a check on him because it puts a check on all grand schemes, evolutions and revolutions. But, especially, Normal Life checks those dreams, such as poor Raskolnikov’s – such as Russia's Bolsheviks' –that call men and women to cruelty, murder and mayhem for justice' sake. Mikhail Gorbatchev invoked Normal Life for Russia when the Soviet Union fell in 1991.  

Driving the Black Nail into human hearts is Putin’s last, best chance for success.

He and his confederates invoked it in the aftermath of the 22 March 2024 Crocus City Hall massacre in Moscow.

Just a day after the murders, Russia state television featured a short, seemingly banal, play: four accused paraded before the stern and pitiless judge – from time immemorial, a trope favored by authorities in Russia and elsewhere.

But on closer inspection, it wasn't just ordinary authoritarian messaging. It was invoking the murder idol, tickling at murder joy, conjuring the Black Nail.

“The Mad King” – from “’Okolotok’, When Scary Tales Turn into Reality”. Photo courtesy 104 Paris © Yevheniia Laptii

One of the accused, Saidakrami Rachabalizoda, had the right side of his head bandaged, disguising an [a missing] ear. A second, Muhammadsobir Faizov, plopped half-naked in a wheelchair, missed an eye. Two other battered accused, faces swollen and bruised, shambled along with One-Eye and One-Ear.

Even as the sad parade staggered up to the pitiless judge, media were reporting that interrogators had cut off accused Rachabalizoda’s ear and forced him to eat it; accused Faizov’s interrogators had gouged his eye out.

The two battered accused were props, legends that said: With us, not just pitiless judges but bottomless cruelty, too.

Videos of the mutilations and beatings were and are available on the Russia internet as well, doubtless, as elsewhere.

Directed and deliberate, theatrical, naïvely comic, medieval, the conjuration cries: “Look at the cannibal who eats his own ear! Look at Cyclops the cripple! Look! Those sacks-of-shit black-asses can’t even walk straight!”.

Releasing the mutilation videos has no less a part in the dark spectacle.

Once conjured, the Black Nail, like Cupid’s arrow, must get purchase in the heart in order to prosper. Sadism and voyeurism are to the Black Nail what seduction and sex are to love: growth media. Pierced by the Black Nail, the heart longs for dark satisfactions: “Get that scum! Slap it up! Gouge it out! Rip it off! Make it eat it!”.

If you can, be there with me in Kyiv on 15 August 2024 between dawn and noon. Be on your own responsibility for what you believe and be with me to exorcise the Black Nail with real presence. 

______

“Okolotok”, meaning "self-sufficient village" in Ukrainian, is a village run by children in a well-known folk tale, explains Kharkiv-based photographer and creator Yevheniia Laptii. The Mad King is the wild child of the tale. He dreams of seizing total power and a princess living in the shadows along with it. ’Okolotok’, When Scary Tales Turn into Reality” photo montage of a children's dramatization of the tale represents Laptii's realization that the tale is both sweet dream and nightmare after a soldier from Russia's occupation force told her “All will be well. If you join us”.

Yevheniia Laptii’s work featured in the 2024 edition of “Circulations”, an annual Europe-wide exhibition of emerging photographers at Centquatre Paris.

"The Age Demanded" [a new poem by Ernest M. Hemingway]

"The Age Demanded" 

 

The age demanded that we sing

And cut away our tongue.

The age demanded that we flow

And hammered in the bung.

The age demanded that we dance

And jammed us into iron pants.

And in the end the age was handed

The sort of shit that it demanded.

 

-- Ernest M. Hemingway

 

"New poem?"

"It was new when Ernie used his middle initial."

"So what was his middle name?"

"Miller."

"Why did you post it?"

"The age demanded it."

Save the Date: A Poetry Reading in Response to Antisemitism [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Sunday, February 18, 2024, 2:30 PM

In Person at the Museum of Jewish Heritage
Edmond J. Safra Plaza
36 Battery Place
New York, NY 10280

Livestream

Cultural critic and keynote speaker Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall, will provide historical context for today’s worldwide uptick in antisemitism, focusing specifically on New York City. Curators Martine Bellen, Ruth Danon, and Andrew Levy have brought together poets Rosebud Ben-Oni, Jordan Davis, Sharon Dolin, Joanna Fuhrman, Nada Gordon, Patricia Spears Jones, Pierre Joris, Adeena Karasick, Vincent Katz, Burt Kimmelman, Basil King, Stephen Massimilla, Sharon Mesmer, Uche Nduka, Mercedes Roffe, Sean Singer, Yerra Sugarman, Anne Tardos, and Edwin Torres to share works, reflecting on this current moment. 

Find more information here.

Deconstruction as a political strategy

Deconstruction relies on the flipping of binaries. "Losing is winning. Crime is justice. Rape is love. Death is life." No wonder the new Jacobins hate Orwell. 

from Lee Smith, "The Global Empire of Palestine," in Tablet, December 19, 2023

<<<
The salient fact is that the crushing military defeat suffered by the Palestinians will hardly matter, as long as the world’s one superpower—alongside Europe and the Gulf Arab states—stand ready to rebuild whatever Israel destroys. By continually revitalizing the Palestinians, by giving them new life, the stewards of global affairs have engendered something that by definition cannot survive in nature on its own: a society that celebrates death as its highest value. The Palestinians claim that it is their perseverance and faith, their willingness to suffer great losses, that ensures their ultimate victory. But the source of their steadfastness—their ability to replenish their arsenal and refurnish their tunnels and other military infrastructure—is, in fact, a luxury repeatedly afforded them by the U.S. and its European partners. Had world powers simply allowed Israelis and Palestinians to make war, the party of permanent resistance would have had two choices—change radically or perish entirely.

Instead, having immolated themselves and their children many dozens of times in their efforts to burn down Israel, the Palestinians have again been led back across the river of death. Their escorts past and present—from the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc allies to Europe and the United States as well as the Gulf States and Iran—have employed them in the way minor actors have typically been used throughout the history of the Levant: as assets in the great game of nations.

But no power had ever thought before to preserve a culture so devoted to death that its highest purpose is to extinguish itself in the service of killing others. No one before had means or the motive to do so.

Now, however, something new has been brought into the world, something monstrous.

All the wretched of the earth have attached their hopes and grievances to the Palestinians not because Hamas and the PA, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and others are indigenous underdogs resisting the colonialist war machine, or stalwart subalterns on a campaign for universal liberty. Rather: Terrorists, criminals, psychopaths, and fantasists from every part of the globe have grafted themselves on to the Palestinian cause because the most basic laws of nature have been revised to accommodate it. The Palestinian cause gives hope to each of these groups—hope that their own nihilistic and murderous ambitions could win world favor as well. And they have.

Under the rules set by great powers to govern the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, anything is possible. Losing is winning. Crime is justice. Rape is love. Death is life. These are the slogans of the new spirit of the age, the dawning of the Empire of Palestine.
>>

from "The Fight for the Future of Publishing" [by Alex Perez /The Free Press]

Inside the Book World

from "The Fight for the Future of Publishing" [from The Free Press] by ALEX PEREZ   / November 28, 2023
Ideological fanatics and fear have crippled the major houses. But new book publishers are rising up to take the risks they won’t.

The Old World

The disruption of the so-called Big Five who make up the publishing industry—Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and HarperCollins—has been a long time coming. For two decades, their collective revenue, which was $25.7 billion in 2020, has been basically flat. Then, in 2022, that figure declined by 6.5 percent. 

Editors who spoke with The Free Press attributed that drop to people emerging from the Covid lockdowns and socializing more than reading.

But that’s not the whole story.

For years, there has been a growing politicization inside the industry, which editors describe as a slowly percolating illiberalism that makes it difficult to publish books by authors who don’t adhere to the new dogma. Out of fear of losing their jobs and friends, these editors (we spoke with ten across these publishing houses) insisted upon speaking anonymously.

“It’s so much harder to publish controversial books than it was when Judith Regan published Rush Limbaugh back in the day,” said an editor at a major publishing house, referring to Regan’s time as a Simon & Schuster editor in the early nineties, when she acquired a book by the conservative radio host.

The new dogma, industry insiders told me, is two-pronged: books should advance the narrative that people of color are victims of white supremacy; and nonblack and non-Latino authors should avoid characters who are black and Latino—even if their characters toe the officially approved narrative. (White authors who write about black or Latino people oppressed by white people have been accused of exploiting their characters’ trauma.) 

“It began, really, in 2010, 2012,” the award-winning author Lionel Shriver, best known for her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, told The Free Press. “It’s just been getting worse, and there are a lot of characters or plot turns in my own earlier books that, especially if I didn’t have this pretty solid relationship with a mainstream publisher, would get me into trouble or would be called out, and I’d be told to change them, or if I were just starting out I would be rejected because of them.”

After Woody Allen’s memoir was dropped by Grand Central Publishing in 2020, it was picked up by independent publisher Arcade—and became a NYT bestseller.

One of the biggest flashpoints in the politicization of the publishing industry arrived in early 2020 with publication of Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt.

Cummins’ novel—about a Mexican woman and her son who cross the U.S. border to escape violent cartels—won a seven-figure advance and was hailed by celebrities from Oprah Winfrey to Stephen King. But Cummins, being half-white and half-Puerto Rican, ran into trouble with Latino activists who accused her of appropriating Latino struggle. After protests erupted outside her publisher, the Macmillan imprint Flatiron, Cummins’ national book tour was canceled, and the publisher apologized for how the novel had been marketed. (Despite the controversy, American Dirt went on to sell more than three million copies. Cummins declined to comment for this article, saying she is busy working on her next book.)

At the same time, publishing houses started canceling books by established but “problematic” white male authors including Woody Allen, whose memoir was dropped by Grand Central Publishing, a Hachette imprint, in March 2020.

Then, in late May 2020, George Floyd was murdered. 

In an immediate attempt to appear committed to combating racism, the major publishing houses rushed to hire and promote editors of color. Several editors described the hiring and promotion frenzy of 2020 and 2021 as “excessive” or “obviously political,” and they identified several key diversity hires who alienated longtime editors, agents, and writers.

These included Dana Canedy, who had spent most of her career at The New York Times doing “corporate communications,” according to her LinkedIn profile, before being named publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint; Phoebe Robinson, a stand-up comedian who now runs the Penguin imprint Tiny Reparations Books; and Adenike Olanrewaju, who was a publicist at Penguin and The New York Times, where she was also a newsroom contributor, before being named executive editor of HarperCollins. Since joining the house in late 2021, Olanrewaju has secured one deal, according to Publishers Marketplace. 

Neither Robinson nor Olanrewaju replied to requests for comment. Canedy, who left her position in July 2022 after two years at Simon & Schuster, told The Free Press that any claims she was “unqualified” for the job “are cheap shots likely made by an incredibly small number of unnamed sources who do not deserve my energy.” 

Human Resources departments at the Big Five were mostly behind the drive to hire and promote unqualified job applicants without any guidance, an editor at a major publishing house told me. The editor added that it was not uncommon, in late 2020 and 2021, to encounter new editors and editorial assistants who were out of their depth—“young people without previous publishing experience who struggled to write a professional email.”

Someone Who Isn’t Me, by the punk-rock musician Geoff Rickly, was published by Rose Books in July and is now in its fourth printing—a big feat for a first-time novelist and press.

At the same time, the new generation of junior editors and editorial assistants—steeped in the progressive identitarianism of the campus—were making their voices heard inside those companies. 

“Most of the people who we hired were literature majors,” another editor at a major publishing house told The Free Press. “They come in having read a lot more bell hooks and Jacques Derrida than even The Atlantic, not realizing they’re pretty radical.”

After the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, many publishing staffers were “like, ‘Ben Shapiro is definitely a Nazi,’ and there was no point in trying to explain to people that Ben Shapiro”—a conservative Jewish commentator—“is definitely not a Nazi,” the editor said. 

Another editor said: “People were scared. People were afraid to lose their jobs. Still are.”

In addition to the new editors, a gradual feminization of publishing has made the industry less adventurous, Lionel Shriver said. “The problem is the editors, almost all of whom are women,” she said. “Women err on the side of trying to please, they tend more to be communitarians and risk averse and therefore, I think, the female takeover of publishing has made it cautious and bland.”

‘A New Generation of Ideological Fanatics’

With the new editors came new books by mostly untested, “diverse” writers whose stories featured characters struggling to overcome the shackles of whiteness or the patriarchy.

These include Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me, which was published in 2022 and has been described by its publisher, Flatiron, as “an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story” about a gay, black man. 

Nadxieli Nieto, an editor who joined Flatiron in the wake of the American Dirt fiasco, bought the book for $250,000. So far, according to the sales tracker BookScan, it has sold nearly 4,500 copies—not nearly enough to cover the advance. (BookScan, the book industry site from which sales-copy figures come, does not include digital book sales.)

Similarly, in 2022, Flatiron bought Elliot Page’s book—a memoir that revolves around the actor’s gender transition—for more than $3 million. So far, it has sold south of 68,000 copies, according to BookScan.

In 2021, Dial Press, a Random House imprint, bought Lucky Red—described as “a genre-bending queer feminist Western. . . following a young woman’s transformation from forlorn orphan to successful prostitute to revenge-seeking gunfighter”—for more than $500,000. So far, it’s sold about 3,500 copies.

In February, independent publishing house Zibby Books made its debut with Alisha Fernandez Miranda’s memoir My What If Year, which CNN International called the “the next Eat, Pray, Love.”

Then there’s Carolyn Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan, described by The New York Times as “a story of three young girls, Black and biracial, who are kidnapped and thrown into the basement of a decaying house in Queens.” Ferrell’s book was acquired in a “significant deal” (a.k.a. more than $250K), but has so far sold 3,163 copies since it was published in 2021.

“The rule of thumb,” one editor said about book advances, “is that if you paid $7 per book sold, you paid the right amount.” The editor added: “You can pay $1 million for something and have it be a bestseller and still lose hundreds of thousands of dollars,” even if you sell tens of thousands of books.

All the while, according to some prominent writers and editors, these publishing houses appeared to be discriminating against white male writers. In June 2022, best-selling author James Patterson called the difficulty white male authors were facing “just another form of racism.” After a backlash, he quickly apologized and said: “I absolutely do not believe that racism is practiced against white writers. Please know that I strongly support a diversity of voices being heard—in literature, in Hollywood, everywhere.” But one month later, acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates made a similar point. In a tweet, she wrote: “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested.”

A senior editor at one of the major publishing houses echoed these thoughts, telling The Free Press: “We flat-out decided we weren’t going to look at certain white male authors, because we didn’t want to be seen as acquiring that stuff.” 

When asked whether editors openly acknowledged that they were discriminating against writers because of their skin color, this editor replied: “I don’t think it was worded quite as blatantly as that. It was worded more like, ‘Is this the right time to be championing authors of more traditional backgrounds?’ Often, the language was a bit opaque.”

Adam Bellow, who spent many years at HarperCollins and St. Martin’s Press, a Macmillan imprint, before moving to Post Hill Press, a conservative publishing company in Nashville, acknowledged “generational change” is a fact of life. 

“It just so happens that, in this case, the new generation is a generation of ideological fanatics,” Bellow said.