Which of these statements, lifted from a newspaper, is true?
The New Yorker has parted ways with its art critic (Jackson Arn) after the Condé Nast-owned magazine received complaints that he behaved dishonorably and made people "uncomfortable" with his allegedly “inappropriate” behavior at the periodical's 100th anniversary party in February.
Don Lemon claims women at CNN sexually harassed him, including one who touched his nipples.
Rosie O'Donnell, who will turrn sixty-three next week, revealed that she is moving to Ireland for "a nexus of reasons, tax benefits being one, but also my lifelong love of Yeats, Keats, and Gerard Manley Hopkins."
“I’m gutted," Amanda Gorman siad. "Because of one parent’s complaint, my inaugural poem, The Hill We Climb, has been banned from an elementary school in Miami-Dade County, Florida.”
“Heroin, it’s my wife and it’s my life,” the late Lou Reed confided. "So what? Everyone knows Freud took cocaine, Nitetzsche opium, and Picasso hashish. Carl Sagan smoked pot, and it wouldn't surprise me if these computer geniuses, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, took LSD."
POTUS posted: “The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen.”
Admitting he had lied when he bragged to have cooked for multiple US presidents in the White House, TV chef Washington Irving pled guilty to the lesser charge of hiring afemalecook to dress up like Aunt Jemima.
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.
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," inTablet, 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" [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 TheNew 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.
For Schadenfreude it would be hard to beat the story the New York Post broke under the head "Turkish lawmaker has a heart attack after saying Israel ‘will suffer the wrath of Allah.’" The piece had Isabel Keane's by line; the date, December 12.
<< A Turkish lawmaker who declared that Israel “will suffer the wrath of Allah” went into cardiac arrest and collapsed on the floor of Parliament Tuesday — mere moments after delivering his harsh critique of his country’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.
Startling footage shows Hasan Bitmez, 53, standing behind the podium before suddenly falling to the ground while addressing the Grand Assembly of the Turkish National Assembly.
“You will not escape the wrath of Allah,” Bitmez said moments before he collapsed and seemingly hit his head on the marble floor of the General Assembly Hall, sending droves of concerned onlookers running to his side.
Bitmez’s heart reportedly stopped in the Parliament but was later restarted, YNet News reported.
Bitmez, who serves as deputy head of Turkey’s Felicity Party, is also diabetic. He received two stents in arteries in his heart after an angiography at a local hospital, YNet reported, citing BBC in Turkish.
He is believed to be in critical condition.
Before his collapse, Bitmez fired off against the Turkish government for having “endless love for Israel,” and said the government “contributed to every bomb dropped by Israel.”
Lawmakers from the Justice and Development Party, which is led by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, punched back, blaming Bitmez’s condition on “God’s wrath,” according to minutes from the session.
While Turkey condemned Israeli citizen deaths caused by Hamas’ surprise Oct. 7 incursion, days after the horrifying attack Erdogan referred to Hamas as “freedom fighters.” >>
"It was news to us," Major Blitzen of the Mossad told Secretary of State Antony Blinken when the latter shared Bitmez's assertion that Erdogan has expressed "endless love for Israel." The two shared a short nervous laugh.
Bob Dylan, whose song "With God on Their Side" was cited by both sides, declined to comment.
There's a new movie about Barbie coming to a theater near you. I assure you that Denise Duhamel's Kinky, her 1997 book of poems inspired by the famous doll is better than the movie. We celebrated Kinky's twenty-fifth birthday. Here's a sample poem:
BARBIE JOINS A TWELVE STEP PROGRAM
Barbie is bottoming out, she's sitting on the pity pot. She hasn't the know how to express any of her emotions. Before she even gets to her first meeting, she takes the first step, admits her life has become unmanageable. She's been kidnapped by boys and tortured with pins. She's been left for months at a time between scratchy couch cushions with cracker crumbs, pens, and loose change. She can't help herself from being a fashion doll. She is the ultimate victim.
She humbly sits on a folding chair in a damp church basement. The cigarette smoke clouds the faces around her, the smell of bad coffee permeates the air. The group booms the serenity prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Poor Barbie is lost in a philosophical quandary. Her God must be Mattel. How can she turn her life and will over to a toy company? Must she accept her primary form of locomotion being the fists of young careless humans?
And what can she change? The only reason Barbie is at the meeting at all is because she wound up in the tote bag of a busy mother. She toppled out when the woman, putting on lipstick at the bathroom mirror, spilled the contents of her bag onto the floor. The mother didn't see Barbie skid under a stall door where a confused drunk, at the meeting for warmth, was peeing. Never thought Barbie had problems, she said, picking up the doll. She thought it would be funny to prop Barbie in the last row. No one else noticed the doll as she fidgeted in her seat. The hungry drunk went on to spoon a cupful of sugar into her coffee.
Barbie sat through the meeting, wondering: What is wisdom? What is letting go? She wished she could clap like the others when there was a good story about recovery. She accepted she couldn't, hoping that if she stopped struggling, her higher power, Mattel, would finally let her move. Miracles don't happen overnight, said a speaker. Take the action and leave the rest to God, said another. Barbie's prayer that she would be at the next meeting was answered. A member of the clean-up committee squished her between the seat and back of the folding chair and stacked her, with the others, against the wall.
Basketball great Willis Reed spoke about his literacy project. David was eager to get his predictions for the upcoming Knicks season.
In 2003, then chairman of the NEA Dana Gioia, invited David to join him in Washington for the annual Washington Book Festival, hosted by Laura Bush. It was a great event. Dana had even arranged for David's mom Anne to come along and for all of us to join him at the White House for the breakfast ceremony preceding the Festival.
Just as the guests were taking their seats for Bush's opening remarks, David saw former Knicks great Willis Reed enter the room. He was impossible to miss, of course; at 6'10" he towered over just about everyone in the room, with the exception of former Detroit Pistons center Bob Lanier (6'11"), also in attendance.
Reed was on hand to talk about his literacy project.
I watched David from across the room (he was seated among the day's speakers; I was elsewhere, with Anne). He lit up when Reed took the podium. When the proceedings adjourned and guests made their way to the exits, David practically lept over seats with the finesse of a point-guard making a layup shot with two seconds on the clock. I've seen him focus on an objective, but this was masterly.
He reached Reed and I snapped the photo, above.
As it so happened, my office in New York City was at One Penn Plaza, across the street from Madison Square Garden. On a whim, I phoned the Knick's publicity department with the request that Reed sign the photo, which he graciously agreed to do. I've given David many gifts over the years, but I think this signed photo of the basketball great ranks among his favorites.
-- sdl
The moment no Knicks fan will ever forget: when Willis Reed hobbled onto the court in the deciding game of the 1970 championship series with the LA Lakers. When Reed came out, the crowd roared. Reed, injured, played well. The great unselfish Knicks of Reed and Walt Frazier, Dave DeBuschere, Bill Bradley, and Dick Barnett, coached by Red Holtzman, won the game, the series, and the hearts of New Yorkers.
A few excerpts from Kay Ryan's "I Go To AWP" (written for Poetry, in 2005, the year AWP was in Vancouver)
<<<
Simone Weil would have starved herself to death before she would have gone to AWP.
Another Fear
I have a weak character. I am very susceptible to other people’s enthusiasms, at times actually courting them. I like to sit among people who feel strongly about a basketball team, say, and get excited with them. I love to love ouzo with ouzo lovers. These are, of course, innocent examples. But this weakness concerns me in going to AWP. If I’m exposed to the enthusiasms of others, I know that I am capable of betraying my deepest convictions, laughing in the face of a lifetime of hostility to instruction, horror at groupthink. The only way I’ve ever gotten along in this world is by staying away from it; I have had only enough character to keep myself out of situations that require character. Now here I am, going to AWP. How am I going to remember: these people are THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL? They will seem like individuals, not deadly white threads of the great creative writing fungus.
Back to the Panel
The ways the panel members say they stay creative are not what I would have said in their place, which is that I had abandoned the teaching of creative writing and run as though my clothes were on fire. Rather, one says she teaches but she also does her own writing projects at the same time, currently putting together an anthology of stories by sex workers. This is a person of an industriousness, social res-ponsibility, and generosity beyond my imagining. A number of panel members, with members of the audience nodding in agreement, say that they are actually nourished by student work, and stimulated to do their own work. I am speechless. My sense of this panel, mostly made up of women and attended by women for what reason I can’t say, is that these are sincere, helpful, useful people who show their students their own gifts and help them to enjoy the riches of language while also trying to get some writing done themselves. They have to juggle these competing demands upon their souls and it is hard and honorable. I agree and shoot me now.
Lunch Break
I met up with Dorianne Laux at the sonnet panel. In spite of my abstract contempt for everyone in attendance here, I am on the functional level delighted as well as grateful to see this person whom I know and like, a warm human being, a strong poet, and the head of a writing program in Oregon. This is all so distressing. I knew it would be. We find Dorianne’s husband, world’s-nicest-poet Joe Millar, and collect Major Jackson, a young poet making a name for himself, teaching in a writing program, and not incidentally an old student of Dorianne’s, and we all go for lunch at a little place around the corner from the Fairmont. I am so happy to be tucked into this booth with these down-to-earth, generous people whose lives are writing, as mine is. Why have I kept myself from this camaraderie? There’s lots of relaxed book chat. Major talks about not yet feeling he has an arc for his new book. (What is an arc? Dorianne explains that this is a term current in creative writing circles and refers to a shape the whole book of poems should ideally have, like a narrative arc, as I understand it, and forgive me if I have this wrong.) Already it is coming to me why I don’t have more of this camaraderie; just the thought of vogue shapes for poetry books oppresses like cathedral tunes. Dorianne seems to be able to coexist with stuff like this, letting it wash over her. The more I think about it, the more oppressed I feel—so many of us writing books of poetry, with or without arc. How in the world can I feel really, really special? No, I think poets should take the lesson of the great aromatic eucalyptus tree and poison the soil beneath us.
Transgressive and Post-Confessional Narrative in Contemporary American Poetry 12:00-1:15 PM, Friday.
Such a lot to think about, just in the panel’s title!
The word transgressive is thick upon the ground here at AWP. I could also have attended panels titled, “Transgression and Conven-tion: Writing the Erotic Poem” and “Impure Poetry: The Poetics of the Transgressive, Taboo, and Impolite.” It’s funny how writers will all want to jump on the same bed till the springs pop out. Then they go jump on another one. Transgressive apparently now means sex. Didn’t there used to be other transgressions? Will there be others again? How about, transgression against obsessive self-regard? That would be a good one: “Hello. I’m Jen and I keep having impersonal thoughts.”
Then post-confessional. What could this mean? Is post confession what comes after confession? Perhaps contrition? Or Hail Marys? Or dedication to good works? Or does post-confessional mean Confessional like Sexton or Lowell, but ironic and self-conscious now—saying, I am confessing, I see myself confessing, but I know no one can really confess?
In the event, transgressive and post-confessional narrative turned out to mean loosely-plotted tales of sex and attitude, read really fast and/or at high volume, which left me feeling amused and pleasantly avuncular, grateful to not be listening to a mumble panel.
Wait; I can’t feel avuncular. I’m a genetic woman. But I do. Am I starting to have transgressive issues?
When education and consumerism merge, students get what they want, and one thing they appartently want is all A’s – as striking students at the New School in New York City demanded in November. They also want an igloo of protection from the weather of reality. But the very virtue of great books is not that they protect and reassure us, but that they disturb us and make us confront those elements of actuality that are hardest to endure. Literature is not comfort food, even if there do exist good books that one can consume with the ardor of a teenager eyeing a box of chocolates.
A faculty committee formed to devise a safe, harmless great books course would realize pretty quickly that, with the possible exception of Jane Austen, almost every item on the list is vulnerable to objection. The Iliad glorifies war. The Odyssey perpetrates a double standard in which Odysseus is allowed the pleasures of Calypso while Penelope must resist the attention of her suitors. Genesis propounds creationism. Dogmatic Dante audaciously puts Mohammad in a low circle of the Inferno. Infidelity is good for a belly laugh in Chaucer. Rabelais is ribald. King Lear demonizes daughters. Swift’s Gulliver puts out a fire in Lilliput by urinating in it. The Oedipus cycle of Sophocles and the Oresteia of Aeschylus confront readers with parricide and matricide, respectively, which may trigger a mental upheaval if Freud was on to something. Freud’s work is itself verboten because he is out of intellectual fashion. Alexander Pope’s satirical masterpiece “The Rape of the Lock” has to go on the grounds that the very conceit of the poem trivializes rape.
In each case the protesters miss both the forest and the trees by focusing on a single fallen leaf. This is deliberate. The formula, derived from the acolytes of the arch-deacon of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, is to focus on the periphery, not the center, of the object of criticism. But the secret of The Odyssey is not that the hero favored by the gods belongs to the ruling class. The secret of The Inferno is not that it helped its author get back at his enemies. The point of Anna Karenina is not that her husband is a symbol of Russian Imperialism.
Hamlet engages us not because the prince’s treatment of Ophelia is caddish but because the prince raises the most pressing questions facing all of us. “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” Ernest Hemingway said. Yet you’ll not find the book on required reading lists, despite the appeal it has always made to young minds in formation. One complaint: the use of racist lingo, accurately reflective of the time of composition. More recent protests center on the notion that the author, a white man, dared to write about slavery, as if that were a province reserved only for slaves and their descendants. Consider the harm this kind of thinking does to our idea of imaginative liberty. Now that you’ve heard the score of Porgy and Bess, would you really want to travel back in time and discourage the Gershwins from giving voice to denizens of Catfish Row?
The censoring of bawdy works is a little like airbrushing the cigarette out of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s hand in a postage stamp. It puts the past sous rature (“under erasure”), as deconstructionists put it. The erasure robs the past of its pastness, its right to exist on its own terms, whether we approve of them or not, even if they strike some of us as either a dangerous precedent or a premonition.
Having twice mentioned deconstruction as a culprit that has bought us to, if not to the edge of the abyss, the unfortunate state of affairs that exists in our universities and colleges, I feel I should add a third example. Easy to do, because a basic tactic is to divide the world into binary oppositions, pick one out, and then flip the power status in the pairing. Thus, traditionally the teacher rather than the student was “privileged.” Now, however, the student holds the face cards. A complaint from an enraged college kid, bogus or real, could cost the instructor his or her job. Teachers used to give grades. Now they are expected to give all A’s, while students get to evaluate their instructors with anonymity and without risk. A topsy-turvy world: the world of deconstruction.
In the 1960s at Columbia, the desire of students to confront the modern literature most likely to prove upsetting was intense. It led Lionel Trilling to devise such a course and then to reflect on the experience in a fascinating essay. Trilling writes that he had given his students a taste of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Freud, Nietzsche, Conrad, Thomas Mann and William Blake. “I have asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serous study, saying: ‘Interesting, am I not? And exciting if you consider how deep I am and what dead beasts lie at my bottom.” Trilling could question the maturity of students who moved “through the terrors and mysteries of modern literature like so many Parsifals, asking no questions at the behest of wonder and fear.” But the Columbia professor had no doubt that the teaching of modern literature -- including that which may be said to bear an adversarial relationship to the prevailing culture -- was worth doing well and with a full consciousness of what the enterprise entailed.
In 1965, Trilling observed tartly that the “progressive educational prescription to ‘think for yourself’ . . . means to think in the progressive pieties rather than the conservative pieties (if any of the latter do still exist).” He could see that in the postwar era liberalism had for all intents and purposes emerged triumphant in the clash of ideas in the academy. The author of The Liberal Imagination might be expected to applaud the development, but Trilling valued the dialectic of ideas, where thesis meets worthy antithesis, and he foresaw danger in the hegemony of an ideology.
Of one thing there is little doubt. Reading the great books -- whether Plato or Machiavelli, Ovid or Milton, Montaigne or Lady Murasaki, Augustine or Emily Dickinson , Aristiphanes or Swift -- will continue to trigger an intense response and may even lead us to the terrors and mysteries of the Abyss.
-- For eleven years, David Lehman taught a course uncompromisingly called “Great Poems” at New York University.
from "Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Big Fat Nonbinary Mistake" by Blake Smith Tablet, January 12, 2023
Subhead: "The queen of queer theory sought to relieve the persecution complex that haunted the West. Instead, her work has intensified it"
<< There are (at least) two sorts of women who love gay men in a way that makes gay men like me nervous. Camille Paglia is one of the best-known representatives of the first sort—along with those other Italian American celebrity fruit flies, Madonna and Lady Gaga: energetic, pretentious, (pop-)cultured women who imagine gay men as their “creative” and “interesting” counterparts.
The second kind—stereotypically nerdy, mousy, and frumpy sweater-wearing—loves gays not as a gaggle of chattering slags who support her self-conception as someone sexy and scandalous, but rather from the safe distance of books. These women read and often write about gay men and gay sex, in an intellectualized fantasy through which they escape their own sexuality. (Why young women of this type increasing purport to be gay men, and pursue surgery in an attempt to make themselves so, is a mystery for another time.)
Perhaps the most intellectually significant example of the second type was Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the founders of queer theory. In her books Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and The Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Sedgwick laid crucial theoretical groundwork for the study of how male homosexuality, and queerness more generally, shaped and were shaped by the literature, philosophy, and culture of the modern West. As a gay man and an academic, I have long felt a pull of gratitude toward her, and also a push of revulsion against what I can’t help but recognize as her cringe-inducing type.
Sometimes reading an author you have the unsettling certainty that if you’d known them in high school, you’d never have let them sit with you in the cafeteria. In the same way that I shudder inwardly at the sight of a dowdy, apparently asexuated woman reading “boys’ love” manga or The Song of Achilles, I am troubled whenever I read Sedgwick—a fat straight woman who recounted the miserable paucity of her sexual relations in Dialogue on Love (1999)—write about male anal eroticism with annoyingly evident delight at her transgression of academic propriety. The gay male thinkers who made her work possible, like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, never insisted on such ostentatiously provocative specificity in their writing, whatever they did in practice—not least because they imagined that the erotic, as Barthes’ American translator Richard Howard put it, is what the writing intellect can obliquely evoke but not directly enact. >>>
It used to be God whose decomposing corpse made the big stink. Nietzsche announced the death. Freud put forth the exposition in The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents. In its cover story of April 8, 1966, Time made it official in a cover story wisely phrased as a rhetorical question: “Is God Dead?”
If religion had been the opium of the masses, and masses on Sunday mornings were a casualty of deicide, people could turn to the usual alternatives – politics and art – but the youth culture was in full swing in 1966, and the nearest thing to transcendence was an acid trip at a rock festival or blowing yourself up making a bomb in a Greenwich Village townhouse. Meanwhile, the subject has receded to the terrorism and fundamentalism pages of the newspaper, and the obituary focus has long since shifted to literature.
The death of the novel had worried all-star panelists for years. Now, with Updike and Roth dead, a new consensus started to form around the notion that the TV serial as exemplified by The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Fauda, House of Cards, and Homeland has displaced and supplanted the novel as a mass entertainment form -- one that can aspire to be both wildly popular and notably artistic, as the novel was at its best. The past tense in that last clause makes me sad, though I have the seen the future and it is even more enthralling than Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga as done BBC-style with Damian Lewis as Soames.
The death-of debate of the moment centers on poetry and takes the form of essays, sometimes jeremiads, in wide circulation monthlies. Last month the NY Times declared that poetry is dead because T. S. Eliot murdered it, which was a novel though not poetic way to note the 100 anniversary of ”The Waste Land.” If you wonder at magazine editors who run variants of the same article, rehashing the same tired arguments, don’t. Think of the ingenuity that goes into the packaging. This time: poetry as the corpse in a detective story whose culprit was the least-likely suspect.
“People who are not poets make fools of themselves talking about poetry,” La Rochefoucauld said. “It is the one thing they have in common with poets."
The more things change, the more they stay the same -- or get worse. From "Old Literature and Its Enemies" by Claude Rawson, London Review of Books, 25 April 1991.
The identification of theory with a more or less coercive political agenda has been pointed out from time to time, and its more triumphalising publicists are increasingly open and even boastful on the subject. It has merged with the wider issues of ‘political, correctness’, ‘multiculturalism’, and one or two other phenomena which have lately attracted worries of a ‘new McCarthyism’. An article in the Wall Street Journal of 13 November 1990 reported the now notorious affaire in which Stanley Fish, Chairman of the English Department at Duke University and a major national power-broker of the theory trade [below right], wrote to the Provost of the University demanding that local members of the National Association of Scholars should be banned from ‘key committees involving tenure or curriculum decisions’, subsequently affirming that the organisation was ‘racist, sexist and homophobic’. The NAS is said to be dedicated to the preservation of traditional scholarship. The founder of its Duke University branch is James David Barber, a civil rights activist and past president of Amnesty International, which suggests that the association may be something other than a hotbed of reactionary prejudice. At all events, Fish circulated his letter among a handful of ‘trusted colleagues’, one of whom ‘was sufficiently taken aback by its contents to see that it was made public’. When the campus newspaper broke the story, ‘Prof. Fish denied ever saying that NAS members should be excluded from tenure and curricular committees. “It was really strange to hear him say that,” a student editor marvelled. “We had the letter with his own words asking just that, right in front of us.” ’ Fish ‘declared himself unavailable for comment’.
But not for long. Two months later, Fish was being reported in the New Republic (18 February 1991) as having said that he didn’t believe ‘free speech’ was anything ‘more than an expression of power’. A graduate student asked him to elaborate: ‘“I want them,” responds Fish, referring to students and faculty, “to do what I tell them to.” Later, he explains to a small group: “I want to be able to walk into any first-rate faculty anywhere and dominate it, shape it to my will. I’m fascinated by my own will.” ’
At this point, with the issue reduced to the egocentric billowings of an individual, the example would seem to lose its representative status. This is not so, however, for several reasons. One is that coercive egomania on this scale has become an institutional feature of literary studies. It goes with positions of tribal leadership in a discipline not formerly given to the unquestioning worship of intellectual thuggery, and the damage it does to the educational process is something we should be thinking about. A variant case, reported on in Lehman’s book [Signs of the Times], is that of [Jacques] Derrida. An equally soft-spoken authority called Houston Baker, on record as saying that choosing between Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck is ‘no different from choosing between a hoagy and a pizza’, and that his ‘career is dedicated to the day when we have a disappearance of those standards’, can nowadays be elected President of the MLA. It seems evident that such an out-look would not get him very far in the fast food business, which adds countenance to the proposition that people go into English studies because they’re unlikely to make a success of anything else.
Secondly, this style of egomania attracts to itself and to its hangers-on – in the form of salaries, support services, perks, lecture fees and the expensive hoopla of conferences and other promotional circuses – immense sums of money which would be better spent on more urgent educational priorities, including better schools for some of the disadvantaged groups on whose behalf, it seems, Professor Fish and his analogues will only go so far as to limit the free speech of others.
A third feature of this coerciveness is that it has its institutional reflection in codes of behaviour which the university to which Fish belongs is seeking to impose on its members. The New Republic reports, for example, that Duke University has initiated a group with the Committee on Public Safety-like title of ‘Committee to Address Discrimination in the Classroom’. This body, which was given the charge of uncovering faculty racism in the classroom, found very little in the way of overt bias. But in its monitoring of the classroom it did discover examples of ‘disrespectful facial expressions or body language aimed at black students’. The committee has promised to continue its work.
Duke, you may say, is perhaps unusual. Once a traditional and unflamboyant institution, it decided a few years ago to go trendy. With the aid of the entrepreneurial Fish it has collected the biggest and loudest assembly of literature professors dedicated to [Alvin] Kernan’s scenario of doing dirt on literature (a nest of singing turds, as one disaffected wit described them). It is the world’s largest hypermarket of hard theory, as well as of applied multiculturalism, and the launching-pad for more round-the-clock attention-seeking fatuities than there were air sorties in the Gulf War.
But it’s evidently not the only place where a thought police, or body-language police, is getting into gear. A programme at Tulane University in New Orleans is being set up in which ‘faculty and students will be encouraged to report on each other’ for signs of racism and sexism, with every department watched by ‘an “Enrichment Liaison Person” to inform the administration about continuing progress in ... the “Initiatives” ’, according to an anguished letter to the press from the Chairman of the Political Science Department. Many universities have more or less avowedly institutionalised the practice, in making appointments or promotions, of preferential treatment on grounds other than the candidate’s contribution to knowledge or his or her intellectual ability.
These not only include the candidate’s race, sex or sexual preference, but the correctness of his or her opinions. One result of this is that departments which used to make themselves mediocre by preferring white males over better-qualified women or blacks are now making themselves doubly mediocre by the same process in reverse, with many of the original second-raters still in place. This seems bad not only for scholarship but also for race and gender relations.
The American press (Newsweek and the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, regional dailies and the campus papers) have picked this up in recent months, with predictable references to Orwellian nightmare and McCarthyism. David Lehman reports the ‘commonplace wisdom among job-seekers at MLA conventions that ... if you want to make it in the criticism racket, you have to be a deconstructionist or a Marxist or a feminist. Otherwise you don’t stand a chance.’ There is no doubt that this is the advice given to graduate students when they are considering their research topic, by advisers who may be motivated as much by a realistic estimate of the student’s career prospects as by a political agenda of their own.
***
Lehman’s Signs of the Times examines the impact of Deconstruction in the United States. It does not engage in technical debate as John Ellis or Thomas Pavel have done, and is not an academic but a ‘journalistic’ book: journalistic in an honourable sense, which will doubtless not be immune from the sanctimonious sneers of the high priests of the de Man cult, who freely use journalism to decry the journalism of those who reported the Nazi sympathies of their dead leader’s wartime journalism.
What Lehman offers is a survey of the current fortunes of Deconstruction as a professional or ideological routine, and especially as a talismanic or valorising term, in American intellectual life, and of its penetration into other disciplines than literature. He also gives the fullest account I have seen of the known biographical facts about de Man, which apparently include financial irregularities, possible bigamy, a Rousseauistic callousness towards the children of his first marriage, as well as Nazi collaboration and four decades of mendacity or dissimulation on most of these subjects.
Lehman offers good coverage of the gobbledegook and doublethink brought to bear in de Man’s defence: ‘De Man’s entire writing effort is a silent trace of the reality of an event whose very historicity, borne out by the author’s own catastrophic experience, has occurred precisely as the event of the preclusion – the event of the impossibility – of its own witnessing’; ‘only the trivially guilt-ridden pathology of bitter academics who have always resented de Man’s intellectual, i.e. critical, power would want de Man to have inscribed himself in a conversion narrative’; and, especially startling as refutations of alleged anti-semitism go, ‘are not, indeed, Paul de Man and his deconstruction somehow overwhelmingly Jewish – as Jewish as anyone, in our multinational 1980s, can be?’
The fullest coverage is reserved for Derrida’s responses in the journal Critical Inquiry, which assail the assailants with the finesse of Ubu Roi and the conciseness of Castro. The second rejoinder, engagingly entitled ‘Biodegradables’, is longer than all six answers to his first defence put together, and must be the most voluminous mixture of Shandean self-exhibition and vulgar abuse ever to have been allowed into a journal professedly committed to rational discourse. The English text of these pieces incidentally suggests in places that Derrida and his translator do not have between them a sufficient knowledge of both English and French to know that he doesn’t mean what he is sometimes represented as saying. Since Derrida regularly lectures in America, and since his American readers read him in translations from the French, the potential for misprision opens up as an abyss of truly continental proportions.
Derrida’s inordinate polemical scripts are the written counterpart of his lecturing style, an advanced case of galloping logorrhoea. The audiences are vast, but with definite signs of shrinkage as the days go by, and Lehmen wonderfully describes a scene at Cornell in 1988: ‘The undergraduate sitting behind me whispered excitedly to her companion, “He isn’t God,” in the tone of one who is trying to persuade herself of something.’ The subject was ‘The Politics of Friendship’. On the Monday,
he commenced his lecture by quoting Montaigne, who was himself citing Aristotle: ‘O my friends, there is no friend.’ The two parts of the sentence are incompatible, Derrida observed. If there is no friend, to whom am I speaking? Or, with a shift in the formal emphasis: if I can address you as my friends, how can I say there is no friend?
The following Wednesday, with his audience halved but still running into hundreds, he addressed ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’:
‘Fraternity? Cela suffit!’ he said. Fraternity ... was exclusionary ... True friendship is understood as possible between two men but never between a man and a woman or between two women. ‘The double exclusion privileges the brother, even above the father,’ Derrida said – fighting words in a discourse in which patriarchy is in as much disrepute as, say, phallogocentrism ....
On Friday it was question-time. The scene switches to a ballet of ingratiating interrogations, fielded with deprecatory simpers or oracular condescension. But watch the punchline:
A professor of Romance studies tossed him a verbal bouquet, or tried to. He observed that a certain passage in Montaigne’s essay on friendship is ‘the most Derrida-like passage in Montaigne’. (Derrida disagreed.) ... With the air of the star pupil, a literature professor returned to ‘O my friends, there is no friend.’ Was the ‘asymmetry’ in the apostrophe not an example of the ‘breakdown between performative and constative language’?
This afforded Derrida an opportunity he could seize. ‘The asymmetry of the sentence makes one wonder which half of the equation is subordinate,’ he said, then launched a monologue that concluded with the observation that ‘one of the most interesting features of phallogocentrism’ is that ‘you can’t have an animal as a friend.’ Question: ‘You said that women are excluded [from traditional concepts of friendship], yet Aristotle likens friendship to the mother’s desire to know her child.’ Answer: ‘Mothers are not necessarily women.’
Claude Rawson is the Maynard Mack Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University.
The Ukrainian poet Vyacheslav ("Slava") Konoval sent us these three poems for publication. A member of the Geer Poetry Group (Wales) and a member of the Federation of Scottish Writers, Slava lives in Kyiv and is determined to weather the Russian military storm. He tells me he has devoted much energy to address "acute social problems, such as overcoming poverty, ecology issues, the relationship of people with the government." I mean to ask him whether he wrote these three poems in English or translated them. Do they not read like translations? On the theory that there is a certain charm in poetry as a second language, and in respect of the embattled nation for whom Konoval would speak, I present them here even before I find out more.
Now I have found out more:
<<< Yea, I am writing in English to promote my compatriots and show the thick skin of the Ukranian soul.
Translation of anything cannot guarantee the precisely, especially in art activity, so I do original form writing in non-my native language.
Yea, I live in Kyiv and haven't leave my city from time of the overwhelming Russian invasion till nowadays. >>>
Don’t be a freak
I can’t be a freak, I can’t play it, I have nothing to speak. From thought about it I want only to spit.
I’m not a freak, I haven’t millions on account, I’m not strong as beek, which stands firmly on the ground or on the mount.
I was brought up with my mother’s milk, it is precious like silk, hey, artificial behavior is bilk.
Richard’s Castle
On the sprawling mountain of Usypalnytsia, the neo-Gothic wind built a castle for the Lion Heart, below St. Andrew's Church. The castle's a marvel of art!
An unknown architect loved the pages of Walter Scott, having built pointed Spires, laid his heart.
Moody mountain, sharp descent, she let the towers in through philanthropic help, maybe cent, neither royal funds, no sin.
The royal castle shines, in yellow colors, in the graceful contours and lines.
Night Singer
Where missile strikes hit, where the borders with Belarus are close, I am asking for Your consent, please, permit to tell about the Ukrainian company, I honor her, raise a glass, and toast.
In days of turmoil, in stormy days, IKOC like a weapon took a thread and a needle, IKOC has will, courage and actions, not empty phrases.
Weavers, mechanics, accountants, they are bees, buzzing in workshops, IKOC flaunts its image and patents sewn shoes and uniforms for the military, sketches in laptops.
With style, taste, and quality IKOC cares about defenders, who grind the enemy in a meat grinder, and like blenders.
May the company prosper that IKOC had a pre-war profit, an investor is waiting for him in line, a sponsor.
Ed:Re "Night Singer": Diligent Internet searches of IKOC turn up many a cul de sac. Other poems of his are posted here. Other of Slava's Engish-language poems, such as "Painful condition," can be found here.
Painful condition
Once on Thursday, I woke up weak, having been covered with a warm quilt, with a merciless temperature, I am dying, and I am bleak. Like a pendulum, hearing the run of strikes in the clock’s click. Laying in bed, I had exhausted from the undead, I am similar to a sickly chick. Contemplate on the white pills, that had become the color of capitulation. Please, God, stop all human ills, overcome the pains, and be a healthy nation.
My dad landed on Utah beach, not as part of the first wave, thank god, or I probably wouldn't be here, but later, to clean up. He was a soldier in the 94th Infantry Division that fought in the Battle of the Bulge and liberated a concentration camp. It was in Nennig, Germany, that the Germans gave his division its nickname "Roosevelt's Butchers" for stacking the dead in houses and along roads and refusing prisoners, lacking the means to guard and transport them. Like so many others, he enlisted, a tough street kid from the Bronx, the child of immigrants from Poland and Ukraine. During boot camp, he was court-martialed for striking an officer who called him a dirty kike. Though he was acquitted, he got shipped out soon after without having completed his training. I don't know much about his service, not because he was particularly reticent but because he died suddenly at 50, before I was mature enough to imagine my parents had lives worth learning about. How I regret that I never asked him about those years. Anyone who has tried to get WWII military records knows that a fire destroyed many of them. Thus, all I have are the things he carried: his dog-tags, a French-English dictionary, a guide to Europe, and, oddly, a copy of Don Quixote in Spanish. Several years ago, I gathered these mementos together and along with a few photographs asked Star Black, the brilliant poet, photographer, and collage artist to make something of them. A few weeks later she presented me with three collages, one of which is shown here. That's my dad in the middle, looking handsome, and so young! In the upper left is a page from his guidebook in which he wrote a list of the places he fought his way through, ending with "and a funeral in some god-forsaken place."
One of the more moving accounts of life as an infantryman during WWII can be found in Roll Me Over, by Raymond Gantter. Ganttner was a teacher who decided to turn down his third deferment. He was unfit for officer status so he joined the infantry as a private. His service was almost identical to that of my father's. Here's a passage:
It is the slow piling up of fear that is so intolerable. Fear moves swiftly in battle, strikes hard with each shell, each new danger, and as long as there's action, you don't have time to be frightened. But this is a slow fear, heavy and stomach filling. Slow, slow . . all your movements are careful and slow, and pain is slow and fear is slow and the beat of your heart is the only rapid rhythm of the night . . . a muttering drum easily punctured and stilled.
Upon completion of his service and return to the US, my dad had difficulty finding work. I recently discovered among my mother's things, a cache of the letters he wrote to potential employers along with a pile of rejections. Over time, my dad's letters became increasingly imaginative (some might say desperate). At around the same time, he and his brothers agreed to change their names from Horowitz to Harwood, the surname of a minor British royal. It was the name I grew up with and that made it possible for me to witness anti-Semitism by those who had no idea that I'm Jewish. I thought of myself as an undercover Jew.
It's no secret that literary people and humanists are reluctant to take an unpopular position that deviates from the party line. So it is noteworthy when someone pops off, refusing to yield to the forces of self-censorship. An enterprising editor named Elizabeth Ellen [left], the poet and writer who runs Hobart magazine, undertook an e-mail correspondence with Alex Perez, a former professional baseball player who attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop. As Perez explains it: "I couldn’t see—forget hit—a 95 mile per hour fastball, and so it was over. My dream of being the next Alex Rodriguez was wiped away, so I decided to give the writing life a shot—maybe I could be the Cuban-American Ray Carver." Think about it: the American dream reconfigured as the metamorphosis of Alex Rodriguez into Raymond Carver! That rates a wow.
Perez [right] is a very outspoken fellow, and both he and his editor are courageous, for it is entirely predictable that individuals outraged by his views have denounced them and derograted him vehemently. Here's how Jonny Diamond sees it, pulling no punches: "With encouragement from Ellen, Perez rehashes numerous timeworn clichés about the artistic cowardice of the literary establishment—its elitism, its careerism, its overwhelming whiteness, its simultaneous disgust with and fetishizing of the working class—and sounds like just another caffeinated undergrad reheating yesterday’s manifesto." The staff of the magazine resigned over what Diamond characterizes as a "tedious anti-woke" rant. This event, too, is eye-raising. One wonders whether the tactic of mass resignation or the threat of revolt has run out of gas. (Its precedents include incidents at the New York Times and The New York Review of Books, both of which fired or forced the resignation of a prominent editor because of staff complaints.) "Your editor published something you didn't like, and you resigned? Is that what they taught you in journalism school?"
Not everyone joined in the chorus of boos. Meghan Daum [left, author of The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through The New Culture Wars, wrote a piece under the heading: "Who Killed Creative Writing? Thoughts on Alex Perez, Hobart magazine, and price of literary citizenship." Daum's sense of humor rose to the occasion. "To be honest," she writes, "my appetite for this sort of online blowup diminishes hourly. Though I’m as prone to schadenfreude as any other media professional trying to hold onto relevance in an increasingly winner-take-all economy, there’s something about watching extremely online people have noisy meltdowns that makes me feel like I’m inhaling my own body odor. But some of the stuff Perez was saying was not only true; it was, for lack of a better term, extra-true. It was true on a molecular level. It was true in a way that made you not only nod in agreement but almost physically shudder in recognition." For example, "I’ve come to see the MFA in writing as the educational equivalent of a draft dodge.” That, too, rates a wow.
Here's a very brief portion of Elizabeth Ellen's interview with Alex Perez (pub date: September 29, 2022). Perez is the speaker.
<<< The literary world is so bland because of the ideological uniformity of the scene. As I’ve said throughout, most writers are seemingly aligned with progressive orthodoxy and wokeness. I say seemingly because a lot of writers reach out to me in private—like you did—who haven’t bought in but are afraid to speak out publicly. So what you have are writers who are woke and others pretending to be woke out of fear and the result is a scene that is totally flattened aesthetically. Isn’t it weird that most writers sound like operatives for the Democratic Party? Do they want to be the press secretary for Joe Biden or do they want to be writers? Do you have to wear a pussy hat and pray to RBG and idolize little doctor Fauci if you want to be a writer? I’m not saying writers need to be rightwing, but it’s strange that most writers present as Democrats.
This restrictive culture that demands ideological uniformity creates a scene in which writers trade relevance and ambition for “literary community.” If you’re not a good, little woke writer who dons the pussy hat you won’t be part of the “literary community” and lose out on publishing your flash fiction about hating America in Ploughshares or a webzine read by fifteen pussy hat wearers. What’s wild is how writers with zero readership micromanage their careers! Tweeting all the Democratic Party talking points. Supporting the correct politicians. Hating the designated “bad” people. These unknown writers watching what they say and doing all this work—for no payment! —and no one even reads them! The mainstream literary world operates this way, as does the indie scene. Everyone a good, little striver, striving for scraps.
The crazy unedited shit we want to read doesn’t exist because writers are now some of the most self-conscious and self-censorious people on the planet. They can’t say anything we’ve said in this interview. They can never have the fun we’re having here. As the man said: Sad! All this to say that, yes, the literary world left me behind, but now I’ve transcended the literary world. This interview, as a matter of fact, feels like my swan song. My final goodbye to the “literary community.” >>>
<<< “My family left Cuba, left everything behind to come to America, and I was afraid of some of the most mediocre people on the planet. I was deeply ashamed. … I remained a pussy until 2017, when Hurricane Irma, a category five monster of a storm, was set to destroy Miami. A day before impact, I was sitting at Starbucks with a buddy, and said, “If we get through this one, I’m going to write whatever the fuck I want from now on.” The fear of the storm coincided with the peak of my shame, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. Irma ended up missing Miami, but something had changed. I dropped the agent soon after and started writing political/cultural stuff; I started writing about all the stuff I was secretly talking about with friends. My first published piece of cultural commentary, an essay about Philip Roth and American manhood, appeared in Tablet Magazine. I’ve been doing it ever since. This is how I make a living now. It’s very nice to get paid to write, I must say. I highly recommend it.”>>>
For the rest of the interview, click here. https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/alex-perez-on-the-iowa-s-writers-workshop-baseball-and-growing-up-cuban-american-in-america
Note: On Elizabeth Ellen's home page we're told that "In 2014, Ellen authored a controversial essay for which she was removed from an anthology of ‘provocative women writers’ to be published by Black Lawrence Press. Upon Ellen's public removal from the anthology, several other prominent female writers pulled their names and contributions from the anthology in support of Ellen, including Roxane Gay, Cheryl Strayed, Laura van den Berg, Amelia Gray, Lindsay Hunter, xTx, Mary Miller and Jac Jemc." Ellen wrote a letter that she knew would prove controversial, saying "I refuse to be afraid of my fellow women. Of entering into a discourse with them for fear I will say something they don’t like. That’s not what our moms marched for. It’s certainly not what mine marched for. Let’s remember this." As a result of the letter, the press dropped a story by Ellen that they had accepted for publication. The editors thought Ellen's letter was "provocative," a no-no, so they canceled a story on a totally unrelated theme. Here's what Brett Ortler wrote on the controversy for The Nervous Breakdown.
Our valued contributor Emma Trelles is the 9th Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, and in August 2022, she was named one of 22 Poet Laureate Fellows across the country by the Academy of American Poets. The daughter of Cuban immigrants, she is the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and a finalist for Foreword-Indies poetry book of the year. She is writing a new collection of poems, Courage and the Clock. Her work is anthologized in Best American Poetry; Verse Daily;Best of the Net; Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity; To Give Life A Shape: Poems Inspired by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and others. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University and has taught poetry and creative writing workshops in academic and community based settings such as the O, Miami Poetry Festival, the Sanibel Island Writers Conference, Antioch University-Santa Barbara, and the Pintura Palabra project at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum.
Emma has contributed over 100 posts to this blog. She generously introduces us to the fine work of other poets, especially Latina/o/xs poets.
Find out more about Emma here, and read her contributions to this blog here.
I'm excited to introduce this conversation between Cynthia Good and Nick Courtright, who I've paired because of their shared investment in travel, documentary poetics, and entrepreneurship in literature and the arts. Here, they discuss their latest collections, as well as the intersection of lived experience, craft, and the business of writing.
Cynthia Good is an award-winning poet, journalist, and former TV news anchor. She has written six books including Vaccinating Your Child, which won the Georgia Author of the Year award. She has launched two magazines, Atlanta Woman and the nationally distributedPINK magazine for women in business. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals includingAdanna Journal, Awakenings, Book of Matches, Brickplight, Bridgewater International Poetry Festival, Cutthroat, Free State Review, Full Bleed, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Hole in the Head Review, Main Street Rag, Maudlin House Review, MudRoom, Outrider Press, OyeDrum Magazine, The Penmen Review, Pensive Journal, Persimmon Tree, Pier-Glass Poetry, Pink Panther Magazine, Poydras, South Shore Review, The Ravens Perch, Reed Magazine, Tall Grass, Terminus Magazine, They Call Us, and Voices de la Luna andWillows Wept Review, Semi-Finalist: The Word Works 2021,among others. Her debut poetry collection is available for pre-order from Finishing Line Press.
Nick Courtright is the author of The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light and Punchline, and he serves as the Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. His poetry has appeared in The Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review, among dozens of others, and essays and other prose have been published by such places as The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, Gothamist, and SPIN Magazine. With a Doctorate in Literature from the University of Texas, Nick lives in Austin with the poet Lisa Mottolo and their children, William and Samuel.
Cynthia Good: Why were you moved to focus on place, and what places in particular, since it is a bit mysterious in some of your beautiful poems?
Nick Courtright: I was drawn to place because the otherworldliness—and normalcy—of non-America called for a deeper exploration. I’m very aware of how fortunate I am to have seen a lot of the world, and what I found there was not just a bunch of tourist sites, but a reminder that the lives of others are just as rich and nuanced—and perhaps even more so—than ours in America, even though in America we tend to have a rather flat impression of the rest of the world.
In Tablet, a fascinating essay on the intellectual merging of religion and politics in the form of Islamism and Marxism:
<<< The post-1967 Arab intellectual life was that of “collective neurosis,” in the words of former Marxist intellectual George Tarabishi. The first self-object of neurotic obsession was Arab culture and Islam. Imitating the Frankfurt School’s analysis which exonerated revolutionary thought from the possibility that it produced Nazism and fascism and instead identified them as manifestations of the latent violence and mythological thinking in European and Christian culture, so did the intellectuals of the new Arab left identify Islam and Arab culture as the source of the region’s own latent reaction and oppression. The 1967 defeat was blamed not on what is gnostic and religious in revolutionary thought, or the Fanonian valorization of brutal violence as a spiritually redemptive act, but on traditional culture. The new leftists doubled down on Marxism and revolutionary thought and placed the entire blame squarely on the irrationalism of traditional culture and religion.
The most important work of the genre, and by far the most influential Arab intellectual work of the 20th century, was the four-volume Critique of Arab Reason, an obvious play on Kant, by Moroccan thinker Mohamed Abed Al-Jabiri. In his work, Jabiri provided a systematic analysis of foundational Islamic texts showing that everything from Arabic grammar to Islamic law contained the nucleus of irrationalist and magical thinking. His work was a triumph for the calls for more Enlightenment-style rationalism, generally understood as a refined Marxism with clearer atheistic presuppositions.
The second most prominent intellectual of the genre was Algerian French Sorbonne professor Mohamed Arkoun. If Jabiri wanted to follow the Frankfurt School’s lead and push revolutionary thought toward Marxism’s roots in Enlightenment rationalism, Arkoun wanted to go the other way, following the lead of postmodernism, in rediscovering Marxism’s other roots in Romanticism. Arkoun brought Derrida and Foucault, without ever saying so explicitly, to bear in excavating Islamic Arab epistemology to uncover its deep layers of power relations obscured by myth and Quranic semiotics. Jabiri and Arkoun still occupy the center of Arab high culture intellectual life.
Below the high culture and sophisticated analysis of the new left, a populist new left emerged, primarily centered in Lebanon, fueled by the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Ali Ahmed Esber, known by his pagan pen name Adonis, and by the writings of Ghassan Kanfani. The rising Palestinian guerrilla groups, Fatah and the PFLP, a splinter Marxist group from the quasi-fascist Arab Nationalists’ Movement, managed to overthrow the old left from the leadership of the PLO and took its place—a development which was seen as an inspiration to all the Arab new left forces dreaming of overthrowing and replacing the Arab old left. The Palestinian guerrilla groups, inspired by Régis Debray, were making a “revolution inside the revolution,” a natural outcome of the urge to invert devastating defeat into a decisive victory.
This revolutionary subversion inside the Arab revolutionary movement managed to invert the conception of the Palestinian cause. Pre-1967, Arab nationalism held that Arab unity was the road to Palestine. Post-1967, the Palestinians inverted this Hegelian motto by turning the salvific dream of a destroyed Israel and a liberated Palestine into the essence of the revolutionary mission itself. “Palestine is a revolution,” became the new self-conception of the rising Palestinian factions, adding it to the ranks of a transnational anti-capitalist revolutionary movement that included Vietnam, Cuba, Black Power in the U.S., German Marxist terrorism, and others. After their expulsion from Jordan, Palestinian groups declared their plan was to turn Lebanon into an “Arab Hanoi” from which a popular liberation war and a total revolution would revolutionize the entire Middle East. This was the decade in which Palestinian groups laid the grounds for international terrorism of plane hijacking, assassinations, and bombings.
It is important to mention here that in all the ideological tracts and literature of the Palestinian groups, the works of French and communist intellectuals were continually quoted. The first Fatah newsletter after the Munich Olympic Village terrorist attack featured quotes from Fanon on its cover.
To the right of the new Arab left was the Islamic left, a group of committed Marxist intellectuals who decided to apply Maoist principles of popular mobilization and saw Islam as the most suitable vehicle to do so. It was not uncommon for Arab Marxist Christian intellectuals, such as Munir Shafiq, to convert to Islam and become Islamic Marxists. In Egypt, the strongest base of the Islamic left, this milieu of intellectuals was led by Abdul Wahab Al-Missiri, Hassan Hanafi, Mohamed Imara, Adel Hussein, and Nasr Abu Zayd. Missiri, a student of Nazi sympathizer Abdulrahman Badawi, focused entirely on synthesizing a Marxist-Islamic critical theory of Zionism and Judaism, depending on Lukacs, Marcuse, but above all Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge in producing a seven-volume critical deconstruction of all of Jewish history and culture, revealing its inherently colonialist, imperialist, and dehumanizing nature. When Missiri was once asked about what remained from the Marxism of his youth, he answered, “Nothing and everything … my Marxism dissolved into Islamic humanism.” Others, such as the Islamic thinker Hassan Hanafi, who is the teacher of the current generation of Egyptian intellectuals, maintained that Marxism is identical to Islam.
By the time of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, in which Khomeini demanded “dissolving all ideologies in Islam,” there was enough public interest in a potent mixture of Islamic fundamentalism, existentialism, and Marxist revolutionary thought embodied in intellectuals like Ali Shariati for a wave of conversion to political Islam to overtake the ranks of Maoist and Marxist Lebanese and Palestinian militants and intellectuals, for whom Islam would become the gateway back into the embrace of the masses.
In Egypt, Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, had the ambitious plan of ending Egypt’s leftist and pro-Soviet orientation and transforming Egyptian politics and culture to fit inside the Western camp. This ambition was centered upon the achievement of recognition and peace with Israel, to which the population and the intellectuals were opposed. The fierce resistance Sadat met from the hegemonic establishment of Nasserist and leftist intellectuals led him to resort to two strategies: political repression of intellectual life, and a restoration of Islamic conservatism, and even fundamentalism, in order to maintain popular support for the state.
Unbeknownst to Sadat, by that point, religious thought had completely dissolved into revolutionary thought to an extent that made it impossible to provide a nonrevolutionary reading of Islam. In turn, the definition of intellectual life itself had been profoundly altered to exclusively mean “leftism.” Egyptian intellectuals, poets, and journalists filled Egyptian culture with anti-Sadat, anti-American, and anti-Semitic works. Folk poets wrote songs mocking Coca-Cola and the American lifestyle. Young novelists such as Sonallah Ibrahim wrote novels about a protagonist eating himself into annihilation because of the invasion of Coca-Cola capitalism. Amal Donqol, a talented poet, wrote his infamous poem “No reconciliation,” exalting the eternal worship of vengeance upon Israel.
Shortly before his assassination by Islamic revolutionaries, Sadat signed an order to arrest over a thousand Egyptian intellectuals. After his successor, Mubarak, came to power, and with the dangers of an Iranian-styled Islamo-Marxist revolution ever closer, he released the imprisoned intellectuals, made peace, and restored them to their various chairs heading the universities and media agencies. A division of labor was established where the state would deal with Israel and the U.S., while intellectuals were responsible for maintaining an anti-American and anti-Israel national culture, a situation recognized today in Egypt as the “cold peace.” Hamas, Hezbollah, 9/11, Baathist Iraq, the Arab Spring, and the Islamic State are all downstream from this intellectual story.
Leftist intellectuals such as Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky are therefore not wrong when they declare that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are part of the international left. A journey of philosophical inversions started from a Hegelian inversion of Christian theology, then a Marxist inversion of Hegelianism, a fascist-Nazi inversion of Leninism, the globalization of European thought, the conversion into Arab nationalism, its fragmentation into Arab Marxism and Palestinian radicalism, and their inversion back into theology, creating an ideological tornado with antisemitism as its vortex. The aggregate result was the gradual decivilization, and moral and social erosion, of entire Muslim and Arab societies, many of which collapsed unto themselves in spirals of self-destruction.
The dissolution of religious thought of otherworldly transcendence into a political transcendence inside history fundamentally transformed and restructured the identity of Islamic religious piety into the piety of struggle. Muslim identity was remolded into an eternal struggle that in its origin is not the jihad of classical texts, but the German dialectic world made by Marx. A religious doctrine of martyrdom and eternal life in the hereafter merged into a cult of the eternal revolutionary glory and hero worship of the Che Guevara type. This is the best explanation one could offer for the peculiar phenomenon of Muslim societies becoming more religious since the late 1970s in a way that only translated into more rage, more rebellion, less moral restraints on violence and sexuality, and conspicuous pagan worship of pain, blood, and misery. This is also the best explanation for why the societies of the Arab Gulf, which did not modernize during the 20th century, seem to have a much smoother transition away from antisemitism into social liberalization and peaceful worldviews.
Let’s assume I’m correct, and Islamists got this idea by way of a global revolutionary culture that got it from Lenin who got it from Marx who got it, not by way Plato as Popper assumed, but by way of rediscovery through inverting Hegel’s inversion of Christian theology. Doesn’t this theory naturally fall right back into the religious dogmatism that is associated with Marxist intellectuals? Raymond Aron rightfully thought so in his Opium of the Intellectuals. Theory then reverts into a theology that becomes a political religion waging religious wars, schisms, ancestral worship, and textual fanaticism. Theology made philosophy by Hegel, philosophy made politics by Marx, and then politics was made into a religion. So naturally, Qutb’s and Khomeini’s conversion of the Marxist inversion reverted back into theology. But what does theology lose by this double inversion and what does it gain? Much. It becomes a religion of atheistic politics. It loses all its basis of religious justification and with it its entire moral structure and becomes an immanentist atheistic theology that leads to no redemption, no transcendence, and nowhere.
I want to emphasize what this article is not saying. I’m not saying that any form of Islamic fundamentalism could be attributed to modern revolutionary thought. Indeed, all religions have their own forms of modern fundamentalism as a response to modern liberal social organization. But Islamic fundamentalism proper means a rigid and ultra-conservative social ethos that is resistant to social change, as best exemplified in the Salafism that until recently dominated the Arab Gulf.
What the union of imported European ideologies like Marxism, Nazism, and existentialism with Islam accomplished was to profoundly alter the entire conceptual scheme and epistemological foundations of Arab societies so that even Islamic fundamentalism, unbeknownst to itself, could no longer provide a pre-revolutionary reading of Islam. European moral philosophical traditions and their language managed to make a tectonic shift that resulted in the development of a modern Islamic political theology that is totalitarian, dystopian, and revolutionary. The Islam of Iran, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaida is simply a regional variant of progressive Western revolutionary thought.
Yet I am not saying that the West is to blame for this development. For if this article seeks to affirm anything it is that the West-Islam dichotomy is not only meaningless but delusional. Cultural and moral relativism are meaningless when the foundation of all our modern moral and political thinking comes from the same place. Europe has managed to create a truly global human culture that no longer has ideational barriers and in which fashion, style, fads, and ideas form global mimetic contagions.
This is a story of a global nightmare constructed by intellectuals from all religious and national backgrounds. The Enlightenment and its aftermath are now just as solidly a part of Islamic intellectual makeup as they are in Western cultures, and if the Muslim world is to move forward it would be through the recognition and not the denial of this fact. If the moral and social destruction of the region resulted from incompetent Arab intellectuals sleepwalking in the orbit of a global culture, the solution is competence. The exploitation of the intellectual, social, and political energies of impoverished and pre-modern societies for use as cannon fodder in the great ideological battles of the Western left has had disastrous effects on the social, economic, and political development and progress of many Arab and Muslim societies. In this regard, the Western left’s theology of how the West destroyed other societies has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, from which it is now our duty and obligation to liberate ourselves. >>>
Solveig Lucia Gold, Joshua Katz's wife, rises to the doleful occasion of the dismissal of Katz, the renowned professor of classics at Princeton. Princeton "has revoked my tenure and dismissed me," Katz writes. "Whoever you are and whatever your beliefs, this should terrify you." The headline of his op-ed in the WSJ (5/25/22): "Princeton Fed Me to the Cancel Culture Mob."
Solveig Lucia Gold, a Princeton alumnus, reflects on this turn of events in Common Sense
<<< In 2022, it seems, all sex is to be celebrated—except between older men and younger women. Student-teacher relationships are unwise for all sorts of reasons, and Joshua will be the first to tell you why. But when the same people who think that children can consent to puberty blockers claim that a 21-year-old woman cannot possibly consent to a relationship with her professor, it’s hard to take them seriously.
Let me tell you about our relationship. We wake up, we compare Wordle scores (and Dordle and Quordle), I make him exercise. We clean the dishes from the night before while singing made-up songs about bears, he chides me for not squeezing out the sponge, we spend some hours apart writing, I tell him what I want for lunch, he makes it for me, we go back to writing, we pick a new recipe to cook for dinner, I chop the onions, he minces the garlic, and then I make him dance with me around the kitchen. We’re weird, but we’re extremely well-matched.
My point here is that we are a relationship of equals. Power transfers back and forth in any relationship, and my relationship with Joshua is no different. But ask anyone who knows us: I am the alpha.
And as much as the naysayers have tried to get me to feel ashamed about my husband, I am tremendously proud of him.
I am proud to be married to a man who owned up to his one big mistake and repented for it. A man with courage of conviction, who did not walk back his comments about anti-racism when his colleagues demanded he do so. A man who did not let despair and depression win, even as lifelong friends deserted him overnight.
The prospect of no longer teaching at Princeton is devastating for my husband: He loved his job, and he has given his entire adult life to the university. The relentless bad-faith efforts to destroy his career and reputation have driven him sobbing into my arms more nights than I can count.
I suppose Padilla Peralta, who last year made a splash in the New York Times Magazine for his stated desire to destroy the existing discipline of Classics, is getting his wish. As was widely reported, Princeton’s department last year voted to eliminate its language requirement for undergraduates. Now it has eliminated its most legendary language instructor. The great irony is that the elimination of the language requirement was, in part, to encourage students to take ancient languages other than Latin and Greek . . . and Joshua was the only member of his department qualified to teach multiple such languages: Egyptian, Sanskrit, Tocharian, Syriac, Akkadian, Old Norse, Old Irish, etc. Indeed, Joshua’s earliest academic publications concerned Native American languages. His work was the least Eurocentric in the department.
And then there is the chilling message Princeton has sent to Joshua’s colleagues and to academics everywhere: step out of line politically, and we will find a way to bring you down. Show us the man, and we’ll show you the crime.
Perhaps Joshua’s tormentors have no skeletons in their closets—but then again, several senior administrators who have served in the last few years are or have been in romantic relationships that would now violate Princeton’s official policies. The Ivory Tower is a house of cards. And for the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say, I’ll almost be glad to see it fall. >>>
University of Salford cancels SONNETS from writing course because they are 'products of white Western culture' amid push to 'decolonise the curriculum'
University of Salford chiefs sideline sonnets from their creative writing course
Second-year students will no longer have to write sonnets for their assessment
Historian Dr Zareer Masani called the change ‘patronising’ and ‘outrageous’
PUBLISHED: 17:34 EDT, 15 May 2022 | UPDATED: 03:42 EDT, 17 May 2022
University chiefs have sidelined sonnets from a creative writing course over concerns they are ‘products of white Western culture’.
The poetic form, notably used by Shakespeare, has fallen foul of efforts to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ at the University of Salford.
Following a drive to make the course more diverse, second-year students at the university will no longer have to write sonnets for their assessment.
Dr Scott Thurston, leader of the creative writing course at Salford, said students would still be required to undertake exercises in composing sonnets.
Acclaimed examples include Percy Bysshe Shelley’s "Ozymandias" which includes the line: ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
While it may be obvious to some professors that Shakespeare's sonnet 29 is not only the product of white Western culture but also an act of "colonization," I, a former English major in the king's own regiment, don't understand the logic. Bragging rights go to anyone who, in the comments field, can explain the reasoning to me. -- DL
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark
Solveig Lucia Gold, Joshua Katz's wife, rises to the doleful occasion of the dismissal of Katz, the renowned professor of classics at Princeton. Princeton "has revoked my tenure and dismissed me," Katz writes. "Whoever you are and whatever your beliefs, this should terrify you." The headline of his op-ed in the WSJ (5/25/22): "Princeton Fed Me to the Cancel Culture Mob."
