LA Review of Books Blog

Dream State: Speaking an Endangered Language with Poet Victor Terán

2012-03-06T13:06:00.001-08:00

by Ben Rodkin

Artwork © Demian Flores; courtesy the Language Activists project.

LA-based artists David Shook and Ben Rodkin are collaborating to document the lives of poets and artists in the Zapotec Isthmus of Oaxaca, México. At the heart of the project is the lingering pulse of Diixda-Zapotec, the indigenous tongue these language activists are refusing to concede. Poet Víctor Terán is central to the movement. In "The North Wind Whips" he writes:

The north wind whips through,

in the streets papers and leaves

are chased with resentment.

Houses moan,

dogs curl into balls.

There is something in

the afternoon's finger,

a catfish spine,

a rusty nail.

It would be difficult not to find — in this translation by David Shook — a note of longing for an alternative space between the physical and the linguistic. In the piece below, Ben Rodkin visits with Terán and other Zapotec Isthmus poets to learn more about their resistance to the language of "prosperity and order."

Each cart in Juchitán’s open-air market is stretched with fabric for shade, and from a distance together they can look like a port packed with long rows of raised sails evenly aligned against the jetty. Underneath are cut flowers, depths of fruit and vegetables and tubers from this fertile state, all order of dried peppers, sacks of grain and beans spilling over, native handmade dress work. It’s the colors of this city that first occur to people. There are pointillist fields of color in every line of sight.

At one end, not far beyond the backside of those carts is a stretch of pale dirt, and scrub, and outposts of Coral trees with tentacled prehistoric-looking blooms. Beyond that, long cool corridors separate rows of small houses, and Victor Terán sits in front of one of the houses underneath a burlap awning. His legs are outstretched in front of him, hands locked behind his head so that his elbows point directly up into the air. He appears to be asleep, but he is not. Beside Victor, at the end of an extension cord that leads out of the front door is a record player. Glen Gould’s recordings of the Goldberg Variations play, and Victor’s face reads every strike of the piano hammers, his sandaled feet swaying just a little.

Victor is a poet and a language activist. We’re here to discuss his ongoing creative and organizational effort to preserve his endangered Isthmus Zapotec language, and soon we are inside, and a few more poets, and a painter have arrived. We sit around his small kitchen table and drink a home-brew corn beer from a plastic bucket that sits in the middle of us. Their meeting begins, and a conversation that could easily have succumbed to self-pity and vitriol is instead inspired. They focus on actionable concepts, and the energy around the table is high all the way through.

Victor explains that speaking an endangered language is like lucid dreaming. It’s a haunting way to look at language disparity. You can maintain a tongue’s reality by conjuring its myth, by asserting its presence. But why then at some moment do you not just give in to its ephemeral destiny, if it is inevitable that you will eventually (and soon) awake anyway, unable to ignore the rumble of morning traffic beyond those very real walls?

Immediately he navigates an answer to his own question: Isthmus Zapotec is not a trade language, and there are no keyboards bearing its alphabet. It’s held upright only by wobbly cultural scaffolding maintained by a few that choose the dream state over the loss of their native language. The reason is simple. The loss of Isthmus Zapotec would singularly and effectively mark the end of a direct line of thousands of years of culture, and within a few generations, total disappearance would occur. The death of the language is not the death of a medium, but of an art form. To save it would be to save not just a present heritage, but a future one as well.

This has long been the course of things, and the idea of due course is often the crutch of dismissal. To preserve a language becomes activism, and activism is to provoke. The suppression of Isthmus Zapotec has not been simply a result of pragmatism, but of politics as well. Oaxaca is known for its often-violent native uprisings, and within some mainstream political groups, Isthmus Zapotec is viewed as a language of revolution and subversion.

This has led to pervasive efforts to completely replace it with Spanish, the language of prosperity and order. In a region of nearly 4 million people, Isthmus Zapotec is a language now spoken by fewer than 100,000, and one spoken-well by fewer than that; the cultural protectorate of only a handful.

Victor Terán in 2010 © Crispin Hughes, courtesy the Language Activists project.

One of the poets tells us about an incident a few years prior at a secondary school in another part of Mexico, an occurrence that he fears is often repeated surreptitiously right there in Oaxaca. Faculty members entered the library and woefully cleared the stacks of all material written in the region’s indigenous language, having been ordered to do so by the school’s board of trustees. The bum-rush lasted only minutes, and every last page of the works were gone. There was a quiet protest after, lasting a couple of weeks, mandated by the students.

The protesting students had one insurmountable concern. The material was gone, and they had nothing else with which to fill those gaps on the shelves. Local booksellers and clearinghouse catalogues had likewise been emptied. The press subsequently failed to maintain the story, and when that year’s graduating class moved on, the issue was completely forgotten.

In Juchitán it is left to Victor Terán and his contemporaries. Victor asserts that new ideas, new writers, and ever more determined perspectives will replace those books disappeared from the stacks. There will be a new precedent for films and paintings and sculpture by indigenous artists too. If their numbers and their bodies of work reach an unavoidable mass, and just as importantly if the distributors and publishers and gallery owners likewise take on this same obligation, then Isthmus Zapotec will again have currency and vitality.

You can listen to Isthmus Zapotec poetry read in both English and the original tongue here.

To read more about the Language Activists project, and its fundraising efforts, go here.

You may also contact Phoneme Books at: editors@molossus.co

Radar LARB

2012-03-05T10:39:00.008-08:00

Smile © C.P. Heiser

Our staff picks for weekly reading:

Charlotte Brontë’s French homework from March 16th, 1842, discovered by Brian Bracken: "Un Rat, las de la vie des villes, et des cours; (car il avait joué son rôle aux palais des rois et aux salons des grand seigneurs) un rat, que l’expérience avait rendu sage, enfin, un rat qui de courtisan était devenu philosophe, s’était retiré à sa maison de campagne (un trou dans le tronc d’un grand ormeau) où il vivait en ermite et dévouait tout son temps et tous ses soins à l’éducation de son fils unique." (Translated into English by Sue Lonoff with commentary from Bracken.)

Annalee Newitz and the question of reproductive rights in science fiction: "It might be useful, as we contemplate the futures offered by science fiction and politics, to consider that the struggle over reproductive rights is really a struggle over parenting. It's not about when the child becomes 'alive'; it's who will take care of the child when he's running around the holodeck."

Seth Fischer's Notes from a Unicorn: "It was 1990 or 1991. My mom wanted me to look cool, but she was from LA, not Boston, so she had me dressing like some kind of weird white preppy surfer member of N.W.A, with terrible neon green shorts that went down to my knees and a bright orange hypercolor shirt that got brighter as I sweated on it. No one would talk to me, obviously, but I kept pace with two kids who would at least let me run near them."

Rob Horning on Houellebecq: "Houellebecq’s characters are notable for how completely they embrace the consumerist ethos: believing that youth is society’s primary index of value, that sex is the only pleasure and is eminently commodifiable, that disposability is natural, that quality is ultimately reducible to quantity, that the quest for novelty is our only genuine tradition, that secular materialism has triumphed once and for all over atavistic spirituality."

Dana Stevens, caught between Dyer's Zona and Tarkovsky’s Stalker: "It would be nice if, at the end of your life, the locations of where you lost your most beloved ten or twenty possessions could be revealed to you, if you could see a film that showed your younger self walking away from the festival in Adelaide, slightly drunk, while the Freitag bag, discreetly stylish in grey, sat there neglected … So that’s what happened, you would say to yourself, shaking your head in astonishment at the simple but profound mystery of loss."

LARB Recommends

2012-02-29T17:06:00.004-08:00

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Thursday, March 1^st: Group Event celebrating the release of The Rattling Wall, Issue 2 featuring Katie Arnoldi, Helena Lipstadt, Lou Mathews, and Michelle Meyering at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Friday, March 2^nd: Kent Hartman discusses and signs Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Best-Kept Secret with special guest guitarist Don Peake at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Reading by Jaap Blonk and Mathew Timmons at The Poetic Research Bureau beginning at 6:30 pm.

Saturday, March 3^rd: A sound poetry workshop by Jaap Blonk at The Poetic Research Bureau beginning at 12:00 pm.

Sunday, March 4^th: Libros Schmibros monthly book club led by co-directors David Kipen and Colleen Jaurretche focusing on Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence at Hammer Museum beginning at 1:00 pm.

Tuesday, March 6^th: A discussion of Tony Judt’s last book with historian and co-author Timothy Snyder in conversation with book critic Jonathan Kirsch at Mark Taper Auditorium beginning at 7:00 pm.

Red Hen Press presents an evening with award-winning writers B.H. Fairchild, Nikky Finney, Willis Barnstone, and Dewitt Henry, moderated by Tony Barnstone at Boston Court Performing Arts Center beginning at 7:00 pm.

Thursday, March 8: Hammer Readings featuring poet Louise Glück beginning at 7:00 pm.

William Gay, 1941 - 2012

2012-02-28T10:11:00.008-08:00

Image Courtesy Nashville Arts Magazine

Padgett Powell, author of The Interrogative Mood, writes to us from Florida about William Gay:

"Gay wrote authentic, not putative, put-up horror. Honestly felt, correctly put dark shit, not cornpone in a dark wrapper. Okra, not corn syrup."

From The Tennessean:

“It’s going to be one of those old stories of the artist whose true impact is discovered once they are gone,” said Randy Mackin, a friend of Mr. Gay’s who often invited the author to speak to his classes on contemporary Southern literature at Middle Tennessee State University.
“He picked up where Faulkner left off. He’s filling that gap left by Larry Brown. For me, at least, he was the voice of American Southern fiction, and no one did it any better.”

And from Oxford American:

Radar LARB

2012-02-27T13:54:00.010-08:00

Image © C.P. Heiser

Brett Easton Ellis, fanboy: "CREEPY #97 was great! A fantastic cover! Six superb stories...one of them a masterwork! What more could a fan ask?"

Patrick Brown wonders what Hollywood would do without books: "If the publishing industry really does collapse, as some predict it will, it won’t be the big houses or the independent bookstores that will be most affected, it will be Hollywood."

From Letters of Note: DFW to Don DeLillo: "...your thoughts have confirmed my belief that what usually presents in me as a problem with Discipline is actually probably more a problem with Dedication. I struggle very hard with my desires both to have Fun when writing and to be Serious when writing. I know that my first book was the most Fun I've ever had writing, but I know also that the only remotely Serious thing about it was that I very Seriously wanted the world to think I was a really good fiction-writer. I cringe, now, to look at how so much of my first stuff seems so excruciatingly obviously exhibitionistic and so Seriously approval-hungry."

Uncomfortable: Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal on Dick Cavett:

LARB Recommends

2012-02-22T16:38:00.002-08:00

Mountain View © Lisa Beebe from Cecil Castelluci's Literary Diaspora Project.

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Wednesday, February 22^nd: "Does foodie culture do anyone any good?" A lecture by Adam Gopnik and Jonathan Gold at the Getty beginning at 7:30 pm.

Literary Death Match featuring Ned Vizzini, Steve Abee, Antonia Crane, and Michelle Haimoff at Busby’s East beginning at 9:05 pm.

Steve Erickson reads and signs his novel These Dreams of You at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm.

The Milan Review of the Universe hosts readings by Amelia Gray and Tim Small at Family Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

Thursday, February 23^rd: Cecil Castellucci, LARB's YA editor and author of First Day on Earth (Scholastic), is hosting the debut of Teen Author Reading Night at the LA Central Library, beginning 6:30 pm. Authors to appear include: Lauren Kate (Fallen in Love); Abby McDonald (Getting Over Garrett Delaney); Kathy McCullough (Don’t Expect Magic); Blake Nelson (Dream School); and Carol Tanzman (Dancergirl). Find more information here.

An evening with Philip Levine, U.S. Poet Laureate at the Mark Taper Auditorium beginning at 7:00 pm.

The Department of English presents William Flesch workshop and lecture at UCLA beginning at 1:30 pm.

Boundary Pageant #2: Census tracts and statistical citizenship at Machine Project beginning at 8:00 pm.

Friday, February 24^th: Jacqueline Berger and Eric Gudas read at Beyond Baroque beginning at 7:00 pm.

Saturday, February 25^th: "The Craft of Poetry: Deconstructing Peresroika": Poetry reading and reception at Craft and Folk Art Museum beginning at 7:00 pm.

Group Event discussing and signing Writers On The Edge: 22 Writers Speak About Addiction and Dependency at Book Soup beginning at 4:00 pm.

Sunday, February 26^th: The Poetic Research Bureau presents Dorothea Lasky and Anthony McCain at The PRB @ The Public School beginning at 5:30 pm.

Monday, February 27^th: Jeffrey Wasserstrom, LARB Asia Editor, will be a panelist at the UCLA Asia Institute's colloquium, "China: Capitalist Development and Popular Resistance." The colloquium will examine the roots of popular resistance in contemporary China, and consider the way in which it is affecting capitalist development and the political system. Find more information here.

Tuesday, February 28^th: Author Eric Klinenberg in conversation with journalist and LARB Editor Laurie Winer at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Thursday, March 1^st: Group Event celebrating the release of The Rattling Wall Issue 2 featuring Katie Arnoldi, Helena Lipstadt, Lou Mathews, and Michelle Meyerling at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Radar LARB

2012-02-20T09:46:00.000-08:00

Sparrow-headed Girl Shrieking in Delight © Click Mort at clickmort.com

Bukowski live at City Lights Poets Theater, San Francisco, September 14, 1973: "Well, just let me sit here and drink beer. What was it I heard Cage one time he got up on stage and then he just stood there and he ate an apple and then he walked off. He got a thousand dollars. I'll just drink this beer and I'll leave, right?"

Roger Bellin on American Nietzsches: "In America...Nietzsche the smasher of idols has himself become an idol."

Jon Cotner on Anna Deavere-Smith's citizenship in action: "When I watch Let Me Down Easy, I'll always catch myself transcribing Deavere-Smith's transcriptions out of the desire to grow close to each subject. I want to become a better listener."

Mark O'Connell on Martin Amis and classic video gaming: "Invasion of the Space Invaders, then, is the madwoman in the attic of Amis’ house of nonfiction; many have heard rumors of its shameful presence, but few have seen it with their own eyes. I recently discovered a copy in the library of the university where I work, and I don’t think the librarian knew quite what to make of my obvious excitement at this coup."

Jonathan Lear on on "A Lost Conception of Irony": "My Crow friends already take themselves to be Crow [Indians], it is for each of them the most distinctive aspect of their identity, and yet, when the question arises, there is something uncanny, unfamiliar and uncomfortable about the thought of whether they (or anyone else around them) really is Crow."

Jon Baskin on coming to terms with Franzen vs. Wallace: "Then, in a highly anticipated piece for the April 18th, 2011 New Yorker — so highly anticipated that the magazine offered an advance version as online bait to reel in thousands of 'likes' on Facebook — Franzen proposed a brand new distinction, the simplest yet. The real difference between the two writers, he argued, was that whereas Franzen cares about other people, Wallace had always been a narcissistic jerk."

And, for what would have been Wallace's 50th birthday, a collection of 46 things to read and see from The Awl.

Sarah Braunstein introduces James Shea's poem-of-poem-titles:

...Poem Before Dying. Poem
Shortly Before I Head to Dinner. Poem in Which
I Enter Drops of Dew Like a Man with Tiny Keys.

LARB Recommends

2012-02-16T00:03:00.001-08:00

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Thursday, February 16^th: Percival Everett will read from his new novel, Assumption, as part of the [ALOUD] Reading Series on Thursday, February 16th at 7:00 PM at the Los Angeles Central Library.

Gary Phillips signs and discusses his latest novel Treacherous at Eso Won Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

P.G. Sturges discusses and signs Tribulations of the Shortcut Man at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Friday, February 17^th: M.G. Lord discusses and signs The Accidental Feminist at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Saturday, February 18^th: Alex Gilvarry discusses and signs From the Memoirs of Non-Enemy Combatant with special guest Ned Vizzini at Book Soup beginning at 4:00 pm.

"Consider David Foster Wallace": a discussion of his work featuring Jonathan Lethem, Laura Miller, and D.T. Max at Pomona College beginning at 5:00 pm.

Sunday, February 19^th: Edward St. Aubyn reads and signs his novel At Last at Skylight Books beginning at 5:00 pm.

Monday, February 20^th: The Scott Wannberg uninvitational birthday reading at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm.

Tuesday, February 21^st: Lawrence Weschler in conversation with David L. Ulin at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Wednesday, February 22^nd: "Does foodie culture do anyone any good?" A lecture by Adam Gopnik and Jonathan Gold at the Getty beginning at 7:30 pm.

Literary Death Match featuring Ned Vizzini, Steve Abee, Antonia Crane, and Michelle Haimoff at Busby’s East beginning at 9:05 pm.

Steve Erickson reads and signs his novel These Dreams of You at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm.

Thursday, February 23^rd: An evening with Philip Levine, U.S. Poet Laureate at the Mark Taper Auditorium beginning at 7:00 pm.

Radar LARB

2012-02-13T20:32:00.000-08:00

L.A. River cc M. Goetzman

Anne Trubek on a library that bets on future literary greats: "The Ransom Center is on a buying binge, but not with the long-dead titans of literature in mind. Instead, the library is pursuing the private papers of contemporary authors. This fall, the center locked down the papers of the living Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee — spending $1.5 million on more than 160 boxes containing drafts, notebooks, and letters, among other things. It’s also scooping up material belonging to authors like Denis Johnson, Jayne Anne Phillips, Julian Barnes, and Steve Martin (yes, that one)."

Avi Steinberg uncovers the steamy history of librarian pornography: "...I began to hear moaning sounds. At first, I dismissed these as some kind of auditory hallucination, an occupational hazard of reading too much porn. But then I looked around and determined that this particular moaning belonged to a real woman standing a few rows away. To be precise, she was in the process of being properly pinned to the bookshelf by a male companion. After a hasty glance, I retreated to my carrel but can report that the proceedings were, if not quite spirited, certainly forceful — a book fell from the shelf — and that they terminated in muffled resound and a swift escape."

Chris Hedges on the "cancer" of the Occupy movement: "The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists — so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property — is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state."

David Graeber's response to Chris Hedges' article: "This is why I feel compelled to respond to your statement 'The Cancer in Occupy.' This statement is not only factually inaccurate, it is quite literally dangerous. This is the sort of misinformation that really can get people killed. In fact, it is far more likely to do so, in my estimation, than anything done by any black-clad teenager throwing rocks."

Ned Beauman on Beckett's misappropriated proverb: "'Fail better' is now experimental literature’s equivalent of that famous Che Guevara photo, flayed completely of meaning and turned into a successful brand with no particular owner. Worstward Ho may be a difficult work that resists any stable interpretation, but we can at least be pretty sure that Beckett’s message was a bit darker than 'Just do your best and everything is sure work out all right in the end.' Yet it’s only because Beckett’s name is attached to the quotation and because a lot of people think of him as a sage without quite knowing what he stood for that it has spread so widely."

The first conversation between kindred authors John Jeremiah Sullivan and Wells Tower, courtesy of New York Public Library.

LARB Recommends

2012-02-09T11:18:00.000-08:00

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Friday, February 10^th: Krys Lee discusses and signs Drifting House at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

Ramona Ausubel reads and signs her novel No One Is Here Except All of Us at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm.

Sunday, February 12^th: A reading at the Batcaves of Griffith Park featuring Seth Blake, Colin Dickey, K. Kvashay-Boyle, Jillian Lauren, and Beth McNamara beginning at 3:00 pm.

Tongue and Groove LA presents LARB YA editor Cecil Castellucci, Daniel Pyne, Rena Durrant, Joan Kelly, and Rick Lupert at The Hotel Café beginning at 6:00 pm.

Vermin on the Mount featuring writers Samantha Dunn, Tod Goldberg, James Greer, Joshua Mohr, J. Ryan Stradal, and David Shook at the Mountain Bar beginning at 8:00 pm.

Five Points Homoerotic Valentine’s Day, a tribute to Gertrude Stein. Featuring a reading by Christine Wertheim and a screening of Paris Was Woman, organized by LARB editor Kate Wolf at WorkSpace beginning at 6:00 pm.

Monday, February 13^th: Geneva Overholser delivers the 44th Annual Hays Press-Enterprise Lecture at UC Riverside at 7:30 pm.

Wednesday, February 15^th: An evening with Denis Johnson at University Park Campus beginning at 7:00 pm.

Gary Phillips signs and discusses his latest novel Treacherous at Eso Won Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

P.G. Sturges discusses and signs Tribulations of the Shortcut Man at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Tangled Web: An Interview with The New Inquiry's Rachel Rosenfelt

2012-02-07T09:47:00.000-08:00

What follows is an interview with The New Inquiry's Editor in Chief Rachel Rosenfelt, conducted over email by Los Angeles Review of Books Managing Editor Evan Kindley — the first in an occasional series on internet little magazines for the LARB blog.

How, when, and why was The New Inquiry originally founded?

I started The New Inquiry with two friends, Mary Borkowski and Jennifer Bernstein, as a shared Tumblr blog in 2009. We weren’t thinking of it as a magazine back then: it was more of a tactic to establish a community-driven creative outlet that wasn’t available to us in our post-collegiate lives. I can’t speak for either of them, but in my case, pouring my energy into TNI fulfilled my need for intellectual and creative stimulation beyond wage work.

We were experimenting with the platform for a while before the formative moment struck. I was reading through the archive of one of my favorite critics, Scott McLemee, when I came across a prescient piece he wrote in a 2007 issue of Bookforum called "After the Last Intellectuals." This was a few years after the article’s publication, and in the intervening time we had experienced an economic crash, the contraction of the university system, the death of print, and the rise of new media. The institutions that Russell Jacoby describes in his book The Last Intellectuals — mass media, mainstream publishing, the academy, all the places which had come to employ and therefore absorb a category we had once known as the public intellectual — had atrophied across the board. As a result, the would-be academicians, editors, copy writers and advertising cronies who would once have been absorbed into those institutions suddenly constituted a surplus population.

I also realized that the most fiercely intellectual, provocative, and original thinkers among this new population were never very well-assimilated into cultural institutions to begin with: they weren’t the kind you’d meet at a publishing party, or who would’ve be dispositionally capable of working their way up the organization ladder. But these same people who had already taken advantage of new media and managed to carve out an independent platform for their for themselves online, and this sudden change in the paradigm actually put them at a distinct advantage. The crazies, the loose cannons, the pseudonymous hermit, the girl shouting on a blogspot soapbox: these were the new voices on the cutting edge of culture and I made it my business to bring them together.

Strengthened and focused by McLemee’s example, ideas, and eventual mentorship, we began to think of The New Inquiry as more of a movement than a magazine — and we still do. I set out to connect with the already established extra-institutional writers and artists that I most admired, as well as discover strong emerging voices that hadn’t yet found a platform to enable their development. It’s sort of a Bad News Bears montage genesis story: me searching the crevices of New York and the Internet to bring together the rag-tag group of misfits who would eventually coalesce into a real team. The salon we run in New York gives my editors and contributors a space to connect as people rather than bylines and form a real, concrete community, for which there is no substitute.

Do you think The New Inquiry reflects New York? Do you aspire to?

I think so. The role of the salon in our organization is a side-effect of the demands placed on New Yorkers by real estate. We can’t gather at each other’s apartments because of inhospitable roommates or landlords, and there are few public spaces that aren’t primarily commerce-driven, which is infertile ground for developing anything resembling a rooted community. The West Village isn’t exactly what it used to be.

It was pure serendipity that helped us find the bookstore where we gather today, and to develop a strong friendship with its proprietor, who has become central to our project. The store has been a New York institution since 1970s, but rent drove it underground over the last few years. Today, it's hidden in a rent-stabilized apartment (contrary to popular assumption, it does not double as a residence) where you’ll find the best rare and used book selection in the city, bar none. The bookstore is a focal point for The New Inquiry’s community, and its keeper instills our project with the value-system that keeps our community bond strong.

What magazines or websites (past or present) do you model yourselves on?

All and none of them in a sense. TNI’s unusual roots makes it a different creature than most of the magazines we resemble on the surface. We aspire to write essay-reviews in the tradition of (if I may) The Partisan Review, The New York Review of Books, and Bookforum, which is to say we look for critical pieces that go beyond their subject.

One element that sets us apart from other magazines is that we’ve committed our review section primarily to coverage of independent and academic press books, which have suffered tremendously from the dramatic reduction of review sections in most newspapers and magazines — not to mention the trend of critics-as-publicists sweeping the few book supplements left standing.

Do you think there's a kind of criticism that is more suited to the internet than to print?

It depends on how you define criticism. To my mind, criticism at its core is merely the act of revealing links between objects. The long form essay was once the best (or only) way to reveal social or historical contextualization or demonstrate the relationship between two seemingly unrelated works of art, but new media has created new ways of doing this.

The ability to assemble multimedia is key. The commentary-less juxtapositions between philosophy, contemporary scientific findings, art, and link round-ups that you find on our designer Imp Kerr’s New Shelton Wet/Dry is one excellent example. And I think the fluid tonality enabled by blogs lays the ground work for something like If You Can Read This, You’re Lying to develop a political stance that oscillates effectively between audacious claim-making and satire. Just to name two.

What (more generally) are the intellectual influences behind TNI?

I won’t speak for the group as a whole because I don’t filter the contributions of each of our editors through my point of view, but I was initially turned on to criticism by music writers: Greil Marcus, Ellen Willis, and Peter Guralnick were all big influences of mine. My degree is in Women’s Studies, and a feminist perspective drives a lot of my sense of purpose to make The New Inquiry one of the (very) few critical magazines committed to bringing attention to the best art and criticism by women, under the direction of an editorial board with women on all levels of leadership, including the person responsible for paying the bills (me) — which key to keeping TNI systemically women-friendly.

What are some of your favorite pieces that you've run, which reflect what you want The New Inquiry to be all about?

Rob Horning’s writing has definitely given shape to The New Inquiry’s voice. He’s developed a brilliant and original body of work related to social media. A representative piece might be “Comfortably Alone,” and I also recommend one of his sleeper-hits, “The Failure Addict."

Matt Pearce’s “Death by Twitter” is a great example of how a critic who is also a digital native can extract deeper meanings from the new forms enabled by digital media than your average trend columnist.

Malcolm Harris’ body of work on TNI and elsewhere about student debt has made the issue a defining one for us. One of my favorites of his is "School’s Out Forever."

I think Jenna Brager’s essays for us do a great job of positioning what might otherwise be esoteric academic press books in the center of widely-relevant public discourse. Her “Bad Mothers” piece, which we published just two days after the Casey Anthony verdict was announced, is one example.

Much of your material has been outspokenly political. Do you see TNI as occupying any particular ideological position? Are there causes or tendencies that you, as a group, align yourselves with?

The guiding principle in the editorial process is: Is this boring? Is this safe? If the answer is yes, then it’s not for us. We’re not offering a platform for any one political group to rally around. I’m lucky to have a lot of politically active, passionate editors on staff and I’m happy their work produces conversation and debate, but TNI isn’t an organ for some leftist faction. I picked the best writers and thinkers I could find. If a lot of them happen to be socialists, communists or radical anarchists, so be it.

How is the new TNI Beta site, launching this week, different from what's been online since 2009?

The most significant change enabled by the new site is our ability to host blogs in addition to publish our regular flow of essays and reviews. We’ve assembled a dream team of the best bloggers on the internet: Maryam Monalisa Gharavi (South/South), Aaron Bady (Zunguzungu), Evan Calder Williams (Noonday Shadow, formerly of Socialism and/or Barbarism), Christine Baumgarthuber (The Austerity Kitchen), Autumn Whitefield-Madrano (The Beheld), Imp Kerr (Shines Like Gold), and, of course, Rob Horning (Marginal Utility).

In addition to the free content available on your website, you're now offering a $2 downloadable magazine. Can you explain the thinking that led to this decision? Will magazine readers get any content that website readers won't?

The New Inquiry Magazine is a monthly collection of new and past content organized around a common theme, delivered on the first Monday of each month as an e-reader-enabled PDF. Readers can subscribe to the magazine for $2 per month.

It’s counter to our editorial perspective to protect content behind a paywall and frankly, it’s bad business. It astonishes me when editors of magazines tell me they save their best essays for print. Why on earth would they think it’s wise to actively prohibit their best articles from going viral online? On the off-chance that people do end up talking about a print-only article, the publication will get shamed into putting it online anyway. It’s silly.

In theory, freeloading readers can make a point of reading absolutely everything we publish over a several month stretch for free on the web and get the full TNI "experience," but I think subscribing to the magazine adds value for other reasons. First and foremost, because it provides our readers with a low-barrier method of supporting what we do. Most people don’t know that our editors work on a volunteer basis, and part of that work includes raising money to pay all of our contributors for their work. We have less funding than most other magazines of our visibility, yet we're one of the few online publications that offer writers compensation. The $2 subscription model creates a micro-payment revenue stream to help us do this.

The other reason to subscribe is for the value of the magazine itself. It’s worth noting that our editorial structure is relatively non-hierarchical. Editors are authorized to develop pieces with contributors of their choosing without my direct oversight, which results in the defining characteristic of The New Inquiry’s editorial voice: unpredictability.

Aside from the convenience of delivery and the beautiful design and original illustrations by Imp Kerr, the magazine gives readers the ability to engage with our content in a more editorially focused way (under the direction of Atossa Araxia Abrahamian and Sarah Leonard). For instance, our first issue, "Precarity," features both new and classic essays we’ve written or commissioned that rhyme in some sense with this notion of “precarity.” We have a dialogue between Hannah Hart of My Drunk Kitchen and Frank Warren of Post Secret discussing the unprecedented experience and inherent instability of sudden, unlooked-for internet fame; a conversation about freelance writing between Willie Osterweil and Susan Salter Reynolds (whose firing from the L.A. Times we learned about from Tom Lutz's essay "Future Tense" in the LARB); a piece on women’s tenuous use of so-called "erotic capital" in the workplace; essays about internships and temp work; and criticism about the precarious-economy underpinnings for shows like Breaking Bad and Dexter — all rounded out with magazine-y content like a regular advice column and other features that you’ll have to subscribe to the magazine to see! The content will all be online eventually, but you see some of it first in the magazine. It’s a really fine line to walk: we’re mostly of the generation that believes we’re entitled to all information whenever we want it for free, but my whole goal is to put these writers in the position to feed themselves with their work.

Basically, $2 a month is a pretty negligible price to pay for 130 pages of outstanding, illustrated, meticulously labored-over content. And if a lot of people subscribe to it even though they don’t really have to, we can keep making it.

Click here to subscribe to The New Inquiry Magazine.

Images: Mark Iantosca; Andrew David Watson

Radar LARB

2012-02-06T10:28:00.000-08:00

From Got Medieval © Carl S. Pyrdum

Christopher Glazek on why the crime rate is too low for our own good: "Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence."

Carl Pyrdum of Got Medieval: "Me, I’m too easily distracted by the margins to be able to discuss the apparent gender ambiguity of Christ in the main image on a page and its implications for normative heterosexualized spiritual desire without going 'Hey, look, a monkey!'"

Anthony Lane skewers Madonna's W.E.: "Recent reports from Liverpool claimed that irate moviegoers had come out of The Artist complaining that there were no words in it, and asking for their money back. In the same spirit, I hereby demand a refund for W.E., because of its outrageous lack of sex. What on earth is the point of a Madonna product, in any medium, if it contains not a single orgy?"

Perry Anderson reviewing Sino-Americana: "In the years since his exit from the State Department, he explains, he has been to China more than fifty times, hobnobbing with its leaders, but his conversations with these epigones dwindle to banalities after the heights of his dialogues with Mao. The Chairman had treated him as a ‘fellow philosopher.’ Deng could not live up to the same standard, still less his successor."

Alan Levinovitz's brief history of the blurb: "In the 1600s practically everyone wrote commendatory verses, some of which were quite beautiful, like Ben Jonson’s for Shakespeare’s First Folio: 'Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage / Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage, / Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like night, / And despairs day, but for thy volume’s light.' (Interestingly, Shakespeare himself never wrote any — one can only imagine what a good blurb from the Bard would have done for sales.)"

Klosterchuck? A comparison:

Malcolm Harris on Chuck Klosterman, 2001: "The book Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman was just named winner of The ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. I’m guessing this doesn’t mean much to more than (maybe) 10,000 people in the entire country. In fact, if you effortlessly understood 100 percent of this article’s opening sentence, you can probably skip the rest of the piece."
Klosterman on tUnE-yArDs, 2o12: "The album w h o k i l l by tUnE-yArDs was just named record of the year by voters in the 2011 Pazz & Jop poll. I'm guessing this doesn't mean much to more than (maybe) 10,000 people in the entire country. In fact, if you effortlessly understood 100 percent of this article's opening sentence, you can probably skip the rest of the piece."

And so on.

LARB Recommends

2012-02-01T16:41:00.000-08:00

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Wednesday, February 1^st: Update: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED and will be rescheduled. An evening with David Milch discussing his writing career and new HBO series Luck at Track 16 beginning at 6:30 pm.

David Graeber discusses and signs his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm.

Thursday, February 2^nd: Tricia Tunstall in conversation with community affairs director of L.A. Philharmonic, Leni Boorstin at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Ben Marcus reads and signs his novel The Flame Alphabet at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm.

Saturday, February 4^th: The Rattling Wall, Issue 2 reading and release is being held at The Standard beginning at 7:00 pm.

Jeanne Cordova in conversation with Dr. Chris Freeman to celebrate Cordova's book When We Were Outlaws at Skylight Books beginning at 5:00 pm.

Trinie Dalton's Baby Geisha book launch at Family beginning at 7:30 pm.

Monday, February 6^th: An evening with Wael Ghonim in conversation with author Reza Aslan at the Los Angeles Theatre Center beginning at 8:00 pm.

Tuesday, February 7^th: Garrett Hongo discusses his latest book of poetry at the UCLA Library beginning at 4:00 pm.

Wednesday, February 8^th: Henry Diltz in conversation with Kristine McKenna at Track 16 beginning at 6:30 pm.

Author Jodi Kantor in conversation with Adam Nagourney, New York Times staff writer at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Radar LARB

2012-01-30T10:46:00.000-08:00

Palms © C.P. Heiser

From James Murray's The Evolution of English Lexicography, published in 1900: "The English Dictionary, like the English Constitution, is the creation of no one man, and of no one age; it is a growth that has slowly developed itself down the ages; its beginnings lie far back in times almost pre-historic. And these beginnings themselves, although the English Dictionary today is lineally developed from them, were neither Dictionaries, nor even English." (From the epigraph to Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary.)

Jeff Weiss on The Doors' L.A. Woman: "From recording to writing, the approach is rough but relaxed. No set hours. No working at night. No more than three takes, recorded live on 8-track with minimal overdubs. Desks are shoved to the side. Quilts hang from the walls for higher fidelity. Working from the second floor, out of sight, Botnick hooks up a console speaker and tape recorder. For session work, he recruits Elvis Presley's bassist, Jerry Scheff, and rhythm guitarist Marc Benno, who frees Krieger up for kaleidoscopic solos. A disciple of the King, Morrison is thrilled."

Guy Patrick Cunningham on reading in pieces: "Fragmentary writing is (or at least feels) like the one avant-garde literary approach that best fits our particular moment. It’s not that it’s the only form of writing that matters of course, just that it captures the tension between 'digital' and 'analog' reading better than anything else out there. And that tension, in many ways, is the defining feature of the contemporary reading experience."

Adam Gopnik on the The Caging of America: "What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world — Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment — time becomes in every sense this thing you serve."

Video from TripleCanopy: Zoe Beloff's film and installation The Infernal Dream of Mutt and Jeff is on view at M HKA Museum (Antwerp, Belgium) from February 16 until June 3, 2012.

Mutt and Jeff on Strike from triple canopy on Vimeo.

Unpacking Music Man Murray: My visit with one of L.A.'s last great record collectors

2012-01-26T10:39:00.000-08:00

by C.P. Heiser

Murray and the collection © C.P. Heiser

Turning to his record player and switching to a 78 stylus, Murray lets drop a scarce test pressing of a Valentino recording, circa 1923. “Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar...” he croons, the voice on key and sure, if only a little brittle. Meanwhile, the door into the collection is open, and I see just a hint of it: a glimpse of the shelves stuffed with the engraved sound of countless other voices and instruments.

Music, as it relates to an object bearing recorded sound: this is what Murray Gershenz has been obsessed with for decades. Born in the Bronx in 1922, he served as a parachute mechanic during the Second World War before moving west and stumbling into a career as a cantor for various Los Angeles synagogues. All the while he collected records and tapes, and soon collecting took over. Big band, jazz and blues. Classical, folk, rock and roll. Murray collected all of it. In the ’60s he opened up a book and music shop at Santa Monica and Western. It wasn’t long before the books were jettisoned and the music took over.

Fifty years later, one of the largest private record collections open to the public sits on Exposition Boulevard between the 10 freeway and Baldwin Hills. Painted twice across the cinderblock exterior — once in large block letters and then in cursive, over the security-gated entrance — is the name Music Man Murray. If a building can be called a doppelganger, than this drab, isolated structure might be the corollary for the man who unlocks its doors and shuffles inside each day.

We speak at Murray’s desk, in the anteroom of the two-story building. Behind me, I can feel the presence of the collection — one that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Half a million. Maybe more. (The rest is in a warehouse somewhere else.) But let’s get something straight from the outset: this is no museum exhibit, and hardly an archive. It is a singular mass, a monster comprised of hundreds of thousands of recordings, many of them ancient 78 pressings or eight-track cassettes or acetate prints, which, I am beginning to sense, no longer matter so much without each other. Maybe this is why the Collector, who is fast approaching ninety, doesn’t want the thing to splinter apart, doesn’t want it to be sold off piecemeal. He wants a buyer for the monster.

“I want to get the hell out of here,” he mutters at his desk, surrounded by favored memorabilia. An insomniac, he’s spent many nights recording compilations of rare records he didn’t want to lose track of through sale: collecting, in other words, his own collection. These favorites are here, near his desk, always in sight. “Crazy,” I say, admiringly. Murray gives me a sweet look that might be his signature. He is straight out of central casting. Behind a ticklish-looking mustache and large glasses, his eyes are bright and thoughtful, with white tufts of hair decorating the sides of an otherwise bald pate. Glancing over my shoulder I wonder if it’s time to see the collection. Go on in he tells me. He’s feeling tired today.

Behind me, the Collector stands propped within the jamb (doubtless where he ought to be in case of an earthquake), backlit by the open door to the warehouse, the shelves of the collection looming over him: sagging under the stock, insurmountable, and almost pointless — who’s going to climb them? Stymied by the albums which are shoved in so tightly together it takes effort just to pull one out, I turn to look at Murray in the doorframe, and snap a picture. What’s happened to the Collector? What is happening?

“Things just stopped moving,” Murray says, not so much glum as done. Along the side of the staircase, a hulking conveyor belt, used for transporting boxes of inventory between the first and second floors, sits idle. It hasn’t moved in a long time either.

Murray’s got other stuff to do anyway. As it turns out, he’s an actor, does TV and film and radio. If you watch Modern Family or Parks & Recreation, for example, you might have seen Murray. A documentary film by Richard Parks, about Murray and his attempts to sell the collection, debuts this weekend (see the trailer for the film below). In all, Murray seems satisfied with his life. In fact, he seems fine with moving on, leaving the collection — his life’s work — behind. The question is whether somebody will buy it complete and allow Murray to leave, for lack of a better term, with a clear conscience. Otherwise, there will be another, more ambiguous question to face: when does a collection stop being what it is?

Murray remembers the early days of his career, when he was visited by another music collector. The man wanted to sell his collection. Murray went to the man’s house and valued the collection of records — it was full of gems and rarities and worth a small fortune. At the time, starting out as he was, Murray was in no way prepared to make such an acquisition. Of course, he did anyway, taking out a loan and spending much of a day heaving boxes of the man’s records back to his shop. It was an epic score, and Murray still relishes the memory.

Two weeks later the man returned, asking if Murray would consider selling back the collection. The man must have been terribly distraught to embarrass himself this way, but Murray doesn’t remember very well. Why should he? There was no chance in hell he was giving it back. Murray does remember asking the man why he sold the collection in the first place. “Persian rugs,” the man answered. They were his new love, but not for long. The man bought a rug with the money Murray had given him, but missed his records. I imagine a distinguished-looking man in a smoking jacket. Lying on some fine, elaborate carpet, he stares mournfully at the useless record player beside him. Murray shakes his head. The Collector may have wise eyes and a kind face, but there is little sympathy now, only bemusement for the fellow who didn’t know himself well enough to understand that the collection represents the collector, and that to abandon it is to abandon oneself. If you’re ready to let go of what you once were, like Murray says he is today, that’s one thing. If you’re not, you’re like the poor fool who handed Murray his soul. Murray, it turns out, isn’t as sweet as he looks.

In “Unpacking My Library,” his essay on book collecting, Walter Benjamin claims that the best way to acquire a book is to write it oneself. The second best way, he says, is to steal it. The point? There is utter hubris in the collector’s impulse. However self-effacing or geekily awkward a collector might be, however apparently humble in manner or appearance, a true collector harbors inside of him the arrogance of a despot, the blind desire of Cortez. As Benjamin famously quoted the Latin: “Books have their fates.” And copies of books have their fates as well, he says, the most important fate being its “encounter with the collector, and his collection.” For the collector, “the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves."

Behind Music Man Murrays’s apparent sweetness, the competitive drive to acquire, to possess, still flickers in the story he tells of the errant collector. The collector is both conqueror and liberator. Of any given specific set of like objects, Murray tells me, “You have to have everything.” That is the mark of the true collector: you must possess a private Manifest Destiny, a fetish driven by rivalry, competition. The problem is that Music Man Murray’s rivals just aren’t coming anymore. There aren’t the same obsessive people out there working hard to track down, say, every last acetate copy of Heda Hopper’s radio program “Hollywood Magazine” (which, incidentally, Murray pulled for me from a pile near his desk). As Murray says, they just stopped coming. So the flicker in his eyes snaps on and off, like a pilot light not finding gas.

What puzzles me a little is why Murray doesn’t appear to be suffering from even the mildest case of existential angst. Near the end of Benjamin’s essay, the critic distinguishes between public and private libraries, noting that the phenomenon of collecting loses much of its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Why, then, is Murray okay with giving up his life’s project, the single thing that has defined him more than anything else, and just walking away? Perhaps it’s that he’s come to the conclusion that, without other collectors, he simply is no longer a collector himself. The place that is Music Man Murray and Murray the man are no longer inseparable. The place is the place. Murray is Murray. And if the hand-lettered sign on the building has lost hold of its referent, what, then, is the place worth?

Without prompting, Murray tells me an interesting if apocryphal story. It is about a journalist who visits an asylum to investigate patient treatment. The reporter speaks to different people who present clear reasons for their being committed. During his work, the reporter comes across a man whom he believes to be a visitor like himself, given how absolutely normal — totally sane — his behavior seems. It is only after a long, pleasant chat that this man reveals, in passing, that he is a patient at the asylum. The reporter is flummoxed, and blurts out, “But you’re completely fine! Totally sane! One hundred percent uncertifiable. Why in God’s name are you here!?” The man demurs; the reporter insists. At which point the man’s eyes bulge and he explodes in a rage, attacking the reporter savagely, beating him and clawing at his face. “His problem,” says Murray. “He was convinced he was crazy.” That was his sticking point, Murray says: the guy didn’t want to be told he didn’t belong there.

We’re back at Murray’s desk. I ask him what makes a collector collect, and Murray tells me it’s like malaria. “Once you get bitten, you can’t give it up.”

We smile, but I think we both know that’s not quite accurate. Collecting isn’t a contractible disease, randomly acquired. To be a true collector is an essential trait of personality, like being a “leader,” or a “clown.” It is a private pathology. There is no “somewhat of a collector.” You either are, and you always have been, or you aren’t. If it wasn’t records for Murray, it would have been bottle caps or baseball cards or vintage cars.

And perhaps this is how the story of the lunatic lines up with Murray, at least the Murray of today. Like the lunatic who isn’t a lunatic, Murray is a contradiction: a collector who isn’t a collector. For both men, it may be a question of place. The lunatic will scratch and claw to stay in the asylum no matter how often he’s told he doesn’t belong there. He will protect his rightful place in the asylum. Murray, on the other hand, is leaving the place that has defined him. And someday soon, he hopes, he will be a collector without a collection. Outside, the building with his name on its façade appears to be shrinking, just as music, too, has shrunk. These days, music lives inside a few scattered bits of data, the fetishized object becoming, at least for the masses, not so much the music as the little hand-held device upon which it plays.

I nod and Murray nods and the record scratches out the tune, “Pale hands I loved...” That’s “loved” — past tense — though I doubt this is the last time he plays it.

Left to right, filmmaker Richard Parks, Murray's son Irv, and Murray © C.P. Heiser

Richard Parks' documentary Music Man Murray premieres this weekend at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. For more information about the film you can visit Parks' site for the film, or click here for a schedule of screening times. It will also be screening at the East Bay Jewish Film Festival.

LARB Recommends

2012-01-25T15:34:00.000-08:00

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Thursday, January 26^th: Héctor Tobar in conversation with journalist Jesse Katz at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Literary Death Match featuring LARB’s Matthew Specktor, Edan Lepucki, Ben Loory, and Natashia Deon plus a trio of all-star judges at Busby’s East beginning at 8:15 pm.

Carol Wolper discusses and signs Anne of Hollywood at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Ben Marcus reads and signs his novel The Flame Alphabet at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm.

Friday, January 27^th: Brian Kellow discusses and signs Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Sunday, January 28th: Tongue and Groove presents: Heather Havrilesky, James Meetze, Susan Sherman, Leslie Schwartz, and Ron Darian at The Hotel Cafe beginning at 6:00 pm.

Tuesday, January 31^st: Pico Iyer in conversation with Los Angeles Times staff writer Tom Curwen at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Wednesday, February 1^st: An evening with David Milch discussing his writing career and new HBO series Luck at Track 16 beginning at 6:30 pm.

David Graeber discusses and signs his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm.

Thursday, February 2^nd: Tricia Tunstall in conversation with community affairs director of L.A. Philharmonic, Leni Boorstin at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Reading about Moscow (With Beijing on My Mind)

2012-01-24T11:03:00.000-08:00

by Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Collage © Lisa Jane Persky

Once upon a time, specialists in Chinese studies, like me, felt we had a lot in common with scholars who focused on Russia. We each shared an interest in large countries that had command economies and Leninist systems of rule. We each struggled to make sense of comparably opaque and often misleading official pronouncements. And when it came to works of dystopian fiction, we both studied places that were widely considered “Orwellian” in nature. But then came a pair of events whose twentieth anniversaries have just been marked: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the founding of a new Russian Federation. In the wake of these major changes, the comparative landscape began to shift. Soon, the contrasts between China and Russia seemed to far outweigh their similarities. After all, 1992 began with a new government in Moscow striving to leave the Communist era behind, while an old one in Beijing expressed its determination to keep China under Communist Party control and territorially intact.

And yet 2012 begins with the Russian and Chinese constellations once again falling into alignment. China is still sometimes referred to as Orwellian, but neither it nor Russia is now seen as the closest real-life approximation of a “Big Brother State,” a title that now belongs to settings such as North Korea where harsher forms of authoritarianism are the rule. Some China specialists, myself included, have recently argued that consumerism, materialism and a culture of distraction have come to play such a pivotal role in keeping Hu Jintao and company in power that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World may now supplant the previous fictional template through which we once viewed Chinese authoritarianism: Orwell’s 1984. My reading of commentaries and reportage on Putin’s Russia suggests that the same shift from Orwell to Huxley makes sense when we look toward this fledgling, and questionable, democracy.

The realignment of the trajectories of the two countries creates an eerie effect for me when I happen to read something on Russia with the goal of forgetting, for a brief moment, about China — the country I teach and write about for a living. My effort to escape is undermined by the feeling I sometimes get when immersed in a newspaper or magazine article about Russia — the feeling that the words coming off the page could just as well have been written about China.

This happened most recently when I picked up David Remnick’s fascinating “Letter from Moscow: The Civil Archipelago,” which appeared in the New Yorker’s final issue of 2011. Focusing largely on responses to Russia’s late 2011 elections, it offers a sweeping look at everything from the complex and challenging activities of human rights groups, to the still-underdeveloped nature of civil society in a post-totalitarian state, to the limits placed on the press in a country whose leaders are determined to contain the flow of information that undermines their authority. The big themes Remnick addresses often brought Chinese examples to my mind, but so, too, did some of its small details. For example, in trying to capture the frustration and outrage that many urban residents feel at the special perks enjoyed by members of the government, their kin and their cronies, Remnick turns to driving habits. Solving traffic congestion in Moscow is a simple matter for “officials and the well-connected,” who employ specially issued “flashing blue lights” that, when placed atop their luxury cars, allows them to zoom through traffic-snarled streets as ordinary drivers have to pull aside to let them pass. To be sure, China does not have the same blue light system. Nevertheless, the Chinese Internet is filled with angry posts describing incidents when officials and their family members acted — and got away with acting — as though the rules that apply to others simply do not apply to them.

I feel a particularly strong sense of “he could have just come back from China” as Remnick describes a recent spate of urban protests in Russia. For Remnick, this form of resistance demonstrates that the authoritarian country’s young professionals are becoming less "bovine," “apathetic” and “anesthetized by stability” than they once were. This exact assessment of Russia’s middle class struck me as something I could have read on the “Letter from China” blog by Evan Osnos. (Osnos, incidentally, reports from Beijing for the magazine that Remnick edits.) It is not just that we have been seeing an uptick in middle class activism lately in the PRC as well as in Russia. It is that, as Osnos often points out, the Chinese authorities have been working overtime to convince upwardly mobile young professionals to continue to accept a flawed status quo, as long as it brings them creature comforts: a deal that the government struck with this demographic group in the wake of 1989, and one that is becoming less and less secure as time goes by.

One particular Osnos post on this theme, written in 2010 and called “The Age of Complacency?”, reviews the main points of a dystopian novel by Chan Koonchung, a former Hong Kong resident now based in Beijing, which was generating enormous buzz in China’s capital. Just released in English as The Fat Years, Chan’s novel (which owes a good deal to both Orwell and Huxley but only name-checks the latter) examines how “the most privileged and educated men and women” in a China just over the horizon (the story is set in 2013), “struggle to balance the benefits and perils of life under high-functioning authoritarianism.” The novel encourages us to wonder about the choices that lie before those who, as opposed to being left behind during their country’s rise, “have reaped the rewards” of economic development, but now increasingly wonder what they have sacrificed in terms of political liberties. Remnick identifies a similarly tricky situation in Russia, at a time when there is increasing unease with Putin’s government among not just dissidents and the poor, but some who have been doing quite well for themselves in recent years.

Osnos’ “Letter from China” is one of the blogs I rely on most heavily to help me track the changes in a country that I can only periodically visit. His April comments on the Arab Spring were particularly fascinating for a China specialist watching from afar. In posts entitled “China: The Big Chill” and “Why Ai Weiwei Matters,” he reported on government moves to intimidate or silence gadfly figures, including many less internationally famous than Ai who were detained around the same time and yet in some cases remain in prison. These moves to quell freedom of expression, Osnos argues, were launched in part because Beijing was jumping at shadows in the wake of Mubarak’s fall. Yes, the Arab Spring touched even China. And, as Remnick notes, the same was true for Russia. The swift transformations in the Middle East and North Africa of early 2011 ensured that the year would be a nervous one for authoritarian leaders of all ideological persuasions, and his depiction of the anxiety in Russian leadership circles was eerily similar in tone to those nervous shudders emanating from Beijing.

The tense state of affairs in Chechnya, a frontier zone with a largely Muslim population, doesn’t do anything to help fears of actual resistance spreading to the capital. Remnick’s “Letter from Moscow” highlights these regional “differences” within Russia. Despite the shift toward Brave New World governance in Moscow, the style of rule in Chechnya seems to be much more akin to the “boot-on-the-face” variety depicted in 1984. In Remnick’s words, the authorities are particularly “ruthless” and “draconian” in dealing with any hint of dissent there, and he describes the dangers journalists face in reporting on and from the region. Chechnya lingers as perhaps the biggest failure in “democratic” Russia, making it, again, not so different from China these days.

Again, Osnos’ coverage of China, in this case of regional strife in the borderland area of Xinjiang, aligns with Remick’s in interesting ways. Like Chechnya, which stands at the very edge of the Russian Federation, Xinjiang is located at the edge of the PRC. In a July 2009 post called “Looking Beyond Ethnicity,” Osnos refers to Beijing’s “decades of trying, unsuccessfully, to snuff out resistance” in Xinjiang. The Party’s mishandling of Uighur/Han tensions — and its overlooking of their economic aspects — has resulted in a region “embroiled in a pattern of uprising and crackdown” that contrasts sharply with the situation in most other parts of the country. In a follow-up (“Xinjiang: The Reckoning Begins”), Osnos describes a Han man armed with a stick who tears open a car door to threaten the pair of foreign reporters inside.

The similarities between Russia (where national elections, no matter how flawed, are held) and China (where the upcoming leadership transition is being worked out in obscure ways) should not be overstated. The Russian press is not controlled as tightly as the Chinese media. Putin is not just like Hu Jintao. Chechnya is not just like Xinjiang. And so on.

Still, even though any China-Russia analogy is bound to be imperfect, imperfect analogies can be useful. They can lead us to break out of entrenched, misleading modes of thinking and help us become attentive to connections and parallels we might otherwise miss. Putting today’s Russia and contemporary China in a shared category, rather than one in a post-Communist box and the other in a still-Communist one, can help us see things about each country more clearly. It also makes it less surprising to hear that leaders in Moscow and Beijing may once more be looking to the other capital for inspiration about how to handle specific problems, as Remnick illustrates in his one comment about China: a reference to members of Putin’s circle studying the sophisticated techniques the Chinese authorities have developed in their struggle to control the flow of dissenting opinions via the Internet.

The imperfect China-Russia analogy inspires a final fanciful thought, triggered in part by 2012 marking not just the 20th anniversary of the founding of a successor state to the old Soviet Union but also the 40th anniversary of a turning point in Chinese history: Nixon’s historic meeting with Mao. If a Rip Van Winkle figure prone to two-decade-long naps woke in late February 1972, after falling asleep in 1952, he would have been shocked to learn that a summit was underway in China between Mao (one of the world’s most famous Communist leaders) and Richard Nixon (a fervently anti-Communist American President). But as the preceding exercise has shown, if the same fellow dozed off again in 1992 and woke up now, he would also be in for an unsettling surprise: discovering it was no longer easy to tell, without paying close attention to details, whether a New Yorker “Letter from…” article or blog post was about a post-Communist Moscow or the still-Communist Beijing.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chair of the History Department at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2010). His reviews and commentaries have appeared in newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and a wide range of magazines and journals of opinion, including New Left Review, the TLS, the Nation, the Huffington Post, Time and Newsweek. He is the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies and co-founder of the UCI-based China Beat blog/electronic magazine. Read his first piece for LARB, "Hot Dystopic," which appeared in May 2011.

Articles by Evan Osnos referenced by Professor Wasserstrom are available at Osnos’s blog. Specific links are as follows:

“The Age of Complacency?”

“China: The Big Chill”

“Looking Beyond Ethnicity”

Radar LARB

2012-01-23T15:03:00.000-08:00

Image: M. Goetzman

Literature and Sport from Ford to Foster Wallace by Jason Cowley: "I used to think that a choice had to be made between sport and literature; that you couldn’t be both a sportsman and a book man. They represented two separate and distinct cultures, the life of the mind and the life of action, and there was no connecting bridge between them... I was wrong, of course, but it took me many years and the emergence of the new memoir-writing about sport, inspired by Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Pete Davies’s All Played Out in the early 1990s, to understand why."

Pico Iyer: An advocation of the long and meandering sentence: "Nowadays the planet is moving too fast for even a Rushdie or DeLillo to keep up, and many of us in the privileged world have access to more information than we know what to do with. What we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in a larger light. No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news flashes or RSS feeds, but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances — the 'gaps,' as Annie Dillard calls them — that don't show up on many screens. Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker... Enter (I hope) the long sentence..."

David Shields: An advocation of a newer, more immediate fiction: "Books, if they want to survive, need to figure out how to coexist with contemporary culture and catalyze the same energies for literary purposes. That cut-to-the-bone, cut-to-the-chase quality: this is how to write and read now."

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Jennifer Grotz's poem "Poppies": "When I first read Jennifer Grotz’s 'Poppies' all I could tell you was that I liked its sound. I didn’t have any idea what the poem was about. I just liked letting the words fall off my tongue when I read it aloud. It was elemental, and I think almost every poem I love is like that for me. At a base level it just sounds good... But then I went back and I saw the philosophy at work."

[excerpt] Michael Schulman on Polari, "once the jabberwocky for British gay men": "The existence of a 'gay language' is not well known, even in the U.K. A poll of British gay men in 2000 revealed that half of respondents had never heard of it. If Polari is known outside of England, it is most likely because Morrissey once titled an album Bona Drag, which means 'nice outfit.' And there is a brief Polari scene — with subtitles — in the 1998 film Velvet Goldmine ('A tart, my dears, a tart in gildy clobber!'). But you’d have to scour a lot of pubs to find anyone who still uses it in conversation. When the Cambridge list came out, Paul Baker, the leading Polari scholar, was surprised that it had been considered endangered, not extinct."

LARB Recommends

2012-01-18T14:33:00.001-08:00

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Wednesday, January 18^th: Eric Weiner in conversation with Lisa Napoli discussing his new book at Track 16 at Bergamot Station beginning at 8:00 pm.

Ayad Akhtar and Amy Waldman: Two novelists on the lives of American Muslims before and after 9/11 at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

The Under Appreciated & Egocentric Poetry Readings presents Kate Gale, Billy Burgos, Rebecca Gonzales, and Luivette Resto at Ellis Martin Gallery beginning at 7:00 pm.

Thursday, January 19^th: Kramers Ergot Number 8 book party release with Ben Jones, Johnny Ryan, Sammy Harkham, and Tim Hensley at FAMILY beginning at 7:00 pm.

Friday, January 20^th: Steven J. Ross discusses and signs Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

A Reading Party with Popcorn and Young Adult Authors (Carol Tanzman, Janet Tashijian, Crickett Rumley, and LARB YA Editor Cecil Castellucci) at The Last Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

Lectures from Beyond present Will Alexander: "Poetry as Divine Roulette" at Beyond Baroque beginning at 7:00 pm.

Saturday, January 21^st: Hollywood Forever and PEN Center USA Present: A reading by Anne Carson at The Masonic Lodge beginning at 8:00 pm, introduced by LARB Poetry Editor Gabrielle Calvocoressi.

Monday, January 23^rd: Author Norman Lebrecht in conversation with Deborah Borda, president and CEO of Los Angeles Philharmonic Association at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Wednesday, January 25^th: Les Figues Press presents: Play It Forward at The Last Bookstore, starting at 7:30 pm. Readers will include Harold Abramowitz, Carribean Fragoza, Myriam Gurba, Jen Hofer, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, and the LARB's very own Kate Wolf.

Thursday, January 26^th: Héctor Tobar in conversation with journalist Jesse Katz at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Literary Death Match featuring LARB Senior Fiction Editor Matthew Specktor, Edan Lepucki, Ben Loory, Natashia Deon, and a trio of all-star judges at Busby’s East beginning at 8:15 pm.

Radar LARB

2012-01-16T07:22:00.000-08:00

Image: C.P. Heiser

Kate Braverman on this place: “I know California isn't a real destination. You can't get there from New Jersey, not simply by following a line drawn on a map. The process of arrival is more subtle and complex. It involves acts of contrition. You must appease the gods. You must find novel forms of penance. You must tattoo your children and look at the wonder. It's about conjuring and awakening and intuitions you wish you never had.” (From Wonders of the West, offline and out of print)

Dave Gardetta on the true costs of parking: "Our downtown contains more parking spaces per acre than any other city in the world and has been adding them at a rate of about 1,000 a year for a century. If you grew up here, the earliest and most essential phrase drilled into you by adults — 'Remember, we’re in blue Mickey' — was uttered in a parking lot bigger than Disneyland itself. Angelenos can immediately recognize outsiders, lost souls seen wandering through parking garages with no memory of where the Corolla sits."

Tilda Swinton on Woolf's Orlando: "Woolf wrote of the limitations of memoir – 'they leave out the person to whom things happened' – and so with Orlando she fuses memoir and biography, that discipline so revered in her father’s study and which she so eagerly wished to revolutionise in a night. We could say that Orlando is Woolf’s avatar dressed up in Sackville-West’s clothing."

Caitlin Flanagan on what it feels like to be a girl (reading Joan Didion): "Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves. 'I’ve been reading you since I was an adolescent,' a distinctly non-adolescent female voice said on a call-in show a decade ago, and Didion nodded, comprehending. All of us who love her the most have, in ways literal and otherwise, been reading her since adolescence."

Chris Wallace on what it feels like to be him: "At least four times I’ve gone home from a day’s work without a word, never to return. I’ve left schools, left my position as starting quarterback for a college football team, and left this piece a half dozen times. My distinguishing feature is a pair of taillights."

Lars Bang Larsen on art in the long nineties: "Art became animated by biennials, magazines and art fairs; by artists who strayed from the studio and integrated their mobility into their work; and by curators who shed the historical baggage of the museum’s archive. The general activity that surrounded art – its media, infrastructure and social activity – became as prominent and energetic as art itself."

'Who do you know that I don't?': A Conversation with Ry Cooder

2012-01-12T13:47:00.000-08:00

by C.P. Heiser

Ry Cooder; photo by Vincent Valdez

 In November, Rolling Stone released its “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” list, a ranking of the top-100 compiled through the polling of musicians and other experts recruited by the magazine. Ry Cooder appears high on this list, ranked number 31 all time (following slide guitarist Elmore James and just ahead of ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons). On the only other occasion when the magazine sought to put the world’s greatest guitarists into single file (in 2003), Cooder broke the top ten, coming in eighth place. And it is Cooder, probably as much as any artist appearing in the ranking, who underscores the exasperating reductionism and arbitrary nature of such a list. As a composer, musician and producer he is remarkable precisely for his scope beyond the instrument he plays—for his focus on collaboration (on projects like the Buena Vista Social Club) and the inclusion of traditional influences in his own music. For all his individual greatness and legendary skill as a slide guitarist, Ry Cooder’s career has been anything but singular.  

Los Angeles Stories, Cooder’s first book of short fiction, was released in October by City Lights. There is a feeling in the stories, as in much of his music, that something is being documented; that voices, and personal histories, are being preserved not for posterity, but against annihilation by some overriding and corrupted power.

A Los Angeles native, Cooder sets (and dates) his stories in booming 1940s and 50s LA. His best characters — especially the working musicians that often appear — exist in a world we might rightly identify as the hazy space between the numbers of "top one hundred” success. Skipping back and forth across the boundaries of different worlds, Cooder’s characters rub elbows and bend rules, all the while maintaining a delicate kind of invisibility.   I spoke with Ry Cooder in November, not long after the release of Los Angeles Stories. He appears in conversation with journalist Lynell George at Vroman’s Bookstore tonight.

Your collection Los Angeles Stories opens with “All in a day’s work,” the story of a friendless man whose job it is to go door to door asking people to list themselves and their occupations or businesses in something called the City Directory, which was sponsored by local business. It called to mind All The Names, the novel by the Portuguese writer José Saramago, which features a clerk trapped in an arcane bureaucracy called the Central Registry, where the records for every birth, marriage and death in the unnamed city are kept. While Saramago’s clerk lives with the weight of the names themselves, your character, Frank, is out finding them, creating a catalogue from scratch. And unlike the unnamed city in Saramago’s novel, the historical Los Angeles of your story is very real, as was the Directory itself. How did you discover it?

  I have a friend who’s a garage sale connoisseur — a tool man, a DIY guy, a proponent of “if you can’t unscrew it, you don’t own it.” He ran across the Directory somewhere, and brought it to me. It predates phone books by many years and first appeared before WWI, a time when nobody had phones in their own homes. Just imagining how they compiled this thing, it must have been a huge job. I still don’t really know how they managed it; I just made it up based on how I figured they would have to do it — a huge force assigned to specific territories, going door to door, adding entries and so on.  

From that I figured you could invent a character who worked for the City Directory — a simple, do-nothing type of guy who happened to encounter things as he made the rounds on this job. There would be a story behind every door. He’d be the kind of person nobody would mind opening the door for. He’d live on Bunker Hill because you’d want him to contemplate the people who lived there, in those old apartments and big decaying houses.  

"All in a day’s work” is set in 1940, in a Los Angeles of limitless growth and possibility, and you present us with this one little guy, literally going door-to-door, noting down the souls of the city in the interest of this growth. For him, the only reality is the one he walks through. He doesn’t even know what’s happening in Europe with “Adolf H,” as another character in the story puts it.

  I have this huge map of Los Angeles, a digital scan of a hand drawn map and anytime I lingered on something in the Directory, I’d look it up in the map. With the map and the book I began to visualize the city as it was, and once I did that, it wasn’t hard to imagine people connected to the businesses listed. My character for this story would be assigned to beauty parlors and visit a place called Beauty by Rene — which is inspired by an actual listing in the Directory.   

There were all these entrepreneurial people too. Modern, pragmatic people who, during the Depression, began opening up their homes to serve meals. Lunch rooms as they were called. So you had a lot of apartment houses listed by name. Doing other research, I’d seen photographs of the Chili Counter in Aliso Flats, which was opened in front of someone’s house on a residential street. Sure enough, when I looked it up in the Directory, there it was.  

There was just a lot of stuff going on at the time that would never fly now. Not that you could necessarily get away with anything, because it was an entirely different mentality; but there was just more space for all kinds of oddball things to happen and be done that in this day and age you just can’t do. What we have now is an endless tableau of corporate underwriting and advertising that undermines that individual impulse to do it yourself.

  What came first (to you, at least): the City Directory, or Los Angeles Stories? Were you already writing the stories or did the Directory help you to write them?  

The story in the book, and the Directory itself, came later on, after I’d written a majority of the other stories in the collection. Once I got the Directory, and started working on a story, I saw that it would be a good beginning. At that moment having written all the other stories I could see immediately: ‘Ah! I know where I’m going with this!’ If you’re attentive and alert, you’ll be prepared when somebody gives you something valuable to use. I learned that playing music.  

Billy Tipton turns up in Los Angeles Stories, a jazz musician and bandleader who is probably most famous for turning out to be gender assigned female at birth. Even though he grew up female, he was able to keep his switch to male presentation more or less secret from the public-at-large until after his death. It’s kind of amazing how a whole community of musicians and groupies kept the secret for so long, enabling Tipton to pass seamlessly in the public eye. How did Tipton find his way into your book?  

Secret knowledge comes with belonging to any kind of closed society. For touring musicians, it has a lot to do with being on the road so frequently, apart from families and regular social orders, living in this other world. Tipton is a perfect example of that. I wanted my fictional character — this fella’ Al Mafis who is half-Mexican and who can pass for white (as long as he doesn’t aim too high) — I wanted him to introduce us to that world where the rules can be bent, if you’re careful. In cities, but especially in LA, there was and is an immigrant mixture that blurs color lines. But musicians in particular could go where other people of color simply couldn’t. The members of swing bands, for example, could turn up at parties and homes that other minority people of the time would never be allowed in to. Of course, they might have to enter through different doors, but they were there, and accepted in a certain way.  

So in my story, Tipton and my fictional character Al are doing this all over the place, except on totally different scales. And Al knows that if he’s smart and careful, he’s going to find something, and something is going to break for him, though necessarily to a lesser degree than it did for Tipton. The public at the time simply didn’t know what was going on. Like someone says in the story: The white kids who come to see one of these acts: they don’t even know what time it is.   

You might say Billy Tipton is just giving us a nice pivot, a good fulcrum, to move some things around. He’s passing, big time. Betty Newlands, the girl he seduces in the story and brings to LA, was the name of the mother of a friend of mine. I still have such a picture of the real Betty in my mind, after all these years, and so I put her in this story, running away with Billy after getting them into trouble. You have to draw from something personal.  Tipton’s a good example of your interest in complex hybrids: people who mix and are mixed and get mixed up in different ways.

You grew up in Santa Monica in the Fifties. Where do you think you got this initial curiosity for the great mix, which we see in your musical collaboration, but now also in your story collection?  

Santa Monica was pretty white and it was incredibly segregated. You had a small Mexican and black population which was cornered in a small neighborhood. It was what you call a Sundown town — the kind of place where there could never be free movement for people of color; a pretty hard ass place to be a minority of any kind.  Raymond Chandler writes of Santa Monica pretty dimly — he called it Bay City – but he hated its fascism. Donald Douglas, based in Santa Monica, ran the show there like a fiefdom. Overall, quite a tight-ass little town. I didn’t like it at all when I was a little kid. It was boring, a terrible place. Flat and featureless.  

What got you out?  

I had a series of eye procedures done to correct my vision when I was a kid, and we had to go to Downtown to see the doctor. I loved looking out the window at the old buildings and apartments. The doctor would give me a pad and pencil and I’d just draw what I saw. ‘Take him up Bunker Hill,’ said the doctor to my mom. ‘Just go up Angels Flight. It’ll be great.’ But my mom was so scared to go into the streets that we never did. Because of that, I was able to see that Bunker Hill and Downtown were where it was at and I started going on my own at a pretty young age.

  I loved Pershing Square, and the mix of people. The music that I was interested in — coming from the South — the Oakies and Arkies and all that — it was there. You could see there was a whole world once you got to Downtown. So growing up in Santa Monica, all I wanted to do was leave it. And it was easy. Public transportation was an ordinary thing to do in the Fifties. My mother hated to drive. When she had to do it she was totally overcome by anxiety, so when I was willing to take a bus and a trolley to see my eye doctor in Downtown, she said fine.   

Your stories, set in the Forties and the Fifties, feature regular people living in a pretty weird place – Los Angeles – at a time when its growth seemed unstoppable. The city is less a background then a recurring subject for your character sketches, which, as in the case of the tailor Ray Montalvo in “Who do you know that I don’t?”, are almost always concerned with themes of identity and status.   

Back then a tailor would be the kind of person who is peripheral, but important. Somehow, for some reason, a tailor is a very confidential person. He is supposed to keep very quiet. Just about the only more confidential person out there is the undertaker. And with that, there is status in the community – so-and-so knows this and so-and-so knows that. Tailors trade in made-to-order outfits, sure, but they trade in secrets too.   

My characters don’t have the privilege and carte blanche that rich people do in terms of how they live and preserve their wealth. At the same time this is a time before the dismantling of our trolleys and the construction of the freeway system that Mike Davis writes so well about — a freeway system that functions to cordon off and contain certain communities from spreading into others. So it was more of a wide-open place, more available to everyone.  

Spokane, Washington: more than once in Los Angeles Stories, it comes up as a place to go, if you’re leaving LA.  

Spokane is the opposite of Los Angeles. Pure white, an end of the road type of place. My dad worked for Grayson’s department stores and he travelled a lot to straighten out problems in their regional stores. He came back from Spokane one time and told me about this whole embezzlement scheme that he’d unearthed and how he confronted this clerk who panicked and blew the whistle on management. I incorporated that story. And then of course Billy Tipton ended up in Spokane, broke and miserable, living in a crappy apartment. Spokane is supposed to be very beautiful, but I guess I view it as the last bend in the road.  

Was your dad much of a storyteller?

  It was very hard to draw anything out of my dad. He wouldn’t give anything away. The things that told the story for me were the photographs. Not my dad’s, but my dad’s dad — my grandfather — who was a doctor and a photographer and generally an all-around guy who travelled a lot and was curious about a lot of things and took a lot of pictures. My dad kept those photos and I loved to look at them. Those photos got me thinking. And since it was hard to get my dad to ever say what was going on in the photos, I got to making up scenarios for them. Most of the story of [the album] I, Flathead is drawn from those pictures. But as a little kid I would make up stories based on my grandfather’s pictures, and I would mention them to other people. My parents would always scold me -- you can’t just say things about yourself that aren’t true! But I just felt the need to interpret them somehow.

LARB Recommends

2012-01-10T21:12:00.001-08:00

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Wednesday, January 11^th: Tea Obreht discusses and signs The Tiger’s Wife at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

Ellis Avery discusses and signs The Last Nude at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Thursday, January 12^th: Slake after Dark presents LARB contributing editor Aimee Bender reading selections from her short stories and novels at Atwater Crossing beginning at 7:00 pm.

Lynell George in conversation with Ry Cooder in support of his book, Los Angeles Stories at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

Friday, January 13^th: Exchange- A Panel on L.A.’s Emerging Alternative Creative Economy at The Last Bookstore beginning at 8:00 pm.

Tuesday, January 17^th: [ALOUD] at Central Library presents Luis J. Rodriguez and Father Gregory Boyle discuss the struggles of post-gang life beginning at 7:00 pm.

Listen in as comic geniuses Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel discuss their new book, Lunatics at the Skirball Center beginning at 7:30 pm.

Wednesday, January 18^th: Eric Weiner in conversation with Lisa Napoli discussing his new book at Track 16 at Bergamot Station beginning at 8:00 pm.

Ayad Akhtar and Amy Waldman: Two novelists on the lives of American Muslims before and after 9/11 at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Radar LARB

2012-01-09T17:49:00.000-08:00

Bee © Mike Goetzman

James M. Cain on Southern California: "If you are like myself before I came here, you have formed, from Sunkist ads, newsreels, movie magazines, railroad folders, and so on, a some¬what false picture of it, and you will have to get rid of this before you can understand what I am trying to say . . . Wash out, then, the "land of sunshine, fruit, and flowers": all these are here, but not with the lush, verdant fragrance that you have probably imagined . . . Wash out the palm trees, half visible beyond the tap dancing platform . . . When you have got this far, you can begin quite starkly with a desert."

Lapham's Quarterly on idleness: "It is the soul’s first habitat, the original self ambushed—cross-sectioned—in its state of nature, before it has been stirred to make a plan, to direct itself toward something. We open our eyes in the morning and for an instant—more if we indulge ourselves—we are completely idle, ourselves. And then we launch toward purpose; and once we get under way, many of us have little truck with that first unmustered self, unless in occasional dreamy asides as we look away from our tasks, let the mind slip from its rails to indulge a reverie or a memory."

Cory Doctorow on the enduring relationship between science fiction and the future: "I believe that in nearly every instance where science fiction has successfully ‘‘predicted’’ a turn of events, it’s more true to say that it has inspired that turn of events. Gene Roddenberry’s set-dressers didn’t ‘‘predict’’ that Motorola’s engineers would make flip-phones that bore a more-than-passing resemblance to Star Trek’s communicators. Rather, Motorola’s engineers were trekkers. Flip-phones were ‘‘predicted’’ by Gene Roddenberry in only the most trivial sense – the same sense in which I ‘‘predict’’ that a pizza will arrive shortly after I order it."

Michael Prodger on David Hockney: "He is, for all his popularity, a figure who divides opinion. He is widely admired as one of the finest draughtsmen of his generation and for his remarkable sense of colour. His fascination with technology meanwhile has been seen as both innovative and as a distraction from his real metier. The content of his pictures is lauded for its evocation of place — a California swimming pool or a cool 1970s interior — and criticised for a lack of depth. He has been dismissed as merely a lightweight if joyous flâneur like Raoul Dufy and hailed as encapsulating the spirit of the age."

Jason Diamond on books and branding "authenticity": "Books have always been a status symbol for some parts of society. . . But this impulse to collect these books is slightly more complicated: it isn’t just about posturing but about a certain longing. The rustic, the outdated, the handcrafted and antiquated—these things seem ubiquitous. Cucumbers pickled in mason jars line the shelves at Whole Foods, men are buying bespoke suits styled after bygone eras, and hip kids are throwing Depression-era hobo-themed weddings. We’re a generation enthralled by authenticity and craftsmanship. Walter Benjamin wrote that in an era when everything was reproduced, nothing had the aura of originality. Now, most men’s clothing is made en masse—and we find ourselves missing the hand stitched. Likewise, many of our libraries consist only of e-books—and our old paperbacks seem to posses a one-of-a kind personality."

John Ruscer on the literary magazine Harlequin Creature: "The journal's cover is crafted by letter press, and every page of every copy is hand-typed on a vintage typewriter. No photocopying or inkjets here. The Harlequin Creature crew produces each copy of their journals through "typing bees," where Smith Coronas, Underwoods and Royals bang away and carefully placed keystrokes forge every letter."
Harelquin Creature is currently taking submissions.

LARB Recommends

2012-01-04T19:35:00.000-08:00

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Thursday, January 5^th: Jeff Garlin in Conversation with Henry Rollins to discuss Rollins’s new book Occupants at Largo beginning at 8:00 pm.

Kathryn Kay discusses and signs The Gilder at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

Saturday, January 7^th: Acker & Blacker’s The Thrilling Adventure Hour featuring WorkJuice Players Paul F. Tompkins, Paget Brewster, and many more at Largo beginning at 8:30 pm.

Sunday, January 8^th: The New Short Fiction Series presents a reading by Elizabeth E. King at The Federal Bar beginning at 7:00 pm.

Hammer Conversations presents: curator Kellie Jones and her her father- renowned poet, playwright, and activist Amiri Baraka discussing their new book at Hammer Museum beginning at 2:00 pm.

Wednesday, January 11^th: Téa Obreht discusses and signs The Tiger’s Wife at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

Ellis Avery discusses and signs The Last Nude at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Thursday, January 12^th: Slake after Dark presents LARB Contributing Editor Aimee Bender reading selections from her short stories and novels at Atwater Crossing beginning at 7:00 pm.

Lynell George in conversation with Ry Cooder in support of his book, Los Angeles Stories at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

Siddhartha Deb: A Teacher of a Different Kind

2011-12-27T15:42:00.000-08:00

In the ninth installment of the LARB’s Writers on Teachers series, Morten Høi Jensen discusses Siddhartha Deb, a rising star of the New York literary scene whose new nonfiction book on contemporary India, The Beautiful and the Damned, has met with some controversy (its first chapter was expurgated in the country to which the book is devoted, thanks to a court injunction).

Edmund Wilson once described his Princeton teacher, Christian Gauss, as “a teacher of a different kind — the kind who starts trains of thought that he does not himself guide to conclusions but leaves in the hands of his students to be carried on by themselves.”

Siddhartha Deb, too, is a teacher of a different kind. He is young, for starters, and seems often to stand apart from the academic milieu; though he keeps a formal, professional distance to his students he is really more like an older sibling than one of the customary mid-life antiques one always half-expects. He is well-versed in the latest contemporary writing; he listens to MC Solaar and wears hoodies when not in the classroom; he writes lucid, intelligent criticism for hip New York journals like n+1 and Bookforum.

In other words, when it comes to Deb the generational gap that unavoidably exists between students and professors is pretty narrow. This gap shrinks even further once you factor in the genuine sympathy and interest Siddhartha always displays. My stock-image of him in a classroom has him hunched over the desk with his arms in front of him, listening and nodding his head intently, muttering, ‘Right, right, right, right.’ And yet he manages to command respect. While a student of his at Eugene Lang College of The New School I often felt the tectonic plates of my own opinions and tightly-held ideas loosen or shift.

I took Deb’s class “Reading for Writers: Roberto Bolaño.” He had already written at some length about Bolaño for Harper’s and the Times Literary Supplement, and in a 2007 panel organized by n+1 — later published in their pamphlet series as What we Should Have Known: Two Discussions — he added Bolaño’s name alongside W.G. Sebald’s as one of the two of the most important contemporary fiction writers. In that same panel discussion Siddhartha said of his students that they often seemed to lack historical awareness: “They’re very bright, they go to a liberal arts college; they’re very smart. But whatever kind of historical context it is — world-historical context certainly, but even an American historical context — is missing.” The Bolaño class wasn’t narrowly designed to explicate the Chilean novelist’s work, but to consider it in as large and amiable a way as possible. Imparting on us the weight and scope of historical context was paramount.

In his long Harper’s essay, Siddhartha argues that “Bolaño is in some sense working over the unsolved case of Latin American violence,” and part of the thrill of the class was the sense that we, too, were contributing to a case of strong literary and political importance, and that this case (because Bolaño’s fiction and essays were still being translated) was an ongoing one. We were — all of us — discovering and digesting his work in tandem with its appearance in English; with Siddhartha’s guidance we navigated everything from the politics of literary translation to the history of the book review; we considered the decline of manifesto-writing and the rise of the MFA short story; we even looked into odd modern cultural phenomena like Stuff White People Like. This was the thrill of discovery, not just of an individual writer but of the reverberations of storytelling in historical and cultural terms. Bolaño presented a world for us, but it was Deb who helped us explore it.

On the day of our final class I was walking down Sixth Avenue with my friend (and fellow classmate) Alyssa, lamenting the fact that we wouldn’t be spending two days a week in a classroom with Siddhartha anymore. When I casually mentioned the possibility of starting a review or discussion group, she broke into a spasm of excitement and passion. We immediately set about enlisting other students and, privately referring to ourselves as “The Siddhartha Debs,” agreed to meet once a week at Café Loup (eventually we downgraded, for financial reasons, to City Tavern on Thirteenth Street). Over gin or Jameson we revisited class discussions and vowed to uphold the literary flame Bolaño and Siddhartha had kindled. When eventually we put together our modest little zine, Siddhartha emerged as our most vocal and enthusiastic supporter; he invited us to come present our journal to one of his classes, and got us a spot in an impressive faculty reading series at The New School.

This was a gift. For months we had been reading and writing with Siddhartha in mind. His dual role both as an accomplished fiction writer and engagé literary critic was, we felt, something to aspire to.

I realize now that the thrill of discovery was not limited to Bolaño only, but applied in equal measure to Siddhartha’s own writing. In The Point of Return (2002), his debut novel, there is a description of the narrator’s father that invokes Siddhartha’s gifts as a writer and critic:

“It was as if, with retirement, the layers of life as a veterinary doctor, as an officer, had fallen away to reveal the peasant who had always lived beneath the suits and ties.”

Cutting through many a congealed convention to reveal undercurrents of a political, social, and cultural nature, with a critical eye that is — to use one of David Foster Wallace’s memorable neologisms — "incisionish": this is the Siddhartha way. The Beautiful and the Damned, his brilliant new book of narrative non-fiction, embodies this method. At a reading at KGB Bar earlier this fall, I was happy and proud to see him greeted with excitement and interest. He deserves it; his writing, like his teaching, is of an altogether different kind.

Morten Høi Jensen is a freelance book critic. His writing has appeared in Bookforum, Open Letters Monthly and The Quarterly Conversation. He is books editor for IDIOM Magazine.

Radar LARB

2011-12-26T14:19:00.000-08:00

The Boxing Day Swim (courtesy fimb and flickr creative commons)

Football and foxhunts, department store sales and epic sessions in the pub: as this article points out it's a wonder Americans haven't adopted Boxing Day for themselves (never mind it's that other kind of football). O well. You still have the blips at Radar LARB (most Mondays):

The Full-Stop editors: The Situation on American Writing: Dana Spiotta: "I truly don’t think about audience at all until a book comes out. Then I wonder who will respond to it and why. I have no idea if the audience for serious fiction has grown or contracted. I don’t feel as pessimistic about it as I ought to. I just think humans want and need to read good fiction. Maybe they forget it sometimes, but I can’t imagine people will give up reading stories."

Michelle Dean: The Struggle for the Occupy Wall Street Archives: "An example of how Jez talks: The first time I asked him to explain his motives for starting the archives, he grinned and said, 'The idea came from a number of places, and I’ll try to make it as simple as possible, as succinct as possible.' He paused and then took a deep breath. 'There is an essay, or an interview with Jacques Derrida, which occurs in a book called Philosophy in a Time of Terror.'"

Alan P. Lightman: The Accidental Universe: Science's Crisis of Faith: "Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles."

Maria Russo: Is 2011 Really Just 1991?: "Kurt Andersen has really done it now. His more than three decades spent monitoring the tremolo fluctuations in urban American style, power and class distinctions appear to have ended in defeat, with a single, glum Vanity Fair essay."

Kee Hinckley: "On Pseudonymity, Privacy and Responsibility on Google+."

Passionate Utterances: Learning from Stanley Cavell

2011-12-23T23:14:00.000-08:00

The seventh installment of LARB's Writers On Teachers series: Sianne Ngai describes her time studying with Stanley Cavell. Find the whole series in one convenient sidebar near the top of the blog.

I was a grad student in English at Harvard in the mid-90s, but physically there for just three years, anxious to move to Brooklyn for a relationship as soon as I became ABD. In that brief but intense period of time, I tried to take as many courses offered by Stanley Cavell as possible. In my last year, I asked him to be a member of my dissertation committee. Looking back I’m still flooded with gratitude (and astonishment) by the fact that he said yes.

At the time I couldn’t have said why I felt so attuned to Cavell’s writing. I just knew, after reading his essay on moods in Emerson and Nietzsche (“Aversive Thinking”) and then his books on Thoreau and remarriage comedy (The Senses of Walden, Pursuits of Happiness), that I wanted to read more, and to think and talk with him as much as possible about the things he thought were interesting. All the more so when I realized that, in person, Stanley Cavell was exactly like the voice his writing projected. That voice, no matter what it happened to be speaking about — Shakespeare and the avoidance of love, Jacques Derrida and J. L. Austin, the Hollywood women’s film of the 1930s and 40s — was unfailingly generous and infectiously interesting. It was a meta-philosophical voice, preoccupied less with the wrongness of skepticism (that is, with skepticism understood as intellectual error, thereby capable of intellectual correction) than with its status as a basic condition of human life and also as a kind of madness, a denial of our shared reality with other minds. Cavell’s voice was a kind of therapy against that madness. It was also an utterly and profoundly non-snobby voice: the voice of a philosopher concerned with philosophy’s aversion to the ordinary, and with the nondiscursive aspects of ordinary language — its affect and force, its ontology as action — that seemed to interest so few other philosophers of language at the time. It was, finally and significantly, the voice of someone deeply interested in how gender inflects both of these problems.

I took four courses in a row with Cavell, all in the philosophy department: two graduate seminars on Lacan, an undergraduate lecture called “Aesthetics: Opera and Film,” and a graduate seminar on King Lear. I loved these courses, even when I wasn’t sure I understood what they were truly about. (It’s called “Opera and Film,” but what’s it about really? I kept asking myself.) This was mostly due to my ignorance; I was still playing catch-up, in part by reading as much of Cavell’s work as possible. But I think it was also due to the genuinely open and experimental nature of the courses Cavell taught. He was trying to work out certain questions in them, with us. This felt really thrilling.

“Opera and Film” was one of my favorites. The syllabus, as was always the case in Cavell’s courses, was not so much eclectic as complex. We listened to and/or watched Carmen, Don Giovanni, Tannhäuser, The Lady Eve, Now Voyager, Moonstruck, Smiles of a Summer Night. We read J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things With Words with Shoshana Felman’s The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, Catherine Clément and Susan McClary on women in opera, Baudelaire on Wagner, and selections from Cavell’s own The World Viewed and A Pitch of Philosophy. Sometimes, delightfully, he would pause during a lecture, walk to the piano on stage, and play a passage or two from the score discussed in the reading. And as the semester progressed it became clear that what the course was “really about” was the peculiar ontology of what Cavell (adapting J.L. Austin) called passionate utterances: how they demand a response in kind, how words can be “owed,” or thought of as a form of indebtedness to others.All of this was linked to the question of whether the split between words and music in opera was gendered, and to what became of the female voice in Hollywood melodrama.

Similarly, the grad seminar on King Lear was really about what Cavell called problematic praise, which was, in turn, another way to think about the complexities of aesthetic judgment and criticism. In addition to Shakespeare’s tragedy, which foregrounds the consequences of false praise and ingratitude, we read Heidegger on thinking and thanking (What is Called Thinking?) and Henry James’s remarkable story about mass-cultural author worship (“The Birthplace”). One day Cavell showed us a scene from The Band Wagon (1953) in which Fred Astaire, as Cavell read it, tries to find a way to express his indebtedness to African-American dance. Cavell noted the way in which Astaire, a song and dance man, is shown, strangely, in ¾ shot (cut off at the thighs) for the beginning of the film. It’s not until after a routine in a penny arcade, in which Astaire does an extended duet with a black male dancer, that, as Cavell put it, pointing to his image on the screen, Astaire manages to “find his legs.” Cavell read this performance as an act of praise, or as an expression of aesthetic indebtedness and gratitude; thinking also, as Cavell often did, about issues of race and appropriation, I wondered if it wasn’t also readable as a kind of reparation or apology (which we often refer to as something “owed”). Both praise and apology belong to the class of what Austin called “perlocutionary” utterances, in which, as Cavell notes, the felicity of the action is dependent less on the “I” than the “you.” In other words, if you do not accept my compliment or apology, then I haven’t successfully complimented you or apologized.

Cavell’s Lacan courses were more straightforward, organized around the French psychoanalyst’s own famous seminars. The first, “Freud After Lacan,” was on Book III: The Psychoses (Freud’s reading of Daniel Schreber). The second, whose name I can’t remember, was devoted to Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Kant, Sade, Antigone).

I was the only first-year English grad student in “Freud After Lacan.” This made taking the course feel a bit lonely (so much of grad school is about learning alongside the people in your cohort) and that much more intimidating. It was Lacan, after all, and I didn’t have a buddy to confide in, to talk with about my confusions. I was too much in awe of the philosophy Ph.D. students in the class, especially the many advanced ones in their fourth and fifth years, to make friends with them. Above all there was the difficulty of Lacan himself: those daunting quasi-mathematical algorithms, that sublime, inaccessible Real. But offsetting all of this was the fascinating question: What was it about Lacan (and Lacan’s interpretation of Freud, in particular) that Cavell felt he had to grapple with philosophically? The fact that it was Stanley Cavell — someone who constantly wrote about language and gender, but who nonetheless was not on the chart of poststructuralists I’d been supplied with as an undergrad (a chart that included Lacan but not Cavell) — suddenly made Lacan all the more interesting.

In the classroom, Cavell was intense and serious, though often smiling. He had an amazing flash of a smile. While his syllabi were intricately structured, his pedagogy was open to the point that if he were struck by an issue in a text mentioned in someone’s presentation, he would immediately revise the syllabus to assign that text in order to bring everyone else into the conversation. His way of thinking was explorative as opposed to combative, which is not to say that he never took issue with other thinkers. And though he was generous with his students, he didn’t pretend to like everything they said. I once mentioned Theodor Adorno during a seminar, and Cavell, irritated but also showing a sense of humor about that irritation, said that Adorno always felt like a “flea in his ear.”

In seminar I always tried to snag the seat right next to Stanley, on his left. (Mostly so I could hear him clearly; at the time I had a note-taking obsession, which involved transcribing every single word the professor said.) There was always a ring of auditors sitting around those of us at the table, and often these auditors were visiting from other countries. There were also professors and graduate students from various departments at BU and MIT. Once the philosopher Hilary Putnam was there; another time it was Stanley’s wife. Cavell would talk first, in a directed but relaxed way, and student presentations on the reading followed. People worked really hard on the presentations, and they were almost always good. Somewhere in a file cabinet I still have all of their handouts about Freud and Lacan, including ones by Nancy Bauer (author of Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism) and William Bracken (now in the philosophy department at UC Riverside).

I was inchoate and jelly-like in graduate school (kind of like a slime mold), but Cavell was kind to me anyway. He seemed to take me seriously. He gave me a lot of his time. Once, after having lunch together, he said to me, “You’re very dutiful.” The gentlest of criticisms. Of course, I — dutifully — tried to be less so.

We have stayed in touch, albeit loosely and intermittently, over the last 17 years. Here’s the last email I sent him:

Dear Stanley,

Just a note to say hello and also how much I wish I could be at the
conference on your work this October! (I committed myself
to something else in Montreal on the same date, otherwise I **would** be
there).

I actually had a dream last night in which I ran into you at a dog park. (Do
you have a dog?) The dogs were happily playing somewhere off on the field,
and you asked, Did you put your name on the list to get my family
newsletter? I hadn't. First thing I did when I woke up was to
refind your email address on the internet, and that's when I found out about
the conference. Which kind of **is** a family.

Best wishes to you,
Sianne

Stanley wrote back and said he did indeed have a dog, Kaya, who always stays by his side during his days of writing. He said he didn’t have a family newsletter, but he did have an autobiography he was expecting to appear soon; if I sent him my address he’d send me a copy.

¤

Sianne Ngai is Professor of English at Stanford University. She is the author of Ugly Feelings (Harvard, 2005) and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, forthcoming also from Harvard in fall 2012.

The Long and the Short of It: Writings on Contemporary China (A Top Ten List for 2011)

2011-12-21T04:31:00.000-08:00

The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung
Cover image for the English-language translation, from Nan A. Talese.

LARB contributor and China matters specialist Jeffrey Wasserstrom offers multiple tiers of recommendation for year-end reading.

'Tis the season for best books lists, which—to invoke a Chinese saying—sprout up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. Just in case somebody asked, I was prepared to offer my own: 2011's best books on recent Chinese political and cultural developments. No one asked. And while I could go ahead and simply post my list anyway, it feels a bit late for holiday book buying. What might be more useful—especially for readers without a lot of time during the holidays—is to highlight some of the notable short form and long form news reports, reviews, and commentary pieces from the last year. The result is a Top 10 list that I hope will give readers an enlightening overview of how a variety of writers have been addressing the major events, trends and phenomena in the world’s most populous country. And if you have the time to plunge into a book just now, or are looking for that last-minute gift, I’ll mention one published in the last couple of years to pair with the article in question. (I’ve reviewed many of these myself, for venues such as TIME and the Asian Review of Books, but in each case, I’ll point readers to a review by someone else, so that they get a perspective different from mine about the work’s value.)

Though the list is eclectic, a fair number of the titles address collective struggles for change or profile individuals known for speaking out against abuses of power. This perspective is not coincidental (see my own China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know). Though TIME’s decision to name “The Protester” its 2011 person of the year was likely not driven by events in China—this was, after all, the year of Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street—dissent is always a crucial theme when discussing China and its future.

Granted, Chinese protests, though sometimes in the headlines, have not been generating the same kind of intense global scrutiny that they did back in, say, 1989 (when, incidentally, Gorbachev got the “Person of the Year” nod from TIME, just as he had in 1987). Still as Megan Shank and I argue in a commentary coming out in the next issue of Dissent, 2011 saw plenty of expressions of discontent in China. And some of the biggest Chinese news stories that broke after we completed our piece, such as the self-immolation of Tibetan monks and the drama in the village of Wukan, have underscored the significance of the issue.

A Long Form Top 5

1. “The Han Dynasty”: New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos’s profile of one of China’s most interesting and hard to categorize intellectuals: Han Han. (Abstract only; full article behind a paywall.)

The subject of this piece, Han Han, made his name as a novelist and racecar driver, but he is now probably most influential as a blogger with a massive following who has become increasingly political in recent years, writing posts that are often scrubbed away by censors soon after they appear—but not before being shared and reposted. Pair it with New Yorker contributor Zha Jianying’s book, Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China, which limns the varied political choices being made by entrepreneurs and intellectuals, some of whom, like Han Han, are neither dissidents in the classic sense nor unquestioning supporters of the status quo (for more on the book, see David Pilling’s review).

2. “A View on Ai Weiwei’s Exit”: Australian Sinologist Geremie Barmé’s essay, inspired by the famous gadfly figure’s detention last spring.

The piece, accompanied by photographs of the artist’s work, offers a deeply informed look at how exactly Ai Weiwei’s art and political stances have developed in recent years. Pair it with the artist’s own commentaries and online posts, published in book form earlier this year (for more about that volume, see Los Angeles Review of Books contributor Alec Ash’s “The Last Rant," a review of the compendium).

3. “In Fast-Growing China, A Warning about When Prosperity Isn’t Enough”: Foreign Policy contributing editor Christina Larson’s article following protests over a toxic chemical plant in China’s northeastern city of Dalian.

In August, Larson, who has a long-term interest in environmental issues, quickly headed to the metropolis and began interviewing participants. In addition to a valuable early dispatch on the event that went up quickly at Foreign Policy.com, she wrote this longer analytical piece for the Atlantic. Pair it with Chan Koonchang’s The Fat Years, a dystopian novel set in a booming yet tightly controlled China of 2013. The Fat Years has been dubbed a Chinese 1984, but is often concerned with the Brave New World question of how far material satisfactions alone can take a society (for more details, see Jonathan Fenby’s review of the English language edition, which was published earlier this year).

4. “Little Girl Found”: Financial Times Shanghai correspondent Patti Weldmeir’s poignant reportage tracking the fate of an abandoned baby girl.

Wedlmeir combines reminiscences from her own life (she adopted her two daughters in China) with the story of her efforts to discover what became of the infant she discovered outside of a Dunkin’ Donuts. Memoir and investigative journalism are enmeshed in this unusual piece. A good companion for this story is Mara Hvistendahl’s Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (for more about that book, see Megan Shank’s review).

5. “China Gets Religion!”: Ian Johnson expels any lingering doubts a reader might have about the importance of the religious revival underway in China and the government’s struggle to come to terms with it. (Abstract only; full article behind a paywall.)

Ostensibly a review of four recent publications, this piece by Johnson—a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of two powerful books (one on China, the other on Islam in Europe)—is actually, like many of the best New York Review of Books pieces, an essay that uses the works under review as a starting point for a comprehensive look at a major issue. This article could be paired with any of the four books Johnson reviews, but a particularly engaged companion might just be James Carter’s Heart of Buddha , Heart of China, , which looks back at the interplay between political and religious engagements over a long swath of the 20th century (see Justin Ritzinger’s review for details).

A Short Form Top 5 (fittingly, with shorter summaries)

1. Tania Branigan’s “Mao Lives: How China Keeps the New in Touch with the Old”: A lively examination of the “Red Song” craze and related cultural trends. Pair it with: Timothy Cheek’s edited volume A Critical Introduction to Mao (see the discussion of that work in Pankaj Mishra’s “Staying Power: Mao and the Maoists”).

2. Barbara Demick’s “In China, What You Eat Tells Who You Are”: A well-argued look at the politics of eating in a country that has been rocked by tainted food scandal in recent years. Pair it with Chinese Whiskers, an allegorical tale of corruption and food scandals by Pallavi Aiyar, former Beijing correspondent for the Hindu (for more on the book, see Los Angeles Review of Books contributor Maura Cunningham’s review).

3. Josh Chin’s “Train Crash Stirs Chinese Net Furor”: A trenchant analysis of the popular anger triggered by a high-speed train crash (and by government efforts to block an investigation of its causes and limit reporting on the event by the Chinese press); particularly good at quoting from and explaining the importance of microblog posts on the incident. Pair it with Susan Shirk’s edited volume Changing Media, Changing China (reviewed by Andrew Nathan here).

4. Edward Wong’s “Pushing China’s Limits on Web, If Not on Paper”: A clear-eyed analysis of censorship mechanisms and the varied efforts that freethinkers have been making to circumvent them, organized around writer Murong Xuecong’s comments upon receiving a prize. Pair it with Perry Link’s Liu Xiaobo’s Empty Chair, which takes its title from the result of the Chinese government blocking Liu from attending the ceremony in which he was awarded the Nobel Prize (for more on that e-book, see Paulo de Almeida’s blog post).

5. Malcolm Moore’s “Inside Wukan: The Chinese Village that Fought Back”: An extraordinary piece of on-the-scene reporting about rural China, in which villagers angered at unscrupulous developers and government corruption managed to evict all representatives of the Chinese Communist Party from their community. Pair it with Yu Hua’s China in Ten Words; particularly, the “Disparity” chapter in which the context for this sort of militancy is well described (for more, see Pico Iyer’s review).

Ending with a nod to Yu Hua brings this post full circle. I began by reflecting on the list of top 2011 books on contemporary Chinese politics and culture that I created but never shared. Well, now I’ll happily share one thing. The list was going to begin by describing China in Ten Words as the best book on the topic I read all year. I was going to mention as well that Yu Hua also gave the best talk on China I heard in 2011—the presentation at Pomona I mentioned looking forward to in my last post to this blog. If you missed that event, you can get a good sense of its flavor from an op-ed he wrote afterword, inspired in part by the questions he got from the audience that night. Called “Chinese Autumn is No Arab Spring,” it is the perfect essay to reflect on as we wait to see how the drama at Wukan ends and prepare for what 2012 has in store for the people of China and the writers, Chinese and foreign alike, who try to understand the meaning of the latest developments in a country that so often moves in surprising directions.

Radar LARB

2011-12-19T00:10:00.000-08:00

Slavoj Žižek's praise for Ralph Fiennes's adaptation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus: "For his forthcoming film adaptation, Ralph Fiennes (with the writer John Logan) has done the impossible, confirming in the process T S Eliot's claim that Coriolanus is superior to Hamlet. He has fully broken out of the closed circle of interpretative options and presented Coriolanus not as a fanatical anti-democrat but as a figure of the radical left."

"On Becoming an Editor" by Sven Birkerts: "It took only a few days on site... to see that a magazine is, figuratively speaking, a receiving dock for the products of our collective dream-life—those “pure products” that Williams invoked—and that editing is, before readying manuscripts for publication, very much a business of cutting away the less essential in order to expose the more essential. I mean this both in practical and philosophical terms. Editing, I have found, is the search for signal in a sea of noise."

James Greer's review of Green Girl by Kate Zambreno: "The book is by turns bildungsroman, sociological study, deconstruction, polemic, and live-streamed dialogue with Jean Rhys, Clarice Lispector, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, the Bible, Roland Barthes, and most of Western European modernism by way of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project."

Sasha Stone on Fincher's re-envisioning of Stieg Larsson's famous heroine, Lisbeth Salander: "When Fincher announced he’d next be doing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo some grumbled that it was going to be a “paycheck movie” for “fuck you money” — a crowd-pleaser, not a “Fincher film.” Not a Fight Club. Not a Zodiac. And no, not a Social Network. It’s funny how quickly most of us are ready to classify something because it’s too weird to have it just dangling out there as an unknown, which makes it all the more strange that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is one of the best films of 2011."

Lucy Ferriss on the resuscitation of interest in longer novels: "We think of ourselves as living in the age of the excerpt. When pressed, most professors I know admit that they assign fewer pages of reading now than they did, say, 20 years ago. We share these statistics and sigh. Pressed further, we admit to skimming more ourselves, to reading short online articles rather than the lengthier printed versions, to choosing our leisure reading based in part on the lean word count of the book... The odd paradox of this impression of the dumbed-down reading world is that young people seem to be gravitating toward doorstoppers. And reading them."

A Spectacle and Nothing Strange

2011-12-17T13:11:00.000-08:00

By Eve Fowler

This summer I made 20 silkscreen posters, like the ones that are posted around LA advertising concerts, boxing matches and other events. The text on my posters came from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. I placed these posters in public spaces around Los Angeles.

I have been working with this particular text in various ways for about a year. Some of the posters read: "A spectacle and nothing strange," "A difference of very little difference," "Very like the last time," "There are the ones who do see me," "A narrative of like and like it," "Very different but much more" and so on. I'm interested in the multiple interpretations a viewer can have seeing this text in public. I'm also interested in making something that is accessible to everyone, or at least a very broad audience. I see Stein’s language as queer, in both senses of the word, but I think it is open-ended and can be understood in various ways.

I made one poster as a test and attached it to a fence on Beverly Blvd. where other signs like it were hung. I was curious about how long it would stay up and how it would survive the rain. While I was hanging the sign two boys, probably around 14, came over and looked at it. They walked away and then came back and asked me, "What is that?"

In other words, they were asking, "What does that phrase mean?" The text on the poster read, "This is it with it as it is". I told them it was a sentence from a book by Gertrude Stein, a writer I like. They said, "Oh, it's cool! It's like a tongue twister." I am interested in the idea that people will enjoy this language in some way.

At the end of this project, I’m going to place a sign in each of the locations where the other signs were hung. This one is color with no text with the exception of very small "Gertrude Stein" on the border of the poster where the name of the printer normally appears.

My previous work—photographs of the queer community, my wrapped lesbian library, and the collages I have been making for the last few years—has led me to this project that serves as homage to Gertrude Stein and queer writers in general. I've also been interested in modes of distributing art that are different from those that are institutional. In terms of this project I'm interested in direct public access in a vernacular way.

Eve Fowler is an artist living in Los Angeles.

http://www.evefowler.com/iWeb/www.evefowler.com/home.html

LARB Recommends

2011-12-15T15:55:00.000-08:00

Los Angeles International Airport by Garry Winogrand featured at In Focus event on 12/20.

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Thursday, December 15^th: Carson Mell will be reading from his new novel The Blue Bourbon Orchestra and signing copies at Family beginning at 7:30 pm.

Slake at Chevalier’s Books featuring poet Luke Davies, Sam Slovick, Melissa Chadburn, and Brendan Schallert beginning at 7:00 pm.

Saturday, December 17^th: Insert Blanc Press Benefit and Holiday Party featuring performances by Harold Abramowitz, Amanda Ackerman, Brain Ang, Allison Carter, and many more at Weekend Gallery beginning at 6:00 pm.

Cinefamily’s Fantastic, Elastic 24-Hour Fundraiser Telethon with 24 hours of awesome events. LARB contributing editor Jonathan Gold gives a lecture on “Food and Film” beginning at 4:15 pm.

Neil Hamburger presents a book release party/screening/variety show for Flying Saucers Rock n Roll by Jake Austen at Cinefamily beginning at 2:30.

Sunday, December 18^th: Tongue and Groove: a monthly offering of short fiction, personal essays, poetry , spoken word, and music featuring LARB Senior Editor Matthew Specktor, LARB Editor-at-Large Lisa Jane Persky, Anna David, and Jillian Lauren at The Hotel Café beginning at 6:00 pm.

Boundary Pageant #1 presents designer, developer, and professor Liz Falletta performing “How I Spent Two-and-a-half Years Drawing Three Lines” at Machine Project beginning at 2:00 pm.

Tuesday, December 20^th: In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945-1980 exhibit opens today at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Center for Photographs

Interview: John Jeremiah Sullivan, "Pulphead"

2011-12-12T20:35:00.000-08:00

by Michael Goetzman

J. J. Sullivan, Skylight Books. November 15th, 2011

Image by Michael Goetzman

John Jeremiah Sullivan seems disconcerted when asked who’s most influenced his writing. There’s a long, pained pause. It’s an impressive silence — followed by a sigh, followed by an “I don’t know,” which, I realize, is probably an accurate answer. How could anyone know? Identifying one’s influences is speculative at best — more often an exercise in wishful thinking than careful self-assessment. Then again, that doesn’t keep most who are asked from tossing an interviewer the bone of a few well-worn names. Ultimately Sullivan withholds any decisive answer, neither fully accepting nor eschewing the exalted bunch critics have chosen for him: David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe among others.

The comparisons to Wallace are unavoidable. We likely haven’t seen an bricolage of reportorial essays like Pulphead since A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and there’s no doubt Sullivan, like most journalists of his generation, has borrowed a few stylistic flourishes from Wallace, tapping that dynamic space between high and low, between rambling cerebral voice and pithy, clarifying magazine sentence. Sullivan just seems to be doing it better than everyone else. The essays engage such disparate subjects as Christian rock, Axl Rose, Tennessean cave art, and 19^th century botanist Constantine Rafinesque. They’re outlandish, enlivening, and adroit; even so, they’d feel haphazard and disconnected if Sullivan weren’t able to meet each subject with the same essential curiosity and bemused non-judgment.

In the interview below, conducted last month before his reading at Skylight Books, Sullivan discusses much of his personal and professional history at times alluded to in Pulphead. He talks about growing up in the South and cultivating a passion for pop music, about living in New York before and after 9/11, and about his uncanny kinship with fellow Southern writer Wells Tower; he touches on the time he rocked out with James Wood in Bryant Park and about taming the “I” — and, at one point, he just sits gravely, racked by the trouble of pinning down his influences.

Many critics have commented on the surprising interconnectedness between pieces that, on the outset, seem completely unrelated. What do you think unites these pieces?

I’m glad that the interconnectedness of the pieces comes across. I worked really hard on that, not just when it came to choosing the pieces for the book but while writing the pieces, I was working out an interconnected set of concerns; they all felt like part of some project. I didn’t know what the project was. Now I see that it was the book. And to help make a united whole, I chose pieces that spoke to each other and spoke out of what I saw as my deepest fixations.

Like what? Your own obsession with each subject does seem to be a uniting theme.

Well, the South is all over the place. Pop music is all over the place. History. It’s all the shit I’m into, but when I try to go deeper than that, it becomes muddy and that feels important somehow. I’m still writing about those things; I’m still tapping those things so I’m not ready to codify them yet. That’s what the writing is. It’s an attempt to put those obsessions in some sort of order.

How do you approach the research on a subject? One article described you as "magnetized": crazy stuff seems to come to you instead of you going to it. Do you attribute that to luck or your approach?

There’s definitely some luck involved. But it’s also true that if you keep hurling yourself at the wall, eventually a crack will open and it’s also true that there are fourteen pieces in the book, but in the period covered by the book I probably wrote 45 pieces and I was naturally picking out the ones where more interesting things were happening to me, so that skews the specimen sample a little bit.

How did you revise the essays for the book?

Well, during the time I was writing the pieces, I was often trying to have fun with pop culture references that were only of real meaning at the moment. That’s one of the fun things you can do with magazine writing: talk back to the machine a little bit. So, I cut some of those references out. And, you know, certain sentences that had sounded right in the magazines didn’t sound right in the book; different formal pressures condition your reading of sentences in different ways. I couldn’t plan for that, but now I see that there are some sentences that I fucked up because I was trying to smooth them out a little too much.

Do you have a sentence in mind?

There was a sentence in the Christian rock piece that was, “It wasn’t long at all before the little fuckers rounded on me.” That was from GQ. That was a good English sentence but something about it — the cussing in that piece always sounded a little forced, so I changed “little fuckers” to “children,” and I think I weakened the sentence. It’s weird — even in editing yourself, you’re still not seeing it all. You’re still falling into little traps.

You were an editor for about ten years before you started writing professionally. Do you feel being an editor has generally helped or hindered your writing process?

It helps up to a certain point. As an editor, you’re learning the whole time — learning tricks, acquiring tools. You’re getting to watch writers that are much better than you work on their pieces at the workshop level. So you could ask, “Why did you take out that comma?” “Why did you cut that page?” “I don’t just want to know that you did it; I want to know why you did it. What was influencing the mechanism at the moment that caused you to think that this thing wasn’t working or that it needed to be better?” That was my education.

But there does come a point where you have to make this mental decision to shut off the editing instinct; otherwise, you can’t exist as a writer; the writer is a little antagonistic with that voice. You go to write one sentence and can instantly think of five good reasons why it shouldn’t be like that, but that’s not the way writing works; you’re saying something because you have to say it. A good writer is not necessarily best buddies with the editor — that’s your playing partner, you’re trying to beat that person. It took me a while to figure that out. I’m still not sure I’ve totally figured it out.

To get a bit of your pre-professional history: You grew up in Louisville, Kentucky?

I was born there, but I grew up mostly across the river in Southern Indiana.

And your first book Blood Horses is part memoir about your father who was also a writer. Are there a fair amount of writers in the family pedigree?

Oh, yeah. My father was a sports writer, and my mother was an English teacher, so there was never any hope for me. I mean, in our house, if you could use language well then you had some power. I can’t remember who it is, but there’s a writer who pointed out that it’s often the case with writers: they grew up in houses like that, which makes so much sense.

You moved to New York in the late nineties only to move back South several years later. What was your experience as a writer in New York like?

In some sense I don’t feel like I have a right to have an opinion about it because some of my friends are still there. They've become New Yorkers and I know much less about it than they do, but I will say that it was an interesting time, if you were to pick seven years to spend there, to have them straddle 9/11 very neatly like that, was something else. I was just coming to know and love the city as it was before and felt that I belonged there for the first time. Then there was that day, and everything after that was totally different. It’s just hard to overstate the extent to which it changed the city at every level.

Did you feel it was harder to write and live there after that? Was that part of the impetus to move back to the South?

I don’t think so. That was a different thing. That was just personal shit that goes with being in the city. No, if anything, 9/11 made me want to stay, because you wanted to see how it played out. But I didn’t feel like I could survive there as a writer anymore. If you can’t breathe, you’ll punch out a window. I wasn’t even really there yet as a writer; I hadn’t figured much out. That was the problem: I needed to figure that shit out. I couldn’t get in touch with my own voice at its quietest in order to find whatever it was I needed to say. I didn’t feel like I was getting there. I needed time, I needed… solitude, I guess.

Much of your writing focuses on music. In one interview, you pointed to an early interest in music writing as the locus of your desire to “figure out” good writing.

Yeah. Actually, my brother was a big influence here. He was the first person I ever heard talk about a piece of art in a deeply critical way — critical not in the negative, but in the analytical sense. He was just a student of pop music from an early age. I don’t know what tripped that in him, but it was his thing. We would sit down and go through Beatles chord books together. It wasn’t just a case of rocking back and forth in front of the speaker and saying, “Isn’t this brilliant.” It was saying, “Look at this fucking bridge, look at what they did here. That’s why this is so much better”: the mechanics of it. And he and I would argue a lot. He was an early opponent. So, yes, I definitely think I was delving into and parsing music before writing, at least on a conscious level.

Were you in any bands yourself?

Yes. Many a high school band [laughs]. I’m sort of in this band called Fayaway now, in Rollington, North Carolina. But it’s more of a concept thing.

I heard about this gig that you and Fayaway played at Bryant Park with James Wood.

Yeah, that was fun and weird. James Wood is a great drummer. The guy is a monster drummer. I mean, with us he was just doing a sort of skittery bongos thing, but he’s actually a studio-level drummer. I think that was his thing for years. When he was younger, he was really serious about it. As you can imagine, he’s really serious about everything he does.

How familiar are you with Wells Tower and his debut Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned?

You know, it’s funny. I’ve never met him, but I’ve been into his work ever since he first started getting published, and I remember hearing his name from Roger Hodge at Harper’s before he got known and see him as sort of a comrade. I’m going to meet him in New York in a few weeks for the first time, which I’m looking forward to.

There are definite similarities between his and your writing. Despite him writing in fiction and you in non-fiction, it seems like you guys are kindred spirits in a way.

Yes, and he and I have confirmed that since — that we had been reading each other all that time. I don’t know why we never met, because we have lots of mutual friends, but maybe exactly for that reason, maybe it was a healthy distance. I’m anxious to see what he has to say at this thing in New York. It’s rare to have a conversation in front of an audience where it’s actually a real conversation. I have all these things I want to talk about with him. It’ll be neat.

So your first conversation in person will be in front of an audience?

Yeah [laughs]. 2011, man.

So Jonathan Franzen and several other authors made a list of the ten things they’ve learned in writing fiction for The Guardian a year or so ago, and he suggested reserving use of the first person only for an “irresistible” or “distinctive” voice. You’ve made ample use of the first person pronoun in your pieces, and have been praised for your skillful use of it. How do you manage it?

Well, it’s something that has taken me a long time to get to. It certainly wasn’t like that in the beginning. I sort of had to tame the first person I guess. It’s a process of training your ear. You know when you listen to your own voice on a tape it sounds strange? You can’t really hear it the way other people hear it. You’re trying to do the exact same thing with the first person. You want to hear it the way a disembodied third person observer would hear it. What does it sound like in the larger scrum of human communication? You’re trying to tune in to that and it takes time.

Also, I think Franzen there is registering the power of the first person to sink a piece, and I share that; I’m hyper-sensitive to that. Sometimes it’s one of those things where you think you’re vigilante about it, but you can have a deafness to your own first person, even though the first person of another person shrieks at you. I try to stay on guard toward the first person wanting to be there for it’s own sake. It’s one of those things. It’s good for your writing to have a healthy skepticism of the first person and to want to make it work for its pay. It’s like, okay, if you’re going to come in here and start talking in the middle of my piece, saying “I” and pretending to be me, then you better be working, you better be taking me somewhere the piece couldn’t go. So when I use it in my pieces, it’s usually when I feel something in my experience is going to give the reader access to the subject. For example, in the Christian Rock piece, I get into my high school evangelical phase because I feel like this is an experience I shared with these kids. I don’t have to pretend sympathy with them. I was there. And, for instance, in the Axl piece, writing about growing up in rural, white-trash, Southern Indiana suddenly became quite relevant to understanding Axl Rose.

How important has reading been to your development as a writer?

Indispensible. By using other books, mining other books, you’re adding to your palette. If you look at my first book Blood Horses, it used pastiche to a certain extent — incorporating whole swatches of other text without dicing them up, and I’ve buried that a little bit in my work ever since, but it’s still the way my brain works. My pieces almost always begin with my in dialogue with something. They don’t begin ad ovo, you know, sitting at the blank white page and trying to think of a sentence. Something is already happening by the time I start writing; something I’ve read has set me off, an image I’ve seen has set me off. So, the more of that you can expose yourself to, the more pistons are going to be firing. That’s how I’m wired anyway. I know there are other writers who claim never to read anything, where they’re just transcribing something running in their heads but it’s not like that for me.

What authors have had the biggest influence on you?

[Pause] I don’t know [pause]. I feel like I’ve stolen from and reacted against almost every book I’ve ever read. The people I read with greatest pleasure would be… again it makes sense to be almost random. A book will come into my life and my experience of it will totally obliterate any sense I have of a personal canon.

Do you know the philosopher Zizek?

Yes, Slavoj.

Right. He’s funny, and you know he has this thing about love, the evil of love, and he says, I really don’t like love, because what love says is: I pick you out from everything, and I’m going to give you special attention, meaning that everything else is denigrated, and he says there’s something a little evil in that, and in the same way I think that there something a little philistine about lists.

How do you feel about the comparisons to David Foster Wallace?

David Foster Wallace died, and in the conversation about his death a certain sort of book got elevated, got enshrined. That book was the literary essay collection that has a reportorial narrative flow to it, and my book was the first one that came along and sort of fit that neatly and so people go to that. It’s natural. And it’s also true that I stole a lot of shit from him, as well as from all the other people I read, and I will continue to do so. But it doesn’t penetrate too far when I hear that stuff.

[Pause] Man, your influences are weird; I always wonder how authors are so confident when they talk about their influences, like how are you so conscious of that? Because when I look at my own case, at my own past and memories of writing certain things, it’s never very conscious; your influences often get at you by tangent and subterfuge. It’s not always the books that you would like to have influenced you that do.

And I’ll tell you something that I just realized in the street outside that I might mention. When I was in college, Mark Richard wrote this piece about Tom Waits, this unbelievable profile for Esquire — best thing ever written about Tom Waits if you can ever find it, and I read that when I was 19 or 20, when I was in a hero-worshipped thrall, and I’m sure that had a massive influence on me and, I mean, look at what I ended up doing. But, bottom line, I’ve never thought about it because I don’t want to; your influences are a problem.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Tolstoy’s stories translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky, this husband and wife team who are retranslating all of Russian literature. They’re sort of the next great translators after Constance Garnett, and these stories are just fucking revelatory, my god. This story Hadji Murat you have to read. I bet they have the book here.

John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux last month. You can find it here, at Skylight Books.

Michael Goetzman is the Assistant Managing Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Los Angeles.

Radar LARB

2011-12-11T22:14:00.000-08:00

Cirocco Dunlap's "Literary Genre Translations": "Original Text: 'I ate a sandwich and looked out the window.' Sci Fi text: 'I placed the allotted nutrition capsules on my tongue bed and looked to the Nahin VI-8373 space podhole.'"

Adam Penenberg on "The Next Great Media Form": "The MP3 of journalism may be the "live blog," which relies on the merging of platforms and weaving of text with video, audio, external links to other articles (including those of rival news organizations), blogs, tweets, Facebook posts, and whatever other useful information is available."

Tom Lamont on Alan Moore, the comic-book writer behind the protest mask: "Moore has been caught off-guard in recent years, and particularly in 2011, by the inescapable presence of a certain mask being worn at protests around the world. A sallow, smirking likeness of Guy Fawkes – created by Moore and the artist David Lloyd for their 1982 series V for Vendetta."

Jenny Turner on the current state of feminism: "Feminism... has been ‘disarticulated’ and ‘undone’, bits pulled out, reworked and retwisted, and other bits dumped. At the moment, the popular elements include ‘empowerment’, ‘choice’, ‘freedom’ and, above all, ‘economic capacity’ – the basic no-frills neoliberal package. It’s fine for any ‘pleasingly lively, capable and becoming young woman’ to aspire to this. It doesn’t matter if she’s black or white or mixed race or Asian, gay or straight or basically anything, so long as she is hard-working, upbeat, dedicated to self-fashioning, and happy to be photographed clutching her A-level certificate in the Daily Mail. This young woman has been sold a deal, a ‘settlement’. So long as she works hard and doesn’t throw bricks or ask awkward questions, she can have as many qualifications and abortions and pairs of shoes as she likes."

Marilynne Robinson answers the 1939 Partisan Review questionnaire: "So as Americans we need to stop irrational attacks on our own government, at the same time that we find some way to hold it to the standards of dignity and integrity we and the world have a right to demand of it. Because if democracy does indeed lose prestige, these crowds, wherever they are, will turn into warring factions, falling into chaos that will seem to justify new repression. Needless to say, responsibility for the state of the world would ideally be felt by people in positions of influence in the media."

Fail Better: After Recent Occupy Evictions, Jack Halberstam Offers Tips On Learning to Lose

2011-12-08T09:30:00.000-08:00

"Oh, Lol0": Heavily-favored Lolo Jones doesn't live up to expectations in Atlanta.

Hope is fried. Change is burned out. Sentimental, noncommittal, notional: Messieurs Hope and Change have proven to be as disappointing as their historic standard-bearer, the current President of the United States. As we speak, they are likely pacing shabby cages—gaunt shadows of their former, meaningful selves—sideshow creatures of Third Way politics.

What are the alternatives to what we thought were the alternatives? The Occupy Movement sparked something that should not end with this recent spate of evictions. Intrinsic to its function is an avoidance of objectives or demands or goals — a position which, much like the unmarketable, uncommodifiable butch lesbian referenced by Jack Halberstam — resists and blocks advances by the capitalist system. What the Occupy movement created was a failure, in short, to communicate; a refusal to interface, or engage, on power’s terms. Occupy went into public space to be nothing less than an expression of failure. By resisting the market-driven hope prescribed by institutional power, Occupy opened the door for other alternatives to take root (see Robin Hood).

For philosophy that informs this strategy, Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure may be considered a key, if not seminal, text. A Professor of English, Gender Studies and American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, Halberstam’s crash course on failure follows three easy steps, which she kindly submits below.

People have sometimes misunderstood me to be saying that we need to learn how to fail, when in fact we know how to fail quite well. What I am really recommending is that we rethink the logic of success and failure to find better and more expansive ways of incorporating failure into our understandings of life, love, death and politics. Otherwise, success/failure is a zero sum game, with increasingly fewer (but bigger) winners, exponentially more losers, and very little in between. The 1% and the 99%, in other words.

As it turns out, when I recommend failure, people seem to want tips. So consider this a crash course in failure, a self-help guide to failing well and failing better. And why should we learn how to fail? Because winning has become the byword for greed, arrogance, profiting from others, conformity; winning means gloating, hoarding, condescending. What’s great about losing? Failing? Failure can become a potent form of critique, a repudiation of capitalism and profit margins, a refusal of the norm, an indifference to assimilation and a route to other ways of being in the world.

1) Follow the loser.

In a photography project associated with the 2000 Sydney Olympic games, aboriginal and queer artist Tracy Moffat takes profoundly moving pictures of the participants. As she tells it, Moffat was told in the months leading up to the Olympic games that she was being considered as an official photographer for the Games. She replied that she was willing but never heard back from the committee. This implicit rejection only motivated her further to document the parts of the games that “official” photographers ignore — namely the spectacle of losing. From second to third place, from silver to bronze medals, she became increasingly aware of the hierarchy of losing.

As Moffat puts it here: “So, at home, alone, in September 2000, there was just me and the television coverage of the Games. It was then that I narrowed my interest down to the position of Fourth. What could be more tragic than coming Fourth in the final of an Olympic games race? It’s sadder than coming last because when you come Fourth you have just missed out on a medal. You almost made it, but you just missed out. Fourth means that you are almost good. Not the worst (which has it’s own perverted glamour) but almost. Almost a star!”

Moffat's photographs capture the outside of success: the runner ignored by the camera; the exhausted swimmer excluded from the celebration party of the medalists; the athlete who trains for years only to lose in the moment by a fraction of a second, a centimeter, an ounce, and who tomorrow is lost to anonymity. These images remind us that winning is a multivalenced event: in order for someone to win, someone must fail to win and so this act of losing has its own logic, its own complexity, its own aesthetic, its own beauty. Moffat tries to capture the texture of the experience of failure. “Fourth” for Moffat also refers to the “Fourth” world of Aboriginal culture, and so it references the erased and lost art of a people destroyed by the successful colonizers.

Fail?

The unrelentingly patriotic coverage of the games in many countries — particularly in North America — offers pristine images of winning, underscored by the desire to flex muscle and pose as the under-dog all at the same time. While individual North American athletes practice plenty of failure at the games, American audiences are generally not permitted to witness those failures; we are instead given wall-to-wall coverage of triumphant Yanks in the pool, in the gym and on the track. We are given the histories, strategies and work ethics of winners all day, every day and so we miss the larger drama of the games, emerging as it does from unpredictability, tragedy, close defeat, and yes, messy and undignified failure.

2) Be a lesbian.

Losing takes us on to other L words: Lesbian is irrevocably and happily tied to failure in all kinds of ways. Indeed, according to Heather Love: “Same-sex desire is marked by a long history of association with failure, impossibility and loss” and she continues: “homosexuality and homosexuals serve as scapegoats for the failures and impossibilities of desire itself.”

It is this “backward” history that a show like The L Word wants to overcome and replace with a sunny and optimistic version of queerness. The makers of the obnoxious and infectious Showtime soap The L Word would love, in other words, to redefine lesbian by associating it with “life, love, leisure, liberty, luck, lovelies, longevity, Los Angeles,” but we know that L can also stand for “loser, labor, lust, lack, loss, lemon, Lesbian.” “Same sex, different city,” the ads for the show declare cheerily. And it is that “same sex” assurance that represents the heart of The L Word’s success; for the loser in the glossy and femme-centric series is of course the butch who can only appear as a ghostly presence in the fluffy androgenous character of Shane.

What the L Word must repudiate in order to represent “lesbian” as “successful” is the butch. The butch therefore gets cast as anachronistic, as the failure of femininity, as an earlier, melancholic model of queerness that has now been updated and transformed into “desirable” womanhood. The butch lesbian indeed is not only a failure within contemporary queer renderings of desire, she stands in for a failure within consumer culture writ large because her masculinity becomes a block to male desire while feminine lesbians, of the variety imagined within a hetero-pornographic imagination, sell everything from beer to bathing suits. Somehow, the masculine lesbian proves to be a kind of kryptonite for capitalism.

And so, in an example like The L Word, we see that in order to make “lesbian” appealing to men and straight women, the specific features which have stereotypically connoted lesbian in the past — masculine appearance and interests and jobs — must be blotted out to provide a free channel for commodification. While even feminine gay men can function within this framework (because they still model a desire for hetero-masculinity) the butch lesbian cannot: she threatens the male viewer with the horrifying spectacle of the uncastrated woman, and she challenges the straight female viewer because she refuses to masquerade as castrated.

The L Word lesbians “succeed” within the secular economy of televisual pleasure precisely by catering to conventional notions of visual pleasure. Shane, with her romantic prowess, her emotional detachment, her boyish demeanor reminds the viewer of what has been sacrificed in order to bring the lesbian into the realm of commodification. In the lingering reminder of the mark of failure that usually signifies as lesbian, we find the persistence of politics at the heart of the lesbian project.

3) Don’t be successful, be fantastic.

Animated films offer an incredible archive for failure: geared towards children they recognize that childhood, despite the myriad ways that we sentimentalize it, is one long drawn out experience of failure and frustrations, misunderstandings and unknowing. Because the child must be allowed to fail in order to learn, the films that address them have very supple and creative models of community, progress and success most of which involve flawed creatures who rebel against their society’s standards of success and failure and invent their own. Finding Nemo, for example, is about a little fish with a disabled fin who ventures out into the open ocean against his father’s advice and learns that what is important is working with multiple others for freedom, rather than burying oneself in the family and the neighborhood and preserving the status quo. Chicken Run is essentially a film about organizing and freeing oneself by rising up together as a multitude and flying the coop.

Much of the Occupy Movement represents a generation raised on Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc. and Chicken Run, people who have taken to the streets to make protest through sheer numbers, collectivity, multiplicity: fish versus fishermen, chickens versus farmers, monsters versus corporation, woodland creatures versus suburbs!

And let’s not forget Fantastic Mr. Fox — a masterpiece of stop animation that tells the quaint story of a fox who cannot settle into a life of domesticity but wants to go wild and so returns to his old ways of stealing chickens from the farmers. He has a sissy son, a yoga practicing nephew, a patient wife and a pack of wild animal friends who support him when the farmers track him down and, yes, cut off his tail. In the film’s finale, Mr. Fox gets his tail back in an improved, detachable form. Detachable being better than organic because it relives him of the phallic burden of always having to be “quote unquote fantastic.” Being fantastic then means:

1. Turning the mundane and the ordinary into the odd and the eclectic;
2. Finding kinship in all kinds of odd relations (the sissy son and his macho father); and
3. Knowing that power or the phallus is not organic but can be put on and taken off.

In my work I have turned repeatedly to the “silly” archives of animated film. While many readers may object to the idea that we can locate alternatives in a genre engineered by huge corporations for massive profits and with multiple product tie-ins, I have claimed that new forms of animation, computer generated imagery (CGI) in particular, have opened up new narrative opportunities and have led to unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer.

There is a “dark side” of animation, and stop-motion animation in particular, which takes us not simply through the looking glass but into some negative spaces of representation, dark places where animals return to the wild, humans flirt with their own extinction, and worlds end. Of course, in animation for children, they never do quite end and there is usually a happy conclusion even to the most crooked of animated narratives. In Coraline, for example, the young girl who has escaped through the walls of her apartment to a bizarre universe with an “Other Mother” and “Other Father,” returns home and is happy finally to be back. And in Fantastic Mr. Fox, the hunted and haunted animals that have been driven from their homes by the farmers, rejoice in their sheer survival. In Where The Wild Things Are — part animation, part magical puppetry — Max leaves the sad, haunted beasts with whom he has built and destroyed habitats and submits to the strong pull of the oedipal home. But along the way to these “happy” endings, bad things happen to good animals/monsters/children and failure nestles in every dusty corner reminding the child viewer that this too is what it means to live in a world created by mean, petty, greedy and violent adults.

To live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint and ultimately to die; and rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly and the hopelessly goofy. Rather than resisting endings and limits, let us instead revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable fantastic failures.

The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam, Duke University Press, 2011

LARB Recommends

2011-12-07T20:31:00.000-08:00

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Thursday, December 8^th: Slake After Dark presents Ben Ehrenreich and Triple Chicken Foot at Atwater Crossing beginning at 7:00 pm.

OR Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books celebrate the publication of Alive Inside the Wreck by Joe Woodward at the L.A. Press Club beginning at 7:00 pm.

Friday, December 9^th: Beth Gates Warren discusses and signs Artful Lives: Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Saturday, December 10^th: Alice Bag discusses and signs Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story at Book Soup beginning at 5:00 pm.

Sunday, December 11^th: Semiotext(e) celebrates the release of their first DVD: Gilles Deleuze From A to Z at The Mountain Bar Los Angeles beginning at 6:30 pm.

A reading at the Mandrake Bar to celebrate the release of Black Clock 14 with Rick Moody, Seth Greenland, Merrill Feitell, Tara Ison, and Sara Gerot, introduced by Steve Erickson. Beginning at 7:00 pm.

Tuesday, December 13^th: "Pilgrimage: A Photo Lecture" featuring Annie Leibovitz at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

A group event for Criminal Class Review at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Wednesday, December 14^th: Hammer Readings, "Some Favorite Writers: Literary Los Angeles & the Los Angeles Review of Books" featuring LARB editors Tom Lutz, Matthew Specktor, and Lisa Jane Persky in conversation with Mona Simpson, beginning at 7:00 pm.

Slick 4-Star Flicks Spark Kids' Film Fete

2011-12-01T10:36:00.000-08:00

In his extensive archival research for "Half Termite, Half Elephant," his review of Jonathan Lethem's The Ecstasy of Influence posted on the main site today, Mark Haskell Smith turned up the following never-before-seen document, which appears to depict a young Lethem having a formative ecstatic experience (click to enlarge):

Making Sense of Protest: A Reading List for Kids

2011-11-30T07:34:00.000-08:00

Suffragist rally, undated.

On the morning after Occupy LA's eviction, LARB Young Adult Fiction Editor Cecil Castellucci provides a reading list for the kids.

Out of town on my book tour I’ve been watching as much Ustream of the Occupy movement as I can. In recent days, my absence from home heightened my anxiety about the rumored booting of the LA occupiers. Now it’s done. They’re gone.

Isn’t it funny, this strange new world in which we live? We can watch it all and yet still be so far away. The Occupy movement is not something that can be swept under the table or ignored because it is unseen. I saw it. You saw it. People of all ages probably saw it. It went comparatively peacefully. Which, as we all know, has not always been the case lately.

Is witnessing actually also participating?

I think yes. I was heartened by something that Ben Ehrenreich said to me when I went to a reading for his new novel, Ether. I told him how much I enjoyed his essay about the Occupy movement that we published here in LARB at the beginning of Occupy LA. I had shown up a few times to City Hall to sit and to donate food and books to the library.

“I am trying to show up, but I feel like I’m doing nothing,” I said.

“Cecil," Ben said, "Remember there are many ways to march."

Anyone who has read any of my novels knows that many of them have manifestations of resistance in them. Egg, in Boy Proof, marches on L.A. City Hall against Genetically Modified Food. The Janes in The Plain Janes do art as action against terrorism. Rose and her friends in Rose Sees Red go to the biggest No Nukes rally in American history, which took place in Central Park in 1982. In my books the characters are young people. They are at the cusp of waking up and figuring out their way in the world; along with the active role, if any, they may wish to play in it. And in my books, one option that is there for them is to go somewhere and show up and make a case for their point of view.

With the Occupy movement suddenly a ubiquitous topic for various cities across the country and the world, I can’t help but wonder: what are the kids thinking? How can they make any sense of it? On one side, there are the occupiers — many of them not much older than the kids watching from their homes — people willing to sit and camp in public spaces across America because something may be terribly wrong. On the other side, there are those who are sworn to protect us and our right to peaceably assemble, suddenly and without apparent reason pepper spraying non-violent student protesters.

So often we hear that witnessing violence on TV and in films and videogames (or even reading about it in books) desensitizes teens. But what does it mean for teenagers now to witness a more direct and real kind of violence in the real world and for real reasons? They know about movements of the past, such as the civil rights movement, the suffragist movement, and the anti-war movement. But with that historical distance it is easy to see who was fighting the good fight. History, literally, has already been written. But in the present day, with so much access to information, decisions about what we believe are harder to make than ever. How do kids decide for themselves where they stand? Where do they go, beyond the news and social media sites, to make sense of it?

I know that I always go to books.

In this context, I thought that it might be helpful to compile a list of YA fiction that we can share with our teens. I put the word out that I was searching for books that show action and protest in the 20th and 21st Century; books with which to begin conversations. These books are not about the Occupy movement. They are about characters who go to rallies and assemble and speak up for what they think is right or who are profoundly changed by the historical circumstances around them. If you are a teen, read them. If you are an adult with a teen who is waking up to politics, maybe one of these books is for them.

And please, add your own suggestion to the comments below. This list is by no means complete. It is just a starter list.

Crossing Stones by Helen Frost

Destroy All Cars by Blake Nelson

The Fragile Flag by Jane Langton

Hoot by Carl Hiassen

Little Brother by Cory Doctrow

My Life with the Lincolns by Gayle Bradeis

My Mother the Cheerleader by Robert Sharenow

One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia

Peace is a 4 Letter Word by Janet Nichols Lynch

Rose Sees Red by Cecil Castellucci

Rock and the River by Kekla Magoon

Too Big a Storm by M Qualey

Wide Awake by David Levithan

The Gospel According to Larry by Janet Tashjian 

Ghetto Cowboy by G. Neri

LARB Recommends

2011-11-29T13:28:00.000-08:00

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Tuesday, November 29^th: Miranda July in conversation with writer Joshuah Bearman at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Nelson George discusses and signs The Plot Against Hip Hop at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Thursday, December 1^st: Luis Alberto Urrea in conversation with Carolyn Kellogg at the Mark Taper Auditorium beginning at 7:00 pm.

Sunday, December 4^th: Chris Daley, Ben Loory, Jen Hofer, Ben Ehrenreich, and Peter Orner at Vermin on the Mount, beginning at 8:00 pm.

Wednesday, December 7^th: Kola Boof reads from her novel The Sexy Part of the Bible at Stories in Echo Park, beginning at 7:30 pm.

Radar LARB

2011-11-28T09:49:00.000-08:00

William Deresiewicz on the writers who misread Obama: "These people were supposed to be good at reading character; how could they have missed the fact that Obama’s whole strategy — those very 'voices' his ability to impersonate they were so enamored of — consisted of appearing to be all things to all people? He could talk Harvard and say 'yo mama' — yes, and be a writer to writers, a black to blacks, young to the youth, and 'one of us' to the Wall Street crowd (his biggest donors), too. Leftist, centrist, urban, heartland, Christian, rationalist: he obtained multitudes."

Adam Plunkett remembers a certain teacher in "The King of the Ghosts": "He lambasted an essay’s 'methane,' at one point, and praised another for its 'sheer sphincter-shattering beauty.' Writing a short essay to render something you loved endlessly was 'trying to blow a watermelon through a straw.' Most writing was 'written half-asleep and read half-asleep,' whereas his every sentence spoken or written confirmed his alertness and his comprehensive comprehension and his care. He was immaculately alive, which made you terribly eager to show that you were all there as well."

Ben Austen sums up "The End of Borders and the Future of Books": "For many years and in many communities, a Borders was the only place a reader could find certain literary journals, books from academic presses, and new fiction and nonfiction from authors who weren’t bestsellers."

"Pre-Occupied" by Mattathias Schwartz: "Lasn is sixty-nine years old and lives with his wife on a five-acre farm outside Vancouver. He has thinning white hair and the small eyes of a bulldog. In a lilting voice, he speaks of 'a dark age coming for humanity' and of 'killing capitalism,' alternating gusts of passion with gentle laughter. He has learned not to let premonitions of apocalypse spoil his good mood."

Jonathan Lethem talks to Geoff Dyer: "Here is an important difference between us. You could do these books as sidelines or diversion, almost, I imagine, writing fiction in the morning and then doing the film or Talking Heads stuff in the afternoon. I operate at a far lower level of energy and inspiration, but a higher pitch of desperation!"