1. Co-Conspirators
(movements & manifestos)
2. Fellow Travelers
(loose ad hoc confederations and alliances or mutual sympathies)
3. Strange Bedfellows
(academic partnerships; the publishing industry; the party circuit; business as usual)
4. Doctor Nos
(cranky gatekeepers: reviewers, editors)
5. Mavericks and Isolatos
(the fringe, the exiled, the out-of-it, the-above-it-all)
Charles River
Upper Limit Cloud/Lower Limit Sail
Monday, March 15, 2010
Is Literature Exceptional? (Reply to Menand)
Is poetry, is literature, a special case? Can we still speak, with straight faces, of poetic exceptionalism? Or is literature, as Luke Menand avers in his recent consideration of Lionel Trilling, merely a report on experience that enjoys no special privileges?
Menand closes his article on Trilling on an autobiographical note:
"I was taught to think about literature as part of the history of ideas, and to believe that people wrote novels and plays and poems because they had something to say. I still think that this is true. I think that literature is a report on experience. I just don’t think that it’s a privileged report on experience. It is, as Trilling felt in his darker, anthropological moods, simply part of the cultural activity of making meaning."
Admittedly, it takes a fine mind to make an argument for dethroning literary privilege from the pages of The New Yorker. I’d like to think Menand is wrong. I’d also like to ask him why he’s taking a paycheck from Harvard while masquerading as an English professor. But the question is a serious one; it deserves consideration.
Reared on the high modernism of Pound and Eliot, I’ve always taken it for granted that what poets do is special. Not in the sense that we have access to some higher fund of wisdom, or more penetrating insights into the human heart. But that the music itself, the making of it, and the making of it within a long tradition, within the continuities and communities of form, sets it apart from other forms of cultural activity; because that concern with form is at its heart utopian. It sees the world as always potentially otherwise. More importantly, it attends to the myriad details that go by everyday unnoticed. Not just the details, but the warp and weave of them into patterns of meaning and from those patterns, song – the re-affirmation of the body’s scope – its pleasures and and its tremblings – the bewilderments of living.
When Williams equated poetry with the daily news, observing that “men die miserably everyday for lack of what is found there,” was he making a case for poetry’s difference from ordinary reports on experience found in newspapers – the common run of things – or was he instead dethroning poetry as an exceptional case, placing it in the order of the common run, saying it is no different a report than what is found on the front page, only you must learn how to read it if you could receive what it has to offer – “you got to try real hard.”
As a culture critic, Menand wants see around every corner, map out every angle of a of particular social nexus. (It is what we do, after all). The instrument he uses to perform this magic feat is, of course, historicism. But while his approach shares much in common with that of Greenblatt, attending to the nuance and complex intertwining of public and private, social and literary, relations, it also seems to set too high a premium on continuity.
It's perfectly well to map the circulations between film noir and New Wave, as he does in his Cold War lectures, making persuasive claims about how they are linked as moments and movements of cultural exchange. But his lack of finer grained detail sometimes troubles me since it runs the serious risk of conflating disparate things for the sake of unity and at the expense of all the discontinuities, large and small, that also mark these exchanges. Back of it seems to lie a method founded more on sustaining a certain ironic tone than revealing either linkages or fissures. And while without irony, no real historical distance can be credibly maintained, it's sometimes a slippery slope to enlightened, that is to say, cynical false consciousness.
Two readings I attended this week brought all this home to me. The first was an appearance of Seamus Heaney at Sanders Theater in Memorial Hall, a grimly gothic Godzilla of a building, an enormous cenotaph for Harvard’s Civil War dead. The theater itself is a kind of culture barn: all warmly burnished wooden risers and balcony; the overall mood one of reverential hush. This, dearly assembled, is where Culture takes place: the epicenter of the Privileged Report. Heaney, a very sweet and, it must be said, gracious and humble, man, was almost up to the task of filling so august a space, though I thought it did his poetry no favors.
The work itself was uneven. A poem like “Rain Stick” I found to be a mash of cloying clichés and bardic imperative: “Listen now again” – a line which anxiously closes the poem, all but suffocating the delicacy that precedes it. “Two Lorries,” an attempt at the frisson of the dialectical image that dissipated any force it might have had by meandering through anecdote and then resorting to heavy-handed juxtaposition. The two lorries, one that carried coal (and a flirtatious coal man) to his childhood home; the other that carted an IRA bomb down the same road, are clumsily conjoined by the phrase “flash forward twenty years.”
The violence of the episode and its historical significance fail to get any traction. His newest work, based on Book VI of The Aeneid, mixed charming Irish colloquialisms with a graver classical idiom, but the final effect was not very moving. At his best, Heaney has a way with pitch and stress that is marvelous: constructing clusters of tessellated consonants that are deeply chthonic; an Orphic music that makes you feel (as in Sobin or Bunting or Johnson) that if the trees and rocks could speak, this is how they would sound. Though I can never think of this strain in his work without recalling Terry Eagleton’s take-down of Heaney’s version of Beowulf, in which he rips to shreds the etymological fallacy of Saxon fetishism and regional vernaculars.
The second reading I went to, about an hour later, was Bill Corbett’s at Harvard Book Store. If Heaney’s reading exemplified what Manny Farber called “white elephant art,” the kind of work that’s mired in its own self-importance, then Corbett’s was surely “termite art,” work that tunnels through its own boundaries, constantly dissolving them. Corbett’s performance, in a small room of the store, maybe 30 folding chairs, with many folks crowded around in nooks and aisles, was a complicated mixture of bravura self-display and genuine generosity. Through anecdotes about Groliers, Robert Lowell, and many others, both famous and obscure, and by mixing their work in with his own, he invoked a vivid sense of continuum and community. Not just poems, isolated instances of speech, but of what it means to be part of poetry. It was as charged and vital a reading as I’ve ever heard. To cap it off, there was Heaney, Bill’s old friend, sitting in the front row, obviously and hugely enjoying it all.
What do these two readings point to? First, each offered its own version of exceptional cultural space and experience, from the very public to the quite intimate. Second, both displayed how poetry creates a space for saying things where none had existed before. This space belongs to no particular cultural forum but comes out of the ways in which language is used. Poetic speech is predicated on and proceeds by the drive to say what can’t otherwise find its way into speech. And if that sounds too much like therapy, let me put it this way: poetry opens us to the danger and risk of having experience – whether as Erleibnis, the shock of the instant, or as Erfahrung, the mediated measure of that instant. The best poetry does both.
If this doesn’t make literature exceptional, then I fail to understand the meaning of the word. Because how we make meaning matters. How we construct a poem is different from how we report the daily news. They report experience at two vastly different registers: the one reified; the other tearing away at the fabric of social conventions for understanding and feeling.
Poetry is not the only way to report experience. But for me, it is the most powerful, the most musical, the most spiritual, that is, the most alive to the potential and promise of being: that which cuts closest to what it means to be alive. Poetry may not, in fact, be a report on experience at all, but more insistently, more urgently, an experience in its own right, one that brings us into the presence of being alive, here and now, in a body, and feeling all the risks of feeling, listening to them as we never could have before.
P.S. Since first writing these notes, in the Fall of 2008, I’ve become a teaching assistant for Menand’s “Art and Culture in the Cold War” class, an experience I’m enjoying a great deal. Menand himself strikes me as a thoroughly decent guy: sincere, witty, and even warm and affable, though the affability seems to be swaddled in insulation; it has some trouble rising to the surface. I suspect he's intensely shy, or else socially phobic. I’ve always thought him of as being more of an essayist than a scholar, but that's only because he's so nimble at what he does that you tend to forget your reading some truly fine intellectual history. He belongs to a certain tradition of American letters I've always admired, one that includes Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Robert Warshow, Dwight MacDonald, and yes, Pauline Kael. And despite my misgivings about what kind of axe he might be grinding, his remark, in lecture, that "art messes with biology" will endear him to me always.
Menand closes his article on Trilling on an autobiographical note:
"I was taught to think about literature as part of the history of ideas, and to believe that people wrote novels and plays and poems because they had something to say. I still think that this is true. I think that literature is a report on experience. I just don’t think that it’s a privileged report on experience. It is, as Trilling felt in his darker, anthropological moods, simply part of the cultural activity of making meaning."
Admittedly, it takes a fine mind to make an argument for dethroning literary privilege from the pages of The New Yorker. I’d like to think Menand is wrong. I’d also like to ask him why he’s taking a paycheck from Harvard while masquerading as an English professor. But the question is a serious one; it deserves consideration.
Reared on the high modernism of Pound and Eliot, I’ve always taken it for granted that what poets do is special. Not in the sense that we have access to some higher fund of wisdom, or more penetrating insights into the human heart. But that the music itself, the making of it, and the making of it within a long tradition, within the continuities and communities of form, sets it apart from other forms of cultural activity; because that concern with form is at its heart utopian. It sees the world as always potentially otherwise. More importantly, it attends to the myriad details that go by everyday unnoticed. Not just the details, but the warp and weave of them into patterns of meaning and from those patterns, song – the re-affirmation of the body’s scope – its pleasures and and its tremblings – the bewilderments of living.
When Williams equated poetry with the daily news, observing that “men die miserably everyday for lack of what is found there,” was he making a case for poetry’s difference from ordinary reports on experience found in newspapers – the common run of things – or was he instead dethroning poetry as an exceptional case, placing it in the order of the common run, saying it is no different a report than what is found on the front page, only you must learn how to read it if you could receive what it has to offer – “you got to try real hard.”
As a culture critic, Menand wants see around every corner, map out every angle of a of particular social nexus. (It is what we do, after all). The instrument he uses to perform this magic feat is, of course, historicism. But while his approach shares much in common with that of Greenblatt, attending to the nuance and complex intertwining of public and private, social and literary, relations, it also seems to set too high a premium on continuity.
It's perfectly well to map the circulations between film noir and New Wave, as he does in his Cold War lectures, making persuasive claims about how they are linked as moments and movements of cultural exchange. But his lack of finer grained detail sometimes troubles me since it runs the serious risk of conflating disparate things for the sake of unity and at the expense of all the discontinuities, large and small, that also mark these exchanges. Back of it seems to lie a method founded more on sustaining a certain ironic tone than revealing either linkages or fissures. And while without irony, no real historical distance can be credibly maintained, it's sometimes a slippery slope to enlightened, that is to say, cynical false consciousness.
Two readings I attended this week brought all this home to me. The first was an appearance of Seamus Heaney at Sanders Theater in Memorial Hall, a grimly gothic Godzilla of a building, an enormous cenotaph for Harvard’s Civil War dead. The theater itself is a kind of culture barn: all warmly burnished wooden risers and balcony; the overall mood one of reverential hush. This, dearly assembled, is where Culture takes place: the epicenter of the Privileged Report. Heaney, a very sweet and, it must be said, gracious and humble, man, was almost up to the task of filling so august a space, though I thought it did his poetry no favors.
The work itself was uneven. A poem like “Rain Stick” I found to be a mash of cloying clichés and bardic imperative: “Listen now again” – a line which anxiously closes the poem, all but suffocating the delicacy that precedes it. “Two Lorries,” an attempt at the frisson of the dialectical image that dissipated any force it might have had by meandering through anecdote and then resorting to heavy-handed juxtaposition. The two lorries, one that carried coal (and a flirtatious coal man) to his childhood home; the other that carted an IRA bomb down the same road, are clumsily conjoined by the phrase “flash forward twenty years.”
The violence of the episode and its historical significance fail to get any traction. His newest work, based on Book VI of The Aeneid, mixed charming Irish colloquialisms with a graver classical idiom, but the final effect was not very moving. At his best, Heaney has a way with pitch and stress that is marvelous: constructing clusters of tessellated consonants that are deeply chthonic; an Orphic music that makes you feel (as in Sobin or Bunting or Johnson) that if the trees and rocks could speak, this is how they would sound. Though I can never think of this strain in his work without recalling Terry Eagleton’s take-down of Heaney’s version of Beowulf, in which he rips to shreds the etymological fallacy of Saxon fetishism and regional vernaculars.
The second reading I went to, about an hour later, was Bill Corbett’s at Harvard Book Store. If Heaney’s reading exemplified what Manny Farber called “white elephant art,” the kind of work that’s mired in its own self-importance, then Corbett’s was surely “termite art,” work that tunnels through its own boundaries, constantly dissolving them. Corbett’s performance, in a small room of the store, maybe 30 folding chairs, with many folks crowded around in nooks and aisles, was a complicated mixture of bravura self-display and genuine generosity. Through anecdotes about Groliers, Robert Lowell, and many others, both famous and obscure, and by mixing their work in with his own, he invoked a vivid sense of continuum and community. Not just poems, isolated instances of speech, but of what it means to be part of poetry. It was as charged and vital a reading as I’ve ever heard. To cap it off, there was Heaney, Bill’s old friend, sitting in the front row, obviously and hugely enjoying it all.
What do these two readings point to? First, each offered its own version of exceptional cultural space and experience, from the very public to the quite intimate. Second, both displayed how poetry creates a space for saying things where none had existed before. This space belongs to no particular cultural forum but comes out of the ways in which language is used. Poetic speech is predicated on and proceeds by the drive to say what can’t otherwise find its way into speech. And if that sounds too much like therapy, let me put it this way: poetry opens us to the danger and risk of having experience – whether as Erleibnis, the shock of the instant, or as Erfahrung, the mediated measure of that instant. The best poetry does both.
If this doesn’t make literature exceptional, then I fail to understand the meaning of the word. Because how we make meaning matters. How we construct a poem is different from how we report the daily news. They report experience at two vastly different registers: the one reified; the other tearing away at the fabric of social conventions for understanding and feeling.
Poetry is not the only way to report experience. But for me, it is the most powerful, the most musical, the most spiritual, that is, the most alive to the potential and promise of being: that which cuts closest to what it means to be alive. Poetry may not, in fact, be a report on experience at all, but more insistently, more urgently, an experience in its own right, one that brings us into the presence of being alive, here and now, in a body, and feeling all the risks of feeling, listening to them as we never could have before.
P.S. Since first writing these notes, in the Fall of 2008, I’ve become a teaching assistant for Menand’s “Art and Culture in the Cold War” class, an experience I’m enjoying a great deal. Menand himself strikes me as a thoroughly decent guy: sincere, witty, and even warm and affable, though the affability seems to be swaddled in insulation; it has some trouble rising to the surface. I suspect he's intensely shy, or else socially phobic. I’ve always thought him of as being more of an essayist than a scholar, but that's only because he's so nimble at what he does that you tend to forget your reading some truly fine intellectual history. He belongs to a certain tradition of American letters I've always admired, one that includes Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Robert Warshow, Dwight MacDonald, and yes, Pauline Kael. And despite my misgivings about what kind of axe he might be grinding, his remark, in lecture, that "art messes with biology" will endear him to me always.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
What I'm Reading (1)
Aghast at the notion of hobbies and “free time” (since it cannot be defined apart from the time already subordinated to the unfreedom of the always laboring individual), Adorno declares that “making music, listening to music, reading with all my attention, these activities are part and parcel of my life; to call them hobbies would make a mockery of them.”
On a somewhat less haughty note I offer here the first of an intermittent series of ongoing extracurricular reading, with a sideways glance at the “extra” since it, too, is already enfolded within the larger syllabus of attention. “The sideways glance” is a telling trope. These are books that give me pleasure or excite my interest in some way and have little or preferably nothing to do with my work as a scholar. But the sideways glance is merely the deferral, or diversion, of full attention. It is attention attended to on the sly.
Anatheism, Richard Kearney
Kearney’s earlier work has been important for me in thinking through my own projects and desires set in the ruins of theology, especially the groundbreaking The God Who May Be. The book’s seductive subtitle “Returning to God After God,” drew me in inspite of myself , since lately I’ve wanted more critical subtlety and less overdetermined affirmation on this subject than Kearney seems able to offer. The post-structural turn in religious studies, as exemplified by Kearney, Caputo, Winquist and Taylor, has fallen prey to a certain set of rhetorical pieties. A predictable and inevitable turn, really. But one wants more. I don’t know yet if this book has it. But Kearney’s work is marked by a largeness and generosity, a compassion toward the anxiety of our deepest questions about God, that I find uplifting. OK, so this is actually a book I’m reading (more like skimming through) with an eye toward my chapter on Oppen, trauma and theology. As is the next book, sort of.
The Thirteen Petalled Rose, Adin Steinsaltz
In the late 90s, I enjoyed a lively, if short-lived, correspondence with Tom Mandel while I was wrestling with my review of his remarkable and haunting book, Prospect of Release. Steinsaltz was an important thinker for him and I’ve returned to this book, which I never really found my way into, in the hope that it will speak to me more clearly this time around. Again, as with Kearney, I’m really after the academic angle here. Norman Finkelstein is organizing a panel on Mike Heller for next year’s Louisville conference and I have an idea of writing about Mike’s work in conjunction with Tom’s, especially the latter’s Letters of the Law, which I’ve recently returned to.
Thing of Beauty, Jackson MacLow
How is it I’ve never really appreciated the magnitude of MacLow’s accomplishment till now? Probably a suspicion about the legitimacy of procedural poetics. That suspicion has been laid to rest since I picked up this beautifully produced volume from UC Press at The Coop last week and have been stunned repeatedly by it. In Boulder I’d owned the jaunty little Burning Deck edition of The Virginia Woolf Poems, which I enjoyed, but somehow felt fell short of Major Significance. The big revelation in this book is the excerpt from “The Light Poems,” a series of procedurally-determined permutations which open continually onto themselves in a kind of slow cataract of shifting panoramas. And the elegy for Paul Blackburn is exquisite.
The High Window, Raymond Chandler
Since December, when I came across Judith Freeman’s lovely The Long Embrace, a very perceptive and moving biographical homage to Chandler and his wife, Cissy, I’ve been re-reading The Master’s collected works. And I’ve been reading them slowly, often at the rate of a single chapter per night, lingering over descriptions or particular constructions. There’s no particular order to my reading. I began with The Little Sister, which I’d only read once, then read Playback for the first time. I think I was always afraid how disappointing I’d find it, but while it’s not on the level of his earlier work, it’s still enormously pleasurable. The descriptions of La Jolla, in particular, take on special resonance after knowing the biographical details of that time in Chandler’s life. And some of the set pieces, such as Marlowe’s conversation with the old man in the hotel lobby, are as rich and eccentric as anything Chandler wrote. After that I went back to his earliest stories: all four pieces in Trouble Is My Business, two of which I’d never read before, and then a few from The Simple Art of Murder, which I didn’t find quite as satisfying. That was followed by The Lady in the Lake. The last time I read it, about two years ago, I raced through it and the plot seemed jumbled and faintly preposterous. This time around, read at a savoring pace, it gained strength and clarity. Now, The High Window, which I also recall as ending on a dismal note as far as plot resolution goes. Though no one in their right mind would read Chandler for his plotting. In all the novels what comes across most powerfully is a picture of a certain species of modern loneliness. They’re only moments, casually occurring here and there, seeming throwaways, mere transitions before the next thing happens, as when Marlowe enters his office, opens the windows, buys himself a drink from the office bottle, and contemplates the dusk, the smell of cheap cooking, and the dust gathered on his desk. These are the best moments in the work. They are also the quietist. The sense of someone being alone with himself, looking out the window at the city.
Up in the Old Hotel, Joseph Mitchell & Back Where I Came From, A.J. Liebling
About the beauty of human foibles and eccentricities, they were never wrong, the Old Masters. These paeans to mid-20th Century New York and a now nearly vanished scene of convivial urban modernity are without peer. Part social anthropologists, part lyric poets, part hardnose investigators, and all-round aficionados of all things Manhattan, Mitchell and Liebling immerse themselves in the rich detail and odd rituals of unsung lives that make the city The City: an emblem of heterogeneous abjection and delight. Along with James Agee, Mitchell and Liebling were New Journalists avant la lettre. To read these books is to fall in love with writing all over again.
Honorable Mentions
Last fall I took up with a spate of turn-of-the-century romances of the primitive. It began with Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, then moved on to Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes and A Princess of Mars. The Haggard was the best of the lot, with Tarzan the biggest disappointment. I’d never read it before and seemingly missed the crucial age range when it might have stirred me. These boy’s own stories still have the power to thrill, while their racist and primitivist constructions of Otherness and history offer endless grist for the scholar’s mill.
On a somewhat less haughty note I offer here the first of an intermittent series of ongoing extracurricular reading, with a sideways glance at the “extra” since it, too, is already enfolded within the larger syllabus of attention. “The sideways glance” is a telling trope. These are books that give me pleasure or excite my interest in some way and have little or preferably nothing to do with my work as a scholar. But the sideways glance is merely the deferral, or diversion, of full attention. It is attention attended to on the sly.
Anatheism, Richard Kearney
Kearney’s earlier work has been important for me in thinking through my own projects and desires set in the ruins of theology, especially the groundbreaking The God Who May Be. The book’s seductive subtitle “Returning to God After God,” drew me in inspite of myself , since lately I’ve wanted more critical subtlety and less overdetermined affirmation on this subject than Kearney seems able to offer. The post-structural turn in religious studies, as exemplified by Kearney, Caputo, Winquist and Taylor, has fallen prey to a certain set of rhetorical pieties. A predictable and inevitable turn, really. But one wants more. I don’t know yet if this book has it. But Kearney’s work is marked by a largeness and generosity, a compassion toward the anxiety of our deepest questions about God, that I find uplifting. OK, so this is actually a book I’m reading (more like skimming through) with an eye toward my chapter on Oppen, trauma and theology. As is the next book, sort of.
The Thirteen Petalled Rose, Adin Steinsaltz
In the late 90s, I enjoyed a lively, if short-lived, correspondence with Tom Mandel while I was wrestling with my review of his remarkable and haunting book, Prospect of Release. Steinsaltz was an important thinker for him and I’ve returned to this book, which I never really found my way into, in the hope that it will speak to me more clearly this time around. Again, as with Kearney, I’m really after the academic angle here. Norman Finkelstein is organizing a panel on Mike Heller for next year’s Louisville conference and I have an idea of writing about Mike’s work in conjunction with Tom’s, especially the latter’s Letters of the Law, which I’ve recently returned to.
Thing of Beauty, Jackson MacLow
How is it I’ve never really appreciated the magnitude of MacLow’s accomplishment till now? Probably a suspicion about the legitimacy of procedural poetics. That suspicion has been laid to rest since I picked up this beautifully produced volume from UC Press at The Coop last week and have been stunned repeatedly by it. In Boulder I’d owned the jaunty little Burning Deck edition of The Virginia Woolf Poems, which I enjoyed, but somehow felt fell short of Major Significance. The big revelation in this book is the excerpt from “The Light Poems,” a series of procedurally-determined permutations which open continually onto themselves in a kind of slow cataract of shifting panoramas. And the elegy for Paul Blackburn is exquisite.
The High Window, Raymond Chandler
Since December, when I came across Judith Freeman’s lovely The Long Embrace, a very perceptive and moving biographical homage to Chandler and his wife, Cissy, I’ve been re-reading The Master’s collected works. And I’ve been reading them slowly, often at the rate of a single chapter per night, lingering over descriptions or particular constructions. There’s no particular order to my reading. I began with The Little Sister, which I’d only read once, then read Playback for the first time. I think I was always afraid how disappointing I’d find it, but while it’s not on the level of his earlier work, it’s still enormously pleasurable. The descriptions of La Jolla, in particular, take on special resonance after knowing the biographical details of that time in Chandler’s life. And some of the set pieces, such as Marlowe’s conversation with the old man in the hotel lobby, are as rich and eccentric as anything Chandler wrote. After that I went back to his earliest stories: all four pieces in Trouble Is My Business, two of which I’d never read before, and then a few from The Simple Art of Murder, which I didn’t find quite as satisfying. That was followed by The Lady in the Lake. The last time I read it, about two years ago, I raced through it and the plot seemed jumbled and faintly preposterous. This time around, read at a savoring pace, it gained strength and clarity. Now, The High Window, which I also recall as ending on a dismal note as far as plot resolution goes. Though no one in their right mind would read Chandler for his plotting. In all the novels what comes across most powerfully is a picture of a certain species of modern loneliness. They’re only moments, casually occurring here and there, seeming throwaways, mere transitions before the next thing happens, as when Marlowe enters his office, opens the windows, buys himself a drink from the office bottle, and contemplates the dusk, the smell of cheap cooking, and the dust gathered on his desk. These are the best moments in the work. They are also the quietist. The sense of someone being alone with himself, looking out the window at the city.
Up in the Old Hotel, Joseph Mitchell & Back Where I Came From, A.J. Liebling
About the beauty of human foibles and eccentricities, they were never wrong, the Old Masters. These paeans to mid-20th Century New York and a now nearly vanished scene of convivial urban modernity are without peer. Part social anthropologists, part lyric poets, part hardnose investigators, and all-round aficionados of all things Manhattan, Mitchell and Liebling immerse themselves in the rich detail and odd rituals of unsung lives that make the city The City: an emblem of heterogeneous abjection and delight. Along with James Agee, Mitchell and Liebling were New Journalists avant la lettre. To read these books is to fall in love with writing all over again.
Honorable Mentions
Last fall I took up with a spate of turn-of-the-century romances of the primitive. It began with Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, then moved on to Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes and A Princess of Mars. The Haggard was the best of the lot, with Tarzan the biggest disappointment. I’d never read it before and seemingly missed the crucial age range when it might have stirred me. These boy’s own stories still have the power to thrill, while their racist and primitivist constructions of Otherness and history offer endless grist for the scholar’s mill.
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