Partly (who am I kidding, mostly) in response to the veiled resentment I read online this week—so thin and venomously precious it spun from gossamer—I pre-ordered her book. How dare she have the wily temerity to proudly unleash what is possibly a clumsy but ambitious first collection into the world! (But I must say, the self-flagellating hedge of that all-too-clever title doesn't inspire confidence. I thought she was a blackpilled zoomer, not a "so... I did a thing" smol bean millennial?) From what little I've read, a Woolf she ain't, but Godspeed to any cocksure debut author who ardently lets loose a Ginsbergian howl. Greatly looking forward to your review!
She's a blackpilled zoomer *and* a smol bean millennial! She often lists the multitudes she contains in the book. I had to laugh at the antepenultimate sentence from the Zadie Smith piece on the campus protests that has everyone so riled up, because it could come straight out of My First Book, confirming the Gens X and Z ironist alliance against Boomer/Millennial certitude and/of identity:
I haven't yet read the ZS piece. I doubt I will. Not because I don’t often quietly admire her work (now there was a cocksure debut author!), nor because I don't feel a resigned solidarity with her detractors (as a '91 millennial, I probably have within me the same haplessly thunderous concern at the myriad evils of the day), but imagine the antediluvian innocence you'd need to see the words "Zadie Smith" + "The New Yorker" + "campus protests" and not be able to anticipate, down to the last umlaut (here's a millennial tick: "uhm ackshually, it's a diaeresis..."), every argument, and still feel the need to pearl-clutch online! You only get half a dozen free articles a month, people! At least re-read, with awe, Baldwin, or read, with exasperation, Brody!
Right, no need to bother reading it. There was no need for her to write anything, and, in fact, she doesn't write anything. The novelist's/essayist's baffled horror at violent events and intractable conflicts should just be taken for granted and be allowed to go unwritten unless the dreaded nuanced position can itself be expressed in poetic or prophetic language as in (to borrow your example) the younger Baldwin. Otherwise, a born political polemicist would in lusty and explosive prose cheer on the revolutionaries or the police (or go from one to other over the course of a life à la Hitchens). And since we know she's not going to lustily cheer on the revolutionaries, there is finally, as you say, no need for anyone to get angry about it on the internet.
(The only novel of Smith's I've read, On Beauty, has the same problem as the essay, though. It was also fixated on a liberal hesitation between competing reactionary and radical claims. I was a young radical when I read it 20 years ago, but I didn't think it was very good on the apolitical grounds that its anguished liberalism just wasn't realized as a novelistic theme very excitingly, compared to its much more imaginative Forsterian model of Howards End, and I never read another of her novels.)
I couldn't have put it better myself. Coincidentally, about a month ago, I was skimming Smith's Wikipedia page, clicked on On Beauty, and genuinely laughed out loud at the accolades section: the lone listing is from that Greatest Books website, triumphantly heralding it as “the 2449th greatest book of all time.” That's so perfect!
For whatever reason the Ulysses that’s found its way into my hands is primarily the 1961 edition, although I have an earlier, late forties hardcover lying around somewhere. I respect the book but I can’t imagine ever being the sort of person who reads it closely enough to put much thought into the variations-my experience with it is a bit like Borges! The thing about “fascist” literary figures is that seemingly anybody in the early 20th century who wasn’t a Dos Passos style Marxist could be described as such. I’d probably go with Lawrence for the anglosphere and Hamsun (who was I believe an actual hitlerist) for the European world. In the postwar period it’s probably Mishima.
Yes, and those Marxists were bad too! Part of the reason for Joyce's enduring hyper-canonicity among the modernists is that he really wasn't either a fascist or a Marxist. I forgot about Mishima—need to read more, but I do like him. I read Hamsun's Hunger, but it didn't make a big impression. It was like a 2010s novel!
I was fixating on this “fascist” question re: Mo Diggs’ post yesterday about the political tenor of what might be the “new literature” now (if it’s going to be “Dimes Square,” someone needs to really break out of the tired late-2000s-alt-lit-but-plus-edgy-racism aqueduct. I think Madeline Cash has potential but might get self-trapped in the too cool for school ghetto). And I just don’t think literature as we know it surfs these trends in the way music or film or the digital realm now obviously does. Who are the “alt-left” novelists of the hegemonic period Diggs thinks was regnant since - what - the 60s? (I’m leaving aside the 2010s and the bookstore front-table woke extravaganza which is too obvious.) Because the figures that loom large (Delillo, Roth, Pynchon* - even Wallace, Franzen, Zadie Smith - and then late 2000s, Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti and imitators, shortly then Moshfegh, Knausgard, etc.) seem in the former case a very American left-libertarian or even crypto-conservative (maybe same thing!) or resolutely apolitical, at the least blandly inoffensive along that dimension of their work. It’s not like we have Shaws or Zolas or non-Instagram Celines in any high culture way. (Even Houellebecq’s right-wing incel reception in the US seems seriously misguided — he’s a terminally disaffected lib). I was telling someone today that “the canon” is a canon of exceptions, of weirdos, who may magnetically draw apart from their era’s consensus, but get oddly collected in the horseshoe inertia of trying to, like, say true things about this life.
*I’d offer that the more Pynchon I read, the more I find that his conception of race as a determining historical force and American inheritance (even in Mason & Dixon when he’s projecting it onto Dutch South Africa) is at turns totally predictive of “woke” monomania, but still in line with a hippy-libertarian ethos of sorts. The first fifteen pages of Gravity’s Rainbow would not in a million years make it past a modern publishing house’s sensitivity reader.
Right...the politics of the fiction of DeLillo, Roth, Franzen, Moshfegh, Cash, Levy, and, well, me are basically the same politics, which are basically the politics of Emerson and Hawthorne too, and James and Faulkner and Ellison. The American left-libertarianism is very deep and enduring! Pynchon, Morrison, Silko, Erdrich, Ishmael Reed (and Faulkner in another of his modes) are partial exceptions because, as you say, of the way they construe race to function and of the means they're sometimes willing to countenance to disrupt this functioning, but even with them the left-libertarianism is still underneath, is the reason they focus on race in the first place, even as it's ironically also the reason most of the writers in the first list don't. The question is whether or not there's been so much Marxist tutelage in higher ed that it will finally achieve the power to reshape what's been canonized in the past and what gets canonized in the future, if we don't just descend into general illiteracy. It hasn't happened yet, but we'll see!
“…is the reason they focus on race in the first place, even as it's ironically also the reason most of the writers in the first list don't.” Could not have said it better. Also one of the reasons that Reed’s Flight to Canada is so great. Race-obsessed? Yeah. Anarchic, postmodern, taboo-defying, playful (even…ultimately…sexy? With a getting-down scene on a couch while Lincoln/JFK is getting shot on the color television? Absolutely. Almost kind of Lana Del Rey).
No, we don’t really do leftist novelists in the orthodox sense! The point about Pynchon is true about Dos Passos too-and he became a hardcore Jeffersonian conservative libertarian after the late 40s, his last major work railing about postwar bureaucracy left and center etc. Gasda aside the Dimes people don’t have what it takes imo, they’re still clinging to an aesthetic that passed its sell by date almost a decade or so. You can debate whether that expiry was a natural death, but it was a death!
Connecting disparate parts of the post, even Joyce published at least once in an Italian fascist journal. Never know which of the Inviserati are reading comments, but would hugely recommend the Bloomsday Book as a companion to the summer reading (just don’t pay cover price): https://a.co/d/4r165Pw
Yes, I used the Bloomsday Book the first time I read it too. Stuart Gilbert's old user's guide is good too, if crazily of its time. I would NOT recommend Ulysses Annotated for a first-time reader; you'll go crazy that way.
Sidebar re: Borges, did you ever read his (I think) first book, A Universal History of Iniquity? It’s still my favorite, but guiltily so, as if I told people my favorite Beatles song was “Love Me Do.” I think he disowned it in later years as “baroque,” which is true and also what’s great about it.
I rushed to the 1922 facsimile I purchased for this purpose some months ago and was relieved to discover it was the Oxford World Classics. I had figured the differences weren't too significant, and this was what was on offer at the university bookstore, so I'm pleased that I at least Gettiered myself into a usable edition :-)
Excellent! I've only browsed through that edition in the bookstore, but I've read the same editor's Oxford edition of A Portrait of the Artist, and it's good and reliable.
Partly (who am I kidding, mostly) in response to the veiled resentment I read online this week—so thin and venomously precious it spun from gossamer—I pre-ordered her book. How dare she have the wily temerity to proudly unleash what is possibly a clumsy but ambitious first collection into the world! (But I must say, the self-flagellating hedge of that all-too-clever title doesn't inspire confidence. I thought she was a blackpilled zoomer, not a "so... I did a thing" smol bean millennial?) From what little I've read, a Woolf she ain't, but Godspeed to any cocksure debut author who ardently lets loose a Ginsbergian howl. Greatly looking forward to your review!
She's a blackpilled zoomer *and* a smol bean millennial! She often lists the multitudes she contains in the book. I had to laugh at the antepenultimate sentence from the Zadie Smith piece on the campus protests that has everyone so riled up, because it could come straight out of My First Book, confirming the Gens X and Z ironist alliance against Boomer/Millennial certitude and/of identity:
"Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward."
I haven't yet read the ZS piece. I doubt I will. Not because I don’t often quietly admire her work (now there was a cocksure debut author!), nor because I don't feel a resigned solidarity with her detractors (as a '91 millennial, I probably have within me the same haplessly thunderous concern at the myriad evils of the day), but imagine the antediluvian innocence you'd need to see the words "Zadie Smith" + "The New Yorker" + "campus protests" and not be able to anticipate, down to the last umlaut (here's a millennial tick: "uhm ackshually, it's a diaeresis..."), every argument, and still feel the need to pearl-clutch online! You only get half a dozen free articles a month, people! At least re-read, with awe, Baldwin, or read, with exasperation, Brody!
Right, no need to bother reading it. There was no need for her to write anything, and, in fact, she doesn't write anything. The novelist's/essayist's baffled horror at violent events and intractable conflicts should just be taken for granted and be allowed to go unwritten unless the dreaded nuanced position can itself be expressed in poetic or prophetic language as in (to borrow your example) the younger Baldwin. Otherwise, a born political polemicist would in lusty and explosive prose cheer on the revolutionaries or the police (or go from one to other over the course of a life à la Hitchens). And since we know she's not going to lustily cheer on the revolutionaries, there is finally, as you say, no need for anyone to get angry about it on the internet.
(The only novel of Smith's I've read, On Beauty, has the same problem as the essay, though. It was also fixated on a liberal hesitation between competing reactionary and radical claims. I was a young radical when I read it 20 years ago, but I didn't think it was very good on the apolitical grounds that its anguished liberalism just wasn't realized as a novelistic theme very excitingly, compared to its much more imaginative Forsterian model of Howards End, and I never read another of her novels.)
I couldn't have put it better myself. Coincidentally, about a month ago, I was skimming Smith's Wikipedia page, clicked on On Beauty, and genuinely laughed out loud at the accolades section: the lone listing is from that Greatest Books website, triumphantly heralding it as “the 2449th greatest book of all time.” That's so perfect!
Beating 2449 with Major Arcana seems like an achievable goal for me to focus on right now.
For whatever reason the Ulysses that’s found its way into my hands is primarily the 1961 edition, although I have an earlier, late forties hardcover lying around somewhere. I respect the book but I can’t imagine ever being the sort of person who reads it closely enough to put much thought into the variations-my experience with it is a bit like Borges! The thing about “fascist” literary figures is that seemingly anybody in the early 20th century who wasn’t a Dos Passos style Marxist could be described as such. I’d probably go with Lawrence for the anglosphere and Hamsun (who was I believe an actual hitlerist) for the European world. In the postwar period it’s probably Mishima.
Yes, and those Marxists were bad too! Part of the reason for Joyce's enduring hyper-canonicity among the modernists is that he really wasn't either a fascist or a Marxist. I forgot about Mishima—need to read more, but I do like him. I read Hamsun's Hunger, but it didn't make a big impression. It was like a 2010s novel!
A 2010s novel wouldn't be as intense! Although on reflection I probably do need to replace Lawrence with Barnes...
I was fixating on this “fascist” question re: Mo Diggs’ post yesterday about the political tenor of what might be the “new literature” now (if it’s going to be “Dimes Square,” someone needs to really break out of the tired late-2000s-alt-lit-but-plus-edgy-racism aqueduct. I think Madeline Cash has potential but might get self-trapped in the too cool for school ghetto). And I just don’t think literature as we know it surfs these trends in the way music or film or the digital realm now obviously does. Who are the “alt-left” novelists of the hegemonic period Diggs thinks was regnant since - what - the 60s? (I’m leaving aside the 2010s and the bookstore front-table woke extravaganza which is too obvious.) Because the figures that loom large (Delillo, Roth, Pynchon* - even Wallace, Franzen, Zadie Smith - and then late 2000s, Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti and imitators, shortly then Moshfegh, Knausgard, etc.) seem in the former case a very American left-libertarian or even crypto-conservative (maybe same thing!) or resolutely apolitical, at the least blandly inoffensive along that dimension of their work. It’s not like we have Shaws or Zolas or non-Instagram Celines in any high culture way. (Even Houellebecq’s right-wing incel reception in the US seems seriously misguided — he’s a terminally disaffected lib). I was telling someone today that “the canon” is a canon of exceptions, of weirdos, who may magnetically draw apart from their era’s consensus, but get oddly collected in the horseshoe inertia of trying to, like, say true things about this life.
*I’d offer that the more Pynchon I read, the more I find that his conception of race as a determining historical force and American inheritance (even in Mason & Dixon when he’s projecting it onto Dutch South Africa) is at turns totally predictive of “woke” monomania, but still in line with a hippy-libertarian ethos of sorts. The first fifteen pages of Gravity’s Rainbow would not in a million years make it past a modern publishing house’s sensitivity reader.
Right...the politics of the fiction of DeLillo, Roth, Franzen, Moshfegh, Cash, Levy, and, well, me are basically the same politics, which are basically the politics of Emerson and Hawthorne too, and James and Faulkner and Ellison. The American left-libertarianism is very deep and enduring! Pynchon, Morrison, Silko, Erdrich, Ishmael Reed (and Faulkner in another of his modes) are partial exceptions because, as you say, of the way they construe race to function and of the means they're sometimes willing to countenance to disrupt this functioning, but even with them the left-libertarianism is still underneath, is the reason they focus on race in the first place, even as it's ironically also the reason most of the writers in the first list don't. The question is whether or not there's been so much Marxist tutelage in higher ed that it will finally achieve the power to reshape what's been canonized in the past and what gets canonized in the future, if we don't just descend into general illiteracy. It hasn't happened yet, but we'll see!
“…is the reason they focus on race in the first place, even as it's ironically also the reason most of the writers in the first list don't.” Could not have said it better. Also one of the reasons that Reed’s Flight to Canada is so great. Race-obsessed? Yeah. Anarchic, postmodern, taboo-defying, playful (even…ultimately…sexy? With a getting-down scene on a couch while Lincoln/JFK is getting shot on the color television? Absolutely. Almost kind of Lana Del Rey).
I should have said: which is why I prefer it to Mumbo Jumbo.
No, we don’t really do leftist novelists in the orthodox sense! The point about Pynchon is true about Dos Passos too-and he became a hardcore Jeffersonian conservative libertarian after the late 40s, his last major work railing about postwar bureaucracy left and center etc. Gasda aside the Dimes people don’t have what it takes imo, they’re still clinging to an aesthetic that passed its sell by date almost a decade or so. You can debate whether that expiry was a natural death, but it was a death!
Connecting disparate parts of the post, even Joyce published at least once in an Italian fascist journal. Never know which of the Inviserati are reading comments, but would hugely recommend the Bloomsday Book as a companion to the summer reading (just don’t pay cover price): https://a.co/d/4r165Pw
Yes, I used the Bloomsday Book the first time I read it too. Stuart Gilbert's old user's guide is good too, if crazily of its time. I would NOT recommend Ulysses Annotated for a first-time reader; you'll go crazy that way.
Ulysses Annotated is actually a lost Borges story
Lol definitely! To be clear, though, I would recommend Ulysses Annotated for a second-, third-, fourth-, etc.-time reader.
Sidebar re: Borges, did you ever read his (I think) first book, A Universal History of Iniquity? It’s still my favorite, but guiltily so, as if I told people my favorite Beatles song was “Love Me Do.” I think he disowned it in later years as “baroque,” which is true and also what’s great about it.
I haven't, unfortunately. Should do a read-through of the whole Collected Fictions someday.
I rushed to the 1922 facsimile I purchased for this purpose some months ago and was relieved to discover it was the Oxford World Classics. I had figured the differences weren't too significant, and this was what was on offer at the university bookstore, so I'm pleased that I at least Gettiered myself into a usable edition :-)
Excellent! I've only browsed through that edition in the bookstore, but I've read the same editor's Oxford edition of A Portrait of the Artist, and it's good and reliable.