AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

Reviewed by:

• The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class by Cynthia Cruz
• Josh Polinard (bio)

Robin DiAngelo's bestseller White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (2018) opens with a quote by Charles Baudelaire, arguably most known nowadays as a popular line from the 1995 film The Usual Suspects: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." The allusion implies that the most effective means of addressing white supremacy in the US is to first regard it as an insidious, silent oppressor, lurking in the shadows of a clandestine, all-but-completely-disavowed white privilege rather than solely as a signifier for pointy white hats and swastika-clad purveyors of amphetamines.

Cynthia Cruz's The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class cautions us of a similar form of disavowal—one that secures the advantage of the ruling class by insisting there simply is no working class in the United States. As Cruz states in chapter 3, "Neoliberalism's message … states vehemently that we are all born with the same privileges, that we all have the same advantages, and that those who do not succeed have only their own ineptitude and/or laziness to blame."

Although the bulk of Cruz's manifesto outlines the trajectory of other working-class artists' fulfillment of the rags-to-riches myth—albeit in a manner that calls the fulfillment part into question—it is the close examinations of her own struggle as a working-class author that are perhaps the most poignant. As she states in the previously mentioned chapter: [End Page 162]

When during my two years in the [MFA writing program] I was told repeatedly by my classmates and my professors that my poems made no sense, I felt ashamed and assumed, automatically, that they were right. As a result, I deleted large portions of my writing. It took me decades to recognize that the very things I was erasing in my writing were class-based, which is to say that what my classmates and teachers were unable to comprehend was my worldview. When I am told to make my work more "clear," what I am actually being told is to make my writing adhere to a certain cultural aesthetic, which is formed and determined by middle-class writers and editors … assimilating into the literary elite is the payoff.

What Cruz shares here speaks to the melancholia referred to in the title of the book, which Freud, in his essay "

Reviewed by:

• A Suite of Dances by Mark Weiss
• Christopher Winks (bio)

The title of Mark Weiss's full-length poetic sequence immediately conjures up associations with the transformations of dance rhythms by the likes of Bach and Handel, wherein popular musical idioms are subjected to harmonic variation, contrapuntal voicings, and other techniques of sublimation/etherealization. As with these Baroque composers, albeit in words, Weiss explores the multiple possibilities and ramifications of the languages of dance within that most Terpsichorean of verbal forms: poetry. Johan Huizinga's analysis in Homo Ludens (1938) of dance as "a particular and particularly perfect form of playing" and poetry's affinity with play as "apparent in the structure of creative imagination itself" is especially relevant to Weiss's project, where (to quote Huizinga again) "the words themselves lift the poem, in part at least, out of pure play into the sphere of ideation and judgment."

Within that sphere, one might think back to Ezra Pound's "dance of the intellect among words," which certainly holds validity here—Weiss notes "the dance of words / as fixed as a minuet"—but to my mind, the precursor text of which A Suite of Dances is an extension is William Carlos Williams's "Desert Music": "How shall we get said what must be said? // … // Only the counted poem, to an exact measure: / to imitate, not to copy nature, not / to copy nature // NOT, prostrate, to copy nature / but a dance!" Effectively challenging Huizinga's declaration that "music never leaves the play-sphere," Weiss tips his hat to Williams with a subversive alteration of one of the older poet's most often-quoted observations: "No ideas / but in music / No music / but in things." And this book dances to the ever-changing music of/in things, memories, encounters, life itself in all its precarious wonder: "So, in the larger space / as well, and dance, and dance."

A Suite of Dances consists of twenty-seven sections, each composed of an [End Page 137] individual title and numerous separately titled short poems—some as brief as a single word—indented from the "primary" (left-aligned) poem to which they are in a way counter-statements or variations, even at times digressions. What stands out immediately is Weiss's breadth of perception: his noticings often take the form of flashes and glimmers, signs of someone always involved with his surroundings and whose consciousness actively interacts with and processes that which befalls and that which is the case. Moments of quasi-Wittgensteinian philosoph

Reviewed by:

• BRUT: Writings on Art & Artists by Harold Jaffe
• Eckhard Gerdes (bio)

Harold Jaffe's transgressive fictions range from the social critique of his novel Mole's Pity (1979), through his fiction treatments of celebrity in Madonna & Other Spectacles (1988), 15 Serial Killers (2003), and Brando Bleeds (2022), and carry on throughout his disturbing and astute docufictions such as Porn-Anti-Porn (2019) and False Positive (2002). But in all cases, Jaffe makes one consistent decision as a writer: the dominant methods of employing fiction are not the essential basis of literary art.

What makes Jaffe's writing unique is, perhaps, how he creatively and effectively combines the strategies and techniques of fiction with nonfiction. His docufictions blur the distinction between the two. In that sense, Jaffe's work reimagines the first dictum of the English novel: the pretense of being nonfiction. Readers of eighteenth-century novels must have realized that writers such as Defoe and Swift were not actually relating true accounts but were using nonfiction as a conceit upon which to build their novels. This process has been thoroughly discussed in Lennard Davis's Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (1997), which traces the history of the novel from the printed ballad, which was ostensibly the sharing of the "news" (cf. novellus in Latin), to the adoption of the conceit by eighteenth-century novelists. But the factuality of the work was not a real issue. It only had to look like that. [End Page 158] Present-day readers can read The Onion or the satire of "The Borowitz Report" without believing the stories are true. This synthesis of fact and fiction was foundational in the novel but has been misunderstood and misused by scores of writers who believe that they are so special that all a novel really needs to be is a roman à clef. Indeed, hundreds of these works are of the type that I call "I hate my parents" or "I screwed my grad student" novels. And though some value can be found in these works, the novel as a form is much larger than that. It can certainly be used for social purposes, but is a work whose goal is to effect social change primarily social commentary or a literary novel? What destination is the author driving toward? Is the goal social commentary or literary excellence? Those are clearly separate and distinct goals. Which of those choices is more important to the author? We should not conflate astute social commentary with literary excellence.

• PanentheismOntology of the Future, or Poetics?
• Daniel T. O'Hara (bio)

"Panentheism" in theology is the belief in the co-inherence of God and the world. However else God and the world are defined, it is this relationship that distinguishes it. Neither absolute transcendence nor total immanence describes God vis-à-vis the world or the world vis-à-vis God. Similarly, the world, while emerging or emanating from God, is not God's mere reflective mirror, but instead, by virtue of its divine inherence, acts as provocation to divine development. Unlike, say, Gnosticism, in which there are two or more divinities—the original alien god whose plenum or extended presence contains the God of this world (or Demiurge) who constructs it, and many archons or minor administrative, largely evil heads of the cosmos—panentheism argues for all beings as gods-in-potential expression. The violence of all this onto-theological procession, as you might imagine, is internalized and externalized, leaving no being long at peace before a new event of co-inherence arises to produce a new phase.

I became interested in panentheism in part as a response to my reading of Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future, a provocative 2021 book by Zahi Zalloua, and Cormac McCarthy's award-winning Border Trilogy of the 1990s (All the Pretty Horses [1992], The Crossing [1994], and Cities of the Plain [1998]), which led me into reading McCarthy's entire work and that of many of his scholarly commentators. McCarthy has long been seen, at least partially, as putting Gnosticism to use in generating the mythological dimensions of his fictions, and given the superb promptings of Zalloua's book (is our species already in an inchoate posthuman state?), I became hooked. The term panentheism itself I first observed in Steven Frye's introduction to his edited collection of critical essays on McCarthy in the Cambridge Companion Series (2013).

Zalloua introduces the reader to the emergent ontologies of cyborgs, animals, material objects, and Black Being (with a line through the second [End Page 174] term). All of these topics are read by their theoretical champions as being at the center of their critical movements, all of which are components of a new materialism and a radical, often racially informed polemical critique of all that has been in the name of what must become, in this present moment of universal crisis. The interface between machine and human, animal and human, real-world objects and humans, and Afro-pessimists and conventional left-wing ideologues (who are for only a piecemeal peaceful change) forecast what has already emerged elsewhere and is now pervading American society: a quest to move beyond all inherited and too-well understood

Reviewed by:

• The Story of NFTs: Artists, Technology, and Democracy by Amy Whitaker and Nora Burnett Abrams
• Jessi Rae Morton (bio)

In The Story of NFTs: Artists, Technology, and Democracy, Amy Whitaker and Nora Burnett Abrams provide a thoughtful and well-designed overview of the role of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) in the art world as well as the relationships between NFTs and art history. The authors acknowledge often that NFTs are relatively new and that therefore the book can offer little in terms of future predictions or assertions about the long-term effects of NFTs on artists and art markets. Instead, Whitaker and Abrams seek to engage with numerous questions about blockchain technologies—including NFTs and DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations). To address such questions, some definitions are necessary; Whitaker and Abrams cover key concepts and terms early in the book, and they also provide an appendix that walks the reader through the process of minting an NFT. The appendix defines and explains platforms, protocols, wallets, keys, and smart contracts—all concepts that are mentioned earlier in the book, but with which some readers may prefer to spend additional time. The Story of NFTs is not exhaustively entry-level; readers who are already familiar with the basics of NFTs and block-chain technology will still find much to learn, and less familiar readers will get quick, direct definitions that allow them to move on to the more interesting, though less technical, aspects of the topic. The Story of NFTs is predominantly interested in the relationship between NFTs, blockchain technology, and visual arts, and so the technological elements—though important and duly attended to—do not take over the book.

The book's introduction calls attention to two key moments in recent art history—the Association of Art Museum Directors COVID-19-related decision to loosen sales restrictions on museums for two years and the March 2021 sale of Beeple's NFT Everydays: The First 5000 Days for over $69 million. These two events serve to characterize recent disruption within the art world, [End Page 17] but they are not the source of the disruption. Whitaker and Abrams point to these moments to illustrate how NFTs moved to the forefront of art discussions in the past few years, then trace the history from which these moments grew. They set out to "understand NFTs not as an alien landing but instead as part of the history of art." When considered in this light, NFTs appear as a development in the art

• Particularly the Press
• Charles Alexander (bio)

Often I have wished to gather into a room, for a conversation if not a lifetime of conversations, a few women writers of the early twentieth century, specifically, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). They are all, in their own way, Curies "of the laboratory / of vocabulary," as Mina Loy (who should also be in this group) described Gertrude Stein in a poem. Anyone who has run a press might think that a "laboratory of vocabulary" is a kind of euphemism for a printing room. All four of these women at one time or another were either publishers or editors, of books and/or journals that helped fuel a burgeoning modernist movement, that truly made it new, and in some ways remade the world. You might think Woolf (who is the one who more than the others got her hands inky while printing) is the only one of these writers who is not a poet, but not when one encounters a passage such as this from The Waves (1931):

I do not know—your days and hours pass like the boughs of forest trees and the smooth green of forest rides to a hound running on the scent. But there is no single scent, no single body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, here on a spike of the mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back.

I think one might, at the least, consider her a poet in prose, one of the three or so finest poets in prose we have ever had in the English language. That she was also quite serious as a publisher enchants the imagination, that is, how did she manage it all? She had help, of course, in her most supportive husband, Leonard. Such an enterprise had a rather casual beginning, or so it seems when we consider her diary entry for her birthday, January 26, 1915: [End Page 166]

I don't know when I have enjoyed a birthday so much—not since I was a child anyhow. Sitting at tea we decided three things: in the first place to take Hogarth [a new place to live], if we can get it; in the second, to buy a Printing press; in the third to buy a Bull dog, probably called John. I am very much excited at the idea of all three—particularly the press. I was also given a packet of sweets to bring home.

So began the adventure of the Hogarth Press, which the Woolfs named after their new home. I was moved to write this column essay when I found out that one of the many books from the Hogarth Press was Composition as Explanation (1926), by Gertrude Stein, which begins in a way that speaks of bo

• The Translation Stone
• Brian O'Keeffe (bio)

In 1799, a large stone was discovered in Egypt. Inscribed on its surface were texts in Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphs. Would this stone permit the hitherto undecipherable hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians to be understood? Key to unlocking the secrets of the Egyptian script was that the three languages incised on the stone were equivalent to one another: each was a translation of the other. In a few short years, the code was broken and the hieroglyphic riddle solved. Finally the meaning of those elegantly oval eyes, proud-beaked falcons, and bulbous scarab beetles was translated into French and English. Egypt—the entire country a scroll of lapidary writing unfurling from obelisk to pyramid to temple complex and burial chamber—now became legible. The Rosetta Stone, as it's now known, of course, is the emblematic artifact of translation itself. It is the translation stone.

Before Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion accomplished their translation work, the Egyptian hieroglyph was, along with the Sphinx, a byword for enigma itself. Greeks, Romans, and Ottomans attempted the translation, but in vain. But as much as hieroglyphics daunted all those who attempted to penetrate their glyptic secrecies, some wondered whether they also represented an ideal language, as if pictograms might somehow be more expressive of concepts and ideas than the writing systems of Greek or Latin. Plotinus, in his Enneads, speaking of "the wise of Egypt," remarked that "in their effort towards philosophical statement, they left aside the writing-forms that take in the detail of words and sentences—those characters that represent sounds and convey the propositions of reasoning—and drew pictures instead, engraving in the temple-inscriptions a separate image for every separate item." Discreteness, rather than the clotted details of words forming into sentences, is what Plotinus likes here: perhaps philosophy is better articulated when one image expresses one distinct idea, no more, no less. "Thus," writes Plotinus, "they exhibited the mode in which the Supreme goes forth." As philosophy [End Page 105] dreamed its dreams of Supreme Ideas, ideal Essences and Forms, the desire for a universal, indeed primordial language accompanied that dream. In his work Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652–54) Athanasius Kircher claimed not only to have translated the Egyptian hieroglyphs but also that Adam and Eve spoke that language in the Garden of Eden. And the frontispiece to Johann Becher's 1661 book, Character pro notitia linguarum universali, another proposal for a universal language, depicts his characters inscribed on an Egyptian obelisk. The investment in Egyptian hieroglyphs waxed and waned with the centuries, some countering

Reviewed by:

• Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2022 by Grace Shulman
• Hilary Sideris (bio)

Grace Shulman, master of many poetic forms and beloved poet-citizen of New York City, has published a second volume of selected poems, Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2022. Her earlier collection of selected poems, Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems, was published in 2002. Shulman's poems go well beyond personal narrative to encompass a range of human experience and thought. They allude to cultural figures and artists as well as humbler folk from the past. David Mason described her as a poet attuned to the past, "hearing footsteps and looking under her own soles to see what is there," feeling the vibrations of other times and people. But Shulman does not shrink from autobiography, and her poems often grapple with intense pain and grief.

"Without a Claim," the title poem from Shulman's 2013 collection, ponders the fallacy of human ownership of the natural world through the lens of the American immigrant experience. The poem recounts the poet's uncomprehending experience of becoming a landowner. "I couldn't take it in," Shulman writes,

when told I owned this land with oaks and maplesscattered like crowds on Sundays, and an undergroundstrung not with pipes but snaky roots that writhed

when my husband sank a rhododendron,now flaunting pinks high as an attic window.The land we call our place was never ours.

The waves of immigrants who arrived in New York after its "discovery" by Europeans, the poet's ancestors among them, came from places where they had nothing, in the hope of having something to call their own. Yet the land's [End Page 132] truest owners, the Montauks, were the only ones able to understand that it wasn't even theirs:

If it belonged to anyone, it wasthe Montauk chief who traded it for mirrors,knowing it wasn't his. Not the sailors

who brought the blacksmith iron, nor the farmerswho dried salt hay, nor even the later locals,whale hunters, the harpooner from Sumatra,

the cook from Borneo, who like my ancestorswandered from town to port without a claim,their names inside me though not in the registries.

No more than geese in flight, shadowing the lawn,cries pierc

• ScenesSoft Skull Press: An Interview with Mensah Demary

Could you briefly describe your press's history?

Soft Skull Press began in New York City in 1992 as photocopied, tape-bound books. Over thirty years later, Soft Skull continues to evolve, becoming wiser and more thoughtful about the literature we publish. Though the history of the press should be remembered and protected against nostalgia, Soft Skull today is a house of diverse literary writers among a continuum of independent artists, past and future. Soft Skull has published award-winning books across genres by authors including Lynne Tillman, Rebecca Walker, Maggie Nelson, Kashana Cauley, Hiromi Kawakami, and others. Since 2021, Soft Skull has been led by Editor-in-Chief Mensah Demary, and Assistant Editor Cecilia Flores.

How would you characterize the work you publish?

Each Soft Skull title is a distinct, singular work of literature demonstrating integrity, developed through practice, and derived from the intuition of its author. Soft Skull Press exhibits mastery and genius unrestrained by genre.

Who is your audience, and in what ways are you trying to reach them?

Our audience consists of thinkers, dreamers, and artists seeking a sensory experience beyond reading who collude with our books to foster liberation through the attractive force of affinity.

By cultivating a curatorial approach to our initiatives, events, and acquisitions, Soft Skull tries to reach its audience through interdisciplinary and creative events, partnerships and campaigns. Our collaborative editorial practices render the book neither object nor subject, exclusively, but encourages lines of articulation and flight connecting our titles, authors, concepts, and worlds to one another, fostering a cosmos within which our readers are at liberty to place themselves.

By partnering with inventive and multimedia digital art spaces and intentional, public, cultural institutions, Soft Skull aims to provide events [End Page 171] and experiences for our authors and readers that celebrate, interrogate, participate in, and reimagine the composite parts of a book's object-to-subject relationship.

What is your role in the publishing scene?

It is vital to independent literature that we provide a home for artists who eschew corporate publishing. As editors and collaborators, we think deeply about our relationships to Soft Skull, its authors, and their titles. We are defenders of the life of the mind. We do so, in part, by pushing back against opinion for opinion's sake. We ask our authors, and ourselves, to refine their opinions into theories, across genres, faithful to a body of fact.

Examples of this can be found

Reviewed by:

• The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction ed. by Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Alistair Rolls
• David Riddle Watson (bio)

As a fan of the Cambridge Companion series, I was excited at the arrival of The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction. As the trend in "worlding" literature continues with the recent publication of volumes such as Crime Fiction as World Literature (2017) and The Routledge Handbook to Crime Fiction (2020), it is refreshing to see the field of crime fiction get its place among other literatures, often considered more worthy of serious study. Because crime fiction is in the process of finding its place in the canon, the editors point out that this installment in Cambridge's series begins from a different place than most volumes: "As scholarly companions go, this volume is atypical. While most companions aim to map an existing field … The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction endeavours to introduce and advance what is still an emerging field." To that end, the volume aims to "take a significant step towards defining the field, identifying its theoretical fault lines and offering an overview of the local traditions and transnational hybridizations that constitute it."

This volume is a valuable addition to crime fiction scholarship, and I believe the editors are successful in their stated mission to expand this emerging field, with many essays genuinely breaking new ground. The collection begins with an attempt to describe the state of the genre. Jesper Gulddal and Stewart King point out in "What Is World Crime Fiction?" that crime fiction [End Page 149] is "emphatically, a global phenomenon," arguing that the "global reach of the crime genre is evident from the fact that crime fiction is written, published, sold and read on a significant scale on all continents … with an established literary culture." This requires a "fundamental rethinking of the crime genre itself," by which they mean to break free from the desire to associate the genre so closely with American and British models at the center that we are prevented from "recognizing non-Western crime fiction unless it closely replicates Western models." This collection recognizes these non-Western works by looking at publishing houses, sales data, and works from regions across the globe. The first six essays of the collection deal with material conditions tha