WFH Links 13 - January 14th, 2022
Hello everyone! Here are some great things I’ve been reading in the past two weeks.
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(Book Review) The wonderful Patricia Lockwood reviewed the newest Karl One Knausgaard novel for the LRB:
“All your time will be eaten by someone – why not him, who has made such a huge crazy claim on it? It is a reassuring fact of human beings that they are not particularly delicate in their processes, not particularly discerning in their tastes. They can, in short, digest tin cans, and in more than one sense enjoy it. The literary stomach of the world is a goat’s, not a hummingbird’s, and Knausgaard knows it.”
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(Literary Criticism)
“William Marx’s starting point is the proposition that literature does not begin with Homer or Hesiod or the Epic of Gilgamesh; it begins when Plato expels the poets from his republic. That is the moment when ‘literature’ comes into being as a concept, the moment it is first theorised as a distinct discourse with a different status and different imperatives to other modes of expression. Plato draws a sharp line between literature and philosophy, laying claim to truth, reason and virtue on behalf of the latter. He attributes to literature everything that philosophy is not: it is thus condemned as a seductive but morally corrupting realm of lies, an irrational form of emotional manipulation. The very first attempt to define ‘literature’, in other words, is made by its enemy. - Literature/Antiliterature by James Ley
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(Literary Criticism) I’ve been greatly enjoying a collection of William H Gass’s critical essays this week. I found my favorite so far, his 1970 essay Philosophy and the Form of Fiction, available online here.
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(Gloating About a Niche Brouhaha) The publisher’s blurb for the 2015 bestseller and critically-fawned-over sadistic torture fantasy “A Little Life” by certified creep Hanya Yanagihara reads,
“A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.”
Which is the most brave-faced, hilariously misleading way I could think of to tempt someone into reading 800 pages of graphic self-harm, insane trauma revelations, and medical emergencies waiting for Jude to just kill himself already (reader, to save you the trouble: he finally, finally, does). So, Doubleday blurb writer, I hope you read this and that you can share my amusement that your sleight-of-hand brought me this terrible book as an Easter present from my unsuspecting mother. As the internet idiom has it, sometimes you wake up and choose violence. In this case it took a remarkably long time, but with the release of her somehow-even-worse-sounding “To Paradise” this month, critical knives are OUT for Hanya, overrated fantasizing-about-the-torture-of-gay-men sadist that she is, and I am relishing it. Here are two of the best so far: Ad Nauseam by Rebecca Panovka and Hanya’s Boys by Andrea Long Chu.
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(Analogies for Our Times) Three writers I admire have separately arrived at an analogy between our time of ‘hyper political’ polarization without content and the decade-long, society-rending Dreyfus Affair of the French Third Republic. Each of these pieces is interesting in its own right, and further illuminated by their various reasoning towards that equivalence: Every Day a Dreyfus Affair by Justin EH Smith, John Ganz’s reading notes from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and Anton Jager’s podcast appearance to discuss hyper politicization.
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(Politics & COVID) Freddie deBoer has felt like my Obama Anger Translator a few times recently, about higher education debates, or fighting about terminology instead of politics, and now, most cathartically, about covid panicking.
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(History) This thread is a fascinating glimpse into Woodrow Wilson’s lifelong obsession with the figure of President Lincoln, assigning him a position of pre-eminence as the American of his century, but also misreading him as a ruthless, nation-building figure struggling above all to increase American power. This strange image allowed Wilson to overlook any of Lincoln’s emancipatory legacy and see himself, a nationalist Southern Democrat, as Lincoln’s direct successor, extending his supposed American-value-projection onto the world stage. Certainly a perspective on Wilson and his role in American history I’ve never heard before!
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(Immigration & Economics) This study on nurses emigrating from the Philippines found that, rather than decreasing the supply of nurses locally, the number of registered nurses has actually increased for every nurse who emigrates, due to the increased incentives to train!
Alex