My review of The Politics of Hope (After the War): Selected and New Poems, by Dubravka Djurić, edited and translated with an interview by Biljana D. Obradović, and a foreword by Charles Bernstein, Roof Books, 2023, can be found on Jacket 2:
The Politics of Hope
Lutheran theological seminary humor from 1981, on a plaque for my father that I never saw before or heard him talk about. I discovered it in storage with some of his belongings only recently, after his death more than three years ago now.
Below is the text.
__
This is to certify that
The Rev. Dewey Diaz Wallace
Presbyterian Divine and Church Historian Extra-Ordinaire
Has Been Designated
An Honorary, Middle-of-the-Road Anglican
By the Church History 3 Class
Virginia Theological Seminary
Spring Semester, 1981
In Recognition Of
His abilities as an erudite, entertaining lecturer with an amazing grasp of the first, middle, and last names of all sorts of churchly notables, both historical and hysterical.
An uncanny ability to mention a certain seminary in Princeton, New Jersey, in every lecture, at least once.
And
His recall of, and willingness to share, as writer’s cramp sets in at noon on Fridays, his fund of stories regarding most unforgettable evangelicals and long-dead theologians.
Engaging in “The Jerks” and various other holy awakenings.
____
I discarded the plaque with its humor that is not even remotely like my father’s humor. The description in it though certainly does sound quite a bit like my father, which is why I have posted a photo of it here, and the complete text, for the sake of any relevant posterity.
I really enjoyed the poems by Beth Joselow’s always surprising and inventive new book, Someone Is Awake All Night. Each poem is its own room. The mood is a fascinating combination of frightened and calm, overwhelmed and steadfast. The subject matter changes and slides within the poems and between poems in a way that’s sometimes oblique yet also feels grounded in good sense. The poems can be dark or funny or both. They don’t avoid human pain while also refusing to make pain the point.
The book shows the importance of contemplation as a useful response to distress, how aging can’t be avoided but doesn’t have to define everything about experience. The poems feel oddly comforting even when they don’t really offer comfort, if we can imagine that comfort can come from being alive to the awareness of what we sometimes cannot do. There are no platitudes in Someone Is Awake All Night. There’s just the reality of waking again and looking at oneself and others and figuring out how to stay present in the world in whatever time we have left.
Although George Washington discussed with some men the possibility of his becoming King, the idea was rejected, and the U.S. was founded as an anti-monarchical country. To be in favor of a King is to be against the founding values of the United States. The United States government has always been based on the idea that no leader should be above the law.
The United States was not however founded as an anti-socialist or anti-communist state, since the rise of ideas associated with socialism and communism did not happen until the 19th century.
In fact there were a number of 19th century American groups, most often Christian groups, who practiced socialist ideas. So being an American or a Christian does not mean that one has to be against socialism or communism.
In the 1920s and 30s, during the early development of the Soviet Union, many Americans became anti-communist or anti-socialist, but many Americans were also pro-communist or pro-socialist. In fact a significant rise in socialist ideas in the United States comes in the Progressive Era of U.S. history (roughly 1896-1917). And Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. President who led the country through the depression and World War II, instituted many socialist ideas into the practice of the U.S. government and helped the country get past the depression.
Roosevelt’s U.S. government made some reprehensible decisions, of course, the internment of Japanese Americans most especially. Being a socialist doesn’t mean making no mistakes.
The rise of anti-communism in the United States begins in earnest with the U.S. government of the 1950s, while the 1960s and 70s saw a resurgence of socialist and communist ideas among the people of the country.
At no time in the history of the U.S. government has a desire for kings and monarchy been a significant part of the government, although the Confederacy did believe to a significant extent in the idea of a white aristocracy.
All of which is to say: if you are in favor of the U.S. President being like a King who is above the laws, your values are historically anti-U.S., anti-American.
If you believe in some degree of socialist or communist ideas, you are simply part of one ongoing tradition in U.S. life, one that has been sometimes loved or hated by different Americans.
The Supreme Court decision earlier this week to make “official” Presidential acts beyond the reach of the law can be said to be a fundamentally anti-U.S. attempt to give the President some powers like those of a King, while at the same time they granted themselves (the Supreme Court) some powers of an aristocracy, something that is also anti-U.S.
Support of the Supreme Court decision is to be against the founding principles of the United States. Donald Trump has come out in favor of that deeply anti-American decision.
Although I don’t have details, I learned yesterday that fiction writer Harold (Hal) Jaffe has died. He lived in the San Diego area, where he taught at San Diego State University for many years. He was generous to me, inviting me to read at San Diego State University and publishing my work several times in Fiction International. He visited my campus twice to read, and brought with him all the flair, power, and danger for which his work was rightly loved by those who knew it. The students I met who worked with him were devoted to him. He acted from a set of beliefs that included the idea that the goal of politics should be art, not that the goal of art should be politics, and that crucial to the role of the artist should be not just to challenge everything, but to experience everything, to always put oneself at risk in one’s practice.
His writing was often astonishing: blunt, experimental, surprising, risky.
In memoriam, I’m posting here my review of his book Anti-Twitter, 150 50-Word Stories, that appeared in the Jan / Feb 2011 issue of American Book Review.
Some worthwhile, relatively recent fiction (translation 2015) out of Puerto Rico. The narrator maybe talks a little too much early on, but once the character dynamics kick in, the narrative has some surprising turns in its development and some fascinating cultural dynamics built around the presence of the Chinese in Puerto Rico.
The second half of the book is riveting and intertwines literary politics, cultural politics, and globalist and economic politics into some wild and emotionally crushing moments. The book feels like it has echoes of Bolaňo and the cultural politics of many other Central and South American novels of earlier generations, but the social environment, and the dynamics of its younger age group characters, make it feel fresh. All of it, especially the literary politics, shows a very new Puerto Rico.
These are books that I recall reading and enjoying in my teen years. I’m sure I read many others that I don’t remember, including books I didn’t like. In fact I took a high school Advanced Placement English class my senior year and don’t remember the book list from that class at all, and that’s true even if some books from that class are on this list (who knows? not me). These are the authors and books that stuck with me, proved by the fact that I still recall them.
Edgar Allan Poe, Complete Tales and Poems (from 8 on)
Edward Lear, The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear (from 8 on)
Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, ed. Cerf, Wagner, and Wise (Penguin Books anthology) (from 11 on)
Arthur Conan Doyle, nearly all of the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels (from 11 on)
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (read the trilogy every summer from 13-15. Probably read The Hobbit at age 11 or 12)
Agatha Christie, nearly all (read between the ages of 13 and 18; picked up again in my 40s)
William Faulkner, most (from 13-forever; first read Sanctuary in 8th grade on my own because it was considered a “dangerous book” and read all the others over some years after)
Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird (14; ninth grade English)
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, and other stories (14? Ninth grade English maybe? Not sure)
Frederick Douglass, The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass (14; ninth grade English)
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (14? 15? Not sure)
William Golding, The Lord of the Flies (14? 15?)
Stephen R. Donaldson, Lord Foul’s Bane (15). I read the second and third books in this series and didn’t like them.
A.A. Milne, The Red House Mystery (15? 16?)
Nikolai Gogol, selected stories (15? 16?)
C.S. Lewis, The Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, That Hideous Strength, Perelandra (15-17)
John Barth, The Floating Opera, The End of the Road, The Sot-Weed Factor (15-17 and ongoing. The summer I was 16, The Sot Weed Factor replaced The Lord of the Rings as my summer epic)
Flannery O’Connor, all (from 15 on)
John Updike Rabbit, Run, The Centaur (16)
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, the sonnets (16; some in 11th grade English)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, The Double, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov (16-18)
Frank Herbert, Dune (16; tried the second book and didn’t like it)
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (16; it was legendary in my family how much I hated this book on my first read because of the Linton family; by my college years, it had become one of my favorite novels.)
Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (16)
Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, Jude the Obscure (16-17)
Ngaio Marsh, many titles (16-18)
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath (16-17)
James Wright, Native Son (17)
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man, Finnegan’s Wake (17)
In the novel The Blizzard (2010, English translation 2015) by Vladamir Sorokin, events take place in dangerous and potentially deadly cold and snow and ice. The book features a lot of human brutality, exploitation and indifference to other humans and displays the essential grimness and frequent desperation of human behavior. It has satiric, comic elements that are sometimes nearly slapstick and often involve equipment not working in the dangerous weather. The question is whether the journey is going anywhere or will end up being a hopeless loop of absurdity that may lead to death. There is probably a message about the hopelessness of living in a totalitarian society with a cold climate for which alternatives seem mostly fantasy.
I’ve long been a fan of Russian literature, and while I liked this book I didn’t love it because the features above are so much like so much other recent Russian fiction that I find in English translation. It left me wondering what might be some recent Russian novels that are not about coldness, brutality, indifference, and political hopelessness. But I suppose Russian fiction about warm weather is probably hard to come by.
In my writing lifetime, I’ve published probably maybe 100, maybe 200 reviews of contemporary literature of various lengths and in different contexts. And of those reviews, maybe at most ten of them have been more negative than positive, maybe because I mostly prefer to write about books I mostly like.
As might be expected, those ten more negative reviews received much more attention than any of the others and made people angry, usually not the writer, but sometimes, and more often friends of the writer or professional editors. In at least one case I can think of, I seem to have inadvertently made a permanent enemy of one editor who rejected me for all further work for the journal, not that I cared that much really.
It was around the time that I learned how much that one editor hated me (a person I’ve never met) that I stopped trying to place reviews in publications and turned to reviewing books only on my blog or sometimes in publications at the request of others. But I’ve never again queried anyone about accepting a book review. Maybe I was tired of it, didn’t feel a need to do it anymore. I still do publish quite a few reviews or mentions of other books though, but I don’t ask for publication permission anymore. That part just doesn’t seem worth it.
But the thing I also realized was that the world of professional book reviewing of contemporary literature didn’t have much use for even minimal levels of honesty. Book reviews are most of the time no more than promotions for a book, except in the hands of a very small number of reviewers who keep their role as professional haters, a position I didn’t want either. I’m not asserting the value of “objectivity” in reviewing because I know there’s no such thing. But there’s just not much opportunity for independence of thought.
I say all this because sometimes, these days, people will ask what happened to book reviews of contemporary literature? Reviews still exist, obviously, but there aren’t nearly as many as some writers might like. But along with the problem of finding an audience for reading reviews, the literary field is too closed in on itself, too small and threatened in its very existence, to have more than a few options for thoughtful, honest, independent reviews. Most reviews are reviews of books written by people who know the writer, or know friends of the writer, or are known as enemies of the writer.
So what, really, is in it for the book reviewer of the work of literature by a living author? It doesn’t improve your own position as a writer in the world, most of the time, to talk about somebody else’s book. It gets you a few murmurs of thanks if you say something positive and some significant hostility if you don’t. Maybe if you do something for somebody, they’ll do something for you; that’s about the best aspect of it.
Oh well. I’m still going to write about books when I feel like it, which is sometimes. But if you’re looking for one reason (among several) why book reviewing in contemporary literature has faded, look no further than the desires for success with which the field is saturated, and which no one in the field stands in any clear space outside.
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This is the first book of hers in which Jean Day’s work finally “kicked in” for me at a higher level of connection and understanding. Her poems have always been evocative, disruptive, oddly bent, never going where I imagine them going, Ashbery-like in their elusiveness. But somehow The Night Before The Day On Which is the one in which I could feel all the writing in the book gathering together into something that felt cohesive, a vast yet tight pattern, however much any given line turned away from a previous line.
A twisting and twisted Americana.
There’s something about the accumulation of one detail after another, of metaphors that jump away from each other, that add up to a world view that I can feel as connected, a strange mesh of identifiable context. It’s a context that reaches far into the past, that branches out into speculation and query, and and yet still always has a firm, even harsh, critique of the limits that people and their values impose on each other, now, here, and in other times and places: Inside the kernel’s a tiny game.
You can hear a Timex pound fifty feet away
It’s not music
not even microscopic
but plain speeches of the fish and branches
of LaCrosse, Wisconsin
midway across the Miss.
from a circus of fleas
to flat-out wilderness
Our foes
don’t want us in their schools “No worries.”
God has decided to withdraw his tiny hands (p. 54) There’s a incisive take on politics and culture throughout the book, especially if you can imagine what it might feel like to be a nested doll stuck inside another nested doll, layer after layer, none of us ever getting free, each one of us brilliantly done up for a festival of the freedom of lights that is often promised but never arrives. In the poems, I feel myself present in many contexts of struggling to understand, of not always knowing what I don’t know or what I might know, of not becoming what I might. In a way, these are tragic poems, but not of the obvious kind, sort of like a tragedy you didn’t know was a tragedy until long after it happened. There’s a lot of space out there in the world, both inside and outside the human, but the openness that one might imagine from it feels, in this powerful book, almost endlessly deferred.
