Tuesday 3.35: Reading Rainbow

Something I’ve been seeing in, or perhaps projecting onto the books I’m currently reading, is a desire for a different perspective. As we approach a year of relative solitude, a year in which the lion’s share of our time was spent in one place, seeing things from a different perspective becomes all the more appealing.

With that in mind, here’s a list of some things I’ve been reading lately that, at least to me, seem concerned with the frame:

Neighbor
Rachel Levitsky

Stating, “I’ve decided to use my obsession with my neighbor as the context for a discussion of the State,” Levitsky’s summarizes a work that places her as object rather than subject in a series of meditations on relation, otherness, mediated distance, and self definition. How we relate to one another and our place in the world is fertile ground for any poem, but as Levitsky expands her view from intimate interpersonal connection, psychic distance, and the structures around her, she gives the reader a different frame for these analyses.

And in a year spent indoors, who doesn’t shiver at lines like:

An apartment can only absorb
so much.

Love in a Dry Season
Shelby Foote

Something about the plot feels too orderly and deliberate, as if Foote is always providing justification for his characters’ actions rather than establishing and observing their realities, desires, and foibles. Foote’s probably best known as the congenial, very Southern historical face of Ken Burns’ The Civil War, and I don’t doubt that his perspectives have aged somewhat into the dominion of the apologist, but he was an adept cultural historian and a very good writer whose tone and mood capture the irony of the seething injustices underpinning a superficially dignified and respectable southern society.

On one sort of allegorical level, the novel addresses the long, difficult reconciliation between North and South through the lens of a love triangle involving northern transplant Harley Drew. Context-free quotation:

Not that [Harley Drew] had a decision to make: he had made it long ago, back at the very start when he told himself he would catch the next train out if Florence died before the major did, thus avoiding a painful explanation and farewell. The truth was—like many men who have reason to suspect (without believing) that they are scoundrels—his nature was essentially so kind and considerate, he could never bear to inflict an injury face to face, not even when he stood to profit by it.

Foote is neither the sum of his obvious influences (Faulkner, O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, &c.) nor a response to them. He’s not as good, sure, but sometimes he seems to suggest that the modern tragedy of the South, like that of America, might just be a whole bunch of people taking their lives a little too seriously. I don’t know. It sounds absurd when you put it that way, and I haven’t got it all the way figured out yet.

The Socialist Manifesto
Bhaskar Sunkara

If the present socialist movement in the US is ever going to gain any traction, it will need to understand its own development, as well as the differences (and similarities) that characterize the economic and social environment today vs. those that historically functioned as a breeding ground for socialist thought.

Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin magazine, presents a sound, reasonable case for why this shit would work, and why now is as good a time as any to pursue it. He doesn’t shy away from the drier, necessary crash course in foundational socialist thought, but he also doesn’t linger on it too long, nor does he revere the Richard Florida Creative Class stuff that’s kind of in vogue.

In some ways, Sunkara is asking the same question that Levitsky is: What’s my relationship to the State, and how could it be better?

The First Books of David Henderson & Mary Korte: A Research
Iris Cushing

A different kind of nonfiction narrative that celebrates the daring, curious, serendipitous collective spirit that characterized writing scenes in the 1960s, this essay-length pamphlet presents pretty academic poetic theory as an entertaining almost oral history, at the center of which are David Henderson, a founder of the Black Arts movement, and Mary Korte, a nun and poet who gets involved with radicals in San Francisco in the 1960s.

Largely biographical, Cushing also presents a theory of small-press ethos that would today inform punk and DIY perspectives—a reminder that thought should feel invigorating, daring, and radical, and a book about the necessity of making books.

Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism
John Patrick Leary

Essays today too often push a conceit to its breaking point, or are otherwise exhaustive and exhausting in a way that gives their subjects more attention than they’re ultimately worth. This is why Leary’s concise criticism, framed as a lexicography, seems to suit me—it suits its subjects. You can talk about what design thinking and platform model really mean in modern economic and social terms in a few well-worded sentences. You don’t need 10,000 words, especially you don’t want to lose or otherwise dilute the takeaway that most of the time, this stuff is just a bunch of bullshit.

The “definition” thing can be a tired trope, sure, but in a white-collar world where abstractions define and redefine themselves and each other ad nauseam, anything that grounds you can be just the shift in perspective you need to properly look at a subject like innovation. Leary almost takes the perspective of the apparatus itself, articulating how a lexical structure can both describe and construct economic and social realities, or permit behaviors by obscuring or meaning or reframing relationships established within our increasingly (and necessarily) abstract and complicated associations with capital.