book divination

 From time to time, someone asks me how I find books to read. The process looks a bit like this:

While this clip shows Catherine Brant at work in 1954 divining subterranean water sources in the English countryside, it is akin to how I move in print-laden spaces (libraries, book stores, magazine stands, rare book stalls, etc.). In those environments, I find myself subject to mysterious impulses, tugged by opaque forces and animalian currents.

We others, who have long lost the more subtle of the physical senses, have not even proper terms to express an animal’s inter-communications with his surroundings, living or otherwise, and have only the word “smell,” for instance, to include the whole range of delicate thrills which murmur in the nose of the animal night and day, summoning, warning, inciting, repelling. It was one of these mysterious fairy calls from out the void that suddenly reached Mole in the darkness, making him tingle through and through with its very familiar appeal, even while yet he could not clearly remember what it was. He stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts to recapture the fine filament, the telegraphic current, that had so strongly moved him.

Kenneth Grahame, “Dulce Domum,” The Wind in the Willows

Similar feelings occur when I am standing in front of the bookshelves or stacks or piles in my house: an openness to inscrutable signals. They almost always lead me to something good. I think one of the best things any reader can do for themselves is to cultivate this capacity.

Ways I do not pick a book:

• Algorithms
• Popularity
• Recommendations (with a very few exceptions)

Still, even knowing that so many recommendations miss the mark because people are wonderfully, specifically strange, I do occasionally compile sprawling lists of books that I think might make excellent gifts for certain readers. If you are curious, they are linked below.

The dreamiest gift: time to read and write. Photo from the collection of Billy Parrott.

• Vol I: Books for, among others, toddlers who love adjectives, cooks of elevated thriftiness, and aspiring critics.
• Vol. II: Books for, among others, doomsday preppers, romantic scientists, bell-ringers, and evil financiers/crypto enthusiasts.
• Vol. III: Books for, among others, small and persistent questioners, middle-aged witches, the wryly empathetic, and mycophile wellness hustlers.
• Vol. IV: Books for, among others, bourgeois anarchist cooks, women who want it all, lovers of Victorian gossip, undead grammarians, and unsentimental Ohioans.

I also share the books on my personal wishlist each year in posts celebrating an imaginary jólabókaflóð (Yule book flood); you can find those here. See also: Years of non-book gift guides (many of which do, in fact, include books), indexed here.

Aspirational winter reading ensemble.

Wishing you warmth and time to read and days with more light.

read lately / 5.28.2025 - visible mending: when edits are the story

A brutal edit.

When I tell people I am an editor, they usually have no idea what that means. This is understandable because editing is meant to be invisible. I mostly spend my days in service to someone else’s writing, working as a blurry amalgam of finder, fixer, filter, medium, mediator, therapist, coach, and project manager. No one is supposed to see what I do.

I think this is why I am fascinated by works where editing is obvious—anthologies, collections of letters, selections from diaries, artfully arranged found fragments of text. These are books with ghosts in plain sight, revealed by the shadows of what’s there and what’s not.

Bright fragments, but not a whole.

Helen Garner, HOW TO END A STORY: COLLECTED DIARIES, 1978-1998. This hefty selection of fragmentary diary entries documents twenty tumultuous years in the middle of the writer Helen Garner’s life—a time of professional success, personal struggle, and marital strife. Garner’s attention is capacious and keen, her sentences beautifully precise; her descriptions of weather, of children, of swimming, of people on the bus, in church, or at dinner parties remind me of Vivian Maier snapshots—ordinary life captured with mesmeric, beautiful specificity. These I could read forever, and they could stand alone in a book of their own. But the diary also details Garner’s life and work, and here, I found myself distracted by a sense of something missing.

The diary records what Garner sees, but it does not capture her agency. Her choices happen off the page. Much of the last two-thirds of this volume deals with Garner’s relationship with V., the Australian novelist Murray Bail. There is so much that is ogreish in V.’s behavior from the outset that I was baffled as to why this acutely intelligent, successful, forty-something woman with a rich community of family, friends, colleagues, and lovers, not to mention her own beloved homes, would sacrifice so much to be with him. Inevitably, the relationship fails (he cheats on her with a neighbor), but it takes ten years, 500 pages, and a litany of acutely observed indignities to get there, like the time she shows up at his house to celebrate her birthday and he assumed she would bring the food and cook the dinner, or the time he lectures her about the limits of women’s writing as she scrubs the toilet, something he won’t deign to do. Or the way he insists that she leaves the house every day when he is writing, disparages her work, or protests letting her daughter stay with them when she visits. Besides the long bad dream that is V., there are passages dealing with negative responses to her work—the uproar around her book THE FIRST STONE, which deals with sexual assault charges filed by two young women against the head of their college (Garner thought this was an overreaction), and a friend’s hurt at how she depicts him in a story. Because the diary offers so little context, I ended up reading quite a bit about Garner to piece what happened together.

Anne Enright, in her LRB review of the diaries, writes that “accurate self-observation is not the same as insight.” I’ve never encountered a work that makes that so blindingly plain. It is impossible to know what is in the unedited diaries, but for me as a reader, this edit was both too much and too little. I either needed less, a tighter edit of brilliant descriptions of ordinary life, or more—more context, more depth, more why.

An expert repair.

Elias Canetti, THE BOOK AGAINST DEATH. I read this on a glowing screen, huddled under my striped duvet, very late at night—a cozy spot for cuddling up with this manic scrapbook of death. It is culled from some 2,000 pages of notes, book extracts, one-liners, and news clippings Canetti compiled between 1937 and his death in 1994. Thinking about these reams of material, an infinitude of potential books against death appears in my mind’s eye, but I am grateful to have read this one, selected by an editorial team that included Canetti’s daughter.

The material is organized chronologically. Year after year, Canetti rails against death, his ardor and resistance undimmed, his outrage ever-keen at all loss of life. He finds it unnatural—an affront, an abomination, a theft, a crime, unjust and inhumane no matter the circumstance. (He also defined “survivor” as someone who endures at another’s expense—Joshua Cohen explains that “a classic Canettian survivor is a Hitler, a Stalin, a Hussein, a Putin: a dictator without limits who stoops to every deceit and act of violence to perpetuate his reign, slaughtering his fellow man as a means—and increasingly as the only means—of forestalling his own inevitable mortality.”)

Initially, this struck me as charmingly absurd; after all, aren’t death and life inextricable? But slowly, awe crept in; humility, too. Canetti’s outrage pierces the heart, because he insists there is no small loss: loss is loss. And in his time, same as our own, the impulse to diminish, to calculate, to minimize or balance death and what it represents is always omnipresent. Canetti never succumbs to this. For him, any death is always a total tragedy, an irreparable harm, an attack. Sebastián Sanchéz, in a review for Asymptote, writes, “The Book Against Death represents something of a guerilla campaign: the death of death via a thousand cuts, with the weapon of a thousand aphorisms and ephemera. To read it is to experience a sustained, gradual expansion of one’s conception of what death is, and the role it plays in human life.”

I have found this book deeply helpful in protecting my own sense of outrage from erosion in this era of horrors.

Texts artfully arranged for preservation and enjoyment.

Charles Burchfield, THE SPHINX AND MILKY WAY, ed. by Ben Estes. I first clapped eyes on Charles Burchfield's paintings of slumped houses and ecstatic, vibrational landscapes at an exhibition in New York; though painted long ago, they felt uncannily close to me, and I was jolted to realize he was born in Ashtabula, Ohio, not far from my mother’s family, and grew up in Salem. Most people see Ohio as a nowhere land (it is a place that has been wholly denuded and reshaped by settlers, with old trees and untouched places rare and precious), but there is a beauty here, and Burchfield saw it; Ohio was a landscape that stayed with him. He wrote some 10,000 pages over 54 years of journaling, and the editor Ben Estes has gone through and truffled out an assortment of gems, presented here as fragments alongside reproductions of paintings—Burchfield writing about the shifting sky or the hum of telegraph wires or the sparkle of dewy grass or dandelions:

… it is as difficult to take in all the glory of a dandelion, as it is to take in a mountain, or a thunderstorm.

Ray Johnson and William S. Williams, FROG POND SPLASH, ed. by Elizabeth Zuba. This slim volume is one of the most beautiful pieces of editing I have ever encountered. I go back to it to feel inspired by love revealed in two dimensions— Williams’ clear-eyed, insightful writing about his friend, the collage artist Ray Johnson, and Zuber’s evident care in sourcing, selecting, and arranging these texts, which are pulled from forty years of private emails, letters, published, and unpublished work.

A gleeful assemblage.

Other books read lately:

TL;DR: faith healers, murderous schoolgirls, zombie travelogues, twisted loves, chalk mountains, historical fan fiction, revolutionary Milton, first-class second-rate authors, a collective novel, conflicted biography, obtuse men, mutant mosquitos, trauma plots, lesser Lispector, bad Cusk, assorted fairy tales.

FEBRUARY

Scholastique Mukasonga, SISTER DEBORAH and OUR LADY OF THE NILE. Picked these books up not knowing what to expect; proverbial socks blown off. One is the twisting, unexpected history of an American who becomes a faith healer in 1930s Rwanda, the other of schoolgirls at an elite Catholic school in Rwanda circa 1980, a secluded environment already thrumming with the currents of bigotry and grievance that will lead to genocide. Electrifying reads; strongly recommended.

Anne de Marcken, IT LASTS FOREVER AND THEN ITS OVER. A zombie lady’s travelogue through an apocalyptic landscape; the image of a one-armed grandmother patiently allowing her zombie grandchild to gnaw the stump is one I won’t soon forget.

Yoko Ogawa, THE HOTEL IRIS. A young woman with a horrible mother drifts into a sordid, sadistic affair with a much older man; a grim read (I prefer THE MEMORY POLICE and THE PROFESSOR AND THE HOUSEKEEPER.)

Michelle White, BLIND FOLLY, OR HOW TACITA DEAN DRAWS. I am obsessed with Tacita Dean’s work, which is why I enjoyed this, even though it is a fairly standard piece of art writing—a bit jargony, a bit repetitious, reaching for something there in the work it fails to capture.

MARCH

Yang Shuang-Zi, TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE. The unlikely love story of two women—a Japanese writer and her Taiwanese translator, ca. 1938—presented as a recovered text with afterword from the women and their daughters. Like TRUST by Hernan Diaz, it over-explains, leaning hard into a vision of the past that seems more wistful and wishful than believable.

Orlando Reade, WHAT IN ME IS DARK: THE REVOLUTIONARY AFTERLIFE OF PARADISE LOST. After teaching PARADISE LOST to a community of incarcerated students, Reade begins to trace how Milton’s poem has shown up in liberation struggles since its publication despite its inherently anti-revolutionary bent. His book focuses on 12 readers of the poem, including Thomas Jefferson, Dorothy Wordsworth, Hannah Arendt, C.L.R. James, and Jordan Peterson. While Reade’s work in prisons and the section on the Haitian revolutionary Baron de Vastey were intriguing, I think I would have preferred rereading PARADISE LOST itself (such a strange work, the way it makes a bureaucracy of Heaven.)

Vicki Baum, GRAND HOTEL. This 1920s smash-hit novel about the denizens of a Berlin hotel was turned into a smash-hit movie and musical; Baum felt dogged by its extraordinary success all of her life. (She described herself as a “first-class second-rate writer.”) I read it in a gulp one night in Paris, sleepless from jet lag. Near the end, there is an odd moment, right in the middle of the action, when everything pauses for a haunting, dirge-like dialogue between a dying man and a naked beauty on the highly specific indignities of their experiences of poverty. I found it worth reading just for that.

The Old School Writers Circle, THE ELEVEN ASSOCIATES OF ALMA MARCEAU. This collectively written cliffhanger feels like it was created by friends having a lot of fun. It is full of interesting ideas—secret cells of older folks working as radio-transmitting spies, mysteries swirling in the Mona Lisa’s sfumato—weighed down by an over-reliance on exposition and skimpy characterizations. Maybe the sequel will help.

Jean Strouse, FAMILY ROMANCE: JOHN SINGER SARGENT AND THE WERTHEIMERS. Reliance on the so-called telling detail is a trap for biographers, but Strouse overcorrects here, larding this chunky biography about Sargent’s personal and professional relationship with a powerful Jewish family with too many details that say nothing. I read it to the end, amazed that someone could do so much research and spend so much time and end up with so little to show for it.

Philip Pullman, CLOCKWORK OR ALL WOUND UP. A well-oiled little tale of deception, desperation, and sinister automatons.

APRIL

Angus Wilson, ANGLO-SAXON ATTITUDES. Academic fraud, midlife crises, hypocrites galore: entertaining (if dude-ly) book about a sixty-something man trying to course-correct after a lifetime of dubious decisions.

Michel Nieva, DENGUE BOY. Mutant mosquito-human runs rampant in dystopian future controlled by virofinance titans; also features a virtual reality game about colonization and vacation resorts in Antarctica, thanks to global devastation. Originally a short story, probably better as a short story, at least for me. Lots of gleeful gore.

Sayaka Murata, EARTHLINGS. A trauma plot pushed to the limit: abused child, murder, disassociation, estrangement, cannibalism! Read after reading Elif Batuman’s profile of Murata in The New Yorker (like sending an alien to profile an alien). I enjoyed the deadpan humor of CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN, but EARTHLINGS mostly grossed me out.

Clarice Lispector, THE WOMAN WHO KILLED THE FISH. If you have ever dreamed of having Clarice Lispector tell your child a bedtime story, this collection is for you. Four rambling, chatty tales about fatal pet neglect, rabbit detectives, a shaggy dog and a witch, and a dumb hen named Laura.

MAY

Fleur Jaeggy, THREE POSSIBLE LIVES. Intense, shard-like character sketches of Thomas de Quincy, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob with details that lodge in the memory like splinters. I never would have guessed Keats was a fighter.

Rachel Cusk, ARLINGTON PARK. A sour, condescending novel of suburban motherhood.

Sam Wasson, FOSSE. A sprawling biography of the damaged choreographer that counts down to his death; what Fosse got away with boggles the mind.

Natalie Babbit, THE DEVIL’S STORYBOOK. A dapper, trickster Devil attempts to cause mayhem with mixed success in this brief collection of tales.

Joan Aiken, THE WINTER SLEEPWALKER. Read to Hugh at bedtime; I especially enjoyed the story of a tidy sailor who ends up married to Poseidon and is driven mad by the drifting sand that is a constant in their underwater palace. They amicably part ways, and she goes back to the Navy to rise through the ranks, leaving their twins in the care of her mother.

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Currently reading: PARALLEL LIVES: FIVE VICTORIAN MARRIAGES by Phyllis Rose.

Bookmarked: Jessica Stanley’s new book, CONSIDER YOURSELF KISSED (as a longtime fan of her newsletter, I am thrilled and not at all surprised to see such a rave reaction to her work); all of the books mentioned in this NYR piece by Nathaniel Rich: A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC (time to reread), STORM, THE SECRET OF THE OLD WOODS, THE DROWNED WORLD. Also very intrigued by a title Helen Garner mentions in passing, Edith Sitwell’s PLANET AND GLOW-WORM: A BOOK FOR THE SLEEPLESS.

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Images:

Fragment of a head of Commodus, ca. 180 CE. National Museums of Liverpool: “Commodus is known to have suffered a 'damnatio memoriae,' and some portraits of Commodus have their faces deliberately removed.”

Byzantine mosaic tesserae. 6th–15th century The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Shigaraki Jar (Tsubo), Edo period (1615–1868). Stoneware with natural ash glaze and gold lacquer repairs. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Paintings and Calligraphy by Literati of Iga Ueno, early 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Untitled (Memory Jug), undated. Fleisher Ollman.

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read lately / 4.22.2025 - artificial limbs

In the video for Oneohtrix Point Never’s “A Barely Lit Path,” two crash test dummies ride in a self-driving car. It is night; they are in a forest. They may have been traveling a while, because diversions are in evidence—a chess board, puzzle pieces scattered on the floor. One dummy flips through a lavish edition of Samuel Butler’s 1872 Erewhon, a novel that includes some of the earliest thinking on machine consciousness and artificial intelligence. It’s unclear how or if the dummy reads; though molded in the semblance of human features, its face is smoothly eyeless. Time passes; the dummies clasp each other’s rubbery hands and play rock-paper-scissors. As the car picks up speed, they seem to sense something is awry. One detaches its leg and throws it at the dashboard, but the car cannot be stopped.

This hurtling leg came into my mind reading Rachel Ingalls’ novella, In The Act. Helen’s husband, Edgar, is spending a lot of time tinkering with something in his locked home lab. After he tells her that he needs her to be out of the house while he is working, she sneaks in to see what’s going on:

There was the sofa. And there was a bundle of something thrown on top of it, wrapped in a sheet. She was about to pass by when she saw a hand protruding from one of the bottom folds of the sheet.

She let out a gurgled little shriek that scared her. She looked away then back again. Propped against the edge of the sofa’s armrest was a leg, from the knee down.

It’s all part of an uncannily human-like robot. Helen is unnerved, but comforts herself by imagining that Edgar must be trying to create some sort of super-advanced computerized crash test dummy destined to improve humankind. But of course that is not it—it turns out Edgar is using groundbreaking technology to make himself a hyperrealistic sex robot.

Leg, incoming!

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In the beginning, a computer was a person. Computers worked as assistants to alchemists and astronomers, doing calculations and compiling measurements of the skies and stars and seas. By the mid-19th century, computers were often women, who sometimes solved problems as piecework sent by mail. Later, large teams of computers, working in concert, calculated the trajectory of missiles and did the math that detonated the atomic bomb and put humans in space. These groups inspired the development of machine computers, including the ENIAC, built in World War II to automate missile trajectory calculations, and women computers became the first coders, tasked with figuring out the way to get the machines to actually work. It wasn’t long before people starting wondering how to make these machines more human-like in their functions, tracing the weird loop lassoing us all.

Marilyn Wescoff (standing) and Ruth Lichterman (crouching) wiring the ENIAC with a new program. From Mental Floss: “‘There was no language, no operating system, no anything,’ [Kathy] Kleiman says. ‘The women had to figure out what the computer was, how to interface with it, and then break down a complicated mathematical problem into very small steps that the ENIAC could then perform.’ They physically hand-wired the machine, an arduous task using switches, cables, and digit trays to route data and program pulses.” Image from the archives of the ARL Technical Library via Wikipedia Commons.

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The MANIAC, (the Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer), the machine that gives its name to Benjamín Labatut’s most recent novel, was one of these early mechanical computers.

Labatut’s MANIAC consists of three stories, each a slippery blend of fact and invention. The first, “Paul, or The Discovery of the Irrational,” unravels a crisis of individual despair:

On the morning of the 25th of September 1933, the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest walked into professor Jan Waterink’s Pedagogical Institute for Afflicted Children in Amsterdam, shot his fifteen-year-old son Vassily in the head, then turned the gun on himself.

Ehrenfest, a close friend of Einstein, was bereft. Nazism was ascendent, his beloved son, a Jew with Down’s Syndrome, was doubly imperiled, and the emerging science of quantum mechanics had fractured the world as Ehrenfest understood it:

[He] knew of no way to keep him safe from the strange new rationality that was beginning to take shape all around them, a profoundly inhuman form of intelligence that was completely indifferent to mankind’s deepest needs; this deranged reason, this specter haunting the soul of science … a truly malignant influence, both logic-driven and utterly irrational, and though still fledgling and dormant it was undeniably gaining strength, wanting desperately to break into the world, preparing to thrust itself into our lives through technology by enrapturing the cleverest men and women with whispered promises of superhuman power and godlike control.

The second, “John, or the Mad Dreams of Reason,” is a choral recounting of the startling life of John von Neumann, the person who, perhaps as much as anyone else, is the architect of our current technological reality.(1) Through the voices of his colleagues, friends, wives, rivals, brother, and child, Labatut conveys von Neumann’s terrifying brilliance, which led, among other things, to the development of the MANIAC, built at Los Alamos to run the thermonuclear equations needed to build the hydrogen bomb. It later became the first machine to beat a human at chess.(2)

John von Neumann’s wartime Los Alamos ID badge photo. Labatut uses this von Neumann quote as an epigraph: “You insist there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine that can do just that.”

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Von Neumann’s capacious, insatiable mind could see things that others’ couldn’t, including a future shaped by artificial intelligence. Labatut has von Neumann’s wife, Klari, describe his vision:

Jansci thought that if our species was to survive the twentieth century, we needed to fill the void left by the departure of the gods, and the one and only candidate that could achieve this strange, esoteric transformation, was technology; our ever-expanding technical knowledge was the only thing that separated us from our forefathers, since in morals, philosophy, and general thought, we were no better (indeed, we were much, much worse) … we had stagnated in every other sense. We were stunted in all arts, except for one, techne, where our wisdom had become so profound and dangerous that it would have made the Titans that terrorized the Earth cower in fear, and the ancient lords of the woods seem as puny as sprites and pixies. Their world was gone. Civilization had progressed to a point where the affairs of our species could no longer be entrusted safely to our own hands; we needed something other, something more.

Labatut’s Klari thinks von Neumann had finally lost the thread: “His analysis made no sense to me and I said as much: There was no evidence for any of this.” But von Neumann is sure this force was coming, and when he asked what it would take for a computer to think, “he said that it would have to understand language, to read, to write, and he said that it would have to play, like a child.”

Lee Sedol, playing AlphaGo in 2016.

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The final section of the book, “Lee, or the Delusions of Artificial Intelligence,” deals with what happens when we ask computers to “play.” It reconstructs the 2016 Google DeepMind Challenge match played between Lee Sedol, the best Go player in the world, and AlphaGo, an AI program. The complexity of Go, an ancient game of strategy elevated to an art by its most skilled practitioners, had long thwarted computer programmers who had mastered chess with comparative ease. When Google challenged Lee to play against AlphaGo in a five-game match, Lee was expected to win. Instead, he became a hero for winning a single game. Shattered by the experience, Lee retires from the game:

I don’t see the point. ... Go is a work of art made by two people. Now it’s totally different. After the advent of AI, the concept of Go itself has changed. It is a devastating force.

That devastating force is coming for us all, birthed out of world-destroying bombs, built by people who can’t see the flaw in assuming that just because a thing can be done, it should be done.

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In the year since I first read THE MANIAC and IN THE ACT, the world has changed. Now, whenever I sit down to type, a little bubble pops up, asking me if I want help “refining” my text. With a few prompts and some editing, I could have saved myself the trouble of trying to write this at all. And reading over what I have written, I can see that it falls short—the transitions jerk and pull; I fail to explain myself. A machine could probably do better.

There are too many things I want to try and cram in—how Microsoft and OpenAI have redefined “artificial general intelligence”—the bogeyman-god computer specter that learns and thinks for itself at a human or superhuman level—as an AI tool that generates US$100 billion in profit.(3) Or what it is like to try and edit AI-generated copy, something I have to do more and more, and the way it is a maddening search for a there that is not there, because no actual mind threaded together the arguments. The inane circularity of asking machines to write text to be read by machines. The appalling consumption of energy and water required every time someone skips writing an email or generates a picture of the pope in Balenciaga. (Ingall’s story, written in 1987, nails this—the impulse to reduce miraculous, terifying tools to petty, selfish ends.) I want to share my dumb human certainty that there are no shortcuts to knowledge or art or love or transcendence or care or faith or joy or companionship or community or any of the things that truly matter, that there are only shortcuts to destruction. (4)

But I will just say that I think both THE MANIAC and IN THE ACT are worth reading—the first, for making too-little-known history come alive, and the second because it is funny as hell, and we need all the laughs we can get as the dummies drive the car toward us, faster and faster and faster. (5)


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Notes:

1. Take a moment to scroll von Neumann's Wikipedia page; be prepared to be awestruck/freaked out by the scope of his work, then request George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe from the library. Labatut credits it as a primary inspiration for The MANIAC, and I found it to be an even more profoundly mind-rattling read.

2. The computer’s association with games is weird and not a little sinister, I think. Like many, I first encountered this tool, created to facilitate war, as a giant, complicated beige toy for mediocre amusements like Oregon Trail. I was oblivious as to how or why it came to be.

3. See: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-a-financial-definition-of-agi-report/

4. Is this where I am supposed to say I am not a machine-smashing Luddite, to signal my fundamentally reasonable nature? Contrary to popular perception, Luddites were not wholly opposed to technology—many used weaving frames and other tools. But what they saw in power looms was the manifestation of a system designed to devalue their labor and enrich the few at the expense of many, and they weren’t wrong.

5. As I was writing this, another video with a menacing car came to mind: Radiohead’s “Karma Police.” In it, the hapless man who is about to be run down finds the courage to stand up and face the car—and he burns it down. As a bookend to “A Dimly Lit Path,” it conjures a sense of Butlerian Jihad, ha.

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Other book reports.

read lately / 2.10.2025 - criminality, idiocy, corpse spirits, and thin ice

Books I read in January, 2025:

Kaoru Takamura, LADY JOKER, VOLUME 1 and 2. This story begins in 1947. An internal memo from Hinode Beer notes the reception of a letter from one Seiji Okamura, a former employee. The letter follows, detailing the departure of forty employees, intimating that discrimination against Japan’s segregated buraku community was somehow a factor. This rambling missive proves to be the tiny pebble rumbling into avalanche, the flap of the butterfly’s wing that sparks chaos. Over the next 1,200 pages, Takamura illuminates its slow and devastating impacts, from the five gamblers—a pharmacist, a truck driver, a banker, a cop, and a welder—it pulls into unexpected partnership nearly fifty years later, to the murky swirl of business, law enforcement, and media that coalesces around their crime. LADY JOKER is often compared to THE WIRE, and that’s apt—both are singularly ambitious in their attempt to capture the capacious complexity of a corrupt culture. Takamura, drawing inspiration from an actual crime, mesmerically depicts a world of men hemmed in by sclerotic culture of work, shame, and stasis. It took me about 300 pages to really get into it, but once I did, I could not put it down.

Ermanno Cavazzoni, BRIEF LIVES OF IDIOTS. Using the The Lives of the Saints as a model, Cavazzoni presents portraits of 31 people marked by saintlike intransigence. They have grasped hold of something—a notion, a plan—and will not let it go. They panic about the speed of the whirling world, they build doomed flying machines from tractor parts, they see visions in shrubberies, they administer injections with pine needles, they worry about the feelings of metal objects, they hit themselves with rocks. Sometimes this is due to mental illness or incapacity, which struck me as an unnecessarily cruel choice, given the dazzling range of human folly available to mock. But Cavazzoni wrote this book in the 1990s, and I am reading it in 2025. His deluded farmers and failed whores have nothing on the billionaire idiots, murderous idiots, greedy idiots, and craven idiots running riot in the world right now. And it is a government of idiots. As John Ganz points out:

Musk’s total idiocy is structural: it goes back to the very origin of the Greek term idiotes, a person who cannot understand the shared political life of the city. These people cannot understand that their wealth and power are not their sovereign creations but the shared product of the wider state and society that supports and sustains them.

Douglas J. Penick, THE OCEANS OF CRUELTY: TWENTY-FIVE TALES OF A CORPSE SPIRIT, A RETELLING. Brahman dreams; in his dreams, he overhears the twenty-five stories the god Śiva tells his consort Pārvāti. Waking, Brahman speaks to his wife of this dream, and Śiva, enraged, strikes him dead, dooming him to become a vetāla, or corpse-spirit. The vetāla must hang from a tree for eternity, unless a king comes to break the curse. Some time later, a demon ensnares the wise king Vikramāditya, who is sent to bring the vetāla back. But this is no simple task. If Vikramāditya speaks to the vetāla, the vetāla vanishes, returning to the tree, and the task begins again. But speak Vikramāditya must, because each time he lifts the vetāla up, its clammy incorporeality on his back, it whispers a story in his ear, and asks him to judge the people in it. He cannot refuse. Only when Vikramāditya is well and truly stumped will the task be complete and the vetala freed.

This book is a beautiful retelling of the Vetala Panchavimshati. Most of the stories involve love and lust, honor and dishonor, cruelty and death, and maintenance of the social order (everyone must do what they are ordained to do). Themes and plots seem to repeat, stories blur and end abruptly. And because I am in the state of mind that I am in, it felt impossible not to see some parallels in Vikramāditya’s plight with where the U.S. is right now, doomed to carry forward a malignant spirit again and again and again until we learn.

There was no end to all this going and going, and no meaning, just a cascade of fragments, all incomplete.

Ellen Obed, TWELVE KINDS OF ICE. Perhaps when you wake with a start at four in the morning with your heart in fear’s clammy hand, you do not want to spend the cold predawn hours reading about Japanese crimes or death or madness in the harsh glow of your trusty bedside headlamp. (Not me, obviously, haha.) This slim little volume, charmingly illustrated, offers something else entirely: a dozen warm memories of cold times. Organized around a whimsical taxonomy of the types of ice Obed experienced as a skating-mad child in Maine, it is a gentle ode to childhood and winter’s passage. Hugh and I spent a happy January hour on the couch watching the snow fall and re-reading it.

*

Currently reading: OUR LADY OF THE NILE.

Bookmarked: RADICAL HOPE, ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS, THE CATHEDRAL OF MIST.

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Images:

William Blake. For Children: The Gates of Paradise. Plate 12, "Help! Help!" 1793.

Detail from Peter de la Primaudaye’s The French Academie wherin is discoursed the institution of maners and whatsoever els concerneth the good and happie life of all estates and callings by precepts of doctrine, and examples of the lives of ancient sages and famous men, 1589.

Siva and Parvati (Uma-Mahesvara). Northern India, Uttaranchal, Almoral, 10th century. From the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Charles Gardner, Children skating at Stone House Pond, 1985.

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Other book reports.

read lately / 11.18.24 - gardens and impossible things

One Friday in October, after dinner, we drove to the lake to look for the Northern Lights. They were barely discernible to our eyes—the faintest cast of green and red—but the camera trapped the light.
Standing on the crumbly strip of city beach, the wind in my face, I heard the water washing against the concrete barrier, I saw flashes of distant faces, the other people scattered up and down the broken shoreline, illuminated intermittently by the blue light of phones, all of us looking hard into the dark, all of us aware, for just a moment, that we were standing amidst strange, fiery, near-invisible energies.

Now, here we are, standing in another broken place, looking into a different sort of dark.

Over the summer, I read quite a few books, and I meant to write about them here. Maybe I will, but there are three that I keep thinking about.

Derek Jarman, MODERN NATURE. You may have seen this image somewhere: a small austere house, rectangular and low, black, with two windows staring yellow, set in a field of gravel improbably tufted with flowers. Depending on the angle, a power station appears in the background. This is Prospect Cottage, the Dungeness home of the artist, poet, and filmmaker Derek Jarman. He bought it as a rundown Victorian fisherman’s hut after he was diagnosed with H.I.V. in 1986, and spent most of the rest of his life there, hauling in buckets of dirt to sink into the shingle, planting poppies and sea kale and bugloss and borage and roses that somehow survived in this stony, salty place. He filled the house and garden with art from friends and things he found on the beach; part of John Donne’s poem “The Sun Rising” runs along the house’s exterior cladding. This book is a chronicle of his time there and work in the garden, as well as his life before it; it is extraordinary. First, because it is a document of his mind. Jarman had the sort of brutally deep education in Western classics that more or less vanished somewhere in the middle of the 20th century and a relentless appetite for culture, learning, and thinking, and this suffuses every line he writes. It is like standing in a sea wind: bracing, challenging, energizing. Second, because it captures time in two dimensions, both Jarman’s own shifting feelings and experiences, as he lives in the uncertainty and doom that was an H.I.V. diagnosis in the 1980s, when so much was still unknown and fear was running riot, but also the broader time, the TV programs and the politics and simply the habits of being. All books are products of their time but they are often sloppy vessels; this is not. Maybe because Jarman was very aware that his time was limited and precarious; throughout the book, friends and acquaintances die. No one really knows what to expect. But he hauls dirt to the garden. He tries new varieties of rose. He gets aggravated by idiocy and ignorance and petty annoying things. He reads and walks on the beach. His friends are there for him (Tilda Swinton shows up for him again and again, and then there is the astonishing devotion of Keith Collins, Jarman’s great platonic love.)

And Jarman keeps dreaming.

Dreamt last night I held a bowl of the rarest jade, the colour of honey with a sage green iridescence. The bowl of precious stones was threatened by a thief. I preserved it through terrible trials, assailed by the demon thug intent on stealing it. He curled round me ceaselessly, like a crab, with switchblade claws; then suddenly it was over. He deflated like a balloon, disappeared like a little Michelin man with a gasp of rushing air.

 

Otto L. Bettmann, THE GOOD OLD DAYS—THEY WERE TERRIBLE! This book has the aesthetic of a title destined to live sandwiched between old copies of Reader’s Digest, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and Chicken Soup for the Soul in a jumbled rack near the toilet. I found it at a book sale in June and bought it for $.50, mostly because I was amused by the chapter subheadings:

The Kitchen: A vale of toil

Farm Women: Draft horses of endurance

Farm Children: They lead a life of numbing blandness

Loneliness: The West was haunted by loneliness, and its twin sister, despair

Those are all sections from the chapter on rural life; Bettmann also covers air, traffic, housing, work, crime, food and drink, health, education, travel, and leisure. When I sat down to read it, though, my amusement gave way to fascination and admiration. In 1935, Bettman fled to the U.S. from Germany, where he had been director of the state art library in Berlin. In New York, he assembled what would become the Bettman Picture Archive, a three-million-image resource for “publishers, educators, ad-men and the audio-visual media.” He pulled together this book in 1974, at the rump of the Nixon era, drawing from images and news clippings in his archive to offer a corrective to what he saw as the “benevolent haze” obscuring the United States’ collective historical memory of the late 19th and early 20th century:

I have always felt that our times have overrated and unduly overplayed the fun aspects of the past. What we have forgotten are the hunger of the unemployed, crime, corruption, the despair of the aged, the insane and the crippled. The world now gone was in no way spared the problems we consider horrendously our own, such as pollution, addiction, urban plight or educational turmoil. In most of our nostalgia books, such crises are ignored, and the period’s dirty business is swept under the carpet of oblivion. What emerges is a glowing picture of the past, of blue-skied meadows where children play and millionaires sip tea.

If we compare this purported Arcadia with our own days we cannot but feel a jarring sense of discontent, a sense of despair that fate has dropped us into the worst of all possible worlds. And the future, once the resort of hopeful dreams, is envisioned as an abyss filled with apocalyptic nightmares.

The book is simple and brisk, with a spread dedicated to each subchapter summing up just how wretched things were in any one specific dimension of ordinary American life, illustrated with photographs, etchings, and newspaper quotes from the time. These horrors build and build, illuminating a country with city streets full of shit, air full of smoke, shoddy housing, public beaches with bloated animal corpses, milk adulterated with chalk, children beaten by schoolteachers and maimed at factories, workers driven to despair, corrupt officials at every level of government, and the cruelties of so-called justice, enacted through inhumane punishments and lynching. While many of the problems Bettmann discusses are still with us in altered forms, his point holds: Overall, things are so much better—startlingly, shockingly better. I found myself thinking that if I could jump back to 1900 and talk to someone then, they might well have no hope that anything would ever change. And yet, so many seemingly impossible things came to pass because people did try, and kept trying.

For anyone tempted by the notion that the past was somehow better, in any way, shape, or form, it is a clarifying read.

Rumer Godden, AN EPISODE OF SPARROWS. I had read exactly two other books by Godden—a charming slight one about a mouse and a dollhouse and a peculiar, memorable one about three sisters pinioned like specimen butterflies by the social stratifications of British colonial culture. Neither one prepared me for this. Octopuses have three hearts and hagfish have four; I am not sure how many this story has—at least two, but maybe five. One is Lovejoy Mason, a little girl growing up between the cracks of society, suddenly and furiously possessed by the impulse to create a garden in her ratty, post-Blitz London neighborhood. But there is Olivia, middle-aged and muddled, smothered by the efficient morality and complacent prosperity of her sister, Angela, but reaching for some way to make her life make sense. There is Sparkey, small and runny-nosed and bony-legged, and Tip, who can’t help himself from helping. There is Vincent and his empty restaurant, and his wife, Mrs. Crombie, trying to make it work. There is a miniature rosebush. And then there are the plates. I don’t think I’ve ever come across another scene in literature where a plate made me cry.

It’s a beautiful, subtle, richly observed story about the possibility and impossibility of change and compromise and love.

"I sometimes think," said Olivia, "from watching, of course, because I am not experienced, I think experience can be a—block." Again it was clumsy, but she knew what she meant.

"And why?" asked Angela, amused.

"Because if you think you know, you don't ask questions," said Olivia slowly, "or if you do ask, you don't listen to the answers." Olivia had observed this often. "Everyone, everything, each thing, is different, so that it isn't safe to know. You—you have to grope."

*

Currently reading: THE BOOK AGAINST DEATH, THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE GRAVEDIGGER’S GUILD.

Bookmarked: GASLIGHT, THE ELEVEN ASSOCIATES OF ALMA-MARCEAU, FAIRY TALES FOR THE DISILLUSIONED, PARTISAN OF THINGS.

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Images:

Photograph of Northern Lights over Lake Erie by me.

Photograph of Prospect Cottage by Howard Sooley.

Trailer for “The Garden,” by Derek Jarman, 1990.

Mary Harris, better known as Mother Jones, surrounded by striking child mill workers, via the Library of Congress.

Movie poster for “Innocent Sinners,” a movie based on AN EPISODE OF SPARROWS.

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Other book reports.

read lately / 7.11.2024 - the periodical table

Here is an unusual fact about me: I edit print magazines.* It is far and away the best job I have ever had, not least because it gives me a reason to buy and read magazines, activities I have long loved.**

The magazine is an underrated format. They are like charcuterie boards—an assemblage of tempting morsels, a meal you eat as a snack. You don’t have to “finish” one to enjoy it; you take what you want, however you like. In books, authors are the sun at the center of the universe, but in magazines, light shines from more than one star. Asteroids can rocket by. The editorial vision is there at the center, but it is shared and brought into being by many minds and hands, and it can change.

Making a magazine feels a little like staging a play—everything depends on the particular assemblage of collaborators and the alchemy of transmuting what starts as a creative cacophony into something choral and coherent. There are hard limits, including deadlines and budgets, but there is also room for interpretation and collaboration and accidents and improvisation. There is a framework for interaction between editors and writers and designers that (when it works) somehow makes everyone better than they could ever be on their own. And, unlike a book, as soon as a magazine is finished, it is ready to be remade again, elastic to changes in time and voice and design. This is one of the things I love most about them. That, and the pictures, of course.

Here are a few gems in my magazine rack:

FLAIR: March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, and December 1950, ed. Fleur Cowles. The first time we spoke, Anja Charbonneau (founder, editor-in-chief, and creative director of everything Broccoli) asked me if I had ever seen FLAIR, Fleur Cowles’ short-lived, legendary magazine. I had not, but when I looked it up online, I was enthralled. This summer, I finally started piecing my own collection together and can report that FLAIR is even more wonderful in person. Each issue has a theme—for example, May 1950 was the rose, and its pages were scented like roses. I keep huffing my copy, hoping to catch the smell of ghost roses. Each issue has extravagant, winsome details like gold ink and silver paper, mini-book inserts, fold-out spreads, absolutely irresistible peek-a-boo cutouts (think tiny windows that open to reveal the rooms within), plus a veritable bonanza of batty old ads. Everyone from Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dali to Ernest Hemingway and Gypsy Rose Lee wrote for FLAIR; Saul Steinberg’s cartooned ready-mades star in an inset booklet. Rose-scented pages and fancy bylines did not come cheap, though; each issue printed lost $.75 cents, which is millions in today’s money, which is why it lasted just one year, even though it was an absolute sensation at the time.

I plan to read through these slowly, with clean dry careful hands.

FMR, English edition, Vol. V, No. 21, August/September 1986, ed. Franco Maria Ricci: It’s a good thing I was sitting on the floor when I started paging through FMR, because I might have fallen right down. As an object, the magazine, dedicated to capturing “the ageless splendor of beautiful perishing things,” is striking–the text is set in classical typeface (Bodoni was a passion of Franco Maria Ricci’s), and there is spread after spread of richly detailed photographs and art reproductions framed by inky, glossy black, conjuring the effect of a spotlight. This particular issue includes features on Lalique (with an essay by Colette), Donatello (paired with an excerpt of Vasari), Thonet (commentary by Adolf Loos), and the amazingly detailed miniature cities 17th and 18th century war strategists used to plot sieges. FMR is another discovery I owe to Anja, and the more I learn about it, the more my mind melts. It was the passion project of Ricci, who titled it with his initials—read aloud, it’s “éphémère.” FMR was printed in French, German, English, and Italian, and Susan Sontag, Umberto Eco, and Octavio Paz are all listed as advisors in my copy. The whole undertaking seems wildly expensive, completely improbable, and marvelous; even the ads are ridiculously gorgeous. Apparently, Ricci was such good friends with Borges that he promised to build him a massive maze, which opened in 2015. He seems almost like a character out of a dream (or Borges story). This is a snippet from the editor’s letter:

My friends sometimes ask me how, issue after issue, I choose subjects for FMR. It is not easy to answer. Sometimes an exhibition, a restoration, or a new discovery suggests the magazine’s content. At other times it suddenly seems very urgent to present a theme I have been thinking about for years. It is as if an unexpected breeze pushes me in a certain direction, and I cannot help but comply with it.

FMR ran from 1982 to 2009 and relaunched in 2022. I’m eager to see a new issue and begin hoarding back issues.

THE FLORAL OBSERVER, Spring 2024, ed. Rachel Hays/Taxonomy Press: When I saw this nature-themed, risograph-printed newspaper in person at the Seattle Art Book Fair, I was immediately charmed. It recalled the paper blizzard of hyperlocal newsletters, church circulars, school mimeographs, community broadsheets, and advertising placemats that drifted through ordinary life in my formative years. The Spring 2024 issue includes a bird-themed crossword, garden fails and wins, instructions on scattering seed, a story on trilliums, a letter from the editor, lists of nature sightings, and a classifieds back page.

FOR SCALE: PRINT ISSUE, ed. FOR SCALE: The bracingly opinionated and dauntingly smart design newsletter has ventured into the print wilds via an appealing broadsheet format (think big, satisfyingly rustle-y newsprint pages that act as effective camouflage for emotionally damaged, shabbily dressed ‘70s-era private investigators hired to eavesdrop on reckless adulterous women). Like a scuzzy gumshoe, one of my favorite pastimes is listening to other peoples’ heated and revealing conversations, which is what reading FOR SCALE feels like to me, a design-world naif. The advertisements, all labeled “THIS IS AN ADVERT” in big, screaming banners, are an especial joy.

THE LOWBROW READER OF LOWBROW COMEDY, ISSUE 13, ed. Jay Ruttenberg: I picked up this pocket-sized publication at The City Reader in Portland despite a Jesse Eisenberg byline (I find his humor writing a little hardy-har-har) because there is an intriguing essay on Maurice Sendak, an interview with Joan Rivers, and a cartoon about Elaine May.

Take heed: The no-bra look is in for corpses.

MILDEW, Volumes 1 and 2, ed. Ellen Freeman: Ellen has one of the most curious and inspiring minds I’ve ever encountered, which is probably why MILDEW, her magazine about second-hand fashion, is such a good read. This bit from her editor’s letter for vol. 2 captures some of what makes it so special:

What does interaction without transaction feel like? What does it mean to share freely? Secondhand fashion exists in the zone between wh

at’s mine and yours. In Mildew, we talk about conventional secondhand shops, but we’re also interested in exploring alternative economies and fluid ideas of ownership. … [Y]ou’ll find articles about secondhand clothing, but also secondhand culture: crowd-sourced nostalgia, one country borrowing a soap opera from another, migrants connecting their histories through textiles, hybrid garments and identities, and a shop selling nothing but memories.

That is a shop I’d like to visit.

SLIGHTLY FOXED, THE REAL READER’S QUARTERLY, NO. 82, SUMMER 2024, eds. Gail Pirkis and Hazel Wood: Scaled like a paperback, this is thoughtfully made journal full of thoughtful people writing thoughtful things, mostly about the books they love.

VESTOJ, ISSUE NO. 10, Autumn 2021, ed. Anja Aronowsky Cronberg: I came across this intriguingly brainy fashion journal a few years ago at C’H’C’M. I misread the subheading and sub-subheading as one statement: “THE JOURNAL OF SARTORIAL MATTERS ON DOUBT.” The prospect thrilled me, and I was a little disappointed to realize that doubt was not a recurring theme (doubt is definitely a recurring theme for me). I keep coming back to Mary Wang’s essay on impending motherhood, Candace Opper’s essay on 1990s-era suburban mall fashion, and Renate Strauss’s archive of fashion doubt. There’s more I have yet to read, including a short story by Kate Chopin. (Reprints and excerpts are the funkier cheeses on the magazine charcuterie board; I love them, which is why I found Lapham’s Quarterly so irresistible—I hope the print edition comes back.)

WORLD OF INTERIORS, JUNE 2024, ISSUE 500, ed. Emily Tobin: Everyone needs one (relatively) easy-to-find print media treat, and WOI is mine. Reading it is akin to eating marzipan—delectable and best savored slowly, in small bites. If I lived the sort of life where I had my own light-filled library filled with rare treasures, I’d make room for Min Hogg-edited back issues of WOI because they are stuffed with beautiful things to look at, and the sort of casually erudite writing that makes me wish I read Ancient Greek and knew off-hand the ins-and-outs of various 18th-century porcelain manufactory practices.

I could keep going, but that’s more than enough for now.

Me, barricaded in a fortress of old newsprint, reading.

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Currently reading: HONEY FROM A WEED by Patience Gray.

Bookmarked: FIELD GUIDE TO THE PATCHY ANTHROPOCENE.

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Images:

A woman reaches for a copy of Life on a New York City newsstand in 1936. Time Inc. Picture Collection / The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images.

FLAIR magazine covers and a spread from the May 1950 “Rose” issue, via Open Culture.

FMR No. 21.

MILDEW Issue 2 table of contents.

Anthony Angel (Angelo Rizzuto), “Woman reading inside newsstand,” 1953-56. Library of Congress.

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Notes: 

* My singular career path: First, I studied subjects hiring managers consider useless (specifically: theater and classics). Next, I spent years being rejected from hundreds of jobs and pieced together a wild, disconnected series of soul-stunting gigs, including janitor, landscaper, cancer center file clerk, theater ticket-taker, child support enforcement agency temp, telemarketer (lasted one day), second grade teaching assistant, part-time librarian, front-desk concierge, holiday bookstore help, high school theater set designer, law office jack-of-all-trades, cocktail bar schmoozer, “newsroom” editor (i.e, proofreader), sculptor’s admin assistant, t-shirt illustrator, Etsy shopkeeper, ghostwriter for a beauty, luxury, and fashion copywriter, architecture intern, blog editor/social media manager, and “consultant,” that usefully nebulous catch-all. (Forget murder clowns and pantsless public speaking; job-hunting is my nightmare.) Then, out-of-the-bluest blue, I got an email with the subject line “Editor for a new magazine.” This led to a phone call where I explained at some length why I was not the right person to hire. I got the job, and have been part of a team that makes magazines and books ever since.

** My life in magazines:

CHILDHOOD: HIGHLIGHTS (anodyne and inescapable for visitors to pediatricians’ in the 1980s), RANGER RICK, 321 CONTACT, DYNAMITE, MAD (I relished the waft of subversion, even if I didn’t fully get it). STONE SOUP and CRICKET were too wholesome and teacher-approved, but spent I hours and hours with my parents’ copies of THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG. Seemingly endless yellow-spined copies of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. PLEASANT COMPANY and J. PETERMAN catalogs were formative.

TEENS: Eschewed TEEN BEAT and TIGER BEAT; loved SASSY. Dutifully read the major music magazines (ROLLING STONE, SPIN, NME), inescapable glossies (COSMOPOLITAN, VOGUE, SEVENTEEN, ELLE, MADEMOISELLE, GLAMOUR), and ubiquitous middle-class coffee-table standbys (TV GUIDE, READER’S DIGEST, PEOPLE, TIME, and NEWSWEEK). Horror-read WOMAN’S WORLD and LADIES HOME JOURNAL at my grandma’s house, all fad diet advice and “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” columns; the rotating thrills of tabloid headlines at the grocery-store check-out. Ascendency of MARTHA STEWART LIVING, pierogi-loving New Jerseyan; the discovery of HARPER’S. Many nameless zines I wished I had saved, plus the ARCHIE MCPHEE catalog.

TWENTIES: Read to be an informed citizen (THE NEW YORKER, HARPER’S, THE ECONOMIST) and consumer (LUCKY, DOMINO, DWELL, and BLUEPRINT, a short-lived Martha Stewart production; I kept every copy). I briefly subscribe to FOREIGN AFFAIRS, and when I am feeling flush, pick up BOOKFORUM, ARTFORUM, BOMB, INTERVIEW, THE UTNE READER, TIN HOUSE, and GRANTA. Ruth Reichl’s GOURMET. Was never hip enough for TIMOTHY MCSWEENEY’S QUARTERLY CONCERN or THE BELIEVER.

THIRTIES: Living in New York, I start reading NEW YORK. Increasingly obsessed with reviews (THE NEW YORK REVIEW; THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS). The KINFOLK era commences. Read THE PARIS REVIEW for the interviews; start paying attention to N+1 and THE BAFFLER. Captivated by the visual worlds of SELVEDGE, WORLD OF INTERIORS, and APARTAMENTO. Entranced by CABINET. Skeptical of MONOCLE. I enjoy GARDEN & GUN and DOWN EAST and hoard copies of LAPHAM’S QUARTERLY. Amid the continuing collapse and death-knelling of print, I begin working as the editor of a print magazine.

PRESENT: HARPER’S, THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, and THE NEW YORK REVIEW for love; THE ATLANTIC and THE NEW YORKER for duty. My pack-rat era commences: I buy back issues of magazines wherever I can scavenge them and whatever looks interesting at actual newsstands.

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Other book reports.

read lately / 6.1.2024 - motley stones, the pushcart war, and assorted mountains

I was at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Sunday, looking at an exhibit of fairy tale illustrations and marveling at how dots of white paint can read as glittering mail. The works I was looking at—some drawings, some prints—were all designed to live in the pages of books, but the originals had a sharp, beguiling aliveness that escaped mass reproduction. I snapped pictures—writhing serpents, inky foxes, impossibly beautiful, dead-eyed maidens against shimmering water-color skies—but they don’t capture what made the images so charismatic, the presence of the ghosts of hands. Then I went upstairs and looked at Barbara Bosworth’s photographs of stars and lightning bugs, of a woman holding a soap bubble and a man holding a flashlight, a smear of brightness, many smears of brightness.

In March, I was in Ireland. I spent a year in Dublin long ago, and when I was there, I often went to the National Gallery of Art. Mostly, I went to look at a painting by Caravaggio. Though I had seen it many times, I couldn’t recall what it looked like anymore. I just held a memory of electric feeling, of awe and wonder. As I walked through the galleries again, all this time later, I wasn’t quite sure that I’d find it. But when I saw it, I knew. It was unmistakable, so much more alive than anything else in the room.

It’s a miracle, isn’t it? All these things that people make.

Adalbert Stifter, MOTLEY STONES. There is a specific narrative move I think of as W.G. Sebald’s—a nesting of one seemingly unrelated story inside another, often with a shift of who is telling the tale, thwarting readerly expectations of where a story will go, a step off the groomed path into a wilderness that might hold anything, where the meaning is not plain but muddied and tangled, fractured by life the way tree roots break up a sidewalk. Turns out, this move is not Sebaldian—it’s Stifterian. Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868) was an Austrian writer well-known to Sebald, who cited him as an influence, and reading this collection of electrifyingly strange short stories, most named after a type of rock or mineral formation, full of sentences eschewing the comma, that old reliable friend, I felt dazed and dazzled and pulled back toward the days when I was very small, when every story was new, before patterns had been graven into my sense of how things must go or end. These are stories of kindnesses and cruelties, of specific landscapes and storms, of listening and listeners. I loved reading this book and will read it again.

Jean Merrill, THE PUSHCART WAR. I first made Jean Merrill’s acquaintance via a gleefully destructive elephant who learns the hard way that actions have consequences. THE ELEPHANT WHO LIKED TO SMASH SMALL CARS became one of our favorite picture books. Having a copy around was an excellent personality test for other parents—reflexive pearl-clutchers/non-kindred spirits eschewed chaotic noisy singalongs of “The Smashing Song.” I picked up THE PUSHCART WAR not realizing that it was by the one and same Jean Merrill. I was struck by the Tony Kushner blurb:

The Pushcart War had a profound impact on me; when I was a kid I devoured it several times, and I've carried it deep inside me ever since. The book gave me a point of entrance—my first, I imagine—into the world of resistance to political and economic injustice and chicanery. It made opposition, even non-violent civil disobedience, seem fun and right and necessary and heroic, and something even someone as powerless as a kid could and should undertake.

Well now! I started reading it to Hugh, not quite sure what we were getting into, and we tumbled into glory. It is such a smart, funny, and sharp book about the world that it has made almost everything I’ve read since, from novels to newspaper articles, feel drab and clumsy. Merrill conjures up a New York City of both the future and past, where a nefarious cabal of truck company owners are angling to own the streets. This starts by eliminating the pushcarts—but the pushcart peddlers unite (fractiously, because that is the truth of community organizing) and fight back, sparking a counterculture with its own slang (“don’t be a truck!”), codes, and folk heroes (all hail Frank the Flower). Along the way, Merrill pulls in the police, the media, celebrities, and the government and their various compromised and compromising relations to the situation at hand; it’s like The Wire, but with peashooters instead of guns and a sense of humor. In the way of many children’s authors, Merrill wrote oodles of books, but I am going to get my hands on THE TOOTHPASTE MILLIONAIRE (set in East Cleveland!) and read it next.

Eric Shipton, NANDA DEVI (1936); Maurice Herzog, ANNAPURNA (1951); Lionel Terray, CONQUISTADORS OF THE USELESS (1963); John Evans, NANDA DEVI: 1976 INDIAN-AMERICAN CLIMBING EXPEDITION JOURNAL OF JOHN EVANS (1976); Kurt Diemberger, THE ENDLESS KNOT: K2, MOUNTAIN OF DREAMS AND DESTINY (1991). When I feel a specific degree of overwhelm (presently, due to a combination of current events/big stress + making three magazines at the same time/small stress), I cope by reading books about people doing perilous things for no good reason: venturing to polar regions, sailing alone for long distances, crossing deserts, climbing mountains. The last time I dove this hard into the world of mountaineering literature, I had a baby—for me, contemplating the difficulties of climbing a mountain and getting back down with its endless permutations of murky motivations, self delusion, choice, preparation, chance, weather, skill, improvisations, and pure luck, offered more illumination about parenthood than any number of parenting books. 

Some of these books are more fun to read than others—Eric Shipton’s account of reaching Nanda Devi was wonderful, notable especially for the deep respect and admiration he had for his Sherpa climbing companions—the legendary Ang Tharkay (he reappears as the lead guide in ANNAPURNA), Pasang, and Kusang—and his aliveness to landscape. (For another extraordinary account of trekking in the Himalayas, read Jamaica Kincaid’s AMONG FLOWERS: A WALK IN THE HIMALAYA.) Herzog’s ANNAPURNA is a canonical mountaineering book about the 1950 French expedition to climb an 8,000-meter peak and absolutely wild; two-thirds of the book is about the difficulty of locating the giant mountain, and the last third is a harrowing and unnervingly cheerful account of the costs of summiting it (many, many, MANY fingers and toes). It’s littered with mildly shocking midcentury details like pills popped and trash tossed at the very summit of the mountain. Lionel Terray was a key member of the Annapurna expedition and instrumental in getting people high on the mountain down alive. His memoir, CONQUISTADORS OF THE USELESS (the best title of any adventuring memoir ever), recounts his many, many feats of climbing. Both books are an absolute hoot in that the pictures included make it plain just how much the text accounts, detailed as they are, fail to capture the actual peril of these feats. (As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about words, I find it grimly satisfying to encounter the limit of what words can do.) 

The Evans and Diemberger books both deal with disasters. Evans was part of the troubled 1976 American expedition to Nanda Devi, where the climber Nanda Devi Unsoeld died (her father, Willi Unsoeld, named her after the mountain, and was on the expedition, too). Evans’ diary is a laconic, dude-bro document of going a very long way right after his wife had a baby to do not very much; death is relegated to a postscript. The death of Julie Tullis, Deimberger’s climbing and film-making partner, haunts his book. She died in the K2 tragedy of 1986. It’s weirdly gripping to watch him grapple on the page with an impossible task: justifying questionable choices made for questionable reasons.

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Currently reading: INTO THE SILENCE: THE GREAT WAR, MALLORY, AND THE CONQUEST OF EVEREST by Wade Davis (reread); STUFF: INSTEAD OF A MEMOIR by Lucy Lippard.

Bookmarked: HEADSTRAP: LEGENDS AND LORE OF THE CLIMBING SHERPAS OF DARJEELING; SHERPA: THE MEMOIR OF ANG THARKAY; IMAGINARY PEAKS: THE REISENSTEIN HOAX AND OTHER MOUNTAIN DREAMS; THE LIFE OF TU FU; FIELD GUIDE TO THE PATCHY ANTHROPOCENE.

Elsewhere: A rock collection.

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Images:

Robert Frank, "Untitled (Mary and Children with Sparklers on the Beach, Provincetown), "ca. 1958.

Cabinet card of Julia Marlowe’s hand, via Anonymous Works.

Ronni Solbert’s illustration of Frank the Flower and his peashooter, from THE PUSHCART WAR.

Mountaineers from the 1961 Indian Expedition to Nanda Devi looking at the mountain from a snow camp on Devistan I. From the Suman Dubey collection, via Alpinist.

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