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David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

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David Auerbach’s Books of the Year 2016

2016 was a year of chaos for me as it was for many others. This list is provisional rather than a source of eternal endorsements. No, I did not read all of Anwar Sheikh’s Capitalism, but what I did read seemed serious and substantive enough to make it worthy of mention. Despite the inconsistencies of John Hands’ Cosmosapiens, I find it makes enough points about the traps of scientific orthodoxy to make it a provocative and worthy read. And there are books like Alec Ash’s Wish Lanterns that I simply didn’t get to.

I chose three books above all others as those that helped me get the most distance and perspective from the immediate tumult. Each of them did so in a very different way. Goodstein’s Simmel study is one of the few serious philosophical studies of Simmel and a major work, dedicated to showing his obscured influence through the 20th century and placing him alongside Musil as an eerily prescient prophet. It made a suitable epilogue to my commentary on Simmel’s Philosophy of Money.

Trentmann’s Empire of Things is an absorbing attempt to apply Annales-style ecological analysis to modern history and particularly the process of consumer consumption. It crosses Braudel with Veblen, yet the result sometimes approaches Simmel in its portrait of the self-reinforcing drives of consumption. As a portrait of larger ecological processes guiding our world, it pulled me away from the enveloping yet wholly reactive world of news and politics.

And Krasznahorkai’s chronicle of his travels in China is also a provider of needed distance, walking the path he has charted out that weaves between order and chaos, familiar and foreign, human and inhuman, beauty and suffering, profound knowledge and profound ignorance. He mentions Hungarian revolutionary Sándor Petőfi’s poem “Freedom, Love,” written with Hungarian which in Fu Yin’s translation (the book claims Lu Xun, but I believe this is inaccurate) became one of the most well-known poems in Communist China. With that irony in mind, it seems fitting to quote it here.

Szabadság, szerelem!
E kettő kell nekem.
Szerelmemért föláldozom
Az életet, Szabadságért föláldozom Szerelmemet.

Liberty and love
These two I must have.
For my love I’ll sacrifice
My life.
For liberty I’ll sacrifice
My love.

生命诚可贵,
爱情价更高。
若为自由故,
两者皆可抛。

 

Books of the Year

Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens: Reportage (The Hungarian List)
Krasznahorkai, László (Author), Mulzet, Ottilie (Translator)
Seagull Books

Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary
Goodstein, Elizabeth S. (Author)
Stanford University Press

Fiction

Between Dog and Wolf (Russian Library)
Sokolov, Sasha (Author), Boguslawski, Alexander (Translator)
Columbia University Press

Fragments of Lichtenberg (French Literature)
Senges, Pierre (Author), Flanders, Gregory (Translator)
Dalkey Archive Press

Bottom's Dream (German Literature)
Schmidt, Arno (Author), Woods, John E. (Translator)
Dalkey Archive Press

The Last Wolf & Herman
Krasznahorkai, László (Author), Batki, John (Translator), Szirtes, George (Translator)
New Directions

Zama (New York Review Books Classics)
Di Benedetto, Antonio (Author), Allen, Esther (Translator), Allen, Esther (Preface)
NYRB Classics

Bright Magic: Stories
Doblin, Alfred (Author), Searls, Damion (Translator), Grass, Gunter (Introduction)
NYRB Classics

Iza's Ballad (New York Review Books Classics)
Szabo, Magda (Author), Szirtes, George (Translator), Szirtes, George (Introduction)
NYRB Classics

DISPOSSESSED
Borbely, Szilard (Author)
Perennial

Berlin-Hamlet (NYRB Poets)
Borbély, Szilárd (Author), Mulzet, Ottilie (Translator)
NYRB Poets

Loving (New York Review Books Classics)
Green, Henry (Author), Robinson, Roxana (Introduction)
NYRB Classics

Caught (New York Review Books Classics)
Green, Henry (Author), Wood, James (Introduction)
NYRB Classics

Back (New York Review Books Classics)
Green, Henry (Author), Eisenberg, Deborah (Introduction)
NYRB Classics

The Invisibility Cloak
Fei, Ge (Author), Morse, Canaan (Translator)
NYRB Classics

The Gradual
Priest, Christopher (Author)
Titan Books

The Doomed City (Rediscovered Classics)
Strugatsky, Arkady (Author), Strugatsky, Boris (Author), Andrew, Bromfield (Author), Glukhovsky, Dmitry (Author), Glukhovsky, Dmitry (Foreword), Andrew, Bromfield (Translator)
Chicago Review Press

A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings (Translations from the Asian Classics)
Li, Zhi (Author), Handler-Spitz, Rivi (Editor), Lee, Pauline (Editor), Saussy, Haun (Editor)
Columbia University Press

The Lights of Pointe-Noire: A Memoir
Mabanckou, Alain (Author), Stevenson, Helen (Translator)
The New Press

We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays
Hazzard, Shirley (Author), Olubas, Brigitta (Editor)
Columbia University Press

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 4, 1966–1989
Beckett, Samuel (Author), Craig, George (Editor), Fehsenfeld, Martha Dow (Editor), Gunn, Dan (Editor), Overbeck, Lois More (Editor)
Cambridge University Press

Soft City: The Lost Graphic Novel
Pushwagner, Hariton (Author), Ware, Chris (Introduction), Herbert, Martin (Afterword)
New York Review Comics

The One Hundred Nights of Hero: A Graphic Novel
Greenberg, Isabel (Author)
Little, Brown and Company

Pascin
Sfar, Joann (Author), Gauvin, Edward (Translator)
Uncivilized Books

The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye
Liew, Sonny (Author)
Pantheon

Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir
Hart, Tom (Author)
St. Martin's Press

Mickey's Craziest Adventures
Trondheim, Lewis (Author), Keramidas, Nicolas (Artist)
IDW Publishing

Dungeon: Monstres – Vol. 6: The Great Animator
Sfar, Joann (Author), Trondheim, Lewis (Author), Stanislas (Author), Keramidas, Nicolas (Author)
NBM Publishing

 

Nonfiction

The Face of the Buddha
Empson, William (Author), Arrowsmith, Rupert (Editor)
Oxford University Press

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Godfrey-Smith, Peter (Author)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Deep Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series)
Goodfellow, Ian (Author), Bengio, Yoshua (Author), Courville, Aaron (Author)
The MIT Press

Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath
Tocqueville, Alexis de (Author), Zunz, Olivier (Editor), Goldhammer, Arthur (Translator)
University of Virginia Press

Ancient Worlds: A Global History of Antiquity
Scott, Michael (Author)
Basic Books

Memory and the Self: Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography
Rowlands, Mark (Author)
Oxford University Press

The Voynich Manuscript
Clemens, Raymond (Editor), Harkness, Deborah E. (Introduction)
Yale University Press

Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity
Olen, Peter (Author)
Palgrave Macmillan

The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography
Gordon, Edmund (Author)
Chatto & Windus

China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay
Pei, Minxin (Author)
Harvard University Press

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
Russell Hochschild, Arlie (Author)
The New Press

Europe since 1989: A History
Ther, Philipp (Author), Hughes-Kreutzmüller, Charlotte (Translator)
Princeton University Press

Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900
Beiser, Frederick C. (Author)
Oxford University Press

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History
Rid, Thomas (Author)
W. W. Norton & Company

In the Darkroom
Faludi, Susan (Author)
Metropolitan Books

Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought
Kloppenberg, James T. (Author)
Oxford University Press

The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962—1976
Dikötter, Frank (Author)
Bloomsbury Press

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization
Milanovic, Branko (Author)
Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press

The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything
Puett, Michael,Gross-Loh, Christine (Author)
Viking

America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History
Bacevich, Andrew J. (Author)
Random House

Politics against Domination
Shapiro, Ian (Author)
Belknap Press

The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere
Smith, Eric (Author), Morowitz, Harold J. (Author)
Cambridge University Press

Law in American History, Volume II: From Reconstruction Through the 1920s
White, G. Edward (Author)
Oxford University Press

Reality and Its Dreams
Geuss, Raymond (Author)
Harvard University Press

The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom
Stigler, Stephen M. (Author)
Harvard University Press

The Ways of the World
Harvey, David (Author)
Oxford University Press

Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion
Jacoby, Susan (Author)
Pantheon

Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises
Shaikh, Anwar (Author)
Oxford University Press

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton Studies in Political Behavior, 1)
Achen, Christopher H. (Author), Bartels, Larry M. (Author)
Princeton University Press

Democracy: A Life
Cartledge, Paul (Author)
Oxford University Press

Individuality and Entanglement: The Moral and Material Bases of Social Life
Gintis, Herbert (Author)
Princeton University Press

The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature
Shirane, Haruo (Editor), Suzuki, Tomi (Editor), Lurie, David (Editor)
Cambridge University Press

Alchemist in Literature: From Dante to the Present
Ziolkowski, Theodore (Author)
Oxford University Press

All the Kremlin's Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin
Zygar, Mikhail (Author)
PublicAffairs

Medieval Europe
Wickham, Chris (Author)
Yale University Press

Experimental Music Since 1970
Gottschalk, Jennie (Author)
Bloomsbury Academic

Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s
Heller, Michael C. (Author)
University of California Press

Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind
Montero, Barbara Gail (Author)
OUP Oxford

The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution
Klarman, Michael J. (Author)
Oxford University Press

Bananaworld: Quantum Mechanics for Primates
Bub, Jeffrey (Author)
OUP Oxford

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
Harari, Yuval Noah (Author)
Harper

Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White
Tisserand, Michael (Author)
Harper

David Auerbach’s Books of the Year 2015

I was dissatisfied with my 2015 reading. A number of projects and situations contrived to cut down my reading time drastically, and so this list feels even more provisional than most years, a grab-bag of things that stood out for me stood out for me personally rather than a considered ranking. I think in a better world we would all do books of a given year 5 to 10 years down the line, and the resulting lists would be far more well-considered. Maybe 25 or 50 years would be even better.

I was pulled into a number of projects and situations that obliterated both my concentration and reading time, the biggest being my Facilitated Communication investigation, which consumed an entire quarter of the year. That would not have been so bad by itself but a handful of other similar matters made it difficult to do as much comprehensive reading as I would have liked. I’ve resolved to change that this year.

So, wish a bit of disappointment and shame, I am attaching a “Promising Nonfiction” section of books I haven’t yet assessed. These are books that due to their subject matter, pedigree, author, or some other factor struck me as being worth investigating, but which I didn’t have time to do so. Note that it is entirely possible that some of these books are terrible–they just merit a look in my mind. (Example: Cesar Hidalgo’s Why Information Grows would have been on the promising list, but I did get time to take a look at it and it did not fulfill its promise. On the other hand, I am near-certain Noel Malcolm’s latest tome of scholarship is brilliant, but simply didn’t have time to get to a work so far outside outside my current area of focus.) If any readers have opinions on them, please chime in.

Book of the Year

Fiction

Thought Flights

Price: $20.00

24 used & new available from $14.22

The Blizzard: A Novel

Price: $11.99

1 used & new available from $11.99

The Complete Works of Primo Levi

Price: $49.88

51 used & new available from $35.00

Horse of a Different Color: Stories

Price: $15.99

19 used & new available from $3.47

The Librarian

Price: $3.98

14 used & new available from

A School for Fools (New York Review Books Classics)

Price: $14.95

15 used & new available from $3.84

Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

Price: $15.63

28 used & new available from $1.90

Thus Were Their Faces: Selected Stories (NYRB Classics)

Price: $16.99

38 used & new available from $7.50

A General Theory of Oblivion

Price: $17.10

19 used & new available from $2.78

The Wake: A Novel

Price: $17.00

72 used & new available from $1.80

Kvachi (Georgian Literature)

Price: $15.39

30 used & new available from $9.15

Eyes: Novellas and Stories

Price: $12.19

67 used & new available from $4.00

Book of Numbers: A Novel

Price: $29.43

59 used & new available from $2.25

The Door (NYRB Classics)

Price: $17.49

94 used & new available from $4.69

Callimachus: The Hymns

Price: $37.95

20 used & new available from $29.97

Silvina Ocampo (NYRB Poets)

Price: $14.00

9 used & new available from $7.00

Eileen: A Novel

Price: $8.99

1 used & new available from $8.99

A Brief History of Seven Killings (Booker Prize Winner): A Novel

Price: $7.99

1 used & new available from $7.99

The Tale of Genji

Price: $14.72

1 used & new available from $14.72

Macbeth: Third Series (The Arden Shakespeare Third Series)

Price: $12.95

59 used & new available from $2.06

Mr. Kafka: And Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

Price: $12.43

42 used & new available from $5.39

Incidents in the Night Book 2

Price: $15.60

19 used & new available from $4.12

Dungeon: Monstres – Vol. 5: My Son the Killer (5)

Price: $14.99

16 used & new available from $7.99

Melody: Story of a Nude Dancer

Price: $14.30

27 used & new available from $4.38

The Eternaut

Price: ---

1 used & new available from

Fatherland: A Family History

Price: $15.81

72 used & new available from $5.16

Nonfiction

World Philology

Price: $48.73

22 used & new available from $48.73

Chaos Imagined: Literature, Art, Science

Price: $50.00

18 used & new available from $9.95

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz

Price: $11.99

35 used & new available from $1.50

The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter

Price: $64.80

12 used & new available from $39.95

The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution

Price: $58.00

10 used & new available from $25.50

Physics: A Short History from Quintessence to Quarks

Price: $12.28

19 used & new available from $1.97

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology

Price: $25.00

69 used & new available from $1.18

Forgetting: Myths, Perils and Compensations

Price: $19.00

1 used & new available from $19.00

Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune

Price: $25.05

27 used & new available from $4.99

The World the Game Theorists Made

Price: $113.00

7 used & new available from $103.36

Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural

Price: $54.00

10 used & new available from $41.01

European Intellectual History from Rousseau to Nietzsche

Price: $36.80

13 used & new available from $3.21

Orientation and Judgment in Hermeneutics

Price: $42.99

1 used & new available from $42.99

The Occupiers: The Making of the 99 Percent Movement

Price: $14.25

42 used & new available from $2.50

Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

Price: $9.99

1 used & new available from $9.99

Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil's "Aeneid"

Price: $26.00

14 used & new available from $26.00

The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution

Price: $38.31

26 used & new available from $2.96

Greek Models of Mind and Self (Revealing antiquity ; Book 22)

Price: $26.99

1 used & new available from $26.99

Track-Two Diplomacy Toward an Israeli-Palestinian Solution, 1978-2014

Price: $47.00

27 used & new available from $6.84

Promising Nonfiction

The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology

Price: $26.80

26 used & new available from $11.88

Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity

Price: $19.83

1 used & new available from $19.83

A Sense of Power: The Roots of America's Global Role

Price: $19.03

50 used & new available from $12.95

Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance

Price: $11.75

78 used & new available from $3.19

Realpolitik: A History

Price: $17.54

21 used & new available from $9.32

Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew: Entangled Lives in Morocco

Price: $82.50

5 used & new available from $74.39

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception

Price: $9.99

1 used & new available from $9.99

Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present

Price: $21.52

28 used & new available from $3.99

Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World

Price: $17.04

71 used & new available from $4.24

The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

Price: $16.99

1 used & new available from $16.99

The Black Mirror: Looking at Life through Death

Price: $18.75

56 used & new available from $2.16

Violence All Around

Price: $38.00

1 used & new available from $38.00

Barbarism and Religion: Volume 6, Barbarism: Triumph in the West

Price: $117.00

18 used & new available from $95.00

KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

Price: $14.99

1 used & new available from $14.99

Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity

Price: $10.99

1 used & new available from $10.99

China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed

Price: $16.74

1 used & new available from $16.74

Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947

Price: $41.99

48 used & new available from $2.10

The Third Reich in History and Memory

Price: $22.65

41 used & new available from $4.08

The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East

Price: $37.50

64 used & new available from $2.31

State Power in Ancient China and Rome (Oxford Studies in Early Empires)

Price: $112.28

10 used & new available from $23.20

The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism

Price: $23.75

1 used & new available from $23.75

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution

Price: $43.89

25 used & new available from $5.47

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

Price: $39.99

72 used & new available from $2.99

Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

Price: $17.64

76 used & new available from $1.95

The Country of First Boys And Other Essays

Price: $17.59

27 used & new available from $13.58

The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore

Price: $19.89

1 used & new available from $19.89

Books of the Year 2014

I had less time for reading this year than I would have liked. When I selected Drago Jancar’s haunting and beautiful The Tree with No Name for Slate’s Overlooked Books, it was still with the knowledge that I’d read a lot less fiction than I’d wanted. And Antal Szerb’s excellent, though modest Journey by Moonlight is a bit of a cheat, since I read it (and wrote about it) when Pushkin Press published it all the way back in 2003, rather than when NYRB Classics reissued it this year. It’s stayed with me, though, so I can pick it with more certainty than some of the other choices.

Seeing Richard McGuire’s long-gestating Here finally be published bookends my reading the original 8 page version in RAW when I was 13, when it changed my life. I wrote about the original Here in 2003 too.

And Alonso de Ercilla’s 1569 Spanish-Chilean epic The Araucaniad has been an alluring title to me since I read about it in David Quint’s fascinating Epic and Empire in connection with Lucan’s Civil War. Quint described The Araucaniad as one of those rare epics that takes the side of the losers, and it’s one of those artifacts, like Lucan’s Civil War, that doesn’t fit neatly with any common sense of literary history. Its relevance stems from its own grim variation on a theme that is at the heart of so many great epics and books: in Quint’s words, “that those who have been victimized losers in history somehow have the right to become victimizing winners, in turn.” It deserves a new translation.

As with last year, I haven’t read the entirety of some of the nonfiction selections: Chris Wickham is an excellent historian but I’m not going to deny that some of his Annales-ish wonkery had my eyes skimming. And while the biology and physics books are pretty interesting, I can’t say with much certainty that they’re accurate.

If anyone’s curious as to why some book or other made the list, feel free to ask in the comments. Thanks again for reading my work here or elsewhere.

(As always, I do not make any money from these links; they’re just the easiest way to get the thumbnails.)

Literature

Contemporaries and Snobs (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

Price: $33.20

1 used & new available from $33.20

The Tree with No Name (Slovenian Literature)

Price: $14.95

7 used & new available from $7.96

I Am China: A Novel

Price: $13.99

1 used & new available from $13.99

All Our Names

Price: $6.99

1 used & new available from $6.99

Foreign Gods, Inc.

Price: $9.99

1 used & new available from $9.99

A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly

Price: $40.00

23 used & new available from $33.24

Prae, Vol. 1

Price: $38.40

22 used & new available from $31.69

The Time Regulation Institute

Price: $10.99

1 used & new available from $10.99

The Alp (Swiss Literature)

Price: $12.95

17 used & new available from $7.62

The Stories of Jane Gardam

Price: $15.79

67 used & new available from $4.00

Harlequin's Millions: A Novel

Price: $18.00

23 used & new available from $1.98

Journey by Moonlight (NYRB Classics)

Price: $21.15

11 used & new available from $3.87

Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics)

Price: $16.10

22 used & new available from $4.49

 

Nonfiction

Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach

Price: $60.00

10 used & new available from $20.00

The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought

Price: $156.95

5 used & new available from $40.00

Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton's Epic

Price: $33.60

23 used & new available from $12.95

Why Is There Philosophy of Mathematics At All?

Price: $31.99

18 used & new available from $18.00

A World without Why

Price: $41.36

17 used & new available from $21.58

Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

Price: $21.33

77 used & new available from $0.01

From Akhenaten to Moses: Ancient Egypt and Religious Change

Price: $25.49

5 used & new available from

Religio Duplex: How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion

Price: $21.00

1 used & new available from $21.00

The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself

Price: $27.32

42 used & new available from $2.62

Social Dynamics

Price: $94.66

7 used & new available from $90.68

Absolute Music: The History of an Idea

Price: $26.99

1 used & new available from $26.99

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia

Price: $23.84

6 used & new available from $16.84

Science and Emotions after 1945: A Transatlantic Perspective

Price: $120.00

2 used & new available from $110.01

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age

Price: $27.95

27 used & new available from $4.41

July Crisis: The World's Descent into War, Summer 1914

Price: $78.99

11 used & new available from $15.20

The Logical Must: Wittgenstein on Logic

Price: $67.96

12 used & new available from $43.00

After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900

Price: $29.99

6 used & new available from

Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle

Price: $38.51

32 used & new available from $1.27

Pay Any Price

Price: $13.02

9 used & new available from $6.00

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous

Price: $26.95

55 used & new available from $2.21

Becoming Mead: The Social Process of Academic Knowledge

Price: $38.00

10 used & new available from $24.13

The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon

Price: $42.00

21 used & new available from $31.41

Children into Swans: Fairy Tales and the Pagan Imagination

Price: $29.95

10 used & new available from $13.09

Earth's Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters

Price: $40.62

14 used & new available from $3.65

Forensic Shakespeare (Clarendon Lectures in English)

Price: $24.99

21 used & new available from $10.09

The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution

Price: $90.00

10 used & new available from $45.69

Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame

Price: $46.48

11 used & new available from $42.48

In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence

Price: $172.00

5 used & new available from $172.00

 

Comics

Here

Price: $23.36

88 used & new available from $8.14

Beautiful Darkness

Price: $50.35

32 used & new available from $5.24

Beauty

Price: $55.96

10 used & new available from

Dungeon: Twilight – Vol. 4: The End of Dungeon (4)

Price: $13.74

16 used & new available from $12.25

Sam Zabel And The Magic Pen

Price: $24.95

22 used & new available from $4.50

Incomplete Works

Price: $19.99

10 used & new available from $10.45

The Encyclopedia of Early Earth: A Novel

Price: $15.99

88 used & new available from $2.52

The Encyclopedia of Early Earth: A Novel

Price: $15.99

88 used & new available from $2.52

Perfect Nonsense: The Chaotic Comics and Goofy Games of George Carlson

Price: $49.99

12 used & new available from $21.97

Weapons of Mass Diplomacy

Price: $34.63

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A Conversation with Janice Lee

Janice Lee is an American writer, artist, editor, programmer, and generally well-rounded intellectual. We discussed her recent book Damnation and its influences from the work of Hungarian director Bela Tarr and writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai (responsible for the film Damnation), the difficulties of being an “American” writer and what that even means, the grim brilliance of Hungarian culture, and the end of the world. I recommend checking out Damnation and her earlier works Daughter and KEROTAKIS, available at her site JaniceL.com. She is also the executive editor of Entropy Magazine. Many thanks to her for her time and patience in engaging with me.


DA: I was happy to see you mention Pamela Zoline’s science-fiction stories in your best of the year. I read “The Heat Death of the Universe” as a teen and thought it was quite remarkable, and quoted it in an art essay I wrote last year, Archimedes’ Mindscrew. Zoline’s story is, I think, very directly apocalyptic, which connects her to Tarr and Krasznahorkai’s work. Krasznahorkai has spoken of his “personal relationship with the apocalypse,” and Tarr’s landscapes often look like the black and white residue of some post-nuclear blast. “Even if this is the apocalypse, if you stay indoors and mind your own business, the angels and demons will leave you alone” (Damnation). What I get from all of these artists is a negating of the seeming scale of things: apocalypse isn’t a definable event or a point in time, but something baked into the order of things. (Which is why, I presume, entropy has held such an appeal to many apocalyptic writers.) Krasznahorkai says that the apocalypse has already happened. So what is apocalypse for you?

JL: “We are living in the apocalypse. The first moment of life was the first moment of the apocalypse and death. Please, don’t fear the apocalypse.” This quote by Krasznahorkai is maybe the one that resonates with me the most, this idea that we are already and have always been living in the apocalypse. The apocalypse, for me, is more of an anticipatory state. In another interview Krasznahorkai talks about birth as a journey towards failure, this inevitable journey that becomes the life in which we live, bookmarked by these two events in time. But, as we see in Tarr, time carries on without us. Time is the vantage point from which we observe and anticipate. And in one way, the real tragedy is that we must go on whether or not the apocalypse is really coming. That we go on, is the heroic gesture, is the gesture of hope. The apocalypse is about failure, but also about relief and hope. It is about the modification of reality, the ability to see the world from a pair of eyes not just one’s own. It is about disintegration and ruin, yes, but also about empathy and the relationships between human beings. It is about the acceptance of uncertainty over clarity and an abandonment into the beauty of reality. It is about the plateau, the daily struggle, not the end.

From Bela Tarr's Damnation.

From Bela Tarr’s Damnation.

DA: For all the talk about the “death of the subject,” it seems like people still return to interpersonal relationships, even familial relationships, as a place to ground themselves. Even if we are neurologically predisposed to find meaning there, we do not seem to want to let go of family or friendship in the same way that we let go of God. You titled a book Daughter, where you call a daughter “the excavator of dead gods,” and you dealt with Frankenstein, the synthetic child, in KEROTAKIS. I’ve been amazed at the sense of stability and certainty (comparatively, at least) given to me by my child. Campanella and Plato wanted to emancipate humanity from the idea of the family (nuclear or extended oikos), but the idea has never gotten much traction outside of cults. For me it’s due to two nigh-unassailable factors: the ability of creation within the family, and the reification of blood ties (real or virtual). The family is the ultimate self-propagating cult. You’ve written, movingly, about the death of a parent; what does that mean to you relative to the apocalypse, relative to time?

JL: The death of parent both changes nothing and everything. What happens during grieving, which lasts an entire lifetime, is different at various moments of life. When my mother died, it was sudden. I was sad, yes, but also shocked, and heartbroken in a way that only dealt with the finality of a life, trying to come to grips with an absence that wasn’t felt as a significant presence until the finality of death. Probably what hit home the hardest was when we returned to my parent’s house one evening and my dog proceeded to run around the house looking for something. He went into every room repeatedly, sniffed all of the corners, looking up at me, looked some more. He was looking for her of course, without the ability to understand that she wasn’t coming back, but also with an understanding that something was wrong. The apocalypse is a prolonged state for me, the anticipation of some finality, but this, too, is living. In one moment I remember my mother and realize how much I have become like her. In another, I lament the strange construction of an identity I have created after her death, how the collage of memories I have pieced together into an identity says more about what I need in this moment from her than who she really was as a human being. I think about how we remain constantly and incessantly surrounded by ghosts, and again, these ghosts say more about the present moment in which we find ourselves in than the ghosts themselves. After all, it is us who keeps them here, not them who linger.

From Bela Tarr's Damnation.

From Bela Tarr’s Damnation.

DA: Does time go on without us? One modern philosophical theme is the idea of the block universe, the idea that time is a human construct and all moments exist on equal footing with no concept of “now.” I read this as fundamentally similar to Nietzsche’s eternal return, since each moment is a moment that becomes emblazoned eternally. Yet physics seems to indicate profound incomprehensibility at the heart of things, such that even as we try to grasp the universe-without-us, the universe-without-us turns out to be the universe-without-us-with-us.

JL: Indeed. There is time, and then is time. What both Krasznahorkai and Tarr really point to is how subjective time is, how eternity isn’t a quantitative measurement, but more of a feeling, an endured and continuous state. Eternity can last 4 seconds, it can last hours. So time becomes something that may or may not exist outside the human world, but at least it is only significant and felt when embodied corporeally.

DA: I recently read British-Chinese novelist Xialu Guo complaining that American “realism” was a limiting ethic. Your work certainly doesn’t embody the sort of conventional writing to which she’s referring, but my reaction was Krasznahorkai’s work certainly feels more real to me than the sort of literal mundanity peddled by people from Franzen to Tao Lin. Looking at the situation in Ferguson, it reminds me more of The Melancholy of Resistance than The Corrections. But then, American literature always seems to have had a legitimacy problem. As Ann Douglas wrote, “Melville’s writing is alive with his outraged conviction that he cannot produce a work significantly better than his culture.” I think that the aspiration to a 19th century European-style realism (like that of early Henry James) is one alternative response to that problem. Is it time to reclaim “realism”, or throw it away?

JL: Realism is always such a tenuous and odd term for me. I mean, much of art has been dealing with this notion right. What is more or less realistic? What more or less embodies or expresses what is real? Once in a writing class a professor compared the work of Samuel Beckett, where real is someone trudging through the mud for countless pages, versus Bertolt Brecht, whose plays point to constructedness of reality itself. Or to look at a photograph of a vase of sunflowers versus a painting by Van Gogh where the deformity and texture and warpedness and colors of the sunflowers enacts a different kind of reality than the photo representation. Krasznahorkai’s work feels real to me in the way that it invokes such familiar qualities of abjectedness and intertia. There is mud, yes, but the humans who insist on moving through the mud, persistent. These kinds of impulses seem to human to me, so real, even if these people are so far from the reality that I live in everyday. Even something about Krasznahorkai’s sentences, the language that seems to constantly overturn itself, these protracted moments where the present gets drawn out in this way but continues to change direction. “Real” makes me think of expression and the dilemma of expression, or the dilemma of representation. So much is inarticulatable. And sometimes the inarticulation becomes the articulation. For example, I’ve been obsessed lately with taking photos of the sky and the sunset in Los Angeles. But these photos can’t capture any of the essence of what I feel in those moments looking up at the sky. That’s an impossibility. But the photo then becomes the articulation of that inarticulatable moment in a way that the evidence acts as a frantic ghost, a wound, a relinquishing of the everything of a single moment into a concentration of something, no matter its density or weight.

From Bela Tarr's Damnation

From Bela Tarr’s Damnation

DA: America has a long-running streak of Millenialism in its religious populations, but in my own reading I’ve always felt like Eastern Europe has really had the monopoly on doomy apocalyptic literature–and that in contrast, modern secular America is very good at minimizing eschatology and doom (malaise, yes, but not doom). So when reading Damnation through two lenses, first my own American lens and then through my image of Tarr and Krasznahorkai’s European presence, and I felt somewhat dislocated, caught between my preconceptions of American garrulousness and Eastern European austerity. This was one of the reasons I wanted to read your other work, to see how to what extent I would feel one association or the other; what I noticed in those other works was, in fact, that your use of religious and morbid content acted to smooth over the gap between these two divergent conceptions. So aside from asking for your reaction to my own impressions, I’d like to ask whether you feel a particular American component to your work, and to what extent you feel other lineages (whatever they may be) tugging on you?

JL: This is a hard question for me to answer. Mostly, because I’m not sure. I’ve never been to Europe. I can start there. I’ve actually never left North America. Nor do I feel any strong or direct connection to the history or culture of Eastern Europe. Yet, nonetheless, the worlds of Tarr and Krasznahorkai make sense to me, make more sense to me than probably any of the other worlds I’ve encountered in film or literature or art yet, and I’m still wondering why that is. I was very pleasantly surprised, when, taking this silly little online quiz, to find that my test results deemed Hungary as the country of my internal citizenship. So maybe there is something there. But something more to do with the bleakness, the worldview, the hope, the empathy, etc. rather than the specific history or culture. Whether I feel a particular American component to my work, I can only answer that with the above, and an added piece of information that, well, yes, I’ve lived in America my entire life and will probably die here. Yet, I’m still not sure of this relationship between a writer’s country and the art that is produced.

DA: Hungary, or more generally the “Alpine-Carpathian zone” (in Paul Magocsi’s term) has been a touchstone for me as well. The area produced a huge number of influential scientists and mathematicians in the 20th century as well, in addition to its great artists, yet I’d be hard-pressed to make a generalization about it other than a generally dour, skeptical, yet curious worldview. When I was in Slovakia two years ago, I felt a bit more at ease with the willingness of people to criticize and express themselves unselfconsciously, as though the freedom to speak one’s thoughts would be welcomed without it being taken as a personal affront. Even something as simple as saying, “Have you read X?” to a stranger and hearing “Yes, I didn’t like X” was refreshing. But as Douglas says of Melville, the inability to come to grips with America is probably one of the signposts of being a real American writer. America simply does not seem to produce national figures like Goethe, Pushkin, Shakespeare, or Soseki. T.S. Eliot had to go to England to become a national figure there!

JL: I’m becoming more and more convinced that I really need to visit Hungary ASAP, to really be in the physical space and investigate what it is about that place that draws me so close and which I somehow, from a great distance, empathize with so closely.

From Bela Tarr's Damnation

From Bela Tarr’s Damnation

DA: You work as a programmer, as have I. There was a time, centuries ago, when the sciences and the humanities were not so differentiated, long before C. P. Snow made his “two cultures” argument. For me this split is something I live, because writers of all stripes are so different from technically-minded people, and each points out the deficiencies in the position of the other (and how I possess both sets of deficiencies.) More than anything else, the public image of technology, in the eyes of writers, bears no resemblance to technology as I relate to it and as most techies I know relate to it. What is often called dehumanizing or mechanistic I see as blessedly regular and beautiful, a source of beauty purer than that in all but the greatest works of art. This was why I was drawn to Robert Musil, for trying to reconcile the two, and Krasznahorkai touches on this at length in his references to the mathematics of tuning and Cantor’s infinity. This too seems to be common to the region; Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole is one of the most precise books about being lost in language that I know. And it is the fierce organization of sections like “The Machinist” in Damnation that makes me think of programming. Where are the joins for you?

JL: I agree that it seems these kinds of modes of thoughts and roles seem to be getting more and more specialized. But honestly, to me, I’ve never distinguished between these disciplines. I work as web designer, yes, one of my many modes of thought and being. Evident from my first book, KEROTAKIS, I’m also research-obsessed and have a lot of interests, including neuroscience, the occult, alchemy, the paranormal, ufology, biological anthropology, psychology, theology, phenomenology, etc. I just mentioned in another interview that I like to stay away from aesthetic categories that act as constricting forces and rather, see all these disciplines and areas as overlapping wavelengths on a broader spectrum, or different perspectives on the same subject of study, namely, life. I wouldn’t be a writer if I didn’t study science first. I wouldn’t see narrative the way I do if I hadn’t, in some part of my life, been on the track to be a doctor. And I wouldn’t have the relationship with language I do today without the films of Bela Tarr. That is to say, it’s hard for me to separate between these areas, between the sciences and humanities even, at least in my own practice.

The Black Pushkin and The Blackamoor of Peter the Great

Alexander Pushkin was descended from Ibrahim Gannibal (1696-1781), a black page kidnapped and brought back from “Lagon” in Africa–possibly either in modern-day Cameroon or Ethiopia. Given as a gift to Peter the Great, the emperor became Ibrahim’s godfather and brought him up as a noble with education and responsibility. Ibrahim became a captain in the army, wrote on geometry and engineering, and was called “the dark star of the Enlightenment” by Voltaire.

Ibrahim was possibly Pushkin’s great-grandfather on both parents’ side, at least according to this essay. Pushkin’s black heritage seems a bit better-known than, say, George Herriman’s (and Pushkin was more open about it than Herriman), but it hasn’t sufficiently passed into common knowledge for Jonathan Gill, the author of Harlem: the 400 Year History, not to write that “J. A. Rogers saw everything through the lens of race, insisting that even Beethoven and Pushkin were black.”1

In 1827, Pushkin started a fictionalized romantic history of his ancestor, The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, dubbing Ibrahim “the son of a black sultan,” thus noble through and through. He abandoned it after about thirty pages, so what’s left is more or less just the setup for an ensuing drama that was never written. What got written, though, is fascinating. Ibrahim is a likable, suave, and thoughtful nobleman who goes to Paris for a time (culture! education!) before returning to St. Petersburg in the early 1720s. While in Paris, he romances the Countess D., and they fall seriously in love with each other. She also gets pregnant, to the scandal of everyone save her oblivious husband: “men took bets on whether the Countess would give birth to a white or black baby.” Disaster is averted when the (black) baby is swapped with the newborn of a destitute woman, and Ibrahim’s son is raised far far away.

Thus the public, which had anticipated an uproarious scandal, was frustrated in its expectations and had to content itself with mere vilifications.

Ibrahim, displaying characteristic caution, decides it best to leave the Countess before (a) her husband finds out, or (b) the Countess grows tired of him. Ibrahim does not foresee his own love dying, but he’s sufficiently alarmed by the prospect of losing her that “the torments of separation would probably be less painful.” Though brutally matter-of-fact to himself, he handles the matter with spectacular grace in his Dear D. letter to the Countess:

My happiness could not last. I have enjoyed it in defiance of fate and nature. You were bound to cease loving me: the enchantment was bound to vanish…Society, with its fickle ways, persecutes in practice what it permits in theory: its cold mockery would have sooner of later overpowered you, it would have humbled your soaring spirit, and you would have in the end have grown ashamed of your passion…What would then have become of me? No1 I’d sooner die, I’d sooner leave you, than wait for that terrible moment…

Your tranquility is dearest of all to me, and you could not enjoy it while the gaze of society was fixed on us…Just think: should I subject you to the same worries and dangers even longer? Why struggle to unite the fate of such a tender and graceful creature with the unlucky lot of a Negro, a pitiful being, scarcely granted the title of man?

The Countess is upset but gets over it and takes a new lover. Ibrahim responds with the resignation that he did the right thing but wishes it hadn’t been the right thing:

What sensations filled Ibrahim’s heart? Jealousy? Rage? Despair? No; rather a deep benumbed feeling of depression. He kept repeating to himself: I foresaw this; this had to happen…He wept for al long time. The tears eased his sorrow. Then, looking at his watch, he realized it was time to go.

Ibraham’s sensible circumspection contrasts with very nearly every other character in the Pushkin oeuvre, not to mention the dominant archetypes of Russian literature in general, who tend much more toward the passionate than the hyper-rational. He also contrasts with the bumbling fop Korsakov, a friendly though callous noble back from Paris who doesn’t know Russian matters and is soon humiliated at a ball through a ritual fraternity-style hazing presided over by Peter himself. Korsakov’s mistake was in trying to dance with the young Natasha, whom Peter soon decides would make a great bride for Ibrahim, and so suggests a marriage. Ibrahim initially demurs, but after Peter insists, Ibrahim starts to entertain the idea:

To marry! And why not? Or am I destined to spend my life in solitude, never experiencing the greatest joys and most sacred obligations of a man, just because I was born below the fifteenth parallel? I cannot hope to be loved, but that is a childish objection. Can one trust love in any case?…The Emperor is right: I must ensure my future…I will not demand love from my wife: i shall be content with her fidelity. As for her friendship, I will win it by unfailing tenderness, trust, and indulgence.

Natalia’s family is horrified. “Don’t throw Natashnka into the clutches of that black devil,” cries her grandmother. But her grandfather accedes, for three reasons. First, the Emperor has asked; second, the Emperor promises great favor to his whole family; and third, Natalia is in love with Valerian, an orphan of lower origins whom her family took in. Her grandfather is so horrified by her love for Valerian that he decides that marriage to Ibrahim is the best course to stave off his daughter’s unfortunate passion. Natasha is thoroughly repulsed and takes sick just to avoid Ibrahim, only to find out that her family is now apparently entranced with him. (Her aunt says, “What a pity he’s black; otherwise we couldn’t wish for a better bridegroom.”) This is, she realizes, because of her love for Valerian, and she is stuck.

Only one hope remained for her: to die before the hateful marriage came to pass. This idea comforted her. She submitted to her fate with a faint, sorrowful heart.

And that’s where Pushkin stopped. Pushkin’s friend A. N. Wulf wrote that “The main intrigue of the novel, as Pushkin says, will be the sexual infidelity of the Negro’s wife, who gives birth to a white child, and is punished by being banished to a convent”–an inversion of the earlier adulterous pregnancy. (Indeed, this did indeed happen with the real Ibrahim’s first wife, who went to jail for ten years.) Would the father be Valerian? Korsakov?

Even in the short fragment, two contrasting portrayals repeat. First, Ibrahim as the superior noble, favored by Peter, adored by the Countess, possessed of rare intelligence and wisdom easily besting that of fools like Korsakov and Valerian, traits for which he is recognized not only by the Emperor but by most of the characters. Second, Ibrahim as the curiosity and outsider, given the gifts of nobility yet sealed off from familial and amorous integration with the native population among which he lives. It is not until the Emperor proposes the marriage that Ibrahim even considers the possibility of starting a lineage and becoming a patriarch.

The opposing portrayals meet in the reaction to the marriage: while Natasha’s family disdains Ibrahim on racist grounds, her grandfather still prefers him (in a second) over a lower-class heel like Valerian. Ibrahim becomes the instrument by which the lower class can be kept out of the family and their nobility preserved. This time, class trumps race. This was to end in the irony that a white baby would signify Natasha’s infidelity and betrayal, and would presumably meet with a worse fate than the secret but treasured son of Countess D. Yet both these relationships are less inflected by race than his relations with most people. He considers himself an object of curiosity to most: “As a rule, people looked at the young black man as if he were some strange phenomenon.” He even resents the affections of women because of this, as “He felt that in their eyes he was a kind of rare animal,” and he dislikes being fetishized in that way. Yet on the next page the narrator intercedes and tells us that many women do see him “with feelings more flattering than mere curiosity, though he in his prejudice either did not notice anything or fancied only flirtation.” It takes the Countess’ guileless attention to dissolve his suspicions and allow him to fall in love.

So Pushkin tells us explicitly that for all his intelligence, there are limits to what Ibrahim knows of other people’s thoughts, and he cannot always distinguish genuine affection from fetishistic curiosity. The question, then, is whether this is the source of Ibrahim’s doubts about the Countess. His performance regarding her, in relationship and in separation, is seamless, but when he worries that the Countess is capricious, is the caprice in matters of love alone, or with regard to her perception of race as well? Does he fear that he will fall out of being viewed as a human and become a curiosity again? The same confusion ironically comes to light in Natasha’s loathing of Ibrahim, which, because it originates from her love of Valerian, obscures whether she sees him as a curiosity or merely as the guy she’s being forced to marry. And despite Peter’s good will, Natasha’s family goes through with the marriage because of his identity as a noble, which sufficiently overshadows his race, yet also reduces him to a single dimension.

There is an undercurrent of race-as-epistemic-confusion, because the introduction of a new social category (race) knocks existing categories (class, family role, even lover) off-kilter, and not in predictable or unidirectional ways. Translator Peter Debreczeny suggests that inconsistency and general confusion, particularly with regard to Ibrahim’s character, prevented Pushkin from continuing the novel. It’s hard to say. But while Eugene Onegin may be the more sharply-drawn and memorable character, I find Ibrahim to be the more mysteriously evocative.

  1. J. A. Rogers (1880-1966) was quite a character, though. Henry Louis Gates writes:

    If America hadn’t already invented the “one-drop rule” by this time, Rogers most probably would have. He seems to have had some sort of miscegenation-meter, which he used to “out” all sorts of “white” people as having black ancestry. And while he erred on the side of excess as he peered into the proverbial woodpile, Rogers got it right an impressive amount of the time, especially considering when he was publishing his work. (At the other end of his collected works, though, stands The Five Negro Presidents, which, shall we say, would get the “Black History Wishful Thinking Prize,” hands down, were there such in existence.)

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