Hello Readers,

This newsletter isn’t going to be changed too dramatically by the election, not because I’m trying to create an escape into or refuge in books (though you can certainly use this newsletter that way) and absolutely the fuck not because I think any space that talks about books can be apolitical. Rather, it’s because I see this newsletter as part of what I can do to make the world more complicated, more joyous, more curious, more interesting; experiences and emotions that I believe directly oppose fascism. (Fascists certainly do try stamp all of those out, don’t they?) Furthermore, I’ve seen experts on authoritarianism suggest writing down what you value and what you believe in so when those values and beliefs are threatened, you can remind yourself of who you actually are. In a lot of ways, this newsletter has always been a practice of writing down what I value and believe in.

At this moment in the process, some might try to argue that reading is itself antifascist and that any work at all promoting books and the culture of reading is going to oppose the forces that made Trump president twice now, but if that were true, Trump would never have been president at all. (How many of those people have Ivy League degrees? How many of them have written books? How many of them work in publishing or run publishers!?) If you recognize a book’s power to create, you must also recognize its power to destroy. Otherwise, you’re not talking about real power, so much as you are talking about a personal emotional experience. I do believe books are powerful and I believe I’m doing what I can to help that power be wielded in the best possible ways or elevate those authors, books, and people who I believe are using the power of books for justice.

Obviously, I’m going to write here about what is happening the world and I’m going to highlight books here based on what happens in the world. (This is an outlet for me, after all) Also obviously, I am going to need to change some things in my life to be a better fighter than I have been. (I don’t yet know what that’s going to be.) But I think I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing with this newsletter at least. As I figure out what to change, I’m focusing on the strategies I’ve seen a lot of experts in activism lay out for the rest of us, about choosing a focus and starting with what energizes you. Obviously, books are both a focus for me and a source of energy for me. I’ll figure something out.

Whatever that something is, I’ll still keep trying to introduce you all to books that make the world complicated, joyous, curious, and interesting.

Josh

P.S. If you like what I’m doing here the best way to support it is to help grow the list of subscribers, so share the sign up link around. Thank you!

YESTERDAY

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Ishmael is full of shit. The cetology chapter is weird and beautiful and vital to understanding the project of the book. Moby-Dick is a farce that wants you to think it’s a tragedy long enough to distract you from the pickpockets.

I think Moby-Dick suffers from two forces far beyond its or Herman’s control; readers who are nowhere near ready for it are forced to read it in school; and the image we develop of “serious literature” (most often in school) puts readers in perhaps the worst intellectual posture to get the most out of Moby-Dick. Trying to teach somehow to read literature with Moby-Dick is like trying to teach someone to play soccer by showing them videos of Messi walking around during a game. Yes, you are exposing students of the form to one of the form’s highest expressions, but you’ve got to have some knowledge of the form to even know what you’re looking at. You need some critical experience with novels to productively understand a novel about novels. To that second force, thinking of Moby-Dick as “serious” makes it difficult to appreciate when Melville is…fucking around. And he’s fucking around a whole lot. I mean, most of our introduction to our narrator (who calls himself Ishmael) is him fucking around on Nantucket. (And then fucking around with talking about fucking.)

To put this another way, you are going to have a difficult time enjoying Moby-Dick if you take Ishmael seriously. Which is not to say that there are not important ideas in the book or that it is only concerned with figuring out its own genre. Ahab’s obsession is a useful image for many different phenomena, including the convenience of conservative ideologies that reduce all of the complexities of human life to a single easily graspable point and the dangers that come when people in power only care about that single point. Furthermore, I would argue that if novels speak to you as a reader and a person, then digging into how novels function is also an avenue to digging into how you function.

You see “fuck around and find out,” isn’t always a bad thing. Often it can be a good thing, a beautiful thing, an enlightening thing. I mean “finding out,” is often the whole point of doing things in the first place, including fucking around. (Including reading Moby-Dick)

Buy Moby-Dick from Porter Square Books

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TODAY

Melvill by Rodrigo Fresan

Fresan is becoming one of my favorite authors. The Bottom of the Sky is one part meditation on the early days of science fiction and one part meditation on the course of life into death. For the first 100 pages you’ll think “This isn’t sci fi,” then something will happen to make you say, “Oh, yeah it is,” and then you’ll settle into understanding this beautiful book is in a genre all its own. It’s also perhaps the only book I’ve read that digs into just how…weird those “golden age of sci fi” guys like Asimov and Heinlein really were about women. I’ve only read the middle volume in his trilogy that is ostensibly about a writer who tries to merge with the Higgs Boson, but I loved it. At times baffling, at times exuberant, at times your curmudgeonly professor uncle who doesn’t like smart phones, at times breathtaking, The Dreamed Part is less a book and more a mind-altering substance. Fresan writes about and towards that pliable mental state between waking & dreaming. A tremendous literary accomplishment with some of the most amazing prose about books & reading I’ve ever seen in a novel. (We need to have a society that lets me retire so I’ll have time to finish the trilogy.)

Melvill uses the fact (premise maybe) that Herman Melville’s father Alan Melvill caught a fever while crossing a frozen Hudson river and never really recovered eventually falling into delirium before dying and imagines Herman was at Alan’s bedside transcribing (and eventually annotating) Alan’s ramblings. Oh, and Alan hangs out with vampires while he’s on his grand tour in Europe. This will be an odd following sentence because, in some ways Melvill is the most subtle of Fresan’s novels that I’ve read with the insights to the nature of language and living created through beautiful prose and surprising turns of phrase rather than in the plot & structure of the book. (Though those aspects are also pretty fucking wild, because Fresan.)

If you’ve never read Fresan I think Melvill is a good starting point. If you’re an English language reader you’ve absorbed enough about Moby-Dick even if you haven’t read it, that it can be somewhat of an anchor in reading Melvill. And Alan is one of those “Just smart enough to get himself in a lot of trouble” characters who is that way in a relatively charming way, so his nonsense is fun to listen to. Fresan’s play with the structure of the work, through his use and discussion of footnotes and annotations makes this an accessible entrance into books that fuck around with structure.

And it’s just so weird and beautiful.

Buy Melvill from Porter Square Books

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TOMORROW

Worthy of the Event by Vivan Blaxell

You ever read a book and it is just crystal clear the author just does not give a fuck. They’ve got their project and they are just going to write the fuck out of it and if anyone has an issue with that, well, go read something else.

Worthy of the Event explores the question “How do we become who we are?” but before it really gets into answering that question, it grapples with what the “are” actually is. In order to “become who you are,” you need to understand what it means “to be.” Of course, there is always the real chance understanding what it means to “be who you are” is actually impossible calling into question the entire structure of the question “How do we become who we are?”

Blaxell is a trans woman and her perspective on the question is going to be very different from mine as a cis man because “becoming who she is,” involved physically altering her body through surgery. Becoming who she is, isn’t only an intellectual or philosophical or even emotional issue; (the way it essentially is for me as a cis masculine man who has to define all of those terms in relation to and in opposition to toxic masculinity, misogyny, & patriarchy) it’s a medical issue.

That said, I don’t think Blaxell would necessarily create a distinction between “medical” and “philosophical,” especially if we understand the self as the fluid entity that we create the efforts of trying to be that self. But if we understand “the self” in a different way, well…<shrug>. I love how uninterested Blaxell seems to be in giving us any kind of answer to the questions she poses, or even, letting us maintain our footing in her ideas for any extended length of time. So to me reading Worthy of the Event, feels like one of those up-too-late drank-too-much conversations with your smartest friends, where every other sentence starts with “Yeah, but the thing is,” and you have no idea where you ended up or even how you got there, but you are certain you’re grateful that whatever happened, happened.

Preorder Worthy of the Event from Porter Square Books

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FOREVER

The Serpent and the Fire: Poetries of the Americas from Origins to Present edited by Jerome Rothenberg & Javier Taboada

There are many people who think they own the definition of “American” and each and every one of them can go fuck themselves. Arguably the most powerful, most liberating, most democratizing idea from “America” is the idea that individual people and groups of people can make their own “America,” something outside of past traditions, something beyond the place and family of their birth, an opportunity for redefinition that unlocked pathways to wealth, power, and influence for people and populations who’d never had access to those pathways before. But those in power everywhere don’t want other people to have access to those pathways. Or, rather, those in power here want to preserve the image of that pathway to further enable the exploitation of those who will never even see it. So those in power in “America” have, essentially as soon as the United States of America was founded as a nation, sought to petrify the definition of “America.” And there is power in controlling the definition of “American.” That power helped elect Donald Trump.

And this isn’t just me interpreting the collection. In the introduction, Rothenberg and Taboada explicitly say they want this anthology to meet this moment of rising fascism in “America,” and around the world.

The anthology is organized both chronologically and thematically to push on, play with, explore different ideas, images, and formulations of “America.” There are plenty of familiar and obvious names and plenty of obscure ones. There are works that are obviously poetry and works that strain the bounds of a functional definition of poetry. If you already love poetry, you need to get this anthology. But even if you’re not a poetry reader, I think this acts as a good introduction (more so than some of Rothenberg’s other great anthologies) in large part because of how committed it is to breaking the idea of “poetry” down to its most fundamental elements. In some ways, someone who has never really thought about poetry before might be the ideal reader. Keep it nearby. Embark on a lifelong journey.

Buy The Serpent & the Fire from Porter Square Books (where it’s 20% off in December!)

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