Modern Fiction
First book assigned in Modern Fiction
is Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus.
The professor: dandelion lady
tall & thin, an old head capped
in gray-blonde wisps, spits
the hard R from her chest day one,
then again day two, then switches
to the Conrad novel every other time
like she’s not sure if there’s a max
before graves beneath her feet—below floor
and stair and brick—snap,
reach high, and drag down.
Tour guides say Thomas Jefferson went here,
but none detail the dense
death that shrouds
Williamsburg grounds,
the dead who live well
and those who stay dead.
Thomas Jefferson is a modern fiction.
The students here call him TJ,
his statue fixed to Old Campus like a sundial
telling no time but these, Read more »
The most striking thing about this remarkable surface was how easy it was to ignore. It flooded the entire floor surface so perfectly that it just seemed natural that you would glide on this cornucopia of shapes and textures, which made no attempt to reference the space of the hotel or the urban context around it. There was something else. Spending enough time observing the space made it clear that the carpet works in support of the hotel’s organization, in setting an atmosphere, and in moving people in inexplicable ways. “Why does it look like that?” was therefore followed by “What does it do?” during that long afternoon of carpet watching. As it turned out, there were no simple answers. The historians were not alone in their ignorance: front desk clerks and hotel managers, perfectly capable of guiding you through the thickets of the city’s urban history or recommending the right drink at the bar, had no idea who designed the carpet and with what motives.
Criticism in the broadest sense is a key tactic for maintaining a nonrigid, noncomplacent orientation toward the world. You’re always stepping back and looking at everything afresh, never taking anything for granted, never turning a blind eye to your own complicities and flaws—ideally, anyway. We are committed to criticism not as a way of formulating value judgments but as a literary-artistic-intellectual practice that has a relationship to irony as defined by Friedrich Schlegel: “clear consciousness of an eternal agility.” It’s also related to Adorno’s comment that “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” The common denominator that links irony with Adorno’s remark is this: Never get too comfortable, never be quite congruent with yourself, and never assume anything else is entirely congruent with itself.
Despite his many intellectual achievements, I suspect there are some concepts my dog cannot conceive of, or even contemplate. He can sit on command and fetch a ball, but I suspect that he cannot imagine that the metal can containing his food is made from processed rocks. I suspect he cannot imagine that the slowly lengthening white lines in the sky are produced by machines also made from rocks like his cans of dog food. I suspect he cannot imagine that these flying repurposed dog food cans in the sky look so small only because they are so high up. And I wonder: is there any way that my dog could know that these ideas even exist? It doesn’t take long for this question to spread elsewhere. Soon I start to wonder about concepts that I don’t know exist: concepts whose existence I can never even suspect, let alone contemplate. What can I ever know about that which lies beyond the limits of what I can even imagine?
People throughout history have imagined ideal societies of various sorts. As the twentieth century dawned, advances in manufacturing and communication arguably brought the idea of utopia within our practical reach, at least as far as economic necessities are concerned. But we failed to achieve it, to say the least. Brad DeLong’s new book, 
Mikhail Gorbachev presented a figure of Greek tragedy proportions. Possessing good intentions and intellectual curiosity, Gorbachev nonetheless became the most reviled man in Russia, following the USSR’s demise. Yet, with Gorbachev, his worst qualities were connected to his best. Gorbachev was the wrong man at the wrong time to resolve the contradictions created by the Stalinist and then Brezhnev bureaucratic model of really-existing socialism in the Soviet Union. Increasingly hated at home, Gorbachev was beloved by world leaders in the “West” as the man who peacefully (at least by the comparative metrics of collapsing empires) unwound the USSR, even if trying to save its all-union character. Meanwhile, for China, Gorbachev delivered lessons in what not to do when reforming a sclerotic post-Stalinist system requiring economic reforms, if not transformation.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton 
By 2050, nearly 7 out of 10 people in the world will live in cities, up from just over half in 2020. Urbanization is nothing new, but an effort is under way across many high-income countries to make their cities smarter, using data, instrumentation and more efficient resource management. In most of these nations, the vast majority of smart-city projects involve upgrades to existing infrastructure. Japan stands out for its willingness to build smart communities from scratch as it grapples with a rapidly ageing population and a shrinking workforce, meaning that there are fewer people of working age to support older people.
Kon Trubkovich. The Antepenultimate End, 2019.
It seems we’re always tinkering with those eternities, not just to cherish their value or find their meaning, but to transform them into something else. Maybe that’s what creative writing ultimately is—momentary eternities arranged so that they somehow move the reader the way a perfect arrangement of musical notes might do. Reading is a compelling pastime for millions because words function as artfully selected indicators of events and images that readers will complete in their own minds, as they follow verbal guideposts for the imagination to begin to do its work.
