by Rebecca Baumgartner

I never intentionally set out to read what one critic referred to as “landfill nonfiction,” and yet it seems harder than ever to avoid falling into such a book by accident. The term is a bit harsh, but you probably already have some idea of what kind of books I’m talking about. 

These are the books with bright covers and upbeat titles that follow roughly this formula: This is Actually Pretty Obvious: A Really Overblown Claim about How We Can Fix Everything and Maybe Even Have More Fun. Many of the books I’m talking about would be shelved in the Self-Help section of your bookstore (remember those?) but the format has now expanded to include popular science, general psychology, sociology, politics, economics, and more.

One of the first things you notice about landfill nonfiction (which I’ll call “pop nonfiction” to be less mean), aside from the formulaic, casual title and the trendy aesthetic of the cover, is the abundance of “malcolms,” folksy anecdotes that an author uses to gently and obliquely introduce a topic to readers imagined to be intellectually shy and prone to bolt at the first sight of a difficult idea.

Often, the malcolm seems to have no relevance to the topic at hand, at least at first. The coy author-as-compère is waiting for the right moment to show you why this story is relevant. The more random the malcolm seems, the more satisfying will be the payoff (or so it is supposed) when the author ties it all back together. A story about a day in a busy hospital that started like any other, or the author’s boat trip with his wife, or a scene from Fiddler on the Roof, eases you into an intellectual project without shocking your system with too much thinking right off the bat. It’s nonfiction writing envisioned as PowerPoint presentation, a corporate icebreaker and team-building exercise before you get down to brass tacks. Read more »

Schrödinger’s Cat

by Derek Neal

I simply can’t seem to stop writing the same essay over and over. This is, I admit, not a great opening to a new essay. If all I do is repeat myself, why bother reading something new from me? Fair enough. You’ve heard it all before. But allow me one objection, which is that many writers write the same novel repeatedly, many filmmakers create the same movie multiple times, and these are often the best novelists and filmmakers. Now, I don’t mean to put myself in this category, but I can take solace in the fact that the greats do the same thing I seem to be fated to do.

Paul Schrader, whom I have mentioned in many of my recent essays, has made the same movie for the last 30 years. I thought it was just his recent trilogy—First Reformed, The Card Counter, and Master Gardener—but then I watched Light Sleeper from 1992, starring Willem Defoe as a drug dealer trying to change his life in New York. Does he write in a journal? He does. Does he sleep in a spare bedroom with no furniture? You bet. Does he try to change his life, only to be dragged back into the world he thought he could escape? Of course. Finally, does the move end with the Pickpocket ending, with the main character achieving something akin to a state of grace while paradoxically in prison? He sure does, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. This is Schrader’s world, it’s what he does best, and when I feel like spending a couple hours there, I know where to go.

Another writer who does this is Patrick Modiano, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. It had been a few years since I’d read a Modiano novel, and a week or so ago I decided I’d like to go hang out for a bit with the phantoms that haunt Modiano’s France, stalking the dark streets with the silent specter of French collaboration during World War II hanging over them. I started reading Des Inconnues. Was there a character narrating a story in the first person about their past? There sure was. Did this character fall in with a shady group, a cast of characters who used fake names and performed clandestine activities? Absolutely. Was anything ever resolved, or would the characters exist in a dream-like state from beginning to end, unable to explain the meaning of what had happened to them? Indeed, the characters would never wake up.

The fact that writers repeat themselves is not a criticism, then, but a recognition that they are performing variations on a theme close to their heart and presenting their version of what it means to be a person living in the world. Read more »

Ruth Asawa. Drawing from Works on Paper, ca 1980’s.

More here and here.

Current show.

Thank you Philip Kivitz, for the tip.

by Joseph Shieber

The humanities are once again in crisis, as they have been so many times before. What distinguishes this latest crisis from many of the crises preceding it, however, is the extent to which the current crisis in the humanities is exacerbated by the current political climate. Attacks on the humanities fit very well with the current right wing attack on higher education more generally; the Right moves seamlessly — one almost wants to say thoughtlessly — from attacks on one to attacks on the other.

Given this climate, it is not surprising that diagnoses of the current crisis in the humanities would focus on the politics of the humanities. Emblematic of such diagnoses is a widely discussed recent piece by Tyler Austin Harper in the Atlantic, “The Humanities Have Sown the Seeds of Their Own Destruction.” There, Harper suggests that the current crisis of the humanities is the result of political capture: the humanities disciplines are now hostage to left-wing political movements and, as a result, have become targets for critics from the center and right.

Underlying this diagnosis is Harper’s suggestion that the political capture of the humanities is the result of an attempt by representatives of those disciplines to respond to a perceived lack of practical benefit of the study of the humanities — a low return on investment (ROI) — by suggesting that the practical benefits of the humanities are not monetary, but social or political. “If the humanities have become more political over the past decade,” Harper argues, “it is largely in response to coercion from administrators and market forces that prompt disciplines to prove that they are ‘useful.’ In this sense, the growing identitarian drift of the humanities is rightly understood as a survival strategy: an attempt to stay afloat in a university landscape where departments compete for scarce resources, student attention, and prestige.” That is, the study of the humanities makes for better people and, in turn, better societies, rather than better workers. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Thomas R. Wells

Americans dominate global (social) media and one result of this is that the rest of the world is overexposed to Americans’ ideas, and also to their ideas about themselves. One such idea that is more or less endlessly repeated is that even middle-class Americans are actually poor these days.

I accept that many Americans are perfectly sincere in this belief but that doesn’t make it true, whether one defines poverty in terms of meeting basic needs, or as a relative decline between generations or between America and other nations. Yes – some Americans are poor, really poor by any reasonable standard. But not most Americans, or the average (median) American, which is the claim I see constantly.

The evidence shows that most Americans are richer than ever, and richer than most people in the rich world – that they consume more, live in larger homes, and so on. They are objectively some of the luckiest people in world history. On the one hand all this narcissistic whining about imaginary poverty is mildly annoying for the rest of the world to have to listen to. On the other hand, it reflects shared delusions about individual entitlements and America’s economic decline that are driving a toxic ‘doom politics’ of cynicism and resentment, while also neglecting the needs of actually poor Americans.

Two misunderstandings in particular seem to drive the mistake: that everything is more expensive these days, and that the rich took all the money. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

When I was a little boy my parents had a book that convulsed me with giggles. It was a collection of cartoons by Abner Dean called What Am I Doing Here? I couldn’t read, and I didn’t understand what was happening in the pictures, but the people in the cartoons were naked! You could see their tushies! It just cracked me up.

One day the book disappeared. I think my friend Neal from down the street boosted it, but in any case I forgot about it for many years. Then one afternoon when I was about 20 I came across it again in a used book store. I remember the feeling distinctly. The drawings were strangely familiar, and they were deep. Some of them made me shiver with the shiver of cosmic deepness. Readers who were once 20-year-old pot smokers will know what I mean. But the man wanted $12 or some such impossible sum, and I had to leave it in the store.

I was in another used book store 25 years later, and I came across it again. I recognized the cover and eagerly paged through the cartoons. This time they struck me as silly. “Sophomoric” was the word that came to mind. I didn’t see any reason to buy it.

Another 25 years has gone by, and there was an ad for a re-issue of What Am I Doing Here? in the New York Review of Books. It said:

With an inimitable mixture of wit, earnestness, and enigmatic surrealism, Dean uses this most ephemeral of forms to explore the deepest mysteries of human existence.

I ordered a copy. (Drumroll, please.) Nothing. Not funny, not deep, not clever. Nothing. An entirely forgettable book of entirely forgettable cartoons.

So which is true? Is it wet-your-pants funny, chillingly deep, or just silly? The question, as the Buddha used to say, “is not rightly put.” I experienced the book in all of those ways, and all of my experiences were perfectly valid. “But what is it really?” is not a proper question. I wasn’t wrong when I thought it was hysterically funny, and I’m not wrong now that I think it’s silly. The category of correctness or incorrectness doesn’t apply. Read more »

A painting at the Löwenhof Hotel in Vahrn, South Tyrol.

by Raji Jayaraman

Vijay was the smartest kid in class. It was a small class, and we weren’t especially bright, but I don’t mean that he was smart in a big-fish-small-pond sense. I mean it in absolute terms. He was a math genius. Short and slight of build there was nothing remarkable about his appearance, at least not neck-down. Neck-up, it was a different story. He had a massive head and we’re talking Boss Baby proportions. On anyone else, that head would have been fair game for mockery. But perched on Vijay’s shoulders, with a brain that size, it seemed like the only feasible design choice.

The boarding school we attended wasn’t especially prestigious. It wasn’t Mayo or Doon, where blue-blooded Indians waitlisted unborn children who, by accident of birth, were predestined to rule. No, the currency for admission wasn’t pedigree. It was money. There were three groups of students who could afford to attend our school. The first was rich kids, whose parents paid out of pocket. Some belonged to the petty nobility who, despite the half-century old abolition of titles, had managed to retain some ancestral wealth.  Theirs was old money. It was solid, with no need for external trappings. Indeed, their lack of pretension was so flagrant it bordered on deceit. In middle school, for instance, we had to cancel our third and final run of “You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown” because one of the lead actors’ fathers, L.’s dad, died. As the eldest son, L.  had to go home to perform his father’s final rites. Snoopy never returned to school because he was now the Raja of P.

The new money was different. They had generous monthly allowances and wore designer clothes with fancy French names I couldn’t pronounce: Es-spirit, Die-ore, Gukki. Many of these kids belonged to families who, by hook or crook, had secured state monopolies in key industries of India’s post-independence “licence-Raj”. Others were expatriates whose parents worked in Indian joint ventures, or belonged to well heeled families from neighbouring countries. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

There was an old man who so loved his son,
His day was only properly begun
Once he had hugged his darling to his breast
And kissed his tender cheek. Nor could he rest
At night until the boy was put to bed;
And still he’d stand by him, and stroke his head.
Or let’s just say: he liked him well enough,
Could bear his cries, and was not over-rough
When scolding him, begrudged him not his meat,
And saw that he had leather on his feet.
No, it was worse: in truth, he hated him,
Became a father on a drunken whim
And now was bound by duty, not by joy,
To spend his dotage tending to the boy.

The point is—love, or loathe, or suffer him,
That man prepared to carve him limb from limb
In answer to the urging of a voice
Within his head, which offered him a choice:
Prove your compliance with a sacrifice,
Or be excluded from my paradise.

It didn’t come to that, of course. The child
Was spared—not by his father, who was wild
To do the will of his delirium,
But by the very same mysterium
That had decreed the awful liturgy,
Which very act proved it a deity:
Inscrutable, contrarian, perverse—
A fitting ruler of the universe. Read more »

by Gus Mitchell

(Read Pt. 1)

If there has been a decline in many parts of our culture in the last several years, and if we are increasingly bored by the infinitude of content offered us in exchange, then the blurring of art and content has a lot to do with it.

Increasingly, both societally and culturally, we can process only information, or as Mark Zuckerberg put it, via “information flow.” In the world of culture, this translates to awards, lists and listings, rankings, ratings, returns, engagement, traffic, clicks, likes, shares, subscriptions, metrics, algorithms, data, numbers. Mass culture is now nothing other than the content we feed into this nexus of informational processing.

But only imagination can transfigure information, reify it, make us feel it, make it mean or do something.

To return to that etymological ramble from last time, content in adjectival form is a feeling of a “fullness”, that feeling which Shakespeare associated with the “heart’s content.” But content, in this sense, and capitalism, are incompatible. In Capitalism and Desire, Todd McGowan writes that “those who are not continually seeking new objects of desire”, or those who “content themselves with outmoded objects and recognize the satisfaction embodied in the object’s failure to realize their desire…are not good consumers or producers” of the commodities that capitalism produces to fill the sense of emptiness it inculcates. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Breaking Point.

Digital photograph February 2022.

by Brooks Riley