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This Week in Books: An Everlasting Meal

The False tomb of the child of Akbar in the Tomb of Akbar the Great in Agra on an overcast day. Robert Ruidl/Getty

Dear Reader,

The book that’s been the most help to me during lockdown is a book I’ve never read; I didn’t need to read it for it to save my life. I just needed, just one time, from a review or maybe from simply reading the jacket copy, to absorb its premise and go “huh that makes sense” and then to lock that information away deep in my nether-brain where it would be reserved for the occasion when I would really, really, really need it.

I am, of course, talking about Tamar Adler’s (no doubt) incomparable An Everlasting Meal, a (if I’m not mistaken) wonderful book, the main thrust of which (as I have been led to believe) is that to properly run a kitchen, you have to be constantly planning how the leftover ingredients of one meal will seamlessly blend into the next. This (surely) is a way of thinking and strategizing your grocery shopping which Tamar Adler wrote an entire book about. And I used to be such a bad cook — a non-cook, if you will — that when I first learned oh so many years ago about this concept from the book’s jacket copy or (as I’m now recalling) from my friend Hannah, who described the contents of the book to me (yes, that’s it, she once described the book to me) on the phone (honestly I barely have interacted with this book) or perhaps as we rode together on the train, I was so struck by the powerful logic of it that I locked it away tight in my hind-brain, my deep and permanent lizard-brain. In fact, so stunned do I remember being by this tremendous insight of Tamar Adler’s which (I have reason to suspect) she laid out in detail in the book An Everlasting Meal, that I have got to believe it had an impact on my grocery shopping and meal-planning right away; but the effects weren’t all that pronounced for a very long time, since back then I (truly) did not know how to cook anything. I did not know how to cook anything until last year and therefore until last year I never had an everlasting meal; I never had much more than an everlasting sandwich.

Last year is when I started getting really into recipes. But, reader, I was still a mere “shopping for one recipe at a time” person, a type of person which I have, these past few weeks, come to regard as a very weak and inferior type of person when compared to this accomplished and frankly powerful “shopping for three weeks of meals at a time” person that I have become.

To be totally clear, I placed a Fresh Direct order 3 weeks ago and we have not left the house since. I am a god.

Not a day of lockdown has gone by on which I have not thought of Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal, a book I have not read. Not a day has gone by on which An Everlasting Meal has not made me mighty.

I still have plans to make so many — so many different — curries that it would make your head explode. If I told you how many I’m afraid the information would hurt you.

I have never read Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal, but, if I never get the virus, friends, I am attributing my survival entirely to the fact that I once merely heard about Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal (a book so powerful that I am beginning to think that no one ever actually could read it without suffering some sort of permanent brain injury, or descending into madness, or raising up a creature from the Dark Pool Below the Tower in My Dreams and unleashing it on an unready world) and that, upon merely hearing of Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal, I inscribed in my deepest and darkest most everlasting thoughts a message that will never leave me, that I cannot — that I will not! I refuse to! — forget: “Thus darkly and alone is the Way to everl

 

[Editors’ note: This draft of Dana’s weekly books newsletter, which we received in an email from a strange address that included several photographs in the attachments, each of which is labeled “the False tomb of the child of Akbar at the Tomb of Akbar the Great in Agra on an overcast day,” ends abruptly mid-sentence. We will update this post when we finally hear from Dana what the message of An Everlasting Meal is.]

 

1. “In ‘Afropessimism,’ a Black Intellectual Mixes Memoir and Theory” by John Williams, The New York Times

In an interview, Frank B. Wilderson III talks about his memoir-theory hybrid Afropessimism, which, true to its title, makes the pessimistic case that black suffering is “essential” and even “necessary” to the psychic life of society. It’s hard to read the coronavirus death statistics this week and not see his point.

2. “Beth Alvarado: Grieving in Dreams” by Kimi Eisele, Guernica

Two novelists discuss what it’s like looking back at the books about grief, mass death, and apocalypse they wrote before the coronavirus. “We had no idea then that the virus was there, waiting, and about to be so swiftly spread. Or maybe we did know, could sense, our own precarity. What could possibly sustain a world so stacked toward some and against others?”

3. “No One Disagrees With Rebecca Solnit” by Jennifer Wilson, The New Republic

Jennifer Wilson takes a turn touching the third rail of book criticism by pointing out that a widely lauded feminist author of many books is maybe a bit too easy to agree with.

4. “The Brilliant Plodder” by David Quammen, The New York Review of Books

Many years ago, I intensely read David Quammen’s extraordinarily gripping book about how pandemic viruses emerge. I liked his writing so much that I picked up his book about Darwin and read that, too. Ever since corona showed up, Quammen’s name has been popping up in my feeds a lot as various publications have asked him to weigh in, but I never click on those articles; in fact I feel alarmingly triggered by them, because that book was so terrifying that, honestly guys, the fact that David Quammen is weighing in means we are in terrible trouble. So, uh, here’s an article he wrote about Darwin instead. I read it; it’s delightful. Let’s all read this one and not the others; let’s not become paralyzed by fear when David Quammen says the Big One has come, as he foretold it would.


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5. “For the Union Dead” by Daniel Mason, The Atlantic

A short story from Daniel Mason’s forthcoming collection A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, in which the narrator discovers a startling aspect of his recently deceased uncle’s favorite hobby.

6. “Broken Pieces” by Cody Delistraty, Poetry

This is a really excellent profile of the poet Cynthia Cruz. “Throughout our afternoon together, Cruz earnestly asks me to help her interpret her poetry, as though she has located the lock to the deepest recesses of her mind but not the key.”

7. “Rereading Sanmao, the Taiwanese Wayfarer Who Sold Fifteen Million Books” by Han Zhang, The New Yorker

One of the world’s more popular writers has recently been translated into English for the first time. Han Zhang reflects on her girlhood fascination with Sanmao.

8. “from Hex by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight,” Bomb

An excerpt from Rebecca Dinerstein Knight’s novel Hex. After a lab accident, a disgraced toxicologist makes a choice. “I guess you could say that I like revenge and they like common decency. I guess you could say I don’t approve of myself enough to protect myself.”

9. “Season of the Witch” by Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Bookforum

A review of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, a novel about a real-life murder which she wrote in lieu of an investigative report because “in Mexico… they kill journalists, but they don’t kill writers, and anyways, fiction protects you.”

 

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We’re Not All in This Together

Getty / Photo Illustration by Longreads

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | April 2020 | 8 minutes (2,043 words)

Call it a dystopia, call it the apocalypse, whatever it is, the fact is, right now, we all have the capacity to kill each other. It’s not an exaggeration, it’s just a fact: We are literally holding each other’s lives in our hands. In a pandemic, every single person’s actions have the most extreme consequences for every single other person. I’m not sure how you can get more serious than that. I’m not sure how people can STILL not take that seriously.

Fuck. It’s hard to express anger without just expressing it. The second you write it down it loses that volatility. How do I convey the rage I’m feeling right now watching families continue to gather together, watching friends clandestinely meeting, laughing like they aren’t responsible for the rising death toll? Should I do it in physiological terms? Ok, I’ll list the symptoms like an illness, since that’s what we’re working with right now: Shallow breath, rapid heart rate, adrenalin. A fucking waterfall of expletives. Shaking. I’m literally shaking with rage. My face is permanently scrunched, my throat twisted, like I’m perpetually getting ready to scream — to shout and kick and yell and punch. Or maybe an analogy works better. Feral animals, threatened and fearful, can explode into bouts of wild insanity. One minute they’re calm, the next they’re thrashing and biting, their eyes bulging and unseeing, their entire body a fist. Blind rage: Uncontrolled, undirected, unstoppable.

I saw all of those unctuous half-naked bodies packed onto a sweltering beach in Australia, knowing there was a pandemic, and I thought of all the humid holes in the ground packed together in Iran, awaiting the same number of dead bodies. I saw all those stupid drunk kids in bars in the U.K. knowing there was a pandemic, and I thought of all those abandoned nursing homes in Spain full of the same number of scared seniors left to die on their own.

But I’m not feral. So I just sit here, in the most populous city in Canada, simmering. And when I walk outside, when I run on the road, and I see a park full of people, or strangers face to face, I fucking stare. And I fucking shake. And I don’t say, “What the FUCK are you doing?” Because when I’m told to stay away for everyone’s health, I do. Even if they don’t. Even if they are the 20 percent who believe this is all blown out of proportion, who have the power to sink the 80 percent of us who don’t. Even if they are the reason we went from 90 percent of coronavirus cases spread by travel to 90 percent spread by community. In an apocalypse, a stranger can be a comfort. In a pandemic, they’re nothing but a threat. The community that is left is found in the human beings who distance themselves, not for themselves alone, but for everyone else. Maybe so many people don’t get it because it’s a human paradox: That the further apart we are, the closer we become. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Pneumonia coronavirus

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jessica Lustig, Ed Yong, Leslie Jamison, Rosa Lyster, and Geoff Edgers.

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1. What I Learned When My Husband Got Sick with Coronavirus

Jessica Lustig | The New York Times Magazine | March 24, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,227 words)

“You shouldn’t stay here,” he says, but he gets more frightened as night comes, dreading the long hours of fever and soaking sweats and shivering and terrible aches. “This thing grinds you like a mortar,” he says.

2. How the Pandemic Will End

Ed Yong | The Atlantic | March 25, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,549 words)

“The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.”

3. Since I Became Symptomatic

Leslie Jamison | New York Review of Books | March 26, 2020 | 6 minutes (1500 words)

A month after filing for divorce, single mom Leslie Jamison contracted COVID-19. She wrote this meditation on single parenthood, loneliness, longing, and frustration while sheltering in place — and sweating out the virus — with her 2-year-old daughter.

4. Where Water Used to Be

Rosa Lyster | London Review of Books | March 25, 2020 | 11 minutes (2,810 words)

A look at another crisis the world is facing: water scarcity. Rosa Lyster examines the water-stressed cities of Cape Town and Mexico City — cities grappling with issues related to climate change, infrastructure, and inequality.

5. Sinéad O’Connor is Still in One Piece

Geoff Edgers | The Washington Post | March 18, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,857 words)

“She tore up a picture of the pope. Then her life came apart. These days, she just wants to make music.”

This Week In Books: A ‘Melancholia’ or ‘Take Shelter’ Situation

Aaron Foster / Getty

Dear Reader,

A thing about me is that I’ve been depressed for awhile. Staying inside a lot. And now, Melancholia-like, real life has begun to mirror my mental state: my outer and inner worlds are on a collision course, and it’s not as clear as I’d like it to be which is drawing in the other.

Last week I told my boyfriend I sometimes have this vertiginous feeling that I caused the pandemic by becoming too socially isolated. I was joking, but not really joking. Yesterday when we were looking out the window at the absolutely nobody going by, I said, “What if we imagined this? What if there is no pandemic, and we’ve just convinced ourselves we have to stay inside?” He responded that he does sometimes worry that we are in a Take Shelter situation. That I, like Michael Shannon in the 2011 thriller directed by Jeff Nichols, convinced myself a storm was coming and prepped our shelter for no reason (I was worrying about corona weeks ahead of the curve), but because I turned out to be right (a total fluke), I will become power-mad and lock my boyfriend inside forever!

Honestly, reader, it’s not out of the question. I told him so, and he said that’s fair because it really does seem like a bad idea to go outside, like, ever again. I hear that brave people are out there doing things like gathering PPE donations for frontline healthcare workers or taking groceries to the isolated elderly or just working their regular jobs at the grocery store, which it turns out are wildly dangerous. I keep trying to psych myself up to do something useful like that, but then another formless day peels off its skin, and I find I have achieved nothing. The best I can say for myself is that I am not one of those people at the park making things worse.

Most of this week’s book roundup is about the virus. The whole world is about the virus. I am so sorry.

1. “America Infected: The Social (Distance) Catastrophe” by J. Hoberman, The Paris Review

Film critic J. Hoberman points to political differences between Camus’ The Plague and Elia Kazan’s unacknowledged film adaptation Panic in the Streets as a demonstration of how pandemic response can inspire solidarity or descend into authoritarianism.

2. “‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’: A Story of the 1918 Flu Pandemic” by Katherine Anne Porter, The New York Review of Books

NYRB has printed an excerpt from Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a short novel (originally published in 1939) set during the influenza pandemic of 1918 and based on Porter’s own experience with the disease. It is an unsettling read for anyone contemplating dying in the Javits Center next month.

3. “The Anger of the Sick” by Davey Davis, The New Inquiry

Davey Davis reviews Blackfishing the IUD, a weaponized memoir which its author Caren Beilin hopes will destroy the IUD the way the documentary Blackfish destroyed Sea World; Beilin seeks vengeance against the IUD because her use of the device left her with an autoimmune disorder. Davis writes that what separates Beilin’s memoir from others in the ‘sick woman’ genre is her explicit call to action; to defeat the IUD, we must first overturn a medical system that doubts women’s pain. This review was published last month, but it seems prescient now, written at the cusp of the moment before the political anger of the unwell becomes everyone’s anger.

4. “What China’s Literary Community is Reading During the Coronavirus Pandemic” by Na Zhong, Lit Hub

One of the strangest consequences of the pandemic is that at any given time, you can have the uncanny realization that you know exactly what most of the people you know (and billions of others you don’t) are doing right now: sitting around at home, trying to figure out how to think about (or not think about) the coronavirus. Na Zhong has put together a list of books that a few members of China’s literary community are anxiety-reading right now. It’s weird to think that their motivations to anxiety-read about a) other plagues or b) World War II dovetail so perfectly with my household’s anxiety-reading compulsions this past week; I’ve been covering the plague angle while my boyfriend has World War II cornered for now.


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5. “The Dystopian Novel for the Social Distancing Era” by Joshua Keating, Slate

Joshua Keating writes that Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is the book that’s been on his mind these days, because so far his experience of the pandemic has not been sickness but rather (reminiscent of Ogawa’s surreal novel) the erasure of items from everyday life. “The losses start small and insignificant. At the local coffee shop, the first thing that disappeared was the table holding the lids and the self-serve milk. Then half the tables vanished. Then all the tables. Then the whole shop closed. Then you hear that the employees were laid off … Perhaps you, like me, thought last Saturday that it would be OK to have a couple of friends over to the house as long as you were reasonably cautious … By Sunday, that was off limits. Today, the idea is unthinkable.”

6. “An Attentive Memoir of Life in Parma” by Patricia Hampl, The Paris Review

Patricia Hampl writes that a book she loved 25 years ago, Wallis Wilde-Menozzi’s memoir Mother Tongue about expatriate life in Italy, has taken on new meaning during the pandemic. “I’ve been in conversation with this book for many years. And now, yet again, with the undertow of the pandemic clutching Italy in its fierce grip, the book speaks.”

7. “Gimme Shelter” by Helena de Bres, The Point

Helena de Bres writes about the books that she turned to for comfort during a period of personal isolation she faced as a child, and how books (generally pessimistic, sad) aren’t really comforting her at all during this period of universal isolation. Instead it’s the unbridled optimism of those crazy people who keep going outside that she’s been motivated by, because she realizes how precious those ridiculous optimists are. We must preserve them.

8. “English PEN Calls for Release of Ahdaf Soueif After Coronavirus Protest Arrest” by Mark Chandler, The Bookseller

A brief note and harbinger: “English PEN has called for the release of Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif, who was arrested during a protest about the treatment of prisoners during the coronavirus outbreak.”

9. “Capitalism’s Favorite Drug” by Michael Pollan, The Atlantic

This one is about coffee — the illustrious Michael Pollan reviewing Augustine Sedgewick’s Coffeeland — and honestly it isn’t supposed to be about coronavirus at all, but I read this line and I can’t stop thinking about the rich people who would rather send us back out to die than pay our bills for a little while: “The essential question facing any would-be capitalist, as Sedgewick reminds us, has always and ever been ‘What makes people work?’” On Salvadoran coffee plantations, the answer to that question was: a hunger crisis engineered by the upper class.

10. “Anna Kavan and the Rise of Autospec” by Gregory Ariail, The Los Angeles Review of Books

This one isn’t about corona either. It’s Gregory Ariail’s review of the Anna Kavan short story collection published by NYRB this month, and how Kavan’s style (she lived in the first half of the twentieth century) defined a genre Ariail calls “auto speculative fiction” (as opposed to “autofiction”), which he describes as “a truly combustive marriage of opposites: the searing confessions of the inner life on the one hand, and speculative narratives that systematically violate natural laws and reject normative discourses on the other.” I won’t tell you which lines of this review remind me of corona; you can pick those out for yourself.

Take care of yourself,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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Albatross People

Arthur Morris / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Colin Daileda | Longreads | March 2020 | 7 minutes (2,000 words)

My wife told me she had at last booked a flight back to Bengaluru and so I should relax that evening at our apartment. There I opened a book I was reading about birds, called The Thing With Feathers, by Noah Strycker. I was toward the end, on a chapter about albatrosses.

The wandering albatross looks not much different from a seagull, except it’s enormous. Its wings span 12 feet, twice my height. Wanderers need wings like this because they spend a huge part of their lives floating over the open ocean, plucking fish and squid from the water. They do this away from their mates, because keeping track of each other would cost precious energy needed to stay aloft. Each partner goes about their own life until, once every two years, they flutter back home to the little bits of land in the Southern oceans on which they nest. They greet each other with a dance and quickly go about building that year’s home. Though it takes nine months for an albatross chick to leave its nest, the parents won’t see each other much during that time, either. The baby needs food, and so they fly out in search of it over different parts of the sea. All that time away, and yet albatrosses almost always remain faithful for life.

Read more…

On Solitude (and Isolation and Loneliness [and Brackets])

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Sarah Fay | Longreads | March 2020 | 18 minutes (5,122 words)

 

The change came less as a chrysalis moment, an instant of emergence and blossoming, than after weeks of distress. My apartment at the time was in the rear of the building, away from the street. Even by studio standards, it was tiny — the kitchen too close to the bed, the bed practically touching the bookshelf and the desk. It had a slight view of the Chicago skyline but mainly looked onto a brick wall. My immediate neighbors kept to themselves. They were presences, a series of doors opening and closing. I’d lived contentedly in that remove. It suited me. Then it didn’t. 

Naturally, I blamed my apartment — the claustrophobic lack of square footage, the oppressive brick wall. The moment I walked in the door, I felt a crushing weight on my chest, followed by a pit in my stomach. My environment had to be the cause.

In his essay on solitude, the 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne disagrees: “Our disease lies in the mind, which cannot escape from itself.” Finding contentment in solitude requires self-reliance. (Ralph Waldo Emerson would later agree, though he remained very much engaged in public life.) Montaigne advises us to keep a “back shop,” a private room within the self, where others can’t enter. Plaster and wood have nothing to do with it. We must have “a mind pliable in itself, that will be company.” My inner back shop had somehow transformed from a place of solitude to one of isolation and loneliness.

The ideal of solitude is strength. It’s a skill to be mastered: the ability to be alone without feeling lonely.  Read more…

Coronavirus Could End Trump’s Chance at Reelection, But Things Are Too Terrifying Right Now To Feel Hopeful

AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon

At The Atlantic, long-time Republican Peter Wehner writes what many of us hope is true: That the coronavirus crisis has shown how incapable a leader Trump is, and this crisis will end Trump’s presidency. Granted, a lot of us knew how incapable Trump was before the pandemic. He is a despicable, morally bereft “human being.” And even if Wehner’s prediction turns out to be correct, a national emergency is too great a cataclysm to make it feel worth celebrating right now. Right now, a lot of us are locked inside our homes, self-quarantining, entertaining our kids while protecting ourselves and others. An end to Trump’s presidency is an optimistic outcome; let’s just hope enough of us survive, and our economy endures, to enjoy it. Nothing seems cheery now, here indoors among the stockpiled cereal, canned beans, and coffee, during this isolated, anxious time when so many of us are wondering if our jobs will continue, reading too many coronavirus articles and tweets and updates, and wondering which of our elderly family members the virus will kill. Right now, we can definitely use something to feel hopeful about. The full pantries no longer provide much sense of relief. With the spreading pandemic creeping closer to each of us, it no longer seems like we have much time to wait for Trump’s reign to end. And yet, locked inside our homes, it also seems that time is all we have, one hour ticking slowly by after another. But back to Wehner.

Most of us know Trump’s moral and presidential failings, his lying, cheating, racism, misogyny, and unfortunate ability to get away with behavior that would have ruined other presidents, let alone small-town mayors. Wehner makes a strong case, though: How Trump ignored early warnings about COVID-19. How Trump circulated misinformation, blocked testing efforts, disbanded the NSC pandemic unit, kept shaking people’s hands despite warnings, and how he is clearly incapable of comforting or protecting the public in anyway. Now that we’re in crisis, Wehner believes that Trump can no longer hide his errors and presidential limitations, and it will cost him the election. “Day after day after day he brazenly denied reality, in an effort to blunt the economic and political harm he faced,” writes Wehner. “But Trump is in the process of discovering that he can’t spin or tweet his way out of a pandemic. There is no one who can do to the coronavirus what Attorney General William Barr did to the Mueller report: lie about it and get away with it.”

The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.

It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over.

We will see. But I am grateful for Wehner’s gift of hope. What I want more than anything, is for my family, my friends, my neighbors, and people around the world, including you reading this, to survive, so that we can emerge from this and not only thrive, but can, as Dan Rather recently put it, “follow a path of renewal and improvement of how we structure our society, its economy, its health, its social obligations, and its politics.”

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“I miss my body when it was ferocious” The Transfiguration of Paul Curreri

Paul Curreri -- All photos by Aaron Farrington

Brendan Fitzgerald | Longreads | March 2020 | 47 minutes (12,973 words)

I had seen Paul Curreri a few times around Charlottesville — pushing a cart around the local Wegmans grocery, drinking seltzer at the brewery, holding his young daughter and wearing a brace on one hand — before I worked up the nerve to write to him.

“I’m not sure if you know I’ve been fairly sidelined for the past five years via hand and vocal problems,” he wrote back. “I shouldn’t necessarily assume you know that. Perhaps you just thought I’ve been lazy as shit.” I told him I didn’t want much of his time; I had kids of my own now, too. “Truly,” he wrote back, “there is always time.”

Over a decade, Curreri had released a body of music that should have made him one of America’s most esteemed songwriters. “Paul Curreri gives what few songwriters can,” Matt Dellinger wrote in The New Yorker in 2002. “It hits you soon and hard that you’re hearing something exquisite.” His first albums, built on country blues foundations, shook with dexterous picking and a voice that keened and yipped and roared. A few early songs functioned like artist statements, little revelations of ethos bound up in the tension between the limits of Curreri’s body and the demands of his music. “If your work is shouting, deep-breasted, from sun-up to sundown, take care,” he sang on 2003’s Songs for Devon Sproule, named for the musician he’d marry a few years later. “In time, a shouter you’ll become.”

For years, Curreri’s work had shouted, and so he became a shouter of singular beauty. Then, he went quiet — slowly, at first, then all of a sudden.

Read more…

This Month in Books: The Decameron Is Online

John William Waterhouse, A Tale from the Decameron, 1916. (Wikimedia Commons)

“The pestilence was so powerful that it was transmitted to the healthy by contact with the sick, the way a fire close to dry and oily things will set them aflame. And the evil of the plague went even further: not only did talking to or being around the sick bring infection and a common death, but also touching the clothes of the sick or anything touched or used by them…” —Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron

“At the beginning of the plague, when there was now no more hope but that the whole city would be visited;…you may be sure from that hour all trade, except such as related to immediate subsistence, was, as it were, at a full stop.” —Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

 

Dear Reader,

When the pandemic comes, the usual thing is for people to stop talking to one another. I’ve been consulting my small collection of plague books (a normal thing to own), and I’m getting the impression that this has always been the case. Talking and touching are, after all, biologically indistinguishable; to communicate, you have to get close to someone. Close enough to catch whatever it is they’ve got.

Or anyway that used to be how it went. It used to be that, when a plague came around, if you were worried you couldn’t live without other people and their stories and all their little habits and funny dances and things, you had better secure a few charming young noblewomen to take with you into seclusion at your country villa for the duration of the epidemic. Nowadays the script has been flipped. Clubbers can go to “cloud raves,” bored teens can post funny videos, and I can write and publish this month’s books newsletter from the comfort of my living room — I can communicate myself to thousands of you even though I haven’t left my house in like 90 hours, having been a little too spooked by the specter of “community spread” in New York to see First Cow at the Angelika this weekend even though I already had tickets.

(Not, to be honest, that I don’t always write the newsletter from my couch! But it’s a little different, obviously, working from home as opposed to actively avoiding other people.)

The coronavirus is “the first pandemic in history that could be controlled,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Monday. What he meant is that it’s the first pandemic for which we’ve had a whole host of technologies at our disposal that can allow society to screech to a grinding halt without totally collapsing — arguably the most important of which is the internet. Solitude without loneliness is, incredibly, achievable on a wide scale. We can all quarantine alone, together, in one big villa in the cloud. No need to recruit the noblewomen. The Decameron is online.

With that in mind, here’s a round-up of nine not-to-be-missed book-related stories from all around the web this past month, communicated from me to you with zero physical contact. And, while reading, if you happen to get tempted to go out into a big crowd and breathe other people’s air and feel the heat from other people’s bodies, remember this important piece of advice: don’t.

 

1. “Sex in the Theater: Jeremy O. Harris and Samuel Delany in Conversation” by Toniann Fernandez, The Paris Review

A remarkable conversation on sex, art, and so much more between acclaimed playwright Jeremy O. Harris and sci-fi legend Samuel Delany, whom you may or may not know is also, in the vein of his childhood inspirations Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade, a writer of erotic novels, such as the “unpublishable” Hogg.

2. “A Dirty Secret: You Can Only Be a Writer If You Can Afford It” by Lynn Steger Strong, The Guardian

Novelist Lynn Steger Strong examines the damning economics of authorship.

3. “The Post-Traumatic Novel” by Lili Loofbourow, The New York Review of Books

“What I have found myself hungering for, in short, is literature that stretches past legal testimonies and sentimental appeals toward what, for lack of a better phrase, I’m calling post-traumatic futurity.” Lili Loofbourow reviews three recent books reflective of the Me Too moment and outlines a new approach to the survivor’s story.


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4. “Jericho Rising” by Allison Glock, Garden & Gun

A profile of the incredible Jericho Brown. “In person, Brown is an explosion of life, magnetic, boisterous, a one-man carnival ride. Simply put, there is no scenario where one would be unaware that Jericho Brown is in the room.”

5. “Fan Fiction Was Just as Sexual in the 1700s as It Is Today” by Shannon Chamberlain, The Atlantic

Get this: Henry Fielding made a smutty fanfic of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and he called it… Shamela.

6. “Killing the Joke: On Andrea Long Chu’s Females” by Elena Comay del Junco, The Point

Like pretty much everyone, I take perverse delight in a good takedown. There have been a lot of spicy takedown reviews already this year— Lauren Oyler on Jia Tolentino, Emily Gould on Meghan Daum, Jennifer Szalai on Katie Roiphe — and I suppose that, technically, this not-exactly-positive review of Andrea Long Chu’s Females could be seen as something like a takedown; but in the end Comay del Junco’s approach is so thoughtful that it just makes me more interested in the book. Sometimes disagreement is not discouragement.

7. “Behind the Green Baize Door” by Alison Light, The London Review of Books

A review of Feminism and the Servant Problem, a history of the political tension between the suffragettes and their maids: “Employers protested against interference in the relations between mistress and maid. Some believed that their servants had it easy — novel-reading was a particular irritant. One cautioned against leaving the suffrage paper lying around the house: it was too sexually explicit and political discussion might give servant girls the wrong idea.”

8. “Opportunity Costs: On Work, Idealism, and Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley” by Eryn Loeb, Guernica

Eryn Loeb reflects on her own work history while reviewing Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, a memoir of selling out in Silicon Valley.

9. “The Beats, the Hungryalists, and the Call of the East” by Akanksha Singh, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Singh reviews Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury’s The Hungryalists, a book that explores the connection between Allen Ginsberg and the eponymous group of radical Bengali poets. “Their name is in reference to Geoffrey Chaucer’s use of hungry in in the sowre hungry tyme in his translation of The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius.”

 

Happy reading, and good luck! Stay inside if you can!

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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15 True Crime Longreads and the Questions We Should Ask Ourselves When Reading Them

(Armin Weigel/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

“I think one of the reasons these stories are so popular — and they’ve been very popular since long before whatever true crime boom we’re currently in,” Rachel Monroe notes while discussing her book Savage Appetites, on our cultural fascination with crime, is that “they’re very emotionally engaging.”

“Whenever we’re telling these stories,” Monroe continues, “we’re participating in that emotional, social, political conversation, whether we want to admit it or not.”

For all that we can stream entire seasons of docudramas in a single day, true crime stories often take years to report out and get right. Whether the person facing the facts of any given case is a staff writer or a law enforcement official, even full-time, invested professionals can lack the bandwidth or the resources to investigate every life story that crosses their desks, with the undivided attention each of those lives deserves.

Read more…