Politics, Oliver Sacks, Proust, Korea, Clutter, Levy, Psalms, Earnings, Status

The irregular review of reviews vol. XI

Politics pretending to be literature

In response to a reductive (but admirably enthusiastic) essay arguing that literature is apolitical (it was all over Substance but now I cannot find it) John Halbrooks responded by saying that literature very much is political. And that it can guide your vote in the upcoming US Presidential election…

Yes, obviously, literature is political. But, no, that doesn’t mean it has very much to do with election politics. Let’s put aside the fact that the original essay was more an objection to Literary Theory than politics per se… Halbrooks is wrong.

I hesitate to link to this essay because it is badly argued, but it is a useful demonstration of the way that so much of what so many literary people say is just politics—common-or-garden, same-as-the-man-on-the-bus, unphilosophical, newspaper-level politics—but wearing fancy clothes.

I can add this: careful, empathetic readings of the majority of our most accomplished writers will lead one to principles that will align with democratic (small “d”) values and that will reject fascism and oligarchy. And this year, that means that there is only one option on the ballot.

I’m not allowed to say this in a classroom setting, and I don’t. I let the texts speak for themselves. But I can write it here. And what’s more, I'll give you some examples. In the run up to the election, I will survey a few of my favorite writers in this way. While I generally don't like to reduce literary texts to a “message” (after all, what makes literature important is its ability to capture complexity and nuance), we can certainly discern overarching values in many cases.

I hope he gets round to explaining how reading Milton means we should vote centre-left in modern elections. (Remind me, who do I vote for if I favour Cromwell and the Army? How about putting Ireland to the sword?) What about Burke, Carlyle, and Austen? (Austen, though, is confusing, to be fair: she was pretty conservative but also seems to have been an abolitionist. Talking about splitting the ballot!) Tell me again what it is I should be inferring from Coriolanus and The Taming of the Shrew? And presumably we are not going to be reading Spenser? (Or is Kamala the new Fairy Queen?) Remember kids, it’s ok to read Jane Eyre and become a feminist, just so long as you become a low-Church Anglican feminist who admires St. John… And whatever you do, be careful reading Patricia Highsmith and Agatha Christie!

How far can we take this? If I read Donne and Herbert with “careful empathy”, will I become a good Anglican? How about Johnson? Maybe we shouldn’t let the young read William Morris and John Ruskin. Don’t want them getting the wrong ideas and voting for Bernie! Does reading Dickens make us sexist? Should we ban Walter Scott? What are we to make of the Bloomsbury group?

It’s easy to agree that reading eighteenth and nineteenth century feminists is an exercise in learning feminism, but such crass generalisations about literature should not be indulged in by professors in public.

Oliver Sacks was a late bloomer!

The popular conception of Oliver’s career as both a neurologist and a writer was one of tremendous success from the start. But this was not the case. Oliver was 52 when his fourth book, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” became a wholly unexpected best seller in 1986. In his 20s, 30s and 40s, his life and career had been not only unorthodox, but by many means, a disaster.

Both compulsive and impulsive, driven by self-destructive behavior (especially in his yearslong addiction to amphetamines, and what Oliver himself called periods of intense “mania”), he moved from job to job — twice getting fired — searching to find his way as a neurologist, as a writer and as a closeted gay man. While he had published three books before “Hat,” none had been markedly successful. Even his best-known book from that period, “Awakenings” (1973), didn’t sell well at the time — that wouldn’t change until the film adaptation in 1990 — and was largely ignored by his neurological colleagues.

Also this.

…ultimately, one might say, Oliver was his own most challenging and important patient.

I very much want to read the new collection of letters.

Proust

I loved every word of this excellent essay about reading Proust in French, written by someone who hardly knew any French when she began. Splendid. Splendid.

Once, as I was reading about Vronsky’s face moving into sunlit gaps and then back into the shade of lindens while he walked with Dolly in Anna Karenina, water splashed lightly on the pages. Only when I reached up to touch my face did I realize I was the source of the water. It wasn’t that something sad was happening, not at all (Nabokov would, I think, say it’s simply evidence of the maestro’s inimitable ability to make the passage of lived time match the passage of the novel). It was more that I didn’t have full control over my body, or I had given that control away. Once you have given yourself over, all of reading Proust is a bit like that; I once dreamed Swann’s dream, the one that closes out Swann in Love, and I know it was my brain attempting to give me his correlating conclusion — all that for a woman who wasn’t even my type! Has a book ever completely ruined your life, I thought, and then wrote, once I understood that even my dreams weren’t my own. But ruined in the way that a young coed is ruined by a semester abroad, as she sees everyone around her taking naps at 4 p.m. and thinks I can’t go back.

Book Boom in South Korea

Short video.

Clutter

Marie Kondo was wrong. Some wonderful pictures in this piece.

In the late 20th century, Japan was known for its minimalism: its Zen arts, its tidy and ordered cities, its refined foods and fashions. But Tsuzuki peeled away this façade to reveal a more complicated side to his nation. And Tokyo was the perfect setting for this exfoliation. Like the interiors he photographed, it remains visually overwhelming – even cluttered. Outside, enormous animated advertisements compete for attention against a jigsaw puzzle of metal, glass, concrete and plastic. In the sprawling residential districts that radiate from the city centre, compact homes are packed in formations as dense as transistors on a semiconductor chip, while confusing geometries of power lines spiderweb the skies above.

Honor Levy

This is a very good description (from Pete Tosiello) of the typical sort of thing that makes My First Book an example of discourse fiction. (I wrote about Levy here.)

The buzziest stories here dramatize web relationships, the gulfs between flesh-and-blood demography and pixelated avatars. But in My First Book, as on the internet, everyone — the charismatic misogynists in “Good Boys,” the Rogan-pilled bodybuilders in “Love Story” and “Brief Interview with Beautiful Boy” — is a Type of Guy. Levy’s characters inhabit Instagram, Reddit, Snap, and TikTok with varying degrees of anonymity, bored in their dorm rooms and childhood homes. There’s no subculture or tribal knowledge: Levy’s internet is a Zuckerbergian monolith, where everyone acts in familiar, foreseeable ways. Nudes are requested and delivered, memes are based, activism is cringe. Levy may as well be rattling off the names of network television shows.

He also wrote a splendid piece about Lauren Oyler (another Twitter addict disguised as a writer): “I dont care if Oyler’s a snob, but snobbery is earned! No Judgment is an apropos title: she never defends anything on its merits.”

Izaac Watts and Psalms

Do yourself a favour and read this essay. This is what literary criticism looks like!

There are surely many reasons for the particular early modern enthusiasm for the Song of Songs — scholars have analysed, for instance, the way aspects of its allegory could easily be adapted for theological and political purposes, as well as devotional ones. (Theology and politics were, in any case, rarely very far apart in this period.) You can’t read material from the seventeenth century for very long before noticing this. But I wonder whether part of the explanation for the vogue is, as it were, grammatical. Any early modern learner of Hebrew already had Latin and Greek, and for anyone with that linguistic background what my first teacher would have called the “sexiness” of Hebrew grammar, its pervasive awareness of gender even in comparison to Latin and Greek (already much more ‘gendered’ than English), is one of the most immediately striking things about this new and different language.

Even if you don’t know the name Izaac Watts, you know his work. He wrote the hymn O God Our Help In Ages Past. He was also a very good self-help writer, which I wrote about in my review of David Brooks’ most recent book.

Novelist earnings

Author’s median earnings have dropped to 7k and people are upset. I see very little discussion about why their books aren’t selling and quite a lot about “market concentration” or how these people are talented and win prizes. (Maybe the prizes don’t mean very much?)

If you believe in the labour theory of value you’ll find it easy to say “writers should be paid for their work”. But that theory of value is untrue. Sorry! The world is what it is! Some consideration for the readers, the consumers, the people from whom the money is taken, might be nice?

It’s been a standard part of economics for a century that markets like this are a long tail distribution. Writers have always struggled to make money, a few have always taken the prize.

Publishing mostly isn’t about fiction. It’s about cooking, sports, religion, and other such things. The idea that more independent presses will change this situation is ludicrous. Authors used to be treated much worse in the days of small presses. Go and read about Beryl Bainbridge. Hell, read about Keats and Shelley.

In the age of Amazon, it’s much easier than it ever was to publish without the Big 4. And bookshops were going out of business before the internet in the wake of both Barnes & Noble and the non-bookstore retailers like supermarkets.

But every year millions of books are published. Go into any bookshop and you’ll find more good books than you could want—be that in old, new, translated, niche, or something else. Go to Amazon and you can multiply that by many orders! If what you care about is readers and books, then things are just fine. If what you care about is large earnings for all novelists in this age of abundance, then… you have some maths to do.

What should be more obvious to the people demanding more money is that you simply cannot pay each author “for their labour” and publish all of those books. It’s a fast-changing, complex, and competitive business. In June 2023, HarperCollins reported a 10% drop in sales and a 45% drop in profits. How much extra money would you spend on unpromising fiction authors if your profits nearly halved one year? People go out of business really easily in this industry.

This is from the Oxford Handbook of Publishing,

Very few industries release such a torrent of new products annually. This means that authors and editors experience dual-sided uncertainty since neither know in advance with any certainty, except for a relatively small cluster of about a dozen bestselling authors (e.g. Mary Higgins Clark; Dan Brown), if a book will be successful in the marketplace of ideas. The proliferation of new titles also poses a sizeable economic challenge because of the complex nature of the book publishing, book buying, and book reading ecosystem. Complexity in the marketplace has been analysed by Gokce Sargut and Rita Gunther McGrath, who wrote that ‘complex organizations are far more difficulty to manage than merely complicated ones. It’s harder to predict what will happen, because complex systems interact in unexpected ways. … It’s harder to place bets, because the past behavior of a complex system may not predict its future behavior.’

I have seen people gesturing to the large revenue numbers of publishing companies and saying “see, they could pay”, with no consideration for how the business actually works, the fact that incentives matter, or the reality of profits being the means by which so many books are published.

Status in fiction

Austen understood status—ahem, station; that its shoring up is hardly superficial. The intrigue of the marriage plot springs not just from uncertain affection—“will they fuck”—but the balance of such possibilities with a complex and often competing set of considerations. Status questions, basically, though to the standard socioeconomic strains I would add, particularly in Austen’s case, that of moral status. Alas, fuckability is a kind of status, too.

As a consultant (sorry), I can’t help but envision all of Austen’s single men plotted in a multi-dimensional status model based on fortune, morals, manners, and fuckability with carefully calibrated weights; the heroines judged on the basis of their strategic analyses. “I'm sure some of you might say strategy is immoral” (Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts), but can this be true when Austen weighs moral status so highly? And then Robert Sapolsky makes a pretty compelling case against free will itself—that we’re “biological machines,” our feelings of feelings “a confusing, recursive challenge.”

This is interesting, well-informed, and well-argued, and it is a good thing for novelists to have such theories.