Packing My Library
or, How reading criticism saved me for the 703rd time
I am packing my library. Yes, I am. But unlike Benjamin — a “genuine collector” whose passion “borders on the chaos of memories,” as his famous essay has it — my books form what Elizabeth Hardwick liked to call a “working library”: a private system of easily retrievable information, notes, impressions, and experiences. Arranged by author, each book is its own file folder: articles from 2015 and 2016, as we careened toward the presidential election, clipped and folded into Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism; an editor’s note from Hanya Yanagihara about curating a magazine hidden away in Barthes’ Mythologies; a New York Times investigation of walled resorts in Mexico peeking out of Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. Naturally, I don’t always know where things are. Somewhere, there’s a New York Review essay by David Salle about the use of style in Rachel Harrison’s sculptures, but I can’t remember what book I left it in. Nor do I always remember what’s in each book; the surprise essays and articles provide a texture or an interpolation, an abrasion, when I go digging for quotes or commentary (essays are born in the margins). This has nothing, or almost nothing, to do with books as objects. In fact, I’ve already sold the most Benjamin-esque books that I owned: forty-nine signed leather-bound Franklin Editions, including James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Jean-Paul Sartre, and so on. I liked having them, but I didn’t need them. They weren’t subjects, and — to dip in to another Benjamin essay — their aura wasn’t strong enough to keep me from letting them go.
Because I’ll be separated, for a while, from this “retrieval system” (Sontag’s term for her own library), I’m forced to be judicious in what I take with me. Another way to say this is that I’m thinking about what I want to think about, and what I want to care about. But when my eyes landed on Martin Amis’s collection, The War Against Cliché, I realized I’ve always known what I wanted to think about, what I wanted to care about. I’ve always known, in a sense, my point of departure.
I hadn’t read Cliché since I first bought it as a college student, in 2006 or 2007. I was taking a class with David Treuer at the time — one of those authors and teachers who compel you, even if you’re not much of a notetaker, to write down everything they say and pursue everything they recommend. He suggested I read Amis’s Time’s Arrow, a novel in which Josef Mengele “reassembles” and “resurrects” his patients by virtue of time running backward. After that, I bought what I didn’t know was Amis’s best book. A seemingly innocuous and esoteric collection of essays and reviews spanning 1971 – 2000, The War Against Cliché is a primer, maybe the primer, on how to write about books — and not books as ideas, books as documents, books as reactions, books as symptoms, books as insufficient evidence of the popular Irish author’s Marxism, but books as books. “While literary criticism is not essential to literature,” he writes in his introduction, “both are essential to civilization.” Literature, he says, reflecting on his university days, “was the core discipline; criticism explored and popularized the significance of that centrality, creating a space around literature and thereby further exalting it.” What was unique about that era, he admits thirty years later, was that, in the cliché of Art versus Science, “Art seemed to be winning.”
He admits, too, that this has the tinge of nostalgia: “It is the summit of idleness to deplore the present, to deplore actuality. Say whatever else you like about it, the present is unavoidable.” The democratic, university-led movements of the eighties and nineties may have tried to overturn literature’s hierarchy — the tacit understanding that some books, frankly, are better than others, and other books are even better than those — but literature, he believes, “will resist leveling and revert to hierarchy. This isn’t the decision of some snob of a belletrist. It is the decision of Judge Time, who constantly separates those who last from those who don’t.” It’s not hard to return to some of the more lauded novels of five years ago — Jenny Offill’s Weather is one that sticks out in my mind, since I just read it last year — to know just how severe of a judge time can be.
Rereading Amis now, I’m struck by how exhilarating it is to read. The War Against Cliché does double duty in this respect: not only is criticism thrilling to read again, but so are the novelists and poets under review, under discussion. It made me realize that what I want to think about, these next few months, is literature and art — and a good way to think about literature and art is to read those who engage with it, passionately. What I want from my shelves, as I pack them up, is criticism. And in that spirit, I thought I’d share a few of my favorites.
I excluded anthologies here, because that doesn’t seem fair — otherwise Art in America: 1945 – 1970, edited by Jed Perl, would be at the top of everyone’s list (it’s great, look it up). I also tried to stick to books that are primarily essays about other works of art. Some of them include other essays — Teju Cole’s travelogues, Sontag’s foray in Vietnam, Brodsky on canned food — but most respond, above all, to style. In one of the (many) pieces on Nabokov, Amis reflects on the “unifying intensity and extravagance” in his novels, “an absolute trust in style.” He then quotes Nabokov himself: “For me, ‘style’ is matter.” Reading and rereading these books, I’m reminded of the agency art can offer: to borrow the world, as a character of mine once put it, make an alteration, and give it back. The list, in chronological order (sort of), is below.
But first, a brief note. Like I said, I am packing my library — and everything else. Because of this, I’ve paused all paid subscriptions, and will let you all know once I decide to turn them back on. It probably won’t be before the end of summer. That said, if you’re interested in supporting me and my work, please consider ordering a paperback copy of The Future Was Color, which publishes June 10, or help me spread the word about looking for new freelance projects — both manuscript consultations and copy work.
Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin
A compulsory inclusion, since it’s the genesis, more or less, for all the other books below. It’s hard to overstate Benjamin’s influence on the modern essay.1 While “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” basically created media studies, the essays here on translation and Proust and storytelling are equally, unprecedentedly remarkable.
The Tradition of the New, by Harold Rosenberg
Aside from writing about action painters, Rosenberg has, unsurprisingly, a lot to say about class and painting. In “Everyman a Professional,” he observes how, “Outside each profession there is no social body to talk to, and apart from the forms in which the thought of the profession is embodied there is nothing to say.” It’s an essay on jargon, essentially, which foresees the “professionalization” of all activities, including leisure, in the form of constant neologisms, trends, and images as shorthand for banal, formerly private activities.
Renderings, by Max Kozloff
If you’ve read the notes in The Future Was Color you’ll recall that Kozloff’s ideas on paint and relationality made it into the novel. In “Venetian Art and Florentine Criticism,” he argues that, with color, “one is dealing, at the very least, with the enzymic and metabolic, the temperature and pulse rate of art — set into unique governing and governed ratios with all other elements.” Color resists the usual critical binaries. It isn’t darker or lighter, harder or softer, or even necessarily warmer or colder. Color, he says, “forces us to learn the difference between the visible and the far more exclusive category of the visual. The latter is something that can only be held in the eye’s memory, as it were, and not thought’s [memory].”
Under the Sign of Saturn + Styles of Radical Will, by Susan Sontag
No, I couldn’t pick just one. Saturn has “Fascinating Fascism,” probably one of the most important texts for understanding the relationship between art, entertainment, and fascist aesthetics; while Styles of Radical Will opens with two of Sontag’s best, and most under discussed, ideas: the pursuit of silence as an act of will in resistance to a loudly willful world; and the religious intensity of the pornographic imagination in comparison with the general failure of other aspects of consumerist life to offer similar “selfless” intensities.
On Grief and Reason, by Joseph Brodsky
Even more at home in the essay than in a poem, Brodsky’s fearlessness — and indifference to the opinions of others — was unmatched. My favorite here is the title essay, a forty-page close reading of a single Robert Frost poem (“Home Burial”): “So what was it that he was after in this, his very own poem? He was, I think, after grief and reason, which, while poison to each other, are language’s most efficient fuel — or, if you will, poetry’s indelible ink… The more one dips into it, the more it brims with this black essence of existence, and the more one’s mind, like one’s fingers, gets soiled by this liquid. For the more there is of grief, the more there is of reason.”
American Fictions, by Elizabeth Hardwick
She compares Gertrude Stein’s prose to the music of Philip Glass — “its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form.” Zelda Fitzgerald, who could not find “the hope of release through the practice of art,” yearns, we understand, for the “confidence of society” that artists themselves, with something to show for it, “do not require.” Sylvia Plath, in the last months of her life, “was visited, like some waiting stigmatist, by an almost hallucinating creativity.” Stigmatist! You can’t help but wonder how long it took for a word like that to arrive.
Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace
Aside from the brilliant performance of “Authority and American Usage” — a sixty-page review of a dictionary — Wallace’s essay on the near hypnotic banality of sports memoirs changed how I catch glimpses of television in a bar forever. Later, in an essay on Dostoevsky, Wallace conjures the aesthetic bogeyman all novelists, in some way, have to face: “Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as matter of course that ‘serious’ literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life. Add to this the requirement of textual self-consciousness imposed by postmodernism and literary theory, and it’s probably fair to say that Dostoevsky et. al. were free of certain cultural expectations that several constrain our own novelists’ ability to be ‘serious.’”
The Selected Works of Edward Said (edited by Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin)
This one’s a bit of a cheat, as any Selected Works is a writer’s greatest hits, but its breadth and depth is so formidable, and so exhilarating, that I can’t help it. Besides, it’s my list. Perhaps more than any other writer in the last fifty years, Said understood both the pleasures of literature and its political implications. Applying this dialectic to Palestine, he writes, in 1984, that “terrorism has come to signify ‘our’ view of everything in the world that seems inimical to our interests, army, policy, or values,” and that this designation — that any act of resisting Israel or the United States is a terrorist act — amounts to a denial of the Palestinians’ “permission to narrate.”
Known and Strange Things, by Teju Cole
Writing of Kieslowski’s trilogy (Blue, White, Red), Cole notes how “unforeseen encounters can subtly pile up and determine the course of a person’s life. In any narrative, there is the material that moves the story forward. But the storyteller also includes objects or events that hint at a pattern of signification swirling above the surface, part of the story’s logic but just out of reach.” This, I think, is the deus ex machina we’ve been told is bad storytelling, but is, in truth, the way life works; it acts upon you with the same force we gather to push back. But Cole is a skeptic as much as he is an evangelist. In “Reader’s War,” he juxtaposes Obama’s middlebrow literary taste with the “heartbreaking stories of mistaken identity, grisly tales of sudden death from a machine in the sky” and the “plain fact” that “our leaders have been killing at will.” What happened, Cole asks, to “literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy?”
Vile Days, by Gary Indiana
“There is a short story here,” I wrote in the margin of Indiana’s “Shadows of a Summer Night,” a review of The International Shadow Project 1985 that was so detailed, so evocative, that it wouldn’t leave me.2 Each of Indiana’s reviews — collected here from his art column in the Village Voice — is a testament to why you should pay writers to show up and look at things. Of a series of paintings by John Wilkins, on display at the Cash/Newhouse Gallery in 1985, Indiana detects “an environment of image bombardment” that invites “a sophisticated syntax of visual cues.” As pictures, Wilkins’ paintings “simulate a highly modern fear of the inorganic assuming autonomy, of representation replacing the real.” In a nation ruled by a small handful of small men who own the internet — and the President along with it — it’s hard not to feel, in our own vile days, the sting of Indiana’s observation.
The modern good essay, I mean; I can tell you exactly who ruined the essay for American writers but I don’t want to start a fight, not today.
I did write the story, eventually, and American Short Fiction published it.