Valeria Luiselli's Delightful Post-Modernism

Post-modernism is in a weird place. It's been declared dead for a decade or more, and yet there is still plenty of interesting work being done in the ground it broke. Actually, that part's not weird. I'd argue there are still plenty of Romantics writing today, plenty of Victorians, even more Modernists, and more Medievalists than I feel comfortable considering. As handy as it is for structuring syllabi, survey courses, and textbooks, literary and artistic movements aren't strictly delineated. But even given that standard-issue, chaos-of-existence inherent weirdness, Post-Modernism is still in a weird space. (Postmodernism? You guys have a hyphenation preference?) We all kind of accept that something new needs to replace it, and yet I don't think there's evidence that any particular philosophy or aesthetic has congealed into an identifiable replacement. Add in the fact that the very nature of post-modernism tore down the structures that are usually used to build, identify, and study literary movements, and you get to a very weird place.

But even though post-modernism is a weird place, or perhaps because it's in such a weird place, a lot of good writing is still coming out of it. Cesar Aira, Mark Z. Danielewski, Kate Zambrano, Blake Butler, and Karen Tei Yamashita (have I written that post about why I Hotel should be considered one of the great giant-post-modern novels along with Infinite Jest, Underworld, Gravity's Rainbow, The Recognitions, Deflategate, and Kim Davis walking out of jail to “Eye of the Tiger?” I'll add it to the list) all spring to mind. And, of course, a few of post-modernism's avatars like Thomas Pynchon and Lydia Davis are still kicking it. Furthermore, not every reader has caught up to post-modernism yet (Shit, not every reader has caught up to modernism yet) and not all the problems in our culture that post-modernism (see above) addresses have been solved, so it's only natural, if weirdly so, for writers and readers to continue the post-modern project even as we concurrently tear it to bits in order to replace it.

In her first two novels, Valeria Luiselli is continuing that post-modern project. Her debut, Faces in the Crowd, featured the author as character, a shifting perspective, problems of authenticity, fraud, and consideration of the nature of art, identity and narrative. Her new book, The Story of My Teeth, is, in many ways, even more archetypally post-modern as it is a collaborative work that complicates the idea of authorship (Luiselli collaborated on it with the workers in a juice factory), structured around a made-up system of categorization, that examines consumerism, appropriation, the cult of celebrity, and the meaning of objects, while referencing art, literature, and history. One of the sections is even a chronology of events assembled by the book's translator. At one point, the main character auctions off himself, to help support a church he doesn't particularly believe in, to his own estranged son. You could almost hear Pynchon kicking himself for not coming up with something like that.

But even if she is continuing the post-modern project, Luiselli's work is different. Her work is not paranoid, corrosively ironic, or toxicly nihilistic. Though post-modernism's decades-long sneer at convention was, in my opinion, productive, vital, and often satisfying and entertaining, it has run it's course. Luiselli doesn't sneer. She grins. In Luisellis' work all the anger, the frustration, and the powerlessness that defined earlier post-modernism, are replaced by delight.

Though present in Faces in the Crowd, especially in the voice of the narrator's child, The Story of My Teeth might be the most delightful book I've read in ages. The delight starts with Highway and the opening sentences; “I'm the best auctioneer in the world, but no one knows it because I'm a discreet sort of man. My name is Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez, though people call me Highway, I believe, with affection.” From there Highway tells us the story of his rise and fall, his marriage and divorce, his estrangement and reconciliation with his son (which naturally involved Highway being locked in a really creepy clown-based multimedia art piece that actually exists), his acquisition of the teeth of celebrities and his auctioning of the teeth of celebrities, and, of course, the philosophy of auctioneering he received from the “grandmaster auctioneer and country singer, Leroy Van Dyke.” Through all his ups and downs, all his triumphs and failures, Highway maintains that same “I am a discreet sort of man,” voice. Despite or because of the weirdness or even silliness of the story, the book is a joy to read and that joy remains no matter how critically you might delve into the book's headier ideas.

The best concerts are those where the musicians seem to be having as much fun as the audience. To me, there is something infectious and exhilarating in watching someone in love with what they are doing. Somehow, Luiselli makes it seem as though the person most delighted by Highway, his antics, his philosophy, his auctions, his bravado, the contorted references to other literature, with the images in the back of the book including a Google Maps image of Disneylandia, the use of art, the intrepid potential biographer, and the play of cultural attribution, narrative, and language, is Luiselli herself. All writers love to write. It wouldn't be worth it if we didn't. Very few writers, however, find a way to demonstrate that love at all and even fewer do it so overtly, so joyously, and so, well, delightfully, as Valeria Luiselli does in The Story of My Teeth.

Post-modernism has spent a lot of time and energy tearing down. I like to think of it as an un-fettering process, in which the ideologies most easily leveraged by systems of power to control the creation and interpretation of art were torn away, leaving the artist totally free to approach the content and method of her art. Since we have deconstructed, now we get to reconstruct. I don't know what we're going to build in the open space created by post-modernism but I think we should all be grateful, that Valeria Luiselli, at least, is going to build a playground.

The Care and Feeding of a Total Jerk Who Doesn't Appreciate a Damn Thing You Do for Her

That will be all

Last year, my partner and I did the whole get married business and then the whole go on a trip of a lifetime business (which you can read all about here if you are so inclined). That trip meant leaving our cat, Circe, a, let's say, less than affectionate three-legged black cat with, let's say, not the most generous personality, with our roommate. The good news is that Circe is not a dog, which means there really weren't a lot of time consuming or rigorously scheduled chores. Basically, you can fit caring for a cat into any schedule. (Which is one of the reasons why I, more of a dog person at heart, have a cat, not a dog.) More specifically, and this is good or bad depending on your perspective on cats, Circe doesn't like you, so once you've taken care of the necessities she'll generally leave you alone. Except maybe in the winter when one of the necessities is your warmth. Your sweet, sweet calorically-efficient-for-her warmth.

Naturally, being responsible adults, we left our roommate, who was graciously watching over Circe, a detailed list of instructions, typed, emailed, and printed and hung on the refrigerator. But, since it was me writing the instructions, I couldn't just give her a clear and concise list of responsibilities. What fun would that be? Since I hear the internet likes cats and 'rissa really likes this and I basically do what she tells me, I've decided to share those instructions with you. Please enjoy...

The Care and Feeding of a Total Jerk Who Doesn't Appreciate a Damn Thing You Do For Her

Circe gets a scoop of dry food in the morning (scoop is on the container of food) in the “mouse bowl,” which is not to say the bowl is made of a mouse, just that it has a representation of a mouse on it. She also gets a scoop of dry food in the evening, because she whines if she can see the mouse in the mouse bowl.

Your intransigence in relation to the "basement full of poison" has been noted.

In the evening she gets a teaspoon of wet food (Cans of wet food are behind the signed Alton Brown poster on the liquor cabinet) mixed with a scoop of the powder on top of the microwave, and a little bit of warm water, in the metal bowl, which needs to be washed out ahead of time. And, because you're made of time I guess, you need to smoosh up the little biscuits of slightly solidified abomination into a paste, otherwise she won't eat it.

She can have up to 20 of the green treats in the peanut butter jar a day. We put some in her blue ball so maybe her royal highness gets a tiny scrap of what could be exercise at some point in her day.

Hallway privileges have been revoked until further notice, no matter how much she cries.

Her water dish should be washed out once a week or so. We use the short, blue brush with the gray and blue handle on the sink to wash out all cat related items.

Her litter box needs to be scooped every day, not necessarily because she is a jerk (though, she, of course, is) but to control the smell. Scoop the clumps directly into the toilet. Give them 5-10 minutes to break down and flush them away, like any hopes of having a meaningful relationship with this being.

You are so fucking disappointing.

If you want to try to “play” with her the most effective toy is the bird on the string which lives in the crayon bank. (Which is not a bank for crayons, of course, that would be stupid, but a piggy bank in the shape of a giant crayon.) Most of the time she'll just watch you swing it around like there is nothing in the world you'd rather be doing than boring her with your tired and almost certainly wasted attempt at meaningful interaction, but, you should still try every now and again.

There is a bag of catnip near the treats. You can sprinkle some on any surface you feel comfortable having her go on a saliva heavy wallowing spree, but I'd recommend the cat tree in the living room.

You can also give her fish flakes from the plastic container near the other food. The fish flakes smell like sin and bad decision making, but she likes them.

Given that Circe was alive and in good health when we returned, and our roommate was alive, in good health, and not demonstrating any emotional damages from Circe's refusal to acknowledge her as a living being of inherent value, I'd have to say the instructions were successful.

What I Learned from The Conquering Tide by Ian Toll

The easiest way to tell who was going to win the war in the Pacific was to look at a map. Japan a tiny island with few natural resources. The United States of America, one of the largest countries in the world with what, at the time, seemed like an endless supply of industrial resources. There were only two possible ways Japan had a chance: the first was to maintain, throughout the entire war, their hold on resource-rich conquered territory and the logistics to transport those resources great distances through contested waters, and the second was to deal the United States some kind of early defeat that would convince them to avoid war all together. And so the fundamental idea of Pearl Harbor was that the attack would so psychologically devastating the Americans that they would sign a treaty right away. When the US didn't, the war was essentially over.

That said, there were points in the war, especially early on, where Japan might have been able to create a stronger position for themselves at the negotiating table. A different outcome at Midway for example, or a series of strategic or tactical successes that slowed island-hopping. Or even establishing a strong enough final defense line to discourage an assault on Japan itself. (Of course, that strategy would be rendered obsolete.) Since the U.S was far from perfect in its execution of the war and Japan did enjoy early, and sometimes overwhelming success, why were they unable to create this stronger position? According to The Conquering Tide, the second volume in Ian Toll's definitive history of the war in the Pacific, a key factor was racism.

Those who favored a war with the United States believed that Americans were too soft to handle war. We were too decadent, too rich, and too lazy. We wouldn't put in the effort and we couldn't handle the hardship of war. We were fat. We were weak. We could not withstand the Japanese fighting spirit. The most definitive demonstration of just how ingrained this belief was and how destructive it was to the Japanese war effort was their response to U.S. submarine warfare.

They didn't have one. Despite relying on supplies from overseas territories, the Japanese never developed any kind of anti-submarine tactics or technologies besides depth charges. For a while, U.S. submarine technology, especially the torpedoes, were ineffective, but once those mechanical problems were solved, submarines crippled Japanese shipping, greatly limiting Japan's ability to wage war. Oil tanker after oil tanker was sunk and yet Japan did nothing. Why? They simply didn't believe Americans had the fortitude to endure the privations of submarine warfare.

Nor did the Japanese believe Americans were brave enough to withstand an aggressive frontal assault, no matter how entrenched their defenses were. They assumed, Americans would run from charging Japanese warriors. So in battle after battle, the Japanese wasted thousands of lives on frontal assaults on entrenched defensive positions. They could never seem to learn that Americans with machine guns in trenches and bunkers don't flee. No soldiers with machine guns in trenches and bunkers flee.

What made Pacific Crucible, the first volume in Toll's trilogy, so brilliant was Toll's ability to move back and forth from the most powerful to the least powerful actors. He could tell the story of an enlisted soldier, with as much respect and dignity as he told the story of Roosevelt and Churchill. He was able to give the board rooms and intelligence offices the same weight as the battlefield and the aircraft carrier. He was able to show how the old ways of thinking about war changed or didn't in response to the new technologies of war.

But the story in the Pacific changed after Midway. If the war wasn't over at Pearl Harbor it was certainly over after Midway and it was just a matter of the United States rolling through the rest of the Pacific, like a, well, I guess you'd say like a “conquering tide.” Sometimes this can give the book a plodding, almost punching-the-clock tone and pace. Pick an island, bomb the every-loving fuck out of it, send in the Marines, ease and navigate inter-branch conflict and rivalry, rinse and repeat. But Toll is an historian, not a novelist, and so it feels plodding because it was plodding. But there was always something in that rinse and repeat, always risk and conflict, always death and suffering, and so, as we're punching the clock, Toll never lets us forget we are punching the clock in war.

In some ways, works of history shouldn't have a lot of suspense. I mean, we know how the war in the Pacific ends. But knowing the war ends doesn't mean agreeing on everything about the war. I have long believed the use of nuclear weapons on Japan was unnecessary, that it was far less about achieving victory over Japan as it was waving our dick at Russia. But I'm a lefty-commie-pinko-hippy whatever. But, given how lopsided the victories for the U.S. were after Midway and especially after Guadalacanal, and given how depleted Japanese military resources were, and how clear Toll is in this volume about the state of Japan's ability to wage war, I can't imagine Toll coming to anything other than the same conclusion. It's one thing to read this idea in Howard Zinn, who intentionally set out to offer a different perspective on American history but to see it in a definitive history, especially as so many politicians rabidly cling to the idea of American exceptionalism. would be significant. I was going to read the third volume regardless, because Toll is a fantastic historian, but this odd sense of political suspense makes me downright impatient.

The Last Book I Bought: Grave of Light Edition

It might sound odd to say, but I buy books much less frequently than I would prefer. A combination of limited money, even more limited space in my apartment, and great relationships with a bunch of fantastic publishers who just give me books, means that, even with my generous staff discount from Porter Square Books, I rarely buy books for myself. Which tells me there is often something distinctive or important about a book that compels me to actually spend money and shelf space to own it. Something distinctive and important enough that I think it's worth an informal series on my blog, one that provides another avenue or structure for talking about books that I think you should read, and one that riffs on The Rumpus's great also somewhat informal Last Book I Loved Series.

So the inaugural Last Book I Bought post is Grave of Light by Alice Notley.

I love poetry. I read it, I write it, I review it, I've even blogged about my love of poetry, but there are some major gaps in my awareness and understanding. Perhaps the most glaring one is in American poetry from about the end of the Beats until about Kevin Young, later James Tate, later Merwin, Mary Reufle, and more contemporary poets like Patricia Lockwood and Brian Turner. Basically it is a gap from what is usually taught in schools up until I began reviewing poetry about ten years ago. A lot of poetry happened in that time and a lot of changes happened in the landscape of American poetry in that time.

Alice Notley is in that gap. She was one of the names I would see in collections of poetry criticism or in interviews with poets, but for some reason, the timing of her new collections or my enthusiasm for other poets, or the standard-issue chaos of existence, I never got around to trying her until I saw Grave of Light in the bookstore. I flipped through and saw big blocks of text, long poems, unique arrangements of lines on the page, a blissful absence of pointless empty white paper (don't get me started on poets who assume white space inherently communicates and create these giant fucking books that don't fit on the shelves of any human bookstore), and, at least through the course of a casual flip-through, a refreshing diversity of style, form, and technique. Notlety is, obviously, a poet struggling to express the complicated currents of human experience and is not afraid to be complicated herself to do it. So I got the book out of the library first. (Remember all that about money and space.)

I like the debate about the relative impact of Whitman and Dickinson on American poetry. To me, even if I'm hashing out the distinctions by myself, distinguishing between the two and assigning value to those distinctions, reveals much about my poetics, my political values, and my general aesthetics of literature, as does following their influence through other poets I read and respect. For all her influence, I still contend that American poets have not caught up with Dickinson's innovations in poetic grammar. (If I were focusing on our ideas of grammar, I might take a moment to argue that Dickinson's use of the dash might be the greatest consistent use of punctuation in English, but this post is about Notley.) In fact, I'd go so far as to say very few poets, perhaps especially those short-line white-space enthusiasts that so get under my skin, have even attempted her way of arranging clauses, enjambing lines, and arresting and diverting grammatical momentum.

It's important to note that grammar isn't just about punctuation, but about how the parts of sentences are arranged in relation to the idea of “making sense.” At it's heart, grammar is an agreement that facilitates efficient verbal communication. Grammar is a system of logic, a way of arranging ideas so they make sense to the people who did not originate them. Though poetry has a very different relationship to the nature of sense and logic and communication than prose, it still has grammar, it still has agreements that allow for communication. Beyond her dashes, Dickinson had a way of arranging her ideas to stress the seams of poetic grammar, almost without us noticing it. Each phrase that seems to act as a qualifier or a descriptor also complicates and obscures. There are moments where her work feels so overt and open as to lurch towards a kind of obscenity, but that overtness collapses upon closer reading.

What I found when I started reading Grave of Light was a poet grappling with Dickinson's grammar. And that made the sale.

Josh's Just-for-the-Hell-of-It Shred-Your-Mind Syllabus

There was a moment while reading Geek Love, after something totally insane and totally brilliant happened, when I thought to myself something along the lines of “Wouldn't it be fucking nuts to read this with The Lord of the Barnyard? It might shred your fucking mind.” From the title of this post, you can see I ran with the idea.

Designing a syllabus (well, one you actually plan on teaching) might be one of the most difficult critical and interpretive acts. Not only do you need a professional understanding of the works under consideration, you also have to array them in a way that creates a particular kind of conversation among them. You have to meticulously extrapolate the amount of time students will need to read and understand the works. And then, you have to balance your specific goals against a wider conversation with literature in general at the world at large, creating something specific enough to get your point across, but inclusive enough to reflect the diversity of human life and expression. And, depending on where you're teaching, you've probably also got to cram in some works mandated.

A syllabus is a cascade of impossible decisions resulting in something that is going to be inherently unsatisfying to the person creating it, whilst and at the same time, presenting to the world for rigorous scrutiny a profound statement on your ideas, your priorities, your pedagogy, and, ultimately, the core of your very being.

Unless, you're just fucking around with a thought experiment. Then it's a ton'o'fun. So from that initial moment, I tried to remember other books that created that particular feeling of productive violence on my intellect, that sensation of incisions made in my brain by other people's words, that feeling that new eyes have been cut into my forehead that, for a moment at least, let me look into unimagined dimensions of twisted physics and warped logic. And then there is the sense of being ragged afterward, but in a satisfying way. Once I had a list, incomplete, of course, prose-centric, but not exclusive, I tried to imagine how to build from one work to the next and how that building would play out over the course of a semester or a year. Here's what I came up with.

Ban En Banlieu: Ban is about a lot of things; gender, race, violence, all that good stuff, but it is also about the act of creating, how we create and what we create with. Even the acknowledgments is part of the text. It is all fluid boundaries and permeable borders. At the bookstore, I recommend this specifically as a book for writers and artists because of how it incorporates its own process and I think this syllabus is best read from the perspective that you are an artist of your own consciousness.

The Beauty Salon: Short. Weird. Semi-post-apoacalyptic. What struck me about this bizarre, but compelling book, in particular was that its images didn't seem to work the way images usually work in literature. They resisted metaphor. They resisted interpretation. They didn't play the game of literature the way I was used to playing.

Philosophy of Composition: Poe's work tends to hide its truly subversive insanity beneath a layer of obvious insanity. Whatever madness he depicts, almost certainly hides a more nuanced, more complex, more troubling madness connected to narration, storytelling, perception, and psychology. But this, “essay,” ostensibly on his writing process for the "The Raven," might be the most insane. The least-insane interpretation is that it is a beautifully nuanced, whilst and at the same time, viciously scathing satire on currents in literary criticism at the time. The most-insane is that he actually means what he says and actually composed "The Raven" in the loony-tunes manner he described. Or, he's just fucking with us.

Lord of the Barnyard: As much as American culture likes to celebrate the “self-made man,” there is nothing society hates more than a person who doesn't need it. Starting with the epic and beautiful first sentence, Lord of the Barnyard maintains a frenetic pace through a story of agriculture, racism, small-town politics, garbage collection, and genius. The protagonist, John Kaltenbrunner is a different kind of American hero, but I think he is another vital incarnation of Huck Finn.

Duplex: How would you tell the story of the malignant death-denial pulsing at the center of American suburbia? With robots, wizards, and perhaps four apocalypses. Duh.

Beloved: Your body is not a body so much as it is a focal point for the forces of history that both sculpt your humanity/insanity while at the same time haunting your soul and oppressing your present. There's a reason why Toni Morrison is a Nobel Laureate and a reason why all those “Is Jonathan Franzen our great living American novelist?” discussions are racist, sexist bullshit. Morrison is a genius and Beloved tore me to bits.

We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders: For me, as a reader, problematic juxtapositions and radical changes in narrative trajectory create powerful reading experiences, and so, one goes from Beloved, to Davis's parody/homage/other of academic sociological writing. Can analysis be a story? Do emotions “find a way,” even when the prose style is intended to eschew emotions? What does diction reveal about ourselves? What is it like to get a bunch of barely sincere letters from your classmates while you're clearly having a very shitty Christmas? Much like "A Philosophy of Composition," Davis's short story practically dares you to tear it to pieces, while baffling your attempts to tear it to pieces.

Ghosts: Really any Cesar Aira novel could've gone here. In some ways, How I Became a Nun is even more mind-shreddy, given that it involves manslaughter by arsenic-poisoned ice cream, and The Literary Conference involves giant mutant silkworms, and Conversations is top-to-bottom seated madness, but there is a prose beauty in Ghosts that I think distinguishes it from the rest of Aira's brilliant oeuvre. There is something sneaky about Ghosts that I think makes it fit with this list more seamlessly than his other works. (Though, you should read his other works, too.)

Our Lady of the Flowers: There's nothing sneaky about the beauty in Our Lady of the Flowers. Genet's explicit goals are to reveal (or imbue) the craven, wretched, betraying, criminal with angelic beauty. Genet was a small time crook himself, something of a drama queen in many ways and an absolute trainwreck in all the others; he also was a successful poet, novelist, and playwright in distinct, delineated chunks of his life. I don't think Our Lady will convince anybody that it's beautiful to be criminal, but the book is beautiful and beautiful in a way that makes you wonder how much you can trust your eyes and how much you can trust in words.

Thrown: I've written about Thrown before, focusing on how it considered sports, but there is a ton of other crazy shit going on in this book; about narrative, the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, how we use literature to grapple with philosophy, how philosophy can be employed to live and view one's life, but even if you leave all the heady topics aside, there is still the balls-to-the-wall prose. Howley writes with an intellectual bravado I've only ever seen in Foucault.

Geek Love: The book that started this whole thought experiment. There are lots of reasons why Geek Love would go in a syllabus like this, but I think the most important thing I've encountered about it, to date, is that every time I feel like I start to get a handle on what the book is about it completely throws me. This probably says a lot about me as a reader, but, often the books I most enjoy and the books I feel I get the most out of, I also feel like I have absolutely no fucking clue what is going on.

A Good Man is Hard to Find: I know this one doesn't seem like belongs with the others, but trust, me, after all of these other books, I think you'd seen O'Connor's masterpiece in a new light. I mean, there isn't a decent character in the whole story and there was a point, at least for me, when you kinda empathize with The Misfit. How fragile are our morals and ethics when they are susceptible to annoying kids and a whiny mother-in-law?

Satantango: “Wait, magic spiders. What the fuck?” Satantango is absolutely relentless. Grim. Dark. Soggy. Moldering. Miserable. And yet, Krasznahorkai might be the most beautiful prose-stylist in the world alive. And I think he's clearly perfectly comfortable totally fucking with us. I put Satantango here at the end, because I suspect that, after all the other shit one's brain has been through in the previous books, an odd, perhaps even angelic beauty might arise from this book. There's a chance you might be somewhat inoculated to what would otherwise be shocking or disturbing about Satantango allowing you to focus on the prose itself. Or you'll never recover from the scene with the cat. Probably both.

It has it's problems, as all syllabi do and even over the few weeks I've been working on this I've encountered works that might belong, but it was fun to put together, and fun to imagine how I'd feel when I got to the end of that course. What would you add and where?