A Look Back on a Disappointing Year

My Own Writing

Three stories of mine were published this year. If you want to read "Ruins of a Future Empire," you will need to order a print back-issue of Salvage No. 4, since they do not put their fiction and poetry up on their website. I think it's worth it, not merely for the story, but because Salvage is a serious journal of political thought that deserves to be more widely read. "A Summary of Menistarian Law..." is, for now, only available to subscribers to Lackington's, another publication whose purchase I would recommend, but if either the money or the inspiration fails you, note that they will make it available online for free at some point. The flash-fiction piece "Cynthia" may be viewed by all on the website of Asymmetry.

As of now I have 13 pieces out on submission, 12 fiction and one creative non-fiction (essay), and I am doggedly, perhaps delusionally, optimistic about some of them. But at the moment I have no contracts in hand, so no concrete publication plans on deck for 2018. It is the first year since 2015 to begin that way for me. Which is to say, if someone reading this is a fiction editor who has been considering commissioning something from me, now would be an excellent time for you to reach out.

Translation: The Der Nister Project

Things finally settled well enough in my workday life that I can contemplate applying for grants and fellowships to further my literary endeavors--I am no longer a one-person office, but the Director of a two-person office, so I now have reliable back-up at work. Thus, if I am fortunate enough to receive something, I can arrange to take a bit of time off and know that the grant-seeking endeavors of my colleagues will be in good hands. My debut effort in this vein was to apply for a translator's fellowship from the National Yiddish Book Center. However, even if I do not get the fellowship, the preparatory work for the application stirred in me a great enough passion for the stories of Der Nister (pen name of Pinkhus Kahanovich, lit. "The Hidden One") that I shall proceed with the project one way or the other. (Or, as Der Nister would say, vi-nit-vi.) The initial stage of the project, proposed for completion within one year if I get the NYBC fellowship (longer perhaps if I don't), is translation of the stories he had published under the collection title Gedakht. I have already translated two stories ("In vayn-keler" and "Geyendik") and am working on a third ("A forshpil"). The tone and subject matter of the stories is such that they would fit readily, if perhaps a bit uneasily, in contemporary fantasy publications, which are increasingly open to the publication of work in translation. However, I have not yet sent them out for submission or query, since I need to finish my due diligence either to secure the rights or (what I think is more likely, since Der Nister died in a Russian gulag in 1950) to document that these are in fact orphaned works. Also, the story I am now working on, "A forshpil," has some references to Yiddish theater, so I will likely need to do some archival work in YIVO's excellent collection to try and pin down those references before finalizing that translation. The other two stories stand well on their own, and will likely be ready to go out once I have sorted out the rights question. Let the hidden one not be quite so hidden any more.

Other People's Writing (aside from Der Nister)

The amount of money I spend on things like memberships (e.g., to be able to nominate for the Hugo or Nebula awards) or magazine subscriptions (to keep on top of what is going on in the world of short fiction) is directly tied to my income from story sales. So the former have expired, and on the latter, I am down to The New Yorker, Lackington's, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (and I think my F&SF subscription will expire soon). This is all to say, only slightly apologetically, that I am no longer really trying to keep on top of new short fiction as it comes out. Therefore, this section will focus on what I read within the bindings of books, checked out from one of the libraries to which I have access. Of the books I read in 2017 that were published in this year, the following are those I believe to be worthy of note (arranged in alphabetical order by author's last name, to avoid the futility of ranking):

• Lesley Nneka Arimah, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
• Elif Batuman, The Idiot
• Roxane Gay, Difficult Women
• Nick Joaquín, The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic
• Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
• George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
• Jim Shepard, The World to Come
• Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia
• Jeff VanDerMeer, Borne

Some summary comments, in lieu of full reviews.

• I had been looking forward to the publication of Arimah's first collection of short fiction since her story "Who Will Greet You at Home" first came out in the New Yorker. There is no shame in acknowledging a greater talent. The only notably weak piece in this collection was, ironically, the title story; I am so caught up in the dismal mechanics of climate change that I found its underlying world-building distractingly implausible. The rest are worth seeking out and reading again and again.
• I am honestly not sure how well Batuman's first novel would stand up to reading by anyone who did not attend college in the mid-1990s. Since I did attend college in the mid-1990s, I loved it as a Bildungsroman that rendered obsolete my own potential contribution to the genre. I am glad she was bold enough to undermine the very genre of the Bildungsroman, ending it with the sentence, "I hadn't learned anything at all." And that it is a love story, not about falling in love with a boy (there is a guy, kind of a jerk) but with language.
• Gay is not as great an essayist as she has been built up to be, and while I think she is a good novelist I recognize that there is room for debate. But if anyone makes so bold as to question her command of the short story, we will have to fight. Nearly every story of hers that I have read has been like attending a master-class on form; they are some of the best published in recent years. So finally she has a collection out. Particular favorites of mine from the collection include "I Will Follow You," "FLORIDA," "North Country," "How," and "Strange Gods."
• In retrospect, it appears that Nick Joaquín was one of the best short story writers of the 20th Century. And yet despite his having written in English, he is hardly known by anyone who is not Filipino. So perhaps we should remedy that oversight and all read this new Penguin collection of his work. I don't think he's as strong a playwright as a prose writer--"A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino" has some compelling stagecraft in the first two scenes, but lapses into melodrama and sentimentality in the third. But unlike the play, all the stories are worth reading straight through. I suspect that for readers that share a background knowledge of Catholic religion, there are points of reference that this Jewish atheist cannot identify with, but their emotional and intellectual range was evident to me even with such barriers to shared comprehension or experience.
• The irony of my inclusion of Roy's new novel is that it reinforced my suspicion that she is a better political essayist than a novelist, so unlike many critics I was in no great rush for her to "get back" to writing fiction. Two data points is not enough, but the hypothesis seems to accrete further evidence. Thus my review of the novel, even though I enjoyed and respected it, focuses more on its fundamental structural weakness than its strengths: By starting with Anjum's story, Roy has deceived several lazy critics into thinking that she is the main character. Wrong: The main character is Tilottama. The book written accordingly, through shifting points of view and montage, would have been amazing. But by framing it within the excess detail of Anjum's character development and backstory--rather than allowing those to be revealed, Cubist-style, in glimpses, as was the case with Tilo and her classmates--the overall pace of the resulting work is dragged out.
• I was neither hoping for nor expecting a novel from George Saunders, and I am glad that his contribution to that saggy genre was so experimental in nature. Here's the thing with experimental writing (speaking as a sometime practitioner): Sometimes experiments don't work. But the narration built some momentum, the writing of the Lincoln father-son relationship was sufficiently touching, to get me to overlook some early bumps and become invested in seeing the book through to the end.
• When I like Jim Shepard's short stories, it is because they defy my expectations. He is frequently included in The Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize, and through those means keeps ending up, to my surprise, included in my Meta-Anthologies. So when I saw a collection on the library shelf, I figured I ought to give it a shot, and I am glad I did. Shepard, at least in the stories of this collection has a knack for the catastrophic: its prefigurations, causes, manifestations, and consequences. "HMS Terror" alone makes it worth seeking out.
• I recommend Statovci's novel (written in Finnish, by an author of Kosovo Albanian origin, and translated into English this year) to any first-generation immigrant queer boys with abusive Balkan dads. The rest of you may find the cruel, emotionally manipulative cat who walks on two legs to be the most reassuringly familiar part of the novel.
• If my SFWA membership were still in good standing, VanDerMeer's overdetermined apocalypse is the novel that I would nominate for the Nebula.

Politics

Where to begin? The reassuring thing about the Trump presidency is that, when one points out the horrors, they are not dismissed as the ravings of a paranoid radical. However, locally, I have been shying away from any sort of organizing for the better part of the year, for reasons I have already detailed. The good news since then is that some of the more competent and committed socialists in Maine have begun to take the upper hand and initiative from the egomaniacs and slackers. But, because of the national weaknesses of the party, and the geographical distribution within the state of the people I can stand (i.e., they're mostly not near me), I am not inspired enough to throw in my lot with them once more. I made a slight step forward in how I think about political organizing, but no forward motion on attempting to put such understanding into practice.

On this uninspiring note, forward to 2018! What can we look forward to? Who knows?!

Meta-Anthology 2017

As I have explained in previous years, I make no pretense to this representing the best short stories of this year. First of all, because they are not of this year, having all first appeared in 2016. But also, since I could not possibly keep up with all short fiction publications of interest, I have culled them from four key anthologies, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Best American series, in its Short Story, Mystery Story, and Science Fiction and Fantasy instances, and the Pushcart Prize. Despite the names of those anthologies, it represents not the best of the best, but a selection of what was deemed "best" by others that I found nonetheless to be worth reading. All together, here are nineteen stories, any one of which should have gone viral. Can we hope perhaps that it is never too late?

Chad B. Anderson, "Maidencane," from The Best American Short Stories 2017. First published in Nimrod.

This was a risky story, containing practically everything novice writers are told not to do by well-meaning, aesthetically conservative elders--second person, unreliable narrator, frank depictions of bisexuality. It angers me, in a way that is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with the short fiction ecosystem at the moment, that it first appeared in a journal that "pays" with contributor's copies.

Dale Bailey, "I Was a Teenage Werewolf," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017. First appeared in Nightmare Magazine, December 2016.

Self-consciously referential, but nonetheless manages to elevate itself above its concept with more than a few insightful passages.

Dan Bevacqua, "The Human Variable," from The Best American Mystery Stories 2017. First published in The Literary Review.

The two New Englands meet somewhere in California; climate change impacts and pot cultivation. Several of my favorite things find their way into a single story, and it works.

Tom Bissell, "Creative Types," from The Pushcart Prize XLII. First appeared in The Paris Review.

Two clichés--the underachieving, barely accomplished, man-child writer, and the married couple "looking to spice things up" in the bedroom--get combined in some unexpectedly charming and--dare I say?--even sweet ways.

Lydia Conklin, "Counselor of My Heart," from The Pushcart Prize XLII. First published in The Southern Review.

I am a sucker for anything that gets digs in against Harvard. Because let's face it, lesbian slacker only realizes she loves her uptight girlfriend after killing the girlfriend's dog is a paint-by-numbers epiphany story. Acute socio-psychological observations--especially against Harvard kids--are needed to lend the composition some flecks of impressionist color.

Brendan DuBois, "The Man from Away," from The Best American Mystery Stories. First appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

Up in the north woods portions of New England--Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont--there's a genre of joke that boils down to, underestimated backwoodsman outsmarts the supposedly clever fellas from away. This is a slightly darker than usual telling of that joke, in which a Masshole gets what's coming to him. Still worth a laugh.

Brian Evenson, "Smear," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017. First appeared in Conjunctions.

There is more metaphysical terror in seven pages of Evenson's fiction than in a 700 page volume of existential phenomenology.

Lauren Groff, "The Midnight Zone," from The Best American Short Stories 2017. First published in The New Yorker, May 23, 2016.

Is there a greater fear for a parent than having something bad happen to a child? It could be, being rendered helpless in the presence of one's children.

N. K. Jemisin, "The City Born Great," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017. First appeared on Tor.com, September 28, 2016.

"We got this. Don't sleep on the city that never sleeps, son, and don't fucking bring your squamous eldritch bullshit here." Even if I can't assent to the implicit optimism of the narrator and the narrative--when it comes to New York City, I suspect the Enemy is long since past the gate, its tentacles in every Starbucks-Pinkberry-AppleStore-CondoRehab--I gloried in the rebellious b-boy survivor tenor of its wordplay.

Kyle McCarthy, "Ancient Rome," from The Best American Short Stories 2017. First published in American Short Fiction.

As someone who serves indirectly as a servant to the ultra-rich, it is interesting, and uncannily recognizable, to read a story told by a more direct sort of servant. Also interesting, and uncannily recognizable, to read a story written in the voice of a female narrator who displays a kind of intellectual arrogance that, in earlier generations, was usually coded as male.

Marc Jude Poirier, "Mentor," from The Pushcart Prize XLII. First appeared in Crazyhorse.

My stomach turned in recognition. Too many of us have stories like these; mine involves crabs.

Steven Popkes, "The Sweet Warm Earth," from The Best American Mystery Stories 2017. First appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Somehow, even though I subscribe to F&SF, this story made no impression upon me when it first appeared, to the extent that I do not even recall having read it. Perhaps I had been rendered cranky and impatient by whatever pieces it shared its issue with. A key conceit of the story can be interpreted with either a fantastic or a naturalistic spin, which accounts I suppose for the peculiar combination of the journal of its first appearance and the anthology in which it was included. Yet more important to how this story works as a story is a distinctive narratorial voice and good characterization.

Eric Puchner, "Last Day on Earth," from The Best American Short Stories 2017. First published in Granta.

Contra Tolstoy, all happy families are peculiar, but each unhappy family has some grim similarity to the others. This story is an example of the latter; telling a story about the former would be more adventurous, but risks degeneration into schmaltz.

Sujata Shekar, "The Dreams of Kings," from The Pushcart Prize XLII. First appeared in Epoch.

An appropriately grotesque story of violence and commuting.

Jim Shepard, "Telemachus," from The Best American Short Stories 2017 and The Pushcart Prize XLII. First published in Zoetrope.

Jim Shepard's geeky obsessions do not overlap at all with mine, which makes the fact that he managed to squeeze some great sentences and brilliant paragraphs out of them all the more notable to me.

William Soldan, "All Things Come Around," from The Best American Mystery Stories 2017. First appeared in Thuglit.

I drive my three-year-old to and from his daycare nearly every day, and even though on most parts of most of our drives the greatest hazard would be a wayward deer, still my heart feels like it takes a few steps up in my chest from its customary position to ride just below my throat. This story gave me the heart-directly-in-throat sensation of a child in danger and kept it there nearly from start to finish.

Peter Straub, "The Process Is a Process All Its Own," from The Best American Mystery Stories 2017. First appeared in Conjunctions.

If words like "happiness," "fulfillment," or "satisfaction" smell to you like the emissions of someone with a corpse in their mouth, then you may have more in common with a serial killer than you would like to believe.

Catherynne Valente, "The Future Is Blue," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017. First appeared in Drowned Worlds.

Bless Valente for having the chutzpah to call her readers Fuckwits. All available evidence suggests that we deserve it. (Bonus points for working in a shout-out to Becky's Diner.)

Keith Woodruff, "Elegy," from The Pushcart Prize XLII. First appeared in Wigleaf.

Flash fiction tied together by its dedication.

The Long Road to Menistaria

I wrote "A Summary of Menistarian Law, Composed for the Citizens of Olakia, in Response to Our Present Crisis by Dr. Clemons Indement," early in the year 2014. It was just published in the "Trades" issue of Lackington's (No. 16). I will hold off from talking about what inspired the story until more people have had a chance to read it. For now, I will take a page from my issue-mate Alexandra Seidel and tell the story of the story, some of the reasons why it took so long to find its way into print.

I thought the story was funny--I still do--and Unidentified Funny Objects was open to submissions. The slush readers evidently disagreed; it was rejected within 3 days. From there, things went a fairly standard route--customarily swift rejections from Strange Horizons and Clarkesworld--until I submitted it to an online publication called LORE. There it sat for eight months, until I heard through the grapevine (that is, through one of the "Codex" discussion boards, not from the publishers themselves) that LORE was shutting down.

By then, Unlikely Story, which had previously published by story "The Joy of Sects" as part of the The Journal of Unlikely Cryptography, was seeking submissions for a Journal of Unlikely Academia. Perhaps Dr. Indement came across as too likely an academic; once again, the story scored a speedy rejection.

My next attempt was to the journal Sci Phi, which bills itself as publishing stories that highlight the philosophical dimensions of science fiction. Since that seemed to describe this story even more than most of my stories, I submitted it. It was only after the submission that it became evident to me that the journal aligns itself with the revanchist right wing of the genre, but given the journal's insistence that they wanted stories from all points of view, I kept up my wager.

The short version of that part of the story is that the editor-in-chief seemed to like the story, but it never got published. First, after six months with the story in the queue, he suggested that I "Make it an essay exploring the different national law. Sort of like you have done. Give me a couple of days i'll make some suggestions if you like, if you don't already get what I meant. Upside, it would run a lot sooner." I replied, "I think I'll wait for your suggestions. My concern is that, if I'd wanted to write an essay arguing for a particular point of view, I'd have done so, and most likely would have posted it on my blog. The benefit of a story is that it can be read various ways, depending on the philosophical and political lenses the reader brings to it. But I'll keep an open mind, and look forward to your suggestions."

Three months later, with no editorial suggestions forthcoming, I received a mass e-mail (sent, I believe, to everyone in the Sci Phi slush pile) indicating that they were going to move to a royalties-only model for paying writers--with no guaranteed minimum. To which I replied politely, "I would like to withdraw my story. Good luck with your endeavors."

After that, Dr. Indement's reflections upon Menistarian law got another swift rejection from a venerable digest--Asimov's this time--and then I tried my luck with a short-lived literary magazine, now "on hiatus," that expressed openness both to experimental work and to multiple submissions. Before their current hiatus, they at least had the decency to reject all my stories.

Then a slow rejection from a journal that reads blind, and a quick one from F&SF. I submitted it to a couple of new journals to which I thought it was a match, illusions of which I was swiftly disabused. I even rolled the dice on Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, a publication that is usually not my style, after reading a few stories by authors whose work I like and respect in there. By the end of 2016, I was beginning to despair that this peculiar bit of literature would ever meet the public eye.

Then in March of this year, Lackington's, a publication I had read with pleasure, and which I had tried and failed to crack into with other stories on other themes, announced the "Trades" theme for No. 16. Having taken a few licks, I did ask, "If a story has more 'trades' in the sense of exchanges than in the sense of métiers, worth a shot or no?" Ranylt Rachildis gave an encouraging response; though perhaps I need not have even asked. After all, if there is anything about which Dr. Indement is forthright in his narration, it is the means by which the various figures whose misadventures he recounts have secured their daily bread, regardless of what a reader may think of the legitimacy of their various occupations.

Usually when writers give these sorts of embarrassing, behind-the-scenes details of how hard it can be to find a place for a story, the intention is to send some rousing message of inspiration to other would-be writers: "Don't give up! You never know!" I actually think art and literature can benefit, however, from well-timed forfeitures and acts of despair. Some stories merit patience and reward it for both writer and reader, though the monetary rewards are almost never sufficient to the labor entailed. I think Dr. Indement's essay, to which I have given fictional existence, has found an appropriate site for its public manifestation. I encourage you to subscribe to Lackington's, and read it.

Cognitive Dissonance in the Shadow of Bolshevism

A problem of the far left, at least in Anglophone countries, seems to be that we believe our major problem to be "the problem of organization." That "the problem of organization" is posed as such, as if it were a singular problem rather than a carrying case for a great number of other, potentially knottier problems, is a symptom of the fact that, 100 years on, we remain in the shadow of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, or more precisely, of a given set of received myths about that historical event. The fact that I even called it "the Bolshevik Revolution," rather than "the Russian Revolution" or "the partially successful Russian-centered episode in the mostly failed World Revolution that concluded and followed the first World War" is in turn indicative of the nature of the received myth--the notion that the relative success of the revolutionary upheaval in Russia can be attributed to specific features of a political party formation known as the Bolsheviks. And from there, that there is a necessary concordance between one's attitude toward events in Russia at that time and one's approach to political organization today. Nor is the recognition of the mythical nature of this story sufficient inoculation against its effects; for evidence of this, one need only peruse prior entries of my own blog. So long as we believe our political disagreements about the type of society to be created and how to go about creating it to be disagreements about the type of political organization that is necessary for the creation of said society, the more we evade the underlying political disagreements and hamper the building of effective organizations.

The thoughts in the previous paragraph are the consequence, not a summary, of those contained in this Twitter thread I wrote about an article entitled "The sociology of Leninist organizations". Where the author of the article, Scott Jay, was coming from is indicated by his formerly having been a member of the U.S. International Socialist Organization, and the article having been published on a British-centered website that serves as a kind of multi-tendency hub for "left communists." (A phrase that I put in quotes because, for readers not steeped in the far left, it would be mysterious. For the moment, I can recommend the Wikipedia article about this political tendency as being both accurate and comprehensive, a good starting point.) Jay's article suffers both from overgeneralizing specific features of the U.S. ISO and its former comrades in the British Socialist Workers Party to "Leninists" at large, and from overlocalizing sharply observed weakness of left political organization to nominal Leninists. Jay's article is valuable more for these observations than for its attempts at analysis.

For analysis, Jay leans appropriately but too heavily on findings from the early days of social psychology and organizational sociology. Ignoring these disciplines, as most leftists do to their peril, is as if Marx had dismissed all of political economy as "bourgeois." Generalizing directly from their findings, as Jay does, is as if Marx had written Capital not as a critique of political economy, but as a pastiche of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Neither is sufficient. The latter is particularly odd, however, inasmuch as some psychologists have begun to recognize the ways in which their discipline is prone to critique. This brief notice from an APA publication summarizes a study which takes some keystone findings of the discipline to task for being too dependent upon populations of human subjects which they characterize as being from "Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD)" societies. One can and probably should quibble with elements of the acronym--"democratic" clearly being taken as synonymous with constitutional, representational systems of government, which are hardly democratic in essence, and "Western" being a synecdoche for "white". As a critique of the synchronic overrepresentation of privileged social elements in these studies, it is indisputable. In point of fact it does not go far enough, since it does not take account of historical development.

Consider the concept of "cognitive dissonance," upon which Jay's account leans so heavily. Mainstream descriptions of the phenomenon tend to localize it to fringe elements, such as the UFO cult described by Festinger. Jay's application of it to "Leninist" organizations tacitly accepts the marginalization of anti-capitalist ideology. Yet it is precisely the ways in which we are raised in capitalist society to regard its fundamental preconditions as natural that help to normalize the methods used for resolution of cognitive dissonance, both at the margins and the core. Marx's account, in the first chapter of Capital of the "fetishism of the commodity" is an attempt to induce cognitive dissonance by showing how it is by no means obvious that a bushel of wheat, a heap of cotton cloth, and a quantity of human labor-power should all be "equal" to one another, and to a certain amount of money. He does this in part by historicizing, pointing to how Aristotle regarded the early manifestations of a money economy as "unnatural." Aristotle in turn is an example of how earlier societies both created and addressed different types of cognitive dissonance: Man is a "rational, political animal," so only those regarded by the polis as being part of it can be rational, and thus men. Slaves are not human, but "talking tools." Is the resolution of cognitive dissonance through rationalization a "natural" phenomenon of the human animal, as Festinger argues and Jay follows? Inasmuch as it can be observed in a variety of human societies, of different levels of technical development and a variety of cultural backgrounds, probably so. But with both the objects and the mechanisms of rationalization varying so much, we do not have enough data to be able to pin down the natural core. The objects and methods for resolution of cognitive dissonance are in all cases conditioned by the dominant ideas of society, that is, the ideas of its dominant class.

It would seem then that the aim of a revolutionary organization would be the repeated induction of cognitive dissonance, the disruption of received ideas of how things work. The history of Marxist organizations at large provides few examples of such revolutionary organizations, nor is this limited to those that have called themselves "Leninist". Nor does Jay's essay provide a promising counter-model. Throughout he counterposes to organizations built upon recruitment to shared ideas the notion of organizations based in working-class struggles for concrete needs. I can agree with him about the need for the latter, without regarding it as a panacea. Consider, for example, this paragraph:

An organization with a base in workplaces and neighborhoods would be far less likely to split over the bruised egos of the leadership, because splitting would result in a loss of organized power. Instead, for many, splitting is an improvement over hum-drum, undemocratic party life and the only way to pursue an alternative political direction.

What he seems to have lost sight of, perhaps because of the fact that he is based in the United States, is that "organized power" resting on "a base in workplaces and neighborhoods" was the substance of historical Social Democracy and Stalinism. It is easy to lose sight of that, because in the U.S., all left organizations are sects, including social democrats and Stalinists--yes, including the DSA and their "massive" membership that represents one-hundredth of one percent of the U.S. population. "Why should I join your Spartakusbund when the SPD is a power throughout the nation?" "The CPSU is the vanguard of the proletariat, I don't want to hear any bullshit from that traitor Trotsky!" Organized power has been the aim and rationale of time-serving bureaucrats throughout the history of the workers' movement.

The disorganization of power, the disruption of what power would have us take for granted, the de-naturalization of the given social order--this would require not merely a different structure of organization, but a different conception of politics.

Theories of Ideology and Sciences of Belief Systems

Around the time that I left the SPUSA, I conceived a non-fiction writing project which I think I will be laying aside. Tentatively entitled "The American Ideology," the aim would have been to try to identify a set of ideological presuppositions that would be both peculiar to citizens of the United States and nearly universal among them. I still think it would be a worthwhile project, but not necessarily the best use of my individual efforts.

Theories of ideology play approximately the role in Marxism that epicycles did in Ptolemaic accounts of the solar system. While important, foundational hints were provided were provided in Marx's work--the first chapter of Capital on commodity fetishism, the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and of course The German Ideology, left to the gnawing criticism of the mice and published posthumously--it was never his top priority. Nor should it have been. As of his death, working-class political parties had been formed in all the countries in which advanced capitalism had taken hold (including Britain and even the United States), and these parties were growing and advancing in their theoretical and practical comprehension of capital. The proletarian revolution was on the march. Ideology--the ruling class's mechanisms of deception and self-deception--would no doubt be overcome. The future was bright.

The concept of ideology takes on an importance to Marxist thinkers in direct proportion to the apparent distance of the proletariat from fulfillment of its imputed historic role. Lenin wrote "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism" at a moment when he thought he would not live to see a revolution. Gramsci's notebooks were written in a Fascist prison. Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" functions as a postmortem of the 1968 French uprising and his own party's dubious role in bringing about its defeat. Theories of ideology derive sophistication from the depths of their authors' despair.

Theories of ideology are important and necessary if one aims through politics to hold onto a long-term hope for victory, and to trace a reasonable-seeming path from defeat to victory. The important phase here is "long term." If there is no long term, or at least no reliable promise of it, then theories of ideology no longer serve a purpose for political tactics. It may be nice to understand why people believe what they believe, and how it feels to believe the things they do, even if those beliefs are ultimately self-destructive--a radical extension of empathy--but unless one has a path forward for shifting those people from false consciousness to true, that knowledge is of limited utility. In a short-term perspective, it more useful to be able to assess whether, on the basis of a grouping's current set of beliefs, it is possible for them to be inspired to take beneficial action. Such a judgment may well be entirely independent of one's judgment of the truth value of those beliefs.

So I am setting aside the "American Ideology" project. One of the more useful things to come of it, however, was reading Towards a Science of Belief Systems by Edmund Griffiths. I say this even though I consider the book itself to be flawed, precisely insofar as the author holds to a notion of the scientificity of a certain form of Marxism. This blog post will not be comprehensive critical analysis of the book. But I will highlight some of what I regard as its strengths and weaknesses.

A strength is his definition of "belief systems": "a set of propositions held to be true, to which some emotional charge (affect) is attached and which gives more or less cogent expression to a general sense of how the world is." (§3) But this in turn reveals a weakness, namely his insistence upon the phrase "belief systems" in lieu of "ideology." For example, he writes, "Among Marxist writers, meanwhile, ’ideology’ is correctly used in a sense that is both broader and narrower than ‘belief system’: broader because it also includes, for instance, the arts, and narrower because it refers only to phenomena that are seen determined in some way by a mode of production." (§3) Both the narrowness and broadness that Griffiths imputes to "ideology" as compared "belief systems" seem dubious to me. The broadness because, by emphasizing the propositional content of belief systems, it downplays the importance of phenomena, such as the artistic works, from which it may be difficult to extrapolate a belief system's propositional content, but which may be essential for decoding its affective meaning for believers. And the narrowness because, if Marxism is taken seriously as a science, then in the final analysis every phenomenon is ultimately "determined in some way by a mode of production."

In general, Griffiths seems motivated by a kind of anxiety about the scientificity of Marxism. By electing the term "belief systems" he wishes to hold open the possibility of participation in his proposed new science by people who do not accept Marxism, and thus might be repelled by the term "ideology" and its associations. Yet he himself holds to the truth of a certain kind of Marxism, and devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 5) to articulating the possible relationships between "belief systems and the materialist conception of history."

(A secondary problem here is that "materialist conception of history" ought not to be treated as singular, or as identical with Marxism. The latter has already been shown by Plekhanov in his Development of the Monist View of History, which shows how Marxism borrows from and extends insights from earlier forms of historical materialism. That there can be other materialist conceptions of history is central to my emerging world view, i.e. one that would dispense with the dualism between "man" and "nature" implicit both in Marx and in his putatively "monist" predecessors, as can be found for example in this passage from "The Critique of the Gotha Program": "Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. the above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor.")

From his definition, Griffiths identifies two topics of analysis that are essential to analysis of belief systems. One would be the affective dimension, and to this his book contributes far less than might be hoped. The other is the propositional content and how it hangs together through a combination of explicit and implicit beliefs. This hanging together is described through what he terms "descriptive logic," that is, analysis of how believers actually reason, rather than an attempt to impose prescriptive, formal logic onto the propositions of a belief system. The power of this methodology can be seen precisely in that it can be applied to Griffiths himself.

Let us take, for example, a statement of Griffiths that I find factually false, since these can often serve as entry-points to the implicit reasoning of a belief system:

"It may seem odd that no well-developed science of belief systems has yet to be put forward within Marxism, and that the most thoughtful and interesting Marxist writers have not typically devoted a great deal of their attention to belief systems – certainly much less than they have given, say, to the arts. There are book-length studies of artistic and aesthetic questions by such prominent Marxists as Plekhanov, Lukács, and Trotsky; and a number of brilliant Marxist thinkers have done their best work precisely on the arts (Caudwell, Max Raphael). Belief systems have not been so favoured. There is Kautsky’s stimulating book on early Christianity, there is some outstanding work by Marxist historians and other scholars (Rodinson, Christopher Hill, Peter Worsley)... but, in general, Marxism’s knowledge of aesthetics and the arts is considerably in advance of its grasp of belief systems." (§108)

I have already given a brief criticism of Griffiths' differentiation of "aesthetics and the arts" from "belief systems," but the factual errors of this passage go deeper. At best it represents an incomplete bibliography, at worst a blind-spot: One can use the author names given to reconstruct some of what a fuller bibliography of Marxist theories of belief systems would include. For example, Plekhanov’s Monist View contains much material in this vein; his oeuvre has been incompletely translated into English, but Griffiths’ fluency in Russian denies him this excuse. Lukács’ work includes not only History and Class Consciousness, but also Eclipse of Reason. From Trotsky: The Stalin School of Falsification, Their Morals and Ours, and In Defense of Marxism are all must-reads for examples of reconstructions of the belief systems of others and their articulation to class interests. Then there are the missing names (Gramsci being the most glaring omission).

A bit of "descriptive logic" goes a long way in reconstructing Griffiths’ apparent blind-spot. In the following reconstruction, I follow Griffiths' convention of italicizing those propositions which are directly quoted from the work of the believer, leaving the implicit steps in the reasoning process in plain text:

1. Marxism is true.
2. If Marxism were true, then we would be on the way to the proletarian overthrow of capitalism and creation of communism.
3. We appear to not be on such a path.
4. In the history of Marxism, apparent failures of the proletariat to fulfill its historic mission have been explained with reference to theories of ideology, which claim to account scientifically for belief systems.
5. None of those theories of ideology accounts well for the present world political situation.
6. Thus a well-developed science of belief systems has yet to be put forward within Marxism.

I would thus argue that Griffiths succeeds partially in his aim, in developing a theory of ideology (though he does not call it that) whose power is not dependent upon agreement with the author's Marxism, and that this power is demonstrated precisely insofar as the methodological insights of descriptive logic can be applied critically to Griffiths himself. Extension of this study can include the further elaboration (and formalization) of descriptive logic, but would also need to attend to the comparatively weaker portion of Griffiths' work, the study of affect. As with his gloss on Marxist theories of ideology, there are bibliographical gaps that provide a hint as to directions for future research. For example, there is a substantial Enlightenment and proto-Enlightenment literature on the relationship between reason and affect. Spinoza and Rousseau stand out to me as its pinnacles of achievement. Comparing this literature with the literature of modern experimental psychology to see how well it has held up would be a worthwhile endeavor for someone who wished to study the affective nature of belief systems (or ideologies--I am convinced that the terminological distinction is largely a matter of taste.)

There is far more of value to be found, in embryo, in Griffiths' slim little book, and I may return to my notes on it for other entries. But I would argue that, at this moment, the study of ideologies has more ethical and aesthetic import than political significance. And so for the time being, I hope to be able to turn such of my energies as are available for writing away from the essayistic and back toward the fictional.

Emancipatory Biopolitics

I have for some time (at minimum since November of last year) been saying that Marxism is past the point of provability, and thus no longer salvageable as an exemplar of "scientific socialism." In more short-hand forms I have taken to referring to myself as "post-Marxist," dissatisfied with that term, since it encompasses a wide range of political and philosophical manifestations, more than a few of which I dislike. What I have not had time to do, until now, is try to articulate what aspects of the Marxian edifice retain some plausible correspondence to the facts, and which have to be jettisoned as corollaries to negated premises. After I left the SPUSA last month, I have had time, and my thoughts have begun to cohere, for the first time in years, into something resembling a coherent world view. This post represents my first attempt to articulate that world view. Its weaknesses are, I hope, in the nature of a first draft.

There have, within movements purporting to be Marxist, been two distinguishable visions of the communist aim. One can find traces of both in the first section of the Gotha Program. One is the notion that workers get more and more, until the workers have it all. This Marx stigmatizes as Lasallean, even as he concedes that, with some modifications, it describes a necessary but temporary stage. The second is that the workers cease to be workers as distinct from society at large, that the self-emancipation of the proletariat corresponds to its self-abolition as a class. The contradiction, insofar as it is Marx's own contradiction, is a contradiction in the Hegelian sense, one that resolves itself through its own immanent development. More concretely, Marx argued that the partial (trade union and legislative) struggles waged by the working class to lessen its exploitation at the expense of capitalist profit, while they would not end that exploitation, would enable the working class to develop the collective confidence and self-concept necessary to take over from the capitalists--and thus to put itself out of existence. One finds the two visions in different proportions in different areas of Marx's work--more of the aggrandization of the proletariat in "Value, Price, and Profit," more of its self-abolition in the "Communist Manifesto"--but both are there.

Varying admixtures are found in later Marxist writers as well. For example, Trotsky articulates the former vision when he writes (in his 1939 essay "Marxism in Our Time," that is, on the eve of the bloodiest war in history) that "The class struggle is nothing else than the struggle for surplus-product." Its traces are all over the Transitional Program as well. The notion that the class struggle is "nothing else" than the struggle over surplus-product does not mesh well with Marx's dictum from the Manifesto that "every class struggle is a political struggle." The point is not to pick on Trotsky: He was intelligent and well-read, and quite familiar with self-abolition as an aim of the proletarian class struggle. For example, it figures in the arguments of his book on Literature and Revolution. That the economistic notion of the class struggle as the struggle for the surplus figures so strongly in his more overtly political writings may help account for the political weaknesses of subsequent organizations claiming to be Trotskyist, but does not necessarily cast doubt on Trotsky's quality as an interpreter of Marx. Certainly not in comparison to some of the alternatives.

How do these two visions fare in the face of climate crisis, in which Marxism's "fundamental positive hypothesis has been invalidated, not as a moment of a self-devouring dialectic of negativity but as an inexorable consequence of physical processes triggered by humanity but escaping its control"? Neither fares well. For the moment, we need to examine each in turn before comparing their bruises and wounds.

"The struggle over the surplus-product" can be summarized more concisely in the slogan of someone who was never a Marxist, the American trade unionist Samuel Gompers: "More." One hesitates, at a moment when the inequality of wealth and income in the U.S. is the greatest it has been in nearly a century, to abjure the need for workers to demand more. Most such struggles, in fact, can and must be joined without hesitation. To fight for a shortening of the working day and working week, for more leisure and freedom, is a fight to lessen subordination to capitalist production and its destructive outcomes. To fight for better health and safety on the job is to insist that some things have value that cannot be reduced to the universal equivalent of money. To decouple the basic preconditions of social life--health, food, water, shelter, education--from employment and the wage is essential.

But what of fights for higher wages? At the basic level, among the layers of the working class who now are not paid enough to meet their basic needs (on a global scale--the majority), this is an urgent demand. But if posed more generally, we must ask, to what end? What does more money get us? Greater claim to a mass of commodities, most of which meet no need at all, but whose production serves to accelerate our social death.

Or fights for more jobs? We must ask: Doing what? Creating what? And most importantly at the moment, creating what waste products?

The struggle over the surplus-product is a struggle over the conditions of our hastened collective demise. A political struggle would be a struggle for human survival, against heedless destruction, and thus, against the very conditions for the existence of the surplus-product.

Does this mean that we forego the struggle for "more" entirely, in favor of a direct struggle for proletarian self-abolition? This would not be an unprecedented conclusion, and has been articulated repeatedly by representatives of the "communization" current. Where I would differ from most representatives of such thinking is that they present the unilateral preference for self-abolition as compared to economic struggles as belonging to Marx; I consider this a misreading, but such philological questions pale in comparison to magnitude of the tasks we now face, and are thus tangential. A more important difference, that makes it impossible for me to embrace the notion of immediate communization that might, somehow, outrun the coming decline of capitalist rule is that this vision underrates the necessity of class-consciousness as a precondition to class self-abolition. (I've linked to a post from 2013 even though I now regard that post to have been too flippant in its approach to the underlying question. I still hold to the conclusion, if not to the style of argument.) Based on tracking atmospheric carbon concentration, the probable links of current weather phenomena to climate change, and some of the second-order effects in the literature, I estimate we have perhaps twenty more years until climate effects begin to erode the social wealth created in the twentieth century. If the preconditions for communism are both material and within mass consciousness (with mass consciousness being understood not as an ideal phenomenon, but as something conditioned by and forming part of the material conditions), then those preconditions are slipping away rather than strengthening.

Note that I am not postulating an eternity of capitalism. That is frankly an impossibility. With the drive to accumulate being so fundamental to capital as a social phenomenon, it is incompatible with human survival over the long term. Either we all die, or human self-preservation intervenes to replace capitalism not with communism, but with some form of as yet unheralded class society (because there will be scarcity, and with scarcity, "to each according to their needs" is impossible).

There is thus no longer a singular class struggle (if there ever was), but struggles on two fronts. The first, indispensable struggle--because without it the second struggle is impossible--is the struggle for human survival. It is the struggle against anything that threatens to accelerate climate transformation to a point where adaptation and survival are rendered impossible. The second struggle is over the shape of the new society that emerges among surviving humanity. It is the struggle to preserve and expand human freedom despite the damage we have done to ourselves, to defend every gain made by oppressed people in spite of capitalist rule and to ensure that those who consigned us to such straitened circumstances are not allowed to set terms for their own continued dominance.

The ugly not-quite-neologism I have come up with for this double struggle is "emancipatory biopolitics". (A quick Google search tells me that over the last 10 years, a few people who write about people like Foucault, Negri, and Agamben have used the phrase. Whether it is used in precisely the same sense as I intend, I do not know, nor do I particularly care at the moment.) The important point to make is that this struggle is not (just) a class struggle. It opens up a struggle within the ranks of what Marxism would term the working class. A pipeline welder, and a nurse volunteering as a medic in a water protectors' encampment, are both workers in a sense that Marx and most Marxists would understand. But they have taken opposite sides in the fundamental struggle for survival. It is only by regarding the former as a complete dupe of the capitalists that one can excuse his actions--and I have met enough workers who do destructive jobs to know that they are not mere dupes, that they are thinking beings as capable of rationalizing their actions as I am capable of rationalizing mine. And lest you decide that I have conveniently chosen an extreme case, consider more such dyads: A wall-builder, and a migrant attempting to climb a wall. A coal truck driver, and a child (maybe even his own) suffering asthma. There are two sides. One can change sides in this struggle--we must try to get more people to change sides--but ultimately one must take sides.

This is because the site of the struggle is not production, which under capitalism is necessarily capitalist production, that is, production for profit. It is a struggle over (social) reproduction, that is, the ways in which human beings collectively create the social conditions and material necessities for one generation to replace another. To the extent that capitalist production has either crowded out or taken parasitic control over other modes of social reproduction, it has become ever more the production of waste products (CO2 and leaked methane, of course, but also pollution in air, land and water, food waste, and human beings consigned to being treated as waste). The struggle against capitalist production over the conditions of social reproduction is the struggle over how much shit we will allow capital to choke us with.

I do not anticipate founding a "Party for Emancipatory Biopolitics." Not only is the phrase a barbarism, but the formation of a party would be beside the point. We have to ask ourselves, what type of knowledge, and what type of power, do we need to organize and build, in order to wage the double fight for survival and freedom? With no false modesty, I can honestly say that the point is not to have read Marx, Camatte, Foucault, or Negri. Such erudition pales in comparison with knowing where the water-treatment plants are, when the oil trains are scheduled to pass through town, the production and storage of food, or how to find and use stockpiled weaponry. For a negative example, of what can go wrong when the the forces of death are the ones who know and act on such matters, consider Jamie Allinson's account of ISIS in his essay "Disaster Islamism". But also comparatively unimportant (though sometimes tactically necessary) is knowledge of the names and personalities of local elected officials or the mechanisms of constitutional government. The types of knowledge created and mobilized by a party are at best of secondary importance. A "collective" instead, perhaps?

I make no strong claim to originality in this. My path to this outlook may be rare or unique, but the outlook itself is, I hope, not. Nor are the names especially important, either. But since my skills are primarily as a reader and a writer, let me end this on a comparatively optimistic note. Whatever the phrase "Collective for Emancipatory Biopolitics" lacks for stirring euphony, perhaps can be compensated for with a summary slogan: "Long live life! Death to death!"

Why I Am Resigning from the Socialist Party USA

Is there any genre of writing more tiresome than the leftist letter of resignation? The protagonist and narrator is always more sinned against than sinning, a paragon of good judgment mired in others' groupthink, and world-historical import of the decisive conflicts is inflated to a degree inversely proportional to the actual stakes of the disagreements. This will not be such a document. I almost decided not to write this, but since I did announce my decision to first join four years ago on this blog, and have defended once or twice since then even when I adjusted my own political outlook from that which first led me to join, it seemed to me appropriate to register my departure. That way, any regular readers--if I have any of those--might not be left with out-of-date impressions of my affiliations.

The fact of the matter is that the decision as to whether or not to renew my membership has been an annual agony. It has not helped matters that the time for me to decide whether or not to renew always, until this year, seemed to coincide with what one comrade whom I like has referred to as "the annual spring schism." The word "schism" implies more in the way of substantive political differences, though, than is appropriate. The general contours of these fights, played out primarily over social media, create an impression of a more or less homogeneous ideological old guard that is comfortable with the party as it is, and more heterogeneous groupings of relatively new members who sense that it is or must be changing. But that is an oversimplification. Close examination of the lines of demarcation usually reveal them to be fractally intertwined, with enclaves and exclaves embedded into one another.

In three prior years, I renewed either because of the combat--it seemed to reveal that things were broadly moving in what I considered the right direction--or in spite of it, because of promising developments on the local level. Indeed the comforting myth repeated by party leaders of longer standing is that the people who get most embroiled in the online fights are least involved in building the party on the ground, and that one should focus on working in one's local area. This year, for precisely this reason, I did not hesitate to renew: There seemed to be no "spring schism" (in fact, there is, but delayed), and things seemed to be going well for socialists here in Maine.

Well, they're not going that well in Maine. And if any local journalists have clicked looking for dish about local activists, sorry, you're not going to find that here. What I will say is that, in the Southern Maine local at least, the things I found repeatedly troubling at the national level about the culture of the SPUSA have been faithfully replicated: An aversion to political discussion and debate, and an emphasis on patching things up interpersonally (or scapegoating individuals when that proved impossible) in lieu of attempting to resolve political disagreements through a combination of argument and action. The new Eastern Maine local, which is less stagnant, seems not quite as uniformly prone to these faults, but there's a real danger of them succumbing to it as well. The notion that there was, in the party, a clear differentiation between online kibitzers and on-the-ground organizers, or that local efforts are an antidote to national malaise, has now become clear to me as what I referred to it above--a comforting myth. Knowing that it is a myth deprives it of all comfort. And lacking any apparent contradiction between what I find banal about the local party and moribund about the national one, there appears to me no available lever for change. At least not internally.

In my initial post announcing my decision to join the SPUSA, I referred to it, tentatively, as appearing "flexible." I recognize now that, coming from a political background of organizations that mistook rigidity for durability, what I mistook in the SPUSA for flexibility was mere softness. The organization is no more flexible than a marshmallow. Subject to pressure, it will nonetheless retain and return to its pre-existing shape. Rigid organizations grow, if they grow, by scaffolding themselves a piece at a time. Marshmallows grow, if they grow, through the amorphous accretion of fluff. In a tumultuous political situation, rigid organizations will shatter; if a marshmallow survives, it does so only by way of being crushed underfoot rather than set ablaze.

And so for the good of my mental health and family life, I will no longer allow myself to be fruitlessly exasperated. There are, within the SPUSA, people who strike me as being quite serious about the need for revolutionary transformation of society. Those I am sure I will see around in other contexts. For those for whom it functions as an ego-boost, a pink-shaded version of Kiwanis, or a secularized church, we're probably mutually better off parting ways.

Aphorisms toward a History of American Marxism

A materialist history of ideas is not an oxymoron: It would be a history of the institutions that shape and propagate the ideas in question.

A visible difference between the histories of European and (U.S.) American Marxism: The predominant institutions to shape and propagate the former have been political parties, trade unions, and in moments of rebellion against the bureaucratization of the first two, collectives. The predominant institutions of the latter have been the academic circle, the sect, and the cult.

This difference is conditioned in part by the differences in mainstream political and civic life between the two continents. U.S. political parties are not membership organizations with defined programs. They are not the means of ideological mobilization, but the ends. A rigid caste delimitation is maintained between the ideologist and the ideologized, so ideas are formed in more delimited elite circles: the think tank, the secret society, the religious denomination.

There have thus been two dominant trends in attempts to Americanize Marxism. One is to ape the methods of elite political formation--to attempt to turn the academic circle into the think tank; the cult into a secularized secret society; to capture the ballot line. The results are Marxisms unrecognizable as such when measured by the notions of a European orthodoxy. The other has been to attempt to Europeanize American political culture: to build a mass political party as such (the Socialist Labor Party and Socialist Party of the 1900s and 1910s; the pre-Popular Front Communist Party; arguably, the Black Panther Party as well); to revolutionize the trade union (first as tragedy: the IWW; then as farce: the more syndicalist formations within American Trotskyism); or to re-create an ideological collective on a European model (the Johnson-Forrest Tendency in the 1950s; the Sojourner Truth Organization and various Maoist formations in the 1970s). State repression has played an inarguable role in the decline of these attempts, especially of the first two types, but this does not negate the fact that all such attempts have degenerated into the forms proper to American Marxism: the circle, the sect, or the cult.

Horse Dances and Goat Songs

I have been reading Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt, in the newest version put out by University of Nebraska Press. I am glad to have encountered this text, an essential reference in any discussion of the history and spiritual practices of North American native peoples, in such a complete critical edition, as it helps clarify even to a casual reader which aspects of the text originate faithfully from the visions of Lakota warrior and medicine man Black Elk, and which are intrusions of Neihardt's authorial voice. Neihardt, a poet and journalist, first met Black Elk in 1931. It would not be fair to call Neihardt "a man of his time," since in terms of his respect for the intelligence and dignity of Native American peoples, he was far in advance of nearly all white men of his day. Yet there are traces in Neihardt's prose of a condescension, and a casual acceptance of the race "science" of the pre-World War II Euro-American intellectual atmosphere, that sit poorly with this modern reader.

This became particularly clear for me in Appendix 5, which reproduces a column that Neihardt wrote for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch describing his first encounter with Black Elk. In the very first sentence, he speaks of "a contemporary antiquity that, in certain cultural respects, may be described as pre-Homeric." What he means by "pre-Homeric" is spelled out, in embarrassing detail, at the end of the column's lengthy concluding paragraph.

Black Elk's "visions, as set forth in careful detail for this writer, rank easily in beauty and profundity of significance with the supreme things in the rich literature of the Aryan peoples. [sic] ... Unfortunately, for us white people, literature, in our sense, never developed among Black Elk's people. His culture never passed the evolutionary stage of the dance ritual and accordingly the great vision can be adequately expressed only in the dance ceremony, with its accompanying song. One portion of the vision alone--the horse dance, which is poetry of a sublime order--would require some five or six hours to produce.... Black Elk is truly a great poet; and if ever our world shall be privileged to see and understand his masterpiece, the horse dance--as this writer hopes it may--there will be few to question the indubitable truth of this statement."

The reference to "evolution" betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of culture, and the contrasting of dance ritual to "literature, in our sense" indicates a convenient forgetting of the facts of the Homeric and post-Homeric antecedents of that literature. Unlike Homer--who, if he existed, may never have scratched so much as a character into the earth--Black Elk was capable of writing, albeit only in Lakota. And following the Homeric epochs, the next great Hellenic creative outburst, to which "we" trace what is called literature, was what is now called "tragedy." That word in most European languages shares a common ancestor with the modern Greek word τραγούδι, meaning "song." And what did that ancestral word mean in ancient Attic dialect? "Goat." Ancient Athenian men wrapped themselves in goat skins to sing and dance in groups, and from that we now have the written words of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Together with their less reputable cousin comedy, these goat-songs came to be known as drama, which by the time Neihardt was writing had re-accommodated itself to song and dance in the form of musical theater, both on stage and in a new sort of painted vision of shadow and light called "film." A big hit on Broadway that year was a show called The Band Wagon which featured a song entitled "Dancing in the Dark" that became a hit for Bing Crosby. Walking around St. Louis, Neihardt might have heard a passerby whistling the tune.

The emergence of boundaries between various modes of expression is something against which artists and visionaries have rebelled nearly everywhere and every time such boundaries have been around to rebel against. While it can fairly be stated that genre boundaries tend to be an emergent property of "civilization" (for which read, class-divided societies) the precise mapping of those boundaries varied not only over time, as an evolutionary perspective would have it, but with the overdetermined ideological structures developed by dominant classes to legitimate their rule. For example: Christian clerics embraced the liturgical use of instrumental music as a point of differentiation from both Judaism and Islam, with their austere emphases on the unadorned masculine voice. With the lyrics and order of, say, a mass prescribed and known to all, the means of expressing devotion and passion in Western European music shifted from the word to the ensemble of voice and instrumentation, from the melodic line to the harmonic combination. From this decision to J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor there is not a straight line, but a series of breaks, discontinuities, and alternate pathways. Nor was the victory of the ensemble over the soloist, the composer over the librettist, ever final. From Mozart's collaboration with Schikaneder, through Beethoven's Ode to Joy, Wagner's dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk, to Schoenberg's Gurrelieder or Ned Rorem's simple settings of poems by the likes of Wallace Stevens, the musician longs to be reunited with the poet. This longing is at least partially understood by Neihardt himself, in that he recognizes Black Elk as one of his own, a poet.

As I hope to have shown with my random walk through the cultural leavings of what is called the West, both high and low, "literature, in our sense" has never been as far away from the horse-dance and the goat-song and Neihardt seems to have been taught. Nor is Black Elk's vision, and its description as relayed through Neihardt, far from what might have been recognizable as holy to Homer, or Sophocles, or the prophet Ezekiel. Just as classical sculpture has literally been whitened, by erosion of once vibrantly painted surfaces down to a durable marble base, the literature of the ancients has been metaphorically whitened, through the construction of dubious genealogies that retroactively project the modern myth of the West onto cultural artifacts that should amaze through their strangeness and multiplicity. It is possible to read Black Elk through Homer. It may now be more necessary to read Homer through Black Elk.

Asymmetry

The fiction blog Asymmetry has been at it for a couple of months, long enough that their aesthetic is coming clear. Today, they published a piece of psychological horror, of flash fiction length, entitled "Cynthia". I wrote it. But to get a sense of what they are up to, I would recommend reading the early stories contributed by editor Nathan Kamal, which are some of the more interesting pieces they have put out, and the ones that convinced me that this new endeavor would be a good spot for my story.

Any writers reading this who have a piece that sits uncomfortable at an interstitial point between genres ought to check them out, and submit work to them. Anyone who likes to read that sort of story, keep track of this venture and see what it puts out.

Meta-Anthology 2016

Here I go again. This features short stories that appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, Best American Mystery Stories 2016, 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI, and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. Because of the lag built into the editorial processes of those volumes, the stories in question were first published in the year 2015. I make no pretense of this comprising the best stories of that year. Just the stories that best exemplify what "anthologies" (from the Greek άνθος, "the blossom of a flower," or metaphorically, the highest or best; and λόγος, "word") ought to be about.

Megan Abbott, "The Little Men," from Best American Mystery Stories 2016. First appeared in Bibliomysteries.

To be quite honest I am not entirely sure what happened in this story. The narrative so effectively evoked the main character's increasing paranoia that it collapses the line between the real and the imagined, leaving the reader with the unmistakable smell of gas and the indisputable fact of death.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, "Apollo," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in The New Yorker, April 13, 2015.

There is more going on beneath the surface of this eleven page story than on the surface of most novels. Bonus points for any reader who can pinpoint the ways the narrator of this story subtly undermines his own contentions and beliefs.

Steve Almond, "Okay, Now Do You Surrender?" from Best American Mystery Stories 2016. First appeared in Cincinnati Review, vol. 11, no. 2.

When my meds are out of whack I bear a bit too much resemblance to the protagonist of this story. The daughter seems a bit too young to support the twist, but it was otherwise entertaining enough that I decided to suspend disbelief.

Tahmima Anam, "Garments," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in Freeman's, October 2015.

The challenge of writing a good sweatshop story is that it is hard to convey exhaustion if one has not lived it, and hard to find the time to write if one is living through that exhaustion. While there may be some sweatshop poets in Bengali, few if any of them have been translated. Anglophone residents of the republic of letters have to trust that Anam has bridged this gap well enough to tell us about life at the other end of the supply chain.

Charlie Jane Anders, "Rat Catcher's Yellows" from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. First appeared in Press Start to Play.

I read this story when it first came out in a themed anthology, and already considered it to be one of the better pieces from 2015. A compelling portrayal of how love manages to survive the circumstances, and even the minds, which first gave rise to it, it holds up well on a second reading.

Andrea Barrett, "Wonders of the Shore," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in Tin House

This is a very bookish story--literally--but I am a very bookish person. A kind of 19th Century "Missed Connection" unfolds in the margins of some popularized natural history.

Charles Baxter, "Avarice," from 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI. First appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review.

This is either the most anti-capitalist Jesus story of the year, or the most Jesus-y anti-capitalist story. And so much more besides.

Matt Bell, "Toward the Company of Others," from Best American Mystery Stories 2016. First appeared in Tin House 65.

A novel excerpt that works on its own as a short story, and thus makes me want to seek out and read Scrapper, whence it came. The world needs as many Detroit stories as possible.

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, "The Bears," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in Glimmer Train, Spring/Summer 2015.

More than a hundred years later, our writers and our neuroscientists are still catching up with William James's early psychological insights. Along the way Bynum refashions the Goldilocks story into an allegory of the clueless disconnection of contemporary life.

Ted Chiang, "The Great Silence," from Best American Short Stories 2016 and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. First appeared in e-flux.

This may be the best story of 2015, though I did not have occasion to read it until it was reprinted in the May/June 2016 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (the same issue in which my story "Caribou: Documentary Fragments" appeared). My message to Ted Chiang: "You be good. I love you."

Chris Drangle, "A Local's Guide to Dating in Slocomb County," from 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI. First appeared in The Oxford American.

What passes for country music these days isn't really country music any more. This story is like an old-time country song in prose form, complete with war, tragedy, sex, liquor, and the love of a dog.

Louise Erdrich, "The Flower," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in The New Yorker, June 29, 2015.

I loved this story when it was first published. In a different layout, I found more to love--it's odd, but certain sentences stand out better when stretching across a full page than when in a third-of-a-page column, and vice versa. Such as, for example, Anishinaabe practices in the naming of girls.

Yalitza Ferreras, "The Letician Age," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in Colorado Review, vol. 42, no. 2.

Reminds me, peculiarly, of N. K. Jemisin's novel The Fifth Season, insofar as, when geological time and human time intersect, pliable organic matter usually ends up singed or crushed.

Kendra Fortmeyer, "Things I Know to Be True," from 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI. First appeared in One Story.

I suspect this was set in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, rather than contemporaneously, in the wake of our Endless Wars, because today the story told would be encompassed within a few abbreviations and stock phrases, such as PTSD or paranoid schizophrenia. Fortmeyer set herself the challenge of telling a story through a narrator whose words, literally, escape him, and met it admirably.

Tom Franklin, "Christians," from Best American Mystery Stories 2016. First appeared in Murder under the Oaks.

Some Southern Gothic worthy of Flannery O'Connor, except this one appears to have been based upon real yet obscure incidents of the class struggle in southern Alabama.

Meron Hadero, "The Suitcase," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in Missouri Review, vol. 38, no. 3.

An Ethiopian-American O'Henry story, redolent of injera and berbere. There are many world cultures in which hospitality and honor are bound up with one another, so I also ended up chuckling with recognition in those places where Ethiopians sounded strangely like Greeks or Ashkenazi Jews.

Smith Henderson, "Treasure State," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in Tin House 64.

Haven't we all wished we could cave in our fathers' heads like pumpkins? Oh, is that not quite a universal sentiment? Well, the pumpkin was asking for it.

Robert Lopresti, "Street of the Dead House," from Best American Mystery Stories 2016. First appeared in nEvermore!

There are a few too many Poe retellings in the world, but this among the better ones that I have seen. There is something in the intellectual atmosphere that is leading many a writer to try to give voice to the beasts.

Elizabeth McCracken, "Mistress Mickle All at Sea," from 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI. First appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story.

The story accretes, like a pearl on a grain of sand, around this aphorism: "The world was their oyster. An oyster was not enough to sustain anyone."

Erin McGraw, "Priest," from 2017 Pushcart Prize 2017. First appeared in Image.

Pascal's wager does not always work.

Caille Millner, "The Politics of the Quotidian," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in ZYZZYVA no. 104.

I wanted to dislike the story. After all, I am so sick of stories and novels set in academia, have a general, principled stance that the world would be better with fewer of them, not more. But at a certain point it hit that this was my story--the impostor syndrome, the unexpected failure to play a game one scarcely knew existed--and then it became more than my story, with added intersections overdetermining the outcome. Roland Barthes looms large in the text, but Pierre Bourdieu lurks in the subtext.

Michael Noll, "The Tank Yard," from Best American Mystery Stories 2016. First appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July 2015.

This could have been one of the best stories of all time, not merely one of the best stories of 2015, had it not taken a moralistic turn toward the end. The turn was ambiguous enough, however, to keep the story from melting into a puddle of cant. Rural desperation and methamphetamine bond to one another as tightly as anhydrous ammonia and H₂O.

Dominica Phetteplace, "The Story of a True Artist," from 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI. First appeared in ZYZZYVA

The difference between being "Gen X" and "Millennial" seems to be roughly the difference between being imprisoned in the Panopticon, and being born into it. Dominica Phetteplace's writing brings me the closest I can be to understanding what that difference means.

Karen Russell, "The Prospectors," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in The New Yorker, June 8, 2015.

To snatch back life from death is the biggest steal of them all. To know the fact of one's death well enough to be able to forget it is what it takes to become a ghost.

Sofia Samatar, "Meet Me in Iram," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. First appeared in Meet Me in Iram / Those Are Pearls.

A lost city, or a tribe, of which one may imagine oneself to be a part.

Vandana Singh, "Ambiguity Machines: An Examination," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. First appeared on Tor.com.

Vandana Singh is so comprehensively, multi-facetedly brilliant as to vaporize all trace of writerly ego. No one else can write about the possibility space of impossible machines half so convincingly.

Micah Stack, "The G.R.I.E.F." from 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI. First appeared in The Oxford American

It's hard out there for us queer hip-hop heads. A little bit of fantasy helps the hate flow smooth.

Lisa Taddeo, "Forty-Two," from 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI. First appeared in New England Review.

Is there any Schadenfreude better than watching terrible people make one another, and themselves, miserable?

Brian Tobin, "Entwined," from Best American Mystery Stories 2016. First appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, June 2015.

I like this as a voice-driven driven story, capturing the iterative nature of guilt and depression, despite the somewhat contrived nature of its revelations along the way. I like the fact that redemption and forgiveness cannot be given by facts, when the person who feels the guilt does not wish for either.

Catherynne M. Valente, "Planet Lion," from The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. First appeared in Uncanny Magazine May/June 2015.

"What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?" I like stories that begin as jokes but become sublime.

John Edgar Wideman, "Williamsburg Bridge," from Best American Short Stories 2016. First appeared in Harper's Magazine, November 2015.

I recently had a story rejection pounce on one of my meta-fictional digressions, so it is a relief to see that someone can get away with them in print. To be fair, Wideman does it better.

Salvage

These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

--T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land," 430-432

The collapse of the Socialist Workers Party of Britain, by way of a sexual assault cover-up scandal, emitted several incandescent fragments, as leftist party implosions have and will. One is tempted to compare it to the supernova that overtook Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party thirty years ago, and to invoke the 18th Brumaire's overused quote about "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." But if the first time was already farce, then what is the second instantiation? Commedia dell'Arte?

One commonality between the WRP of the 1980s and SWP of the early 2010s, however, is a great quantity of talented individuals, who were not only underutilized but actively sidelined, biding their time in wasted anticipation of the coming insurrection. Within the nebula that once was the mothership of Cliffism, a gravitational agglomeration of such persons has emerged, in a project known as Salvage Quarterly, one of the more promising outcomes of that reckoning.

The "Quarterly" in that title has, to date, been more aspirational than descriptive. As a former contributor to Proletarian Revolution magazine, however, I consider that an expected part of the terrain of leftist publishing. In contrast to most leftist publications, however, they print poetry, visual art, and fiction, and they pay contributors. So when Nick Mamatas mentioned to me that Salvage's fiction editor was looking for "stories under 3000 words" that were not "bad agitprop"--and by the way, this fiction editor was none other than China Miéville--I sent a story that had unsuccessfully made the rounds of more conventional science fiction and fantasy publications, but that I thought would be to China's taste, entitled "Ruins of a Future Empire." Despite a few lingering blemishes, he saw some merit in it, and after a round or two of gentle editing, the final product is now available in Salvage's fourth issue.

Here you can see the story listed, way down at the bottom of the Table of Contents.

Thus I am now on a first-name basis with one of the best novelists of our generation, and even share space with him on the list of contributors printed on the back cover:

Aside from their willingness to print my fictions, however, there are more substantive reasons to value Salvage. They are among the few projects on the international far left today willing to attempt to come to grips with the central antinomy of our present moment--the ineluctable urgency of crisis, and the presently dire state of proletarian class consciousness. It is a relief to be involved, if only tangentially, with an effort to address this through collective effort rather than individual ratiocination. (Note for the perplexed: Such general endorsement of the project does not amount to a specific endorsement of each essay or thesis comprised therein.)

To read my story, or to get a sense of what Salvage is about, buy the issue. Perhaps consider subscribing.

Zionism Then (1933) and Now

The Zionist Organization of America, the most unrepentantly right-wing Zionist organization in this country, has unsurprisingly come out in defense of Trump's ban on Muslim immigrants and refugees. The ZOA, like the hard-right nationalist parties in Israel with which they align, are the ideological and organizational descendants of "Revisionist Zionism," led by Vladimir Jabotinsky.

On February 24, 1933, less than a month after the appointment of Hitler as the Chancellor of Germany, the Jüdische Rundschau, the leading Zionist newspaper in Germany, reported on a speech that Jabotinsky had just given in Berlin (see page 2 of issue 16. The Rundschau was aligned with what was then the mainstream of the Zionist movement, which favored an alliance with the Jewish labor movement in Palestine (though certainly not with Palestinian Arab workers!), and a conciliatory attitude toward the British Mandatory authorities, so their reportage of Jabotinsky, while fair, was not entirely sympathetic. They wrote the following:

Er legte dar, warum Kommunismus und Zionismus unvereinbar seien. Es sei z. B. das politische Ziel der Kommunisten, Europa aus allen Kolonialländern vertreiben zu wollen, während sich Jabotinsky als enthusiastischer Anhänger des europäischen Rechtes auf Herrschaft in der Kolonialländer bekannte. Aber ist nicht die jüdisch-palästinensische Arbeiterschaft selbst die schärfste Gegnerin des Kommunismus?

My translation is as follows:

He laid out why Communism and Zionism could not be united. For example, it is the political aim of the Communists to expel Europe from all the colonial countries, while Jabotinsky is well known to be an enthusiastic supporter of the European right to rule the colonies. But isn't the Jewish labor movement in Palestine the sharpest opponent of Communism?

Two days later, the Reichstag was set aflame. In this moment, as the Nazis were getting ready first to come for the Communists, as Niemöller would later famously reflect, the Labor Zionists saw fit to counter Jabotinsky by boasting of their own steadfast opposition both to Communism and to the struggles of colonized peoples for liberation.

Seventy-four years later, the heirs of Jabotinsky, having long since outpaced the Labor Zionists in the struggle for hegemony within the Zionist movement, are still boasting of their opposition to the supposed barbarian hordes. The way was paved for this by their putative opponents, the Labor Zionists. Those who do not learn from history may get what they deserve, but not before they have dragged the rest of us to hell alongside them.

Has it ever been more clear that any Jew who wishes to remain loyal to the sacrifices of our ancestors, and the moral core of Jewish traditions, that Zionism must be repudiated?

My Top Ten Books of 2016

I read enough books in 2016 that were published that year--and enough of them were good--that it actually makes some meaningful sense for me to indicate which of those books were, for me, in the top ten. These are included without regard to genre, with the result that two are novels, five are single-author collections of short stories, one is a scholarly monograph, and two are single-author collections of essays.

1. Rabih Alameddine, The Angel of History

Despite the advances in anti-retroviral therapies, it is still possible to die of HIV/AIDS. Nonetheless, the "plague" marks off discernible generational divisions among gay and bisexual men. For the elders, those who are now in their fifties (like Jacob, the protagonist of this novel) or older, it meant watching your friends and lovers die. For those around my age, it meant knowing people who caught it when it was still expected to be a certain death sentence, and coming out in an atmosphere in which that threat haunted every erotic liaison. Comparatively carefree young ones appear as characters, foils to Jacob's grim aesthetic of survival. By extensively referencing Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, one of the best novels of the 20th century, Alameddine plays a dangerous game, which works because of his own sharp dialogue and shimmering prose. Early on in the book, I felt myself falling in love with Jacob. The elements of the fantastic are extensive enough that I hope any readers of mine who are eligible to nominate for awards in the macro-genre of "science fiction and fantasy" will read this novel and consider it.

2. Louise Erdrich, LaRose

I already did a long post about the changes in my reception of Erdrich over the years. I had been looking forward to this novel since the appearance of "The Flower" in the New Yorker, a short story based on sections of the novel. I was surprised but not disappointed--though "The Flower" digs deep into the history of colonization, much of LaRose takes place closer to the present. The result is an affecting portrait of the unpredictable ways history can play out into multiple presents, complete with cute kids, family tragedies, and fart jokes.

3. Matthew Neill Null, Allegheny Front

Null's short story "Gauley Season" appeared an earlier Meta-Anthology entry of mine, so I was thrilled to see this collection. Nearly all the stories were as good or better than "Gauley Season." Loosely linked, and well rooted their Appalachian setting, the collection shows Null to be one of the best practitioners of the art of the short story working today.

4. Catherine Besteman, Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine

A young anthropologist begins her career studying members of a subordinate ethno-racial caste in a distant land, settled agriculturalists in a country where nomadic herders dominate, many of them descendants of slaves marked by a darker hue. Decades later, after much turmoil in their homeland, the people she studied, including several of her original informants, find themselves resettled as refugees in a declining mill town in the whitest state of the USA--the same state where the anthropologist is now a tenured professor. And the same city where I work, not far from where I live, so reading this book I had the at times disorienting experience of encountering friends and acquaintances in the text, endnotes, and/or acknowledgements. The sole weak point of the book is chapter 6, which I wish had been as incisively critical as the other chapters, highlighting gaps and contradictions in the discourses of the more cosmopolitan-minded members of the helping professions that it profiles, as ruthlessly as other chapters expose the muddles of international humanitarian NGOs, national and local governments, bigots, and even refugees themselves. Aside from that, the book serves as a guide for how to stop "seeing like a state," and start "seeing like a refugee." And in my opinion, the latter will become an increasingly necessary disposition, not only for remaining humane, but for survival.

5. Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

If Liu were only responsible for much of the growing availability of Chinese science fiction in English translation, he would be one of the most important figures in literature today. But before he turned his hand to translation, he was already an undisputed champion of short fiction in the genre. This collection is a welcome addition, not least because many of his short stories previously appeared in online publications. (Personally, I prefer to read fiction on a printed page; I find it more conducive to the necessary contemplative posture than reading on a screen.) The new story contained in the collection "An Advanced Readers' Picture Book of Comparative Cognition," should be considered for awards.

6. Eric Neuenfeldt, Wild Horse: Stories

If this book already won the Grace Paley Prize, does it need my praise? Evidently, judging from the fact that two months after its release mine is still the only review on Goodreads. Loosely linked short stories, most set in Wisconsin, all with youngish working-class white men as protagonists--a sawyer, a scrap hauler, a snow plow driver, a wheelchair builder, retail clerks in marine and medical supplies, a remedial educator in a prison, and a good few bicycle mechanics. This book could be subtitled "Why Trump Won"--not because I could imagine most of these characters voting for him (though there are some exceptions), but because through these stories one sees the aftermath of the decay of social institutions that would once have worked for men like them, the growth of their cynicism--and you know that none of them would have been ready for Hillary. The best story in the book is "Lifer".

7. Rion Amilcar Scott, Insurrections: Stories

Another set of loosely linked short stories, this time all set in a fictional Maryland town, descended from a fictional antebellum slave insurrection. Within that space, Scott satirically explores the potentialities of blackness set not against whiteness (at least, for a change, not primarily) but against itself. The insurrections chronicled here are on smaller scales, but prefigure the fire next time.

8. Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

Worth reading if only for the first essay, "Black Body," which revisits the "village" in James Baldwin's "Stranger in the Village" in order to give voice to critiques that might be unimaginable otherwise. But there is much more that is worth reading in this volume.

9. John Manderino, But You Scared Me the Most: And Other Short Stories

It is unfortunate for Manderino that this book is getting shelved with horror, because even though he toys with the conventions of that genre and makes good use of the uncanny, the predominant emotional expression that results is laughter rather than the shiver. I especially recommend the title story, "Bigfoot Tells All," "Self-Portrait with Wine," "Bob and Todd," and "The Weary Ghost of Uncle Doug."

10. Sayed Kashua, Native: Dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian Life

Kashua is arguably the best living writer in Hebrew. There is probably no argument that he is the funniest. And he is a Palestinian, an Arab, who grew up with Arabic as his primary language until high school in the "Arab town" of Tira. (Municipalities in Israel are classified--by the government--according to their ethnic makeup. Tira and places like it exist because the ethnic cleansing with which the state of Israel was created was not 100% successful, only about 80%.) All of which helps him in his efforts as an ironist. My Hebrew is good enough to appreciate Kashua in the original, but only in short bursts, so the translation of this collection is welcome--not only for my sake, but for others who should hear his voice. This leaves the question of whether the translation works or not. Does humor translate? For me it did, though this translation makes some odd choices, particularly when it comes to leaving Hebrew and Arabic phrases untranslated. Sometimes inexplicable--why not render "ikhsa" as "yuck" or "yech" or "gross"? Sometimes clearly prudish. (Did the translator think that Kashua's profanity would render him less sympathetic to an Anglophone audience? Mother's cunt!) So I wonder how many of the layers of meaning would make their way to a reader who was not like me, who did not know some Hebrew and a little Arabic and a lot about Israeli society and Israeli racism. And if the only people who can appreciate the book are those who have been immersed enough already in "the situation" to have made up their minds about it, then what, exactly, will it have accomplished? Well, if nothing else, it will have accomplished this passage:

"Dad, what's a mortgage?" I asked whenever I saw an article about mortgage holders being thrown into the street, penniless.
"A mortgage, my son," the communist would answer after lengthy reflection, "is a debt because of which poor people have their home taken away."
"What, a mortgage is a Nakba, Dad?"
"Exactly, a Jews' Nakba."