I’ve moved my blog-like writings over to sub stack. Hopefully at some point I’ll import the old posts from this site as well. In the meantime, check me at https://lauratanenbaum.substack.com

Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife was one of my favorite things I read last year so with some trepidation I watched the film last night, which I didn’t know existed until I saw the trailer in my twitter feed. It’s not a great movie – I don’t get why they had to make the husband win the Nobel when the whole point in the novel was he won the lesser “Oslo” prize, and while casting Jermey Irons’ son as the son crushed by being the son of a famous man probably seemed promising, he seems completely lost. Glenn Close (and her daughter, playing a younger version of herself) are completely brilliant, and this Gen Xer will never not be excited to see Christian Slater drop in, and he’s amazing as the slimy would-be biographer. And I appreciate that they named checked a house in the obligatory Smith reference. 

Something the movie does amazingly well, in a different key than how it was done in the novel, is show the absurdity of prize culture – the handlers who teach you how to bow to the king, the Great Writer being introduced to the chemist he of course has nothing to say to, the sterile rooms and hollow words that mean nothing while paying tribute to the power of words. 

I watched this while procrasitinating from preparing for my Spring classes, including introduction to Creative Writing. This time I’m going to try using Lynda Barry’s Syllabus, which is all about the daily practice of observation. I tell students writing is about how “creative” you think you are, or how talented, or what brilliant ideas you have, but about the practice of paying attention. Of course one has to discipline oneself to believe this. You can only go so far with the spiritual stuff outwardly but I do kind of believe this. 

Glenn Close ending the movie with a blank page is not the most original thing in the world but I found myself moved by it. It seems deliberate an important that it remains blank. We don’t see her start to write the One Great Work that will even the score. “The writer is the one who writes,” people say, against credentialism or MFA culture, and I think that’s true, but even more, I think, the writer is the one who pays attention. Curtis Sittenfield gets at this nicely in her great New Yorker story about MFA-land, where everyone is jockeying for the coin of that realm, a fellowship. (It’s darkly amusing to me that there and in the film, teaching is the terrible thing that will happen to you if you don’t make it. The myth that Real Writers must hate teaching knits nicely with the others about their selfishness). “Don’t think all this literature stuff is going to teach you how to live,” Alice Kaplan recalls Paul de Man telling the eager graduate students in French Lessons, a lesson she remembers with a twinge after they learned of his rendez-vous with fascism. “Why Write” I ask my students on the first day. No one of course says prizes, but the equvlients are there for all of us: validation, recognition, even vengence. Some of these may be rigtheous reasons, they may motivate, they may provide good work. But stubbornly, I still think, sometimes, that the purpose is to teach us how to live, that if we step out of the midcentury mythology of the writer who must behave badly, there is something in the practices that guides us. 

I think a lot about the fact that Kerouac died a middle-aged alcholoic in his parent’s basement and that Ginsberg died an old man surrounded by people who loved him chanting for him. The difference was that Ginsberg dealt with and accepted his sexuality, but it was also something, I believe, in how he wrote, not to record the great rolicking adventures, not to compete with life or stop time but to make peace with it. 

I read Maus in graduate school. I’m pretty sure it was the first graphic novel I ever read. I wasn’t a comic book kid – pretty much my sense of the form was the Sunday comics that came with my parents’ Chicago Tribune subscription and the The Far Side. I was vaguely aware that there was a new form out there called “the graphic novel” and that this was a leading light, but I was unprepared for what unfolded as I read. Like Toni Morrison or Roland Barthes, it hit a place not many readings could do: it was talking about “the power of historical memory” or “representing the unrepresentable” or whatever such graduate school themes that are real and important but can’t help but suffer once we name them this way, but it was also compulsively readable and resonated in ways I would have then been embarassed to describe as “personal.” For weeks I imagined mouse faces on people I saw, the thin curves of those haunted faces. As a graduate student spending my share in a crappy apartments, who still thought that only crappy apartments had mice in them, I remember thinking a lot about that choice of making us mice in his book. I imagined that as with Philip Roth, the Serious Jews might have a thing or two to say about that, about the irreverence with which he approached this subject. Without knowing much about the history of comics I knew Spieglman came from the underground scene, and the irreverance of the whole thing was what held me. For some reason, one of the things I remember most from that first reading, over twenty years ago now, was when the narrator is describing his father doing something really cheap – I think saving old cereal boxes – and stops himself. Can I say this? Can I talk about my Dad being a cheap Jew? It’s like when you read Portnoy and think, wait you can actually write about that? People who are tragic but also small and petty and neurotic in comic ways – can you actually make the joke? As a veteran of Sunday school Holocaust lessons, the most subersive thing about the book was that matter of factness with which it showed that survivors, as we’d been taught to call them without a modifier, were not necessarily saints. And not just in the dark sexy way people like to talk about “complicated” people. Sometimes they were just a pain in the ass. To those to whom evil is done, do evil in return – but sometimes they just hoard rubber bands, and there’s something in that worth recording, even next to all the rest of it. 

Maybe it was just because I read it in the late nineties, when everyone was talking about “metafiction” but the thing I remember most is how often there are moments like this, especially in the second volume as he recounts how the writing took over his life, how he doesn’t want anyone to make it a movie, how he’s not sure what was accomplished by the whole enterprise. The panel I think about more than any is one where he quotes Beckett to his shrink, about how words are an affront to the unnammable. Then there’s  a panel where both he and the shrink are silent. Then, he says, “on the other hand, Beckett did say it.”  In the current discussions about the book since some terrible and/or stupid people did what terrible and/or stupid people do, I’ve seen a lot about how it’s an important book because there are no heroic non-Jews who come in and save the day, it’s just destruction and what you live with. And that’s true of course. But it seems to me the more important thing about the book is its ideosyncratic and irreverant nature – the choice of animals as away around the pornographic representation of extreme human suffering, but also the willingness to interrogate his own storytelling and consider the ends it might serve. “Reading and writing aren’t sacred,” Adrienne Rich once wrote, “but people have died as if they were.” Spieglman is too smart, too ruthless an observor, too perceptive of folly to believe that books can save us, and that he writes and draws even though he knows this is part of what makes his creation so valuable.

Since my mother died three years ago, I’ve said to a lot of people that if I learned one thing from grief it’s that you recognize anniversaries and time even if you don’t think you do. You can live on a tiny patch of concrete and know nothing about migratory birds, but the temperature rises and holiday decorations go up and you’ll remember how it did something like that time, last year.

On Wednesday, March 11th last year, I went to teach my classes. Because my school has a weird Jan-Feb interterm, it was the start of a new semester. I ended up meeting my classes in person twice before we went online. On March 11th we discussed the opening of Baldwin’s Go Tell it On the Mountain, one of my favorite novels to teach, his bildungsroman about breaking away from a preacher father very much like his. After we talked about that, we went from 1930s Harlem to asking what  they’d heard about Covid. I think it started in a lab, someone said. No, I said, that’s wrong, a thing I rarely say to students in quite that way. They asked if I thought we would shut down. I said I didn’t know. I heard the rich schools shut down, one woman said, to no one in particular.

Then I asked them to fill out a little piece of paper with their email and their level of comfort with different technologies. I don’t think I mentioned zoom because I don’t think I’d heard of zoom. The second class I did this in was a computer lab which mean I was awkwardly trying to see their faces around the screens when I asked them how they felt about screens. I guess that was good practice.

Later that day I walked through the atrium and everyone was asking about it, about whether we were shutting down. I said I’d heard there was a case at LaGuardia, and maybe one at John Jay. Someone made a shrugging gesture and I said, yes, that’s right, I don’t know I don’t know. I think it was about an hour later someone said they’d seen the tweet from Cuomo which was how we find out we were shutting down.

The next day, March 12th, I took my older kid to school and for the first time the subway was noticeably emptier. Up until then the only thing different on our commute had been a few masks and that when we went into Starbucks the barista said he couldn’t put coffee in my to-go mug because of the new protocols. But that day the space started to take shape. One man, the only one in the car wearing a mask, looked at me nervously and said, “So we’re doing this?”

Six month later I’d watch Hamilton with the kids and thought about that line, which in the musical comes when Burr and Hamilton foreshadow their duel by serving as seconds for another one and fail to resolve it.  I wondered what that man meant: of course his “so we’re doing this” had none of Hamilton’s bravado. I thought maybe he was saying, “ok, so we’re going to dive into this abyss?” “Ok, so we’re going to let people die?” “Ok so we’re going to do . . .whatever it is we have been doing ever since?” Of course it wasn’t “us” who was deciding this – it was the asshole in charge and the asshole who had sent the tweet the let me know I wouldn’t be going back to my office. But somewhere in his hesitation I could feel there was already collective mourning in the air – anticipatory grief, like the climate people say.

That night we talked about whether we should keep the kids home from school and daycare. The teachers were talking sick out if they didn’t shut down soon. I’d like to say we took a stand on principle and foresight but we ended up keeping him home largely because it was a half day and it didn’t seem worth the commute.

I’m not a superstitious person but I felt very aware that that next day, the first one they were home with us, was Friday the 13th. My mom died on a different Friday the 13th. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, I’m the kind of person who feels the need to preface what I’m saying by saying I’m not superstitious. Because calendars and rituals an anniversaries and lucky and unlucky days no longer seem like they should fit that category.

I was seven months pregnant when my mom died so I pretty much just went on survival mode, or powered through, or whatever dreadful way we have of describing of acting in the world as if you were someone else not because there is some piece of your identity and history of which you are ashamed but because your functioning demands a presentation at odds with that experience. I guess I was basically saying, ok so I’m doing this, as I dragged myself to the doctor for extra scans before class and they asked if I’d been under any extra stress lately.

Living in a city far from where my mother had lived, where even my closest friends had only met her a few times, there was no daily way to mark or acknowledge the presence of her absence. Like many I longed for the recognition of rituals, but even saying Kaddish each week (something I planned and failed to do) felt private. I joked that I’d wear black for a year to mark the time but who in New York would notice? That you could cry anonymously in New York was something I’d always loved, but what if you wanted people to notice, or at least know why? And yet people just went about their business. How many people I walked by had mothers? All of them, it seemed, as I pushed my newborn in the stroller, though I knew it wasn’t true.

Around this time I told a friend grief was down at the bottom of my to do list, but I’d get to it eventually, a “joke” I’ve repeated many times since. She gave me a sweet smile, the one we give our kids when they say something it takes a deep kindness to respond to. “That’s so cute that you think it works that way.”

And so, as the year, the traditional period of Jewish mourning came to an end, I went to the rabbi and basically asked for an extension. I almost always give my students extensions when they ask for them so I figure she’d return the favor. Maybe I could have a little more time, given the circumstances? She said there was commentary that said there were exceptions, because of course there are, and suggested a book of Psalms. An incomplete! Everyone tells you not to give them to students, that they never actually finish, and usually they don’t, but in my whole good-student life I’ve never been so proud of a grade.

I keep thinking about when people will start grieving, when the shock wears out, those who aren’t already deep in it, and how long it will take, and how much pressure there will be to forget it all. Many folks may find themselves going to bosses, friend and lovers and saying, please, give me an extension. Let me be sad just a little longer. Sometimes, as I get older and know the losses will rack up with age, and think about what the shape of the big crisis of the planet and its livability might look like, I think, I will never get to it on my list, I will never catch up, the griefs will simply lie across each other and grow. And I’ve come to think that that’s ok, or not ok but just that I’m no longer trying to imagine it otherwise, that, as Whitman wrote of Lincoln’s assassination, another one of those tragedies that came with spring, “I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”

Books I read this year!  I had an average reading year: not a lot more books than most years, but no fewer either. Not a great number, but not bad for a year of being home with the kids, remote learning, taking on new union responsibilities, and, of course, the whole underlying sense of dread thing. No being holed up with the Decameron, not a mostly topical list, but everything is topical when the world feels the way it felt this year. Since my reading time is limited, I’m selective enough and don’t have to do the kind of “boring but need this for research” academic stuff anymore, so I enjoy pretty much everything I read. I’ve tried a couple times and always failed to do various reading challenges of categories, but not doing academic work per say does mean that I tend to read across genres and topics naturally. This year I also started a regular reading exchange with my writing partner where we mostly alternate between poetry and essay/memoir/fiction, so this added to balance and made my list a little more contemporary than usual. If I had to choose, I’d say Greg Grandin’s book is the one that made me think the most and made me the most angry, and Ellen Bass’s gave me the most pleasure. 

History/General Non-Fiction

Ben Ehrenreich The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine. Beautiful, powerful book based on Ehrenreich’s time living with the people of Hebron, Ramallah, and other communities in the West Bank, brining us the stories of heroes of the resistance to occupation like Issa Ammro, founder of Youth Against Settlements, currently facing yet another round of arrest and threatened imprisonment by Israel, and the Tamimi family. The way he slow-builds up to the unspeakably awful and batshit national insanity that lead to the 2014 assault on Gaza is so masterfully done, and he’s wonderful on the absurdity at the heart of occupation: what it means to draw a line around a house, or describing a dogs playing poker in the inspection room of a prison. I know Ehrenreich is also a novelist and essayist, and it shows not just in description but in the fullness of his vision, as when he notes: “I understood for the first time that in its daily functioning, the prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpoints and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair.” 

Judith Levine and Erica Seiners, The Feminist and the Sex Offender. I had the pleasure of interviewing Levine and Seiners about their work here. This is a great short and lucid account of the issues of how to have non-carceral responses to sexual violence. My favorite thing about it is how the co-authors foreground their collaboration and transcribe conversations into the text. 

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns. A masterpiece of oral history, one of my favorite genres since I picked Studs Terkel up off my parent’s shelves. Wilkerson brilliantly selects her central figures, to represent the three waves of the Great Migration, people who are both representative and exceptional as human characters, and paints the larger picture through the history they brushed up against. 

Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth. What kind of a country to you get when, from its beginning, that country claims as its birthright the right to have unlimited expansion, to have no borders at all? That this seems in retrospect an obvious question but that I’d never thought of it exactly this way is a tribute to the power of brainwashing, or maybe just to Grandin’s writing: this is the rare history that’s an overview covering vast periods that’s also full of important things I didn’t know, like the horrific history of the Texas Rangers which were basically a military for lynching Mexicans. It’s also an extremely rare book that put our current horror in a new light, seeing Trump as “new” insofar as it’s a pessimistic turn of the empire turning inward, an imperialism resting on scarcity. Probably the best book I read this year in terms of thinking about it ever since. 

Jenny Brown, Without Apology. Great short overview of the history of the radical fight for abortion rights and why the courts didn’t win this right for us and won’t be the ones to protect it. As in her super-important Birth Strike, she packs more knowledge into a single page than many writers do in chapters, while still being totally accessible and engaging.

Adam Hoschschild, Red Cinderella. Fun biography of Ruth Pastor Stokes, a Russian immigrant who married a millionaire and agitated for socialism, not necessarily in that order. I wrote about it here. 

Fiction 

Brandon Taylor, Real Life.  The best novel I read this year, and the Booker Committee agreed. A campus novel that shows the smallness of campus/college town life with out taking easy potshots. Being about biology graduate students rather than literature ones helps perhaps, as does the best descriptions of people coming and going from parties I’ve read in ages, and a digression to the protagonist’s past that is the most devastating, gorgeous, necessary chapter I’ve read in fiction in a long time. 

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad. I’ve been curious about Egan for a long time and after reading a New Yorker profile of her really wanted to read her. She comes up in retrospectives of the 10s as one of the leading novelists, a decade in which the rein of the Jonathans over publishing gave way to something much more interesting. And there’s a lot to like in these loosely entwined stories of music world folks, but a lot doesn’t quite seem to land, and there’s an uncanny valley feeling to the “experimental section” that takes the form of a powerpoint presentation. But I like to keep an open mind about such things. Someone right now is writing a novel in the form of a series of zoom meetings and maybe it will be very good when I read it in 2030. 

Kate Walbert, A Short History of Women. I picked this up from the free library a few years ago and started reading it in a fit of insomnia. It deals with the history of suffrage through a multi-generational family story about the descendants of a woman who starved herself for suffrage.  I was interested in that since the pandemic seemed to have taken the edge of the centennial of suffrage discourse (and I never wrote the long piece about this I wanted to), and wanted to see how it was handled. It’s well done and apparently got some traction when it came out in 2009. But as often with these kinds of boos, there’s one story that just works more than the others, in this case the one about Dorothy, the 60 something divorcee who finds herself obsessed with Florence Nightengale and getting arrested for taking photographs on military bases. Perhaps not surprisingly the suffrage history feels less alive than the contemporary context: it was bracing to notice how, accurately to the spirit of the time, Dorothy’s affluent daughter casually refers to her own support for Bush as something of a minor faux pas, something to be embarrassed about but no big deal really. 

Jenny Offill, Weather. My other standout novel of the year along with Real Life. I wonder if it’s a coincidence the two 2020 novels shone far above these other recent ones I read. This one felt especially timely as an early quarantine read for me, writing about the climate crisis from the perspective of now, of background and mounting anxiety, and illusions of safe places to go. I don’t blog anymore really but I wrote a post about this one. 

Katherine Ann Porter, Pale Horse Pale Rider. The only real “classic” I read this year and the only directly pandemic-related book. I started with the title novella with my writing and now reading partner. It’s a stunning account of a young woman working as a drama critic for a small regional paper, dealing with the hassles of office life and the repressive wartime atmosphere when the plague strikes in 1918. It made me feel like I’d read and forgotten it because the rhythms are so recognizable to the modernist era, and I keep trying to place whose they are most like – Delmore Schwartz maybe – but they’re her own, and, most movingly, a more powerful sense of what this year felt like than anything I read about this year with the exception of everything Kiese Laymon wrote about this year:

“Slowly, unwillingly, Miranda drew herself up inch by inch out of the pit of sleep, waited in a daze for life to begin again. A single word struck in her mind, a gong of warning, reminding her for the day long what she forgot happily in sleep, and only in sleep. The war, said the gong, and she shook her head.”

It’s especially moving that this story is one of a survivor, that takes us into what Miranda’s illness and near death feel like physically, psychically, spiritually, from the inside, and the journey back: one of the many stories so glaringly absent from our collective failures this year.  The first novella in the book, “Old Mortality” is also stunning, dealing as it does with Miranda’s early life as she works her way out of the thickets of family mythologies and prejudices: the classic bildungsroman story, but stunning when you arrive there, and the stretch forward towards what is to come. 

She would have no more bonds that smothered her in love and hatred. She knew now why she had run away to marriage,and she knew that she was going to run away from marriage, and she was not going to stay in any place, with anyone, that threatened to forbid her making her own discoveries, that said “No” to her.  . . Oh, what is life, she asked herself in desperate seriousness, in those childish unanswerable words, and what shall I do with it?  

A “What is life” has never felt so earned to me since Lily Briscoe picked up her brush. And “Noon Wine” is perhaps even more stunning: the story is something out of Faulkner or O’Conner – hired farm hand with mysterious past shows up; bad things happen – but unlike them, Porter gives these farm people – especially the woman – the same interiority and philosophical seriousness she gives the stands in for her younger self. 

The Completist 

Vivian Gornick, Unfinished Business, The Odd Woman and the City, and The Romance of American Communism. A lot of people discovered or rediscovered Gornick this year. I wrote about rereading Romance earlier this year; in the piece I also reflect a bit on her new book Unfinished Business, which I heard her read from in one of my last pre-Covid outings and The Odd Woman and the City, the only other book of hers I hadn’t already read, which was heartbreaking to read as a tribute to exploring the city and feeling steeled for life by it. Gornick’s treatment of the experience of politics, her early writings on feminism and explorations of the craft of essays are just about a perfect Venn diagram with my interests and often non-intersecting worlds, so watching people discover her has been a delight. 

Memoir/Essay/Biography 

Sara Paretsky, Writing in the Time of Silence. A Christmas gift last year from my mother-in-law and I tried to lay some good karma by reading it right away which is . . not always the fate of my Christmas gifts. It a short book and the has an uncanny valley feeling to it, as Paretsky’s not very strikingly radical observations about politics and free speech in the Bush/War on Terror era are presented as daring – I don’t mean this as a criticism, just a reflection on how cramped that decade really was. The parts about Paretsky’s coming of age and coming to writing in Chicago were fascinating and made me want to read her fiction. 

Kiese Laymon, Heavy. Perhaps the best book I read this year, probably the one I’ve thought about the most. When I had a my students read excerpts from it I also had them read an interview he gave called “Is it possible to write a truthful memoir” which seems right but also insufficient to describe what he does – truth telling directly to a flawed parent you still love being not just the incidental result of the book but is core aim and a reflection – I can’t really think of another author who so directly connects this country’s inability to tell the truth about itself to our inability to do this in our lives. Along the way, there’s so much about intellectualism among the poor, respectability politics as a complex way of dealing with life, how schools fail to tell us the truth about our world, the cruelties of academia, body image in men, and so much more. Laymon also wrote two of the new essays that got me through this year: “Mississippi: A Poem in Days” and the first great piece of writing inspired by a viral tik Tok that I’m aware of (really)! 

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts. Nelson writes about motherhood and queerness and creativity and is influential with lots of writers I love, but I didn’t love this as much as I wanted or expected to: she tries to do something like Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse with marginal quotations (another technique I love) but it didn’t quite work here: I think there’s an unresolved tension at the heart of the book about trying to write an intimate book that’s in part about a partner whom she describes as craving privacy, and it seems like the tension stands in the way of the project instead of becoming the subject itself as it needed to. I do love that she takes queer theory seriously and tries to work out how it relates to the positions she now wants to take and how those positions come from affect.  

Porochista Khakpour, Brown Album. I bought this because of her amazing essay “13 Ways of Being an Immigrant” that I read in an anthology. It’s a very useful model for students of a personal essay through woven scenes. I thought about teaching the whole collection but found it somewhat uneven, there’s a certain self-dramatizing quality and straining towards certain stylistic features of “essay” that didn’t sit quite right, but I still loved a lot of the pieces. 

Hanif Abdurraqib They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. Wonderful collection of essays that blend music criticism, memoir and reflections on life under Trump and in the era of Black Lives Matter. He’s also a poet and does great things with form and rhythm. Made me download a bunch of new music and even enjoy reading about music I’ll never listen to. Worth it for the revelry about Prince’s Super Bowl performance alone.

Daniel Mendelsohn The Elusive Embrace.  I bought this years ago having enjoyed Mendelsohn’s New Yorker pieces. The way Mendelsohn writes about desire and the hard boundaries he draws between the queer community and family life feel dated even as his own experiences undermine his categories, but the last section is a lovely mediation on family history as he untangles the real story behind a family legend about a the tragic young death of an ancestor. 

Poetry 

Poetry took over more and more of my reading this year thanks to my own forays into writing it and the addition of a reading exchange to my meetings with my writing partner. I also, like many, found it the best thing to read this year: the art form in which time is already stretched and weird, in which death and grief are always present and everything heightened even when – especially when? – everyday life fails us. Since this is a list of books read, it doesn’t include the countless rereads of Grace Paley or Adrienne Rich or the delights messing around on the Poetry Foundation website, but it should. In the meantime. 

Danez Smith, Homie. Delightful and full of life and optimism: feels appropriate the I read it in the before. “My President” is a delight that feels like 2020’s answer to the evergreen “I want a dyke for president” of my youth and I can’t wait to teach it.

Staceyann Chinn, Crossfire. Remarkably, this is Chinn’s first collection, having focused on the performance aspect of her work for years, but they work on the page, especially the direct addresses and the humor and the movement between polemic and ecstatic praise. 

Claudia Rankine, Citizen. Years ago before Rankine became one of the best known poets around, I “went” to “The Provenance of Beauty,” a play that took place in the guise of a bus tour through the South Bronx; a stunningly well-done use of this format in a way I’ve never experienced with most “experimental” theater. I also loved her 2004 collection Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. So I’m a little sad Citizen didn’t quite land for me – I wanted the essayistic element to be more fully there, but I’m fully ready to imagine the fault lay with me in some way of how I approached it. 

Jericho Brown, The Heritage. As good as everyone said. Love the callbacks, the way the collection is put together, the humor, the light, the sexiness. 

Ellen Bass, Indigo.  I bought this book because of the title poem in The New Yorker, which is still my favorite poem I read this year. Those turns! So many of them! And this whole book . . I just felt her sitting with me, an older and wiser and funnier version of my friends or the friends I’ve needed and lost, reflecting on age; the way a whole span of twenty or thirty years of a life and its turns are taken in the way only an older poet can, the attention to illness and caregiving, and being old but wanting more more. And then there is this . . .

Today I heard a young woman read a poem 

in which her husband lifts her bare bottom 

onto the kitchen counter 

and, in the next line, spreads her legs.

The marriage has problems. They may already be divorced.

But suddenly I am ruing the fact 

that no one has lifted my bottom onto a kitchen counter.

Not when my bottom trotted high and proud. 

And not when it began to eye the floor

as if contemplating its future.

And now, I’m going to die

without ever being taken on those cold hard tiles.

Don’t tell me it’s not too late. It is. 

Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things. Horses, the alternating pull of city and country, desire and mourning. Surprising and affirming and devastating at turns. 

Natalie Diaz, Post-Colonial Love Story. If Indigo was the poetry collection that made me feel the most, this was probably the one that made me think the most: really interesting formal experiments, and something I’ve never experienced in the way she writes about the natural world – especially water – in a way that feels as fresh and vital and necessary as the moment of environmental demands. 

Miscellaneous: 

Excerpts from the Diary of Rosemary Meyer. The publisher sent this to me and I feel bad I failed to write about it. Rosemary was Bernadette’s sister an artist and this journal of a year is a nice chronicle of artistic circles and feminist preoccupations at the time but ultimately written too sparsely, in the short-hand way I often keep diaries I don’t expect to be published, for me to find a way in, though I was trying, before everything happened. 

Anna Deveare Smith, Let Me Down Easy.  In this play Smith applies her Studs Terkel as play style oral histories to health care and the body – what it is like to have illness or injury and to seek or give care. It’s brilliant like all her work, and especially relevant for this year: the monologue from a nurse at a hospital abandoned by authorities during Hurricane Katrina read like a message in a bottle to us in the near future that we failed to heed. I taught it in the Spring, which ended up being quite a coincidence, and though I had a very rough transition to online teaching, I think students got quite lot out of reading this as so many of them dealt with illness and caregiving. 

Books I Read with/to the (Bigger) Kid 

Brian Jaques, Redwall.  Kind of like Lord of the Rings, but with rats and weasels. 

Raymon Smullyan What is the Name of this Book?  I have great memories of working out these puzzles when I pulled this from my dad’s shelves. It was a delict to again puzzle around knights and knaves and the portraits in Portia’s caskets, though I was a bit startled to find out how many jokes my dad had cribbed from it.  

Sydney Taylor, All of a Kind Family and More All of a Kind Family.  A pure delight to revisit these childhood favorites of mine. Some very old-school gender notions (maybe as much a product of the 50s in which they were written than the 1910s in which they are set) but they hold up very well. It was fascinating to read the account of the polio epidemic of 1916, which sent the family to the Rockaways for the summer out of a belief it was safer. Also when the family gets scarlet fever, the health department comes over to put the quarantine marker on their house, which I found unbearably touching for obvious reasons. 

My goal for next year is to read more than this year; or, more ambitiously, one for every year of my life. 

Previous years’ books

2019

2018

2016

 

For a while I went each December to see Alvin Ailey with a few friends. For a while I was also taking classes at their huge school in the west 50s right near where J. teaches. It’s one of those things you can’t let go of if you’re like me – even if you only do it a few times, the fact that anyone can walk in on off the street and take a class with these world class artists. 

Shortly after quarantine, the Ailey company put out a short video of a few of their dancers doing parts of “Revelations,” Ailey’s masterpiece and tribute to the gospel tradition, in isolation. I must have watched it twenty times. Here were these beautifully trained bodies, living in tiny apartments or in a little back yard with a kid or a dog, doing that characteristic reach. Since then they’ve put out a range of gems from their archive as a “digital season” and now, this, a blending of different performances of “Revelations” in the almost sixty years since its creation. 

I got more curious about Ailey this year when I finally read Isabel Wilkerson’s history of the Great Migration. She talks about the many artistic greats whose lives and work were made by the migration. Ailey was one of them. Born in 1931 in Rogers Texas, his family was part of the lesser-known branch of the migration, of African-Americans from Louisiana and Texas out to California. In Rogers, the church and its music were his only refuge; in L.A. he saw the Katherine Graham company perform. He went on to study dance, join the Horton company and perform on Broadway before starting his own company. Even after the creation of “Revelations” and other masterpieces It struggled financially for many years until it was aided by a wildly successful tour of the Soviet Union where they once received 30 curtain calls.  

Ailey died in 1989, at age 58, during one of the worst years of another pandemic. Reportedly he asked that the cause of death not be listed as AIDS in order to protect his mother. 

I just finished reading the novel Weather, by Jenny Offil. It’s about climate anxiety so not exactly light reading if you’re looking for a distraction, but it is in short and in fragments so very readable if your attention span is shot to hell. It’s also completely brilliant. A few thoughts, equally fragmented:

– What’s brilliant about it, as highlighted in this interview with my friend Jo, is that it’s not, like a lot of climate fiction a futuristic dystopian scenario. It’s about now, about living with anticipatory grief and anxiety, about the gap between what we know and our day to day lives. We think – at least I sometimes think: – ok, when I get my life together, I’ll become a better, more full time activist and live a serious enough life, but most of the time we scroll the articles, give money, then read a kid a bedtime story and deal with annoying people at work. This is what Lizzie, the book’s librarian protagonist does. There’s a lot of gentle humor in her relationship to her husband who takes a numbers-based approach to things that are likely to resonate with couples and friends dealing with their different responses to Trump anxiety, climate anxiety, and, now, virus anxiety.

– Along with anticipatory anxiety, a major theme is the illusion of safety. Lizzie’s climate scientist mentor takes her to a dinner with silicon valley bigwigs (“They want to live for ever but they can’t wait two hours for a cup of coffee.”) After they politely listen to the numbers and the warnings and everything, they get to their real, had a few drinks question: Where should we go? Where will we be safe in 50 years? Of course we wouldn’t ask for ourselves, they say, but we’ve got kids. They know their money can’t buy what they thought it could, but at least it should buy them an answer to the question. I’m thinking a lot about the stories told by illusions of the safe place, if only we can get there. Zionism, of course. Reading this close to Passover: the story of forty years in the desert and then the safe place. But, more complicated for me personally, the way people in my grandmother’s generation would talk about those who were smart enough to leave Europe in time. I never thought America was a safe place, but I knew that intellectually. Now it just seems crazy we could have ever thought this was the safe place. That running from programs and seas and viruses is the norm of our lives and we had this funny little blip of suburban life and the biggest worry your family’s pressure on you to be a doctor, all of it.

– It’s really funny! Not just dark sardonic stuff, though there’s some of that too, but actual jokes.
Like: “Bartender says we don’t serve time travelers. A time traveller walks into a bar.” Are Jonathan Safran Foer or Frazen ever funny in their why-we-eat-animals-why-I-love-birds-and-we’re-all-doomed but-I-actually-don’t-write-as-if-I-feel-very-doomed-at-all-books. It seems pretty telling to contrast the title of this book – Weather, the atmosphere, the thing that shapes us – to Jonathan Safran Foer’s We are the Weather in terms of ego and proportion. As with COVID, one thing the climate crisis teaches us it that our lives are biological and constrained by cells and particles and how recent and strange a thing that we have constructed a world that allows us to forget this. Sometimes I think climate change is our punishment for always thinking that “talking about the weather” was what superficial characters in Victorian novels did to avoid the really important and taboo topics.

– The main character’s son’s name is Eli, and they have a bedtime ritual eerily similar to ours, and the characters live in the neighborhood next to ours, though it’s unnamed, as she also brilliantly doesn’t name Trump or Uber or many of the other way-we-live-now elements of the book. There’s even a discussion of the racial disparities of the G&T program in Brooklyn schools. Well, Brooklyn mothers are not exactly underrepresented in contemporary literature, so I shouldn’t feel particularly pandered to, but still. Since the whole novel is uncanny, this did not exactly take away from the feeling. I actually feel like if I were more talented and wanted to write a book about what is in my brain in 2020, it would be this book, which is kind of a nice feeling, since then I can not feel bad that I could never have written it.

Amidst all the other cases of rage, one of the times I got the angriest in 2019 was when I found out, thanks to one of those free libraries, that David Books edited a Best American Essays some years back. One of the best experiences I had this year was teaching Creative Non-Fiction for the first time, and near the end of the semester I sent students lose on longreads and longform to search around on topics of interest to them, and it made me think about the categories that fall under this term, which I’ve used to group these reads. Whether there is more great writing, especially in left magazines, now than at some other time I can’t say, but I can’t think of a year when I read so many amazing essays and articles. Not all the ones on this list are from 2019, because that’s not how I read. I tried to take no more than one or two from any given publication, since there are so many wonderful ones out there right now.

Personal Narratives:

Prachi Gupta, “Stories about My Brother” for Jezebel. It’s not enough to say this essay is “about” how masculinity killed the author’s brother, even as he blamed feminism for his unhappiness, or about the courage it took for the author to look for answers about who he had become, but in any case it’s worth an infinite number of thinkpieces about incels, and would be heartbreaking even if it weren’t beautifully and smartly written, but it is those things also.

Walter Johnson, “Guns in the Family”  for Boston Review. This was in Best American Essays, thankfully not edited by David Books this year, but I don’t know how many people read it, but my students did, which was a little unfair since it draws on a scholar’s lifetime of insight along with his experience growing up with guns. The scene about trading stories about his rural background in exchange for yucks in grad school I’m sure will resonate with many.

Righteous Rage:

Rhonda Lieberman “Painting Over the Dirty Truth” for The New Republic. Come for the bitter truth about who is funding your favorite museums (Kander may be gone but the Kochs and Sacklers remain!), the craven uses of “woke” art to cover a multitude of sins, and stay for the best use of a Soprano’s reference you didn’t know you needed because in your mind it’s still the start of the 2010s, not the end.

Lizzie Presser, “When Medical Debt Collectors Decide Who Gets Arrested” for Pro Publica.  Alternative title: “I tremble for my country when I remember God is Just.”

People’s Histories: (lots of these because they are probably my favorite thing to read)

Heather Ann Thompson, “How a Series of Jail Rebellions Rocked New York – and Woke A City” for The Nation. Fascinating, heartbreaking and timely story I knew next to nothing about despite my immersion in the literature of protest  during this time – how prison rebellions went far beyond Attica.

Kathryn Schultz, “The Many Lives of Pauli Murray,” for The New Yorker. A few folks know my dream book project would be something like Sharp, but for feminists: a series of profiles in which political life is not opposed to individuality but the very thing that makes self possible. Murray is a case in point, as is Schultz’s masterful accounting of Murray’s many lives, pioneer legal work, complex gender identity and final fascinating turn as an ordained minister.

Sarah Jaffe, “The Road Not Taken,” for The New Republic. From today’s plant closings, a look back at what happened when autoworkers decided they wanted to struggle not just for better working conditions but for jobs that didn’t suck. I gave it to my students because such a thing is so hard for them – for so many of us – to imagine.

Emily Bass, “How to Survive a Footnote,” for n+1. Fascinating account of the struggle for Global AIDS justice, which affected millions of people but is a literal footnote to the Oscar nominated (wonderful) documentary about ACT-UP and a parable about the activism of generations (her case mine) that slip through our narratives – worth 10 think pieces on why there are no Gen X socialists.

Isaac Brosilow, “The Skokie March That Wasn’t”for Jewish Currents. Why the famous Nazi march through Skokie never actually happened, what happened instead, and why it’s about segregation and race and divisions in the Jewish community and how to fight fascism, not just the ACLU and free speech. Also featuring a cover photo of my badass uncle as a handsome young thing.

Profiles:

Rachel Kushner on Ruth Wilson Gilmore for The New York Times Book Review. I’m fascinated by the fact that this piece, by a novelist, does such a better job of presenting the ideas of a truly radical thinker than most profiles written by “serious” political folk. With its ability to dramatize a scene of Gilmore engaging the regular arguments against prison abolition that she’s heard a million times, it’s rare profile of a thinker that cares about how thinking and changing minds actually happens.

Sarah Marshall on Tonya Harding for The Believer. I discovered Marshall’s You’re Wrong About podcast this year which took me to this piece about class, media spectacles and what it means to be just about the best in the world at something and have that not be enough.

Takedowns. I write a lot of reviews, but usually of things I like or want to write, and I’m conflict adverse and not very clever, so my admiration of a righteous take down is as strong as my conviction I’ll never write one (though this I guess came close).  These two both manage to be hilarious and enjoyable while also showing how the badness of the books in question show something important:

Kate Aronoff on Jonahtan Safran Foer and the sad climate boys for The Nation. I’m an English Professor who writes about politics, so I like to think novelists are capable of saying something about the world, and the last thing I wrote this year, was about that. But boy, when they get it wrong, do they ever. Remember when John Updike wrote a 9/11 novel, because the world suddenly – suddenly! – was dark and confusing and bigger than which neighbor you were fucking? When it comes to climate, Aronoff shows, such things are not just silly but a wasted opportunity – we do need new ways of telling stories, and it’s maybe too simple to say well to do accoladed authors who just discovered things are like, really, really bad, aren’t the ones to do it, but there it is.

Tobi Haslett on Thomas Chatterton Williams: Y’all know about Haslett, right? No? Going to end by letting him begin:  “Something is happening out there in the dark fields of “the discourse.” Incoherence is now a virtue. Rather than irony, modesty, discernment, ambivalence, or the mental sprightliness needed to parse conflicting views, a proud refusal to make solid arguments may be the cure for our divided times. Incoherence strikes a blow to partisan bickering and campus groupthink. Incoherence recoils from “tribes.” If an opinion sounds half-baked, or a claim brashly obtuse, it’s simply plowing through your pieties and wrenching open your padlocked mind. Incoherence is courage, incoherence is pluralism, incoherence is an ideological opera full of swordfights and forbidden love. Incoherence thrills and exhausts people; in this way, it resembles thinking.”

Read the whole thing; happy New Year of reading to all.