Posts by Elizabeth Huergo
I’m becoming an avid reader of Substack, and one of my favorite sites is Paul Krugman’s. Earlier this month, Krugman, a Nobel laureate in Economics, observed “…that everything Musk and Trump say about what they’re doing is false, including what they say about their motivations.” The pandemonium they are creating isn’t the point, he notes. The point is the consolidation of power. At this very moment, Krugman warns us, we are experiencing an “attempted autogolpe,” which he translates as a “self-coup,” and defines as act by which “a legitimately elected leader uses his position to seize total control, eliminating legal and constitutional restraints on his power.”
Golpe de estado and coup d’état both refer to the violent and unlawful overthrow of a government. The Spanish word golpe and the French word coup both refer to a “hit” or “strike.” Krugman is using and attributing a term from an opinion piece by Charles T. Call that appeared on the Brookings Institution website in 2021, “No, it’s not a coup — It’s a failed ‘self-coup’ that will undermine US leadership and democracy worldwide.” Two days after the January 6 attack on the US Capital, Call beseeches us to look to other countries (Peru, Guatemala, Bolivia) in order to understand that the attack was a “self-coup.” Despite the reference to Latin America, Call slips from Spanish (autogolpe) to a mishmash of English and French (self-coup). Perhaps that slip and the noticeable absence of irony are connected?
In Spanish “auto” has several meanings, including an act done by oneself. The Diccionario de la lengua española defines autogolpe as a violation of a country’s legitimate law, ordinance, or custom by someone in power for the purpose of consolidating and affirming power. I don’t know who first translated “auto” into “self”. “Self-coup,” however, does not lead to clarity but bathos. The violent, destructive strikes against law, ordinance, and custom shift rather quickly from the sublime to the ridiculous.
“Self-coup” has a pop-psychology vibe. I imagine someone fretting before a mirror, a big guy, strong guy, tears in his eyes, trying to power through a debilitating idea about himself that affects his moods and behaviors. A malevolent clown, he is not feeling good about himself, and he is going to usurp that part of his consciousness, beating out of himself what he deems unacceptable because, well, he is the State.
Another favorite Substack site is Book Post, founded and edited by Ann Kjellberg, a member of The New York Review of Books editorial staff from 1988 to 2017, the editor of Little Star (literary magazine), and the literary executor of poet Joseph Brodsky. Kjellberg began Book Post in 2018 with the hope of creating a community of readers and writers. Her purpose? She wanted to “restore” and “broaden” a nationwide “commitment to informed discourse and culturally rich expression,” a highly laudable goal.
Book Post is on a short break right now. Kjellberg is taking a couple of weeks to reflect on the balance she wants to achieve “between the works of ambition and insight that [she is] trying to introduce readers to and [her] own more worldly excursions into the business of publishing and news.” Her search interests me. […]
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One
I was exiled in 1961, after Fidel overthrew Batista, a reactionary, US-backed puppet that quashed without mercy every Democratic movement in the country that was not in concert with US interests. The result unfortunately was Fidel, who descended from the Sierra Maestra, symbol and agent of a counter-revolution that itself sprung from a nexus of social injustice, foreign colonization, and imperial greed. Like so many others I lost my homeland, the trajectory of my life, and the lives of my family, inflected permanently.
Exile is a dislocation, the result of an interminable chain of causes and effects that lie far out of any one individual’s reach or grasp. It is not a choice, like the decision to pull up stakes and “go West” and “grow up with the country” as Horace Greeley advised. Exile is an hecho consumado, a fait accompli if you prefer the French expression. You find yourself in a car that is careening madly across lanes, the driver incapacitated. You reach for the steering wheel. Alas, you are locked in the trunk.
As a child I witnessed the adults around me struggling, working to put one foot in front of the other, while carrying on their backs the sorrow of loss and the fear of uncertainty. That’s hard testimony for anyone to bear, though children are highly plastic, adaptive creatures. Reading was my solace, my way of surviving. Reading mirrored my transit between home and world. I could shuttle across time and space with Austen and the Brontë sisters, Heinlein and Hemingway, Orwell and Huxley, or whatever book I stumbled upon and know that being “in between” was safe; that the transit between self and story offered an important silence.
“What did you learn in school today?” my mother would ask at the dinner table.
Whatever I reported was countered with lessons from my parents about Cuban history and literature, Cuban customs and language. It wasn’t until many years later, reading Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual, a work he presented initially for the BBC’s Reith Lectures, that I realized fully the gift my parents had given me, something Said refers to as the exile’s “double perspective”.
One of the advantages of exile, according to Said, is that we learn to “[l]ook at situations as contingent, not inevitable, [to] look at them as the result of a series of historical choices made by men and women, as facts of society made by human beings, and not as natural or god-given, therefore unchangeable, permanent, irreversible.”
Exile is “contrapuntal,” Said argues. It teaches you to see the present, not in isolation, but always in “counterpoint” (his word) to what has passed: the genocide, slavery, internment camps, forced labor, and colonialism upon which the present is built. You are haunted by history. You become a real-life version of Cole Sear, the troubled, isolated boy who claims to see dead people (“The Sixth Sense,” 1999).
By writing I give witness to a type of loss that for the great majority of Americans no longer exists as a felt experience. The trauma occurred so many generations ago that the immediacy of the pain has faded. To me, on the other hand, the pain of U.S. attempts to colonize Cuba is unremitting, as is the brutality of the ongoing 62-year embargo […]
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“To the Person Sitting in Darkness” is a demanding read by today’s standards. Though perhaps the difficulty makes Twain’s essay more important now, when emotive images (memes) have usurped argument and skimming has replaced reading. Pathos is not logos, and reading is not a form of mental hang gliding. Another difficulty is that the essay is anchored in history. All literary texts are anchored in history. Some, however, seem to be more easily untethered. This is not one of those.
To appreciate the satire, we have to appreciate the political events Twain witnessed, as well as the language used by those in power to represent those events to the voting public. Twain was a member of the Anti-Imperialist League, a group of like-minded thinkers who had the audacity to argue against militarization and colonialism, against self-serving hypocrisy and untrammeled violence. “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” was published in 1901 in the North American Review and it reflects some of the ideas and values associated with the League.
In February of 1898, President McKinley demanded that every US citizen “remember the Maine.” Today the phrase might be emblazoned on a tee-shirt or a trucker cap. Then, as now, the point was not to remember. The point was to forget the slaughter the US was inflicting on civilians in China, South Africa, the Philippines, and Cuba.
The explosion on the USS Maine, anchored in Havana Harbor, killed 266 of its 354 servicemen. The explosion was not the work of a rabid Cuban or Spanish terrorist. It was caused by a faulty boiler. McKinley and his Administration knew that. They recruited Randolph Hearst (think Rupert Murdock) and lied, turning a hideous and tragic accident into a political ruse.
They manufactured the perceptions and so the consent of the public.
Political ruses work, and, in fairness to McKinley, we can think of other cynical, propagandistic manipulations of language in the name of democracy–e.g., the false claim about the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin, the vial of yellow cake proffered as justification for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.
By April of 1898, the ruse had given McKinley the leverage he needed to ask Congress for authority to intervene militarily in Cuba, arguing that “[t]he only hope of relief and repose from a condition which can no longer be endured is the enforced pacification of Cuba.”
“Enforced pacification”? That’s the sort of political euphemism that would make Orwell wince. McKinley wanted Cuba for the same monetary and military reasons Jefferson wanted it just after the Louisiana Purchase. Congress complied with McKinley’s demands and offered the Teller Amendment, which specifically states that the US has no “intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said Island except for the pacification thereof.”
Having already misrepresented the deaths of 266 servicemen for his own political gain, McKinley gave Congress the middle finger. He called for 125,000 volunteers and a naval blockade of the northern coast of Cuba, knowing his actions would provoke Spain into declaring war on the US, which it did. In the US, this conflict is referred to as the Spanish-American War. Cubans, using less euphemism, refer to this event as the U.S. intervention in Cuba’s War of Independence from imperial Spain.
If you don’t quite get how galling McKinley’s illegal […]
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No prophet is welcome in his own country according to the New Testament. It isn’t so much what they foresee. It’s that their predictions are based on their ability to observe the foibles, biases, and bad practices of the present. Prophets foresee the future much like climate scientists who analyze past and present in order to predict the death of coral reefs and the steady rise of sea levels. We don’t want to hear anything critical about ourselves, and we don’t like inscrutable killjoys, prophets who warn us to temper our appetites, to nurture good habits, and to think of others.
One of my favorite secular prophets, Neil Postman, was a media and social critic at NYU for nearly 40 years. I was watching Jordan Klepper and Ronnie Chieng’s interview of Kyle Chayka, author of Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, on The Daily Show when I thought of Postman. The premise of Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, published in 1985, is that electronic media is homogenizing culture.
I have not read Filterworld yet. According to NPR, Chayka “argues that all this machine-guided curation [created by algorithms] has made us docile consumers and flattened our likes and tastes.” Chayka adds that “the algorithms pressure artists and other content creators to shape their work in ways that fit the feeds.” Algorithms are narrowing the scope of our world and spoon-feeding us our own biases. (In my mind’s eye I see Narcissus, enraptured by his own image, tipping his weight too far over the bank, and falling to his death. Or is the proper analogy to Midas who, in one of many versions of his story, dies of starvation induced by avarice, the food that touches his lips turning to gold?)
The despairing, enraged lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah eventually turned the crowd against him. People just did not want to hear another jeremiad, so they stoned him to death. “Shuffle Off to Bethlehem,” the eighth chapter of Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, has the pacing, the crescendo of a jeremiad, one we no longer have the option of dismissing since it has become our daily experience. Most of the coral is dead now and no longer the color of coral. The city of Miami has installed water pumps along certain streets that flood on a regular basis.
In 1985, when we were all less enraptured, Postman observed that a televangelist would be loath to base a sermon on Christ’s pointed remark to his disciples about materialism and salvation; specifically, that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (KJ Matthew 19:23-26). Postman quotes the executive director of the National Religious Broadcasters Association, who admits “‘You can get your share of the audience only by offering people something they want.’” The audience is told the moral lesson they want to hear because the televangelist is no longer a shepherd who loves his flock and leads them to safety. Love has shifted and become lucre, which is what the shepherd will see more of if he pleases his […]
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In a public-school decades ago, I learned early American History from someone who described the arrival of English pilgrims on this continent as a direct fulfillment of God’s will. The Almighty Himself, this teacher told the class, wanted these Europeans to inhabit this second Eden. As for the handful of murderous Calibans who managed to scale the walls of Paradise, the pilgrims could not help bumping into them, which is why we have Thanksgiving.
Obviously, the “c” word was never spoken in this classroom. The pilgrims’ motives, like the motives of the pioneers who later pushed westward across an “empty” terrain, could never be questioned. Their actions could never be referred to as conquest or the will to power, only the godly, progressive unfolding of civilization. The story this teacher told of the Boston Tea Party of 1773 was similarly plumb, square, and solid. The Sons of Liberty boarded ships in Boston Harbor and tossed crates of tea into the sea because “no taxation without representation” was a noble belief for which these patriots were willing to kill and die.
What I remember most about that long-ago classroom is the blank weight of questions I could not form much less express. How did the Sons of Liberty rationalize political violence? Why was their destruction of private property laudable? The ships they boarded, after all, were built in America and owned by Americans. Did the ends justify the means?
There were, too, comparisons across centuries that remained unspoken. For example, how were the Sons of Liberty in 1773 different from the rioters who spilled into the streets after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968; or the members of the Clamshell Alliance who demonstrated against the production of nuclear weapons in 1976?
The ships boarded by the Sons of Liberty were trading with the British East India Company. What were the British doing in India, anyway? Was it anything like what the US was doing in its “backyard” (e.g., Cuba, 1961; Brazil, 1964; Bolivia, 1971; Chile, 1973; Argentina, 1976; etc.)? Why, on that December night of the raid, did some members of the Sons of Liberty dress as Indigenous Americans?
The 1773 event was invoked in 2009, when a group of right-wing Republicans formed the Tea Party, taking on the famous moniker without considering who they were emulating or what they were tacitly evoking. Like their earlier comrades, the Tea Party Republicans didn’t like taxes. That was clear, though I remember wanting desperately to interrupt the television pundits and ask them to ask these reactionaries how they felt about level sidewalks and working streetlamps; well-paved roads and well-timed traffic lights; dog parks and snowplows; electrical grids and clean water?
“What will happen next?” the pundits asked one another after each commercial break. Only the future mattered. My mind drifted back to Orwell’s 1984 and the “memory hole,” the chute into which poor Winston tosses bits of reported information, the first draft of written history. Down the chute and into the incinerator went the facts, along with every possibility of understanding the present moment.
People remember Santayana for his aphorism, “[t]hose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” which appears in The Life of Reason, a very accessible philosophical tome. The sort of memory […]
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“Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.” The line, written in 1764, belongs to Oliver Goldsmith, an English poet and novelist barely anyone reads anymore. His words could have served as an epigraph to Nathan Heller’s essay, “The End of the English Major,” which appeared in The New Yorker in February of this year. But these days, who lingers over an epigraph? And who would dare make the counter-intuitive argument that “underserved” students of every race and ethnicity should pursue a degree in the Humanities?
I would.
About a million years ago, I was an English major. On breaks, I worked at the up-town dress boutique where my mother, the seamstress who spoke broken English, knelt before wealthy women, pinning up hemlines. Their husbands, often retired leaders of industry, sat in plush chairs waiting for their spendthrift wives, killing time asking me whether I could sew and why I had no accent. When I told them I was an English major at a private university, they snorted and hiccupped, amused that a working-class Cuban immigrant would take such a ludicrous, impractical path.
I had no conscious understanding then about my drive to conquer the language that had conquered my parents, separating us from family and culture. All I had was a heart ignited against tyranny and the will to intervene between my parents and those members of the English-speaking world who mocked them.
“I can’t understand you,” the woman on the other side of the notions counter sneered at my mother.
“I think you can,” I countered.
Embarrassed, the woman counted out the zippers and buttons, the packets of sew-on snaps and spools of hem tape my mother had requested. She had never expected anyone like me, like my mother, to challenge her assumptions about the humanity of others.
In a recent Substack post, the self-styled Democratic populist, Jim Hightower, calls out right-wing politicians in North Carolina, Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and Mississippi for doing their best to eliminate the Humanities from university curricula:
“The right-wing’s shriveled view,” Hightower writes, “is not about expanding one’s horizon and enriching America’s democratic society—but solely about training students to fit into a corporate workforce, sacrificing the possibility of a fuller life for the possibility of a fatter paycheck.” (11/14/2023)
Hightower is correct, though the shift from teaching students to think, as opposed to teaching them how to make a widget, is at least three decades old now. I have witnessed that shift from the podium at the front of a college classroom.
The decline in the Humanities began the day a rapacious politician, masquerading as an intellectual (“thought leader”), defined higher education as an “economic engine.” Suddenly the process of education became a cumbersome means to a lucrative end, the fastest possible monetization of a young student. The question of how we develop a thoughtful, well-rounded, contributing member of society was dispatched, usurped by a different question. How will the graduate, degree in hand, serve the interests of specific business sectors?
With far too few exceptions, exceptions that break along economic class, we are no longer teaching students to think or asking them about the distance between how the world is and how it could be. We […]
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I once heard the comedian Trevor Noah describe the daily news as a yoking of terror and joy. A meteor, he quipped, is hurtling toward earth, and it’s shaped like a penis. Noah captures brilliantly the conundrum of our times: Should we cry or should we laugh? This summer the movie box office captures that same mix of horror (“Oppenheimer”) and glee (“Barbie”). Nuclear annihilation or flat arches? Even the pile of books stacked near my bed offers extremes: nonfiction essays about the end of a climate that can sustain human life, or a novel about a woman who starts again at mid-life.
While there are a number of authors writing about the environment, Elizabeth Kolbert remains my absolute favorite. She doesn’t simply write about the environmental sciences. She doesn’t simply report on climate change. She tells us a story that compels us to slow down and listen. Take Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, for example, which was originally published in 2006 and then revised and published again in 2015. “Field notes” suggests a random collection of observations. Yet what Kolbert achieves here is a hybrid form, scientific reportage that also works like a collection of carefully woven short stories about our relationship, as a species, to the world around us.
“The Darkening Sea,” one of the chapters in Field Notes, is the story of how scientists came to understand something they never thought possible, in Kolbert’s words, “the chemistry of an entire ocean changing.” The heroes are the scientists who are trying to save some of the tiniest aquatic organisms, pteropods, one of many marine species that wear their skeletons on the outside of their bodies. As the world’s oceans absorb more and more CO2, they are losing their alkalinity. The pteropods’ skeletons are dissolving, and the sea is darkening. Will the scientists save the pteropods? Will our heroes defeat the culprit who, in Kolbert’s words, “set in motion change on a geologic scale”?
Kolbert describes Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, published in 2021, as “a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” Turns out we are the villain and the hero. We don’t know whether to cry or laugh. We certainly don’t seem willing to transform the greed that has driven us to this point into altruism, stewardship, obligation. In Under a White Sky, Kolbert interviews a panoply of experts, all of them, as she notes, genuinely hopeful about their work. They were less hopeful about politics. Geoengineers can shoot pellets into the atmosphere to deflect the sun’s rays, changing blue sky to white, and cooling down rising temperatures. Politicians will decide who lives under a white sky and why.
Reading Kolbert’s work, including The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, for which she earned the Pulitzer in 2015, I recall Coleridge’s ancient mariner, a figure enlightened and thus compelled to tell the same story to anyone willing to listen. Obviously, Kolbert’s genre is nonfiction. That said, it is difficult to ignore the dramatic arc of her essays, the distillation of her interviewees into characters, and the thematic focus on the human species, sublime and ridiculous, standing at a […]
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There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –
Emily Dickinson compares a book’s power to carry us to a different place and time to a frigate. From the fathoms of memory, an image of myself as a child rises: me curled up in a remote corner, stowed away for hours in the cargo hold of a book, visiting places where there were neither bickering parents nor exile’s terrible loss. Books carried me away. They brought me back safely and just in time to set the table for dinner. As the years passed, I came to know reading as one of the surest ways of understanding the frames that shape our interpretation of the world, of others.
How do you see the world? This is the tacit question we ask an author each time we slip into a story. Reading is the closest we can be to understanding another person’s way of seeing. We are all trapped within our own consciousness. We peer through frames we are often unaware of such as culture and language, family and upbringing. Even the physiology of our eyes plays a role in determining how near or far we can see, as well as the colors and shapes of the world around us.
The price of a ticket on Dickinson’s frugal Chariot has risen. So much already overdetermines whether a child can stowaway in a book. Is the school library open, its shelves stocked? Or is it locked, deserted, filled with dust and abandoned furniture and long lists posted by the door of titles that should never ever be read? Does the surrounding community have the funds to build a public library? Are there adults around with the leisure to model the very habit of reading?
I imagine Dickinson would be disappointed to see the shift from readers as travelers to readers as consumers; or, more accurately, to readers as rapid skimmers of information packaged in a way that privileges speedy consumption over the quality of what is consumed–information over knowledge, product over process. Algorithms predict our reading choices and then present even narrower ways of seeing, thus confirming our own prejudices. Artificial intelligence machines such as ChatGPT can learn and generate language.
So why not use A.I. to generate the essays or novels an audience has learned to crave? Put differently: why not let the ends justify the means? Why not plagiarize every paper and “autocomplete” every love letter and memoir, every poem and novel all in the name of money? The romance of stowing away in a book is a distinctly quaint 19th-century idea, or so it seems.
In a recent piece in the New York Times, Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts, and Jeffrey Watumull observe that programs such as ChatGPT offer nothing like human thought because
“[t]heir flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case—that’s description and prediction—but also what is not the […]
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If writing ever makes you feel lonely, consider Cecile Pineda’s work. You won’t find solace there. You will find a model of courage, of an artist living “at the edge of Being,” the phrase she uses in a 2004 interview with Jeff Biggers in The Bloomsbury Review. Pineda never offers readers the comfort of genre, of managed expectations. She never feigns a coherent, well-organized world or self. For her, the world is mutilated and nonsensical, and the self is shattered. She writes as she lives, balancing between life and death, always a soldier at the tip of the spear, never a general safe at the back of a fray. Didion could point to a center that wasn’t holding. Pineda would not, even to the point of madness.
What does madness feel like? In her memoir, Entry without Inspection: A Writer’s Life in El Norte, published in 2020, two short years before her death, she compares it to being “…evicted from yourself.” As she explains, your world vanishes. “There’s nothing left to fall back on, no sense of who you might be or where you might have come from or what dues you may have paid. Nowhere is your country, no one is your kin.” The burden of his undocumented status, that feeling that “[n]owhere is your country, no one is your kin,” lies at the heart of what she terms her “cultural deracination”:
My father made the decision to deprive me of a language (Spanish), in a sense to cut out my tongue. But he was not stupid. He understood this country, he respected the weight of its racism; the vacuum presented by its aspiritual culture. He made a conscious decision that I would speak French (my mother’s language) in place of Spanish. But I am fiercely proud—especially in the face of California State Proposition 187—of claiming my place as the child of an illegal.
Her mother is French. Her father is Mexican. Her father cuts away one of those two native tongues in order to protect her. She sutures her tongue, claims her place as a Chicana, only to find herself separated from the broader culture. Here is the “estrangement” that forges her identity as a writer living “at the edge of Being.” The title of her memoir refers to her father’s immigration status. He fled the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and crossed the border under an assumed name. Her memoir begins and ends with her father’s passage across the border and the resulting eclipse of his identity and hers.
Pineda drapes the story of her life over a ten-day arc, the story of Jean Blum, a Holocaust survivor and the whistleblower who drew national attention to the deaths of immigrants detained by ICE, immigrants like her father, who sought asylum but were criminalized instead, charged with “entry without inspection.” The connections between Blum’s story and Pineda’s are not random, though to readers demanding explanations, transitions, or sustained argument, Pineda throws down the gauntlet. Make what you will of these intersections between Blum’s story and mine, she seems to say; between the racism that ignited Hitler’s followers and the racism that ignites dehumanizing US government policies and border militias alike. She and Blum share “the story of a life in search of […]
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William Zinsser’s On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction is one of those resources that can be found on the bookshelves of so many writers and students of writing. Assigned to teach an undergraduate grammar course this next academic year, I placed it on the list of required texts. I want my students to understand grammar in a broader context–not simply as the equivalent of a driving manual filled with rules to memorize but as a set of tools for developing voice and ultimately for developing a sense of purpose. For Zinsser there is a “personal transaction” that forms the core of good writing. “Good writing,” he explains, “has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it’s not a question of gimmicks to ‘personalize’ the author.” For Zinsser “clarity” and “strength” are at the core of good writing.
Divided into four parts, On Writing Well begins with a discussion of these two core “Principles,” with Zinsser evoking George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” and then offering more recent examples of the “clutter,” the “verbal camouflage” that is especially evident in business and politics. Although Zinsser sees his work as a “complement” to Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, his discussion of writing reminds me of the work of Richard Lanham, who, echoing similar ideas, offers a rather handy method for revising prose.
In Revising Prose, Lanham asks what appears at first to be a simple question: “Who is doing what?” Here is one of Lanham’s examples of “Official Style” and its revision using what he terms The Paramedic Method (PM):
[Official Style]
The establishment of an error detection mechanism is necessary to establish a sense of independence in our own movement planning and correction.
[Revision]
Unless we know we are doing something wrong, we can’t correct it.
One important point to observe is how Lanham focuses on the main subject and verb: establishment is. Notice that he switches out the abstract noun (“establishment”) with a more human pronoun (“we”). He also switches up the verb, making it less passive: “is” becomes “can’t correct.” Another important point reveals the conscious presence of the writer. Lanham chooses to subordinate one idea to the other: “Unless we know…, we can’t correct.” He makes a decision that helps his readers understand how the absence of one thing influences another. In the process, he also creates a lovely cadence. Don’t believe me? Try reading both examples out loud with feeling. What do you hear? At what points are you able to rest and take a breath?
This is so much fun! Please indulge me in another example of Lanham’s PM:
[Official Style]
Pelicans may also be vulnerable to direct oiling, but the lack of mortality data despite numerous spills in areas frequented by the species suggests that it practices avoidance.
[Revision]
Pelicans seem to survive oil spills by avoiding the oil.
Here again Lanham focuses on the axis of the sentence, its main subject and verb. Here again he is consciously present. What strikes me, however, is what I can only call the moral core of the sentence, the sentence Lanham has lifted in situ like a forensic archeologist revealing a bone fragment at a mass grave. Hearkening back to Orwell, the revised sentence requires us to […]
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Novels reside at the intersection of psychology and sociology. Depending on the era and the novelist, the intersection of the psychological and the social shifts and becomes the story of a character’s formation (the bildungsroman), or the story of a society that works to crush the very notion of character or self. Novelists negotiate that intersection, consciously or not, reflecting the history they witness and the societies in which they abide, telling the story of a character who develops agency because she disobeys, or the story of a character crushed because she can only obey.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, reflects on the biblical story of the Tower of Babel in a recent essay in The Atlantic. For Haidt, Babel serves as a metaphor “for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit.” As he explains, these past ten years everyone in the US became “disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We [became] cut off from one another and from the past.” What caused this disintegration? Haidt points to a shift in how “social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations.” Social-media users “became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand–activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.”
According to Haidt, “[o]nce social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.” These dynamics were driven by “like,” “share,” and “retweet” buttons that encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics….” These “viral dynamics” have been detrimental to democracy, exacerbating the very conditions James Madison most feared and expressed in “Federalist No. 10.” For Haidt, Madison and his peers were “excellent social psychologists” who understood how “‘the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions’” erode democratic process.
In sum, social media after 2009 has been corrosive to the forces that, Haidt explains, social scientists (and Founding Fathers, by extension) consider essential to democratic societies: “social capital (extensive networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.” The story of Babel serves as a metaphor for the fragmentation and anarchy that corrodes democracy. Haidt emphasizes Madison’s observation that “people are so prone to factionalism that ‘where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.’” He concludes that, unfortunately, “[s]ocial media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous.”
Speaking of “shared stories,” one way to interpret the story of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) is to emphasize the vanity and audacity of humanity. Intent on building a tower high into the heavens, we managed to offend God, who then retaliated, punishing us by dividing one against the other, making everyone’s speech different and incomprehensible. Another interpretation begins with the recollection that humanity was already divided by language, well before they built the offensive tower.
Consider how the Protestant poet and political pamphleteer John Milton describes the Fall of man in Paradise Lost as a fall from language, a widening breach between Adam’s thoughts and the words […]
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem was the first collection of Joan Didion’s essays that I ever read, attracted by the allusion to W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” a favorite poet and poem. Didion, born in 1934, died this past December 2021; Yeats, born in 1865, died in 1939. Their lives straddled centuries so that, like Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, they each faced in two directions. Yeats looked to the past (a world war, ancient scholars, the Book of Revelations) to prophesize about the future. Didion focused on the present, honing an uncompromising will to see and name what she saw.
For Didion, the writer must see with a nearly prophetic clarity that strips away sentiment and anything that obstructs, which is perhaps why she ends her preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem with a warning: “writers are always selling somebody out” (italics original). Clarity trumps expediency every time. Writing is not predicated on a desire for objectivity, which is itself an impossible fantasy, but rather an unwavering intention to observe her heartfelt response to the world. There is nothing ascetic or mechanical to what she describes. As she notes pointedly, “since I am neither a camera eye nor much given to writing pieces that do not interest me, whatever I do write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel.”
Yeats developed his fantastic ideas about history and aesthetic production over many years and most fully in A Vision (rev. 1937), a fascinating collection of stories, theories, reflections, and metaphors that serve as a key to his poetry, his sense of humor, and his grappling with modernity. Yeats imagines human history in two-thousand-year cycles, and he represents these cycles as cones. Time spirals from the apex to the base of the cone and back. At the apex, the narrowest point in the cone, the centrifugal forces, the social and cultural values that hold us together, are the very strongest and produce great art and human advancement. As the point farthest from the apex, the “widening gyre” or base of the historical cone, we are in “Discord,” in want of harmony, separated from our heart (dis = “apart” and cordis = “heart”).
Didion’s allusion to Yeats’ poem is critical to understanding her despair after the collection’s title essay “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” was published. Didion explains how, for some years, the images in “The Second Coming” had “reverberated in [her] inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there.” The connection between eye and ear is also something Didion shares with Yeats, so the affinity she finds in his lines is no surprise.
In the first stanza of “The Second Coming,” Yeats evokes the approaching moment of collapse: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” He situates us at a moment in history when “[t]he best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” In the second stanza, a vision of Spiritus Mundi, the Spirit of the World, of human history, appears to him. Discord is sure to come, for what he sees at the beginning of the twentieth century, the next two-thousand-year cycle, is a “rough beast,” the Anti-Christ, “slouching towards Bethlehem.”
I like to think great poets write […]
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All writing is a form of storytelling, so if you are puritanical about genre, this is the point where you should clutch your pearls and look away. The stark grocery list stuck to the refrigerator door is the skeleton outline of its author’s desire. It promises a plot (a trip to the store); characters (the list maker, the hero who treks to the store, store clerks and cashiers and inattentive customers); conflict (what if there are no vine-ripe, organic, locally sourced heirloom tomatoes?); setting (pristine kitchen, packed parking lot, labyrinthine rows of cans and jars); and any number of themes and symbols (the Siren song of the cookie aisle, empty shelves, and banks of crisp, glistening greens). Can you understand now how the desire for that perfect Tinga de Pollo lies tacit in the stark outline scribbled on a scrap of paper and stuck with a magnet to the refrigerator door?
Organize the list, add to it a series of imperatives (chop, toss, stir, drizzle), and it becomes a recipe, another tacit story about a cook and what and whom she loves. Insert the recipe, along with a few other favorites, into a story of two young, star-crossed lovers, and it becomes the novel, Like Water for Chocolate, the recipes reinforcing aspects of Laura Esquivel’s story: the role of women in a patriarchal family, the expression of love (familial and erotic) through cooking. Squint and the novel becomes part sociological treatise (a story about Mexican society at the end of the nineteenth century). Squint again and it is a historical narrative (a story about the Mexican Revolution). Esquivel’s novel is a fable, an epic, another example of magical realism, the critics sputtered. They want desperately to classify it, which is a little like killing something in order to possess it.
Historians are novelists who feel a near religious devotion to the factual elements of the stories they tell, confessing their slightest detour into the realm of inference as if they committed a deadly sin. Naomi Oreskes and Erick Conway are both historians of science, yet the confounding problem of how to communicate the rapidly accelerating pace of climate change turns them into iconoclasts.
Genres are useful as long as you are willing to shatter the icons you worship. Consider Oreskes and Conway’s opening sentence, its clauses perfectly balanced, encapsulating the full arc of their story in a manner reminiscent of Dickens: “Science fiction writers construct an imaginary future; historians attempt to reconstruct the past.”
One sort of writer looks forward and the other back; one puts things together, the other takes things apart; and both want to understand the present moment.
Oreskes and Conway imagine how a “future historian” writing in the year 2393 from somewhere in the Second People’s Republic of China might struggle to understand how a civilization as brilliant as the West could also be so bloody stupid, how “[k]knowledge did not translate into power.” The plot of the “future historian’s” story is our collapse. The story, however, “essays” (tests, tries) itself, offering factual answers extrapolated from scientific data.
What does the “future historian” conclude about us?
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How did Judith Ortiz Cofer transform herself from a “frustrated artist” to a “working writer”? Read The Latin Deli, where she describes her transformation as “an act of will.” She decided to get up at 5:00 a.m. each morning, two hours before anyone else in her household. The decision became an expectation she had of herself, and the expectation developed into a daily ritual, whether she was writing poetry or fiction or dividing her time between the two genres. She completed her novel, The Line of the Sun, not by expecting an enormous swath of time to open magically before her, but by writing in small increments every day. She developed short, reflective essays and stories the same way, later collecting them side by side with poems that amplified or reframed their themes. She empowered herself by making an active choice and recognizing that the “urgency to create can easily be dissipated,” especially if you are a woman. In “5:00 A.M.: Writing as Ritual” she admonishes us to do whatever we have to do, including “stealing” time from ourselves.
Ortiz Cofer presents the decision to write as a simple practicality. Read Woman in Front of the Sun, however, to understand the weight and complexity of her struggle to give voice to her experiences as a Latina, born in Puerto Rico and raised in the US. The essay “Are You a Latina Writer?” answers the question posed in the title. Her purpose as “an emerging writer” evolved. She wanted her work to serve as a bridge, a way of transiting across borders
so that I would not be like my parents, who precariously straddled cultures, always fearing the fall, anxious as to which side they really belonged to; I will be crossing the bridge of my design and construction, at will, not abandoning either side, but traveling back and forth without fear and confusion as to where I belonged–I belonged to both.” (Woman in Front of the Sun)
To write she must separate herself out from parents “who precariously straddled cultures.” She must design and build a bridge and travel from one side to the other, never abandoning her family and sense of place, never being fearful or confused. Aside from the magnitude of the tasks she sets for herself, there is the paradox she must negotiate daily: to survive, she must be separate and unlike her parents; to survive, she must never separate herself from or betray them. This is a double bind that I understand especially well as a Latina from a sister island, Cuba.
In “A Prayer, a Candle, and a Notebook,” the sense of distance between herself and those she loves is even more stark. In this essay, faith, hope, and the notebook where she records her memories serve as the sources from which she fills her well of knowledge:
As I look deeper into myself,” she writes, “I discover that I left the place where my family’s well is located. As a writer I am always in the new territory of Myself Alone. I am looking for new lands to discover every time I begin a sentence. I carry nothing but a dowser’s wand and my need to make order, to find a few answers.” (Woman in Front of the Sun)
Ortiz […]
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