Happy Friday, everyone. I’ll be taking Labor Day off, so no email on Monday, but there’s plenty of stuff to read to hold you over to Tuesday. First, keep an eye on The Weekly Standard’s Books and Arts page over the long weekend, as essays and reviews from the latest issue are released online.
Next, here’s Andrea Long Chu on Lexi Freiman’s satirical novel on teens, cyborgs, and critical theory. I’m not sure what Chu means by “historical pain.” Still, it looks interesting: “In Lexi Freiman’s Inappropriation, feminism is a club. Ziggy’s new friends collect traumas like comic books, sheathing their precious wounds in fantasy’s protective plastic sleeves. They comb their classmates’ Instagrams for heteronormativity. They attend pool parties at the popular girls’ gated mansions in hopes of getting harassed…These games make sense to Ziggy. They are the millennial version of the workshops her mother, Ruth, runs out of their living room, New Agey group-therapy sessions in which women séance each other’s relatives, then break to decorate throw pillows. Like her friends’ games, these workshops teach Ziggy that the gap between the self and historical pain can only be bridged by make-believe. This is satire, but it is not sarcasm. A lesser novel than Inappropriation would pick on what the book’s jacket copy calls ‘PC culture,’ a fruit that hangs so low it might as well be a vegetable. It is easy, and always flattering, to condemn performative wokeness. It is harder, and smarter, to ask if politics ever transcends adolescent fantasy. Ziggy uses the political as an excuse for belonging. Are you telling me you don’t? Freiman suspects you do, and she has the same thick, buttermilky compassion for her readers as she does for her characters, sour and full of saggy lumps. She burlesques them—and you—but only because she identifies. The results are darkly funny.”
Bijan Stephen visits the last Blockbuster in America. What did Blockbuster offer that Netflix can’t?
The women of Impressionism: “Morisot is lyrical where Cassatt is analytical; her color is clearer and less rich. Her paintings tend toward a balancing of color, even a kind of monochromy. One could construct an extensive point-by-point comparison between Cassatt’s Autumn and Morisot’s vernal park-bench portrait Young Girl in a Park (1888–93). But for all the differences, what they share is a systematic use of the painting’s facture—mostly free-flowing in Morisot’s case, more restless and agitated with Cassatt—to articulate the canvas as a space of nearness, to express at once both the distinction and the continuity between a painting’s subject and the surrounding space, the hidden unity of figure and background.”
Robert P. Baird reviews William Logan’s latest collection of essays: “Logan is both a world-class grumbler with a crotchety disdain for what used to be called multiculturalism and a stiletto-sharp stylist with appealing allergies to cant and special pleading. (Not even Richard Wilbur, one of his favorites, got off easy for publishing a weak book at age 79.) At once meaner than he needs to be and funnier than he has any right to be, he writes so well you nearly forget how much you disagree with him. While Logan’s reputation as a hatchet man is well-deserved, his often hilarious vituperations have long obscured his talents as a close reader and literary historian. In his latest book, Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods, he seems determined to balance his accounts. Here the barbed aperçus and hollow-point insults of his reviews have given way to careful, almost comically meticulous literary-historical investigations.”
Nicolas Shakespeare reviews a new book on Hemingway’s destructive infatuation with Adriana Ivancich: “Wyndham Lewis blamed Gertrude Stein for making a clown of Hemingway by teaching him her ‘baby talk’, the result being that Hemingway ‘invariably invoked a dull-witted, bovine, monosyllabic simpleton, a lethargic and stuttering dummy… a super-innocent, queerly sensitive village idiot of a few words and fewer ideas.’ Nowhere is that description truer of Papa than in his relationship with Adriana…His letters to her are as rambling and incoherent as hers to him. She writes: ‘I whould [sic] have so many things to say to you that I prefer to skip them all.’ And again: ‘Put your eye glasses on and look at me streat [sic].’ Yet dumbfounded by her ‘rapier wit’, he urges Adriana to write poetry (which Mondadori will publish) — ‘In the interior of the island of Cuba/the earth is red/red’ — and to draw the cover illustrations (which Scribner will publish) for the two novels that he starts with Adriana at his side, Across the River and into the Trees and The Old Man and the Sea. Not deserving to stand on the same shelf as Lolita or Death in Venice, Across the River is a direct transcription of Hemingway’s embarrassing middle-aged infatuation with a girl whose dialogue, according to Mary, was ‘banal beyond reason’. Autumn in Venice goes some way to explain why that novel, which in all seriousness he considered ‘a helluva book’, if not his best, is quite so fascinatingly atrocious, and, in the estimation of the critic Maxwell Geismar, ‘a synthesis of everything that is bad in his previous work’.”
Researchers may be closer to locating the lost Monastery of Deer following the discovery of a medieval game board in the Scottish town of Mintlaw.
Fiction critic and former National Book Critics Circle board member Mark Athitakis is starting a “weekly-ish” newsletter. I’ve followed Mark’s work for almost ten years now, and he’s always worth reading. Subscribe here.
Essay of the Day:
Chris Willie, an expert in environmental physiology and a post-doctoral fellow with the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, was working on an essay for The Walrus on the opioid crisis and his addiction to fentanyl when he died of an overdose. That was published last week with his family’s permission. Here’s a snippet:
“The human mind is a wondrous liquid experiment: a system of organized chemicals that grows itself into the future, like plants with roots in time. Motivation begins deep in the brain, where a neurochemical cauldron of past experiences, present morale, and future goals coalesce to stimulate a particular behaviour: I want that. This desire for something blooms as an isolated electrical explosion from some cells in your core, the place your feelings are born into your world. Which is to say, the basis for motivation is a primal thing in a wanton pursuit of prey. The big drugs— cocaine, opioids, methamphetamine— infect this motivation, wrap you tenderly in a warm dopamine blanket, and then drag you by your ankle behind a runaway horse. In the United States, there are now more deaths from overdoses than car crashes or gun violence: overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of fifty. In British Columbia, more people died from overdoses in 2016 than of Alzheimer’s, chronic liver disease, and suicide. It’s estimated that fatal opioid-related overdoses have tripled since the start of this millennium.
“But preconceptions die hard. No one suspects chronically constricted pupils, long sleeves, and drowsiness in a doctor or lawyer or professor as anything but the signs of overwork. And society’s view that hard drugs are principally the vice of city ghettos has persisted despite evidence that these substances are more widespread. In areas particularly ravaged by opioids, such as Vancouver and Huntington, West Virginia, the problem is so common that if a funeral is delayed due to an autopsy backlog, it is often assumed that the deceased died of overdose.
“The assumption that a single hit of heroin will cause a lifetime addiction is more the result of things like Richard Nixon’s war on drugs than of pharmacology. If Nixon’s perceptions were strictly true— that drugs are highly addictive and that all addicts are criminals— every patient ever given morphine would be out there stealing purses to feed their need for more. There are all manner of data on the effects of heroin on the minds of mammals, but on one point many agree: infant stress can produce an adult brain with a heightened response to opioids and greater tendency toward addictive behaviours.
“In a study done in the 1970s, for example, it was found that rats who were isolated from other rats will choose water laced with drugs. By comparison, when the rats were introduced to a highly social environment, called ‘Rat Park,’ and given two seemingly identical water sources, they avoided the water laced with morphine. It wasn’t a definitive study, but it showed that environment does play a role in addiction.
“Humans, too, will take to behaviours and chemicals that alter our interaction with the world in order to numb internal strife. Substance abuse is the attempt to extrinsically alter our internal experience— our perception of the world— to escape pain. Taking control of our internal climate is called coping, and the better our coping mechanisms are, the less urgent our need for escape.
“I have never excelled at coping. I was that infant child who hammered his head on the ground when frustrated by anything at all. It must have been embarrassing to parent the son with the ever-present forehead scabs. Perhaps I found it soothing, because, thirty years later, I still find serenity in chaos and derive calm from risk. And I occasionally still bang my head in frustration.”
Photos: The Namibian Coast
Poem: Edmund Keeley, “On Turning Ninety”
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