March, 2010
by Barbara Hoffert | Mar-12-2010
National Book Critics Circle Announces Its Winners for the Publishing Year 2009
On Thursday, March11, 2010, at the New School’s Tishman auditorium in New York, the National Book Critics Circle announced its award winners for the publishing year 2009. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Holt), a Booker Prize winner last year, won the fiction award. The board saw it as an extraordinary accomplishment, original in voice and ambitious in style, that brings us into intimate contact with a compelling Cromwell.
The poetry award went to Rae Armantrout’s Versed (Wesleyan University Press) for its demonstration of superb intellect and technique, its melding of experimental poetics but down-to-earth subject matter to create poems you are compelled to return to, that get richer with each reading.
The nonfiction award went to Richard Holmes for The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon), a book that links science and literature, re-creating a period that we associate with poetry—thus making new links and moving our thoughts in a whole new direction.
The criticism award was given to Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays (Graywolf), a quintessential essay collection that reveals emotional truths about our country. In biography, Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life (Knopf) won the biography award for a powerful example of reportage, a close reading of the life and the circumstances that delivers a superlative understanding of who the writer was. Finally, in autobiography, the board honored Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End (Norton) as a funny, exact, philosophical reflection, told from the end of the author’s life yet never presuming that age grants special wisdom—only some affecting and unexpected stories.
by James Marcus | Mar-09-2010
Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member James Marcus discusses
poetry finalist Rae Armantrout's Versed (Wesleyan University Press)
For much of her lengthy career, Rae Armantrout has cocked a skeptical eye at the American language—as if it needed a background check and a good body frisk. It wasn’t the music of words that aroused her suspicions. It was their capacity to sneak in bad faith and political flab under the radar. And yet Armantrout’s poems, with their tendency, as she has said, to “focus on the interventions of capitalism into consciousness,” have nothing of the ideological hall monitor about them. They are instead playful, poignant, and metaphysically alert—never more so than in Versed, her tenth collection.
Here as elsewhere, she has a fondness for the snub-nosed, snapped-off line bequeathed to American poetry by William Carlos Williams. Her attitude to the sort of humble objects that prompted Williams’s famous credo (“No ideas but in things”) is a little more complicated. She begins “Name Calling” with a tongue-in-cheek denunciation: “Objects are silly. / Lonesome / as the word ‘Ow!’ / is.” And yet in the next stanza, she seems more than willing to pay them mind:
Could we grant them
a quorum—
dense,
with the shiny
glossolalia
of the leaves,
the resilience
of open-ended
questions?
She is similarly ambivalent about the very idea of metaphor. On one hand, it strikes her as an endless series of bogus equivalencies. In “Equals,” such representations seem downright sinister: “One lizard / jammed headfirst / down the throat / of a second.” In “Integer,” Armantrout is even more straightforward: “Metaphor / is ritual sacrifice. / It kills the look-alike.” Yet her own poems are constructed out of marvelous (if strictly rationed) bits of figurative language, and she knows we are more or less stuck with the “mesh / of near / approximations.” In “Scumble,” a witty riff on the arbitrary relationship of words to the things they represent, she asks:
What if there were a hidden pleasure
in calling one thing
by another’s name?
Oh, but there is. Doubters need only immerse themselves in Versed, whose vigilant, often beautiful poems seem to reset the reader’s mental instrumentation—what Armantrout calls the “whirligig / of attention, / the figuring and / reconfiguring / of charges / among orbits / (obits) / that has taken forever.”
Click here to see Rae Armantrout read from Versed.
The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.
by Art Winslow | Mar-09-2010
Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, 
Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Art Winslow discusses nonfiction finalist Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books)
By 1921, Henry Ford’s company had a lock on more than half the U.S. automobile market, turning out 2 million Model Ts a year, with a cost of production 60% lower than it had a decade beforehand. This was not the “race to the bottom” of today’s globalism, searching for the cheapest possible labor, either, for when Ford announced he would pay workers an incentive $5 dollars a day, it was twice the industry standard of the time. It was not the production line per se but the close and careful choreographing of multiple processes simultaneously that allowed for the industrial efficiency, the approach that came to be known as “Fordism,” as Greg Grandin explains in Fordlandia.
Grandin’s book is an account of a Ford project little known today, the establishment of a rubber plantation on a tributary of the Amazon in the Brazilian jungle, but along the way it also presents a lucid and nuanced analysis of the contradictions built into Ford’s brand of paternalized capitalism. Even as he catalogues its failures, Grandin notes that Ford’s impulses toward social engineering “compare well with what is available in much of the world today.”
Over the course of nearly two decades, Henry Ford pumped tens of millions of dollars into funding two American towns in Brazil, “complete with central squares, sidewalks, indoor plumbing, hospitals, manicured lawns, movie theaters, swimming pools, golf courses, and of course Model Ts and As rolling down their paved streets,” Grandin writes. (Ford, born on a farm in Michigan, hated cows; today one of those golf courses is grazeland for cattle.)
The major purchase of Brazilian property, on the shore of the Tapajos River, was roughly sketched out by two employees Ford sent there in 1927, who drew a line on the map encompassing 5,625 square miles. The state of Para ended up ceding Ford slightly less, but the nearly 2.5 million-acre swath was about the size of Connecticut, and the half that represented public land was given to Ford free, the government was so eager for development in its backwater regions.
Ford understood “that high wages and decent benefits would do more than create a dependable and thus more productive workforce; they would also stabilize and stimulate demand for industrial products by turning workers into consumers.” In an ideal sense Ford was an admirer of Emerson, and he pictured in his methods a kind of holism that Grandin interprets as “an American pastoralism that didn’t oppose nature and industrialization, or man and the machine, but saw each fulfilling the other. “ Yet “both his car and his factory system worked against the world he hoped to bring into being,” Grandin asserts.
The eccentricities and worse of the man—Ford’s anti-Semitism, for example—are well explored by Grandin, who rounds out his chronicle of hubris and steady slippage in the Amazon (including uprisings by the workers) with accounts of Ford’s penchant for attempting to create self-sustaining village industries and planned communities, several of those in Michigan. When production of latex proved extremely problematic, Ford’s mission was then rationalized as a civilizing one. Ford hated FDR’s New Deal, but the 1930 revolution in Brazil that brought Getulio Vargas to power, propelling pro-labor, FDR-style legislation, helped him a great deal, but one of the multiple ironies in Fordlandia.
As Grandin sees it, “Born more from political frustration at home than from the need to acquire control over yet another raw material abroad, Fordlandia represents in crystalline form the utopianism that powered Fordism—and Americanism.”
Click here to read an excerpt from Fordlandia.
Click here to watch Greg Grandin discuss Fordlandia (courtesy of Democracy Now!)
The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.
by Carlin Romano | Mar-08-2010
In a literary world where only one Italian intellectual gets to be world-famous at a time, Ignazio Silone (1900-78) enjoyed that perch in the middle years of the 20th century. Although the literature Nobels in his lifetime went to Deledda, Pirandello, Quasimodo and Montale, Silone's complex profile—novelist, activist, editor, political theorist, former communist turned gently anti-communist tribune of socialism—made him an authoritative and admired figure. Praised by the likes of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann and Bertrand Russell, he died with the aura of "classic author" about him, his 1930s novels Fontamara and Bread and Wine translated everywhere.
With the notable exception of Primo Levi, whose well-earned American apotheosis led to multiple biographies in English, modern Italian novelists and intellectuals rarely find an American biographer, let alone one with the grasp of Italian intellectual culture possessed by the fine Hofstra historian Stanislao Pugliese. His Bitter Spring is a gift, the first thorough study of Silone in English. Anyone especially interested in Italian literature or mid-century European intellectual history should be even more grateful, for Pugliese does the best job yet of explaining a man who seemed inexplicable even to his Irish wife of three decades, Darina Laracy.
Having lost both his parents and 5 of 6 siblings by the age of 14, the writer born Secondino Tranquilli in Pescina dei Marsi, Italy—an Abruzzo town devastated by a 1915 earthquake that killed his mother and some 70 percent of its populace—grew up with a profound sense of life's injustice and a forceful determination to fight it. A co-founder of Italy's Communist Party at 21, he became a commited opponent of Mussolini at home.
One of the many aliases he took on as a roaming Italian Communist activist—"Ignazio Silone," which he chose while languishing in a Spanish jail in 1923—would later become his nom de plume. A 1927 visit to Moscow , during which he quickly intuited the advancing authoritarianism of Stalin as the latter turned on Trotsky, spurred Silone's questioning of doctrinaire communism. By 1931, clinically depressed and expelled from the Italian Communist Party because of his independent stands, Silone turned to expressing his anti-fascism in committed, realist fiction written during exile in Switzerland. Skeptical, savvy, cosmopolitan, yet ever drawn to the humble Catholicism exemplified by St. Francis and the spiritual, ascetic Celestines, Silone, with Fontamara and Bread and Wine, captured the fight for justice of Abruzzese peasants armed with Catholic folk wisdom, trickle-down Marxism, and little else.
After World War II, Silone became Italy's leading liberal intellectual, co-editing the prestigious journal Tempo Presente from 1956 until 1968 when he learned, to his dismay, of its covert funding from the CIA. He resigned and thereafter devoted himself wholly to writing. After his death, in 1996, another controversy broke out about Silone's loyalties when Italian historian Dario Biocca found letters suggesting that Silone may have been a minor informer for the Fascist Party during his 20s. The issue remains cloudy. The whole of Silone's life better indicates that whatever favors he may have traded with a Fascist policeman for specific purposes, and whether he was a double agent or a triple agent, he was never, ideologically, a Fascist sympathizer. A fairer assessment was the one delivered by Italy's president upon Silone's death in 1978: Pescina's cultural warrior as the "noble, rigorous, inflexible, democratic conscience of contemporary Italian culture."
Pugliese untangles and evaluates the still mysterious threads of Silone's secretive life and undercover affiliations better than anyone so far. More important, he brings back to life a writer whose reputation has unfairly receded. Like Camus, who once remarked to Simone Weil's mother that Silone deserved the Nobel Prize more than he did, Silone tolerated no acolytes or disciples, and resisted invitations to power. (He declined the posts of Italian ambassador to France and head of Italian state broadcasting.) Silone never developed literary worshippers who might have kept his flame alive. Bitter Spring eloquently unpacks why so many distinguished figures of art and culture saw kindred greatness in the man who flintily described himself as "a Socialist without a Party, a Christian without a Church."
Click here to read an excerpt from Bitter Spring.
Click here to watch Stanislao Pugliese discuss Bitter Spring.
The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.
by Eric Banks | Mar-08-2010
Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Eric Banks discusses nonfiction finalist Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin)
In The Hindus: An Alternative History, Wendy Doniger relates a Tamil story retold by her late colleague A.K. Ramanujan that could serve as a metaphor for her enterprise. The Brahmin wife of a sage is sentenced to death by her husband. At the moment she is to be beheaded, she embraces a Pariah, and both are decapitated. When the husband remorsefully restores them to subsequent life, their heads are transposed by mistake—and the resulting Brahmin-with-a-Pariah-head and Pariah-with-a-Brahmin-head require a unique set of sacrificial practices. “Such a conflation is not a monstrosity, nor is it a mistake—or if it is, it is a felix culpa.” Drawing on that felicitous fault—the mismatched heads a proxy for mixtures of caste but also the pure-gods-go-crazy meeting of southern India and north, the boomerang between earthy folklore and venerated text --Doniger asks “not where the disparate elements originate but why they were put together and why kept together. The political implications of regarding Hinduism as either a hodge-podge or, on the other hand, culturally homogeneous or even monolithic are equally distorting; it is always more useful, if a bit trickier, to acknowledge simultaneously the variety of the sources and the power of the integrations.”
Trickier is an understatement in The Hindus: Like any good recovering Orientalist, Doniger is profoundly moved by her subject’s polyvalent inclusiveness and radical plurality, its sometimes impossible-to-square dualities, its centuries-long knack for sticking the wrong head on the wrong body. The history she tells in The Hindus--which is very different from saying “her history of the Hindus”--involves as one might imagine vigorous explorations of the Rig Veda, the Brahmanas and the Upanishads, and those epics of the Indian imaginary, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. But what makes The Hindus a stunning and audacious work of cultural history is her equal commitment to that little tagline of the subhead: “An Alternative History.” In focusing on the experiences and representations of women and the outcast/outcaste Dalits as well as the fluctuating symbolic, economic, and sacrificial place of various animal species (particularly horses, cows, and dogs) across epochs, Doniger’s story alternates like a Slinky in perspectives and values and meanings—and portrays a Hinduism absorbing and refracting a cluster of heterogeneous practices.
For all its historical sweep, The Hindus is a surprisingly personal text, written with vivacious pluck and playful verve. Doniger switches back and forth between a lens wide enough to pack in the panorama of several centuries of subcontinental dynastic history and conquest and one microscopically sharp enough to sort through the granular life in the hoariest myth. Whether writing on bhakti devotional practices of the South or the complicated aftermath of Raj Orientalism, Doniger never misses the bigger picture for the intimate or allows the broad view to get in the way of the key detail. Much as the dynamics of exclusion are a central—maybe the central—part of her interpretation and understanding of the religious complexes of South Asia, The Hindus is acutely sensitive to delve into much in addition to the canon of revered texts. (“To the accusation," she writes, "that I cited a part of the Hindu textual tradition that one Hindu ‘had never heard of,’ my reply is: Yes!, and it’s my intention to go on doing just that.”)
The Hindus is the passionate distillation of a career’s work by one of the most accomplished Sanskritists of the past century, a generous and ambitious and gregarious book. As she writes about placing the Ramayana in its historical context, she amply shows how “the human imagination transformed the actual circumstance of the historical period into something far more beautiful, terrible, challenging, and elevating than the circumstances themselves.” At a moment when fundamentalisms of all stripes make absolutist demands on the imagination, Wendy Doniger’s gift of The Hindus stands as a blessed alternative.
Click here to read an excerpt from The Hindus.
Click here to read an interview with Wendy Doniger on The Hindus.
The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.
by Lizzie Skurnick | Mar-07-2010
Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Lizzie Skurnick discusses criticism finalist Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays (Graywolf)
What do a gentrifying lakeside Chicago neighborhood, the invention of telephone poles, NAFTA, and race-based adoption have in common? In Eula Biss’s book of essays, Notes from No Man’s Land, it’s the formation of America—but a vision of America antic, new and varied, and as far from a melting pot as Lake Michigan.
Essayist Eula Biss began her career as a poet, and Notes bears that lyric stamp, her deft prose taking on heavy-duty subjects in forms that camouflage their weight. In the essay "Time and Distance Overcome," Biss weaves the creation of the network of telephone poles with the history of lynching. Another subtle contrast comes in “Is This Kansas,” in which Biss recounts her time among the rowdy students of Iowa City and the treatment of New Orleans residents during Katrina. The most obscure pairing is the book's most affecting. In "No Man's Land," Biss mixes fragments of the pioneer story of Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder with Biss’s experience as a new resident in the gentrifying Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. Able to draw insight from items as mundane as the bottle of Tide left on the sidewalk as a boy submits to a pat-down, Biss leaves us realizing our country remains gripped by the same myths, fears and enthusiasms since we've settled the prairie, only in modern, seemingly unremarkable forms.
By approaching her subjects sideways, Biss avoids sounding dry or clumsily political. But she also makes an implicit point—the story of our country is not straightforward, but one of unexpected siblings and strange adoptions, a story of change, adaptation, and surprising ancestry. In “Time and Distance Overcome,” Biss writes, “When I was young, I believed the arc and swoop of telephone wires was beautiful. Now, I tell my sister, those poles, these wires, do not look the same to me. Nothing is innocent, my sister reminds me. But nothing, I would like to think, remains unrepentant.” After reading Notes from No Man’s Land, readers will have a hard time seeing America the same way, too.
Click here to see Eula Biss read from Notes from No Man's Land (courtesy Book TV).
Click here to read an excerpt from Notes from No Man's Land.
The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.
by Craig Morgan Teicher | Mar-07-2010
Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Craig Morgan Teicher discusses criticism finalist David Hajdu's Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (Da Capo)
David Hajdu is tough on contemporary music. He calls John Zorn "the living master of creative delusion." He describes "the unapologetic commercialism of Taylor Swift's music." Concluding his review of the long-awaited 2004 release of Brian Wilson's lost follow-up to the Beach Boys' seminal Pet Sounds, Hajdu says, "Smile, masterpiece or not, is still lost." Hajdu is a skeptic—it takes a lot to impress him, and he is deeply interested in how an artist's own self-delusions can impede the realization of a musical vision. But, in thinking so hard about the juncture where personality and performance meet, Hajdu hears things in music most of us do not, the subtleties that are lost or are born in the gap between the sounds a musician thinks he or she is making and what a listener hears.
The central piece in this collection of essays and reviews (not just of music, but of cartoons, comics, movies, corporate culture, and online journalism) is an extended piece on Billy Eckstine, the jazz singer and bandleader whom Hajdu says "simply redefined what it meant to be black and a celebrity in America." In tracing Eckstine's rise and fall, Hajdu finds a representative life for illustrating how a society can fail its geniuses, or the other way around, which is, in fact, the overarching subject of this book.
It's an ambitious project, and Hajdu proves his point through the details. There's an incredibly moving essay about Wynton Marsalis, who showed up in New York in the early '80s and quickly became the popular figurehead of jazz, only to tarnish his crown a decade later with his own inflexible standards. Hajdu is able to sweep away all of Marsalis's holier-than-thou criticism of younger musicians when he finds the trumpeter playing anonymously in a New York club, where it becomes clear that, in spite of himself, Marsalis can really blow his horn. Again and again, in pieces about figures as different as Ray Charles and Harry Partch, Hajdu is able to get the artist out of the way of the music. He'll send you back to your record collection—or your iTunes library—and, after reading Heroes and Villains, you'll hear better.
Click here to read an excerpt from Heroes and Villains.
The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.
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