Tag: Book Review

Book Review of Liam MacSheoinin’s GEORGE W. BUSH BUYS COKE IN MID-ETERNITY

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An Agenbite of Inwit & Other Wits as Well

by Duff Brenna

“Hedonic Engineer” Brian Jordan has wandered off the straight path and is nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita (midway along the journey of life), when he falls madly in love with the luscious Rachel, a woman who should have a warning sign stamped on her gorgeous behind that reads Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate: Abandon all hope ye who enter here! Upon her tail hangs the tale of MacSheoinin’s wildly-word-rich, rollicking satire. READ MORE

An Uneasy Revelry: a review of Before Saying Any of the Great Words

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An Uneasy Revelry

by Okla Elliott

“Unease in the ochre-filled skies, unease in the silky /labyrinth of the gut, unease / in the artist’s double, triple nibs”

—David Huerta, “Song of Unease”

Since many American readers may not be familiar with David Huerta, let me introduce you to the poet, before I go on to discuss this career-ranging selection of his poetry and Mark Schafer’s excellent translation of it. Huerta has written nineteen books of poetry and has received nearly every literary award a poet can win in his native Mexico. He is associated with the Neobaroque movement in Latin American literature and with postmodern language poetry. In 2005, he received the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for lifelong contribution to Mexican literature. Suffice to say, he is one Mexico’s (and the Spanish language’s) major poets. He is also well known as a political columnist, translator, and activist. But fame and recognition are not enough to convince a discerning reader, and one ought not to be impressed by awards but rather by the work itself.

The first poem I’d like to look at, “Machinery,” is a good example of both Huerta’s strength as a poet and the difficulties Schafer had to overcome in translating him. It is a longish poem (65 lines), so let’s only look at the opening movement:

What’s the use of all this I ask you your fever your sobbing
What’s the use of yelling or butting your head against the fog
Why crash in the branches scratch those nickels
What’s the point of jinxing yourself staining yourself

The odd syntax and the overflow of poetic energy are well represented in the English. My only complaint is that in the first line, the English allows for a double reading such that the speaker asks the “you” his question and perhaps asks “your fever” and “your sobbing,” while also allowing “your fever” and “your sobbing” to still be the “all this” of his question—all of which is a really pleasant possible double reading, but which is unfortunately not in the Spanish. The Spanish reads “Para qué sirve todo eso te digo tu fiebre tu sollozo.” The verb is decir (“to tell, to say”), thus allowing for the more literal “What’s the use of all this I tell you your fever your sobbing” but which does not eliminate the possibility of a double reading, since the issue isn’t really so much the verb as the indirect object “te” in Spanish that is placed before the verb instead of after it in English, thus eliminating the possible double-meaning in Spanish and creating it in English. Basically, what we have here is an example of why Umberto Eco calls translation “the art of failure.” Spanish grammar clarifies what the English cannot without major alteration to either the sense or syntax. And so my complaint is not with Schafer’s translation but rather with the onerous task of translation itself. Schafer meets with dozens of these sorts of impasses throughout the book and generally finds innovative ways around them, and when no way around exists, he limits the loss in joy from the original, as he has here. (My complaint, I trust most will agree, is rather nitpicky and perhaps entirely unimportant in some readers’ minds.)

Let’s now look at “Sick Man” in its entirety, which exemplifies the productive strangeness of many of Huerta’s poems. Here, illness disrupts reality and language, making technically nonsensical language carry an emotional resonance that a more direct psychological realism could not:

The nighttime dog eats
two rings of blood
but the twilight dog chases him away.
The diamonds in his chest
burn and scatter.
The daytime dog licks
the entrance to his chest
but the nighttime dog
knows the way out.
All the dogs
want a backbone of diamonds.
Two rings of fresh blood spin around.
His chest finds itself increasingly alone
with the scent of barking.

That threatening bark is perhaps the threat of debilitation at illness’s hand, the fear of death, the crushing loneliness of serious illness. And the synergistic confusion is (and isn’t) the impenetrable meaningless of death/illness. I don’t mean to shrink Huerta’s poetic language to prosaic interpretations, since he could just as easily have written a straightforward thought-piece on illness and animal imagery, had that been what he intended to communicate, but I think the above-mentioned notions are some of the things he is after. Also, notice the perfect use of the title to force our understanding of the poem. I likely would have thought the poem was only mediocre if it were, for example, titled “Dogs.” His title (“Hombre enfermo” in the original) adds an emotional valence to all the words of the poem that would otherwise be mere pretty language without emotional import. This technique of title-as-lens is one Huerta uses to great effect throughout the book.

Schafer tells us in his introduction that he has two goals in mind with this book. “On the one hand, I want to offer English-speaking readers an overview of Huerta’s poetry since he published his first book, El jardín de la luz, in 1972. On the other hand, given that Huerta is alive and well, writing and publishing prolifically, I want to give readers ample opportunity to revel in his more recent work.” And revel is exactly what the reader does.
The publication of Before Saying Any of the Great Words is another in a long line of great contributions Copper Canyon Press has made to American poetry. In a post-monolingual world, and especially in the USA, which is quickly becoming officially and unofficially bilingual, I hope Huerta’s work will be read widely. Works in translation have a long tradition of influencing English-language poetry—from the Earl of Surrey, who invented blank verse in order to translate Virgil’s Ænead (which was metered but not rhymed)—thus allowing for Shakespeare’s plays to exist as we know them—to the importing of such forms as the sonnet from its Italian progenitors or the couplet from the French, and so on. What better time than now, in the age of globalization, for us to learn from our literary compatriots who live in other countries and write in other languages? I would therefore suggest Before Saying Any of the Great Words not only for classes on Latin American literature but also for poetry workshops, working poets everywhere, and anyone interested in the marvelously rich culture of Mexico.

***

[The above review was originally published in Florida State University’s The Southeast Review in a slightly different form.]

Looking Beyond the Surfaces in David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End up Becoming Yourself: a Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (a Not-Really Review by Raul Clement)

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I.

Let’s judge a book by its cover, shall we?

The book in question is David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End up Becoming Yourself: a Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, and it is the first work resembling a biography of Wallace since his death by hanging in 2008. As such, it is an odd start – less a biography than a casually edited transcript of a week-long conversation between Wallace and Lipsky – but for right now it’s all we’ve got.

And perhaps it’s fitting that Wallace get to present himself in his own words. Words are, after all, what we come to Wallace for – that unique and explosive alchemy of high and low, of literary and pop, of slangy and technical, of intimate and cerebral. Or as Lipsky describes it in his afterword, placed oddly but cannily before the main text of the book (in imitation of Wallace’s experiments with form, but also so as not to have the reader’s final impression of Wallace be of his tragic death):

“He wrote with eyes and a voice that seemed to be a condensed form of everyone’s lives – it was the stuff you semi-thought, the background action you blinked through at supermarkets and commutes – and readers curled up in the nooks and crannies of his style.”

So ordinary and not. Somehow extra-ordinary, ϋber-ordinary, able to tap into the unarticulated places that we all share.  “A condensed form of everyone’s lives,” emphasis on condensed as contrasted with everyone.  Or as Wallace himself expresses it:

“If a writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart they are. Wake the reader up to stuff that reader’s been aware of all the time.”

This waking up is what we – or at least I – come to great writers for. But for this existential alarm clock to go off, we must see ourselves in the writer. He must be everyone.  And it is the job of the biographer to tease out this everyone – to emphasize the ordinariness over the genius which allows the writer to express it. Genius, if it exists (and is not just the product of concentrated effort), is why we are drawn to writers; ordinariness is what allows us to apprehend genius. Even in a book as seemingly hands-off as Lipsky’s, the agenda of teasing out the ordinariness behind the genius is present.

And we need look no further than the cover to find it.


II.

[Note to the reader: this is not a review in the traditional sense. If you want the subjective opinion of a stranger as to whether this book is “good” or not, there are dozens of those in major newspapers, magazines, and journals around the country. This is, rather, an analysis of the rhetorical project of Lipsky’s book as I see it.]

In the cover photo, Wallace sits in a study or office with his dog on his lap. An innocuous photo, but let’s think for a second about what it means. A dog is middle-American – you could even say middle-world. People of all races, ages, countries, and income backgrounds own dogs. Man’s best friend. The idea here is that Wallace, for all his “tortured brilliance,” is ordinary. Relatable. If you don’t believe me, check out the countless profiles on Wallace which use his dogs, his habit of chewing tobacco, and the fact that he wears a bandana not to be hip but because of his sweating issues, as proof of his ordinariness. Check out Lipsky in the introduction, describing his first impressions of Wallace’s house in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois:

“I’ve also been surprised to find the towel of Barney, subbing as a curtain in his bedroom, and the big poster of the complaint singer Alanis Morissette on his wall.”

But lest the reader forget that, for all his ordinariness, Wallace is in fact extraordinary (and note the word surprised in the previous sentence; Lipsky is surprised chiefly because this ordinariness is unexpected), this scene is set in a study.  A reliquary of thought and creative production. He is surrounded by books. Stacked sideways and at crazy angles, presenting a view of the artist as someone who can’t be bothered with the details. Not pretentious, however – the lone book spine we can read is The Encyclopedia of Film, which while no doubt a substantial volume, is hardly Wittgenstein. This could very well be coincidence – and I’m not saying all these details are calculated – but it achieves the desired effect of the cover as a whole: to make the extraordinary relatable, to make genius ordinary.

If we share so much with a brilliant mind, the cover suggests, perhaps, by a kind of transitive property of human intellect, we too can be brilliant.

Now let’s move to the title. Although. Of course. You. End Up. Becoming. Yourself. I’ve broken it down into discrete language units to emphasize how important each is in conveying the central idea of the book. Appropriately enough, the phrase comes straight from Wallace’s mouth – a toss-off line in the context of a book-length interview, but one which takes on new weight when made to stand alone on the front cover and, in doing so, to speak for the book as a whole.

Although: This gives the effect of an ongoing conversation we are just now joining. A classic postmodern technique (yes, at this point we can say that: classic postmodern), the idea that narrative has no beginning or end – and it is one that plunges us into the moment and creates a sense of casualness that a more rigid structure would deny.

Of course: creates a rhetorical bond between reader and writer. “We both know this,” it says. “Now let’s think about it together.” This is a technique Wallace uses frequently in his nonfiction and some of his best fiction (see the narrator of Infinite Jest), a position which implies the reader is every bit as smart as Wallace. That this is a lie – we wouldn’t be reading him if he weren’t somehow smarter, more alive than us – is beside the point. It’s a lie that flatters us and makes us feel at home in the text.

You: Just as the slightly awkward abutment of the two prepositions although and of course creates a sense of naturalness – which in turn seems honest, and therefore inspires trust – so does the familiar pronoun you. You is the same thing as one, but in place of this stiff, academic generalization, we have a word that points at the reader and includes him in the generalization. Like of course, it establishes a rhetorical bond: the you here is closer to we than it is to one. It is, in fact, all of us.

End Up: I’m going to skip over this for now, since the important thing is how it plays off of becoming. I will say, however, that it has an informal quality that fits with the title as a whole.

Becoming: This book is a process. While it chronicles a road trip, it is also a trip toward the self. Wallace’s self, yourself. The interesting thing is that this self is not a birthright – it is a destination, somewhere you end up. This is another postmodern idea, the self as constructed, but with a twist. You don’t create the self you would like to be – though there is a great deal of that going on in this book – but the self you need to be. Or maybe it is not created at all, but discovered. As in Wallace’s writing, postmodern techniques are used for old-fashioned ends.  Moral ends.

(Here, for reference, is the excerpt on the back of the book, which I feel comfortable including under the umbrella of the cover:

“If you can think of the times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings.  The ability to do that with ourselves…I know that sounds a little pious.”

Everything is here. The casualness, the self-awareness – “I know that sounds a little pious” – the idea of self as active creation. As moral duty.)

Yourself: We are along on this process of self-discovery with Wallace. Anything that happens to him happens to us. His problems and questions are ours. As such we relate to genius – become it, in fact – which is precisely the reason we read the biographies of extraordinary people to begin with.

We want to understand why we are not them, sure, but we also don’t want to lose the dream of becoming them.


III.

How do these themes carry forward into the book? At first glance, Lipsky’s biography appears to be the product of laziness – a quick cash-in on the Wallace legacy. As mentioned, the book is essentially a direct transcript of a week-long conversation between Lipsky and Wallace during Wallace’s tour in promotion of Infinite Jest. Lipsky’s intrusions are minimal. I will quote a few at random, not so much for their content, but so that you get a sense of their flavor.

A few section headings so that we know where we are:

“First Day,” one reads, “David’s House, Tuesday Before Class, In the Living Room Playing Chess, His Dogs Slinking Back and Forth Over Carpet.”

Bracketed asides contain additional thoughts of Lipsky’s – sometimes purely informative, sometimes meditative, sometimes undermining – about Wallace or the subject at hand:

“[Hums while playing chess: not tremendously good at chess; strong, however, at humming]”

Or later, as they discuss why Wallace won’t take an advance on his work:

“[This remains chess: as if I’m trying to trick him into castling prematurely.]”

But mostly they talk: about the way literature works, about the perils of fame, about what it means to be human in an age of nonstop self-gratification. To readers of Wallace, these will be familiar themes – present in almost every word he wrote. But they also talk about Bruce Willis movies, Wallace’s boyish crush on Alanis Morrisette (endearingly, Wallace keeps calling one of her songs “I Wanna Know” instead of “You Oughta Know”), about Wallace’s desire to get laid on tour and his disappointment that it hasn’t happened yet.

Again: ordinariness combined with extraordinariness. The conversation flows between these two modes with the naturalness of, well, a conversation. Lipsky is more archivist/editor than writer. His interruptions have the informative purpose and staccato style of editor’s notes. What this does is allow us to be there with him.

If Wallace, in his writing – and Lipsky and his editors with the design and format of this book – makes every attempt to have us feel that his mental journey is ours, then we are also Lipsky, along for the ride. By using the road trip as the book’s organizing principle, Lipsky not only literalizes the internal journey (just as the external journey is made metaphor by the title), but he furthers the impression of Wallace’s ordinariness. Road trips traffic in the mundane: hotels, Denny’s restaurants, time spent cramped in rental cars or waiting at baggage claims. Bad pop radio, hours with nothing to do but talk.

Bond.

And bond they do. At first, Wallace is guarded. He gives the answers he thinks Lipsky wants. He is careful to downplay the impact of his newfound fame and his excitement over the book tour. Part of this, as he states repeatedly, is a way of making sure he stays grounded. But it is also a calculated attempt to seem humble and unpretentious. Here is one of Lipsky’s asides:

“[He has sized me up as a guy who likes “laying”… I now know he did this sort of thing as an approach, and I can see it here, his trying to guess what people, what I wanted.  That’s who he is too: trying to read people.]”

This is not to say he is being dishonest. Rather, it’s honesty with a motive. The simple and miraculous thing that happens in the course of this book is that the motive seems to drop away – or maybe it simply changes, from manipulation to communication. Wallace begins to trust Lipsky. Compare this to the earlier talk of getting laid:

I really have wished I was married, the last couple of weeks. Because yeah, it’d be nice to have somebody to um—you know, because nobody quite gets it.  Your friends who aren’t in the writing biz are just all awed by your picture in Time, and your agent and editor are good people, but they also have their own agendas. You know?  And it’s fun talking with you about it, but you’ve got an agenda and a set of interests that diverges from mine. And there’s something about, there would be something about having somebody who kinda shared your life, and uh, that you could allow yourself just to be happy and confused with.

It’s probably naïve to think that this version of Wallace is any less calculated than previous incarnations. Wallace is too smart for that. But the effect has changed. We get, more than any other place in the book, a deep sense of his loneliness. It’s at this moment we fully feel the death not of Wallace the writer (extraordinary), whose loss we already feel or else we wouldn’t be reading this biography, but of Wallace the human being (ordinary). The book has achieved its rhetorical goal, not through any calculated and – in the most literal sense – superficial means of cover artwork and title, but by allowing Wallace the room to speak. To become himself.

And it’s therefore not surprising that in this moment, when we are closest to the felt impact of Wallace’s death, he seems at his most alive.

The Cognitive Turn in Theory and Cultural Studies: A Review of Patrick Colm Hogan’s Understanding Nationalism

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[The following review-essay was originally published in Inside Higher Education.]

The Cognitive Turn in Theory and Cultural Studies: A Review of Patrick Colm Hogan’s Understanding Nationalism

by Okla Elliott


1. Academic Triangulation: An Analysis of the Paratextual Aspects of Understanding Nationalism

In critical theory—or, perhaps, Theory with a capital “T” as some would have it—many scholars’ use of such thinkers as Marx, Freud, Lacan, etc (all thinkers whose fields have been heavily updated with empirical research since their contributions) can seem like an attempt to explain the movement of celestial bodies via Copernican mechanics. This of course is not to suggest that these thinkers are entirely non-productive or that they got everything wrong. After all, Copernicus’s model for equinoctial measurements is still used today (roughly putting March 21 as the marker of spring’s coming and September 23 as that of autumn’s), and his calculations of the Earth’s precessional period (a sort of wobbling on its axis) was within 99.9% of current astronomers’ calculations. Also, the so-called Copernican Revolution informs our current ideology much more than any contribution Niels Bohr made to the field of science. That said, Copernicus would not be able to get Verizon’s satellites into orbit, allowing me to email this review to my editor, so it is worth thinking of the advances that have been made.

In order to locate Patrick Colm Hogan’s book in the overall academic discourse, I propose we continue to borrow from the field of astronomy, this time the term “parallax shift”—which Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek has also made use of, though in a much more radical way than I propose we do here. A parallax shift is the apparent displacement of an object caused by actual change in the position of the point of observation; most importantly, the angular amount of such change in position. Using some basic geometry, these angular shifts can be used to triangulate the distances between various objects, thus locating them in space.

But what objects ought we to use to triangulate location within the academic cosmology? For a rudimentary location, we can use the paratextual aspects of a book to measure the parallax shift and thus triangulate its location. I offer here such a triangulation of Hogan’s Understanding Nationalism.

First off, we see that the book is part of Ohio State University’s Narrative Series, edited by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz. This lets us know certain things about the book. It will be concerned with the structures of narrative and with cognitive psychology. It also lets us know it will be first-rate overall (even if one happens to disagree with all or part of the book), given that series’ excellent reputation.

Secondly, the Index to the book tells us volumes alone. Number of references to Derrida: 0. Number of references to Foucault: 0. Spivak: 0. Lacan: 0. Hegel: 1 (but only in passing). Antonio Negri: 1. Chomsky (both as linguist and political thinker): 5 (though my count has it at 7, if you include the Introduction, which the Index doesn’t). Judith Butler: 0. Freud: 3 (though the Index doesn’t list any of them, despite their being in the book’s main text). Benedict Anderson: 26 (and 1 more in the Intro). There are over a hundred references to various cognitive psychology experiments, papers, books, and theorists. And while Marx gets no direct mention, “Marxists” are mentioned 6 times.

And the last paratextual aspect we’ll consult is simply the author’s bio: Patrick Colm Hogan is a professor in the English Department, the Program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, and the Program in Cognitive Science at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. From this, I think we can safely assume that we’ll get a comparative approach that incorporates several languages, literatures, and disciplines. And, indeed, we do.

As the final word I’ll offer on the book’s and its author’s location in the academic cosmology, I’ll say that the clarity of his writing style, his consistent use of cognitive psychology and analytic philosophical techniques, and the authorities he cites generally (though not dogmatically) locate Hogan on certain sides of current academic debates. He seems more sympathetic to the analytic philosophical tradition than to the so-called continental tradition—though he doesn’t have any axe to grind on this matter, since he happily makes use of the likes of Marx(ists), Freud, and Negri; but his methodology is clearly analytic. He also clearly falls on the Chomsky side of the Chomsky-Foucault debate about linguistics and human nature—that is, he believes that there are similarities between human languages and that these are due to neurobiological and cognitive psychological factors found across the species. I wish I could offer an unbiased assessment here, but Chomksy’s Universal Grammar model has been proven time and again to be as accurate as any scientific theory could hope to be. Foucault’s work on power and biopolitics is groundbreaking, and it is likely a (minor) flaw of Hogan’s book that Foucault’s talk of power and the mechanisms of biopolitics are not mentioned, but this reviewer at least is happy to see a more careful and scientific discussion of linguistics among literary theorists. Foucault was right about a lot of things, and his thinking has proven productive in several fields, but there is zero evidence that he was right about human language acquisition and composition, while there is and continues to be more and more overwhelming evidence that Chomsky is right, but perhaps more importantly, Foucault’s linguistic approach is all but totally nonproductive, especially if the task before us is understanding nationalism, which here it is. Also, given the total domination of the Foucauldian view in literature departments, it is heartening to see another approach taken. This is what I will refer to as the cognitive turn in theory and cultural studies (echoing the similar turn in the social sciences), and it’s a movement I would like to see carried further.

But again, I want to stress that Hogan does not have any axe to grind and never brings up these academic turf wars and even ought to be excluded from them, since he makes use of various competing traditions, using whatever tools will yield the most productive results and provide the strongest explanatory accounts of nationalism and its mechanics. I only mention these turf wars here for the purpose of locating him within these intellectual traditions.

2. Five Hierarchies and Four Metaphors

Hogan’s primary interest in this book is how in-group and out-group identities are formed and reinforced. He writes: “…each of us has countless identities. But these do not have equal importance to our self-concepts and they do not have equal motivational force. I have isolated five parameters governing the hierarchization of identity categories—salience, durability, functionality, opposability, and affectivity” (65). Let’s look briefly at his definitions of each of these five hierarchies.

His explanation of salience is thus:

…some conceptual categories and some objective properties are more salient than others. Suppose I look into a room. The room has some furniture, a few gum wrappers on the floor, a movie poster, and a corpse. If someone asks me what is in the room, I am likely to ignore the furniture, gum wrappers, and movie poster, mentioning only the dead body. This is because the corpse has a high degree of salience. Salience has two aspects. First, it involves the intrinsic properties of the object…For example, things that are smelly or loud tend to be highly salient. Second, salience involves relational characteristics. These are a matter of subjective propensities that link one to the object in attention-eliciting ways. (58)

Notice here that he claims objects have intrinsic aspects. This is the kind of thing scientists assume regularly, whereas most Theorists do not. But let’s set our triangulation aside for the moment and carry on with the terminology Hogan introduces.

Of durability Hogan writes:

Other things being equal, we prefer categories that refer to more durable properties. In connection with categorical identity, we need to distinguish two levels of durability. On the one hand, there is the degree to which an individual’s category status may change. On the other hand, there is the degree to which the social group isolated by the category is itself enduring…In the case of identity categories, then, high durability means that I am unlikely to leave the group and the group itself is unlikely to dissolve. With respect to both levels, nonelective identity categories, such as race, tend to have an advantage over elective categories, such as religion, nation, or class. (60)

And so, durability is key to the hierarchization of in-group/out-group considerations. There are racial tensions between, say, African-Americans and Irish-Americans, despite the their sharing the second half of that hyphenate; and the differences, even if they don’t lead to tensions, are more durable in regard to race. One can convert to Catholicism; converting to another race is, to say the least, slightly more difficult (though cosmetic surgical techniques are and will likely continue to change this fact). But durability alone is not enough to explain in-group/out-group divisions that are the undergirdings of nationalism.

Which brings us to functionality. Hogan writes:

But durability too is insufficient. Consider a very simple case. I am presented with a $100 bill in a plastic bag. Paper is not very durable. Plastic bags (I gather) are. However, I am very unlikely to categorize this gift as “plastic.” I am likely to say, “Wow! One hundred dollars!” The reason for this is straightforward: We also choose characterizations based on importance, usefulness, value. Not that this is not confined to positive value. A large credit card bill in a plastic bag would have the same consequences. In the case of identity categories, it not quite accurate to speak of value. Rather, we would say that categories have greater or lesser functionality. (60)

So, while there are many categories of varying durability, it is essential to look at the social functions of the categories as well.

That said, however, Hogan goes on to explain that “a very common property may be highly functional, durable, and salient. But it is unlikely to trigger categorization. When we are treating identity, one of our main concerns is distinctiveness” (61). But how do we get at distinctiveness? Hogan offers the following:

If a particular feature varies in slight increments from one person to another, then it is a less likely choice categorization than if a feature varies in large steps. The limiting case of this is bipolar division Thus, a sharp, bipolar division is more likely to be high in our hierarchy of categories than is a more smoothly graduated set of differences. I refer to this as opposability. (62)

This makes an immediate sort of sense, though I am immediately reminded of the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda who shared nearly every physical and cultural trait, except for the slightest of distinctions, and those largely made up and not even discernable to most. That said, Hogan’s theory is not without merit. One type of identity category scores very high in opposability—sex. And here we see distinctions of the broadest sort made across all cultures.

But Hogan adds one more category to his list—affectivity. He writes:

It is not, then, simply a matter of ideas. It is also a matter of motives. These motives derive their force from our emotional engagements or the category’s affectivity, our final parameter.

In order for nationalism to have concrete, practical effects, citizens must feel something about that national category. Our emotional response is in part a simple result of labeling, as we have already seen. It is a matter of categorical identification triggering responses in the amygdale or insula in the case of out-groups, and perhaps regions such as the basal ganglia (which are connected with trust; see King-Casas et al.), in the case of in-groups. (63)

Here is another strength of the book, one that my other quoted passages have not sufficiently illustrated. Hogan makes regular use of striking cognitive psychological and neurobiological experiments as evidence to back up his claims, and while he admits these experiments are not 100% accurate yet, they do at least offer excellent scientific guidelines for how the brain processes events and data of the sort pertinent to a discussion of nationalism. (Here I am again reminded of our friend, Copernicus, who did not get everything right, but who brought our thought and scientific accuracy centuries forward with his book Revolutions.)

Hogan also offers an interesting account of metaphors in order to set the groundwork for how metaphors work in the discussion of nationalism. What is admirable and most useful here is that he takes into account so many languages and finds the commonality among them. This is another place where Hogan strikes me as Chomskyian. One might even be tempted to say he is looking for a Universal Grammar of Metaphors.

It is via this work of metaphors that literature becomes particularly interesting in terms of nationalism—and I think we should define the term “literature” as broadly as possible.

Here are, in brief, his four categories of metaphors: “inferential (metaphors that guide our thought about a target), articulatory (metaphors that facilitate our communication of ideas about a target), emotional (metaphors that facilitate our communicative transferal of feelings regarding a target), and unmotivated (metaphors that express a spontaneous recognition of parallels, initially without further functions)” (130).

Hogan goes on to make a quite convincing schema of how these metaphors are used in both organized propaganda and organically arising nationalist sentiments. There isn’t space here to elaborate on his analysis, so you’ll simply have to read the book for this and other reasons.

3. Conclusion, In Which I Argue That This Book Matters and You Should Buy and/or Teach It

Nationalism is a force that has driven much of history—ranging from recent debates on the Iraq War or immigration here in the US to the India-Pakistan conflict to more distant phenomena such as Nazism and earlier ones going back as far as ancient Persia and Rome, and so on. It is, however, worth noting that while the word has taken on a generally negative connotation among activists and intellectuals, there are also anti-colonial nationalism(s) and pro-democracy nationalism(s), to name but two of the types of nationalisms many activists and intellectuals would likely feel at least some sympathy for, if not support outright. Nationalism might therefore be the single-most important point of cultural and historical study—that is, if we judge importance in terms of human lives (or deaths) and historical forces. It is for this reason that Patrick Colm Hogan’s Understanding Nationalism is such a necessary investigation.

It is not, however, merely the topic that makes the book valuable. Many books are published on the subject every year, and many smart and useful ones even. But what makes Understanding Nationalism unique is its methodology. Hogan attempts to explicate nationalism via an admirably interdisciplinary approach. He makes use of cognitive science as fluently as political science; quotes as freely from the Persian national epic, The Shanahmeh, as he does from Walt Whitman; imports the insights of Noam Chomsky the linguist as or more readily than Noam Chomsky the political thinker.

Understanding Nationalism is an excellent book, one that could (and should) be used in a variety of classrooms—e.g., political science, cultural studies/critical theory, literature, sociology, cognitive psychology, and even advanced rhetoric courses (depending on the class’s focus of course). It has been often said that all critical theory (or Theory) must be interdisciplinary, and that it must be productive and applicable in many fields. Despite going rather strongly against the stream of post- and anti-structuralist trends in critical theory and cultural studies today, Hogan’s Understanding Nationalism certainly qualifies as critical theory of the highest order.

In airing his frustrations with the task before him, Copernicus wrote in Revolutions that “the courses of the planets and the revolution of the stars cannot be determined by exact calculations and reduced to perfect knowledge.” This is the difficulty of doing careful evidence-based scientific analyses—the constant frustrations of failure—but the rewards of such inquiry are, if you’ll excuse the pun, astronomical. I applaud Hogan for his contribution and wish his book great success. I can only hope it receives the attention it deserves.

Book Review of Curtis Smith’s BAD MONKEY

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Spending/Reading Politically: Curtis Smith’s Bad Monkey

by Raul Clement


Historically speaking, I don’t read much work from small presses and journals.  I am well aware of the arguments against this: 1) as an aspiring professional, I should support the industry that I hope will support me; 2) there’s a lot of good stuff out there that doesn’t get picked up by major New York presses; 3) politically, not supporting small presses is like shopping at Wal-Mart over your local grocery.  Yet I tend to stick to Barnes & Noble.  Indy for me is McSweeney’s or Tin House.

Recently, I won a drawing from Press 53. The prize was a book of my choice from their catalog. Because of my ignorance about small presses, I pretty much had to pick at random.  I chose Bad Monkey, a book of short fiction by Curtis Smith, for two reasons, both superficial: 1) the title struck me as amusing; and 2) I liked the cover.

It turns out you can judge a book by its cover—if that cover is a monochrome photo of a shirtless man crouched, monkey-like, on a back alley stairwell.  The photo promised a collection that was quirky and dark—and those adjectives apply.  There are stories about abduction, Russian mobsters, Ukrainian rapists, and demolition derbies. This is not the plotless, slice-of-life fiction so popular in journals, large and small, these days.

Even better news is that these stories avoid the pitfall of other work of their kind: stylization. Curtis Smith knows that high drama, in order to be believable and compelling, must be grounded in careful prose and attention to detail.  He writes about the most over-the-top subject matter with a subdued lyricism that reminds me of writers of a more traditional bent, like John Updike.

Here is a passage from the first story in the collection, “The Girl in the Halo.” It is told in the second person, the “you” being a teenage misfit in a high school of rich kids. One of these kids, a girl named Sally for whom “you” harbored secret feelings, has gone missing—presumably not willingly. In this scene, Smith observes the effect of her absence on the chemistry lab she and “you” took together:

“…how many bleary mornings had you spied on her, her purple pen scribbling notes and Mr. Fink droning on as he held one of his molecules, a slapped-together collection of spheres and connecting sticks that reminded you of a child’s toy.”

I’m not going to pretend that there’s anything groundbreaking here. But it’s solid, unflashy writing. It starts with “bleary,” which evokes the drag that high school was for most, while being a word we can read right past. But what really gets me here—what really takes a sledgehammer to my cynical reader’s heart—is the purple pen, encapsulating as it does an entire world of vanished innocence and half-realized femininity.  And the molecular model is great, too: who doesn’t remember these, and yet who remembered that he remembered them?

This is what good fiction’s all about: the oft-referenced “shock of recognition.”  By generating that shock, Smith earns the right to tell a story in the second-person (and present tense at that, though the above quote doesn’t demonstrate it).  He earns the right to sensationalist subject matter.  I am not going to give away the ending, but suffice to say, it’s a killer—pun certainly intended.

There are flaws in this collection. At times, the writing can wander into the excessively literary. At these moments, it reminded me of the worst stuff from small journals and presses—writing that adopts the tone of “good” writing, while having none of the feeling or insight. Here’s an offender from the same story, concerning the rumors that have circulated around school regarding Sally’s disappearance:

“Daryl Stone claims he spotted Blake’s red car on the other side of the Duke street railroad crossing, and between the hoppers’ cars flickering, thundering parade, he saw a blonde in the passenger seat…but when the caboose passed, the car was gone, the gate’s zebra-striped arm raised over a deserted macadam patch.”

I seriously doubt Daryl Stone described the scene this way. Now one can argue that this is the way “you” re-imagine(s) it. But there are similar instances throughout the collection, where Smith loses track of his characters in an ecstasy of linguistic posturing. Here’s one from “Without Words”:

“Ambrose, a cost analyst by trade and thus skilled in calculations and extrapolations, could have predicted these things, but when her loaded-down car pulled from the curb, what he couldn’t have predicted was the greater absences that would find him, his life’s unappreciated scaffolding of love and trust and faith sent crashing to the ground.”

I trust you can see why this is bad—or maybe not bad, but merely competent. A little bullshitty. Additionally, there are several examples of flash fiction here, which in trying to pack too much punch in too small a space, fail to achieve resonance. Maybe some people will like them; I preferred the more expansive work, where Smith’s lyrical aggregation has time to take hold.

But these flaws are, by and large, overlookable. Stories like “Think on Thy Sins”—in which a series of questionable moral decisions lead to one of the most bad-ass, and emotionally damaging eruptions of violence in recent short fiction—more than justify the $12 cover price which I cleverly avoided, but which you will have to pay. An earlier collection, The Species Crown, is next up on my list. I will shell out hard cash for it, and unlike when I shop at Barnes & Noble, I will know my money is going to the preservation of something real.

This could be the beginning of beautiful friendship.


Raul Clement is a musician and writer living in Greensboro, NC. His work appears in such journals and anthologies as Coe Review, Mayday Magazine, and Main Street Rag, among others. He is currently at work, with co-author Okla Elliott, on Joshua City — a Brechtian, po/mo, sci-fi novel replete with lepers, revolutionaries, and Siamese triplets who can see the future. An excerpt from Joshua City appeared in Surreal South 2009.