Joshua B. Lukin (1968-2019)

Last week, Josh Lukin, my dear friend and a member of this blog, died, a little less than one month short of his fifty-first birthday. Josh was an Associate Professor in Temple University's English Department, where besides teaching writing, he was a disability studies scholar and a critic. He edited a book published by Aqueduct Press, It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis, and contributed essays to Daughters of Earth (“Cold War Masculinity in the Early Work of Kate Wilhelm”) and The WisCon Chronicles, Volume 7. He co-edited, with Samuel R. Delany, a special issue of Paradoxa on the Fifties, and was the editor of Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States, as well as special issue on Samuel R. Delany for the minnesota review. He wrote numerous articles on the work of Philip K. Dick, Patricia Highsmith, Jim Thompson, and, of course, Chandler Davis, among others.

Josh introduced himself to me, via email, early in the summer of 2001, to solicit a review from me for the special issue of Paradoxa he was co-editing with Chip Delany. When I replied to his email, he immediately wrote back, and that was the beginning of a long, intense email correspondence. He was thirty-two at the time, I was fifty; he was working on his dissertation and preparing for the academic job market, and I was someone who'd been reading and thinking and writing about many of the same things he was into for a bit more than twenty-five years. Over the length of that correspondence, we mined several common areas we were passionate about, often through mutual interrogation, and often reverting to old insights we'd shared when resonant examples presented themselves to one or the other of us months or even years later. Within the first week of that correspondence, he wrote:

In general, I'm interested in f & sf works that (a) defy the "bourgeois myth of free will" tradition that I associate with Heinlein and acknowledge the existence and limits of the body (because, having suffered a chronic illness for 25 years in the U.S.A., I have a very personal vendetta against that myth and those who uphold it) and (b) that can be taught in a Literature and Medicine course (because I'm entering the academic job market in two months and have to present myself as able to teach as many things as possible--and if possible, to present my illness as an asset rather than a sin).       

And of course I recognized at once why he wanted to engage with me, since my own work came at his interests from a different, but highly compatible angle, which his previous references to my work had intimated.

I think anyone who knew him would tell you that while Josh was brilliant and profoundly serious, he was also irrepressibly playful. That playfulness spiced rather than spiked his (or my) seriousness, constantly erupting into his prose (and, in person, into his speech). Early on, he wrote:

[T]o a Canadian scholar who recently said to me, "You laugh about the Bush administration, but it's serious business," I responded, "Of course it's serious business: who laughs about happy events?"

Well, yes. Although I wasn't always fond of his penchant for punning, I shared his need to make "the serious business" funny. ("Making it funny" was one of the few things that ran in both of our familial backgrounds.) I can well imagine it helped him get through the gruesome medical situations he faced in childhood.

We met, face to face, for the first time in Buffalo, on March 22, 2006, where we were both attending the Samuel R. Delany Symposium. He rented a car and picked me up at the airport, all bundled up, wearing a hat with ear flaps. (I had bought a winter coat, of the sort unnecessary for Seattle winters, at a used clothing store: and still found it necessary to dress in layers the next day.) We were both terrified to meet, as any people who have grown close in an online relationship naturally are. The first evening was a bit rocky. But when he picked me up at my hotel the next morning, we became easier with one another. The next night, after having drinks in the bar with Carl Freedman, Steve Shaviro, Chip Delany, and me, Josh broke into song, and Carl joined him. Breaking into song is something Josh did often, which I of course hadn't known from merely email contact. He did this in Madison, too, when attending WisCon with his wife, Ann Keefer. Song--especially Broadway musical songs (but also Dylan and Leonard Cohen et al) was an important part of his life. Josh adored Stephen Sondheim. It got him through the worst of his constant struggle with Crohn's. And he scattered phrases from songs in his emails, and often used them in the subject line.

Finally, I must say this, too: Josh was a writer. Yes, his writing mostly took the form of scholarship. But his prose was always a pleasure to read--even his dissertation, which, in all its elegance, filled me with joy. It bothered him that people generally associate the designation "writer" solely with those who write fiction. But Josh's skill and talent for writing was superb. His prose was a constant reminder to me that every genre of writing, including scholarly genres, ought to be infused with grace and intelligence.

Josh always used to write R.I.P when someone important to us left our world. And so I'll say that now for Josh: R.I.P, beloved friend. (And thanks for all the fish.)

P.S. Please, please feel free to leave anecdotes and remembrances of Josh in a comment.  I and everyone else who loved Josh will treasure them.

Josh Lukin's "Pity Is Shadowed by Contempt"

Josh Lukin's "PITY IS SHADOWED BY CONTEMPT": AN INTERVIEW WITH ANNE FINGER has been posted at Wordgathering. Having read a book of short fiction by Anne Finger and having published Josh's "Ishmael in Love: Anne Finger and the Reclamation of Disability" in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, vol. 2, 1 (which is available for free download at thecsz.com/past-issues/csz-v2-n1-2012.pdf‎), I had to run right over to read it when he mentioned to me that it had been posted. In his introduction, Josh writes:

Activist, educator, and cultural worker Anne Finger has long been prominent in the U.S. disability movement. The author of three volumes of fiction and two memoirs, she has served as President of the Society for Disability Studies, written for Disability Studies Quarterly, and contributed to countless disability anthologies and conferences; at present, she is the board president of AXIS Dance Company, among the first dance companies to welcome disabled performers. In addition to disability-specific work, her career of activism extends from the 1960s peace movement to the Occupy movement: she has marched on the Pentagon and helped to shut down the Port of Oakland.

Finger's first book, the 1988 story collection Basic Skills, contains several disability-themed works, two of them drawing on her childhood experiences of polio. Her 1990 memoir Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy, and Birth, integrates accounts of her early life, her social activism, and her experiences at the hands of the medical profession, both as a polio survivor and as the mother of a baby in intensive care. In the process it explores the impact of sexist and ableist oppressions on her life and mind, and dramatizes her struggles with them. Her 1994 novel Bone Truth, incorporating a number of autobiographical elements, tells a story of a woman considering motherhood and struggling to frame a narrative explaining her own life and her difficult parents, particularly her abusive father. Among many other things, it is a historical critique of masculinism on the Old and New Left. With 2006's Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio, Finger produced an anti-individualist memoir, one that integrates her own experiences and feelings into a wealth of social and historical contexts. The stories collected in her 2009 Call Me Ahab, like Elegy, aspire to reveal the breadth of disability culture. The volume is a postmodern tour de force that re-envisions the experiences of legendary disabled characters from art, fiction, and history, through a disability-justice perspective.

The interview covers a good deal of feminist and activist territory. Here's just a morsel to pique your interest:

 JL: Then comes "Abortion" (1985), which contains the line, "'The flight from freedom,' my fingers snapped, 'the rise of the right-wing, the … it's not exactly freedom we're fleeing from … it's a half-way revolution, a quarter turn.'" How it felt in the late Seventies when we weren't getting the revolution we were hoping for.

AF: Right, right. And also that sense of having abortion rights but not having much that went along with it, and not having achieved the revolution in gender relations that we'd hoped for, trying to put that whole stew of things together.

JL: And not having achieved the revolution in class relations which would give abortion rights a context in which—

AF: Yes, and very specifically there, I'm thinking about a lot of the loneliness that people experienced. The lack of connection, and the isolation that people feel, and the lack of a sense of community, and the way that freedom can sometimes feel like more isolation, more being cut off, creating so many choices that you end up alone.

JL: The end of "Abortion" goes through the metafictional analysis that will become one of the glories of Call Me Ahab. It talks about the drama of the story, explains how real-life events were altered to turn it into a work of fiction, and ends with "a slogan, an image, a moral: and with a plea to reimagine our language, to tell and tell our stories again, until we have words to echo our lives." Needing new narratives and cutting through the received narratives. I keep hearing that in connection with what Occupy and other radicals today are trying to do. Can it be done? Can new narratives reach people?

AF: Oh absolutely. I just think we always have to be off-balance. We always have to realize that whatever story we tell, it's never going to be the final story. Until the end of the human race, which I guess will be the final story, but only by happenstance. I think of it in terms of disability studies, that whatever point we come to, we're never going to come to a final understanding, we're never going to come to a final resting point, we're always going to be needing to see that, whatever we've created, it's silenced some people, it's excluded some things. And to just constantly be aware of that exclusion. And I think the same thing in terms of finding that language to speak. It's always going to be partial, there's always going to be a kind of yearning at the edges, a sense that we haven't fully articulated things.

I've been involved in an online forum where somebody was discussing a book and used the term "mental illness," and somebody else fired back, "You know, this is a really offensive term, and people in the mad pride movement or the psych survivor movement don't like this terminology" ;and there's been a very interesting conversation about terminology. The idea that we're going to come up with the perfect term — I understand why people can have a very strong reaction to the term "mental illness," and the dangers of it; and I understand that maybe at times it makes rhetorical sense to deploy that, and that we always have to be aware and we always have to be negotiating those things.

JL: We need words for things, and the dream of a pure language isn't going to happen; and so we'll always have our scare quotes and brackets and strikethroughs and footnotes and the like.

AF: Exactly.

JL: There's a story in Basic Skills called "A Tragedy" — originally published as "Our Tragedy" (1985) — which has the line, "We were no short-haired, thin-lipped Maoists out to offer ourselves up as the vanguard to Providence's working class." But you talk a lot about the asceticism of the radicals and their grandiose self-image.

AF: And I have mixed feelings about that. Because any revolutionary change has to come about by being really unreasonable. It has to come about by people being driven. It has to come about by people being grandiose. And at the same time that grandiosity and that unreasonableness has to be tempered. And the work of tempering that has to happen within movements. And it's hard to live with.

***

Now go read the complete interview here: http://www.wordgathering.com/issue26/interviews/finger.html.

Aqueductista News

--At Alexandria's Eve, Nic has posted a thoughtful review of Nicola Griffith's With Her Body.

--Marjorie Senechal reviews Chandler Davis and Josh Lukin's It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis, at length, for the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. I think I can safely aver that this is the first time an Aqueduct Press title has been reviewed in a mathematics journal.

--I'm going to the dentist this afternoon, to have a "tiny" cavity filled. More exciting is that I've just received, in the mail, this year's Clarion West tee-shirt. This year's class didn't put a brain with a fork on it, but it's not without its own particular moment...

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2010, pt. 19: Josh Lukin

Read and Appreciated in 2010
by Josh Lukin

For the past few summers, I’ve taken a break from my Areas of Specialization and Course Preparation to read some Victorian fiction. This June, after a tense Spring semester in which my own health and the College’s treatment of its contingent faculty were both disappointing, I flung myself into the short fiction of Mrs. Gaskell, finishing Gothic Tales, A Dark Night’s Work and Other Stories, and Cousin Phillis and Other Stories. Looking at the critical reception of some of the works therein, I noticed that, as with Thomas Hardy (who owes an awful lot to her), critics had been most dismissive of the short stories, such as “The Grey Woman,” that centered on bonds between women (“What about Cranford,” you ask. She gets away with depictions of female community in Cranford by her deft use of the flipness that characterizes early Dickens: readers who are threatened by seeing women interact with one another sans men have the escape hatch of laughter/irony). Gaskell is perhaps most celebrated for her depiction of poverty, but I was also impressed with the way she dealt with disability. Unlike, say, George Eliot’s “Brother Jacob,” in which cognitive disability is used for farcical effect, Gaskell’s “Half a Life-Time Ago” and “Cousin Phillis” are serious explorations of what effects the presence of a mentally disabled man have on a rural community.

My next Victorian adventure, late in June, involved another author who was better-than-average in his depictions of female agency and of people with disabilities, and who I think was taken less seriously than Dickens partly for that reason—the polyamorous stoner Wilkie Collins. I made it through the biggest Collins novel on my shelf, 1864’s Armadale. Wow. Take a look at this passage, in which a bland and gentle aristocrat is forced by his sense of propriety to accept the presence in his train compartment of the novel’s villain:

The train came up at the same moment. Setting Midwinter out of the question, the common decencies of politeness left Allan no alternative but to submit. After having been the cause of her leaving her situation at Major Milroy's, after having pointedly avoided her only a few days since on the high-road, to have declined going to London in the same carriage with Miss Gwilt would have been an act of downright brutality which it was simply impossible to commit.

Admirers of twentieth-century movies and novels will find the situation reminiscent of one that Patricia Highsmith used in 1950 (with Lydia Gwilt in the role of Bruno)—the correspondence led me to consider, using D.A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police, how often post-WWII noir fiction recollects some of Wilkie’s topoi. Miller’s agenda was to present the Victorian novel as a conservative force, educating readers in social norms and showing the perils of violating them; he wrote in opposition to critics who liked to find “subversive” attitudes in an era’s literature. Hence he finds Walter in The Woman in White learning that he may not identify with a victimized woman or bond too closely with another man but must take his position as head of a nuclear family, with his wife safely subordinated to him and male camaraderie relegated to his past. Whether or not Collins’s book in fact endorses that trajectory, that schema is an ideal of patriarchal society; hence I was delighted to notice that Jim Thompson, for example, quite specifically targets tough-guy heroes’ dehumanization of women and rejection of male bonding, and that the pattern Miller finds of a woman being incarcerated, rescued, vitiated, domesticated, and impregnated is the very narrative that Thompson likes to parody.

Aside from its relevance to my Areas of Specialization, however, I was struck by such passages in Armadale as

In the miserable monotony of the lives led by a large section of the middle classes of England, anything is welcome to the women which offers them any sort of harmless refuge from the established tyranny of the principle that all human happiness begins and ends at home. While the imperious needs of a commercial country limited the representatives of the male sex, among the doctor's visitors, to one feeble old man and one sleepy little boy, the women, poor souls, to the number of no less than sixteen—old and young, married and single—had seized the golden opportunity of a plunge into public life. Harmoniously united by the two common objects which they all had in view—in the first place, to look at each other, and, in the second place, to look at the Sanitarium —they streamed in neatly dressed procession through the doctor's dreary iron gates, with a thin varnish over them of assumed superiority to all unladylike excitement, most significant and most pitiable to see!

Paragraphs such as that, and indeed the amount of time the novel spends on the first-person narrative of a tragic heroine who, relentlessly used by her social betters and abused by her first husband,  develops a heartless and mercenary approach to life the risks of which she apprehends too late, let me to expect that there’d be some nice feminist analysis of the novel.  But I did not find anyone making even the tentative claim that hey, maybe Wilkie was doing some deliberate social critique concerning women's lot in his society: criticism seemed to move quickly from the 19^th century complaint that the heroine didn’t suffer enough for her sins to the Milleresque "Look how he's enforcing the status quo" argument. Indeed, even recent criticism sometimes gets the plot wrong or euphemistically refers to Lydia as “mistreated” (when she is in fact battered) by her first husband.

Late in July, I opened another Victorian novel that had been on my shelf for a couple of years, Margaret Oliphant’s Hester. Mrs Oliphant (to use the name with which she signed her work) wrote ninety-nine novels (as well as twenty-five nonfiction books, fifty short stories, and three hundred essays) because she had to, Mr Oliphant having died early and (to her) unexpectedly; and she thought prosperity would remember her as having worked hard but never having become George Eliot. But I found Hester an interesting experience:  there are passages where the prose is rushed, passages where I thought "This is a great novel of sensibility," passages where I thought "This is a little painful in the way it turns mine eyes into my very soul and there I see such black and grainèd spots as will not leave their tinct,” (The great novels of manners can do that—A Room with a View and Trouble on Triton, for example) times when I mused, "This began like Balzac but is becoming like Jane Austen stretched on a taffy-pull."  But by the end, I was extremely moved and ready to rank it as among the most powerful British novels of its decade, in the company of The Mayor of Casterbridge.  Not only are the events touching and the psychological insights cutting, but the level of realism, the sense that these are in many cases characters whose depth and lives extend far beyond what we see or hear of them, makes a marvelous contrast with that Dickensian irony that enables us to look down smarmily on some Victorian characters (indeed, one or two characters explicitly state that their needs are greater than those of people in Dickens!).

Other, shorter Victorian fiction I enjoyed included Amy Levy’s Romance of a Shop and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Lawyer’s Secret. The latter is a thriller with, if I recall correctly, no redeeming social importance. It’s published by the incomparable Hesperus Press, which also offers a nifty edition of Edith Wharton’s first novel, The Touchstone—a tale of shame and reconciliation that is, as Virginia Woolf said of a much longer novel, “written for grown-up people.”

I see that Locus is reporting coverage of Jennifer Egan’s new story-cycle, A Visit from the Goon Squad, on accounta its storyline extends twenty years into the future so it must be SFnal. It’s a beautifully written book in which Egan reinvents herself as a punk Proust, a hippie Dos Passos, a rock-and-roll Faulkner who uses her mastery of multiple points of view to address the horrors of memory, the ravages of time, the perils of narcissism, and the evolution of PR. Although racism, homophobia, disability, and poverty appear in the world the book depicts, the focus tends to be on educated, mostly-white professionals—some readers have been unhappy with the fact that the world’s more beleaguered peoples tend to appear only in the background.

Of the other living authors whose work I enjoyed this year, three are Aqueductistas:  Rachel Swirsky, whose Through the Drowsy Dark is so clearly the work of a mature and seasoned author that I keep looking for her apprentice volumes, but I guess it’s her first book; Eleanor Arnason, whose Mammoths of the Great Plains is as valuable for its amazing Author Interview as for the eponymous novella; and Suzy McKee Charnas, whose Dorothea’s Dreams contemporary litfic has not yet caught up with, two dozen years after its initial publication. Aqueduct’s latest anthologies, Wiscon Chronicles 4 (ed. Sylvia Kelso) and 80! (eds. Karen Joy Fowler and Debbie Notkin), are also too beautiful for words.

Following a link from Matt Cheney, I came across Gary Lutz’s praise for Sam Lipsyte, whose sentences include gems such as “Everybody wanted everything to be gleaming again, or maybe they just wanted their evening back” and “Home, we drank a little wine, put on some of that sticky saxophone music we used to keep around to drown out the bitter squeaks in our hearts.” Most of the stories in Lipsyte’s spectacularly bleak Venus Drive contain prose of that caliber, sprinkled appropriately through his stories of thugs and losers in our neoliberal world—Padgett Powell’s “Paley meets Bukowski” strikes me as an apt description of what Lipsyte is up to.

I had the privilege of seeing Anne Finger at the Society for Disability Studies in June, which motivated me to pick up her short-story collection Call Me Ahab.  The volume left me saying, “This is someone who belongs in the contemporary US fiction pantheon with Powers and Fowler.” Great protest fiction, the quality of which is illustrated by this response from a reviewer who’s confused by irony and could only appreciate the weakest story in the book—remember how Slate dealt with irony in Fowler? It’s often a good sign when the doxosophers are nonplussed.

I’m not a big reader of history, by and large; but I was moved by a couple of volumes in that genre this year. Thanks to my association with Chandler Davis, I tried reading his wife’s Slaves on Screen, which is indeed All That; and thanks to my decision to teach Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate in my contemporary literature course, I read Bruce Cumings’s revelatory The Korean War. It’s remarkable that someone as far left, by today’s standards, as Cumings got to publish this book; and his work is not only an invaluable corrective to past accounts of that conflict but an incomparable guide to some aspects of how the Cold War, the Red Scare, and the permanent militarization of the U.S. began.

Defining “history text” a little more broadly, I must praise Sartre’s 1944 Anti-Semite and Jew, which may have been the first nonfiction volume of JPS to appear in English—I believe it was serialized in Commentary in 1947. Sartre certainly understood the Tea Party: one can readily see today’s analogues of his “anti-semite”s waving signs that say “I want my country back”; and one can read, say, Fred Clark’s analysis of movement conservatism and recognize how closely it meshes with “Since the anti-Semite has chosen hate, we are forced to conclude that it is the state of passion that he loves” or “The more one is absorbed in fighting Evil, the less one is tempted to place the Good in question.” My only objection to Sartre’s schema is to his

A man who finds it entirely natural to denounce other men [to the authorities] cannot have our conception of humanity; he does not even see those whom he aids in the same light as we do. His generosity, his kindness, are not like our kindness, our generosity. You cannot confine passion to one sphere.

Written in 1944, these lines are the product of a situation in which it was a matter of survival to classify others as allies or enemies. But the rhetoric, I think, tends to other the anti-semite in a manner that’s a little too self-congratulatory—Sartre’s insights into the anti-semitic temperament should, I think, be occasions for readers to reflect on themselves and not to say that “we” are incapable of these crimes.

Taking the commuter train from the Philadelphia airport with Chandler Davis, I got into a discussion of Left opposition to World War II; Chan pointed out that U.S. Leftists who opposed the war were not necessarily slavish adherents to the Communist line but, in many cases, came out of a pacifist or anti-imperialist tradition. Hence the Communist Woody Guthrie had to persuade Pete Seeger, a product of the Quaker/pacifist tradition, to support the war effort. “Look at Phil Klass’s ‘Constantinople,’” Chan said. I did, and found it a moving essay thanks in no small part to the beauty of its prose and its deft command of irony.

Another genre which I rarely look at, even though it’s important to my understanding of literature, is the Poets on Poetry book. But this year saw the release of Marilyn Hacker’s Unauthorized Voices, an intense and meticulous set of appreciations of contemporary poets, and of the paperback edition of Adrienne Rich’s A Human Eye. Which is so good that one just wants to point and go, “Oboy!” Or just quote some characteristically nifty lines: “But we can also define the 'aesthetic' . . . as news of an awareness, a resistance, that totalizing systems want to quell: art reaching into us for what's still passionate, still unintimidated, still unquenched.” And

We may view the imagination as a kind of gated, landscaped neighborhood—or as a river, sometimes clogged and polluted, carrying many kinds of traffic, including pollen and contraband, but in movement: the always-regenerating impulse toward an always-beginning future.

Perhaps the most widely celebrated Poet on Poetry (again, broadly defined) volume of the year, which is certainly worthy of all the accolades it’s getting, is Stephen J. Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat:  Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes. Sondheim, like Rich, teaches anyone who encounters his words about the ethical demands of creative work—in his case, of the imperative for rigor, seriousness, and a commitment to the highest of standards in approaching one’s craft. Plus he turns out to be a thoughtful and passionate critic and memoirist. I find his prose—even the two sentences that are unsympathetic to feminists and the two pages that decry “academic egos”—to be a lovely expression of his personality.  

Josh Lukin teaches at Temple University, a public university in inner city Philadelphia that serves a diverse student population, as a contingent employee of the First Year Writing Program.. He also belongs to Temple's Interdisciplinary Faculty Committee on Disability. Dr. Lukin’s primary specialty is in noncanonical fiction of the midcentury US; he has also published articles about Alan Moore, Oscar Wilde, and the Black Panther Party. In 2008, the University Press of Mississippi published his anthology, Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States; his work has also appeared in minnesota review, The New York Review of Science Fiction, jml: The Journal of Modern Literature, Anarchist Studies, and The Encyclopedia of American Disability History. Earlier this year, Aqueduct Press published It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis, which Josh edited.

Tonight in Toronto

A reminder:

Chan Davis and Josh Lukin will be at the Toronto Public Library, the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, & Fantasy, tonight at 7:00, doing one of their fascinating discussion sessions and (perhaps) reading from It Walks in Beauty. 

Wednesday evening, in Buffalo

Two Aqueductistas will be appearing at a bookstore event in Buffalo on Wednesday. The Aqueductistas are Chan Davis and Josh Lukin, the bookstore is Talking Leaves, and the event is a celebration of the publication of It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis, a book edited by Josh Lukin and published by Aqueduct Press. Chan and Josh will be reading and signing.

Samuel R. Delany, by the way, recently posted this comment on his Facebook page:

I'm reading a really fine book, of great interest to historians of the middle 20th century, people who like science fiction, and general fans of clear thought and good fiction: It Walks in Beauty: The Collected Prose of Chandler Davis, edited by Josh Lukin.

I do wish I were able to attend myself. I'm sure the discussion will be both entertaining and stimulating.

A Clutch of Reviews

Here are a few recent reviews of some Aqueduct Press books.

*Publishers Weekly has reviewed Aqueduct's first Heirloom Book, It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis, ed. Josh Lukin:

This scholarly volume, the first maleauthored book from feminist SF press Aqueduct, explores the work of Chandler Davis, who refused to cooperate with 1950s McCarthyism and was dismissed from the University of Michigan faculty, academically blacklisted, and briefly imprisoned. As Lukin writes in his extensive introduction, Davis's writings "remind us that nothing and no one is as immutable as the dominant order would have us believe." Five stories--including "Last Year's Grave Undug" (1953), in which an "atombombed" America is still in the grips of "the Red scare" even though nations no longer exist, and the sublimely powerful "It Walks in Beauty" (1954), which examines a society where women with careers are rendered genderless--are accompanied by numerous essays, a speech, and a lengthy interview, all of significant interest to any fan of political SF. Copyright © Reed Business Information

*Donald D'Ammassa has reviewed Tomb of the Fathers by Eleanor Arnason:

Here’s a clever and quite original planetary adventure. A crew of humans and aliens is conducting research on a planet supposedly abandoned by its intelligent residents when a malfunctioning AI decides to strand them there. In short order they begin to uncover secrets about the decline of the alien civilization, which mixes the serious and the humorous in about equal measure, and yes there’s considerable social commentary mixed in with the laughs and surprises. It’s quite short – not much more than a novella – so the satire doesn’t get too long winded, and there’s an active plot as well. Have a few laughs and look at human behavior from a slightly different viewpoint.

*And Strange Horizons has posted Narrative Realities: A Symphony in Four Books by Matt Cheney, an essay that discusses Narrative Power edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, Reality Hunger by David Shields, and Vanishing Point by Ander Monson. On his own blog, Matt remarks:

All four books are well worth reading, thinking about, arguing with. I especially hope that in the wake of Paul Di Filippo's review of Who Fears Death in the B&N Review that the column will offer an alternative way of evaluating the novel. For the way Di Filippo read the book, I think his assessment is valid, but he read it in the most narrow and silly way possible, the way someone who's only ever read science fiction would read. And I know he hasn't only read science fiction, so I'm perplexed at the assumptions he applies.

It Walks in Beauty: now available

It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis, edited by Josh Lukin, is now available through Aqueduct's website-- and, until July 1 (its official publication date), for $16 (which is a $5 reduction in price). As you may recall, I posted about this book earlier, previewing its table of contents and a lengthy excerpt for Josh's introductory essay. Here's a more general description, with blurbs:

Harvard awarded Chandler Davis a PhD in mathematics in 1950. Three years later, Davis was served with a subpoena as a result of his having paid for the printing of a pamphlet critical of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and his subsequent ordeal included the loss of his job at the University of Michigan and a six-month imprisonment in 1960 for contempt of Congress. Blacklisted from full-time academic jobs in the US, he ultimately found employment in 1962 at the University of Toronto, where he is now an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics. It Walks in Beauty collects several of his science fiction stories, which probe deeply into such social and political issues as nuclear escalation, gender roles, and eugenics, as well as a selection of his essays, originally published in venues ranging from The New York Review of Books to the Waging Peace Series of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The volume also includes a lengthy interview of Davis by Lukin; a speech Davis made at the February 1995 meeting of AAAS; and three essays by Lukin, taking a long view of Davis's work.

In addition to his lifelong activism as a civil libertarian, Davis has been a director of Science for Peace and is a trustee of the Davis-Putter scholarship fund, founded by his father in 1961 to award grants to students working for peace and social justice. A poet and composer as well as a long-time co-editor of The Mathematical Intelligencer, Professor Davis combined his artistic and scientific interests in the anthology The Shape of Content: Creative Writing in Mathematics and Science (Chandler Davis, Marjorie Senechal, and Jan Zwicky, editors. Wellesley, MA: AK Peters, 2009).

"Although Chandler Davis has published less than a score of science-fiction short stories, some of us have long treasured them as brilliant gems. Josh Lukin's thoughtful collection of Davis's fiction and nonfiction offers 21st-century readers a fine introduction to the work of this neglected and invaluable writer."
— H. Bruce Franklin, author of War Stars: The Superweapon in the American Imagination and Vietnam and Other American Fantasies

"This is a wonderful and unusual selection of science fiction and political/psychological non-fiction, a collection of writing by Chandler Davis. Informed by his personal life, his unwavering political activism over the last half century, his professional life as a mathematician, Davis's work provides invaluable insight and direction about what is to be done ¡V and always with wit, clarity, tolerance, and dissent. Whether writing imaginatively or factually, he shows how narcissism so destructively gets in the way of seeing others as real people and how it works against acknowledging what is unknown. Chandler Davis relates to past, present, and future times, always open to decipher the whole picture and to speak up."
— Judith Deutsch, President of Science for Peace

"This is a terrific book. I can't remember the last time I have seen fiction, especially science fiction, put so richly in context. It Walks in Beauty introduces us to a remarkable man, gives us insight into the American science fiction community of the 1940s and 50s, and reminds us how much damage the McCarthy era of red hunts did to ordinary human lives and to American civilization. Among the stories, I especially like "The Names of Yanils," a thoughtful consideration of the relation of people to tradition, and "It Walks in Beauty," an utterly creepy and true description of sex roles in 50s America. I remember those sex roles, just as I remember the red hunts.We have not recovered yet. Nor will we recover until the ideas and integrity of people like Chandler Davis are incorporated into our history and culture."
— Eleanor Arnason, author of Ring of Swords and A Woman of the Iron People

And if you're wondering why the avowedly feminist Aqueduct Press has published this book... Well, I recommend you read it to find out! You can purchase the book here. (Or you could nudge your local library to acquire it.)

It Walks in Beauty

I suspect many readers of this blog may not know who Chandler Davis is (though some may have guessed he's historian Natalie Zemon Davis's husband). I wrote about one of his stories, "It Walks in Beauty," in "Old Pictures: The Discursive Instability of Feminist SF" (The Grand Conversation, 2004), a story that was first published in 1958 and was reprinted by Ellen Datlow on SCIFCTION.COM in 2003. Chan published most of his science fiction stories in the 1950s, and one in Crank! in 1994. But the particulars of his situation are complicated.

Harvard awarded Chandler Davis a PhD in mathematics in 1950. Three years later, hes was served with a subpoena as a result of his having paid for the printing of a pamphlet critical of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and his subsequent ordeal included the loss of his job at the University of Michigan and a six-month imprisonment in 1960 for contempt of Congress. Blacklisted from full-time academic jobs in the US, he ultimately found employment in 1962 at the University of Toronto, where he is now an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics.

It Walks in Beauty collects several of Chan Davis's science fiction stories, which probe deeply into such social and political issues as nuclear escalation, gender roles, and eugenics, as well as a selection of his essays, originally published in venues ranging from The New York Review of Books to the Waging Peace Series of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a speech he gave at the February 1995 meeting of AAAS. And, of course, the three meaty essays by Josh Lukin I mentioned in my last post.

Here's the Table of Contents:

INTRODUCTION

History, Heresy, Hegemony:
On the Relevance of Chandler Davis—by Josh Lukin

ESSAYS AND LETTERS

Critique & Proposals 1949
. . . From an Exile
Two Open Letters: (1) “Violence and Civility” (2) “Imprisoned Mathematician: J.L.Massera”
The Selfish Genetics
From Science for Good or Ill
“The Untimely Rhetoric of Chandler Davis’s Essays”—by Josh Lukin

STORIES

Last Year’s Grave Undug
Adrift on the Policy Level
It Walks in Beauty
The Statistomat Pitch
The Names of Yanils

SPEECH

“Shooting Rats in a Barrel”: Did the Red Hunt Win?

INTERVIEW

“Trying to Say Something True”: The Paradoxa Interview with Chandler Davis

AFTERWORD

"Alternatives to Reverence"—by Josh Lukin

EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

You may well be wondering why Aqueduct Press, which focuses on feminist science fiction, has chosen to launch Heirloom Books with a title by two men. Here are a few snippets from Josh's "History, Heresy, Hegeony: On the Relevance of Chandler Davis," the essay that introduces It Walks in Beauty:

It Walks in Beauty: Selected prose of Chandler Davis is the first male-authored book to be published by Aqueduct; it includes three stories with all-male casts; and its articles most often focus on male victims of oppression. Its aptness for a feminist press is, then, not immediately apparent; so I hope to make a case for it on biographical, literary, political, and theoretical grounds. Davis’s feminist life and the strategies he developed in his battles with the Red Hunters could be of particular interest to feminist readers; a look at his work is also important to more general issues of ideological struggle and of recovering ideas and texts from progressives of the past –hence my emphasis on the fact that US Communism from 1935 – 1955 was a fruitful source of feminist thought, which provided a milieu that supported Davis’s values. The relevance of Davis’s work to several present-day political battlegrounds will also, I believe, become evident in the course of my argument.

Josh then considers the biographical, literary, political, and theoretical aspects of the relevance of Chandler Davis's work for Aqueduct Press readers. Under the literary rubric, Josh writes,

I have argued elsewhere that, in an era in which the grossest misogyny in life and literature passed unremarked or celebrated, even small anti-sexist gestures were worthy of notice. Chandler Davis was in the minority of SF writers who sought consistently to create female characters with competence, authority, and agency. In the stories for Astounding Science Fiction that first made his reputation, we see a female Congressional staffer whose competence and quick thinking helps avert nuclear holocaust (“To Still the Drums,” 1946), a revolutionary cell on Ganymede in which men and women have equal authority (“The Journey and the Goal,” 1947), a female leader of a revolt against a eugenicist autocrat (“The Aristocrat,” 1949), and a planetary research team in which men and women collaborate as scientific peers (“Share Our World,” 1953). But Davis’s most penetrating anti-sexist statements are his later works set in patriarchal societies –not only “It Walks in Beauty” but also the oft-reprinted “Adrift on the Policy Level.”

Jean Smith, in a tribute to Davis, characterized “Adrift on the Policy Level” as “about scientific advice getting shuffled aside in a corporation,” which suggests that the story’s theme is bureaucratic incompetence in the world of commerce. While broadly true, that characterization elides the story’s most innovative social, psychological, and political attributes. Politically, it matters that the setting is not “a corporation” but “The Corporation,” a quasi-governmental entity that not only runs on marketing but administrates large geographic regions; psychologically, the story’s satirical punch owes much to the way in which The Corporation has by the end imposed a blissful false consciousness on the protagonists; and socially, the story offers a novel depiction of how an oppressive society uses gender to further its ends.

The subtleties of the story’s approach to gender may not be immediately clear to a reader today, as the piece plays with three commonplaces that are rooted in the era of its creation, viz:

(1) The Fifties (and indeed the preceding and following decade) saw a huge expression of anxiety that managerial jobs were emasculating or feminizing men, both because they were not rugged individualist forms of self-assertion and because they entailed “emotional labor” and attention to the minutiae of pleasing others, tasks that were thought of as more appropriate to women.

(2) SF of the Fifties (and the Forties and the Sixties) had rigid conventions in which women were allowed authority. Luise White famously observed in 1975 that “ . . . active, vigorous women characters [in SF] invariably worked either directly for the state, or for some male-run institution that controlled so much power and revenue, it might as well be the state itself” (Delany 167); she noted that these women included the heroes –Kathy in The Space Merchants, Rydra Wong in Babel-17, and many others– as well as the monsters, such as Hedy in The Space Merchants and Olivia in The Stars My Destination.

(3) Mainstream literature was less ambivalent: women with authority in political or bureaucratic milieux were pretty consistently monsters along the lines of The Manchurian Candidate’s Eleanor Shaw, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s Big Nurse, The Ugly American’s Marie MacIntosh, and (from Humbert’s point of view) Lolita’s Miss Pratt. Such women, however, were unsexed or sexually grotesque. Historian Robert Dean points out that The Ugly American, for example, “warned [that] women could subvert the imperial project from two directions: from within, as indolent luxury-loving ‘Moms,’ and from without, as alien sexual temptresses” (29).

The Communist line on gender may also be relevant to an understanding of the story, as Communists regarded female empowerment within the constraints of capitalist institutions as no success at all, a goal of bourgeois feminism (today we would call it a Third Wave approach). An attentive Communist would also have been aware of (albeit not necessarily in agreement with) Popular Front era arguments about “sexual servility” like Rebecca Pitts’s, which is also relevant to “It Walks in Beauty”:

To get a husband (even lovers, even admirers), [woman under capitalism] must please the dominant male –“normally” an undeveloped egotist who regards her as a means to his own pleasure. It becomes her business, therefore, to arouse desire; to play by means of sex-allurement, dress, and personal charm upon male ego-sexuality. Instead of being a rounded, creative personality, she is warped and twisted . . . It is proof of a strong urge in woman that so many really do –in spite of this terrific pressure from bourgeois society –lead creative lives. (324)

Pitts does not use the word “business” casually; she is consciously in a tradition of criticizing the commodification of Sex Appeal. And while Chandler Davis seems loath to depict any woman as unconsciously “warped and twisted,” his work is remarkably aware of the sexist pressures that Pitts and other thoughtful Reds described.

So “Adrift on the Policy Level” is the work of an author whose stories have begun, perhaps thanks to the political persecutions or social changes he is observing, to grow more caustic and satirical; and it is the product of a creative mind that has already, in “The Aristocrat” and “Share Our World,” shown the ability to circumvent SF conventions concerning the position of empowered women. Unlike Davis’s earlier stories, “Adrift” cannot offer a character who is conscious of its society’s problems and points the way toward freedom. The premise of the satire –that The Corporation is a total institution, exercising all of its hegemonic powers to preserve the status quo– obviates the possibility of a liberating figure. Instead, the story does its political work by burlesquing the ideological norms of mid-century US society and fiction. If the emotional labor and inauthentic “other-directed” poses that the managerial world requires are “feminizing,” it asks, wouldn’t the perfect corporation have them done by women using the skills of “manufactured femininity”? If the tools of the sexual temptress are so powerful, wouldn’t female agents of authority use them, rather than being starchy and schoolmarmish termagants? Isn’t gender and the ability to perform it in the hope of manipulating one’s superiors something that men have also, such that Mr. Demarest’s style of masculinity can change “from Viking to Roman” as the occasion demands? And, pace SF traditions, how likely is it that a corporate-political functionary under capitalism can use her “active, vigorous” character and her suasive powers for anything other than being a Company Woman and maintaining the institution’s homeostasis?

And from the concluding section of Josh's intro:

Chandler Davis’s fiction is, like his accounts of Red Scare survival and his nonfictional broadsides against conservative views of human nature, a model of hopefulness. Demystifying the processes by which oppressive structures are naturalized and legitimized exposes those structures as contingent and reversible. If history has been purged by human beings, it can be recovered by human beings; if we have lost sight of the human origins of ideologies, we can regain it; if the forces of reaction create alluring new subject positions for people, so can the forces of liberation; and if subjection to ideology does not mean that people are stupid, they can change their minds.

Heirloom Books is about not only preserving past pleasures in danger of being lost, but also about recovering the history that matters to feminists. Canons are useful, but as we all know, they never tell the whole story.

Aqueductista Events This Weekend

Two Aqueductistas will be talking, reading, and signing at bookstores on Saturday. Nisi Shawl will be appearing at Book People in Moscow, Idaho. According to the Daily Evergreen, this will be a "brown bag lunch" event and that besides reading from Filter House, Nisi will also sing with accompaniment from Brian Clark on guitar. Here a snippet from the article in the Daily Evergreen:

Her work is helping pioneer the capacities of the sci-fi genre beyond the cliches from questioning the most rigid social norms. She will be reading from her latest collection of short stories, “Filter House,” from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at the BookPeople of Moscow bookstore on 521 S. Main St.

“I use science fiction to question the authority of the way things are. It’s good for challenging the status quo and that’s what I use it for," she said.

Defying any branch of mainstream storytelling, Shawl said her ratio of female to male protagonists is nearly nine to one and the women are rarely preoccupied with locking down a love interest. Yet, Shawl said she doesn’t feel particularly aware of trying to write feminist literature.

“It’s not a conscious or preachy thing, gravity is a part of my work too,” she said.

On the other side of the country, in Phialdelphia, Josh Lukin will launching Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States by giving a lecture-- "How Dreams of Freedom Survive in a Conservative Time"-- at Big Blue Marble Bookstore in Mt. Airy at 3 p.m. Here is the bookstore's description:

Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States. Reading with Josh Lukin. An examination of fiction from repressed voices in a misunderstood decade, with essays by Stephanie Brown, Ladislava Khailova, Kathlene McDonald, Ian Peddie, Harry Thomas, and Jennifer Worley. Were the 1950s an oppressive or a liberating time? Some scholars argue that the Red Scare, newly institutionalized discrimination against gays, and a public discourse saturated with sexism left wounds in American society. Others trace the origins of sixties liberation movements to the fifties and celebrate America's postwar prosperity, or argue that such new phenomena as rock 'n' roll, teenage consumerism, and Beat poetry gave Americans a new sense of freedom and identity. Invisible Suburbs advances a new synthesis of both views from the perspective of literary scholarship. Josh Lukin is lecturer of English at Temple University. His work has appeared in many periodicals, among them Modern Language Notes, Minnesota review, Comics Journal, and Exquisite Corpse, as well as in the anthology Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century.

Have to say, I'd love to be able to attend both of these events and am sorry I can't.

Invisible Suburbs

Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States, edited by Josh Lukin, has just been published by the University Press of Mississippi.

Here's the Table of Contents:

Introduction: Thirty-Three Years of the Fifties
by Josh Lukin

Good Old Boy Masculinity and Same-Sex Desire in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Bitterweed Path
by Harry Thomas

Postwar Left Feminism and Antifascist Resistance in the Culture Work of Martha Dodd
by Kathlene McDonald

Anybody's Protest Novel: Chester Himes and the Prison of Authenticity
by Stephanie Brown

Rewriting Patriarchal Paradigms of Retardation in Elizabeth Spencer's The Light in the Piazza
by Ladislava Khailova

The Mid-century Pulp Novel and the Imagining of Lesbian Community
by Jennifer Worley

Afterword: The Conditions of Reception
Josh Lukin

Alluring, no? For more about the book, or to purchase it, go here.

"Trying to Say Something True"

Back in 2003 ParaDoxa published an illuminating interview with Chandler Davis in its special issue on Fifties Fiction, edited by Josh Lukin and Samuel R. Delany. The interview, "Trying to Same Something True," is now available online through Ray Davis's Bellona Times Repress. Chandler Davis, though known principally as a mathematician, published several sf stories back in the fifties. (In fact, I discuss one of them, "It Walks in Beauty," which was reprinted by Ellen Datlow at SciFiction.com and could be called Tiptreean avant la lettre, in my essay "Old Pictures: The Discursive Instability of Feminist SF.") Interestingly, Chan Davis also published a proto-Writing-the-Other essay in a fan magazine.

In his intro to the interview, Josh writes:

For all that Herb Philbrick led three lives, the indefatigable Horace Chandler Davis puts him to shame, leading at least seven. He is Chan Davis, the writer of a dozen science fiction stories that probe deeply into social and ethical issues; he is the renowned mathematician Chandler Davis, longtime editor of The Mathematical Intelligencer and innovator in the theory of operators and matrices; he is an anti-war activist, having coordinated international protests against the war in Vietnam and been a director of Science for Peace; he is a composer, having cowritten the music for Theodore Sturgeon's song "Thunder and Roses" as well as more recent works; he is a member of the mighty intellectual family that includes his wife, the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, and his daughter, the literary and cultural critic Simone Weil Davis; he is the author of several acclaimed poems; and he is a lifelong civil libertarian who has organized for freedom of expression in Eastern Europe as well as North America.

In 1953, Chandler Davis was served with a subpoena as a result of his having paid for the printing of a pamphlet critical of HUAC. His subsequent ordeal included the loss of his job at the University of Michigan and a six-month imprisonment in 1960 for contempt of Congress. Blacklisted from full-time academic jobs in the US, he ultimately found employment at the University of Toronto in 1962, where he continues to work as Emeritus Professor of Mathematics. He and his wife have each written articles and given lectures recounting his case in the context of the Red Scare years.

Check it out!

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2007, Pt. 9: Nisi Shawl and Josh Lukin

We're not done yet! I've still got people reporting in. So here are two more--

Nisi Shawl:

My name’s Nisi Shawl. I’m a writer whose day job is writing. I review books, mostly SF, for the Seattle Times. Every year, in addition to my paid assignments, I turn in a short paragraph about my pick for Best Book of the Year, to be included with other reviewers’ picks in a sort of “summing up” article. In 2007 I reviewed fifteen books for the Times. Five of them were the best. I did pick one and write the requisite paragraph, but for some reason it wasn’t included in the article.

My Five Best Books I Reviewed for the Seattle Times: Thirteen by Richard K. Morgan, Spook Country by William Gibson, The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson, Time's Child by Rebecca Ore, and The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss. I finally picked Thirteen to write about. Here’s my paragraph on that one:

Thirteen, by Richard K. Morgan (Del Rey). Science fiction reviewer Nisi Shawl called this novel an “achingly good” look at male violence and racial justice through the eyes of a genetically engineered supersoldier living three hundred years from now, full of “harrowing truths, gritty romance, complex politics, and synapse-swift action.”

I was following several Times templates in writing that paragraph, including a mandated wordcount. I didn’t have the space to mention my other four Best Books, or to say why, if forced to create a hierarchy among my picks, I’d place Thirteen at the top.

Aqueduct Press has provided me with that space.

The New Moon’s Arms is probably Hopkinson’s best novel to date. That’s saying quite a lot. Hopkinson does quite a lot here: she provides vivid sensory impressions of the beautiful Caribbean environment, glimpses of human nature by turns hilarious and regrettable, panoramic views of grass-roots anti-neo-colonialist organizing, and the most believable scientific extrapolation on the possibility of sentient marine mammals I’ve seen since Vonda McIntyre’s 1997 novel The Moon and the Sun.

Time’s Child was the first novel of Rebecca Ore’s I’d read. I enjoyed it so much I campaigned passionately for my book group to pick it, but at the meeting where we discussed it most everyone dismissed Time’s Child as weak and lacking in verisimilitude. One member even returned his copy to the store where he bought it, so he would not have paid money for it. Myself, I still love the book’s heroine, Benedetta. She’s a 15^th-Century Italian camp-follower who hangs out in Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop, then makes the transition to a twenty-fourth century filled with plagues and time machines with an ease that gives the lie to our modern concept of people of the past as automatic idiots. Within the first few pages she won my heart, refusing to believe in the ersatz afterlife created by experimenters from our future to protect her from culture shock: "Benedetta knew she wasn't in Purgatory when she saw a scab on the angel's knuckle." Also, Benedetta, an “older woman,” winds up in a long term sexual relationship with a hot Viking hunk.

I read Molly Gloss’s The Hearts of Horses twice. It’s set in 1917, in an apocryphal Oregon. The heroine, 19-year-old Martha Lessen, trains rather than breaks horses, and gradually becomes involved in frontier society. The pleasure of the book, for me, was in its evocation of a time and place vanishing as they appeared. For the Times I wrote: “Like Carol Emshwiller and Kathleen Alcalá, two other women writing Westerns and SF (both ostensibly male genres), Gloss ignores boundaries instead of defying them. The mythic and the mundane are one. So her re-creation of a romantic past and its irrecoverable dreams feels solid, rooted in the everyday of long ago, palpable as the curve of a china mug in your hand.”

Gloss’s book isn’t SF. Neither is another of my Bests, Spook Country by William Gibson. Its otherly edge derives from immersion in the world of spies and renegade bureaucrats. The language Gibson uses is ultra-easy on my inner ear, as ever, and I was especially entranced by Tito, one of his three protagonists. Tito’s a transplanted Chinese/Hispanic Cuban, scion of a family of self-exiled secret agents. He lives under the protection of escape protocols learned by heart, and the entirely believable intervention of guerreros, Afro-Cuban warrior spirits familiar to me from altars in my own home. I won’t say any more about Spook Country, as you’ve probably heard plenty about this book elsewhere. It was one my editor did include in the Times article, as her pick.

Because my editor didn’t include my paragraph on Thirteen, no SF books were included in the “Best of 2007” article, in a year when there were so many good ones that I had enormous difficulty selecting just a single representative title. I have no idea why my choice was omitted. I just saw the article, and the editor’s out of town for the next two weeks as I write this.

Just so someone somewhere out there knows, there are two reasons why I wish that article had mentioned Thirteen; two reasons in addition to its overall excellence and the points I mentioned in the paragraph I submitted. The first reason is that it moved me more deeply than any of the others. It simply struck a deeper emotional chord. I’d quote the passage that made me cry when I read it; but it wouldn’t have the same effect, obviously, taken out of context. Buy the book. Don’t skip ahead. It’s on page 405.

The second reason is that Morgan has dared greatly, and deserves to be rewarded in like kind. Morgan is white; his protagonist, Carl Marsalis, is a black man genetically engineered to be superior—as followers of machismo measure superiority. For the most part, Morgan’s transracial writing rings true for me (I’m an African American, so though I’m not an expert on “blackness,” my take is relevant). No “magical negro,” Marsalis works entirely from his own agenda. He enjoys sexual encounters with several women while avoiding paying for that enjoyment with his life, as most fictional black men do. Another character, a woman with the same machoistic enhancements Marsalis has, illustrates the strength inherent in balancing traits traditionally viewed as masculine and feminine. But it’s the book’s racial subtext that won my approval.

I could say more. If you want to hear it, just ask me.


Josh Lukin:

I worry that it’s a sign of aging: more and more often, it seems, I look back on a year of art consumption to find that I haven’t discovered as many new artists or as much new work as I useta, instead tending either to look at the work of artists I already liked or catch up on classics I’d missed. In 2007, for example, I expanded my collection of Dave Van Ronk albums from about three to twenty-one, thanks largely to my having discovered ebay and taken to digitizing lp’s once I’d bought them there. Van Ronk was a virtuoso musician and a true pioneer, whose unnecessary death six years ago says a lot about the effects of our nation’s health care “system.” Other skillful artists whose work I continued to follow or to accumulate were Sidney Lumet, who at eighty-three came out with a very good film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, and the late Stanley Elkin, whose 1984 novel The Magic Kingdom is a hilarious romp through the world of terminally ill children and narrative medicine.

I enjoyed such crime novels as George Pelecanos (The Wire)’s Right as Rain –this is a guy who knows how to tell a good masculinity story—and Lawrence Block’s Hit Parade, in which Keller the killer finally achieves the terrifying disjunction between his conscience and his profession that he has long aspired to find. Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch, which I finally got around to reading 133 years after its publication, was one of those novels dismissed during its author’s lifetime for its focus on the actual experience of people with disabilities; now it’s recognized as having shown an understanding of blindness that anticipates the work of Oliver Sacks on that impairment. Sadly, the Oxford University Press seems to have taken the novel out of print this year; happily, David G. Hartwell at Tor rocked my world by bringing Philip Dick’s ninth realist novel, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, back into print. The last of the realist novels Dick wrote in the Fifties, HD in O is one of those books that would be noir if the protagonist were not too demoralized to commit a crime: bleak, bleak tale of paranoia and frustration with the false promises of the American Dream.

Another tale of promises and lies that grew on me, after I’d initially been underwhelmed by it, was Colson Whitehead’s 2006 novella, Apex Hides the Hurt. Whitehead’s gift for lyrical snark pervades this simple parable of an injured advertising consultant who can no longer stomach being in the deception business. But the most heart-wrenching tale of promise and disillusionment that I encountered was My Name Is Buddy: Another Record by Ry Cooder. Seventeen songs and an illustrated booklet tell the story of three small animals with Popular Front ideals roaming around the country and through the past seventy-five years. It drives home the contrast between the kind of world we were supposed to be living in by now according to the dreams of the Thirties and the one we got. Drives it home like nails on Golgotha. Pete Seeger makes a guest appearance. For a more analytical view of the Red Decade and its aftermath, I finally got around to reading Michael Denning’s classic The Cultural Front, as part of a study of the Old Left into which I got so deep that I began speculating to random acquaintances about how deep Lead Belly’s support for the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact ran. Loved Denning’s historical and intellectual narrative, although I disagree with some of his conclusions. Another great document of radical history I encountered, one which hasn’t received enough attention thanks to the polarizing effect that ensues upon the mention of its author’s very name, is Mumia Abu-Jamal’s We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party. Probably the best in-print introduction to what that organization was and did.

Other classics that I read included, sixty-six years after its publication, Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature. Bunny Wilson was, with only a few lapses, the literary essayist that Luke Menand and Christopher Hitchens only dream of being. Did you know that Hemingway threatened to sue Bunny for accusing his work of misogyny? Disappointingly, the title essay of the Wilson book is its weakest; but at least it called his readers’ attention to the Philoctetes, which I had read with some delight earlier this year. I’m ashamed to admit that 2007 also saw my first encounters with Carol Emshwiller’s mindbending fable Carmen Dog and John Ford’s Monumental film The Searchers. Each in its way good heartwarming fun. I have more of an excuse for only this year seeing Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, as it has not been readily available in the thirty years since its first release. My enjoyment of this sublime slice-of-life picture was briefly mitigated in the movie house by a cluster of septuagenarian culture vultures, whose voices I swear were modeled on Art Garfunkel’s 1968 Recordings of Old People, grousing at the end: “THAT WAS A BAD MOVIE!” “Didn’t it get four stars in the paper?” “What was the paper thinking?” “It had some good music, but that was it.” “Pret-ty bad.”

The other movies I delighted in this year are perhaps not widely canonized as classics, but they have an honored place in the Josh Canon. Blacklisted screenwriter Paul Jarrico, in European exile, followed up his celebrated Salt of the Earth with the Cold War romp The Hot Line, which is like the Platonic Form of 1960s farce. Anyone who doesn’t like it should be airmailed to Barcelona. Almost twenty years before The Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges played a West Coast slacker with a violent Vietnam vet friend in Cutter’s Way, a neo-noir dramatization of Neil Hertz’s dictum, “People would rather get their stories straight than live.” The movie is respected and has gained some attention in the disability narrative canon, but is perhaps not widely known. A movie that would have been a big success if it had not fallen between the cracks of a turnover in studio personnel was 2005’s The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, a delightful and kinda feminist exemplar of the Julianne Moore as Struggling Fifties Housewife genre, with a nice supporting performance by Woody Harrelson.

Would I be turning this blog into an echo chamber if I were to praise Christopher Barzak’s One for Sorrow? Would I be turning this blog into an echo chamber if I were to praise Christopher Barzak’s One for Sorrow? Having spent twenty-one years of my life living right outside the inferno into which Barzak’s hero descends (Youngstown, OH), I can’t refrain. Lovely, gorgeously written, sentimental story of class tensions and rural anomie. Fun fact: the book’s wittiest exchange is between that hero and a fictionalized version of gay Youngstown secondhand bookseller Jack Peterson, whose store is called Dorian Books and who, in real life, doesn’t age! I love Barzak dearly, but an even closer friend, Rebecca Ore, released an equally nifty book this year that did not receive its due: Time’s Child, marketed as epic skiffy futuristic adventure, is in fact a small-scale intellectual fantasia held together by “Ore's dry satiric voice and astute eye for setting. She makes credible and interesting the micropolitics of smart, verbal people from various past eras struggling to determine whom to trust in a future Eastern Pennsylvania landscape . . . a soothing vernal chat with a rapier-witted polymath.” To repeat my own words, which are now owned by Jeff Bezos.

Possibly the greatest 2007 book I’ve yet read is another one that has received the attention it deserves: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by the ass-kickin’ Junot Diaz. Diaz’s widely-revered first book, the story cycle Drown, was all about masculine norms and how they fuck up their adherents: the novel attempts, sometimes with a little less confidence, to incorporate female subjectivity as well into a story whose characters and scope really necessitate that every Ford/Auster/Roth Navel-Gazing White Guy Novelist kill himself immediately. Give up, dudes. You’re over with. It’s pernicious: I was reading it and going, okay, I see what he’s doing here, okay, this is nice, okay, does this guy have to be so obsessed with using this rhetorical invention, yeah, okay, pretty intense . . . and then I finished and closed it. And two hours later I was all, HOLY SHIT! Novels aren’t supposed to be able to do that! Words aren’t supposed to be able to do that! Nothing that is signifiable in The Discourse is supposed to be able to do that. This man keeps it Real. I had to, like, take a nap. Diaz’s friend Edwidge Danticat wrote a novel a few years ago with overlapping topics, The Farming of Bones. Read and liked that one this year too: it reminded me of some great feminist sf odysseys, but was perhaps less hopeful than most, thanks to its historical setting in 1930s Haiti.

An ongoing project in my study of Contemporary US Fiction is to look at what I call Hippie Elegies –novels that look back melancholically on The Sixties (including those parts of that era that followed 1970). Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland was one of the founding documents of that genre, as was T.C. Boyle’s World’s End; Philip Roth’s American Pastoral was its conservative counterpart; Susan Choi’s American Woman, a feminist rebuttal to Roth; Jennifer Egan’s The Invisible Circus, a nice exemplar of the genre. This year, I very much enjoyed Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, not only for its vivid contrasts between the historical portrayals of the radical Seventies and the contemporary scenes of hipsters and swells in neoliberal Seattle today but for its strengths in conveying the excitement that the earlier era’s music can elicit even in contemporary young people. The passages on Arthur Lee and the Beach Boys are worth the price. I followed the Spiotta piece with Sigrid Nunez’s Hippie Elegy, The Last of Her Kind, a powerful but very pessimistic story of female friendship with strong allusions to The Great Gatsby. Ultimately, although the novel shows an acute awareness of social injustices, its narcissistic leads and its bleak conclusion might prevent it from being a particularly progressive story itself; but that doesn’t detract from its aesthetic and intellectual substance.

Having read all three of Jennifer Egan’s novels in previous years, I turned recently to her 1997 short story collection, Emerald City. I really liked about half of it. And it helped me develop my Theory of Egan: her stories and novels almost all concern characters who commit an existential act of transgression (or in a couple of cases suffer someone else's) in the expectation that it will lead to self-realization and find that they've actually been severed from any sense of selfhood, and have often just embraced a desire that was not their own when they could have stayed rooted, or in their own skins as it were, and pursued their own enthusiasms/affections/productive loyalties. Very like Dostoyevsky or his epigone Jim Thompson or, hey, James Baldwin ("the moment when no one else is real to you, nor are you real to yourself"). In short, when you make that break, when you try to go “Outside of society” (pace Patti Smith), you’re more likely to end up George Hurstwood than Dean Moriarty.

Egan’s novel-length work tends (like that of her Brooklyn neighbor Whitehead) to show how that severance is historically-grounded, such that it’s at odds with those authors who misread social change as ontological horror, those who take what's interesting in Pynchon and PKD and put it into an ahistorical, asocial, Austere (that's the adjective form of "Auster," right?) context. In short fiction, not so consistently or explicitly (although the last two stories in her collection do emphasize class and history); but that allows a reader to get a clearer look at the affective side: her interest in how it feels when, having lost the anchor to the identity you'd been accustomed to, you're the one who "Melts Into Air" really comes through. And, not being a conservative at heart, Egan in her short stories sometimes defies Girard's and Dostoyevsky's grim prognoses: three of the happiest endings in her short fiction give a credible account of a girl taking a stand and saying "No" to a potentially annihilating mimetic desire. There’s a similar moment, I think, in her own account of her life, wherein she says part of her anorexia was an attempt to satisfy what she saw as her mother’s desires for her and recounts how becoming an artist allowed her to find a healthier and more independent sense of agency.