In the context of frequent rhetorical sparring and escalating threats of nuclear destruction, little common ground is said to exist between Israel and Iran. Enmity between the two states is often framed as the product of irreconcilable geopolitical, ideological, and strategic differences. Iran’s support of terrorist organizations that seek Israel’s destruction, the regime’s religious character, and supposedly anti-Semitic leadership all appear to ensure confrontation between the two states. This supposedly self-evident “reality” is commonly invoked by politicians, claims-makers and the media. On the one hand, Israel is often portrayed as an oasis of democracy and shared values in a region supposedly characterized by Muslim extremism. Iran, on the other hand, is generally seen as decidedly “Other.” Governed by a hermetic group of religious radicals, the image most commonly presented of Iran is one of repression, backwardness and a lack of “rationality” with regard to geopolitics. If indeed Israel is seen as the primary exemplar of Western “modernity” in the Middle East, Iran is discursively constructed as a useful binary. It is precisely this seemingly self-evident dichotomy that Haggai Ram seeks to interrogate in Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession, a lucid account of Iran’s place in Israeli society’s social imaginary.

While much scholarly work on Israeli-Iranian relations frames tensions in geopolitical terms, Ram’s innovation is to evaluate the cultural and discursive foundations of those terms. Employing the sociological concept of “moral panic,” Ram takes on the commonly held notion that Iran and Israel are “natural” enemies. Instead, Iranophobia suggests that Israel’s “moral panic” finds its roots in cultural anxieties relating to Israel’s precarious conception of itself as essentially “Western.” Ram’s analysis argues that fear of Iran is in fact deeply connected to tensions generated by the presence of non-Western Jewish immigrants in Israel. These groups are seen as calling into question the state’s Ashkenazi (European) “ethnocracy” and complicating Israeli society’s perception of itself as fundamentally European and “modern.” The conception of Iran and Iranian culture as essentially non-Western, as some kind of “Other,” allows Israeli society to conceive of itself and build an identity in contrast to that country and its people.

Iranophobia begins with a discussion of Israeli-Iranian relations in a historical context, sketching a process of “Othering” that, in Ram’s words, represents the inauguration of Iran’s “radical alterity.” While official diplomatic relations did not exist during the time of the Shah, the regime represented for many Israelis a golden-era in Israeli-Iranian relations. Military cooperation and significant business ties were cemented, while Israeli businessmen frequently spent long vacations indulging in Tehren’s “Western” amenities and nightlife. Ram points out that both the Israeli and Iranian state shared a modernization process that ultimately sought to “transform oriental subjects…into deracinated replicas of Europeans, even while they remained affiliated to their own religious cultures,” later contending that “Israeli-Iranian relations before the revolution therefore rested on mutually constitutive perceptions of each other as carriers of the Western mission in the Middle East.” This point is significant, as it serves to buoy later claims with regard to Israel’s anxiety over Iran in the post-Shah period. If, for a moment, Iran had managed to transform itself into a nation that embodied the “civilizing” effects of Western “progress”—much like Israel—the Iranian Revolution seemed to point to the fact that politics and ideology could transform a country and people “back” into non-Western subjects. Ram explores how the Iranian Revolution seemed to have an important resonance in Israel, where officials and journalists openly despaired that the capitalist modernity and “progress” embodied by the deposed monarch would be replaced by a “regressive,” atavistic revolution. Pointing to the geopolitical shifts of that period, Ram argues that the shared ambition for a united Israeli-Iranian front against their perceived mutual enemies in the Arab world began to shift as Israel made piece with Egypt. Insofar as Ram suggests that Israeli society requires the perception of an existential threat, the concomitant peace with Egypt and unfolding Iranian Revolution witnessed a shift from fear of the “Arab threat” to that of the “Iranian threat.”

In subsequent chapters, Ram sketches the process by which Israel’s perceived “modernity” increasingly requires the amplification of the Iranian threat. This fear allows Israeli society to symbolically exorcize its own “unmodern” elements—which, according to Ram, consist of the increasing number of Middle-Eastern Jewish immigrants (Mizrahim) that are uncomfortably perceived to be questioning the future of secular, Western Zionism. Ram explores the tensions embodied in Israel’s claim to a shared Western culture, consistently undermined both by the possibility of Middle Eastern Jews “assimilating” Israel into the surrounding region, as well as the nascent settlement movement that belies the notion of secular democracy through its state-sanctioned religious mission. Thus, “what lies at the bottom of Israeli anti-Iran phobias is the disheartening feeling that present day Iranian realities are, in effect, actualizations of the Jewish state’s future.”

Later chapters explore post-9/11 relations between the two countries and the treatment of Iranian Jews by Israeli immigration officials and envoys from Jewish organizations. After 9/11, an apparent thawing of relations between the United States and Iran seemed to gain momentum as the countries appeared willing to cooperate in overthrowing the Taliban, a mutual enemy. Ram contends that the prospect of a diplomatic horizon between the United States and Iran was particularly disconcerting to Jerusalem. With somewhat less attention to empirically grounded evidence that for the most part characterizes Iranophobia, Ram suggests that the 2002 Karine-A affair (in which a freighter supposedly bound for the Palestinian territories with Iranian weaponry was intercepted by Israel) may have been an attempt by Israel and her supporters to undermine US-Iranian relations.

Later in the decade, Iran is seen as being used as a cover for Israeli military action. During the 2006 Lebanon War, Israeli leaders frequently invoked Iranian influence as a rationale for the ferocity of the Israeli response to Hezbollah. These invocations of Iranian influence allowed Israel to argue that it was functioning as a bulwark against the supposedly inevitable confrontation between Judeo-Christian values and the dangerous forces of radical Islam. By conflating the war in Lebanon against Hezbollah with the “Iranian threat,” Israeli military and civil leaders sought ideological cover for an extremely destructive war. Ram shows how politicians and commentators sought to associate Iran with the very creation and identity of the forces being fought in Lebanon. Eschewing any reference to political, cultural, and historical factors that might have led to the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the war became seen as a fight between the secular Jewish state and the dark forces of global Islamic extremism. This discourse emphasized the Iranian state’s role in supposedly manipulating its “satellites” in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, while ignoring the historical context in which these groups emerged. As Ram points out, from the point of view of mainstream Israeli public opinion, “Israel’s offensive war on Hezbollah was, in effect, a defensive war against Iran.”

The final chapter of Iranophobia explores the multiple, if somewhat bizarre, attempts by Israeli officials to convince Iranian Jews to immigrate to Israel. Unable to understand the continued presence of Jews in a state supposedly characterized by virulent anti-Semitism, Israeli immigration agencies offer Iranian Jews everything from housing to monetary gifts in order to facilitate their migration. Once again, Ram points out the contradictions that are embodied by Israeli society’s relationship to Iran and its Jews. Ram argues that the Shah’s attempt to “aryanize” Iranians and convince them that they were “really European in their origin” meant that Israelis were willing to lend tacit support and legitimacy to a continued Jewish presence in Iran. After the Shah, bereft of these de-orientalizing forces, Iranian Jews were expected to immigrate to Israel in order to participate in the “civilizing” mission of that state. Though many Iranian Jews have emigrated abroad, a significant number chose not to settle in Israel, but rather in the United States or Europe.

With some 30,000 Jews remaining in Iran today, Ram unpacks the simplistic assumption that their history has been one of unending persecution. Rather, he argues that the trajectory of Iranian Jews has been complex (much like minorities in societies throughout the world), comprising periods of discrimination and violence along with significant periods of cooperation and inclusion into the larger society. While pointing out the unevenness of this trajectory, Iranophobia correctly suggests that recognizing only histories of violence and exclusion appear particularly limiting and are consistently undermined by the historic record.

Though Iranophobia employs Moral Panic Theory in an innovative way through an understudied case, at times the theoretical arguments Ram proposes could benefit from a more sustained engagement. While a fundamental aspect of moral panic is the notion of the social reaction’s disproportionality, Ram does not consistently make the case that the responses are disproportionate to the material threats. This omission reflects Ram’s desire to avoid the danger of sliding into the realm of strategic and security analysis. Iranophobia indeed makes a compelling argument for a reassessment of the basis of Israeli-Iranian enmity; however, Ram elides the geopolitical implications of a nuclear-armed Iran. While his analysis of Israeli responsibility for this threat is quite useful, there are moments when the notion of moral panic does not seem an appropriate metaphor for the possibility of nuclear warfare between two nations. Indeed, Moral Panic Theory—as originally conceived by practitioners at the Birmingham Centre—sought to explain how the social uproar over relatively minor incidents was rooted in deeper cultural anxieties. Thus, Stanley Cohen’s classic work on the social reaction to small-scale disturbances at a British seaside resort is shown to relate more to anxiety over shifting post-war value systems than to the incidents themselves. While in some respects this framework aptly describes the cultural anxiety around the Mizrahim—Israel’s so-called “Others within”—it appears somewhat less analytically robust in describing the reaction to a nation of 65 million.

Whether the threat from Iran is overemphasized or not, it seems somewhat less feasible to assess the relations of two (nearly) nuclear powers within a framework whose very meaning suggests a situation that is not constitutive of a serious threat to society. This is not to say that the threat Iran poses has not been overemphasized by the media and claims-makers (“moral entrepreneurs” in the language of Moral Panic Theory). However, this does not necessarily negate the very real threat of confrontation between the two countries today. In particular, as Ram seeks to analyze the cultural reaction to Iran rather than the geopolitical aspects of this confrontation, it becomes difficult to assert the essential disproportionality of the response without engaging with the geopolitical realities of the relationship. Though Iranophobia covers new ground in articulating the discursive logic of this reaction, at times a more critical engagement with the veracity of Israeli claims would go a long way in proving the disconnect between fears and reality. These challenges aside, Iranophobia presents an innovative approach to studying Israeli-Iranian relations and should be seriously engaged with by anyone interested in the cultural foundations of this relationship. As consent among the local population is essential for any state’s long-term geopolitical strategy, the discursive underpinnings of society’s reaction provides unique analytical insights, as Ram has proved to great effect in Iranophobia.

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Imaginal Machines

At every level, Imaginal Machines is a subversive text. Against the rising tide of complacency, Stephven Shukaitis sketches out new possibilities for political engagement that are at once seditious and savvy. Resolutely anti-disciplinarian (in both senses of the word), he leaps recklessly from philosophy to art criticism to social movement studies. In the book’s opening pages, Shukaitis promises to “connect Surrealism with migrant workers, the Industrial Workers of the World with Dadaism, and back again.” Against all odds, he does so, and with great aplomb. From its non-linear organization to its whimsical typeface, Imaginal Machines courageously defies convention. Throwing caution to the wind, the book explodes the limits of both what can be said and how it might be said.

Stylistically, Imaginal Machines is both entertaining and terrifically complex. The text overflows with prescient metaphors, digressions, in-jokes, and parenthetical observations. But these quips and asides are not merely adjunct to the primary text but rather rival the “main” narrative for attention. The subtext quickly becomes the surface, and in an affront to neo-positivist ways of knowing, Shukaitis bends his lyrical prose sideways and backwards, without ever compromising lucidity. Reflecting the uncertainty of postmodern times, nearly every declarative statement comes paired with a qualifier or a caveat. The result is a text that folds in upon itself with multiple levels of meaning.

The body of the text is centered around a series of case studies (though the notion of a case doesn’t align with the author’s method). Shukaitis takes us on a whirlwind tour of what others have called “alternative institutions” (several of which he was involved in personally) and offers a probing introspective analysis. Yet unlike other recent assessments of the global Left “scene,” which tend to be optimistic to the point of absurdity (for example, We Are Everywhere, NowTopia, Real Utopia), Shukaitis maintains his (self-)critical edge throughout. Indeed, Shukaitis is keenly aware that—by most measures of success—the Left is losing badly. For example, in a chapter on worker self-management (WSM), Shukaitis describes his four-year-long involvement with a worker-owned record label in vivid detail. But ultimately, he concludes that WSM may have limited radical potential (though his argument is significantly more complex), and in the process offers the type of deep self-critique that is painfully absent in most
Left circles.

The term Imaginal Machines merits some explanation. As Shukaitis notes, his title is borrowed from a term coined by Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), itself a derivative of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s desiring-machine. So the imaginal machine is “a particular arrangement or composition of desires and creativity as territorialized through and by relations between bodies in motion.” The idea of outer space figures prominently here. For Shukaitis, the metaphor of space is relavant precisely because it represents that which cannot be (entirely) known. In science fiction film, the music of Sun-Ra, and the popular imagination, space functions as a zone of limitless possibility. Shukaitis suggests that a politics bounded by the coordinates of the known world is hopelessly constrained. Instead, “an imaginal landscape is a precondition for actually finding a northwest passage in the physical world.” Whether or not space is operating at the level of metaphor here, it is a powerful heuristic device.

Imaginal Machines is often remarkable for what it doesn’t do. Though the concept of “radical imagination” emerges as a dominant theme, Shukaitis self-consciously refuses to mention C. Wright Mills, whose Sociological Imagination is usually considered among the most important contributions to the concept. For a traditional social scientist to write a book on the “imagination” without explicitly invoking Mills would approach blasphemy. But Shukaitis is no traditional social scientist (though he may be a blasphemer). Likewise, Karl Marx appears mainly through his metaphors (the architect and the bee, the old mole, “storming heaven”). Yet Marx lurks in the deep crevices of Imaginal Machines’ pages and his influence is never far from the surface. Though the book is, in part, a critical encounter (rencontre) between autonomist Marxism and poststructuralist theory, this is not Shuakitis’ main intellectual project.

While it adheres to some extent to traditional book-publishing conventions, Imaginal Machines strives to be a rhizomatic text with no beginning and no end—only a boundless middle. Characteristically, most of the book’s conclusions arise from the embedded case studies, while the book’s final chapter (the “actual” conclusion) opens up far more questions than it provides answers to. In the section on work and self-management, Shukaitis at one point recommends a politics based on “the constant immanent shaping and creativity that will not allow itself to ever be totally bound in a fixed form.” There is a sense here that Shukaitis is commenting on the very text he is producing—or better yet, the “work” of book-writing. If there is an enemy in Imaginal Machines, it is the idea of closure—that struggle should at some point cease, that the revolution should be contained, that organizations should seek permanence.
This opens the question of failure, another major theme in the book. For the post-9/11 Left, most of the last decade has been characterized by moods that don’t translate well into English—malaise, ennui, schaedenfreude, and melancholia. Large street protests seem to have quieted down, while, at the same time, the ever-resilient late capitalist state has demonstrated a unique ability to co-opt dissident movements. Of course, as Shukaitis reminds us, this is nothing new. thirty years ago, the threat of worker militancy and factory occupations famously portended the rise of worker participation committees, quality circles, and the team concept—a blow from which most unions have yet to recover. More recently, in continental Europe, widespread protests around (against?) precarious work were “answered” in the form of “flexicurity” (flexible security) regimes—a Phyrric victory at best. Yet accelerated cycles of recuperation—defeat via compromise—may well be a unique feature of post-Fordism. The task then becomes devising a politics that can resist the overarching tendency toward capture—even temporarily.

Here, Shakaitis draws heavily on the notion of infrapolitics, as posited by James Scott and popularized by the cultural historian Robin Kelley. Much like Deleuze’s minor politics, Kelley’s infrapolitics suggest a “hidden transcript of power…or a space that is somewhat encoded or otherwise made less comprehensible to those in power.” Shukaitis argues that in order to avoid recuperation, resistance must operate largely in the sphere of infrapolitics—beyond the watchful gaze of the state—and speak in ways that defy understanding. Perhaps the answer to Guyatri Spivak’s prescient question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a definitive “yes”—but not in ways that are universally intelligible.

The audience for Imaginal Machines is sure to be broad. On the one hand, the book is written by a movement insider with extensive knowledge of the contemporary American Left and is grounded in real political struggles. On the other, Imaginal Machines is a sophisticated endeavor, deeply informed by high theory (especially of the Italian autonomist and the French poststructuralist variety). Yet Imaginal Machines is not just another “social movement study” by an academic from the distant perspective of a “neutral” observer. Shukaitis constantly reminds us that actually-existing political practice is already immersed intheoretical presuppositions, just as good theory emerges from real struggles. But Shukaitis transcends and ultimately dispenses with the classic binary between “theory” and “practice” by masterfully weaving both into a seamless narrative. The result is the rare academic book that is certain to appeal to activists and organizers, but does not compromise its scholarly integrity in so doing.

This is a unique and extraordinary text that deserves wide attention. Just as Baruch Spinoza famously posed the question “What can a body do?” Shukaitis seems to ask “What can a book do?” The answer, it appears, is far more than we think.

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In 1851, the same year Moby-Dick was published and the first World’s Fair was held in London, German engraver and printer J.G. Heck published his Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science. The scientific revolution that began in the mid-sixteenth century was over and science had assumed its modern form. His categories, terminology, and methods are as recognizable as our own: Heck’s illustrations cover physics, botany, zoology, mathematics, and technology. Seen side by side, they are startling in that the illustrations all attempt, in one way or another, to reduce the world to discreet categories and essences.

In this new book of poetry, Joshua Poteat uses Heck’s art as a starting point for a work that is both dreamlike and prescient. Illustrating the Machine that Makes the World: From J.G. Heck’s 1851 Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science is comprised of three main sections and two appendices. The second appendix is comprised of seventeen reproductions from Heck’s Archive. These “plates” reflect a broad range of Heck’s concerns: one shows a boar being killed by dogs while another shows a globe divided into meridians, facing a small sun. Both the globe and the light hitting it are mechanically dissected: the lines and angles are precise and still, and intersections are marked with letters and numbers. Heck inscribed the German words for morning, evening, noon, and midnight at the top, bottom, right and left of the globe: the illustration appears as the scientific version of concepts of
earthly time.

Poteat states which poems link to which plates in brackets underneath their titles. In the particular case of the illustrations noted above, both are referenced in a poem entitled “Illustrating the theory of twilight.” Here, Poteat is reinstating the truth of time that lies outside mechanical understating. He unapologetically signals the poetic twilight of the sublime; the twilight that seems to invoke elements of magic, the supernatural, and the places where worlds intersect in profound ways, particularly the worlds of humanity and of nature. It is of the nature of this poetic twilight that it suggests not just endings and death, but also wonderment and visionary experience, and the fascinations and fears of childhood.

Down in the reeds, farthest from God,
where the vultures wash their feet,
is where I slept the night the dogs found
the wild boar, half-dead from a cancer,
and brought its head back to the yards.

The dogs are crazed by the kill, “as if they had seen the one true vision/of light that comes after an animal/is slaughtered in its sickness.” Extreme states of violence and madness are contrasted with the mystical mode of insight. As the light dims, the emphasis in the poem continues to turn away from mechanical reality to visionary experience: the narrator recalls vultures living “in the cupboards, in the walls” of an abandoned house, where nature (and here we must not quibble with semantics—his nature is the nature of the romantics: it stands for those things that are somehow either outside of, or lost by humans: the pure, the terrible, the uncontrolled, the still) has reclaimed the house as her own and trees are growing inside of it.

Along with the question of the poet’s relationship with nature, Poteat shares with Wallace Stevens a concern with the unanswerable question of God:

I refuse to say
I saw God in their faces, the twilight
around me told me this, and I believe it.

The refusal to say is in tension with the statement of belief, but the poet sees this tension as a condition of experience. This tension is heightened at the end of the poem. Poteat makes clear, in the chilling and final lines of the poem, yet another aspect of the poetic twilight: isolation:

what animal
is this that cannot live without a man to tell it, death is close,
stay near, do not leave me, you are all I have.

The answer is, of course, no animal. The poet suffers from a particularly human isolation, and his projection of pity onto the animal world is an expression of his distance from it and its magnetic pull. As this distance and pull are negated in Heck’s cold, motionless, exact illustrations, Poteat has employed the Blakean move of employing contraries so that the truth of the matter does not stand alone, but can be perceived through the partial insights of holistic perception.

Poteat’s epistemological search leads him to the margins. The first poem in the series is called “Illustrating the illustrators” and its subtitle indicates that it corresponds to an anatomical engraving of human hands: “When we wrote the name that we were told/was ours, the name that contained all, we would be given all that would be lost,/there was a pleasure in the small, exact/movements of our hands.” The poet at the outset introduces an aesthetic awareness outside the bounds of conventional science, and reminds us of the waning of religious monopolies on meaning as well as the importance of considering the medium of communication itself. Along with the notion of knowledge as pleasure, Poteat’s voice echoes the religious idiom: searching, meaning, suffering, and loss. The insistent recurrence of the word “all” sets a tone of near despair as absolute truth withdraws. As with other instances in his work, the Big Questions are set against humble images: the physical, actual hands of the illustrators, of those who have gone before in their attempts to somehow map out or explicate some portion of the world.

As humans lost faith in an immutable absolute, an analogue to God emerged: the myth of the underlying girders of the universe, the algorithms that explain the flight of birds if not of human desire. In “Illustrating the theory of interference” (a theory postulating that memory loss occurs when unrelated memories begin to intersect) Heck’s design is of a single, elegant spiral leading to a black, shaded sphere. It could just as well be an illustration of the geometric movement of a planet or, conversely, of a universe centered around the Earth. Poteat states that, “God’s plan cannot restore the decaying groves of fire,/and the gold birch buries sap low and pure/for the deer to salve their throats. These are facts.” The word “facts” is stated assertively, almost aggressively, as if to conclude an argument. What is at stake? The disappearing cultural memories of belief are still lingering, but they are infused with the raw hunger of animal nature. This hunger is among the last of the absolutes. He concludes, “If only I was with her now,/I could be in the world remembering this.” In the light of the poem’s themes, these final lines that might otherwise present an unexpected invocation of a past love, now echo the Psalms with their plaintive music of simple human desires transformed into a deep need for transcendent meaning and connection.

The irony of the title is that Poteat and Heck’s ways of illustrating stand in stark contrast, even if they have been spawned by the same cultural forces of industrialization and social progress. Heck’s drawings are rigid, symmetrical, clean, and clear. Even the previously mentioned plate of enraged dogs devouring a boar has a detached, mechanical, fixed quality to it. All sense of motion and change has been replaced by stillness and exactitude. Poteat’s poems usher in contraries: pleasure, curiosity, love, understanding, growth, and serenity are met with madness, death, decomposition, darkness, blindness, and suffering. The tension between loss and fulfillment operates on the level of language as well: the lines are cyclical, the images elusive, the realizations tentative. Over the course of the book, the themes and images recur, but elliptically, and under the daunting shadow of an ever increasing nothingness. Even language itself exists in decay and twilight. The nature of this nothingness remains obscure, but this attempt and consequent failure to understand is not a meaninglessness act. Always, there is the suggestion of something else, “the brightest last.” We can understand: we just can’t understand “all.”

In keeping with the poet’s concern for totality, the poems in the book stand alone as fully realized works, but also connect with each other and achieve a sort of thematic arc. Over the course of its pages, the poems transition from the lyrically surreal opening lines to those in “Appendix One,” in which blank space becomes the defining structure. The darkness of the images is contrasted with the empty whiteness overcoming the printed pages. All throughout the book, images of rot and ruin have suggested a near religious longing for completion and unity. By the time we get to the first appendix, this contrast begins to find itself figured in the structure of the poems themselves. The words are replaced, by dissolution or by the light of white space: earlier poems are rewritten, or, really, eviscerated. This appendix is made up of the remains of the earlier poems. Passages are erased, revealing entirely new images and new ways of making sense of them. We are prepared to see the growing blank space on the pages as imbued with meaning: decay, sunlight, emptiness, ghosts, and birth. Perhaps the blinding whiteness of Melville. Here is the great negation of Heck: less is shown, but the resulting picture of the world is intended to be more complete than Heck’s compendium of all the sciences.

Of course, one of the stays against a mechanistic model of the world is the imagination itself and the imagination is key because it presents another way to consider the question of religion without collapsing into a rigid or limiting dogma. Poteat suggests what is possible only through creative thought: foxes turn inside out; a slug, “fresh as cinnamon,” arises from the dying embers of a stove; pigs sing to the moon. We occasionally glimpse the looms and locomotives we might associate with nineteenth century technology but bucolic images dominate: sheep, fields, and fireflies. These are all images that highlight the “something else” side of nature: the sense of a peace outside our normal day to day affairs, a sense of meaning that exceeds our grasping. Imagination itself is one of the tools in this search for whatever feels lost or missing and dying.

Another move that stands in contrast with Heck is Poteat’s use of quotes and allusions. The allusive is slippery, reciprocal, and relational. It is inexact. James Joyce and Wallace Stevens are quoted directly, Stevens outside and inside the poems, and Poteat’s lines echo both the latter’s theories of the necessary fiction, as well as his constantly shifting sense of awareness: the fluidity of consciousness.

Perhaps Poteat is open to charges of invoking both a now unpopular Modernism as well as an unpopular Romanticism (not that thinking people would be overly concerned with this). But Illustrating the Machine is very much a book of our time, and the anxieties central to its tensions are not those of Heck’s, even if we see their origins in his engravings. Poteat is no Byronic individual, alone amid the raging storms of alienation and despair. While there is a great deal of isolation within his poetry, he emphasizes his language’s intertextuality. The notes include extensive explanations of who inspired what poems, and the inspirators range from sculptor Alice Aycock to surrealist Mary Ruefle to “the red foxes of Hampstead, North Carolina, if there are any left.” In fact, his notes resemble the liner notes section of a hip-hop album, with their mix of crediting samples and
citing influences.

Poteat recognizes that we must “forgive the pastoral,” and so we must, even if this pastoral vision is hardly one of Arcadian tranquility: it is bloody and antagonist, even as it yields moments of beauty and temporary, anxious insights. He writes, “At the edges of all fields, there is a space/for disorder.” As we continue to push to the edges of the “field,” bucolic or scientific, we enter increasingly into uncertainty. The notion of God shifts; memories seem tenuous. Vultures stir in the cupboards. The hum of a machine blends with the sound of a river.

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Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors

A New Literary History of America by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Belknap Press (2009).

There is an early, instructive moment in A New Literary History of America—Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors’s magnificent collection of short essays on American literature and culture—that reflects the tone and scope of the entire work. Norma E. Cantú is describing a visit to the Alamo and her participation in a healing ceremony, an attempt to exorcise a century and a half of “violence, overt and covert, that was done to Mexicans and blacks in Texas” after the thirteen-day siege in 1836: “The rupture, the terrifying rending of the fabric that was life before 1836, has made me who I am, but it has also rendered many of us Texans blind to our own history. The healing circle that October afternoon taught me that the battle is not yet over.” Cantú’s message, at once recuperative and polemical, is emblematic of the volume as a whole, which reads less as a standard literary history than a “healing circle” of its own, a linked set of disparate moments and actors, drawn together in remembrance, solidarity, even defiance, and pledged to the forging of new histories, new readings of the collectively-shared past that is America. Cantú’s essay on Texas-Mexico border writing is at once a reverie for the dead, an attempt at cathartic closure, and a process of communal rebirth, and so is A New Literary History of America The collection is nothing short of a re-visioning of American literary history and identity in light of the concerns of the twenty-first century, a new set of sightings, soundings, and range findings of once-familiar territories from contemporary perspectives.

A book as long and as rich as A New Literary History of America cannot have justice done to its many individual essays in the space of a single review. Nevertheless, highlights from the volume fairly leap out every twenty or thirty pages or so, begging especial mention: Cantú’s luminous essay, mentioned above; or Mary Gaitskill’s take on Norman Mailer, which pastiches the first-person style of the first part of Mailer’s Armies of the Night, and in so doing offers at once a subtle critique of Mailer’s swaggering authorial voice and a celebration of his personal and literary excesses; or screenwriter Michael Tolkin’s deft pairing of hardboiled noir prose with the drinking stories of Alcoholics Anonymous members; or Marcus’s prophetic reading of Moby Dick against a twentieth-century TV Guide and twenty-first-century reports from the battlefields of Afghanistan. In all of these pieces A New Literary History of America delights as well as instructs, the contributors fashioning their own highly stylized narratives in direct response to the critical challenges posed by the texts and authors under study. In so doing these essays usefully collapse the boundary between critic and subject, reviewer and reviewed, so as to quite efface normative divisions between the arts of fiction and criticism. While not all of the pieces in the anthology reach for these heights, the more standard, encyclopedia-style essays—which constitute the bulk of the volume—are nevertheless almost uniformly successful, short, lucid gems of exposition and erudition: the effect of reading these pieces, a few at a time over the course of a month or so, was that of so many windows opening up onto a shadowy past, be it the coasts of the Americas as first glimpsed by European voyagers, or the reception history of James Fenimore Cooper’s wilderness romances in Europe, or even the professional acting career of Junius Brutus Booth, father of John Wilkes Booth and the introducer of Romantic theater to the United States. Even those authors particularly well-embalmed by the twin desiccants of scholarship and popularity, sawdust-stuffed figures like Emerson and Whitman and Henry James, get a thorough airing, and new light thrown into the unexplored crannies of their well-creased hides. All of these pieces, and so many others—especially those treating subjects and periods in which I’m a proud nonspecialist—are consistently informative and exciting.

But like any list or canon, even the inclusiveness and openness of A New Literary History of America cannot fully encapsulate or encircle the entire terrain of American cultural and literary history, even with the inclusion of chapters on Porgy and Bess, Bob Dylan, and Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, all of which share space with more traditional subjects like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Carl Sandburg, and Philip Roth.

Like groundbreaking books on American literature before it, books such as D. H. Lawrence’s iconoclastic Studies in Classic American Literature or Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, the ultimate inconclusiveness of A New Literary History of America is a happy fault of its rare virtues: its plurality and attempt at an all-encompassing sweep; its commitment to the poetics and politics of literary, cultural, and historical criticism; its self-reflexive inquisitiveness of its own and others’ narratives of origin and identity; and its privileging of diversity and hybridity over sameness and rigidity—qualities that the book will be seen to share with America itself, whose always-elusive “more perfect union” is forever receding, like Gatsby’s green light, beyond its grasp. The omissions and imperfections of A New Literary History of America are many: one looks in vain among the contributors for luminaries like Louis Menand, Rebecca Solnit, and Toni Morrison; a few of the contemporary chapters, like Hua Hsu’s on hip hop, are thin on texture and detail; brand-new modes of communication, like LOLspeak and YouTube,
are absent. But even these gaps succeed as provocations to further exploration, lacunae on our historiographical map to be filled in with further literary and cultural cartography. At its best and quirkiest, A New Literary History of America reads like a vast provocative setlist or syllabus compiled by a team of obsessive collectors and enthusiasts—Benjamin’s author-as-producer refashioned as the twenty-first-century’s geek compiler of alternative histories and tragically overlooked moments. As a great literary mixtape, A New Literary History of America looks beyond itself to other, newer literary histories, ones even less finished or closed, open to newer media and newer discoveries. At times I found myself wishing that the book weren’t immured by copyright laws and the solidity of print production, that an open-source weblog or online supplement were busy recording further contributions to this great project—the genesis of slash fiction, the beauties of Andy Warhol’s a: a novel, learned excurses on the lyrics of Jay-Z or the nomadic aesthetics of iPhone photography: the list, as with this compendious list of lists, is long. A New Literary History of America stands strongly, as both example and challenge to the work—spanning periods, genres, languages, ethnicities, and media—that will follow it.

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Author Louis Menand

The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. W. W. Norton and Company (2010).

The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected by Jonathan R. Cole. Public Affairs (2010).

In Willa Cather’s 1925 novel The Professor’s House, Godfrey St. Peter, a professor of history at a Midwestern university, befriends Dr. Crane, a professor in the physics department at the same school (and mentor to the novel’s tragic hero Tom Outland). These two professors, one from the humanities and one from the sciences, find a common foe in what they see as the encroachment of industry and profit in the educational process, a phenomenon that threatens their goal of producing well-rounded, cultivated students. As Cather describes it: “His friendship with Crane had been a strange one. Out in the world they would almost certainly have kept clear of each other; but in the university they had fought together in a common course. Both, with all their might, had resisted the new commercialism, the aim to ‘show results’ that was undermining and vulgarizing education. The State Legislature and the board of Regents seemed determined to make a trade school of the University.” That this appears in a novel published in 1925 is some indication of how long there has been this persistent anxiety over the aims of higher education, and the fear that market forces were corrupting the values of institutions of higher learning. (In The Professor’s House these forces of profit play a major role in the story, as the scientific discovery of the deceased intellectual prodigy Tom Outland ends up being patented and used to fund the luxurious lifestyle of St. Peter’s unscrupulous son-in-law.)

One wonders what Professors St. Peter and Crane would think of today’s universities with their power rankings, outsized athletic programs, and students who resemble not so much pupils as customers (who are always right!). And that’s not to mention the rise of for-profit conglomerates like the University of Phoenix. Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas and Jonathan R. Cole’s The Great American University, are two recent works on higher education which attempt to make sense of where the nation’s colleges and universities are today, what makes them work or not work, and what challenges lie ahead for American higher education in the coming years.

Before taking his current position as the Bass Professor of English at Harvard, where he has been since 2003, Louis Menand taught here in the Graduate Center’s English department. His newest book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, is part of W. W. Norton’s Issues of Our Time series edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Menand mentions that he served on a committee to re-develop Harvard College’s General Education curriculum, and this had no small part in inspiring the book, which examines the history of higher education, ideas about appropriate curriculum, and the state of graduate education at the current moment. Coming from a different angle is Jonathan R. Cole’s The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected. Cole is a sociologist by training and served as the Provost and Dean of Faculties at Columbia University from 1989 to 2003. In this book, Cole examines the nation’s largest and most prestigious research universities, shows why the United States is the unequivocal world leader in academic research, and argues that this status could be threatened by limitations on research and inquiry put in place in the past eight years.

As you may have gathered from the literary reference that began this review, my own allegiances are in the humanities. I am a student in the English department here at the Graduate Center, and my dissertation project is on academic novels such as Cather’s The Professor’s House and Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, examining them in the context of the history of American higher education. All of us in this profession encounter debates around higher education and policy in some form. Though it is impossible to keep up with every article, trend, and debate, we all read our share of pieces from The Chronicle of Higher Education and InsideHigherEd.com. However, my work on this dissertation has led me to dive headfirst into the voluminous field of higher education history. I soon found myself drowning in a sea of monographs full of overlapping information, murky statistical claims, and confusing, convoluted historical narratives about the origins and trajectory of America’s institutions of higher education and all of the administrative personalities that have shaped the field. Complicating matters even more is the fact that the American collegiate system is not really a “system’ at all, but a loose network of degree granting institutions. On the up side, this allows for a wonderful diversity of institutions and approaches. According to Cole, there are roughly 4,300 different institutions of higher learning granting degrees in the United States today. Ultimately, that variety is an asset that allows students of various abilities, backgrounds and interests to choose among a plethora of options. We now have small liberal arts colleges like Berea College in Kentucky, a school known for its innovative financing which does not charge its students tuition. We have massive public state colleges like Ohio State University which, while located in Columbus, functions like a whole city unto itself. And we also have unique institutions with specific historical missions such as my alma mater, Morehouse College, the nation’s only all-male historically black college. Cole’s number of 4,300 also includes the hundreds of community colleges spread out across the country. But how does one begin to document and quantify the outcomes of education given all these disparate institutions and their assorted curricula? How do you compile a history of American higher education in such a way that it gives us a language for assessing the success and failures of education and provides some grounding to make the appropriate changes to ensure that these institutions remain competitive in the 21st century? Some scholars have taken an institutional approach, examining the history of one particular institution and its administrative decisions about curriculum. Other historians have attempted sweeping historical surveys of American higher education as a whole, and the library shelves groan under the weight of these tomes, many clocking in at 500 pages or more.

In The Marketplace of Ideas, Menand narrows his emphasis to a set of particular issues, but in the process provides a useful overview of American higher education. The book is organized into three essays examining three particular issues in higher education: 1) the history of the general education curriculum, 2) the logic of academic disciplines and the allure of “interdisciplinarity” as a buzzword in academia, and 3) the politics of professors and the academic labor market. Menand’s writing style may seem deceptively simple—the book clocks in at a slim 174 pages—but in the course of presenting the background on these topics Menand also does a masterful job of taming and synthesizing over a century’s worth of scholarship on higher education. To boil all that down to an accessible narrative requires some generalizations, and there are many in The Marketplace of Ideas. But Menand has picked his reductionisms wisely and his attempt to fashion a coherent narrative out of all of this history is in itself a useful exercise that will allow scholars to reevaluate some of the central themes in the history of American higher education.

One of the most
striking concepts that jumps out of the book’s second section is his insistence on labeling the years between 1945 and 1975 as the “Golden Age of Academia,” a period during which “the number of American undergraduates increased by almost 500 percent and the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent.” This is a level of growth that will likely never be surpassed. Higher education continued to grow after 1975 but at a much slower rate. The Golden Age began with the end of World War II and the introduction of the G.I. Bill, and lasted until the financial turmoil of the 1970s. The G.I. Bill is perhaps the single most important piece of legislation in the history of American higher education. It extended what was once a privilege reserved for children of the wealthy to thousands of working class veterans. These measures have radically reshaped the look, feel and size of
America’s colleges.

No doubt many of my peers approaching the job market will want to skip ahead to the third section titled “Why Do Professors All Think Alike.” Here Menand confronts the well-worn conservative gripe against a leftist bias in higher education, especially in the humanities where multiculturalism and pop culture have allegedly replaced the sober study of Western Civilization and its greatness. Menand dismantles this argument by citing surveys that show that the academy does in fact lean liberal, but it does so across disciplinary lines, including in the sciences, and that within that umbrella of “liberal” is a variety of political and religious perspectives. However, Menand acknowledges that “the politics of the professoriate is homogenous,” and goes on to argue that this homogeneity is rooted in how academia trains and hires its professors. While I don’t think Menand’s explanation is convincing his discussion of academic labor is worth a look less for its intervention into the culture wars and more for his examination of the “time to degree” which has blown wildly out of proportion. For instance, a typical graduate student in English will spend roughly ten years earning a doctoral degree. Other humanities fields have comparable numbers. This is an unnecessary and sadistic system. Menand proposes that the humanities Ph.D. should be streamlined in the way that programs in medicine, law and business are administered, with a set number of years and clearer program requirements. The length of the Ph.D. program prohibits many students from considering the process at all. Shortening the time to degree would make graduate education seem less daunting for college graduates from modest economic backgrounds who may have already sacrificed greatly just to get an undergraduate degree and who may be interested in earning a Ph.D. but unable and unwilling to endure its length and cost.

As for the labor market itself, Menand writes that “There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs.” These ABDs have increasingly served as the cheap labor force for teaching undergraduate students. In recent years we have seen a graduate student unionization movement necessary to counteract universities using graduate students to teach undergraduate courses, even the upper-level ones once reserved for tenured faculty. (I first typed in “full-time faculty,” but many adjuncts are teaching full-time, which is precisely one of the problems.) Menand does not go far enough in indicting the exploitation of the current adjunct teaching system. And one wonders if this system of contingent labor has any chance of being stopped. Now with the rise of for-profit schools and the prevalence of corporate management in higher education becoming the norm, the situation continues to look bleak. Nevertheless, Menand provides some ammunition against the usual narrative of an “overproduction of Ph.D.s.” Marc Bousquet’s book How the University Works and his blog of the same name, also contests the “overproduction” thesis, showing that the demand for teaching is actually higher with more students enrolling in college each year, and that adjuncts are being slammed with larger class sizes. The question of “overproduction” must be seen in light of the growth of adjuncting as the default teaching model for the humanities.

At first glance the hefty 660 pages of Jonathan Cole’s The Great American University appears to be exactly the kind of dense, foreboding book I described earlier that makes up the canon of higher education history. And to some degree it is. But Cole has done an exemplary job of making the narrative relatively accessible despite the voluminous statistical data and flurry of eminent names that bog the book down at times. Cole has spent most of his life at Columbia where he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in sociology, and later served as provost for fourteen years until 2003. His focus in the book is, well, universities like Columbia. Cole identifies about 260 institutions that now claim to be research universities and narrows his focus to the 100+ that sit at the top of the list.

The first section of the book chronicles the history of the nation’s earliest institutions of higher learning and examines how these colonial colleges evolved into major research universities over the years. Long story short, by 2001 the United States has produced a third of the world’s science and engineering articles in refereed journals, and in three of the past four years American academics have received a majority of the Nobel prizes for science and economics. The American university system, like the nation itself, has firm roots in England, but Cole also describes how American institutions borrowed from the German model of the 19th century, with its combination of research and teaching. Germany is a key part of Cole’s conclusions in the book. Cole returns to the history of Nazi Germany in the 20^th century to demonstrate how repression of free inquiry damaged Germany’s standing as the site of the world’s most competitive research institutions, driving talented academics in Germany and Austria to American universities where they helped these institutions to flourish. The second part of the book details the specific discoveries and innovations that have originated in American research universities—things such as the bar code, congestion pricing for traffic, and even the Internet itself. The third part outlines what Cole sees as a potential threat to the American research university—the squelching of academic freedom and scientific inquiry—especially that which took place under the eight long years of the Bush presidency.

Cole sounds optimistic that the Barack Obama administration will restore science to its rightful place in our research institutions and restore some of the restrictions put in place by George W. Bush’s flat-earth approach to scientific knowledge. In his most recent State of the Union address, Obama at least mentioned the importance of science education (as well as funding for community colleges). But Cole is leery of the damage done by the recent financial crises, and in this regard the Obama administration has already been a major disappointment (for anyone not on the board of Goldman Sachs that is). This, in fact, raises a looming question about Cole’s own study. He identifies a number of innovations in science and economics as well as the social sciences and humanities, and cheerleads for the goodness of America’s institutions of higher learning. But I was also left wondering as to the extent that these same elite institutions and their departments of economics and business were the breeding grounds for the very policies that have left all of us in financial turmoil and threatened the opportunities for a generation of young Americans whose families may no longer be able to afford college at all. Ultimately, it is this relentless push for profits and a continued faith in corporatization and finance capital to solve all our problems that is changing institutions of higher education, including the way they teach students, and how they train and hire faculty. Neither of these books seems interested in challenging corporatization of higher education at the ideological level (not that they need to do so as several other books and many articles have already tread over that ground). But what they have both done is map out the current terrain of the American university in ways that will help us to understand how to ensure that in the rest of the 21^st century, the nation’s colleges and universities maintain high standards of achievement, and continue to be a force for good.

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Poet Louise Glück

A Village Life: Poems by Louise Glück. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2009).

One way to approach a book of poems is to imagine not how the poet speaks, but from what stage. Wordsworth talks out of the woods, on a long walk. Allen Ginsberg shouts to his reader from a crowded bar. Walt Whitman stretches out in the grass in Fort Greene park in the middle of a fair and talks to the sky. Louise Glück’s work, to me, has always felt unearthly and disembodied. In her early collections, the poems remind me of a wedding tent: like a blindingly white, taut canvas ratcheted to steel poles. At first glance her work is impenetrably cold and flat. Underneath, though, is a teeming crowd—a fatally optimistic couple, a weeping ex-lover, a drunk mother; the exchange of gifts, someone stepping on someone’s toes during the dance.

Her more recent books, including her newest collection, A Village Life, puts its speaker on an amphitheater stage, reciting to rows of empty seats. The audience which Glück’s speakers address (which feels spare to begin with) has one by one retired for the evening, to the poet’s great advantage. Her lyricism is now a bare bones echo of previous poems, her subject matter whittled down to mourning the loss of the sensual world. A Village Life abandons any pretense of interest in love, family, or epic betrayal (some of her previous themes). Now everything has given over in service to one question: how does a person watch the body age, how does a person watch death come?

One of America’s most auspicious poets, Glück was born in New York City in 1943. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Seven Ages (2002), Meadowlands (1996), The Wild Iris (1992), and Ararat (1990). The current judge of the Yale Younger Poets Series, she is the recipient of not only the Pulitzer Prize but also the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollinger prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. A professor at Yale University, Glück produces a new book of poems every five years or so (A Village Life comes just four years after her last book Averno).

Throughout her work, Glück has turned to and from traditional poetic lenses to examine her obsessions with sexuality, hunger, and mortality; using Greek mythology, personal narrative, she is (as the critic Helen Vendler wrote) “a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems… have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither ‘confessional’ nor ‘intellectual’ in the usual senses of those words.” The confidence and coldness of her work is refreshing; it creates this sense of speaking to the empty amphitheater I mentioned earlier, and the eerie sense that Glück is speaking out loud to no one, like a voice from beyond the grave. Of course, this feeling is the result of impossible control and brevity, and her glittering scalpel-like technique. Her work also relies greatly on her indulgence in the tradition that the poet bends God’s ear. Glück isn’t much interested in overturning cliché; that doesn’t mean, however, that what she is doing isn’t spectacularly difficult and moving.

Like her more innovative contemporary Anne Carson, she has turned to Greek mythology to frame her preoccupations with betrayal, metamorphosis and fate. Averno revolves around Greek mythology and sorcery (with titles like “Persephone the Wanderer,” “Prism,” “A Myth of Innocence,” “A Myth of Devotion,” and “Omens”).

Her book Meadowlands uses gods and goddesses to heighten to epic levels human grief and disgust; in “Circe’s Power” she writes: “I never turned anyone into a pig. / Some people are pigs; I make them / look like pigs. / I’m sick of your world / that lets the outside disguise the inside.” The poem concludes: “My friend, / every sorceress is / a pragmatist at heart; nobody / sees essence who can’t / face limitation.” It’s a common cliché that every poet is trying, throughout their life, to write one poem. “Circe’s Power,” though addressing sinister desire, magic, and transformation, is really a poem about the impossibility of metamorphosis. Glück’s work is about the excruciating inability to believe in a world beyond the sensual world in which we exist. “Nobody / sees essence who can’t / face limitation”: to rejoice fully in the essence of life requires one to acknowledge death—the limitation of the world, or of our human life on earth. In her spectacular book The Seven Ages, Glück writes a heartbreaking elegy for “The Sensual World”:

I caution you as I was never cautioned:
you will never let go, you will never be satiated.
You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to
hunger.
Your body will age, you will continue to need.
You will want the earth, then more of the earth—
Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will
not respond.
It is encompassing, it will not minister.
Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you,
it will not keep you alive.

A Village Life is about the disillusionment that spring brings newness, the memory of one’s young body when facing the old, the distance the elderly have from young couples. In this way, it offers little new in terms of subject matter or tone. The reader will encounter Glück’s familiar end-stopped lines; simple imagery; declarative sentences and haunting endings. The book is stripped bare; one way we see this is in the repetition of titles through the book. The reader encounters, for example, two poems called “Bats,” two called “Earthworms,” and three “Burning Leaves”; the recycled titles mimic the book’s preoccupation with the exhausting (as opposed to rejuvenating) cycle of seasons which the characters witness, again and again.

This village, of course, is not a community but rather a sort of otherworldly snow-globe, with people and their quiet steps forward and backward; it is a kind of purgatory on earth, with small grievances and smaller pleasures, with exhaustion, silences, disappointments, and yet the ongoing awe in the simple present day. One speaker remembers her childhood: “we were kids again, sitting on the front steps in the morning, / eating a peach. Just that, but it seemed an honor to have a mouth.” There is no sense that this honor–just to have a mouth—has transformed somehow into a wiser, albeit quieter poem-speak offered to the reader. Instead, the book is leaden with its silences: “No sound except the roar of the wheat”; “We’d get quiet after a while. The night would get quiet. / We had given the night permission to carry us along.” A man goes into a bar, and tells us about the owner and him—“If we’re alone, he turns down the volume of the television.… / If there’s no game, he’ll pick a film. It’s the same thing—the sound stays off, so there’s only images. / When the film’s over, we compare notes, to see if we both saw the
same story.”

In her essay “Against Sincerity” (in Proofs and Theories, 1994) Glück spends some time considering how, for Keats, “That world—this world—was heaven; in the other he could not believe, nor could he see his life as a ritual preparation. So he immersed himself in the momentary splendor of the material world, which led always to the idea of loss.” It is easy to see why Glück would feel kinship with Keats. Keats, of course, was heavily influenced by Wordsworth, who approached his poetry with more anxiety about the “hidden reaches of the mind” than on the experience of death (inasmuch as they can be separate). Glück’s own work is, in some ways, a melding of the two poets; her own emphasis is on the boundaries and limitations of the philosophical / intellectual and sensual, as well as the paradox of community—that it is absolutely necessary to live our lives with others, and yet impossible to understand another’s subjectivity or share our own.

She writes that Keats “was given to describing his methods of composition in terms implying a giving-in: the poet was to be passive, responsive, available to all sensation. His desire was to reveal the soul, but soul, to Keats, had no spiritual draperies. Spirituality manifests the mind’s intimidating claim to independent life. It was this invention Keats rejected. To Keats, the soul was corporeal and vital and frail; it had no life outside the body.” And so with Glück:

Crossroads

My body, now that we will not be traveling together
much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw
and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I as young—
love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never it its choices, its intensities.
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could
not be promised—
My soul has been so fearful, so violent:
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you
cautiously,
not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:
it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.

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Petrushka

Il mondo della luna by Franz Joseph Haydn. Performed by Gotham Chamber Orchestra.

This review is about three recent adaptations of classical works: The Győr National Ballet’s take on Stravinsky’s early-twentieth-century masterpieces, Petrushka and Rite of Spring, and Gotham Chamber Opera’s production of Haydn’s opera Il mondo della luna (The World on the Moon).

Petrushka was originally composed by Stravinsky for the Ballets Russes, the company responsible for premiering most of the sensational avant-garde ballets that took Paris by storm in the first decades of the twentieth century. It premiered in Paris in 1911. The ballet’s conceit has its roots in Russian folklore, as did most of Stravinsky’s works from this period. It takes place during the festival of Shrovetide, in St Petersburg’s Admiralty Square. The title character, Petrushka, is a puppet whose master endows him and his fellow puppets, the ballerina and the Blackamoor, with real human emotions. The requisite love triangle ensues, and ends calamitously with the Blackamoor killing Petrushka in front of an audience of festival-goers. When the puppeteer tries to reassure the audience that the puppets are not real humans—that they are, in fact, just wooden puppets—Petrushka’s ghost appears above the theatre.

Almost nothing remains of this plot in the Győr Ballet’s rendition of Petrushka. The choreographer, Dmitrij Simkin, states in the program: “I present here, not dolls with human feelings … , but humans who act like puppets in a society controlled by propaganda where misleading the masses and brainwashing controls the whole society.” Simkin’s choreography basically inverts the original tale, presenting Petrushka as a man who refuses to give in to the will of the Soviet equivalent of a puppeteer: a military commander.

The ballet begins (and ends) not with Stravinsky’s score, but with a Soviet song, the type commonly sung in that era by the workers’ choirs that were the government’s favorite form of music-making. As the song plays, a dozen or so Soviet “puppets,” decked out in Soviet costumes replete with red handkerchiefs around their necks, begin a rather mechanistic dance. Even after the song ends, they keep dancing, seemingly incapable of recognizing on their own something as simple as the end of the music. The only two characters who stick out from this corps of good Soviet folk are Petrushka (the only man onstage with a bare neck) and his would-be master (in full military uniform).

The plot of the ballet is abstracted to the point of formlessness. The set comprises statues of a hammer, a sickle, and Lenin’s head, with a glowing red star suspended in what appears to be driftwood presiding over the stage. The ballet itself alternates between the Soviet-puppets’ mechanistic dance, and the existential duel between Petrushka and the commander. Rather predictably, Petrushka dies, and several of the dancers are crushed by Lenin’s head as it rolls across the stage.

This is too bad. Stravinsky’s score was composed for a very specific tale—you hear, in the music, a man with a hurdy-gurdy and a man with a music box fighting for the audience’s attention, the puppeteer charming his puppets to life with his flute, and so on. To erase all of these moments from the choreography seems a waste, and ruins the delicate balance between dance, narrative, and music that first made the ballet such a success. Listening to the score without watching the ballet is similar to listening to a film score without seeing the film. Watching the Győr Ballet’s production does not do much to fill in those blanks. I’m sure it’s possible to update the ballet in ways that would convey the same anti-Soviet message, while keeping the narrative of the original ballet intact. Unfortunately, this production failed at the task.

Perhaps Rite of Spring would have been a better vehicle for an anti-Soviet ballet: the original plot revolves around Stravinsky’s vision of a Pagan Russian spring ritual ending with the sacrifice of a virgin. Surely a group of frenzied comrades in Soviet garb sacrificing a terrified girl who refuses to submit could send much the same message as the Győr Ballet’s production of Petrushka?

At any rate, this is not what choreographer Attila Kun does in his new production of Stravinsky’s watershed ballet. The 1913 premiere, with its scandalously primitive sets and costumes, ugly, angular dancing that more closely resembled a communal seizure than ballet, and jarringly loud, dissonant music, caused a riot: perhaps the most-discussed moment in the history of classical-music concerts.

Kun’s production follows the basic outline of Stravinsky’s scenario, but removes the primitivist-Russian flavour. The dancers are scantily clad in simple white costumes, perhaps closest in ethos to ancient Greece, although some audience members I spoke with thought the look to be more space-age. The set is practically nonexistent: the only thing onstage besides the dancers being a white sheet which they sometimes dance behind, creating ripples in its surface as they touch it. The counterpart to all this whiteness is the lighting, which constantly changes colors and brightness. When the victim finally succumbs to her fate, her white costume is drenched in blood.

This is all fairly effective, but as in Petrushka, something is missing: the original choreography. The dancing in this production was simply too nice, too close to conventional ballet, too artful. The only real signs of primitivism were the several times that the dancers ran around on stage, something that is none too exciting to watch. The thing that made the original Rite of Spring really shocking was the way in which the dancers’ bodies contorted, and the perfect synchronicity between their actions and Stravinsky’s brutal music. Without that, this production felt sanitized.

•  •  •

Gotham Chamber Opera’s production of Haydn’s little-performed comic opera Il mondo della luna was another animal entirely. The company’s production amounts to a postmodern pastiche, collapsing several centuries’ worth of fashion, technology, and performance traditions into each other, but the mélange works: this was one of the most entertaining and enjoyable opera productions that I have ever seen.

The big hype surrounding this production was the unusual performance space: the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium. Where better to produce an opera that revolves around an aristocrat tricked into believing he has been sent to the moon than in a planetarium that can really be made to look like the moon? Yet it seems somewhat miraculous that not only did the folks at the Planetarium agree to allow the production to be staged in the first place, but also that everyone managed to get along well enough to see it through to the end.

The best part about the decision to produce Il mondo della luna at the Planetarium is that it seems to have inspired the company to take unprecedented license with the opera. If you are going to project images of the night sky onto the ceiling of your performance venue (something Haydn could never have dreamed of), what else can you modernize? Perhaps more importantly, what else will the performance space force you to modernize, and how well will you adapt?

The first thing to be changed was the music of the opera itself. The conductor, Neal Goren, explains in the program notes that while some of the opera’s arias are “not only the best of Haydn, [but] the best of music … there is a great deal of chaff among the wheat of Il mondo della luna.” So he trimmed the opera down considerably, from over three hours in length to a swift ninety minutes, with no intermission. Mr. Goren’s shortened version of the opera worked well; it had a snappy pace, only lagging a little towards the end.

The unusual locale of this production presented several obstacles. The planetarium is circular, its 350 seats situated around the circumference. There is no stage; no orchestra pit; none of the comforts of a standard opera house. But the company rose splendidly to the task. The orchestra was seated on a raised platform to one side of the planetarium. The main action of the opera took place directly in front of their platform. The singers moved around between the floor and a second elevated platform and rolling ladders, all maneuvered by a team of stage hands throughout the show. In the end, the lack of a stage turned out to be one of the show’s biggest assets. The fact that the singers were in constant motion made the production more interesting to watch. And because the singers were often on the floor or wandering between aisles, there was an interaction between them and the audience that rarely happens in contemporary opera productions. I found myself wondering whether the ultimate consequence of staging the opera in such a supposedly modern environment was to bring it back to its original setting: the opera was first performed in the Esterháza, the palace of Haydn’s patron, presumably in a hall much smaller than today’s opera houses.

Adding even more to the visual interest were the wonderfully outrageous costumes. At the beginning of the opera, when everyone is firmly earth-bound, the costumes are typical, with the aristocrats wearing the usual 18th-century period costumes replete with fancy wigs. When Buonafede is tricked by the astrologer Ecclitico into thinking he has traveled to the moon (in reality he is merely a little out of it from taking a heavy sleeping potion), the aura changes entirely. Buonafede himself is decked out in an Apollo-style space suit, and the other main characters of the opera get outfits straight off the set of Star Trek consisting largely of shimmery, white spandex. These costumes don’t just look twentieth century and beyond, they are also quite technically advanced. Since the use of stage lights would wash out any projections on the Planetarium’s ceiling, the singers’ faces are lit during the moon scenes by lights that have been worked into their costumes in various ways. This merely adds to the sci-fi quotient of the costumes.

The thing that really made the production a success, though, was the performance style, which had been adjusted forward several centuries, drawing heavily on the comic style of Gilbert and Sullivan shows. All of the singers ham it up as much as possible, and considering how ridiculous the plot of the opera is to begin with, this is really a very good thing. In addition to being very funny, the singers also play up the raciness latent in the opera’s text. The maid sports a fairly scandalous costume, and the lover of one of Buonafede’s daughters sticks his head up her skirts in an ensemble early in the opera. Even traditional 18th-century elements of the opera, such as the moon nymphs’ dance, were updated. Instead of featuring traditional ballerinas, the moon nymphs in this production were hula hoop dancers, decked out in head-to-toe spandex, using light-up hoops that seared through the dark Planetarium.

•  •  •

Watching the Győr Ballet one night and Gotham Chamber Opera the next illuminated what works and what doesn’t when companies try to update classic works. The Győr Ballet’s productions of Petrushka and Rite of Spring added little to my understanding of the works largely because they tried to improve on artworks that needed little improvement. It would take a true work of genius to make those ballets better than they already were. Gotham Chamber Opera, on the other hand, managed to take a second-rate comic opera and update it just enough that contemporary audiences would find plenty to fall in love with. 

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Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Harvard University Press, 2009

Many New Yorkers might wonder what use it is to understand a company like Wal-Mart. After all, with no Wal-Marts in the city most of us aren’t Wal-Mart shoppers, and the social and political culture of New York is far different from the one we regularly associate with Wal-Mart. Isn’t Wal-Mart simply a red state thing? Why should anyone not in “Wal-Mart Country” bother trying to understand this phenomenon?

In two important new works, historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Bethany Moreton each seek to answer those questions. To understand the important changes in the United States (and even the world) in the last thirty years we must understand Wal-Mart, they argue. Whether you are interested in political, economic, or cultural history, Lichtenstein and Moreton each make a powerful case for the decisive influence of Wal-Mart.

In The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business, Nelson Lichtenstein offers a comprehensive view of the company, detailing where it came from and how it became the largest retailer and private sector employer in the world. A distinguished labor historian who has also made major contributions to the history of politics and political economy, Lichtenstein goes beyond Wal-Mart’s impact on American labor, politics and the economy. As the title suggests, The Retail Revolution seeks to explain how Wal-Mart, as the “vanguard of the retail revolution,” has overthrown the previously dominant form of global political economy and has ushered in “a new stage in the history of corporate capitalism.”

In each chapter Lichtenstein focuses on a different aspect of Wal-Mart’s history and contemporary story. Telling the story of Wal-Mart’s origins, Lichtenstein places the company’s ascendance at the end of a one-hundred year period in which manufacturers dominated the American economy. Sam Walton, Wal-Mart’s founder and patriarch, grew up in a world where retailers played second fiddle to manufacturers. But by the 1970s—Wal-Mart’s “miracle decade,” in which the company cracked the $1 billion sales mark—manufacturers’ dominance was coming to an end.

In one of the most interesting chapters of this fascinating book, Lichtenstein explains just how Walton was able to raise Wal-Mart to such heights. Through an innovative use of technology to track and distribute products Walton transformed the relationship between merchant and vendor. He created his own distribution centers and network and he pioneered a barcode system to keep track of every piece of merchandise. After 1987 Wal-Mart’s communication was further aided by the world’s largest private, integrated satellite communication network. This was nothing less than a “logistics revolution” Lichtenstein tells us, and it allowed Wal-Mart to put the squeeze on its manufacturers and suppliers, employing this wealth of new data to “leverage their enormous buying power.” This ability to pressure manufacturers and suppliers was one of the major reasons the company could offer such low prices and it remains Wal-Mart’s major advantage in the global marketplace.

Having clearly established the logistical innovations that aided Wal-Mart’s growth, Lichtenstein’s chapter focusing on the role of China comes across brilliantly. Initially attractive to Wal-Mart because of its “stable currency, developed infrastructure, political reliability, and compliant workforce,” China is now crucial to Wal-Mart’s continued success. But Wal-Mart’s innovative methods to pinch producers and suppliers have created a nightmare for workers and labor standards in China. As the author explains, “an excruciating squeeze on all of its [Chinese] suppliers” has produced “a cascade of social pathologies that corrupt and distort every supply chain relationship: between the prime Wal-Mart vendor and its subcontractors, between factory inspectors and factory management, and between the production supervisors and the young female workers who compose the overwhelming bulk of the factory workforce.” So, during high-production season in China’s Guangdong Province, subcontractors producing Wal-Mart goods regularly require “seven-day workweeks and eighteen-hour workdays.” Lichtenstein makes crystal clear the horrifying image of a “vast new universe of sweatshops that fill the production end of the Wal-Mart supply chain.”

Although highly original information is packed into every chapter of The Retail Revolution, more familiar to observers of Wal-Mart will be Lichtenstein’s chapters on the company’s conservative and male-dominated corporate culture, its ties to right-wing political and religious movements, and its unabashed and unwavering attempts to keep out labor unions. Those keeping track of Wal-Mart in the news will also be familiar with the stories Lichtenstein tells of the union and community groups’ challenges to its expansion into Southern California, Chicago, and Maryland.

However, Lichtenstein captivates the reader by placing these well-told stories alongside Wal-Mart’s attempts to expand internationally. According to Lichtenstein, while the company has been enthusiastically embraced in many parts of Latin America and East Asia, Wal-Mart has run into roadblocks “in nations where either politics or a tough regulatory environment robs the company of the capacity to slash labor costs or build a new generation of suburban stores.” In the United Kingdom, for example, Wal-Mart has had considerable trouble while in Germany, where the company failed to grasp the significant differences in political culture, it has experienced “outright failure.”

Lichtenstein concludes The Retail Revolution by asking the reader to consider the future for Wal-Mart and what an opposition movement might be able to yield. Lichtenstein suggests that the decline of the labor movement and Wal-Mart’s hostility to unionism “has reawakened interest in what progressives and New Dealers used to call ‘the labor question.’” “On the agenda” for progressives and labor activists today “is not so much a struggle specifically against Wal-Mart, although that is well under way. In the end, it is Sam’s World, the one in which people are compelled to live under economic and psychological duress, that needs to change.” Lichtenstein predicts “a day of reckoning” for Wal-Mart, at home and abroad.

Bethany Moreton adopts a different approach to Wal-Mart that focuses instead on the region and the people that produced the company. Although To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the company, Moreton aims to do even more. She seeks to reclaim the people of Wal-Mart country from historical and political irrelevancy. Moreton makes a case for placing these people, especially Wal-Mart Moms (the white, rural women who worked and shopped in the early Wal-Mart stores) at the center of the political and economic changes in the last three decades of American history.

In a surprising and interesting argument, Moreton claims that the people of Arkansas, the original Wal-Mart country, held tightly to their 19th century populism, and that this political and cultural legacy actually helped facilitate the rise of Wal-Mart from the populist heartland. This shouldn’t be so surprising, Moreton argues, if we recognize that populists “were not purely hostile to business or bigness.” They proposed farmers’ cooperatives and producer’s monopolies over the farming sector, improved infrastructure, and they favored the idea of “federal resources for a favored segment of the polity, the virtuous farmers.” Thus, Moreton argues, the “fragmented legacy of Populism” facilitated the rise of “the mega-corporations of the Sun Belt.” Demands for the state to underwrite regional development and concern about keeping resources local all “contributed to Wal-Mart’s subsequent success” and “helped the world’s largest company win hearts and minds to the cause of corporate capitalism in the old heartland of anti-corporate agitation.”

Other values that workers and customers from Wal-Mart country brought into the stores were even more decisive. As the author puts it, these people, especially middle-aged mothers, “brought rural, Protestant family ideals into the workplace, changing the face of postindustrial America.” Although authority in Wal-Mart stores was clearly vested in men “as men, not as management,” and all women were therefore subordinate, Moreton maintains that Wal-Mart women still had a good deal of power. They “made their priorities known, and management responded accordingly,” thereby being the source of “the original momentum” for “a new service ethos” which would “grow to an economic gospel.” Through the “relationship between customers and clerks, the people in early Wal-Mart stores taught management how to function in the new economic niche it was creating.” This was the “ethos of service … a new ideological basis for valuing work and for explaining the radical inequalities it produced.”

Moreton intends this argument to be a response to journalists and scholars like Thomas Frank who fail to fully understand what happened in Wal-Mart country. The women and men of Wal-Mart were not duped into placing social and religious concerns before economic needs, nor were they simply exploited workers who were too stupid to realize it. According to Moreton, Wal-Mart shoppers and workers helped shape a company and a workplace that met their needs as well as those of Wal-Mart owners and management. Women workers at Wal-Mart “did not automatically claim the identity of ‘worker’ or, indeed, of ‘woman.’ Their own preference was for a different cultural tradition, that of Christian service,” Moreton claims. So, even though the servant model that Wal-Mart moms helped promote offered management a new claim to authority and even though it solidified patriarchy in the workplace as well as the home, it also offered female service workers a new source of respect and it ensured greater participation by husbands at home. This was, according to Moreton, an acceptable compromise for Wal-Mart women.

In addition, To Serve God and Wal-Mart tells the story of the simultaneous rise of the New Christian Right, ascendancy of free-market ideas, and growth of Wal-Mart as an international corporation. Finding many points of intersection between these three stories, Moreton argues that Wal-Mart country became, through the direct support of Wal-Mart, Inc., the home of Christian free enterprise, a movement that fused religious and economic ideas to evangelize for free market capitalism.

In the early-1970s, the United States was experiencing the political and economic tremors that would cause the New Deal state and New Deal liberalism to collapse. Wal-Mart and the people of Wal-Mart country played an important part in this process, Moreton observes. Contributing to the growing “prestige of the market,” Wal-Mart and the Walton family provided “a highly productive laboratory of free-market faith during the 1970s and 1980s.” By introducing a free market educational campaign among its management as well is in regional Christian colleges, Wal-Mart helped plant the seeds that would grow into the neoliberal “Washington consensus.” Wal-Mart became the main benefactor of conservative Christian colleges like University of the Ozarks, John Brown University and Harding University, giving them key financial support when other sources of funding were hard to come by. In return, regional Christian colleges moved economics courses and business departments to the center of the curriculum, promoting a widespread regional embrace of free market ideas and creating ready avenues for future company management. Housed at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, Students in Free Enterprise, an extracurricular organization that promoted free enterprise ideas among college students, represented an exceptionally “outstanding laboratory for the elaboration and dissemination” of these ideas. In all these ways, Moreton shows, Wal-Mart country was especially fertile ground for the seeds of Christian free enterprise to take root.

The ideology of Christian free enterprise that grew out the careful collaboration between Wal-Mart and conservative Christian colleges had an important impact on the course of economic globalization, particularly as it would affect Latin America. Moreton demonstrates how this movement tapped into an evangelizing spirit that extended south of the border to Mexico and Central America. Offered Walton Scholarships, Latin American students came to Sun Belt Christian colleges to receive training in the virtues of free market capitalism as well as evangelical Christianity. When they returned to their home countries, these Walton Scholars could be depended upon to help establish international branches or at least spread the gospel of free enterprise.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart is a fascinating and useful work of US cultural and economic history. Moreton adds much to our understanding of the people of Wal-Mart country leaving the reader with a better idea of the complexity of this group. Even as it answers certain questions, however, Moreton’s work raises others. In her attempt to understand the agency of Wal-Mart employees, Moreton eclipses workplace concerns these laborers must have had, and she fails to fully engage with them as workers, an identity that likely persisted even if in a subordinate position alongside the identity of Christian servant and woman. Nelson Lichtenstein acknowledges the widespread devotion to Wal-Mart that many of its workers had, but he also details the many complaints that these same workers put forth. Where is the anger over being forced to do unpaid work or the anxiety that unusual work hours and limited benefits produced in the workforce? Are we to assume that this was completely erased by workers’ devotion to Christian servanthood? Even in the earliest Wal-Mart workers this seems unlikely.

Another set of questions arises around the ideology of Christian free enterprise that occupies such an important part of Moreton’s story. As Moreton explained the formation and influence of Christian free enterprise I frequently found myself wondering what differentiated this sort of ideology from mainstream market fundamentalism. What made it “Christian” free enterprise? Moreton does show how Southwest Baptist University, the home of Students in Free Enterprise, fused Christian and business education and she clearly demonstrates that free market fundamentalists partnered with Christian fundamentalists to build a powerful movement. Still, what is missing is a careful discussion of the exchange between economic ideology and evangelical theology, without which Christian free enterprise is left looking virtually identical to other forms of free market fundamentalism.

These concerns aside, Bethany Moreton has written an extremely interesting book. Alongside Nelson Lichtenstein’s The Retail Revolution, To Serve God and Wal-Mart adds a great deal to our understanding of US history and the contemporary world. These books should put to rest any question about the relevance of Wal-Mart and the significance of political and cultural movements produced in Wal-Mart country.

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Author Philip Roth, March, 1962

One December day in 1817, John Keats wrote to his brother the following: “I had not a dispute but a disquisition… on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature… I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” He had, of course, no idea what impact “negative capability” would have on future generations of writers and readers. John Dewey said this letter “contains more of the psychology of productive thought than many treatises.” And indeed, negative capability—when contrasted with the various ideologies of his time and since—holds up impressively well.

It is true that negative capability is a quality we find in all great works of literature: consider John Milton’s sheer awe at the universe in Paradise Lost; the sinners’ inability to comprehend the present in The Inferno; and the brilliant, cyclical Hamlet. That strong authors must be comfortable with “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” holds no less true for contemporary literature (or art in general): Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, for example, rests on the wavering dock of her sanity.

Keats’ concept of negative capability can help us understand the relative dearth of extraordinary fiction with a more-or-less explicit political aim. First, there is the certainty and conviction required for an author to sustain a “message” or political perspective over the course of a novel or book of poems. In addition, it must be a Sisyphean task to achieve this with characters who are three dimensional and negatively capable (if you will). Poetry or fiction which is rooted in the politics of identity risks becoming at best irrelevant, at worst curious or quaint, when our understanding of such identities inevitably shifts—more appropriate for the study of culture, than the study of literature, for example (inasmuch as they can be separated). Whether or not an author is justified in fearing his or her work will cease to be relevant in future generations, or—more important—whether such a fear is productive, is a conundrum that political authors arguably circumvent, in their investment in documenting what is happening right now.

The exceptions are brilliant, outstanding, and integral to American culture and history—Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl; but the vast majority of literature which takes on political thought as its main topic falters and dissipates into the ether. I Sing the Body Politic: History as Prophecy in Contemporary American Literature offers a keyhole view into recent literature and art that grapples with some of the most painful events in recent American history, including the war in Iraq, George W. Bush’s presidency, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. The book is less interested in the literary style, or artistic success, of the works it considers than it is in revealing the political valences of their content. Instead, the authors present a boook where “in essays by five senior scholars, major works of American literature and film are analyzed in the context of a larger set of arguments about American injustice at home and across the empire.” The book focuses on some predictable artists and authors: Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Spike Lee, and Michael Moore. It also includes an essay (its strongest) by Michael Zeitlen which compares the memoirs of veterans of the Vietnam and Iraq wars. The tone of the book is no-nonsense, and if you don’t know the authors’ and editors’ politics by the end of the introduction, you’re reading it upside-down. Highly critical and full of moral outrage, the authors attempt to demonstrate how political resistance manifests in the work of some of the nation’s most important writers and film makers.

The first chapter, “Stupidity’s Progress: Philip Roth and Twentieth-Century American History,” considers Roth’s famous trilogy of I Married a Communist (1998), American Pastoral (1997), and The Human Stain (2000). David Rampton details Roth’s own, diluted version of negative capability:

Where there is an American pastoral, there is the American demonic. Where there are blithe assumptions about upward mobility, there are the workers chained to their stations in the factories. Where there is prosperity for the upper half, the other half, down-sized and staring at the poverty line with no medical insurance, loses out to the forces of globalization. The comforts of the suburbs are simultaneously a cover for seething discontent. The ideals of the founding fathers are used to justify the most blatant kind of imperialism.

(Interestingly, Rampton doesn’t address the most oft-cited criticism of Roth’s work, which is his overt and detailed misogyny.)

The ambivalance or uncertainty in Roth’s political maneuvering—for example, equal helpings of disgust for patriotism and the domestic terrorists of the Sixties—is widely undercut by the consistency of his rant: Americans are stupid, and we’re getting worse. His critique of America’s anti-intellectualism, willful naïveté, gluttonous consumerism, and isolationist ideology comes from the gut. It is as though Roth himself, nudged and cajoled by the international fallout from American ignorance, is at the edge of the cliff that is this country—and he’s decided to make the leap a little bit gleeful, for his trouble. What makes his novels so intensely pleasurable to the reader is this glee—the pure, unapologetic hedonism, the adolescent playing hooky—that characterizes his novels. But of course, as an older white American male, Roth is in a position to elide gracefully the sense of indignation which characterizes much of American far-left politics. The pleasurable sense of irony and freedom in futility woven through his novels, in fact, are largely possible because of Roth’s sensibility—observing, as he does, from outside of the fray.

“Spike Lee, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X: The Politics of Domination and Difference,” by Gordon Slethaug, considers and celebrates Lee’s work. His films (focusing mainly on Malcolm X and Do the Right Thing) document the negotiation between militant and nonviolent resistance in the black community over the past fifty years. Unfortunately, much of the essay is an attempt to determine whether the politics of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr. are most championed in Do the Right Thing—when the success of the film itself is created by the complexity of the community represented toward each other, toward the other, and toward America. The author concludes that “arguably… this film is not about the possibility of integrating black and white or of sitting down at a table together but about creating black manhood… ‘liberating the black man in American society rather than integrating the black man into that society.’”

By far the most moving essay in the collection, “The American Wars: History and Prophecy in Vietnam, the Gulf, and Iraq” by Michael Zeitlin compares the memoirs of veterans from these wars, attempting to discern what differences, if any, the soldiers from these wars have experienced upon returning home. Zeitlin is remarkably deft at corralling the many issues at hand, and comes to a conclusion that, impressively, doesn’t awkwardly squash the men’s experience to create some kind of synthesis. Zeitlin offers a chilling perspective on the role that war films have had on generations of American men: Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket. He quotes one young man: “Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended.…We watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills.” One soldier told him “The psy-ops bastards continue playing the loud rock-and-roll music. I like rock music, but I don’t think it belongs in my war. It was fine in the movies, on the boat with Martin Sheen going up the fake Vietnamese Congon or with the grunts patrolling Ho Chi Minh as they take a hill and heavy casualties, but I don’t need The Who and The Doors in my war, as I prepare to fight for or lose my life. Teenage wasteland, my ass. This is the other side.” Culling through the interviews, memoirs, films and music of America’s most recent wars, Zeitlin reminds us that America may not be ready for this new generation of soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, with amputated limbs, with broken families. Zeitlin concludes that one difficulty the Iraq veterans face is the cognitive dissonance of coming home to a cheering America. He compares this dynamic to that of the Vietnam vets, who came back to an America that was deeply divided; he concludes that the celebration of the homecoming of our newest generation of veterans is entirely for the media, far from cathartic to those men and women who return exhausted, traumatized, and just glad to be alive.

These three essays—on Roth, Lee, and America’s recent wars—do much to articulate the radically different perspectives on what form liberal criticism might take in the arts (unfortunately, the book ends with an essay on Michael Moore—who could single-handedly destroy Keats’ ideal of negative capability. Admittedly, this is his purpose: “Moore’s oeuvre stands or falls on its ability to tell the truth as he sees it…. Moore’s vision of the American political scene is clear, consistent, and plausible and when he puts his thoughts on paper or edits film as a documentarian must, this vision is not betrayed”). The collection reminds us of the difficulty of writing about politics, but also the importance; we should be grateful to those admirable artists who are able to pull it off.

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“I don’t read the newspaper, I get my news online” is a phrase heard so often, it could be considered the battle cry of the digital-age. And as with any battle, this one is not without its casualties. Today it seems as if the entire country is declaring the passing of the newspaper industry. Newspapers are seen simultaneously as outdated relics and another victim of the multi-headed hydra known as the economic recession. In a particular stroke of irony, in the first nine months of 2009, the New YorTimes Business/Financial desk has published between ten and twenty stories

documenting the downfall of papers both large and small, including the Times itself. There is even a website, newspaperdeathwatch.com, started in March 2007, which is doing an unofficial body count of papers that have fallen by the wayside.

What the online generation may not be aware of is that most of the news they find on web sites such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN is drawn, in whole or in part, from the major national newspapers which they claim not to read. What would happen if news as we know it simply ceased to exist?

From this point of departure, Alex Jones, a newspaper reporter since childhood (a story which figures prominently in his account) brings us Losing the News. He sets the scene with a moment in h

Shorenstein Center Director Alex S. Jones with Franco Ordonez and Ames Alexander of the Charlotte Observer, at a 2009 panel on the future of reporting.

is career as a journalist whose beat was the press itself. He broke a story about a Kentucky newspaper family who decided to sell their papers in the face of family turmoil. That story was written in 1986, long before the current ‘crisis’ of the news industry came to the fore, though it had been facing the all-too-common consolidation process that was characteristic during the Reagan years and has only increased since.

This introduction, though it was about the selling of a newspaper, was more illustrative of the journalistic process that Jones and others like him prize as the essence of a trade. The story was in depth—6,500 words in the New York Times business section—took a lot of time and resources to write, and kept the reporter away from his desk where he could have been covering other stories. Nonetheless, the story was deemed important by the editor and the paper covered it. From the introduction, it is clear that the author is certainly nostalgic about his work, and he makes no effort to hide that fact. But, to simply cast this as a swan song of a bygone age would be to misrepresent why it seems to have been written. The author is wholly concerned with the implications of the loss of independent journalism for a democratic society.

The book makes the case that while news and newspapers will certainly persist, the nature of journalism is undergoing fundamental changes due to the circumstances facing newspapers, which Jones argues do the majority of original reporting on which other news media base their content. In his analysis, then, simply focusing on saving the newspapers as businesses will not be sufficient to save the news. “The news” as Jones conceives of it is more about standards of objectivity than the medium of columns and newsprint. He observes that, at their genesis, newspapers were often directly financed by unions and political parties; thus any thought of objectivity or verification would have been laughable. Professional journalism, Jones argues, was the result of both an increased financial stability which provided editorial independence as well as the establishment of a set of best practices. As journalism found its way into the academy, standards of objectivity were incorporated into a professional code, a sharp contrast from the days of William Randolph Hearst and “yellow journalism.”

The news is also determined by what is covered. His first major discussion outlines the different types of news one sees in a paper, be it a daily owned by an old newspaper family like his in Greenville, or one owned by a large conglomerate like the Gannet Company. At the center of any real newspaper are the “accountability” stories which range from the coverage of international affairs to policy debates in the congress and statehouses to local issues. Under the umbrella of “accountability news” are “bearing witness” stories, which are descriptive accounts of events, “explanatory” pieces which offer analysis of events and provide historical and/or present context, and finally investigative journalism, which is done against and in spite of powerful interests who would rather that certain events remain secret or covered in a very superficial fashion. Since the advent of professional journalism, these types of stories have been the lynchpin of any good paper and are thus called the “Iron Core”
of news.

Though these stories are often the least entertaining to read, they inform the reader of things that will affect their lives, be it directly or indirectly. However, the impact of these stories does not end with their publication. Accountability news has a second life in the subsequent analysis, which forms a second tier of reporting that is largely based on opinion. Editorials and other forms of “advocacy news,” in all the different media ranging from magazines to television programs to blogs are largely reactions to the accountability news produced by the paid reporting staffs of newspapers. Writers and orators on all sides of the political spectrum thus depend on the steady stream of information that newspapers provide. Political and social thinkers at least as far back as the founding of our country have seen a free and independent press as indispensable to our democratic practice. This is at the heart of the link between news and democracy envisioned by thinkers such as Walter Lippman and John Dewey, who Jones references in his chapter on “Media and Democracy.” Though Lippman and Dewey had different ideas of who ‘the public’ was and therefore who needed the news, the purpose remained consistent: to inform the citizenry for their more effective participation in self-governance.

The primary problem facing the news today is a financial one. Newspapers were at their zenith from the 1960s until the 1980s. Profits were high even at many small papers and so were investments in the quality of news; reporters were hired en masse and compensation for the work was handsome. The pursuit of truth was a prized value among the best of the profession, regardless of political persuasion. But, as Jones points out, truth is expensive and time consuming. The journalistic maxim of verification requires maintaining relationships with many sources and often protecting those sources under pain of prosecution and lawsuits. If papers like the New York Times and Washington Post weren’t financially stable, they would surely have caved under pressure from the federal government at notable moments such as the Watergate scandal and the publication of the Pentagon papers. More often, however, it is smaller local incidents that show the value of an independent press, whose role has time and again been to hold government and industry accountable for their practices.

Profitability is thus an essential element of providing the most objective news. Since the 1980s, and at an accelerated pace since the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, newspapers, along with television and radio, have been consolidated into an increasingly small number of hands under the umbrella of large corporate media conglomerates. With the switch to a corporate model, newspapers have come to expect larger profit margins in the short term and are no longer as concerned with news as with attracting larger audiences and greater advertising revenues. In this model the iron core of news has taken a back seat. Sensational content such as entertainment coverage more commonly seen in magazines now finds its way into serious newspapers and is ubiquitous among local tabloids. Opinion pieces and syndicated columns replace locally oriented stories, leaving a paper with a local reputation but little local coverage. Likewise, content provided by government and business public relations desks, often unedited, have become a more common feature in news media of all forms.

While the new business model engendered a shift in the choices made by newspapers from within, top-down technological shifts further affected changes from without. Advertising, which has accounted for the viability of newspapers nearly since their introduction, has been adversely affected by web-based services such as craigslist and autotrader. The lower (and sometimes nonexistent) cost and increased visibility of internet advertising has created a serious obstacle for newspapers, which were once unparalleled in their ability to reach consumers. Falling advertising revenues forced papers to cut back on labor in the form of reporting and to increase pressure on the remaining staff. Jones gives numerous accounts of once-mighty newsrooms throughout the country that have been reduced to thin staffs of amateur reporters forced to fill quotas of content. The shift is perhaps most evident in the orientation of editors, who had erected a metaphorical wall between the advertising and news desks of their papers. Many of the same editors now must divide their time equally between these two tasks.

A third aspect of the crisis is the declining circulation of papers large and small. This is again connected with technological shifts that make print seem antiquated. While he imagines that there will always be some who prefer a print form newspaper, the availability of online editions, often for free, makes economic and practical sense for an increasing numbers of readers. That many people read New York Times stories through search engines such as Google News, which does not pay anything to the Times for its content and keeps the ad revenues for itself, renders the online editions of even large papers redundant, not to mention self-destructive, since it is precisely from these sites that Google gets its content. A compounding problem for circulation is the public faith in newspapers. Because so much of today’s journalism in all media is advocacy and opinion-based, a fact which bloggers and television pundits make no attempt to hide, the public has come to see news in all media as inherently biased. In sum, he sees newspapers being caught, and often lost, in a glut of news media without being set apart for their central contribution and particular ethos of objectivity and verification. The end result, for Jones, is that regardless of the work that goes into reporting, people see any story that they don’t agree with as a result of intentional skewing by the source. While there is discussion of some recent breaches of media ethics, such as the Jayson Blair case, more often than not journalists make an attempt at verification. If anything, Jayson Blair made the New York Times re-evaluate its scrutiny.

The casualties of this multifaceted crisis are laid plain in Jones’ book. The San Francisco Chronicle and to a lesser extent the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe are all major market newspapers which have been forced to shed significant portions of their newsrooms. Medium-sized papers like the Rocky Mountain News and the Baltimore Examiner have been forced to close their doors, while others such as the Detroit Free Press and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have moved to online and hybrid print-online formats. The Washington Post, New York Times and Gannet conglomerates have seen their share prices fall a great deal, out of proportion even with the precipitous market drop of October 2008. Considering these circumstances, it is unlikely if not impossible for newspapers to continue along on their old model.

The book concludes on a somewhat hopeful note, as Jones remains optimistic about the future of the news, if not with newspapers as its primary source. As the problem was framed as primarily financial, the question of “saving the news” gets tangled up with concerns around financing the news. He looks at exemplary cases of newspapers which, faced with the crisis, have devised creative strategies for engaging readers and remaining viable.

Obviously, news agencies of all sorts need to increase their web traffic in order to compensate for lost advertising revenue in print. Though newspapers do have relatively reliable names, the size of their operations has made their transition to the web slow. Jones is skeptical about the recent phenomenon of “citizen journalism,” where readers become collaborators and contributors to the news they read. The problem he sees is that though writing content is easy enough, citizen journalism is not beholden to the same standards as professional journalism. The blogosphere, though he points out some of its brighter spots, is equally suspicious because it is flooded with interested voices above which it is hard for even the best of them to rise. He is also, at best, ambivalent about a nonprofit model for newspapers, where donors and foundations would support newspapers instead of advertising revenue and circulation. Though in rare instances there have been large donations of time and resources, it is unlikely that foundations or donors would enter into long-lasting commitments with newspapers.

Ultimately, the solution for Jones is for newspapers to find a way to reconnect with their readers while remaining economically viable. While he bemoans the loss of reporting staff in newsrooms throughout the country, he recognizes that this may be a response to overexpansion while times were good. Newspapers must find ways to cut costs and perhaps endure a period of lower profits. But, in the face of all this, the core of accountability news must not be sacrificed. With accountability news at its core, he feels newspapers can adopt new strategies that cater to the mediums readers prefer. Content can be provided for print readers, online consumers, and even those that prefer to read their news over their cell phones. This would allow papers to remain in print while capitalizing on new outlets and remaining relevant to the next generation. Regardless of the format, Jones is concerned with saving the news for what matters most about it, its role as an objective source of information for citizens in a democracy.

All told, Losing the News offers a breadth of information on a timely issue that is of critical importance. The author is a true insider who cares deeply about the future of the industry both economically and ideologically. As such, he is critical of the direction papers are heading and the motivations that have brought them there. Through his historical and contemporary discussions of the role of newspapers, an effective case is made for why we need news as a centerpiece of a democratic society. He frames the crisis and the solutions in terms of the principles of the industry, the journalistic ethos, and the economic strength that makes adherence to it possible.

With that in mind, the critical flaw of the book is its grounding in the industry. Perhaps, because the author is a professional journalist and a part-owner of a newspaper, he can’t see beyond the profit motive to examine strategies that might exist outside of it. As such, it is easy to see why he is so skeptical of a non-profit approach to news. While it is certain that economic strength has had some positive impact on news coverage in the past, that might not be the
way forward.

The book also doesn’t do enough work highlighting the strengths in emergent online reporting. Though the Daily Beast and Politico may simply be “truth squads” who hold mainstream media like newspapers accountable through their tertiary reporting, sites such as Salon.com and Slate produce original investigative reporting that is severely lacking even among the best print sources. The point is well taken that the massive proliferation of the blogosphere can lead to sensory overload; but some standout sites have risen above the clatter to provide original and useful reporting that adheres to many of the same standards of quality that have characterized newspapers at
their best.

A book written by an industry luminary during perhaps the greatest panic that industry has ever known cannot help but suffer from some flaws of judgment and even some name calling. Regardless of that, the history and the grounding in theory that the book provides is incredibly valuable. One can’t help but heed Jones’ warning that the news must be saved if democracy is to persist. If there is no effective way for the public, however that is defined, to obtain verified, objective information, democracy will
surely suffer.

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