Nonfiction Reviews

A Prague Flâneur

Vítězslav Nezval
Translated by Jed Slast
Twisted Spoon Press ($19)

by Allan Graubard

For those who enjoy strolling around a city they know well or don’t, which they live in or visit; who have no particular destination in mind; who wander at different times, drawn by places and people they encounter and which, for intimate reasons, captivate them, will find an ally in A Prague Flâneur. Its author, Vítězslav Nezval, founded the Czech Surrealist Group and was one of the leading poets and writers of the avant garde. A Prague Flâneur is Nezval’s paean to the city, his city, then on the brink of disaster: The Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia was complete by March 1939, soon after the publication of the book.

The flâneur, of course, comes to us from mid-19th century France. In The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire depicts the figure as a stroller who observes in poignant detail what he encounters in and around a city but who keeps his distance, preferring to represent the experience in solitude, visually or with words. Some eight decades later, Nezval reveals the legacy of the term anew. Inspired by Prague’s polyglot architecture, mechanized systems, distractions, crowds, and those rare spaces (streets, parks, playgrounds) that can transform the normal urban chaos we expect, enjoy, or endure, Nezval orchestrates the city’s analog—the book.

Nezval’s writing style mirrors the kind of critical-poetic journalism with which surrealists captured the currents of cities—particularly their marvelous, disorienting, delirious, or dreamlike aspects. A Prague Flâneur is replete with historical descriptions of this or that street, building, restaurant, or café, and how they played in Nezval’s life— from his days as a poor, hungry university student to his rise as a literary figure—as well as brief sketches of writers and artists important to him. As he describes it, Prague takes on a multiform, resonant charge, socially proscribed but personally invented.

After Nezval, others continued to revive the legacy of the flâneur as they conceived it. A decade on after World War II, the Situationists’ dérive (their drift through the city) provoked theoretical remarks on a new context: psychogeography, a term they coined and which, as things go, now appears as a sub-discipline of geography. Heightening the stakes for Nezval, though, are two pivotal events that bring an often-feverish poise to his writing: the immanence of World War II and the fate of the Surrealist Group.

The former stems from the September 30, 1938 signing of the Munich Agreement, by which England and France ceded to Nazi Germany the Sudetenland, then part of Czechoslovakia—a Hail Mary to delay the onset of war that Nezval knew would fail; the only question was when. Anxiety percolates through the book, sharpening its tempered edge. The planes that fly above Prague presage the battle to come. The country arms only to fall months later, betrayed by its allies.

The latter involves Nezval’s split with the Surrealist Group, the repercussions of which followed him and now cannot help but appear as subtext to the book’s exuberant, elegiac tone. The cause of the split was partly political: Nezval supported the USSR, despite the terror Stalin unleashed on his opponents. The majority in the group criticized Stalin’s hunger for victims, which included leading Russian poets and artists, Communist revolutionaries, and uncounted allies or bystanders. Most were put on trial, given sentences, exiled to the Gulag, or executed. There was no possibility of rapprochement.

Nezval’s recognition that only the USSR could mount a force equal to that of Nazi Germany and wage war against it to victory was true enough in retrospect. The other members of the group—whom, oddly, Nezval never names—re-organized and continued on. Perhaps for emotional balance, Nezval recounts his friendship with André Breton and Paul Éluard: the mutual esteem they held for each other, several experiences they shared in Prague, and something of their rich collaborations. A somewhat specious critique of psychic automatism follows, which allows Nezval to clarify how he would write from then on (faced with the immanence of war, cultivating the absence of intention was not something he prized). Be that as it may, when Nezval leaves his apartment, he enters a realm that he creates: the city as his avatar, with chance their conductor.

A Prague Flâneur lives up to its title in a fraught historical moment through which Nezval sought a way to live without sidelining in his writing the inspiration Prague gave him and that he now gives the reader: walking through it, loving and fighting in it, playing out his days and nights with a keen sense of what makes it all unique, even funny (a satirical escapade with an escaped crab its capstone).

This translation, finely done by Jed Slast, is of the rare, unexpurgated first edition with photographs by Nezval, which hit the streets in the fall of 1938, coincident with the signing of the Munich Agreement. Given the consequences of that agreement and the Nazi conquest soon to come, Nezval had the book pulled from its bookstores so that he could delete passages that might compromise him with Nazi authorities, including his celebration of Stalin and his cutting portrait of Hitler as a young agitator of the lumpenproletariat in seedy Berlin beerhalls. An appendix carries that content and the edits Nezval made.

Characteristically, Nezval ends the book with a brief paragraph that recalls the narrative’s through line. It has a solitary atemporal quality—not yet mythic, but almost so. Place it as the first paragraph in the book and it works just as well. Is it an ending or a beginning? For Nezval, it could be both:

Oh Prague, I turn you in my fingers like an amethyst. But no. I just walk, and I see in the magical mirror of dusty crystal that is Prague the animated expression of someone who is fated to find himself and to wander, to find himself through wandering. 

 

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Dead Weight

Essays on Hunger and Harm

Emmeline Clein
Knopf ($30)

by Olivia Q. Pintair

When Emmeline Clein began writing her debut essay collection, Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm, she originally planned to document female hysteria. Her subjects would be fictional and non-fictional women branded with that diagnosis by a misogynistic culture that pathologizes and fetishizes the pain it produces—women hallucinating into their wallpaper, sobbing in hospital hallways, and wasting away in the folds of Y2K tabloids. Her focus shifted, though, as Clein has said in interviews, when she realized how many of the figures she was researching shared struggles with disordered eating. As Clein began “to harmonize with a ghost choir” that includes medieval anorexic saints, anonymous Tumblr users, Ottessa Moshfegh protagonists, Simone Weil, Cass Elliot, Karen Carpenter, and many of us readers, the book transformed into an attempt to frame disordered eating within the context of the systems and industries that profit from it.

Tracing the cultural and medical histories of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and orthorexia, Dead Weight undoes several tricks of the light. Through investigative reporting, criticism, and prose, Clein reveals that disordered eating is not a solipsistic malady; rather, it is an integral weapon of a racist, classist, and misogynistic society that depends upon the age-old lie that sick and sad young women are crazy, unreliable narrators. To undo that lie’s prismatic refractions, Clein shows us how common and culturally incentivized disordered eating is. Meditating on the casual gore of modern womanhood, she excavates the cultural, economic, and political underbellies of an epidemic wrought by and for a capitalist world. The result is a manifesto against “dissociative feminism” and the “lethal culture” that Western beauty standards empower.

Across Dead Weight’s thirteen essays, Clein navigates the rabbit holes of Reddit feminism, the aughts-era Tumblr-verse, diagnostic hierarchies, the eating disorder recovery industry, modern wellness culture, Ozempic’s arrival to mass markets, and the unsettling allure of bimboism. Her voice is sharp and familiar, moored to a sense of solidarity with the people living and dying along the faultlines she documents. In most autobiographical accounts of eating disorders, Clein writes, “the only way to survive seems to be renouncing your suffering sisters . . . I’m trying to find out what might happen if we blame someone other than each other and ourselves for a change.”

Clein quickly dispels any expectations for the nostalgic and bone-laden accounts of eating disorders that readers may be used to. Instead, she recasts the often isolating struggle as a collective one. In one essay, Clein explores how phases of capitalism mirror disordered eating patterns:

If bulimia was the eating disorder of Reaganomics and millennial girlbossery, and anorexia was the eating disorder of aughts-era austerity, [injectable weight loss] drugs might foster an eating disorder for a new age of technocapitalism, wherein we try to recast hunger as just another inconvenience we can eliminate with an app.

Elsewhere, Clein traces the normalization of eating disorders in a culture of ubiquitous commodification. “Eating disorders are good for capital,” reads one essay, which traces “the chain of money that leads from eating disorder treatment centers, weight loss companies, CBT companies, and pharmaceutical companies back to the same pool of investment capital.”

As Clein probes statistics and anecdotes, it becomes clear that disordered eating is not a mark of girlish insanity or vapid self-interest, but an apparatus of late capitalism. Women and femmes are peddled a beauty standard that remains a thinly veiled prerequisite for financial and social success, then are pathologized for trying to reach it. “Heroin chic is back,” The New York Post announced in 2022—Ozempic makes it easy now. As most anyone on the internet could attest, social media algorithms incentivize conformity and drain our energy to rebel. We seem to lose something when we follow their rules—and also when we don’t.

“I’m trying to be honest here: I’ve always wanted to live the kind of life that ends up in a story,” Clein writes, leveling with her audience. The women who starve themselves in books or on screen, she acknowledges, are often main characters, and maybe that is what the supposed trade-off is: Submit to the role, and you could be the heroine. But as Clein continually reminds us, those stories “are fiction,” repeated enough that they have become not only a cliché but also a narrative propping up several multi-billion-dollar industries and a conglomerate of mental illnesses with one of the highest collective death rates in the world.

For Clein, writing Dead Weight was an effort to humanize suffering people who, like the Victorian women drowning in white dresses in 19th century British and American literature, are usually romanticized in media but dismissed in real life. Like Simone Weil, Clein understands the visceral way in which the question of how or whether to eat is also a question of how or whether to be; the Self, as an experience and as an imagined ideal, is her primary interest. Early on in the book, she asks readers to picture the archetype of the “skinny, sexy, sad girl” as an ideal self that floats out at sea, “purring false promises from just over the horizon line”; she then points out that like those literary women whose misogyny-induced deaths are so predictably written as romantic inevitabilities, this archetype didn’t swim out to sea of her own accord. “Someone stranded her at the vanishing point . . .” Clein writes, “and they don’t want us to reach her because then we might save her, convince her she’s been lied to like the rest of us.”

Advancing toward the menacing clarity of that realization like a chess player, Clein refuses to talk down to her readers or underestimate their agency. She is interested in a political future beyond both the commodification of pain and the avoidance of it. “I have a question for bimbos and dissociated girls alike,” she writes in the collection’s coda. “How are we shaping our bodies and behaviors to become desirable to the most powerful, according to their value system?”

As Clein contextualizes her subject matter within existential questions about selfhood and solidarity, Dead Weight becomes relevant not only to those suffering from eating disorders, but to anyone trying to remain feeling and alive in a capitalist world that commodifies selfhood at the chaotic clip of a panopticonic auctioneer. The Self, Clein posits, is not an asset that should either escalate in perpetuity or submit to disappearance, but a synthesis of experience, alive insofar as it risks its own imagined stasis toward relationship and connection. Undermining narratives of our own isolation and insanity could destabilize industries that profit from them, Clein argues. “We don’t have to be solo heroines on lonely journeys; we can also be sisters and friends, side characters in someone else’s story . . . We can, maybe, even be the person who changes it.”

At the end of the book’s penultimate essay, Clein returns to consider the roots of her own suffering from disordered eating:

I watch my adolescent body get thrown like a pebble into a pond. The blame ripples out, past my therapist, another woman floating on her back in the water, into green fields of money and men. I see magazines filled with waifish models and . . . the Instagram ads . . .  offering me mental health quizzes and meditation for women apps and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix show and diet tea. I see the eating disorder memes and weight loss progress Instagram accounts and slim, smiling influencers, and wonder how I could have ended up anywhere but at the bottom of the lake.

“It can be politically mobilizing to feel the weight of that pain,” Clein said in a conversation with Rayne Fisher-Quann published in Nylon; “it makes me want to be alive in order to try to change it in what little ways I can so that maybe some younger girl doesn’t have to feel this bad.” Ultimately, Dead Weight is an offering born of Clein’s commitment to doing that—to envisioning a world in which girlhood isn’t a minefield of diet trends, where genuine human connection renders dissociation unnecessary, and where bodies are land and not property. In this world, Clein dreams, the lake might not be a place where people drown or disappear, but an expanse where we might find each other. This is a world she can see, she promises—not over a horizon line, but somewhere closer.

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Tap Dancing on Everest

A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Mimi Zieman
Falcon Guides ($22.95)

by Sandra Hager Eliason

Mimi Zieman wasn’t sure why she stuffed her dancing shoes into the bag she was packing for her trip to Mount Everest, but when the team was stuck at base camp with another delay, she pulled the shoes out to do dance routines on a flat rock, lifting everyone’s spirits. Zieman’s memoir, Tap Dancing on Everest, describes her time as a medic for a team attempting to scale the east face of Everest without oxygen or sherpa support. The book chronicles the dangerous expedition, beginning as the support teams’ binoculars search the heights for any trace of missing climbers and ending with a harrowing trip down the mountain; between, Zieman explains how her life path led her to this adventure.

Dance gave Zieman strength in her early life, and her job as a field researcher in the Rocky Mountains later drew her to continue exploring the mountains. She booked a flight to Nepal the day she was accepted to medical school. Zieman knew it normally took years to get a climbing permit—she would be a doctor by then—but when the expedition leader obtained one earlier than expected, she got permission to leave in the middle of her medical training, with the intent to conduct a research project on high altitude medicine (which she studied while also completing her regular medical school curriculum).

Nature lovers will appreciate Zieman’s vivid descriptions of scenery:

As spectators, we watched the natural elements sing and dance in a dramatic showcase. . . . Act One was the changing cones and shafts of sunrise, the lifting veil of night revealing pink and orange and yellow spotlights. Act Two was the main act of the day . . . showering us with the brightness of whites . . . until the swift fall of shadows enveloped us in the chill of twilight. . . .

Act Three, the finale, shined with the twinkle and swoosh of star and moon. . . . the waning sun spraying golden on the peaks, the white caps shimmering under a final dust of blue before black.

As the expedition encounters delay after delay, Zieman expertly conveys the climbers’ frustration and urgency. Zieman also offers detailed insight into the Everest expedition process—needed equipment, support, food, and the creation of camps set up at increasing altitudes to support the climbers.

The only woman on her trip, Zieman describes the discomfort of being around so much testosterone-fueled energy, but she does not wallow: When a mountain climber brags “I know I can make the top . . . I’m going to come back. Plan my own Everest expedition,” she blurts, “Well, if you need a doctor for your next expedition, call me.”

Overall, Tap Dancing on Everest is an enjoyable memoir with something to offer readers of travel, nature, medicine, or science writing—as well as anyone who appreciates a compelling, real-life adventure tale.

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The Rent Collectors

Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA

Jesse Katz
Astra House ($28)

by Nic Cavell

A phenomenal work of sociology and anthropology, Jesse Katz’s The Rent Collectors focuses on Giovanni Macedo, who botched a gang hit which resulted in the death of an infant and called down a hit on himself that was itself botched. Macedo, who was eighteen years old when he committed the crime, became the center of a nationwide manhunt and ultimately turned himself in, then assisted local and federal cases against the Columbia Lil Cycos. Many words in The Rent Collectors are devoted to the machinations of the gang’s higher-ups whose orders Macedo was assigned to carry out. But though Macedo’s narrative is harrowing and Katz’s presentation of it is powerfully critical, this book works its strongest magic in the evocation of the undocumented lives of immigrants in MacArthur Park, who repurpose the neighborhood into a vibrant site of street vending even as they are shaken down by both a police force empowered to levy exorbitant fines and the Columbia Lil Cycos, who charge for vending on their turf—two sets of “rent collectors.”

Katz first documented MacArthur Park and its vendors for the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s. When his son left for college in 2011, Katz moved to the neighborhood and became further fascinated by the local economy. In this book, he has excavated the lineage of the park, describing changes in storefront businesses and the make-up of the mostly undocumented vendors who have used the public space across generations. Here is USA Donuts, with its “La Vida Loca” mural by 18th Streeters artfully and ominously announcing their territory with paintings of sub-machine guns and a “snake-wrapped woman”; there is the Video Mania, where Macedo and his handlers stopped to gather their wits just before embarking on their crime. We meet old stalwarts of the neighborhood such as the Matiases, whose daughter Shorty walks the line between friendship and informant with both police and gang members, eventually becoming a key witness for the District Attorney’s office; we also meet newcomers like Francisco Clemente, an undocumented worker who began vending in the evenings as a side hustle from his day job operating an auto repair shop. Clemente arrived in 2007 after the Columbia Lil Cycos had instituted a tax on all vendors on their turf, but he chafed against their authority and fought a mostly solitary battle against the extortion along with two women: Jessica Guzman, a fellow vendor he began a relationship with, and Daniela Garcia, Jessica’s friend who was pregnant by another man and for whom Clemente felt responsible.

And of course there is Macedo, who we learn is a miracle—he survived being throttled with a rope and tossed off a cliff along a hazardous roadway in Mexico. Despite his cooperation with authorities after the fact, he acted for the Columbia Lil Cycos, and on September 15, 2007, he was given a weapon and asked to gun down Clemente for his obstinance. Clemente took four bullets—one is still embedded in his jaw and another lodged near his spine—but survived. Garcia, whose baby had only been born twenty-three days prior, grabbed the infant as soon as the shots rang out, only to discover that he was foaming blood at the mouth; there was little doubt in her mind that whoever killed him was a monster.

Macedo, who didn’t know Clemente, the two women, or the infant before he pulled the trigger, was immediately hit with remorse, although in prison he had an uphill battle imagining the full scale of his crime, knowing so little about the lives of those most closely affected. When he pleaded guilty, he was sentenced to fifty-one years and four months for voluntary manslaughter and three counts of attempted murder, plus gang and gun enhancements. But in the years since the sentencing a new view of justice embracing second chances has taken hold in California: It has been shown that in offenders under the age of twenty-five, the brain and its impulse control centers are not yet fully formed. As such, Macedo, who committed his crime at age eighteen, may have the opportunity to take decades off his sentence, along with around 16,000 other California inmates.

For most of MacArthur Park’s history street vending has been illegal, and with or without the gangs, sellers have been hassled by the police. When Trump was elected in 2016 and the rhetoric against undocumented immigrants turned especially venomous, there was finally political will to make immigrants’ lives easier by decriminalizing their vending. But what began as goodwill toward the undocumented community quickly became onerous; rules about how far off the street, how far away from storefronts, and how far away from streetlights and other vendors didn’t take into account crowded MacArthur Park realities. Fines were again instituted for vending in any way that deviated from the new rules, and just like before, they were of a size that would negate a significant chunk of profits, crippling the immigrants’ enterprise. Despite a wave of new Latino politicians in the city’s firmament, the undocumented community continued to be treated as a blemish on the urban landscape.

Clemente and Guzman got a break when one of the LAPD detectives who worked their case decided to sponsor Clemente for a green card, navigating the channels of an opaque legal system; the couple now have four children. Garcia slipped through the cracks and into the criminal justice system for theft and drug offenses. The shot-callers Macedo helped put behind bars are serving lengthy sentences. After surviving two RICO cases, the Columbia Lil Cycos are as strong as ever in MacArthur Park, with new personnel earning the chance to work for the Mexican Mafia, the godfathers of Latino gangs who operate from within facilities like the federal “supermax” prison in Colorado. And the immigrant vendors continue to suffer slings and arrows in the shadow of government neglect and reprisal. In The Rent Collectors, Katz tells all their stories with aplomb.

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American Precariat

Parables of Exclusion

Edited by Zeke Caligiuri, Fong Lee, B. Batchelor, C. Fausto Cabrera, Will Anderson, Warren Bronson, David Janisch, Kennedy Amenya Gisege, Mark “Red” Altenhofen, Ronald L. Greer II, Jeff Young, and Lavon Johnson
Coffee House Press ($19.95)

by Sara Dovre Wudali

The essay anthology American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion works to “polish the world” into a better version of itself. The twelve editors are a team of incarcerated artists and writers from Minnesota who offer a unique perspective as culture bearers from society’s most hidden corner. Jennifer Bowen, who facilitated editorial meetings through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, explains in an introductory note that incarcerated populations feel societal changes deeply, though their perspectives on those changes are “invisible by design.” To make the people behind this curation effort visible, the book includes transcriptions of editorial conversations after each essay; these transcriptions crack open the process of building an anthology and clarify that the editors see their role as a quest. Who, after all, understands power and class better than those whose very freedom has been ruptured by it? Or, as editor Kennedy Gisege puts it, “In prison, we see precarity in a totally different way than maybe somebody [who has] gone to the University of Minnesota or Harvard. You know, we’ve survived. We’ve lived the experience, so we identify easily with other fellow human beings who have suffered.”

Each essay tells a personal story, and many function also as treatises or manifestos written from within what British economist Guy Standing identified as the fast-growing “precariat” class, defined by its shared exposure to risk. The editors have chosen to include texts about living in the United States from within positions of vulnerability and instability by a mix of well-known authors (Eula Biss, Kiese Laymon, Kao Kalia Yang, Steve Almond) and newer voices as well. The topics range across the most difficult issues we face as a nation: poverty, mental health, homelessness, climate change, immigration, racism, mass incarceration, LGBTQ rights, and more.

Members of the precariat are, Michael Torres writes, “unsafe and (un)seen.” In his essay about surviving higher education as a Mexican American, Torres weaves a personal story of isolation and surveillance, and the editorial conversation that follows ranges across broader discussions of migration, citizenship, cultural identity, code-switching, shame, and assimilation. “White people,” editor Chris Cabrera says, “have the option to reject homogeny and to identify as simply human . . . White people get to choose the cultural conflicts with which to engage, whereas to be racialized as anything else, is to be drafted into a conflict by virtue of the color of your skin.”

Alice Paige also writes of isolation and surveillance, but from a transgender perspective: “The isolation feels like death,” she writes, and “everyone is watching me, judging how I perform femininity.” The hard-hitting tone of Paige’s lyric essay echoes the punk rock she uses to celebrate being alive: “I trade a violent home life for a violent homeless life. . . . I go across and beyond myself. I leave myself behind.” Tension builds as she and other trans friends navigate trauma, homelessness, and infuriating waits for medical care. When she learns that every forty-five seconds a queer youth commits suicide, every minute of survival becomes one to celebrate. The editorial discussion after this piece digs into rage and gender in punk rock, the politics of gender identity, and how language can be a tool to prevent suicide.

There’s a sense of a ticking clock in many of the works in this anthology; after all, as editor Zeke Caligiuri writes in his foreword, “Time, in the life of a writer, or a prisoner, is an emergency.” Time is a resource continually in crisis, measured in long years of exile and marked by sudden uncontrollable changes in circumstances. TM “Redd” Warren plays expertly with chronology in his personal essay about life with a cellmate and the deliberate care they take with their creations: their baking, paintings, friendship. In Sarith Peou’s essay, “The Promised Land,” both the author and the subject of his story lost years to untreated mental illness; now prison holds them both. Lauren Markham’s essay “Can We Move Our Forests in Time to Save Them?” reveals a Hail Mary plan to avert one catastrophic outcome of the climate crisis. Kristen Collier relates how the debt her mother incurred on her behalf grows exponentially out of control; using masterful metaphors, Collier describes how it consumes her future.

The cumulative effect of these essays, each from a different slice of society, makes clear that the American precariat is enormous and its issues are enormously complex. The editors discuss the “American fallacy” of bootstrapping our way out of precarity, which additional rights should be included in the Constitution, and how and whether outrage can be shifted into action: “You wake up and you have a fucking knee on your neck. And you inherit that shit. Just like people inherit comfort.” They also discuss their own darknesses, rage, and despair, and question whether their paths to prison were inevitable—but camaraderie and hope shine into the discussions too. Many of these editors have known each other for years, and their discussions reflect mutual respect and knowledge of each other’s quirks and interests, such as when they good-naturedly clear the way during one discussion for editor David Janisch’s monologue on the three reasons trees should have rights.

From the very first pages of the foreword, Caligiuri warns the reader that American Precariat is a dangerous project: Society’s decision-makers know “the threat that artists and poets pose to the ideas of the captivity business.” In a place made to break people down, a community built by artists and writers becomes a cultural force resisting not just the disassembly of their own humanity, but that of all American society. After all, as Janisch says in the last words of the book, “when following the news, you can get really numb to it. The news doesn’t make a difference. But this essay? All these essays . . . That is one thing that’s really cool about paying attention to the world—it’s just one big story.”

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Embodied Unconscious

The Feminine Space of Sexuality, Surrealism, and Experimentation in Literature

Edited by C. M. Chady
Spuyten Duyvil ($30)

by Robert Eric Shoemaker

It is possible to train roses to grow up and over walls, evading their presence. To climb. Escape. Be unruly. Language is the same sort of plant if nurtured. Organic and ravishing.
             —from “Unto Herself,” Interlude by Stephanie Michele

C. M. Chady’s recent anthology Embodied Unconscious: The Feminine Space of Sexuality, Surrealism, and Experimentation in Literature gathers a unique “community within a creative lineage”: experimental women writers affiliated with Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics reflecting on the fifty-year audio archive of the school’s famed Summer Writing Program. Transcriptions of lectures and panels from the program, along with introductory “interludes” written for the anthology, are presented with the aim of locating related historical and contemporary zones of women writers in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The book is divided into two parts: The first half is on language, poetics, and gender, while the second is more specific to gender and the unconscious, especially in Surrealism and Dada. Selected voices from the archive include Jane Augustine, Joanne Kyger, Erica Hunt, Bernadette Mayer, Gertrude Stein, Clarice Lispector, Mina Loy, and Lorine Niedecker. One can listen to the audio recordings of these talks at Naropa University’s library website for a multimedia experience.

The essayists collectively gesture at shared lineages of women writers to honor their importance, address their historical underrepresentation, and highlight their potential to inspire today’s writers. If language is gendered, the contributors agree, then creative writing can reorient language so as not to be “unconsciously repeating the world to myself,” in contributor Marlie McGovern’s words. “Our realities are shaped through language,” editor Chady concurs, and women in experimental literary traditions have constructed a space outside of “language that simply didn’t work” by using “innovation out of necessity.”

Through the interlude and transcript clusters along with writing prompts, the essayists document their creative engagement with the archive. Importantly, however, the anthology’s choices and methods are guided by voices and traditions that speak to each contributor rather than by a canon or a predetermined idea of what readers want; Augustine, represented in a substantial seven of the included fourteen talks from the Summer Writing Program, must have struck a chord with many of them. The book is thus meant to be a subjectively experienced guidebook to select parts of the archive, not a cogent argument about the whole of women’s experimental writing.

Situating the archive as a thing to experience certainly embodies Naropa’s approach to creativity and lineage—this is a meditation, not a thesis. Still, core to Embodied Unconscious is an argument for re- or un-defining woman-ness by becoming in writing, to borrow Simone de Beauvoir’s famous phrase, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” As the contributors each define their own woman-ness using the archive, we see how the category “woman” means multiple things to this group—and even to some essayists individually. But while defining gender and sexuality, placing texts in concert with identity, and identifying the poetic techniques and values that follow are all central to Naropa’s legacy, the tension between claiming space for women (as recompense for oppression) and un-defining spaces as supposedly for either women or men (in order to remove that gendered power dynamic) is palpable.

Fortunately, the anthology presents options for engagement with identity-based questions. Identitarian definition often precludes varieties of sexual and gender experience beyond the normative (e.g. cis and hetero), while the complete loss of categories can invalidate collective and individual experiences. The in-between of definition and un-definition, the becoming space, is the more fruitful area to explore, and Embodied Unconscious makes its home in that space, inviting the reader to wander its pathways without settling in one interlude or transcript.

One of the most compelling aspects of Embodied Unconscious is how the finer differences in poetics between the contributors and their chosen forebears hinge on what “woman” means and who carries which aspects of that label. Questions about the feminine and its presence in poetry are illuminating, inviting, and heartfelt when presented subjectively; when presented as objective truth, however, they can read as exclusive, incomplete, or even inaccurate. There are clear tensions here between waves of feminism; remaking the feminine and preserving versions of it inscribed by certain authors; using labels with different assumptions and intentions (e.g. queer and bisexual) to describe the same writers; modes of writing (some more scholarly and some more lyrical); and conflicting trends of progressive politics.

The most well-written interludes engage the lyrical identities of the writers voiced from the archive through the essayists’ own aesthetic modes, including feminist surrealism and eco-poetics. This suggests that personal connection with a poet through the archive can create a sense of discovery leading to creative innovation and an identity-based autonomous zone of community—or as contributor Stephanie Michele illustrates it in an essay on Mina Loy, “Wide open. Gold flecks clustered of imagination hanging by silk threads. Trace.”

Some engagements embracing multiplicity shine out. Michele composes her first essay in Gertrude Stein’s “language matriculated into a science” to illustrate her debt to Stein’s work and Stein’s importance to our contemporary literary world. This is a capacious style, an embodiment of Stein’s language-altering logic rather than a description of it, that remains critical and inquisitive, integrating quotations as italicized lyrics among the author’s own. Michele’s enjambment of Stein and herself allows her arguments to blossom without precluding anything or anyone else’s multiplicity: “a sentence is restless and multiple,” she proclaims. Further, she brings Stein and Google into the same space, recognizing what this anthology, born of technology (of recordings, of ghosts speaking), has the capacity to be.

In her second essay, Michele paints a dreamscape in which Mina Loy appears to her, for what better way to honor an ancestor than in their own tongue: “moon high, glazed light over a mountain’s skin.” Kathy Tun also crafts a lyrical take on lineage, arguing that women writers speak back through the archive to hopeful “understudies” who hear echoes of themselves in their words and ask to walk in their roles. In Tun’s extended metaphor of performing a part, mere imitation in the costume of Mina Loy or Lorine Niedecker becomes difficult: “how did an experimental artist respond to the call?” she asks. It’s time for the understudy, walking on, to become their own interpretation of the role and for the stars of the lineage to light her way forward.

Tun’s metaphor is an outstanding way to imagine the passing of the torch in the experimental tradition, but also begs the question of whether nonbinary or male writers might step into these roles with the same intentions. Such moments in Embodied Unconscious pose an imaginary that has multiple genders and invite non-female readers to embrace that imaginary for the interlude’s duration. These readers aren’t disallowed from women’s experimental writing—we’re encouraged to read beyond our gendered experience, and the expansive lyrical aesthetic of some essays pushes us to shift paradigms rather than grapple with identity labels—but some essays do not quite relinquish the categorical terminology that they use to undefine gender.

Chloe Tsolakoglou, for example, argues that it seems foolish to write from within dichotomies when experience is not gendered; using Clarice Lispector as the example of a “perfect combination of feminine and masculine,” she then reverts to a “feminine imaginary” as her target creative, illustrating how even when an author’s inclination is toward becoming both, the definition of both still rests on either. This is possibly a product of theorists like Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous, who were writing when these recordings were made; more recent queer and feminist scholarship dissolves the gender binary further, so it would be exciting to see Naropa’s archive reexamined with these dissolutions in mind.

Sex, gender, and other identity categories do not imply a readership or a writership; they position a poet in time in how they express themselves, but they do not dictate a static interest for later generations. This is why, of the options presented in the anthology, the selection of a poetic lineage by an energized acolyte is more exciting than the lying-in-wait of a lineage to be accessed by password; rather than gaining entry to a predetermined canon through identity, one can find kinship with the identity of a poetic ancestor queerly or even in tension, like the kinship with Robert Duncan and H. D. that Joanne Kyger mentions. The distance between these poles is a vivid subtext of Embodied Unconscious, a spectrum along which to place one’s own position in relation to poetics from all corners of the archive, to which no one roadmap or canon exists. Beyond the specific writers it engages, this book speaks to the very paths we travel to dream ourselves into a future. As Chady writes, “we contribute to the lineage as it becomes us, forever entwining us with ideas of the past, present, and future”— whichever future we can manage to embrace.

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1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left

Robyn Hitchcock
Akashic Books ($26.95)

by Frank Randall

Some lifetimes are marked in music rather than time, where the pivotal moments are forever linked to a chance encounter with a particular song. The revelation of hearing Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis on the same cassette copy of Dick Clark 20 Years of Rock and Roll. The summer you spent your birthday card cash on a cutout bin copy of Let It Be, reckoning with the meaning of “A New Phase Beatles Album.” The pressure-packed week your older sister’s boyfriend loaned you both Bridge of Sighs and Are You Experienced and asked you to choose between Trower or Hendrix—because clearly, your answer would reveal the essence of your being.

My senior year in college, I wrangled a part-time gig at the town’s only record store, and the various employees (mostly other students) would take turns providing the soundtrack to our shifts. One employee had a record so rare the store had no copies for sale. It was a far-flung import that had somehow made its way to our shores, and on a good day, she would bring it to work to play. This was a mostly acoustic, introspective music, not quite belonging to any one genre; it used a language unlike any I had heard before, with lyrics sung in a British accent that cut new paths through the sonic landscape. It sounded like it was recorded behind the singer’s bedroom door, where I did my own hopeful strumming. Personal and peculiar—and absolutely essential—it was I Often Dream of Trains by English singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock. I begged my coworker to let me borrow it for a weekend so I could make my own cassette copy. She agreed, but only after I swore an oath to let no harm come to this precious musical testament.

Nearly forty years and many acclaimed albums, paintings, films, videos, stage digressions, liner notes, and comic strips later, Hitchcock has pulled a marvelous and relentlessly inventive memoir from his creative well. 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, focuses on the unforgettable moment in time when the latest release from the Beatles was the most important thing on earth—next to, of course, the latest release from the keeper of the keys to the universe, Bob Dylan. For an impressionable young person, new music had meaning like never before, and it was changing at an unfathomable, exhilarating speed. As Hitchcock recalls about first hearing “Strawberry Fields Forever”: “The Beatles are developing so fast, and yet, because my friends and I are developing too, this seems only natural.”

Hitchcock’s journey begins in pre-revolutionary fashion with him passing his teenage Sundays in the family driveway, wheeling a transistor radio around in his little sister’s doll carriage and listening to the latest hits on BBC’s Pick of the Pops. His move from a reasonably normal family home to the private Winchester College boarding school proves as unsettling as one might imagine for a boy of thirteen, but it’s a timely immersion into a new universe for a young introvert ready to embrace new sounds.

Limiting his coming-of-age story to a single year could have produced unreasonably narrow results, but Hitchcock uses this focus to his benefit, introducing us to the academic tradition and psychedelic ether in which his personality coalesced. His observations of key moments are alternatingly transportive (“Incense caresses the air, while John Coltrane’ s saxophone plays from one speaker and Hendrix’s guitar from another”), moving (“Occasionally, I still destroy my favorite things . . . and I still don’t know why”) and revelatory (“And I will become a songwriter. ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ hooks me, ‘Desolation Row’ pulls me in, and ‘Visions of Johanna’ . . . more subtle, more engulfing: it becomes me.”).

By late spring, the Holy Grail of Highway 61 Revisited gives way to the long-awaited arrival of the Beatles’ most secretive recordings to date, the era-defining Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Hitchcock’s crooked path through boarding school involves the influence of unforgettable schoolmates and tragicomic staffers, unexpected encounters with groundbreaking musician and producer Brian Eno and dream cameos by Bob Dylan, Donovan, and other colorful icons. As in his songs, he makes room for fictional sojourns, where the rules of strict biography are gleefully abandoned in favor of dream play and teenage fantasy—a fitting device to convey the convergence and emergence of young lives in 1967.

Like the best of creative memoirs, Hitchcock’s account helps describe how the simple and strange events in a young life turn out to become culture itself, seeding the history we all assume occurred without the assistance of countless anonymous players. For instance, despite having encountered dozens of references to the notorious Boxing Day broadcast of the Beatles’ film Magical Mystery Tour, here we finally have an eyewitness account that it wasn’t that bad a show after all.

We certainly don’t need a book from every musician wrestling with their status as a “cult artist,” but Hitchcock’s expansive coming-of-age tale effectively combines the intangible magic of the 1960s with actual events that help illuminate his work. For example, Hitchcock has always made room for vividly drawn water creatures in his songs, so to learn that his childhood home had a river running adjacent helps explain the frequent presence of these animals in his lyrics; why not make a song about your pet crayfish? Or the druids that you know dance among the ancient circle of trees on the hill overlooking your school? Or the UFOs that have collected your schoolmate along with his cheese? (Spoiler alert: This last was only a temporary and relatively harmless abduction.)

While often (and fairly) categorized as psychedelia-inspired, Hitchcock’s songs have never been limited to a particular genre. They careen from topical to romantic to surreal, and his knack for inviting absurd characters and fantastic situations into his music is on full display in 1967 as well. His inventive stage banter, rich with humor and showcasing his unique talent for the well-placed non-sequitur, has made his storytelling as delightful as his music over the years, and here it makes a seamless transition to the written page. Like any performer worth his salt, Hitchcock leaves us wanting more when he finally exits the stage of this memoir. He takes care not to burden us with unnecessary verses, nor does he commit the mortal sin of repeating the bridge, closing his micro-history with a strong chorus and tidy epilogue. The appreciative audience sends him off with well-deserved applause, lighters raised, hoping for an encore.

1967 is one of the epochal years that make us who we are, responsible for countless ripples of influence across culture. There are other such years, of course: Some musicians might need to write a book about 1976 with New York City as the setting, or coming of age in Minneapolis in 1984. But Hitchcock is a proud flag-bearer of 1967, revealing that annum to be as unrepeatable and unique as the author himself. In 1967, Hitchcock deftly captures the mercurial spirit of the time, and his luminous prose shows he’s not only a singular maker of music, but has been a secret writer of books all along.

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The Swans of Harlem

Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History

Karen Valby
Pantheon ($29)

by Charles Green

Karen Valby’s compelling new history tells the forgotten story of Dance Theatre of Harlem, a Black ballet company that gave dancers of color the opportunity to perform and star when most doors in the industry were closed to them. Formed in 1968 by Arthur Mitchell after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the company was soon performing around the world, playing before Queen Elizabeth II and David Bowie and meeting celebrities like Mick Jagger. Celebrated as groundbreaking dancers at the time, DTH is not widely known today. During the pandemic, five of the company’s founding ballerinas reunited for regular Zoom sessions to reminisce and share their legacy with the world; Valby’s book compiles their stories.

Although all five dancers shared a love for ballet, each came from different backgrounds. Lydia Abarca grew up in the New York housing projects, having abandoned any hopes of actually performing. Sheila Rohan, from Staten Island, initially lied about her age (she was twenty-eight) and claimed she had no children in order to join the company; when she finally told Mitchell, he gave her a slight raise and was more lenient if she showed up late. Gayle McKinney-Griffith, the daughter of a mechanical engineer, grew up in suburban Connecticut; she would later become the company’s ballet mistress. Marcia Sells was from an elite Black community in Cincinnati whose family hosted DTH when they were on tour. Karlya Shelton-Benjamin, the only Black dancer in the Colorado Concert Ballet, was inspired to join DTH after seeing Abarca on the cover of Dance Magazine.

These ballerinas worked incredibly hard both on and off-stage. On tour, they would have to unload their own equipment from the bus and often prepared makeshift stages by pouring soda on the floors to make them sticky. They learned how to dye their ballet shoes and tights brown, experimenting to find shades that suited each of them.

Mitchell was a fiercely demanding personality, pushing the dancers to perfection; he was also verbally abusive, frequently berating the dancers about their weight. On one tour, he sniffed at each dancers’ hotel room door to tell who was baking their complimentary pastries. He also drove away board members and advisors who dared suggest improvements to his vision; despite his talent and ambition, he was his own worst enemy. Yet Mitchell worked well with children, letting the neighborhood kids take lessons in their street clothes, showing them how dance techniques could help them jump higher in basketball, and breaking down street dances into ballet moves.

Valby goes into great detail about the five dancers, even presenting entire chapters in their own words. Abarca, however, seems to be the main character of the book. It makes sense, as she was the “star” of DTH and her story is one of the most dramatic. After leaving the company, she taught Michael Jackson the moves for the movie version of The Wiz; following her dance career, she married and took administrative jobs, falling into alcoholism before her daughter helped her back to sobriety. Indeed, The Swans of Harlem begins with Abarca’s granddaughter confused after a school presentation where classmates honored current ballet star Misty Copeland, wondering if the stories she had heard about her grandmother’s pioneering performances were true. By spending so much time on Abarca, the book almost unwillingly turns her into a Copeland figure, a lone history-making woman, whereas the dancers of DTH shaped history as a group.

The bond between these women, even decades later, is powerful to witness. In several Zoom sessions, Abarca shares deeply personal stories, including of having an abortion in 1968 and of Mitchell once kissing her after an event. When the others are asked if they felt resentment for Abarca getting so many of the lead roles and being Mitchell’s clear favorite, they defend her, knowing it was not her intention to steal their thunder. There is also frank acknowledgement that Mitchell preferred lighter-skinned and thinner dancers; even while he wanted to promote and celebrate Black dancers, he was influenced by traditional white ballet.

In 2008, DTH went on hiatus for five years due to financial difficulties. During this time, publicity heightened around Misty Copeland as a groundbreaking Black ballerina, which contributed to the company becoming forgotten. (The dancers and Copeland meet at several events, and while Copeland gratefully acknowledges them and the dancers are gracious about her stardom, some awkwardness and resentment is evident.) The five dancers contemplate other reasons for their erasure as well, noting the tendency many women have to downplay their talents and how Mitchell encouraged them to consider their individual accomplishments as the company’s.

Well-researched and written with an easy, flowing style, The Swans of Harlem gives a platform to these talented women who have been hidden for too long. It also raises questions about race, gender, and publicity in the arts, and reminds us that even now, few dancers of color belong to U.S. ballet companies.

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Who's Afraid of Gender?

Judith Butler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($30)

by John M. Fredericks

During a 2017 conference in Brazil that Judith Butler helped organize, a group of protestors burned the world-famous philosopher in effigy. They claimed that Butler’s work threatened to dissolve the meaning of gender and undercut cultural values, responding to ideas presented more than twenty-five years earlier in Butler’s career-defining book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990). Amidst the constant oversimplification of the book’s arguments outside academia, Butler, who uses they/them pronouns, has been maligned by many in the conservative movement, often unfairly cast as a feminist agitator out to destroy concepts like biological determinism not only at UC Berkeley where they teach, but around the world.

In their latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler addresses the general public as one of the leading thinkers in gender studies: They attempt to reclaim their own work, reposition themself within public discourse, and advocate for the rights of transgender and genderqueer people. Butler wants to understand how the term “gender” has come to represent all that is evil, malignant, and subversive in popular culture, as well as how national governments, political parties, and sometimes even other feminists are attempting to erase the rights of others.

For Butler, the term “gender” has become a phantasm, an emotionally charged and misdirected catch-all used to incite fears, both psychological and material, about the world around us. Butler argues that “this phantasm, understood as a psychosocial phenomenon, is a site where intimate fears and anxieties become socially organized to incite political passions.” Showing how this phantasm morphs into an “anti-gender ideology movement” around the world, Butler maps how gender has become weaponized to “call for the elimination of gender education, the censorship of texts concerned with gender, and the disenfranchisement or criminalization of transgender or genderqueer people.”

Butler’s previous works on gender can be hard to understand; their poststructuralist approach leads to occasionally impenetrable prose and a style of reasoning that is, perhaps intentionally, difficult to parse. Butler seems to be aware of this critique, however, and Who’s Afraid of Gender? is clearly written for a wider audience. Especially in the first half of the book, Butler tries to be as approachable as possible in discussing the phantasmatic effects of gender studies, using a vast constellation of research across disciplines to describe it in various contexts. The first four chapters take on global politics, the Vatican, attacks on gender studies in the United States, and the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County.

In each of these chapters, Butler presents arguments against gender studies, then uses their expert command of rhetoric to provide detailed counterpoints to (and contradictions in) the logic of the anti-gender movement. Readers might wish at moments for a more structured argument; while the phantasmatic interplay between the fears surrounding gender studies and the material consequences for transgender and genderqueer people around the world is important, Butler sometimes employs straw man arguments to stand in for entities trying to restrict our ideas about gender. This polemical approach leads Butler into uneven territory, appealing to a wider audience at the cost of complexity.

Nowhere is Butler’s argument more impassioned and polemical than when discussing trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and the movement’s attempt to contain gender under a narrow definition of biological sex. In their chapter on TERFs, Butler runs through the argument that biological sex is immutable and that transgender people, specifically those assigned male at birth, are a threat to society, taking advantage of the gender spectrum to visit violence upon women in bathrooms. Butler invokes author J.K. Rowling, an outspoken TERF in British cultural discourse, and weaves a fascinating argument about the symbol of the penis, patriarchal frameworks of being, and the need to disavow TERFs as anything but feminists: “Feminism has always been a struggle for justice, or is, at its best, precisely such a struggle, formed in alliance and affirming difference. Trans-exclusionary feminism is not feminism or, rather, should not be.” This is an important argument for Butler, because the term “alliance” is central to their argument throughout the book. According to Butler, instead of casting gender as a nightmarish phantasm that negates transgender and genderqueer people’s lived experience, feminism should be allying with everyone who investigates how gender as a framework for social, historical, and cultural discourse can help us understand our material existence.

The most interesting chapters in Who’s Afraid of Gender? come directly after Butler’s discussion of TERFs. In these chapters, Butler investigates the idea of biological sex as immutable, which forms the intellectual and ideological basis for most arguments against transgender identity and expression. Here, Butler seems to be doing a bit of rehabilitation of their arguments in Gender Trouble. They argue that biological sex and gender are not opposite ends of the spectrum, as though biology is only immutable and gender is only performative, but that both biology and the term “gender” (a troubling word that is not easily translated in every language) are products of a set of cultural processes, forever entangled. This entanglement forms the basis for how we understand both biological sex and gender in our particular social and historical moment in time; nature and culture, the environment and the body, dialectically create the processes by which we understand ourselves. As Butler writes:

The “environment” is, thus, not just “over there” at a distance from our bodies. We take in the environment as it takes us up and the environment is fundamentally altered by human interventions and extractions—and climate change is a stark testimony to how those interventions can become destructive. None of us can be formed without a set of interventions, and those external impingements become the conditions of our emergence; they become part of who we are, intrinsic to our forms of becoming, which follow no one trajectory.

Passages like this abound in the book’s later chapters; the ease with which Butler is able to present an entire field of research and apply it to another, equally complicated, field to draw conclusions about our lived experiences prompts some of the most satisfying moments in the book. Whether discussing biological sex, feminist materialism, marxist ideology, colonial power, racial theory, climate change, or the nature/culture dichotomy, Butler displays a remarkable clarity and nuance.

While the reader gets the sense throughout Who’s Afraid of Gender? that one of Butler’s main objectives is to encourage feminists to seek alliances with anyone fighting for social justice, this plea to open up the tent and encompass multiple lived experiences is also what complicates the book. Butler’s ability to tackle so many topics—some of which seem only tacitly connected to the gender debate—can make this volume both challenging and rewarding. An important work within Butler’s own canon and the field of gender studies as a whole, Who’s Afraid of Gender? will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on cultural discourse.

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The Garden Against Time

In Search of a Common Paradise

Olivia Laing
W. W. Norton & Company ($27.99)

by Sarah Moorhouse

Writing and gardening have often been linked. We might think of the word “anthology,” which literally means—like the Latin word florilegium—a gathering of flowers. Both terms refer to collections of excerpts or extracts, an activity that was popular among readers during the Renaissance. Olivia Laing’s new book, The Garden Against Time, brings this historic practice to mind; a memoir-cum-history of gardening, it presents curating a space for plants as a creative process, one just as involved with the imagination as writing can be.

Examining numerous thinkers enthralled by gardens and gardening and forming a collection of ideas like an array of plants, Laing’s book is, as she declares, “a garden opened and spilling over.” Gardens, for her, are a site of radical possibility; her Instagram bio labels her as a “writer/gardener,” and this dual identity, which saw Laing drop out of an English Literature degree in her early twenties to train as an herbalist, is tied up with her environmentalism and fierce social conscience. As a child, Laing attended a convent school with a garden that provided her with a “sense of absolute, unquestioning belonging,” and through each subsequent garden she has tended, she has been attempting to recover and cultivate this feeling.

The Garden Against Time begins in 2020 when, after “a surge of good fortune,” Laing purchased and began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk. By laying down roots in its soil and watching green shoots spring up, she found hope amidst constant anxiety about the coronavirus pandemic and wider environmental disaster. While she claims that she “never saw the garden as a place to escape reality,” Laing rejoiced in how “the outside world receded” as she replaced doom-scrolling on her phone with weeding and sowing.

In some ways the book is an extended meditation on how this has always been the paradox of gardens; Laing argues that green spaces reflect the times they were created in, from the Garden of Eden and the grounds owned by eighteenth-century slave traders to the imaginative oasis that artist Derek Jarman cultivated while dying from AIDS in the late 1980s. That she attends to these sometimes troubled histories should be no surprise, for each of her previous books has expressed a thrumming dissatisfaction with the political status quo: for example, Laing’s 2018 novel Crudo is set against the backdrop of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election campaign, while her 2020 essay collection Funny Weather considers ways art can address social injustice. In this new volume, Laing describes how gardening became a “solace” and even a “compulsion” at a time when it felt that “everything I wanted to say sounded exactly like the sort of thing a person like me would say, a stupid liberal.”

Laing does occasionally veer close to sounding trite when waxing lyrical about gardens. When she declares that “the garden I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world,” the reader might struggle to take this at face value; Laing has experimented with rejecting private property (she spent part of her twenties living in a protest camp), but it’s hard to read the same degree of radical nonconformism into her embrace of gardening—one of the most conventional middle-class pursuits. Moreover, her garden is no cabbage-patch; in 2022, the British magazine House and Garden ran a feature on “Olivia Laing’s dream Suffolk home,” showcasing Laing’s resplendent property. When read alongside that article, Laing’s gushing descriptions of blooming hyacinths and hooded lilacs can’t help but seem a bit bourgeois.

Mostly, however, The Garden Against Time does not shy away from gardening’s association with class. Most notable is the tale of Iris Origo, an elegant landowner who used the gardens of her Tuscan villa to shelter refugees during World War II. Origo’s estate was transformed from a place that represented exclusivity to a site of protection and communal belonging, though eventually, both house and garden were requisitioned by the Germans. Upon the Allied victory, Origo’s garden was left “full of shell holes and trenches” and “covered in a foul litter of broken objects,” yet Origo noted after returning home that “there is still jasmine on the wall”; its classism shattered, the garden had become a site of both destruction and hope.

Laing’s own garden also offers her the context to explore a running drama between opposing forces. Engaged in a continuous battle against weeds, Laing is initially attached to the idea that her garden paradise cannot contain any destructive elements, declaring, “Eden was my intention.” Midway through the project, however, she changes tack: If she is to upend the paradigm whereby gardens denote exclusivity and escapism, then she cannot shut out pernicious elements, be they weeds, world events, or—increasingly—the impact of climate change, which manifests as droughts and extreme heat.

This brings Laing to the most important idea in the book: that in attempting to make things better, “we need to start from our contaminated present and not some future position of undiluted purity.” We can’t wait for fossil fuels to become obsolete before we address climate change in earnest, nor can we give up on being kind to one another during times of entrenched political divisions. Laing arrives at a criticism of Eden, blaming this archetypal garden for propagating an ideal of purity that is incompatible with sustainability, and explaining that “the fantasy of perpetual abundance” is Eden’s “more sinister legacy”:

So many of our most ecologically deleterious behaviours are to do with refusing impermanence and decay, insisting on summer all the time. . . . To accept the presence of death in the garden is . . . to refuse an illusion of perpetual productivity . . . an illusion purchased at a heavy, soon unpayable cost.

Laing arrived at this realization during a drought in the summer of 2022, when it became clear that to water her plants, she would need to “disregard the consequences, the rivers that were drying up by the day.” Her garden, she saw, exists within the “contaminated present” and like everything we use, its materials have a hidden cost. By accepting “death in the garden,” however, Laing begins to formulate an alternative approach founded on a cyclical notion of time, whereby death is not the end point but is instead involved in various processes of renewal. Intriguingly, this echoes the case she makes for art as a mode of “resistance and repair” in Funny Weather.

But what might a garden founded on “resistance and repair” look like? Laing offers a clue in her descriptions of London after World War II, when wildflowers and plants sprang up from the city’s rubble. A public garden emerged that was beautiful for its incongruity as well as for the sense of shared possibility it represented, with the ruined city “mantled in gold and imperial purple, the ripe smell of buddleia mixing with the sourness of brick dust and mould on the air.” Laing sees this as a metaphor for other types of flourishing in post-war Britain, suggesting that through “housing, education, the welfare state . . . there was a brief vision of the nation as a collective garden, in which everyone could partake of the fruit.”

This is lofty stuff, but Laing’s enthusiasm for her subject is infectious, and she is convincing in her assertion that exposure to nature’s beauty is a right, not an indulgence. “Each garden run along these wilder, richer lines,” she urges us to recognize, “participates in a great network . . . sustaining and supporting life.” Laing gives these words weight by showing what happens when our contact with nature is taken away, suggesting that the Romantic poet John Clare’s descent into madness was exacerbated by his removal from the green spaces he so loved. During his confinement at Northampton General Lunatic Asylum between 1841 and his death in 1864, Clare would write on scraps of paper such messages as “where flowers are, God is, and I am free.” Laing, too, believes that freedom can be found in a garden.

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