AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"Contemporary Conspiracy Culture: Truth and Knowledge in an Era of Epistemic Instability by Jaron Harambam (review)","authors":"Elżbieta Drążkiewicz","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929662","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Contemporary Conspiracy Culture: Truth and Knowledge in an Era of Epistemic Instability</em> by Jaron Harambam <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Elżbieta Drążkiewicz (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>contemporary conspiracy culture: truth and knowledge in an era of epistemic instability</small></em><br/> Jaron Harambam<br/> Routledge<br/> https://www.routledge.com/Contemporary-Conspiracy-Culture-Truth-and-Knowledge-in-an-Era-of-Epistemic/Harambam/p/book/9781032172668<br/> 256 pages; Print, $43.99 <p>In July 2021, President Joe Biden stated that by hindering immunization campaigns individuals and social media spreading disinformation were \"killing people.\" To address these and other similar concerns about the ways in which conspiracy theories have been weaponized not only in the United States but also in other parts of the Western world, a strong body of literature has been published in the last few years.</p> <p>Much of this scholarship follows in the footsteps of Theodor W. Adorno and Karl Popper, who studied the topic because they were concerned that conspiracy theories were dangerous for democracy and for the peaceful coexistence of societies. An even more important scholar in the American context is Richard Hofstadter, who coined the term \"paranoid style\" as a pejorative designation to reflect his positionality on the issue. As a result of those influences, as well as a current concern for the future of liberal democracy, much of the literature on conspiracy theory was and still is dominated by a pathologizing approach.</p> <p>But there are authors who dare to take a different angle. Among them is Jaron Harambam, whose <em>Contemporary Conspiracy Culture: Truth and Knowledge in an Era of Epistemic Instability</em> is not prompted by the need for moral judgment but rather by anthropological curiosity, a need to understand the world of Dutch conspiracists. As Harambam emphasizes, his goal was not to condemn or discard people who engage with conspiracy theories but rather to learn what such alternative forms of knowledge mean for the people who endorse them.</p> <p>Like many scholars, Harambam started his research by exploring popular websites and social media channels. Yet unlike others, he did not just harvest <strong>[End Page 45]</strong> the digital space; he also immersed himself in the Dutch conspiratorial milieu. To better understand the world of people who engage in conspiracy theories concerning finance, media corporatism, science, government, and the supernatural sphere, he attended their events, met them at their homes, read the books they read, watched movies they recommended, and conducted in-depth interviews. This methodology not only allowed him to approach people propagating conspiracist views with compassion but also gave him the opportunity to learn about the social, political, and cu","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141516011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Intellectual Civility and Engaged Pluralism: Remembering the Singular Accomplishments of Richard Jacob Bernstein (1932–2022)","authors":"Vincent M. Colapietro","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929684","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929684","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Intellectual Civility and Engaged Pluralism<span>Remembering the Singular Accomplishments of Richard Jacob Bernstein (1932–2022)</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Vincent M. Colapietro (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Richard J. Bernstein lived a long, full, salutary life. He enjoyed a distinguished academic career as a beloved teacher, prolific author, adept administrator, gracious colleague, and tireless interlocutor. The knit of his pensive brow when listening deeply to whomever he was engaged in conversation was nearly as memorable as the spontaneity of his contextually calibrated smile, on occasion subtly wry, not infrequently unabashedly broad. The deep resonance of his remarkable voice was no less memorable. He delighted in nature and children seemingly as much as the rough-and-tumble of intense philosophical exchanges and the exacting work of a responsible interpreter of the most challenging texts (no one could make an author such as Benedict Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, or G. W. F. Hegel, or Charles S. Peirce not only become accessible but also come alive as well as Richard). He knew just the right children's books to read to the children of students who happened to be accompanying their mother or father when visiting his summer home in Jay, New York, as he did what texts to put into the hands of his students who were struggling to find their way philosophically or professionally.</p> <p>In his John Dewey Lecture, \"The Romance of Philosophy\" (2007), Bernstein made effective use of A. N. Whitehead's essays on education, stressing that the initial phase of any intellectual engagement when properly approached is the stage of romance. \"Without romance,\" Bernstein, following Whitehead, insists, \"precision becomes pedantry, and generalization impossible,\" or, at least, fecund generalizations possessing experiential salience become impossible. The ideals of rigor, precision, clarity, and subtlety cannot be gainsaid but divorced from the <em>romance</em> of philosophy, the affectively charged engagement with intellectual questions in their deepest human import, degenerate into purely technical skills all too often exercised <strong>[End Page 161]</strong> for the sake of professional vanity. Rooted in the romance of philosophy, however, these ideals constitute nothing less than a code of honor in and through which fidelity to one's love is effectively expressed. Technique apart from vision is empty <em>and</em> blind, vision apart from technique almost always an all too facile and flaccid affair.</p> <p>Like his close friend Richard Rorty, Bernstein was at once a philosopher's philosopher and an author who won a readership across disciplines and fields outside of academic philosophy. If his more controversial friend garnered more attention, it was in large part because Richard was far less of a provocateur. While Rorty had the uncanny kn","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141516010","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Zeina Azzam's \"Hedge against Hardship\": A Conversation with the Poet Laureate of Alexandria, Virginia","authors":"Renee H. Shea","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929676","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Zeina Azzam's \"Hedge against Hardship\"<span>A Conversation with the Poet Laureate of Alexandria, Virginia</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Renee H. Shea </li> </ul> <p>The poet laureate of Alexandria, Virginia (2022–25), Zeina Azzam is a writer, editor, and community activist. She is the author of the poetry collections <em>Some Things Never Leave You</em> (2023) and <em>Bayna Bayna, In-Between</em> (2021). Currently, she is one of the Virginia-based poets contributing to an anthology for the conservation project Writing the Land (writingtheland.org).</p> <p>Azzam's parents were Palestinian refugees were forced to flee to Syria in 1948 to escape the Arab-Israeli War. The family moved to Beirut when Azzam was a baby, then immigrated to the US in 1966 when she was ten. Staying at first with her grandparents in a small farming town in Iowa, she spent her teenage years in Delmar, a suburb outside Albany, New York. She received a BA in psychology from Vassar College, an MA in sociology from George Mason University, and an MA in Arabic language and literature from Georgetown University. She has served as executive director of The Jerusalem Fund and its educational program, the Palestine Center, and director of Educational Outreach at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.</p> <p><em>This interview was conducted via Zoom and email during September 2023</em>.</p> <small>renee shea:</small> <p>As the poet laureate—Alexandria's first Arab American laureate—what do you see as your opportunities and responsibilities?</p> <small>zeina azzam:</small> <p>I'm so honored to be in this position. The responsibilities are to bring poetry to the community by getting people to read, write, and appreciate it. Right now, I'm doing just that with a grant from the Alexandria Office of the Arts to hold a haiku contest. Three external judges picked the twelve winners, and their poems were put on placards placed around the city. As someone just walks down the street and sees a poem, it may become part of their life. <strong>[End Page 115]</strong></p> <p>I do two poetry workshops a year and write a special poem for the annual Alexandria birthday party held by the [Potomac] river. I've written poems for the city's jazz festival, and I am often called to judge poetry contests in the schools and jail. There are also historic commemorations. Alexandria has a difficult history, including two documented lynchings, and last year I was asked to write a poem for each one.</p> <small>rs:</small> <p>Alexandria has made a bold commitment to memorializing these lynchings, including providing soil for the Equal Justice Initiative; you wrote the poem \"The Earth Speaks: Honoring the Lives of Joseph McCoy and Benjamin Thomas.\" Have you felt in an uncomfortable position in the community doing that work?</p> <small>za:</sm","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141516022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Forgotten Night by Rebecca Goodman, and: Lilith Walks by Susan M. Schultz (review)","authors":"Leonard Schwartz","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929666","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929666","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Forgotten Night</em> by Rebecca Goodman, and: <em>Lilith Walks</em> by Susan M. Schultz <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Leonard Schwartz (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>forgotten night</small></em><br/> Rebecca Goodman<br/> Spuyten Duyvil<br/> https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/forgotten-night.html<br/> 300 pages; Print, $20.00 <em><small>lilith walks</small></em><br/> Susan M. Schultz<br/> BlazeVOX<br/> https://wp.blazevox.org/product/lilith-walks-by-susan-m-schultz/<br/> 108 pages; Print, $22.00 <p><strong>[End Page 66]</strong></p> <p>Writing is both will and receptivity, design and chance, an assertion of the self and submission to a greater rhythm of language and of being. Rebecca Goodman's novel <em>Forgotten Night</em> emphasizes receptivity, even malleability, and an openness to these larger rhythms, even as its narrator, Jewish and self-estranged, seeks out precise answers to a personal question. The book follows her peregrinations through Alsatian French villages in search of hints about her grandfather's experiences there as a soldier during World War I, as well as in thrall to her Jewish ancestry amid antisemites of various epochs, from the Middle Ages to the Holocaust. Unlike Patrick Modiano in <em>Dora Bruder</em>, in which the first-person narrator meticulously tracks each bit of information he can find about Dora, a Jewish runaway teenager from the late 1930s, documenting the bureaucratic and epistemological moats that block his way sixty years after the fact, Goodman's narrator is absorbed into the psychogeography of each location. There is water, there is light, there are restaurants, there is wine, there is the chance of knowledge through osmosis. There is also the possibility of a total collapse of identity. It is as if history were experienced through the veil of dream, a dream that sometimes washes over and engulfs within itself the ostensibly waking narrator and reader.</p> <p>Goodman's writing is both broken and supersaturated:</p> <blockquote> <p>When I stepped back from the door, I looked up. Words rained all around me. At first a soft drizzle—conjunctions, words that seemed to connect but not describe. And, but, so—and I thought about those words that tried to connect. My childhood. My lined notebook. My awkward print. And then, softly, the words penetrating my clothes, my body. Adverbs, adjectives. Raining down on my skin, beneath my skin. Flowing through me. Disguising me. Revealing me. Forming the notion of who I was and who I could be. When <strong>[End Page 67]</strong> I looked around, I was ensconced in language—a language I could not understand—but feel. Words breaking apart mid-air. Fractured into letters, consonants, vowels. … Broken into images, sounds, birdcalls, wind. The water well. The stream. The walls surrounding the village. The silence around me. The landscape","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141516014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prize for the Fire: A Novel by Rilla Askew (review)","authors":"Ken Hada","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929665","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929665","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Prize for the Fire: A Novel</em> by Rilla Askew <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ken Hada (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>prize for the fire: a novel</small></em><br/> Rilla Askew<br/> University of Oklahoma Press<br/> https://www.oupress.com/9780806190723/prize-for-the-fire/<br/> 384 pages; cloth, $26.95 <p><em>Prize for the Fire</em> is set during the reign of King Henry VIII. The climactic scene of the novel, the burning of condemned reformist heretic Anne Askew, occurs in 1546, one year before Henry's death. In this historical fiction, Rilla Askew faces the artistic challenge of avoiding exposition when authentically embodying multiple historical personalities and information, while also bringing her imaginative characters and scenes realistically into that history. The complexity of the history surrounding Henry's reign could easily provide readers with an indecipherable maze were it rendered by a less skilled author. Moreover, the distance between contemporary readers and the mid-sixteenth century also presents a serious challenge. So, considerable research and great care had to be exercised by the novelist to have the book make sense, let alone make it appealing. Among multiple relevant sources, the author consulted <em>The Examinations of Anne Askew</em>, a collection that contains a firsthand written record of the experiences of the protagonist.</p> <p>The novel follows two overlapping strains that eventually conspire to bring Anne to her public execution. The first concerns historical context, with its whims and reversals of King Henry and a host of figures contributing to and/or affected by his actions. Within this strain, Anne winds up in London in 1544 and for a time serves Queen Katheryn Parr. Anne is discovered to be a skillful translator of Latin and is admired for her ability to argue scripture. These attributes place her in good company with the queen, who has been appointed regent while Henry is away at war in France. Although the royal <strong>[End Page 63]</strong> court is not free from suspicion and self-seeking politicians who oppose reformist theology, Anne finds her purpose in the service of Katheryn, a reformist sympathizer. She helps the queen and her ladies translate texts from Thomas à Kempis and Erasmus, and in secret they illegally read, interpret, and translate the Coverdale translation of the Bible.</p> <p>This experience with Katheryn, along with her regular fellowship with other Protestant believers in secret meetings, in conjunction with Anne's prior insistence on publicly reading the Bible, builds the case against her in public examinations before Bishops Wriothesley and Gardiner. Refusing to recant or to identify fellow reformists, she is racked, then burned at the stake.</p> <p>Convinced that she should not be \"unevenly yoked\" with an unbeliever, Anne seeks annu","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141516015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems by Dionne Brand (review)","authors":"Michael Joyce","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929671","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929671","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems</em> by Dionne Brand <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michael Joyce (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>nomenclature: new and collected poems</small></em><br/> Dionne Brand<br/> Introduction by Christina Sharpe<br/> Duke University Press<br/> https://www.dukeupress.edu/nomenclature<br/> 672 pages; Print, $29.95 <p>Reading Dionne Brand is like waking from a dream of a long conversation to find that the conversation—or is it the dream?—continues in waking life and cannot be shaken off. Brand has received every major award for Canadian literature, and this new collection has already been dubbed \"a monumental publication from one of this country's most important poets\" by the <em>Toronto Star</em>. She is one of a small, albeit global, benighted cohort of what might be called \"most celebrated, least known\" writers, especially revered by other writers, about whom most American readers remain oblivious or uninformed until a Nobel Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, or like announcement flashes across a screen. Her thirty-five books and films present a poet, novelist, essayist, poetics innovator, cultural critic, activist, polemicist, and seer of astonishing range and enduring import. Hers is a transcendent, fervent presence and woven witness, a radical independence and fiery resistance.</p> <p>Approaching such a monumental collection as a new reader, one might happily start with Christina Sharpe's brilliant introductory essay, a model for what ought to replace outworn canonical declinations, offering close readings that are acts of contextualization and provocation, protective of an evolving—alive—poetic consciousness. Another choice, taken here, is reserving Sharpe's essay as a corrective and conspiratorial accompaniment to a kind of hybrid, even quirky, bracketed reading of Brand's published work starting at the end with the insistent sequence of lyric/narrative poems, <em>Ossuaries</em> (2010), and then circling back to the earliest book collected here (she declining <strong>[End Page 92]</strong> to collect an earlier as juvenilia), <em>Primitive Offensive</em> (1982), putting off the seven intervening books and newest work for a time.</p> <p>In their differently voiced, thirty-year-apart braidings, both <em>Ossuaries</em> and <em>Primitive Offensive</em> are characterized by what the Nobel award for Alice Munro, the first and thus far only Canadian woman to be awarded it, described as the \"uncompromising way\" Munro \"demonstrates that love rarely saves us or leads to reliable happiness, and that few things can be as devastating to us as our own dreams.\" Like fellow Trinbagonian V. S. Naipaul, Brand, to quote the Nobel citation for Naipaul, unites \"perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny … that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.\"</p> <p><em>Primiti","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141530883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Porgy & Bess by Miles Davis by George Gershwin by Dubose Heyward by Jeffrey DeShell (review)","authors":"Jane Rosenberg LaForge","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929667","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929667","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Porgy &amp; Bess by Miles Davis by George Gershwin by Dubose Heyward</em> by Jeffrey DeShell <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jane Rosenberg LaForge (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>porgy &amp; bess by miles davis by george gershwin by dubose heyward</small></em><br/> Jeffrey DeShell<br/> Spuyten Duyvil<br/> https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/porgy---bess.html<br/> 154 pages; Print, $18.00 <p>Deeply embedded in the American consciousness are at least two stories that allegedly capture the essence of Black life in the twentieth, and now the twenty-first, century. One is not set down in letters, or even sung, like the other; but it is one that has played out with alarming frequency on the impromptu theaters of America's streets, parks, and college campuses. It has no single name, although locations, such as Ferguson, Missouri; and the names of the protagonists, such as George Floyd and Sandra Bland, come to stand for these situations. The other is <em>Porgy &amp; Bess</em>, the George and Ira Gershwin opera of Black poverty, violence, drug use, and murder. Revolutionary in its time—1935—for its all-Black, classically trained cast, <em>Porgy &amp; Bess</em> has been revived and revised at least as many times as white police officers have killed unarmed Black people. The roles in <em>Porgy &amp; Bess</em> may be recast, its sets redesigned, and its direction and choreography revamped, just as the circumstances of a police killing may differ as scenarios are reshuffled. But the outcome in both instances is always, always the same. <strong>[End Page 71]</strong></p> <p>In <em>Porgy &amp; Bess by Miles Davis by George Gershwin by Dubose Heyward</em>, a Black graduate student is killed by a white campus cop after a confrontation in the hall of a college dorm. The facts are never in doubt. But the struggle over the narrative—who's responsible, who's been victimized or warrants vilification, and what kind of punishment should punctuate the production—is at the heart of the conflict. Francesca Fruscella, the fictional Denver detective whom Jeffrey DeShell has called upon to solve mysteries in two previous novels, is brought onto the University of Colorado campus, in Boulder, as an independent investigator. \"You need to watch your language,\" she is told by a supervisor when she complains about the assignment. But the language she uses, to say nothing of the metaphors she will retreat into, or the \"virulent corporate weasel speak\" and other tongues she will encounter, are the real culprits, in a crime that is committed not during but after the murder.</p> <p>DeShell has rendered his detective's odyssey without punctuation, which serves to make readers complicit with the reductive, racist cover-up that seemingly objective language will eventually provide. By withholding commas, quotations, semicolons, hyphens, and period","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141530882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Water Memory: A Novel by Tom Strelich (review)","authors":"Edward M. Bury","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929668","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929668","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Water Memory: A Novel</em> by Tom Strelich <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Edward M. Bury (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>water memory: a novel</small></em><br/> Tom Strelich<br/> Owl Canyon Press<br/> https://www.owlcanyonpress.com/product-page/water-memory-paperback<br/> 167 pages; Print, $15.00 <p>Fiction structured around a society grappling with some kind of dystopian challenge—a climate catastrophe, an economic meltdown, the breakdown of democracy, a renegade virus, propaganda overload, individual freedom quashed or curtailed—generally contains chilling scenes, strikingly nefarious characters, and plot development based on day-to-day survival and shrouded in impending doom and calamity. Writers concoct these bizarre tales with the intention of forecasting what awaits mankind should society continue with war, oppression, widespread disruption to the environment, and other large-scale affronts to the common good and a normal way of life.</p> <p>The world described in <em>Water Memory</em> touches upon some of the maladies noted above, yet without the devastating fallout or breakdown of society. The dystopian condition presented can be characterized as one where the landscape of the United States (and apparently the rest of the world) is thrown off course—somewhat slightly but definitively—following a global seismic shift that reverses the earth's magnetic poles, causing everyone to grapple with memory loss of some sort. Remarkably, despite this cataclysmic event, life as we know it generally continues: businesses and farms operate somewhat as normal, local and national governments function, retail commerce continues, a lesbian couple strengthens their bond, and an empowered, larger-than-life evangelical preacher maintains a commanding presence over his flock on a sprawling campus in central California.</p> <p>Furthermore, given the memory upheaval taking place, progress from a technological perspective abounds and becomes a part of everyday life. Artificial intelligence is incorporated to perform basic chores needed to maintain a well-groomed lawn and even fertilize and cultivate large vegetable fields, while those planning to engage legal counsel \"could buy a LawyerBot app to <strong>[End Page 75]</strong> automatically analyze case law, conjure damages, counter sue, and appeal ad infinitum.\" And, the characters introduced within this seemingly strange new world are mostly presented as everyday men and women and have nothing in common with the ghouls, zombies, and decidedly frightening creatures that populate and drive the action in most well-known post-apocalyptic tales.</p> <p>Author Tom Strelich sets his story during some year in the early twenty-first century, as there are passing references to Walmart, Trader Joe's, TikTok, and even Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos; yet the novel presents a some","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141516016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Marvel (the Word) by Ellen Lytle, and: Day True by Roberta Gould (review)","authors":"Hilary Sideris","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929672","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Marvel (the Word)</em> by Ellen Lytle, and: <em>Day True</em> by Roberta Gould <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Hilary Sideris (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>marvel (the word)</small></em><br/> Ellen Lytle<br/> Nirala<br/> https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9788195191567/marvel-the-word.aspx<br/> 112 pages; Print, $29.95 <em><small>day true</small></em><br/> Roberta Gould<br/> Independently published<br/> 96 pages <p>The past interacts a great deal with the present in Ellen Lytle's poetry collection <em>marvel (the word)</em>. A New York City poet now living in the Hudson Valley, Lytle writes in fractured lines that eschew transitions. In lowercase and often in the present tense, she narrates quotidian activities such as cleaning and making a salad. These activities might also include a visit to the cardiologist, <strong>[End Page 97]</strong> where she observes her heart on a screen. Even as her mitral valve leaks \"octopus bluish ink, backwards into her chamber,\" Lytle considers \"mayonnaise or // hummus / chop or cut onion, celery / or spinach,\" paying attention to serious medical issues and dinner alike. Her flat affect provides a counterpoint to the tragedies that unfold—Trump's election, the death of a dear dog—and allows her to sidestep sentimentality and record the lived moment.</p> <p>Lytle's matter-of-factness permeates such poems as \"hurry them all to sea,\" which begins \"usually after he muff dives my crotch / i laugh at everything,\" and \"everyone needs something new in september,\" in which the poet packs up clothes, which is \"almost like packing away people,\" and turns on a lamp, \"guessing her return / will already be dark.\" Noticing a ripening squash on the kitchen shelf, she reflects that she \"could have loved him / could have roasted that squash for him.\" Regret, that most useless of human emotions, crosses her mind, but not for long.</p> <p>Sometimes Lytle opens the door to the past, and even invites it in. Struck by the cleanliness of her new apartment in the poem \"death may be a visiting dove outside our window,\" she mourns goode, her deceased Welsh Corgi, remembering his \"first relaxed sleep soiling\" and his subsequent messes, \"his few spots scrubbed up / as if they never were, all his toys, except punchy / donated.\" His memory lives on without his stroller, blanket, and \"plump bed,\" despite his owner's attempt to render him \"erased from the life scape\" because, as Lytle acknowledges, \"November's in charge.\"</p> <p>The past also haunts the poem \"caught between trees in a marsden hartley painting,\" which begins with delight in the moment when \"celery stalks fit perfectly / into the cold water pitcher, sitting / joyously on the fridge shelf\" and then recalls \"stumbling with goode / through thickets of trees / as if caught inside a painting where it's impossible to foil cold,\" before del","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141516019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Glitch Poetics by Nathan Allen Jones (review)","authors":"Will Luers","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929678","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Glitch Poetics</em> by Nathan Allen Jones <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Will Luers (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>glitch poetics</small></em><br/> Nathan Allen Jones<br/> Open Humanities Press<br/> http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/glitch-poetics/<br/> 284 pages; Print, $25.00 <p>In <em>Glitch Poetics</em>, Nathan Allen Jones extends the already extended meaning of the term \"glitch,\" at once a technical error and a ubiquitous expressive art technique that in many ways has come to define a digital aesthetic. Jones presents glitch as a contemporary literary strategy that seeks to model and critique what it is like to live inside a global 24/7 technical infrastructure. The term was first used in 1962 by astronaut John Glenn in reference to an electrical surge on a space expedition and has since come to mean the result or outcome of a breakdown in any technical system. Glitch as a digital art aesthetic is an appreciation and celebration of such outcomes, when a computer's deterministic system gives way to something spontaneous, beautiful, and outside human intention. Glitch art's startling bursts of colored pixel blocks, often accompanied by glitched sound in commercials and popular movies, have become signifiers for our technical future—whether it is utopian or dystopian. But Jones is not interested in telling a history of expressive glitch. Such a task would be too complex to cover. When did intentional error in art or literature begin? In the eighteenth century, with Sterne's artful inability to tell a proper story? In the nineteenth, with Mallarmé tossing words around the poetic page? In the early twentieth, with Picasso's broken perspective? From 1970s experimental filmmakers scratching and burning film strips to 1980s avant-garde video artists bending and interrupting video signals, each new machine for artistic expression seems eventually to find cultural value in that machine's dysfunction. The frustrating glitchiness of the early web—plug-ins not working, pages failing to load, code interrupting flows of text <strong>[End Page 134]</strong> and image—was embraced by net artists such as the collective JODI and Olia Lialina. Jones does touch on these and many of the important visual glitch artists—Nick Briz, Rosa Menkman, Jon Satrom—but only to provide a context for exploring the mostly untold history of glitch in literary expression.</p> <p>While visual and sound glitch artists seek out \"wrongness\" by manipulating code or disrupting hardware or software functionality, the \"wrongness\" in language arts has a different creative methodology. Literary glitch aims for what Jones calls \"media realism.\" The performance artists, poets, and novelists explored in <em>Glitch Poetics</em> do sometimes play with devices, signals, and data, but with an intention to expose human/machine systems ","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141516023","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}