Tuesday Two

WHAT I'M READING 2

THE FOURTH TURNING IS HERE: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End by Neil Hope (Simon & Schuster, 2023)

Draw four slightly overlapping squares (roof shingles) and call them generations. The subject of this book is four squares of current vernacular shorthand: GI, Boomers, X, and Milennials. These generations overlap at the edges like roof shingles, a design that allows for the recorded prejudices and opinions of one generation to slide into another, chronologically and with the authority of an AI fed on ink and pixels. Each square is bursting with cherry-picked public information, related in seemingly casual and off-handed prose that will make any reader, indifferent of education and good sense, to nod affirmatively. After you've nodded affirmatively to what Boomers, for example, are thought to be in popular culture and uncheckable statistics, you will have no choice but to flow into the next square, the Xers. This is not the inevitable gravity of water, as the shingles metaphor would have it, but the forceful and invisible hand of the paté maker holding the neck of a goose to feed it boiled corn.

This is the blueprint for any pop book success, so it would be hardly worth talking about, if this was any pop book, even a better informed one like let's say, "Future Shock" by Alvin Toffler, or the more recent "Capital" by Thomas Pickety. Nor is this a passionate plea for cannibalism like Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" (still the libertarian bible), or a founding-of-a-religion tractatus like L. Ron Hubbard's "Dianetics." Nor is this a kitsch foray into alien conspiracies, or Ruth Montgomery-style visions of angelic visitations. Like Hungarian, a language outside any linguistic family, "The Fourth Turning is Here" belongs to no known genre. It is a blown-up pamphlet, a hybrid between WiKi and "Mein Kampf," factual on the surface (inside its squares) and driven by Adam Smith's invisible third hand. It is also a favorite book of Steve Bannon, Steve Miller and all the other Steves around Puppet Trump. That perverse crew has a specific agenda that could be "art" if it wasn't so superficial and clunky. "The Fourth Turning is Here" aims its generational squares at a simple idea: the Grey Champion, aka Trump. Quote: "At a moment of national peril, they will need fearless leaders in whom they can see an aspirational vision of what they could collectively become. Thus will the Gray Champion ride once more." "They" is us, btw. Kick up the heavy metal.

If you haven't been hypnotized by the honey-covered-buzz by page 341, you are in for an imperative prophetic voice that will have you on your knees before you can say "fascism." Just saying.

THE BLUE FLOWERS by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright (New Directions, 1985)

What does it mean for a writer to be free? Does anyone currently scribbling, experience the intoxicating delight of laying down some mindblowing tracks that have no known source or premeditated intention? A rare thing that, even in the best of times. Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) was a member of both the Académie Goncourt and the Collège de Pathaphysics, and the founder of OULIPO (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), which is like saying that he was simultaneously a deep-diver and a record-setting aviator. Author of novels, essays, scientist and mathematician, Queneau was lucky to live in times of maximum permission to experiment. When the outside world was hell (war) he performed spectacles of the imagination that his generation, which included the Surrealist poets and post-war cinema, applauded and tried to one-up. Don't dismiss generational upsmanship, it is a stronger feeling than general misery. "The Blue Flowers," along with "The Sunday of Life," and "Exercises in Style," all of them translated superbly by Barbara Wright for New Directions, are fundamental writing tools, like your brain and your keyboard. I taught "Exercises in Style" to my students for a quarter of a century, and I never tired of it. It is a text that generates the feeling of liberty, a license to be a fool. I am re-reading Queneau because I find it hard to be free when I write these days. There is a something that isn't a deadline (I love those), or despair about language being eaten by machines (though that concerns me, too, because the motherfuckers owe me money), nor is it the so-called "cancel" atmosphere that makes changing pronouns a crime (I've been a pronoun-changing criminal before the baby-critics started lecturing). None of those bother me. I suspect, stop me if I'm wrong,  that the despondency is caused by the lack of inspired new writing. Like everyone else, I enjoy earnest memoiristic writing that treats its author voluptously, but when it's over I feel like watching TV. WTF?

FETIȚA STRIGĂ-N PAHAR poems by Nora Iuga (Editura Nemira, 2023)

 If there is a Nobel Prize for poetry out there that hasn't been chewed to death by the rats of politics and the decadent kinks of jurors, it should be given to 94-years-old Romanian poet Nora Iuga. In the tradition and ouside the tradition of the brilliant poets of the 20th century, and a star among those of the 21st, Iuga's verse is pure whiskey in a world of watered beer. A feminist with the chops of Frida Kahlo, the wit of Mina Loy and the imagination of Lenora Carrington, she leaves her contemporaries (mostly dead) and her younger colleagues (mostly alive) in the dust of her winged mare. Untranslated in English, she needs a fearlesss bilingualist to do her right. I am not that one, but here are two lines from "To Each Their Sun:and I who am I waiting for when/I look at my watch?"You are a poet calling for her translator