Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feud
(Lyndall Gordon, 15:06)
The account of the family feud amongst Emily Dickinson's brother & others is fascinating. Who knew that someone in the 1870s could be virtually polyamorous?  Austin Dickinson was in a marriage that cooled, due to his fear that his wife Susan would be harmed by any additional pregnancies. Although their marriage was not dead, it was gravely wounded when an astronomer, David Todd, came to Amherst, with his wife Mabel. The marriage between the Todds was decidedly odd. David was a louche, who angled to get other women into bed. He encouraged his wife to pursue a symmetrically open attitude. When she encountered the charismatic Austin, she swooned, and they eventually consummated their "marriage" of true minds. She did continue relations with her weasel husband, David, and he actively encouraged this affair, since it greatly aided his standing within Amherst College, where Austin was the treasurer. There's a sad, and somewhat sordid, quality to this affair, since 3 of the parties were enthusiasts, but the 4th, Susan Dickinson, was greatly aggrieved. While Lyndall's book fascinates in its first half, focused on Emily Dickinson, and her family milieu, the second half is a serious slog. Very few people can be expected to care about the posthumous manipulation of Emily Dickinson's oeuvre with anything like the intensity of attention lavished upon it by the author. It's certainly fascinating the Mrs. Mabel Todd succeeded in controlling a great deal of the manuscripts left by Emily, notwithstanding the apparent fact that Emily never once deigned to speak to her, and could plausibly be viewed as being quite chilly toward this usurper. If the second half had been compressed by a factor of ten, it might have been a great story. But the endless dilations on the manuscript wars can only be of interest to a very small number of scholars. I write this as someone who has a great appetite for academic feuds. The former magazine Lingua Franca could have made hey of this in an incisive 10 to 15,000 word essay, which could have been delicious. But to spend more than 5 times that many words on something so dusty, is ultimately a misperception of the audience that could possibly exist for such a work.

Teaching & its Predicaments

Teaching & its Predicaments
(David K. Cohen, 6:22)
When I was interning at BBN as Allan Collins' cognitive apprentice, I came across a paper of Cohen's where he mentioned that teaching, along with psychotherapy, aims at human improvement, and is therefore an impossible profession. At the time, that sort of pessimism was balm to my anxious soul. Perhaps I've shifted over the past 20 years, since my interest in Cohen's formulation waned, in spite of the lucid exposition. I asked myself if I'd've been more receptive, had Cohen been describing the challenges of making a dent in the market with a new company, rather than asking what enables a teacher to succeed in making a cognitive connection? Maybe.

The Minus Times Collected: Twenty Years / Thirty Issues (1992-2012) 

(Hunter Kennedy, ed, 464pp)

Interesting, if rather slight in its impact. The whole freaking thing appears to be typed on a typewriter, which has a certain fey gravitas. Seeing Sam Lipsyte listed as a contributor made this a closer for me, although I only found a few pieces amongst the mass of pages. David Eggers contributed odd drawings that were some sort of homage to Barthelme's 40 stories. Hipster musicians, such as Cat Power & Will Oldham, also appear. 

The Financial Lives of the Poets

The Financial Lives of the Poets
(Jess Walters, 8:00)
Sublime. Almost as good as Sam Lipsyte's amazing The Ask. The narrator is a journalist who's hit the skids, in debt, unemployed, and the bad times get worse when he accepts a hit of marijuana from a stranger in front of a 7-11. The problem spiral doesn't always seem plausible, so in that, Walters does not live up to Lipsyte (or Martin Amis or TC Boyle at their darkest best). But I devoured this, surrendering to the spasms of delight sustained by Walters' vision of America on the verge of bankruptcy.

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story
(D.T. Max, 12:33)
Spot on assessment of the life of DFW. Since I've at least *tried* to read every single book of Wallace's, I must straight out admit that I find his mind interesting. If pressed, I'd say that some of the short stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, as well as parts of the collection Oblivion deserve lasting attention. But he was such a broked-y sick puppy, disingenously simulating humility, fawning to ingratiate himself as polite, while never accepting that he was merely brilliant, rather than trail-blazingly original. This biography reveals numerous incidents of a pathological drive to exaggerate his intelligence, such as absurdly trying to woo Mary Karr by falsely claiming to have perfect SATs. I wish there was even more in this book on his friendship and rivalry with Jonathan Franzen, but the book does a fine job of compassionately discussing DFW and his life, without ever succumbing to the excesses that marred the writer's own work.

The book of the unknown : tales of the thirty-six

The book of the unknown : tales of the thirty-six
(Jonathon Keats, 217pp)
I'm an admirer of Keats' outre science-themed art installations (e.g., porn for plants, or the many-world making kit).  This set of stories is so derivative of IB Singer, it's impossible for me to imagine why anyone would enjoy it. The actual drama is never Bashevi-an; the yiddishkeit is very explicitly second-hand.

Putin: Man without a Face

Putin: Man without a Face
(Masha Gessen, 10:30)
Astonishing to dive into the thug-ism that characterizes Russian's Great Leader. Masha Gessen does a superb job of documenting the pettiness, the wobbly and all but random road that led Yeltsin (guided by Boris Berezovsky) to elevate the KGB bureaucrat in St Petersburg to become the leader of the former Soviet state. It's almost impossible to stare at the brutality of his actions, which include intentionally blowing up Moscow apartment buildings, staging the Moscow theater hostage fracas, and even the Beslan atrocity. Gessen claims that Putin's thieving ways exceed even kleptomania, extending to what she labels pleonexia (an intense drive to possess what rightly belongs to others.) The tale of the stolen Superbowl ring is matched by an outrageous incident where Putin is shown a glass rifle filled with Stolichnaya, and he hands it to his bodyguard to take away. Small potatoes, to be sure, but the total is perhaps $40 billion. Masha Gessen is a gifted journalist, and brother of the depressive Keith.

The Empirical Stance

The Empirical Stance
(Bas van Fraassen, 6 out of 9 hours)
As an undergrad, working to write an honors thesis with Arthur Fine, I was immensely impressed with BvF's The Scientific Image. These lectures are just as cogent, balanced, and helpful in thinking about abiding philosophical questions, which can be cast as theological (Does God exist?) or merely metaphysical (Does the external world exist?). Although I began the book with glee, I am not as anxious about the status of metaphysics as I was when younger. I can definitely recommend this to anyone who needs to understand how philosophy can articulate its role as an interpreter of science, without ever arrogating to itself a role as somehow more fundamental than science itself.