#thomas meaney

[days-of-reading]

Today I’m reading this intriguing piece in the Times Literary Supplement on the late and great Robert Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books. Nothing beats the pleasures of reading a perfectly understated paragraph.

[11-9n]

“Petty but at least occasionally sublime.”

[days-of-reading]

How to write a sentence: exhibit A (highlighted).   from Thomas Meaney, “The legend of an Editor” in the Times Literary Supplement

[russianreader]

Something I Learned Today: Red Power

Sean Trischka, “Something I Learned Today” (Hüsker Dü cover) Marxism did not make many inroads in Indian thought in North America – as opposed to its adoption by Indigenous thinkers elsewhere in the Americas – until the Second World War. Six decades before theories of settler colonialism were developed by Maxime Rodinson for Israel and, in their current academic configuration, by Patrick Wolfe…

Something I Learned Today: Red Power

[bobbole]

"The Atlanticist is a special species of Western liberal who sees the world order as an American-led, European-assisted project that requires hard-nosed dealing with the rest of the globe, which must, whether through entreaties or force, hegemony or domination, be kept in its place. For Atlanticists, “credibility” is a word to conjure with. It means staying the course in whatever quagmire they have made—from Vietnam to Afghanistan—the idea being that rival powers will take this as a sign of steadfastness rather than the hubris of an elite that diagnoses its own citizenry’s aversion to wars abroad as a form of populist disease". 

Thomas Meaney, Masters of War

[grandhotelabyss]

I somehow never got around to Amis* despite the overwhelming Anglophilia of the milieu that produced me: I probably should have read him in college, but I was too busy reading the Victorians and postmodernists. His love for Bellow and Nabokov is intriguing though- i’ve often thought that one of the main weaknesses of *American* literature is the opposite tendency, a predilection for periods of extended self-loathing about the fact that we can’t really produce these intricate and elegant novels of settled hierarchal society the way that the English can- so I’m curious to know what the opposite looks like. And yes, the downbeat stuff on MLIR, Parklife and The Great Escape is generally the best Blur (although I dig the upbeat stuff too!)

*father or son!

Right, the complex that starts with Henry James's book on Hawthorne, is carried through those midcentury critics I mentioned in our James-Melville conversation (as well, significantly, both Gore Vidal and Joan Didion), and extends to the late-20th-century laments over the absent social novel of both Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen. The historian-journalist streak, as opposed to the poet-prophet—except that, as we established, both Melville and James are large enough to contain both.

One way to see Amis and his cohort, again with a pop music analogy, is as the literary version of the British Invasion: American "rock" with its diverse influences (mainly Jewish rather than black, in the novelistic case as opposed to the musical) reimagined through the lens of post-imperial Britain. Here they differ from the later and belated phenomenon of Britpop, with its initial nationalist riposte to America's indie-grunge turn, deliberately de-Amerifying rock.

Thomas Meaney, reviewing Inside Story when it came out, distinguished Amis's style from the English realist tradition and made the Bellow-rock connection:

The magnetism of Bellow for Amis’s generation of English writers is well attested: Hitchens, Ian McEwan, and later Will Self and James Wood, all found something in Bellow’s high-calorie sentences that they couldn’t get at home. It was perhaps, above all, the permission to dispense with the rationed intensity of good mid-century British prose – the clean, spare, simplicity of George Orwell’s diction that reached its apotheosis in VS Naipaul and has been gently ironised by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Amis ran farther than any of his peers in the opposite direction: towards a maximalism that he has never abandoned or so much as questioned. His head-swaying to American street-wise rhythms, albeit leavened by English classicism, is the literary version of Mick Jagger crooning “Hoochie Coochie Man” at the Checkerboard Lounge with Muddy Waters, or Daniel Day-Lewis, son of Cecil, shouting, “I will find you!” in deerskin breechcloths under a waterfall in The Last of the Mohicans.

Other than Austen—a genius and so above rules or considerations of taste—the English social novel doesn't interest me much either; I've never gotten anywhere with Thackeray or Trollope, mildly dislike Fielding, cheer on Woolf's polemic against Bennett. I prefer their Romantic visionary prose tradition, which, in figures as distinct as the Brontës and Dickens, as Woolf and Lawrence and Forster, turns what appear to be social novels into myths and gospels. On this basis, I've never read Kingsley either; he doesn't really seem to "export." Martin, however, loved Fielding and Austen and has a definite undertow of the traditional English satirical social novel (Meaney's "leavened by English classicism") for all the visionary coloration he borrows from inherently aclasscal Americans.

Anyway, the chapter I'm now writing in Major Arcana, one of the last, is titled "Et in Arcadia Egirl," so I should probably stop pretending I am not also in part writing a satirical social novel.

[lligkv]

Doing a little roundup of some articles I’ve read recently.

*

One is a profile by Jennifer Wilson of Duke University Press editor Ken Wissoker, who published Lauren Berlant and others. I rolled my eyes a bit at the fawning tone of the much of the piece (especially considering how the descriptions of Wissoker’s exacting taste and style, and the occasional spikiness of his manner, mirrors the impression given by Hanya Yanagihara—whose work I find extremely suspect, basically trauma porn—in the New Yorker’s profile of her). And I came away thinking I’d rather academic presses and their authors did their work on the margins, and quietly—looking at conversations askance, and not driving them, writing for those who have the eyes to read. With the theory inspiring practical effects, inspiring those who read it to take action in the world, rather than feeding back into the economy formed by profiles like these as they’re written, read, and inspire more profiles or more Discourse.

I get that theorists’ work can be powerful. And I understand the impulse to honor those, like editors, who help shape theorists’ work into what it is. But we don’t need any of them to be made into cult figures.

Oddly, the cultification of theorists particularly on the left—the investments people seem to demonstrate in them as people, over and above their work—has made me appreciative of controversies like the Avital Ronell and John Comaroff cases. Insofar as they help people recognize theory is what matters moreso than theorists, who will often fall short of the commitments they call for—being no less susceptible to systems, like the academy, that incentivize group allegiance and political maneuvering for being able to eloquently critique those systems and perhaps provide alternatives.

On that level, I guess it’s good we have this piece about the institutionalization of once-marginalized disciplines, to guide us to consider the effects and hazards of that institutionalization. I’ve also seen some good responses online asking whether Wilson’s claim that the authors Wissoker and Duke UP champion now “hold the keys” of the academy is actually true. And if it is true, well, what good does it do to control a dying academy that theory can perhaps only describe, not resuscitate…?

*

In both Thomas Meaney’s review of Jean-Yves Frétigné's recent biography of Antonio Gramsci (To Live Is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci) and Sophie Pinkham’s review of London School of Economics professor Lea Ypi’s memoir Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History, which chronicles her experience living through Albania’s transition into liberal capitalism in the 90s, there’s a focus on a) historicizing the “end of history” period, now that we’ve gotten far enough out of it to be able to look back on it, and b) working toward the practice of a clear-eyed socialism that’s free from both cynicism about the future and blindness to the difficulties attendant upon any implementation of socialism.

As Meaney puts it, “If Gramsci has aged better than many of his peers, it is in part because he became a thinker for a defeated, rather than a triumphalist, left. With his own cause in ruins, Gramsci became ever more interested in the ways of the enemy.” That interest is necessary because what the left fights is atavistic. The attractions of conservatism and fascism are primal, though the convictions of the left can also be deeply felt. And so there will always be a seed of reaction in any leftist political formulation, one we’ll have to know how to combat.

[rightsinexile]

Who is your dance partner? European strategy in Africa and its recent impact on asylum seekers

The following is an article published by the London Review of Books on 7 November 2019 and written by Thomas Meaney, an American writer who has focused on the 2015 European political crisis over migration. Here he reviews a book that looks at European strategy in Africa throughout history and its recent impact on asylum seekers.

The Sahara​ is one of the few places on earth no one has been foolish enough to try to conquer. There have, however, been attempts, over the centuries, to govern it.

[…]

Since the start of the Libyan and Syrian civil wars in 2011, European policy towards North Africa has stepped up another gear. In Agadez, an old trading town in central Niger, hundreds of white pick-up trucks lie impounded at a military base. They are the former cash cows of men who made their living transporting their fellow West Africans across Niger and the Sahara towards Libya, but who now, if they aren’t in prison, try to pass as entrepreneurs in a mostly non-existent start-up economy. On the Niger-Mali border, more than two hundred miles to the west, temporary villages have been built with EU and UN funding for those fleeing uncertainty in Mali, itself a consequence of Nato’s intervention in Libya. Women and men line up to have their fingerprints remembered by machines to help the state keep track of them – scanning is required if you want to be offered housing. In Niamey, Niger’s capital, French and UN specialists assess asylum claims at a distance of several thousand miles from the French coast, with only the most plausible applicants approved for the onward journey. It’s the sort of offshore processing that the UK Border Force can only envy. Read more here.