When we first started the Los Angeles Review of Books, one of our rules was, NO LISTICLES! So far we&#8217;ve resisted the impulse to put out our selection of the 100 best books of the year, too. We feel like it is so grossly unfair to the 101st best book of the year. I am only partially kidding. The real issue, of course, is that we think of LARB as a place for discussion and reflection, not for rating, a place for evaluating the contribution a book or film or idea makes to the conversation, not its excellence in some abstract way.
What we offer here, then, in this anthology of articles published in 2015, are notable pieces (among many others) that managed to make us think about new topics, or in new ways about old topics. The pieces here were selected by our editors for your pleasure and edification, and while this is definitely not a collection of &#8220;LARB&#8217;s Best of 2015&#8221; &#8211; because we don&#8217;t do that &#8211; we think you&#8217;ll agree, they are among the best essays of the year, anywhere.
&#8211; Tom Lutz, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher

Introduction by Tom Lutz

STAR TREK makes it look easy. Warp drive eliminates all that unhappy fussing with fuel, mass, and acceleration: the Enterprise, traveling orders of magnitude faster than current science tells us is possible, turns and stops and reverses course on a dime, and the dilithium crystals that make this possible are only in short supply when the plot temporarily demands it. Replicator technology that can effortlessly change energy into matter and back again (without explosions or pollution or toxic radiation) eliminates the need to manage supplies or carefully recycle materials; a related technology, the transporter, allows people to hop back and forth between ships and planetary surfaces without worrying about gravity wells or delta-v calculations (and transporters even filter out diseases and harmful chemicals in the bargain). The ship generates its own gravity (somehow); the shields offer protection from space debris; inertial dampeners make the ride smoother and more comfortable than any of our cars, planes, or trains; keeping everybody warm is never even posed as a problem — the list goes on and on and on. Magical future technologies lubricate any potential stumbling block at every stage on the road to galactic glory.
New novels out this summer from Kim Stanley Robinson (Aurora) and Neal Stephenson (Seveneves) dismantle the fantastic Star Trek vision of space travel in favor of a portrayal of space exploration with more vertigo, more friction, more weight, and more gravity. Their ships don’t just turn and can’t just go; fuel is a constant consideration, as is velocity and acceleration, with both novels devoting long (but fascinating!) sequences to various complicated physical problems of orbital mechanics. There are no replicators — in fact, there’s crushing scarcity, with overawing recycling programs that seek to recover every last drop of oxygen, water, and nutrient and return these back into the system. There are no transporters: if you want to get from the ship to the ground, or from a lower orbit to a higher orbit, you’ve got to pay for it. If you want to have any sort of internal gravity at all, you’ve got to get your ship to spin. And there are no shields, no force fields for safety: this is dangerous work, with only the too-thin walls of your spacecraft to protect you from immediate death in the impossibly cold vacuum outside.
In both novels, the reintroduction of actual physics into narratives about human beings in outer space seems to slide away from happy fantasy toward something that looks more like gruesome survival horror. These novels are closer to The Walking Dead than Star Trek: accidents, shortages, suicides, murders, starvation, asphyxiation, and disease take center stage. For someone raised (as I was) on dreams of spaceflight, these novels are simultaneously exhilarating and completely horrifying. The fact is that we just shouldn’t live in space, but we want to anyway — these novels envision the start, the wonderful and terrible start, of what it would take to even begin to manage living up there permanently.
¤
Aurora and Seveneves, coming out so near to one another and so strongly reconsidering the idea (or fantasy) of the outer-space colony, almost demand to be taken up together; at the same time, however, these are very different novels from two very different writers. Although his imaginings have grown progressively darker in tone since the Mars books, Robinson remains our great utopian science fiction writer, even as his work has argued in favor of a more limited vision of technological futurity that works with nature rather than in opposition to it. (Robinson would say that this is not pessimism so much as realism, a taking seriously of the fact that we are biological entities living in an ecological niche upon which we are entirely dependent for survival.) Stephenson (perhaps especially in Seveneves) comes from almost the exactly opposite orientation: his skepticism about the ability of human beings to behave intelligently and decently borders at times on the radically anti-utopian, while his trust in the ability of technology to transcend apparently hard and insurmountable limits is almost boundless. What is fascinating, in reading the two books together (as, I submit, one should!), is how these two diametrically opposed perspectives collide somewhere in the middle, as their separate premises each begin to unspool.
These books are exceptionally long — nearly 500 pages for Aurora, almost 900 for Seveneves — and they are both structured around significant plot twists that I was very pleased to be surprised by and do not wish to spoil. And the books are, I find, truly structured by these twists: the novels are nearly impossible to discuss with any seriousness and depth without discussing the twists. With regard to Stephenson’s book, at least, the promotional material (including the plot summary on the first page) makes clear that at some unknown point as you read you are going to encounter, in stark defiance of any notion of Aristotelian formal unity, the words “FIVE THOUSAND YEARS LATER …” (Don’t worry. Somehow it works.) But in the case of Robinson’s book, the decision has been made to market Aurora without any reference to the two central twists in the plot that utterly (and, I found, delightfully) transform the narrative.
I believe that our culture has, in general, become much too spoilerphobic; I’m sure there are those who feel that even granting a “spoiler alert” is itself a kind of spoiler, if only at a zero-level, insofar as I’m telling you there is something here to be spoiled in the first place. Not every pleasure of reading is reducible to or swamped by suspense. But in this case I find I really do have to tread carefully: I’m going to endeavor, as best I can, to talk about what I find interesting about each of these two books without saying exactly what happens or why it’s so very great when it does. Follow me, please, if you dare.
¤
Robinson is very at home in space, with many of his best-loved novels revolving around a more-utopian or less-utopian future for humanity in the larger solar system (the Mars trilogy, 2312, Galileo’s Dream, the early novels Icehenge and The Memory of Whiteness — even his wonderful alternate history novel The Years of Rice and Salt ends on the image of a space launch). In fact, many of Robinson’s stories seem to be alternate-universe versions of each other, with the same future-historical events occurring in different order or in different ways, or with better or worse results. Aurora is no exception: it traces the story of one of the generation starships flung out from the solar system during the Accelerando, Robinson’s alternative name for the prophesied technological Singularity. In previous books these launches have always been something of a dead end: those explorers journey (<a href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/review/struggle-forever">as he says in 2312</a>) “beyond human time, beyond human reach” into “a vastness beyond comprehension,” outside history itself. In the Mars books and 2312, the narrative point of view stayed in the solar system as those hollowed-out asteroids left us behind in search of some other possible home; this time, we leave Earth behind and stick with one of the asteroids.
In this novel’s version of the Accelerando, the intergenerational starships are launched in 2545, and we check back in with the group over 150 years later as the 2,122 descendants of the original explorers approach Tau Ceti, where probes have indicated Earthlike planets that can support terrestrial plant and animal life. The spaceship has always been an attractive figure for ecological thinking, and Robinson dives into the metaphor with verve, showing how the fantasy of outer-space colonization is not some suspension of ecological rationality but instead requires total commitment to it. Everything on the ship is part of a biological-ecological machine that has been constructed inside a space that is simply too small and too overdetermined to work properly, with essentially zero external inputs; it functions, but only just barely, and with constant corrective intervention from its human caretakers. The imminent arrival on Tau Ceti offers a new horizon for exploration, but not really a significant escape from these constraints: there’s no reason to expect any extrasolar planet to be especially hospitable to terrestrial life, which evolved precisely here, at precisely this distance from precisely our sun at this precise moment between ice ages. The surface of another planet won’t look like a California studio backlot or the Vasquez Rock formations where the original Star Trek shot so often on location — it will look to us like Antarctica, or the pock-marked surface of the moon, or the Mariana Trench, or Hell. The Tau Ceti colonists are undertaking a task that will be almost unthinkably, unfathomably difficult — a lunatic task, which Western civilization has not only convinced itself is its destiny but which has been used to justify all manner of short-sighted, anti-ecological behaviors in the meantime. We’re gleefully destroying our only good home, pretending we’ve got someplace else to go.
Seveneves, for all its myriad differences from Aurora, operates on much the same premise concerning the practicality and desirability of significant numbers of human beings living in outer space: it might be possible, but it’s certainly not a good idea, not something you’d do if you had a ton of better options. In Seveneves, we don’t have better options — as evidenced by the novel’s transcendent first line (sure to enter the canon of legendary first lines in science fiction novels): “The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.” At first this is just an astronomical curiosity — how? why? Dare we ask, who? — but the news very quickly turns apocalyptically grim. The seven giant boulders that are all that remain of the moon are in unstable orbit, splitting and pulverizing each other; scientists soon recognize that within two years the pieces will begin hurtling down to Earth in what they call the “Hard Rain.” This will be a mass extinction event on par with anything that has ever occurred in geologic history; the planet will be uninhabitable for 5,000 years, and nothing on the surface will survive.
For nearly everyone alive, there is simply nothing to be done. Seven billion will die. But plans are put into motion to bootstrap an ark into space from the International Space Station, on which a tiny number of human beings might survive; a similar project, considered much less likely to succeed, is developed for bunkers deep underground. The entire industrial capacity of human civilization is suddenly and immediately devoted, for these two years, toward the rapid development and manufacture of the devices the “Cloud Ark” will need to create a self-sustaining community in high orbit to wait out the Hard Rain, so that the descendants of the few thousand humans chosen to survive might someday (in the unfathomably distant future) make a return to the planet. The clock is ticking: 700 days.
¤
These are both, I should say, genuinely great reads, especially as the initial premises described above give way (via those undiscussable twists) to fascinating new decision-points without clear or easy resolutions. I think Aurora may well be Robinson’s best novel (and I’ve heard other fans of his say the same thing), and Seveneves is certainly in the same ballpark as Anathem, Cryptonomicon, and Snow Crash (my favorites of Stephenson’s books). They’re both terrific.
What I find best about the two books — and better together, in some sense, than simply taking up either one in isolation — is their examination and reevaluation of our current cultural preoccupation with the end of the world, a collapse which seems at once imminent, unavoidable, and our own fault, a result of social, political, and economic decisions we have made and now refuse to unmake, no matter how obviously unsuitable they are to our new global and ecological context. What both Aurora and Seveneves examine is that new value alternatively called adaptability or sustainability or resilience — the capacity of human societies to survive what would otherwise appear to be insurmountable disasters, whether through their willingness to murder other people to get ahead (call that one bad resilience) or else through the happy intersection of ingenuity, solidarity, and hope.
I was reminded last year of Tom Godwin’s well-known 1954 short story “The Cold Equations” <a href="http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2014/03/cory-doctorow-cold-equations-and-moral-hazard/">by a great Locus Magazine column by Cory Doctorow.</a> In the story, the captain of a space freighter loaded with medicine for a deep-space colony discovers that a young girl has stowed away on his ship. The “cold equations” are the laws of mass and acceleration that govern this transport: the ship doesn’t have enough fuel to get to the colony with the girl’s added mass, they can’t jettison any of the medicine, and the captain can’t sacrifice himself because the stowaway lacks the expertise necessary to successfully land the ship. So there’s just one option: the girl needs to be thrown out of the airlock to die horribly in space in order to preserve the larger mission.
Doctorow sees the story, rightly I think, as exemplary of a large-scale problem in contemporary SF: the story delicately and deliberately constructs an emergency lifeboat scenario in which there seems to be no choice but to hurt someone, training its reader to see the world in terms of forced, miserable choices and no-one-could-have-predicted crises that always scale up to shove more and more victims into that airlock. We can’t stop telling this story: even in our fantasies we keep constructing worlds of death, reveling in the nightmare choices they foist upon us. This brand of “lifeboat ethics” is the imaginative standpoint of a tremendous amount of science fiction today, which focuses on dead, ruined, zombie worlds, hopeless worlds, worlds without futures, populated by battered, broken, and brutal survivors who have lost the will to care about anyone besides themselves. There’s a politics to this fad — a bad one. “Stories about how we can’t afford to hew to our values in time of crisis,” Doctorow writes, “are a handy addition to every authoritarian’s playbook, a fine friend of plutocrats, and they reek of self-serving bullshit every time they’re deployed.”
The shift in narrative situation from zombie wasteland to fragile spaceship in Aurora and Seveneves breaks us out of our well-ingrained, supremely well-rehearsed habits of apocalypse — and lets us see the option of a different future than permanent, hopeless standoff. What makes both Aurora and Seveneves more Star Trek than The Walking Dead, despite everything I have said, is their ultimate refusal of the brutal zombie logic of the contemporary moment in favor of an ethical demand that is, if not always exactly utopian, getting somewhere very close to it. Here disaster is an opportunity for inspiring nobility, for a coming together, whether or not we always answer that call. The truly radical kernel in both of these books is the notion that as we drift through space in our tiny pocket of air and water and warmth, much too small and much too fragile, leaping together into an unknown and frightening future, maybe the best choice we can make is to try to take care of one another as best we can.
¤
<a title="Gerry Canavan" href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/gerry-canavan/">Gerry Canavan teaches 20th- and 21st-century literature and culture at Marquette University.</a>

The Warm Equations

The Warm Equations by Gerry Canavan

This essay is excerpted from a longer piece forthcoming in Neoliberalism and Literature (2016), ed. Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith.
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IF YOU GO ON PornHub, you’ll find a lot of different kinds of porn, some pretty obvious (“blowjob,” “gangbang”), some not so obvious (“feet,” “tickling”), and at least one or two (“smoking while pissing”) the attraction of which is not obvious at all (no offense, smokers and pissers). What you won’t find, despite the fact that in book form it has sold over 100 million copies and as a film has made more than $500 million, is contract porn. But now, with its release on DVD, Fifty Shades of Grey — maybe the only movie ever made that’s understood the appeal of a woman looking at a man across 12 inches of hard-wood conference table and murmuring “no anal fisting” — puts contract in the light it deserves (glowing, above the Apple logo). It’s not so much that with Fifty Shades, porn has gone mainstream; it’s that with Fifty Shades the mainstream has been revealed as porn.

Of course, it’s not as if masochists didn’t always sort of know that. After all, the founding text of sadomasochism, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, revolves not exactly around its hero’s desire to be a “slave” but instead around his desire to be a slave by “contract.” Like the one in which he agrees to become the “property” of his “cruel mistress” while she, “in exchange,” agrees to “appear as often as possible in fur, especially when she’s being cruel to her slave.” And like the several contracts Sacher-Masoch himself actually entered into with his mistresses. The slave by contract has made a choice, and the importance of choosing links masochism not only to compulsion but to consent, identifying freedom with the right to sell not only one’s labor but also, if one wishes, one’s person and insisting on both the benefits and the pleasure associated with the exercise of that right. Or, as Marcela Iacub puts it, “It’s my body,” and I can do with it “what I want.”

Unlike 50 Shades’s Ana, however, Iacub is not a fictional English major; she’s an Argentinian-born French intellectual. And her cruel master is not the tall, young, and attractive CEO of Grey Enterprise Holdings Inc.; it’s the “short,” “old,” and “ugly” CEO of DSK Global Investment Fund — Dominique Strauss Kahn, the former Managing Director of the IMF who ended up paying a Sofitel housekeeper what was rumored to be $6 million in order to make her accusation that he’d raped her in his hotel room go away. DSK always claimed that the sex had in fact been consensual and, whether or not anyone else believed him, Iacub apparently did. The aspect of DSK’s character that interested (attracted and/or repelled) her, Iacub says in Belle et Bête, the memoir she wrote of the affair she had with him, is what she calls the “pig,” and the essence of the pig is his love of freedom: “le propre du porc est la liberté.” He needs to do whatever he wants and he needs the person he does it to to want it too; he needs to be “sur que son partenaire consent.” And even when the pig ends up biting off part of her ear and eating it, Iacub can’t quite give up the idea that the exercise of freedom has been hers as well as his: “c’était mon corps et … je pouvais me faire dévorer si je voulais.”

Indeed the value of free market exchange is central to Belle et Bête. Earlier in the book, before the affair has begun, she turns down an offer from DSK’s then wife, Ann Sinclair, to work with her “for free” (“gratuitement à son journal”) because, she says, it seems to her wrong to “travailler” “sans être payé”; she is, “par principe contre le travail gratuit.” And the loss of her ear only confirms the principle that people should be paid for what they do and should pay for what they get since, in exchange for the ear, what she gets is “salut,” which is, she says, more than worth it: “Ce n’est rien comme prix, une oreille.” “To pay only an ear in exchange for understanding the true nature of my desires is a bargain.” So just as you don’t write for free, you don’t get to understand your desire to be “abused” for free. Once you do understand it, instead of writing for the French Huffington Post for nothing, you write your memoir for something.

Albeit not as much as you hoped for. The idea of Belle et Bête was more of a publishing sensation than its actual sales were, although not because masochism doesn’t sell. In the months just before and just after Belle et Bête appeared, Cinquante Nuances de Grey was doing almost as well in France as it had in the US and the UK. Indeed, just as submission teaches Iacub about her desires, the opportunity for the “submissive” to learn about hers is described as the “fundamental purpose” of the contract that — laying out the dominant’s right to “flog, spank or whip” the “submissive” and establishing her “consent” to being so spanked and whipped — looms even larger (10 full pages) in Fifty Shades of Grey than it does in Venus in Furs.

Which, given the political role that contract and consent have been called upon to play in the last half century, makes a certain sense. Iacub has a series of what she calls “nightmares” in which she insists that she has the “right” to give herself to DSK and, speaking in terms that any follower of libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises would immediately recognize, she complains that only in a “paternalist” or “tyrannical” society would “the State” insist on its power to “interfere” with the desire of one “consenting adult” to be eaten by another. Of course, von Mises’s objections to “paternal government” more usually involved things like the state’s interfering with the consumption of “cigarettes” and “canned food” not ears. The state, he argued, had no right to compel producers to label the actual contents of their products and thus interfere with the ability of “individual citizens” to buy whatever they wanted.

But the logic is the same. In Human Action, von Mises makes a foundational distinction between “two kinds of social cooperation,” preferring “contract,” where “the logical relation between the cooperating individuals is symmetrical” (“John has the same relation to Tom as Tom has to John”) to “command” or “subordination,” where “there is the man who commands and there are those who obey his orders” and which is thus “asymmetrical.” And, although the relation between a “Dominant” and a “Submissive” would seem like the exemplary instance of asymmetry (one commands, the other obeys), the reconfiguring of that relation as one that the submissive desires and to which she consents renders them symmetrical. Like John and Tom, the submissive and the dominant are both getting what they want. If masochism in Belle et Bête is a kind of libertarian nightmare, in 50 Shades of Grey, it’s not just an American (as Heather Havrilesky rightly calls it) but, more pointedly, an Austrian wet dream.

At least it would be if the contract ever got signed. Or it is, but only because (while endlessly discussed), the contract never does get signed. Since Ana basically does everything Christian wants her to do right from the start and doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to do, it becomes, Christian says, “moot,” and, of course, it always was, as they both know, “unenforceable.” One way to understand this rendering irrelevant of what is structurally at the center of the text’s will-she-or-won’t-she plot is as the expression of a certain ambivalence about understanding their relationship as contractual. After all, from page one, the novel is clearly headed toward marriage and the attempt to avoid marriage being reduced to mere contract is a characteristic component of an older (late 19th and early 20th century) domestic ideology — one that gets a fleeting reprise in Fifty Shades when Christian is outraged by his father’s suggestion that he and Ana sign a prenuptial agreement.

The idea here is that what the two of them have is a freedom even purer than any that can be or needs to be embodied in a contract. But where the older resistance to seeing marriage as contractual involved the sense that contracts were too easy to dissolve (i.e., by divorce), this newer ambivalence involves just the opposite: the sense that contracts are too constraining, or, at least, constraining in the wrong way. For the scene in which Christian angrily repudiates the prenup is immediately followed by his telling her to propose a safe word (she chooses “popsicle”), smacking her bottom, and then (in traditional soft-core fashion) “thrusting” “deep” into her while her wrists and ankles are cuffed to the four corners of their bed. The power of consent here — Ana experiences, as always, “the most intense climax” ever — not only doesn’t require a contract but is, as the reminder about the safe word suggests, made possible by the contract’s irrelevance. For once you have a safe word, you don’t need a contract. As long as Ana doesn’t say popsicle, she is getting exactly what she wants and, the second she does say it, she will also be getting exactly what she wants.

There’s a sense, then, in which the sexual contract they didn’t sign is both superseded and perfected by the sex they go on to have. Indeed, the contract supersedes and perfects itself since it too contains a provision for safe words, while insisting (revealingly because tautologically) that “all that occurs under” its terms “will be consensual,” including the Submissive’s right to withdraw at any time and the Dominant’s “right to dismiss the Submissive from his service at any time and for any reason.” In this refusal to countenance the paradox at the heart of contract (you choose to give up, in certain circumstances and for a certain amount of time, your right to choose) contemporary masochism (maybe we should call it neoliberal masochism) perfects what we might now call liberal masochism by replacing liberal freedom of contract — binding in a way that necessarily limits the will — with a fantasy of continuous consent, of a social bond, as one might put it (and as David Graeber has put it) based “solely on the free consent of [its] participants.”

What Graeber is imagining, of course, is an anarchist’s utopia, one that might be contrasted to the reality in which the right to dismiss someone from your service at any time and for any reason (and, naturally, to quit at any time and for any reason) has assumed new prominence in the US labor market. Of course, at will employment has been the default setting of the American workplace since the end of the 19th century and instead of thinking of it as increasingly dominant, some commentators today worry about (or take satisfaction in) the fact that the state has carved out some exceptions to it. But the exceptions primarily (and predictably) involve only protected categories like race, sex, and age, and the primary bulwark against arbitrary dismissal — membership in a union, hence the protection of a union contract — has, in the neoliberal period, shrunk in tandem with the rise in inequality. The standard estimate is that three quarters of the private sector workforce are at will employees. In this world, as Andrew Hoberek convincingly argues, a contract begins to look (but only for the worker) like “a site of nostalgia,” since the union contract that binds you to a one percent raise and contains a no-strike clause is better than no contract and no raise. From the boss’s perspective, however, the handcuffs that bind Ana only as long as she wants to be bound and the image of her resistance (“Why do you defy me?” Christian asks) as the expression of her desire (“Because I love you,” she replies) are the fantasy that makes the free market seem truly free — what workers really want is to be fucked.

This is what it means that, as Ana says, “Christian’s idea of a relationship is more like a job offer.” And also what it means for the novel to be unconcerned about the contract’s unenforceability. The liberal bug (the state won’t make you do what you promised) is the libertarian/anarchist feature (the state won’t make you do anything at all). More importantly, perhaps, it’s why — despite its unenforceability and despite its redundancy (the safe word really does all the work) — masochism can’t quite let the contract go. For what is standardly described as Fifty Shades’s contribution to the mainstreaming of the S&amp;M lifestyle could more plausibly be described as its participation in what a writer in the Harvard Business Review calls the new “work style” that, as she enthusiastically observes, “more and more people are choosing,” the “contingent work style.” The essence of the contingent work style is that contingent workers are understood not as employees but as “independent contracting parties.” Indeed, the licensing agreement that Uber (perhaps the paradigmatic practitioner of the contingent work style) requires all its drivers to sign explicitly specifies that “no employment contract is created between [the Dominant and the Submissive]”— I mean, “between Uber and the Drivers.” The point of this stipulation for contingent workers is that, as independent contractors, they have “the freedom to be their own boss.” The point for Uber is that because it’s employing bosses not workers, it doesn’t have to pay benefits like social security or workers’ compensation (not to mention the fact that bosses can’t form unions).

In other words, the reason neoliberal masochism won’t just let contract go is because it’s only employment contracts that it really wants to get rid of. After all, by making the neoliberal denial of the difference between employer and employee literal (i.e., by thinking of us all as investing our human capital), real capital saves itself a lot of money. Or, as the lead attorney in the class action suit recently filed against Uber says, “By not classifying its drivers as employees, Uber is shifting the expenses of running a business to its workers.” In Fifty Shades of Grey, it’s not until Christian gives Ana the company she’s been working for as a wedding present that she can fully experience the transcendence of the liberal relation between employer and employee by the neoliberal relationship between independent contractors. (The company is even called “Independent Publishing”!) But Uber drivers can get that same glow just by signing the licensing agreement. And the rest of us can get a version of it every time we rate and are rated by our drivers, hoping for a match as good as Ana’s and Christian’s (and dreading one as bad as Dakota Johnson’s and Jamie Dornan’s).
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<a href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/walter-benn-michaels/">Walter Benn Michaels has just completed a new book, The Beauty of a Social Problem; Photography, Autonomy and Political Economy.</a>

50 Shades of Libertarian Love

50 Shades of Libertarian Love by Walter Benn Michaels

Biology, Destiny, Purity

Biology, Destiny, Purity by Urmila Seshagiri

SEEN FROM A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW on Google Maps, the Bohemian Grove (20601 Bohemian Ave., Monte Rio, Sonoma, California 95462 — you can even see the street view to a certain point) doesn’t seem all that forbidding: A lush valley of timber with occasional clearings through which we can glimpse cottages and outbuildings, there’s nothing behemoth, though surrounding areas have opulent estates, formal gardens, and shapely pools. It looks dull. It probably is. The Grove — site of the “Mid-Summer Encampment” of the exclusive Bohemian Club, where the wealthy and powerful put on skits and cavort and cross-dress and give rise to conspiracy theories — provides both a central image for Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s third collection of poems, Metropole, and a literal cover image (a sepia-toned pastoral snapshot, taken, I hope, without permission). “To be fit / for the world one must periodically leave it, / affectionately,” O’Brien says. His poem reads like a Zagat guide to the Grove, seemingly gleaned from reports both official and infiltrative:
<blockquote style="padding-left: 30px">
Grab our missing spears and begin
to think the Bohemian Grove, trees,
theatricals, songs that hold exquisite
filtering of sunlight down to the boys
were women there in the powerful glades,
in the 20s, there’s nothing like it, to have
loins for the first time running around
in leaves, in the 70s I sang a song of we
became ourselves again as women, specifically
houris, the “leaves of love” falling
by chopper and could see the security cordon…
— from “Bohemian Grove”
</blockquote>
Who shall be allowed to participate in language, in naming and noting, in this world made of words? The book’s title raises the question too, with its attendant issues of center and periphery, capital and province, power and powerlessness. In the mysterious center of power, O’Brien reminds us that, even at play, in secret, naked or in drag, in fantasy and kink, the powerful are never not economic agents, warmongering, destructive. 
O’Brien is unlikely to gain membership to the Bohemian Club by virtue of this book, although geographically he should be eligible, as a resident of Berkeley, where he is a professor at the University of California. Newspapermen founded San Francisco’s all-male Bohemian Club in 1872, with a charter that promoted alcohol, argument, and “good-fellowship among journalists,” but by the turn of the century its summer encampment at Bohemian Grove had become a nexus of wealth and power and The Arts. Their motto is “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here,” which supposedly is a reminder not to talk business, but mostly is just spooky. (Whose motto is about spiders?) They do, of course, talk business, and some of that business has been the establishment of the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atom bomb. 
But they also talk art. The journalist and historian George Wharton James, in his pithily named California: Romantic and Beautiful, The History of its Old Missions and of its Indians; A survey of its Climate, Topography, Deserts, Mountains, Rivers, Valleys, Islands and Coastline; A Description of its Recreations and Festivals; A Review of its Industries; An Account of its Influence upon Prophets, Poets, Artists and Architects; and some reference to what it offers of delight to the Automobilist, Traveller, Sportsman, Pleasure and Health Seeker, With a map and seventy-two plates, of which eight are in colour (1914), had the glorious opportunity to expound on the grand vision of the Bohemian Club, noting that it was founded
&nbsp;
<blockquote style="padding-left: 30px">
by a few of the literary and artistic spirits that found themselves in San Francisco after the first great decline of the gold excitement of 1849. Its members were all individualists. They cared nothing for precedent or other men’s ways of doing things, hence in their annual celebrations they struck peculiar and striking notes of fun and entertainment that made an invitation eagerly sought after.
</blockquote>
Early guests of the Bohemians included Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling, though today’s members are more likely to be defense contractors and mutual fund managers. Every Republican president since William Howard Taft has been a member, along with several Democratic presidents, Henry Kissinger, Jack London, Walter Cronkite, Ambrose Bierce, Henry Ford, Witter Bynner, Barry Goldwater, Bret Harte, Colin Powell, Mark Twain, and Donald Rumsfeld.
<img style="vertical-align: middle;margin: 10px 20px 10px 20px" title="Metropole (jazz cafe), Anonymous" src="http://c323254.r54.cf1.rackcdn.com/1332538288_Metropole (Jazz Café) Anonymous.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="314" />
All of this history bears on O’Brien’s book, which is about the grotesqueries of aesthetics and politics. In O’Brien’s work, the Bohemian Grove becomes an emblem of the art impulse gone awry into its most patriarchic, bourgeois, dangerous, murderous, bloody meaninglessness. In proposing the Grove as a Tartarus of art — and, more generally, that the dominant culture is itself becoming a kind of Bohemian Grove — Metropole is a companion volume to Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas: both are descended from Blake’s understanding that we constantly wrap ourselves in chains, even and especially when we enact performances of liberation. To Blake, when we start to rise from our chains we slip into other, heavier chains that we think are freedom, and each is tougher to escape. From this perspective, the joy we think we feel becomes just another form of agony. In Metropole, the provincial paradoxes of California provide a metaphor for a more universal condition, as the book’s title suggests. At its core, Metropole presents an argument about agony and self-delusion, misery and exploitation, and yet the presence of the poems at all suggests the possibility of transcendence, although the poems make no claims to being transcendent. In the slack spaces and slippages between things, there is something that satisfies me on that fundamental (if ultimately grotesque) Bohemian Grove, I-like-art level; but the poems create, in another area, a disharmony that also satisfies.
Part of this disharmony is the clash between speech and silence, presence and absence. “Vague Cadence” describes “a part of speech without a name” as “a building dream within.” An unclassified part of speech must be invisible — some way a sentence works that isn’t written, but is read nonetheless. Not spoken, but heard. Words repeat almost unnoticed, inside lines, rather than at line-endings — moves, useless, marks, practice, acts, hapless — consonance behind a scrim. It is like a ladder that materializes only as you climb. This holds true for the rest of the book: If the cadence of Metropole is vague, it is all the more alluring for being only dimly perceived, like an army drilling some meaningful, hard-to-interpret distance away.
Perhaps though — as O’Brien gently reminds us later, in the poem “Metropole” — the outsider’s paranoia is a misreading. Here, the pantomime of the Bohemian Grove is compared to the starkness of a bomb testing ground, for bombs, perhaps referring to the U.S. Navy bombing range in Vieques, Puerto Rico:
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Use of these motifs suggests a supple understanding that the face and head can turn repeatedly. The pattern of the shield was raised with spears like current hours sent through time to see, so some believe it written very quickly others soon agreed. The owl or spider hidden on the dollar bill rewarding paranoia is if anything a printer’s mark. Viewed through small embedded lights, North Oakland looks like contests won by quiet whites and pinks the jasmine spills. No chance of living anywhere but testing grounds
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The potential for attention to become its own form has also been a question for the poets who seem most directly to have influenced O’Brien, such as Michael Palmer, Ann Lauterbach, John Ashbery, and Marjorie Welish. O’Brien’s work seems more interpersonal and directly political than theirs, which may be a generational difference. At times the poets of the late 20th century have seemed like mere decorations of a decadent empire, having failed, by and large, to engage the essential matters of their time. O’Brien’s work on the sentence seems to me a direct assault on language itself, and, admittedly failing to unharness the possibility, at least permits attention and focus as, he writes, “a form of enraged sympathy.” 
O’Brien is dealing with the old problem of distinguishing pretense from what we truly need from art, and therefore from each other. He takes a mathematician’s pleasure in attacking a challenging problem, in exploring pattern, shape, logical proofs, and theoretical constructions. In poems such as “Ambien,” “Dizzy Procession,” and the Whitmanesque “Failed Catalog,” he pursues experiments of phrasing all the way to their failure, or verge of failure, redefining failure as “an argument for permission.” If his lines sometimes seem like nonsense, remember that the most powerful lines in sacred texts are often a little nonsensical — they require a leap. (The poet Robert Hass has described the experience of reading O’Brien “like watching Fred Astaire dancing on a mirrored floor.” Fathoms of intellect, comedy, and politics reach far beneath the poems’ elegant surfaces.) The movement of the mind is the movement of obsession, often navigating unwanted and intrusive thoughts, as persistent as grief or as brief as a crush, and the process of a poem inevitably revolves through this territory but only takes form in the pressurization of poetic technique. “Failed Catalog” initially acknowledges failure and concludes with a shrugged reminder that failure has been promised and delivered, dropping off mid-stanza with “etc.” But it’s an “etc.” as loud as the “the the” at the end of Wallace Stevens’s “The Man On The Dump.” 
O’Brien brings his scrupulous attention to prepositions and articles, the smallest units of language, and sees the immense possibility within, the way Blake sought “To see a world in a grain of sand, / And a heaven in a wild flower.” This is more than the grammarian’s nerding-out on parts of speech; it is the exploration of the atom, the subatomic. Armed only with sentences, O’Brien is asking what expectations and assumptions the reader brings to the inner workings of a sentence, of a phrase, of any combination of words, the parts of speech themselves. He is out to understand the possibility of the sentence, including, I think, the reader’s role in making meaning. He doesn’t tap out of this wrestling match against the enemy: It’s a tag team cage match, writer-and-reader to the death against The Problems.
“Metropole,” the 39-page sequence at the core of the book, is written in bands of iambic prose, three bands to a page, a feat of virtuosity that even the skeptical reader must admire. Form’s ghost haunts these pages. Colonial critics would have accused O’Brien of witchcraft for the things he says, and the ways he says them. Words frequently shift function over the course of a sentence, with nouns becoming verbs, objects becoming subjects, pronouns shifting antecedents, creating a very precise kind of dream-speak, as in this funhouse example: “The longer messages go unanswered questions falling down inside a crowd.” Or this: “The sun revolves around the earth revolves around the sun.” As a consequence, these embedded sentences have the intensity of koans or paradoxes or riddles. Their mere presence conveys both seriousness and play, aphoristic syntactic conundrums counterbalanced by sentences that overlap and may or may not match up.
¤
California has always been a home for poets; it’s also always been mostly a poem itself. Among the disputed origins of the word “California” is the Anglo-Norman epic poem La Chanson de Roland (written in 10-syllable lines with a strong medial caesura and symmetrical assonance, much like Beowulf). From then on, the word seems to be a poeticized version of a city along the Crusade route, altered to fit the poem’s formal requirements, perhaps exaggerated through Orientalist exoticism. It begins to appear in literature, in other poems and novels, presaging a rich, magical island far in the distance, beyond Asia. Western civilization invented California before they found it and changed the land to suit the fantasy, the way a poet may adjust syntax and diction to satisfy the ear.
In 1914, James described California poetry thus:
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Her singers have been more natural, more exuberant, less restrained an academic than those of any land yet known to history, and they have sung a larger truth into the inner consciousness of the thoughtful world, in that they have set a new standard, viz., that pure naturalness is to be preferred to conventional artificiality, that spontaneous expression is ever superior and more to be desired than labored and studied formal periods … I venture the assertion that there is one way, and one way only, to know and understand California. That is the way of love. One hour of love will reveal more, grasp more, comprehend more than a year of critical study. If you take the critical attitude — which in nine cases out of ten is the ignorant attitude — the antagonism set up renders sympathetic understanding impossible.
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Whereas in the July 19, 2011 Los Angeles Times, the obituary for California poetry was half-written:
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With still to-be-determined state budget cuts looming, University of California Press has decided to suspend the publication of its poetry book series New California Poetry. The press expects to take a cut of about 10% in direct funding from the University of California.
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It was not merely the expected budget cuts that motivated the suspension of the New California Poetry series, which in its time has published 33 books, including Metropole and O’Brien’s two previous volumes. UC Press Director Alison Mudditt, whose appointment was announced in December, and who makes $287,757.50 a year, gently reminded the Times that “the shifting marketplace for books and publishing are of even greater concern. The far bigger challenges are the structural ones to our industry and markets which (not unlike the newspaper industry!) require us to rethink and retool to remain a vibrant and relevant voice in the digital age.” She is probably correct that the digital age has little room for poetry, although it’s a matter of choice about what fits in a room. I think of the old conundrum of who, among the peoples of Earth facing the planet’s destruction, should be sent on a theoretical space mission to continue humanity. Doctors? Engineers? Popes? 
Let’s shoot poets, the press’s decision seems to say — either into space, where their important work can bother someone else, or perhaps with tranquilizing darts to keep them calm until a cure is found. A survey of industry professionals might reveal several possible cures, including, as Muddit says, the sudden manifestation of an angel investor to underwrite the series; but also, they perhaps when daydreaming imagine, the final silence of a poetry-reading audience, to erase the minute fraction, the speck from market research data. In suspended animation, the New California Poetry Series will be allowed to be forgotten, one more kind of human love atrophied, so that the UC Press may turn its attention away from Wharton James’s Prophets, Poets, Artists and Architects toward California’s Automobilist, Traveller, Sportsman, Pleasure and Health Seeker. 
I am not being fair, of course. The UC Press continues to publish poetry, including important works from Ian Hamilton Finlay, and has an important backlist of work by Robert Duncan, Frank O’Hara, Paul Celan, and many fine anthologies. But so casually relinquishing commitment to serious contemporary poetry diminishes those older volumes as well. The problem-solving mind is at work here, as it is throughout government and business. Authorizing and deauthorizing art is part of California’s long guidance by the fantasies of the Romantic period. Dead poets are covered in laurels; live poets are left behind.
One of the pleasures of reading the New California Poetry series has been knowing that I’ll witness something new, hear a line I haven’t imagined before, and have my intellect and imagination engaged and pressed. It has published landmark books, including Keith Waldrop’sTranscendental Studies, which won the National Book Award in 2009, Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, and Fanny Howe’s Selected Poems, along with groundbreaking titles by Brian Blanchfield, Julia Gridley, Laura Mullen, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Joshua Clover, Leslie Scalapino, Juliana Spahr, Brian Teare, and Srikanth Reddy. The New California Poetry series has served poetry as Silicon Valley serves the software industry, offering consistent innovation, and O’Brien’s Metropole is one of the best of their books. They’ve proven that a publisher can be like the Bohemian Grove, in the best sense: an echo chamber and a place for serious play, where art and business can meet and try to come to terms.
I hope the UC Press is able to resuscitate the New California Poetry series; barring that I hope that its poets find publishers who will be dedicated to their work. According to Forrest Gander, one of the four co-editors of the series (along with Hass, Brenda Hillman, and Calvin Bedient), the series is dormant, “as a cave is said to be, not dead”; he believes that the support within the UC Press exists to re-launch it, with luck and fortune. That’s how poetry always survives, through luck and fortune. And money also helps.
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Weaving Spiders Come Not Here

The Program Era and the Mainly White Room by  Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young

THE LOST GOSPEL is not the worst book ever written. I once attended a party where I was subjected to an excerpt of dinosaur erotica. It was a lovely gathering otherwise, but my ears were assaulted by pages from Taken by the T-Rex. I will say no more for fear that I will corrupt you, gentle reader. The silver lining of my turpid tale is that I now have a new barometer for beastly books. While The Lost Gospel is no match for dinosaur erotica, it is equally daring.
Here are some of the claims that Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson make: (1) a 6th-century text that never once refers to Jesus or Mary Magdalene is secretly about Jesus, Mary, and their children; (2) the character “Joseph” named in this text represents Jesus, Apollo, Helios, Mithras, and a Roman emperor simultaneously; (3) Mary Magdalene was not Jewish and was, moreover, a priestess of Artemis; (4) when Jesus refers to the Queen of Sheba (Matt 12:42), he is speaking of Mary in code; (5) Jesus — not a peasant, but a powerful figure in the world of Roman politics — was the victim of not one but two assassination attempts, both of which he survived; (6) the Roman general Germanicus was the second threat to Jesus, but a Roman prefect named Sejanus saved him, Mary, and their children; and (7) the wine of the Last Supper symbolized Mary’s menstrual blood. As you will see below, this is only a small sampling of this book’s originality.

What, you might wonder, warrants such derring-do? They take a 2nd-century fiction written about two characters from Genesis — Joseph and Aseneth (here referring to the son of Israel; compare to Genesis chs. 41, 46) — and decode this story’s “true” meaning. The story of Joseph and Aseneth, according to Jacobovici and Wilson, is really the secret history of Mary Magdalene and her husband, Jesus. To keep the secret of their marriage and family, various Gnostic authors from the 2nd to the 6th centuries wrote “Joseph” when they really meant Jesus, and “Aseneth” when they meant Mary. This allows Jacobovici and Wilson to rewrite the history of Jesus. They conclude: “Joseph and Aseneth gives us a glimpse into a story untainted by later Roman theology. We finally have a document that was slated for the fire, but is now seeing the light of the day.”

In order to arrive at such a conclusion, the authors must employ conspiracy theories and find hidden meanings behind the story’s plot, characters, and symbols. This fiction is without a doubt about the patriarch Joseph’s marriage to a foreign woman in Egypt named Aseneth. The story was of interest to later Jews (and perhaps Christians) because it was irregular — in many cases taboo — for Jewish men to take foreign wives. Joseph and Aseneth was written from this impetus. Aseneth is made to look like the perfect bride and convert. Jacobovici and Wilson are correct that the story employs symbolism. For example, Joseph’s depiction is reminiscent of the sun gods of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. But the authors stretch credulity by forcing Jesus’ divinity into this symbolism. They write: “Helios’ imagery was applied by Christians not to a Sun god, but to a ‘son’ god — to Jesus and Jesus alone.” It should be obvious to anyone that “son” and “sun” are homophones in English and that this ancient fiction was not written in English (it was first written in Greek). Jacobovici and Wilson certainly know this, but mislead their readers anyway. Indeed, they do so repeatedly, with tenuous connections, confused logic, and blatantly incorrect claims throughout the book.

For example, the authors argue that a celibate man in first-century Galilee would have been shocking, so Jesus must have been married. While overstated, we can follow their intended logic. But they also maintain throughout the book that Jesus’ marriage was so scandalous that it had to be covered up. So which was it? Was Jesus’ sexuality scandalous to his first followers or not?

Jacobovici and Wilson offer us another example of confused logic as they discuss Mary Magdalene’s “true” identity as a gentile priestess of Artemis (if this sounds outlandish, you will share this misgiving with professional historians everywhere). The authors claim that the religion of Jesus was Judaism and that his first followers were Jewish. This much is uncontroversial. But they would have us believe that Rabbi Jesus married a gentile priestess and that this fact was covered up by the Apostle Paul’s community. Oddly and awkwardly, the authors suggest that Paul (who is best known for his inclusion of non-Jews) was offended by Jesus’ marriage to a non-Jew. Moreover, Jesus — who was purely Jewish and not corrupted by Roman theology — forsook the religion of his birth to wed a foreigner. The authors are either confused or purposely attempting to confuse.

This happens so often in the book that I must conclude that its authors use confusion as a matter of strategy. The very title of the book is built upon this sort of sensationalized misinformation. The Lost Gospel is based on a text that is not a gospel and was not lost. The authors attempt to explain that the manuscript was “lost” in the British Library, labeled British Library Manuscript Number 17,202. They give the impression that this document was all but neglected by modern interpreters as it collected dust in the archives. This is false, and they know it’s false. They claim elsewhere that several copies of this story are “well preserved” in Christian monasteries, and that “Christians have read, treasured, translated, expanded, and preserved” this text. Even after admitting the fact, much of the first half of their book endeavors to promote Joseph and Aseneth as a grand conspiracy.

The second half of The Lost Gospel offers a reconstruction of first-century history that reads like fan fiction. After describing “the greatest wedding of all time,” Jacobovici and Wilson recount the plot to “kill Jesus, abduct Mary the Magdalene, and murder the kids.” The villain is Germanicus, the nephew of Tiberius (never mind that he died in 19 CE). Germanicus, it shouldn’t surprise you at this point, is not mentioned by name in the text of Joseph and Aseneth. Rather he is represented by the encoded name, “son of Pharaoh.” The plot fails, however. Helped by the heroic Sejanus, Jesus survives and the non-Jewish church of Mary Magdalene becomes Gnostic Christianity. This sect begins to venerate Mary as a goddess alongside the Son of God.

The authors give us an extremely implausible plot. They suggestively ask, “Who wanted to kill Jesus early in his mission? What did he do that merited death in their eyes? Was it simply because his wife was incredibly beautiful?” This could easily be the most extravagant of their many irresponsible suggestions: the power players of the Roman Empire might have targeted Jesus because… Mary Magdalene, his wife, was too alluring! By the end of chapter 15, I half-expected NFL heartthrob Rob Gronkowski to enter the fray. Gronk’s inclusion would have fit well with the authors’ haphazard anachronisms as they skip from Hebrew Bible legend, to 6th-century manuscript, to 3rd-century Christian debates, to 21st-century forgeries, all in service of sexualizing a first-century woman.

This brings me to my most serious concern with the entire Mary Magdalene enterprise. Mary was a follower of Jesus and an important witness to his impact upon history. Our earliest and best sources say little of her sexuality. But she continues to scandalize the Christianized West because she is unattached to a male. The West, it seems, cannot stand to leave her sexuality unexplained. We have therefore turned her into a sinner, a prostitute, a wealthy courtesan, Jesus’ girlfriend, Jesus’ wife, and (now with this book) a sexualized goddess. The Lost Gospel reflects and contributes to our need to explain significant women in sexualized terms. What Jacobovici and Wilson have demonstrated is that we will consume fan fiction disguised as history without thinking twice about our misogynistic tendencies. I don’t know if the authors have such tendencies, but they obviously intend to capitalize on ours.

The Lost Gospel by Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson is not the worst book ever written. After all, I have heard remarkable accolades for A Gronking to Remember. But The Lost Gospel is perhaps the worst book ever written about Jesus.
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<div><a href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/anthony-le-donne/">Anthony Le Donne (PhD, Durham) is the author of The Wife of Jesus: Ancient Texts and Modern Scandals.</a></div>
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LARB Digital eDitions #43: 2015 Anthology

January 2016124 pages