Happiness is little magazines
The first of occasional highlights from lit journals and literary mags
One thing I miss about being an editor is curating writing and essays. As a consolation prize, I’ll use this space to occasionally celebrate some of what I’ve been reading in “little magazines”—the literary journals and niche critical publications that shape culture even if they are not consumed as mass culture.1 I think these publications are the lifeblood of culture. They are also regularly sources of surprise, delight, and challenge. The are piled around our house because I can never let go of the treasures therein.
Without further adieu, a few pieces I’ve especially appreciated over the last few weeks:
Kenyon Review: “The Journal of Anodyne Historical Documents” by Peter M. Kazon
I probably loved this, at least in part, because it felt like a throwback to the experimental, “postmodern” fiction of the 90s (think: Julian Barnes’, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters). Ostensibly a “Personal Encyclopedia,” the alphabetical entries draw us into a drama of suffering and love in the horrifying age of AIDS. The experience manages to be both cosmic and intimate. Refuses paraphrase.
Liberties: “The Olive Branch of Oblivion” by Linda Kinstler
Liberties is, hands-down, the most provocative, unpredictable journal of thought & culture right now. This essay is a great example of an essay I disagree with profoundly and yet learned so much from. It occasioned questions I’ve never asked before. Challenges “devotees of what has become a secular religion of remembrance,” Kinstler offers a brief for the ancient, pagan principle of oblivion—an erasure for the sake of the future. Oblivion “was a paradoxical promise to never remember and to always remember. … Abiding by its rules, we acknowledge that who we have been is not the same as who we are, or who we may yet become.”
Kinstler recognizes that oblivion is antithetical to forgiveness: “To forget a transgression is a distinct moral act that liberates its subject from the dueling imperatives to either avenge the wrong or to forgive it. It is, in this sense, an important rejection of the language of reconciliation, of loving one’s enemy. It offers a path forward where this kind of ‘love’ is unimaginable, if not impossible.” To which I would only add: this kind of love is always unimaginable, always impossible. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
Yale Review: “Three Poems” by Catherine Barnett
Read all three (including “Nicholson Baker and I”) but do not miss “The Search.”
Paris Review: “The Art of Poetry No. 115,” a conversation with Louise Glück
A master class and a literary experience in itself. What a mind. Any writer would profit from this. I note just one gem, in response to a question about her writing habits:
I don’t think I write through transition periods. What happens to me is that something stops, something ends, something is brought to a closure. Then I have nothing—I’ve used up whatever it is that I had and must wait for the well to fill up again. That’s what you tell yourself, but it doesn’t feel like a sanguine experience of sitting quietly while the well fills up. It seems like an experience of desolation, loss, even a kind of panic. The thing you would wish to be doing, you can’t do. I’ve been through a lot of those periods, and what seems to happen, or what has happened in the past, is that after a year or two, or whatever the duration, another sound emerges—and it really is another sound. It’s another way of thinking about a poem or making a poem, a different kind of speech to use, from the Delphic to the demotic. Suddenly I’ll hear a line—you can’t hear this yourself when I read, because my voice tends to pasteurize everything—suddenly I’ll realize that I’m being sent some sort of message, a new path, and I try it on.
New York Review of Books: “The Workings of the Spirit” by Peter Brown
This is vintage Brown: erudite, generous, sensitive, curious. He is reviewing Peter Heather’s ambitious new history, Christendom (which I hope to somehow find time to read) and show appreciation for the sweep of what he’s accomplished. But for me, the second half of Brown’s essay is fascinating insofar as he gently challenges Heather’s confident naturalism—as if all the dynamics of Christendom from 300-1300 can be explained in terms politics and power dynamics. “Let me make a suggestion,” Brown proposes: “modern historiography of the expansion of the early Church seems to have left little room for the Holy Ghost.” What follows is a remarkable intervention to read in the NYRB.
Bonus: “Translation without Angels,” a poem by Walt Hunter in NYRB
I was given an idea of the good
and I was taken quickly from
the same idea, though at first it was as simple
as a tree I saw the ground, conserving summer,
populate with geese, some deer, the pachysandra.
The good was what I had without myself.
When I describe it now, the whole scene strikes me
as the remnants of the kingdom of ends.
Or the Marian lyric when the help for pain
has only recently departed.
I was given
understanding without mercy, over and over.
Understanding only ever changed the tree
to a darker color, light and dark
and light and dark and darker still
like a manifestation of the March wind.
I was given waiting for the person I loved,
for children, given time, and I was taken
hostage by the elements of time before I knew it.
I was placed without my knowledge or approval
in the middle of the tree and grew within it.
Happy reading. Til next time.
“Little” is, of course, a relative term. The one mag I’ll include here that’s perhaps on the bubble of “little” is the New York Review of Books with a reported circulation of 135K. The Atlantic, by comparison, reports circulation of 833K. The Paris Review, the most prestigious literary journal in the country, has a circulation of 28K.