Protégés
An Update/Addendum.
I’ll have a new essay up next week (possibly two!); I’m having a trusted reader look one over for me the weekend. It’s a strange time to be writing: there’s pressure to try to keep up with rapidly unfolding events, but I know very well that I’m not well-informed or insightful enough a political writer, like Rebecca Solnit, to produce anything on short notice that’ll be worth your time. So instead I’m taking my time to try to write something that will be. Plus, of course, there’s the undermining suspicion that writing is a silly impotent thing to be doing at a time when the other side is murdering us in the streets—like bringing an epigram to a gun fight. In the meantime:
This post is to promote new work by two of my former students, the twin subjects of my earlier essay Protégé.
Madeline Cash has just published her first novel, Lost Lambs, which is, among many other things, very funny; there are good jokes and wordplay in almost every paragraph, but there was one—kind of a throwaway line, really—that kept coming back to me for weeks. Any time I’d spontaneously start laughing, my girlfriend would ask: “‘Italy World’ again?” But it’s not only funny; it’s a smart, sad, affectionate novel about family. Also there’s a secret sex cult in it.
And Naomi Brenman has a new essay up on her own substack. It is not entirely unfunny, but humor is hardly the main thing going on in it; in fact this one is frankly harrowing. Naomi’s work does not fuck around. She goes deep—straight into God and death and the big questions. She doesn’t pretend to have answers, but she never comes up empty-handed, either.
I am achingly proud of my two former students—now colleagues—as they pursue their separate trajectories.
Speaking of epigrams at gunfights reminded me of this quote from Nick Jaina:
“Writing a poem is like trying to halt a supertanker by holding a dandelion up to it. You can laugh at the frivolity of it. You can ridicule the person for doing such a thing. But—and I’m not saying this makes you one of them—when you laugh at poets, you laugh alongside tyrants. You are standing next to the powerful and the angry and the rich, and you might as well be a bully too, laughing at the weak person cutting snowflakes out of tissue paper. Yes, you are right. But is right everything you want to be?”
"Plus, of course, there’s the undermining suspicion that writing is a silly impotent thing to be doing at a time when the other side is murdering us in the streets—like bringing an epigram to a gun fight."
Fair point. I think a lot of us feel impotent in the face of this shit. What can I really, actually do to make a difference? But calling it out and for what it is still matters. Standing for basic human decency still matters. And obviously, it's more practical than taking the eye-for-an-eye route. Keep fighting the good fight. The pen (Keyboard?) may not be the most devastating of weapons, but you use what you have. And unless action movies have lied to me, a well placed pen to the neck can win the fight.
Thank you for your work!