Francis Spufford’s fictionalized book Red Plenty looks to the 1950s-1960s “cybernetics” initiative to answer one of the main questions about the USSR: “Could the Soviet project to build communism have succeeded, or was it doomed to failure from the start?” In his review for The Hoover Institution, Marshall Poe contends the latter.
Was the Soviet Union doomed to fail?
Are Books Clutter?
When Marie Kondo's Netflix show came out, Hannah McGregor writes for Electric Literature, "the Internet suddenly had a lot of opinions about clutter."
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Defense Against Detractors
Recommended reading: Adele Waldman defends the purpose and form of the novel and balances David Shield‘s Reality Hunger against Anna Karenina.
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Overhearing the Wisdom
Recommended Listening: Poet Rachel Zucker speaks with John Murillo about duende and the ethics of writing poetry.
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Going In
In 2012, the Portuguese writer José Luís Peixoto, on the occasion of Kim Il-Sung’s 100th birthday, went to North Korea for a fifteen-day trip. The experience led him to write a travel memoir, Inside the Secret, which you can read in serialized form online at Ninth Letter magazine. You could also read Pulitzer laureate Adam Johnson’s new Granta essay about the country.
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On Representation
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White Noise on White Noise
“In the silence, there is solitude. In the solitude, there is silence. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.” Don DeLillo, author of White Noise, “reviews“ Taylor Swift‘s white noise for The Atlantic.
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I’m not a Hoover Institution dude, but yeah, the Soviet project was essentially a totalitarian project, from Lenin on. Terror and mass death on the top end and incompetence and decay at the bottom were inevitable. When you decided people are good or bad depending on the groups they supposedly belong to, you don’t get a system that can succeed in making life better.