New at The Point: an incisive look at Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis that calls it “the most prescient American novel of the past fifteen years” and asks,”is it possible to mount any meaningful resistance to capitalism on the level of culture?” The latest print issue features this essay as well as a symposium on privacy, and will be launched at a release party in Hyde Park on Saturday night.
The Point Issue 9: On Art, Commerce, and the Prescience of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
Brutalised Africans Made Glasgow
Amidst increasing calls to “memorialize slavery’s ties with Glasgow in a more sensitive way,” Scottish poet Kate Tough recently published a tribute poem, “People Made Glasgow.” Tough calls on the city to install a permanent slavery exhibit, a memorial garden, or new street names as well.
“I have always wondered.”
John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Diary” for the Financial Times features the Mars Curiosity, Quaker school songs, and all sorts of family bonding.
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Escape to the Seaside
“You have turned to stone. A hairline crack runs along your entire length from crown to toe. Your feet have turned to liquid, and you are melting onto the kitchen floor.” Are you living in an Elena Ferrante novel? Li Sian Goh at The Toast has compiled a helpful list of ways to tell whether or not you might be a character in Ferrante’s final Neapolitan novel, The Story of the Lost Child.
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In This Here Place
“In this here place, we flesh; … Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it.” Toni Morrison‘s Beloved as featured in a powerful essay by Allyson Hobbs for The Root about black life, Philando Castile, “and the trauma that remains.” See also: a consideration of parallels between Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic and The Odyssey.
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Envying Men
What’s the one thing that Rivka Galchen envies about men? Well, “the envious thought was simply that a man can have a baby that his romantic partner doesn’t know about. This is a crazy thought, of course, but I find myself feeling it with such sincerity that I cannot see its edges.”
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Author as Commercial Mechanism
Has Edward St. Aubyn killed the existentialist novel? Jacob Kiernan at Full Stop Magazine has a few ideas about it. If it’s existential quandary you’re after, this essay for The Millions on the beautiful afterlife of books–which may not be so much of an afterlife, after all–will be perfect for you.
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Translating on a Tether
“There are so many ways to look at translation. One that has recently occurred to me is that of a tether: the translator is tethered to the meaning of the original the way an animal can be tethered to a stake. You can’t take off and roam the hills, but you can definitely move around and experience a comfortable degree of freedom.” Asymptote talks with Juliet Winters Carpenter about Japanese tanka poetry, Machi Tawara‘s Salad Anniversary, and the careful balance of translation.
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Point Omega is a wonderful book as well. The literary establishment, and those prone to pick their books according to the latest hype and fashion, wrote off DeLillo after Underworld, acted as if he was an old man with nothing left to say, or, that what he had to say was of little importance and derivative of his earliest work. But The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and Point Omega and three of his best novels. DeLillo is a brilliant diagnostician of American culture, and that ability hasn’t abated with time, it’s only gotten more acute. The problem is you have to work, really work, while reading his prose, and some people just don’t want to. They want their truth to go down easy. DeLillo is not easy, but he’s essential. Always has been, always will be. When Cosmopolis came out it was waved off with a sigh. In this way late DeLillo reminds me of late Kubrick (of The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut), in that he is only getting better with age, but no one will admit it, because in this country, to be old is tantamount to being invisible at worst, or being considered irrelevant at best.