2023 read #88: Whereas by Layli Long Soldier.

Whereas by Layli Long Soldier

106 pages

Published 2017

Read from August 17 to August 18

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

The first half of this collection explores how language is shaped for propaganda as well as for truth. The violence of colonialism and its empty depravities, the fragmentation of self and social bonds, the scattered bones it leaves behind, all latticed and woven into fragmentary imagery and misleading occlusions. Words are tools of empire, carelessly wielded so long as the results are the same. The American empire breaches treaties with impunity. Words, however, are also possessions of the dispossessed. 

Balancing words to figure an understanding of landscape and language, Long Soldier pulls us through dizzying heights of diction, the vertigo of overlapping sounds and meaning, gaps left behind by genocide and the deliberate gutting of many cultures on behalf of the American empire. In the gaps are words too large to emerge from one throat. Grief too large to encompass condenses into loss.

“A poem about writing, bo-ring,” begins one section of “Vaporitive,” then concludes, “What am I doing here, writing. What am I doing here righting the page at funerals.” The next section muses, “I notice the carcass and her bark: both absent. / So I learn to write around it, the meat, in wide circles to be heard.”

The second half is a response to the cynical delivery and language of the 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. To call the resolution performative would imply that anyone behind it cared enough to perform. Long Soldier’s rebuttal is astonishing, inexorable and nearly breathless, a document of a lifetime — many lifetimes — of systematic disempowerment, marginalization, partitioning. Generations of genocide and dehumanization by the colonial hordes, caught and illuminated in the language of the Resolution and in the interactions Long Soldier relates, with strangers, with family, with self, with separation. “(2) Resolutions” is as stunning a work of poetry I’ve ever encountered.

2016 read #70: Laughter in Ancient Rome by Mary Beard.

Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up by Mary Beard
278 pages
Published 2014
Read from September 4 to September 9
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I enjoyed Mary Beard's snark and snappy-but-educational style in her popular history, SPQR -- so much so that, after I finished it, I immediately looked up her other works. This one caught my eye: a book about Roman laughter and jokes from a scholar gifted with that rare combination of wit, writing ability, and authoritative knowledge. What could possibly be better?

I suspected my error the moment inter-library loan put the volume in my hands and I saw it was from the University of California Press, published as part of a line of classical lecture series. I still enjoyed Laughter, but it was a dense, technical work, full of the convolutions of postmodern scholarship in the humanities. (Beard vows in the preface, "My aim is to make the subject of Roman laughter a bit more complicated, indeed a bit messier, rather than to tidy it up.") This is a worthy goal -- fatuous simplifications and over-general "explanations" are a pest to be rooted out and burned away -- but the English language has yet to arrive at a fluent way to handle the necessary backtrackings, subordinate clauses, and complexification of statements this entails. I'm having a hard time even getting across what I mean (though, to be fair to myself, I've been out of academia for six years, and it's unseasonably hot and sticky as I struggle to write this review). Beard pushes bravely through the thickets of po-mo social science and emerges with, mostly, a surprisingly readable work, but popular history this is not. It's fascinating, largely because of Beard's skill at making such thick stuff readable, but for a casual reader who keyed in on the title and expected hilarity, it's a bit of a disappointment.

2016 read #59: Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane.

Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
342 pages
Published 2015
Read from July 22 to July 28
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Much of the critical coverage I've seen relating to this book emphasized its role as a "word-hoard." At least one review gently chided Macfarlane for producing what at times amounts to a topographic dictionary; I put off reading Landmarks for months, in fact, persuaded that it sounded more apt as a reference volume than an edifying read. The word-hoards, however, make up only half of the raison d'être of this volume. Landmarks is equally if not more so a wayfinding exercise through Macfarlane's influences as a writer, a protracted argument by example in support of a particular school of nature writing. Many of the chapters began life as introductions to the foundational texts (and authors) Macfarlane visits. The visits range from moving epitaphs (the chapter on Roger Deakin) to cursory overviews that quickly veer away to different authors altogether (the "North-Minded" chapter begins as an ostensible examination of Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams but spends far more words introducing Peter Davidson). Macfarlane produces some of his most precise and elegant prose in pursuit of these authors, but its beauty is often pulled up short by his subject matter -- a guided tour of a writer's favorite books, no matter how elegantly worded, is always going to carry the stigma of a listicle.

The word-hoard, in its turn, is fascinating, but so loaded with Gaelic words and regional synonyms for general terms that its usefulness to an outside writer is limited, except in its role as a prompt to imagination and specificity. Which, after all, is Macfarlane's central argument throughout Landmarks. Great nature writing demands precision of meaning; the culture-wide drain of that precise awareness of the natural world is what Macfarlane, in his own way, hopes to avert, or at least delay.

2013 read #99: The Stories of English by David Crystal.

The Stories of English by David Crystal
534 pages
Published 2004
Read from July 21(?) to July 29
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

This is the first review I'm writing after the great laptop disaster. It is Weird As Hell typing on a keyboard with a working E key. I keep wanting to hit CTRL-V every single time there's an E coming up. My fingers keep fouling each other on the keyboard. It doesn't help that this is a big clacky keyboard of the sort libraries have been using for the last decade or two. Give me a laptop keyboard almost any day. So long as all the keys actually work.

Anyway, this was a pretty good book. Much more informative than Bryson's Mother Tongue, albeit far less entertaining. Crystal doesn't become utterly dry at any point, but it does seem to drag on a bit in spots. As usual with me, I most enjoyed the chapters dealing with the oldest permutations of the language; I annoyed Jen with my constant attempts to sound out the Old English bits sprinkled throughout the first part of the book. But even the post-Tudor material was interesting to me, in part because my knowledge of British history peters out by Elizabeth's time. For a book with the stated goal of "telling the stories" of dialect English, of "non-standard" language, it's really kind of baffling how so little space gets devoted to English overseas; between them, American, Canadian, Australian, Indian, and African Englishes get maybe an entire chapter of coverage.

I'm sure there was a lot more I could have said about this book if I cared to, but I haven't had to write anything on a public library terminal in ages, and between that and this keyboard, the whole situation is not conducive to profound thought.

2013 read #67: The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson.

The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson
245 pages
Published 1990
Read from May 29 to May 30
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

This was a solidly entertaining book in the expected Bryson fashion, but just a little bit underwhelming. It was good, but lacked a certain punchy je ne sais quoi that elevates Bryson's very best work, such as In a Sunburned Country. Partly this underwhelming effect may be due to my coming to this book so late, after absorbing much the same information and humor (or at least halfhearted approximations of the same) from a few dozen Cracked and io9 articles and one or two other books on the peccadilloes of language. Bryson can't be faulted for that. Nonetheless I finished this book feeling there should have been a lot more to it, both in substance and in humor.