Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm’s obituaries invariably mention the historian’s “Age of…” series — The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875, The Age of Empire: 1874-1914 and The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991. Those books do make an impressive set.

It was his essays, however, that I found myself returning to, having recalled Hobsbawm insightfully remarking on subjects I also chose to address. Open Letters Monthly, for instance, published (under a title I never liked) something I wrote about jazz festivals in which I cite Hobsbawm’s 1994 essay “Jazz Comes to Europe.” A piece I composed concerning Labor Day (forthcoming in Cream City Review) is informed by another essay collected in Hobsbawm’s Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion, and Jazz.

The Guardian reports that Hobsbawm submitted a manuscript to his publisher a few months before his death. It was a collection of essays.

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Mongrel Empire & Detroit

Recently I learned that soon I will no longer be Detroit’s sole Mongrel Empire Press author. The Norman, Oklahoma-based publisher, which issued my essay collection Fighters & Writers in 2010, plans to issue Walking into Solstice, poems by Anca Vlasopolos, this year.

 

As it happens, Vlasopolos was teaching at Wayne State University during my graduate studies days there, though I didn’t know her then. But since we have a city, a university and a publisher in common, we’ve discussed the obviously appropriate idea of holding joint readings. Some of her poems posted at The Stone Hobo and Beasts in a Populous City, with their images of bruises from punches and 24-caliber fists, suggest we have some thematic commonalities as well.

 

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Rodwan Does Still Write

Although the long temporal gap between the last post and this one might suggest otherwise, the title of this site remains true. Here’s some evidence: two essays and a short story.

• “The Fighting Life: Boxing and Identity in Novels by Philip Roth and Norman Mailer,” Philip Roth Studies, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2011, pp. 83-96.
• “The Great Migration,” The American Interest, Vol. VII, No. 1, September/October 2011, pp. 95-99.
• “The Punch Not Thrown,” Spot Literary Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 2011, pp. 38-39.

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Notable Essays of Illness

In what feels to me like an almost perfect development, something I wrote made the list of Notable Essays of 2009 in The Best American Essays 2010, edited by Christopher Hitchens.

I say “almost” because it would have been better to best rather than notable, but I happily take the honor. The proximity to perfection relates to an earlier post in which I mentioned both Hitchens’s editorship and his writing about his own health. I predicted that the anthology would include what I called “essays of illness.” (It does. Nurse Jane Churchon writes about pronouncing people dead. Ron Rindo describes life with Ménière’s disease.) I also mentioned my own contribution to the genre, the very work declared notable: “Weight Loss: A Love Story,” which first appeared in Blood & Thunder: Musing on the Art of Medicine and is also included in Fighters & Writers.

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Kundera Stumbles

Convincing people that there’s something to mourn in a “post-art” era, and that what has been lost can be recovered with a renewed commitment to art, will take more than exclamation-point laden proclamations about art’s importance. Reviving interest in neglected artists requires more than italicized insistence on their meritorious achievements. Yet these sorts of inadequate maneuvers too often characterize Encounter, Milan Kundera’s latest tribute to the novel and other art forms. (I offer a more detailed discussion of the book in the September 2010 Open Letters Monthly.) I wish I could have mustered the enthusiasm for Encounter that John Simon does in the New York Times, but I simply couldn’t.

As it happens, I often agree with what Kundera says, but I know that asserting something and effectively making an argument aren’t the same things, which he seems to forget. The writer of some glorious novels and some superior nonfiction could have displayed a bit more care for the art of the essay this time around, in my opinion. (I say more about Kundera, as well as Albert Camus, whom I also discuss in connection with Encounter, in an essay in the forthcoming fall 2010 issue of Spot Literary Magazine.)

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Frank Kermode’s Legacy

Does the death of literary critic and scholar Frank Kermode on August 17 signal the impending end of a cultural epoch?

Adam Kirsch, senior editor at the New Republic thinks so. Kermode “was one of the last exemplars of an ideal that dates back at least to Matthew Arnold: the ideal of the literary critic as the humanist par excellence,” Kirsch writes in Slate. “What gave the critic his special authority was the way that he thought and wrote at the intersection – of the classics and the contemporary world, of literature and society, of the academy and the common reader.” In addition to teaching at Cambridge and Columbia, Kermode authored or edited more than fifty books. He wrote regularly for publications such as the London Review of Books, which he helped initiate, and the New York Review of Books.

As it happens, one of the essays in Fighters & Writers germinated with an NYRB review Kermode wrote of a collection of nonfiction by George Orwell. A reference Kermode made to an accusation that could have radically altered Orwell’s reputation prompted me to investigate the charge, delve into books about Orwell, revisit his work and produce a personal essay about his lasting impact on me.

Fighters & Writers also includes a piece on Martin Amis, whose The War against Cliché Kermode discusses in a biting passage Kirsch quotes in his obituary. Kirsch wrote one of the more astute assessments of another Amis collection, The Second Plane, as I note in my essay about that book.

I’d like to think Kirsch is wrong about a literary era’s death coinciding with Kermode’s. I mention the connections with my work simply to illustrate that the intersection Kermode mapped still sees some traffic.

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Essays of Illness

Every year I read Best American Essays – both because I’m one of those oddballs who actually enjoys essays and because I want to know what the competition is up to – and every year I’m struck by the popularity of morbidity and mortality as subjects of short nonfiction. The writers selected may contemplate fatal or less serious diseases, they may ponder the degeneration of their own health or someone else’s, but each volume reliably includes at least one essay on decay and death, and usually more than one.

Of course I recognize that such fundamental matters merit essayists’ consideration and that individuals’ experiences of sickness can yield compelling stories. Still, with so many essays of illness out there, and because of a constitutional unease with sharing intimate personal information with strangers, I hesitated before adding to the celebrated sub-genre.

But I did contribute to it. I wrote about physical conditions my wife and I confronted in a piece first published in a journal called Blood & Thunder: Musing on the Art of Medicine and subsequently included in Fighters & Writers.

Perhaps the way to explain my doing this is to rework a favorite line of Christopher Hitchens’s and say what matters is not what you write about but how you write. Hitchens writes about his struggle with cancer in the September 2010 issue of Vanity Fair. It is a revealing column – more openly personal than his argumentative memoir Hitch-22. It’s also a fine piece of writing, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in a future “best of” anthology. As it happens, Hitchens edited the forthcoming 2010 edition of Best American Essays. I would be surprised if there isn’t at least one essay of illness in it (even if he did make his picks before his diagnosis).

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