Several years ago, N. K. Jemisin, the fantasy and science-fiction author, had a dream that shook her. In her sleep, she found herself standing in a surreal tableau with a massif floating in the distance. “It was a chunk of rock shaped like a volcanic cone—a cone-shaped smoking mountain,” she recalled. Standing before the formation was a black woman in her mid-forties, with dreadlocks, who appeared to be holding the volcano aloft with her mind. She was glaring down at Jemisin and radiating anger. Jemisin did not know how she had triggered the woman’s fury, but she believed that, if she did not ameliorate it quickly, the woman would hurl the smoldering massif at her.
Jemisin awoke in a sweat and jotted down what she had seen. “I need to know how that person became who she is—a woman so angry that she was willing to move mountains,” she told me. “She was angry in a slow burn, with the kind of anger that is righteous, enough to change a planet. That’s a person who has been through so much shit that she has been pushed into becoming a leader. That’s an M.L.K. I needed to build a world that would explain her.”
When I meet with Errol Morris, the browser on his desktop is open to his Twitter profile. On another desk close by sits a wooden box, inlaid with velvet, and filled with row after row of glass eyes. They remind me of the strabismus that robbed Morris of stereoscopic vision as a boy. They’re also an unavoidable metaphor for the lenses of the camera through which Morris has forged his life’s work. But it’s the intrusion of that other prosthesis, the many-eyed lens of social media, that permeates this scholarly, Saturday quiet at Fourth Floor Productions in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s a bit like noticing the unmistakable bulge of swollen lymph nodes beneath the robe of a plague doctor: a grim reminder that we really are all in this together.
When surveyed as a single effort, Morris’s work — 12 documentary features, two television series, three books — is the pursuit of the point at which falsehood bifurcates from truth. Sometimes that point is concrete, and sometimes it’s elusive, and sometimes it’s beside the point entirely. But to say that even — and perhaps especially — he is not immune to the chaotic and ambiguous beam of our networked discourse is to point out certain pervasive, underlying realities about the nature of information in 2020, realities that have a particular bearing on Morris’s latest film, what you think about it, and why it matters.
With schools having largely withdrawn from the practice of making students memorize poetry, few of us today have anything approaching the interior resources of a rhapsode. You might argue that we don’t need them: books are inexpensive and widely available, and we can use the Internet to look up pieces of writing that we may have forgotten or that we want to read. The rhapsodes themselves were obsolete long before the digital age was a glimmer in the eye of the future. Still, though they’ve long since disappeared, their role in the ancient world is a reminder that in reading aloud, we are taking part in one of the oldest and grandest traditions of humankind. Indeed, the long and rich lineage of reading aloud, as a type of oral storytelling, stretches back to the days before anything was written down.
But, ultimately, boiling the argument down into two sides misses the point. It’s 2020, baby—the future. Cutting books into two separate volumes is basic stuff.
Each chapter in “Recipe for a Perfect Wife,” by Karma Brown, begins with either a laughably dated recipe from a Betty Crocker-era cookbook (Chicken à la King, Tuna Casserole) or a quote from vintage advice books for wives and mothers that have titles like “How to Make Him Propose” or “Don’ts for Wives” or “What a Young Wife Ought to Know.” (That last one, written in 1902, instructed the young matron to “shape her life to the probable and desired contingency of conception and maternity. Otherwise she has no right or title to wifehood.”)
Funny how the world used to be so backward! Hahahaha! The joke is on the kitten-heels-and-apron-wearing 1950s housewife wielding a can of cream of mushroom soup, right?
The adage ‘stay in your lane’, beloved of creative writing and journalism circles, has become a mantra for a generation seeking to navigate an era of fast-moving identity politics. It pushes against a tendency more common to writing of the past, of the majority-white, upper-middle-classes spokespeople of an elitist media proffering their inexpert opinion on any given subject. Staying in one’s lane refers to the tendency by which we each recognize the limitations of our knowledge, and straying outside of it can lead to fairly justified reprisals from an army of online commentators. So how do we square this with the latest offering from Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, which sees her veer wholly outside of her lived experience, yet emerge, I think, triumphant?
It’s an irreducible tension that’s never quite resolved, because resolution would be beside the point. “The Longing for Less” generates more questions than it answers — which is only appropriate, considering that the “deeper minimalism” Chayka pursues is more about vulnerability than control.
“Pronouns are suddenly sexy,” Dennis Baron declares at the start of “What’s Your Pronoun?” For “pronouns,” read one specific pronoun, or rather its long-lamented absence in English: the third-person singular gender-neutral pronoun. And for “sexy,” read thorny. Pronouns now come up in lawsuits, school regulations and company codes of conduct. Colleges ask students to provide their preferred pronouns; online dating sites offer pronoun options. “It used to be nerdy to discuss parts of speech outside of grammar class,” Baron, a professor emeritus of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois, writes. “Now it’s cool.”
After this slightly forced attempt at with-itness, “What’s Your Pronoun?” settles down into a scrupulous and absorbing survey. Its great virtue is to show that these issues are nothing new: Gender-neutral pronouns like “ze,” “thon” and “heer” have been circulating since the mid-19th century; others as far back as 1375.