please don't get mad at me

I. Rachel Cusk's Kudos
I read Rachel Cusk's novel Outline a few years ago for class, and it was one of the few "autofiction" texts I really enjoyed that semester.

Anyway. She has just published her third book in the so-called Outline-trilogy, and whether you read that or not, this piece on all three books by Merve Emre in Harper's is a small masterpiece of its own. Maybe that's overstating things. It's really good, though. To wit:

Cusk wants us to notice Faye noticing, and she wants us to see it as an act of volition and power, a supremely human act of creation that defies what critics have written about her novels—almost all of it complimentary, much of it wrongheaded. Cusk is not “objective” or “modest” or “passive” or any of the other humble words reviewers have used to describe her prose. Nor does she “disappear” when she relinquishes the autobiographical mode cultivated in her startlingly candid memoirs of motherhood (A Life’s Work) and divorce (Aftermath). The writer who notices is after a different kind of intimacy with her reader, an intimacy born not of confession—this is my husband, these are my children, this is my confused, unhappy life—but of sensibility and taste. She is not a realist in the impersonal, Flaubertian sense. She commandeers reality, bending colors, sounds, incidents, and people to her subjective truth, seeking the strange beauty in ordinary, even ugly, things.

II. A Prayer for the Poor

Once the principle of interest—especially compound interest—is recognized as a legitimate means of encouraging lending, it requires very little ingenuity indeed to create a system in which one man’s poverty is another’s source of wealth, and in which it is very much in the interest of creditors to see that the poor remain poor.

III. Unpopular Article Alert

"Feminism is based on human equality. You can’t just leave some humans out." [...] Besides masking the wound to women, abortion allows men to [...] treat women like toys that are broken by pregnancy.

Reader be warned, depending on who you are, as the above article will make you mad. Maybe that's a reason to read it? Maybe not. Maybe you've had a long day. Have some wine. Think about something else and then one day, if you want, think about this again.

I mostly liked the quoted line about how men treat pregnant women. A woeful reality.

VI. Hellfire Opinion
No one needs any more words on the migrant crisis at the border. There are enough pictures, audio clips, and stories to make the scene plain. We have an obligation to donate (if you have money), to pray (if you're a believer), possibly to call or write or protest, and definitely to defend the inherent dignity of any person prior to the claims of politics. That's notion is written explicitly into the Declaration of Independence, to say nothing of natural and divine revelation. Politics doesn't go all the way down - meaning "refugee" or "migrant" or "American" can't be essential identities - and unless a defense of the ontological belovedness of people is better developed, our politics will continue to sour. That's heady and hefty and whatever, but all I mean is the simple truth everyone knows: treat these people - even "wrongdoers" - as people. They're literally our neighbors.

The bigger and ever-expanding Internet problem is that it's so frustrating to experience troubling news in a more immediate and immersive setting and yet remain unable, in immediate terms, to do anything.

V. Fun Opinion
C.S. Lewis's the Chronicles of Narnia series isn't allegory. "But, but-" No. Stop. It isn't. Have I said this before? Have I written it? People are always on me about, Hey, the Lion is just Jesus in furry make-up. (Furry Jesus!) But that's a point in my favor. That's why I'm right, because Aslan isn't a one-to-one symbol for Jesus; Aslan (for Lewis) is the person of Jesus simply visiting another world. What Lewis has created isn't an allegory, but a multiverse. He actually has one of the more poetic multiverses in fantasy with the Woods Between the Worlds from Magician's Nephew. Where an allegory like The Pilgrim's Progress or Everyman has types of characters and places standing in for real-world specifics, C.S. Lewis's characters live in literal WWII England. In fact, Philip Pullman's anti-Narnia trilogy is far more allegorical, offering a fake world in stead of, rather than next to, our own, and in which one-to-one arguments abound. To say Lewis's adventures are an allegory misunderstands the dynamics of the work, or why it is more specific and weird than a masked retelling of the Gospel. Honestly, it usually feels like someone's dislike of Narnia is antecedent to their calling it an allegory. The latter is supposed to be a dead and deadening art form, and as such is more insult than description. That's certainly how Tolkien used it, which is too bad, because it means he was also (technically) wrong.

So, that's the hill I'm prepared to die on as a critic, I guess. Furry Jesus Forever.