The Maris Review, vol 106

The theme of the week is "Every piece of writing is a wager about how things may or may not hold together, on the page and off." – Emily Labarge

What I read this week

Dog Days by Emily Labarge

I love books like this: a big fat blend of personal writing and literary criticism and theory and experiments in form that leave you in awe of the author's brain (the last one was Lucy Ives's An Image of My Name Enters America which I wrote about for my best of 2024 list for Vulture).

In 2009, when she was 25 and on vacation in the Caribbean, Emily Labarge and her family were held hostage for seven hours. It happened in 2009 but its also happening now and always, the memories disjointed but vivd. Her memoir is about how trauma, and PTSD, upend narrative structures and the way time works, and the struggle to write about it anyway despite its unwieldiness. There's what she calls "the good story," the version that "doesn't make anyone too uncomfortable, bad, complicit," but that's not the story she wants to tell in Dog Days. The book is Labarge's attempt to tell the messier version, which requires her (and the reader) to sit with what's incoherent or overwhelming or unresolvable.

Along the way she looks to literature and film and art and music for a guiding hand, different ways to construct an untellable story. She finds inspiration in the short stories of Lorrie Moore and Amy Hempel (me too), the poetry of June Jordan, the true crime writing of Maggie Nelson, the timing of Philip Glass's opera, Einstein on the Beach, the paintings of Mary Barnes, and so much more.

I particularly love Labarge's study of the Lynchian universe, where "something is happening or threatening ti happen or happen again." particularly the incredibly scary last couple of seconds of the season three finale of Twin Peaks when the dread of the past burbles up in you and becomes a screech: "The history of dead girls and dead mothers and delinquent, deceitful fathers; the history of all families; the history of the whole of America, which is also the history of trauma eternally visited upon self and other." A devastating book, but also an inspiring one.

Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI by Carissa Véliz

I always love when I get a new way to frame information that I'm thinking about all of the time anyway. Carissa Véliz is a philosophy professor at Oxford who here that predictions and the people who offer them are always concerned with gaining power. When someone purports to know what the future holds, they are selling you something. We should always be weary of them, whether we're talking about Nostradamus and other seers, or astrologers or statisticians, or what's happening now, when billionaires keep telling us how much we need to use AI to make predictions.

Prophecy is a great followup to The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game by C. Thi Nguyen. It reinforces what I've known for quite a while, that algorithms are not our friends, that numbers don't always tell the truth, that humans are too messy and weird to be predictable. And it's the messiness that makes us interesting

Véliz illustrates her points by going back through the history of so called futurists, but then zeroes in on our present time moment with examples that make sense (but yes, of course I loved how much she wrote about the unpredictability of the book publishing world). She writes in a style that's wry and personable and righteously angry (you know I love righteous anger!), so that Prophecy is an invigorating and even empowering read.

Under a section called Why There's No Such Thing as Data Driven: "We don't collect data, even if we talk that way; we create data. Data are designed by people, built to serve our curiosity and interests... We drive the data through our own values, through what we want to know or achieve, through our will to power. And then we claim that the data is the driver to cover our tracks."

What will save us from the data collectors and AI overlords? Simple curiosity. Oh, and also paper books. eBooks are informants, Véliz says, but analog reading can't be monitored. As always if you're buying digital I suggest you do so from Bookshop.org or Libro.fm.

I want to quote so many passages in this book, but why don't I leave you with this?

As I was saying in January, apropos of nothing

Divorce Memoirs by Not-Rich People

There's a new divorce memoir out today that is getting a lot of buzz. I'm sure it's great, but I want to focus on divorce memoirs by excellent writers who do not have oodles of inherited wealth and who would probably appreciate a bump in book sales. Here's a little list: