Monthly Archives: December 2020

Staff Picks: The Age of Skin

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The Age of Skin by Dubravka Ugresic
by JP Poole

My copy of Dubravka Ugresic’s The Age of Skin is highlighted, underlined, and peppered throughout with asterisks, exclamation marks, and messy notes. Why? Because Ugresic might just be one of the best essayists on the planet; her praises are sung by the likes of Susan Sontag, Joseph Brodsky, and Charles Simic. The New Criterion stated, “As long as some, like Ugresic, who can write well, do, there will be hope for the future.” Indeed, the future is critical to her work. As long as there are those who threaten to erase history, deny genocide, the Holocaust, mass executions, the rape and murder of innocents, as long as war criminals roam free and lead carefree lives, and as long as nationalism rears its monstrous head all over the globe, then the future remains a distant dream unless we are able to reconcile our past. Documentation, writing itself, resists that ever-pressing historical erasure, and is charged with the moral purpose of setting humanity back on some sort of sane and rational course.

Ugresic takes on the heavy baggage of the world by seesawing between humor and horror. In the title essay The Age of Skin, she talks about the tricky process of embalming Lenin’s body, noting that Lenin’s Mausoleum also sells caskets, including a pricey special edition made out of crystal called the “Al Capone,” so named after the casket pictured in The Godfather. In a single paragraph she might mention the author of Fifty Shades of Grey, Maxim Gorky, and Shakespeare.

In meticulously documenting and cataloging modern life, her essays are like packed storage units, stuffed to the gills with the artifacts of arts and culture. Like a museum tour guide, she leads us through the bleak detritus, capitalist’s junk, and beautiful polished antiques of lost eras, forging a path through her material in a way that readers can comprehend. To the left, we see a flag from a war-torn nation, to the right, we see refugees bonding over baklava.

In a Nexus Institute lecture, she talks about deprofessionalization—when education, qualifications, and even basic levels of competence are no longer required for key political positions and important leadership roles. Just this week, I read Anne Applebaum’s incredible essay “The Collaborators,” published in The Atlantic. She states that loyalty is the main ingredient any corrupt regime seeks out in order to maintain power. Applebaum offers the example of when Trump appointed Sonny Perdue, a businessman with an array of conflicts, a devotion to lobbyists and special interest groups, and zero objectivity, to Secretary of Agriculture. Perdue then hired his own team of individuals who also lacked qualifications, including a long-haul truck driver, whose resume boasted experience in “hauling and shipping agricultural commodities.” A domino effect of incompetence ensures that an entire political cabinet resembles a scene out of Dumb and Dumber, but with real-life consequences and drastic risks to public health and welfare. Ugresic makes a similar point in her book: tyrants don’t like being disagreed with, advised, educated, or told what to do—they like yes-men; they like to be in charge of their own rose-tinted legacy.

Ugresic left the former Yugoslavia in 1991 when the war began. In American Fictionary she writes about living in the cellar of her apartment building in Zagreb, with a bag of essentials ready and waiting at the door: “[a]t the sound of the air-raid warning siren we would run down to our cellars, improvised shelters, carrying the bags with us. In their bags many women brought along knitting needles and wool.” She was invited to the safe harbor of Amsterdam and has lived there ever since. “What saved a life,” she writes, “is a daily routine: feeding paper into the typewriter, writing an article…” As I read through her books, which largely home in on the tumult created by the Yugoslav war, I can’t help but see similarities with the rise of fascism in the U.S. My comparisons are inept and elementary, but I’m keen enough to understand that Ugresic possesses key insights into American politics; she saw the signs long ago. In fact, anytime a government begins to clamp down on (or discredit) scientists, artist, thinkers, professors, and doctors, you know there’s a problem.

Her essay “Good Morning, Losers!” is a loving ode to her highly educated friends, who’ve found themselves wondering where they’ve gone wrong in life. Their university degrees can’t compete with what today’s culture wants, self-fixated life-style bloggers, who seem to have found the elixir for eternal happiness. No one, no matter how intelligent, is completely free from pining after the perfect life. She writes: “Under Communism, a person could always blame the system, Communism itself; under capitalism we are all to blame for our own shortcomings.” Thus, her friend becomes fixated on the life of Jenn J., a beautiful woman with a beautiful family, who spends her time making eco-friendly cloth gift bags, bouncing between her Upper West Side home and cottage getaway.

Another friend, an astrophysicist, is out of a job. He’s left scrolling the internet for anything to keep himself afloat. A few clicks swerve off course. “There before him on the computer screen loomed Kim Kardashian’s large, oiled butt. The butt wasn’t moving, it watched my friend like a meteorite, a glacier, a star… Kim Kardashian’s butt came jumping off every website, the world over, wherever he clicked.” In this telling passage, a highly educated man is mocked by popular culture. The butt has achieved unrivaled success, where the astrophysicist is asking himself “where have I gone wrong, oh, how did I end up here?”

In the same essay, Ugresic shares her friend’s anxieties. People don’t seem to want cogent sentences anymore. “In the forty years I’ve been writing, we’ve reached a point where hardly anyone buys serious books anymore…” Instead, the publishing marketplace is clotted with influencers, such as the young British beauty expert Zoella, whose YouTube channel has over ten-million subscribers. Seeing the potential for teen-girl cat nip, Penguin snapped Zoella right up, publishing her book Girl Online, which she penned very little of, stating, “Of course I was going to have help from Penguin’s editorial team in telling my story.” Her “story” is one of wealth, privilege, bouts of anxiety, and plenty of hair products. When culture no longer maintains artistic, intellectual, and moral standards the reward is plump booties and advice on how to do hair. Just today, I was reading an article on a trusted news site when Google placed an ad for the company of hot available redheads.

One of the elements I appreciated most about The Age of Skin is Ugresic’s claim that many of the political problems we see today hold deep roots in misogyny—a hatred of women is key in maintaining any dictator’s control. “Misogyny” she writes, “functions like radiation. It is invisible and not a single person is spared by it.” A very visible reminder of long-standing efforts to silence women shows up in her essay “The Scold’s Bridle.” If you google the term, you’ll discover a frightening torture device straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale, designed to suppress women with loose tongues. Eventually the iron cage with a metal bit to prevent speech is no longer needed because women mute themselves. They internalize the belief that their thoughts have no place in the spheres of religion, politics, or academia. Want proof? Ugresic asks us to picture a “public intellectual” in our minds. A male figure, perhaps wearing a tie and spectacles, is bound to materialize first and foremost. Indeed, I had trouble thinking of someone who might be considered an important female intellectual on par with the no-longer-living Susan Sontag. (Ugresic is one of the few that came to mind.) Then again, I had difficulty conjuring a contemporary public intellectual at all. Knowledge isn’t exactly revered these days. Ugresic understands this, which might be why she juxtaposes carbohydrate-heavy popular culture—La La Land, Nutella, and Bill Clinton/James Patterson—with the nourishing art of Bohumil Hrabal, Mary Beard, and the sculptures of Bakic; she isn’t asking us to choose sides, to make only “healthy choices,” but to notice, observe, and discover our own path out of the darkness and into the light.

Staff Picks: The Factory and The Hole

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Down the Rabbit Hole: The Strange and Wonderful World of Hiroko Oyamada
by JP Poole

Reading the novels of Hiroko Oyamada is a bit like walking into a test kitchen. Amidst the hustle and bustle, you watch flames leap six feet high, inhale mysterious aromas, taste flavors you never knew existed, and observe someone singe the top of a cake with a blowtorch. For a book under a hundred pages, The Hole especially is filled with food: mugicha tea, pickled cucumber, miso soup, rice, omelets, dried squid, Kameda Crisps, a spindly herb-like plant called myoga (Japanese ginger). Frankly, it’s nice to see characters eat, it’s a reminder that while they might be a bunch of symbols on a page, we still relate to them because they share our appetites—they get hungry after a long day’s work just like we do.

More so than character, the main ingredient in Oyamada’s work is place. Place is the bed of rice that plot is built around. Place is what tricks readers into believing they’re encountering something static, and recognizable, that is until Oyamada begins to shift the ground and cracks and fissures form, revealing strange and unsettling entities that were lurking all along. Her first book, The Factory, is set at a sprawling live/work campus akin to the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, or Google—a mini-city, complete with different colored badges, corporate lingo, and a company “ecosystem” that one must work to become a part of, or risk exclusion. Within the factory are species of animals that seem to be taking over—they arrive like a flock of birds outside of a fast food joint waiting for French fries to drop. There are Grayback Coypu (aka Nutria) that seem to be growing larger each year; Washer Lizards, reptiles that have learned to live off of lint fibers; and Factory Shags, black birds (think Cormorant) that have no fear of people and whose numbers are ballooning out of control. It’s a bit Hitchcock, a bit George Bernard Shaw. Animal invasion meets industrial sprawl, unchecked commercial growth and expansion, a threat that one senses could swallow humanity whole.

The setting in her newest book, The Hole, is a remote suburb along a river—with the nearest grocery store a long walk away and buses that run every hour. Not the liveliest setting; but then all you have to do is wait a few pages before the predictable turns intriguing. Asa’s husband Muneaki has been transferred to a new office a few miles from where he grew up. The timing happens to be perfect. Asa’s mother-in-law, Tomiko, offers the young couple the house she owns next door rent free. Asa’s comforted by the fact that they are moving next door to Tomiko, not in with her; it’s a chance for the couple to get their footing, and save, save, save. Asa gladly quits her job in the city and becomes a housewife for the summer, spending long hours alone, cooking meals for her husband, running errands, finding that, without a full-time job, the days are endless. Of her new mind-numbing unemployed life, Asa says:

In theory, I could watch TV, use the computer, read a book, bake like I used to when I was single—but it seemed like everything cost money. I had to spend money to pass the time. People say housewives get free room and board and even time to nap, but the truth is napping was the most economical way to make it through the day.

What you should also know is that it’s summer in the suburb and oppressively hot. The cicadas are cranked up loud. Asa states: “To my human ear, they sounded like a bunch of machines, a spray of emotionless noise.” She has to do her grocery shopping early in the morning; her husband needs the car, so she’s essentially housebound. (A familiar feeling, right?) Things turn strange when Asa’s sent on an errand. Tomiko needs some money deposited, so Asa must walk to the nearest 7-Eleven to deposit the cash. (That, too, is a bit strange.) On her way to the store, she sees an animal she can’t identify: it’s not a dog, or a raccoon, but a large black furry animal with stick legs, round ears, and a long tail. Instinct propels her to follow it to the river. It’s then that she falls into a deep hole. While this hole doesn’t lead to another world, everything thereafter takes on a hallucinatory air as thick as summer’s humidity. After falling into the hole, Asa is not the same, and the suburb and its occupants aren’t either.

Oyamada balances the recognizable boredom of modern life—a life where one must think about savings plans, benefits, permanent positions, home loans, and taxes—with ecological strangeness: plants, insects, and animals growing up around us as we exist. People, too, are strange creatures. After seeing the animal, Asa can’t forget it. She realizes that it isn’t something she can Google. Her description is too generic and would produce “millions of hits.” The more she learns about the animal, the more she questions reality. Like Alice in Wonderland, which Oyamada references in the book, Asa falls down a rabbit hole. Her brother-in-law, an outsider, who lives in a shack, doesn’t work, and is a shut-in, leads her closer to the animal, her white rabbit. He wisely states: “People always fail to notice things. Animals, cicadas, puddles of melted ice cream on the ground, the neighborhood shut-in. But what do you expect? It seems like most folks don’t see what they don’t want to see.”

He’s right. Think about all the strange things we choose to ignore (perhaps because we have to): creepy crawling insects in the sink, an odd-colored mushroom, invisible-to-the-eye microbes that feast on our human skin, without which we’d be in deep trouble. Writers, artists, thinkers—these are the outsiders, who help us to remove the horse blinders and see what surrounds us. Oyamada’s fiction is refreshing for how much it defamiliarizes everyday existence. There are things in life that are deeply familiar—punching the clock, shopping at the co-op, watching reality TV—but there are also mysteries, wonders, oddities that we cannot name. The natural world is especially intriguing and a bit suspicious because, like Asa, we can sense changes a-brewin’. Oyamada’s work begs the question: What happens when creatures know more about us than we know about them? Read more of her novels and perhaps we shall find out.