Quarter in Review: On Sailing, Bailing, and Stillman
Each vernal equinox, I am confronted with the eternal possibilities of renewal and balance. As the official end of winter, the spring equinox is a day marked by rebirth, where the world’s wide womb yawns open for planting. It is also, personally, daunting: with winter’s thaw comes the end of months of quiet contemplation, and I remember that I am less frightened by the prospect of an isolated winter than I am of a reckless spring. For now, we are in Pisces season; tomorrow, we return to the beginning of the Zodiac, to domineering Aries. As the sun crawls back to its zenith, the days teem with unbridled anticipation, the clouds start to clear, and the seas begin to seethe. Our publisher and editor-in-chief are in the captain’s quarters, charting our course for the next three months. Our main mast is weathered from the whip of winter storms and the hull is due for scrubbing, but this ship has been good to us—even if it is small.
From now on, we’ll be giving our readers a peek below deck on every solstice and equinox—that is, four times a year, in March, June, September, and December. We want to articulate what it is we’re doing here: what we’re building, who we are, where we’re headed. And from what I can tell, this is quickly becoming Noah’s Ark—so, here, take a bucket. Pour one out for all the magazines that have closed this past year. Then settle in, because this ship needs bailing every day. Between filling orders, planning our next print issue, pursuing additional sources of funding, organizing our pitches inbox (which has been inundated as of late—thank you), and keeping up with our self-imposed editorial calendar, it can sometimes feel like more work than any one of us sailors signed up for. But that’s what a crew is for. Does anyone have a bigger ship? Preferably one loaded with cash—like, maybe a yacht? We could really use the money to pay contributors more. Maybe the Merchant Royal? Or we could pirate a whaling ship. Anyone got the bandwidth for that next week? I digress.
This is a moment to pause, and an opportunity for grounding. It’s to remember how far we’ve come as a little magazine founded to strengthen the dialogue between the coasts and the Midwest. It’s to remind our readers (and, in a way, ourselves) that a “text” worthy of criticism can be many things. In case you’ve forgotten: We’re primarily an outlet for literary criticism, but we publish writing that examines techniques, contexts, climate, history, art, and place by operating in a recognizable critical mode. And we hope that doing so breaks up the dominant intellectual narrative and introduces new voices, new avenues, and new possibilities for criticism, for what is worthy of criticism, and who is worthy of writing it.
Let’s go to the quarterdeck; I’ll even let you steer the tiller.
Last month, Brian O’Neill reviewed Jon Lauck’s The Good Country, a book that demonstrates how the Midwest “is in fact the birthplace of reform, of a new democratic American culture, and of true progressivism.” He brings us through Lauck’s interrogation of the widely accepted history of the Midwest. While today the region largely swings red, in the 1800s, several of its states were the first in the country to outlaw slavery. “The free Black population in Ohio grew from 337 in 1800 to 36,000 in 1860. Ohio, and the whole of the Northwest Territory was for free Blacks what it was for others: a land of a new type of freedom.” It’s a story invested in telling the fullness of Midwest history as a way to honor the region and inform the coasts’ impoverished understanding of the so-called “flyover states.” I wonder what it means for so many Americans to tie parts of their identity to region, generation after generation, and in so doing, what stories get passed on about difference and cultural boundaries. What is it that gets glorified?
For regional contrast, we published Ryan Baesmann’s interview with the communist writer Malcolm Harris: Palo Alto, Disinterred. They discuss how the California Dream became a California Dystopia: How Stanford designated itself as an engineering metropolis based on bionomics and eugenics, and continues to prop itself up with a system of domination and production. As just one example, the University occupies thousands of acres of stolen Indigenous land and refuses to give it back, even though more than 700,000 native people reside in the state today. Baesmann, for his part, asked Harris about Hoover’s involvement in creating anti-communist sentiments, the lesser-known anarchists and labor leaders in California history, and the legacy of psychedelics in Palo Alto. The New York Times reviewed and condemned this book because, it seems, of its Marxist critique of capitalism. Rather than engage with its ideas, the review belittles Harris and wilfully misunderstands his argument, treating his call to dismantle the wrongs committed under capitalism as below consideration. Perhaps this is the clearest pointer for what we’re doing here: creating a space to critique hierarchies and systems of power, especially in the context of place. We are not, you may have noticed, building the next New York Times.
Shortly before that, Julia Shiota chronicled her experience with climate grief since 2011, when an earthquake and subsequent tsunami devastated Japan. She recalled watching live footage of Sendai, the city she grew up in, swept away by water: “The disconnect between the gentle fluidity of the water and the amount of destruction caused by it remains with me.” On February 3 of this year, a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, and spilled an estimated one million pounds of chemicals and combustible materials into the ground and air. The trains carried vinyl chloride, a toxic flammable gas that makes PVC pipes and boils at eight degrees Fahrenheit, meaning that when the trains crashed and began leaking, boiling liquid came out of the tanks. Now, an estimated 3,500 fish are dead. Residents are reporting nausea, dizziness, headaches, shortness of breath, and dead pets. It's being called the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. For Julia, healing from climate grief requires not just remembering how others have survived similar disasters, but also taking meaningful action to protect the environment and its inhabitants—homeowners, wildlife, rail workers—from further harm. Yet so far Norfolk Southern has remained eerily unwilling to take full accountability for the spill’s ramifications.
Living in this world, as any good gardener knows, requires both a taming and respect for nature. Suspended Reason reflected on lessons learned from gardening and the need to cultivate what we hold dear. “The plants fertilized yes but also pruned and moved and weeded, a system of mattering made matter.” It’s a lesson that extends to borders and city gates and hypertexts, using différence as a method to care for the spaces we inhabit and the spaces, even if far away, we send shipments through. Because most boundaries, anyway, are semi-permeable. “We ought to stop thinking of boundaries as things which prevent, constrain, and disable, and begin to think of them as things which allow, generate, and enable.” The land, our minds, our fiction, all of it tends towards entropy—or disaster, or decay, or disintegration, or delivery. Whichever word is your preference. Boundaries are a form of preservation.
Because, as Preston DeGarmo points out, we’re letting even our fictions break down, turn into nonsense, become something akin to our Uber Eats order. Some contemporary fiction embraces ample white space and textual strategies that abandon the paragraph form. As our fiction becomes further optimized for the digital age, the boundary between the blog and the book dissolves: “They are the building blocks of a streamlined reading experience, one redolent less of poetry than of posts on LinkedIn, where paragraphs are increasingly seen as faux pas, excessively taxing on the reader and thus less effective at driving engagement.” I think of the scene in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, where Tom speaks to Audrey about Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. “It’s a notoriously bad book. Even Lionel Trilling, one of her greatest admirers, thought that,” Tom tells her. Audrey reads Trilling’s review and returns with a well-reasoned question (“What’s wrong with a novel having a virtuous heroine?”), to which Tom unabashedly admits he hasn’t actually read the book. He says, his nose turned up, “You don’t have to read the book to have an opinion on it. I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism.”
I guess what I’m saying is that you should give your attention to the things that deserve it. Midwest history: yes. But also Stanford’s shady history, the East Palestine spill, survivors of climate catastrophes, late-career poets who write as well as they ever have, even if the world has seemed to move on, and millennial sex novels on troublingly heteronormative desire.
Oh, and read the books. Not just our reviews of them.
The past six months have been a period of fervent activity and growth at CRB, and we’re grateful to have you on board as we continue to sail uncharted waters. Before you leave, look over the weather bow: You see that open ocean? The prospects are unlimited—even if, at times, foreboding. But we’re ready to set sail for summer, and we hope these pieces, this review-in-review, have persuaded you that we’ll be here again in three months, in a year, in a decade, bailing and assessing the course. For now, we’re looking forward to the stillness of summer, with its promise of fresh publisher’s catalogs and long, hot, glorious days. I’ve given you a glimpse of the charts and rituals behind our editorial process; I hope you’re inclined to it.
See you at the solstice.