studeronomy's reviews
102 reviews

1.
We’ll never know everything we want to know about our distant ancestors. They’re gone.

And insofar as we gather evidence about the lives they lived and make conjectures about those lives, we still only see them through a glass darkened by our own shadows. That’s my key takeaway from Stefanos Geroulanos’s The Invention of Prehistory, a fun and frustrating work of popular scholarship.

In his epilogue, Geroulanos summarizes his overall project:

Throughout this book, I have tried to offer a strong criticism of our pretensions to grandeur, our thirst for powerful stories, our belief that we grasp the whole picture and spin it into a thorough system of knowledge. It’s always nice to blame others, the ideologies of the enemy; but this project is more of a criticism, as philosophical as it is historical, of our delusion—that we grasp the origin as much as the end, that we control the definitions, that we have master knowledge.

This tracks. The central thread that runs through Geroulanos’s book is his opposition to post-Enlightenment humanism. The project of humanism, he argues, has failed. The ideology of humanism put us squarely on a path toward violent colonialism, the genocides of the twentieth century, and climate catastrophe. Whether he wants to or not, Geroulanos joins a diverse group of grumpy scholars and anti-humanists like Giorgio Agamben, Alasdair MacIntyre, René Girard, and Girard’s pupil Peter Thiel in concluding that the Enlightenment was a mistake and humanism really messed things up.

To be clear: Geroulanos isn’t a post-humanist. Rather, he seeks an alternative, more humane paradigm through which we can live together on the planet. In many ways, the field of prehistory is incidental to his overall project. It’s one of several lenses he could have chosen through which to examine the problems inherent in humanism. Our acquisition of knowledge about any subject (especially history) always always always always reinforces the ideology of the present day, for better or for worse (and usually at the expense of actual knowledge). This is true whether we’re talking about the deep past of our hominoid ancestors or the human past since the beginning of the historical (re: written) record.

To be fair, Geroulanos admits that the field of prehistory does produce legitimate knowledge about the past that is probably worth having. But what we do with that knowledge is usually problematic. Geroulanos writes: “We telescope at will back in time to draw meaning from the deep past about ourselves and the world we want.” Yes, that’s true…and show me a scholarly discipline that emerged from the Victorian era that wasn’t used to justify obscene criminality. I don’t think you’ll find one.

But it’s not really until the epilogue that Geroulanos finally admits that recent discoveries by geneticist and paleoanthropologists have revealed much solid information about our lineage. But really, he asks, what do we want to know about our ancestors? That question changes with every generation and within every cultural and political context. And usually, the answer to that question has disastrous results for people on the social, political, and cultural margins. Geroulanos writes:

The most obvious and greatest cost of the 250-year obsession with human origins research has been borne by the Indigenous peoples whose destruction was rationalized because they were ‘primitives’ who were ‘vanishing’ anyway; by Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and others deemed subhuman by Nazism; by all those who were racialized by ideas about prehistoric humanity; and by refugees, still disdained today as a watery mass and a horde.

Later, he writes:

The problem lies less with science or museums rather than with the humanist impulse that accompanies them. The story told in this book is in part a story of scientific horrors. But it is not a story, for the most part, of evil philosophers or scientists, nor at all a story in which science is the enemy. It is a story of the lengths that we will go to convince ourselves that we share something more than (most of our) DNA with hominids from tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago: that what we share with them is meaningful, that it is our ‘human nature.’

A noble sentiment, I think. “Human nature” is a term that is usually invoked to push people around, to oppress people who are marginalized (look at how often neoliberal economists “naturalize” their theories and justify their most brutal policy recommendations by appealing to “human nature”).

But even here, I’m a little irked. To minimize the DNA we share with hominids from tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago is, in my view, to minimize something genuinely important. Our shared DNA does indicate that we share something—perhaps a lot—with our ancestors.

2.
Don’t get me wrong: The Invention of Prehistory is a fantastically entertaining and informative work of popular scholarship. I loved the chapter about the Catholic paleoanthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose theory of the teleological “omega point” at the end of evolution was…just wild. Geroulanos seems to sympathize, a little, with Bataille’s attempt to preserve the spiritual dimensions of human life amid our discoveries about the distant past (Bataille described the Lascaux cave as “the holy of holies”: problematic but beautiful).

And Geroulanos’s epilogue departs from a lot of the moralizing that precedes it. In the final pages, he encourages caution when we study human ancestry and (especially) disseminate knowledge about human origins to the public.

But on the whole, I was frustrated with The Invention of Prehistory because, too often, Geroulanos conflates our paradigms of knowing (and interpreting knowledge) with the acquisition of knowledge itself. He writes with a very moralistic, sometimes shrill, tone about the men and women whose work has produced a lot of our best knowledge about our distant ancestors. At times, it seems like Geroulanos believes that such knowledge is not worth having if it is used to justify atrocities.

Geroulanos claims that The Invention of Prehistory “is not a story, for the most part, of evil philosophers or scientists, nor at all a story in which science is the enemy.” You could have fooled me. He has virtually nothing good to say about any scholar, professional or amateur, whose work he examines. Two of the exceptions is his treatment of Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and (to a lesser extent) Sigmund Freud…all darlings of what Paul Ricœur famously called “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” Geroulanos has adopted these hermeneutics wholesale.

Take Saussure. His linguistic analysis (in Geroulanos’s account) bucks the most politically problematic accounts of the origins of human language. Saussure sees through his contemporaries, whose morally reprehensible racial ideologies framed their theories about language. Nevermind, of course, that Saussure’s account has been widely rejected by linguists, and that today’s most credible theories of the origin of language a) amount to corrections of the morally reprehensible models or b) rest on new models of genetic and cognitive analysis. Saussure got the morality right, even if he got the knowledge wrong.

Geroulanos writes: “The fantasy [of humanism and prehistory] allows us to forget that in reality, humans have almost nothing in common with our paleolithic forefathers. We live in the world we have created.” Okay, fair enough. But who is the we here? I don’t live in a world that I’ve created—other people created it for me. And other people created their world for them. And on and on back…all the way, perhaps, to our “paleolithic forefathers.” The past is a foreign country, it’s true. But it’s not utterly inaccessible, as some post-structuralist critics have implied.

In Courting the Abyss a study of the contradictions of free speech within the English liberal tradition, John Durham Peters divides Anglophone society into three camps: religiously-minded people for whom knowledge is acquired through revelation; empirically-minded people for whom knowledge is acquired through the scientific method; and critically-minded people for whom knowledge is acquired through rational (often skeptical) inquiry. Two groups in these three camps will often unite against the third group, and the religiously-minded and critically-minded typically “team up” against the empiricists in order to undermine the authority of “science” per se (especially when they don’t like the products of scientific knowledge).

And few people are as skeptical as me of “science” as a category of ultimate knowledge acquisition. The scientific method is a powerful process of knowledge acquisition, but it is viewed by most English-speaking people as an ultimate arbiter of truth. This is a problem, and it actually contributes (I think) to scientific illiteracy. People in general have no idea what “science” actually is, and at the same time nothing shuts down an argument like “scientific evidence.”

But for Geroulanos and other scholars in the humanities, scientific knowledge is not merely one type of knowledge among many. It is inherently compromised by its imperialist origins. And yet, as I’ve reiterated throughout this review, every imaginable field of knowledge and art since the Enlightenment has deployed in the service of empire.

After a while, I began to feel guilty for being curious about ancient hominids at all!

Reading The Invention of Prehistory, you get the impression that it’s virtually impossible to acquire scientific knowledge without hurting someone. Geroulanos’s struggle with the ethics of knowledge acquisition is most apparent in his chapter on Neanderthals. He rightly criticizes the racist framework within which specialized knowledge about Neanderthals is presented to the public. And he admits that, given the power of recent genetic analysis, we have a much clearer sense of what the Neanderthals’ lives, including their relationship with anatomically modern humans, was like. But, he writes in that chapter’s conclusion, “We still cannot reach the Neanderthal. However much we may ‘know’ about him…he continues to say more about us.” Consequently, Geroulanos’s hypercritical approach to knowledge acquisition, his “hermeneutics of suspicion,” often deploys the same language and critical tools that creationists, climate change deniers, conspiracy theorists, and medical charlatans use when they attempt to overturn scientific consensus.

This is not a party I would be eager to join. 

 Lauren Groff is now officially my favorite living American writer, or at least she’s tied for that spot with Joshua Cohen (author of The Netanyahus). Groff's writing is full of deep affection for her characters but she’s also as wise and honest as a steel beartrap: not one of these stories lets a single character off the hook for the decisions they’ve made or the thoughts, motives, and feelings they have. She’s also just an incredible writer of prose. She describes air conditioners springing to life in the Florida spring “like trolls under the windows.” One character, a brilliant mathematician, notes that “unlike other numbers, money was already self-fertilized.” Whenever I started one of the stories in Florida, I was immediately hooked and couldn’t stop reading. “When we are lonely for a long time,” she writes in one story, “we people the void with phantoms.” I don’t know if she’s lonely, but there are clearly a lot of phantoms in Groff’s world, and we’re lucky that she shares them with us. 

Great idea for a comic, poor execution. The use of two frame narratives could have been cool—they might have mirrored the “set theory” that is a major preoccupation of the characters in this comic—but the frame narratives themselves are pretty boring. The first frame involves the writers/artists behind Logicomix debating how to tell their story, and the second frame involves Bertrand Russell giving an autobiographical lecture on whether the U.S. should enter WWII. The authors wanted to connect Russell’s great career ambition (he wanted to discover the foundations of logic and mathematics) to a moral lesson about how we make ethical decisions. But the lesson they arrive at is pretty underwhelming: humans are irrational and Nazis are bad. Okay.

If you want to read a similar (if non-illustrated) book about the theoretical foundations of knowledge and deep ethical quandaries, check out Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World. The stories Labatut tells are riveting. The story that Logicomix tells is dull by comparison. I suspect that the authors hoped Logicomix would make these exciting ideas accessible to younger readers, but I can’t imagine this comic holding their attention for very long.

Part of the problem with Logicomix is that Bertrand Russell isn’t an interesting protagonist. Sure, he lived an unusual life and had an unsual personality, but a lot of the unusual stuff gets left out of this comic. The supporting cast (Gödel, Frege, Wittgenstein) is full of wild personalities, but they don’t occupy enough of the narrative to really make this book as weird and fun as it should’ve been.

Finally, the authors didn’t take enough advantage of the comic format. Seeing Gödel as a little toddler was fun, but apart from that, there’s very little here that utilizes the near-endless visual possibilities of a comic. Most of the time, we’re watching Bertrand Russell just…live his life, have his thoughts, and argue with his colleagues. Not that interesting, visually.

Again, if this is a topic that interests you and if you want a riveting story about the lives of people who push the boundaries of our knowledge about reality, check out When We Cease to Understand the World. Or, if you’ve got endless months of time to read, maybe go back to a classic like Gödel, Escher, Bach. I’ve also heard good things about Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland, Sheilla Jones’s The Quantum Ten, Marcelo Gleiser’s The Dawn of a Mindful Universe, Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist?, or any number of books by Sean Carroll. If you’re looking for a comic book on these subjects, I’m not really sure what to recommend…Logicomix might be your best bet, but the authors could have done better. 

Alphabetical Diaries is, however, an extraordinary work of narrative.
And she understands what I’m getting at: “There must be other ways to write a diary than all this minutiae; I don’t want another night at home with all my thoughts.”
And so it’s really, really, really hard not to judge her.
And so, reading Alphabetical Diaries, I was judgmental of Sheila Heti: of the fact that she published 60,000 words of her diaries.
And yes, one of the functions of a diary is to vomit out our passions and worst selves onto the page, to objectify them and make them physically incarnate, and then to toss them aside.
Because liberalism is a lie, and so am I.
Because she’s a woman who enjoys having sex, and writes about it, and publishes what she writes.
Because she’s part of the cosmopolitan “creative class,” with all the grating parochialisms that come with that.
But in this book, “you” is just another word for “I”…which is actually pretty interesting, if you think about it.
But it’s difficult not to read someone else’s diaries, however scrambled and encrypted, without becoming judgmental.
But judgmentalism is not just ugly—it’s a sin, probably the most serious sin, the ultimate misstep anyone can make when interacting with another human, whether in person or on the page.
But private diaries are not typically edited and published by their author, which is what Heti did here (along with the alphabetizing).
But she continues: “It’s amazing to me how life keeps going.”
But the minutiae is of course why this book works at all.
But then she writes, correctly: “When you are jealous of other people, you forget there is a place in the world for you, that you occupy a real and legitimate place.”
For example: “To write one thing that is honest instead of a pack of lies well said. To write the book about being a loser. To write this book again. To write with the thoroughness of my whole being for the rest of my life. Today I shampooed the hair of a man named David who is the conductor of the orchestra at the National Ballet.”
Her meditations on lust and love are ultimately quite fruitful: “But my task is not to love him, but simply to love—to be a person who loves—so to love him as part of an overall loving, not at the exclusion of everyone else, with blinders on, focused only on him, but rather focused on the entire universe, for the universe is my first relationship, the fundamental one….”
Her meditations on writing, which all contradict each other, also all ring true: “If I want to write, I have to move away from, not towards, the dazzle.”
Her thoughts about work, and how to think about one’s own projects (whether writing projects or the kinds of projects you don’t want to do but that other people require you to do) are often extremely moving: “I realize more and more these days that people finish things and live in a world of time, rather than nothing finishing or taking forever for the sake of the eternal.”
How can I, an enlightened liberal, be so harsh and shocked when a woman expresses her sexuality?
I decided to read Alphabetical Diaries immediately upon hearing the premise: a person’s diary edited down and all the sentences reordered in alphabetical order.
I didn’t care whether I would like the book or not; I wanted to experience it.
I once had an idea for my wake, for after I die: I would have my loved ones post my entire Internet browsing history on the walls, everywhere for everyone to read, uncensored, like a kind of self-immolating art exhibit.
I related painfully to this sentence: “It is clear that I have spent these past three years thinking about myself, and that I have a gap in my education three years long.”
(I think, therefore I am?)
I think we can all imagine worse fates.
I thought it might be more like poetry, which I read more than prose, than narrative fiction or memoir.
I was dreading the chapters “I” and “T,” because they would include the words “I” and “then.”
I wouldn’t have been so judgmental of this project if Heti was a man, and so I’m a misogynist, or at least I have strong misogynistic tendencies, and I’ll freely admit that.
I’m not entirely sympathetic to the idea that writing is a lonely, painful activity: “When I think of another year of writing, it seems impossible to explain.”
In English, the letter “Y” appears near the end of the alphabet, and so “you” comes last, which is a good metaphor for the West, just as ya’s position in the Russian alphabet is a good metaphor for the East.
In Russian, my Russian professor used to say, the alphabet ends with the letter “Ya,” which is also a word that translates into the English “I,” so that “I”—the individual—always comes last in Russian.
It’s like life as a woman under the Taliban doesn’t exist, or something.
More on the theme of work and artistry: “It’s better to work, to go into the underground cave where there are books, than to fritter away time online. It’s crazy that I need all of these mental crutches in order to live. It’s fiction. It’s fine.”
My idea about my wake and the browser history.
Of how fucking much she writes about her damn relationships—romances and friendships and fellow creatives—and how she must assume that these relationships are intrinsically compelling to her readers.
Of how invested she is in being “a writer” (“everything has to be sacrificed for writing,” she says) and in fame (“they want to know that after suffering comes salvation, and that salvation will come in the form of fame”).
Of how much she frets about her (largely successful) writing career.
Of how much she talks about the universe as if it has four corners: New York, Paris, London, and California (Toronto, she writes, is just “a pot of concrete”…which I suppose she has the right to say, because she’s from Toronto).
Of how much she writes about sex, and how if a male author wrote about sex like she does, it would be “problematic” (one of her white male friends complains about this fact, complains that he cannot “feel he owns his experiences sufficiently or, if he owns them they do not matter—they are not the important stories to be told”).
Of how narcissistic that seems, and how self-pitying.
Of how privileged she seems, even when it’s clear she struggles with money and can’t keep up with the lifestyles of her peers.
Of how quickly she’d likely agree with what I’ve just written, of how quickly she’d efface herself and accept my judgments.
Okay, who cares?
One thing I didn’t consider was how many other great words begin with “th,” including the word “then.”
Perhaps those are the sacred things in life.
She complains: “I never meet any new people. I never meet any of the interesting people there are to meet.”
She is at least quite critical of her desire for fame and success: “You are nothing but slime, aspiring slime. … Your ugly hollow aspiration.”
She meditates on first knowledge, I think, when she writes: “Use whatever techniques you want and remember what you first knew: that it doesn’t matter what the book is about.”
She pities herself, like we all do, for her inability to be other people: “Walking home from the party, I was upset, thinking Agnes had it all because she had a husband, and now she could have a kid, while I had nothing.”
She says that she wants to write “fiction and nonfiction together, because the imagination is more amazing than anything in life, and life is more amazing than anything you can make up.”
She wants “to be neither beautiful nor famous nor eccentric” (or maybe not; she might be referring to someone else here, I don’t know).
She whines: “I once believed that making art was going to bring me happiness and success and be this pretty thing.”
She writes, “It is a great failure to age.”
She writes, “That’s all I want to know, what the human laws are,” and isn’t that what we all want to know?
She writes, “When you break up with someone, you feel you must have had such incredible powers of self-deception to have gone out with them at all,” and damn, that rang true.
She writes, correctly: “We don’t have a reigning morality. We don’t have a unified religion or philosophy. We don’t know what to be afraid of.”
She writes: “I have started playing Tetris, which feels halfway between writing and drinking.”
She writes: “I love the entire universe and everything in it.”
She writes: “I put my teeth in my pocket.”
She writes: “If in ten years I have a personality, that would be nice.”
She writes: “Regretting not being in New York, a feeling I suppose I will always have” (vomit).
She writes: “We can’t look at humans directly because it’s too hard. We can’t look at ourselves.
We can’t see where cruelty or selfishness comes from.”
She writes: “You can’t afford to move to New York. … You probably won’t move to New York. You probably won’t move to Paris. You see magic and beauty everywhere. … You will probably die in Toronto.”
Some things in life are impossible to explain and that doesn’t have to be a problem.
Sometimes she is Aristotelian: “Everything is very close right now, is about to be brought into being, is just millimeters away.”
Sometimes she is Platonic: “Everything is more beautiful and glittering in my mind than it ever is in real life.”
That, again, is the truth Alphabetical Diaries reveals.
(That’s actually a really horrible thing for me to insert into another person’s head, and I apologize to Sheila Heti for doing it.)
That’s what Heti is doing here, in her own way, and it works so, so well.
The urgency is palpable.
The way these sentences smash together, the juxtaposition of her ambitions and the mundane, is extremely satisfying.
This isn’t just about the knowledge she first acquired as a writer, but the knowledge she was born with, the instinctive knowledge we’re all born with, I think.
When she gets to “then,” a narrative forms that is exhilarating: “Then…then…then…then….”
Why am I so judgmental? 

 This is a volume of translations of translations within translations by unknown translators. Consequently, the organization can be confusing, the prose can be stilted, and the stories can be hard to follow. But the compelling moments shine so brightly it hurts. A real-life satyr instructs a desert monk on where to find God. A woman assumes the identity of a (male) desert monk, Mulan-style, and she out-monks her male counterparts—she is only discovered to be a woman after she dies, and of course she becomes a saint. The devil has numerous conversations with desert monks, and he usually walks away frustrated that he can’t trick them into screwing up their monkish ways. Two desert monks who live together in a cell decide to quarrel over who owns a specific tile on the floor, not because they care about the tile, but because they’ve never quarreled before, and so they feel insufficiently worthy of repentance (spoiler alert: they suck at quarreling). Two desert monks visit the big city: one fornicates, the other doesn’t, but the non-fornicator confesses to fornicating so that their abbot’s punishment will be lighter on the monk who actually fornicated.

All the desert monks trip over each other trying to confess sins greater than the others' sins, trying to achieve humility, and then failing to achieve humility because they tried too hard.

All the desert monks also seem to have lions as pets, and one desert monk curses his lion for eating meat (which, in case you don’t know, is what lions do).

A lot of these desert monks just give up on being desert monks, because being a desert monk is too difficult for them. But, as the desert monks continually point out, grace abounds.

Then there is my favorite story, the cryptic tale of the abbot Lot. Another abbot, Joseph, came to Lot and asked, “Father, according to my strength I keep a modest rule of prayer and fasting and meditation and quiet, and according to my strength I purge my imagination: what more must I do?” In response, Abbot Lot stood up and held his hands toward the sky, "and his fingers became like ten torches of fire, and he said, ‘If thou wilt, thou shalt be made wholly a flame.”

That’s metal.

I also liked this one: “A brother asked the abbot Alonius, ‘What is contempt?’ And the old man said, ‘To be below the creatures that have no reason, and to know that they are not condemned.’”

If you read nothing else from this volume, read the essays “Of Accidie” and “Of Mortification” by Cassian of Marseilles. They are two of the most honest and accurate accounts of the pains, challenges, boredom, and self-effacement that accompany any serious journey toward God.

In sum: it’s hard out there for a monk. 

 1.
Accidental Czar is a good overview of the U.S. state department’s interpretation of Vladimir Putin, with fun illustrations by Brian “Box” Brown. The book’s author, Andrew S. Weiss, is the kind of guy who worked as an executive director for the RAND corporation. He went to an Ivy League university (Columbia) and then served on the National Security Council, at the State Department, and at the Defense Department. He was a policy advisor for both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, which should tell you something—the guys who worked for both Clinton and W. were usually 100% down with the policy continuities between those administrations, the continuities that led straight to the Iraq War, woot woot. These were also the guys who pushed hard for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia.

Weiss previously led the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Moscow Center, a think-tank for Russian liberals and their allies to encourage and implement liberal reforms in Russia (the Moscow Center was shut down, but Weiss still works for the Carnegie Endowment). His articles have appeared in the New York Times and Foreign Policy. He has appeared on NPR. He has written papers for the Brookings Institute. He goes to the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Is any of that intrinsically bad? No…but when all those meritocratic checkmarks start to accumulate on a single CV, I get suspicious.

Weiss admits that, despite his vast education in Russian and Soviet affairs, there was a lot he didn’t understand about Russia before Putin’s villainous turn. I blame part of that ignorance on Weiss’s ideological commitments: you’ll only get so far in your analysis of Russia if you have centrist-liberal (neoliberal?) priors. Such analysis becomes especially messy when you believe in the benign efficacy of global capital to solve the world’s problems. And according to his biography on the RAND website, “Weiss was a vice president and investment strategist at American International Group, Inc. subsidiary companies, where he worked primarily on global commodities, energy, and foreign exchange markets.”

So yeah, he’s that kind of guy.

2.
Let’s start with the good: Accidental Czar is a lot of fun to read. The accounts of Putin’s upbringing and the myths of Putin’s personal history are entertaining. The histories of Russia that Weiss includes are good overviews of the nation’s origins, development, and ambitions.

Above all, Weiss offers one of the best accounts of “Putin’s brain” that I’ve encountered. An American diplomat once told Weiss that Putin’s entire worldview could be divided into three distinct sources of knowledge: first, there’s the real-world stuff Putin knows that everybody knows (e.g., the American dollar is the global reserve currency; China and the U.S. are locked in a proto-Cold War; the E.U. is facing a reemergence of far-right political parties; the Nazis lost WWII; Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia; etc).

Second, there’s the secret (and real) stuff Putin knows from his firsthand experiences in intelligence and as head of state (stuff you and I aren’t privy to, at least not without Wikileaks).

Third and finally, there’s all the crazy stuff: conspiracy theories about Western homosexuals in Ukraine literally crucifying toddlers on actual crosses, or Obama single-handedly launching the Maidan revolution because Michelle is LGBTQ+, or whatever.

Putin’s brain synthesizes these three types of knowledge through such an extraordinary process of osmosis that, when you’re talking to him, it’s impossible to disentangle the three. You just wind up getting frustrated (like Obama) or played (like Tucker Carlson).

Weiss’s account of Putin’s life and rise to power is mostly accurate, but it has its limits, especially when Putin’s biography begins to intersect with world politics. Weiss portrays American leaders and diplomats as well-intentioned fools and goofs who continually underestimated Putin. These Americans appear naïve and harmless, not political tigers in their own right with their own agendas and their own strategies for global hegemony.

This portrayal is not very plausible.

3.
Alongside Weiss’s American goofs, there are a number of American villains. Take the case of Edward Snowden. Weiss describes the Snowden saga as if the main story was not the wild and flagrant violations of privacy committed by the U.S. government or the terrifying extent of the NSA’s surveillance powers over the entire planet. Weiss brushes over these details and jumps right to Snowden’s flight to Russia—a flight he didn’t exactly choose to make (he was on his way to Latin America and wound up stuck in Russia, which isn’t exactly destination #1 for dissidents).

Snowden has behaved like a weakling and a coward since he wound up in Russia (although I’d challenge you to tell Putin to his face that his domestic surveillance is as pernicious and widespread as America’s). For Weiss, Wikileaks and Snowden are just pawns in Putin’s plan for domination over Eurasia and his scheme to *gasp* deny the presidency to Hillary Clinton (the liberal resentment over Russia’s miniscule role in the 2016 election is pretty thick in Accidental Czar).

You’d never know, reading this book, the extent to which the U.S. lords its surveillance, intelligence, and military agencies over enemies and allies alike…and how little we’d know about America’s covert foreign policy without Snowden’s revelations. For Weiss, Snowden is just another pitstop on the road to the November 2016 U.S. election and the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

4.
Things get a little silly as Weiss moves toward the 2016 election. At the beginning of Chapter Six, Weiss recounts the history of KGB propaganda in the U.S., from spreading lies about the secret origin of HIV in a U.S. lab to spreading obvious non-lies about the fact that Ronald Reagan wanted was taking a militaristic stance against the U.S.S.R., or the fact that J. Edgar Hoover was *gasp* a homosexual. These are the mighty columns of disinformation on which, according to Weiss, Putin built the edifice of the Donald Trump presidency.

Weiss recounts how Putin successfully used asymmetrical warfare in Ukraine in the years between 2014 and 2022. He also recounts how Putin’s allies in London encouraged Brexit; how his media hosted Nigel Farage, Alex Jones, Richard Spencer, and Iowa’s crypto-Nazi former congressman, Steve King; and how his lackeys tried to sow divisions among and within Western nations.

I remember seeing some of this firsthand as a tourist in Berlin in 2014, when far-right demonstrators outside the Bundestag waved Russian flags and placards with slogans like “EU ist nicht Europa” and “BRD ist nicht Deutschland” (one wonders what is Germany, precisely, if not the BRD? Is this some kind of backwards appeal to the deutsches Volk who unsuccessfully invaded the Soviet Union?).

None of this seemed to be working in Germany, where the rise of the far-right had more to do with Syrian refugees than with Putin’s machinations. And if Putin’s machinations succeeded in Ukraine before 2022, it was only insofar as the Kremlin could hack the nation’s physical and digital infrastructure and wreak havoc all over the country. Putin was successful in shutting down the power in Kyiv; he certainly wasn’t successful in winning the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people.

So these brazen, destructive tactics weren’t exactly successful in Ukraine. But Weiss argues that far less powerful tactics were somehow successful in the United States, where Putin’s goons created fake Facebook accounts to rile up American voters (who were already pretty riled up) and leaked DNC emails to Wikileaks (emails that confirmed what most people already knew and/or thought about Hillary Clinton). Weiss complains that Trump used Russian propaganda “to paint Clinton as sleazy and unethical,” which…c’mon, you don’t exactly need Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin to make that argument.

Weiss also complains that the American far-right (Donald Trump and his supporters) and the much smaller American far-left (Jill Stein and the weirdos who vote for her) had connections to Russia. Consequently, conservative complaints about American elites after the 2008 financial crisis and leftist complaints about American foreign policy after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are, for Weiss, at least partially Russian in origin.

To be fair, Weiss is careful to point out that the divisions that led to Donald Trump’s victory were homegrown American divisions, and that you didn’t need to be a one-time KGB agent to see with your own eyes that 50% of Americans view the other 50% of Americans as mortal enemies, and vice versa.

In one of the book’s images, we see a meme (based on a real meme) showing Satan arm-wrestling Jesus. Satan says, “If Clinton wins, I win!” Jesus responds, “Not if I can help it!” The meme prompts the viewer to hit “like” to help Jesus win.

As an Orthodox Christian with an Evangelical background, I can tell you that this is pure grade-A ‘Murican-bred religious nationalism, even if it was authored by a cash-hungry teenager in St. Petersburg. This is where policy analysts like Weiss lose track of the plot—they spend lifetimes at elite institutions learning about non-American societies while missing much of American culture and its discontents. (I remember hearing the “Pod Save America” guys talking about how, during the Obama administration, they didn’t understand Evangelicals’ commitment to Israel because they didn’t grow up around Evangelicals. Which, if you live in America and you didn’t know any Evangelicals growing up, you lived a fairly charmed-but-isolated American life.)

All that to say: you don’t need to be a Russian spy to understand the braindead logic of American Christians and deploy that logic in Trump’s favor. You also don’t need RT in order to platform Alex Jones and Richard Spencer, or to smear George Soros. America’s homegrown conservative media is happy to do that without any help from the Kremlin. Steve King didn’t become a Nazi-loving congressman because of Russian hackers in St. Petersburg. He was elected by like-minded racists from Iowa.

Jones and Spencer and King (and Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage) are not, as Weiss claims, “useful idiots” for Moscow. They’re just idiots.

5.
I’m not trying to minimize the effects of Russian propaganda, especially regarding Ukraine. The accusation that Ukraine is overrun with neo-Nazis is, for me, quite serious. First, it’s just not true—there are more flesh-and-blood neo-Nazis in the German Bundestag today than in the Ukrainian Rada (where, if I’ve heard correctly, there are precisely zero extreme-right representatives). Some propagandists point out that Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. But we conveniently ignore the fact that, for every single Ukrainian collaborator with the S.S., there were hundreds (thousands?) of Ukrainians fighting the Nazis in the Red Army.

Second, you hear this talking point about Ukrainian Nazis and Ukrainian collaboration with Nazis repeated in the U.S. all the time…especially (I’m ashamed to say) on the anti-war left, for whom no American military intervention is ever justified. Well, that is, no American intervention except for WWII, but the American left is awfully quick to point out that the Soviets won that war on the West’s behalf.

As for Putin's propaganda in the West: honestly, if Putin is fighting a propaganda war against the United States, so what? As Julia Ioffe said in an interview after the 2022 invasion, we should be very honest about what’s happening in Ukraine. This war is the result of a criminal invasion of Ukraine by Russia first and foremost, but it’s also a war between Russia and the West. And this war started in 2014 at the earliest. So why all the hand-wringing about Russian propaganda and cyberattacks? Because Putin targeted NPR darlings like Hillary Clinton and wrapped his arms around neoliberal bêtes noires like Julian Assange, Steve Bannon, Jille Stein, and (above all) Donald Trump? Is liberal rage against Putin about Ukraine or the 2016 election? Are they angry because Putin is a murderous autocrat or because “orange man bad”?

In any event, Putin is clearly failing at whatever he’s trying to achieve through these manipulations of Western media. Weiss quotes Putin’s old KGB boss, General Kalugin, who says that the KGB’s prime directive “was not intelligence collection, but subversion—active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO.”

Whelp, mission not accomplished, whether we’re talking about 1989 or 2024.

6.
In Accidental Czar, Weiss includes several entertaining sections (wonderfully illustrated by Brown) on the history of Russia. But these sections rely too much on an interpretation of Russian history that has become popular in Western academic circles, especially since Putin became such a baddie. According to this interpretation, the whole Russian “thing”—the Russian character, the Russian soul, Russian autocracy, Russian bureaucracy, Russian corruption, Russian military resilience—is the consequence of Russia’s unique geographic location: an expanse of difficult-to-defend territory stretching for thousands of kilometers in every direction around Moscow, the center.

Want to understand Russian history and Russian policy? Well, you’ve gotta understand its geography…just as understanding British or American or French or Chinese history and policy requires you to understand their geography.

There’s a lot of truth and power in this kind of analysis, what we call “geopolitics,” but it’s became especially popular after the 2014 invasion of Crimea. In the two years since the full-scale invasion, geopolitical analysis has been positively unavoidable. Ideology is out; realism is in. Nineteenth-century Great Power politics is back—turns out, it never left! And everybody is doing it, on all sides of the Ukraine issue, from John Mearsheimer (realpolitik scholar and opponent of U.S. involvement in Ukraine) to Stephen Kotkin (centrist scholar who advocates for a partition of Ukraine) to innumerable lesser-known foreign policy experts throughout the world (including in China) and even, at times, Alexandr Dugin (pro-Russian crypto-fascist), Timothy Snyder (pro-Ukrainian liberal historian who personally purchased drones for the Ukrainian army), and Antony Blinken (our internationalist Secretary of State who has never met a Muslim-majority nation he wouldn’t like to invade).

Geopolitical analysis of global politics and economics can be an incredibly powerful tool for understanding why certain nations prefer certain policies. But it can also serve as voodoo cultural studies, especially when you start ascribing ideas about “national personalities,” “historical patterns,” and “cultural characteristics” to the locations of rivers and mountains.

And I worry about the extent to which we’re all overcorrecting toward Great Power theories of history after the (bogus) “end of history” euphoria of the 1990s and the (failed) multi-trillion-dollar construction of American military hegemony in the early 2000s. Now America is just one of three global superpowers playing chess with a bunch of marginal nations full of newly un-colonized brown people whom we don’t exactly trust. Some of those nations, like Brazil and India, are moving up in the world, and for America, now is the time to win them for the West, for liberalism, for international institutions, and for global capital. This is America’s foreign policy project for the twenty-first century, and Putin is making that project a little…complicated.

One last thing...
When Madeline Albright is blurbing your book, you know that you’ve either written a book that Madeline Albright really happens to like or you’ve written state department propaganda. Accidental Czar is the latter. A lot of the material is completely true, but it’s still anti-Russian propaganda. I enjoyed the book, but I don’t trust it. The information is mostly true, but the reason it has been compiled into this graphic novel is to construct a narrative about American naivete and the need for robust action against America’s enemies. As with most stories we tell about Russia, we’re talking about us, not the Russian people or the Ukrainian people. Their diverse and oft-conflicting stories get lost amid our constant storytelling. 

A stunning volume of poems.

From the little I know of Kaveh Akbar’s biography, he has struggled with alcoholism, and nearly all of these poems reflect that and reflect the tensions between his Iranian heritage and American identity. Subjects like alcoholism and immigrant identity are well-worn and risk becoming…boring.

The same is true of the way Akbar weaves these subjects into his success as a poet. At one point the speaker describes himself “rolling around on the carpets of rich strangers/ while they applaud and sip their scotch.” Which, yeah, I get how strange and humiliating that must feel, but if you’re a poet with a sizable audience, then let me play you the world’s smallest violin.

But Akbar continually wins my sympathy back. And he is aware of how he may appear to unsympathetic readers: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry./ This may be me at my best.” The voices in his poems are charming and heartbreaking, and the imagery is awesome. Here are some of my favorite lines and moments from this collection:

“a crimson robe floating/ up from the Gobi/ sand into prophet then back into sand”

“envy is the only deadly sin that’s no fun/ for the sinner”

“We all want/ the same thing (to walk in sincere wonder,/ like the first man to hear a parrot speak)”

“You just don’t know yet which parts/ of yourself to value…/ your irises or their mothish obsession/ with light.”

“even our great-grandparents saw different blues owing/ to the rapid evolution of rods and cones”

“Do you know how hard it is to dig a new river?/ To be the single tongue in a sack full of teeth?”

“Mostly I want to be letters—not/ their sounds, but their shapes/ on a page. It must be exhilarating/ to be a symbol for everything at once:/ the bone caught in a child’s windpipe,/ the venom hiding in a snake’s jaw.”

“I pictured myself/ reduced to a warm globe of blood/ and yearned to become a sturdy in my end-/lessness, to grow heavy and terrible/ as molten iron poured down a throat.”

“the stomach/ of the girl who ate only hair was filled with hair they cut/ it out when she died it formed a mold of her stomach reducing/ a life to its most grotesque artifact”

“we now know some angels are more terrifying/ than others our enemies are replaceable the stones behind their teeth/ glow in moonlight”

“there were so many spiders/ your mouth a moonless system/ of caves filling with dust/ the dust thickened to tar/ your mouth opened and tar spilled out”

“Come to bed with me, you honest thing—/ let’s break into science. I’ll pluck you from my mouth/ like an apple seed, weep with you over other people’s lost pets./ The strangeness between us opens like a pinhole on the ocean floor:/ in floods a fishing boat, a Chinese seabird, an entire galaxy/ of starfish. We are learning so much so quickly. The sun/ is dying. The atom is reducible. The god-harnesses/ we thought we came with were just our tiny lungs.”

“Plants reinvent sugar daily/ and hardly anyone applauds.”

“There has been a swarm/ of hungry ghosts orbiting my body—even now,/ I can feel them plotting in their luminous diamonds/ of fog, each eying a rib or a thighbone. They are/ arranging their plans like warms preparing/ to rise through the soil. They are ready to die/ with their kind, dry and stiff above the wet earth.”

“sexless as a comma”

“I’m keyless as the language of twins”

“See how/ I am all rosejuice and wonderdrunk? See how/ my throat is filling with salt? Boil me. Divide/ me. Wrap me in paper and return me to earth. One day/ I will crack open underneath the field mushrooms./ One day I will wake up in someone else’s bones.”

“in Islam there are prayers to return almost anything even/ prayers to return faith I have been going through book after book pushing/ the sounds through my teeth I will keep making these noises/ as long as deemed necessary until there is nothing left of me to forgive”

So yes, Calling a Wolf a Wolf is a remarkable, gorgeous collection of contemporary poetry by a poet I can’t help liking, even if the voices he cultivates wear on me a little bit at times. Indeed, the voices in these poems can get exasperating, but the moments of raw beauty more than make up for that. 

More of an essay collection than a single argument with a sustained thesis. I was hoping for the latter—a comprehensive argument for an essential definition of "art." So I was a little disappointed. Still, the first essay—"Wakeful Dreams"—was beautiful and worth reading. 

 Lo Kwa Mei-en’s poetry frames the immediacy and the urgency of personal identity—what it means to be a person—within poems that are spare, wide, and often difficult. By spare, I mean that the structures of many of her poems consist of a few thin threads, letting her syntax flow in the breeze. By wide, I mean that her poems expand and stretch as they flow in the breeze, leaving lots of empty but meaningful space on the page.

And because the forms and syntax of these poems are often difficult, you can feel a little disoriented as you read The Bees Make Money in the Lion. But the volume’s certain images and themes help stabilize and return you to (what I interpret as) Mei-en’s central concern: the way in which citizenship and national identity strip away the experience of being human like skin being stripped from a martyr. It’s about biopolitics, basically, if you want to use a Foucauldian term. If the word “Foucauldian” doesn’t turn you off. God, I sound like a grad student.

The images and themes I refer to brush against the limits of what it means to be a human being. Mei-en incorporates all kinds of references to non-human animal life (or to zoology as such) and to extraterrestrial life (frequently playing on the fact that the word “alien” refers to extraterrestrial beings and to immigrants, migrants, and refugees). “Zoology counts us in,” she writes, “as against them and against joining them, as not a fair choir but chimeras in yellow moods, like a feral cat burying her fleas….” The “us” that zoology taxonomizes so uncharitably could be human beings in general, or it could be an immigrant being interpellated within the American state (which is a huge part of Mei-en’s biography).

In one of the collection’s best poems, “Aubade with Beginning, End, and Zodiac,” Mei-en writes:

Zoophobia predicted my alien romance. In the year of the lam,/ an Earth boy spit out my tooth. It was red like a page of the sun/ yellow as the word he held me down on. He called me a real/ bitch between the streets on fire, flower, and fur. There was no/ xenogenesis in the future and no future in which the schtick/ colonized my cage away.

These quotations are drawn from two of the volume’s later poems, where Mei-en’s arguments become more explicit and the collection’s narrative logic begins to cohere. The above quotation synthesizes the animal and extraterrestrial imagery nicely. Both quotations make surprising use of the word “yellow,” which of course is a loaded word for an Asian American writer. One can feel, within the difficult syntax stretched over the wide/loose structure, the agonizing process of a personal identity being molded and interpellated within a steel vice of political and national systems. “What if a nation is that,” Mei-en writes, “One master/ forger makes love to an old master’s debts One asshole/ tells the difference Sold: self-landscape in old leather/ More power to the broker Let’s grow gold together/ There are lines of beast and boast…”

Mei-en’s wordplay can be a little forced (“let’s grow gold together,” “a real bitch between the streets”), but I do that kind of thing all the time so who am I to judge?

A lot of ink has been spilled in recent years arguing that formally “difficult” or formally “innovative” poetry historically has been weaponized against poets of color. Which, yeah, that’s true. But Mei-en helps demonstrate the potential for difficult poetry to express the voices of people whose identity has been stripped by the politics of nationhood, and to express those voices with perfect clarity.