Holdings 1:1
Helicopters, fascists, extreme reading, and more
What’s going on at The Book Hold? Here’s what’s going on.
Birds of paradise
Like many residents of Los Angeles, I have long wondered why the cops love flying helicopters around our skies so much, especially when it doesn’t seem to (and, research has long shown, couldn’t) have anything to do with ensuring public safety.
A few years ago the City Controller put together a report saying the helicopter program was silly. In its response, the LAPD expressed their regret that neither the Controller nor any members of his staff went on a “fly-along.” The implication seems to be that the experience of being in a helicopter is at least part of, and maybe an indispensable part of, the justification of the helicopter program.
The “birds of paradise” series attempts to discover the nature of this experience through the eyes of literature.
- In an introductory post, I sketch this background and describe the central conceit of the “birds of paradise” series: If the usual empirical methods of study are inadequate for justifying cops in helicopters, perhaps literature, with its unique capacity for capturing the nature and content of experience, can give us a clue.
- In the first post for this series, I discuss Saint-Exupéry’s novella, Night Flight.
Literature and fascism in Italy
I’m working my way through a stack of novels from before, during, and after the second World War in Italy, that is, around the time of Mussolini’s rise to and fall from power.
- Part 1 of the series is on Bontempelli’s The Chess Set in the Mirror
- Part 2 of the series is on Calvino’s The Path to the Spiders’ Nests
These two are intended to provide historical ‘bookends’ (their publication dates are 1922 and 1947 respectively) to the Mussolini (the fascist) era in Italy. But I cheated:
- Part 3 of the series is on Ortese’s The Iguana
The Iguana is admittedly from much later (1965) than the work I’m primarily interested in, but I think there is good reason to see it as moving in the wake of authoritarianism in Italy, and it provides a convenient model for thinking about the distinctively (and oddly) imperialist shape that Italian fascism assumed.
Why the interest in fascism and authoritarianism? Oh, you know, the obvious reason.
Big-picture stuff, and my favorite things
Right now The Book Hold is basically a blog on books, that’s true. It has a “take.” It professes to be about “extreme reading for very serious people.”
- I describe what I mean by “extreme reading” in this post.
For reasons alluded to in that post, I bristle at the idea of “recommendations.” Do I “like” the books I write about on The Book Hold? Sure, but I like them the way I like Kant’s first Critique—not because they’re “entertaining” or so delightfully pleasant that I’ll feel depraved for consuming them, but because they force me to think about difficult things.
Nevertheless, I also do some reading not only because I want to make fun of the LAPD or understand the relation between writing and political authority. For lack of a better description, I collect posts on books I just so happen to like under the “my favorite things” tag. Right now these include discussion of:
- Majdalani’s The Big House, and
- Redonnet’s Forever Valley.
No through-thread; they’re just a couple of books I was drawn to and read and happened to like, and that had me thinking.
Coming up on The Book Hold
- I have probably quite a few more posts in me on fascism in Italy. I’ve also been reading some Romanian works written under Ceaușescu (so many trams!). And certainly the dictator novel, a favorite subgenre of mine, looms constantly. The several traditions of reflection on the relationship between writing and authority are and will remain an ongoing interest of The Book Hold.
- I’ve been reading and thinking about works in a contorted version of the ‘travelogue’ tradition written in France during the interwar years—Michaux and Leiris in particular. Something will come of it.
- Links to books on The Book Hold are affiliate links on Bookshop. I’ll be putting together a few thematic shelves on Bookshop, and perhaps after a while will have a bonafide ‘shop’ of very cool books for you to browse there.