LA Review of Books

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak to Rachel Nuwer about her recent book, I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World. They discuss the drug's emergence in the Bay Area during the 1960s when pioneers hailed it as a groundbreaking mental health therapy for treating everything from addiction to trauma before the US government classified it as a dangerous Schedule I drug. Eric, Medaya, and Rachel also discuss MDMA's surge in popularity as a party drug during the 1980s and 1990s, as well as inclusion in new clinical trials currently underway to research its effectiveness in treating severe cases of PTSD. Across her account of MDMA's past, present, and future, Nuwer's accessible journalistic account informs and challenges what we know about how the drug works and how the government, researchers, and underground renegades have shaped the scientific and cultural discourse that surrounds it. Also, Kristin Ross, the author of The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life returns to recommend a range of works that capture and comment on everyday life: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidaya Hartman, the writing of Mike Davis and Fredric Jamison on Los Angeles, the noir novels of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald set in Sothern California, the detective novels (and even-darker fictions) of George Simenon, and the historical novels of Janet Lewis, including The Wife of Martin Guerre.

Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak to the author Kristin Ross about her recent book, The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life, a collection of essays that examine how everyday life emerges as a vantage point for understanding and transforming our social world. The book represents three decades of Ross's writing about the everyday in French political, social, and cultural theory and history, including the commune form and current autonomous zones in France, the romance and memory of the May 1968 protests, and the present predicaments both faced and created by the Macron government. Featuring a long interview with the pioneering philosopher Henri Lefebvre, the book also invokes the work of Frederic Jameson, Jacques Ranciere, Emile Zola, and many others, to explore the intersections of political transformation and cultural representation as resources for thinking opposition and liberation in the present. Plus, artist Martine Syms, whose new exhibition Loser Back Home is currently on view at Spruth Magers in Los Angeles, returns to recommend Steffani Jemison's novel A Rock, A River, A Street.

Kate Wolf is joined by the acclaimed artist and filmmaker Martine Syms to discuss her new exhibition Loser Back Home, currently on view at Spruth Magers in Los Angeles. Sym's work in the show encompasses video, sculpture, painting, photography, installation, publishing, and clothes. It merges recognizable brand names with personal ephemera to create a form of self-portraiture and explores the slippery nature of self as distilled through technology, as well as a state of "dysplacement"—a term coined by the historian Barbara Fields to describe the loss of a shared sense of connection to one’s familiar or home country. Last fall, Syms also released her first narrative feature film, The African Desperate, which she co-wrote and directed. The African Desperate (now streaming on MUBI) takes place over the course of 24-hours in the life of an artist named Palace on the day she receives her Masters of Fine Arts degree at a small college in upstate New York, combining formal innovation with humor, pathos, and astute social commentary. Also, Craig Seligman, author of Who Does That Bitch Think She is?, returns to recommend Liz Brown's Twilight Man: Love and Ruin in the Shadows of Hollywood and the Clark Empire .

Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with writer Craig Seligman about his recent book, Who Does That Bitch Think She is? Doris Fish and The Rise of Drag. The book follows the story of the groundbreaking drag queen, performer, and artist Doris Fish, who was born in Australia in the early 1950s as Philip Mills. Seligman initially wrote about Fish in the 1980s after they met through his boyfriend in San Francisco. He builds on his past interviews to recount Fish’s life, from her early days in Sydney when she was a member of the outre drag group Silvia and the Synthetics, to her time living in San Francisco, where she moved in the late 1970s. She formed the group Sluts A-Go-Go there, and went on to become one of the city’s most celebrated performers, writing and starring in the cult film Vegas in Space, and staging increasingly avant-garde and political performances until her death from AIDS in 1991. In addition to Fish’s story, Seligman looks at larger attitudes toward drag, both within the queer community and outside of it, elucidating the way drag has seeped into popular culture and why it still remains a radical act today. Also, Joanna Biggs, author of A Life of One's Own, returns to recommend Still Born, a novel by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey.

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by editor and writer Joanna Biggs, whose new book is called A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again. Joanna is an editor at Harper’s Magazine. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, The Nation, the Financial Times and the Guardian. In her new book, Joanna is attempting to recalibrate her life after a divorce. She turns to literature and specifially, to nine different women writers and philosophers, ranging from Mary Wollstonecraft to Sylvia Plath to Toni Morrison to Elena Ferrante. In exploring their lives and their work, Joanna finds radical ways to live and rebuild, inspired by these women who forged their own paths outside of domestic and societal expectations. With the help of their writing and their example, Joanna slowly starts to find a new sense of self. She writes “I was alone in many ways, but in my reading I had company for the big questions.” Also, Gary Indiana, author of Do Everything in the Dark, returns to recommend The Age of Skin by Dubravka Ugresic.

Kate Wolf is joined by author, critic, and artist Gary Indiana to speak about the recent reissue of his 2003 novel, Do Everything in the Dark. Told on the heels of the aftershock of AIDS and the coming catastrophe of 9/11, alongside an ever-increasing globalization, Do Everything in the Dark centers on a group of friends, who, as Indiana writes in a new introduction, are “experiencing crises in their personal or professional lives, having committed themselves to relationships and careers that, however bright and promising for years, were suddenly not working out.” The characters are artists, actors, filmmakers, and writers like the auto-fictive narrator of the novel, Gary Indiana. In New York City, over the summer of 2001, the narrator becomes both axis point and witness to the various breakdowns his friends undergo: he receives their missives from far-flung locations across the world, their late night phone calls, and follows their private moments from an omniscient point of view. Through it all, he questions his ability to help them or change the course of their lives—if life at this late point in history is even livable— while offering his friendship all the same. Also, Tom Comitta, author of The Nature Book, returns to recommend the complete oeuvre of Percival Everett.

Writer and veteran book critic Christian Lorentzen and Pantheon publisher and editor Lisa Lucas join Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to talk about recent shake-ups in the publishing industry. The guests discuss the closure of Bookforum and a spate of other small magazines and websites, changes to social media, the DOJ's decision to block Penguin Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster, and their hope despite the difficulties. Are we at an inflection point for American publishing? Can the industry adapt to these challenges before it's too late?

A look at our sometimes uncomfortable relationship to television. In the first half of the show, Eric Newman is joined by Hunter Hargraves to talk about his new book, Uncomfortable Television. Hargraves argues that since the dawn of the new millennium, American television has kept audiences glued to the screens with intensely plotted and character-driven dramas that borrow from the epic aesthetics of cinema as well as reality programming. At the same time, this type of TV shellacks us with disturbing images and themes: graphic sex, addiction, misogyny and racialized violence, despicable antiheroes, and the exploitative world of ordinary people sharing their profound pain for a national audience of millions. What's unique about this programming is that it encourages us to find pleasure in being disturbed, training us to survive an increasingly precarious world that it also asks us to surrender to. Next Newman and Kate Wolf speak with LARB's TV editor Phillip Maciak about his new book, Avidly Reads: Screentime. Part cultural criticism, part personal essay, Screentime explores how fears over kids spending too much time playing video games and watching TV in the 1990s has morphed in the current proliferation of ubiquitous screens that capture—and demand—our attention seemingly everywhere. Screentime looks at how what once was a threat has now become a metric tracked in every moment of our lives.

Today we’re speaking with writer and critic Claire Dederer, the author of Love and Trouble, as well as the memoir Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses. She is a long-time contributor to the New York Times, and her work has also appeared in the Atlantic, The Nation, NY Magazine as well as many others. Her new book is called Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. The book is a personal and critical investigation of how to deal with the art of difficult, or monstrous people. She first started thinking about this question while working on a book about Roman Polanski. Dederer dives into the knotty moral issues around art and the often flawed people who make it. She considers how an artist’s behavior might stain and affect the way an audience approaches a work. Dederer explores and asks questions about people like Woody Allen, JK Rowling, Picasso, and Nabokov. How do we deal with the monsters among us, especially when they’ve created something we love? Also, Hernan Diaz, author of Trust, drops by to recommend works by two Norwegian writers, Love by Hanne Orstavik and Evil Flowers by Gunnhild Oyehaug.

Kate Wolf is joined by the Turner prize-winning artist Helen Cammock to discuss her new book, and current exhibition at Art and Practice in Los Angeles, I Will Keep My Soul. Both are drawn from Cammock’s time in New Orleans—which she began to visit early last year—and address the city’s social history, geography, and community. Her book brings together poetry, film stills, photography, collage, and a number of archival documents from the Amistad Research Center. One of the focuses of Cammock’s research is the artist Elizabeth Cattlet, an active member of the Civils Rights Movement who taught in New Orleans early in her career in the 1940s before leaving the US for Mexico. Decades later, she received a commission to create a sculpture of Louis Armstrong in Congo Square, a historical meeting place for enslaved people in the city. Cattlet’s words and work are woven throughout the book, and evoke the rich accumulations of history that are ever present, and constantly presenting themselves, within a contemporary encounter of place. Also, Colm Toibin, author of A Guest at the Feast, returns to recommend Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These.