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Our own Michael Rob­bins has two reviews out this week:  a wickedly hilar­i­ous take­down of Robert Hass’s selected poems in the new issue of Poetry mag­a­zine, & a less wickedly hilar­i­ous appraisal of John Ashbery’s latest in the London Review of Books (sub­scriber only, but per­haps a copy could be pro­vided backchan­nel), which con­tains the first cita­tion of our own Oren Izenberg’s forth­com­ing Being Numer­ous. Please check ‘em out.

The fall issue of Nar­ra­tive Mag­a­zine includes a pair of excerpts from Amer­i­can Idol, the novel I’ve been writ­ing in fits and starts during this long slow slog through grad­u­ate school. The novel tells the story of an Amer­i­can anthro­pol­o­gist who lives South Amer­ica and stud­ies Amer­i­can Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies, though the latter don’t appear in either excerpt here. I was espe­cially pleased and grate­ful to see that on their front page the good folks at Nar­ra­tive had nudged my mug up next to my friend and mentor Annie Dil­lard, whose stun­ning Pil­grim at Tinker Creek is excerpted in the issue as well. Anyway, check it out…

Just wanted to post, belat­edly, a link to Ms. Dark’s excel­lent inter­view with Gopal Bal­akr­ish­nan in Lana Turner, since I have of late found myself non­plussed by the skep­ti­cism with which what seems an utterly uncon­tro­ver­sial, even triv­ial, claim is too often met—that cap­i­tal­ism will come to an end.

The fail­ure of this phase of cap­i­tal­ism, pre­sag­ing maybe wider prob­lems and fail­ures of cap­i­tal­ism, is that end [of his­tory], again, posing the ques­tion what it means for some­thing to come to an end. Cap­i­tal­ism, one is fairly sure, will not come to an end in the same way the Roman Empire did or Feu­dal­ism did or even the Soviet Union did. So we should be able to track the vec­tors of a declin­ing system in ways that allow us to grasp the speci­ficity of our own sit­u­a­tion, to gauge, as it were, the var­i­ous levels and dimen­sions at which a system can be con­tin­u­ing for­ward and then other levels at which it might be flat-​lining. And so I think we’ll have very com­plex prob­lems of both thought and polit­i­cal prac­tice in this coming period.

But I would encour­age every­body not to think about the his­tor­i­cal prob­lem of the future of our way of life: cap­i­tal­ism. Is it long for the world? How much longer? What might we do both to improve con­di­tions in the here and now and to think about alter­na­tives to it. Every­thing, as we know, all modes of social life, even­tu­ally come to an end and I think we’ve been a bit too accus­tomed in this period that we’re just coming out of to think that that truth, while cer­tainly true of every­thing that came before, might not be true of us. And if it were true of us, it might some­how be the case it would only matter in the very long term. And I think we might increas­ingly be con­fronted with evi­dence that that is not the case.

This week Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Press is pub­lish­ing The Heart of William James, a selec­tion of essays edited by my friend Bob Richard­son. Bob is the author of a tril­ogy of tremen­dous biographies—on Thoreau, Emer­son, and James—and to cel­e­brate the pub­li­ca­tion of this new book he’s got a guest post up at The Second Pass today on James’s “war against war.” Here’s a bit from the start:

By 1910, James was against war itself. His notion of a “war against war,” as he puts it, had been build­ing for at least a decade. His posi­tion, unusual still today among peace advo­cates, rec­og­nizes that war is a deeply attrac­tive thing for many of us, and that we do not in fact want peace—at least not entirely. He wrote before D.H. Lawrence observed that “the essen­tial Amer­i­can is hard, iso­late, stoic, and a killer.” And long before Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or, the Poem of Force,” James noted that “the Iliad is one long recital of how Diomedes, and Ajax, Sarpe­don and Hector killed.” It is the great­est strength of James’ argu­ment that he seri­ously rec­og­nizes the grip war has on us and will con­tinue to have. Rather than say we all love peace, let’s not fight, James instead tries to har­ness the war-​spirit and turn it against itself. We will have to kill war.

While you’re over there, be sure to check out the rest of TSP’s William James week. Good stuff.