He is more than a poet or novelist: Ray Young Bear is a word-collector who has been at work transcribing and assembling on the Meskwaki Tribal Settlement, near Tama, Iowa, for nearly fifty years. His work is not done in obscurity: last year saw two of his poems, (he calls them “word songs”), published in The New Yorker, his second publication in the magazine. And his collected poetry, Manifestation Wolverine, won an American Book Award back in 2016.
And yet, that night, he talked about dreams, dark beer, and Steely Dan. Later, after I drove him home and left the Meskwaki Settlement, I realized that in underlining his words, I had emulated what readers and those few academics who have studied him have been doing to Young Bear’s work for decades: grating only the surface of a truly singular writer’s work, missing the point entirely.
It’s not enough just to read anymore. It’s not even enough to post your reading on Instagram anymore. Today, you have to create an atmosphere to show just how analog and sensual you’re being. That often involves … a candle.
Home from the hospital, I found myself Googling “Down syndrome.” I knew immediately, even though I would languish in denial for a week as we awaited genetic-testing results.
During that week, my entire worldview, a belief system informed by my career in cultural anthropology, began to crumble. Here I was, an expert in a discipline that studies and celebrates the diversity of humankind, struggling to come to terms with a child born different.
Today I am ashamed that I ever felt this way. My love for Michaela is so powerful that I can’t fathom life without her. So why was I initially devastated by her Down syndrome diagnosis?
Throughout Lost, Withycombe outlines a comprehensive yet incredibly accessible history about the shift in the narrative. She provides detailed accounts from the letters of women, includes excerpts from medical journals, and uses the larger historical context to situate this ongoing negotiation between women and doctors to dictate the terms of what pregnancy was and wasn’t. The shift isn’t necessarily one of feeling, but one, perhaps of faith.
Hark Morner, the antihero of Sam Lipsyte’s fourth novel, “Hark,” is a huckster. Armed with some half-baked philosophy and imagined historical facts, he seduces audiences with woolly pronouncements even he doesn’t quite believe in, like “If you grow silent, easeful, the body will launch the spirit’s shaft true.”
His audiences don’t quite believe it either. Hark’s “Mental Archery” brand targets skepticism-soaked corporate retreats and conferences infested with “internet imams, public atheists, and assorted bandwidth hustlers.” But we’ve collectively struck a deal with the hucksters, Lipsyte means to say. We’re now so eager for distraction from our anxieties that we’ll accept some well-packaged, Hark-ish nonsense if it helps us get away from it all.
I heard about what you said, but nah. We both know I, the African lost in America, had to come and claim your body. And to level with you, homie, when I got word, no shock shot through me like the lightning of revelation. I figured it was always going to end this way for you, bruh; the child of pain is obviously pain as well, couldn’t dream of being anything more than its sorry daddy was.