Branching Out
Launch week serendipities, a surprising book review, and a conversation with Lore Wilbert
Dear Friends,
Happy Saturday! And to all of you who are new to the Substack: I’m delighted to have you. This is my weekend missive, a little collection of things I’ve found beautiful, interesting, or amusing. It is a bright, blue, and cold morning here in Scotland. I’ve just consumed a pastry, washed it down with a black americano. It’s a gift of a Saturday morning, after an exciting and somewhat exhausting week!
You are a Tree made its debut on Tuesday. Book launches are sort of a funny thing. On the one hand, it feels like a big deal. And on the other hand, nothing exactly, materially happens. It was a work day, so I spent the morning the typing away, made an appearance on one TV show on the east coast via Zoom, had lunch, submitted grades for the class I taught last semester, went on another show via Zoom, had dinner and then tuned into my regular editorial call for Plough.
And voila! Somehow amidst that ordinary (and rather busy!) day, You are a Tree made its way into the world. It was, I will confess, pretty delightful to see pictures of people’s copies arriving— even in the UK where supposedly it doesn’t release for another two months! I was particularly tickled by my dad’s post:
A man who loves metaphors, you can see perhaps why I dedicated this particular book to him. I was also very amused when I posted a screen shot of this on Twitter, and shortly afterwards Rita Felski, a world leading scholar of literature (whom I engaged with at length in my Phd thesis!) retweeted it. Sometimes the internet is, in fact, delightful. All in all, it was a happy launch week. And I got to celebrate in real life with some friends on the evening of the launch.
It felt appropriate, if I may be so bold, that of all scholars Felski would stumble upon the tweet. Felski’s work on literary criticism has focused on a movement called Postcritique, which was a movement away from what Paul Ricouer (who I quote in the book!) described as the “hermeneutics of suspicion”: always evaluating texts for some underlying structure whether psychological, social, or sexual and thus (to use a tree metaphor) missing the forest for the trees. Felski affirms the place of Critique, but suggests that there are other ways to read than looking for some underlying system of oppression in all books.
She writes that for many, reading “is about intoxication rather than detachment, rapture rather than disinterestedness.” Her work demonstrates the kind of pleasure and power of language and reading. She writes of the wonder that “black squiggles on a page can conjure up such vivid simulacra of persons, things, actions, places; that readers can experience such powerful sensations and emotions as we react to these shadows and phantasms.” I hope my little book on metaphor captures some of the delight and wonder of words.
Anyway, it was a good launch week, and I hope that if you haven’t already, you will consider, as my dad put it…
Getting your blooming copy today…
Some of the themes in my book were brought back to mind through a surprising source this week: The Map and Its Territory by the controversial French author Michel Houellebecq. I was told by person who recommended this book to me that I am only allowed to read this book of Houellebecq because I would violently dislike the others. (And let it be known that I’m not endorsing this one). But for all his professed atheism, of contemporary novelists Houellebecq writes perhaps more than anyone about God. So I wanted to see what he was about.
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