Front Table Newsletter 10/14

On This Week's Front Table, examine how the arts and sciences have always danced together; then explore reflections on the absurdities and abjection of being a poet who is also an office worker. Deepen how you think about the legacies of war, the presence of the past, and the renewed promise of art for our lives today; and consider John Lewis, a man whose heroism during the Civil Rights movement helped to bring America a new birth of freedom. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.

John Lewis: A Life
(Simon & Schuster)
David Greenberg

Born into poverty in rural Alabama, Lewis would become second only to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. He was a Freedom Rider who helped to integrate bus stations in the South, a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, and the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he made into one of the major civil rights organizations. He may be best remembered as the victim of a vicious beating by Alabama state troopers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he nearly died.

Thoroughly researched and dramatically told, Greenberg’s biography captures John Lewis’s influential career through documents from dozens of archives, interviews with hundreds of people who knew Lewis, and long-lost footage of Lewis himself speaking to reporters from his hospital bed following his severe beating on “Bloody Sunday” in Selma. With new details about his personal and professional relationships, John Lewis: A Life is the definitive biography of a man whose heroism during the Civil Rights movement helped to bring America a new birth of freedom.

Much Ado About Numbers : Shakespeare's Mathematical Life and Times
(The Experiment)
Rob Eastaway

Shakespeare’s era was abuzz with mathematical progress, from the new concept of “zero” to Galileo’s redraft of the heavens. Now, Rob Eastaway uncovers the many surprising ways math shaped Shakespeare’s plays—and his world—touring astronomy, code-breaking, color theory, navigation, music, sports, and more. How reliable was a pocket sundial? Was math illusionist John Dee the real-life Prospero? How long was a Scottish mile, and what could you buy for a groat? Do Jupiter’s moons have a cameo in Cymbeline? How did ordinary people use numbers day to day? And might Shakespeare have tried that game-changing invention—the pencil?

Full of delights for devotees of both Tudor history and the Bard, Much Ado About Numbers is proof that the arts and sciences have always danced together.

Time's Echo
(Vintage)
Jeremy Eichler

In 1785, when the great German poet Friedrich Schiller penned his immortal “Ode to Joy,” he crystallized the deepest hopes and dreams of the European Enlightenment for a new era of peace and freedom, a time when millions would be embraced as equals. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony then gave wing to Schiller’s words, but barely a century later these same words were claimed by Nazi propagandists and twisted by a barbarism so complete that it ruptured, as one philosopher put it, “the deep layer of solidarity among all who wear a human face.”

With a critic’s ear, a scholar’s erudition, and a novelist’s eye for detail, Eichler shows how four towering composers—Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten—lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving, transcendent works of music, scores that echo lost time. Summoning the supporting testimony of writers, poets, philosophers, musicians, and everyday citizens, Eichler reveals how the essence of an entire epoch has been inscribed in these sounds and stories. Along the way, he visits key locations central to the music’s creation, from the ruins of Coventry Cathedral to the site of the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv.   

As the living memory of the Second World War fades, Time’s Echo proposes new ways of listening to history, and learning to hear between its notes the resonances of what another era has written, heard, dreamed, hoped, and mourned. A lyrical narrative full of insight and compassion, this book deepens how we think about the legacies of war, the presence of the past, and the renewed promise of art for our lives today.

That Still Moment
(David Zwirner Books) 
Edwin Denby

After starting his career as a dancer with companies and troupes in Germany and Switzerland, Edwin Denby moved to Manhattan, where he formed friendships with prominent members of the New York School, including Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, and artists such as Rudy Burckhardt. In his critical writing, he brought his experience as a dancer to the page along with a poet’s sensibility, distinguishing himself as an authority through delicate observation and illustrative prose. This collection of writings highlights Denby’s interdisciplinary scope and range of expression, as well as his sharp, singular voice and empirical sensibility toward all works of art.

This Still Moment pairs Denby’s landmark essays on dance criticism and portraits of major performers, such as Vaslav Nijinsky, with selections of his poetry that are long out of print. The writer and editor Cal Revely-Calder further contextualizes Denby’s life and work in his insightful introduction.

Annihilation
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 
Michel Houellebecq

In Michel Houellebecq's Annihilation, it is 2027 and France is in a state of economic decline and moral decay. Unemployment, rural poverty, and income inequality have reached unprecedented levels. As the country plunges into a closely fought presidential campaign, the French state falls victim to a series of mysterious and unsettling cyberattacks. A video posted on the internet depicts the guillotining of Finance Minister Bruno Juge.

As an adviser to Minister Juge, Paul Raison is close to the heart of government. His wife, Prudence, is a Treasury official, while his father, Édouard, now retired, has spent his career working for the French counterterrorism agency. Paul’s personal life is as troubled and as atomized as that of the nation: his marriage has become strained, while his ties with his siblings are distant. But when Édouard suffers a stroke, Paul has an opportunity to repair his relationship with them, as they determine to free their father from the medical center where he is wasting away.

I Was Working
(Princeton University Press)
Ariel Yelen

Seeking to find a song of the self that can survive or even thrive amid the mundane routines of work, Ariel Yelen’s lyrics include wry reflections on the absurdities and abjection of being a poet who is also an office worker and commuter in New York. In the poems’ dialogues between labor and autonomy, the beeping of a microwave in the staff lounge becomes an opportunity for song, the poet writes from a cubicle as it is being sawed in half, and the speaker of the title poem decides “to quit everything except work,” sacrificing her life and loved ones to bury herself in her four jobs, striving at any cost to find relief from the attempt to both have a life and be a good worker—“No one was happy to see me, and so / at last I could work. No one said it’s okay. It wasn’t / okay, thus my work flourished.” Despite such discontents, I Was Working finds humor, play, and even joy in its original and compelling search for the possibility of self-liberation.

Suggested in the Stars
(New Directions)
Yoko Tawada

It’s hard to believe there could be a more enjoyable novel than Scattered All Over the Earth—Yoko Tawada’s rollicking, touching, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship and climate change—but surprising her readers is what Tawada does best: its sequel, Suggested in the Stars, delivers exploits even more poignant and shambolic.

As Hiruko—whose Land of Sushi has vanished into the sea and who is still searching for someone who speaks her mother tongue—and her new friends travel onward, they begin opening up to one another in new and extraordinary ways. They try to help their friend Susanoo regain his voice, both for his own good and so he can speak with Hiruko—and amid many often hilarious misunderstandings (some linguistic in nature)—they empower each other against despair.  Coping with carbon footprint worries but looping singly and in pairs, they hitchhike, take late-night motorcycle rides, and hop on the train (learning about railway strikes but also packed-train-yoga) to convene in Copenhagen. There they find Susanoo in a strange hospital working with a scary speech-loss doctor.  In the half-basement of this weird medical center (with strong echoes of Lars von Trier’s 1990s TV series The Kingdom), they also find two special kids washing dishes. They discover magic radios, personality swaps, ship tickets delivered by a robot, and other gifts. But friendship—loaning one another the nerve and heart to keep going—sets them all (and the reader) to dreaming of something more... Suggested in the Stars delivers new delights, and Yoko Tawada’s famed new trilogy will conclude in 2025 with Archipelago of the Sun, even if nobody will ever want this “strange, exquisite” (The New Yorker) trip to end.