Front Table Newsletter 10/21

In the more than 230 years since the Constitution took effect, the constitutional law governing the conduct of foreign affairs has evolved significantly. But that evolution did not come through formal amendments or Supreme Court rulings. Rather, the law has been defined by the practices of Congress and the executive branch, also known as "historical gloss."

Curtis A. Bradley documents this process in action. He shows that expansions in presidential power over foreign affairs have often been justified by reference to historical gloss, but that Congress has not merely stepped aside. Belying conventional accounts of the "imperial presidency" in foreign affairs, Congress has also benefited from gloss, claiming powers for itself in the international arena not clearly addressed in the constitutional text and disrupting claims of exclusive presidential authority.

Historical Gloss and Foreign Affairs proposes a constitutional theory that can make sense of these legal changes. In contrast, originalist theories of constitutional interpretation often ignore influential post-Founding developments, while nonoriginalist theories tend to focus on judicial decisions rather than the actions and reasoning of Congress and the executive branch. Moreover, the constitutional theories that do focus on practice have typically emphasized changes at particular moments in time. What we see in the constitutional law of foreign affairs, however, is the long-term accumulation of nonjudicial precedents that is characteristic of historical gloss. With gloss confirmed as a prime mover in the development of foreign affairs law, we can begin to recognize its broader status as an important and longstanding form of constitutional reasoning.


Nymphs
(Seagull Books)
Giorgio Agamben; Amanda Minervini, trans.

In 1900, art historians André Jolles and Aby Warburg constructed an experimental dialogue in which Jolles supposed he had fallen in love with the figure of a young woman in a painting: "A fantastic figure--shall I call her a servant girl, or rather a classical nymph?...what is the meaning of it all?...Who is the nymph? Where does she come from?" Warburg's response: "in essence she is an elemental spirit, a pagan goddess in exile," serves as the touchstone for this wide-ranging and theoretical exploration of female representation in iconography.

In Nymphs, the newest translation of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's work, the author notes that academic research has lingered on the "pagan goddess," while the concept of "elemental spirit," ignored by scholars, is vital to the history of iconography. Tracing the genealogy of this idea, Agamben goes on to examine subjects as diverse as the aesthetic theories of choreographer Domineco da Piacenza, Friedrich Theodor Vischer's essay on the "symbol," Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectic image, and the bizarre discoveries of photographer Nathan Lerner in 1972. From these investigations, there emerges a startlingly original exploration of the ideas of time and the image.
 

Consider the Turkey
(Princeton University Press)
Peter Singer

A turkey is the centerpiece of countless Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Yet most of us know almost nothing about today's specially bred, commercially produced birds. In this brief book, bestselling author Peter Singer tells their story--and, unfortunately, it's not a happy one.

Along the way, he also offers a brief history of the turkey and its consumption, ridicules the annual U.S. presidential "pardon" of a Thanksgiving turkey, and introduces us to "a tremendously handsome, outgoing, and intelligent turkey" named Cornelius. Above all, Singer explains how we can improve our holiday tables--for turkeys, people, and the planet--by liberating ourselves from the traditional turkey feast. In its place, he encourages us to consider trying a vegetarian alternative--or just serving the side dishes that many people already enjoy far more than turkey. Complete with some delicious recipes for turkey-free holiday feasting, Consider the Turkey will make you reconsider what you serve for your next holiday meal--or even tomorrow's dinner.


The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary
(Vintage)
Sarah Ogilvie

The Oxford English Dictionary is one of mankind's greatest achievements, and yet, curiously, its creators are almost never considered. Who were the people behind this unprecedented book? As Sarah Ogilvie reveals, they include three murderers, a collector of pornography, the daughter of Karl Marx, a president of Yale, a radical suffragette, a vicar who was later found dead in the cupboard of his chapel, an inventor of the first American subway, a female anti-slavery activist in Philadelphia . . . and thousands of others.

Of deep transgenerational and broad appeal, a thrilling literary detective story that, for the first time, unravels the mystery of the endlessly fascinating contributors the world over who, for over seventy years, helped to codify the way we read and write and speak. It was the greatest crowdsourcing endeavor in human history, the Wikipedia of its time.

The Dictionary People is a celebration of words, language, and people, whose eccentricities and obsessions, triumphs, and failures enriched the English language.


Helen's Exile
(Eris)
Albert Camus

Written in the aftermath of the Second World War, Albert Camus's essay is a searching inquiry into the origins of the hubris and fanaticism that laid waste to twentieth-century Europe. At once a celebration of the classical virtues of balance and serenity and a warning to Camus's contemporaries, Helen's Exile is a profound analysis of the nature of modernity.


Impossible Things
(Duke University Press)
Miller Oberman

Offering an intimate account of intergenerational grief, Miller Oberman's new collection of poetry, Impossible Things, explores his experiences as both a transgender child and father. Oberman weaves in passages from his own deceased father's unpublished memoir to engage with the mysterious drowning of his eldest brother, Joshua, at age two, a tragedy that cast a shadow over his childhood. He depicts his own youth and parenthood in the context of his father's trauma, employing queer and trans theory and experimental poetic forms to challenge and expand discourse around fatherhood and masculinity. Oberman moves beyond an attempt to solve the mystery of Joshua's death and interrogates how much we can ever know about our forebears or understand their impacts on our lives. Impossible Things offers a necessary intervention into the well-worn terrain of fatherhood/boyhood memoir and functions as a living elegy, communicating with the past, the dead, and the unknowable while speaking to the possibilities for healing intergenerational trauma.


I Am Alien to Life
(McNally Editions)
Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes is rightly remembered for Nightwood, her breakthrough and final novel: a hallmark of modernist literature, championed by T. S. Eliot, and one of the first, strangest, and most brilliant novels of love between women to be published in the twentieth century. Barnes's career began long before Nightwood, however, with journalism, essays, drama, and satire of extraordinary wit and courage. Long into her later life, after World War II, when she published nothing more, it was her short fiction above all that she prized and would continue to revise.

Here are all the stories Barnes sought to preserve, in the versions she preferred, as well as a smattering of rarities as selected by critic and New Yorker contributor Merve Emre. These are tales of women "'tragique' and 'triste' and 'tremendous' all at once," of sons and daughters being initiated into the ugly comedy of life, monuments all to a worldview singular and scathing. As Emre writes in her foreword, "[Barnes's] themes are love and death, especially in Paris and New York; the corruption of nature by culture; the tainted innocence of children; and the mute misery of beasts . . . her characters may be alien to life, but they are alive--spectacularly, grotesquely alive."