Morten Høi Jensen

The Los Angeles Review of Books blog has posted their ninth Writers as Teachers installment, my mini-essay on the Indian novelist and critic Siddhartha Deb. Read it HERE.

Next month the venerable NYRB Classics will add an essay collection by Dwight Macdonald to their impressive catalogue. Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, edited by John Summers and introduced by Louis Menand, is a selection of Macdonald’s writings on American culture during the 50s, 60s, and early 70s, touching on subjects as various as Tom Wolfe, The Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Time Magazine, and Ernest Hemingway. It makes for a thrilling read; more often than not Macdonald is bogged down in crazy wars against the petty-bourgeois culture that

vitiates serious art and thought by reducing it to a democratic-philistine pabulum, dull and tasteless because it is manufactured for a hypothetical “common man” who is assumed (I think wrongly) to be even dumber than the entrepreneurs who condescendingly “give the public what it wants.” Compromise is the essence of midcult, and compromise is fatal to excellence in such matters.

An insightful review of Masscult and Midcult has already appeared in Bookforum. The front page of the fall issue refers to “Dwight Macdonald’s Doomed Culture Crusade”—an appropriate phrase considering mind-nuking standards of the contemporary midcult. (What would Macdonald have made of Jersey Shore, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, and Dancing with the Stars?) 

Masscult and Midcult will be the only Macdonald book currently in print. This is a shame. Discriminations, a 1974 collection of essays and afterthoughts, gives a better impression of the range of Macdonald’s interests and concerns as a critic. It includes his brilliant close-reading of the Warren Report, a very funny and penetrating account of a visit to the White House during the Johnson administration, and a lucid defense of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. Countless memorable Macdonaldisms abound throughout. There is the description of Jack Ruby on trial for the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald: “one remembers him slumped in his seat, head lolling low, mumbling incoherent answers, stupefied, sodden with despair, poleaxed by History”; the suggestion that the only thing that journalism school can teach you is how to tie your shoelaces; the sight of a police car that “came nosing along the deserted street in that unsettling way police cars have, like Melville’s pale shark slipping ominously through tropical waters.”

Discriminations is the ideal volume for new readers; Memoirs of a Revolutionist, an earlier collection of “essays in political criticism”, is advanced reading. Much of it appeared originally in Politics, a magazine edited by Macdonald from the vantage point of his living room and in whose pages names like Albert Camus, Nicola Chiaromonte, Geroge Orwell, and Simone Weil often appeared. (George Scialabba has called it “the best political journal ever published in the United States.”) Memoirs partly maps Macdonald’s fascinating political journey with its many layovers in Trotskyism, anarchism, “conservative” anarchism, and pacifism.

I’ve written a syllabus on Scandinavian literature in translation for Bookforum‘s website. Take a look at it here.

Open Letters Monthly’s May issue features my review of two relatively new books by the Spanish writer Javier Marías. Read it here.

The Brooklyn Rail’s online InTranslation supplement has published my translation of four poems by Thomas Boberg. Here is the synopsis posted elsewhere on the site:

Thomas Boberg is probably the least insular of contemporary Danish poets. A life spent travelling and residing throughout–especially–South America has earned him comparisons to César Vallejo and Nicanor Parra, as well as the translation into Spanish of his 1993 collection Vandbærere, which appeared in Peru as Portadoras de agua the following year. This in addition to several acclaimed works of travel writing has cemented Boberg’s reputation as a kind of travelling man of Danish letters, hurling into the duck pond of his home country artistic impressions of a dizzying variety.

The book-length poem Hesteæderne (The Horse Eaters), in which the first of these poems appears, is a surreal and allegorical near-indictment of contemporary Danish society, peppered with references to T.S. Eliot, Karen Blixen, and Søren Kierkegaard, but served according to the strange, other-worldly recipe of Boberg’s genius. The society he portrays–which is and is not contemporary Denmark–is a post-apocalyptic dystopia of rampant corruption, violence and moral degradation from which no one, it seems, is spared. “I write…because I won’t put up with it,” Boberg writes elsewhere, and The Horse Eaters is really a sustained, artistic manifestation of that impulse.

The rising star of Danish literature, Josefine Klougart, kindly answered a few questions for my Jyllandsposten blog last week.

Kulturkappellet recently published my essay (written in Danish) on Roberto Bolaño. Read it here.