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Joseph Salvatore

Joseph Salvatore

Category Archives: Essays & Criticism

Publications in The New York Times Sunday Book Review

21 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by Joseph Salvatore in Essays & Criticism, New York Times Book Review

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In my role as Books Editor for The Brooklyn Rail, I have a small sense of how much work my editors at The New York Times Book Review have to do.  Each of the following book reviews has been improved by those fine editors.  I’m deeply grateful to them.  (Note: Some of these reviews appeared in the NYTBR’s ‘Fiction Chronicle’ and ‘The Shortlist’; those titles and authors have been listed separately.)

Bucky F*cking Dent, By David Duchovny

XO Orpheus, Edited by Kate Bernheimer

The Cool School, Edited by Glenn O’Brien

The Moth Anthology, Edited by Catherine Burns

The Twelve (part two of The Passage vampire trilogy), by Justin Cronin

We The Animals, by Justin Torres

There Is No Year, by Blake Butler

Mary Ann In Autumn, by Armistead Maupin

Dogfight, A Love Story, by Matt Burgess

The November Criminals, by Sam Munson

The Escape, by Adam Thirlwell

Generation A, by Douglas Coupland

Sometimes We’re Always Real Same-Same, by Mattox Roesch

The Death of Bunny Munro, by Nick Cave

Home Boy, by H.M. Naqvi

The Cry of the Sloth, by Sam Savage

Perforated Heart, by Eric Bogosian

Ugly Man, Dennis Cooper

The Hospital for Bad Poets, J. C. Hallman

Pygmy, by Chuck Palahniuk

Security, by Stephen Amidon

After You’ve Gone, Jeffrey Lent

Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet, by Darrin Doyle

Pandora in the Congo, Albert Sanchez Pinol

The Unknown Knowns, Jeffrey Rotter

Future Missionaries of America, by Matthew Vollmer

Body Surfing, Dale Peck

Out of My Skin, by John Haskell

 

 

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New review for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Dec. 3rd, 2013

03 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by Joseph Salvatore in Blog, Essays & Criticism, New York Times Book Review

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Adam Gopnik, Ben Percy, Benjamin Percy, Damien Echols, Emma Straub, Glenn O'Brien, Joyce Maynard, Kate Bernheimer, L.O.L., Library of America, Norman Mailer, Peter Straub, Richard Price, The Moth, The Moth Anthology, The White Negro, West Memphis 3, West Memphis Three, XO Orpheus

A huge thanks to the editors at the New York Times Book Review for this assignment, which ran in Sunday’s paper. Lots of reading, true . . . but isn’t that the fun part? Anthologies make great gifts — especially when purchased from independent booksellers. Shop local, read global.#indiesfirst

Cover_xo_Orpheus

Do conservatives hate English courses?

22 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by Joseph Salvatore in Essays & Criticism

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Thanks to Prof. Erika J. Galluppi at East Carolina University for sharing this IHE article on why conservatives hate English courses.

I’m not so sure they do, however. And author Mexal’s tone (how many times must he repeat “cultural Marxist theory”?) didn’t always make me feel he did either. (Also, his using Breitbart as his departure point felt to me [who actually believes strongly that conservatives are indeed not English-haters, but are rather, in fact, threatened by any idea that questions their traditional beliefs (the terms themselves support this: a “liberal” prefers a variety of opinions and is open to change based on those views — i.e., separation of church and state is a concept that liberals tend to favor over conservatives and is one that seems to have come about from previous experiences of “traditional” religious connections to a “traditional” government — and a “conservative” prefers to keep in place traditional behaviors and beliefs and is not open to making changes based on any new or diverse reasoning that might challenge their traditional behaviors and beliefs] lame and embarrassing: i.e., why not cite Jesse Ventura’s opinions on English classes, or George W Bush’s. As someone deeply and spiritually interested in the argument, I wish Mexal had picked a less-easy target (I won’t even discuss the fact that the gentleman is dead).

As a young English major in college (after being an even younger psych major, business major, criminal justice major), I attended a talk and interview by Reagan’s speech writer Peggy Noonan. She was promoting her memoir WHAT I SAW AT THE REVOLUTION, and was being interviewed by the late conservative/civil libertarian Boston talk-show host David Brudnoy — himself a brilliant speaker and thinker and well-read gentleman (an American Studies degree from Harvard) whose own homosexuality and homophobia may have lead to his death from AIDS (ah, but I digress). Brudnoy commented on Noonan’s writing talent and Noonan talked about how reading the ancient classics and modern classics (such as Yeats) not only enriched her life, but enriched her writing, as well. Reading, she said, was the key to good writing. I swooned, caring not that she wrote speeches for one of the most anti-intellectual presidents of our time. Stephen King (most definitely not a conservative) makes the same point as Noonan about reading in his ON WRITING. In fact, King’s stridency on the point seems less “liberal” and more “conservative” than Noonan’s.

Before I went to college, my mother, a devout Roman Catholic, shared with me an article on the relationship between going to college and losing one’s religious faith. The article suggested that education at its basis was about questioning accepted truths and that this made holding onto one’s faith-of-origin difficult. (I still have this article somewhere.) Then in college I read Kierkegaard’s FEAR AND TREMBLING (or it might have been THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH) where he questioned faith-of-origin, and I thought, “Whoa, here it comes. My mother was right. I’m about to “have my faith challenged” in a college literature and philosophy course.” I held on white-knuckled as I read the book. Kierkegaard asked a simple question: How can one be a Catholic if one was born a Catholic? How can one be a Jew if one was born a Jew? How can one be a Muslim if one was born a Muslim? These seemed like gentle enough questions to ponder, I thought in my college’s library. (Thinking also, of course, that the devil hath the power to assume a pleasing shape.) Truth be told, I was able to think about why I was calling myself a Catholic back then in a way I had never considered before. I realized I hadn’t been in spiritual crisis as a baby and hadn’t needed that specific religion to help me make sense of the existential terror of this random and uncaring universe while my binky was virtually attached to my mouth, and had not asked my parents to baptize me into the faith. I may not have had that experience — the challenging of my accepted, traditional beliefs — had I not gone to college and taken that lit class (so, thank you Mom and Dad for sending me). And I realized something else: those deeply challenging questions may have reinforced, if not forged anew, my own religious faith. Made it my very own and not the bequeathing of my parents. Or it might have made me see the randomness of all religious impulse in our “what-a-piece-of-work-is-man” mammalian brain tissue and humanoid nerve endings and fearful and trembling and sick and dying flesh and bones. Could be either way, I guess.

All this is to say that Mexal is touching on a classic debate in literary criticism: the fear of art. Plato feared it: Book 10 of THE REPUBLIC says that we will will feed and bathe the poet, crown him with laurel, and then kick him out of our Republic, for he trucks in “images” (contemporary conservatives, in Mexal’s mind, replace “images” with “English classes”). And Aristotle embraced art: In PHAEDRAS he discusses the soul-enlarging (“psychagogia”) experience that comes from words. In POETICS he discusses aanother experience that comes from words: “catharsis,” the purging of emotions through the experience of terror and pity that well-made art (tragedy) can provide. Reductively put then: Art can produce catharsis that can produce psychagogia that can produce a challenge to one’s traditional belief system. Or even more reductively (and dangerously irresponsibly [i.e., bordering on propaganda]) put: Art produces a startling challenge to our traditionally held beliefs by allowing us to experience lives that aren’t our own, and in the doing we see how it might feel to be in a predicament in which we would not want to see not only ourselves, but anyone else. So this psychagogia, this enlarging of the soul (whatever one wants to accept of that problematic term), may very well lead to empathy. And with empathy comes the challenge to help others, make the world a better place for everyone, not just members of our own political party.

Yesterday, NPR’s show “Morning Edition” did a piece on the sentences of politicians. A student of mine this term, in my grammar and style course, did an analysis of Lincoln, whose sentences were, for his time, short and clear. What do you imagine to be the grade level of our contemporary Congress?

NPR’s Morning Edition:  http://tinyurl.com/c7tlwkt

Essay on why conservatives hate English courses | Inside Higher Ed: http://tinyurl.com/7uycjpo

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Essays & Criticism

26 Monday Sep 2011

Posted by Joseph Salvatore in Essays & Criticism

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Browse this section of the site for essays and criticism that I’ve written over the past few years.

We The Animals, by Justin Torres (NY Times)

25 Sunday Sep 2011

Posted by Joseph Salvatore in Essays & Criticism

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Book Review, Justin Torres, We The Animals

We The Animals, by Justin Torres (NY Times) 09/21/2011

There Is No Year, by Blake Butler (NY Times)

29 Friday Apr 2011

Posted by Joseph Salvatore in Essays & Criticism

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Blake Butler, Book Review, There Is No Year

There Is No Year, by Blake Butler (NY Times) 04/29/2011

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