Jennifer jazzSpill Ink on It

Abstract

jennifer jazz Spill Ink on It New York. Spuyten Duyvil. 2020. 222 pages. SMART, BITING, VIOLENT, and often perplexing, this memoir is reminiscent of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. Beyond the authors having Antigua and matrophobia in common, jazz, like Kincaid, reveals truths in the work that others might well consider taboo. Spill Ink on It is an excellent personal, social commentary on life, spanning her early years of the 1960s through the 1980s, in the US and abroad. Divided into four sections—“Amber,” “Green,” “Blue,” and “Red”— the memoir charts the development of the author from early adolescence until twenty-two years of age and zeroes in on life in New York during the 1980s. A high school creativewriting teacher advised jazz to “organize your moods into colors”—and the reader will invest in the author’s many moods. Her stories and her facility with language are compelling. She is raised with two other siblings (and later relatives from the Caribbean) in a family of women: GreatGrandmother (Granny), Grandmother (Nanny), a self-absorbed mother (“she gets flustered when I ask for advice”), and aunts. From each she learns life lessons that aid or impede her quest for an identity that suits her temperament. Always the rebel, she is an outcast at school; she drops out of a liberal arts college after the first semester, has trouble keeping a job, travels abroad in search of a man she is convinced she loves, and eschews money (read as capitalism) in general. Later in the LÁSZLÓ F. FÖLDÉNYI László F. Földényi Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears Trans. Ottilie Mulzet. New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2020. 304 pages. LÁSZLÓ F. FÖLDÉNYI is a widely lauded Hungarian essayist, cultural critic, and professor at the University of Theatre, Film, and Television in Budapest. Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears gathers Földényi’s essays written between the years 1990 and 2015. According to its back cover, the collection “considers the fall-out from the end of religion and how the traditions of the Enlightenment have failed to replace neither the metaphysical completeness nor the comforting purpose of the previously held mythologies.” Whereas not all essays tackle this thesis head on, all contain at least undercurrents and passages underscoring it. Throughout, the author proves himself to be highly educated in matters of art and “high culture,” particularly German writers, artists, and thinkers. “A Natural Scientist in Reverse,” which follows an analysis of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, and “Kleist Dies and Dies and Dies,” which recounts Heinrich von Kleist’s tragic double suicide, are two prominent examples of this. The litany of names he invokes is impressive. There is hardly a German intellectual of the last two centuries whose name does not make an appearance in one of his essays. Földényi is at his best when he sticks to his core—the history of art, literature, philosophy. Sadly, as the cover proclaims, his collection comes with a mission that upholds a long tradition of postmodernist attacks, not only on science as a way of attaining knowledge but also on modernity more generally: “[T]he physicist who declared that measurability is the last criterion of reality was the victim of a misapprehension .” (“Mass and Spirit”) “[He] projects his own conceptions and thoughts onto nature, violating it as much as scientists do.” (“A Natural Scientist in Reverse”) Building on the old sentiment that science only takes away without adding , the author leans into a yearning for a time predating modern science, when our understanding of natural phenomena and our own species was dominated by mythology—a time when people looked not to scientists but to authority, clergy, and Books in Review 104 WLT SUMMER 2020 work she declares herself androgynous and enters into a brief lesbian relationship. One of the most compelling aspects of the memoir is the author’s observations on life. Of being called the N-word she observes, “It would be the first but not last time some random antagonist would try to redeem history where I’m...