Slipping by Mohamed Kheir

Abstract

BOOKS IN REVIEW solve scientific problems when the facts are in question, values are in conflict, and urgent, high-stakes decisions must be made. In this way, one can blend all kinds of knowledge, values, and beliefs to analyze solutions. If the experiences of social media are any measure of how this “post-normal” approach might work, one should approach the authors’ recommendation with skepticism, simply because our brains have a limbic system as well as a cerebral cortex. The danger of “postnormal science” is that we wade around infinitely in a swamp of confirmation bias, where the most inflammatory and emotion -triggering images and statements will prevail. With our reptilian brains, pathos will always devour logos and ethos. Part Three: Collapsosophy is, in essence, applied philosophy, with the dominating metonymy being that of weavers and weaving, to make whole the torn cloth of our world, and by extension, our reality. In it, the authors admonish the readers to shake off the state of permanent adolescence promulgated by a capitalist, consumer-culture world, and to embrace adulthood. The weaving involves bringing together spirituality and the material world to create “rough-weather networks” and to build bridges from new, agreedupon zones: defended, autonomous, sustainable , etc. The key weaving process will take place through social networks, and, like mycelium in the soil, we will be knit together by means of groups where we will listen without judgment, and share our perspectives to solve urgent problems. The book ends by asking the reader to ask, What use does the human species serve among other species, and what is its role in the chain of life? The answer is not given but is tacitly suggested: we must use our intelligence and our abilities to communicate and create technology to be good, facilitating stewards of all life. Susan Smith Nash University of Oklahoma Magda Cârneci FEM Trans. Sean Cotter. Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2021. 238 pages. DEFYING DEFINITION AND regaining it only through comparison with formidable authors who take their art seriously , Magda Cârneci’s FEM is a metaautobiographical narration in which the experience of feeling is itself the plot. An extended narration of dream sequences and memories of flowering from girlhood to womanhood, FEM is an exercise in analytical sensuality that is fluid but clear and easy to read, written in an epistolary form in which the narrator dons the guise of Scheherazade as she converses with a soonto -be ex-lover. Language itself is a work of art that Cârneci seems to constantly whittle away at, harmonizing with the unnamed protagonist’s mission as she purposely sublimates her own life and personal history: “I am looking for a coherent image of the world, one that will fit into my mind, one where I can find my place. Or maybe a coherent magic of the world.” The focus of FEM is sex—not necessarily the sexual act but the experience surrounding it, decidedly heightened, for Cârneci is no Philip Roth. If anything, she writes love with rapture, I daresay as well as Anaïs Nin writes it. The dream sequences point to an obvious surrealist influence, but Cârneci also engages profoundly with classical tropes, such as sexual shape-shifting —thus finding creative kin in female authors who have done this so successfully, such as Anne Carson and Alice Oswald. It is certain that Cârneci reworks a personal and universal odyssey of a “sentimental education.” Having also read Magda Cârneci’s poetry , what strikes me as her trademark is a feeling of emotional intensity seeming to continuously rise to a fever pitch, balanced by a patently aestheticized style that nods not only to the author’s background as an art historian but to her nature as a true artist : “He is lilac and translucid, he looks as fragile and as precious as a glass vase, from mysterious Etruscan graves.” As for Sean Cotter’s translation, it is downright transparent, as fluid as the text itself: “I left the earth behind, an Easter egg painted with a lot of blue, a little yellowochre , and dark green, an ever smaller egg, ever farther away. I drifted tranquilly past the moon, with...