Postcards from the End of America (i)

from poet Linh Dinh

Judge a book by its cover. What it’s for.

The author appears on the front, the second panel from our right on the photograph above, as the title: LINH DINH all caps in the largest font there. I take it that the poet Linh Dinh has become a brand, as an habitual reader might consider the poet ROBERT GRAVES’ name on 1 of his historical novels.

Why not. The poet and his publisher have put out a bookshelf in prose. Look left to the bottom of the furthest panel, the inside back flap, to the imprint. 7 Stories Press first published Linh’s stories in Fake House (2000), more in Blood and Soap (2004),

third, stories he selected and translated in Night, Again (2006), and fourth his own novel Love Like Hate (2010). This fifth title, presented on its cover as the subtitle, is Postcards from the End of America (2017).

The cover is from 1 of the cards Linh has posted to the world-wide web for years, each illustrated by snaps taken after a journey by bus or train to the cheapest bar he can walk to from the station. He drinks with the barflies and reports their news.

The cover shows a window display of Buddhist and Taoist tchotchkes in gold above and the Empire State building and Liberty in silver below. The vitrine offers those passing by an ikon to venerate, an objet d’art to display, a souvenir to cherish?

Or is Linh rather saying that all he has found on offer in America is junk behind glass? Hang on. The author did take the picture but the publisher Dan Simon put it on the cover. He also sprang for rich color reproductions of 16 postcard snaps just inside,

head shots of those Linh has met. What does Dan make of the work? He placed a blurb on the cover, between title and sub-title, “Linh Dinh is already one of the secret masters...”

Like the happy Buddha in the window? I should hope not. What Ed Park, a literary editor who has published a novel set among clerks in an office, whose family name is a clan from Korea, wrote in full was “Linh Dinh is already one of the secret masters of short fiction.”

Ed was reviewing the poet’s 1 novel in light of his previously published stories. Ed graduated from my college English department. His personal name is my middle one, that of nearly 1 dozen English kings. Ed studied that language and literature 10 years after me.

Dan put blurbs from older whiter men on the back cover, third panel from the right in the photograph above. Chris Hedges is my older brother’s age, as Linh is my next younger brother’s. A reporter turned author on current events,

Chris praises Linh’s “brilliant observations penned on the terminal decline of the American empire.” A preacher’s kid now himself ordained, he notes Linh’s role as himself an icon for veneration. “There are few writers in America I admire more.”

Matthew Sharpe, a novelist 1 year older than Linh, speaks next of the poet as the road buddy and drinking companion of the collective unconscious of the United States of America. Like Chris, Matthew has read the book.

Finally, Ron Unz speaks. Ron is 1 of the physicists just my age who balked at professionalization in graduate school to instead put their math to work on Wall Street. Ron published analytics, sold his press,

and ever since has devoted himself to the public good, an old-time independent professional turned well-to-do capitalist with opinions. His Unz Review has hosted and promoted Linh’s postcards. Ron praises Linh in terms of Jacob Riis.

The two immigrants’ photographs both show shocking poverty. Jacob however was a reformer in the metropole while Linh’s grace is to speak in friendship with those he meets at the periphery. The poet’s title suggests that he does not expect the cavalry.

Well those are 3 blurbs by colleagues with related interests who have read the book and offer context, information, or insight. Outstanding. Really. I note, tellingly, that none of the 3 peers is a professor of writing, who make fulsome blurbs.

I note without such prejudice that they are all guys. Linh likes women and they like him, professionally and out on the town. Still, there it is. It’s a book about getting loaded among strangers.

Brave and crazy, which I am not sure the poet grasps but most women do. There is also no one there with any literary or scholarly connection to Viet Nam. That is beautiful and just because here we have a Vietnamese considering the USA.

The inside front cover, the leftmost panel, fourth and final from the right in the photograph above, summarizes the book in an epic catalogue, a Carl Sandburg recital of American toponyms, from Cheyenne to Osceola. A second paragraph provides insight, “the uncanny power of the people facing societal devastation.”

Dan and staff did good work. Bravo. Then, over at the back panel, at the furthest right, under Linh’s own portrait of himself and a stack of reading, someone did their job. There is work and then there is the job.

Work is force across distance, hauling water and wood, moving words from place to place. The job is deference to authority. The back flap begins with the names of some heaps of money at interest who have cut the poet a check at rate deeply discounted

from what they pay a man to mow the lawn. Fuck them. I think that is what is up with Linh lately. He is flipping off the United States and our money. He has extended this work for another 5 years outside our bounds,

at last retreating from Africa to Viet Nam just recently as I write at the turn of March into April in 2022. He has stopped publishing his postcards at Ron’s site and started up here at substack where a person can earn a living.

So far so good. But whoops his postcards after the book have increasingly voiced intellectual anti-Semitism, where one blames my people for the movement of capital and the order of nations, as well as the domestic and foreign policy of the United States and Israel.

But wait there is more. He also has expressed disgust at the personal qualities of Jews as individual members of a race. He doubts that anyone ever gassed a Jew in Europe. Personally, as a man, I think he has lost his shit,

as I often have done. I am mad as a hatter, a bone fide psychiatric patient. First off, as I would tell anyone who asked, I would like to see him stop drinking completely right now and for the rest of his life.

Second, as an ethnographer I note that we go off the rails when we come in from 1 year in the field. Linh has been out for 30 years at dozens of new sites every year. Third, as a Jew, suspicious, I judge that he poses no threat.

He is a gentle man, moreover an intellectual incapable of working with men of action to a fell purpose. He has not even collaborated with those who oppose Israel from among university researchers and teachers here in the US. He can’t stand them, not them really,

but their jobs. He has put out as much scholarship as any of them but they can’t employ him because he is unschooled, and they are in the business of school. School is all about spotting and bringing up people who sometimes do their work but always do their job, some stupid shit that will make everything worse.

Wrong guy. Linh is a poet. 1 of the people whose work I have addressed throughout their careers. I plan to work through this book in more essays here, then start at the beginning with the first book of stories as I did when it first came out. I can afford to do the right thing.

Anti-Semitism and Jew-hating are not illegal. Nor is anger with Israel. Denying the extermination of the Jews of Europe is legal in the United States, and in Viet Nam. That country enjoys good relations with Israel, another winner in an anti-colonialist civil war. The man in the street admires Hitler for giving France a hard time,

but so what. No defender of the Jews can hurt Linh over there and he can do no harm. Hearing from a hater does however focus the mind, in light of events last century. Linh’s views lately are interesting to think about in light of the postcards book because among its supporters

Ron Unz, for instance, is a Jew, Matthew Sharpe has published a Jewish family novel, Chris Hedges is clergy sworn to philo-Semitism, and if Dan Simon isn’t a Jew he bears 2 of our names and works in publishing in New York where declaring your hatred of us was normal until 1970 but a firing offense all this century.

My guess so far is that Linh’s soul is saying goodbye to all that, as Robert Graves did, or all you all can go fuck yourselves, as I have done many times. The best our common world has been able to do for this poet’s work is to patronize him. I never liked seeing that.

Dan Simon for instance has published 5 of Linh’s books earnestly, but in a list mostly sympathetic to Communism, by political authors who have lived no politics, have studied none, who don’t work at a professional level in more than 1 language, who have not gone out and about. Linh didn’t fit there.

So now, it seems to me, he is burning bridges passed on the road to something else. No foundation or publisher that has worked with him in the United States will associate further with a declared Jew hater and anti-Semitic propagandist.

If he starts working instead with Arab and Iranian foundations and publishers they will learn their lesson too. Never forget, as Maxwell Perkins remarked of Thomas Wolfe, from here in North Carolina, that every author is a son of a bitch.

We all need 1. Whatever Linh is up to lately, in this book he is ours, out reporting on the world none of us ever made, our creation. By the time I catch you up on his previous achievement I hope there will be more of his love for the world to report. I trust the movement of a poet’s soul.

Next time I read 1 of the postcards.

Viet Nam letters has since addressed Postcards from the End of America 2 more times, first on August 6, 2022, then on August 22, 2022. The poet Linh Dinh is the subject of 1 more on April 29, 2023.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022