Harper’s Notes (4/7/25)

Wrestling with desire: Society is saturated with sexuality almost to the point of obsession, but what if this display of rapacious desire is about something more than just sex? The first two letters of The Harper Review’sspring issue question the centrality of sex in our lives and point to deeper cultural values at play beyond just lust and desire. Jordan Gabriel and Georgie Hallbach illustrate that prestige and validation, respectively, underscore much of our sexual thinking and interactions, even sometimes turning sex into a thing of pain and disgust. Gabriel and Hallbach instead advocate from a position of restraint. Instead of moving toward a sexuality that is a “disordered” abstraction, we should reevaluate our conceptions of sex, look beyond received notions of what sexuality should be and instead come to understand what it is to us.

Vipers in the bosom: In 1992, Dennis Covington, a journalist for The New York Times, traveled to his native Alabama to cover the trial of Glenn Summerford, a hard-drinking evangelical preacher accused of trying to murder his wife with rattlesnakes. While covering Summerford’s trial, Covington falls in with the Church of Jesus with Signs Following, a strange yet enticing group of worshipers who demonstrate their faith by drinking poison and handling deadly pit vipers. Slowly but inexorably, Covington is sucked deeper into their world, until one night he too is led by the Holy Spirit to take up serpents in the ultimate expression of faith.
Fascinating and perplexing by turns, Salvation on Sand Mountain is a journey into the religious mind unlike any other. In relating his own journey of faith, Covington takes the reader into the heart of the snake handling movement, where he finds religiously motivated sexism, dangerous machismo, and an abiding suspicion of outsiders. But to his surprise, he also experiences love and acceptance as the congregation welcomes him as one of their own and initiates him into the mysteries of snake handling. Part cultural history, part memoir, part psychological study, Salvation on Sand Mountain is a tragic and moving account of a community struggling to come to terms not only with its own identity, but also with the encroaching pressures of modern life.

Silly goose: On campus, literary events cluttered the first week of Eliot’s cruelest month. The Parrhesia Program for Public Discourse’s “The End of the University and the Future of Criticism” ran into the Creative Writing department’s “Internal Ecologies.” Both were inspired (and plagued) by the cynicism and pleasantries that invariably accompany institutional affiliation. One can only listen to so much talk about art before hungering for the thing itself. Drifting off by the sixth panel, I slipped out of the Logan Center and caught a bus to a bookstore in Bridgeport.

Behind tilting shelves and a stained wood floor, Léon Pradeau hosted a reading for his new book of poetry, “This is it”. The room held a menagerie of fold-out chairs and canned beer. The poems speak of loving in a foreign country, this country. Their speaker is an “I” who sometimes drops pronouns, verbifies adjectives, omits commas, then remembers them in excess, and repeats the titular refrain, askew. These quirks are conspicuous, measured against polite syntax. But normative language recedes into the self-possessed reality of this language. It is strange, strange as a mind before it is stuffed and smoothed into yesterday’s clothes, strange enough to carry sentiment without sentimentality. What a relief that, fumbling for expression on the other side of legibility, we have not yet exhausted poetry for love.

Parasocial parenting: Hila Blum’s How to Love Your Daughter opens with Yoella, a widowed mother, staring through the window of the house of her daughter, Leah. While Yoella insists the two were once inseparable, they are, at the novel’s opening, completely estranged. Yoella spends the following 250 pages tracing her memories of Leah’s childhood in an attempt to pinpoint the moment it all went wrong. Leah herself remains absent, and her silence is filled by Yoella’s increasingly frantic grasps for truth. As Yoella slips between timelines, the contours of her relationship with Leah become increasingly blurry, and it becomes increasingly unclear whether or not we can trust her. She misses faultlines in her dogged pursuit of keystone events, and I found myself longing for an aside from Leah that never came.
I had hoped the novel would reveal something divinely universal about the relationship between mothers and their daughters. But, as Blum writes, “stories about mothers and daughters are always in medias res, working backward to the beginning, even as there is no beginning.” Blum ultimately poses more questions than she can answer, but perhaps her failure reflects the complex nature of mother-daughter relationships.