On murmuration, migration, and Gary Shteyngart's dick

Publishing is in the middle of a survival performance--a spiraling black cloud, beautiful and mysterious and pathetic all at once--and I can't look away.

Of Gary Shteyngart’s recent profile in the NYT, my client Caitlin asks me, in so many words, What IS this?

Ostensibly timed to promote Shteyngart’s latest novel—Vera, or Faith—the piece lavishes more than half of its 2000 words (and many photos) on the author’s sartorial tastes: bespoke suits; Irish walking sticks; luxury watches. Of the last, Shteyngart owns about thirty; the nicest, a Patek Philippe, might be worth $100,000.

A further 250 words concern Gary’s dick. A few years back, there was an incident: loose foreskin, stray hair, lingering infection, pus everywhere. The unbearable pain—the un-manning—led to a crisis of self, which bloomed as a passion for luxury goods. Before the penis incident, Gary Shteyngart was a slob; after, an aesthete.

What of the novel? Who knows. The piece offers us approximately 19 words concerning its plot, along with a further hundred or so on Shteyngart’s “bold” choice of narrator, a young Korean-American girl. (What will the woke mob say!)

Just in case we miss the Nabokovian echoes of the title, though, we do have Salman Rushdie phone in to call Shteyngart “up there” with the great Vladimir himself.

What IS this?

Caitlin: it’s the murmuration.

*

There is, in sum, a lot of movement in publishing right now. There is more opportunity in a wider variety of categories than there has been in several years.

And yet all this movement is happening amidst an eerie, hushed tenderness. So if I had to sum up the vibes in a word, I suppose I’d go with the esoteric and rather unpoetic crepuscular, adj. Relevant to either the dawn or the dusk.

What a beautiful time this is: liminal, quiet, weighty. So many of the most fascinating creatures on the planet become active in the crepuscular hours: the skittish deer, the horny rabbits, the wily coyotes, the careful nighthawks and dazzling fireflies.

For the nature lover, it’s sacred to behold, even as our eyesight fails in the dark.

I wrote this to you in March, describing what I saw at the London Book Fair: a publishing industry hallowed with the energy of hospice rooms and birthing suites; an industry between worlds.

For us, this is a time of awe and ache, a time for which the English language reserves its most beautiful words: gloaming, threnody, aubade, vesperal, evensong. Robots and fascists wait patiently in the wings. God is change, as Octavia Butler said, and God is here.

These are the tenebrous hours—like those in which, en masse, all over the Anglophone world, from fall through spring, starlings rise to dance in the sky.

*

Have you ever seen a murmuration? Named for the sound of several hundred thousand wings rustling together, they’re miracles of instinct and improvisation: leaderless yet cohesive; chaotic yet precise; ephemeral yet unforgettable; spooky AF.

They are also, scientists believe, a survival performance, the starlings’ attempt to find safety. But what kind of safety, and for whom? Different experts have different opinions.

One theory is that of the Selfish Herd: every starling in the crowd is trying separately to move toward the center of the pack, away from the vulnerable periphery. Altogether, the mass of them spiral in self-interest—nothing more.

Another theory is more communitarian: it’s the self-defense of solidarity. The birds are moving together to bamboozle raptors. Joined in a spiral, they no longer look like dinner; the mass is too big, too scary, too confusing. Or maybe—in my own anthropomorphizing imagination—too beautiful.

Whatever the underlying motivation might be, this fact of murmuration remains: Alone, each starling’s just a bird. Together—moving as one, through no real will of their own—they become something else entirely.

*

Let’s take our own murmuration Anne Lamott style, Caitlin: bird by bird.

Bird: Gary Shteyngart, dandy. Consider especially the title of the NYT profile: “Is Gary Shteyngart one of the last novelists to make real money from the craft?”