Percival Everett, _I Am Not Sidney Poitier_

 NOT EVERETT'S MOST audacious novel...but that is a high bar. 

The narrator's mother, a Poitier but unrelated to the famous actor, named him "Not Sidney," which is a good joke and sets the novel up for the kind of wordplay S. J. Perelman wrote for the Marx Brothers. 

     "Are you not Sidney Poitier?"

    "Yes, I am Not Sidney Poitier."

The narrator's mother also invested in Turner Broadcasting when it was just a blip of a startup, so her death, when the narrator is just eleven, leaves him breathtakingly wealthy.

So the novel is a bit like Great Expectations. Like Pip, Not Sidney comes of age with no worries about how to provide for himself, and encounters a number of vivid characters who help, or hinder, or both as he figures life out--with the important difference, of course, that being a young Black man in the South is quite distinct from being a young gentleman in Victorian London, especially in one's relations with the police. He is also a bit like Voltaire's Candide, though, as these encounters have the effect of knocking down one or another illusion about how things work.

The extra Everettian fillip to the novel is that Not Sidney keeps finding himself in scenarios that are funhouse  reflections of Sidney's films--The Defiant Ones, Lilies of the Field, Buck and the Preacher, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Not Sidney physically resembles Sidney, we are told, and does so increasingly as the novel progresses, until he is finally actually taken for Sidney. What's this about? I'm not sure--it reminded me of Max Beerbohm's "The Happy Hypocrite," a story that makes literal the old proverb of wearing a mask that one's face eventually matches. I'm still puzzling this one out.

Elizabeth Willis, _Liontaming in America_

AN EXCELLENT BOOK, but difficult to describe. "This book is not a memoir," the first sentence states, so that point is settled, but even without that caveat few readers, I think, would assume it was one. The word "I" does not occur frequently, and most of the book's attention is devoted to people who lived in the 19th century. 

The book is a poem, I think I can say, an American kind of epic poem that has some affinities with Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, parts of Louis Zukofsky's "A," and Charles Reznikoff's Testimony; that is, it includes a generous amount of the documentary, sometimes foregrounds its own processes, and often seems like a bold attempt to write a poem about the whole United States. (As in The Maximus Poems and Hart Crane's The Bridge, for instance, the woman we are used to calling Pocahontas appears.)

And while the book is not a memoir, Willis's own family background frames the project, for much it concerns the history of Mormonism and that movement's history in Utah. (And the end, unless I am jumping to conclusions, reflects the death of her parents in an automobile accident [p. 294].)

I don't know whether Willis would call herself a Mormon currently, and I would not call her a proselytizer or even an advocate, exactly, but she does provide a different kind of light on the church than we usually get. The section called "Boy" gives us a Joseph Smith who is neither a fast-talking charlatan nor a madman, but a made-in-America visionary. The church he founds breaks with precedent in a number of ways, especially in allowing polygamy, but in Willis's handling this is not patriarchy run amuck, but a willingness to reinvent the paradigm of the family in a way that might actually enable new kinds of communities, especially women's communities.

The book's title, we learn in a concluding "Author's Note," comes from "a 1926 essay in which Robert Walser compares a liontamer to a Mormon polygamist whose wives only appear to obey for the sake of public performance." The Mormon wives we meet in Willis's poem are a bit like the powerful medieval abbesses who, technically, had to acknowledge the authority of the church priesthood and hierarchy, but who nonetheless usually succeeded in managing what they wanted to manage, doing the work they wanted to do and creating communities that ran on their own terms.

Liontaming in America put me in mind not only of Olson, Zukofsky, and Reznikoff, but also of Harold Bloom's The American Religion, Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic, Lucy Sante's Low Life, and Saidiya Hartman's Waywatd Lives, Beautiful Experiments by foregrounding people and movements a little more shadowy, a little more idiosyncratic, a little stranger, a little more obsessed and less assimilable than the people and movements you will meet in, say, a Ken Burns documentary. America, Willis convinced me,  is not what we generally think it is.

Benjamin Labatut, _When We Cease to Understand the World_, trans. Adrian Nathan West

 I HAD READ about half of this collection of thematically unified stories, all about crucial figures in the sciences and mathematics in the early decades of the 20th century, when I decided it would make a good gift for my son-in-law, who has a doctorate in aerospace engineering. 

After buying him a copy and then finishing the book, I wondered how appropriate a gift for him it was, really, since all the figures in the book--Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Shinichi Mochizuki, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger--come off as obsessed, or possessed, prey to delirium, making their advances by intuitive or counter-intuitive leaps, reckless about the short- or long-term consequences of their discoveries. Divine madmen, a priesthood high on their own prophecies.

We are leagues distant from any idea of scientific objectivity here, any idea of cool ratiocination or calm deliberation--it's all sturm und drang, visionary poetry by other means. For instance, Schrödinger arrives at a formula that "applied to any physical system" would enable one "to describe its future evolution." But the formula is built around an abyss:

The problem lay in its central term--the soul of the equation--which Schrödinger had represented with the Greek letter psi and had baptized as the "wave function." All the information one could wish to have about a quantum system was contained in  the wave function. But Schrödinger did not know what it was. It had the form of a wave, but could not be a real physical phenomenon, because it moved outside this world, in multidimensional space. Perhaps it was only a mathematical chimera. The only certain thing was its power, which seemed unlimited. In theory.

All the other figures in the book seem similarly poised on the edge of their own abysses, peering past the edge of the  knowable into some realm where matter turns into metaphor and then back into matter, forever flickering.

Is that what doing advanced physics is really like, or is it a fiction writer's fantasy? I can't judge, and my son-in-law hasn't said anything yet. It does make for compelling reading, however.

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Greil Marcus, _Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations_

 THIS "VERY SHORT book" (to quote from Marcus's acknowledgments) contains three pieces based on lectures Marcus gave at Harvard in 2013, each about a song: "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" by Bob Dylan, "Last Kind Words Blues" by Geeshie Wiley (and possibly Elvie [possibly L. V. ] Thomas), and "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground" by Bascom Lamar Lunsford.

The book has no introduction or conclusion, and thus does not present itself as thesis-oriented, but it does have a recurring idea: that the songs are not so much expressions of an individual performer's vision as they are a kind of convergence of a tradition, a performer, and an audience. Each song has recognizable antecedent songs, each has been given a distinctive stamp by the performer, and each found an audience for cherished the song, for whom became a kind of touchstone.

One of the performers, Dylan, is among the best-documented artists of our time, subject of innumerable books, including a few by Marcus; diligent research can turn up a good amount of info on Lunsford; we have nothing but ambiguous traces of Wiley. But the individual existence of the performer is only part of the story in this book, and maybe not even the most important part. The song chooses its vessel, in a way.

Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations is a late echo, I think, of the folk music boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. I only vaguely remember that phenomenon, as I was in  the early primary grades at the time, but I do remember the breakout hits like "Walk Right In" by the Rooftop Singers and "Tom Dooley" by the Kingston Trio. There was even a TV show, Hootenanny (and, much later, a mockumentary, A Mighty Wind). Once the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan in early 1964, almost everyone moved on to something else, but "folk" loomed large for a few years.

An odd thing about "folk music" is that, in most countries, attention to folk culture is a marker of romantic-conservative leanings, a slightly perverse impulse to re-create some original purity that supposedly existed before modernity contaminated everything, but in the United States, folk music has long-established connections to progressive politics. This connection goes back to the WPA and Woody Guthrie, I suppose, and the Seeger family (Pete's father, Charles, was both a musicologist and a Marxist), and was certainly still strong in the early 1960s, as folk music was joined at the hip to "protest" music, as in Dylan's 1962-63 output.

Marcus's idea that these "folk" songs are, in some ineffable but discernible way, truly the creations of the folk, not entirely those of individual performers, and that they speak in some real way to our national circumstances, strikes me as participating in that connection between folk music and progressive politics. I am all for it--grateful for it, I will even say.

Robert Duncan, _Poems 1948-1949_

  I CONTINUE TO find out how wrong I was about the shape of Robert Duncan's career prior to The Opening of the Field. He published quite a few collections, it turns out, although with small presses and in small runs. Duncan's Collected Early Poems and Plays, published in 2012 by the University of California Press, runs to hundreds of pages. 

This volume was published by Berkeley Miscellany Editions in, I guess, 1949 or 1950 (it bears no date), printed by the Libertarian Press in Glen Gardner, NJ. It collects the poems Duncan was writing after those gathered in The Years as Catches (see post for August 18). 

Duncan is getting franker, more audacious, in some ways more playful than in his earlier poems. Duncan is more obviously out in these poems, the love poems more plainly addressed to other men, and the language saltier, although I know that mainly thanks to the efforts of a previous reader of the copy I obtained from a local university library.

(By the way, I was a little surprised to find this book in the public stacks, not in special collections.)

For instance, "The Venice Poem" has expurgated lines on pp. 31 and 32, Some prior reader of the copy I read had supplied the missing lines, e.g., "the forlorn c********* is not wonderful." (Written out in the book was a 10-letter vulgarism for one who performs fellatio, a word unprintable in 1949 and even now one that gets flagged by Blogger's vigilant bots.) I thought at first that someone was just taking liberties, but no, a cross-check of "Venice Poem" as published later confirms that the added lines are accurate. Interesting, no?

Even more interesting, the saltier, more audacious Duncan is also a more visionary Duncan. Wings are being stretched and readied for flight. The most obvious sign of this, I thought, was "I Tell of Love," a post-Pound refashioning of Cavalcanti's "Donna mi prega." The presence of Cavalcanti's poem in Pound's Canto XXXVI, in Zukofsky's "A"-9, and here makes me wonder about it being a kind of modernist touchstone--mainly due to Pound's standing, I suppose, but some possibility of modernist-poetry-as-mystery-religion is shimmering here too. 

I would love to see a performance of "A Poet's Masque," with which the volume concludes, but I am not getting my hopes up.

Álvaro Enrigue, _You Dreamed of Empires, trans. Natasha Wimmer

 I WAS A mite concerned, upon commencing this novel, to see it was about the arrival of Cortés and his Spaniards in Tenochtitlan in 1519, Enrigue already having made fictional use of that event in Sudden Death. Why revisit it? Turns out, however, that Enrigue changes things up by narrating mainly from the point of view of the indigenous Mexicans, so You Dreamed of Empires is well worth your time even if you have already read Sudden Death. (If you have not read Sudden Death, you really should.)

The Spanish conquest of Mexico does raise questions. Why did the Aztec empire not simply kill Cortés, enslave his men, and have done with things? My mid-1960s U.S. education suggested the Aztecs were technologically outclassed (horses, gunpowder), superstitious, and disorganized. None of that sounds likely at this point. 

Enrigue's evocation of the encounter sounds truer. The Aztecs did not know quite what to do with the smelly, hairy strangers who had arrived at the capital for several reasons. For one thing, the subject peoples of their empire were oppressed and resentful and looking for an opportunity to overthrow them. For another, their administrative protocols were so elaborate as to hamstring them, procedurally, creating fatal delays. Enrigue has a lot of fun with Tlilpotonqui, cihuacoatl (chief executive) of Tenochtitlan and his anxious efforts to see that the forms are observed--these chapters reminded me of Saint Simon explaining the proprieties of Versailles.

For another--these are likely Enrigue's own inventions--Moctezuma, the emperor, is (a) fascinated by the Spaniards' horses and wants to keep them around long enough to figure out how to use them and (b) is  tripping on mushrooms most of the time. 

So, one could say the barbarians won. Except there is an alternative-history twist at the end that I am still trying to figure out. 

The real stars of the novel, though, are Atotoxtli, Moctezuma's sister and wife, and Malinalli, a captive princess who is Cortés's translator. Their scene together is worthy of Schiller's imagined meeting between Queen Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots.

Tony Tulathimutte, _Rejection_

LAST MONTH, THE New York Times ran an article about "performative feminism," that is, young(ish) men who know their way around the discourse and cultural codes of feminism, but who have acquired these skills mainly in the interest of getting dates. The story, much to my surprise, did not so much as mention Tony Tulathimutte's short story "The Feminist," which is a cringe-inducing portrait of exactly such a character. The story ran in n+1 way back in 2019, and had a lot of readers at the time, so Im not sure why the Times writers did not give it a nod. 

Maybe the omission is weirdly à propos, though, since "The Feminist" is the lead story in this 2024 collection called Rejection, in which every story is about being the one who does not get picked, chosen, elected, noticed, mentioned, etc. The performative feminism strategy of the protagonist of "The Feminist," for instance, backfires spectacularly over and over again, and in the story's final sentence he seems to have drifted into the toxic precincts of incel-dom.

Tulathimutte's skill in presenting these...I guess I have to call them rejects, grim as it is...is so compelling that the book can be hard to stay with. You keep wishing you could tell a character, wait a minute, don't hit "send" on that one, but they always do, with catastrophic results. Part of you wants to quit reading, but there you are, driving slowly past the pileup, rubbernecking.

What I most enjoyed, though, and a good reason to keep going through cringe after cringe, is that the collection has not only thematic coherence, but some surprising internal connections that make it an unconventional kind of novel. Alison, the protagonist of "Pics," may be spending time with the protagonist of "The Feminist" while she tries to get over being  rejected by Neil, and then later winds up having to break loose from Max, the insufferable narrator of "Our Dope Future." Kant, the protagonist of "Ahegao, or the Ballad of Sexual Repression," is the brother of Bee, author of  the epic post that accounts for most of the pages of "Main Character," and the Craig that Bee at one point has to fend off may be the narrator of "The Feminist." The stories add up to a portrait of a generation that grew up online. An unflattering portrait, but, well.

The final text in the book is a publisher's letter to Tulathimutte rejecting Rejection. This letter must be Tulathimutte's own work, since the publisher's greatest objection to Rejection is the inclusion in the book of the rejection letter itself. Not everyone likes this kind of Borgesian metafictional move, but I do.