Loads of Learned Lumber

Monday, March 11, 2024

Haruki Murakami, _A Wild Sheep Chase_, trans. Alfred Birnbaum

I WAS GIVEN this by two different people sixteen years apart, which seems a strong hint from the universe that I ought to read it. I had already read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and enjoyed it...so why not?

Back in 2012, the New York Times Book Review published a cartoon titled "Haruki Murakami Bingo," in which the player could claim a square whenever an item like "mysterious woman" or "ear fetish" or "old jazz record" turned up in a Murakami novel. As the friend who was the second person to give me the book as a present  remarked, A Wild Sheep Chase would make one a quick winner in Haruki Murakami Bingo. It has everything.

It's 1970. A Tokyo advertising man in his later 20s is adrift--his marriage is breaking up, he is weary of his career, he is suffering from a vague anomie--when it is unexpectedly given an assignment he must fulfill, or else: find a sheep born with a black star on its hindquarters. 

Joining forces with a mysterious woman with beautiful ears with whom he has frequent and robust sex (three squares right there), he pursues a series of leads to the northernmost regions of Japan's northernmost island, Hokkaido, where he...

...well, let's just say it works out. The details of the plot seem less important, less Murakami-esque, than the atmosphere of surreal noir dread peppered with Japanese historical and cultural references.

Another friend once remarked to me that the Japanese have a predilection for re-creating the creations of other cultures (Chinese poetry, Scotch whiskey, American noir), and the re-creations moreover and mysteriously both achieve uncanny fidelity and remain resolutely and unmistakably Japanese. It's a neat trick, and Murakami is a master of it.

Friday, March 8, 2024

A. M. Homes, The Unfolding_

BLURBS FROM GARY Shytengart, Nathan Hill, Michael Chabon, Salman Rushdie, Phil Klay, and Jonathan Lethem--we are obviously dealing with a "writer's writer" here, but it would be a boost for the republic for this novel to find a wider audience. It's a perceptive analysis of our current malaise. 

The Unfolding presents itself as the view from Bohemian Grove, where the very wealthy hang out with the very powerful and kick around ideas about how to keep the wealth and the power under their capable management.

The novel's main character (last name is Hitchens but typically referred to in the novel simply as the Big Guy) is present at a special party for major McCain donors on the night of the 2008 election, and is so shocked and dismayed at the outcome that he decides he has to do something. He assembles a group of like-minded and similarly wealthy and influential men, their object "to get back to our roots, to what makes us strong." As one of them puts it, "America is in the crapper and we need to do something about it. We're not going to stand by and wait to see what happens; we're going to make something happen and we need someone to put that idea out there in front of people." The novel ends on Inauguration Day, 2009, with a big dinner at which the group, now named the "Forever Men," is officially launched.

The novel's great insight, I'd say, is that while Propertied White Men (PWM) love to praise the Constitution and the founding fathers, they do so out of a sense  that the Constitution was drafted to preserve and protect the interests of PWM. When the Constitution turns out, in the fullness of time, to have the potential of constraining those interests or taking into account other interests, the PWM begin to see the Constitution as broken, no longer doing its job, in need of "extraordinary measures," as one of them puts it.  "It will look like a natural occurrence, a call for security, a return  to our core values. That's our sweet spot," as another one says.

Serious as it is, the novel also has some outrageous satirical humor (reminiscent of Dr. Stangelove in that regard), a lot of it about male posturing--from that angle, the many scenes of the Forever Men's meetings are as hilarious as they are scary. 

We also get a deep look, thanks to the Big Guy's interactions with his wife (at the Betty Ford Center) and daughter (at a tony finishing school in northern Virginia) that gender can make a big difference in how white privilege works. The "M" in PWM is always under scrutiny in  the novel, and among the novel's slier touches is that one of the Forever Men, a "confirmed bachelor," in in the closet.

The bone-deep anxieties within white privilege may be the novel's other core insight. It presents the election of Obama as a psychic disturbance in the GOP that could boil up into a major breakdown, which maybe it has. Would MAGA have happened without the election of Obama? 

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Michael Palmer, _Sun_

 ANYONE OUT THERE remember the golden age of the North Point Press in the middle-to-late 1980s? Evan Connell, Guy Davenport, James Salter…it ran out of gas about 1990, but what a run, including this collection from Michael Palmer. I recently ran across some praise of this, and now I can’t remember where, but it sounded worth searching for, and lo and behold, when the interlibrary loan item arrived it was from the library of my alma mater. A good sign.

I had encountered poems by Palmer before in Douglas Messerli’s anthology From the Other Side of the Century and Paul Hoover’s Norton anthology Postmodern American Poetry without their especially registering on me, but this collection definitely worked for me.

Here is a good short excerpt from “Baudelaire Series”:

The secret remains in the book
It is a palace
It is a double house 
It is a book you lost
It is a place from which you watch
the burning of your house 
I have swallowed this blank
this libel of shores
nights that like the book are lost

The secret seems both securely contained—in a book that is like a palace or house, or inside us, our having swallowed it—but also vanished—the book lost, the house burned. We have it and we have lost it. The poem has a relatively definite referent—the secret— but of course we don’t know what it is, so the word “secret” points candidly and unambiguously into a borderless mist. The poem hollows out its assertions even as it makes them.

Most of the book is like that—something is happening here, but we don’t know what it is, do we, Mr. Jones? The vertigo of such gestures is exactly what my friends who don’t like poetry don’t like about it, but it’s exactly what I go to poetry for. 

Something about what Palmer pays attention and finds worth mentioning, something about the unspoken, unfathomable logic with image follows image works for me. So thank you, whoever it was who praised Michael Palmer's Sun.


Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Jeff Sharlet, _The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War_

 I DIDN'T READ all of this, but I did read its longest chapter, also titled "The Undertow," which at 120 pages amounts to a substantial portion of the book.

In this chapter, Sharlet goes to Sacramento to attend and report on a memorial rally for Ashli Babbitt, the military veteran and Q-Anon enthusiast who was among those attacking the Capitol on January 6 and was shot and killed by a member of the Capitol Police. Sharlet collects some straight biographical information on Babbitt but is perhaps more interested in how MAGA forces went about shaping her into a martyr, even though the raw material was not that promising. This part of the chapter kept making me think of Horst Wessel.

The larger part of the chapter, though, is about Sharlet's drive back to the East Coast, a long highway journey with frequent stops to talk to people about our deepening national polarization, cultural and political. As a journalist, Sharlet is automatically suspect in the eyes of most of the people he talks to, but he seems genuinely to want to know where they are coming from and to report of them fairly--even those that seem definitely around the bend, like  the preacher who is convinced Hillary Clinton was put to death years ago.

The most compelling aspect of the  chapter, I'd say, is its "road movie" quality. The highway system is rendered as a region of its own--inside the United States, part of the United States, but semi-autonomous, a republic within the republic, deeply American but ticking to its own clock, living by its own code. To be on the highways for days on end is to become unmoored, and that unmooring becomes part of Sharlet's account. We no longer have our familiar bearings, no longer have much certainty about what the truth is. We're tethered to reality still--Sharlet needs to get back to Boston to get his heart medicine prescription refilled--but lightly tethered, and a gust of wind might slip the cord and land us in an America where everyone we meet is a Flannery O'Connor character in a Trump t-shirt...and they are in charge.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Roger Reeves, _Best Barbarian_

I WAS ALREADY planning to read this, but Reeves's essay in Granta, "Through the Smoke, Through the Veil, Through the Wind," bumped it up to the top of my list. As the variety of honors it has received suggests, it is excellent.

As in Zadie Smith's successful re-boots of Forster (On Beauty), Chaucer (The Wife of Willesden), and Dickens (The Fraud), Reeves engages deftly with some Anglo canonical influences (T. S. Eliot in "Poem, in an Old Language," Yeats in "As a Child of North America," Beowulf in a couple of poems about Grendel) while foregrounding a Black cultural inheritance (Phyllis Wheatley, Langston Hughes, John and Alice Coltrane, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Jericho Brown). It's a heady brew, but he drinks it down and does not even wobble.

Take, for instance, the first of the two long poems at the book's center, "Domestic Violence," which appropriates the trip to the underworld in Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid as well as Pound's and Eliot's appropriations of that topos, then pivots on the astonishing datum that the Louis Till who figures in Pound's Pisan Cantos was the father of Emmett Till ("Yes, that Emmett Till," Reeves writes in the notes), taking the poem suddenly into the gravest urgencies of the present.

(I'm still trying to figure out whether the second long poem in the middle of the book, "Something about John Coltrane," is in dialogue with Michael S. Harper's "Dear John, Dear Coltrane." It might be...but I'm not sure.) 

Recurring images--field, tree, blood--give the book a mysterious unity. Those images may be connected--seem to be connected, in a way I don't understand-- to the most intimate poems of the book, those about the death of his father and the birth of his daughter, especially "After Death."

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Elizabeth Willis, _Alive: New and Selected Poems_

 I DO NOT remember why I bought this. I don’t think I saw any reviews…I don’t think anyone recommended it…I don’t think I saw some reference to her work somewhere…it may have just been that  this collection was published by NYRB Books. Whatever it was, it worked out. This is a great collection.

Quite a few of the poems, perhaps as many as half of them, are prose poems and brilliant examples of the genre. (I checked David Lehmann’s anthology of prose poems to see whether I had come across her work there, but no.) They have a way of matter-of-factly dropping a non sequitur in a deadpan, nothing-to-see-here way that reminds me of James Tate.

What struck me most, though, is a quality that I associate with some Emily Dickinson and Lorine Niedecker poems, having to do with the poem not needing to be seen/read/noticed as a poem to be a poem. Most poems, nearly all I think, want you to see them, want to register on readers’ consciousnesses as poems. A lot of Willis’s poems seem more self-sufficient than that, almost as if they do not need to be read and recognized as poems to be poems. We could call this a kind of modesty or self-effacement, but it could be a kind of supreme indifference too, the absence of any need of readerly approval. I find it very attractive, somehow.

The final poem, “About the Author,” seems to be a witty twist on just this point, playing as it does on the idea that if we readers see the poems as poems we will want to know about the source of the poems, the poet, assuming her to be remarkable and interesting and wise. And even though I repeatedly found myself thinking, as I read Alive, that Willis is interesting and remarkable and wise, “About the Author” seemed a well-dropped reminder that whether I came to such conclusions or not, her poems were poems. 

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

George Scialabba, _What Are Intellectuals Good For?_

 AMONG THE ADVANTAGES of retirement is getting around to the years’ worth (decades’ worth?) of books that I have been wanting to read but had no immediate, pressing need to read, such as this collection of articles and reviews by George Scialabba.

I figured the book was a good bet because I have been enjoying Scialabba’s reviews for years—always crisply written, well-informed, and thought-provoking. 

The earliest collected here is a piece on Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Rorty, and Alasdair MacIntyre that appeared in the Village Voice in 1983, the most recent a valedictory piece on Christopher Hitchens that appeared in n+1 in 2005–that is, a farewell not to Hitchens the person, who died in 2011, but to Hitchens the writer one looks forward to reading, given his support of the war in Iraq. (Hitchens was still alive when this collection was published in 2009.)

I am on Scialabba’s wavelength in several ways. I have a wide, deep soft spot for the New York intellectuals of the post-WW II era, and so does he; the deeply appreciative piece on Dwight MacDonald was a highlight of the book for me, and I also relished those on Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe. Though not a conservative, I am always interested in what an intelligent and articulate argument for conservative ideas looks like, and so is he, hence the serious appraisals here of John Gray, Allan Bloom, and William F. Buckley.

We even dislike some of the same things. When Scialabba calls Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism “an inexhaustibly tiresome book,” all I can say is amen. (I know he’s important—but one can be important and inexhaustibly tiresome in the bargain.)

I don’t like Christopher Lasch as much as Scialabba does, but reading Scialabba makes me think I should like Lasch more than I do. I like Isaiah Berlin a lot more than Scialabba does, but his point about the cold water Berlin throws on any kind of aspirational thinking sounds right. We are of one mind, I was happy to see, on Rorty.

He’s a national treasure, I think. I haven’t seen much by him lately, but I trust he’s still reading and writing.