Isabella Hammad, _Enter Ghost_

 THE NOVEL'S MAIN character, Sonia Nasir, is a professional actor of Palestinian origins who has mainly lived and worked in the United Kingdom. As the novel opens, she is paying an extended visit to an older sister who as an adult chose to live in Israel ("the "old country," so to speak, though under occupation). Sonia feels her sister does not entirely approve of Sonia's decision to stay in the west.  Although it is not entirely clear how well-founded those feelings are, Sonia's need to prove herself true to the cause makes itself felt through the whole novel.

Through old connections, Sonia has a chance first to assist in the rehearsals of and then perform in an Arab-language production of Hamlet, to be staged in the West Bank. (Hamlet, I learned a few years ago, has often been adapted for performance in a Palestinian setting, as I wrote about in the post for December 21, 2020.) 

The novel has several interesting storylines. We have Sonia and her family, both immediate and extended, working out their relations to each other and their family's past. We also get several short but vivid scenes of how Palestinians live under Israeli rule, both in Israel and in the West Bank. Most entertainingly, we have behind-the-scenes glimpses of theater professionals getting an ambitious production together, including dealing with a variety of surprises that have to be managed.

I could have used a little more information about the director's vision of the production. Hamlet has a variety of themes that might speak to the Palestinian situation--usurpation, generational conflict, the weight of the past, the difficulty of moving from thought to deed--so I was wondering which of them this production moved to the foreground. Even in the absence of that info, though,  the opening night makes for a strong closing scene for the novel, and Hammad's writing was strong throughout.

John Calvin, _Writings on Pastoral Piety_, ed. Elsie Anne McKee, trans. Elsie Anne McKee and others

CALVIN'S BEST KNOWN writings (e.g., The Institutes of Christian Religion) are mainly those of a theologian arguing with other theologians and can be a bear to tackle. McKee switches things up by focusing on writings in which Calvin is talking to lay people, members of his church or his movement, about being a Christian and living as a Christian: we get sermons, some prayers, some explanations of the liturgy, excerpts from books he wrote expressly for lay people, and some letters. 

He still sounds learned and often stern, but he has taken the tone down a notch here, and he is not trying to lay waste to other people's arguments, so we get a different image of the man.

Still, he leans in hard on the basic tenets of reformed Christianity. You (and all of us) are one sorry case. (Calvin's near-perfect contempt for his own species counts for much in the general idea of him.) Nothing you could possibly do for yourself can save you. Nor can any church or sacrament save you. Only God can save you--and God did, through the agency of Jesus Christ. That's the whole story. Grasp that and hold on to it.

We can still get together in a community, i.e., a church, for mutual support and encouragement, and we can perform the sacraments recorded in the gospels (communion and baptism), but Calvin emphasizes that the bread and wine are but the "mirror" or "likeness" or "visible sign" of the atonement, not the atonement itself, as baptism is but the visible sign of your redemption, not the redemption itself. The sacraments, the pastors' sermons, the ceremonies of worship all keep us focused on the main idea, but they are means to an end, never an end in themselves. 

As for pilgrimages to saints' relics, or counting repeated prayers, or venerating statues--kick all that back down to Rome where it belongs.  None of that claptrap saves you. The priest and his sacraments don't save you. The church doesn't save you. Jesus saved you, and no matter what you do, you're going to stay saved, whatever the priest and the church say.

One item that particularly struck me is Calvin's unpacking of the Lord's Prayer, which he pointedly reminds us is not designed to be a prayer said by an individual for his or her own sake, but a prayer said by all of us for all of our sakes.

The final and for me most memorable item: a letter written to several women who had been arrested for worshipping as Protestants. In France, this worship made them heretics, who could be burned at the stake (as one of them was). I can't imagine what I would have been able to write to people about to be burned at the stake for belonging to a movement of which I was a leader. Calvin came up with something that honored them and might have consoled them. He seems like a mensch.

Bennett Sims, _White Dialogues_

 I AM GOING to go out on a limb and say Sims is my favorite young US fiction writer. I am guessing he is still under 40, though perhaps not by much...oh, let's just say he is my favorite millennial US fiction writer.

I say that having read only this, his first collection of short fiction, and his 2013 novel, A Questionable Shape (see post for March 24, 2020), but count me a devotee.

Sims reminds me of David Foster Wallace (with whom he studied at Pomona, it turns out) in his profoundly faithful representations of the tortuous paths of over-thinking--or we might call it an inability to stop thinking, to hit on a conclusion you are willing to act upon. (His novel is based on the story of Hamlet, the greatest over-thinker of them all.)

The collection's brilliant opening story, "House-sitting," about a caretaker of a cabin out in the woods, "Za," about a woman trying to figure what tone to hit and how to hit it in an email to a recently-won boyfriend who is traveling abroad, and "Radical Closure," about a person trying to pick the best spot to write, all track consciousnesses trying to solve problems that grow more insoluble the longer they try to solve them, each contemplated solution blossoming fractal-fashion into new problems.

Crucially, all three of these centers of narrative consciousness are on their own, without a trusted friend to say, "Okay, just stop. Stop now." A Questionable Shape was, among other things, about whether being a friend means supporting a friend in ever more arcane pursuits or instead trying to pull them out of a downward spiral. The characters in these stories (with a notable exception, "Two Guys Watching Cujo on Mute") have no such friend, and so wander deeper and deeper into the labyrinth.

One center of narrative consciousness, that of closing story "White Dialogues," is part of a crowd--he is attending a lecture on Vertigo--but as the lecture is being held by a film studies department in which he has recently been denied tenure, he is as alone in a crowd as one can be, and he gets deeper into a darker labyrinth than anyone else in the collection.

Giorgio Agamben, _Hölderlin's Madness: Chronicle of a Dwelling Life, 1806-1843_, trans. Alta L. Price

A FRIEND'S RECOMMENDATION of this book is what led me last fall to a rabbit hole that turned into an immense underground cavern. If I am going to read a book about Hölderlin, I thought, I should read some poems by Hölderlin, and that led to reading commentaries on Hölderlin by Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Lacoue-Labarthe, and I am no longer sure who else in the following months, until I finally felt as ready as I was going to be to pick up the Agamben book.

As the subtitle indicates, the larger part of the book--216 of 329 pages--is a year-by-year account of the time when Hölderlin, accounted by his friends and family to be insane and provided with a caretaker, was living a very quiet, retired life in a small town. The chronology includes a few of the poems he wrote in that time, lots of letters and journal entries by people who visited him, and even a few invoices from the caretaker about routine expenses like shoe repair and wine. 

The book also has a prologue (70-some pages) and an epilogue (30-some pages) which sketch out a thesis, of sorts--although calling it a "thesis" implies some rigorous argument is being made, when Agamben is more floating a possibility, making a suggestion. 

The suggestion is that Hölderlin's madness might have been more a so-called "madness," that is, not a descent into unreason or delusion or catatonia but a kind of withdrawal, abdication, renunciation, a stepping away, a letting go. Not that Agaimben is saying Hölderlin was putting on an act or trying to pass for something he wasn't; he wasn't feigning madness á la Hamlet (if Hamlet was feigning). Rather, he had found a way of radically simplifying his life.

As Agamben sees it, Hölderlin was dropping the tragic mode for the comic one, relinquishing the ambition to be a prophet, a soothsayer--to utter Germany into being the way (the Romantics thought) Homer had uttered Greece into being. Instead, he was writing short, unfussy poems about the turning of the seasons and improvising on the piano.

He could be right. Agamben's version of Hölderlin's last three decades reminds me of the Bob Dylan of 1968-1973. A whole generation was hanging on Dylan's every word, scrutinizing his songs for clues about the secrets of existence, but it's as if Dylan decided, "fuck it, I'm going to cross everyone up and just write country songs until people get over this obsession with me." Hölderlin made the same move and then stuck with it, played it out.

Sam Riviere, _Conflicted Copy_

AS IN RIVIERE'S earlier volume Kim Kardashian's Marriage, all the titles in this collection come from a process of matching all the words in one list (after, darken, dead, old, pink, safe, and true) with all the words in another list (colours, dogs, fame, mode, PDF, poem, and souls), yielding such titles as "Dead Mode" and "Safe Souls." 

Absent from this volume, however, are the pairings that had already served as titles for books by Riviere: his novel Dead Souls, his re-working of Martial After Fame, and four of him pamphlets ("True Colours," "Darken PDF," "Old Poem," and "Pink Dogs"). 

As with his earlier collections, Riviere's method here is to work with material generated by automated digital processes, in this instance GPT-2. All the poems--texts?--were composed in December 2020 and January 2021, thus with software several steps behind what is available now, but they all do have that uncanny AI sheen.

I wonder if AI is getting less useful for poetry as it gets better for prose. That is, the more AI-generated texts achieve the flat neutrality of workaday prose, the less they have the happy surprises and accidents that (once upon a time) gave some digitally-created texts a certain freshness and originality, a saving touch of weirdness. 

The poems in Conflicted Copy rarely sound weird. They sound like AI-texts with their wordy constructions, gratuitous modifiers, wobbly qualifications, and superficial clarity occluding a profound vagueness. "I have always been impressed by people who / manage to maintain relationships beyond the / normal bounds of traditional marriage." They sound, that is to say, like a lot of the place-filler text that shows up in packaging, advertising, instructions, junk mail... almost everywhere you look.

As I kept reading, though, there was a poignance, or a melancholy, some ineffable stunted beauty to these poems. Sometimes the sheer baldness of utilitarian prose lends it a kind of grace, as if we can see hidden with it the luminous, memorable prose it was hoping to be. This is the secret of some of Gary Lutz's and George Saunders's stories, I'd say, and of Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, and Katie Degentesh's The Anger Scale.

Whether the poems in Conflicted Copy have this grace because of some tailoring Riviere has done, or because they just happened to have it, I don't know. In fact, it all may be in my own readerly response, my own imagination. But there is something affecting in these poems' very inability to be affecting.

_Pistis Sophia_, ed. Carl Schmidt, trans. Violet MacDermot

 A GNOSTIC TEXT, written in Coptic and likely translated from Greek, but not from the the famous Nag Hammadi haul. A western collector got hold of it way back in 1773. How it survived to that point despite the animosity towards the Gnostics no one knows, but is likely an interesting story..

Compared to the Nag Hammadi texts, it's quite long--hundreds of pages in this edition. The title might translate "Faith Wisdom," or "Wisdom's Faith," or some variation along those lines.

In the text, Jesus is in a long conversation with his disciples (including Mary his mother, Mary Magdalene, and Martha) explaining what he saw in the other realm before he rose from the dead. 

If I followed this exposition correctly--and I am not at all sure that I did--some powerful but rebellious element of the great one-ness broke away and created the material world, hoping to be worshipped as creator by that world. The rebellious element is called Authades in some parts of the text, but in some other parts is Sabaoth  the Adamas. He is keeping a number of other beings (also his creations, perhaps) in thrall, including Sophia (that is, Wisdom). But Jesus suggests Sophia will be able to free herself and return to the great one-ness.

And so will the disciples, if they straighten up and live right rather than indulging their material bodies. 

Jesus, I think, acts as an intermediary between Authades' unfortunate creations (and the creations of his creations, which would include human beings) and  the great one-ness. Jesus can show us the way to return to  the great immaterial one-ness, if we shake off our illusions (or take the red pill, I guess).

In a way, in this scenario, God the Creator is actually a breakaway Lucifer figure who is hoping we will believe he is the ultimate reality, and has suborned Wisdom herself to that end...so as to gaslight us all, shall we say. But Jesus is revealing the truth about him so we can free ourselves from his illusions and return to our true home, the great one-ness.

I kept wondering--did William Blake somehow get a hold of this?

Also of note: Mary Magdalene is obviously the top student in the class. Whenever Jesus poses a question, she has the right answer immediately, and Jesus always congratulates her on getting things right. Peter complains at a couple of points that the women are getting to do all the talking, so Jesus lets him get a couple of answers in, but the overall message is clear: Mary Magdalene is the one who really gets it.

James Shea, _Last Day of My Face_, 2 of 2

 MY EARLIER POST on James Shea's new book was about how the "I" of the poet often seems there-but-not-exactly-there in the poems--glimpsed in the reader's peripheral vision, we might say, but vanishing when looked at directly. The passage in Eliot's The Waste Land that begins "Who is that third who walks always beside you?" comes to mind.

But can one write a long poem on these principles? A long poem foregrounds the poem-ness of the poem, it seems fair to say, inclining the reader to pay more attention to its making: to the poem's structure, its patterns, its through-lines, and its suggestions of narrative. And, of course, whenever you are thinking of the poem as a made thing, you are also thinking about its maker. So, to use the same example, even in a long poem as disjunctive and fragmented as The Waste Land, we start piecing together a story or looking for a confession.

Last Day of my Face ends with a longer poem (nine sections, fourteen poems), and yes, I did look for a story or a confession, but the poem seemed to have anticipated such readings and to be playing a game with them. Take its title, for starters: "Failed Self-Portrait." So, yes, the poem portrays its maker...but no, it does not look much like him.

There is an "I" here, also a "you" with whom "I" seems to have been intimately connected ("I" and "you" break up in section 7), but the outlines of the "I" slide and shimmy, not quite staying in one place long enough for us to get a fix. In section 9, "I" apologizes for their indeterminacy with a telling nod to Robert Duncan:

                                             Often

I am not permitted to return to a meadow.

If the depth of acknowledgement

of one's failings measures success,

then I am winning in the oddest way.

It's not easy to understand silence,

to gather the ice cream in the morning.

Life's a long self-introduction that ends

abruptly.

Do not feel too bad about not quite understanding who I am, the speaker seems to say--I am still trying to get there myself--and succeeding, moreover, in the oddest possible way. And that is exactly where I was, after reading "Failed Self-Portrait" three times in a row--convinced that, in the oddest possible way, the poem succeeds.

Did I also look for a story? Yes, I did, and found myself wondering if the "I" was not the same person throughout the poem. That is, might the "I" of part 3 be the "you" of part 2? Or, perhaps, of several sections? Is there a dialogue going on? This is all, I admit, a retro-fit based on the breakup in section 7, and somewhat on the "I" of part 3 mentioning wearing a necklace while the "I" of part 5 mentions once having been a boy. But it works...in a way...almost.

The moment in "Failed Self-Portrait" that most convinces me of its success, though, comes toward the end of part 5:

Oh,

to

write

a

moderately

long

sentence

that

begins

in

my

mind

and

ends

in

yours.