Robert Benchley, _My Ten Years in a Quandary, and How They Grew_

 I BECAME BESOTTED with humorist Robert Benchley’s writing when I was in my middle teens in the later 1960s. I found The Benchley Roundup and Chips Off the Old Benchley, both of which were “best of” anthologies, in the Des Moines Public Library and read them both multiple times. My Ten Years in a Quandary is one of his regular collections, gathering his New Yorker columns from the middle 1930s. It was published in 1936 and had gone through sixteen editions by 1939, the date of my copy, which I picked up in a used book store for $4.50.

I’m still utterly charmed, almost sixty years after my peak Benchley phase, but I find it tricky to describe Benchley’s particular mode. He’s not folksy, á la Mark Twain or Garrison Keillor. Nor is he witty and sophisticated, exactly—that is, while he was witty and sophisticated (Harvard-educated, one of the founders of the Algonquin Roundtable, writer and performer in 1930s Hollywood), his persona in his humor columns is usually a little befuddled and out of touch and entertainingly cranky about it. He often adopts the pose—and gently satirizes the pose—of a person who does not understand why the world had to get so complicated. Back around the turn of the 21st century, for example, he would have been very funny about the rise of the internet.

Speaking of the internet, a quick look establishes that The Benchley Roundup is still in print (University of Chicago Press [!]), but the Library of America has yet to bestow on Benchley the classic status it has bestowed on James Thurber and S. J. Perelman. Could we be due for a Benchley revival? We could do worse.

Nancy Lemann, _Lives of the Saints_

 ANOTHER FINE NOVEL set in New Orleans to shelve near Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. I had not heard of it before it was republished by New York Review Books, but apparently it has produced a slowly-growing cult reputation since its original publication in 1985.

The novel takes place over about a year in what seems to be the 1970s. It’s nearly plotless, in a good way; the novel consists of short vignettes from the point of view of narrator Louise Brown. Louise is a dry, disenchanted observer of the moneyed old New Orleans families among whom she grew up. “It is this passing parade which I chronicle,” she remarks at one point.

 The voice Lemann conjures for Louise is the most memorable element of the novel. It is a bit like the conversation of a person who should not have another drink, mainly due to a tendency to repeat words: “Maybe Claude would break my heart, and it would not really be so outlandish. Hearts have been known to break. Hearts have been known to break before. Maybe he would break my heart, and then I would have Tragic Dignity.”

While the recurring phrases give Lemann’s prose the roll of speech, the capitalizing of “Tragic Dignity” is like a little eye-roll letting you know that she doesn’t want you to think she’s being melodramatic. She’s not asking or hoping for your sympathy. I found myself sympathizing all the same.

Claude is Claude Collier, brilliant and charismatic but self-sabotaging—he reminded me of Charles Stringham in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, but I bet you can provide your own examples—and yes (spoiler alert), he does break her heart.  His own heart is already broken due to the accidental death (spoiler alert) of his younger brother, Saint (his actual name is Saint Louis Collier). Claude’s grief makes it understandable that the relationship with Louise, whom he is certainly fond of, never quite gets off the ground. Given that he not only breaks her heart but drives her crazy (“‘I’M CALM!’  I screamed”), maybe that’s for the best.

I learned from Michael Gorra’s review in NYRB that Nancy Lemann is the sister of well-known journalist Nicholas Lemann, which made me wonder how Nicholas would have written about these people. Maybe he has, somewhere.

m. nourbeSe philip, _Zong! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng_

 THE HISTORY BEHIND this book-length poem: navigation went so badly awry on the Zong, a slavery ship, part of the triangular Africa-America-England trade in the 18th century, that the captain of the Zong decided the only way to make a profit on the voyage was to drown the captive Africans on board and collect the insurance money. Under the circumstances, the insurers did not want to pay, leading to the court case Gregson v. Gilbert, the conclusions of which are included as an appendix to the poem.

It's a story with a lot of resonance, obviously. It highlights not only a fatal flaw in human relations--the ease with which we can see the Other as a means to an end, an object, even a commodity--and a fatal flaw in capitalism--its tendency to put profit above all other priorities.

philip does not present the story in a direct, straightforward way, however. To a large extent, the reader has to already know the story before he or she can discern it in the poem. The poem relies on strategies that reminded me of Gertrude Stein, H.D., Pound, Zukofsky, Charles Olson--disjunction, fragmentation, parataxis--and thus demands a high degree of readerly engagement. This is most marked in the section titled "Ferrum," from which the following is taken:

 [...] circe how                                          ls des

                           troys a riot                                       a circ

                  us of mur                        der she who cre

ates & des              troy s is no mo                              re give us this

                  day our ne                       groes our profits

The reader has to slow down and concentrate a little to see "circe howls / destroys a riot / a circus of murder / she who creates & destroys is no more / give us this day our negroes our profits."

Not a quick read, then, but you can see what philip is getting at: this is a story that immediately tried  to occlude itself, did not want to be known, that scarcely knows how to be  told...so the poem is almost unreadable, but not quite, not really...the truth is right there under the surface if you keep looking, although part of you does not want to look.

I read the new (well, 2023) fifteenth anniversary edition of the poem, which includes new essays by Katherine McKittrick and Saidiya Hartman as well as a new foreword by philip herself, much of which is about how the work has been performed (excerpts of some performances can be found on YouTube).

Robert Fernandez, _Wild Child_

WILD CHILD IS another more recent chapbook by Robert Fernandez, this one published by Illicit Zines, which is part of Blush (https://www.blush-lit.com/illicit-zines). 

The five poems on these thirty pages are the typeset-and-printed versions of poems also found at Fernandez's website The Chimeras (https://www.the-chimeras.com/) in their original form, "poems composed using nontraditional media and supports," e.g., poems written in (I am guessing) chalk, crayon, or felt tip marker on cloth, or fluorescent light tubes, or silver balloons. The site is worth a visit whether or not you pick up the chapbook.

Is the chapbook worth picking up? Lord, yes. I read the poems without knowing they came from a project in a liminal zone between poetry and visual art, and they amazed me. "Natasha" has a kind of narrative arc to it, like a shattered reflection of some long ago episode. "Antigone" adds a dimension to Fernandez's ongoing fascination with Sophocles' tragedy. "Neck Braces" and "Book of Black Cigars" feel like action paintings turned into poems. "Winter Dreams," a riot of bubblegum colors in its original form, is Fernandez in his relentless mode: "LSD / RIMBAUD / BLOOD". 

This is the first Illicit Zine I have looked at, but it seems like a worthwhile operation. And it's always good to have more Fernandez.

Robert Fernandez, _Las Moradas_

 IN MY OPINION, Robert Fernandez is one of the best poets now writing in the United States. It has been a while since his last book came out, so it is a fine thing to have this chapbook from Arrow As Aarow. 

Las Moradas ("the dwellings") is twenty-three poems "excerpted from The Living," as explained in an endnote. I've read it three times, each time more convinced that the "I" of the poems represents a unified character or perspective and the poems cohere, but until the whole of The Living appears, that will have to stand as simply my best guess.

The poems present us often with an "I," but rarely with a he, she, or they. A "sunflower man" appears, and a "master," and "the lyricists / along the river bank / playing soccer," but we mainly have a single person in the middle of a singularly intense passage. There is an important "you" in the fourth poem, and that "you" may be part of the "we" sometimes named. By and large, though, we are connected to an individual consciousness.

That consciousness is vibrantly attentive, marked by both desire and wariness. There are quite a few animals (a tiger, a wolf, vultures), and there is blood. There may be rituals or ceremonies--

(the soap-

stone sucks up the

splashing blood that resists

Brazil-wood bowls

as much as it can)

--and we may have the molecules of a sort of bildungsroman, as the speaker seems to in a period of new challenges and new dangers in the territory he (or she--"moradas" brings to mind Teresa of Avila) is exploring. We get hints that the passage will prove transformative:

it is the first gnosis

fist host been but eye can see

it is the chapter of hammers

of froms

of planes

And in the final poem, we even get a sense of arrival:

& for a moment 

there was a world

 

there was a world

& silos still-

ly in the distance

I don't know why I think those silos mean we got the harvest in, the granaries are full, we got past the hammers, and we are going to be okay. But that is what I think. 

I'll have to wait for The Living to see how good my guess is. In the meantime, Las Moradas is definitely worth seeking out.  Thank you, Arrow As Aarow.

John Philip Newell, _The Great Search: Turning to Earth and Soul in the Quest for Healing and Home_

JOHN PHILIP NEWELL is a former clergyman in the Church of Scotland (he "let go" of his ordination a while ago, as he says in his introduction), and the search named in his title is for a spiritual movement that can provide the wisdom, energy, and inspiration needed to act on climate change.

As he mentions at points throughout the book, a lot of traditional Christian teaching will not be helpful toward this end: the doctrine of original sin and fussing about the ontological status of Jesus of Nazareth, for instance. Insisting on the duality of spirit and matter will cause problems as well; one of his chief recurring ideas is that he need to think of the Earth and the natural world as being as ensouled as we are. The Golden Rule should extend not just to our human neighbors, but to our animal and plant neighbors as well, the whole of the environment.

Most of the book is devoted to discussions of nine figures from several traditions whose ideas could contribute to the Earth-focused spiritual movement: Thomas Berry, Nan Shepherd, Martin  Buber, Carl Jung, Julian of Norwich, Jalaluddin Rumi, Rabindranath Tagore, Etty Hillesum, and Edwin Muir. The friend who lent me  this book likely had in mind my attachment to Julian, and what Newell says about her resonated with me. All nine chapters were illuminating, especially those devoted to people I knew little about (Hillesum, Muir, Berry, Shepherd).

One surprise: American indigeneous spirituality seems obviously well-suited to Newell's search, but he does not mention it. As much as he gets around--he mentions being at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico--he surely knows about it...but not a word. I hope someone hands him a copy of Jerome Rothenberg;'s anthology Technicians of the Sacred soon, and that he writes about it.

David Foster Wallace, _Both Flesh and Not_

BOTH FLESH AND Not collects essays, articles, and reviews by Wallace that did not appear in either of his essay collections, A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster (2005). I bought it in December of 2012, not long after it came out, but I have put off reading it for (brief pause for arithmetic) almost fourteen years because even though I knew I would enjoy it, I also knew it would sadden me to know that this is it, there’s no more.  That’s exactly what happened.

The title essay, which comes first in the book, may be the best thing in it. It originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine, where it was titled “Federer as Religious Experience,” and it describes the unique and astonishing prowess of the tennis player Roger Federer. I know almost nothing about tennis and never watched Federer play, but the essay was such a bravura display of Wallace’s characteristic virtues as a writer—patient and conscientious explanation of fine points, mastery of infinite shades of tone, verbal ingenuity, and the eerie sense that he is talking just to you—that my ignorance of tennis proved no obstacle to deep relishing of the essay.

Also excellent are Wallace’s review of Peter Johnson’s The Best of the Prose Poem and his introduction to the 2007 edition of The Best American Essays (which Wallace edited). Both take original and inventive approaches, but their dazzle is not strictly for dazzle’s sake, as it only makes clearer Wallace’s love of the possibilities of writing.

“Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama” is good to have, too. Like Everything and More, it highlights Wallace’s lonely eminence as a great American writer who was also a math nerd.

Some of the pieces from the 1990s have not aged as well. Wallace’s review of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Daughter is a welcome tribute to that excellent book, but seems over-lengthy at almost fifty pages.

But it’s all good to have. After all, there will be no more.