ONLY ONCE IN a while do I encounter a poet's second book and like it so much that I seek out the poet's first, and even more rarely do I actually make the time to read it, but yes, I am that big a fan of Sax's Bury It.
Madness (a National Poetry Series winner, selected by Terrance Hayes) has a lot of what made Bury It so appealing: rhythm, candor, critically-inflected (i.e., in this instance, Foucauldian) identity politics, a lyricism that the book's anger only enriches.
The poems revolve around illness, and what gets defined as illness (cf. Foucault), and cures, and what gets defined as a cure (cf. Foucault). The speaker of the poems is usually a young man up against his diagnoses, their associated cures, and the professionals in charge of administering same. A vein of humor runs through the book, but it's dark.
A design/structural feature of the book is a recurring reproduction of Appendix C of the 1952 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (which lists "Homosexuality" alongside "Acrophobia," "Pyromania," and "Tantrums") that gets methodically erased as the volume proceeds. This erasure may be a progress, but the final poem--titled, sure enough, "Erasure"--raises the fearful possibility that if you remove all the wrongs and mistakes there may not be much left.
Monday, January 21, 2019
Saturday, January 12, 2019
Ben Katchor, ed., _Best American Comics 2017_ (Bill Kartalopoulos, series ed.)
BEN KATCHOR'S SELECTION stays a good instance from the mainstream. He includes quite a few self-published items, for instance. A few things might even be called outsider art rather than comics: that is, they have not been "published" at all, but exist as singular items in art galleries. These items are "comics" in form, words, pictures, panels, so they fit in well and certainly reward attention--I'm not objecting to their presence. That presence does, though, suggest a surprising development.
Comics, in the forms with which we are most familiar, were a commercial product designed for mass consumption before they were anything else. Whether newspaper "funnies" or comic books, their very origin occurred in a context that was all about broad appeal and high sales. Like the earliest cinema, they were about being as entertaining as possible for the greatest number of people possible, not about their creators' particular vision or sensibility.
It did not take long at all for an expressive, auteur-like streak to emerge in newspaper comics--Winsor McCay, George Herriman, E. C. Segar--and comic books eventually had their Will Eisner and Carl Barks. But these artists' brilliance was continually in negotiation with the necessity of pursuing the same objectives pursued by the creators of The Gumps and Nancy and Archie. I might even argue that it was not until the emergence of R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, and the other underground-ers in the 1960s that we had comics that were mostly derived from the peculiar obsessions and fixations of their creators.
If Katchor's selection represents the best in American comics--not everyone would agree, but let's just assume for the sake of argument that it does--we are now 180 degrees away from those origins. Katchor includes nothing from the mainstream, not much from even the more prestigious kind of graphic novel. With a few exceptions, the material here is deeply personal, idiosyncratic, expressive, even alien and strange. Not only would they never appear in a newspaper, but even Fantagraphics would probably say, "Geez, I dunno...."
A surprising development, but an appealing one.
Comics, in the forms with which we are most familiar, were a commercial product designed for mass consumption before they were anything else. Whether newspaper "funnies" or comic books, their very origin occurred in a context that was all about broad appeal and high sales. Like the earliest cinema, they were about being as entertaining as possible for the greatest number of people possible, not about their creators' particular vision or sensibility.
It did not take long at all for an expressive, auteur-like streak to emerge in newspaper comics--Winsor McCay, George Herriman, E. C. Segar--and comic books eventually had their Will Eisner and Carl Barks. But these artists' brilliance was continually in negotiation with the necessity of pursuing the same objectives pursued by the creators of The Gumps and Nancy and Archie. I might even argue that it was not until the emergence of R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, and the other underground-ers in the 1960s that we had comics that were mostly derived from the peculiar obsessions and fixations of their creators.
If Katchor's selection represents the best in American comics--not everyone would agree, but let's just assume for the sake of argument that it does--we are now 180 degrees away from those origins. Katchor includes nothing from the mainstream, not much from even the more prestigious kind of graphic novel. With a few exceptions, the material here is deeply personal, idiosyncratic, expressive, even alien and strange. Not only would they never appear in a newspaper, but even Fantagraphics would probably say, "Geez, I dunno...."
A surprising development, but an appealing one.
Tuesday, January 8, 2019
James Baldwin, _If Beale Street Could Talk_
THE ENVIABLY-NAMED Thomas Chatterton Williams began his review of Zadie Smith's Feel Free (London Review of Books, August 30, 2018) this way: ""Several of the last century's finest non-fiction writers--Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin--longed to be novelists." He is setting up the point that Smith, indisputably a novelist, happens also to turn out excellent essays, but I was pulled up short by the implicit suggestion that Didion, Sontag, and Baldwin were not novelists, but only (apparently) aspirant novelists.
I can see what he means about Sontag, even though The Volcano Lover actually sold well, as did Didion's Play It as It Lays and Book of Common Prayer; Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain made it on to a lot of syllabuses, I believe, and Just Above my Head got a National Book Award nomination. Still, I suppose Baldwin's name simply equates to The Fire Next Time and the amazing essays for a lot of people.
I wonder whether the movie adaptation of this novel, besides selling some copies of its source, will re-direct attention to Baldwin's fiction somewhat. It may well, because this is an excellent novel. As you likely know (I haven't seen the movie yet myself), it's about a romantic couple in Harlem. By the time she learns she is pregnant, he is in jail, wrongly accused of rape. Most of the novel is about her ongoing relationship with him, memories of their early time together, and her and her family's efforts to free him.
The novel's point of view is mainly the woman's--Tish's--a risky choice, but I think Baldwin succeeded. The portraits of her family and the family of her lover, Fonny, are rich, particular,, and indelible.
The lovers' main problem--i.e., the patterns of law enforcement that Michelle Alexander has taught us to call the New Jim Crow--is so enduring a one in their community that it hardly feels that the book is set in any particular time. Historical locators are scarce; the book was published in 1974, and there is a quick reference to Les McCann's "Compared to What," which was a hit in 1970, but the action could be occurring in just about any decade after World War II, including the present one.
The writing, as is ever the case with Baldwin, is graceful and incisive at the same time. The drama feels real, especially the intense confrontation between Fonny's family and Tish's family at the book's mid-point. Tish and Fonny themselves are a bit too good to be true, à la Romeo and Juliet, but why don't we just say their love brings out the best in them and leave it at that? And the book is tight, succinct (maybe even a bit too succinct at the end, when I was hoping for a bit more denouement than we get), quick-moving. Maybe Baldwin-the-novelists's day has come.
I can see what he means about Sontag, even though The Volcano Lover actually sold well, as did Didion's Play It as It Lays and Book of Common Prayer; Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain made it on to a lot of syllabuses, I believe, and Just Above my Head got a National Book Award nomination. Still, I suppose Baldwin's name simply equates to The Fire Next Time and the amazing essays for a lot of people.
I wonder whether the movie adaptation of this novel, besides selling some copies of its source, will re-direct attention to Baldwin's fiction somewhat. It may well, because this is an excellent novel. As you likely know (I haven't seen the movie yet myself), it's about a romantic couple in Harlem. By the time she learns she is pregnant, he is in jail, wrongly accused of rape. Most of the novel is about her ongoing relationship with him, memories of their early time together, and her and her family's efforts to free him.
The novel's point of view is mainly the woman's--Tish's--a risky choice, but I think Baldwin succeeded. The portraits of her family and the family of her lover, Fonny, are rich, particular,, and indelible.
The lovers' main problem--i.e., the patterns of law enforcement that Michelle Alexander has taught us to call the New Jim Crow--is so enduring a one in their community that it hardly feels that the book is set in any particular time. Historical locators are scarce; the book was published in 1974, and there is a quick reference to Les McCann's "Compared to What," which was a hit in 1970, but the action could be occurring in just about any decade after World War II, including the present one.
The writing, as is ever the case with Baldwin, is graceful and incisive at the same time. The drama feels real, especially the intense confrontation between Fonny's family and Tish's family at the book's mid-point. Tish and Fonny themselves are a bit too good to be true, à la Romeo and Juliet, but why don't we just say their love brings out the best in them and leave it at that? And the book is tight, succinct (maybe even a bit too succinct at the end, when I was hoping for a bit more denouement than we get), quick-moving. Maybe Baldwin-the-novelists's day has come.
Sunday, January 6, 2019
Ryan H. Walsh, _Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968_
IF YOU HAVE not, you should read Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons, even if you are not much interested in either its author (a relatively minor man of letters from interwar Britain) or his subject (a deeply eccentric late Victorian novelist, Frederick Rolfe, pen name "Baron Corvo"), because the book's method creates its own interest. Rather than research Rolfe and write an ordinary birth-to-death biography, Symons begins the book with his discovery of one of Rolfe's novels, then narrates his own deepening and widening research into who Rolfe was and what became of him. The book gradually evokes a whole moment, a peculiar English sub-culture of the 1890s. It's the Citizen Kane of biographies.
Walsh's book has a comparable approach, which is why you should not think of it, quite, as a book about the brilliant Van Morrison album from which it derives its title. Walsh writes of his introduction to it by the woman he later married, an dog his learning that the album was mostly written while Morrison was living in Boston in 1968, trying to stay clear of the organized crime elements in and around his American label, Bang Records. Walsh hears rumors that recordings exist of early versions of the album's songs, as performed around Boston and Cambridge by Van and a small group of local musicians, and he sets out to track them down.
This search branches out, though, into the whole counter-cultural underground of Boston and Cambridge circa 1965-68. Presumably, this is a mapping of the cultural context from which Morrison's album emerged, but it quickly becomes fascinating for its own sake. We encounter Timothy Leary, a ground-breaking local public television show, the Velvet Underground (who played a club called the Boston Tea Party much more often than they played any venue in New York), the Velvets' diehard young local fan Jonathan Richman, James Brown's role in preventing a riot breaking out on the night of MLK's assassination...and, especially, Mel Lyman.
Lyman was a member of Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, the missing link between the folk revival and hippiedom, and also a self-appointed guru who led a commune with cult-ish overtones. The commune put out a remarkable underground paper--Avatar--but became increasingly self-absorbed and defensive. This story winds up getting perhaps a few thousand more words in the text than Van Morrison does, but that's hardly a fault. It uncannily evokes the atmosphere of a certain part of the United States during the late sixties.
Walsh does nonetheless illuminate Astral Weeks, though. He did not interview Van Morrison--perhaps not much of a disadvantage, seeing as Van the Man says something different about the album every time he talks about it--but he did interview Janet Planet (Morrison's life-partner at that time), producer Lewis Merenstein (who picked all the session musicians), the musicians with whom Morrison developed the songs in Boston, and a few of the session men themselves. The heart of the album's mystery is not laid bare--it never will be, I imagine--but its incandescence is heightened a little by what Walsh discovers, and that is an accomplishment.
Insofar as the book is advancing the thesis that something going on in Boston around 1968 determined the shape of Astral Weeks, I would have to say the case is not entirely made. For all the intriguing connections Walsh brings out--that Lou Reed was a reader of Alice Bailey's Treatise on White Magic, for example--the threads are too loose and various to be pulled together into a fabric. That hardly matters, though. A book as smart, as passionate, as observant, as tellingly written as this one does not have to prove anything to be worth reading.
Walsh's book has a comparable approach, which is why you should not think of it, quite, as a book about the brilliant Van Morrison album from which it derives its title. Walsh writes of his introduction to it by the woman he later married, an dog his learning that the album was mostly written while Morrison was living in Boston in 1968, trying to stay clear of the organized crime elements in and around his American label, Bang Records. Walsh hears rumors that recordings exist of early versions of the album's songs, as performed around Boston and Cambridge by Van and a small group of local musicians, and he sets out to track them down.
This search branches out, though, into the whole counter-cultural underground of Boston and Cambridge circa 1965-68. Presumably, this is a mapping of the cultural context from which Morrison's album emerged, but it quickly becomes fascinating for its own sake. We encounter Timothy Leary, a ground-breaking local public television show, the Velvet Underground (who played a club called the Boston Tea Party much more often than they played any venue in New York), the Velvets' diehard young local fan Jonathan Richman, James Brown's role in preventing a riot breaking out on the night of MLK's assassination...and, especially, Mel Lyman.
Lyman was a member of Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, the missing link between the folk revival and hippiedom, and also a self-appointed guru who led a commune with cult-ish overtones. The commune put out a remarkable underground paper--Avatar--but became increasingly self-absorbed and defensive. This story winds up getting perhaps a few thousand more words in the text than Van Morrison does, but that's hardly a fault. It uncannily evokes the atmosphere of a certain part of the United States during the late sixties.
Walsh does nonetheless illuminate Astral Weeks, though. He did not interview Van Morrison--perhaps not much of a disadvantage, seeing as Van the Man says something different about the album every time he talks about it--but he did interview Janet Planet (Morrison's life-partner at that time), producer Lewis Merenstein (who picked all the session musicians), the musicians with whom Morrison developed the songs in Boston, and a few of the session men themselves. The heart of the album's mystery is not laid bare--it never will be, I imagine--but its incandescence is heightened a little by what Walsh discovers, and that is an accomplishment.
Insofar as the book is advancing the thesis that something going on in Boston around 1968 determined the shape of Astral Weeks, I would have to say the case is not entirely made. For all the intriguing connections Walsh brings out--that Lou Reed was a reader of Alice Bailey's Treatise on White Magic, for example--the threads are too loose and various to be pulled together into a fabric. That hardly matters, though. A book as smart, as passionate, as observant, as tellingly written as this one does not have to prove anything to be worth reading.
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