Seamus Heaney, _The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes_

 WONDERING WHAT DREW Heaney to this play, I figured it must have had something to do with Ireland. The translation of Dante and the Dantean influence in Station Island have something to do with Ireland, I feel sure--the Ugolino episode evokes civil conflict, betrayal, and the thirst for revenge: the main ingredients of most literature about the Troubles, from Juno and the Paycock and The Informer and The Hostage up to The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Cal and Milkman.

So is there something Irish about Philoctetes? Betrayal? The nursing of grievance? The passing along of grievance, the legacy of injury, to the next generation?

I'm guessing it's the hope for reconciliation that drew Heaney to the play. The story, briefly: Ten years ago, on the way to Troy to reclaim Helen, the Greeks marooned one of their warriors, Philoctetes, because he had an incurable wound in his foot so putrid-smelling that his presence was intolerable. Now, however, they learn from an oracle that they will never take Troy unless they have Philoctetes' bow. Odysseus recruits the now-dead Achilles' son, Neoptolemus, to gain Philoctetes' trust, obtain the bow, and skedaddle back to Troy.

Philoctetes, who is still on that island with his suppurating foot, is still angry at the Greeks and will do nothing to help them voluntarily. Neoptolemus does win his trust...but then feels bad about misleading him. He wants to bring to Troy not just the bow, but Philoctetes himself. He wants a reconciliation. 

And the point of The Cure at Troy is that such a reconciliation can happen; the seemingly impossible yet deeply hoped-for thing can occur. This leads to the lines of the play, spoken by the chorus, that Joe Biden often quotes:

History says, don't hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

Is this about Ireland? The Cure at Troy was published in 1991, quite a while before the Good Friday Accords. Is it about 1989, about what happened in Poland and Czechoslovakia? Heaney was acquainted with Milosz, I believe, possibly with Havel. 

The "hope and history rhyme" line is a striking one, which made me wonder how others had translated it.  Turns out it is not a translation at all, but all Heaney. At least, the choral song in which it occurs near the end of the play did not show up in the first three English translations I found. Heaney wanted it there, which, I suspect, tells us a lot about what he found in the play. Or maybe wanted, or hoped, or needed to find in the play, even if he had to write the passage that embodied it himself.

Alison Bechdel, _The Secret to Superhuman Strength_

 ALISON BECHDEL IS one of those people—Bob Dylan, John Ashbery, Todd Haynes, Johnny Marr come to mind, for me—who seem constitutionally unable to produce anything uninteresting. 

All of the Dykes to Watch Out For collections are worthwhile, by my lights. This is the third of the “book” books, and like its two predecessors it is funny, poignant, insightful, and a visual delight.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength is in some ways more ambitious than Fun Home and Are You My Mother? It’s physically larger, in full color, and, though still mainly autobiographical, it contextualizes Bechdel’s story in a wide historical perspective. 

The main current in the book is Bechdel’s conscious efforts, from childhood on, to become stronger. Each of the six decades of her life so far gets a chapter, and in each one she is pursuing one or more activity with the intention of becoming stronger and fitter: skiing, martial arts, bicycling, and running, for example. With each activity, she also gives us a sense of the culture around it, how at one time or another it was having its moment, with its particular buzz and patois, its particular equipment fetishisms. Even though this is mainly her story, we get a sense of how broad a movement physical fitness has become in the USA.

But bodies come attached to minds, perhaps to spirits, and Bechdel’s pursuit of bodily fitness intersects often with her pursuit of mental and spiritual fitness. Accordingly, we learn also of her involvement with yoga, meditation, Buddhism, and the Anglo-American culture of seeking, particularly as represented by the English Romantics (focusing on Coleridge and the Wordsworths) and the American Transcendentalists (focusing on Emerson and Fuller). 

Bechdel achieves the near impossible by taking herself seriously without…taking herself seriously. That is, she makes no apologies for devoting herself to physical and spiritual self-development. Her pursuits can seem like solipsistic self-absorption—do indeed seem so to some of her friends and partners, it looks like—but the reader never doubts that they are for her not just worthwhile, but indispensable, the activity that enables her to live a meaningful life. Yet she is so funny about it all—so self-deprecating, so clear-eyed about its absurdities, that the book never has the irritating smugness so many, many tales of self-improvement have. 

And her drawing—is it better than ever? I’m ready to say yes. The same painstaking detail, but also occasional pages in a loose gray wash…a greater tonal variety than ever. As I was saying, is any Bechdel going to be one you should skip? Nope.

Nathalie Léger, _Exposition_, trans. Amanda DeMarco

 THE BACK JACKET copy calls Exposition the first in a triptych--a painting in three panels--would we call Exposition a portrait, then? It's not historical fiction, but not a biography either. It lies within hailing distance of art criticism or art history, but what kind of art history devotes any space to the author's father's marital infidelities? So let's just say portrait. A portrait with a lot of other things in the background.

Exposition is a portrait of Virginia Oldoini (1837-1899), the Countess of Castiglione, a celebrated beauty and Parisian social figure of the Second Empire (1850-1870), for a time the mistress of Napoleon III. The Countess is famous for being photographed--"the most photographed woman on the 19th century," reputedly. A lot of painstaking preparation went into the photographs, attention to clothes, hair, setting; some are in costume or are representations of a historical character. Robert de Montesquiou--the main model for Proust's Charlus--was among those fascinated by her and by the photographs. The most famous of them, "Scherzo di Follio," you have probably seen; it often figures in accounts of the early history of the medium.

The France of the 1850s and 1860s was politically gruesome (see Robert Browning's "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society") but it was a flourishing era for French art--there were the Impressionists, of course, not to mention Baudelaire and Flaubert. So, is the Countess an artist? Is she a precursor of Cindy Sherman? Is she the ancestress of all the artistically-inflected self-representation that now occurs globally on the internet?

Maybe. Léger raises such possibilities, but she does not spend a lot of time or energy on them. Rather than turn the Countess into that familiar figure, the woman ahead of her time, or attribute to her motivations we can readily recognize, Léger ponders her in all her bewildering idiosyncrasy. What did she think she was doing? Why is it still interesting?

It has something to do with the male gaze, Léger seems willing to venture. If to be a woman has a lot to do with being looked at, all the more so if one is beautiful, even famous for being beautiful. Is that something one can work with, do something with, heighten, appropriate, turn inside out? Or is it just a cage, however you decorate it?

I'm hoping to have time this January to look at the next two panels of the triptych.

Kent Russell, _I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son_

 KING KONG THEORY could be crudely described as a book about the perils of being born female, and I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son serves to show that being born male is no stroll in the park, either--or at least not for American-born millennials.

Born forty years earlier than he was, Russell might have been a journalist in the Hunter S. Thompson vein, but the demand for that sort of thing has largely evaporated--not that you know that from the Knopf jacket copy that proclaims "a debut shot through with violence, comedy, and feverish intensity that takes us on an odyssey into an American netherworld." Russell does no trade in fear and loathing, nor does he devote a lot of space to his drug intake. Instead he turns his reportorial attention to the bizarre sorts of things American men elect to do, such as: 

--acquire immunity from snakebites by letting themselves be bitten regularly by poisonous snakes ("Mithridates of Fond du Lac")

--design gory special effects for horror movies ("Say Good Morning to the Adversary")

--become one of professional hockey's "enforcers"--that is, the players who get rough with opposing player attempting to get rough with the team's best scorer ("Showing Up").

The jewel in the crown (and the reason I bought the book) is "American Juggalo," in which Russell attends a Gathering, the annual summer festival for fans of the Insane Clown Posse. As drop-in literary journalism goes, this essay can sustain comparison to Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," about Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love, or David Foster Wallace's "Ticket to the Fair," about the Illinois State Fair. Russell is not of the scene, and he has a sense of its absurdities, but he does not want to merely mock it, and he almost kinda sorta gets it. I hope this piece becomes a classic.

(For contrast, like a sweet breeze wafted in from some pastoral Eden, we have "Artisanal Ball," about baseball as played by the Amish.)

What is going on with American men doing such stupid things? Is it because American men have always done stupid things--is this is our legacy from our fathers? The book's title, it turns out, is not something Russell's father said to him, but something Daniel Boone once said to a son who showed no interest in military service. Trying to be what our fathers were, or wanted to be, or  thought they had to be...is that what it is?

Interspersed throughout I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son are essays with dates rather than titles, almost all from September 2013, in which Russell describes a lengthy visit with his own father in Florida. Russell is trying to obtain his father's co-operation for a piece in which Russell will travel to the ancestral home of the Russells, Ohio, to write about the family's history. Dad, fearing his son will annihilate the family in a snark-blast for some snooty national magazine, won't go along. But even though Russell fails in his quest to get Dad up to Ohio, we get a convincing portrait of the man, and incidentally a glimpse into what fathers mean to sons, what sons means to fathers... not to mention a glimpse into a masculinity that is not exactly toxic but nonetheless hard on the liver.

Virginie Despentes, _King Kong Theory_, trans. Frank Wynne

I READ THIS last month, and am reading Frank Wilderson's Afropessimism this month, so I am thinking, my god, critical theoretical discourse has gotten a lot more entertaining to read these days--personal, slanging, taking no prisoners, marching through Georgia and scorching the landscape without explanation or apology.

King Kong Theory has actually been around for quite a while; it came out in French in 2006 and was first published in English in 2010. This English translation appeared relatively recently, in 2020. The book is not readily comparable to anything I can think of in American letters. It could imaginably occupy a space on a shelf within heckling distance of books by Camille Paglia, Chris Kraus, Kathy Acker, and Maggie Nelson given its promiscuous blending of memoir, fiction, critical theory, and polemic. Despentes seems to give even less of a rat's ass what the tenure and promotion committee thinks than those writers do, however, and is even happier to give enlightened feminist consensus the middle finger than Paglia is. 

Opening sentence: "I write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the old, the bull dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckable, the hysterics, the freaks, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh." And we accelerate from there.

Chapters are devoted to rape, sex work, pornography, with punk rock and authorship as unifying motifs. What does King Kong have to do with it? 

As women go, I'm more King Kong than Kate Moss [who had the Fay Wray/Jessica Lange role in the most recent film about the giant gorilla]. I'm the sort of woman you don't marry, you don't have kids with; I speak as a woman who is always too much of everything she is: too aggressive, too loud, too fat, too brutish, too hairy, always too mannish, so they tell me.

But she is both the exception and the rule--for is any woman actually like the woman Kate/Faye/Jessica represent, "sexy but not slutty, married but not meek, with a good job but not so successful she upstages her husband, slim but not hung up about food," and so on? "I suspect she doesn't exist," writes Despentes. King Kong Theory takes a gleeful stick to this particular piñata for 139 pages, and it is one adrenalized read.

Bernardine Evaristo, _Girl, Woman, Other_

 BOOKER PRIZE WINNER for 2019, and a better than average Booker winner, I'd say. 

At the novel's hub is radical lesbian experimental playwright Amma, whose new play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey,  is having its premier at the National Theater--she is hitting the big time, in other words. The first section is from her point of view, filling us in on her story and sensibility.

The next eleven sections are the spokes, we might say. Many are from the point of view of other people present at the premier--Amma's daughter, an old lover, an old playmate. But we also get a few sections from people connected to the people connected to Amma...maybe more a network than a wheel, then.

What the characters all have in common is not only that they have a (sometimes mediated) tie to Amma, though.  They are also all women (though one is moving towards non-binary) of African heritage (some having come from Africa itself, some the children of immigrants, some the descendants of people abducted from Africa many generations ago). Even more intriguingly, they all also have in common a kind of free-verse style of presentation that Evaristo came up with for the novel. A random sample:

     by the time Carole began her banking career in the City, Bummi had a staff of ten

     one of them, Sister Omofe from church, was the most pleasant and diligent worker of them all

     her husband, Jimoh, had taken a second wife back in Port Harcourt where he ran his mobile phone business and left her to raise their two sons, Tayo and Wole, alone

Have to admit, I was skeptical at first--is this actually going to work over the course of a 450-page novel? But the free-verse method actually gave the book a headlong momentum. I found it very hard to stop in the middle of any character's section, absorbed not just by the conjuring up of the section's character (all in free  indirect discourse) but by the style's pace, the march of the statements, continuously unscrolling without affording any natural place to pause.

Since the characters shared this discourse as well as their connections to femaleness and Africa, they always seemed to belong in the same book together, even though they are also widely different--of different generations, different politics, different levels of education, different classes, different sensibilities. Together they constitute a cosmos, and by the the time we get to the  final chapter, "The After-party," we have traveled far together. 

And then, a neat little curveball in the epilogue. Or perhaps we should call it a googly.

Bob Mehr, _Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements_

WHO WOULD HAVE thought, back around 1986, that thirty years on a ramshackle, off-the-radar band like the Replacements would have a 435-page history, with a further 16 pages of notes?

Yet it makes a kind of sense, too. Bon Jovi (to name only one monster ‘80s band) sold records and played for audiences in numbers whole levels of magnitude beyond anything the Replacements ever achieved. For sheer unquantifiable devotion among their fans, though, the ‘Mats were unmatchable. (Mehr, by the way, explains the band’s odd nickname.) To the band’s faithful, frontman Paul Westerberg’s songs were scripture, their verge-of-chaos live shows a sacrament, their penchant for self-sabotage the only true holiness.

The book breaks neatly into two halves, the Replacements with Bob and without Bob—Bob Stinson, that is, founder of the band and human train wreck, kicked out of the band as an unredeemable liability just when it looked like they might conceivably break huge. They were arguably a better band without him and his car crash guitar solos—except, of course, that they now sounded more like every other band and were Never the Same. 

The dropping of Bob and its complicated effects—not least on his half-brother, Tommy, the band’s bassist, who stayed on without him—is among the many topics on which Mehr proves illuminating. Mehr is a great journalist; he did the legwork to find the right sources, won their trust, got the story. He writes as a fan, but not a besotted one. He can capture the incandescent, unpredictable brilliance of the band without sparing the details of how they could be their own worst enemy. (Their two network TV appearances led to lifetime bans from both networks.) His writing is always sturdy, often eloquent.

Are there still high school dropouts with day jobs as janitors flailing away in midwestern basements, blasting through cheap amps, coming up with such howls of angsty joy as “Kids Don’t Follow” and “I Will Dare”? I don’t know. I hope so.