Kim Hyesoon, _Autobiography of Death_, trans. Don Mee Choi

THE COVER OF DMZ Colony mentions that Choi is the translator of Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, which reminded me that I had acquired this at some point and not gotten around to reading it...so it seemed like an opportune moment.

The English translation (from New Directions) includes an interview of Kim by Choi, in which we learn of a traditional Korean belief that after death, the soul circulates for 49 days before it is reincarnated. The 49 poems of the main part of the book correspond to these 49 days, so we might read them as the soul's circulation in this liminal zone among perceptions, memories, and anticipations. So we have something a bit like the Tibetan Book of the Dead (which provides the epigraph of one of the poems) or the second chapter of Han Kang's novel Human Acts, in which we get the narration of Jeong-Dae, a young man shot by the government's troops at the Gwangju Uprising (which is part of the background of "Autopsy (Day 24)").

That may make the book sound a bit more domesticated than it is, though. The explanation about the 49 days draws a kind of faint outline around the book's turbulence, we might say, but does not resolve or quell that turbulence. Autobiography of Death is a wild ride through a phantasmagoria with continually  metamorphosing characters. Is the "you" frequently addressed in the book the soul, or death, or something else, something restlessly mobile? I was never entirely sure.

"Name (Day 42)" put me in mind of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, to give you an idea how trippy the book gets. I would cite "Mommy of Death (Day 26)," "Hiccups (Day 31)," "Lord No (Day 36)," and "Don't (Day 49)" as providing similarly harrowing pleasures.

The book includes a long (16 pages) poem not part of the main sequence proper--"Face of Rhythm"--that seems to track a long, difficult, elusive illness. Placed in the same book as "Autobiography of Death," it's as if the anxiety of being alive is looking through a window at the anxiety of being dead.

Oh, and speaking of Han's Human Acts: Choi mentions in a note at the end of the book that Kim Hyesoon worked as an editor during the dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan, in which post she dealt with a play that was entirely redacted by the censor and with being slapped in the face seven times by a government official for withholding information about an author. Exactly these affronts happen to Kim Eun-sook in the third chapter of Han's novel. Kim Hyesoon must be a model for Kim Eun-sook, to some extent, which makes me wonder, was Kim Hyesoon actually present at Gwangju, as Han's Kim Eun-sook was? Probably not, as Choi likely would have mentioned that, but I did wonder.

Sianne Ngai, _Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting_

 AT SOME POINT last summer, I had seen Ngai's work cited so often that I decided I had better read some of it, and the cover image of Lucille Ball (as Lucy Ricardo) awkwardly straddling a barre in a dance studio was enough to persuade me this was the one to read.

Aesthetics has been a bit neglected as a philosophical domain in recent decades, I would say. Aesthetics as a discipline developed by focusing on the beautiful, the sublime, the great, the important, on good vs. bad taste, etc., and so was terribly exposed to arguments (by Pierre Bourdieu, for example) that it was just a cover for class privilege, a camouflage for power, a ducking of responsibilities. Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just might serve as an example of aesthetics, as a discipline, being a bit on the defensive.

But Ngai gives aesthetics a whole new energy by taking up more familiar, lower stakes categories--the cute, the interesting, the zany--and using them to build a convincing argument about where art is and where we are in our late capitalist moment.

For example, Ngai connects the "cute" to avant-garde poetry and the paradoxical power that may emerge from powerlessness, the "interesting" to that which opens up to the not-yet-noticed and not-yet-articulated, and the "zany" to the increasing tendency of work to involve more and more kinds of performance (even to the need of performing "humanness" if one os a flight attendant or answers phones). She not only illuminates the language game one plays with these tokens, so to speak, but also can make rethink Hello Kitty. 

Like Fredric Jameson she has a gift for turning from high culture to popular culture to high theory and back again without missing a beat or batting an eye, and however far she goes, the means of production and its relationships are never far away. The chapter on "zany" gathers in Lucille Ball, Richard Pryor,  and Jim Carrey, reasonably enough, but also the zanni of the commedia dell'arte, Diderot's dialogue with Rameau's nephew, Nietzsche and Arlie Hochschild, Hardt and Negri and Kathy Weeks...and it all adds up to an insightful discussion of the unexpected kinds of labor late capitalism ropes us into doing. 

Sianne Ngai and Wyndham Lewis

 LAST SUMMER, AS I was reading Jameson's Allegory and Ideology, I was also working my way through Sianne Ngai's Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. An excellent book, and I will be getting to it in a day or two, but I thought I would devote a separate post to the notice she gives to that fascinating figure Wyndham Lewis.

Fascinating to me, anyway, but also problematic, as can be seen from the promptness with which most discussions of Lewis that are not by Lewis specialists gravitate towards the ways he can be seen as anti-semitic, or racist, or misogynistic, or fascist, or homophobic...as I said, he's problematic.

Ngai simply draws on Lewis's fascinating (but, yes, problematic) The Art of Being Ruled in talking about the relationship of avant-garde writing to her category "cute" (via Lewis's "savage indictment of cuteness" in his discussion of Gertrude Stein and the "child-cult") and in talking about Nietzsche's relationship to her category "zany."

That Ngai brought in Lewis simply to provide an interesting sidelight on her topics, not in order to show his wrong-headedness, was refreshing.

By the way, the book's indexer left out one of Ngai's more detailed discussions of Lewis, which can be found on pp. 302-04, note 61.

Diane Seuss, _Frank: Sonnets_

 I WAS IN Seattle last October, and whenever I am in Seattle, I get on over to its excellent poetry bookstore, Open Books. This book was prominently displayed, and I had seen it praised in a few places, so I went ahead and bought it. A few months pass, and it wins a couple of major prizes (the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle), so it lands right at the top of my summer reading list. 

All this while, though, being unfamiliar with Seuss's work, I had been assuming she was on the younger side--say, under 40. Then, on p. 26, I read: "My first crush was Wild Bill Hickok, not the actual guy but the guy who played him on TV, Guy Madison, who died of emphysema [...]". What?! I too was a fan of the TV Wild Bill, and imitated his unusual practice of wearing his holstered sidearms backwards, handles pointing forward, with my toy six-shooters. But that show was on TV in the 1950s...how old is Diane Seuss?

Born in 1956, she is just two years younger than I am, in turns out. She went to an excellent midwestern liberal arts college, just as I did. In her early twenties, she had an up-close brush with the eruption of punk rock, and in her later twenties with the eruption of AIDS, right when all of us born in the mid-1950s did. My oldest daughter was born in 1985; her son was born in 1986. She is now a college teacher and so, it happens, am I. 

This all became clear over the course of Frank, a sonnet sequence with significant autobiographical content. Not that Seuss and I resemble each other all that much--she has lived a lot closer to the edge than I have, and sometimes gone clean over the edge, it sounds like, and more power to her. But I was haunted by the idea that we could easily have been at the same Ramones concert, or the same panel presentation at MLA, or had kids in the same playgroup...that sort of thing.  I couldn't put the book down.

Is being unable to put it down a virtue in a book of poetry? It seems more like the kind of thing you would say about a thriller or Harry Potter. After sixty or ninety minutes with a poet, you should probably just step away for a while lest they completely rewire your circuitry. But it's hard to step away from Frank. It's one of those conversations where you think, well, it's late, but let's just open another bottle and/or another pack of cigarettes and see where this goes.

Frank put me a bit in mind of Alice Notley's Alma in its combination of intimacy and headlong rush, which naturally put me in mind of Ted Berrigan (sonnets, etc.), but I found the form was reminding me less of him than of Berryman and the Dream Songs. Why? Something in the utterly personal associative logic of the movement of the poems? I'm just guessing. I don't know. I found myself reminded of Berryman repeatedly, though.

Is the book's title a tribute to Frank O'Hara (mentioned in the final poem) or Amy Winehouse (who furnishes one of the epigraphs)? 

Keith Gessen, _A Terrible Country_

 A GIANT STEP beyond the likable but thin All the Sad Young Literary Men, I'd say. A friend said A Terrible Country is "a good novel, not a great novel." Not great, maybe, but I'd go stronger than "good"--an excellent novel, I'd say, and one bears comparison to at least one indisputably great novel, Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale.

In Flaubert's novel, Frédéric Moreau is a young man of civilized tastes and progressive opinions living in Paris at the time of the 1848 revolution. He is in love with Mme. Arnoux, the wife of an older friend, and convinced both that he can win her and become a leading figure in the new society being born in the revolutionary tumult. By the novel's end, he has learned the hard lesson that he never had a real shot either with Mme. Arnoux or as a leader of men. He's actually a fairly typical product of his class and his time.

Gessen's Andrei Kaplan was born in Moscow and emigrated to the USA with his family when he was a child. Now in  his mid-to-late 20s, he has pursued an academic career in Slavic Studies but seems stalled-out at the crucial post-dissertation stage. His girlfriend drops him. With not much going on, he has no reason not to accept a proposal from his brother (who has returned to Moscow and is making money) that he live in Moscow for a while and look after their grandmother.

Andrei takes a while to get used to Moscow, but his Russian becomes fluent, he makes some friends he can play hockey with, he meets a group of very stimulating young intellectuals who are interested in reviving socialist ideals in post-Soviet Russia, and he even gets a girlfriend. (The middle of the novel offers a fascinating, cliché-free portrait of post-Soviet Russia, with which Gessen is well acquainted.)

Like Frédéric Moreau, Andrei has plenty of raw material for elaborate fantasies about what sort of person he is on the cusp of becoming. 

Like Frédéric, he is embarrassingly wrong. (I'll spare you the details.)

I don't know whether A Terrible Country will become a classic, but in its handling of theme of the young man  hitting the wall of his own delusions, it has a shot at enduring. 

Jericho Brown, _The Tradition_

 ONE WOULD EXPECT a poetry collection titled The Tradition to demonstrate familiarity and deftness with a variety of closed and/or regular forms, and Brown certainly checks that box; you would likewise expect it to allude cannily to canonical poems, and Brown does that as well, as when his "Of the Swan" glances back at Yeats's "Leda and the Swan."

It does not surprise that the collection's title poem turns out to be a sonnet. 

It does surprise that the "tradition" invoked is that of American police killing black men. 

And there you have the particular power of the book. A collection that is "woke," shall we say, reflecting on questions of race, sexuality, and justice, is not such an unusual thing these days. Likewise,  a collection with some neo-formalist tightrope-walking is not such an unusual thing. That Brown can do either, switching from one to the other and even doing both at once, makes this one of those prize-winning books (a Pulitzer in the case) whose prizes feel deserved.

Fredric Jameson, _Allegory and Ideology_ (5, and final)

I WAS WITHIN about twenty pages of finishing this last August...then the semester began and I forgot all about it. I finished it yesterday.

The last chapter had detailed discussions of two contemporary novels I particularly like, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Tom McCarthy's Remainder. Jameson here brings the book's argument around to postmodernity (his wheelhouse, famously), noting that postmodernity will be found in its cultural productions not in a mimetic or representational way but "in the forms themselves and their slow mutation, emergence, or decay, a process in which their approach to the Real or retreat from it requires us to come to terms with representation as reality and to adjust such unwieldy apparatuses as the one proposed here here to detect the significance of its inevitable failures." 

When Jameson writes of "its inevitable failures," is the antecedent of "it" the work of art's "approach to the Real" or "the one [i.e., the 'unwieldy apparatus"] proposed here"? Is it the approach or the apparatus that is bound to fail?

Does anyone at Verso actually edit this? Or do they just assume anyone willing to work through to the last chapter of a book by Jameson will manage somehow?

I guess the main point is that Mitchell's and McCarthy's novels do not reflect our postmodern circumstances like Stendhal's mirror ambling down the road but instead embody them structurally, reproduce them in their form. Okay, fair enough. Sounds right.

I am ten months from retirement, so I ask myself. am I still going to want to read this sort of thing once I retire? I've been trying to keep up with Jameson's arguments since I was a graduate student, and I have to admit I have learned a great deal from him, but how much am I going to want to wrestle with this sort of writing when I don't...you know...have to?

Have to say, though, it was gratifying to see Jameson found Remainder and Cloud Atlas worth writing about. 

Dan O'Brien, _Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch_

 THIS WAS A selection for our book club. I had not heard anything of it, and was not looking forward to reading it, actually, but it turned out to be excellent.

Basic storyline: it's the late 90s, and rancher/novelist Dan O'Brien is dealing with the failure of his marriage and the never-ending challenges of raising cattle on the Great Plains: keeping them fed, making sure they survive the winter, managing the damage they do to the natural environment, the recurring cycles of debt. After an eerie encounter with a buffalo, described in the opening pages, he decides to switch to raising buffalo. The book follows the story of his converting his operation from cattle ranch to buffalo ranch over the course of year and a half, roughly.

O'Brien is good at presenting the advantages of buffalo-raising. Since bison are native to the prairie, they thrive on it mjuch better than cattle do: they need no supplements to native grasses, they know how to find their own water, they handle the winter well, and need little veterinary intervention. Their meat is actually better for us than beef (less fat, less cholesterol). Their presences actually restores the land rather than compromising it. 

What makes the book excellent, though, is not its argument for raising bison, but its novel-like aspects. O'Brien is excellent in narrating an episode (his first buffalo auction, his driving a trailer full of buffalo during a snowstorm), in conjuring character (his hired hand Erney, real estate maven Dick, neighbor Stan), in relating the history of those who farmed (and failed) on his land before he acquired it. He is  good at evoking the landscape and its seasons, even better at evoking the people who live on it.

A fine book. I'm going to try grilling ground buffalo tonight.

 

Nick Hasted, _The Story of the Kinks: You Really Got Me_

THE TITLE AND subtitle ought to be flipped, it seems to me, but it's good to have a book this readable on one of my favorite groups, the Kinks, and one of my favorite songwriters, Ray Davies. Hasted's book is not a masterpiece of rock biography (a category in which I would include Bob Mehr's book on the Replacements and Paul Trynka's book on Iggy Pop), but it's workmanlike and solid.

Hasted is good on the Davies brothers' neighborhood and family background and good on the group's various crises (being banned from touring in the USA thanks to a dustup with the musicians' union, the collapse of Ray's marriage in the early 1970s, Ray's lengthy fascination with writing concept albums). He is especially good on Dave Davies, whose guitar, voice, and songwriting were rarely in the spotlight but nonetheless a crucial presence for the whole of the band's existence. I had no idea of the ups and downs of Dave's story, but they turn out to be vertiginous. I did know there was a good deal of sibling tension, which Hasted does a fine job of reporting on without taking a side.

Hasted got interviews with Ray, Dave, drummer Mick Avory, and the brother of the late Pete Quaife, the group's original bass player, so the book has a strong primary-source core. Extra points for talking to Bob Henrit.

Although Hasted does justly by the band's career high points--the volcanic eruption of "You Really Got Me," the London anthem "Waterloo Sunset," the run as an arena-filling live act in the US--I wouldn't say he's as eloquent and insightful about the peculiar, unique beauty of the group's work as a few other writers have been (John Mendelsohn, Greil Marcus, Erik Campbell). So there's still room for that. Whoever does eventually write the definitive assessment of the Kinks, though, will benefit from Hasted's book.

Don Mee Choi, _DMZ Colony_

 A CASE IN point regarding the point that came up in the Baudelaire post of a few days ago, viz., poetry not being the same as verse. DMZ Colony won the National Book Award for poetry, which makes for a convincing institutional affirmation that yes, this is poetry. But there is no regular verse here, and only some free verse; most of the book, typographically, is in prose. 

Nor is the prose particularly lyrical or imagistic or cadenced or any of the qualities that lead to prose being called "poetic." A good many pages simply presents phrases from an interview with Ahn Hak-sop, a political prisoner and victim of torture in South Korea. One section is the invented testimony of some of the children killed in Sancheong-Hamyang massacres of 1951. There are prose passages about journalists like Choi's father, who tried to report on and document the brutal methods of some of South Korea's series of dictatorial regimes. Complementing the text are a variety of photographs and drawings.

We are very far from anything a reader who pre-dated Baudelaire would call poetry, then (to say nothing of a good many who post-date him). But there is no other obvious thing to call it. It has elements of memoir, of documentary, of fiction, as well as some pages of familiar (i.e., lineated) poetry. The pictorial elements are integral rather than illustrative--they need to be there. So what is that? As with Cha's Dictée, one might hesitate to call it poetry, but one is stuck for what else to call it. 

So is "poetry" now not only what looks and sounds like poetry, but also large tracts of the unclassifiable and unnameable?

It's an unforgettable book. Set this alongside Han Kang's novels The Vegetarian and Human Acts and Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution and you get a quite different idea of South Korea than you are going to get from images of Gangnam or from BTS. 

Zadie Smith, _The Wife of Willesden_

 IT'S HARD FOR me to write about Zadie Smith without immediately deliquescing into fanboy gush, so I'm not even going to try to maintain some sort of judicious objectivity here. This is brilliant. Writing a play around a 21st century version of the Wife of Bath, in which the Wife is a Londoner of Caribbean origin, is already a great idea. That the play goes so far as to be faithful line by line to Chaucer's original makes it all the more amazing. Then add in that Smith wrote the update in (loosely) rhyming iambic pentameter couplets, just like Chaucer's original, which takes us to even higher levels of astonishment. Then, at the end, when Smith throws in a Chaucerian "Retraction" taking her own (first four only) novels to task, what alternative do we have to sheer awe?

Plenty of folks will be happy to take cheap shots at this. Ignore them. To repeat: this is brilliant.

Charles Baudelaire, _Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en Prose_

 I HAD READ a large handful of these in anthologies, but had never read the whole book through--the flight to Paris seemed a good opportunity.

Are they great? Well, yes. You knew that. "Any where out of the world" remains a particular favorite.

They seem important, too, in their implicit cancellation of the idea that poetry is purely and simply verse. If poetry is not purely and simply verse, what is it? Baudelaire's preface/dedication emphasizes aspects of the language: "musicale sans rythme et sans rhyme, assez souple and assez heurtée pour s'adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l'âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, de la conscience." [my translation: "musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and abrupt enough to adapt itself to the movements of the soul, to the undulations of reverie, of consciousness."] Is it a discourse's ability to respond to or model the lability of our interiority that makes it poetry? 

Perhaps also its ability to respond to or model the lability of urban life, as Baudelaire goes on to say: "C'est surtout de la fréquentation des villes enormes, c'est du croisements de leur innombrables rapports que naît cet idéal obsédant." ["It is above all living in large cities, it is the intersections of their countless communications, that gave birth to this artistic obsession."] I'm guessing Baudelaire's example was crucial as Eliot made his way towards an English poetic of the city.

Some of the pieces herein, appearing today, might be called "flash fiction" or "lyrical essays," which goes to show how what an immense legacy Baudelaire has. We continue to ask what poetry is if it is not verse, and the attempts at answers continue to be generative.

George Packer, _The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America_

 I READ ABOUT 100 pages of this the year it was published (2013), but, not finding it all that engaging, I dropped it at that point. In 2017 it was often cited as helpful in explaining the forces that had elected Trump (cf. J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land); that made sense, insofar as the book looks at how working-class white Americans came to feel betrayed and forgotten, but did not inspire me to pick up the book again. Then I read that the book contained, in its later pages, an excellent profile of Peter Thiel. Okay, I thought--I will read that, at least.

Peter Thiel is an important backer of Vance's campaign for the Senate in Ohio, and my recurring nightmare is that Thiel's deeper-than-deep pockets and Vance's remarkable story and canny rhetoric will combine to create a politics that unites Trump's base with no-kidding, naked-fist authoritarian politics. Without a loose cannon like Trump at the head of the movement, what might happen? I fear some "it can happen here" nightmare.

So, I needed to know more about Thiel. Packer's profile (contained in the three chapters titled "Silicon Valley") is indeed excellent. It gives us a relatively familiar figure: brilliant nerdy kid (Dungeons and Dragons) gets elite education (Stanford), discovers conservative politics (Ayn Rand), makes an unfathomable amount of money as founder/early investor in what  grow to be internet colossi (PayPal, Facebook), and decides to remold American society.

The surprises: Thiel is gay (which might have made him more sympathetic to the situation of the marginalized and excluded, but no, seems not to have) and highly interested in achieving immortality (which might line him up as a potential Great American Eccentric, à la Howard Hughes).

But are my anxieties quelled? Not so much. Coming to this right after Vuillard's l'ordre du jour, I was wondering if Thiel could do for Vance what Krupp did for Hitler. Was January 6 just our Kapp Putsch? Just a prologue to the real tragedy?