Lizzy Goodman, _Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City, 2001-2011_

THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS at the end of Lizzy Goodman’s oral history of the New York music scene at the turn of the 21st century require five pages but somehow fail to mention Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me, an oral history of the New York music scene of the 1970s, even though Goodman sticks fairly closely to the template laid down by the predecessor volume. (Whoever wrote the jacket flap copy for the hardback gives McNeil and McCain their due, I’m glad to report.)

Meet Me in the Bathroom, like Please Kill Me, focuses on pioneering bands playing in tiny, unhygienic, and usually short-lived clubs, then suddenly getting a few white-hot months of global attention, then having a few decades of trying to understand exactly what the hell happened. As was the case with the archetypal New York band, Velvet Underground, the bands that learned from the pioneers often had much longer and more lucrative careers than the pioneers themselves (Television as opposed to U2 in the 1970s, the Strokes as opposed to the Arctic Monkeys in the ‘00s). 

Along the way,, there are a lot of parties, a lot of sex, a lot of drugs. James Williamson’s role in Please KIll Me as opiate-evangelizing Prince of Darkness is reprised in Meet Me in the Bathroom by Ryan Adams.

So, a not entirely original book, but illuminating. I hadn’t realized that the Brooklyn and Manhattan wings of the explosion saw themselves as quite distinct, for instance, or that dance club culture contributed as significantly as it did (lots of good material here from James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).

It would be nice to have a book like this on every now-legendary scene. It must take an enormous amount of work: figuring out who to talk to, getting them to talk to you, transcribing everything, then the arduous work of collating and organizing into a coherent story. Stories of scenes would inevitably sound a lot alike—the grubby, unlikely beginnings, the early tremors, the explosion, the drawn-out dispersal and entropy—but having the eloquent little ground-level-view stories always makes a difference.

Jean Genet, _Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs_

 CONTINUING MY TREK through outlaw lit (Kathy Acker, Gary Indiana, Michelle Tea), it made sense to look back to the canonical literary outlaw, Jean Genet. I read Querelle of Brest in translation many years ago--1975, it must have been--and had not liked it enough to try another, but what the hell, I thought, let's try a different one.

I read Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (Our Lady of the Flowers) in French, which was a little tricky since Genet employs a lot of underworld slang, but his French is otherwise classical and often elegant--a lot easier to read for me than Céline, in other words. The narrator is in prison as he writes. He evokes the petty criminals, drug users, drag queens and other marginalized folks he used to run with in Paris. Three characters in particular get most of the attention: drag queen sex worker Divine, her manager (let's say) Mignon, and her sometimes boyfriend, the handsome young criminal Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs.

The narrator respects and admires these three, even exalts them one could say, while manifesting a consistent dislike, even disdain for the straight world of authority, power, and wealth. Genet lays the groundwork for such soon-to-be-ascendant icons as Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley, not to mention all the romantic rebels that followed in their vast wake.

It so happens (I learn from Edmund White's thorough 1993 biography) that Genet really did write the novel in prison (he was caught stealing books) in 1941 and 1942, and its characters are based on people he actually did hang with when he wasn't in jail. 

The dates of composition set me thinking--what did it mean to be imprisoned during the era of Vichy and the Nazi occupation? More to the point, how does someone in prison go about getting published during the era of Vichy and the Nazi occupation?

According to Harry E. Stewart and Rob Roy McGregor, authors of Jean Genet: From Fascism to Nihilism, Genet used literary contacts who were collaborators or maybe-collaborators (e.g., Cocteau) to get Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs published. They further make the case that he was, at least in the 1930s and up until the liberation, anti-semitic and sympathetic to Nazism. 

It's not a great case, though. Their study's publisher, Peter Lang, does not inspire confidence, and neither does their panicky tone (Genet sought "to diminish man's achievements, to dismantle all authorities, to crush human dignity and human society everywhere"). White's soberer assessment is that Genet was willing to use any ally to get published, whatever the ally's politics (e.g., Sartre). Whether Genet really ought to be an icon of the left...eh, I don't know. 

For a case that he really does deserve to be an icon for queer expression, check out Elizabeth Stephens, Queer Writing: Homoeroticism in Jean Genet's Fiction.

Sally Rooney, _Beautiful World, Where Are You_

 THE TITLE LOOKS as though it should end with a question mark, but neither on the cover nor on the title page is it so rendered...so we'll call it good without one.

The main characters of Rooney's third novel are Alice, a young Irish female novelist who (like Rooney herself) has experienced early and brilliant success, and Eileen, Alice's best friend of long standing, who writes and does editorial work for a literary journal in Dublin. As the novel goes along, we also meet Felix, who works at a warehouse in the town on the west coast of Ireland where Alice has moved to get away from the stress of her career and who becomes Alice's lover, and Simon, a somewhat older man Eileen has known since her teens, who becomes Eileen's lover.

The chapters alternate between Alice and Eileen's email correspondence and narrative chapters in which we watch them going about their lives and keeping their relationships with Felix and Simon afloat, despite some storms.

I was not sure what to make of the novel, actually, until  I read a review of it in NYRB by Merve Emre, who noted that the email correspondence chapters bring us very close to Alice and Eileen while the narrative chapters feel oddly distant, externalized, confined to surface appearances.

I thought (1) that is absolutely true and (2) that is just how I felt watching the television adaptation of Rooney's previous novel, Normal People. 

In that novel, chapters alternate between free indirect discourse (if you prefer, close first person) from the perspective of Connell and free indirect discourse from the perspective of Marianne. The poignancy of the novel lies in our knowing exactly what Connell feels about Marianne and exactly Marianne feels about Connell, while they themselves have to rely of guesses and inferences based on the person's behavior, just as in life, with the inevitable and often heartbreaking fallibility we all are prey to.

The television adaptation, however, offers none of the interiority of the novel. We see what the camera and editing can show us, hear what microphones can record, but we can only guess what the characters are thinking, based on what they do and say. We have to work with the same limitations that Connell and Marianne labor under--and that feels very, very different from the novel, almost a completely different story.

Beautiful World, Where Are You is structured around this very same dichotomy--so much so that I wondered whether its genesis lay in Rooney's experience working on the screenplay for the television series. 

The correspondence of Alice and Eileen gives us interiority aplenty; they are frank, funny, and open with each other (up to a point, we learn by novel's end), and they have the rich presence of actual people, just as characters in a novel should. The narrative chapters, however, scrupulously avoid offering interiority at all. We see what they do, we hear what they and others characters say, and occasionally a smell or a tactile sensation is described, but we have no idea what anyone is thinking, save what we can infer from their behavior. 

It's like the narrative chapters of Beautiful World, Where Are You are already a film. The narration confines itself to what a camera or microphone can record. In the correspondence chapters, we get the internal landscape of Alice and Eileen. Once I tumbled to that, I found the book fascinating.

In the latter part of the book, all four characters get together for a holiday, and things go both incredibly well and incredibly rockily. We do end up with a happy ending, I'd say, a four-handed happy ending that rivals that of the Dashwood sisters, Edward Ferrars, and Col. Brandon Sense and Sensibility.

What I will mainly remember from this novel, though, is its neat demonstration of how different films are from novels.

Victoria Chang, _Barbie Chang_

HER FOURTH BOOK of poems, from 2017. That's "Barbie" as in the iconic doll, ironically deployed here since the book has much to say about the humiliations of assimilation. Many of the poems cast Chang as suburban mom trying to fit in with the other suburban moms somewhere in the whiter-than-mayonnaise Midwest, and not making it very far. The other suburban moms of the neighborhood constitute the ominously named "Circle," and try as Chang might to join, the Circle is impenetrable. She is just not sufficiently Barbie.

The verse here is quite a bit like that of The Boss, the headlong unpunctuated rush of a mind that can't quite keep up with itself, making a thousand associations a minute, lighting up with verbal juggling ("mimesis" and "mimosas"!), yet also wielding a satiric sword edge that will slice and dice you before you know what's happening.

As with Dear Memory, I found myself wondering: where is the husband? Is Barbie Chang a single mom? And who is P.? The second and fourth sections are sonnets addressed to a "P.", and in good sonnet fashion they suggest romance, perhaps an illicit romance, without being very direct about it. 

Then it occurred to me that "P." might be Poetry, in that a suburban mom who is also a poet probably has to guard her writing as though it were a clandestine affair, as if devotion to poetry was a kind of adultery. What Barbie has time to write--or reason to write? What Barbie "wishes to win the Guggenheim like / Paul Muldoon to doom // others like Paul Muldoon to write / rejection letters sending // them out the New Yorker windows." Barbie Chang does. (And Victoria Chang, let us note, now has won a Guggenheim and been published in the New Yorker.)

Victoria Chang, _Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief_

 THE WORD "UNIQUE" gets overused, but it may truly apply here. At least, I can't think of another book much like it. It's a kind of epistolary memoir. It covers Chang's childhood family, her education, her career as a writer, and her becoming a parent herself, but all through letters she has addressed to people who have been a part of her life--not preserved letters, I need to note, but letters expressly written from here and now that recall and weigh vivid moments in Chang's relationship with the addressee. 

There are letters to her parents, of course, figures already well known to readers of Chang's poetry, but also letters to grandparents (some of whom she never met), to teachers, to classmates, to other writers, to her children.

(But not to her husband, or ex-husband, as the case may be. I noticed and wondered about this. It seems that this person would be important, if only as father of the children. Maybe they struck a deal that she never gets mentioned in her writing?)

The peculiar intimacy of the letters combined with their being written for  the sake of this book creates a movement back and forth over the private/public divide, the reader being admitted to something profoundly personal, without the reader's ever being explicitly addressed. 

And what to make of the circumstance that the addressees perhaps will never read these letters? Several are dead, for one thing, and the classmate who taunted her during a run in PE class (an incident that also shows up in Love, Love) may not even know that Chang ever became a writer, much less that his adolescent cruelty has now become part of contemporary literature (twice).

Insofar as Chang has already written searchingly of her parents, their origins in China, their struggle to adapt to and make a success of life in  the United States, and their illnesses, a lot of the book covers familiar ground, but Chang changes things up by adding a visual element: family documents and photos that have been turned into support for writing, poems in some cases, transcriptions from an interview with her mother in others. 

Chang's other books do not, however, have nearly as much reflection on being a writer as this one does, in its letters to mentors, would-be mentors, disappointing mentors, fellow workshop students, and writing comrades. Some of these folks come off not much better than the taunting middle school bully. No names are given, but in a few instances guesses may be made.

Victoria Chang, _The Boss_

 IN THE MANY courses on "leadership" being offered across this wide and deluded land, does poetry ever occur on a syllabus? Rarely if ever, I would assume. I just did a Google search for "poems about leadership" and found Kipling's "If" (no surprise), Frost's "The Road Not Taken" (hmm), and Hughes's "A Dream Deferred" (what?), so I am guessing no one who teaches leadership classes has given this possibility much thought. 

Well! Let me recommend to all teachers of leadership that they offer their students this slim volume of poems from 2013. The poetry is excellent. Chang adopts a tumbling, unpunctuated flow that makes a good match for the churning moil in the consciousness of a worker. The language sparkles with playful wit but also has an iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove satiric wallop. The book's really great accomplishment, though, is its making radiantly plain how workers feel about bosses, even modern, enlightened bosses. And that is something every would-be leader ought to know. 

The Boss also includes several ekphrastic poems base on Edward Hopper paintings, whose night time urban office interiors make a perfect complement to walls-closing-in claustrophobia of the "Boss" poems.

Victoria Chang, _Love, Love_

 I HAVE BEEN taking a deep dive into Victoria Chang because of an interest in her new book (With My Back to the World) and thought I would give this, her novel for middle school readers, a look even though its title seemed a flashing warning sign.

Turns out (a) the title is, in the first instance, a tennis reference and (b) the novel is in free verse and a brisk, engaging read. I would recommend it, in fact. (Caution: spoilers ahead.)

The narrator/speaker is Frances Chin, who is in circumstances very like Chang's own as a girl (as she notes in an afterword): growing up with Chinese immigrant parents in a mostly-white professional class suburb of Detroit. Frances is 11, has no reliable friends at school, feels the pressure of her parents' high expectations, and has only strained relations with her slightly older sister, Clara. 

Over the course of the novel, Frances does make a good friend, Annie, and finds something she is really good at: tennis. She also figures out, Nancy Drew fashion, what is bothering Clara--trichotillomania, compulsive plucking out of one's hair. She finds a way to tip off Clara that she knows what is going on without alerting their parents, a keeping-mum for which Clara is deeply grateful. 

Both Frances's new friendship with Annie and the new footing of her relationship with her sister provide examples of relationships in which neither party has a power advantage--in other words, love-love, the score in tennis prior to anyone's scoring a point and gaining an advantage. The ending of the novel is not all roses, but Frances has made important progress.

The plot of the novel has a kind of classic YA shape, with no particular innovations, but the verse of the novel conveys Frances's loneliness, her anxiety, and her eventual coming into hope with great economy and verisimilitude. 

Paul Muldoon, _Howdie-Skelp_

AS DID EVERY previous Muldoon collection, Howdie-Skelp ends with a long poem. "Plaguey Hill" is a heroic crown of sonnets no less, mainly, but not exclusively, about COVID and the lockdown of spring 2020 (as "Encheiresin Naturae," the heroic crown of sonnets in Muldoon's previous collection, Frolic and Detour, was mainly, but not exclusively, about the 1916 Easter Rising). 

That's not the only long poem here, though. Howdie-Skelp's generous 176 page count includes three other poems longer than ten pages, all of them bristling with classic Muldoonian earmarks: formal ingenuity, bone-dry wit, a boatload of allusions, and slow-building emotional charge.

If one was a boy in the 1950s, as Muldoon and I were, one devoted a good deal of one's attention and imaginative energy to Westerns, so I enjoyed the way cowboys, "Indians," and the landscape of Monument Valley circulated through "American Standard," which not only revives the Muldoon aleatory picaresque of such early poems as "The More a Man Has, The More a Man Wants" but also seems to be spoof-celebrating the centenary of Eliot's The Waste Land ("Shanty. Shanty. Shanty.").

"23 Banned Poems" might not count as a long poem, comprised as  it is of twenty-tree short ones, but their thematic cohesion could be said to give it a single identity. Perhaps in response to the conservatives around the USA who are storming school boards insisting that all books with sexual content  be removed from school libraries, each of the twenty-three poems describes an Old Master painting in which sexuality is well to the foreground (lots of paintings of Susanna and the peeping elders) or going on in a corner somewhere (Bosch) or perhaps in the eye of the beholder (a few paintings of the Last Supper). Have your phone handy so you can inspect the paintings before or while reading the poems. Muldoon is at his saltiest now that he has passed 70, a bit like the Yeats of "Words for Music Perhaps" or the "Three Bushes" poems.

"The Triumph" is a 9-section elegy in terza rima (lots of terza rima in this volume) for the late Irish poet Ciaran Carson. As befits an Ulsterman's tribute to another Ulsterman, emotions are kept on a short leash here, but as the memories and Irish phrases cycle through, the emotions begin to mount nonetheless, going all the deeper for not being directly said.

That's the thing about Muldoon. Virtually every page reveals his fascination (obsession?) with poetic form, and we tend (lazily) to associate devotion to form to emotional dryness, chilliness, sterility. Not in Muldoon. Just try "Salonica," the poem in which the word "howdie-skelp" occurs (the dust jacket flap helpfully glosses "howdie-skelp" as "the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn").  It's about passing the scene of an auto accident--"That young woman's body sprawled by the side of the road" is how it begins--and it's a kind of villanelle on steroids. But dry? Chilly? Sterile? No. As with the Carson elegy, it's tightly cinched but devastating.

Juan Rulfo, _Pedro Páramo_, translated by Douglas J. Weatherford

BLURBS FROM BORGES, García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Susan Sontag...how is it I have not already read this? Well, now I have, and it's easy to see why it has the reputation it does. First published in 1955, it predates the famous Boom by a decade or so, but it has the earmarks of that renaissance: the grit of actuality somehow combined with the otherness of a dream, the atmosphere of a myth grounded firmly in history.

The unnamed narrator is looking for his father, Pedro Páramo, who like the senior Hamlet, is dead but seems to be still in charge. We get glimpses of moments in his rise from hardscrabble urchin to village boss as the narrator collects information. Páramo's rise coincides with the era of Porfirio Diaz, and there are hints that the Mexican Revolution has a hand in his toppling, but the prevailing hallucinatory, even supernatural atmosphere kept me from being altogether certain about any detail.

I read most of this short book (120-some pages in this new translation published in 2023) one night when I couldn't get to sleep, which turned out to be ideal circumstances in which to read it. As I read, the sun felt hot, the ground underfoot hard, but I was moving in a ghost world, vivid but intangible, the tale unrolling with the inevitability of a dream. An eerie, one of a kind fiction.

Kate Briggs, _The Long Form_ (3)

 IF ANYONE EVER asks me what I think is the best 21st century novel so far, I may well go with this one.

What I wrote about this novel back in December still goes, to wit:

(1) As its title suggests, it is a novel that reflects deeply and insightfully on the form of the novel itself. It connects to the modern novel of a century ago by being set in a single day, like Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, and to the novel of two-and-a-half centuries ago through protagonist Helen’s reading of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, another novel that devotes much space to the topic of the form to which it belongs. Briggs knows her narrative theory—she has translated Barthes—and spreads it on generously, but the novel’s frequent infusions of theory never seem pretentious or gratuitous; rather, they are consistently fresh, illuminating, and attuned to fictional context in which they occur. 

(2) That The Long Form is interested in what novels do and how they do it feels right because it does something novels have not done with great frequency: depict the relationship of mother and infant daughter. Compared to the father-son relationship, minutely scrutinized in Oedipus, Hamlet, Ulysses, Infinite Jest, and a few thousand other classics, the mother-daughter relationship has gone relatively under-described. The undisputed classics (Sense and Sensibility, Little Women) tend to be more from the perspective of the daughters than that of the mother. Morrison’s Beloved and Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood memorably take that perspective, but it’s still a short shelf. The Long Form could be the beginning of a redressing of the balance. 

Although The Long Form does briefly and bravely take the perspective of the six-week-old Rose (drawing on some suggestions from D. W. Winnicott), for most of its 400-some pages it adheres closely to the point of view of new mother Helen as she nurses Rose, takes her out to the park in a stroller, assembles a mobile, and performs similar new mother activities. And I kept thinking: why have I never read about this in a novel before? Mothering a newborn is one of humankind’s oldest and most universal activities—why are literary depictions relatively scarce,  and why do they leave out as much as they do? As the novel shows again and again, the mother and a newborn are a complex and dynamic world, worthy an epic or two. And in some respects they are even a world sufficient unto themselves—Helen gets some welcome help from friend Rebba, but we never find out who Rose’s father is, and no thought of him crosses Helen’s mind.

(3) The Long Form scarcely has a plot and nimbly demonstrates what a dead weight plot usually is. If, on Helen’s walk with Rose in the park, she notices a strange man, that man does not turn out to be a stalker, or a murderer, or in possession of a flashdrive he is going to pass to a spy or a journalist, or any of the other possibilities engineered to keep people turning pages. In The Long Form, any number of Chekhovian guns never get fired. And is just that fidelity to plain, familiar experience that kept me turning pages, wanting more. The plain and familiar has a fascination and glory all its own, its own revelations and transfigurations, exemplified here by Rose’s first smile.

A big basket of kudos to the Dorothy Project for publishing this and for everything else they do.

Haruki Murakami, _A Wild Sheep Chase_, trans. Alfred Birnbaum

I WAS GIVEN this by two different people sixteen years apart, which seems a strong hint from the universe that I ought to read it. I had already read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and enjoyed it...so why not?

Back in 2012, the New York Times Book Review published a cartoon titled "Haruki Murakami Bingo," in which the player could claim a square whenever an item like "mysterious woman" or "ear fetish" or "old jazz record" turned up in a Murakami novel. As the friend who was the second person to give me the book as a present  remarked, A Wild Sheep Chase would make one a quick winner in Haruki Murakami Bingo. It has everything.

It's 1970. A Tokyo advertising man in his later 20s is adrift--his marriage is breaking up, he is weary of his career, he is suffering from a vague anomie--when it is unexpectedly given an assignment he must fulfill, or else: find a sheep born with a black star on its hindquarters. 

Joining forces with a mysterious woman with beautiful ears with whom he has frequent and robust sex (three squares right there), he pursues a series of leads to the northernmost regions of Japan's northernmost island, Hokkaido, where he...

...well, let's just say it works out. The details of the plot seem less important, less Murakami-esque, than the atmosphere of surreal noir dread peppered with Japanese historical and cultural references.

Another friend once remarked to me that the Japanese have a predilection for re-creating the creations of other cultures (Chinese poetry, Scotch whiskey, American noir), and the re-creations moreover and mysteriously both achieve uncanny fidelity and remain resolutely and unmistakably Japanese. It's a neat trick, and Murakami is a master of it.

A. M. Homes, The Unfolding_

BLURBS FROM GARY Shytengart, Nathan Hill, Michael Chabon, Salman Rushdie, Phil Klay, and Jonathan Lethem--we are obviously dealing with a "writer's writer" here, but it would be a boost for the republic for this novel to find a wider audience. It's a perceptive analysis of our current malaise. 

The Unfolding presents itself as the view from Bohemian Grove, where the very wealthy hang out with the very powerful and kick around ideas about how to keep the wealth and the power under their capable management.

The novel's main character (last name is Hitchens but typically referred to in the novel simply as the Big Guy) is present at a special party for major McCain donors on the night of the 2008 election, and is so shocked and dismayed at the outcome that he decides he has to do something. He assembles a group of like-minded and similarly wealthy and influential men, their object "to get back to our roots, to what makes us strong." As one of them puts it, "America is in the crapper and we need to do something about it. We're not going to stand by and wait to see what happens; we're going to make something happen and we need someone to put that idea out there in front of people." The novel ends on Inauguration Day, 2009, with a big dinner at which the group, now named the "Forever Men," is officially launched.

The novel's great insight, I'd say, is that while Propertied White Men (PWM) love to praise the Constitution and the founding fathers, they do so out of a sense  that the Constitution was drafted to preserve and protect the interests of PWM. When the Constitution turns out, in the fullness of time, to have the potential of constraining those interests or taking into account other interests, the PWM begin to see the Constitution as broken, no longer doing its job, in need of "extraordinary measures," as one of them puts it.  "It will look like a natural occurrence, a call for security, a return  to our core values. That's our sweet spot," as another one says.

Serious as it is, the novel also has some outrageous satirical humor (reminiscent of Dr. Stangelove in that regard), a lot of it about male posturing--from that angle, the many scenes of the Forever Men's meetings are as hilarious as they are scary. 

We also get a deep look, thanks to the Big Guy's interactions with his wife (at the Betty Ford Center) and daughter (at a tony finishing school in northern Virginia) that gender can make a big difference in how white privilege works. The "M" in PWM is always under scrutiny in  the novel, and among the novel's slier touches is that one of the Forever Men, a "confirmed bachelor," in in the closet.

The bone-deep anxieties within white privilege may be the novel's other core insight. It presents the election of Obama as a psychic disturbance in the GOP that could boil up into a major breakdown, which maybe it has. Would MAGA have happened without the election of Obama? 

Michael Palmer, _Sun_

 ANYONE OUT THERE remember the golden age of the North Point Press in the middle-to-late 1980s? Evan Connell, Guy Davenport, James Salter…it ran out of gas about 1990, but what a run, including this collection from Michael Palmer. I recently ran across some praise of this, and now I can’t remember where, but it sounded worth searching for, and lo and behold, when the interlibrary loan item arrived it was from the library of my alma mater. A good sign.

I had encountered poems by Palmer before in Douglas Messerli’s anthology From the Other Side of the Century and Paul Hoover’s Norton anthology Postmodern American Poetry without their especially registering on me, but this collection definitely worked for me.

Here is a good short excerpt from “Baudelaire Series”:

The secret remains in the book
It is a palace
It is a double house 

It is a book you lost
It is a place from which you watch
the burning of your house 

I have swallowed this blank
this libel of shores
nights that like the book are lost

The secret seems both securely contained—in a book that is like a palace or house, or inside us, our having swallowed it—but also vanished—the book lost, the house burned. We have it and we have lost it. The poem has a relatively definite referent—the secret— but of course we don’t know what it is, so the word “secret” points candidly and unambiguously into a borderless mist. The poem hollows out its assertions even as it makes them.

Most of the book is like that—something is happening here, but we don’t know what it is, do we, Mr. Jones? The vertigo of such gestures is exactly what my friends who don’t like poetry don’t like about it, but it’s exactly what I go to poetry for. 

Something about what Palmer pays attention and finds worth mentioning, something about the unspoken, unfathomable logic with image follows image works for me. So thank you, whoever it was who praised Michael Palmer's Sun.

Jeff Sharlet, _The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War_

 I DIDN'T READ all of this, but I did read its longest chapter, also titled "The Undertow," which at 120 pages amounts to a substantial portion of the book.

In this chapter, Sharlet goes to Sacramento to attend and report on a memorial rally for Ashli Babbitt, the military veteran and Q-Anon enthusiast who was among those attacking the Capitol on January 6 and was shot and killed by a member of the Capitol Police. Sharlet collects some straight biographical information on Babbitt but is perhaps more interested in how MAGA forces went about shaping her into a martyr, even though the raw material was not that promising. This part of the chapter kept making me think of Horst Wessel.

The larger part of the chapter, though, is about Sharlet's drive back to the East Coast, a long highway journey with frequent stops to talk to people about our deepening national polarization, cultural and political. As a journalist, Sharlet is automatically suspect in the eyes of most of the people he talks to, but he seems genuinely to want to know where they are coming from and to report of them fairly--even those that seem definitely around the bend, like  the preacher who is convinced Hillary Clinton was put to death years ago.

The most compelling aspect of the  chapter, I'd say, is its "road movie" quality. The highway system is rendered as a region of its own--inside the United States, part of the United States, but semi-autonomous, a republic within the republic, deeply American but ticking to its own clock, living by its own code. To be on the highways for days on end is to become unmoored, and that unmooring becomes part of Sharlet's account. We no longer have our familiar bearings, no longer have much certainty about what the truth is. We're tethered to reality still--Sharlet needs to get back to Boston to get his heart medicine prescription refilled--but lightly tethered, and a gust of wind might slip the cord and land us in an America where everyone we meet is a Flannery O'Connor character in a Trump t-shirt...and they are in charge.

Roger Reeves, _Best Barbarian_

I WAS ALREADY planning to read this, but Reeves's essay in Granta, "Through the Smoke, Through the Veil, Through the Wind," bumped it up to the top of my list. As the variety of honors it has received suggests, it is excellent.

As in Zadie Smith's successful re-boots of Forster (On Beauty), Chaucer (The Wife of Willesden), and Dickens (The Fraud), Reeves engages deftly with some Anglo canonical influences (T. S. Eliot in "Poem, in an Old Language," Yeats in "As a Child of North America," Beowulf in a couple of poems about Grendel) while foregrounding a Black cultural inheritance (Phyllis Wheatley, Langston Hughes, John and Alice Coltrane, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Jericho Brown). It's a heady brew, but he drinks it down and does not even wobble.

Take, for instance, the first of the two long poems at the book's center, "Domestic Violence," which appropriates the trip to the underworld in Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid as well as Pound's and Eliot's appropriations of that topos, then pivots on the astonishing datum that the Louis Till who figures in Pound's Pisan Cantos was the father of Emmett Till ("Yes, that Emmett Till," Reeves writes in the notes), taking the poem suddenly into the gravest urgencies of the present.

(I'm still trying to figure out whether the second long poem in the middle of the book, "Something about John Coltrane," is in dialogue with Michael S. Harper's "Dear John, Dear Coltrane." It might be...but I'm not sure.) 

Recurring images--field, tree, blood--give the book a mysterious unity. Those images may be connected--seem to be connected, in a way I don't understand-- to the most intimate poems of the book, those about the death of his father and the birth of his daughter, especially "After Death."

Elizabeth Willis, _Alive: New and Selected Poems_

 I DO NOT remember why I bought this. I don’t think I saw any reviews…I don’t think anyone recommended it…I don’t think I saw some reference to her work somewhere…it may have just been that  this collection was published by NYRB Books. Whatever it was, it worked out. This is a great collection.

Quite a few of the poems, perhaps as many as half of them, are prose poems and brilliant examples of the genre. (I checked David Lehmann’s anthology of prose poems to see whether I had come across her work there, but no.) They have a way of matter-of-factly dropping a non sequitur in a deadpan, nothing-to-see-here way that reminds me of James Tate.

What struck me most, though, is a quality that I associate with some Emily Dickinson and Lorine Niedecker poems, having to do with the poem not needing to be seen/read/noticed as a poem to be a poem. Most poems, nearly all I think, want you to see them, want to register on readers’ consciousnesses as poems. A lot of Willis’s poems seem more self-sufficient than that, almost as if they do not need to be read and recognized as poems to be poems. We could call this a kind of modesty or self-effacement, but it could be a kind of supreme indifference too, the absence of any need of readerly approval. I find it very attractive, somehow.

The final poem, “About the Author,” seems to be a witty twist on just this point, playing as it does on the idea that if we readers see the poems as poems we will want to know about the source of the poems, the poet, assuming her to be remarkable and interesting and wise. And even though I repeatedly found myself thinking, as I read Alive, that Willis is interesting and remarkable and wise, “About the Author” seemed a well-dropped reminder that whether I came to such conclusions or not, her poems were poems. 

George Scialabba, _What Are Intellectuals Good For?_

 AMONG THE ADVANTAGES of retirement is getting around to the years’ worth (decades’ worth?) of books that I have been wanting to read but had no immediate, pressing need to read, such as this collection of articles and reviews by George Scialabba.

I figured the book was a good bet because I have been enjoying Scialabba’s reviews for years—always crisply written, well-informed, and thought-provoking. 

The earliest collected here is a piece on Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Rorty, and Alasdair MacIntyre that appeared in the Village Voice in 1983, the most recent a valedictory piece on Christopher Hitchens that appeared in n+1 in 2005–that is, a farewell not to Hitchens the person, who died in 2011, but to Hitchens the writer one looks forward to reading, given his support of the war in Iraq. (Hitchens was still alive when this collection was published in 2009.)

I am on Scialabba’s wavelength in several ways. I have a wide, deep soft spot for the New York intellectuals of the post-WW II era, and so does he; the deeply appreciative piece on Dwight MacDonald was a highlight of the book for me, and I also relished those on Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe. Though not a conservative, I am always interested in what an intelligent and articulate argument for conservative ideas looks like, and so is he, hence the serious appraisals here of John Gray, Allan Bloom, and William F. Buckley.

We even dislike some of the same things. When Scialabba calls Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism “an inexhaustibly tiresome book,” all I can say is amen. (I know he’s important—but one can be important and inexhaustibly tiresome in the bargain.)

I don’t like Christopher Lasch as much as Scialabba does, but reading Scialabba makes me think I should like Lasch more than I do. I like Isaiah Berlin a lot more than Scialabba does, but his point about the cold water Berlin throws on any kind of aspirational thinking sounds right. We are of one mind, I was happy to see, on Rorty.

He’s a national treasure, I think. I haven’t seen much by him lately, but I trust he’s still reading and writing.

Matthew Desmond, _Poverty, by America_

I'VE OFTEN HEARD that Michael Harrington's The Other Americans (1963), an account of the persistence of poverty during the country's post-war growth boom, was read by enough of the right people at the right time to influence the Great Society programs that came along a couple of years later. I earnestly hope something like that happens with Desmond's book. An astonishing synthesis of passion and precision, it could change the policy landscape...if heeded.

Most of us too quickly assume that the poverty of the poor has to do with their own shortcomings--things they failed to do, like finish high school, or things they did that they ought not to have done, like tumble into substance abuse. Desmond makes it clear that the poverty of the poor has much more to do with advantages maintained by the rich--employers who benefit from keeping wages low, property owners who benefit from keeping rents high. Add in the broad American reluctance to support public goods (e.g., strong public schools, adequate public health care, subsidized childcare) and you see why the poverty rate hardly budges (except during COVID--but that influx of support for public goods ended all too soon).

Desmond underlines that despite the Nazarene's line that "the poor are with you always," poverty is an eradicable problem if we have the will. Raise the minimum wage, foster low-income housing in all neighborhoods, collect all the taxes that are owed but not paid, and the landscape could change in a generation.

We can all think of several reasons why that may not happen--racism, lingering pseudo-Calvinistic notions, the disproportionate political power of the wealthy--but the key and possibly revolutionary idea is that it is not impossible. We could, if enough of us so chose and worked towards it, bring about the end of poverty as we know it.

Elaine Equi, guest editor, and David Lehman, series editor, _The Best American Poetry, 2023_

 AMONG THE RIPPLES of retirement is that I read the 2023 BAP well before the 2024 BAP was published. It's a new day.

Some guest editors make a point of very broad-church, stylistically diverse selections (Denise Duhamel in 2013, for example), but more of them, I would say, provide a narrower stylistic spectrum fairly close to that of their own work (the Hirsch-Trethewey-Gioia run of 2016-18, for example). Elaine Equi is more in the latter camp.

Equi's introduction spells out as plainly as possible that she likes poems that are short, humorous, and witty. The 2023 BAP thus has a pronounced penchant for the short, humorous, and witty, which makes for a brisk read, but can sometimes leave the impression that you are reading a collection by a single poet rather than an anthology. 

I like short poems, too, but a few longer ones would have been welcome. The book's longest poem, Dunya Mikhail's "Tablets VI," turns out to be 24 very short poems. 

Not that many unfamiliar names this time, but some really nice things by familiar ones: a Timothy Donnelly "chariot" that was not in Chariot, great poems I had not seen before from Victoria Chang, Matthew Zapruder, Cole Swenson, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Diane Seuss. And, happily, a poem by Elizabeth Willis--has she been in BAP before? She must have been, but I know she hasn't appeared frequently. 

Michelle Tea, _Black Wave_

 BROADLY, BLACK WAVE  (2016) aligns with earlier Tea memoirs The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America and Valencia. The voice and ethos are the same as in those books, and the setting in the first part of the book is the San Francisco of Valencia but a few years later; the second and slightly longer section is set after a move to Los Angeles. 

Black Wave leans into fiction somewhat more, I’m guessing, than the other two books. A few episodes seem more fanciful than actual, such as a passionate afternoon with movie star Matt Dillon, and the book sometimes signals its own fictiveness, as when Tea acknowledges, “In reality, Quinn and Michelle weren’t scheduled to meet one another for over a decade,” or when Tea notes that a character named Lu insisted upon being removed from the book after “a tremendous fight in front of the beverage table at a party.” But the fictiveness of Black Wave is most dramatically apparent when the world ends in 2001.

But then again, how fictional is that? It is true enough that after 9/11, it seemed that a great many things did actually end, never to return, that some things that had mattered a great deal seemed suddenly trivial, that things that had never demanded attention suddenly exploded into salience. It’s a genius move, actually. Tea captures more of the actual strangeness of the era with this surprising device than higher profile efforts by Jonathan Safran Foer and Don DeLillo managed. 

I particularly wanted to read this because Maggie Nelson praised its representation of substance use problems in On Freedom. I second the motion. Tea does not romanticize her descent into dependence, for which this reader was grateful, but she does not wax lyrical about her getting sober, either, which is the particular temptation of books about that difficult process. 

Sarah Thankam Mathews, _All This Could Be Different_

THE NOVEL'S FIRST-PERSON narrator, Sneha (she has a last name, but I can't find it), was born in India but raised in the USA. Her parents have returned to India, but she stayed to complete a bachelor's degree and now has a promising career despite the sluggishness of the economy (circa 2012-13) in a new town (Milwaukee). She has bonded with a lively group of friends from college and some new ones, including the slightly older Marina, with whom she has commenced a promising love affair.

So far, so Jhumpa Lahiri...and indeed Sneha's undergraduate coursework included reading Interpreter of Maladies, Mathews cannily tipping us off that she knows her novel is part of an emerging body of fiction about the South Asian immigrant experience in the contemporary United States.

Things start to go wrong for Sneha. Her boss somehow never gets around to paying her. The property manager at her apartment house is a jangling barbed-wire ball of hostility. Marina has a drinking problem. Her parents back in India are trying to find a husband for her. Over a few months, the omni-competent, super-achieving Sneha becomes anxious and depressed, is living on ramen, and finds herself unable to reach out either to her friends or to her family.

Mathews makes Sneha's year-of-the-wheels-coming-off all too plausible. You can taste that ramen, smell those unwashed dishes in the sink. The inevitable collapse occurs--and, mercifully, friends and family pull through. The threat of a suit for wage theft gets her boss to pay up. Sneha gets a new job and a new place to live and works on a reconciliation with Marina. She comes out to her parents, and they come around. Whew.

The last of the novel's four sections is set about ten years later--that is, about when the book was published, 2023. Sneha is back in Milwaukee (she has moved to D.C.) for a wedding, and is looking back at the chaos of ten years before from an altogether more grounded perspective. Her maturity was hard-won, but she did achieve it. Not that her loife is perfect, but she has come through.

Quite a satisfying novel, really, and it's Mathews's first. She is worth keeping an eye on.

Alejandro Zambra, _Ways of Going Home_, trans. Megan McDowell

 INTERESTING STRUCTURE HERE. In first section of this four-section novel, the Chilean narrator recalls interaction he had with one of the neighbor families, especially one of the daughters, when he was about ten. The neighbor family is under some stress; the father is wanted by the Pinochet government and is living under an assumed identity. 

In the third section, the narrator meets up with the daughter again about twenty years later, not having seen her in the interim. They have an affair, but it’s hard to tell how enduring it will turn out to be.

In the novel’s second and fourth sections, the narrator is a novelist—the author, indeed, of the first and third parts. However, he is stuck with the novel and his marriage has come apart. 

We have reasons to think that the writer who narrates the second and fourth sections based the narrator of the first  and third sections on himself. For instance, the novelist’s mother reads the same books and makes some of the same observations as the mother of the narrator in the novel-within-the-novel. 

Does that mean that Eme (the ex-wife of sections 2 & 4) is based on Claudia (the neighbor girl of section 1 re-encountered years later in section 3)? And what would that mean? 

I’m not sure. The novel does, however, seem to be about an inherited trauma—the generation that came after the Pinochet coup (Zambra was born two years after it happened) but whose lives grew up around the catastrophe their parents lived through, their lives shaped by a catastrophe they did not remember and would not even get an account of until they were adults. 

Barbar Kingsolver, _Demon Copperhead_

 I WAS ABOUT a hundred pages in when I decided this was now my favorite Kingsolver novel, dislodging The Poisonwood Bible, which had reigned serenely for a good twenty-five years.

I could go on an on about the merits of this book, but I will confine myself to three.

1) it's an honest but compassionate description of a problem that has been devastating the USA for years, focused on a region that has been hit particularly hard. Refreshingly (and in contrast, I would say, to J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy), there is no victim-blaming, and we see the problem more from on the ground than from up above (as in Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain). As an example of how fiction can illuminate a social reality, it can stand alongside Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

2) Quite unlike The Jungle, though, Demon Copperhead is a literary tour de force. The strategy of constructing the novel on the scaffolding of Dickens's David Copperfield could have been strained and distracting, or simply a way of showing off, but it ends up being one of the most brilliant successes in intertextuality that I have ever read. My only quibble is that Mr. McCubb, while certainly as feckless and irresponsible as Mr. Micawber, lacks his model's warmth and humanity.

3) The voice of Demon is convincing throughout, which must have taken some doing, not only because Kingsolver has never been an adolescent boy, but also because Demon has to sound intelligent, observant, and articulate without ever sounding bookish. His vocabulary, allusions, and syntax have to be those of an irregularly-educated young American male who almost never picked up a book, yet also have to make the settings vivid, convey nuances of character, and reflect Demon's ever-evolving consciousness. An impossible task, it would seem, but Kingsolver does it. As a breathtakingly-written book in the voice of someone who has to sound un-bookish, it rivals and maybe surpasses Peter Carey's True Adventures of the Kelly Gang. 

And so many vivid episodes--Demon getting robbed in a convenience store restroom, the 4th of July party, the pain clinic.... This is a masterpiece.

Daniel Defoe (probably), "Of Captain Misson" and "Of Captain Tew and His Crew"

I'VE BEEN READING reviews of the late David Graeber's posthumously-published final book, Pirate Enlightenment, and it sounds fascinating. Somehow, though, I feel I should read his Debt first, and I promised myself I would finish Piketty's Capital before I started Debt....so I may never get around to it. But I can at least read the chapters in the 1724 book A General History of the Pyrates (often assumed to be by Daniel Defoe) that touch on the founding of Libertalia.

Captain Misson was a French naval officer in the late 17th century who (if the story is true) had his assumptions about God, society, and the world rocked by a disillusioned Italian priest and decided to devote his ship and crew to piracy...but of a new kind. Misson abolished class distinctions, insisted that all important matters be decided democratically by the crew, divided whatever wealth they captured equally, and set a policy of giving sailors taken prisoner, who were typically executed, the option of joining the crew or being set down safely at the nearest port.

Eventually Misson and his crew set up a colony in Madagascar, established on the same democratic and egalitarian principles, after coming to an agreement with the neighboring indigenous peoples. An Englishman, Captain Tew, and his crew eventually join them.

Is any of this true? There is not much in the way of corroborating evidence, unfortunately, although apparently there actually were a few such experimental communities, as described and analyzed in Graeber's book.

True or not, the accounts of Captains Misson and Tew speak to the circulation of democratic and egalitarian ideas several generations before the American or French Revolutions, even if only in fantasy.

Roger Reeves, "Through the Smoke, Through the Veil, Through the Wind"

 THIS ESSAY WAS published in Granta 162, which came out about a year ago, but I only read it this week, and let me tell you...it is among the most moving, most thought-provoking, most powerful essays I have ever read. Up there with Baldwin, Orwell, Didion, I think--an extraordinary convergence of a particular event at a particular setting, personal history, and American history rendered in extraordinarily vivid and cliché-free language...beautiful, lyrical language, I want to say, but given that the subject is the trauma of enslavement I am going to say sublime language. 

Jorie Graham, _To 2040_ (3) and Saint-John Perse, _Anabase_

AS I READ To 2040, I kept thinking of Saint-John Persse's Anabase, a book-length poem published in France in 1924 and in an English translation by T. S. Eliot (no less) in 1930.

I had not read Anabase since the 1980s and so was surprised to be reminded of it. I don't think the likenesses, such as they are, were intentional on Graham's part. Perhaps she has not even read it; Perse is not often cited these days, although he was well regarded in his own time (Nobel Prize, 1960). Still, it seemed worth thinking a bit on why the one book called up for me memories of the other.

Anabase has orientalist fantasy aspects that render it problematic for a contemporary reader, but its leading quality is that it seems set in an indefinite antiquity somewhere near Asia Minor while at the same time being shot though with the sensibility of the present (i.e., early 20th century). 

It has a little of the effect of Dune or Star Wars in that some of the customs and institutions in those fantasy worlds seem drawn from historical antiquity while others involve highly futuristic technologies. The difference being, though, that the world-building in Anabase is intentionally fragmentary and incomplete, more suggestion than assertion. 

Here is a short bit from the Eliot translation:

   To the place called the Place of the Dry Tree:

   and the starved levin allots me these provinces in the West.

   But beyond are the greater leisures, and in a great

   land of grass without memory, the unconfined unreckoned year, seasoned with dawns and heavenly fires. (Matutinal sacrifice of the heart of a black sheep.)

So it sounds like a modern translation of an ancient text for which the explanatory context has entirely vanished. 

To 2040 sometimes has a similar atmosphere in that it is set in the future, but a denuded future, from which a lot of familiar landmarks have been effaced. An eerie, alien bareness surrounds us in To 2040 as it does in in Anabase. We are conscious of something gone: in Anabase, it is the clutter of modernity, while in To 2040, it is non-human nature.

To 2040 is something akin to The Waste Land, too, especially "What the Thunder Said" with its juxtaposition of the desert of the Gospels with the moral collapse of the First World War. In fact, the last poem in Graham's book, "Then the Rain," certainly made me think of the "Then a damp gust / bringing rain" passage in "What the Thunder Said." The unspeakable relief, the hope of that...but in Graham the coming of rain seems to be about earth gathering strength to renew itself once the last human beings have finally disappeared.

Jorie Graham, _To 2040_,, 2

 IN A RECENT review of new books by Annelyse Gelman and Elisa Gonzalez in NYRB (1/18/2024), Anahid Nersessian quoted a remark by Eileen Myles: "It's really hard to figure out what's poetry and what's a tweet at this time." The observation took me aback at first, but on reflection, I saw what she meant. It is not just the poetry shelves at my local Barnes and Noble sag under the weight of multiple volumes of Rupi Kaur and Lang Leav and other practitioners of Instagram-ready poetry, but people like Chelsey Minnis, working from the other side, so to speak, can leave you wondering whether we have any business making distinctions. 

And then I thought, "well, there's Jorie Graham." There is no mistaking a Jorie Graham poem for a tweet. Right?

But now and again in To 2040 one reads something like this:

stay in touch it  is
saying, stay in touch 

babe. I'm here 
for u. I'm always
going to be
here for you.

A good many poems in To 2040 are in short-lined quatrains, justified all the way left, and use text message shorthand: u, yr, cd, bc, that sort of thing. They do not all use phrases like "I'm here for u," but they are a few steps down Graham's typical diction. 

I discovered, on checking, that there are quite a few poems in this form (short-lined quatrains, text message shorthand) in the final section of Runaway (2021).

What's going on?

Damned if I know. The only thing that occurred to me was that Graham found it freeing or refreshing to work a more popular vein, like Yeats writing "Words for Music Perhaps" after the highly wrought ottava rima poems of The Tower and The Winding Stair. Just letting that (famous) hair down. Or perhaps they are tongue in cheek? But the quatrain poems do not do a lot to lighten the mood, I'd say.

More on the mood tomorrow, maybe.

Jorie Graham, _To 2040_, 1

THIS IS GRAHAM's first new collection with Copper Canyon (who in 2022 re-published her last four books with Ecco as a single volume). I wonder why she changed publishers? I'll probably never know.

The title may mean that the book is set, so to speak, in the future, its landscapes those of a world in which present rates of climate change go unaddressed and we end up in a world of no birds but AI ones (which I think is what "Dusk in Drought" is about). Graham has been writing about this at least since Sea Change (2009), but the flash-forward effect adds an unnerving dimension. Also noticeable is the probing of the relationship between poets and nature, raising questions of what becomes of that relationship as "nature" vanishes. 

The date in the title may also carry an implication about Graham's age, as she would be 90 in 2040, and in some poems of Part II the speaker seems to be in a care facility of some kind. Graham has been in this neighborhood before, too, in the cancer patient poems of Fast (2018), a particular favorite of mine among her books. Here, too, the flash-forward lends the familiar a strangeness--we get a Graham we know, but within and around it another Graham.

Imagining herself into a not-too-distant future is a surprising move for Graham, as she has always been a student of the now--the phenomenological now, I mean, the always-opening present moment. There were always memories of the past and anticipations of the future as well, I know, but her characteristic move seemed to be to stay with the present so intensely that it almost broke off  from the continuum of time and hovered there, a Grecian urn made to stand still for contemplation by her language. And she is still doing that in this volume--only it's a "now" from some 16 years hence, conjured by her imagination. 

I don't want to call it "science fiction poetry," as that sounds just a tad silly, but you could certainly read To 2040 alongside Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future without any sense of incongruence.

Chris Bachelder, _The Throwback Special_

 GLAD TO SEE this got some respectful attention (a National Book Award nomination); Bachelder has been one of the overlooked gems of American fiction for quite a while.

The novel has a very peculiar premise: 20-some American men get together once a year to re-enact the failed flea-flicker play (i.e., the titular "throwback special") in the course of which legendary Washington Redskin quarterback Joe Theismann suffered a career-ending leg injury after a tackle by legendary New York Giant linebacker Lawrence Taylor.

The re-created event occurred in 1985, about 30 years before the time the novel is set. We never find out when or how the men hit upon the idea of doing the re-enactment, or why they have been so faithful to it over so many years, or what they find meaningful about it. The tacit nature of the enterprise, the absence of speeches or explanations, struck me as a key element of the novel's portrait of American (white, middle-class) male-dom, with its fervency and commitments about things it will not and probably cannot explain. 

The re-enactments probably began when the men were young, maybe college-age, but in its current state the group gives Bachelder plenty of room to represent the contours of American middle-aged masculinity, about which he is so spot-on all I can say is "yikes."

Religions often include annual recallings, even symbolic re-enactments of significant, sometimes terrible events--Passover, Purim, Christmas, Easter, Muharram--so Bachelder also gives us (subtly, without anything overstated or even explicit) an insight into the origins of religions. The "why" of the re-enactment somehow involves Theismann's trauma, Taylor's remorse, something about our emotional investment in the spectacle of sports, something about the human ability to create symbol and allegory. In that respect, it put me a little in mind of Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. Bachelder's touch is a bit lighter and maybe a bit surer than Coover's (though I admire  both books).

An example of Bachelder's deftness: when the novel actually arrives at the climactic event of the re-enactment itself, Bachelder does not write from the point of view of any of the participants, but rather from that of some conference attendees (for "Prestige Vista Solutions") who just happen to be at the same hotel as the re-enactors that weekend. They are observing from a distance without knowing exactly what is going on. A surprising but perfect choice, making the re-enactment we have been waiting for for 200 pages seem mysterious, strange, comical but oddly fascinating. Who knows, one of these spectators to the bizarre ritual of these middle-aged men made be the next to take up the baton--may become, who knows, the Throwback Special's Paul.

Luke Mogelson, _The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible_

LUKE MOGELSON HAS logged quite a few years as war correspondent for the New Yorker but happened to be back in the USA for our own local wars in 2020: the no-vaccines-no-masks protests, the George Floyd protests and counter-protests, and the Trump-was-robbed  protests, culminating in the attack on  the Capitol on January 6, 2021. 

The centerpiece of the book is Chapter 17, a fifty-page, first-hand account of what went down at the Capitol, a version of which ran in the New Yorker. (Mogelson, I believe, took that amazing video of buffalo-horned Q shaman Jason Chansley ensconced in Mike Pence's chair in the Senate chamber.) Mogelson's account has the benefit not only of his actually having been there, but also of his having spent months beforehand reporting on the very people swarming up the steps, zip-ties at the ready. It could well become the definitive written account.

Made me wonder--what would Tom Wolfe have done with this material? 

Mogelson does so good a job reporting the martial fervency of the pro-Trumpers that I was somewhat relieved that he doesn't think we have a real civil war on our hands. He has reported on several real civil wars, and he emphasizes that they involve real grievances, real injuries--the death of one's family members, the destruction of one's hometown. Those storming the Capitol were motivated more by what they thought they might be losing than by anything they had actually lost. As Mogelson puts  it, "Were large-scale violence to erupt in the US, it would be something different: a war fueled not by injury but by delusion." (316) 

Then again, back in 1861, the South seceded more for what they thought they might lose than for anything they had actually lost. So who knows.

Ben Lerner, _The Lights_

SO MANY EXCELLENT poets hit a vein of prosperity with books of prose and the next thing we know, they are no longer publishing much poetry: Patricia Lockwood, Eula Biss, Lucy Ives, Anne Boyer. I am glad to see this is not the case (yet) for Ben Lerner. He has published three novels to considerable acclaim, and his essays and stories show up in the New Yorker and Harpers, yet here he gives us a generous (100+ pages) volume of new poems. You go, Mr. Lerner.

Really good new poems, too. Lerner likes to stretch out, and the longer poems tend to be the stronger ones--"The Lights," "The Dark Threw Patches Down upon Me Also," "Rotation," and my particular  favorite, "Untitled (Triptych)," in which we wander through the Met with Lerner as he awaits test results (as to whether is wife is pregnant, I think), making one dazzling unexpected connection after another.

That Lerner's success in prose has potentially enlarged the audience for his poetry may have prompted the thoughts about connection and accessibility that occur in the volume's closing poems ("The Rose, "The Son," "No Art") and may even account for the recurring invocations of Whitman, who certainly sought connection and at least occasionally tried to be accessible. The volume's real secret sharer is a different New York poet, though--Ashbery.

The whoops-what-happened jumps in syntax, the juxtaposition of precise technical vocabulary with the throwaway phrase of the week, the oblique strategies of the prose poems--none of this comes from Whitman, no, nor from Brooklyn's other laureate Hart Crane, but from good old J.A. And I for one am thankful. You go, Mr. Lerner--you go.

Eve Babitz, _Eve's Hollywood_

HER FIRST BOOK, I believe...published when she was 30 or so. I read this as the next installment in a run of outlaw lit after Cookie Mueller, Gary Indiana, and Kathy Acker, but while Babitz has a bohemian edge--lots of drugs, lots of boyfriends--she is too full of good cheer to come across as much of an outlaw. You need a little Des Esseintes jadedness to strike the outlaw lit pose, but it's hard to sound that world-weary, dying-from-ennui note when you are in ecstasy over finding the perfect taquito.

The good cheer is also a departure from classic literary accounts of Los Angeles--Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One--which tend to play up the spiritual sterility and desperation under the glamorous surface. Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, and James Ellroy are a little more forgiving, but still attracted to the city's more dire side. Not Babitz. The chapters on the Hollywood Branch Library and Watts Towers are downright celebratory. 

The prose is always light on its feet, inviting, a bit relaxed about the rules...quite a bit like California, come to think of it.

Is the "James Byrns" described in the chapter "Rosewood Casket" a portrait of Gram Parsons? Sure seems like it.

Lydia Millet, _A Children's Bible_

 A CHILDREN'S BIBLE reminded me of Rick Moody's The Ice Storm (1994). In Moody's novel, set in the 1970s, some suburban parents get together in someone's house for drinking, drugging, and partner-swapping, leaving their high school age and younger kids to look after themselves. The natural disaster named in the title arrives in the night, downing power lines and  the parents' derelictions of duty especially salient.

In Millet's novel, some well-off parents rent a palatial home in the countryside for a long vacation of drinking, drugging, and partner-swapping, leaving their high school age and younger kids to look after themselves. A hurricane arrives, disrupting power supplies and communication systems, creating circumstances (including a fatality) that make the parents' dereliction of duties especially salient.

I thought Millet's novel was actually more interesting, though, for a few reasons. One, we get the edgily witty and consistently on-point voice of first person narrator Eve.  Two, the kids actually get organized and improvise a functioning collective, leaving the parents to their own hedonist devices. Three, there are some well-paced, thriller-adjacent episodes (e.g., the arrival of a trio of armed marauders) that left me with the impression that a film adaptation of the novel could be brilliant.

And--crucially--four, the whole novel could stand as a parable for the older generation's obtuseness and sloth in responding to the climate crisis, a lapse for which the younger generation will end up paying the highest costs.

I've wanted to read Millet since I saw her in a pandemic-era zoom-cast with Tom McCarthy and Joshua Cohen, talking about William Gaddis. McCarthy and Cohen, both erudite and articulate, got into trying to out-articulate and out-erudite each other, and Millet just seemed to be thinking, hoo, boy, what have I gotten myself into? Just her facial expression as McCarthy and Cohen did their grad-seminar thing gave me the idea that she would have a knack for satire--and so she does.

Robert Plunket, _My Search for Warren Harding_

FIRST PUBLISHED FORTY years ago, this novel's republication could launch it as a belatedly-discovered classic, à la John Williams's Stoner. 

To describe it briefly, it is Henry James's The Aspern Papers set in late 1970s Los Angeles, with the dark farce dialed up to 11.

Narrator Elliot Weiner (not Jewish, he wants you to know) is a historian and would-be-biographer of twenty-ninth President Warren G. Harding. He is hot on the trail of an amazing trove of documents belonging to Rebekah Kinney, a mistress of Harding who bore him a child and is now living in the Hollywood Hills. (Rebekah's circumstances blend those of Nan Britton, Harding's actual mistress, with those of the all-but-forgotten silent film star Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard.) 

If Weiner can get those documents, his career is assured, so he is willing to tell any lie, betray any trust, and manipulate any friendship to get his hands on them. Ethically, he is even worse than the unnamed narrator of The Aspern Papers, although also more self-aware.

Weiner is also racist and homophobic, even though his own queerness is often discernible to the reader; he is the most despicable narrator, in fact, that I have come across in a good long while. Tarquin Winot in John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure could match him, perhaps. Weiner's tart observations on California, his associates, and his own projects are constantly amusing, however, and the consistent backfiring of his best-laid plans shows Plunket to be a master architect of farce. My Search for Warren Harding is a comic masterpiece.

I wonder if the novel will end up on syllabusses? It would be tough to teach, since Weiner is so awful in so many ways. Perhaps in fiction-writing programs, though? Given Plunket's stylistic energy and whiplash wit, the novel's influence could only be salutary.