Anne Carson, _Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera_

 ...NOT TO MENTION an oratorio and a screenplay.  Carson is nothing if not generous.

I think this replaces Glass, Irony, God as my favorite book by Anne Carson. It's close. The screenplay about Abelard and Heloise perplexed me, I have to say. But the opera and its accompanying essays, in which Carson finds a way of using Sappho's famous fragment about the man sitting across her from her beloved to illuminate the religious thought of Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil, seems to me the best example I have yet seen of how Carson combines lightly-carried learning, audacious thinking, and lyrical grace to tell us something we really need to know--in this case how we sometimes need to get out of our own way, so to speak. 

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.