Larry Levis, _Winter Stars_

 PAINFUL BUT BEAUTIFUL. "My Story in a Late Style of Fire" aligns unnervingly with two of the poems that appeared in The Darkening Trapeze, "Elegy for the Infinite Wrapped in Tinfoil" and "Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire," but the figuration of self-destruction as arson is if anything more direct and confessional in this earlier poem. I got the feeling that some headlong but doomed affair had once and for all finished off Levis's marriage, that he knew it was futile and wrong but wasn't about to stop himself, and ended up burning down his own life. I'm just guessing, of course.

That poem and the two final ones in the book would be part of any argument that Levis's work is worth reading and heeding, I think. "The Assimilation of the Gypsies" and "Sensationalism" both start from photographs by Josef Koudelka, with Levis opening the photos up into stories or screenplays that turn out to be about our relationship to time, which is mainly our relationship with death, and so we might connect these to an earlier poem in the book, "Those Graves in Rome," one of which is the grave of one whose name was writ in water...and it's all painful. But beautiful. I'm going to go see if I can recall the last stanza of "Ode on Melancholy" now. I had it memorized once. I bet Levis did too.

Larry Levis, _The Dollmaker's Ghost_

HIS THIRD BOOK, first published by Dutton in 1981. The edition I read is a "Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary" reprint, which appeared in 1992. My copy must be later than that, though, as the back cover copy refers to Levis's death in 1996. The book is still in print, which means it must still be finding readers twenty-eight years after Levis's passing--good to know.

The collection previous to this one, The Afterlife (1977), was the first of Levis's books I read, and the difference between that book and this one felt large. The Afterlife was by no means a light-hearted or sunny book, but it had streaks of whimsy and spots of hope in it. The Dollmaker's Ghost feels bleaker. A lot of it seems to inhabit rural spaces or those small, nearly deserted towns scattered on the highways between Iowa City and Fresno. It feels lonely.

From the reading around I have done since I read The Afterlife, I know that Levis wrote much of it in the happier years of his marriage to poet Marcia Southwick. But something seems to have already gone awry in Part One, which finds Levis back on his parents' grape-growing operation, haunted by memories of his growing up and wondering where he lost the plot. 

The book has a lot of retrospection in it. Levis's last, posthumously published work is mainly retrospection, I would say--all those elegies--but it's a little different here, more about being haunted by old photographs and drifting smoke as well as by actual ghosts, who show up often in Part Four (e.g., the dollmaker of the title). 

Here are some lines from one of the poems in Part Four, "Some Ashes Drifting Above Piedra, California":

And now,
if we listen for their laughter,
Which vanished fifteen years ago
Into the cleft wood of these boards,
Into the night and the rain, 
It will sound like cold jewels spilling together,
It will sound like snow...
We will never have any money, either,
And we will go on staring past the sink,
Past the curtain,
And into a field which is not even white anymore,
Not even an orchard,
But simply this mud,
And always,
Over that, a hard sky.

The "they" are the farm workers who used to live in the shack the speaker is describing. I'm not sure who the "we" could be, but I suspect the other person acknowledged in that "we" is not actually physically present in  the shack with the speaker, because he seems really, really alone.

James McBride, _The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store_

 I WAS A little irritated by a misstep in Chapter 17, "The Bullfrog." Most of the chapter is the dialog of a meeting of the chevry ("the men's group that decided important matters at the temple") of a Jewish congregation in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. The meeting occurs, we are told on p. 207, in 1936. But on p. 208, in the conversation before the meeting actually gets down to business, notice is taken that "Paul Hindenburg had chosen a young Austrian named as Adolph Hitler to serve as chancellor"--but that happened in early 1933. Are the men of the chevry years behind on the news, or did the author and his editors just not catch the problem?

The latter, I suspect. McBride does seem really interested in  the 1930s, so far as that goes. There was a presidential election in 1936, but the novel does not mention Alf Landon or Franklin Roosevelt, nor any New Deal program. No one listens to the radio. No one mentions Will Rogers or Shirley Temple. No one mentions the Yankees' amazing rookie, Joe DiMaggio. No one mentions Satchel Paige. Pottstown seems to be under some kind of giant glass dome separating it from the rest of the USA, save when someone needs to make a trip to Philadelphia.

Oh, well. I guess a novel set in the 1930s doesn't really have to mention  the 1930s, and McBride is clearly more interested in the Jewish and the Black populations of Pottstown, who are united in their resistance to the oppressive practices of the Klan-joining population of Pottstown. They cooperate to spring a deaf orphaned Black 12-year-old, Dodo, from a nearby state institution for the disabled, Pennhurst, which has a reputation for cruelty and mistreatment, especially as practiced by a guard known as Son of Man.

Why does Son of Man call himself Son of Man? What made him such a predator? What is his relationship to Nate Timblin, who plays a crucial role in the plan to spring Dodo? We never find out, unfortunately.

The novel does have its virtues, though. Chona Ludlow, one of the Jewish characters, is a beacon of light and righteousness, an embodiment of the Kabbalistic principle of tikkun olam. The chapters narrated from the point of view of Dodo are brilliant.

A likable book in lots of ways. But I can't tell why McBride bothered specifying that it takes place in 1936.

Jeff Tweedy, _Let's Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc._

 JEFF TWEEDY'S 2018 memoir is a likable read.  The voice is down-to-earth and conversational, with plenty of self-deprecating humor. Tweedy is a son of the Midwest, so there you are. His accounts of growing up in Belleville, a small  town in southern Illinois, and of his life with his wife and two sons are tender and affecting; his account of recovering from addiction to opioids is candid and straightforward.

I found myself wanting a little more, though about the "two different guys named Jay covered in this book," as Tweedy puts it in his introduction, two people who were especially crucial in his artistic development as a musician and songwriter.  Jay Farrar and Tweedy founded the band Uncle Tupelo when they were teenagers, and it was with Farrar that Tweedy first stepped on stage to perform, began working on his craft, and began building a reputation. Jay Bennett joined Wilco, Tweedy's second band, after their first album and served as the fuel that enabled Wilco to achieve the escape velocity that took them out of the roots/Americana orbit (where Son Volt, Farrar's post-Tupelo band, largely remained) and brought them to stardom.

The relationships with both Jays ended in strife. but what exactly happened? Did Farrar dislike that Tweedy wanted equal time as a songwriter on the albums? Why did the last iteration of Uncle Tupelo (bassist John Stirratt, drummer Ken Coomer, and multi-instrumentalist Max Johnston)  follow Tweedy into Wilco rather than Farrar into Son Volt? Did  they volunteer? Were they recruited? How did that go down?

And Jay Bennett. What happened there? What made their collaboration so fruitful for a few years, then unsustainable? How did the Wilco of A.M. turn into the Wilco of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot? Why did Bennett eventually get fired from the band?

Tweedy does write about how Farrar was uncommunicative, even a bit sullen, and about  how Bennett could be manipulative and unreliable. but one feels there is a whole lot more to the story. 

If you are interested in Tweedy's growing up and his family life, Let's Go (So We Can Get Back) is your book, but if you are mainly curious about Uncle Tupelo and Wilco, I would recommend Greg Kot's Wilco: Learning How to Die.

Jeff Tweedy, _How to Write One Song_

 THE FIRST SECTION (on why you should definitely go ahead and try to write a song, if you have ever had the wish to) and the fourth section (on why you should be brave and perform the song for others, once you have written it) were not all that germane for me, since I have written dozens of songs and performed them for small but indulgent audiences here and there, but I nonetheless appreciated the core messages: first, that creating something is one of the best ways available to spend your time, and second, that sharing what you have created builds human community.

The middle sections, on generating lyrics and music to accompany them, were brilliant--they certainly accorded with my own experience and would be helpful, I think, both for someone who had never written a song and someone who had written a good many.

On the subject of lyrics, Tweedy does not say "look in your heart, and write" or recommend soul-baring confession. The exercises he recommends depend quite a bit on the aleatory and improvisational, on not taking yourself utterly seriously, and that's perfect. That way, the songwriter is going to come up with something to work with, and once the work begins, the heart and soul are going to be coming to the party in any case.

On the subject of music, Tweedy emphasizes (rightly, I'd say) that being an instrumental virtuoso is not at all required. If you can carry a tune most of the time and hit a few key notes on your piano or guitar, you are good to go. Tweedy recommends learning how to play songs you like, and I would second that--figuring out Lou Reed and Elvis Costello songs was my own training in song architecture. How much of the brilliance of Lennon and McCartney as songwriters derives from the hours of covers they learned to play in the Hamburg days? A lot, I bet.

He also recommends, bluntly, "steal." Well...yes. Take a song you know and like, re-jigger it some way, and there you are. As John Lennon remarked when George Harrison got legally dinged for the resemblances of "My Sweet Lord" to "He's So Fine," all songwriters steal, but you need to cover your tracks. 

A helpful, generous, and very down-to-earth book.

Odd footnote on Larry Levis

 This shows up on p. 70 of Elegy:

Lovely convulsion of thighs lathered as a horse's back,

Because, as Marx said,
Sex should be no more important than a glass of water.

When I read this, I recalled the same idea had shown up in The Darkening Trapeze, p. 67, when Levis is explaining that "the only surviving son of Jesus Christ was Karl Marx":

One thing he said I still remember, a thing that's never there 

When I try to look it up, was "Sex should be no more important...

Than a glass of water." It sounded vaguely like the kind of thing

Christ might have said if Christ had a sense of humor.

Levis's difficulty in looking up the quotation likely results from the quotation usually being attributed not to Marx, but to Alexandra Kollontai, a key figure in the Bolshevik intelligentsia. 

Larry Levis, _Elegy_

THIS IS THE FIRST of the two posthumous collections of Levis's poetry, edited by his teacher and friend, the late Philip Levine. It's very strong--the strongest of the three books by Levis I have read, I would say.

The collections with nine poems titled "Elegy...," e.g. "Elegy with the Sprawl of a Wave Inside It" and "Elegy with an Angel at its Gate." There are two similarly titled poems in The Darkening Trapeze (the second posthumous collection), and in  the afterword to that book David St. John speculates that Levis had in mind making his own version of the Duino Elegies. That would be worth bringing out, if any enterprising publisher is interested. All eleven are ambitious, unnervingly dark, but powerful, and the cumulative impact if published as a stand-alone book would be large, I suspect.

The "Elegy" poems are mainly memory poems, naturally, conjuring up the vanished, or maybe they are not conjuring up the ghosts so much as they are haunted by them. There are some good memories, like the work Levis did alongside the farmworkers in his father's vineyard, but the poems are all in the key of loss, and some are staggering. 

What are we but what we offer up?

Gifts we give, for oblivion to look at, & puzzle over, & set aside.

Oblivion resting his cheek against a child's striped rubber ball
In the photograph I have of him, head on the table & resting his cheek
Against the cool surface of the ball, the one that is finished spinning, the one

He won't give back.

The "him" in the photograph: Levis's son? Levis himself? Oblivion? The ball has completed its movement and is at rest, but is gone, irretrievably gone, as the child is too, another example of "time's relentless melt," as Sontag says all photographs are. Nothing remains of what we offer up save that we did, indeed, offer it up. 

Yet we still have these poems, and the poems are not nothing.

Ruben Bolling, _Tom the Dancing Bug Awakens_

 THIS COLLECTION (VOLUME 6) gathers Tom the Dancing Bug comics from 2012-15. Ruben Bolling made his big pivot to political topics in the Trump years, but there was already a lot of politics in these strips--wealth inequality in the "Lucky Ducky" installments, middle class precarity in the "Chagrin Falls" installments, various hypocritical compromises of the second Obama administration, like the drone program, in several comics. Odd to be reminded how disappointing that second Obama administration often was, given what we have to deal with since.

Bolling knows his comics history and, as always, astonishes with his ability to conjure up the look of several distinct styles: Hanna-Barbera, Carl Barks, EC comics, Sunday School pamphlets, the ads that blossomed in the back pages of comic books back in the pre-Maus days before started taking themselves seriously. He's a master.

I wonder--will we ever see Louis Maltby navigating the perils of middle school again, or Billy Dare again take crafty advantage of the conventions of narration? Bolling has bigger fish to fry these days, true, but I look forward to seeing Louis and Billy again when things calm down...if they ever do.

Larry Levis, _The Darkening Trapeze_, with a long digression on two camps in American poetry

THIS IS THE second of two posthumous collections of Levis's poetry, both edited by friends and fellow poets. The first, Elegy, was put together by Philip Levine and appeared in 1997, the year after Levis died; this one was edited by David St. John and appeared in 2016. 

Readerly gratitude is in order. Going through the work Levis left behind and deciding which poems were finished, which version was the definitive one, and how he intended to organize the poems would all be difficult enough, but to do that while also remembering a dead friend would be heartbreaking.

The poems are excellent. Darker and sadder than those in the only other book by Levis I have read, The Afterlife, but with the same originality of vision and figuration: "The village slept in the gunmetal of its evening." One notices an interest in self-destruction in "Elegy for the Infinite Wrapped in Tinfoil" and "Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire." In "Threshold of the Oblivious Blossoming" Levis describes himself "Sitting inside & waiting for my dealer to show up so I could buy / Two grams of crystal methedrine from her," which seems like a risky thing to mention in a poem, but I suppose the police rarely read poetry.

I don't know David St. John's own work, but seeing his name reminded me of American Hybrid, an anthology he edited with Cole Swensen and published in 2009. The anthology took as its working hypothesis that (a) there are two broad camps in contemporary American poetry and (b) there is a lot of interesting work going on in the in-between, when poets associated with one camp try on the moves of the other camp.

The two broad camps--as I would describe them, not necessarily as St. John or Swensen would--look like this:

Camp A is representational or mimetic; it aims for a kind of fidelity to phenomena, to a "getting right" of what is sensed, experienced, remembered. Work in this camp would likely be praised for being honest, or moving, or vivid, or "so true." Mary Oliver, for instance.

Camp B is non-representational; it tends to see the relationship between language and reality as unstable or unknowable, so "getting it right" is out of the question. Writing a poem is more about form, procedure, method, working with language itself. Work in this camp would likely be praised for being innovative, ground-breaking, experimental, radical. Lyn Hejinian, for instance. 

It's not exactly a Crips and Bloods situation. Poets in one camp, a few drinks in, may say snarky things about poets in the other camp, but there is a lot of interaction between the camps--hence American Hybrid.

This made me wonder: would St. John have put Levis in the anthology had Levis still been alive in 2009? Levis is certainly Camp A--the poems routinely focus on his memories and experiences and the places and people he has known--but at the same time, the reader gets the uncoupling-from-reference effect that one gets in Stéphane Mallarmé (the great-grandaddy of Camp B) or Wallace Stevens (whom Levis obviously admired). This mainly happens when Levis's genius for figuration seems about to leap off into wild blue synaesthesia: "a flash of green silence almost alive / In the palm of your hand," for instance. There is a simple signified behind this dazzling signifier--water--but the signifier trembles on  the brink of autonomy. 

The more of Levis I read, the more interesting he gets.

Nathalie Léger, _The White Dress_, translated by Natasha Lehrer

 THE WHITE DRESS is the third in a trilogy of prose portraits of women artists. The first two--Exposition and Suite for Barbara Loden (LLL 12/24/2021 and 4/14/2022)--bear witness to delayed but fulfilled justice or vindication, since the Countess of Castiglione's photography project and Barbara Loden's 1970 film Wanda, disregarded and undervalued at the time of their making, did eventually find audiences and recognition. The White Dress tells a more sobering story.

Pippa Bacca was an Italian performance artist who, in 2008, was video-recording herself hitch-hiking around Europe and the Mediterranean in a wedding dress, with the goal of promoting world peace. The project was brutally ended when she was raped and murdered by a man who picked her up in Turkey (who was eventually caught because he kept and used the camera, with Bacca's footage still on it). 

Braided with this story is that of Léger's parents' marriage--a story not as terrible as Bacca's, but grim enough, with Léger's father seemingly set on humiliating and wounding his wife and daughter with his flagrant infidelities. This story has previously appeared in the trilogy, in Exposition, but here Léger pays particular attention to how marriage (the white dress) damaged her mother's life. 

Decidedly downbeat, then, and for that reason an unexpected way to end a trilogy about women artists whose work is brought back to life thanks to archival research. Or is the book suggesting something like that will happen in Bacca's case? A painful but worthwhile read.

Anne Dufourmantelle, _Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living_, trans. Katherine Payne and Vincent Salle

THE ORIGINAL FRENCH version of this book, Puissance de la douceur, was published in 2013; when this translation appeared in 2018, Dufourmantelle, only 54, had already died. Cancer or car accident, I guessed, but it turns out she died while trying to save two children from drowning in the Mediterranean. How many philosophers, or intellectuals in general, have died trying to save another's life? It's a short list, I expect.

Power of Gentleness reminded me of Sianne Ngai's Our Aesthetic Categories. The history of aesthetics largely involves philosophers wrestling with what "beauty" is, or "the sublime," but Ngai upended things and started new conversations by trying to understand the "cute," the "interesting," the "zany." Similarly, while many philosophers have thought about power and duty and necessity, Dufourmantelle started a new conversation by taking up "gentleness." Or douceur--her translators point out in a prefatory note that the French word covers a different semantic landscape than the English word does, as douceur can refer to sweetness and softness as well as mildness or tenderness.

The book is in thirty-six chapters, short essays of two or three pages--the whole book is scarcely over a hundred pages in the Fordham University press edition--all working through the apparent paradox of the title. We tend to associate power with force, but refraining from force also makes things happen. Dufourmantelle makes some unsurprising points along these lines--for instance, about Tolstoy and Gandhi--but also some very surprising ones--for instance, about animals: "So close to animality that it sometimes merges with it, gentleness is experienced to the point of making possible the hypothesis of an instinct that it would call its own." A strange idea--nature, red in  tooth and claw, has a gentleness instinct? But we do see animals being gentle with each other, and where does that come from? Not from having taken an ethics course.

Dufourmantelle offers some important caveats. Gentleness ought not to be confused with "mawkishness," and we should keep in mind that it can be "bastardized into silliness." She notes that "gentleness does not belong only to the good." But we need what it makes possible, as she particularly emphasizes in the section "Justice and Forgiveness" and the final section, "A Gentle Revolution."

I was especially struck by this, in the section titled "Childhood":

We would not survive childhood without gentleness because everything about childhood is so exposed, hyperacute, in a way violent and raw, that gentleness is its absolute prerequisite.