Maggie Nelson, _Pathemata, or, The Story of My Mouth_

 I WAS A couple dozen pages into Pathemata and persuaded that it was one wild ride when I checked the acknowledgements page in the back--I wanted to see what Nelson may have said there about partner Harry Dodge. At the end of the acknowledgements, I found this "Disclaimer":

"This work conjoins dream and reality; all representations of people, places, and events should be understood in that spirit."

Hence the wildness of the ride. The territory explored in Pathemata is a lot like the Wonderland explored by Alice, logical and absurd at the same time, frightening and consolatory at the same time, monstrous and familiar at the same time. And like Wonderland, it's a dreamscape--or some of it is. 

For me, it hearkened back to the old Maggie Nelson. After The Argonauts landed on so many coffee tables and syllabuses, Nelson seemed to be working from her new standing as a public intellectual in On Freedom, and she just did not seem comfortable. Nelson is more at home in the disruptive and transgressive, the strange and unsettling. In Pathemata, she is back home.

Pathemata is a (dream?) journal about buccal-and-dental health issues during COVID days, and it deserves shelf space alongside Huysmans's A Rebours or Mircea Cartaresçu's Solenoid in its evocation of the nightmarish aspects of dentistry.

It's not just about that, of course, given the range of Nelson's interests and the acuity of her perception, not to mention the complexity of her life. I was wondering whether Dodge was mentioned in the acknowledgements because throughout the book Nelson's relationship with "H" seems strained. Was the estrangement just in dreams, provoked by 2020's gamut of anxieties? Or actual? None of my business, anyway, and the acknowledgements do thank "the magical creatures with whom I shared heart and home during this time, including Dodge, presumably.

"Pathemata" is Greek for "suffering" or "pain," and the word is often used in a phrase, "pathemata mathemata," that means "learning from suffering." Does leaving "mathemata" out of the title imply nothing was learned? I would say no, it doesn't imply that, since the book ends with Nelson telling of a lesson about pain she did not get around to learning while undergoing labor but may be at last ready for: "The moment for the lesson is now."

Patricia Lockwood's four new poems in n+1 #51; Ben Philipps, "Evasive Species"

QUITE A FEW poets I like--Lucy Ives, Maggie Nelson, Ocean Vuong--seem to publish more prose than poetry lately. Can't blame them, really, given the relative sizes of the audience for poetry and the audience for prose, but I still feel a twinge of regret. Such being the case, it was heartening to see four new poems from Patricia Lockwood in the most recent issue of n+1.

I have been a fan of Lockwood since Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, and that is going back a ways, even back before "Rape Joke." Lockwood has not published a collection of poems since 2014, but in the meantime the brilliant autofictions/memoirs Priestdaddy, No One Is Talking about This, and (quite recently) There Will Never Be Another You have made her famous (profiled in the New Yorker, no less).

The new poems did not remind me much of her earlier poetry, but after all, it's been ten-plus years, and a lot has happened in the meantime (see the three autofictions/memoirs). These poems still have some of the anarchic, she'll-say-anything streak of her early work, but I'd say they seem under more control. There are bows to illustrious precursors, Plath (not at all surprising) and Yeats (surprising, to me, but happy to see it), a fascination with minerals, and an idiosyncratic religious inflection.

I hope more are coming.

The same issue of n+1 has an interesting essay by Ben Philipps on climate-conscious poetry--okay, I admit it, I did not expect an essay on climate-conscious poetry to be interesting because, you know, déjà lu, but Philipps began with an interesting move, talking about the two large camps of American poetry. I think of them as representational and non-representational (see post for Sept 11, 2024); Philipps goes with "confessional" and "experimental." The poetry Philipps wants us to pick up on, which he calls "eco-confessional," perhaps bridges the divide, because it tends both to say "I have to tell you about this" and to aim at a kind of dislocation and upsetting of familiar tropes, trying to jar the reader out of complacency. 

Sounds promising, no? Philipps persuaded me to look into the poetry of Rachel Allen.

Daniel Mason, _North Woods_

 SO, I AM wondering, how does Daniel Mason maintain an enviable career as a novelist--this, his fifth, was a NYTBR "10 Best Books of 2023" honoree, and A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth was a Pulitzer Prize finalist--while also handling his duties as an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford--Stanford!--a position that the author's bio tells me he holds. I mean, how does one do all that? 

North Woods has an unusual structure in that the main element of continuity is neither a character nor a plot but a setting, an old house in a wooded area in a remote part of western Massachusetts. The first version of the house, apparently rudimentary, was thrown together by a pair of lovers escaping the Puritanic rigors of Plymouth. It was added to over the years by a retired soldier who wants to grow apples and later by a wealthy man who wanted to turn it into a hunting lodge, but it finally falls into ruin, its abandoned grounds visited by amateur archaeologists and dendrologists.

So we get the longue durée of a novel like, say, Yaa Gyasi's Homecoming, but instead of following a family's genealogy, we see the transformations of a certain place, as in Prairyerth, William Least Heat Moon's non-fiction "deep map" of central Kansas.

Mason keeps this all moving along with well-tempered prose and intriguing characters (spirit mediums, lobotomy practitioners). We don't get to spend more than a chapter or two with any character, which is somewhat unfortunate, because of all of them are distinct enough to be interesting. Mason incorporates a supernatural element, though, that means that some of the characters, or their traces, reappear when we are not expecting them. And then there is that mountain lion. And that ax.

Percival Everett, _I Am Not Sidney Poitier_

 NOT EVERETT'S MOST audacious novel...but that is a high bar. 

The narrator's mother, a Poitier but unrelated to the famous actor, named him "Not Sidney," which is a good joke and sets the novel up for the kind of wordplay S. J. Perelman wrote for the Marx Brothers. 

     "Are you not Sidney Poitier?"

    "Yes, I am Not Sidney Poitier."

The narrator's mother also invested in Turner Broadcasting when it was just a blip of a startup, so her death, when the narrator is just eleven, leaves him breathtakingly wealthy.

So the novel is a bit like Great Expectations. Like Pip, Not Sidney comes of age with no worries about how to provide for himself, and encounters a number of vivid characters who help, or hinder, or both as he figures life out--with the important difference, of course, that being a young Black man in the South is quite distinct from being a young gentleman in Victorian London, especially in one's relations with the police. He is also a bit like Voltaire's Candide, though, as these encounters have the effect of knocking down one or another illusion about how things work.

The extra Everettian fillip to the novel is that Not Sidney keeps finding himself in scenarios that are funhouse  reflections of Sidney's films--The Defiant Ones, Lilies of the Field, Buck and the Preacher, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Not Sidney physically resembles Sidney, we are told, and does so increasingly as the novel progresses, until he is finally actually taken for Sidney. What's this about? I'm not sure--it reminded me of Max Beerbohm's "The Happy Hypocrite," a story that makes literal the old proverb of wearing a mask that one's face eventually matches. I'm still puzzling this one out.

Elizabeth Willis, _Liontaming in America_

AN EXCELLENT BOOK, but difficult to describe. "This book is not a memoir," the first sentence states, so that point is settled, but even without that caveat few readers, I think, would assume it was one. The word "I" does not occur frequently, and most of the book's attention is devoted to people who lived in the 19th century. 

The book is a poem, I think I can say, an American kind of epic poem that has some affinities with Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, parts of Louis Zukofsky's "A," and Charles Reznikoff's Testimony; that is, it includes a generous amount of the documentary, sometimes foregrounds its own processes, and often seems like a bold attempt to write a poem about the whole United States. (As in The Maximus Poems and Hart Crane's The Bridge, for instance, the woman we are used to calling Pocahontas appears.)

And while the book is not a memoir, Willis's own family background frames the project, for much it concerns the history of Mormonism and that movement's history in Utah. (And the end, unless I am jumping to conclusions, reflects the death of her parents in an automobile accident [p. 294].)

I don't know whether Willis would call herself a Mormon currently, and I would not call her a proselytizer or even an advocate, exactly, but she does provide a different kind of light on the church than we usually get. The section called "Boy" gives us a Joseph Smith who is neither a fast-talking charlatan nor a madman, but a made-in-America visionary. The church he founds breaks with precedent in a number of ways, especially in allowing polygamy, but in Willis's handling this is not patriarchy run amuck, but a willingness to reinvent the paradigm of the family in a way that might actually enable new kinds of communities, especially women's communities.

The book's title, we learn in a concluding "Author's Note," comes from "a 1926 essay in which Robert Walser compares a liontamer to a Mormon polygamist whose wives only appear to obey for the sake of public performance." The Mormon wives we meet in Willis's poem are a bit like the powerful medieval abbesses who, technically, had to acknowledge the authority of the church priesthood and hierarchy, but who nonetheless usually succeeded in managing what they wanted to manage, doing the work they wanted to do and creating communities that ran on their own terms.

Liontaming in America put me in mind not only of Olson, Zukofsky, and Reznikoff, but also of Harold Bloom's The American Religion, Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic, Lucy Sante's Low Life, and Saidiya Hartman's Waywatd Lives, Beautiful Experiments by foregrounding people and movements a little more shadowy, a little more idiosyncratic, a little stranger, a little more obsessed and less assimilable than the people and movements you will meet in, say, a Ken Burns documentary. America, Willis convinced me,  is not what we generally think it is.

Benjamin Labatut, _When We Cease to Understand the World_, trans. Adrian Nathan West

 I HAD READ about half of this collection of thematically unified stories, all about crucial figures in the sciences and mathematics in the early decades of the 20th century, when I decided it would make a good gift for my son-in-law, who has a doctorate in aerospace engineering. 

After buying him a copy and then finishing the book, I wondered how appropriate a gift for him it was, really, since all the figures in the book--Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Shinichi Mochizuki, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger--come off as obsessed, or possessed, prey to delirium, making their advances by intuitive or counter-intuitive leaps, reckless about the short- or long-term consequences of their discoveries. Divine madmen, a priesthood high on their own prophecies.

We are leagues distant from any idea of scientific objectivity here, any idea of cool ratiocination or calm deliberation--it's all sturm und drang, visionary poetry by other means. For instance, Schrödinger arrives at a formula that "applied to any physical system" would enable one "to describe its future evolution." But the formula is built around an abyss:

The problem lay in its central term--the soul of the equation--which Schrödinger had represented with the Greek letter psi and had baptized as the "wave function." All the information one could wish to have about a quantum system was contained in  the wave function. But Schrödinger did not know what it was. It had the form of a wave, but could not be a real physical phenomenon, because it moved outside this world, in multidimensional space. Perhaps it was only a mathematical chimera. The only certain thing was its power, which seemed unlimited. In theory.

All the other figures in the book seem similarly poised on the edge of their own abysses, peering past the edge of the  knowable into some realm where matter turns into metaphor and then back into matter, forever flickering.

Is that what doing advanced physics is really like, or is it a fiction writer's fantasy? I can't judge, and my son-in-law hasn't said anything yet. It does make for compelling reading, however.

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Greil Marcus, _Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations_

 THIS "VERY SHORT book" (to quote from Marcus's acknowledgments) contains three pieces based on lectures Marcus gave at Harvard in 2013, each about a song: "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" by Bob Dylan, "Last Kind Words Blues" by Geeshie Wiley (and possibly Elvie [possibly L. V. ] Thomas), and "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground" by Bascom Lamar Lunsford.

The book has no introduction or conclusion, and thus does not present itself as thesis-oriented, but it does have a recurring idea: that the songs are not so much expressions of an individual performer's vision as they are a kind of convergence of a tradition, a performer, and an audience. Each song has recognizable antecedent songs, each has been given a distinctive stamp by the performer, and each found an audience for cherished the song, for whom became a kind of touchstone.

One of the performers, Dylan, is among the best-documented artists of our time, subject of innumerable books, including a few by Marcus; diligent research can turn up a good amount of info on Lunsford; we have nothing but ambiguous traces of Wiley. But the individual existence of the performer is only part of the story in this book, and maybe not even the most important part. The song chooses its vessel, in a way.

Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations is a late echo, I think, of the folk music boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. I only vaguely remember that phenomenon, as I was in  the early primary grades at the time, but I do remember the breakout hits like "Walk Right In" by the Rooftop Singers and "Tom Dooley" by the Kingston Trio. There was even a TV show, Hootenanny (and, much later, a mockumentary, A Mighty Wind). Once the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan in early 1964, almost everyone moved on to something else, but "folk" loomed large for a few years.

An odd thing about "folk music" is that, in most countries, attention to folk culture is a marker of romantic-conservative leanings, a slightly perverse impulse to re-create some original purity that supposedly existed before modernity contaminated everything, but in the United States, folk music has long-established connections to progressive politics. This connection goes back to the WPA and Woody Guthrie, I suppose, and the Seeger family (Pete's father, Charles, was both a musicologist and a Marxist), and was certainly still strong in the early 1960s, as folk music was joined at the hip to "protest" music, as in Dylan's 1962-63 output.

Marcus's idea that these "folk" songs are, in some ineffable but discernible way, truly the creations of the folk, not entirely those of individual performers, and that they speak in some real way to our national circumstances, strikes me as participating in that connection between folk music and progressive politics. I am all for it--grateful for it, I will even say.

Robert Duncan, _Poems 1948-1949_

  I CONTINUE TO find out how wrong I was about the shape of Robert Duncan's career prior to The Opening of the Field. He published quite a few collections, it turns out, although with small presses and in small runs. Duncan's Collected Early Poems and Plays, published in 2012 by the University of California Press, runs to hundreds of pages. 

This volume was published by Berkeley Miscellany Editions in, I guess, 1949 or 1950 (it bears no date), printed by the Libertarian Press in Glen Gardner, NJ. It collects the poems Duncan was writing after those gathered in The Years as Catches (see post for August 18). 

Duncan is getting franker, more audacious, in some ways more playful than in his earlier poems. Duncan is more obviously out in these poems, the love poems more plainly addressed to other men, and the language saltier, although I know that mainly thanks to the efforts of a previous reader of the copy I obtained from a local university library.

(By the way, I was a little surprised to find this book in the public stacks, not in special collections.)

For instance, "The Venice Poem" has expurgated lines on pp. 31 and 32, Some prior reader of the copy I read had supplied the missing lines, e.g., "the forlorn c********* is not wonderful." (Written out in the book was a 10-letter vulgarism for one who performs fellatio, a word unprintable in 1949 and even now one that gets flagged by Blogger's vigilant bots.) I thought at first that someone was just taking liberties, but no, a cross-check of "Venice Poem" as published later confirms that the added lines are accurate. Interesting, no?

Even more interesting, the saltier, more audacious Duncan is also a more visionary Duncan. Wings are being stretched and readied for flight. The most obvious sign of this, I thought, was "I Tell of Love," a post-Pound refashioning of Cavalcanti's "Donna mi prega." The presence of Cavalcanti's poem in Pound's Canto XXXVI, in Zukofsky's "A"-9, and here makes me wonder about it being a kind of modernist touchstone--mainly due to Pound's standing, I suppose, but some possibility of modernist-poetry-as-mystery-religion is shimmering here too. 

I would love to see a performance of "A Poet's Masque," with which the volume concludes, but I am not getting my hopes up.

Álvaro Enrigue, _You Dreamed of Empires, trans. Natasha Wimmer

 I WAS A mite concerned, upon commencing this novel, to see it was about the arrival of Cortés and his Spaniards in Tenochtitlan in 1519, Enrigue already having made fictional use of that event in Sudden Death. Why revisit it? Turns out, however, that Enrigue changes things up by narrating mainly from the point of view of the indigenous Mexicans, so You Dreamed of Empires is well worth your time even if you have already read Sudden Death. (If you have not read Sudden Death, you really should.)

The Spanish conquest of Mexico does raise questions. Why did the Aztec empire not simply kill Cortés, enslave his men, and have done with things? My mid-1960s U.S. education suggested the Aztecs were technologically outclassed (horses, gunpowder), superstitious, and disorganized. None of that sounds likely at this point. 

Enrigue's evocation of the encounter sounds truer. The Aztecs did not know quite what to do with the smelly, hairy strangers who had arrived at the capital for several reasons. For one thing, the subject peoples of their empire were oppressed and resentful and looking for an opportunity to overthrow them. For another, their administrative protocols were so elaborate as to hamstring them, procedurally, creating fatal delays. Enrigue has a lot of fun with Tlilpotonqui, cihuacoatl (chief executive) of Tenochtitlan and his anxious efforts to see that the forms are observed--these chapters reminded me of Saint Simon explaining the proprieties of Versailles.

For another--these are likely Enrigue's own inventions--Moctezuma, the emperor, is (a) fascinated by the Spaniards' horses and wants to keep them around long enough to figure out how to use them and (b) is  tripping on mushrooms most of the time. 

So, one could say the barbarians won. Except there is an alternative-history twist at the end that I am still trying to figure out. 

The real stars of the novel, though, are Atotoxtli, Moctezuma's sister and wife, and Malinalli, a captive princess who is Cortés's translator. Their scene together is worthy of Schiller's imagined meeting between Queen Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots.

Tony Tulathimutte, _Rejection_

LAST MONTH, THE New York Times ran an article about "performative feminism," that is, young(ish) men who know their way around the discourse and cultural codes of feminism, but who have acquired these skills mainly in the interest of getting dates. The story, much to my surprise, did not so much as mention Tony Tulathimutte's short story "The Feminist," which is a cringe-inducing portrait of exactly such a character. The story ran in n+1 way back in 2019, and had a lot of readers at the time, so Im not sure why the Times writers did not give it a nod. 

Maybe the omission is weirdly à propos, though, since "The Feminist" is the lead story in this 2024 collection called Rejection, in which every story is about being the one who does not get picked, chosen, elected, noticed, mentioned, etc. The performative feminism strategy of the protagonist of "The Feminist," for instance, backfires spectacularly over and over again, and in the story's final sentence he seems to have drifted into the toxic precincts of incel-dom.

Tulathimutte's skill in presenting these...I guess I have to call them rejects, grim as it is...is so compelling that the book can be hard to stay with. You keep wishing you could tell a character, wait a minute, don't hit "send" on that one, but they always do, with catastrophic results. Part of you wants to quit reading, but there you are, driving slowly past the pileup, rubbernecking.

What I most enjoyed, though, and a good reason to keep going through cringe after cringe, is that the collection has not only thematic coherence, but some surprising internal connections that make it an unconventional kind of novel. Alison, the protagonist of "Pics," may be spending time with the protagonist of "The Feminist" while she tries to get over being  rejected by Neil, and then later winds up having to break loose from Max, the insufferable narrator of "Our Dope Future." Kant, the protagonist of "Ahegao, or the Ballad of Sexual Repression," is the brother of Bee, author of  the epic post that accounts for most of the pages of "Main Character," and the Craig that Bee at one point has to fend off may be the narrator of "The Feminist." The stories add up to a portrait of a generation that grew up online. An unflattering portrait, but, well.

The final text in the book is a publisher's letter to Tulathimutte rejecting Rejection. This letter must be Tulathimutte's own work, since the publisher's greatest objection to Rejection is the inclusion in the book of the rejection letter itself. Not everyone likes this kind of Borgesian metafictional move, but I do. 

Marianne Moore, "Henry James as a Characteristic American"; Elizabeth Bishop, "Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore"

A NICE SIDE benefit of Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting is picking up some excellent suggestions for further reading. Both of these items showed up in her chapter on Moore and Bishop.

I think only Moore could get away with calling the child of wealth and nearly-lifelong expatriate Henry James, Jr., a "characteristic American," but she does. The argument, I think, is that James studied what made Americans American with a singular assiduity and that his longtime residence in Europe and England made a better lab, so to speak, than the USA itself, since American-ness could be better studied in a contrasting environment. 

"Argument" may be too blunt a word, though, since the essay, like many of Moore's poems, is an intricate construction--a monkey puzzle tree?--of quotations from James, mainly from his non-fiction, that is meant more for contemplation than for the drawing of conclusions.

"Henry James as a Characteristic American" was published by Hound & Horn in the issue for April/May 1934, which is right around the time Bishop first met Moore. Bishop, as an undergraduate at Vassar already a great admirer of Moore, likely read it, which is why it comes up in Cohen's chapter. "Efforts of Affection" is Bishop's account of that first meeting and the long friendship that grew from it. 

It's beautiful--graceful, generous, wise, loving. 

Odd and maybe a little sad that it never appeared in Bishop's lifetime. She worked on it over the last ten years of her life, and it seems fully developed to me, but it was not published until 1983, four years after Bishop's death, in Vanity Fair. Did she not think it was quite done? She was famous for holding things back from publication until she absolutely positively thought they were ready. I'm glad someone decided it was worth publishing and that it was included in Bishop's Collected Prose.

Rachel Cohen, _A Chance Meeting: American Encounters_

 A BRILLIANT BUT hard-to-describe book. The original subtitle of 2004 does a better job of suggesting the book's project than that of the 2024 NYRB reprint I read: "Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967." We have something like a group biography (Leon Edel's Bloomsbury: A House of Lions, Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men), but not exactly, because we are talking about a much longer stretch of time (over a century) and the figures do not constitute a movement or a group.

What we get are thirty-six chapters, each what Cohen calls a "double portrait," each presenting an occasion when one well known American writer (or photographer, or composer, or painter) met another: "intertwined lives," as the original subtitle had it. We have chapters, for example, on Gertrude Stein and William James (she studied with him at Harvard), on Mark Twain and Willa Cather (she got to go to his 70th birthday party, which was quite a big bash), on Joseph Cornell and Marianne Moore (two deeply idiosyncratic artists who got along famously).  Some meeting were fortuitous and never repeated (Matthew Brady photographed the eleven-year-old Henry James and his father), some became collaborations (Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes) or lasting friendships (Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore), some went badly, badly wrong (Katherine Anne Porter and Hart Crane).

The book does not have a thesis, exactly. It does not seem to be making an argument. But you nonetheless seem to be watching a kind of tapestry being woven, or a kind of fantastically ornate braiding, the cultural life of a country coming into being as the practitioners of one art or another cross paths, acknowledge each other, strike sparks, and return to their paths. Something, the reader feels, is being intangibly communicated among all of them and passed on from one generation to the next, mysteriously making things cohere.

Not everyone who might be here is here--no Dickinson, no Fitzgerald, no Hemingway--and the figures chosen are mainly people who mostly lived and worked close to New York City. Somehow, the field we are looking out upon still feels broad, even representative. 

The time Cohen invested in this book must have been immense, but all her research is carried lightly, and the prose is as swift as a running brook. A Chance Meeting is one of a kind and a delight.

John Banville, _The Sea_

 JOHN BANVILLE AND J. M. Coetzee occupy adjacent niches in my memory palace of contemporary fiction. They are close in age: Coetzee was born in 1940, Banville in 1945. They both write in English, but neither is from the U.K. or the United States (Banville is Irish, Coetzee South African). Coetzee has won the Nobel Prize, and Banville ought to (methinks). Finally, even though they write in English, they seem much more influenced by the continental masters—Dostoevsky, Mann, Kafka, Musil, Nabokov—than by the English ones. 

The Sea won the Booker Prize back in 2005, and it seems to me his most Proustian novel, saturated in themes of time, place, and memory—not to mention another of Proust’s particular hobbyhorses, social class.

The recently-widowed art historian Max Morden is back in Ireland at the summer holiday spot his family stayed at in his later childhood. Shades of Balbec, but the Mordens stayed in the humbler cottages, while Max can now afford a nice B&B. 

Max spends part of the novel remembering his wife and her relatively early death from cancer, but he spends more time remembering a family, the Graces, that he attached himself to one of his last summers there.

The pubescent Max became erotically obsessed first with the mother of the family, Mrs. Grace,  then with the daughter, Chloe. The really cunning trick of Banville’s first-person narration, though, is that we see that Max’s story is not simply of sexual awakening, but simultaneously one of social aspiration, of getting out of his family’s working class world into the middle class world of the Graces.

More wrenchingly, Max seems to be starting to realize that his marriage, too, might have been not just about sexual attraction, but about getting up-and-out from the world into which he was born. That Chloe may have been his first love but was also a rung on a ladder, a means of ascent—and, terrible to realize, maybe his wife was too.

Alison Bechdel, _Spent_

GRAPHIC AUTO-FICTION, I guess we could say. Alison Bechdel enjoyed breakout success with a graphic memoir, Fun Home, about growing up in a family mortuary business with a closeted dad, a thwarted mom, and two brothers; the book became the source for a successful Broadway musical. The Alison Bechdel of Spent enjoys breakout success with a graphic memoir, Death and Taxidermy, about growing up in a family taxidermy business with a sister; the book becomes the source for a successful television series. Both the actual Bechdel and the Bechdel of Spent have a partner named Holly and live in Vermont; I do not know whether the actual Holly also raises goats. In short, Spent takes place in an alternate universe just a hair to one side of our own.

The political economy of this alternate universe works just like our own. Holly and her goats and Alison and her books have to navigate the same terrain of labor, commodification, exchange, and (unfortunately) exploitation that we do. The chapter titles of Spent are all taken from the chapter titles of Volume I of Marx's Capital: "The Process of Production of Capital," "The Process of Exchange," and so on. I wasn't sure how well this conceit worked, to be honest, but it does emphasize that artists, even though their work is highly specialized, idiosyncratic, and personal, are still workers, just like the rest of us, subject to the same economic forces as the rest of us, even when they are as successful as Bechdel.

The real treat of Spent's alternate universe is that it includes several characters from Bechdel's beloved and much-missed comic, Dykes to Watch Out For: Stuart, Sparrow, Louis, Ginger, and (briefly) Samia. (Not Mo, however--perhaps Mo and Alison being in the same universe would create a cosmic collapse.) They are older--Stuart and Sparrow have a college-age kid--but still they are a wise, funny, and affectionate portrait of the way at least some of us live now. New character Naomi is a welcome addition, and Alison's MAGA-fied Christian sister reveals some surprising dimensions by book's end.

Paul Muldoon, _Joy in Service on Rue Tagore_

 MULDOON'S LATEST, I am happy to confirm, contains plenty of what you are expecting/hoping to find in a volume by Muldoon.

Exuberant play with a variety of closed forms--sonnet, quaternary, pantoum, some you don't know the names of, some that probably do not even have names yet? Check.

Whirligig simultaneous development in the same poem of deeply unlike subject matter, like the fall of the Roman Republic and  the rise of glam rock? Check.

Outrageous rhymes (e.g., Aristotle's star pupil / Mott the Hoople)? Check. Several checks.

Due honor to those to whom honor is due? Check! ("Near Izium," on Ukraine's valiant self-defense.)

Oh, and of course, the long final poem, check, but moreover this one--"The Castle of Perseverance"--can stand beside "Yarrow" as one of Muldoon's most moving and vulnerable poems. 

And there's also the things you were not expecting but are happy to find: a couple of surprisingly moving Christmas poems ("Nativity, 2020" and "Whilst the Ox and Ass") and a convincing, cliché-less acknowledgement of one's own mortality ("The MRI"). 

Like the Union veteran in the Winslow Homer painting on the book's cover, swinging his scythe, Muldoon is still out there after all these years, gathering the harvest.

Mário de Andrade, _Mácunaíma: The Hero with No Character_, trans. Katrina Dodson

 ...WHAT THE heck is this? It's almost one hundred years old, for one thing, first published in Brazil in 1928. The main character, Mácunaíma, is a folklore figure, an infinitely resourceful trickster who outsmarts every opponent and sleeps with everyone's girlfriend while also being capable of feats of strength--so, maybe Br'er Rabbit plus John Henry plus Pecos Bill? Except that he at one point takes off for São Paolo and masters the accelerated, mechanized, bristling with modernity urban environment as thoroughly as he mastered the Amazonian forest and the backlands. 

Translator Dodson's afterword mentions Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and the Tropicália movement of late 1960s Brazil (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes), and both comparisons make sense: traditional material laced with the latest and most electrifying modernist concoctions, Paul Bunyan on LSD. Start with stories from the indigenous peoples living by the Amazon, stir in some of the traditional wisdom of the enslaved African peoples who slipped off to start their own settlements in the forest, top liberally with heteroglossia of Finnegans Wake, and serve. 

Dodson also mentions Rabelais--right about that too, the same erudite sending-up of erudition, the same blowing up of literary decorum, the same feeling that these characters are much, much larger, in every way, than we are.

I suspect that there are a good many expressions in Andrade's Portuguese that just do not go easily into English, leading Dodson to creaky colloquialisms ("pizzazz") that show up on the pages like leaky, wrinkled balloons. What are you going to do? Props to her for going ahead and getting it done (and props to New Directions for publishing it). What must it have been like to go from Clarice Lispector to this?

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 1: Prodigy in the Making

 THIS NEW BIOGRAPHY is as good as the reviews are saying it is, but with notes and index it does clock in at just over a thousand pages, and knowing myself as I do, I expect it will take me the better part of a year to finish. That being the case, it seemed better to post my notes on it section by section, rather than waiting until I have finished the whole book. This way, the details are relatively fresh in my mind.

The main outline of Buckley's career is relatively familiar stuff, given how famous he was, but Tanenhaus has added a wealth of detail.

(1) I already knew, for instance, that Buckley grew up wealthy and privileged in Connecticut with a great clan of siblings. What I did not know was that even though the Buckley children had the usual horses and private schools and extensive travel associated with their class, the family's devout Catholicism made them a bit apart, a bit of an "other." 

Tanenhaus conjures up the Buckley family childhood as a little bit Swallows and Amazons, a little bit Mitford sisters: a world of its own, with rivalries, private jokes, keen enthusiasms. Founded in privilege, yes, but also astonishingly self-sufficient psychologically and emotionally. Also surprisingly well-versed in the Spanish language and Mexican culture (The father had made his fortune in Mexican and Venezuelan oil.)

(2) Young Bill's first political passion was America First and Charles Lindbergh, the anti-intervention movement that was gathering momentum in 1940 and 1941 but evaporated after Pearl Harbor. His father, William F. Buckley, Sr., was passionately (and unsurprisingly) opposed to the New Deal and also, it turns out, dead set against American involvement in World War II. Son Bill, a teenager, enthusiastically joined the cause, taking the America First side in debates at his school (Millbrook Academy). 

(3) Buckley always seemed to have a Southern Agrarian, I'll-take-my-stand streak to his conservatism, and it turns out he came by it honestly: besides the big place in Connecticut, the family had a big place in South Carolina. Tanenhaus reports that the Buckleys treated the mainly Black household help in South Carolina well, but the family shared their white southern neighbors' opinions on the rightness of segregation.

(4) Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale, was written the year after he graduated and counts as an early example of one of the enduring American literary genres: the right hook aimed at academia (later practiced with great success by Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and Christopher Rufo).

(5) Again and again, one's jaw drops at Tanenhaus's spadework. For instance: World War II was still on when Buckley finished high school, and he went into the army. His unit was scheduled to go to the Pacific, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war to a quick close, so Buckley spent his stint doing administrative work in Texas. Tanenhaus found out exactly what he did and how well he did it. I'd call that going the extra mile. He doesn't spend a long time describing Buckley's duties and does not attempt to overstate their importance...but he does actually have the goods. Every page testifies to just how thorough his research was.

David Trinidad, _Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems_, (1 of 2)

 TRINIDAD CAME UP with an ingenious way of organizing the book. Most "new and selected" volumes tuck the new poems at the end, but Trinidad put them in front and gave that section its own title, "Black Telephone." The section is about the length of a generous collection (120 pages), so I would not be annoyed to plunk down $19 for this even had I already purchased the volumes from which the "selected poems" were selected.

I don't know Trinidad's work well enough to say whether "The Black Telephone" is a staying-in-the-wheelhouse collection or a radical-departure collection, but I will say that (a) Trinidad's work is distinctive and (b) I like it. He combines elements I never would have expected to be combined: a passion for Sylvia Plath with a passion for Patty Duke, for instance, or thirty-four haiku based on episodes of the 1960s television series Peyton Place, or a list in the style of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book that includes "The voice of Dusty Springfield." . Much of the work is based on and quite candid about his own memories and experiences ("Sheena Is a Punk Rocker," "AIDS Series"), but we also get formal experiments like an idiosyncratic erasure poem based entirely on phrases Sylvia Plath underlined in her copy of Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night.

Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Sharon Tate appear, as does Dick Fisk (a gay porn star); steering by those stars, we know we are in queer baby boomer male waters, but there are more than enough surprises to keep things interesting. Had James Schuyler been born thirty years later than he actually was, he might have written not unlike Trinidad.

Timothy Egan, _A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them_

READING THE WORST Hard Time, Egan's book about the Dust Bowl, was a personal landmark for me; my parents grew up in the Dust Bowl, and Egan's book gave me a clearer idea than I had ever gotten before, even from their own stories, of what their childhood had been like.

This book did not have the same personal relevance for me, but considering it was about events of about one hundred years ago, it felt painfully relevant to our moment. 

The Ku Klux Klan, the terrorist vigilante outfit of the Reconstruction years, was revived in 1915 in the wake of D. W. Griffiths' popular and influential film Birth of a Nation (which, among other things, celebrated the exploits of the Reconstruction era Klan). By the mid-1920s, stoked by a variety of anxieties about "others" (Blacks moving north, Jews, Catholics, women's suffrage), membership had exploded, and the Klan had started to flex some serious political muscle.

Egan focuses on Indiana, where a particularly energetic Klan organizer and demagogue, D. C. Stephenson, had such a talent for provoking and channeling the fear and ressentiment of midwestern white Protestants that Indiana's local law enforcement, municipal government, courts, and state legislature were all crawling with Klan members. Stephenson saw himself, with some justification, as the most powerful man in the state. He could even tell the governor what to do.

Besides being a talented organizer and effective speaker, Stephenson was a serial rapist and sexual abuser, crimes he could commit with a degree of impunity, given his connections. However, Madge Oberholtzer, a woman he kidnapped, raped, and assaulted, lived long enough (despite poisoning herself in desperation) to  tell her story. Her parents, friends, and lawyers were foresighted enough to have her deathbed testimony witnessed and notarized, and that testimony was ruled admissible in the prosecution of Stephenson for what he did to her. In a verdict that surprised the whole country, he was convicted.

Because Egan focuses so closely on two characters, Stephenson the Caligula wannabe and the brave though grievously injured Madge, I kept thinking what a natural candidate for a film or television series A Fever in the Heartland is. I was thinking even more, though, of how much D. C. Stephenson--arrogant, entitled, vicious, dishonest, drunk on his own power, seemingly beyond the reach of the law--reminded me  of a certain DJT, and what a sweet and fitting thing it was that justice at long last caught up with him.

Robert Duncan, _The Years as Catches_

I SPOTTED THIS on a table at Third Mind Books in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and thought--what have we here? I had always thought (a) that The Opening of the Field (1960) was Duncan's first collection of poetry and (b) that the five collections of his poems I had read were the whole shebang. Wrong on both counts, as I should have guessed, since Duncan was 41 when Opening of the Field came out and was obviously no beginner.

The Years as Catches was published by Oyez, located in Berkeley,  in 1966, and reprints poems that appeared in Heavenly City, Earthly City, published by Bern Porter in 1947, and Selected Poems, published by City Lights in 1959.  These count as rare books now--Heavenly City, Earthly City is available on Abebooks at prices ranging from $100 to $2500 and Selected Poems (Pocket Poets #10) for from $40 to $80, so I feel reconciled to having spent $40 on this, even though I could have purchased it for half that on Abebooks. Live and learn, or so one hopes.

I was hoping to glean some information about Duncan's decision to reprint these earlier poems from Lisa Jarnot's biography, but was thwarted by there being no entry for either  The Years as Catches or Heavenly City, Earthly City in her index. This may just be a question of careless indexing, but what a pain in the tush.

The poems? Right, the poems. My main impression was that Duncan, in  these poems, had not yet started sounding like Duncan. He had obviously been reading Eliot and Pound and like them liked to stir in some 16th and 17th century vocabulary and sentence construction when writing of contemporary phenomena: 

                     Already ere I wake

I hear that sound. Shout & fill the air with sirens.

No sound that you can make for war or human misery

can meet that sound nor cover it. No waste you wrake

upon the body, no ravaging of mind nor spirit can

make deaf nor blind nor insensate.

That is from the poem "The Years as Catches," written in 1942 and addressing (I think) the disaster of the Second World War in the vein of an older poetic idiom, as we might say Eliot's "East Coker" does. 

When we get to the 1946 poems, though, the poems start sounding less like Duncan's models and more like Duncan, especially those in which he is open about his sexuality. The  love poem "Heavenly City, Earthly City" in particular, while sounding a little like Shelley at times (it reminded me of "Epipsychidion"), looks forward to Duncan's distinctive marriage of a Romantic idiom to a Modernist one.

Nettie Jones, _Fish Tales_

THIS 1983 NOVEL was recently re-published, which is how I heard of it. It's a crazy ride. 

The narrator is a woman named Lewis, and as that detail suggests, fluidity prevails. The novel is set in Detroit and New York City, but we seem to be not so much moving between the two settings as to be now in one and now the other, without any explicit indication that Lewis has relocated. Similarly, although the novel seems set in the mid-to-late 1970s and occasionally the early 1980s, the narrative does not seem to be in strict chronological order, as mercurial in time as it is in space.. Sometimes we learn this our that character's eye color or skin tone, but their ethnicities generally go unspecified, and we rarely get anyone's last name. The characters' genders and sexualities likewise wander where they will, and the erotic is never far away.

In other words, for a forty-year-old novel, it feels very congruent with contemporary sensibilities. To me, it seemed comparable to Michelle Tea or Dodie Bellamy, but wilder, more operatic, with a sort of 1970s anarchic streak reminiscent of writers like Robert Coover, John Barth or Donald Barthelme. 

Part Two ("Connect"), about Lewis's relationship with a brilliant and well-connected quadriplegic named Brook, feels somewhat more linear than Part One ("Disconnect'), but it's still wild, an emotional roller coaster if you can imagine a roller coaster that operates in five or six dimensions rather than the usual three.

Olga Tokarczuk, _Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead_

 I GUESS THIS is a murder mystery...that is, some people are murdered, and we find out near the end of the novel who murdered them...fortunately, though, we the readers get a lot more than the mystery's solution to think about--to wit, we get the novel's narrator and main character, Janina Duszejko, whose voice and presence Tokarczuk conjures up with preternatural salience and clarity. 

Janina--whose name it feels awkward to use, since she herself does not much care for it--has a variety of appealing traits: self-sufficiency, an appreciation of William Blake (whose Marriage of Heaven and Hell the title quotes), affinity with the natural world, and a willingness to call authority to account.

One expects Big Ideas and Grand Themes when reading a Nobel laureate. I'm not sure this novel has any big ideas, but it certainly speaks to the hope that there is some way to overturn patriarchy and its arrogance and entitlement. For 2025, that feels like plenty. 

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, _The Passenger_, trans. Philip Boehm

 BOSCHWITZ, A GERMAN Jew, got out of Germany in 1935, not long after the Nuremberg laws were passed, so he did not experience firsthand the post-Kristallnacht weeks of roundups, camps, and desperate attempts to flee in late 1938...this novel is so vivid and terrifying, though, that one would swear he did experience them. 

The novel's main character, Otto Silbermann, is a successful German Jewish businessman, a World War I combat vet, and married to a gentile, but none of that is doing him the least bit of good as he tries again and again to get out of Germany before he is hauled off. He takes train after train, back and forth across the country, clutching a briefcase full of cash, not knowing whom he can trust or which encounter with a petty official might be his last as a free man. He even attempts to cross into Belgium on foot, at night...to no avail.

The modifier "Kafkaesque" keeps coming to mind, given the central European setting, the nightmare-like circularity and repetition, and the pervasive hostility and suspicion Silbermann has to navigate around. But then one recalls it's Germany, it's 1938, and there is nothing either fantastical or allegorical about the accelerating dwindling of Silbermann's chances of getting out.

The novel's most terrifying aspect is that the people Silbermann deals with gradually stop seeing him as really human at all. He is becoming Agamben's homo sacer. 

Apparently the novel was published in the USA as early as 1939 and in the UK in 1940 without attracting much attention. Hats off to all involved in its rediscovery and republication.

Eduardo Galeano, _Memory of Fire: Faces and Masks_, trans. Cedric Belfrage

TRYING TO KEEP up my South American literature momentum after Zama and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, I picked up the second volume of Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy, which I had been vaguely intending to get to ever since I read the first volume back in...well, let's just say it was a while ago.

I'm not sure the English translation of Memory of Fire is still in print, although apparently digital versions are available. It's brilliant. Imagine a history of the Western Hemisphere, focusing mainly on Central and South America, in three volumes, each volume a thousand close-printed pages. Then imagine each of those 1000-page volumes trimmed down to its most vivid vignettes, personalities, and episodes, the details and events likeliest to stick in your memory, so you have three books of about 250 pages apiece. That would give you something like Memory of Fire. 

The first volume, Genesis, covers the Americas from their pre-historic dawn up to the end of the 17th century, and the second, Faces and Masks, covers the 18th and 19th centuries. Galeano adopts a leftist perspective, so the 18th century is mainly about ruthless colonial exploitation and enslavement, the 19th century mainly about  efforts at independence and liberation that end up largely benefitting the better-off, but he generally avoids being explicitly political, instead letting the stories speak for themselves. Therein lies the genius of the book. Brilliant vignette follows brilliant vignette without any big conclusions being drawn or morals pointed out, but the overall message is impossible to miss.

Along the way we meet quite a few figures comparable to di Benedetto's Zama and Machado de Assis's Brás Cubas, parasites parading their entitlement. We also meet some of the people who were pushing back and working for change--and I expect we will meet a few more of those in the trilogy's third volume, on the 20th century: Century of the Wind.

Karen L. King, _The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle_

A LARGE MAJORITY of scholars think that the Mary of the Gnostic text "Gospel of Mary" is Mary Magdalene, but it is not at all likely that Mary Magdalene herself or anyone who knew her firsthand wrote the "Gospel of Mary." Insofar as the title of King's 2003 book implies she is writing about the actual woman mentioned in the Gospels, it's a little misleading; her book is actually a thorough analysis of the 2nd century "Gospel of Mary." It's a fascinating and illuminating analysis, however.

The book includes a translation of as much of the original text as survives (most of it is missing), a careful, cross-referenced analysis of the text's relationships to other Gnostic texts and to the New Testament, and a historical argument about what the text reveals about the early Christian church.

"The portrait of Mary as a repentant prostitute is pure fiction with no historical foundation whatsoever," King rightly emphasizes--as Susan Haskins and Philip Almond explained, that whole story was a bit of hermeneutical acrobatics by Pope Gregory I. When King goes on to say "The historical Mary of Magdala was a prominent Jewish follower of Jesus, a visionary, and a leading apostle," though, I was pulled up short by the last two nouns. 

The Mary of "Gospel of Mary" is certainly a visionary and a leading apostle, but to say the historical Mary was those things is to float presumptions as airy as Gregory's. One can imagine that some oral tradition of the historical Mary lies behind some of the details of "Gospel of Mary," perhaps. But we have no actual evidence of such an oral tradition. King or an editor should have tapped the brakes here, I think. 

But King's argument in Part III--that the Christian church of the first few generations was much less unanimous, much more roiled by controversy, than the usual narrative about those beginnings suggests--is utterly convincing. The grouching in 1 Timothy about keeping women from preaching only makes sense if we grant that women actually were preaching, King argues, and "Gospel of Mary" probably does give us an idea of what that preaching may have been like.

Will Hermes, _Lou Reed: The King of New York_

HUMORIST WILL CUPPY once wrote, "Great writers should be read, not met." (He made the observation in the course of a piece on Frederick the Great and the lengthy, increasingly awkward visit Voltaire made to the Prussian court.) 

Lou Reed was one of the greatest American songwriters of the post-WW II era, I would say, surpassed only by Dylan (n.b., Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and Neil Young are Canadian), but he was perhaps better listened to than met. He could be curt, dismissive, insulting, and downright cruel to friends, family, partners, and bandmates, to say nothing of journalists, whom he often treated to unalloyed vituperation.

Hermes is eloquent and insightful about the power of Reed's writing and musicianship. What we now call indie rock would probably not exist, or would be unrecognizably different, without what Reed wrote and performed in the Velvet Underground. Hermes is also informative about and properly appreciative of the highlights of Reed's solo years: Transformer,  The Blue Mask, New York, Magic and Loss. Hermes even plucks a true gem, "Junior Dad," from sprawl of Lulu, Reed's widely-dismissed collaboration with Metallica. Hermes also made me resolve to listen to Metal Machine Music all the way through from beginning to end at least once, although I have yet to follow up on that resolution.

In between explications of Reed's music, though, we get story after story of Reed being mostly unpleasant to mostly everyone. These stories do not diminish Reed's accomplishments as a songwriter, but they do leave a sour aftertaste. In the latter part of Reed's life, at least, his marriage to Laurie Anderson and the gradually growing public recognition of his greatness make for a happy-enough ending.

The book's highlight, I think, is the digging Hermes did into the pre-Warhol years, Reed as a high school rocker and a protégé of Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse. Reed was not exactly a nicer person in those days, and his great accomplishments were still in the future, but Hermes does a brilliant job of conjuring up for readers the genius-in-embryo that Reed was.

Susan Haskins, _Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor_

 HASKINS'S 1993 BOOK surveys the same topics covered in the more recent book by Philip Almond (see post for June 10)--Mary Magdalene in the gospels and the gnostic gospels, Gregory the Great's creation of the "composite Magdalene," the astonishingly inventive medieval legends about her, her becoming the icon of penitence--but in a great deal more detail.

Almond's book is brisker and a little livelier, but if you are in the mood for a really deep dive, go with Haskins. Haskins has an extensive background in art history, so she is particularly well informed on the long and ever-evolving iconological traditions around the Magdalene.

Her book was published ten years before Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, so there is just a glancing reference or two to the conspiracy theory that Mary and Jesus had children and that their descendants were the kings of France. The less said about that, the better, methinks.

Is Mary Magdalene having a moment? The New Yorker ran an interesting article by Eliza Griswold on her in April, and the Urban Abbey, a Methodist-affiliated congregation in Omaha, had a program called "Six Weeks with Mary Magdalene." I myself hope she is, and about time, too.

Isabella Hammad, _Enter Ghost_

 THE NOVEL'S MAIN character, Sonia Nasir, is a professional actor of Palestinian origins who has mainly lived and worked in the United Kingdom. As the novel opens, she is paying an extended visit to an older sister who as an adult chose to live in Israel ("the "old country," so to speak, though under occupation). Sonia feels her sister does not entirely approve of Sonia's decision to stay in the west.  Although it is not entirely clear how well-founded those feelings are, Sonia's need to prove herself true to the cause makes itself felt through the whole novel.

Through old connections, Sonia has a chance first to assist in the rehearsals of and then perform in an Arab-language production of Hamlet, to be staged in the West Bank. (Hamlet, I learned a few years ago, has often been adapted for performance in a Palestinian setting, as I wrote about in the post for December 21, 2020.) 

The novel has several interesting storylines. We have Sonia and her family, both immediate and extended, working out their relations to each other and their family's past. We also get several short but vivid scenes of how Palestinians live under Israeli rule, both in Israel and in the West Bank. Most entertainingly, we have behind-the-scenes glimpses of theater professionals getting an ambitious production together, including dealing with a variety of surprises that have to be managed.

I could have used a little more information about the director's vision of the production. Hamlet has a variety of themes that might speak to the Palestinian situation--usurpation, generational conflict, the weight of the past, the difficulty of moving from thought to deed--so I was wondering which of them this production moved to the foreground. Even in the absence of that info, though,  the opening night makes for a strong closing scene for the novel, and Hammad's writing was strong throughout.

John Calvin, _Writings on Pastoral Piety_, ed. Elsie Anne McKee, trans. Elsie Anne McKee and others

CALVIN'S BEST KNOWN writings (e.g., The Institutes of Christian Religion) are mainly those of a theologian arguing with other theologians and can be a bear to tackle. McKee switches things up by focusing on writings in which Calvin is talking to lay people, members of his church or his movement, about being a Christian and living as a Christian: we get sermons, some prayers, some explanations of the liturgy, excerpts from books he wrote expressly for lay people, and some letters. 

He still sounds learned and often stern, but he has taken the tone down a notch here, and he is not trying to lay waste to other people's arguments, so we get a different image of the man.

Still, he leans in hard on the basic tenets of reformed Christianity. You (and all of us) are one sorry case. (Calvin's near-perfect contempt for his own species counts for much in the general idea of him.) Nothing you could possibly do for yourself can save you. Nor can any church or sacrament save you. Only God can save you--and God did, through the agency of Jesus Christ. That's the whole story. Grasp that and hold on to it.

We can still get together in a community, i.e., a church, for mutual support and encouragement, and we can perform the sacraments recorded in the gospels (communion and baptism), but Calvin emphasizes that the bread and wine are but the "mirror" or "likeness" or "visible sign" of the atonement, not the atonement itself, as baptism is but the visible sign of your redemption, not the redemption itself. The sacraments, the pastors' sermons, the ceremonies of worship all keep us focused on the main idea, but they are means to an end, never an end in themselves. 

As for pilgrimages to saints' relics, or counting repeated prayers, or venerating statues--kick all that back down to Rome where it belongs.  None of that claptrap saves you. The priest and his sacraments don't save you. The church doesn't save you. Jesus saved you, and no matter what you do, you're going to stay saved, whatever the priest and the church say.

One item that particularly struck me is Calvin's unpacking of the Lord's Prayer, which he pointedly reminds us is not designed to be a prayer said by an individual for his or her own sake, but a prayer said by all of us for all of our sakes.

The final and for me most memorable item: a letter written to several women who had been arrested for worshipping as Protestants. In France, this worship made them heretics, who could be burned at the stake (as one of them was). I can't imagine what I would have been able to write to people about to be burned at the stake for belonging to a movement of which I was a leader. Calvin came up with something that honored them and might have consoled them. He seems like a mensch.

Bennett Sims, _White Dialogues_

 I AM GOING to go out on a limb and say Sims is my favorite young US fiction writer. I am guessing he is still under 40, though perhaps not by much...oh, let's just say he is my favorite millennial US fiction writer.

I say that having read only this, his first collection of short fiction, and his 2013 novel, A Questionable Shape (see post for March 24, 2020), but count me a devotee.

Sims reminds me of David Foster Wallace (with whom he studied at Pomona, it turns out) in his profoundly faithful representations of the tortuous paths of over-thinking--or we might call it an inability to stop thinking, to hit on a conclusion you are willing to act upon. (His novel is based on the story of Hamlet, the greatest over-thinker of them all.)

The collection's brilliant opening story, "House-sitting," about a caretaker of a cabin out in the woods, "Za," about a woman trying to figure what tone to hit and how to hit it in an email to a recently-won boyfriend who is traveling abroad, and "Radical Closure," about a person trying to pick the best spot to write, all track consciousnesses trying to solve problems that grow more insoluble the longer they try to solve them, each contemplated solution blossoming fractal-fashion into new problems.

Crucially, all three of these centers of narrative consciousness are on their own, without a trusted friend to say, "Okay, just stop. Stop now." A Questionable Shape was, among other things, about whether being a friend means supporting a friend in ever more arcane pursuits or instead trying to pull them out of a downward spiral. The characters in these stories (with a notable exception, "Two Guys Watching Cujo on Mute") have no such friend, and so wander deeper and deeper into the labyrinth.

One center of narrative consciousness, that of closing story "White Dialogues," is part of a crowd--he is attending a lecture on Vertigo--but as the lecture is being held by a film studies department in which he has recently been denied tenure, he is as alone in a crowd as one can be, and he gets deeper into a darker labyrinth than anyone else in the collection.

Giorgio Agamben, _Hölderlin's Madness: Chronicle of a Dwelling Life, 1806-1843_, trans. Alta L. Price

A FRIEND'S RECOMMENDATION of this book is what led me last fall to a rabbit hole that turned into an immense underground cavern. If I am going to read a book about Hölderlin, I thought, I should read some poems by Hölderlin, and that led to reading commentaries on Hölderlin by Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Lacoue-Labarthe, and I am no longer sure who else in the following months, until I finally felt as ready as I was going to be to pick up the Agamben book.

As the subtitle indicates, the larger part of the book--216 of 329 pages--is a year-by-year account of the time when Hölderlin, accounted by his friends and family to be insane and provided with a caretaker, was living a very quiet, retired life in a small town. The chronology includes a few of the poems he wrote in that time, lots of letters and journal entries by people who visited him, and even a few invoices from the caretaker about routine expenses like shoe repair and wine. 

The book also has a prologue (70-some pages) and an epilogue (30-some pages) which sketch out a thesis, of sorts--although calling it a "thesis" implies some rigorous argument is being made, when Agamben is more floating a possibility, making a suggestion. 

The suggestion is that Hölderlin's madness might have been more a so-called "madness," that is, not a descent into unreason or delusion or catatonia but a kind of withdrawal, abdication, renunciation, a stepping away, a letting go. Not that Agaimben is saying Hölderlin was putting on an act or trying to pass for something he wasn't; he wasn't feigning madness á la Hamlet (if Hamlet was feigning). Rather, he had found a way of radically simplifying his life.

As Agamben sees it, Hölderlin was dropping the tragic mode for the comic one, relinquishing the ambition to be a prophet, a soothsayer--to utter Germany into being the way (the Romantics thought) Homer had uttered Greece into being. Instead, he was writing short, unfussy poems about the turning of the seasons and improvising on the piano.

He could be right. Agamben's version of Hölderlin's last three decades reminds me of the Bob Dylan of 1968-1973. A whole generation was hanging on Dylan's every word, scrutinizing his songs for clues about the secrets of existence, but it's as if Dylan decided, "fuck it, I'm going to cross everyone up and just write country songs until people get over this obsession with me." Hölderlin made the same move and then stuck with it, played it out.

Sam Riviere, _Conflicted Copy_

AS IN RIVIERE'S earlier volume Kim Kardashian's Marriage, all the titles in this collection come from a process of matching all the words in one list (after, darken, dead, old, pink, safe, and true) with all the words in another list (colours, dogs, fame, mode, PDF, poem, and souls), yielding such titles as "Dead Mode" and "Safe Souls." 

Absent from this volume, however, are the pairings that had already served as titles for books by Riviere: his novel Dead Souls, his re-working of Martial After Fame, and four of him pamphlets ("True Colours," "Darken PDF," "Old Poem," and "Pink Dogs"). 

As with his earlier collections, Riviere's method here is to work with material generated by automated digital processes, in this instance GPT-2. All the poems--texts?--were composed in December 2020 and January 2021, thus with software several steps behind what is available now, but they all do have that uncanny AI sheen.

I wonder if AI is getting less useful for poetry as it gets better for prose. That is, the more AI-generated texts achieve the flat neutrality of workaday prose, the less they have the happy surprises and accidents that (once upon a time) gave some digitally-created texts a certain freshness and originality, a saving touch of weirdness. 

The poems in Conflicted Copy rarely sound weird. They sound like AI-texts with their wordy constructions, gratuitous modifiers, wobbly qualifications, and superficial clarity occluding a profound vagueness. "I have always been impressed by people who / manage to maintain relationships beyond the / normal bounds of traditional marriage." They sound, that is to say, like a lot of the place-filler text that shows up in packaging, advertising, instructions, junk mail... almost everywhere you look.

As I kept reading, though, there was a poignance, or a melancholy, some ineffable stunted beauty to these poems. Sometimes the sheer baldness of utilitarian prose lends it a kind of grace, as if we can see hidden with it the luminous, memorable prose it was hoping to be. This is the secret of some of Gary Lutz's and George Saunders's stories, I'd say, and of Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, and Katie Degentesh's The Anger Scale.

Whether the poems in Conflicted Copy have this grace because of some tailoring Riviere has done, or because they just happened to have it, I don't know. In fact, it all may be in my own readerly response, my own imagination. But there is something affecting in these poems' very inability to be affecting.

_Pistis Sophia_, ed. Carl Schmidt, trans. Violet MacDermot

 A GNOSTIC TEXT, written in Coptic and likely translated from Greek, but not from the the famous Nag Hammadi haul. A western collector got hold of it way back in 1773. How it survived to that point despite the animosity towards the Gnostics no one knows, but is likely an interesting story..

Compared to the Nag Hammadi texts, it's quite long--hundreds of pages in this edition. The title might translate "Faith Wisdom," or "Wisdom's Faith," or some variation along those lines.

In the text, Jesus is in a long conversation with his disciples (including Mary his mother, Mary Magdalene, and Martha) explaining what he saw in the other realm before he rose from the dead. 

If I followed this exposition correctly--and I am not at all sure that I did--some powerful but rebellious element of the great one-ness broke away and created the material world, hoping to be worshipped as creator by that world. The rebellious element is called Authades in some parts of the text, but in some other parts is Sabaoth  the Adamas. He is keeping a number of other beings (also his creations, perhaps) in thrall, including Sophia (that is, Wisdom). But Jesus suggests Sophia will be able to free herself and return to the great one-ness.

And so will the disciples, if they straighten up and live right rather than indulging their material bodies. 

Jesus, I think, acts as an intermediary between Authades' unfortunate creations (and the creations of his creations, which would include human beings) and  the great one-ness. Jesus can show us the way to return to  the great immaterial one-ness, if we shake off our illusions (or take the red pill, I guess).

In a way, in this scenario, God the Creator is actually a breakaway Lucifer figure who is hoping we will believe he is the ultimate reality, and has suborned Wisdom herself to that end...so as to gaslight us all, shall we say. But Jesus is revealing the truth about him so we can free ourselves from his illusions and return to our true home, the great one-ness.

I kept wondering--did William Blake somehow get a hold of this?

Also of note: Mary Magdalene is obviously the top student in the class. Whenever Jesus poses a question, she has the right answer immediately, and Jesus always congratulates her on getting things right. Peter complains at a couple of points that the women are getting to do all the talking, so Jesus lets him get a couple of answers in, but the overall message is clear: Mary Magdalene is the one who really gets it.

James Shea, _Last Day of My Face_, 2 of 2

 MY EARLIER POST on James Shea's new book was about how the "I" of the poet often seems there-but-not-exactly-there in the poems--glimpsed in the reader's peripheral vision, we might say, but vanishing when looked at directly. The passage in Eliot's The Waste Land that begins "Who is that third who walks always beside you?" comes to mind.

But can one write a long poem on these principles? A long poem foregrounds the poem-ness of the poem, it seems fair to say, inclining the reader to pay more attention to its making: to the poem's structure, its patterns, its through-lines, and its suggestions of narrative. And, of course, whenever you are thinking of the poem as a made thing, you are also thinking about its maker. So, to use the same example, even in a long poem as disjunctive and fragmented as The Waste Land, we start piecing together a story or looking for a confession.

Last Day of my Face ends with a longer poem (nine sections, fourteen poems), and yes, I did look for a story or a confession, but the poem seemed to have anticipated such readings and to be playing a game with them. Take its title, for starters: "Failed Self-Portrait." So, yes, the poem portrays its maker...but no, it does not look much like him.

There is an "I" here, also a "you" with whom "I" seems to have been intimately connected ("I" and "you" break up in section 7), but the outlines of the "I" slide and shimmy, not quite staying in one place long enough for us to get a fix. In section 9, "I" apologizes for their indeterminacy with a telling nod to Robert Duncan:

                                             Often

I am not permitted to return to a meadow.

If the depth of acknowledgement

of one's failings measures success,

then I am winning in the oddest way.

It's not easy to understand silence,

to gather the ice cream in the morning.

Life's a long self-introduction that ends

abruptly.

Do not feel too bad about not quite understanding who I am, the speaker seems to say--I am still trying to get there myself--and succeeding, moreover, in the oddest possible way. And that is exactly where I was, after reading "Failed Self-Portrait" three times in a row--convinced that, in the oddest possible way, the poem succeeds.

Did I also look for a story? Yes, I did, and found myself wondering if the "I" was not the same person throughout the poem. That is, might the "I" of part 3 be the "you" of part 2? Or, perhaps, of several sections? Is there a dialogue going on? This is all, I admit, a retro-fit based on the breakup in section 7, and somewhat on the "I" of part 3 mentioning wearing a necklace while the "I" of part 5 mentions once having been a boy. But it works...in a way...almost.

The moment in "Failed Self-Portrait" that most convinces me of its success, though, comes toward the end of part 5:

Oh,

to

write

a

moderately

long

sentence

that

begins

in

my

mind

and

ends

in

yours.

James Shea, _Last Day of My Face_ (1 of 2)

 JAMES SHEA'S THIRD collection includes a poem, "That's That," about the word "that." It's short, so here is the whole poem:

Certain words I dislike.

Ooze. Lozenge. Other words

I love. Katydid. Bumblebee.

Take that, for instance,

how it comes fat from the mouth,

nowhere to elide it (massage it).

It's a pronoun (that's what I like)

a conjunction (that I might love),

an adverb (that much),

an adjective (that word

sounds like what it stands for:

is-ness). This is quiet,

less of a claim. I defer

to the sure sense of things.

That's how I approach catastrophe.

It seems to me that this poem provides a key, of sorts,  to Shea's poetry. 

For one thing, he likes echoes; another poem is titled "A Void's Void," and the collection has lines like "wind / enters every window" and "a shout from a field / very far afield." 

More crucial, I think, is the difference between "that" and "this." I would concede that "this" is quieter, "less of a claim," as Shea puts it, but "this" also often indicates proximity, while "that" suggests a certain amount of distance. Suppose we re about to enjoy a picnic at the park. When I say, "Let's not take this table, let's go over to that one," I am probably recommending we pick a table that is farther away than the one right at hand. When my grandson says, "I don't want to wear this hat, I want to wear that one," he is declining to wear the hat I have just handed him, preferring one still up on the shelf. 

Similarly, Shea's poems are less likely to say "look at this" than they are to say "look at that." In some subtle way, they gesture away from themselves to something a bit farther off.

I saw the streetlight turn on from my bedroom window,

it was dusk, the sun behind the hills still casting

a white glow against the remnants of a backlit sky,

like the sky in Magritte's painting of men falling anonymously [....]

A lot of poems, I submit, would stick quite closely to that "I" in the bedroom. Shea's poem casts out to the horizon, then for a painting even farther away (Houston, if you're curious). The difference between "look at this" and "look at that" is quite a bit like the difference between "look here" and "look there," and the above lines are a good example of how a Shea poem will gravitate towards "look there."

There are a good many windows in Last Day of My Face, and that may be a sort of key as well. Sometimes the poems almost seem to want to vanish, to become the windowpane that one does not notice because one is focused on the object beyond it. This is not a typical move in English language poetry; what one takes away from "Ode to a Nightingale" is not the nightingale, and "The Snow Man" does not try to make you see the snow man. Since Romanticism, poems tend to be, sooner or later, about the poet.

But not always. Lorine Niedecker's poetry has an effect a bit like Shea's, as does some of George Oppen's. Shea has spent a lot of time with Chinese and Japanese poetry, and that too may be making a difference.  The poems are not ego-less, exactly--first person singular pronouns do crop up--but somehow the objective that-out-there outweighs the subjective this-in-here. 

Let's look again at the last line of "That's That": "That's how I approach catastrophe." Several of the poems in Last Day of My Face do feel like they are approaching catastrophe, upheaval, loss--"Fresh Report," "Recovery Time," "Saccade"--and they all do "defer / to the sure sense of things," as calm as the two figures in the sculpture at the end of Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli," whose "ancient, glittering eyes are gay."

I haven't even gotten to the long final poem yet. Next time.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, _Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas_, trans. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Peterson

 I HAD BEEN meaning to read this for quite a while, and it seemed like a great followup to Zama (see post for May 20). As in Antonio di Benedetto's Zama, our main character is a 19th century upper-class South American man (Brazilian in this case) who does very little but expects a great deal. The author's intentions seem, broadly speaking, satirical. 

Neither Di Benedetto's Zama nor Machado's Brás Cubas is likely to earn much readerly sympathy, but their sheer presumption makes them interesting, and Cubas has the added distinction, unusual in narrators of novels, of being dead. Machado's novel was published in 1880 and may be the first fiction to attempt this trick; I know of no earlier examples, and hardly any later--about the only example that comes to mind is the Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard.

Death seems not to have made Brás Cubas wiser, more generous, or more grateful. He has no misgivings about the institution of slavery, for instance (legal in Brazil until 1888), or the the affair he conducted over many years with the wife of a friend. He never got any kind of career going, but that seems not to bother him. He seems not to have any intellectual interests other than an attachment to the eccentric theories of his friend Quincas Borba (the subject of another novel by Machado), nor to have held tight to any principles, nor to have thought much about using his high status to forward any kind of social progress. He doesn't get much accomplished at all, really.

So why he does he become interesting? His candor? His indifference to what we think of him? His lack of remorse? He's past caring about anything, and that carries its own kind of allure.

Tommy Orange, _Wandering Stars_

 IT TOOK ME a while to start appreciating this book. It happened on p. 221, when a couple of the characters are talking about Donnie Darko.

     "What about the sequel?"

     "It was really bad. Like, we couldn't even finish it."

     "That bad?"

     "I think most sequels are bad."

     "Yeah, I think they are."

I think I laughed out loud at the point. Since Wandering Stars is a sequel to Orange's 2018 novel There There, the conversation struck me as an inspired metafictional wink to the reader, Orange letting us know that he knows that there is nothing easy about what he is trying to pull off.

Wandering Stars follows the example of one of cinema's most successful sequels, The Godfather, Part II, in being set both before and after the events of There There. The twelve chapters of Part One, "Before," present some of the ancestors of the Bear Shield and Red Feather families that we meet in There There; among those ancestors are survivors of the Sand Creek Massacre and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The ten chapters of Part Two, "Aftermath," show how Orvil Red Feather's being shot at the catastrophic conclusion of There There affects him, his brothers, his grandmother, and his great aunt. Two final chapters in Part Three, "Futures," take up how Orvil and his younger brother Lony have moved into adulthood.

The novel really began to engage me once it focused on Orvil and his brothers; a story took shape as the three young men struggled in their different ways to make sense of what had happened to their family. While I was reading Part Two, Part One retrospectively gained meaning, as I began to see that the family had been living for generations with attempts to erase them and their culture, first through literal murder, then through "education" and addictive substances. Against all odds, though, the family survived.

Orange writes as brilliantly as he did in There There. He again varies the narration--sometimes first person, sometimes close third, occasionally second--and there is a lyricism, too, that I don't remember noticing in There There, suggesting a reality behind appearances that unites the generations, even though the Red Feather brothers have no information about ancestors like Jude Star or Opal Viola Bear Shield. 

Wandering Stars reminded me a bit of Dara Horn's People Love Dead Jews. Horn takes up the irony that a large audience exists for stories in which the reader or viewer identifies with Jews who were killed or driven away or are in some way long gone--Anne Frank, Maus, Fiddler on the  Roof--but a lot of the same folk find the presence of living, here-and-now Jews just a bit discomfiting. Similarly, Wandering Stars takes up the irony that romanticizations of the vanished indigenous way of life can be very popular--e.g., Dancing with Wolves--but living, here-and-now indigenous peoples still have to resist marginalization, incomprehension, and erasure.

Ariana Reines, _The Rose_

WRITTEN CONCURRENTLY WITH Wave of Blood, perhaps? The Rose is mentioned a time or two in Wave of Blood, so perhaps it was already finished by October 2023, even though it appeared after Wave of Blood had already been out a few months. If conceived concurrently, they would be fraternal rather than identical twins--a lot in common, but easily told apart.

Reading The Rose reminded me a lot of reading Reines's other collection of poetry--not so much because she revisits material she has written of before (although, yes, she does) as because it conjures that same headlong feeling, that feeling that you had better not stop reading, that there is no way off this roller coaster until it comes to its end. That, and the feeling that you are playing a game of chess with Reines, but she has already finished the game in her head and has already started playing the next game while you are still trying to figure out her moves in this one.

So: familiar material? Yes, in that Reines again writes of her mother and again embraces abjection...that is, somehow, Reines turns being treated badly into a kind of agency, an assertiveness, a claim to power...ehh, that doesn't make any sense. But if it made sense, why would she write about it?

     If our fathers

& mothers loved us right

Would we need to write

At all? If we were more tele-

Pathic as a species

Which we should have

Become by now, let's

Be honest, what would

Become of writing & art

But explosions in the heart

Mansions of great intricacy

We'd create invariably'& constantly

On behalf of one another

With no need of a culture

To transact these things

For us?

Part I seems to come out of the aftermath of a difficult love affair, while Part II seems to be written during the affair, creating the odd feeling that that the difficult affair has already been lived through before it has been experienced. And then Part III is a long poem, "Theory of the Flower," which starts with Molly Bloom (if you have not heard Siobhan McKenna's reading of Molly's soliloquy, you should find it just to hear her say "swimming in roses") and pinballs through Joni Mitchell, Cynthia Nixon, Ezra Pound, and the Roman de la Rose before, in its last four pages...turning into...something utterly...different...and pivoting back to Joyce, only not exactly. Whew. Maybe the best thing she has ever done. 

I have often thought of Reines as a contemporary confessional poet, and I still do, but I am grateful for the clear line she draws on p. 107:

& long ago I made a solemn vow not to go

The way the Confessionals went.
I just don't see my death bringing Justice.