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.

Tommy Pico, _Nature Poem_

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK (published 2017), Pico explains why he doesn't want to write a nature poem.

I can't write a nature poem
bc it's fodder for the noble savage
narrative.

 

I can't write a nature poem
bc I only fuck with the city

I don't like thinking abt nature bc nature makes me upset there is a god

I can't write a nature poem bc English is some Stockholm shit,
makes me complicit in my tribe's erasure--

You can't be an NDN person in today's world

and write a nature poem.

All compelling reasons, but Pico ends up writing a nature poem anyway. Deciding that nature does not only mean streams and fields and clouds and trees, but (à la Wittgenstein) nature is whatever is the case, Pico writes his nature poem just by noticing whatever is going on around and inside him, presenting detail after detail, impression after impression. 

As in Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, the accumulation of detail and impression usually feels random, haphazard, until a killer closing line pulls everything into focus. (I am not going to quote any of the closing lines, because they only work if you have read the lines leading up to them. Just take my word on this.)

Indeed, one of the book's one-line poems--"I'm going to be so sad when Aretha Franklin dies"--made me wonder if what Pico was really up to in Nature Poem was writing his own  Lunch Poems, since that book's most famous poem is "The Day Lady Died," about hearing the news of Billie Holiday's death. 

On the book's next-to-last page, Pico acknowledges that he may have written a nature poem after all--"Admit it. This is the poem you wanted all along"--but is "you" Pico or the reader? Both, maybe. Pico has written his nature poem by not writing one.

David Keenan, _This Is Memorial Device_

I WANTED TO read this the very minute I read a description of it in a review of one of Keenan's more recent books. This Is Memorial Device presents itself as an oral history of the musical scene of a particular city at a particular time, on the model of McCain and McNeil's Please Kill Me or Goodman's Meet Me in the Bathroom, but the city is not New York or London or San Francisco or Manchester but Airdrie, Scotland, about twelve miles west of Glasgow, population about 37,000. 

All the bands in this book are fictional, and even within the fiction none of them get noticed beyond the boundaries of Airdrie--not even Memorial Device, by unanimous assent the scene's leading band, whose recorded output consists of a couple of self-released LPs and a few self-released cassettes. For the initiated, however, for the true believers, for the early disciples, they were transformative, visionary, a once-in-a-lifetime glimpse of the possibility of transfiguration.

Judging from their cited influences--Sun Ra, La Monte Young, free jazz--Memorial Device and the other bands of the Airdrie scene would have been a challenging listen for the uninitiated. They had little in common with other bands coming out of Scotland in the early 1980s (Big Country, Aztec Camera, Mike Scott of the Waterboys) and they would have looked on such phenomena as Culture Club, Duran Duran, and Wham with bottomless loathing. But a key ingredient of any scene is the music you all hold in unreserved contempt.

I don't know whether Airdrie actually had a lively post-punk scene circa 1978-81, but Keenan evokes with heartbreaking accuracy that feeling of being in a scene, where everyone seems to be in a band or about to form a band or just devoted to seeing the shows and getting the cassettes, and a tiny stage with a buzzy PA in a basement with damp walls and a reeking bathroom seems like the perfect setting for glory.

I hit a bump about halfway through, where Keenan has a chapter that tries to render the sound of Scots vernacular (à la Irvine Welsh)--somewhat taxing for an American reader. But the rest of the book I gulped down, and the only problem was that, like most scenes, it was all over all too soon.

Philip C. Almond, _Mary Madalene: A Cultural History_

AS THE SUBTITLE alerts us, Almond is interested not only in the woman identified in the gospels as the the first person (or one of the first two or three persons) to learn and report that Jesus of Nazareth had risen from the dead, but also in the complicated figure cobbled together in western Christianity over the next few centuries.

Accordingly, Almond goes over the passages in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in which Mary Magdalene appears, then moves on to:

-- the Mary Magdalene of the 2nd and 3rd century Gnostic Gospels, in which she always seems to get Jesus's point before anyone else does, is singled out as his "companion," and even gets kissed on the mouth by him;

-- the "composite" Mary Magdalene declared by Pope Gregory (the Great) in the late 6th century, blending the Mary Magdalene of the Easter story with Mary of Bethany (sister to Martha and Lazarus, washer and anointer of Jesus' feet) and with the sinful woman in Luke 7 (who, likewise, washed and anointed Jesus' feet); 

-- the Mary Magdalene of medieval saints' legends, who evangelized France and later withdrew to a contemplative life and grew her hair out until it reached her ankles;

-- Mary Magdalene the penitent sex worker who, hair unbound and at least partly undressed, was depicted in painting after painting after painting for centuries; 

-- the Mary Magdalene of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and a few works of highly speculative, not to say fantastical "scholarship," who actually married Jesus and had children with him.

Almond is conversant and highly comfortable with the relevant scholarship, and writes briskly, engagingly, and sometimes even playfully ("Henry VIII was ambiguously to embrace Protestantism so that he might bigamously embrace Anne Boleyn"). It's a short book, just over 300 pages, and a brilliant detailed introduction to a fascinating figure.

Gabrielle Zevin, _Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow_

 I READ THIS a month ago and apparently forgot to write a blog post about it. I read it for one of our book clubs, and I probably would not have picked it up save for that circumstance, but I enjoyed it. 

One strength of the novel is its offering a glimpse into the world of video games--a world I have no familiarity with whatsoever. As children, the novel's two main characters, Sam Masur and Sadie Green, bond over some of the same games my kids played--Sims, Oregon Trail--so reading about their fascination with the artificial worlds of these games gave me an idea why game-playing was so compelling to my kids and to many, many, many of my students over the years.

Sam and Sadie become friends--despite frequent misunderstandings and quarrels--and artistic collaborators, the creators of fantastically successful games. The key ingredient to their collaboration, however, is their friend Marx Watanabe, as he is the one who helps them navigate past those frequent misunderstandings and quarrels. He is Sam's best friend, eventually (to Sam's chagrin) Sadie's lover, and his charm and savvy make him the linchpin of their flourishing business.

But--spoiler alert--he dies in a spectacularly tragic fashion. Can Sam and Sadie remain successful collaborators without their Brian Epstein? 

Marx, before becoming the business whiz bringing Sam and Sadie's company to new heights, was an aspiring actor especially keen on Shakespeare, which gives Zevin an opening to bring in a good bit of Shakespeareana, including the phrase from Macbeth's famous speech that she takes for her title. I was not sure what she was up to with this, but it was diverting to spot the allusions. Maybe the novel was a little game-like itself in this way.

Eliot Weinberger, _The Life of Tu Fu_

 TU FU, WHO also shows up in internet searches as Du Fu, was the other great Tang Dynasty poet besides Li Po (circa 8th century CE). Weinberger explains in an afterword that this book "is not a translation of individual poems, but a fictional autobiography of Tu Fu derived and adapted from the thoughts, images, and allusions in the poetry." 

What to make of that description? I don't know. How faithful a portrait of Tu Fu this book is, how close these texts come to recreating Tu Fu's poems in English, whether these texts correspond even roughly to Tu Fu's actual poems--I have no idea. 

The book worked for me, though. I think it was Hugh Kenner who wrote of Ezra Pound's Cathay and Homage to Sextus Propertius that in looking far away from the here and now of Europe during World War I, Pound responded all the more profoundly to the crisis. The Life of Tu Fu is like  that. It manages to evoke the mood of the pandemic and the final chaotic year of the first Trump administration--the dislocations, the ruptures, the estrangements, the sense of being in endless free fall--with renderings of the lines and images of a Chinese poet (and beleaguered bureaucrat) who lived thirteen centuries ago.

Soldiers still guard the ruined palace: rats run across the tiles.

A squirrel with folded hands outside his broken nest.

That dandelion in the wind once had roots.

 Live like a wren, unnoticed on a high branch, and you'll stay alive.

It's been so many years: I imagine her face, looking at me skeptically.

Rick Barot, _The Galleons_

 I THINK I first read Rick Barot way back in 2006, when a group of his poems led off the Legitimate Dangers anthology. I don't recall those samples making an impression on me at the time, but in the last few years, in one periodical or another, I kept coming across poems of Barot's that I liked, so...why not try one of his collections?

This one is from 2020 (a new one came out in 2024). The collection's title (also the title of ten individual poems within) refers to the Spanish ships that carried the spoil and pillage of empire across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to Spain. Barot was born in the Philippines, one of the places despoiled and pillaged (not only by Spain, but also by the U.S.A. after 1898), and many of the poems look at his and his family's relationship to the history.

I tend not to expect elegance from poetry collections with this kind of thematic content, but that's the word that kept coming to my mind. Monica Youn puts it well in one of the blurbs on the back cover: "Rick Barot brings his understated virtuosity and perceptual sensitivity to bear on issues of postcolonialism, representation, memory, and grief." The themes ("postcolonialism, representation, memory, and grief") are what might land this book on a syllabus, but its elegance ("understated virtuosity and perceptual sensitivity") is what kept pulling me in. 

All the poems are in unrhymed couplets, the syntax poised, the imagery clean and telling, as in these lines on spring:

The blooms called forth by a bare measure of warmth,

days that are more chill than warm, though the roots must

know, and the leaves, and the spindly trunks ganged up

by the trash bins behind our houses. The blue pointillism

in morning fog. The blue that is lavender. The blue that is

purple. The smell that is the air's sugar, the sweet

weight when you put your face ear, the way you would

put it near the side of someone's head. Here the ear.

Here the nape.

                       ("The Names")

That spring feeling of a "bare measure of warmth," the exactness of "spindly trunks ganged up," the swerve to the Seurat allusion, the "air's sugar" that turns to an evocation of eros. So good. And I literally, no kidding, just opened up the book at random to find that passage. It's that good all the way through.

Amit Chaudhuri, _Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music_

I ENJOY INDIAN music in a casual, hardly-know-what-I'm-listening-to kind of way, so the idea of learning more about it appealed to me, and any book by novelist Chaudhuri promised to be at least readable and likely fascinating. 

Finding the Raga, I'm glad to report, is both readable and fascinating, not only because of Chaudhuri's graceful prose but also because he has, in addition to writing his novels, been practicing and performing this music for most of his life. The book incorporates a good deal of his own personal history as a musician, which includes picking up a guitar in his teens because of a fascination with Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, so his account of the music's history and techniques reflects a performer's intimacy with the tradition.

What I learned: 

Since about my 95% of my familiarity with Indian music derives from listening to sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar's mainly instrumental albums (I also once saw his daughter Anoushka in concert), I had not realized how central to the tradition vocal performance was. I've been listening to some of the singers mentioned by Chaudhuri (e.g., on pp. 74 and 126), and what I now realize about Ravi Shankar is that a lot of his power, like that of great violinists, comes from how his lines "sing." 

I knew Indian music was based on improvisation, but I had not realized there were no "composers" as we understand them. A lot of jazz and rock improvisation is based on pieces known to be written by, say, Rodgers and Hart or T-Bone Walker or Charlie Mingus, but while some Indian melodies have persons' names attached to them, they are no one's intellectual property. They are a shared legacy.

Chaudhuri also emphasizes that Indian music is not mimetic, not representational. This can be said of most music, I suspect, and is why Walter Pater once claimed that all arts aspire to the condition of music. Chaudhuri means, I think, that a particular raga is not happy or sad--the same musical pattern (or thaat) could sound happy or sad, or convey any other emotion, depending on what the performer does. (This reminds me that every time I've heard Dylan perform "I;'s All Over Now, Baby Blue," it seems to mean something different.)

I also learned that the improvisations are not free-wheeling, anything-goes affairs, such as you might get from a stoned American guitarist noodling a scale over a drone and imagining he is playing Indian music. Every melodic pattern has its own allowable moves, and these depend on things like the time of day it is. As in western classical music, the performer has to walk a fine line between precise execution and giving the piece his or her own particular shape.

Chaudhuri has illuminating things to say about the Indian musical tradition's relationship to the literary one (Meerabai, Rabindranath Tagore) and makes some telling connections to English language literary traditions as well (Blake, Cavafy). 

A fine book.

Antonio Di Benedetto, _Zama_, trans. Esther Allen

IMAGINE THE NARRATOR of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground as a Spanish colonial official in late 18th and early 19th century Paraguay, before Bolivar and independence, and you will have some idea of Zama. The narrator of the second part of Notes, I should specify— the prickly, hypersensitive bundle of ego, quick to take offense and even quicker to give it, who turns his friends’ dinner party into a psychodrama—that Underground Man, not the older, sadder but wiser narrator of the first part, who has gained a little self-awareness. Don Diego de Zama resents being posted to a provincial backwater without any of the privileges or prerogatives or responsibilities he feels ought to be assigned to a man of his rank and talents—talents we see no evidence of in his discourse or his activities. He never comes within miles of self-awareness.

Envious, resentful, given to petty and not so petty deceits and betrayals, eaten up by bitterness, Zama ought not to be enjoyable to read about, but sure enough, he is. He has no redeeming qualities. He bumbles obtusely from turpitude to turpitude, hypocrisy to hypocrisy. He has no sense of humor, no sense of perspective. The whole governance structure to which he is parasitically attached is rotten, overdue for collapse, and he has no idea at all that such a collapse is coming. 

Yet the book is delicious, somehow. As with Notes from Underground, tracking the character’s progress is like watching a slow-motion train wreck. You don’t want to look away, even though you know it’s going to be terrible.

Amelia Rosselli, _Sleep_

 ROSSELLI (1928-1996) had an unusually complex background. Her Italian father was an anti-Fascist dissident whom Mussolini had assassinated. Her English mother raised her in England, Switzerland, and the United States. She wrote poetry both in Italian and in English; Sleep gathers much of her poetry in English. 

Her poems in both languages are deeply idiosyncratic, full of invented words, logic-defying modifiers, and inside-out syntax: "Preparing the downfall of strips / of teasing talk was the grey upshot of the conversation / which in cannibal laughter demonstrated its impreparation." Her poems sound the way they do partly, perhaps, because she was not fully a native speaker of either Italian or English, but she seems to be using her own dislocation in language as a way of addressing a dislocated reality. 

There's a consciousness of tradition, too, as she was a great admirer of Shakespeare's sonnets. A kind of broken-and-reglued Elizabethan idiom crops up in almost every poem: 

Of mishap we know but the name, yet

our gentle brook, rook-called, (the giant

trees unfurl their tender light by the night

light of a waning moon) the giant trees

do but unfurl the development of our love,

the brook chants to the rook: --black raven

collapsing into the science of every-day

transport.

As with the Elizabethans, love and madness are frequent themes--but "themes" may be the wrong word to use about these quicksilver poems, which do not want to stay in any one place for very long. 

The back of this NYRB Books edition carries a quotation from Pasolini, which surprised me since I had read elsewhere that, though he had been helpful at times, he had serious misgivings about Rosselli's poetry, especially about its experimental and cosmopolitan aspects. In the quotation, he compares Rosselli's poems to "the most terrible laboratory experiments, tumors, atomic blasts" as a way of talking about their "stupendousness." Is there an upside to having your work compared to a tumor? 

I found the poems spell-binding, myself, although hard to describe. Every sentence makes sense while you are in the middle of it--it was only later that I went, "wait, what?" If you like immersions in sheer otherness, Rosselli is worth a look.

John Ganz, _When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s_

 THERE IS ALREADY a small library of books trying to account for Trump and MAGA. I have read a few--David Corn, Jeff Sharlet, Luke Mogelson--as well as some of their Cassandra-like precursors of the late Obama era, like George Packer (The Unraveling) and Arlie Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land). I am going to declare John Ganz's book the best of the lot. Even though it is concerned with events and people of thirty-some years ago, it does the most persuasive job of explaining how we got here. Ganz's key point is that we have been headed here for a long time.

A lot of the people and events to which Ganz devotes attention might not show up even in a trivia contest these days, but he makes the case that all the key features of the MAGA world-picture surfaced in one or another manifestation in the 1990s. A political player willing to bring the dog whistles of racism well down into the audible range? David Duke. The hope that a businessman in the White House will save us? Ross Perot. Culture wars? Pat Buchanan. Unapologetic police violence? The beating of Rodney King and the trial that exculpated the officers who beat him. Adulation of tough  guys? John Gotti's elevation to icon. The idea that the United States government is an oppressive occupying power that has to be resisted with firearms? Randy Weaver and Ruby Ridge.

Ganz explains his title in the opening pages. Left-leaning people lazily assume that social and cultural progress occurs naturally, linearly, as time proceeds, and that reactionary forces cannot, so to speak, "turn back the clock." But maybe the clock can be broken, if those who feel excluded by and resentful of progress decide they have nothing to lose. We can certainly see that willingness to burn it all down in the Trump era, and Ganz forcefully shows that we had been seeing it, without quite recognizing, for decades.

Ariana Reines, _Wave of Blood_

 THIS CAME OUT last fall from a British publisher, Divided Publishing, and I don't happen to know whether there will be a U.S. edition or not. It's not hard to obtain--I got my copy from Seattle's Open Books--and the price is printed on the back cover in dollars as well as pounds, so maybe this edition is it. In other words, don't wait, because if you are at all interested in Ariana Reines, you ought to read it.

The book is a good many things at once. It was written after October 7, 2023, and addresses that horror and the horrors that have followed. Reines is Jewish, and her family, like most Jewish families, was affected by the Holocaust; lest you think her engagement with Judaism and history follows familiar lines, though, ponder this: "The real tradition isn't written in our books. The real Judaism is hidden in women's bodies." If that pulled you up short--wait, what? what do you mean?--well, she's not done.

Tears sprang to my eyes as I wrote the last sentence. How dare I write such a thing.

I have been sick with shame and dazed with blood. I will be told that such a feeling is unrevolutionary and that to give in to it is bourgeois.

I have been searching for a way to speak accurately and protest accurately that does not masculinize me, that does not find me hardening my speech into the eroticized militancy of the noble freedom fighter.

And that's the hybrid of emotional honesty and intellectual rigor that makes Reines one of a kind. Wave of Blood consistently achieves that hybrid.

Another surprising hybrid: Reines could be considered a confessional poet, and this book is particularly remarkable for her candor about her family, especially her mother. But she's also a visionary poet. Most visionary poets are too spellbound by the eternal and infinite to devote much time to the muck and muddle of the here and now, but not Reines. "I'm someone who has had overpowering mystical experiences. [...] These experiences are here to be had, by all of us, by anyone who wants them. [...] Having experienced such things, it behooves  the experiencer to cultivate and create an active relationship with these new regions of consciousness--or else  they'll just close back up." A grounded visionary...how many of those have we had? Traherne, Dickinson, I would say Yeats...but they are scarce. And Reines is one.

There's more: glimpses of a reading tour of Europe, interpretations of Milton, quite a few poems (including "Disinhibitor," the brilliant one that showed up in the New Yorker, of all places). I'll close with this:

          Poetry isn't a profession

A person simply goes into. You have

To be fucked up to do this and especially

To stay. It does not attract the best

Or the brightest. We are some of the most

Sanctimonious low-attention-span narcissists

Around. But it gave me life

Which I had longed  to see naked

And it held me up to living

In a very naked way

And showed me breathing

And gave me space

To find my way...

Morgan Parker, _Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night_

 PARKER'S FIRST COLLECTION (2015) includes a poem called "Young, Sassy, and Black." It's easy to imagine Parker frequently hearing this trio of adjectives; she was 28 when this collection came out, she is often audaciously funny (e.g., the five poems here with the title "Miss Black America"), and many of the poems foreground Black culture, history, and experience. It's easy to imagine her getting weary of those adjectives, too. The entirety of the poem "Young, Sassy, and Black" reads:

I use these words
to distract you.

I'm not sure whether the "I" is Parker talking to the reader or some embodiment of the literary marketplace talking to Parker, but the clear message is that Parker is not going to be pigeonholed--she has a lot more arrows to her quiver than being young, sassy, and black. Verbal invention, for one thing: "Somewhere in Jersey, the wood house / cowers around me like a smell." Fearlessness, for another: "I'm thinking, what would happen / if I started masturbating on this subway car?" Put the two together and you have a gift for laying it right on the line:

Baby think of my skin
as the best part of the song. Take me
by the ribs and lay me at the bottom
of a dirty creek where I can 
get a good view.

John Banville, _Snow_

 I'VE READ NINE novels by Banville, but never, until this one, any of his mysteries. As it happens, this is the first of his mysteries to be published under his own name, rather than the pen name "Benjamin Black." One review I read suggested that Banville made an exception this time because of the gravity of the issue in the novel's background: pedophilia in the priesthood and the Irish Roman Catholic Church's extraordinary efficiency in covering it up.

He may also have decided to put his own name on it just because it's really, really good. I do not read many mysteries and enjoy even fewer, but I was impressed by this one. It has a lot of Banvillean virtues: diamond-eye social observation, masterly prose, and a first-person chapter from the point of view of Father Tom, the pedophiliac priest, that is absolutely convincing and absolutely chilling, pure Dostoevsky.

There was also a small but perfect gift for readers who, like me, lean more to the literary Banville. Snow is falling for a great deal of Snow, which called to my mind Joyce's classic short story, "The Dead." I was delighted when Strafford, the novel's detective, dropped an allusion to Joyce's early masterpiece in a phone conversation with his superiors:

    "Where would he have gone to? Is it now snowing down there, like it is here?"
    "Yes, Chief. Snow is general all over Ireland."
    "Is it?"
    "It's a quotation--never mind."
    Strafford could hear his superior breathing down the line. Hackett valued Strafford, but also considered him  too clever by half.

That's all, but it's plenty. If you recognize the quotation, you know it occurs in the devastating final paragraph of Joyce's final story, and that the snow that falls both on Gabriel Conroy's Dublin and on Michael Furey's graveyard in Galway falls alike on "the living and the dead," that Gabriel has just learned the lesson that the living and the dead constitute a whole, that the past is always ineradicably with us. The past is still very much part of the present for the boys, now men, that Father Tom abused--PTSD, we could also call it--and that little Joycean inflection explains why Snow is the perfect title for Banville's novel.

Jonathan Beecher, _Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848_

I DO PLAN to attempt to scale Christopher Clark's magisterial Revolutionary Spring at some point, but this one is really the perfect book on 1848 for me. As Beecher's title indicates, he focuses on writers who lived through and wrote about the events in Paris of that year; a few of them, Alphonse de Lamartine and Marie d'Agoult, are no longer much read, but most are still heavy hitters: Marx, Flaubert, Hugo, Tocqueville, George Sand, Alexander Herzen (if Tom Stoppard writes plays about you, surely you are a heavy hitter).

Okay, why did I love this book? First, Beecher is staggeringly well-informed about each writer, but avoids getting mired in pedantic detail (which could easily happen in writing about a historical phenomenon with the documentary record this one has). Every chapter is gracefully written and skillfully paced. Had Edmund Wilson written a book about Paris in 1848, it would probably be as good as this one, but I'm not sure. That's how well made it is.

Second, I have been enjoying following up my reading of Beecher by turning to the writers themselves. Marie d'Agoult, whom I never would have picked up without having been tipped by Beecher, turned out to be a brilliant, engaging writer, and I am in the middle of seeing a whole new side of Tocqueville--the cool, judicious tone of Democracy in America almost disappears from his memoir of 1848. Herzen awaits, and I am hankering to re-read The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and A Sentimental Education. I may even try Napoleon le Petit even though I tend to find Hugo tiresome.

Third, Writers and Revolution gave me a kind of refracted perspective on our own turbulent times. Think of the last sixteen years--the elation and high hopes of Obama's election, only to have our souls stomped on by the election of Trump, then the flaming up of hope with Biden, and then the looming shadow of authoritarianism with Trump 2.0.  In 1848, France went through just as precipitous, just as cardiac-arresting a political roller-coaster in just ten months. Beecher shows that it marked all of these writers, who were all eyewitnesses, for life. And boy, do I get that.

Halle Butler, _The New Me_

NICOLE FLATTERY'S REVIEW of Butler's recently-published Banal Nightmare made me curious enough to check whether my local public library had a copy--they did not, but they did have The New Me, Butler's second novel, published in 2019.

Is there a burgeoning genre about educated, intelligent, talented young women in their later 20s, stuck in a profoundly stressful and unpromising office job in a major city and currently without any likely romantic prospects, who decide to chart a new course for their lives in some way and end up making a worse hash of things? Lexi Freiman, Catherine Lacey, Lauren Oyler, and Christine Smallwood all seem to working this particular vein of ore--even Robyn Schiff's book-length poem Information Desk may fit, in fact. Some kind of new archetype is forming.

Millie, the main character of Butler's The New Me, has a temp job she thinks is leading to a full-time job. We, the readers, know it is not. Millie also seems self-deluded about her ability to drink less and to get her exercise program started. She does not seem recovered from her break-up with almost-fiancé Jamie (who may also have died by suicide--I wasn't sure about this), and her best friend seems to be in the relationship mainly to have someone to get drunk with. Things go from bad to worse and Millie turns up at her parents' place.

I had a hard time judging Butler's tone here. Is Millie an object of satire? She is a terrible judge of her own situation, so the narrative sometimes seems to be laughing behind her back (as it were). I did, however, feel bad for her a lot of the time, and I was sorry things went as completely amiss for her as they did. 

In this respect, Millie reminded me of Elif Batuman's Selin, in The Idiot. Ridiculous but lovable? Lovably ridiculous? Someone whose self-created catastrophes we chuckle at because we know she will grow up and turn out fine? Or another lost soul in the city? A new archetype is definitely forming.

 

Sally Keith, _Two of Everything_

 I WROTE A review of this for another and much more respectable blog, and that review will probably be posted in a few weeks or so, so in this space I am not going to say much more than thank you, Sally Keith, for your fine book.

Two of Everything is a kind of memoir-in-poems of Keith and her partner going through the process of adoption.  (The partner is called "Amor" in the book, which I don't think is her actual name, but talk about resonant....) This always delicate process is even more delicate for same-sex couples, so the book is full of frustrations, disappointed hopes, and dead ends. What a payoff, though--"December Light," the book's final section, is radiant with joy. 

Word of mouth is bound to help this book; I can't imagine anyone reading it and not recommending it.

Jana Prikryl, _Midwood_

 What most struck me about Prikryl's second collection of poems, No Matter, was its being quite different from her first, The After Party; this, her third, is not much like either. Like No Matter, it feels stylistically unified (all short poems, with a remarkably consistent voice), but even more than the earlier book it seems intended to be taken as an integrated whole. The "you" of the poems, for instance, seems like the same person throughout, and the twenty-four poems titled "Midwood" interspersed through the book read like a sequence thanks to shared arboreal imagery. 

However, Midwood also has the range in time and space of The After Party, making it quite different from the here-and-now focus of No Matter. Much of the book seems set in Italy (e.g., the seven poems titled "The Noncello," a river in Italy). but Canada, New York City, and the town in Czechia where Prikryl was born all figure as well. The remembered and the anticipated get almost as much attention as the present, as though Prikryl as picking up on the poet-as-river idea that crops up in Heidegger's analyses of Hölderlin.

At the same time, the paratactic crops up, as in Adorno's analyses of Hölderlin. Here is "Midwood 3":

Out of the garment of the land
            it is not spring, why then you say
rank, but isn't 
an oracle around perimeter of which 
the words their lipid speeds pull from
and here so on the face of it
reserve, is it a reservoir
            if spill headfirst another's shape

Prikryl avoids end-stop punctuation throughout (no periods, question marks, exclamation points, or even semi-colons), which does a lot to unify the voice of the volume but also creates an unmoored effect in the syntax. The reader never knows for certain whether one line continues the sentence of the preceding line or starts a new sentence. 

Sentences thus unanchored and adrift were rare in Prikryl's earlier work, but I really liked the effect. I assumed from the outset that the title Midwood alluded to Dante's famous and unbeatable figure for a midlife crisis, that we were with Prikryl in una selva oscura without map or compass...unanchored and adrift, in sum. Where are we, and how the hell did we end up here?

Midlife crisis looms especially in the Noncello poems, which seem to be about an adulterous affair. I am not at all positive about that, but adultery or infidelity seemed to be hovering behind the lines, as in Jorie Graham's The Errancy. 

And the self-doubt of a classic midlife crisis? Plenty of that, too, as when the trees in "Midwood 20" are "like me // annoying strivers / in constant danger of making bad choices." 

Thomas Bernhard, _Correction_. trans. Sophie Wilkins

 I have read a good handful of stories by Bernhard, but this was my first Bernhard novel. I chose it for a somewhat perverse reason: I had read that its sentences had the highest score on someone's "difficulty of reading" index. The sentences of Correction are long, true, but are not complex in the way that (say) Proust's or Faulkner's or Broch's are; they extend over whole pages because the narrator keeps interrupting himself to explain, or qualify, or revise, so the effect is more one of garrulity than complexity. The prose is not all that hard to read.

It's a worthwhile read, though. The (unnamed) narrator is writing to explain to us the life and work of his brilliant friend Roithamer, one of the sons of a wealthy and prominent family and a polymath of genius.  His final project was to build a cone-shaped dwelling for his sister in the center of a forest on or near their family estate. He completes the project, but his sister dies before she can move in, and Roithamer then kills himself--his suicide is the "correction" of the title.

I don't think the preceding paragraph would count as a spoiler, by the way--we learn of all these events within the first few pages. There is no suspense in the novel, nor plot, really--just the intelligent-but-not-brilliant narrator doing his painstaking, constantly self-correcting best to understand and help us understand his terrifyingly brilliant friend (based on Ludwig Wittgenstein). Rough analogues might be Serenus Zeitblom in Mann's Doctor Faustus trying to explain Adrian Leverkühn to us, or Lenù trying to explain Lila in Elena Ferrante's quartet, or even Jeffrey Cartwright trying to explain Edwin Mullhouse in Stephen Millhauser's strange and wonderful Edwin Mullhouse.

Bernhard's vision of the situation is a bit darker than Millhauser's, Ferrante's, or Mann's, which should come as no surprise. Genius is pain, as John Lennon explained to Jann Wenner back in 1970, and the pain in Correction is as bottomless as Roithamer's genius.

Theodor Adorno, "Parataxis: On Hölderlin's Late Poetry," trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen

 THE ENGLISH VERSION can be found in Notes to Literature, Volume II, if you are interested. Dates from 1960. Heidegger only crops up in the essay a few times, but he is definitely in Adorno's crosshairs.

I found this a demanding read, with its paragraphs sometimes stretching past the two-page mark and sentences such as "The sublimation of primary docility to become autonomy, however, is that supreme passivity that found its formal correlative in the technique of seriation." Hmm, okay. After three passes at such pronouncements, I tend to give up and plunge ahead, hoping things will clear up later. In other words, if you want a truly accurate précis of Adorno's argument, you will have to look elsewhere than here.

A few points emerged for me, though. The content of a poem is not what it explicitly states, Adorno writes--that is, not simply equivalent to the propositions it makes. How things are said matters as much as what is said. The form is part of the content. So far, so good--Heidegger would not dissent from that, I imagine. However, when Adorno writes, "Every interpretation of poetry that formulates it as Aussage [message] violates poetry's mode of  truth by violating its illusory character," I have a feeling he sees Heidegger as one such violator.

Heidegger definitely might dissent from the next part of Adorno's argument, which is that the form of Hölderlin's later poems (the Hymns, mainly) is dialectically engaged with (what we will call) the propositional content of the poems. That is, the sentences of the poems may be saying one kind of thing, but the form of those sentences--their parataxes, the ways they scramble or abandon classic Ciceronian sentence construction--is saying another kind of thing, posing a challenge to the propositional content of those very sentences. Thus, the truth content of the poem is not at all identical to the truth (or otherwise) of the propositions of the poem. 

I'm not in a position to judge how strong Adorno's evidence for this argument is, relying as I do on English translations of Hölderlin. But it made sense, as a general argument, and lines up with the widespread tendency to see Hölderlin as anticipating the ruptures of literary modernism (Adorno sees him a precursor to Beckett, for instance). 

I had not read Adorno on poetry before this--apart from his famous parenthetical aside that writing it after Auschwitz was barbaric--and I have to admit I was enlightened and impressed. I will have to build up some stamina before attempting another, though.

Morgan Parker, _There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé_

 PARKER'S 2019 COLLECTION Magical Negro was a favorite around here. She has since published a book of essays and a YA novel (and perhaps an analysis of Project 2025--can that be the same Morgan Parker?), and they certainly look worth investigating, but while waiting for the successor to Magical Negro I thought I would look into her back catalogue.

The cover of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé offers Carrie Mae Weems in bed, in a nightgown, legs splayed, cigarette in hand and wicked look on her face...as if to say, "if you can't deal with this, just go on back to that Mary Oliver book you were looking at." Somewhat like Roger Reeves and Shane Book, Parker can go from the canonical (W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens) to in-your-face contemporary ("99 Problems") in an eyeblink--no apologies, no explanations. She can be funny and furious at the same time ("99 Problems" again, or "Heaven Be a Xanax," or "13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl"). 

Her verbal invention never flags.

when moon rises peach
over Mom's kitchen table
some grasses bending
                     homegirl way

   ("Beyoncé, Touring Asia, Breaks Down in a White Tee")

It hits me first thing: I've never been cool.
I am driving with glass eyes and lead feet. 

I jetpack into the heaviness alone.
My bare face hanging out all over the kitchen counter. 

   ("My Vinyl Weighs a Ton") 

I'm sorry. Let me fucking mourn me.

For the diamonds that didn't shake loose.

   ("Funeral for The Black Dog")

The collection's leading theme is Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, named in at least a dozen of the book's poems. I wish I knew enough about Beyoncé to say something credible about Parker's analysis of her place in the culture, but I just don't. I gathered she matters somewhat more than Barack Obama does, an insight that rearranged my own sense of the cosmos in what I suspect is a very healthy way.

Charles Taylor, "Engaged agency and background in Heidegger"

THIS IS A chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, edited by Charles Guignon and published in 1993. I picked up the volume hoping for some clarification of my question (i.e., how was it that Heidegger, an eloquent advocate for poetry and general and Hölderlin in particular, was also a Nazi?). Hölderlin only comes up in Guignon's volume a couple of times, and Taylor does not mention him at all in his contribution, but Taylor was still helpful. Very helpful.

Taylor's first sentence: "Heidegger's importance lies partly in the fact that he is perhaps the leading figure among that small list of twentieth-century philosophers who have helped us emerge, painfully and with difficulty, from the grip of modern rationalism."

If Heidegger wanted to get us out of the grip of modern rationalism, poetry would certainly be a way to do it. Poetry can be rational, of course, but it tends not to deal with straightforward propositions that are either true or false. When Keats says of the nightingale, "Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!", he is making an obviously false statement...arrant nonsense, even, if you are a strict logical positivist sort of person. Within the poem, though, the statement moves things forward, gets us somewhere, helps us understand something. Is there a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem? No, there is not. And yes, there is.

The problem arises because fascism in general, and Hitler in general, also tended to look down on rationality as inferior to blood, national feeling, intuition, instinct, the will to power, and so on. With disastrous results.

So, to restate my problem in the terms that Taylor has enabled me to see, can we have the opening-up-possibilities, new ways of seeing thing kind of irrationality that good poetry provides without at the same time inviting the demonizing, fear-mongering, blood-shedding kind of irrationality that turns our communities into war zones? 

I need to look into Taylor's most recent book.

Jenn Shapland, _My Autobiography of Carson McCullers_

AS SHAPLAND'S TITLE suggests, this is not exactly a biography of McCullers; Shapland tells us a lot about herself in it, but it's not exactly about her, either. Let's call it a meditation on what writers can come to mean to us even though our only relationship with them is actually only with the writing they left behind, much of which was not even intended for us, but which inexplicably has a power to explain us to ourselves. 

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers reminded me of A. J. A. Symons's brilliant but unorthodox Quest for Corvo (1934), in which he gives us a biography of the brilliant but unorthodox novelist Frederick Rolfe, who published as "Baron Corvo." Rather than start with Rolfe's birth and duly march readers forward to his death, Symons begins by telling us how he came to read Rolfe, how he began his investigations, what he found and where he found it, and how he was able to piece together Rolfe's life story. Biography as detective story, if you will.

Shapland's book is also about her investigations, her time in the archives, her spending time in the places McCullers spent time, her piecing together of a story...in this case, a story that (unlike Rolfe's) has already been entombed in weighty formal biographies (Virginia Spencer Carr, et al.). As with Symons's book, a portrait emerges that is all the more interesting because we have seen some of the process through which the portrait emerged.

Shapland goes much further than Symons does in revealing her own investment in the subject of her portrait, though. Rolfe was gay, and Symons straightforwardly acknowledges that while leaving his own sexuality out of the discussion. (Was Symons gay? On the one hand, he was married; on the other hand, he was also planning to write a biography of Wilde.) Shapland places McCullers's queerness in the foreground of the portrait right from the opening pages, and states plainly enough that writing about McCullers has been crucial in the recognition, acknowledgement, and embrace of her own lesbian sexuality. 

McCullers's other, more academic biographers tend to be cagier or more cautious on this subject. They tend to talk about bisexuality, conflicted feelings, ambiguity, that sort of thing. I don't know whether Shapland is right that Mary Mercer was McCullers's lover as well as a devoted friend. Clearly, Shapland wants Mercer to have been lover as well as friend, for reasons that have a lot to do with Shapland's own sense of kinship with her subject. In an academic biography, letting your own feelings tip the balance this way would not be okay...but it does feel okay here, because Shapland is so upfront about it, even calling our attention to it, and because it makes a valid point about how and why we read.

Shapland's portrait of McCullers has more than a bit of the portraitist in it, but Shapland is so honest about that (again, see title) that her book seems something more worth having than another biography. 

Sam Riviere, _After Fame_

NOT A TRANSLATION of Book I of Martial's epigrams, let's emphasize--maybe an "imitation," along the lines of Alexander Pope's Imitations of Horace or Samuel Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes." Apparently some of it was translated using a digital translation program, the kind of program which at the time the book was published (2020) was still capable of producing refreshingly odd results, but still, very far from a translation. Martial in a wobbly 21st century mirror, we might say.

For example, number 47 in Martial's Book I is about a contemporary of his who has switched careers from being doctor to being an undertaker, and Martial makes the joke that he has not really changed his work at all, as he is still putting people underground. Riviere's 47 reads:

This is to acknowledge

that poets do admin

in 2018: received

I think the joke here is that poets who get jobs in academia find themselves saddled with stultifying tasks, but perhaps in some cases their poetry was already stultifying, so no major change has occurred. So the relation between Martial's poems and Riviere's is more oblique and through-a-cloud-darkly than that between Pope and Horace or Johnson and Juvenal, but still discernible and sometimes wickedly funny.

After Fame certainly aligns with Riviere's 2021 novel, Dead Souls, a picaresque trip through the institutions contemporary writing inhabits (see LLL post of Oct 2, 2023). Martial is an urban poet whose short, sharply pointed poems conjure up a setting of ill-gotten wealth, literary sophistication, intoxication, sexual adventurism, and plagiarism, a setting which (mutatis mutandis) is an awfully close match for that of Dead Souls.

I wondered whether Riviere himself had had to bat away any accusations of plagiarism, since Martial accuses a few people of appropriating his work and Solomon Wiese, a key character in Dead Souls, has his own troubles on that score. Riviere's early poetry had incorporated random search-engine finds (like what the USA called "flarf") and that may have led to the kind of sticky intellectual property questions that Wiese deals with in the novel. (Working with Martial is risk-free in that regard; he has been dead for about 1900 years, and that may be part of the joke.)

The irony is, though, that Riviere is about as original poet as you are ever going to encounter these days. Reading him is a continuing surprise.