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.