Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The End of Beauty _ (4) and _Region of Unlikeness_ (1)

 EXTRAORDINARY POETRY COLLECTIONS do not necessarily make their authors famous, but The End of Beauty did put Graham into a whole new league. It created sufficient buzz that I heard of her, found a copy, and got hooked. This was about 1990 or 1991, I think; the book had already been out for a few years. I remember leaving it on a table in my office during the weeks I was reading it. A friend picked it up, spent about twenty minutes with it, and said, "This is the real thing."

The cover of the 1991 follow-up, Region of Unlikeness, bears evidence of its predecessor's impact. Blurbs from Frank Bidart, John Ashbery, and James Tate--a three-headed endorsement from the previous generation of poets that would be hard to surpass. The author bio mentions that Graham is now "on the permanent faculty" of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and has received a MacArthur grant. So, at 40, Graham is doing better than okay. 

Whatever fueled the takeoff of The End of Beauty is still burning hard and bright in Region of Unlikeness. The "Foreword," three pages of short quotations from Augustine, Heidegger, the Bible, and Melville, announces plainly enough that the poet's intellectual ambitions have not slackened. 

History is present here as mythology was present was in The End of Beauty, and as the myths of the earlier volume were presented as a kind of self-portraiture, so the big events here are infused with Graham's own circumstances. 

In "Fission," she learns of the assassination of Kennedy when a screening of Kubrick's Lolita is interrupted by the management to make the terrible announcement. That a 13-year-old girl is watching Lolita is enough for an unsettling poem, anyone might suppose, to say nothing of attending the showing with her parents, but to have so charged a moment as Humbert's first glimpse of Lo shattered by the announcement that the handsome young man whose arrival at the White House seemed to promise a transformative renewal has been shot dead.... 

Graham was present at les événements in Paris in 1968 and was even arrested, but "The Hiding Place" is not a call to action nor a nostalgic bliss-was-it-then-to-be-alive memory but a montage of grim details that suggest no one at the time knew exactly what was going on, not even Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Danny the Red--if he is the "certain leader" Graham faced "above an open streetfire."

"From the New World" is one of Graham's most remarkable poems (it provided a title for her second book of selected poems). It is not "about" the Holocaust, exactly, but orbits a horrifying detail from the 1987 trial of John Demjanjuk, known as "Ivan the Terrible" while he was a guard at Treblinka. I can't say I really understand why Graham pairs this story with memories of her grandmother sliding into dementia. It might have to do with the slipperiness of identity, as one of the issues in the trial was whether Demjanjuk really was "Ivan," and Graham's grandmother does not entirely believe that the girl she is talking to is Jorie. It might have to do with how fragile things are, or how resilient things are, or the sheer power of the world's devouring maw. It's an arresting poem, though--and by "arresting" I mean it brings everything to a halt while you are reading it.

Walter Kempowski, _All for Nothing_, trans. Anthea Bell

 If YOU ARE in the mood for something bleak, sobering, and comfortless, here is a novel for you.

Set in East Prussia (a territory now mostly within Poland and partly within Russia) in the early months of 1945, All for Nothing is about the von Globings, a family belonging to the provincial nobility. The father, Eberhardt, is in Italy with the German army, leaving the rest of the family--his attractive wife, Katharina, his adolescent son, Peter, an aunt, Peter's tutor, and a few other retainers--in their grand old family home out in the country, near the town on Mitkau.

The von Globigs are not fervent Nazis--they look down a little on the local party boss, Herr Drygalski--but they have gone along to get along. They have sold most of the land of their estate well before the novel begins, and the investments they relied on for income have been upended by the war, but they do have Eberhard's officer pay.

They are all settled into their routines when the novel opens, routines that begin to get frequently interrupted by folks coming through from the east, looking to stay a while before pressing on to Germany or other points west. Each chapter looks closely at one of the von Globigs or at some party of visitors: "the Painter," "The Violinist," and so on. The steady stream of temporary guests is due to the  Russian army's progress to the east. The von Globigs are not too concerned about this, though, assuming things are bound to turn around.

By the time they realize things are not turning around and start packing to leave, the situation has deteriorated badly, society is coming unglued, and they find that nothing and no one can be relied on.

By the end...well, I'll avoid spoilers here. But just to repeat: bleak, sobering, and comfortless. And powerful in its understatement, its restraint, its telling the whole story without any melodramatic gesture at all. 

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The End of Beauty_ (3)

THE TITLE PHRASE occurs in a poem called "The Lovers," apparently about a couple; it begins, "They have been staring at each other for a long time now/ Around them the objects (circa 1980) / Then corridors, windows, a meadow, the _______." In the latter part of the poem, I'm guessing, things get sexual:

Listen, this is the thing that can trap it now--the glance--

the howling and biting gap--

and our two faces raised

that nothing begin (don't look away),

that there be no elsewhere,

that there be no elsewhere to seed out into,

just this here between us, this look (can you see me?) this

     look afloat on want,

this long thin angel whose body is a stalk, rootfree,

     blossomfree,

whose body we are making, whose body is a _______,

(only quicker, much quicker, a conflagration)

The phrase occurs earlier than this passage, a dozen or so lines in: "Here it is, here, the end of beauty, the present."

"The end of beauty," by itself, suggests termination, closure, something over and done with, but in this line Graham seems to be working with a different meaning of "end," the end as goal or purpose, the thing one hopes to bring about. So we may be talking about the goal of beauty, what beauty exists to bring about, and in this poem beauty exists to get two people together, to turn two individuals into lovers, into the making of one body.

The book's next poem, "Vertigo," calls up the same idea: "How is it one soul wants to be owned / by a single other / in its entirety?--". This time, though, it's a question. Can this really be the purpose of beauty, of life itself, of being? One wants to be owned. But why does one want that? Can we, should we, stop ourselves from wanting that?

This reminded me of how, in Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, there seemed to be few other people around, as if Graham preferred being on her own. "To the Reader" in The End of Beauty shows us a young Jorie Graham intent on a Science Fair project, with a description of her activity that simultaneously suggests her work as a poet. "I swear to you this begins with that girl on a day after sudden rain," she writes, and the girl heads out to "the allotted earth--for Science Fair--into the everything of / one square yard of earth," where a relentless excavation commences. That girl doesn't need a partner--a partner would only slow things down. But the woman that girl became wants a partner--perhaps everything depends on  that. Or does it?

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The End of Beauty_ (2)

THE RECURRING SITUATION in the poems of The End of Beauty involves a famous couple, usually a man and a woman, and a moment of rupture, or the crossing of a line, or some other decisive instant that creates a before and after. A couple (at least) of the poems are about Adam and Eve, and we also have Orpheus and Eurydice, Tristan and Isolde, Apollo and Daphne, Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Mary and the angel Gabriel, Demeter and Persephone, and Penelope and Odysseus. The poem “Pollock and Canvas” also seems to belong in the category somehow, involving as it does a heightened, intense, almost feverish scrutiny of an emerging event, with the canvas as the painter's counterpart/mate. (Which could be biographically true, for all I know. Perhaps Lee Krasner wished she got half the attention the canvases did.)

The final poem, "Imperialism," might also count as a version of the situation, as Graham may be telling a Higher Being ("Nothing but a shadow, lord, and hazy at that") to whom she is married ("what is it for // this marriage, this life of Look, here's a body") about being taken, aged nine, to the Ganges by her mother, and entering the river with hundred of thousands of pilgrims. It's a moment that definitely creates a before-and-after, it sounds like ("they had to call whatever doctor was on hand / to give me a shot of what? --probably Demerol-- / to stop the screaming"). 

This would all be interesting enough, but Graham ups the ante by calling some of these poems about dyads-in-crisis self-portraits. The book's first poem, about Adam and Eve, is titled "Self-Portrait as the Gesture between Them," and we also have "Self-Portrait as Both Parties" (Orpheus and Eurydice), "Self-Portrait as Apollo and Daphne," "Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay" (Odysseus and Penelope), and "Self-Portrait as Demeter and Persephone." 

The titles suggest these poems depict something about the poet herself. But what? Does she identify with the woman in the dyad, and do the poems somehow reflect her first or second marriage? Or is she both parts of the dyad? Or is she the crisis the dyad is experiencing? Maybe these poems picking up something of an earlier generation of American poets, a Plath-Sexton-Berryman-Lowell confessionalism, but in a high modernist, oblique way. 

Graham once in a while veers towards straightforward confessionalism, as in the poem about being taken to the Ganges or "Ravel and Unravel," which revisits Penelope but includes lines that seem to address her (then) husband: "You walked ahead, lost one, carrying / Emily, all cargo now that I / am emptied finally / of all but my own / undoing [...]". But she seems to be telling us a lot more in the dyad-in-crisis poems, even though is not at all easy to say what she is telling us.

And what about that other dyad: poet and reader? Graham comes just little short of Jane Eyre in her willingness to speak right to us (e.g., "To the Reader"), telling us things she seems not to have told anyone else. 

Re-Reading Jorie Graham: _Erosion_ (2) and _The End of Beauty_ (1)

 SIXTEEN OF EROSION's thirty-three poems use a stanza of six short lines, the first, third, and fifth usually of three accented syllables, the second, fourth, and sixth usually of two (and slightly indented). The combination of the short lines with Graham's typically complex sentence structure creates a headlong tumbling or falling movement, straight down as it were, as though into a well, or as though we were trying to catch up with the White Rabbit.

Graham was obviously a bit in love with this form at the time she was writing the poems in Erosion, so it surprises that in her next book, The End of Beauty, foof, it's gone. In Helen Vendler's chapter in Graham in The Breaking of Style, she explains how Graham, in her third book, goes for a whole different kind of form, with lines stretching across the page like midwestern horizons. (The End of Beauty was Graham's first book with Ecco, who accommodated her with wider and wider pages, eventually getting to the almost square pages of Swarm, Never, and Overlord.)

Vendler makes an interesting argument about the shift from the vertical to the horizontal, from going down to going across, and how Graham seems to now be in a different mode, lighting out over the territory rather than excavating.

Vendler also notes a couple of other distinctively Graham-ian moves that make their debut here:

(1) the fill-in-the-blank spaces where the syntax suggests a word is called for, but the word has been omitted or never supplied, e.g., "looking into that which sets the _______ in motion," from "Orpheus and Eurydice."  For someone my age, this device infallibly recalls tests in junior high or high school along such lines as "The chief exports of Chile are _____, ______, and _______." Insofar as  the device recalls the stress of being tested to choose the one-and-only right word, it is a bit unnerving; since this is a Graham poem, however, and one senses she herself might have filled the blank in any number of surprising and counter-intuitive ways, one gets a heady sense of possibility as well, an invitation to participate in the creation of the poem. Can one feel intimidated and liberated at the same time? That's a close as I can come to describing the effect. It may be the cosmos beings set in motion, or it may be the mojo.

(2) the numbering of lines--or, it may be, the numbering of sections that consist of only one line--in several of the poems, e.g., "Self-Portrait as the Gesture between Them" or Part II of "Pollock and Canvas." Vendler calls this device the "freeze-frame," as in a film projected frame-by-frame so that each image gets its own moment rather than blurring into the illusion of movement--as in Douglas Gordon's art installation "24 Hour Psycho," say. This strikes me as an ingenious way of conveying Graham's desire to notice everything she can about a moment before it hastens on its way, making it...slow...down...like...this so she (and we) can get a good look at it. 

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Erosion_ (1)

 AS NOTED EARLIER, Hybrid of Plants and of Ghosts already sounds like Jorie Graham, but Erosion (1983) sounds even more like Jorie Graham.

There is more of that hyper-attention, that intense focus on the moment, as if trying to notice every single thing about the moment before it goes, before it gives way to the next moment. I wonder if the tendency of the details of one's surroundings to fade and disappear is what the title is naming. The collection does include a poem titled "Erosion," which begins by claiming to love sequence, one thing giving way to another, slow disappearances: 

Today, on this beach

I am history to these fine

pebbles. I run them

through my fingers. Each time

some molecules rub off

evolving into 

the invisible.

But since this poem involves a "we," I started to wonder if the erosion was going on in the relationship as well, that it was wearing away, that its end it was in sight. The poem ends ominously:

Outside the window it's starting to snow.

It's going to get colder.

The less full the glass, the truer

the sound. 

This is my song

for the North

coming towards us.

Is the relationship also about to evolve into the invisible? 

Elsewhere, the poems seem to want things to stop, or hold still long enough to be completely experienced, even inventoried. This may be why the poems often look at paintings, where motion is arrested--one poem is about two portraits by Klimt, but more typically the paintings under our eye are by masters of the Italian Renaissance. 

But then the paintings start moving, as in what may be her first great poem, "San Sepolcro," in which we behold "this girl / by Piero / della Francesca, unbuttoning / her blue dress, / her mantle of weather, / to go into // labor." 

     Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
     forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
      is a button 

coming undone, something terribly

     nimble-fingered

finding all the stops. 

Childbirth is, famously, an event that is not stopping or holding still for anyone, and to have that turn into music--the breath and the stops suggest a recorder or flute to me--the art perhaps most enmeshed in time--well, that works for me. Poetry has affinities with painting on the one hand, making things stand still, but affinities with music on the other hand, dits effects occurring through the modality of time.

    

Daniel Kehlmann, _The Director_, trans. Ross Benjamin

 FIRST NOVEL I have ever read by Daniel Kehlmann, but it won't be the last. Brilliant writer. 

The Director depicts the bad luck and worse choices of G. W. Pabst, legendary German film director of the silent era (Pandora's Box, et al.). When the Nazis take power, Pabst takes his wife and young son to Hollywood, figuring he can make the transition á la Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. Unfortunately, he gets assigned only mediocre projects over which he has only limited control. Disappointed, he takes wife and son back to Europe, figuring he can do something closer to what he wants to do in Switzerland or France. However, they are in Germany visiting his aging and ailing mother when the war starts, and they can't get out. As soon as the Nazis discover the great Pabst is back in Germany, they swiftly recruit him to make films--the films he wants to make, of course, within reason, but naturally he wants his films to be suitable for the New Germany, doesn't he? Doesn't he? Hmm?

What kind of compromise, how many compromises, are you willing to make to pursue your vocation? In Pabst's case, as imagined by Kehlmann, the answers are "any kind" and "as many as it takes."

Being a film director, Pabst is in a situation more like an architect's than a writer's. A writer could just keep writing whatever he felt called to write, but keep it all in a drawer, waiting for things to change. Making a film, though, like raising a building, requires capital, materials, expensive equipment, and people with highly specialized skills. Anyone with a phone and editing software could make a crude movie now, perhaps, but Pabst had no such options. In the 1940s, you need real resources to make films. And so the Faustian bargain was made, with the usual results.

So, a morally serious novel, and a historical novel that economically and vividly evokes another era, but what really struck me is how versatile Kehlmann is in handling point of view. The chapters often give us Pabst's point of view--most memorably, I'd say, in his interview with a shape-shifting Goebbels who seems able to be in two places at once as well as to say two very different things at the same time. But we also have a chapter in which Pabst's wife has to navigate a Nazi book club, another in which his son has to stay on the right side of his school's Hitler Youth, and a couple (which open and close the book), set in the 1960s or 70s, in which Pabst's cinematographer, succumbing to Alzheimer's, accepts an invitation to appear on a TV talk show and answer questions about his old boss. Kehlmann's ability to click from one character's perspective to another's dazzles.

The chapter that took the cake for me was from the point of view of P. G. Wodehouse (unnamed but easily recognizable), who, in the middle of making his own compromises with the devil, meets Pabst at a film premiere.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts_

A NEW COLLECTION by Graham, her fifteenth (!), is forthcoming in May, a circumstance that struck me as a good moment to read the whole corpus again. 

Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts is her first collection; it appeared in 1980, the year she turned thirty, as part of Princeton UP's Contemporary Poets series (alongside volumes by, among others, Robert Pinsky, Grace Shulman, and Carl Dennis).

The title is from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It occurs in a passage in which Zarathustra is declaring, "I teach Superman." Even the wisest man, Zarathustra insists, is but a temporary conjoining of bare life, like a plant (bios, maybe), and a spirit (zoë, maybe), thus a hybrid of plant and ghost, but the Superman will be something else again.

I don't think Graham was interested in the übermensch, really, but she was plainly interested in embodiment and consciousness right out of the gate, as she has been ever since. 

The thing that immediately struck me on reading this book again (I first read it over thirty years ago) is how assured it is. Most first collections include a certain amount of fumbling, baldly derivative poems, overplayed hands, and such, but Jorie Graham seems to be 100% Graham right away. (Not publishing her first collection until she was thirty may have something to do with this).

A poet with whom I conversed about this book told me she had heard that Graham recommends poets begin a collection with an ars poetica, and Graham seems to do exactly that here with "The Way Things Work." Graham always pays attention to things with a certain ferocity of concentration, and this poem takes that approach: "The way things work / is that we finally believe / they are there, / common and able / to illustrate  themselves. / [...] / The way things work / is that eventually / something catches." Throughout the book, Graham pays attention intently, waiting, maybe probing for the moment when something catches.

The waiting is not always patient, which is why I threw "probing" in there. Another poet with whom I was conversing felt that Graham tended to fall into a subject/object dichotomy, monitoring her own sensorium and consciousness so minutely that she sacrificed any chance of getting out of herself, shall we say. Maybe so...a bit like Hamlet in that respect, monitoring her own consciousness then monitoring her monitoring ("That would  be scanned"). She isn't one for spontaneity, relinquishing control, delirium. 

There is a lot of control in her sentence structure, for instance--reminiscent of Walter Pater, late Henry James, and Virginia Woolf. That is fine by me--I love Pater, James, and Woolf--but few contemporary poets go in for that degree of syntactical elaboration. Merwin and Ashbery were a couple of the key contemporary poets when Graham started writing, but you don't see much of the parataxis of Merwin or the juggling with the colloquial that you see in Ashbery. She seems to be going for something else--maybe something more high modern, if I am right in thinking "I Was Taught Three" has one eye on Yeats's "Among School Children."

Another striking thing: not many other people in the poems, which are mainly about features of the landscape and animals, most often birds. The volume feels eerily depopulated until about two-thirds through, when a "you" surfaces. (See, for instance, "The Slow Sounding and Eventual Reemergence of.") The "you" may just be Graham's way of talking to her own consciousness as she monitors her monitoring, and the "we" may just be human beings, but I wonder if the "you" was first husband William Graham (of the Washington Post Grahams), to whom she was married from 1973 to 1977, and the "we" the two of them. Hard to say. Plath and Sexton may have been important precursors, but Graham is not confessional...at least not in that way.

Jacques Derrida, _Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question_, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby

FINISHING A BOOK by Derrida always feels like an accomplishment to me, even when, as in the present case, (a) the book is a short one, just over a hundred pages, (b) it is one of the relatively easier ones, in this case one of his lectures, and (c) I wouldn't say I understood all of it. 

Picking up this book is one more attempt of mine to sort out what Heidegger saw in Hölderlin. Hölderlin only comes up in Derrida's ninth chapter, but the whole lecture addresses the issues that puzzle me, as it concerns Heidegger's development between Being and Time (1927) and texts from the 1930s like his rector's address of 1933 and Introduction to Metaphysics (written in 1935, although not published until many years later).

Derrida notes that in Being and Time Heidegger declares that he wants to avoid the word "spirit"--geist--and largely succeeds. The word geist comes back hard in the 1930s texts, though, looming larger and larger, with Heidegger eventually concluding that no word in any other language can translate what geist means. The untranslatability of geist implies that Germany has some indispensable role in the unfolding of history and truth, seemingly--which is quite close to where Heidegger is in his texts on certain of Hölderlin's poems.

Derrida thus seems interested in the question of how Heidegger fell into orbit around the Nazis. That interest only becomes explicit in the last five pages of the book, but seems implicit throughout, and may be telling us what "the question" in the title is--i.e., how did a smart guy like Heidegger fall for the Nazis? That's not the only way to interpret the title, though, since Derrida also notes that Heidegger believed only humans had geist, and only humans could ask questions, so geist is connected, among other things, to the ability to formulate and pose questions.

The lecture was delivered in 1987, which got me wondering. In the early 1980s, Derrida and deconstruction seemed politically and/or ethically suspect, even nihilistic, to many American naysayers  since (according to these naysayers), by emphasizing how slippery language was, how tenuously pinned to the actual it was, it pulled the rug out from under efforts towards progressive social change. 

The naysayers chalked up a big win when, in August of 1987, a researcher discovered that Derrida's friend and fellow deconstructionist Paul De Man had done literary journalism for a collaborationist newspaper in Belgium during World War II. (Not to mention other problems, like committing bigamy.) De Man's newly discovered past seemed to confirm that there was something profoundly wrong with deconstruction.

Hence my wondering: was this 1987 book published before or after the revelations about De Man? The lecture does cite De Man's Allegories of Reading, but says nothing about his collaborationist past. Derrida was soon, however, to treat this painful question with (I think) extraordinary clarity and intellectual honesty in "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” published in Spring 1988 issue of Critical Inquiry.

What was the actual sequence of events here? I need  to know.

Amy Clampitt, _What the Light Was Like_

I HAVE LONG thought I should get around to reading a book by Amy Clampitt. For one thing, her getting her first full-length collection published at age 63 makes her an inspiring example, and for another, we share an alma mater. I bought What the Light Was Like many years ago, but it was reading Anthony Domestico's review of Willard Spiegelman's new biography of Clampitt that tipped me.

Clampitt's diction is rich, one could say, with a higher cholesterol level than I am used to reading of late. For instance: 

              That veiny Chinese

lantern, its stolid jelly

of a fruit, not only has

no aroma but is twice as tedious

as the wild strawberry's sunburst

stem-end appendage: each one must

be between-nail-snipped at both extremities.

That's a lot of syllables for a gooseberry, but you can't deny they are well chosen and artfully arranged. I am guessing Clampitt's poetic lineage goes back through Dylan Thomas, Hart Crane, Gerard Manley Hopkins, on back to John "load every rift with ore" Keats. (Keats gets a memorable eight-poem sequence here, focusing on his miraculous year, 1819).

Even when Clampitt gets mildly satirical, as in "A New Life," a portrait of a young wide and mom climbing the corporate ladder, the lure of Romantic spiritualized landscape beckons:

                 These days
She's in Quality Circles, a kind of hovering
equipoise between Management and non-Management,

precarious as the lake-twinned tremor of aspens,

as the lingering ash-blond arcade of foliage

completing itself as it leans in to join its own inversion.

I'm not sure what the richly elaborated image of trees reflected in water is up to in this portrait of a 1980s go-getter, but what the heck, it's lovely, so why not?

Clampitt reminds me also of a lower-cholesterol poet, Elizabeth Bishop, in her attention to landscape and her tendency to use first-person pronouns sparingly. Apart from the sequence on Keats, the collection's sections center on place: Maine in the first part, the Midwest of Clampitt's childhood and youth in  the second, New York City in the fourth. As with Bishop (e.g., "At the Fishhouses"), Clampitt's landscapes feel charged with memory and a kind of interiority even though no "I" is explicitly identified. Clampitt's language brightly calls attention to itself, the top student waving a hand and begging to be called on, but she herself is only subtly present.

Hermione Hoby, “Long Story”

I AM NOT familiar with Hoby, but this essay in the February 2 New Yorker caught my attention because I have long admired David Foster Wallace’s writing and also have an ongoing interest in the question of whether women readers find him worthwhile. 

I do know some who do, but a lot of women readers don’t. There are a few reasons for this. His depiction of women characters does not get high marks, or even passing marks, from everyone. But his biography may be the bigger problem. He admitted to watching a lot of porn (see “Big Red Son” in Consider the Lobster). After Infinite Jest, he took full advantage of the sexual opportunities that come with literary celebrity, according to biographer D. T. Max. According to Mary Karr, who would know, he made a scary boyfriend. I think too that a lot of writing-oriented young women got very, very tired of hearing from writing-oriented boyfriends that they really, really had to read Infinite Jest. There was no joke about guys enamored of Wallace in the 2023 Barbie movie, but there could well have been.

A high point of Wallace-resistance was Amy Hungerford’s essay/chapter “On Not Reading DFW,” from 2017 or so. Hungerford intensely disliked Infinite Jest without even having read it. Patricia Lockwood’s 2023 take in the LRB was more tempered but well short of an endorsement.

Hoby’s essay starts by discussing how Wallace-resistance has almost become the default position for writing-oriented women. Wallace’s reputation, she writes, is as “a byword for literary arrogance, a totem of masculine pretentiousness, a red flag if spotted on the shelves of a prospective partner, and reading matter routinely subjected to the word ‘performative’ in its most damning sense.” 

She dissents, carefully. Her piece is mainly about Infinite Jest, published thirty years ago this month, and she particularly notes the humanity and humility of the novel’s attention to 12-step culture, especially through the character of Don Gately. She even suggests the novel may be due for a “cultural feminization,” thanks to a new edition with a foreword by Michelle Zauner. (The tenth anniversary edition had a foreword from Dave Eggers, so the landscape has obviously changed a lot in the meantime.)

I hope she’s right. I guess we’ll see. 

Judith Butler, _Who's Afraid of Gender?_

READING JUDITH BUTLER in the early 1990s felt a bit like reading Derrida in the 1970s, in that neither writer seemed inclined to make concessions to the reader. The implied message: if you can't keep up, go home. By the nineties, though, Derrida's sense of an abiding audience led him to relax a little bit, to render his arguments a little easier of access. Butler, too, aware of having a sizeable potential audience, has for quite a few years now been willing to intervene in public questions with arguments that do not rely on the daunting apparatuses they used in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter. ("Is Judaism Zionism?" from 2011, can serve as an example.) 

Who's Afraid of Gender? counts as a public intervention, I would say, as it deals with topics being debated in courts and legislatures all across the country and all across the world; in fact, and unfortunately, it is even more urgently timely now than it was on its publication in 2024. The answer to the title's question is "a whole lot of people," including the Catholic Church, the Trump Administration, and certain British feminists, except they name their enemy not "gender" but "gender ideology." The battleground is sometimes sharply defined--public bathrooms, locker rooms, medical care for minors--but sometimes might include anyone and any topic found in the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, and sometimes might even include the desire to roll everything back to the days of the trad wife.

Butler's arguments are composed, rational, lawyerlike, their rhetoric temperate and judicious--which must have taken them some doing, for, as they point out, there is little that is rational or temperate or even evidence-based in the manifestoes of those trying to destroy "gender ideology" root and branch. As Butler emphasizes throughout, these culture warriors are battling a "toxic phantasm," an imaginary monster conjured out of their own fears and anxieties, a bogey that has nothing in common with actual LGBTQIA+ people.

But this leaves us with a tough question. Can the phantasmatic be countered with rationality, evidence, logic, as Butler is trying to do? Its sources may be more unconscious than that (as Amia Srinavasan has recently suggested in a London Review of Books essay, "The Impossible Patient"), something way down in the humid boiler room of the id. 

Butler gave us a psychoanalytic map to homophobic anxiety long ago in The Psychic Life of Power. Perhaps they are guessing that those who have declared war on "gender ideology" would not sit still for a psychoanalytic account of their own motives, and so are hoping to get a hearing with clear-light-of-day public accountability kinds of arguments. Will those be enough? One hopes so.

Percival Everett and James Kincaid, _A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond_

THIS IS A brilliant and funny epistolary novel composed by Everett and one of his colleagues at USC. The book is not what its title proclaims, exactly, but instead the correspondence kicked off when a junior staffer of the staunch segregationist South Carolina senator named in the title sends a book proposal to Simon and Schuster. It is never clear whether the junior staffer (to whom Everett and Kincaid give the pitch-perfect name Barton Wilkes) has actually consulted with Sen. Thurmond about this project, but he is relatively clear about the proposed book's trajectory, which will be to show that Blacks in the former Confederate states never had it so good as they did before the Supreme Court messed everything up with Brown v. the Board of Education, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The proposal makes the rounds at Simon and Schuster, the various letters and memos revealing a seething snakepit of office politics. Meanwhile, Wilkes keeps sending in tantalizing bits of what the Senator (supposedly) has in mind for the book and insinuating himself multifariously into said snakepit.

The proposal advances to the point where ghost writers are needed. Everett gets pulled in because a Black author will lend the project a certain credibility; Kincaid gets pulled in because...I don't know, the more the merrier, I guess. 

The personal crises of various editors and editorial assistants at Simon and Schuster mount up, Barton Wilkes egging them on the whole time. The tangled murk of the project gets murkier and more tangled and ever more overtly racist. Everett and Kincaid eventually take a special trip to South Carolina (where Everett in fact grew up and went to high school) to meet the senator himself.

Everett has a knack for being highly entertaining while honing very sharp satirical points, and that knack is fully on display in this one.

Joyelle McSweeney, _Death Styles_

 THIS BOOK CAME out of a deeply painful circumstance: a daughter born with a fatal medical condition that led to her death after just thirteen days. 

McSweeney chose an interesting set of constraints for these poems: to write every day, “to accept any inspiration presented to me,” and “to fully follow the flight of that inspiration for as far as it would take me.” Accordingly, each poem’s title is a date, with a subtitle indicating what inspiration chance presented, and some of them are several pages long.

As you might expect, McSweeney’s daughter’s death figures in the poems often: “Darling / I’m sorry you didn’t survive / reverse aubade / every time the sun rises / I want to crumple up / this whole heliocentric universe.” Her accepting the themes and images presented by chance adds an entirely unpredictable swirl to her grief, though, so the poems continually surprise. The krater (the bowl in which ancient Greeks mixed wine), the hooded merganser (a kind of of duck), Mary Magdalene, Leonard Cohen, Mary Shelley are among the dictated-by-chance elements that eerily blend, as if destined to, with McSweeney’s memories and grief.

This may be why the book feels more like actual grief than do books that focus more closely on the grief itself. Our losses occur in a world that does not pause for us—if we are lucky, some will afford us a little space and a little quiet, but meanwhile everything keeps inexorably rolling on. Even our own consciousness keeps inexorably rolling on. And McSweeney’s poems do have that headlong rush, that sense of onward movement pulling us along even when we feel emotionally paralyzed. And the onward movement may be the very thing we need. The “Death Styles” sequence concludes: “I refuse / to shut my eyes / because I was robbed / of something / by a god / and I’m going to/ to keep looking / till I find it.”

And a shout out to Nightboat Books and designer Kit Schluter for the beauty of this book as an object. Taller and narrower than most books, a bit like Atheneum volumes from the early 1970s, with a cover that looks like a woodcut or lino cut with subdued blue, green, red, and pink on a black background, the paper embossed or lightly textured somehow. The presentation of the poems blended seamlessly with the reading of them.

Quinn Slobodian, _Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right_

 TRUMP HAS NEVER seemed to have an ideology or political principles, exactly--he always seems to be winging it--but his administration and core supporters seem to have a vast array of ideologies, not all of which designed to be complementary. Having read books by Kristin Kobes du Mez and Matthew Taylor on Trump's Christian supporters, I had difficulty imagining what those supporters would talk about with the supporters Quinn Slobodian describes. But every coalition has its share of awkward conversations, I suppose.

Slobodian's book is short (176 pages of text) but dense (90 pages of notes and bibliography) and he is looking at the hard-core free market / Austrian school of economics / Mont Pelerin Society people involved in the rise of the right both here in the U.S. and in a good many other places. As opposed to the Buckley-led conservative fusionism that married neoliberal economics to religion, Slobodian argues, this group marries neoliberal economics to racist and eugenicist fantasies. This group--key figures, besides F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises themselves, include Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Charles Murray, Markus Krall, Peter Boehringer, Peter Brimelow, Samuel Francis, Richard Lynn, and Curtis Yarvin--celebrates one or more of what Slobidian calls the "hards": "hardwired culture, hard money, hard borders."

Hardwired culture: racial differences, as revealed by IQ testing, are hereditary and permanent, so white people are rightly in charge and should remain so.

Hard borders: because of "hardwired culture," letting in many non-white people will lead to social deterioration and disintegration.

Hard currency: back to the gold standard for national currency, please. But, failing that, all the smart cookies will be amassing gold as a hedge against the coming race-war apocalypse.

The folks circulating these ideas are, by and large, not at colleges and universities, but instead at foundations and think tanks that have been created to foster free-market-friendly thinking. The racist, eugenicist, xenophobic ideas are an add-on, apparently, but stir up mighty passions. 

If the people at major research universities and (say) the New Yorker and the New York Times are our broad-daylight intelligentsia, the people Slobodian writes about in this book are our in-the-shadows intelligentsia, mainly known to each other and to wide networks of website/podcast/newsletter subscribers. They are men of the underground, unlikely to break into the bestseller lists alongside Timothy Snyder and Jill Lepore, but often handsomely funded, shining stars in a dark firmament all their own. And they seem to have not a few disciples in  the Trump administration. 

So, when the Evangelical potentates meet the Mont Pelerin potentates, do they talk about the Rapture, or about Milton Friedman, or do they just talk about the Super Bowl?

Susan Howe, _Debths_

ONE COULD ORGANIZE a great course on American culture and literature around the books of Susan Howe, reading Mary Rowlandson in conjunction with Howe's Singularities, or Emily Dickinson in conjunction with My Emily Dickinson, and wrapping up with a field trip to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in conjunction with this one, Debths.

The tricky part would getting the students to engage with Howe's writing, which makes few concessions to ordinary readerly expectations. Debths, for instance, contains "Tom Tit Tot," a fifty-some-page poem created by collaging photocopied bits of old books (some legible, some not) into spiky clumps of text. 

The relatively more conventional poems would also discourage a reader unprepared to make an effort.

John Chipman Gray and the Rule Against Perpetuities

Something more ancient than what you remember or may not

remember moved me to lean on you. Because of all the dead.

I can't.

            My cry is in the frost.

John Chipman Gray is the Gray of the law firm Ropes and Gray and also a much cited authority on property law. He wrote an influential book about the limits of perpetuities, that is, efforts to legally bind how the people of the future can dispose of property...which is in a way what Isabella Stewart Gardner tried to do in creating her museum with the stipulation that it had to remain exactly as she arranged it...but can one really do that? Does that make the dead more powerful than the living, to the point that life starts shutting down "because of all the dead" hedging us in with their demands that things not change? Does "my cry is in the frost" evoke one of Howe's illustrious predecessors as a poet of New England, someone who might not even recognize Howe's poetry as poetry but is nonetheless part of the tradition that enables her work?

Howe's poetry opens up if you, the reader, work at it. But you do have to work at it.

Howe is someone whose work I respect and admire more than I enjoy, but I do respect and admire it.

César Vallejo, _Trilce_, trans. Rebecca Seiferle

 In January 1994 (if "AI Overview" is to be trusted) I attended a reading by the late Philip Levine at which, briefly interrupting the reading of his poems, he enthusiastically recommended the poetry of César Vallejo. Not long after that, I stumbled upon this volume (Sheep Meadow Press, 1992) in a wonderful local used book store (A Novel Idea, Lincoln, Nebraska) and promptly bought it. 

Then it remained on my shelf for slightly over three decades until I read Michael Hofmann's recent LRB review of Margaret Jull Costa's new translation of Vallejo (The Eternal Dice, New Directions) and thought, "hmm, don't I have a book of his already?" And there it was on the shelf, not far from a few Vargas Llosa novels, a supernova waiting for me to open it up. 

Well, Levine was right. I remember taking his recommendation to mean that Vallejo's poetry must be a bit like his own--straightforward, plain language, socially conscious--so I was taken by surprise by Vallejo's willingness to firebomb each and every convention: not just prosodic, but also syntactic, and even lexical (for instance, he made up the word "trilce," and no one is sure what it means). 

Vallejo is certainly aware of tradition, certainly aware of history, even pulling in some Quechua elements alongside the Spanish ones, but he is less interested in preservation than in recombining the pieces into something transformatively new. As Joyce left Ireland for the continent in order to write Ireland--"to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race"--Vallejo left Peru for Paris in order to write Peru. How Peruvian Vallejo's Peru is I cannot say--maybe the relationship is like that of Blake's "Albion" to England--but it's a lively place to contemplate.

And Trilce was published in 1922, the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land, two other great examples of the illuminating reconfiguration of a place, a history, and a culture by the writerly imagination.

It must be a good time for Vallejo-in-English, since we have not only the Jull Costa translation but another new one from NYRB Poets by William Rowe and Helen Dimos. It would be worth my while to read another translation, I think; Hofmann notes that translations vary widely, since the poems are very hard to pin down, and that no one translation can be definitive.

And I have reaffirmed respect for the critical judgements of Philip Levine. I should have known from his championing of Larry Levis that he was not the kind of poet who admires only work aesthetically comparable to his own. His celebration of Vallejo confirms it.

László Krasznahorkai, _The Melancholy of Resistance_, trans. George Szirtes

 I HAVE OWNED this for years, maybe ten, but I only started it last August. I was only a hundred pages in or so when I saw the announcement that Krasznahorkai had won the Nobel. The sweet part of that was my being able honestly to answer "yes" when asked whether I had read anything by him.

A magnificent novel, I would say. It took me a few months to read, however.  It is not long (just 314 pages in the New Directions paperback I read), although it is dense (some paragraphs are a few pages long), but I found myself needing to takes some weeks-long breaks from it because it is terrifying. It probably did not help that I tended to be reading it between 11:00 p.m. and one o'clock in the morning.

The Melancholy of Resistance is not a thriller nor a horror novel. The terror lies in the novel's depiction of a crypto-fascist authoritarian seizing control of a modest-sized city in Hungary, and the not-at-all-distant similarities between what is happening in this fictional town and what is happening in the U.S.A. right now.

Krasznahorkai's portrait of the seizure of power does not seem historically specific; no dates are mentioned, nor is the Arrow Cross or Ferenc Szálasi. We are definitely in Hungary and might be in the 1930s or 1940s, although there are no references to historical events that might pin the story down (much as The Trial seems set in Prague before the outbreak of World War I, but we get no certain indications that it is). Krasznahorkai seems to be about drawing archetypes rather than writing historical fiction.

The key archetype is Mrs. Eszter, whose attributes coincide frequently with those of President Trump and his team: a sense that her will is a law unto itself, a willingness to exploit common fears and resentments to gain power, the whipping up of hatred against outsiders, the promptness in erecting Horst Wessel-like "martyrs," a readiness to resort to violence. No armbands, banners, or slogans, but the psychological architecture of right-wing authoritarianism is all there.

The novel takes place over just a couple of days, but in that brief time Mrs. Eszter stages a kind of coup, helped at first by the police chief (who turns out to be an unreliable drunk) then by a state official making a visit, somehow collecting the reins of power into her hands. The opportunity she is looking for arrives in the form of a traveling company with an unusual exhibit, a preserved whale (Leviathan?), a departure from the familiar that she uses to provoke the town's suspicion of outsiders and fear of the unknown to the point of violence.

Can anyone stop her? Perhaps her estranged husband, Mr. Eszter, person of letters and musicologist (he is particularly interested in the keyboard tuning systems of Andreas Werckmeister--as with the possible allusion to Hobbes's Leviathan, there may be thematic implications here). But Mr. Eszter can't get it together, quite, can't protect his eccentric friend Valuska or the town from Mrs. Eszter's machinations. He succumbs to the idea "that there was one law and one law only, that of the strong which dictated that 'the stronger power was absolute'." Shades of Stephen Miller! The town "cannot be governed in the old way anymore!" insists Mrs. Eszter, and it turns out she knows exactly what the new way should like. Shades of Miller again, not to mention the whole administration to which he belongs.

Kim Hyesoon, _Phantom Pain Wings_, trans. Don Mee Choi

 I WAS READING somewhere recently about South Korea's low fertility rate, which has been <1 for a few years now (replacement level is 2.1). The writer's take was that the education level of South Korean women has risen dramatically in recent generations, but the society's patriarchal culture has scarcely budged, with the consequence that younger South Korean women are intentionally avoiding marriage and motherhood, even boyfriends and sex (you can read up on the "4B movement" in a good many places).

Reading Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian and this collection by Korean poet Kim Hyesoon has made me a well-wisher to the 4B movement. The male entitlement on view in both books induces shudders. HUNTR/X wouldn't stand for it, I'm sure (come to think of it, they don't have boyfriends, do they?).

The collection's (English) title refers to the pain someone who has had (for example) a leg amputated can still experience in the now-absent leg, although the missing limbs in this instance are wings, as though Kim were a bird who had lost her wings. The poems seem to be working out this loss or working towards recovering birdness while at the same time grieving another loss, the deaths of her parents. As Kim writes in the essay that New Directions have appended to this translation, "I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out for birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language."

Being a bird, for Kim, seems to involve getting up and out, leaving the cage, breaking into a new dimension (that I was also reading Cartarescu's Solenoid as I was reading her poems might have reinforced this theme for me). For instance:

I fly then stop

I fly then chirp

Inside my made-up world, I can go very far

Not a song

Not an echo

but a faraway place where there's only freedom

I'm bird, bird flying in that place

That is not exactly a typical passage, though, as Kim is usually wilder, stranger, more surreal. Try this:

You died faraway and returned

Daddy, like an owl,

you perch on the dining table

and see night during the day

night during the night

Daddy, when you're too embarrassed, 

you swear every other word

like I swear at myself in the third person

Everybody says it's my fault

and not my brother's fault

Daddy, your flesh-colored head

spews white hair like a white trumpet

I wondered a bit at translator Don Mee Choi's decision to go with "Daddy" throughout the book, since the word will certainly remind English-speaking readers of Sylvia Plath, but it turned out Kim is conversant with Plath (see p. 127), and the intertextual echo came to seem, as in the quoted passage, uncannily  resonant.

Kim may not attract an audience the size of those for K-Pop, or South Korean film, or even Han Kang's novels, but if you were wondering whether South Korea's cultural explosion is also happening in poetry, the answer is yes.

Mircea Cartarescu, _Solenoid_, trans. Sean Cotter (2 of 2)

SEVERAL CHAPTERS ARE set in the narrator's childhood, and I was taken by surprise by how familiar the world of these chapters seemed. I say "by surprise" because even though Cartarescu and I are in the same age cohort--I am two years older--Romania in the late 1950s and early 1960s must have been a very different place than the American Midwest during the same period. Or so one would think. But the atmosphere of the institutions, the slightly stricken look of the streets, the lingering traces of life as it was before the Second World War, were apparently similar enough that the landscapes of Solenoid, physical and spiritual, seemed eerily recognizable to me.

The young Cartarescu and the young me were growing up under very different kinds of government, of course. Soviet troops only left Romania when Cartarescu was two years old, and Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power when the novelist was nine. The novel only occasionally glances at the political, however, and perhaps the Cold War era as lived in in the lower-profile regions of the East was somehow comparable to the same historical experience in the lower-profile regions of the West.

Ceaușescu is never mentioned by name in the novel, but we still get a sense of a lowering sky, of a grayness, of painfully circumscribed opportunities, of a vaguely oppressive something or other that gets in the way of any kind of flourishing or renewal. All this may be Cartarescu's way of  rendering life in a totalitarian society. And the novel's recurring sense that there is another possibility, a fourth dimension, mysterious but possibly accessible, may have a political aspect: it may represent, among other things, the feeling that there is another way to live, that Communism might come to an end. The tesseracts, Klein bottles, and unreadable manuscripts may all be pointing to the idea that the unrealizable may be realized after all, in some other realm, some other time, some barely imaginable transfigured future.

The end of the book, when Bucharest seems to emerge out of a state of suspended animation into some kind of transformation, both devastated and remade, perhaps renders the cataclysm of 1989. There are no specific references to those events, which in Romania were particularly terrible. But the sense that we have emerged into a different world, unfamiliar but alive with potential, make for a hopeful ending.

Mircea Cartarescu, _Solenoid_, trans. Sean Cotter (1 of 2)

 IT TOOK ME quite a while to finish this, taking a few breaks, but my admiration for it is limitless. Deep thanks to Deep Vellum for bringing it out in the U.S. and to Sean Cotter for a graceful, compelling translation.

My genre designation would be "alternative autofiction." That would be "alternative" as in "alternative history," e.g. Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle or Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, historical fiction that imagines how history might have unfolded had one event or another fallen out differently. Solenoid, I think, is (to some extent) about one of the lives Cartarescu might have led had some episodes in his earl life gone differently. The only comparable novel I have read is Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1, which actually gives four alternative lives to a characters whose starting circumstances closely match Auster's own.

The (unnamed) narrator has literary ambitions as a young man, but a poetry reading that might have been his big breakout moment goes terribly wrong, and he instead becomes a teacher of Romanian at a secondary school in Bucharest. Cartarescu's own youthful literary ambitions bore fruit: he got published, won prizes, became famous. But what if they hadn't? He might easily have ended up teaching Romanian literature in Bucharest, in just such a school as this, with a group of students, administrators, and fellow teachers as idiosyncratic as the cast of a Wes Anderson film.

The building itself has its idiosyncracies, for that matter, subterranean passages and outbuildings that house unlikely objects (e.g., a kind of demonic, David Cronenberg dentist's chair) and contain mysterious portals. The world of Solenoid is somewhat comparable to that in Alasdair Gray's Lanark, a grimy urban setting that somehow exists alongside, or parallel to, or behind a weirder, more fantastical one. A kind of European magical realism, maybe, as in Bruno Schulz or Gunter Grass? 

The novel's mysterious parallel other world may be the one in which Cartarescu is a celebrated novelist. Is that world better? Maybe, maybe not. The crucial notion is that it is there. The novel persuades you that the world you know in its three familiar dimensions is not the only world there is--that fourth and fifth dimensions are out there, to be fleetingly glimpsed in dreams, or in the visionary theories of Nikola Tesla, or the inscrutable language of the Voynich Manuscript, or in the humming power of the giant solenoid buried under the narrator's house, which enable him and his girlfriend Irina to levitate during sex.

Jane DeLynn, _In Thrall_

PUBLISHED IN 1982, but I had never heard/read of it until I saw Malin Hay's London Review of Books piece on the 2024 Semiotexte reprint. Hay explains (as does Colm Tóibín in this volume's introduction) that the novel has long had the standing of a classic among lesbian readers, and it's easy to see why. It's brilliant.

The narrator, Lynn, is a senior in an all-girls high school in New York City, circa the mid-1960s. She is Jewish and middle-class, belongs to a circle of girlfriends who reminded me a bit of the girls in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, is dating a handsome, athletic but profoundly uninteresting boy named Wolf, and has fallen helplessly in love with her English teacher, Miss Maxfeld.

Miss Maxfeld notices how seriously smitten Lynn is, starts inviting Lynn to her apartment for tea, and eventually, a sexual affair commences. Miss Maxfeld is taking advantage of the situation, one could say, but it's hard not to sympathize with her. She is lonely, but would never have seduced Lynn, I felt, had Lynn not been wholly receptive to being seduced. Miss Maxfeld is painfully clear-eyed about both Lynn and herself. She never flatters and always tries to be honest with herself and Lynn about how short-lived the affair is likely to be. She entertains no illusions and tries to dispel Lynn's illusions, without much success.

I found myself admiring Miss Maxfeld, actually, while Lynn...well, let's say Jane DeLynn has few rivals in the category of writers making adolescent characters based on the writers themselves seem vain, foolish, and maddeningly self-centered. James Joyce, perhaps. Joyce in the fifth chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man perhaps makes Stephen Dedalus as little likable as DeLynn makes Lynn--a performance of artistic self-abnegation so complete one can only salute and admire.

An early chapter features Lynn's English essay on the tragic hero, in which she argues that she herself is the perfect example of a tragic hero (see above, "maddeningly self-centered").  As the book approached its close, I began to fear that the novel's denouement would turn on the irony that, by getting fired, Miss Maxfeld would be the character with the tragic ending. Inevitably Lynn's parents are going to find out what is going on, and inevitably are going to pursue some form of punishment for Miss Maxfeld, and I was sure Miss Maxfeld was going to be fired if only to fulfill narrative symmetry.  However (spoiler alert), Lynn prevents that outcome in an unexpected flash of quick thinking and unselfish action. Whew. 

In an alternate world, this might be assigned in high school to be read alongside Catcher in the Rye. It would make a nice counterbalance.

 

Tommi Parrish, _Men I Trust_

 PARRISH'S GRAPHIC NOVEL deftly reconciles seemingly divergent modes. 

The "graphic" part feels expressionist. The human figures, for instance, are highly stylized, with small, sometimes tiny heads and enormous legs, their torsos stretched and elongated. (The effect is a little like the figures of Fernand Léger.) The color palette changes from episode to episode, looking a  little like Matisse here, a little like Emil Nolde there, darkening or brightening with the tone of the episode.

The "novel" part, however, is unvarnished realism. Eliza is a single mom with one son and an ex-husband who tends to be delinquent with child support payments. She has a job and is trying to establish herself as a spoken word poet. (Parrish uses an Anne Boyer poem as a sample of Eliza's work, so we know she's good.) Sasha is slightly younger and has yet to get much of anything going for herself; she has just moved back in with her parents, an arrangement that pleases no one. 

Sasha hears Eliza read and develops a powerful crush. Most of the novel is Sasha doing her damnedest to get as close as she can to Eliza, hoping to become her lover. Eliza appreciates Sasha's friendship but is not ready to reciprocate Sasha's feelings.

The reader assumes...well, this reader assumed that we were headed for some nice rom-com ending, but actually, no we are not. We get the tale of a relationship that might have gone in one direction but instead goes in another, alongside all the up-and-down stress of living in families and trying to make a living. 

Straight contemporary urban realism, then--but taking place in a visual world all its own. Maybe a little like what you might get if Georg Grosz turned Berlin Alexanderplatz into a graphic novel.

I'm baffled by the title. A few men make brief appearances in the story, but not a one of them seems trustworthy. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Matthew D. Taylor, _The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Democracy_

 I HAVE RECENTLY been reading several books that try to map out ideological configurations of Trumpism. This one covers the Christian nationalist angle. On the whole, I found it not quite as illuminating as Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes de Mez (who provides a dust jacket blurb here), but it adds some valuable detail to that portrait.

Taylor focuses on what he calls the independent charismatics. Charismatics are Christians who believe that the miraculous powers bestowed on the apostles on Pentecost--speaking in unknown languages, healing, prophecy, handling snakes without getting bitten--can still be obtained by those open to the Holy Spirit. Some charismatics belong to traditional denominations (e.g., Roman Catholicism), and some belong to denominations explicitly dedicated to tapping into the Pentecostal powers (e.g., Assemblies of God). Other charismatics, however, find the whole institutionalized structure of a denomination--creeds, polities, seminaries, ordination, and so on--an obstacle to the flow of the Holy Spirit, so they just set up shop for themselves, so to speak. These are Taylor's independent charismatics, and there are a lot of them out there.

These are not your familiar run-of-the-mill evangelicals, by the way. Those folks tend to support Trump, but find his style a little off-putting. The  independent charismatics, however, are truly on board, and were much in evidence on January 6, 2021...yea, even on the very ground of the Capitol Mall itself.

The main body of Taylor's book looks at several of the leading personalities of this tendency. The "independent charismatics" are not formally organized, of course, but they are highly networked and do sometimes coordinate activities. The late Peter Wagner, at one time of the evangelical-but-not-necessarily-charismatic Fuller Theological Seminary, was particularly effective at networking and coordinating. Dutch Sheets worked up the "ekklesia" movement, based on the idea that the Greek word "ekklesia," usually translated "church" when it occurs in the New Testament, should really be translated "assembly," hence the church and the government ought to be one and the same. Lance Wallnau came up with the "Seven Mountains Mandate" metaphor, a version of "dominion theology" (i.e., again, fusing church and state) asserting that (charismatic) Christians should aspire to control the seven crucial dimensions of a society: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. We also meet Paula White, Cindy Jacobs, Ché Ahn, and Sean Feucht, all of whom Taylor deftly evokes. (Not sure what his own theological orientation is, but he almost sounds like an insider at times.)

The main idea seems to be that the United States ought to be guided by the Holy Spirit, which practically means it ought to be guided, perhaps ruled, by independent charismatics. Bringing this about may require battling demons--that is, it may require violence. "We will not take dominion by remaining passive. We will only take dominion if the Body of Christ [= Christians, the church, the ekklesia] becomes violent and declares war on the enemy!" That's Peter Wagner, from his book Dominion!, p. 118 (Taylor is scrupulous about his sources). 

The saying of Jesus that gives Taylor's book its title--"From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force" (Matthew 11: 12)--was quoted by some of those storming the Capitol five years ago today, and according to Taylor, it has become a watchword among Christian nationalists.

What in the world do they see in Trump, though? Does he ever seem to have been seized by the Holy Spirit? (His babbling could sound like talking in tongues, I suppose.) The answer to this puzzle is the "Cyrus Anointing," another Lance Wallnau trope. Just as King Cyrus of Persia, not himself an Israelite, delivered God's Chosen People from bondage in Babylon, so Donald Trump, not himself one of the saved, will deliver God's Chosen People from bondage in a secularized, multicultural, woke USA. 

Joe Brainard, _The Nancy Book_

WHAT EXACTLY DREW the brilliant writer and visual artist Joe Brainard (1942-1994) to Ernie Bushmiller's comic Nancy? 

There have always been a few strips that attracted more educated and sophisticated readers (Krazy Kat in the 1920s, Pogo in the 1950s, Peanuts in the 1960s, Doonesbury in the 1970s, Calvin and Hobbes in the 1980s), but Nancy seems an unlikely candidate for that kind of attention. Its humor was broad, its drawing plain and reduced to essentials, its vision of the culture straight down the middle of the road. Yet Brainard is by no means the strip's only admirer: Scott McCloud, Art Spiegelman, and Bill Griffiths are also advocates.

That Nancy is a kind of apotheosis of ordinariness may be what fascinated Brainard. His astonishing "I Remember," among its other virtues, holds nothing back in its embrace of ordinariness. So when Brainard adds Nancy's face  to a De Kooning, or a Picasso, or a Goya, the juxtaposition of a drawing style meant to be infinitely reproducible with revered works of individual genius, there's a beauty in the sheer incongruity, masterpieces made cozy and homey by the bare-bones geometry of Nancy's face, Nancy elevated to the firmament by her placement in iconic paintings. 

Or, when Nancy and another comic character, the silent Henry, engage in athletic sex, we get a different effect, not unlike the détourné comics of the Situationists. The domesticated is re-wilded, the complacent surface of the family newspaper is ruffled by anarchic winds, the sanitized and safe rendered dirty and dangerous.

The Nancy Book is an homage that becomes a work in its own right. That one could not imagine such a project with, say, Blondie, may reveal in a roundabout way the nature of Bushmiller's idiosyncratic genius.