Joanna Klink, _Days and Chances_ (1)

 I HAVE BEEN reading Joanna Klink since her second collection, Circadian (2007).  Around 2008, she gave a reading on the campus where I taught. I remember telling her how much I appreciated Circadian and mentioning that I wanted to read her first book, They Are Sleeping. “It’s not very good,” she said. I think that’s the only time a poet ever steered me away from one of their own books. (By the way, the book was good, although perhaps not as good as Circadian.)

I read her subsequent books—Raptus (2010), Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy (2015), and The Nightfields (2020)—and they were consistently excellent (I reviewed Excerpts somewhere about ten years ago).

Even so, the people I know who would recognize the name “Joanna Klink” I could count on one hand…and I know lots of bookish people. Writing as well as she has for as long as she has should, one would think, attract measurable general attention. She has gotten some kinds of recognition: a job at a prestigious institution (Michener Center at University of Texas Austin) and a major publisher (Penguin). No Pulitzer or National Book Award, though (I hope that changes soon), and a profile a good bit lower than those of (say) Mary Oliver or Patricia Lockwood or Ocean Vuong.

I bring this up because whenever I read someone’s article on poetry’s declining prominence, on its loss of cultural centrality, or its diminishing audience, or (fill in the pessimistic blank), the assumption always floats up that poetry has been its own worst enemy, it isn’t addressing our main concerns, it’s become too hermetic…that sort of thing.

But after reading Richard Siken’s last book, then picking up this, I’m thinking…why would anyone say there’s a lack of good, strong poetry now? It’s abundant! There is so much of it! 

Why do so few people know this?

Richard Siken, _I Do Know Some Things_

 I HAD READ and heard that this book is good, but I was still taken by surprise. It is...jaw-dropping good. 

I thought very well of Siken's first book, Crush, which twenty years on from its publication stands as a contemporary classic, if we are ready to concede there is such a thing.  I don't know why I never picked up his second collection, War of the Foxes, published ten years after Crush. Checking my records, in 2015 I seem to have been reading Lisa Robertson, Dawn Lundy Martin, Susan Howe, Mary Hickman, and Patricia Lockwood, so I was not wasting my time...still, looking back, I feel like scolding myself. I hope to rectify the omission soon.

As you probably know, Siken suffered a debilitating stroke in 2019. Somehow, besides re-learning how to talk and walk, he re-learned how to write poems. 

In many respects, these poems feel different from the poems of Crush. Siken's earlier poems performed a variety of feats of legerdemain with lineation and sentence construction while orbiting various men over whom Siken was obsessing. The poems of I Do Know Some Things are printed as prose, with no special lineation at all, and the sentences tend to be short. Most of the poems are about his own situation or those of family members, especially his father, who died in the period when Siken was writing these poems.

Unchanged, though, are Siken's audacity, powers of invention, and ability to land some startling leaps.

"I tried to say something nice to the nurse. I introduced myself. She said we had already met. I thought she was moody until I realized she was several nurses, each working their own shift. To them I was Hamlet in a  long line of Hamlets. My problems were unimpressive and not unique."

Some leaps launch him into the surreal, as in "Fear":

"I am jet fuel and six miles long. I am bad business. I make the rooms grow smaller. Underneath my shirt is another shirt and under that the cloudbanks clang their worksong. They pitch their weight in droves."

But I was most amazed by "Sentence" in the book's seventh and final section, where Siken reflects on his own practices, explaining how lines differ from sentences and then dropping a sentence whose length and elaboration David Foster Wallace might envy.

The backstory of this collection, compelling as it is, is overshadowed by the poems themselves.

_The Letters of Max Beerbohm, 1892-1956_, Rupert Hart-Davis

MAX DOES NOT give away a lot about himself here. Although editor Hart-Davis believes one of the letters to Florence Kahn, whom Max later married, suggests that Max was asexual (and perhaps it does),  Max is not one for confessions and revelations, generally. Charm, perfect manners, inimitable style, piercing eye--the reader does get all that, and a generous helping of reproduced drawings as well. 

I can hardly explain to myself why Max always dazzles me. He's one of the great caricaturists, I'd say, and this collection of letters makes clear that a lot of his caricatures were of friends...and that they stayed friends. Perhaps because however unflattering the caricatures are, one never senses malice.

And then there are those Max sentences. Perfectly clear, perfectly turned, yet still able to come around from behind and startle you. 

And different as I am from Max, unlike him in so many ways, I enjoyed finding out that we both admire the prose of Lytton Strachey.

Sybille Bedford, _The Trial of Lady Chatterly's Lover_

 THE 1960s REALLY were the golden age of long-form journalism. Rachel Carson. Tom Wolfe. Truman Capote. Norman Mailer. Gay Talese. And Sybille Bedford, who is perhaps not as famous as the others but whose account of The Crown v. Penguin Books, the trial over the legality of publishing D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, was published by Esquire magazine in 1961 and is available as an 80-page book from Daunt Books.

On the cover of the Daunt version, the words "Would YOU let your WIFE read this BOOK?" are much larger and more prominent than the book's actual title--a canny design call, since Bedford spends less time on what is or isn't obscene about Lawrence's novel than on the prosecutor's assumption that upper- and upper-middle-class men need to be in charge of what women and the laboring classes read. 

Chief prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones clearly does not think reading the book would do him or men like him any harm, but he keeps asking the large cast of writers and academics Penguin call to testify to the book's artistic value whether they would let their wives and servants read it. 

We remember this trial mainly for legalizing the literary depiction of human sexuality--fair enough--but what Bedford also brings out is the overturning of the idea that the upper classes knew what was best for everybody. And that was a big part of the 1960s, too.

Sigrid Nunez, _The Vulnerables_

 THE NOVEL BEGINS, "It was an uncertain spring"--just like that, within quotation marks, because Nunez's novel's first sentence quotes the  first sentence of another novel, Virginia Woolf's The Years. Like The Years, The Vulnerables is a hybrid of fiction and non-fiction, of novelistic narrative and essay, of invention and reflection on what actually happened.

The novel mainly concerns how the unnamed narrator, whose circumstances (age, profession, residence) are quite a bit like Nunez's own, managed during the COVID lockdown of 2020. She is parrot-sitting and living in the New York apartment of a friend who is about to give birth in the Bay Area; she is also sharing that apartment with the son of other friends of that friend, a young man who has dropped out of college during his final semester before graduation and is on the outs with his parents.

The Vulnerables does not have a lot of plot--not much intrigue, conflict, suspense, tension, resolution, etc.--although the narrator's relationships with the parrot (Eureka) and the young man (Vetch [ha!]) do develop in interesting ways. Much of the novel, though, has to do with the chance encounters, ruminations, memories of the narrator during those months.

What exactly makes the novel so compelling, then? Why did I enjoy it so much? Why did I find it hard  to put down? I cannot say. Nunez ignores about every maxim one would receive in a fiction workshop (including, as she notes, the recommendation that one not begin a novel by talking about the weather), but for some reason, The Vulnerables is more a delight than almost any of the novels that do adhere to those maxims.

If I had to pin down a reason, I would say The Vulnerables gracefully engages the question of the relation of the written to the real. So ponderous a question, but Nunez spins it like a frisbee and sends it aloft to you. Catch it if you can, or simply enjoy its flight.

Naomi Baker, _Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century_

THE SUBTITLE WOULD be a little more on-point if it were "Radical Religious Women of 17th Century England," but this is an excellent book. I might not have come across it save for Erin Maglaque's review in NYRB, so a tip of the Puritan black felt hat to her.

The middle decades of the 17th century were a time of upheaval all over Europe and certainly in England:  the civil war, the deposition and execution of a king, the founding of a new form of government, the radical remaking of the Church of England, and a brief but intoxicating period when all sorts of books that would never have made it past the royal censorship were being published. Some of the men who took advantage of this opportunity to publish wildly original theological and political ideas, like Gerrard Winstanley and Abiezer Coppe, began getting some attention in the 20th century. Only more recently have the women who published similarly bold pronouncements and proclamations attracted historians' notice. Baker's book brings some of these women vividly to life for the general reader.

None of the dozen-plus women Baker introduces us to is a well-known name to anyone but scholars of the period, but Rose Thurgood, Sarah Wight, Anna Trapnel, Hester Biddle, Mary Fisher, and Jane Lead (to name a few whose stories I found especially interesting) were all remarkable figures. Simply by publishing their experiences and speculations, they were upending hierarchies; they were (a) women, (b) not university-educated, (c) not ordained ministers, and (d) not from the upper classes, and therefore utterly without any of the qualifications or standing that the 17th century would have regarded as conferring authority. That didn't stop them, though. And it turns out what they had to say--about the church, about Christianity, about religion's role in society, and about what is Godly and what is not--still strikes a few chords. Consider this from Jane Lead: "Dive into your own celestiality and see with what matter of spirits you are endued, for in them the powers do entirely lie for transformation." (William Blake's parents may have known Lead's works.)

I wanted immediately to find some of these texts for myself, but most have been out of print for hundreds of years. One can turn up things online--but what I really would like to see is a nice fat Penguin, edited by Baker herself, with choice excerpts from all of these writers. (I have to say that what I found online would benefit from careful editing.) How about it, Penguin?

Chelsey Minnis, _Opera Fever_

 OPERA FEVER READS much like Part Two of Minnis's 2018 collection, Baby, I Don't Care. The book's design is again by Jeff Clark, which accounts to some degree for the feeling of continuity, but the sense that is one reading a continuation of the same book comes more from the recurring poetic form (ten lines per page, in two groups of five lines each), and most of all from a similarity of voice, with frequent leaps and veerings from one line to the next and a second person addressed as "Darling." 

Also like its predecessor, the book evokes Golden Age Hollywood. The frequent "Darling"s land with a certain Tallulah Bankhead drawl, and the imagery put me in mind of what Jack Smith might have come up with if he edited his favorites bits of Now, Voyager together with his favorite bits of The Big Sleep.

There are differences, too, but subtle ones. The poems in Baby, I Don't Care frequently address someone as "baby," but that familiarity is avoided in Opera Fever. Ellipses at the ends of lines, a salient feature of Poemland (2009), disappeared from Baby, I Don't Care but appear often in Opera Fever. (I'm not sure what to make of this, but the ellipses in Opera Fever are often just two periods rather than the conventional three.)

I don't know how to feel about the very marked similarity between the two books. Generally, I like poets who change it up some from collection to collection. Victoria Chang and Ariana Reines could serve as examples. Jorie Graham has sometimes settled into similar forms for two or three consecutive collections, but over the course of her career has changed things up quite a few times. 

On the other hand, other poets succeed by finding their thing and sticking with it. Merwin from The Lice on, say, or Ashbery in his last four or five volumes, or Paul Muldoon in his last four or five. As a friend observed, think of Mark Rothko or Agnes Martin. They found their thing and stuck with it, with spectacular results. 

Minnis is far too canny a poet for me to conclude that she is simply in a rut. If she is in a rut, she is deliberately in one, and we her readers need to roll with it.

Alexandra Kleeman, _Something New Under the Sun_

AN EXCERPT FROM this appeared in The Baffler and caught my interest, so I picked it up. It's very good, but not quite what I expected.

The initial premise, very much to the foreground in the excerpt: our main point-of-view character, Patrick Hamlin, is a NYC-based literary novelist who has not quite broken through. A couple of film producers have, however, bought the film rights to his Hamlet-inspired novel, Elsinore Lane, and he has come out to Hollywood to serve as a production assistant and, he expects, to offer invaluable advice to the production, being the author of the source material.  And to maybe give his career a boost, too.

However, it turns out that being a "production assistant" mainly amounts to transporting objects and people, and the producers are less interested in Patrick's novel than in whipping up a CGI-enhanced ghost story to reboot the career of former child star Cassidy Carter, who has had a difficult, paparazzo-ridden transition to adulthood, including a few public scenes, á la Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. 

Meanwhile, Patrick's wife Alison, anxious and conscience-stricken by the approaching climate catastrophe, has taken herself and their daughter to an all-but-inaccessible experimental community in far upstate New York.

Interesting set-up. Can Patrick save his novel from Hollywood exploitation and save his family in the bargain?

If Something New Under the Sun were a film, both questions would be answered in the affirmative, but it is actually an ingenious satirical novel. 

Patrick's production assistant duties mainly involve transporting of Cassidy Carter, who turns out (a) to be a lot more interesting, in Kleeman's hands, than Patrick is and (b) to actually possess in real life the sleuthing skills of the character she played for several seasons on television, teenage detective Kassi Keene. Cassidy comes across a California scam of Pynchonian dimensions in the mass marketing of WAT-R, a manufactured water-substitute that is making billions for somebody but unfortunately inducing dementia in its consumers.

Something New Under the Sun, however, does not turn into a Pynchonian noir. The enigmatic closing chapter takes our two main characters out to the desert, where they encounter a grey-suited figure and...meet their ends? I don't know. Patrick and Alison's daughter Nora is going to be all right, I imagine, as she possesses visionary powers, but everyone else seems to be sliding into the chasm.

So, not a book for folks who like loose ends tied up, but Kleeman's satirical insight is sharp and the novel has at least one unforgettable character in Cassidy Carter. Kleeman also has a gift for description--a gift not in high demand these days, perhaps. As Maureen McLane put it in a poem in the most recent LRB, 

description is decadent and passé

some say         some say

 And yes, description can get tedious, but try this: "As Cassidy follows the curve of the road out to the desert, the valley fades into the long, brown flats of Riverside, adorned by a sarcastic smattering of palm trees. Out past the highway, terra-cotta-shingled houses huddle around twisting inner streets and culs-de-sac. [...] In the backyard of a sand-colored ranch, pale concrete surrounds an empty swimming pool, punctured by short, tough plants with tiny blue flowers growing through cracks in the surface."

Katherine Rundell, _Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne_

 I APPRECIATE DONNE, but I picked this up mainly because I enjoyed Rundell's reviews and essays in the LRB, the NYRB, etc.  She carries her learning lightly, and her prose is lucid and witty. Not unlike Donne, she snaps a neat metaphor. On the deanship of St. Paul's: "it was also a fantastic piñata of a job: hit it, and perks and favours and new connections came pouring out." On the facial hair of Edward Alleyn: "a beard that looks like he cut it with a rusty ice-skate." Topping it all, on p. 254, an abecedarian prose poem indicating the range of erudition evident in his Donne's sermons.

Donne was not only one of the great poets in a golden age of English poetry, but also "star preacher of the age," not to mention courtier, diplomat, military man, lawyer...he even did a prison stint. It's hard to imagine John Ashbery producing his body of work while also being celebrated for his sermons and accompanying American troops into Baghdad, but that's the kind of career Donne had. Those were different times, as Lou Reed once sang.

To be clear: Rundell's is neither a definitive nor a critical biography; it does not aim at comprehensive detail and touches only on some highlights of the poetry.  Worthwhile? Yes. Clocking in at just under 300 pages, authoritative and crisply written, it would make a perfect starter book for anyone curious about Donne.

Hua Hsu, _Stay True_

HUA HSU IS a staff writer at the New Yorker, and this book, his second, is a memoir focusing on a college friend, Ken Ishida, who was robbed, kidnapped, and murdered in the summer after their junior year. 

Hsu and Ken did not, judging by the surface of things, have enough in common to serve as the basis of friendship; Hsu was an indie kid, a 'zine writer who got his clothes at thrift stores, Ken a business major and frat brother who shopped at Abercrombie and Fitch. They were both "Asian-American," but the Hsus were Taiwanese-Chinese and the Ishidas Japanese, so their family cultures were distinct, too. Still, they became close friends, sharing smoke breaks on the balcony of their dormitory.

College-age folks typically embrace their chosen cultural affiliations with a certain ferocity, especially if they are indie kids, but the book goes to show one can still have a kind of flexibility and openness at that age. Or maybe the secondary-family aspect of dorm life explains the friendship, the live-and-let-live tolerance we (sometimes) extend to those with whom we share living quarters. A lot of the book is a convincing portrait of a not-that-likely friendship.

The main turn in the book, of course, is Ken's terrible death. Stay True is set mainly in the late 1990s, and I was reminded over and over of something that happened about the same time on the campus at which I was teaching: the death of one of our English majors in a house fire. Carlos's death had a galvanizing effect on his friends, I recall. The English majors at our small college tended to know each other well and socialize together, and mortality's abrupt interruption of the relatively idyllic routine of campus life was for them a psychic revolution. Real Life, when one is that age, is supposed to be some number of months or years away, yet here it was, grim and implacable and iron-visaged. Reading about what Ken's loss meant to his friends, and to Hsu in particular, was so minutely evocative of what Carlos's death meant to his friends that I am prepared to say that Hsu got this traumatic event exactly right.

Richard Siken, _Crush_

 A FRIEND'S GIVING me Siken's recent book, I Do Know Some Things, inspired me to re-read this one, his debut from 2005, a Yale Younger Poets selection. I think I read it in 2007, probably because of the selections from it in the Legitimate Dangers anthology. I remember thinking it was good, but I didn't pick up on his next collection, perhaps because it didn't arrive until 2015. 

Re-reading Crush now, I think it is not just good, but excellent, one of the outstanding debut collections of the 21st century's first decade (alongside, say, Ariana Reines's The Cow and G. C. Waldrep's Goldbeater's Skin). It seems a key precursor for collections like Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Sam Sax's Bury It. 

In Louise Glück's introduction (she was the Yale Younger Poets judge that tapped Siken), she writes, "For a book like this to work, it cannot deviate from obsession (lest its urgency, in being occasional, seem unconvincing). Books of this kind dream big; they trust not only what drives  them but the importance of what drives them. When they work, as Plath's Ariel works, they are unforgettable; they restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form." 

That's exactly right, I think. Obsessives can be precise and passionate at one and the same time, exact and extravagant at one and the same time, because only too much comes close to being enough.

I should quote a least a bit, don't you think? Let's go with this, from "A Primer for the Small Weird Loves":

      The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater

because he is trying to kill you,

            and you deserve it, you do, and you know this,

                  and you are ready to die in this swimming pool

      because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means

                        your life is over anyway.

Joshua Hammer, _The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu (and Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts)_

 BY THE WAY, the author is the Joshua Hammer whose journalism on events in Africa appears in The Nation, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, not the Josh Hammer associated with the Claremont Institute and the Edmund Burke Foundation. As a case of noted authors working at the same time and sharing an unusual name, this coincidence is up there with P. Wyndham Lewis (avant-garde writer and painter) and D. B. Wyndham Lewis (popular biographer).

For quite a while, western scholars assumed that there was not much of a documentary tradition in Africa before European colonization, but they were mistaken, for Mali had extensively developed such a tradition in the 15th and 16th centuries.  Collecting, preserving, and cataloguing as many of these manuscripts as he could was the work of Abdel Kader Haidara, the bad-ass librarian whose activities we follow for much of the book.

The collection is in jeopardy after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, which enables al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists, in cooperation with Tuareg separatists, to sweep into Mali from the North. The manuscripts are the fruit of an Islamic culture, yes, but one the jihadists regard as heretical, so Haidara has to find a way to get the immense collection away safely before it is captured and destroyed.

He succeeds--as the books subtitle lets us know, so that's hardly a spoiler. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is a brisk read, an inspiring story, and an illuminating look at both the history and the current circumstances of Mali.

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 5, Last Campaigns (1974-2008)

 1) Finishing this biography, I had the odd thought that it is a kind of inverse of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. When Boswell met Johnson in 1763, Johnson was already 53 and had already accomplished most of what he is famous for: the dictionary, above all, but also the Life of Savage, Rasselas, the Rambler essays, and “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” Yet most, maybe three-quarters, of Boswell’s biography is about the last twenty years of Johnson’s life--not Johnson's most productive years, but the years when Boswell often had him under close observation, writing everything down. 

Tanenhaus spent quite a bit time with his subject as well, something at least close to the twenty years Boswell knew Johnson. As far as I know, they did not travel together, as Johnson and Boswell did to the Hebrides, or belong to same famous club. Still, Tanenhaus spent a lot of time with Buckley, and he could have brought in a lot of anecdotes based on direct observation, á la Boswell, yet he seems to be deliberately refraining from doing so.

Part 5, the book’s concluding section, contains the whole of the time Tanenhaus was in contact with Buckley, yet it is the shortest, even though it covers the widest range of years.

Tanenhaus’s having long known his subject does nonetheless leave a kind of dusting on things, transmitting a familiarity with his subject that is felt by the reader in lots of hard-to-pin-down ways. Take his account in Chapter 49 of the celebration of the entrance into the priesthood of Brent Bozell, Buckley’s longtime friend, co-worker, and brother-in-law. Tanenhaus may not have been an eyewitness at this event, but his account of it all but puts Buckley right before us.

2) I don’t know that Tanenhaus explicitly says anywhere that the election of Ronald Reagan, possibly the culmination of the movement Buckley had been helming for three decades, actually represented an anti-climax for Buckley. He sure leaves this reader with that impression, though. 

Tanenhaus skillfully conveyed the excitement of Buckley and the National Review-ers in getting Goldwater nominated in 1964. In 1980, their man Reagan--a friend of Buckley and a subscriber to National Review--not only gets nominated, but wins. Victory! However, Buckley and Reagan disagree about the Panama Canal...Reagan declines to attend the NR 25th anniversary bash in December 1980...Buckley is not offered a Cabinet position...it's just not the way anyone might have imagined it.

Buckley pulls back a bit from the magazine, Firing Line starts winding down, Buckley seems more involved in his a-week-in-my-life memoirs, in his series of spy novels, in being host-with-the-most than he does in the revolution.

3) Tanenhaus does not explicitly address the question of whether Buckley bears some responsibility for the election of Trump eight years after Buckley died. Anyone attempting to answer that question would need to read Tanenhaus's book, certainly, but he leaves it alone (Trump references in the index = zero). 

Having read the book, I'm not sure how I would answer the question. It's hard to imagine Trump being elected without the modern conservative movement behind him, and without Buckley there might not even have been a modern conservative moment. On the other hand, Buckley was principled, Trump is not, and it's not clear that Trump is even "conservative" in any of the senses that Buckley was. It's hard to imagine Trump on Firing Line. I'm going to say Buckley has some responsibility for the election of Trump, but I don't think he would be much pleased about that.

Kathryn Neurnberger, _Rue_

 I POSTED ABOUT Nuernberger’s previous collection, The End of Pink, and that post is the second-most-visited post of my blog, a bit north of 1,200. Surprising, no? I mean, Nuernberger is accomplished and respected, but still. 

Given the date of the post—October 17, 2016—perhaps Russian bots were looking to latch onto anything that might help elect Trump, and perhaps the phrase “the end of pink” had promising overtones of anti-feminism and anti-socialism, just the thing for stopping Hilary. 

Eh, who knows. If the post got one person to read the book, mission accomplished. It’s a fine book, as is this one.

Rue is both a plant and an emotion, making it an apt choice of title for this collection, which pays a lot of attention to the landscape, especially its plants, and which does betray regret. In various poems, Nuernberger seems to regret or half-regret her job, her decision to live in the country, and her marriage (see the title poem). What I can find on the internet suggests that at some time after 2020, when this book was published, she found a new job and moved to Minneapolis. The internet does not seem to know how things went with the marriage.

Rue (the book) tends toward the conversational—that is, the poems often begin with observations about the speaker’s immediate surroundings, the sentence structure and diction are plain, the language mainly matter-of-fact—but never stays there. Just when the reader is lulled into a kind of passivity, out jumps a surprisingly candid revelation, or an unexpected new topic, or an audacious image. Rue makes a lot of bold moves.

The collection is worth reading just for those jumps, but we also get portraits of other women artists whose work is highly involved with plants, such as Maria Sibylla Merian and Anna Atkins, and if you, like Neurnberger, are interested in plants, you will also pick up some lore. 

Edmund De Waal, _The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss_

 COULD THIS BOOK, I wondered, actually be as great as so many people say it is? Turns out, yes.

De Waal’s book begins with a collection of netsuke (miniature Japanese carvings in wood and ivory) assembled by Charles Ephrussi in the 1880s and 1890s. The Ephrussis were a prominent European banking family with origins in Odessa; Charles was a connoisseur of the arts in Belle Époque Paris (being the third son, he had not that much to do for the family business). He is the figure in the top hat towards the back in Renoir’s famous painting Le Déjeuner des canotiers and may have been part of the inspiration for Proust’s Swann. De Waal does an extraordinary job of evoking the art world of that time and place and how it crashed into the anti-semitism of the Dreyfus Affair. (Charles’s grandfather is De Waal’s great-great-great-grandfather).

Charles gave the collection as a wedding gift to his cousin Viktor, who belonged to the part of the family running the Vienna branch of the bank. De Waal turns out to be as sure-handed and evocative in conjuring up Secession Vienna as he was with Belle Époque Paris. Here too, however, anti-semitism exerts pressure, thanks to the anti-semiotic mayor Karl Lueger.

The real, fatal pressure comes in 1938 with the Anschluss, when Austria is incorporated into Nazi Germany. The Ephrussis lose their business, their house, and their art collection to Nazi appropriation. The netsuke, however, being so tiny, are smuggled out by a house servant, and find their way to Viktor’s son, Ignace, who got out early to the USA and joined the army when America entered World War II.

After the war, Ignace moves to Tokyo—and once again De Waal skillfully represents a legendary milieu. De Waal, great-nephew of the gay and childless Ignace, becomes the next inheritor of the collection.

Besides being compulsively readable, De Waal strikes an extraordinary balance in presenting, on the one hand, the beauty of artistic objects and the sensibility of those who love and preserve them, and on the other, the cruelty and brutality of history (including not only the Holocaust but the bombing of Tokyo). The Hare with the Amber Eyes is a book that will continue to attract readers for generations, I will venture to say.

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 4: Controlling the Message (1966-1974)

 THE MAIN EVENT in the fourth part of Tanenhaus's life of Buckley is the coming of Firing Line, the long-running public affairs talk show in which Buckley interviewed a long and amazing list of newsmakers and opinion leaders. Among the ironies of the show’s run is that Buckley, who made no bones about providing a conservative perspective with his show, gave more airtime to radical leftists (Eldridge Cleaver, Jesse Jackson) than the mainstream media ever did. He was probably hoping to show how extreme and out-of-touch the radical left was, but in the process he produced a show that’s an invaluable archive, a better record of the actual politics of the era than any of its competitors.

Buckley decided to support Nixon rather than Reagan for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, disappointing or infuriating any number of hard-core movement conservatives. Buckley felt Nixon was conservative enough and had a better chance of winning, but there was much gnashing of conservative teeth after Nixon opened up relations with China. 

Part Four also provides close-ups of a couple of Buckley’s more embarrassing public moments: (1) his clash with Gore Vidal when the two were providing commentary on ABC of the 1968 nominating conventions, in which Vidal triggered an on-camera meltdown by Buckley, and (2) Buckley’s advocacy for the release of convicted murderer Edgar Smith, of whose innocence Buckley was convinced. It turned out Smith was actually guilty, and a few years after his release nearly killed someone else. 

The obvious analogue (which Tanenhaus points out) is Norman Mailer’s advocacy of Jack Abbott, which likewise ended badly. I also thought of Vidal’s sort-of defense of Timothy McVeigh (“The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh,” Vanity Fair, September 2001). 

Marjan Kamali, _The Lion Women of Tehran_

 I AM GUESSING that this novel is about Kamali's parents' generation. She was born in 1971, but the two main characters, Ellie and Homa, were born in 1943, and most of the novel is set during their childhood and young womanhood, in an era before Kamali was born. I wondered whether some of the characters and events were drawn from Kamali's own family history, but for all I know the whole story is imagined.

It's a novel about female friendship. Ellie and Homa become best friends during primary school, are separated for a few years, then again become best friends in high school and college, then are estranged when Ellie inadvertently tips off a government agent that Homa is behind the distribution of certain anti-government pamphlets. Homa is arrested, imprisoned, and tortured and raped in prison. Ellie emigrates to the United States with her husband and loses touch with Homa. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, however, Homa reaches out to her old friend to see whether she can help Homa's daughter (Homa was impregnated in being raped) to get to the U.S.A. She can and does, and the old friends are reconciled.

As a study of female friendship, I found the novel not quite as compelling as Elena Ferrante's famous Neapolitan quartet. I got a good idea of what Ellie found dazzling in Homa, but less idea what Homa saw in Ellie. Surprisingly, Homa is much more interesting in the chapters narrated by Ellie than she is in the chapters narrated by herself.

The chapters narrated by Homa seem to pay less attention to revealing her character than they do to filling readers in on what is happening in Iran after Ellie emigrates. In these chapters, we learn about the Shah's somewhat paradoxical modernizing-yet-repressive regime and about the advent of theocratic rule under the Ayatollah Khomeini, but Homa herself is not that strong a presence.

The novel has its share of memorable scenes, especially when Ellie and Homa are young and scooting around Tehran, and Ellie's mother is a memorable character in a Mrs. Bennet sort of way. The Lion Women of Tehran does have a kind of "book club" texture and aura, though. It's a brisk read, but I don't expect it will stay in my head the way Ferrante's novels did.

George Saunders, _Vigil_

 I DO NOT always appreciate Adam Mars-Jones's harsh reviews of recent novels in the London Review of Books--I sometimes wonder whether there are wicked giggles in the LRB office as the editors discuss whom he will eviscerate next--but I thought he had a reasonable complaint about Saunders's new novel. In Saunders's previous novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, the reader could gradually piece together how the afterlife in which the book is set worked: what its options were, what the better and worse choices were, what was at a stake. Vigil is also set in some liminal zone between our life and the afterlife, but as Mars-Jones noted in his review, it's harder to tell how things work.

The narrator, Jill "Doll" Blaine, has been operating in this liminal zone for about fifty years. Has she remained close to our world because she is still attached to it? Because she has unfinished business? Maybe--she died young when a bomb intended to kill her police officer husband killed her instead, and at the time of her death everything in her life was going extremely well, so she may feel not ready to leave.

Or is she still there (here) because she has been given work to do? She hovers near people who are on the point of death, offering comfort and consolation, helping reconcile them to  their new condition, a special class of angel, perhaps.

However, she is currently assigned to K. J. Boone, a dying oilman, more crucially an oilman who did much to undermine and discredit climate science in order to enhance the profitability of his business. Is Jill supposed to be helping Boone to see the damage he has done, so as to achieve contrition, opening a path to a better afterlife? At certain moments, she seems to be working more towards this end than that of comfort.

None of these questions, so far as I could judge, got a definite answer, and that was frustrating. 

Saunders still has that uncanny ability to conjure the internal voices of his characters, and he does an especially good job with Boone's, I think. Given how insightful and moving Lincoln in the Bardo was, though, Vigil was worth reading but mildly disappointing.

Paul Molinari, _Julian of Norwich: The Teaching of a 14th Century English Mystic_; Frances Beer, _Julian of Norwich_

I HAPPENED TO read these two books on Julian one after the other and was struck by the contrast between them. Both writers approach Julian with respect, insight, and reverence--even with a love that lifts right off the pages of their books. But they seem almost 180 degrees apart.

Molinari was a Jesuit, and his book from 1958 puts its greatest energies into showing how completely Julian’s experience and conclusions align with Roman Catholic tradition and doctrine. 

Beer’s 1998 book is mainly a translation of the shorter version of Julian’s Revelations, with the Jesus-as-Mother chapters from the longer version appended. She also provides an introduction and a concluding essay; in the latter, she sees Julian as “however inadvertently, something of a radical,” noting her “transcendence of misogyny” and her “rejection of hierarchy.” 

Beer’s view is closer to my own, certainly. Julian seems to be pushing back against the idea that the divine is totally male and against the exclusion of women from conversations about the divine. I also have the feeling that she doesn’t believe in damnation. But Molinari certainly makes a thorough, carefully documented case for her perfect orthodoxy. 

Duck or rabbit?

Nam Le, _36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem_

 EVEN THOUGH THERE has been an extraordinary flowering of Vietnamese-American poetry in recent years—e.g., Ocean Vuong, Paul Tran, Truong Tran, and Diana Kho Nguyen, to name only the authors of collections I have read—the title of Nam Le’s debut collection took me by surprise. It’s as though some contemporary of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth had titled a book Another Jewish-American Novel.

The title does acknowledge, though, that the historical and cultural experience out of which Le is writing has been written about often enough by others that it has begun to have its own recognizable contours. The traumas of colonization, imperialism, and war; the further traumas of relocation to the United States; life among the stereotypes American have about Asian cultures (Ezra Pound is mentioned often); the subject matter of Le’s poems carries with it a kind of déja lu familiarity.

But let’s also note the phrase “36 ways” in the title, hinting as it does at Le’s formal versatility. The experiences out of which Le writes and the conceptualizations he works to dismantle may be recognizable and even familiar, but page by page he keeps finding new ways to bring it before his readers. Hardly any two poems here have quite the same voice or quite the same form. While each poem has something to do with Vietnam and being Vietnamese, lending the collection unity, each poem is also methodologically distinct, lending the collection variety. 

Whether a poem can be this attentive to formal variety and still be “sincere” is a question the book addresses (see poems 13 and 14), and it’s a good question. Le’s poetry is as knowing and as conscious of itself as a seminar paper. Does it still work? By and large, I’d say yes.

Catherine Lacey, _Biography of X_

AS A NOVEL that purports to be the biography of a recently deceased brilliant figure as written by a longtime close associate with no claims to being brilliant, Biography of X has some interesting predecessors: Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann is the most famous, but Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954 by Stephen Millhauser and Ticknor by Sheila Heti are also worthwhile. Lacey takes the whole conceit further, though.

First, "Biography of X" by C. M. Lucca not only has its own title page inside Biography of X by Catherine Lacey, but also its own copyright page, author bio, and author photo. Small touches, yes, but they add a tablespoon of verisimilitude, and I appreciate the extra ingenuity.

Second, the biography is set in an alternate-history 20th century USA, á la Roth's Plot Against America.

X was an artist--versatile (filmmaker, novelist, songwriter, and more), transgressive, and internationally celebrated. She gave up her name and lived as a variety of different characters for years in sustained performances that eventually became her breakthrough piece, The Human Subject. She is also what Jenny Offill in Dept. of Speculation called an Art Monster, a creator so single-mindedly focused on her work that she she leaves a trail of human wreckage behind her. She is not meant to be a portrait of anyone in particular, I'd say, but figures like Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker, and many others contribute details to X's life and legend. (Many of the things X says are adaptations of quotations from actual artists.)

C. M. Lucca is X's widow--that is, part of the trail of human wreckage. Lucca tries to steer away from the topic of how she herself was damaged by X, but keeps getting closer to candor as the novel proceeds. The emotional stakes keep rising as we get further  and further in the novel, in (I thought) an utterly convincing way. Henry James would have been impressed, I think. As we begin, Lucca mainly wants to clear away the mistakes and misjudgments of X's first biographer, but the deeper we go, the more visible her grievances against X become.

The tricky, even audacious device Lacey combines with the cowed-but-resentful biographer narrator is setting the story in an alternate history. "Biography of X" by Catherine Lucca is set in a U.S.A. in which the states of the old Confederacy seceded again in 1945 and existed as a separate nation for fifty years, establishing a fascist-theocratic government with old school patriarchal customs. X, as Carrie Lu Walker, was born and raised in this society, became a resister, and eventually was lucky enough to get out.

The alternate history has a few other striking touches (Emma Goldman is part of FDR's New Deal cabinet, Frank O'Hara did not die in that road accident), but the Atwood-like misogynistic dystopia of the "Southern Territories" gets most of the satiric energy. (The depiction of life in the "Southern Territories" has some points of contact with Lacey's Pew, we should note.)

Biography of X became harder to read as X's capacity for cruelty became more evident, but it was still compelling. And Connie Converse is a character! Check out her album How Sad, How Lovely on Bandcamp.

Ocean Vuong, _Time Is a Mother_

I THINK THIS is actually a bit stronger than Vuong's first collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016). The longer poems, in particular, struck me as sturdier, more surprising, and more ambitious than those in  the debut collection.

A good deal of this collection reflects the passing of Vuong's mother, who was vividly represented in Vuong's novel, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous. My having read that novel likely added to the impact these poems had with me.

The title (I think) refers to the idea that time gives birth to us, but no doubt it also means that time can give us a very, very hard time.

Johnny Marr, _Set the Boy Free_

AS YOU MIGHT expect, Marr’s memoir is clear, unfussy, down to earth, and a reminder of how different he is from his onetime songwriting partner in the Smiths.

He is especially good at conveying his excitement about music, which goes back to some of his earliest memories, and at capturing the euphoria of the extraordinary takeoff of the Smiths.

As to the breaking up of the Smiths, in Marr’s telling it seems somewhat comparable to that of the Beatles. Like McCartney, Marr wanted to entrust management to a certain party, and the other three wanted a different party, and they could not settle the question. So no more Smiths.

Marr is full of praise for his many later collaborators (e.g., Bernard Sumner, The The, Modest Mouse, and the Cribs), but this part of the book is anticlimactic, I have to say.

Set the Boy Free came out in 2016, by which time Marr had started making solo records, beginning with The Messenger in 2013. I saw him live in I think 2014, in Omaha. It was a not-very-large club, and the crowd was not that large either, but Marr gave us a fiery, no-holds-barred set that even included great Smiths songs such as “How Soon Is Now” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” It was a glimpse into the molten core of rock and roll for the two hundred or so people who were there--one of the best shows I have ever seen. The encore included “I Fought the Law,” in the Clash arrangement. Stunning.

I saw Morrissey about a year later, and he fully lived up to his reputation for petulance. His Smiths cover was “Meat Is Murder,” which might be the consensus pick for the Smiths song one is least interested in hearing played live. No encore. Yes, Morrissey and Marr are different indeed.

Henry James, _The Outcry_

 YOU DON'T HEAR about this one much—it’s the last novel James completed, published in 1911. Don’t go in hoping for anything like The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, or The Ambassadors, though, for you will be (as I was) disappointed.

For one thing, it comes from an idea James had for a play. As such, the novel is mainly scenes of dialogue, and particularly ponderous dialogue at that, as it carries much of the novel’s exposition and tends toward people staking out debate positions rather than having conversations. The sympathetic characters line up tidily opposite the not-so-sympathetic, and there is a not-very-interesting romance that tips towards matrimony by the novel’s end. The Outcry seems more the work of James the would-be playwright than James the novelist…and that’s not good.

For another, the novel is (by James’s standards) topical, and the topic is probably of slender interest for a contemporary reader. James was inspired by a 1909 newspaper-led campaign to dissuade the Duke of Norfolk from selling an Old Master painting his family owned (Holbein’s The Duchess of Milan) to the American millionaire Henry Frick. (The campaign succeeded, and the portrait is now in the National Gallery in London, not in the Frick Collection in New York City.)

In The Outcry, Lord Theign is in embarrassed enough circumstances (thanks to daughter Kitty’s gambling debts) that he is tempted by American millionaire Breckinridge Bender’s interest in a Joshua Reynolds portrait of one of Theign’s ancestors. Stakes are raised when a bright young English connoisseur, Hugh Crimble, spots another of Theign’s families Old Master paintings as the work of an Old Master other than the one to whom it has been long attributed, making it much rarer and more valuable.

Theign is meanwhile hoping that his younger daughter, Grace, will agree to marry Lord John. Lord John is serving as middleman for Bender, probably in hopes that the painting’s sale will pump up Grace's marriage settlement. But Grace has eyes for…Hugh Crimble.

It all seems a bit on the rattletrap side, doesn’t it?  I have read about two dozen novels or short novels by James, and The Outcry, I’m sorry to say, is the first one that seemed to me not really worth the reading.

Catherine Lacey, _The Möbius Book_

 VERY UNUSUAL TRICK here. One side presents title, author, and a white outline of a Möbius strip on a blue background. Open it up, and you get jacket copy, title page, copyright page, a dedication, and a memoir of what sounds like a terrible break up. Flip the book over, and you have the very same cover, the very same jacket copy, title page, and copyright page, but a different dedication, and (it turns out) a different text: a fiction (88 pages, a short novel or long short story) in which the character whose point of view gets the most attention is worrying about the (apparent) bloodstain seeping from the door of the neighboring apartment while she is being visited by a friend who has been through a terrible breakup.

The neat thing about a Möbius strip, as you may recall from math class, is that one starts with an ordinary two-sided strip of paper, but a half-twist and a piece of tape will you give you a strip of paper with only one side--as you can confirm by yourself by trying coloring it with a crayon.

So the memoir and the fiction seem like two texts, but are in some sense one text.

But in what sense? 

The memoir part, which by sheer chance is what I read first, tells a grim story. The man who in the text is only known as The Reason (as in "A man downstairs was The Reason I'd turned from inhabitant to visitor") breaks up with Lacey via an email, even though they are in different rooms of their shared apartment at the time he sends it. Most of The Reason's reported behavior is similarly odd and cruel. (Googling suggests that writer Jesse Ball is The Reason.)

The memoir might remind you of other getting-myself-back-together narratives, like those of Elizabeth Gilbert or Cheryl Strayed. Lacey explores quite a few different avenues--spiritual, sexual, pharmaceutical--and makes what seems like progress in purging her life of The Reason and his inexplicable behavior. The most interesting parts for me, I'd say, are Lacey's memories of an intensely Christian adolescence in Mississippi. It was easy to connect these memories with the setting of Pew or X's Southern Territories years in Biography of X.

The fiction is interesting in that even though it does have a character who has been broken up with, it gets (for the most part) well away from the experience of the broken-up-with person. The fictional situation includes but also gives the slip to Lacey's own breakup, and that bloodstain under the door becomes the focus of our attention.

I'm not sure The Möbius Book will catch on with the book clubs, but it certainly shows Lacey's resourcefulness and powers of writerly invention.

Solvej Balle, _On the Calculation of Volume, I_, trans. Barbara Haveland

THE QUICKEST WAY to describe this novel is to invoke the film Groundhog Day. Like Phil, the character Bill Murray plays in that movie, Tara Selter keeps waking up to find she is starting anew the day she lived yesterday—November 18th, in her case. The 121st time this happens, she starts keeping a journal of her experience of being stuck in the calendar, and that journal is the novel. The novel ends when she attains a full year of November Eighteenths and decides she has to get out of where she is (setting up Volume II).

Not an original concept, then, obviously, but I thought this novel was actually more interesting than (the undeniably charming) Groundhog Day for a couple of reasons.

First, this being a novel and a first-person novel at that, we get a lot more interiority than we do from a movie (from just about any movie, really—novels are the hands-down champion art form for interiority). Tara does a lot thinking about what is happening, what she can do to get back to the calendar everyone else is on, what the rules of her new mode of being are, and so on. We get to know her a lot better than we get to know Phil.

Second, her situation is more interesting than Phil’s. For one thing, she can move around. On her original November 18 she was in Paris on a book-buying trip (she and her husband are rare book dealers), but she finds that she can leave Paris and go back to her own house in her own hometown. When she wakes up in her own house, though, it is November 18th again, and her husband is surprised that she is not in Paris.

Tara tries explaining to her husband what is happening—something Phil never tries to do—and he is sympathetic and wants to help. The problem is, she has to explain it all again the next day, which is November 18 again, and eventually this wearies her. She starts staying in the ground floor guest room and avoiding her husband—whose November 18 movements she knows by heart—just to avoid the frustration of the explanation that never moves things along.

Tara also discovers that she does leave traces as one November 18 is followed by the next. If she has three apples in the kitchen and eats one, on the next November 18th there are only two applies in the kitchen. Similarly, the books she bought in Paris on November 18 are still with her the next November 18th…sometimes. 

The accidental discoveries accumulate, experiments are made, and Tara is growing towards something even though she is on some kind of time loop.

We figure out soon enough why Phil is stuck in a loop—he has to keep reliving February 2nd until he is a better person. With Tara, it’s not that simple, obviously. But why, then? Perhaps there will be some answers in Volume II.

Laura K. Field, _Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right_ (2)

 FIELD PROVIDES A classification system in a chart on page 7 of Furious Minds, dividing the scene or movement she is surveying into four groups: "National Conservatives," “Claremonters,” “postliberals,” and “Hard Right Underbelly.” The groupings don’t seem to represent sharply distinct schools of thought, though there are differences in style and emphasis, we might say.

The “Hard Right Underbelly” people are mainly online presences and tend to be wilder and more ferocious in their rhetoric. Field places Raw Egg Nationalist, Mencius Moldbug, and and Bronze Age Pervert in this group. Their outrageousness places them outside the mainstream of the movement in some ways, but they have large followings among the base, and Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin) apparently has the ear of Peter Thiel, who has the ear of J.D. Vance, so they are not exactly marginal. 

“Postliberals” tend to be Roman Catholic with theocratic tendencies. Patrick Deneen, whose Why Liberalism Failed got a nod from Obama a few years ago, is the best known of them, Adrian Vermeule the most formidable. A key idea here is “integralism,” that is, incorporating Catholic doctrine and values into civic laws and institutions. 

The “Claremonters” are associated with Hillsdale College and the Claremont Institute. The Founders and the original Constitution, with its varieties of brakes on full democracy, are particularly revered in this group.

The “National Conservatives” tend to take a very hard line on immigration.

The thing is, the Hard Right Underbelly also takes a hard line on immigration, the Claremonters would also like to see church and state get cozier, the National Conservatives like the idea of restoring traditional patriarchal family arrangements, etc. Mutual influence, networking, and ideological convergence mean that Field’s group lines can’t be tidy—she often makes remarks along the lines of “we will see more of him in a later chapter,” so the whole phenomenon is more a rhizome than her categories suggest.

As I mentioned in the previous post on this book, Field disagrees with her subjects on most topics and does not bother to conceal her feelings. Michael Anton, discussed in her book as a “Claremonter,” went on at length about Field’s abandonment of any kind of objectivity in a flame-snorting review in a recent issue of the Claremont Review of Books. I found her book immensely enlightening, but I would be curious to read a book on the same people by someone more sympathetic to their views, just to get an idea how things look from their perspective. I imagine, though, that Field’s take is the one that would sound most true to me. For all of them, making America great again seems to boil down to “put white straight Christian men back in charge of everything.” I would hate to see that happen.

Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (5)

A CURIOUS COUNTERPOINT is struck, though, when the next poem, “Suddenly,” begins by suggesting that farming is still going on:

as if beside me

the solitary horse

neighs in the

 

neighbor’s distant

 

field […]     (77)

The furrows, the field, and the horse together recall Edward Thomas’s “As the Team’s Head-Brass,” written in 1916, less than a year before Thomas was killed on the Western Front. The poem’s speaker is having an intermittent conversation with a farmer, who pauses for a minute at the end of each furrow he cuts with his horse-drawn plow. The conversation is about the devastations of the war. Had the war not come, the speaker says, they would be living in “[a]nother world”; “‘Aye, and a better,’” the farmer replies, “‘though / If we could see all all might seem good’” (Thomas CP 29). The farmer has some faith in the future; indeed, the very act of plowing affirms that faith. At the beginning of the poem, two lovers are glimpsed slipping into a nearby wood, slipping out again at poem’s end. Their presence, too, suggests ongoing life amid disaster.

     Graham re-envisioned and expanded Thomas’s poem in “The Hiddenness of the World,” published in Runaway(2020), developing the idea of the disruption and possible renewal of natural cycles. She winked in the direction of Thomas’s poem, I believe, in “In Reality” in To 2040: “The winning ticket is still in my pocket. / The disappearing lovers are still in my satchel. / I have the stories we needed ready” (46). That the two closing poems of Killing Spree make contact with “As the Team’s Head-Brass” floats just a whiff of hope, as does an even more surprising quotation from Pound on the book’s last page: “what thou lovest well / remains” (80)—a line from the Pisan Cantos, a line about what cannot be lost even in defeat.

     And we also have the cicadas. They appeared in “Dawn 2040” in To 2040 and reappear in “Suddenly,” at a crucial juncture:

& the rising & falling silences

of terminal hunger

like the cicadas

revving up again

 

after having ceased long enough

 

for us to have forgotten the story

 

completely, for us to be

 

surprised again

 

by their engine     (78)

The disappearance of the cicadas, even for long periods, does not mean there are no more cicadas. Similarly, perhaps, some hopes can disappear, some principles can disappear, poetry of the farthest-reaching kind can disappear, but all these things may be underground, biding their time, to reappear when we have forgotten all about them. 

Raise yr voice in my voice.

Or raise my voice in yrs.

What remains is

 

always, only, voice—this, here,

this creature in the bony

enclosure, these cicadas in

 

the burning trees.  (79)

Laura K. Field, _Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right_ (1)

OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT does not strike anyone, I guess, as an ideas-and-principles person. He himself says he likes to go with his “gut”; people who like him might instead talk about his instincts and intuitions, while people who don’t like him (as I do not) might talk about his whims and impulses. He’s a canny gamesman, we could probably all agree, but he probably hasn’t cracked a book since college, if he did even then.

There are plenty of ideas-and-principles people around him, though—Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and J. D. Vance come to  mind—and plenty more in various think tanks, foundations, and  the blogosphere who are making and disseminating arguments for why Trump is the right person at the right time for the U.S.A. Field’s book, which has been cited all over the last place during the last half-year or so, is a survey of a wide array of these folks.

Field has a doctorate in political science—more specifically, in political theory (the three main domains of political science as an academic field are U.S. politics, international politics, and political theory). Political theory shares a long border with philosophy, going back to Aristotle’s Politics and Plato’s Republic. Field came up as a Straussian, that is, someone working within the conceptual frameworks created by Leo Strauss, an influential and controversial figure who thought the west made a terrible wrong turn in the early modern era.

Most Straussians would be roughly classed as conservative or neo-conservative, and Field herself might have been classed so before (as she writes in her preface) she had a crucial encounter with the conservative movement’s deeply rooted sexism and patriarchal assumptions. 

Field’s own experiences with and takes on contemporary conservatism are a large part of the book, actually. Even though her book is published by a university press (Princeton, no less), it does not seem academic, at least not in the narrowest sense. First person singular pronouns crop up often, and she does not conceal her distaste for some of the ideas held by her subjects. The book is more intellectual journalism than an academic study, we might say.

It’s certainly illuminating, though. Having recently read two books covering adjacent territory—Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards and Matthew Taylor’s The Violent Take It by Force—I noticed that while Slobodian and Taylor end up talking about distinct, non-overlapping groups of MAGA-ites, Field talks about some people discussed by Slobodian, some discussed by Taylor, and a whole lot discussed by neither. She gives us a very wide chunk of the MAGA intellectual spectrum.

Furthermore, she gives us an important clue about what may be holding that spectrum together. The free-market fundamentalists Slobodian writes about may not have a lot in common with the independent charismatic Christians Taylor writes about, and neither group may have much in common with mavericks like the Bronze Age Pervert, but they would all agree that white straight (or profoundly closeted) men should be in charge. And that, Field helps us see, may be the real core of the phenomenon.

Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (4)

IRONICALLY, THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT of ultimate defeat may itself belong to this particular high modernist tradition. Eliot’s last major poem, Little Gidding, written when the outcome of the Second World War was in doubt, dwells on “a king at nightfall,” on “three men, and more on the scaffold, / And a few who died forgotten / […] / and of one who died blind and quiet” (CPP 143). The warriors and combatants in Yeats’s late poems are badly besieged (“The Black Tower”) or sole survivors (“The Curse of Cromwell”) or finally overcome (“Cuchulain Comforted”); “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” faces the problem of having nothing left to say, and “Man and Echo” wonders whether what he did manage to say did more harm than good. Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen” could not be terser or more final, and Pound’s admission of defeat in Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX – CXVII could not be more explicit:

But the beauty is not the madness

Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me.

And I am not a demigod, 

I cannot make it cohere. (Canto CXVI, Cantos [1972] 795-96)

Defeat was perhaps inevitable. Acknowledging defeat, though, is not the same thing as wishing one had never made the attempt. Even Pound, amid his wreckage, “a blown husk that is finished” (“from Canto XCV,” Cantos [1972] 794), seems to feel the effort was worth making. And so with Graham in Killing Spree. She did not win the race. Hypocrisy, cruelty, greed, and exploitation won the race. But she is still on the track, taking her defeat lap, and there is a dry, radiant joy in seeing her take it.

     Killing Spree is dark, but even so, there are cracks where the light gets in. Some of the cracks, examined closely, open into surprising vistas. The book’s penultimate poem, “Then,” begins with a moonrise and the speaker’s arm around a sleeping beloved. The speaker wants to “let go / of the world / as it was / once,” and chastises herself for past delusions:

& we thought we were

free, we thought

there was history

 

in the world—

but it was an

illusion, wasn’t it, it

must have been,

 

because otherwise how

could it have

disappeared

so suddenly.     (75)

The poem ends with the image of surviving wildlife—"all the watchers in their dens”—inhabiting

what were once

the sun-warmed furrows

farmers cut

into the earth

 

when there were farmers.   (76)

Farmers have disappeared along with the hummingbirds in this terrible future. Since farming relies on an enormous reservoir of faith in the future, faith that the labor will be worthwhile, that the plants will survive, that the social structures distributing food will be intact, that there will be people to whom the food will be distributed, the imagined disappearance of farmers is as dire a dystopian detail as any in Killing Spree. 

 

Catherine Barnett, _Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced_

HAVING READ BARNETT’S other collections, I decided to go back and read the first, first published in 2004. My copy looks to be from the fourth printing, which is doing better than okay, I would say.

Barnett’s hallmarks are already present here in her first book; the poems are lucid and subtle, take short but striking lyric flights, and feel honest.

A good many of the poems in the first part of the book seem to be about the death of two nieces in a terrible plane crash. A few minutes of internet search suggest to me that the nieces may have been on Alaska Airlines flight 261, which fell into the Pacific after “a catastrophic loss of pitch control,” according to Wikipedia.

As in Barnett's other collections, we get some good poems about her son, who at this point seems to have been in the toddler/pre-schooler era. 

Barnett’s poems don’t dazzle, I would say, but one can keep coming back to them and they are just as good as one remembers them.

Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (3)

SINCE PART OF the failure is not saying the right words at the right time, implicated in that failure is poetry itself. Opening poem “The World” ends:

[…] the words even

the right words

 

cannot be un-

 

furled from breath from

mind oh

memory no cannot be

dug up dug up from

 

this buried world.     (5)

Even for one with Graham’s astonishing command of language, words seem to have lost their power in “You Shall Not Speak”:

[…] I don’t know

if there’s anything left now in

my heart. It is so 

 

dry. I must 

scour it with 

words. They must bring 

moisture 

 

back. As they rise up in me 

they almost touch 

my fingertips & then 

they flee onto this 

 

page, they leave bits of 

themselves, right here, this trace, these skins…. 

Once they rivered everywhere—    (42-43)

She has a voice, and feels the imperative “to / sing instead—sing!—and the right / song the surprising one full of / forgiveness good- / natured among the many / shrieks” (53). But in the very next poem she asks, “Who am I kidding” (56). At moments poetry seems capable of making a difference: “I clench my hand around / this pen. / I staunch the current” (64). More often, it fails:

Are you almost done I hear myself say,

but when I throw my words onto the scales

nothing moves.  (32)

 

     What feels like the failure of poetry in Killing Spree might be more narrowly described as the failure of a high modernist project belatedly undertaken. Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and the Auden of the 1930s attempted to address the entirety of the cultures in which they lived about the questions of greatest moment for their time, drawing on the more serious intellectual currents then in circulation and working in the more advanced frontiers of their form. Similar ambitions animated many of modernism’s immediate inheritors: Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Duncan, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz—naming Schwartz, however, may suggest how foredoomed such ambitions are. Historically, these or like ambitions lie behind great poems not only of the visionary prophet tradition, like those of Milton, Blake, and Whitman, but also poetic monuments like Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Pope’s Essay on Man, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and Tennyson’s In Memoriam. For the modernists, though, such undertakings faced seemingly impossible odds. Their culture had become too various and incoherent—an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” as Eliot memorably put it in “‘Ulysses’, Order, and Myth” (Kermode Selected 177)—for any poem or poet to address, organize, and interpret the whole of it. The political positions their cultural commitments led them to take seemed suspect (and, in Pound’s case, literally criminal). The project asked too much.

     Poets understandably moved away from it. Poets born after 1980, the year Graham’s first book appeared, look less towards the example of the high modernists than towards those of Elizabeth Bishop, Jack Spicer, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery, all of whom certainly had ambitions, but less grandiose, less delusional ones. They were, arguably, more modest, more honest, and clearer-eyed about poetry’s reach and capabilities. The need to address urgent questions remained, but strategies like the poetry of witness, more reportorial than hortatory, seemed more effective than that of the Cantos. Explorations of marginalized identities and communities made the unified, integrated culture Eliot hoped to call into being seem not at all desirable. Poetry that seems to declare, “I am writing to clarify and illuminate where we, as a community and culture, stand right now,” as attempted by Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Auden in his twenties, scarcely seems tenable now. It is hard to think of any living poet apart from Graham who is even trying. Killing Spree often seems like an acknowledgement that the project is not just difficult, but impossible. 

Thomas Pynchon, _Shadow Ticket_

THAT DETECTIVE AGENCIES early in their history (e.g., the Pinkerton agency) were involved in industrial espionage, union breaking, and red baiting has given Pynchon ample opportunity to combine noir-derived plot lines and tone with his conjuring of (nearly) ubiquitous and (nearly) omnipotent networks of secret power and authority. As he did in Against the Day and Inherent Vice, he takes full advantage of the opportunity in Shadow Ticket. Lew Basnight of Against the  Day even makes a cameo appearance. (I imagine he is not the only crossover detail, but I will leave such trainspotting to others.)

Hicks McTaggart is our gumshoe here. It is late 1932. Hitler is on the brink of taking power in Germany, and the USA has just elected FDR. The Depression is showing no signs of lifting. In Milwaukee, Hicks gets handed a tricky assignment involving the wild daughter of a dairy magnate. Tracking down the daughter and the swing musician she loves will eventually take Hicks to Hungary, where….

…well, you know, things happen. The novel has its plot, knotty in classically noir ways, but the real treat is Pynchon’s writing, the dialogue that seems to come right out of Ben Hecht and George S. Kaufman, the arcane lore, the evocation of time and place, all those  things at which Pynchon is simply better than everyone else. 

If you like Pynchon (as I do), I expect you will like this (I did), and if you are just curious about Pynchon, this might be a good book to start out on, at just under three hundred pages. Shadow Ticket probably will not dislodge The Crying of Lot 49 as everyone's favorite among Pynchon’s relatively shorter books, but it does provide a modest-sized sample of how Pynchon can fascinate.

Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (2)

IN PLACES, THE book’s anxiety that some last opportunity to avert a slow-motion disaster has been missed takes on a generational aspect. Born in 1950, Graham is a boomer, part of a generation that came of age both in the U.S.A. and in Europe with a sense of mission, an aspiration to enlighten and transform the world. As an undergraduate, Graham took part in one of the more spectacular attempts to realize that vision, the student uprisings of Paris in May 1968. Recalling les évènements later in “The Hiding Place,” a poem in Region of Unlikeness (1991), Graham depicted a state of confusion, even the leaders having scarcely an idea of what was happening or what might be achieved; a similar cloud of worthy but futile intentions hovers in “Demonstration” in Killing Spree. “I took off my glasses / & pocketed them” the poem begins, a sensible precaution as the speaker approaches the crowd.

[…] The others

were all already

there. There was

 

chanting, there were orders, the instructions were

loud.     (10)

The year may be 1968, or we may be at a No Kings rally. Whenever this event is happening, the speaker hopes it will be unifying and effective, will “become a river of selves, of dis- / appearing selves, us all / stepping again now into the self-erasing / crowd […]” (11). The chanting intensifies: “it sounds just like / answers but what was / the question” (13). It turns out no one knows, exactly. 

[…] I think one sd

it’s a game, it’s a theory, but 

just then everything

 

you’ve read about  

for all these years

began. Right then. As if it were planned. As if we were

expected. It has not ceased since.      (13)

Whatever the demonstration was aimed at, the Fifth Republic or Donald Trump, was ready and waiting and was not about to abdicate, no matter how intense the chanting. The poem ends:

If you can hear me there,

if this reaches you,

forgive us,

we did not know who we were.

Whether the setting is 1968 or 2025, we hear a generation saying to its children, its grandchildren, and its great-grandchildren: we intuited something was wrong, we tried to do something, but we failed. In “Who,” Graham writes, “that power that / ferocity we had / to reach out—reach out-- / something was done to that” (6).