John Ashbery, _Flow Chart_

GIVEN THE MULTIPLE-UNIVERSES hypothesis, somewhere there is a world where one day each year is devoted to public readings of John Ashbery's Flow Chart, in its entirety. Excerpts are read at weddings and at funerals. It is the classic graduation gift, its distinctive square shape giving the secret away before it is even unwrapped -- Flow Chart is this world's Oh, the Places You'll Go!

I would gladly live on this world.

Marjorie Perloff, in the blurb on the back of my paperback copy, calls Flow Chart "a very long poem that recalls Wordsworth's Prelude," and yes, it does -- insofar as it seems autobiographical, only the autobiography may not necessarily be Ashbery's, and the speaker relates the story of his life as if to someone who knows the whole of it already and only needs the right triggering allusions (is Ashbery his own Coleridge, both the "I" and the frequently invoked "you" here?).

What do I most like about Flow Chart? The versatile voice, tacking from drily camp to painfully direct to Stein-ian impenetrability, sometimes in the same sentence? The final section, as powerful as the fifth and final movements of each of Eliot's Four Quartets in mapping the maker's relationship to his art and its audience, which interrupts itself to announce, "Excuse me while I fart. There, that's better. I actually feel relieved." The unfailingly persuasive rhythm, the wise sonorities that end in giggles, the nod and the wink as you are led to the abyss?

I give up. Let's just quote:

Once, a whale will be kind, and no other grief can exist after

that. (54)

Although we mattered as children, as adults we're somehow counterfeit

And not briefed as to what happened in the intervals to which this longing led us,

which turns out to be not so tragic after all, but merely baroque, almost functional. (77)

What right have you to consider yourself anything but an enormously eccentric though

not too egocentric character, whose sins of omission haven't omitted much,

whose personal pronoun lapses may have indeed contributed to augmenting the hardship

silently resented among the working classes? (150)

Excellent is the peach, and stirring the tales

of battle, the calls to emulation. But excellent also is the spat-out pit, the ideal

of zero growth, when it comes to that. (196)

Malcolm Gladwell, _Outliers: The Story of Success_

IT DELIGHTS ME to imagine a travelling business executive in an airport bookstore quickly grabbing and purchasing the new Malcolm Gladwell book because of its title, which seems to promise foolproof advice on how to slash and burn your way to the top of the corporate foodchain, and then discovering while in flight that he has in fact committed himself to a roof-to-foundations dismantling of that Great American Business Myth, the self-made man.

Taking up a variety of examples of individuals who have achieved phenomenal, way-off-the-end-of-the-bell-curve success, Gladwell demonstrates that yes, they had talent, and yes, they worked hard, but they also had good fortune on their side, unusual opportunities, lucky coincidences -- that even being born in one decade rather than another (even one month rather than an another) made an incalculable difference.

Even one's cultural inheritance -- a good example of something over which one has no direct control -- can unpredictably redound overwhelmingly in one's favor (as it did for some of the sons of the New York City Jews working in the garment trade in the 1930s) or fatally against it (as it did for some Korean airliner pilots).

Gladwell's invocation of cultural differences as a key factor in one's success is likely to raise hackles -- but he is not ranking ethnicities in order of likelihood of success, so he is not simply resuming where the late-19th, early-20th century racial theorists left off, and he makes clear that what matters most is the unpredictable ways a culture's tendencies play out in quite specific contexts.

How does he do it? -- that is, digest the voluminous psychological research upon which his books are based and then make it all graceful, lucid, and vivid, even unto the experimental approaches used by the researchers, so the reader experiences something like the dawn of discovery? Talent, certainly, hard work, doubtless, and very probably something else, to judge from the thesis of this very book, but lucky us to be born at the right time to have the pleasure of reading him.

Mary Jo Bang, _Elegy_

I READ THIS some while ago, but you know how it goes -- busy, busy, busy. I hope to blog a bit more assiduously this week.

Several of my impressions of Elegy have blurred in the meantime, unfortunately, though not the main one, which is that the book is not quite what its blurbs would lead one to expect. The front inner flap of the dust jacket tells us that the book "chronicles the year following the death of her son" and embodies "the most profound and private grief," and variations on this theme recur in the blurbs from Marjorie Perloff, C. D. Wright, Nick Flynn, and Fanny Howe. All of which sets you up for a sort of contemporary In Memoriam...which is not exactly what we get.

Bang's poetry is weird, witty, oblique, skittery, playful... and, though relatively subdued and often streaked with pain, Elegy is still Mary Jo Bang. A poem from her previous book, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, pops in at one point (explicably enough -- Strange Balloon is a book of ekphrastic poems, and the poem in question, "Three Trees," was inspired by one of her son's paintings), and utterly different though the premises of the two books are, the tonality of the poem blends easily into both. Elegy is unlike her other books, but hardly utterly unlike -- it shares their Bang-ness.

Anyone picking this up expecting the transparently confessional -- as I did, and I should have known better -- will be...disappointed? I hope not. Thwarted, perhaps, initially, very likely confused for a bit, but perhaps also relieved that the book is not so frankly exploitative as it might have been, perhaps moved to see that emotional honesty can mean not the relinquishment of art but its closer embrace.

Jennifer Moxley, _The Sense Record and other poems_

SO WHAT ARE we to make of this -- some poems in strict iambic pentameter, a couple of sonnets, allusions to classical myth, quotations from Wordsworth, Whitman, William Cullen Bryant (!), even syntactical inversion and rhyme ("Songs /unlike a virus have grown in this season / of record rare, they sound an echo long / in repose and leave conflicted reason / to its bafflement") -- and yet this is not a book by Gjertrud Schnackenberg.  It even seems in some ways 180 degrees away from Gjertrud Schnackenberg.

I bought this having been intrigued by Moxley's The Line, which had its elegances and symmetries but seemed plainly enough born of an out-there poetic that would have no truck with such traditional formal properties as turn up in The Sense Record.  And yet...those very properties end up seeming audacious in Moxley's hands.  Perhaps because she alludes not only to Wordsworth and Bryant but also to Verlaine, Césaire, Creeley, and John Wieners, but even more because of lines like these from "The Ambition of Art":

[...] constructed oblivion laid out lettristic

in heavy regular beautiful beats, arc of an entreaty -- but I

hate this dream and I hate its vanity.

A simultaneous attraction/repulsion for traditional form is more interesting than either an attraction or a repulsion would be, or so it seems to me.  The same poem ends:

Not a slight adjustment in vision, nor a new world view,

nor tradition's exhaustion restored infinitum

nor the same old encoded line but... can I say it?

Will meaning suffice?  Notwithstanding our friendships

and family we drift, cut throats in quest of credentials,

yet the mind is the life that will die by consent 

to the hand but in strategy held, let liberty's pitfall

engulf us, if the night must fall then...

Why write poetry, why work so hard at it, why sacrifice other important human considerations to it, why anguish over whether it is good or not -- such questions hover behind the lines and are not answered so much as accepted, clearsightedly, without swooning, maybe a bit of melodrama but earned melodrama, I think, if there is such a thing, in a volume in which Moxley restores tradition without succumbing to it, deals out those same old encoded lines while knowing what she most wants is somehow beyond them.  In her skill in a medium she is not certain she trusts, she reminds me again, as in The Line, of Laura Riding.

I expect I will be returning to this book, especially for "The Ambition of Art," "The Second Winter," "Behind the Orbits," and most especially for "The Sense Record," from which I quote here:

Why must I alone account

for those I have known all too briefly.

To feel their psychic egress

I would as much deny

were it not for my suspicion

that built into intelligence

lies some strange quadrant

of a fractured Heaven

or Hell, an individual memory complex

stretched across the globe

vanished-existence maps

destroyed by the nonchalant amnesia

necessary to live.

Fractured... and cold and rook-delighting, perhaps?  What a surprise to find a whiff of the Yeatsian here.

Gary Lutz, _I Looked Alive_

SO WHY IS this book not even in print when it ought to be on every must-read list for contemporary fiction?  Used copies start at $46.49, according to Amazon.com, so some canny publisher ought to get on it right now.

Lutz advocates usually mention his sentences, and with unusually good reason.  You have never seen anything like them.   Precision veering into vagueness, confession overtaking evasion, clarity trying to wring its own neck...a Lutz sentence is often a story all by itself.  "For we were brother and younger sister, cobelligerents on the centerpiece of a pushed-apart sectional sofa, and I told her, naturally, that when it had happened to me, the 'friend' was a boy with a disadvantaging face, big and round, much of it still to be filled in, and before the day was out I had gone sick for the first venereal do-gooder to come my way."

Most of the stories here are written in the first person, with narrators that vary somewhat in age, gender, and circumstances, but the Lutz-sentence is not about capturing the way anyone talks ("She was a woman of punctual life-tides, ate right, had suffered at all the right  hands"). There is a lot of adapting a word from one part of speech to another in novel clusters of morphemes ("...one part of her would be arisen, pivotal, summonsy, awag -- a chancing hand, perhaps, or gleamed, unsecretful ankle").  There are the disjunctions and dislocations of modernism, but without the sense that all will sort itself out once we crack the code.

The collection, Lutz's second, is dedicated, as his first was as well, to Gordon Lish, which may be why I at times one thought of Raymond Carver.  Lutz's characters, like Carver's, tend to be at the end of their strings, long out of good options, which were never plentiful anyway.  As in Carver, a sadness too deep for tears rises off the page.  

But there is no other sad like Lutz's sad. Character after character at some imponderable distance from the other people in their lives, from the conditions of their existence, from their own bodies and those bodies' preposterous needs.  The wish to articulate the truth of this alienation struggles painfully with resentment at having to know it or name it at all.  The characters seem to be trying to get away from their stories in the process of telling them, handling the toxic stuff of their lives with the thick padded gloves of the Lutz-sentence, which somehow also manages to leave that stuff as naked and exposed as it could be.

Doesn't sound like much fun, I know, which perhaps answers the question of why the book is out of print.  But Gary Lutz is a writer we need.

Adrian Tomine, _Shortcomings_

NOT THAT I read every graphic novel out there, but I've read a handful of particularly good ones -- Maus, of course, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Craig Thompson's Blankets, Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, Charles Burns's Black Hole, and now this -- and I'm starting to wonder: is the realistic graphic novel (excluding, that is, the superhero and sci fi  and fantasy and noir stuff) always going to be about childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood?

Tomine's book is a sharply observed and subtly narrated study of the dissolution of a romantic relationship between two Asian-Americans in their 20s.  Our main focus is Ben Tanaka, intelligent but touchy, sarcastic, and lacking any obvious talents or ambitions.  He is preoccupied with the idea of sex with white girls, but anxious about the size of his penis (a point signalled not only by the title but also by a ruler running along the bottom of the hardback cover binding). This preoccupation annoys his girlfriend Miko, as well it might, as does his indifference to her ambitions and his unwillingness to generate any of his own.  

Miko's departure to New York City for an internship produces a farewell scene so awkward and tense that it feels like a breakup; Ben later drops in unannounced in New York City to see how things stand and discovers that in fact, yep, it's over, and goes home.

Favorite detail: the visually rhyming infidelities in the upper right hand corners of pages 65 and 95.

Favorite character: neither Ben nor Miko, both of whom are a bit exasperating, but Ben's best friend, Alice Kim, grad student at Mills College and take-no-prisoners lesbian.  But how did Ben, who is a pill most of the time, ever become such good friends with someone as smart, saucy, bold, and grounded as Alice?  

A fine graphic novel, but I'm still wondering, are we ever going to get graphic novels about middle-aged people?  Even people who are middle-aged (Lynda Barry, Charles Burns, Alison Bechdel) seem to focus on childhood and youth.  Is that because comics, no matter what, are bound in so many ways to youth?

Well, there's always Harvey Pekar and, occasionally, Chris Ware...

Garry Wills, _Head and Heart: American Christianities_

GARRY WILLS IS, I believe, incapable of writing an uninteresting book, and I say that having read something like fifteen of them.  The lightly borne learning, the handsome prose, the cultural breadth... who else could have written so persuasively about Augustine, Lincoln, and John Wayne?

Head and Heart, a survey of the intersections of American religious life with American political life from colonial times to the present, is far from uninteresting, but to my mind Wills has been more interesting about the same subjects elsewhere, especially in Under God.  That book was focused more on its own moment (roughly, the election of 1988) than on the past, but Wills skillfully folded in enough history to give that book almost as much historical depth as this one has, so for a longtime Wills reader Head and Heart often gives one a feeling of déjà lu.

The opposition signalled in the title is between the United States as liberal, Enlightenment undertaking, religiously congruent with  the deism of the founders or Emersonian Unitarianism or the mainline liberal Protestantism of Reinhold Niebuhr, and the United States as God's new chosen people, religiously congruent with the New England Puritans, the Great Awakenings, the current religious right.  Wills, drawing with broad strokes, portrays the former as intelligent but dry and brittle, the later as juicily passionate but dim and bigoted.  Typically the two tendencies are at odds, but when they ally -- as he argues they did in the abolition movement and the civil rights movement -- the U.S. lives up to its conception of itself.

Wills then is all for the occasional bracing infusion of religion into public life and debate, we might say, but he is also and crucially all for separation of church and state, so the last section of the book is a gloves-off drubbing of the Bush administration's trampling of that principle, and a fully deserved one.  The richest part of the book, I'd say, if like me you happen to have already read Under God and Wills's books on 18th and 19th century American politics.