Jessica Savitz, _Hunting Is Painting_

THE TITLE SETS the tone for the volume: a baffling assertion, but so calm and so clear that it creates a micro-climate in which the truth of the proposition seems incontrovertible. The book as a whole, its seven mysteriously-titled sections (e.g., "Conception is the Breaking Chain of a Burning Torch"), and its individual poems constitute a series of nested micro-climates that resemble consensual reality in some respects (containing trees, water, fire, and birthdays) but operate according to causal modalities all their own.

HUNTING IS PAINTING

Brown shirt littered in dove's blood;

Hunting is painting and excavating some greater forest.

And hose-water and knife through scales

Cooks alcohol of supper --

I spread the light in salt over my food

And often use a knife to remove a bruise

From the golden peach.

There is bait in the mouths of ice-fishermen.

The cutting knife heals, the fuel becomes the meal, the anglers themselves have taken the bait -- every poem has similar ostranenie-effects, lying at some tangent to the known world yet making the known world come into clearer focus by being obscurely different.

Some lines in "Ceremonial" suggest the title may derive from cave paintings like those of Lascaux, that the poems perhaps represent some intersection of document, dream, and desire.

it's greened, it's ruined

braided minerals on the cave walls

I went into the cave

of my own consciousness

and painted animals on the rounds and ledges there

I am standing or crouching on the shelf of the cave there in

the mind

I am The Neanderthal Kings

with this sweaty ash and jeweled eye

Like Medbh McGuckian, Savitz homes in on the True Earth-Wyrd.

Let's not forget the images drawn by Allison Hawkins, either, the perfect complement to this small book of charms and spells.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, _The Beautiful Struggle: a father, two sons, and an unlikely road to manhood_

I SO MUCH enjoyed the super-carbonated fizz of Ta-Nehisi Coates's prose in an article I read in The Nation a couple of years ago that I decided to see if he had published a book. Sure enough, he had -- this one, which came out in 2008.

A coming-of-age memoir by a male African-American writer has to make its way past some monumental precursors: Black Boy, Notes of a Native Son, Manchild in the Promised Land, to name some of the obvious ones; Daryl Pinckney's High Cotton, to name a less obvious one. The Beautiful Struggle is not quite in that class, but worth the time nonetheless.

Coates grew up in West Baltimore in an interesting situation. His father was a committed member of the Black Consciousness movement of the 1960s and 1970s, whose calling was maintaining a small press devoted to that cause, and who simultaneously worked on the maintenance crew at Howard University so his kids could take advantage of a tuition remission program there. Born in 1975, Coates as a child was surrounded by DuBois, drums, African mythology; the family did not observe Christmas or the Fourth of July. He grows up with constant reminders that he has to get the grades he needs to get into Howard, or, as the book always calls it, "Mecca."

Just outside the door, though, as Coates comes of age, is the crack epidemic, gangsta rap, and the flight of the black middle class to the 'burbs. It's a bit like the story of a red diaper baby born in the late 1930s, suckled on legends of the Spartacists, the Wobblies, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, coming of age in the McCarthy era.

Intriguing as these circumstances are, though, the book does not quite get its narrative arc all the way off the ground. Coates has more than his share of difficulties at school and in the neighborhood, and there is some drama at home (his father believes in corporal punishment, but not in monogamy), but the potential energy of the story tends to become diffused.

Fortunately, there's enough combustion in the prose to keep the pistons moving and the pages turning. Coates draws a bit on street vernacular, a bit on the language of comic books and sword-and-sorcery fantasy, but he has a way with a trope that is distinctly his own. To pluck an example almost at random, here is a bit on how Coates, forced to miss drum ensemble practice in order to take driver's ed, daydreamed his way through the class:

I just placed my palms on my thighs in ready position, leaned back in my wooden chair until I was five hundred years away, until I stood in the court of Mansa Musa, in a kufi and a dark robe. My djembe hung from my shoulders, and when the Lion of Mali nodded, my hands fired and called across the Sahel. The teacher would lower the lights and show films on driver safety. But I would play lead on my lap, imagining dancers who kicked and leaped through the dark like great black flamingoes.

Ariana Reines, _Coeur de Lion_

HOW I GOT a hold of this is a story in itself. Intrigued by Reines's The Cow (see LLL for January 2011) and noticing that she had a second book out, I decided to find a copy. Checking my usual online outlets, I discovered not only that were there no new copies available, even though the book had been published as recently as 2007, but also that the cheapest available used copies were going for eighty or ninety dollars apiece. Surprising, no? Well, thanks to the powers that be for inter-library loan, and thanks especially to Mills College Library, whose copy found its way to me all the way here in Nebraska. I hope they put it in their rare book room when they got it back.

Fence Books, I gather, will be putting out a new edition in September, so soon Reinesians will not have to go the lengths I did to read Coeur de Lion.

And it was well worth the trouble. Very different from The Cow, which was a kind of high-wire act with flaming batons, bristling with startling appropriations, difficult, jarring, staring the reader in the eye with "hold on tight or get out now" look. Coeur de Lion is almost... confessional. Not to mention compulsively readable, hard to put down. Is it OK to say that? I think of Tina Celona's poem "Sangria," in Octopus # 11:

Confessional poetry is not very popular right now. Transparency is also out of favor, so that if you write in a style that is invisible people will hate you. Nonetheless some people are able to get away with it, if they approach it in a way that is not naïve and that contributes something new. For instance, Lydia Davis. I think it is possible to get away with such a thing, but I would not recommend it for everyone.

Coeur de Lion, which seems to have been written during and about a fairly short timeframe, orbits around a relationship that seems to have foundered, with a certain amount of attention devoted to Reines's studies, writing, and memories. I would describe it as both confessional and transparent. For instance:

Did I tell you

That I finally

Read your novel

All the way through?

When I reread

The first few pages

I thought

I might have been

Too hasty

When I told you

That day in the

Valley that

It was terrible but

Then I read on

And it is pretty

Bad, not in a

Good way. Sometimes

There is an excellent

Sentence and

My heart swells

With hope -- now

That I sort of hate

Myself for having

Fallen for you.

So, is the book, to pick up Tina Celona's criteria, not-naïve? Is it something new? The final lines of the excerpt I've quoted could almost come from a high school girl's journal, so Reines is apparently willing at least to sound naïve. The prevailing mood is not exactly new, either, as it seems to be that of Dickinson's Master Letters, a profoundly intelligent woman in love with an attractive but not nearly as intelligent man, swinging from abjection and unworthiness to bemusement and indignation in vertiginous swoops.

Not exactly not-naïve, not exactly new, but if we ask "does it work?", I would have to say yes, it does. It has the gravitational pull of a black hole. It won't let you go.

I remember heading off to college nearly forty years ago and discovering in the dorm room of nearly every woman with whom I became acquainted a copy of Ariel or The Bell Jar or both. At that time, both books were about nine years old. I like imagining that girls currently negotiating the reefs of third and fourth grade will as high schoolers come across Coeur de Lion (and, for good measure, Maximum Gaga) and bring much-read copies to their dorm rooms and then later write the dissertations that will make the Mills College copy of the Mal-O-Mar edition worth even more than it is now.

Jennifer Egan, _A Visit from the Goon Squad_

AMONG MY RESOLUTIONS for the remainder of May 2011 is to finish at least a few of the books I left one-half, one-third, or one-quarter read in 2010. I started with this one... we'll see how far I get.

The Pulitzer people and I are not often on the same wavelength, but this book is a gem. It has the same jaded fascination with the pinging adrenal buzz of the fashion/entertainment world as Look at Me, the same probing of the way friendship can be braided with abandonment and betrayal as The Keep, but it's a stronger book than either of those.

It has some of the effect of a collection of short stories, as each chapter could be read independently, but works well as a novel, since we re-encounter characters from story to story, a peripheral figure in one chapter becoming the POV character in another. Each story/chapter focuses on a fairly narrow time frame of a day or a few days, but since we see characters at several different stages in their lives (and not in chronological order, just to make things more interesting), and since Egan has an extraordinary deftness at filling in antecedent action in a swiftly-paced paragraph, we get a novel-esque depth of time.

And time is our theme here. Although the music industry types we meet seem capable of hiring thugs, and although "The Goon Squad" would be an OK name for the kind of late 70s/early 80s alt-indie bands we meet in these pages, the "goon" of the title is time itself. Time, too, can rearrange your facial design, cripple you for life, leave you for dead. Much of the novel is about how we lose things, leave them behind, how we change, how things are taken away.

Intriguingly, though, a lot of it is about how time also restores things, about unexpected second chances, how life can resume after a pause. Lincoln Blake, a mildly autistic teenager in the second-to-last story (which takes the form of a PowerPoint presentation by his sister Alison) collects pauses in popular songs. Bix, an early e-mail adopter we glimpse in a story set in the early 90s, foresees a time when the Internet will do what people used to imagine heaven would do, i.e., bring back into your life everyone you ever knew. Scotty, a brilliant guitarist who did a Syd Barrett, re-emerges to play a legendary free concert in the "Footprint," Egan imagining the Twin Towers site transformed into an open-air performance space.

And then there are Alison Blake and Lulu, who, like the Miranda/Perdita/Marina characters in Shakespeare's late plays, have the power to make the world seem new again.

Delightful to find in the acknowledgements a shout-out to Jacob Slichter's excellent rock-n-roll memoir So You Wanna Be a Rock and Roll Star, which, among other things, describes the genesis of that pause in Semisonic's "Closing Time," which quite rightly makes Lincoln's list.

Olivia Manning, _The Great Fortune_

This is the first volume of "The Balkan Trilogy," a paperback of which I picked up remaindered for $1.99 or so back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, shortly after it had been turned into a Masterpiece Theatre production starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson (ditto its sequel, "The Levant Trilogy"). Somehow twenty years slipped away without my so much as opening it, even though it had the signal honor of being reprinted as a New York Review of Books Classic in 2010. Then, somewhat out of the blue, it was tapped by the book club my spouse and I belong to...

... and it turns out to be excellent. All six novels center upon Guy and Harriet Pringle, a recently married young English couple, who owing to Guy's teaching position at a university in Bucharest are in Romania in the fall of 1939 when Germany and the Soviet Union descend on Poland. The Great Fortune takes us up to the fall of Paris in 1940. The ambiguities and uncertainties of the "phoney war" period find their analogue in the the tentative, what-in-the-world-is-he-thinking, what-have-I-done-now feints and parries of the Pringles' brand new marriage. As the marriage gets serious when Harriet has to deal with a strange rebuff from Guy (he casts her for, then dismisses her from, an amateur Shakespeare production he is organizing) and at the same time gets a sudden offer to run off with one of his colleagues, so the war, after a winter's hibernation, gets serious as the Germans invade Belgium.

The writing is strong, brisk, intelligent, the characters sharply drawn (especially the shamelessly cadging Russian aristocratic exile, Prince Yakimov), the sense of history looming over one's shoulder convincing. Not surprising that Anthony Burgess called this "the finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer." It certainly measures up to the the other British WW II novels I've read (Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh).

It's a stroke of genius, for instance, that the Shakespeare play Guy Pringle is mounting in Bucharest is Troilus and Cressida -- a systematic dismantling of the romance of war. On virtually every page is a deft descriptive touch; from a balcony on a rainy afternoon, Harriet looks out on the crowd watching the funeral procession of an assassinated prime minister: "As the band drew near, the umbrellas, quilted below, moved towards the kerb: the police, wearing mourning bands on their arms, rushed wildly along the gutter pushing them back again." It had never occurred to me that a crowd of umbrellas, seen from above, would resemble a quilt; but as soon as I read that, the whole scene popped into my imagination.

Nell Freudenberger, _Lucky Girls_

THIS BOOK AND its author have collected quite a few honors: the PEN/Malamud Award (for "excellence in the art of the short story"), designation as a New York Times Notable Book, Freudenberger's being chosen by the New Yorker last summer as one of the "Forty Under Forty" fiction writers.

There are five stories here -- generally speaking, they are intelligent, subtle, well-mannered stories about intelligent, subtle, well-mannered people, for the most part U.S. citizens whom circumstances have taken to the south Asian sub-continent. Nuanced, evocative descriptions of settings... carefully integrated exposition of the characters' pasts... faintly enigmatic, open-ended final paragraphs...

... left me almost perfectly unaffected, to tell you the truth. Everything perfectly just-so, like a 19th century academy piece.

The last story, however, won me over and gave me reason to look forward to the next Freudenberger that wafts my way in Granta or the New Yorker. "Letter from the Last Bastion" is original in form (a 60-page college application essay that its author will never send), its plot revelations surprising and effectively paced, and it actually has something interesting to present about the composition of fiction.

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, _Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses_

MY FACULTY COLLEAGUES and I are being encouraged to read this, and being the co-operative faculty member I (sometimes -- nay, often) am, I read it. Unwelcome news.

Arum and Roksa conducted an extensive study (almost 2400 students on 24 different campuses) and found that most undergraduates are not making much headway in mastering "critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills" during their first two years of college.

Why not? Well, they're spending a lot less time studying than they used to, with more time than formerly devoted to part-time jobs, volunteering, clubs and activities, and general hanging out. It also turns out that they can get away with studying less because their instructors are assigning less work (specifically, reading and writing) than they once did. It's a sweet deal all around; the faculty can spend more time on their research, the path to bigger rewards and more prestige, and the students can spend more time hanging out.

Specifically, courses in explicitly pre-professional majors -- business, education, communication, computer science, social work -- seem to require less in the way of reading and writing, with concomitant slowed acquisition of critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills. Not exactly a surprise.

More surprisingly, "active learning," "collaborative learning," and greater involvement in student life activities, which have been energetically advanced in recent years as means to increase student engagement in learning, turn out not to be helpful in developing critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills. So, what is helpful? More reading, more writing, studying alone. Which doesn't sound fun.

The takeaway seems obvious to me: those faculty in business, education, communication, computer science, and social work better get cracking and build a little rigor (rig-gah as Teddy Roosevelt would say) into their curricula toot sweet.