TONNERRE DE BREST! Little Riad Sattouf's learning to read via Tintin (see The Arab of the Future 2) led me to pick up a couple of Tintin books that had been around the house for a while without my getting to them. These two are linked stories about baby-faced Tintin and his pal, the crusty old salt Captain Haddock, finding (in first book) instructions to find an old pirate's treasure and (in second) the treasure itself.
Pretty familiar stuff, really. And (to my mind) a little less satisfying, as narrative, than Treasure Island, because Stevenson had rival groups in competition to find the treasure first, adding urgency to the hunt. Tintin and Haddock have rivals for finding the instructions (which have been separated into three different pieces of parchment), but not for finding the treasure; the sole obstacle to their finding the treasure is their own tendency to misinterpret the instructions. A bit less exciting than having to outmaneuver Long John Silver.
What is satisfying, even sublime, about these books is that Hergé loves to draw ships, especially La Licorne, the vessel commanded by Haddock's 17th century ancestor. We have not only an episode in historical flashback on the decks of La Licorne itself, but the story begins with Tintin finding a scale model of that grand old ship. Turns out there are three such models (each with a parchment hidden in its mainmast) that have to be found, so Hergé gets to draw a fully-rigged 17th century ship on almost every page, and he does it with love every time. He depicts it from any number of angles--what a master of foreshortening he was--and the drawing is always immaculate, radiant.
The 20th century boat on which Tintin and Haddock set off to find the treasure is also rendered in loving detail, but the real heart of the tale is that Hergé gets to draw that 17th century ship over and over.
Thursday, June 28, 2018
Monday, June 25, 2018
Thomas Powers, _The Killing of Crazy Horse_ (2)
THERE ARE TOO many ironies in thinking of Crazy Horse as a great American, chief perhaps that "America," or its state apparatus, murdered him. It's obvious Powers admires him, though, and that there was much to admire. Powers sticks close to the known facts, leery of speculation, and if he has any of the novelistic imagination that (for instance) Mari Sandoz (God bless her) let loose in her account, he keeps it reined in.
Crazy Horse is a figure that plucks at the imagination, though. His name in his own language, Tasunka Witko, might be more literally rendered "His Horse Is Crazy," with "crazy" here standing in for a word that could also mean a kind of visionary delirium. He seems to have been the kind of charismatic figure whom a community naturally turns to, but who also stands a bit apart from the community norms. He was made a "Shirt Wearer" at a young age but also had that distinction taken away for some kind of infraction of community values. He was famously taciturn but also possessed of extraordinary insight.
Towards the end of Powers's account, I found myself thinking of...weird as this sounds...Jesus, another charismatic figure who in some ways was apart from his community (as in his "the Law says tats, but I say this" moments). Towards the end, they both showed signs of exhaustion, Jesus in his last week in Jerusalem, Crazy Horse in coming in to the Red Cloud agency. They both just made it into their early 30s before they were put to death by the authorities in whose side they had been a thorn, and both were betrayed by friends who had become estranged. Rumors of being still alive after a public death were circulated about both (cf. Elvis and Jim Morrison). Something about them was just plain from elsewhere.
It is, though, hard to imagine Jesus as an intuitive military genius capable of stunning personal bravery in battle. Apparently a maneuver conceived and personally led by Crazy Horse split Custer's men and proved decisive at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He's Jesus plus Simon Bar Kochba.
Crazy Horse is a figure that plucks at the imagination, though. His name in his own language, Tasunka Witko, might be more literally rendered "His Horse Is Crazy," with "crazy" here standing in for a word that could also mean a kind of visionary delirium. He seems to have been the kind of charismatic figure whom a community naturally turns to, but who also stands a bit apart from the community norms. He was made a "Shirt Wearer" at a young age but also had that distinction taken away for some kind of infraction of community values. He was famously taciturn but also possessed of extraordinary insight.
Towards the end of Powers's account, I found myself thinking of...weird as this sounds...Jesus, another charismatic figure who in some ways was apart from his community (as in his "the Law says tats, but I say this" moments). Towards the end, they both showed signs of exhaustion, Jesus in his last week in Jerusalem, Crazy Horse in coming in to the Red Cloud agency. They both just made it into their early 30s before they were put to death by the authorities in whose side they had been a thorn, and both were betrayed by friends who had become estranged. Rumors of being still alive after a public death were circulated about both (cf. Elvis and Jim Morrison). Something about them was just plain from elsewhere.
It is, though, hard to imagine Jesus as an intuitive military genius capable of stunning personal bravery in battle. Apparently a maneuver conceived and personally led by Crazy Horse split Custer's men and proved decisive at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He's Jesus plus Simon Bar Kochba.
Friday, June 22, 2018
Thomas Powers, _The Killing of Crazy Horse_ (1)
YEARS AGO I read another excellent book on the Sioux Wars, Custer, et al.--Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star, which I would still recommend, a gracefully written and impressively unsentimental book--and I thought that would suffice for me for this lifetime, actually. But in May, B. and I visited Fort Robinson in northwestern Nebraska, the very spot Crazy Horse was killed, and saw the monument erected to his memory there in the 1930s. I remembered that back in 2010 when this book was published, I had purchased it, shelved it, then forgotten about it (a sequence e of events all too common in my book-buying patterns). Well, never too late for a great book, right? So I found it and sat down with it. Sat down with it several times, actually; at 467 pages, with another 100 pages of notes and index, it's not a swift read.
Powers is an expert on the CIA, on the development of nuclear weapons, and a variety of related Cold War phenomenon, not an established historian of the American West. This book, he tells us, is the late flowering of a "childhood passion for Indians," which had been reawakened by a 1994 visit to the spot where the Battle of the Little Bighorn took place, then by a visit to Fort Robinson: "The killing of Crazy Horse is not abstract at Fort Robinson," he notes (I know what he means), and he decided to find out all he could about how that death occurred.
His examination involves a lot of context--the society and way of life of the native peoples of the plains, the finding of gold in the Black Hills, the wiping out of Custer and his men, the U. S. government's protracted and almost invariably bad-faith negotiations with the Sioux over several generations. True to the book's title, though, at the focal point of his microscope are the circumstances of Crazy Horse's death, in almost hour-by-hour, then second-by-second detail.
(When I mentioned I was reading this, several folks thought it was another of those Bill O'Reilly books. Couldn't be further from that sort of thing.)
Powers is particularly interested in the native perspective on this event (and on the whole period, in fact). For historiographical purposes, the documentation of the U. S. perspective is a lot more regular, consistent, and available; the documentation for the native perspective, which mainly takes the form of interviews and family memories, is not at all regular, not at all consistent, and sometimes long removed in time from the events themselves. Accordingly, a lot of traditional historians just dismissed it. Not Powers. He has gone to some lengths to track it down (e.g., interviewing the descendants of some of the Sioux who knew Crazy Horse), combed through it meticulously, evaluated it judiciously, and presented it lucidly.
As Powers presents it, the killing of Crazy Horse was not an execution, not an assassination, in some ways not even exactly deliberate, but the kind of murky death-in-custody that we associate with classic instances of the corruption of police power.
To be continued.
Powers is an expert on the CIA, on the development of nuclear weapons, and a variety of related Cold War phenomenon, not an established historian of the American West. This book, he tells us, is the late flowering of a "childhood passion for Indians," which had been reawakened by a 1994 visit to the spot where the Battle of the Little Bighorn took place, then by a visit to Fort Robinson: "The killing of Crazy Horse is not abstract at Fort Robinson," he notes (I know what he means), and he decided to find out all he could about how that death occurred.
His examination involves a lot of context--the society and way of life of the native peoples of the plains, the finding of gold in the Black Hills, the wiping out of Custer and his men, the U. S. government's protracted and almost invariably bad-faith negotiations with the Sioux over several generations. True to the book's title, though, at the focal point of his microscope are the circumstances of Crazy Horse's death, in almost hour-by-hour, then second-by-second detail.
(When I mentioned I was reading this, several folks thought it was another of those Bill O'Reilly books. Couldn't be further from that sort of thing.)
Powers is particularly interested in the native perspective on this event (and on the whole period, in fact). For historiographical purposes, the documentation of the U. S. perspective is a lot more regular, consistent, and available; the documentation for the native perspective, which mainly takes the form of interviews and family memories, is not at all regular, not at all consistent, and sometimes long removed in time from the events themselves. Accordingly, a lot of traditional historians just dismissed it. Not Powers. He has gone to some lengths to track it down (e.g., interviewing the descendants of some of the Sioux who knew Crazy Horse), combed through it meticulously, evaluated it judiciously, and presented it lucidly.
As Powers presents it, the killing of Crazy Horse was not an execution, not an assassination, in some ways not even exactly deliberate, but the kind of murky death-in-custody that we associate with classic instances of the corruption of police power.
To be continued.
Wednesday, June 20, 2018
Frank Bidart, _Desire_
I BOUGHT THIS a year or two ago--that is, about twenty years after it was published--and I notice that my copy is from the fourteenth printing. I mean...that's pretty damn good, no? The print runs were probably not large, but fourteen printings suggests the book really took hold.
To my own surprise, since Bidart is accounted more a disciple of Lowell and Bishop, I thought of Ezra Pound while reading this. "The Return," for instance, about Roman soldiers in Germany coming across the remains of a legion that had been overwhelmed. Coincidentally, Pound has a poem of the same title, but what seemed Poundian was the focus on a precise but powerfully suggestive historical incident, the structure of the verse, the use of language from an ancient source (Tacitus), and the exploratory, circling nature of Bidart's poetic investigation of the event, which reminded me of Pound's "Near Perigord," also about long-ago warfare.
Some of the shorter poems in the first half of the book similarly put me in mind of Lustra-era Pound, so while I was reading "The Second Hour of the Night," the long poem in the second half of Desire, with its juxtaposition of Hector Berlioz's account of his marriage to Harriet Smithson and Ovid's version of the myth of Myrrha, it was hard not to think of the Cantos.
How crucial an influence upon the the possibilities for the long poem in the 20th & 21st centuries are The Cantos? Immense, don't we have to say, even if you don't much care for The Cantos itself, or for much of it? Who did more than Pound to liberate the long poem from narrative, to suggest other structural principles?
The toxicity of Pound's politics has done a lot to undermine his reputation, all too justifiably I'd have to say, but you couldn't write the history of 20th century poetry in English without him, if only for his importing a version of Chinese poetry into English and for dramatically expanding the possibilities for the long poem.
To my own surprise, since Bidart is accounted more a disciple of Lowell and Bishop, I thought of Ezra Pound while reading this. "The Return," for instance, about Roman soldiers in Germany coming across the remains of a legion that had been overwhelmed. Coincidentally, Pound has a poem of the same title, but what seemed Poundian was the focus on a precise but powerfully suggestive historical incident, the structure of the verse, the use of language from an ancient source (Tacitus), and the exploratory, circling nature of Bidart's poetic investigation of the event, which reminded me of Pound's "Near Perigord," also about long-ago warfare.
Some of the shorter poems in the first half of the book similarly put me in mind of Lustra-era Pound, so while I was reading "The Second Hour of the Night," the long poem in the second half of Desire, with its juxtaposition of Hector Berlioz's account of his marriage to Harriet Smithson and Ovid's version of the myth of Myrrha, it was hard not to think of the Cantos.
How crucial an influence upon the the possibilities for the long poem in the 20th & 21st centuries are The Cantos? Immense, don't we have to say, even if you don't much care for The Cantos itself, or for much of it? Who did more than Pound to liberate the long poem from narrative, to suggest other structural principles?
The toxicity of Pound's politics has done a lot to undermine his reputation, all too justifiably I'd have to say, but you couldn't write the history of 20th century poetry in English without him, if only for his importing a version of Chinese poetry into English and for dramatically expanding the possibilities for the long poem.
Monday, June 18, 2018
Dominic Smith, _The Last Painting of Sara de Vos_
I PROBABLY WOULD not have picked this up had our book club not voted it in as our June book, but it turned out to be enjoyable. A bit reminiscent of Colum McCann in having three distinct-but-related story lines in three different historical settings, braided together in rotating series over the whole book rather than in chronological sequence.
One story line is set in 17th century Holland and concerns Sara de Vos, married to a painter and a painter herself. They endure a series of bad breaks, the worst being the death of their only child, a daughter. A painting Sara makes to commemorate the lost child, At the Edge of the Wood, has become her only known surviving work at the time of Storyline Two...
...set in 1950s New York. At the Edge of the Wood was purchased by a merchant named de Groot and has remained in that family for over 300 years. Current owner Marty de Groot is a successful lawyer in addition to having considerable inherited wealth, but suffers from anomie until he discovers his family heirloom has been stolen and replaced with a skillful forgery. He finds out the forgery is the work of Ellie Shipley, a young art history doctoral student whose dissertation is floundering. Under an assumed name, he first hires her, then courts her, plotting a terrible revenge.
Third storyline: Sydney, Australia, the year 2000, and Ellie Shipley, now an eminent art historian for her work on women artists of the Dutch Golden Age, is organizing a major exhibit, and finds out two copies of de Vos's most famous painting, the original and her youthful forgery, are on their way to Sydney. Marty de Groot is still alive and is bringing his painting (is it the original or the ]forgery?) himself. Questions will inevitably be asked. Will she be exposed and disgraced?
Smith obviously did a lot of research for Story Line One, but what with all the details about food and furniture and guild rules and tulips, it feels a little too worked-up. There is more attention to the background than to Sara, who remains two-dimensional.
The Marty-Ellie agon was compelling, though. Their relationship is born in a cloud of dishonesty, dissimulation, betrayal, and corruption, but nonetheless has something genuine in it, something they both badly need: the jolt that would get them out of their respective ruts.
One story line is set in 17th century Holland and concerns Sara de Vos, married to a painter and a painter herself. They endure a series of bad breaks, the worst being the death of their only child, a daughter. A painting Sara makes to commemorate the lost child, At the Edge of the Wood, has become her only known surviving work at the time of Storyline Two...
...set in 1950s New York. At the Edge of the Wood was purchased by a merchant named de Groot and has remained in that family for over 300 years. Current owner Marty de Groot is a successful lawyer in addition to having considerable inherited wealth, but suffers from anomie until he discovers his family heirloom has been stolen and replaced with a skillful forgery. He finds out the forgery is the work of Ellie Shipley, a young art history doctoral student whose dissertation is floundering. Under an assumed name, he first hires her, then courts her, plotting a terrible revenge.
Third storyline: Sydney, Australia, the year 2000, and Ellie Shipley, now an eminent art historian for her work on women artists of the Dutch Golden Age, is organizing a major exhibit, and finds out two copies of de Vos's most famous painting, the original and her youthful forgery, are on their way to Sydney. Marty de Groot is still alive and is bringing his painting (is it the original or the ]forgery?) himself. Questions will inevitably be asked. Will she be exposed and disgraced?
Smith obviously did a lot of research for Story Line One, but what with all the details about food and furniture and guild rules and tulips, it feels a little too worked-up. There is more attention to the background than to Sara, who remains two-dimensional.
The Marty-Ellie agon was compelling, though. Their relationship is born in a cloud of dishonesty, dissimulation, betrayal, and corruption, but nonetheless has something genuine in it, something they both badly need: the jolt that would get them out of their respective ruts.
Sunday, June 17, 2018
Lucie Brock-Broido, _Trouble in Mind_
IF I WAS asked to recommend a Brock-Broido volume, I would probably go with The Master Letters, a bravura performance that shows her range and ambition. I have been wondering, though, whether Stay, Illusion might be her best, really, confident of its power, a foundation-trembling Bach organ performance. My favorite, even so, is this one.
It's intriguing, for one thing. Why the cover with a detail of the same painting that she used for the cover of her first book? Why the title reference to a famous old blues song? (Brock-Broido's cultural reference points tended to skew high rather than popular.)
For another thing, it's intense. "I" occurs in almost every poem, and the "I" has a coherence and consistency over the book that feels confessional even though nothing very specific is revealed. The second person comes up, too, in some very arresting ways:
For a poem to be true, it must "come from an Ever."
If you don't fathom that, then you should not be reading this.
I wasn't sure I did fathom that, actually (it's from Stevens it turns out), but I kept reading, and I was soon found out, shortly after Brock-Broido dropped in a glancing reference to the West Bank:
You did not dream I held political
Ideals, did you. [She was right, I did not.] You should not be reading this and are.
What is it about this book? Imagine a Victorian collection of fairy tales, tending to the disturbing end of Hans Christian Anderson, say ("Little Mermaid," "The Red Shoes," "The Snow Queen"), in an ornate edition with hand-colored illustrations under tissue paper, elegant but just a little frightening, the sort of thing Edward Gorey would keep on a special shelf. Then imagine that that book had a child with The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Trouble in Mind is a bit like that.
Something terrible and searing has happened, something on the order of Dickinson's "I never lost as much but twice," some erasure, separation, I don't know what. Dickinson does not seem ever very far away in Brock-Broido; "The Deerhunting" seems like a recasting of "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun," for example. Brock-Broido does not go in for Dickinson austerity, the whitewashed walls in winter light--she likes her jewels and embroidery--but she can drop you in the abyss the way Dickinson does.
Like a madrigal, a pastoral
In the pocket of my houndstooth vest,
You are the only beauty in this
Celestial torture I will call my own.
It's intriguing, for one thing. Why the cover with a detail of the same painting that she used for the cover of her first book? Why the title reference to a famous old blues song? (Brock-Broido's cultural reference points tended to skew high rather than popular.)
For another thing, it's intense. "I" occurs in almost every poem, and the "I" has a coherence and consistency over the book that feels confessional even though nothing very specific is revealed. The second person comes up, too, in some very arresting ways:
For a poem to be true, it must "come from an Ever."
If you don't fathom that, then you should not be reading this.
I wasn't sure I did fathom that, actually (it's from Stevens it turns out), but I kept reading, and I was soon found out, shortly after Brock-Broido dropped in a glancing reference to the West Bank:
You did not dream I held political
Ideals, did you. [She was right, I did not.] You should not be reading this and are.
What is it about this book? Imagine a Victorian collection of fairy tales, tending to the disturbing end of Hans Christian Anderson, say ("Little Mermaid," "The Red Shoes," "The Snow Queen"), in an ornate edition with hand-colored illustrations under tissue paper, elegant but just a little frightening, the sort of thing Edward Gorey would keep on a special shelf. Then imagine that that book had a child with The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Trouble in Mind is a bit like that.
Something terrible and searing has happened, something on the order of Dickinson's "I never lost as much but twice," some erasure, separation, I don't know what. Dickinson does not seem ever very far away in Brock-Broido; "The Deerhunting" seems like a recasting of "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun," for example. Brock-Broido does not go in for Dickinson austerity, the whitewashed walls in winter light--she likes her jewels and embroidery--but she can drop you in the abyss the way Dickinson does.
Like a madrigal, a pastoral
In the pocket of my houndstooth vest,
You are the only beauty in this
Celestial torture I will call my own.
Saturday, June 16, 2018
Rachel Cusk, _Kudos_
CAN THIS REALLY be the end? If so, it ends on an unnerving note, Faye swimming in the ocean as a naked man on the beach locks eyes with her and pisses "a golden jet" into the sea.
The novel begins with a conversation with an airplane seat mate (shades of Outline) en route to a literary festival (shades of Transit). The festival in Transit was just one chapter, however, and in Kudos the festival occupies the whole book. My best guess is that the festival is in Lisbon (a European capital by the sea, steep hills, jacaranda trees). The festival's--any literary festival's--task, as one character puts it, is "the attempt to make a public concern out of a private pastime," the writing and reading of books.
Ordinarily, writing and reading are solitary activities; Kudos is about the economic and social bustle that goes into the commodification of those activities: the translators, the editors, the publishers, the festivals, the panels, the interviews, the prizes (kudos is Greek for "honor")... and let's not forget the patronage. One of the writers Faye meets has recently been a guest of what sounds a great deal like the Santa Maddalena Foundation (see Tomaz Salamun's The Blue Tower), and it does not sound like she enjoyed herself.
Once again, the novel's attention is chiefly on the stories Faye is told by the people she meets, some of them new acquaintances, some of them longtime associates, and one of them someone we have already encountered (Ryan from Outline, who in the meantime has had a great publishing success that has not made him more likable). The tone (it seems to me) is more satirical than in Outline or Transit, probably due to the setting, which seems to encourage posing. In Kudos, Faye seems like a Lillian Ross or a Janet Malcolm, someone who can keep people talking long enough to hang themselves with their own ropes. Several of the people on the novel are supposed to be interviewing Faye, but they always end up dissecting themselves.
It's the summer of the Brexit vote, but that topic does not come often; Faye has remarried, but we learn even less about that. (Once again, Faye's name occurs in the text exactly once, p. 227).) The novel carries a feminist ground tone, though, expressed not so much by Faye as by several of the women writers she meets, some of whom seem a little self-important, but who collectively create a discernible change-has-gotta-come mood. The whole festival--especially the long mid-day meal scene, pp. 123-66--does sometimes seem simply a pissing contest among prickly male egos. Maybe that is what the final page is about.
This is the third novel I've read in recent years that prominently features a book festival (counting Outline and Joshua Cohen's Book of Numbers, partly set at the Frankfort book fair) and so far none has given me the slightest inclination to attend one.
Can't believe Kudos is the last one. I'm saddened. We should at least get to meet the new spouse, I think. The man from second-to-last episode of Transit, do you suppose?
The novel begins with a conversation with an airplane seat mate (shades of Outline) en route to a literary festival (shades of Transit). The festival in Transit was just one chapter, however, and in Kudos the festival occupies the whole book. My best guess is that the festival is in Lisbon (a European capital by the sea, steep hills, jacaranda trees). The festival's--any literary festival's--task, as one character puts it, is "the attempt to make a public concern out of a private pastime," the writing and reading of books.
Ordinarily, writing and reading are solitary activities; Kudos is about the economic and social bustle that goes into the commodification of those activities: the translators, the editors, the publishers, the festivals, the panels, the interviews, the prizes (kudos is Greek for "honor")... and let's not forget the patronage. One of the writers Faye meets has recently been a guest of what sounds a great deal like the Santa Maddalena Foundation (see Tomaz Salamun's The Blue Tower), and it does not sound like she enjoyed herself.
Once again, the novel's attention is chiefly on the stories Faye is told by the people she meets, some of them new acquaintances, some of them longtime associates, and one of them someone we have already encountered (Ryan from Outline, who in the meantime has had a great publishing success that has not made him more likable). The tone (it seems to me) is more satirical than in Outline or Transit, probably due to the setting, which seems to encourage posing. In Kudos, Faye seems like a Lillian Ross or a Janet Malcolm, someone who can keep people talking long enough to hang themselves with their own ropes. Several of the people on the novel are supposed to be interviewing Faye, but they always end up dissecting themselves.
It's the summer of the Brexit vote, but that topic does not come often; Faye has remarried, but we learn even less about that. (Once again, Faye's name occurs in the text exactly once, p. 227).) The novel carries a feminist ground tone, though, expressed not so much by Faye as by several of the women writers she meets, some of whom seem a little self-important, but who collectively create a discernible change-has-gotta-come mood. The whole festival--especially the long mid-day meal scene, pp. 123-66--does sometimes seem simply a pissing contest among prickly male egos. Maybe that is what the final page is about.
This is the third novel I've read in recent years that prominently features a book festival (counting Outline and Joshua Cohen's Book of Numbers, partly set at the Frankfort book fair) and so far none has given me the slightest inclination to attend one.
Can't believe Kudos is the last one. I'm saddened. We should at least get to meet the new spouse, I think. The man from second-to-last episode of Transit, do you suppose?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
