BIRI 2013 #3 Art Objects by Jeanette Winterson

Books I Read In 2013

#3

Art Objects

Jeanette Winterson

Knopf

1996

I got this book because I wanted to continue thinking about art criticism. Perhaps more deeply. The first essay, "Art Objects," was good for deepening my thinking about the art object (and how art objects). The rest of the book was a whole other beast.

"Art is intimacy, lover's talk, and yet it is a public declaration."

This grappling between the most intimate and the most public.

"There are plenty of Last Days signposts to persuade us that nothing is worth doing and that each one of us lives in a private nightmare occasionally relieved by temporary pleasure.  / Art is not a private nightmare, not even a private dream, it is a shared human connection that traces the possibilities of the past and future in the whorl of now."

This idea that art should do more than provide us with a window into our private nightmares.

"Art is not documentary. It may incidentally serve that function in its own way but its true effort is to open to us dimensions of the spirit and of the self that normally lie smothered under the weight of living."

But this documentation could also open us to dimensions of the spirit that normally lie out of reach of each of our own particular small worlds.

"I do not think it is possible (or moral) to write a book that is made to affect others without being affected oneself."

This is the question.

"It is to poets that I turn for the lessons I need and the lesson seems to be to use a variety of moood and tone to make way for those intenser moments where the writer and the word are working at maximum tautness."

This turning to poets.

In this book, Jeannette Winterson is given to grand pronouncements, large declarations. Much more so than I would have expected. Somehow, I thought her ambitions would be smaller, more contained. I was wrong. I learned something about her, I guess.

BIRI 2013 #2: A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon by C.A. Conrad

Books I Read In 2013

#2

A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon

C.A. Conrad

Wave Books

2012

(This is a book of C.A. Conrad's (Soma)tic Exercises with the poems he wrote after doing the exercises. I read the book and got increasingly enthused and ended up writing an exercise in tribute. Here it is.) 

THE DEER AND DAISIES

"the / deer and / daisies are / not why it's / remembered"

- C.A. Conrad

Exercise: Find a site of dehumanization and trauma or violence or warfare. It can be something recent or something in the more distant past. Something close by or something you have to travel to. Terrorist attack. Drug violence. Perhaps a murder site. Perhaps a battle site nearby. Perhaps your own home. The thing is you should know right where it happened. Or have a good idea of right where it occured. You are going to go there.

As C.A. Conrad says, "The exercises are designed to fling us OUT OF our routines. Routine is what puts a cap on the imagination. [...] So the exercises give EVERYONE—no matter who—the frame to bust out of that routine, if only for a little while. The exercises get us to deliberately engage the world in unexpected ways."

Sit down in a spot where you can feel comfortable. First record the sounds of that particular place for a while. Like a few minutes. Or ten minutes. All the while take your notes. Just notes and notes. Think about what happened, but don't write about it. Feel your body in the space. Feel the fear of something bad happening to you in that same place.  Was the site a place where recent violence happened? Are you afraid something could happen to your body? Think about the ghosts that might run through that place, afraid. If you feel afraid in the space, write in that fear. If you don't feel the fear, then write in the feelings that you do have. Write what you see, what you observe, what you feel, taste, smell. Write down all of that. Try to make your writing of these notes match the rhythm of the scene, write notes with the same rhythm of the noise around you. Don't turn away from that noise. Stop and deeply listen to it. Let the writing of notes flow out of the scene in front of you. Don't feel bad about the writing not being good. Don't stress yourself in that way. Just write what you are able to write in that particular moment. Let the writing occur without getting in its way too much. There is a poem in there somewhere. Try to tease it out later.

This process of teasing out can be dicey. As C.A. Conrad says in an interview at the end of the book: "In shaping the poems there are often lines that jump out and present themselves as lines for the poem, yes, but very often lines present ways to entire new structures that were not even considered at the time of doing the exercise. Trusting the notes. Trusting too that at the time of carrying the notes around to form the poem is its own kind of exercise, BEING in the world with the notes. Does that make sense?"

If you lose hope, here is another quote from C.A.: "But WHY DO THIS? Because the world is beautiful, and I'm here, knowing its beautiful, and I'm tired of some people having money to BREATHE while others suffer. Suffering is a big part of what I look to for guidance. Suffering and love. Resistance is most urgent. Resitance is the real magic. As you soon as you set yourself down thte path of NOT being agreeable to the directives of others your poetry becomes THAT LIFE! It becomes YOUR POEMS, YOUR LIFE!"

And remember: "I never want to be anything but a student of this world who travels with other students, anxious, disturbed, always eager to imagine yet another kind of handle on the door."

BIRI 2013 #1: Green-Wood by Allison Cobb

Books I Read In 2013
#1

Green-Wood
Allison Cobb
Factory School
2010

Something about the way trees talk or don't talk. About how graves talk or don't talk. About how poetry talks or doesn't talk. "Shards of poetry glint from the prose like the pieces of metal — commemorative “dog tags” offered to soldiers, their bodies returned from Operation Iraqi Freedom for burial — that lie beside some of the graves." The poetry pierces out, like the first mention of gayness on page 124 of the book (it ends on page 131). Reproduction and the failures of reproduction. A moment when Walter Benjamin suggests that women did not walk erect, that they only learned to walk on two feet in order to have face-to-face intercourse. The way Benjamin fades. A way of thinking about history and the body, the body within history. The "I" piercing through the frame of the text as well, through the repeated fragments: saying no to poetry and still making it. Allowing poetry to filter through a bit. A sense with this book that I could read it again and again and find something brilliant again and again. Or open it to any page and read one sentence and it would be brilliant: "where light makes us, even / us, its face." How to gather things up in the face of death and war launched in the name of that death. How to listen to trees, or at least channel them through the books surrounding us. Also, the birds: faraway birds in Papua New Guinea recovered through colonial, Linnaean botanical expeditions and birds closer to home in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. 600,000 bodies feeding the trees and the land. The poetics of etymology: "Paradise comes from ancient Iran, a compound of pairi- "around" + diz "to make or form (a wall)."

Several different manuscripts happening in this book at once. A treatise on a cemetery. An exploration of trees and birds. A foray into Thoreau, Emerson, Benjamin. The history of Cleaveland. An investigation of private space, colonialism. An attempt to have a child. These fragments create a latticework; one string wandering away and then another suddenly showing back up to pick up where we left off. The latticework or the weave in the narrative. The mixing of poetic line and prose sentence. The use of the three asterisks to mark the sections off from one another. The way lists of objects appear and re-appear.

Afternoon with the Little Red Leaves Textile Series

What does a tiny series of books make.  A tiny series of books made of strings and textiles.  What could a tiny series of enclothed feelings make in the world.  How could anyone look at them without seeing their smallness, but also the love and care for each.

One of the authors in the series, Mairéad Byrne, has a bio that says she was "born into her father's library in Dublin, the fifth of eight chapbooks" and these little books feel this way too, born slowly and growing more numerous over time, finding homes on shelves.  Their homes outsourced all around the globe.


Like, for example, A Reading: Birds by Beverly Dahlen. The fact of the two poems in the book.  The first one a poem by Dahlen that spans over the course of several pages and thinks about birds, about doves, about how we think about or see or look at or say birds.  How do the words say the "cranes" or the "tule fog" or "sparrows" or all the other "mythical creatures" gathered.  How did we learn the names of all these birds.  Who did the teaching of what is a "robin" and what is a "sparrow."  Who would "mother them."

The end of Dahlen's poem is jarring, dwelling in "how miserable is this imitation:" "the mourning doves' hoo-hoo-hoo."  And there is something that is felt to be lost, something that has seemed to escape from the book, what was lost in the dove's call becoming those marks on the page.  But then moving on, the realization as Dahlen includes an endnote with "the story of the mourning dove as told by the Yurok people of northwestern California."  And suddenly, going back in time to these first words, this first writing or human singing of the song of the mourning dove, the miserableness of the imitation of the hoo-hoo-hoo is deepened, added to, made more profound and somehow the echoing of this new imitation thickens the previous attempt: "Wee...poo...poo."

And then Lucky by Mairéad Byrne with illustrations by Abigail Lingford.  This one is orange and red and green and black and all kinds of colors irrecognizable to this colorblind eye and, when opened, reveals a more colorblind friendly field of black polka dots (that aren't actually black I think) and yes I do feel lucky, like lucky is what I feel like to have such a beautiful little object in my hand.  And suddenly I am making rugs and observing centipedes and lap-tops together for the first time.  And then the eye is popping out through a series of Figures, scientific illustrations of how an eye comes to protrude and then exude from the eye-socket and it's weird and beautiful.

And in a rush, I think I don't need to fix up my house, I can just set up the floodlights.  I'm told I "can rent them fairly cheap or even invest in a set."  And with those floodlights I'll never have to worry about my ramshackly house again.  Yes!  And I never saw a more thorough meditation on an unexpected "Heap of Snow" in the back of a pick-up truck than the one found here.  Ever.  At the end of the book, Byrne comments on "anything on which smaller things feed" and she reminds me I'm thinking about these little books.

What do these little books feed on.

Holes punched out and made to run a course around the text:

Tiny windows with tiny microscopic slides slid through the carefully sized gaps, creating tiny new poems: collaborations between book-maker and poet:

And I've figured out what these tiny books feed on.  You should too.

g-point almanac: passyunk lost by Kevin Varrone

I've never felt a sadder spring, then a spring in Philadelphia.  Or at least that's the way I feel today on this unexpectedly slowly falling day here in Houston.

Let's meditate on snow falling, try to remember the bits of light sloughing out of the empty expanse of sky and grayness.  The gray of the snowstorm.  But wait.

snow is not sky falling, pollo

poco, it's sky

sloughing bits

of wissahickon mica

schist 'til

heft is on us,

high brought

low, fly weight, exfoliation.

And suddenly I can remember the snow, the weigh it sloughs, its heavy weightlessness, its heft.  These are careful words, weighty Middle-English words (not that I looked them up to check, they just feel that way, have that feel of long f sounds).  I also have not googled "wissahickon mica" but just from spending time with this book (g-point almanac: passyunk lost  by Kevin Varrone) I have a feeling that this is a particular kind of geological sediment.  And I am guessing this geological sediment is around Philadelphia.  And I have not googled "passyunk" either, but I'm guessing it is a street in the city of brotherly love.  Brotherly.

This book feels like a series of wintry experiments,  a continuation of a quest to keep on writing through the dismal grays of the long, barren snowfalling.  Many of the pieces are titled what look like dates, beginning with "1.7" and getting progressively more February, then more March.  The first poems in January are in a section called "a fortnight for st. distaff."  It is made of slippery square boxes of text, justified mostly and yet sometimes a line pushes out the side and sometimes a line doesn't reach the justified line.  As if the lines themselves were resisting the Word justification strategies, pushing or pulling their way out of the text block:

 One with more well-behaved lines:

I was reading here with the light filtering through the blinds and through the one missing blind and thinking about the sentences in the photo, how light falls, quickly, headlong.  Light's tail.

What does light do?  What does light make?  What are words about light or the world able to do, to make?

I realized that if I were a strophe

or an imp or an ooze--a great stroke

                                                     on canvas--

I could not make a building

make a building great

make anything.

Repeat.  Make.  Repeat.  Make.  What is the difference between poetry and architecture?  Painting and architecture?  What is a building?  Do we make anything lasting in the process of our art?  Does a building last longer?

History pervades and invades:

passyunk avenue was a footpath

& several (from the anglo-french several,

"existing apart").

I've been thinking and writing around rivers, through rivers, through others words about rivers for some time now.  Often it feels rather hopeless or at least strange and repetitive (like crossing rivers).  Boring or lost.  And then sometimes when I feel most at a loss about why I've been obsessed with these rivers and I can't take it anymore, I pick up a book, like I picked up this one (recommended and lent by a friend).  And inevitably, I stumble on a line like this one that makes me realize it's okay to be lost among the rivers:

perhaps the city has risen

not from ashes

but from the foam of its rivers,

Yes, we can write whole books about so little. Yes, a day can be full with so little.  Or so little full of itself.  When I finished this book, one line kept re-occuring in my mind.  Spring has never seemed so sad as a spring in Philadelphia.  And in the background of this sentence, Jack London's old dictum that "The coldest winter I ever knew was a summer in San Francisco."  I haven't googled anything yet, so if I fractured the quotes, forgive me.  I wanted to rely on memory though, because this book lingers in memory, its deceitfulness, its perpetual habit of getting lost.  It lingers on winter days after the equinox, the days ever-so-slowly lengthening.

The end (and the whole) is winsome and full of ennui (a word that comes up numerous times).  There are tiny poem-letters to "e," a lost lover or loved one of some kind.  The end:

dear e, the traces

                       don't stay

as they pass (save as

a million flecks of mica

in the sky).

day keeps putting on

its cloak and darkness

keeps putting things away

Endnote: Wikipedia confirmed my feeling: "Passyunk Township is a defunct township that was located in Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania. The township ceased to exist and was incorporated into the City of Philadelphia following the passage of the Act of Consolidation, 1854. Passyunk, spelled in old deeds and records Perslajingh, Passayunk, Passyonck, Passajon, Passajungh, Passaming and Paisajungh, the name of a Native American village. It formed a tract of land computed at 1,000 acres (4 km²), originally granted by Queen Christina, August 20, 1653, to Lt. Swen Schute in consideration of important services rendered to the Swedish colony of New Sweden by the said gallant lieutenant."

Broke!

Tomorrow night in Houston, Hank Hancock reads from the his serial novel Broke as part of the Poison Pen Series. I initially started seeing Broke some years ago (around 2006?) as Hank passed out each chapbook-like entry of the series (in true guerrilla fashion) not to his extended network of friends and acquaintances, but rather direct to the wider community in small stacks around town. I understand the urban, random approach: everyone has a right to his work and it is out there on the street, the same streets where his characters are wandering around. Hank wanted everyone and anyone to stumble on his text, including his characters: Carla and Mica and Vernon and Janine. But for me, it was frustrating. I wanted to collect-the-whole-series like I collected Garbage Pail Kids when I was younger. I had a capitalist need for the whole set. Or a collector's dream of possessing them all. But Hank didn't make that possible. At first.

Now, thankfully, the whole series is up and on-line on a gorgeous website at broke-houston.com. All of the entries are there, or at least all of the ones that have been released so far. Right now, that's three chapters with each one divided into four smaller sections. This week Hank presents the fourth chapter (or entry or section).

And what is Broke all about?

A hurricane is sweeping into Houston. Actually, it's Hurricane Rita. The local denizens of the central city, the adjunct professors and art workers and retail shop clerks and waiters, are all deciding what to do. Hurricane party or traffic jam in the Piney Woods? Fleeing or wandering through the empty landscape of the depopulated city? At the same time, police are pulling a body out of the bayou downtown. All around the trees are growing and swaying and building canyons and structures; Hank names most of the trees, chinaberries and crepe myrtles and more, and a ton of the plants, saw palmettos among them. The street is alive and the city is tense and on-edge as routines are broken and everyone prepares for the expected onslaught with its totally unpredictable effects. The highways are crowded and stopped and suddenly the city can see "how the earth had been moved to shape a roadbed that rose above culverts and gullies, and that cut angles into inclines ... how velocity shapes the world, and how inhospitable that world became once the imperative of velocity had been compromised."

One of the enjoyable things about the text is that it is still very much in the process of being made. It's not perfect or always primly polished, and it doesn't purport to be so. In one installment, in the middle of the page, is the message: what the? what’s going on? this page is in the middle of some edits… I'm going to read this as intentional. As just another kind of footnote. There's a panoply of footnotes, as the offstage narrator tells us where we can read more about a particular item of interest in a novel from 1974 or a Le Tigre song we should listen to from 2004 or a store in Massachusetts that sells the same T-shirt a character is wearing. Everything is in the process of being made in collaboration with the reader. And often what is in the story is drawn from other, obscure-to-me novels, like John Hawkes’ 1964 Second Skin or 1951’s Beetle Leg.

There's a lot of strangeness in the situation, this clearing out of an entire city, and there are moments of humor sprinkled around: "Jacob could not seem to keep his finger out of his nose. It was not the cool nose-wiping of the cocaine user, but honest-to-goodness, mouth-agape, index finger pointed straight up and in. He seemed to be trying to get at his own brain." Sometimes the characters and the situations feel like those moments from the movie Slacker, people walking, talking, smoking cigarrettes, going to house parties, playing chess at a café, extremely educated people asking questions and interviewing, making political speeches. But it's a slacker who is preparing for the impending Rita doom.

Broke is gentle with its (anti-)heroes, always kind with their quirky eccentricities and their often belabored emotional engagement with the world. There's not a lot of irony here or mocking. The characters are cared for, looked after by their all-knowing narrator. And since many of the characters are often cruel to themselves, it's nice to feel like someone is looking out for them.

I'm happy someone is writing this story about this Gulf Coast in this way, in public and in installments. Serial fiction has a long and "storied" history, stretching all the way back to the One Thousand and One Nights; Broke a sweet blend of nineteenth-century publication strategy and zine culture and chapbook arts. But I will say I'm too thrilled that I don't have to wander Montrose looking for a copy in random stacks anymore, since it's all on the Interweb. But I still want a copy of this fourth installment tomorrow night. And I want the book when it finally (hopefully) comes out in all its broken-chinaberry wasteland glory.

Review of Dog Ear by Erica Baum

I became a member of the amazing and incredible Ugly Duckling Press this year. I'm happy. I got Dog Ear in the mail a few weeks ago. I'm even happier.

The concept behind these dog ears is clear from the outset. Someone (that someone being Erica Baum) has decided to take photos (or scan?) dog-eared pages of books. Out of these small squares of bisecting text emerge small puzzles, small challenges to the reader to re-learn how to read.

Initially, I found the squares curious. I was drawn into looking at them, attempting to read them or to decipher them. Should I read the words that were cut in half? What if the majority of the word was there, but just a piece of it was missing but I still felt like I could reasonably infer what the word would have been? Did the word exist then? How to read the tiny tips of a serif l or the squiggly lines and dots of the remainders of letters? I was puzzled, unsettled, put off, intrigued.

Kenny Goldsmith's introduction (which is (fittingly for Goldsmith) partially plagiarized from Dick Higgen's 1987 book on pattern poetry) helps us navigate the poems with his reference to the traditions of leonine verse. Higgins points out that this kind of poetry is difficult to define (Goldsmith says it's difficult to "explain") and then they both provide the same example of this sort of verse:

We are immersed in a world of choose-your-own-adventures, Goldsmith says. And I would add that they seem like small mindtwisters, mindteasers, prodding us on and poking us out of a passive reading position. Reordered or re-read in multiple ways, each text has a seemingly infinite number of readings, which made me think about the way this is a facet of most of the poetry that engages me (and the same is true for other forms of writing and art as well). We've stumbled onto an axiomatic truth about the multiplicity of possible readings of a literary text. However, Baum pushes us to think about this in an even more extreme, deranged (rearranged) kind of way. Whenever we read, we are forced to make decisions: in a long novel, we skip paragraphs or skim sections, breezing past character or situations we'd rather not dwell on. Perhaps there is a particular kind of writing or language we like in a particular book and another kind we are not so fond of, well, this propels us to make decisions as we read about how we are to read. Baum makes this process visible, forcing us to reconsider, rethink and reanimate our reading experience. With the turn of each page, we're confronted once again with the doubt: how is this to be read?

The books Baum has chosen to dog ear are hardly random. Goldsmith recommends trying to do this process with other books around you in your home in order to quickly realize just how difficult it is to make something provocative. Hopefully, this will help you to understand just what Baum's "accomplishment" really is. Baum has chosen what are all prose books (actually mass-market paperbacks) for her dog-earing. So there are words which are broken in half by dashes due to prose conventions about typesetting. How do we read these words in this poetry when necessarily they are not continued on the next line? How does this help us to think about the gap between prose and poetry? How does it make us aware of the very conventions of prose and poetry?

Some of the plates are easier than others to read. One of the more "transparent" ones is Plate XVI, Differently:

This small piece is strangely satisfying, pleasurable, even calming, mainly because there are so few extraneous bits of words: "174," "175," "MI," plus a strange squiggly shape next to "MI" and then a tiny little serif tip next to how. In comparison with all of the other dog ears, this one seems plain and clean. It's as close as we get to easy reading in the book, I think. And yet, even this one can be read in so many different ways, as Goldsmith points out in the introduction and Eileen Tabios points out in her engagement with the book.

Other squares are more dense, more crowded and more full of bits of words that stymie easy reading. Compare the experience of reading that first plate with this one, Plate VI Fallout:

Clearly this one is more of a struggle, more of a puzzle, more of a challenge for reading. "It" is cut off. A parenthesis is closed but never opened. Dashes lead into the ehter. A half "C" at the very bottom threatens. The serif tip of a "t" morphs into a bit of an "e" and then "d." But yet the title of the poem, Fallout, alludes to this kind of breakdown, this lingering radioactive cloud post-explosion.

The book is a joyful kind of hard reading, a kind of difficulty that challenges, the kind of difficulty Charles Bernstein has written about in the Attack of the Difficult Poems. I think Dog Ear is a perfect book to learn how to find the fun in reading poems that ask the reader to work, poems that ask the reader to participate, engage, judge, decide, involve themselves. Poems that force the reader to do more than simply sit back smugly in their chair and delight in a singular revelation.

The Morning News is Exciting

A review I wrote of The Morning News is Exciting by Don Mee Choi just went live at the Quarterly Conversation. This book moved me in so many ways to rethink issues of translation and political engagement and poetics:

Translation is at the center of the whole text. It becomes a means of searching for home, of narrating the inability to find a home: “What is truly home? I am here, but I remember there.” For Choi, translation has become an activity inseparable from her own writing; in fact, Choi seems to be questioning this very duality of translation vs “one’s own work.” Her work provokes questions: what is the difference in process between translation and writing based on appropriated text? How does collaboration and miscommunication come to form the basis of a poetics that can no longer distinguish clearly between the original and the derivative? Translation is a necessity to communication, especially due to the continuous repetition of scenes of leaving and returning. In this process, translation is at once mundane (“Translation must remain as ordinary as the bed” in “Petite Manifesto”), but is also not to be trusted—an inscrutable tool of imperialism and colonialism ( it is, in fact, the bed, “where I am likely to die”). In “Diary of Return” Choi boils it down to: “Translation for me is a form of exile and empire.” Choi is able to contain both of these realities of translation in her own writing: translation as liberatory both creatively and politically and also translation as contaminated by imperial conquest and contemporary power imbalances.

Read the whole review here.

My review of the new Norton Anthology of Latino Literature is on-line at the Literal reviews blog:

The new Norton Anthology of Latino Literature has already unleashed and will undoubtably continue to provoke signigicant debate, brow-beating, anger, emotion, territorial defense, criticism, passionate displays of righteousness, tears, boredom, gossip, scrutiny, love and enlightenment (among other things). This process of upheaval is positive. A Norton anthology has a certain weight to it, both physical (2,600+ onion-skin pages in this case) and intellectual (as a tool of canon-formation). While there have been other solid, rigorous anthologies of U.S. Latino literature by respected critics, Norton anthologies have always held a special place in American literary in-fighting, perdón, discussion.

Check out the whole review here.

Scatterthoughts on one by Jen Hofer

if a wall is a river

a bit of interference

flowing past the checkpoint

makes the image accurate

How can blockage or obstruction communicate more, or more effectively than clarity? In one, Jen Hofer posits: how can a wall be a river? I suppose the reverse would be more clear, more obvious: the question of a river being a wall. This is something the media talks about ad nauseum: how a river, for example, the Río Bravo/Río Grande becomes literally a wall, a border, a division. But I think postulating the opposite here brings up this pertinent question: how can a wall be a river? How can we take apart a wall and make it a river? What does this thinking or languaging do to the wall itself? And so then if a wall is a river, then a bit of interference could actually flow through the wall, past the checkpoint and Jen is letting us know that the image could be more accurate then, with this interference flowing through it and preventing it from being altogether clear.

Jen is thinking a lot about what the city feels like in wartime, how the days have "gone lax with likes with unrequited ease as there is in this metropolis such a dizzy bungalow sense of radiating spokes with no center to sing of." There is a horror in this distance from the war, a horror in the distance from the suffering upon which our days of ease are based.

The lines are often interrupted, broken, sometimes by dashes or white space or parentheses, and also by challenging paratactic leaps from one conglomeration of words to the next. There is so much beauty in the leaps, in the dispersive moments when (as if a bomb has gone off) the words scatter across the page and then (un)expectedly reunite at the close of a section into a tight stanza that seems to re-stab in forceful and gut-wrenching ways.

Loved it.

Been thinking a lot about private and public, about what we show and what we do not show, about how we navigate spaces, especially interspaces. Also been enjoying reading The Guilt Project by Vanessa Place, a meditation on the existing state of law on rape and sexual offenses in the U.S. Halfway through now and the book is a fascinating look at the system through her perspective as a appellate defense lawyer for sexual offenders. I was stopped in my tracks tonight by this paragraph:

As a people, we still shudder at the sight of our neighbor's smoke, and can't abide his smell. We like bigger houses on bigger lots, blocking off many square feet of air to no purpose but buffer. We throw our arms open to the world and keep out hearts and minds strictly to ourselves. We don't much like the idea of anyone knowing who we are, not exactly, which is part of the reason we eschew the public intellectual, or any spokesperson beyond the Hollywood or Washington celebrity, because we understand they are neither entirely real now representative. Even the promise of salvation and life everlasting is a private promise, for we are a private people.

The kind of national "we" she uses is a little irksome upon second reading and yet I am still struck by Place's ability to generalize in ways that feel helpful and productive. Not only does her analysis ring intensely true, it's also written with such wit and skill. Check it out.

A Review of JBAD: Lessons Learned by Danielle Adair

Ulises Carrión is a hero of seventies Latin American writing. He says something important in his essay “The New Art of Making Books:” “In a book of the old art words transmit the author's intention. That's why he chooses them carefully. In a book of the new art words don't transmit any intention; they're used to form a text which is an element of a book, and it is this book, as a totality, that transmits the author's intention.”

Recently, I picked up a notebook of sorts from Les Figues Press in Los Angeles that deals with experiences of the author, Danielle Adair, during a “twelve day embed during the month of November 2008 with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division of Task Force Duke in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.” The book, From JBAD: Lessons Learned is printed as a notebook on a translucent onionskin paper that gives the book a feeling of impermanence and disposability. The text is constructed solely out of comments and statements made by the individuals she spoke with during her time as an embedded “journalist” in that camp. The book is also a webpage called First Assignment and comes with a photocard of people drinking tea and a tea bag that Danielle made as a kind of gift that comes along with the book. The title of her book seems to be tongue in cheek, i.e. in a loosely collected structure of quotations gathered from different speakers at the Infantry camp in Afghanistan there will be no report on what lessons she learned. The title is a provocation. It says, look here for the lessons I learned and then you look for the lessons and there is nothing actually there.

It is interesting to apply Carrión idea of the role of words in “new art” to the JBAD project. The words in Adair’s book do not have any intention (or if there was an intention of the speaker, it is recontextualized and altered by appearing in the book); in fact, the words are not even Adair’s. The project as whole—the book, the teabag, the photo card, the website—indicates an intention on Adair’s part to participate, to embed herself literally in something not-her-own, something foreign, a military intervention on the other side of a very large world.

Adair’s book seems to be a perfect example of what Carrión is talking about. A book that does not need to be read word for word, a book that can be skimmed, whose conceptual project is more important that the actual words on the page. As Carrión said, “Old art's authors have the gift for language, the talent for language, the ease for language. For new art's authors language is an enigma, a problem; the book hints at ways to solve it.” The quotes from the people around Adair in the camp attest to this fact; there words are enigmatic, fragmented, often deeply problematic. There is a hint of a solution in Adair attention to detail, to the voices around her, to deep listening. In another part of his essay, Carrión says that the new author has no intention; the sole intention is to “test the language’s ability to mean something.” Can these words, these dangerous imperial words about conquest and military intervention actually be made to mean something outside of their original context? Adair doesn't give us an answer, but she is definitely testing, experimenting and trying to find out.

Rupert: A Confession

Rupert: A Confession by Dutch author Ilja Leonard Pfeiffer is an unfortunate exploration in the first person of the psychoses of a porn-obsessed voyeur with troubling rape fantasies and delusions of grandeur. The book is organized into a monologue delivered over the course of three hearings as Rupert attempts to defend himself in court against the accusation he committed a crime (we only learn the crime in the last pages of the book.) The premise is an interesting one, one that kept me reading to the end of the book. Despite this, Rupert's pompous tone and narcissism were difficult to read; it was exactly the kind of person I am least interested in hearing from: a misogynistic, self-obsessed man prone to repition and longwindedness. At times, it felt like listening to sick, secret thoughts of a rightwing talk radio host. Most of the book is devoted to Rupert's lonely wanderings around the city as he stalks women or derides them silently to himself in bars and cafes. Not only is this material really depressing and gross, it also seemed like the kind of vicious misogyny I've seen and read so many times before in movies and books.

Publishers Weekly called this book "a deliberate provocation" and even the promotional material from Open Letter says the book is "offensive." No doubt, I do not think all literature needs to be uplifting or inspirational; I like dark and disturbing as well. I also think literature should question established norms, including the confines of leftist doctrine about what is "right" and "good." However, this book seemed to provoke for no real reason other than to make obvious something that I already knew: men can be sick and cruel, arrogant and self-centered. The book made all of this disgustingly clear. Perhaps some would find something exceptional in the prose (which seemed well translated by Michele Hutchinson) but while it was captivating, the language itself wasn't enough to mask the essential vacuousness and insanity of the main character.

I should mention here that I am a dedicated fan of Open Letter, the publisher of Rupert: A Confession. I support their mission of publishing and disseminating literature from around the world in English translation.

Despite all this and especially after reading Rupert, I have to wonder if it isn't time for Open Letter (now in its second year of publishing) to provide its readers with a few more books from outside of Europe (and by non-Euro women!). The only non-European books (all by men) offered by Open Letter are by Rubem Fonseca of Brazil, Macedonio Fernández of Argentina and Jorge Volpi of Mexico (and his book seems to be set in Russia and other northern climes). As far as forthcoming titles, there will be three more one author from Argentina, Juan José Saer. Now, I definitely understand that the press is young and new, but I do hope in the future to read translations from other languages and other continents. If the mission of the press is to "open cultural borders," I'd hope the fluid and cultural borderlines demarcating the "European" tradition from the rest of the world would also be crossed.

And for now, a moratorium on self-centered, psychotic European men.

Kathy goes to Haiti. And takes us too.

So I just finished reading Kathy Goes to Haiti by Kathy Acker.  This is the real, true-to-life, 100% veridical story of Kathy Acker going to Haiti.  Just kidding.  Of course, this is no simple memoir to be trumpeted from the treeless mountaintops of Haiti as the truth of Kathy Acker's experience.  Rather Kathy gives us her own strange, strange image of the journey of a woman named Kathy from Port-au-Prince to Cap Haitien and back.  Along the way she is bothered non-stop by men who just want to sleep with her.  These encounters on the street, in cabs, on beaches, in hotels, bars and restaurants begin with a sexual proposition, then a quick refusal by Kathy, next insistence and usually ends in Kathy's agreement to play.  Bizarre interactions are the norm.  The book often seems to be like a Dick and Jane reader rewritten as a bizarre voyage of sex, colonial highjinks and drugs.  The prose is deceptively simple, lulling the reader into a kind of happy acceptance of the truth of it.  The reader follows Kathy step by step along her journey in Haiti from her arrival at the airport to the Cap and back to the capital.  This simple prose is fun fun fun to read in that it demands no special attention from the reader.  I haven't read all that much Kathy Acker: I started with a Best Of anthology and then went out and bought this book (which comes as a three novel set, so now I will read the other novels as well.)  What would Acker do with a character with her own name voyaging in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere?  Besides for several brief, eerie moments when the novel switches into a kind of psychotic first person, the narrator uses the third person practically the entire time.  Kathy does, Kathy sucks, she wants, she sees, she fucks, she is ready to leave.  In fact, the monotony of the sentence structure is profoundly unsettling after a while.  Kathy's reactions to situations and her interlocutors reactions continually lack emotional umph; it is as if everyone got very high and then walked around, hot and sweating and horny in the Haitian sun.  Kathy gets angry when she faces the privileges of the Haitian upper classes, but beyond talking about it being wrong, she does absolutely nothing about it.  Oh, and she has long, masochistic sexual encounters with a rich, drug-dealing Haitian guy.  The book is full of stereotypes of the worst kind, from the beginning to the end and these walking, talking stereotypes leave the reader wondering what exactly to think.  What becomes clear is that despite Kathy (the character obviously) thinking she is superior and removed from what is going on, the plotline and her own emotional dependency and fucked-up-edness exposes her involvement in the worst of the world's worst.  

Graphic taken from The Butane Group website.  They did a performance-theater piece that partially used Acker's novel as inspiration: Haiti (live and let die).

Nobody's Home, Not Even You or Me

So I am participating in the "Lost in Translation Reading Challenge" this year.  Basically, another blogger came up with the idea of calling on lit-bloggers to write six reviews of translated books on their blogs in 2009.  Then we post these reviews on our blogs and she reposts them on her Reading Challenge blog.  Sounds like a good idea.  So this is my first one:

Nobody's Home 

by Dubravka Ugresic

I love the title.  At first, I didn't even notice it, like I read the words without really taking time to read their full meaning.  But the wonderful experience of doing a double-take on the title happened to me.  A few essays into it, I closed the book and looked down at the title and realized the multiple meanings.  What a kid says when a person calls the house and asks for the parents and they are

n't home and the kid says "Nobody's Home."  Or what we could imagine a sign saying at a house that wanted a robber.  Or how we feel when we are left on hold for hours by a company's customer service specialists.  Or what we say about someone who just isn't all that bright.  And then finally, the big meaning: that in this postborder world where we all end up moving so much (or some of the us), as it turns out we all end up in a condition of not-being-at-home.  That, as another writer I admire pointed out recently, we all have multiple homes (place of birth, growing up, adulthood, parents' birth, ancestors' graves, etc.) and no home at all.

Dubravka Ugresic writes about all of these homes with an amazing ease.  As she moves across borders in Europe and the Americas, she casually leads the reader with her.  I never thought I would be deeply interested in Amsterdam, but Ugresic makes the city (her exile home) a symbol of all that the "First World" purports to be--efficient and welcoming and stultifying and soul-numbing.  She muses on cities, personalities, peoples' quirks, literary theory, political history, post-Communism in a way that never seems heavy or difficult.  She is kind to her readers (which might be due to the fact that most of these essays appeared originally in newspapers which need to attract readers and keep them and which pay Ugresic for her writing.)

Her musings on memoir are especially interesting, this cultish fad that threatens to make every life worthy of being recounted and that adds to the religion of celebrity the world is invaded with today in outlets from tabloid journalism to blogs to Facebook.  We are all celebrities, memoir would have us believe.  We all have a a story to tell.  Ugresic points out:

While most people around the world are barely surviving (starvation, wars, illness, poverty), and can do nothing but bite their tongues, a powerful minority is howling publicly about their misfortunes.

Ugresic writes about Wynonna Judd's recent memoir in which she purports to write "straight from the heart" and teach the reader some "life lessons."  As Ugresic points out, socialist textbooks insisted that the point of literature was to teach life lessons.  Ugresic has a keen ability to draw the eerie parallels between socialist screed and uber-capitalist products.  As she points out:

The problem is that the genre of memoir is registered as a literary genre, yet all its elements--intention, author, language, substance, interpretation, and reception--are edging over into

 the realm of religion.

Ugresic helped me to understand why I feel so uncomfortable with the public journalling element of blogging and with the explosion of memoir as a genre.  The ability to speak about one's personal life when so many people can't.  Obviously, I don't condemn people who write personal blogs or memoirs, but I do have a great discomfort with this idea that the text is the person is a lesson is a life is the truth revealed.  And yes, there also seems to be something profoundly religious about writing one's story down, i.e. as Ugresic points out: 

The prophetic messages are qualified as authentic if they are a) simple and coherent; b) truthful...; and c) in line with the accumulated wisdom of humanity..., in other words, compilatory.

In another section of the book, Ugresic writes about a strange scene of Vladimir Putin kissing a fish on national television and she uses it to talk about the contemporary hunger for the limelight.  

It was once considered vulgar and a sign of bad upbringing to speak of yourself, to tell the public about your private life, to cosy up to people you don't know, and to show undue interest in the private lives of others.  How did it happen that what used to be vulgar has become an essential part of daily life?

In the end, Ugresic ends up writing a lot of small details of her life of travel and bordercrossing, from rides on trains to her Amsterdam, from her travels in the US to taxi cab drivers in Moscow.  She writes about her very personal experiences of Tito's Yugoslavia (and the anti-fascist creation of that state) and Tudjman's ultra-nationalistic Croatia.  She writes about feminism in pre-"democratic" Yugoslavia and the Brittany Spears Girl Power Eve Ensler Vagina Power feminism of today.  Constantly writing about her self, she illuminates so much more.  Kind of an anti-memoir.  Her self-deprecatory, casual, fast-paced style draws the reader in without cheapening the prose.

Before I close, I should comment on the translation by Ellen Elias-Bursac.  Honestly, it was a pleasure to read the prose because it flowed in such a natural, clear way.  At times, I forgot the foreignness of the subject matter--Tito's Yugoslavia, Amsterdam's suburbs, Estonian tourism--because the tone lulled me into such easy reading.  Thanks.

Memorias de Yourcenar

Un regiomontano, que ahora cuento como un amigo, recientemente me recomendó el libro Memorias de Adriano de Marguerite Yourcenar. Dijo que lo estaba disfrutando mucho. Me gusta mucho como él escribe, así que fui y lo compré. Lo acabe de terminar. Leí la traducción del francés original al español. La traducción es de Julio Cortázar. El libro me parece uno de estos que te agarran a la primera lectura, pero por lo menos en mi caso, me siento todavía un poco inmaduro para el libro. Quizá porque son las memorias de un hombre que ya vivió su vida y que se encuentra en su lecho de muerte con todas las memorias de su vida rodando por la cabeza. Me parece que es un libro que volveré a leer en unos años y que sacaré aún más provecho de él luego. Bueno, aquí van las citas que en este momento de mi vida me agarraron por alguna razón o otra (unas más obvias que otra):

Nunca me gustó mirar dormir a los seres que amaba; descansaban de mí, lo sé; y también se me escapaban. Todo hombre se avergüenza de su rostro contaminado de sueño. (25)

He comprendido que pocos hombres se realizan antes de morir, y he juzgado con mayor piedad sus interrumpidos trabajos. (83)

Aquellas vanas tentativas se explicaban pasablemente por la afición al libertinaje; se mezclaba en ellas la esperanza de inventar una nueva intimidad en la que el compañero de placer no dejara de ser el bienamado y el amigo, el deseo de instruirlo, de someter su juventud a las experiencias por las que había pasado la mía, y quizá, más inconfesadamente, la intención de rebajarlo poco a poco al nivel de las delicias triviales que en nada compremeten. (161)

Pero ninguna caricia llega hasta el alma. (177)

A veces me pregunto en qué escollo naufragará toda esa cordura, puesto que siempre naufragamos: ¿será una esposa, un hijo demasiado querido, una de esas trampas legítimas en que caen por fin los corazones timoratos y puros? ¿O sería sencillamente la vejez, la enfermedad, la fatiga, el desengaño que nos dice que si todo es en vano, la virtud también los es? (240)

Eager and impassioned tenderness, sullen effeminacy. (Cita de Shelley) (280)

Debe existir alguien, siquiera en el trasfondo en la aventura de un libro bien llevado o en la vida de un escritor feliz, alguien que no deje pasar la frase inexacta o floja que no cambiamos por pereza; alguien que tome por nosotros los gruesos volúmenes de los anaqueles de una biblioteca para que encontremos alguna indicación útil y que se obstine en seguir consultándolos cuando ya hayamos renunciado a ello; alguien que nos apoye, nos aliente, a veces que nos oponga algo; alguien que comparta con nosotros, con igual fervor, los goces del arte y de la vida, sus tareas siempre pesadas, jamás fáciles; alguien que no sea ni nuestra sombra, ni nuestro reflejo, ni siquiera nuestro complemento, sino alguien por sí mismo; alguien que nos deje en completa libertad y que nos obligue, sin embargo, a ser plenamente lo que somos. (286)

Cry Colonize Crash

First, my aunt mentioned this book, Eat Pray Love, to me, said it was inspiring and gripping, said she couldn't put it down. A series of other clichés to say that it had changed her life, or at least provided for good reading on the couch on a Sunday. I love my aunt, but I didn't quite trust her judgement on this one enough to read it. Then, I saw a writer in Houston from the Creative Writing program reading the book in the what-seems-to-be the new center of literary hangout hipness in town - Antidote Coffee on Studemont - where it seemed half "the Program" now lives, writes and commerces in trade secrets. So this writer was reading Elizabeth Gilbert on the plant-decorated patio, gravel underfoot, next to a professor in "the Program." She said to the professor that the book was a respite, a place to rest, relax and renew. Also said that initially she was not interested in the book because it was the typical white women goes to Third World countries and then writes a book about them. But then, she was sucked in and ended up loving it, being changed by it, finding herself in it. Sorry to get all Oprah, but you get the picture.

After hearing this second person go on about it, I borrowed my aunt's copy. Well, here's my report: it made me think of something I heard the distinguished essayist Eliot Weinberger say a few weeks ago at a translator's conference. To paraphrase: "I read international literature, because contemporary U.S. literature all too often has become the story of a man or woman sitting next to the pool, deeply upset and heartbroken because of a recent divorce." For me, Eat Pray Love is exactly this. American woman of a certain class and privilege survives difficult divorce, receives six figure book advance to travel to the three I's (Italy, India, Indonesia), finds her own navel repeatedly in other countries, and comes back to sell the tale (and sell the tale after that one). Her story inspires millions.

Now I am certainly not against international travel or searching for yourself or getting a divorce or being inspired or any of this. But the book (like so much popular contemp lit) seems chock full of unexamined privilege, a frightfully isolated and narrow worldview, and a naiveté that is depressing. The book makes me what to read a kind of anti-Eat Pray Love with writing in translation by people in Italy, India and Indonesia. Now that book I would buy (Come on Open Letter! Come on Words without Borders!).