Summer reading

AMERICAN PSYCHO
by Brett Easton Ellis
I would be willing to accept the defense that Ellis’s quickie squib is in fact a satire of consumerism, a literary bit of photo realism if there was compelling art here. There isn't, however, and the defense falls apart. Ellis writes as if he had to submit this against a deadline, and he'd wasted his considerable lead time by living off his hefty advance. Ellis does a good job of diagnosing the narcissism of the eighties, but that by itself does nothing for either our understanding or empathy.
The emotionally neutered stretches of hacking, slicing, stabbing and bashing , juxtaposed against descriptions of material things that may as well have been photocopied from catalogues, is an interesting effect and achieves an ironic value soon on, but just as soon the effect is spent. And yet the detail goes on, as does the singularly flat line narration. Even the gross out factor wears thin and grows tedious; as with pornography, the power Ellis brings to the subject of hyper-violence isn't aesthetic, certainly. This reminds you of nothing else so much as someone taking pointlessly large doses of drugs in the vain hope of finding the rush and thrill of their first encounter. What Ellis has done is written a bad book who's only distinguishing element is that is all symptom. It does not deaden the reader to the horrors of psychotic violence, as most readers I encounter are sufficently offended and aghast at the amount of disheartening imagination Ellis can cast. Perhaps the ideal readership was supposed to folks like him, already deadened.


 THE DIAGNOSIS
by Alan Lightman

Out of the DeLillo playbook, a business commuter gradually loses the use of his limbs, and his confronted with medical experts who disguise their inability to treat him and render a diagnosis by having him submit to yet more tests. A novel full of comic moments and sleights of hand-- the father's relationship with his son is sad stuff, two-hankie time-- but there is strong feeling of what the world would be like if all the things that we plug into stopped giving us the illusion of information and clarity and instead added to our anxiety, increased oh-so-slowly another ten or twenty degrees. Lightman isn't the most graceful writer, but this novel works rather well. One will note the shared concern with DeLillo, who wrote a kind blurb for this novel: nominally intelligent citizens who realize too late their trust in the priesthoods of specialists and jargon masters have not only not aided them in their real or imagined crisis, but in fact made their lives worse.

Used Books: "Pastoralia" by George Saunders

A funny book

Author George Saunders is a crazed ,surrealist comedian who , in his tales of conflated literary genres and cultural traits defying any personalized sense of proportion  you might have and cherish, reminds you in moments of  the three year old for whom there is no required separation between ideas, things and the places where they may belong.  That is to say what ever makes sense in the telling of a tale is okay, is alright, is perfectly natural, "natural", that is , because it occurred to the three year old while his mind gathered it's narrative materials. Nothing is excluded, no matter how out of wac. So it is with Saunders, who's 2001 story collection Pastoralia is simply an inspired and condensed can of insanity.


Something about this world reminds me, fleetingly, of The Bed Sitting Room, a film directed by Richard Lester, where addled Brits go about their business after a three-second nuclear war, as if nothing had happened, unaware that their actions are very odd permutations of old habits. This , along with the fact that some characters are morphing into inanimate objects.

What's similiar is that they way you, like Lester, treat your inventions less as weirdness for it's own sake--Tom Robbins when he's boiling over--but how you keep the descriptions and the details of your character's lives in scale; your tone has the unfoldings and detail bask in the light of their own skewed logic: the details relate to one another. "Sea Oak" , with all it's reversals and inversions , pretty much gets the internalized logic of diminishing returns in strip clubs. The returned aunt from the dead, pissed an aggressive economic agenda for a family of whiners, was genius.His use of brief sentences and jerky dialogue makes this skewed universe clang and clack with a sound and feel not so removed from the actual world: his attention to the banal, and his twisting the items just so, makes this a wonderful set of satires. "Sea Oak" is particularly brilliant.

A basic and important strength in your writing is the spare style you prefer to use, as it allows you, it seems to be, to accumulate the carnivalized strangeness and build on it credibly, if that's the word to use. It gives your zaniness a subtle, additional dimensionality that makes this series of tales read like descriptions of a fully realized universe. 

Animal Farm: barnyard epitath

One loves this book beyond all reason, but when might we
begin to use Don DeLillo's "White Noise" as a narrative warning
against the unassuming stance that the language of authority
is , in itself, the right one?

There is nothing like re reading a classic novel you first considered a masterpiece in high school some decades later, let us say thirty five years or more, and realizing that the book you esteemed has travelled less well through time than your memory would like. George Orwell, although a particularly potent essayist on matters of politics and culture, was a ham-handed prose stylist when it came to his fiction and, one might add, a story teller for whom the obvious moral is the only point to consider. The cautionary lesson is fine as it goes-- the roads to mankind's worst, deadliest dilemmas are paved with good intentions-- but it is such a safe position that taking issue with it is the equivilent to declaring yourself insane, untrustworthy, a morally bankrupt stakeholder in Bad Faith Futures. Partisans left and right nod to the sentiment and find new ways to bark at one another and , notably, contrive new ways to assume the Absolute Power both sentiments warn readers and voters against. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and once you understand this as the point of the tale that has farm animals standing in for the History of the Soviet Revolution and it's brutal goonishnness, one feels as if they're being clubbed over the head with a point that was clear to begin with. This is a dry , brittle parable, a fairly gutless morality play; we need be suspect of those books that are easily co-opted by both right and left wing ideologues as a metaphorical evidence of their more convoluted explanations and apologies for why things are they way they are.

History stammers when it repeats itself

U.S.!
a novel by Chris Bachelder


Chris Bachelder is a lovable prankster who likes to turn the nicely fitting glove of literature inside out. while the rest of us are looking for meanings and various forms of significance in the interior decorating of conventional fictional devices--to this day, we all yearn to have poets and novelists to tell us The Truth-- Bachelder prefers to spray paint on the props and show us the cluttered backstage of these settings. And better yet, he rather likes in tying the shoelaces together of the pompous, the serious, the bizarrely sanctimonious. "U.S.!" has him imagining a world where the true believers in an American Socialist Revolution manage, through some vaguely revealed ritual of magic realism, to bring the dead activist novelist Upton Sinclair back to life; back to life the poor, steadfast, solemn socialist does, looking increasingly awful and putrid at the edges, going on the lecture trail, writing and publishing more of his cardboard narratives, trying to convince an amazingly uninterested citizenry the exact nature of what's killing them. Nothing comes of this, as expected, and the intrepid Lewis finds himself talking himself hoarse , only to find himself being killed violently and then ingloriously resurrected yet again. A surreal fish-out-of-water story, Bachelder has a perfect ear for duplicating the static prose of the late novelists, and excels at demonstrating the striking contrasts between those who think that literature can make populations shed their entrenched and deeply rooted versions of Bad Faith and rise to the selfless cause of The Common People; this is a story of where the idea of the progression of history toward a final and just time, intersects with a culture where history does not end anywhere at all. Rather, it splits off into many tributaries, a crossroads every five metaphorical miles.Upton  Sinclair , tragicomic figure he is, stops at each of them, scratching his head as to which road to take

Caught in the loop

Erica Wagner does a serviceable job of summarizing the new Bret Easton Ellis novel Imperial Bedrooms in the New York Times, in which he brings us to speed on the whereabouts and doings of the characters in in his first book, 1985's "Less than Zero". She does a creditable job as well at highlighting his novelist skills --a talent as a surreal quick sketch artist is duly noted--and furnishes a longer list of matters that have made him , in large part, the most tedious of contemporary novelists. It would suffice to say that Ellis has a love of characters who are impossibly, ruthlessly detached from the violence and decadence they observe or create, and that the trick of having a creation observe himself being observe is a dated use of a loosely construed idea of phenomenology. Comparisons to another novelist who harps on repeated themes, Joyce Carol Oates, are obvious enough --his fascination with the bombed out souls of post-eighties consumers, she on the trials and traumas of women who cannot seem to avoid violence coming upon them--but the qualitative differences are striking. Ellis never really seems to leave the parking lot of his plot lines; his scenes and locations are alarmingly the same, whatever names or coats of paint and layers of wallpaper he applies to them. Oates has, at least, energy and speed of production on her side--while a good many of her books, one after another, seemed composed from compulsion than inspiration, she does connect with novels of real power and psychological complexity, as seen in The Falls and The Tattooed Girl: the idea that victim-hood is something one attracts is a subtle idea on many fronts, and Oates, as subtle intelligence despite her fascination with brutal narrative developments, explores the issues . At her best she is as unnerving as Flannery O'Connor could be in her novel Wise Blood. 

Ellis prefers flat-affect in his presentations: the detail of a photograph or a bit of video tape, unconsidered, unfiltered, tersely revealed. He has the hope that somethig of Hemingway emerges from his writing and that a greater effect takes hold ; he wants the zeitgeist of his decade, the 80s, to sweep over us. He invites us to weep over the loss innocence.

His obsession with the self-referential was once effective,but the value as irony as been exhausted, what had been taken as an implicit critique of 80's drug-infused egomania seems now like nothing else other than a repeating tape loop of rearranging old ideas. There is little to suggest in the body of work he's published at this late date that he's capable of doing anything other than performing face lifts , elaborate productions and smaller bits of of nip-and-tuck--on the short story that furnished the sketchy basis for his first novel. Ironically, an epitaph for this new book is a line from a song by Elvis Costello, "Beyond Belief", from his album Imperial Bedroom.  The quote itself is less important than the fact that Ellis borrowed his novel's title from an album by a musician who has convincingly gotten over the issues of his twenties and hasn't spent the remainder of his career retro-fitting his old conceits.

A book worth reading and re-reading

The fuss over postmodern style has blessedly subsided a while ago, leaving me with the opportunity to clear some novels from my bookshelf that  aged as well as I would have hoped. What had seem novel, bold, smart in the eighties and nineties now seems, well, contrived, faddish and tacky.  DeLillo , Pynchon and others are doing just fine for credibility , of course, and  younger writer's effort,  Chris Bachelder's Bear v Shark:The Novel, scores big with his 2002 debut novel. It was the po-mo laugh fest that the over-praised and under-edited Jonathan Franzen strained. "The Corrections".It answers what every Luddite might have been wondering about the long term effects of television watching on our much assaulted nuclear family.

In the future, the televisions have no off switch, nor do they have remote controls, because technology has gotten to the point that television no longer influences the culture, but IS the culture. Reality and simulation melt together seamlessly, without a trace of resistance from the archetypal family whose path we follow as they prepare themselves for a Las Vegas vacation to witness the much hyped Media Event of Bear v. Shark. Bachelder keeps a straight face through out most of this short but punchy novel, and displays an ear for the way television cant infiltrates our daily speech, and invades our dream life. Scattered through out the book are a heap of fast and savage rips on Mass Mediated news, sports call-in shows, flouncy entertainment under which nothing substantial resides. In this world, experts in the guise of pundits, jocks, philosophers, and academics all feed a an uncountably intrusive technology that renders every distraction and disturbance into an entertainment value, to be used until a new contrived sequence of illusion can be set in place.

Bachelder, demonstrating a brevity and incisive wit that trashes the claims made for the word-gorged "genius" of D.F. Wallace, writes surely, sharply, with his eye never off his target.  Though he does, at times, resort to the sort of post-modernism stylistics and cliches, such as having the author step out from the story to deliver some self-aware discourse on the limits of narrative's capacity to represent the external world fully, completely -- he has a novel or two to go before the lit.critese is pounded out of him -- our author finally reveals a humane side underneath the smart language, and issues forth a funny yet serious warning about our habit of relinquishing our thinking and our capacity to live imaginatively over to the hands of data-drunk programmers.

Point Omega by Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo's novels have been remarkably strong given the length of his career, and the only one I think is subpar is his 9/11 novel; nicely fitted, of course, with some of the author's famed verbal brilliance, but it seemed more per-formative than anything else, with the estranged characters and their respective stages of psychic exile twined in pro forma fashion around that date's catastrophe. The novel seemed to have been written out of sense of obligation, that the author who had made a career out of writing about a world that fits the 9/11 cliche "everything has changed" felt compelled to give his remarks in fictional form. It alone among his books was a labor to read, as it seems to have been a labor to write.

Otherwise, I salute his post-Underworld writings The Body Artist and Cosmopolis, a delicately etched character study and a black comedy respectively who's central characters, a performance artist and a digital guru commodities broker, reach the end of the belief systems that filled in the interior absence of purpose and commitment to the world.In this instance I find much to like about "Point Omega", although I think it helps if you've read several of his books , are aware of his larger themes and appreciate the way he has condensed and concentrated his themes into a hard,splendidly spare narrative line. It is, I think, a continuation of DeLillo's examination of a culture that has had the mystery and mythology stripped from it by the harsher trends in Modernism, replaced with various wrap around belief systems ranging from political ideology, art-for-art's sake, technology and assorted other absolutist-tending habits of mass-think that each attempt to replace what had been the spiritual, the religious, the intuitive.

Our character Elster, here, is a polymath, a genius versed in a seeming unlimited variety of cross-indexed disciplines, someone whom the intelligence and defense apparatus of the State brought on as someone who's musings about their agendas and techniques might somehow give them an advantage over opponents both current and future. Elster,though, is someone who finds his learning, the knowledge and he garnered in an effort to weave his way through an infinitely complex network of warring belief systems, collapsing upon itself. Now he considers the finite essence of all things, stripped of meaning as he has been stripped of his inner life;he watches an endless artful deconstruction of an iconic movie, he prefers the limitless waste of the desert, he desires an existence that can be mute, meaningless, flat and precisely without resonance. I think this is powerful stuff, really, a lyric poem.

The Faith of Graffiti: a brief exchange

I've been re-reading Norman Mailer's "The Faith of Graffiti" , and it seems astounding Mailer grasped a street aesthetic born of marginalized , nonwhite urban youth. This is an important essay I suspect Eric Michael Dyson or Cornell West would come to admire. Mailer is susceptible to the charges of depicting these artists as noble savages, but he does make the connections between the impulse to transform the environment by adding a bit of one's personality upon it with the shattered reconstructions of Picasso's vision. Nice polemic, this. What impresses me is that he refined the existential-criminal-at-the-margins tact he controversially asserted in his essay "The White Negro", backing away from the idea that violence could direct one to knew kinds of perception and knowledge, and emphasized an aesthetic response to a crushing , systematized oppression. Living long enough ,I suppose, made Mailer aware of strong trend in urban style that added value to circumstances and individual growth that didn't involve a fist, a gun or a knife.

BARRY ALFONSO:Some would argue, of course, that graffiti IS a form of violence against society: specifically, the aggressive territorial pissing of one segment of the population upon the sense of order of another segment. This is less an act of sticking it to The Man than dominating the sensibilities of the meeker, more sedate urban population, a transgressive act akin to screaming into the face of someone who will not (or cannot) raise their voice. It’s hard to see this as heroic, and I suspect that the artistic component – especially when we are talking about that lovely habit called “tagging” – is of less importance here than the sheer thrill of breaking the rules. I think even Mailer would agree that the upholding of SOME kind of rules is the only way to improve American society, particularly in the face of the corporate lawbreaking and governmental malfeasance he so often condemned. It may not be Mailer’s job to iron out the contradiction in this thought. But suppose a team of grafittitistas broke into his home and spray painted their art all over his face? This might prove instructive to his family and friends to see. It might even be a blow against some sort of oppression. But I don’t think Norman would’ve liked it very much.

Mailer would argue that modern architecture and the corporate power it represent is violence againsts them and their right to exist, and that graffiti is an aesthetic response to an economic reality that wants nothing to with individuals or their dreams or their latent talents. It creates an intimate relationship with the surroundings that other wise seem designed to urge one to end their lives anonymously. Mailer, though, was talking about a particular quality of prolific taggers , "writers" as they called themselves, and rather rightly discussed them that they were artists no less than the gallery variety. Without patrons, easels, formal training, their walls of the city became their canvas--in those canyons, in those tunnels, on those billboards, all things that hover over them and diminish them in stature, there is an opportunity to declare "I Exist".
-----------------

(Barry Alfonso, writer, critic, and storyteller and long time friend, weighs in):

BARRY ALFONSO:If this was indeed Mailer’s position, then it is the sort of elitist pseudo-primitivism that win followers for George Wallace, Glenn Beck and other champions of populist fascism. To say it plain, ordinary working folks think that scribbling your name all over the city they have to live and work in is just a form of childish eye pollution committed by bums who have nothing better to do. Apparently, Mailer would have us think that the proper way to protest urban ugliness is to make things MORE ugly, which is akin to making satirizing executions by chopping people’s heads off. (Any allusions made to Picasso is a red herring, with two eyes on the same side of the fish head.) It further appears that for all his later maturity of outlook Mailer never dropped his sweaty-palmed worship of anarchy that he glorified in “The White Negro.” Mailer the Liberal would cringe at the thought, but the tagger is just an Ayn Rand hero with a spray can and without the discipline, a rampant ego who celebrates nothing more his need to be noticed. Such activities give birth to firing squads.

The irony of it all, I guess, is that Mailer can be said to tread on the Noble Savage sentiment, but what he asserts in both "White Negro" and "The Faith of Graffiti" is there is a need, nay, a requirement for self-definition among those who are denied the means to do so for reasons of race, gender, economics, and that the form these taggers have taken is a way of making something that resonates. What he argues , essentially, is that the impulse, inspiration and discipline of committing yourself to unsullied artistic expression is the same , whether it happens to be in European salons, SoHo Art Galleries, Museum Walls, or on the side of a Brooklyn water tower; he rejects art as the domain of the white culture the final aim of which is a fat commission and corporate sponsorship and college courses and brings it again to something that is human in it's dimension. As it regards black American culture, the likes of Amiri Baraka, Cornell West and Eric Michael Dyson would find quite a bit to agree with about Mailer's treatise. Urban culture is now the stuff of dissertations, has been codified as an aesthetic with it's own critical parlance, and is now a legitimate part of the larger cultural landscape of America, and Graffiti, like it or not, is an essential element of this mid 20th century development. Mailer was the first one to write seriously , on his own terms , about this. One can argue with Mailer's tone, his arch style and his interest in neo-primitivism, but I think his interest in the young men he interviewed and spent weeks with as a writer was honest and his ideas about their work were sincere. In a forward to the book, he reveals that the title was given to him by an artist who was seriously injured from a steep fall that happened when he was tagging a structure from on high. He was talking about having faith in something, an ideal, that motivated you beyond your limits. I can only paraphrase, but it came down to him telling Mailer that the name of the book that would come out of this would be "The Faith of Graffiti".

Best Books of the Decade

Strange, it seems, that this December we must consider not only the best books of 2009 , but the best books of the decade, and shudder at the thought that the last ten years have gone by so quickly. Or have they? Thinking back on the events gone by, personal, political, economic, literary, through each bit of bad news, good news and indifferent reports, one does realize, finally,that it's been a full decade in the passing. It's as though one had fallen asleep in the backseat during a long, tedious trip , only to be woken up with a start when the car finally stops. Coming out of the fog, one hazily asks "Here already?"

But we are here, ready or not for the next decade, ready or not in one's attempts to secure a sound employment ( too much detail, perhaps, but I was laid off my job last week, but I'm in noble company). My best guess to that matter is that we are ready; there have been some terrific books written over the last ten years , some brilliant writing, intriguing tales, illuminating accounts of emotion and fancy, all of which serves the central purpose of literature, to help us think about ourselves in the world.

These books have kept me out of the vacuum of merely sitting in front of a computer grazing off the headlines --they have kept me engaged with the world for the last ten years and have given me ample reason to talk to old friends and make new ones. We have something to talk about, and that seems to be the point of reading books and sharing what one enjoys with others; books are the grounds through which our different lives find a common set of metaphors , through which we can discuss surmount of differences and frame our similarities.

My best books of the Last Decade. These remarks, of course, are culled from previously posted reviews.


My Vocabulary Did this To Me
poems by Jack Spicer

Spicer is an interesting poet on several levels, all of them deep and rich with deposits that reward an earnest dig. He is , I think, on a par with Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams with the interest in grilling the elaborating infrastructure of how we draw or are drawn to specialized conclusions with the use of metaphor, and it is to his particular brilliance as a lyric poet, comparable to Frank O’Hara (a poet Spicer declared he didn’t care for, with O’Hara thinking much the same in kind) that the contradictions, competing desires and unexpected conundrums of investigating one’s verbal stream are made comprehensible to the senses, a joy to the ear. No one, really no one wrote as distinctly as the long obscure Spicer did, and editors Gizzi, Killian and publisher Wesleyan Press are to be thanked for restoring a major American voice to our shared canon.

Bear v. Shark
a novel by Chris Batchelder


Bear V. Shark by Chris Bachelder is post-modern hoot. Don't let the tag "post modern" put you off, because Bachelder gets it exactly right as he skews his target, television and the culture of Total Media Saturation. Bear V.Shark is a great, wild read for anyone who enjoyed Pastoralia or the work of Mark Leyner. There is a vaguely described though loudly trumpeted Big Event forthcoming that's precisely what the title suggests, in a future time when TVs have no off switches and whose soft ware can sense a viewers boredom and flip the channels for them: TVs are everywhere in this world, in the kitchen, the furniture, bus stops, train stations, and in such a society, the idiom of everyday language is subverted by commercial patois and jingles. America, here, is subtly insane and in a constant state of distraction.This is the America that Baudrillard absent mindedly ruminated about, only much funnier, edgier, and smarter in the evisceration


Cosmopolis
a novel by Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo again shows that he's our best novelist of American absurdity with this strange off-kilter comedy that centers around the events of an eventful day in Manhattan. Against a backdrop of raves, a Presidential motorcade, a rock star's funeral, mysterious street demonstrations and the constant, ghostly electronic feed of news of pending financial disaster, a young billionaire asset manager limousines uptown to get a haircut in order to embrace his sense of inevitable, personal apocalypse. DeLillo's writing is outstanding, funny with a cool lyricism, poetic when you least expect it. The brillance here, as with White Noise and especially Mao ll is the way characters seek to reconfigure their metaphors, their assuring base of references , once their world view is rattled and made less authortative by unexplainable events and human quirks. This is semiotics at its best, an erotic activity where DeLillo probes and glides over the surfaces of ideas , notions, theories and their artifacts, things intellectual and material emptied of meaning, purpose. It's a hallmark of DeLillo's mastery of language that he gets that psychic activity that constantly tries to reinfuse the world with meaning and purpose after the constructions are laid bare; Eric, here in this world of commodity trading, which he regards as natural force that he's mastered and control, attempts to reintroduce mystery into the world he is trapped in. He is bored beyond the grave with the results of his luck. His efforts to live dangerously , spontaneously and thus get a perception he hadn't had and perhaps secure a hint of a metaphysical infrastructure that eludes, all turn badly, but for DeLillo's art it's not what is found , discovered, or resolved through the extensions of language, but rather the journey itself, the constant connecting of things with other things in the world; this is the poetry of the human need to make sense of things in the great , invisible state beyond the senses, a negoiation with death. His imagistic tilling of the semiotic field yields the sort of endless irony that makes for the kind of truly subversive comedy, a sort of satire that contains the straining cadences of prophecy. The city, the place where the the hydra-headed strands of commerce, history, technology and government merge in startling combinations of applied power, becomes an amorphous cluster of symbols whose life and vitality come to seem as fragile and short-lived as living matter itself.

The Time of Our Singing
a novel by Richard Powers

This amazing novel by Richard Powers. an ambitious generational tale of an American family with a mixed heritage of African-American and German Jew, and covers the travails, triumphs and tragedies of this family. There are three children, one with a beautiful singing voice who opts for a classical music career, a daughter who becomes involved with the civil rights struggle,and a second brother who, though gifted as well, buries his ambition to bridge the gap between his siblings. Not a perfect novel--sometimes Powers' superb style turns into a list of historical events as a means to convey the sweep of time-- but the central issues of race, identity, culture are handled well within the story. The writing is generous and frequently beautiful, especially at the moments when the description turns to the music. Powers, as well as any one, describes how notes played the right way can make one believe in heaven and the angels who live there.

Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles
a memoir by Kate Braverman

Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles is a memoir, of sorts, about growing up in Los Angeles, and then the eventual moving away from that famously center-less city. Writing in a high poetic and semiotically engaged style that recalls the best writing of Don DeLillo (Mao ll) and Norman Mailer (Miami and the Seize of Chicago), Braverman deftly defines isolated Los Angeles sprawl and puts you in those cloistered, cul-de-sac'd neighborhoods that you drive by on the freeway or pass on the commuter train, those squalid, dissociated blocks of undifferentiated houses and strip malls and store front churches; the prose gets the personal struggle to escape through any means , through art and rage, and this makes Frantic Transmissions not unlike Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, wherein the prodigal son or daughter deigns to move up and away from a home that cannot keep them, with only raw nerve and the transforming elements of art to guide them. What Braverman confronts and writes about with a subtly discerning wit is the struggle of defining the place one calls home, and what roles one is obliged to assume as they continually define their space, their refuge. All through this particularly gripping memoir there is the sheer magic and engulfing power of Braverman's writing; I was fortunate to receive an uncorrected proof of Frantic Transmissions a couple of months ago, and I was knocked out by what I beheld. Sentence upon sentence, metaphor upon simile, analogy upon anecdote, this writing is rhythmic and full of stirring music. There is poetry here that does not overwhelm nor over reach; this is an amazing book, and it is one of the best books about life in Los Angeles , quite easily in the ranks of Nathaniel West, Joan Didion, and John Fante.


HIP:The History
non fiction by John Leland


John Leland's Hip:The History is the sort of book I like to read on the bus, the portentous social study of an indefinite essence that makes the reader of the book appear, well, hip. This is the perfect book for the pop culture obsessive who wonders, indeed worries and frets over the issue as to whether white musicians can become real blues musicians or whether Caucasian jazz musicians have added anything of value to the the jazz canon besides gimmick.

Leland, a reporter for the New York Times, has done his research and brings together the expected doses of cultural anthropology, literature and, of course, music to bear on this sweeping, if unsettled account as to what "hip" is and how it appears to have developed over time. Most importantly he concentrates on the lopsided relationship between black and white, each group borrowing each other's culture and suiting them for their respective needs; in the case of black Americans, rising from a slavery as free people in a racist environment, hip was an an ironic manner, a mode of regarding their existence on the offbeat, a way to keep the put upon psyche within a measure of equilibrium. For the younger white hipsters, in love black music and style, it was an attempt to gain knowledge, authenticity and personal legitimacy through a source that was Other than what a generation felt was their over-privileged and pampered class. Leland's range is admirable and does a remarkable job of advancing his thesis--that the framework of what we consider hip is a way in which both races eye other warily--and is sensitive to the fact that for all the attempts of white artists and their followers to cultivate their own good style from their black influences, the white hipsters is never far from black face minstrelsy. For all the appropriation,experimentation, and varied perversions of black art that has emerged over the decades, there are only a few men and women who've attained the stature of their African American heroes, people who, themselves, were the few among the many.

The Silver Dazzle of the Sun
poems by Paul Dresman

The speakers are shaped by language that accommodates the vastness of region, The West, both as a physical place and collective social construction, looms large in a good deal of the present poems(as it is in Dorn's long lines), and it is the marriage of voice and location that gives the poetry in The Silver Dazzle of the Sun a life that is absent from too much published poetry. The world climbs through the language and appears through deft description fresh as a moment of first perception; style is content, to beg an old question, but it's a worthwhile distinction to make clear. Dresman's work brings us a world of felt experience that can be addressed in useful ways. There are no epistemological quandaries here, no rueful mediations on malformed vowels. There is , though, plenty of wit, anger, flights of lyric speculation, writ with a sure composing hand.There is something of a medley of voices at play in these works, where a terrain on which innumerable generations of have written on emerge in a layered and subtly orchestrated music. The poetics of wonder, rage, joy and sorrow are harnessed with extraordinary skill. Above all else, the poems come from a voice that is speaking to you;
there are moments when the candor and unreticent wit of the writing makes you ponder again the incidents in your own experience that you might not have regarded for years. The poetry is that good.


Big If
a novel by Mark Costello

This is a superb comedy of contemporary American life involving a low-level Secret Service agent who finds she must get reacquainted with her computer-genius brother when she takes a respite from the paranoid turns and twists of her job. This is a book of richly skewed characters doing their best to make sense of their lives. Costello's prose is alive with the things of our life, and is superb at demonstrating the clash between happiness material items promise and the world that denies such rewards. He is the master of setting forth a metaphor and letting it travel through a storyline just beneath the surface, operating silently, almost invisibly, always effectively.

Their father, in the first portion of the book , is a moderate Republican insurance investigator of scholarly reading habits who happens to be a principled atheist. You cannot have both insurance, the practice of placing a monetary remuneration on unavoidable disaster, and assurance, which has religion promising protection from evil and disaster. The children, in turn, assume careers that seem to typify the dualism their father opposed, son Jens becoming a programmer for the Big If on line game for which he writes "monster behavior code" that attempts to outsmart human players and have them meet a hypothetical destruction. Daughter Vi, conversely, becomes a Secret Service agent, schooled in the theory encoded in The Certainties, a set of writings that lays out the details, nuances and psychology of extreme protection. These are world views in collision, and Costellos' prose is quick with the telling detail,the flashing insight, the cutting remark. On view in Big If are different models on which characters try to contain , control, or explain the relentless capriciousness of Life as it unfolds, constructs through which characters and the country and culture they serve can feel empowered to control their fate in a meaningful universe. The punchline is that Life goes on anyway, with it's fluctuating, undulating, chaotic dynamics that only occasionally seem to fall into place. Costello wrests a subtle comedy of manners from the small failures of anyone's world view to suitably make their existence unproblematic. This is a family comedy on a par with The Wapshot Chronicle, but in an America that is suddenly global, an air that makes even the most familiar things seem alien and fantastic. Costello is a modern master, and fans of White Noise and The Corrections will enjoy the emergence of a master.


It's Go In Horizontal: Selected Poems 1974-2006
poems by Leslie Scalapino

Laying out a poem like it were a trail of bread crumbs a reader would to the bigger feast of The Point Being Made is not how writer Leslie Scalapino writes. As we find ourselves in a time when the popular idea of the poet and their work they compose seems slanted toward the lightly likable Billy Collins and others witing poems that can be grasped, shared, written out in a fine hand on perfumed paper and preserved between the leaves of a dictionary of quotations. Scalapino requires not the casual gaze but the harder view, the more inquisitive eye. Scalapino brings a refreshing complexity to her work, a sanguine yet inquisitive intelligence that is restless and dissatisfied with the seemingly authorized narrative styles poets are expected to frame their ideas with. The framing, so to speak, is as much the subject in her poems and prose, and the attending effort to interrogate the methods one codifies perception to the exclusion of details not fitting a convenient structure, Leslie Scalapino has produced a body of work of rare and admirable discipline; the writing is a test of the limits of generic representation.Her work as well is an inquiry in how we might exist without them. In as series of over nineteen books over published since the seventies, she has been one of the most interesting poets working , an earnest inquisitor of consciousness and form blurring and distorting the boundaries that keep poetry, prose, fiction and auto biography apart.It's Go in Horizontal is a cogent selection from three decades of writing. The distinction blurring is not a project originating with her, but there is in Scalapino's work the sense of a single voice rather than expected "car radio effect", the audio equivalent of Burrough's cut up method that would make a piece resemble an AM dial being moved up and down a distorted, static-laden frequency. Leslie Scalapino's writing is one voice at different pitches responding to an intelligence aware of how it codes and decodes an object of perception. The work is fascinating , interrogations that wrestle with the act of witnessing.

The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
poems by Ted Berrigan

It's not enough that we have the same first name and the same Irish second initial, my attraction to Berrigan's poems was the rather unbelligerent way he ignored the constricting formalities in poetry and rendered something of a record of his thoughts unspooling as he walked through the neighborhood or went about his tasks. "Where Will I Wander" is the title of a recent John Ashbery volume, and it might well be an apt description of Berrigan's style; shambling, personal, messy, yet able to draw out the sublime phrase or the extended insight from the myriad places his stanzas and line shifts would land on. The world radiated a magic and energy well enough without the poet's talents for making essences clear to an audience needing to know something more about what lies behind the veil, and Berrigan's gift were his personable conflations of cartoon logic, antic flights of lyric waxing, and darkest hour reflection , a poetry which, at it's best, seemed less a poem than it did a monologue from someone already aware that their world was extraordinary and that their task was to record one's ongoing incomprehension of the why of the invisible world.

The Age of Huts
poems by Ron Silliman

The Age of Huts brings together several books he's published as a long standing project. It makes for alternately exhilarating and exasperating reading. Those who stay with Silliman and his task are rewarded with what is really the most thorough on going examination of the American vernacular since William Carlos Williams composed and assembled his central epic poem Paterson in 1963. Silliman’s is the language of a place, and there is a logic as the streams and eddies of unassigned sentences the blended variations at once rich, dissonant.

The Time of Our Singing
a novel by Richard Powers


This is an amazing novel byRichard Powers. an ambitious generational tale of an American family with a mixed heritage of African-American and German Jew, and covers the travails, triumphs and tragedies of this family. There are three children, one with a beautiful singing voice who opts for a classical music career, a daughter who becomes involved with the civil rights struggle,and a second brother who, though gifted as well, buries his ambition to bridge the gap between his siblings. Not a perfect novel--sometimes Powers' superb style turns into a list of historical events as a means to convey the sweep of time-- but the central issues of race, identity, culture are handled well within the story. The writing is generous and frequently beautiful, especially at the moments when the description turns to the music. Powers, as well as any one, describes how notes played the right way can make one believe in heaven and the angels who live there. 

The Plot Against America
a novel by Philip Roth

Novelist Philip Roth, always a spiky and unpredictable story teller, creates an alternative history for America, a fascinating and troubling fantasy of "what if": Charles Lindbergh, aviation hero and Nazi-sympathetic isolationist, is nominated by the Republican Party in the 1940 presidential election, and handily defeats FDR. Using his own family as the center of this fable, Roth has written a novel with the impact of a memoir of hard and terrible times,speaking to how easily a homegrown fascism could take root and grow. The power of Roth's novel lies not only in the impressive historical research he brings to the novel, but especially in how creeping Totalitarian persecution effects the lives of characters who are complex, sympathetic, argumentative. This is not a dry recital of dates, events, names from fading ledgers and indexes, because the novel is a family saga among its several formations, and what Roth has done is highlight a family's struggle between each other and their inner lives while the nation prepares to give in to its worse fears and lay the land for fascism. Several instances -- the family listening the radio during the convention, a hapless father become less powerful in the children's eyes as political forces move against American Jews, the subtly advanced symbolism of the fictional Philip Roth's stamp collection-- gives a reader an vivid accounting of the things that disrupted, destroyed, lost by systematized evil.

The Plot Against America is a masterpiece of the first rank, as relevant as morning headlines, timeless as great literature, qualities that place him, unexpectedly, in the same league with Sinclair Lewis.This is art as a form of truth-telling, of an acute paranoia made comprehensible through a focus of literary skill that gives voice to the unspeakable. Roth was obliviously raised to revere democracy , and this work, tempered by experience and the history of human kind to go wrong and become complicit in evil, sounds off a warning for the reader that is hardly an original thought but meaningful resounds even still: the price of freedom is constant vigilance because the enemies of our rights as citizens are snakes sleeping with one eye open.


The Body Artist
a novel by Don DeLillo


DeLillo is perhaps the best literary novelist we have at this time, which the career-defining masterwork Underworld made clear to his largest readership yet: at the end of all those perfect sentences , sallow images and and long, winding, aching paragraphs is a narrative voice whose intelligence engages the fractured nature of identity in a media-glutted age. The Body Artist has him contracting the narrative concerns to a tight, elliptical 128 pages, where the Joycean impulse to have a private art furnish meaning to grievous experience is preferred over the dead promises of religion and philosophy. What exactly the woman character does with her performance body art, what the point is of her ritualized , obsessed cleansing of her body, is a mystery of DeLilloian cast, but it's evident that we're witnessing to a private ritual whose codes won't reveal themselves, but are intended as a way for the woman to again have a psychic terrain she can inhabit following the sudden and devastating death of her film maker husband. The entrance of the stranger in the cottage turns her aesthetic self-absorption , slowly but inevitably, into a search into her past in order to give her experience meaning, resonance, a project she quite handily ignores until then. The sure unveiling of her psychic life is a haunting literary event. DeLillo's language is crisp, evocative, precise to the mood and his ideas: you envy his flawless grasp of rhythm and diction as these traits simultaneously make the cottage on the cold , lonely coast seem sharp as snap shot, but blurred like old memory, roads and forests in a foggy shroud. A short, haunted masterwork.

Crackpots
a novel by Sara Pritchard

Brief, beautifully written book about an awkward young girl being raised by an eccentric family. Note that there is no child abuse or other hot button stuff engineered in to make the book appeal to the Oprah book clubs, just a humorous and bittersweet novel of a girl, beset with any number of glum circumstances and embarrassments, maturing to a resilient adult with soft irony that gets her through the day. Pritchard is especially fine as prose stylist.

Half Life:Poems
poems by Meghan O'Rourke

Meghan O'Rourke,poetry editor for The Paris Review and a cultural editor for Slate,is also a poet with unique ability to get a nearly intangible notion, an inexlicapable sensation into words. Giving voice to hunch, making the half-idea a textured, tangible thing, hers is a poetry that completes sentences we cannot finish ourselves. Precision and morphological accuracy aren't the point, and the words themselves, the images they create or suggest, are more like strands of half remembered music that is heard and triggers an intense rush of association; any number of image fragments, sounds, scents, bits of sentences, suggestions of seasonal light in a certain place, race and parade through the mind as fast as memory can dredge up the shards and let them loose. Just as fast, they are gone again, the source of quick elation or profound sadness gone; one can quite nearly sense that streaming cluster of associations that make up a large part of your existence rush onward, going around a psychic bend, scattering like blown dust in the larger universes of limitless life. All one is left with is memory of the sudden rush, the flash of clarity, and the rapid loss, the denaturing of one's sense of self in a community where one might have assumed they were solid and autonomous in their style of being, that nothing can upset the steady rhythm of a realized life.

Hunter Thompson, again

I was looking for something to watch on TV while avoiding chores when I stumbled upon HBO on Demand. I browsed through the available movies, most of which I had either ignored in the theaters because they seemed bloated and bland in the previews, or seen already and had no desire to watch again. The typical cable problem: too many channels and nothing interesting. I decided to check out a few more movies and found one that I had missed, Terry Gilliam's adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Johnny Depp as the late Hunter Thompson and Benicio Del Toro as his sidekick, the drug-crazed Dr. Gonzo. "Crazed" is the right word for the film; Thompson's book of the same name is a hilarious masterpiece of drug-induced paranoia, where his loud and frantic prose worked brilliantly. One could feel the fear and intensity and laugh at the madness. 

Gilliam, however, is a heavy-handed director and tries to recreate the frenzy of Thompson's prose with a restless, jittery, and argumentative visual style, words that also describe Depp's portrayal of Thompson. The film failed in its attempt to revive an old sensation, and so did Thompson's body of work, many years of declining returns on his old reputation. Sometimes I'll pick up a book I had read and enjoyed years ago just to see if the writer's prose still has the same effect on me after my taste and expectations have changed, that is to say refined by experience, whether good, bad or neutral. Some writers still have that knockout punch in their old books--Mailer in An American Dream and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Hemingway with In Our Time , among many others--and some heroes have aged poorly over time, like Lester Bangs, Charles Bukowski. No surprise; in my mid-fifties, I'm drawn to the deeper lyricism in the words that fill a page, the tone that goes beyond the moment of excitement and that continues to resonate as an example of writing that nails its moment perfectly. 

A recent re-read of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson was this kind of book, from its infamous road trip opening to its paranoid adventures at a Las Vegas Narcotics officers convention; for all his death wish and self-centered recklessness--a revolutionary without a plan--Thompson wrote the final word that needed to be written on living on the edge. One wondered, even when young first encountering Thompson and his extreme style, whether he would fall off that edge or if someone would push him. It can't be that surprising that Hunter Thompson ended it the way he did; the only question to ask is why it didn't happen sooner. He was a case of Hemingwayism gone wild on crack cocaine, that one's challenges were one's character, and that the unwritten essence of a personal code was formed by how well one overcame one crisis after another.

It was always about struggle with Thompson, the struggle to meet deadlines before his drugs took effect, the clock ticking before a deadline would come again and he had nothing but a paragraph of drugged nonsense; like Kerouac, who he greatly admired, he came to document less the event he had been assigned than his own chronicles of using his body as a testing ground for new and improved abuses. You might say that he treated his mind as like a car he'd constantly try to rev up, lift up, juice up in hopes of getting the engine and suspension to take a sharp turn faster, meaner, louder, with the thought of eventual breakdown for the moment blocked out by the sheer mania and thrill that such speeds and close calls give you. But his mind fried; he wrote less; he mumbled more in public speeches and talks; he broke bones; his manner was a textbook example of the word "fried".

Hells Angels It was as if the synapses that had fired and given **the world** Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas had fused **the ends** of his nerve endings and made it impossible to change style, outlook or interest. Other writers of similar aesthetic--Mailer, Wolfe--found new voices, bigger subjects, subtler ways to put forth their arguments with existence. Thompson was stuck in time, trying to sustain himself on sparking fits of rage and guile, coming up with little that was new, as it must be for an artist to keep a pulse worth beating. The real bummer is that he lived all these years knowing that he didn't have another good book in him. This might have been his biggest pain to endure, and it might have been the one he meant to stop once and for all.

I agree that Thompson is an easy target, but then again he rarely missed a chance to make himself one. The curse of being a celebrity writer is that one risks becoming a brand name and finding themself facing audience expectation more than their muse. Thompson became Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo Journalist , and became something of a clown making faces for a paying crowd. The pity of it all is that he had great talent when he put it to work, the result being a small but strong core of books from his body of work: Hells Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

But the act got old and the body couldn't keep up the paces anymore, and his writing became erratic, cruel, angry; he became a writer eternally dissatisfied without recourse to wit or irony. There was something sadly drastic about Better than Sex, a strange assemblage full of loud declarations and not much coherence; Thompson in his prime could emerge from his comic paranoia and invective and land on an illuminating point. This was all hollow gesturing. The problem, I suppose, was that Thompson never took the time to change his act, his style, to consider a project that would reshape his notion of what constitutes writing. Mailer dropped the third person persona and wrote The Executioner's Song, a fugue-paced saga made of terse sentences, and went on to a later career that still provoked controversy. Tom Wolfe, in turn, became a novelist, a good thing for him, as they mitigate his later essays, a string of missives from a sourpuss. In both cases, to varying degrees, the changes of stylistic venue kept both writers fresh in their old age. Thompson didn't avail himself of the chance.

I don't dismiss him as a drunk and a drug addict; I simply won't discount those things that ruined his talent. We do need to consider him seriously as a representative author of his time, but this needs to be done with it in mind that his biography is a cautionary tale for those who read him, like him, and decide they want to write crazy paragraphs like he did. One would need to emphasize the distinction between trying to write like Hunter Thompson and trying to be Hunter Thompson.

Used Books: paragraphs for slow Saturday morning

Underworld -- Don DeLillo

Yes, the novel sprawls over the years and the characters in sideways fashion, but DeLillo has managed sprawl to good effect before, and here he does not slacken in skill. The search for the baseball, about which not much is known is except rumor purporting to be History, big H, lays the ground beautifully for a series of stories linked by the search for a usable , recent past through the ruins of a society that flies in the face and faith of the search. Great satire, great prose--DeLillo is among the best living writers in English, I believe: there's not an ounce of fat. This is savvy and skill and sheer know-how that eludes our faux wonder child, David Foster Wallace, prematurely praised for too little work. DeLillo is our best living novelist.

House on Mango Street --Sandra Cisneros

A little jewel, from the point of view, in large part, of a small girl growing up in the slums. I don't know how other the author's work reads, and her poetry, from what I've read, is ordinary and quietly competent, but House is heartbreaking, where you witness the hardening of a world view before the young girl had any larger experience. A gem.

The Hours --Michael Cunningham

The intertwined narratives, connected through time and each related in some marginal way with the issue of Virginia Woolfe and her novel Mrs. Dollaway, is lovely, being about lose, desire, the great inability to frame an ideal and then live in it in a universe that is busy, intrusive, insensitive to inner life. Cunningham commands the Woolfe style : the stream of conscious that is amid thought in the ebb and flow of existence: we have , again and again, real images, concrete in detail and form, become, through character musing and more musing, become abstract, fluid, merged with the fleeting psychology of each passing moment. A good work.

A Frolic of One's Own --William Gaddis

I love the fact that the late Gaddis simplified his style, not a wit since the 1958 publication of his first novel, The Recognitions. Brilliant dialogue, which drives the novel, sans character attribution. The lawyer trade should duck under the table if they see a judge with this book poking from his robe.

Birds of America --Lorrie Moore An outstanding prose writer, this is a terrific set of short stories. It is a cruel error to regard her as a women's author, as her stories have a dimensionality that have the travails and emotions of her women characters' resonate with a congruent male readership.

"Next Life" by Rae Armantrout

Next Life, Rae Armentrout (Wesylan).  

Rae Armantrout is a poet of intensely private language whose seeming fragments of sentences, scenes, and interior recollections still read vividly, provocatively. A member of the Language group of poets whose other members include Ron Silliman, Bob Perleman and Lynn Hejinian, among other notables, she has distinguished herself from the frequently discursive style that interrogates the boundaries between the nominal power of language and the contradictions that result when conventional meaning rubs against insoluble fact, Armantrout's poetry is brief, terser, more taciturn and pared to the essential terms and the sensations they conflate. More autobiographical, perhaps, more concerned with raising a sense of genuine autonomy from the words one employs to define direction and purpose, Armantrout's poetry is an ongoing inquiry about what lies beyond our expectations once they've been given the lie. As in this fine collection's title, what is the "Next Life"? What she leaves out is fully formed by its absence; 

 

We wake up to an empty room addressing itself in scare quotes. "Happen" and "now" have been smuggled out to arrive safely in the past tense. We come home to a cat made entirely of fish. --"Reversible" 

A good many poets lavish their subjects with an overflow of language that twists and turns and deliberately problematizes syntax to achieve effects that are more stunts than perception or even an interrogation of an elusive notion. Armantrout's poetry is strong, stoic, lean to the degree that what remains are the resonances of a personality witnessing the truth when internal idealism and material fact don't compliment each other. Armantrout's poetry is a calm voice intoning over the varied scraps and arcana of experience and crisply discovers, underlines, and speaks with a curt irony. There are things we've said we were, there are the things we've become, and there are the words we first used to make our declarations asserted again, though mutated, altered, given a few shades of new meaning to meet the demands of a life that becomes more complicated with small, distracting matters. There's a blunted, occasionally jagged feeling to Armantrout's lines, a cadence that will alternate between the intricate, acute image, half-uttered phrases that seem like mumbles, and the juxtapositions of word and deed that expose an archive of deferred emotion. 

 1. "That's a nice red," you said, but now the world was different so that I agreed with a puzzled or sentimental certainty as if clairvoyance could be extended to the past. And why not? With a model sailing ship in the window of a little, neat house and with a statuette of an stable boy on the porch, holding a lamp up,  someone was making something clear-- perhaps that motion is a real character. 2. How should we feel about "the eraser"? "Rampages" wears one expression while "frantically" wears another: conjoined twins, miraculously separated on Judgement Day? Then "only nothingness" is a bit vague. But words are more precise than sight-- increasingly! 3. The old man shuffles very slowly, not between a crosswalk's white lines but down one of them. Like a figure in a dream, his relations to meaning is ominous.-- --

"Agreement" 

 These are voices of a consciousness that surveys several things at once; time is collapsed, details are suggested, associative leaps abound, and the phrase is terse, problematic. Above all, this is a poetry of concentrated power; what is spoken here, the dissonance between expectation and the manner of how perception changes when idealism greets actual events and deeds, are the things one considers late at night when there's nothing on cable, you've read your books, and only a pen and paper remains; what of me remains in the interactions, the negotiations, the compromises that constitute "making my way" in the world we might inhabit? This is a city of comings and goings, of people and their associations dancing and struggling with the invisible forces of repulsion and attraction; one seeks to transcend what it is that surrounds them, but find that their autonomy is merely a fiction shared only with the self when a community is lacking to applaud or argue with one's declarations of self. Armantrout gets to that minor and hardly investigated phenomenon of how all of us--as readers, writers, consumers, family members--create our dissonances in a manner that is intractable and ingrained. This is a fine, spare, ruminative volume by a singular writer.

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read 

Pierre Bayard (Bloomsbury) 

 Those among us who struggled with deconstruction, post-structuralism, semiotics, and the like in the seventies and eighties, when we found out that language in general and literary writing in particular couldn't possibly address the world as is will remember the sweetly slippery issue of intertextuality. Promoted by Derrida and deMan, if memory serves me (and it often doesn't), this was the fancy footwork that while books fail to address the nature of things and make them fixed, unchanging situations, texts (meaning books) referred only to other texts, and the coherent systems writers seemed to uncover or create about how things are in practice drawn from a limitless archive of each text that came before the one you might have in your hand and considering it's fidelity to your experience. A futile concern, we find, since everything has already been written, everything has already been said. If this were true, we asked, how can it be that some theorists are using language to precisely describe what language cannot do, i.e., precisely describe things? I never read a response that made sense, as the answers seemed even more steaming heaps of gobbledygook that made the anchored theory before even more impassable. But no matter because at the time one had discovered a nice hedge against having to read a book; I am being grossly unfair to the good critics still taking their cues from Continental thought, but deconstruction and intertextuality were choice methods of not dealing with what a writer was saying, instead giving a jargonized accord of how all writing and discourse cannot get beyond itself and actually touch something that terms try to signify. This is the basic thrust of Pierre Bayard in his book "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read ". 

Bayard is both a professor of French literature and a psychoanalyst, and puts forth his statement in a surprisingly breezy account of why one need not have read a book to discuss it in detail and even to have a strong opinion as to a book's success or failure. Intertextuality strikes again, since Bayard spends a good amount of his time emphasizing that what really counts in one's relation to the printed word was the reputation and contexts books have, their relationships to the things they are not. This much of the book was great fun, since it is the bookseller's curse to know a very little about a great many things, and I have had to extemporize opinions and conjecture and create theory on the spot when asked by customers to discuss the merits of books I haven't read, and at times hadn't even heard of. Bayard deals with the same methodology, emphasizing that any of us, so pressed for an unsubstantiated opinion, would make do with what was available to us currently, be that the book's reputation, reviews one might have read. Bayard's assertion, satiric and attractive at the same time, is that discussing books old and new is a game of one-upmanship in how one stays current with an author's buzz factor rather than his content, and there is something gleeful in the way he describes the sort of artful improvisation a spirited raconteur can get away with as he riffs upon a tangential element. 

Tangents, in fact, are almost the real art in the literary community, and the dirty little secret is that a good number of us readers get away with our faux critiques and commentary because our audience is likewise without an idea as a book discusses in detail, in depth, with texture. No one wants to spoil the game, a matter Bayard lampoons with his own strategic deceptions. This is enjoyable to a degree, although the same repetition of his humorous application of post-structuralist residue to a generalized obsession with being well-read is wearying after a bit, even in a book as short as these 182 pages. Still, there is here the spirit of Roland Barthes, specifically in his collection of newspaper columns “Mythologies”; Barthes was that rare thing, playful in is undressing the signifiers and the signified. There is something of the poet in Barthes’ musings, which, I think, was the original intent of this type of criticism. Bayard has some of that instinct, but one cannot escape the feeling that he’s riffing to the only song he knows. This is a joke, perhaps, that is always already told.

Big If has Big Ideas and sucker punch laughs

Mark Costello's novel Big If is a superb and unforgiving comedy of American life involving a low-level Secret Service agent who must get reacquainted with her estranged computer-genius brother when she takes a respite from the paranoid turns and twists of her nerve-rattling job.This is a book of richly skewed characters doing their best to make sense of their lives, or at least have their lives take on a fleeting semblance of normality. The quests, individual and collective, aren't what anyone would expect—this novel takes a hard left turn from the Anne Tyler/Paulo Coelho fictions that insert everyday mysticism into the complications of city life—and the results are habits, tics, behaviors, and alienation from self that comes close to home, in the heart of the nest: the bedroom, the dining room, the kitchen, the places one lives the most and gains small satisfactions or walls themselves off to unreachable Siberias of the psyche.

In many ways, this is one of the best novels to investigate what one might do without God, or even a convenient social construction of The Public Good. All points of reference in Big If are minimized and negotiated from relevance. Costello's prose is alive with the things of our life, and is superb at demonstrating the clash between the happiness material items promise and the world that denies such rewards. He is the master of setting forth a metaphor and letting it travel through a storyline just beneath the surface, operating silently, mostly invisibly, always effectively.

Their father, in the first portion of the book, is a moderate Republican insurance investigator of scholarly reading habits who happens to be a principled atheist. You cannot have both insurance, the practice of placing a monetary remuneration on unavoidable disaster, and assurance, which has religion promising protection from evil and disaster.

The children, in turn, assume careers that seem to typify the dualism their father opposed, son Jens becoming a programmer for the Big If online game for which he writes "monster behavior code" that attempts to outsmart human players and have them meet a hypothetical destruction. Daughter Vi, conversely, becomes a Secret Service agent, schooled in the theory encoded in The Certainties, a set of writings that lays out the details, nuances, and psychology of extreme protection. These are world views in collision, and Costello's prose is quick with the telling detail, the flashing insight, the cutting remark.

The problem, of course, is that no one can define what "good" is. Big If is excellent, and what makes it work is that Costello accomplishes the dual difficulty of handing us a small town/suburban comedy the likes of John Cheever would have admired. The other is with the rich detailing of the other Secret Service agents who work with Vi Asplund.

There is something of a domestic comedy seamlessly interwoven with a skewed Washington thriller, with the elements of each spilling over and coloring the underlying foundations of both. In the first part of the novel, we have an atheist Republican insurance investigator who has a habit of crossing out the "God" in the "In God We Trust" inscription on all his paper money, replacing the offending word with "us". Vi, years later, winds up in a job where "in us we trust" is the operating rationale, as she and her fellow agents strive to protect their protected from the happenstance of crowds, acting out on intricate theories and assumptions that can only be tested in the field.

Costello is wonderful at the heightened awareness in the ways he presents his details, his comic touches. A beautiful agent who still receives alimony checks from her smitten ex-husband carries on a correspondence with him via the memo line of the checks, where he continually writes "come back to me". She writes "No, never" each time, deposits the check, knowing that her ex will see the reply when he receives the canceled checks. The book is full of these fine touches. We have a sense that it's the small things, the small frustrations, as much as the larger disasters that conspire against our happiness.

On view in Big If are different models on which characters try to contain, control, or explain the relentless capriciousness of Life as it unfolds, constructs through which characters and the country and culture they serve can feel empowered to control their fate in a meaningful universe. The punchline is that Life goes on anyway, with its fluctuating, undulating, chaotic dynamics that only occasionally seem to fall into place. Costello wrests a subtle comedy of manners from the small failures of anyone's world view to suitably make their existence unproblematic. This is a family comedy on a par with The Wapshot Chronicle, but in an America that is suddenly global, an air that makes even the most familiar things seem alien and fantastic.

William Logan can't remove his nasty mask

Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue
By William Logan

William Logan has become more famous as a disgruntled critic and trench-level wit than as a poet, his nominal calling, and it seems fated that the good writer will be recalled who he has dismissed so many for no reason other than an excuse to ladle out more of his cold, lumpy gruel.

Even in those instances where one is inclined to agree with him on principle there remains the scraping sound of a blade being sharpened in the background--in his estimations of Billy Collins, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Robert Frost, all one need do is read on with half an eyelid open , allowing the reviewer to present his good, balanced graces and equivocations until he lands upon the puffed-up sins he wishes to expose and the poems he desires to slice and dice. It's a chronic malignity that suggests more symptom than judgement, an indication of someone who makes a harsher case than is required so much of the time.

An honest criticism is appreciated, always, but the negative is the only coin Logan chooses to spend which, I think, renders his judgements suspect , no less than a publicist's hand out. Does Logan desire to be Poetry's Simon Cowell? Doubtless, since there is a kick indeed in handing out bad notices. In Logan's career, however, it ceases to be a form of Truth Telling than an expression of a mind that cannot adjust it's comprehending filters long enough to dare a fresh insight, an idea that might surprise the reader. The lamest stand up comic alive comes to mind--you've heard these jokes before, a long time ago.We have instead a wind up monkey, clashing it's cymbals intensely until someone winds it up again.(less)
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Hip: The History

HIP:The History
By John Leland

John Leland's Hip:The History is the sort of book I like to read on the bus, the portentous social study of an indefinite essence that makes the reader of the book appear, well, hip. This is the perfect book for the pop culture obsessive who wonders, indeed worries and frets over the issue as to whether white musicians can become real blues musicians or whether Caucasian jazz musicians have added anything of value to the the jazz canon besides gimmick.

What we have with Hip is a what Greil Marcus has been attempting to for decades, which is write a coherent narrative of the margins of American culture, descendants of slaves and the children of immigrant parents, coalesced in ways in which each other's style and manner intermingled even if the respective races did not. The grace moment in history is that some wonderful things emerged from all this borrowing, posturing and tension, the jazz, rock and roll and a genuine American literary vernaculary; the tragedy is that it took generations of racisim and violence to produce the historical conditions for these vital arts to emerge. The question of hip furnishes the theme that brings Leland's sources together--what emerges is the story of two races that cannot live together and cannot be apart.

Leland, a reporter for the New York Times, has done his research and brings together the expected doses of cultural anthropology, literature and, of course, music to bear on this sweeping, if unsettled account as to what "hip" is and how it appears to have developed over time. Most importantly he concentrates on the lopsided relationship between black and white, each group borrowing each other's culture and suiting them for their respective needs; in the case of black Americans, rising from a slavery as free people in a racist environment, hip was an an ironic manner, a mode of regarding their existence on the offbeat, a way to keep the put upon psyche within a measure of equilibrium. For the younger white hipsters, in love black music and style, it was an attempt to gain knowledge, authenticity and personal legitimacy through a source that was Other than what a generation felt was their over-privileged and pampered class.

Leland's range is admirable and does a remarkable job of advancing his thesis--that the framework of what we consider hip is a way in which both races eye other warily--and is sensitive to the fact that for all the attempts of white artists and their followers to cultivate their own good style from their black influences, the white hipsters is never far from black face minstrelsy. For all the appropriation,experimentation, and varied perversions of black art that has emerged over the decades, there are only a few men and women who've attained the stature of their African American heroes, people who, themselves, were the few among the many.

Premature Burial: Greil Marcus Mummifies A Great Song

Author Greil Marcus made a name as rock critic by insisting that the tide of history is directly mirrored by the pop music of the period. This can make for exhilarating reading, because Marcus is, if nothing else, an elegant stylist given to lyric evocation. But it is that same elegance that disguises the fact that he comes across a middling Hegelian; the author, amid the declarations about Dylan, the Stones, the Band, and their importance to the spontaneous mass revolts of the sixties, never solidifies his points. He has argued , with occasional lucidity, that the intuitive metaphors of the artist/poet/musician diagnose the ills of the culture better than any bus full of sociologists or philosophers, and has intimated further that history is a progression toward a greater day. Marcus suggests through his more ponderous tomes—Lipstick Traces, Invisible Republic, The Dustbin of History—that the arts in general, and rock ‘n’ roll in particular, can direct, in ways of getting to the brighter day, the next stage of our collective being.

Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads is an attempt to assemble a history of the pivotal song, bringing together well-worn facts about dates, names, and incidents that have been amply discussed in many previous studies of Dylan’s life and work. The idea buzzing underneath Marcus’ account of the people, places, and things that led up the creation of “Like a Rolling Stone,” the six-minute transitional masterpiece that made rock and pop musicians do a hard left turn, was that Dylan was the hero in a history and was not aware that he would be a hero. Known and more obscure facts about Dylan’s life and writing are presented breezily. Brought to us are short, sharp glimpses of how Dylan moved from being an imitator of Woody Guthrie and backwoods balladeers to a hero of the civil rights movement. He was fascinated with French Symbolist poets Rimbaud and Verlaine and the Beats (especially the barbed-wire prose of William Burroughs).

The diffusely presented elements eventually lead to Dylan’s controversial decision to abandon folk music and to “go electric.” It’s conceptually intriguing for Marcus to focus on the titular song and the entire album it was drawn from, 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited. The incidents, the details, and the exchanges—real and imagined—of who Dylan was working and socializing with at the time of the recording of “Like a Rolling Stone” are fascinating in themselves, but the elliptical style is frustrating as one finishes one chapter and starts another : you begin to wonder when the data begins to cohere into an argument for what it all means. Marcus prefers a gestalt approach, to have his topic appreciated from the many obscure incidents instead of having everything presented in complex theory. The reader is likely supposed to understand what he’s getting at without the professor’s hand directing him back to the chalk board diagram. An admirable trait in more skillful writers, but Marcus is often gets lost in the smallest implications of any one piece of evidence. The lack of even the slightest thesis statement, the failure to follow through on any intriguing idea that arises from his research is maddening.

Lucky for the reader Marcus is an engaging prose writer, and one can forgive to a degree for not being clearer with what he was getting at. His preferred method seems to be inference rather than careful argument; there is something in his tone that seems to be inspired by the early poems of Eliot and William Carlos Williams. Like them, he seems content to let the “sense-making” to the reader. I suppose everyone knows a character like Marcus, a smart person who makes smart declarations about large, expansive topics but lacks the skills or willingness to make the formal argument.

Marcus, though, isn’t the one to draw us the map. But what has been aggravating with Marcus since he left the employ of Rolling Stone and began writing full-length books and essays for cultural journals is that he chokes when there’s a point to be made—he defers, he sidesteps, he distracts, and he rather gracelessly changes the subject. Again, this can be enthralling, especially in a book like his massive Lipstick Traces the Secret History of the 20th Century where he assumes some of Guy DeBord’s assertions in Society of the Spectacle and situates rock ‘n’ roll musicians in a counter-tradition of groups that spontaneously develop in resistance to a society’s centralized ossification and mounts an attack, through art, on the perceptual filters that blind the masses to their latent genius.

He never quite comes to the part where he satisfyingly resolves all the mounting, swelling, grandly played generalizations that link Elvis, the Sex Pistols, and Cabaret Voltaire as sources of insight geared to undermine an oppressive regime, but the reader has fun along the way. Marcus wants to be a combination of Marcuse and Harold Bloom, and he rarely accomplishes anything, the singular criticism either of them produced in their respective disciplines, political philosophy, and literary criticism, but he does hit the mark often enough to make him a thinker worth coming back to.

Marcus has written so much about Dylan, or has absorbed so much material about him, that he can produce a reed-thin critique on one song and pretend that it is much, much more than what it really is. The problem is a lack of thesis, a conceit Marcus at least pretends to have with his prior volumes; he depends entirely on third-hand anecdotes, half-recollected memories, and a flurry of details gleaned from any one of the several hundred books about Dylan published over the last 30 years. This amounts to little more than what you’d have if you transcribed a recording of the singer’s more intense fans speaking wildly, broadly, intensely amongst themselves, by passing coherence for Sturm and Drang. For the rest of us with a saner appreciation of Dylan’s importance, Like a Rolling Stone is a messily assembled jumble of notes, press clippings, and over-told stories. Marcus, obviously enough, attempts an impressionistic take on the song, but the smell of rehash doesn’t recede, ever.