Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America

Quick, quick as it's time for me to fly. Or actually drive. But this last little bit I've been engaged reading about Amerigo Vespucci. Judicious, engaging, balanced (if rather critical of Vespucci, Columbus, and the lot of the early European explorers of the "New World"), Amerigo succeeds in sketching the man, from limited sources (very limited sources), and the world he lived, worked, explored (to some extent), and puffed himself up in.

Vespucci, it turns out, was sort of a shit. But as Fernández-Armesto points out, most of "them" were. The book, however, isn't.

Tenaya Darlington, Madame Deluxe

My god, almost two weeks since I finished anything of substance?!? Maybe that's why I'm feeling so funky. That's funky in a bad way, not in the Madame Deluxe way.

But the read itself was enjoyable... enough? No, that's damning by faint praise. Not everything worked (as you would expect) but I suppose, for me, that the "failures" -- those passages and pieces that don't quite connect -- are more glaring in poetry than in prose. Certainly than in novels, where the scope and expanse of the narrative (and the sheer weight of the words) tends to sweep through and over the infelicities. In the very engaging works, at least.

But even the most engaging poetry collection isn't enough to swamp the failures. Which is not to say that there are failures in Tenaya Darlington's Madame Deluxe -- certainly none that have stuck with me.

These are poems with an edge and a spice mildly reminiscent of perhaps the greatest (to my mind) book-length poem of all time: Suzy Zeus Gets Organized. A bit more holistically playful than Suzy Zeus, and certainly more poetically, formally "inventive" (Darlington is at play with the words and forms deployed -- and they are "deployed", quite consciously, or so the collection reads).

Her "The Student Asks the Poet Basho: What is Victoria's Secret?" is one of the great examples of the above. It could have become too cloying, too clever, and far too obvious. It's none of those.

And it is all very much worth the time it takes to read.

Félix Fénéon, Novels in Three Lines

Novels in Three Lines is a fascinating, evocative, and somewhat disturbing collection of newspaper filler written in 1906 by Félix Fénéon. A sample (at random):

"During a pleasure outing in an ill-famed neighborhood of Toulon, Brigadier Hory, of the 3rd Colonial, was stabbed to death." (13)

"Twirling a lasso and yahooing, Kieffer, of Montreuil, committed thrice in two years, galloped away. He vanished. He went on to hang himself." (56)

"Too bad! Mentré of Longwy, who revealed to us he was the winner of the 250,000 francs in the tuberculosis lottery, seems to have been hoaxed."(107)

Well, the last wasn't wholly at random. I scanned the pages trying to find one that did not involve yet another accident (crushed thorax), suicide, or murder.

It is a brutish, violent world that comes across in these "novels" -- but perhaps only proper as Fénéon is compelled to come right to the denoument, the world tied up as it is among and before the three lines.

I did tire of them at times, having to put the book down and rest. Get some space. It was... just too much unhappiness and death, at the hands of others and oneself. But a fascinating way to see a frantic, mad, and bloody world, not unlike our own.

"What?! Children perched on his wall?! With eight rounds M. Olive, property owner in Toulon, forced them to scramble down all bloodied." (60)

Damn, Toulon was rough!

Poetry 191.4 (January 2008)

I'm now traveling about a month behind in Poetry -- the arrival of the February 2008 edition reminding me to dip into the prior month's that was sitting on my end table.

The poetry itself was engaging but not exceptional this month, nothing struck me as wonderful or notably awful. Though, for that matter, I'm not sure that there has ever been a poem in Poetry that has compelled me to buy a collection.

The prose, the reviews, that's another matter. Though here, this month, I have to say I was disappointed. There has been an edge to the prose of late, of the past year? more? It's hard to tell at this point. But a smart -- it's been criticized as "snarky" -- wit about many of the reviews. This month's were weak. Mackowski's dismissal of Atwood (and celebration of Jamie) perplexed me -- I'm no partisan of Atwood's but I couldn't understand the argument from the examples provided. And Mlinko on Pinsky and Kinzie was a dismal conflation of the worst of the emotive and academic impulses in literary criticism.

Bring back the snarky, please!!

Nadine Gordimer, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories

I keep reminding myself that Nobel Prizes are awarded for past work, not the promise of work to be done.

Nadine Gordimer's latest collection, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, has left me perplexed, disappointed, but I hope not wholly put off her writings.

I first read Gordimer late in my graduate career: on my preliminary exams I explicated one of her short stories for... what? Two hours? Three? And thoroughly enjoyed it. There was depth and nuance that was easily accessible yet not at all superficial.

I should really go back through my files and see if I can find out what that story was.

And then there were her later novels: notably The House Gun and The Pickup, both of which I found to be engaging studies and stories of the "new" South Africa.

But here, in her latest, I struggled early to find anything that I could connect with, a storyline that I could buy into, that felt... that felt like some little piece of home. Instead I stumbled through a memoir of a tapeworm (and a not very engaging one at that -- tapeworm, that is), a memory of a dream of Anthony Sampson, Susan Sontag, and Edward Said. I mean, really...

I haven't read Gordimer widely enough to know reliably whether these are merely exercises she is using to explore new narrative territory for her, or perhaps just struggling to find her way to a topic that moves her -- and while the stories themselves sometimes read a little rough (there were more than a few times I had to reread passages before I could make sense of who or what she was writing of), her style has survived largely intact.

Unlike many collections, this one does strengthen the deeper one pushes into it, as Gordimer begins to imagine and more fully immerse herself, as an artist, in the lives of those who are more distant from her. And while the "Alternative Endings" that close the book are the sort that churn my stomach, each of the three dealing with marital infidelity, they are also among the strongest pieces in the book.

And while I wouldn't want to read an entire collection of such, they were welcome... comfort? No, not comfort; but in looking out and beyond, the dreamworld or the intestinal track, Gordimer connects.

Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine

I am a relatively recent reader of books on current events, any more sustained attention really having come into play over the last three to five years. And that's been driven in no small part by our rather grotesque engagement in Iraq and my desire to try to understand what the hell has happened and where we're heading.

But I'm not a (wholly) narrow interest reader, which is why books like Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court do grab my attention. And why I let that attention (and my grubby little paws) then grab the books.

Well, that and the titled "promise" to pull back the curtain on the wizard...

A book of secrets this is not, however.

I certainly know more having finished the book. And it is both a relatively quick and rather enjoyable primer on the modern Court (though not one that is likely to please the strict constructionists of the world who ask for rigor and footnotes and dispassionate reporting and/or analysis). Dispassionate this is not. Toobin both feels strongly about the Court (and the Justices who once did and currently do sit on the Court) and is willing to channel the strong feelings (be they real, supposed, teased out, or perhaps wholly imagined?) of the Justices themselves.

And to my mind he does a more than credible job in presenting the import both of the cases that have been brought before the Court and the opinions rendered (both majority and in dissent).

It presents a Court that I feel myself to have imagined -- though the close-up portraits of the Justices (many of them rather unflattering) and Toobin's fleshing out of the machinations on the Court (and between the Court and the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Executive) only hinted at in mainstream reporting both titillate and, to my mind at least, inform.

Pleasantly.

Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Damned

Bukowski is still a treat. What does that say about me?

I am not an acolyte. I neither aspire to write the poetry of Bukowski nor to live the life of his poems. My one substantive, if passing, brush with Los Angeles was years and years ago when I took two days to walk the length of Sunset Boulevard from Union Station to the Pacific Coast Highway before hopping on a plane to New Zealand.

But he is getting harder to read, maybe because I am seeing less of the wink and the nod and more of what seems to be the very real struggle and difficulty and hardness in the life portrayed.

This struggle and pain -- raw but also masked by no small bit of bluster -- is set off in The Pleasures of the Damned by the oddly (and uncharacteristically) surreal pieces, and those others -- equally rare and uncharacteristic -- that betray a real tenderness and vulnerability.

What does that say about Bukowski?

I think that he tried.

Marguerite Abouet & Clément Oubrerie, Aya

Aya is the first "African" graphic novel I've come across. At least as an actual, physical specimen. It's a collaboration of an Ivoirean writer (Marguerite Abouet) and French illustrator (Clément Oubrerie) and put out by Drawn & Quarterly.

It's beautifully put together, the illustrations are straight-forward but evocative (and I do enjoy the way that Oubrerie uses washes of color to set the visual tone for the panels), and the story itself couldn't be more simple. I'm not sure that I would refer to it as a "comedy" or even self-consciously "humorous" as various blurbs and reviews have noted. Not that it's humorless -- not by a long shot.

But it is more gentle than anything else: the story, the characterizations, even the illustrations -- there is a softness to this short work that is very appealing.

I seem to rely on the gentle these days.

You can read the opening pages here (pdf). Do so.

David Leavitt, Florence, A Delicate Case

Another long delay between books and... well, inevitably, I feel out of sorts for it. Not plowing through any particularly lengthy tome -- though I am currently working through a few different books and collections in bits and pieces -- but instead I'm settling back into life at home, after another (glorious) reading vacation in Virginia.

To keep to the road show theme, I just finished David Leavitt's rather tepid Florence, A Delicate Case. This too is part of a larger series -- Bloomsbury's The Writer and the City -- and while not a waste of time it was, at best, well... tepid.

Or rather my reaction was such.

It is a very personal and yet at the same time rather distant accounting of primarily the foreign -- that is English -- presence in Florence. Name-dropping (of names that prove I am not nearly as literate as I should be in the British diaspora of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), extended quotations, and quite a bit of "inside baseball" talk as far as the social machinations of the expatriate community -- and how this was all portrayed in various literary works (of mostly middling quality) -- make up the volume.

Now Leavitt acknowledges as much towards the close of this slight book, but awareness (laudable) does not make the book any more enjoyable. I will, to be sure, move on to the other volumes in the series (have already read and thoroughly enjoyed Edmund White's stroll through Paris) but am not particularly inclined to delve into anything else of Leavitt's.

Adam Roberts, The Wonga Coup

I got more and more depressed as I read Adam Roberts' The Wonga Coup. The idea that 75 armed men -- regardless of how well-armed -- could overthrow a government (in this case, Equatorial Guinea) would have been laughable if not for the fact that, well... If they had been a little more discreet and maybe had a bit of luck, they could have done it.

But perhaps depressing is a bit too strong.

Disappointing. I was increasingly disappointed the further I got into the book.

I don't read this sort of book for the swashbuckling adventure of it all. I've gotten a little past that. But Roberts never really figured out what sort of book he wanted to write. It's no wonder that the film rights have been picked up, it has all the elements of a "classic" 1970s mercenary in black Africa flick.

But Roberts, to his credit, also wants to build a case, a dossier. So "revealed for the first time ever" are various facts, testimony, etc.

Oh, how I wish he had actually provided this information. The narrative cries out for appendices (maybe we could actually see some of these documents he touts, read some of the emails he paraphrases, etc), practically begs for citations (or maybe that was me; I mean, how many unsourced 2 paragraph quotations can we swallow?), and is in dire need of a more deft editorial hand.

And here's the rub for me. As you push through the book you start hearing the same lines, the same little snippets of dialogue, the same scenes replayed. Wait? Didn't I just... Yes, you did. Jump back and forth, the same descriptors, the same... It's like he didn't quite know how to write a straight line chronicle, beginning to end, let alone finishing it up.

A bit of an odd criticism to level at a working journalist, but perhaps the sheer length was too much. At times it feels like it; it certainly reads like it.

Not an unpleasant read. Certainly not a difficult read (though keeping up with the cast of characters as Roberts jumps all about became a bit of an exercise in futility and one that I eventually just let go) -- but one that will, I would be willing to bet, be better told on screen.

At least Hollywood often doesn't even bother to try to keep to the facts...

Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World as Stage

Not nearly as witty or labyrinthine as I've come to expect of Bryson (see his A Short History of Nearly Everything if you doubt his abilities or wonder what his style, well-honed, can do) it also doesn't come as much of a surprise, considering the scholastic-industrial complex that has been built -- and maintained -- around the Bard.

After all, barring the discovery of the manuscripts (gasp!), a 7th authenticated signature, or another copy of the First Folio, what is there left for the amateur to uncover? What connection could possibly be drawn that hasn't already been the subject of 2 dissertations and 3 self-published crackpots?

Not much.

So in Shakespeare: The World as Stage the main task Bryson sets for himself is to burnish the standing of Shakespeare as... well... Shakespeare. A difficult task, as he repeatedly points out, since so little is known of Shakespeare's life in the first place. Many qualifications, disabusing of false notions (before settling on the "reasonable" assumptions), an acceptance of uncertainty, and a final settling of accounts with the anti-Stratfordians.

There are, of course, little bits and pieces that are delightful. My favorite, by far, is the use of "foul papers" for rough drafts. That's a keeper, like hoelweg.

And it is a pleasant enough diversion. But a little less than I had... expected? Or perhaps hoped for.

The volume is one in the "Eminent Lives" series of Harper Collins -- which is itself a rip-off of the excellent "Penguin Lives" series. What I want to know is why neither of these publishers can seem to put together webpages devoted to these series (instead of just shilling us off to the "sales annex")?!?

The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

I am not a big fan of short stories. I prefer to dive in and be swept away -- a remnant of some sprawling romanticism? an unshakable Victorian sense of what comprises a grand narrative? -- perhaps for neither of these reasons, but short story collections more often than not gather dust. Or, when I do read them, too often it is as a chore, something to slog through (too many collections of marginal stories in graduate school?).

I certainly can't object to them on length alone: I am constantly seeking out shorter books so that I might be able to finish them. Relatively easily.

So what is it?

I'm not sure. But The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake easily buck that prejudice. They are astounding evocations of poor, hard, violent lives, lived out by poor, hard, struggling men and women. I made the mistake of reading the two Afterwords in my volume and feel like none of the words I could use to describe the stories would be my own.

I did start to think of Tom Franklin's Poachers while reading Pancake. Pancake's stories are quieter, more humane (though nonetheless hard, true, and cutting for it).

Read them. Pick up a copy and read them.

It doesn't hurt that Pancake came to my alma mater to write. Of course, he also killed himself here.

So read the stories. They're all we've got.

Ronald Wallace, The Uses of Adversity

I first encountered Ronald Wallace's poetry at an English Department faculty gathering back in the fall of 2006. It had a bite and a humorous edge -- perhaps because it was more tightly selected and directed, perhaps from the way Wallace reads -- than the bulk of what's in The Uses of Adversity.

Which is not to say that the poetry is bad. Not in the least. But it is not what I remembered. Or perhaps not what I made it to be in my memory. And it was those memories that prompted me to pull this collection down from the display at the local Borders.

Maybe that and the fact that every time I read it out to myself, the title prompts me to think about -- and start singing -- KT Tunstall's "The Beauty of Uncertainty".

Wallace is playing, primarily, with form in these poems. Or rather, he has bound his memory with a loose sonnet form -- an Italian octave and sestet throughout the collection. Rhyme is only occasional and I did not take the time to read enough of the verse out loud to get a strong sense of commonalities of meter.

The collection is dominated by memories and, inasmuch as the gaze is a long one, by aging, though Wallace himself is a vigorous poet. These poems aren't burdened by the memories encapsulated, yet neither do they set sail. Perhaps it is not the years but the form that limits?

They read, to me, as a poet telling stories, quite contently, as he looks out his back door.

Maira Kalman, The Principles of Uncertainty

This is the collection of Maira Kalman's columns by the same name from the New York Times -- running for a year (since ceased) -- gathered up in a single volume.

It's an interesting little collection of art and... well, art. And narration (not so much captioning)? Which is... well, poetry? Memoir? Art?

Not sure which.

Kalman, who also illustrated Strunk & White's Elements of Style, has a video on her website called the elements of style movie (you'll need quicktime to play it), which goes a long way to showing you what The Principles of Uncertainty is all about -- which is a little of everything ("How can I tell you everything that is in my heart. Impossible to begin. Enough. No. Begin.") and nothing ("How can I tell you everything that is in my heart. Impossible to begin. Enough. No. Begin.").

See what I did there? Didn't say shit about what the book is all about.

I liked it.

But it's Christmas, my son wants to race cars, and we should probably take a walk before it gets dark.

Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa

A long silence, perhaps mistaken for slagging effort or the allowance of creeping ignorance was, instead, the wages of working through the latest tome of Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa.

True to it's titling, the focus is on the white presence in what is now South Africa -- and the countries of Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and Botswana -- from the mid nineteenth century to the aftermath of the Boer War, with the narrative generally emphasizing the "Great Men" in shaping the development of the Union. It is, not surprisingly, almost universally men -- though interestingly, Olive Schreiner is a recurring figure which sparked memories of reading her Trooper Peter Halket as a photocopied packet for a class early in my graduate career, and being quite struck by the power of the book, much moreso than her Story of an African Farm; the other woman to recur in the latter pages is Princess Catherine Radziwill, as Cecil Rhodes's late-life spook... er... biographer -- or alternately, "stalker", as the Wikipedia entry not incorrectly asserts.

Meredith has been amazingly prolific in recent years: in addition to Diamonds, Gold, and War, he has revised and republished an earlier work on Zimbabwe as Mugabe: Power, Plunder, and the Struggle for Zimbabwe (read) and published the sprawling and well-received The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence (not read, but on the pile).

Janet Maslin in the Times considers Meredith's writing to be more "perfunctory" than in The Fate of Africa -- I'm not entirely sure what she means by that. Regardless -- and despite the fact that I wish there were more than merely perfunctory coverage of the non-white role in the shaping of the southern African states (but I suppose that is wishing for something that the book never purports to be -- and this particular "lack" is reflective of the way that these communities were essentially treated, both rhetorically and in law and practice) -- Meredith provides a compelling picture of the way in which we stumble, bumble, bulldoze, cajole, bribe, war, and otherwise cobble together countries.

Yup, we just sort of throw these things together...

Poetry 191.3 (December 2007)

Another month, another Poetry. Highlight of this issue was, again, a prose piece: Clive James's witheringly appreciative dismantling of Ezra Pound's Cantos. And yet... and yet...

David Orr's "The Train" sprung something loose in me, not a poem -- certainly not as it is -- but an idea at least. What to do with:

Those little flashes of... nothing, of insignificance -- standing on the platform in New Brunswick; reading in the bathroom in Waikiki while my son doesn't sleep in his bed -- that make up my memories.

And though presented in an article on Italian poetry (that accompanied a selection), there was this little gem, by Patrizia Cavalli:

If you were
to knock now on my door
and if you took your glasses off
and I took off mine which are just like yours
and if you then entered into my mouth
unafraid of kisses that are not alike
and said to me: "My love,
what has happened?" -- it would be
a successful bit of theater.

My god...

Uche Nduka, Eel on Reef

I finished Uche Nduka's Eel on Reef yesterday morning and have been wondering what to make of it since. Well, truth be told, I was wondering what the hell to make of it just a few poems in.

I know that I'll be writing a more detailed review for the African Poetry Review (USA) shortly. But in the meantime...

Oh goodness!

I purposely avoided reading Kwame Dawes's introduction hoping to come to Nduka's poetry fresh. But instead, in my darker moments, I read it as just so many words chewed up and spit out on the page. Dawes is a much more generous reader, yet even he at times "felt as if the poet was working too hard to confuse me and I resented that" (11).

Resentment is too strong a word for my own feelings. Baffled? Not just by the "what" but the "why" of the collection (which, I might add, is beautifully put together and very attractively laid out). Dawes is a fan of the imagism, encouraging the reader to surrender and "write" the poetry fresh; rush through and linger. He sees reward where I only felt a degree of weariness.

There were glimmers that struck, an eroticism that almost rolled at times. But for the most part I was left to duck my head and push through.

George Sarrinikolaou, Facing Athens: Encounters With the Modern City

I am in deep, profound need of a light, funny book to read. Yes, I can chalk up much of that need to the seemingly endless tail chasing I've been doing lately, but Sarrinikolaou's Facing Athens is also due some share of the blame.

It is an almost unremittingly bleak read. Perhaps too much to assess it as "dark," it is not exactly melancholic either -- for though Sarrinikolaou closes out the book with a paragraph that casts the preceding in such a light, the idea of "melancholy" in remembrance suggests a certain degree of nostalgia, which is not something that Sarrinikolaou can muster.

It is... a cynical read of everything? Not snarky. It is not a chronicle of the Americanized exile returning with the knowing eye, regurgitating his own irony onto the city. No, not that. There is just... why go to Athens? Why did he go back to Athens?

Never having been to Athens, it is a hard thing to understand given the portrait of the city that Sarrinikolaou presents.

But it is also a perspective that he seems to carry regardless of his vantage point, or place:

"Because I was born to working-class parents and have lived only in cities, the problems implicit in the landscape -- poverty, poor urban planning, sheer ugliness -- have always claimed my attention. But as I held my baby, these problems acquired an urgency that had me fantasizing about a way out of Brooklyn."

From "The View From His Window" in the New York Times, 18 June 2006.

A hell of a burden to bear, surely. And one we all seem to carry about at times (regardless of what meets our eye on gazing out the window). But I was, sad to say, a bit relieved to put his down.

The fact that it became mine in the first place, of course, speaks both to the way I read and the way he writes. For what it's worth.

Mark Doty, School of the Arts

School of the Arts is the first work by Mark Doty that I've read, though not the first I've picked up. He is one of those contemporary poets who is lurking around my scanty awareness of American poetry as someone to be read and yet... Until now, hadn't been.

Not sure exactly why I picked up this volume, at this time. In Borders. Had a coupon to burn. Thought I wanted to treat myself to a poetry collection. And I found myself home with School of the Arts.

I've never really known how to write -- especially in brief -- about poetry. A tricky business considering the field I've chosen and where so much of my energy goes (when it goes). But to speak in generalities about such compressed language?

Let's not.

One of the striking things about this collection, or rather about my reading of this collection, was how in the process of reading I felt the urge to write. Not write in the moment, but to remember a scene, a setting, a feeling that Doty evoked and revisit it myself. In a line or stanza or, god forbid, an entire verse.

It reminded me of all that was before me and the poetic possibilities of... well, everything. Seen, broken off, reworked, re-created -- and renewed.

It was abundantly clear, as well, that Doty was working on this volume at the same time that he must have been working on (or at least preparing the way for) his most recent memoir, Dog Years.

The lines that jumped out at me?

"what's less graceful / than transport?"
From "The Vault - 4. Hood"

Seems to be sort of loading the dice -- wonderfully so, when you think about it: "transport" really is such a leaden term. Clever, clever. And very much the art of poetry.

Although I might take issue with the assertion itself.

Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read is a fun little book. If I ever acquire any family members of a playfully literary (and/or critical) bent, Bayard's book will surely show up as a gift for some occasion or another.

As all the reviews I have read are quick to point out -- within the opening lines -- this is not a "how to" on passing yourself off at cocktail parties populated by academics, whether intimidating or just merely pretentious. It is, instead, a deftly spun exploration of how we talk about books.

His tongue is frequently and deeply in his cheek, but where, exactly? And in the midst of a chuckle -- or appropriately self-conscious bit of jargon (see "masks the countergesture") -- is a telling turn that casts... what? This whole project? The efforts that underlie this project? In a very different light.

Or perhaps I am simply enamored of Bayard for providing me the necessary cover for having forgotten all those books I've read -- and all those books on my shelves (and that I continue to buy) that I might never read.

At least not in the "traditional" sense.