The Threepenny Review 116 (Winter 2009)

I have been getting The Threepenny Review for some time now. It arrives, I take a quick peek, I think I really ought to start it now, I put it on one of the piles of magazines...

And there it sits.

As this last issue sat. For a bit. But on a pile that was closer. A pile of more current magazines and articles. One that turned over more rapidly than most. And since for the last two or three weeks a bad back has compelled me to walk instead of running to the office, I had that much more time to read.

Finished though it was in the sweet, warm confines of home, the bulk was read and enjoyed on the road. A mish-mash of articles, fiction, and poetry, it was uniformly strong and engaging. By far, to my thinking, the most intriguing was Gideon Lewis-Kraus's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" (not, sadly not, available on the Threepenny website): detailing his encounter with the performance Call Cutta in a Box. Lewis-Kraus's own experience, his own performance in the written piece, is at once understated (almost transparent) and yet, as perhaps it's meant to be, transformative.

For as gripping as that piece was, my interest rarely waned in the others. A closing story by Mary Gaitskill (who I had never read before), a piece on the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who I don't believe I had ever heard of before), a dismantling of Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight -- all engaging and all, almost without fail, setting off little flurries of thought, often bringing me up short to scribble notes of my own, as I trundled back and forth between the office and home over the course of this last week.

Grégoire Bouillier, Report on Myself

What an interesting little book Bouillier's Report on Myself is. And I use "interesting" well aware of the possible double edged nature of this particular descriptor. Caroline Weber, writing in the New York Times, enjoyed it. As did most of the reviews aggregated at The Complete Review (which in its own review enjoyed it far less).

Bouillier, and I can't help but note this, chronicles a rather hard childhood, which seems to run counter to the opening line of the book, "I had a happy childhood." Or perhaps it's because Bouillier presents something far different from a chronological memoir. Instead, he opens chapters firmly in the past, with the six, seven, eight year old self and drifts and meanders along through second great loves and their dissolution, or his brother's disappearance, or...

So maybe I don't have a proper picture of his childhood, muddled as it is with loss and hurt of later years. Or maybe it's Bouillier who lacks perspective.

Structurally -- schematically -- I am quite enamored of the book. He makes the jumping about work for the most part (though, perhaps intentionally, I found myself rather lost and at sea as he he embarks on his own Odyssey -- striking a rather heavy-handed and labored pose as Ulysses in the late-middle stages of the book).

It's also quite something to read that "For eighty-five hundred francs a month, my job was to compose, in fewer than sixty characters, news items about children killing each other as they got out of school, husbands cutting their wives' throats, mothers smothering their babies, not to mention suicides" (117). Ah, the more things change...

Funny how even ones own reading circles back on itself. In little ways.

Do I risk a final judgment? I trust I do a better job with my son than Bouillier's folks did with him. It can't be that hard now, can it? Ah, but will Owen have as much material to work with or the drive to work it in the manner and to the extent Bouillier does? Ah, well, that's a risk I'm far more willing to take.

The book, the book? Not as strong as his later work, The Mystery Guest (which actually appeared in translation first), but, slight as it is, worth a visit.

Toyin Adewale, 25 New Nigerian Poets

Anthologies of multiple poets are always spotty affairs. Toyin Adewale's 25 Nigerian Poets is no different.

Interestingly, it includes two rather unremarkable poems by Helon Habila -- "Birds in the Graveyard" and "After the Obsession" (the latter starts strong but becomes mired in cliche when he explicitly conjures the obsession) -- three years before he "burst" onto the scene with his novel, Waiting for an Angel.

The strongest poem in the book is probably Remi Raji's "Cyclone", which opens:

Nightmare flickers
In our twice – thrice-beaten
eyes, no more meaning
in the gram, no gram
in the grammar of lives
my pain goes
like a stubborn present
our pain
Is a stubborn
Present
Tense

Adewale hopes that this collection is "enjoyed as an appetizer" (v) and yet there is little joy in these poems, midwived, as she says to open the "Introduction" to the collection, by "[t]he stimuli of suffering, the pain of the motherland, the desperate passion of a people who have found their collective national heritage pillaged by thieving generals" (iii). One does wish there was just a bit more art to them, though.

Philip Ardagh, The Not-So-Very-Nice Goings-On at Victoria Lodge

I was drawn to this little bit of nonsense -- The Not-So-Very-Nice Goings-On at Victoria Lodge -- sitting on the clearance cart at Half Price Books (a moderately interesting mostly illustrated book for $2? of course I'll buy it) because the author (whose name I recognized) is one that my son, Owen, is reading (okay, okay: and that we are reading too, together, as he drifts off to sleep at night).

Gun-toting (never seen) aunts and sisters, plotting servants, and "an over-stuffed robin, packed full of dynamite" (31) make for a pleasant enough diversion. It's not a children's book, at least not in the same way that Ardagh's Eddie Dickens and Awful End books are. The illustrations -- not by the author but copped instead from The Girl's Own Paper (0f 1891-1892) -- are a delight, if you go for that sort of stuff.

And I do.

I suppose I'll leave this out so that one day Owie stumbles across it. He probably won't know what to make of it all. Which is sort of the point. Sort of like the very stuff of our lives: cut and paste and cobbled together to create a mostly absurd story to tell our friends, families, and ourselves.

John Carlin, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation

fill in the blank...

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594201749/bigdaddyshomepa
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/books/review/Keller-t.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/playing-the-enemy-by-john-carlin-926490.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3559477/Review-Playing-the-Enemy-by-John-Carlin.html
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12202525

Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader is a little slip of a book, but a delight at that. And though perhaps not to everyone's taste, I can't imagine any devoted reader not taking a great deal of quiet, easy pleasure from it.

As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed, and passing her bedroom that night clutching his hot-water bottle, the duke heard her laugh out loud. He put his head round the door. "All right, old girl?"

"Of course. I'm reading."

"Again?" And off he went, shaking his head. (13)

It is witty and smart without being precious, and he seems to light into just about everyone with equal, quiet glee; though perhaps the monarchy (in the person of the "real" Queen, the flesh and blood Elizabeth II) comes in for it more than others. It's hard to know, for She is rather a happy warrior, if a lonely and initially unwitting one at that. I'd stand with her.

And that's all to Bennett's favor.

Jonathan Brent, Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia

I seem to have something of a literary fetish for Stalin. Odd coming from someone whose grandfather died in the gulag?

Young Stalin, Koba the Dread, Revolution on my Mind... Maybe it's just totalitarianism. Maybe there's something in me. Maybe there's something I imagine might be in Stalin to explain... what? Why we're so cruel? How it is that after millions dead we still act the way we do, in ways both small and large?

Not quite memoir, nor history, Jonathan Brent's Inside the Stalin Archives is a pleasing mix of both, with a strong dose of current events thrown in; perhaps to justify the "Discovering the New Russia" subtitle. I'm not sure there is any substantially new ground turned over in the work, but Brent is a good writer with some interesting stories and an eye for entertaining and telling detail (though he does, occasionally, overwork the latter).

The most telling detail, for me, is the story Brent repeats at least twice and which he closes the book with (a struggle with trying to understand what's happening in Russia; why the figure of Stalin, as a revered figure, persists; why anti-Semitism has exploded... again): Stalin chastising his son for taking advantage of his name -- "Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, not even me!"

If I ever really understood that, could feel that, I would be dead to everything. But to try to understand that? Look around you: we have to try.

Paul Madonna, All Over Coffee

Paul Madonna's All Over Coffee is a marvelous book. It is a collection of strips from a daily and Sunday comic series that Madonna did for the San Francisco Chronicle. The text is minimal, poetic often (without being pretentiously so, though there's a slip here and there), and the drawings are just beautiful.

As I was thumbing the book in the bookstore I was immediately reminded of the work of Ben Katchor, who Madonna notes briefly as an influence in his Afterword (more on that later). And I love Katchor.

But whereas Katchor is, perhaps, playfully surreal, Madonna is astonishingly focused and detailed and yet at the same time stripped down. There are no people in his work which makes it at one and the same time both entirely your own and oddly unreal. The text accompanying each picture is evocative and more like a snippet of conversation overheard among... well, almost ghosts. I think this is part of what gives the pieces their haunting, ethereal beauty.

Madonna also includes a rather extensive Afterword, where he goes into great depth of the hows, whys, and wherefores of the strip. Interesting, all of it. And he is a good writer on the whole. Yet there seems something... obsessive isn't the word. Unnecessary? Clearly (though rather perplexingly to me) the strip was controversial -- perhaps for its minimalism? -- and the Afterword reads not so much as an apologia (which would be insufferable) but rather as an effort to explain. In great detail. So that you have the opportunity to understand. Everything.

Wholly unnecessary. Though clearly Madonna felt compelled. Well good on him. No worries. But you? You go ahead and enjoy the strips -- they're marvellous.

John van de Ruit, Spud

John van de Ruit's Spud feels like something of a throwback. It's the story -- in the form of a diary -- of a 14 year old boy's first year at boarding school in South Africa. It's not particularly brutal, but hardly wistful or overly-romanticized. It's just fun. Familiar -- even to those like myself who never went to boarding school (though perhaps I did just enough summer camps away to connect) -- without being cringe-inducing or uncomfortable.

There is the requisite death (without dwelling on it or maudlin drama; these are 14 year old boys, after all, not 50 year old men channelling 14 year old boys), a grand drama (the school is staging a production of "Oliver"), lots of farting, barfing (not so much connected to the...), drinking (the majority being done by the adults), madness, and sex, sex, sex. Or rather talk about sex. The sex that is had, if it is actually had, happens off-stage.

Like much of the life of a 14 year old boy.

Good fun, on the whole.

Though now, I suppose, I really ought to turn my attention back to "serious" South African literature. And we all know what that means (though someday I do wish someone would explain to me why): buggery. Lots and lots of buggery...

Edmund White, Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel

Rimbaud was something of a shit. Much more of a shit in his early years than the latter (such as they were -- dying at 37) but something of a shit through and through.

At least, such would Edmund White's Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel lead us to believe. And I have no reason to doubt. The double life, of course, refers to Rimbaud's (very) early attention to poetry (or rather, the "poetic" life & poetry -- the latter marking a sea-change in French verse; the former marked by his acting the part of a mammoth shit) and his subsequent turn away from poetry and, after fits and starts and plenty of dead-ends, refashioning himself as a trader in the Horn of Africa primarily.

I do wish there were more on those last years. White covers them but spends the bulk of this slim volume on those early years, as a poet, as a shit, as master of the poet Verlaine (no cuddly love muffin himself, I might add), and as terror and brute towards just about all others (as well -- for he was a terror and brute to Verlaine).

The book itself is put out by Atlas & Company, which has seemed to come out of nowhere to start publishing beautiful little books that, if nothing more, look fantastic. There were a few typos in this volume which I'm sure one of the editors read and thought, dear god!! I wish they weren't there. But they are.

Next up, Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia. Not immediately, but soon enough. I'm just rather happy to be free of Rimbaud.

Did I mention he was something of a shit?

Graham Greene, The Third Man & The Fallen Idol

It's been awhile since I've read any Graham Greene. A long while. And the Greene I've read in the last 10 years has been Norman Sherry's massive biography, Gloria Emerson Loving Graham Greene, and... oh, there was a slight little volume of his Kurtzian trip up the Congo.

I picked up the bundling of two of his novellas -- The Third Man & The Fallen Idol -- for a dollar and set it aside for the trip home. Disappointing? No. But they are no The Power and the Glory. Nor am I the same -- boy? man? -- that read Power and The Comedians and Our Man in Havana and... I kind of miss that boy. Not wholly, but for the way things sang in me.

And it's rather odd, let me tell you, to be reading Graham Greene and thinking about Joan Didion. The narrative trope of Greene's "The Third Man" -- the reconstruction of events from notes, testimony, personal recollection, files -- reminds me so much of Didion's novels. Don't ask me which ones, I'm not home with my library. Not Play It As It Lays but maybe The Last Thing He Wanted? Democracy? A Book of Common Prayer?

I love Didion. I loved Greene. I love my memory of Greene (which is vague and dreamy and wrapped up with crossing myself in European cathedrals).

Because now, of course, different things sing. Which is why I keep reading. And which is why I'm looking forward to finishing up Sherry and reading Greene's selected letters. And why, one day, I am sure I'll reread The Power and the Glory and ache and wonder why. Again. It's just, now, I'm not expecting an answer.

Charles Bukowski, Come On In! New Poems

Unlike the last Bukowski I read, Come On In! did take hold of me. Not for the usual reasons, though (such as they are).

This is the first collection where Bukowski was showing his age. Showing his age and, at times, almost a maudlin side. And an increasingly self-deprecating humor and playfulness. The latter being, to me, and my passing familiarity with his work, the most striking.

unconcerned with
petty argument
we have floated free...
giant macho soaring
balloons!

WHEE!"

"gender benders" (247)

It just rings and sings and laughs unlike anything else of Bukowski's that I can remember.

The end of the collection collapses into ruminations on aging, marking -- and accepting -- as old and dying everything that once simply was, and perhaps was run hard. The poems "old poem", "older", "everything hurts", "husk", "cancer", and the collection closing "mind and heart" -- among so many others -- present an almost gentle man, so at odds with the image evoked in the mythology and so much of his poetry.

It's intriguing. A little startling too. And part of me wants my tough guy back.

Philip Roth, Indignation

My, my... I'm a bit of a late convert to Philip Roth, only discovering his works (that means actually reading them) in the last few years.

He's a hell of a writer.

His characters are pretty much bastards. And Marcus Messner, the protagonist of Indignation, is really no different. But who among us -- and I guess by "us" I mean the once modestly gifted late-teenage/early-twenties male -- isn't or wasn't a bastard at some point, an arrogant, self-satisfied know-it-all with a chip on his shoulder? His sheer pig-headedness and egoism (in the more clinical sense of the word?) is discomfiting and quite off-putting.

But in some sense I suppose it's what I admire most about Roth: his willingness to stick with these nasty folks, to play out the worst (and the banally callous), to see not redemption at the end but life (and death) and the very real messiness of it all -- even when it leads to the laughable but ultimately grotesque "Great White Panty Raid of Winesburg College."

The narrative is a little more gimmicky than most; the story a rather odd throwback (mirroring the setting). Does it work? I think so. Maybe. I'm kind of... ambivalent about it (which is also the sense I get from the Gates and Kakutani reviews in The New York Times -- I do think it could make a helluva film). But I've been ambivalent about most of the Roth I've read. And I continue to pick him up and... well, I guess I'll continue to pick at and worry that inner bastard through Roth; at a somewhat safe distance.

Jane Mayer, The Dark Side

Sigh.

Or maybe it's more properly, "Ugh!"

At last, though, I'm finished reading Jane Mayer's, The Dark Side. And I say that not because it was a bad book -- not at all -- but rather because it is such a good book. So thoroughly and unremittingly effective in what it sets out to do: detail how we, the United States, has become a state that uses torture.

That's it.

That's bad enough. For me. And difficult enough to wrap my head around -- and impossible to accept in any real terms. That's my failing.

There is a point in the book that Mayer discusses the sense in which on paper many of the techniques described -- stress positions, extremes of hot and cold, sensory deprivation (or overload), humiliation, etc -- don't seem like much, don't seem to rise to the level of torture individually. And yet the cumulative effect, stacking one such practice on top of another, can brutalize.

And it dawned on me then why this was proving so hard for me to read: Mayer never stops. It's one case after another, one brutalization following the last, in all its gory detail of pulverized flesh and furtive masturbation and hooded beatings and... Despite reservations within the government and military, despite court rulings, the apparatus keeps pushing on, removing players, revisiting and revising legal rulings so that our agents can continue. At some point I just wanted her to stop. To spare me the details.

She never does. Because there's been no end to it. Still.

Ugh.

Sigh.

Hummingbird: Magazine of the Short Poem 19.1 (September 2008)

Almost without fail, I tear into a Hummingbird when it arrives.

Okay, perhaps that's an unfortunate choice of words. A little gruesome that, and perhaps a little too... active? passionate? frenetic? a description of my relationship with the journal. It's much more like I curl up and read through. Usually once but sometimes twice (perhaps at some remove).

It's a quiet, sometimes far too earnest, but always pleasant time. The best issues have a few short pieces that strike just the right chord -- with me, with the season. with... something.

Art Stein's "The Poet" is just such a piece:

Her
attempts
to plagiarise
God
have not
gone well
lately

Marvelous.

Charles Bukowski, Dangling in the Tournefortia

Bukowski or Chiasson? Chiasson or Bukowski? Dangling in the Tournefortia or Natural History?

I went with the safe pick. The known. What felt easy, for the last weekend of summer. Bukowski.

Perhaps known too well. I won't say that I was bored by Dangling, but... There was nothing gripping here. Nothing new. Of course, it could be argued that there's little "new" in Bukowski as we step from collection to collection -- I'm willing to own that as much as the fact that it might have been... well... just me that failed in the reading. Wrong time. Bored with the prospect of heading off to the track, hammering away at the typer, hammering away at my liver and my lungs.

First published in 1981, it sits roughly in the middle of his living production (the sheer volume of posthumous collections makes his oeuvre exceptionally top-heavy; the Tupac of the poetry world). So maybe he was tired. Maybe he was bored.

Or maybe it's all just a crap-shoot and we can't analyze these things too much. I'll stop trying. And I know I'll read more Bukowski. When he does grab me, he's an awful lot of fun...

Ceridwen Dovey, Blood Kin

I'm not sure what to make of Blood Kin. Or rather, I'm not sure what I make of Dovey's novel.

No doubt it is, in no small part, because I have a hankering after a strong sense of place. And Blood Kin exists in that netherworld reminiscent of Coetzee's work (to whom she has been compared -- it's rather an obvious parallel to draw, not the least because of her own personal geography; Coetzee also provides a blurb for the jacket). No blame in that.

And the novel works. A bit fantastic; more broadly fantastic than Coetzee's work, which to my thinking is so effective because it takes that ethereal No-Place and grounds it so thoroughly and starkly in one individual. Dovey's work weaves together six narrators. It works. For the most part.

Part of my quest for place is rooted in the fact of it being summer -- and my hankering after our own, my own, American South -- and my continuing search for a sense of South Africa (draw your own conclusions). I wouldn't say I expected it in Dovey, but I had half a mind looking for hints of it.

Ah, but it's a new day, and I'm getting old; I should yield more freely to the gifts of the young.

I will be interested to read what comes next. I suppose a short story in The New Yorker is inevitable -- following in the footsteps of other arguably African Next Big Things (Adichie and Akpan come immediately to mind).

In the meantime, you can read a review of Blood Kin in the New York Times, listen to an interview on NPR, peruse her website, and view some video of her on YouTube -- on her book, on power, and on beauty; as well as a reading or two.

The cover, by the way, is about as striking a cover as I've seen in a long while. It just looks good on the shelf.

Eric Hobsbawm, On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy

Hobsbawm's On Empire is a rather pedestrian presentation of the tottering, unstable American empire; an "empire" deserving of the quotes, unlike any that has gone before (because it exists in a world unlike any that has gone before). In very simplistic terms, then, it seems to me that the history Hobsbawm presents -- more often than not in glancing comparisons to the past British empire -- is of limited use for anything other than setting off how the times are so very different.

Ah, but what is history "for" after all... Lordy, it's too early.

In setting off the times and the American "empire" from others that have gone before he succeeds rather well. There are, too, touchstones that Hobsbawm returns to time and again that bear keeping in mind: that inter-state wars have largely fallen by the wayside, that armed conflict tends to be on a smaller scale, yet its impacts on civilian populations has magnified; that there is no territorial underpinning to the American "empire," it being instead largely a matter of force projection than territorial coherence, or even incoherence (and thus, any pax Americana is necessarily an attempt to impose or keep the peace without, whereas in the past -- for instance, pax Britannia -- it has referred to a peace the within the empire, albeit a peace that has been aided by peace without).

But not surprisingly for a book of collected addresses, it doesn't quite hold together. Nor, I suppose, should it be assumed that it will. Too bad, on the whole; though not a bad read. It has left me with a few things to think about... if no great insights.

Charles Bukowski, Bone Palace Ballet

Back to one of the old stand-bys. Bukowski.

I find it impossible to "date" his work -- early? late? somewhere in-between? It all seems in-between: between worlds, times, memories, moments. And that's probably the great draw. In fact, I'm sure of it. Feed the inner-rebel, the angry young man, and yet maintain a bit of the dilettante sensibility: sleep with whores and go home to Mahler; get drunk and fight and go home to the typer and hammer out a bit on Dostoyevsky.

But there's something a little different about Bone Palace Ballet. Not on the whole. But he writes of his daughter and far more of his wife than I can remember in previous books. ("In previous books" only in the order of my reading -- "in other books".) And of his age -- though there is less surrender than simply the fact in it.

And he does have perhaps the most unblinking assessment of wannabe writers I have read anywhere:

"the weak"

are always proclaiming that
they are now going to concentrate
on their work, which is usually
painting or writing,
it is known, of course, that they have
talent, they simply haven't... well...

And on he goes. Oh my... ouch. Truly. True. For some? For most? For many? For me?

For me? No. I hope. Still. Ouch.

Calvin Trillin, Deadline Poet: My Life as a Doggerelist

I've always really enjoyed Trillin's work. While I haven't read any of his food books (for which he is widely... known? published?), I developed a taste for his memoirs and reportage (of which the most recent that I've seen is "The Color of Blood" and "Capital Fellows" -- in issues of The New Yorker from the past months) and thoroughly enjoyed his novel, Tepper Isn't Going Out.

I never was one for his "Deadline Poet" schtick, and I don't think it's just because of my own pretensions as a poet. I don't, for that matter, think my pretensions have much to do with it. It just... Well, I didn't think his "doggerel" (his word; I'd probably use, in my pretension, "light verse") was all that funny.

But I was at a poetry reading with a friend, was looking for something light, saw Trillin's Deadline Poet sitting by the elbow of the arm that held the hand which held my head as I half paid attention and half reflected on the pretensions of these other poets, and thought: what the hell, I like his stories.

Ugh. Nothing.

It's not just the (Trillin-tagged) gray, bland quality of the Bush I years (around which most of the book and Trillin's doggerel revolves) but there's just nothing to it all. The core -- the verse -- never much appealed to me but I suppose I expected or hoped the stories around it all to redeem. John Sununu? C. Boyden Gray? Early Clinton (Bill)?

I don't know, maybe I've become too earnest. But it left me cold. At least it's finished. And on we go.