Death, "For the Whole World to See"

Sheesh. Great lost Detroit black punk band, who recorded seven singles in and around 1974 with the help of Funkadelic producer Don Davis, who must not have done much but turn the recorder on and let it bleed. Certainly some MC5 ringing in their ears, little Stooges, not much metal in the fast stuff but some in the bluesy slower stuff: the tremendous thing about these songs is not who they sound LIKE, but who FOLLOWED them and sounded like them. Particularly the Bad Brains, who either listened to this in their sleep or are these guys children. The stuttering drums, the crushing guitar riffs, the simple-as-brain-damage refrains, the dum-dum-bullet-stupid bass: I'm such a troglodyte at heart! "Keep on Knocking" is the standout, but "Rock n Roll Victim" is the Bad Brains-ish one for sure. Love the songs, love the narrative (brought to me, pathetically enough, by a New Yorker article about them this week. But it made me crank some Bad Brains for the wife, and we thought we were hearing some lost Kiss or some neanderthal Van Halen for sure. For thor's sake buy it (not that I did) and give the guys some money after all these years.

The Suspect, L. R. Wright

A quietly satisfying mystery novel, remniscent of Simenon: one finds out WhoDunIt in the first pages, but the book unfolds as as WhyDunIt, a masterful character study set in a small town in British Columbia featuring a Royal Mountie detective, a librarian, and two old men, principally, but other characters are quickly and deftly sketched.

There is very little violence, except implied, or recalled: the murder of one very old man by another very old man. The reason for the crime comes out slowly, through flashbacks. The tremendous natural landscape of BC plays a role too, as a destructive force each character struggles against, as a creative force each character struggles to find a nourishing spot within.

Sleep while I Sing takes place after The Suspect: the detective and the librarian are repeating characters, and their relationship, romantic, emotional and intellectual, is important in both books.

Palladio by Jonathan Dee

I read Palladio with excitement and curiosity, a novel about the advertising business (and other things). My good friend and fiction reviewer without peer Donna Rifkind had recommended Dee's new novel, The Privileges, but I had to wait for my hold at the public library, and snapped up Palladio in the meantime. Dee is a morbidly interesting writer -- that is, I had no idea I was so interested in the world of advertising, the contemporary world of advertising, as well as a thumbnail history of advertising in America in the past fifty years, until Dee began telling me a story about a young man and an older man in that business. Oh yeah, there's a woman too, but it's mostly about advertising. Dee will be compared (by others certainly, and now by me) to Tom Wolfe, since there is a "masters of the universe" sort of a feel to his protagonists (even more so The Privileges) and if I had ever been able to finish a single Wolf novel, I might even make the comparison ring true. But I haven't. Still recommend this book, though: Dee has a marvelous gift.

So I get the new one finally and I'm in a tizzy of anticipation, glancing at it on my nightstand, dutifully (and happily, if in a hard-working sort of way) finishing David Mitchell's stunning Cloud Atlas before I dig in. And The Privileges is a good read, compelling, and Dee once again makes several uber-rich lives somewhat transparent to me and interesting, but on the whole the new one was a disappointment, second half of the book never really delivers on the thesis grandly contstructed in the first half -- that is, a successful couple, I mean so successful that in the second half of the novels pedestrian details like actual numbers of dollars and how many millions have vanished completely , a successful couple (and their couple of somewhat less successful, if gorgeous, children) will have to eventually pay the piper in some fashion for all their success. They don't pay. The wife's father dies, the husband blows out his knee during one of his fanatical workouts, they must stand by their daughter after she is in a bad car wreck where some people apparently die, after partying for several days and nights with her at one of her family's many luxury homes, and the son is held hostage by an "outsider artist" he is considering promoting. (I'm not making that outsider artist bit up, though it sounds like I am.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas is a tour de force. A lengthy "novel" consisting of six novellas that move chronologically from the early 19th century to the distant post-apocalyptic future in the first half of the book, then reverse and run backwards in time in the second half (from p.a. future to 19th century, so we end where we began), and which six novellas are linked with what at first seem to be casual coincidences (the diary chronicling a sea voyage in the first novella becomes a tattered rare book that a young composer in the 1930s finds and reads in the second novella, a piece by the young composer is heard in the third novella), it as ambitious and experimental and daring as it is compellingly and closely written in each of the six wildly-different narratives.

The Hidden Fortress, Akira Kurosawa

My son and I saw THE HIDDEN FORTRESS at AFI Silver yesterday afternoon, what a masterpiece! The 21-year old Misa Uehara as the Princess was particuarly astounding, more than holding her own next to the redoubtable Toshiro Mifune as the General, and Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara as the two peasants reluctantly accompanying the Princess across ... See Moreenemy territory. They are equal parts Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, the grave-diggers from Hamlet, and reputedly George Lucas's models for C3PO and R2D2 in Star Wars. A stunner.

Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy (1971)

Forty-five. It is strange how little one changes. The psychologists are all wrong about puberty. Puberty changes nothing. This morning I woke with exactly the same cosmic-sexual-religious longing I woke up with when I was ten years old. Nothing changes but accidentals: your toes rotate, showing more skin. Every molecule in your body has been replaced but you are exactly the same... The scientists are wrong: man is not his own juices but a vortex, a traveling suck in his juices.

Blame by Michelle Huneven

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

So... no review yet, Seana? OK i get it -- this brilliant book speaks for itself, it's the story i most wish i'd written by the writer i most wish i were. first experience of it was a vinyl LP (yes i'm old) recorded book from the library -- first 2 chapters, read by kvjr. himself. (the other 2formative lps were spoken chapters of walden and george carlin's am/fm.) read the book soon thereafter and over & over since, and thanks to it i am perpetually (like billy pilgrim) unstuck in time, and convinced (like the tralfamordians) that life's just a bowl of cherries, i.e. a collection of vividly tasted moments, occurring simultaneously & ever accessible in the 'here and now.') point is... thank you, kvjr, and thanks sean for bringing him to mind.

I quote (without permission, thus far) a comment by my old and deep friend Steve Hayes, a mentor, nay, magister!, whom I am lucky enough to have held on to all these years, a comment spurning me to complete this hapless posting of a cover image of my beloved Schlacthaus Funf, which Steve and I probably read for the first time within a year or two of each of at Gonzaga High School. Yes, a terribly special book, a memorable book which I too have re-read over the years without any real need, since whole paragraphs seem to spring to memory whenever I wish, untrue about almost every other novel I have read in my life, a life which will be most notable for Number Of Novels Consumed, if nothing else.

First and foremost, the prose style is beautifully simple and profound, one reason it was such a controversial smash when it was published (1969), as it finds avid fallow soil in the adolescent mind. The simple declarative (but no less allusive) sentences are still rigidly effective after so many years. After a fervent teen following in the 1970s, it has been widely banned and contested as suitable reading material for high school students, ever since, the way they bury a book in Amurica.

The number of Germans burned to a crisp in the fire-bombing of Dresden may very well be closer to 25,000 than to the 132,000 that Vonnegut claims, and this may be of import to the burnt-bean-counters of miliary logistics, but Vonnegut's moral and aesthetic claim that this ruined the subsequent imaginary life of his poor hero Billy Pilgrim is without challenge, vide PTSD ruining the lives of hundreds of war veterans in the past 20 years who witnessed far less numerical slaughter in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Second and foremore, it is an anti-war novel about a war -- WWII -- still roundly acclaimed as "the last good war." And a good 'un it undoubtedly is in the prism of history, the systematic defeat of a global menace. But Vonnegut sticks to his man's eyes -- Billy Pilgrim's -- a fragile set of eyes to begin with, that crumple in the very first instance of hands-on warfare. And Vonnegut is more concerned with the larger lens of the years that follow Billy Pilgrim's brief, utterly naive service in the very last months of the Second World War, as Billy returns to America and collapses slowly and inutterably over the 25 years that follow.

For me, at least now when the assurance of science fiction printed literature has abided a great deal (who cares now that you can buy the game and BE THE SHIT, right?), the science fiction sections of the novel are not as moving as they once were, but they certainly provide a counterpoint, and it's important to remember the vital emergence of science fiction in American literature in the 1950s and 1960s (Slaughterhouse Five lost out to no less than Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness (another shatteringly good "sci fi" title) in 1970 for both the Hugo and the Nebula Award, no small shit for us pointy-headed sci fi fans at the time).

It seems to do that rare thing in penetrating a harsh shared space between realistic fiction and "speculative fiction," where the jump to speculative is a result of something real, is a psychological adjustment, and makes more sense than just the pure fantasy realm.

There, Steve: it's what I got, at the moment. But I hear you, and adore it much the same as you did, and do.

Also snuck in the surprisingly good 1973 film of same right after I read this -- Ame liked it too -- it had this gooey early 1970s film technique to it that was jes right.

The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

Drunken Angel, 1948 film by Akira Kurosawa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdyVxVvTVXo

Lit by Mary Karr and The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around. - GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908

I'm going to try to combine an appreciation of books side by side. It had occurred to me already, late in Karr's memoir, that I might find some friction and frisson by writing about both while balanced on one beam, before the late-breaking development that she falls for Merton and converts to Catholicism herself.

This book didn't dazzle me like Liar's Club did (now due for a revisit, seventeen years after I first read it), and I totally missed Cherry. But it grew on me. Almost tossed it aside halfway through -- I don't love non-fiction, particularly memoirs -- there's this pathetic, completely naive reader in me (the larger part, for sure) who listens to voices in narrative and believes they are real, despite the genre -- and I had niggling concerns throughout this book that I actually might hate the speaker and that because she was in fact a real person, this bothered me to no end.






How embarassing that I'd never read this earlier. A gorgeous, profound meditation on living and meaning.

The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows, not by clarity and substance bu by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intelletct that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything. (p. 29-30, Harcourt Brice, 1998, 50th Anniversary Edition.)

The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most; and his suffering comes to him from things so little and trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being that, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves. (p. 91)

Lowboy by John Wray

The Comforters by Muriel Spark

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

Land of the Blind by Jess Walter

Tink Desk Unit

Past blasting. Tiny Desk Unit, a seminal DC new wave band, was recently featured in a Washington Post Magazine story about the old 9:30 Club. I do remember them playing at Columbia Station in 1980 and that I went with my oldest sister Maureen–I also remember being heartbroken over one thing or the other and spending much of the time that night in the car, sullenly smoking cigarettes. Courtesy of the TDU's keyboard players website, I’ve now listened for a good hour – and am struck by how good they are, unlike other bands of that era, like the Insect Surfers (I have a couple IS songs and don't care for them at all). But TDU has a sort of a talking heads funky thing going on (bassist and drummer were black) that I love – and the chick singer sounds like the Slits/Sleater-Kinney.

Fantastic quality video of them from 1981 is here -- http://www.bobboilen.info/Tiny_Desk_Unit_Music/concert_video_files/tdu_hurrah.mov

Love and Desperation music by Sweet Apple

The shameless Roxy Music Sirens album cover ripoff was what first attracted me here -- but digging in, I discovered the songwriter/singer was the lead singer of the underrated Cleveland band Cobra Verde, and the drummer (and occasional lead-guitar soloist) was none other than J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. More 1970s-roots-mining here: the first song and single sound like an undisovered Kiss track with a better drummer and a messy electric guitar attack. Still listening, still like it a great deal. Three thumbs up.

Unincorporated Persons of the Late Honda Dynasty poems by Tony Hoagland

Trying to review this volume of poems for Tikkun, not crazy about it yet. Do like Hoagland's earlier volume, Donkey Logic. Another entry in the American surrealistic tradition I can't see to get enough of.

Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett

Good example of a current-affairs novel that really works. Uses the first Gulf War as a back-story, and the mortage-securities-Wall Street meltdown as front-story.

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Bit of a slog, but I liked this. Read Johnson's Fiskadoro many years ago, when he was first getting published, and liked it alot. This is the first Vietnam novel that I've read in years and years. There's a certain Apocalypse Now build-up to it, one central character behind a mythical American advisor who may or may not have "crossed over" to the native side, out of an obscure faith in the power and imagery of the Viet Cong's nativism. The CIA ma, the "colonel's" nephew, waits patiently for his assignment, the running of a double agent.

Another narrative thread concerns two brothers, one in the military in Southeast Asia, and the younger brother who stays behind. Their roots are desperate lower-class, blue-collar, white-trash American Southwest, and Johnson weaves a series of phone calls and brief meetings over the years where the brothers finally get to know each other for the first time.

Another interesting character is a woman involved with a charity mission in Thailand and Vietnam, slowly going crazy from her isolation and exposure to the horrors of the plight of children in nations completely obliterated by wars being fought between superpowers that use their tiny backward nation as a battlefield.

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Re-read this, first time since mid 1970s. Loved it. It seems more commonplace now, some of the literary conventions Vonnegut uses and reuses here -- the author-as-character, the coincidences, the sci-fi plot tie-ins -- but I think for the time, 1973, it was revolutionary.

Three to See The King by Magnus Mills

Odd odd book about a man who lives in some odd unnamed contemporary desert and cavern wilderness in a tin house. Seems to be a savior-fable, centering on a cult of drifters on a western pilgrimmage to build and live in their own tin houses, under the leadership of a charismatic messiah-like man. Weird, weird. Unsatisfying. But I read it anyway, because I like Mills' other two books so much.

All Quiet on the Orient Express by Magnus Mills

A book that seems to be a first version of The Restraint of Beasts: again, a rootless young man
stays on after summering in a caravan in rural Britain, takes on a job doing odd jobs for an eccentric man, painting rowboats, fixing machinery, running errands, delivering milk.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer

A beautiful and profound book. Two sections, two different stories -- or are they about the same person? or are they different versions of the same story. In the first, Jeff, a bitter, disillusioned freelance writer, attends the Bienale art exhibition in Venice, mostly because he's bored of London and wants the free stuff he'll get as a travelling reporter for a magazine. He meets a beautiful, mysterious, passionate American woman and has a torrid affair.

In the second, an unnamed narrator travels to Varanasi, again bitter, again disillusion, and undergoes a spiritual and metaphysical catharsis, ending as a bearded, homeless ascetic who seems to be falling into psychosis.

The only connection between the two novellas? In the first, the woman mentions to the man that she might next be travelling to Varanasi, and he says that he too also wants to go there at some point.

Yellow Dog by Martin Amis

Liked it, at least until the last third or so when it became boring and lost momentum, pitching and yawing about like the jet plane about to plummet to the air, one of the main plot developments of the conclusion.

Amis does not write a careless sentence, there are no quotidian moments.

Made the mistake after finishing it of looking up some reviews, which were almost universally bad.







a rawther fetching picture of MA from London's National Portrait Gallery, sort of like a Mick Jagger who stayed in school.

Await Your Reply

The Man in the Wooden Hat

Inglourious Basterds

I'm no enormous Tarantino fan -- the train started and stopped at Pulp Fiction for me -- but I thought this was a tremendous movie, mostly for the extraordinary performance of Christopher Waltz, who managed to in three languages to be the most menacing, attractive, complex antagonist I think I've seen in film in years. If he hadn't been a Nazi, I would think he would have been nominated for Best Actor.

The three languages thing, for me, was a big deal. Sure, Brad Pitt's a cutie, and I understand he studied for months with a serious Ozark Mountains dialogue coach so he could sound so convincingly Carolina as he did -- but come on! Waltz sounded menancing and competent and human and believable in THREE ROMANCE LANGUAGES -- I'm quite sure he didn't need an "accent" coach in any of them.

The Tin Drum - new translation by Breon Mitchell

This will not comment on the new translation, too much: having read in the early 1980s, the original acclaimed Ralph Manheim translation originally published in 1959, I can't pretend to remember that version clearly enough to compare the two, although my copious excited undergraduate notes in the margin bear witness to how struck I was with the language of whatever the original might be. All I can do is compare my original underlinings with the same passages in the new one.

Mitchell, to his credit and to my slight discomfort, adds an intriguing afterword about the differences between the two translations. He wants to make clear that there were things in the original manuscript that just couldn't be printed in 1959 (although not that many, as one of Grass's multitude of prodigious literary gifts is his ability to lyrically and cryptically euphemize without quite having to hand you the keys to the car -- Martin Amis comes to mind, among others, although I'm sure both Amis and Grass would point to Nabokov as the more unitary model in dressing up one's salaciousness). Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman also comes to mind, since we hear the narrator's voice incessantly on every detail of existence preceding his birth, although he is not born until the end of chapter 3 ("Besides, the nurse had already cut my umbilical cord. There was nothing more to be done" in the original, substitute a semi-colon for the period after "cord" in the new translation. Can you hear me now? Mitchell seems to be saying.)

Or, for instance, in the original, "As always where the future of Poland is at stake, the Virgin Mary was in on the proceedings" has become "As always when the future of Poland was at stake, the Virgin Mary appeared in the crowds at these conflagrations," leading me easily to pick the former over the latter, going with easy colloquialism of Manheim over the anti-slanging of Mitchell. "Impersonating a meat-colored baby" is now "Impersonating a reddish blue baby." Little stuff like that. To Mitchell's credit, he does claim to have restored Grass's original long sentences in many places that Manheim had turned to a series of short sentences, softening some of Grass's rhapsodical, poetic stretches as a way of introducing him to a large American audienc. The long sentences as paragraphs are great stuff, and seem totally authentic to Grass's intent.

My notes of old go some distance in proving that, in 1981, I was struck by the forest, not the trees: I liked quotes, back then, stuff that could be plucked out and read aloud, as aphorisms. And there are certainl lots of them. But reading it now, relatively quickly, utterly sober, it is the sweep of the narrative that amazes me, and the intricate realistic sculpture of the landscape of Danzig, what Grass refers to as the "provincialism" of his novel, in his preface, where he also recalls wondering as a 29 year old why any self-respecting publisher would be interested in such a story steeped in a small-town locale like Danzig.

Faith Fox by Jane Gardham

Homeless Photographs by Tom Stone

http://tomstonegallery.com/

The Restraint of Beasts

This is a very funny, very dark and very powerful book. Kafka isn't the exact forbear, but he's up there in the tree someplace. For me the more immediate touchstone is Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, one of my very favorite novels. It concerns a fencing business in Scotland. The narrator has just been named foreman of a three-man team, by his efficient and stern boss, who is interested only in the improvement of the art of putting up cattle fences. The foreman tried to control his team of sullen, silent, lazy and disturbed workers, but to no avail. The plot revolves around (spoiler) the manslaughters they commit each of the three times they are sent on a job to either construct or create a farmer's cattle fence. It's hard to describe, obviously. And doesn's parse well into quotable moments, as the whole narrative

The Rivalry at Ford's Theatre

AMERICA Magazine's Outstanding Catholic Chief Executive of 2009

Michael Sean Winter's named Governor Martin O'Malley of Maryland as 2009's Catholic Executive of the Year (now that's a weird-looking trophy, one would guess), and blogged about it in AMERICA magazine here.

I added a comment in defense at the bottom of a chain of pro-lifer's complaints about Governor O'Malley's perceived "inaction" on abortion.

The Fallen Idol, directed by Carol Reed

Pure pleasure. From the director of The Third Man. Monumental score, creepy little touches everywhere, exquisite casting, and a happy ending.

Ralph Richardson is heartbreaking as the butler, earnest, witty, caring, and love-lost. The boy, played by Bobby Henrey, is wondrous. The tightly-plotted mystery can't help but bring to mind Hitchcock.

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

"As he often did when he left a place and his body was leaden with booze, he felt fat and orphaned."

"Two engineers walked behind him, talking about a busted flange, how it was going to take two hours, maybe three, to fix, and Ruth though, Two hours in this shithole? and then he heard it again -- a dry distant crack, and he knew that on the other side of those trees someone was playing baseball."

The Gathering by Anne Enright

It took me three different false starts, but I finally read The Gathering by Anne Enright (no relation, goddamnit) and found it, finally, very powerful, very moving.

That said, the first person narrator is one of the most singularly unpleasant voices I've ever head. Negative is her only tune.

This Side of Brightness by Colum McCann

War Bird by David Gewanter

War Bird, David Gewanter (Phoenix Poets: the University of Chicago Press, 2009) (review originally published in Tikkun Magazine) (Buy it)

As a wounded Afghanistan veteran has it in an email home in David Gewanter’s poem, “American Incognito,” “As a state…/Afghanistan is next to Mars.” Where does the imagination live, and what are its politics? In “Hamlet of Merano: The Lotus Eaters,” Gewanter plays with the roles of tour guide and literary historian, knotting together a poem from strands of history and literature, but makes something new of the aggrandizing narcotic of the place itself. The reader can live in a verbal space greater than physical perception or emotional recognition, in the fires sparked by juxtaposition. A town in the Alps between Italy and Germany, Merano is not only a geographic border, but also a cultural and historical one. Gewanter’s poem is an extraordinary guide to a Merano not in any record, one that hides in imagination’s untouchable shadow, ideal and replete. Pound wrote part of The Cantos in Merano; Kafka went there as a cure for tuberculosis (“even Kafka, scowling like Bogart/came to Merano once, for the waters…”, a wondrous quoting of the film Casablanca, which captures the film’s droll irony, as Rick says to Captain Renault, “I came to Casablanca for the waters,” and Renault replies, “The waters? What waters? We're in the desert,” to which Rick replies, “I was misinformed.”)

In the poem’s present tense, undergrad tourists (“… the ox-eyed/girls of Appalachia College (study abroad)/stretch for the castle’s champagne grapes, /or play hacky sack in short-shorts…/O to be a grape underfoot–”) are subordinated to the history of the place. Gewanter summons the Lotus Easters of Homer, Herodotus, and Tennyson, and the mystical plant that Homer’s sailors eat, that kills their desire to return to the ship, and keeps them locked in their dreams: “The eye sees what it remembers,/the imagination dreams its rut/is fresh, not tragical-comical-historical…/Who, pocketing the chilly grapes, would not/name himself king here,/and forget who is king?

We’re used to reading political philosophy, history, and cultural objects as themselves first--that is, as definite “non-fiction” texts that revel in linearity and objectivity. Journalism lassoes a topic at best with a fine sprinkling of detail. Gewanter uses politics, history, and culture, but not objectively: he proclaims his poems; character or setting lead, and develop in tone from the set of a character’s mouth, the suggestive atmosphere or shape of a landscape. His diction and associations trip you up and force you back to chaotic juxtapositions built within, or by, sentences; his syntax creates a history of his imagination, which we read as an imagining of our history.

In “1972: The Battery,” the weather, adolescent political feelings and sexual maturation (“the battery hums along the leg”), conspire with the first hints of adult ennui in the American summer of the Cambodian incursion. Two high school boys, the “Billboard Bandits,” are electrocuted during one of their pranks, and their school becomes a battleground. When the bombing in Cambodia begins, the radical students want to leave the flag at half-mast, their private grief for the Billboard Bandits mutating into a public outcry over the political decision. At end, the hippies and the football players face off in an American political contest in miniature, over keeping the flag down in shame, or up high in pride.

“American Incognito,” a startling longer poem, unites wounded Iraq war veterans at Walter Reed hospital, the discovery of the spine of a prehistoric beast found in Washington, DC in 1898, and a primer on breeding hawks. It’s an anguished political howling. A wounded vet who once burned poppies in Afghanistan now finds comfort and forgetfulness only in his morphine treatment (“gorked on pain relief cocktails”). And in the momentous year 2001 when the poem is set, the future that did happen wasn’t “monkeys talking” as in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rather, history stepped ahead all over our dreams for it, ridiculously (in the honoring of a Capitolosaurus dinosaur which never really was), politically (in the confused, negating tenure of George W. Bush), and tragically (in a chilling 9-11 reference to the moment “when Mohammed Atta decides he cannot date a waitress”). Soldiers patrol in a dust storm in Iraq, a scene crosscut with George W. Bush’s DUI and Laura Bush’s “vehicular manslaughter” conviction in high school (“the car found guilty”).

Gewanter shows great range to superb effect: from “Baudelaire’s Day Book (September, 1993: The Cauliflower)”--an imagistic prose-poem of a death-bed vigil--to “War Bird: A Journal,” a mad riffing on the 2003 poets’ anti-war rally at the White House, in response to Laura Bush’s politically-minded cancellation of a poetry “salon”. There there’s “Desaparecidos: The Unspeakable,” a playful poem about modern critical poetical thinking that is also a moving elegy for the silence real grief imposes, when language fails us.

The poems are funny, vicious and swirling, many politically motivated, their ironic language lobbying for connections between strata of meanings. How do politics and history and culture sound in the subjective, as something spoken by the poet who cares about the texture of language, the privileged placement of sound and sense, above a layer of “meaning?” Gewanter’s history feels personal, a history he creates consciously in the present, as a preparation for the future. We want some of our poems, at least, to be beyond knowing, larger than plot-driven, not necessarily lessons in how to feel or what to see, but voices we catch and chase, like a drowsy consciousness drifting toward sleep, suddenly sharply awake, enlightened or puzzled by possibility.

All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones

I'm reading All Aunt Hagar's Children, Edward P. Jones' second short story collection. It's good, depressing, dense, etc. The DC stuff amazes me, this whole rich novelistic life of the streets. He's got a particularly crushing line in the story "Root Worker" about my high school:

"Long before they reached 1st, N.E., Glynnis found that so much had changed, disappeared, but everything that was important to white people remained. Gonzaga High School. The railroad. After 1st Street, she saw that many of the places she had known as a girl were still standing, and that gave her heart some relief."

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

The final installment, not out in America until May. I broke down and bought it from Amazon UK. Fully worthy part three, inconceivable to me that he could sustain it over three length novels. This one concerns a shadowy government organization, sort of intelligence-ish, that runs foreign spies who've sought asylum in Sweden. More soon. Let's hope Hollywood doesn't t fuck up the movies.

Winter's Bone

Daniel Woodrell sure can write a sentence. He manages, in Winter's Bone, not only to come up with a convincing, emotionally-taut plot, but his lean, beautiful prose makes the entire journey through the Ozark white-trash countryside a wonder. His protagonist, 16 year old Rees Dolly, searches for her missing father, who has defaulted on a jail bond, unwittingly putting the house at risk for repossession where Rees lives in with her demented mother and two younger brothers. Rees is a supergirl, taking care of her charges tenderly and completely, teaching her younger brothers to shoot a gun in the fear that they will need the skill much sooner than later. Her relatives, a sprawling, vicious, secretive and ancient Ozarks clan, threaten her, succor her, and ultimately confound her in her search.