The band Dictaphone has, ironically, eschewed the use of voice in its two previous LP’s, Vertigo II and M.=Addiction, for a language of machine-like hisses, sighs, and glitches punctuated by sparse strings and euro-jazzy clarinet riffs.   This Belgian collective, led by composer Oliver Doerell, continues the formula on Poems from a Rooftop, but does include the spoken word on one notable track, “Rattle,” as well as elements of speech in the title song and “Maelbeek” (reference to a small “green space” in Brussels which many see as a monument in direct opposition to Belgium’s growing urbanization).  If the album title looks familiar,  it’s because you may remember that during Iran’s Green Revolution in 2009, citizens, in fear of government persecution, protested from their rooftops.

You’ll find Dictaphone under the genre “electronic,” which is, of course, misleading.  All recorded music is electronic in the sense that electronic signals are required to transmit sound to contemporary recording devices, even those we may call “digital,”  a distinction which complicates things even further (though it is true that there is no digital signal without an electronic one first).  Besides the fact that Dictaphone uses traditional classical instrumentation in it’s compositions, the “electronic” elements of the music are often sampled “field noises”–meaning they are sounds recorded from the world, rather than sounds created by “electronic” instruments, like a Moog, say, or, to complicate things again, an electric guitar.  If anything, these sound pieces are acts of resistance against the very idea of classification.  And yet this is a controlled rebellion, each tune unfolding carefully and melodically, respectful of the silence which makes it possible.

Behind the idea of the dictaphone, or recorded sound in general, is the idea of capture–arresting motion, which is life, and, by artificial means, fixing it in time.  And one wonders about these etchings in wax, the pressure of a stylus against a supple medium,  vibrations and currents switching from off to on, on to off, off-off and on again, silence to non-silence–sounds that in Tolstoy’s words are “too dreadfully exciting” to not find means of impression.

When I attempted this 100 books project the first time back in January of 2011, I began with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (read the review here), which had long been recommended to me by several friends/colleagues. I loved it, and it remains in the top 5 of my list of all time favorite books. I was excited to return to Atwood this year with The Edible Woman. I’m sad to report, upon its completion, that I didn’t think much of it.

The prose sounded distinctly Atwood (if I’m allowed to make that judgement, having now read only two of her many, many novels), but unlike in The Handmaid’s Tale, in which her vivid and lengthy descriptions are achingly beautiful and enrich the heartbreaking loneliness and despair found in the pages of that book, the details in The Edible Woman come across as unnecessarily long, boring, and a little self-indulgent, and I found myself sometimes skimming several paragraphs and thinking, Get on with it already.  

Additionally, the protagonist, Marion, is not very likable, which made it difficult to become invested in any of her conflicts. The other characters, who are also pretty unlikeable, are at least a bit more engaging, particularly Marion’s fiery and deceptive roommate, Ainsley, who tricks a man into impregnating her, as well as the mysterious Duncan, whose friendship with Marion threatens to dissolve her engagement. These two are the ones who kept me reading until I reached the end of the novel, long after my interest in Marion’s passivity and inaction had waned.

It’s impossible to talk about Atwood’s writing without talking about feminism (or protofeminism, as is the case with this novel, which was first published in the mid-1960s). The Handmaid’s Tale is layered with feminist themes, making clear through the compelling narrative what a loss it would truly be to both genders if society were to devolve into the alternate future that book presents. The Edible Woman, while exploring similar themes, delivers them much less successfully, and these ideas, like the characters, come across as frivolous and trivial.

I’ll of course continue to explore Atwood’s other work, but I can’t recommend this particular novel.

Be on the lookout for some poetry reviews in the coming weeks!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/opinion/and-the-winner-of-the-pulitzer-isnt.html

Rachman’s debut novel, which follows the reporters and employees of an international English-language newspaper in Rome, is really excellent. I read this book in two all-night blocks between midnight and six in the morning while almost constantly breastfeeding a week-and-a-half-old baby who has her days and nights very confused. So, I was grateful for such an enjoyable distraction. (My new daughter is awesome, but being awake all night is not my favorite life activity.)

Each chapter of The Imperfectionists offers an intimate glimpse into the personal life of someone from the paper, with short vignettes in-between that piece together the story of the paper’s original founder and publisher, Cyrus Ott, and the subsequent takeover of his son, Boyd, and then grandson, Oliver. The full realization of life in Rome falls a little short, but otherwise the chapters feel mostly complete and self-contained. They could almost stand alone as short stories, but they leave just enough untold that in order to get the full richness of the work, each chapter needs the others in order to be completely satisfying.

What I like the most about this novel is that it’s not beautifully written and is still absolutely great. (Which is not to say that it’s not well written, just that there was not a single point when I read a sentence and then stopped to think, Wow, lovely.) My favorite pieces of writing are usually ones that successfully create a strong story through gorgeous prose (think Karen Russell or Lorrie Moore), but Rachman’s book somehow doesn’t need pretty sentences—his more straightforward narrative is realistic and humorous and that works even better for the particular story he’s telling. The novel is entertaining, engaging, interesting, hilarious, and heartbreaking all at once, and this supplies plenty of momentum to keep the reader turning the pages.

Rachman’s writing is impressive in how much sympathy he manages to elicit for each of his characters, not all of them likable, especially when each has a relatively small space in which to develop. The chapters devoted to Arthur Gopal and Craig Menzies are especially heartwrenching, and I found Hardy Benjamin and Herman Cohen to be two of the most enjoyable protagonists. Truly though, each chapter is excellent, and Rachman’s account of journalism and the newspaper business is approached in an honest, relatable, and unsentimental way that I think greatly serves his book. The ending feels anti-climactic and thus a bit unsatisfying, but this is not a criticism of Rachman’s writing, since the conclusion of his novel is both realistic and appropriate. All in all, this was an incredibly great read.

Read it? Leave some thoughts below.

Damien Jurado's Maraqopa

I am wary of sincerity.  Is it because I am incapable of appearing to possess it even if I feel possessed by it?  I joked with a friend recently that I am capable of competing with almost anything but the hint of sincerity.  Its place in art necessarily troubled given that by definition the creative act is an artificial one, a construct by which feeling is enacted and/or elicited—sincerity remains misunderstood.  And yet it is undeniably present in certain works, despite cynics like myself.

Damien Jurado makes songs that miraculously conspire against their own forms, as if by some sleight of hand their very components disappear in service of unforeseen inevitabilities.  His voice, for instance, a highly honed instrument, even as it cracks plaintively at times, never appears to fuss with itself.  But there is nothing Zen here, no studied transparency in the service of anti-lyricism.  The voice is pleasantly dry yet capable of a wide range of feeling—the result an unperturbed elocution of complex affect.  The opener, “Nothing is News,” for instance, though soaked in psychedelic references like much of the album, using plenty of effects on Jurado’s usually unadorned vocal delivery, never quite betrays the sum of its parts, even as the noodling electric guitar soloing would normally be cause for some concern. If anything does dominate this impeccable 36-minute mix (if not Jurado’s whole catalog), it’s a kind of defeated desire—one could argue a desire for fully actuated expression, a desire we are blessed as listeners that this singer wisely allows to remain unfulfilled.

Guy Capecelatro III's North for the Winter

Guy Capecelatro III’s voice beguiles guile in its own reedy and muted pluck.  Like Jurado, he is best as a storyteller, his rhymes in songs like “Switch” tripping deftly over themselves, stumbling into the lives of his characters, as if onto a stage the world had built for them.  Capecelatro’s world is “something you can’t say/ though you’re in it every day;” he tallies the world’s absurdities like collected wooden figurines in an unadorned vitrine, pieces of lived experience you lift from the world and finger smooth “until you’re out of it” (”North Dakota”).  An artist to be treasured and, frankly, appreciated far, far more than he already is.

Andrew Bird is the least sincere of his fellow songwriters.  I would argue, in fact, that his brilliance comes from a constant struggle to subdue his insincerity into seemingly effortless forms.  His superior musicianship would be too easy a place to start, perhaps.    Yes, he’s impressed the likes of Yo-Yo Ma with his playing, and his whistling chops are unrivalled, but I look more towards his lyric sensibilities for possible explanations of his complex relationship to sincerity.  Put simply, he’s a clever Bird, this one.  Perhaps, irresistibly so.  What separates this album from his previous, Noble Beasts, though, which seemed a barrage of ideas, is a patience that allows each song the space to find its own unique shape. His phrasing here is typically flawless, and he is full of all the same tricks; the difference is that the magic arrives without introduction; it simply saunters into the spotlight and moves along coyly, leaving us wanting more.  He also does something lyrically I don’t think I’ve heard before: he not only leaves rhymes hanging to be fulfilled unexpectedly in the next line, but he even leaves some of them unsung like shadow-rhymes—preferring a calculated silence, which one could argue is, perhaps, the only real sincerity.

They Went On--Who's Afraid Of Richard Dreyfuss?

Another finished RPM Challenge and more shameless self-promotion!  I’m currently listening to Damien Jurado’s new album  Maraqopa and Guy Capecelatro III’s North For The Winter.  Lovely songwriting on both counts–two troubadours who’ve honed their songs to the white heat of a packed ice ball.  The 2012 music reviews are on the way.  Lots of good stuff dropping this year.  Stay tuned.  Per usual, I’d love any feedback about They Went On’s Who’s Afraid of Richard Dreyfuss?

Alexandra Fuller, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight           

It’s taken me awhile to write this review. I wanted some time to reflect on this memoir before commenting on it. In this book, Alexandra Fuller (“Bobo,” as she’s called throughout her childhood), recounts her experiences of growing up in South Africa with her parents and older sister, Vanessa. Her story is interesting, but I can’t say the same for the writing itself.

One of my goals this year was not to be quite so snobby about what I consider good literature, or at least to judge others less about what they deemed to be quality reading material. In my mind, part of this goal includes me not seeing a whole heap of merit in writing a bad review. At the end of the day, I’m just one reader. I’ve yet to publish a novel. So, you know, what the hell do I know anyway?

This book came highly recommended to me by several friends, and the premise is certainly promising. I learned a lot about South Africa, which Fuller successfully paints as simultaneously magical and terrifying with exactly the right dose of a child’s perspective. The characters are all also worth reading about; the least interesting, honestly, being Fuller herself, though she’s got a lot to live up, particularly in comparison with her fascinating mother, Nicola. Fuller’s mother is a beautiful disaster of a woman, a spirited alcoholic with a love for dogs who can’t quite seem to find her footing in an unforgiving country she loves fiercely. She is one of the most vivid and captivating characters in a book that I’ve come across in a long time.

There are places where Fuller’s writing is indeed lovely, and as someone with almost no background knowledge about South Africa in the 1980s, Fuller’s story is engaging. The issue I had with the memoir, mostly, was that the book itself didn’t hold up to my curiosity about her life. I would love to get a cup of coffee with Fuller. I’d love to go to a lecture and hear her talk about her childhood. But the parts of her upbringing and her family that were the most interesting somehow didn’t translate exactly right on the page—something felt missing while I was reading. It was possibly one of (or a combination of) these things: There were too many historical details in some places, or historical details without the proper context, or the order of the short chapters felt somehow inadequate, or there were places where I felt like I needed more information or that I didn’t have enough, and the story seemed to drag because of it.

Fuller also writes about her mother’s alcoholism and the death of several siblings without offering much reflection on these topics. I understand the inclination to avoid heavy-handedness or to steer away from memoir-writing-as-therapy, but I do think that memoir (over fiction) has a taller order to fill regarding at least some type of reflection on the events or experiences being written about, and in this way I felt the book also fell short.

Those concerns aside, there was certainly still much to praise in Fuller’s writing, and to follow Nicola through the eyes of Fuller as the family moves around Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Malawi, and Zambia alone is worth the read.

If others have read this book, I’m very curious to hear your thoughts on it.

They Went On

After having one of my songs featured on the first 2012 RPM podcast (I’m about twenty minutes in, the penultimate piece), They Went On (an odd moniker for a one-man band, I know) is glad to be done with the first draft of ten songs.  I’ve already cut one song and look forward to doing more tinkering, deleting, adding, etc… before the deadline at the end of the month.  Thanks again for the support.  Comments always welcome and appreciated.

Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Moore’s slim novel took me two tries. I sat down some number of months ago and read the first eight pages of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, the book’s opening section. It felt too dense and disconnected—I couldn’t find anything to grasp onto to pull myself through. I felt a little bored. I put the book away.

When I came back, the first eight pages were still slow, and it was still difficult to find my footing in the story. But then Moore cuts away from the present moment, where readers are with the protagonist, Berie Carr, and her husband, Daniel, in Paris, to Berie at fifteen, working at an amusement park called Storyland with her best friend Sils. In about two pages, the book suddenly becomes all the things I needed it to be—relatable, engaging—and it also very quickly becomes stunningly and beautifully written.

The book falls easily and naturally into a format that switches between Berie’s teenage life with Sils and her current adult life as she and her husband vacation in Paris. It’s meant for anyone who has ever been a teenager and now is not, for anyone who once had an idea about what their life might become and then entered reality, gained an adult perspective, grew up.

Moore nails the deeply complex and multi-layered lust-love that inhabits the intensely close friendships of teenage girls, as well as the longing and nostalgia one feels as an adult looking back on their younger self. She even brings life to the complacency, boredom, and resignation that accompany a marriage that is no longer fulfilling—a muted and lingering unhappiness. While doing all of this, she also writes gorgeously:

I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can only guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone? (17)

Read this book. It’s absolutely stunning.

Kathryn Stockett, The Help

I’m happy to report that so far I’m about two-and-a-half times as fast at reading than I am at reviewing. : )

Stockett’s novel chronicles the lives of several southern women in the early 1960’s: Black maids caring for white children and families, as well as a few of the white women who have hired them. Just home from college and swept up by the momentum of the early stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement, Skeeter Phelan, one of the books protagonists, begins to question the treatment of the black families in her town. Along the way, she forms a close bond with Aibileen Clark, a black maid working for one of her friends, and together they embark on a complicated, difficult, and secret battle toward social change.

I started reading this novel at my grandparents’ house in Savannah, Georgia over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, which gave the book a really interesting (and extremely appropriate) context. As a child, I remember listening to my mother tell me stories of her family’s own maid, Nelly, who cleaned the house and helped take care of her and her younger siblings when she was growing up in Atlanta, Georgia in the 1950′s and 60′s.

I had dozens of questions for my grandmother while reading The Help. Nelly started working for my grandfather’s aunts and uncles when she was just seventeen, and by the time she began working for my grandmother, she was in her mid-forties. (“You can never really tell their ages,” my grandmother told me when I asked. “Who, maids?” I questioned, knowing of course that this was not what she meant, but she said nothing.)

My grandmother spoke repeatedly about how lucky her family had been to have Nelly, how special she was, and how she was “one of the family.”

“Did you make her use a different bathroom?” I asked, since this was a pretty significant point of contention early on in The Help, and I was relieved when my grandmother balked at this question.

“What? Of course not. Sometimes she would get in the bath with the kids. We didn’t care. She was great.” Then my grandmother told me a story about letting my mother, as a toddler, go home with Nelly one weekend after my mother’s insistent begging. She even went to church with Nelly that Sunday. My grandmother spoke of this memory fondly, laughing happily even now, almost sixty years later, at the thought of her young Jewish daughter at Nelly’s church. “She had so much fun that weekend,” my grandmother said, “she talked about it for weeks afterward.”

“What did your neighbors think,” I asked. “Was this type of relationship the norm?”

“No,” she said, and here, for just a moment, she looked a little sad. “I guess we were considered progressive.”

It was interesting for me to think of my grandmother, who I find to be a fairly conservative woman, as someone who was once called progressive by her community like it was a dirty word.

Nelly died when my mother was in high school, shortly after ending her employment with my grandparents as they prepared to move to Savannah. My mother came home from the funeral miserable and angry. She was one of perhaps only a dozen or so people in attendance, and she was, my grandmother seemed almost certain, the only white person present. I regret that my mother is not alive today for me to ask her about her own experiences with Nelly, to compare her life to what’s laid out in Stockett’s novel. My grandmother told me that she had a hard time reading The Help. “I got through about forty pages,” she said, “and then I thought, ‘I lived this, why do I need to read about it?’”

But, I’m embarrassed to admit, even after the perspective I gained from those conversations, the time period and lifestyle conveyed in this book were still difficult for me to comprehend in a realistic, meaningful way. Stockett does an excellent job of bringing an early 1960’s Jacksonville, Mississippi to life in the pages of her novel, but at no point can I reach beyond the text and picture the story as something other than fiction. This is in no way a failure on Stockett’s part—it is a deficiency of my own. Even the LGBT equality movement or what racism still looks like today in America can’t really equate to what this way of life must have been like. Trying to really place myself in this environment is like asking me to imagine what it would be like to run a recon mission in Fallujah. I can understand it as an abstraction, I can grasp why it’s horrific, but it’s impossible for it to feel truly real to me.

What was easy, however, was getting wrapped up in this book, to lose entire hours telling myself, “Just one more chapter….” The characters are engaging, vivid, and personable, and the story is thoroughly interesting. The pacing is slow in just a few places, but not in a way that makes it unreadable or boring; in fact, I felt that this lent credibility and authenticity to the storyline. The ignorance and hatred of some of the characters instilled plenty of anger and disappointment in me, and there were also several poignant and truly beautiful moments of community and outreach that brought me to tears. There is a lot of emotion packed into this lovely book, which definitely makes it one I’d recommend.

Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

Here’s the truth: It will be impossible for my review of this book to be unbiased in any way because I am just pretty much madly in love with Karen Russell. She’s a magnificent writer, and I’ve spent a lot of time with her impressive first collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Like her debut novel, it too is wonderful, and you should certainly check it out if you have not yet had a chance to delve into this gem.

Swamplandia! follows Ava Bigtree and the Bigtree family as they fight to save their alligator theme park, located in the Florida Everglades, in the wake of Ava’s mother’s untimely death and the opening of a bigger, better completing amusement park on the mainland. The novel becomes a triple coming-of-age story for each of the three Bigtree siblings, Ava, Ossie, and Kiwi, and it is also a painful exploration into the complicated cycles of grief and identity in the aftermath of such a tragic familial loss.

Having lost my own mother a few months after my eleventh birthday, just two years younger than Swamplandia!’s brave protagonist, the hurt in this story was immensely relatable. But even without this connection, one of the most brilliant things about this book is the way in which is takes its incredibly foreign and unique characters and setting (alligator wrestling, possessions by ghosts, a theme park modeled after Hell, a mysterious bird man, a depression-era swamp dredge, the list could go on and on) and makes them immediately plausible, ordinary, and familiar.

Another striking feat of this novel is that each sibling experiences a deeply complex coming-of-age almost exclusively alone (either physically, emotionally, or both), and the quality of Russell’s writing is so good that the burden of this isolation is magnified onto the reader. I finished this book feeling more lonely that I’ve felt in a long time—but it was partly that well-known feeling of loneliness born out of turning the last page of a great novel and knowing that you’re saying goodbye to a wonderfully invented world you’ve inhabited almost without realizing it, as well as to each meaningful character contained within it.

Despite the (frankly tired, in my opinion) criticism Russell sometimes gets about her unnecessarily extensive vocabulary usage, particularly when writing in a child’s voice (I think you’re doing great as an author if this is what people are finding to complain about, by the way), I simply can’t recommend this book highly enough.

Read it? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.

The Tan Vampires

A few words on year-end lists: Those who make them feel important for doing so.

More than a few words about this list: Though important, this list should by no means be  interpreted as a best-of arrangement.   The order, though important in terms of premium listening pleasure, suggests no hierarchy.  I do, however, have a few additional words for my first selection, which is currently in my cd player in my car on repeat:  Think of the Roots new album undun as a contemporary counterpart to Blind Willie McTell’s rendering of “Dying Crapshooter’s Blues”  (just puttin’ that out there!).  And one more thing concerning my sixth selection, “I found a Body” from The Tan Vampires:  This is a band you should keep a look out for, and listen closely to the lyrics on this one (wonderfully dark humor!).  I’ll let the rest of the list speak for itself.  Except for the Waits cut:  Is there a song out there that better captures the absurdity of a soldier coming home from war?  Time to shut up and listen to these songs one more time before years’s end.

1. One Time, The Roots Feat. Phonte and Dice Raw–undun [Explicit]

2. Holy, Holy, Wye Oak–Civilian:

3. Hell Broke Luce, Tom Waits–Bad as Me:

4. Medicine, We Were Promised Jetpacks–In the Pit of the Stomach

5. Et Tu, 13 & God–Own Your Ghost

6. I Found a Body, Tan Vampires–For Physical Fitness

7. Little Black Submarines, The Black Keys–El Camino

8. Landforms, Other Lives–Tamer Animals

9. She’s a River, Firehorse–And So They Ran Faster…

10. Colomb, Nicolas Jaar–Space is Only Noise

11. Runner Ups, Kurt Vile–Smoke Rings for My Halo

12. I Might, Wilco–The Whole Love

13. June, Jolie Holland–Pint of Blood

14. Born To Be Loved [The Kitchen Tapes], Lucinda Williams–Blessed

15. Codex, Radiohead–The King of Limbs

16. Drmz, AA Bondy–Believers

17. Santa Fe, Beirut–The Rip Tide

18. SWM, Tapes ‘n Tapes–Outside

19. Slow Lights, Sin Fang–Summer Echoes

20. Rising, Son Lux–We Are Rising

21. Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win, The Beastie Boys (Feat. Santigold)–Hot Sauce Committee Part Two [Explicit]

22. Lyric, The Sea and Cake–The Moonlight Butterfly

23.  Patton State Hospital, We Are Augustines–Rise Ye Sunken Ships

24. Crescent-Shaped Depression, Title Fight–Shed

25.  How Come You Never Go There, Feist–Metals

So, in the spirit of New Year’s Resolutions (who doesn’t love a little peer pressure?) I’m restarting my year of 100 books. Some will likely come from this original list I made last spring. Maybe I’ll add a few from the Man Booker Shortlist or James’ top ten picks from 2011. When my daughter arrives at the end of March, I’ll try not to switch over exclusively to cardboard children’s books. : ) As always, your suggestions are welcome in the comments section below.

1. The Instructions by Adam Levin:  An infuriatingly big and brilliant novel.
2. Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White:  The Nobel winner you may never have heard of, White is Australia’s rightful heir to Virginia Woolf.
3. Remembering Babylon by David Malouf:  Another Australian, Malouf creates scenes in this novel that I can almost guarantee will never leave you.
4. Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves by Siri Hustvedt:  This, Grasshopper, is book length “essaying” in the true sense of the form.
5. Blue Nights by Joan Didion:  OK, so I could read her instructions on how to brush one’s teeth.  Still, the way in which she universalizes personal suffering could, perhaps should, summon the weary to form cults.
6. 

   Adam Levin - The Instructions

   Flap by Mark DeCarteret:  After Googling this poet, read his poems and try, if you can, to come up with a cogent argument as to why he is not more well-known.
7. Otherwise Elsewhere by David Rivard:  A poet who taps at the cold fragile glass of the lyric form, leaving behind a splayed beauty.
8. How To Live or A life of Montaigne: In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell:  A hymn to uncertainty.
9. The Art of Recklessness by Dean Young:  If you want some understanding of the aims of contemporary poetry, leave David Orr and Stephen Burt alone and let this slender little book lead into the necessary dangers.
10. Hard Ground photographs by Michael O’Brien, poems by Tom Waits:  A totally unrecognized “occupy” movement can be arranged simply from the notes of the once nameless and voiceless that grace the books final pages.

with Luca Fiore
music by Nodey & Omar
sound design by Moritz Reich

It’s obvious from the trailer that the film is well produced and artistically shot. I’ll be purchasing my copy soon.

There never was a world for her/ Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

-Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West

He begins somewhere in the back of the bookstore.  The bearded guy who announced him looks befuddled at first until we all hear him approaching through the rows of real crime books.  “Is there a poem in here somewhere?” he’s saying aloud.  “Where will I find it?”  This sort of thing.  And then he’s among us, those of us sitting patiently in folding chairs—most attempting to look away to avoid eye contact.   Some poor man with an aisle seat gets the brunt of it:  “Is there a you and an I or are we one?” he asks an unsuspecting sheepish looking fellow, who is no doubt focused only on summoning enough courage to read his own poem when the open reading starts.   I’m focusing on the spines of books now, reading their titles, comparing fonts, hoping my friend sitting next to me doesn’t catch my eye or, worse, nudge my leg.   I don’t want to discourage anyone, after all.  When he gets to the podium everyone seems a bit more relaxed.  We’re waiting for the poems now, wondering if he’s found them, but what we get is a ten minute definition of the difference between the soul and the spirit—how our culture has the whole thing muddled, how one is reaching down and the other up.

***

I started writing poetry because at the age of nineteen the outside world no longer vibrated at the same frequency as my insides, which, in their seemingly fragile and unceasing trembling, rendered me a fixture on my parent’s couch for a stretch of about two months.  I had finished my first year of college with a growing since of Otherness, a feeling I had kept at a safe enough distance with a concoction of recreational chemicals for most of my adolescence.  The formulas weren’t working anymore, however; I was running out of combinations of self-medication and growing more afraid of what waited beyond the haze.  I still have the journals I was writing at the time.  I was pushing at the limits of language I had come to accept as part of life’s incompleteness; I wanted to write what was happening to me.  The words flap wildly like spasmodic wings on the page, like an injured bird trapped in a shoebox.  I love their energy still:  “I’m tired of my mind and the silence of stones.  I want to chew the world to pebbles,” I write on August 5, 1988. The mixed metaphors howl and snap at an unknown foe.  I don’t know whom I was reading at the time or if I was even capable of reading.  That would come later.

***

I want to write this carefully.  How after the spirit/soul guy finished his definition, which I realized then was a poem, a woman rose to begin the open reading.  She looked uncertain as she made her way to the front.  She took a folded piece of paper from her purse and carefully pressed it smooth on the podium, a gesture that seemed to calm her for a moment.  “I’m a bit nervous,” she said.  “I’ve never read a poem in public before.  You see, I started writing poetry because something terrible happened to me.”  It was clear now that if I were to laugh involuntarily it would be unforgivable.  I even thought about stepping outside to avoid such a social disaster, but I didn’t want to her to take my departure personally, especially after the words that followed.  “I was sexually assaulted two years ago.”

One is always hesitant to paraphrase the contents of a poem, and considering the context here, the stakes seem even more dangerous.  And yet I suspect that I will never forget the image of a “turd” swirling around the bowl while being coaxed by a speaking toilet to “take the flush”(the poem’s title).  This metaphor is, of course, hilarious, if only for its scatological innovation.  But to laugh?  I was not alone among the hunched figures attempting to ascertain the poem’s intent.  Her face, too, was hard to read; she seemed earnest, yet capable of ironic self-defense.  What if she meant to be funny and we didn’t laugh?  What if she was attempting to heal herself through humor?

***

I can almost remember the fever with which I would search out a phrase I had come across in my reading that I needed to find again as a way of making some sense of my own body in the world.  I knew, for instance, that the line “Worm be with me, this is my hard time” came from a Theodore Roethke poem, but, pie-eyed, I would pour over the pages of his collected just to find somewhere in the middle of “The Lost Son” the actual inked letters that corresponded to the shape in the middle of my chest.

As for the new record…What are you waiting for?

• I’m no good at lying, and this will assure completion.
• You’re probably reading something that’s wasting your time and these books could solve that.

The Instructions is a big ambitious beguiling book.  Adam Levin is genius material (and, yes, I know the dangers and futility of such a moniker, but still…).  He constructs a thousand plus pages of compelling fiction–no small feat.  Well, to be honest, I’m only on page 484, but I’ve seen no signs of flagging.  And don’t take seriously any of the comparisons you may have read to David Foster Wallace.  This is straight narrative, spanning a period of four days in the life of an indescribably precocious grade-schooler.  Yes, we have footnotes and e-mails and embedded essays, but this is no post-modern maelstrom, any more than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a study in layered narratives in the form of a Russian-Doll full of letters.  I will eschew a plot summary here in the service of alleviating any prejudice toward certain subject matter.  That said, don’t let the religious content, if you are averse to such leanings or consider yourself inconversant in such matters, keep you from giving yourself over to the ride.  If you have any interest, however, in theology or Jewish mysticism, specifically (personally, I’m a sucker for this strange mixture of logic and magic to be found at the fringes of our religious traditions), waste no time in getting to your nearest local bookstore and tucking this tome under your arm.  What’s important here, and the reason for my commitment to finishing this book, is the depth of human experience that Levin plumbs.  This is high comic tragedy without the overbearing irony to keep you at too much of a distance.  Like Moby Dick, the book begs you to allow its indulgences; trust they will lead to a reconsideration of what it means to be human–to believe, to doubt, to suffer and to love.  Yes, Levin seems to be telling us, fiction, despite the cynicism even among many of its practitioners, can still do this.

[sic], thankfully, transcends its clever title in ways I am yet still uncertain but confident, nonetheless.  In another words, I’m only on page 10, but two or three sentences that can only be described as revelatory have me convinced.  In fact, this is memoir at its most convincing.  Joshua Cody is a composer, as well
as a writer, making his exploration of illness and its meanings musical in the fullest sense of the word.  He understand the physical nature of his medium, what he calls the “material slapping of molecules against the tympanum of the ear,” and its inextricable relationship to what is an undeniably physical subject.  If you think you’ve read all you can about cancer, think again.  If you think you’ve read enough “self-revalation,” you’ve yet to read it.

Which brings us back to the tattooist.  I, of course, upon recognizing him as the person who tattooed some letters on my wrist about a year ago, decided to check out his page.  Now for you non-Facebookers, one can decide what one wants non-Facebook friends to see upon visiting one’s page.  Being a non-Facebook friend of the tattooist, I was hoping he wasn’t too stingy, so that I might…what?  Find out that he is a satanist is what!  And as he puts it in his section on “religious views,” this is no mere adolescent phase where one simply paints anarchy signs in public places.  Now, the relationship between satanism and anarchy is one he chooses not to elaborate upon, but I would imagine something less Infernoesque (Dante’s Hell is, in fact, anything but anarchy) and more of the Zoroastrian rebel angel variety.  The theology here is, perhaps, beyond my reach, but  Milton’s satan is probably a good starting place.  As many have noted, the anti-hero of Paradise Lost is, in fact, a  likable character, at times, possessed of a love so deep for his creator that he refuses to love anything more, even his beloved creator’s prized creation–man.  Hence, his refusal of God’s order to love man as much as God himself and the beginning of a sinister (homo-erotic?) love tryst.

If you can pardon my metaphysical ignorance here, perhaps you can at least sympathize with my distress upon being permanently imprinted by the hand of a worshiper of the Dark Prince.  ”What does this mean?” I couldn’t help asking myself and other unsuspecting friends, who have, no doubt, put up with far worse obsessions than this one.  I wanted to be somehow reassured that the tattooist hadn’t somehow ritualized the act of tattooing in such a way as to cast a pall upon what to me was a very meaningful memorial to a lost friend. This may seemed far-fetched, perhaps, but my overactive imagination created hidden satanic messages or symbols within the innocent words inked into my skin.  Wouldn’t an overly zealous Christian tattooist, for instance, find it completely acceptable to surreptitiously place Biblical references within a patron’s tattoo?  What kind of satanist was I dealing with exactly here? Was he on a satanist mission?  Did he wish to convert others?  Can you imagine satanists going door to door like Jehovah’s Witnesses?

Thankfully, a friend conversant in Catholic Law gave me some words of wisdom.  Mind you, an exorcism had already been considered and ruled out due simply to a fear of unnecessarily inviting Satan into the equation.  I simply wanted an intellectual restoration of my spiritual status quo (whatever muddled mix of mysticism and skepticism that may be).  He pointed out that  a major Canonical question after the sex scandals involving Catholic priests was the validity of the rites performed by the offending arbiters of God’s will.  Were sacraments, for instance, still God-inspired, even if performed by an egregious sinner?  His answer was what I wanted–something definitive and clear:  Yes.  What is most important in a sacrament is the intention of the receiver; the giver of the sacrament, although important in the equation, cannot negate the power of God’s will to reach the believer.  So, I reasoned, if I was not “open” to satanic messages, I was safe, because I was not a willing recipient of transformation.  Good enough for me.  At least for now.

And yet I still wonder about this satanism (I’m afraid to capitalize it for fear of giving it some legitimacy) thing.  I can’t imagine being confident enough to align myself with any “-ist,” never mind one that includes a malevolent figure of dread.  I don’t know whether my tattooist, for instance, should be considered courageous or foolish in the face of what to me is the Unknown/Unknowable.  I do believe in evil, in a broad sense, and believe in fighting against it, but I am unsure of its source.  If, as I tend to believe, God (a convenient moniker) is in a state of becoming as we are, then God must have an adversarial force against which to test his individuation.  Hinduism, in oversimplified terms, simply acknowledges no distinction.  Satan for me is No to existence in all its manifest complexities; God is a resounding Yes.  As a human, I am pinned between these twin eternities, but must choose, or allow myself to be chosen, to lean toward one or the other, if only to know its force, which is to say, at last, to be alive.  Consequently, if I am to be “alive,” I want to be on the side of life, at least as often as I am capable, if only because it seems a bit more friendly.

shybird 2, Bill Knott

What I am attracted to in this particular painting is the complexities of its gesture as a figure, combined, paradoxically, with a simple, unadorned quality of expression.  The painting is at ease with itself–the figure’s clownish curtsy mocked effortlessly by the sheepishly hooded eyes and benign frown.  The limbs so perfectly balance the gesture that one is hard-pressed to imagine another possible rendering.  The colors, too, even in their minimalist boldness, do little to distract from the overall effect.  The black-lined red pronounces the figure’s lovely hunch, while the orange highlights make for the playful yet deliberate movement.  The sharp white draws us to the sleepy drabness of the face’s attractive malaise, the flawless eyes pronouncing a weary beak.  A figure “maligned,” perhaps, but still finding, in an increasingly apathetic age, a unique form of self-conscious protest.  Thank you, Bill Knott.

The most stimulating films I’ve watched this summer have been documentaries (not necessarily new, but new to me). Here are the top three in order of overall impact (And, yes, I did like Exit Through the Gift Shop, but it inevitably missed the gut check for me):

1. Marwencol. Changed the way I think about art in ways that continue to surprise me. The basic premise, without giving away too much: Mark “Hogancamp,” brain-injured as the result of a severe beating outside a bar, begins to create a miniature town with its own evolving and elaborate plot as a way of addressing the complexities of his old and new realities.

2. Waste Land.  Art as communal change; art as revelation about the moral ambiguities of hope.  Premise: Renowned contemporary artist Vik Muniz returns to his native Brazil, where he hazards an artistic vision to invigorate the world of the catadores–trash pickers who subsist on what, within the world’s largest landfill, may still be used.  The art of the recycled?

3. Scott Walker: 30 Century Man.  A biopic both for those uninitiated into the world of this enigmatic musician/songwriter, as well as for Walker enthusiasts (Kijak is the first director to actually get any kind of real access to Walker’s process).  You’ll never be able to hear David Bowie, Last of the Shadow Puppets, Richard Hawley, Radiohead, Tindersticks, or Nick Cave, for instance, with the same ears again.

…oh, and just in case you didn’t already know:

Image from Director Bill Morrison's movie, Spark of Being

Need some help here. I’ve been listening with continuing fascination and awe, frankly, to the album Spark of Being, the soundtrack, performed by Dave Douglas and Keystone, to Bill Morrison’s cinematic adaptation of Frankenstein. DJ Olive’s textures and Gene Lake’s nervy drumming, in particular, create a a sonic approximation of what The Creature may have felt stumbling into its body.  First, does anyone out there in Fogland know where I can find Morrison’s actual film; I’d love to actually own a hard copy, but I’ve been unsuccessful thus far in tracking one down.  Also, I’m teaching a class on Shelley’s Frankenstein in the fall, and I’m interested in anything that the myth has inspired in the way of both pop and high art–anything from Lady Gaga’s monsters to poems, novels, songs, etc…  I would greatly appreciate any comments below.  Thanks.

Before I was born, my mother decided to name me Nora. She must have said it aloud to herself, touching her belly. Nora, Nora, letting the sound of it loll off her tongue like a ribbon of water. It took. Why does anyone get attached to an idea? It just fit, like a maple in a forest of oaks. I probably flipped over like a fish. Named! Real as a plum. I thought it was a done deal. It was a family name, and my great aunt used it for her daughter’s middle name. She was older, and my mother decided it had already been well enough distributed. My first loss. I have a theory that most things that are taken away you can reclaim. I think Donovan says that too, but anyway, Nora is a theorem I am trying to prove.

Ananke is the goddess of destiny and fate, but I didn’t know that. Only that the sound of it came to me on a wing and a breeze, like John Lennon’s corn flake dream. I heard it. I had to look it up. I was singing a song I wrote that goes, “Not my brain, Mr. Steinway’s brain, not mine. Not my brain the riverboat’s brain, not mine….” It goes on like that repeating all the many people and images and objects from which my brain has been combined. The brain, a context of culture, personages. A hummy number in the middle of which came this Nora Ananke, and so it was, and so she is.

What struck me most about the artists who took the stage was their easy relationship with fame, which has crested for them all but the perhaps rising Texas star, Jessica Munn. Amy Grant smiled at me in the bathroom. I had no idea who she was. Clearly, these artists are products of chance as much as will, given we were in Nashville and many are the singer/songwriters who are trying to crack that code by which these rose to the top like Cheerios. Johnny Rivers did not sing the song he is perhaps best known for, “Secret Agent Man:”

They’ve given you a number

and they’ve taken away your name.

Oh, be careful what you say.

You’ll give yourself away…

Which is exactly what they got up stage, big as life, and did. To that.

An excerpt:

Let her fail. Let her write pages and pages of painful poetry and terrible prose. Let her write painfully bad fan fiction. Don’t freak out when she shows you stories about Bella Swan making out with Draco Malfoy. Never take her writing personally or assume it has anything to do with you, even if she only writes stories about dead mothers and orphans.

I highly recommend reading the entire entry (linked above). Thoughts? As always, we welcome them in the comments section below.

16. Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Page 45 of 220.  Clearly a work of genius, this one was suggested to me by my local used bookseller and framer of pictures at “A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words.”  Sorry, John.  I’ll have the book back to you shortly, when you finish framing the Coltrane poster (joking).  We talk books often, and this one surfaced in a discussion of McCarthy’s The Road.  Similarly post-apocalyptic, Hoban’s book reveals an imagination of a diffent order altogether, however.  I can’t complain about complacent language with this one either.  Think Finnegan’s Wake with a bit more phonetic cues to keep your head somewhat above water.  And yet that was part of my problem with the book–my inability to hear its voice.  I stopped somewhere around this sentence: “Eusas voyce (which it wer all ways a low and sorrerful kynd of voice even them times when you myt think Eusa myt be jollyer nor other times) said […]”  Brilliant, no?  Twain would be hard-pressed to pull anything like this off.  And yet in an imagined world, unlike Twain’s and McCarthy’s (to some extent) actual one, one still expects the language to rise naturally from the landscape.  Hoban never gives me a sense of place–a way into his character’s actual encounters with external reality.  Perhaps, I’m just a stick in the mud–but I like to know just how far I can go into the ground and if it will hold me.  This one had me leaning far too often.

17. James Le Fanu’s Why Us. Page 72 of 262.   This book gave me what I wanted and then I abandoned it.  Selfish, I know.  What did I want?  I think it was some kind of re-assurance that human consciousness is “special” or “mysterious.”  Another selfish, anthropocentric notion.  What can I say, I’m frightened, or, more specifically, disturbed by materialist views of human experience.  In a nutshell:  Le Fanu takes the latest science on consciousness and identity and basically shows what little we really know and how science, as a discipline, continues to reveal our befuddlement.  He’s preaching to the choir here, but sometimes the choir needs to let out a big Hallelujah and move on to the next song.

18. Samantha Power’s Chasing the Flame. Page 89 of 262.   A Problem from Hell, Powers’s Pulitzer-prize winning book on genocide, profoundly changed my view on geo-politics and U.S. involvement in world affairs.  What that view is now is perhaps too nuanced for discussion here, but suffice it to say that she engenders MLK, Jr.’s famous quote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” from “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” with new moral fervor.  Her book, in fact, caused me to attempt to retract a poem of mine that was to be published in Sam Hamill’s Poet’s Against the War, but I’d already signed the contract.  Chasing the Flame follows the life of the pioneering U.N. leader Sergio Vierrra de Mello.  We experience his frustrations and strong will, his human weaknesses and profound sense of justice.  A great book for those wanting to understand the complex role of the U.N. plays in world affairs.  Spring semester was coming, however,  and I had to prepare for classes.  I was reading Meredith Hall’s memoir Without a Map for the third time, taking particular interest in her travels in the Middle East and the relationship between her personal and political life.

19. Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World.  Page 141 of 354.  I loved Hyde’s The Gift; for one thing, it completely changed my understanding of Ezra Pound.  So if you have trouble with Pounds moral shortcomings, as I did/do, and those misgivings color your reading of his work, check out the chapter in The Gift on Pound as a manifestation of Hermes.  Anyway, Trickster has the same appeal, with an even  more unabashed reverence for myth and folklore.  Hyde is a popular writer, but he is no slouch as a scholar, and his writing can be dense.  To be honest, I’m having trouble remembering why I stopped this one, or remembering anything specific about the book at all.  I do have an image of a coyote with its own intestines spooling out of its body only to be wrapped around its waste and tied like a belt.  Maybe that was enough for me at the time.  Fairly certain I’ll go back to this one, though; I’m curious about the whole eating thing and the problems external intestines might cause in that regard.

20.  Eleanor Henderson’s Ten Thousand Saints.  Page 57 of 385. Not sure if this is only a temporary cessation or not.   One thing for sure, though, I’ve given up on the NYT’s Book Review as a credible source of literary assessment; I’ve been let down too many times.  In the reviewer Stacey D’Erasmo’s words, Henderson “writes the hell out of every moment.”  If only.  And, perhaps, it is this myopic view of literature that ruins it all for me.  I’m left wondering how a reasonably literate person–someone who I am sure is aware of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and  Samuel Beckett–can find “overintense description” in this book.  Even though D’Erasmo inevitably excuses Henderson her “flaws,” I’m dumfounded that she found any of this kind to begin with.  What has happened to the “realist” novel?  Are we to choose between fantasy and blandly rendered reality.  Page 53, the end of the second chapter, exhibits one of Henderson’s rare exuberant encounters with her medium.  She writes: “She clapped her hands, as though to scare a flock of crows from her garden, and the three beats echoed in Jude’s waiting ears, taking flight through the valley and up into the morning.”  Is this the overintense description that so many critics find tiresome.  The passage is lovely enough , but not, in my estimation, intense enough–if by intensity we mean lyric veracity.  Are the boy’s ears really “waiting”?  As if they’re sitting on a log with their legs crossed?  And how are we to experience the noise moving from an echo in the waiting ears to a flight through the valley?  The flaws here, as with most writers, are with complacency of description, not with over-description, which has become synonymous to far too many with over-indulgence.  Is it that “deceptively simple” prose has more and more become the supposed corrective to literature’s only purpose worth preserving–attempting to describe the indescribable?  Writers, all us lovers of the written word ask is that you try.

Joan Brady, courtesy of the Guardian, gave the first book on this list, Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, a stellar review. A few others that look exceptionally noteworthy include Ian Sample’s book exploring the Higgs boson, and what appears to be two gems that help readers uncover at least a small slice of the science behind understanding human action: Oren Harman’s, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness and The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley.

Just in case this is getting a bit too left-brained for you, Guy Deutscher makes the list with Through the Language Glass: How Words Colour Your World, which delves into the science of language.

At least a few of these will be making my Year of 100 Books list (which I am indeed still slogging though, slowly buy surely). Keep us posted if any of these make it home from your local library for summer reading.

Curious to know what you think about this list from The New York Times Magazine, Clarity readers. Agree? Disagree? Which of your favs made it? Which amazing game-changers were you shocked to see left off? Nabokov’s Lolita was named the clear winner, but apparently Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay wasn’t too far behind. Comments and thoughts below, if you please.

The NYT article also mentions the list of 100 greatest non-fiction books that the Guardian ran back in June. I’d love to hear your ideas about that as well.

Because here’s a theory about fashion at least: a clothing ensemble is no longer cool when it has been appropriated in miniature as doggie drag.

If it holds true, the classic, and one might have thought timeless, appeal of the yellow polka dot bikini may well have expired. Mark your calendars. When Fido is scoping out Fiorina in this hot little number, the Joleens of the world have long-since outpaced it. Of course, given what made it popular is the pairing of naughtiness with innocence, it can probably make a comeback in irony, but with so few other indicators possible on a beach towel, the wearer may have to dye her hair blue to signify she’s aware of it.

2

Before the captain bought the forty-one foot sailboat in May 2011, it was owned by a hoarder. Lucille crammed every corner of the boat’s two cabins with assorted trinkets that the captain had cleared out over the course of a few days. All he had chosen to keep  of the clutter was a drawer full of brand new, blank baseball caps, assorted in color and identical is style.  Some of the trinkets had been hot-glued down, and these he could not seem to pry off.  So I would be walking around deck and see random angel wings or three plastic tropical fish and know that no storm could knock those overboard.

On 7 June 2011, when we got to the boat, it was  just north of Rochester, New York.  The captain, the minister and I had a fair amount of grunt work to do, but that didn’t stop Lucille from wasting our time. I was guzzling water and cursing the heat when I first heard the woman’s voice. Its vowels were always stretched long. Every minute or so she would stammer, and while she would she would hold out a note as if singing, always singing, “aw!” Then the words would snap back in and sense would have to be made of them again. Lucille undertook the difficult task of explaining to us the bounty of a thousand scavenger hunts that had been filling her boat. She said, “The theme is ‘palm trees’. Keep that in mind. The theme is ‘palm trees’.” Then she went on connecting a list of the now tossed pieces to that theme. When he first bought the boat, the captain had asked if she wanted what was still in it, and she had said no. But it was clear that she had meant for the captain to keep it all, as it was all very important to the theme, which is palm trees.

As soon as Lucille was out of earshot, the minister told the captain that he should marry herto keep her dream of living on a boat alive. Cursing followed this. As interesting as Lucille was, I didn’t think of her as the danger she would become. Her baffling ignorance about everything functional on the boat meant that we had no idea what worked and what didn’t. She didn’t know what the bilge pump was, for example, and so could not tell us that it was not working at all. Luckily we were able to get the engine shipshape before we left, but this took some doing.  The minister was short, looking something like a dwarf in a fantasy novel, and so he was able to scurry over the corners of the four-cylinder diesel until everything was where it needed to be. What was wrong with the engine had to be discerned and solved by the captain and the minister, because Lucille had never run the engine herself.

Lucille had only taken the boat out onto the water once during her three years with it, and that time it had been handled by an employee of the boatyard, not her. That was Lucille’s first year with the boat, when it had spent a summer at a slip in a marina. At the end of that summer she had had it pulled and put on the cradle where it remained until us. Lucille had still lived on it, on land, in the cradle, for two summers. We realized that she had been using the head and filling the tanks with her waste without a single pump out that whole time. Such negligence coupled with such ignorance made for grave danger.

The last time Lucille was aboard it was several hours into a beastly day when we all had work to do. Still we humored her as she told us about the mural she had meant to paint where the name had once been. It was going to be a landscape of palm trees. She asked us if we remembered that the theme was palm trees and we nodded. The back had been blank in preparation for her tropical mural, and so the captain had put his favorite name down, “Spell Bound”, rather than use the boat’s original name, “Bewitched”. ”I see you changed the name,” Lucille said just before she left us that first day. ” I hear that’s terrible luck.” It occurred to me that she was worse than any bad luck, but I only stayed silent.

Several gallons of sweat and twenty-four hours later, the boat was plunked into the Genesee River. Lucille was back and watched it get put in. She was clapping with the base of her palms as if she were an otter. Her face was wrought with wrinkles from her emotions’ intensity. It could have been bliss or rage or both. We three got on board and looked at each other like sportsmen in a huddle. The captain gave us orders and we were ready to cast off, but the minister stopped us both for something important. “This your last chance to sail off with her,” the minister said to the captain. “Fuck you,” the captain said to the minister. “The theme is palm trees,” I said to them both.

William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick (long ago a neighbor of mine in Berkeley) remain very important writers to me. I honestly believe they will be read far into the future, because they were so very far ahead of their time, both in terms of their understanding of private psychology and the even more mysterious mechanisms of society. They each present some unaccountably original perceptions, and while unquestionably eccentric as authors and individuals, their work is highly social—and their vision of the novel as an art form is fundamentally one of social commentary.

I find this a refreshing tonic to so much of the so-called “realistic” fiction that dominates mainstream literature today, and I think it connects American writing at large with the greater flux and flow of world art. They’re not the only ones to do this of course, but they’re two writers who instantly come to my mind who can stand with Kafka for opening the blurred windows of possibility in the 20th century.
Two quotations also drive my mythology. “We have become the tools of our tools.” –Thoreau. “Strategy is what we need to employ because we recognize that others too have plans.” – Ulysses S. Grant.

While some may think of Thoreau as but an early rebel Nature Boy, I take the view that his small body of work actually sets out a surprisingly articulate agenda of social concern that was literally a century or more ahead of the curve. Well before industrialization and the power of mass media really took hold, he was looking forward, where a later writer such as Mark Twain was essentially looking back.

While he’s often associated with the natural conservation movement (and seems to fit right in with what would become a great science fiction theme as depicted in say the film Silent Running), Thoreau is almost brutally unnostalgic and bitingly predictive of many of the human psychological implications of technological progress and dependence. Put very simply, I believe he’s the American writer, and perhaps the writer, who glimpsed modernity first. All the New England foliage calendar and yearbook quotes that have followed since can’t undermine the essentially subversive alarm he sounded back in the 1840s.

Grant is another fascinating figure. A great military leader who became President—and became mired in a period of astonishing corruption. A famous drunk and hardheaded pragmatist, he nonetheless shows what Arthur Conan Doyle, in the voice of Sherlock Holmes, would call “a remarkable subtlety of mind.” More so than any of his contemporaries and colleagues, he understood that history as it ultimately unfolds can be no more clearly understood in near time than the smoke and mess of a battle. History, he would say, is how we report the battle—and he grasped that this is another form of battle too.

Perhaps even more importantly, he expressed in sharply simple terms that events of “great pitch and moment” rarely have simple causes—and almost never discrete causes.

While a kind of cult adoration has developed around the assassinated President he served as General, along with an unfortunate dismissal of his own Presidency, Grant nevertheless offers us some poignant insights into the muck and rumble of social movements and decisive historical events. I encourage a reconsideration of him as damned prophet of modernity, in that he reminds us of the smoke of battle, and the smoke of media. Like Thoreau, he had one foot firmly rooted in a lost past, and one foot reaching forward into our perhaps lost present.

Finally, I’ve been heavily influenced by Henry James’ immensely peculiar novella The Turn of the Screw. Readers of this famous work will know that the first experience of it is as a ghost story—just as James’ copious notes about the book indicate he intended.

But something happened in the course of the writing. The story evolved, and so do our later readings of it. A second, more mature age investigation reveals other layers. Typically these take two forms. One relates to a new awareness of narrative strategy—the complex framing of the story and the question of narrator reliability. The second and more significant is a psychosexual interpretation to fascinate any Freudian.

What we are left with as readers who have looked twice is, to me, a highly provocative conflict. Supernatural explanation or psychological? Are the ghosts “real” or are they in the mind? If the mind is theater for all reality, to what extent are the ghosts not real if present there? It’s one of the most basic and enduring philosophical issues.

With a disturbing level of fastidious precision, James keeps all doors open. I count this as one work that you need to read almost word by word. It’s very definitely inspired some of my own deepest thinking on the nature of ghosts, and the nature of mind.

The “reality” of ghosts (or big yellow taxis and dogs made of balloons for that matter) is at street level determined by the simple question of—do you see what I see? I could be hallucinating or imagining. Things get considerably stranger if you and I are hallucinating or imagining together.

The idea that ghosts (in all the complicated guises this concept holds) may not be photographable, like a dragon’s head in the clouds, and yet still be perceived and active in the theater of many minds simultaneously is in fact the essence of civilization.

As one of my characters in Enigmatic Pilot says, “I show you plenty ghosts.”

But I want to start with the name of the band, itself, before we get to musical aesthetics and the particulars of the album in question.  What would an Arctic Monkey look like, anyway?  More hair, obviously–and yet, is it us humans who are the Arctic Monkeys, the only primates to travel willingly to such climes?  And what does this make us?  Adventurous seekers?  Stupid mammals?  I’m undecided. Which brings us back to the album in question.

Suck it and See is, in many ways, an obvious continuation of Humbug, an album which slipped under most critic’s radar but remains my favorite of the band’s four.  Humbug, more than anything else, showed me just how much can happen within the confines of a three minute pop songs; I will even hazard a comparison to classical lieder, a la Hugo Wolf (an even denser writer than Schubert) with guitar hooks. The band has the musical acumen to sound as if they are “scoring” Turner’s unceasingly clever (I too hate the word, but it’s appropriate here and meant in the best possible way) lyrics, which are delivered with the kind of timing you expect from a much more seasoned singer.

Some fans will no doubt fault the new album for its lack of punch.  One hears more Smiths here than Buzzcocks, for sure; and yet this is still the band who originally created such a stir with their rhythmic punk-like assaults and playful touches of 70′s psychedelia…

NEWS FLASH:  This album is a *&^%in’ gobstopper supreme.  Yes, I’m sucking it right now, and I’m beginning to see different colors form on my tongue.

OK, so what yesterday I thought was a lazier attention to song craft than on Humbug is sounding more like a softer, looser bed for a more relaxed lyrical swoon–I’m thinking of a heterosexual Truman Capote reclined on a divan with just the right concoction of martinis and vitriol.  Add to that a male adolescent attachment to sexual angst and you get lines like “That’s not a skirt, girl,/ that’s a sawed off shot gun/ And I can only hope/ you’ve got it aimed at me.”  Or the even more burnished masochistic cliche: “Be cruel to me/ cause I’m a fool for you.”

This band is custom made for suckers of all stripes.  Why not see if you’re one of them?

• Creative Nonfiction call for submissions for genre-bending nonfiction. June 13 deadline.
• The Eyes of Babylon Writing Contest (in Drama, Fiction/Nonfiction, and Poetry). June 14 deadline.
• Bitter Oleander Press Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award (for a single poem). June 15 deadline.
• Damselfly Press call for submissions of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction (women writers only). June 15 deadline.
• Horse Less Press call for manuscripts (poetry or mixed-genre). June 15 deadline.
• RopeWalk Press Thomas A. Wilhelmus Chapbook Award for Fiction. June 15 deadline.
• All Nations Press Nonfiction Chapbook Competition. June 15 deadline.
• Southern Poetry Review Guy Owen Award (for a single poem). June 15 deadline.
• Blue Light Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. June 15 deadline.
• University of Akron Press Akron Poetry Prize (for a manuscript). June 15 deadline.
• Philadelphia Stories Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction (for a short story). June 15 deadline.
• St. Louis Writers’ Guild Deane Wagner Poetry Contest (for a single poem). June 15 deadline.
• New Millennium Writings Contest (in poetry, fiction, flash fiction, and nonfiction). June 17 deadline.
• The Whistling Fire call for poetry submissions. June 25 deadline.
• Autumn House Press Fiction and Poetry Contests (for a manuscript). June 30 deadline.
• Four Way Books fiction and poetry manuscript open reading period. June 30 deadline.
• Borrow Street Press Book Contest (for a poetry manuscript). June 30 deadline.
• Literal Latté Short Short Contest (for flash fiction). June 30 deadline.
• Bauhan Publishing May Sarton First Book Contest (for a poetry manuscript). June 30 deadline.
• Bridport Arts Centre Bridport Prize (in poetry, short fiction, and flash fiction). June 30 deadline.
• Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition (for a poetry manuscript). June 30 deadline.
• Glimmer Train Fiction Open (for a single story). June 30 deadline.
• Hidden River Arts Awards in Fiction and Drama (for a single story/novel excerpt or a full-length play). June 30 deadline.
• Hunger Mountain Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize. June 30 deadline.
• Dream Horse Press Poetry Chapbook Prize. June 30 deadline.
• Snail Mail Review call for poetry and fiction submissions. June 30 deadline.
• The National Poetry Review Annie Finch Prize for Poetry (for a single poem). June 30 deadline.
• The International Aeon Award Short Fiction Contest (for stories in a speculative fiction genre). June 30 deadline.
• Omnidawn Publishing Poetry Prize (for a first or second book). June 30 deadline.
• Parlor Press New Measure Poetry Prize (for a poetry manuscript). June 30 deadline.
• Flash 500 Flash Fiction Competition. June 30 deadline.
• Pearl Poetry Prize (for a poetry manuscript). June 30 deadline.
• Red Hen Press Short Story Award. June 30 deadline.
• University of North Texas Press Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (for a fiction manuscript). June 30 deadline.

In the back of my mind, I thought writing preparation for something, perhaps a solid self who would guide me through the dark wood and into a sunny glade of applause, but I also thought I could shore up past mistakes like an armory should the circumstances arise again, which they don’t. A thousand trunks of theater garb await a play I will never perform. Writing has not even prepared me to set down the next line, to answer any question vulnerable as a bud.

Integrity requires relationship to establish a shared moral or artistic value. Writers choose to communicate above all else, for the duration of the action, which is not planting hostas or purple hull peas or checking a child’s mouth after its sudden interaction with the swingset. Many are the letters written to the world that receive no reply, so the conversation need not be externally reciprocal to be valid, but dialogic it necessarily is.

If nothing else, one is the impulse of the context to receive itself, which it does in a variety of ways. One inquires, as to how to woo joy, own it, encourage its return. I am a joy glutton, a bigot even. The other emotions can move along. It wasn’t always so; I used to savor the mellow lap of sorrow, but that was when I had time to appreciate its depth and tug. Schubert too is hard to appreciate during a game of four square.

Do the peaks and valleys of emotional topography level out? They cannot. Thus, does the ability to feel abrade or weaken? Do the dizzying changes slow? Has irritation coated a calloused pearl of being, inside which one wriggles smally, until even the hearing goes?

Writing attends. One is accompanied by it, as Malone is by his things, which he accounts for and puts away, a stick that pushes The Unnamable toward the murmuring threshold, then silence without showing its hand. What place has validation in the quest that concludes Beckett’s novel—to know? Great writers receive and are denied affirmation, so in itself, public or private sanction is no proof. But doubt opens a space, offers a locking door in a full house, behind which one is asked why teach or fix cars or design gardening gloves? Others have had their moment of aloneness to determine how and whether to belong.

Attention remains a fact when it is not given. Ignoring is active, whether a homeless beggar or food piracy in Somalia. Dare a writer ask for an eye, an ear, a hand? I could go for years without posing the question seriously to myself and have. But it insists. A trickle of focus spills every time I pick up a pen and do not trust the boldness of that request, the pressure of its need. If it is mine only, I am dead.

I’ve enjoyed the jokes going around about the recent doomsday predictions for this first lovely day in weeks for this part of the country (southeastern New Hampshire; apparently, the end will come differently for different regions/ timezones, etc…).  I was particularly amused by the humorous postulations concerning pets (Would they join their “raptured” masters”?  Who would be left to care for them?).  And yet there is clearly a sadness here too, a way in which human concerns on the macro level remind us of the particulars of our life–the loves and losses that constantly create new emotional worlds for us–apocalypses (literally, “unveilings”) large and small that, in Milton’s words, can make a Heaven of Hell and Hell of Heaven.

I provide no theories about the earth’s fate or the fate of our species, religious or secular.  My mother recently lost her closest friend, and I saw how her world was changed forever.  My family spent a wonderful day together after the funeral, and I could see that love was still possible for my mother, and the rest of us, in this new world.  And isn’t that what all the great religious traditions have tried to teach us?  Love survives us and is always at the ready to transform this shifting and uncertain reality.

Increase chronicles Purpura’s pregnancy and the first year of her son Joseph’s life. Had I not already been familiar with her writing and known it to be so richly lyric I can’t say I would have picked it up for the subject matter. I no more imagine myself a mother than Purpura admits to identifying herself before the blue X slowly crossed itself on the test, an “unknown, variable quantity.” So, Increase is also about finding one’s shape as it shifts literally and metaphorically, and that is a process is a poet’s work and a longshoreman’s. Still, I doubt I would have explored it, biased as I am against the importance of wet naps and breastfeeding. I admit Purpura gave me access to a realm I didn’t imagine existed. I actually think my mother crossed it, between her job at social services and ceramics classes—that variegated plain on which one stumbles across the amaryllises of childrearing, and finds oneself capable of almost anything. I admire her for the strength of her character, but Purpura’s text gives me a sense of how she reached it—through close observation, by attuning an eye so sensitive it notices:

Balls of wool pulled from the carpet have a dense center, an outer corona thinning to breath, a nimble-spoked haze that turns over in the gust and wake of footfalls.

Not since I read Jean Genet have I so felt the experience of one single day with human senses to be enough to digest for a lifetime.

Many are the ways one trains attention and the cunning. I gave motherhood little credit for harnessing it, but after Purpura describes the negotiation and conflict of birth as “the mystery coming for you, creaking into your peace, into mine because I am no longer audience, but, moment to moment, protagonist, splintering away from the opening scenes, further into the act…the singular moment,” I found a curiosity I congratulated myself to scoff at before. So, we need more texts like this one, and I know they are out there. Catherine Wagner, Beth Ann Fennelly are two names that spring immediately to mind for being bold enough to write seriously about motherhood, the war of the domestic, the romance and “odd loneliness of a new friendship,” as Purpura describes the nursery softly filling with light. Dare I allow my patronized inner feminine to respect it? Have I too found in myself “all along there has been room…to feel increase in the crowded space I am becoming.” If not for motherhood, for the catch and crush of living ever more broadly, fully invested in the drama?

Go read this brilliant and hilarious blog. Go on. Do it right now.

If you like what you see, I suggest dropping what you’re doing and immediately reading every single story in the “Best Of” list on the right-hand side of the page. You won’t regret it.

You’re welcome in advance.