Dear Blogger

Dear Blogger,

This blog, though infrequently updated and infrequently viewed, as well as rudimentary in design, is not SPAM, but rather a book review blog and a site through which to make occasional announcements about my own writing. I hope this is clear. While I often find SPAM quite interesting from an aesthetic standpoint, I do not, at this time, wish to be identified as a practitioner of this uniquely tawdry aesthetic.

Thank You,

JB.

Readers of this blog: please see the post below (assuming my blog has been unblocked), for a new review of William T. Vollmann's first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels (1987).

William T. Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels

You Bright and Risen Angels, William T. Vollman. New York: Atheneum, 1987.

“This book was written by a traitor to his class. It is dedicated to bigots everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equality’s brood with sulfur and oil, to huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper, for you have nothing to lose but your last feeble principles.”

William T. Vollmann, Karachi-Anatuvak Pass – San Francisco, 1981-85 (in an epigraph to the novel).

Because he tagged along with mujahideen into Soviet-invaded Afghanistan, because he traveled to the north pole and a number of war zones, because he bought the freedom of a Burmese prostitute, has written about other prostitutes, asked poor people why they are poor, ridden the rails, and written a 3,000 page treatise on the moral calculus of violence, William T. Vollmann the persona has, to some extent, outgrown or overwhelmed the text.

But in Vollmann’s defense, the text he writes never seems to suffer too much from this fascination with his methods, and, besides, his aesthetic frequently hybridizes fiction and non-fiction, and in the books I’ve read authorial intrusion is common. By continuing to write ambitious, surprising books, and perhaps by the quirks on his resume`, Vollmann has become a well known name in American literature. And one way to look at well known names in literature without having to tug along a lot of the baggage and detritus that comes with notoriety is to examine the earliest work.

You Bright and Risen Angels is unlike anything else Vollman’s written since, to my knowledge (which is rudimentary: in addition to YB&RA I’ve only read - so far - An Afghanistan Picture Show, Europe Central, and Riding Toward Everywhere). The author calls the book a cartoon, and that appellation is pretty much exact. So what is the value of the literary cartoon?

It shouldn’t even have to be asked. We identify the form with humor, usually, and everything that You Bright and Risen Angels has to say about the world is said through humor, humor that is black and biting but ultimately good-natured. The book eschews seriousness at all turns, though it lacks neither ambition nor sincerity, and this is the crux of its genius: it’s a cartoon, meant to be read quickly and digested easily and then lost to time and the sprawl of undifferentiated information, but unlike that model it also encompasses wonderful digressions on science, war, history, and politics (some of it invented), as well as an insistence on speculating about both the emotional trauma of conflict as well as difficult moral questions when there are no easy heroes to serve as exemplars or subjects of our sympathy.

And, of course, the book addresses a subject not typically known to cartoons: large-scale political and social conflict and how such conflict is shaped by changes in technology. Gail Pool’s 1987 review of the book in The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/21/books/vollmann-angels.html - adequately summarizes the rambling narrative, but for this review I’ll just cover the skeletal structure: Vollmann’s world is divided between revolutionaries and reactionaries, and since this is a cartoon, don’t bother looking for any middle ground. The reactionaries are led by Mr. White, a powerful leader in both reactionary politics and industry, as well as the primary developer of electricity, which he achieves through his remote Colorado school of indentured engineers, The Society of Daniel. Bug is our revolutionary hero, though we learn early in the book, when Bug’s charge Susan questions him about the rebellion’s motives after Susan assists in an attack on the San Francisco Municipal Subway, that Bug “suppose(s)” that they are “doing this for the trees.” It is soon after this and other random targets and acts of violence that we learn not to sympathize with the revolutionaries or any particular social force in the book, but to sympathize with every pitiable actor caught in its maelstrom, the book itself being a battle of wills between the narrator/author, a perhaps revolutionary-sympathetic computer programmer himself reliant on the force of electricity, and Big George, a mysterious, immortal entity who is sort of like Cormac McCarthy’s The Judge as though applied to a metafictional conceit (Vollmann describes him as “the eternal winner”). The resistance is complicated by a parallel movement composed entirely of insects under the leadership of something called The Great Beetle (there are a lot of characters, like a Russian novel, but Vollmann includes a helpful index or “social gazette” at the beginning).

Gail Pool, in The Times review, notes that the book is, one sense, a critique of American history and the crimes of the powerful. But the version of history it critiques is also a cartoon – constructed with invented dates, places, and events all revolving largely around Mr. White and his cohorts and the development of electricity, Bug’s alienated childhood, or entomology. I loved this alternate history aspect of the book for the simple pleasure of watching the warped verisimilitude unfold, and it seems to me a precursor of a book like Ben Marcus’ Notable American Women. Everything in the book refers to the world imagined in the book: products are brand-named after Mr. White and his underling Dr. Dodger. Wayne listens to bluegrass music about the “blue globes” of electricity. Historical figures like Thomas Edison are incorporated into the narrative of Mr. White’s American dynasty.

With its alternate histories, manic cartoon tone, absurdly stylized characters (mean that in a good way), various locations (California, Colorado, Oregon, Florida, Texas, Alaska, South America, and probably more) and its visionary, digressive silliness, the novel reminded me a lot of Johannes Goransson’s writings about excess and grotesquerie on his blog Exoskeleton. You Bright and Risen Angels is an excessive work, long, unrefined (one blurb called it barbaric) and unwieldy, and much of the pleasure of reading it lies in the exhilaration its excesses provide. The book addresses questions of morality and conflict, but there are no final lessons or heroes or tidy resolutions to draw. The book is a living world, even if it’s a cartoon world, and in a world like that there cannot be simple resolutions.

In The Times review, Pool critiqued the book for its digressiveness. I guess this is a polarizer, but I’d say the book succeeds on the Moby Dick principle – the digressions become an essential part of the narrative. Pool also critiqued the book (her review was mostly positive, though clearly she didn’t think as much of it as I do) because its cartoonish characters are not “emotionally involving.” I think the characters are emotionally involving, but not in the traditional way in which specific characters win our sympathy or identification. The novel is a sort of farce in which we are compelled to sympathize more democratically, with both supposed heroes and supposed villains, all of whom, at one point or another, will probably disgust us. In this way, this absurd, magical, Kafka-meets-Pynchon –meets-Lautremont ride is surprisingly similar to “real life.”

(Postnote: yes, there is a story about Vollmann and this book: it seems he basically tricked a company into hiring him as a computer programmer in the late 80s, though he had no experience in this field, and instead of going home, many nights he would stay in the office all night, writing the novel on the computer, sleeping under his desk, hiding from the custodial staff, and subsisting almost entirely on candy bars for days at a time. Most of that according to the author, I think).

dreamspots/updates are ready to install

My friend records his dreams into a Dictaphone in the morning, and then later transcribes them on this blog:

http://thesedreamsaremine.blogspot.com/

Why would you want to read this? My friend is a talented dreamer or a talented transcriber. These dreams are funny and alarming. They are sort of like the poems James Tate and Russell Edson write consciously, but these do not come from regular old consciousness. I won't review his dreams at length but I will heartily recommend them as good literature from an underutilized genre/medium.

I rarely have amusing or interesting dreams. I also don't remember dreams often.

The dream transcribed on 9.20.08 about the exchange student's ears is a classic.

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In the coming weeks there should be some prose reviews here, starting with William T. Vollmann's first novel You Bright and Risen Angels, which seems either underrated or forgotten to me in light of much of the attention on his later work. Later in the summer: maybe back to poetry.

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Also, the links to my writing will be updated soon. I have a chapbook of poems coming out soon. Updates are ready to install. If I make a note of it here, I might actually get to it...

Areas of Fog. Joseph Massey. Shearsman Books. 2009


Talking about the weather
became trite
which was sad

- Joshua Beckman


In thinking of Joseph Massey’s new collection Areas of Fog, I allude to the Joshua Beckman poem above not because Beckman and Massey share a similar aesthetic when it comes to the short poem – far from it – but because Massey’s poems would probably agree with the sentiment expressed. These poems are set to the weather, and by the weather are inextricably bound to the local geography Massey explores in Northern California, a point I’ll come to later.

But first I should acknowledge the context of my reading of the book. It would be disingenuous for me to review this collection as though I hadn’t seen the majority of its poems before – the reality being that I’ve read chapbook versions of four of the five sections of Areas of Fog. So perhaps the primary question of this review is how Massey’s visually and sonically muscular minimalism – so accustomed to chapbook length – reads when collected together in Areas of Fog.

I have no complaints, or very few. Ever since I took a chance on Bramble a few years back, I’ve felt that Massey’s aesthetic is one to be soaked up for its vivid pleasures and envied for what it’s able to do with so little and without resorting to any artificially constructed world or externalized imagination. All the blurbs on the back of the book note the idea that “the world” in Areas of Fog is “this world,” utterly, crisply real and unaffected (as Peter Gizzi says in his, “the world simply happens in these poems”). Not that I feel there’s anything wrong with artificially constructed worlds, surreal imagery, the use of narrative, or even dreaded irony, if applied sparingly and without a bunch of built-in cynicism. But the poems in Areas of Fog don’t use these tricks, and they seem to exist simply for the music Massey can wring from the physics of the world around him. So what, more specifically, do these poems “do” besides the obvious detailing of a particular environment on very precise and careful terms?

The Objectivists were also interested in nailing down the details of the immediate world for their own sake, but these poems build on that aesthetic with a new twist. There are reference points to Creeley, Niedecker, and Cid Corman, but Massey doesn’t stop once he’s distilled the clarity of his environment into a few choice details – moonlight picking out the oil on the surface of a puddle of rain, a hummingbird in hover, or factory lights that “crease” gradations of darkness at night – he also takes an interest not just in the perceived object but in the nature of our perception, and often very affectingly. Take this one from Bramble: “ before we feel the/ breeze we see/the weeds fold over.” Or, the poem “February,” in its entirety, from the section Out of Light:

rain’s
remnants’

shape
splinters

window
night pulls

apart

I can imagine the window losing form and fracturing into liquid in the rainy night. These poems offer no pretensions about how we describe the world to appease our need for order and ease of recognition, instead choosing to make music out of the reality of our senses’ separations, ambiguities, and perceptual scales; they chart, in other words, the inner world of the mind and eye (and ear and so on) rather than simply the thing seen or perceived, and so only in Areas of Fog can it realistically happen that “Sun/blots out a mountain” through the “dusk-tinted window” of a Greyhound bus. In another poem simply titled “Scale[1],” the reader can again feel an act of immediate perception taking place, something completely natural, though to see it verbalized is (pleasantly) surprising:

Gust of litter – now
the light’s

obvious.

This effect, repeated throughout the book, shapes the dimension of these poems that might be described as “geographical” or “environmental.” I’m very interested in ideas of place in poetry, particularly those that go beyond surface preconceptions and received ideas, and through this perceptual sculpture Massey manages both to create and very precisely describe a world at once – largely the Northern California coast in Humboldt County. Another way in which Massey makes the landscape his own while also effectively noting it down “objectively” is through smart repetition throughout the book’s sections: of words (especially verbs), recurrent images, devices (e.g. possessives doubled up like “rain’s/ remnants’//shape). The book’s accuracy in this “environmental” regard also has to do with the openness and inclusiveness to the phenomena noted down. It’s not all fog-cloaked redwoods and foaming pacific beaches so that the reader knows the exact position of the poem on the map, but also images that could occur anywhere in the twenty-first century U.S.: traffic’s drone, garbage in sunlight, a wad of gum, an abandoned lot. It’s an honest balance of dark and light, mysterious and routine, unique and ubiquitous. And this extended, monumental-in-miniature study of a landscape and the carefulness with which it’s approached in words are the evidence of the success of Areas of Fog in synthesizing previously independent chapbook-length works. The overall image we’re left with is somehow a singular vision, though fractured and diverse and teeming with distinct phenomena.

Some of the more recent poems, such as “Impasse,” indicate new interests and more expansive forms. Some of these more expansive poems are fruitful for me, but I don’t get as much from lines like “Our senses/snag against//the world’s burned,/blurred lists” (from “Impasse”) as I do from much of the shorter, more imagistic material. But some variety and experiment within a project don’t hurt anything. Most of all, at the risk of reinforcing the old cliché of books being your friends, these refreshing poems are good company – quiet, open, and free of unwelcome proclamations and dictations (except those taken directly from the weather). To quote from another of the lunes originally published in Bramble and now collected in Areas of Fog:

company tonight -
silence’s
cricket-warped surface

Company tonight indeed. I can’t think of why you shouldn’t read Areas of Fog.


[1] Collected, interestingly, in the Out of Light section, though some readers will probably note that these poems originally appeared in a much earlier chapbook titled Minima St. and still available (I believe) in its entirety online.

Three from Lorine

Dusk -

He's spearing from a boat -

How slippery is man

in spring

when the small fish

            spawn

*

Beautiful girl-

pushes food onto her fork

with her fingers-

          will throw the switches

of deadly rockets?

*

No matter where you are

you are alone

and in danger - well

                   to hell

with it.

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Poems, 1957-1959

from Collected Works, Lorine Niedecker

The Cosmopolitan

The Cosmopolitan.



Reading Donna Stonecipher’s The Cosmopolitan[1] reminded me of one of Jorge Luis Borges’ responses in a book of interviews titled Borges at Eighty:

Audience: Since you are such a peaceful man, why is there so much violence in your stories?

Borges: Perhaps because I come of military stock. Because I might have been somebody else. But really, now, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe in violence, I don’t believe in war. I think the whole thing is a mistake. I believe in agreeing, not disagreeing. I don’t believe in countries. Countries are a mistake, are a superstition. I suppose the world should be one, even as the stoics thought. We should be cosmopolitans, citizens of the world. I have so many hometowns, for example, Buenos Aires, for example, Austin, Texas, for example, Montivedo, well, tonight Cambridge, why not? Geneva, Edinburgh, ever so many hometowns. It’s much better than having one hometown or one country.

Borges speaks of the romantic cosmopolitan, of globalization as peaceful seamlessness under ideal or humanistic principles, of ceaseless exploration and cultural ferment – a vision of cosmopolitanism, of world citizenship, that it seems many of the nameless figures in The Cosmopolitan’s more narrative moments – the man, the woman, the architect, the “cosmopolitan sitting in Hong Kong drinking a caipirinha” – also seek, only to be rebutted, ultimately, by a frank sense of limit in this limitlessly imagined world: “We walked under the awnings of fancy hotels and were reminded that life could be otherwise, but when we walked past the poor we felt on the contrary reinforced in our own destinies”

Borges’ cosmopolitanism in the interview (conducted in 1980) is a sort of utopian world citizenship abstracted from history, which is an attractive notion, but in truth this sort of cosmopolitanism vanished before it could ever begin. The systems, processes, and consequences of globalization have only accelerated since the time of the interview, and today the idea of nationalism or national influence really could seem superstitious, or at least antiquated, in an age of global financial interdependence, transnational banking, and endless cultural transferal (or hegemonic infection, given the tone one wants to take). A world that is, as we know very well after recent events, nothing at all like the pleasant vision offered by Borges.[2]

All of this to say that Stonecipher skillfully envisions this same conflict of imagined and real world-system through the unlikely metaphor of travel. But these poems are “travel writing” as it ought to be, or at least travel writing that is honest with itself. The violence here is under the shiny, orderly surfaces of transit and commerce. From Inlay 8:

9.
From this airport alone, you could fly to Geneva, Fez, Malta, Alicante, Berlin, San Francisco, and Luxor. We’ll do that one day, he said. We’ll arrive at the airport with one suitcase each and fly to the destination that seems to us to hold the greatest promise of annihilation.

Passages like these and their destruction-bent citizens are intermingled with writing that evokes the genuine pleasure and antiquated mysteries and myths of the travelogue (“As for me, I would choose to infiltrate foreign territories via the spice route rather than the silk route” – also from Inlay 8), including all we find enticing about art, architecture, poetry and the rest, so that the ideals and realities of a globalizing world are not seen so much in opposition but in a muddled, shifting blur – wherein the perspective of the tourist is woven through the perspectives of all those the tourist encounters – “I would choose to infiltrate” (emphasis mine). As Ron Silliman observed in his review of The Cosmpolitan (and with regard to the Claude Levi-Strauss quote and Strauss’ confrontation with poverty in India), “travel is guilt, tourism borders on genocide.” But Stonecipher reminds us that “The Cosmopolitan” – ever self-aware and engaged – “knows the difference between the hutus and the tutsis” (Inlay 5). In these poems we see the new world enacted constantly – in every waking moment, as if by keystroke or takeoff – on the ruins of the old – the declining nation-states for which one nameless figure secretly mourns and the abandoned houses of Detroit where Utopian colonies might start up. But just as “No one likes walking down a broken escalator” (Inlay 15), all the obsessions of the new do not give pause to ponder their own waste and byproduct. Stonecipher manages to capture both the hyperkinetic lure of an endlessly reinvented set of global conditions and also the terror, the underlying threat of overload, conflict, and instability.

I feel obliged to mention the form of this book, of course – the inlay structure and quoted material, but I also suspect much has already been said of these formal devices. What I might add (or not) is this: I find it interesting how certain quoted phrases are not only lodged within each inlay, but also resonate throughout the book, their words reappearing in the details of the numbered prose passages of other inlays. E.g. Susan Sontag’s “the inauthenticity of the beautiful” from Inlay 4 reappears throughout the book in other guises, and I don’t just mean that phenomena presumed beautiful are dissected or deconstructed in some way. Stonecipher’s choices of word and imagery – the materiality of the language, the poetry as delivered by the poet herself - also tend to replicate this sentiment, and some of the most typically lyrical or vivid moments in these poems describe the utterly banal – e.g., “In a blitzkrieg of a stranger’s perfume I was suddenly illuminated” (Inlay 20) or “stamps of the most beautiful ice-blue” (Inlay 21). The effect of this swarm of echoes and slant repetitions is not so much a structured cohesion, but a sense of connections more subtle and (ultimately) fleeting, a sense reminiscent of a phenomenon invoked a few times in The Cosmopolitan: déjà vu.

The quotations also affect the reading of the poems in other unexpected ways. I.e., you may begin to imagine your own inlays and think of these poems in dialogue with other source material you know. Like Borges on violence and cosmopolitanism. And then, in Inlay 16, you read: “He wanted to be a citizen of the world and was crushed to discover that the world fields no citizens as such.”

[1] I haven’t yet read any of Donna Stonecipher’s other books, but you might check out her excellent translations of German poet Veronika Reichl wherever you can find them online.
[2] Which is not to indicate, at I know it might sound, that I think this is indicative of some naïveté on Borges’ part; clearly Borges was putting forth an ideal he would have wanted to see (and which relates to his own work, as does the question he was asked). Nor should I ignore, as I do, the way the reaction to loaded terms like cosmopolitanism is going to be substantially different for someone born in the late twentieth century in America vs. someone – a genius, frankly – who lived under Peronism in Argentina.

The Surveyic Hero

The Surveyic Hero is (check it) out:

www.horselesspress.com/surveyichero.html

File under scooters and call it a poem.

Surveyic Information

CHAPBOOK

I have a chapbook forthcoming from horse less press in July 2007. It is called The Surveyic Hero.

More on this later.