false 31 281 278 true 5677824 read 3 true 1071717 currently-reading 0 true 1071716 to-read http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/80164013 to: I Am Not Jackson Pollock: Stories (Paperback) by John Haskell
Haskell was another of those names that popped up on my list, alongside F Gander and a couple others I'm sure I'll cycle through in another month or so, and this was the first book of his I could find.... I was interested in what I anticipated to be the cross-genre elements of this, and in that regard, I wasn't disappointed, or at least not much.... This book is a series of "narratives" that to me are a lot like essays, really-- usually two or more well-known figures have their biographies rehearsed (and I'm only speculating here, but I'll speculate) and augmented by Haskell to develop some idea outside of their particular lives: so Joan of Arc and the woman who played Joan of Arc in a movie and Mercedes McCambridge all serve to develop an idea about authority and submission to authority.

Like I said, there's not too much narrative here, and what there is serves the purpose of developing this idea: authority, desire, identity.

Most of the stories concern actors, and there's a regular slippage in the way Haskell writes between actor and character, so it's Janet Leigh who is traveling on the highway and killed in the motel in Psycho, by Tony Hopkins, not Norman Bates. I'm sure this is intentional, and maybe it's this part of the rhetorical approach of the book that makes it fiction at all? But it's odd, and I'm still not sure I fully get it.

Part of my idiosyncratic response to this book is that I've read Martone's stories about celebrities years ago and a couple times since, so I feel like, for me, this is slightly familiar territory thematically, even if Haskell's approach is new. I think I might have been more wowed if I hadn't first read Martone.

I want to read _American Purgatorio_, to see what Haskell does with a broader palette.
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/79718352 to: When Angels Rest (Stay More Cycle) by Donald Harington
This is the first Stay More novel I've read, and really, it blew me away.... a while back my friend Daren mentioned Harington and how it was criminal he was so little known, and after reading this, I couldn't agree more.

So let me say this loudly from my internet rooftop: Harington is a great writer, on a sentence level and as a plotter. The story is really intriguing, builds toward satisfying elements, and is just brought off with a level of polish on the level of the sentence that reminds you of Dickens or someone like that-- you feel like you're in good hands, lean back, and give thanks for the true and deep-bodied enjoyment you are about to receive.

It doesn't hurt, either, that the book has some moderately ambitious goals, some talk about war stories v love stories, some really nice crossed identifications between the Axis and the Allies, and just generally smart writing about how a really small place can form really significant and surprising connections to a much larger world.

That said, the last movement of this book, what is done to the narrator's gf-- wtf? That seemed on the one hand totally unmotivated, and on the other, totally unresolved at the end of the book. I'm more than willing to accept that the story is picked up in another of the Stay More books, but in this one-- wow, that was a shitty way to end this book! I want it to put the period on the thematic issues introduced above, something about love and war, but man, I just don't see it.

So, a really great book with what, at first blush at least, is a deeply flawed ending. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78944467 to: Infanta (National Poetry Series) by Erin Belieu
I like parts of this: it certainly has some of that gnomic headscratching quality I sometimes like in spite of myself. And the "sexy" poems in section two are pretty great, full-blooded and tearing teeth kinds of poems. But overall, I felt that the poems just weren't quite there-- there was little memorable about them, even in the sexy poems, phrases I'd like to ponder and play with some more, forms that are interesting, etc. I'd read Belieu again, for sure. But this book feels like its on the way to being the work of an interesting and celebrated poet, but not there just yet. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78944254 to: Eye Against Eye (Paperback) by Forrest Gander
I got one of my usual wild hairs and thought I needed to read something by Gander, who bobbed onto the radar a couple times. It was good, if different than I thought: this is both sparse and southern, a combo I don't always put together. Neither are totally in my wheelhouse, to be honest, so I don't know what to think.

This one comes with poems connected to pictures by Sally Mann which I think are hurt by being faced with poor reproductions of the same photos (which are landscapes, not what I think of Sally Mann for, really, either). So, these are solid poems, and a solid book, but not entirely to my taste. If you're Caroline, though, and wanted a distraction from _Deepstep Come Shining_, this might interest you. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78667479 to: n+1 Number Eight: Recessional (Perfect Paperback) by n+1
I really like N+1, because it challenges me and makes me feel dumb like I used to when I was an undergrad, a feeling I really don't get often enough. It's good for me, because I don't like to feel dumb and this mag really challenges me, creates the strong sense that there are whole categories of thought I don't have even a passing awareness of.... I mean, the editor's essay took me an hour to read, and it's like, ten pages!

On other more specific fronts, this issue continues a general trend that is a little worrying, that the mag is evolving toward becoming more like other mags-- too much fiction in this issue, for starters (I'm a fiction writer, I love fiction, including fiction from N+1 editors), and all cut from the same cloth, stories about foreign cultures.

Every issue I think is a little miracle and a little warning of the mag's continued decline into being indistinguishable from all other mags I like but which blur together. This issue is no exception, on either front. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78667034 to: The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures (Paperback) by Phoebe Gloeckner
A pretty amazing document of words, delivered in a voice that feels more or less pitch-perfect-- flat, affectless except when it's not, profane and good, along with comix that supplement and sometimes but not always take up the story.... This is a really solid piece of work, one I used to hear about a lot when it came out but which I think has maybe been forgotten under the avalanche of other, "all-picture" versions like Ariel Shrag's and Alison Bechdel's.

My one concern is the ending, which I don't know, felt a little abrupt and which didn't really seem the culmination or completion of much of anything. It's the kind of thing that I'd shrug off in a memoir, but I think I'm supposed to read this, at least in part, as fiction, and it lacks that shaping that I want from fiction. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78155990 Caroline's review of Stars Fell on Alabama (Library Alabama Classics)
by Carl Carmer

oh yeaahhhhhh. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/77839393 to: Walking to Martha's Vineyard (Paperback) by Franz Wright
Somebody mention F Wright to me the other day, and I thought, I've never read his work, so I gave this one a shot. I think it's decent-- these are well constructed poems of religious contemplation, alternating with poems about coming to terms with an absent father (the poet J Wright). I do feel like the religious poems lack the kind of angry passion I think characterizes the best religious poets like, I don't know, George Herbert. They seem a little easy, actually, with less of the wrestling with God, the fight that sets in when you don't want to submit. These poems seem more than ready to heel, roll over, and show their throat. I'm not sure that's a problem, really, but given the spiky lines and etc that Wright works in, I wanted a little more fight from the poems.

The daddy poems were, by and large, better for me, because they were more bruised and beaten up, like they had more to lose.

A solid book of poems, but one I doubt I'll revisit. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/77839208 to: Father of Noise (Paperback) by Anthony McCann
I read Moon Garden a while back and couldn't get into it-- it was somehow too abstract to me, too hard to connect it back to anything identifiable. Maybe because this is an earlier book, it felt less distanced for me, and I really got into it. There are some beautiful lyrics here, the kind of poems I want to write everytime I get 24hours alone in Brooklyn. Magical, transformational, musical and richly felt. This is a really enjoyable book of poems. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/77838437 to: Go Down, Moses (Paperback) by William Faulkner
This is a tough one, because there are so many things going on in this book, and it's hard to comment on just a few. But here goes:

It's Faulkner, so the writing on a sentence level is frequently amazing. I mean it, there's no one else who has such a weird, idiosyncratic, characteristically garrolous and wonderful style. More than that, it's almost root and branch of the stories Faulkner tells.

So what's missing? Well, the stories themselves are often a little less whelming than you might get in other Faulkner: "Fire and the Hearth," for example, has a ton of potential but kind of loses the thread, and gets way too invested in the hunting for buried gold plot. It's like Faulkner knew he needed to introduce the genealogy for the other stories, and the theme of patrimony, and dreamed up this plot as a fun way to do all that.... and it is. But then he didn't follow through with an ending as good as that beginning. And "Pantaloon in Black"? That's stories almost a bad joke. The second part of it is a bad joke, an obvious afterthought when it could have been something deep seeing and great. The title story leaves a lot to be desired, too, though at that point, I was mostly ready for the book to be over.

That said, "Old People" really works, even if it needs "The Bear" to lean against. And "The Bear," most of it at least, is incredible, if a bit unnecessary (I mean, the story is pretty basic). But then there's the difficult part four, where Ike and McCaslin go through the family books-- and here, there's what strikes me as a colossal failure, both of intent and imagination-- there are ideas in this section that are, frankly, repulsive distortions of history. I am talking specifically of the comments Ike makes about reconstruction that I think are fully authorized by Faulkner and which are just mean. There are other parts of this that are problematic on the level of theme, too, something about who gets to redeem the land, and from and for who, that turn up again in "Delta Autumn" that made me cringe a little (at least in the latter story there's some daylight between Faulkner and Ike, or at least you can tell yourself there is). But what I think is equally striking is the writerly failure of part four-- I know Faulkner does weird things with structure and narration, but this section feels a lot like he threw up his hands and just went with what he had, which weren't much. In other words, I think "The Bear" was meant to be a novel but Faulkner couldn't figure it out, so it ends up here. It's a problem, because without section four there's not much to the story aside from some gorgeous writing. But with section four, you've got a real piece of shit that stinks to high heaven.

Oh well, I wanted to re-read this one, and I have.

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