false 90 101 87 true 5816825 read 1 true 121761 currently-reading 13 true 121760 to-read <![CDATA[Bryant added 'Complete Poems']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/53400847 to: Complete Poems (Paperback) by Elizabeth Bishop
In the May 14, 2009 issue of The London Review of Books, Colm Tóibín writes that in the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, "Description was a desperate way of avoiding self-description; looking at the world was a way of looking out from the self." He goes on to say that "The fact that the world was there was both enough and far too little for Bishop. Its history or her own history were beside the point." Given that the lyric mode† has become the dominant mode of contemporary poetry (as opposed to epic or didactic or pastoral modes), and given that contemporary lyric is often conceived as "overheard" or confessional poetry, Tóibín's contention is an interesting one. When we overhear Bishop, we don't hear her talking about herself. She's talking about fish or armadillos or moose. For a reader steeped in the patent egoism (and occasional egotism) of contemporary lyric poets like Louise Glück, Frederick Seidel, John Ashberry, or Jorrie Graham, Elizabeth Bishop cuts an odd figure. There seems to be not very much Elizabeth Bishop in the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Biographical critics, meet your ultimate foe.

Yet reading this collection, which includes all published poems, unpublished poems from her youth, and a series of translations, one sees that Tóibín is not altogether right. Bishop's description was not a desperate way of "avoiding self-description"; it was in fact her very method of self-description. In fish and armadillos and moose she saw human characteristics that dissolved the boundaries we are wont to erect between human and animal. Observe how in "The Fish," Bishop struggles to reject the animal as something fully other:

I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip--
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.

...

Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.

The narrator toggles between anthropomorphizing description ("his sullen face") and clinical, distant language ("the mechanism of his jaw"), correcting herself mid-stride ("if you could call it a lip," "or four and a wire leader"). This is a wonderful poem that transmutes the fish-out-of-water disorientation to the person who has caught the fish. She cannot make sense of it, categorize it, and when she tries, she wrestles with signs of noble struggle, even wisdom, and confirmations that it is a beast with eyes "shallower" and "yellowed" when compared with human eyes, eyes that don't "return my stare." It's wise and mundane, deep and shallow, all at once. In the final lines, the mystery of the fish overwhelms the narrator's sense of victory:

I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

Surrendering the fish means surrendering her attempt to figure it out. Much of what I find stirring and delightful about Bishop's poetry is this surrendering posture, an angle of defeat that never fully lets on quite what it's up to. In more overt poems like "Questions of Travel," Bishop unabashedly poses a series of difficult questions that imply defeat, including the famous closing lines:

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there ... No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?

It is in the struggle for understanding that Bishop finds the vitality of the self. This reminds me of Louise Glück's poetry, but Bishop's feels less like therapeutic self-expression, and it is the better for it. For Bishop locates the turmoil between what she thinks she knows and what she cannot or does not know not only in her own head but also in heads of seemingly the weakest or most ridiculous creatures. In doing so, she suggests an identification between herself and vulnerable animals like the armadillo or the sandpiper. This identification has a way of both expanding the range of her conundrums--they afflict even weak animals--and reducing their self-importance--if even a sandpiper can have the view that "The world is mist. And then the world is / minute and vast and clear," how special is it that we can, too?

"Sandpiper" closes

he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

This is Bishop, too. We find her looking for something, something, something, darting her head among the objects and mysteries of material life like a sandpiper flitting its head along the pebbled shore. Her collected poems prove that among the million grains she knows where the rose and amethyst lie.


†On the rise of the lyric mode in modern and contemporary poetry, see Michael Silk's important chapter "Lyric and Lyrics: Perspectives Ancient and Modern" in the Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric, pp. 373ff. Silk ably demonstrates how privileging one mode of poetry, the lyric mode, reached such an extent that the mode itself is now synonymous with poetry. ]]> <![CDATA[Bryant added 'Lolita']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78017482 Lolita (Paperback) by Vladimir Nabokov
bookshelves: currently-reading
]]> <![CDATA[Bryant added 'Selected Stories']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/69203479 to: Selected Stories (New York Review Books Classics) by Robert Walser
]]> <![CDATA[Bryant added 'Travels with Herodotus']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/61214625 to: Travels with Herodotus (Paperback) by Ryszard Kapuściński
The late Ryszard Kapuscinski traveled the world as a journalist, spending significant stretches of time in China, India, and several African countries. He always carried with him a copy of Herodotus' "Histories," the fifth-century writer's only known work, a masterpiece mélange of history, ethnography, folklore, and anthropology, and a work studded throughout with meditations on the human condition. For those who are new to Herodotus, Kapuscinski consistently alerts the reader, through ample quotation of his favorite writer, that Herodotus is so much more than the proverbial epithet "Father of History" would suggest. Like Kapuscinski the journalist and reporter--the parallel between Kapuscinski and Herodotus is never made explicit but is also never deniable--Herodotus displays a roving, restless curiosity that embraces not only the epic battles of history but also the marginal stories of the maimed and nearly forgotten figures who stand in the wings of heroism's vast stage. As I told friends and acquaintances this year while writing an MA thesis on aspects of Herodotus' great work, Herodotus' "Histories" reminds me of the Sunday edition of the New York Times: it contains everything, even section one might term Styles and Weddings & Celebrations.

It is precisely in the acknowledgment of Herodotus' breadth and affirmation of multiplicity that one must also aver his ideological elusiveness. Does Herodotus choose a side in the Greco-Persian wars, and if so, how sure can we be that he expresses himself unambiguously in his work? Is one way of culture superior to another? What are Herodotus' politics? Scholars have grappled productively if not wholly conclusively with these questions for centuries. In recent decades, especially since the 1987 publication of an edition of the journal Arethusa devoted to Herodotus, the prevailing trend in Herodotean scholarship has been one in which the open-ended, broad nature of his work militates against pinning down its author's convictions.

Kapuscinski's love of Herodotus, on the other hand, more than a few times succumbs to a set romanticizing, naive binaries that belie the essential complexity of Herodotus' work. A representative example is when Kapusinski writes that "There is a war going on . . . in which Persia is to conquer Greece--meaning, Asia is to seize Europe, despotism is to destroy democracy, and slavery is to prevail against freedom" (p. 204). The terms "Europe" and "Asia" certainly existed in Herodotus' time, but their application in this context is anachronistic (loaded as the terms are nowadays with significant differences between religion, politics, and culture) and recklessly polarizing. For instance, Book V of Herodotus deals with Ionia, part of the Greek world but also part of the Asian world, and Herodotus, himself from a mixed background, rightfully recognizes the admixture of cultures and perspectives that existed in Ionia. The so-called Ionian revolt, in which various Ionian city-states unsuccessfully tried overthrowing Persian hegemony, occupies an extended narrative position in which Herodotus ably depicts the tyrannical, power-seeking motives of the Greeks against the tyrannical, power-seeking motives of the Asians. As the title of an online article by Oxford scholar Christopher Pelling suggests, "East Is East and West Is West: Or Are They?" In other words, Herodotus' work is intellectually honest enough to show the Greeks looking Asian and, as Elton Barker has demonstrated in his recent book on debate in the ancient world, the Asians in their assemblies looking Greek.

Nor is it always right to say that Greece (itself a difficult term, as Greece was never in the fifth-century BCE a politically unified place) was a bastion of democracy and Asia the navel of despotism. Despots and tyrants littered the world on both sides of the Aegean. The Greek Aristagoras may not have been as openly cruel as the Persian king Xerxes, but he was no democrat. Nor is Xerxes always shown being a jerk; in fact, he often looks better than the Greeks. Such cross-overs, the right hand playing bass while the left tinkles the treble notes on Herodotus' moral keyboard, have furnished the contention among some scholars that Herodotus' work is not so much a celebration of freedom and democracy as it is a warning against those Greeks who would jettison it when it becomes inconvenient. During the Pelopponesian Wars, the Greek civil war that followed on the heels of the Greco-Persian wars, Athens became its own tyrannical empire inflicting its heavy rule on other Greek city-states. Does Herodotus celebrate Athens in his work, or does he implicitly lament the Athens of yesteryear, before the city became the internal despot, terrorizing Greece (such as it was)?

Finally, a frustration that emerges from this book is Kapuscinski's divided attention between two subjects--Herodotus and the modern beat of his journalistic world--that he never manages to reconcile. At the end of a chapter in which he has recounted four significant passages from Herodotus, Kapuscinski tells us that finishes the sentence and sets the book down on the table. He swats away some bugs and goes home. This is it. No meditation, no analysis, just summary of Herodotus and bug-swatting. It's one thing to be suggestive. But simply to quote a string of passages with no apparent purpose leaves the reader feeling somewhat betrayed.

But I must set aside these frustrations in remembering that what Kapuscinski lacks in nuance he possesses in sheer vivacity. He writes of Herodotus at one point that he was a "fascinated, unflagging nomad" in a world where most people are content to be at home. There is an openness, a geniality to Kapuscinski that is indeed worthy of his companion. ]]> <![CDATA[Bryant added 'The Bell']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/68034854 to: The Bell (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) by Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch tries packing a hefty load into this book: characters who represent different lifestyles and intellectual attitudes; vivid analepses that inform the present time of the story; bizarre and at times hokey twists of plot; brackish psychological struggles; and not always subtle messages about imagination v. convention. (Two of the main characters, Paul and Dora Greenfield, exemplify this dichotomy: Paul is an art historian, Dora a fledgling albeit unsuccessful artist. Dora wears sandals, even when the weather is cool. But of course.) The result is a book that occasionally hits its stride--the chapter when Dora begins maniacally ringing the re-discovered bell is both plausible and beautifully written--but often suffers from an over-accumulation of unfocused detail. Certain characters are merely Rand-esque mouthpieces for particular ways of life. Murdoch never gives James, for instance, the chance to develop as a proper character; she just tells us what he's like and plants a dull speech in his mouth about the virtues of following God's commandments. Yet one senses that his intended importance to the novel's structure disproportionately outstrips the role Murdoch actually assigns him.

As a meditation on the tragic attempt to order the emotions and the contingencies to which their impulses give rise, this is a powerful novel. The book's structure cleverly unveils the ways in which all the the main characters at the Imber community suppress their compulsions until the suppression reaches a hazardous boiling point. Late in the book, a host of hidden desires overwhelms the apparent orderliness of the characters' lives and implodes their community. Dora, the free-thinking, sandal-wearing, iconoclastic, beer-drinking, outdoor-love-making (get the idea?) woman, emerges triumphant and unscathed. The flaw, though, with this novel--and with any novel that attempts too stringently to represent ideas through people--is that ideas are less inconsistent than humans. Systems of thought are, when properly developed, systematic; human personalities aren't. Reading this book I found myself inhabiting a rebellious position similar to Dora's, wishing that the characters would break free of the over-simplified molds that Murdoch had cast for them. ]]> <![CDATA[Bryant added 'Revolutionary Road']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/67649282 to: Revolutionary Road (Vintage Classics) by Richard Yates
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
]]> <![CDATA[Bryant added 'The New Kings of Nonfiction']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/61214545 to: The New Kings of Nonfiction (Paperback) by Ira Glass
Ira Glass seems to commit an uncharacteristic act of hyperbole in calling these writers "kings" (and I don't mean simply because several of them are women). Perhaps he means the stories themselves are the kings, what with their power to echo beyond their apparent subjects into the crevices of our cultural Zeitgeist. All the same, the selling point of hyperbole notwithstanding, there is a lot of worthwhile, regally fascinating material here. I recommend in particular Malcolm Gladwell's piece on Lois Weisberg, which artfully interweaves anecdote and sociological statistic; Bill Buford's piece "Among the Thugs," a jarring evocation of the madness that takes hold of football (soccer) fans in contemporary England; and Mark Bowden's "Tales of the Tyrant," a 2002 piece from the Atlantic that chronicles the outrages and excesses of Saddam Hussein. So finely wrought are the details in this last piece that one is reminded how glib and bullet-pointed our traditional media sources have become. We still need the essay. ]]> <![CDATA[new comment from Bryant]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/34447186 Chris's review of Butcher's Crossing (New York Review Books Classics)
by John Edward Williams

If you liked this (you did), read "Stoner" and "Augustus." John Williams is a great and sadly neglected writer. ]]> <![CDATA[Bryant added 'In Ruins']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/55461686 to: In Ruins (Hardcover) by Christopher Woodward
The goal of this book, to survey various literary and artistic reactions to both the idea and reality of (mostly ancient) ruins, is an admirable one. It's also an ambitious one, and just as ruins themselves frequently demonstrate, between the idea and the reality falls the shadow. Woodward does not allot (or was not allotted by his publisher?) ample space to tackle the topic in the detail it merits, and the result is a frequently cosmetic treatment of a subject that should be explored more deeply. Despite occasional passages of lucid analysis and engaging rumination, there is a casual disconnectedness to Woodward's style that imprisons his book's potential. Reception studies is an emerging sub-field within both classics and art history, and Woodward's book proposes a study along the lines of reception: how do later generations engage with the literary and material remains of past cultures to generate their own definitions of culture? Woodward's treatments of Byron, Shelley, and various painters gesture in the direction of a fascinating reception study, but he frequently shifts gear after only getting underway. The upshot is a light study that reads easily and would be a pleasant book to have in the bag while traveling through Greece or Italy. Indeed, it may be own fault for approaching the book too studiously. ]]>