Jon Frankel's Blog, page 19

GAHA: Tompkins Weekly REVIEW

Franklin Crawford reviews GAHA: BABES OF THE ABYSS in the Tompkins Weekly, HERE

MARIANNE HAUSER: THE TALKING ROOM

THE TALKING ROOM

By Marianne Hauser

FC2, 1976

In 1976 Marianne Hauser published one of the most astonishing novels I have ever read, The Talking Room. She was 66 years old and had been writing and publishing since the 30’s, first in German, later (starting in 1947) in English. The talking room is about a pregnant 13 year old being raised by lesbian parents. Narrated by the girl the story takes place in New York City, during the years of blight and neglect. The smell of urine and polluted water pulses through its pages. This is not a novel celebrating queer life. It has no agenda. It is vulgar, hilarious and brilliant. Her prose is precise and concrete, full of sensual detail, such that I felt like I was living and breathing the air of its rooms and walking down the streets.

The characters are mostly identified by a single initial, and Hauser uses this device in a most Joycean manner. B, the narrator, lives with her Aunt V, and her biological mother (there is some suggestion early on that she might be a test tube baby), J. The father of her unborn child is O. There are also Uncle D and another named lesbian couple, Q and T. Flo, the African American housekeeper of the V household, is the other observer in the book.

V and J, and their unending marital warfare, dominate the narrative. B lies in bed listening to her transistor radio and the raging fights, discussions, tantrums, and fucking of V and J in the room below hers. Half heard phrases float through her mind, mingling with dreams, memories, reveries and fantasies. B is one obstreperous, horny, mean young woman. She is in full revolt against her parents and her vitriol is especially reserved for Aunt V. Aunt V is the voice of authority, of the normative adulthood sneered at by its characters. She is a successful business woman, buying and renovating brownstones and very proper. She is obsessed with J, a promiscuous, bisexual alcoholic who despises V but is totally dependent on her.

V wants a child and cannot have one, so she pesters J into getting pregnant. Much of the first part of the novel is taken up with their struggle to either get in vitro fertilization (a technology that existed but had not been successful when the novel was published, the first test tube baby was born in 1978), the traditional turkey baster, or the old fashioned way: pick up sailors in dives and fuck them in alleyways. J prefers option 3, and V in desperate fits of jealousy and rage roams sailor bars in search of her lost lover. These encounters are described by B in the most wonderful, filthy detail. All of the sex in the book is like this. Hauser is an exuberant defiler. To call B and this novel ‘transgressive’ is to rob if of its pungency. It is a dick in the eye, an assault, with humor, on propriety and lies of every kind. Writing like this by a man would be celebrated. But this novel, one of the few Hauser titles in print, is utterly lost and forgotten. It puts to shame other books, in method, in prose style, in attitude. Most books with this level of linguistic hedonism, unbridled hostility and desire, are not written well. The difference between Hauser and say Kathy Acker is immense. That distance can’t even be calculated, as Hauser is a true artist in total control of her materials. One of the most enjoyable, ironic, and resonant battles in the book is that waged by Aunt V against B’s weight: B is fat, and likes being fat. She wants to eat, a lot. She is furious that V is trying to control her diet. Her weight conveniently covers up her pregnancy, but that is not why she is heavy, no. She likes to eat as much as she likes to fuck. And she is certain she will be forced to have an abortion.

J is an explosion of invective and violence. She gets drunk, blacks out, smashes furniture, spews curses, beats V up. She is virtually indifferent to B. Like Robin in Nightwood, J is uncontrollable, and given to alcoholic wandering. She disappears towards the end of the book, and the last chapters are devoted to V’s pathetic search for her. At one point she brings in another J, but this J, also a drunk, promiscuous bisexual, is loquacious, and non-violent. V is reduced to begging her to hit her but she won’t. It isn’t nice. In a rage V kicks her out.

This is foremost a novel of voice and consciousness. B sees more than a single narrator can see, or hears more, as her narrative drifts through time. There is a strong surreal dimension to the work, but it is overwhelmingly realistic in feel, as genuine realism must include the irrational, beyond time and space dimensions of reality, the subjective experience of a mind and body in the world. That a woman in her 60’s should choose a 13 year old for narrator, and set a book entirely within the subculture of gay NY in the 70’s is just amazing. And outrageous. I am dying to uncover the critical response to this book at the time. Of course, it was published by Fiction Collective, a publishing collective started by a group of experimental writers spread out across the country. Hauser was a professor at Queens College, and very much a part of the NY underground literary scene, but she was of an older generation. Her true contemporaries are Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy, who also did not give a shit about what a woman was supposed to behave like, or a lesbian. And Hauser was not a lesbian. She slept with men and women. I doubt she would have considered herself a feminist, at least, she was not a feminist writer, or a lesbian writer, or a woman writer. And for that she has been doubly punished with obscurity. I have read that she knew Barnes. Hauser lived into her 90’s. She wasn’t as prickly as Barnes, and she published a lot more, but she has not been recognized. I pray, PRAY that this changes. I pray, PRAY that Hauser will be discovered, as Dawn Powell was in the 90’s. Her obscurity is not so much an insult to Hauser as to intelligent readers of fiction.

Here is a link for an appreciation by her former Sun and Moon Press publisher: American Cultural Treasure

READING SPENSER

Reading Spenser, Master of Mutabilitie

In that same Gardin all the goodly flowres,

Wherewith dame Nature doth her beautifie,

And decks the girlonds of her paramoures,

Are fetcht: there is the first seminarie

Of all things, that are borne to liue and die,

According to their kindes. Long worke it were,

Here to account the endlesse progenie

Of all the weedes, that bud and blossome there;

But so much as doth need, must needs be counted here.

Before reading Blake I had little interest in Spenser. My only exposure to him was in those pages of the Norton Shorter Anthology dedicated to poets between Chaucer and Shakespeare. Despite being a contemporary of Shakespeare, he seemed archaic and boring. Boring is a charge hurled at him often, and it’s understandable. Where Shakespeare and Donne are shockingly modern in perspective and language, Spenser is thoroughly Renaissance, and his linguistic experiments were indeed with archaism. Spenser was a committed Protestant, of the militant party, and a Neoplatonist. The former infuses much of his writings with a partisan tone. The latter informs his allegorical method. This method is part of what makes him so alien to a modern sensibility. That and all of the stylistic vices he indulged. Spenser could personify anything. But what all of this misses is the sheer delight of Spenser.

Until the 20th Century Spenser was one of the four undisputed champions of English poetry: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton were the guiding deities. What happened? Well, if Milton was exhausting, Spenser was enervating. The Faerie Queene is the longest poem in the language. It hasn’t the vigor of Milton’s epic, which in any event was eclipsed also. Who has time for this? He wasn’t of the plain school. Ben Jonson said ‘he writ no language’. Eliot quotes his Prothalamion in The Wasteland (sweet Thames run softly till I end my song), but I don’t recall Eliot writing about him. Pound gives him a few lines in his anthology Confucius to Cummings, and in the How to Read book Spenser is a specimen. But because of his role as a colonial officer in Ireland, you won’t read references to him in Yeats or Joyce, even though they resemble him in many respects. Joyce is a very Spenserian writer! And I believe much of the strange, surrealistic beauty of Spenser’s writing comes from Irish poetry, an unacknowledged influence, but a plausible inference given his biography, and references to Irish bards in his only extended prose work, View of the Present State of Ireland

I’ve read most everything he wrote, and it is a remarkable body of work, singular in the English tradition. Consider that he, Sydney, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Herbert, Herrick and Milton wrote within the same hundred years: Sydney was born in 1554 and Milton died in 1674. Spenser’s dates are 1552-1599. Shakespeare first plays date from about 1588 at the earliest. The Tempest first played in 1611. His influence on Shakespeare and Milton is profound. When Spenser started writing English poetry was just emerging from what CS Lewis called the ‘drab age’. That is, the age between Chaucer and Wyatt. Skelton gets short shrift here. (Spenser wrote a poem, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, a reference to Skelton’s Colin Clout, a rube who criticizes court corruption; Skelton is as drab as a paisley Rolls Royce). Spenser wrote The Shephearde’s Calendar in 1579, a radically inventive pastoral poem with a poem per calendar month. They are uneven. Each one is preceded by an emblem, and followed by an analysis of that emblem and notes both on vocabulary and references, supposedly written by an EK Chambers, whom many think is Spenser himself. (This is a bit like the mysterious Onlie Begetter of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the never identified Mr. WH, a crux which Jonathan Bate resolved by playfully suggesting it is a result of a common printer’s error, substituting the letter H for the intended S, Mr. WS, or William Shakespeare). The notes were necessary because Spenser set out to use a wider vocabulary and a broader range of literary reference than was then common. But it is also a mark of experimental work that it will include its own exegesis, whether tongue in cheeke or not (cf the Wasteland, David Jones’ poetry, DFW Infinite Jest ad naus etc). Each poem is in a different form, but all of them are pastoral dialogues between a group of shepherds. Some are more serious, such as November, and some just gorgeous, like the Aprill Aeglogue in praise of Elizabeth, with this Ovidian catalogue of flowres:

Bring hither the Pink, and purple Cullumbine,

With Gylliflowers:

Bring Coronations, and Sops in Wine,

Worn of Paramours.

Strow me the Ground with Daffadowndillies,

And Cowslips, and Kingcups, and loved Lillies:

The pretty Pawnce,

And the Chevisaunce,

Shall match with the fair Flowre-Delice.

Spenser could write like this in his sleep. And the amazing thing is, late in his career he’s still at it. Like the Thames, Spenser’s imagination, and ear for rhyme, and eye for image, seem to be inexhaustible.

By itself The Shepheard’s Calendar would have made Spenser a major poet. But he also wrote the Amoretti, a sonnet sequence celebrating protestant marriage (and the actual courtship with his wife), the Prothalamion and Epithalamion, the Fowre Hymns, translations, The View of the Present State of Ireland, some satires, and The Faerie Queene. DStrangely, much of the sonnet sequence is pedestrian and tedious. Sydney’s and Shakespeare’s are far more tantalizing and complex. But of course it is the Faerie Queen that is the big game. There are 6 complete books, each made up of 12 cantos, and each canto running to about 50, 9 line stanzas. The rhyme structure is ababbcbcc. The first 8 lines are iambic pentameter and the 9th line is hexameter. That one extra stress is very important. This stanza, which persists into the 19th century, is remarkably flexible, but it places a high demand on the poet to come up with rhymes.

The best of the whole poem is the incomplete 7th book, the Mutabilitie Cantos. This is Spenser’s Tempest, a late work that seems to sum up all that he has written before, and transcend it. I think anyone interested in exploring Spenser should start there.

Much of the use of allegory makes The Faerie Queene obscure for the modern reader. At least its ultimate purpose and meaning are shrouded in Reformation and Renaissance politics and theology which are in turn represented by allegorical figures. But that isn’t terribly important as the action of the poem is clear, and Spenser’s symbolism often hits you over the head. It’s not necessary to know that a vomiting beast is the Roman Church after all, when you read the contents of that vomit. And you don’t need to be a scholar, just a well-read poet, to get most of what’s going on. In any event, don’t get bogged down in the details, go for the glory spots: the Bower of Bliss and the Bower of Adonis, the cave of Mammon (Moloch!), Britomart, Una and Duessa. The tale of Britomart, told over two books (Books 3 and 4), is wonderful and fascinating, as she disguises herself as a man to search for her lover, and fights the vicious knights of Faerie, preserving her virtue for the man she loves. Book 5, dedicated to the public virtue of Justice, is as distasteful as his writing about Ireland. And the pastoral of book 6 is a bit annoying, though its invocation of the graces is numinous, Botticelli come to life on the page. The strongest books are 2, 3 and 4. I read them at different times. Book 3 I read once between Christmas and New Year’s, lying on my couch. It was a several day affair, with lots of tea and classical music. I was as happy as a pig in shit!

Spenser creates an entire world. It is all things: theological, philosophical, tactile, libidinal, joyous, frightening, serious, silly and literary, gloriously literary. Spenser is the little engine that could. He never gives up. Much is made of his erudition, but he’s a light weight compared to Milton, a bag stuffed with knowledge. He got his Greeks and Romans confused. I’m not sure how much of Plato he actually read. But he absorbed the classics into his English stomach and heart where they roiled and mutated and ultimately sublimated into great English poetry. The poem is work of neoplatonist syncretization: Arthurian, biblical, classical myth fused with the contemporary. The Faerie Queene inspired Milton to write Paradise Lost. Originally he intended to write and Arthurian Epic, but Spenser already did, so he turned to the Bible. Blake dipped his pen in the well of Spenser, often, as did Keats and Shelley (Lamia and The Witch of Atlas are Spenserian poems). Long before that Shakespeare is quoting him in Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Oberon to Puck

That very time I saw, but thou couldst not,

Flying between the cold moon and the earth,

Cupid all arm’d: a certain aim he took

At a fair vestal throned by the west, 530

And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,

As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts;

But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft

Quench’d in the chaste beams of the watery moon,

And the imperial votaress passed on, 535

In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell:

It fell upon a little western flower,

Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,

And maidens call it love-in-idleness.

(act 2 scene one)

 

Venus and Adonis is a Spenserian exercise, though as you would expect Shakespeare mocks, embraces and exceeds the master, as he would do with Marlowe and Virgil and Ovid.

Well, enough. I leave you with a quote, the last words of The Faerie Queene:

WHen I bethinke me on that speech whyleare,

Of Mutability, and well it way:

Me seemes, that though she all vnworthy were

Of the Heav’ns Rule ; yet very sooth to say,

In all things else she beares the greatest sway.

Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle,

And loue of things so vaine to cast away;

Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle,

Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle.

 

Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,

Of that same time when no more Change shall be,

But stedfast rest of all things firmely stayd

Vpon the pillours of Eternity,

That is contrayr to Mutabilitie:

For, all that moueth, doth in Change delight:

But thence-forth all shall rest eternally

With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight:

O thou great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight.

NO EXPECTATIONS

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

By Charles Dickens

Coming to a classic novel late is good thing. There was a time when Great Expectations would have been wasted on me. But at age 54, with a lot of books under my belt, I feel free to love this book in the way it should be. Reviewing it seems a little silly. What more can I say about a monument? Except, don’t treat it like a monument. Treat it like a book that was written by a man for an audience of adults, most of whom read it in a magazine, as it appeared in installments.

It is amazing to think of a serious novel about gratitude, but that is exactly what this is. It is possible to be too sophisticated to produce art, to be too concerned with intelligence and not enough with the emotions that make compelling narratives. I don’t believe that literature can improve us morally, but it can articulate what it is to be a human being. Gratitude, the prodigal son, forgiveness and repentance are all thought to be Christian ideals. But not in Dickens’ world. These psychological truths, the truth of our condition as human beings, of our obligations to each other, ourselves and to the truth, require no church or preacher. They do require a community of morally articulate individuals who act on their conscience. And Dickens is part of that community. In this story we see a Victorian man, a prominent author, reserve his greatest sympathies for a criminal condemned to execution. His horror is excited by the cruelty of child abuse and poverty, by bitterness, by fraud. But if he merely wove the tale of Pip out of moral sentiment it would be bad. Instead he tells a rip roaring story, and does so with great subtlety and beauty. I expect Dickens to be full of vivid characters. I was surprised by his descriptions of nature, of the marshes of Pip’s childhood, of the Thames as he and Herbert oar their scow downriver, and of the strange old brewery where Estella lives. I could not put this book down, even as I luxuriated in its sentences. I can think of no greater novel. It simply exists in a category of its own, an archetype from which other stories are struck.

POET CAROL RUBENSTEIN, VANISHED NUMBER

My old friend, the poet Carol Rubenstein, has published 4 new poems on Jerome Rothenberg’s site Poems and Poetics. Rubenstein’s work is dense and associative, with a profusion of images, but always driven by a single concern. In this case it is Auschwitz, which she visited several times over the course of a single year. I first met Carol in 1991, at an open mike reading in Ithaca. The poem she read was easily the best one that night, and it was indeed about Auschwitz. Carol is an inspiration, a true artist who wears her dedication lightly. She lived in Sarawak for years, translating Dayak poetry, which she published in two volumes (which brought her to Cornell, where the John M. Echols Southeast Asia collection resides), The Honey Tree Song and Nightbird Sings. 

MAD DOG COLL

MAD DOG COLL

An Irish Gangster

By Breandon Delap

Mercier Press, Cork, 1999

I love true crime stories. Some of the earliest adult books I read as a kid were the mafia books of the early seventies, like The Valachi Papers and Honor Thy Father. True crime is inherently dramatic, but shears the actors of heroism or romantic anti-heroism. What is left is the brutal truth of human greed and psychopathology. The best true crime stories show the family and social milieu in which the gangster rises and falls. Only rarely is this rise and fall tragic. I can’t actually think of a tragic gangster story.

Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll, an Irish gangster in New York, was gunned down by his enemies while making a call in a drug store, in 1932. The weapon was a machine gun. He was almost cut in half. He was 23 years old and a famous, feared, and loathed bootlegger, kidnapper and enforcer. He resembles the gangster antiheroes of 1930s film, played with insouciant charm by James Cagney, and dark, menacing intensity by Edward G. Robinson. Coll apparently could be a charmer, but he lacked intelligence.

Delap narrates Coll’s short and astonishingly violent life with more than the usual reportorial efficiency. His prose is hardboiled and Hibernian, especially in his physical descriptions of people. Coll’s lawyer, Samuel Liebowitz, “was broad in the beam, with a rostral face and tobacco colored eyes. He was as bald as a Dutch cheese, and great wads of fat protruded from his neck.” He is also particularly good at tying the story back to Ireland, where the Coll family is still known. In these pages Dutch Schultz, Coll’s early employer and later nemesis, Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond, Owney Madden, Lucky Luciano and others pop off the page. But it is Coll who rules the book as he hijacks, kidnaps and murders his way through the Bronx and Manhattan. The climax of his career is when he and a few accomplices open fire on a Harlem tenement, where children are playing in an open fire hydrant. Five were seriously injured and five year old died. The killing came as a climax of a running street war for control of the liquor trade he waged against Dutch Schultz. It outraged the city. Coll’s eventual trial ended in acquittal and exposed the inherent corruption of New York City police, who had a suborned a witness. The fact was no one would talk, even the victims. The law of silence was absolute among the city’s poor, of whatever ethnicity.

After this Coll’s life was on a short lease. He briefly allied with Diamond but Diamond was gunned down. By the end most of Coll’s accomplices were in prison or on death row, and he and his wife were broke, living in a flop house with a friend, where they shared a single bed. Coll is an example of someone who can go far in this world on the breath of a delusion. It is hardly tragic that he, an impulsive, psychopathic killer, lived in an age of gangsters who were becoming business men. This book is a good portrait of a time and a place where gangster violence was committed by Jews, Irish and Italians, in broad daylight, on the streets of the nation’s biggest city, a situation unimaginable today, where such things happen in the ghettos of segregated cities isolated by large stretches of depressed farmland.

Checking Amazon, I see how insanely expensive this book is. What a shame. Get it from interlibrary loan. Libraries are beautiful things.

Beyond the Margins: Interview

My interview with Cara Hoffman is on Beyond the Margins!

Thank you, Cara.

JAMES DUFFICY, POET

My friend James Dufficy has some new poems in Black Box Manifold. These are some of the best he’s ever written, provokative, sly, funny, and harrowing. Please read them!

COUNTRY STYLE RIBS

Birthday Dinners

This weekend was my son’s birthday. He turned 15. We don’t get a lot out of him these days other than grunts. A grunt is an extremely serviceable sign to the 15 year old male, and can represent assent or dissent. However, dissent is most often registered with a tirade of some sort, not a mere grunt. Mild disapproval can be expressed by it however. One becomes adept at decoding these grunts through context. It is after all what we have designed ourselves to do, in the godly, and gloomy, self-contemplations of pre-lapsarian time, or non-time as it were. (Although time is said to have come into being with the rest of creation, it is hard to see how it could possibly matter in paradise, without death).

In unhappy families, as well as happy ones, birthdays are celebrated with birthday dinners, usually a menu of favorite foods, selected by the condemned. Ledijnik, as noted elsewhere in this blogh, has a few favorite foods that elicit enthusiastic grunts. So I prepared the usual tomato based stew of sausages, shrimp, monkfish, calamari and clams, which we ate over bucatini, with garlic bread. One day he will be old enough to wash it down with some Sicilian Primitivo. Until then I will have to do it. Since I’ve posted that recipe, I’m going to post what we ate last night, another favorite of Ledijnik’s, and perfect for a slushy December eve, after the pagan tree has gone up and been decked. In terms of the tree: it’s important for me to remember that this tree represents not just the birth of the lord, but his means of execution. Now that that’s out of the way, let me proceed to food! The food is not god’s body but it ought to be. I made a Chinese stew of country style ribs with turnip, mushrooms, tofu and napa cabbage. I have published many variations of this basic recipe, but I write it again because people looking for ways to prepare a certain cut of meat might find it useful, and might not immediately assume that you can use the same basic preparation for a variety of meats.

Country Style Ribs stewed with Mushrooms and Turnips

3lbs country style ribs (find meaty ones mostly, but don’t neglect the fat!)

1 large onion sliced pole to pole

¼ cup slice ginger

2 T chopped garlic

1 T coriander seeds

1 T black peppercorns

3 star anise

1 or 2 pieces dried tangerine peel

1 stick cinnamon

1 t Szechuan peppercorns

¼ cup Shaoxing rice wine

Good pinch of salt

½ large turnip cubed

10 dried shitake mushrooms reconstituted (save soaking liquid)

½ napa cabbage shredded

1 cake of tofu cut into big cubes

1 small leek sliced at a diagonal, like a horse ear

Another ¼ cup Shaoxing rice wine

2-4 T vinegar

1 t sesame oil

Ground pepper

Chopped cilantro

Chopped scallions (about ½ cup)

Fish sauce to taste or light soy sauce

Cover the ribs with cold water and bring to a boil. Discard the water and rinse the ribs. In a soup pot, braising pot, or other thick bottomed pot big enough to hold the ribs and a whole lot of other stuff, heat some vegetable oil (not olive oil!) over high heat. Add onions, ginger and garlic, toss for a minute, reduce heat to0 medium, add spices and stir until fragrant (don’t burn). Add ¼ cup of rice wine and ribs and stir about. Then cover with cold water (cover it by about an inch) and slowly bring to a simmer. Simmer for 3 hours. Turn off heat and take the ribs out. Strain the broth. Pull the meat from the bones. Bring broth to a boil and add turnips and mushrooms and the soaking liquid (there should be about a cup of liquid). Cook 15 minutes and add napa cabbage, leaks and tofu. If there isn’t enough broth (there was when I did it) add stock or water. When they are done (it doesn’t take long) add ¼ cup rice wine, a lot of ground pepper, vinegar, sesame oil, fish sauce to taste, then the cilantro and scallions. Serve over rice noodles (the pho width), or wheat noodles or rice. You can substitute any root vegetable or other kind of cabbage or green you like. I drank it with some Gewürztraminer from Alsace, but beer would be great, or sherry, or whatever gets you through the night.

Prurience Fascinates Me

Another interview, this one with Miette at Whiskey Tit.