L.J. Moore's Blog, page 13

Pleasure, by Brian Teare

Pleasure, by Brian Teare

(69 pps/Ahsahta Press, 2010)

ISBN: 9781934103166

In Pleasure, poet Brian Teare repossesses one of our oldest stories of identity: the fall from innocence. Pleasure contains an intertwined narrative: in one, a man recounts the experience of watching his loved one sicken and die at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. He is blindsided, as stigma and fear replace what he comes to recognize as a former state of grace.

In this fall, he comes to understand that Eden is the idea of a closed garden, a mythic place that is an ideal no one can ever return to. It is a memory one creates, perhaps helplessly, in defiance of loss:

… dead says Let there be a record,

dead says Let memory live a little

longer, dead says Do not forsake me,

dead says and says and this is

our common immunology…

The memory, the story, replaces what was once real:

…I author this Eden

to keep you near. Understand? Outside, the real garden

withers, too; the door warps and on the hottest days

won't let me out of the lyric, which can't keep anything

alive. I'll tell you how I feel: fuck the real.

From this impossible place, a cold, flawless plot, Teare's second narrative springs: it is the story of storytelling itself– how the mythic reality we create, our individual and collective Edens, become inextricable from the actual. The act of creating these stories, or Language, Teare asserts, could be seen as the snake in the garden, both the way we acknowledge our mortality, and the way we try to outwit it:

And the snake,

lumen skin

of alphabets, rubbing his stomach in the dust…

flickered and split

and new

black sinew out of the slough dead lettered vellum

legless crept and let fall wept

whisper, hiss, paperhush:

with the skin

language left behind I bind time to memorial…

Teare's choice to reclaim the Eden story is particularly powerful, as it is a protected narrative, one so carefully guarded in some interpretations that to re-write it could be considered an act of blasphemy, a spiritual crime. This is illustrative of one of the many points Teare makes about nature of language, and of storytelling, and its intrinsic connection to our mortality: we are caught between the reality of experience, and the alternate, fleshless body we weave in story:

O Deus, I remember: Self and Other,

and between us every elegy, all the fallen

Language that couldn't hold it's own

and wouldn't give it back, had no flesh

except how long dust keeps our alphabets…

Pleasure isn't an intellectual exercise. Though its concepts are heady, the poetry isn't sacrificed for the ideas: it is wrested from them. Pleasure is filled with music. It is powered by grief, but the kind that rises on a spiral of emotional force that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

The reward of Pleasure is Teare's honesty, skill, and soft, insistent ferocity, acknowledging to the reader that we are living a shared, evolving manuscript:

…what was wordless, what passed as fact :

late summer outside the windows :

dim doors struggling shut; wind

an umbrella open against dull sun;

to keep them clean, all the small dogs in sweaters;

all theories of the real :

a ruin somehow intact…

Meanwhile: the spectacular disaster

of the actual.

Listen to Brian Teare read from Pleasure, here.

Romey's Order, by Atsuro Riley

Romey's Order, by Atsuro Riley

(64 pages/University of Chicago Press, 2010)

Atsuro Riley's rich, jangling, spry, feisty sound-paintings in Romey's Order make reading his poetry like taking a synesthetic drug: sometimes it is hard to tell if you are tasting a sound, or feeling a color, or vividly remembering a place you've never visited.

"This is the house (and jungle-strangled yard) I come from and carry.

The air our here is supper-singed (and bruise-tingeing) and close. From where I'm hid (a perfect Y-crotch perch of medicine-smelling sweet gum), I can belly-worry this (welted) branch and watch for swells (and coming squalls)

along our elbow curve of river…"

Riley creates a way of seeing through sound: read his work aloud. It is meant to be read aloud. What comes out of your mouth will sound like a southern gothic symphony, and it will be a place you want to live.

In the poem, "Skillet" Riley stews in all the goth of Faulkner, but then boils the broth off. He claims his language and then spins and spins and spins with it, like a gypsy moth, or like Willy Wonka with the flavor of cast iron:

"Was mine-drawn,

Was pig-iron;

Is a cast-heft

Fact.

Chokedamp's in it

Born blackdamp.

Blood-iron

Ore-stope, lode-lamps,

Turnturbulating crubble-corf and -barrows.

Trace-tastes of (blast-furnace) harrow-smelt and pour.

Holds the heat hard. Rememories flavors: no warshing.

Carques and plaques itself in layers, like a pearl."

Finally, there is a book of poetry not "about" language, but singing language alive. Romey's Order conjures: place, people, scent, humidity, humor, meaning. It is pure maple sorcery.

Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, by Kay S. Hymowitz

Read this review at Publishers Weekly

Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys

Kay S. Hymowitz, Basic, $25.95 (187p) ISBN 978-0-465-01842-0

What do Adam Sandler movies, Maxim magazine, and South Park have in common? According to journalist Hymowitz's unpersuasive polemic, they are compelling evidence that "crudity is at the heart of the child-man persona," an increasingly ubiquitous personality type among men age 20–40 who don't grow up because they don't have to. Weaving together the socioeconomic and cultural paradigm shifts of the last half-century, Hymowitz identifies the appearance of "a new stage of life" in developed societies–pre-adulthood–where the traditional life-script: grow up, marry, have children, and die, is now: "What do I want to do with my life?" But in a world where social demands no longer equate manhood with maturity, frat dudes, nerds, geeks, and emo-boys can remain in suspended postadolescence, while women, whose biological clocks are ticking, are forced to choose between single parenthood and casting their lot with a "child-man." It's a provocative argument that Hymowitz advances with considerable spirit, but she conflates character with maturity, and her blaming feminism for the infantilization of men wrests more power and control away from men, suggesting that they can't develop a sense of responsibility without a woman's help.

Ethical Wisdom: What Makes Us Good, by Mark Matousek

Read this review at Publishers Weekly

Ethical Wisdom: What Makes Us Good

Mark Matousek, Doubleday, $25.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-385-52789-7

Matousek (Sex Death Enlightenment) makes a case for why human beings are inherently ethical creatures in a provocative book that suffers from uneven execution. Wired from birth with "mirror neurons" that function involuntarily, and cause us, for instance, to tear up when others cry: "Emotions, not reason," Matousek asserts, "are the bedrock of ethical life." Drawing on philosophy, neurological and psychiatric research, anthropology, pop psychology, and mysticism, he debunks the belief that organized religion is a necessary framework for an ethical sense, and demonstrates that moral behavior evolves out of a complex interaction between our built-in empathy for those we identify as like ourselves, and the way we respond (or don't respond) to the supposedly abstract suffering of those we deem as "other." In the hands of an Oliver Sacks, this braiding of the scientific, moral, and anecdotal could be revelatory; Matousek, however, repeatedly substitutes opinions and inferences for fact, sapping his argument's credibility and his reader's patience.

The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by Kim Barker

Read this review at Publishers Weekly

The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Kim Barker, Doubleday, $25.95 (300p) ISBN 978-0-385-53331-7

Barker, a journalist for ProPublica, offers a candid and darkly comic account of her eight years as an international correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in Afghanistan and Pakistan, beginning shortly after September 11. With self-deprecation and a keen eye for the absurd, Barker describes her evolution from a green, fill-in correspondent to an adrenaline junkie who gets hit on by Nawaz Sharif, former Pakistani prime minister, and becomes adept in "how to find money in a war zone, how to flatter a warlord, how to cover a suicide bombing, how to jump-start a car using a cord and a metal ladder." Barker reveals how profoundly the U.S. continues to get Afghanistan wrong–that American personnel in the country live in a bubble, rarely dealing with Afghans, that they trample on local customs by getting routinely and "staggeringly" drunk despite Islam's prohibition of alcohol, and throw offensive costume parties at the Department for International Development (DFID). In equal measure, Barker elucidates the deep political ties between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the U.S.'s role in today's "whiplash between secularism and extremism," and blasts Pakistan's leaders for destroying their nation through endless coups and power jockeying.

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity, by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

Read review at Publisher's Weekly

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, Faber and Faber, $26 (307p) ISBN 978-0-86547-909-8

Currid-Halkett (The Warhol Economy) takes a tasty subject and rehashes it into sawdust in her repetitive study of celebrity. She dissects the "collective fascination with some people over others," postulating that our preference for watching television and surfing the Internet over actual engagement has created a public "lonelier than ever" but with free, instant access to indulge our "voyeuristic tendencies." Analyzing the appeal of personalities as disparate as Paris Hilton and Bill Gates, she concludes unremarkably that celebrity has little to do with talent or fame, but with an unquantifiable "light" recognized and exploited by those whose livelihoods depend on star-based revenue, including the media. Having made this point, the remainder of the book is reiteration, supported with diagrams and tables that seem unnecessary in supporting the incontrovertible conclusion that "celebrity ultimately hinges on whether we decide to pay attention or not." A glimmer of interest flares on the penultimate page of the book, when Currid-Halkett observes that, "on the whole many of us care far more about [Jennifer] Aniston's latte than the thousands being murdered in Sudan," a more puzzling phenomenon that could have proved a more promising focus. (Nov.)

Living Large: From SUVs to Double Ds, Why Going Bigger Isn't Going Better, by Sarah Z. Wexler

Read this review at Publisher's Weekly

Living Large: From SUVs to Double Ds, Why Going Bigger Isn't Going Better
Sarah Z. Wexler, St. Martin's, $23.99 (222p) ISBN 978-0-312-54025-8

Wexler, a staff writer for Allure magazine, spent three years on the road, investigating America's worship at "the Church of Stuff." Wexler dives into America's new normal where bigger is better and our landscape is dominated by starter castles, Barbie boobs, megachurches and megamalls, jumbo engagement rings, mammoth cars, and landfills visible from space. By turns horrified, tempted, incredulous, guilt-ridden, mystified, and captivated by these excesses, Wexler approaches her subject with a compassion born of her own complicity (she's an SUV driver and enjoys her shopping). Though the book covers increasingly familiar postrecession "the party's over" territory with the depth of an extended magazine piece, Wexler brings a friendly first-person perspective to her study of surfeit and of the psychology behind our compulsion to consume and squander, why "living large" is defended by some as our "God-given right as Americans" and in other cases, might be downright unavoidable. (Nov.)

The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

November 28, 2009

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

The rings of the planet Saturn are really one continuous ring made up of innumerable small particles. One well established astronomical theory suggests the rings are debris left over from a moon that was pulled apart when its orbit fell too close to Saturn. Light reflected from the varying substance of the rings is what makes Saturn appear to wax brighter and ebb dim.

W.G. Sebald's book, The Rings of Saturn, does not concern itself directly with the planets or astronomical topics, but with a very personal exploration into how a contemporary person can possibly shoulder an awareness of shared human history, and not be obliterated by it. His title serves as a kind of map legend for how his book is meant to be followed and understood. The Rings of Saturn begins where many stories end—that is the moment of surrender. Our narrator, fresh from a walking tour of Suffolk, England, has found himself hospitalized in a state of physical and emotional paralysis, noting that "I saw a vapor trail cross the segment framed by my window. At the time I took that white trail for a good omen, but now, as I look back, I fear it marked the beginning of a fissure that has since riven my life. The aircraft at the tip of the trail was as invisible as the passengers inside it. The invisibility and intangibility of that which moves us remained an unfathomable mystery … our world… no more than a shadow image of another one far beyond."

Sebald, born in Germany in 1944, has concerned himself in many of his books, with the aftermath of Word War II— specifically its effects on the collective psyche. In The Rings of Saturn this sense of collective memory is not just an idea discussed, but an experience created via Sebald's narrative style and occasional photographs which serve not simply to illustrate, but work as sometimes poignant, sometimes humorous counterpoints to the story. The plot of this book is simple: our narrator sets out on a walking tour, noting the local and regional history as he goes. But Sebald immediately begins to complicate the idea of personal experience, introducing characters either known to him as friends or literary figures he has a personal rapport with, letting their voices take over, until it is difficult to say who is guiding the reader—Sebald himself, or a kind of merged voice made up of whatever persona from the past we have tuned in to. The overall effect is both disconcerting and strangely equalizing. Reading this book is akin to dreaming someone else's dream—not just experiencing another person's internal landscape, but also grasping that particular sense of ineffable significance that only a dream conveys.

The major themes of The Rings of Saturn are memory, the fear of death because of the loss of self-awareness, visibility and invisibility, and the idea of the human capacity for both cruelty and forgetting. Sebald's rings are the rings of history and human experience—at one moment, taken together and when the light catches them right, they give off a mesmerizingly beautiful incandescence. At another moment, one sees them for what they materially are—the dregs of utter destruction swirling in a void.

What makes this book worth reading is that these huge, heady, existential, tectonically vast ideas never hijack the deeper purpose of the book—that is to point out the profound beauty and human compassion that Sebald sees even at moments of great despair. It is a perfect book for anyone who has ever questioned how to live in a moment when the weight of the sheer amount of history seems difficult to bear, or as Sebald puts it, "Will what I have written survive beyond the grave? Will there be anyone able to comprehend it in a world the very foundations of which, have changed?"
In story after story, Sebald returns to the idea of continual accrual and collision—of births and deaths, of the changing of the landscape both suddenly and gradually—and that this continual cycling is what produces the light that signals life. Hence why the invisibility of that airplane, cutting across the sky in the hospital window frame, signified a fissure in Sebald's life—the fissure being the moment of understanding that there is no permanent grasping of meaning. Like the rings of Saturn, which are really only one ring, sometimes what lies beneath is visible, sometimes invisible, sometimes bright, sometimes fading, as things become one thing for a time, and then drift apart.

The Rings of Saturn
written and with photographs by W.G. Sebald (296 pages/New Directions 1995)
translated by Michael Hulse
reviewed by LJ Moore email: editor.moore (at)gmail.com

View all my reviews

The Lyricism of Sluts and Drunks, a review of A Communion of Saints, by Meg Withers

Originally published in Jacket #36

The Lyricism of Sluts and Drunks

In 1987 I was a senior in high school, living in a middle-class neighborhood in Los Angeles. That summer before my senior year, there were whispers along the street where I lived; one of our neighbor's sons, a young man in his early 20's, had come home to die. He had AIDS. Two years later, my first cousin was killed in a terrible accident — he was only 17 years old. He was not gay, but during the memorial service, the minister, caught up in the heat of his preaching, went off on a tear about the evils of the contemporary world — among them was AIDS — a sign of God's wrath on homosexuals.

I recalled these two events while reading this book, because I realized that I had always approached the AIDS epidemic as a thing. A "thing" disconnected from people, and disconnected from first-hand experience. As with all catastrophes, there is always an attempt to find a reason, to understand why the unthinkable has happened, and most of the time the easiest place to find fault or place blame is with the victim: this is the inherent political nature of any tragedy, and the politics of the AIDS epidemic, not the actual experience of the tragedy, were really all I had experienced.

Meg Withers' book, A Communion of Saints, approaches such a fraught subject in the spirit of this particular experience of that tragedy — by getting right in its face — literally while clutching a cocktail in one hand and a bible in the other. I think it's important to say that I'm already focusing at this point on the tragedy, which is impossible not to take into account when writing about this period of time. But the book itself really avoids that trap — it begins like a fable, with a sympathetically fucked-up misfit arriving in paradise and being effortlessly, wondrously kidnapped into a glitzy, drunken, diva-istic, many-layered enclave of misfits.

So I mentioned that the book doesn't fall into the trap of existing in order to explain, justify, or champion the AIDS epidemic. Neither is it a romanticization of a carefree "fuck the oppression of morality" fantasy. What I felt it was, in the reading, was an offering and an elegy. The book is dedicated to, and about, real people, who are not remembered best as "part of a tragedy" or a "symbol of a former time". They were people with complex histories who were later caught up like insects in amber. This book sets out to explode that idea, as it also sets out to explode the idea of an easily interpreted universal morality.

The story is told in a series of candid, candy-bright prose poems. They are titled in a style reminscent of Henry Fielding in "The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild" — where each title introduces the plot of that particular poem, but written as a kind of tongue-in-cheek morality play. Examples of the titles show what I mean: "in the beginning was…", "in which even knowledge hurts…", "thus fear crawls its way…", and "in the end arlene/noboyfriend visits blowhole…". The poems themselves are highly visual and tactile. Since everyone is drunk and drugging throughout the story, it could be easy to get lost in that kind of rush of disconnected emotion and energy — but the poems are solidly anchored in physical descriptions of people, and the kaleidoscopic beauty of their personalities. They seem to match the surroundings in this bizarre way: the tropical lushness of Hawai'i that is so characterized by lushness, is full of these dazzling lushes.

Add to this a further complication: each poem is coupled with a bible passage, which, taken in the context of the poem it is paired against, emphasizes that the moral fury that rained down on those contracting AIDS and living "unclean" lifestyles came from a book that is, in it's most popular King James version, a 397 year old revision of a smorgasbord of fairy tales, historical records, morality lessons, political gambits, mystical poetry, and elegiac biography with so many translations, contributing authors, editors and revisors that it might be safe to say that the bible is the most powerful example of the politics of storytelling in existence. I find it humorous, in the blackest possible way, that a book of stories so twisted by time and personalities can be leveled at anyone as an example of truth, or how to behave — or more sadly, a reason that some people deserve to suffer and die.

Withers knew what she was doing when she perched each of her poems atop a solid, pulsating brick of bible verse. She understood that the most incendiary thing you can do is own the thing that disowns you. And that essential polarity, that seemingly mutually exclusive cross-purpose, is a huge part of the craft of this book.

The poems are built on that matter/dark matter tension — the language is often harsh and brash, while the characters themselves are sometimes rude, off-putting and dismissive of everyone, including themselves — but the strange outcome of that harsh, falsely happy-go-lucky language creates something soft, introspective and deeply lyrical. It's like meeting a person so used to being pummeled that they run interference by being preemptively abrasive, yet that abrasiveness is clearly a front.

Some might argue that a bar scene lifestyle is hardly lyrical. I would counter that by saying that having a bunch of sluts and drunks tell a story is a well-practiced tradition of lyric writing, e.g. Sappho, Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Joyce. Drunk people in their regular bar/pub/dionysian meadow are lyrical mouthpieces often allowed to point out (and do) the things the sober are not, giving voice to the trickier and more taboo subjects behind the constant banter of surface jokes and verbal jousts. In fact, it might be that the all-encompassing magnanimity and loosened consciousness of the happy plane of drunkenness is what allows the reader to more easily participate in the candid rush of the book.

There is also the question then, of right and wrong, since the characters themselves admit to being on the fringes of a society which deems their behavior, more often than not, wrong. Enter the monster, which makes its vain, insidious entrance in part two. I'm not talking about the monster of AIDS, I'm talking about a far more sinister monster — that some interpretations of morality lead us to believe that certain people deserve to be sick, suffer and die, while others don't. And the dividing line between those fates is as emphemeral as a story that's constantly being reinterpreted and retold.

I see these ideas all over the book, but here are examples: page 30, in the first poem that disease makes it's appearance in the form of a blemish people later would come to know as Kaposi's Sarcoma:

…we partied on…made fun of his neck/lefteyebrow/ankle when they blotched up worse…he was dead one day…we went to see a cold bronze urn…ashes/to/ashes…after doing too much cocaine/rumncokes that changed nothing…

and here:

…there is no limit now to death and dying…shadows swallow whole kuhio avenue…black cloth replacing red/yellow aloha shirts…until the dead wax more real than the living…

So, maybe the darkness has triumphed a bit in this review so far — reading back over it I see the frustration and angst I felt while reading. But let me end by saying that the book doesn't end in that darkness. It ends, of course, in resurrection, which is what, like a lot of this story, is so disconcerting about tragedy — that if you survive it and go on living, something must be created out of that pain. And in fact, people who come after will have the double curse of not having had to suffer what the people who paved their way did.

I've seen ads on telephone poles in San Francisco recently that show a comic-faced young man with tousled hair, his hands pressed to his cheeks à la Edvard Munch's painting, The Scream. Above him is the caption, "Got Stress? Need HIV meds?" There's room now for humor, there's room now for AIDS to be no longer a death sentence, but an inconvenience.

There's a parallel here back in the bible — that is to Jesus' story — a sufferer-by-proxy. I am not saying that any self-respecting person who died from AIDS would welcome this comparison, I'm just trying to make the point that moral authority is a servant to the interpretation of the source. In the case of Withers' book, all of these wider political questions become eclipsed, as I believe they should be, by the true purpose of the book: to tell the story of a group of beautiful, raucous misfits who found and befriended each other and fell in love and drank and slept around and for a while, were deliriously happy.

Meg Withers

A Communion of Saints

reviewed by L.J. Moore

58pp. Tinfish Press (www.tinfishpress.com). US$14. 9780978992941 paper

L.J. Moore

L.J. Moore lives in San Francisco in a basement by the beach with two ferrets. Her favorite author is Edward Gorey. L.J.'s poetry and photography have appeared in numerous publications. She is a co-editor and co-founder of Small Desk Press, a San-Francisco based small press collective dedicated to supporting emerging writers whose work challenges the conventional divisions of experimental, narrative, poetry and/or prose. Her first book, F-Stein, is forthcoming in December 2008 from Subito Press.