Forrest > Recent Status Updates

I have three sons. I have a hard time imagining them ever being at odds with each other for too long. So, the story-behind-the-story in "Shadows" saddened me a great deal. It's who tale of two brothers who find themselves on the opposite . . . wait, now, you didn't really think I was going to spoil that, did you? An emotional gut-punch of a tale with a touch of the strange. Four stars.

Now I understand. The hidden alphabet was (or could be) used to hide coded messages in poetic speech. It's what they call in D&D "Thieve's Cant". Totally makes sense once it's spelled out for you. Now I see what Graves has been driving at this whole time. And even if he's off on his research and a bit loose with his assumptions, the concept itself is rich and amazing. Finally, I found the key to this book!

The line between psychological dysfunction and the Changeling or Skin Walker is blurred in "Strabismus". Or, if you will, it is a story about a doppelganger that is not, but is the one who sees it, like a rabbit re-absorbing its young, only the young is itself. If this is not making sense to you, perhaps you should just read the story. Four stars to this enigmatic, swirling tale of borderline personality disorder(?).

Ah, there is a cryptographic thread throughout this book. I shall parse it out. But I'm not telling you what I learn. As the introduction states: "Knowledge is not Wisdom". I could give you the knowledge from what I learn, but that would rob you of the opportunity to gather the wisdom yourself.

So . . . much . . . linguistics . . .

I need to read the last 1/3rd of "On a Tangent" again! It's a brilliant unraveling of sanity and reality. Something very Roland Topor-esque about this story. Literary and manic at the same time, with the redolent smell of science fiction. I will note that there are a LOT of typos here that spell-check would not pick up, but a good editorial run would have. Despite the shoddy editorial work, five stars.

Ah, here's where the association between apples and immortality comes from.

An interesting anti-university tirade on pages 241 and 242. I totally agree with Graves here, having seen the same in grad school. Not so much a seat of learning as a seat of entrenchment and intimidation, depending on who is in charge!

Cops and robbers, and now a clairvoyant? We are truly getting into Call of Cthulhu territory (which is exactly why I bought the book in the first place)!

"The Frenzied Farmhouse" was, like the first story in this volume, predictable, but the perverse joy of the journey more than makes up for having foreseen the destination. Fives stars.

And Grabinski's writing style reminds me very much of Brian Evenson's (which I love).

Ah, now we delve into archaeo-linguistics. Interesting, but not compelling enough to pay super close attention to, at least not for me. Still, Graves is thorough, to say the least!

The first paragraph on page 223 might need to be quoted in full. It's a wonderful ode to poetics and a lament for the loss of poetic thinking in our literature. It's got my mental gears churning to near-breaking-point.

The title story puts the "decay" back in "decadence". I figured out the central conceit very early on, but the journey to get there was delightfully atmospheric and rewardingly horrific. Well worth the read, even if you guess what's going to happen in the end. Five stars.

Ah, now we delve into the seedy underworld of Berlin. Truth be told, that's all we really want to know about, isn't it? Well, it is for me.

Gavin Callaghan's critique of Barnitz's critique of Kipling, "Two Dead men: Park Barnitz and Rudyard Kipling" rightly points out some of the inherent hypocrisy in Barnitz's essay on Kipling. But there is a decidedly pro-conservative bent to the whole essay that becomes as derisive of Barnitz as Barnitz was derisive of Kipling. It's good to have the balance of views, but taken by itself, the essay was off-putting.

Chuck Caruso, in his essay "I am Weary of that Lidless Eye", gives a fantastic line-by-line analysis of Barnitz's "Mad Sonnet". He also explains Hegel's "abyss of subjectivity" quite well. But his reading of the poem "Hegel" misses the mark and his analysis of Barnitz's poems through the lens of Hegelian philosophy is strained and unconvincing. Interesting that this essay should follow after Sarraf's.

That said, Sarraf does an excellent job of concisely laying out the philosophical war between Hegel and Schopenhauer and the argument that Barnitz based his text for the poem "Hegel" on Schopenhauer's arguments against the same.

If it was illustrated with cartoons, the first segment of Matt Sarraf's essay on "Barnitz and Pessimism" would read like a Jack Chick tract on anti-natalism.

The essay "The Grotesques: Sins Against the Afterlife" by Ashley Dioses really helps my appreciation of Barnitz's ouvre. I'm not a good poetry analyst. I'm learning, but I'm not great at picking up on the themes and subtleties at poetry a lot of the time. So, it's great to read an essay like Dioses' that I can apply as I go back and reread the poems in my efforts to become better at reading poetry. Making progress!

K.A. Opperman's essay "The Perfection of the Corpse: Necrophilia in The Book of Jade" is exactly the sort of scholarship I was hoping for in the extra material of this volume. Hopefully the remaining essays are this good!

I didn't know that cats eat their own young. The things you learn from poetics! I quite enjoyed the section on the crossover between the stag and bull cult throughout the ages.

I realize that this section of biographies and references to Barnitz is meant to satisfy the completist, but I am getting tired of it. It's like a really, really boring phone game in which people ("scholars") perpetuate and morph errors again and again. Make it stop!

The circular logic wheel keeps on spinning, but I am enjoying the euphoria of dizziness, nonetheless.

Many of the contemporary reviews of The Book of Jade are scathing. I've gotten in trouble on GR for writing reviews like these!

Barnitz's life and death seem to be ignominious travesties.

With so much happening with decadence in and around Harvard during the time Barnitz attended there, it's a wonder that we have very little direct evidence that he interacted with his poetic peers. One wonders if he was a misanthrope or even sociopathic?