Nonfiction Reviews

A Book About Ray

Ellen Levy
The MIT Press ($54.95)

By far the most complete framing of coyote trickster artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995) to date, Ellen Levy’s A Book About Ray engages with the work of the artist on his own terms, or at least as approximate to them as possible. Given the often abrasive opacity of Johnson’s (non-)engagement with curators, critics, and scholars, this can’t have been easy. Levy herself describes her book as “not, or not exactly, a life story. This is an art story.” Some may think they know that story from John W. Walter’s 2002 documentary How to Draw a Bunny, however that film portrayed Johnson mainly as a mail art collagist, adding to the quizzical and cryptic sense of Johnson that had already given him cult-like art celebrity status. Levy’s book reveals more of Johnson’s work and investigates the overall drive behind it.

A Book About Ray progresses in roughly chronological order, though it also freely cycles forward and backward in time via artistic statements on recurring motifs and themes found in Johnson’s work. After early years of artistic output in Detroit, Johnson attended the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the late 1940s, and there he flourished—especially as a favored talent in Bauhaus artist Josef Albers’s classes, dutifully attentive to “the clear, wise, and constructive ideas” behind “the relational nature of color” Albers championed. That aptitude led to a November 1947 cover of the magazine Interiors by Johnson consisting of three rows of colored upright rectangular boxes full of polka-dots of varying size and color along with one row of rectangular boxes with parallel stripes of various colors running across them. His painting Calm Center (1951), a grid of squares each containing a plethora of colored lines that offer “variations on the square,” is also very much in the Albers vein, save that the square at center is solid black.

Also at Black Mountain, Johnson established friendships with fellow student artists such as Ruth Asawa, who he heard speak of “the Taoism philosophy of nothing ness [sic] being everything-ness”; Johnson realized, “I feel that way.” It was at the college as well that he took up with a teacher, beginning the longest romantic relationship of his life with the married sculptor Richard Lippold (it ended in 1974). Leaving the school, Johnson followed Lippold to New York City; in the summer of 1951, they took up residency downtown “in the shadow of the Williamsburg bridge,” occupying individual studio spaces alongside Morton Feldman and John Cage (each of whom had also spent time at Black Mountain). Thus, from a young age Johnson was very much in the thick of the burgeoning New York City art scene, where he would remain even at a distance after moving out to the North Shore of Long Island in 1969.

In addition to the cover of Interiors, Johnson designed now-iconic book covers for New Directions, including William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain and Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations; the Rimbaud cover utilized a portrait of the poet, which Johnson would continue recycling by using it in several collages. In the New York art scene, Johnson knew Andy Warhol and there are significant associations between Warhol’s work and his own. This is particularly true of his use of portraits: Johnson often drew upon images of iconic cultural figures such as Marilyn Monroe, and in fact, pre-dates Warhol’s use of such images with works from 1956-58 featuring James Dean collaged with the Lucky Strikes cigarettes logo and Elvis covered in red wash and bleeding tears.

Levy reports how “Ray and Andy were known to shop together sometimes for movie stills and magazines.” Johnson, however, did not share in Warhol’s loftier ambitions. His portraits of these stars “got progressively grungier” and always remained small; “made to be held in hand by their recipients,” they “speak volubly of the artist’s hand” in their making, as opposed to Warhol’s industrial, oversized mass screen prints. And as weird as Warhol’s reputation holds him to be, Johnson was even further afield. Factory participant Billy Name demonstrates this with a telling comparison, saying “Andy was still like a person” whereas “Ray wasn’t a person. He was a collage or a sculpture. A living sculpture, you know. He was Ray Johnson’s creation.” Art for and on art’s terms alone was always Johnson’s sole intention.

At the center of Johnson’s work are mutually unachievable co-existing wishes. As Levy describes, “Ray Johnson wanted to be famous, and he wanted to remain unknown, and he clung to the belief, whose absurdity he relished, that it was possible to be both at once.” Johnson enjoyed the dilemma of always choosing to have things every and any way he desired, regardless of the lasting impact upon himself, his work, or anything else. Nothing mattered less to him than what many others valued most—critical acknowledgement, financial success, and media attention. Not that he didn’t pay attention to such matters; he simply refused to directly pursue or be enticed by them. The introduction of these concerns into any exchange with Johnson regarding his work would immediately sour further discussion. Yet Johnson nevertheless would send unsolicited correspondence to gallery owners and museum curators, and he had shows and would lecture at art schools during residencies. To be seen and not seen. Chameleon. Enigma. Artist shapeshifter. Johnson was all of these.

In his collages, Johnson constantly interchanged his own set of iconic figures and related symbols, creating exchanges of identity and associated possible meanings. As he announces, “One can pretend to be someone one is not. Children’s play. I’ll be you and you be me. Be my valentine.” There is implicit intimacy behind his work, only it is not necessarily personal: instead Ray Johnson was “a person who lived for art to a point where he convinced others, and perhaps at times even convinced himself, that any aspect of his life that could not be assimilated into his art should not be considered part of the Ray Johnson story.”

Johnson was “a creature and creator of networks,” and one of his first was what became known as the New York Correspondence School. Within what became a vast interlocking web, Johnson openly handed over the reins of creation to others, asking the recipients of collages and other materials he mailed them to work on them and then send them on to others he named, putting all involved on the spot. As Levy asserts, “To correspond with Ray Johnson was to assume the role of artist.” The fact that he was continually looking for opportunities to diminish showing his hand in any artistic activity brought tension into his correspondence, however. Artist-performer Jill Johnston states it plainly: “I didn’t correspond with Ray because he scared me. I found him kind of intense.”

Levy tracks each of the several altering forms Johnson’s artworks took shape in. Among the earliest series were the Moticos, which had the appearance of being “paper scraps” yet were “made things, artworks of a kind” that held meaning beyond any literal, physical manifestation. As he stated: “perhaps you are the moticos.” Johnson would send these works (which easily slipped into envelopes) to Correspondence School participants, and as a result, many of them ended up in the hands of art collectors and dealers without his knowledge, let alone any control over sales or financial compensation. Another important work was A Book About Death, “one of his strangest and most enigmatic projects. The ‘book,’ never constituted as such, consists of thirteen unbound prints designed one by one between 1963 and 1965, each mailed out as it emerged to various correspondents.”

Later came the bunnies—“his signature icon a crudely drawn rabbit-head”—issued with a seven-step set of drawing instructions under the heading “New York Correspondance School”; Levy notes that the “simplicity of its rendering suggests that the icon is rooted in the Duchampian ethic that held that everyone and anyone could be, in fact already is, an artist.” Near the end of Johnson’s life arrived the Move Stars, a series of images forming an “assemblage, laid out on the ground, of graphic images of bunnies and other icons,” each panel-like piece being “32 inches high. And vary from 7 ½ to 8 inches wide,” which Johnson arranged at various suburban locales around his local Long Island home, photographing them with dispensable one-click cameras. These were not seen by many until long after Johnson’s death, when “in 2019, Joel Smith, curator of photography at the Morgan Library, searched them out and went through them all and calculated that the artist had run through 137 cameras, from which he had printed over five thousand images.”

There’s not the space here to cover every aspect of Johnson’s work that Levy brings to light. Her book includes ample color images, scattered as if collaged at times across the pages, and care has been taken to have the book resemble an art object itself, an experimental risk which pays off. Levy’s eye-opening A Book About Ray mirrors Johnson’s elusive disappearances even as it highlights what made this unique artist the phenomenon he was.

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Art Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Henry Martin: An Active Ear

Selected Writings, Conversations, and Correspondences

Edited by Emanuele Guidi and Egidio Marzona, with text by Lisa Andreani, Jordan Carter, Luca Cerizza, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Emanuele Guidi, Henry Martin, and Elisabetta Rattalino
Spector Books ($45)

by Richard Kostelanetz

The remarkable African American art critic, curator, and translator Henry Martin, who died at the age of eighty in 2022, finally gets to be the subject of focus in Henry Martin: An Active Ear. Martin, a native of Philadelphia, was an expatriate author; after attending New York University in the mid-1960s, he traveled to Italy and stayed there, marrying visual artist Berty Skuber and settling with her in the mountainous South Tyrol, where other Americans were scarce.

Martin made his living by contributing articles to magazines and translating Italian texts into English. He was a literary man who came late to art writing; the greatest influence on his prose was another Henry, surnamed James, from whom Martin learned the art of composing extended sentences in long paragraphs. The primary source of his enthusiasm for visual art was Marcel Duchamp, whom he discovered as a teenager in 1950s Philadelphia:

Marcel Duchamp first entered my life when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, surely before I was sixteen when I was old enough to drive. He connects directly to the old red bus at the stop on the corner of the road where my family lived, then a transfer to the green municipal bus somewhere inside the city, and finally the trolly through Fairmount Park to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is a great fake Parthenon atop a great fake Acropolis that stares from a distance towards the center of the city and the statue of William Penn on the summit of City Hall.

Fortunately, one of Martin’s first jobs in Italy was helping the Milanese art historian Arturo Schwarz prepare The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (Abrams, 1969). This immersion explains, perhaps, why the most profound essays in An Active Ear discuss aspects of Duchamp, who became Martin’s principal teacher in modernist aesthetics as well as a touchstone he returned to for decades; with the Italian painter Gianfranco Baruchello (1924-2023), Martin wrote Why Duchamp (McPherson & Co., 1985).

Nearly all the other people whose work is discussed in An Active Ear descend from Duchamp; about pre-20th-century visual art, of which Italy has so much that is excellent, Martin says little. He favors post-Duchamp artists such as Ray Johnson (1927-1995) and George Brecht (1926-2008), not only in discrete essays but in extended probing interviews. Often does Martin reveal that he knows his subjects personally, not to boast but to give his commentary an intimate authority. Only one of his many subjects is African American: Fluxus artist and musician Benjamin Patterson (1934-2016), who likewise resided for a time in Europe.

Emanuele Guidi has constructed An Active Ear to be an alternative kind of biography; in addition to Martin’s essays and conversations, Guidi includes correspondence between Martin and his favorite subjects as well as occasional informal photographs. Of the last, my favorites appear as endpapers, with Martin holding a white bird (perhaps a dove) on his outstretched hand on the front spread and raising his middle finger beside two white guys on the back spread.

What further makes this book a de facto biography are five appreciations written by people who aren’t artists and a remarkably elegant foreword by John-Daniel Martin, Berty and Henry’s son. The only ungainly thing about the book is its format: the sans serif type and small margins make the reading experience challenging.

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Art Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Patriot

Alexei Navalny
Translated by Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel
Knopf ($35)

by Grace Utomo

For some, the difference between what if and what is is a single character. For others, it’s the gulf between silence and annihilation. Alexei Navalny, intrepid critic of Vladimir Putin and leader of Russia’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, chose the latter. Navalny’s memoir, Patriot, which blends traditional narrative, prison diaries, and social media posts, was released posthumously by his widow Yulia Navalnaya in October 2024 after the opposition leader was allegedly killed in one of Russia’s most brutal penal colonies. From surviving assassination by chemical agent in 2020, to 295 days of torture and solitary confinement during 2023-2024, Navalny remained steadfast in his dissent.

Although Navalny composed Patriot in spaces ranging from a tranquil asylum in Germany to a punishment cell above the Arctic Circle, the book’s tone is strikingly consistent. Its opening captures the author’s tongue-in cheek approach to both politics and memoir: “Dying really didn’t hurt. If I hadn’t been breathing my last, I would never have stretched out on the floor next to the plane’s toilet. As you can imagine, it wasn’t exactly clean.” Navalny describes his near-fatal poisoning—believed to have been ordered by Putin in response to Navalny’s carefully documenting Russian political corruption, as well as his two attempts to run for political office—with humor and irony without overplaying either.

As Patriot progresses, Navalny reveals that the memoir he’d begun writing to uncover the truth about his mysterious “illness” has morphed into something else: the saga of an unbreakable battle with the Kremlin. Navalny never doubts the truth will prevail, but his glasses are not rose-colored. He wrote to followers shortly before his death:

Nineteen years in a maximum-security penal colony. The number of years does not matter. I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Whether “life” is defined either by the end of my life, or the length of the life of this regime.
The sentencing figure is not for me. It is for you. . . . Putin must not achieve his goal. Do not lose the will to resist.

Notably absent from Navalny’s messages to supporters and prison diaries are details of what he endured during 295 days in solitary confinement—perhaps an indication of Navalny’s focus on the cause of Russian freedom and of his reluctance to proclaim himself a martyr.

Crucial to Patriot is Navalny’s sensitivity as a husband and father. Starvation and sleep deprivation should desensitize the most high-minded empath, but Navalny remains tender. Halfway through his imprisonment, he writes to his wife Yulia: “I hate glass. Because for six months now I’ve only seen you through glass. In the courtroom, through glass. During visits, through glass. . . I adore you, I miss you. Stay well and don’t get discouraged . . . As for the glass, sooner or later we’ll melt it with the heat of our hands.” This missive demonstrates Navalny’s resolution to lift others up, though a birthday message to his son Zakhar also reveals regret over the collateral suffering Navalny’s activism inflicts on his family:

    What sort of pathetic greeting is it to send a letter to your son on his fourteenth birthday? What kind of memory will that be of being close to his father?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
    Let’s face it, you don’t get to choose your parents. Some kids get stuck with jailbirds.
    But it is on my children’s birthdays that I am particularly aware why I’m in jail. We need to build the Beautiful Russia of the Future for them to live in.

Few of Patriot’s readers in the U.S. will risk imprisonment, torture, or assassination for our ideals, yet Navalny’s call to unmask lies and elevate truth invites global application. This trenchant memoir might prompt us to ask ourselves: What are we doing today to make the world a better place tomorrow?

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Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

A Prague Flâneur

Vítězslav Nezval
Translated by Jed Slast
Twisted Spoon Press ($19)

by Allan Graubard

For those who enjoy strolling around a city they know well or don’t, which they live in or visit; who have no particular destination in mind; who wander at different times, drawn by places and people they encounter and which, for intimate reasons, captivate them, will find an ally in A Prague Flâneur. Its author, Vítězslav Nezval, founded the Czech Surrealist Group and was one of the leading poets and writers of the avant garde. A Prague Flâneur is Nezval’s paean to the city, his city, then on the brink of disaster: The Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia was complete by March 1939, soon after the publication of the book.

The flâneur, of course, comes to us from mid-19th century France. In The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire depicts the figure as a stroller who observes in poignant detail what he encounters in and around a city but who keeps his distance, preferring to represent the experience in solitude, visually or with words. Some eight decades later, Nezval reveals the legacy of the term anew. Inspired by Prague’s polyglot architecture, mechanized systems, distractions, crowds, and those rare spaces (streets, parks, playgrounds) that can transform the normal urban chaos we expect, enjoy, or endure, Nezval orchestrates the city’s analog—the book.

Nezval’s writing style mirrors the kind of critical-poetic journalism with which surrealists captured the currents of cities—particularly their marvelous, disorienting, delirious, or dreamlike aspects. A Prague Flâneur is replete with historical descriptions of this or that street, building, restaurant, or café, and how they played in Nezval’s life— from his days as a poor, hungry university student to his rise as a literary figure—as well as brief sketches of writers and artists important to him. As he describes it, Prague takes on a multiform, resonant charge, socially proscribed but personally invented.

After Nezval, others continued to revive the legacy of the flâneur as they conceived it. A decade on after World War II, the Situationists’ dérive (their drift through the city) provoked theoretical remarks on a new context: psychogeography, a term they coined and which, as things go, now appears as a sub-discipline of geography. Heightening the stakes for Nezval, though, are two pivotal events that bring an often-feverish poise to his writing: the immanence of World War II and the fate of the Surrealist Group.

The former stems from the September 30, 1938 signing of the Munich Agreement, by which England and France ceded to Nazi Germany the Sudetenland, then part of Czechoslovakia—a Hail Mary to delay the onset of war that Nezval knew would fail; the only question was when. Anxiety percolates through the book, sharpening its tempered edge. The planes that fly above Prague presage the battle to come. The country arms only to fall months later, betrayed by its allies.

The latter involves Nezval’s split with the Surrealist Group, the repercussions of which followed him and now cannot help but appear as subtext to the book’s exuberant, elegiac tone. The cause of the split was partly political: Nezval supported the USSR, despite the terror Stalin unleashed on his opponents. The majority in the group criticized Stalin’s hunger for victims, which included leading Russian poets and artists, Communist revolutionaries, and uncounted allies or bystanders. Most were put on trial, given sentences, exiled to the Gulag, or executed. There was no possibility of rapprochement.

Nezval’s recognition that only the USSR could mount a force equal to that of Nazi Germany and wage war against it to victory was true enough in retrospect. The other members of the group—whom, oddly, Nezval never names—re-organized and continued on. Perhaps for emotional balance, Nezval recounts his friendship with André Breton and Paul Éluard: the mutual esteem they held for each other, several experiences they shared in Prague, and something of their rich collaborations. A somewhat specious critique of psychic automatism follows, which allows Nezval to clarify how he would write from then on (faced with the immanence of war, cultivating the absence of intention was not something he prized). Be that as it may, when Nezval leaves his apartment, he enters a realm that he creates: the city as his avatar, with chance their conductor.

A Prague Flâneur lives up to its title in a fraught historical moment through which Nezval sought a way to live without sidelining in his writing the inspiration Prague gave him and that he now gives the reader: walking through it, loving and fighting in it, playing out his days and nights with a keen sense of what makes it all unique, even funny (a satirical escapade with an escaped crab its capstone).

This translation, finely done by Jed Slast, is of the rare, unexpurgated first edition with photographs by Nezval, which hit the streets in the fall of 1938, coincident with the signing of the Munich Agreement. Given the consequences of that agreement and the Nazi conquest soon to come, Nezval had the book pulled from its bookstores so that he could delete passages that might compromise him with Nazi authorities, including his celebration of Stalin and his cutting portrait of Hitler as a young agitator of the lumpenproletariat in seedy Berlin beerhalls. An appendix carries that content and the edits Nezval made.

Characteristically, Nezval ends the book with a brief paragraph that recalls the narrative’s through line. It has a solitary atemporal quality—not yet mythic, but almost so. Place it as the first paragraph in the book and it works just as well. Is it an ending or a beginning? For Nezval, it could be both:

Oh Prague, I turn you in my fingers like an amethyst. But no. I just walk, and I see in the magical mirror of dusty crystal that is Prague the animated expression of someone who is fated to find himself and to wander, to find himself through wandering.

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Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Dead Weight

Essays on Hunger and Harm

Emmeline Clein
Knopf ($30)

by Olivia Q. Pintair

When Emmeline Clein began writing her debut essay collection, Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm, she originally planned to document female hysteria. Her subjects would be fictional and non-fictional women branded with that diagnosis by a misogynistic culture that pathologizes and fetishizes the pain it produces—women hallucinating into their wallpaper, sobbing in hospital hallways, and wasting away in the folds of Y2K tabloids. Her focus shifted, though, as Clein has said in interviews, when she realized how many of the figures she was researching shared struggles with disordered eating. As Clein began “to harmonize with a ghost choir” that includes medieval anorexic saints, anonymous Tumblr users, Ottessa Moshfegh protagonists, Simone Weil, Cass Elliot, Karen Carpenter, and many of us readers, the book transformed into an attempt to frame disordered eating within the context of the systems and industries that profit from it.

Tracing the cultural and medical histories of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and orthorexia, Dead Weight undoes several tricks of the light. Through investigative reporting, criticism, and prose, Clein reveals that disordered eating is not a solipsistic malady; rather, it is an integral weapon of a racist, classist, and misogynistic society that depends upon the age-old lie that sick and sad young women are crazy, unreliable narrators. To undo that lie’s prismatic refractions, Clein shows us how common and culturally incentivized disordered eating is. Meditating on the casual gore of modern womanhood, she excavates the cultural, economic, and political underbellies of an epidemic wrought by and for a capitalist world. The result is a manifesto against “dissociative feminism” and the “lethal culture” that Western beauty standards empower.

Across Dead Weight’s thirteen essays, Clein navigates the rabbit holes of Reddit feminism, the aughts-era Tumblr-verse, diagnostic hierarchies, the eating disorder recovery industry, modern wellness culture, Ozempic’s arrival to mass markets, and the unsettling allure of bimboism. Her voice is sharp and familiar, moored to a sense of solidarity with the people living and dying along the faultlines she documents. In most autobiographical accounts of eating disorders, Clein writes, “the only way to survive seems to be renouncing your suffering sisters . . . I’m trying to find out what might happen if we blame someone other than each other and ourselves for a change.”

Clein quickly dispels any expectations for the nostalgic and bone-laden accounts of eating disorders that readers may be used to. Instead, she recasts the often isolating struggle as a collective one. In one essay, Clein explores how phases of capitalism mirror disordered eating patterns:

If bulimia was the eating disorder of Reaganomics and millennial girlbossery, and anorexia was the eating disorder of aughts-era austerity, [injectable weight loss] drugs might foster an eating disorder for a new age of technocapitalism, wherein we try to recast hunger as just another inconvenience we can eliminate with an app.

Elsewhere, Clein traces the normalization of eating disorders in a culture of ubiquitous commodification. “Eating disorders are good for capital,” reads one essay, which traces “the chain of money that leads from eating disorder treatment centers, weight loss companies, CBT companies, and pharmaceutical companies back to the same pool of investment capital.”

As Clein probes statistics and anecdotes, it becomes clear that disordered eating is not a mark of girlish insanity or vapid self-interest, but an apparatus of late capitalism. Women and femmes are peddled a beauty standard that remains a thinly veiled prerequisite for financial and social success, then are pathologized for trying to reach it. “Heroin chic is back,” The New York Post announced in 2022—Ozempic makes it easy now. As most anyone on the internet could attest, social media algorithms incentivize conformity and drain our energy to rebel. We seem to lose something when we follow their rules—and also when we don’t.

“I’m trying to be honest here: I’ve always wanted to live the kind of life that ends up in a story,” Clein writes, leveling with her audience. The women who starve themselves in books or on screen, she acknowledges, are often main characters, and maybe that is what the supposed trade-off is: Submit to the role, and you could be the heroine. But as Clein continually reminds us, those stories “are fiction,” repeated enough that they have become not only a cliché but also a narrative propping up several multi-billion-dollar industries and a conglomerate of mental illnesses with one of the highest collective death rates in the world.

For Clein, writing Dead Weight was an effort to humanize suffering people who, like the Victorian women drowning in white dresses in 19th century British and American literature, are usually romanticized in media but dismissed in real life. Like Simone Weil, Clein understands the visceral way in which the question of how or whether to eat is also a question of how or whether to be; the Self, as an experience and as an imagined ideal, is her primary interest. Early on in the book, she asks readers to picture the archetype of the “skinny, sexy, sad girl” as an ideal self that floats out at sea, “purring false promises from just over the horizon line”; she then points out that like those literary women whose misogyny-induced deaths are so predictably written as romantic inevitabilities, this archetype didn’t swim out to sea of her own accord. “Someone stranded her at the vanishing point . . .” Clein writes, “and they don’t want us to reach her because then we might save her, convince her she’s been lied to like the rest of us.”

Advancing toward the menacing clarity of that realization like a chess player, Clein refuses to talk down to her readers or underestimate their agency. She is interested in a political future beyond both the commodification of pain and the avoidance of it. “I have a question for bimbos and dissociated girls alike,” she writes in the collection’s coda. “How are we shaping our bodies and behaviors to become desirable to the most powerful, according to their value system?”

As Clein contextualizes her subject matter within existential questions about selfhood and solidarity, Dead Weight becomes relevant not only to those suffering from eating disorders, but to anyone trying to remain feeling and alive in a capitalist world that commodifies selfhood at the chaotic clip of a panopticonic auctioneer. The Self, Clein posits, is not an asset that should either escalate in perpetuity or submit to disappearance, but a synthesis of experience, alive insofar as it risks its own imagined stasis toward relationship and connection. Undermining narratives of our own isolation and insanity could destabilize industries that profit from them, Clein argues. “We don’t have to be solo heroines on lonely journeys; we can also be sisters and friends, side characters in someone else’s story . . . We can, maybe, even be the person who changes it.”

At the end of the book’s penultimate essay, Clein returns to consider the roots of her own suffering from disordered eating:

I watch my adolescent body get thrown like a pebble into a pond. The blame ripples out, past my therapist, another woman floating on her back in the water, into green fields of money and men. I see magazines filled with waifish models and . . . the Instagram ads . . . offering me mental health quizzes and meditation for women apps and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix show and diet tea. I see the eating disorder memes and weight loss progress Instagram accounts and slim, smiling influencers, and wonder how I could have ended up anywhere but at the bottom of the lake.

“It can be politically mobilizing to feel the weight of that pain,” Clein said in a conversation with Rayne Fisher-Quann published in Nylon; “it makes me want to be alive in order to try to change it in what little ways I can so that maybe some younger girl doesn’t have to feel this bad.” Ultimately, Dead Weight is an offering born of Clein’s commitment to doing that—to envisioning a world in which girlhood isn’t a minefield of diet trends, where genuine human connection renders dissociation unnecessary, and where bodies are land and not property. In this world, Clein dreams, the lake might not be a place where people drown or disappear, but an expanse where we might find each other. This is a world she can see, she promises—not over a horizon line, but somewhere closer.

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Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Tap Dancing on Everest

A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Mimi Zieman
Falcon Guides ($22.95)

by Sandra Hager Eliason

Mimi Zieman wasn’t sure why she stuffed her dancing shoes into the bag she was packing for her trip to Mount Everest, but when the team was stuck at base camp with another delay, she pulled the shoes out to do dance routines on a flat rock, lifting everyone’s spirits. Zieman’s memoir, Tap Dancing on Everest, describes her time as a medic for a team attempting to scale the east face of Everest without oxygen or sherpa support. The book chronicles the dangerous expedition, beginning as the support teams’ binoculars search the heights for any trace of missing climbers and ending with a harrowing trip down the mountain; between, Zieman explains how her life path led her to this adventure.

Dance gave Zieman strength in her early life, and her job as a field researcher in the Rocky Mountains later drew her to continue exploring the mountains. She booked a flight to Nepal the day she was accepted to medical school. Zieman knew it normally took years to get a climbing permit—she would be a doctor by then—but when the expedition leader obtained one earlier than expected, she got permission to leave in the middle of her medical training, with the intent to conduct a research project on high altitude medicine (which she studied while also completing her regular medical school curriculum).

Nature lovers will appreciate Zieman’s vivid descriptions of scenery:

As spectators, we watched the natural elements sing and dance in a dramatic showcase. . . . Act One was the changing cones and shafts of sunrise, the lifting veil of night revealing pink and orange and yellow spotlights. Act Two was the main act of the day . . . showering us with the brightness of whites . . . until the swift fall of shadows enveloped us in the chill of twilight. . . .
Act Three, the finale, shined with the twinkle and swoosh of star and moon. . . . the waning sun spraying golden on the peaks, the white caps shimmering under a final dust of blue before black.

As the expedition encounters delay after delay, Zieman expertly conveys the climbers’ frustration and urgency. Zieman also offers detailed insight into the Everest expedition process—needed equipment, support, food, and the creation of camps set up at increasing altitudes to support the climbers.

The only woman on her trip, Zieman describes the discomfort of being around so much testosterone-fueled energy, but she does not wallow: When a mountain climber brags “I know I can make the top . . . I’m going to come back. Plan my own Everest expedition,” she blurts, “Well, if you need a doctor for your next expedition, call me.”

Overall, Tap Dancing on Everest is an enjoyable memoir with something to offer readers of travel, nature, medicine, or science writing—as well as anyone who appreciates a compelling, real-life adventure tale.

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Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

The Rent Collectors

Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA

Jesse Katz
Astra House ($28)

by Nic Cavell

A phenomenal work of sociology and anthropology, Jesse Katz’s The Rent Collectors focuses on Giovanni Macedo, who botched a gang hit which resulted in the death of an infant and called down a hit on himself that was itself botched. Macedo, who was eighteen years old when he committed the crime, became the center of a nationwide manhunt and ultimately turned himself in, then assisted local and federal cases against the Columbia Lil Cycos. Many words in The Rent Collectors are devoted to the machinations of the gang’s higher-ups whose orders Macedo was assigned to carry out. But though Macedo’s narrative is harrowing and Katz’s presentation of it is powerfully critical, this book works its strongest magic in the evocation of the undocumented lives of immigrants in MacArthur Park, who repurpose the neighborhood into a vibrant site of street vending even as they are shaken down by both a police force empowered to levy exorbitant fines and the Columbia Lil Cycos, who charge for vending on their turf—two sets of “rent collectors.”

Katz first documented MacArthur Park and its vendors for the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s. When his son left for college in 2011, Katz moved to the neighborhood and became further fascinated by the local economy. In this book, he has excavated the lineage of the park, describing changes in storefront businesses and the make-up of the mostly undocumented vendors who have used the public space across generations. Here is USA Donuts, with its “La Vida Loca” mural by 18th Streeters artfully and ominously announcing their territory with paintings of sub-machine guns and a “snake-wrapped woman”; there is the Video Mania, where Macedo and his handlers stopped to gather their wits just before embarking on their crime. We meet old stalwarts of the neighborhood such as the Matiases, whose daughter Shorty walks the line between friendship and informant with both police and gang members, eventually becoming a key witness for the District Attorney’s office; we also meet newcomers like Francisco Clemente, an undocumented worker who began vending in the evenings as a side hustle from his day job operating an auto repair shop. Clemente arrived in 2007 after the Columbia Lil Cycos had instituted a tax on all vendors on their turf, but he chafed against their authority and fought a mostly solitary battle against the extortion along with two women: Jessica Guzman, a fellow vendor he began a relationship with, and Daniela Garcia, Jessica’s friend who was pregnant by another man and for whom Clemente felt responsible.

And of course there is Macedo, who we learn is a miracle—he survived being throttled with a rope and tossed off a cliff along a hazardous roadway in Mexico. Despite his cooperation with authorities after the fact, he acted for the Columbia Lil Cycos, and on September 15, 2007, he was given a weapon and asked to gun down Clemente for his obstinance. Clemente took four bullets—one is still embedded in his jaw and another lodged near his spine—but survived. Garcia, whose baby had only been born twenty-three days prior, grabbed the infant as soon as the shots rang out, only to discover that he was foaming blood at the mouth; there was little doubt in her mind that whoever killed him was a monster.

Macedo, who didn’t know Clemente, the two women, or the infant before he pulled the trigger, was immediately hit with remorse, although in prison he had an uphill battle imagining the full scale of his crime, knowing so little about the lives of those most closely affected. When he pleaded guilty, he was sentenced to fifty-one years and four months for voluntary manslaughter and three counts of attempted murder, plus gang and gun enhancements. But in the years since the sentencing a new view of justice embracing second chances has taken hold in California: It has been shown that in offenders under the age of twenty-five, the brain and its impulse control centers are not yet fully formed. As such, Macedo, who committed his crime at age eighteen, may have the opportunity to take decades off his sentence, along with around 16,000 other California inmates.

For most of MacArthur Park’s history street vending has been illegal, and with or without the gangs, sellers have been hassled by the police. When Trump was elected in 2016 and the rhetoric against undocumented immigrants turned especially venomous, there was finally political will to make immigrants’ lives easier by decriminalizing their vending. But what began as goodwill toward the undocumented community quickly became onerous; rules about how far off the street, how far away from storefronts, and how far away from streetlights and other vendors didn’t take into account crowded MacArthur Park realities. Fines were again instituted for vending in any way that deviated from the new rules, and just like before, they were of a size that would negate a significant chunk of profits, crippling the immigrants’ enterprise. Despite a wave of new Latino politicians in the city’s firmament, the undocumented community continued to be treated as a blemish on the urban landscape.

Clemente and Guzman got a break when one of the LAPD detectives who worked their case decided to sponsor Clemente for a green card, navigating the channels of an opaque legal system; the couple now have four children. Garcia slipped through the cracks and into the criminal justice system for theft and drug offenses. The shot-callers Macedo helped put behind bars are serving lengthy sentences. After surviving two RICO cases, the Columbia Lil Cycos are as strong as ever in MacArthur Park, with new personnel earning the chance to work for the Mexican Mafia, the godfathers of Latino gangs who operate from within facilities like the federal “supermax” prison in Colorado. And the immigrant vendors continue to suffer slings and arrows in the shadow of government neglect and reprisal. In The Rent Collectors, Katz tells all their stories with aplomb.

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Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

American Precariat

Parables of Exclusion

Edited by Zeke Caligiuri, Fong Lee, B. Batchelor, C. Fausto Cabrera, Will Anderson, Warren Bronson, David Janisch, Kennedy Amenya Gisege, Mark “Red” Altenhofen, Ronald L. Greer II, Jeff Young, and Lavon Johnson
Coffee House Press ($19.95)

by Sara Dovre Wudali

The essay anthology American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion works to “polish the world” into a better version of itself. The twelve editors are a team of incarcerated artists and writers from Minnesota who offer a unique perspective as culture bearers from society’s most hidden corner. Jennifer Bowen, who facilitated editorial meetings through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, explains in an introductory note that incarcerated populations feel societal changes deeply, though their perspectives on those changes are “invisible by design.” To make the people behind this curation effort visible, the book includes transcriptions of editorial conversations after each essay; these transcriptions crack open the process of building an anthology and clarify that the editors see their role as a quest. Who, after all, understands power and class better than those whose very freedom has been ruptured by it? Or, as editor Kennedy Gisege puts it, “In prison, we see precarity in a totally different way than maybe somebody [who has] gone to the University of Minnesota or Harvard. You know, we’ve survived. We’ve lived the experience, so we identify easily with other fellow human beings who have suffered.”

Each essay tells a personal story, and many function also as treatises or manifestos written from within what British economist Guy Standing identified as the fast-growing “precariat” class, defined by its shared exposure to risk. The editors have chosen to include texts about living in the United States from within positions of vulnerability and instability by a mix of well-known authors (Eula Biss, Kiese Laymon, Kao Kalia Yang, Steve Almond) and newer voices as well. The topics range across the most difficult issues we face as a nation: poverty, mental health, homelessness, climate change, immigration, racism, mass incarceration, LGBTQ rights, and more.

Members of the precariat are, Michael Torres writes, “unsafe and (un)seen.” In his essay about surviving higher education as a Mexican American, Torres weaves a personal story of isolation and surveillance, and the editorial conversation that follows ranges across broader discussions of migration, citizenship, cultural identity, code-switching, shame, and assimilation. “White people,” editor Chris Cabrera says, “have the option to reject homogeny and to identify as simply human . . . White people get to choose the cultural conflicts with which to engage, whereas to be racialized as anything else, is to be drafted into a conflict by virtue of the color of your skin.”

Alice Paige also writes of isolation and surveillance, but from a transgender perspective: “The isolation feels like death,” she writes, and “everyone is watching me, judging how I perform femininity.” The hard-hitting tone of Paige’s lyric essay echoes the punk rock she uses to celebrate being alive: “I trade a violent home life for a violent homeless life. . . . I go across and beyond myself. I leave myself behind.” Tension builds as she and other trans friends navigate trauma, homelessness, and infuriating waits for medical care. When she learns that every forty-five seconds a queer youth commits suicide, every minute of survival becomes one to celebrate. The editorial discussion after this piece digs into rage and gender in punk rock, the politics of gender identity, and how language can be a tool to prevent suicide.

There’s a sense of a ticking clock in many of the works in this anthology; after all, as editor Zeke Caligiuri writes in his foreword, “Time, in the life of a writer, or a prisoner, is an emergency.” Time is a resource continually in crisis, measured in long years of exile and marked by sudden uncontrollable changes in circumstances. TM “Redd” Warren plays expertly with chronology in his personal essay about life with a cellmate and the deliberate care they take with their creations: their baking, paintings, friendship. In Sarith Peou’s essay, “The Promised Land,” both the author and the subject of his story lost years to untreated mental illness; now prison holds them both. Lauren Markham’s essay “Can We Move Our Forests in Time to Save Them?” reveals a Hail Mary plan to avert one catastrophic outcome of the climate crisis. Kristen Collier relates how the debt her mother incurred on her behalf grows exponentially out of control; using masterful metaphors, Collier describes how it consumes her future.

The cumulative effect of these essays, each from a different slice of society, makes clear that the American precariat is enormous and its issues are enormously complex. The editors discuss the “American fallacy” of bootstrapping our way out of precarity, which additional rights should be included in the Constitution, and how and whether outrage can be shifted into action: “You wake up and you have a fucking knee on your neck. And you inherit that shit. Just like people inherit comfort.” They also discuss their own darknesses, rage, and despair, and question whether their paths to prison were inevitable—but camaraderie and hope shine into the discussions too. Many of these editors have known each other for years, and their discussions reflect mutual respect and knowledge of each other’s quirks and interests, such as when they good-naturedly clear the way during one discussion for editor David Janisch’s monologue on the three reasons trees should have rights.

From the very first pages of the foreword, Caligiuri warns the reader that American Precariat is a dangerous project: Society’s decision-makers know “the threat that artists and poets pose to the ideas of the captivity business.” In a place made to break people down, a community built by artists and writers becomes a cultural force resisting not just the disassembly of their own humanity, but that of all American society. After all, as Janisch says in the last words of the book, “when following the news, you can get really numb to it. The news doesn’t make a difference. But this essay? All these essays . . . That is one thing that’s really cool about paying attention to the world—it’s just one big story.”

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Nonfiction Reviews

Embodied Unconscious

The Feminine Space of Sexuality, Surrealism, and Experimentation in Literature

Edited by C. M. Chady
Spuyten Duyvil ($30)

by Robert Eric Shoemaker

It is possible to train roses to grow up and over walls, evading their presence. To climb. Escape. Be unruly. Language is the same sort of plant if nurtured. Organic and ravishing.
—from “Unto Herself,” Interlude by Stephanie Michele

C. M. Chady’s recent anthology Embodied Unconscious: The Feminine Space of Sexuality, Surrealism, and Experimentation in Literature gathers a unique “community within a creative lineage”: experimental women writers affiliated with Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics reflecting on the fifty-year audio archive of the school’s famed Summer Writing Program. Transcriptions of lectures and panels from the program, along with introductory “interludes” written for the anthology, are presented with the aim of locating related historical and contemporary zones of women writers in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The book is divided into two parts: The first half is on language, poetics, and gender, while the second is more specific to gender and the unconscious, especially in Surrealism and Dada. Selected voices from the archive include Jane Augustine, Joanne Kyger, Erica Hunt, Bernadette Mayer, Gertrude Stein, Clarice Lispector, Mina Loy, and Lorine Niedecker. One can listen to the audio recordings of these talks at Naropa University’s library website for a multimedia experience.

The essayists collectively gesture at shared lineages of women writers to honor their importance, address their historical underrepresentation, and highlight their potential to inspire today’s writers. If language is gendered, the contributors agree, then creative writing can reorient language so as not to be “unconsciously repeating the world to myself,” in contributor Marlie McGovern’s words. “Our realities are shaped through language,” editor Chady concurs, and women in experimental literary traditions have constructed a space outside of “language that simply didn’t work” by using “innovation out of necessity.”

Through the interlude and transcript clusters along with writing prompts, the essayists document their creative engagement with the archive. Importantly, however, the anthology’s choices and methods are guided by voices and traditions that speak to each contributor rather than by a canon or a predetermined idea of what readers want; Augustine, represented in a substantial seven of the included fourteen talks from the Summer Writing Program, must have struck a chord with many of them. The book is thus meant to be a subjectively experienced guidebook to select parts of the archive, not a cogent argument about the whole of women’s experimental writing.

Situating the archive as a thing to experience certainly embodies Naropa’s approach to creativity and lineage—this is a meditation, not a thesis. Still, core to Embodied Unconscious is an argument for re- or un-defining woman-ness by becoming in writing, to borrow Simone de Beauvoir’s famous phrase, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” As the contributors each define their own woman-ness using the archive, we see how the category “woman” means multiple things to this group—and even to some essayists individually. But while defining gender and sexuality, placing texts in concert with identity, and identifying the poetic techniques and values that follow are all central to Naropa’s legacy, the tension between claiming space for women (as recompense for oppression) and un-defining spaces as supposedly for either women or men (in order to remove that gendered power dynamic) is palpable.

Fortunately, the anthology presents options for engagement with identity-based questions. Identitarian definition often precludes varieties of sexual and gender experience beyond the normative (e.g. cis and hetero), while the complete loss of categories can invalidate collective and individual experiences. The in-between of definition and un-definition, the becoming space, is the more fruitful area to explore, and Embodied Unconscious makes its home in that space, inviting the reader to wander its pathways without settling in one interlude or transcript.

One of the most compelling aspects of Embodied Unconscious is how the finer differences in poetics between the contributors and their chosen forebears hinge on what “woman” means and who carries which aspects of that label. Questions about the feminine and its presence in poetry are illuminating, inviting, and heartfelt when presented subjectively; when presented as objective truth, however, they can read as exclusive, incomplete, or even inaccurate. There are clear tensions here between waves of feminism; remaking the feminine and preserving versions of it inscribed by certain authors; using labels with different assumptions and intentions (e.g. queer and bisexual) to describe the same writers; modes of writing (some more scholarly and some more lyrical); and conflicting trends of progressive politics.

The most well-written interludes engage the lyrical identities of the writers voiced from the archive through the essayists’ own aesthetic modes, including feminist surrealism and eco-poetics. This suggests that personal connection with a poet through the archive can create a sense of discovery leading to creative innovation and an identity-based autonomous zone of community—or as contributor Stephanie Michele illustrates it in an essay on Mina Loy, “Wide open. Gold flecks clustered of imagination hanging by silk threads. Trace.”

Some engagements embracing multiplicity shine out. Michele composes her first essay in Gertrude Stein’s “language matriculated into a science” to illustrate her debt to Stein’s work and Stein’s importance to our contemporary literary world. This is a capacious style, an embodiment of Stein’s language-altering logic rather than a description of it, that remains critical and inquisitive, integrating quotations as italicized lyrics among the author’s own. Michele’s enjambment of Stein and herself allows her arguments to blossom without precluding anything or anyone else’s multiplicity: “a sentence is restless and multiple,” she proclaims. Further, she brings Stein and Google into the same space, recognizing what this anthology, born of technology (of recordings, of ghosts speaking), has the capacity to be.

In her second essay, Michele paints a dreamscape in which Mina Loy appears to her, for what better way to honor an ancestor than in their own tongue: “moon high, glazed light over a mountain’s skin.” Kathy Tun also crafts a lyrical take on lineage, arguing that women writers speak back through the archive to hopeful “understudies” who hear echoes of themselves in their words and ask to walk in their roles. In Tun’s extended metaphor of performing a part, mere imitation in the costume of Mina Loy or Lorine Niedecker becomes difficult: “how did an experimental artist respond to the call?” she asks. It’s time for the understudy, walking on, to become their own interpretation of the role and for the stars of the lineage to light her way forward.

Tun’s metaphor is an outstanding way to imagine the passing of the torch in the experimental tradition, but also begs the question of whether nonbinary or male writers might step into these roles with the same intentions. Such moments in Embodied Unconscious pose an imaginary that has multiple genders and invite non-female readers to embrace that imaginary for the interlude’s duration. These readers aren’t disallowed from women’s experimental writing—we’re encouraged to read beyond our gendered experience, and the expansive lyrical aesthetic of some essays pushes us to shift paradigms rather than grapple with identity labels—but some essays do not quite relinquish the categorical terminology that they use to undefine gender.

Chloe Tsolakoglou, for example, argues that it seems foolish to write from within dichotomies when experience is not gendered; using Clarice Lispector as the example of a “perfect combination of feminine and masculine,” she then reverts to a “feminine imaginary” as her target creative, illustrating how even when an author’s inclination is toward becoming both, the definition of both still rests on either. This is possibly a product of theorists like Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous, who were writing when these recordings were made; more recent queer and feminist scholarship dissolves the gender binary further, so it would be exciting to see Naropa’s archive reexamined with these dissolutions in mind.

Sex, gender, and other identity categories do not imply a readership or a writership; they position a poet in time in how they express themselves, but they do not dictate a static interest for later generations. This is why, of the options presented in the anthology, the selection of a poetic lineage by an energized acolyte is more exciting than the lying-in-wait of a lineage to be accessed by password; rather than gaining entry to a predetermined canon through identity, one can find kinship with the identity of a poetic ancestor queerly or even in tension, like the kinship with Robert Duncan and H. D. that Joanne Kyger mentions. The distance between these poles is a vivid subtext of Embodied Unconscious, a spectrum along which to place one’s own position in relation to poetics from all corners of the archive, to which no one roadmap or canon exists. Beyond the specific writers it engages, this book speaks to the very paths we travel to dream ourselves into a future. As Chady writes, “we contribute to the lineage as it becomes us, forever entwining us with ideas of the past, present, and future”— whichever future we can manage to embrace.

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Nonfiction Reviews

1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left

Robyn Hitchcock
Akashic Books ($26.95)

by Frank Randall

Some lifetimes are marked in music rather than time, where the pivotal moments are forever linked to a chance encounter with a particular song. The revelation of hearing Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis on the same cassette copy of Dick Clark 20 Years of Rock and Roll. The summer you spent your birthday card cash on a cutout bin copy of Let It Be, reckoning with the meaning of “A New Phase Beatles Album.” The pressure-packed week your older sister’s boyfriend loaned you both Bridge of Sighs and Are You Experienced and asked you to choose between Trower or Hendrix—because clearly, your answer would reveal the essence of your being.

My senior year in college, I wrangled a part-time gig at the town’s only record store, and the various employees (mostly other students) would take turns providing the soundtrack to our shifts. One employee had a record so rare the store had no copies for sale. It was a far-flung import that had somehow made its way to our shores, and on a good day, she would bring it to work to play. This was a mostly acoustic, introspective music, not quite belonging to any one genre; it used a language unlike any I had heard before, with lyrics sung in a British accent that cut new paths through the sonic landscape. It sounded like it was recorded behind the singer’s bedroom door, where I did my own hopeful strumming. Personal and peculiar—and absolutely essential—it was I Often Dream of Trains by English singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock. I begged my coworker to let me borrow it for a weekend so I could make my own cassette copy. She agreed, but only after I swore an oath to let no harm come to this precious musical testament.

Nearly forty years and many acclaimed albums, paintings, films, videos, stage digressions, liner notes, and comic strips later, Hitchcock has pulled a marvelous and relentlessly inventive memoir from his creative well. 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, focuses on the unforgettable moment in time when the latest release from the Beatles was the most important thing on earth—next to, of course, the latest release from the keeper of the keys to the universe, Bob Dylan. For an impressionable young person, new music had meaning like never before, and it was changing at an unfathomable, exhilarating speed. As Hitchcock recalls about first hearing “Strawberry Fields Forever”: “The Beatles are developing so fast, and yet, because my friends and I are developing too, this seems only natural.”

Hitchcock’s journey begins in pre-revolutionary fashion with him passing his teenage Sundays in the family driveway, wheeling a transistor radio around in his little sister’s doll carriage and listening to the latest hits on BBC’s Pick of the Pops. His move from a reasonably normal family home to the private Winchester College boarding school proves as unsettling as one might imagine for a boy of thirteen, but it’s a timely immersion into a new universe for a young introvert ready to embrace new sounds.

Limiting his coming-of-age story to a single year could have produced unreasonably narrow results, but Hitchcock uses this focus to his benefit, introducing us to the academic tradition and psychedelic ether in which his personality coalesced. His observations of key moments are alternatingly transportive (“Incense caresses the air, while John Coltrane’ s saxophone plays from one speaker and Hendrix’s guitar from another”), moving (“Occasionally, I still destroy my favorite things . . . and I still don’t know why”) and revelatory (“And I will become a songwriter. ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ hooks me, ‘Desolation Row’ pulls me in, and ‘Visions of Johanna’ . . . more subtle, more engulfing: it becomes me.”).

By late spring, the Holy Grail of Highway 61 Revisited gives way to the long-awaited arrival of the Beatles’ most secretive recordings to date, the era-defining Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Hitchcock’s crooked path through boarding school involves the influence of unforgettable schoolmates and tragicomic staffers, unexpected encounters with groundbreaking musician and producer Brian Eno and dream cameos by Bob Dylan, Donovan, and other colorful icons. As in his songs, he makes room for fictional sojourns, where the rules of strict biography are gleefully abandoned in favor of dream play and teenage fantasy—a fitting device to convey the convergence and emergence of young lives in 1967.

Like the best of creative memoirs, Hitchcock’s account helps describe how the simple and strange events in a young life turn out to become culture itself, seeding the history we all assume occurred without the assistance of countless anonymous players. For instance, despite having encountered dozens of references to the notorious Boxing Day broadcast of the Beatles’ film Magical Mystery Tour, here we finally have an eyewitness account that it wasn’t that bad a show after all.

We certainly don’t need a book from every musician wrestling with their status as a “cult artist,” but Hitchcock’s expansive coming-of-age tale effectively combines the intangible magic of the 1960s with actual events that help illuminate his work. For example, Hitchcock has always made room for vividly drawn water creatures in his songs, so to learn that his childhood home had a river running adjacent helps explain the frequent presence of these animals in his lyrics; why not make a song about your pet crayfish? Or the druids that you know dance among the ancient circle of trees on the hill overlooking your school? Or the UFOs that have collected your schoolmate along with his cheese? (Spoiler alert: This last was only a temporary and relatively harmless abduction.)

While often (and fairly) categorized as psychedelia-inspired, Hitchcock’s songs have never been limited to a particular genre. They careen from topical to romantic to surreal, and his knack for inviting absurd characters and fantastic situations into his music is on full display in 1967 as well. His inventive stage banter, rich with humor and showcasing his unique talent for the well-placed non-sequitur, has made his storytelling as delightful as his music over the years, and here it makes a seamless transition to the written page. Like any performer worth his salt, Hitchcock leaves us wanting more when he finally exits the stage of this memoir. He takes care not to burden us with unnecessary verses, nor does he commit the mortal sin of repeating the bridge, closing his micro-history with a strong chorus and tidy epilogue. The appreciative audience sends him off with well-deserved applause, lighters raised, hoping for an encore.

1967 is one of the epochal years that make us who we are, responsible for countless ripples of influence across culture. There are other such years, of course: Some musicians might need to write a book about 1976 with New York City as the setting, or coming of age in Minneapolis in 1984. But Hitchcock is a proud flag-bearer of 1967, revealing that annum to be as unrepeatable and unique as the author himself. In 1967, Hitchcock deftly captures the mercurial spirit of the time, and his luminous prose shows he’s not only a singular maker of music, but has been a secret writer of books all along.

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Nonfiction Reviews