Bill Berkson
Coffee House Press ($16.95)

by Joshua Preston

There are few poets writing today with the range and talent of Bill Berkson. The author of more than thirty books of poetry, collaborations, and criticism, his latest volume—Expect Delays—is typical of Berkson’s work in that there is nothing typical about it. One finds here Dante-inspired cantos, New York School-style prose, and excerpts from his diary—and while this gives his book a sense of scatter, it also keeps things fresh. Where other poets find a formula that works and then promptly poison themselves with it, Expect Delays is anything but formulaic.

As a follow-up to his Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2009), Expect Delays brings together pieces written within the last ten years, including the chapbook “Not an Exit.” More so than other poets, one noticeable trait in Berkson’s work is that so much of it is engaged in conversation with the work of others, be they classical artists or friends from New York and San Francisco. Thus, many names (familiar and unfamiliar) wander across these pages, such as Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and Philip Whalen. While this could be dismissed as “name-dropping” in other hands, in Berkson’s it is a gentle reminder of how much is owed to one’s peers. Furthermore, the warmness with which he writes only affirms that the most prolific literary communities are those that in fact are a community.

The most universally appealing of the book’s sections is likely the sequence “Songs for Bands,” which makes up half the book. As the author explains in a long note, “Songs” was culled from a single Microsoft Word document in which he recorded dreams, quotations, diary entries, and short poems. Taking this writer’s notebook of “more or less impulsive jottings,” Berkson collages them, forming a text that shows a creative mind at work. Scenes flash past, for example, as he leaps from a nightmare (“I slip slowly into my mother’s mind, tangle there so much that panic ensues—I’m inside another person’s consciousness! What if I never returned? The strong sense that this is what it is to ‘go’ mad.”) to a New York Times weather forecast (“Dull with possibility of snow in the High Sierras.”). Then, just as quickly, his mind races to something else, maybe a belief about how art must justify itself (“Why should I look at this . . . instead of out the window?”). Many of these pieces are observational and tongue-in-cheek, such as “Seven Agnes Martins around a room do no one any good; art is best seen in specificity, alone in someone else’s bathroom, for example.” Or “August 28. Albert Gonzales resigns as attorney general of USA. John Ashbery becomes poet laureate of MTV. There must be some connection.”

“Songs for Bands” suffers from the problems all published diaries have, which is that some parts feel rough or underdeveloped; some lines read like first drafts, others like notes meant more for the writer than an audience. But even with these minor problems, the author elevates the writer’s notebook to its own art form, showcasing it as a distinct genre of literature. It is poetry and prose, essay and diary, a text whose value is its many forms joined together. That, coincidentally, is also the perfect description of Expect Delays and Berkson’s work more generally. Both refuse classification—and both are better because of it.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Douglas Wilson
Crossway ($16.99)

by Mark Dunbar

A recommended reading list by conservative theologian Douglas Wilson, Writers to Read isn’t very revealing—except, that is, when it doesn’t intend to be. Written as a series of vignettes, the book consists of nine chapters, one for each of the authors that Wilson thinks should be on any bookshelf. The authors are presented in chronological order—Chesterton, Mencken, Wodehouse, Eliot, Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Robert Farrar Capon, Marilynne Robinson, and his son, young adult author N.D. Wilson. Those already familiar with the pastor’s previous works won’t be surprised by most of the names on the list—or at least the first six, anyway. Much of what Wilson writes either directly quotes from Chesterton or subconsciously ventriloquizes him. He’s already written a book about Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and has set up a graduate writing program in theology which bases its curriculum around Lewis’s popular apologetics. And Wilson’s worldview is largely the same as Mencken’s, which is to say an unfavorable mix of Social Darwinism and flamboyant moral posturing. It’s as easy to quote scripture for this worldview as it is for any other, and Wilson is a brilliant hermeneuticist.

The latter three are more surprising, however. Capon was an Episcopalian priest who divided his time between writing theological books and food columns. What Wilson says he finds most appealing about Capon is his ability to present his religious and metaphysical speculations even in the course of a cook book. This makes sense. After all, Owen Barfield's line about Lewis—that what he “thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything”—is one of Wilson's favorites to draw on. Nonetheless, the only other time I've come across a mention of Capon by Wilson is in a single blog post, where he quotes an uncomfortable passage Capon had written about how men give during intercourse while women merely receive. (Garnished with the innuendo that the thing being transferred is love, let the reader hope it isn't even that indecent.) One would think a writer worth reading would be worth mentioning more than just once.

Robinson also makes little sense on the list, either politically or stylistically. Wilson tries making a corrective nod at this, saying she’s included solely because of her exceptionable writing ability, but that sentiment seems to go against the rest of the book’s strong emphasis on the relationship between form and content, such as when the author quotes Lewis’s commendation of Chesterton’s viperish wit. One is left unsure what to make of Robinson’s inclusion, other than that it’s perhaps an attempt to forestall charges of sexism, which have been leveled at Wilson before.

It’s not surprising, then, that the chapter on Robinson is the weakest. In fact, it seems set up as less a theatre on the talent of Robinson’s writing and more as a warning to conservative evangelists to be wary of those outside the tribe that seem to lend a sympathetic voice. While Wilson admits that in her novels Robinson “creates absolutely no cartoons,” it is quite the opposite, he says, when it comes to her public pronouncements. Thus she thinks opposition to gay marriage (“gay mirage” as Wilson louchely calls it) is an old issue, and that those who most bemoan the modern practice of abortion are suspiciously quiet when it comes to the suffering and dying of innocent babies already born. Wilson is extremely disappointed in these thrift-shopped political views: “As it turns out, her abilities in cross-cultural empathy are limited.” Still, one’s reminded, “that woman can write.” At this point it goes without saying that Wilson is the sort of conservative who believes that when he’s taking a jab at the Clinton clan he’s simultaneously getting the goat of The Socialist Worker.

The inclusion of his son N.D. Wilson isn’t surprising in the same way the inclusion of Capon and Robinson is, though it seems obviously frivolous to include one’s own son on a recommended reading list. I have to admit to not having read any of N.D. Wilson’s writings up to this point, but from the passages quoted in the book, he hardly seems noteworthy. For instance:

I live on a near perfect sphere hurtling through space at around 67,000 miles per hour. Mach 86 to you pilots. Of course, this sphere of mine is also spinning while it hurtles, so tack on an extra 1,000 miles per hour at the fat parts. And it’s all tucked into this giant hurricane of stars.

Which only goes to show that the younger Wilson is a fan of Douglas Adams, and that Mencken was right when he said that if an individual’s religion is stupid, then his science will be as well.

But back to the first six: As already alluded to, Wilson does a good job emphasizing the crucial dialectic between form and content (since the style of one’s prose not only reveals what one thinks, nor only how one thinks, but also how one thinks about what) and if the content of these six writers isn’t always the same, they’re at least always pointing in the same general direction. Within this moribundity of writers is the bucolic conservatism of Eliot and Chesterton, the race romanticism of Tolkien and Mencken, and the political quietism of Lewis and Wodehouse—each of which lead them to similar vulgarities on race, religion, and nationality.

Chesterton was one of the more outspoken proponents of a belated feudalism, called either medievalism or distributivism depending on the speaker’s affection for the idea, that had a strong programmatic hold on many right-wing English intellectuals in the late part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. Eliot similarly romanticized a pastoral idyll of the English countryside that probably never existed, as well as one in the American South that certainly never did. The comfortable illusion of a simple and gallant plantation culture in the South was so warming to the “British poet from St. Louis” that he lamented the Civil War as “the greatest disaster in the whole of American history.” (Which was true enough, at least up to the time in which he said it—just not for the reasons he thought it was.) He also slyly likened urban London to Hell via a literary phrase lifted from Dante.

The two also shared a suspicion of Jews that sometimes expressed itself in outright contempt. Eliot published a collection of lectures in 1934, in one of which he warned that “any large number of free-thinking Jews [is] undesirable.” Chesterton, for his part, mephitically blamed the ideology of Nazism on the Jewish notion of a “Chosen People.” Mencken bought into the notion of a hierarchy of races, wrote to his death essaying that the confederacy was in the right, and for a man who considered himself a tough guy and who couldn’t keep himself shut up about anything, expressed a relaxed silence when it came to fascism. Wodehouse infamously provided his voice for a series of English-speaking Nazi radio broadcasts shortly after they had conquered France in 1941, for which Orwell comically defended him by saying, “It is important to realise that the events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity. The really interesting question is how and why he could be so stupid.”

This hopefully isn’t to make the uncharitable as well as boring claim that one’s aesthetic tastes ought to be in some sense related to—or derived from—one’s political ideology, and Wilson’s book on reading shouldn’t be reduced simply to the social and moral failings of the suggested authors. But just as the way one writes about what tells a great deal about the author, how one reads whom will also tell us quite a bit about the reader. It’s one thing to admit to getting pleasure from reading Mencken’s acerbic effusions—although he had a talent for repeating himself and the hack trait of mistaking vicarious nationalism with a free-thinker’s independence from it—and it’s quite another to celebrate his taking bleacher shots at women, blacks, and Jews. The difference being the same as the one between congratulating someone for putting up a good fight and honoring them for putting up a good fight for a just cause.

Of course, many readers value these six writers for reasons other than religious or political affiliation. In his readings of these authors, however, Wilson reveals that like Chesterton he is attractive when he's being flippant and a little more than faintly sinister when he isn't; that like Lewis he calls for empathy always right before he's about to expose just how little he has; and that like Mencken he is so good at fighting off the demons of hyperbole and sentimentalism in others because he is so bad at fighting them off in himself.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
University of Michigan Press ($29.95)

by Mark Gustafson

It’s high time that we had a book on Anne Carson, one of our most important and anomalous writers. Rather than collecting already-published pieces, editor Joshua Marie Wilkinson solicited “appreciations, readings, investigations, experiments, and performances” from a variety of writers, knowing that these “myriad approaches” would result in “overlap, digression, and strangeness.” The book opens with his fine introduction, and closes with a heretofore unpublished interview. In between, the order of the thirty-two short essays, when based on single works, is mostly chronological.

To witness the essayists essaying to get a grip is fascinating. But such a devious, multi-plied, multi-faceted, protean writer ultimately confounds. For one thing, as Bruce Beasley writes: “In Carson each eachness, each separable body interpenetrates, won’t stay apart. The academic and the unotherable ‘other’ of essay/novel/poem/translation overlap, their categories in a permanent state of error.” Furthermore, she incorporates the thoughts of many, and often abstruse, writers, thinkers, philosophers, mystics, and artists. There is always some degree of “intellectual intimidation,” as Douglas A. Martin admits, “feeling when reading her I must not be smart enough.” He speaks for all of us.

The book has several standouts. Timothy Liu offers gnomic short takes on various Short Talks. Of “The Anthropology of Water,” Jennifer K. Dick writes: “Carson’s reader simply must let go, flow under, breathe in the aquatic literary shifts, the pain of inhaling the impossible, of reaching across it into whatever connections emerge.” Harmony Holiday’s meditations on Autobiography of Red consist of pleasing, non-scholarly, language play. Discussing Decreation in a relatively straightforward manner, Cole Swensen is illuminating and effective. Julie Carr gets personal, telling how various Carson works help her to understand her own life, her mother, her grandmother, her pregnancies. Bianca Stone, the illustrator for Antigonick, makes many exact observations, including: “there is no pretension in Carson’s work.”

De gustibus and all that, but some of the other essays here are disappointing, if not disastrous. For one thing, while I like academic discourse and po-mo lit crit as much as the next nerd, it can be a screen, a refuge for one unequal to the task, and it results here in a number of pieces light on substance. Also, attempts to emulate Carson’s weirdness tend to fall flat; however absurd and randomizing some of her work may seem, there is always her powerful mind with its formidable learning behind it. Finally, several of these responses seem little more than hubristic—look at me, I’m taking on Anne Carson!

Lily Hoang on Red Doc> pleases with a word cloud (the volume’s only deviation from an otherwise conventional text), a personalized response, and an “appendix” of definitions of myth. She writes: “To talk about Anne Carson is to talk about myth. After all, she’s a classicist. . . . ” This, to my mind, signals the major problem with Ecstatic Lyre; I would amend Hoang’s remark to read, “Before all, she’s a classicist.” Neither coy nor arrogant, her short bio (“Anne Carson . . . teaches Ancient Greek for a living”) in Carsonian fashion cuts to the quick, maintaining that everything she writes consciously arises from the primordial muck of Greek literature. There is that aforementioned interpenetration, but also a definite and discernible point of origin.

Thus, with the essays on Carson’s fundamental translations of Sappho and the Greek tragedies deferred, this book is backwards, or upside-down. (Note that the editor, possibly with some ambivalence, classifies Antigonick as Carson’s work rather than Sophokles’.) Elizabeth Robinson undertakes Carson’s Sappho (whence comes—riding on the back of Modernism—Carson’s love of the fragment), but she lacks the hard-won understanding and immediacy of a translator, and she can’t get a handle. John Melillo, although similarly hobbled by his dependence on English, manages to be more successful with his focus on brackets, meter, sound, silence.

Is there a classical philologist in the house? Only one. In many ways, Erika Weiberg’s “Lessons in Grief and Corruption” is the best essay here. Similar to her subject, Weiberg bears her learning lightly, using it to get to the heart of the matter, and shows the intimate connection between Carson’s literary bedrock (Euripides in this case) and her modern concerns, especially linguistic:

In the process of translation, you realize what is strange about your native language . . . Carson creates this experience on the page, both in her poetry and in her translations; she gives the gift of sudden estrangement from the natural feel of English. . . . Suddenly the innocuous word you thought you knew slices sharp and exits through the other side of awareness.

Weiberg adds: “Carson’s English is part Greek already, part her own invention. . . . ” Exactly.

In the interview with Peter Streckfus, Carson’s English is conspicuously refreshing, and clarifying. She likens her opera Decreation’s libretto, born from a lecture on Simone Weil, Marguerite Porete, and Sappho, to the “intoxicating fumes left in the room by mashing up all the grapes of the academic part.” Again, on the distinction between her analytical writing and her aesthetic writing (that interpenetration once more), she says: “I couldn’t separate the strands of it all. So, I gave up on it.”

Carson’s literary stature is one consequence of her volcanic work—she pushes, she blurs, she stuns with her brilliance, she challenges us to strive to comprehend. Her language, her point of view, is “refracted” through so many mediums. For the reader, flashes of sharp illumination are quickly overshadowed by bewilderment. Despite the inevitable dead ends and misreadings, Wilkinson’s collection is valiant and valuable for us enthusiasts. With Carson our reach always, or almost always, will exceed our grasp, but that has to be—and is—enough.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Marge Piercy
Alfred A. Knopf ($27.95)

by George Longenecker

Some may ask how a writer with nineteen books of poetry and seventeen novels can have anything new to say, yet Marge Piercy’s newest book, Made in Detroit, is one of her most compelling. These poems are richly layered with unforgettable imagery and succinct narratives. While foremost a memoir about her childhood, there are poems about her Jewish heritage, the sea, the environment, love and socio-political issues. Each poem is a polished gem—descriptive, sensual, and deeply personal.

Many of the poems continue themes from her 2002 memoir Sleeping With Cats. In the title poem about her childhood in Detroit, she reminisces about her family’s poverty, the grittiness of the city, and her love of literature. “I dived into books . . . I suckled Detroit’s steel tits.” In “Detroit fauna” she reminds us that she grew up in a time that was sometimes more like the 19th century: “I am old enough to remember the sad / horses that pulled open-sided carts.” And “Things that will never happen here again” speaks of the toil and hardships of the World War II years. Here, Piercy reveals a profound awareness of aging:

I miss none of this. They were chores
not pleasures, but still I remember
and my age hangs on me like icicles
that bear down the branches of pine.

Piercy’s poetry is rich with images of the natural world. At times, as in “Little house with no door,” she is as elegant as Frost:

For decades it stood in the oak woods
not on any road but found only
by an old path half grown over:
a one-room house with no door

Several of her poems are about the sea, a ubiquitous presence where she lives on Cape Cod. In “The constant exchange,” one of the finest poems in the collection, she is reminiscent of the prophet Micah: “The ocean gives; the ocean takes away.” The poem is matter of fact as she speaks of the environment and of class disparity in the same breath:

The sea is restless and greedy. It mocks
the summer people with their million
dollar houses . . .
. . . chews them up to splinters, then
tosses their flotsam away . . .

Above all, Piercy writes lines that are so beautiful they bring tears. “The frost moon like a stone wheel / rolls up the sky,” she says in “The frost moon”; “The moon is a fishhook of bone.” With Made in Detroit, Marge Piercy has shown that she can still write narrative and lyrical poetry as good as any of her past verse.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen
Dylan Horrocks
Fantagraphics ($29.99)

Incomplete Works
Dylan Horrocks
Victoria University Press ($19.99)

by Stephen Burt

If you want a graphic novel—no, let’s call them comics—if you want a book-length comic that’s wry and thoughtful and endlessly suggestive about the theory and practice of making comics; about the long international arc of comics history, which hasn’t bent all the way towards justice for creators (especially not creators from decades ago); about how comics fans misunderstand comics makers, and vice versa; about what separated (circa 1995) comic strips from comic books, superhero comics from other genres, mainstream comics from independent creations, loving caricature from satire from heightened realism; about (not least) the history of New Zealand: if you want all those things, and if you like comics, or novels, or films, that change their style and genre with every chapter, so that to follow the plot to the end you have to keep changing the habits by which you read—if you want all those things, you probably need, and you may already have read, Dylan Horrocks’s black and white masterpiece Hicksville.

Self-published chapter by chapter in Horrocks’s zines, collected in 1998 and re-published for North America in 2001, Hicksville told the intricately intertwined stories of the NZ indie comics maker Sam Zabel (a slightly bedraggled stand-in for Horrocks himself); the NZ-born, Stan Lee-like industry titan Dick Burger; and the American fanboy Leonard Batts, who comes to the village of Hicksville to research Burger’s life and discovers the secret history of comics—and maybe also of New Zealand—instead. It could be the Cloud Atlas of comics, unless it’s comics’ version of To the Lighthouse instead, being a meditation on travel, grief, familial love, and aesthetic success—there’s even a climactic lighthouse. It was, for nearly twenty years, the only thing written and drawn by Horrocks long enough to be a proper book.

But no more. Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen is, like Hicksville, a meta-comic, a story about what it means to construct and share fictions made out of panels, captions, pictures and words; like Hicksville, it presents a secret history of what comics could or should have been. It follows Sam much more closely than Hicksville did; it’s a simpler story, easier to follow, with higher production values (full color, for example), and a line that’s more consistent, cleaner, more “professional,” too. Older, married, a dad, not so much anxious or unsettled as anomic and depressed, Sam earns a living by writing the once majestic superhero comic Lady Night, whose current version—boobs, boots, blades, and nonstop battles—he abhors (Horrocks himself wrote Batgirl in the 2000s). Unable to work, Sam escapes into erotic visions; there he encounters Lady Night herself, who tells him “You’re a hack. Get used to it,” then disrobes and invites him to “make me your fantasy, Sam.”

Is it OK to use comics as wish-fulfillment fantasy? If it is OK, what do we do with the misogyny, and the power-worship, and the chauvinism, that turn up all over the history of comics (and, for that matter, in real people’s sexual fantasies)? If it’s not OK, why won’t those fantasies go away? They’re old questions, because they’re hard questions, and they come up in almost any art; but they’re especially pertinent to comics, because so many comics—so many good ones—have been either straight male “power fantasies” (to use Scott McCloud’s disapproving term), or reactions against power fantasies, “boring comics about my stupid miserable life that nobody wants to read,” as Sam puts it (he used to write those too).

Rather than writing either, Horrocks writes both, investigating the human psyche’s need to escape by exploring multiple escape routes. That’s what Sam, and Sam’s feisty feminist sidekicks Alice (a smiling twenty-something con-going fan) and Miki (a rocket-booted manga heroine) literally do, thanks to the Magic Pen. If you blow or sneeze on a comic drawn with that immemorial pen (as Miki explains), you enter the comic: “all you have to do is give it the breath of life.” If, for example, you gesundheit over The King of Mars, by the (made-up) 1930s-40s NZ writer Evan Rice, you will end up on Rice’s Edgar-Rice-Burroughs-esque male-fantasy Mars. “How come the men here are all bright red, but the girls are green?” a spaceman asks; the answer: “Women are from Venus and men are from Mars, of course!” Sam meets Miki on Mars, and Alice on Venus, and Sam Zabel becomes an attractively drawn meta-adventure, with excursions into several other comics’ secondary worlds.

If cartoonists cannot be “God-kings” (Rice’s status on Mars), how should they see their creations? “What if the whole point of fantasy is to go beyond the boundaries of the real?” If comics aren’t good for that, what are they good for? They’re questions you can give almost any comic, from Little Nemo in Slumberland to Hothead Paisan to Secret Wars, and Horrocks has clearly read a lot of comics: the more comics you know, the more references you’ll see in this one, to whole genres (including Japanese tentacle porn: don’t say we didn’t warn you) as well as to individual works. When we see Rice at a drawing board, Rice himself looks like Archie from Archie, but the panel looks like a famous page from Maus.

Sam Zabel is, mostly, a thoughtful delight, a celebration of Horrocks’s chosen medium, with powerful supporting characters helpfully present to save the day and to articulate running feminist commentary while a sad-sack viewpoint character—white, male, educated, and middle-class—escapes into one after another creation. To praise it that way is also to make clear its limits. Sam Zabel can seem like the Woody Allen of comics, albeit with better hair; his adventures with the Magic Pen are his Midnight in Paris, his Purple Rose of Cairo, his fifty-minute hour on the couch.

Sam may not be able to get outside his own head, but at least he knows it’s not the only head around. To re-read Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen is to see an argument that comics will get better—aesthetically, politically, intellectually—the more they get made by people with different experiences, and therefore different fantasies, from the people (people like Horrocks, for instance) who have been likely to write them before. Your fantasies also depend on what your deepest feelings tell you that you need. For Rice, it’s illegal, impossible, or inadvisable sex, with busty green ladies; for Zabel, it’s a chance at real invention, and maybe the love of female fans. For infantry at Passchendaele, it’s not being gassed. And in order to make new comics—that’s the point Alice keeps making, with some glee—you have to find some way to like some of the old ones. “I’ve learned to take those imaginary worlds and make them my own,” Alice says, “subverting them to serve my fantasies.” [162] As she speaks, she’s surrounded by soaring superheroes, one of whom may have just let a bird poop on Sam’s head.

Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen is terrific for what it is, but it’s also less complicated, less challenging—less indie, if you will—than Hicksville. As close to Sam’s perspective as it remains, it may get your hackles up if you are looking for both a new, and a thorough, critique of gender, exoticism, power and politics in comics, even though the volume wants, with an aching honesty, to join that critique.

What it can’t do—because it’s drawn so accessibly, and so consistently—is demonstrate all Horrocks’s powers. For that, there’s Incomplete Works, a selection of Horrocks’s briefer comics—some one page, some long enough to be short stories—made between 1986 and 2012, originally printed by Victoria University Press of Wellington, NZ, and soon available in a North American edition courtesy of Alternative Comics. In my ideal world all comics readers would own Incomplete Works, having devoured either Hicksville or Sam Zabel first. They would then recognize outtakes and dry runs for scenes from the longer works, such as new adventures for the ridiculous M&M-shaped jokesters Moxie and Toxie (whom Sam draws), as well as early, Morrissey-shaped versions of Sam. Horrocks’s readers would—in this ideal world—recognize homages to, and jokes about, the makers of international repertoire (Winsor McCay, George Herriman), and they would learn about real giants of Kiwi comics, such as Barry Linton, subject of an attractive eleven-page nonfiction feature profile in comics form.

Those readers would see, within Incomplete Works, fiction and nonfiction, clean exposition and teasingly used blank space; they would come to see comics—and maybe all art forms—as kinds of collaboration among the artist, the artist’s material, and the reference points, styles, precursors, the artist has known. Best of all, they would see the comics Horrocks drew on blank postcards in the 1990s, when he was visiting Europe or living in England, elegantly spare semi-pro affairs that limn his loneliness and his youthful confusion while also demonstrating the points that Horrocks has since made in essays about comics theory, such as “Inventing Comics” (a response to McCloud) and “The Perfect Planet: Comics, Games and World-Building” (in part a defense of Dungeons & Dragons). You can read these essays, and view other short form comics, on Horrocks’s site, www.hicksville.co.nz. In my ideal world, you would read them all. I don’t live in that world—no one lives in their ideal world, which is one of the points that Sam Zabel makes. But I can get us that much closer to it if I can get you to read Horrocks’s books.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Frédéric Gros
Translated by John Howe
Verso ($16.95)

by John Toren

In a pinch, walking will get us from place to place, though for the most part, we hardly think about it, except in so far as distances are concerned. We ask ourselves, how far is it from the parking ramp to the concert hall, anyway?

Frédéric Gros has a different view, which he shares with us in this collection of essays examining the phenomenon of putting one foot in front of the other. Though he never mentions it explicitly, it's pretty clear that when he isn't teaching philosophy at the University of Paris XII and the Institute of Political Studies, or editing Michel Foucault’s later College de France lectures, Gros is a long-distance walker himself. A number of the essays are devoted to specific elements associated with walking such as solitude, slowness, gravity, and repetition. Interspersed with these often insightful observations, which veer off into metaphysics occasionally, are chapters recapping the lives of philosophers and poets who embraced the peripatetic lifestyle in one way or another, including Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Gandhi, and Henry David Thoreau. A few of the essays are more broadly historical, as Gros takes a look at how walking figured in medieval notions of penance (through the notion of pilgrimage) and the role played by walking in the philosophic schools of ancient times.

From the opening pages Gros makes it clear that he's not interested in walking as "sport"—an activity that involves measurement, comparison, competition, and haste. Nor is he interested in convincing us of the health benefits of walking. And as for those long narratives in which walkers recount their adventures, he notes that most of the material in such books describes events that take place when the walker is not walking.

Thus severely circumscribed, his enterprise would be a little dull, except for the fact that Gros is adept at wiggling out fine distinctions between the various physiological and psychological states that walkers arrive at on the course of a long journey. In an early chapter on freedom, for example, Gros writes:

By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it's all very well for psychologists' consulting rooms. But isn't being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake—for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait—a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone: for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the steam of immemorial life.

Such reflections are followed by an analysis of how it begins to feel to the walker when "outside" ceases to be a transition zone through which to pass on our way from one event to the next, and becomes the "element in which stability exists."

Gros repeats a few stories he's heard from the lips of aged mountain walkers about the trekkers who rush pass them: "They're afraid they won't get there, wanting to walk at that speed!" And he even goes so far as to draw philosophical distinctions between the superfluous, the useful, the necessary, and the essential. He is often successful at introducing an element of poetry into his analysis, as when he writes about slowness:

Slowness means cleaving perfectly to time, so closely that the seconds fall one by one, drop by drop, like the steady dripping of a tap on stone. This stretching of time deepens space. It is one of the secrets of walking: a slow approach to landscapes that gradually renders them familiar.

And just when an element of sameness is beginning to creep into his remarks, Gros mixes things up by devoting a chapter to Nietzsche's love of mountain hiking or Wordsworth's insatiable need to walk while composing verse. These chapters have a pleasant breeziness, free of serious literary analysis or labored attempts to correlate a given temperament with a specific walking style. For Nerval, walking was a part of active nostalgia. Kant was constipated, while Nietzsche suffered from compulsive vomiting. It hardly matters. These chapters are like the interesting people we might meet on the lonely path, with whom we gladly stop to converse before returning to the monotony (and liberation) of the miles ahead.

The historical chapters work less well, perhaps because genuine walking is a matter of individual initiative, whereas the efforts being described in these chapters tend to be institutional and prescriptive. Later chapters devoted to types of pseudo-walking—the promenade and the habitual daily outing, for example—return us to the subject at hand by way of contrast. "The walker of wide open spaces," he writes, "the trekker with his rucksack opposes civilization with the burst of a clean break . . . The stroller's walking activity is more ambiguous, his resistance to modernity ambivalent." After a few more pages of analysis, in which Walter Benjamin figures prominently, Gros concludes: "The walker is fulfilled in an abyss of fusion, the stroller in a firework-like explosion of successive flashes."

At times, while reading A Philosophy of Walking, I felt the urge to dig out my backpack, campstove, and maps; at other times, I found my thoughts turning toward an unread copy of Patrick Leigh Fermor's tales of walking across Europe. But Gros's book is remarkably successful at returning again and again to a few simple points without wearing them too thin, scattering his breadth of erudition lightly here and there for variety and emphasis. And in the last chapter, “Repetition,” he feels comfortable giving a more personal touch to the spiritual dimension of walking long distances, describing at some length the psalmistry of the open road. "Walking causes a repetitive, spontaneous poetry to rise naturally to the lips, words as simple as the sounds of footsteps on the road."

Gros makes walking sound liberating, mind-numbing, fulfilling, and monotonous all at once. Is any of this really true? I can think of one way to find out.

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by Shane Joaquin Jimenez

Scott Alexander Jones is the author of two recent books of poetry, elsewhere (Black Lawrence Press, $13.95) and Carpe Demons (Unsolicited Press, $15), both published in 2014; another book titled That Finger on Your Temple is the Barrel of My Raygun is forthcoming from Bedouin Books. Each of his books is singular—elsewhere is a long poem about the fleeting passage of time, while the impressionistic Carpe Demons reads like a collection of Japanese death poems—but all of his work emanates from a Zen-inspired awareness of the ephemerality and absurdity of existence. As he writes in Carpe Demons: “The graveyard’s patient / As the landfill . . . ”

Scott and I met a decade ago as undergraduates at the University of Texas at Austin, where we both majored in English and worked in the Life Science Library at the Tower—the infamous site of Charles Whitman’s 1966 sniper massacre. We bonded over our shared appreciation for Allen Ginsberg and the cathedral-like solemnity of the Life Science Library’s reading room in the early morning. After graduating, Scott began a period of intense restlessness and travel, which only ended earlier this year when he settled down in Bozeman, Montana. During this period, Scott earned his MFA from the University of Montana, co-founded (with me) the literary zine Zero Ducats, and published his first chapbook, One Day There Will Be Nothing to Show We Were Ever Here (Bedouin Books, 2009).

This interview took place over e-mail over the course of several days, slowed at times by the vagaries of life—stomach bugs, work—and sped up at other times by deadlines and looming travels. I often typed out my questions in my home in North Portland with the lonesome cries of freight trains in the distance. I do not know what Scott’s soundtrack was.

---

Shane Joaquin Jimenez: I’d like to start our conversation by setting the scene. Where are you right now?

Scott Alexander Jones: This very moment, I’m looking up at log rafters in an office filled with old books and scrolls of topographical maps of nearby wilderness, like the Gallatin Range, which I currently live along the edge of and can see outside the window right now, along with some yellow flowers.

SJJ: Is this old office of yours where you write?

SAJ: Not particularly. I’m a pretty undisciplined writer, in the sense that I don’t write daily and never set aside a special time to write. Like Frank O’Hara, I tend to jot things down the moment an idea strikes, which could be anywhere: at a coffee shop, on a plane, in a park.

SJJ: Let’s talk more about this process. How do these moments of inspiration become books? In the words of Quentin “Q” Morewood, “What is the bridge from the water’s edge of inspiration to the far shore of accomplishment?”

SAJ: Lovely platitude. Here’s another one I can hear Rip Torn reciting pretentiously: “A poem isn’t finished, it’s only abandoned.” I forget who, if anyone, actually said that, but I tend to agree. Or at least I used to. I used to struggle to craft the perfect poem, revising compulsively, only stopping when I realized my focus had shifted into something entirely different and it was time (continuing with the maritime metaphor) to abandon ship and dive into something new.

These days, though, I usually just start with some sort of triggering vision and see what rabbit hole it takes me down, without any conscious agenda, and the words fall into place pretty naturally. Whenever I start a new poem, I rarely know how it’s going to end; I’m always trying to surprise myself with some strange lingering moment to end on.

SJJ: But why poetry? It seems like in the time I’ve known you, the trajectory of your work has taken you from meticulous craftsmanship to a Ginsbergian, Zen place of “spontaneous mind.” Is there something specifically about poetry that lends itself to following these triggering events? What ultimately appeals to you about poetry’s form?

SAJ: I think I like that poetry is time-based, with a set beginning and end—as opposed to, say, sculpture or painting. I just as easily could have gotten into film or video art, I guess, but it would’ve been more costly, risky, and required much more planning. With poetry, you can simply write down the vision as it comes and then move on to the next, without having to over-analyze or beat it to death.

SJJ: Can you talk about how you came to poetry?

SAJ: I started reading it in high school in suburban North Texas in the late 1990s, when I discovered Ginsberg, whom I’d never heard of, in an anthology. The risqué language caught my eye, and I ended up reading The Lion For Real aloud to the class. Everyone stared at me blankly, instead of laughing, like I’d thought they would, which let me know I was onto something.

SJJ: What books were you reading during the time you began writing poetry?

SAJ: Biographies and autobiographies. Dozens of them, mostly on or by dead writers: Walt Whitman, Emma Goldman, Gregory Corso, Lorca . . . These just popped in my head, and I’m wondering if it’s partly because each last name almost rhymes with the previous one. I’ve been trying to tone down the musicality in my writing, but a lot of it seems to be subconscious, like the sound of Whitman triggering Goldman triggering Corso triggering Lorca.

Back to your point, though, when I began writing a decade ago, in Austin, I didn’t just want to read what poets wrote; I wanted to learn how they came to write what they wrote, what kinds of lives they led, where they traveled, who they met. So I churned through a good deal of nonfiction. Which, I think, is what brought me to the underlying subject I can’t seem to get away from: impermanence (my first book was called, not too subtly, One Day There Will Be Nothing to Show That We Were Ever Here). Something about seeing the full trajectory of an interesting life, or at least the outline of one, helped me grasp how fleeting all these tiny moments are.

Which is where the Zen thing comes in. Increasingly, I’m drawn less to wordplay and more to passing moments distilled clearly and economically. Whitman said it best: “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt.” Or this great Japanese tanka poet from a hundred years ago, Bokusui Wakayama: “Eyes closed, you lean on a tree and listen to the sea. What is hidden in that distant sound?”

SJJ: I’m glad you brought up some recurrent themes in your work. You published two books last year—elsewhere and Carpe Demons—both of which deal with the insignificance of human life on geologic and stellar time scales. Are these books connected in any way? What structural and thematic similarities/differences do you think exist between the two?

SAJ: I hadn’t really thought of it before, but yeah, in a way they are like companion pieces, interconnected in that they both explore the broad concept of impermanence, both cosmic and personal, by zeroing in on specific visuals, landscapes, interactions, etc. But if the long poem elsewhere, with its color and fluidity, feels sad and slow like a Terrence Malick film (a graceful hand skimming the top of a wheat field), then Carpe Demons is more like David Lynch (something lurking in the dark corner of your room). If elsewhere laments impermanence, Carpe Demons thumbs its nose. If elsewhere is a dream, Carpe Demons is a fever dream.

SJJ: Intriguing distinction. I wonder, though, how this all ties into the notion of impermanence. Why is this such a resonant theme for you?

SAJ: The poets with the most staying power, I think, address universal experiences by focusing on the particulars of their surroundings, and a lot of them lived quite a while ago. Poets from centuries ago who seem to be addressing future generations, you can tell their worlds felt as real to them as this one does to us, yet they somehow tapped into the ephemeral nature of things. The most striking ephemeral poetry I’ve encountered comes from Japanese Zen monks and haiku poets, who often wrote a final poem before dying.

The dream/fever-dream distinction, for me, illustrates two different ways of responding to one thing. So, reflecting on impermanence, you can either be meditative and melancholic, or you can respond with humor and irreverence. Two Japanese death poems illustrate each of these approaches nicely. Over a thousand years ago, a nobleman named Minamoto-No-Shitago calmly and evocatively wrote:

This world—
To what may I liken it?
To autumn fields
Lit dimly in the dusk
By lightning flashes

Then, about five hundred years later, a Zen monk named Shumpo Soki, who had earlier written a poem threatening to behead the Buddha, gathered his disciples together and crudely instructed them:

No single bone in my body is holy—
It is but an ash heap of stinking bones.
Dig a deep hole and there bury these remains
Thus, not a grain of dust will stain
The green mountains.

Though drastically different in tone—one melancholic, the other abrasive and absurdist—each of these responses feels honest and deeply insightful. Two sides of the same coin. These days, I’m trying to find ways of hitting both of these registers at once.

SJJ: Readers can see these fingerprints of Zen all over your work. Both elsewhere and Carpe Demons begin, for instance, with epigraphs by long-dead Zen monk poets (Gizan Zenrai and Kokei Sochin, respectively). And the cover and poem “titles” of Carpe Demons all share the spontaneous no-mind-ness of ensō brushstrokes. But your poems also don’t shy away from random, everyday observations from your 21st-century life (“The redbrick porn theater / Horse rings in ruptured sidewalk”), which in a way is even more Zen.

SAJ: Yeah, I had forgotten that the epigraph for elsewhere ended up also being from a Zen monk. It was originally a transcription of something Daniel Johnston said at a small concert in a record store in the mid-1980s (which I ultimately couldn’t secure the rights to): “One more time. With feeling. Everybody. It’s gonna happen. You know it’s gonna happen. It happens every day. Billions and billions of people have already died. And you too will die. Sing along with us, won’t you.”

That’s about as subtle as a punch to the face, but I liked how the last thing he said was so collective and welcoming, “Sing along with us, won’t you,” like we’re all gonna die but we’re all in this together. Also, “billions and billions” was Carl Sagan’s go-to phrase, so I associate that with a sense of cosmic awe.

I’m glad you brought up that line about the theater and the rings in the sidewalk. I wrote Carpe Demons in Portland—right around the time you moved there, I think—and those were a couple of images I made note of outside the window of the coffee shop on SE Division where I wrote that book.

When I visited last spring, that area looked completely different, with lots of new tall buildings and boutiques where empty lots and dilapidated houses used to be. They were just starting to break ground on a lot of those places when I was writing that book, with jackhammers going everywhere, which probably helped inform the sense of flux. Also, the iron rings in the sidewalk, which are all over Portland, were used back in the day to tie your horses to, so that seemed to encapsulate the vanishing nature of things pretty well.

It’s always a bit strange to me to see modern haiku and tanka talk about cherry blossoms and lily pads instead of, say, highways and light bulbs . . . I was just about to say this feels escapist, but I guess I’m guilty of never writing about modern technology like iPhones or iPads. I’m sure an actual Zen monk would find computers just as ephemeral as falling leaves.

SJJ: I find it really interesting how place can seep into one’s work, especially in poetry with all its elbowroom for inward, autobiographical exploration. You’ve lived in many different locales in your life—as varied as Austin and Missoula and Prague—and I wonder if you’ve found much connection between the places you’ve lived and the kind of writing you’ve produced.

SAJ: Absolutely. Moving to new places always gets the juices flowing, but it’s somewhat less quantifiable than just autobiographical and location-specific details (although, as we’ve discussed, what’s immediately in front of me is crucial to what I do). When I lived in Wellington, New Zealand in 2010–2011, the poetry I wrote was deeply informed by the landscape—the otherworldly beauty over there is pretty impossible to ignore—and I often described what I saw from the balcony of the rickety bungalow I was living in, overlooking downtown and the bay and Mount Victoria.

But that’s also when my writing style became—or at least I hope it became—a bit less precious and “poetry” (read with a snooty British accent) sounding. That’s the part that’s less tangible. Something about packing up and changing your surroundings completely seems to get the mind working in a different mode, allowing for more formal experimentation. The words come somewhat differently in new cities.

Also, it becomes much easier to reflect on experiences in previous cities after you’ve moved on. So, writing about New Zealand became easier when I was in Kansas, and writing about Kansas was easier in Prague. All this moving around—or rather, the obsession with the next place to visit, which, as I’m learning, often distracts from the present moment—was what elsewhere revolved around.

You were living in Seoul when I was in Wellington, and I remember you were working on a novel at the time. Did you have a similar experience with being able to write in a new style and reflect on past events more lucidly after moving from Colorado to South Korea?

SJJ: Absolutely. The title of elsewhere really gets at this experience, with all its nostalgic, wanderlusty evocations. Like you, I’ve always found it easier to write about a city when it’s in the rearview mirror, like writing about the landscape and people of Texas while living in New York and Boulder. And as you mentioned, I spent two years in Seoul writing about a summer I had spent a few years before living in the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris. For writers at least, I think it’s part of a natural, age-old process of trying to make sense of the past by arranging its details into a tidy narrative.

SAJ: What’s even more interesting is that everyone—not just writers—makes sense of the past by arranging disparate details into a coherent narrative. There’s a strong argument to be made for the whole notion of “the self” being simply the running story of our lives that goes on in our minds and that we tell others.

SJJ: That reminds me of something David Mamet once said: “There is no such thing as character other than the habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago.” I think that you’re right that this extends outside of the page, to the interior lives of every person.

SAJ: Or to put it slightly differently, storytelling starts in the interior lives of every person—it’s biologically engrained in us all to tell and be drawn to stories, the way birds know to fly north—and writers simply capture this natural state and turn it into art. There are a few different theories, all of them compelling, for why people like you and me do what we do: to exercise the brain in cognitive play, to display skillful minds for the sake of sexual selection, to learn vicariously about culture and psychology, to come together around common values, or—by far the strangest option—to feed an addiction that stems from arbitrary glitches in our brains. Could be some combination.

I’m fascinated with how storytelling predates written language, how people have been telling stories for ages—maybe even since before we were human in the modern sense.

SJJ: This idea of a continuum of storytellers and writers has come up a few times in this conversation. I’m reminded of the following section from elsewhere:

I imagine you imagining me savantly
idiotic, replenishing

a century of sultry swimsuit
calendars with deadmen I will have lived beyond

You go on to list dates on which you will have lived longer than other writers who have meant something to you—April 6, 2018 for Rimbaud; January 8, 2052 for Corso; nine days after that for the dharma lion himself, Ginsberg. And I wonder, with your awareness of the fleeting nature of all things, do you see any futility to chronicling your experience through poetry? Or is it something else entirely?

SAJ: Man, will I really outlive Rimbaud that soon? We’re getting old. At any rate, excellent question. I don’t see poetry as futile—far from it, actually. Part of what got me into poetry has to do with what you just said about writers being part of a continuum of storytellers. There’s something almost spiritual about hearing people from the past, particularly the deep past, make the same observations as you.

Even Shakespeare reflected on the fleeting nature of things, writing toward the end of his final play, The Tempest, about how the world and everyone in the future “shall dissolve” and “leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” Or as Kerouac put it a few centuries later: “All you do is head straight for the grave, a face just covers a skull awhile. Stretch that skull-cover and smile.”

A couple weeks ago, Woody Allen told Vanity Fair: “You are living in a random universe. You are living a meaningless life. And everything you create or you do is going to vanish with the sun burning out and the universe will be gone and it’s over. My conclusion is that the only possible way you can beat [this conclusion] even a little bit is through distraction . . . Making movies is a wonderful distraction.”

Chronicling my experiences through poetry, at its core, is mostly just a wonderful distraction—something to pass the time, a slight step away from toiling over a Buddhist mandala and then sweeping it all away. Of course, instead of burning poems after they’re written, I find homes for them in journals and books. But poets, arguably more so than other artists, are unlikely to become famous or remembered, even for a short while, since poetry’s such an unpopular art form. So, you’re constantly aware that the journey is the destination. The process in itself of articulating a poem is the goal; the books are just afterthoughts.

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Juan Villoro
Translated by Kim Traube
George Braziller, Inc. ($15.95)

by Peter Grandbois

Juan Villoro has been a well respected and widely read writer in Latin America and Spain for many years, publishing five novels and eight short story collections along with numerous children’s books and a steady output of articles on sports and music for Mexico’s leading papers. Sadly, he has remained unknown in the U.S., at least until now. In large part due to winning the prestigious Herralde Prize for his novel El testigo, the independent publisher George Braziller, Inc. has agreed to publish two of his works beginning with Villoro’s hilarious and wildly absurd short story collection, The Guilty.

With famed serious writers like Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes, Mexican literature has not exactly been known for its humor, which is why Villoro’s work is so refreshing. That’s not to say Villoro doesn’t owe a debt to his literary forebears. Rulfo’s lyricism and Fuentes’ formal experimentation are on display in nearly every story in the collection. However, like any great writer, Villoro at once acknowledges his country’s literary history and extends it, moving into David Lynchian layers of unreality. Take for example the longest story in the collection, “Amigos Mexicanos,” where we follow a gluten-free American journalist named Katzenberg as he searches for an “authentic Mexican experience,” only to find it in a fictional kidnapping orchestrated by a scriptwriter looking to create a little publicity. Or take the story “Holding Pattern,” in which the main character spends his time waiting for a plane that may or may not ever arrive to take him to see his girlfriend. As he waits, he reads a book written by his girlfriend’s former lover, only to realize the book may be determining his reality.

Then there’s the disillusioned mariachi from “Mariachi,” a man whose life seems to be unraveling with each new success. “That night I dreamed I was driving a Ferrari, running over sombreros until they were nice and flat.” He yearns to escape the world of mariachis, but he is trapped by the very clichés that define that world. The climax occurs when he stars in a movie in which the special effects are noteworthy: “There was a scene where a biker came close to touching my penis and a colossal member appeared onscreen, impressively erect.” He seeks help from the movie’s producer only to find that everything in his career, including the meeting, has been carefully manipulated. In Villoro’s stories, sincerity is not possible. Everything is a manipulation. Each “reality” we think we inhabit is only another surface designed by a marketing team. As one character says in “Amigos Mexicanos”: “We live in a world of ghosts: copies of copies, everything is pirated.”

What makes this postmodern romp different from so many others is Villoro’s deadpan wit, captured in the eminently readable translation by Kim Traube: “It was the iguana’s fault. We stopped in the desert next to one of those men who spend their whole lives squatting, holding three iguanas by the tail. The man we called El Tomate, 'the Tomato,' inspected the merchandise as if he knew something about green animals.” Any translation is only as good as its translator, and this opening from “Mayan Dusk” beautifully conveys the humor living in the concise phrasing and matter-of-fact tone of Villoro’s prose.

The U.S. lags behind the rest of the world in publishing translations, and if this book is any indication of what we’re missing, it’s a real shame. Villoro made me believe in the power of postmodernism to reflect back the multiple surfaces of our own highly constructed and often fictional lives. To do so while making the reader laugh out loud is no small feat.

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Mat Johnson
Spiegel & Grau ($26)

by Elizabeth Tannen

“Race doesn’t exist, but tribes are fucking real.” So declares Warren Duffy, the middle-aged, recently divorced comic-book artist who narrates Mat Johnson’s Loving Day, a novel as richly entertaining as it is smart. Warren, like the author, is mixed-race, born of an Irish father and African-American mother. Also, like the author, he appears mostly white. “I am a racial optical illusion,” Warren tells us. And: “I don’t like feeling white. It makes me feel robbed. Of my heritage. Of my true self. Of my mother.”

So powerfully has this tension driven Warren’s life that it’s led him to Wales, and marriage with a Welsh woman, because surrounding himself with whiteness has reinforced his blackness. When the novel opens, Warren has come home to Philadelphia, where he is grieving not only his failed marriage and comic book store back in Cardiff, but also his father—whose dilapidated Germantown mansion is now his.

Johnson has described this book in an interview as his “coming out as a mulatto,” and above all the novel’s arc chronicles Warren’s slow embrace of his mixed-race identity. He’s spent his life consumed by the fight for admission into the black tribe, of which his light skin marks him as an “asterisked” member. He rejects the concept of biracial, and the notion of a mulatto tribe; in the novel he states, “Mixed people are just a kind of black people anyway.”

Generous use of that antiquated word, mulatto, is one way in which Loving Day subverts our usual framework of discussion around race. Another is its celebration of tribalism itself—a value that is, essentially, un-American. We like to imagine ourselves immune from the needs to belong, to depend. We prefer post-racial mythologies in the same way we prefer post-historical ones: we use the past as ornament, not as identity.

At the center of Loving Day is a pair of love stories: between Warren and the newfound teenage daughter that surfaces soon after his homecoming, and between him and a love interest, Sun, whose physical resemblance to himself is so striking that he observes on sight she could be his twin, and who serves as his foil when it comes to views on race. He and Sun first encounter one another at a comic conference, but she resurfaces as a teacher at Melange, the utopian, militant mixed-race arts and educational center that holds together the novel’s characters and themes.

Johnson has a knack for pulling off the semi-surreal, and Loving Day does a deft straddle between the realistic and the bizarre. He also has a gift for comedy. Some readers might be turned off by Warren, immature and openly sex-crazed, irresponsible and often self-loathing. But others will be charmed by his relentless, self-deprecating humor and brutal, vivid sense of self—as complicated and contradictory as that self might be.

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Heidi Julavits
Doubleday ($26.95)

by Lindsay Gail Gibson

“Often,” as Virginia Woolf observed in a 1929 essay, “nothing tangible remains of a woman’s day.” By nightfall, “the food that has been cooked is eaten”; eventually, even “the children that have been nursed have gone out into the world.” The Folded Clock, a new work by Heidi Julavits, echoes Woolf in its opening query: “Today I wondered What is the worth of a day?” Subtitled A Diary, this luminous piece of life-writing poses possible answers to that question in each of the entries that follow, creating a complex composite portrait of the consciousness that persists amid “soup spills and dirty dishes and lengthy logic proofs meant to coerce tired, inarticulate people to bed.”

On the battlefield of everyday existence, diaries represent a kind of mnemonic triage. Like the household designs of Charles and Ray Eames, which Julavits adores, The Folded Clock performs this function even as it meditates on its own form. The author of four novels and a founding editor of The Believer magazine, she describes herself in these headlong terms: “I edit and teach and at times desire to be a clothing designer or an artist . . . and I write everything except poetry and I am a mother and a social maniac and a misanthrope.”

Julavits’s latest work shores up her memories against life’s rough-and-tumble, detailing semesters at Columbia, summers in Maine, residencies abroad; her marriage to the writer Ben Marcus; her musings on art and aesthetics; the time-lapse photography of her children’s growth. More than a mere calendar of doings or an almanac of emotional squalls, however, this book is an attempt to pin down effervescence, a sketch of the self that has sprung up in the cracks of these roles, occupations, and dreams.

The Folded Clock reproduces the format of her childhood diaries, opening each entry with a deceptively simple “Today I.” As an adult, this formula lends itself to a tone of whimsical deadpan, a habit of presenting off-kilter occurrences as utterly humdrum: “Today I ordered ten toy stethoscopes from a party supply company”; “Today I went to a neighboring town to see the gallery opening of the woman inundated by motherhood”; “Today I started reading a book called How to Navigate Today.” Reminiscent of writers like Miranda July and Sheila Heti, this tone preserves only kissing distance between miraculous and mundane, casting the author as realist observer of a world not quite identical to our own.

For Julavits, “today” functions as a formal conceit, a vault from which, with a gymnast’s agility, she executes temporal and associative leaps. Billed as “an accounting of two years of my life,” The Folded Clock shuffles the deck of days: June abuts March, July follows October, May and January meet. The work that results prefers recurrence to resolution, and its nonlinear timeline may represent an attempt on the author’s part to slip the traces of plot—which she associates with novel-writing, and with which she has lately become disenchanted—in favor of a more episodic mode.

The published journal’s implicit promise is to catch personality ungroomed, before its morning toilette; to provide a warts-and-all portrait of the author in conversation with herself. The Folded Clock bears stronger resemblance to the pianist’s impromptu, a work whose painstaking composition mimics spontaneous, improvised play. Likewise, these entries engineer an intimacy more akin to two confidantes’ tête-à-têtes than a wiretap on another’s thoughts. It’s no accident, perhaps, that the making and maintaining of friends—those most quotidian seductions—play a major role in The Folded Clock: the author’s blend of anecdote, disclosure, and self-deprecation mimics the idiom of a deep but platonic bond.

Julavits is quick to interrogate her own motives for charming us, fretting that, in “trying to be charismatic . . . I probably didn’t tell the truthiest truths.” Perhaps not. By taking full advantage of the formal prerogatives at her disposal, however, she has produced an authenticity rarer and more startling than truth unadorned. Her diary returns at intervals to a male friend’s assertion that, when it comes to intimate partners, “Men want a relationship, but women expect a world.” Readers also require worlds of the books we devour, and The Folded Clock delivers one, fully formed.

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