Claudia Rankine
Graywolf ($20)

by J.G. McClure

If you’re looking for proof of the urgent necessity of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, you might simply look to the cover. The image is of David Hammons’s In the Hood. The severed hood of a sweatshirt—empty, tattered, black—stands against a stark white background. The piece was made in 1993: two years before Trayvon Martin would be born, and nineteen years before he would put on a hoodie, go to the store, and—holding a bag of Skittles and a can of sweet tea—be killed by a man holding a handgun. In the aftermath, newsman Geraldo Rivera would make the absurd and heartbreaking claim that “the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death” as the gunman.

So much is encoded in this cover image: the implicit violence of the severing, the absence of a body inside the hood—evoking death and erasure—and its placement against a jarring white background, bringing to mind Zora Neale Hurston’s statement (which Rankine later cites directly) that “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.”

Citizen’s cover is but one aspect of the stunning artistry of this book, the careful and powerful decisions behind each facet of its making. Much has been said about the political importance of Citizen—see, for example, the reviews in The New York Times and Slate—while largely glossing over the book’s artistic achievements, as if what it means and how it means were somehow divorced. But the book’s political power should not be seen separately from its aesthetic power. Rankine has created a text that blends poetry, narrative, essay, and visual art, going even beyond the publisher’s “Poetry/Essays” label into something far more complex and moving: an American Lyric.

One of the many difficulties about discussing the pervasive racism of American life, Rankine writes, is that one does not “know how to end what doesn’t have an ending.” Rather than artificially dividing, ending, or resolving these disturbing scenes into discrete, titled poems, Rankine allows one scene to blur into the next—formally enacting the ongoing and always-unresolved experience of racism. The result is an exhausting accretion of microaggressions. Take the book’s first scene, a childhood memory:

When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows. . . .

The route is often associative. You smell good. You are twelve attending Sts. Philip and James School on White Plains Road and the girl sitting in the seat behind asks you to lean to the right during exams so she can copy what you have written. . . .

You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person.

From the first sentence, the book begins its complicated use of the pronoun “you.” By saying “you let yourself linger,” Rankine establishes a distance from the Self, as if there is a Self that watches the Self act, and dictates what is allowed. Insofar as the “you” is used as a veiled first-person, it creates a further distance between the speaker and her own experience, a distance that Rankine explores throughout the book. But the “you” here can also be the reader, directly addressed, and by casting the reader as the person acted upon, Rankine manages to give him or her a glimpse into the experience of being systematically discriminated against—and even a glimpse is emotionally harrowing. This is one facet of the book’s powerful empathetic project: while reading about the systematic experience of alienation, those of us in positions of privilege are made aware of our alienation from such alienation, precisely because these experiences are not our own.

That Rankine can accomplish such complicated work through the use of a single pronoun is indicative of her strength as an artist. And there is still more—much more—at work in this passage alone. For example, one feels the past as a physical presence, a presence that, “stacked among your pillows,” invades even the most private space of the bedroom. Through unbidden, unexpected associations, the speaker is cast back to a painful early experience: the past, it seems, can attack without warning. What makes the memory especially poignant is how quickly something positive can turn painful: a pleasant smell conjures instantly a memory of racism. Still more troubling, the white girl in the memory apparently thought she was saying something nice: the fact that her intention was not to harm makes the action all the more harmful.

On the next page, we see a photograph of a quiet suburb: white houses, a white car, and a street sign with white letters: Jim Crow Road. The impact is visceral; though one might question the accuracy of memory, the photograph strikes us as unassailable, a fixed record of what is. What could the people who named the street have been thinking? Why hasn’t the name since been changed? Is it possible that those in charge, like the girl in the memory, “mean well”? Have they simply not thought about the harm they’re doing by leaving the name in place—and would such thoughtlessness really be any better than intentional malice? Rankine doesn’t try to guess here; instead, she leaves us to our own conclusions.

This is another powerful theme in Citizen: the inscrutability of intention. Another scene:

You are rushing to meet a friend in a distant neighborhood of Santa Monica. This friend says, as you walk toward her, You are late, you nappy-headed ho. What did you say? you ask, though you have heard every word. This person has never before referred to you like this in your presence, never before code-switched in this manner. . . .

Maybe the content of her statement is irrelevant and she only means to signal the stereotype of “black people time” by employing what she perceives to be “black people language.” Maybe she is jealous of whoever kept you and wants to suggest you are nothing or everything to her. . . . You don’t know. You don’t know what she means. You don’t know what response she expects from you nor do you care. For all your previous understandings, suddenly incoherence feels violent. You both experience this cut, which she keeps insisting is a joke, a joke stuck in her throat, and like any other injury, you watch it rupture along its suddenly exposed suture.

In the face of inscrutable motives by the perpetrator, the victim of racism here begins to doubt herself. In another scene, the speaker wonders if she has “done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having. Why do you feel comfortable saying this to me?” In other words: are your racist remarks my fault? The result is emotionally devastating: we see that not only does the speaker face aggressions from outside, but that these aggressions impel her to be suspicious of herself—and the linguistic distancing of Self from Self that we see throughout the book takes on another troubling dimension. We sense the macroscopic scale of such aggressions: widespread and pervasive, beginning in childhood and continuing every day, they have so thoroughly enmeshed the speaker that even in the moment of resisting the assault she is further pulled into it.

The speaker is poignantly aware of her own ability to do harm. A passage describes a neighbor who calls the police because of a “menacing black guy casing” the speaker’s home. It is, in fact, the speaker’s friend, who is babysitting and has stepped into the front yard to take a phone call. The neighbor does not believe this, and the police arrive. The speaker arrives home to the aftermath, the four police cars already gone:

Your neighbor has apologized to your friend and is now apologizing to you. Feeling somewhat responsible for the actions of your neighbor, you clumsily tell your friend that the next time he wants to talk on the phone he should just go in the backyard. He looks at you a long minute before saying he can speak on the phone wherever he wants. Yes, of course, you say. Yes, of course.

It’s a wrenching moment: in attempting to protect her friend from racism, the speaker has unintentionally participated in his silencing and erasure. With the best intentions, she does the very thing she seeks to prevent. The final two sentences leave us with her realization, her lesson learned—and the damage already done.

The passage reflects the brilliance of Citizen. Rankine never shies away from difficult material, and is never reductionist in her consideration of the knotted complexities of race in our country. From its first page to its last, the book is skillfully shaped to produce a haunting experience. Politically urgent, artistically brilliant, Rankine’s Citizen is a must-read for anyone who cares about literature and anyone who cares about America.

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

Marco Pasi
translated by Ariel Godwin
Routledge ($27.95)

by Spencer Dew

Here’s the sticky wicket with the Great Beast 666. On the one hand, Aleister Crowley shines as a star in the firmament of history, champion of individualism, gadfly to hypocrites, proto-punk provocateur and publicity-chasing prankster who donned the mantle of prophet to receive the religious revelation of the present age: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law! Love is the law, love under will! On the other hand, the revelation of the religion of Thelema calls for shaking free of the shackles of “care for the feeling of others” in favor of engagement in “blasphemy, murder, rape, revolution, anything, bad or good, but strong.” The New Aeon Crowley prophesied would finally spell the end to that “nauseating cult of weakness,” democracy, limping along on the “utterly false” premise of equality among humanity. In truth, Crowley declared, humans are either masters or slaves.

Thus, the man who thumbed his nose at restrictive conventions by writing poems about sodomy and incorporating the doodle of a penis into his signature was also the man who recorded dreams of advising Hitler and wrote that Eastern European Jews practiced human sacrifice. The man who described the United States as “the ‘foul oligarchy of the West’ . . . a cesspool of depravity and corruption, founded solely upon the search for individual gain and profit” also said that world peace “depends upon the original idea which aggrandized America in a century from four millions to a hundred: extreme individualism with opportunity.” The man who danced with joy when he heard the news of Queen Victoria’s death is also the man that scholar Marco Pasi, following at least some of the argument of Richard Spence’s Secret Agent 666, believes worked for British intelligence while in the United States. This might explain his pro-German writings during World War I, though, as Pasi notes, when in 1915 Crowley “tore up his passport in front of the Statue of Liberty and proclaimed the independence of the ‘Irish Republic,’” this can’t be read purely as the audacious act of an agent seeking deeper entry into the anti-British underground, since Crowley had been “calling himself Irish and predicting England’s ruin as early as 1900.” This self-described “Sinn Feiner” is the same man who wrote that “Jews and niggers” were “imaginary,” figments of poisonous “submergence of the individual in his class” and reactions between groups of people identified by “class” rather than as individuals. The question is unavoidable as it is disorienting to tackle: What were the politics of the Wickedest Man in the World?

Here’s how Marco Pasi phrases the conundrum: “What does it mean that “Crowley, despite the apparent radical individualism of Thelema, could look at contemporary totalitarian ideologies and regimes not with horror and downright rejection, as one might have expected, but with interest, or even a certain degree of fascination”? Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics plumbs that fascination, holding that Crowley “can be adequately understood only when placed within the historical context in which his intellectual education took place, and in which his proposed religion was developed.” While this is a truism, the phrasing reveals Pasi’s central concern: Thelema. Pasi presents Crowley’s career a progression with “two main phases,” an “individualistic and romantic” phase followed by a mature phrase devoted to spreading his new religion. Denouncements of democracy and other personal “idiosyncrasies” of Crowley are superseded, in this reading, by a move toward the “democratization of magic” as Crowley evangelizes for his religion’s “universalistic message.” And so we hear that “certain aspects of the Thelemic religious message, as Crowley himself presented them, seem to be in agreement with certain aspects of an elitist and, occasionally, totalitarian ideology,” yet also that

these aspects were not peculiar either to Crowley or, for example, to Nazism; rather, they pervaded to a certain degree English intellectual circles, especially progressive ones before the First World War. The implications of social Darwinism, for example, were discussed not only in radical political circles but also, and primarily, in scientific ones, and were even considered respectable enough before the horrors of Nazism led to a universal, uncompromising condemnation of these ideas.

Pasi is Associate Professor in the History of Hermetic Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, and this book, which began as a dissertation in the early 1990s, still bears traces of wariness about its humble goal of contributing “to the ‘normalization’ of Aleister Crowley as a subject of scholarly research.” Pasi has performed meticulous and multi-lingual archival work, the results of which will be of interest to specialists but may disappoint the general reader. For instance, there is a chapter here on Crowley’s connection with Fernando Pessoa, yet while one gets the sense that Pasi has tracked down all the clues, there isn’t much of a story to tell. On other fronts, Pasi enters the archive to debunk. He parses out various conspiracy theories spun about the magus, like that he staged his suicide in Portugal so he could slip into Germany and serve as Hitler’s occult advisor. While the suicide stunt fits with Crowley’s broader profile of making himself the subject of headlines, Pasi can state plainly that “Neither in Crowley’s diaries from that time nor in the things he occasionally wrote later about Nazism do we find anything to suggest that he had had any personal contact with Hitler or with other members of the Nazi party.” This is a useful contribution to the study of Crowley, to be sure, but, again, not necessarily a great story.

Pasi contributed an essay to the recent academic anthology, Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism (Oxford University Press, 2012), which charted Crowley’s views on magical experience—notably rationalization of such experience via psychological and even physiological lenses, until his “call as prophet of a new religion probably produced a cognitive obstacle that prevented him from taking the process of psychologization to its logical extreme.” Here as well, Thelema takes precedent over all else. Yet Pasi’s narrow subject—Crowley’s claim that his “magick” was empirically verifiable, “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will,” and how this notion fits into broader historical trends of religion and rationality—is one on which he can demonstrate his strength as a historian. Pasi gives attention to some of the same issues in this volume, under the auspices of discrediting “The equation ‘right wing = irrational = esotericism,’ which has been so widespread among left-wing intellectuals after the Second World War.”

This sense of left-wing versus right-wing stances of citizens and governments is how Pasi employs the word “politics,” a term he never defines. Readers expecting a sense for politics more broadly, as human negotiations of desire and power and the expression of recognized or unconscious ideologies therein—“politics” as most contemporary scholars of religion would use the term—will find Pasi’s title misleading. He says, “Crowley did not write much explicitly on politics, but it is my conviction that his body of work is replete with fascinating political implications,” a truism that reveals naiveté but seems also to express some frustration with “politics” as a subject. The question of meeting Hitler is one of fact; the question of sympathizing with Hitler’s politics is murkier, depending upon consideration of multiple, often subtle, tendrils within the Crowley oeuvre. Ultimately, Pasi argues that “politics” posed merely a “temptation” to the Great Beast, all seemingly political statements and actions aside. Pasi holds that Crowley, devoted foremost to the goal of spreading his religious message, did all sorts of things for attention, to draw attention to Thelema. It is prophetic calling—rather than any kind of political leaning—that stands as “the motivation behind some of his choices and behaviours, which might otherwise appear simply extravagant, or dictated by a compulsive need for ‘transgression.’”

This is a soothing thesis, fitting a dissertation geared at “normalizing” a figure that, at the time of its writing, was still taboo. Within this framework, Crowley’s most shocking statements can be “explained . . . by the ‘pragmatic' attitude that he developed in parallel with his messianic convictions.” This also represents a clever defense, smoother than, say, some of the Crowleyite attempts to rationalize the magus’s comments on Jewish blood libel. With Pasi’s thesis, the most outlandish statement or action becomes the early twentieth-century equivalent of click-bait. That time he wrote an open letter to the German air command, urging them to bomb his aunt’s house? That time he urged a goat to copulate with a woman for a bit of magic? His typologies of Jews (active and passive, with different size noses) or the effects of the tropic climate on the sexual drives of Anglo women? All of this is in the service of the gospel of the new age. Pasi is far more parsimonious with his examples, avoiding all of the ones above, but with Crowley the examples are endless—and Pasi’s formula is presented as having applicability across the board. As Pasi puts it, in connection to a piece published by Crowley where he imagines great English poets of the past rewriting a popular patriotic WWI ditty, “Probably, once again, Crowley wished to exhibit his heretical and iconoclastic nature without taking up an explicit position.”

This feels unsatisfying, not to say disingenuous, skipping over critical engagement with Crowley’s statements in favor of the standard explanation of attention-getting. Moreover, to ignore the dynamics of such attention-getting (to what audience was Crowley speaking? How was a given statement or act supposed to draw that audience to Thelema?) returns us to limited conception of “politics” at play in this book, which, like a ceremonial working gone bad, invokes far more than it can control. Simply put, Pasi raises a question he does not answer. His book will certainly be of use as a resource for future academic work on Crowley, but as for the issue of Crowley and politics, the attention given in these pages only exacerbates the problem—leaving this reader, at least, flipping madly back through Crowley’s texts trying to make sense of his statements, increasingly disturbed and increasingly confused.

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

Art, Sex, and Magick in the Weimar Republic
Tobias Churton
Inner Traditions ($29.95)

by Spencer Dew

In this volume exploring Aleister Crowley’s two years in Weimar Berlin, Tobias Churton offers us a glimpse of a society in denial, gnashing at any possible distraction. Keg, thigh, drum, dance, makeup, androgyny: all the usual Weimar quirks are here, but read anew. Half-silks—weekend prostitutes—teeter down the Potsdamer Platz in heels, and transvestites belly up to the bar of the Eldorado club, as we see in a photograph from 1928, though Churton shows us, too, that club’s “transformation into a Nazi headquarters, 1933,” with swastikas clotting up the windows. Meanwhile, Hitler has begun whipping crowds into states of ecstatic fury with a few symbols and some barked incantations. What better place and moment in which to examine that creative and adventurous Briton who proclaimed himself the Great Beast?

In Churton’s view, Crowley is almost an anti-Hitler—as thinker, as willed agent-in-the-world, and, coincidentally, as painter, to which profession he dedicated much of his German time. In this last respect, the author compares Crowley with Otto Dix; as the dictator strips “men of the power to think for themselves” (Crowley’s words; he says also: “There is no room for any star in [Hitler’s] system”), Dix forces “the viewer to face reality even while so many of his characters, drawn from real life, looked the other way.” Churton shows us that gallery owners felt Crowley “had an instinctive grasp of the essences of contemporary German art,” but this isn’t just a case of a thumb on the au courant; rather, he argues, it “had long been Crowley’s own perceptual and expressive apparatus: to see things brutally, so that he might not be led astray by the pied piper of bourgeois narcolepsy.”

Churton is a partisan, to be sure, but he never conceals this. The book, after all, is framed with the explicit goal of “spiritual and artistic enlightenment,” dedicated “to Spiritual Artists of sound and vision everywhere.” Churton’s interest in Crowley’s 1931 Berlin exhibition of paintings, likewise, is personal: “The author would very much like to spearhead a major ‘Porza 2’ exhibition, reassembling as many of Crowley’s Berlin exhibition works as have survived.” So Crowley gets the hagiographic spin, but as the hero of Churton’s tour of a titillating but schizophrenic Berlin, he also gets plenty of space to speak for himself, largely in words drawn from journals and letters. If Churton’s correlation of magick with New Physics or the “national characteristics” of Germans (they “suffer from a surfeit of the rational principle”) can slow things down, Crowley’s contributions almost always add zest. Whether illuminating historical connections (cards between 666 and Aldous Huxley, for instance) or the magus’s aesthetic worldview (“the subject of a picture is merely an excuse for arranging forms and colours”), offering satirical social critique (“It’s against Nature! Howled the germinating Hydra when he/she heard about the new sexual process of reproduction”) or prophetic aphorism (“every phenomenon ought to be an orgasm of its kind”), the Great Beast delivers.

The esoteric is on offer here in two senses. Crowley’s negotiations to claim for himself the role of the Theosophical Society’s “World Teacher” represents the esoteric in the sense of occult adepts, but Churton also indulges in esoteric details of history, making the book feel, at times, padded with undigested data. On the Leipzig Thelema Publishing Company, for instance, we get, first, the shareholders and their respective number of votes and percentages of stock, then the books published with their page numbers and dates. Churton seems to miss certain key references in Crowley’s thought, as well: a discussion of the “I Am” and the “Ineffable Name” must, in the context of a self-described Kabbalistic expert, at least reference the Jewish roots of these notions, while Churton roots them to the New Testament. Likewise, the array of reproductions here imparts the flavor of the Weimar moment, but readers will likely want to see a broader range of Crowley’s own work (Kenneth Anger’s 2002 documentary of a Crowley exhibit in London, “The Man We Want to Hang,” is essential viewing on this front).

The pleasures of the book outweigh such small complaints, however. Moreover, by situating his lionized Crowley in the heart of a moment so blind to dark foreshadowings, Churton responds to ongoing debates about the politics of Crowley and his Thelema religion, albeit from an unabashedly confessional point of view. By Churton we’re shown Crowley at his most audaciously admirable, as in a tremendous (and timely) bit explaining how, as “We are God’s poems . . . begotten in his love-madness,” we do not offend Him but rather provide “Proof that the created is a live and independent Being” when we blaspheme. “Therefore, of all acts, Blasphemy is the most pleasing to God,” Crowley writes. Against such examples of Crowley, Churton reminds us of how history rolled on in the years after Crowley’s bohemian experience of Berlin:

It is conveniently obscured that the Nazis not only persecuted and murdered Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, communists, resistant church leaders, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with mental illness, children with severe infirmities, Slavs, democrats, and any number of political opponents; they also persecuted, imprisoned, and murdered Freemasons, Anthroposophists, astrologers, magicians, neo-Gnostics, Rosicrucians, and followers of Aleister Crowley.

Weimar and what happens after become, in Churton’s hands, the darkness against which to highlight Crowley with stunning chiaroscuro. The Great Beast here stands as a model of true liberation in contrast to the analgesic divertissement of Weimar nightlife, and the standard bearer of individualism rather than what Churton presents as a triumph not of “will” but of a “collective movement”—one that drove its followers, through propaganda and placation, to acts of dehumanization far more wicked than anything in the writings of a notorious occultist.

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Laura Ingalls Wilder
Edited by Pamela Smith Hill
South Dakota Historical Society Press ($39.95)

by Wayne Scott

Just tell it in your own words as you would tell about those times if only you could talk to me.
—Rose Wilder Lane, Letter to Laura Ingalls Wilder

My grandmother gave me a copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods when I was eight years old. Up to that time, I had read only comic books popular in the 1970s—Archie’s Gang, Nancy and Sluggo, and Peanuts. To her delight, I not only devoured that account of westward expansion, but all eight books in the series—and returned to them repeatedly over the next few years. How could one get enough of the adventures of the restless, courageous father? Or the schoolteacher mother, and the three girls who worked alongside them on their farms—especially Laura, “Half Pint,” the feisty, loyal, middle daughter? Like many American juvenile readers in the last century, I found the Ingalls family’s stalwart approach to each adversity mesmerizing.

In a 1937 lecture, Wilder said, “I realized that I had seen and lived it all—all the successive phases of the frontier, first the frontiersman then the pioneer, then the farmers and the towns. Then I understood that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history.” As an impressionable reader, I did not distinguish between “nonfiction” and “fiction.” The adult Laura Ingalls Wilder was writing a story about the child Laura Ingalls. In my mind, I was reading a factual account of real people in a real time. My grandmother wouldn’t have given me anything else.

But, of course, it wasn’t factual. Not exactly.

Approximately three years before the publication of the first book in the Little House series, Wilder drafted an autobiography called Pioneer Girl, intended for an adult audience. Newly retired at age sixty-three, she wrote her story in pencil on paper tablets. Pioneer Girl is the unvarnished, first-person account of Wilder’s life between ages two and eighteen, before she contemplated the marketability of her story, before she had had exposure to editors and agents, before her daughter, the well-known writer Rose Wilder Lane, helped shape the story for “the big market.” Now, newly issued from the South Dakota Historical Society Press in an annotated edition, is the original autobiography, complete with misspellings and marginalia, on which the cherished series is based.

This heavily researched and fact-checked volume of Wilder’s first draft allows for a dismantling, and re-examination, of this important piece of literary Americana. Ironically, in one of the early attempts to refashion the story for publication, Rose Wilder Lane re-wrote the opening line as “When Grandma was a little girl . . .” This would be the story that Depression-era grandparents passed down to their children, a time capsule that captured something essential about our cultural DNA. The published stories celebrate resilience, rugged stoicism and the ability to surmount adversity with optimism and perseverance. These values were as important to frontier life as they were to the reading public during the Great Depression, when the book first captured the popular imagination.

But the original manuscript called Pioneer Girl reveals omissions and alterations that complicate these values and shed light on the “constructedness” of Americana, privilege, and whiteness. How Wilder would transform her real story to represent a part of American history is a fascinating study in memory, rationalization, novelization, and the re-fashioning of history, as well as literary marketability.

In 1930, only days after her mother brought the hand-written tablets to her, Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, surreptitiously sent her agent a few hastily typed pages of Pioneer Girl. At that time, the best-selling and internationally well-known author had just built a retirement house for her parents on their property in Missouri. But she had lost significant savings in the stock market crash and was frightened about money. The publishing industry was beginning to feel the ripple effects, and freelance work wasn’t coming at the same steady pace. Debts were mounting.

Though the agent was uninterested, Lane had confidence in the story and her ability to fashion it into something marketable. She worked with her mother on the manuscript for the next two years. Financial pressures, uncertain economic times, an assessment of how a story needed to be transformed for “the big market” each influenced the development of Wilder’s story. Letters exchanged between Wilder and her daughter reveal the tension between the truth of Wilder’s memories and the pressure to make a marketable work. “After all, even though these books must be made fit for children to read, they must also be true to history,” she wrote to her editor daughter. “I have given you a true picture of the times and the place and the people. Please don’t blur it.” The story had to appeal not only to children, but it also had to resonate with the adults, like my grandmother, who would be handing it down to the children they loved.

The Ingalls family was poor, but the published version downplays their economic desperation. In fact, poverty, more than an adventuresome and restless nature, was a potent factor in many of their decisions. When in 1871 Pa chose to uproot his family from Kansas, it was because land parcels cost more than he could afford. A few years later, after locusts destroyed his crop, he had no means to buy food and requested relief supplies from the government, an early form of agrarian welfare. Later, during a cold winter, his daughters stopped attending school because the family couldn’t afford warm clothing. When grasshoppers destroyed another crop in the mid-1870s, real-life Pa gave up. He moved east to be closer to family, a move that the published story omits because it did not fit with the spirit of the westward expansion. (In the novel, Pa takes the family west to Dakota to settle another claim.) By downplaying the economic hardship in Wilder’s fictionalization, she contributes to the mythology of a pioneering spirit motivated by adventure and indefatigable optimism.

My grandmother’s father had died in the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, leaving a wife with four young children. My grandmother’s twin sister died from scarlet fever when she was three. Pictures of my grandmother’s mother from this time show a stoic woman, lips tightly pursed. My grandmother, and many of her generation who endured similarly tragic experiences, would not have much interest in handing down a book that dwells on overwhelming hardship.

The real-life Ingalls family experienced tragedy, yet Wilder minimized both the facts and the emotional reality of their losses. “A touch of tragedy makes the story truer to life,” she told her daughter, “and showing the way we all took it illustrates the spirit of the times and the frontier.” Wilder and Lane argued about how to incorporate her sister Mary’s illness and eventual blindness into the story. Both feared the tone becoming too dark for middle school readers. Wilder said she did not want the story to become “a recital of discouragement and calamities.” Mary’s blindness does make it into the published story, but Mary—stoically, almost beatifically—bears her lot.

Not so with Laura’s brother Freddie. In the published books, Pa heads a family of women. But Wilder had a brother, Charles Frederick “Freddie” Ingalls, who was born when she was eight years old. This episode of the family’s history receives curt attention in the draft autobiography, where Freddie becomes sick and “one awful day he straightened out his little body and was dead.” When the family moves again, Wilder confides in her draft, “We felt so badly to go on and leave Freddie, but in a little while we had to go on to Iowa.” Children died with alarming frequency in the nineteenth century. Their vulnerability was an undeniable fact on the rough frontier with constrained access to physicians. But the trauma of Freddie’s loss does not fit with the series’ tone of optimistic resilience, so he and his passing are omitted from the series.

One of the most deeply troubling revisions involves the family’s relationship with Native Americans, depicted with wariness and fear. In Pioneer Girl, Wilder writes: “Indians often came to the house and asked for anything they liked.” The published works amplify this portrayal of Native Americans as an aggressive intrusion; throughout the series, Indians are depicted as “other,” enemies to hearth and home. In Little House on the Prairie, Wilder wrote about the land the family first settled: “There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no people. Only the Indians lived there.” A full seventeen years after the book’s publication, a reader complained about the dismissive comment, which Wilder admitted was “a stupid blunder of mine.” She changed the wording.

What really happened on the frontier upends the mythology: in 1869 the real-life Ingalls family participated in an illegal movement to settle what Wilder called “Indian Territory,” in southeastern Kansas. Technically “squatters,” they were part of an influx of intruders, many displaced by the American Civil War. The frequent visits from Indians, depicted as threatening and frightening in the published books, were actually commonplace. The White settlers were unwelcome trespassers, but because the Osage were impoverished, they tolerated these incursions as a kind of tenant relationship and felt entitled to take food and tobacco.

When the Ingalls family moved in 1871, fictional Pa rants, “If some blasted politicians in Washington hadn’t sent out word it would be all right to settle here, I’d never have been three miles over the line into Indian Territory.” In fact he was fourteen miles west of the boundary, a nice geographical metaphor for the degree to which Pa and his writer daughter stretched the truth of the family’s intrusion. Their settlement represented an aggressive colonialism that trampled the indigenous people’s right to remain in peace on their own land, an extension of the U.S. government’s betrayals and callous disregard for the treaties they forced upon the tribes. In the published account, Pa tells Laura, “When white settlers come into a country, the Indians have to move on. The government is going to move these Indians farther west, any time now. That’s why we’re here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick.” It was a tidy rationalization.

When I first heard about the impending publication of Pioneer Girl, I was excited to think there was another beat in the finite series, which I’d already read so many times. But this richly annotated volume, superbly edited by Pamela Smith Hill and a team of scholars, is not an addition to the beloved American classics as much as it is a thoughtful and unsettling dismantling.

The multifaceted real lives of the Ingalls family—their wrenching poverty, the enormity of losses they faced on the frontier, and the encroachment upon and displacement of the Native Americans who preceded them—complicate a simplified vision of the western frontier. Pioneer Girl maps the paradox of American identity, which I recognize in my grandmother’s long life and which I know in my own: that our history’s wounds—minimized, compressed, denied in a kind of hardscrabble centrifuge—come from the same source as its creative resilience, its tragic bravado.

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

Interviewed by Connor Bjotvedt

In Mountain Redemption (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), which won the Fall 2011 Black River chapbook competition, poet Nick McRae focuses on the role of tradition and the emergence of Christian religions in mountain towns. Elegiac in tone and narrative in structure, the book explores life and death in these mountain communities through the lens of Biblical stories and motifs.

In addition to Mountain Redemption, McRae is the author of The Name Museum (C&R Press, 2014) and the editor of the anthology Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets (Sundress Publications, 2013). He earned his MFA in creative writing from The Ohio State University, and is currently a Robert B. Toulouse Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of North Texas.

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Connor Bjotvedt: One of Mountain Redemption’s themes revolves around rural community. I see a type of “rural religion” in the opening poems, centered on the life and death of animals, with humans having a caretaker relationship with the animals that surround them. The people who inhabit the small town setting have also developed their own customs, such as in "Take, Eat," in which the crawdad becomes a kind of communion. Since religion comes back later in the book in a more structured, “church” sense, why does the book begin in the rural community?

Nick McRae: I like the phrase "rural religion"; it definitely feels appropriate to my sense of the book, particularly the first section, as you pointed out, and the third section is almost as strongly tied to that idea, albeit in perhaps a more personal way.

When Diane, my wonderful editor at Black Lawrence Press, asked me for a one-sentence description of the book to send to distributors, I think I used a phrase like "Christian mythos and the legacy of Southern ruralism" or something like that in describing it. Your phrase is probably better, and certainly more concise. But yes, that's something I think about a lot: the myriad ways that symbolism from Christian mythology manifests itself in rural communities. Usually this involves some sort of violent act. You mention the crawdad in "Take, Eat," for instance; there are also many images of dead or dying deer, which is something that stands out in my mind as one of my central connections to violence during childhood. One bit of my standard between-poem banter at readings is that I have no personal antipathy toward deer. I don't, of course, but for some reason it remains a humorous thing to hear someone say.

This type of violence echoes, to me, much of the sacrificial imagery of the Bible: the literal sacrificial lambs of the Old Testament, the figurative sacrificial lamb (Jesus) in the New Testament. There is a way in which the Christian tradition of blessing food before eating it completes a kind of mimicked sacrificial rite, whether that food is the deer or crawdads in these poems or the fruit in "Persimmon," where the violence against the trees requires eating as a kind of atonement for that violence. The danger is that it becomes a justification for violence instead of an atonement for it. Acknowledging that danger, I nonetheless try to honor those traditions as much as I am able to.

CB: As a poet of faith, do you feel that you are narrowing your reader base by including religious motifs and stories in your work?

NM: This kind of concern—whether content that touches on a spiritual tradition might push away readers who are not from nor have any interest in being part of that tradition—is something that we poets think we need to worry about, but I have found that fewer readers than we might expect will reject a poem simply because it touches on religion. It will happen, yes, but I have found it to be somewhat rare.

I had a teacher once who would often say something to the effect of "I don't much go in for the churchy stuff" when confronted with a student poem with religious content, but even he, who voiced reservations right up front, would find things to value in those poems provided they did more than rehash and re-present religious doctrine.

That seems to be the case with the majority of readers. Poems that truly grapple with religion—poems that question it, look at it from new angles, take old ideas apart and rebuild them into something else, something new, something unexpected—those poems tend to feel honest, while for even the most traditional people of faith (I, for one, fall into the considerably nontraditional side of things), poems that deal in unquestioned dogma often feel dishonest, no matter how sincere the belief. There's something about doubt that conveys honesty in ways certainty can never achieve. And most people will give a poem the benefit of the doubt as long as it's an honest poem.

CB: In “Pessimist's Guide to Miracles” you move from a deer, the main animal figure in the earlier poems in the book, to a donkey. This transition comes as the book moves more into the realm of the established religion rather than the folk religion. Is this a tie to the Biblical story of Joseph and Mary?

NM: That's an interesting and perceptive reading of that shift. I didn't have Mary and Joseph's donkey specifically in mind when I wrote the poem, but it does seem to me that, after the lamb (and maybe the serpent and the dove), the donkey is the animal with perhaps the strongest symbolic resonance throughout the Bible and wider Christian culture.

Mary rode a donkey into Bethlehem, as you mentioned. Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem during the Triumphal Entry, just before the Last Supper, which is why Christians celebrate Palm Sunday. The specific donkey that inspired the poem was Balaam's, from the Book of Numbers. His story goes like this: One day, Balaam was riding his donkey down the road when an angel, visible only to the donkey, appears there, intent on killing Balaam. The donkey refuses to approach the angel, but Balaam doesn't know the donkey is saving his life, so he begins to beat the donkey. Suddenly, the donkey is given the power of speech, and it asks Balaam why it's being punished for saving his life. At that moment Balaam, too, sees the angel, and he knows the injustice he has perpetrated.

It's a totally weird story, which is one of the reasons I like it so much, and I think it can be read as a fable; here we humans are, unable to see what is really going on around us, and so in our ignorance we lash out in violence because we don't know what else to do. That is one way in which the donkey in this poem is somewhat like the deer in other poems in the collection; our violence toward these creatures reveals the centrality of violence in how we respond to our world as a whole.

CB: Throughout the book you explore the notion of death; for the majority of the poems, the speaker runs from death and killing because he fears death himself, like in “Thanatophobia on Shinbone Valley Road.” Yet in “St. Nicholas of Lycia, Defender of Orthodoxy, Wonderworker” the speaker, a priest, is told of a murder and he runs to claim the bodies, forsaking the seal of the confessional; he then strips himself of his clothing and plunges his arms into the barrel where the bodies are stored. Does this action suggest there is redemption in death?

NM: I think the priest in "St. Nicholas" doesn't see redemption in death so much as he sees in it the necessity of remembrance. In "Thanatophobia" and the poems like it, the speaker turns away from death because he is afraid of dying, yes, but also because he is unable to deal out death, even for the sake of mercy, the way that he has been taught is good and proper. He resists his complicity in it, just as the priest resists his complicity in the murder of the three little boys. The priest is unwilling to stand by and let the institutions he believes in—the seal of the confessional, the forgiveness that is in the act of confession—act as a shield for the murderous butcher while the butchered children are anonymous and forgotten. He wants to feel their names on his skin, as he puts it, so their death won't be forgotten. Which is sort of the aim of poetry, I think, especially elegy, of which there is much in the collection.

CB: In “Psalm 137,” you take daily life and explore it as almost a ritual, one that has been lost to newer generations. Why did you begin the final section of the book with this poem? It seems to fit more with earlier pieces such as “Mountain Redemption.”

NM: I spent a lot of time in indecision over where to put this poem in the collection. On one level, you're right that it would have fit cleanly into the first section, possibly with "Mountain Redemption" as you suggest. Both poems talk about the mythic dimensions of bygone times and bygone people, so that might have been a good match. However, "Psalm 137" is also an elegy—an elegy for a way of life—and so it also fits at the beginning of section three, just before the series of elegies to my grandfathers.

In the end, I went with that elegiac impulse and used the poem as a bridge from the larger mythologies to the particularities of the men I wanted to elegize. And it was important for me to begin the last section of the book with this poem because it doesn't (at least as I see it) so much call for the old times and old ways to come back as it questions the desire for them to come back—and also whether they were ever real at all, or just mythos.

Psalm 137 in the Bible is an elegy for the Israelites' lost homeland. They have been taken as slaves and forcibly removed by the Babylonians, and their captors, adding insult to injury, ask to be entertained with a song about Zion. To this, the weeping Israelites can only answer "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" So far from home, from what was lost, how could their song have any meaning? I think this poem wants to ask a similar sort of question, something like: How can I sing of this home I have heard of all my life—this way of living and being in the world, where altars and tractors and skinning knives and hymns are the very fabric of reality—when I have only glimpsed the edges of it and when I only half believe in it? Is it a "home I only almost had," as the poem says. A real place, and a bloody place, but a mythic place nonetheless.

CB: The final poem, titled “Apple,” seems to involve both the Biblical motifs as well as the folk religion of the book. You enter the realm of not knowing and remembrance through the memory of the speaker, who wants to bite into the apple and regain the knowledge of its taste, much like the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. He remarks on the fact that it is alone in the field that he has found it in, and that there is no child nearby to taste of it like he did. The speaker decides to bury the apple rather than eat it, and waits for it to grow and to blossom fruit for the next generation. I see this as the final salvation of the mountain towns—a way to unify Biblical and folk religion rather than strictly conform to one or the other. Do you see this poem as a manifesto?

NM: A manifesto? I've never thought of this poem that way, but I like that idea a lot! It would feel good to have the confidence of a manifesto writer (manifestoist? manifestor? Uncle Fester?), though to my mind if the poem is making any kind of statement, it is something much more tentative. But then, to be tentative is just sort of my nature.

This poem, even more than most of my other poems, means different things to me at different times. Right now, thinking of it in the context of your challenging and insightful interview questions, I find myself wanting to read the poem as an exploration of faith and memory. Finding the unlikely apple in the middle of a field, the speaker remembers the painful immediacy of the quince fruit of his childhood. He could eat it and taste the past. He could leave it where he found it and let someone or something else have it. But he can't do that. Instead, he buries it where it can be his and only his, and maybe someday it will sprout and bloom again.

Maybe the apple is like the faith—the powerful, immediate, uncompromising belief in mysteries like God and salvation and ultimate good—that children can experience in a simple and vivid way that most people, once childhood has passed, cannot access in the same way. I think of my faith as something kind of like the apple here: something that is mine and mine only, buried in the black and wormy loam of the physical body, where maybe it will simply die or maybe it will flower. In my mind, that's what faith tends to look like: an in-between state, an uncertainty, a hopeful doubt.

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Interview by Paul McRandle

Few writers trawl their territory the way Iain Sinclair has London—footsore and picking over secret histories, missed encounters, and enigmatic detritus all the way out to the 125-mile ring of the London Orbital. From the occult forensics of his 1970s poems to 2012’s Ghost Milk, his dissident swansong for a city succumbing to the grand projects of a swindling elite, Sinclair picks up the poetic debris and marginal characters sloughed off by England’s capital as it is streamlined to a pure boutique artifact.

Sinclair first came to London in the early 1960s to study film, and the recent book 70x70 (Volcano Publishing) documents a 2013 series of screenings of seventy films, one for each of his seventy years. Not a best-of, these were films that had appeared in his books, each of which possessed “energy, attack, context—but which stood outside the usual registers of excellence.” He and his collaborators designed the series to encourage pilgrimages across London to vanishing venues as a way of reconfigure the city for those willing to take up the challenge.

Following the 70x70 screenings, Sinclair and director Andrew Kötting filmed an eighty-mile walk in the footsteps of the romantic poet John Clare on his flight from incarceration in an insane asylum (the Kickstarter-funded film is soon to be released as By Our Selves). In his harrowing account, Clare sleeps in ditches, eats grass to stave off hunger, talks with ghosts, and remains convinced that on arriving home he’d find his early love Mary Joyce, by then several years dead. Sinclair wound this story together with events from his wife Anna’s childhood in his 2005 book Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare’s “Journey Out of Essex” (Penguin).

In his most recent book, American Smoke (Faber & Faber, $27), Sinclair returned to the icons of his youth, tracking down the traces of beat writers on both coasts of North America. From Gloucester, Massachusetts—home to Charles Olson, who laid out Sinclair’s method of diving into the local to get to the universal—he moves across country and through time to William Burroughs in Lawrence, Kansas, and Malcolm Lowry sweating out Under the Volcano in his Dollarton, B.C. hideaway. Traumas pile up and careers come unglued, as he evokes an intense, lost era with little nostalgia.

Sinclair spoke with me about these and other works in a recent phone interview from his home in Hackney in the east of London.

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Paul McRandle: I’ve been rereading Edge of the Orison and very much enjoying it. Does the film By Our Selves follow the same path in terms of mixing your life, your wife’s experiences, and John Clare’s?

Iain Sinclair: The film is very different. I wanted to do a film of that book from way back; there was some filming done in the beginning and the end by Chris Petit, who’s a longtime collaborator, and also I took photographs of the journey. I had a fantasy of a sort of Werner Herzog-type film, like The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, but nothing ever happened until Andrew Kötting saw a photograph of the straw bear that’s in the book; he became very energized and the film evolved from there. So it’s like the book in the sense that it has numerous elements that work off the myth of the John Clare walk, which is central to the English imagination. It’s also rather like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—this extraordinary epic journey across the English landscape. But the subsidiary elements are completely different, because Andrew works in a subtext story about his relationship with his daughter Eden, who becomes a sort of Dorothy figure from The Wizard of Oz. And the part of John Clare is played by Toby Jones, a well-known actor who’s virtually silent and who’s actually doing the walk, but is also played by Freddie Jones, his father, who played Clare in 1970 in one of the BBC Omnibus films. He’s all voice and the son is mute and physical—they haunt each other. So there’s things in the film that don’t have any part in the book, but it’s the same style, the same impressions, a collage bringing together all kinds of different strands.

PM: I saw Toby Jones in the trailer and he looks terrific in the role.

IS: Yeah, he’s great. The thing with Toby Jones is the detail. He absorbs the character; he doesn’t do anything except look and feel. The few times he spoke it was quite shocking because it was all internalized. Whereas his father is an actor in that full-on English tradition—you’ll hear his voice in the trailer doing bits from the original film. We’ve subsequently spent time with him and filmed and recorded him. He looks like King Lear. He’s really wonderful and very different from Toby in every way, but the two work extremely well together. Toby was four years old when his father played John Clare and his mother played Patty Clare, and so he was quite confused by this when he saw it as a young lad. It made a huge impression on him. I think he wanted to be involved with the project as a homage to his father, who’s now well into his eighties. Freddie actually appeared when we did a show in Oxford: he gave a reading of “I Am” and was tremendous, I must say.

PM: Clare’s early poems have such gorgeous evocations of the environment and very specific images of bird life, plant life, and so on. And then you get to “Journey Out of Essex,” which is a strikingly desperate and sad prose piece. By contrast your book is lightened up by memories of your life with Anna and Anna’s recollections of her childhood, which are fascinating.

IS: It’s using that original story, which is so short really, as a sort of spine, an inspiration, a way of tapping into memory and particularly into Anna’s relationship with that image and that area. And then those strange parallels: John Clare is from Helpston, which is a nearby village, but he went to the church school in Glinton, where Anna went to school. In fact, her family grave is now about ten yards away from Mary Joyce’s grave. So all of those things were quite uncanny.

PM: Did you find that writing about your own life with Anna was more of a challenge?

IS: I don’t know that you really write about your own life—you make a myth of your own life. You smooth over certain things. Again this goes back to people like Kerouac, a writer using more or less of the facts to articulate a larger structure. Sometimes it bends into extremely exaggerated versions, versions that have barely got any relation with life itself, and other times it seems to be almost a diary-like account. It hovers somewhere between the two.

PM: And Edge of the Orison was written four years after the fact . . .

IS: Yes, unlike “Journey Out of Essex,” which was written straight after Clare had done the walk. It’s almost like an impassioned letter; if he didn’t write it the experience would be gone. And already it’s gone to some extent because he can’t quite remember the names of places or what happened, so his account is like this feverish dream. Whereas my Edge of the Orison is done in cold blood, as it were, sometime later. The diary form of the walk is kept at a distance, but it’s used and then the other forms of research that have gone in can take their place alongside it and put it in context.

PM: Can you talk a little about the kinds of research you do—are you looking at receipts and maps and photographs? It seems like a collage.

IS: Yes, that’s basically what it is. It’s like scavenging an accumulation of detritus around the project, picking up pamphlets and so on during the various journeys. But more, it’s about repeated excursions to a territory. It’s not as if I just did that one walk—I went back and different bits spun off the walk for a long period of time. I went round on the canal narrowboat journey, for example, with Brian Catling and Anna, and looked at the landscape from the water, which was another thing. So all that was research, but then there were books that had to be read and attempts to get into the libraries. Northampton Library was really very friendly and useful, and the main thing was to see the actual original manuscript of “Journey Out of Essex.” Peterborough Library was not very helpful; they were really reluctant to let me see things without endless papers and documentation. Then there was also subsidiary research into Anna’s family, which involved quite a lot of poking around documents, looking at gravestones, and all of those things.

PM: You mention in Edge of the Orison that in Clare’s “Journey Out of Essex” manuscript the lines themselves were long enough to suggest walking.

IS: Yes, it looked like a walked page, because paper was very precious to him. It was expensive, so he tends to write right to the very edge; sentences would explode across the page in enormous excitement and then there’d be black gaps and dashes. The physicality of the actual manuscript was like a living map. I felt it was like projective verse, or Kerouac’s spontaneous prose. There certainly wasn’t room for corrections and tidying things up; it was just a great gush. It was beautiful. It was like an action painting. It’s a tremendous manuscript.

PM: Does By Our Selves continue the critique of grand projects?

IS: No, not really. I think that the John Clare story is itself a critique in lots of ways. The Enclosure Act of 1809 totally changed that landscape and he was completely in thrall to the two great landlords of the area, Burghley House and Milton House—everything was owned by them or by Cambridge colleges. And that sense of oppression and enclosure was huge on him. And now of course it’s seeped into the Epping Forest landscape, down into the lower Lea Valley and London. So there are big parallels for me in that story and I touch on them in the book, but not really in the film because the film gains much more of its momentum from Andrew Kötting’s take, which has to do with performance, physicality, and sense of place, but not with those socio-political concerns that I see as coming off the Clare story. The film is a physical drama of moving the figure across the landscape and tapping into the folk roots of English song and the harshness of life at the time. That’s mainly what Andrew’s interests are and I think that’s what comes over in the film quite strongly. There are accidental clashes with what is going on in the landscape now in terms of implanted wind farms and so on, but there isn’t really a critique in the sense that I try to get into my own work.

PM: In moving an object across territory, By Our Selves seems related to your 2012 paddle-boat film with Kötting, Swandown.

IS: I think it’s actually moving an object through bifurcated memories; I’m both revisiting the book and revisiting a central journey, because the idea of doing the John Clare walk came from walking around London and thinking, “How do you get out of it?” This circle goes on forever. And suddenly the idea of this escape walk of Clare’s seemed to sit perfectly at the end of one project and lead into the next. So revisiting that in my own memory at the same time as Andrew is making it weird by imposing the figure of the bear, which becomes an avatar of depression and of the landscape . . . The bear emerges from the landscape and accompanies Clare on the journey and finally splits off away from him and goes into Kötting’s own mystique, whereas Clare just disappears into the gravity of the black hole of the Northampton Asylum, which in this film is slightly associated with the presence of Alan Moore, who is a keeper of the legends of Northampton.

PM: Were there any landscapes you walked through for American Smoke that spoke to you in the way that this walk has?

IS: Yes, the landscape of Gloucester, Mass. The presence and the strength of those few traces of Charles Olson were probably the most significant. That’s partly why I opened the book with that. It was the freshest thing in mind because it came right off the back of doing the Swandown project, where we’d been pedaling this plastic swan through the rivers of England. Coming into America to a fishing port in Massachusetts, it was looking pretty depressed; the economic plight was there and the people seemed to take warmth and strength from remembering Charles Olson. There were very definite connections between these projects and that place powerfully registered in my mind even though I’d never been there, but I’d thought so much about it and read so much in the Maximus poems and his letters. This was certainly a gripping place and the area of Dogtown was especially haunted—the glacial moraines, the rocks.

That was the primary landscape. My sense of the Pacific Coast was much more about movement, as we weren’t really in one particular place long enough to register; we were just moving through. Obviously Gary Snyder in the Sierra Nevada made a very big impression, but it was only a few hours and very fleeting. So it didn’t grip me in the same way that any of the landscapes I’m talking about in England do.

PM: Are there places you intend to return to in America?

IS: I wouldn’t imagine returning to many of the places in that book. Obviously I would like to return to Gloucester; I would return happily to San Francisco, I guess. But I’m more interested in Mexico. It’s drier and more arid. I’ve got feelers that I’ve been pursuing, but whether that will happen, I don’t know. The economics of it are quite tricky.

PM: The section on Roberto Bolaño in American Smoke is fascinating.

IS: Yes, I’ve enjoyed his work very much and he’s a sort of absolute presence, if I can say that. His footsteps seem to be just in the next room all the time, hauntingly so. I’m quite interested in further connections there. I seem to be making some kind of relations now in Spain and Chile and places like that, so who knows?

PM: When it came to pulling together the 70x70 film series, how did the “anti-pantheon”of film come about?

IS: It was two things really. Because the films were being done specifically, as it were, for my seventieth birthday, what I could use most functionally as markers were books that I’d written. I’ve always referenced film quite a lot in whatever I write, so I tweaked out film titles from the various books until I had a long list, and used that as the basis for this structure—rather than thinking about film on its own, or best films or worst films, or anything else. So essentially it’s a form of autobiography through memory of cinema. I then added in a number of films I’d been logging as projects, so that brought it even further into the form of refracted autobiography.

The anti-pantheon business came from a series of conversations with Chris Petit, because we’d made four films for Channel Four in an earlier period and tried to put forward lots of others since that time. One of the things that he got very interested in was an anti-pantheon—films that were well worth holding in memory and for discussion but which had no place in the established pantheons of cinema. They were never going to be listed as great films or bad films, but they were films that seemed to have a quality that was essentially cinematic, that couldn’t exist in other form. It’s hard to define exactly, but we batted certain titles backwards and forwards and agreed on a list for an anti-pantheon. I guess some of the ones in my seventy films would fit with that and others wouldn’t; this is much more my personal list of films that have accidentally been a part of books that I’ve written.

PM: I was struck that Antonioni’s Il Grido went without an audience.

IS: I know, that was very depressing. I’d been looking at Il Grido when I was writing American Smoke, because of the whole section on Italian cinema. And I just had to look at it again and I thought how strong it was, and how interesting to try and position it in England, so this very hip pizza place agreed to show it in its cinema upstairs. And nobody subscribed to it, so they cancelled the show, which I thought was pretty sad. That said something about the whole process. I’ve done a diary piece for the London Review of Books, sort of summing up, and mentioning that. That was one of the weirder moments.

PM: They seemed to be in such well-chosen venues, too.

IS: Well, that wasn’t down to me, but I thought at least some of them were extraordinarily well-chosen. And it told the other part of the story, which was to do with trying to recapture something that happened in earlier times, which was the adventure of actually getting to the place where the film was shown. You’d make a journey and you’d see this strange film that you may not see again for years, because there were no DVDs. There were no ways of tapping into these things—you either found it being screened or you didn’t, and to do it made you journey all over London. I wanted to get back to that.

PM: Finding your way to a theater is something closer to the dream state than sitting in your bed, staring at a laptop screen.

IS: Yeah—there’s the journey, there’s the architecture of the building itself, there are strange people gathered around you to see it. It’s a whole, real world, social experience, whereas the other thing is entirely in the head.

PM: Did you find yourself reassessing the films you made with Chris Petit—The Cardinal and the Corpse, The Falconer, Asylum, and London Orbital—when they were shown in the series?

IS: I think we did, to some extent, because I haven’t looked at them in some time. And they looked different in various ways. The Cardinal and the Corpse, being the first one and the only one made with an orthodox crew, was mainly interesting just for the sheer amount of stuff that was squeezed into a small space. So many characters who were part of a London of what I call “reforgotten” writers, interesting writers who disappeared from the canon and then returned again. And also the book scouts and runners of the used book trade, people who’d been in that world. It was an astonishing kind of party in a sense, gathering all these people together in that moment. Quite a number of them are dead now and you could never do that again, so it was interesting in that respect more than as a film. Whereas I thought The Falconer was a nice sort of paranoid portrait, using document and fiction and myth and the archive, with a slight, unusual sense of what was happening in the city, too—how London was getting to be filled with cameras all watching you all the time.

I thought Asylum probably looked the best of the films; it was the most realized as a film. But of course it had the subtitle “The Final Commission” and it pretty much was. I know London Orbital came after that, but that was an exactly parallel extension of the book being written at the time. And then that really was it, which is slightly a matter of regret. But it was interesting to dust those things down and take a look at them again, because they’re not readily available.

PM: The character Peter Whitehead in The Falconer is a compelling figure, but he’s somebody I could easily understand wanting to distance yourself from.

IS: He was a kind of monster in a way, but interesting. Initially he wanted this thing to be about him—he’s very narcissistic—and he’d keep producing more and more evidence of a life that was largely in film. There were numerous strange scraps of film about him or things he’d done. The film essentially was not about Peter Whitehead, but it became about him, and then of course it became a kind of psychological breakdown around him. And then it got too close and he repudiated it and didn’t want anything to do with it. The further we got, the more sinister he seemed to become. He was quite keen to step away from that.

PM: I noticed that during the 70x70 series you showed a “remix” of London Orbital. Was that out of a sense of dissatisfaction or an effort to try something new?

IS: London Orbital was shown at the Barbican and we did it with a live reading. We just showed a bit of the film and read live to it, which was, I suppose, to try to get into the mode of how things would get done now. There wouldn’t be the possibility of being commissioned to make the larger scale films, but there’s no reason why some kind of image retrievals would not be presented as live, one-off performances in which you deliver the text rather than encode it into a strip of film. It would be much more like a tent show—do it and move on for next to nothing. So looking at London Orbital now was a way of testing out that possible ground for the future.

PM: As a road movie it’s really quite hypnotic.

IS: Well, it’s endless. It feels like it’s just this infinite loop, it could go on and on in almost any order.

PM: It was also interesting to see Brian Catling’s fantastic novel The Vorrh turn up in 70x70.

IS: That’s a pretty amazing story. That book, it was impossible to get anybody to even look at it. Then Alan Moore wrote a forward that was hugely encouraging and in minutes people offered to publish it. Now it’s even got a big American publisher. I think they certainly will bring him over to promote it.

PM: Your work can’t be read without encountering the work of other writers, other filmmakers, painters, and so on, opening up the pleasure of new discoveries. And that seems to have been your technique from almost the very start.

IS: Yeah, I guess so. I think it’s a standard, old modernist technique, isn’t it? You’re full of echoes of other writers; everything is assembled from that starting point. The relation with other writers becomes a sort of detective story, picking influences and suggesting that books lead into other books lead into other books infinitely.

PM: A while back you gave your archive to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas . . .

IS: Well, I didn’t give it, I sold it! It was kind of a life-saving thing. It wasn’t huge Ian McEwan-type money, but it was something. All my early stuff is down there now. I don’t think it’s all been sorted yet. It probably was a huge task to do so, but it was quite a useful exercise for me and I did go over there and look at some things and gave a few talks at university.

PM: And you didn’t feel that you had excavated part of your life and sealed it off?

IS: I felt a relief to make a little bit of space by that stuff going out, but I was slightly uneasy about the fact of it finishing up in Austin, Texas. The people who come and talk to me about things and want to look into various aspects of what I’ve done are really here in England. And if there had been somewhere convenient to do it here, it would have probably felt more right. But on the other hand, it’s so bizarre and exotic to have it there that I do find it interesting.

PM: It seems that the occult themes that appeared in books such as Lud Heat and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings have subsided a bit—the imagery of the ley lines and so on haven’t been as apparent.

IS: Lud Heat, Suicide Bridge, and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings related to periods of my life when I was working as a gardener or whatever in that landscape, so relatively I was disempowered. I had no voice in the way things were. I was quite interested in strange systems of belief and also in the Earth Mysteries, the ley lines and all of those things. This sat very nicely with how London was at that point. And then being a second-hand book dealer after that, I would be reading all kinds of obscure things, very weird and eccentric stuff, and that fed into what I was writing.

But after the late ’80s, when I was writing more mainstream things, I guess the shift became that the political was then occulted—there was a sense that that was the power and it was a different thing. In a sense that discourse maybe had to be stepped down a bit, because it would have made things unreadable. Not that I’m trying to smooth things out to be popular, but I’m dealing with editors. And I’ve certainly not lost interest in those more abstruse areas. I’ve published through smaller presses, like Swedenborg House hereabouts, collaborations with Brian Catling. Those things are still there.

PM: What are you working on now?

IS: Well, one of the nice things about this place is that it’s old, it’s got all of these traces, and they’re infinitely provocative. I’m just about to start doing something along those lines with the Gower Coast in South Wales, which is a very ancient, carboniferous limestone with caves that have the oldest traces of Ice Age man and things, which is not a territory I’ve done anything about for years. But I grew up not too far away and am just starting to use that in a different way. So it’s really going back more into that kind of writing you mentioned before, the earlier Lud Heat era. Mind you, it won’t be the same but I’ll try and touch that spirit.

Click here to purchase American Smoke at your local independent bookstore

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

by Anita White

Below are some impressions, moments, glimpses of genius and humor at the 2015 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference held in Minneapolis April 9 through April 11.

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

Naomi Klein
Simon & Schuster ($30)

by Eliza Murphy

The heat is on. If not the hottest year ever recorded, 2014 sizzled to one of the hottest in the past decade, the result of global warming trends that scientists attribute to human activity. How economic lust and a broken political system have precipitated this climate catastrophe is at the heart of Naomi Klein’s latest book, This Changes Everything.

Klein traces the world’s ecological crisis back to the Industrial Revolution, when coal burning ushered in a new phenomenon: the introduction of gases to the earth’s atmosphere with a potential to turn the planet into a hothouse. Add the burning of oil and gas and the energy-intensive process of extracting fossil fuels, and we’ve got a formula for disaster.

This broken system treats the planet and its inhabitants as if they were disposable and infinitely replenishable, but Klein makes it clear that life on the planet can no longer bear doing business as usual. Her call acts like bellows on smoldering coals of citizen action, a historically successful means of bringing about social change.

Since the industry will stop at nothing to get at the remaining oil and gas deep underground, citizens around the world must stop at nothing to prevent that from happening. Citizens must insist on renewable sources of energy and a more equitable distribution of money. Polluting corporations must be held accountable by paying for the damage they’ve caused.

Klein’s investigation reveals the uncomfortable necessity of reining in our insatiable appetite for the pleasures and conveniences made possible by the remains of liquefied dinosaur bones, sucked from beneath the earth’s crust using increasingly destructive and toxic technology. However, as vital as our individual choices might be for curtailing greenhouse gas emissions, Klein argues that uniting against social and environmental injustice is more urgent. She builds a steady and convincing case that to do otherwise will likely make life on Earth unbearable.

From the start, the book flabbergasts the reader with non-stop what-the-#*%! moments. Klein exposes high-profile environmental groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and The Nature Conservancy, whose leaders reap riches through a free market intent on gutting regulations essential for environmental protection. Bedding the enemy led to public endorsements by these same organizations for misguided cap-and-trade policies that have only led to further carbon emissions, which is in itself a dangerous trend. It also led to the creation of sacrifice zones around the world. Indigenous people are now treated like criminals for entering forests "owned" by gas and oil companies in unconscionable land grabs.

It comes as less of a surprise that a handful of billionaires like Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet continue to profit from dirty industries while spinning public images as saviors. Klein deflates their green-washed promises, exposing them as hollow. Her profiles demonstrate "that seeing the risks climate change poses to financial markets in the long term may not be enough to curtail the temptation to profit from planet destabilization in the short-term." Adding insult to injury, she reveals that these scoundrels are getting even richer by selling disaster insurance.

Perhaps the chapter "Dimming The Sun," devoted to the most cockamamie hair-brained scheme ever given credence by a scientific community that ought to know better, is most outrageous. Observing “disheveled scientists discussing a parasol for the planet," Klein echoes other international stakeholders in challenging the morality of the methods geo-engineers are plotting for "the exploration of radical interventions into the earth's climate system as a response to global warming."

Even though many of these geeks study volcanoes in an attempt to mimic their earth-cooling effects in an effort to devise similar, manmade planetary air conditioners, the schemes sound utterly preposterous and out of synch with natural history. Solar radiation management, the fix of the moment, is an especially risky endeavor. It entails hosing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to block out the sun. Not only would this grand experiment interrupt the solar radiation necessary for renewable energy, it would inevitably cause catastrophic drought and make blue skies a relic. This is hubris of the highest order.

In a rare moment of self-disclosure, Klein links her own experience with fertility difficulties to the horrific after-effects of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This chapter touches on the heart of the issue as she describes the difficulties of marine species to reproduce successfully after exposure to the spilled oil and the toxic dispersants used to “clean” up the mess; she calls the tragic animal losses an aquatic miscarriage. Her reports from the Gulf serve as a reminder of what’s at stake: all of the wondrous inhabitants of the planet are imperiled, from squiggling aquatic species unable to survive beyond the larval state to the playful dolphins whose diet depends on them reaching maturity.

There is nothing simplistic about the remedy Klein recommends. It will take a colossal commitment of people from vastly different backgrounds to overcome their subjective differences and fight against uncomfortable objective realities. We all live on a planet choking on life-threatening gaseous effluents that are a direct result of international trade agreements that consistently trump environmental regulations.

Klein urges readers to join forces to ensure that all of Earth’s inhabitants have the chance not only to survive, but also to regenerate. She shows that we must fight for renewable energy, for a just worldwide economic system, and for fossil fuels to stay in the ground as if our lives depend on it—because they do.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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