Mary Rising Higgins
Potes & Poets Press ($13)

by Patrick F. Durgin

"If the world no longer consists of places, has it become larger because it is no longer a place?" (Andrew Levy, Paper Head Last Lyrics) In our data age, such a question becomes acutely pertinent, particularly in terms of our national ambition to "globalize." Let's think big or, at least, take it another way. Although (or since?) our service providers afford us unlimited access, we can still only count on the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame, at best. So, if a life no longer consists in years, has life become longer because it no longer endures? I'm thinking of hackers, viruses, "Coolio," and other inhuman celebrities. Such myths are always aboriginal in a sense, timeless, out-sourced even. Time, however trite the assertion may be, endures with a bristling elegance; were sundials cropping up out west during the recent millennium scare?

midpoint heliogram

nothing to add     helioabyss

Time and space, the bedrock of physics as well as metaphysics, exacts its revenge on virtual reality. The danger of the latter seems to be that of sleeping (or "surfing") in a burning bed.

This present danger, experienced every day as the lodestar of reactionary media anxiety, provides one lens through which to view the radical modernist poetics, or "material text," as represented in Pound, Stein, all the way to the present, "post-language poetry" moment. Pound sought to "make it new," Marx sought "to change it." Which brings us to the current question: define "it." This is some big, if ephemeral, thinking, but that's nothing new. Aristotle spoke of the necessity of imagining the grand scheme of things—as did Christ and Darwin for that matter. There's not a layperson among us; we each became an expert the second we were able, each in our own ways, to distinguish friends from enemies, compassion from disgrace. Luckily, the best of our poets understand the need for small instances; "times" and "places" catch the eye, if they don't always hold it.

nothing times this when no
first hand accounts go there

Mary Rising Higgins's first full-length collection, really a serial poem organized as a book of hours, plays a straight-faced game with time and space and "her" place in them. Churning with the regal but violent machinations of a bell tower, oclock is a meticulously controlled random-text, a jarring but rewarding read. That is, these poems never invite one to nod in easy compliance, though they attempt to command the attention through formal techniques just this side of "cut-up" and "concrete" writing, respectively. Because of the surface tension of errant commas and neologisms "bright with vocabularies [and syntax] of self invention," the lyric finesse of this book appears at those points in which what we expect of the written word breaks down—the result is that "it feels like to go there becomes what is in front of you."

Though harnessing the powerful, diaristic voice of a day-in-the-life, narrative routines are abandoned in favor of a staccato series of harshly fragmented axioms, provocatively though not unmotivatedly juxtaposed images, and peculiarly enlivening thought-rhymes, light and writing being a typical set of tenors: "prism flare the woman's etude marking." As Higgins's method seems to be written in its midst, though oclock is not necessarily writing about writing, we might expect a challenge in pinning down a "subject" from the outset: "Inscape reforms tools or weapons if we agree to start here phonetic resift she thinks from. . . . What she will ask points to one another." That pronominal "woman's etude marking" widens the subjective scope beyond even the sweeping categories of philosophical discourse, though not thereby spilling over into the ambiguities of current political rhetoric. And that "phonetic resift she thinks" sounds like a rich offer to these ears and an unexpected treat to the eye (Higgins's use of strikethroughs and gently sloping margins late in the book provides a "textimony" to poetic possibilities and possible poetics the same). If the sun illuminates the thing (in space) to which we point, does the "helioabyss"—the dark side of the earth, night?—point to itself from within, unable to differentiate? Or does the "one" point to "another" ad infinitum? The author lets the poem testify to such questions "her" self—"she" appears to be the writing. Meanwhile, Higgins's backbeat veers from startling to lulling, self-important to selfless. And between these poles "her" authority becomes something more rewarding than a simple sequence of anecdotes (be they personal, clinical, or mythical). The subject becomes the sum of the writing itself, not a disgruntled and virtual daybook but a difficult song in which:

so many worlds pivot
killdeer    gillnet     button hook     proem
the hematopoiesis of bone marrow

For a glimpse into the deeply-rooted tradition of US American, radical modernist poetry, oclock is a timely, if you will, "textimony."

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Molly Tenenbaum
Van West & Company ($14)

by Tim Scannell

In this first collection of thirty-two poems, Molly Tenenbaum illustrates the mastery of poetic eye and delicate fingertip of imagination. One recalls, a generation ago, the felt awe in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, or the more aware sensitivity in The Medusa and the Snail by Lewis Thomas. Those traits of the natural world—image and motion, light and color—are fully explored by this poet's skill.

Two poems will easily become exemplars of their kind in the Western Canon: "Every Single Sprout" (we will never again allow our usual abuse of the garden slug); and "The World is the Shape of a Cat" (a hymn to the poet's cat, Nellie-Ivy). A litany of slug-destruction is presented in the first stanza of "Every Single Sprout": the jar of beer, so that "they'll bumble in"; or "diatomaceous earth" to cut their coating "so they leak from themselves," etc. The poet prefers, in dewy morning, to "pick them like fruit":

berries that must
be drawn by the barest of pressures
off the briar that wants
to keep them . . .
. . . one like a plum seed,
but fatter, lines on the sides
like the stripes leading back
from the corner of a kitten's eye;
one with the spotted grace of a leopard,
slender as a salamander, lucent glossy brown.

Even in dry summer, when the slugs do not travel far, the reverent persona will rise "as if theirs is a sweet gift / of silver-trail, of every rescued color—" This crescendo of care for all things great and small emerges, transcendentally, in the passing of the poet's cat, Nellie-Ivy, whose body and spirit are memorialized by "the vault of starry sky, / when every bound leaps you over a tall black hill, / you're high in the hump of her black shoulder . . ."; or, "when you, looking the other way, just glimpse / a cutout on the sill, a stamp / to see through where she used to be, / you're at the sharpened / pupil of her daylight eye."

And so, each plucked string of Tenenbaum's imagination is separately and seen—appreciated; yet the reader may wish for more resonance, a bolder vibration of emotion that is not merely a meditation of things minutely observed, collated, juxtaposed. One is reminded of the anecdote concerning Emily Dickinson, who would only talk—even to her best friends—through the crack of a slightly opened door. Molly Tenenbaum need not be as reticent or cocooned: her poetic voice is mature, finely honed. The structure of her poems, each averaging over two pages in length, build powerfully, wholly aware of development and destination. What would be welcome is a more modulated tone of engagement and speculative encounter, enticingly hinted at in her "Beach Walk and Bad News" (a descriptive meditation on barnacles): "Not tenacious, not clever / to feather supper from the tide, / not foolish or wise to cling or stand— / but at least they're hungry, / curled in salty houses. At least, hard." More salt, please—more bite of tumultuous wave into shore. I am eagerly looking forward to Molly Tenenbaum's next collection.

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Robert Pinsky
Farrar Straus & Giroux ($21)

by Piotr Gwiazda

Robert Pinsky's sixth poetry collection is not a disappointment to his readers. The book contains a number of apt, solid, and vivid poems, precisely what should be expected from a writer who up to this point has successfully welded tacit autobiography and restrained discursiveness, and with this new volume still continues to do so. Already past the "collected poems" stage (The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-96 appeared in 1996), Pinsky has hordes of admirers and detractors, a fact which didn't prevent him from serving as the Poet Laureate of the United States for three years; during his tenure, he made himself available not only at poetry festivals and readings, but also in unconventional and essentially unpoetic vistas: what can be more disarmingly incongruous than a poet reciting verses about memories, mothers, and money on the News Hour With Jim Lehrer?

Pinsky's efforts to popularize poetry, his across-the-nation conspicuousness and academic prominence (he has a permanent teaching appointment at Boston University), make him a perfect candidate to become somebody this country hasn't had for a long time: a distinguished man of letters. In his desire to create an audience for poetry in the United States, Pinsky inches toward the position once occupied (only half-heartedly, to be sure) by Robert Frost—a national bard, the conscience of American people, a consistent and trustworthy voice reminding us where we came from and where we are going as individuals and as a nation (recall Pinsky's 1980 book-length poem An Explanation of America). What Pinsky is risking in his tendency to take himself seriously as a public figure is the danger of becoming a poet whose presence in literary and public spheres becomes so ubiquitous that his work may lose its ability to surprise. Frost was able to avoid that fate; likewise, Jersey Rain offers no indication that Pinsky is becoming a national bore.

The collection consists of pieces already familiar from Pinsky's public appearances, and of altogether new work. The major poems in the volume belong to the first group: "Ode to Meaning," "Biography," "To Television" and "The Green Piano." "Ode to Meaning" is a superb poem, one of the best Pinsky has ever written, a sober investigation and celebration of the concept that became the twentieth century's most transformation-prone and abuse-provoking myth. Never in fear of abstractions, Pinsky is able to skillfully combine philosophical, personal, and satirical elements in his brooding apostrophe:

Untrusting I court you. Wavering
I seek your face, I read
That Crusoe's knife
Reeked of you, that to defile you
The soldier makes the rabbi spit on the torah.
"I'll drown my book" says Shakespeare.

Drowned walker, revenant.
After my mother fell on her head, she became
More than ever your sworn enemy. She spoke
Sometimes like a poet or critic of forty years later.

"Biography" addresses the circularity of events in the poet's life while achieving a fascinating circularity of form. "The Green Piano" is very much like Pinsky's older partly retrospective, partly reflective pieces, while "To Television" pays a reserved though honest homage to the medium so often accused of robbing life of its meaning:

Your patron in the pantheon would be Hermes

Raster dance,
Quick one, little thief, escort
Of the dying and comfort of the sick

Hermes is the guiding spirit of this collection; several poems in Jersey Rain invoke or allude to this most busy of all gods in charge of prudence, cunning, fraud, invention, roads, doors, commerce, good luck, sports, games, sacrifice, and (most appropriately in Pinsky's case) eloquence. At times Pinsky's eloquence enables him to see vestiges of life in the inanimate world around him. Years ago poets used to seek life in a mountain or a tree—today they are more likely to find it in a television set or a computer.

Several pieces in this volume deserve to be called Pinsky's worthiest compositions, but there are also few that seem to be mere leftovers, afterthoughts, or distractions, such as his cold depictions of inanimate objects ("Machines") or personal, quasi-poetic reminiscences ("An Alphabet of My Dead"). But this is not to say that the book is uneven. Many readers are familiar with a Pinsky poem: taut, thick, rich, meaningful, resonant, compact, and complete, such a poem has become so unmistakably his own that, regardless of one's individual preferences, one can still grant his work a degree of consistency, plenitude, and sheer logophilia that makes all good poetry possible. When he is at his best, Pinsky offers his audience an intellectual satisfaction that almost verges on a sensual one, like the self-sufficiency of the speaker of "Samurai Song":

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

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Paul Vangelisti
Littoral Books ($11.95)

by Kim Fortier

An alphabet's letters describe a phonetic system, symbolizing the very process of constructing speech through sound. Vowels denote the voiced components of language, whereas consonants represent the edges of sound—the actions that start and stop the voice in the pronunciation of a given syllable. The 26 symbols of our modern English alphabet, which are so deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness beginning with our recitation of the ABC's in childhood, serve as the backbone for the formal experiments of Paul Vangelisti's Alphabets.

The book is a compilation of five long sequence poems (not surprisingly, each has 26 sub-sections) written over the period from 1986 to 1991—each of which re-invents the alphabet on its own terms. "Los Alephs," the first poem, consists of 26 eight-line stanzas. Each stanza builds-up the phonetic character of a single letter (the poem proceeding in succession from A to Z) through intensive repetition, most notably at the beginning of each line. "Alephs Again" adds definition, á la "A is for apple," to this phonetic play ("G is the most generous letter. . . ", "R seems always reasonable. . . "), while "A Life" creates a sort of screwball biography of alphabetic evolution ("The eye fed in the storm of a circle / smaller than any sign in the writing, / before an emphatic laryngeal not found / in English, etc. . . .") and establishes a correspondence among the Hebrew and English as well as other related alphabets. On the whole, Alphabets explores the ways in which the most fundamental elements of the speech act (i.e., the act of enunciation indicated via each individual letter), when allowed to govern the mode of composition, generate a language field via the energy currents of alliteration, assonance, and rhyme.

The effect of these experiments is a highly textured interplay of sound and sense. Vangelisti's seemingly freewheeling tone is counter-balanced with a strong metrical sensibility and a Steinian ear for word play, allowing the language to come together in ways that correspond strangely to our ordinary sing-song, walking-around-on-the-street talk. As with everyday speech, the writing often veers into the clichéd phrasings and platitudes that riddle our language; yet, while the work-a-day world generally allows the platitudes to slip on through, the collision of these banal yet seemingly magnetic (who can resist?) utterances with Vangelisti's cunning ability to divert meaning re-casts them even further—and more definitively—into the nonsensical realm: "Two spoons are better than one when they don't rhyme or reason"; "Tentative little Indians"; "vowels of celibacy"; "Nine out of ten perfumes lack parental supervision."

What interests Vangelisti most, however, is not nonsense but rather the creation of a non-hermetic sense. With each text, Vangelisti creates an enigmatic yet vaguely familiar soundscape (recitation, "D is for. . .", nursery rhyme, politician's speech, neighbor's soapbox . . .), re-figuring the ground of how the phonetic elements of speaking add up to something called language by garnering our attention to how it is that they move us.

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Ursula K. LeGuin
Harcourt Brace ($24)

by Alan DeNiro

Early in her new novel The Telling, Ursula LeGuin writes about a fundamentalist monoculture trying to squash the "old ways" of learning. Upon encountering this I was hesitant. What literary territory regarding the dangers of fundamentalism hadn't been tread and retread by countless authors before her? What could LeGuin have possibly considered terra incognita? Even with her previous track record as one of the finest writers of science fiction—writing, always, with unquestionable moral tenacity and grace—there was the fear that even LeGuin would falter against the temptation of easy accusations and shrillness against cardboard cutout bad guys.

I'm pleased to report that, when the temptation for those very sentiments presents itself in The Telling, LeGuin openly refuses them, and then subtly discusses (primarily through the discursions and heart-pangs of Sully, her protagonist) the refusal itself. It's a delicate balancing act, but what earns the novel's keep are the strengths that are nearly always associated with any of LeGuin's work: the taut, lucid prose, the exploration of cogent archetypes (both in the natural world and those constructed from human society), the assurance of tone and pace. This is a novel with a great deal of imagined history behind it, both ballasted with "back story" and filling in the nooks and crannies—especially rich if you are already familiar with LeGuin's other works in the "Hainish cycle." Deep in the recesses of history, a species called the Hain seeded and populated a myriad of worlds, including Earth. In other words, the Hain were the ancestors for countless species throughout the galaxy, all more (or less) alike genetically, but also carrying profound cultural differences, so that the word "human" between them is barely applicable. At some point in the future, humankind has entered the concourse of galactic society. One of the apparatus of the Ekumen, a kind of diplomatic bureau that observes and exchanges information with burgeoning cultures on planets that haven't yet "broken through" technologically to space travel yet.

Against this centuries-long backdrop, Sutty is one of only four members of the Ekumen on the planet Aka, with a singular, technology-driven culture that has rapidly been accelerating with Hain technology. LeGuin has drawn on the cultural shifts in Maoist China as a taproot source for her extrapolation. Sutty is one of only four representatives of the Ekumen on Aka, and stuck in the sterile capital city, she knows the older culture and writing-system from her training on Earth, but the "superstitions" have mostly been eliminated by the present government, in which people are not necessarily people but "producers-consumers." A surprising chance to visit the rustic, outlying areas comes up, and Sutty finds herself eventually in the town of Okzat-Ozkat, where the older, quasi-Taoist lifestyle still lives, albeit underground. It is a culture in which storytellers and wise-people, known as Maz. To the new, technology-craving government, the Maz are seen as plague carriers; thus, books are burned, and learning of ancient traditions is virulently suppressed. As Sully delves deeper into this culture, first as a dispassionate observer, and later as more of an active participant, she continually returns in her mind to her own haunted past, on Earth, with her family's run-in and hiding from the theocratically fundamentalist Unists. The outcome—involving a dour technocrat of the state who continually pesters Sully in the countryside—is moving because through the course of the book, Sully struggles with her own assumptions.

The cycle of stories and novels LeGuin has written in the "Hainish cycle" has been a constant recurring well LeGuin has drawn on throughout her career. One would call The Telling a coda of sorts to the cycle, except for the fact that I doubt that LeGuin has exhausted this milieu's possibilities. It's a large tapestry that encompasses her early, semi-apprenticeship novels (Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions), two of the signal SF novels in recent memory, (The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness) and a good deal of novella and short-story work over more than thirty years. In particular, it's worth noting that LeGuin has found river gold with a string of innovative shorter pieces in the 1990s based in the Hainish milieu. "The Shobie's Story" precipitates many of the concerns of The Telling, engaging the reader with a kind of quantum narrative on a spaceship voyage, in which each character experiences separate realities—anchored by the easy, almost "Mom, are we there yet?" banter of a well-rendered family. It is as if "Schrodinger's cat" has become a disturbing Escher-esque chimera and an easy-going house pet at the same time.

In all of these fictions, LeGuin is rarely interested in privileging the "macros" of panoramic space opera: great battles and treaties, larger than life heroes saving the day against all odds. When these events do occur, the backdrop is inverted—relatively ordinary people go through ordeals on a human scale, even when interplanetary history and intrigue swirls around them. In this fashion, The Telling hones in on the commonplace of the alien, as Sutty and the Akans interact through meals, sex, storytelling, and folk medicine.

This, of course, is not to say that LeGuin is somehow a "domestic" writer, content to dwell only on home life (whatever that is). Indeed, her feminism continually informs much of her best work, and LeGuin has provided for us some of the most sustained critiques of hidebound notions of gender in the latter half of the twentieth century. This is intricately tied to the science fictional modes that she writes in; it is nearly inconceivable to think of the tropes taken away from her if the speculative, "unreal" elements were taken away from her. As she writes in her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness: "Yes, indeed the people in [the novel] are androgynous, but that doesn't mean I'm predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I'm merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of the day in certain weathers, we already are." In a similar fashion, it is clear in The Telling that nothing is clear, that the dialectics are always blurring into each other.

Although there are gaps and diffractions in the storyline, loose ends that unravel at times, this is also a novel that teaches the reader how to read it. The novel is filled with elliptical fragments, over and over again told by the characters to each other. "We're not the outside world," one of the teachers tells Sutty. "You know? We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don't say the words, what is there in our world?" The Telling is a permeable novel, loosely bound together in order to let the prose breathe. It is also, in of itself, a snippet of a conversation (and I think LeGuin is consciously positing the novel as such) without end. Ultimately, it is not a novel about radical dogmatism, or the frail chances of healing between wide cultural gulfs. The Telling is about the telling. "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—/Success in Circuit Lies," Emily Dickinson wrote, and this koan-like sensibility envelops the book. Once again, by LeGuin's hands, the audience is in the story's thrall.

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Armistead Maupin
HarperCollins ($26)

by Brad Jacobson

People exist in your life who once were considered the very best of friends. For one reason or another, perhaps due to a change in geography, career, or love, they drop off your radar, disappearing without so much as a "good-bye" or an explanation. If you're a good person (which I am not), you do not take this abandonment to heart. You simply accept it as the way of the world, secretly hoping the person who left you behind will one day reappear to share their stories and reaffirm your dormant friendship. You will let bygones be bygones and welcome this person with open arms, pooh-pooh any tepid apologies offered, and pick up right where the two of you left off.

Nearly a decade after he abandoned his legion of fans, Armistead Maupin returns to his readers offering a laurel leaf entitled The Night Listener. Maupin endeared himself to the reading public and literary critics with his wildly successful Tales of the City series, originally serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle during the late 1970's. His cast of instantly likeable characters living at 28 Barbary Lane drew people into a powerful, entertaining story arc and kept readers enraptured for the better part of a decade. Although he may have felt he had explored all options with the tenants of Mrs. Madrigal's boarding house, many people (myself included) would welcome a return to the favored address and its infamous residents. Did wide-eyed Mary Ann Singleton patch up her estranged marriage to reformed bachelor Brian? Whatever happened to Dee Dee Day, her lover, D'Or, and their twins fathered by a grocery store delivery boy? And what about Michael "Mouse" Tolliver, perhaps the character most closely identified with Maupin himself? Did Michael finally find true love? The future seemed to offer unmined territory and Maupin deliberately decided to leave it that way.

Maybe the Moon followed the final book of the six part series and proved Maupin was still a consummate storyteller, highly adept at turning a wickedly funny phrase and creating lovable characters. How can a reader not be intrigued by the story of a woman dwarf whose only claim to fame is playing a beloved E.T.-type character? But, the fact of the matter was these were not the characters his reading public had come to regard as living, breathing people. Maybe the Moon was not a bad book, per se. It simply did not meet the standards of Maupin's previous work, and some people no doubt felt cheated by a novel with no link to the epic history of the Tales series.

Sorry to say, such is the case with The Night Listener. As with many of Maupin's novels, the book is a thinly veiled semi-autobiographical account of the birth of one relationship in the shadow of the death of another. Gabriel Noone, standing in for Maupin himself, is a well-loved writer of the radio serial "Noone at Night" who finds his personal life and creative abilities in stasis. Abandoned by his long-time lover, Jess, a man hungering to experience the most life has to offer even as he copes with his HIV status, Gabriel throws himself a pity party on an hourly basis. Much gnashing of teeth and beating of breast ensues, doing little to endear the character to the readers. No wonder Jess left this self-hating queer with the martyr complex. Gabriel finds comfort in a telephone relationship with 13 year-old Pete Lomax, a young boy who is dying from AIDS and has a wrenching story to share. You would think this would jolt Gabriel out of his myopic frame of mind, but it soon becomes clear this author is only interested in listening to his own voice, not the voice of a dying child. Certainly, Maupin tosses in a couple of lines about how awful Gabriel feels for being so self-centered, but it is largely lip service. The legitimacy of Pete's story, and ultimately of Pete's very existence, is called into question. The majority of the novel is devoted to defining the lines between reality and fantasy and to the questionable benefits of too much knowledge.

Maupin may be attempting to reveal how an artist relies upon the power of truth and illusion and how these necessary tools of the trade can often burn their master, but Gabriel never lights anywhere long enough to create a rapport with the readers. We are not given the luxury to see him as anything other than a self-absorbed cry baby who rarely acts, but, rather, allows himself to be acted upon. Gullibility, another of his major traits, might be endearing if he were a more likeable man, but he is not. In fact, no one is particularly likeable or intriguing in this novel, not even Gabriel's sassy accountant (a half-hearted connection to the Tales) or the mysterious Pete. Maupin has always been able to rely upon his strong storytelling skills, his sense of humor and his sensitive handling of character development, but for all its twists and turns, The Night Listener mostly proves that it's time to head back to 28 Barbary Lane.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald
Cambridge University Press ($39.95)

by Christopher Fischbach

In the introduction to Trimalchio, the editors of this "early version of The Great Gatsby" repeatedly claim that the publication of this book is "not only for comparison with The Great Gatsby but for interpretation as a separate and distinct work of art." Why they so adamantly make such a case (rather than present Trimalchio as a text primarily of interest to scholars and Gatsby-philes) is baffling, for it could only be legitimate if Fitzgerald consented for this version to be published, or if he was either forced to make revisions to the text or those revisions were made without his permission.

Since neither of these scenarios is in fact true, we are offered two justifications for the editors' highly debatable statement. First, that when Fitzgerald submitted Trimalchio to Scribner's, the text entered the public phase of its existence. He submitted it to the 'publication process,' a loose term for a sequence of mechanical and commercial operations which would, as he knew, transform it from a literary artifact in one copy to a saleable commodity in multiple copies. Naturally he expected to see proofs, and surely he planned to do some revising on them, but there is no evidence that, on 27 October, he contemplated major rewriting or structural revisions. He had completed this version of his novel.

Garbage. What is more likely is that Fitzgerald expected to do revisions on the novel, just as any experienced author would. There is no evidence that Fitzgerald was hostile to Maxwell Perkins's editorial advice; the most significant of which here was to let the details of Gatsby's life unfold to the reader earlier and more gradually throughout the book; the fact that such a structural change was undertaken by Fitzgerald (along with numerous other changes) points to an agreeable working relationship between editor and author. Literary editors do not force or even cajole an author into doing something they don't want to do. I would further argue, contrary to the editor's bizarre claim, that the "public phase" of any novel's existence is not entered until the book is actually published.

The second justification the editors use to present Trimalchio as a distinct work of art is that it "is like listening to a well-known musical composition, but played in a different key and with an alternate bridge passage. . . . To the knowledgeable listener it is like hearing the same work and yet a different work." It's a pretty analogy, but a false one. This may be true for interpretations of previously arranged music (especially jazz, blues, etc.) or for remakes of films, but the musical composition you hear when reading Trimalchio is more like a rough draft that had been thrown away, then stolen from the composer's garbage can and performed as an original piece years after his death.

With all that said, I feel obliged to admit that I enjoyed every second of Trimalchio. It's not really that different from Gatsby, and had it been published as the legitimate text it would probably still be considered a masterpiece. I would even say, if pressed, that I prefer certain sections. For instance, in Trimalchio, the details of Gatsby's life are told directly to Nick by Gatsby in conversation, whereas in Gatsby, Nick relates that conversation to us. Once you've heard Gatsby tell it directly, the revision feels forced—though granted, it shifts more of the emphasis to Nick's voice, and adds to the mystery surrounding Gatsby. Yet for the attentive reader of Trimalchio, much of that mystery is still upheld, since when Gatsby speaks, you can never be sure he's telling the truth. Nick, as we all know, is the only truly honest person he himself knows.

I can only hope, however, that comparisons such as this will be made with tongues in cheeks, and that, as "earlier versions" of great works continue to be published, they will be considered prototypes rather than legitimate, solitary works of art.

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Pamela Lu
Atelos ($12.95)

by Aaron Benjamin Kunin

According to its mission statement, Atelos publishes "under the sign of poetry" works that are "involved in some way with crossing traditional genre boundaries." But there's nothing in Pamela: A Novel that signals any kind of generic instability or discomfort; if we sense any, it's only because the publisher urges us to look for it. This may be the intended function of the publisher's name: either to alert you to the subterranean presence of "signs of poetry" that you wouldn't otherwise see, or else to create signs of poetry that aren't really there. This is a novel that looks and feels like a novel, and it even calls itself a novel. Its title, in fact, is something that it shares with Samuel Richardson's Pamela, which is often called the first novel in English.

But that may be the only thing it shares with Richardson's Pamela. If we have reached a point in literary history at which both Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded and Pamela: A Novel are unproblematically recognizable as novels, is it still possible to distinguish between something that is a novel and something that isn't? The short answer to this question is "no": the novel as a genre includes such various examples that we can't say that it has any identifying characteristics—which is why both Jane Austen and Gertrude Stein say that the novel is simply "everything."

So I'm tempted to argue that the only possible connection between the two Pamelas must be a subterranean one. On the surface, the two books appear to have nothing in common. Richardson's is a domestic drama enacted mainly in scenes with only two or three characters; Lu's is a portrait of a much larger community and is presented almost exclusively in a summary mode, even when it's dealing with specific actions and events. Richardson wants to bring you as close as possible to the scenes in his novel, even to collapse diegetic action together with acts of writing and reading into a single moment; Lu works very hard to distance herself from any moments of intimacy by refracting them through memory, retelling, contemplation, and various technologies of representation. (Lu's novel takes place almost entirely in conversations, but none of the conversations is represented directly; what you get are reported conversations.) You could even say that the title asserts a connection between the two novels only as a way of confirming that there is no connection, or as a way of saying that we have reached a point in literary history where the original Pamela no longer means anything to us.

Nonetheless, the two novels do share modes of processing information, notably in the way they deal with proper names. "Pamela" is one of the few full names given in Richardson's novel; many of the others (like that of her employer/husband, "Mr. B.") are reduced to their incipit letters, apparently in an effort to protect the identity of the characters who bear them. "Pamela" is pretty much the only full name given in Lu's novel (although there's also a cat called "Kit-Ten"), and it's introduced in a way that calls into question the possibility of its usefulness to any person. Otherwise, the names of the characters are reduced to letters, either to protect their identities (or to suggest that there are identities that need protection) or to suggest their resemblance to variables in mathematical expressions.

This technique has two profound effects. One is to remind you that all novelistic effects, including characters, are alphabetical—that is, they result from various combinations of letters. The second is to make it difficult, at times, to remember whether passages in the novel are written in the first-person or the third. The pronoun "I" is effectively reactivated as an unfamiliar figure with richness and depth. And this is wonderful, as it hardly ever happens. (Many writers, following Rimbaud, have rejected "I" as a medium for personal expression, but this gesture usually doesn't feel at all disruptive. The only other time I can recall having this feeling about the pronoun "I" is in reading certain works by Walter Abish: Alphabetical Africa, in which the first-person can articulate itself only in the space between the chapter where the letter "I" is introduced and the chapter where it vanishes; and "What Else," Abish's collage-autobiography, an arrangement of passages taken from 50 different memoirs and diaries, all of them in the first-person.)

Lu then pushes this effect ever further by commenting on it: "We sometimes wondered who this 'I' really was. . . . 'I' (which expanded during times of war or crisis to 'we') was the most ubiquitous, and therefore elusive, self we could imagine: there was no way to find 'I' without by definition losing it, and therefore losing ourselves." Rejecting "I" because it represents another voice speaking through you, rejecting "we" because of its tendency to absorb whatever it's addressing, finally rejecting the possibility of speaking personally or communally in an inherited language, this passage seems to assume that language is a kind of property, and that it belongs to some speakers more than to others. But at the same time, it serves as a reminder that the basic materials of language don't belong to anyone. "I," a personal pronoun, the word we use to designate ourselves, the word we identify with at the most profound level, accommodates more than one person.

So if one implication of this novel is that "I" and "we," like the name "Pamela," are always fictions (or even specifically novelistic effects), another implication is that a word like "I" can never be a fiction. Reading the word "I" in this novel becomes a mystical experience—an invitation to connect to the "I" in all of us. There even seems to be some attempt here, in all the effort to create distance, to arrive at a point so distant that there's no particularity at all, so that the designations in the novel could apply equally well to anyone. For the most part, Lu writes a prose without accent, inflection, idiom, personal style, local color, or historical specificity (although at times it's faintly archaic)—in short, a prose that isn't based in speech. As we have seen, it defaults on any attempt to represent speech directly, and at one point registers surprise at the possibility that speech could be represented in writing: ". . . a web page containing many of R's quotations from college, a find that amused me and astonished R, since R had never, to her knowledge, recorded her spoken statements, much less posted them on the Internet for all to see." This language that no one speaks is something more than the non-style of the late twentieth century, the style that doesn't see itself as a style; Lu is writing in the unjustly disparaged dialect of English called "translationese," the language of literary translation. This novel reads like a translation; you often get the feeling that there is another text behind the novel you're reading, that Lu is trying to accommodate the effects of one language using the materials of another (and sometimes that's exactly what she says she's doing).

This style has had other practitioners in recent fiction, most significantly Lydia Davis, whose work amply demonstrates that you don't have to have a feeling for spoken language in order to have a feeling for language. (Davis's work is also remarkable for its deployment of the first-person plural; she is also the main translator of Blanchot's novels, in which the names of the characters tend to be reduced to their incipit letters, into English.) Like Davis, Lu doesn't like to furnish unnecessary details or to name names; she eschews the techniques of verisimilitude, the minute operations that novelists have traditionally deemed necessary to create a world that the reader can imagine inhabiting. Unlike Davis, however, Lu allows for certain forms of specificity to enter her vocabulary. She can use place-names (countries, cities, institutions, even specific buildings); she can write about popular culture (which isn't exactly a form of specificity, but never mind); and she can use the word "Internet" (maybe Davis can too, but so far she hasn't). There's also a note of archaism in Lu's sentences, at least on the level of syntax. Partly this is a result of reading Lu alongside her 18th-century predecessor, but her sentences, which are controlled, stately, and vigorous, are closer to Henry Fielding's than to Richardson's, which are breathless and exclamatory. You could almost say that Lu is rewriting both Richardson's novel and Fielding's parodic versions Shamela and Joseph Andrews: here, the false and true Pamelas converge; Shamela is Pamela.

I would finally want to retain Davis as a model for understanding Lu's writing (whether Lu is aware of this model or not), not so much for the formal characteristics they may share, but rather for the example of Davis's experimentalism. It seems to me that the experiments in this work are not formal at all; what you get instead is a spirit of experimentation, a kind of Baconian attitude that takes everything it encounters, including its own rules and machinery of operation, as material for thinking, and pushes each thought as far as it can go. The filmmaker Raul Ruiz would call Pamela a "theoretical fiction"—i.e., a theory that is a fiction, a theory that is internally consistent but fundamentally incoherent when viewed from outside, and that can be maintained, therefore, only in the space of a novel. This is a work of "precision," as Robert Musil would say, "in matters of the soul." It extends the novel's capacity to think.

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Ben Katchor
Pantheon ($22)

by Todd Matthews

One of the treasures inherent in comic strips is a combined sense of familiarity and distance. The characters of a favorite strip may inhabit familiar environments such as city streets, neighborhoods, office towers, or gathering places, but many of these places do not truly document actual locations. The littered streets of Kaz's Underworld strip may resemble New York City during a heated garbage strike, but the characters are much too perverse (even by New York City's standards). This is also true for some of the more mainstream comic strips. Dilbert is set in the modern-day office, but the politics surrounding the workplace make the strip universal (hence, much of the strip's success).

I mention all of this because it is an important item to note when considering the work of Ben Katchor and his popular Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer. Katchor has been drawing the Knipl series since 1988, depicting a New York City seemingly untouched by time. His antiquated settings, combined with his sensitivity to modern urban decay, render a New York City that is decidedly distant and uniquely Katchor-esque. Consider some of the unusual plots and features that have appeared in his comic strip: a midget-race-car track; a tapeworm sanctuary; and the Observatory of the Human Limp. Today's Big Apple may not have something as overtly grotesque as the tapeworm sanctuary, but it does have something as overtly grotesque as the Fashion Caf.

Katchor's most recent offering is a book containing collected Knipl strips, and a new 24-page story entitled, "The Beauty Supply District." Fans of Katchor's work will not be disappointed by this new collection. The book is filled with the same quirks that, after nearly 15 years, remain fresh and funny. There is the Institute for Soup-Nut Research, the Municipal Birthmark Registry, and the Misspent Youth Center. Witness, also, the rather spooky (yet charming) championship grave-digging competition. There is also the Haverpease Collection of Dried Fruit ("pears dried in the form of genital organs"; "apricot halves like the ears of cherubim"; "a shoe made of apricot leather for the daughter of a czar"). Perhaps the funniest and most telling feature of Knipl's landscape is the "oldest continually vacant storefront in America"--an anti-salute of sorts to the modern mega-mall.

Yet, for as much as Knipl's world is funny, it is also strikingly sad and somber. The comic strip, often spare, is strangely lonely, haunting and endearing—the key strengths of Katchor's work. Katchor draws a world filled with schemers and dreamers who gather around café booths to plot their next ingenious, though inherently flawed, plan for the city. In this new collection, a visionary architect named Selladore plans on taking the rubble of unused sidewalks to build a pedestrian bridge to Hawaii. The Normalcy Parfum Company holds evening sales seminars for their prized product: the residue of everyday life, captured in small vials ("the smell of a library book"; "the tang of a brown paper bag"; "the aroma of door-hinge oil"). And a board member at the Museum of Immanent Art (featuring a touring museum of shower caps, an exhibit of an influential 19th-century picture hanger, and an entrance with a turpentine fountain emitting the smell of latent creativity) defends his proposal to rent out certain galleries for use as motel rooms each night after museum hours. Reading of Knipl's seemingly uneventful exploits in the city, one longs to climb inside the simple six-panel strips and follow close on his heels. If only we could hold his camera or take his notes!

The captions in Katchor's strips keep the reader on his toes. The panel often begins in the middle of a story, only to bring the reader up to speed in the final panel—a refreshing ending to a short and sweet snapshot of the city. And Katchor's artistic style is as original and strange as some of his characters. Panels switch from close-up, angled shots of his subjects (many dressed in rumpled suits—shuffling along sidewalks, moving in and out of storefronts), to wide-angle landscapes of buildings draped with large placards or sidewalks flanked by sandwich boards. Notably, each panel is drawn with sharp angles and long shadows. Lonely Knipl stands on a street corner in the middle of the afternoon, and the long, dark shadow he casts adds as much to his character as his fedora and his camera.

If anyone was meant to write the quintessential urban comic strip, it is Ben Katchor. He grew up in New York City and attended Brooklyn College and School of Visual Arts. He contributed to Raw, the avant-garde comics magazine, from its inception in the early 1980s. He later produced the books Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay (1991), Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer (1996), and The Jew of New York (1999). There is also a film about Katchor (Pleasures of Urban Decay) and an opera (The Carbon Copy Building) based on Katchor's work. The highpoint of Katchor's career came earlier this year, when he received the esteemed MacArthur Fellowship. Presently, Katchor's comics appear in a slew of alternative weeklies and other publications across the country.

Katchor has described himself as an "urban cartoonist," and his Knipl series as "a small encyclopedia of the city." These are accurate, if understated, terms for an illustrator who has explored the city landscape with an original, fresh eye. Knipl might be a small, slumped character in a large, often cluttered metropolis, but at the generous and talented stroke of Katchor, Knipl's lens has recorded a slice of city life that is witty, sad and nostalgic.

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O POWERFUL WESTERN STAR
Poetry & Art in California
Jack Foley
Pantograph Press ($12)

FOLEY'S BOOKS
California Rebels, Beats & Radicals
Jack Foley
Pantograph Press ($12)

by John Olson

Jack Foley sees California as fertile ground for what he terms "living perplexities." Questions regarding human consciousness, alienation, the relationship of our ethnic identities to our American selves, spoken versus written media, and, most importantly, "the despised and neglected art of poetry, which, with its history of confusion between the aural/oral and the visual, is a kind of emblem for a multimedia situation." California is largely myth, but in many ways a very authentic and revelatory myth: Utopian New Age paradise, an archetype for sensuality and violence, political radicalism, good vibrations and joyous anarchy. The Bay Area, in particular, has been the site of a vigorous and legendary literary scene and the psychedelic zeal of the sixties. It is largely free of the literary baggage of the east and, by virtue of its geographic location, represents the final push west toward the satori of the American experience.

There is a delicious extravagance to these two books that is the very essence of the California spirit. Their scope is as large and multivaried as the hills and streets of San Francisco, as aesthetically diverse as Oakland and as lustily anomalous as Venice (not the one with gondolas in the Adriatic but the one with body builders by the Pacific). O Powerful Western Star (the title is taken, appropriately enough, from Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed"), opens with an introduction by Dana Gioia, a name more generally associated with New Formalist poetics, and one apt to invite a superficial appraisal of these books as being compromised, or diluted, by a broad-minded approach that is too global in its accommodation. But they're not. They are committed to poetry and art in general; poetry and art as they have taken root and flowered and cross-pollinated in California's fecund atmosphere. Foley's essays and reviews include a detailed look at work by Michael McClure, Larry Eigner (with whom Jack Foley was an especially close friend), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima, Brenda Hillman, Philip Lamantia, Sheila E. Murphy and James Broughton. Foley's Books, the companion volume with Oakland's mayor Jerry Brown on the cover, covers a broader range of authors, some of them, such as Yeats, not particularly Californian, while O Powerful Western Star does more to record the granulation and texture of California writing, such as the highly engrossing essay about San Francisco's Batman Gallery. The Batman Gallery (named after its owner, William Jahrmarkt, later known as "Billy Batman;" the nickname was Michael McClure's idea, "you know, battling the forces of evil"), functioned for five years, 1960 to 1965, and featured artwork that was fiercely uncompromising and often disturbing. The gallery was not an isolated enterprise, but grew out of the needs of a community of artists, many of them young bohemians "rebelling against their immediate culture in some way." Ergo, the work was frequently provocative, calculated to raise (as in the case of Bruce Conner's disturbing assemblage Black Dahlia, in essence a magazine image of a nude female with nails driven into it, titled after one of the most grisly murders ever committed in Los Angeles), "issues of violence, fear, repression, pity, rage, sexuality, rape, love; issues of wholeness and disintegration; of voyeurism and reproduced images; of, in Jung's terms, anima and animus."

The turmoil and alienation felt most acutely by our nation's artists, and intensified by California's frontier variables, are at the forefront of these two volumes. The robust eclecticism of Foley's essays are united by a sense of urgency, a crisis in literature. That idealized reader every writer has in the back of their mind—a figure rapt, in an armchair, with a book on his or her lap, turning each page sloooowly, with reverential absorption—is disappearing. That reader today is more apt to be sitting in front of a computer screen, surfing the net or browsing an online magazine. Worse yet: readers are disappearing. We are living in an age where intellect is penalized and vapidity is rewarded. In an essay titled "In Praise of Illiteracy," Hans Magnus Enzensberger identifies a class of people he terms the "second-order illiterate," an unlettered individual whose inability to concentrate or digest his or her own experience is better adapted to our electronic environment. This may not be quite how Foley reads the situation, and I am adding some of my own anxieties to the crisis he describes in his two volumes. But Foley both recognizes and addresses the situation with an optimism I find rather baffling. He presents it as an invigorating, ontological question. "Who am—what is—'I' in the midst of e-mail and Internet?"

Part of Foley's solution for the lack of people patient and persevering enough to sit down and spend some time with some written material is enveloped, quite tangibly, in the back of O Powerful Western Star in the form of a CD. Jack and his wife Adelle perform several of the essays contained in these volumes. The essays cease being essays and become something else; what were once words on a page become nerves and breath, the pitch and cadence of the human voice. You can do your housework and respond to Jack's ideas. Fold your clothes and do the dishes while Jack intones sentences such as this one from "Words & Books, Poetry & Writing": "the electronic media have already changed the conditions of writing, though the exact nature of that change is not yet clear. We live, as Father Ong put it in 1977, in an 'opening state of consciousness,' a state in which even the nature of biography—the nature of what we believe it means to be human—may have to be reconsidered." This is heady and provocative stuff. You may, just as I have done, end up forgetting the laundry and sitting down to listen. Foley is a vigorous and compelling speaker, but there is much that I don't agree with. He is far closer to Whitman's democratic vistas than I am. My reaction to growing illiteracy is purely negative; I'm more apt to believe it is encouraged by monopoly capitalism, that as long as intellectual activity is depreciated, as long as the ability to reflect and concentrate are hampered by the ubiquity of TVs at the airport or the necessity to work longer hours in order to afford the new technologies, the population remains docile and yielding and the corporations remain insured of a continuing labor resource and a large body of complacent consumers. Nor do I have much faith that emphasizing the dramatic and performative aspects of poetry poets can increase the size of their audience and thereby heighten its cultural impact. If the popularity of "slams" demonstrate a growing need to perform rather than read poetry, to turn it into an amateur hour replete with judging and communal guffaws, I see poetry decaying into histrionics and sentimentality, not promoting higher levels of consciousness. But the fact that Jack is getting me riled, stirred up, challenging some of my own long established notions about written discourse, testifies to one of the great values of these two books.

Foley's valorization of speech is reflected in his writing. These essays are eminently accessible and free of dry, academic jargon. The language is lively and inquisitive. The information is comprehensive and well organized. Many of the essays and reviews have appeared in venues such as San Francisco's highly popular Poetry Flash or online magazines CitySearch and The Alsop Review. Foley also hosts a radio program on Berkeley's KPFA called Cover to Cover in which he interviews a wide variety of poets; six of those interviews, including one with Foley himself conducted by Sarah Rosenthal, are included in the two volumes. I was especially gladdened by the interview with James Broughton, whose drollery and joy (poet and companion Jonathan Williams dubbed Broughton "Big Joy") and the deep pleasure he continued to find in life until his death at eighty-four was greatly inspiriting. I discovered a great wisdom here.

One of the greater pleasures I enjoyed in these two books (which, incidentally, are physically large; the size of phonebooks, each with a painting of an Oakland street scene by Anthony Holdsworth) is the California timeline at the end of O Powerful and Western Star. Foley's uncannily thorough timeline gives a comprehensive view of the many disparate and clashing schools to emerge, morph, and/or mutate in the heterogeneous Xanadu that is California. It begins with the publication of Kenneth Rexroth's first book of poetry, In What Hour, and ends with the death of James Broughton in 1999. He includes information about some of the more salient events, such as Ginsberg's legendary reading of Howl at the Six Gallery in 1955, as well as some of the lesser known, but equally seminal occurrences, such as Helen Adam's San Francisco Burning, "a combination of music, drama, poetry, and theatrical staging" which premiered at James Broughton's Playhouse in 1961.

In his interview with Sarah Rosenthal, Foley asks an intriguing question: "instead of lamenting the 'passage' of the Beat Generation, we ought to be asking how their energy can be used now. What kind of 'Howl,' what Visions of Cody is possible for us?" Foley's answer to this is even more intriguing, and might be used to encapsulate the energy at the core of both volumes: "the question all these people are asking is how to live. Do we know any more about that subject than they? One wants to say, with Robert Creeley, 'You'll have to tell mother we're still on the road.'"

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