Bruce Feiler
William Morrow and Company ($23.95)

by H. E. Everding

To accompany Bruce Feiler on this journey to understand the roots of the three monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) as well as his own identity, the reader travels through place (e.g., the Negev, Jerusalem, Savannah, GA) and time (four millennia), always in the midst of a never-ending war. In pursuit of Abraham and his heirs, Feiler weaves together on the spot observations, conversations, careful reading of texts, and histories of interpretation in a poetic style that both informs and seduces.

Even though there is reason to doubt that Abraham ever existed, Feiler discloses the power and resilience of Abraham as symbolic progenitor of three faith traditions. Through his non-fictional research, Feiler discovers myriads of fictional Abrahams. At various moments in history, each of the three traditions choose and reconstruct Abraham in their own image and for their own exclusive religious and political purposes.

Abraham represents readable and engaging historiography (despite its lack of documentation) and hermeneutics. For example, Feiler frames the chapter on Isaac with a personal conversation with the proprietor of B. Cohen & Sons, a small Judaic shop in Jerusalem's Old City. In between he traces how the figure of Isaac and his potential demise by father Abraham became a symbol of the suffering pious Jew (the "Akedah or binding"), the prototype of Jesus' sacrificial death for some Christians (the "crucifixion"), and was displaced by Ishmael in Islamic tradition as the one rendered (the "Dhabih or cut"). All three traditions place the story of Isaac/Ishmael "at the heart of their self-understanding," revealing both their shared origins but significant differences.

Feiler's journey starts at the Temple Mount in war-torn Jerusalem overlooking the Dome of the Rock—symbolic place of Isaac's near-sacrifice—and ends at Hebron where Abraham was buried. After an excellent analysis of Abraham's birth and call by God, Feiler explores various traditions about Ishmael and Isaac, and how Abraham was re-interpreted in the three faith traditions. The final section reflects on Abraham's "legacy" as symbol and hope for conversation among the three religious traditions. As Feiler puts it:

Abraham is like water . . . He's a vast, underground aquifer that stretches from Mesopotamia to the Nile, from Jerusalem to Mecca, from Kandahar to Kansas City. He's an ever-present, ever-flowing stream that represents the basic desire all people have to form a union with God. He's a physical manifestation of the fundamental yearning to be descended from a sacred source. He's a personification of the biological need we all share to feel protected by someone, something. Anything.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

Edited by Diane Keaton
powerHouse Books ($29.95)

by Andrea Balenfield

Anybody who's ever looked over their shoulder at that eerie clown painting in their local dive-bar or past-its-prime restaurant will appreciate this book, as actor/director/writer Diane Keaton has here assembled a bevy of the best this odd genre has to offer. Many of the paintings come from her personal collection or that of art dealer Robert Berman; both Keaton and Berman lurk at flea markets and swap meets, looking for fine art in what Keaton calls "the ugliest genre of them all" among the detritus.

As Clown Paintings amply demonstrates, their search has not been in vain. While none of these works shows the hand of the master, they are startlingly deep in their naïve brushstrokes and restricted subject matter. And rather than conveying a sense of repetition or easy tropism, the more than five-dozen pieces here are intriguingly different. Within the narrow parameters of the genre, these clown paintings convey a real breadth of emotion; as Berman puts it in his afterword, "the passion, absurdity, and the angst in clown paintings transcended all stereotypes that are traditionally associated with works of this nature," while Keaton notes that "these rank amateurs' dogged attempts to put a stamp of personal expression on the map link us to them." That link is indeed indelibly felt throughout these pages.

Keaton further gets at the heart of how we think about clowns by including statements on them by her fellow experts on things comedic: everyone from Woody Allen to Robin Williams weighs in on the subject in short reflections. Unlike the paintings, these pieces reveal an uncomfortable sameness, as most of the comedians confess they simply don't like clowns. Candice Bergen bemoans, "Why don't I get these guys?" Dick Van Dyke confesses, "I never laughed at a clown in my whole life." John Waters reminds us that John Wayne Gacy dressed as one when he wasn't out killing. But some writers give clowns their due: Jay Leno admits, "Their ability to get twenty-eight people into one tiny car is a good lesson for all of us."

This is a fine addition to Diane Keaton's growing shelf of image-driven books, which includes Local News (crime photos) and Still Life (Hollywood tableaux).

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

George Cotkin
The Johns Hopkins University Press ($39.95)

by Christopher Luna

Existentialists argue for personal responsibility in the face of what Walter Kaufmann identified as the four elements of this philosophy: "dread, despair, death, and dauntlessness." But as George Cotkin's overview of existentialism's influence upon American culture points out, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir felt that the "confidence and naive optimism" of Americans blinded them to "the problems of existence, authenticity, and alienation." Beauvoir especially found Americans to be materialistic, "afraid of freedom, unwilling to engage in high-level discussions of serious ideas, childish in some ways, and unable to trust themselves." Yet Cotkin shows there was an existential strain in American culture that preceded all three of these philosophers, in the work of Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Edward Hopper, among others. Unlike their French counterparts, American intellectuals "refused to make a fetish out of nihilism"; instead, "anguish and despair" functioned as "goads to action and commitment."

As Cotkin goes on to illustrate, the horror of World War I and "the skeptical disposition of science had rendered traditional beliefs untenable." The influence of Soren Kierkegaard's "inwardness and religious anxiety" upon American religious thinkers and artists in the first half of the century "did not bode well for political radicalism or reform; it supported for some intellectuals a retreat from leftist commitments of the 1930s." Kierkegaard shared a "faith in the absurd" with his largely conservative followers, who "found much of American religion empty, marked by rote optimism and belief in progress."

The willingness of Kierkegaardian thinkers to wrestle with "paradox, irony, and tragedy" in the aftermath of World War II made the Danish philosopher's ideas very attractive to writers including Thornton Wilder and W.H. Auden, as well as the painters Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, for whom art was "a mythological and heroic 'act of defiance,' which opened the path to transcendence through engagement with the canvas and the unconscious." Kierkegaard's "mode of argument, positing two opposites," was also posthumously appropriated by Cold War proponents who demanded that Americans make a choice between "faith in God and faith in communism."

In the 1940s and 1950s, as the ideas of Sartre and Beauvoir attained prominence, the press emphasized their happiness in an effort to dismiss their philosophy as a pose. The couple skillfully manipulated their reception in France and the United States, presenting a "model of the philosopher as personality" that made them vastly popular. But ultimately, "the reception and dissemination of existentialism" was beyond their control. The chilly reception Sartre and Beauvoir received from the New York intellectuals, anti-Stalinists who "feared the power of popular and middlebrow culture," will be familiar to anyone who has ever argued over whether a particular artist's best work occurred before they achieved fame. Despite their criticisms of existentialism, the writing of New York intellectuals such as Saul Bellow "adopted many of its essentials."

Norman Mailer saw Sartre as "the only thinker in the world who could match him." Both "shared a desire. . . to effect 'a revolution in the consciousness of our time,'" though Mailer thought that Sartre "lacked a sufficient sense of evil." Mailer labeled his own novel, The Barbary Shore, (1951) as existential, and revealed an "existential focus" in The Naked and the Dead, (1948) where "the absurdity of war" is "demonstrated in the utter inability of men to control external events and the forces of nature."

Cotkin includes an astute analysis of Mailer's well-known essay, "The White Negro," in which he claimed that blacks had been "transformed into the psychopathic hipster through centuries of oppressive social conditions." Like Jack Kerouac and the photographer Robert Frank, Mailer saw African-Americans as "endowed with existential recognition and freedom." Cotkin sees this appropriation of the image of the "Negro as sexual libertine" as an act of "bad faith" and racist stereotyping. Mailer's habitual celebration of psychopaths leaves him in "no man's land. Action replaces impotence . . . but at the cost of human solidarity." Mailer is ultimately a "fundamentalist" who believes that only those "who live close to the abyss, who battle against the conformity of American culture. . . are near to religious ecstasy and existential transcendence."

The ideas of Camus appealed to student activists during the 1960s. Like Camus, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer Robert Moses and Tom Hayden, radical activist and drafter of the Port Huron Statement, "worried about how the rebel could avoid becoming the oppressor." Moses felt a certain amount of responsibility for those who were injured or killed in the Civil Rights Movement, while Hayden came to regret calling for violent revolution, having learned from Camus that in "defining ourselves, we must move beyond mere inwardness toward commitment to values such as justice and humaneness." Unfortunately, this section of the book is undermined by Cotkin's statement that these students "were the last generation for whom books made a difference," a conclusion that will surely surprise every scholar and writer alive during the four subsequent decades.

Cotkin concludes with a comparison of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1962), best-selling books that "transformed the lives of many women in America." Both women focused on the "responsibility of the individual" rather than external sources of oppression, and both held "the existential imperative that men and women create themselves through constant acts of negation and transcendence." But Beauvoir did not "appreciate the heroism of women working against constraints in a limited fashion: surviving domestic violence, facing yet another pregnancy, managing to support a family." Friedan, in turn, disagreed with Beauvoir's critique of capitalism; instead, she "was a reformist, wanting women to have opportunities equal to those of men within the existing structures of power." By 1975, when they met for the first time, "Friedan's conservatism . . . and her rejection of sexual politics—indeed, even of discussions of sexual identity—marked her as bourgeois and backward-looking." Beauvoir saw Friedan's ideas for reform as "reactionary, linked to a notion that 'women are doomed to stay at home.'" Both women virtually ignored the plight of the working class and avoided the subject of non-white women altogether.

Within "liberal and leftist academic circles, existentialism had, by the 1970s and 1980s, been pushed aside by deconstructionist and postmodern theory . . . Critics derided existentialism for its refusal to understand the science of signs, the ways in which the human individual is constructed and constrained by structures of thought." Nevertheless, Cotkin concludes that "existentialism is receiving renewed attention in American culture because it speaks to everyone's frustrations in life: to dissatisfaction with ideals of success and to the unavoidably tragic nature of existence." He hopes that we will be able to "pass through despair to, if not salvation, then to a depth of understanding that is at once humbling and enabling."

Despite its fascinating subject matter, Existential America suffers from a maddening repetitiveness. Particular words (e.g. "anguish" and "absurd") and phrases recur so frequently that one is forced to wonder whether the author lacks imagination or is simply insulting our intelligence. Many of the chapters began as articles in scholarly journals and magazines, and it shows. Although it is unfortunate that more attention was not paid to the overall coherence of the narrative, Existential America is a useful reference volume for students of philosophy and American culture.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

What's Your Poison?

Dale Pendell
Mercury House ($21.95)

by Sarah Fox

"Lastly, it was never my intention to write for everyone.
In which case, I would say, you have scored substantial success.
Thank you, Sweetheart. Good night now."

Thus ends the Preface to the long-awaited Pharmako/Dynamis, the second in a proposed trilogy of books investigating "the nature of poisons" by our favorite contemporary alchemist, Dale Pendell. Having read the brilliant Pharmako/Poeia, released by Mercury House in 1995, and then having re-read it several times, we celebrate the much-anticipated arrival of this equally brilliant second volume. We begin again to surreptitiously scan the seed selection at our local co-op (why are the Heavenly Blue Morning Glories always sold out?), and more closely peruse the Linnaean nomenclature of the plants offered up at our farmer's markets (e.g. the innocent-looking and seemingly ubiquitous "Angel's Trumpet," otherwise known as Datura, or Brugmansia, an important ingredient in the Voudun's zombie potion not to mention its notoriety as a potent hallucinogen whose use is generally discouraged by medical experts.)

And we recognize that mischievously intrusive italicized voice—"the ally," as Pendell calls it, or "Sweetheart"—who continues to shadow his scholarship, his method ("where possible, immersion"), and poetic discourse, into the Gnostic lore and language of "the poison path." The Poison, or pharmakon (Greek: poison, or king; the Eucharist, or Jesus; to Derrida, "the undecidable")—in other words, the drug (Middle English: drogge, dry; in a country where plants are "scheduled," I think many of us can appreciate this etymology)—is "both noxious and healing, medicine and bewitching charm, chemical reagent and the artist's colors." It is also the ally, and it talks. Pendell's preface is basically a warning: "Books themselves are poisons . . . A key is necessary to unlock the gate, but anyone is free to just walk around it. I call this technique 'autocryptosis.' It seems only fitting that a book about poisons ought to be poison itself."

Indeed, this book is not for everyone. The common reader will cast it aside as esoteric gibberish. The D.A.R.E. police will find it impossible to understand, least of all conveniently misinterpret. The recreational drug user will become swiftly bored by the lack of unmitigated encouragement and the consistent allegiance to botany, chemistry, spirituality, and history, not to mention there's poetry in it. All the better for those who've been waiting behind the tree line for a chance to linger, hoping to lay a hand on the key. Pendell writes in the first-person plural, putting the reader directly on the path with him. For some this may feel off-putting. Others understand. The gate is locked for a reason: poison is certainly democratic, but the path itself is the way of danger. As Gary Snyder notes in his foreword to Pharamko/Poeia: "This is a book about danger: dangerous knowledge, even more dangerous ignorance, and dangerous temptations by the seductions of addictions both psychic and cellular. It is a book which requires that one not be titillated by romantic ideas of self-destruction. I hope and believe it will benefit human beings and the plant world too. It is not for everyone—but neither is mountaineering."

Who, then, are these books for? If you're still asking this question, chances are they're not for you.

To follow the Way of Poisons, it is essential to learn about plants. As you learn about plants, you will, by the by, meet plant people. . . . In the old times it was not unusual for people to be turned into plants. The old plant doctors knew those stories. The old doctors talked to the plants directly. They knew. That this tree was a girl, that that flower had been a boy. Such things are still true. . . . Our Way, however, is not about being a plant person. Ours is the Poison Path.
--Pharmako/Poeia

Pharmako/Dynamis is an especially inadvisable read for the faint of heart as it showcases those poisons which are stimulants: "Excitantia" (Coffee, Tea, Chocolate, Maté, Kola, Betel, Ma Huang, Khat, Coca) and "Empathogenica" (Nutmeg, MDMA, Ecstasy, GHB.) Pendell has devised a sort of taxonomical mandala, the primary headings being Excitantia, Thanatopathia, Inebriantia, Euphorica, Phantastica, and further in a pentacle with subgroups and alchemical symbols relating to each subgroup. The third volume promises to explore the realm of Phantastica: the hallucinogens. We really hope we won't have to wait another seven years to read it. "There are those who believe we can live without plants. There is thus some urgency to our task. . . ." Yes. The book goes beyond plants, however, and spends some time in its latter third discussing the potential merits of chemical stimulants, such as MDMA, discovered by Sasha Shulgin. The facts around historical use of MDMA and Ecstasy, and how those chemicals became corrupted (chemically and politically) while plunging into the underground scene, is particularly engaging in Pendell's hands.

It seems important not to underestimate Pendell's implication of "poison." Paracelsus stated "Everything is poison, nothing is poison." He also wrote "It is the work of the alchemist to separate the poison from the arcanum." The original poison: Tree of Knowledge. Doctors, shamans, poets, chemists, herbalists, teachers, politicians: possible poisoners all. As Pendell states in "On the Nature of Poison," the introductory essay to Pharmako/Dynamis, "The pharmakon is both remedy and poison: a baneful drug or a medicinal restorative. Homer uses the word both ways." And he defines Pharmakodynamics as "the study of the effects and actions of drugs on living organisms." That means any drug, including spinach, Skittles, aspirin, that cup of coffee you had for breakfast this morning, your trusty Prozac.

Less rhapsodic, more politically charged and germane to the present social temper than Pharmako/Poeia, Pharmako/Dynamis elicits a historical connection between stimulants and capitalism (or simply industrialization), and as always, Pendell locates plants (poisons) firmly positioned at history's crossroads. "Age of Reason. Age of Stimulants. A reasonable universe replacing a rational cosmos. . . . Stimulants eclipsed the age of Exploration. Speed and destination instead of the meandering looking about of a scout in unmapped territory. A closing of periphery. Mercantilism. The trading ship: nothing to see on the voyage, nothing but straight ahead. Destination. Goal directed." Pendell opens the book with an investigation of coffee, tea, and cocoa arriving almost simultaneously to Europe by the late 1600s. By 1700 more than 3000 coffeehouses thrived in London and became meeting houses for the prominent men of the day. Voltaire, whom Pendell calls "the quintessential coffee-shaman," drank 72 cups of coffee a day (bested, of course, by Balzac.) Pendell finds it difficult to "separate the history of coffee from that of. . .the spice trade," which cast Europeans out into the East Indies and the New World on their various expeditions involving piracy, enslavement, and colonization. The desire to sweeten these bitter beverages led to further plundering abroad, namely in Polynesia and Africa, where it took ten times the number of slaves to produce sugar than to produce cotton or tobacco. Even earlier stimulant nations, such as the Aztec and Inca, exhibited a rejection of shamanistic communalism in favor of violent imperialism. Some readers may note the absence of matrilineal-based cultures in the stimulant narrative—the story of speed does seem to transpire mostly in Apollo's domain. We can assume Pendell will revisit Maria Sabina, whom we last met in the Salvia divinorum section of Pharmako/Poeia, along with a ramble through the Eleusinian fields, in volume three, the aptly titled Pharmako/Gnosis.

Our own culture embraces the stimulant to a religious degree, with every work place housing its coffee shrine, Meth the drug of choice among bored rural adolescents, and everybody wanting to get more done faster, absorb more information, beat the clock. "Speed has become our principal and ruling poison," Pendell notes. Stimulants are buoyant, sociable; they feed on capitalist structures because they make us believe we can steal more time. Stealing more time, obviously, means buying more money. The cover illustration for Pharmako/Dynamis, from the 16th-century Charta Lusoria by Jost Amman, shows a swashbuckling couple dancing with big clay pots on their heads—they whistle while they work. "That poisons are excessive is almost tautological," says Pendell. "In this case the poison path goes beyond aesthetics."

But can stimulants be metaphysically valuable? Can the plants and chemicals from which they come hold keys to deeper, more molecular exchanges; can these poisons also be allies on the path? Pendell shows us they can, when used wisely, with respect and attention toward dosage and intent (not to mention set and setting.) In an interview conducted by tripzine.com, Pendell says "I'm more inclined to look to old ways, the older traditions, natural societies, more anarchistically based cultures and looking back to pre-civilized models of society, less hierarchical things. We could say that civilization has come to mean an advanced developed state, but traditional societies were just as intricate and advanced in their way. Another way to look at civilization is that it's an anomalous condition that humans have been in for the last four-thousand years, which does not represent most of our lives—that of having a centralized state, of having standing armies, hierarchical social structures." There are patches of land left in the world where communities do continue to flourish within what might be defined as primitive constructs. Many indigenous cultures struggle to maintain their shamanic roots and their harmonic relationship with the plant world, despite the frequent introduction of Western value systems through missionaries or researchers. In South America—where native use of psychoactive plants has provoked excessive on-site scholarship over the past several decades—many plants currently abused in Western societies sustain their spiritual import to the natives.

An example of a plant whose status varies significantly depending on the culture using it is the coca leaf, which remains important to indigenous South Americans. The coqueros in the Andes carry coca leafs with them on their treks and sometimes mix lime paste into their quids. Coca tea is Bolivia's national beverage, and the leaves are sold to tourists as a cure for motion sickness. The coca plant has served South America, "as food, as medicine, and as a central ritual of communal spirit," for five million years. Yet its abuse in the United States is legendary. Pendell writes at length about Reagan's role in the importation of cocaine (and the development of crack) to the United States, and his subsequent waging of "the war on drugs" (after media hysteria covered up the political atrocities raging on Central America, and as a potential excuse for later intervention in South America.) Even if you already know that the war on drugs is a smokescreen, that your kids are being brainwashed at school, that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Pendell's telling is remarkable in its generosity and scope. He's sensible, as well as literary and intellectual. On top of being a poet (he's published seven books of verse), Pendell is also a computer scientist and an ethnobotanist. He knows what he's talking about, and he's unbelievably eloquent. Then again, he does do drugs. But so do we, and Pendell is as gentle and wise a guide as they come. His intent is to bring to his discourse a grounding in both science and higher spirituality and show how, through his alchemical lyricism, their union can be raised to the level of magic: Gnostic wisdom and shamanism. In the aforementioned interview, Pendell says "My whole project is to subvert the way we think, the way we look at the world, and my two targets are, on the one hand scientism which has a reductionist/materialist approach and would 'dis' this whole discussion, and on the other hand, the naively uncritical new-age thought that is dismissive of the scientific tradition. My whole program. . .is a kind of wager that poetic logic is a truer description, a more complete description of the world than a purely scientific description. But at the same time, the scientific tradition has to be incorporated into it. Trying to pull these two currents in the western tradition back into each other. I think the culture needs that. It's a kind of disease we have."

If our culture is diseased—and I think few would argue that it isn't—Pendell offers a possible and sensible approach to the cure, even if we shirk away from immersion. Perhaps the most interesting, and surprising, essay in Pharmako/Dynamis is "Stealing from Tomorrow," in which Pendell seemingly narrates a personal recovery from freebase overload. Even here redemption can be earned, can be "part of the path," and he persists in his resolve that the poison cannot be blamed for its misuse. He ends this essay with

There is a spring. It comes out of the rocks on a high ridge dividing two great watersheds. The water is very cold and is pure beyond any other. It may be the only thing in the world that is not poison. It is surely the only thing in the world that can save your life. I'm not going to tell you where it is, but you know how to find it.

In other words, physician heal thyself. The essay immediately following "Stealing from Tomorrow" is, appropriately, "Wandering and the Vision Quest," a poetic and fragmented discourse on the hermetics of healing and shamanism.

The book is a veritable catalog of facts, ponderings, beautiful illustrations, and poetry, with quotations ranging from Bach to Nietzsche to the Aztec poet Nezahualcoyotl. Each plant receives its Correspondences (e.g. Coffea Arabica, listed in part below:)

MACHINE: Calculator
METAL: Silver
METAPHOR: Measure
MUSICAL INSTRUMENT: Boatswain's whistle
MYTH: Golden Fleece
MYTHIC HERO: Faust
NUMBER: Zero
OUT-OF-BODY REALM: Realm of Infinite Structure
PHASE OF COITUS: Arousal
PHYSICAL CONSTANT: Placnk/h
PLANET: Sun
POISON: Single Vision
QUARK: Up
REALM OF PLEASURE: Brain
RITUAL EVENT: Caucus
SEXUAL POSITION: Missionary
SIGN: Canis Major
TAROT KEY: Chariot
TOOL: Chart/Map
VIRTUE: Fortitude
VOWEL: Middle Front/e

Sub-headings for each plant include "Parts Used," "History," "Signatures," "Taxonomy," "Chemistry and Pharmacology," etc., and these are interspersed and revisited throughout each section. In his preface, Pendell says the book's structure "is three-dimensional and holographic. Start anywhere. Read backwards. A book is linear by nature, but that is only a single projection—other cut-ups might make more sense." Like a cookbook or a dictionary, it is the kind of text one will open to different places for different needs; it is a reference guide, but reading it from cover to cover is also among the most pleasurable reading experiences we've had in a very long time.

A green ribbon appears conspicuously on the spine of Pharmako/Dynamis, indicating, as we learn from the author's bio, that "Dale Pendell supports the Green Ribbon campaign to free the green prisoners. DIY." The only way to learn the poison path is DIY, immersion, and if we're lucky, by the by, we'll meet a fellow poisoner who's one step ahead with a tip or two to share. Plants are the principal teachers. They have a language, and Pendell gets as close as anybody has to transcribing the way that language might look and sound. The path is not about excess or merely recreation. It is, essentially, about death. We are mortal to be sure, but there are systems, laws, ideologies, and contrivances that limit our potential for transcendence. Do plants hold a key? Pendell examines the idea of death both metaphorically and literally. A few of these poisons could actually kill you, but the chances are unlikely if they're used responsibly. Many, if not most, of them benefit the body medicinally as well as psychically. The kind of death more likely to result from walking the poison path—aside from the obligatory "death of the ego"—is the gradual demise of a way of life, of living in disharmony with not only plants but other humans as well. The dissolution of the manufactured selves which separate us from each other and from our natural world. How long will this take? According to Pendell, the future bodes "hard times for large mammals." Will the real poison please stand up?

This is a brilliant, necessary book. There is genius to Pendell's approach, an erudite playfulness and poetic virtuosity unmatched by anyone writing about plants and drugs today. Pendell's books present a Pandora's box, and once opened, the steadfast and curious reader will soon find herself on the path. ("Opening the jar is the Hermetic pursuit.") Her way of looking at the world becomes spectacularly subverted; the poisons, after all, are greater than the human concepts which categorize and consume them, and they can and will live on without us. Has our existence become so clogged with its own stubbornness as to have eliminated the capacity to hear these ally ambassadors who call out from a world where, according to Pendell, "winds and ocean currents are intersynaptic fluids?" Are poisons involved in expanding our perception of the world and our role in its system, do they hold alchemical keys imperative to our continued survival on the planet? Are they worth the risk? We think perhaps so. Good night now.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

Aaron Cometbus
Last Gasp ($14.95)

by Jocko Weyland

Just after Ronald Reagan's first inauguration, Aaron Cometbus and his friend Jesse decided to start a fanzine. They were thirteen years old. A year later Jesse moved away but Cometbus kept going and has now been regularly self-published for twenty years, garnering a widespread following that falls outside of any conventional demographic. The new anthology Despite Everything collects selections from the "ultra-rare and embarrassing early issues" (with names like Impending Doom) to the current, mature Cometbus. It covers the arc of a hitchhiking, dumpster diving, sleeping-under-garages-and-waking-up-covered-by-ants existence through an unorthodox voice that is just as concerned with all things punk as it is with appreciating the splendors of the wider world.

At the same time Aaron started the zine he was in his first band. Sample lyrics: "Feudal aristocracy was not the only class, ruined by bourgeoisie, shove it Marx, up your ass." Combetbus's roots are the exciting and unprecedented burgeoning of American hardcore music in the early '80s and a fantasy land called Berkeley, where six levels of Swahili were on the curriculum at the high school and bands like Fish of Death played exclusively in parking garages. The handwritten text and poor-quality photocopying of the early issues communicate the raw sense of possibility that punk promised then with a visceral punch. Over time the band news fell away and Cometbus became a much more personal project, turning to sharp and witty observations of the punk scene and America's hidden nooks and crannies. These autobiographical stories are full of a literary talent not usually associated with scrappy zines featuring reviews of greasy spoons in Asheville, North Carolina and tales about finding graffiti under bridges and meeting up with macrobiotic-diet bomb throwing fanzine editor skaters in Las Vegas.

In the introduction the author perfectly describes the cornerstones of Despite Everything's appeal and value. Cometbus, he writes, is "About the desire to look and see. To fully engage and explore, to document, challenge, demand or maybe just appreciate," and its mission is "Making your own fun . . . taking the lifestyle, perspective, and attitude of punk and applying it to real life." While these may not seem like goals that would produce compelling writing, they are manifested with a virtuosity that has produced a serial novel of distinction. It is one that takes the punk program to heart and applies it to a changing and complicated world in which things aren't as simple as they were when Aaron's friend Kevin really stood out at his Bar Mitzvah because no one else in the synagogue had a Mohawk.

Much of the content follows a wandering path through the back alleys and squats of an America unknown to most. Along the way Cometbus often works the graveyard shift at copy shops, when "wingnuts come in to Xerox tinfoil." Aaron's metier is an acute observation of and interaction with the unseen, nighttime side of humanity. It's being at Dan's Donut Bar in Arcata, California after a midnight walk and playing chess until "Greasy-eyed glazed dude" on four hits of acid demands his chessboard back. It's going through forty states in six months using a Greyhound ticket scam. Throughout (with the blocky handwriting and comics and Xerox graphics intact) is an appreciation of life's small pleasures—drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, finding worthless antique bottles in the trash and having great hopes of romance for the beautiful young girl wearing a Ramones shirt in some small town, only to watch her get on a different bus. He is willing to put himself out there with hardly any money and not enough food, displaying a kind of asceticism that is partially a badge of honor but makes for a good life lived to its fullest. Cometbus captures the everyday combination of hope, desire and depression and has an exquisite sensitivity to the "small pleasures that quench your thirst for life, and wash down those big disappointments."

One of the main themes of the anthology is punk's communal ethos. At one point while living in a Berkeley house, Aaron and his friends share what little they have: "Plus, I had a friend who worked at the bakery and kicked down the leftovers." In that house he writes by candlelight because they don't have power, and even if that seems like a parody it is exactly how you imagine the bard of punk toiling on his samizdat masterpieces. He states "Well, I'm not opposed to working. I suppose I'd work if we had a two day work week, workers owned the means of production, wealth was distributed equally, etc." That might come across as laughable, but Cometbus has made a functioning life out of refusal and there is something admirable and enviable about his success at not capitulating and staying free.

"Maybe punk rock is a religion. I know I'm indebted to it for saving me." Punk rock is the guiding light of redemption through an uncaring and incomprehensible society. It has morals, a collective consciousness, a code to live by—and Cometbus strives to keep that spirit alive. His religion is based on "people in bands who worked hard, had guts and humor, and set an example by the way they talked and moved and sang." He is a purist and believes fanzines have been instrumental in shaping identity and making connections and forming the movement. Cometbus consistently refers to the heady inception of punk culture and continues to be a fitting tribute and continuation of those beginnings.

The collective nature of the enterprise demands the inclusion of artwork and stories from many different contributors over the years. They are integral parts of the whole, but the real strength is Aaron's straightforward and spare articulation of the pull between traveling and experience and staying home and putting down roots. A less criminally minded Jack Black for the end of the twentieth century, he tells of getting off the bus in Missoula just after the sun comes up and walking through piles of leaves while worrying about packs of rabid dogs, then going to the library to read all day. In Billings someone calls his name and it's twins he knows from Seattle who save the day. He sees the clowns getting off work and walking their dogs, and has a horrible Thanksgiving in Cleveland where he ends up at the church having dinner with the other lost people with nowhere else to go. There is plenty of solitude but it is often counterbalanced by the rewards of genuine engagement and friendship. And always there is that singularly evocative voice, describing "the Central Valley with its dry heat and smells of orchids and olives" and summing up Portland succinctly: "It started out as a bad mood and slowly grew into a city."

Cometbus is often nostalgic in the sense of acknowledging the sadness of the past passing without proclaiming that it was better. It is a celebration of places full of hopeful and noble suffering, as when Aaron tells a gathering in Pacific Grove about the great punk scene there in the mid-'80s that the new guard know nothing about. "In a way it was depressing, but in a way it was funny and profound. Anyway, it was time to get beer." In a manner that "we" can relate to and enjoy, Cometbus has written about that common striving toward worthy goals while ruefully suspecting that they are probably doomed to failure.

A culmination of this romantic mixture of hope for the future and longing for the past comes in an account of going on tour with his old friends in the band Green Day, just as they were becoming successful to an extent no thirteen year-old hardcore kid in the Reagan era would have ever imagined. It is a sentimental education, coming to terms with "How growing up punk, you have all these rigid ideas about how to live, the way the world works, then experience comes along to make mincemeat out of your morals." That bittersweet observation isn't just about what happened with Green Day. It's about the compromises that come with leaving adolescence, the fundamental dilemma and challenge of "growing up punk," and youthful idealism in general. What do you do later? Even those who are not punk at all can appreciate how as an adult Aaron Cometbus wrestles with that question, while drinking in Despite Everything's unique and important sensibility.

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Koigi wa Wamwere
Seven Stories Press ($15.95)

by Kevin Carollo

I suffered a prison and detention term, but that is out of the past and I am not going to remember it . . . If I wronged you forgive me, if you wronged me, I forgive you . . . Let us forgive and forget.
—Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's first independent President, speaking to British settlers after being released from colonial detention

When people forget the lessons of history, nothing is too evil to be reenacted.
—Koigi wa Wamwere

Colonialism is alive and well in Africa. Its legacy is clearly witnessed in the mindsets and policies of postcolonial leaders who have accumulated great wealth and worked to silence the plurality of voices necessary to a nation's vitality. Leaders, including Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, currently engaged in a civil war since Mobutu's overthrow four years ago), Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (still in power), Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi (deceased), Sani Abacha of Nigeria (deceased), Mwai Kibaki of Kenya (still in power), and so on, have reenacted the colonial order of affairs, typically for the benefit of capitalist interests abroad. On the eves of independence across Africa, the people anticipated liberation from the yoke of colonial influence, and they received more of the same treatment.

In the decades following the era of colonization, it has become incumbent on African writers to articulate the legacy of colonial culture on the minds of Africans. Many have done so at the risk of detention, torture, and death. In articulating the general shift from colonial oppressions to their postcolonial simulacra, the question of freedom has remained paramount in contemporary African writing. We often talk about liberation and freedom these days, with Western leaders antsy for armed conflict among the most vociferous. The current state of the world forces us to pose a number of serious questions surrounding its prospects for freedom: What is the value of liberty taken for granted? Do words such as "liberation" and "freedom" embody more than a rhetorical valence today? What does it take to make such words signify something concrete and meaningful in postcolonial Africa?

If anyone can provide insight into the complexity of these questions, it would have to be Koigi wa Wamwere, the Kenyan activist who has spent thirteen years in prison since the mid-1970s. His autobiography, I Refuse to Die: My Journey for Freedom, was written "for those who value freedom more than power." Initially imprisoned by Kenyan's first postcolonial leader, Jomo Kenyatta, and then suffering multiple detentions under Kenyatta's successor, Daniel arap Moi, Koigi has experienced the various constraints of colonial rule within and without Kenyan prison walls. Whether as a member of Kenya's parliament or as an exile in Norway, he has lived with perennial death threats because of his belief in a Kenya—and an Africa—that truly operates "post" its colonial legacy. The publication of I Refuse to Die provides strong testament to his search for an independent Africa in more than just name. His struggle contains multitudes, and reflects a continental effort to move beyond colonial modes of existence and ethnic rivalries.

I Refuse To Die has a more personal and wide-ranging scope than his 1988 account of his first two detentions, Conscience on Trial (thankfully still in print from Africa World Press, Inc.). Though he re-covers this period of his life, the treatment has a very different feel; the same poems included in both books have different wording, for example. But mostly the shift in narrative effect stems from his lengthy description of the years leading up to his first detention, beginning with chapters entitled "A Kenyan Timeline" and "Childhood 1949-58." With the extensive exposition of growing up in the colonial era—roughly a third of the book—I Refuse To Die offers a more detailed historical context for contemporary Kenyan politics than its predecessor. Once the narrative arrives at the 1980s, things begin to move fast, and Koigi becomes increasingly focused on the juridical nature of his life in prison and exile.

Occasionally, one would like I Refuse To Die to offer more "reflection on" and less "detailing of." What the narrative sometimes lacks in pacing, however, it makes up for in the compelling treatment of how Koigi's life comes to represent the persecution of many, how his survival acquires a curious symbolic resonance for postcolonial Africa as a whole. Like many of its great writers who have endured torture and detention—including Nigerians Wole Soyinka and Ken Saro-Wiwa (the latter was eventually hanged by the Abacha regime, despite international outcry), Malawian Jack Mapanje, fellow Kenyan Ngugi wa Th'iongo, South Africans Jeremy Cronin, Molefe Pheto, Breyten Breytenbach, Ruth First (killed in 1982 by a mail bomb), et al., and so on—Koigi both benefits from and comes under suspicion due to widespread public recognition of his writing and actions. He refuses to die, and his persecutors refuse to kill him—a struggle between freedom and power that often lasts for decades. As in the case of Hastings Banda, Robert Mugabe, and Jomo Kenyatta, some African leaders who detain political prisoners do so after having spent many years imprisoned by colonial regimes—a fact that gives the prison itself a curious symbolic resonance for postcolonial Africa, to say the least.

The Kenyan postcolonial mimicry of colonial order even extends to the roles of prison guards, such that those who guarded Mau Mau dissidents in the colonial era continue working for the independent government. During Koigi's first incarceration in the '70s, a Corporal Kethore asks long-time detainee Achieng Oneko whether he remembers a 1953 flight to Lamu Island Colonial Prison: "When Oneko said he did, Kethore admitted that he was a prison escort in that flight! These askaris were the direct link between the colonial government and the Kenyatta regime."

Many of Koigi's personal encounters with the inheritors of colonial detention reinforce this connection:

"In detention I also met a warden, Kariuki wa Ricu, who boasted of taking part in the hunt for Mau Mau freedom fighters. When he caught Mau Mau, he said, he beheaded them and took their bleeding heads to his white bosses for money."

. . .

"Dr. Bowry bragged that however he badly he treated us, there was nothing we could ever do to him. After all, he asked, what are you? In the colonial detention, I gave Kenyatta water. What did he do to me when he became president? I am still here and will do to you what I want."

. . .

"Another MP [Member of Parliament] had earlier told me how this Kiereini worked as a screener in colonial detention camps like Manyani prison."

These anecdotal links between colonial and postcolonial governments bring home a salient point of regime change: those who inherit or overthrow a corrupt system of government will replicate the corruption of that system—the recognition of which forces us to complicate any notions of independence or liberation. As a consequence, the imperative of saying no, of refusing to die, continues: "I thought, maybe nobody will kill me if I refuse to die. Whenever death beckoned, I would simply say no."

Westerners are willfully ignorant of how a century of colonialism and Cold War has created and enabled the dictatorial regimes of contemporary Africa. But rather than simply blame the era of colonialism for the subsequent problems of contemporary Kenya, and in addition to articulating how the psychology of colonial times continues to operate in the minds of Kenyans, Koigi depicts how indigenous African cultures persist despite the incursion of colonialism. The abundance of Gikuyu proverbs throughout his autobiography suggests that the most accessible forms of resistance lie in indigenous solutions that antedate and have co-existed with colonial rule.

Koigi's lengthy descriptions of family and compatriots serve to illustrate how his suffering has always encompassed an entire people. At the beginning of the text, he asserts: "Among our people, life does not begin at birth." When asked who he was before he was born, his mother explains:

You were my father. That is why I called you him.
Before him, did I live?
Yes, you did.
Have I always lived and shall not die?
People do not die, she said, we only move from one form of life to another and from one world to another. Life does not begin at birth and it does not end with death.

In addition to Gikuyu and Swahili sayings, Koigi includes myriad stories, speeches, and voices to maintain the sense of life as extending beyond the borders of the self. The integration of familial, political, and cultural dimensions of existence does not always occur as effectively as it does here. The collective protests of mothers like Koigi's include such tactics as hunger strikes, public nakedness, and symbolic chaining in court. Their voices are heard loud and clear in I Refuse to Die: "We will remain chained as long as our sons languish in prison. Colonialists put us in chains. Our leaders continue to put us in chains."

Colonialism may be alive and well in Africa, but so are those who say no to it. I Refuse To Die stands as a passionate and poignant testimony to the struggle of one man—and by that I also mean one family and one people—to remember and survive the evil lessons of history. But it is also much more than that. Koigi wa Wamwere, in life and print, challenges us to make freedom a word that means something tangible for all.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

Matthew Derby
Little, Brown and Company ($13.95)

by Joel Turnipseed

Matt Derby is twisted. Then again, so is our world, if you take the time to look at it—and through the lenses of Derby's imagination, it takes on an eccentric quality as well. This collection of some ways linked, some ways not, stories are all of a theme: a grim, dystopic society constructed of pop-icon tropes and futuristic extensions of the 20th century's worst horrors that nevertheless finds within itself astonished moments of shimmering hilarity. Mostly, however, it's a grim world depicted in Super Flat Times, which begins with the killing of the men, strongest first, then the rest: "When the heavy ones were all accounted for, they took men who struggled, men who hid, men with sharp tongues, men with hair on their backs, men named Kevin. The men who did not resist, the men who were willing to die, were sent off to fight wars instead." So it goes, with a certain logic that wouldn't find itself totally outside the pale in certain advanced marketing studies or RAND strategic papers.

Like the art of Takashi Murakami (though Derby owes as much to the writer, Haruki), Derby has determined that the fantastic and terrible horror that inheres in our insatiable thirst for kitsch-pop and readily-available consumerism is interesting both as a medium for art and also as something begging to be flipped into disaster. Just as the old Japanese eccentric painters (from whom, along with anime masters like Kanada, Murakami took a lot of his inspiration) could take something as lovely as a plum tree and view it in such a way that it takes an ominous turn across the screens on which it's painted—rending, for example an ordinary Edo-period motif into a dark phantasm—so Derby, in "The Boyish Mulatto," turns our increasingly post-post work life into the scary absurdity it already is:

At the center my colleagues and I taught people different techniques of coaching food, getting the best performance out of a meal. This type of eating was called 'Eating,' and it involved an intricate set of stances that are illegal now. Our goal, stressed in the grueling two-hour instruction tape, was to teach people how to work in the table, the whole room. It was a lifestyle.

Still, for all its weirdness (and there's plenty), there's a tenderness in Super Flat Times that infuses the collection with hardy doses of well-wrought humanity. There's the orphaned boy, now raised by a surrogate robot father, who can relive the past with the Father Helmet—only to betray the mundane existence of his real father by imagining the fun he had with the robot dad instead. Similarly, in the final appeal of the book, the collection's narrator asks us to carry on the work of translating the horrors that we've long since forgotten how to put into words.

Derby's Super Flat Times are strange ones—but strange with the familiarity of our everyday, suffused with the tenderness that comes from being aware of just how fragile our lives are, and the dark foreboding that precedes the recognition of a vast, unrecoverable disaster. These stories crackle and grumble with a future that is already beside us, waiting for us to look out the corner of our eye to notice it.

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Jenny Davidson
Soft Skull Press ($14)

by Liz Brown

"I'm a person who feels emotion like a punch in the stomach," says Elizabeth Mann, the acerbic 25-year-old narrator of Jenny Davidson's first novel Heredity. Judging from the spare, blunt prose, the heroine took her slug to the gut sometime before the story begins and is still coughing, as if the quickest route to oxygen were the unadorned declarative sentence "I double-check the address, I climb the stairs, I ring the bell at reception, I speak to the manager." The stripped-down style evokes classic hard-boiled parlance, but Elizabeth still gives us the nudge, confessing to her lover's wife that she wants to write a detective novel: "Noir. Raymond Chandler. Chester Himes. Derek Raymond. Robbe-Grillet and the French new novel. No psychology. Lots of brutal sex and violence."

But what the brooding American Elizabeth really wants is her smug, adoring paramour, reproductive-health specialist Gideon Streetcar, to impregnate her with the clone of notorious 18th-century racketeer Jonathan Wild. Dispatched to London to produce copy for a budget travel series, Elizabeth happens upon Wild's skeleton among the medical curiosities at the Hunterian Museum. She also happens upon the water-damaged diary of Wild's wife, Mary, who, starting with her birth in Newgate prison, possesses a set of misfortunes worthy of Moll Flanders. Fueled by an obsession with these artifacts and a pointedly oblique aversion to her father, a famous fertility guru—"Heredity is overrated," Elizabeth tells Gideon—the novel's 21st-century narrator sets about to bear the child of "the sexy eighteenth-century organized crime guy."

Its outlandish premise notwithstanding, Heredity sidesteps time-travel and science-fiction genres, one hand reaching for the crime novel and the other tightly clutching 18th-century British memoir. The shift in form lets air into Mary Wild's narrative, and the prose expands with descriptive paragraphs and juicy period squalor. Davidson's pleasure in her research is palpable; the 18th-century narrator dispenses home-grown treatments for jaundice and rubs elbows with sundry underworld sorts—brawling blackguards, termagant aunts, and even a snappish writer named Daniel Defoe.

In addition to Defoe, Davidson seeds the book with references to British novelists—Charles Dickens, Muriel Spark, Georgette Heyer, Laurence Sterne—but with two savvy heroines vying for the attentions of preoccupied men, the novel recalls not one Fielding but two: Henry and Helen. (For good measure, the author splices in quotes from John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Separated by locution and nearly 300 years, garrulous Mary Wild and taciturn Elizabeth Mann share a penchant for comic raunch; Mary yearns for "the rudder of [Wild's] affections" and Elizabeth wryly notes the bulge of Gideon's asthma inhaler before their first conjugal throes against a display case of medical instruments.

As detective fiction goes, the suspense is muted, with much dialogue devoted to the psychology and ethics of genetic engineering. Dramatic portent is propelled not by the characters' actions but by the longueurs of in vitro fertilization and book restoration. Heredity's page-turning passages belong to narrative digression, to Elizabeth's fetishization of medical history, complete with primers on exhumation and embalming.

Despite its profusion of bookish forbears, Heredity suggests kinship with a visual artist, formaldehyde aficionado Damien Hirst, whose installation "Love Lost" features a rust-encrusted gynecologist chair in a fish-filled aquarium. Like the grotesque decay and medical paraphernalia contained within one of the notorious Young British Artist's sleek vitrines, Davidson's curious literary hybrid is at once creepy, comic, and sterile.

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Kristen den Hartog
MacAdam/Cage Publishing ($24)

by Kris Lawson

The Perpetual Ending is a powerful book about small things, the things that resonate when one looks back at the past. As the novel opens, Jane, the narrator, finds herself stuck in a motel room. She is halfway between her childhood home and the apartment she shared with her lover. Appropriately, the first half of her narrative addresses Eugenie, her missing twin; the second half addresses her lover Simon, to whom she has lied about her past.

Drifting from flashback to stream of consciousness to story-within-the-story telling, not until the end does Jane make it clear whether Eugenie was real or another facet of herself. Jane prefers to think of the two of them as characters from her mother's stories: One and Tother, Chang and Eng, the Platonic whole divided. Jane even hates her name because it reminds her of her sister. "I would not have chosen a name that began with J, which was not even formally accepted into the alphabet until the nineteenth century. For hundreds of years it was simply the consonant form of I, a ghostly twin struggling for its own place."

Den Hartog has a spare narrative style, which includes humorous touches that lighten the grim story of why Jane has rejected her past. Without elaborate prose, she conveys the bright memories of Jane's childhood, shiny and glowing like the horns with which the characters of Jane's stories are burdened. In these works, Jane's loneliness, guilt, and rage are transformed into disturbing fairy tales for children. Each story she tells contains fragments of her past and images from her own and her mother's stories, recombined so as to convey triumph mixed with regret, as if to say nothing in life is free from contamination. But Jane attempts to keep the contamination of her painful past in her fiction; she rarely even admits to herself that her parents are still alive.

Jane's characters are usually girls with horns in their foreheads or sticking out of their spines, who have dry skin like sandpaper that no one wants to touch or who concoct enormous lies to keep people at a distance. They make fairy-tale choices and are unhappy with the results; luckily for them, in fairy-tale fashion they can go back to the way they were. In one way these fairy tale characters are all the same girl, but in another way they are all trying to change the past for Jane, rewriting the end of the story again and again, until she can put it behind her and move on: "time can move so slowly you don't even notice it going by, but it tricks you. Other than dying, there's nothing you can ever do to stop it."

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Uma Paramesweran
Broken Jaw Press ($15)

by Michelle Reale

In Mangoes on the Maple Tree, Canadian writer Uma Parameswaran gives us a forceful yet profound look at an Indian-Canadian family. The characters here negotiate the ordinary travails of daily life while acutely conscious of the one thing many people are hardly aware of: their national identities.

Paramesweran sets two family's lives, the Bhaves and their slightly more domestically challenged cousins the Moghes, amidst the 1997 floods in Winnipeg. Initially readers might feel as though they have begun reading a psychological study of a typical working class family, but slowly and with great skill, Parameswaran—a writer incredibly adept at subterfuge--shows that the conflicts are both internal and external, personal and political. Concurrently, each character struggles with a sense of duty to self, family and country. All the while, the flood rages on, a perfect metaphor for waters that both destroy and cleanse, that provide fear and challenges but at the same time opportunities and second chances.

There are times during Mangoes on the Maple Tree when one wishes for more "silent" space, where we might get a better look at the internal life of Parameswaran's characters—because they are, to the author's credit, so fascinating and multi-dimensional, one longs to "see" them away from the conflicted crowd. Instead we hear nearly everything through a copious amount of dialogue that occasionally wearies and obfuscates a point, paradoxically, by being too direct. Sometimes the dialogue and banter between and amongst characters seems forced and borders on the polemical, but that is a small flaw, compared to the graceful and intriguing story line and the suspenseful and satisfying finish. This is the story of two families that not only dive deep into dangerous waters, but surface and live to tell the tale.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003