Jerome Rothenberg
Wesleyan University Press ($24.95)

by Jay Besemer

I had thought for a long time of preparing a book of selected translations and was faced again and again by the dilemma of where translations end and my other writings begin . . . . I have had a need (I emphasize: a need) to translate and, by translating, to connect with the work and the thought of other poets—a matter of singular importance to me in what I have long taken to be my "project" and the central activity of my life as a poet.
—Jerome Rothenberg

“Selected works” volumes are often challenging for their authors, as Jerome Rothenberg suggests above, but for readers, especially those seeking a good overview of a person's oeuvre, they can be extremely valuable. Writing Through, which covers Rothenberg's masterful "translations and variations" of the works of other poets, is an unusual collection, as is fitting for a poet of unusual range. In a sense, these provide a much more intimate portrait of Jerome Rothenberg than that offered by his original poems—whatever "original" might mean for a poet whose process involves an active dialogue with otherness, whether cultural or outside the conventional definition of poetry or language, having little relation to the popular "hermetic" notion of poetic composition.

Focusing on translations allows readers to gain an appreciation of Jerome Rothenberg as a poet, certainly, but also (and perhaps more intriguingly) as an editor and above all, as a reader of poetry. (This word, "reader," is inadequate especially when discussing Rothenberg's translations of non-written or non-verbal poetry, so it must be understood here as meaning something more akin to participant.) Writing Through is a great help to those who may be unfamiliar with Rothenberg's large, exciting, translation-heavy anthologies, such as Technicians of the Sacred and the two-volume Poems for the Millennium.

One particularly engaging aspect of Writing Through is the occasional commentary introducing sections of work or illuminating individual poems. This is an area in which we clearly see Rothenberg-as-reader, as he lets us inside his translation process. Translation begins with the reading or experience of what is being translated, of course; depending on one's relationship to the language, the first translation any work receives is the private, "silent" one taking place in the mind of the translator. In his commentaries, Rothenberg gives us a glimpse into not only his process of choosing how to render his translations, but also lets us in on the very private experience of a poet encountering what would be, in many cases, life-changing poems. Poets speak like lovers in discussing what other poets and poetries mean to them, because love is the foundation of that meaning, in many ways. It may be mixed with intellectual interpretation, philosophical coloring, or political concerns, but underneath all of that is the original passion which demands that the poet form the ongoing relationship to the work which is essential to the translation process.

Consider the emphasized word in Rothenberg's "Pre-Face": need. The most careful and passionate translators of poets can only be other poets. Tristan Tzara wrote, in the 1940s, of "poetic necessity," and this is the need that Rothenberg identifies; for poet/translators the need may be magnified and intensified by a kind of desperation or frustration at the unavailability of beloved poets in one's home language. When the poetry in question is dynamic, alive, and unconstrained by the narrative conventions of the English language (and the Cartesian obsession for the rational in European literature)—specifically, in Rothenberg's ethnopoetic work—this passionate/poetic necessity becomes even clearer.

The effectiveness of Rothenberg's translations derives in large part from the sense of need which drove them. Without that need the result would have been cold texts—reports, accounts, records—and not poems. Whether the poetic ethnography is more accurate than the "objective" is a fine and fascinating debate. However, Rothenberg prefers to focus on the poetry itself and on its making. His translation never cheats the reader out of the imaginative experience, nor does it claim some faux-scientific distancing, and yet it is respectful and an act of honoring in itself. More than that, it contains information, often in great detail. Look at this section from the sequence "15 Flower World Variations," based on Yaqui Deer Dance songs:

o flower fawn
about to come out playing
in this flower water
out there
in the flower world
the patio of flowers
in the flower water
playing
flower fawn
about to come out playing
in this flower water

This "variation" preserves and carries forward the Yaqui love for the deer honored in the Deer Dance, the sense of unity in the many worlds of the Yaqui culture, and the feeling of the dance itself, in the cyclical repetitions of phrases. But it is clearly not meant to be a narrative or observational record of a dance ritual event. The event, the dance, makes itself felt through the arrangement of the lines, choices of certain words, etc., all of which are standard elements of poetic composition and entirely within the hands of the poet.

Jerome Rothenberg is one of a very few contemporary U.S. poets who really examine, explore, and explode the question, "What is poetry and what is it for?" His answers are constantly evolving and always compelling. Writing Through shares some of those answers, and leaves readers themselves asking good questions. Through the work of poets like Rothenberg, poetry is immediate, ever new, and necessary.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Fathom
Black Square Editions ($12.95)

Neo-Surrealism; or, the Sun at Night: Transformations of Surrealism in American Poetry 1966-1999
Black Square Editions ($7)
Andrew Joron

by Noah Eli Gordon

Hovering somewhere in the ether, outside of any tangible definitions, the practice of Neo-Surrealism takes place, and Andrew Joron is both participant and elucidator. He uses the term for the title of his essay, Neo-Surrealism; or, The Sun at Night, which originally appeared in Talisman and was recently published in an expanded, 59-page edition. Subtitled "Transformations of Surrealism in American Poetry 1966-1999," the essay acts as a primer, introducing key figures whose work is exemplary of the disparate reach of Surrealism's influence on, and effluence through, postwar American poetry. From the aesthetic stasis of the Chicago Surrealist Group's orthodox interpretation to the maverick discursiveness of Will Alexander's ranging oeuvre, Joron documents the important texts of individual writers, sampling some of their work and tracing connections to ancillary disciplines. Additionally, seminal journals and presses connected to the various poets and varied practices of Neo-Surrealism are given ample coverage.

Early in the essay, Joron explains, "surrealism does not levitate above History; the shape of surrealist subversion shifts according to the contours of the surrounding landscape." It is such a shift that informs Fathom, Joron's third collection of poetry. Wholly attuned to the original revolutionary impetus behind the often-invoked imperative with which Breton ends Nadja—"Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all"—Fathom embraces the move from classic surrealism (the creation of the inapprehensible image or object through radical juxtaposition) to the employment of negation, abstraction, and modulation to conjure and shape paradox. The necessity for this furthering of surrealist practice is touched on in the poem "Mazed Interior," which, like many within the book, is simultaneously an ethics and poetics: "Time to try the knot, the Not / Or to be caught / Forever in nerve-traceries of Beauty."

Although adherent to beauty, as darkly as it may manifest itself within the book, Fathom is concerned with more than pure aesthetics, preferring to push through and display the "victorious banner raised above the toppled state." In fact, he opens the book with an essay entitled "The Emergency," which begins with the question, "What good is poetry at a time like this?" Interestingly, and indicative of Joron's own poetic approach, the essay oscillates between exposition and a more enigmatic, cracked-open writing, allowing for the emergence of an "other" or aleatoric meaning, a space which essentially enacts the content of the essay's more easily parsed prose:

American poetry is a marginal genre whose existence is irrelevant to the course of Empire. Yet here, only here, at this very juncture between language and power, can the refused word come back to itself as the word of refusal, as the sign of that which cannot be assimilated to the system—

Word that opens a solar eye in the middle of the Night.

Opens, but fails to dispel the dark. Of necessity, perhaps, because it fails necessity itself. Opens, if only to make an O, an indwelling of zero, an Otherness.

This "otherness" constitutes the spirit with which Joron constellates different texts, concepts, thinkers and artists, covering an expanse from philosophic and phenomenological discourse, from Jakob Boehme's term for negation and relative nothingness, Ungrund, Newton's absolutes in Principia, the conundrum of Fatum and all of its multiple meanings, to Dada and saxophonist Eric Dolphy. Yet, as in the work of Olsen and Pound, or Howe and Mackey, these things inform but do not overshadow the book. One needn't be steeped in history or the philosophy of science, Joron's own education, to engage with it. There is, in fact, something congruous to conceptual art underlining the construction of the book. Following "The Emergency" there are four further subdivisions: the title poem, which fluctuates between the truncated lyricism of its couplets on the right hand page and the marginalia-like commentary on the left; "Constellations for Theremin," a series of prose poems, and an opening artist statement that testifies to the "marvelous confluence between Celan's early and Goll's late work," rather than "Celan's alleged plagiarism"; a collection of twelve lyrics; and "Fantastic Prayers," also utilizing the field of facing pages.

The poems progress with a compressed musicality. Tones are struck, turned and tuned (via "The purest coincidence of system & accident") into pseudo-aphorisms and nearly palpable abstractions and anti-logics, erecting "a misshapen statue of living minerals, neither natural nor artificial." Joron often employs a method of anagrammatic reconfiguration, of slight morpheme shifts and slipping syntax, where "That 'roof'/ Invited this 'proof'" and "That noon breaks into no one." Even individual letters are given an anthropomorphic significance in Joron's exploration of the connections and contradictions "brimming beneath the surface of stabilized meaning":

The pilot alone knows
That the plot is missing its
Eye.

Why isn't this "ominous science"
itself afraid, a frayed
Identity?

Pray, protagonist—
Prey to this series of staggered instants.

Such attention to the myriad nuances and circumstantial relationships that, as Joron notes, led to the emergence of language, makes for a reenactment of the conditions in which its course might be altered, an expanse of the possible through the unfettering of language—the unfathomable fathomed.

Click here to purchase Fathom at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Barbara Zabel
University Press of Mississippi ($45)

by Stacy Brix

In the early 20th century, America began to leave behind the romantic values of imagination, emotion, and interest in the past, and plunge forward into the age of the machine. While the country adopted a drive for objective reality and an increasingly controlled human environment, American art experienced a similar departure, espousing the visual qualities of the new industrial environment with its cold, rational geometry. A new visual language was necessary in order to communicate, express, and understand one's position within the overwhelmingly foreign technological milieu developing around them.

The flood of technological developments stirred a change in the American environment so significant that the nation was caught groping for a concrete conception of identity, an understanding of America's place in the world. The numberless factories found clinging to the nation's riverbanks were essential to what America had become—industry was feeding America's growth in population and its growth as a world power—but America's identity in respect to industry was persistently ambiguous. Americans once found their footing in myths of the unruly West, but the growing phenomena of urban growth captivated early 20th-century artists and the audiences who followed them. Artists of the Ashcan School, for example, gave glory to the cityscape, attending to the visual appeal of filthy alleys and the underbellies of bridges.

In Assembling Art, Barbara Zabel examines four avant-garde artists working in four genres to develop her evidence of this search for the new American identity: Man Ray, Stuart Davis, Alexander Calder, and Gerald Murphy. Art is never independent of cultural and scientific developments, though this is how it is often treated; yet Zabel sees it as a vehicle for understanding the growing, fluxing age, and illustrates how technology supported the avant-garde's primary impulse.

The author suggests that more technological elements ruminate in and through art of the 20th century than ever before acknowledged, demanding a deeper, more critical look at the Machine Age and the aesthetic constructions that erupted from it while complicating our view. Assembling Art re-engages the curiosity of its audience by confronting it with questions: How can a machine visually articulate one's sexual identity in an unprecedented way? Are visual constructions of machine-like compositions able to reinforce a male-dominated culture, and do these same artworks have the ability to release the female from the long-endured male grip? Zabel's approach is suggestive rather than conclusive, and thus truthfully illustrates the ambiguities and contradictions of the avant-garde.

The influence of the machine came to be evident not only in the themes artists chose but also in the process with which artists began to depict themes. Mixed media was becoming more accepted in the production of high art, as is especially exemplified in the reception of the work of the artists in discussion. To work in collage and assemblage was to choose a process much connected to the factory line; art was in its own way a machine, assembled.

Aesthetically, artworks began expressing the clean lines and hard edges specific to industrial-mechanical environments. Most of Gerald Murphy's work renders machines, whose function was often unidentifiable, with aesthetic values inspired by industry. Further, materials such as wires and gears came to be primary vehicles by which artists chose to describe, reference, and criticize the ideas, issues, and values of that time—as if to say that more traditional materials of paint and clay were no longer appropriate for the expressive needs of America's new machine-centered culture.

The role of technology and the machine became so entirely part of physical human experience that soon the body itself was conceived of as something mechanized. Zabel persuasively argues that humans understand themselves in terms of their environment. Once the machine came to be more centrally placed within the human environment, metaphors for people and human activities were derived increasingly from mechanical sources, leading to a conflation of the body and the machine. The body was understood as a system whose various minor components either work together or break down. And this machine was just one among many in the American machine—a single part of a greater system within which humans operate as gears and sprockets.

Zabel reminds us that American artworks of the Machine Age are as complex and enigmatic as the age from which they emerged, and that art serves us with not only truth and beauty, but more valuably with questions of our national, and often individual, identity.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Responsibility and Judgment
Schocken Books ($25)

The Origins of Totalitarianism
Schocken Books ($25)
Hannah Arendt

by Rick Canning

Reading Hannah Arendt is a sober and sobering undertaking, and one reason for this is her business-like manner. She doesn't horse around. Her titles usually announce a weighty subject—The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Life of the Mind, "Moral Responsibility under Dictatorship, "Thinking and Moral Considerations"—and then she sets right to work. "Of about 2,000 SS men posted at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, (and many must still be alive), 'a handful of intolerable cases' had been selected and charged with murder" begins the first sentence of "Auschwitz on Trial," one of the pieces in Responsibility and Judgment; another starts, "There is such a thing as responsibility for things one has not done; one can be held liable for them."

Having established this serious mode, she stays with it. Each page is a solid block of thought (often with footnotes): there are no whims, no fanciful digressions, no rhetorical or metaphorical flights, none of the breaks or modulations that a reader might expect or hope for—just a steady pursuit of serious ideas. As a result, sometimes her work, even a short review, can seem longer than it is. (The Origins of Totalitarianism, at well over six hundred oversized pages, is a mountain of a book.) On the other hand, Mary McCarthy was right when she said that Origins is "engrossing and fascinating in the way a novel is." The same could be said about the nine speeches, lectures, and essays collected in Responsibility and Judgment. And if occasionally the reader suspects that English was not Arendt's first language (it wasn't), her usual style is forceful and clear. "It is the grandeur of court proceedings," she writes apropos the prosecution of Nazi functionaries, "that even a cog can become a person again."

A second reason for the sober tone of Arendt's work, perhaps the most obvious one, is the topics she generally treats. Reading her, one is plunged back into the twentieth century and reminded what a mess it was. In 1968, she referred to the first half of the century as "decades of turmoil, confusion, and plain horror," and this was just a shorter version of her assessment in 1950, in the first sentence of the preface to Origins: "Two World Wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers." It's a wonder sanity itself didn't disappear from the face of the earth.

Hannah Arendt was Jewish. Born in Germany in 1906, she was reading Kant and Kierkegaard by the age of fifteen, and a few years later she was studying philosophy under Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers; it seems a safe bet that when they got together, their talk was profound indeed. By her own account she was not political; politics is the realm of doing, and she was interested primarily in the life of the mind. But this began to change with the advent of National Socialism, a development even the most abstracted intellectual could not help but notice. (Heidegger, who had been not only her teacher but also her lover, made his peace with the Nazis.) Most people, if they're political at all, enter that arena voluntarily, working the phones for a candidate or carrying a petition door to door. Arendt woke up to Hitler. In 1933, the Reichstag was burned (by communists, it was claimed), opponents of the Nazis began to disappear into "protective custody," and Hitler was named chancellor; as she put it later, "Indifference was no longer possible in 1933." She left Germany for France and went to work for a Zionist organization that smuggled German children into Palestine. In 1941 she came to the United States.

With such a background, it's no wonder that totalitarianism was her great subject, and not only when she was treating it directly, as in The Origins of Totalitarianism (and most famously, in Eichmann in Jerusalem). Responsibility and Judgment shows that even much more abstract discussions—of ethics and morality, of political action, the human will, logic, solitude and loneliness, the nature of thinking and understanding—are shadowed by Hitler and, to a lesser extent, Stalin. It was as if everything had to be rethought in the light of the mid-century experience.

In an interview conducted in 1964, Arendt identified 1943, "the day we learned about Auschwitz," as a turning point for her: "It was really as if an abyss had opened….This ought not to have happened…. This should not have happened. Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves." A year later, in a series of lectures included in Responsibility and Judgment under the title "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," she borrowed a word from the New Testament to help clarify this "something": "Evil according to Jesus is defined as a 'stumbling stone,' skandalon, which human powers cannot remove….The skandalon is what is not in our power to repair—by forgiving or by punishment—and what therefore remains as obstacle for all further performances and doings." Arendt outlived the Third Reich by thirty years, but she spent much of that time, intellectually at least, pondering that giant stumbling stone.

The most scandalous part, however, was not Hitler and his associates, or even the camp guards and SS cadres, who behaved with such brutality. In any population, she points out in the same lectures, there will always be people who are driven by hatred or cruelty—outright villains, in other words—and moral philosophy has a category for villains. The true scandal was the behavior of "ordinary people," the so-called good Germans. They never beat or shot anyone, and never ordered anyone beaten or shot; they just found a way to accommodate themselves to beatings and shootings. As long as the Ten Commandments—Arendt's shorthand for all moral codes—were in force, these people never dreamed of following anything else. But when the Nazis came to power and reversed the commandments, the good Germans adjusted themselves. And when the war ended and the Ten Commandments went back into effect, the good Germans accepted that, too.

The four pieces in the first and most trenchant part of Responsibility and Judgment explore the importance of this moral flip-flopping, this "honest overnight change of opinion." It represented, for her, nothing less than a "total collapse of all established moral standards"—the failure, in other words, of the Ten Commandments. This was simply a fact of 20th-century history: all moral codes, when put to the test, had given way. Anyone interested in finding out what had happened, or what might happen, would have to confront this fact.

The main reason for the failure is that a moral code is external; it comes from an outside authority, and an individual can therefore possess a moral code without thinking much about it—in the same way that he might possess some of grandpa's old hats. Such people, Arendt says in "Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship," have the "mere habit of holding fast to something," but no deep commitment to the content of what they hold. "Much more reliable" in a crisis, she says, "will be the doubters and the skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds." In other words, the doubter is more reliable because, as he doubts, he thinks. It's the thinking that makes the difference.

In "Thinking and Moral Considerations," and at even greater length in the "Moral Philosophy" lectures, Arendt develops the idea that thinking itself, regardless of content, has moral implications. When thinking, the individual is both alone and not alone. He is separated from other people, but within himself the thinking person discovers, and talks to, himself. Drawing on Socrates, she argues that the "I" is not singular; instead, self-consciousness produces a split in the "I," a two-in-one structure, a self that speaks and a self that speaks back. Simply put, to think is to engage in an internal dialogue; in so doing, the division within the self becomes more real and more powerful. Being aware that "I am two-in-one" means that there "can be harmony or disharmony with the self."

This potential for harmony or disharmony is what gives thinking its moral potential. The thinking person is always being watched—not by God or the state, but by himself, his partner in thinking—and should he offend that partner, harmony within himself will be impossible. The thoughtful person, faced with the temptation to commit murder, understands that if he yields to that temptation, he will forever after have to live with a murderer. In place of rules inscribed on stone tablets, handed down generation to generation, Arendt substitutes the thinking individual, asking himself in solitude a simple question: If I do what I am being asked to do, will I be able to live with myself?

Her discussion of these ideas is persuasive and clear throughout, and there's even something inspiring in the importance she places on the thinking individual, who looks within and finds the power to say No. It is essentially a negative morality, as Arendt understood. "It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong ": this formulation, which she borrows from Socrates, tells us what not to do. It's a morality of withdrawal and refusal, appropriate in times of extreme crisis, when the system has been so corrupted that working within it is no longer possible.

For a world not languishing in totalitarian darkness, however, this morality is not enough. In dire circumstances, refusing to act can be a form of action, even of heroic action, but ordinary conditions require something else: ordinary action. Arendt understood this, too, but it seems to me that, in this book at least, she has little to say about ordinary conditions and actions. It may be that the disasters of the twentieth century tended to overwhelm her imagination, as well they might; it was a scandalous time, after all. Her mind seemed to turn naturally toward crises, and toward the riddles of individual behavior during crises.

It may also be that she was too honest to offer prescriptions, recommendations, principles, and generalizations that she couldn't believe in. In the final piece in this collection, "Home to Roost," a speech she delivered in 1975, only a few months before she died, she sneers a bit at those who prattle on about the "lessons of history." At first this seems odd, because so much of her work is grounded in history. But it wasn't the attempt to understand the past that she objected to; it was the attempt to use the past to bind the present or, worse, to predict the future. All such "lessons" are suspect because, by definition all "roots and 'deeper causes'… are hidden by the appearances which they are supposed to have caused." The "lessons" of Vietnam, for example, can only be drawn and applied by people, and it is the fate of people to wander around in semidarkness.

In 1953, she put the problem this way: "The main shortcoming of action, it has been repeated time and again since [Plato], lies in the fact that I never quite know what I am doing . . . . Since I act in a web of relationships which consists of the actions and the desires of others, I never can foretell what ultimately will come out of what I am doing now." This is a genuine dilemma, for the point is not merely that we don't know what we're doing—a situation that could be remedied by more thinking—but that we cannot know. Twenty-two years later, in "Home to Roost," she was still wrestling with this problem, speaking of the "'unbelievable' . . . aspect of reality, which cannot be anticipated by either hope or fear."

To say that the future cannot be anticipated is to say that it cannot be controlled; we make the future, but we don't really know how and we won't necessarily like (or even believe) the results. Part of the value of Responsibility and Judgment lies in the fact that it doesn't shrink from this predicament. We don't know what we're doing, yet we have to do something: this isn't a state of affairs likely to please anyone, but it ought to teach us to act with humility. The proud alternative is to believe that the future is ours to make and mold. That's when the real disasters loom.

Click here to purchase Responsibility and Judgment at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Origins of Totalitarianism at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

William Kloefkorn
University of Nebraska Press ($22)

by James Walkowiak

Following his acclaimed memoir This Death by Drowning, William Kloefkorn's Restoring the Burnt Child continues grappling with how 1940s middle America shaped its boys into men. A spirit of gamesmanship permeates the entire book, infusing the story with nostalgia and muted terror. The narrative, recounting Kloefkorn's pre-teen years, opens with a game of match-throwing that nearly burns down his house. Influenced by the rhetoric of the Second World War, Kloefkorn describes the incident as a tactical battlefield maneuver: "It required speed and concentration and purpose—and the God-given ability to strike a match at full throttle and drop it burning down the shirt of the fleeing victim."

The remainder of the book pivots back and forth from the playful to the disquieting—from snapshots of boyhood mischief to dreadful incantations of a bible-pounding minister who preaches "fireandbrimstone." Wherever Kloefkorn travels—barbershops, drugstores, movie houses—he soaks up language, building a lexical cache. He draws foremost from language inflected by the violence and prejudice of war as it filters down to him through ordinary conversation. Overhearing men at a local barbershop, for example, the boy digests the era's racist slurs: he hunts down barn swallows, calling them "Germans and Japs."

A few pages into the memoir, the speaker disrupts the narrative to celebrate the aural pleasure elicited by certain words. As a boy, he loves discovering "richochet," "trajectory," and "flak"—wartime words he admires in spite of the terror they orchestrate between other men. For Kloefkorn, the music of words takes precedence over meaning: "It has taken me a long time to realize the extent to which the story, any story, relies upon a melody." This aesthetic—an aspiration for music—will appeal to readers who know and admire Kloefkorn's poetry, but his privileging of music over meaning produces a problematic narrative. Passages refract similar-sounding voices. A circular time scheme reiterates fragments and shuffles dates and places from one paragraph to another. The narrative lacks a chronological frame of reference from which the reader can assemble all the disparate strands the author gives us.

Kloefkorn, however, intends to conflate events as he retells them; he defends his amorphous time scheme, saying, "Chronology has at best a habit of collapsing, of becoming quickly smaller, like the leaky bellows of the old red-and-black accordion as my grandfather squeezed it." When the narrative compresses linear time successfully, one remembered moment bears imprints of multiple life experiences. We see boys driving dump trucks, shooting birds, climbing boulders, listening to temperance women, and saving cash for radios, all happening simultaneously. This scheme allows Kloefkorn to showcase his lilting cadence and absurdist humor, though he does so at the expense of well-defined characters or the trajectory of an emotional arc. Still, on its own terms, Restoring the Burnt Child testifies to the music of youth which many men spend a lifetime seeking to regain.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Mexico: The Revolution and Beyond
Agustin Victor Casasola
Essay by Pete Hamill
Aperture ($50)

Mexico/New York
Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans
Introduction by Roberto Tejada
Mexico Editorial RM / D.A.P. ($60)

by John Toren

Photojournalist? Photographer? Artist? Historians have found it difficult to place Agustin Victor Casasola comfortably within the pantheon of modern photography, due to the vast scope of his oeuvre, the violence of the times and places he covered in his work, and the unabashedly commercial nature of the agency he ran for over thirty years in Mexico City. Casasola is most widely known today for a few portraits he took of Zapata and Pancho Villa, the two populist heroes of the Mexican Revolution. He was also on hand when Porfirio Diaz, the departing dictator, set sail for Europe from the port of Vera Cruz. But scholars and archivists working in the center for photography that Casasola established late in his career have catalogued more than 400,000 images bearing his name. The difficulty of coming to any conclusions about the overall merit of such a corpus is compounded by the fact that many of Casasola's photos were, in fact, taken by other photographers.

In Mexico: The Revolution and Beyond, we are presented with a choice selection of images from the Casasola Agency, which cover the turbulent times of revolution but also expose the life of the city during its fascinating and awkward coming-of-age as a modern metropolis. There are photos at the race track, and photos of unruly Independence Day celebrations, showing streets jam-packed with men in enormous sombreros; we're taken into dance halls, sweatshops, and "modern" laboratories; and along the way we meet up with snake charmers, riveters, and student protesters. There are bullfighters and society musicians, prostitutes and clowns. The deaths of both Villa and Zapata are represented in gory detail, and Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky and other notables make an occasional appearance; but many of the images chosen by the editors are generic, as if to highlight Casasola's efforts (following in the footsteps of great European photographers like Eugene Atget perhaps ) to document the life of the city.

As the visual record of a region and an age, the photos in the Casasola collection are nothing less than fascinating. We may have seen similar photos taken in North American cities at about the same time, yet here the costumes, the expressions, the flavor is entirely different. The question remains to be answered, whether Casasola's work actually rises above photojournalism, to reach that level of sober-minded profundity we associate with genuine works of art.

In an informative introductory essay Pete Hamill takes a stab at the question, and brings considerable weight to bear on the idea that Casasola was a sort of genius behind the camera. "His eye often recognized what Cartier-Bresson would later call 'the decisive moment': the way bodies fell after the fusillade, the primeval joy of charging cavalrymen. But he also captured the contrast between the horses of nineteenth-century wars and the railroad trains of the modern era. He caught the bold swagger of the soldadera along with the growing indifference to sudden death."

But a careful look at the photos doesn't convey quite the same impression. After all, anyone who takes 400,000 photos is going to catch "the decisive moment" every once in a while. And anyone who takes a picture of soldiers arriving somewhere by both horse and train is going to "capture" the contrast between the two modes of travel. The most obvious thing to note about many of the photos contained in this book is that they're posed. The war pictures aside, they seldom have the instantaneity of a fleeting event, large or small, that's been captured magically on film. Several images are of the type and quality that often wins photo-journalism awards today—the execution of six counterfeiters, for example, whose bodies can be seen crumbling through a cloud of smoke (which may be a doctored negative.) But more often they display the somewhat crude lighting and the dead-pan expressions of individuals who are lined up in front of a camera. Even the pictures of couples dancing at a nightclub show them, not gliding elegantly by, but frozen in place, their faces turned awkwardly toward the lens.

In short, relatively few of the Casasola images elicit that subtle frisson we experience when a slice of time seems to echo with the mysterious import of all time—but as a tireless exploration of both the dramatic events and the incidental details of Mexican life on every social level, this book is a wonderland of engaging imagery.

The handsome volume Mexico/New York, offers a less robust but altogether more aesthetic vision of photography in Mexico. It reproduces a few of the images that appeared in a show held at the Palacio de Bellas Atres in Mexico City during the winter of 2003. That show, in turn, was a re-creation of a show held at the New York gallery of Julien Levy for two weeks in the spring of 1935. No one knows which photos were on view at that show, though the photographers involved were the Frenchman Cartier-Bresson, the Mexican Álvarez Bravo, and the American Walker Evans. Cartier-Bresson had been living in Mexico, and knew Álvarez Bravo well. All three were exploring photography as an expressive form at the time. The subtitle of the show at the Levy gallery carried the intriguing phrase "Documentary and Anti-Graphic Photographs."

The book itself is somewhat of an enigma, however. Reading the breathy preface by Mexican photographer Mercedes Iturbe, one would be hard-pressed to discern precisely why these works are appearing together. The book itself is printed on thick, luscious paper, but a number of the pages are blank; only thirty-five contain images. The typography is stunning, yet there are also glaring typos here and there. And the photos by Evans were taken in New York City, while the rest of the photos depict street scenes in Mexico. (The photos by Evans included in the original show had been taken in the American South.)

In Roberto Tejada's introduction he refers to "the borderline relation of these three photographers to surrealism," and we might add that they possess only a borderline relation to one another. Cartier-Bresson had not yet reached the point of total inclusiveness and nonchalance that would make him the greatest photographer of his time. The works of Álvarez Bravo and Evans share a more public face and a more classical form, though their chosen subjects lay half a continent apart.

It would be tempting to remove a few of these beautifully printed photos from their binding to hang on the wall, because considered one by one, the pictures are striking; in comparison to the Casasola works, they carry far greater formal strength and iconic presence. On the other hand, much of the incidental detail that invigorates Casasola's best images—the hats, the goats, the dust, the smiling revolutionaries—has vanished. The railroad tracks have lost their trains, and the store-front displays, with their manikins and eerie reflections, have become windows to the subconscious, rather than to the aspirations of a rising middle class.

Click here to purchase Mexico/New York at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Nathaniel Dorsky
Tuumba Press ($10)

by Christopher Luna

Filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky's Devotional Cinema, which is based on a lecture he delivered to Princeton's March 2001 Conference on Religion and Cinema, is a beautiful celebration of cinema as a form of religion, a "metaphor…for our being." The author persuasively illuminates the formal elements that contribute to film's ability to address/reflect questions regarding our very existence. Dorsky first discovered "a concordance between film and our human metabolism" when, at the age of nine, he left a movie theater after spending more than six hours in the darkness to find that his perception had been irreversibly changed:

Quite suddenly, the normal things that were my usual reference points, everything that had been familiar to me in my hometown, all its archetypes and icons, became eerie and questionable. I felt alien and estranged…. Eventually I got home, and it even seemed odd that I was in my house. I was feeling this quite strongly and was trying my best to recover from the giant hole that had opened in the middle of my head.

Dorsky made a practice of observing the changes exhibited by himself and other audience members after films. As he "began to become more sensitive to these post-film experiences and the qualities in a film that might produce either health or ill health," Dorsky realized that this power arose from film's "ability to mirror and realign our metabolism."

An alchemy takes place when the form of a work "include[s] the expression of its own materiality," a transmutation that is evident in cave paintings, Egyptian sculpture, 12th-century French stained glass and stone engraving, and the music of Bach and Mozart. According to Dorsky, watching a film "has tremendous mystical implications; it can be, at its best, a way of approaching and manifesting the ineffable. This respect for the ineffable is an essential aspect of devotion." Cinema can achieve a "transcendental balance" in the successful union of "the internalized medieval and externalized Renaissance ways of seeing." The relationship between shots and cuts is also crucial to this balance. Dorsky sees a parallel between "our visual experience in daily life" and the intermittence of light and dark as film runs through a camera or projector at 24 frames per second. Though we do not experience the world as a "solid continuum," learning to accept the "poles of existence and nonexistence" ultimately "suffuses the 'solid' world with luminosity."

Devotional cinema captures the present moment (what Dorsky terms "nowness"), acknowledging the simultaneity of "absolute and relative time." Dorsky defines "devotion" as "the opening or the interruption that allows us to experience what is hidden, and to accept with our hearts our given situation." Just as devotion increases in relation to our openness and "willingness to touch the depths of our own being," film can facilitate revelation when it "expresses itself in a manner intrinsic to its own true nature." Ideally the cinema may even "serve as a corrective mirror that realigns our psyches and opens us up to appreciation and humility." This slim but eloquent book will touch the hearts of readers who approach film as an art form, one which has rarely exhibited the fullness of its vast potential as the one medium which incorporates all other disciplines.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Rosamond Purcell
The Quantuck Lane Press ($25)

by Michelle Mitchell-Foust

In Rosamond Purcell's Owls Head, the search for things is the thing. Archivist, collector, artist, and consumer, she searches for eye-catching detritus in the small town of Owls Head, Maine and negotiates the purchase of found objects with local scrapyard proprietor William Buckminster. Purcell then takes the things home and makes other things—simple. And yet Owls Head is not simple, as the things Purcell makes are not simple. Three memoirs are embedded in Purcell's Owls Head: that of a man, a place, and a woman refining her aesthetic.

Buckminster handles the task of keeping and giving away the mountains of things with the grace and patience of a benign ruler, even in the face of an aggressive faction of concerned citizens who wish he would clean up the place. Purcell says: "I saw him too as a kind of deity from a Down East pantheon of gods that included the Lobster God, the God of the Outer Shoals, and the hardscrabble Potato God." Throughout she sketches his prismatic character as iron worker, host, gossip, historian, collector, rebel, philosopher, husband, merchant whose methods are a mystery—and all in the context of the "almighty thingness of our all-American world." Purcell gives us his voice, too, as he revisits objects from Owls Head that have been translated in Purcell's studio:

B: I don't remember but I remember this, though—
R: —yeah—
—roller skate.
If you see anything you want back…
No, no.
Is it—what you told me—arbor vitae?
Lignum vitae.
Lignum vitae. Oh, it's stuck on there—
A very…heavy wood. Matter of fact it doesn't float. Maybe dragged
up by a scallop fisherman.
Why was it in the water to begin with if it doesn't float?
The ship probably sank.

Buckminster is the thin, serious figure balancing on the precarious mound that is Owls Head. At one point in the biography, Purcell superimposes a ghost image of British collector Dr. James Petiver (1658-1716) over Buckminster, imagining the collectors past and present standing side-by-side: two men "prepared to admire the minuteness of much of the naturalia of this place as well as to take the chaos of its artificialia in stride."

Interesting, too, is the relationship we see developing between subject and biographer in Owls Head. Purcell is a character in the life of her subject; in Buckminster's presence, she becomes the being who wants. She holds up whatever she's found—a horse harness that has grown roots, or a swollen 78 r.p.m. record that sounds like "A New Year's Eve broadcast from the ballroom in London might have sounded to the soldiers in the trenches in France in 1918"—and Buckminster gives the nod or not, keeping some items "high and dry," for his own use, though as Purcell knows, "it's not for models but for love and it's no fair asking to buy them." In searching for the objects of desire she grows to wonder, as she did in childhood, "how 'want' looks"—and tries "not to look like a ridiculous Victorian" when she is turned down.

Want looks a great deal like Owls Head to those who recognize the place as a "terrifying chaos" that wants organization. But mostly Owls Head is a town with a house and a scrapyard and a barn and a mammoth collection of wooden lobster buoys—a collector's paradise whose gravitational pull Purcell cannot resist. She borrows a quotation by architect Philip Johnson (an allusion to a house built by Buckminster's relative Buckminster Fuller) to describe Owls Head: "nothing to do with architecture and all to do with dreams." As she watches Buckminster stabilize the barn, she says, "The staircase to the second floor was free-standing now, with no step at the bottom or the top. The elements of the building stood around me like pieces of a set. 'Under the Big Top only two days count, today and tomorrow.'" Purcell's circus reference is interesting in light of the fact that the objects at Owls Head are testaments to history, yet what the archivist/author/photographer perceives is what happens to these objects down the road, as weather and "translation" work on them. She notes, "Sometimes the stages of an object's evolutionary sequence are in plain sight."

Purcell defines "translation" as "to transfer from one place/condition to another." In order for translation to result in something approaching the sublime, the reader must understand the vocabulary of the image as well as relinquish the conventional classifications for things. Purcell acknowledges that "systems of classifications are [also] inventions":

I exhume the frame of a typewriter, its vestigial hammers like the ribbings of an ancient echinoid. Where does the sea end? At what point does a manufactured object turn into an organism? Do objects drown? Do they ever possess a life—beyond batteries—that might be taken away? Is an object transmuted into another substance ever, like a fossil, turned from flesh and bone to stone? When does an inanimate object become worthy of a scientific name? I name the typewriter Underwoodensis corrupta, a close invertebrate cousin to an echinoid….this typewriter aspires to the same lofty class of object as the book-nest, it too comes from the place where metaphors are made.

Owls Head is a project of nested metaphors and the joy of renaming, and Purcell's writing isolates her artistic process and refines her aesthetic. She sees in the piles of Buckminster's barn a resemblance to artist Robert Wilson's "installation of the hollow elephant, the decrepit Bonapartist watchman, mechanical rats, and opera music." Regarding her studio art—what becomes of much of Owls Head naturalia—she distinguishes herself from surrealist/collector Joseph Cornell:

I understand all too well the impulse to Joseph Cornell-box the world. Beyond a tropism for weathered surfaces and idealized microcosms, I share little of Cornell's vocabulary of lyric opera singers, celestial charts, and marbled papers. I admire his work but am wary of the romantic yearnings the constructions—so attractive—provoke in me. In the end, many of these boxes fill me with regrets. I turn away toward a closer observation of the teeming and intermingling between organic and inorganic forms, of what happens between the ice and the inner tube, the sun and a glass plate negative, the rain and a roadmap.

Purcell sees intensely how organic and inorganic forms work together in the life of an object in the wild, and she knows profoundly, "as Owls Head is a place of tireless consumption, of active burial and renewal by mice, squirrels, bees, beetles, ants, and worms, phenomena such as strings of pearls are illusory, soon dissolved by the sun." She exchanges both worm and pearl for word, for Owls Head is a prose poem, too. Not much since Walt Whitman's Song of Myself have we seen such a catalogue of Americana. Whitman writes:

My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!
Root of washed sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you!
Mixed tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!
Trickling sap of maple, fiber of manly wheat, it shall be you!
Suns so generous it shall be you!
Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!
………………………………………………………………….
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
………………………………………………………………….
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

In Whitman's poem and in Purcell's memoir, America holds still for us, awaits our careful scrutiny, during which we realize that the place is always in motion. The difference between the two approaches is that, unlike Purcell, Whitman was writing America through its people—he writes the egotistical sublime that makes himself (the human) the body of America (organic to organic)—while Purcell writes America through its things, what man has made and time has remade. Purcell acknowledges the biology of the inanimate object, considers context and associates in forensic detail. She is unafraid of what scientists may refer to as "the evil weed of metaphor" and metaphor's cousin synecdoche, which may, in stretching circumstances, move meaning away from the thing itself, rather than closer toward it. She asks herself, concerning "the ideal Platonic object—was a single leg, for instance, still a chair?" And she writes:

We are in the trenches somewhere, all the time, as far as I can make out. However apocalyptic these war scenes, their density owes everything to Owls Head. As a typewriter may also be a fossil echinoid, so piano wire is the horizon off the French coast and a piece of stained lace a bloody stretch of road. One thing becomes another, the shafts of a bird feather a broken Romanesque arch, sewing threads tangled military scrap, and an ape hanging in a museum window becomes the victim of a lynching hanging from a tree.

Purcell's Owls Head has a marvelous section of notes and photographs, but no index, much the way its namesake has no map. The digging is the pleasure. Another famous Maine resident, Stephen King, said in an interview that because we humans have so little time, we are lucky to get to know one or two places. Rosamond Purcell knows Owls Head, and as a result of this stunning book, we can too.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

The Dead Letter & The Figure Eight
Metta Fuller Victor
Duke University Press ($21.95)

That Affair Next Door & Lost Man's Lane
Anna Katherine Green
Duke University Press ($21.95)

by Kris Lawson

For readers who think that Lifetime movies and the muddled genre books that combine romance and serial killers are a product of our tawdry age, Duke University Press has reprinted four 19th-century sensationalist classics that are titillating, vulgar, and moralistic by turns, full of violent action and passion, and as shallow and materialistic as reality television. Such fiction, however, provided an arena for women eager to become writers, and the novels collected in these two volumes—which each contain a fine introduction by scholar Catherine Ross Nickerson—display how vital that opportunity was.

Metta Fuller Victor was the first American—male or female—to write a full-length procedural detective novel (the honor for creating the genre is usually bestowed upon Poe, but as Nickerson points out, "As the brevity of Poe's stories suggests, he first conceived the detective story, for all its structural sophistication, as a concentrated form"). Now-familiar elements of traditional detective novels are present in Victor's books: the crime that occurs immediately before or at the beginning of the story, clues mixed with red herrings, multiple suspects (including the narrator) who all have detailed motives, the investigation and unveiling of the criminal, and finally, retribution or justice. Victor combines these tropes with Gothic/horror elements: the dreaded family secret, the moldering mansion with mysterious locked doors and strange noises, women in long, trailing white nightgowns wandering the halls in "somnambulistic excursions." The author blends these ingredients into a crowd-pleasing sensationalist brew, but her concentration on solving the murders and detailing the steps of those investigations sets her books apart.

A straightforward mystery, The Dead Letter opens mid-story, the murder and initial investigation taking place in flashback. The narrator, Richard Redfield, is an impoverished prospective attorney studying with the kindly Mr. Argyll, who has promised him a job in his law firm. Redfield is in love with Eleanor Argyll, the oldest daughter, who is engaged to Henry Moreland. James Argyll, a ne'er-do-well nephew, also disapproves of Eleanor's engagement. Since Eleanor is a rich heiress and James has a gambling habit, Redfield suspects that James does not truly love her. On a dark and stormy night, Moreland leaves the train station but never arrives at the Argyll house; he is found stabbed to death the next morning on the path from the station. Both James and Redfield are suspects; also suspect are a mysterious woman who followed Moreland from the station and a sinister black-eyed stranger who stared at Moreland on the train. The "dead letter" holds a vital clue for Redfield's investigation, aided by Mr. Burton and his psychic daughter Lenore.

The Figure Eight is more Byzantine in plot. Dr. Meredith, recently returned from California with $60,000 in gold and a Cuban wife barely older than his daughter Lillian, is found dead with a glass of poisoned port next to him. He leaves a scrawled message containing a figure eight, which his family believes to be a clue to find the gold he had hidden somewhere on the Meredith estate. Joe Meredith, an orphaned nephew with a history of bad luck and troublemaking, is the narrator; desperately in love with Lillian, he is also the main suspect. Also suspect are Miss Miller, the upright governess; Arthur Miller, her brother who is looking for a rich heiress to wed; and Inez, Dr. Meredith's fiery young wife whose passion for Arthur is an open family secret. After the estate where the gold is hidden passes to a new owner, Joe and Miss Miller suspect each other of the murder and frequently run into each other as they search for the gold. Arthur excites Inez' jealousy by flirting with the rich heiress who now lives on the Meredith estate, and Don Miguel de Almeda appears, ostensibly to reunite with his cousin Inez, but also to fall in love with Lillian.

Victor's novels have many of the elements of sensationalist fiction. Her two narrators take on disguises and new identities; they experience hallucinations, dreams, even psychic revelations that spur them on or aid them in their investigations. Marriage is a treacherous state; love, especially passionate love, is suspect and those who profess it have sinister motives. However, her story structure, in which the crimes happen before or just as the books begin and are solved as the books progress, is a departure for the genre and more typical of detective stories, where procedure trumps character and controls the plot.

Anna Katherine Green, writing a few decades later in the post-Civil War era, took her inspiration from Victor as well as contemporaries such as Louisa May Alcott and other women writers, most of whom hid under ambiguous or male pseudonyms. Green herself influenced and inspired later women writers of genre fictions such as Agatha Christie and Mary Roberts Rinehart.

That Affair Next Door introduces Amelia Butterworth, a wealthy maiden lady who matches wits with Mr. Gryce, a police detective, as they solve a murder together. Despite the sparks struck against Mr. Gryce's old-fashioned notions of women, Amelia's partnership with him is successful: she finds clues and matches them to motive and opportunity, while Gryce's solid investigative procedure keeps Amelia's flights of imagination grounded in reality. The Van Burnams, Amelia's neighbors, return home from a long trip only to find the dead body of a young woman crushed under their dining room display cabinet. When the victim is identified as Silas Van Burnam's estranged daughter-in-law, Amelia—having witnessed the strange midnight arrival of a young woman and her mysterious companion—uses her friendships, her maid's acting skills, and her own resources to find the clues that lead to the killer's capture.

Lost Man's Lane has more of a Gothic tone. The titular lane is in a small upstate village, where four tramps have disappeared. Amelia's best friend from school days has recently died and her children are still living in the family home, which happens to be at the far end of the lane. Urged by Mr. Gryce, Amelia drops in for a visit and to solve the mystery of the disappearing tramps. Shaken by revelations of her friend's unhappy marriage, attracted by the friendly neighbor Mr. Trohm, and kept awake by ominous noises from mysteriously locked rooms, Amelia does not enjoy her stay in the Gothic genre. With her humor and stubbornness, however, she manages to solve the mystery (again with Mr. Gryce's help) and bursts through a few Gothic conventions while she's at it.

Green's novels had a far-reaching influence on the mystery genre—any story with an unmarried older woman solving crimes owes a great debt to her. But Miss Butterworth, as appealing as she is, is only part of Green's formula. To have a woman, no matter how smart or wealthy, be seen as the equal to a male police detective—and moreover, to have that woman's skills actively sought by police detectives—was a major breakthrough. Amelia's greatest talent consists of spotting clues where others see only domestic details of no importance (a ripped dress, a broken hatpin, a misshapen ball of yarn) and linking them to motivation and character (her observations of human behavior, studied in great detail in her small circle of friends and relatives, applied widely to the human race as a whole). Those themes, along with the light humor sprinkled throughout Green's books, greatly contributed to the foundation of the "cozy" mystery, a bestseller in all its manifestations even today.

Sensationalist novels were the first American fiction to reach bestseller status; Green's 1878 work The Leavenworth Case, in fact, was (as Nickerson tells us) the best-selling novel of that year. Combining in embryonic form the elements of what became distinct genres such as Western, mystery, romance and adventure fiction, sensationalist fiction in pulp books and in newspapers reflected the mass consumption tastes of America—a rapidly expanding, industrializing America with the dirt of slavery and oppression of women under its nails, a country discovering that introspective literature only led to introspective thought (a bad thing when there was so much land to steal from the Indians, so many immigrants to exploit, so many resources to snatch up and hoard). Like the newly manufactured religions of that era or the widely available cheap beer, sensationalist fiction could be consumed easily and required no thought.

Derided in its day just as genre fiction is today, sensationalist literature had one positive result: women could participate powerfully and meaningfully in a new medium. Granted, many women writers used male pseudonyms or ambiguous initials: Victor wrote as Seeley Regester; Louisa May Alcott was A. M. Barnard. But the sheer volume of and demand for sensational fiction gave women an opportunity to dive in and swim in those churning waters despite their murky taint and odor of hellfire. Perhaps the pseudonyms were also useful to hide behind when an author was not especially proud of her pot-boiled work.

In her novel Little Women, Alcott confessed how ashamed she was of her own excursions into sensationalist literature. Jo March, Alcott's avatar, is initially proud of her moneymaking ability and of seeing her work in print, but when a friend points out the shallowness of her writing, Jo realizes "she was beginning to desecrate some of the womanliest attributes of a woman's character. She was living in bad society, and imaginary though it was, its influence affected her, for she was feeding heart and fancy on dangerous and unsubstantial food, and was fast brushing the innocent bloom from her nature by a premature acquaintance with the darker side of life, which comes soon enough to all of us."

Alcott's moral qualms may have prevented her from realizing that "acquaintance with the darker side of life" was a necessary feature if women were to participate fully in society—as faulty, shallow, and dangerous as it may occasionally be. For women such as Metta Fuller Victor and Anna Katherine Green, descending into the world of sensationalist fiction, in all its vulgarity and ugliness, provided them with the opportunity to create new genres, which today have more appeal and possibilities than they might have hoped.

Click here to purchase The Dead Letter & The Figure Eight at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase That Affair Next Door & Lost Man's Lane at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Amanda Stern
Soft Skull Press ($12)

by Stephanie Anderson

In her debut novel, New York writer Amanda Stern depicts the anguish of a doomed and dangerous relationship between a young man and woman—two people who consume each other with the same ferocity with which they consume drugs and alcohol.

The book begins with an elegant, haunting overture: "Three years before we said out loud alcoholic, my breath rode Rochester's snow as icicles. We scraped the car, our girl, big blue. He let me drive plastered behind a wheel. Not our house, we laughed how easy stealing was. His panic attacks in each ventricle. His mother ate him young as afterbirth. His singing—mournful, never about me." This epigraph, composed of paraphrased excerpts from subsequent chapters, serves as a preview of what's to come: the harrowing tale of a self-destructive relationship told in poetic and, at times, heart-wrenching prose.

The Long Haul details the whirlwind courtship and coupling of the unnamed female narrator and her addict boyfriend, a man simply referred to as the Alcoholic, in a series of short chapters in language peppered with the pop-culture credo of "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll." Her decision not to name her characters creates a distance between the two of them and between the story and the reader—an unsettling but ultimately effective method. The characters never come alive as individuals, since Stern situates them only within the confines of their codependency—but their venomous relationship takes on a life of its own when coupled with her lush prose.

The book's unique structure also distinguishes it from other relationship-gone-sour fiction. Stern tells the story in a nonlinear fashion, winding through the past and present, often from one paragraph to the next. The circularity of the storytelling confuses at times, but the absence of a chronological line suits the meandering lifestyle and recollections of the narrator and the Alcoholic, as they flit from college to therapy to gig to rehab. Stern intersperses odd but beautiful stream-of-consciousness passages between some of the chapters. These sections remove us from the narrative and from the conventions of space and time altogether, but they provide clear insights into the mind of the narrator:

There's a burn on your back the shape of Florida but you won't tell me how you got it. … You have secrets I want to know.… I want to see through you, memorize your veins. I lick your eyelids when you cry, run my tongue over your lashes. The salt burns on your face but tastes sweet and sad on my tongue. I want to know why people are warning me about you.

And we need these insights. Stern avoids opportunities to give her characters greater depth by introducing important (and often nightmarish) episodes that never fully develop. She dedicates an entire chapter to the narrator's obsession with her psychotherapist, but we never get a clear sense of either her resolution or continued fixation. In a chapter titled "The End of the World," the narrator and the Alcoholic attend a party together, and she narrowly escapes being raped by another partygoer. The narrator flees, finds the Alcoholic, and then the chapter abruptly ends. The characters never mention the attack again, and we can only infer the ordeal's significance. In this way, Stern plumbs the depths of co-dependence and addiction, but diminishes other dramatic elements.

What Stern chooses to explore, however, she explores well, recounting with grace and precision the depression and downward spiral of the two main characters and their relationship. Instead of growing annoyed at their incapacity, we hope they find the strength to leave each other. Even though we know early on that the relationship will fail, Stern's capacity for storytelling keeps us riveted to see how the tale unfolds.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004