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OBLIVION

David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown ($25.95)

by Scott Bryan Wilson

One of the great things about Oblivion, the new collection of stories from David Foster Wallace, is that it absolutely would not get a passing grade in your typical writing workshop. Wallace's refusal to offer resolution, the relative absence of action or dialogue, and the stories' resistance to easy summary subvert the traditional form; likewise, his intentionally incorrect grammar buttressed by rigidly correct grammar, and the long acronym-laden sentences forming long paragraphs jammed full of minutiae and enough "SAT words" to keep one lunging for the dictionary, will be maddening for some readers. Yet all this is to say that this collection ranks with Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again as Wallace's most complex and most re-readable work, as its myriad layers and innuendoes and clues continuously lead the reader and re-reader along darker, bleaker, and more fascinating superhighways of intellectual thoughts and re-envisioned narrative structures. Furthermore, Wallace beautifully explores loneliness and despair and the inability of his characters to connect with anyone on even the most basic level; there is so much heartbreak and humor and tension in these stories that in many instances they nail down that abstract concept of What It Feels Like To Be Human.

"Mr. Squishy," first published pseudonymously in 2000, lets the reader in on a secret focus group meeting whose members are asked to contemplate the Felonies! snack-cake line. It's an examination of advertising and its often questionable and unethical methods of representing products to consumers. At the same time this group is contemplating the fate of Felonies!, an "urban daredevil," perhaps armed, is scaling the building, and there's the threat of biological terrorism via dissemination of deadly bacteria in the snack cakes themselves. (The threat of terrorism recurs and looms in "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" and "The Suffering Channel.")

"Good Old Neon" is recounted by the narrator after his death, or, "outside of linear time and in the process of dramatic change," or so it initially seems. But as with other stories in the book, the clues and hints masterfully left behind at various moments in the piece's narrative arc begin to point at a narrator very much outside of what is expected. That is, the story creates its own rules, but doesn't follow them to their natural conclusion. Here we encounter a man whose whole life is centered around his admitted fraudulence, and his inability to cease and desist with that fraudulence, and his awareness that those he most hopes will see him as genuine are the ones he's most sure can see right through him.

In the title story, Wallace unleashes a torrent of frivolity that starts with a brainy—albeit very extended—joke, as well as one of the best descriptions in the book: "Her shadowless face resembling something De Kooning himself might have torn from the easel and discarded in media res." Of all the bizarre narrators in Wallace's ouevre, the narrator of "Oblivion" might be the most neurotically annoying yet endearing, as he explicates the trouble with his marriage and how it eventually led him and his wife to a sleep chamber.

There are two shorter pieces, and "Incarnations of Burned Children," the story of a mother and father facing a terrible tragedy, is a highlight of the collection. "If you've never wept and want to," Wallace writes, "have a child." The theme of childhood is elaborated in the juggernaut of the collection, "The Soul is Not a Smithy." Narrated by a pupil "classified as unsatisfactory in Listening Skills, as well as its associated category, Following Directions," it's the tale of a classroom of children scared witless by a deranged substitute teacher. The narrator, not paying attention to the crisis situation but rather creating astonishingly complicated daydream scenarios, recreates much of the tale based on what he heard or read later. Wallace—without being sentimental—creates sympathy not only for the children taken hostage, but also for the teacher as well as the various characters inhabiting the narrator's daedal fantasies; the daydreams mirror in intensity the hostage situation, which, though terrifying and moving, is also pretty hilarious.

Though seven dazzling, complex stories set up this collection, roughly 27% of Oblivion is devoted to the closer, the forgettable clunker "The Suffering Channel." As in "Mr. Squishy" there are two parallel story lines: one involves a man who excretes little objets d'art; the other explores the eponymous cable station that broadcasts clips of the most tortuous human pain and anguish. The descriptions of the channel itself are wonderful—and there are not nearly enough—but the story is marred by limp pop-culture references and juvenile conversations about poop, while the constant reminders of the terrorist attacks of 2001 seem like a sluggish attempt at profundity.

Wallace uses accumulation of the picayune as a foundation for solid interpretation of human emotion: a boy is eager to help his father by snapping open his briefcase locks for him; a man fantasizes about having sex with his coworker while she wears her cross-trainers. It's sort of like those floating islands made of recycled soda cans: pretty from a distance, weird when you get close, but ultimately beautiful once you realize the accomplishment.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

CHECKPOINT

Nicholson Baker
Knopf ($15.95)

by Andrew Palmer

When Knopf belatedly added Nicholson Baker's latest novel, Checkpoint, to its summer list, the announcement generated as much controversy and official nervousness as might have been expected from a novel by a prominent author about two men discussing the potential assassination of George W. Bush. The clamor died down when the book proved to be relatively harmless, no more than a work of literary fiction. It was widely reviewed in the mainstream media, and widely—though not universally—panned. Leon Wieselteir, in a review for the New York Times Book Review, called Checkpoint a "scummy little book"; Timothy Noah, on Slate.com, dismissed it as "pornography." Those who praised the novel tended to sympathize with the anti-Bush rhetoric of its characters, while tempering their praise with reservations about its thin plot and apparent lack of conclusion, moral or otherwise. So Checkpoint was either deliberately inflammatory, pointless, or both.

It turns out to be neither. Checkpoint has been both underestimated and misunderstood, a shameful disservice to one of the best, most original, living American novelists. Though less substantial than Baker's earlier books, it's a significant addition to his work, developing many of the themes he has explored since 1988's The Mezzanine, and revealing his imaginative range to be even broader than he had already demonstrated.

Checkpoint is a short book—just over a hundred pages—and it consists entirely of the supposed transcript of a conversation between two middle-aged men, Jay and Ben, in a D.C. hotel room (with a brief interruption from room service). Right away, Jay tells Ben he's planning to assassinate Bush ("I think we have to lance the fucking boil"), but it soon becomes clear that there is little chance of this actually happening: one of Jay's proposed methods of assassination is to crush the president with a remote-controlled boulder. The conversation turns into more or less of a therapy session. Ben enumerates the reasons why killing Bush is not a good idea (even while venting his own rage against the president), engages Jay in diverting conversation, and gently offers him advice. Jay, for his part, explains the sources of his anger, much of which boils down to ranting against Bush and the war in Iraq: "No, Ben, this guy is beyond the beyond. What he's done with this war. The murder of the innocent. And now the prisons. It's too much. It makes me so angry."

The two men also touch upon their personal histories, from which we learn that they're old college buddies drifting in different directions. Ben is a professor of American history, with a wife and son, while Jay, divorced, has abandoned teaching and spent the last few years drifting from job to job. Jay also has a history of mental instability, though its most serious manifestation up to this point has been a harmless prank—sawing the legs off the chair of an assistant principal.

By the end of the novel, Ben has apparently succeeded in talking Jay out of the assassination attempt. As an alternative, Ben convinces Jay to hit a photograph of a smiling Bush with a hammer. Jay finds the catharsis of this act only somewhat satisfying, but he admits to feeling a little sorry for Bush, and agrees to let Ben drive him home.

Checkpoint is hugely enjoyable. Despite (or maybe because of) its brevity, it is well paced and compelling, and Baker's ear for the rhythms and nuances of dialogue remains unparalleled. Take this early exchange:

JAY: When did we last get together? Was that three years ago?
BEN: May have been. Long time.
JAY: I'm so sorry about that wheelbarrow, man.
BEN: No no no.

Ben's stuttering demurral is exactingly true to life, and the wheelbarrow incident (besides being both humorous and revealing) is never mentioned again—nor does it have anything to do with the dialogue that precedes and follows it. This is precisely what makes it convincing as a turn in a friendly conversation, whose forms are rarely linear. Ben and Jay answer each other's questions and build on each other's points, but they also interrupt, ignore, and mishear each other. They struggle for the right word, misspeak, or make up their own words. Their conversation is awkward and scattershot, as most real conversations are.

Beyond this naturalism, the conversation is also very funny, in Baker's piquant way. Much of the humor comes from the unusual premise, and is about as dark as it gets. But even if hearing the president called a "penisfucker" doesn't arouse a chuckle there are plenty of less partisan comic touches. At one point, the two men are discussing Wal-Mart. Jay rails against it, but Ben is more lenient on the corporate giant:

BEN: I'll tell you, my son has always loved going to Wal-Mart. On our last trip there I bought a DVD of the Andy Griffith Show. It cost five dollars and fifty cents. We got a delicious pretzel on the way out. And there were friendly chatty women in the crafts and sewing area.
JAY: What were they chatting about?
BEN: Who was going to go on break first.
JAY: Anyway, it's pretty dang ugly.
BEN: I'll concede that.

But convincing dialogue and irreverent humor don't necessarily add up to a good novel. In fact, for many critics it's this irreverence that's one of the novel's biggest flaws. Charles Taylor, in a review for Salon.com, condemned Checkpoint for lacking "moral seriousness." Along similar lines, many others have accused Baker of spouting forth the same old liberal arguments, and therefore "pander[ing] to [his] readers' crudest beliefs," in the words of Slate's Noah. Even those critics who appreciate the anti-Bush, anti-war sentiments of the characters have expressed disappointment that those sentiments are so familiar, and that Baker seems to offer no supportable solutions to the current state of our country's foreign relations.

One hastens to remind such critics that Checkpoint is a work of dramatic fiction, and that it's the characters who are advancing the "same old arguments," not Baker. In fact, Baker seems to have gone to great lengths to thoroughly remove any semblance of an authoritative voice from the novel. The text (or so we are led to believe) is pure artifact, the unedited transcript of a conversation. Such a format should encourage readings that carefully distinguish between the characters' opinions and the author's. Even though this distinction has generally been glossed over in the popular discourse on Checkpoint, the array of responses to the characters' views is telling, providing a kind of Rorschach test for readers' positions on Bush and Iraq. Those who support the war in Iraq see Jay and Ben as unthinking Bush bashers. Some have even read the novel as a parody of anti-Bush rhetoric. Those who do not support the war in Iraq praise the novel for advancing opinions similar to their own. If there is parody, they fail to see it.

Such different responses testify to the ambiguity of the novel's message, and indicate that Baker's position—that is, the position of the book, rather than the characters—may lie somewhere in between the two extremes.

What about the charges that the novel offers no solutions? This is a valid concern: Checkpoint may be an accurate document of one side of current popular political opinion ("another discouraging document of this age of wild talk" according to the New York Times's Wieseltier), but because, despite all of its humor, it poses such serious ethical questions, it is reasonable to expect it should suggest some equally serious answers. I would argue that in fact, it does—not about what the Bush administration should do about the war in Iraq, but what the average American citizen can do in the face of this action.

This line of thinking is advanced by Ben, who essentially suggests that it's best not to think too much about current events. "You want to keep focused, keep to a small canvas," he tells Jay. Accordingly, he spends his work hours researching obscure historical curiosities, such as the possibility that American military strategists specializing in "passive defense" are partially responsible for urban sprawl. He advises his students who are upset about the war to copy out a book they like word for word. And his main hobby is snapping photographs of trees with his expensive camera—an activity he encourages Jay to take up as an antidote to worrying about the war. Late in the book, Ben describes the immense satisfaction of photographing a leafless catalpa tree in his neighborhood. "So who cares then about George W.?" he concludes. "He's irrelevant. He's irrelevant. You see?"

Ben's answer to the war, in itself, is probably not satisfactory. But Baker's earlier work, obsessed as it is with apparently meaningless minutiae, makes it easy to conclude that Baker himself supports Ben's position from a more general perspective. Baker has always written about the peripheral—things we're embarrassed to admit we think about (like disrobing a coworker, as in The Fermata), or things that we don't think much about but that hover on the edges of our consciousness (like shoelaces and straws, as in The Mezzanine). Most Americans these days are not actually thinking about assassinating George W. Bush, but it's safe to say that many of us, as Jay suggests, would have ambivalent feelings upon hearing the news of his assassination. It's this shadowy area of morality that Baker explores in Checkpoint.

Superficially, the previous Baker novel that Checkpoint most resembles is Vox (the phone-sex novel): both take the form of an extended dialogue, and both are about subjects that are not normally broached in conversation. And Checkpoint has much in common with The Fermata, also about a man of questionable morality. But in at least one important respect, Checkpoint is more similar to Baker's first novel, The Mezzanine, and his second-most recent novel, A Box of Matches: each of these books is about, at least implicitly, how to deal with certain familiar aspects of contemporary America. In The Mezzanine, the setting is the corporate world, in A Box of Matches it's a middle class household, and in Checkpoint it's the entire country under the shadow of the war in Iraq. Each setting comes with its unique set of problems—the dehumanization of corporate employees, the numbing effects of daily routine, and the ethical responsibility of facing up to a war initiated by the president your country has elected. But Baker's implicit solution is the same in each of the three novels: slow down, pay attention to the little things. In The Mezzanine this means giving deeper thought to ordinary objects, thereby revealing their underlying interestingness. In A Box of Matches this means taking the time each day to appreciate what is unique about your life (despite its superficial resemblance to so many other lives).

What it means in Checkpoint is slightly more complicated. Ben's advice (which could be the moral of most of Baker's books), to "keep to a small canvas," is certainly part of it—but here it's only a starting point. Ben's enthusiasm for photography is a reminder that life exists outside the realm of politics. Unlike Jay, for whom "everything's political," Ben is able to distinguish between politics and ethics, and to recognize the necessity of relegating politics to its proper level of importance. Politics is a means to an end, an end which for Ben consists at least partly in photographing trees.

Escaping into the minutiae of one's personal life is not necessarily the whole answer, though. Baker suggests as much in his portrayal of Ben's unwillingness to talk about squirmy issues like abortion. Jay, against abortion, argues that it's hypocritical for a person to be both anti-war and pro-choice. Ben's responses reveal a moral skittishness that may be disarmingly familiar to many readers (and reads suspiciously like a self-reproval on Baker's part): "I really don't want to debate this with you," he says. "It was better when we were talking about assassination, honestly."

The answer, then—the "solution" critics have searched for—apparently falls somewhere between Jay's moral outrage and Ben's outbursts of willful apathy. It involves striking a balance between the personal and the political. It also involves recognizing that political decisions ultimately affect people on a personal level, and moreover, that what we call politics is itself primarily a collection of people. The first point is implicit in Jay's empathy for the victims of the war in Iraq, but it's the second point that helps Ben to convince Jay not to go ahead with his plan to assassinate Bush:

BEN: [Bush is] a human being.
JAY: No he's not, he's forfeited that status.
BEN: He really hasn't. He's got that sudden smile that he makes when he's answering a question. Have you seen it? It looks like he's not sure how he's going to finish a sentence, and there's a second of panic, his brow furrows, and then—ah!—he thinks of a word that he can plug in there. A big presidential word. He says it, and he flashes that childish smile of relief. It's a little moment of pride—"I made it, guys."

Checkpoint's message could be thought of as an inversion of the adage "The personal is the political." That Baker offers this message in an irreverently insightful, consistently funny, brave-as-nails little book is a testament to the happy sneakiness of his literary project—which has always been of the utmost seriousness.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL

Susanna Clarke
Bloomsbury Books ($27.95)

by Kelly Everding

It all begins with a simple question—"Why was there no more magic done in England?" —and a fantastic and witty history explodes with a Big Bang. In her first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke reinvents an England seeped in magic that lies just below the surface, neglected and unpracticed. The "theoretical magicians" of 1806 were used to doing nothing more than writing dull papers on "magic which was done long ago" until two of their number decide to contact a reputed hermit who "passed his days and nights studying rare magical texts in his wonderful library." Mr. Norrell, as if waiting for the catalytic appearance of these two men, makes a stunning statement that he is a practicing magician, and proves it with a horrific display of power—much to the chagrin of the York magicians, who are forced to disband and give up their studies of magic, per the agreement Norrell has coerced them to sign.

Thus, within 40 pages of this 782-page tome, Clarke beautifully demonstrates the calculating behavior of one of her titular protagonists. Although considered "the dullest man in Yorkshire," Mr. Norrell proves to be quite the Dickensian character—a somewhat cowardly, covetous, and conservative gentleman stubbornly stuck in his ways. Yes, he wants to bring magic back to England, but he wants to keep it all to himself; at one point, someone describes him as "a fishmonger who hopes to persuade people that the sea does not exist." Mr. Norrell hordes magical texts—for the good and safety of England, of course—and establishes himself as the great magician of England, working with Parliament to fight Napoleon Buonaparte's advancing army.

Norrell's foil is Jonathan Strange, a gentleman of large inheritance who, with nothing much better to do, decides to become a magician—largely due to the fact that a vagabond recites to him a prophesy that he will become one. Strange finds he is a natural at magic and does quite well with the limited resources he has, until he finally meets up with Mr. Norrell and becomes his pupil. Norrell ekes out a few books at a time to Strange, which causes some tension: "He told me to apply myself," says Strange. "I was very near asking him what I was supposed to read when he has all the books." Indeed, books seem to propel this story forward: Mr. Norrell's voracious collecting and hording of them, Clarke's references and footnotes to the plethora of magical texts of centuries past, and the one book Mr. Norrell is unable to acquire because of "book-murder." The result of this grows ever more astounding as we learn how the magical book eventually takes form and proves to be the prime mover of the whole novel. Clarke also has fun lampooning the novelists of the day; when Norrell is called upon to give Napoleon nightmares and fails due to his spectacular lack of imagination, one Minister tried to persuade the other Ministers that they should commission Mr. Beckford, Mr. Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe to create dreams of vivid horror that Mr. Norrell could then pop into Buonoparte's head. But the other Ministers considered that to employ a magician was one thing; novelists were quite another and they would not stoop to it.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is thus not only about magic but about books—about what is written in them and how we use that knowledge. Clarke pits Norrell's conservative censorship against Strange's liberal abandon, showing that neither philosophy quite works alone. Perhaps that is why, despite their differences and conflicts, Strange and Norrell are compelled to be together. Magic and books are the glue of their relationship. Eventually magic escapes Norrell's grasp and becomes written in nature: in a bird's flight, in the tree's dance, and in the water's laughter.

Part of the charm of this tale is how Clarke unspools an elaborate history for England, going back hundreds of years to the reign of the Raven King, a magician who divided the kingdom of England and ruled the north. The Raven King was human, but raised by fairies—a notoriously unreliable race of people who enjoy mischief and kidnapping humans to serve them in the magical/alternate underworld they inhabit. Many of Clarke's footnotes provide the background of the stormy relationship between humans and fairies, showing how English magicians often summoned fairies and bound them to serve their own purposes. As a book-learned magician, Mr. Norrell tries to squelch the past and disown the Raven King, but his foolhardy desire to control magic backfires on him, and he commits the type of crime against English magic he rails against throughout the entire book: he summons a fairy to perform a grisly, unnatural task just to gain favor with the English government. By summoning this fairy, this "man with the thistle-down hair," Norrell unleashes a surreal and alien magic upon a few poor, unsuspecting, and undeserving people—including Stephen Black, a statuesque ex-slave and servant whom the fairy decides should replace mad George as King of England, and Strange's own wife.

Clarke does a spectacular job of writing a 19th-century novel in the 21st century, replete with wry wit, quaint British spellings (ancle, surprize), wonderful characterizations, catty conversations that reveal the barriers of class at that time, riveting and often funny footnotes (one runs four pages long) in which she furthers our education of magicians and books, as well as ironic asides catching characters in contradictions and lies, and the very subtle way in which she interjects herself as the narrator—omniscient yet personal—privy to every detailed and intimate conversation. This is the kind of book you do not want to end—ever—and if our luck holds out, Clarke will provide another book much like it, one that will explore the magic of England through the eyes and experiences of the "lower classes," the servants and street magicians who play a vital yet somewhat tangential role in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. For now, however, the enchantment of Clarke's writing should make anyone believe that magic has indeed returned to England.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Postcard from Paris: Frank

by Linda Lappin

It's a rainy day in Paris as I step off the chilly street into a bright cafe near the Duroc metro station. I have come here to chat with David Applefield, an American expatriate who has lived in Paris for 20 years. He is the publisher of Frank, the longest-running Anglophone literary magazine in Paris. This journal of contemporary art, literature, and culture offers a vibrant mix of perspectives from the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Frank's long survival is almost a miracle, given the magazine's independent status. Unaffiliated with any institution, receiving no regular funding, it keeps afloat through the ingenuity of its publisher, a man who came to Paris with a dream.

It was novelist Lawrence Durrell who first encouraged Applefield to start his own press. As an aspiring young writer in Boston, Applefield sent a manuscript to Durrell, asking for advice. Durrell's reply might have daunted a less persistent writer. "I get a lot of letters like yours," Durrell informed him, and then painted a dismal picture of the state of publishing in the '70s. "Why not buy a printing press and print your own work?" Durrell suggested. Ten years later, Applefield founded Frank in Paris, and created his own imprint for fiction and non-fiction by expatriate writers.

Applefield defines himself as a guerilla publisher, meaning he actively seeks alternative routes to get writers into print. Speaking to the Geneva Writer's Conference in February this year, he cited a study of the American publishing industry according to which only one in 29,000 manuscripts submitted to the New York slush piles ever manages to break into print. Applefield believes that writers today can't and shouldn't wait too long for recognition, and encourages them, at all phases of their careers, to find ways to "do it themselves." Writers can pool resources, start their own magazines and publishing houses, experiment with print-on-demand. Still, to do this it takes dedication and effort, and of course, financial resources.

To finance Frank Applefield followed the example of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of the Little Review, who transplanted their magazine to Paris in the '20s. He not only campaigned for subscribers in arty bookshops and cafes, but succeeded in convincing businessmen that investing in quality culture brings benefits to a community in the long run. From issue to issue he also seeks sponsorship for specific projects. Issue 18, featuring a large group of Swiss writers in translation, was partly sponsored by the Pro Helvetia Arts Council of Switzerland.

In addition to the large selection of Swiss writing, issue 18 focused on fiction in America, with a "literary conference call" between American novelists Duff Brenna (based in California) and Tom Kennedy (in Copenhagen), who interviewed each other by phone on the state of American fiction. The issue also included fiction by both Brenna and Kennedy; an interview with Alpha Oumar Konare, former president of Mali, concerning freedom of the press in African countries, unpublished correspondence of James Baldwin; and poems and prose by writers from Russia, France, Turkey, Germany, Bosnia, Hungary, Poland, Spain, Italy, and the US. The range of languages and realities represented made this a multicultural mosaic.

Issue 19, produced jointly with the Literary Review, zeroes in on American writers living abroad and their post-September 11 perspectives on their own culture and on their culture of adoption in a particularly delicate moment of our history. The writers in this issue report from Malaysia, Europe, South America, and the Middle East, addressing the question of their role as Americans abroad at a time when both our world view and economic strategies are being called into question all over the globe.

Negotiating with neighbors in an unfamiliar language, sharing a taxi with a Sikh in a Malaysian downpour, or marching in a peace demonstration against the invasion of Iraq, these writers test the limits of their cultural identity. In environments at once welcoming, alien, rich and dense with impressions, they explore "courage, conscience, and the sources and meaning of being a writer," as poet and essayist Wallis Wilde-Menozzi writes in her essay published in this issue, "Grafting on Italian Roots," and often discovering, like Susan Tiberghien, also featured in issue 19, "Home is Where You Are."

Expatriate writers everywhere have looked to little magazines to make themselves heard; many of the great modernist works we admire today were first printed on private presses in someone's basement in a country of exile. The function of small presses has always been to unearth new writers and works too risky for larger houses to take on, and create a public for them until the time is ripe for a greater audience. True to this intent, Applefield's latest project will be to publish French-American writer Jean Lamore's challenging novel AKA, which has been compared to James Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Richly sensuous, witty and phantasmagoric, Lamore's novel, set in "the remote present," is a rambunctious, mythic voyage through the chaos of Paris, Africa, and contemporary America.

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

R. CRUMB: Conversations

Edited by D. K. Holm
University Press of Mississippi ($20)

by Todd Robert Petersen

R. Crumb: Conversations is the latest in the University Press of Mississippi's Conversations with Comic Artists series, which has featured such luminaries as Charles Schultz (Peanuts), Carl Barks (Donald Duck), and Milton Caniff (Steve Canyon). That a university press is backing this project testifies to the official acceptance of underground comix bad boy Robert Crumb into polite conversation. Furthermore, Crumb's inclusion among this traditional crowd indicates a new level of popular acceptance and legitimization, one aided by films such as American Splendor (2003) and Crumb (1994). These films have exalted not only the underground comix movement itself but their idiosyncratic godfathers as well, bringing them in all their tenacious weirdness to a whole new audience of people who have never once set foot in a head shop.

Crumb, like Bob Dylan, is a reluctant counterculture prophet, and in these at times rascally interviews, he gives the distinct impression that he had little in common with the people who claimed him as their guru and scoured his work for insight, inspiration, and even revelation. On more than one occasion, Crumb tells of hanging out at love-ins around Haight-Ashbury during the late '60s and early '70s only to find himself feeling entirely alienated: "I'd go to these love-ins and stand there and watch all this shit go on; I never really felt like I was part of it. It was like I was a reporter from another planet." During a 1984 interview, Crumb confesses that he used to "fall asleep at those light-show concerts in San Francisco." Nevertheless Crumb credits his LSD binges as the force that changed the direction of his work forever, resulting in landmark characters such as Fritz the Cat, Flakey Foont, Mr. Natural, and Angelfood McSpade. So, while the drugs, sex, obsessions, and controversy incite a certain prurient fascination, these topics soon bore Crumb (and the reader) and he leads us to weightier pastures.

What this book ultimately reveals is a multi-dimensional, deeper, and more pensive Crumb. He is, of course, no fool—conscious of his appearance in words as well as images. When an interviewer remarks that Crumb is nowhere near as ugly as he makes himself out to be in his comics, Crumb replies, "I draw myself to look grotesque because if I drew myself better-looking, people would say, 'Gee he doesn't look as good as he thinks he does.' This way, they say, 'Oh, you look much better than your drawings!'" We always get the Crumb Crumb wants us to see, but here, it seems, he wants us to see something beyond his street-level obsessions, which is the primary virtue of this book.

Since the original pieces were never intended to find a home in a single, collected work, they don't really flow together. In fact, much of this book is repetitious—not to the point of tedium, but at least to the point of making it more pleasurable to read in snatches. A straight run-through would be as overwhelming as eating an entire box of Ding-Dongs in one sitting. Nevertheless, the repetition ultimately reveals much about Crumb's foibles and philosophies. He mellows over the years (as we all must), but a few central issues stick around: his love of old 78s, his distaste for the destruction of regional cultures in America since the '20s, and his sadness over the economic co-option of the underground and of art in general. On these subjects Crumb seems less like a misogynist with embarrassing sexual hang-ups and more like a cross between a Marxist literary critic and an economic pundit on CNN.

Crumb's insights into the business of comix and counterculture are complex. As one would expect from a collection that spans 38 years, there are variations in his take on, for example, the animator Ralph Bakshi's attempts to secure the rights to Fritz the Cat; however, he is surprisingly consistent in his feelings on why he didn't put up a fight when his then-wife Dana used her power of attorney to sign the rights over in 1970. Similarly, how Crumb lost the rights to "Keep on Truckin'," arguably his most famous work, is just as compelling. We learn that despite Crumb's claims to be indifferent to money, the copyright battles with piracy of that design left him $28,000 in dutch to the IRS, resulting in a grand charity effort from the likes of fellow cartoonists Jules Feiffer and Milton Caniff. Through all this trouble, Crumb argues that above-ground operations "automatically get involved in power" and always will co-opt artists. The clarity with which he expresses himself in this regard is concrete and level-headed.

What's great is when things are prosperous and . . . fairly comfortable, things blossom creatively and more people get a chance to create. With hard times, people get squeezed out, or have a hard time. Their creative potential is limited.

Crumb is equally articulate in his discussion of the media takeover of the second half of the 20th century through radio, causing the wholesale destruction of local cultures, which he felt were richer and more artistically interesting. Then turning it back on himself, Crumb said in 1972, "I couldn't handle all the power mass media bestows on you. I don't think anyone should have that kind of power." The problem is that in the intervening 30 years, Crumb has gained that kind of power. The sale of six of his sketchbooks, for example, bought him a house in France.

Beyond the necessary repetition, the only real fault in this book is the design, which is lackluster and doesn't feature nearly enough of Crumb's artwork. Otherwise this is a fascinating look at an intriguing figure in popular culture—one who is proving himself, step by step, to be a man for the ages.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2004/2005 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004/2005

MEN OF TOMORROW: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book

Gerard Jones
Basic Books ($26)

by Paul Buhle

Men of Tomorrow is one of those surprise critical hits that uplift the lowest rungs of popular culture without seeking, as would surely have been done in earlier generations, to uplift and rationalize them as gentility in deep disguise. Postmodernism and a few vindications of talent in comic art—Crumb, Pekar, Spiegelman, and Katchor could almost exhaust the list beyond the aficionado's gaze—have allowed the New York Times, the New Yorker and so on to arrive at a much-postponed conclusion: Even this most pedestrian of popular arts, beloved by generations of ordinary folk via the comic strip and comic book, deserves a little dignity.

Author Gerard Jones is an erstwhile scripter for Batman and Spider-Man, as well as an unacademic scholar-of-sorts on soap operas and media violence. Perhaps for that reason, he has learned to go the other way, reveling in the subculture of the pulps that produced the market and the marketers for comic books. His research is certainly tantalizing, his writing lively. He has a lot to say in particular about the industry-shaping characters in their Jewish lower-middle-class setting of the 1910s-'40s, the crossovers they made between commercial printing, the pulp sex trade and the emerging industry mostly aimed at children. As morals witch-hunter Frederick Wertham was to repeat on every occasion during the 1950s, these guys (with honorable exceptions) were sleazy.

They were, however, an interesting sleazy because they wanted to be upwardly mobile so badly that they experimented with one formula after another until they found ways to exploit the market niche opening up to them. The muscular, semi-clothed body was definitely what caught their interest, the vision of a near-superhuman perfectly able to do all the sorts of things that male children nearly all want to do, if only they could sprout the necessary muscles and dexterity, and also fly. Is this a reading, for the middle 1930s, of futurist fascism, communism, or a miraculously rejuvenated Franklin D. Roosevelt? (Actually, one of the two creators of Superman was a young socialist, and it's reasonable to assume that he had "Mr. Socialism" Norman Thomas in mind). No political theorist, Jones does not probe this kind of issue because his interest is personality and process—above all the process of making money—much like the businessmen themselves.

Men of Tomorrow thus focuses on comic art and artists at the point where comic book sales are racing skyward. Emerging giants of the field like Will Eisner, Bob Kane, and Jerry Iger (an early partner of Eisner's who went on to produce some of the most innovative comics of the era, usually with the imprint of larger companies on them) were at the center of an industry that had grown wildly by the middle 1940s, selling tens of millions of copies each month to kids, GIs, and plenty of others too embarrassed to admit their devotion. We learn amazing details, for instance, about Lev Gleason, the near-Communist non-Jew who revolutionized a sector of the industry with noir-style documentary "true crime" comics, including one series startlingly called Crime and Punishment. And more about the origins of the EC line of goods, guided by later Mad maven Williams Gaines, whose left-liberal politics and commitment to quality afforded opportunities for the best, most serious artists that the industry has ever produced.

The story pretty much climaxes with the 1950s congressional hearings and the campaign of suppression conducted under the guise of the "Comics Code." Jones devotes a few chapters to the revival of Marvel and assorted developments leading to Underground comics and the rejuvenated (it almost never ceased) exploitation of the superhero archetype. By the end of the book, however, this "real-life Kavalier and Clay" (as it is blurb-marketed on the jacket) has many of the same limitations as Michael Chabon's best-selling novel. The day-to-day situation of the comic artist, working in the equivalent of sweatshops during the 1940s, barely registers: their never-realized desire for union representation, their mixture of admiration and resentment toward the hard-nosed bosses—all this is lost. So is the subtlety of Jewish-American life in transition, rapidly changing after World War II, but with many familiar features and attitudes lingering decades longer. Jones is so stuck with the heroic and antiheroic businessmen that the worlds of Crumb, Kim Deitch, Bill Griffith and Art Spiegelman seem part of another universe—when in fact, industry insider Harvey Kurtzman of EC and Mad offered a sun around which a different future orbited.

The story is further handicapped by an indifference to all the comic lines that did not feature superheroes. True, the zealous response to Superman outdistanced everything else in its time, as the Man of Steel inspired countless other characters and became meanwhile a star of beautifully colorful animation. But Funny Animal art was evolving steadily as well, offering the comedy of the little creature against the big creature in a thousand forms, further mirrored in other comic lines that offered the same social commentary via human bodies. It is hard to imagine a book on "the birth of the comic book" without Carl Barks, genius of Donald Duck and his gang, and equally hard to imagine such a book without Little Lulu—yet here it is. Westerns, Sci Fi, and Horror also hardly see the light. Even some of the superheroes that slip by in Men of Tomorrow, like Plastic Man, offered sustained satire on the genre, a sort of immanent critique that preceded Mad's shredding of pseudo-patriotic, authoritarian nonsense.

Never mind. What Gerard Jones does, he does well, and those readers who will tear their hair a bit over what he's left out can come to their own conclusions.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2004/2005 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004/2005

LOUIS: Dreams Never Die

Múm / Hey / Metaphrog
FatCat / Metaphrog Books ($14.99)

by Adam Hall

Between its surreal illustrations and trippy vocabulary, Franco-Scottish duo Metaphrog's forays into what it terms "graphic fiction" offer something to savor and wonder at in each caption of its genre-busting works of art. Louis—Dreams Never Die, Metaphrog's latest effort, is wholly its own unique creation, unlike anything which its art or apparent format might suggest it would resemble.

The story follows the wanderings of a potato-shaped protagonist named Louis and his pet bird in their quest to discover what really happened to Louis's Aunt Alison once she stops writing him. While exploring the town of Hamlet and its maze of bright yellow fences, they are relentlessly pursued by Hamlet's police force, the Fly Catchers, and encounter a motley band of underground dwellers who disguise themselves as colorful flowers. But this is really only half of the story, as the plot itself is merely an allegory for the desperate search for meaning and comfort in a society which sometimes seems to conspire against just those things.

The artwork for the book is rendered in dreamy pastels within a patchwork of captions; the bright colors and soft tones render the creepy elements of the story even creepier. The leader of the Fly Catchers looks like an obese Hitler melded from white Play-Doh, and the Fly Catchers themselves bear a striking resemblance to midget Klu Klux Klan members in military regalia. The illustrative style lies somewhere between Marc Brown's Arthur and The Beatles's animated Yellow Submarine, though the true beauty of Metaphrog's work becomes apparent when the reader stops trying to fit it into the boundaries of what has come before.

The book comes with a CD by European bands hey and múm which contains two tracks that serve as a soundtrack of sorts for Dreams Never Die—but unless the listener understands French, the correlation of the lyrics to the story will be lost to most English speakers. The music itself, though, provides a marvelous backdrop for Louis's adventures: at turns both robotic and tropical, somber yet inspiring, it defies categorization in much the same way the book itself does.

Deftly sidestepping the twin perils of a cheery ending that could only be tacked on and an equally dissatisfying cynical one, the book's conclusion offers no easy answers, but neither does it drown the reader in a vision of despair. The final page of Dreams Never Die raises more questions than it answers, but instead of feeling betrayed, the reader is consoled by the universal nature of Louis's journey. Anyone who has felt the pangs of loneliness will relate to this book; it comforts the reader by saying "you are not alone," which is exactly what the best fiction—graphic or not—can do.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2004/2005 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004/2005

< MORE OR LESS THAN > 1-100

MTC Cronin
Shearsman Books ($15.95)

by Richard Owens

First published in 1993, MTC Cronin's work has increasingly resonated and rippled outward from her native Australia, finding solid support in the U.S. and the U.K. where small presses have vigorously promoted her work and published several of her collections. Cronin's tenth and most recent book,<More or Less Than>, is among her most complex, introducing a multiplicity of seemingly dissociated discourses which flow in organic concord throughout the text. As these discourses rhythmically intersect and diverge, coming and going in alternating currents of harmony and discord, a confusion of voices groping for the temporal origins of their common source emerges:

is it the other side of the body
what speaks from what was prevented
as they prevent what they can
and should, and should
leave the rest to fate
as if there was an arena
and not only that but themselves
as both spectators and participants
the outer and inner circles

Here meaning and conventional conceptions of the world are shattered, dualities are smashed. Outer and inner circles converge, collapsing inward on one another even though conventional illusions are maintained "as if there was an arena."

Yet there is an arena, at least for the work—an arena carefully constructed for the purpose of containing and governing the complex liaisons established between the work's various voices. The 100 parts of the work form a whole, replicating the cycles of organic life—Part 1 beginning with one line, Part 2 with two, and upward to Part 50, from which point the work winds downward, a gradual diminuendo wherein Part 51 has forty-nine lines, Part 52 forty-eight lines, and so on. Part 100 ends just as the poem began—with one line evoking water, the source from which all life flows.

The work is thus not only organic in its cyclicality but also in its momentum, its constant struggle to maintain a natural center of gravity, its relentless and unceasing movement. The opening line—"not simply the stream but they who thought of following"—charts the book's course, drawing a sharp demarcation between the natural world and human civilization. The decision to follow, however, is a conscious and voluntary one, a decision that invariably separates existence from extinction. The corresponding line which mirrors the first, Part 100, carries the reader back to the beginning in cyclical fashion: "ice follows water follows."

Just as the work is cyclically structured, the interlocutory voices which emerge and diminish and reemerge are timeless and dramatically varied. To avoid any confusion regarding the players involved in the text, the narrator clearly delineates the interdependent dialogues, outlining three main participatory spectators using simple, active and direct language:

'follow me' means three, the speaker
a page of water and they, addressed, wavering,
as the third beckons as well as it can, hidden

The narrator in the first half of the book is distanced and clinical, discussing detachedly the Objectivist conception of universality as it is expressed through the particular, "The burning circumstances straight from the pit." In this first half both narrator and audience are appointed judge and jury, plaintiff and defendant. The commerce between narrator and audience is mediated by "a page of water"—the text itself, the meeting place or crossroads where a living dialogue can be established. But the futile efforts of the third party which "beckons as well as it can, hidden" are exposed in Part 32. Here any attempt to preserve interiority and maintain a genuinely human dialogue collapses:

and they tried, in their most prominent places,
in their places most hidden,
to remember the words, to retrieve the words
that might have been spoken in chaos
but the words flew, dead and fast like stones

The confusion of voices here makes it difficult to determine who is hidden and who is not, who is following and who is not. Any attempt to construct meaning, to extrapolate meaning from language, from human relationships, via conventional, orthodox means crumbles inward on itself. Putting the horse before the cart cannot be an issue if one cannot be distinguished from the other. Narrator and audience in this first half merge, the dichotomized parties freely flowing back and forth through the text so that distinguishing one from the other by means of language becomes impossible. Language is everywhere in abundance but, despite its availability, fails to clarify and inform, to resolve. The meaning we, the audience, struggle to establish for ourselves "in the chaos" falls through the quicksand of the presuppositions that all meaning is based on.

From Part 51 forward the book takes on the feel of an epistolary novel. To read the text is to wear the cloak of a voyeur eavesdropping on a private, intimate conversation. They becomes you. The narrator engages directly with the subject—whether the subject be an isolated reader or humanity at large, or, more appropriately, both in their relationship to the sum total of human civilization uninterrupted by time and space. In the intimacy of this second half the narrator betrays the complexity of the poem in one quickly paced passage written in the simplest language. The narrator is tired of hedging bets and offers up the heart of the work, shifting to an all-inclusive we and refusing to mince words:

we are all the same
we are all the same
we are not magical
we are not strong
we think we are magical
we think we are strong

The formidable equalizer in the poem, then, becomes our common humanity, the time-bound fragility of human life we share in common. Cronin's meticulous attention to party and pronoun, to the voices that flow through the poem, give this work a complexity and penetrating depth which carries a timeless theme—the issue of mortality—firmly into the 20th century.

MARCH 18, 2003

Michael Lally
Libellum ($10)

by Larry Sawyer

Michael Lally's March 18, 2003 is at once as simple and commonplace as a handshake and as complex and varied as a hypothetical dissection of the strata that might compose the geological terrain of some distant planet. The poem is titled thus because it was first read on March 18, 2003 at a Poets Against the War reading at the Paula Cooper Gallery in NYC. Other featured readers that night included Ann Lauterbach, Anne Waldman, Robert Creeley, and former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

Each successive line of this single long poem hypnotically speaks what nearly seems the reader's own subconscious roiling. With wonderful cover art by Alex Katz, the kaleidoscope of thought and emotion that struck all after the events of September 11, 2001, has been chiseled here in a profound stone as Lally elaborates upon the changed world in which we find ourselves.

Lally compellingly breathes new life into the unanswered questions that have yet to be sufficiently addressed by a news media that has ignored "news." Every so often, however, the real questions are interspersed with intentionally inane questions such as "who's going to win the award for best actor?" This technique underscores the gravity of the situation at hand and reinforces the relevance of the topics addressed by this important work. In this information age, the poem asks, what is really true?

Is it true even Newt thinks this attack on Iraq is ill conceived?

...............................................................

Isn't it as though the American Revolution
has been reversed without a fight?
Has the vast right-wing conspiracy triumphed
at last—with an almost complete takeover by an alcoholic spoiled brat with
a right-wing Christian fundamentalist makeover?

The mantra of questions begins with the lines

I don't have any answers,
just some questions:

As the poem progresses, however, it does indeed seem as though the very act of asking these supremely relevant questions is enough because the questions asked by this poem are the questions that failed us all in the lead up to the present, ongoing, war in Iraq. Better for us to keep reading and ponder the questions that should have been asked long ago.

Don't the links between the CIA and
drug smuggling date back to its beginnings?

...............................................................

Are we obsessed with the denial of that reality?

...............................................................

Did you know that the company that makes
the new computerized voting machines
that defied the exit polls and put right-wing
Republicans in power where they weren't before
are owned by the right-wing Republican Senator
who did just that in Nebraska, where
according to the results even a majority of blacks
who said they voted against him were obviously wrong
and did the opposite according to his computers?

March 18, 2003 delineates the reasons that we are involved in the morass that so many are ignoring. While it's true that collectively Americans, and the world, were stunned after the tragic events of September 11, Republican talking heads have gleefully reiterated ad nauseam why our civic duty involves ridding the world of evil via a method that has never before been so necessary—the preemptive strike. That this concept violates the very tenets that prophets of every major world religion espouse—Muslim and Christian alike—leads the reader to a very real and very necessary conclusion: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Our choice is to collectively endorse madness and misguided politicos or

to create, as Che once said, a world
where love is more possible?

..................................................

Can't we all just get along?

Lally is riffing at the psychological anti-center of contemporary American consciousness, a very particular consciousness that is fed up and bursting over with the voices that have been far too silent. He has his finger on our pulse and doesn't let up. The prognosis is debatable; the entire poem builds to a crescendo and is over with before the reader has decided what to make of all these questions. One thing is certain, however—the time is now as it never was before. Lally dismantles the Bush dynasty and this American malady in such a subtle way by merely giving voice to what everyone has been thinking. Along the way he asks, what has happened to our voices?

Is it all about blame?
We're all alive and depend on the ocean and trees,
and the air they give us to breathe—so what are we doing?

...........................................................................

You call this a poem?

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THE MEMORY THEATER BURNED

Damon Krukowski
Turtle Point Press ($14.95)

by Chris Stroffolino

When thinking about the rock star as poet phenomenon, one may notice that, in contrast to the Leonard Cohens and Patti Smiths of previous generations (who were known as poets before they became rock musicians), many of the names tossed around today first achieved their notoriety as musicians and songwriters: Jewel, Jeff Tweedy, Billy Corgan, David Berman, and Damon Krukowski all fit this pattern. Berman and Krukowski are probably the least known of these musician/poets, yet they are also the best of the bunch, because neither of them uses poetry as merely a spillover of the stray thoughts and feelings that they couldn't shape into the rigors the art form of the song demands. It may, in fact, be an irrelevant consideration to bring up the fact that Krukowski has been on the music scene for almost 20 years when considering his first book of prose poems, so strongly do they hold up in their own right.

This is not to say that fans of Galaxie 500, Magic Hour, and/or Damon and Naomi will not find some insights into one of the people behind the music in this book, but they should also be warned: Krukowski's seemingly confessional meditative mode in many of these pieces may not be as autobiographical as it at first seems. Not that Krukowski is a mere "trickster," but the trickster does make his appearance along with "the singer, the teller of tales, and the neurotic on the couch." So even though he draws on the experience of his years as a professional singer, songwriter, and musician for quite a few of the pieces in this book, they are almost always tempered with a knowledge of language's artifice and thus never become self-indulgent. Rather, the writer's attitude to writing, singing, or performing becomes a medium through which the reader (even if not a musician herself) may grapple with basic, eternal, questions about identity and one's place in society and the cosmos.

For instance, in "Song Without Words," the speaker recounts (or fabricates) his progression from being a proficient instrumentalist (which instrument is never mentioned) to becoming a vocalist:

But as I sang, I began to think of the words I was singing—these were simple words, both sad and happy ones I had picked up from different lullabies or folksongs I remembered hearing in childhood. The words, though simple, began to affect me. I thought about them more and more often, and they began to take on greater import than I had at first realized.

The danger that Krukowski speaks of here—how words can author the author—may have specific biographical relevance, but more generally points to the danger anyone who has learned to speak must navigate. Likewise, in "Raree Show," Krukowski undercuts the Freudian creation myth by employing imagination in the service of theatre. The speaker is "a prompter at our national theater. It would be a good job, if the principal actor and actress were not my parents—They are our nation's greatest actor and actress because they love the audience more than they love one another, me, or even themselves." This might be the beginning of a tragedy, and certainly there's something dysfunctional about this dynamic; the speaker is reduced to the role of the prompter, a kind of "mute" or "copyist" (which, not accidentally, are the titles of other pieces in this collection). But there is a potentially liberating paradox here—for just as "Song Without Words" could be said to be, on a literal level at least, not a song and made of nothing but words, the speaker of "Raree Show," though presented as helpless to change the predetermined repertoire of "our national theatre," is perhaps able to alter our perception of the family by presenting it as high public farce.

"At the Café Detroit," sounds like it could be spoken by a Dylan, sick of telling his audience "you shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you." "A Testimonial," "Vexations," and "Bells" are excellent accounts of the impetus to become a songwriter and singer respectively, and the struggles to translate feeling into art (which, yes, is made more poignant if one happens to have a Damon and Naomi record on in the background while reading it). "Bells" in particular is a tour de force, offering a metaphorical linkage of the cosmos with a radio. There are also some shorter but less risky pieces in this collection (e.g. "Venus and Neptune," "My Life as the History of a Town") which vary the tone and help the book move along. Other pieces, like "The Envelope," can be read as an account of the "fall" from a prelapsarian, more communally trusting time.

Throughout Krukowski is very adept at showing the possibilities an "I"-based poetry (even with an unreliable narrator) may still have for social critique in the broadest sense, but often his greatest strengths are evident in the shorter pieces, like "The Secret Museum," in which the speaker (a personified sound) squeezes himself into the horn of a Victrola and is transfigured between beats. Here, rather than lamenting the constrictions of "the envelope," the speaker embraces the former confines of his art, whether musical or lyrical.

It may seem odd that Krukowski ends this book with a piece called "Poetry." Why would he put such weight on this idea?

Irrationality, by contrast, mirrors our individual souls. In it we recognize ourselves, but never our friends, relations, or neighbors—it therefore makes poor material for religions and songs—and is the only possible material for poetry.

The distinction between religion and poetry is well-rehearsed enough to be easily grasped, but the implication that songs are more like religions than poetry is more novel and gives one pause. Is this distinction true in general or just for Krukowski himself? One could write an entire book, or perhaps an album, that explores it further.