Blackboards
Tomaz Salamun and Metka Krasovec
Translated by Michael Biggins with the author
Saturnalia Books ($16)

by John Bradley

Tomaz Salamun, you've done it again!

I'm only kidding, of course. I NEVER review my own books, and I would have obeyed this commandment if it were not for the overgenerous kindness of this damn editor, flogging me with so many flattering e-mails. And so I promise I will write this review as if I have never heard of this poet or seen these poems before.

What a wacky fellow, this Salamun. He can make you think you had too much espresso and cough medicine and cell phonage when you read this stuff. Take, for instance "Stefanel Jacket." He talks about "broiling gilthead bream. Hardy meat shot through the sea." Okay, but then watch—all of a sudden he says, "I'm covered in basil." Is Salamun about to be sacrificed? Is this the bream speaking? Help! Then he tells us, "I yank my catch up the stairs . . . ." Fine. But look what he does to us next: He adds to the end of that sentence the name "Metka," his wife, the artist whose artwork complicates terribly this book. Look at what he does to her—"I break down the door and fling her on the couch so it hurts her, / it hurts her, it hurts her, till she groans like a deer." Not to pry into the private life of this internationally respected poet, but why is he exposing for the world his deviant sexual activities? Has the fishing turned him into a rutting animal? Or are we supposed to think the "her" tossed on the couch is the fish and that's who he is hurting? Could this man be a sadist? What have the poor bream done to him lately? I find this very, very scary, but poetry like this is supposed to be scary, no?

In the closing poem, "Heated Passions," we find out why his passions are so heated. He writes here about a castle (I imagine spray-painted on a wall: "Franz Was Here"), and speculates on what a castle represents—apertures, soldiers, power. Ah, the P-word! Here is the key to the castle, to the poem, and who knows, maybe the whole book: "Power chews at everything." And so, even the great Tomaz Salamun must arrive at this sad truth (if it is truly true). Power attacks the castle, power in the form of nature, aided by the filth that comes out of humans and their creations, so that even stone erodes, erodes, erodes over time. But power also comes from the castle, the power of authority, words, rules. Thou shalt obey. This power chews on us all, even the poet with a nice grant to live and write in Umbria, who herds his dislocated words onto a blackboard, which means all his words keep changing, molting, goofing on him and us. Why are the lines so dislocated? Power rattles through the poet and messes everything up. It sprinkles him with basil. It makes the poet mount his wife on the couch. More than once!

This leads us to the very last line of the book: "What we've carved out will fall." Meaning, the very poems and illustrations in this book, all "carved" by Salamun and Biggins (is this a real person, or a play on "Begin, Big One"?) and Metka, who I shall assail in a moment. All words are destined, by the very fact of their wordness, to fail. Even the words of such a clever and horny guy as this Salamun. Note how the last line flashes us back to the second poem of the book, "Pumpkin." (Do they really have pumpkins in the Republic of Slovenia? Or is this code for rutabaga?) Here the book is more hopeful—"The pumpkin is aspirin," "I lean on the birds' / song," and "Cream your belly as you jump." So power giveth and power taketh away, but poetry is power, too—at least when power kindly gooses the poet.

Visual art can also be jazzed and jazzifying. Take the curious figures that Metka Salamun set loose on these pages: These humanesque creatures are lean, bereft of arms, leaping about like a human flea. Usually hopping up, but a few times also down. In the larger, color illustrations, there are sometimes two figures who hint at a silent story. The picture that kicks me in the head is where a bluish figure (a "she" person?) bends over a collapsed pinkish figure (a "he" person?). She seems to be mourning his collapsed-on-the-groundness, while just above her head four poplars sprout from a snakey stick of earth. But wait. From a distance these four slender trees are green exclamation marks springing from the blue person's thoughts! Will her grief, her song awaken him? She needs to read Blackboards to him. Eurydice bringing Orpheus back from the dead.

Do not read this book, however, on a train or bus or car or plane. It will create motion sickness, even if you do not suffer from that malady. You would toss up the lines, though they might reappear in splendid—probably more splendid than in this book—new shapes and combinations. That is the power of this (I almost said "my"!) book. To make you say to yourself, Leave me in a room alone with Language. Let me see what I can do with her. And she with me. And she and me and Biggins. And she and me and Biggins and Metka, if Metka will go for that kind of thing. (She says probably not.)

My name is Tomaz Salamun and I approve the dissolve of these words.

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

Edited by Phillip Sterling
Mammoth Books ($19.95)

by C. A. Tenz

Recipients of Fulbright grants situate themselves intimately in the countries they visit for educational scholarship, whether they arrive as student, scholar, or lecturer. The position affords these people a prestige that shines through in many of the pieces included in Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange, an anthology comprising work by American Fulbright grant recipients. Editor Phillip Sterling, himself a Fulbrighter, chooses pieces that express each writer's distinctive situation as temporary resident in a foreign society. This exploration of academic life abroad takes readers deeper into these distant destinations than most travelogues or tour books.

"Fulbrighters are not mere tourists," Sterling states in the foreword, and this collection of memoirs, poems, and short stories proves his point. James Plath's poem, "The Colonizers Return" offers a critique of Caribbean cruise ship passengers as the speaker views them:

their skin is

shockingly pink, the folds of
affluence more pronounced.

And they hide, always: wallets
in camera bags, cameras in

fanny packs, credit cards in socks,
and eyes behind glasses gradually tinted

like the windows in stretch limousines.
But it's obvious most are new to this,

assuming the (im)position for one or two
weeks and hoping to avoid discovery

as much as discomfort or danger.

Some readers might regard this anthology as elitist or disconcerting because of the distinction editor and contributors make between tourist and Fulbrighter. However, readers interested in conversations with local people and gritty descriptions of local living conditions will find pleasure here.

Offering astute meditations on life in a foreign country, these writers relate folklore and reflect on cultural ceremonies, partake in the quotidian details of life and immerse the reader in specific locales. Each author addresses his or her experiences abroad uniquely, and the collection includes a variety of poetic and prose forms. Poems follow essays; a piece on Indonesia precedes one on Iceland. These differing experiences told in various styles produce an incoherence that the anthology's alphabetical-by-author organization cannot address. Nonetheless, an assortment of powerful cultural material resides within these pages, a worthwhile read for anyone contemplating life in a foreign land.

Turn one page and venture through a war-divided Ireland with Bostonian émigré John Hildebidle as he crosses the fortified border into Derry. Turn the next page and relive Korea though Anthony Petrosky's eyes, "in a claustrophobia of humidity, cars, people / as thick as particulates in parks and palaces." This combination of outsider versus insider perspectives continues throughout the anthology, as the works pay homage to an assortment of encounters. In Donald Morrill's poem, "Junket" for example, he contemplates his time as a foreigner visiting China:

:Through which—excepting banquet toasts and drunken singing—
we avert our faces from the Ministry's cameras,
while still getting to visit this restricted area,
transported by private train, no less.

This experience, written from the point of view of a welcomed guest, differs significantly from Morrill's later essay about riding a train from Soviet Russia to Eastern Bloc Poland during the Cold War. After watching armed Russian soldiers steal jewelry from a fellow passenger, Morrill writes, "The trip has been variously wonderful and horrible, exhausting." The descriptions of travel in foreign destinations glimmer alongside the stories of hardships, no matter the locale.

This inclusion of hardship makes Imported Breads all the more necessary. As other new books, such as George Gmelch's Behind the Smile: The Working Lives of Caribbean Tourism (Indiana University Press, 2003), discuss the problematic elements in tourist travel, Sterling wisely anthologizes the literature of these less-intrusive Fulbrighters. Scholarly exchange affords Fulbrighters access to experiences an ordinary traveler cannot gain; in turn, these Fulbrighters share with readers customs and events generally often invisible to outsiders. Robert Lima embodies this point with his memoir of an elder-making ceremony in Cameroon, in which he becomes "The White Elder of the Menda Hills." The stance of knowledgeable purveyor can prove disturbing as well, as in Richard Jackson's poem of war's scars: "I would like to be able to report / that the 9 year old Rwandan girl did not hide under / her dead mother for hours. There are so many things / too horrible to say." In both depictions, the Fulbright experience offers a realistic portrayal of life in a foreign land. The poems and prose sound not like the narcissistic, confessional literature of expatriation, but instead serve as distinctive reflections on incorporated living.

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

William Zink
Sugar Loaf Press ($9)

by Justin Maxwell

Released in the summer of 2004, this multi-genre collection by William Zink focuses on the then-impending presidential election, using a variety of different literary methodologies to promote a liberal/progressive agenda. This proselytization is so fundamental to the book's vision that even the copyright notice gives complete permission for the reproduction of any part of the book "in any form by anyone anywhere" until after election day, when a boilerplate copyright comes into effect.

Riffs contains some pieces that are sincerely moving. The opening fiction work, "The First Piña Colada War {Abridged}," divulges the secret motivations of over a dozen anonymous senators, then radically jumps to a narrative of Iraqi soldiers under the physical and psychological pressures of the American bombardment, then shifts again to character sketches of Iraqis, told in a chilling past tense that reveals them to be a series of intimate, extended epitaphs. The final piece in the collection, "A Letter to the People of Ohio," makes a thoroughly reasonable and cogent plea for Zink's home state to vote out a universally detrimental administration.

Unfortunately, much of the work between the aforementioned bookends has the consistently clumsy feel of hurried writing. A long section called "Death Penalty Syllogisms and Other Lunacies" points out the foolishness of logic based on assumptions or unanalyzed beliefs; a few of the syllogisms could accomplish this successfully but the section goes on for page after page. Sections of poetry called "Crushers of the Universe" and "By George" have some zip but are ultimately didactic and sophomoric. A collection of aphorisms called "Desperate Graffiti" has some wonderful, put-it-on-your-rally-sign moments, such as "A society that shrugs its shoulders at art isn't a civilization; it's a work crew." But slogans like "Intellectual midgets and wanna-be dictators rely on slogans" are obviously problematic in a collection of political work that relies on emotion over explication; a more carefully made collection would surely have removed such ideological paradoxes.

The book is a collection of different approaches—the riffs of the title—which could potentially sway an undecided voter. Made quickly, it contains all the energy and fear of its time. Its haste leads to problems ranging from distracting typos and a lack of nuanced rhetoric to writing too raw for much impact. In the end it is not a book of great political insight, but it does a fine (if unintentional) job of capturing the political panic that so thoroughly charged the time of its creation. And if it is of dubious merit after the election, when its primary purpose has passed, as a snapshot of contemporary cultural life Riffs from New Id has a unique anthropological value.

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

M. Allen Cunningham
Unbridled Books ($24.95)

by Kris Lawson

A lyrical book about a brutal childhood, The Green Age of Asher Witherow spins a deceptively simple tale from a language as delicate as lace. Told from the point of view of an old man looking back on his childhood in a California mining town, the book achieves a geological resonance with its setting: shot through with veins of memory, crushed by layers of feeling.

In the late 19th century in Nortonville, California, the title character and his family lead a harsh existence, narrowly confined within the boundaries imposed on them by their society and the boundaries they set on themselves. Asher's parents, David and Abicca Witherow, are Welsh émigrés, and their California has no gold rush or quick fortune—only the Black Diamond Coal Company that employs the men and boys of Nortonville, owns their houses, and sells them groceries, clothing and fuel.

When she finds herself pregnant, Abicca feels she is possessed by a demon; she is only calm after her husband reads Bible verses to her. Stubbornly conventional in some ways, Abicca nonetheless allows the estranged wife of the town's founder, now outcast for her skills in midwifery and herbalism, to deliver Asher, which the aged narrator considers "a good name for someone born in the night amid culm banks and black-water drainage bogs." In actuality, Asher is a Biblical name that means "blessed" or "happy." But from the first Asher is literally a creature of the ashes; as a small child he plays in the slithering piles of rocks left over from the mine's processing, where his mother urges him to search for lumps of coal for the family's stove:

The culm banks were known to shift without warning. A child picking coal always hazarded stumbling into some disguised cavity, unsettling the whole mound, and ending up entombed under the chunks of slag, all air squeezed off overhead. The company had issued plenty of warnings to this effect—tales of boys gobbled up in the dumps for their thievery, as if by the unforgiving mouth of justice. But always leery of the company's tight-fistedness, mother saw straight through the moralistic pretext of such warnings and relished the subversion of sending me out with an empty pail.

The Witherow family leads a structured life, punctuated only by Abicca's migraines, during which she becomes a "stone" and Asher and his father creep quietly out of the house. Despite her pragmatism and strong adherence to Christianity, Abicca tells her son Welsh fairy tales, which to him are as much a part of the world around him as the stories of Nortonville's founders and the history of the mine. David Witherow brings part of the mine home with him every evening, as he arrives covered in the black dust that is slowly coating his lungs as well. After Asher is old enough to become a "breaker boy," picking out slate from the coal chutes, his father allows him to work but is disappointed in his son's content in being a miner. "No man's fitted for it," he says. "We endure. Me and all those men."

As in many classic works of literature, in this novel a character's name is usually revealing of that character's personality. Thomas Motion, a small boy who befriends Asher, is always in action, pelting rocks at the boss as the two boys work together in the mine or running from behind in the darkness and knocking Asher to the ground. Thomas envies Asher's calm; Asher would like to see in the dark like Thomas. In a strange bargain, Asher shows Thomas how to be still under the lash of the boss' whip and bear his punishment without showing emotion. At night, Thomas pulls Asher through the darkness, trying to get him to sense the objects around him, the shape of the earth under his feet, until he can navigate as well as Thomas. The first time Asher actually manages to accomplish this nightwalking, he and Thomas go too far, and Thomas disappears.

Concerned townspeople blame the boy's disappearance on Josiah Lyte, the minister's young assistant. Sharing his name with a Biblical king famous for religious reform, Josiah has more than a few pagan sensibilities that unsettle and finally outrage many in the congregation. Asher meets him at the first funeral he attends, that of a boy killed in the mine. He thinks Lyte is unearthly: "he had a peaked look like a revenant: dark hair and pale eyes and a face of angular, jittering features." Lyte treats Asher almost as a contemporary, lending him books and talking to him about the Hindu religion, which he experienced as a child of missionaries in India. But by smiling during funerals and evincing other odd behavior, the young minister has stepped outside the boundaries and Abicca, among others, cannot accept him.

Lyte, not surprisingly, acts a beacon for attention; Asher is not suspected of any involvement in his friend Thomas' disappearance because Lyte has attracted all the suspicion. Asher's other friend Anna Flood also lives up to her name; like a torrent of water, she flows easily into Asher's life and takes over his waking thoughts. Appearing only at night, encased in her mother's giant cloak, Anna becomes central to Asher's development and maturity, his connection to the earth.

M. Allen Cunningham has divided his finely wrought debut novel into sections, charting Asher's evolution from "blood" to "bone" to "ash" and finally to "earth." As Josiah, Thomas, and Anna come into Asher's life, each sets off a series of events that pushes him along like a tide, finally setting him outside the physical and mental boundaries of Nortonville. Like the piles of culm Asher picked over as a child, the layers underneath the surface of his life shift to produce a traumatic change and finally emerge in a new landscape.

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

Chopin's Move
Dalkey Archive ($12.95)

Piano
New Press ($21.95)
Jean Echenoz

by Andrew Palmer

French writer Jean Echenoz is the author of ten acclaimed novels, seven of which have been translated into English. He was already a popular novelist in his homeland before I'm Gone came out in 1999, but when that novel won the Prix Goncourt—roughly the equivalent of the National Book Award—he became a household name. Now, with the recent publication of two more English translations of his work by the estimable Mark Polizzotti, Echenoz stands ripe for further recognition in this country.

Chopin's Move, originally published in 1989, is a slim, crackling, refraction of a spy novel which both participates in and perverts the genre. Its cast of characters includes Franck Chopin, the protagonist, an entomologist turned spy whose signature method is to attach "bugs" to living flies; Vito Piranese, a one-legged spy who trails Chopin and seems to be the protagonist until he's dropped from the novel for good after chapter two; Colonel Seck, an upper-level agent who we don't discover is black until two-thirds of the way through the novel; and sundry other shadowy players who tend to fulfill neither their personal and professional expectations nor the reader's expectations of them as characters in a novel. The story involves Chopin getting mixed up with a high-roller economist and his chess-aficionado thugs, as well as with a lonely seductress whose husband disappeared six years ago. We're tossed back and forth from the not-so-gay north side of Paris to a posh hotel and wooded resort in the country (with plenty of deserted warehouses and suburban wastelands in between), trying to keep up with the constant realignment of affections and allegiances. That Echenoz manages to keep us interested, despite the unapologetically flat characters and the most oblique of plots, is no small feat.

His main weapon in this struggle is his measured, articulate, meticulous prose, infused with sly, playful humor. He shuns extended psychological explorations in favor of elaborate, high-definition descriptions of surface phenomena—clothes, building exteriors, wall paper, peripheral figures, and the like—with a sharp eye for the odd or off-kilter:

The overripe pianist from teatime had been replaced by an organist of similar age, whose russet toupee slipped a notch and in the same direction as his spirited movements, and one of his contact lenses sometimes fell on the keyboard of the Hammond organ: without skipping a kneaded beat, he sought his missing lens between two black keys, quickly spat on it, and glued it back to his cornea.

Passages like this, seemingly divorced from all plot considerations and character development, are sprinkled liberally throughout the novel, hovering just outside the edges of symbol or clue. Often they seem to be there simply for the reader to delight in their photographic specificity.

Such distracted freeze-frames also provide an ironic counterbalance to the madcap, spy game plot, which hops along in spite of itself. Chapters are short; perspectives shift; things happen quickly. Chopin's Move is a breezy book filled with studied prose, but what ultimately keeps the pages turning are not the story or characters, but the sentences.

Piano, published in France last year, walks a similar razor's edge between story and playfully descriptive asides. Here, though, it's a single, strong protagonist who carries us through from beginning to end. Max Delmarc is a world-class Parisian concert-pianist with a horrible case of stage fright, which he treats with large doses of pre-performance alcohol. He lives with his sister and dreams of meeting a woman whom he saw but never spoke to more than twenty years ago. The narrator tells us on the first page, "He is going to die a violent death in twenty-two days but, as he is yet unaware of this, that is not what he is afraid of," and, indeed, before the end of part one of this short, three-part novel, he's stabbed to death by a mugger. Part two takes place in purgatory, a surreal hospital/hostel/prison called the "Orientation Center." Max is nursed to health and then seduced by Doris Day, and another employee there just might be Dean Martin. The director of the center informs Max that at the end of a week-long stay he will be sent either to an idyllic park or to the "urban zone," a city very much resembling the Paris he has just left. Part three is a sharply satiric and often hilarious account of the beginning of Max's eternity in this city.

Because we're attached to Max for the length of the novel, and because he's such a sad and sympathetic character, Piano works on an emotional level that is largely absent from Chopin's Move. We feel for Max, even as he makes his way through Echenoz's funhouse world. If the ending feels too much like a punch line to a very elaborate joke rather than the pathos at which Echenoz seems to be aiming, we can forgive him: the joke's telling was worth it in itself.

Both Chopin's Move and Piano are evocations of loneliness, taking place in a world where even telephones can ring "in a state of solitary exasperation" and cars "(echo) plaintively against the stone facades, the way a man moans in solitary between four bare walls." The main characters are men who lead highly successful professional lives, but whose personal lives are characterized by ineptitude and disappointment. Echenoz's great trick, as Max and Chopin float through absurd, barely comprehensible tableaux in which they are bit players at best, is to shift the focus off of the characters and onto the scenery. It makes them seem all the more lonely (even their creator's not giving them much attention), while at the same time revealing the humor and beauty of the space that surrounds and reflects their loneliness.

At one point in Chopin's Move, Chopin sits in a car with his boss, Colonel Seck. The microscopic brilliance of the following description is typical, and the final sentence could be Echenoz summing up his own work:

Outside the light precipitation continued. Droplets of rain hunched on the glass, sparse and immobile. They had to band together, get unionized in one fat drop before they could hurtle gaily down the windshield, on whose verso, inside the car, droplets of fog clustered toward the same end. It sometimes happened that two drops of different nature rolled down at the same time, united on opposite sides of the windshield, appearing to slice it down the middle. Interesting, all right.

It's hard not to agree with that assessment.

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

Jennifer Traig
Little, Brown & Co. ($22.95)

by Anitra Budd

Americans have many national pastimes, and high among them is hypochondria. You can call it narcissism at its creepiest, or blame it on our unparalleled access to information. Whatever the illness's source, you'll find its manifestations in every urgent care clinic in the country, where armchair physicians happily self-diagnose to anyone who'll listen. Combine this with our lust for perfection, and you'll find many people already have mild forms of OCD. Some might even secretly feel proud of their Type A tendencies. But at its strongest, Jennifer Traig's version of OCD, detailed in her compelling new memoir Devil in the Details, didn't just consist of the constant checking and hand washing Jack Nicholson aped in As Good As It Gets for laughs. Augmented by her childhood Hebrew classes, it eventually became a deep religious fervor known as scrupulosity.

What's termed scrupulosity now might easily have been admired as religious devotion in other eras. The main difference seems to be in the trappings: Traig had no ritual basins, but a washing machine was sufficient. Kleenex stood in for head coverings and helpless pets became livestock, ripe for stewardship. And by repeatedly starving herself over years of anorexia, Traig scourged her body as effectively as any whip could've.

Born to a Jewish father and Catholic mother, who both take a fairly relaxed approach to religion, Traig dabbles in various forms of OCD from an early age. While she refuses to foist the blame for her scrupulosity on her family's hodgepodge spirituality, readers might theorize that her fierce but scattered devotion to obscure Jewish law came from a wish for religious stability. But without any regular instruction, Traig's makes up her own rules and consequences. Her version of Jewish ritual thus becomes a strange beast, at once bastardized and completely inviolate. This inconsistency makes it hard for her to receive any peace from her actions, one of the main benefits of religious involvement; each fabricated ritual only brings up fresh worries about blasphemy and a resulting need for more purification.

Devil itself follows a similar circuitous route, avoiding the typical memoir's linear path from child to adult. Instead it catalogs Traig's life through its shifting array of obsessive predilections, creating a kind of "Obsession's Greatest Hits" album. This is a necessary device, since recounting the peak years of her disorder chronologically would be nearly impossible. As Traig writes, "OCD is a closed circuit." Since every action and thought triggers a series of compulsions and paranoia, it's hard to discern a clear beginning or ending to any event.

From an outsider's perspective, and with the blessing of Traig's hindsight, it stretches the imagination to believe anyone in her community, much less her family, managed to gloss over the signs of her illness. From the work itself, it's difficult to tell how much of this is due to Traig's intense naval-gazing (another byproduct of OCD), how much to a past lack of medical knowledge, and how much to her masterful ability to hide her symptoms. Whatever the reason for her family's strange oversight, it serves to bind the reader to the author, making us complicit in her actions as both silent partner and audience.

Another of the book's assets comes from Traig's understandable eye for details. The vivid images she creates of her late '70s family and Northern California town are almost digitally perfect. But the most moving theme unearthed from her mountain of rituals and habits is the undeniable connection between OCD and faith. Traig's years of religious devotion were supported by a perfect belief that soap and prayer, in the right order, could ward off Armageddon, not to mention save her family from being murdered in their beds. Just because this faith arose from an unusual brain chemistry instead of years in seminary doesn't diminish its intensity, or make it any less fascinating. Pondering the question of how faith begets paranoia (and vice versa) offers the most satisfying pleasure in reading this work.

Memoir enthusiasts may consider Traig's determinedly flippant tone a drawback. When she recounts the horrified look on her mother's face when Traig, as an adult, tries to insist on a low-carb Thanksgiving dinner, it's hard not to wonder how many other genuine moments of concern might've passed by unaccounted for, drowned in a sea of sarcasm. Dropping the Sedaris act more often would've gone a long way toward making her family more human and less "Everybody Loves Raymond." But even the most somber of memoir and self-help fans would have to admit that for most of her life, Traig didn't suffer from any lack of seriousness. Taken in context, humor seems like the most effective shield she, or any other human, has against an overwhelming fear of damnation.

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

Edited by Emily Bernard
HarperCollins ($23.95)

by Shannon Gibney

In a world where the dominant narrative on interracial friendships looks like something out of Ally McBeal (high-powered, beautiful white girl, hangs with high-powered, beautiful, and sassy black girl and thus obtains extra "cool" points), the prospect of an entire book on the topic is a bit terrifying. Far from being yet another vapid and familiar exploration of the power of friendship to "transcend all," however, Some of My Best Friends acknowledges the many racial and cultural differences that weigh upon and sometimes break interracial friendships—while arguing that such difficulties often make these friendships worthwhile in the first place.

Pam Houston locates the primary difficulty as internal in "On The Possibility-Filled Edge of the Continent," claiming "the reason I have never acted on my attraction to black men, why I am only just now beginning to develop friendships with black women, is a . . . kind of self-loathing." In a refreshing if somewhat unfocused essay, Houston reveals that she approached an interview with Nobel laureate Toni Morrison more fearfully than she did mountain expeditions in Tibet and Kenya. After her hourly interview turns into a day-long visit between just-met old friends, Houston realizes that it is her own feelings of inadequacy that have kept her from truly connecting with those outside her immediate circle.

In "Crossing the Line: An Introduction," editor Emily Bernard presents a mother-daughter conflict that few black families want to discuss: black daughters with white-girl best friends that their mothers dislike. Bernard writes that her mother "wanted us to meet and befriend black children who were like us. I appreciated and sympathized with her conflict, but only up to a point. Because for me there was no choice. I preferred the white girls, hands down." Bold words indeed for any black woman to write in the post-Black Power era. But Bernard's honesty about the isolation she felt as the sole black girl in advanced placement classes at her school, and the tyranny of having to embrace a certain kind of blackness in order to claim authenticity, strikes a chord. She feels little or no connection to the other black girls at school, and is more interested in exploring a different, and in some ways more dangerous kind of intimacy with white girls.

The essays that occur outside of a white, normative gaze are what make Some of My Best Friends such a good read. Jee Kim's "Bi-Bim-Bap" stands out for its depiction of the nexus of urban Korean American and African American cultures and for its gripping, scenic structure. And the closing essay, Somini Sengupta's "With Me Where I Go," sears itself into the brain, never to be forgotten. Told in expository form as a letter from an Indian American reporter to a lost African American lover, the beauty of Sengupta's piece is only surpassed by its execution:

Our clans needed each other. Yours needed mine to remind themselves they belonged on this soil. Mine needed yours to know who was on top and who was at bottom. It's the immigrant's rite of passage. And then, under the epidermis of our public identities, there was you and me. Somewhere in the foul brown muck of our antagonism was a more primal longing. Did you hear me trying to tell you, "Tell me about, show me, who am I?"

Sengupta's uncompromising embrace of the demands and rewards that true intimacy yields is breathtaking. One hopes that her essay, as well as others in this fine anthology, will inspire a more honest and inspiring discussion about race, culture and love in this country—both on the page and off of it. As James Baldwin pointed out 40 years ago in The Fire Next Time, we are long overdue.

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

David Rumsey and Edith M. Punt
Esri Press ($79.95)

by John Toren

David Rumsey—not the sort to balk at career change—earned two degrees in Art History from Yale, fell into a small fortune buying and selling real estate in the San Francisco area, and went on to develop one of the most extensive collections of antique maps in the world. Eager to share his collections with others, Rumsey explored, and occasionally pioneered, the technology required to digitalize his maps and display them on the web for collectors, historians, and students of cartography. Cartographica Extraordinaire, a handsome volume almost fourteen inches square, provides a glimpse into the many treasures of the Rumsey Library for those of us who lack the time or the wherewithal to view these colorful and intriguing documents online, or to print them out on the scale they deserve. Along the way, Rumsey and co-author Edith M. Punt offer us a brief overview of the development of maps, and the continuing role they play in the modern world of geographic information systems (GIS).

To judge from the text of Cartographica Extraordinaire, Rumsey's appreciation of maps owes more to his feel for art than his grasp of history. While there are things to be learned on every page of the book about the relations between the development of cities, nations, and continents and the drawing of maps, Rumsey has made no attempt to chart the development of map-making techniques into the digital age—only two maps in the book were created more recently than 1922—and we learn little about the impact of satellites on mapping techniques, dramatic though they have been. Rumsey's interest lies primarily in the beauty and historical preciousness of individual maps, the development of lithographic techniques, the changing role of maps in "taking control" of a landscape, and the fascinating archaisms that old maps almost invariably contain.

Even in this regard we might occasionally wish for more astuteness than Rumsey provides. For example, on one two-page spread) we're given the opportunity to compare two maps of the Vancouver area, one published by George Vancouver himself in 1798, and the other by the Spaniard Espinosa y Tello in 1802. In the text Rumsey describes the controversy concerning who had the rights to America's northwest coast. In the caption to the Spanish map we read:

Vancouver's maps show the English obsession with taking and claiming land by mapping publicly its every detail—they almost saw maps as deeds. Espinosa's approach reflects Spain's view of maps as intellectual property to be hoarded, establishing land ownership by controlling the knowledge of where places were located.

Aside from the solecism of "mapping publicly," the underlying point is questionable in itself: Spain had already relinquished control of America's northwest coast to England in 1790, and Vancouver's map of 1798 was obviously superior in every way to Espinosa's edition of four years later—so the contrasting strategies of disseminating or hoarding knowledge has no relevance to either the control of the area depicted or the date of publication of either map.

Yet the maps themselves remain beautiful to look at. And this sheer variety of eras, styles, and functions brings interest to almost every page of the book. We have exploratory maps, land grant maps, township plot maps, state county maps, relief maps. There is a wonderfully stylized map depicting the migration of the Aztec Indians from Aztlan to the Valley of Mexico which, beautiful though it is, looks more like a child's board game than a scientific depiction of anything. There are maps of rivers, arranged in long thin strips, maps of mail routes, train routes, urban grids. It's interesting to compare the quaint pages from a road atlas published in 1802, showing only a few miles of countryside at a time—but with what seems to be every creek and hill and tree depicted—to the scale and clutter of today's Rand McNally version.

Rumsey has focused his collecting effort on the Western hemisphere, and it's a little disappointing to see so few maps of South America included in the mix. On the other hand, the inordinate presence of the American West among Rumsey's selections may be justified on two counts: the terrain is spectacular, but challenging to render effectively on a flat surface; and the exploration and mapping of the American West played a crucial role in the development of both the area and the modern map. Readers may also be disappointed to find the detail of some of the early maps a bit muddy, but greater detail would presumably have required a narrower field of view, and there are plenty of "close-ups" to balance the beautiful but less than perfectly sharp full-map views occasionally exhibited here. Thus, despite its occasional shortcomings, Cartographica Extraordinaire is likely to bring genuine delight to all non-specialist map-lovers, travelers, and arm-chair historians.

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

Four Arrows and Jim Fetzer
Vox Pop ($14)

by Bradley E. Ayers

American Assassination challenges the reader to render careful, critical judgment about the causation of Paul Wellstone's death, when his chartered plane went down in a remote area of northeastern Minnesota in October 2002. Was the crash an accident, a bizarre twist of fate on the eve of the fiery, outspoken liberal Democrat's predicted reelection to the narrowly divided U.S. Senate? Or was the plane's destruction the work of threatened right-wing forces determined to sabotage our country's elective process for political gain?

Authors Four Arrows (aka Donald Trent Jacobs) and Jim Fetzer passionately assume the latter, but not without making a powerful case. Their thesis is structured around the fundamental, time-honored considerations when appraising any crime: did a potential perpetrator have the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the act, and is there human testimony or physical and circumstantial evidence to support each of these criteria?

The initial chapters of the book are devoted to building the evidentiary case. Fetzer and Jacobs meticulously piece together the events and identify personalities involved preceding the tragedy, as well as those actions and developments, both official and unofficial, following the crash. The authors' reach for information is extensive and goes well beyond that of the authorities. Many contradictions and inconsistencies in the reactions and pronouncements of first responders to the crash site are examined, all suggesting a deliberate effort to tamper with or remove critical evidence from the scene.

It's primarily on the basis of this factual data, which includes verbatim quotations from local authorities, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as well as regional and national media reportage, that an impressive scenario of a possible conspiracy and cover-up emerges. The accusative finger points to the Bush White House and the most powerful in the Administration, with the complicity of key federal agencies. Brief early digressions comparing a possible Wellstone murder conspiracy with other controversial high-profile deaths are a minor distraction; all in all, this is goosebump-producing reading for anyone with lingering suspicions about the crash scene investigation by officials of the U.S. Government.

Having quite effectively made the evidentiary argument for post-crash concealment and deliberate spoilage of the scene, the authors' turn to the motive issue. These enlightening chapters are absolutely essential to appreciating the breadth and intensity of the Bush cabal's animosity that may have led to Wellstone's elimination. American Assassination brings together in its central chapters an extensive list of factors, some fairly obscure in the public view, clearly identifying the Minnesota Senator as a persistent and even greater future threat to the conservative Republican agenda.

With the actual events, initial reactions and reports, documented physical aspects of the wreckage and crash scene observation and the possible motive for assassination and cover-up now before the reader, Fetzer and Jacobs offer a detailed retrospection of alleged "accidental" and "lone-gunmen" fatalities of key or high-profile political figures in the U.S. over the past forty years. Comparison and parallels are drawn between these and the possible murder of Senator Wellstone, buttressing the assassination conspiracy premise.

At this point in the book, in their capacity as educators, the authors step away from the specifics of the case and engage in serious tutoring. Several chapters of the book are devoted to a rather expansive, academic and slightly complex theoretical discussion of critical thinking. This is the methodology professors Fetzer and Jacobs applied in investigating the fatal Wellstone plane crash and analyzing the events, circumstances, evidence and other factors surrounding it. While sometimes a little heavy on classical logic process, the effort is well intentioned and encourages the reader's appreciation for the authors' intellectual effort in researching the Wellstone tragedy.

The truly interested reader is now, hopefully, versed in the discipline by which Fetzer and Jacobs build their case for an assassination conspiracy in the downing of the Wellstone plane. The authors' dissect, item by item, the government's handling of the event, from crash site response and investigation to the suspected manipulation of public information—essentially illustrating how the official system either failed or was perverted to facilitate a manufactured explanation for the crash.

The authors thoroughly document a pattern of procrastination, obfuscation, buck-passing, unanswered inquires, procedural anomalies, policy circumventions, apparent incompetence, discrediting of witnesses and sources, ignorance and degradation of physical evidence value. Most disturbing is the assertion the FBI played a key part in the initial phases of the crash investigation, usurping the established role of NTSB as the responsible action agency in any fatal aircraft incident. The authors' offer a compilation of peripheral testimony, qualified sources familiar with airplane crashes and standards for investigating them.

Furthermore, the authors' point out the Wellstone crash investigation was never subject to public hearing as mandated by NTSB regulation in any high profile case. Staunchly defending the assassination conspiracy argument, Fetzer and Jacobs, in full attack mode, rebut the final NTSB "accident" report with a vengeance. Sentence by sentence, they catalogue the reports' contradictions, lapses, selective use of evidence and testimony, manipulated phraseology, and ignorance of available information that might undermine the government's finding that the crash resulted from pilot error. The authors' conclusion is that the NTSB report is a transparent effort to establish plausible denial and is bogus.

Finally, American Assassination presents the reader with a variety of alternative explanations for the plane crash. Some tend toward the exotic, but are technically substantiated to a reasonable degree. Other, more conventional explanations are also posed for the reader's consideration. Expert opinion is offered and expanded upon. The book concludes with a summary of the major points of argument, set forth in easily understood fashion.

The authors' conviction and ardency are apparent in their work, as is the thoroughness of their research. If the book has any weaknesses from a literary standpoint it's the indulgent, redundant comparison of the postulated Wellstone assassination conspiracy with the murder of John F. Kennedy and the questionable deaths of other major political figures in America in recent years. There is also repetitive overkill in citing the potentially compromising backgrounds of some of the key officials involved in the investigation and reporting of the Wellstone crash. And the astute reader will note a certain editing unevenness of the text, something that's hard to avoid when combining the independent work of co-authors. The book also lacks a bibliography and index.

These shortcomings in no way detract from the substance and essential message of the book. Fetzer and Jacobs have produced an enormously provocative piece of work that should be of interest to anyone concerned that our Constitutional political process, our very lives, can be manipulated by evil forces hiding behind a façade of moral and ideological righteousness in America today. American Assassination, if widely read, could well prompt a public outcry that might ultimately lead to a full exposition of the facts surrounding the strange death of Senator Paul Wellstone. The book is a must read for all who search for the truth.

Editor's Note: Bradley E. Ayers is a former Army special operations officer and author of The War That Never Was: An Insider's Account of CIA Covert Operations Against Cuba (Bobbs-Merrill, 1976). As a former commercial air charter bush pilot, he has flown into Eveleth, Minnesota, the site of the Wellstone plane crash, many times under all varieties of weather conditions.

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

Michael Dregni
Oxford University Press ($35)

by Rick Canning

The great jazz critic Whitney Balliett once pointed out that virtuosity has always been a problem for jazz. That sounds wrong at first, especially to people who don't listen to much jazz, because every famous jazz musician, it seems, is a virtuoso. But Balliett's point is that technique is less important to jazz improvisation than it might seem to be. Jazz musicians don't need to be able to play flawlessly; they just need to be able to communicate. The larger a musician's technique, the stronger the temptation he faces to hide inside it—to play more rather than better. And listeners can hardly help but be dazzled by the fireworks: the scales and arpeggios, the augmented and diminished and inside-out chords, the glissandos, the lightning runs, the oddball intervals. It is dazzling, no question—if also, finally, a little wearisome.

Django Reinhardt, the jazz guitarist who died in 1953, was as dazzling a player as could be imagined, and his life and work is amply celebrated in this new biography by Michael Dregni. Reinhardt had technique enough for two guitarists, maybe three; everywhere he played, jaws dropped. And they're still dropping. To put on one of Reinhardt's recordings today is to be bowled over—but not by technique alone, or even primarily. What strikes the listener with greatest force is joy. Django loved to play, and that love is there in every bar. He amazed himself over and over. The recordings sometimes capture him whooping or laughing as he played, and it's no wonder: he made exuberant, amazing music.

With full use of only two fingers on his left hand (he was injured in fire at the age of 18), Reinhardt could nevertheless do anything he wanted to with a guitar. He was a natural, one of those musicians who seem to play as easily as they breathe. As an accompanist, he was brilliant and probably a little intimidating, with an unerring sense of rhythm, a driving, Gypsy-style tremolo, and a habit of lying low for several bars, then jumping out to hammer four or five passing chords. The impression is of a great vitality only barely restrained.

He was famous, however, for his solos, when the restraints came off and the personality and invention poured out. He had four speeds: slow, medium, fast, and super fast—so fast that sometimes his guitar seemed to buzz like a bee. Speed alone, of course, won't make a good solo, or a good soloist, but it will get a musician noticed; it's a sign of technical proficiency, after all. (According to Dregni, when Reinhardt first heard Gillespie and Parker he shook his head and said, "They play so fast, so fast.") Reinhardt's speed was all the more astounding because of his impaired hand.

But it's perhaps even more impressive that, with so much technique at his disposal, he was able to resist the temptation to rest on it. In Reinhardt's music, the dog almost always wags the tail. He had a superabundant musical imagination. He may or may not have been able to outplay all of his contemporaries, but he could definitely outthink them. Dregni quotes Baro Ferret, "the second best guitarist in Paris," on that point: "Technically, Django did not scare me. It was his mind. He had ideas that I would never have, and that's what killed me."

The result is a music that jumps, like Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, right out of the speakers. It's lively and rollicking, especially when Reinhardt is trading solos with violinist Stéphane Grappelli. Together, they formed a string quintet in 1934—violin, bass, and three guitars. The group was christened the Quintet of the Hot Club of France in early 1935, and the music they recorded over the next few years (Grappelli stayed in England during the war) sounds today at once old-timey and fresh. Swing was king in those days, and both Reinhardt and Grappelli swung so effortlessly that it's easy not to miss the drums and piano.

Django's story is a romantic one, and Dregni covers it thoroughly: his Gypsy childhood, living in a caravan, traveling with the seasons, stealing chickens, catching trout with his bare hands; his early years playing the banjo-guitar; his adventures down the seedier streets of Paris; his extravagant improvidence, gambling away his money or blowing it on big cars and white Stetson hats; his fear of flying, of dentists, of ghosts; his whimsical attitude toward commitments, especially gigs. The book is punctuated with backstage scenes of exasperated band members, ready to perform, asking each other "Where's Django!?" He's usually in a bar, or playing billiards, or just home in bed.

One of the most interesting chapters treats Reinhardt's happy days during the Occupation. Across Europe, tens of thousands of Gypsies were rounded up and killed, eighteen thousand in France alone. Jazz, too, was outlawed; it was degenerate, modernistique, mongrel. Yet Django, the Gypsy jazzman, flourished. He formed his Nouveau Quintette and played everywhere, for everyone—including Nazi officials, many of whom, it turned out, loved jazz.

After the war, the first new 78s to arrive from America brought bebop to France, and that meant the end of swing. Django was ready to move on musically, and he had long dreamed of going to the United States. In 1946-1947, he got the chance, touring the country with Duke Ellington, but apparently Reinhardt came with a few misconceptions. For one thing, he didn't bother to bring his guitar, assuming he would be presented with new ones. The music he made with Ellington, playing an electric guitar, was by most accounts excellent, but Reinhardt was disappointed with the experience, and homesick, too. Success or failure, however, the tour exposed him to the latest American jazz, and it helped to modernize his sound, as Dregni points out. His later recordings clearly show him moving in new directions, mastering bebop idioms and the electric guitar and sounding very different from the prewar Django.

According to the jacket copy, Dregni's book is the "first major critical biography" of Reinhardt, which means that fans have been waiting a long time. Unfortunately, unless they have a particular relish for alliteration and punchy writing, they probably won't feel the wait has been worth it. Dregni has clearly done his homework; his bibliography is impressive, and he appears to know everything about anyone who ever played music in prewar Paris. But his writing frequently gets in the way. One of his favorite, and most distracting, devices is the melodramatic sentence, usually isolated at the beginning or the end of section, the better to stop the reader dead in his tracks: "Django was haunted by nightmares of flames"; "It began with a broken string"; "Inside, was a simple 78 that went off like a bomb."

Still, though the writing isn't as strong as it might be, this book tells the whole story, and is full of insight about the man, his times, and his music. And in the end, it's the music that matters. If this biography spurs readers to discover or rediscover Django Reinhardt, it will earn its place on the bookshelf.

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