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That Kinko's Guy

by Robert J. Nebel

Academic life was not easy for Paul Orfalea. As a hyperactive, dyslexic child growing up in the 1950s and '60s, Orfalea's future looked dim. His education was plagued with one disappointment after another. He flunked two grades and graduated eighth from the bottom of his high school class.

Through strength and support from his family, Orfalea did not let standardized tests and a D average stop him from achieving success. In the early 1970s, a light bulb went on in his head: Offer a service that people need. In this case, it was a photocopy service for students on the University of California at Santa Barbara campus. That small copy shop was called Kinko's—a nickname he earned for having kinky hair at the time. The business grew to over 1,200 stores in nine countries.

The rise and eventual sale of the successful copy center is chronicled in Orfalea's autobiography, Copy This! (Workman Publishing, $23.95). The book is filled with personal and business anecdotes as well as some interesting opinions, including the author’s take on American education system. Neither a liberal nor conservative, Orfalea has a unique perspective on the current state of education and the nation.

Robert Nebel: How do you feel about the No Child Left Behind initiative?

Paul Orfalea: It's awful. We are taking away imagination. We are teaching to tests. What makes America great is in our imagination, not in memorization. We are not a memorization-fixated culture. We can't compete with the Chinese and Japanese in memorization. Where we have been competitive is in creativity.

RN: What would you propose instead of No Child Left Behind?

PO: I would get rid of the Department of Education. I would get rid of the state departments of education and let the local people control the schools.

RN: Would local control be the green light for certain states to discriminate thereby creating an educational apartheid system?

PO: At Kinko’s, we had that argument for centralization. Who’s to say that better parents involved in their children’s education won’t make better decisions than folks who are connected to Washington?

RN: Would you be in favor of vouchers?

PO: I don’t know how I feel about vouchers—I think that conflicts with separation of church and state. I don’t know how I would feel about tax dollars going to them. When I was in school, we had one vice principal for 3,000 students. It seemed that his only job was to paddle the shit out of me. Today, we have six vice principals in a school. Maybe charter schools would be good. We need to get more local control of our schools. We need to get the Washington test-takers out of our schools.

RN: Now that you are retired at a rather young age, you find time to teach at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Southern California. What do you see in today's students?

PO: We have education ass-backwards. Ninety percent of students that I have taught do not know that a Senate term is six years long. They are global studies majors! We are producing a bunch of trout. A trout will bite the hook and a few minutes later will bite the same hook. That is how long their memories are.

RN: Do good grades typically translate to good corporate leaders?

PO: Kids that are allegedly better students are in an elitist class in first and second grade and then they go to their high schools, they go to their universities and the normal dumb shits like me are down at the bottom. These people go to elitist schools and they replicate their elitist thoughts in the corporations.

They don't trust the people at the lowest levels. I've always been a believer that people go to work to do a good job. We do not need as many rules as we have. I don't understand why it is a federal issue on choice. Why is the federal government giving money to my local police department? Soon we will be addicted to the federal government, and we will not want to support our local police force. I have been a believer (with the founding fathers) that the government that governs best is the government that governs least.

RN: What would you do to better prepare the students?

PO: If I reformed school, I would do two things: We can improve a child's IQ by three percent by teaching them a foreign language by seven-years-old. We shouldn't be waiting until high school when they are neurologically not ready to learn it. Second, we emphasize reading too young. Boys do not have the language skills of little girls. Boys go to school feeling like idiots. We wonder why fifty-six percent of the enrollment at universities is female. I might consider having same-sex education. Boys from day one are pampered and feel good about themselves and then when they go to school, they feel like idiots. I would have exercise in the morning at eight. They clearly learn better after they open up their brain. Why can't we accommodate the brain and not the school?

RN: If you had No Child Left Behind when you were growing up, where would you be now?

PO: You know, I never will spell past a third grader. I would still be in third grade if the government had their way.

RN: In the book, you reveal that you are taking anti-depressants. Do you think that kids with A.D.D., A.D.H.D. or hyperactivity should be taking them?

PO: I was opposed to it. Now my son is taking it and he has better self-image. I take anti-depressants. I focus better. All those voices competing for attention. It's part of life. You take a band-aid to stop bleeding, why not take a pill to stop the pain.

RN: Does it help with your legendary bouts of anger?

PO: Fuck yes.

RN: As a successful entrepreneur, how do you feel about the president and his business policies?

PO: I think this guy's a dumb shit to be giving tax cuts and then he wants to give more. He's not a conservative. I don't know what he is.

Click here to purchase Copy This! at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2005 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2005

Bipolar Worlds: an interview with Chris Stroffolino

by Aryanil Mukherjee

Chris Stroffolino with Continuous Peasant band mates

Chris Stroffolino is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: Oops (Pavement Saw Press, 1994), Stealer's Wheel (Hard Press, 1999), and Speculative Primitive (Tougher Disguises, 2005) as well as several limited edition chapbooks. His outspoken views on poetry can be found in Spin Cycle, a collection of essays, talks, and reviews (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001), and he co-edited An Anthology of New (American) Poets (Talisman House, 1998). He was Visiting Distinguished Poet in Residence at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California from 2001-2004, and is currently the lead singer/songwriter of the band Continuous Peasant. He talks here with Aryanil Mukherjee about a plethora of topics ranging from contemporary poetics to cross currents in American poetry in the last half-century.

Aryanil Mukherjee: Casting a look at the different periods of American poetry, which era do you think stands out in terms of its innovation of the poetic language, and why?

Chris Stroffolino: I'm skeptical of talking about poetry in terms of periods or eras, at least in any definitive way. Eras tend to be ill-defined or tend to come down to a few individuals whose ideas of poetry, for rather arbitrary reasons, get put forth as maxims more than others. Often, if we're thinking of American poetry, the name that comes up as the most influential innovator of "poetic language" (which is in my opinion less profound than other forms of poetic innovations) is Ezra Pound, with his theoretical/aesthetic tomes and machinations that persuaded many of the need to "modernize" language and other aspects of poetry to suit what he perceived “the age demanded" and to justify his own particular aesthetics. Thus, it's no accident that he would be held up for his superior "music" or "ear" as many of Pound's "innovations" have now become "naturalized" in many discussions of American poetry of the last 100 years—despite what discomfort many may feel about his poetic project. One could say the Beats did much, for a time, to help provide an alternative to Pound—obviously on an ethical and content level, as well as in terms of language. But this question for me is ultimately more about individuals than movements or periods, and about much more than language. I might even argue that the most important poets for me, even if they can be seen as "innovators," are not primarily so, at least if we restrict the question to “poetic language.”

AM: There's a lot of interest among Indian readers about the Beat Generation poets. Parallel poetry movements happened in Calcutta (Kolkata) in the '60s that apparently seem to have been inspired or thronged by the Beatniks. In retrospect, how do you think the Beats influenced the American poetry scene?

CS: The Beats had a lot to do with opening things up in the late '50s (insofar as writers like Lowell, Rich, and Merwin, in the wake of the Beats, began loosening their prosody, for instance), helped popularize, or laid the ground for appreciation of, other contemporary poets such as Creeley, O'Hara, Jones/Baraka, Ashbery, and so on, and helped many re-evaluate older writers like Williams, Whitman, Blake, and Shelley (whose reputation suffered under the post-Eliot/Pound New Criticism). They also may have had a significant impact culturally beyond mere poetry lineages (insofar as they were able to cross over into the mass media and help turn a post-World War II "baby-boom" generation on to cultural aspects largely ignored by normative media at the time. In retrospect, it's pretty amazing they got so much attention considering how conservative the '50s were, but it just goes to show how things are even more closed up now than they were then. This paralleled to some extent the rise of rock and roll; the younger Bob Dylan, for instance, had a definite kinship with the Beats that may have had an even more profound effect on culture for a time.

Of course, referring to the Beats as a group presents many problems. Take for instance, Corso vs. Ginsberg. While, in general, I think Corso has written the better poems on the page in terms of sophistication and lyric and intellectual intensity, Ginsberg's most important achievement (after Howl) was largely as a popularizer of poetry and as a spokesman and social revolutionary. Both of these roles are necessary, and although my writing may align me more with the former at present, if the opportunity presents itself. I can see myself sacrificing the intense page-poem for a more Ginsbergian role (perhaps with my rock band)—but so far it's a responsibility and a privilege that has not afforded itself to me. I bring this up because in my late 20s and for most of my 30s, I, and I think many others of my generation, thought that we reached a point in our poetry where we outgrew the Beats, or at least a straightforward declamatory kind of poetry. However, as the cultural and political climate in America has grown increasingly conservative, and the original Beat generation poets increasingly dead, and writers younger than myself are increasingly not even aware of what the Beats were able to do (and if they are, they consider it something in the distant past, like Romanticism), I've found myself feeling that what is needed today in American poetry is at least as much of a “rebirth of wonder” as Ferlinghetti called for in the mid-1950s. This is not to suggest a simple return to the Beat ethos—yes, they were part of the sexist 1950s, and women were largely marginalized from the Beat movement— nor do I suggest that we all have to become huge students of their writing. Yet even if the "message" in poetry by Ginsberg and other Beats may be very easy to grasp in a way that doesn't require as much study as Creeley, Ashbery, or others, it may be actually more difficult to live—and that may be the most important aspect to Beat poetry, like rock and roll at its best, "free your ass and your mind will follow." One contemporary poet I admire who is influenced by the Beats is Eliot Katz, who just visited San Francisco. He takes the Beats so seriously, when so many of my more "sophisticated" poetry friends do not.

AM: Shelley seemed to have a stellar influence on Corso; in fact, Corso's poetry appears a little deceitful to me in the sense that it is as much romantic, sensible, and organized and self-destructive as Corso's own life. What do you think?

CS: I think Corso read Shelley quite differently than I do! For me, part of Shelley's brilliance and intensity was his discursive "intellectual beauty." Shelley presented himself as more of an intellectual than Corso. Thus, much of what I liked in Creeley, Ashbery and Stevens, and later in Shakespeare, I found in Shelley—a strong conceptual thinker. Yet he also presented himself as more emotionally intense than Stevens and Ashbery (if not Creeley), and also dramatized himself very insistently as a "the Lyric Self" in ways that many subsequent writers would claim was a little too reckless (in the "fear" of Romanticism which has largely characterized both Victorian and 20th-century norms in American and English poetry). Stevens, Riding, and Ashbery, though three of the most "romantic" (and even "visionary") poets of the 20th century (especially if compared to Eliot and Pound), are nonetheless rather repressed when compared to Shelley. Corso's intensity is much more emotional and lyric than intellectual and discursive. This does not mean Corso is not a very subtle thinker in the best of his poetry, but that his thought is often brilliantly condensed in a tighter gem-like lyricism, without what some (though not me) would call the "dross" of discursive, "prose-like" (dry) explanation one may find in Ashbery, Riding and Stevens. In this sense, Corso is a less-generative poet for me (as the other writers often get my juices flowing to write a poem when reading them more than Corso does), but this does not mean I value him as a poet less. I see a lyric kinship with aspects of Frank O'Hara (O'Hara's beautiful poem called "Gregory Corso's Gasoline" is like, and better than, a review of early Corso.). In the best of Corso there's a brittle, even fragile, intensity of each word, each line, that reminds me of, say, early Delmore Schwartz at his best (as well as Rimbaud, and other poets who have such faith in the “less is more” notion of lyric poetry). It's so well crafted it doesn't seem an accident that he couldn't sustain such lyric intensity in some of his later work. It's unfortunate that this has hurt his reputation as a poet. Is it self-destructive? Is the fact that Corso was "nearly a social failure" a relevant consideration when considering the value of his poetry? I'm torn about that one. Quite a few of the language poets have been candid enough to tell me privately that one of their problems with writers like Corso is not ultimately aesthetic, or political, but comes more deeply out of their fear of turning out like him as a person—as if the mere fact of writing that way would destabilize their bourgeois comforts. Maybe it does, but that hardly discredits Corso for me.

AM: Do you believe that many contemporary American poets including you got divorced from Language Poetry? Was Language Poetry barely an academic hallmark? A manifesto for the movement's sake?

CS: I don't know if I can speak for anyone but myself here, but for me, I never got "divorced" from Language Poetry, because I was never "married" to it. I know some others who got "turned on" to poetry largely through the auspices, or networking prowess, of the Language poets—they are very good recruiters; almost as good as the army—and they would have a different take on it. Perhaps Wallace would be a good example of this; which is why perhaps he coined the term "Post-language" poetry in the mid-1990s. Because I was already clear that I wanted to be a poet before I became aware of the Language poets, and already had a pretty clear sense of what I thought poetry was and could be, the Language poets presented a challenge to me that I found intriguing enough to read them with as open a mind as possible, while maintaining a skepticism toward their claims. In fact, like many have said before me, I found their polemics to be what initially attracted me to them. They presented themselves as intellectual arguers, and this inspired me to write critical prose that would argue back. The polemics also did a good job of whetting my interest in their poetry, and a few of them—Bob Perelman, Carla Harryman most notably—I think, are definitely among the best poets of their generation. But since I still liked writers they said you weren't supposed to like, well, there was a lot of pettiness involved. As time went on, many of them became less dogmatic, but even today there are too many taboos, too many don'ts (a la Ezra Pound), in their prescriptions for proper poetry. I've written more lengthily elsewhere about some of my quarrels with the Language poets and had hoped at one time that they would wish to enter into a dialogue with me, in part because I did take many of their stated concerns seriously, but for the most part they have refused—so I've increasingly found myself reading less of them than I used to.

AM: A fairly large percentage of established, practicing, experimenting poets hold either MFAs or PhDs and teach literature (you, Wallace, Gizzi, etc.) or are otherwise working in the arts. Most Bengali poets have no formal training in any field of arts, and are in professions that are completely incongruent with arts or literature. What's your take on this?

CS: I have TOO many takes on this! I decided I wanted to be a teacher around the same time I decided I wanted to be a poet, but these were two separate decisions (I would have applied for the job of "fool," probably, if it were England in 1590). On another level, your question makes me wonder about the larger social forces that have caused America to become largely a "service economy" of white-collar workers, while the blue-collar, manual laborers are now more found in other countries. Not that I'm nostalgic for the "good old days" of sweatshops or anything—as a first-generation college student, I certainly went to college to avoid the factory in which my dad worked. Maybe the fact that the “growth” of America coincides with electronic mass-media further discouraged manual laborers from the less capital-intensive activity of reading and writing. In any event, I feel the much touted "progress" about the "upward mobility" to be gained from switching from blue-collar jobs to white-collar (presumably more mentally fulfilling) jobs to be another aspect of "the American ruse" that I question. If indeed many poets in America, like me, spent much time in their 20s and 30s going to graduate school to get those higher degrees in part to be able to buy time to work on their poetry (and went into huge student-loan debts in the process), of course we'd want to get jobs in the academy—it’s practically the only marketable skill we have in this increasingly specialized and professionalized society. Since college was the place in which many have learned poetry, and one of the few places in which appreciating poetry was a value, it makes sense that so many of us would want to be there. Now, if poetry were disseminated in other ways—through the media (like rock music is), or through "peer pressure" (like drugs are)—then maybe I wouldn't have felt a need to go to school in the first place. I know that in other countries it's different. For instance, I have some Canadian friends who have been able to get government grants to take a year off to write poetry. It seems it's significantly easier to get grants there to do that, because the poets I knew were young, and not very published. I think if we had a stronger public sector in America, a stronger government support for artists (I'm not talking about a decadent "free ride"—but rather a sense that the grant money would result in some kind of "community service" project that would benefit the commonwealth), then perhaps more poets wouldn't have to be involved with the academy. Not that I think being involved in the academy is a bad thing, but if I believe that poets are best when they have more freedom—more time to think, feel, sleep, and so on—then I also believe we need less money than other people to be able to live. But America is so "all or nothing" in the sense that it's almost impossible to find some means of support that provide the bare modicum to be able to live happily and healthily (I'm not even going to get into the health care crisis!). Instead, it's either poverty and constant stress, or overwork and constant stress. At least a teaching job can allow you three months off in the summer, and that's a start.

AM: What are the politics of the poetry publishing houses in America? Typically, how would a young poet find places to publish his early work? And how has that journey been for you?

CS: Oh gosh, I don't know about the politics of the poetry publishing houses in America (if I knew more, I'd probably be able to get and keep my books in print better!) so I have many conspiracy theories about many presses. Yet, I think most presses that publish primarily poetry are generally very small in America, and generally lose money. So there are many editors who either work more than one job to pay for their little presses, or who have inherited money. These people are really trying, but most poetry books being published hardly ever sell more than 500 or 1000 copies (a good deal of which are probably often bought by the author herself). The situation is very close to what is called a "vanity press" or there's a basic barter system, as poets trade books with each other. In my more cynical moods, I came up with this formula for the contemporary poetry world in America: "buy and read 50 books of poetry a year, and maybe 50 people will buy and read yours"—not that the poet sees the money or anything. Anyway, it used to be more large publishing houses would have a poetry "division" or "wing"; that's not so much the case now. University presses (and others) often have contests to make money. There are also the "anonymous" reading committees; it's shrouded in a certain mystery because people want to avoid the appearance of nepotism (but they're often the most nepotistic). I only tried the contest thing once, and don't plan on trying it again. I’d like to see a press that publishes challenging poetry make an attempt to reach outside the poetry coteries again, for someone with access to the cultural means of production to take a risk on it again (it sickens me that even college radio stations, much less NPR or The Village Voice, for the most part consider poets non-entities). The only example of someone who did this in recent years was Rob Bingham, at Open City, who helped get David Berman’s book to a relatively wide audience (though still not as big as the audiences of Howl, For Love, and The Happy Birthday of Death). He was interested in my work, but he died tragically at a young age. Well, it proves that it can be done, and maybe someone else will appear on the scene and do it.

AM: How have the times changed for poetry journal editors in America compared to when, say, Ed Sanders published his journal Fuck You?

CS: Well, I'd say one big difference is that there are simply so many poets today—perhaps even more than there are readers of poetry. It's a more conservative time (both politically and socially) than the 1960s, and probably even than the 1950s. Many poets (on the self-proclaimed “cutting edge”) claim the "shock value" of those words, or of strapping your naked self to a nuclear warhead, no longer exists, and is now simply passé. But when Albert Gonzalez comes, can Lenny Bruce be far behind? Besides, there are still magazines that are more similar to Fuck You than to most poetry magazines, but more likely they are connected to the "underground" or "punk" music magazines. That culture is more truly the heir to the spirit of the Beats and to Sanders (whose band the Fugs inspired many punk-like bands in the '80s and beyond) in its youth, and its desire to want to change culture, and not strictly publish poetry, or "LITERATURE." I think most poetry magazines today are much more like the way poetry magazines were before the Beats came around and traded in "respectability" for a certain "hipness." I think many magazines, even many I'm glad to have been published in, reek of respectability—and having just said that, I'll add, it's not really their fault. It's but a symptom of what has happened to culture in general in America.

AM: Before we end, I’d like to ask you about one of my favorite poems of yours, "Vive La Difference"—I am curious about the origin of this poem.

CS: The emotional/ethical origin of the poem was a feeling of unrequited Love upon meeting a woman in a bar and feeling how weird, and seemingly backwards, American courtship rituals are. The woman was a fast talker, verbally attractive (I tend to fall for that kind of woman a lot), but attracted to me, it seemed, ONLY FOR MY MIND, alas. So in this poem I'm basically trying to make the best of the situation and really hope that the intensity we shared non-physically could somehow translate to a physical connection, even though I was aware or afraid that we had gotten too close mentally first for this to ever happen. But there's an attempt at ingenuous optimism here. This particular woman did go so far as "dry-humping me" once, but when I reached to take off her shirt, she yelled, "you'll never see them," referring, I suppose, to her breasts. Of course, the poem does other things, and could apply to many other muses I've had (there's a political dimension to this poem) so I don't know how much the dry-humping really illuminates the poem; it probably says much more about my fear of being called (or treated like an) over-intellectual than it does about love.

Vive La Difference

We couldn’t see the sky painted on the ceiling
But the love we knew was blind could. Maybe
We met in a bar because she was as afraid of
My body as I was of hers. Under normal
Dating circumstances this could prevent us
But if the city proves anything it’s that nature
Isn’t normal. And as some have to go to movies
To look in the mirror and others need not be babies
To be born head first it's not really a matter
Of putting the cart before the horse to be friends
Before lovers, to eat the nut before cracking the shell
And feel like we have too much of what others have
Too little of. Nor must I feel like it can be quantified
For consciousness to come off like a teacher who lectures
So much or always calls on the one student, say memory,
Who always has his hands up. forgetting until finals week
To try to get the cuter silent one in the back to talk,
Which is shame when it turns out she has the most
Interesting things to say, or at least it seems that way
After overdosing on “depth.” And so we’re trying to drink
Our way out of the tunnel we’re were too similar to be
Attracted to each other. “Vive La Difference!” says one
Of the bridge-workers to a diplomat at the bar. “It keeps us
In business.” But I don’t know if I want to be kept there,
I protest. “Of course you do, silly. Listen. It’s not so bad.
You get nights off, free lunch, overtime, the pleasure
Of killing two birds with one stone.” But killing two birds
With one stone is just a polite way of saying ‘double vision’—
Any fool who just got fired can see that there only ever
Was one bird; it was blind at that, blind as a bat
That couldn’t care less whether the batter just struck out
The second before the game (played in the Astrodome)
Is called because of rain.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2005 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2005

Poetics, Revelations, and Catastrophes: an Interview with Kamau Brathwaite

by Joyelle McSweeney

Chris Stroffolino with Continuous Pheasant

photo by Beverly Brathwaite

Born in Barbados in 1930, Kamau Brathwaite has contributed a lifetime of effort to the peoples, cultures, literatures, and languages of the Caribbean and the world at large. A poet, scholar, linguist, and cultural theorist, he took his bachelor’s degree with honors from Cambridge in 1953 and, after stints as a public servant and teacher in Ghana and Jamaica, earned a PhD from Sussex in 1968. He has since taught at the world’s top universities and authored upwards of sixty books of poetry, prose, literary criticism, drama, cultural studies, autobiography, and history. A member of the board of directors of Unesco's History of Mankind project, he’s also served as cultural advisor to the government of Barbados, and his prizes, including a Guggenheim and Fulbright, are too numerous to list here.

Brathwaite’s tireless output and status as a public man of letters recall Yeats, as does his interest in the spiritual and ancestral forces that animate landscape, nation, and history. Yet Brathwaite’s stylistic and formal innovations have been equally tireless. As his career has progressed, he has invited more and more vernacular energies (namely a distinctively Caribbean English, Nation language) into his poems, and by the 1980s was breaking away from normative poetic conventions of typography, layout, and appearance, using a dot-matrix-style printer to create a more democratic, expressive visual effect, a kind of visual vernacular. He refers to this style of visual presentation as "Sycorax video style," after the mother of Caliban in The Tempest, the witch Sycorax whose magic Prospero has stolen, along with the island. 2001 saw the re-publication of the important trilogy Ancestors reset in Sycorax video style.

Brathwaite’s new book, Born to Slow Horses (Wesleyan University Press), represents a redoubling of all these energies. It’s a composite text, including prophesy and anecdote, drum songs and jazz riffs, unconventional forms working personal, national, and international events into the mother matter of history and memory. The book also recounts a visionary incident in which the specter of an ancestral slave woman, called Namsetoura, appeared to Brathwaite at his home in CowPastor, Barbados. An angry Namsetoura revealed the spot to be a sacred gravesite and charged Brathwaite not to leave his land, which had been expropriated by the government of Barbados for an airport road. This life-changing visitation has recharged Brathwaite’s style and sense of purpose and also locked him in a battle with his government which is stretching towards its tenth year.

In the following interview, conducted on September 14, 2005, Brathwaite and I discuss Hurricane Katrina, the battle for CowPastor, the visitation of Namsetoura, and Brathwaite’s charged and evolving relationship with style and poetry, ecology and technology, nature and history.

Joyelle McSweeney: We’ve recently experienced such a catastrophe on our Gulf Coast, I’m sure you heard all about how terrible it was.

Kamau Brathwaite: Of course, of course.

JM: —and we also just had an anniversary of 9/11. Catastrophe is an interesting thing for American poets; a lot of people seem to shy away from writing about public themes or very recent things, maybe because they don’t know how to handle them in their writing. But you’re a poet who writes from catastrophe, in that you write about the Middle Passage as almost a constant condition. I wonder what you have to say about writing from catastrophe and how art can come out of catastrophe.

KB: Art must come out of catastrophe. My position on catastrophe, as you say, is, I’m so conscious of the enormity of slavery and the Middle Passage and I see that as an ongoing catastrophe. So whatever happens in the world after that, like tsunamis in the Far East and India and Indonesia, and 9/11, and now New Orleans, to me these are all aspects of that same original explosion, which I constantly try to understand. What is it that causes nature to lunge in this cataclysmic way, and what kind of message, as I suspect it is, what message is nature trying to send to us? And how are they connected, these violent forces that hit the world so very often— manmade or nature-made or spirit-made—they hit us increasingly violently. And I’m at the center of this, I feel—what I have experienced here at CowPastor is a miniscule version of the same thing. That one should have found a home, after a long period of peregrination, and within minutes of finding that home, to be told that you have to leave, on a flimsy, unethical excuse, is another form of catastrophe.

JM: Yes, I agree. In fact, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which things, which we at first glance think of as natural disasters, always have this manmade component—whether it’s causing or whether it comes after this natural disaster, and it’s getting harder and harder for me to see the line between manmade and natural disasters.

KB: You begin to feel that New Orleans, I suppose, is one of our tragic examples, where nature constructed the basin below sea-level, and man came there, built upon it, and constructed his and her theories and hopes and dreams in basically such a fundamentally corrupt way, that when the pressure really hit, the dikes and the levees and the theories have altogether collapsed under the pressure and promptings of nature. And New Orleans for me is an example of how Nature uses so much of man’s doings to send a new message.

One thing about catastrophe, for me, is that it always seems to lead to a kind of magical realism. That moment of utter disaster, the very moment when it seems almost hopeless, too difficult to proceed, you begin to glimpse a kind of radiance on the other end of the maelstrom.

JM: Another way in which nature rises up to intervene is the sort of experience you’ve had with—I don’t know if I’m pronouncing this right—Namsetoura?

KB: Yes. Namsetoura. ‘Nam’ is a concept of mind which is the opposite of man’s mind, ‘man’ spelt backwards, and ‘nam’ also means an imperishable spirit; so ‘man’ is a distortion of ‘nam’. And Namse is a version of Anansi the Spider. So the spider is part of the ‘Nam’ and the ‘Nam’ is a part of the Spider. And ‘toura’ is a way of telling stories.

JM: I see! So when you saw her in your garden, do you feel that that was another kind of intervention?

KB: Of course, that was a presage to what was going to happen because nothing had happened yet. What had happened was that when I was told that I would have to leave CowPastor, I began to photograph everything I could on the pasture, and the pasture itself is about two miles long, and my little area, which is on a ridge between the sea and the hill, is only two acres. And I decided that I would try to photograph everything I could as a kind of memory bank for what I assumed I was going to leave. And on this afternoon when the sun was at two o’clock, three o’clock, when my wife and I were in this little clump of bush which was just behind the house, what you call the garden, and the sun suddenly illuminated this magnificent spider’s web, with a spider at the very center of it. So naturally I went to photograph it. I could see the spider perfectly clearly through my naked eye, but as soon as I looked through the view finder of the lens there was no spider, there was no web, there was nothing! And this happened, of course, two or three times. Each time I went to take the picture there was no evidence of reality. So finally I decided to take the picture anyway. And as soon as I did that the lens split right across its equator.

JM: That’s amazing!

KB: I know, right. So I changed the lens, and got a different lens, and then I did the same thing, and this particular lens almost melted in my hands, got very hot, in fact it burned my fingers as well. So then I felt quite desperate because this seemed to me an extraordinary phenomenon. So my wife went to fetch her box camera, just determined to take this picture. And she clicked the spider, twice. And that was it. We couldn’t see if she got the picture but at least she clicked, and nothing more had happened.

When we took the Kodak to the guy who processed the film, what came out was two, three, actually four pictures came out that afternoon. One spider, normal looking, in the web, the second one, still reasonable, in the web, the third spider seemed to be receding from our gaze, and the fourth shot came up was the image of Namsetoura.

JM: And that’s the image on the front of your new book?

KB: Right. And you can imagine how one felt.

JM: (laughs) No, I cannot! How did you feel?

KB: What happened immediately, I felt compelled to begin to write from this experience. I started out trying to get a narrative, but as I began to conceive of a narrative, this image began to talk to me. Now this is where things get really dizzying. So that the poem that is in the book you are holding is in effect not only my description of what happened, but the words Namsetoura begins to speak to me. And what she tells me is two things: first of all, she’s been here for three hundred years, and no one has ever thought of looking for her, no one has ever thought of a burial, no one has ever thought of respect, so her soul is in a kind of limbo or perturbation. And, secondly, that here I am now to disturb her peace, on the grounds that I am a Caribbean, Barbadian poet, but that as far as she’s concerned, I’m like all the other people through the last three hundred years, don’t know a damn about her, about her condition—her life here on the plantation as a woman, her life as an uprooted African princess or priestess or whatever she was. So that she criticized my own sense of poetry, which is a very humbling experience. She did it in a way which was quite unexpected because normally one would expect a sybil to speak in an oratorical manner, in a very correct, abstract system. But instead of that she used very salty language. She spoke in a mixture of Asante Twi, Ga, and Barbadian Nation language. But she spoke in a very—not a hostile manner—but she used a lot of four letter words. I mean, she chewed me out properly. And that was also, as you can imagine, quite humbling. And the third thing she did was, she implied that if want to really write a poem, having discovered her burial ground, and that if I was to be a man, she said, using ‘man’ in a very sexual manner—if I was to be a man, I would have to have the balls to be able to defend her pasture. That was her indictment to me, her declaration to me that afternoon. And it so happens that soon after that I began to think no longer of leaving CowPastor as we’d intended to do, but I decided, why not stay here and try to defend the situation. I mean first of all I was going to defend her graveyard, I was going to have to challenge the archeologists of Barbados and the Caribbean to come and do some digging. To see what’s there, because you know, let us say that a million slaves died in this little island alone from 1650 to 1838. Let us say that, though we don’t know the exact number. But do you know from all those people dead, after all that time, Barbados claimed they’ve only one graveyard on this whole island.

JM: I don’t believe it.

KB: Yes, it’s unbelievable. I mean, that hit me for the first time, too. But the graveyard that has been discovered by archaeologists from Harvard University happens to be just over the hill from CowPastor. So again, the sense of connection begins to make itself felt.

But what she said is that I should do some real research, I should defend her sacred space, and I should become concerned therefore with the environment, both historically and spiritually, from which she had come. And soon after that I began to make it clear to the government of Barbados, without much response, that I was not going to leave CowPastor until I got some clear explanation as to why they wanted to build a road through this place.

JM: Right.

KB: The road is not necessary here, there are two good roads on either side of the pasture, and my position is that it seems as if all they wanted to do is to build a road because a road can be built. There’s space here, there’s green here, there’s lovely ground here, so why not build a road which makes it easier to get to from the airport to the next village.

JM: So where are you in this?

KB: After I declared that I am not leaving until there was some kind of public discussion of why this is deemed to be necessary, I got no reply, I never got a reply yet from any authority. And that was ten years ago. I’ve been fighting this thing since 1997. I saw Namsetoura just on the cusp of 2000.

And this is a beautiful place with cows grazing and a very peculiar brand of goat we have in Barbados which we call a black-belly sheep, a goat unique to the island, you know, it’s a place I call a Serengeti, a place for grazing and rumination and the rhythm of the animals, people coming to collect the cows in the evening and so on. But, the government decided that this entire pasture should be cleared and therefore the people who owned those cows, they are all now removed, those people have been cashiered off the space and therefore the cows have gone. And then from January this year until March there is a sudden violent outbreak of digging on the pasture, something which we could not understand. We woke up one morning to a clanking. They weren’t content to evict the people, they started digging everything up.

And then, on top of that, we have a very peculiar feature here which I called the Lake of Thorns. It is like a gulley, what you’d call a pond. A little lake, but it is dry in the dry season, but it is filled with water in the wet season. And that water comes off the surrounding highlands, and it helps to drain the pasture. That’s one thing I did get, an undertaking from the authorities, that they should not destroy this pond as well. Because it’s a very unique feature, it includes mangroves, and all sorts of little shrubs and plants in there which I don’t think our botanists have really got to yet. All sorts of little animals, even the monkeys come migrating through here. So it was a unique little special wing of nature.

Well, in all this digging and thumping and clunking, they filled in that pond as well. That’s when I went on the Internet. Because I couldn’t get any satisfaction with the local authorities. I decided at least to talk to the rest of the world about these things. And I got a fantastic response. I never knew the Internet was such a remarkable medium.

JM: Interesting…

KB: Yeah, lots of people are responding, and of course people pass the word from one to the other, and a guy came forward from Cambridge University, who is a poet—

JM: Right, Tom Raworth.

KB: Tom Raworth, right, do you know him? He decided to anchor the whole thing on his website and that made a big difference.

So anyway, as a result of that campaign on the Internet, somebody whispered to somebody who whispered to somebody and there’s now a token little ditch which is supposed to represent the return of the Lake of Thorns.

JM: (laughing) Oh no.

KB: That was the only kind of response we’ve had.

JM: Well, this interview will be on the Internet and I imagine a lot of people will read it. What response do you want from people who read about your case and care about your poetry? What can people do?

KB: That’s the trouble. There’s nothing really that people can do. But if only… Let us say that one day George Bush’s wife might see the site—I’m just giving a fantastic example—and that she became so moved that she decided to speak to the President of Barbados and ask him what’s happening. All that I can hope is that the wider this thing spreads and the more people get to know that the greater the chances that someone of real influence might be able to intervene. Because it seems to me that poets and well-wishers and journalists and literary critics are quite ineffective (laughs) for what I’m up against here.

It is a horrible story, but what is even worse is that with the digging up of the pasture, now it is no longer Serengeti. Apart from the little spot that I defend, the pasture itself is now a hostile environment because the grass is gone, the cows which used to graze the grass are gone, and the place is now an overgrown wilderness. And now it is beginning to encourage vandalism because people are now coming out to the pasture and taking away blocks of stones from some of the houses that were destroyed and so on. It is no longer the kind of place that one would instinctively recognize as a place where psalms could be written. It is no longer a question of David; it is more becoming something like John the Baptist.

JM: Well, how do you take that? Do you think you have an imperative to stay and be John the Baptist here? What do you think is next for you? How long do you think you are going to stay?

KB: I really have no idea. You see, there’s still Namsetoura. I get the impression from my communication with her, and it has been very difficult and I really can hardly hear her, but my impression is that unless there is some kind of rational discussion between myself and the government, then I will stay where I am.

But the whole thing about it is that I’m learning so much about poetry. The pasture is teaching me poetry, because what one would defend about the pasture when it is beautiful, it is harder to defend when it’s ugly. If I came here when the place was utterly hell, I would have left like anybody else. In a sense now, I am faced with a nostalgic situation, perhaps. I’m now harking back after Eden or harking back after a Lost Paradise, something like that.

JM: In what way do you think you’re learning about poetry from the pasture? Are you being taught a dedication or being tutored in nostalgia?

KB: Nostalgia, yes, I can say that quite frankly because the pasture teaches me so much—or I could say Namsetoura, the pasture and Namsetoura, because the two things are so closely connected, the pasture and this image. I can say I’m having a nostalgic phase, I tell you confidently without any embarrassment. I can say this perfectly clear, I don’t feel in any way defensive about it. Nostalgia now begins to have another meaning. Nostalgia means that there is some vision which it is important that we try to preserve. It goes beyond just fact, into something entirely different. It has become standard which you now try to uphold, it is a standard which you try to teach people about, which you hope that others begin to recognize.

In other words, Barbados as an island itself. It was such a beautiful place, not only CowPastor, I’m just a small example, but the entire island is being overrun by building, you know, there’s hardly any grass left. We don’t feed ourselves anymore. We import everything—all our food, all our fuel, everything—and we’re selling large chunks of land to wealthy foreigners, as well…

For the native poet like myself, that is where the nostalgia comes from. All the places where my poetry came from have been taken over by hotels. And they now squat upon my metaphors.

JM: I see.

KB: And not only on my metaphors, but I’m in pretty close contact with the younger poets on the island, and the scope of their vision is increasingly narrow. Their sense of history was never very clear, but their sense of nature, their sense of environment, their sense of possession of space is being slowly dwindled, into, you know, a tenement yard or a space of concrete where you might play baseball. Rather than the great game of cricket which we were famous for.

JM: Right.

KB: And it seems to me that if they’re not careful, instead of poetry, the outward celebration of life which you communicate to others, that poetry can then be poured into drugs, and you can get into a situation that is quite well known in the cities, where the outlet, in the long run, becomes that needle. Or that little spliff. Because you see you can no longer see the sky and feel the breeze and if you do have some creative urge, if you do have a sense of inspiration, to use those grand words, you might find yourself slowly crawling into your own viscera rather than having anyone to share it with.

Right now in CowPastor I no longer can share my outward poetry with the people in Thyme Bottom, who have the cows. So, even as I speak to you, I speak to you almost out of a tin box here in CowPastor rather than speaking to you with a sense of community around.

JM: Well, this is a very devastating story. But another thread that I hear is, and it links to the Sycorax video style, is about technology. You went onto the Internet and you discovered the scope that it has, and the kind of connection it can make. It seems to me that that’s something that runs through your work—both its animistic interest in ancestors and spirits on that level, and an interest in technology, in manmade technology. That doesn’t seem to be in conflict for you—the two seem to go together. Do you think that’s the case?

KB: In fact you are the first person who’s mentioned this, that you notice that the CowPastor and the Sycorax style might all be connected. I really hadn’t realized that, and I really cannot tell you precisely where that link is. The Sycorax actually begins from 1980 when I had those several catastrophes in my own life. You know, the death of my wife, the destruction of my oumfo, and then my death at the hands of the three horsemen of the Apocalypse. [Brathwaite here refers to a traumatic break-in in which a thief placed a gun to the base of Brathwaite’s skull and pulled the trigger. No material bullet was fired, but Brathwaite feels that a ghost bullet traveled through his skull at that moment and rendered him "dead." His life since then is of a different category than his life before.]

JM: Right.

KB: Those three incidents were so traumatic that I was not able to write anymore using my hand as I used to do. And I became a kind of granite. My fist was like stone. And that’s when I came across my first wife’s computer and I began to play with it and discovered Sycorax lurking in the corner of the screen and that’s how the whole thing started. So the technology started from an earlier catastrophe. And it really doesn’t have a narrative connection with CowPastor. The technology, however, let us hope, might be able to sustain me through this second period of bleakness.

But, I’m sorry, it is not really bleakness. What I’m really looking at is a form of radiance. The bleakness is there because there is clearly no obvious end in sight. But I feel so elated at being here and discovering that—but it is not really technology, Joyelle, but an increasing link between myself and ecology, not technology.

JM: Oh, I see.

KB: I do not know where Sycorax video style fits in at all but what has happened to me is that I’m blessed here on this pasture by getting to understand nature in a way which I did not understand much at all. In other words, I used to understand nature via the English Romantic poets—you know, “I wandered lonely as a cloud.”

JM: Sure.

KB: And now I begin learning the details of a banyan tree that’s just here on the side of my house. And a certain tree that are called dunks trees that bear a very bittersweet fruit. And this dunks tree has its own choreography which one would not normally understand. When it begins to bear fruit the tree bends toward the earth. And the dunks, form a kind of stooping ziggurat, like a circular stair, make it easier to pick the dunks from the tree. And if the dunks are removed from the tree, ending that phase of its fertility, the branches begin to elevate once more into their position parallel to the earth. Little things like that, you know, the movement of trees, the kinds of birds and how they build their nests, I have time here. I have time and no rush to get to know things.

JM: I see.

KB: Let me tell you how one time, there was a tree outside of my bedroom window which was trying to make me into a tree. I haven’t found words for it, but I began to understand that trees communicate, as they would have to do, and they found a way of communicating with me via hay fever.

JM: Via hay fever!

KB: What I thought was hay fever was whatever it was that they were using, that dust, as a kind of challenge toward my sensibility. And I’d never had an experience like that! But I went to see the guy who deals with allergies, he almost sent me to the lunatic asylum. When I started to describe what the trees were doing to my imagination, to my nerves, or how I was hearing the sound of growth, I mean, he really thought that I was not quite "in the locker."

JM: To me it feels like poetry has become a 360 degree experience for you, it’s coming through your body, it’s all around you. When I read the 9/11 poem in your new book, I was very moved by it as a linear piece of writing, but then when I read the note at the end about how you conceived of it as either a live performance or almost an installation piece, I was moved again, to consider it in 360 degree space. Does that make sense?

KB: Yes it does make sense. In fact, in the final version of that poem, it is in 360 degree space as you were quite right to say. It was performed here in Barbados to a soundtrack of Coleman Hawkins’ “Body and Soul,” and I used some video from the 9/11 disaster, and I had children’s voices, and the collapsing of the towers, things like that.

JM: So it’s not just a linear poem.

KB: Right, right.

JM: As terrible as the CowPastor incident is turning out to be, it excites me to think about you going onto the Internet and exploring its spatial—you write directly onto a screen and others will see it on a screen. It excites me to think where you might go next with technology and the ecological experiences you’re having.

KB: That’s very interesting. You of course instinctively recognize the power of the Internet. I think you’re a bit surprised that I took so long to recognize it. Really it was thanks to Tom Raworth that I realized what could happen there.

JM: Well, I read, in one of your conversations in the Nate Mackey book [read the Rain Taxi review here], that you have thought about making a poem with a video camera. That’s what made me have this train of thought.

KB: I got a video camera, but I haven’t yet got there.

JM: Well, given your experiences with the regular camera and Namsetoura, I’d be a little nervous, too.

KB: I don’t think I would get that kind of confrontation again. I think that was such a remarkable experience, that, were it to happen to me again, I think I would really be a bit alarmed. Like something had "gone wrong with the wiring." I see Namsetoura as a unique experience. Because the things that she said… For instance, I call my wife Chad, and right away this woman referred to Lake Chad, in central Africa, you know. Her images of water began to make me recognize that she was very much aware, as she should be, of the Lake of Thorns. Though when she was speaking the lake was dry. But as soon as they began to fill that pond in, I knew that what she’d said about water was an important admonition, in her transcript to me. So water becomes an important element.

JM: Yes. It seems like it’s always been important. Through all your different books and styles, that water image is there.

KB: Yes. And then of course New Orleans now begins to haunt me in an entirely different way from 9/11.

JM: Right. I thought of that as well. A way that you have conceived of tide and tidelectics and almost taken that ocean of the Middle Passage and turned it into a cognitive space, a space in which perhaps Caribbean peoples can think outside the Western mode of the dialectic. A kind of tide which touches things. And as I was having this thought, I was really struck by this amazing tide in New Orleans. It does seem connected.

KB: Right, and of course New Orleans is part of the Caribbean.

JM: And part of the story of the Middle Passage.

KB: Right, it is one of the rich deposits of the Middle Passage. There has always been vital connection between the Atlantic Middle Passage and the Mississippi.

JM: Yes.

KB: And if you draw a line from the Mississippi into the Caribbean, you reach the island of Guadalupe. And if you draw a line from the Niger from West Africa across the Atlantic you reach the island of Guadalupe. And the island of Guadalupe is in the shape of a butterfly.

JM: The imagery is there, written on the Earth.

KB: Yes!

JM: I have one last question for you. Several times, now, unfortunately, you’ve been in a struggle to find a secure place for your archives. And in this new book, you have so many forms in it: elegies, of course, and drum songs, and newspaper clippings and letters, anecdotes, essays. It seems like the archive itself is almost becoming a poetic form for you.

KB: I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose the only way to keep the archive is to write a poem!

JM: I see it happening in these books and it makes me optimistic.

KB: And then CowPastor becomes a poem too.

JM: I see that! I can see it from Alabama!

KB: Oh you are speaking from Alabama. I was thinking of you in New York. So of course you are dealing with Katrina. You must be feeling the vibrations of that.

JM: Yes sir, it’s very much a part of even our sense of space, to know that this terrible thing is happening so close. But also, it’s been our privilege to take in people who are evacuees. It’s been a very dark time, and I don’t know how it’s going to… I don’t know how it ever could resolve.

KB: I always say that the one factor you can never take out, is the human one. And what human beings can do in New Orleans, now, we have no idea, but I get a sense that they are going to miracle-ize that place all over again.

JM: Oh, I hope you’re right. I hope you’re right.

Click here to purchase Born to Slow Horses at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2005 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2005

BLACK HOLE

Charles Burns
Pantheon ($24.95)

by David Kennedy-Logan

With only a cursory flip through the pages, Charles Burns's epic graphic novel Black Hole might seem to be a schlocky horror comic with antecedents such as EC's Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror from the fifties, or the gleefully crude and lascivious underground "comix" movement of the sixties. The pages, after all, are filled with freaks, violence, sex, drugs, and depravity. But spend a little more time poking around, and several qualities of this amazing work will prove that initial impression radically incomplete.

The first is the appearance of the book itself, a hefty and striking hardcover. The second is Burns's eminently recognizable artwork—swaths of solid black chiseled with white, impeccably rendered, like woodcuts printed with pure oil—each page is a revelation, and, at over 300 pages long, it's no wonder it took ten years to complete. The final and most impressive quality, revealed only after the hallucinatory narrative takes hold, is the writing. This graphic novel holds its own as a novel in the literary sense, plumbing emotional depths with complexity, subtlety, and multilayered symbolism.

Black Hole relates the trials and tribulations of a group of high school students in 1970s suburban Seattle. Like typical high schoolers, their symbiotic existence is defined by a Darwinian struggle for social standing among their peers—they are concerned primarily with being cool, fitting in, or, at the very least, being left alone; their bodies and minds are hostage to their pituitary and reproductive systems; they have crushes and infatuations; they feel love, lust, jealousy, and betrayal; they smoke pot, drop acid, get drunk, and have sex. The subject matter is not all that dissimilar from, say, Fast Times at Ridgemont High—except there's no gratuitous nudity, cheap jokes, or Spiccoli. Instead, there's the plague.

When the story begins, a sexually transmitted affliction that causes a smorgasbord of physical deformities—from dermatological oddities to genetic mutations to leprotic abominations—is starting to spread among the teen population. Some sprout horns, others become full-on, rotted-flesh zombies. One character grows a mouth on his chest. Another starts shedding her skin. Yet another grows a tail. (As if it weren't hard enough to get a date.) With a new physical taxonomy for labeling and ostracizing "weirdos," the most hideously deformed flee school and home altogether, setting up camps in the woods outside the city. Proving the author has a wry and sardonic sense of humor, one of these ogre-like monstrosities is a former chess club geek.

Structurally and visually, Black Hole is a tour de force. A palpable tension is generated between the ice-cold, hard-edged, clean look of the art and the warm, odorous, messy organic processes that it depicts. The narrative point of view is subjective, and rotates among different characters from chapter to chapter. Sometimes the point of view changes without warning within a chapter, to jarring effect. The story also includes harrowing dream sequences, memories, and drug-induced hallucinations, and Burns presents the entire affair in a nonlinear fashion, placing visual markers delicately here and there to help the reader piece chunks of time together. It would all be unintelligible were it not for the author's mastery of comics' unique ability to manipulate time and space. He creates a simulacrum of subjective consciousness unparalleled in the graphic novel format—and not often matched in even the best prose fiction.

Without a doubt, the plague wreaks havoc on the lives of these young men and women. But the havoc—and here is the key to the singularly convincing artistry of this book—does not differ qualitatively from that wrought by the run-of-the-mill acne, voice changes, body hair, growth spurts, and sexual urges of puberty. It differs only by degrees. Among the worst fears of adolescence is that of being cast out, considered unwanted or unattractive. Black Hole takes this fear—a faint but persistent hum in the background at any high school—and amplifies it to a wail, omnipresent, deafening, inescapable. Compounding the tension and dread is the fact that, as in a Peanuts strip, the parents and teachers of the town are all but nonentities. These teens, on the cusp of adulthood, face their hellish problems alone. Just as they do, for the most part, in reality. And while some have argued that the debilitating, misunderstood, and uncurable ailment Black Hole depicts is a metaphor for AIDS, most readers will find that restricting the scope of the work to a specific disease rather than a fundamental aspect of the human condition is unnecessarily reductive.

An alumnus of Art Spiegelman's seminal RAW magazine, Burns himself grew up in Seattle in the '70s. Kurt Cobain, another Seattle artist obsessed with biology, mortality, alienation, and decay, in the most famous anthem to teen malaise ever recorded, sang, "Here we are now / Entertain us / I feel stupid / And contagious." The song makes a good soundtrack to the book. As a portrait of high school, Black Hole is disorienting, disturbing, and depressing. Rarely has the genuine terror of this stage of life been explored and presented in such an unadulterated and honest way. High school is a pressure cooker that will, when conditions get bad enough, explode with murderous consequences. There is a thread that, even if only tenuously, connects this fictional work of art to real tragedies like the Columbine and Red Lake shootings. That thread is the terminal isolation, crushing self-doubt, and excruciating growing pains of adolescence.

Despite its fantastically horrific episodes, in the end Black Hole is a tender and heartfelt meditation on the turbulent journey from childhood to adulthood, the painful search for a place to belong, and the fragile, malleable, and resilient nature of identity. It is also a treatise on, and a testament to, artistic commitment. Its roots may be in those schlocky horror comics, but its uppermost branches—like those of the whole comics medium—are growing toward the sky.

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WOODY GUTHRIE ARTWORKS

Edited by Steven Brower and Nora Guthrie
Rizzoli ($45)

by Charles Homans

Woody Guthrie's visual art may have originated in the same place and time as the music that made him famous: Shorty Harris's drug store in Pampa, Texas, circa 1929. Between intermittent shifts as a soda jerk, the 17-year-old Guthrie painted murals of desserts and wintry mountain landscapes in watercolors on the front windows of the store, and discovered in the back room an abandoned, rusty-stringed guitar. The former, Guthrie believed, would be his meal ticket when he left Pampa for California in 1937. The latter would help him create one of the most durable archetypes of 20th Century America.

Guthrie is so permanently linked in the popular imagination with the folksongs he authored that it's easy to forget his apparently boundless creative energies were not—and probably could not have been—confined to a single discipline. He never considered himself to be strictly a songwriter, embracing instead the idea of the folksy polymath embodied by one of his earliest heroes, the singing cowboy Will Rogers. Before Huntington's disease halted his prolific artistic output, Guthrie had been not just a songwriter but a socialist newspaper columnist, a well-received novelist, a radio personality, a modern dance accompanist, and the creator of countless works of visual art, ranging from political cartoons to watercolor portraits to bizarre backyard found-object sculptures.

Nora Guthrie (Guthrie's daughter and director of the Woody Guthrie Archives) and Steven Brower (a graphic artist and writer) make an extensive argument for the importance Guthrie's visual output in Woody Guthrie Artworks, a lovingly assembled volume of some 300 Guthrie drawings and paintings. These run the gamut from a studious 1937 oil painting of Abraham Lincoln to haunting 1951 watercolors of lynchings in rural Florida, and they demonstrate, as Brower says in his accomplished introductory essay, "surprising depth, variety, and a highly refined understanding of composition and expression."

It is true that Guthrie possessed an understanding of and interest in highbrow artistic pursuits, though he took considerable pains to conceal it. Ed Cray's 2004 biography Ramblin' Man amply illustrates that behind the self-styled Dust Bowl hobo poet was an avid intellectual who rubbed elbows with Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning in the bohemian Greenwich Village of the early '40s, enjoyed John Cage's piano music, and was married to one of Martha Graham's dancers, Marjorie Mazia Guthrie, for a large portion of his adult life.

His wide-ranging interests notwithstanding, Guthrie's greatest gift was his ear for language, and his paint and ink endeavors pale in comparison to his poetry and prose. While the pieces collected in Woody Guthrie Artworks are often striking, none of them compare to his Dust Bowl ballads or his self-described "autobiographical novel" Bound for Glory, a prose work that reads like the literary missing link betweenThe Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck was a friend and mutual admirer) and On the Road. As a writer, Guthrie was capable of rendering even throwaway sentences indelibly his own, bristling with invented words and lyrical cadence; in his posthumous novel Seeds of Man, he offhandedly describes the flora of Pecos County, Texas as "sandy cactus of every kind, slim and long, fat and thick, wide and low, high and skinny, curly, twisty, knotty, stickery, thorny, daggery-knifed, razor sharp." A cactus observed with similar casualness in the 1943 drawing "Dream" is depicted competently enough, but it's nothing extraordinary.

Woody Guthrie Artworks' revelations are thus more biographical than artistic, and they are most plentiful in Guthrie's later years. When Bob Dylan visited Guthrie in East Orange, New Jersey in the winter of 1961 to collect his torch, his hero hadn't written a song in nine years. The final watercolors in Woody Guthrie Artworks, however, postdate the last of his known songs.

Although Brower presents Guthrie's interest in abstract art as evidence to the contrary, it's hard to see the dominant influence in Guthrie's faceless portraits and spectral forms from 1951-53 as anything other than the artist's deteriorating mental condition. They are often difficult to look at, and under other circumstances, they might raise questions about whether their maker would have wanted them published at all. But Guthrie's true masterpiece was his life itself, and he seemed determined to put as much of it as possible on the public record. In the end, the only thing in this book guaranteed to raise Guthrie's hackles is its price tag.

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INNOCENT WHEN YOU DREAM: The Tom Waits Reader

Edited by Mac Montandon
Thunder Mouth Press ($16.95)

by N. N. Hooker

Image is a complicated business, particularly when selling authenticity. "Part of my character and personality and image that I have cultivated is that I do not endorse products." Waits successfully sued Frito-Lay for an unauthorized imitation. "I hate it when I hear songs that I already have a connection with, used in a way that's humiliating." Yet, Waits enjoys "hearing things incorrectly." Where is the divide between corrupt commercial culture and authentic street sounds? Waits isn't one to examine such situational ironies. His romance with "outcasts" persists as an imagining of the past as more pure.

Charmingly, Waits never considers his work or the work of those he admires as "product." Such innocence after 375 pages feels less like romantic resistance than aesthetic bad faith—the dreamy innocence might benefit from some real guilt. Waits has always been a post-modern collagist: a second generation Beat singing tin-pan alley to post-punk hipsters. (Waits never was a satirist, however—he believed his myths). Waits has yet to produce anything like Bukowski's Women—a deconstruction of his own myths. He drank. He looked the fuck-up, but his career has been charmed and includes an Oscar nomination. Not that any of this success matters, except that Waits's life and music were always collapsed into the "real" thing. "I got a personality an audience likes. I'm the guy they knew . . . who never really amounted to much . . . good for a few laughs . . . a victim. But I don't mind the image." Bonnie Raitt is less circumspect in the same 1969 (!) Newsweek (!) article: "He's able to make all the double knits both tragic and romantic at the same time."

Surveying his life in print, Waits's convincing "surrealist mix n' match" (Luc Sante) persists. Rolling Stone tries a resurrection storyline, but Waits's death, like the throat cancer rumor, was groundless. A sober, smoke-free family man (why is that particular generation so all or nothing?), Waits is also the rare individual who grows more "out there." The incessant mutation of genre has given way to a more organic music—less pastiche. The cleverness has more risk. He may never have the irruptive genius of Captain Beefheart, but as this book reminds us, his wonderful voice from the corners of America has great breadth and poetic power.

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THEORY'S EMPIRE: An Anthology of Dissent

Edited by Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral
Columbia University Press ($29.50)

by Raphael Allison

Theory's Empire announces itself as a long-awaited and much-belated response to the repressive orthodoxy of Theory, Theory "emblazoned with a capital T." Theory with a capital T refers in this case to a generalized reduction of the ideas of writers like Ferdinand de Saussure, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Emile Benveniste, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Edward Said. This list could be extended in many directions, but the editors wish to localize it around a few basic principles: the decentering of subjectivity, the politicizing of literary and aesthetic artifacts, the undecidability of meaning, and the recent professionalization and institutionalization of these ideas to the point of intransigence. As the epigraph to this volume by Christopher Ricks aphorizes: "Theory's Empire [is] an empire zealously inquisitorial about every form of empire but its own." Once proclaimed as an ambitious form of cultural revolution, Theory has become what the editors of this volume call a "tedious obligation" for students interested in literature, inspiring just the thing it hoped in its grandiose and arrogant way to avoid, "the passive assent to established routines." With this collection of 47 essays, written by a wide variety of academic insiders and outsiders—there are considerate essays by eminent scholars like Tzvetan Todorov and Marjorie Perloff as well as screeds by journalists like the hysterical Lee Siegel—the editors hope to offer a counterstatement to this "empire" of intolerance which is ruling universities, limiting a full-blooded engagement with literature, and generally traducing a much-maligned tradition that longs for a phoenix-like return.

It is true that Theory can turn to dogma in about the time it takes to say "phallogocentrism." In her contribution to the volume, "Feminism's Perverse Effects," Elaine Marks relates an experience common to many university professors of what could be called the tyranny of the under- or partially-informed undergraduate Left. In a class on Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road, Marks was shocked to find that the students could not tolerate the fact that "Hurston's narrative did not focus sufficiently on what the students expected to read: the unrelieved story of Hurston's oppression as a black woman growing up in the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." Raised on a crash-diet of highly politicized Theoretical corn, Marks's class could only read Hurston's narrative in ideological terms, and they even had difficulty confronting the very fact of this surprising discrepancy. "In a sense," Marks explains, "the students were denying Hurston the right to write in a certain style, the right to write against the doxa and the discourse of her time and place. They could read Dust Tracks on a Road only in terms of racism and sexism. And because they could not find in it what they were looking for, they denied themselves the pleasures of discovering a new and different text, another mode of writing and reading."

In a similar vein, Valerie Cunningham suggests that the "domestication" of Theory by a cottage industry of critical Baedekers has led to what might be called "Theory tourism," the notion that there are a series of "approaches" one might choose from, and the job is simply to visit each and then decide which one to "apply." From this consumerist perspective, students gas up their chosen theoretical S.U.V. and then plow it through every possible textual terrain, ever missing great vistas for the dogged asphalt. Many essays in this volume address this real problem, and are often eloquent and weary pleas for a "return" to a kind of literariness or aesthetics that guards the literature as a special and unique kind of writing. It is hard to read as informed a scholar as Marjorie Perloff without sympathy as she reviews studies of Conrad's and Joyce's complicity with "power" and concludes that in the "zeal to unmask the hidden ideologies of these and related novels, critics seem to have forgotten what brought them to Ulysses or Heart of Darkness in the first place—namely, the uniqueness of these novels as works of art."

Yet while some such arguments are reasonable, reading through 47 of them over roughly 700 pages raises a few problems. The first is the problem of the discarded baby: with so much dirty bathwater to discharge, few of these writers seem to recognize the many healthy theoretical correctives to a problematically un-theorized professional field that, say, overlooked women and writers of color, or promulgated cultural and aesthetic norms that concealed political suasions. It is easy to dismiss baldly politicized identity politics, as Todd Gitlin does in his essay "The Cant of Identity." Kwame Anthony Appiah's entry, "Battle of the Bien-Pensant," is a more measured critique not of academic moralism as such, but "moralism run amok," which gets to the main issue more clearly and fairly. But so bent are many of these essays on jettisoning Theory's missteps and blunders that they rarely acknowledge any of its successes.

Another glaring issue is repetitiveness. One thing that can be said for Theory is that it is rarely dull. Perhaps, as many here claim, Theory holds in common a certain set of basic ideas and assumptions—what body of work doesn't?—but one of the "joys" of reading Theory is that it is continuously surprising, challenging, different, elusive, maddening, frustrating, devious, wrong, right, insane, other, ugly, contradictory, queer. You don't step into the same river twice reading Theory in the way that you do reading Theory's Empire, which feels more like a thin trickle of harassments, repeated over and over again with righteous outrage and exasperation. Perhaps most problematically, only a few cartoonishly abstracted and simplified claims—ideological critique only carries us so far, there are absolutes we can agree upon after all, literature is special, etc.—stand in for the immensity of theoretical discourse. Yet only a dogmatist or ideologue would contradict such claims.

And so Theory's Empire shreds a straw man. This straw man is constructed of almost willfully blind ignorance and reductiveness, paradoxically revealed in the very places where Theory is charged with being vague, empty, and misinformed: "What precisely is an interpretive community?" asks one critic. "It's just one very loose cannon of a notion knocking about the Theoretical field." In fact, the "interpretive community," whether you agree with it or not, is an idea carefully articulated by Stanley Fish in his essay "Interpreting the Variorum" and elsewhere. Others may use it irresponsibly, but that's not a sufficient critique of Theory. And if Fish is anything but dull, the shrill refrain that Theory is misguided, misinformed, and misused over and again is excruciatingly dull. Also, the books editors, Daphne Patai and Will Corral, often come off as sloppy and biased guides, citing their classroom experiences with "the student who asserts that any interpretation of a literary work is as valid as any other" as self-evident proof against Theory in general. It doesn't take a Frederic Jameson (or a Leo Strauss, for that matter) to realize that the fault here is not with the stars, but with ourselves. Rather than castigate relativism out of hand, they might do better to castigate students who misread and misuse complex relativistic positions out of ignorance and intellectual immaturity. By Patai and Corral's standard, we might as well blame Shakespeare if a student thinks MacBeth advocates regicide.

But perhaps the most glaring problem with this volume is that for all its outrage and urgency, Theory's Empire reads like a belated commentary on a stale zeitgeist. Most of the essays here were written in the 1980s and the early 1990s (to be precise: two essays are from the 1970s, six from the 1980s, 27 from the 1990s, and 12 from the 2000s). At the risk of seeming faddish, it could be said that times have changed. For instance, we get D. G. Myers's essay on "bad writing," originally published in 1999 in the neoconservative Weekly Standard, which hauls out the cliché that academicians like Judith Butler are stylistically obscure. Turning to this familiar punching bag as a way to condemn "Theory" tout court not only seems to ignore how Butler's language is unrepresentative of current critical discourse, but also makes it clear that Myers is unaware of how often this dismissive strategem has been invoked. Alan Spitzer's essay about the contradictions between deconstruction's commitment to antifoundationalism and its "fact"-based defense of Paul de Man's pro-Nazi writings is at once an excellent article and somewhat of a museum piece. The subsection titled "Linguistic Turns" contains some excellent writing, in particular John Searle's detailed rebuttal of Derrida. It's a wonderfully reasoned piece, but—if one may be so bold as to play weatherman—the wind doesn't blow that way anymore. Derrida is dead, quite literally, and the controversies this volume dredges up do not seem to dominate the work being done in current academic scholarship, which has by and large moved on.

One nagging issue with this volume, as mentioned earlier, is the unavoidable suspicion that there really is no such thing as Theory, at least not in the ways in which this anthology supposes. Many of the book's early essays spend a lot of time defining the term, and the amount of energy it takes to do so should suggest how fraught such an enterprise really is. It is reductive and misleading to say that there is some monolithic, unified movement afoot, some conspiratorial group of leftist academics arrogantly protecting their cultural capital. Yes, theoretical language is often deployed to obscure scant knowledge of and engagement with literature, and yes, part of "professionalizing" oneself in academia includes becoming conversant in a torrent of discursive regimes. One of the frustrating elements of Theory's Empire, however, is that it doesn't allow for the existence of this discipline at all, just a simplification of it. For example, a common tactic many writers use is to condemn certain theoretical positions because they fail to conform to other theoretical positions. Raymond Tallis's attack on Derrida (again with the Derrida) relies on the charge that Derrida "misreads" Saussure by failing to distinguish between langue and parole, eventually dismissing the French philosopher as not Saussurean enough: "Most of the errors in . . . post-Suassurean thought derive, paradoxically, from thinkers overlooking Saussure's fundamental doctrines." Well, it depends on whether you see Of Grammatology as "overlooking" Saussure's doctrines or challenging them. After all, they call it post-structuralism for a reason. Tallis's argument tautologically rejects post-structuralism because it is, well, post-structuralist. Does Tallis understand that Derrida meant to overturn Saussure?

Of course, it is difficult not to agree with some of what is said in this volume about the abuses of Theory. But you might say that Theory is like fire: it can destroy a village, or be used wisely in a control burn to avoid the destruction of a village. Or it is like a sword: it can be plunged into an innocent victim's chest, or it can defend an innocent victim's life. Perhaps the N.R.A.'s traditional argument in defense of the Second Amendment might come in handy here: theory doesn't kill literature, people kill literature. There were bad, reductive readers before Wimsatt and Beardsley came along, and there are surely more to come. But with the turn of the new millennium, which begins a period that falls beyond the moment of all but a quarter of these essays, things have started to change. It might even be said that Theory's "empire" has already begun the long, slow process of attrition experienced in the preceding century by other empires of even greater consequence. If so, this book is a little much, and a little late.

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LIKE A FIERY ELEPHANT: The Story of B.S. Johnson

Jonathan Coe
Continuum ($29.95)

by Scott Esposito

Why has Jonathan Coe—author of several distinguished, if decidedly non-experimental, novels—spent the last seven years writing a biography of B. S. Johnson, a writer who tried to write books that made Ulysses look like a starched shirt? And does this odd coupling result in a worthwhile book?

The answer to the first question is to be found in the introduction to Coe's biography of Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant.

In the three decades since Johnson's death, the British novel has reinvigorated itself in other ways, ways which he did not foresee: not by 'making it new' with ever more radical attempts at formal innovation, but by recognizing the multi-ethnicity of modern Britain and opening itself to influences from other cultures . . . there are so many other things to admire in Johnson's work, even if you reject his dogma: his command of language, his freshness, his formal ingenuity, the humanity that shines through even his most rigorous experiments, his bruising honesty. For all of these, he remains one of my greatest literary heroes.

As to the second question, Is the book any good? Unequivocally yes. Coe's biography is unequivocally spectacular because, like Johnson's novels, it combines formal innovation with a humanistic portrayal of a compelling protagonist.

Coe starts things off with a short section entitled "A Life in Seven Novels" in which he provides an overview of Johnson's works. We begin with his debut Traveling People, in which "Johnson [is] testing the water: it contains plenty of experiments with form, but they are not radical. Each chapter is written in a different mode (third-person, epistolary, film script, stream of consciousness, and so on), but this veneer of stylistic adventurousness hides a conventional enough Bildungsroman." By the time Johnson reaches his third novel Trawl, he has discovered and embraced his personal dogma: that novelists should tell no lies but instead strive to tell only the truth about themselves. "It is, according to the author himself, 'all interior monologue, a representation of the inside of my mind . . . the closest one can come in writing.' . . . Trawl contains no plot and no invented characters." Following Trawl is The Unfortunates, an infamous work composed of several unbound signatures delivered to the reader in a box—the reader picks at random, reading in whatever order chance dictates. And then there's Johnson's second-to-last novel, House Mother Normal,

a novel which shows one single (and fictional!) event from ten different points of view. [It] is set inside an old people's home. This nine inmates are sitting down to dinner, along with the House Mother herself, and Johnson gives us ten interior monologues . . . each successive character is more infirm than the last, so that the monologues get more and more fragmented, partial and incoherent as the book progresses . . . Finally we get the House Mother's own version of events, which turns out to be even more unreliable—or at least bizarre—than those of her elderly charges.

"A Life In Seven Novels" is a strong opening, familiarizing us with Johnson's work and philosophy, while tantalizing us with clues to the demons that he struggled with throughout his career. Coe chooses an ingenious method for depicting the latter, one worthy of Johnson himself: commentary on 160 fragments of documents from Johnson's life. The thoroughness of this section is breathtaking, as Coe quotes from not only novel excerpts and letters, but also articles Johnson wrote, unpublished pieces, abandoned novels, scribbled notes, and even a request to Beatle Paul McCartney (spelled "MacCartney") to grant him £50,000 as a fellow experimental artist.

Although he is writing a biography, Coe isn't afraid to open up his novelistic bag of tricks. He makes it clear up front that he will be taking liberties to project himself into Johnson's mind and complete the trajectories sketched out by the fragments. The result is a believable account of a stubborn, conflicted man destroyed by his rigid determination to write shockingly difficult works, even as their lack of commercial viability tore at his confidence, fed his indignation, and put him at odds with larger and larger segments of the British literary community. Coe reveals a man with no center, soaring when his work was reviewed favorably and mired in depressed rage whenever his art met with the tiniest slight. This unflattering portrait is tempered by an understanding of the complexities behind Johnson's gruff exterior, imbuing Coe's subject with the universal humanity Coe so admires in Johnson's characters.

One might think that giving us a compelling life of a brilliant writer would be enough for Coe, but Like a Fiery Elephant has yet another dimension. The central dilemma in Johnson's life was that he could not reconcile what he felt in his heart with the fact that the novels his heart told him to write were simply not going to be appreciated as he thought they should be. This is a dilemma that every good writer must resolve; either she will plow forward, market be damned, or forever remain a prisoner to commercial deities. By presenting Johnson's painful thrashings over this dilemma, Coe makes Like a Fiery Elephant not only an engrossing biography but also a profound investigation into what the writing life is like.

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FORTIFICATION RESORT

Lynn Crawford
Black Square Editions ($11.95)

by Jim Feast

In her new work of short stories, Fortification Resort, Lynn Crawford seems more in tune with the French New Novelists of the 1960s, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, than with the more formalist Oulipo school with which she is sometimes associated. The New Novelists employed a deadpan, impersonal prose that focused on the depiction of exteriors and surfaces rather than inner states. Their purpose was not to forestall sentimentality in the manner of similarly toned American hardboiled writers, but to exaggerate (with a straight face) the characteristics of scientific and academic style and to explore the power to move readers via a mode of writing that is emotionally tamped down.

While Crawford draws from this heritage, the formidableness of her satirical attack gives her writing a different focus. Her language is modeled on—and quietly spoofs—upscale New Age promotional writing, fluff that would extol a spa, new skin enhancer, Pilates program or other psychic or physical rehabilitation. While her prose parodies this material, her content matches style to subject in describing the world of New Age service providers and their clientele. She never voices open criticism of the group, but offhandedly skewers the pretensions, muffled cruelty, and sometimes downright wackiness of her characters.

In "Scout," for instance, the protagonist describes different areas in a deluxe retreat, each more outrageous than the last. In the ocean room, the narrator mentions, "Today, in the mood for something calmer, we set a light wave / light breeze program and discharged imitation sea creatures, designed to users with gentle pressure, no biting, no rough rubbing." That's nothing compared to what we find in the Mean Sex building, where the narrator visits the Potty Room, "a station used by a few regulars who orchestrate their play around going to the bathroom: forcing one another to go, not allowing one another to go," in order to "test bacteria levels." And then there's the UFO Abduction area. The agility of Crawford's writing keeps such descriptions from going over the deep end into obvious satire; she balances readers on the knife edge of uncertainty as to whether she is being straightforward or slyly devious in her tales.

Take "Eco Lady," in which she pokes mild fun at Green Party politicians. In this piece, the feisty grandmother who leads the local ecology movement decides to repackage polluted land while it is awaiting cleanup in the following manner: "She enlivens potentially dead land with a synthetic modern forest-park: clumps of plastic painted to resemble seasonal trees, groves of firs, bushes, and well-marked paths." Or look in "Fancy," the tale of a daughter who is reminiscing about the spirited hi-jinks of her mother. The daughter good naturedly suggests that no one could be offended by this prank: "Mom makes a stew and stirs in, along with peas, beef, carrots, a half dozen buttons."

These examples should indicate that Crawford's Fortification Resort, which might have resulted in heavy-handed exercises in French-derived prosody and jejune protest, has been filled with amazing élan, rib-tickling humor, and effervescent delicacy.

FLEDGLING

Octavia E. Butler
Seven Stories Press ($24.95)

by Shannon Gibney

Octavia E. Butler's Fledgling offers a new vision of the Other, one which is grounded as firmly in biology as it is in technological experimentation. In this sense, Butler's fourteenth book covers similar ground as her acclaimed book Dawn and her Parable series, but in exploring the theme of an amnesiac genetically modified vampire, Fledgling is thoroughly new territory.

Fledgling is the story of Shori, a young vampire who awakens at the beginning of the book to find herself half-dead and surrounded by the charred remnants of what used to be her home. Blind with hunger but still not remembering who or what she is, Shori stumbles upon Wright Hamlin, a human who she feeds on and who later becomes the first in her new group of "symbionts." Shori eventually mates with other human symbionts, whose blood she feeds on and who, over time, grow addicted to her venom (which in turn, prolongs their lives and makes them healthier).

Shori and Wright begin a journey to uncover her story and also to find any family who may have survived what they learn was a vicious attack on her community. Along the way, they discover that Shori is part of a new race of vampires who have been crossed with African Americans in order to prolong their resistance to sunlight. The race is called the Ina, and Shori is the only living female Ina in her family. Someone, Shori and her ever-growing group of symbionts discover, is threatened by the existence of daylight-immune vampires and is trying to wipe them out.

Although Fledgling takes awhile to get going, the tenacious reader will be rewarded with an interesting Ina trial at the end. These scenes, as well as Shori's interactions with her symbionts, reveal the tenuous relationship between evolution and regression, power-sharing and power-holding, insider and outsider status—all themes which Butler has been exploring for some time. Less interesting are the frequent and rather bland descriptions of food, and the novel's less-than-tension-filled plotline.

But hardcore Butler fans who are addicted to her unique blend of speculative fiction, feminism, and African American culture will not be disappointed with Fledgling. The book delivers the reader into a world that refuses to be predictable and comfortable, a world where your most basic assumptions are inverted, and eventually, dissolved.