THE CLASSICAL TRIVIUM: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time
Marshall McLuhan
edited by Terrence Gordon
Gingko Press ($39.95)

LOVING THE MACHINE: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots
Timothy N. Hornyak
Kodansha International ($26.95)

by Ann Klefstad

What happens when you use a new lens to reread a familiar aspect of the world? The use of such a tool can be facile—to mix metaphors, it can be the sort of hammer that makes everything look like a nail—or it can transform the familiar landscape, make new attributes appear.

The crafting of such new lenses is perhaps the best use of real scholarship: the work of deep imagination as well as painstaking acquisition of fact. Such a new lens can tell us how careless our views of other times and places often are. When we are imprisoned by familiar assumptions, such times can seem too similar to our own, and the differences we do perceive are not understood fully, because we lack a full context of difference. The careless move forward and the automatic reversion constitute a double motion that keeps us too centered on our own assumptions.

Both of these books can act as such new lenses, with different degrees of acuity.

McLuhan's piece on Thomas Nashe, and his use of the trivium to understand the full context of Renaissance rhetoric, is a kind of textbook example of the transforming power of an unfamiliar concept understood fully and researched exhaustively. McLuhan used the concepts honed in this work—which was his doctoral thesis—to transform our understanding of the importance of the medium, the form, to meaning. The distinction between form and content could never be simply assumed again.

The trivium—grammar, dialectic, rhetoric—was a curriculum, a set of methods, dating from the Greek classical era. It's a system to produce meaning that's consistently readable. That is, it's a machine for writing, and for reading the writing that's been written under its aegis, inside its system. It was the bedrock of scholarly curricula from the Greeks all the way through the medieval era and into the Renaissance, a kind of disembodied doppelgänger of the hard-built forms of our culture.

In his thesis on the topic of the trivium in Thomas Nashe's writing, McLuhan seized on some of the systems-style thinking that characterized his later work on the relation of medium and content, and found in the medium of a Classical and medieval curriculum (the trivium) a key to the eccentric and brilliant Renaissance writer Thomas Nashe's message. The increase in clarity this brought to his understanding of Nashe was a foretaste of the increased clarity to be brought to a larger study of culture using similar methods. In his scrupulous attention to the importance of the history of form, content—any content—was seen to be far more intricately tied to it than we previously suspected.

What about the other book? The other new lens? Timothy Hornyak attempts to revise mistrustful Western ideas of robotics and the cyborg by giving us the lens of Japanese mechanical history. The view of the human simulacrum, he says, is very different in Japan. By giving us a careful history of what produced that difference, he attempts to inflect, our understanding of the possibilities of the medium.

The robot—both the aestheticized human robot and the functional industrial robot—is a device and a set of ideas as well. We can displace ideas of humanness onto this doppelgänger, ideas of what matters about our bodies, our wills, our functions. The robot is a kind of embodied rhetoric of the human, and different cultures will take different attitudes to it. Hornyak, in this popular-audience book on the Japanese attitude towards robots, investigates the reasons for Japanese robot affinity in that culture's rhetoric of human origins and destiny—and its difference from cultures of the West in this regard.

His study, however, is far more shallow. This book is an anecdotal history that's quite readable but not ambitious about developing the explanatory power of its anecdotes. The insights Hornyak propounds help us to know the factual history of robotics in Japan but do little to get at the differing notions of what constitutes human essence that would seem to underlie the East-West distinction he proposes. You're left at the end of the book wondering if there's any real difference at all between American and Japanese ideas of robots.

The books are only adjacent, not connected, but there are resonances that travel between the ideas of a system of language that drives real-word constructions and a real-world construction that is created by rhetorics of being human as well as cyber-languages. The real opportunity in reading these books is the chance to see how thorough knowledge of the history of forms differs from a superficial knowledge of a historical event in its interpretive power.

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Volume One
Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy
Bloomsbury USA ($14.95)

by Maria Christoforatos

More often than not I conduct my days dressed in scruffy denim overalls and unshined shoes, however Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy's The Affected Provincial's Companion refreshed my more subtle sensibilities. This lovely book—designed almost entirely by the author and with a foil-embossed green cover and charming illustrations—is divided into three segments: "Apothegms, Treatises, and Naughty Rimes," "Metaphysical Squibbery," and "Anecdotes and Vignettes." The succinct chapters amble agreeably from topics such as the proper grooming of one's beard ("Now That You Are A Man") to the preservation of authenticity without falling apart at the seams ("On the Diluted and Concentrated States of Being").

Lord Whimsy hilariously addresses sublime deportment and naturalist curiosities as well, searching bogs for the Pine Barrens Treefrog or conducting theatre nights with fiddler crabs. One particularly astonishing sartorial refinement he suggests is to attach a female moth to one's lapel, as "the female moth emits powerful pheromones that attract males, so that when attending an evening garden party, one might astound fellow guests by strolling about in a cloud of fornicating moths." The volume also contains a number of convoluted philosophical maps outlining topics such as nostalgia versus continuity, the blooming of character as demonstrated by the butterfly, and even mighty strategies for masculine "self-congress." (!)

While there is certainly no lack of uproarious themes, a sharp observer lies beneath the light-hearted tenor. Whimsy's inspection of trends such as metrosexuality and the fundamental differences between bohemianism and dandyism reveal a vibrant, keen eye and talent for extracting both the salient and subliminal aspects of the cultural landscape. Those who enjoy the finer points of ornamentation will find solace in many of the articles. For example, "Overdress!" refutes the notion that to overdress is a pompous activity, and astutely calls out "underdressing" as its own form of artifice and corridor to social privilege. And in "Gender and Dandyism," Whimsy sincerely advocates an inclusive state of affairs, although perhaps a survey of the history of aesthetic artifice would have been illuminating here as well. All the same, Whimsy's identification of dandyism as the evocation of "androgynous elements within a masculine vessel" rings true.

The Affected Provincial's Companion can be read not only as a witty appraisal of dandyism but as an anti-apocalyptic enticement to forge one's own life and world into the texture that sings most to one's senses. In a world where it appears cynicism and jaded sneers are valued as survival mechanisms, this is a spirited act indeed. Whimsy's call to harness enchantment in the everyday lends the book broad appeal. It is written with an unequivocally effervescent hand and is a wonderful achievement—a truly charming appeal from the heart of a naturalist, a satirical counsel in refinement, and an ecstatic summons:

We shall abandon the use of nuts and bolts for seeds and water, employing the infinitely complex processes of nature: Imagine a city composed of giant, sentient fungi! Three-bedroom orchids! Pitcher plant elevators! Laptop computers grown from venus flytraps!

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Francine Prose
HarperCollins ($23.95)

by Eva Ulett

In the opening line of her new book, Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose asks an essential question: "Can creative writing be taught?" Her response is that creative writing can be learned in part from the careful reading of accomplished writers, including the old masters; "And who could have asked for better teachers: generous, uncritical, blessed with wisdom and genius, as endlessly forgiving as only the dead can be?" The first chapter, "Close Reading," describes Prose's theory that,

Reading this way requires a certain amount of stamina, concentration, and patience. But it also has its great rewards, among them the excitement of approaching, as nearly as you can hope to come, the hand and mind of the artist.

Prose goes back to basics with chapters on "Words" and "Sentences", the fundamental constructs of writing, what Stephen King referred to in On Writing as part of a writer's toolbox. It seems likely that readers, perhaps even those endeavoring to write fiction, fail to consider writing on this elemental level. Yet Prose demonstrates through well-selected examples how the art of fiction is created at this level. So what constitutes a beautiful sentence?

The answer is that beauty, in a sentence, is ultimately as difficult to quantify or describe as beauty in a painting or a human face. Perhaps a more accurate explanation might be something like Emily Dickinson's well-know definition of poetry: "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know this is poetry."

Prose devotes chapters to the elements of writing generally discussed in how-to books on the craft, using Henry James and Nabokov in the chapter on "Narration"to illustrate how point of view informs readers about setting and character. "Character," for its part, is illustrated with examples from Heinrich von Kleist's, whose novella The Marquise of O— brought Prose's undergraduates students together in their discussion of the story's characters as though they were involved in the Marquise's "life and loves."

In the concluding chapters Prose describes the challenges of teaching creative writing and the pursuit of writing fiction, an art form with no rules that cannot be broken; and in the case of some masters of fiction, with felicitous results. Yet Reading Like a Writer is not all forensics. The book, of infinite use as a creative writing text, is also instructive to serious readers, and is itself a pleasure to read. Prose's careful construction supports her contention that "All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another."

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Ander Monson
Graywolf Press ($15)

by Jessica Bennett

Ander Monson has a geeky devotion to many things: computers, disc golf, card catalogs, pop culture, and, above all, words. His playfulness with the last has produced a volume of poetry (Vacationland, Tupelo Press), a collection of fiction (Other Electricities, Sarabande), and this new non-fiction collection, the winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction prize. What's truly remarkable is that all three have been published in the space of less than two years—a trifecta that would be noteworthy even if the author hadn't received starred reviews inPublisher's Weekly for both the fiction and Neck Deep. Monson seems well on his way to establishing himself as an important voice in contemporary literature, and could conceivably bury us in books of all forms and genres before the end of the decade.

In this often amusing, inventive, and unconventional approach to autobiography, Monson comes at us sideways with personal revelations and observations that are alternately filled with infectious enthusiasm and shamefaced contrition. Acutely aware of the danger of prose becoming prosaic, he breaks from the confessional mode of so much literary nonfiction and instead uses forms that mirror what the reader imagines to be his thoughts—disjointed and poetic at times, sometimes tightly organized, at others free flowing, and at still others frenetic. The result is a complex and surprisingly consistent mix.

In "I Have Been Thinking About Snow," the second essay in the collection, Monson intersperses commentary and remembrances with irregular lines of periods, the dots representing at once the natural pauses of writing—as though he held down the period key in between his thoughts—and the snow itself. Here, alternating with meteorological data and vague observations about beauty, we get glimpses of Monson's childhood in Upper Michigan:

..................................Is snow a lack or a mass. The white suggests the lack, but such weight! I used to demand that my brother cover me over with snow until it weighed so much that I could not move. My head would pop out of the patted-down bank like a Whack-a-Mole. My brother would begin to pelt me with snowballs. That weight would feel so good above me.

The observations gradually grow briefer and more remote, the sections of dots taking over the page much the way a white-out overtakes a road in a winter storm, until we reach two pages covered in dots, the only text "such" and "isolation," separated from each other so that even these words can't seem to find a meeting place. Then the text begins to build again, giving the feeling of the writer coming back into focus. This prose-poem, experimental essay, or whatever label you can affix to it, contains all the pleasure of poetry's negative spaces—open for interpretive readings—combined with the field-guide-to-life qualities of good literary non-fiction. Monson serves up frank honesty along with opacity, sometimes in the space of a few dots, and both are the better for the combination.

The book begins with two experimental pieces—a rigidly regimented essay in the form of a Harvard outline followed by the aforementioned amorphous and dotted homage to snow—so the third piece, "Cranbrook Schools: Adventures in Bourgeois Topologies," comes as a surprise with its funny, provocative, and straightforward prose:

Although I am not proud of it, I am waiting here for a revelation. I am waiting for meaning, for my experience to unpack itself, for my criminal history to find a kind of home, some explanation, or maybe truce.

Monson unfolds this "criminal history" with the skill of a good mystery writer, giving us just enough to keep the pages turning without telling all until he's good and ready.

Monson writes with such seeming ease, even though he seems uneasy with the role of a writer of non-fiction from whom honesty is expected, if not delivered. The specter of James Frey hangs heavy over Monson's head, and Frey is mentioned more than once in the collection as a kind of disclaimer—Monson's not necessarily giving us perfect veracity, even if he's sincerely trying. Often here the words flow like conversation—a conversation with a friend whose preoccupations you may not share but you can appreciate nonetheless. As in a conversation with a smart but excitable friend, you may find yourself at the end wondering at those spaces left, the lies of omission, the thoughts abandoned to tangents—and hoping to hear from him again soon so he can fill in some of the blanks.

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Keith Knight
Top Shelf Productions ($12.95)

by William Alexander

Pat Parker once wrote a poem called "For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend." It starts like this:

The first thing you do is to forget that i'm Black.
Second, you must never forget that i'm Black.

I'll be using Parker's Paradox to review Keith Knight's new anthology of (Th)ink cartoons, "Are We Feeling Safer Yet?" The first thing to do is forget that he's Black.

Knight's cartoons are single-panel snapshots of politics and current events. His adorable drawing style gives the impression that each cartoon is a window into a warm, happy world of harmless humor; instead he takes an unflinching look at war, torture, and poverty. There's a skillful negotiation at work here: Knight's wit and goofy style serve as pressure valves, releasing the tension that comes of tackling harsh material, but a topic like police brutality is also made more disturbing when the characters sport silly grins. The result is as painful as it is hysterical. Imagine Dick Cheney guest-starring on The Muppet Show, and you pretty much get the idea.

The Vice President gets a fair amount of abuse in (Th)ink, but the most recurring character is a tiny, grinning, giggling Dubya. He points at his television and laughs, delighted, when he wins the first democratic election in Iraq because we've lent them our voting machines. He hands drafting notices to homeless Vietnam vets, rides a tricycle, and shouts "Bring it on!" to Mother Nature during Hurricane Season. The wee character is so cute and clueless that you almost feel sorry for him. Almost.

To sum up: Keith Knight is an outstanding cartoonist, comedian, and political commentator. He's also Black, and don't ever forget it.

The main character of the K-Chronicles, Knight's semi-autobiographical comic strip, is Black. Most of the ordinary folk who walk through (Th)ink panels are Black. Most of the political issues in (Th)ink are of particular relevance to the African-American community, such as reparations, voter disenfranchisement, and the subtle difference between "finding" and "looting" groceries in a flooded New Orleans.

The comparison to Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks is inevitable; like Boondocks, (Th)ink takes shots at the flashy materialism of gangsta culture and booty-ogling on BET. The two comics also share slightly geekier material, referencing Star Wars and X-Men (my favorite has Malcolm X sporting Wolverine claws). But (Th)ink is no Boondocks knock-off. Knight's visual style and sense of humor are his own, and the nation is lucky to have him.

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Jules Verne
translated and edited by Frederick Paul Walter and Walter James Miller
Bison Books / University of Nebraska Press ($15.95)

by Ryder W. Miller

Mostly known for movie adaptations and a few books widely read by adventure fans, Jules Verne (1828-1905) has in recent years gained renewed attention for his prolific body of work. Verne, arguably the most successful French writer in the English language, is no longer remembered simply as the author of a few very famous science fiction books (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days). He was also a poet, playwright, and arguably the founder of science fiction—writing such speculative novels before the moniker was coined.

This recently published edition of The Meteor Hunt ably shows why Verne is still admired by readers today. According to the translators in their foreword, we have largely been reading "frauds" and "criminally slapdash versions" of Verne's novels, many drastically altered by his son Michel—this very book, in fact, was previously released as The Chase of the Golden Meteor and reissued by the same publisher not long ago. But this more accurate text of The Meteor Hunt, along with Paris in the Twentieth Century and a few other titles, breaks the mold of what we are accustomed to expect from Verne: an un-crowded extraordinary voyage without a lot of romance. In contrast to the dense social novels of the same period, Verne's works focus on the intellectual challenges of scientific enterprise, presenting new inventions, explanations, and possibilities—and as is well-known, many of the technological predictions and issues he wrote about have since become real. There are no new technologies or modes of transportation in this book, but Verne does correctly predict here that we may someday be in danger from a meteor that is on a collision course with Earth.

Despite being book-ended by rigorous literary scholarship—in addition to the polemical foreword there are notes, an afterword, and an annotated bibliography—The Meteor Hunt is a charming novel, and the translators have gone to great lengths to keep it authentic and fun. The story revolves around a solid gold meteor on a collision course with Earth, which is causing a great deal of anticipation and consternation. Here we find well-rounded female characters, often missing in Verne's other famous works; we also find wry commentary on the economy (the golden meteor will flood the gold market) and human ambition (astronomers vie to be recognized as the first to discover the meteor), yet the satirical sense of the novel does not interfere with the engaging scientific tale being told. In this winning edition, The Meteor Huntwill surely add to the Verne renaissance currently underway.

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Hala El Badry
translated by Nancy Roberts
The American University in Cairo Press ($22.95)

by Rudi Dornemann

Some novels derive their power from an in-depth view of a single individual facing a crucial time in their life. Others offer a panoramic view of many lives, perhaps across the events of many years. Hala El Badry's novel Muntaha achieves a dual effect, following Taha Musaylihi, the mayor of a Nile-side village during the years just after the end of World War II, but also showing us the joys and struggles of life in the village during the first six decades of the 20th century. In the end, Taha's story is inextricably bound together with the stories of those around him—his family, first, but also the villagers on whose behalf he works, and even the story of Egypt as a whole.

In a period when Egypt is no longer a British colony but not yet an independent nation, and local authorities can be arbitrary and harsh, small misunderstandings can quickly be compounded into crises that threaten the village's very existence. A shrewd judge of character who knows everything that goes on in his constituency, Taha is an excellent mayor, conscientious and widely trusted. He's often pressed into the role of intercessor between the villagers and the local police force, and carries out this role ably until the evolving situation threatens to overwhelm his best efforts.

This plotline alone easily provides enough substance for a novel, but El Badry's vision is broader, encompassing Taha's parents and siblings, his wife and children, and the residents of the village of Muntaha. The novel moves nimbly from one character to another and moves with equal ease from the present moment to recollection to flashback.

Taha recalled the day when he had decided to change the course of his life and become a grain merchant. He remembered the cartwheels as they clattered beneath the weight of his body, and the speed of the two horses as he flew with them over the dirt road like a shooting star falling into a darkened sky.

Slipping backwards or forwards in time allows El Badry to show the early seeds of events or to capture a sense of how the memory of those events shapes those who come later. Along the way, there are weddings and scandals, tragedies and moments of humor, and always the ongoing routine of everyday life in Taha's household. While the ordinary lives of Muntaha's inhabitants are central to the book, the novel is occasionally punctuated by eccentrics who wouldn't be out of place in a Faulkner story and wonders that would be at home in Garcia Marquez's work.

Sometimes lavish to the point of poetic, the prose is rich and descriptive, part of a reflective and intimate storytelling voice. By "storytelling," I don't mean to imply that Muntaha is a work of Arabian Nights-style exoticism. While there's much that a non-Egyptian reader will find unfamiliar in the lives of El Badry's characters, the novel has a feel of family stories remembered and retold. This tone fits with the ongoing relationship between the present and the past—and even the future—that is integral to the novel.

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Alan DeNiro
Small Beer Press ($16)

by Rod Smith

German theologian Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) coined "numinous" to describe "that which is wholly other," the mysterium tremendum et fascinans ("mystery awesome and fascinating") that leads people toward magic, religion, and the like. Alan DeNiro's stories have plenty to do with otherness and abound with awesome, fascinating mysteries. Yet he and Otto (English occultist Kenneth Grant, too, who used "that which is wholly other" to define "evil") harbor fundamentally different agendas.

For Otto, any union between human and numinous entity is both partial and fleeting, even within the high-yield realms of Pentacostalism or Vodoun. Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead's protagonists mostly start half-numinous and, practically begging for epigenesis, become more so—sometimes for good, as in "Cuttlefish." The Genoan street urchin who spends his days killing and dismantling the titular critters does so neither out of hate nor from the scant renumeration he gets from his only friend, a dealer in birds. He hears the thoughts of cuttlefish all over the globe, and merely seeks a little piece and quiet. Problem is, the telepathic contact continues even beyond the grave, seriously threatening his sanity until salvation arrives in the guise of a vampire squid.

By no means are DeNiro's characters always so troubled; for some, the miraculous is second nature. Before her transformation, the trapeze artist of "Fuming Woman" (like the cuttlefish boy, nameless) leaps higher and higher, catching one bar in her teeth, the next with her belly button, the third with a kidney, and the highest with "her slightly ironic, melancholic disposition," all while the circus beneath her is convulsed in a riot that threatens to bring the big top down. DeNiro makes the extraordinary ascent seem like part of her act.

Just as he both de-stigmatizes the wondrous and makes it seem perfectly natural, the author excels in bringing the sinister aspects of mundane existence to the surface. Blundering, overzealous, government functionaries (and their functions) bear the brunt of his wit-and DeNiro is often damn funny-in "The Fourth," when they nearly destroy a neighborhood over three packets of Kool-Aid an innocent husband and father receives in the mail.

DeNiro doesn't pick exclusively on squares, by any means. The title story's targets are the 23rd-century counterparts of today's New Agers and Boomer-style activists, royal pains one and all for the emancipated teens who make up the bulk of Suddenly's population, but especially thorny for the narrator (nameless until story's end) after he falls in love with a girl who's part dolphin. That the author captures the 18-year-old mindset perfectly enough to jog an octegenarian's memory only sweetens the fruits of his imagination. While he hardly lacks for peers—Benjamin Rosenbaum, Aimee Bender, and Small Beer Press publisher Kelly Link stand out—the extent of DeNiro's range and the suppleness of his voice would set him apart even minus the compassion that drives Skinny Dipping. Who could possibly resist a writer whose giants sit in their suburban living room around an XXL Monopoly board, as DeNiro's do in "The Friendly Giants," cheerfully moving massive, custom-designed pieces?

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ROCKDRILL 8: VIA
Caroline Bergvall
Optic Nerve/Carcanet (£14.95)

SURREALISM'S BAD RAP
Garrett Caples
Narrow House Recordings ($12)

by Christine Hume

"Here is the great secret:" Tristan Tzara famously manifestoed, "Thought is made in the mouth"—and, I would add, comprehension hits consciousness more directly via listening, which is more continuous with thinking and feeling than reading. Two recent poetry CDs attest to the potency of the mouth as a site where sense and sensuality fuse and refuse to compete. In the mouths of Caroline Bergvall and Garrett Caples, voice pulls our attention toward itself as idiosyncratic sound as it gathers into provocative moods of communication.

Both Bergvall and Caples deliver voices that are deeply marked, accented, tuned to the relativity of meaning and expression. Yet for all their investment in context—situational and temporal specificity—their voices seem utterly unlocatable in very distinct ways. Both voices hold us captive by their uncanniness—in conflict and in contact with a present moment—and their capacities to mutate for each track, allowing language to decompose and reconstitute itself so that its phonemic, morphemic, and paragrammatic qualities air themselves viscerally. Bergvall is especially skilled at using interrupted, partially audible, phantom, and crypt words that percolate in an erotic aporia. Caples sometimes blurts or blurs language, sometimes buries it underneath a guitar as a libidinal articulation of displacement. The corporeal body, its mythological transformations and vulnerability, asserts itself in both voice and language. Body parts come at us in both CDs—sometimes in French, sometimes with diapers, often associated with animals. Both Bergvall and Caples play in the physicality of sound, as lexical inflections of an identity crisis. They rattle and unravel any sense of objective status of gender, nationality, or class. Yet the strategies and effects of their approaches to sound poetry couldn't be more contrary. Bergvall's austere and expertly engineered recordings create an addictive ritual out of her voice, which hypnotizes with braids of polyglot unconscious, whereas Caples' raw, lo-fi brio concocts a series of acoustic adventures, complete with a cadre of collaborators and dedications.

The first tracks of each album buoy up the radically different spirit and aesthetic of Bergvall and Caples. Bergvall begins Via by performing the sentence "Ambient fish fuck flowers bloom in your mouth will choke your troubles away" with the attentiveness of a spell. The words are spoken as if they are irritants on the tongue; they are unruly words simmering with insinuations. The initiating sentence permutates ten or so times, slipping sounds sonically through reincarnations—flowers become fodder, loose, goose, bouche, toche, touch—that land in a psychic stutter opening "a door, adore" on the poem's final perversion. Each sentence, each pronunciation tries itself out, it searches as it drives the saying out of the parking lot of the said. Bergvall's slow start amps up the tension by sharply articulated consonants and prolonged vowels that enact the sense of language blooming in the mouth, choking us, like an irrepressible sob. The passage's subtle, minute shifts in tone conjure sounds between languages and between semantics and music. Rhythm is foregrounded as a medium of somatic communication. Its phonetic rhythm sounds somewhere between lullaby and fucked-up love song. In less that two minutes we get a strobe-light of bloom and choke, of affirmations and negations, of ambivalence and annoyance—of elided sentence and list. The erotics of the language merges with a violent grammar to produce something brutal, obscene, and deeply affective.

Caples's opener, "For Tune," is a chant of coupleted four-letter words, beginning with "Fuck love." Like Bergvall's "Ambient Fish," this piece plays as both list and sentence, alternating between the two in a manner that manages never fully to commit itself to either. This use of ambiguous syntax creates tension and meaning, while it keeps our listening active and amused, keeps us sharp to the interpretive branchings of each word pair. Its word traffic is as much afterthoughts and emendations, precursors and predictors, as it is a narrative. In this way, and due to the intricacies of rhyme, the percussive one-syllable strikes, and the exploration of tensions between "fuck" and "love," the piece feels like an homage to early rap. This poem is bracketed by a tiny introduction of the standard of poetry readings that claims the poem's "unfinished" condition and a long applause that sounds inappropriately polite. If the familiarity of the introduction signals what follows will be a "typical" poetry reading, it only serves to mislead. It does however set the reader up for audible breaths and mouth noises, occasional stumbles or hesitations, dynamic glitches, scrappy recordings, and a "live" intimacy that characterize the entire CD.

Two other versions of "Ambient Fish"—on PennSound, a flash version on EPC—testify to the on-goingness of Bergvall's work, often context-specific, always open to language as an object of desire, sought out and subject to the transformative power of failure and attempt. Many of these pieces are products of much performed and textual revision, and all but one are published in books, sometimes in the spirit of documentation. Though, as in Caples's work, the performance is both tribute to and transgression from textual versions, showing improvisation as an aesthetic and as compositional technique. In fact, one of the most acute differences between the two CDs is that Bergvall's work has clearly always had performance in mind, whereas Caples embraces textual primacy—he renovates the poetry reading, kicks the conventional off stage, without approaching the realm of performance art.

Caples offers us a generous 26 tracks, between 44 seconds and seven minutes, that pack a kinesthetic, gleeful carnival of digital tricks, including at least one veritable song. The strepitant spirit of the CD accretes a riveting intensity studded with gems of sardonic wit. The comic here calls out our complicity in power structures, displaying the unacceptable in a ludic timeliness. What this highwire act of mixed comedy and edgy seriousness foregrounds is the complex balance between performance, which recognizes the audience as "other," and individual artistic gesture, which lives in an altogether other-world. Most of the pieces make more of a gesture toward narrative than "For Tune," but they do so by employing enigmatic phrasing and an almost three-dimensional aural coherence.

With the exception of "Ambient Fish," Bergvall's eight tracks are more expansive, conceptually-driven projects. The splintered and ringing "About Face" anatomizes an art historical perspective on the face as it defaces words to accommodate traces, seams, and fractals of other language events. This track, like most of the CD, trades on using repetition as a temporal structure of the aural imagination (in the same way that an image is a spatial structure of the visual imagination). The titular piece, "Via," sets 47 alphabetically arranged English translations of the first canto of Dante's Inferno noting translator and date; under it—or rather inside it like auscultation—runs a faint musical cannibalization of Bergvall's voice. The succession of effects is always ballasted by the context-alerts of names and dates, never allowing us sensual immersion into its minutely shifting linguistic densities, and thus producing in us a full longing concentrated by the fact that we are not lost on a path in the dark wood, we are passing inscriptions of those who once were.

Perched on opposite ends of an aesthetic see-saw, these two CDs promise us a plurality in audio poetry culture. Anyone who doesn't love them must have a low opinion of joy, that is, thought made and mused in the mouth.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007

André Gregory
Theater Communications Group (13.95)

by Justin Maxwell

André Gregory's Bone Songs is a layered, melancholic work driven by its language. The publication of the play itself—Gregory's first, though he is an acclaimed director and filmmaker—is one manifestation of this complex layering, since Bone Songs is the theatrical avatar of Gregory's performance "After Dinner with André," which is Bone Songs collaged together with "fragments from my [Gregory's] life, childhood and first marriage, as well as thoughts about love, death, time, and just about anything else that pops into my head in the moment faced with each night's particular audience."

The complex identity of the text mirrors the complex identity of its characters. With a heartbreaking plurality of identity, characters from different points of the same lifetime are able to explore the dangerous terrain their life has covered. While the characters are clearly differentiated from one another, they are primarily defined by their relationship to each other. Older He and Younger He offer two perspectives of one man's lifetime, and they are coupled with the same dynamic form in their respective spouses, Older She and Younger She. The Explorer, possibly the next stage of life for Older He, is a haunting and tortured character—his songs and soliloquies are like spells; he is a warlock of the human capacity for grief.

Fittingly for a verse play, it is the breathtaking language of the work that holds the publication together. The language of Bone Songs and the universality of its generically named characters allow it to escape the solipsistic gravity that claims so many narratives based on personal experiences. Although the He characters blur with Gregory (especially in performance), the characters in the work are whole unto themselves and don't serve as his direct surrogates within the play. Thus we stay in the experiences of the characters; as they tell their story we think of them, not Gregory.

Bone Songs is primarily set in Antarctica, and the personal terrain of the work matches the physical terrain of this locale: foreboding, difficult, and beautiful. The Explorer sets up this dichotomous relationship: "words like 'love' and 'seeing you' are things we learn in school, but no one tells what happens next when you're far out at sea..." Here the personal and the physical merge, each elucidating the other. This abstract setting, described in only the sparsest fashion, isn't a land that Gregory (or anybody else) calls home. With section titles such as "Waking the Spiders on the Floor: Things You Should Have Said but Never Could," the play takes us to a little-understood land where each memory is as stately and threatening as an iceberg.

Despite Gregory's focus on character and setting, neither people nor landscape really drives Bone Songs; instead, the play is built around tone. The audience feels its way through the events of the story and the experiences of the characters; we are drawn in by the telling of their stories. The rhythm underlying the tone is contrapuntal in its warmth, and the beat of the play's language is sexual, almost a chant—but a mystical, spell-casting chant, not a prudish Gregorian. Even when Younger She denies her partner physical contact, the rhythms of the language keep their sensuality:

No. No.
Let go.
Only whisper to me,
whisper to me.
Tell me, if you must,
but without a sound how much
and if and when and why.

The sentences are short and made breathy by the line breaks, while the "w" and "s" phonemes augment this and simultaneously add an intimate whisper to the iambs that dominate the language. This level of detailed attention to the smallest points of language makes the work consistently powerful.

Because the performance of Bone Songs also incorporates spontaneous monologues by Gregory (here collected at the end of the text in a final segment called "Fragments"), the play's poetic strengths are coupled with the raw spontaneity of live performance. For a work of such well-constructed language to incorporate the unplanned elements of the performance successfully and then have them live on the page is impressive indeed. The spontaneous elements of the performance layered into the conscious reading coupled with the surreptitious aliveness of Gregory's language gives the greatest threat to all that ice—there is something warm, something profoundly human, that could melt away the cold.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007