Bruna Mori
Paintings by Matthew Kinney
Meritage Press ($14.95)

by Craig Perez

In the essay “Theory of the Dérive,” Situationist International founder Guy Debord defines a basic situationist practice: “the dérive (literally: ‘drifting’) [is] a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.” In Dérive, Bruna Mori drifts through the varied ambiances of New York City and lyrically maps the city’s “psychogeographical” contours.

The first section of Dérive presents “an assemblage of interwoven images of Manhattan’s Chinatown, maintaining the lines as they were collected, alluding to one’s experience as imposed upon a neighborhood, as well as the city’s imposition upon an individual.” Mori’s poems embody the “rapid passage” of collecting and assembling her sensory experience of the city.

The poem “Rushing” exemplifies the sense of passage:

Under a temple, I seek refuge from neon lights flashing, good luck braided into door frames, inverted wet paint signs, stairs I can’t descend. Lampposts feed skies at twilight. You are the unexpected angle that intersects me and the camera. Shadows no longer fall on fingers but that of my body across. Yellow nightness. Again the skittish cat with yellow eyes, and Chinatown in yellow and red screams even at night. Girls raise arms for a cab, raise T-shirts encircling bellies, raise bellies.

Mori’s encircling, subjective impressions encircle us with the currents, fixed points, and vortexes of this particular dérive. Drifting through Chinatown’s “unexpected angles,” Mori braids concrete detail (“inverted wet paint signs,” “raise bellies”) to the abstract (“yellow nightness,” “red screams”) to inaccessible mystery (“stairs I can’t descend”).

Returning to Debord’s essay, we read: “the spatial field of a dérive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself. It should not be forgotten that these two aspects of dérives overlap.” Throughout Dérive, we witness the spatial field shift from delimited to vague as the motive of the poet shifts from orientation to disorientation. In an untitled series of poems, Mori crafts character studies of people she meets on her dérive:

hsien ju does not pray because he finds
enough luck at the local mah-jongg hall.
[…]
hsien lights incense and a
few bills for the ghosts of his ancestors,
so they too may gamble in heaven.

These tenderly constructed portraits create an ethnographic intimacy that deepens objective observation. Mori suggests that a city isn’t only a swirling carnival, but also a collection of individuals and individual stories.

The last section of Dérive involves Mori’s “outward engagement in the boroughs.” These poems are “based on riding subway trains to the end of each line and disembarking to lose [her] way among new immigrant communities, ‘70s-era public housing, halfway houses, and cemeteries.” Mori’s willingness to disorient herself transforms what could be banal “city poems” into “psychogeographical articulations,” as in this one about the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge:

Colon, rectal, and gastroenterology clinics intermingle with air force recruitment centers. I am ineffectually looking for evidence of Italy or Greece in remnants of Easter bunnies, folds of American flags. Tulips of sameness, columns of similarities each possessing their own fractures sprout from oil of calzones and gold chain links. A waitress sucks the tips of her glasses to “Hungry Like the Wolf”.

Debord posits that the architecture of urbanism consists of “different unities of atmospheres and of dwellings […] surrounded by more or less extended and indistinct bordering regions.” As Mori “ineffectually [looked] for evidence,” she discovered a city haunted by its bordering regions. Debord explains this transformation: “The most general change that dérive experience leads to proposing is the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression.” Like the last sentence in “Bay Ridge (Brooklyn),” Mori shows us how the dérive blurs the border between “poethnographer” and the “poethnographic subject.”

Amidst the dérive poems, there are a few poems in this collection that drift from the subject of the city. The most powerful example is “After Affect”:

There is fire in the sun.
There is not much sun.

The reality boat of sediment
Dances on my infirm sleep.

There is fire in the sun,
I will visit its citizens.

Mori created these poems through homophonic translations of the Argentinean poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s Textos Selectos. At first, the different tone of the translations seems to interrupt the overall project of the book. However, Mori maybe is suggesting that homophonic translation represents a kind of textual dérive. Unlike other homophonic translations, which translate line by line, Mori translates at unexpected angles. For example, the quoted section from “After Affect” above comes from Pizarnik’s “La Jaula.” Mori translates the first two lines, “Afuera hay sol,” then skips several lines ahead to “barcos sedientos de realidad bailan conmigo […] a mis sueños enfermos” ("The reality boat of sediment / Dances on my infirm sleep”). Mori drifts through Pizarnik’s “psychogeographical contours” to carve out a situation for poetry. In the spirit of the dérive, Mori then incorporates lines from a different Pizarnik poem—the next two stanzas of “After Affect” translate the 7th section of “Arbol De Diana.”

Mori treats Pizarnik’s Textos Selectos as an opportunity for a dérive, following variable sensorial paths to “the end of each line.” Although I’m not thoroughly convinced that these poems necessarily heighten our reading of the city, they definitely add another “bordering region” from which to represent the violent re-shaping of post 9/11 New York (we can read Mori’s other homophonic translation in Tergiversation, a free e-book from Ahadada Books).

Reading Dérive teaches us what Debord articulates as the lessons of drifting: “The lessons drawn from dérives enable us to draw up the first surveys of the psychogeographical articulations of a modern city. Beyond the discovery of unities of ambiance, of their main components and their spatial localization, one comes to perceive their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses. One arrives at the central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivot points.” Throughout Dérive, Mori presents what she perceives as the city’s “principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses.” She’s attentive to the city in regard “to its own [dis]orientation, a certain proprioception.” Complementing Mori’s poems, Matthew Kinney’s ink paintings of the city create striking visual “pivot points” on which the book turns. In the end, Dérive doesn’t attempt to precisely delineate a stable map of the city; instead, Mori and Kinney manage to lyrically translate the changing architecture and vibrant humanity of urbanism through “poethnographic” techniques.

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

Daniel Borzutzky
BlazeVOX ($14)

by Vincent Czyz

At first, Daniel Borzutzky’s The Ecstasy of Capitulation seems like another small book from another small press, and initially the collection doesn’t defy expectations of boredom: “Noun Clause” was a snooze. “Present Progressive” didn’t progress. “Simple Present” was simply forgettable:

I only think of you when I do not
think of you. Conversely, when I
think of you, I do not think of you.
Of course, when I think of you, I
think of you, but the you I think of when I  …

And so on. But then there are poems like “The Hippo-Lexicographer Affair,” which lampoons the Iran-Contra affair and satirizes the rhetoric of politicians.

I did not trade our soybeans for hair pieces, nor
did I trade our confessional poets for Persian
ornithologists.  I have issued a directive
prohibiting the undertaking of covert
ornithology.

Or the equally satirical excerpt from “Henry Kissinger's Acceptance Speech for the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize”:

And thoughts of
Peace, my friends, flow much more smoothly when men of broad vision accessorize
Their suits with silk handkerchiefs manufactured in
Civilized nations …
[I]f lasting peace is to come, it
Will be the accomplishment—not of a well-dressed man or a well-dressed
Family, or even a well-dressed nation—it will be the accomplishment
Of a well-dressed mankind.

The pace continues to pick up with Kafkaesque pieces such as “Exile,” the reading of which is something like walking a downtown street, catching a glimpse of yourself in a plate-glass window, and suddenly realizing you are naked and all the clothes shops are closed for some unannounced holiday.

Borzutzky has a gift for juxtaposing incongruous elements and for taking unexpected turns, an ability to transubstantiate the mundane into the weird. His words are apt to invade your language, use it as a springboard to get into your cognitive processes, and make you rethink what you thought utterly unobjectionable—perhaps best exemplified by these lines from “Urban Affairs”:

We approve of intersections but are opposed to streets in general.
Alleyways and dead ends should be paved over with mountains.
Potholes should be filled with violets, or ideas.

Intensely aware that writing is not holy, authors are not divine, and literature has much in common with the newspaper lining the litter box, Borzutzky is enamored of the Barbaric Writers—the brainchild of Chilean author Roberto Bolaños—who interact with the works of literary masters by defacing them in the crudest ways imaginable. Borzutzky pays homage to the group with his own deadpan fantasy:

When I watched the Barbaric Writers defecate on my
manuscript, I felt a great sense of relief, a great sense of
fraternity with these men who loved literature enough to
destroy it, and I recalled a poem I had once written, but
never had the confidence to publish, about a so-called
poet who shat himself into a toilet, only to float on his
back as torrential downpours of poetry filled the bowl and drowned
him.

Whether Borzutzky is satirizing politicians or social conventions, the language of sex or of popular magazines, or our innumerable failed relationships (intimate, familial, or otherwise), there is a manic energy that is cannily channeled into his verse and a quirky sense of humor that often leaves the reader chortling to himself like a patient in a psych ward. The word choices are deft, the language precise and, perhaps taking their cue from the Barbaric Writers, these poems never take themselves too seriously:

For who is to say that the air we breathe
is anything more than a secret code both
capricious in structure and marketable in
the substance of its sad and tender humility?

I leave you to puzzle out the answer to that one for yourself.

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

Peter Kuper
Crown ($19.95)

by David A. Beronä

Peter Kuper’s latest work is an extensive self-parody of a cartoonist’s life and an impressive example of autobiographical fiction in a graphic narrative. Kuper portrays his alter ego as Walter Kurtz, a middle-aged cartoonist who invites the reader into his studio to hopscotch between self-absorbed tales of his discovery of sex and drugs in his youth, political parody of the dysfunctional Bush administration based on the 1960s comic Richie Rich, and the problematic experiences of his life as a husband and parent in New York against the backdrop of 9-11.

Kurtz’s initial face-to-face dialogue with the reader—à la Scott McCloud—is set against the backdrop of a posh studio replete with fireplace. When the cartoonist’s wife, Sandra, walks in, the glamorous interior disappears in one big “poof” to expose reality—a few bookcases, a file cabinet, and a drawing board crammed into a small room with papers strewn about the floor. The book juxtaposes the reality of Kurtz’s life with Sandra—her pregnancy, the birth of their daughter, and their subsequent life together—with the imaginary, quizzing the reader about events as he jumps from past to present.

Kuper’s storytelling skill allows these layers of his narrative to flow seamlessly. Cultural icons are scattered throughout the panels, including a memorable sequence in which Kurtz wears Hugh Hefner props—a pipe and a bathrobe—when he flies back through his teenage years to the moment he lost his virginity. Kuper includes tributes to comic strips like Spy vs. Spy, Popeye, and Krazy Kat; Mad Magazine and his own longstanding publication World War 3 Illustrated; and fellow cartoonists such as his peer Seth Tobocman and his elder R. Crumb, the latter of whom is surely among his most important influences.

The book’s crisp black and white artwork changes from black to brown during dream sequences and memories of events; this simple printing device makes the transition from reality and the integration of his inner and outer worlds more startling. While Kuper’s extensive list of works includes award-winning graphic novels like Sticks and Stones and The System as well as his recent adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

Stop Forgetting to Remember may be his best work to date. In it, Kuper has not only catalogued our culture, but he’s created a memorable character in Kurtz—one who ultimately rises above his personal fears and the doomsday cacophony that threatens him, leading to a hopeful conclusion that encourages us to examine our own lives.

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Kim Deitch
Pantheon ($23)

by Todd Robert Petersen

The term “graphic novel” has become ubiquitous over the last few years, but in many cases it’s a misnomer. The major graphic narratives of the last few years have been autobiographical. Even though graphic memoirs from Maus to Persepolis challenge both the traditional comics and narrative memoir forms, Kim Deitch injects postmodernism and cultural history into a relatively standard narrative to give us a Crumb and Pekar-esque cavalcade of post-psychedelic tall tales.

Deitch’s central character in Alias the Cat! is a fabricated version of himself, one so self-consciously over the top that it makes James Frey’s somewhat fictionalized memoir seem like C-Span coverage of a congressional policy debate. The book consists of three elaborate yarns spun by Deitch and a Citizen Kane-like menagerie of narrators, in which Deitch returns us to the more fanciful era of comix, where titles such as American Splendor, Fritz the Cat, and Mr. Natural filled the head shops.

In this, he isn’t breaking any ground—the likes of Montaigne, David Sedaris, and Hunter S. Thompson have all fabricated versions of themselves for the literary marketplace. Nevertheless, Deitch turns the memoir on its head, not simply by making up stories or relying on disingenuous forms with nebulous titles like “fictional autobiography.” Deitch positively revels in his own sheer preposterousness and his peccadilloes as both a cartoonist and collector.

In the first section, we are introduced to Deitch and his wife Pam while they’re exploring a flea market. They discover a man selling a plush black cat that has caught Pam’s fancy. The price is steep: a cool thousand dollars. The reason for this high price is the man’s history with the cat, a history that reads like the love child of a sea shanty and Joe Versus the Volcano. The stuffed cat becomes a central figure in the book—a case study in the id run amok.

In the second section, the cat manifests himself in Deitch’s discovery of a fascinating series of found texts (silent film serials, old newspaper comic strips, and reel-to-reel amateur oral history). Here we have more of the fifth-degree black-belt bullshitting, but there is a Spiegelmanesque level of self-referentiality concerning the medium of comics as well, one that offers subtle commentary on the ways in which the newspaper and movie business have not really changed in a hundred years.

Section three delivers a tour de force wrap-up, climax, and denouement that is every bit as miraculous in its ability to draw the far-flung edges of this book together as the best episodes of the Simpsons and Seinfeld. The absurdity doesn’t ease up; like a Frank Zappa guitar solo, it manages to attain new heights just as it seems to reach exhaustion.

Despite the beauty of much of the recent wave of graphic memoirs, there has been a seriousness that can be a little overwhelming. Alias the Cat is a welcome break—it won't make you think too hard, and it’s laugh-out-loud funny, a sheer joy from end sheet to end sheet.

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Matt Fraction and Gabriel Bá
Image Comics ($24.99)

by Rudi Dornemann

As part of the new “slimline” format from Image Comics that’s meant to be more accessible than the bulk of comics produced by the major publishers, Matt Fraction and Gabriel Bá’s Casanova is relatively inexpensive and generally self-contained. These constraints shape the comic, increasing the density of the story to give the reader what still feels like a full issue. In Casanova’s case, that means a visually and verbally intense comic delighting in its own rapid-fire complexity. Ironically, the reader who first encounters Casanova in collected form may have an advantage—it’s easier to keep the comic’s many moving parts in view when reading the seven issues as a single volume.

With its psychedelic flair, mix-and-match mash-up of genres, and baroque pop aesthetic, Casanova might be Fraction and Bá’s attempt to create something like a comics equivalent of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album. Certainly, there’s a ’60s-style hipness to the comic, with its references to James Bond movies and the 1968 French film Diabolik (itself an adaptation of an earlier Italian comic). Title character Casanova Quinn is the cat-burglar wayward son of a family that runs a world-wide undercover organization. Pulled into a parallel dimension where he’s the well-behaved son and the top operative for the family agency, Casanova finds himself on a series of spy missions replete with mad scientists, mummy-wrapped megalomaniacs, metaphysically-superpowered mystics, armies of female robots, giant floating entities with triple-decker skulls and floating hands who look like Mayan hieroglyphs brought to life, and a wide assortment of double-crosses and elaborate plots gone wrong. Besides the over-the-top plotting, Fraction gives Casanova wall-to-wall snappy dialogue and plenty of witty scripting moves—a page on which all the word balloons are blank, or the recurring “talking heads” who offer fourth-wall-breaking character thoughts and editorial comments in the space between panels. Artist Bá keeps pace with Fraction’s manic storyline, creating image-packed pages that often mix a number of small, bounded panels with larger panels that bleed off the page and contribute to the comic’s sense of busy fullness.

Fraction and Bá’s synergy is evident all through Casanova, from the Diabolik-homage of the first page to the final issue, which includes, among much else, a fight scene inside a giant Japanese robot captioned with several crossed-out attempts at hyperbole (e.g., “The seven-fold smackdown six issues in the making!”) and a final declaration that isn’t struck out: “I love comic books!” The phrase could easily serve as the slogan for the whole of the collection; Casanova has the feel of a joyride, with Fraction and Bá opening up the throttle and seeing where the road will take them.

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

Greg Bottoms
University of Chicago Press ($20)

by Eliza Murphy

Traveling through god-haunted regions with author Greg Bottoms as a guide pitches the reader into unusual physical and psychological territory. No stranger to the Christian-infused South, neither is Virginia-native Bottoms indifferent to the religious preoccupation that sometimes occurs with mental illness. Haunted by the impact of his brother’s schizophrenia and violence—his brother was incarcerated for nearly burning down the family’s home while his parents and another brother were inside—Bottoms sets out on a search for the whereabouts of the micro-thin, semi-permeable membrane separating religious ecstasy and madness.

Using the travel narrative as a means to unveil what drives certain individuals to create their prodigious, overtly religious art, Bottoms assumes the role of roving journalist to gather intimate, personal stories about outsider artists William Thomas Thompson, Norbert Kox, and the late Howard Finster. Shying away from analysis, he opts instead to let the characters speak for themselves: “I want things to reveal their connections to other things, to show unity, to make sense.” He includes snippets from books about outsider art and mental illness; the overall effect is a mix of journalism and journaling, resulting in a sort of self-reflexive collage.

The narrative is strongest when Bottoms offers specific, visual details—for example, he describes an effeminate rollerblader in tight, white shorts and gleaming gold jewelry skating perilously close to the prison near Finster’s Paradise Garden, the drab colors of the prison a vivid contrast to the bright, garish colors of the garden. At times, Bottoms cannot disguise his discomfort, such as when he encounters a storeowner who proclaims how good slavery was for the country.

In the process of documenting instead of critiquing, Bottoms makes generous use of notes from his journals and transcribed tapes of interviews he conducted with the artists and people connected to them. There is a raw, unedited quality to the portraits; the reader becomes a fly on the wall, eavesdropping on conversations that veer into some difficult territory. Each of these artists experienced Christian-centered visions that altered the course of their lives, visions of such a profound nature that they felt compelled to pick up brushes to paint messages they received from God.

It’s difficult to avoid reading this as some sort of pathology involving elaborate, paranoid, fixed delusions of a religious nature—or have these artists stumbled upon a creative ordering of a chaotic world, ways of giving rampant contradiction, dissonance, and nihilism some sort of meaning? If their worldviews were more coherent, less fixated on demonizing segments of the population, perhaps their apocryphal and troubling visions would have granted them the roles of prophets.

As it is, Bottoms reveals artists who all broke with the conventions of their past, who found constructive ways to recover from traumatic histories, and in this way avoided being diagnosed according to the DSM-IV, the manual that governs contemporary psychiatry through its symptom-based criteria (a text Bottoms took on his journey). In the process, they found their own ways to heal without use of potentially soul-deadening psychotropic drugs.

Bottoms demonstrates empathy for his subjects, acknowledging “It is easy to ruin a life—my life, your life: it can take only a little well-placed destruction.” While attempting to get at the impulses behind the creation of quite disturbing, with mutilated Christ figures and “bloody baby doll” parts, he sometimes falls prey to one of the pitfalls he perceives in outsider art. Citing an example from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, about how information alters perception, Bottoms writes: “The way we see and interpret is suddenly charged by tragedy. Outsider art, once collected, often makes the caption more important than the painting for the sake of display.” But the way Bottoms portrays the artists occasionally veers close to what he condemns, as he offers portraits that emphasize his subject’s madness over their work. He takes stabs at his reporter role, too. “If there is ugliness in outsider art collection, there is ugliness in the collection of a life story, too.”

That reporting can get a little sloppy: at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, he incorrectly refers to an exhibit as “Ascending Addiction,” when it was actually called “High on Life: Transcending Addiction.” And instead of grappling with the current debate about outsider art, Bottoms opts to focus on an easy target—the unfortunate sideshow appeal of the work of outsiders, whose work is often overshadowed by their biographies.

The work of outsider artists is unusual, and the biographies of its makers are often riddled with tragic circumstances. Bottoms makes a valiant effort to seek the common ground these artists share, to transcend madness to reveal what humanist psychiatrist Dr. Hans Prinzhorn saw as one of the fundamental impulses driving art-making—“to actualize the psyche and thereby build a bridge from the self to others.”

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Walter Mosley
Little, Brown & Company ($19.99)

by Kevin Carollo

Coming in at around half the length of Chris Baty’s novel-in-a-month plan No Plot? No Problem!, Walter Mosley’s deliberately slim tome on writing a novel over the course of a year is an odd bird. The difference in approach between the two can be glimpsed in the titles alone. Mosley’s uses no punctuation, while Baty’s avails itself of a question mark, an exclamation point, and follows with “A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days.” Both books aim for the creation of shorter, manageable novel lengths (50,000 words or so), and both offer useful advice to the beginning novelist about getting started, developing characters, and taking the next step once the first draft is completed.

There is decidedly less velocity and caffeine in This Year You Write Your Novel, which, like the title of the short story collection You’ve Got to Read This!, can be read either as motivational or as a mild form of punishment. Mosley saves the exclamation points for some shining moment off the page in the uncertain future—and, curiously enough, for this slightly threatening exhortation to the reader at the outset: “If you want to finish this novel of yours within a year, you have to get to work! There’s not a moment to lose. There’s no time to wait for inspiration.” Gee, Mose, do I have to? But the “congratulations” he offers on page 95 don’t get an exclamation point. This must be because his answer to the question “When am I finished rewriting?” doesn’t have one either: “Never. The novel never attains the level of perfection. No matter how much you rewrite and rewrite again . . .” He’s right, of course, and by now we get it. Mosley seems so intent on not getting anyone’s hopes up, so invested in being the staid practitioner, that one becomes curious as to why he wrote the book in the first place.

To be sure, novels are odd birds, and the idea of writing about how to write a novel rather than actually writing a novel is perhaps an even odder undertaking. And now you’re reading something about reading books about writing books, and this, too, seems odd. What will make readers turn the next page of your writing? Moreover, what makes you, the first reader of your work, want to write the next page? Having penned 25 books, Mosley understands the charge that comes with writing electrifying fiction, and he knows the intensity and intimacy of the craft. He may wear his age on his sleeve a bit, but overall his pointers are sage, concise, and grounded. Where Baty encourages turning the internal editor off for the first draft and month, Mosley gets us looking at the trees in the forest, and the forest reflected in every tree. The rewrite is where the real writing begins for him. The charge is up to you.

Mosley insists that one should write every day, for at least an hour and a half. That’s every day, 52 weeks a year. Still reading? To write is first and foremost to commit to writing. Mosley also confesses to taking six poetry seminars during his MFA days, and he “still can’t write even a passable poem.” He does this to champion poetry and poetry workshops as a way for novelists to get close to language and make every line of their prose sing. Reading poetry and reading widely is great advice for everyone, and specifically validating for those who naturally love to explore multiple genres.

After providing an array of examples on crafting a paragraph, Mosley offers a solitary exercise aimed at revising “flatness in the prose.” By this point, he is confident that readers can turn the following three sentences of “flaccid prose . . . into something more”:

I went to the store and bought a dozen apples. After that I came home and decided to call Marion. She told me that she was busy and so she couldn’t make it to the dance.

I realize I’m writing a book review and not a novel right now, but let’s see what happens if I try to harden these lines up:

After two months wandering the produce section of Ultra-Max, I finally decided on a dozen apples, my least favorite fruit. I called Marion in the parking lot to tell her how they found me and what I’d seen, but she was too preoccupied with the fact that her nails and hair had stopped growing to care. She was afraid she might be dead and not know it, and this would somehow interfere with our apparently busy schedules as citizens of Greater Max. “Can ghosts still dance?” she asked hopefully. I couldn’t remember.

It will never be perfect, but I like it so far. It makes me want to say “Thank you, Mose!”—with an unnecessary exclamation point and everything. Now go write your novel, and have a blast.

Note: The reviewer of This Year You Write Your Novel has just finished writing an awesome crime novel entitled Pull Tabs. He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled You Will Never—And I Mean Fucking Never!—NOT Write Your Awesome Novel Now!!! It will never be published, or completed. Never! Please send tax-free ten-dollar donations to Rain Taxi for your free personalized excerpt (lengths may vary). Somewhere on your check or in your email, write “YWN-AIMFN!-NWYANN!!!” Brief personal information or anecdotes about your situation are also appreciated. I’m totally serious.

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

Charles Clover
The New Press ($26.95)

by Ryder Miller

Charles Clover, an award-winning journalist and an editor for the Daily Telegraph in England, seeks to alert the world about the decline of the world fisheries' stocks in The End of the Line, noting that the concerned consumer has the power to change the dangerous practices contributing to this crisis. Clover's call to action should make one angry, and he suggests that we should take that anger with us to the supermarket and when we go out for a meal. Clover is also adept at turning a phrase, and he is so versed in the subject that The End of the Line abounds with wonderful lines and succinct language.

Clover is not a vegetarian—in fact he’s a sports fisherman—and as such this book is aimed at those who would rather not give up eating fish. He doesn’t advocate for giving up eating fish entirely, but he does struggle with what tack to take to convince people to change their fish consumption, saying, “The question of how to make this solution politically acceptable is one of the great problems of our time.” Modern environmentalists who struggle with this question are often out-radicalized by well meaning people who are out of touch with the mainstream. Henry David Thoreau mused in Walden that we would all be vegetarians by now, but there are those who are invested against making a change. That is especially the case with the entrenched fishing industry.

Though Clover thinks it will take forty years to “come to grips with the global crisis caused by intensive fishing,” in his documentation of the damage the world fisheries have wreaked it becomes clear that sustainability efforts were needed generations ago. We are already fishing down the food chain; unless we make a change we may be left with only minnows, plankton, and starfish to eat.

Clover supplies a number of useful solutions: certification for sustainable fishing methods; fish farming, although it comes with its own risks, to ease pressures on stocks of wild fish; and more marine sanctuaries, or safe zones, where fish can hide and multiply. He also points out the health benefits of eating less fish, since they accumulate toxins from the environment. Finally, he provides a Choosing Fish Guide that allows the consumer to become a direct part of the efforts to protect fish. Not fully developed here is one controversial solution: “preventing fish from being exposed to any kind of fishing gear at all.” Many will choose to eat less fish, but it is surprising that there are not more people who eschew fish consumption altogether in the spotlight.

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Lew Paz
Plum Bell Publishing ($21.50)

by Jaye Beldo

Most people who embark on the path of philosophy quite likely have very little foreknowledge of what they are really getting into: endless, exacting, and unimaginably deep self inquiry; perpetual questioning; continual assessments of one's beliefs; and considered responses to metaphysical and mystical experiences. In our present world, the “answers” to life’s persistent questions are typically spoon-fed to us by pseudo-gurus, New Age visionaries, and other assorted pundits of the nether realms; there is not much cogent support for such challenging self-analysis. The rare individuals who dare to embark on such an uncertain route usually take great pains to remain reclusive, leaving genuine inspiration for the rest of us in tragically short supply.

In the past, such literary notables as Henry David Thoreau provided ample encouragement for those wishing to achieve some degree of enlightenment. Yet such transcendental luminaries have become so incredibly rare now, it seems we are left with only mass-marketed me-ism and other pathologically hedonist approaches to self-realization. However, in this remarkable and innovative work, ontological renegade Lew Paz gives readers the seldom seen perspective of someone who risked the enormous and daunting task of inner inquiry. What emerges from this philosophical travelogue is more than inspirational—it demolishes the reader’s cherished and outdated belief systems and risks encountering what’s left behind, regardless of how archetypically terrifying or bewildering. Paz, unlike most ad hoc philosophers-at-large, sustains a relentless and intense quest to grasp something luminous and beautifully. His work emanates a vitality that has been extinguished in this age of fearful conservatism and political correctness, where even the so-called “enlightened” may seem guarded and paranoid.

Aside from an off-putting and dubious attachment to Heidegger, whose affiliation with the Nazis, the author reminds us, forever clouded his weltanschauung, Paz’s work is most certainly worth examining, pondering, and reflecting upon in moments of solitude. At times, Paz expends too much energy addressing all the usual negating elements that encroach upon enlightenment and achieving a trans-egoic state, as found in organized religion, materialist science, and the reductive behaviorism proliferating the psychotherapeutic industry. Yet, once he moves past these conflicts, he shares with us a unique and much needed event horizon, one that he has scrutinized unflinchingly and from a perspective of genuine and hard-won compassion. Pushing Ultimates is recommended for anyone who may be fearful of the philosophical inquiry, not just as an initiatory and inspirational means of getting to the omega point of self-realization, wherever that may be, but also as a reliable guidebook to take along all throughout the journey.

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

Matthew Baigell
Syracuse University Press ($45)

by Daniel Morris

An emeritus professor of art history at Rutgers, Matthew Baigell has over the last decade become the foremost scholar of 20th century Jewish American art history. Where his previous titles in this area—Jewish Artists in New York: The Holocaust Years and Jewish American Artists and the Holocaust—focused on a specific theme, the current volume offers a broad introduction to an emerging field while continuing to emphasize the Shoah as the signal event to which Jewish artists respond in their work.

Baigell’s intends his study of what he calls “fourteen representative modern artists” as a first step into a field that he admits requires further research. One artist represented here is Helène Aylon, a contemporary feminist mixed-media and installation artist who grew up in an ultra-Orthodox environment in Boro Park, Brooklyn. Baigell illustrates that Aylon “has challenged the ways in which Jewish tradition has treated women,” focusing on a work in which “she placed on large surfaces membranous sacs filled with oil.” At first relaying Aylon’s own comment that her artwork might refer to female sanitary practices—“unconsciously suggested by the prayer invariably said by the Orthodox after using the bathroom”—Baigell then admits his own study at this point is merely speculative. “I mention this interpretation to make the point that an enormous amount of work needs to be done in order to begin to understand the kinds of knowledge and experience that a person from an Orthodox background can bring to his or her art consciously or unconsciously, and that might be lost if not recalled and written down soon.”

Arguing that time is of the essence, Baigell stresses the need for more art historical scholarship to take place before vulnerable Jewish folkways, histories, and memories are lost, depriving future viewers of the full significance of the rich visual traditions of American Jews. “Their works are important in that they contribute to the centripetal action of Jewish survival rather than to the centrifugal action of cultural dispersal.” Specifically, Baigell groups Max Weber, Ben-Zion Dinur, and Hyman Bloom as immigrants born around 1900 who painted genre scenes of Hasidic men dancing or praying, studying Talmud, or holding the Torah. For these artists—who remembered the old world but lived uneasily in the new—the genre scenes became emblems of cultural identification and security while also connoting fears of a vanishing Orthodox past. “The world Bloom invokes in these portraits is not one of the quotidian, of daily activities in the Orthodox community, but rather of the loss of religious knowledge and the loss of memory of the ancient ways and customs. It is as if these men, the learned men of Bloom’s childhood whom he wants to memorialize, are vanishing before our eyes . . .”

Unlike the work of the genre painters, it is not easy to decipher the Jewish content of Mark Rothko’s enigmatic stacks of colored rectangles from the 1950s. Baigell nonetheless reads Rothko as a Jewish artist through his emphasis on memory and his conflation of a mythic past with contemporary experience, especially in paintings of Greek tragic figures such as Agamemnon; he argues that Rothko’s fascination with Greek tragedy is his oblique way of dealing with the Holocaust. In Barnett Newman, another influential mid-century abstract painter of the New York School, Baigell reads the signature “zip” paintings in which a “narrow stripe appears to be on the same plane in depth as the larger, but less intensely colored rectangular shapes” in the context of Lurianic Kabbalism. Kaballah, it turns out, has been important to several artists including the contemporary abstract painter and sculptor Tobi Kahn, as well as for the Lithuanian-born social-realist painter Ben Shahn. Baigell interprets Shahn’s inclusion of Hebrew letters in many of his pictures as “a meditation on the mystical qualities of letters” in The Zohar.

In dealing with art that contains obscure Hebrew texts, Baigell performs a scholarly service by unpacking the often elliptical meanings of Jewish iconography. Such is the case with his interpretation of Shahn’s “Allegory” (1948) as representing the hand of God about to smite Aaron, which Baigell reads as a Biblical parallel to the Holocaust. Baigell also associates artists such as Jack Levine and Abraham Rattner with the politically radical dimension of Judaism, saying their “art-making finds its roots in the prophetic hope for social betterment that has helped fuel Jewish religious concerns since biblical times.” As is typical of many of the artists under discussion, Rattner is interpreted as a socially conscious artist, but one who comments on contemporary events (the Holocaust, the newly founded state of Israel, atomic warfare) through Biblical parallels. Some of Rattner’s pictures recall the prophet Ezekiel, associated as he is with themes of destruction, resurrection, and redemption. In general, the Bible, understood as a living text subject to contemporary midrash, has replaced the nostalgic genre scenes of Eastern European Hasidic life found in early 20th-century painting as the contemporary Jewish artists’ preferred link to Jewish tradition.

Unlike the study of Jewish American literature, Baigell admits serious analysis of Jewish American art is still in its infancy. “In comparison to those who have written so copiously about Jewish American authors and cultural figures over the last several decades, art historians are light years behind.” Benefiting from his own correspondence with many of the artists under discussion, as well as from his knowledge of Jewish traditions and themes, Baigell here offers a fine study of how Jewish-American artists attempt to redeem history through memory, often in the face of losses that would be almost inconsolable without representation.

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