Richard Bruce Nugent
Da Capo Press ($18)

by Douglas Messerli

If you prefer the pious potboilers of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker to the irreverent interrogations of Amiri Baraka and Ishmael Reed, better skip Richard Bruce Nugent’s Gentlemen Jigger, a fiction—written in the 1930s, but published here for the first time—which even in its title hints at its “incorrect” attitudes (the title, Thomas Wirth notes in his Introduction, “is a sardonic riff on an old racist ditty: ‘Looky, looky, Gentleman Jigger—half white and half nigger.’”) And Nugent, through his witty alter ego Stuartt Brennan, uses the “N” word enough, as did Whoopi Goldberg recently on the television show “The View,” to draw tears of frustration not only from Elizabeth Hasselbeck (a fellow panelist on that show who, after hearing Goldberg’s outburst, began to cry) but from any well-meaning correctionist.¹

Nugent, the bad boy provocateur of the Harlem Renaissance, dared to speak out in the late 1920s not only about racist attitudes against darker-skinned blacks within the African American community, but also about that community’s prejudices against homosexuality. Along with younger black figures Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Countée Cullen, Aaron Douglas, and Zora Neale Hurston (Nugent, Thurman, Hughes, and Cullen all being gay or bisexual), Nugent challenged readers through the publication of the journal FIRE!! to consider their brothers and sisters less as part of an essentialist community and more as often eccentric and contradictory individuals. Meant to shock, Nugent’s contribution was a drug-induced dream story, “Smoke, Lillies and Jade!” about an encounter with the narrator and a male Hispanic pickup who he calls Beauty.

A son of a noted Washington, D.C. family (his mother was a Bruce), Nugent was so light-skinned that when he first arrived in New York he lived for a few days in a whites-only hotel, and apparently, when he was first introduced to the dark complexioned Thurman, he excused himself, confused over his own racist feelings, an event presented in this passage in Gentlemen Jigger:

It was just as Stuartt was succumbing to the invitation of the food that Tony pointed to the table and said, “There is Raymond Pelman.”
It was a distinctly unpleasant shock—so unpleasant that Stuartt lost all desire for food. Silent and empty-handed, he followed Tony to Pelman’s table. So this was the brilliant Raymond Pelman—the Negro from whom he had expected so much. This little black man with the charming smile and sneering nose, with sparkling, shifting eyes and an unpleasant laugh.
Stuartt decided that Pelman was not to be trusted. He was too black. Stuartt had been taught by precept not to trust black people—that they were evil. And Stuartt was the totality of his chauvinistic upbringing.
. . . Stuartt felt decidedly uncomfortable in his presence. So, after a polite ten minutes of torture, he took his leave.

Returning to Thurman later, Nugent apologized for his behavior, and soon after the two became close friends, sharing a room in what they proclaimed Niggeratti Manor, a rooming house owned by businesswoman Iolanthe Sydney, who charged many of the Harlem writers and artists little or no rent.

From the beginning Nugent, like his character Stuartt in this roman à clef fiction, was an absolute charmer—he had previously worked for Buster Keaton and Rudolf Valentino—and was blessed with an intelligence and wit that, when combined with Thurman’s own brilliant patter, thoroughly entertained and educated their frequent visitors. Indeed, the first half of Gentlemen Jigger consists of many of their witty conversations and descriptions of their frequent and sometimes outrageous parties, replete with pretty boys, beautiful women, and plenty of gin. The characters Nugent presents—most of them fairly recognizable to anyone acquainted with the artists, dancers, and writers of the day, the central ones of whom are Rusty (Wallace Thurman) and his boyfriend, a white Canadian nicknamed Bum; the beautiful Myra (presumably Zora Neale Hurston); her lover the Jesus-look-alike Aeon (represented as Stuartt’s brother, but in actuality probably a mix of Claude McKay and Jean Toomer); the noted white writer, photographer, and sponsor of Black writers and artists Serge Von Vertner (Carl Van Vechten); and Tony (Langston Hughes)—attend to the conversations of the duo, intelligently responding and debating with them. Some of these discussions are just witty riffs on sexuality and drinking. On their way to a picnic, Myra and Aeon are unexpectedly met by Stuartt and Rusty:

“We are cupids—thoughtfully, one of each color, one in each of your honors. Every young and beautiful love should have its quota of obstacles and chaperones. Consider us the more evil of these.”
“Did you bring the gin?” Rusty asked. “I see Myra brought our lunch.”
“I brought ‘green dawns’ after seeing what you were bringing to read aloud.” Stuartt turned toward Aeon and Myra. “Firbank and Proust,” he explained. “Dawns are wonderful,” he continued without pause. “One part absinthe, one part alcohol, tinted with crème de menthe and sparkled with lime and fizzy water—cool as lemonade and potent as—”
“Let’s leave sex out of it,” breathed Rusty, “particularly such gutter and dialect as is mouthed by juveniles.”
“Oh, what you said!” Stuartt chattered as he poured several cups of the incredible pastel drink from a mammoth Thermos. After handing one to each of them, he took another and started to the forward part of the bus, saying over his shoulder, “Oats for the uniformed horse—he looks unhappy.” A few moments later he could be seen offering it to the bus driver.

But in the majority of these intellectualized Bouvard and Pecuchet-like interchanges, they are painfully self-aware in their conversations of the political and racial issues surrounding their lives. In their first conversation with Bum, for example, when Thurman’s Canadian friend admits that he has no knowledge at all about the Harlem Renaissance, he is “lectured” by the two:

“First of all, Bum, I suppose you have never known a Negro before. That’s the usual defense. And you expected to find us more or less uncivilized denizens of some great jungle city, believing in witch doctors and black magic and all that. Well, you’re right. Or maybe you’ve read Harriet Beecher Stowe and feel sorry for us. Do. Or Octavius Roy Cohen and are amused, or Seabrook and are afraid. You know, Rusty, it really is too bad we aren’t more different. What a disappointment we must be.”
Rusty synchronized into the routine. “Well what can you expect. A group of people surrounded for a hundred years or so by a culture foreign to them. How long can you expect it to remain foreign?”

Later in the book, among several long comic dialogues, Stuartt takes issue with the group’s praise of fellow artist Howard (likely Aaron Douglas), dismissing their comments that Howard’s work is “essentially African” by noting the absurdity of describing anything as “African” and brilliantly expounding on the vital differences between a “Gabun full figure,” and art from Sudan, Congo, or by a Benin native. Like a true didact Stuartt explores the complexity of this issue, remarking to Rusty, “Remember these things. . . if ever The Bookman wants an article on Negro art.” In this sense, Nugent’s fiction is less a recounting of the lives of him and his friends, and more a complex discussion of various issues involving art, race, and sex.

Accordingly, for some readers Nugent’s dialogic writing will seem like a bumpy, baggy affair, with what critic Northrup Frye has described in his Anatomy of Fiction as “violent dislocations in the customary logic of narrative.” Indeed, the editor of the Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader characterized Wallace Thurman’s fiction, Infants of the Spring—a work written at the same time as Nugent’s which often incorporates scenes similar to Gentleman Jigger (in a biopic about Nugent, Brother to Brother, friends even accuse Thurman of copying from Nugent’s manuscript)—in terms that might equally apply to Nugent’s writing: “The novel was melodramatic and much too didactic, its talkative characters caricatures.”

As Frye warns, however, in works such as Nugent’s (and Thurman’s) “the appearance of carelessness reflects only the carelessness of the reader or his tendency to judge by a novel-centered conception of fiction.” For both of these fictions are anatomies, not novels, a satiric form of fiction that “deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes.” The major figures in such works are represented as “pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts”—all of which might describe Stuartt and Rusty (or Paul and Raymond in Thurman’s work)—who suffer the disease of the intellect. Here the country weekends of Thomas Love Peacock, Aldous Huxley, and Wyndham Lewis, where the pedant captures the attention of his guests over drinks and long dinners, is replaced by the raucous celebrations at Niggerati manor and dinner at Devores.

Another structural aspect of anatomies is the tendency, as in Petronius’s Satyricon, to gather together individuals representing all social classes and/or to represent the pedant-hero undergoing a voyage that includes both the upper echelons of society and the underworld. It should come as no surprise, accordingly, that after Stuartt’s encounter with the Harlem underworld—ending, as it does in Thurman’s book, with dispersal and disillusionment—the second half of Gentleman Jigger takes us through another kind of underworld, the Mafia, in which low-class figures live aside the wealthiest classes of U.S. society.

The Stuartt we encounter in part two, now living in Greenwich Village, is almost a new being; he has grown his hair long, and, as Bum describes him, “the kid sparkles.” Whereas in the first half of the fiction Stuartt presented himself as a knowing wit, here we see him admitting to Ray, a young handsome Italian vaguely connected with the mob, that he has never had a gay sexual experience before. His clumsy attempts at love are met with a feeling from Ray that he needs to protect and educate the innocent neophyte. This new Stuartt, moreover, although still very much a philosophus gloriosus, is far more modest and honest in expressing his ideas. In Niggerati manor he lived without a job in utter poverty; now he is selling his art, and his apartment has become a meeting place for Village artists, young hoodlums, and visiting art patrons—the perfect location, of course, for his further musings on various subjects, sacred and profane.

So fabulous are the characters in this section that it becomes hard to tell whether or not Nugent is still writing a roman à clef or has abandoned it for pure fantasy. If the events are accurate, as Wirth suggests, we must rewrite the annals of gay history to include noted Mafia members. But in another sense, it makes no difference, since the overriding structure of the book continues to be the form of the anatomy.

After his affair with Ray, Stuartt moves up the Mafia social ladder by taking up with “the biggest shot known to Ray,” Frank Andrenopolis, the so-called “Artichoke King,” (a character likely based on mobster Ciro Terranova, who controlled much of New York before “Lucky” Luciano). Although generally heterosexual, Frank, who has been turned into the police by his moll, casually begins a sexual relationship with Stuartt that only enhances the young artist’s reputation. On a trip to Chicago, the two encounter the big mob leader, Orini (based on Luciano), to whom Stuartt takes an immediate disliking; offended, Orini drives Stuartt to his lakeside mansion, undetermined whether to beat him or make love. Playing dangerously with Orini’s notions of manhood, Stuartt escapes the beating, and woos the mobster into bed. Stuartt also attracts the attention of Bebe, Orini’s mistress, and threatens to sign her and himself as dance performers at a local club, unless Orini is willing to buy her out of the contract.

Next door to Orini’s mansion Stuartt encounters the socialite Wayne Traveller (probably based on Grace Marr, with whom Nugent formed a platonic relationship and later married); she further promotes Stuartt’s career. More success follows, as Stuartt, presumed to be white, does the costumes for a musical (in real life, Nugent had a non-speaking role in Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy) and dances in a film with Bebe. In the midst of these joyous activities, however, a young boy enters the theater asking for donations for the Scottsboro Boys, and Stuartt, requesting his weekly payment, hands over the check for $3,000. Later, queried by a gossip columnist who finds his gesture a strange one, Stuartt answers: “I can’t see why it’s so funny, though. No one seems to think it strange if a Jew helps a Jew. But it’s news if a Negro helps a Negro, I suppose—.”

With that, Stuartt’s career comes shattering down upon him, as racism wins the day. Unlike Thurman’s novel, however, in which the Nugent character Paul Arabian commits suicide, Nugent turns the tables, so to speak, in his own fiction. To buy him out of his contracts, he is paid $100,000—the amount he has previously told Orini he would need to survive for the rest of his life!

So too did Nugent prevail, outliving most of the figures of the Harlem Renaissance. And while the character Nugent in the biopic Brother to Brother is presented as being homeless, in reality the artist lived out his life modestly in Hoboken, continuing to meet with the board of the Harlem Cultural Council, an organization he helped found years before. Yet there is still something terribly sad about this satiric masterpiece and Nugent’s own life, for in the end his is a story about intelligent, loving, and beautifully youthful individuals trying to survive in a world of general stupidity and hate.

¹The discussion on “The View” about the “N” word is far more relevant to the issues above than one might imagine. This discussion, brought about by Jesse Jackson’s use of the word over what he thought was a closed mike, led Goldberg to argue that white people’s use of that word meant something far different that its use in the black community, where its hateful meanings had been transformed into something that was used in different contexts—perhaps akin to the gay community’s reclamation of the word “queer.” At the time of Nugent’s novel, the white author (and long time friend to many Harlem Renaissance writers) Carl Van Vechten had just published his view of Harlem in Nigger Heaven; upon publication of the novel many of Van Vechten’s friends, black and white, were outraged and hurt. Nugent’s use of the word in Gentlemen Jigger also makes his friends quite uncomfortable, although they recognize that he is being a provocateur.

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Philip K. Dick
Tor ($25.95 )

by Ryder W. Miller

Before Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) became a successful science fiction writer, he wrote realistic fiction, penning titles such as Humpty Dumpty in Oakland and Voices from the Street. Now, as these books appear in the wake of his literary and cinematic rebirth, one can see what he was originally trying to do. In Dick's realistic novels, characters long for the American Dream. One can find the influence of Henry Miller (The Air Conditioned Nightmare) and Arthur Miller ("Death of a Salesman") in these early works, as they feature circumscribed salesman who do not fit in at work and are struggling to make a better life.

In Milton Lumky Territory, written in 1958 and first published (posthumously) in 1985, is a case in point. Aspiring businessman Bruce Stevens seeks to work in the territory of the older salesman Milton Lumky; being a friend of Bruce’s new wife Susan, Milton tries to help Bruce along in a scheme to buy Japanese typewriters that they can sell for a higher price in America. Milton fronts the money for Bruce to make the initial investments, but things go downhill from there, leading the characters to grapple with a semi-existential crisis.

Dick here writes plainly about life in California, the vagaries of love, and the struggle, sometimes spiritual, to survive. He depicts Milton as a fault-ridden character who, although helpful, often wisecracks and has strange opinions. Milton has problems with Bruce for not believing in god and finds it strange that Bruce’s desire “to make a store run is a permanent value.” When his younger rival realizes that he wants to leave “Milton Lumky Territory,” we know it’s not merely the sales area he’s talking about.

Like many of Dick’s main characters in his realistic novels, Bruce and Susan decide they need to move to start again—but missing from most of these novels is what happens to the characters after they have moved. Similarly, the tone of In Milton Lumky Territory is not very adroit; as in his science fiction novels, the story can feel sparse and padded with unneeded adjectives. There is little of the wild conjecture that one finds in Dick’s more popular books; rather than oppressive and violent governments of the future, there are toxic personalities to avoid. The only memorable reference to science fiction in Dick’s currently available realistic fiction is a character in Humpty Dumpty in Oakland who comments that the genre should be “easy” to write.

It was in fact easier for Dick, who in the 1960s became a favorite speculative writer for many readers, eventually developing a cult following. Yet though not as fun as his fantastic works, In Milton Lumky Territory and Dick’s other realistic books cut straight to the heart of the American Dream. These are real people Dick is writing about, the kind of morally complicated people you might find in any nearby store, and they each have their own dramas.

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Olivier Rolin
translated by Jane Kuntz
Dalkey Archive ($12.95)

by Levi Teal

One enters Olivier Rolin’s Hotel Crystal through a narrow door with a brass knob, which rests loosely in its housing and will not turn until jiggled. Once inside, readers will find thick green shag underfoot that swallows the sound of their passing. The plot is the overstuffed, four post bed abutting the east wall. The characters are the myriad wallpapers, overlapping in places, repeating in others. The story is the small writing desk facing the window, served by a crooked chair. The voices are the layered smells that seep from inside the armoire—oak, varnish, mildew, starch.

Each chapter of Hotel Crystal begins with a meticulous description of the main character’s current hotel room, followed by a pertinent anecdote. The protagonist presents himself in these first-person anecdotes as—among other things—a prominent figure in international intrigue and espionage, and as a lecturer on Proust who’s greeted at brimming lecture halls by crowds of swooning, short-skirted schoolgirls. It’s readily apparent that he is inventing his autobiography. The only room our narrator can neither remember nor describe—unless he’s perpetrating a cover-up—is the epicentral room #211 at the Hotel Crystal.

All these flights of fancy are written on whatever materials the author has at hand: pages torn from books such as Under the Volcano, Alice in Wonderland, Leaves of Grass, and Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces, as well as postcards, travel guides, notebooks, etc. That he is composing his work on unsent postcards and stationary suggests he seeks correspondence, but has no one to whom he can write. Instead, he stores his writing in a briefcase, which he abandons in a taxicab immediately before his disappearance. The briefcase is found by a friend and turned over to a group of editors, who guess and second-guess at authorial intent and arrange content as they see fit.

Sorting out this mess of unreliability is part of the fun; Rolin’s biting satire of the thriller genre, academic world, and “high” culture is another. Most enjoyable, though, are the protagonist’s fictitious bits of autobiography. He writes both the hotel room depictions—Perec-esque in their menacing commitment to precision—and the fraudulent autobiographies because he is bored. The real reason behind his globetrotting is never revealed, but the unexceptional rooms he occupies suggest his life outside his writing is mundane. These hotel room vignettes seem like the character’s primary coping mechanism.

That these descriptions never lead to anything may frustrate some readers, but this is part of Rolin’s gambit. In the end, Hotel Crystal uncovers and questions our boredom and frustration—with this novel, literature, reality itself. We are left facing the void, our own personal room #211, which can (and must!) be filled only by our own imaginations.

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Leon de Winter
Translated by Arnold and Erica Pomerans
Toby Press ($14.95)

by Kevin Carollo

“Now what do you want to know?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.”
—Franz Kafka, The Trial

There is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. To judge whether life is or is not worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy.
—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.
—Ben Okri, The Famished Road

In recent world literature, there is a widespread hunger to reckon with the legacy of the 20th century. The epic task of translating its weight on human consciousness means a spate of authors from around the globe are compelled to revisit History writ large, alternately focusing on the buildup to World War II, the Holocaust, the ensuing Cold War, the era of decolonization and neocolonialism, the breakup of the Soviet Union—and the consequences of such radical shifts in the world’s geopolitical and cultural imaginary. In Leon de Winter’s splendid novel Hoffman’s Hunger, protagonist Felix Hoffman happens to be thinking about all of these things as he deals with myriad physical ailments and searches vainly for happiness by reading Spinoza and gorging himself on food and drink.

Death-driven and self-loathing, in Hoffman we see a convincing archetype of the insatiable century he’s ashamed to be surviving. Currently the Dutch ambassador to Czechoslovakia and living in Prague, Hoffman is also a Holocaust survivor, and has lost his twin daughters—one to a strange, heartbreaking illness in the 1960s, the other to drugs in the 1980s. Astonishingly, de Winter seems to have written this work during or extremely close to the novel’s narrative present, the second half of 1989. Originally published in 1990, and a bestseller in Holland and Germany, this is apparently the first of Leon de Winter’s works to appear in English (in a deft translation by Arnold and Erica Pomerans), meaning that it took the post-Cold War era of globalization to bring this ambitious and engaging novel into our language.

One cannot help but wonder why this is. Towards the end of the novel, Hoffman thinks: “The destruction of the [Berlin] Wall marked the beginning of the end. It seemed out of the question that a lasting peace would descend upon Europe. Peace had always been based on fear in the continent.” It is a curious kind of rumination, typical of Hoffman’s skepticism and more than a tad ironic coming from a purported promoter of Western diplomacy and development. The novel’s frequent conjectures eerily anticipate the turn of the century’s transition from Iron Curtain to European Union, a transition defined by numerous balkanizations, intense immigration fluxes, national identity crises, and incredible bloodshed. What have we learned exactly? Felix, our insatiable antiheroic hero, desperately wants to know.

In addition to the eerie sense of prescience one feels when reading Prague’s most celebrated chronicler of alienation, Hoffman’s Hunger shares with Kafka an obsession with the body, unforgettably inscribed in stories like “A Hunger Artist” and “In the Penal Colony.” Where Kafka’s hunger artist cannot find anything he likes to eat, de Winter’s Hoffman—as well as an obese American character named Freddy Mancini—cannot find any way to stop eating. The awkward cocktail parties and cloak and dagger politics of the novel come replete with profound ruminations on the nature of happiness, guilt, death and greed.

It is hard not to see the allegorical potential of such hunger: we consume and consume but are never satisfied; our desires are destined to be our undoing. Food serves as both a sublimate for something deeper and more frightening within us, and as a site in which all of these hungers, fears, and Cold War cultural identities are contested. De Winter reminds us that beneath the cliché “you are what you eat” lurks a global politics of cultural consumption.

Though Hoffman’s Hunger is as heady as it is heavy, it is paradoxically a fast, intense read, and somehow more moving than depressing. Perhaps this comes from the yearning de Winter adds to the debauchery and pathos of the unsatisfied existences and failing bodies of his primary characters—the all-too-human desire for knowledge, for happiness, for love, for survival, for meaning. This novel is indeed a lot to chew on, but to the translators of Leon de Winter, it must be asked: can I please have some more?

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Jerome Charyn
W. W. Norton ($25.95)

by T. K. Dalton

Jerome Charyn's new novel, Johnny One-Eye, is a picaresque set in Manhattan during the American Revolution. The eponymous hero was born in a brothel run by his mother, Gertrude. His patrilineage is unclear, but may include the taciturn, red-headed giant, George Washington. For the duration of the Revolution, Manhattan teems with prostitutes and spies, and Johnny's allegiances, as well as those of the supporting cast, often waver. Johnny One-Eye's great success lies in creating a world steeped in “the hurly-burly of a war without real perimeters or rigid lines.” Its downfall is in the ease with which its hero rides the flux.

Mercenary though he may be, Johnny is loyal to a handful of characters. He ties his fate to the traitorous Benedict Arnold, in whose service as a “scribble boy” he lost an eye; to a British officer who employs Johnny as a spy; to another redcoat who prosecutes Johnny as a double agent; and to Washington, whose soup he (mildly) poisons for the chance at an audience with the rebel leader. This tangle of alliances creates an intriguing situation only heightened by Johnny's hopeless attraction to Clara, the stunning “octoroon” prostitute adopted by Gertrude, the brothel's madam, when both she and her biological son was young. Gertrude's devotion to the “farmer-in-chief”—affection recklessly returned by the general—leads Johnny to conclude that Washington is his father. These flimsy bonds push the boy's sympathy over to the shoeless, rag-tag rebels.

Still, Johnny's access to the major players of the day seems too convenient. The crown's secret service is stymied when looking for Washington, but this teenager who begins the tale under suspicion for attempted assassination has a sixth sense on the subject. Johnny's easy access to the general is only topped by the general's access to regular escape. Washington and his British counterpart square off in a dramatic game of blackjack set in the brothel: “We'll announce a colossal game, a tournament of champions at the Queen's Yard,” says William “Billy” Howe, the British general defending Manhattan. “My spies tell me he won't be able to resist.”

The execution of the scene, however mawkishly set-up, shows Charyn's gift for period drama. Here, the general asks to borrow a ribbon, the significance of which is known to he and the madam alone. “Washington bowed to Gert with a sweep of his arm that was like the motion of a duelist or a dancer of the minuet. For a moment he was outside Billy's realm—Billy's headquarters and house of cards—and was only with Madame. He committed the edge of her ribbon to his lips, said, ‘Now I have the luck I will need,’ and ducked inside the closet.” For Charyn, Washington's ability to hold it together is mythic, and here, the magic holds.

Johnny takes the myth one step further, putting an equally monumental woman behind the farmer in chief: “Gert was his [Washington's] America—not the America of Martha and Mount Vernon—but of a certain bawdiness that seemed to elude him, of imagination he seemed to fear. He could not have conducted a war without such imagination, conjuring up a people and an army with the force of his mind.” Charyn captures that bawdiness, the rough rancor of thirteen intransigent colonies formed by dissidents and debtors, in a remarkable way. He demonstrates a nearly effortless use of archaic lexicon. Despite a few stumbles (“I espied a pair of bodkins,” or “Verily her face was aglow”), the story earns its yellowed parchment feel with this sort of subtlety: “I wrote love letters for the keepers of the pit dogs,” Johnny says of his time on the prison ship. Of the other “nuns” in the brothel, he writes, “They were fine Christian women who went to the mariners' church, the only one that would have them, and indebted themselves to the tobacco dealers who took advantage of their passion.” The Revolutionary age was singular, a nation simultaneously learning to talk and hitting puberty. It's an oddly relevant one, too, as Charyn makes clear with this sentence: “They expected the entire town to greet them as liberators.” His “they” is the British and his “town” is Philadelphia, but anyone can make the contemporary substitutions.

What keeps Johnny One-Eye from being a great book is Johnny One-Eye himself. At a time when nearly everyone was almost always risking practically everything for abstractions like liberty, our hero takes almost no initiative for even something as worthwhile as romantic love. Two women, spy-prostitutes, both tell him they wished he had kidnapped them, taken them from the battlefield. Don Quixote wouldn't have hesitated. Our picaro, though, is meek. He moves too passively between epic figures, never understanding them, rarely exercising even a healthy amount of free will. Johnny even recognizes this some eighty pages from the end: “Damn my own reticence, my own inclination toward folly—I was always at the edge of things.” It's anachronistic, and hard to believe someone who reads Aeschylus and Aristotle might believe it, but maybe Johnny thinks the world is flat. Charyn, unfortunately, lets him think so.

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Dorothea Dieckmann
translated by Tim Mohr
Soft Skull Press ($14)

by Spencer Dew

Guantanamo chronicles the transformation of Rashid, a German who, while vacationing in South Asia, is arrested and shipped to America’s most famous detention facility. In this alien world of outdoor cages and grueling, imposed rhythms, subjected to the excruciating pain of torture and the agony of monotonous, exposed captivity, Rashid loses his old sense of self and becomes someone new.

This surrender begins on the biological level, as hunger turns to “generic desire for generic slop,” “a dull feeling in his brain and on his tongue” that prompts him to wait for and savor tasteless meals. Later, confusion and fear give way to Rashid telling his captors what they want to hear, even feeling guilty that he can’t offer more details on his jihad, a word he’d never used before being brought to this place. Likewise, from originally thinking of the Koran as a collection of “fairy tales” Rashid finds that, when locked up in a prison camp with nothing else to read, the words of the scripture take on mystical resonance, inflecting his experience and worming their way into his dreams.

By the end of the novel, however, the hallucinatory dislocation is gone, and Rashid is surreally at home in his constriction, living now in a walled cell, anticipating small favors and treats—a twinkie, a Kit Kat bar. Acculturated to his hellish existence, Rashid dreams of paradise as “Security level four. A shower every day. Videogames.” The longing for distraction and comfort replaces the idea of freedom. Plans for suicide are dismissed with the arrival of a Happy Meal and the “feeling of reassurance and familiarity” it brings. Rashid may vomit after gorging himself, but the “unmistakable sensation of having been uncomfortably full” offers something like satisfaction.

Dorothea Dieckmann is a master of description and the psychology of confusion, and as the panicked dependency of the abused on his abusers takes root and grows, she shows herself to be an heiress to Robbe-Grillet and Kafka. With the disquieting, warped ending of her book she surpasses these teachers and gives us something more contemporary and indicting: in the next cell over, Jamal, who has extracted a miniature Barbie doll from his Happy Meal and named it after his wife back in Manchester, sings saccharine snippets of pop song lyrics, crooning “This is where I long to be… la isla bonita.”

There is a second, more subtle narrative of transformation within Dieckmann’s book—the story of America’s decline, of the risk of the nation and culture collapsing from within due to the complacency of citizens who fail to protest (or even pay attention) to the lawlessness and immorality of their government. For a German, the grave weight of such responsibility bears special resonance, but for all readers, this disturbing tale functions as an urgent parable for our times.

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THE MAN WHO TURNED INTO HIMSELF
David Ambrose
Picador ($13)

THE DREAM OF THE STONE
Christina Askounis
Atheneum ($17.99); Simon Pulse ($8.99)

by Kelly Everding

Books don’t have an expiration date. They may go out of print and become hard to find, forcing readers to comb their local used bookstore or search the internet for a discarded copy, but really good books stay that way. Too often publishers are caught up in the next, new thing—always looking to the next season, the brand new book that will possibly be a bestseller. And the bookstores push old titles off the shelves faster than you can say “new Stephen King novel.” Time is the killer of these books: that’s why it’s refreshing to see publishers recognize a good book and give it a deserved second life. Picador has begun a new series of re-discovered books entitled “The Best Book You’ve Never Read” with their first deserving title, The Man Who Turned Into Himself by David Ambrose. And Atheneum Books for Young Readers has reprinted a wonderful young adult novel by Christina Askounis entitled The Dream of the Stone. Both books were originally published in 1993, and now fifteen years later, both books can enjoy a second chance at a new audience.

Coincidentally, in each book, the protagonists travel to other worlds to discover their true selves. In The Man Who Turned Into Himself, Richard Hamilton, or Rick to his friends, enjoyed a perfect life with his wife Anne and his child, four-year-old Charlie. He looked forward to an important meeting at the bank where they were expected to approve a loan to expand his thriving business as a publisher of magazines and newsletters catering to specialty fields. “I sometimes felt that we were luckier, and happier, than we had any right to expect,” mused Rick. But there are forces at work to disrupt this happiness, little rips in the perfect picture that trip him up. First, he falls off the roof of his house in pursuit of a recalcitrant cat. Luckily he survives the plummet with only a few bruises. Then on the way to his meeting, he nearly collides head on with a semi truck. He averts that tragedy, but he suspects some force in the cosmos was trying to communicate with him. “To miss death twice in one morning was too close for me. I had this jolt of superstition about things coming in threes.”

In the bank meeting, Rick’s preoccupied doodling reveals a horrible premonition of his wife’s death, and without explanation, he catapults out of the building to find her, but it is too late—Rick arrives at the horrific scene of the automobile accident just in time to say goodbye to his dying wife. The intense agony and denial of the moment triggers a critical mental shift, one that changes his life, or shall we say “lives,” irrevocably. “I roared into the blackness of my inner universe: a roar of terrifying, primal, primitive defiance.” Then unbelieveably, Rick heard his wife’s voice and realized all was not lost. He had his wife back, and so began looking around for Charlie, only to be answered with “Who?”

Ambrose uses the quantum physics theory of Multiple Worlds to create a spell-binding and compulsively readable (and re-readable) novel. His story not only reveals a possible scenario for traveling through these parallel realities, but also takes into account the subjective nature of quantum physics, in which the observer is a necessary component in the outcome of experiments. When Rick awakens from his blackout, he slowly realizes he’s not in the same life he left. Here he is known as Richard, a real estate broker, and his once muscular physique is now flabby. Anne is there and so is his best friend and lawyer Harold, but the differences stand starkly in relief to his old life. Although information about this world leaks through his bewilderment, his odd behavior sends him temporarily to the psyche ward, where in order not to be committed for life, Rick acquiesces to Richard and plays along—for a while.

But I’m still here.
Rick.
Yes, RICK!
Widower of Anne, father of Charlie. Poor little Charlie, where is he? I should be with him, instead of trapped inside the mind (if that’s the word) of this spineless, dumb, near-doppelganger of myself who’s making love to the equally near-doppelganger of my dead wife. . .
. . . there isn’t room for the two of us in this world.

While Rick gets pushed deep into the subconscious of Richard, he slowly begins to make contact with his parallel world counterpart, establishing communications and unwittingly leading Richard toward a disastrous life or death decision.

Ambrose’s internal thriller spills out into consequences for the other characters who haven’t a clue about the struggle going on within one man’s mind. And as the reader makes his or her way through the story, it becomes apparent that this narrative is a document presented to the blind psychiatrist Emma J. Todd (who also has a younger counterpart in Rick’s world). We are presented with letters and transcripts to further document the strange but—to Emma—open-and-shut case of dissociative identity disorder. Her diagnosis, however, is called into question with a final bit of harrowing proof that Rick’s story may not have been all in his mind. Just as there have been many studies and evidence of remote viewing, astral projection, and other psychic phenomena, it may be that the mind is the key to time travel and travel between worlds. We do it whenever we crack open a book.

And please do crack open Christina Askounis’s The Dream of the Stone, a story that also involves travel between worlds, but these are two very different planets—one of them in danger of immediate destruction. Only Sarah Lucas can help this planet, but she has her own problems. Her parents were killed in a plane crash, and her genius brother Sam is wrapped up in his work on a top-secret project for his mysterious employer, the Cultural Institute for the Propagation of Humanistic and Exploratory Research (CIPHER). But when he comes home for the funeral, they discover some strange equations written on the wall of their treehouse, equations that help Sam to complete his project. Sarah promises to keep it a secret if Sam will explain what’s going on:

He hesitated, studying her for what seemed like minutes. “Have I ever told you about wormholes?” he asked at last.
“As in earthworms?”
He shook his head. “As in quantum foam. The entire universe is permeated by a sea of wormholes—incredibly tiny tunnels, ten to the minus thirtieth centimeter—that lead from one part of the space-time continuum to another.”

He goes on to describe the difficulty in finding a wormhole in space, then enlarging and stabilizing it enough to travel through. With the help of the hastily scrawled equations, his project—a force field he calls The Looking Glass—may be able to do this. After Sam returns to CIPHER to pursue his work, Sarah must leave her idyllic home to stay with her despised Aunt and Uncle who live in New York City, where she begins to have weird dreams and to feel like she’s being followed. Especially after Sam sends her a strange gift, a paperweight that was “a pure dark blue, the ethereal blue of a winter twilight deepening into night. Hidden in its depth, among veils of clouds, glimmered a universe of tiny silver stars. The Stone.” The Stone proves to be an irresistible draw for the nefarious Zvalus, the head of CIPHER, who attempts to kidnap Sarah and steal the Stone. With the help of a strange old lady (the one believed to have written the equations in the tree house) and a handsome young man named Angel Muldoon, Sarah escapes—only to be thrust into another world. She learns she is the “Stone-bearer” and with that bears the heavy responsibility of returning the Stone to the world to which it belongs. Now she must rise above her own human frailty and fears and draw from an inner reserve of strength and self-confidence to save both Sam and a world that is not her own.

Askounis writes a clever and heartfelt tale filled with science, magic, and adventure. Her imaginative creation of an alien world that is both strange for its odd creatures and evolutionary divergences and familiar for its compassion and respect for life is all the more meaningful when threatened with annihilation at the hands of greedy corporate entities. Especially moving is the tree-being Miladras who helps Sarah when she is seemingly abandoned all alone on the bewildering planet. Miladras communicates telepathically (patiently instructing Sarah on how to quell her bird-like, scattered thoughts so his words may enter her mind) and is able to move, swimming its roots through dirt paths. “We are the Dreaming Trees. For us there are two seasons: the Season of Walking and the Season of Dreaming. When we walk, as now, we wander along the forking paths, and each one tends his own garden. When we dream, we are rooted. We dream together, each one the same dream, season upon season.” Miladras teaches her about his world and instills a great love in Sarah that helps her to understand her role in saving this fragile alienscape. If perhaps we could communicate this way with our trees, would we be so eager to clear-cut and destroy our rainforests? This is a unique tale that cleverly parallels the dangers we face in our own world, and hopefully will awaken young readers to the need for conservation. Fifteen years later, the message is pertinent still.

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G. E. Patterson
Ahsahta Press ($17.50)

by E. K. Mortenson

In a recent issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, Reginald Shepherd writes: “The ideal reader is on the one hand willing and alert enough to actively participate in the poem’s production of meaning and on the other hand demanding enough to insist that the poem provide the material with which to produce such meaning.” This could well serve as a frontispiece for G.E. Patterson’s To and From, which expects the very sort of ideal reader Shepherd describes.

Each of the poems in Patterson’s volume may be loosely classified as a sonnet—each has fourteen lines, grounding the reader in familiar poetic territory—but within that form, Patterson’s paratactic verse keeps the reader adrift enough to remember that even in the closed world of the sonnet’s argumentative structure, there is much that cannot be resolved. Patterson even seems to allude to this situation in “‘Curiosity, Tenderness, Kindness, Ecstasy’”:

Yes it is hard to speak of what it was
Look how he tries to link the dots and arrows
Calling out those names we can imitate
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Suddenly the edge doesn’t seem away

Each of Patterson’s poems aches for the “dots and arrows” to be connected and followed, but each drifts maddeningly from the reader’s grasp. Yet though elusive, Patterson’s poems strike the perfect balance between clarity and opacity. There is “enough” in the verse to keep readers hungry:

How do we long to think in terms of wholes
See that words don’t fall to the ground together
Start across the uneven field of grass
One of us says meaning the other should
Perhaps one interest is something like safety
(“‘Glib Pirouette out of Messiness’”)

Such passages demonstrate Patterson’s deep understanding of our precarious, postmodern condition: We desperately wish to see the whole, to perceive all, but we are constantly thwarted in our attempts. As he writes in partial conclusion of the above poem, “All this is too large to be seen at once.”

Patterson is a poet to be admired, a poet whose use of poetic form demands that readers be open to both cohesion and fracture in the verse and in their lives. To return to Shepherd: “The reader must reach out to the poem, but the poem must also reach out to the reader, however obliquely.” To and From certainly demands this from the reader, and offers this in return. In an age of one-sided poetic transactions, this volume is a welcome addition.

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Ron Silliman
University of California Press ($21.95)

by David Huntsperger

In the 1970s and ’80s, Ron Silliman made his name as a San Francisco Language poet. Like most of the Language poets, his early books were first published in modest quantities by small, avant-garde presses. Now, with the publication of The Age of Huts (compleat), some of Silliman’s most innovative early writings are once again in print.

Although much of the poetry in The Age of Huts has heretofore been difficult to come by, Silliman is hardly emerging out of obscurity. His book-length prose poem Tjanting, one of the major Language writings of the ’80s, was republished by Salt in 2002; his book of criticism The New Sentence (Roof, 1987) helped define the poetics and politics of the Language movement; his anthology In the American Tree (National Poetry Foundation, 1986) did for the Language poets what Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry did for the avant-garde of the 1950s; and his acclaimed blog (ronsilliman.blogspot.com) has become an institution in its own right.

With the publication of The Age of Huts and the forthcoming publication of The Alphabet (University of Alabama Press, 2008), it has become easier to assess Silliman’s oeuvre to date, and to compare his achievement to his modernist forbears, which include Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, among others. Following the example of the modernist long poem, Silliman is at work on a life poem, which he has titled Ketjak. This poem comprises The Age of Huts,Tjanting, and The Alphabet, and will eventually include his current project, The Universe.

What distinguishes Silliman’s postmodern magnum opus from Pound’s Cantos or Williams’s Paterson is his commitment to rigorous procedural forms. In many subsections of The Age of Huts, Silliman uses exacting, predetermined rules to structure his writing. The first section—also titled Ketjak—is a 98-page prose poem divided into paragraphs of increasing length. The first paragraph has one sentence, the second has two, the third has four, and the fourth has eight. One expects the fifth paragraph to have 16 sentences, but instead it has 14, while the sixth has 28. The seventh and eighth have 54 and 108 sentences, respectively. Presumably, if one kept counting, this doubling-minus-two pattern would continue (though few readers, myself included, are going to count 98 pages’ worth of sentences to see if the formal pattern is consistent).

Within the increasingly long paragraphs of Ketjak, sentences repeat and expand. Here, for example, are the first three paragraphs of the poem:

Revolving door.

Revolving door. A sequence of objects which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line.

Revolving door. Fountains of the financial district. Houseboats beached at the point of low tide, only to float again when the sunset is reflected in the water. A sequence of objects which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, camels pulling wagons of bear cages, tamed ostriches in toy hats, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line.

These paragraphs employ a formal innovation that Silliman and other Language poets dubbed the “new sentence,” a mode of writing that often features scrambled syntax, fragmented grammar, and narrative disjunction. Because it’s difficult to connect one sentence to the next, readers must pay heightened attention to the text. If one reads carefully, one encounters not a narrative but a collection of material details that—taken as a whole—provides an interesting picture of Silliman’s life in the ’70s. Silliman writes, “Attention is all,” and indeed he is thoroughly attentive to quotidian events:

The nurse, by a subtle redistribution of weight, shift of gravity’s center, moves in front of the student of oriental porcelain in order to more rapidly board the bus. Awake, but still in bed, I listen to cars pass, doors, birds, children are day’s first voices. A cardboard box of wool sweaters on top of the bookcase to indicate Home.

As sentences expand and become interspersed with others, one experiences a sense of repetition in reading that is analogous to the repetition inherent in the mundane events of everyday life. The fragmented and occasionally gritty details that cycle through Ketjak and through the rest of The Age of Huts suggest a larger, urban world. As Silliman puts it, “The form itself is the model of a city, extension, addition, modification.”

The Age of Huts contains a variety of other experiments, including Sunset Debris (a section of prose poetry written entirely in questions) and The Chinese Notebook (223 aphorisms on the nature of language and the definition of poetry). Perhaps the most interesting procedural experiment in the collection isBART, an 11-page prose poem consisting of a single run-on sentence written entirely on a Bay Area Rapid Transit train on the afternoon of Labor Day, 1976. In addition to documenting what he sees on the train, Silliman frequently makes metatextual gestures toward the act of writing itself; at one point he even proposes an “anthology of literature scribed on public transit.”

For readers who have not read Silliman before, The Age of Huts is a fine place to start. It collects some of his best early work, and it also foregrounds some of the major concerns of the Language poets: the relationship between language and politics, the effects of grammar and syntax upon representation, and the function of poetry in a postindustrial society. As Silliman and his fellow Language poets transition into a more mature stage of their careers, and as Language poetry itself becomes a recognized—if still divisive—part of the American poetic canon, it becomes possible to consider the provocative early Language writings with a measure of historical detachment. At a distance of three decades, Silliman’s early work remains valuable not only for its importance within an avant-garde tradition but also for its continuing relevance today.

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Ed Pavlić
University of Georgia Press ($19.95)

by Michael A. Antonucci

To conclude his 1966 essay “The Changing Same (R&B and the New Black Music),” LeRoi Jones writes, “If you play James Brown. . . in a bank, the total environment is changed.” Jones claims Brown’s music produces “an energy” and “summoning of images” that takes “the bank, and everybody in it, on a trip. That is, they visit another place. A place where Black people live.” Similarly, in Winners Have Yet to be Announced, poet Ed Pavlić takes his readers “on a trip.” Written as a response to the music of singer/songwriter Donny Hathaway, Pavlić’s third volume of poetry sketches Hathaway’s life and career through a series of prose poems that situates the musician and his work within the Black music continuum; Winners also offers an account of Hathaway’s personal and artistic struggles, which culminated in the dramatic circumstances surrounding his death in January 1979. Fusing poetry and biography, Pavlić’s work succeeds in surveying points of intersection between Black life, Black music and the “place[s] where Black people live.”

A composer, arranger, pianist, and vocalist, Donny Hathaway gained a reputation as a musical innovator and resourceful improviser. Hathaway’s singular talents become evident as the music he produced reconfigured various Black music environments. Fully exploring the possibilities of those musical spaces marked “R&B,” “gospel,” “soul,” “jazz,” Hathaway entered these territories and moved between them (listen to Everything is Everything and hear him turn Errol Gardiner’s “Misty” inside out; follow the call and response, stacked horns and layered vocals of “I Hear Voices;” trace the high arcs in his live, recorded rendering of “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”). For this reason, in the course of making the transition from legendary session man and studio musician to Grammy-winning recording artist, Hathaway came to carry the label “genius.” Accounting for his music’s blues nuanced grooves— the digging, shifting, movements in color and form— Hathaway explained, “ I am in the process of expanding and developing styles. I love music, period.”

Winners locates this love for music and conveys a sense of the brilliant urgency that informed Hathaway’s creative process. Pavlić describes his project as “an attempt to translate into print what happens in the quality and tone of Donny Hathaway’s singing voice.” Subtitled “a song for Donny Hathaway,” the book collects and arranges imagined conversations, interview materials, and an intensive set of “listening notes.” This approach becomes especially evident in “Listening Notes: Mercy Medical Psychiatric: January 13,1973: Chicago, IL,” the second of the six poetic sequences (or “tracks”) that compriseWinners. With these lines, Pavlić offers a poetic translation of Hathaway’s music. The third section of “Mercy,” for example, begins with a description of his sound as, “an open tone in the ache that connects your hands and feet and fingers.” The poem continues as Pavlić writes, “Like the volume of a dream. Immense, full. It’s never loud. It’s how a sound fills a submerged structure. Underwater bridge.” After identifying the specific qualities of Hathaway’s vocal stylings and instrumental configurations in this way, the poet brings attention to the movement he understands as central to Hathaway’s musical project. In the fourth section of “Mercy” Pavlić’s speaker states,

Cause, of course, if you’re not carefully anchored, a sound can carry
you with it. Then where are you? Truth is you don’t know. How many
times have you heard a song and been transported into a scene. A
place. Not the memory of a place, man, it’s a volume you’ve entered.

Entering this “place,” which he calls “a deep listener’s alibi,” the poet locates the space Hathaway conjures and contact in his music. As such, Pavlić’s poetic sketch of Hathaway’s soundscape reveals a set of profound, localized memories— both real and imagined. Presenting his readers with a “puddle with no bottom,” the poet charts this terrain, making it as familiar as it is disconcerting, and thereby offering one more variation on Baraka’s “changing same.”

Tracing the movements within Hathaway’s music, Winners marks numerous points of convergence linking Black life and Black music. In this respect Pavlić’s verse identifies sites drawn from an interior geography that stretches from the Carr Square housing projects in St. Louis to the piano player’s strong left hand. His poems measure distances and gauge sources that resonate with the words of James Baldwin and the blue notes of Curtis Mayfield. Their lines travel along these frequencies— from churches and nightclubs on Chicago’s Southside, along Hathaway’s imagined discussions with Einstein, Cezanne and Debussy. As such Pavlić’s Hathaway becomes in blazing pathways, seeking transcendent space, and singing at the intersection of Nation, Soul and Music. Winners capture this powerful dynamic in the voice of a stockyard worker who relates his encounters with Hathaway’s music in “Interview: Grave Yard Shift.” He states, “Simple as that. It was black life. I ain’t no philosopher. He sung you / a black man’s life. You knew cause you’d lived it. You’d even sung it / yourself.” Pavlić’s poem continues and the stockyard worker goes on to explain, “So, that’s what I heard. I sat there high as a kite and watched that/ stocky brother sit at the piano and stare my life down. He opened/ his mouth and what came out was things none of us looked at. Life.”

Pavlić’s stockyard worker concludes this “interview” by speculating, “As for Mr. Hathaway, leave it up to the radio, watch. / They’ll make a Christmas singer out of him. They’ll have my man / coming down the chimney. Sugar Plums.” His comments echo and confirm thoughts delivered by Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman in his obituary of Hathaway from the Village Voice. Published shortly after the musician fell to his death from a window in the Essex House hotel in New York, Guzman also suggests that Hathaway and his music were vulnerable to exploitation by the recording industry. While considering “Where is the Love?”— the hit recording Hathaway had collaborating with Roberta Flack, which remains his most widely recognized work— Guzman writes, “Perceived on its own, the “Where Is the Love?”. . . might be a pretty thing to look at. But since it exists as part of the total music flow, anyone who felt uneasy about the song in 1972 was dead on target, as it represented [an] insidious creeping Vegasism.”

Increasingly, the strains of the music business took a toll on Hathaway, as both an artist and as an individual. Pavlić’s poetry provides a set of insights into the turmoil that accompanied Hathaway as he worked in the aura of success. Winners thereby serves as both a poetic sketch of one musician’s attempt to articulate a complex aesthetic vision and an examination of audience conventions and production expectations that confront Black musicians. In an interview with the Washington Post after the death of her singing partner, Roberta Flack addressed a question about the tensions Hathaway experienced personally and professionally by stating, “There are a lot of us who are black musicians and who are trained and move away from black naturalness. Donny was not interested in crossing over, under or beyond. He had that natural thing.” Significantly, the poetry in Pavlić’s Winners regards “that natural thing” as a deeply grown, blues-rooted, aesthetic informed by both African-American experience in the United States and the movements of Black people through the course of a greater African diaspora. In this way, Pavlić’s poetry recalibrates the critical apparatus for evaluating the apparent incongruencies of Hathaway’s body of work. It brings consideration to this musician’s varied musical ambitions and identity, and establishes a framework for evaluating the range and depth of his work—from his days as Little Donny Pitts, “the Nation’s Youngest Gospel Singer,” to the recording he made of Carole King’s “You Got a Friend” with Roberta Flack, to his performance of “Theme for the Television Show Maude" at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1973.

Pavlić’s investment in this project becomes fully evident in Winners’ opening poem, “Interview: Cause of Death: A Sound or Something Like It.” Throughout this poem an unnamed former band-mate of Hathaway’s recalls a wide-ranging conversation between himself and Hathaway concerning musical composition theory and movement of culture. He recalls Hathaway referencing 17th-Century composer Claudio Monteverdi, the Medici family fortune, Turkish floral patterns, James Baldwin, and Pope Pius II to relate a theory of modern music’s construction. Ultimately, however, the poem’s speaker goes on to describe the nature of their collaborations on stage and in the studio as follows: “He’d pound a cord, hold the pedal, press / his left hand into that big, meaty thigh and act like he’s really letting / loose. All the time his eyes on you like they’re staring through barbed / wire. A smile inverted, augmented, seventh slid up and diminished.” Pavlić’s speaker in “Interview” continues,

You can see it now if you want to, see if I’m lying. Take a good look,
hell, take half a one-eyed look, at the cover of Everything is Everything.
You call that a smile? Just another go-lucky day with the kids, right?
Right. Happy day in the new Black nation, right? Morning in the
homeland of the soul. Right? Show him what he’s won, Bob.

“Interview: Cause of Death,” Winners’ longest “track,” concludes as the poem’s speaker recounts how Hathaway punctuated a point about Black music. He remembers Hathaway repeatedly striking a chord and asking, “They’ll say there’s more to it than that, than this. . . They’re right. So, why the act, you know, as if there’s so / damned much less to it than us?” Through the course of the five poetic series that follow “Interview,” Pavlić explores Hathaway’s question, locating multiple dimensions within it. In this way, Pavlić’s volume contributes to conversations concerning Black music and African-American experience. Similarly, the formal choices he makes in Winners also blur boundaries, redrawing the limits of prose poetry and creative non-fiction. Pavlić thereby provides a measure of poetic insight into the “environments” and “energies” of both Black music and Black life as he charts movements of the “changing same.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008