Dan Kennedy
Algonquin ($14.95)

by Ellen Frazel

Imagine landing your dream job, only to realize that this job completely destroys and invalidates the dreams you once had. This job takes everything you thought to be true, everything you held with deep respect in the world, and dashes it against the hard, shiny rocks of corporate industry. For Dan Kennedy, a failed musician who grew up in awe of Led Zeppelin, Kiss, and Iggy Pop, a job in the music industry seemed like the best way to pursue his passion for music. With high hopes of discovering America’s next great rock band, Kennedy instead finds himself tangled in the sticky web of the corporate pecking order, full of power plays and hard decisions about what kind of expensive picture frame to buy for your office.

Luckily for us, Kennedy survives his time at the major record label, emerging to tell a hilarious tale of many painfully awkward encounters and mishaps in his memoir Rock On. From fighting with a coworker over a chocolate chip muffin to organizing a gangster rap music video, Kennedy will have you laughing out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of the music industry. Kennedy also brings us closer to this world by interspersing humorous lists and self-composed lyrics between his anecdotes. He outlines the power structure of the office, telling us about “The Heavy Hitter” (“You’re making seven figures”), “Upper Management” (“You lurk in the same places; same corner offices, same executive washrooms”), “Glorified Middle Manager” (“you’re not making small talk with influential cohorts while urinating”), “Glorified Foot Soldier” (“you can’t manage anyone”), and “Real Foot Soldier” (“Who was there when, say, slow-jam diva Brandy needed some clothes brought to her hotel room in the snowstorm? . . . You! You’re the real deal, because you actually do something”).

Despite Kennedy’s ability to find the extraordinary humor in his workplace, his seeming aptitude to laugh it all off, there are many times in his story when he simply expresses wanting to fit in. For anyone who has felt the baffling desire to do well at a job you dislike, to impress coworkers in spite of your feelings for them, Kennedy’s contradictory feelings are understandable. Throughout the book, his passion and respect for music still prevail; he admits,

Sometimes I walk around the floors peeking in offices, like a tourist lost in a museum. You can’t help but feel how this is your last chance to see this. That none of the old-school mogul stuff is going to last much longer—a little slice of American pop culture that might’ve peaked and is now almost gone without a trace.

There is a bitter feeling of regret and loss beneath the humor of Rock On, because it is apparent to Kennedy that the days of Rush and Led Zeppelin are over. The industry now churns out identical pop stars, hip hop princesses, and angry rockers with manufactured lyrics and iconic wardrobes. This is not what Dan Kennedy signed up for.

Unfortunately, the everyday routine of work and the powerful draw of money can numb the mind to certain core values and beliefs. Kennedy finds himself sucked into this world, no longer finding it all that odd that well-paid executives sit around in meetings discussing a pop star’s hairstyle or listening to the new hit song being used in a women’s razor commercial. Throughout Rock On, you can really feel Kennedy’s internal battle between not wanting to sacrifice his ideals and wanting to succeed in the music industry.

At times, you may want to yell at him for throwing his values to the dust, but Kennedy is only human. “I know this stuff is all a big dumb lie,” he writes, “But I want to try for once in my life. . . I want everyone to think I’m a normal and successful man like the others.” Kennedy gives it to us the way it really happened—he admits feeling that compelling force asking him to sell his soul to the industry. In this way, Kennedy succeeds in crafting a multi-faceted book: his humor, often bitter and cynical, exposes the dangers of working in the corporate music industry. For a short time, Kennedy lives teetering on the edge of a bottomless pit of forsaken morals; he experiences the vapid void within which people sit around getting paid to create pop culture.

All of Kennedy’s feelings towards music and his job culminate in a fervent retelling of seeing Iggy Pop in concert. The energy of Iggy, “this fifty-six-year-old life force” bounding and jumping around the stage, and the audience holding middle fingers up to MTV ads, show Kennedy that there are still people out there who really love rock music. Jumping up onto his amps, Iggy shows just as much contempt for the music industry, “face to face with the industry suits up in the balcony” yelling “Jump down here you fat fucks! I dare you to jump! You won’t jump because you’re scared!” Later, Iggy goes so far as to scale the V.I.P. mezzanine, scattering the record executives’ tables and “complimentary Skyy vodka and cranberry” drinks everywhere. In this same spirit of rebellion, Rock On is Dan Kennedy’s way of redeeming himself, his big middle finger to the industry, his own destruction of the V.I.P. section.

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Marybeth Hamilton
Basic Books ($24.95)

by Tim W. Brown

Since the colonial era, white Americans have shown interest in the music produced by African-Americans. For example, in Notes on the State of Virginia Thomas Jefferson praised his slaves’ talent for playing the “banjar.” During Reconstruction, Northerners and Southerners alike struggled to describe this music, which sounded foreign to their Western-trained ears. African-Americans themselves promoted their unique musical style to white audiences, most famously the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who introduced Negro spirituals to listeners internationally. By the 20th-century, however, appreciation of this music had faded as African-Americans became more interested in ragtime, jazz, and other popular musical forms.

In Search of the Blues provides a solid overview of the efforts of several individuals who dedicated their lives to recovering the lost folk music of African-Americans. Some, like John and Alan Lomax, are widely celebrated. Others like Howard Odum, Dorothy Scarborough and James McKune are less well known. But according to author Marybeth Hamilton, all were instrumental in recording and transcribing traditional African-American music and shaping present-day conceptions about the style known as the blues.

These collectors’ stories are practically epic in scope. They ventured into African-American communities, inside notorious prisons, and down obscure back roads, capturing on primitive recording equipment what remained of this music in the memories of sharecroppers, prisoners, and itinerant musicians. In addition to encountering a basic distrust of whites and a disinterest in old tunes, they learned that live performances were rapidly being supplanted by DJ’s spinning “race records” in African-American bars and juke joints across the South. Indeed, the records were often the same ones heard on Chicago’s South Side and in Harlem.

Most important to Hamilton is the process by which a founding myth of the blues was advanced. She writes, “the Delta blues was not born in the bars and dance halls of Mississippi. . . It was discovered— or, if you like, invented—by white men and women, as the culmination of a long-standing fascination with uncorrupted black singers, untainted by the city, by commerce, by the sights and sounds of modernity.” This myth has dominated music history and criticism into the present and is prevalent in the writings of noted authors Robert Palmer and Greil Marcus. Its greatest proponent was Alan Lomax, who commemorated his Delta sojourns in The Land Where the Blues Began. An ever-narrower definition of “authenticity” resulted, which defined genuine blues as sung for personal reasons by aimless drifters who had no intentions of performing, recording, or publishing their music.

All of which begs the question: what did African-Americans think about these white people invading their towns, asking questions about obsolete music, and pushing microphones in their faces? An answer is suggested in Lost Delta Found, edited by Bruce Nemerov and Robert Gordon (Vanderbilt University Press, 2005). The source materials for Lost Delta Found were recently unearthed after disappearing for decades inside the Library of Congress. The book consists of sociological studies, jointly authored by Fisk University scholars and the Library, that documented the everyday lives of African-Americans in Coahoma County, Mississippi, circa 1941-42; John Work, a music professor at Fisk, researched the same musical genres as Hamilton’s subjects. Hamilton alludes to this important corrective to the blues founding myth in her endnotes, but she ignores its implications within the body of her book.

The portrait of Alan Lomax that emerges in Lost Delta Found is decidedly unflattering. Ostensibly a co-sponsor of the Coahoma Study as an archivist at the Library, he co-opted (less generous observers might say “plagiarized” or “stole”) Work’s contributions to the project, even confiscating field recordings Work had made and depositing them in the Library in defiance of an agreement to share credit for the Study’s findings. That Hamilton gives short shrift to this unsavory story relays the false impression that only whites showed interest in African-American folk music. In addition, her book’s citation methods could stand to be more robust; although phrase notes and an excellent index appear at the end, a more formal list of works cited and numbered endnotes would be useful.

In spite of these flaws, Hamilton has produced an important work of music history that sheds light on obscure appreciators of an even more obscure art form. American culture is all the richer because of what these individuals turned up—material that, as the author amply demonstrates, could easily have been lost to history forever.

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edited by Stephen Cope
University of California Press ($19.95)

by Joseph Bradshaw

Over a decade in the making, Stephen Cope’s edition of George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers is an in-depth presentation of Oppen processing the poetics behind his highly acclaimed poetry. Book-ended by a section called Prose (which includes the essay “The Mind’s Own Place”) and a section called Papers (made up entirely of “Twenty-Six Fragments,” his reputed last writings), the main attraction for most will be the section called Daybooks, which makes up the core of the volume.

As Oppen worked on his books, rather than keeping a notebook to process his thoughts he would use single leaves of paper, variously typing or writing on them by hand. He then idiosyncratically bound them using materials such as pipe-stem cleaners or paste, and in one case a single nail hammered into a block of wood. Michael Davidson, editor of Oppen’s New Collected Poems, named these handmade books “daybooks” in 1985, when he published a transcription of one of them in an Oppen feature of the journal Ironwood.

In an illuminating discussion about the daybooks, Cope writes, “Akin to. . . notebooks, journals, diaries, and the like, these papers are finally none of these; nor are they fully letters, essays, or aphoristic statements.” Oppen never intended these books to be published; they were meant entirely for his own use in processing his poetic work. It is for this reason that they are so disorganized, or, to use Oppen’s words, “a nightmare of bric-a-brac.” Cobbled together—often even on the same page—are notes on Cold War-era politics; annotations to the philosophers, poets, and writers Oppen was reading; reflections on poetic process and the public and private lives of the poet; and, among many other things, thoughts on what Oppen often refers to as “the women poets” (which points to a complex, problematic issue within Oppen scholarship: his attitude toward feminine subjectivity).

Leafing through the bric-a-brac, what makes the daybooks so engaging is that we are able to see Oppen’s process at work. Cope has been conscientious to present the pages of the daybooks, as well as those of "Twenty-Six Fragments"—with all of their cross-outs and overwrites—in a manner that gracefully displays a "textual vitality," as Cope puts it, without falling into incomprehensibility. To do this, he developed a comprehensive textual apparatus that uses roman text to indicate typed passages; italicizedtext to indicate handwritten passages; [brackets] to indicate indecipherable text; ^arrows^ to indicate insertions; strikethroughs; and so on.

In page after page, Oppen’s exacting mind is active, such as in this passage about a poem by Oppen’s admirer, Armand Schwerner:

Fucking and even bucking— Alright ^Ok by me^.

While there is obviously a difference between the statements “alright” and “ok by me,” the difference is on a micro-semantic level, and we see Oppen—famous for the attention he so strenuously pays to the “little words”—weighing these micro-differences throughout the daybooks. It is no surprise, then, that in a later daybook entry we find the following passage:

I mean my work to be a process of thought. Which means I am the literary equivalent of the scientist. not of the [ ]—not, that is to say, the entertainer.

But not to be overlooked is the section of Oppen’s published prose. In addition to “The Mind’s Own Place,” Oppen’s single comprehensive statement of poetics, there are several short reviews and a few scant notes on individual poets. These make up the entire corpus of prose published in Oppen’s lifetime. One piece, titled “Statement on Poetics,” which was written late in Oppen’s life and published posthumously, focuses on the relation of prosody to poetic process, and illuminates Oppen’s habits of revision:

I try one word and another word and another word, reverse the sequence, alter line-endings, a hundred two hundred rewritings, revisions—This is called prosody: how to write a poem. Or rather, how to write that poem.

Also not to be overlooked is the volume’s index, compiled by the poet Andrew Joron. In service to Oppen’s exactingness, Joron has suitably gathered an enormous span of subjects touched upon throughoutSelected Prose, which is quite a feat given the brambled nature of the daybooks. These subjects range from those already often associated with Oppen, such as ethics, sincerity, and truth, to those that have not yet been the focal point of Oppen scholarship, such as dreams, religion, and sexuality. It is a meaningful tool in a book that will undoubtedly deepen readers’ experience and understanding of Oppen, and broaden the scope of Oppen scholarship in the years to come.

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edited Zong-qi Cai
Columbia University Press ($32.50)

by Lucas Klein

Implicit in the question How to Read Chinese Poetry is whether reading Chinese poetry is any different from reading non-Chinese poetry. If not, then what is the justification for a “guided anthology” such as this? And, for that matter, what is Chinese poetry? According to editor Zong-qi Cai, “This anthology features 143 famous poems composed over a period of almost three millennia stretching from the early Zhou [ca. 1027–256 BCE] all the way to the Qing, the last of China’s dynasties, which ended in 1911.” While this is a colossal span of history, it leaves out vernacular poetry written in modern Chinese in the last hundred years, often under the influence of Western poetry and forms. It is also a very small number of poems to represent three thousand years. The contributors make up for this lack by embedding these poems in essays discussing the poems and their historical, generic, linguistic, and cultural background and contexts. In this way the volume serves less as an anthology than as a primer, a starting point on a path leading the student to understand Chinese poetry better.

The student is the expected mindset—if not identity—for the reader of this volume: while the chapter-essays can of course be read in any order, they beg to be read as part of a course in pre-modern Chinese poetry, arranged chronologically, with a teacher who can provide further information and reading material. To complete the book the syllabus would likely need to double-up some readings, as rare is the college with a semester long enough to accommodate a chapter a week for eighteen weeks. Nevertheless, for the student who reads the full volume, the breadth of the Chinese poetic tradition and its habits of reading are the reward.

For the reader unaccustomed to assigned readings and classroom discourse, the volume presents certain challenges. The odd speech customs of American Sinology may require patience: “poetic text” for “poem,” “heptasyllabic” to describe a seven-character poetic line, “traditional” as a synonym for “pre-modern” or “classical” (as in, “many traditional commentators and modern scholars have expressed the belief. . .” [Xinda Lian]), and the overuse of Romanized Chinese in place of English translations, not only for sub-genres (e.g. shi, ci, sanqu, etc.), but also for titles and terminology (e.g. Shijing and Chuci, along with bi-xing, qing jing, fugu, etc.). While some of these professorial quirks do not inhibit understanding, others hide obstructive ideology: with “traditional” as closed and foregone, literary scholarship adheres to and reiterates a sharp break between China’s past and present, as if the two had nothing to do with each other. Other word choices, though, may in fact deserve thinking through: if “poetic text” requires that we differentiate our understanding of Chinese literature from more familiar, Western poetry, is that something we want to do?

How to Read Chinese Poetry seems designed for a classroom open to both East Asian Studies majors and wanderers from English departments interested in poetry “for its own sake.” While the attempt to unite these separate constituencies despite their separate agendas and interests is noble, its fallout goes beyond the perennial debate over the utility of poetry. The Chinese language, for instance, is also implicated, as the book seems conflicted over how to treat the range of Chinese knowledge amongst its readership: all poems are transcribed not only in Chinese characters but with Romanized pronunciation and tone-marks as well, whereas for names of authors and terms, no tone-marks are given, and anyone interested in the Chinese word must flip through the index. While the editor and publisher must have wanted to avoid intimidating students who do not know Chinese, the result is an emphasis on the sound of poetry unmatched by equal care about allowing students to discuss poetry in Chinese with Chinese speakers. And for all that, the structure of sounds in poetry is incomplete; the book gives no pronunciation guide to help students previously unexposed to the conventions of Chinese Romanization, and while non-speakers of Chinese can hear how the poems sound in Mandarin online (at www.cup.columbia.edu/static/cai-sound-files), what about the instances of Middle Chinese or older whose transcriptions find their way into the book? When we read Fusheng Wu say that “rhyming words. . . yōng and jiàng” were “pronounced in archaic Chinese as λiwoŋ and γeuŋ, respectively,” where do we go to find out what that means?

If these are problems for the East Asian Studies major, the problem for the English major or otherwise reader of poetry may be the caliber of translation. While Cai acknowledges—in what sounds like a critique of a style pioneered by Wai-lim Yip and Gary Snyder—that “In translation, many Chinese poems, especially those written in a highly condensed style, can easily appear hackneyed,” the translations written by these academics just as easily appear stilted, even lame. And while fine lines exist, such as the alliterative elegance of “Green, green grows the cypress on the hilltop, / Heap upon heap stand stones in mountain streams” (trans. Zong-qi Cai), or the understatement of “Tear-laden ink is gray and dull with dust” (trans. Shuen-fu Lin), more often there are lines of such clunking dullness as “The Seven Beginnings and the Beginning of Quintessence of Myriad Things, / Are sung solemnly in harmony. / The gods will come enjoying the banquet, / We sincerely hope they will listen to the music” (trans. Jui-lung Su).

But while some of the scholars have attempted art in their translations—such as Charles Egan’s use of punctuation in his chapter on Quatrains, or Xinda Lian’s bawdy rhyme in his chapter on songs under the Mongols—the inattention to translation manifests the absence of discussion of how translation affects our understanding and appreciation of poetry. The book includes no discussion, for instance, of the meaning behind Xiaofei Tian’s translation of jiŭ as “ale” while everyone else makes it “wine.” The ways that different scholars approach the dueling demands of philological accuracy and English affect—along with the intemperate states of both—presents a missed opportunity to discuss the different points of entry into reading Chinese poetry. Likewise, the volume gives no discussion of the differences between different translations of the same poem, such as “Sui Palace,” by Late Tang poet Li Shangyin, as translated by Robert Ashmore—

Purple Spring palace halls lay locked in mist and haze;
he wanted to take the “ruined city” as a home of emperors.
The jade seal: if not because it returned to the sun’s corner,
brocade sails: they would have arrived at heaven’s bounds.
To this day, the rotting grass is without fireflies’ flash;
through all time, the drooping willows have sundown crows.
Beneath the earth, if he should meet the Latter Lord of Chen,
would it be fitting to ask again to hear “Flowers in the Rear Courtyard”?

—or as translated by Zong-qi Cai—

Purple Spring’s palace halls lay locked in the twilight mist;
He wished to make the Overgrown City a home of emperors.
The jade seal: if it had not somehow become the Sun-horn’s,
Brocade sails, then, would have reached heaven’s end.
To this day the rotten grass is without fireflies’ flash,
From antiquity lie the drooping willows, with the sunset crows.
Beneath the earth, if he would run into the Latter Lord of Chen,
How could it be fitting to ask about “Rear Courtyard Flowers”?

The pervasive ignorance of translation also means that Chinese poetry’s cross-cultural relationships get little attention: some writers, particularly Cai and William Nienhauser, cite other poetic traditions, but Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa only get one mention, and Chinese influence on Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese poetry is not discussed at all. Conversely, foreign influence on Chinese poetry is downplayed: Wendy Swartz’s section on Xie Lingyun does not mention his Buddhism, and while Xiaofei Tian analyzes the Buddhist elements of Chinese palace-style poetry, by not mentioning the ways in which Sanskrit poetics may have influenced Chinese prosody, she leaves foreign influence a matter of content only, and never form. Conversely, when Maija Bell Samei introduces the song lyric genre as stemming from a time when “new music from Central Asia began entering China and soon became all the rage at the cosmopolitan Tang court and in Tang urban culture,” the topic is never mentioned again, suggesting that foreign influence is only a matter of form, and not of content.

But while these slips represent significant deficiencies in the study of Chinese poetry, they are quibbles against the overall success of How to Read Chinese Poetry, and any good teacher would be able to incorporate these points into the lesson plan. The strengths of the book, undiminished by its imperfections, appear in the elegance and facility with which the contributors engage with and explain the language beneath (not beyond) translation. In their discussions of Du Fu and Li Shangyin, two of Chinese history’s most persistently hermetic poets, Robert Ashmore and Zong-qi Cai demonstrate the vagaries and ambiguities of Chinese poetic language at its highest. Similarly, David Knechtges’s examination of the rhymeprose of Sima Xiangru displays an erudite mastery of Sima’s poetic erudition. The possibility the volume provides for the reader to see many layers of the poems at the same time defines the book’s value; what Paula Varsano says about one poem by Li Bai holds true for the book’s manifold perspective on its poems: “The convergence of these multiple readings is precisely what yields the intoxicating sense of the impossibility of discerning, with our eyes, the causes of the events that unfurl before us, or of grasping the true, quixotic nature of the relationships among things.”

If the East Asian Studies major can learn how to appreciate the depths of poetic heritage within an otherwise business- or politics-focused pursuit, what can the non-student reader of poetry learn from How to Read Chinese Poetry? While the question of the title is never answered directly, by oblique example we understand the interrelationship between poetry and history, and to read Ronald Egan’s chapter on how the Song dynastic history shaped its poetics, or Grace Fong on the influx of women poets in the late imperial era, is to begin to understand both how and why. As Xiaofei Tian explains, “in appreciating the poetry of a different age, we should take its historical and cultural contexts into account,” but are historical and cultural contexts any less important for appreciating the poetry of our own age? Against a still prevalent idea that Western poetry can be read simply as rhetoric, the contemporary American poetry-reader can learn from a Chinese scholarly tradition that has never had much patience for such ahistoricism. Poetry everywhere is infused with its own history, and rather than the Joycean “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake,” history is for classical Chinese poets more often a dream they are trying to comprehend and control. In its scholarly awareness of the relationship between poetic lines and historical context, readers of poetry in any language can learn from the critical traditions, as much as the poems, of Chinese poetry, and glean from How to Read Chinese Poetry the answer to the question of how to read poetry.

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edited by David Goodway
Cecil Woolf

by Jeff Bursey

Emma Goldman (1869-1940), born in Lithuania but most often a resident of the United States, became both infamous and an inspiration for her anarchist activities and writings. Her most enduring work may be found in the causes she championed (described in, among other places, Living My Life, a two-volume autobiography first published in 1931). In his introduction to The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Emma Goldman, David Goodway provides a good overview of her eventful life, judging that “1906 to 1919 mark the apogee of her revolutionary career.” After spending two years in a U.S. jail for campaigning against conscription in the First World War, in 1917 she was “immediately deported” to Russia. My Disillusionment in Russia, published in two volumes (1923-1925), charts her disenchantment with Bolshevism. It and she were enemies forever after. Goldman became an English citizen through a marriage arranged for that purpose. Her activist nature never diminished, but she was in “limbo” from the mid-1920s until, with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, she found a new purpose.

In England, Goldman organized, harried, lectured, wrote, and attempted to stir society to show sympathy towards and give money to the Spanish cause—to little avail, “considering the rigidity of the British Public,” as she wrote to Powys in February 1937. She did better in Spain. “Here I am again in England after three months in Spain. I may say, without exaggeration, the three most exultant months of my entire career.” The hysteria, bloodshed, carnage, and devotion to a true anarchist cause (no government, but governance by the people as equals) found among Spaniards, Catalonians in particular, rejuvenated her as she neared seventy. The civil war within the civil war—political infighting between those on the side of Stalin and those who were not—ended her time there. Back in London, she resumed trying to enlist sympathies and provoke political pressure about the treatment accorded those who had fled to France from besieged Spain. “Let no one talk to me about the liberality of France,” she wrote Powys during the winter of 1939. “In point of fact France has been living on her past, like some unfortunate women whose age is devoid of everything worthwhile and who therefore can have nothing to give to the world except their boastful youth.” By the summer she was in Ontario, Canada, where she died in May 1940.

John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) is the best-known member of a prodigious literary family that contained Theodore Francis (T.F.) Powys (1875-1953) and Llewelyn Powys (1884-1939), among other writers and artists. In 1930 alone, ten books appeared written by five family members. The brothers were prolific, perhaps overwhelmingly so: their works were densely woven, mystical and/or animistic; they stayed away from literary cliques; and they weren’t interested in long silences between works. Despite his own output, JCP (as he is often referred to) fell off many literary maps soon after his writing life stopped. He began as a poet in the 19th century, but shifted to lecturing, first in England, and then, profitably, in the United States from the early 20th century to roughly 1930, addressing countless audiences in major cities and small towns. He met Emma Goldman on such a circuit, and in 1936 referred to her as “an old colleague of mine in the States in the cause of free Culture and enlightenment for the masses.” Lecturing was how Powys maintained himself and his family (his wife Margaret Lyon and their child, Littleton) until the success of Wolf Solent (1929) encouraged him to give that up. Living in the States for long stretches also helped him stay away from a marriage that never suited; Powys met the ideal sylph of his dreams, Phyllis Playter, in Joplin, Missouri in 1921 when he was nearly fifty and she was twenty-six. They lived together until his death.

In 1915, Powys’ first novel, Wood and Stone, sold very well, and he quickly wrote a second, Rodmoor (1916). These were followed by many books that might be regarded as literary self-help works, alternating with dithyrambic appreciations of other writers. Those two titles, as well as After My Fashion(1920; not published in his lifetime), and Ducdame (1925), are now available through Faber’s print-on-demand service. In 2007, the Overlook Press published two significant works: the complete version of what many consider his finest novel, Porius (1951), which had previously only appeared in abridged versions; and the first biography devoted to JCP alone, Morine Krissdóttir’s Descents of Memory, that hopefully will increase interest in his work and life. Overlook has in print most of the masterworks: A Glastonbury Romance (1932); Weymouth Sands (1934; Jobber Skald in England); Autobiography (1934);Maiden Castle (1936; the unabridged version); and Owen Glendower (1940). Wolf Solent has remained in print through a variety of publishers. While this is not a renaissance, or a return to his popularity in 1915 or the early 1930s, it does indicate serious interest. Once more, people have the chance to see why such diverse writers as Annie Dillard, Henry Miller, Theodore Dreiser, Robertson Davies, and Margaret Drabble have been advocates.

The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Emma Goldman, recently released by the small English publisher Cecil Woolf, is another addition to the fine collection of Powys letters his firm has already published. The letters cover the period 1936-1940, and with such figures—Powys full of admiration for Goldman, Goldman consumed by the dire state of Spain—we might expect either a cautious correspondence or one that takes full flight and seizes the reader. “How important was this correspondence to the participants?” Goodway asks in his Afterword. He offers an only partially satisfying answer, that Powys was an “invaluable morale booster” for Goldman, and that she tutored him in anarchist thought, correcting his early errors. Thanks to her, Powys could balance his idiosyncratic outlook on the world with political thought. Her re-education of him was necessary, and beneficial, and it gave him the words and concepts to refine and better articulate his own libertarian (i.e., anarchist) views.

This seems a particularly narrow ledge from which to view the workings of both writers. Like many of his siblings, from the very beginning Powys never fit into a wider society easily, and he learned to be (or persisted in being) singular and unclassifiable. Here, I believe, Goodway has the tail wagging the dog. In the introduction he writes, “Why, it has to be asked, is Powys not at his best in his correspondence with Goldman?” After knocking down a few possible reasons, he provides an answer: Goldman was “not a close friend. . . at the outset—rather, a celebrated acquaintance.” In short, some hero worship had to be gotten over, and only after four years, so Goodway’s reasoning goes, does Powys relax and sound like he did when writing others.

That seems like another partial answer. There are other reasons why Powys sounds restrained (by his standards) in what is a revealing correspondence of great worth to Powys and Goldman scholars. The first letter is from Goldman to Powys on the first of January 1936, and in it she asks his advice on how to “go about to gain a hearing,” that is, find a venue to attract audiences in England. She also sends him material that might help him figure out a way she could promote herself. A year later she asks if Powys would let her list his name, as well as Llewelyn’s, for a “theatre affair” she is arranging. In January 1938 Goldman asks Powys to be a sponsor for a different matter. He provided a written tribute to her that “brought a lump to [her] throat.” However, it can’t be used for her purposes, being “too personal,” and she asks for something a general audience can hear. Powys obliges. Later in 1938 he provides an article on Spain for a publication, at her request; it contains errors that Goldman corrects some months after its publication. At the end of this year she returns to his re-education. “I have no desire to impose such works in you, but I will be very happy indeed to send you a collection of some of the things by the foremost exponents of Anarchism.” When she writes inquiring about his latest book, Owen Glendower, in June 1939 it almost comes as a shock due to the rarity on her part of such questions. She then asks if he’d consider writing a preface to someone else’s book, offsetting her momentary interest in his vocation. For his part, Powys always inquires after her work, thanks her for whatever she sends him, and responds to what she’s doing, in England, Spain, and Canada. Throughout the correspondence Goldman alternates between two main salutations: “Dear John Powys” and “Dear Friend.” Powys generally writes “My dear Emma Goldman” or “Dear Emma.”

I mention these things because this important correspondence—charting Goldman’s English activities on behalf of Spain, and Powys’ deepening understanding of anarchist thought—is remarkably free of fun. Powys relished the joyous liberty of going off on flights of fancy. A sign of his high spirits, and his interest in what he’s saying and responding to, is found in multiple clauses in one sentence (often fragmented, filled with dashes and underlining) that loops around or leaps away from the main subject, eventually getting back to the main topic that has, in the course of the lines, been subtly or grandly transformed. These are frequent in the letters Powys and English novelist Dorothy Richardson exchange (also newly published by Woolf this year). Goldman’s epistles don’t allow room for Powys’ usual humour to present itself, since he is often both tutored and used as an instrument, with his own literary work not nearly so important as a political cause. He rarely opens up for an exchange of a literary sort, or delving into the mystical that is a hallmark of so much of his writing. Anyone familiar with Powys would know his habit for placating or worshipping others, and those things are definitely present in these letters. I also believe that Goldman is sincere every time she praises his warmth towards her, for he did support her. That is why the publication of their letters is so welcome. It shows a restrained Powys and a Goldman more interested in large movements than an individual she was “always so glad to hear from.” Hear from, but perhaps not listen to as openly as an equitable friendship would require.

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Aleksandar Hemon
Riverhead Books ($24.95)

by Salvatore Ruggiero

“Why does the Jewish day begin at sunset?” This is the quiet refrain posed by Lazarus Averbuch, the evasive subject of Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel The Lazarus Project. The novel interlaces the narrative of Vladimir Brik, a displaced Bosnian refugee in Chicago who receives a grant to write about the untimely and violent death of Lazarus, with that of Olga Averbuch, Lazarus’s sister who is forced not only to come to terms with her brother’s death, but also with the humiliation and condemnation of being an unwanted immigrant at the turn of the century in America.

Brik is a writer for a Chicago paper—his column entitled “In the Land of the Free,” where he discusses being a stranger in a strange land, has given him a bit of local celebrity, enough so that when he applies for a grant to take on this Lazarus project, he is easily awarded the money to head back to Europe to see what remains of Averbuch’s beginnings. With him he takes along an adventurous old friend from home, a photographer named Rora, so that he can have snapshots of the landscapes of the Ukraine, Moldova, and Bosnia. As they follow the path taken by Averbuch to escape the anti-Semitic 1903 Russian pogroms, this road trip through Europe, encapsulated with male angst and a cast of local characters that charm and inform, becomes a more delightful, mature, and textually innovative version of Everything Is Illuminated.

Meanwhile, in what the reader can only assume is Brik’s story about Lazarus—one hundred years before Brik’s own pilgrimage—Olga Averbuch is trying to get a proper Jewish burial for her brother, who was gruesomely shot by a Chicago policeman when he attempted to give the officer an important piece of paper. (This murder evokes memories of the Amadou Diallo killing in New York, when policemen unloaded forty-one rounds into Diallo’s body, another immigrant story that begs to be told.) Olga’s pleas fail to impress the police, and she gets taken in by Lazarus’s associates, who further confuse and inform her about immigrants’ rights.

Hemon weaves these two striking narratives together, aesthetically and physically joining them with the glue of several black and white photographs between each chapter—evidently meant to be Rora’s, although credited to Velbor Bozovic and the Chicago Historical Society. What at first seems gimmicky proves its very worth as the novel does: neither the photographs, Brik’s travels, nor Brik’s writing about Olga and her brother ever get to the core of Lazarus, his past, and his death. Everything is just a suggestion, a hint at what could be the truth. This is a narrative of the void, the unknown. The narrator himself states it in his first line: “The time and place are the only things I am certain of: March 2, 1908, Chicago. Beyond that is the haze of history and pain, and now I plunge.” Never do we receive a lucid vision of Lazarus or his former life. Never do we understand why Brik himself can’t paint this portrait of this émigré, even as we uncover cities and items left behind. Never are the photographs direct representations of the chapter. We can peel back layers of narrative, but Hemon never lets us get through to the heart of the matter, as if there is still another gossamer filtering the light source.

The novel opens and closes with a brutal and almost random murder, one from each narrative. “Why does the Jewish day begin at sunset?” No answer is given, but The Lazarus Project almost grants this as a response: So that what is unclear is only in the beginning; so that life can grow out of death; so that life is what is remembered at the end; so that we are free of death in life. This is a collection of voices and stories of the other, of the sunset waiting for a sunrise that may or may not ever emerge.

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Ethan Canin
Random House ($27)

by Luke Finsaas

Judging by the fiction its famed Writers’ Workshop faculty produces, living in Iowa must be a lot like driving at night with no decent radio station in range: there’s not much to do, so you just mull over things. Take Ethan Canin’s new novel, America America. The novel is marinated in history, boiled in politics, and spiced with a sprig of murder: a recipe, it would seem, for lackluster melodrama. But instead, Canin offers a compelling story in the Iowa style—reading this novel is like sitting down with an articulate old timer and listening to him talk until the pot of coffee runs out.

Our narrator in America America is Corey Sifter, an elderly newspaperman. He’s a pensive man raised on hard work and honesty, and from the first sentence, you know that you can trust him—there are no syntactic pyrotechnics or literary cat-and-mouse games to be found in this novel. Corey tells a straight story, even though it may be a complicated one.

At age sixteen, Corey went to work as a groundskeeper at the Metarey’s elegant estate. For reasons he can’t determine, the patriarch, Liam Metarey, took a personal interest in him: he paid for Corey’s education, and when he decided to fund Senator Bonwiller’s 1972 presidential campaign, Corey landed a minor role as the Senator’s driver. In this way, Canin ushers us backstage to watch the machinery of politics, and the picture he paints is quite convincing. Most of the novel presents Corey distilling his memory, trying to understand his own involvement (and culpability) in Bonwiller’s presidential campaign.

As Senator Bonwiller begins to peak in the national polls, a damning article hits the street; the article touches on a frozen mistress and a crashed Cadillac, recalling the real-life Senator Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick tumble. But instead of handing the reader that luxurious, black and white morality, Canin leaves us wrestling with a complicated character: a good man who may have made a mistake.

That Canin forces his readers to ponder what they’ve read is the strength of America America. Unfortunately, the minor characters and the women in this novel are like decorative plates; none of them have their own volition. The eccentric alcoholic, the nihilistic reporter, and the apple-pie homemaker all remain stock characters on the operating table, waiting for the defibrillator.

One scene is particularly telling. During an exclusive party, Christian Metarey, the younger of the Metarey daughters, drags her yard-boy/boyfriend, Corey, into a barn. No, not to neck—to watch her father agree to fund the Bonwiller campaign. It’s a fun scene, but it’s obvious that Christian is merely a plot device here. And to make matters worse, after the big moment has passed, Christian murmurs “I can’t believe we saw that together“ and “presses her tongue between [Corey’s] teeth.” Since when did politics turn on teenage girls?

Still, America America is far and beyond the most ambitious book Canin has written. Weighing in at 480 pages, it’s about the big themes of politics, progress, and morality, but it doesn’t pander to any demographic. The characters aren’t quite well rounded enough to please readers of Proust, and there certainly isn’t enough throat slitting, warhead thieving, or disrobing to grab the thriller fan base. There’s both heavy-handed foreshadowing and ambiguous plot points, and cell phones pop up amidst the old-fashioned prose. Canin walks that wobbly tightrope between popular fiction and literature, and even if you don’t like the routine, you have to admire his bravado.

America America is, therefore, not a great book, but it is certainly a good one. For fans of Canin, it’s a fun read. For those who have yet to stumble upon his gentle prose, however, Emperor of the Air or The Palace Thief will make better introductions—America America gives a feeble first handshake, and for a writer that has penned so many strong, engaging works, it sells his brilliance a tad short.

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Daniel Grandbois
BOA Editions ($14)

by John Domini

In a quip that’s become dangerously famous, Stephen Dedalus insists on aesthetic distance: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Daniel Grandbois certainly fulfills the demand of Joyce’s surrogate in Unlucky Lucky Days, his debut assortment of fabulist flash fiction. The author’s nowhere to be found—not even in the penultimate entry, “The Author.” The story presents a portrait of the artist on a thumbnail, if not a pinkie-nail—indeed, nothing in the book runs so long as three full pages—and it eludes social and economic crosshairs. Instead it offers a few words about the sources of Grandbois’s fiction: a great-uncle’s photo, a daughter’s toy, the wife’s bedside reading. The brief piece charms, but its point seems obvious, a cheer for the unbridled imagination. “I dreamt of lion’s-head knockers loping through the neighborhood,” the Author explains, “ringing people’s bells.”

A brass lion’s head playing a middle-school prank seems typical of these metamorphoses. Unlucky Lucky Days divvies 73 surreal miniatures more or less evenly among seven sections labeled, as if he were a good Judeo-Christian, Sunday through Saturday. Yet the sensibility comes across as pagan; spirits reanimate the world’s common clay. One of the first to cast the collection’s peculiar spell is “The Prayer,” a relatively gloomy amuse-bouche. A Native American ancestor ceremony brings back to life the nightmare morning of 9/11, at the microscopic level of the prayer-blanket: “On closer examination, the hairs. . . were tall buildings with broken windows and people inside.”

With that glimmer of the high-tech present, Grandbois completes his recreation of Stone-Age myth. Similar last-minute reversals distinguish nearly all these dream-loops, sometimes healing and occasionally quite the opposite. The reversal, rather than the accident of where the Author got the idea, provides the impact. Consider “The Tunnel,” a Tuesday-piece here presented in its entirety:

A man and a woman stepped into a tunnel. It was lighter inside than they had expected. In fact, the deeper they went, the lighter it became until the light was so bright that it blinded them both.

Childlike yet chilling, both Tunnel of Love and Inferno, the story creates a climactic rush via the lack of commas and arrives at an irony rooted entirely in expectation upended. A number of other turnabouts are rooted in less—sometimes in as little as a play on words—yet nonetheless supply rightness and closure. At their best, these stories push cross-cutting valences to peak intensity, then abandon them.

In cases like “The Prayer,” when Grandbois strips his narrative onion, the reek recalls the kitchen sink—meaning on occasion there emerges a world we recognize. “Hat and Rack” might have to do with sexual secrecy (the final word is “closet”), and “The Sea Squirt” might make an environmental argument. But even when the stories lack such grounding, the writer negotiates the shoals of cuteness skillfully. He may work with a clumsy giraffe, with signifying wads of gum or, repeatedly, with articulate spiders (the jacket copy mentions Just So Stories, but Charlotte’s Web is also a touchstone), yet he nearly always strikes a balance between the ticklish and the haunting. Those wads of gum mutate into the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, then achieve the timelessness of geometry.

Just as “The Gum” makes use of Pythagoras, these stories prove rife with other texts, too much so for the children’s section. The language whirls into judicious puns, and it’s not averse to high rhetoric or subtle reference. Here Lolita teases Humpty Humbert into a great fall, and there we catch echoes of Bob Dylan. “Almost Borges,” in fact, may depend too much on bookishness; one has to recognize the dying old writer to enjoy the thrill as life comes to the household objects he so memorably invested with power.

Borges, what’s more, draped his fantasies with a larger cultural fabric, and Unlucky Lucky Days disappoints insofar as it lacks the same. Grandbois delights us in small, with his chiseled prismatic shards, but in large he frustrates the desire for greater vision, for the “conscience of the race” that Stephen Dedalus sought to forge. Such vision remains part of why we need book-length literary art; even the prankish young T.C. Boyle (an ancestor who goes unhonored here) dramatized the clash of the hippie pipedream and the American project. Still, these drifting, teeming Days merit the benefit of the doubt, since Grandbois shows every promise of taking on greater weight.

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Rick Dakan
PM Press ($15.95 each)

by Spencer Dew

The hackers—or self-described “trolls,” hackers of a particular, trickster type—who recently flooded the Epilepsy Foundation web pages with fluttering, seizure-inducing color fields, did so for the particular joy of disrupting other lives, finding gleeful amusement in anarchic disruption, expressing this unique pleasure via the subgenre of on-line laughter known as “lulz.”

The geek grifters of Rick Dakan’s crime fantasy novels pull similar pranks for similar thrills, but they’re also in it for the cash. “This is just what we do for fun,” one character says—except, of course, that it’s also what they do for a living. Blackmail, demanding ransom, counterfeiting certifications of value for comic books, running an underground party. . . the list of crimes quickly reflects the quirkiness of this particular “crew.”

“Flat-out robbery and theft and even extortion were not the business they wanted to be in. Nor did they want to steal from anything who couldn’t afford it. They were supposed to be Robin Hood (or at least that’s what they told themselves so they could sleep at night).” But Robin Hood robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. These kids are anarchists, or claim to be, interested in causing chaos and making money.

Are they nihilists as well? It’s a little hard to tell too much about these characters, as characterization is one thing these books markedly lack. Two people tell each other, for instance, that they are in love, and one woman cries after she uses a remote control rifle to blow off a man’s head, but the outward expressions don’t seem reflective of any real inner life, just gestures to help move the plot along, get the guy in bed with the girl, get the crew out of one danger and into another.

Geek Mafia is set some years in the past, with lots of Internet chatter and more of a pulp edge. Mile Zerois set in Key West, where the grifters live out a sort of adolescent fantasy of high-tech play. It reads at times like a homage to Scooby Doo (with, of course, a cross-dressing Kung Fu expert), and defies not only logic but also its own attempts at reference to the real world. While the time is “post-911” and “institutional paranoia and limitless homeland security spending” are referenced, our characters live safely on Red Bull and string cheese, playing video games and rolling marks, fucking from time to time and keeping Hello Kitty gas masks under the bed.

The absurdity of the plots—electrified floorboards of a fortified house, the seizure of a pirate museum for a confrontation with a villain—wouldn’t matter so much if these novels didn’t come across as disturbingly vacant responses to well-publicized trends of contemporary life. While we, the readers, live increasingly in a surveillance state, Dakan’s crew lives in a world with an endless supply of endlessly hackable cameras and video screens. While we live in a society defining itself via voyeurism and self-exposure, Dakan’s grifters drift in and out of nude patio bars and live “off the grid,” not through layers of carefully fabricated identities but simply by being invisible, holed up in their headquarters or chasing after bad guys and marks in total anonymity, all the watching cameras neatly turned off. And when an older character says he respects Hunter S. Thompson for his ability and willingness to “speak truth to power,” it’s anachronistic; in the world Dakan creates you make your own power, and “truth” isn’t much of a worry. “NSA intercepts and FBI investigations and CIA assassinations” are mentioned in a speech intended to sound darkly prophetic, but the character giving the speech has just been beaten, and is a paranoid relic of another era, the world of the Weather Underground and a yearning for revolution rather than the world of Grand Theft Auto and the small pleasures of criminal pursuit and nerdy style.

Perhaps most disturbingly, “classic anarchy” in Dakan’s brave new world is represented as the incorporation of different grifter crews: “Why not model ourselves after the paragon of right-wing capitalist greed and exploitation?. . . I’m talking about a privately held, foreign-based holding corporation that can let us pool our resources, launder money, provide ready-made cover, establish untraceable lines of credit, even buy and sell real estate and big ticket property. Hell, even provide health insurance.” Meanwhile, the sorts of crimes presented as “practically a victimless score” hurt not only individuals—say, the man who believes his daughter has been kidnapped by thugs—but also the ideals of a non-anarchic world, what we call “society.” Protesting franchise corporate coffee by spraying fake blood over a crowd as part of an elaborate plot to extort right-wing talk radio listeners because they are “the most credulous, illogical people out there” isn’t good satire, it’s just taking the conventions of democracy—critical thinking, civil conversation, and peaceful demonstration, to name three concepts Dakan’s characters would find painfully stale—and disrupting them for the sake of cheap lulz.

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Jim Krusoe
Tin House Books ($14.95)

by Michael Jauchen

Girl Factory opens with vintage Jim Krusoe hi-jinks. Jonathan, the book’s narrator, visits an animal shelter intending to liberate a dog named Buck, who, after years of secret government testing, has developed human-like intelligence. But through a case of canine mistaken identity, the well-meaning Jonathan accidentally uncages a rabid-man eater named Megamon who immediately kills a Cub Scout and an old woman shopping for pets, and then heads out the door on the hunt for more victims. It’s the perfect opening for a novel that, from beginning to end, runs rambunctiously wild inside Jim Krusoe’s fictional world—a world dictated by pure chance, where oddness is the norm, and where the strip-mall blandness of American suburban life is rendered hilariously surreal and violent.

After Megamon’s release fades from the newspaper headlines and Jonathan can once again show his face on the streets of St. Nils (which, book by book, is becoming Krusoe’s own Yoknapatawpha County), Girl Factory settles down into its central action. One night, as he’s finishing his shift at Mister Twisty’s yogurt shop, Jonathan goes down to the basement and discovers a makeshift laboratory where six women, completely naked and unconscious, are preserved in giant, glowing cylinders full of a mysterious yogurt solution. As if that weren’t shocking enough, one of the girls happens to be the spitting image of Jonathan’s first love, Mary Katherine.

This strange discovery launches Jonathan on a journey that eventually comes to include murder, a creepy support group for widows and widowers, a former sea captain who spins yarns while chronically watering his lawn, a gun-toting health inspector, a zoo that’s been converted to an upper-crust hangout where the patrons get their kicks by heckling panthers, and oodles and oodles of exotically flavored yogurt. Jonathan charges himself with the task of reviving the preserved women, and as he conducts his DIY experiments, he fills us in on the events of his life that have brought him to this point—including his relationship with Mary Katherine and, in one of the novel’s funniest scenes, his father’s death at a Mexican poncho shop.

What sutures all of these disparate tidbits together is the unbelievably attuned narrative voice of Jonathan. Like the narrators of Krusoe’s Blood Lake and Iceland, Jonathan can editorialize, rationalize, and soliloquize about anything. He talks around things a lot, and he presents his off-kilter world to us with skewed similes (many reminiscent of Richard Brautigan at his best), a manic eye for detail, a propulsive syntax, and a cool but completely offbeat logic that would befit any Kafka anti-hero. Here’s Jonathan, for instance, recounting a memory sparked by one of his nightly examinations of the woman who might be Mary Katherine:

Her shins were as streamlined and smooth as the legs on a Danish Modern coffee table my parents once had. Her knees, friendly and yet fragile, were a symphony of flat and rounded planes, dimples and sinew. How often I had held Mary Katherine’s right knee in my left hand while she drove the two of us to the donut shop just a few miles down the road from my dorm, moving my hand only to change the station on the radio of her old Dodge from rock ‘n’ roll to easy listening and then back again; my other arm resting out the open window, as all the while I looked toward the horizon for my first glimpse of the giant donut sculpture strapped to the shop’s roof that would signal our destination, and which, come to think of it, seemed a premonition of the life that awaited us, although in different ways, at Mister Twisty’s.

Girl Factory is packed with writing like this, and repeatedly, just as Jonathan’s tangents seem to be spinning out of control and the writing starts reaching a little too far, Krusoe reels it all back in with the elegance, surprise, and seeming effortlessness of a natural-born humorist.

Perhaps the greatest thing about Girl Factory (and Krusoe’s fiction in general) is that while it’s wacky and outlandish and extremely funny, it also possesses an authentic pathos. Hidden beneath Jonathan’s labyrinthine language and digressive insights is a deeply lonely human being, and Krusoe manages to tinge all of his joking with sharp pangs of authentic heartbreak. When we witness a melancholy Jonathan sighing longingly at a girl who might be his ex-girlfriend in a Plexiglass canister full of yogurt, the scene’s not just funny—it’s also, in a strange way, incredibly moving.

In Girl Factory, Jim Krusoe has served up a shaggy dog tale of the highest quality. It’s impressive that a novel with so much to offer is as tightly constructed as it is, and it’s refreshing to come across prose this free-wheeling and fun. And though you can easily spot Krusoe’s precursors—Sterne, Kafka, Barthelme, Lynch—presiding over this book as its surrealistic and humorous godfathers, Girl Factory still manages to remain a work that’s wholly Krusoe’s own: hilarious, oddly touching, and dizzily readable.

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