Giorgio Agamben
translated by Luca di Santo and Kevin Atell
Zone Books ($24.95)

by Adrian Doerr

Since the publication of the English translation of The Coming Community in 1993, Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical work has held a prominent place in Anglo-American academic thought. Characterized by his immense subject range—spanning a field that moves from the political to the poetic—Agamben’s writings are above all dense affairs with complex conceptual turns condensed into tight sentences, often requiring several readings to penetrate their meaning. So it is no surprise that these qualities are on display in Agamben’s The Signature of All Things, a book devoted to working through some of Michel Foucault’s key methodological breakthroughs en route to laying out Agamben’s own conceptions of method. That such a text exposes some profound limitations of his own thought should probably not surprise us either.

The Signature of All Things is subdivided into three chapters, each inaugurated by the isolation and analysis of a specific concept, which serves a prelude to Agamben carrying out a broader analysis of this idea within the framework of Western philosophy. Chapter one, with its focus on the concept of “paradigm,” and chapter three, devoted to Foucault’s important theory of “archaeology,” both start explicitly with Foucault, while chapter two, begun with a reflection on Paracelsus, centers on a theory of “signatures.”

Notably, all three of these Foucauldian ideas are located primarily in The Archaeology of Knowledge andThe Order of Things, and these texts are the ones Agamben turns to the most to elaborate his arguments. This focus at first glance seems surprising, given both the greater scholarly interest in the past fifteen years in the “later” Foucault—the Foucault of governmentality, the dispersion of power across the social field, and the History of Sexuality series—and the weight Agamben places on this period of Foucault in his most influential book, Homo Sacer. Indeed, such an approach feels almost anachronistic at this point, a step back to the 1970s when these earlier works served to prompt a sea change within segments of almost every social science and humanities discipline. But there is a method to this selectiveness of Agamben, one that emerges explicitly in the final chapter, and serves to provide this text with the exigency for its methodological exploration.

Agamben isn’t overly concerned with arguing for the importance of Foucault’s methodology, or directly deconstructing rival methods, but rather with showing how it connects with some of his own theories. For example, the first chapter begins with a comparison between Foucault and Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm. Quickly, though, both thinkers are mostly left behind, allowing Agamben to connect this theory to the thoughts of, among others, Aristotle, Kant, Plato, Heidegger, and Goethe, and in this process illustrate how the notion of a paradigm exhibits a close relationship to his ideas about analogy and singularity.

In this case, a paradigm defies accommodation with any dualist or binary manner of thinking—which Agamben feels lingers behind many problems in Western thought, like the rigid separation between subject and object or human and animal—and instead “replaces a dichotomous logic with a bipolar analogical model.” This alternate method of paradigmatic knowing has the further quality of being ultimately rooted in its ontological status, with the consequence that the “historicity of the paradigm lies neither in diachrony nor in synchrony but in a crossing of the two.” This final idea becomes a running motif in Agamben’s text, as he evinces considerable concern in each chapter toward a rethinking of the temporal investigation of concepts and objects—a concern that makes its most serious claims in the book’s final chapter.

Before proceeding, though, a quick note on the style of the text, which is unfortunately littered with distracting rhetorical gestures that give off an air of elitism. This happens on the very first page of the preface: Agamben begins by stating, “Anyone familiar with research in the human sciences knows that, contrary to common opinion . . .” and repeats that final phrase, “contrary to common opinion,” only a few lines later, after having just pointed out how the “astute reader” of his text will have the clarity of mind to “determine what in the three essays can be attributed to Foucault, to the author, or to both.” While these phrases attempt to serve alternately as ideological critique (“common opinion”) and a performance of the author’s knowledge (“anyone familiar with”), they have the effect of foreclosing other interpretations while simultaneously allowing Agamben to evade providing proof for these opinions.

And it is proof, notoriously such a difficult and elusive aspect of conceptual arguments, which is allowed to go begging in the style of the text. As is typical for Agamben, slender page or page and a half sections within a chapter dwell on a quotation or two from a thinker, only to be linked in subsequent sections to selections from other philosophers by Agamben’s considerable conceptual dexterity and poetically evocative writing. It is these last two qualities that end up carrying so much of the argumentative weight of the text, since Agamben will often produce tremendous claims out of a few citations, claims that often seem quite a stretch given his limited source material.

Another problematic aspect of this text, which brings us back to its philosophical claims, is its overall approach. By ranging from philosopher to philosopher, finding nuggets and traces in so many thinkers for his project, Agamben reconstructs an unending narrative of Western philosophy, a continuity of ideas that stretches back from ancient Greece to the present. This reconstructs a profoundly idealist version of the world and thought, one that severely limits historical change and the influence of material reality upon the shaping of thought itself. And this is why Agamben has to assert the ontological primacy of the paradigm in chapter one—because for him, in the last instance, there is a continuous being of thought that retains its shape throughout time.

Such an interpretation appears premature at best, or erroneous at worse, given the importance Agamben places in the final chapter on history, where he suggests the human sciences need to rethink “the very idea of an ontological anchoring, and thereby envisag[e] being as a field of essentially historical tensions.” This comes at the very end of an argument circling around two key positions—one, a critique of a historical method based on “origins” and, two, a passionate call for a return to a linguistic method centered on a structural (and culturally based) model as opposed to the currently hegemonic Chomskian generative grammar (and its basis in biology)—and both are seriously flawed.

On this latter score, while a more culturally based approach is ultimately more correct—and the suggestion of a return to structuralism also sheds light on why Agamben would mostly stick to some of Foucault’s earlier work, which worked in a creative tension with that intellectual movement—it points out a serious limitation in the type of historical ontology Agamben is arguing for. Such a return paints movements in academic methods in an overly voluntary fashion, as if method is a simple choice for scholars, and not influenced by broader economic, political, and social forces. This is not to discount the responsibility of individuals in their research, but the rise of more biologically driven theories in the human sciences probably has more to do with the rise of conservatism in the last thirty to forty years in North American and Western Europe than with the mere preference of academics.

This blindness to broader social forces is also related to a misplaced critique of history as a search for origins. Basing his argument on Nietzsche, and Foucault’s important essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Agamben proceeds to attack this concept without offering any contemporary examples of this historical method in action. Indeed, to characterize the practice of history as a “search for origins,” especially in light of the significant changes in the discipline in past forty years (some directly inspired by Foucault), feels a bit hollow.

The result of displacing the study of history from origins to “effects,” as Agamben envisions, is a historicized ontology, which only raises more questions than it answers. For example, despite their cultural, economic, and geographic differences, is the historical ontology the same for a Sudanese peasant and a London stockbroker if they inhabit the same time frame? And is there a better paradigm of the use of historical ontology as a method than Martin Heidegger’s famous dramatization of the German people as fulfilling their destiny via the Third Reich?

In the end, Agamben’s approach leads to history becoming mystified into an endless circuit of ideas, where concepts always supersede actions and materiality, and the latter fail to alter and redefine the former. That such an approach continues to strike a chord with readers also seems symptomatic of the political and economic changes alluded to earlier—it is a perspective that suggests that “thinking more correctly” replaces all the dirty work of materiality.

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John D’Agata
W. W. Norton & Co. ($23.95)

by Cindra Halm

For readers who know the genre-bending lyric essays that John D’Agata writes about in and selects (as an editor) for Seneca Review, and for those who have read his own high-concept, high-construct poetic essays in Halls of Fame (Graywolf Press, 2001), About a Mountain may be a surprise. Reading at first like investigative journalism and morphing into a compendium of facts and quantifications, morphing again into personal and collective takes on forays, fears, habits, and failures, the book looks and acts like conventional prose rather than a rebel child of poetry.

For example, there are sentences that cohere into paragraphs instead of remaining a sequence of resonant lines surrounded by white space. There are interviews with experts and laypeople, snippets of personal experience, descriptions of Americana, examples from history, relentless numbers, possibilities, and associations—okay, D’Agata fans will recognize the list-making urge. Here, though, an objective framework of minimalistically linked sections reflects the methodology of both journalist and crisis counselor—who/what/when/where/why/how/why/why/why—and transforms, through layering and a rising pitch, into a subjective howling for all that is and could be lost. Most different from Halls of Fame, a consistent, forward-striving propulsion drives the prose, supported also by both the rapid-fire monosyllabic headings and the black and yellow crime-scene ticker-tape of a book jacket.

This is not so surprising for readers of D’Agata’s running commentaries about the history, form, and function of the essay as editor of two (out of a proposed trilogy) recent anthologies, and in special “lyric essay issues” of Seneca in which he expands and even recants some of his earlier and more stringent definitions of the form. The overall project seems to have wandered from the “how” of things into the “why,” and in reading About a Mountain, we come to know that “why” is dangerous territory. Risk still informs, resides, and rattles here, in unexpected ways different from more obvious structural manifestations.

Explicit topics: a summer in which the author helped to move his mother to Las Vegas and stayed; the politics of nuclear waste and Yucca mountain; a teenager’s suicidal jump from the Stratosphere Hotel; signs, sales, semiotics; human nature’s persistence for meaning-making; Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Implicit topics: the half-life of vernacular; the pull toward decay and decline; aggregates; how we need containment; countlessness; the leaps between experience and language; the reach of each primal voice.

You’ve got to read this book the whole way through. Its verve and profundity live in accretion, in connections made from the juxtapositions, sheer plethora of cataloging, and the exposé of language’s uses and methods. Part encyclopedia, part travelogue of the human animal’s posturings and vulnerabilities, part “Yes, there will be singing, /About the dark times” (Bertolt Brecht, from the poem, “Motto”), About a Mountain houses unabashed poignancy in addition to serious social and moral critique.

It’s very difficult to excerpt from this book because it’s an ecology, an archeological site of a civilization’s linked artifacts in which context is everything. Ultimately, the main character here is THE SIGN, in its literal, glitzy bulk (we are, after all, in Las Vegas), its undercurrents and blatancies of persuasion and propaganda, its attempts at representing experience. “Attempts,” from the French essai, conflates all the themes and scenes of the book, demonstrating the “meta” self-referential aspect, the ars poetica (ars essayica?) strand of discourse present to some extent in most of D’Agata’s work, by which the topic of essay writing itself ebbs and flows throughout the whole.

Late in the book, a kind of thesis statement to this effect emerges. Here is the author, reiterating the assessments of the Department of Energy’s panel of experts, assembled for the purpose of formulating a sign to mark Yucca Mountain’s nuclear waste storage facility: “We must find ourselves, the panel says, having an experience: an essaying into the purpose of what’s apparently purposeless, an essaying that tries desperately to cull significance from the place, but an essaying, says the panel, that must ultimately fail.” It’s not a plot spoiler to say that, as it turns out, a marker for a nuclear waste site and a metaphorical association with a teenager’s suicide may ultimately reflect a sense of meaninglessness.

About a Mountain, then, in addition to being a record of these experiences, is, in itself, an experience. It’s a rogue sign, an addition to and an accretion of the officially sanctioned one at the site, and the headstone marker of a troubled kid. Wildly informational, textural, guttural, this is what this extended essay does: though it cannot and does not exactly replicate the world, it makes a world, about the world, singing.

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Evan Brier
University of Pennsylvania Press ($49.95)

by Matthew Thrasher

The intellectual anxiety of our age is that no one reads anymore. Television and the Internet have murdered the book, skinned it, and now wear its mask throughout outer and cyber space—sleeping in its bed, living its life, and laying claim to its nexus of imagined benefits. Better than murder, this is identity theft; we haven’t left Crusoe in the library, we’ve put him on Broadway. But are we convinced that the imaginative sprawl of Starcraft II can match that of The Odyssey? How does watching Ray Winstone slay the Grendel in IMAX 3D compare to reading Beowulf? Don’t our pedagogues still believe they know a cross-dresser when they see one?

New media has a knack for mimicry. Because of this, the death of the book is not the end of meaningful mass culture; instead, it is a problem of postures. No one reads, but the more terrifying development may be that no one curls up. The cozy, cognitive relation between book and reader has mutated into the unflinching, passive gaze of the surfing couch potato and the Internet troll—Dante’s Inferno for X-Box notwithstanding. We’ve created a monster, and it’s turned against us. The doomsday scenario is not hard to imagine: a Dawn of the Living UnRead in which the final bastions of knowledge hold out against a swarm of increasing delinquency rates, spiking drop-out rates, and a widening achievement gap.

Now that the magnitude of the current dilemma has sunk in, rewind this conversation sixty years. Ask yourself, when have cultural commentators ever believed that people other than themselves read? Better yet, what consequences have such commentators attributed to a world without reading? In A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction, Evan Brier shows how these questions can arise in the most unlikely of times. The post-war United States witnessed the proliferation of the paperback, the development of the up-scale trade paperback, and the purchase of publishing houses by large media conglomerates. Books and novels were widely read and publishing was a lucrative business venture. Still, no one believed that the general public read.

Brier resists the tantalizing, yet timeless, question: why don’t people read? Rather, he proffers a richer alternative: why, in a particular historical moment, do we perceive the state of reading to be in crisis? And what does this say about the practitioners of reading—publishers, literary agents, and authors? One way to address this question in the 1950s was to turn to the Cold War. Vicious fear mongering among American elites engendered a culture of intellectual scarcity (not enough math, not enough reading). As long as there was Communism, there would be a perceived dearth of reading amongst the American public.

However, Brier demurs, eviscerating this powerful rhetoric of fear by revealing a series of multi-leveled contradictions that permeated the post-war book market. People may have had the USSR in mind when they claimed that no one read, but they also had in mind a series of novels that discredited mass culture while participating in it. Readers didn’t read themselves out of communism; they read themselves into believing that no one else read.

For Brier, the culprit was the publishing industry, not the reds. On one hand selling, on the other claiming that no one was buying, literary scions were publishing works of art that were both beyond the market and very much a part of it. Writers, too, played the game, spurning the rise of advertising while relying on famous friends to obsequiously review their works—a clandestine form of marketing. In Brier’s portrait of the post-war era, a repression of the popular was necessary to become popular in unpopularity.

And the rapidly evolving populace was ready to absorb the message. The rise of the English department and the surplus of GI Bill college grads allowed publishing hucksters to market the novel to a new middle-class that was not only more educated, but more discriminating in its cultural preferences as well. For the first time, publishers could market books to people who hated marketing—highbrow readers who believed that their intellect and their literature were singular.

In this scheme, analysis becomes a romantic psychoanalytic. Brier sits down with works such as The Sheltering Sky and Fahrenheit 451 and reveals their deep-seated anxieties regarding mass media and middle-brow culture. For instance, Bradbury’s classic work is not just about the horrors of state censorship; to Brier, it is about an author trying to come to terms with his medium. How can Bradbury’s work be so indebted to the rise of the paperback while at the same spinning a dystopian vision of a society in which mass-culture has triumphed over the free-thinking individual? At the same time, he sits down with the books’ readers. How could numerous individuals buy (and later come to adore) books that were explicitly opposed to being read by large quantities of people? Hence the unrequited romance of the post-war American novel: consumers came to love books that did not love them back.

A Novel Marketplace is a pulverizing work that operates on multiple levels to reconfigure the commonly held oppositions between blockbusters and art, television and literature, art pour l’art and the market. Brier does not content himself with an economic analysis of the novel. Instead, he reads what he perceives to be the post-war situation in the history of publishing, the biography of authors, and the very texts themselves. If the novel is losing its cultural prominence today, it is not because people have come to embrace mass media outlets such as television and the Internet. Nor is it because people have stopped reading. Instead, it is because there has been a fundamental shift in the institutional connections that allowed novels to flourish in the post-war era.

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René Backmann
translated by A. Kaiser
Picador ($12)

by Spencer Dew

Consider the village of Chiyah, where an Israeli-erected barrier “slices in between apartment buildings” and “loops around and through various religious properties (Christian monasteries, pilgrim hostels, churches, schools, and retirement homes),” cutting through “the landscape like a giant chain saw.” Here, as René Backmann describes it, “the wall separates Palestinians from Palestinians,” and “the only Israelis present in the vicinity are a few settlement families living in two old Palestinian homes,” a “‘wild’ settlement, called the Kidmat Zion . . . not on the list of official settlements published by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics” yet still “protected by the Border Police detachment that has set up shop in the former Cliff Hotel.” One could imagine a whole book about Chiyah—a number of books, even—but Backmann does not linger on the particulars of this place or its populace.

A Wall in Palestine takes as its mission an investigation of the contested “security barrier” (or “annexation wall”) dividing Israel from the West Bank, and there is much ground to cover. Backmann wants to prompt his readers to ponder why “the length of this continuous obstacle was estimated at nearly 435 miles when the line that serves as the border between Israel and the West Bank is no longer than 202 miles.” For this purpose, he has included maps, from which one can see how the wall gobbles its way into the West Bank, bisects communities, and disregards the 1949 “Green Line” border. These maps, while shocking, are also somewhat lifeless; roads “forbidden or with restricted access for Palestinians” are marked, but it’s unclear if all roads are. No population data for towns or settlements is given, and there is no charting of past entrance points for terrorists. Standing alone, these maps can be read as objective fact or as a reflection of a specific ideology, but Backmann’s decision not to accompany them with direct commentary and explanation is troubling, as are the larger lacks, in his book—a lack of clear speaking when it comes to goals and a lack of detailed engagement with human particulars.

Backmann’s journalistic style tends toward dry narration; even in his quickly related interviews of architects and victims of the divider, there are few real glimpses of character or encapsulations of the human cost of the wall’s presence. There is a moment with a man who explains how his morning commute out of Jerusalem is only fifteen minutes while it takes him “two to three hours to get back home at the end of the day, because of checkpoint delays,” but Backmann speeds away from this rich and relatable anecdote to more facts and figures, which, while addressing the scale of the economic catastrophe wrought by the wall, don’t express it nearly as well. Likewise, Backmann interviews a shepherd whose ability to pasture his sheep was prevented by the erection of the barrier. “I sold a part of [the herd] to make a little money,” he says, “and slaughtered the others, one by one, to feed my family. May Allah punish the Israelis for what they do to us!” In two sentences we have poignancy and rage, the banal reality of oppression and a disquieting glimpse into the sort of religious fanaticism that fuels violence on both sides of the wall. But Backmann moves on; religion as a motivating force is of no concern for this book.

There is undoubtedly a larger goal here, but it is vaguely defined. “Can Barack Obama reopen the road to peace,” Backmann asks at the close of his book, at which point many readers will surely flip back to see if they missed the chapter where the conflict itself was explained. But Backmann, dealing with such a literally concrete manifestation of policy as the wall, remains abstract as to his conclusions and what he aims for his book to accomplish. “What if today’s security threat to Israel came not from the surrounding region, but also from the misguided decisions of its own leaders?” he asks. “Does Israel imperil its chances at peace and security by showing indifference to Palestinian human rights; by refusing to acknowledge or at least entertain the possibility that Palestinian anger springs from the legitimate desire for liberty; by assuming that all Palestinians are complicit with international terrorism; and by repeatedly casting irresponsible accusations of anti-Semitism at anyone who attempts to criticize Israeli policies and decisions?” As with the question about Obama, these mouthfuls seem shockingly unrelated to anything earlier in the book. We have heard neither accusations of Jew-hatred nor international terrorism. While we have heard about outbursts of “anger” (the 2001 Dolphinarium discotheque bombing is mentioned, in passing), there is nothing like a practical sense of what Palestinian “liberty” might look like—save for, I suppose, the absence of the wall.

I found it impossible to read Backmann’s book without comparing it to other works, comparisons not to Backmann’s advantage. A Wall in Palestine covers similar ground to Nida Sinnokrot’s engaging documentary “Palestine Blues,” pursuing similar questions about the curves and loops along the divider’s route—though Sinnokrot, carrying a camera into the orchards and up to the faces of the people affected, makes maps come alive, cry, sing. Backmann, attempting to contextualize this wall within what is often euphemistically neutered as “the situation,” ends his study with a chronology not of events “directly pertaining to the wall” (though these are noted with an asterisk), but of the modern state of Israel, beginning in 1896 with the publication of Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State and ending in 2009, with Netanyahu’s rejection of a freeze on settlements. Again, some readers will see objective fact and others a narrative of bias, but, in any case, the book makes no other gesture toward such a scope of history. It can hold nothing, then, against Adina Hoffman’s portrait of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali and his milieu, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness. Hoffman expertly alternates between a wide-lens survey of the past and vivid engagement with the particularities of the people enduring this “situation,” both Israeli and Palestinian. Hoffman, for instance, would have spent enough time with that shepherd to parse out his idiosyncrasies and present him as a full person, located in history.

Ultimately, the book I thought of the most, as I plodded through Backmann’s pages of statistics on settlements or surveys of judicial decisions, was Philip Gourevitch’s masterful study of the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. Gourevitch, like Hoffman, untangles the various strands that led to the present while, via self-examining narration, engaging in empathetic encounters with people involved in, or able to offer some insight on, the events he’s investigating. Backmann’s book remained distant, the reality obscured, which is deeply unfortunate for a book with such an urgent subject. Luckily, we have Sinnokrot’s film, but this is far from enough. Backmann’s shortcomings should jolt others into action, and the wearying way he skims over moments that should be given deep attention will, at the very least, prompt readers to try to imagine all that Backmann does not offer. Consider this fact that he relays:

For security reasons, Palestinian vehicles are no longer allowed to enter Israel, except for humanitarian purposes. It is now impossible for a resident of Bethlehem, for example, to drive to Jerusalem, fill her car up with goods, and drive back. Drivers from the West Bank must leave their cars in the terminal parking lot, cross the terminal by foot—if they have a permit—and, on the other side, take one of the new buses from there into the city. The ticket costs 1.5 shekels. The bus drivers, carefully chosen and trained by Israeli security services, are responsible for verifying that their passengers have the required permits, and will lose their license should they make any error.

Hoffman or Gourevitch would have given us that woman from Bethlehem, and given us that driver, too, made us feel what that 1.5 shekel could cost and have some sense of the experience of that walk and that ride. Backmann, in his presentation, raises question after question. The very mention of special security training for bus drivers deserves some detailed follow-up, but A Wall in Palestine has no time for such texture, such realistic consideration; its author moves too quickly, on too broad a survey of his topic, in a quest for far too vague a peace.

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Christopher Finch
Prestel USA ($23)

by Mason Riddle

It is hard not to know who Chuck Close is. From his recent appearance on The Colbert Report to the New Yorker ad in which he is clothed in a black leather jacket and the “artist edition” Philip Glass T-shirt he designed for Gap, Close has accrued a media persona that soars way above the conventional notion of visual artist as celebrity. Authored by his longtime friend and colleague Christopher Finch,Chuck Close: Life attempts to grasp the magnitude and sheer force of the artist’s aesthetic and humanitarian reach, with mixed results.

For the uninitiated, Close revolutionized the sleepy genre of portraiture, transforming it from a passive to a dynamic act of seeing for both the viewer and the maker. Beginning with his first, staggeringly monumental, black and white Big Self-Portrait from 1968—acquired soon thereafter by the Walker Art Center, where Finch was then a curator—Close’s portraits, including those of his wife Leslie, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, President Bill Clinton, and Brad Pitt, among others, have raised the barometric pressure of the human face to levels heretofore unknown. Close has depicted his “heads” in a variety of scales ranging from little more than six inches in height to just shy of ten feet, and through a variety of media—oil and acrylic on canvas, pastel, watercolor, print, daguerreotype, and jacquard tapestry.

Now 70, Close’s own visage—shaved head, salt and pepper goatee, and steady gaze behind round ever-present glasses—is still striking, and he continues to document it in one form or another. That Close moves through his daily life in a wheelchair due to a traumatic physical Event (capitalized by the artist) in December 1988, which tragically left him a partial quadriplegic, has only intensified his drive to make art, his humanity, and his will to evolve and succeed.

Life is divided into three sections: Close’s early life in the state of Washington, BFA and MFA from Yale, and teaching career at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; his subsequent time in New York City, from the Soho struggles of the mid-1960s to his burgeoning success in the 1980s; and the post-Event years, in which the artist has had to recreate his life and make art under an entirely new set of rules. In each section, however, the reader all but tanks in a tsunami of information. While some of it is certainly necessary, do we really need to know so much detail about grandparents and aunts and uncles? That Close had a number of serious physical ailments since he was a child is useful context, but after a few rundowns we get the idea that he had the will to overcome them in creative ways. It’s also brought up more than once that after his 48-year-old father died when he was twelve, his supportive but controlling mother made him sleep with her in the same bed; perhaps curious, it leads to little else later in the book. And following Close’s tragic Event, Finch reminds us unrelentingly how difficult it is to be a partial quadriplegic, and the great toll it took on Close, his wife Leslie, and their daily routine.

Finch is also prone to interpreting or analyzing a situation with “might have” or “may have” to the point of reader frustration. For example, of the separation and divorce of Leslie and Chuck Close in 2009-10, Finch writes: “In retrospect, it seems that extreme contrasts in personality might eventually have placed a severe strain on the marriage even without the unthinkable complications imposed on the situation by Chuck’s disability. That possibility would have been easier to deal with because it would not have been weighted with all of the feelings of guilt and bad faith that ultimately followed the cataclysm.”

Finch’s knowledgeable discussion of Close’s various styles, materials, and process is enlightening, but his frequently lengthy descriptions are underserved by the relative lack of images (although a companion volume titled Chuck Close: Work is available from the same publisher). The book succeeds most as a social history of the early years of New York’s downtown art scene, and in putting Close at the center of its transformation—the reader truly gets a sense of its maturation from the mid-1960s to the present day. Ultimately, however, Chuck Close: Life suggests that personal, decades-old friends may not make the best biographers.

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Edited by Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery
University of Iowa Press ($39.95)

by Patrick James Dunagan

Robert Creeley held a privileged and problematic role in American poetry, and his death marks the end of a critical stage in its development. As Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery’s Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work makes clear, Creeley bridges Modernism with Postmodernism: grounded in his early passion for D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound, Creeley held a central place at the heart of various mid-century poetry communities, including Black Mountain College, the second generation New York School/northern California nexus of the 1960s and ’70s, and the beginnings of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school. Throughout Creeley’s work, his concern is always to be there in the writing and the living, merging them into a single take, and to expand upon how one goes about knowing, engaging, and getting on with it: continually facing the present act of writing without predetermination or anticipation of the finished poem.

Form, Power, and Person marks the occasion of a SUNY Buffalo conference in October 2006, a year and a half after the poet’s death, where versions of these essays were first presented. Sudden, wintry environmental conditions nearly forced a complete last minute cancellation, and “participants spontaneously shifted panels from the unreachable north campus to a conference room at the hotel,” shrinking the audience to mostly one of fellow presenters—which makes this publication all the more a blessing. This collection provides a range of fittingly varied critical approaches, though the emphasis throughout is on the poems, with little to no attention given to the numerous essays, reviews, stories, or other work; however, there is a substantial focus on connecting the poems to various practices of Creeley’s living as evidenced in his interviews, correspondence, and teaching.

Although this is a particularly academic grouping, the broad range and style of writing hardly ever makes for dry reading. In his introduction, Stephen Fredman remarks that, “One of the hallmarks of [Creeley’s] writing and conversation alike was a personal vocabulary and syntax” and further observes how “Creeley’s nakedness is most conspicuously displayed in his intimate relationship with words.”Fittingly, included here are valuable engagements with Creeley’s early years of conflict over his identity as a man and husband, friend and lover. Michael Davidson takes up careful consideration of Creeley’s poem “The Finger,” making connections evident with the masculine rage Rachel Blau DuPlessis explores in her treatment of the complex layers of Creeley’s obsession and appraisal of “hole” imagery, from his own childhood loss of his left eye to the occurrences of vaginal and rectal references.

Marjorie Perloff offers an acute reckoning of the, dull negative commentaries churned out on Creeley throughout the ’60s and ’70s—which leads into a close reading of Creeley’s “The Rain” in relation to Williams, Robert Lowell, and Apollinaire, as well as brief consideration of Creeley as a non-Concrete poet via Augusto de Campos. Both Charles Altieri and Alan Golding pursue distinctive critical discussions of specifics of Creeley’s poetic sequences of the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Peter Middleton gives a personal remembrance of his time as a student of Creeley’s in Buffalo during the fall of 1977, which he manages to lead into useful consideration of Creeley’s particular tactic of sharing with the class his own poetic meandering thought in monologue musing during any particular week. While it’s interesting to hear that assigned texts included Charles Olson’s The Special View of History, Robert Duncan’s The Truth & Life of Myth, and Duncan McNaughton’s Sumeriana, it is more interesting to hear that Creeley

did not teach Olson’s work, for the talk was not, as most professors would have offered, about authors and texts . . . the lecture appeared at first to meander around what one might loosely call epistemological (he himself avoided all such jargon) questions, which Creeley carefully traced out, following one lead and then another as the sequences of thought reached a conclusion only to point out a new trail, or come to a dead end that necessitated starting over.

Middleton’s residual excitement throughout is infecting:

The overriding emphasis in these classes was on the “authority of information” we should look for in poetry . . . no existing knowledge carried such authority. Even the authority of his own discourse should not be taken for granted. His performative teaching continually demonstrated right in front of us the importance of the practice of learning and writing which informed his poetry, in the hope that we would learn to emulate the rigors of such inquiry in our own research and possibly our own poetics, rather than file his utterances as facts.

Benjamin Friedlander’s adept discussion of Creeley’s writing as experience takes account of how poems, for Creeley, are based in living moments: “consider ‘The Act of Love,’ a poem in which Creeley tries to work out what it might mean to perform love—not the physical act of making love but the experiential act we call being in love.” As so often is the case in Creeley’s poems, it is the exercise of thought which informs the poem. Peter Quartermain explores the question of what makes a “political poem” for Creeley, emerging after a thorough consideration to the realization that Creeley’s poems “engage the reader in immediacy of apprehension and thought” and that as Creeley himself said, “Language is a political act.”

In his later poems celebrating memories of past friendships, Creeley continued living the writing, as Libbie Rifkin’s opening reference to “for Mitch” in her essay on Creeley’s friendship with Denise Levertov attests: “a poem of great regret, both for the general fact of surviving, as he put it in another poem, ‘the continuing, echoing deaths’ of so many good friends, and, more painfully and particularly, for not having been a good friend.” Such memorial poems, “reflect . . . distance, but they also suggest something of the tone of the relationship at . . . periods of real significance.” Creeley engages with the past, present, and future by re-living the past through the writing and allowing his own feelings and understanding of the relationship to unfold within it.

This collection offers opportunity for understanding Creeley’s “growth” evidenced in his poetry from the ’50s onward, providing an entry point for the uninitiated as well as offering much for the familiar student and scholar. The majority of writings presented are not available elsewhere, and the few that are have been revised. It remains fascinating how many sides to Creeley are to be found in his poetry, interviews, and correspondence. The poet never turns the same ear in the same manner twice.

Despite various criticisms during periodic changes in his work, Creeley never wrote the same poem—except, in his own words, to “find [him]self saved, in words.” This collection stands as testament to the lasting value the work shall continue to hold for readers: drawing them in, only perhaps later to repel them, and then draw them in again. By turns, Creeley’s work is playful, bothersome, loving, proverbial, probing, offensive, mad, inspiring, and tyrannical. Above all, it offers evidence of a wisdom-fool who arrives at no definite answers in pursuit of profound questions throughout his life.

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Erik Anderson
Otis Books/Seismicity Editions ($12.95)

by Paula Koneazny

In his preface, Erik Anderson describes The Poetics of Trespass as a twofold project of walking and writing: “Over several weeks during February and March of 2007, I walked out the letters of the word ‘pastoral’ across a span of twenty blocks in central Denver, using my apartment as the epicenter. These are the pictures of those tracings.” In writing upon his city’s streets, sidewalks, alleys, and open spaces, he is, in part, quoting Paul Auster’s City of Glass, in which a writer of detective fiction discovers that a man he has been hired to trail is walking the streets of Manhattan in a pattern that spells out Tower of Babel. Anderson here records his own, analogous “attempt to inscribe language into a non-linguistic space.”

In choosing the word pastoral for his inscription, the author expresses his desire to return the country to the city, to trace curves where experience is usually constrained by right angles. However, just as pastoral poetry describes a romanticized ideal rather than a more complicated reality, Anderson realizes that dualistic terms such as urban and rural, pristine and scarred, symmetrical and asymmetrical may mean little to nothing at all, since “the city can’t help but revert to the country—corners to curves—even as the country is transformed into the city.”

Anderson often begins a day’s walk by cataloging the cast-off objects or people that he encounters. Such urban accounting brings to mind Brenda Coultas’s The Bowery Project, in which she observes and records “activities that occurred and . . . objects that appeared on a brief section of the Bowery between Second Street and Houston.” Both poets make use of their respective cities, reclaiming them as civic space, in the sense of space utilized by citizens. While “trespassing,” Anderson encounters obstacles: streets and sidewalks laid out in a grid that make tracing an o or a cursive a difficult; urban neighborhoods that present dangers for pedestrians, as he learns when he is mugged “near the corner of 9th and Washington . . . walking unsuspectingly along a hedge.”

Writing by walking is an ephemeral, if not entirely hidden, activity. In this respect it is akin to the land art, such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Dennis Oppenheim’s Cancelled Crop, that Anderson discusses in conjunction with much larger and more enduring transformations of landscape: the redesign of the streets of Paris during the 19th century, the construction-by-reconstruction of Central Park in New York when “the hills the city’s fathers had previously flattened” were rebuilt, and an immense island-building development underway in Dubai. In fact, one can view Denver itself as a gigantic installation comprising many smaller compositions, both transient and semi-permanent, within its borders.

In addition to the layout and architecture of cities, Anderson muses about paintings he recalls, including Tintoretto’s The Rape of Helen and two paintings on exhibit in a small museum gallery devoted to “The Scholar’s Tradition” of Asian Art. Accident plays a role in his selections: he doesn’t choose to look at the painting “Mountain Landscape” for aesthetic reasons; it just happens to be hanging on the wall opposite the only chairs in the gallery. Similarly, getting mugged and visiting the emergency room aren’t part of Anderson’s plan. Nevertheless, The Poetics of Trespass ends up including a photograph of the exact spot where he was attacked while tracing the letter O.

Walking as a form of writing practice has a long tradition. Prose writing by poets does as well. Nevertheless, the shift to prose causes Anderson some anxiety: “I’m not certain what it says about me as a poet that I am only able to take long walks, write in a meandering prose, or sit in abandoned galleries staring at forgotten paintings. I worry that I am no longer a poet. I feel the poem has gone dead in me, and that this work, obsessed with poetry, is as close to a poem as I can come.” That said, Anderson sometimes achieves in his prose the kind of compression associated with poetry. For example, when he remarks, while looking up at Denver’s version of the World Trade Center, that the “bank logo at the top of one of the towers reflects in the glass of the other,” he opens up his poetics to a discourse about politics and socio-economics. That discourse, although not in the book, is suggested by the image.

“The Neighbor,” a series of prose poems or short-short essays in which the author reflects upon two movies, Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood For Love and its sequel, 2047, closes out the book. In this section, the author continues to think about cities, neighborhoods, art and the constraints built and legislated into civic space. Functioning as an addendum or coda, it relates The Poetics of Trespass, with its references to Martin Heidegger’s house of Being, to that same philosopher’s notion of man as the neighbor of being. Although not absolutely necessary for Erik Anderson’s book to feel complete, “The Neighbor” adds some tangential yet intriguing discussion to what still would be a fascinating but slimmer volume without it.

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Bill Clegg
Little, Brown ($23.99)

by Scott F. Parker

In the urgent, present-tense prose by now standard for addiction memoirs, Bill Clegg’s Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man recounts a prodigious attempt at self-destruction followed by his eventual recovery. It’s a familiar narrative, and one that necessarily undermines any suspense; the fact of the book’s existence evinces Clegg’s rehabilitation. The guaranteed redemption explains some of this sub-genre’s popularity, but there’s also the attraction of peeking into a world of unfamiliarity—in this case, the world of crack cocaine.

Opening his story in medias res, Clegg eagerly reveals the desperation of crack-addiction: “I can’t leave and there isn’t enough.” He’s six days into the month-long binge that is the book’s central story. During this binge he will blow, or rather burn, through a small beach’s worth of crack rocks and many thousands of dollars—paying for, in addition to drugs, all sorts of vodka, hotel rooms, and airfare he won’t use. It’s a committed attempt at self-destruction, and one of the author’s triumphs is to cop to the intentionality of this obliterating urge rather than present his addiction as simply a case of pursuing pleasure too far.

Clegg doesn’t feel compelled to offer a cause for his drug abuse, but in alternating chapters he does interrupt the story of his demise with flashbacks from his childhood. Until about halfway through the book when the flashbacks begin to coalesce into a real background and the narrator into a real character,Portrait relies on the immediacy of its language and crack-hit-length blocks of prose. The book comprises hundreds of compact scenes separated by white space, a strategy evocative of how memory works and reminiscent of Nick Flynn’s memoirs. These short passages have a tendency to reach for punchy endings that keep the reader moving on to the next one, and they occasionally get melodramatic. Take for example these lasts lines, all from the first chapter: “It’s daybreak and the dealers have turned off their phones”; “stems are destroyed”; “by some unwanted miracle my heart hasn’t stopped.”

It’s a relief in Portrait’s second half when Clegg stops trying so hard to impress the reader—as the tone cools it becomes easier to care about the narrator—but the reader never gets behind him all the way, because there just isn’t much there to get behind. Clegg fails to present a thoughtful guide through his drug-addiction. Instead, he leaves us with his drug-addicted former self for the majority of the book.

Here’s Clegg in reference to holding hands with his boyfriend, Noah, while having sex with a prostitute: “And I will remember how convinced I was that night—as I had been every night with him before—that knowing what he knew, seeing what he’d seen, putting up with what he chose to put up with, he was the only one who ever could. The question I never asked was why.” Why is indeed a good question that, as it goes unanswered, reveals the book’s biggest flaws. We know next to nothing about Noah, in fact, the central person in the narrator’s life. Late in the book, when Clegg writes, “He seems less like a person and more like a figment from a dream I once had, some nocturnal wonder I cannot revive after sleep, only remember,” all the reader can do is agree.

Clegg’s failure to think about why Noah put up with him is indicative of the book as a whole, which contains almost no reflection from the narrator. This style, seemingly motivated by the Hemingway iceberg principle, may work nicely in fiction but it doesn’t tend to suit memoir very well, and leaves this book feeling somewhat vapid. Lyrical and descriptive as Clegg’s writing can be, his reluctance to make sense of Portrait’s events reduces its reach.

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Georges Perec
translated by Marc Lowenthal
Wakefield Press ($12.95)

by Kevin Carollo

to see not just the rips, but the fabric (but how to see the fabric if it is only the rips that make it visible: no one ever sees buses pass by unless they’re waiting for one, or unless they’re waiting for someone to come off of one . . .)

The city is where we are most together and apart together. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, the most banal objects or quotidian trajectories become marvelous moments of anonymous being. This is perhaps what Georges Perec and his fellow Oulipo practitioners inherited from the Surrealists—the belief in the resonant meanings of everyday language and life. The marvelous is found in the dynamic intersection of language and the material world, or the “hundreds of simultaneous actions, micro-events, each one of which necessitates postures, movements, specific expenditures of energy.” The initial clinical tone of the text soon makes way for the delectably poetic nature of An Attempt. By observing the intricate “fabric” of one urban intersection, Perec creates a strikingly beautiful poem out of the everyday, observed world.

The poetic potential of this particular experiment should be noted at the outset. Criticism of Oulipo, or the “Workshop of Potential Literature,” necessarily tends to focus on the scientific or “experimental” nature of the group. Perec himself is, after all, perhaps best known for A Void (La Disparition), a 300-page novel about disappearance written entirely without the letter “e” (or, alternatively, as author of the world’s longest palindrome). The end result of An Attempt suggests quite a dramatic kind of epiphanic potentiality imminent in all people, places, and things—and yet this somehow occurs in the humble, understated way of the everyday. Little haikus creep more than leap out of the text:

People stumble. Micro-accidents.
A 96 passes by. A 70 passes by.
It is twenty after one.

Here, Perec is ostensibly just listing everything he can observe, but it reads more like a profound insight into the nature of existence—people are micro-accidents, aren’t they? And, though Perec is merely noting the passing buses and time of day, their ritual and predictable trajectories make one think about how they reflect our banal and “infraordinary” lives. An elision of metaphysical boundaries also occurs between the humans and pigeons of the square: “The pigeons at my feet have a fixed stare. So do the people looking at them.” This observation sets up another nice haiku:

All the pigeons settle on the plaza.
The lights turn red (they do this often)
Scouts (same ones) pass by the church again

Perec chooses a decidedly local focus in both space and time for his experiment—the Place Saint-Sulpiceduring a weekend in October 1974—but in so doing he strikes a chord of universality in the urgent and ephemeral course and commerce of urban experience. He soon realizes his attempt to somehow exhaust this place by describing it is doomed to delightful failure; exhaustion implies a completion or mastery that both the place and writing resist. In his cogent afterword, translator Marc Lowenthal calls the project a “noble exercise in futility.” Nor does it seem that Perec ultimately cares to be objective about the objects he observes. One day he obsessively records the passing of buses, the next day he’s “lost all interest in them.” Are they the same buses? That is for you to decide. Meanwhile, this beautiful little tome of urban motion and “Ghostliness” from the past is truly haunting.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010