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HORSE AND RIDER

Melissa Range
Texas Tech University Press ($21.95)

by Russ Brickey

Recently, at a poetry panel somewhere in the Midwest, a traveler from New York stood up. “Where is the terror?” he shouted at the five poets sitting in front of the room. “We in New York live with terror. We have planes coming at us every day and it’s only a matter of time before one of them takes something else down. Why isn’t that in your poetry?”

The traveler’s quarrel is not particularly unique; a common complaint against poetry these days is that it has little to do with the “real world.” Poets, the critics contend, are self-indulgent and disassociated, and lyrical excess has overcome any sort of social obligation; conversely they sometimes argue that social obligation in poetry is simply the rehashing of clichéd ideals. What readers such as the traveler from New York seem to want is an overt expression of our age’s unpredictable violence and the fear that we may all become victims of it. But contemporary poetry often shies away from the overt metaphor, and many argue that this is its power—poetry is for the mind, an arabesque of image and language, inner voice talking to inner voice so that we can overhear and make meaning from the conversation.

Melissa Range, a Walt McDonald First Book award winner, actually bridges the gap between the necessity of interiority and the necessity of speaking to the world. She writes about violence and its sublimated terror, yet Range has managed to attack the subject without losing the quiet edge that sets poetry apart from the loud mainstream of postmodern culture.

Each poem in Horse and Rider is dedicated to one aspect of warfare, be it a portrait of Achilles walking the beach after battle, a self-portrait of Samson, or the devices of war themselves: each poem in part two of the collection, “The Warhorse,” gives voice to an accouterment of the battlefield. “The Battle-Axe,” for instance, speaks directly to the reader:

Because not every yeoman can afford
a sword, I make myself available
for more than farm or forest chores.

The reserve, what is left unspoken, is what is spookiest about these lines. “I make myself available” the Battle Axe says to us, its gristly psychopathology glaring between the lines. But then, like a true assassin, the Axe is proud of its ability to hew and rend:

I’ve bisected the breastplate, hewn
the helm, and beheaded the berserker
while the knight’s still reaching for his scabbard.

Nevertheless, none of us, not even the formidable Axe, is free from class warfare: “But still, they want to battle and to die / by a princely, pricey sword” the Axe laments a line later. The hand grenade, the javelin, even the marginalized tent peg get their turn at the dramatic monologue. “They’ve sown your field with dragon’s teeth,” the Landmine says, “That’s me: a sheathed spark, a seething seed.” The Arrow taunts ravenously: “Bonnie boy, I’ll get beneath your bodice: / I’m the bodkin that flies broad and lodges deep.” The Trebuchet (a medieval catapult used in siege warfare) is actually rather introspective: “Like you, I’m an ingenious engine,” it says to the reader, “the union of force and intellect.” We, like the missile launchers of yore, are force and intellect; we too, Range seems to be telling us, are ye olde engines of death.

Other poems in the book explore less usual suspects. “The Canary” is victim to the mine blast. “Dragging Canoe” paraphrases Chief Tsiyu Gansini of the Cherokee nation and leader of the Chickamauga resistance on the American Frontier: “I’m a child of this dark and bloody ground,” the character says, revitalizing one of the Chief’s most famous statements. A “Prayer” is “An axe-blow like a pallet through the roof, // a mallet that can flurry monoliths / to sand.”

Horse and Rider takes us to the realization that there is nothing particularly unique about fearing the suicide bomber or the hijacker; violence, war, and the sociopathic willingness to kill and maim is as old as humanity. The battle-axe and the hand grenade have exactly the same purpose, even the same register. In a singular and smart voice, Range speaks directly to the Western reader during a time of warfare; at the same time, she speaks to the long and bloody memory of our species and to any reader of any time or place.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

BEYOND THE FIRE

Mary Leader
Shearsman Books ($15)

by Kate Angus

Mary Leader’s third collection of poetry, Beyond the Fire, is the work of a restless and inquisitive mind. Rather than adhering to any set narrative or thematic arc, the overarching structure here is that of formal inquiry—the poet seems to be investigating what will happen if she eschews traditional line breaks and instead indicates a pause by alternating bold and regular typeset, as she does in “Mnemosyne,” or how she can hew a shape out of the white space in “Queen of Heaven” so that the visual shape of the poem echoes its mentions of roses and becomes both blossom and root. This is not to say that the book lacks emotion or an animating presence—the voice in these poems is assured, tender, and wry—so much as that the poems assert a fierce intelligence, forcing what is said to grapple with a series of constraints imposed on how it is said.

These formal concerns are important, and provide the book with, paradoxically, both its greatest strengths and its weakest moments. The danger of relying on explorations of form is twofold: the poem may become interesting primarily as a formal exercise, and the form itself may lack interest. Leader, on occasion, is subject to both these dangers. “They Vibrate,” for example, consists of long lines of repeated word pairs in alternating superscript and subscript. This technique creates a space between the words that does indeed seem to blur and vibrate, but the paired words (red/blue, whore/virgin, mars/venus, crest/trough, she/he, etc.) already exist in such obvious relationship that the variants Leader introduces are not always strong enough to derail the reader’s forward momentum. For those inclined to luxuriate in details and incremental movement, there is a pleasure to be found in exploring the liminality Leader plays with here, but readers whose aesthetic interests do not lean toward typographical acrobatics may feel shut out.

Leader’s most effective poems—and there are many in this collection—tend to be ones where the form is neatly balanced by content and where both contain surprises. “Rosh Hashanah Sutra,” for instance, declares its allegiance to openness in the dual religious traditions of its title, and consists entirely of a catalogue of various Shofars, including the lovely sequence

Urgent-unnamed-bird Shofar;
Manhole-cover-struck-by-tire-quickly-lifted-set-down Shofar;
Man-and-woman-passionately-but-not-violently-arguing Shofars;
Footfalls-upstairs Shofar;
She-who-pronounces-the-words-honey-cake Shofar;
Kettle Shofar;
Doorbell Shofar;
Stack-of-plates Shofar;
So-called silence Shofar;

Extending this list upwards to fifty lines, the poet’s careful culling of worldly details turns the catalogue into a prayer in which the mundane is sanctified through observation.

Perhaps Leader’s multifaceted intelligence is best showcased in the book’s opening poem, “Tallit with Stripes from the Book of Judges,” which weaves together a history of suicide, destruction, and creation as it tells the story of a place famous for its prized blue dye. The poem upends both our narrative expectations (a girl’s body is anointed with “a clear liquid,” and “Then / A little repentance entered the woman’s heart, / But too late: the girl had already come back to life”), as well as our sense of place as Leader describes and revises the landscape (“Storms and berries were the exact colors of each other” later becomes “Storms and berries were the exact opposite of white”). The plain text of the poem is punctuated by italicized bold type lines culled from the Tanakh (the stripes promised in the title); this by extension implies the poem is the tallit, and thus transmogrifies script into the sacred.

Although there are moments when Leader’s reliance on formal exploration undermines the overall strength of her poems, Beyond the Fire is also replete with the type of moments A.R. Ammons called “splendid occasions”—the perfect meeting of external and internal forms.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

APPROACHING ICE

Elizabeth Bradfield
Persea Books ($15)

by Lucy Bryan Green

In this mesmerizing voyage to a land “more ice than earth,” Elizabeth Bradfield probes the lives of polar explorers, the people they left behind, and the desires that propelled them. She embarks on this journey “Because this life, this alarm clock time card / percolator direct deposit income tax stop light // seems vast and blank and numbing.” To the vacuousness of modern existence she responds by guiding her readers to “the plenty at the poles”—a frigid wilderness populated not only by caribou, seals, emperor penguins, and polar bears, but also by adventurers, scientists, athletes, and tourists.

The rich detail in these imagistic, highly readable histories originates in the decade’s worth of research undergirding Approaching Ice. In one portrait, early Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, “romantic past all sense,” starves “in his tent eleven miles from cached supplies.” In another, the photographer aboard Shackleton’s ill-fated Endurance “plunge[s] shirtless into the slushy hold” to save glass negatives. The poet expresses this hope to the adventurers she resurrects:

that despite my distance
and the tendency of light
over ice toward mirage,
some shape comes through
that both of us
can recognize.

Bradfield’s burning devotion to her subjects gleams brightly against the glacial landscapes they occupy.

The voice of the poet also comes close to autobiography in a series of prose poems entitled “Notes on Ice in Bowditch.” Using definitions from a navigation handbook, she reflects on the intricacies of love. Under the entry for “ice breccia,” Bradfield writes: “Patchwork sewn tight with freeze into one big blanket. The old, old blue with the new white. Different strengths and ways of being brittle. This is my answer to the years between us. There can be fusing. There is a name for it.” With a speaker who frequently submerges herself in the third person, these interludes provide welcome moments of intimacy. Their emotional potency only intensifies as Bradfield reveals more about the partner they address—a woman lover who travels to Antarctica without her, carrying her poems.

Bradfield skillfully maneuvers between romantic desire and the passions that impel people to the poles. She portrays early explorers yearning for untouched places, fleeing a world besmirched by human hands. In an ironic turn, she writes of men contriving trials for the sake of recognition, “Their passage loud with anticipated medals, applause.” She even delves into political obsessions with ownership, detailing the Third Reich’s attempt to claim Antarctica by dropping “aluminum darts / tattooed with a crooked cross / every twenty miles into what they saw.” Her insights into the insatiable nature of longing—whether for adventure, accolades, or “the chance to again make human an eden”—lend poignancy to an already exquisite collection.

“And what myths would the land write / for itself?” Bradfield muses. With a naturalist’s eye for observation and a poet’s ear for lyricism, she gives an inspired answer in sixty-one penetrating poems that will enthrall lovers of natural history, narrative poetry, and historical fiction.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

OUR CHROME ARMS OF GYMNASIUM

Crystal Curry
Slope Editions ($14.95)

by Greg Bem

“What telling there is is always good . . . But, my heart holds out for a mobilization frenzy,” Seattle-based Crystal Curry carefully projects in the preface of her latest, most complete, and most completely disruptive book of verse, Our Chrome Arms of Gymnasium. Pulling the cover open is like entering an enthralling, mysterious cave and finding a microcosmic reality waiting within. Every element of the world appears familiar, but the lighting is quite selective. Truths come in hyper-conductive shrieks.

The book is a powerful reaffirmation that American poetry can be as bright as it is startling, shocking, and haunting. Our Chrome Arms of Gymnasium revitalizes exciting literary themes in form and tone that have been deadened and softened since the ’80s, encouraging the fantastic with complex pizazz. In “Executive Branch,” Curry weaves verse that confronts issues of gender while retaining an isolated and unique aesthetic:

Grain bearers: frisk & fallow. Marizpan
Cloud: my bushels
closed
to this. Daddy This: which
shall
expire
. Women
at desks, bound with
licorice: yes.

There is something in the air that makes these speakers imminent soothsayers. An established right of way is clearly dominant, and yet, in Curry’s realm, the end is nigh for comfort.

The personas in Curry’s poems latch on to their dynamic and unstable environments, giving those nearby stability through maddening, distinctive promises. In the tricky “Brigadier Rory Gentle,” the acidic tone leads the speaker into rules of reassurance for the audience: “We’re a fit fit fit & what you’ll think you see in my centurion slide out, is my shoe. / Grapple with the order, hoary morality, shoot up the ballroom, shake down the latrine. / I’ll cinch my shorts, Fort Trocadero, bar the door, tuck in safe, the rusting heirlooms.” In a world of decay, Curry’s words are able to invoke Pound, Duncan, and Olson, as well as more present influences like Ashbery and Iijema.

The poems form to make a language of sense but Curry does not offer it up easily; a cryptic barrier has been propped up like the defense of a sprite. In “Sky-Lit Hi,” frazzled verse reseats itself with a remarkably powerful use of repetition:

Digitally re-mastered from the pluribus tongue,
As clack through the dance hall as all-fall-down better,
Hip bones horde language, barometric or better,
The charge for admission: lip, Tom Collins or tongue.

Molding into the base of the text is metrical skill rubbed over an appreciation for form that is flicked around to spread a snarling mode of speech, one fit for a heroine or fallen angel. This voice rises and falls from poem to poem and can be found everywhere in the text, binding it together.

The subtly invasive lay-feminist voice is even stronger when it sounds most personal. In “How I Explain Myself to Former, Current & Potential Husbands,” Curry fleshes out an Aunt Maggie with anger, sorrow, and a horrifying seriousness:

I am bullet shells. I’m a frigging anachronist.
I aligned myself with the inner ear.
I pried your damned prick from my liminal ear.
I am prying your damned prick from my liminal ear.
I will pry your damned prick from my liminal ear.

This decrepit endurance is one of many examples of how Curry manages thematic weight in this book. As flashy as each speck of language is in each poem, the meaning circles all that “hapless demise / on the hovel door,” which lets us know we should be paying attention to the awkward, to the creepy, and to the familiar—and that we must concentrate on the process of liberation that leads us through each.

There is energy to be found here, and the energy is in capturing something ecstatic, something human, “as it is the cure / for the tender maladies.” Allow yourself to find the maladies in this book and relate how they are stilled and defused. Stepping into this cave is an enticing opportunity, but sitting inside and exploring the crevices provides a more intense and rewarding experience.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

STEFAN AND LOTTE ZWEIG’S SOUTH AMERICAN LETTERS: New York, Argentina and Brazil, 1940–1942

Edited by Darién J. Davis and Oliver Marshall
Continuum ($24.95)

by Jesse Freedman

When news of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union reached Stefan Zweig, his response was one of unyielding sorrow. Born in 1881, the celebrated novelist and biographer had already endured a series of profound upheavals: at thirty-two, his Jewish ancestry had forced him to emigrate from Vienna, while the atrocities of the First World War had significantly diminished his belief in the superiority of European culture. Now, as he confronted the brutality of the Nazi regime and the failures of the Weimar experiment, Zweig concluded that he had slipped into the third—and final—of his lives. “My generation has become superfluous,” he wrote from New York City. “We have been a failure.” The hopelessness with which Zweig associated Nazi aggression was soon to overcome him: together with his wife, Lotte, he committed suicide in the isolated Brazilian village of Petrópolis in 1942. Zweig was sixty-one, Lotte but thirty-four.

Edited by Darién J. Davis and Oliver Marshall, Stefan and Lotte Zweig’s South American Letters provides a detailed epistolary account of the life and times of one of Europe’s preeminent intellectuals. The collection—which casts Zweig not only as a writer but as a refugee displaced by war—begins with the arrival of Stefan and Lotte in Brazil, where the two, despite mounting anxieties regarding family left in Europe, revel in the allure of Rio de Janeiro. As Davis and Marshall make clear in their thoughtful introduction, at least part of the Zweigs’ fondness for Brazil stemmed from their growing status as celebrities: daily, remembered Lotte, photographs of the couple appeared in South American newspapers. Regarding his own popularity, Stefan referred to a “difference of fate,” as if, by a force greater than himself, he had been selected to escape the “heals of the beast.”

In their letters to Lotte’s brother and sister-in-law, Manfred and Hannah Altmann, the Zweigs struggled, at times, to strike an appropriate tone, referring on several occasions to their “shame” at having discovered in Brazil such a “perfect life.” Still, they expressed as best they could their horror at the “great misery of mankind.” From South America (and, for a short, unhappy period in 1941, the United States), Stefan and Lotte monitored the trajectory of the war, recording their shock at starvation in Occupied France and the sinking of the British passenger liner City of Benares in 1940. As Davis and Marshall rightly suggest, the Zweigs experienced increasing despair as the conflict entered its middle years: Stefan, in particular, conveyed considerable regret at having to think—and write—in the same language as Hitler, while Lotte struggled to keep her asthma (and husband) from spiraling out of control. These were, as Zweig wrote to the Altmanns following the Battle of Britain, “very obscure times.”

While Stefan’s reputation in South America assured the Zweigs safety and financial security, it did not guarantee them a sense of belonging: indeed, in the days preceding his suicide, Stefan referred to himself rather pitifully as a “squatter.” The man whose youth had been spent traversing Europe, and whose biographies had charted its greatest minds, now found himself half a world away, a stranger to the continent that had inspired so much of his work. “I shall never [again] in my life,” he lamented in 1941, “have a real home.” The war, he continued, in a letter published for the first time in this collection, had “destroyed so much.”

Ultimately, Stefan and Lotte Zweig’s South American Letters reads as a cruel story of dislocation and despair: from their arrival in Rio de Janeiro to their dual-suicide in Petrópolis two years later, the Zweigs were unable to relinquish themselves of the knowledge that the people of Europe—once “pleasant and cultured”—were engaged in an endless conflict for racial and territorial supremacy. Through it all, however, the Zweigs continued to write, approaching their correspondence as a form of therapy—one which allowed them, rather like the tortured characters of W. G. Sebald or Joseph Roth, to come to terms with what Stefan referred to in 1942 as the “incertainty and isolation” of war. Their pact complete, the Zweigs succumbed to their desolation—and to the desolation of a generation robbed of its homeland.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

THE CANALS OF MARS

Gary Fincke
Michigan State University Press ($29.95)

by Scott F. Parker

The Canals of Mars, Gary Fincke’s memoir in parts, comprises five self-defining categories of memories (Beginnings, God, Work, Weakness, Endings). These categories, as you can just about tell from their titles, feature overlapping content and theme, but the organization allows Fincke to emphasize aspects of his life in a roughly chronological sequence. The perfectionism his parents encourage in him in the Beginnings section becomes the devotion he gently rebels against in the God section, which becomes his only relatively hard-working approach to a string of low-skill jobs, and finally becomes, in Weakness, the reluctant acceptance of his asthma, poor eye sight, and appreciation of beer. It’s only in Endings, with Fincke as an adult, his parents dead or dying, that he seems freed from the guilt of imperfection. But this is also when, thanks to his writing, he’s become the kind of hard worker his parents or God might respect.

The emergence of the subject’s self (shaped as it still is by childhood circumstances) plays out in the book’s narration as well. In early chapters Fincke blends into his background, highlighting the geographical, historical, and familial contexts that played such large roles in shaping him. It’s as if in his childhood the author’s identity is overwhelmed by the larger forces of the world, the larger personalities of his father and grandfather, and the moral authority of his parents and church. It’s not until halfway through the book that a clear picture of the narrator presents itself. While, by the reasoning given above, this grants narrative legitimacy, it also makes the first half of the book less interesting to read. Early chapters run almost completely away from the common memoirist’s tactic of putting an idiosyncratic narrator front and center, and give us almost no narrator. When one does coalesce, it’s as a sort of “normal guy” who works as a stand-in for the reader and keeps much attention directed toward the world outside his head—on the passing of the industrial era in Pittsburgh and the ascendency of mass-produced junk (and the accompanying death of places like his father’s bakery).

In the book’s most engaging sections—Work and Weakness—the “normal guy” approach allows readers to get a sense of Fincke as a good person struggling to create his own life as he begins leaving his childhood behind while that childhood world itself begins to fade away. Building a clay tennis court as an adolescent, he confirms that he’s not as hard a worker as his father and gets his first taste of class-consciousness. Summer jobs as a janitor and a factory worker show him worlds he where doesn’t, and doesn’t want to, fit in. Witnessing enough irreversible alcohol-related mistakes in college, he’s able to curb his own binge drinking. In these and other struggles for an authentic self, Fincke demonstrates how such a project—impossible, though, to ever complete—might be steadily pursued.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM: THE NATURAL HISTORY OF INNOVATION

Steven Johnson
Riverhead Books ($26.95)

by Kevin Smokler

A great “book of ideas” can change the way an entire culture views itself. A lousy one catches fire, burns out, then hangs around forever like an ill-conceived piece of public art circa 1974. Either way, such books are required to run the gauntlet of doubters who insist they are little more than Trivial Pursuit cards in hardcover, deep research in service of the easy summary and spitback which somehow still require lengthy explanations at expensive conferences and corporate retreats.

In Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson has skated along a careful middle, skewing a commonly held assertion with reams of evidence but giving the reader room to kick the baseboard. His arguments let in air on purpose, which keeps them from seeming too yoked to a particular cultural or political moment. And although Johnson says this book turns more towards “his most argumentative book” (the 2005 study of pop culture, Everything Bad is Good For You) than his previous two (historical biographies of an inventor and a public health scare), he is not asking you to see it his way, but another way.

Johnson’s premise is that innovation is rarely the product of a genius with an epiphany but rather of ecological factors that help an idea take root and flower. The body of his effort explores these seven factors: “The Adjacent Possible”, “Liquid Networks,” “The Slow Hunch,” “Serendipity” “Error” “Exaptation” and “Platforms.” Ideas, like evolutionary movement or balls of rubber cement, grow thanks to random, messy collisions with other half-formed notes and circumstances and arenas that allow for these traffic accidents to happen. They do not fall from the apple tree or into the bathtub, but you must have a bathtub for the inventor to think in, time to guess what the rising bathwater means and be wrong, and the foreknowledge and space to see a falling apple as more than just a falling apple.

The author lines up these seven principles between the lenses of a concept he calls “The Long Zoom,” which asserts that patterns dilate, that behavior or modes of change at the level of a species or an idea can be mirrored at the level of a tropical rain forest or an information network. Whether or not this concept holds up to current information theory research, it nicely buttresses Johnson’s umbrella argument that creative change for the better is both as natural a phenomenon as acquiring energy or disposing of waste and that similarities across disciplines are too repeated to dismiss as coincidence. “We have no shortage of theories on how to make our organizations more creative or explain why tropical rainforests engineer so much molecular diversity,” he asserts in his introduction. “What we lack is a unified theory that describes the common attributes shared by all these innovation systems.”

Johnson’s concept is not doubt catnip to a certain kind of reader (ye of the coastal, shake-my-foundations variety). But Where Good Ideas Come From would little more than a fashion show for a fashionable premise (albeit one backed up by deep digs into biology, history, and social research) without the essential opening and closing chapters. “The Long Zoom” idea lives in the opening and emphasizes the “Natural” in Johnson’s subtitle. Innovation, he’s saying, isn’t my pet project, but the next best version of itself to which everything gravitates.

The book ends with an odd hybrid of statistical research and academic confession, a concluding chapter that feels a bit too much like an appendix. Here, Johnson graphs the milestone inventions of the last 600 years to determine how many came about via an individual or a group and how many were driven by commercial interests or not. Predictably, he concludes that as we approach the modern networked era, innovation seems to be increasingly diffuse and non-self-interested in nature, a conclusion that supports his premise without adding much to it, an effort than seems both redundant and a little defensive.

But just then, Johnson tells us why and makes it stick. In a few short pages, he interrogates his own methods (loosely chaining evidence across several disciplines instead of “diving deeply into a single story,” as he did in his previous books) and outlines why his choices make sense for the topic. “The anecdotal approach sacrifices detail for breadth. Yet it, too, runs the risk of being accused of cherry-picking.” “Your audience has to take it on faith that the case study you’ve chosen is indeed representative of a wider truth.”

The placement is crucial. Johnson doesn’t begin Good Ideas with how he approached the topic (which always seems a bit like apologizing to the reader for a sin not yet committed) but by ending it that way, he invites the reader both to reread and poke at his premise. Thus, he positions the author not as an appointed genius but as an actor in an environment of innovation.

One may argue whether Johnson’s sort of achievements match the immovable permanence of a generation-defining novelist or an unmatched presidential biography. But books, like ideas, are meant to be participants in a multi-sided conversation—they are meant to be circulated, tossed about, hated, loved, and learned from, not simply judged and medaled like Olympic athletes. They should knock around the liquid network not stand silently like oracles within it. Where Good Ideas Come From does just this.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

THE BOX: Tales from the Darkroom

Günter Grass
Translated by Krishna Winston
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($23)

by Joshua Willey

Günter Grass’s most recent opus is a miniature epic, packing an amazing amount of material into a single afternoon’s read. The Nobel Prize winner here writes in an elliptical, fragmentary mode; there is so much to read between the lines that his prose sometimes verges on poetry, though there is another art form at work. Subtitled “Tales from the Darkroom,” the narrative hinges around photography, revealing deep love for photographic mechanics and particular reverence for a certain old Agfa camera.

Grass has set up a stunning parallel between photography and memory. In both cases, he argues, the spatial and temporal constraints that ruled the original moment no longer apply. Thus, the magical Agfa can capture phenomena that are not, in the strictest sense, there in the first place. Likewise, the act of remembrance is as much one of imagination as it is of history, as Grass, a master novelist knows all too well. A fellow German, the luminary filmmaker Werner Herzog, speaks of a secret magic of cinema, instances when forces beyond direction come to the surface, and it’s these instances which Grass seems intent on capturing here, though the book is also a sort of memoir (following 2007’s Peeling the Onionand to be followed by what he claims is his final foray into memoir, Grimms' Words: A Declaration of Love). “The only thing about which there should be no doubt is that once upon a time there were guardian angels, when Marienchen could prove everything in black and white” Grass writes. Such sentiments smack of another recent star of German literature, W. G. Sebald, who famously went so far as to fill his small oeuvre with black and white photos, which bore diverse relationships to the text, but consistently ushered the reader into a highly charged space where the shaky dynamic between representation and history creates a kind of euphoria.

The Box focuses largely on the period when Grass was writing Dog Years (the conclusion of his Danzig Trilogy, which began with his masterpiece The Tin Drum), and he gives the reader a good sense of his writing process, implying that photographs were in fact essential to his prose. “And on the stove, which she’d made a point of photographing, a kettle was steaming, as if someone not visible in the picture, the mother say, was about to make tea or coffee” he writes.

It’s refreshing to read Grass in such an intimate and relaxed mode; his career has been so politicized that it has at times been tempting to let that overshadow his artistry. Grass served in the SS (as he recounts inPeeling the Onion), and was one of the founders of a distinctly European magical-realism, but here he seems to be planning a vanishing act. Though the final lines of The Box do anticipate more ink to come, the work’s obsession with time eventually indicts itself and its author, admitting not only the inevitability but also the seductive power of that final step out of existence.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

GROWING UP PSYCHIC: From Skeptic to Believer

Michael Bodine
Llewellyn Worldwide ($16.95)

by Kelly Everding

If you’ve ever watched Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal, a reality TV show that helps children who suffer through the uninvited attention of ghosts, you know that a common theme runs through each show: fear and helplessness followed by eventual acceptance, empowerment, and confidence. And that is basically the theme running through Michael Bodine’s Growing Up Psychic, although Bodine adds a healthy dose of humor, self deprecation, and a little bit of rage to the formula. In this compulsively readable memoir, we learn about Bodine’s introduction to the shadowy world of the dead starting as a six-year-old in 1960s-1970s Minneapolis, Minnesota, along with his more famous older sister psychic/healer Echo Bodine. Theirs was not a typical childhood, as creepy visitations jolted them out of their picture-perfect upper middle class lives and deposited them soundly in the world of channelers, mediums, crystal gazers, and the like. Much like the children of Psychic Kids, Bodine resented the weirdness and was afraid of what his friends and others outside his household would think of him and his family. “I just wanted it to be normal. I was tired of the people, the church, the noises, the smells, the things moving around. I didn’t want to talk about reincarnation, life after death, or poltergeists. . . . I wanted to look at someone and not see colors all around them. And it would be nice to come home from school and not have one of my family members possessed.”

Bodine’s humor and snarky voice leavens the terrifying things he experiences throughout his childhood into young adulthood and beyond. His ambivalence borders on disbelief, even with the proof right before him. Regardless of the cool aspects of his gift (such as Jerry, a boy spirit who attaches himself to Michael—although this friendship turns a bit ugly later on), Bodine fights these powers tooth and nail, eventually succumbing to alcohol, drugs, and delinquency to escape them. The family pretty much falls apart. His mother, a stalwart embracer of the paranormal and gifted psychic in her own right, invites the strange psychic community into her home, but finds that she can’t keep her marriage together. When Michael’s father leaves, the money eventually dries up and the Bodines are reduced to a comparatively poor existence. At the age of fourteen, Michael entered into addiction treatment at a place called Pharm House. When he returns home from one such meeting, he explodes, “I don’t want this shit. . . . If it’s a gift then where do I exchange it? If I can’t exchange it, show me how to block it out.”

Despite the psychic camps, possessions, ghost busting (well before the movies came out), and his self-destructive tendencies, Michael Bodine somehow comes out the other end a successful psychic, a consultant to the stars (this book features a great introduction by comedian Lewis Black). He eschews any new age-y or spooky clichés, but rather favors blunt assessments, emphasizing his grounded and genuine personality. Michael’s just a normal guy who helps people with his exceptional—and nonreturnable—gifts.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore
Purchase this book at your local independent bookstore.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

ANIMATING SPACE: From Mickey to Wall-E

J. P. Telotte
The University Press of Kentucky ($40)

by Emy Farley

To paraphrase one of the great critiques of reviewing, writing about a visual medium is like dancing about architecture—a challenge, to put it mildly. But like Wile E. Coyote’s relentless pursuit of the Roadrunner, J. P. Telotte enthusiastically attempts the impossible—discussing the importance of “space” in animation, from the physical to the philosophical, without the use of the visual platform on which animation rests—in his latest study on the culture of film, Animating Space: From Mickey to Wall-E.

This 260-page essay anchors itself largely within two camps: one on the conclusions of historian Anthony Vidler and theorist Stephen Kern, and one primarily on theorist Paul Virilio’s assertions. Kern and Vidler’s perspective, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is that “space is a form of understanding and not an objective reality”—i.e., space, along with our understanding of it, is relative to the perspective of the individual. In the visual world, this movement caused artists to attempt to “capitalize on this fluidity” by almost letting their audience in on the process or the thinking behind what decisions went in to the artistic choices being made. Virilio’s postmodern view, on the other hand, focuses not on what is there, but rather on what is not there—our willingness to allow a “reality effect” to “stand in for the real, ceding primacy to what we have constructed rather than to the models for that construction.”

Telotte frames his discussion within the history of animation, weaving these philosophies in as he goes. Moving through time, the study starts at keyframe animation’s beginnings with Winsor McCay’s 1914Gertie the Dinosaur and ends at such recent live-action-and-animation hybrids as 2004’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and 2007’s Beowulf. This approach shows how time and technology have slowly led animation from Gertie’s Point A, where the animator brings himself, and his audience, in to the film, and the animated actors manipulate their own worlds from inside the screen, straight to today’s Point B, where humans in film are often motion-captured simulacra, carrying out their actions in animated worlds through special effects.

Animating Space traces technological innovation in animation through time as well, and studies how its use became animation’s double-edged sword: through technology, animation could make its audiences feel that the action on screen was almost as real as reality itself. Telotte then asks the question: if animation ceases to be fantastic, then how is its reality any different than the reality of live-action film? If animation strives to become more real, then what is the need for the expense and time called for by animation? Here, Telotte succeeds in studying and explaining the mitigation of this potential disaster by examining the path of Disney Animation, and exploring how that studio used technology to their advantage by not simply allowing technology to give their films nice decoration, but rather by using it as part of the film’s natural environment, by having characters interact with the advances technology afforded them and making technology almost a part of the story—making it seem as though the characters all lived in three-dimensional worlds. This move not only served to help audiences accept the characters, but also helped the films retain their sense of the fantastic, the feeling modern audiences continue to have when confronted by wonders of modern cinematic technology: the awestruck wonder accompanied by a gasp of “how did they do that?” This jump also helped to re-define animation’s status, moving it from a sub-category of film to being thought of as film in its own right.

Moving on from his study of full animation, Telotte discusses hybrid films, such as 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where animated characters and humans interact with each other within the same worlds. In these works, Telotte begins to move out of Vidler and Kern’s relativistic vision and into the “reality effect” world of Virilio, slowly building toward a caution “about the reality effect that has become pervasive in postmodern culture . . . to both animated film and life itself.” Telotte goes on to quote Patrick Tatopolous, a production designer and director, as saying “the dangerous thing about creating environments in CG is that because you can do anything, you can lose track of that sense of reality,” which can, in turn, Telotte says, “create impossible spaces, improbable movements . . . and pointless trackings through ‘space.’” Telotte closes by looking at today’s modern films, pointing out how virtually everything released now combines live-action and animation, binding animation inseparably from film in ways its pioneers could never have imagined.

While Animating Space proves surprisingly adept at attempting to show readers what the author has seen in a lifetime of studying the history of animation, the truth is that if the reader does not already have an understanding of animation, its jargon, or its history, this book may prove frustrating or even inaccessible without a dictionary and YouTube close at hand. If the reader cannot instantly conjure up an image of the film being analyzed, much of the discussion falls flat and otherwise convincing points can easily be lost. Thus, the book needs more images than it provides to woo those outside the “animation geek” realm.

This aside, Animating Space succeeds marvelously, and provides a means for exploring how animation has reflected society’s views on what is and is not permitted when it comes to films showing us versions of our own realities. Whether there is any intentionality on the part of the animators behind this reflection remains unproven, however Telotte’s point was not to prove causality, but simply to study how animation’s rules have changed as society’s perception of reality has shifted. As a study, the book manages to do just that. With a little more architecture and a little less dance, it does what the coyote couldn’t—it catches the elusive Roadrunner.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore
Purchase this book at your local independent bookstore.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011