by Maria Damon and Murat Nemet-Nejat

Alan Sondheim is a new media artist, musician, writer, and performer concerned with issues of virtuality and the stake that the real world has in the virtual. He has worked with his partner, Azure Carter, and the performer/ choreographer Foofwa d'Imobilité. Sondheim examines the grounds of the virtual and how the body is inhabited. Since January of 1994, Sondheim has worked on the "Internet Text," a continuous meditation on philosophy, psychology, language, body, and virtuality; the Internet Text is coordinated with multi-media work on various websites. A pioneer in the field of electronic literature, he coined the term “codework” to signify the multiple ways in which computer coding language itself becomes part of the diegetics of the immanent text. He performs in virtual, real, and cross-over worlds; his virtual work is known for its highly complex and mobile architectures. He has used altered motion-capture technology extensively for examining and creating new lexicons of behavior. His current work is centered around the phenomenology of terrorism and anguish, and their cultural expression.

Because Sondheim’s range is so wide, it can be approached from many perspectives and it reflects many obsessions, intellectual and aesthetic currents and traditions, and concepts of embodiment. Two colleagues coming from very different preoccupations—Murat Nemet-Nejat, poet and translator with an interest in the apocalyptic, and Maria Damon, scholar with an interest in the abject, the fringe, and the “wasted”—teamed up to ask Sondheim a few questions in relation to his work in general and to surge, a recent work, in particular.

Sondheim’s work can be viewed here:

surge text: http://www.alansondheim.org/surge.txt
email archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
most recent texts: http://www.alansondheim.org/tr.txt
http://www.alansondheim.org/ts.txt
http://www.alansondheim.org/tt.txt
http://www.alansondheim.org/tu.txt

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Maria Damon opened with some basic and general questions about method and intent:

Maria Damon: I was first drawn to your work by the emotional rawness, the insightful and literary exposition of the abject. One of my favorite pieces of yours was the seemingly simple "Wath You," in which a series of simple repetitions were weirdly torqued by searching-and-replacing one vowel with another: "A hate you. A really really hate you. A love you. A lake you a lattle bat." That the complexities of a relationship could be captured in repetitive, minimalist vocabulary and an infantile level of exposition, combined with the defamiliarization of a vowel shift effected by a simple word-processing function, completely captivated me. At the time I didn't know you were a multi-faceted artist-writer-theorist. I thought you were some kind of anomalous eccentric, without context, an “outsider writer”; such is the strange world of listservs and online community. As I got to know your work I realized how it synthesizes many orders of being; for example, in one piece you transform actual dancers' duets into strangely dismembered Second Life gyrations, accompanied by music on a variety of manically played (by you) stringed instruments. The "live" iterations of your work—pieces in which you play your instruments, Azure Carter sings her trancelike dirges based on your work, and Foofwa D'Immobilité thrashes brilliantly on the floor—have always been my favorite, but I find exceptionally compelling your explanations of how you build the virtual work, layer by layer by layer.

So, in light of this background, can you say a bit about your relationship to the simple and the complex? A huge question, I know, but very basic.

Alan Sondheim: I'm not sure where to begin. Years ago, Victor Weisskopf wrote about the "quantum ladder," how different levels of reality might be somewhat analyzable as internally coherent—so for example, a great deal of chemistry can be done without considering particle physics. Herbert Simon wrote about "nearly decomposable hierarchies," thinking along parallel lines. So what might be complex on one level is simple on another; in computer programming, for example, there are higher level languages that coalesce or cover up the details of lower level ones (all the way down to the movement of electrons in integrated circuits). I tend to think this way, but I also bring into play the idea of the abject, the dissolution or corrosion of any of these schemes. The abject is entangled, tawdry, sleazy; it's the realm of death, of anguish, of sexuality, of slaughter and scorched earth policies. It's as if death and sexuality reared their heads (bad metaphor). The digital domain seems to me to be always already corporate, governed by protocols, and a clean and proper body; it's fetishized, tied to consumerism, to the clever, to fast-forward culture (the “surge” which is always ahead, which never looks back, which is the promise and premise of eternity), and so forth.

So I'm interested, if one might consider digital culture a kind of game space or mapping space, in the edge spaces that are always there, hidden. The digital manifolds, in other words, are leaky, full of holes, hackable; they're not closed. If you think of digital manifolds as so many objects presenting an appearance of closure, of totality, you might also think of their falling-apart, their ruptures, and it's the abject, which we inhabit, that is the subject and object of the manifolds. This is where complexity and entanglement, where liquidity and soft worlds, are manifest; they're found in the edge spaces and throughout the porous world/s. I work in these spaces, around virtual worlds, around coherent language and coherent coding. I'm frightened of them, have nightmares about them, am aroused by them, am horrified by the miseries of anguish and genocide, the meat/muscles/brains/organs/tissues of bodies; at the same time, sexuality, sports, hysterias, can rise to the level of exaltation within similar domains. In these areas complexity and simplicity break down altogether, not that they're entangled, but that the symbolic itself, the ability to construct and deploy language/s, no longer functions; one's left with the cry. The cry is at the center and periphery of my work; how can it be otherwise? There are issues around such, from the exterior, within other manifolds, issues about geopolitics, the environment, gender, representation, and so forth—the usual issues, but grounded or floated here around absolute darkness on one hand, and the illusory light of the digital on the other.

MD: Being a polymath, do you ever experience conflict between your many modes of artistic practice—playing music, writing words, designing visual effects—or are they seamlessly integrated for you? How do you layer a piece?

AS: This is a really good question, going to the heart of things. For me, every piece, whether writing or mixed-mode or music, is an open world; even in the music, there are always serious philosophical concerns which can be expressed that way. For example, the guzheng pieces are played on both sides of the bridges; one side is in-tune, and the other side supports the in-tune side. But that support also represents (as I wrote) a kind of abject musical field, which can undercut or form part of a “tonal sea” with the other; they're in dialogue, if not dialectic. That fascinates me, as to those precursor moments in dance or music when performers are “getting ready” to perform, and I've made films of them—they're not liminal, in-between, moments, but moments beforehand where the breath is held.

The same is true in my writing, whether I'm using computer programming or not—there's always a moment of entering the literary-philosophical thicket.

For me, then, these aren't separate modes, but moments that wash over one another, create skeins of associations. The images work the same for me—for example, with the guzheng, I had, at least in one piece, put up images of blood-red shelf mushrooms that were decaying, intensely; they'll survive that way through the winter! So there is form and abject exhaustion in their raggedness, but also hope!

There are also issues of available tech, which, as an independent writer/new media artist, I face constantly. Occasionally I'm given access to university equipment—the Cave at Brown (a 3-d immersive environment), motion-capture equipment at NYU and Columbia College Chicago, and, years ago, a whole host of virtual environment equipment at the West Virginia University in Morgantown. I'm grateful for these opportunities, but they don't last; as a result, I see my work as reliant on “available tech”; I try to work with whatever I'm given at a particular point in time. That’s limiting of course; for example, universities are moving towards immersive virtual reality with Oculus Rift and other technologies, and people I know are using these devices in virtual worlds. But because I have no access to these things, I find my research outdated in some ways—I can think of so many things I'd like to do! At least with writing, music, the imminence of virtual worlds, and codework programming, I can act somewhat on my own, and investigate writing, writing technologies, philosophy, and so forth, with limited means.

The modes of artistic expression, I want to emphasize, are really integrated for me. If I had access to an improvisatory real/virtual opera company, I'd be all set. So the work I do is deeply driven by what, for me, are “serious” concerns, and then the products/productions follow suit. (Most of the productions are stepping-stones, not finished pieces, but, like jazz solos, work always already in progress; there's a deep dynamics involved.)

MD: You're so torrentially productive, posting every day across a variety of online platforms, that it seems perhaps a bit strange to ask you the standard questions about having a creative practice, but I will. Is there such a thing as "inspiration" in your practice? Or is it anxious compulsion in the face of catastrophe? And how do you "go about it" on a daily basis? Do you think "I'm going to create x or y today" when you get up? How does the sitting-down-to-do-it come about?

AS: There's definitely inspiration. Most often I'm following a line that stems from thinking (or trying to think) philosophically; sometimes, for example with the virtual world work, I've been curious about, and experimenting with, “arrangements”—situations with extreme parameters, for example—attempting to see what will fly in terms of a new (virtual) physics or avatar behavior. This can be quite methodological. But at the bottom of this, there is definitely that “anxious compulsion in the face of catastrophe”—how can one make sense of this world of slaughter, overpopulation, extinctions, religious absolutisms, migrants, the rise again of totalitarian tendencies? I work towards and through these issues as best I can. I am also inordinately fearful of death, always feeling, as far back as I can remember, that I'm running on thin ice, that death is imminent and immanent, that if I have an idea or concept to think through, work upon, I should do it now.

On occasion dreams play a role; the piece/s I put up today, for example, are based on a dream I had, in which I asked our cat, who died six days ago, "dear ossi, today is the day you stop the wind"—and I began thinking about the artificial weathers in virtual worlds, how they blow things around, how that can be controlled. I wanted to see what the control felt like, when complexity overwhelmed weather, and I made works like these:

http://www.alansondheim.org/stopthewind06.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/stopthewind.mp4

I worked furiously at the stopthewind video; someone was coming over, and I needed to finish this! The whole thing from start to finish took only an hour. But the thought that went into it lasted all night, and before that, working elsewise with these themes.

If I'm working with music, it's very different; I'll practice at times for a long time, tuning an instrument (and some of the ones I play are difficult to tune), preparing to record it; if (rarely) programs are involved, I will still record live, if at all possible. The music, as I pointed out, also has philosophical implications for me, and I'll develop this in the playing, tuning, writing, program if I'm using one, etc. And I'll record in the middle of the night when everything is silent—when, to be a bit romantic, the world can speak through a dialogue with an instrument, myself, and as little as possible between.

Finally, the most difficult thing is always the writing; at times it uses code, and I have programs I've written that act as catalysts for thinking about things. I cull from the writing I've already done, rearrange things, create a discourse on the run, and use that text, as well as straight-forward somewhat philosophical descriptions of what I'm doing. I'm fearful of sounding naïve or ignorant, of going off-track, of not sufficiently understanding the mathematical concepts, for example, that influence me so much (geometries, categories, networks, logics, etc.). So the writing is really difficult for me; I hope I write things that might be read in the future as a kind of contribution to a certain kind of philosophical thinking, if any of my work survives at all. The writing is the interiority of everything I do.

And I write anytime, even at a local cafe; I bring a netbook or tablet with me for that, so I'm out of the house, so to speak, working in isolation in the midst of strangers, but taking comfort in their presence. The daily tasks Azure and I do drop away, the dialogue is made somehow simpler on a small and intimate screen.

My work has always been driven by a sense of wonder, a sense of what-if? The “what-if” often involves the idea of edges, glitches, striding across barriers, just to see what will happen. This sense is also reflected in the images we take of fungi, in work I've done with very low frequency and crystal radios, and so forth. It's also involved in playing traditional instruments in new but respectful ways, in playing music as quickly as possible—what am I capable of doing? And it's where a real excitement lies for me; the fecundity of the world constantly makes itself felt in this regard.

I must add that I would not be able to do any of this without Azure Carter, my partner; together we have a dwelling, home, habitus, not an emptied space that would otherwise send me reeling with its harshness.

At this point, Murat Nejet-Nemat focused the interview on a particular, and recent, piece, surge; his questions come from a writer’s point of view. Both MD and MNN agree that metaphysical concerns are very much part of Sondheim’s work:

Murat Nemet-Nejat: I think its metaphysical dimension is essential to understanding your work in its totality, rather than as individual performances or acts. My intention in starting with the idea of the apocalypse was to show how exquisitely you are attuned to the movements in our time, and especially their nightmarish and farcical extremes—both the massacres in Syria and our electoral primary season being expressions of it. I see surge both as a reflector of and a visceral antidote to these conditions, both a victim and a Cassandra. In what follows, I use the words "apocalypse" and "rapture" deliberately because religious discourse is an integral part of events in the world, be it with ISIS or the Syrian Civil War or European immigrants or American politics. Contrary to having zero connection, I see surge as a visceral revolt against extremeness by presenting a contra, a subjective abjective of extreme suffering. The idea of the apocalypse, as an ending beyond an ending, seems to be crucial in your work. Do you agree with this assessment? If so, what does apocalypse mean to you? What are the origins of this impulse—if there are any—personal, historical, ethical, ecological, etc.? How does it affect the direction or substance of your work?

AS: The apocalypse always seems to entail a religious ontology; I don't think that way, but rather in terms of a slow corruption, abjection; abjection underlies everything I write about. Abjection will always have its denouement in the cold death of the universe, perhaps in proton decay, something beyond comprehension, except theoretically, the manipulation of symbols, metaphors, which themselves are undermined. I have no impulse that I know of towards the apocalyptic; what sort of impulse would that be, except for thinking of a general conflagration? The apocalyptic draws me nowhere; it's part of the reason I think of anguish, which has no resolution, no beginning and no ending, no ending beyond an ending, etc. In my work, thinking of scorched earth, genocide, scorching of scorched earth, etc., is thinking of a dissolution. If anything, and this is of interest to me, my work is anti-apocalyptic, since it does not entail belief, and belief underlies apocalypse. There is none, there are the murked waters of anguish and abjection, that's all. That's the heart of it for me.

MNN: The title surge is very fascinating because it has multiple—some of them completely contradictory—meanings, some of which you yourself develop/exploit in the work. "Surge" means an increase; but also, as the root of the word "surgery," it implies "cutting out," a diminution. You have an entire section devoted to surgical (undoing) processes.

AS: Surge cuts, flows outwards, covers the ground with troops and bodies; above all, it transforms everything, everything. On a techno-political level, I think of it as an exponential increase of knowledge, tools, networks, flows. Fernando Zalamea points out that the last three decades have resulted in more mathematical knowledge than the previous two thousand years; in cosmology, I think one might make a claim that the past twenty years have superseded everything that came before. So how does one deal with this? If we were born ten years ago, we would have no problem at all; the surge would be the norm; one would live within the exponential. That's where I want to be, where I hope to be—within this brutal increase that is at the heart of all there is, a world of continual supersession. You can see the relation to scorching here; it's not all pleasant.

MNN: Also, as I began reading the work, for some reason I was continuously reminded of the concept of rapture. Is surge an anti-rapture rapture?

AS: As with “apocalypse” I associate “rapture” with religious or spiritual connotations; I can't see much of a relationship with my own work at all. I know people who find the idea of rapture fundamental; as an atheist I don't know how to respond to this. I draw my inferences from books on extinctions, ecologies, cosmologies, etc.; religion seems dangerous.

MNN: The third question has to do with the very powerful image accompanying surge. I am assuming it is a digital photo of a black hole in the sky, an image that obviously resonates with the text. Was this image completely "found" or did you in some way have to manipulate it—more than merely framing it—for the "right effect"? This question is important to me because, in your work in general, I sense two powerful, yet contradictory impulses/ideas. On the one hand, respecting and feeling for the otherness of others—bombed children in foreign lands, animals, plants, molecules, star dust, etc.—is absolutely crucial for you. On the other hand, you believe in an ontology—the real/reality in our modern world is virtual, embodied (if I understand you correctly) in avatars. Does this contradiction resonate for you, and if so, how do you deal with or resolve it, if at all?"

AS: There are two images, http://www.alansondheim.org/0000.jpg and http://www.alansondheim.org/1111.jpg; both are constructed from avatars I've created (you can't photograph a black hole, only the effects in any case). The images act as framing devices; there's a nod to the star-child in 2001, but something else goes on in them, an uncanny perturbance. They're uncomfortable.

In regard to ontology, the term is problematic, given particle physics and cosmology. I don't think the real/reality in our world is virtual, but perhaps tending towards the opposite; the virtual is part and parcel of the real (something pointed out by Heinz von Foerster years ago, in his notion that negation was inherent in organism). Avatars for me—in the sense of virtual world avatars—are functions, projections, and introjections, something I think of in terms of flows, “jectivity” in general. So they're a site for research of sorts, if the experiential can be considered research at all.

I don't see a contradiction in any case; the real and virtual are inextricably entangled; one can feel and act on compassion, empathy, political impulse, and still believe in a certain abject and fuzzy organization of the world. But this also depends on how “world” is defined; there are “worlds” of belief, for example. For me, I basically believe in broad-based ontologies underlying particle physics and cosmology—the constitutivity of our cosmos. By “broad-based” I'm exposing my own ignorance; the mathematics of physics is mostly beyond me. But that's where my fascination lies. And how do multiverses, branes, hidden dimensions, flows, dark matter, virtual particles, etc.—how do these objects / things / flows / figure within traditional ontological thinking? Or epistemology for that matter? This is all fascinating—an almost crystalline domain here on one hand, and then those images of slaughter and destruction in everyday life on the other.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Jonathan Bate
Harper ($40)

by Katie Marquette

Ted Hughes is arguably one of the most hated men in literary history. Following the death of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, and the subsequent success of her dark and disturbing Ariel poems, Hughes was accused of everything from wife beating to sadism to outright murder. Feminists proudly adopted the deceased Plath as one of their own, a female artist brought to the point of despair by an egotistical man, or so the story went. Her grave was repeatedly vandalized: “Sylvia Plath Hughes” was changed back to simply “Sylvia Plath,” with crude marks etched over the surname “Hughes.” The message was clear: in the grand drama of history, Sylvia Plath was to be remembered. Ted Hughes was to be erased.

Jonathon Bate’s new biography, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, challenges this traditional narrative. The book’s release in the fall of 2015 might have marked the first time a significant biography has been solely devoted to Hughes; previous biographies have generally been dual-biographies of Plath, with one biography even titled Her Husband. Whatever else, this is truly the story of Hughes, not Plath.

Writing in elegant and lucid prose, Bate gives readers a glimpse into the life of a brilliantly complicated man. We follow Hughes through his raucous youth, hunting and fishing with his brother and father. His childhood on the English moors instilled in him a deep love and respect for nature, a passion that led him to become an environmental activist in his later years. He was a smart but distracted student, preferring to work on his own projects. He had a natural talent for writing and poetry, and although he considered a career as a zoologist, it seemed he was always destined for the literary life.

He met Sylvia Plath when she attended Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship. Their connection was immediate and they were married only four months after they met. Their notoriously passionate and troubled marriage occupies only a brief section of the biography, but Bate is sure to emphasize the importance of this time, as Hughes’ years with Plath were an incredibly formative time for him as a poet. It was Plath, after all, who typed up and sent away the manuscript of The Hawk in the Rain, his first poetry collection, which would win him the Galbraith prize and a much-needed $5,000.

Hughes loved and was loved by women all his life. His hulking frame, deep voice, and passionate nature endeared him to countless women, only a handful of which we get to meet in Bate’s biography. Despite his notoriety, Hughes was an intensely private man and many of the details of his relationships are left to conjecture. What can be said with certainty is that Hughes was infatuated with women, even viewing them in mythical terms. He was obsessed with Robert Graves’s The White Goddess and saw women as powerful, but often destructive, characters in the drama of his life.

Hughes’ life was filled with tragedy: the death of Plath, the death of his lover Assia Wevill and their young daughter Shura, the death of a longtime friend and lover of early onset cancer—the list goes on. One can only be grateful he didn’t live to see his son, Nick, commit suicide. Bate explains the complex way in which Hughes dealt with these tragedies. Famously, Hughes placed immense importance on his dreams, often viewing them as prophetic. He also cast divinations, asked for people’s star signs, and used a Ouija board. A deeply spiritual man, he saw meaning in everything, perhaps especially in death. He also saw his role as poet in mythical terms. When made Poet Laureate of England, he saw himself as noble seer, diviner of truth. In his mind he was performing a sacred duty.

While the personal details of Hughes’ life are undeniably engrossing, Bate also gives equal attention to his poetry. While Hughes’ poetry is infamously repetitive and abstruse, it is also expertly crafted, filled with complex allusions and metaphors. With his thorough knowledge of Hughes’ life, Bate seamlessly weaves poetry in and out of the narrative. With so much interest in Hughes’ personal life, his art is often left out completely. Bate takes pains to give equal attention to portraying both Hughes the man and Hughes the artist, an awareness any serious student of poetry will appreciate.

The thesis of the biography, if there can be a thesis to a man’s life, is that Hughes’ tragic marriage to Plath completely dominated his life. Although Bate has done an admirable job in keeping this biography focused on Hughes, not Plath, ultimately it seems he cannot escape her. Hughes, a man obsessed with myth and meaning, saw Plath as a shade from the underworld, a wraith come to haunt and inspire him. Although previous biographies have often painted Hughes as the adulterous womanizer, Bate gives us a softer, but no less accurate, perspective. This book is especially important for the many Plath disciples who still dismiss Hughes’ literary contributions based on somewhat simplistic assumptions about his and Plath’s marriage.

"I hope one has the right to one's own life," Hughes said, while in the midst of legal disputes over rights to Sylvia Plath's work. This tension between being a public figure (Poet Laureate, "myth-maker," "prophet," etc.) and a highly private person dominated Hughes' life. Clearly this contradiction would plague his biographer as well; Bate devotes a lengthy section at the end of the book to justifying the existence of this “unauthorised life”—a type of biography, Bate insists, Hughes would have preferred. The role of biography is complex, but for what it's worth, Bate can rest easy knowing he has written a candid, thorough, and respectful account of such a monumental figure. Thanks to Bate, Ted Hughes cannot be erased after all.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Pattie McCarthy
Apogee Press ($15.95)

by Jenny Drai

In “genre scenes,” the third and final section of Pattie McCarthy’s new collection of poetry, the speaker tells us to “choose a moment & mark it.” What bookends this instruction is a consideration of individual moments of motherhood, moments that have shaped the parameters of history, language, and Western art. The book takes its name from those handmade volumes made of fabric that contain quiet activities to entertain and instruct young children; in doing so it both considers silence and turns the notion of silence on its head. Motherhood is bustling, even full of white noise that sometimes threatens to consume the self. In “xyz&&,” a series of short pieces containing linked impressions, lists, and micronarratives, McCarthy writes:

in physics, a daughter is a nuclide
formed by the radioactive decay
of another. of course, mother rhymes with
another. but this is just too meta-
& silly & loaded for me. pinion
on the clean fin clear clear wave always at a loss,
we remain open, persons in process.

Here, McCarthy’s use of enjambment and short lines, conversational and pleasantly erudite at once, make a case for the power of insistence in the process of personal evolution. In other words, the line may be over, but the thought continues and joins other thoughts to form the building blocks of personal art. The speaker of this poetry is aware both of depletion and of the possibility that loss (of time? of energy?) is a transformative process that may create an entirely different whole. We are the sum of our present circumstances, this poetry tells us in language that is both spare and evocative.

Circumstance and reflection are considered at length in the ekphrastic poems that make up “genre scenes,” most of which pull the reader in with winding lines that alter pace and make use of repetition. “her I have painted / myself painting myself,” McCarthy writes in “self-portrait, seated.” Constantly, consistently, the poet/mother/speaker writes herself into and away from artistic representations of femininity and motherhood through the ages, considering work by Flemish, Dutch, and French painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as more contemporary works by Elźbieta Jablońska and Kate Kern Mundie. In doing so she tethers herself to her own experience of work, creativity (or the lack thereof), and domesticity. In “the listening girl (repetitions exist),” McCarthy evokes a painter who “liked making / paintings of women spinning reading cooking / lacemaking” and writes:

listen in listen listen hush
you’re making so much noise I can’t hear you

let us consider the surface of domestic order
or not let us consider the domestic
or feral pigeon let us pluck it like a chicken
let us empty the wine jug let us be reckless & overheard

In these textured, run-on lines, the speaker both shushes and celebrates the comfortable racket of daily life, suggesting that in the dual navigation of silence and noise, of reception and creation, lies movement and thus survival. Throughout this collection, McCarthy grounds the reader in gestures of love, bemusement, adoration, and interdependence as the poet-mother tests her own boundaries and abilities and tells us, “there is always / another one to be found.” In Quiet Book, the reader finds thrust, brevity, fragmentation, and completion.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

Nelson A. Denis
Nation Books ($17.99)

by Spencer Dew

The first so-called democratically elected governor of Puerto Rico, Nelson A. Denis tells us in this necessary book, smoked opium and was doubly controlled by the drug. The pipe dulled his spirit and the U.S. government blackmailed him with evidence of his addiction. Denis could make more of this valence: the oppressed wallowing in the transitory pleasures of oppression, compliant under the boot of the colonizer, complicit in helping to crush those of his fellows who attempt to resist. Yet Denis’s book is a work of history—essential history, to be sure—and he refrains from speculation about possible paths forward, even though this is the question demanded by each page of this chronicle of horror: How can Puerto Rico be free?

Puerto Ricans are called American citizens, but the term is inaccurate. Puerto Ricans are denied the full legal protections of Constitutional subjects. They can vote in American presidential elections only if they abandon the island and move to the U.S., yet they can be (and have been, in massive numbers) drafted into the U.S. armed services. It is difficult not to see the production of troops as one of the chief rationales behind the American colony of Puerto Rico, along with its strategic location and, perhaps most importantly today, its role as a captive consumer base.

The island is not patrolled by occupation forces; rather, colonial control here is primarily economic. The island has more Wal-Mart outlets per mile than any other place on earth. Any product that enters or leaves Puerto Rico is required by U.S. law to be carried on U.S. ships. Major marine freight companies thus unload and reload shipments to Puerto Rico in Jacksonville, Florida (a boon for America, in terms of jobs; an extra expense for our colonial subjects on the island). The price of certain commodities (automobiles, sure, but also produce) are higher than in the U.S., as is the cost of living, though the per-capita income on the island is less than half that of the poorest U.S. state. The island’s government, barred by law from filing for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, faces a debt crisis totaling $72 billion.

It is to this situation that Denis’s book speaks, and it is because of this situation that the book proves so difficult to review. The response inspired by War Against All Puerto Ricans is visceral: rage, guilt, despair, fear. It is hard to believe in the ideals of American democracy, the transformative promise of American law, when learning the details of a history of American conquest and oppression. American governments, American officials, and American laws, after all, banned the use of Spanish in Puerto Rican public schools, made it a felony even to own a Puerto Rican flag, and responded with violence to peaceful protests—not only machine-gunning “American citizens” in Ponce but using Air Force planes to bomb “American citizens” in two towns. Denis’s title is not a hyperbole; it is a quotation, a description of policy. He tells a story of American political and business leaders intent on owning the island, setting the Federal Bureau of Investigation to subjugate the Puerto Rican people through blackmail and terror (over 100,000 Puerto Ricans were subjects of carpetas, or secret files), and using the legal system to smash organized dissent with the arrest of thousands of nationalists. This history is largely unknown within the States, and in those cases when its contours are familiar, the dominant gloss of the perpetrators, that this was all just an “incident between Puerto Ricans” prevails.

In truth, the Puerto Rican Revolution of 1950, the main focus of Denis’s book, was a cry for international attention, a plea for recognition and justice. Wildly asymmetrical, including an assassination attempt on President Truman and a three-hour gunfight between a lone barber and dozens of police and U.S. National Guardsmen, the attempt failed and continues to fail. As a case in point, the Kirkus Review coverage of this book calls it a “relentless chronicle of a despicable part of past American foreign policy,” as if the oppression of the Puerto Rican people were behind us and Denis’s book were not an indictment of ongoing American policy. Indeed, this book is particularly urgent now. If this electoral season (for president, in the US; for governor, on the island) is to offer anything more than a contest of popular appeal and private funding, this book must play a role—this is a history of which all candidates should be informed and a present question to which they all must respond.

Which returns us, again, to the problem of a path forward, and the difficulty of writing this review. Is Puerto Rico’s situation not, like that of an opium addict, intractable? Visiting the island, I was shocked by the predominance of American retailers and fast food franchises. As PR-1 cuts south through the island and rises into the mountains, the billboards rise higher. The project of U.S. colonialism cannot be divorced from the project of U.S. corporate capitalism, and it is this drug—for it surely is a drug—that Puerto Ricans are happily consuming even as their island falls apart. American politicians, with American legislation, could take steps to relieve the island’s immediate financial crisis and should, indeed, pave the way for a free nation of Puerto Rico. But it will be an audacious task for Puerto Ricans to gain for themselves something resembling true freedom, addicted as they are to an American economic model sufficiently crippling on its own, even liberated from the draconian restrictions and penalties of the Jones Act. While there is ample reason to be deeply pessimistic about the island’s future, I also have to feel that the revolution Puerto Rico needs would offer a model for the world and that history has put Puerto Rico in the unenviable but privileged situation of confronting, years before the United States will have to, the utterly destructive force of late stage capitalism. The island may simply stumble forward, into infrastructure collapse, increasing segregation by class, walled foreign enclaves, and the eventual transformation into a narco-state. Or Puerto Rico could offer a model for the world, drawing on the same values and models of community the nationalists in this book celebrated and embodied.

I am too wary to end on an optimistic note, but Denis, whether due to editorial pressures or simply out of a sense that some catharsis was needed after so much recounting of insurmountable oppression, highlights the heroic side of the lost revolution. He gives us a Pedro Albizu Campos ready for canonization, insisting that the island is not for sale and later saying that “According to the Yankees owning one person makes you a scoundrel, but owning a nation makes you a colonial benefactor.” He reminds us of General Smedley Butler, author of War is a Racket and “I Was a Gangster for Capitalism”—works well worthy of reprinting and rereading. And he gives us page after page of play-by-play with that aforementioned barber, Vidal Santiago Diaz, who engages the government in an operatic one-man shootout, with Albizu Campos speeches blaring from a radio and Santiago Diaz himself singing politically tweaked versions of “traditional Christmas aguinaldo,” each verse punctuated with a pistol shot.

If the reader can close this book placated by some imagined solidarity with a futile last stand against an enslaving political and economic hegemony, then Denis will have failed. Canonizing these nationalists, like canonizing anyone, is a trap. In my hometown, Chicago—the distance of which from the island, as Puerto Rican nationalists in that city are quick to note, allows for a certain freedom of political imagination—there is a mural of Albizu Campos crucified. He is about to be pierced through the side by that first “democratically elected” governor of the island, the opium addict. This image—liberty beaten and bound, the deathblow to be delivered by complicity and stoned indifference—seems a far more apt image to carry away from this book. This book, after all, is not entertainment; it is an indictment and a call to action.

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Lawrence Coates
Miami University Press ($15)

by Richard Henry

A “child stalked by death” and an incidental act of kindness in a world without it drives the tragedy in Lawrence Coates's Camp Olvido. The time is the early 1930s, the place California's Central Valley work camps. Migrant workers and their families, mid-level bullies, and bosses upon bosses all populate the novella, but the wild card is Estaban, the liquor-man, who travels the camps with a barrel full of illegal brandy and unlabeled bottles of wine.

Estaban commits the initial transgression as he shuts down his camp visit for the night. Against all of his instincts, he steps away from his car, from his brandy and wine, to the stable where a sick boy is being cared for. He sees the seated mother cradling the child, with the child's father standing just behind. The tableau might be a migrant Madonna and Child, documented in black and white by Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, or any of the hundreds of WPA photographers working in the latter half of the 1930s. One can imagine Coates being employed by the WPA's Federal Writer's Project to record, without judgment, the series of tragedies.

Estaban's laying of a five-dollar bill at their feet leads to an escalating series of transgressions. The act is small, and the gift is "calculated . . . an offering to buy the camp's good will on his next visit." Nor is there much compassion when Estaban later agrees to take the child's father to one of the bosses so he may seek permission to leave with his family and find medical help for his son. He does so because, having just been emasculated by the novella's truly malevolent bully, "he would gladly see someone else's life embittered." The lack of redemption undermines any Christian allegory; any change in status in Camp Olvido is achieved only by violence. Still, Coates manages to offer us a touch of sympathy.

From one perspective, the strength of this novella is also its biggest weakness: it is excellently constructed. Every small encounter pays off; everything moves along as though pre-ordained. With its well-informed and deep explication of the economic system through the actions of the main character, invocations of John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos are inevitable. But lost is the humanity. For this aspect, it would be profitable (sic) to read the novella against, for example, José Antonio Villarreal's Pocho, Tomàs Rivera's And the Earth Did Devour Him, or Elva Treviño Hart's Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child.

Camp Olvido won Miami University Press’s 2015 novella prize, and joins four other novels by Lawrence Coates that are set in California: The Goodbye House, The Garden of the World, The Master of Monterey, and The Blossom Festival.

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Edited and translated by Theodoros Chiotis
Penned in the Margins ($15.99)

by John Bradley

“The [Greek economic] crisis was not simply financial,” writes editor and translator Theodoris Chiotis in his introduction to Futures: Poems of the Greek Crisis; “it was the dissolution of a fantasy of a world that perhaps never was.” The destruction of this “fantasy”—of a democratic society fully integrated with the European Union—understandably leaves anger and bitterness in its wake, as the poems in this anthology demonstrate. In work that varies greatly in style and structure, from prose poems to villanelles, forty-one poets offer seventy-eight poems on the psychological and emotional effects of the Greek economic turmoil.

Dissolution is an apt rubric for Chiotis to use, and it can be seen in many of the titles of poems in this anthology: “Incomplete Syntax,” “Poem to Be Recited at Protest Rallies When Riot Police is Twenty Metres Away,” “Small Poem in Memory of Suicide Victim Dimitris Christoulas,” “Homeless (Roof-less),” “The Chaos,” and “The Invisible Man or Plan for a Revolution.” Dissolution can be found as well in the imagery, as in “The Table,” by Vassilis Amanatidis. Once a symbol of coming together, the table now “gradually dwindled into a furniture, / that was imperceptibly torn to pieces.” And it can be found in fractured language, as in Steve Willey’s “Blood Poem”: “That half of my Greece is called blood is my poem.” Dissolution even threatens to unravel poems. In Yiannis Stiggas’s “The Road to the Newspaper Kiosk,” we learn: “—this is where a line with hammers is missing—.”

The dissolution of a nation leads to despair and violence. George Ttouli, in “Mutilated Images,” uses a litany to show social upheaval:

In Lefkosia they open fire
on politician’s motorcades.

In Lefkosia I threw my passport
on the burning placards

What? What am I trying to say?

In Lefkosia I watched a cockroach
crawl beneath the barricades.

Often a dark humor emerges, as in A. E. Stallings’s “Austerity Measures,” one of two villanelles (both by Stallings) in the anthology: “Weep, Pericles, or maybe just get drunk. / We’ll hawk the Parthenon to buy our bread.” Absurdist humor also appears in three striking prose poems by Thomas Tsalapatis: “Transparent,” “The Nail,” and “The Box.” In “The Nail,” our narrator tells us how a nail grows from his forehead. Doctors eventually solve the problem: “They hung a painting on my forehead.” This absurdist solution has a drawback and an advantage—the narrator can no longer see anything other than the back of the picture, but the consolation he finds is “it’s not like that there is anything special to see.”

Social breakdown can also lead to defiance. “And if only death and nothingness are the only things left for us / Then in death and nothingness we shall find hope,” writes Nikos Erinakis, in “The New Symmetry.” In “Days To,” a poet who goes by the name of Universal Jenny offers advice, such as “Push over the cliff whatever’s moving your way,” “Neutralise the verb ‘to shock’,” and “Draw courage from zero.” Katerina Iliopoulou, in “In Heaven Everything Is Fine,” sums up why we turn to poetry at a time of crisis: “Words are a means of survival.”

Much thought has gone into the creation of this book. Chiotis wrestled with the issue of “Greekness” and decided to include “not only Greek poets but also poets of Greek descent . . . and poets who have a personal connection or affinity with Greece.” The titles of each of the five sections of the book employ “financial jargon”: “Assessment,” “Adjustment,” “Implementation,” “Singularity,” and “Acceleration.” Chiotis also features, at the start of each section, a photograph of Greek street art; one shows us an image of Cupid, with the message: “fuck February 14th” and “Make Love & Class War.” The cover art is also arresting, displaying a marble sculpture of Atlas bearing on his back not the world, but a large Euro coin with the value of “0.”

There is one problem, however: Most of the poems in Futures are translated by the Greek poets themselves. And many of these self-translated poems contain badly worded lines. For example, in Emily Critchley’s “Protest Song, 11th December 2010,” she states: “Police are people too— / have so much feelings to give—” In Constantintinos Hadzinikolaou’s “The Adelaides,” he writes, “She goes and find him . . . .” In Yiannis Stiggas’s “In the Style of Y. S.,” Stiggas offers: “it is poetry to that kicks at the stool.” It’s unfortunate that these problems weren’t caught because when writers experiment with breaking grammar and syntax for effect, as many of the poets here appear to do, errors leave the reader wondering what fractures are deliberate.

This minor issue, however, does not dim the power of these poems. “I want to gatecrash history,” reads the graffiti in one photo. This impressive anthology does just that.

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Emily Bludworth de Barrios
H_NGM_N Books ($15.95)

by Ashleigh Lambert

The glorious trouble with being human is that “the self is in fact / just loose. / / One works to define a context / for one’s life.” The alternative to pursuing this difficult work? “To be bigger and older and draped / in knowledge and skin. / / Having yet to have undergone / the great transformation.” Figuring out what this work entails, and why some of us have an easier time of it than others, is at the heart of Splendor, the first full-length poetry collection by Emily Bludworth de Barrios.

The speaker’s self-building work requires her to engage with feelings and questions that will be familiar to many of her readers: envy, ambition, whether to reproduce, how to love, the proper place of work in one’s life. These all turn out to be facets of one overriding concern: how to grapple with privilege. If that induces eye-rolls, consider the skill with which the poet presents the problem. Early in the book, the speaker longs for “the sense / of unearned accomplishment. / / That is something at which / one cannot fail.” Although it is “beguiling,” she rejects this cheap facsimile of achievement. But her familiarity with it leaves a lingering smudge of guilt.

Another possible definition of privilege is put forth later: “Empathy which one stands there holding / no place to put it.” Or maybe privilege is “my general expectation of being / pleased all the time.” Or perhaps it is simply moving through one’s life with the sense of oneself as “I who have been given so much it was not clear / where the world ended and I began.”

Eventually, a claustrophobic affect is achieved, as the speaker circles around and around her good fortune, taking its measure, testing its strength, but unable to either immerse herself in it or to flee. Her evident desire to acknowledge her unwarranted luck leaves her curiously unable to look beyond it, to consider what comes after acknowledgment. At times she lapses into a peculiar and self-congratulatory kind of nostalgia, one which assumes that generic “people” in some unspecified past didn’t have as active an interior life as the conspicuously confused modern generation. She misses “the old people / who are real grown ups,” for whom “regular work” smoothed “Shards of inadequacy and disappointment / No space for a full evening of self-doubt.”

Perhaps this nostalgia is born of an anxiety about how to act in the present. The speaker in these poems does crave clarity about how to respond to the world’s claims on her:

I know with my whole mind
I don’t think about these things just right.

Why bring it up then.

Because I inherited a life
for which I am grateful.

But such luck, no matter how reverently examined, cannot hold. As the speaker catalogs her good fortune, there is the growing sense that a disaster is brewing in the wings. And when finally “the bad thing really happens,” the speaker’s fragility is replaced with humility and wisdom as she is forced to draw upon her inner reserves.

Bludworth de Barrios is at her best when explicating desires we cannot be proud of or accommodate. In Splendor, she infuses with radiance that which we tend to keep opaque.

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Richard Reeves
Picador ($18)

by Douglas Messerli

In the very first chapter of this study of the Japanese American Internment camps of World War II, Richard Reeves quickly takes us from Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 to the sudden outcry against Issei (first generation immigrants), Kibei (children of immigrants born in the U.S. but educated in Japan), and even Nisei (second generation Japanese American citizens) by numerous governmental figures and state leaders, particularly in the West. Among the worst of the rabble-rousers were General John L. DeWitt, Colonel Karl Bendetsen, Governor of Idaho Chase Clark (who hatefully stated, “the Japs live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats”), Attorney General Earl Warren, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Supreme Court Justices Tom C. Clark and William O. Douglas, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, and journalists Walter Lippmann and Edward R. Murrow. Even cartoonist (and later writer of beloved children’s books) Theodor Seuss Geisel—who drew ugly caricatures of Japanese Americans—and the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, Roger Baldwin, joined in the national hate-mongering. Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron dismissed all city employees of Japanese lineage, arguing “There isn’t a shadow of a doubt that Lincoln, the mild-mannered man whose memory we regard with almost saint-like reverence, would make short work of rounding up the Japanese and putting them where they could do no harm.”

Before long, California organizations such as the Lions and Elks, the Supreme Pyramid of the Sciots, and the Townsend Clubs joined in the discrimination and disparagement, and almost daily, DeWitt and military officers reported spotting fleets of Japanese ships, threats of raids and landings, and imminent attacks on Los Angeles, none of which was true. But then, as Reeves reports, “something did happen. On December 23, a Japanese submarine torpedoed and sank a Union Oil tanker, the company’s largest, the USS Montebello, in sight of Cambria, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco . . . By Christmas of 1941, soldiers, FBI agents, police, and local authorities were conducting raids on homes across California, Oregon, and Washington, arresting people whose names had never appeared on the sloppiest government lists.”

People would arrive home to discover FBI agents or other authorities had entered their homes, and were soon after taken away for supposed questioning. Fathers would be pulled from the house in the middle of the night and sent to camps no one had yet heard about. Even in Nebraska and Colorado, Japanese Americans were arrested with absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing. Indeed, Reeves describes that in some cases, when fathers were taken away, sons volunteered to serve in the army.

Despite very little evidence that Japanese Americans might be disloyal to the United States, on March 2, 1942, President Roosevelt signed the proclamation that would lead to the arrests and transfer of thousands of Americans of Japanese heritage to various camps (Manazar and Tule Lake in California, Minidoka in Idaho, Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Poston and Gilla River in Arizona, Amache in Colorado, and Rower and Jerome in Arkansas).

Japanese American citizens and immigrants were forced to sell their land, houses, and furniture, and sent off—often with family members being sent in different directions—to older barracks and long unused governmental camps located in cold mountain locations, deserts, and steamy swamps. Through letters and historical records, Reeves spends numerous pages of his book describing the nearly unbearable conditions of these camps, whose inhabitants were plagued by freezing temperatures, wild sand storms, and drenching rainfalls. The evacuees were told that they were being taken to the camps in order to protect them, but as they noted, the guns on the other side of the barbed wire borders were pointing in toward them, not out toward any possible intruders.

Although some artists such as Ansel Adams, who attempted to document camp life, and Isamu Noguchi, the noted sculptor who volunteered to teach art to the evacuees, attempted to bring community activities to the boredom of camp life, Reeves describes that such activities aroused little interest from these basically farm folk. In fact, as other books such as Violet Kazue de Cristoforo’s anthology May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow (Sun & Moon Press, 1997) have revealed, there were haiku clubs in many of the camps, as well as numerous painting groups. Some camps held weekly dances and created scout troops for the younger internees. And both young and old had educational opportunities. Regardless of the shock of becoming subjects of such hate from their fellow citizens, and the harsh conditions the Japanese Americans faced in the camps, some semblance of meaningful activity gradually arose in the infamous internment installations.

As the war progressed, some Nisei were encouraged to volunteer for the military—many of whom did join up later in the remarkable One Hundredth Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Teams fighting in Europe, by war’s end liberating some of those imprisoned in the Jewish concentration camps, while in the U.S. their own parents remained locked away in somewhat similar conditions. Other second generation men and women were released to work in the Midwest and East, with the provision that they could not work or live near railroad tracks or military centers.

Eventually fractures between the locked away Japanese Americans began to grow, particularly between the first generation immigrants, together with those educated in Japan, and the often younger and more assimilated Nisei—particularly when all were asked to sign a loyalty oath after their rights as American citizens had already been taken away. Gangs of disbelievers, the so-called “no-no” boys (who had refused to sign) began attacking those who had more moderate views or even their other family members, particularly at Tule Lake. Many feared that all would be sent to Japan after the war and found little reason to remain loyal to a nation that had been so disloyal to them.

The government made it worse by rounding up most of the disloyals and sending them to Tule Lake, while refusing to keep order within. Major protests occurred, which brought about further feelings of injustice and hatred. As Reeves makes clear, conditions in the camps were often worse than the prisons to which the most violent were shipped.

Even when officials began to release the prisoners, others were afraid to leave for fear of how they might be treated by their fellow American citizens. Several feared leaving their older family members behind, and worried about the breakup of family which had been so central to their upbringing. Some, strangely enough, had become dependent on camp life, where meals and activities were served up to them freely. Many, who had lost everything they had owned, had nowhere else to go.

Reeves ends his detailed account of these camps by turning his attention to the young Japanese American soldiers who bravely fought for the U.S., demonstrating clearly that the post-Pearl Harbor hysteria had utterly no basis in reality. His descriptions of several Japanese American young soldiers are some of the most touching passages of his generally moving book.

After the war, some of those who had strongly supported the camps, like Earl Warren, came to regret their racism and injustice. Reeves argues Warren’s 1954 decision on public school integration in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, where he joined the court’s unanimous decision, “was related to [his] disgraceful actions in 1942.”

The author ends his fascinating account of this American infamy with a comment from Connie Nice, the director of The History Museum in Hood River, Oregon, where even after the war, a local group posted ads in the papers which read “So Sorry Please, Japs Are Not Wanted in Hood River”: “I’m hoping that people will just stop and think: Could we do that again? Are we doing that again, with Latinos or Mexicans or Muslims? . . . I’m not saying this little exhibit [A Circle of Freedom: Lost and Restored] will change the world. But I want people to walk away and say, ‘Maybe we didn’t do that right’ and I hope then that they’re not going to repeat history.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016