Aleister Crowley
Wordsworth Editions ($7.99)

by Spencer Dew

In this posthumous collection of stories by Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), we see evidence of the Great Beast’s comparative religious and occult knowledge, though too often this is hauled into service for the churning out of tepid pulp pieces. Dust off some Vedanta, plug in the cult of Apollo or a ouija board or the ceremonial conjuration of an angel, add a drop of “the Primal Water of Chaos” alongside a chunky paragraph rehashing appropriately watered-down Kabbalah, insert a murderous dwarf or hunchback or a team featuring one of each, and abracadabra: “Now therefore his disciples came unto the Vault of that Mystic Mountain, and with the Keys they opened the Portal and came to him and woke him.” So let it be written, so let the writer get paid.

Crowley claimed, as prophet of the new religion of Thelema, that his Book of the Law was channeled via automatic writing, the real author being a nonhuman entity. This book, regrettably, reads as if the spirit of Hack took possession of Crowley’s hands and spun off assorted tales of mystery, ornate allegories, and gassy philosophical dialogues.

Not that there aren’t interesting relics hidden in the muck. In “A Death Bed Repentance” Crowley revisits the Plymouth Brethren sect, his oppressive childhood religion, stripping bare their fallacies and using their central, stubborn theological insistence in an omnipotent and just deity to reveal how little that movement cared about the narrative contents of their holy scriptures. This is most interesting as a think-piece, as a revealing glimpse into Crowley’s biography and mind. The same is true of “Felo de Se,” which walks through Thelemic thoughts on suicide (and allows Crowley some punching practice with his nemesis, Christianity, like the jab about that faith being predicated on “the most deliberate suicide possible, since he had planned it from all eternity, even taking the trouble to create a universe of infinite agony in order to redeem it by this suicide.”

Indeed, the best parts of The Drug offer traces of the bombast and wit so evident in Crowley’s other works, though these seem, at best, rough versions of what one would expect from the author of such inspired works of fiction as Moonchild and Diary of a Drug Fiend. There are pleasant one-liners (Sufi poetry may engage the erotic for spiritual reasons “but also, I believe . . . because [the Sufi writer] is just as dirty-minded a beast as you and I” and some clever ideas (those willing “to become the saviours of their country shall be called the Synagogue of Satan, so as to keep themselves from the friendship of the fools—who mistake names for things”), but for the most part these pages are given over to cheap melodrama, to nymphs, and divine gardens, narrators that introduce themselves as “the Key of Delights,” plots exploring “the death-struggle against Nature, to which there is only one end,” and the rumbling of ancient things into abysses as the gods stride by or howl or are suspiciously unresponsive to human entreaties. When Crowley writes that “Of course, no more than one seventh of the wisdom is ever confided to any one of the Seven, and the Seven meet in council but once in every thirty-three years,” the only math that makes sense is the author calculating his payment by the word.

This dialed-in quality can, at times, allow Crowley to play to his strengths. He knows a great deal about classical pantheons east and west, and he can effortlessly bring those deities to life, squabbling and prancing across his pages. In one successful light moment the Buddha is given “Well, so long, old chap” as a line of dialogue. Such moments bring to mind Crowley’s smugly tongue-in-cheek Simon Iff Stories, all exponentially superior to the offerings on hand here. Indeed, the light, snide, characteristically arrogant tone Crowley does so well is here too often discarded for prose that oscillates between “deep-throated mockery of the gods” and a shrieking, crucifix-shattering pitch of horror.

Horror is a real problem here. “The Testament of Magdalen Blair” is famously scary, though it would be a sight more frightening if it didn’t belabor “the essence of horror” in such leaden language—just give us a creepy hint of the scene, please, and spare us lines like “And then there came the cold-drawn horror of stark blasphemy against this God—who would not answer.” Horror hurts this collection, too, by making comparison inevitable: Crowley is no Lovecraft in these pages, nor is he Poe. If, as a reader, you’re interested in a gripping story, told via the text of a personal journal abandoned in the wake of a mysterious catastrophe and purporting to plot the causes of madness, there’s probably a better text out there for you than the one included in The Drug. But for aficionados of Crowley or those interested in the history through which he lived (useful notes in the back contextualize and offer dates for the pieces in this thick volume), this book is worth the investment of a few dark evenings.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

Wendy S. Walters
Futurepoem Books ($16)

by Ashleigh Lambert

How does racism make a space? In Troy, Michigan, Wendy S. Walters turns sonnets into maps that document the terrain of oppression. If a collection of sonnets seems like an archaic approach to confronting the structures that enable racism, consider: sonnets and suburbs both concern themselves with imposing order on what is deemed unruly. Aren’t the suburbs—isn’t America—primarily concerned with “triumph over topography,” and can the desire to control the land ever be separated from the desire to control who inhabits it? Isn’t a sonnet an efficient tool for drawing new boundaries—the line taking the place of the surveyor’s rod, the octave and sestet sketching out the shape of a plot?

Walters’s vision roams freely over the landscape. She peels back layers of history to show the connections between the Troy of antiquity, the settling of Michigan by whites, the rise of the automobile and the suburbs. “Founding,” a crown of sonnets, traces the history of Troy, beginning and ending with the exhortation, “Start with some common interests in escape.” A fall is pre-ordained, inscribed in the name: “A Troy made again / invites myths of walled cities and idols / of speed into the woods to undo us.” Paranoia becomes inextricable from a sense of place: “A fear of mixed-use / space reflected mistrust, a solitude / philosophy.”

In “Prologue, 1970s,” our attention is directed to “snow in right neighborhoods outside one / gray city.” A resonant word, “right,” with its echoes of both angles—as in construction, development—and morality. The nuances of that word are useful to keep in mind, as studies show that even when people of color do everything “right”—graduate high school, get married before having children, find full time-work—they are less likely to be granted the trappings of middle-class life than their white peers.

Walters sketches out the contours of this world with its brutal logic and inviolate rules, then zooms in on one particular resident of this landscape: the speaker herself. Speaking alternately from the positions of I, she, the writer, and our girl, Walters seizes the power of multiplicity. Sonnets and suburbs have historically valued a stable self and Walters’s shifting voice is a welcome departure from this tradition. Midway through the book, a girl appears, hiding in the desolate woods “from those who don’t seek her out.” Is this girl the poet? She is more than that:

The writer illustrates our girl’s worries
as a wall of windows. Look out. See how
she waves as she walks up the road? She wants
you to join her, but you can’t catch up.

Angry and sad that the white world won’t acknowledge her value, this girl still affirms: “I remain.” The Troy of Walters’s poems may not be the stuff of epic, but as the poet tartly reminds us, “This saga / matters as much to me as epics do / to everyone else.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

interviewed by Sarah Suzor

E.B. White once wrote, “It is not often someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” The line is about his immortal character Charlotte, but it could easily apply to Jessica Piazza and Jill Alexander Essbaum; their story of writerly friendship supersedes the possible ego of competition, and instead grows the relationship they share into one of appreciation, adoration, and respect. This is all the more remarkable as both are highly decorated writers: Piazza is the author of a prize-winning debut collection of poems, Interrobang (Red Hen Press) and a subsequent chapbook, This is not a sky (Black Lawrence Press, $8.95), and she has boldly taken up the Poetry Has Value initiative, which contemplates and perhaps re-defines the worth (literary and figuratively) of contemporary poetry. Essbaum is the author of several acclaimed poetry collections and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, but has recently seen her debut novel Hausfrau (Random House, $16) noted as a New York Times Best Seller, mentioned in People magazine, and frequently described as a modern-day Madame Bovary.

In the interview below, Essbaum and Piazza explain more of their shared story, each from their own perspective.

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Sarah Suzor: How did you two meet?

Jill Alexander Essbaum: We met at Curra’s in Austin. Craig Arnold called and asked me to come to meet his girlfriend Rebecca Lindenberg (who I also love beyond all reason and compare), but because it was Craig, it was a last-minute invite (I sure do miss that guy) and I almost didn’t go. And then we hit it off. Our first girl date was on the back patio at Austin Java.

We met because we had to. It was foreordained.

Jessica Piazza: Serendipitously, of course. Mostly because we met through a dear mutual friend, the poet Craig Arnold (who died several years ago in an accident in Japan), although we almost didn’t come to the fateful lunch that ultimately set the scene for our origin story—Jill wasn’t that into coming down to South Austin, and I was in a problematic relationship that had me cancelling plans often, so it could have been otherwise. But Craig and his partner, the indomitable Rebecca Lindenberg, were in town for a few days and insisted Jill and I meet. Or maybe they just wanted to see both of us and it was convenient. Either way, it was kismet. Over margaritas and chips at Curra’s Grill, Jill and I realized we had a lot in common, not the least of which is a really offbeat sense of humor and a love of joyous trickery and game-playing in poetry. I’m not sure how this Brooklyn bruiser immediately clicked with a small-town Texas girl, but we did. And over the decade plus since then we’ve become closer than I would have imagined—we’ve become family. Even after Jill moved to Switzerland and I left Texas, we were still family, even more so maybe—talking all the time, helping each other through everything. Jill spent every Thanksgiving here for years; I would come see her at UC Riverside Palm Desert every residency she did there. Family.

SS: How would your writing careers have been different without knowing each other?

JAE: It would be sad and boring and I wouldn’t be publishing this novel. Really. She facilitated the meeting of my first agent, and preceding even that, she was my first and best reader. We were each other’s dates to the Westchester Poetry Conference whenever we went which made it less awkward for us (and more awkward for everyone else). She gave me license to be looser with my tempo and meter, and I’d like to think I taught her the freedom to rhyme weird shit.

JP: I know I wouldn’t be as brave—I wouldn’t have the courage to forget what the rest of the world thinks and just write what makes me happy. In practical terms, I certainly write more because of Jill’s example. Our processes are pretty much the opposite—she writes all the time and is incredibly painstaking, while I write in fits and starts and produce a truckload when I’m in the zone—but we always encourage each other and keep tabs on our output. Jill is my very best reader. We sometimes collaborate on poetry exercises and we’ve given each other lines; there are poems I’ve published that I’m pretty sure contain lines she originally wrote, and vice versa, but we don’t really keep track anymore.

It was also Jill who made me love rhyme even more than I already did. I was a meter geek when we met, but I was into a Marilyn Hacker style of subtle rhyme, the kind where in certain poems you might not even notice it. Jill on the other hand was bold—she couldn't care less when she was too much on the page—and I was dazzled by that, so I took her example and ran with it. We both rhyme like bulls in china shops now, and I love it.

Although, I just read back and saw you asked how our careers would be different, not our writing. And it’s hard to say, except for the fact that Jill has been my biggest fan and supporter. Just ask anyone in the industry she knows if she’s talked me up to them at one point or another; chances are yes. I do the same for her, of course, but she’s been doing this longer than I have and is further in her career, so I’m especially grateful. And the truth is, it’s just really good (for my heart and career) to have someone so damn talented rooting for me.

SS: Jill, your new novel Hausfrau is getting a lot of attention. How do you feel about the hype?

JAE: It terrifies me. It delights me. It makes me miss my dead parents—I want to slap it under a magnet on their refrigerator under my last report card. I want the world to love it. I want to succeed. But if I don’t, I want to be ok with that. And the truth is, I kind of am. The endgame is the art, right? I’ve come farther than most. I’m entirely humbled. I’m gratified. I’m grateful.

SS: Jessica, what was your reaction when you found out Jill’s book was picked up by Random House?

JP: I started jumping up and down and screaming. It’s funny, I introduced Jill to the agent that picked up the book, and I had a really good feeling that he’d want to take it—though neither of us could have imagined that the first editor who read it would buy it, and that the editor would be David Ebershoff, one of the best in the business. But I wasn’t really surprised; the book is that good. I was just happy. It’s a total blessing, and no one deserves it more than Jill does.

SS: You both participate in jobs outside of creative writing. What are your most exciting endeavors right now?

JAE: I was married about a year ago and I adore this husband more than I adore cake. More than icing, even. (And you can ask Jessie: I fucking love icing.) Our life together is one of those aforementioned exciting endeavors. Every day he makes me laugh like an audience member in a Redd Foxx concert: heartily, inappropriately, with wild, nostalgic, abandon.

JP: I’m teaching a lot and running book clubs throughout Southern California, so I’m busy. I’m also promoting Interrobang and This is not a sky, so that takes time. I’m trying to conceptualize my next book, but I'm not sure where I’m going with it yet. Jill says I should write a novel. We’ll see.

I'm really pleased that my second full-length collection is coming out this April with Red Hen Press. It's called Obliterations, and it's a sequence of erasure poems that use articles from the New York Times as their source texts. I co-wrote it with a dear friend, Heather Aimee O'Neill, who is another example of the amazing fortune I've had in the strong, talented, female friend department.

Besides that, the thing I'm most excited about right now is this blog I’ve started called “Poetry Has Value.” I took a pledge that in 2015 I’d only submit poetry to paying markets and that I’d blog about the experience. It was just a crazy experiment to see what would happen if I insisted that poetry—a genre that gets a lot of respect but not much compensation—could make money just like journalism or fiction or art can. (And yes, I know it’s hard to make money at any art. I’m just questioning the rote idea that success in other genres might eventually lead to payment but poetry hardly ever does.) Anyway, the site became much bigger than just me; amazing guest bloggers like Terry Wolverton and Sandra Beasley have weighed in on the subject, and I started interviewing the editors and publishers of paying literary magazines specifically about how they make it work. I’m hoping that it serves as a resource for people interested in switching to a paying model, and illustrates that in some (though definitely not all) cases it can be done. I’ve also created a public, editable spreadsheet of poetry journals that pay writers so poets can consult it (and add to it!) at will. It’s really become a community where people can discuss poetry, money, and worth, and I'm proud to help lift what I see as a taboo against talking about poetry in terms of money. The site is at www.poetryhasvalue.com, for those interested.

SS: Jessica, for you, what is the most intriguing aspect of your new chapbook of ekphrastic poems, This is Not a Sky?

JP: It was exciting to let the art inform my style. This work, unlike Interrobang, isn’t formal at all, but somehow it still . . . sounds formal? I mean that it sounds a lot like me. But I was able to play all sorts of games in the poems that I never would have because the artists’ styles called for it. So the poem based on the Escher drawing is circular and repetitive; the poem based on the Twombley painting is full of scrawl. And all of them have a QR code, so the reader can scan it with a smart phone and go directly to the art, which I love. Most readers won’t, I know, but it’s a fun option to have.

SS: Jill, in your opinion, what’s Jessica’s signature writing style?

JAE: Formal but not formulaic; classic in her consideration of themes, explosively innovative in her treatment of them; marked by a loping, subtle iamb; zig-zag-ey, which is to say unexpected—it’s like you read it the way one runs away from an alligator; fun but never entirely frivolous; with a sadness that underscores even the lightest, brightest moments. Original. Of unknown origin. Imported. Important.

SS: Jessica, in your opinion, what’s Jill’s signature writing style?

JP: Finely-tuned, perfectly-crafted, over the top word lust. She’s a novelist that poets can truly get behind and a poet that really appeals to the everyday reader, too. She’s high-falutin’ and yet somehow really down to earth. And punny. She’s all sorts of punny.

SS: Jill, for you, what is the most intriguing aspect of your new book, Hausfrau?

JAE: Intriguing to me? I’m listening to the audio book as I type this, and it’s a surreal experience, as if this is someone else’s book. I’ll think: Holy crap—did I write that??? And then: Huh. I guess I did write that. Damn, girl. Good on you. And then: Wow, this is a lot dirtier than I thought it was.

For others, I can only hope what intrigues them is the way I’ve told the story. It’s really a quite simple story, but I’ve paced it with deliberation and forethought. My wish is that I’ve told it well.

SS: Jessica, can you explain a bit more about “Poetry Has Value”?

JP: I can say that it wasn’t about creating a manifesto. I don’t insist that every journal should pay poets—at least not now, because it isn’t possible. I just wanted to do this experiment because I thought it would be evocative for others, and that it might start a conversation that’s sorely needed. But the most important thing I can get across is this: people say there aren’t any readers of poetry, and that’s not true. There aren’t enough, sure, but there are readers. And if poetry lovers subscribed to even three or four journals a year, the whole industry would be different. We need to support what we love and what we enjoy.

This experiment, far from being about me making a living (which I won’t, I promise), is really about asking all of us to consider why we don’t expect to get paid for the hard work we do creating our art, and in what ways we’re complicit in these industry-wide issues.

SS: Jill, what’s the most drastically different part about writing fiction, as opposed to poetry?

JAE: I had to sit still longer, but that’s it. This is a very organized novel; it’s structured in the way that something like a traditional poem might be structured. There’s a “turn” two-thirds of the way into the book. The timeline lasts exactly three months, and each section lasts precisely one. Each month features a birthday party. I wrote this book exactly the same way I write my poems: ain’t no word here that ain’t been vetted. None. All decisions have been entirely considered. All. Were all choices correct? That’s up for anyone’s interpretation. But I relied on the economy of language that poetry demands, and the necessity of choice and decision-making that poetry calls for.

SS: Jill, what would be Jessica’s go-to karaoke song?

JAE: Woof. We listen to such different music I’m not sure I could answer that. But what if I suggest one? How about the Cameo classic “Word Up”?

SS: Jessica, what would be your go-to karaoke song?

JP: “When You’re Good to Mama” from Chicago, or “Beautiful Girls” by Sean Kingston. (Don’t knock the latter until you’ve heard my version!)

SS: Why do you feel it’s important to share a bond as writers as well as friends? Is there something particularly special about admiring each other as people as well as admiring each others’ creations?

JAE: Because I love her and trust her and know her. And we don’t always agree; the tension between our work—not the sameness—calls it into question, and makes for the best writing. After a point I think writing groups are a good way to avoid putting your work out into the world; they are by turns congratulatory and disheartening, and you often wind up writing something that pleases everyone, rather that something that pushes you to go beyond yourself. Too, Jessie and I have similar but not perfectly matched aesthetics. She’s introduced me to poets I didn’t know. For example, she turned me on to Eric McHenry (who in turn pointed me to Richard Kenney), and Albert Goldbarth, and she convinced me to second-chance Ben Lerner, which I’m glad I did. For my part—and Jess, forgive me if I’m wrong here, you know I have the forgetfuls—I think I was the one who brought her to Harvey Hix and Evie Shockley and Atsuro Riley. And then there are those beautiful moments where we come to love poets separately but at the same time—notably, Kate Greenstreet vis-à-vis her masterpiece, The Last 4 Things. The day we discovered that we have the same favorite all-time poem was the day I knew I’d love her forever. (I won’t say what it is.)

I’m a better person and a better writer and I hope a better friend because of her.

JP: Yes. There’s something special. I have a few close friends who are also amazing poets and wonderful readers for me (Rebecca Lindenberg, Elizabeth Cantwell, Cody Todd and Joshua Rivkin come to mind immediately), and the respect I have for them as people is entirely more important than my admiration of their craft (which is substantial, trust me.) With Jill, we realized we liked each other as people before we even read each other’s poems, and though we both really loved each other’s work from the beginning, I think our styles have developed together—almost the way poets of the past who were part of a given school might influence each other. That kind of deep influence, the kind that isn’t accompanied by anxiety, requires an even deeper friendship. So I feel lucky to have my sister Jill. The fact that she’s insanely talented is just gravy.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

Paul Beatty
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($26)

by Calista McRae

The Sellout opens in the hallways of the Supreme Court, where the narrator—the defendant in an impending trial, and the sellout of the book’s title—is fortifying himself with an especially potent joint. His explanation of his crimes forms the core of this bristling, exhausting, constantly funny novel: he has been keeping a slave and has been trying to reinstitute segregation in his home town.

Paul Beatty’s satirical novel is not easily summed up. Simultaneously gleeful, irritated, and resigned, its targets are all over the place, though a sophisticated humor smooths out the book’s cumulative anger, as well as its gruesome melancholy. The old man who becomes the narrator’s slave, for example, was one of the original comedians of The Little Rascals; he is equally ridiculous and mournful.

This satire is also ambivalent about comedy itself. While the goal of laughter is to puncture and expose, when Beatty’s characters laugh, the act is inane and fake as often as it is tonic. The most vivid emblem of complacent laughter occurs a few pages from the book’s end, at an otherwise black open-mic standup night: one white couple arrives late, and laughs too loudly and too knowingly.

And yet, comedy and delight vibrate in every corner of this book, from single phrase to plot. The narrator grew up in a ten-block neighborhood zoned for agriculture despite its position in the inner city of Los Angeles; named “Dickens,” it is also known as the “Murder Capital of the World.” When Dickens is taken off the map by richer areas that want “to keep their property values up and blood pressures down,” the Sellout discovers one of his first projects: to reinstate its boundaries. (Borders are a recurring theme in Beatty’s novels; in 2008’s Slumberland, the narrator tried to restore the just-toppled Berlin Wall.) There follows a barrage of jokes about Los Angeles, and about places and politics more broadly. Take, for instance, an extended passage on sister cities: “Some cities marry up for money and prestige; others marry down to piss off their mother countries. Guess who’s coming to dinner? Kabul!” The narrator finally tries a city matchmaking system, which offers Dickens three potential companions: Juárez, Chernobyl, and Kinshasa. Each rejects Dickens.

Within such set-pieces, all kinds of verbal humor contend for attention, from the miraculously apt to the miraculously absurd. An officer of the court is “a proud Budweiser of a woman with a brightly colored sash of citations rainbowed across her chest.” The celebrity intellectual who replaces “slave” with “dark-skinned volunteer” in Huckleberry Finn, and who rewrites The Adventures of Tom Soarer, uses an African-American presentation software known as “EmpowerPoint.” Driveby shootings have become harder to anticipate: “with these new hybrid, silent-running, energy-saving automobiles, you don’t hear shit,” and the gunman can clear out “while getting fifty-five miles to the gallon.”

Such passages suggest that language is a centrifugal force in this novel, but language also holds all these disparate performances together. Even the longest of Beatty’s sentences can be read out loud, with ease. As with the comedy of Dickens himself—or that of American satirists such as Flannery O’Connor and Junot Diaz—it’s hard to refrain from doing so.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

Sven Birkerts
Graywolf Press ($16)

by Scott F. Parker

If you wanted to reduce Sven Birkerts’s Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age to a nice, digestible nugget of information, the subtitle gets you pretty much there. You can assume, rightly, that the book argues for art in the face of the Internet’s onslaught on our attention. Somehow, you intuit, Birkerts will make a distinction between art and the Internet that establishes a meaningful difference between, say, reading a single bound codex line by line and navigating infinite hypertext at your whim. If you’re not in a hurry, you could glance back at the title and notice a possible pun on the word subject. You might wonder if Birkerts is hinting that the way our digital culture is constantly changing the subject on us actually has the effect of changing the subject (i.e., you, me, him, or the self in general).

Now that you’ve decoded the book’s title, part of you might be thinking: do you really have to bother reading the whole thing? There are so many other books, articles, who-knows-whats out there, so much information coming at you in your various feeds and streams and clouds, why get bogged down? You can move from idea to idea. You can be free—infinite. This is pretty much how I read the Internet. I can’t bear to click on an article because I’m more interested in what other articles might be out there.

Here’s the thing about taking the time to sit down and actually read the words in this book instead of just assuming you get the point (even if you do): Changing the Subject not only argues but also embodies and performs its central claim that art is a necessary antidote to information. The proof is in the experience. To turn oneself over to an essayist is to see the world through someone else’s eyes. In the case of reading someone like Birkerts who sees clearly into his subject, it is to become (for a time) smarter than oneself.

And now subject points in at least three directions. Birkerts’s subject is the intersection of art and information; it is also his experiencing self; it refers as well to the reader’s self as she tries on his point of view. In a way, perhaps, the question has already been begged. If reading is old-fashioned, the notion of an individuated self may be too. Birkerts thinks so in the book’s first essay: “The realization of autonomous selfhood is no longer our primary beckoning ideal—if it ever was.” As connection continues to replace reflection, the self gets distributed across the various networks in which we enmesh ourselves

So who’s going to want to read this book? In class this morning, I caught my best student tapping away at a screen in the back row. This isn’t one of these students who is merely fulfilling a requirement, who communicate with all their being that truth or morality or whatever is not really worth getting worked up. No, my best student—the one whose comments are most insightful, whose readings are most penetrating, the one who asks engaged questions of her classmates and her teacher as well as of herself. There she was tapping away in her private bubble. Maybe it’s true that if she weren’t bored she wouldn’t have taken her phone out, but how can a classroom compete with literally anything she can imagine? That may be the core of the question of attention. In the old model of self it is a virtue to put one’s attention outside oneself, to concentrate on something that may not be immediately gratifying but that may pay off greater rewards later; under the new model there is no such thing as “outside oneself.” What’s the difference, from an eighteen-year-old’s point of view, between the information coming out of her teacher’s and her classmates’ mouths and the information available on her device?

For Birkerts a difference exists: “For, you see, contemplation is not a subset category, not just one kind of thinking among many. It is the point of thinking, its alpha and omega. Contemplation directs itself at the existential, which is to say, at that which pertains to the possible why of our being.” This is the central question of our existence, and the Internet can only ever respond to it by changing the subject. What if being human just doesn’t mean what I think it means anymore? What if the medium is the message? What if technology is never neutral? Merely to raise such questions puts one in a defiant camp out of step with the times. How much easier to go with the flow, the forward march of what Max Frisch (via Birkerts) calls technology: “the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.”

The counterargument that usually gets made is that Plato was against writing for the same kinds of reasons, and just look how naive he was. There are always those who are afraid of technological development and they always look foolish in retrospect. Never mind the tenuousness of taking one of Socrates’ arguments as Plato’s final position on the subject. What’s really misleading about the Plato-Luddite argument is that it depends on a false analogy between the writing revolution and the digital one. While writing externalizes—and thereby overrides—thoughts and memories, it simultaneously preserves (or even establishes) the self, whereas the digital revolution, in diffusing it, spreads the self out into nothingness.

If the latter prevails, it seems likely that the self we generally take as a locus of singular identity will come to be seen as a historical accident or a stage in development. But this is not a given. Development, progress—these are not givens, they just appear so when we think we seem them in the rearview mirror. The future is not the past extended. The forces of history are forces of history, and the future is up for grabs. If we decide that the self is something worth preserving, we can choose to curb the reaches of the digital revolution. And if not we, at least some of us.

Changing the Subject is a rallying cry. “To achieve deep focus nowadays is to strike a blow against the dissipation of self.” It is to preserve the self, to draw out the historical moment. Those of us who care about reading and reflection will be drawn in, empowered, reassured; we will find ourselves in the best company. Those who are inclined not to read Birkerts in the first place may well miss everything he’s saying.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

Adrian Tomine
Drawn & Quarterly ($22.95)

by Steve Matuszak

Killing and Dying could almost be the title of a long-lost noir featuring Richard Widmark as a streetwise tough struggling to survive in a chiaroscuro urban landscape of moral ambiguity, all while torn between his love for a woman and his .45. With his penetrating new collection of short stories, though, cartoonist Adrian Tomine has in mind something more ordinary, albeit no less agitated by conflict. Taking his title from words used to denote those extremes of stand-up comedy—roaring success and abject failure—Tomine signals his interest in exploring the ebb and flow that makes up the daily surge of human endeavor, in turn creating a book brimming with well-observed detail and aching humor.

The first story of Killing and Dying, “A Brief History of the Art Form Known as ‘Hortisculpture,’” focuses on Harold, a horticulturist who decides to become a “hortisculpturist.” Typical of the protagonists in the six stories that are collected in the book, Harold is unhappy with his life and, gripped with restlessness, strives to make it more fulfilling. Relaxing in a bath after a hard day that included being condescended to by a woman for whom he works, Harold is inspired by designer and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi to dedicate his life to the development of a new art form, a combination of horticulture and sculpture that involves plants growing out of a clay sculptural base. Harold’s heated description of hortisculpture at a party provokes the acquaintance with whom he’s speaking to equate it, rudely though perhaps aptly, with a chia pet.

The retort is the first sign of the resistance to hortisculpture, which will include openly hostile criticism, that Harold will face over the years. His defensive response—“Well, I suppose that’s how one might describe it . . . if they were talking to a child,” a slur that quickly devolves into Harold offhandedly referring to the man as “someone who is essentially a glorified bank teller”—signals Harold’s future struggles, as over-confidence comes up hard against self-doubt, fueling the anger with which he lashes out at the world, including his family. The results are pretty funny.

The ache of the heart that produces the kind of dissatisfaction experienced by Harold—driving one to do something, anything, to quell it, but missing the mark as often as hitting it—lies at the heart of most of these stories. In the title story, for example, fourteen-year-old Jesse sets in motion a bruising family drama when she tentatively suggests to her parents that she might be interested in pursuing stand-up comedy. While her mother fervidly encourages Jesse, registering her for a class in stand-up with the unpromising name “Junior Yuks,” her father is much warier, seeing indecision in Jesse’s decision, telling his wife, “I just think we could be a little more selective about which of her . . . whims we choose to encourage. I mean, whatever happened to that two hundred dollar ukulele? Or those trapeze lessons? That really paid off!” And in the story “Go Owls,” one of the best in the collection, that unease leads to the pell-mell establishment of an unstable, quickly abusive romantic relationship.

The impressive variety of stories in Killing and Dying signals Tomine’s further growth as a storyteller. In the early 1990s, when he was just sixteen years old, Tomine revealed himself in the handful of mini-comics he self-published to be a comics prodigy with an eye for telling detail and an adventurous willingness to experiment. By the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, with the publications of Summer Blonde, an engaging collection of stories about romantically challenged twenty-somethings in California, and Shortcomings, Tomine’s abrasively funny novella about race, romance, and rants, his talent had matured; the books’ themes of loneliness, alienation, and the desire to connect were told with admirable restraint and humor. Still, Tomine’s imagination, rich as it could be, was limited to protagonists who were roughly his same age and social class. The stories weren’t autobiographical—he had, as he claims in the introduction of his collected mini-comics, “learned the useful trick of taking a personal experience and veiling it with a sex change or two”—but one was left with the nagging suspicion that they were only one step away.

However, with the stories in Killing and Dying, Tomine shows a greater ability to “veil” his experience, allowing him more leeway to explore his characters and their actions with openness and honesty. The stories feature a range of characters and situations: a middle-aged small-time drug dealer with more secrets than he cares to share with his new girlfriend; a Japanese mother returning to America to salvage her marriage; a lonely veteran haunting an apartment where he used to live; and a young woman trying to escape her life after she is continually mistaken for an internet porn star.

Tomine’s reach is also reflected in his art, which is as varied as the stories. “A Brief History of the Art Form Known as ‘Hortisculpture,’” for example, is drawn in a cartoony, “big foot” style common to daily newspaper strips, an association emphasized by the story’s structure, comprising recurring sections of six black and white, four-panel sequences—which almost always end in a gag—followed by a full page strip in color. It’s a formula familiar to anyone who reads the classic daily comic strip reprints that have proliferated in the past decade. Telling his story like a comic strip renders Harold’s pain comic—making it easier to bear—and familiar, something common that comes into and leaves our lives every day.

In “Intruders,” on the other hand, the book’s final story, Tomine employs a thick line, images menaced with shadow, appropriate for a story in which a soldier, “between [his] second and third tours,” runs away from his unwelcoming family to spend his nights in a motel and his days sneaking into an old apartment, daydreaming there, even eating lunches he had packed and brought along, until a surprise encounter leads him to reconsider his secret visits. “I walked up the block, into the stream of oblivious, happy people with their families, their shopping, their chatter,” he tells us in the final panels of the book, “And starting right there, I tried my best to become one of them.” And we believe him, the ending almost optimistic. But it is undercut by our knowledge that he doesn’t succeed. We know he goes back to the war, to his third tour, borne by the ebb and flow of life back to that place of killing and dying.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016