Simon Winchester
HarperCollins ($27.99)

by Ryder W. Miller

Simon Winchester, author of more than a dozen books and frequent traveler on the Atlantic, takes on the difficult task of trying to explain that ocean’s history and wonder. Unlike Hugh Ambrose’s recent The Pacific, which chronicles the personal experiences of soldiers during and after World War II, Atlantic is a multifaceted exploratory journey which seeks to answer wide-ranging questions about this unique ocean.

A variety of historical players are described in a barrage of tales that includes four continents and their exotic sounding, and sometimes remote, ports; all manner of ocean lore is presented; and various interpretations of the Atlantic are provided. Winchester takes so many approaches because, as he posits: "It is a tricky tale to tell. Simple chronology might suit very well the story of the making of the physical sea itself—but the details of the human experience are scarcely so amenable."

To describe his growing understanding of the Atlantic Winchester starts each chapter with a quotation about one of the seven stages of life from the famous "All the world's a stage" monologue in As You Like It: "Infant; School-boy; Lover; Soldier; Justice; Slipper'd Pantaloon; and second Childishness." For example, he opens Chapter 6:

The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloons,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side.
His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice.
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound.

While somewhat anthropomorphic, this leads to a well-told chapter about the failures of marine conservation, especially the demise of the cod fisheries of the American Northeast. There is also good coverage of global warming’s impact on the Atlantic.

Winchester’s presentation encapsulates past and future—when all the continents were, and will be again, a single, large landmass—but it also reveals the present gray waters humans have always known. All sorts and stripes have sought their fortune on it, including explorers, fishers, travelers, artists, writers, soldiers, merchants, scientists, and defenders. And many, like the author, have left their mark; Atlantic is a wondrously quotable book (e.g., "From here onward the sea yawned open wide and featureless, and soon took on the character that is generally true of all great oceans—being unmarked, unclaimed, largely unknowable, and in very large measure unknown").

The Atlantic is the most overused and traveled ocean in the world. In reading about its history, its majesty, and its vastness, in Winchester’s powerfully human terms, we are left to contemplate how the ocean appears to be fighting back with rising waters and severe storms.

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Marianne Tatom Letts
Indiana University Press ($19.95)

by Jeremy Wade Morris

On Feb 18, 2011, Radiohead launched their newest album, The King Of Limbs, on their website. The digital download cost $9, though fans could also pre-order (for $50) what the band described as the world’s first “newspaper” album: a deluxe audio-visual package consisting of 2 vinyl records, a CD, a digital download and hundreds of pieces of artwork. The launch followed Radiohead’s much-hyped 2007 release of In Rainbows, where the band let users pay what they wanted for a download of the album.

Talented musicians and master anti-marketers, Radiohead have spent their careers pushing the boundaries of musical creativity and mass production. Marianne Tatom Letts’s excellent new book returns to the origins of the band’s subversive marketing strategies: the making and selling of two of Radiohead’s most interesting, dense and disputed albums, Kid A and Amnesiac. Letts’s smart, in-depth account reveals as much about Radiohead’s ambivalent and conflicted relationship with popular culture and contemporary capitalism as it does about their musical appeal.

Some might argue Letts’s biggest contribution is her theorization of what, conceptually speaking, makes a concept album. Her introduction discusses academic and journalistic work on the topic (with nods to undisputed concept albums like Tommy and The Wall) in order to position the concept album within art rock and progressive rock traditions. Letts presents a concept album taxonomy that will be highly useful for popular music scholars. While some song cycles hold together based on a linear narrative with a plot or characters, others cohere thematically and rely on repeating musical or lyrical motifs. Letts assigns Kid A and Amnesiac to a category called the Resistant Concept Album: one that is “unified but resists interpretation,” on account of its non-explicit plot, musical discontinuity, and unclear lyrics/concept. Kid A and Amnesiac aren’t the first resistant concept albums, but they are illustrative of a tradition that simultaneously subverts and fulfills the expectations of the recorded music commodity.

After a well-researched survey of Radiohead’s career before Kid A, Letts proceeds with song-by-song readings of the musical, lyrical, and paratextual elements (i.e. packaging, websites, and other marketing materials) of the albums under consideration. She claims it is “helpful but not absolutely necessary” to know how to read music, but music scholars will surely take more away than general audiences in other fields (i.e. media studies, cultural studies, etc.). Still, Letts makes a sincere effort to keep her interpretations accessible for non-experts and to link her readings back to the wider themes her book explores.

Kid A and Amnesiac are resistant concept albums because they feature loosely unified mediations on the death of the subject in modern life. Letts convincingly traces how the first four songs of Kid A follow a subject whose only means of coping with the alienation brought by modern technology, politics, and capitalism is to disappear completely. She then argues the second half of Kid A and most of Amnesiac can be read as persistent but futile attempts to reconstruct the subject. Letts skillfully addresses lyrics, groove, notation, and other song elements where appropriate. She also uses inventive techniques like grouping lyrical snippets from across songs to form an “image trail,” a method that seems particularly suited for analyzing a fragment-spewing poet like Thom Yorke.

Despite her attention to the music, Letts never forgets it is not just sound that conditions our reception of albums, but also the way albums come to us. Kid A was marketed atypically without true radio singles or proper music videos, whereas Amnesiac had a more traditional launch. Despite the fact the band and its label (and subsequently, the press) trumpeted Amnesiac as a return to the “classic” Radiohead sound, Letts pours water on the idea that it is somehow easier to digest. Although some readers might quibble with her insistence on following the status of the modern subject across both albums, Letts likely never intended her reading as the only one. For Letts, it is clear that a “concept album is in the eye/ear of the beholder”—a statement that in some ways trumps her conceptual taxonomy but remains entirely inarguable.

Letts’s bigger achievement here is her nuanced approach to Radiohead as commodity, as cog in a larger system the band both reviles and requires. Radiohead embody the irony of trying to make an “artistic statement that exists above . . . the corporate culture that will ultimately receive and promote it, then packaging that statement to sell back to the consumer.” Radiohead hide from this contradiction within layers of fragmented lyrics, abstract artwork, and labyrinthine websites (I remember the Kid A website reading “www.radiohead.com—as useful as a chocolate fireguard™”). The band has spent years reconciling its public image with its ethical and political commitments by masking both. Radiohead may present a scathing critique of commodity culture but they are reflexive enough to know the role they play in their own commodification.

In this sense, the resistant concept album becomes a metonym for Radiohead’s entire career. By resisting the form of the concept album while still adhering to it, Kid A and Amnesiac show “there is no escape within the modern human condition, just as there is no escape for Radiohead itself trapped inside the capitalist machine.” Letts, via her readings, sees only one way out: “In the end, music as a commodity must become self-critical, must confess its commodity character without surrendering its utopian content: that the world could be otherwise.”

This is what was so exciting about In Rainbows. By asking users to set their own price, Radiohead suggested that the world of mass music production could be otherwise. Many in the industry worried the band was devaluing music, giving it away for free. Instead, the possibility of free forced a questioning of the relationships between listeners and the music commodity, which was ultimately freeing. Sadly, Radiohead’s experiment also made the perfect rock music marketing campaign. Skeptically, In Rainbowsshowed how far the music commodity could be pushed (i.e. selling it once as a download, once as a CD, once as vinyl and once again as individual songs and tracks). Like the vanishing subject Letts tracks onKid A and Amnesiac, the utopian potential Radiohead sparked disappears completely, lying dormant and waiting until the band’s next album launch. Or as Radiohead sings, and Letts quotes: “I will see you, in the next life . . .”

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Robert Morrison
Pegasus Books ($35)

by Spencer Dew

There may have been a Malay, one day, who dropped by unexpectedly at Dove Cottage, and he may have hit up England’s most famous addict for some opium. Thomas De Quincey, to whose dubious recollection we owe this tale, tried, lacking any “Asiatic” language, to communicate by reciting a few verses of the Iliad. Or, to read this odd anecdote another way, in the face of exotic horror, De Quincey announced his own classical education, his status as cultured. Insistence on this dichotomy between the savage and the civilized runs throughout his oeuvre. Carried away in writing, describing the heights of a laudanum high, De Quincey indulges in Orientalist imagery, but as a political reactionary, a xenophobe, he is quick to differentiate fantasy from reality: “I honour the Barbarians too much by supposing them capable of any pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones of an Englishman.”

A gentleman addict, getting a kick from wandering the working class streets or taking likewise forgettable release in the beds of prostitutes, De Quincey fancied himself a man of refined, if particular, taste—“a quart of ruby-coloured laudanum . . . and a book of German metaphysics placed by its side, will sufficiently attest my being in the neighbourhood”—but he was never quite sufficiently a man of wealth. Indeed, as Robert Morrison’s comprehensive account of a life makes clear, debt was a constant problem. De Quincey acquired “new London debt . . . in the very act of extinguishing the old Westmorland debt,” for instance, and, as with drug use, this is a recurring cycle, despite his being repeatedly “put to the horn” and publically humiliated.

One gets the sense from this biography, though, that De Quincey was a hard man to humiliate. Something of a hack journalist (Thomas Carlyle said he wrote “for bread in the paltriest of all newspapers”) who nonetheless created works approaching genius, a man who kept coded entries chronicling his masturbatory activity, and a sycophant in courting the friendship of the famous Wordsworth, De Quincey does not lack for eccentricities, for weirdness. Some of that freaky edge is dulled here by Morrison’s dry narration, but, drawing on publications and letters previously unavailable, this book gives us more of the life of De Quincey than we’ve seen before. If Morrison’s writing tends toward the flat, De Quincey, when he’s quoted at length, more than makes up for it. Consider these “Asiatic scenes,” De Quincey’s recounting of a dream in which “I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed.”

I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

One almost needs a pith helmet to read such prose, as it offers both a world tour and a psychedelic trip through the trappings of comparative religion. And it is here, among the tropes of De Quincey’s visions—both those he presumably experienced and those he carefully composed for his reading audience—that Morrison’s biography tantalizes with what it reports but, for the most part, does not presume to interpret. Take the crocodile, for instance: this creature haunts De Quincey. As Morrison says, “No single image tortured De Quincey like the crocodile. It brought out his worst fears of self-division and otherness.” But that is pretty much all that Morrison says about it. The biography, by necessity, must move on to other things, the accrual of more debt, the services of more prostitutes. While Morrison has some theories of his own, particularly about “the bifurcation of the self” as an experience that plagued De Quincey, his gestures toward such theories seem designed merely to raise more questions, to inspire future readers—and students, and scholars—of De Quincey to launch their own quests into the strange jungles of his texts.

The author who famously described opium as “the secret of happiness,” wasn’t exactly overflowing with mirth; rather, as Morrison notes, De Quincey was obsessed with death and alterity, consumed by visions of infinite shafts opening in the sky that found intellectual reflection in the “frightful magnitude” of the universe as revealed by new work in astronomy. For De Quincey, too, the Christian theological narrative of the fall from grace was something reiterated individually in every human psyche—through dreams, through trauma, through confrontation and recognition of the “the vile, the bestial, the unthinkable” within us all. Morrison, hiking swiftly onward through the years of De Quincey’s life, drops these intriguing themes like crumbs, one implication being that future books on De Quincey need to focus on precisely these themes, exploring any or all of them in detail through the voluminous De Quincey oeuvre—not just the Confessions, but also his criticism, his explicitly political writing, and that masterwork,Suspiria de Profundis.

Suspiria, indeed, raises yet another question: what are we to make of these dreams, these visions, not just in terms of content—the racism and imperialism of the imagery, the cosmological and theological speculations, the wild psychological theories—but in terms of phenomenon? There’s that Malay again: is he a real person, an opium hallucination, or a conscious literary creation? It may have been in De Quincey’s commercial interests to confuse these categories, as with his encounters with Levana, the Roman goddess of childhood education—not, De Quincey tells us, via “the poor machinery” of “spelling books-and grammars,” but rather by “that mighty system of central forces hidden in the deep bosom of human life”—as well as those three dreadful Mothers that flank her in Suspiria.

Morrison makes clear De Quincey’s investment in fashioning himself as a product. “What shall be my character,” writes a young De Quincey. “I have been thinking this afternoon—wild—impetuous—splendidly sublime? dignified—melancholy—gloomily sublime? or shrouded in mystery—supernatural—like the ‘ancient mariner’—awfully sublime.” The desire to become such a “character”—and, in turn, to turn “character” into a commodity, to invent himself as a celebrity author via his own weird experiences, either lived or claimed—remains the central and most intriguing aspect of De Quincey and his work. Morrison sometimes relays this without much spark, as when he writes, “Laudanum dragged De Quincey through hell . . . Yet like many addicts, in the nineteenth century and far beyond, the severity of his addiction did not prevent him from functioning at very high levels for decades.” Opium, however, was far more than merely “a prison, not a death sentence,” as Morrison puts it; the embrace of the exotic, the harrowing, the supernatural, and the sublime was also all part of a project to produce literature by living a literary life. It is for this conceptualization of art through experience, as much as for the glimpses of historical context revealed by his life, that De Quincey is of interest to the contemporary world.

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edited by Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski
Zone Books ($24.95)

by W. C. Bamberger

The access to knowledge movement, which often goes by the acronym A2K, is like an iceberg: only a small part of it rises to the top of the media stream where nonactivists get a glimpse of it. The most visible struggle for most of us is probably that of music and film companies vs. those who download media without paying, either for private use or for sampling purposes. The blocking or restricting of Internet access in China and Egypt, and the successful struggle to bend pharmaceutical companies’ patent rights to bring affordable HIV drugs to the people of Africa (a success now being actively undermined), are other high profile instances. But there are many more facets, many quandaries and contradictions inherent in the wider effort.

The fact that A2K concerns are so varied is one of the problems its activists face: “Can file sharers, software programmers, subsistence farmers, and HIV-positive people find useful common cause in their joint opposition to existing regimes of intellectual property?” This 600-plus page collection of essays is intended to offer a sampling of such efforts, as well as a history of the movement and help for the reader trying to understand all these questions within a larger context. The essays range widely, into some very unexpected areas, from the matter of how indigenous knowledge can be protected (including something called “paid public domain”) and even John Locke’s views on what we mean when we say we “own” ourselves.

Each of the editors contributes an introductory essay surveying parts of this newly-emerging, fragmented, and unstable field. Amy Kapczynski provides a “conceptual genealogy” of the movement, while Gaëlle Krikorian addresses the activist and political aspects, with an accent on struggles between the third world and the developed countries.

One of the central points of debate is one most of us would understand, at least economically: If a creator—be it an artist or a pharmaceutical company—has invested time, energy, and money in the creation of something, shouldn’t that person or entity have the right to control its dissemination and reap financial benefits?

This assertion is, as the essays here remind us, a conceptual approach or narrative that supports the expansion of intellectual property rights. But there are other narratives, as well. Agreements such as the Doha Declaration maintain that some things—public health, for example—trump intellectual property rights. There is no consensus about the point at which the sheer importance of some concerns—from access to medicine to text books to sampled music—outweigh those rights.

Not surprisingly, there is a great divide between the attitudes of the developed nations and those that are still rising. As with energy consumption and pollution, developing nations feel they should have the freedoms that the U.S. and the European Union had when they were younger. Some of the arguments the underdogs offer are very intriguing. In “Undermining Abundance” Philippine social activist and engineer Roberto Verzola offers this observation:

Furthermore, the countries that complained most loudly about the piracy of their intellectual property were themselves most guilty of pirating intellectuals such as doctors, nurses, and engineers from the Third World. The latter was deemed a more malignant case of piracy because it took away the original and left no copy behind.

The U.S. and its business interests often come off as the bad guy in these essays. Very early in 2001, for example, the new Bush administration tried to strike down policies, authorized by international treaty, that allowed Brazil to have some leverage over international pharmaceutical companies and so get AIDS drugs to more its population; the uproar was so great that the Bush administration quickly retreated. Bill Gates once flew to the Philippines to make a deal with the government whereby their pirated software was declared legal in exchange for which previously ignored copyright laws were to be enforced for the general populace.

As would be expected, several writers discuss ideas such as that of an “intellectual commons,” of open source software, of open-access publishing, of collective research, and similar efforts that would be crippled by enforcement of copyright laws. (True to its own spirit, this entire text is available as a free download at www.zonebooks.org/pdf/ZoneBooks_A2K_.pdf.) Among the more interesting points made is how different a physical commons is from an information commons, the first of which is said to suffer under common ownership while the second thrives. Even on these points there is disagreement, some even worrying “that more information could in some cases not improve, but rather threaten access to knowledge.”

Some of the arguments sound radical, such as Krikorian’s point that increasing copyright laws creates conditions favorable to the “production of pirates,” and that “they easily fit into a political environment that is predominant in many Western countries in which security and repression ha[ve] become routine.” Others sound a little foolish: Cory Doctorow’s contention, for example, that, “If copying on the Internet were ended tomorrow . . . YouTube would vanish . . . Flickr would dry up and blow away,” hardly seems a weighty argument for liberalizing intellectual copyright laws.

But then, others might believe that it is. Like so much within the A2K debates, this comes down to a matter of opinion, political stance, economic position, and more; in short, how one views the present social reality, and what one holds as a social ideal. This collection is vitally important, then, in that there is much here to help us make our opinions more informed ones, even while it illustrates how there are no easy answers to the relevant questions.

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Douglas Coupland
Atlas & Co. ($24)

by Mark Gustafson

To call Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) a media prophet, albeit a reluctant one, is not news. The works by which he is known, includingThe Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium is the Massage, are not much read anymore; on a superficial level, they have left two time-worn bytes: “the medium is the message,” and “the global village.” That he was also an ambitious scholar, a devout Catholic convert, and someone apparently much further along the autism spectrum than most of us may be fresher information. So also McLuhan’s modernist credentials (he was an ardent fan of the linguistic shenanigans of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, an acquaintance of Pound’s, and a friend of Wyndham Lewis’s), his flirtation with New Criticism, and his study with the literary critics F.R. Leavis and I.A. Richards. This short biography, by a writer known especially for his novel Generation X, is keen on linking Marshall (as Coupland usually calls him) with today’s digital world.

The occasional interposition of other material—entries from an internet name generator, a test for autistic tendencies, descriptions from used-book databases, MapQuest directions, Gmail’s automatic suggestions, YouTube comments, a few typographical flourishes, etc.—helps this biography meet its hipness quota. At the same time, Coupland adheres to standard biographical procedure, with the conventional structure of a lifeline (birth to death and the stages in between), various subplots (the mama’s boy, career intrigues), the roughly sketched social and political background, and even some overt autobiography.

About Coupland’s writing, there is good and bad. It is rich in idiosyncratic and refreshing formulations like “fame curve,” “prude loop,” “Technicolor pimpings,” “Muppet Kremlin,” and “academic Smurfpolitics”; it postulates the brain as “an enigmatic beige pudding” and McLuhan as “an information leaf blower.” On the other hand, while cliché can be effective when used in moderation, Coupland pours it on, veering dangerously toward the trite and even maudlin. For example: “Marshall . . . You were in the right place at the right time, and it wasn’t random. How do any of us end up being fascinated by some things and not by others? And why do so few of us do the things we like doing? It was an adventure, Marshall, and wasn’t it grand?” The overuse of cliché tends to weaken assertions like “had Marshall not been born, there would have been a hole in the world. . . . We are only better for his having been alive.”

Furthermore, Coupland exhibits relative cluelessness about the life of the mind. After describing McLuhan, the young instructor, as “a skinny guy who seemed prematurely old, who talked only about religion and literature, who had no listening skills,” he asks: “This was the guru whose ideas would revolutionize the way we see the universe?” And: “That Marshall ended up becoming what he became as the result of studying a sixteenth-century English satirist, rhetorician, and critic is as freaky as if he’d studied Easter rituals in medieval France and emerged at the end as a rocket scientist.” But several pages later the steps are logical and clear. While the ivory tower with its blinkered academics often deserves dressing-down, Coupland too readily (is it defensively?) descends to caricature and poor generalizations. The academy was where McLuhan spent most of his life, and where he belonged.

No doubt, keeping the biography of a major figure and formidable intellect brief is difficult. But even though Coupland suggests the reader fill in some blanks with Wikipedia, this does not relieve him of the burden of appropriate selection and omission. He still needs to engage at some depth with the key ideas and thinkers that shaped McLuhan; unfortunately, he shows little evidence of having done so (with, for example, Alfred North Whitehead or G. K. Chesterton, though Dagwood Bumstead gets more than his due). “Heady stuff!” he exclaims.

Surely there is a connection between McLuhan’s work and ways to think about today’s world of instantaneous communication and information. But mere reassurances that he is important, “more so now than ever, because he saw this coming a long way off, and he saw the reasons for it,” are not enough, nor are mentions of Baudrillard, Barthes, Lacan, and Foucault. Little or no substantive explanation is marshaled for support. Coupland writes, on the one hand: “Dear God, he would have enjoyed using the internet.” On the other hand: “Society was absorbing too much technology too quickly, and he knew it. Did he like this? No! He hated, loathed, abhorred it. . . . How the man ever came to be perceived as technology’s cheerleader is a mystery.” Yet he too is complicit, as though he wants it both ways.

Coupland’s sympathy with his subject is plain—in their medical history, their nationality, and even in their unbidden (and maybe inappropriate) elevation to spokesmen for a generation. Unlike the hapless, snooty professor in Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall—whom McLuhan, in a brief cameo, famously rebukes with the subtitle of this book—Coupland surely knows something of his work. But is it enough?

As the book has keyboard commands as a structural device, using “return,” “command . . . shift,” and “escape . . . control” as headings for its three major sections, I have pondered using those other commands, “enter,” “delete,” and “option/alt,” for my criticism. But even while Coupland’s book leaves many questions frustratingly unaddressed, it has its merits, and effectively conveys some of McLuhan’s complex fascination. It has led me to dust off books long dormant on my shelf (especially The Gutenberg Galaxy, “one of the most brilliant books on books and the effects of print and reading ever written”), and to read them with new awareness. Maybe, after all, that is enough.

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Edited by David Shields and Bradford Morrow
W. W. Norton ($17.95)

by Scott F. Parker

One of the defining questions of the 20th century was, as David Shields and Bradford Morrow write in their introduction to this new anthology, “if there is no transcendental meaning, and we know we are mortal, how do we construct a life with value?” If The Inevitable is any indication, this question continues to shape the intellectual and moral situation at the start of this century. In our post-Nietzschean world, human life comes burdened with the need to account for itself—a necessity made urgent by the looming and “inevitable” promise of death.

Shields and Morrow, addressing this challenge head-on, have gathered together twenty contemporary writers and set them loose on the subject of mortality. The book, as they write in their introduction, is an “attempt to look at death from distinctly different points of view, by writers who see death as a brute biological fact that does not necessarily guarantee some passageway to eternal peace or punishment. And while this gathering may center on death, it is ultimately about the existential fact of our ineffable selves, our mortal bodies, death’s fragile ‘other half’: life itself.”

Compiling essays that don’t hold up religion as an absolution of the problems of life, Shields and Morrow invite readers to face those problems directly. There is nowhere for the reader to hide in Sallie Tisdale’s excruciatingly detailed meditation on flies. Neither is it possible in a review to convey how profound are these words when they follow that meditation: “When I begin to accept that its very fragility and perishing nature is the beauty in life, then I begin to find safety inside a burning house. I don’t need to escape if I know how to live inside it.” There might be religion in this book, but it’s a religion of this world.

Though distinct in style, and in the kind of solace it offers, The Inevitable is quite similar to Shields’s earlier book The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), in which he arranges a collage of medical facts, reflections on death, details about his own failing body, and observations about his dad’s seemingly indestructible one. One of the things that made that book a winning tragedy is that while his ninety-plus-year-old father seems indestructible, the reader can’t escape the knowledge that he isn’t. And the implication/reminder follows immediately: neither is the reader. So the solace comes not from escaping the specter of death for the length of an entertaining book, or from reading self-assuring promises that no writer is in any position to make, but from the satisfaction that comes from seeking truth. We know that, as Lynne Tillman writes in The Inevitable, “Of death, mortals are absolutely ignorant. The dead, fortunately, are beyond caring.” But in the lead-up to our own deaths, our thinking about the end is of the utmost importance to how we live.

Our responses will be as varied as we are—and one of this anthology’s strengths is that in featuring so many writers it has a chance of having something for every reader. You will have your favorite. It might be Joyce Carol Oates’s portrait of grief after losing her husband, Kyoki Mori’s response to her mother’s suicide, or Margo Jefferson’s sociological distillation of the deaths of “Negroland.” Mine is Kevin Baker’s deliberation over whether to be tested for the lethal Huntington’s disease (a rare hereditary condition he had 50/50 odds on), which demands us to imagine what we’d do if our chances of survival were 50/50—and to think about what we will do since our chances are zero.

Not surprisingly, The Inevitable is wildly quotable. Here’s an almost-random sampling of some of the passages underlined in my copy: “If one believes people are dying as soon as they are born, then living itself is an illness overcome only by dying.” (Lynne Tillman) “The solace of anonymity is that it is what bonds us finally with every other human.” (Robin Hemley) “There are some presences whose absence can undo even the strongest people.” (Christopher Sorrentino) “In reality, unlike fiction, people’s lives don’t run according to some overarching narrative.” (Kevin Baker) “Even if one can imagine dying or being dead, one can’t represent it autobiographically.” (Tillman) “Honoring the dead, delighting the living, making the world a safer, nicer place. If that is too humble a definition of art, then one wonders why it is so rarely achieved elsewhere.” (Geoff Dyer)

David Foster Wallace, who Shields and Morrow quote in their introduction, wrote that “a big part of [a writer’s] job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.” You’ll find twenty writers here who are doing that same job, giving sustained attention to this most final subject and thereby offering what might be your best hope for redemption.

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 Edited by Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner
University of Chicago Press ($25)

by Patricia Briggs

What does making art look like? Because artists’ studios are considered off limits, it’s pretty hard for the average person to know. Viewers typically encounter the object d’art in the pristine environment of a gallery as a completed thing—the concluding statement of an invisible process. The modern exhibition keeps artists in the shadows so that the artwork “can speak for itself.” While the artist’s studio is necessarily a private space in which artists can work and think, the cloak of mystery that shrouds the studio and blocks dialogue between artists and viewers creates a blind spot that leads to many misperceptions. Happily, such misperceptions are dispelled by The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, edited by public art curator Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner, who is not only a painter but also an active critic and co-director of The Suburban, an avant-garde gallery run out of the garage of her Oak Park home. Readers of this book in effect become seminar students in a class on “the space of artists” co-taught by Jacob and Grabner.

Unfortunately, the romantic image of the artist as a sensitive loner is alive and well—in fact, it is still so prevalent that it sentences many artist wannabes to years of frustrating isolation and causes viewers great confusion when they encounter conceptual art, performance art, or installation art which does not correspond to this narrow, outmoded ideal. Countering both the cloak of mystery surrounding the artist’s studio and the stereotype of the artist as heroic outsider, The Studio Reader offers multiple points of entry to its topic, with reprints of meaty historical scholarship and many short meditations on the studio written especially for the volume by artists working today. Here and there, a critic offers their impression on the art world ritual of the “studio visit,” as when Marjorie Welish relays her experiences maneuvering the minefield of ego and insecurity in order to engage artists in critical conversation about their work.

Directly undercutting the mad genius mythology, The Studio Reader opens with entries written by conceptual artists who describe their studios like offices. Buzz Spector lists “every studio I have had since graduating from college”; number one on the list reads: “Second bedroom in an apartment. Drawings made at small thrift shop table and stored beneath bed. One bookshelf, made of boards and concrete blocks, and a four-door file cabinet. Two years”. All fourteen of Spector’s studios since the 1970s are essentially larger variations on the first. John Baldessari recalls passing on an offer of a studio in the early 1970s when he started teaching at CalArts. “By that time, I was a full-fledged conceptual artist. You know, they don’t need studios. God forbid that it leak out that I had studio [laughs]”. Baldessari admits that he has three offices today that house his staff and equipment, and give him a separate space in which to think and make.

Photographs of studio interiors showing bookshelves, stacks of cardboard filing boxes, slide projectors, metal equipment carts, and so on, establish that the artist’s studio isn’t necessarily a place of explosive emotions as it is so often imagined to be, but that it is just as likely a rather dry utilitarian environment. Elsewhere less severe images of the studio appear. Performance artist Michael Smith describes himself as a “Chief Clerk” “puttering” around his studio, retrieving emails, writing lists, and endlessly rearranging stuff, all the time whispering to himself “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can”. Rachel Harrison writes, “at times the studio seems like a graveyard of unsuccessful work” and “I find a lot of what I do in the studio pretty embarrassing”. Because the selections written by artists are only a page or two long, I found myself Googling and bookmarking websites; The Studio Reader made me hungry for more information about artists I didn’t know.

The essays that situate the artist’s studio historically are also captivating, if less entertaining that those contributed by artists. In a book weighted toward conceptual art, it is good to see a selection drawn from Svetlana Alpers’s The Vexations of Art: Velazquez and Others (Yale University Press, 2005) chronicling the parallel development of the artist’s studio and the scientist’s laboratory from the 17th through 19th centuries. Tracking what she calls the “changing conditions of pictorial knowledge,” Alpers argues that the studio is an “experimental instrument” which shifts from a “mimetic” use in Vermeer’s time to an “analytic use” in Cézanne’s: “Having begun as a light-box making images of things, the studio becomes, like the mind, tracking basic connections in matter.” A section from Caroline A. Jones’s important bookMachine in the Studio (University of Chicago Press, 1996) charts the shifting definition of the American artist and his studio in the post-war period. Also in The Studio Reader are essays on the gendered space of the studio and artists’ efforts in the 1970s to repurpose derelict buildings for workspaces and quite a lot more.

In a particularly interesting essay devoted to the contemporary moment, Katy Siegel’s “Live/Work” draws connections between young artists’ fascination with “relational aesthetics”—artwork that focuses on participatory events and human interconnectivity—and the new kind of studio that young urban artists today typically rent—small rooms in re-fabricated industrial buildings filled with floor after floor of identical “studios.” Unlike the communal studio that characterized an earlier generation of repurposed industrial buildings, today’s young artists rent studios that have more in common with “the sweatshop and the office cubicle”. “I believe,” Siegle writes, “this more social art . . . expresses a survival instinct amid work conditions that foster isolation”.

The Studio Reader closes with an essay by critic Lane Relyea on the now ubiquitous assemblages constructed out of every kind of found object, raw building materials, cardboard, things that are shiny, and duct tape. Relyea aptly describes this breed of “unmonumental” sculpture as “conglomerations of heterogeneous, loosely related items”. These “mobile units,” he writes, “repurpose already existing objects, sites, and discourses, the aim being to access and link various databases and platforms—maybe immaterial social acquaintances or information, maybe more material pop-culture inventories like old record collection or the intimately biographied yet anonymous cast-offs accumulated in thrift stores”. Identity today, Reylea argues, is similarly mobile and networked though databases constantly accessible through our smart phones and computers. A far cry from the studio as a private and separate place where artists could plumb the depths of their individuality, ”the studio is now that place where we know we can always find the artist when we need to, where she or he is always plugged in and online, always accessible to and by an ever more integrated and ever more dispersed art world”.

Written on request for The Studio Reader, Relyea’s and Siegel’s essays, like so many others in the book, are truly engaged in a living dialogue instigated by the collection’s editors. The Studio Reader covers critical ground and should be required reading for any artist trying to find their footing in today’s art world.

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Graham E. Fuller
Little, Brown and Company ($25.99)

by Spencer Dew

“If there was no Islam,” Graham Fuller argues, “there would certainly be other religions around playing similar roles under similar conditions. With no religions at all, we would still readily find or create other ideologies to justify the same acts. Thus, a world without Islam does not markedly change the nature of things.” Fuller, former CIA Kabul Station Chief and former vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council, here pads out a 2008 Foreign Policy cover story by imagining an alternative history in which Islam is not a factor. There is open speculation (if Britain had never controlled India, would there have been partition?) and a revision of what Fuller takes to be popular misconceptions. The Crusades, for instance, were motivated primarily by “economic, political, and social” factors, not theological ones. The Reformation, likewise, “exemplifies . . . the intensely political nature of events usually understood as being primarily religious in character.” To focus on religion as a motivating force in such events he considers a mistake; religion “is the vehicle of political confrontation and turmoil, not the cause,” “a means to an end,” a tool used by “political leaders” to manipulate the masses.

The goal of this argument is to clear religion from the practical strategy of American foreign policy. Fuller holds that America must “act as if Islam did not exist in formulating its policies in the Middle East.” Such a stance leads to prescriptions like “no more foreign boots on the ground in Muslim countries,” as a way to delegitimize Bin Laden’s mission by ceding to his demands. Fuller also urges that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict be solved, implying that this will be easier than it has appeared over the course of history once negotiators realize that Islam has nothing whatsoever to do with the creation of the Palestinian problem, and he urges a shift in rhetoric: “‘Zero tolerance for terrorism’ is another slogan that needs to disappear,” he writes, claiming that it is an “empty phrase.” While not offering an apology for terrorist tactics, Fuller insists on their occasional necessity, quoting the Declaration of Independence at length and resuscitating the old semantic saw that one person’s “terrorist” is another’s “freedom fighter.”

That is not the only slippery slope in this strange book. Fuller idealizes religion as something separate from politics. “Sadly,” Fuller writes, “when religion becomes linked with political forces, it tends to lose its soul—its spiritual dimension.” Early in the book, he draws a line between “religion as faith” and “organized religion,” implying that the first is something private and deeply considered, while the other is “a supreme vehicle for many other facets of human aspirations, including politics, fears, drives, prejudices, dreams, and bitterness.” Fuller insists that in those instances when religion voices “prejudices” or “bitterness” it is not authentic, but rather another tool in the Machiavellian toolkit used to manipulate the gullible masses. Certainly religious commitments and symbols are prey to manipulation, but to isolate some form of authentic “religion” from “politics” is not only misleading as an approach to religion, it also obfuscates the complex dynamics of the Islamic ummah, a community which has always been as much about “state” and “power” and “politics” as about faith or the bolstering of ethical claims with eschatological promises.

By reading much of religious history as merely political, Fuller gives us a world in which religion is tangential to Nazi Germany, to Zionism, and to Al Qaeda. Progressing through a selective whirlwind tour of history, Fuller skips from example to example without adequate consideration of context. A foray into China, for instance, supposedly shows that ethnic diversity is “the particular problem, not Islam,” while ignoring the complicated relation of the Chinese government with Islam, long defined as an ethnicity. Most dubious, however, is how the outcome of this book’s speculations seems predetermined. Imagine a world without Islam, and the world looks very much like the one we already know. There’s some hubris and some tragedy in Fuller’s devotion to his own argument, and in the assertion that the path of foreign policy will be somehow clearer if religion is brushed aside.

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Guy de la Valdène
Lyons Press ($24.95)

by Andrew Cleary

Guy de la Valdène is a remnant of what he prefers to call the "sporting life." This means something distinct from the hunting La Valdène observes in his old age, something that hearkens back to a certain nobility in the endeavor that he imbibed in his youth, and his memoir The Fragrance of Grass takes pains to make the distinction.

Born to a life of inherited luxury among the hunting preserves and estates of Normandy, La Valdène has spent the fifty years since his adolescence—when he first took hold of a gun—plotting and executing a long and varied succession of hunts. He trails game across Europe and America, in the far north and the deep south. He has enjoyed, he admits, a life of "idleness and uncomplicated pleasures, an existence of good fortune and sport, of limited accomplishments and few regrets."

Growing up in a French castle, La Valdène learned the pleasures and demands of hunting from raffish gamekeepers, men who celebrated wine and loud company in equal measures. In apprenticeship the young La Valdène would crouch at dawn in the blind of a remote marsh, waiting for the landing of a migrating flock. Or he would march in a line of nobility through the manicured fields of estates, shotgun held at the ready, as servants in an opposite line flushed game from their hiding places. Through these stations of his youth La Valdène came to admire above all the grey partridge, Perdix perdix. "My sporting life begins and ends with Perdix perdix", he says, and it's that bird he hunts through all these varied landscapes, anticipating its presence on his plate.

And yet, though La Valdène has relished from youth the unique pleasures of shooting to kill, he enters his seventh decade with a feeling of bittersweet ambivalence, a sense of the wrongs of hunting which dogs him on his 800-acre Florida farm. It is this ambivalence that animates The Fragrance of Grass, and rescues its author's memories from the chronicle of killings they threaten to become.

"Hunting introduced me to nature half a century ago," says la Valdène, and with each journey to the wild he returns to "a better, more innocent place". There he experiences an "unqualified delight" in his surroundings, and though this delight produces in him a grumbling that hunting is best made for the killing of wild animals, and not simply ones pen-raised for the purpose, it also wakes in him a reverence for the vistas he finds on climbing remote Montana mountains or driving through the wetlands of Sasketchewan.

This reverence sometimes extends to those animals La Valdène kills. With regret he recounts shooting a deer in Scotland, or a box turtle on his farm, each time swearing off the murder of that particular species in the shame he feels in witnessing their death. "Compassion may be one of the few compensations of growing old", he says. He holds up this compassion like a trophy, turning it this way and that, so that we might inspect it with him, as when he finds a five-foot rattlesnake on his farm:

I no longer enjoy killing snakes or any other animals for no reason. But my dogs are small and if, sometime in the future, that snake bit one of them, the dog would probably die. . . . In its death throes, the snake uncoiled off the ground, one last string of venom spraying out its hollow teeth, the late afternoon light catching the stream and coloring it gold.

Since I now am keenly aware of the inevitability of death, when I kill an animal I understand that I have destroyed a part of myself. To mitigate these recurring misgivings, I now say, "I'm sorry," loudly enough for the dogs to hear, even though I am fully aware they plainly don't care.

La Valdène cares, however, and while his caring may sometimes catch on preference—hunting on foot, he says, is better than from a car, in solitude (or with one or two other men of similar sensibility) is better than in a crowd, with a dog is best of all—it carries to a deeply held gratitude for the moral education he has taken from those preferences. Hunting has brought La Valdène in contact with the wild, natural world, and this contact has fostered in him a love for preserving that world as he has found it. Though, admittedly, he wouldn't mind taking a few partridges out of that world for dinner.

For those who might wish to share in the ecstatic experience of the grey partridge, La Valdène includes a short chapter of recipes, most of them adapted from recipes hailing from the Middle Ages or from La Valdène’s memory of meals made by the chef of his childhood estate. The point, it seems, is to enjoy the finer things in life the proper way. If there is such a simple, identifiable ethos to this singular, evocative memoir, it is this.

La Valdène concedes that his life of leisure has given him a strangely privileged vantage on man’s place in nature. But the strangeness and the privilege, once conceded, do not negate La Valdène’s keen powers of observation, contemplation, and thanksgiving. As long as he feels he must hunt, La Valdène figures he may as well make sure to enjoy it:

From an evolutionary point of view, it is absurd for me to think that I should question man's urge to hunt, an urge that has been imprinted on our DNA for 250,000 years. In time, the inclination will undoubtedly disappear from our genes, but for those of us who still live on the land, hunting is as ordinary as eating or sleeping. The quality of the experience is another matter.

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Kevin Grange
University of Nebraska Press ($19.95)

by Barb Teed

“I had to wonder—why are the most beautiful places in the world also the most dangerous?”

The lure of legends and the allure of mountains have possessed the human race for eons. Kevin Grange’s remarkable debut, Beneath Blossom Rain: Discovering Bhutan on the Toughest Trek in the World, merges the myth of the Yeti and the tangible Himalayan mountains into a tension-filled journey through Bhutan, Land of the Thunder Dragon. Grange transports readers on his 216-mile, twenty-four-day Snowman Trek—named for the often sighted, never confirmed, Abominable Snowman. His task, and that of his nine-member trekking party, is to stay alive and complete their journey on what many deem the planet’s toughest trek. “Historically, fewer than 120 people attempt the trek each year, and of those, less than 50 percent finish,” writes Grange.

Surrounded by superstition, trail ghosts, 369 varieties of orchids, and the mystic location of Shangri-La, Grange seeks understanding of his life and the meaning of blossom rain, or metokchharp. Blossom rain, explains Grange, is steeped in Tibetan and Bhutanese folklore. He describes it as that moment of rainbow light when it is rainy and sunny at the same time. When this happens, it’s considered very favorable. “I understood that the moment of blossom rain is auspicious, but I wanted to know why and, more important, what it meant. I had a hunch it would help me on my own journey.”

On the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month in the year of the Fire Pig, or September 24, 2007, he begins his excursion with the Canadian Himalayan Expedition and guide. Grange knows the Snowman Trek is going to be tough—day two, for example, is 13.6 miles with a 2,250-foot-elevation gain, nearly twice the suggested rate for proper acclimatization. His tour group includes sixteen people, thirty horses, twelve tents, and a portable chamber to treat severe altitude sickness. “Everybody cries at some point on the Snowman Trek,” his trail mate informs him.

Constantly facing altitude sickness and inhospitable environments, Grange gradually becomes enamored by fragile plantation, rare animals, and the continual warmth and contradictions of the Bhutanese people. For example, Grange commits to making the trek technology free in order to experience the Zen-like atmosphere. He is amazed when, during a puja ceremony performed by Buddha monks, a priest takes a ringing cell phone from underneath his robe. Similarly, prayer flags Grange describes as the “sacred speed bumps” “on the highway of trails throughout the Himalayas” catch the wind and romance of the Snowman Trek but at the same time conflict with the detailed phallus symbols painted on houses. The pictograms honor not fertility but one of Bhutan’s most famous saints, the Divine Madman.

Grange’s earlier attempt in 2004 to finish Bhutan’s Jhomolhari Trek failed when altitude sickness forced his abandonment. Internal doubt about achieving the Snowman Trek compels examination and conversation within Grange interwoven throughout the book:

But loudest and worst of all was the voice inside my head—my inner critic—that old familiar foe.You have insomnia, it said. No I don’t, I replied. It’s the first sign of altitude sickness. I’m just adjusting. You never should’ve come. Yes I should have. You’re going to quit, waste all your money, and look stupid. No, I won’t. Yes, you will. No! Yes! No!

His search for self follows Grange into Bhutan, a nation promoting Gross National Happiness, and he finds the isolation of the Himalayans strangely comforting: “I’d felt far more remote on a crowded anonymous street in New York City than I ever did on the Snowman Trek.”

Grange successfully blends trail terror with trail humor. Snow camels, or yaks, are traded for horses at higher elevations and present a new set of challenges for the group. “How would I describe the arrival of the yaks? They were like thirty, half-ton first-graders with sharp horns on a field trip.” The hazards of the toilet tent he presents as akin to a lethal combination of Sartre’s No Exit and Milton’s Paradise Lost. “Could the toilet tent be the reason only 50 percent of people finish the Snowman?” he wonders.

Bhutan history and mountaineering lore weave throughout Grange’s writing with a series of flashbacks to early years growing up in New Hampshire. His journalism background crafts a well-researched read, and he effortlessly spins Bhutan’s environment and landscape into screen-worthy images. In the vein of Aron Ralston’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place and the film 127 Hours, the book shows why extreme adventuring is so difficult to resist. Readers will forgive Grange’s occasional slips into clichéd slang and will find him, and Beneath Blossom Rain, charming and witty.

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