Dubravka Ugresic
translated by David Williams
Open Letter ($15.95)

by Steve Street

Considering the scope of references in this twelfth book and fifth collection of essays, the originally Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic might well have come across Kurt Vonnegut’s dictum that a writer must above all be a good date—i.e. good company for a reader. She seems to believe it, anyway, though like the opinions she expresses on everything from the ramifications of digital culture to hotel furnishings to insects, she’s more complicated than that. In fact she’s less like a good date than like a good childhood friend who still lives nearby and drops in often, with urgent topics on her mind. Luckily what’s on Ugresic‘s mind is mostly new and engaging, especially for readers of this new American edition. But her strong presence—voice is really inadequate to her—in pieces that range from the hundred-page title essay to two-page reflections on a single observation, can cause some annoyance.

For example, readers might be put off by a confidential tone that assumes they’ll agree with her. A museum in her adoptive Netherlands displays only “exemplars of the worst kind of pretentiousness,” end of anecdote; she doesn’t even describe, let alone argue how so. Of atrocities she cites as indications of increasing worldwide chaos and immorality she’ll offer undocumented generalizations like “many Indians sell their organs” and assertions of scores of slave-labor networks in western Europe. For all her own insistence on calling what she sees as she sees it rather than as she’s been expected to by the chain of insistent authorities under whom she’s lived, from Tito to Croatian nationalists to organizers and patrons of the “literary festivals that [now] criss-cross the European continent,” she seems to be writing to a remarkably uncritical audience. And sometimes she’s just wrong, as in “literary magazines are so few as to be of no use. . .” (They might be useless, but they’re everywhere, no?).

Not that she doesn’t provide evidence, sometimes even to a fault. In the second-longest essay here, “A Question of Perspective,” she details her version of why she left Croatia, essentially to avoid what amounted intellectual bullying by other writers and academics in a nationalistic fervor after the break-up of Yugoslavia. As Phillip Lopate points out in his canonical Art of the Personal Essay, this form’s “enemy . . . is self-righteousness,” though it’s true that Ugresic’s blow-by-blow of escalating injustices and betrayals also limns a dynamic that’s one of her larger themes: the way systems that supplant others can perpetuate systemic evils.

That’s hardly a fresh insight, and even on less overtly political topics she sometimes relies on the trite sarcasm of a splenetic adolescent, often of the “Oh they think they’re so cool” variety, especially when it comes to cultural trends. Some of this effect might well be due to the nature of translation, though David Williams’ work is faultless in terms of clarity and readability. But as Ugresic herself says of a writer in the Croatian in which she wrote these essays, “I . . . recognize the nuances and tones. I catch the scent of every word . . . I know that every word . . . [and] every sentence . . . is just a new layer of powder on its owner’s face.” Her accusation is of hypocrisy, and while that’s not one of her own apparent faults, her prose might well have gotten similarly scrubbed down a bit somewhere along the line.

But her passions are intact, as we become increasingly aware. Besides hypocrisy, she’s against cruelty, greed, injustice, and exploitation; what she’s for, if doing is endorsing, includes curiosity and an indefatigable quest for truth. More than anything, this credentialed comp-lit academic turned self-described cultural critic hates what she interprets as having come about as a consequence of the downfall of Communism and the ascendancy of global business and technology over any political ideology at all: the particular kind of cultural boorishness she dubs “karaoke culture.” In brief, her coinage indicates an Internet- and YouTube-enabled assumption worldwide that everyone not only can make art, but should. “Author, Work, and Reader are the three elements that create a literary work,” she instructs us in a section of the title essay called “Karaoke Writing” that treats fan fiction, slash fiction, and the cell-phone novel that “has rocked the powerful Japanese multimedia industry”; “Author and Work have had their time, and now it’s the Reader’s turn.” And elsewhere: “We used to send out ghostly signals of our existence, and now we make fireworks out of our lives.”

The difference she perceives is that contemporary culture, whether global or locally (and transparently) manufactured by emerging systems and structures, is, in inverse proportion to its prevalence, empty. She illustrates with a hypothetical runner carrying a ceremonial porcelain bowl that turns out to contain “water soup,” and by citing actual offbeat museums (of Odd Socks, of Toilets) that upend the concept of preserving cultural traditions and excellence. It’s not a simple question of high versus low: though not by name, she cites Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao. The containers become more important than the contents, she says, and mentions world-class violinist Joshua Bell, who can fill Carnegie Hall but was largely ignored when he played incognito in a subway station (viewable, ironically enough, on YouTube).

Her approach varies between academic vocabulary with full argumentation and the kind of visceral epiphanies drawn from casual observations you might expect over a back-yard fence. “In this private big brother show, this public big brother show, we record everything. . . [but] we don’t communicate.” In “Filipinas,” her one-dimensional revulsion at women in nightclubs seems moralistic and easily shocked, even prudish. For all her eschewing of ready-made concepts like loyalty to “homeland”—even that word makes her flesh crawl—she expresses an absolute allegiance to the poor. Her sensibility is a sort of “mash-up” (a technique of karaoke culture she criticizes) of Fran Leibowitz’s and Barbara Ehrenreich’s, with maybe a dash of David Foster Wallace’s, in her burrowing for the truth. Like all of them she can be insightful, though not always intentionally. She’s so conversant with current culture that she seems younger, but she admits she comes from the post-World War II generation in a then-Communist country, so she’s watched systems both political and cultural from inception to collapse.

She’s also lived in times and places where, “because of the written word, writers have lost their lives and been put to death.” That’s maybe her biggest difference from Americans, whether writers or readers. For those of us who grew up postmodern, whether ironic or post-ironic, it can take a George Saunders-like wit to awaken feeling, as in his 2005 GQ piece on Dubai, “The New Mecca”—rather than the memory of a world in which decency and justice were considered achievable social goals, toward which writing could help. For all her savvy perceptions, Ugresic writes as if out of nostalgia for those earnest beliefs, and for all her particular dislikes and closely considered evidence she admits to wandering, “dazed and confused, around [a] vanished system of coordinates. East and West definitely no longer exist. . . . the world has split into the rich, who enrich themselves globally, and the poor, who are impoverished locally.”

Borderless as her concerns are, hers is a perspective forged in the part of the world she knew first, and she has much to teach us about it, especially if you couldn’t quite follow Balkan events in the 1990s—as well as, in an extensive compendium in her own academic specialty, about regional Croatian literature that even two centuries ago was partially set elsewhere. Ugresic herself is too, of course, as a resident of Amsterdam now and a world traveler—her first collection of essays was written in New York City, and two pieces in Karaoke Culture address trips to the Philippines and Bali. But her real points of reference are Japanese films and those of the Coen brothers, Sinclair Lewis and Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, Tito and Obama, Facebook and Twitter.

So by the end of Karaoke Culture you’ve developed a new respect for your childhood friend: she’s turned out to be as up-to-date as you are if not more so, speaking with traces of an intriguing, not-quite-identifiable accent you’d tuned out long ago. And you might wonder what else you’ve missed.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Andrzej Stasiuk
translated by Michael Kandel
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($23)

by Amy Henry

Small countries should be allowed to cut history class. They should be like islands off to the side of the main current of progress.

Driving out of Poland, Andrzej Stasiuk is again ready to explore the remote and often mysterious villages of Eastern Europe. He’s covered this lesson plan before, inFado (Dalkey Archive, 2009), where his quiet travels took the long way around to places that maps ignore. In On the Road to Babadag, he continues to explore “the other Europe” to discover what makes people there survive despite being forgotten or ignored by the rest of the continent. His pace is slow and observant, with a writing style that mimics the region: spare, straightforward, and honest.

There are countless ways to write a travelogue, and the writers of such usually proclaim a love for the places they visit. At times, however, the travel story becomes their story, more about their reactions to a place than the location itself. Only Stasiuk, along with Tony Fabijancic (writing about Croatia and Bosnia), seems to recognize that the stories belong to the inhabitants and aren’t there to be manipulated by outsiders and processed into anecdotes.

Stasiuk writes from observation: he rises early and quietly finds a cup of coffee and watches people go about their lives. He misses nothing: the gait of the already-tired worker, the way the shops put on their faces as the day begins, even how a tired man drinks his liquor. He doesn’t judge the people he observes, or imagine what could have been different politically. No matter where he ends up, he seems to pinpoint a simplicity and contentment uncommon to Western lands:

At that same hour, in that same dying light, cattle were coming home . . . Scenery and architecture may change, and the breed, and the curve of horn or the color of mane, but the picture remains untouched: between two rows of houses moved a herd of sated cattle . . . The “worst and smallest” nations live with their animals, and would like to be saved with them. They would like to be respected with their livestock, because they have little else.

What comes from this work is an appreciation for the small and simple but ultimately noble deeds of strangers. When he inquires of an elderly man about a certain train’s departure, he finds, hours later, that the man followed to make sure he got on the right one. In another city, a street kid advised him to avoid his intended hotel, suggesting another. Stasiuk doesn’t fall for it, thinking it a setup; it turns out his original choice was uninhabitable and the one the boy recommended was preferable, being clean and safe. This same boy helps him change his money, get a packed meal, and make the train on time without taking a dime for his efforts. Finally, he tells of an old woman on a lonely country road who has little to her name but finds a sense of purpose by scrubbing down the street anytime a car passes.

Stasiuk is the ultimate road trip companion; he’s thorough in his knowledge about the region’s people and culture, but he also knows when to keep quiet and just admire the view. The historical context is always present, as it has to be in this part of the world. Many Westerners assume that Eastern European history is just war and genocide, with a bit of Count Dracula thrown in. Ignoring the stereotypes, Stasiuk notes philosophers and poets inspired by the variance of light that appears in these hills and valleys. At one point, he sidetracks to find the grave of Emil Cioran, a Romanian poet and author who was a contemporary of Eliade, Sebastian, and Ionescu in the 1930s and for whom preserving the Romanian identity was vital.

All is not bucolic though; Stasiuk also investigates the culture clash in Chisinau, where the availability of Western goods intersects the most humble of farmer’s markets. It’s not so much the disparity but how he describes it that makes it instantly recognizable: “a Romanian-Slavic mix of loveliness and risqué makeup: peasant modesty in dance-hall gear. The general impression that everyone is playing at being something other, each according to a private notion of a world not here.” His description corresponds perfectly to how modernization in the larger cities is awkwardly positioned between Western influences and old-world traditions.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Inga Muscio
Seven Stories Press ($17.95)

by Amy Wright

I donʼt often go in for political agendas, but “in” is precisely where one must go, according to Inga Muscio, to source the wellsprings of violence and to find the courage for empathy. The title of her new book, Rose: Love in Violent Times, echoes the title of her first book, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, and indeed it could be a sequel—if self-respect leads to greater regard for others. Muscio argues that it can and should; the book continually affirms that a strong sense of self precipitates an expanded awareness of the surrounding world.

In the second chapter, “The Violence of Entitlement,” the author makes the case that we—and she doesn’t specify her pronoun as Americans so much as contemporaries—have been indoctrinated with an aggressive “frontier mentality” that prizes advancement before intimacy, progress before honey bees. Physical acts are only one particularly grotesque aspect of violence. Inattention equals acquiescence and contributes to raising the societal threshold for emotional immunity. When it comes to the context we inhabit, Muscio makes it clear that we are either complicit with it or instigating change.

While Rose might recall some of the protest anthems of the 1960s, it is no flower child pleading with us to make love instead of war. Bob Dylan asks those who won’t lend a hand to get out of the new road, but Muscio claims that we are the road—paved and oil-slicked and littered with the detritus of power-centric thinking. She dares her readers to commit to responsible relationships. “Love is a verb,” Muscio insists, and if it raises consciousness, it does so in proportion to increased demands.

Her call to action is as immediate as a cell phone. Words carry bias. It is not only Styrofoam that remains with us for generations, but those “material witnesses to past, present, and future” that gaze out from every dictionary. Change starts at the level of language, she argues:

Itʼs unhealthy and passively violent to use words like “love” or “war” without ever stopping to define them in your life, from your experience, while taking in as many perspectives as possible.

Her premise is as far-reaching as her hope, but it is not unrealistic. She doesnʼt propose to end war or violence, but to embrace a perspective that comprehends a total human nature. To pretend away imperfection or to idealize someone ultimately reduces the capacity of love, which is not something, she says, “other people bring into your life” but “something you do.” Violence even operates as an agent of metamorphosis Muscio can appreciate, even if she admits she doesn’t understand how.

In this way, Rose may present an irreconcilable position for some. Inga La Gringa, as the author goes by on her website, makes her points in terms that might chaff someone raised, in an environment where propriety outweighs expressive license. She also has a tendency to simplify the sources of blame to make her point. But to recognize how certain reactions have been governed by hand-me-down beliefs is to stop being ruled by them. The force that drives the paradigm of violence can evolve, and her text provides one directive for undertaking it.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Ryan Van Meter
Sarabande Books ($15.95)

by Nasir Sakandar

Growing up in the vast and quiet space of the Midwest, Ryan Van Meter kept his homosexuality a secret from his friends and family, and for a while from himself. It is not hard to imagine why he would keep such a secret. It was only in the beginning of the 20th century that homosexuality came into the vernacular of psychoanalysis, and at the time it was used primarily to describe what was believed to be a mental illness. Van Meter’s debut collection of essays, If You Knew Then What I Know Now, explores the silence and quietness that remain around homosexuality and the difficulty in defining yourself when all you know is you’re “different.”

Van Meter relates his experiences in fourteen interconnected and chronologically arranged essays, looking at how his sexuality informed his upbringing, his embarrassments, and his insecurities. He begins with “First,” which was anthologized in The Best American Essays 2009. The essay considers the author’s first sexual attraction, or what he thought was a sexual attraction at the age of five. Van Meter weaves through the present tense, while not letting go of his anguished reflective voice as he describes sitting in the backseat holding another boy’s hand, wanting to marry him. The haunting conclusion of the essay foreshadows the vacant solitude to come as his mother blatantly—and to the young narrator’s mind, harshly—says that boys cannot marry boys. The rest of the ride is as his experience growing up: silent.

Years later, at the age of thirteen, Van Meter acknowledges for the first time that he is different. This realization comes in the form of fear, not of a person, but of aliens. In the essay “Specimen,” Van Meter watches a television program about people abducted by aliens, and is convinced that he will be too. “It seemed inevitable, guaranteed. They were going to take me onto their spaceship and pull me apart.” This is also probably the first time Van Meter knows why he is keeping a secret. He is so afraid of being abducted that the only person he tells is his mother, and he begs her to sleep next to him each night. In “Specimen,” Van Meter understands the loneliness of being different; it is the beginning or the unraveling of the deeper secret that has not came into view.

As years pass by, the secret became more apparent to Van Meter. He meets another gay schoolmate named Justin, and realizes that dating women does not satisfy him the way he thinks it should; later he finds confidence in a friend named Kim. Eventually, attending Christian camps and glancing at men, his classmates, his father’s friends, all point Van Meter toward the conclusion that he is gay.

In the second half of the collection, Van Meter comes to terms with his homosexuality. In an essay on the word “faggot,” the mature Van Meter opens with a scene where a student uses the smear to describe one of his colleagues; from there he moves to conservative pundit Ann Coulter calling former Senator John Edwards “a faggot.” The essay looks at the word’s origins, and Van Meter’s encounters with it. Despite the essay feeling out of place in the collection, it is understandable why it is included: every gay man has had that slur directed his way, and when one is unburdened from suppressing who he is one begins to inquire where the burden to suppress comes from—and “faggot” is at the heart of it.

What is striking about If You Knew Then What I Know Now is how much the Midwestern landscape rolls onto the page, and into Van Meter’s life. The Missouri plains, the lakes of Minnesota, the humid summers, and the winter cold are all felt, though they are not explicitly identified. Perhaps that is one reason why Van Meter’s experience feels so unique, so pertinent in its telling. There is a juxtaposition of solitude here: in the silent and boundless landscape of the Midwest, one is often forced into silence, just like one forces themselves into silence when keeping a secret. Luckily for Van Meter, the secret is out, and the release serves him and the reader well.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Jerry Yang
with Mark Tabb
Medallion Press ($24.95)

by Adam Stemple

There will be no spoiler alerts in this review; Jerry Yang won the Main Event at the 2007 World Series of Poker. About half of his memoir All In is taken up with this competition, where in pedestrian prose, Yang and co-author Mark Tabb tell the familiar story of a not particularly strong player who follows a great run of cards to a championship. Luckily, however, that's only half the book. Interspersed with the Vegas tale is the far more interesting story of the young son of a Hmong leader forced to escape Laos and survive a Thai refugee camp en route to America. This story is harrowing and dramatic.

Despite the short shrift given to some of the most emotionally wrenching events (and the perhaps too numerous depictions of defecation), the Laos–Thailand–U.S. journey is must-read material. Even those somewhat familiar with the culture and tragic recent history of the Hmong population will find new details in All In: life as the child of sustenance farmers in the jungles of Southeast Asia, the cruelty of Ho Chi Minh's political descendants, the danger of trying to escape a repressive regime, the banal horrors of a refugee camp. Even the language works better here than at the card table, since we're viewing events through the eyes of a young boy.

There is a fair amount of proselytizing in the book—Yang is a devout Christian and he isn't afraid to let people know it—but this isn’t as bothersome as it sounds. His faith carried him through some of the darkest days imaginable, and unlike many of the hypocritical creatures we hear about in the news who use religion to justify bigotry, oppression, and a host of other crimes, Yang actually appears to act in a way that most Christians just profess: loving thy neighbor, turning the other cheek, doing unto others, etc. If you walk the walk, you're allowed to talk the talk.

In the end, readers of All In will find themselves rooting for Yang—he seems like a genuinely nice guy who survived an unbelievably hellish childhood to become not just a poker champion, but a psychologist and philanthropist. You can win a single tournament on luck alone, but to go from sustenance farming to head of your high school class and a master's degree—all in a language you didn't learn until you were over ten years old—requires an inconceivable amount of hard work. Furthermore, to hit a financial windfall you'd never have dreamed of as a child in Laos and then spend a great deal of it helping others shows, as the book's closing states, "the true mark of a champion."

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

James Attlee
The University of Chicago Press ($26)

by Paula Cisewski

The moon is sort of a cliché, right? Even contemporary poets tend to avoid it. But say, for instance, I become lost one night, does the moon suddenly become more relevant? Or can’t I simply use my smartphone as a flashlight until I stumble my way back to the fluorescent parking lot that contains my car and GPS? In his collection of essays Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight, James Attlee challenges us to reexamine our relationship to the night sky for the sake of both our sense of mystery and our planet’s health.

A perfect way to read this travelogue/narrative inquiry would be to enjoy a single essay each day as the new moon waxes toward full—it’s roughly the way the twenty-six essays wax in length. Attlee’s loose nod to the form of his subject is pleasing, as is the relaxed raveling of the book’s arguments and images from one essay to the next. He begins in “Moonrise” by stating that “much of the planet we inhabit no longer experiences ‘night’ as it was once understood . . . Most of us . . . are increasingly cut off from the movements of the silent satellite that controls the tides, linked in the human mind for centuries with love, melancholy and madness.” The night, he states, has been “rendered spectrally pale today by the intensity of our self-regard.”

“Some books begin as a random accumulation of ideas, spinning like the debris of rock fragments, ice and gases that follow an impact in space. Gradually, as more material is added, they attain mass and attract more objects to themselves, eventually, as their inner cores cool, achieving solidity. It is thought that this is how the moon was formed.” Indeed this is the way the collection reads, beginning in an English dentist’s chair and travelling from points such as the rim of Mount Vesuvius to a moon-viewing festival in Kyoto to neon-soaked Las Vegas. Attlee provides us with a collage of fascinations. He creates simultaneously a cubist portrait of the moon and of the moon reflecting its audience. Here is the moon beneath which Li Po drank his wine and wrote his poems. Here is the moon toward which Galileo focused his telescopes, the same moon that terrified Mussolini, the same moon Futurist megalomaniac Marinetti wanted to see obliterated with gaslight.

Attlee guides us not only through space but also through time, from earliest mythology to today’s flavor of moon worship. In “From Vegas to Vega: American Moon,” he describes his experience in the Arizona desert where any one of us could, as he attempted to, book time on a platform surrounded by parabolic mirrors to bask in concentrated moonlight.

Ultimately, Attlee’s moon reflects our species objectively: Romantic painter, fascist, poet, distanced family member, fallen soldier, and scientist alike all claim some portion of night. However, taking to heart the number of goddesses associated with the moon who have been worshipped around the globe, the almost complete lack of female observers given voice in the collection is highly noticeable, though this reads as less of an omission on the author’s part than as an illuminating silence. That absence is another facet of the same cultures that Attlee turns a critical eye toward for exhausting the extensive natural resources necessary to wipe out night with technology.

But are we of the increasingly sprawling urban landscape doomed to forego the introspection that the unpolluted night sky allows? Attlee doesn’t leave us with so bleak a fate. “Each generation gets the sky it deserves,” he states, “bequeathed to it by its parents. Distanced and diminished as it is by human brightness, today’s moon demands of us greater attention, a little more effort.”

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Blake Butler
Harper Perennial ($14.99)

by Nick Ripatrazone

Insomnia has long been fodder for poets: Sylvia Plath, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Bishop, Walt Whitman, and others chronicled the debilitating struggle with sleep. Blake Butler’s first book of non-fiction, Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, shifts that most poetic trouble to prose, and the transition brings new complications and perspectives to the condition. Butler’s recursive, malleable syntax not only mirrors the blurry minds of the sleepless, his prose redefines that “sleeplike helpless state.”

Nothing is fluid in its fragmentations. While Butler always returns to “so many nights that [keep] me up long after I lay down,” the narrative bounds between an impressive array of subjects and tones. Butler travels to write at his parents’ home—he is a partial caregiver to his father, whose dementia has spurred “the destruction of his aging brain,” causing him to leave “meatloaf in the cabinets with the clean dishes” —and he laments his helplessness here: “For all the ways I feel failing as a person, this is the most palpable of all.” Butler’s self-effacing memories, including masturbating to a Family Feud screenshot of Pamela Anderson and overeating his way to 260 pounds in ninth grade, combine with a care for his father to create an absolutely genuine persona, stripped of the pretensions and posturing common to memoir.

Even the book’s structure mirrors the fight for order and focus in the tired mind. Nothing spins between Butler’s real childhood memories, surreal imaginations, and current, almost biological encounters with his computer. In the midst of these necessarily whirling sections, Butler tucks absolute gems. “A Condensed History of Night” unfolds a history of sleep while concurrently expounding the constancy of human invention and creation. His breadth of reading, from Wittgenstein to Borges to Lispector, informs the possibility that an overtired mind can find escape in words.

Perhaps the most inventive metaphor of Nothing is the representation of the house as central location for sleep. From bed to room to hallway to property, Butler redefines our sense of domestic space. Staid architecture becomes the muddy artifice of mind. He carries the metaphor into filmic representations of home-space; particularly smart is his rendering of Stanley Kubrick’s spatially disoriented The Shining, “in which no characters are pictured sleeping.”

Butler represents insomnia as physiological and emotional fanaticism, an internal fear with external symptoms. Sprawling sentences descend into capitalized confessions, and then italicized, second-person whispers. Butler’s previous books—particularly There is No Year andScorch Atlas—embraced the concept of book art, and Nothing is also refreshingly experimental. Spaced text, metafictional footnotes, and a glow-in-the-dark cover complete the reading experience of disorientation.

As Nothing progresses, Butler’s range of sleep-concerned references become nearly encyclopedic: “‘You don’t try to photograph the reality,’ Jack Nicholson said, quoting Kubrick, in an interview years after the director died inside his sleep, ‘you try to photograph the photograph of the reality,’ and somewhere in this, the replication forming its own version of the same—to want and want at and never enter.” For Butler, straight anecdote is never sufficient. References are layered and cloaked in his trademark recursivity, making the reading experience organic work, though never laborious. One would expect no less from a mind so coaxed into continuous thought. Nothing, despite its title, is about something palpable: one man’s concerted, successful attempt to distill a wayward, awake world into words.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Adam Kirsch
Yale University Press ($24)

by Spencer Dew

Last January in a New York Times Book Review special issue on the present and future of criticism, Adam Kirsch wrote, “Increasingly, I feel that argument is only the form of criticism, not the substance, just as passing judgment on a particular book is only the occasion of criticism, not the goal . . . The critic participates in the world of literature not as a lawgiver or a team captain for this or that school of writing, but as a writer, a colleague of the poet and the novelist. Novelists interpret experience through the medium of plot and character, poets through the medium of rhythm and metaphor, and critics through the medium of other texts.” Kirsch went on to advance a conception of “serious criticism” as that which shows “a mind working out its own questions—about psychology, society, politics, morals—through reading” and which therefore shows its audience “what reading can be: a way of making one’s self, one’s soul.”

Such a conception echoes that of Lionel Trilling, the literary and cultural critic whose legacy Kirsch seeks to defend in this recent volume. I say defend because the tone here is one of striking back, against a moment—or moments, as both Trilling and Kirsch identify their own contexts in this way—of “unliterary culture” in which Trilling’s example proves “so valuable, so heartening” because it demonstrates “what it means to define one’s self through reading, [and] proves that this kind of readerly heroism is always a possibility for those who believe in it,” regardless of how marginal or alone they may feel within that wider “unliterary” (or even anti-literary) society. The “heroism” of the individual and the individual’s will, along with an insistence on the literary as a privileged ground for making sense of the self and society, is what makes Trilling matter in the present moment, Kirsch argues. Trilling’s importance is not as historical artifact—of the New York intellectuals, the Menorah Journal circle, Columbia University as the ’50s turned to the ’60s, etc.—but as a defender of the primacy of literature, the importance of criticism, and, indeed, of the literary critic as heroic figure.

Such a conception—like Harold Bloom’s theory of poetry as always belated, struggling with the agonistic pressures of influence—is, of course, reflective of the conceiver’s position. Thus, Kirsch is quick to point to those moments where Trilling looks to critical work—Freud, for instance—as inducing the same pleasures as “a satisfactory work of art,” and he is particular tender on the charge “that Trilling was, at heart, not a great literary critic but a failed novelist, and therefore an unhappy, unsatisfied man.” Despite some solid evidence of frustration and even woe on Trilling’s part, Kirsch insists that Trilling’s experiments with fiction granted him “first-hand experience of what many critics do not understand: the tremendous will of the artist, and the moral dubiousness of that will.” Like Matthew Arnold, his model in criticism, Trilling’s career can be read “as a tale not of genius snuffed out, but of imagination tamed and made useful by conscience.”

So, in Trilling-esque fashion, Kirsch uses Trilling’s ideas and career as pretexts for his own investigations, giving us an extended reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” thoughts on the Pirke Aboth and Jewish identity, and attention to Freud and Sontag and Whitman and Austen and the shift to the ‘60s and the task of the anthologist—all of which have their moments. Yet Kirsch’s defense of Trilling pales in comparison to one written several decades ago by Mark Krupnick,Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism, a study that not only proceeds with more grace and accessibility and intensity than Kirsch’s but which also avoids the somewhat self-important focus on “heroism” in contrast with marginalization. Rather than mourning the moment as “unliterary,” Krupnick frames his work via the then-new “professionalization and specialization of criticism” away from periodicals and into the academy, with the related growth of a “new guild mentality” replete with fractured sectarian narrowness and baroque in-group jargon. Trilling, in contrast, “not only wrote well but wrote as a man speaking to men, not an academic specialist plying his trade,” as another social critic and Trilling aficionado, Morris Dickstein, put it in Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties.

While Kirsch focuses on the “heroic” (artistic) will of Trilling—and, therefore, the critic in general—Krupnick, following a claim from Matthew Arnold on what criticism must necessarily be, sets his sights on the “undulating and diverse” in Trilling’s thinking, or what Krupnick terms Trilling’s “allergy to closure.” The critic who opposed “a sentiment of wholeness” of the self in contrast to the “weightlessness” of the modern world remained, resolutely, a thinker of contradictions, driven by and preserving, in his work, paradox. Consider his central notion of “moral realism,” which Krupnick calls “the imagination of complication.” Both Krupnick and Kirsch quote Trilling’s definition of this concept as “not the awareness of morality itself but of the contradictions, paradoxes and dangers of living the moral life.”

One irony of Trilling’s story is that while his mode of criticism, focused on a rather 19th-century notion of the self, fell out of favor in part because of the rise of literary theory, with its fetishization of apophatic language and insistence on fragmentary conceptions of subjectivity, Trilling’s insistence on complexity and paradox and resistance of closure echoes—albeit in a different vernacular—the investments and claims of Derrida and other poststructuralists. That “there is no possible way of responding to Belsen and Buchenwald. The activity of the mind fails before the incommunicability of man’s suffering,” is Trilling’s own observation, one which Krupnick reads as elucidating the postwar essays as responses to precisely such horror, via their focus on instances, in literature, of “moral realism.”

Kirsch says this awareness of the complications of morality “has the most immediate implications for both personal and political life; and Trilling argues that literature is uniquely able to teach it to us,” going so far as to call this recognition of contradiction a “homeopathic cure” for potential problems of liberalism, linked later with “the renunciation of utopianism and the sanctity of diversity.” Certainly some such awareness can serve as a useful antidote to political naiveté and various forms of zealotry, but there is something a bit reductive to Kirsch’s spin here.

In Kirsch’s kid-glove handling of Trilling’s notorious “we,” which has sometimes been read as condescendingly elitist, we see a complication to precisely this line that “complexity,” as Kirsch claims, somehow directly counters “utopianism.” “To enroll in Trilling’s ‘we,’” Kirsch writes,

is to enter into his experience, not to submit slavishly to his judgments; the commonality it expresses is provisional and literary, not sociological. Properly understood, it is a humbler form of address than if Trilling were to write ‘I,’ which would turn him into an authority handing down judgments, or to write in the third person without addressing the reader at all. His ‘we’ is an improvised, and sometimes clumsy, attempt to make his writing about texts as involving as other people’s writing about characters and plots.

Krupnick, more directly, states that Trilling is constructing “a counterhistorical ideal community, a society that did not in fact exist,” while Kirsch says elsewhere that Trilling “felt a need for the reassurance and community that only criticism can provide.”

In short, the “we” of Trilling’s essays is not some pie-slice of New York intellectuals or readers of a certain journal at a certain moment in time, but, rather, an inclusive second-person persona predicated on the hope of transhistorical community, including Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson and other critics long-dead and not-yet-born. This deferred dream we is utopian, an imagined, ideal community that does not yet exist. Likewise, Kirsch’s relentless focus on the “heroics” of the critical act, standing brave against the swarming tides of “unliterate” contemporary culture, has a bit of the utopian to it as well.

Ultimately, Trilling may only matter to the extent that a given reader finds herself included in that “we,” or at least appreciative of the emphasis on complexity and Trilling’s implied canon of great works. This audience may be limited, but it is sure to always include critics—critics who, in praising Trilling, portray him, to some extent, in their own image.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Judd Ethan Ruggill and Ken S. McAllister
The University of Alabama Press ($35)

by Scott Newton

The titular conceit of Judd Ethan Ruggill and Ken S. McAllister’s new course-correction for video game criticism is equal parts “fun and brimstone”: Gaming Matters is a playful exploration of the allegedly boring, manipulative, duplicitous, and labor-intensive elements of an “alchemical” medium most readily understood through debasement and dissolution . . . or disillusion . . . or both. Lifting the veil on the production of video games and their attendant scholarship, Ruggill and McAllister focus overdue attention on the medium stripped of its video effects, story, marketing, and style. Exploring the uninteresting and coercive drudgery at its core, they contend, will teach us how the best games expand our sense of self, world, and moment, and how the worst will reduce us to laborers doing cultural work on the medium’s market’s behalf.

This is an enjoyable and provocative intervention launched from an ivory tower of gaming: Ruggill and McAllister have a record of influential publication, co-direct the Learning Games Initiative (a trans-disciplinary research group focused on the study of video games), and curate one of the largest game archives ever assembled. Never mind, then, that the first third of their short book is over-steeped in description of the medium’s disparate, “irreconcilable” discourses. Few others so ably address the scholarly, corporate, and political forces whose (often disharmonious) rhetorics will shape video games’ historical and future import.

Ruggill and McAllister wield Gaming Matters against current thinking across domains—and solicit the attention of gaming readers everywhere—by labeling the medium “inherently boring and therefore obligated to constantly hail players to keep them interested.” From Desert Bus toDeus Ex, they argue, players are plagued by video games’ “aimlessness,” where everything from predictability to erratic and unstable plot development, from mundane and repetitious tasks to a “perpetual discomfort [generated by] tension, frustration, failure, and even physical pain” requires that games aggressively and incessantly commandeer “personal experience, private fantasy, and public opinion in order to become culturally viable.”

As disconcerting as it may be to reflect on one’s gaming history through such a lens, it is worth noting that this critique burns brightest in the presence of failed games, the meaninglessness of bad stories, and the anti-art of technological reproduction. What medium is enjoyable absent skilled hands and the sum effect of its methods of meaning-making? Film denuded must be at least as boring; there’s nothing more inherently interesting about a jump cut than a cut-scene, until, for instance, we’re comparing Kubrick to Quake.

Where their argument might dead-end at “boring media are boring,” Ruggill and McAllister make real in-roads describing the incessant ways video games draw gamers from boredom into engaged play. All media operate by making demands on consumers’ attention, but video game players are hard-wired into the (inter)active creation of “the narrative, thematic, and ideological structures that determine the artifactual and medium-focused experience” of the games they’re playing. The acts of learning and improving skills required by unique games not only “transport players into a different sort of consciousness,” they ensure “the work of culture formation [is] being done on players” as they play.

Unpacking this work of “culture formation” is at the unspoken heart of Gaming Matters. Learning to play a game is the equivalent of learning to inhabit a subjectivity that is at once singular (to the experience of the game learned), social (shared with other players of the game), historical (via the experience of previous game-subject positions), and hopelessly imbricated in a commercialized system (to know a game from its player-perspective is to hear, answer, andrecreate through play its invested codifications of social relations and incessant advertisements).

Ruggill and McAllister frame this process as “manipulative and duplicitous” not only because it assuages boredom with artifice and interpellation, but because the majority of games “balloon” the importance of the present to meet economic pressures: “As the ludic golem of a game takes form, a long past of earlier games congeals into its husk until the medium is transformed into a single artifact that exists as a game only when it coexists with the now of player(s) playing.” How easy it becomes, then, to re-package and re-teach history as a series of related game subjectivities that point endlessly toward the saleable future.

It’s true that for the video game industry, there is no more important moment than this “now” of active play. Most new games have a very short window of profitability, massively emphasizing their need to hook players with replay value and downloadable “add-on” content. Yet the same duplicities that generate sales, manufacturing and relieving us of our boredom in a recursive, culture-forming loop, can yield more important and worthwhile takeaways. While inhabiting good games requires a complicit casting of oneself under the enchantment of enjoyable subjectivities, it also requires real imaginative investment in and reflection on a simultaneous perception of self, self-in-history, and self-as-history.

For Ruggill and McAllister, this experience can be as poetic as it is enjoyable: “Like a splendid and ageless soul remembering itself before its fleshly catchment, the anamneses of the greatest computer games do not freeze time so much as obviate it.” And for (and in spite of) all their calculated invective, theirs is often an aesthetic and captivating argument. Readers interested in how and why video games are changing the way we relate to each other and technology in general, and commentators actively re-making discourse to fit the aggregate, evolving video game medium, will find playing with the ideas in Gaming Matters can be insightful, challenging, and well worth the time.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Kembrew McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli
Duke University Press ($25.95)

by Allie Curry

Cutting Across Media begins by assuming a broader and necessarily more interdisciplinary debate about appropriation and copyright. For all their sweeping implicating, copyright reform activists Siva Viadhyanathan (Copyrights and Copywrongs), Lawrence Lessig (Free Culture), and Kembrew McLeod (Freedom of Expression) need the range of works anthologized in a collection such as Cutting Across Media to demonstrate that their work concerns not just a monolithic and imaginary community of artists, hippies, anarchists, and teenaged downloaders, but the mainstream of society. The format of the work itself captures the eclecticism of collage, considering that moments of impossible academic posturing are balanced with a few nicely curated oral histories, interviews, and photo essays.

The collection vacillates between well-demonstrated and novel critical positions. Where the most prominent works on the subject tend to dwell on digital’s infinite capacity to reproduce and share itself freely and its current kowtowing to corporate rights management, this book begins by situating appropriation art and collage in the earlier recesses of the twentieth century with Walter Benjamin, the Surrealists, and Dada. Along the way, it touches upon zine culture, audiotape collage, street art, and new wave science fiction; it critiques the international outflows of copyright-subject culture and then it critiques the debate itself.

Nothing represents this blending of perspectives better than author Jonathan Lethem’s celebrated 2007 Harper’s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence” which is the collection’s thematic heart. For those well-read in the matter, the content of the essay seems familiar (such as the claim that “Copyright is a ‘right’ in no absolute sense; it’s a government-granted monopoly on the use of creative results”). But the structure of the essay reveals itself to be a plagiarism, an assembly of lines Lethem “stole, warped, and cobbled together as [he] ‘wrote.’” As Lethem explains in the short interview that precedes his essay, “appropriated culture has an energy that comes from the surprise and awkwardness, the disconcerting quality that comes from seeing things moved in and out of other contexts.” The same might be said of the collection as a whole.

Eva Hemmung Wirtén’s essay succeeds particularly in reframing the discussion, in laying bare the ideologies informing the popular critical intellectual property narrative. “Emerging is not so much a clearly identifiable [copyright] ‘studies’,” she writes, “but the presence of certain dominating discourses made up of recurring key tropes.” These discourses wax critical of romantic notions of creativity and individual talent while being implicitly committed to them; they assume that everything is better when it is free in both the economic and political sense of the word; they privilege male and Anglophone perspectives. French droit d’auteur—a legal principle that at its semantic core attends to the moral “right of the author” the way British and American “copyright” promotes the public’s interest in consuming and reproducing creative work—is easily forgotten in the popular discourse (indeed, Vaidhyanathan dismisses the moral rights approach as “censorious as well” in his interview with Carrie McLaren). Alternatively, Wirtén finds solutions in re-examining copyright policy through the lens of common law’s friendliness to “interdisciplinary incursions” in cultural theory and comparative literature.

As Wirtén writes and this collection asserts, “the tension between intellectual property rights and the public domain are global issues and problems.” From its dissections of transnational provocateur Chris Ofili and the folk music pilfering and proto-sampling composer Béla Bartók,Cutting Across Media argues that this tension is subject to all the familiar insensitivities and transgressions of cultural hegemony. Joshua Clover—the rare contributor in the work who isn’t wholly sold on the libratory potential of collage—argues that gangsta rap is the result of groups such as Public Enemy’s “retreat from political critique, or retreat from dramatizing inter-racial and interclass conflict as the dominant social fact”, which “coincided exactly with the historical moment in which the force of law brought an end to hip-hop’s era of popular theft.” As a result, “hip-hop is now in its second decade of celebrating ownership: of cash, cars, jewelry, and, alas, women.”

Despite Clover’s remarks—he is after all, commenting upon the often problematic interactions between legal and aesthetic codes of ownership/theft—Cutting Across Media is notable in the insight it provides into hip-hop and rap’s participation in appropriation art and collage culture. Davis Schneiderman discusses DJ Danger Mouse (author of the The Grey Album, a mashup of rapper Jay-Z’s The Black Album and The Beatles’s The White Album) alongside William S. Burroughs and McLeod’s interview with Public Enemy goes beyond the perennial sampling lawsuit example the most outspoken leaders in the debate love to share. Most forcefully, one can read here in the artist’s voice how the rising cost of sampling clearance made their early work impossible and altered their sound notably.

Nevertheless, the ideology Wirtén critiques shines through in the collection again and again. For example, Jeff Chang writes:

“Freedom of expression” is often described as a positive right to receive and disseminate information and ideas, as well as a negative right preventing curbs to their flows within society. But freedom of expression may also describe aspects of artistic expression that encompass their inspiration, production, dissemination, and reception.

Chang argues that freedom of expression might belong more in a discourse of “cultural rights, communication rights, human rights, and moral and legal rights.” Cutting Across Media delights in discipline-shaking passages like these, but until more global and fewer “freedom” and “rights” rhetoric-happy non-Western perspectives make their way into a work such as this, Cutting Across Media cannot be absolutely everything it strives to be. All credit to scale of the debate it imagines, the book only begins to sketch a course of action if we are to “intervene and interrupt social conventions in a way that is political” (Benjamin), if we are to reclaim the cultures we can observe being increasingly monopolized, monetized, and managed on a global scale.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012