Ishmael Reed
Baraka Books ($19.95)

by Spencer Dew

For six decades, Ishmael Reed—a writer of novels, plays, poems, and essays—has been offering critiques of American culture. As editor of Konch, the online literary journal, Reed has sought “to publish those voices that are ignored by the American media,” as he writes in a recent issue, declaring Konch in contrast to “the American media, progressive, mainstream, corporate and alternative literary magazines, book reviews, etc. [who] continue to publish writers and poets from the same background and values.” (“Konch at 16”, published in the spring / summer 2012 issue) Any analysis of Reed’s writing style makes it clear that his values have priority, at times even over content. Consider an early and characteristic passage from this new collection:

Both CNN and MSNBC have formed an alliance with the Tea Party, which includes leaders who’ve called for the president’s assassination. Even Melissa Harris-Perry, a black woman, described by MSNBC as a progressive, said that “There are a lot of things I like about the Tea Party.” What lot of things? A prominent Tea Party member referred to the president as “a skunk,” a reference to the president’s bi-racial heritage. Does she like the Tea Partiers showing up at rallies with guns, or signs showing the president in a coffin? Calling for his assassination? Jules Manson, a darling of the Tea Party, made a Facebook post that said the following: “Assassinate the fucken [sic] nigger and his monkey children.”

We see here some of Reed’s righteous motivations for political critique, but we also see several aspects of his approach: screed pushing without citation or detail (What leaders? Who is Manson? Was there any notice of this post, any response?) while specific individuals are subject to attack based on decontextualized fragments. Reed gives us insufficient information;Going Too Far does not begin to go far enough to stand as informed, reliable critique of the cultural catastrophe it purports to address.

The book is divided into three parts. The first, on the Tea Party and racism in America, compares the Tea Party’s rise to that of the National Socialists in Germany— “and for those who might protest that such an analogy is off limits, I would remind progressives that prominent neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers play an important role in the Tea Party,” he writes, without naming any names. In the second part, he attacks the film Precious, which he claims “advocates the sterilization of poor black women”; the author of the novel on which it was based, Sapphire; and “one of the more odious products about black life,” “David Simon’s neo-Nazi The Wire.” The third part is an assemblage of interviews.

Precious “is to blacks what Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ was to Jews,” says Reed, who adds that he “wasn’t surprised that NPR’s Terry Gross would become part of the film’s promotion. I stopped listening to her years ago because she seemed to have a thing about casting all black men as sexual predators.” Again, we are given no examples of this “casting.” Likewise, we are told that Reed no longer reads The New York Times Magazine because it devotes attention to “flesh-eating black cannibals, lazy and shiftless welfare mothers,” and that its “coverage of Africa could be written by Edgar Rice Burroughs,” but specific examples are not provided. While Reed does draw on the New York Times for several examples throughout his text, and while several of the pieces collected here were published as Op-Eds in its pages, he insists that, as part of a larger “Jim Crow media,” it is implicit in publicizing “this hate crime as entertainment, this neo-Nazi porn and filth” which is Precious. His main argument against the film is that “blacks were shown as incestors and pedophiles,” and that the screenplay “follows the Nazi model” of idealizing whites, though he is also troubled that this is “a film in which gays are superior to black male heterosexuals,” as well as by the fact that “in this movie Caribbean Americans are smarter than black Americans.”

Reed’s argument against The Wire is that the show “locates drug activities almost exclusively among the black population, which makes it propaganda, because, as writer Michelle Alexander told Sasha Lilley on the program Against the Grain, broadcast on KPFA radio, most drug users and sellers are white.” While The Wire seems content to “dump all of the country’s pathologies upon the inner cities,” his own play “Hubba City offers a more complicated view of the War on Drugs.” He is quick to state that he is not “opposed to white men writing about the ghetto. Over the years I’ve published scores of white men and women,” yet this reflexive turn to his own accomplishments—the plays he’s written, the people he’s published—is basic to some aspects of his critique. Consider his attack on Sapphire, author of the novel Push, on which Preciouswas based: Reed asks us to consider that since he has published “the works of over thirty black women writers from the U.S. and Africa over the last five years, why can’t Sapphire do the same and shouldn’t she avoid verbs like ‘rampaging’ in light of her poem ‘Wild Thing’ which helped create the hysteria that resulted in five black and Hispanic kids being sent to prison for a crime they didn’t commit?” No attention is given to the conflation of the task of the novelist with that of the publisher, or whether in Reed’s view all novelists have a responsibility to run websites publishing other writers. The story of how a word in a poem managed to send innocent children to prison is also not explained.

There are three main problems with Reed’s approach: scale, selectivity, and shallowness. By scale I mean, for instance, the overuse of Nazi metaphors (though Reed might object to the term “metaphor”), or when Reed states that “the American media, up to its old tricks by raising lynch mobs against misunderstood groups,” is like “The kind of people who call Picasso’s work ‘Cubist’ as a way of denying its African influences.” Does “lynch mobs” here mean “lynch mobs”? I think for Reed it does, but there is, if nothing else, a burden on him to explain his usage of such terms. By selectivity, I mean how Reed, in service of a narrow point, assembles fragments of information without explanation or context: only rarely does he track things down. In an interview with novelist Nuruddin Farah, remarkable for Reed’s seeming lack of any background material for the questions he’s asking about what he calls “the so-called ‘pirates’” in the Gulf of Aden, Farah tells him “If you Google ‘dumping nuclear waste in Somalia’ you will find lots of articles,” but Reed doesn’t pursue this issue. Finally, shallowness permeates Reed’s approach. He has, for instance, a valid argument about racism in the media and media control by corporations, but he’ll advance this only by making snide remarks about Arianna Huffington, then degrade his own case by, for instance, referring to Paul Krugman as being “treated as the leading economist of the white power shadow government,” or, in lieu of a reasoned critique of Senator Mitch McConnell’s votes, policies, or statements, Reed will simply say “He’s from Kentucky and though Kentucky was not part of the Confederacy, a Confederate ‘shadow government’ was a powerful influence on the state government during the rebellion launched by traitors.” Most of the personal attacks here are reserved not for politicians but for academics and artists, other writers, creating a tone that coexists uncomfortably with Reed’s own self-aggrandizement: “When Tupac mentioned me in a song, it compensated for all of the hostile responses to my nonfiction and fiction.”

Another revealing moment occurs in an interview with Reed, when he’s asked if he has “Any advice on how to become more critical in news consumption?” Reed answers: “I have an online magazine. I get useful information each day from those who write on Facebook,Counterpunch.com, Media Matters, FAIR. And Richard Prince’s ‘Journalisms’ are essential.” The first impulse is to cite his own accomplishments. The second, to speak not of a widening circle but a linked network of those who share perspectives and “likes” and who, likely, are willing to applaud his vitriol, regardless of the lack of depth. Again, here is a case of a writer not going nearly far enough, not even bothering to speak past his particular in-crowd. The result is neither criticism nor informed political discourse. There is value in the raw anger of these pages, but only if they goad others into doing actual research and constructing reasoned, informed arguments. As for the petty attacks on other artists for not being publishers or for being gay: that is just poison.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2012/2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012/2013

A.T. Mann
Sterling Ethos ($19.95)

by Gerard Malanga

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to trees lately, especially now that we’re nearing the end of autumn and the leaves have turned and are falling to the ground. It’s a subject that has always fascinated poets. I’m reminded of Robert Lowell’s precise and focused imagery, embedded somewhere in hisNotebooks: “twilight floating through the manes of trees.” Or the picture postcard of ephemeral reality that T.S. Eliot captured in: “The fog is in the fir trees” (The Dry Salvages). For his part, Robert Creeley once explained that trees are “the resonance of experience.”

It’s that time of year when nature seems to fold in on itself and go into a deep sleep, a season of tranquility. And it is this sense of tranquility that envelops the reader of A. T. Mann’s new book,The Sacred Language of Trees, an anecdotal history of the myths, cults, and religions involving trees from earliest times to the present.

Mann’s 1978 breakthrough book, The Round Art: The Astrology of Time and Space, was chockfull of esoterica and rich in varied personalities, both famous and obscure—all with their charts facing them in full view. Richly infused with many surprises, it would forever change the way astrology charts are looked at. (Sadly, it is out of print.) Thirty-five years and a dozen books later, Mann is still very much a man of letters and ideas; in his new book, he communicates in diamond-cut prose what trees are telling us—and what they are saying is both loving and frightful. Their language is spiritual. There are no subtitles here.

The Sacred Language of Trees is not so much a departure from where Mann first began, but a continuation of those discoveries that enchanted him along the way. It is structured in storied chapters or reflections: “Chaldean, Babylonian, and Assyrian Tree Myths,” “Hebrew Tree Symbolism,” “The Christian Story of the Paradise Trees of Eden,” and “Mesoamerian and Native American Trees” illustrate the sheer breadth of the territory that this short book covers.

Mann weaves anecdotes and stories, both factual and personal, in concise and simple ways without losing any of their richness and depth; his stylistic approach is unique and fluid. He’s not so much letting you in on a secret, but remains entirely open to sharing what he knows with his readers. Here’s an example of the author at his most succinct:

We must realize that human intervention has a measurable impact upon the natural world, and that (as studies have shown) if we don’t change our habits of consumption, we could easily bankrupt our natural resources in the foreseeable future.

A similar lament for the natural world has been sung through the ages by important and worldly individuals. Take this remarkable parallel in T.S. Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society, in which the poet voiced his sympathies and concerns about the planet’s fate in 1939:

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.

Mann is among these “succeeding generations,” as are we all. And indeed, evidence of this cost abounds. Take the disappearance of many species of birds, occurring more so now than at any other time. Trees are birds’ habitat. Without them, birds have nowhere to fly to, nowhere to perch, and nowhere to nest.

It seems a shame that warnings of this nature must persist throughout history, to be repeated again and again. A first instance of any tree from recorded history comes from the Bible, when Eve plucks an apple from the tree of knowledge. In this instance, the apple tree becomes sacred for its warning—only the first tree to speak to us in a language we would do well to heed.

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David Eagleman
Vintage Books ($15.95)

by Scott Vickers

Since the dawn of the natural sciences, when Galileo first gazed into the heavens and surmised that Earth was not the center of the universe, humans have been anxiously trying to understand some basic questions: “Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here?” These questions have driven, in large part, the evolution of the sciences. Shortly after Galileo’s blasphemous observations took hold, European proto-scientists invented a new teleology that became known as the scientific method, based on objectively provable outcomes during experimentation. At first, these experimenters concerned themselves with the natural world—the plant, animal, and mineral kingdoms, while the study of humankind was left to philosophers and theologians. Eventually, a convergence occurred that gave birth to what we today know as neuroscience—a growing sub-specialty of general neurology—which has gained a huge influence over how humans currently attempt to answer the questions of who, what, and why we are.

Neuroscience’s influence over our self-conception is evidenced by its alignment with the pharmaceutical industry: it has helped to create psychoactive drugs that are all too familiar to us today, such as Prozac, Ritalin, and Wellbutrin. Scandals surrounding the development and testing of some of these drugs are well documented, and have given neuroscience as a whole a bad name. Reading David Eagelman’s Incognito, therefore, is a refreshing testament to the integrity of neuroscience as a valuable asset toward understanding the ongoing mysteries of the human psyche.

As majestically as Carl Sagan used to speak about the outer galactic regions of space, David Eagleman writes about the “billions and billions” of neurochemical phenomena that take place every millisecond inside the human nervous system and its command center, the brain. His elegant descriptions of the structures and substructures of the brain, coupled with his deeply humanistic concerns, are enthralling and he proffers an irresistible mystery as the central theme of Incognito: “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.” (Any scientist who can so meaningfully quote Pink Floyd, as well as Whitman, St. Augustine, Jung, and Loren Eiseley, among others, might well be worth reading.) Eagleman answers the primal question “Who are we?” with an equally confounding proposition, “[The brain] does not allow its colossal operating system to be probed by conscious cognition. The brain runs its show incognito.”

As a neuroscientist, Eagleman’s main concerns focus on the treatment of the “diseased” mind—including the fairly common conditions of depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, Parkinson’s disease, Tourette’s syndrome, and epilepsy—and of the criminal mind, especially as it concerns one’s capacity to be rehabilitated, or not, from sociopathic behaviors. In both cases, he eschews the purely scientific reductionism and so-called neo-Darwinism of those who believe that the mysteries of the human brain can and will be resolved through the discovery of smaller and smaller subsystems and genetic/chemical formulations, as if “humans are best described only as pieces and parts” and are “no more than the cells of which we are composed.” On the other hand, he is reluctant to subscribe fully to the notion of the human soul:

If there’s something like a soul, it is at minimum tangled irreversibly with the microscopic details. Whatever else may be going on with our mysterious existence, our connection to our biology is beyond doubt. From this point of view, you can see why biological reductionism has a strong foothold on modern brain science. But reductionism isn’t the whole story.

As for who we are, why we’re here, and where we came from, Eagleman goes on to say, “the truth is that we face a field of question marks, and this field stretches to the vanishing point.” If we could all adopt Eagleman’s astonishing sense of humility in the face of uncertainty, it might go a long way toward freeing us to interpret these questions in a manner that both ensures our continued curiosity and creates a narrative of meaning that informs our individual lives.

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Aatish Taseer
Graywolf Press ($16)

by Spencer Dew

In this memoir and travelogue, a son wrestles with his father’s absence by travelling for eight months from Europe to Pakistan, through Syria and Turkey and Iran, compiling notes for a book. This book, tragically, was used to defend Taseer’s father’s assassination by one of his bodyguards, an extremist who justified his act because Taseer’s father, a prominent Pakistani politician and then Governor of Punjab, violated certain Islamic codes of behavior—he drank, for instance—and, while insisting on an identity as a “cultural Muslim,” he was not a believer in the truth claims of Islam. The younger Taseer recently wrote a piece for the Huffington Post discussing this, a piece that serves as an advertisement for the new American edition of the book, under review here. There is something awkward about that confluence of tragedy and commerce, and indeed, there is much that is awkward with this book, as Taseer insists upon reading his own struggles with cultural and religious identity alongside a weakly argued thesis that a similar struggle exists throughout the “Muslim world” he tours.

Taseer’s mother was an Indian Sikh with whom his father had an extramarital affair. When Taseer published a piece linking the turn to extremism among Muslim youths in Britain with an estrangement from identity, his estranged father contacted him in a harsh letter, telling Taseer that he did not understand what it means to be Muslim and therefore should not write on the issue. But what Taseer cannot understand—and, thus, one motivating factor for the quest that became this book—is his father’s atheist yet adamantly “Islamic” identity as a “cultural Muslim.” At the end of his journey and the end of this book, however, he’s no closer to such an understanding.

Along the way, he gives us whirlwind snippets of scenes so familiar as to be cliché—an underground party in Iran with the requisite illegal alcohol, for instance—distilling little more than platitudes from his various informants, turning scenes and situations that could have provided a forum for revealing reflections on Islamic identity into flat recitations of the already-known. To illustrate the level of squandered opportunity, here is an author with a tattoo of the Hindu god Shiva on his right arm who performs the Hajj pilgrimage; it is implied that the tattoo resulted from youthful drunkenness and that he kept it concealed during the Hajj. But Taseer doesn’t push farther than that. Reading this book, I felt like Charlie Brown, trying and trying to kick that football, to gain some satisfaction of new insight—but the author, like Lucy, sets it up only to yank it away.

There are far better books wrestling issues of Islamic identity, even mixing autobiography and travelogue. Abdellah Hammoudi’s masterful A Season in Mecca represents the philosophically hyper-reflective end of this spectrum; Michael Muhammad Knight’s Journey to the End of Islambrings the verve. Both offer more depth of insight into questions about Islamic identity in a single chapter than Taseer does in his entire plodding book. And both are acutely aware that there are multiple Islams, regardless of (multiple, conflicting, culturally contingent) doctrinal claims (and desires) to the contrary. What Taseer gives us is an Iranian commenting on how folks there “suffer from a kind of schizophrenia,” switching between the legally enforced codes of the street and their private—if illegal—lives. Or the platitudinous comment that Wahhabi theology stands in contrast to “places of music, dance, amulets and comparatively tolerant, flexible doctrines.” Or a talking head in the wake of the Danish cartoon controversy explaining why Jews and Christians, if they were true to their religions, would likewise be offended by representational art. It’s simply not enough.

There are worthwhile moments in the book, such as a scene, from childhood, where Taseer is mocked by relatives on his mother’s side for being circumcised. This, with reflection and expansion, could have made a terrific magazine piece. Here it becomes mainly another signifier for the confusion of identity Taseer feels: is he a Muslim, he wonders? Is his atheist father? And if so, how? Ramblings about “real Islam” and “real faith” are not useful in this regard; neither is recounting childhood therapy sessions or, worst of all, talking over and past informants. In yet another promising set-up, Taseer asks a Pakistani “How do you want religion in Pakistan to be?” “In everything” is the reply.

“Shariah?”
“Yes.”
“Saudi?”
“No, that’s a kingdom.”
“Iran?”
“No, that’s something else.”
“Then what?”
“Like in the time of the Prophet. An Islamic republic.”

Then Taseer protests that the idea of a republic is “a European concept coming out of ancient Greece,” and the two people are suddenly talking past each other. The author isn’t listening, and we, therefore, learn nothing new.

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Jason Weiss
Wesleyan University Press ($24.95)

by W. C. Bamberger

ESP-Disk was a short-lived record company that in some ways typified the independent and progressive spirit of the 1960s—with, as was most often the case, both its idealistic and its darker sides simultaneously present. ESP was begun by Bernard Stollman, a lawyer who in the early part of the decade had gotten involved with progressive music (he tried to act as Bud Powell’s manager for a time), volunteered for a time to help the legendary Moe Asch of Folkways Records, and was involved with the Esperanto movement. Esperanto, the manufactured “universal language,” in fact gave the label its name. “ESP” was short for Esperanto, and not, as most thought, a suggestion that the records were meant to operate on some higher, extra-sensory, plane.Always in Trouble tells us that Stollman’s first recording effort was Ni Kantu de Esperanto, which included poetry, comedy, and songs. The backs of ESP albums (immediately identifiable by their black and white covers) included notes in English and Esperanto, to encourage its spread.

Stollman began arranging recording sessions for artists who were having trouble getting contracts. His first jazz session became Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity, a milestone in the then just-awakening Free Jazz movement. This was recorded in July of 1964, but not released until the next year, after Stollman went to his parents and asked them to finance his idea for a record label. In September of 1965 ESP released a dozen albums simultaneously, making a bigger splash than they could have by releasing them singly: “It was a matter of critical mass,” Stollman told interviewer Jason Weiss. Along with the Ayler album, there were releases by Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Bob James, and Ornette Coleman.

Stollman later expanded his interests to include such alt-primitive rock performers as the Fugs, the Godz, Pearls Before Swin, and The Holy Modal Rounders, even as he continued to record jazz players no one else would touch. There were one-offs such as a recorded issue of The East Village Other, with the participation of Allen Ginsberg, Tuli Kupferberg and the Velvet Underground (their first issued recording). Aesthetically, ESP was one of the ultimate flowerings of a certain hardscrabble “scene” of free jazz and hard core “hippie” attitude.

But there were problems too, primarily the familiar ones of broken promises and financial evasion. Jason Weiss, author of a book on jazz saxophonist Steve Lacy, and editor of a selection of writings by Brion Gysin, conducted the interviews with Stollman and as many of the recording artists as he could locate and who were willing to talk to him. The first section of the book, roughly a quarter of its length, comprises a series of interviews with Stollman where he talks about the label’s history, its demise (it closed down in 1974), and its almost unnoticed resumption of business thirty years later.

Stollman is intriguing, entertaining and perceptive when he talks about his involvement with the musicians, writers, and artists of the 1960s, but when the business side of ESP is discussed things get a little strange. In response to musicians’ claims that they found their records selling all over the U.S. and in Europe while they received no money, Stollman says that all the money went to the Mafia gangs who controlled the record-pressing plants and who would run off bootleg copies of the albums and ship them without his knowledge. Tom Rapp, of Pearls Before Swine, comments with rueful humor on this story in his interview:

My real sense is that [Stollman] was abducted by aliens, and when he was probed it erased his memory of where all the money was. I think that probably makes as much sense as the Mafia and the CIA.

The musicians interviewed here at times sound bitter about these financial irregularities, but more often say they are grateful for the fact that their work was recorded and made (if fitfully) available. Those Weiss interviewed include John Tchicai, Roscoe Mitchell, Gato Barbieri, and many more, and many of the stories they have to tell are fascinating, some heartbreaking. There are also a large number of old photos that are fascinating on their own. Unfortunately, where Stollman’s section is edited into a relatively cohesive narrative, no effort has been made to provide any kind of structure for the others’ interviews—they seem to have been simply laid in, catch as catch can. While the repetitions and digressions in these interviews will be valuable to those with an interest in a particular artist—I learned a few things about Ishmael Reed and Gunter Hampel that I hadn’t known—reading these from the beginning of the section to the end is a confusing experience, and many readers may just shrug and put the book down.

Oral histories come with their own set of characteristic problems that each editor has to deal with, a balance between the sources’ revealing comments and the axes they (and we) all have to grind. In this case it seems Weiss chose simply to let the cast talk and leave us to our own devices to sort it out. It may be best to view Always in Trouble as an important source book for those interested in the time period rather than as a successful book.

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In which Ted Pelton (publisher of Starcherone Books) and Davis Schneiderman (“an American innovative writer and academic”) discuss Kent Johnson’s A Question Mark Under the Sun

(Starcherone Books, $16)

TED: Davis, my good friend, here we are. Yet of course you will say, where is here? I can say there is a bottle of Pernod on the table and a sign for the Deux Magots above our heads on this warm Parisian day and you may counter, Non, monsieur, that is not Pernod but a piña colada in a hollowed out coconut, one for each of us, and we are so lucky to have both arrived at the same conference, with light schedules, in Waikiki, and to be able to sit here admiring the turbulent and magnificent Pacific. Fiction invents what is not here but in so doing imagines it is. And then again this not to say that what is not here could not ever be here or has not ever been hereor on some level, while not here, is here, or even isn’tmade here by the act of imagining. These are also what fiction brings to bear. The invention is not the truth, perhaps, but the invention is not other than the truth either, and may even in time become the truth. D’accord?Let’s talk about this book by Kent Johnson, A Question Mark Above the Sun, that some have called poetry or nonfiction but I would call fiction, comingling the real and the invented.

DAVIS: Funny, my good friend Ted, I thought we were meeting in another part of the world entirely. Although I agree we are both on archipelagos of sorts. That is not the question. And why not Fire Island, setting for the famous poem of Frank O’Hara’s, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island,” penned, perhaps some years before his death-by-dune-buggy at the same location? Yes, we are definitely on Fire Island. And why is the new book, which is about this poem and its perhaps suspect provenance, classified as fiction? First, for those not-yet-in-the-not-knowing, Johnson hypothesizes that this oh-so-very-famous poem of O’Hara’s was perhaps, maybe, quite possibly but even so maybe not, penned by his friend and all around poetic cut-up Kenneth Koch. Koch read the poem as a memorial for O’Hara some weeks after O’Hara’s death, and AQM suggests that there are questions, gaps—as-yet-unexplained lacunae—in the story of how Koch came to have this poem and how no one else had ever seen it before. AQM asks this question: Did Koch “gift” a poem to O’Hara, ceding authorship, as a testimonial to their friendship? The book is as clear as Kent ever is on the fact that it is a thought experiment or hypothesis. Further, Kent claims again and again that he would be happy to be proved wrong. What do you think? I’ll write your response for you . . .

TED: Well, Davis, first may I just say what a pleasure it is to be collaborating with you in this way. You bring so much vivacious energy to everything you do that I’m pleased to luxuriate in the glow of our discussion in this manner. What I think you are getting at in that delightful and inimitable way of yours is that Kent’s critiques of authorship are so much a part of his past work that it is hard for some readers to take anything he does or writes as face value. Many will remember Araki Yasusada and the questions of ethics and authorship raised by the fact that Yasusada has been revealed to be not a poet/Hiroshima survivor, but a heteronym of another as-yet-definitively revealed author. Therefore, when Kent’s book claims that it is less provocation than thought-experiment, people, and even the O’Hara estate, have a hard time cleaving the messages-as-stated from the long history of very clever meta-critiques at work in Johnson’s oeuvre. Further, since AQM is explicitly fiction—why it says so on the book, in fact!—the critical algorithm is even more unsteady. But how, exactly?

DAVIS: Ted . . . is it possible? Yes, it is! Look who just walked up. I am sure, Ted, you know our good friend here, Tosa Motokiyu.

TED: Of course! Tosa, what a pleasure.

TOSA: Gentlemen, the pleasure is all mine.

DAVIS: Please join us—pull up an Adirondack. This is a magical coincidence, because Ted and I were just discussing a text very dear to your heart, and in which you play a starring role. And indeed we are doing something of a reprise of your fabled and notorious fictional tape-essay, featured in Kent Johnson’s A Question Mark Above the Sun, which transcribed the meeting you, Ojiu Norinaga, and Okura Kyojin had with Joe LeSueur, Frank O’Hara’s former roommate. It was LeSueur’s speculations in his 2003 memoir, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, that first opened up the can of worms about the questions surrounding authorship of O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.” But, Ted, back to your initial question—or was it mine? —about calling Kent’s book a work of fiction—and, please, Tosa, jump in at any point where you might offer additional insight . . . I believe your thought processes might have involved a sense of what fiction began as and what it has become in our own time, if I might be so bold as to reimagine your thinking. That is, there was a time when fiction maintained a status as a kind of dangerous discourse. We have all opened up old novels and seen expository beginnings to the effect of “On a late afternoon, at the end of the last century, in the town of M——— . . .” This of course is a very quaint construction, and yet I think it pointed to a status of fiction that has left us in more recent centuries, now that the genre is fully formalized—that is, that there was formerly something much more dangerous in this form-that-shares-so-much-with-lying and all the senses that fictive storytelling in its pre-conventionalized condition brings with it: deceit, treachery, scandal and scandal-mongering, hoax. The author cannot reveal in which town named M the things he is about to relate occurred, nor the year, nor perhaps anything more than the general time-period and region. These people may yet be walking around. Actual lived life stood just beyond the edges of the fictive, and there might be some crossing over, and we know what types of disasters might follow indiscrete revelations, the transmission of unconfirmed rumors into the place where they might do real damage to people’s lives and estates.

TED: Estates, exactly. Because stories in our world are not mere entertainment or pastimes, but the undergirding of property, intellectual and otherwise, shot through with legal constructions that purport solidity but are likewise narrative-driven and, at least potentially, no less fictive than any novel. It seemed to me that, in his blurring of the true and the fictive (the book, for instance, contains several reviews of recent poetry books formatted as a novella), Kent Johnson taps into something unstable and alive in the very nature of what fiction is and does, and yet something perhaps lost in our own moment of more settled genres, where books are all designated for shelving assignments, as Mystery or Poetry or Creative Nonfiction or what-have-you. The fact that real people had real problems with things Kent was writing, things he often, as in the case of Mr. Motokiyu’s tape-essay itself, deliberately announced as “fictional,” which nevertheless inspired a point-by-point refutation by poet Tony Towle—this fascinated me, and was something, as the publisher of a fiction press, I wanted to claim.

TOSA: This is a very interesting discussion, and I am humbled and honored to see the uses to which Kent Johnson and now the two of you are putting my work with the New York School. Tell me, for I have been dead some time, this work is now for general sale? Was not its publication blocked for a time? Wait, why am I asking you at all? Like Tiresias, I have crossed over and back again, and therefore possess the gift of sight beyond sight.

DAVIS: (turning on tape recorder) Speak into the microphone, please.

TOSA: I see that Starcherone, one of the most spirited of the independent presses, has developed largely due to the untiring efforts of one man, yes, I am getting the image of a man . . . a professor type . . . working, let’s see, here it is, at a college in upstate New York.

TED: (irritated, with Buffalo accent) Western New York.

TOSA: Yes, this is the man who has reprinted AQM in this new-and-expanded edition and who has now claimed it, or helped to do so, as a work of fiction. This man, further, is named . . . give me a moment . . .

TED: Um, “Ted”?

TOSA: Yes, yes. The spirits have communed with you as well, brother? You are clearly a great visionary as . . .

TED: Yes, and getting back to the new edition of AQM. The possibility that the O’Hara or Koch estates would not wish for a work of fiction—labeled as fiction—to present a hypothesis that even its author admits, again and again, is probably untrue, would only further prove that Kent is able to destabilize the genre by raising these interesting questions about authorship.

TOSA: Yes, I see many questions emerging from the void, and turning into . . .

DAVIS: Perhaps the power here, then, is to some extent generated by Kent Johnson’s figure as an “Author” with a capital “A.” So much of his work interrogates authorship (e.g., his version of Kenneth Goldsmith’s DAY, with his name stickered over Goldsmith’s, etc.), that he has perhaps located himself in a Duchampian space where the critique of the traditional author-mode gives power to his own signature. Put another way, would this book have caused its controversy if it were authored by Ted Pelton or Davis Schneiderman?

TOSA: This man you call Davis, he is the one who has published a largely-blank novel, BLANK, yes?

TED: Yes, Davis, I understand what you are driving at. The question then becomes whether Kent’s critiques are emboldened or somehow weakened by his “authorship”? I think that AQM carries with it its own controversy, and that Starcherone saw an opportunity to re-conceptualize this controversy by creating an edition that incorporates many of the responses to the controversy generated by its initial printing, as well as new commentary on the legal and issues involved when “fair use” quotation is denied not on any legitimate legal basis but as a sheer exercise in power. (The new edition features, among other commentary, a Foreword by philosopher and intellectual property rights theorist David Koepsell.) In the initial blow-up, a major corporation, two estates, and their attorneys threatened legal action against a one-man-run poetry publisher, Punch Press, if they reprinted excerpts of copyrighted words of verse. As a result, the book was released in a privately circulating subscription edition of 100. Starcherone had to think long and hard before daring to bring this book out as a general trade edition. We also are volunteer-run and live a moment-to-moment existence, and didn’t know how far deep pockets could tie us up if unfriendly judges granted injunctions against us, forcing into court, etc., the merits of the case being beside the point. Johnson did something brilliant, though, with the issue of the copyrighted text, creating ostentatious redactions and summaries of the no-longer-quoted material, symbolically drawing attention to what power was doing to poetry. For Starcherone’s purposes, since the text redacts quotations for O’Hara’s poem and instead uses descriptions of those lines, in its place, the edition changes direct discourse to indirect discourse—to discourse circumscribed in the fictional space—and therefore creates a frame for discussion that . . .

TOSA: I see, yes, a slip of paper, yes, what do you call it . . . ?

DAVIS: Precisely. Think of the ways that a bleeped-out word in a radio edit of a hip-hop song draws attention to the original with a vengeance. Each bleep is like the dead in a Poe story. The corpse comes back, again and again, in recuperated form . . .

TOSA: This paper has numbers on it . . . numbers attached to what we have ordered. My hold on this is slipping . . . gentlemen, the spirits are too strong. You must excuse me (runs from table, quickly).

(The bill arrives.)

TED: Wait, before we settle our debts, there are a few more things we should note . . . as scholars. Because, interestingly enough, given all of the levels of disguise and hoax, the authorial destabilizations you rightly draw attention to and the weight of distrust Johnson trails behind him like the chains of Jacob Marley, Johnson actually appears to be onto something regarding the odd provenance of this poem, and even if it’s ultimately just ingeniously clever plotting, there’s a fair amount of old fashioned textual scholarship to back him up. First, there’s the apparent fact that New York School poets were not above a bit of identity-switching as part of the playfulness of their enterprise generally. In 1966, the same year O’Hara died, a poem in the style of Mayakovsky appeared in Art and Literature, authored by “Koichi K. O’Hara,” identified as “a Japanese poet and critic in the field of literature and Russian problems” and identified as a likely collaboration between O’Hara and Koch by both John Latta (on his blog Isola di Rifiuti) and by Terence Diggory (in his Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets). This factoid alone makes it that much more plausible Koch might have imitated O’Hara imitating Mayakovsky in “A True Account . . .” a few months later.

DAVIS: Uh, Ted . . . ?

TED: I’ll get the bill, don’t worry, we just received our NYSCA grant. As I was saying… Johnson also contends the font of the typescript of “A True Account” does not match that of the typewriter (from O’Hara’s Museum of Modern Art office) that O’Hara may have used at the time of the poem’s current carbon-dating, but that it does match one that Koch used in letters to Fairfield Porter in years just following O’Hara’s death. This last discovery by Latta, a poet and Senior Information Resources Specialist at University of Michigan, and Johnson’s correspondent and informal research partner for much of this project, occurred just as the new edition was going to press, and Latta’s Isola di Rifiuti was where much of the debate over these issues played out in 2008 and 2010. Yet since that time, and with everything now laid out in the new edition, for the world to see, there’s been a great and colossal silence.

DAVIS: Ted!!

TED: Quite a lot to yell about, you’re right! “Bluster and bullying by Random House,” Latta has written recently, “with the consent (or at the urging of) the Estates, and poets Bill Berkson, Tony Towle, Ron Padgett, and Jordan Davis ganging up to lend their misplaced righteousness as cosignatories to an attempt to quash Johnson’s intrepid and loving look at the poem’s oddly catalectic history and its premonitory gist: is there a stranger story in recent literary history, or one less bruited about, particularly by those principals who might be expected to reply to Johnson’s singular offering with fervors untempered by the usual corporate-model clutch and own pettinesses? (And, still, one awaits a reply to Johnson’s overwhelming question . . .).” What—what is it, Davis? Hey, where are we? Where did all this water come from?

DAVIS: Perhaps Fire Island was a bad idea after all; in the middle of your critical reverie a floodcame surging upon us. The entire South Shore of Long Island has been affected. We’re now adrift in the Atlantic Ocean.

TED: Fie and fie again!, I say. We are not adrift, we are on the steadiest of ground—the driest of land—for we are asking the question to which no one dares to make suitable response? Who is the Author of “A True Account . . .”? The intriguing proposition that Koch may have written the poem, or at least the absence of evidence to the contrary, becomes, in Johnson’s nimble fingers, as plausible as Ted Pelton and Davis Schneiderman perhaps writing portions of each other’s sections of a conversation about this startling as-yet-not-disproven proposition!

DAVIS: I couldn’t have put it better myself. Then again, who may compete for eloquence with the man brave enough to publish and champion this oddly compelling work? Yes, my friend, I speak of you: publishing provocateur. And, let’s hope, now, more than ever, as I will need to follow in your wake: strong swimmer.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012/2013

Why Lee Child’s Stoic Man of Action Has Clung On for 17 Books

by Peter S. Scholtes

A hero ain’t nothin’ but a sandwich, but imagine one packed with fat and vitamins for a cheetah’s metabolism, protein for the garbage furnace of your heart. Like the diner food and coffee savored by Jack Reacher, scruffy giant of Lee Child’s thrillers, heroes are utilitarian. They’re only as good as the energy they give you. So forget the mythic journey parsed by Joseph Campbell. Heroes are about you, not them. They sing the song of tomorrow, the one about how life is good, so why not try?

Consider the stroke of inspiration that made Reacher both a happy drifter and decorated ex-Army military police. Maybe it took a British ex-patriot, Jim Grant writing under a nom de pulp, to see the American armed forces as our ultimate expression of socialism. For despite playing permanent hooky on adult life and preferring silence to talk, Reacher is clearly the product of a forced community, the kind of lifelong schooling where everyone’s a teacher. Unlike most strangers who come to town and mete out justice, he mentors in a crisis. “Good work, pal,” he tells the bus driver who keeps his passengers from exploding. “Grow up,” he tells a police detective still acclimatizing to reality.

The signature Reacher moment comes early in 1997’s Killing Floor (Berkley, $16), the first book in Child’s now-bestselling series, when it dawns on our sensualist, wry-eyed wanderer that a Central American-style death squad has recently stomped through a rural Georgia house looking for him. I forget the plot—you will, too—but there’s a beautiful breath of chill in the way conspiracy announces itself silently. “Thank God we weren’t here last night,” whispers his ally, a local cop. To whom Reacher composes a careful response:

I knew I had to sound confident. Fear wouldn’t get her anywhere. Fear would just sap her energy. She had to face it down. And she had to face down the dark and the quiet again tonight, and every other night of her life.
“I wish I had been here, “ I said. “We could have gotten a few answers.”
She looked at me like I was crazy. Shook her head.
“What would you have done?” she said. “Killed four men?”
“Only three,” I said. “The fourth would have given us the answers.”

In the real world, vigilante violence is a bad idea, of course. But we accept it in genre fiction because we know it’s not real. It stands in for all the things we can’t do. The difference with this particular daydream is what it allows us to rehearse: the quiet reframing of the possible, from recoiling to confrontation, helplessness to power. Reacher is a teacher, never mind his Incredible Hulk body. He even has the amused but non-condescending tone of a good one. Which might be why I’ve come across so many Reacher books in faculty lounges over the years. What sets him apart are his intentions with that speech to the cop (who, true to escapist formula, is also his bed partner). “I needed her to be bright, tough, self-confident,” he thinks. “It was working.”

The therapeutic value of this stuff can be gauged in direct proportion to Child’s effectiveness as a horror writer, which is frequently great (Stephen King is a fan). The classic Reacher scenario involves him trapped behind many thick walls with death waiting, thinking his way out of problem after problem. In 2009’s Gone Tomorrow (Bantam, $16), he’s jailed in a nightmare post-9/11 government torture prison under the streets of Manhattan—and the rest deserves a spoiler alert. Not only does Reacher bust out, with some effort, but he catches a cab, barefoot, to the Home Depot on 23rd Street, just before it closes, buys gardening clogs and a pry bar, then heads back for his friends.

At one point in 1998’s Die Trying (the titles do run together), Reacher is trapped by the bad guys inside a mountain in Montana, crawling through skeletons and rats into a seam that keeps narrowing as his light goes out.

He was using the dead flashlight like a blind man uses a white cane. It smashed on solid rock two feet ahead of his face. He heard the tinkle of glass over the rasping of his breath. He struggled ahead and felt with his hands. A solid wall. The tunnel went no further. He tried to move backward. He couldn’t move at all . . . He went rigid with panic. His throat clamped solid.

Reacher dies, and that’s the end of the story—just kidding. But what’s less predictable (second spoiler) is how he talks himself through that same darkness later:

He was hauling himself along through the tunnel and laughing out loud. Shaking and crying with laughter. He was no longer afraid. The tight clamp of the rock on his body was like a caress. He had done this once, and survived it. It was possible. He was going to get through.

Have any other crime books proved so self-consciously affirming? Where George Pelecanos offers life lessons and Richard Price his depressive dread, Child is all flip rationality and arcana, Ian Fleming without neuroses. It’s a tonic, because at some unconscious level we know despair is just terror in slow motion. And there’s enough of that going around that Reacher’s cheerfulness seems old-fashioned. Beyond his hot breakfasts, hitchhiking, and grandfatherly vernacular (“That’s for damn sure”), he’s a throwback to the imagined values of non-hardboiled WWII America: humility, responsibility, even monogamy (at least for the length of a book). This dharma bum admires Eisenhower for building the open road in the first place, sees creative insubordination as part of a job well done. Yet he’s free from his elders’ illusions about gender, sexuality, race, and American exceptionalism. The soldier bleakly observes (in 2008’s Nothing to Lose) that no war in his lifetime was worth the cost.

Conservatives may forgive Child his politics, because breakneck suspense is its own traditional value, and he so obviously loves America: the wide-open spaces that Reacher turns into battle maps; the military-industrial relics that show how well deadly things can be made. (Elaborate, abandoned military structures work their way into at least two plots.) The British-isms that slip past Child’s editors are charming (“about” for “around,” “memory stick” for “flash drive,” and a persistent misunderstanding of the expression “nothing doing”), but they’re minor compared with the wonderfully corny slang Child wishes we still used (“You bet your ass”). It’s a grateful tourist who describes the highway in 2001’s Echo Burning: “He said nothing. Just watched Texas reel in through the windshield ahead of him, hot and brassy and yellow.”

What keeps Child’s spell unbroken is his psychological specificity. The other characters are alive, the victims’ means of survival shown to us before Reacher awakens the dormant part of them that was once hope, etc. The villains are zestful—nobody writes them better. These bullies scrambled through their own skeletons to become a ruling class. And Reacher is funny because no loner is more aware of his function as a hero. Child’s Morse code prose is perfect for him, like Elmore Leonard by way of Henry Rollins. (Beloved tic of the books: “Reacher said nothing.”) A man with no possessions—Reacher owns a foldable toothbrush, period—has undeniable mythic and comic power. (“When does he wash his underwear?” my friend’s step-mom wonders.)

Grant has said he chose the name Child to come earlier in the alphabet, and wrote Killing Floor for money after losing a job in British television—the utilitarianism running both ways. Yet it’s clear he dotes on his character, and describes him as a projection of wish fulfillment. Before seeing the recent Jack Reacher movie (a surprisingly not-bad adaptation of 2005’s One Shot, and practicallyDie Hard next to the loathsome new Bond and Bourne), I knew my disappointment wouldn’t be in the casting of Tom Cruise in the title role (he manages something like ease, an acting miracle) but that I would no longer be able to mentally superimpose my face on an army-man body drawn by Jack Kirby.

Books are better for that kind of thing anyway. And in a way, the more fantastical and unlikely the plot of a Reacher book, the better. While 2010’s gut-twisting 61 Hours and Worth Dying For are ingeniously planned, 2012’s rollicking A Wanted Man has the whiplash twists of a storyteller literally making it up as he goes. And there’s probably no physical counterpart to the seaside Maine castle imagined in 2003’s Persuader, where Reacher battles a steroid-inflated monster who is about to force a kidnap-surviving college student to have sex with his mother. But Child keeps the pace so quick, the details so vivid, you barely notice the shadow puppetry he’s performing for real-life humiliations, violations, and traps—all the things Reacher explicitly helps process.

“Stay alive, and see what the next minute brings,” he keeps telling himself, remembering the advice of an old commanding officer. Child writes so well, you never notice these are words to live by.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2012/2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012/2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012/2013

An Interview with Alexander Theroux

author portrait courtesy of Fantagraphics

by Paul Maliszewski

In Estonia, as Alexander Theroux observes, post offices sell shampoo, dish detergent, and sanitary pads, used-book stores pencil in their prices at the back of books, fisherman play pan-pipes to attract fish, and doors always swing out. Theroux, the author of four novels, includingDarconville’s Cat (Doubleday, 1981) and Laura Warholic (Fantagraphics, 2007), went to Estonia to be with his wife, Sarah Son-Theroux, a plein air painter who had been awarded a Fulbright grant. He had planned to work on a novel, but found material instead for Estonia: A Ramble through the Periphery ( Fantagraphics, $24.99), a rich travelogue full of purposeful digressions and well-turned cameos, such as the woman who runs the box office at a small cinema, dispensing tickets and then inquiring where one would like to sit, “as if,” Theroux writes, “the place was Dallas Cowboys Stadium with 80,000 seats.” The high, the low, the literary, and the pop cultural mix freely in Theroux’s work; he follows a discussion of Heidegger’s On Time and Being with “Estonian cuisine is something of an oxymoron,” and then launches into a vivid, though not exactly tasty account of what he ate and saw eaten. Theroux, who has also published nonfiction books about the primary and secondary colors as well as the artists Edward Gorey and Al Capp, stacks such details atop historical references, myths, and recollected run-ins with shopkeepers and his fellow Americans. His book, finally, is as much a model of the country as a portrait of himself, the visiting outsider guided by an unquenchable curiosity and fine mind.

This interview was conducted by e-mail during the summer of 2012.

Paul Maliszewski: While walking in Estonia you wonder, “Why would a carrot be called aporgand? A pineapple an ananaas? A book a raamat? A cross a rist? A priest a papp?” Where does your love of language come from?

Alexander Theroux: I came to view the world as a word puzzle and, with no special aptitude I can name, fixed on the whys and wherefores of language from my earliest days. Song lyrics. Signs. The stories read in first and second grades. My parents almost always read to us at bedtime. Poems by Whittier. Scenes from Oliver Twist.Kidnapped. Treasure Island. The names alone intrigued me. Dr. Livesey, Squire Trelawney. The name Balfour sounded the knell of the romantic. Robinson Crusoe. I loved to hear read the exploits of Natty Bumppo. Authors had an aura of the godlike to me. The Latin prayers fascinated me as an altar boy. I can still recall carved names on buildings I saw from the MTA train when I was a youngster. Who can explain why? Words were magic to me. I once inadvisably glued my finger and thumb together at the Magoun Library in fourth grade trying to amuse a pretty little girl on whom I had a crush, and when the librarian came over angrily to inquire what the problem was and I pointed with a shrug and replied, “Mucilage”—a word that always made me laugh—she very coldly stated, “You are more to be pitied than censured.”

I have had the intricacies of automobile engines explained to me over a lifetime at least fifty times and cannot remember a thing about them. We remember and savor what we love. But I am still word-perfect, however, on exchanges I read in a Scrooge McDuck comic book, ca. 1948.

PM: You also mention an early interest in codes. Was that related to your love of words?

AT: I have six siblings. As kids, competitive, it was in our nature to want to keep things from each other, and codes were very effective in this matter—indeed, codes ciphers, are languages all to themselves, many languages. We covertly used as ink milk, lemons, transposed numbers, etc. Nothing Turing-like, mind you, nothing of genius. I had the luck to grow up in the age of radio mysteries, spy magazines, comic books, and even movies that reflected a fascination with the surreptitious, G-men, the FBI. Was it related to the paranoia over communism and hunting reds? No doubt. In my day, one could send away for Dick Tracy decoder rings, codebooks, spy kits, all sorts of Junior Secret Agent paraphernalia. I loved Charlie Chan movies. The Shadow. Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons. One of my junior high school teachers, old Edward Finnegan, an actor, had a part in Walk East on Beacon, a classic red-scare movie. That gave me a thrill. I also got the chance to meet Herbert Philbrick, author of I Led 3 Lives, when I was about eleven or twelve and was agog shaking his hand. There was a lot of this kind of hoodoo. Remember poor Cardinal Mindszenty and how the Stalinists jailed and tortured him (or so the nuns told us)? I recall them recounting how Commie interrogators, in order to extract confessions of guilt, deviously placed a zinc pail over his head and drip-drip-dripped water on it to drive him mad!

I could have communicated with him by code!

We had nothing but time on our hands.

PM: You write about your anger over President’s Bush’s war in Iraq and the war on terror. How did it feel to travel then as an American? Did you think about how you would explain U.S. policies, if asked?

AT: I spent all of winter 2007 and much of spring 2008 living in Estonia, mainly in the city of Tartu. The U.S. presidential primaries were taking place at the time, highlighted by the wanton excesses and horrors of the Iraq war—which, unlike President Barack Obama, a loudly braying and double-chinned Hillary Clinton stubbornly and stupidly supported—particularly the tactics of torture. I remember very well of course back in 1965 and 1966 traveling through Europe when the Vietnam War was raging, and I had visited the Soviet Union as that war continued on and on. I have never found myself abroad in fact when the U.S. was not at war, and each one of those wars being waged—curiously enough—were wars that we had started. A quaint fact, don’t you think? I am not a mindless pacifist, by the way. It is simply that I have had to stand by for a lifetime and have to watch so many anti-Communist witch-hunts and listen to so much bullshit about them. In the 1960s, it was Communists we hated. We found them everywhere we looked, at home, under our beds, in our closets, in the State Department, at Harvard, in granny’s knitting drawer, and of course we wanted to slaughter them all in the name of God. In Iraq, it was “terrorists.” Careers depend on agitprop. It is old men and bitter cowards and loony ideologues—the ones who never fight—who love war. Eunuchs. Thank them for the high body counts of brave young men. They find it good for the economy, especially when other people do the fighting.

Draft-dodging is what chicken-hawks do best. Dick Cheney, Glenn Beck, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh (this capon claimed he had a cyst on his fat ass), Newt Gingrich, former Attorney General John Ashcroft—he received seven deferments to teach business education at Southwest Missouri State—pompous Bill O’Reilly, Jeb Bush, hey, throw in John Wayne—they were all draft-dodgers. Not a single one of these mouth-breathing, cowardly, and meretricious buffoons fought for his country. All plumped for deferments. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani? Did not serve. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney? Did not serve in the military. (He served the Mormon Church on a thirty-month mission to France.) Former Senator Fred Thompson? Did not serve. Former President Ronald Reagan? Due to poor eyesight, he served in a noncombat role making movies for the Army in southern California during WWII. He later seems to have confused his role as an actor playing a tail gunner with the real thing. Did Rahm Emanuel serve? Yes, he did during the Gulf War 1991—in the Israeli Army. John Boehner did not serve, not a fucking second. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY? Not a minute! Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-MS? Avoided the draft. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl, R-AZ—did not serve. National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair John Cornyn, R-TX—did not serve. Former Senate Republican Policy Committee Chair John Ensign, R-NV? Did not serve. Jack Kemp? Dan Quayle? Never served a day. Not an hour. Not an afternoon. These are the jackasses that cherish memorial services and love to salute and adore hearing “Taps.”

George Allen, former Republican Senator from Virginia, a supporter of Nixon and the Vietnam War? Did not serve. Rick Santorum? Did notserve. Tom DeLay, Dick Armey, Bill Frist, Dennis Hastert? Never served a day. These are the true bullshit-artists. Chris Wallace. Brit Hume. Sean Hannity. Roger Ailes. Bill Kristol. George Will. Neil Boortz. Michael Savage. Ted Nugent. Rep. Eric Cantor whose voting strategies reflect that he serves in Congress more for Israel than for the United States? Not a day. Please look it up, if you think I am either exaggerating or fabricating all of this. None of George W. Bush’s three brothers, Jeb, Marvin, or Neil served. None of George H. W. Bush’s three brothers, Jonathan J., William T., or Prescott S. Bush served. It would be a joke, if it were not so tragic or so venal or corrupt.

You inquire how I would explain the United States and its policies if asked. I would rather remove myself and weep for the injustice in life. I weep for the young brave dead soldiers, sacrificed for nothing.

Have I made my point?

PM: You seemed, though, to feel some obligation to explain the United States while you were there, a sense that you were like an ambassador.

AT: I tend to feel pronouncedly more patriotic when I am abroad and remember being furious in Paris in 1965 when I saw, from a bus, French students burning the American flag. I love this country, fully, not in moderation, but I cannot abide hypocrisy or jingoism, in any form or shape, or the weasels who perpetuate it—all those yahoos with their hyper-extended muscular nationalistic bullshit that down through history has started wars (making money, invariably the subtext, is always the goal), like cretinous Toby Keith doing that tough-guy bit, fist-faced Laura Ingraham’s repeated gasconade, “We are the greatest country in the world,” even the Olympic Games recently held in London where, broadcast by NBC and spearheaded by that parochial dwarf Bob Costas, all the foreign competition was studiously ignored while tight camera shots focused exclusively on the American athletes, so that in any given event no one had any idea who was competing. Did you ever hear any country’s national anthem played? Watch an athlete from another country stand on the podium to receive a medal? Not a single time, not once, not ever. Although the People’s Republic of China won nearly as many gold medals as the USA, I never saw a Chinese athlete getting his/her gold nor heard the anthem. I remember a volleyball match between Brazil and the USA in 1984 when the hatred was so intense that the players on both sides were giving each other the finger and spitting curses.

No, I never felt an obligation to explain this country to foreigners and never for a minute conceived myself as anything like an ambassador. Would anybody believe that this Congress of self-promoting boanthrops has been sitting on its hands for four years while the country is so badly failing? So lost? Partisanship is unpatriotic! The more I look around, the sadder I feel. I have always comforted myself that my first citizenship is to the City of God, in any case.

PM: Travelers, if they’re given to reflection, learn about the places they visit at the same time they see themselves laid bare. You write, “I may carry the idea of combat in my person, I truly hope I do not, but that evening seemed to point me toward a major direction.” Would you say more about this realization?

AT: I hate injustice, I despise inequity, I condemn hypocrisy, I abhor the lack of reason. When you find yourself in the 21st century having to argue with supposedly civilized human beings against the immorality of torture, what possible hope is there? To have a captured a human being—to have him helpless in your power acutely and self-consciously an American—and to be torturing him in a bestial way? Employing methods used by Torquemada in the 15th century? Surely that is something you are going to have to explain one day to your Maker, and there will be punishment for it. It will not be forgotten. It is a crime, a blasphemy against all decency. I have wondered about the karma of Ted Kennedy’s death by brain cancer. His father had Ted’s sister lobotomized, remember?

No, I want to forgive, not be combative. Compare the sweet and gentle forgiveness of the Vietnamese people with the savagery and vindictiveness of Israel with its never-ending cycle of retaliation The Law of Talion, a tooth for a tooth. Even as I write, Israel is seeking vengeance for the bus-bombing in Bulgaria, which they blame on Iran, when they themselves over the last year by subterfuge have sought out and killed many Iranian scientists in Iran! Israel has had full range operational nuclear weapons capability since 1967 and has signed but not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Their chemical weapons program, located at the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) in Ness Ziona, is never mentioned while the United States has thrown every last sanction at Iran that it possibly could. Anything off balance here?

It is the Vietnamese we should follow, not Israel.

PM: Do you find it hard to forgive?

AT: I have to admit, I do find it hard to forgive, although it depends on what we are talking about. I am sentimental and believe in, cherish, the idea of the abrupt turn of sudden forgiveness. I am not an injustice-collector, but often feel the need to spank, where spanking is required—forgive me, this is a confession—unfortunately I do remember slights and frankly the worst part of me always feels an obligation to retaliate, often with the somewhat megalomaniacal—and no doubt un-Christian—idea spoiling within me that my enemies deserve it!

PM: Does revenge fuel your writing?

AT: Revenge—I have written about this somewhere before—is the main subject of the modern novel, if it isn’t that of literature in general.

PM: Does revenge motivate the daily work of sitting at your desk and writing?

AT: I am not unaware that in his essay “Why I Write” George Orwell, among his list of the “four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose,” gave top-billing to the compulsion on a writer’s part “to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc.,” and he goes on to add as some sort of admonition in order to forestall any argument:

It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen—in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.

I have to say that agree with him. Understand, I am not a Corsican. It is just that a satirist who delights in lampooning thrives on the need of what he sees to rectify, to revise, to skewer, to spank, to criticize, to correct. To me Orwell’s reference to “grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood” is more than anything a metaphor for the snools who plague you. I don’t know if I have ever written a book or poem in which at one point my pen was not dipped in acid.

PM: I love the details in the book and the allusions you muster. You write that Dante uses the verb “to smile” only once in the Inferno and pigs scratch themselves only with their right leg. There’s a real delight evident, as if, finally, you’ve found where a puzzle piece goes. What are you reading to come by these wonderful bits?

AT: Our house is filled with books. I guess I read passionately with a need to know and see the act of reading as an act of cognition and not simply a means of passing time. I like to think that we can somehow carry our knowledge with us into eternity. What astonishes me is that many reviewers blame me for the very kind of details you cite with admiration. Style—a high style of writing—is suspect in this world where less is considered more. I am often scolded for not writing like John Grisham and James Patterson, Maeve Binchy and Nora Roberts, whom Stephen King adores and praises to the sky. Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc. Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc. Ours is the Age of Shoddy.

PM: You refer to Gravity’s Rainbow several times in your book. Can you say something of Thomas Pynchon’s importance to you?

AT: I love Pynchon’s sense of humor. I admire his invented names. I treasure his style. I also find him also in too many places pretentious, inaccessible, and even unreadable—I should say incomprehensible. One of the few boasts I believe I can make is that in my fiction I have never written a single line in a single book to obfuscate or to becloud. Pynchon’s wife was my agent, briefly, some years back. I gave her to sell the completed manuscript of my novel, Laura Warholic. Her singular and idle response to the book was that the matters of love and sex in the book were “ordinary”; she mailed it back to me without so much as a by-your-leave.

PM: What about Cortázar and Hopscotch?

AT: I love that novel. Now that is a book that is full of puzzles and codes. I wish I could have been a member of “The Serpent Club.” What amazes me is that Cortázar invariably received praise and admiration for the high style, lists, loquacity, boldness, ingenuity, and encyclopedic invention in his fiction, particularly that book, while the mediocre book-reviewers and invidious drabs to whom I am inevitably assigned by the New York Times—drab and hateful ink-stained failures, for the most part—only scowl at my work. I attribute this to envy and the ham-handed convention that nowadays seems to prevail everywhere in this business that asks, Who does he think he is?

PM: You wonder in Estonia about travel trends, writing, “Who would deny that taste is largely whim?” Do you think that’s true more broadly, of one’s taste in movies, say, or books?

AT: Tastes actually seem like whim but slowly grow out of the slants we acquire as we grow up and develop, who knows how or why? I have an acquaintance that is insanely right-wing—he is a bright, often congenial, talented guy—and whenever he is talking to me I am always secretly wondering: what terrible thing happened to him in the past? What are his deepest fears and neuroses and how did they take hold? What hatreds? How did he miss certain lessons?

I am constantly wondering how we form—are formed. Why does one sit in that part of a theater? Prefer unsalted potato chips? Avoid plaid? Loathe Los Angeles? Mistrust crowds? Believe that to look is to listen? Defend Dickens, no matter how sentimental he is? Remain completely indifferent to the Israeli occupation of Palestine?

PM: Your time in Estonia, in “the back of beyond,” seemed difficult. The culture was strange, the language ungraspable. By the end, you were wrestling with fundamental questions of existence and the spirit. Were you surprised to be led there by travel?

AT: I was completely turned off by the flat-footed uncongeniality of the society there, which frankly became worse under closer examination. But I couldn’t write there, not with any comfort, certainly. I also felt closed in, to a degree. As to the latter part of your question, I have been asking the fundamental questions of the spirit since I was six or seven years old—out of speculation not, by any means, because of any peculiar genius or precocity on my part—simply because those questions seemed always knocking on the doors of my mind and heart.

PM: The passages in the book about you sitting alone in empty churches, thinking, whiling away hours in prayer and reverie, were tremendously moving, ecstatic even. What is the relationship between religion and those fundamental questions? Has your faith helped you to face them or given you some framework for understanding?

AT: Can I confess that I am a practicing Christian. Orthodox and straightforward. No assertions here that I have special gifts or insights. I kneel to my Lord because I am such a failure. I pray, I hope, I look to the Gospels. Frankly, no fundamental question is not God-related, surely, and my faith, such as it is, is the bulwark of my life—writing life, human life, etc. Christ means more good book reviews. I stand with Marianne Moore who begins her poem, “Poetry” saying,

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.

PM: In the last chapter, you express the hope that your book will share shelf space “with Lawrence’s Sardinia and Canetti’s Marrakesh and Theodore Cook’s Old Provence.” What do their books and yours have in common?

AT: The writers of those books, among others, savored the details, found the thisness in those places, were the ones, as W.H. Auden wrote in “Musee des Beaux Arts,” to notice some untidy spot:

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

Writers are the scouts of the world, the great noticers, the true map-makers. They are the prophets, as Percy Shelley and Horace point out—the vates. The unacknowledged legislators of the world. The visionaries. But I have no special prevision—give me no credit, it was obvious as the sun—although frankly I was savoring the details back there when at night my father was reading to us about the adventures of Billy Bones and the “black spot” and the Admiral Benbow Inn.

PM: The Grammar of Rock, your book about rock lyrics, is forthcoming from Fantagraphics. Are the best lyricists like your scouts of the world? And with what works of music writing would you have your Grammar share shelf space?

AT: My effort here is actually a book less about music than about language and literacy in regard to that. The best lyricists can compare with the best poets, although being less grave or as richly inspired they rarely if ever reach to the miraculous heights where, at their majestic solitude, Shakespeare or Milton, John Keats or Wallace Stevens live. Your last question is tough. Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite might be one. My book is comic to a degree, and frankly in a real sense an autobiography of what I have heard—have been hearing—all of my life. What the Sirens have sung. Or, better, when I have heard them what I have heard them sing . . .

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2012/2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012/2013