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Bourdain’s Bleeding Heart

July 1, 2010 in online by Emily

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain
(Ecco, June 2010)
Erin Lewenauer

It’s been a busy ten years since Anthony Bourdain first let readers into the dark corners of his kitchen and his mind with the mega-bestseller Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. The sometimes ornery chef has gone on to publish a hefty handful of books and articles while moving from country to country with his Emmy Award-winning show No Reservations.

Now retired from the restaurant kitchen, Bourdain proves that he has indeed learned a lot in his 28 years behind the stove. Like him or hate him, Bourdain does not pull punches. He speaks with clarity about chefdom in his Confidential sequel, Medium Raw, revealing “the searing heat, the mad pace, the never-ending stress and melodrama, the low pay, probable lack of benefits, inequity and futility, the cuts and burns and damage to body and brain—the lack of anything resembling normal hours or a normal personal life.”

The book opens with a scene a la film noir in which a group of heavy-hitter chefs gather in secret to partake in illegal cuisine. The chapters that follow touch on Bourdain’s reckless days on St. Barts, the conundrum of selling out, and the chef-author’s updated feelings on fellow gastronomic celebrities. “Rachael Ray sent me a fruit basket. So I stopped saying mean things about her. It’s that easy with me now,” a sanguine Bourdain admits.

Once a rogue and a provocateur, the Bourdain of Medium Raw is a sage authority. “I am frequently asked by aspiring chefs, dreamers young and old, attracted by the lure of slowly melting shallots and caramelizing pork belly, or delusions of Food Network stardom, if they should go to culinary school,” says Bourdain. “I usually give a long, thoughtful, and qualified answer. But the short answer is ‘no’.”

After his own graduation from the Culinary Institute of America in his early 20s, Bourdain published two “unsuccessful novels” and kept his day job, which spanned an impressive number of Manhattan kitchens. But the facts of Bourdain’s life are different now; he is older, he is a father, he is no longer a chef, and he deems himself happily uncool. He has traded the fast-paced, sweaty, profanity-ridden days in the kitchen for the time and the pleasure to dream up new ways to vilify Ronald McDonald for his daughter’s benefit. The bombastic and angry tone has mellowed considerably.

Medium Raw’s camera pans out slowly on the present, the scene spliced together with vivid shots of bygone years. Bourdain manages to avoid sentimentality in favor of a studious take on today’s food culture, where the Food Network thrives yet Gourmet magazine is out of business. Bourdain intelligently and humorously explores the effects of the economic crisis on the restaurant business, the ups and downs of Top Chef, a day in the life at New York’s Le Bernardin, the benefits of dozen-course tasting menus versus lure hamburgers, and his latest heroes and villains.

All of the skills that served Bourdain well as a chef—“creativity, technical skill, leadership abilities, flexibility, grace under pressure, sense of humor, and sheer strength and endurance”—have translated into his writing. In one of the best and most candid moments of the book, he allows readers to peer in on his coveted “food porn,” describing himself devouring a pain raisin at a small, Parisian boulangerie: “The reaction is violent. It hurts. Butter floods your head and you think for a second you’re going to black out.”

The tamed, more circumspect Bourdain of Medium Raw remains detail-oriented, hilarious, and sharp as ever despite the constant references to his age. As impressive as his hyper-awareness of foodies and the food industry is his generosity in sharing an honest view of a world that blends food and travel with an intimacy that so few people ever experience first-hand.

Erin Lewenauer, a poet and freelance writer from Milwaukee, is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a graduate of Vassar College and has lived in Paris, Boulder, and New York City.

Poetry with Teeth

June 1, 2010 in books, poetry by Emily

Birdwatching in Wartime, by Jeffrey Thomson
(Carnegie Mellon University Press, February 2009)
Dmitry Berenson

John Berryman made the famous observation “Life, friends, is boring” and many poets today seem to agree. A great deal of modern work seems to be concerned with mining through layers of the mundane to access some nugget of meaning. We often conflate the everyday and the possible.

Birdwatching in Wartime suggests that the problem may be geographical. Most of us simply don’t live where it’s dangerous. We no longer feel overwhelmed by physicality— hunger, pain, and wild beauty. Jeffrey Thomson brings us back to this world.

Thomson’s poems wind through the Amazon, detailing the fantastical creatures that seem to emerge from every direction. The poems are at times overwhelming, but leave me with a terror and fascination unmatched in any other poetry I’ve read. Much of the effect comes from Thomson’s lyrical dexterity:

…a pity not to have seen

the spattered sun

scribbled down to nothing more than matchlight on army ants

engraving leaf litter,

the cuneiform of tapir prints in the mud of that flat-banked stream,

not to have seen

the wattled jacana scrawl across water lilies with her vast, forked feet

a pity

never to have taken piranha from the river and watched them slap

their gibberish

across the bottom of the boat.

But unlike many lyrical poets, I get the sense that Thomson’s language is lagging behind the reality of the experiences, not dominating them. I picture him running through the jungle, breathlessly jotting down what is happening around him without enough time to focus on any particular wonder.

There is an almost inconceivable breadth and strangeness in Thomson’s landscapes. In “Landscape with Flooded Forest,” Thomson shows us a world where “the horizon rises up around the shoulders of trees/ and fish fly through branches in flocks of scale…a wire-tailed manakin flames/ through the middle-story treetops and pink dolphins/ slalom through the sunken trunks.” The impossibility of these images and their apparent reality challenge the imagination. But there is a darker side to these worlds; a constant danger:

when those wasps

stapled my back and sides and face

…

…when the splotches flushed across my back

my neck, my sweat-licked face,

when the diaspora of venom wrote a question across my back

in hot letters that left me

cold and shaking

The less personal but no less fierce violence of the “Tarantulas that hunt fish” or “piranha, red-bellied as rage…that dissembled a swimming sloth” also stalks through the poems. Thomson’s cocktail of fear and wonder is potent. It keeps the poems engaging even when the density of creatures and events threatens to overwhelm them.

Though Thomson’s Amazon poems are the vanguard of Birdwatching in Wartime, they are not the totality of the army he has deployed. He also experiments with two long multi-part poems. The first, the “Celestial Emporeum of Benevolent Knowledge,” plays with the idea of cataloguing experience into a handful of categories. Thomson’s fresh use of language is an asset here and the poem sparkles with clever metaphorical gems. Though it’s length and wit are impressive, the poem seems to buckle under the freedom afforded by its scope. The second long poem, “Blind Desire,” is largely successful, with a coherent series of three-tercet sections interlocking through a sequence of overlapping images.

Other directions abound in Birdwatching, including commentary on religion, imperialism, and desire, a poem entwined in the philosophy and desperation of Jack Gilbert, and a poem comprised solely of footnotes. But it is really the Amazon poems and their “Landscape” form, which re-appears throughout, that give this book its thrust. “Beauty is a theatre of risk” writes Thomson, and in terms of form and content, this book goes all in.

Dmitry Berenson is pursuing a PhD in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon
University. He is an avid reader and writer of poetry.

Czyzniejewski’s Bedroom Community

March 29, 2010 in books by Emily

Elephants in Our Bedroom, by Michael Czyzniejewski
(Dzanc Books, February 2009)
Erin Lewenauer

Following the lives of floating souls, Michael Czyzniejewski’s debut short story collection could be a disenchanted autobiography of our generation. The stories, all written in first person, possess a collective strength of voice and echo the authority of nonfiction. They throw a spotlight on the little problems that are sometimes, let’s face it, the big problems.

To the extent that Elephants in Our Bedroom conforms to a genre of fiction, it lies at the midpoint between realism and fabulism. This is to say that while Czyzniejewski’s stories contain elements of the supernatural and fantastic (“Pleurisy” begins, “About eight years into our marriage, the dictionary started lying to my wife”), they also smack of good Midwestern sense. All of the multilayered characters appear simultaneously perturbed and amused by life’s uncertainties and its refusal to grant guarantee. In “Wind” the narrator’s infant son falls off the couch, which triggers a memory of his own father’s suicide and the question of what the future holds. “Streetfishing” hilariously details a day in the life of two friends who sit on their street, get drunk, and fish for a laundry basket. In “Valentine” a husband becomes suspicious of his wife’s yearly visit to the gynecologist on Valentine’s Day. And in “Green” the narrator’s husband invites all of her old lovers to stay with them for two weeks.

Czyzniejewski’s prose is direct and immediate (some stories border on flash fiction), yet it retains energy and never bores. There are moments of brilliance in the characters’ commentary on how the world is arranged (“I’m not sure why she fosters my once-a-week binging, but again, that’s the way we deal with each other”), and any writer could learn from and admire Elephants’ airtight plots.

But what is most striking about Czyzniejewski is that he does not attempt to explain the unexplainable. He does not apologize for keeping readers at a safe distance or for the pleasure his characters take in keeping secrets. Not even for the fact that once the well-crafted humor dissipates, readers are left without anything to hold onto. In other words, his stories function like the best of fiction: they are true to life. While Elephants in Our Bedroom can be intermittently depressing, the optimism inherent in truth-telling prevails.

Erin Lewenauer, a poet and freelance writer from Milwaukee, is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She reviewed Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs for Hot Metal Bridge in 2009.

The Originality of Mr. D’Agata

March 4, 2010 in books by Emily

The Lost Origins of the Essay, by John D’Agata
(Graywolf, August 2009)
Joshua Schriftman

David Foster Wallace called John D’Agata “one of the most significant U.S. writers to emerge in the past few years.” According to Andre Codrescu, “Here is an essayist who fears nothing.” These comments reference D’Agata the essayist (who established his own hybrid voice in Halls of Fame) and not D’Agata the anthologist, but both “fearless” and “emergent” are equally suited to a description of D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay and his entire, massive, three-volume mosaic redefinition the essay. The trilogy’s first volume, The Next American Essay, anthologizes one essay per year from 1975 (the year of the anthologist’s birth) through 2003 (the year of the book’s publication). The Lost Origins of the Essay, though the chronologically first of the triptych, has just now arrived, and it endeavors to cover the formative moments of essaying that precede 1975. (The trilogy’s final volume, The Foundations of the American Essay, is still forthcoming.)

Of course D’Agata’s selections do not actually form an inclusive picture of every major essayistic moment in global literary history, and despite the book’s 600-plus-page heft, you still get the feeling that D’Agata may just be getting started. That said, the essays he’s selected do compose a brilliant constellation. He moves from the far shores of history in Sumer and Babylonia to the center of the classical cosmopoleis of Plutarch and Seneca and then east to the proto-essayists of China and Japan. Later writers include Montaigne and Bacon, Basho and Blake, and Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. And from the twentieth century, D’Agata plucks Artaud, Pessoa, Woolf, and Celan, but also Ana Hatherly, Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar. Avant-garde and performative essays show up from Clarice Lispector, Kamau Braithwaite, Marguerite Duras, and Samuel Beckett. And D’Agata offers his own introductory words to each entry—the sum total of which compose a work that is as much an essay as any of the essays he’s introduced.

In his commentary on a surreal and haunting dialog written in South Africa by Azwinaki Tshipala in 315 C.E., D’Agata writes: “Ask a friend: what is an essay? An essay, I suspect, is something to which your friend might turn to watch a problem being solved, a proclamation made, the world recorded honestly. After all, no matter how playful Seneca, Plutarch, or Theophrastus make their essays, let’s not kid ourselves about them: their essays are making arguments.” And there it is, I thought on my first reading. A clean definition of all of these strange angels cutting across the page: they’ve each their own voice and form, but in the end they all are rhetorical. They are making arguments.

But on a second read, I paid more attention to the rest of D’Agata’s treatment of the seventeen-hundred-year-old essay: “We might read these arguments through the lens of emotion, or experience, or a boldly clever adventure into the limits of human logic, but once we emerge from reading them aren’t we nevertheless changed? Haven’t we been moved? Doesn’t good art resist the intelligence only almost successfully? Or: is every essay an intelligence that inaugurates its own form?” It’s a subtle enough distinction that I breezed past it at first, but it constitutes the difference between changing readers’ minds and changing their way of thinking. In an essay about essays, D’Agata’s formula accounts for the difference between changing someone’s opinion on what constitutes an essay and changing their way of reading nonfiction.

Throughout this anthology, D’Agata throws everything in his arsenal against the misperception of nonfiction as “a genre that is merely a dispensary of data”—a “genre of negation.” In his introduction to Basho’s “Narrow Road to the Interior,” for instance, D’Agata offers an etymology of memoir that reaches past the Latin memoria to “the ancient Greek mérmeros, an offshoot of the Avestic Persian mermara, itself a derivative of the Indo-European for that which we think about but cannot grasp: mer-mer, ‘to vividly wonder,’ ‘to be anxious,’ ‘to exhaustingly ponder.’”

And this brings me to the best way I’ve found to express what D’Agata’s constellation is itself essaying: a thing that is both a form and an action, an etymology of the art of the essay.

About a Mountain, another of John D’Agata’s reconsiderations of the nonfiction genre, was published by W. W. Norton & Company in February.

Joshua Schriftman teaches and writes for a living but also has experience in marketing, travel, retail, sushi, and construction. He currently lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and daughter, where he is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. He has essays of his own appearing in the spring issues of Ninth Letter and The Pinch.

Novelist Heidi Durrow Looks Up

February 15, 2010 in books by Emily

The Girl who Fell from the Sky, by Heidi W. Durrow
(Algonquin, January 2010)
Liberty Hultberg

Durrow’s debut novel explores modern multiracial identity within one mixed girl’s experience of love, family, class, and beauty in an American society still defining these ideas decades after the Civil Rights Movement. The main character’s perspective, if sometimes a bit sentimental, provides a precise lens through which to view a delicately complicated and shifting world.

Rachel, daughter of a mother newly emigrated from Denmark and a Black American G.I., opens the novel as the only survivor of a mysterious, tragic accident that leaves her in the care of her grandmother and the black community in Portland, Oregon. Her curly hair, light eyes, and fair skin are the source of much attention and scrutiny, forcing Rachel to examine what it means to be Black.

Like Nella Larsen’s biracial heroine Helga Crane in Quicksand, Rachel is a child of multiple worlds—White, Black, American, foreign. At once an insider and an outsider, she strives to reconcile parts of her character that belong to rigidly separate lives. She wonders what it means when friends tell her she “talks white” and worries that “the Danish in me [will] be something time makes me leave behind.” She ponders how identity is tied to what others see and refuse to see, to the events that confront her unprepared in the present and those that remain only in her memory.

Interspersed throughout the narrative are the voices of other family members and witnesses to the accident, with their own versions of reality. Readers are reminded of how, like ripples in water, a tragedy affects an entire community. But the story remains Rachel’s—it is through her innocent-yet-haunting blue eyes, private ponderings contained in what she calls her “blue bottle,” and the wide stretch of blue sky she sees above that we experience the violence of the everyday, the loss of the past, and the hope for a future in which our vision of race and family and difference is inclusive and expansive.

Though Durrow compellingly shifts Rachel’s perspective to reflect her always-inexact, ever-changing insider-outsider position, at times she sacrifices the cohesiveness of the chronology. Rachel’s age is too often uncertain, her voice more innocent than her experience would suggest. Yet beneath the halting words lies a poetry that poignantly captures the pain and loss of death and separation from family. The reader can see the taunting looks of Rachel’s classmates, hear the Danish accent she suppresses, feel the widening circles of heat within her as she experiences her first kiss.

The Girl who Fell from the Sky, winner of the Bellwether Prize for best fiction that addresses issues of social justice, is a book that enlivens American identities of the past and the present. In these pages are echoes of our ancestors, Langston Hughes speaking to Nella Larsen, Nella Larsen speaking to Alice Walker, and this new voice—Durrow’s—speaking to us.

Heidi Durrow will give a reading and lecture at the University of Pittsburgh on April 13, 2010.

Liberty Hultberg is a Creative Nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh whose writing deals with multiracial identity.

Lethem’s Motherless Manhattan

January 30, 2010 in online by Emily

Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem
(Doubleday, October 2009)
Steve Gillies

A quarter of the way into Jonathan Lethem’s novel, narrator Chase Insteadman takes a break from the action to spend a short chapter describing the view from his window of a flock of birds in a church spire. He’s described it already, but he tells the reader he wants to take make sure to get it right. Then he completely fails to do so. His description of language as the very thing that makes accurate description impossible is emblematic of the book. “I employ it the way a dog drives a car,” he says, “without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don’t. Yet I go around forming sentences.” Attempts to find or convey some kind of meaning about the world consistently run headlong into the futility of language or the very idea of meaning itself.

Except, to say Insteadman takes a break in the action might be putting it generously. There isn’t actually too much action to speak of. Surviving off residuals from a teenage TV career, Chase Insteadman drifts aimlessly through the novel, attending fancy dinner parties, eating cheeseburgers in greasy spoons, and getting high in the ratty apartment of oddball ex-rock critic Perkus Tooth. Insteadman indulges Tooth’s obsessions, from paranoid delusions about Marlon Brando and something called the Gnuppets to a religious awe of a type of pottery that can only be seen by bidding on it on ebay. Yet anytime they might be in danger of following one of these obsessions into something resembling a plot, Lethem quickly moves them along to some new and equally fruitless pursuit.

Meanwhile, Insteadman’s astronaut fiancé writes love letters to him via weekly tabloids while trapped aboard a space station. A giant tiger that might not actually be a giant tiger patrols the city, wrecking buildings that are coincidentally inconvenient to urban development. A very literal grey fog hangs over the financial district. Blending science fiction with surrealism, Lethem artfully renders a Manhattan that’s both strange and familiar, not to mention almost entirely populated by people with silly names. The aforementioned Insteadman and Tooth are joined by the likes of Oona Lazlo, Laird Noteless, Georgina Hawkmanaji and Strabo Blandiani. It’s the type of book where someone named Bloody Chicklets or Kilgore Trout could come strolling by at any moment.

There are dangers in following in the footsteps of Pynchon and Vonnegut. For one thing, it isn’t the 60s anymore. What once seemed new and profound now can seem an awful lot like random stoner-talk in Perkus Tooth’s living room. Yet Lethem takes care to place such concerns in contrast to the novel’s hyper-modern surroundings.

Sure, there’s a conspiracy in Lethem’s Manhattan. There are hundreds of them. The question Lethem’s characters ask, though, is not what is reality? but in a place like this, what isn’t reality? The world Lethem creates can be a cold and alienating place. Still, it has room for friendship, genuine human moments, and the promise that something new and indescribable lurks in the writing around every corner.

Steve Gillies is a current MFA Candidate in Fiction Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. He was born in Brazil, raised in Alabama, and spent a considerable amount of his adult life in Chicago. One time he made a comic book that was called “the stupidest I have ever seen” by a noted Environmental Chemist.

Calvocoressi’s Fighting Words

November 30, 2009 in books, poetry by Emily

Apocalyptic Swing, by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
(Persia Books, September 2009)
Amanda Brant

Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s second book of poems, Apocalyptic Swing, resonates with a quiet intensity. Issues of the body, love and sex, of fighting and falling and yet rising again because there is no choice flow through this collection involving a boxer who is caught up in the fight and world that exists around it in a small American town.

One time you hit a guy so hard

even he looked impressed before he fell
to the mat and started to seize.
She didn’t let you touch her for days

after that.

Calvocoressi works from within the ring, as poems become the victor, loser, referee, someone shouting from the crowd. Small town concerns take precedence, become all that matter. These poems are the lights, the sweat shining on the floor after, evidence of what’s left. Apocalyptic Swing holds a sense of struggle, fight and courage and power, combined with a profound feeling of loneliness that plays part, even as an entire community’s inhabitants become a single entity of pride, anticipating something better.

These poems draw on people who are struggling to survive, whether in the ring or in their everyday lives. The boxer is any one of them, and he becomes the whole town, which could be any town, and they are all fighting, deserving to win, but usually walking away broken, beaten.

A sad history of short-lived triumph shifts through, coupled with hope. This time will be better:

It will feel better than any floor
that’s risen up to meet you. It will rise

like Easter bread, golden and familiar
in your grandmother’s hands. She’ll come back,

heaven having been too far from home
to hold her. O it will be beautiful.

Calvocoressi’s language is controlled with a confident, relaxed tone of honesty that quietly tells of a town and its people, one story, one memory at a time. Her poems take the hit, get back up, train for the next fight, keep going. Family and community encircle, push the importance of effort and love into the face, wrap it up between the knuckles, prepare for the punches. Small wars, small fires move from mouth to mouth, family to friend, keeping everyone warm, and relying on the chain to prevail, to stay lit, to stay alive. There is the fight and what’s worth fighting for—there cannot be one without the other.

Amanda Brant is a current MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She is originally from Indiana but now lives in Pittsburgh’s Southside with her dog, Maddie. Her work has recently appeared in Invisible City.

Maile Meloy Gets What She Wants

November 14, 2009 in online by Emily

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy.
(Riverhead/Penguin, July 2009)
Loring Ann Pfeiffer

If I recounted a handful of the stories from Maile Meloy’s most recent collection, the book would quickly begin to seem sensational. In “Red and Green,” a teenaged girl has a sexual encounter with a much older man (a client of her attorney father); in “Lovely Rita,” a widow raffles off her romantic services to her dead husband’s colleagues; in “The Girlfriend,” the father of a murder victim, desperate to understand the mind of the man who killed his daughter, interviews the murderer’s girlfriend. But what is most remarkable about Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It is that the experience of reading it elicits much more complicated responses than a simple summary of its plotlines might suggest.

A skilled sustainer of tension, Meloy writes stories that don’t so much resolve as arrive at a lingering uncertainty. Like most real-life conflicts, the tensions at the center of Both Ways break only because some force shunts them aside. In the final paragraph of “Travis, B,” after Chet Moran has had his hopes for intimacy dashed by a young lawyer named Beth, he stands in the darkness trying to determine how to proceed. Just before the cold weather forces him inside, he takes the only action he can at that moment—he removes from his pocket the piece of paper that contains her phone number, memorizes it, rolls it into a ball, and throws it into the wind. Such an ending contains within it both a finality—the piece of paper is gone, after all—and an uncertainty—if Chet intends to call Beth, why has he felt it necessary to rid himself of all physical traces of her?

It is Meloy’s economical use of language that enables her to sketch these stories in as emotionally complex a way as she does. The A. R. Ammons poem from which this book’s title comes conveys in just sixteen words—“One can’t/ have it/ both ways/ and both/ ways is/ the only/ way I want it.”—the at-times excruciating nature of the decision-making process. Similarly, in Meloy’s collection, the complications that underlie characters’ actions are lain bare in short sentences and paragraphs that feature the simplest possible diction. In my favorite story in the collection, “Two-Step,” a medical resident, Naomi, listens as her friend Alice relays her suspicions that her husband is having an affair. Five pages into the story, Meloy takes us inside Naomi’s head: “Naomi hesitated. She had told her husband that she was leaving him, with the understanding that Alice would simultaneously—or at least soon—be told the same thing. It had been a difficult week” (94). These three sentences entirely shift this story’s trajectory, but Meloy conveys this reversal in the simplest language possible—“It had been a difficult week” is one of the best examples of understatement I have recently come across. Because she reveals Naomi’s adultery in such a matter-of-fact way, Meloy avoids the melodrama typically evoked by the other woman and, instead, extends the reader’s sympathies.

Both Ways is not perfect. A Montana native, Meloy is at her best when writing about rural locales and the people who populate them; when the collection ventures elsewhere, Meloy’s characters lose some of their complexity. In “Liliana,” the titular character reads like a caricature of a flamboyant European doyenne, and her miraculous return from the grave ends up indulging in the sensationalism that the rest of this collection so judiciously avoids. Likewise, when the aging Argentinian hero of “Agustin” tries to help a former lover who has lost everything, he comes across as merely kind-hearted, not as a character with whom the reader feels aligned.

In the vast majority of Both Ways’ stories, though, Meloy’s unresolved tensions and her simple language help her to achieve near-mastery of the short story form. These stories challenge the reader to do that most difficult of things—suspend judgment of characters and, instead, exist with them in the tensions they inhabit.

Loring Ann Pfeiffer is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, where she studies Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama.

Revisiting the End: Atwood’s Eco-Jeremiad

October 31, 2009 in books, online by Emily

The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood
(Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, September 2009)
Bradley J. Fest

Readers who remember the final scenes of Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood’s 2003 entry into speculative, post-apocalyptic fiction, may not be surprised to find that she has written a sequel. The Year of the Flood (whose narrative is staged simultaneously with Oryx and Crake’s) suggests an alternative to Crake’s diabolical destroy-the-world-to-make-it-new vision. Here, an anarchic cult called God’s Gardeners has reinterpreted the Bible to support a version of eco-Christianity, erected a hierarchic monastic order to ensure the success of its eschatological project, and reclaimed various ruined urban spaces so heavily under the heel of the all-powerful Corporation. The Year of the Flood, for the most part, attempts to offer a less problematic utopia than that imagined by Crake in the first novel, even if achieving it still requires the deaths of 99% of the world’s population in what God’s Gardeners call the “Waterless Flood.”

Though assuredly a worthwhile, thought-provoking, and interesting read, The Year of the Flood, like the soon-to-be overexposed film 2012, is yet another contribution to the glut of what I call “eco-jeremiads.” Atwood’s consideration of the apocalypse only exacerbates the manipulative and weighty rhetoric of the genre. While Oryx and Crake raised some serious metaphysical and ontological questions through its use of eschatological catastrophe, it is unclear what the new novel is attempting to accomplish beyond its gesture toward the generalized anxiety that “we should be more environmentally conscious.” In the same way that nuclear disaster narratives often merely point out the banally obvious—it would be really bad—The Year of the Flood relies upon the apocalyptic thrust of disaster primarily to highlight the author’s serious (if unambiguous) environmental engagement. It appears that Atwood truly intends much of this novel as a model for a lifestyle that moves past the “green” and “eco-friendly” into a wholly-revamped mode of operating in the world more naturally and responsibly. There are hymns interspersed throughout the book (and set to music on the website) that are explicitly intended for readers’ “amateur devotional or environmental purposes.” Major figures in history of ecological activism form a religious canon for the Gardeners: St. Rachel Carson, St. Dian Fossey, St. Al Gore, St. Julian of Norwich. But Atwood isn’t really exploring much territory beyond that of other eco-utopian or eco-apocalyptic novels (most notably the bundle of work from Kim Stanley Robinson).

Adam One, leader of God’s Gardeners, asks in his final speech, “Do we deserve this Love by which God maintains our Cosmos? Do we deserve it as a species?” If the major goal of this novel is to answer “No, we don’t, but we should all work individually toward a place where we would deserve that love,” then it is quite successful. But everything from Carson’s Silent Spring to Shyamalan’s The Happening has effectively already covered the same ground. For Atwood, the possibility of a collective, emergent movement capable of effecting change gets derailed in favor of a thrilling yet normative narrative with an emphasis on the individual’s relationship to the environment. Basically, The Year of the Flood comes off as being far more programmatic than aesthetic, and it is difficult to discern much in that program beyond the cliché: “think locally, act globally.”

(That said, if the endings of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are any indication, Atwood may be inclined to contribute one more post-apocalyptic novel to this universe. A third volume might provide an interesting and necessary engagement with our penal system and culture of ubiquitous surveillance. But we shall see.)

Bradley J. Fest, a PhD student studying 19th through 21st century American literature with an emphasis on literary representations of the apocalypse, recently reviewed Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice for Hot Metal Bridge.

Reines Lays Out Baudelaire

October 15, 2009 in books, reviews by Emily

My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Ariana Reines
(Mal-O-Mar Editions, October 2009)
Chad Vogler

Ariana Reines notes in her brief preface that Charles Baudelaire began producing text for My Heart Laid Bare sometime around 1859 and composed notes for this work perhaps until his death in 1867. The intended result—an autobiographical work in which to “cram all [his] rage” —was never realized. In its place we encounter a collection of fragments, notes toward prospective essays, and personal musings. Baudelaire never intended to publish these fragments, and the sections progress rapidly through moments of unmitigated candor, oblique shorthand for future investigations, and autobiographical concerns over his debts, his health, his method, and his “greatness.”

My understanding of Reines’s translation is couched in a fair degree of ignorance; I do not speak or read French, and I have never seen the André Guyaux edition from which she draws. One scarcely needs to be a Francophile, however, to appreciate the vivid brevity that Reines brings to her endeavor. Norman Cameron’s previous translation (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1950), for example, presents the opening passage of the fifth section:

Woman is the opposite of the Dandy. That is why she should be regarded with disgust.
Woman is hungry, and she wants to eat; thirsty, and she wants to drink.
She feels randy, and she wants to be ——— .
Fine characteristics!
Woman is “natural” — that is to say, abominable.
Moreover, she is always vulgar—that is to say, the opposite of the Dandy.

Reines’s interpretation reads:

Woman is the opposite of the Dandy.
Therefore she is horrifying.
Woman is hungry and wants to eat. Thirsty, she wants to drink.
She is in heat and wants to be fucked.
Deserves it!
Woman is natural, which is to say abominable.
Also she is always vulgar, which is to say the opposite of the Dandy.

The success of Reines’s translation relies partly upon her willingness to displace a certain “etiquette”—which substitutes a long dash for “fucked” yet finds little fault in a description of women as “always vulgar”—in an act of fidelity to Baudelaire’s title. Reines’s rendering allows us to witness the corporeal fixation that suffuses Baudelaire’s text without the protective qualifications that attend a high register. I have no idea whose translation is more “accurate,” but Reines’s translation of “Deserves it!” where Cameron arrived at “Fine characteristics!” perhaps foregrounds the sensibility that each translator brings to the source text.

As an object (much like the press’s simultaneously released GLORY HOLE/THE HOT TUB by Dan Hoy and Jon Leon), this edition exemplifies Mal-O-Mar’s intelligent regard for formal novelty. (If there is a spoiler alert to be made, this is it.) Reines’s My Heart Laid Bare is printed on nine pages of full-sized newsprint, and the title is printed in a font size large enough to be read easily from the other side of the street. The decision to deliver the poem in this medium is endlessly intriguing: Baudelaire characterizes newspapers as “a tissue of horrors” in section 80, yet we encounter that opinion as readers in the present age, immersed in digitization and anxiety over the possibly imminent demise of proper newspapers. Of course, we must make the necessary distinction between newsprint and newspapers, and it may be that Baudelaire is granted a small victory here: the occupation of a form he vehemently despised. Edgar Allen Poe, cited in Reines’s translator’s note, elucidates both the text and its formal delivery:

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own—the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—”My Heart Laid Bare.” But—this little book must be true to its title.

Mal-O-Mar’s edition resides at the perimeter of the definition of a “book,” but it does manage to depart from previous English translations that bury My Heart Laid Bare within collections of Baudelaire’s works. As a discrete, self-contained object, however, we might still argue whether it manages to be “very little.” We can easily describe it as slim. Yet its physical presence is imposing enough to resist becoming the “disgusting aperitif” with which “the civilized man accompanies his morning meal.” Readers need no prerequisite reverence for literary objects to understand that Baudelaire’s text must be laid flat and opened wide.

Chad Vogler received his B.A. in English from UC Berkeley and currently attends the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is the assistant poetry editor for Hot Metal Bridge. He lives in a house without a furnace in Point Breeze.

Chabon Takes on Manhood

September 30, 2009 in books by Emily

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon

(HarperCollins, October 2009)

Erin Lewenauer

Michael Chabon is a natural charmer. He sells readers something they’re not even aware they’re buying: a whole-hearted belief in his heartbreaking, hilarious, and highly imaginative version of the truth about his past, his writing, and his family. “Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing,” Chabon bellows with gusto. After starting his career with the sensitive Mysteries of Pittsburgh, following it with the quirky Wonder Boys, and winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for the omniscient The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Chabon continues to prove his sincere dedication to his audience with his comprehensive collection of personal essays. At 46, in a “gesture of baseless optimism,” Chabon uses his eleventh book to reflect on and critique his existence as a fallible yet admirable character in his own adventure tale.

Chabon’s short essays range from the activities of his childhood in Maryland (“cooking entails stubbornness and a tolerance—maybe even a taste—for last-minute collapse”) to the awkward pain of adolescence (“only people who don’t give a damn have style”), to his humorous college years (“because I was bright and a would-be artiste, my own misogyny wore a beret, as it were, and quoted Nietzsche”), and finally to the complications of marriage and fatherhood (“It turns out there are only nine different ways of being a father, and eight of them are distinguishable from one another only by trained experts from Switzerland”). These are remembrances of an author who grew up relatively unsupervised and independent, and who realized early on that “for true contentment, one must carry a book at all times.”

Still, Chabon remains mysteriously (and somewhat suspiciously) silent on the activity of writing. He concedes that “in almost everything I’ve written, you can find buried treasuries, Batcaves and hidey-holes, half-forgotten underground worlds that perhaps encode the rapture and the bitterness of my own isolation,” but focuses primarily on his childhood experiences and his own children. The Wonder Boy revels in life’s details and surprising outcomes, from his lifelong status as a “geek” to raising two boys and two girls (along with sustaining a marriage and caring for a gigantic Bernese mountain dog). If his new collection has a fault it is that his privacy and urge to protect himself and his family leave the reader wanting to know more.

Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, Chabon works in a lilting yet energetic prose style that harkens back to F. Scott Fitzgerald; he can scrutinize the dark elements of human nature and the hopeless state of the world, and then magically transform them into scenes that radiate romance. Manhood for Amateurs (whose points of focus include Jewish heritage, the escapism of comic books, Chabon’s first sexual escapade, and astronomy) fulfills the author’s promise to completely, albeit temporarily, fill a void with his big-hearted words. “Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude,” Chabon concludes. In uncertain times, in an unstable world, his work is more valuable than ever.

Keep On Keepin’ On: Pynchon Rewriting American History

September 15, 2009 in books, online, reviews by Emily

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

(Penguin, August 2009)

Bradley J. Fest

The publication of Inherent Vice makes even more apparent that one of Thomas Pynchon’s fundamental projects for the past fifty years has been to rewrite the history of the United States. If the novel is not exactly an alternate history in the mode of something like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), it is surely a history that privileges the outsider, the deviant, the interstitial, occluded, and secret. If the Tristero was the mark of global conspiracy in the 1960s, it is the “Golden Fang” which reinscribes that secret history of the world into the aughts. In this way, Vice finds its closest companion in the Pynchon oeuvre in The Crying of Lot 49. A psychedelic-noir set near the end of 60s in Los Angeles, Vice is relatively and surprisingly straightforward… for a Pynchon novel. Romping into the seedy underbelly is as-always-wonderfully-named-Pynchon-character Doc Sportello, a private detective who quickly becomes embroiled in a tangled network of postmodern intrigue. But instead of being named the executor of an estate, an old flame of Doc’s comes walking up to his office. Cue Humphrey Bogart smoking a joint.

I do not think it a mistake to call Vice a sequel to Lot 49, but a sequel that only forty years of hindsight could provide. Like if Lucas didn’t screw up and wait another ten years before telling Jar Jar Binks’ story. And this is what makes it so weird. First of all, though I won’t tell you how, the book ends on an explicit contemplation of our current moment in which distributed networks are becoming the form all social interaction. Unlike Gravity’s Rainbow, whose ending feels like a cheap, untimely meditation on technology, Vice explicitly transposes the 20/20 significance of ARPAnet (in brief: the internet) onto the fabric of the tale. In considering Vice as a sequel, however, I must acknowledge that its similarities to Lot 49 are not always its strongest suit. The sixties were kinda-sorta promising in Lot 49, whereas that optimism, or spirit of the time (if you will), is surely on the wane in Vice. The main weavings of narrative motion—sexual escapades, drug use, mysteries wrapping into mysteries, protagonists who never really “get it” even if they show pluck and aplomb throughout— are still on display, and haven’t necessarily aged well. Pynchon is every bit as foot-loose and fancy-free as before, but after publishing two massive novels Mason Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006), he rides Inherent Vice like the last leg in the Tour de France when the winner is already more-or-less crowned and merely has to coast in.

Still, it is fascinating to juxtapose pretty much straight-up noir with the psychedelic culture of the late 60s. And it’s a viciously fun tale. Having also recently traversed the sky with the Chums of Chance, I cannot, as a late comer, feel more and more tickled by his work. So, some bias, eh. But that doesn’t change the fact that Vice is, like, fun to read. The pages turn, and all that; and it’s kinda sexy.

And here Pynchon is always pretty successful. Juxtaposing one popular generic construct with another, as in Gravity’s Rainbow’s convergence of WWII stories with the spy narrative (mostly a Cold War thing), Vice permits noir to go beyond its recent status as merely inspiration to La Nouvelle Vague and historically enter a world which, to vastly oversimplify it, is a cross between Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, and Law and Order: Charles Manson’s Internet Dating Show. In other words, it combines popular culture, established genres, and detritus pretty well.

Vice is definitively adding to Pynchon’s fifty-year paranoia project, multiplying the global conspiratorial forces whose goals could be anything from world domination in the form of eugenics (Alex Jones) to merely a tax haven for dentists . This is ultimately the success of Vice: its paranoia is relevant. Against the Day’s anxiety over time and light, to boil it down, was perhaps too metaphysical. GR’s permanent implied mark of importance upon Slothrop prevented the materialization of the conspiracy of Rocket 00000 (or whatever) to escape farce, even if an infinitely complex farce. Vice, however, lets the apocalyptic Pynchon—the Pynchon who imagines a “more-perfect-world” through a Tesla who never existed, an ARPAnet which throws Humphrey Bogart into the ash-bin of history (as Tarantino just did to WWII)—breathe deeply in returning to the late 60s. In this late, strange age, it feels like something of a call to “remember” the sense of the future contained in that moment when the past was slowly falling away (rather than forget, something which Doc is constantly doing), when the revolutionary nature of the “hippie” lifestyle was becoming aware of its own narcissistic naïveté, when the apocalypse had already happened and everyone was clear about what exactly that was or meant. There is simply too much of the 21^st century here to see this as merely a critique of the LA (or the America) of the 60s and what it led to. For there is a strange suggestion that “perhaps” it all went in the right direction: “Someday. . . there’d be phones as standard equipment in every car, maybe even dashboard computers. People could exchange names and addresses and life stories and form alumni associations to gather once a year at some bar off a different freeway exit each time, to remember the night they set up a temporary commune to help each other home through the fog.” In other words, Pynchon seems to be suggesting that if what we’ve gained from history is the ability to discern ourselves within a community of people, even if it be of the Facebook type, and if this is all we have of the past, of the perverted promise of it, then so be it.

Bradley J. Fest received his MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh, where he is now a PhD student studying 19th through 21st century American literature, with an emphasis on literary representations of the apocalypse.