My Year In Books

A Cool Million by Nathaniel West Dec. 15-20 Alternate Title: How...

ourcenturyofugh — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 03:35:00 -0500

A Cool Million by Nathaniel West

Dec. 15-20

Alternate Title: How Not to Write a Satire

(I misplaced my copy of the book at home when I went there over break.)

Okay, so first off, Miss Lonelyhearts is my favorite book. Day of the Locust is pretty high up there as well. Those are two books that know how to really distill a lot of emotion and social commentary into potent, compact forms. I mentioned this to people at parties when I started my grad program in August. That’s how you introduce yourself in MFA programs, I guess. A while later, this book appeared in my school mailbox. I couldn’t find out who put it there, but I read it. I kind of wish I hadn’t because it was a real bummer to learn West had wrote such strangely bad book in between two masterpieces.

Now, okay, there’s some brutal satire that really hits the mark here. It’s supposed to shed a light on the illusory nature of the American dream––that it’s a story told to subordinate classes by the ruling classes to keep them in line. Unfortunately, by making the conservative character’s imaginary boogeymen (media controlling Jews and Communists) real (though somewhat humorously unseen by the other characters) villains in the story, West muddles the message he’s after. Also, the narrative voice seems to want to lampoon the casual racism of contemporary (or maybe Victorian, idk) narratives, but ends up sounding like the logical beginning point for hipster racism. Look, it’s not enough to say something racist or sexist that reflexively points out its own racism or sexism. “Ha ha, isn’t that racist?” is a really dumb joke.

Now, A Cool Million is modeled after Candid. The characters, the melodramatic plot construction, the narrative voice all mirror Voltaire’s satire. However, where the earlier book uses stereotypes to lampoon the Europeans who created them, West doesn’t have that level of nuance, which is unsettling to learn about the author of Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust, two nuanced and complicated works. The ending, of a dead Lemuel Pitkin being a martyr for a fascist dictatorship when all he set out to do was earn some money to save his mother’s house, is nicely cynical. However, the fact that he was assassinated by a Communist agent confuses the whole point. Yes, it’s funny if conservative fever dreams end up being real in a farce, but in this book it means that, to a point, the character savaged by the most pointed satire of the book is kind of right. And, ultimately, what’s the point of that?

Theory of Tables by Emmanuel Hocquard Dec. 9-10 Alternate Title:...

ourcenturyofugh — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 03:06:15 -0500

Theory of Tables by Emmanuel Hocquard

Dec. 9-10

Alternate Title: A Side Always Disappears

Oh my god. This book. It does things I didn’t think could work in poetry. The way each poem exists as fractured, bare entity and calls attention to its fractured nature, its artificiality and then builds through the use of a few central images is marvelous. It’s a quiet, contemplative book that also enacts a lot of violence on the idea of the poem, on the idea of the page.

At first, I didn’t know what to make of the book. But then, the poems started to compound, to comment and connect in unexpected ways. The brittleness and longing (for connection both personal and artistic) becomes more emphatic as each whispery plea rubs against the next. By the end of the book, I wanted to read everything Hocquard has written. This book is tense and lean and relaxed and soft. It builds gradually and subtly from pieces that seem like almost-poems into a something much, much greater.

Poet in New York by Federico Lorca One day in late...

ourcenturyofugh — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 02:57:00 -0500

Poet in New York by Federico Lorca

One day in late November

Alternate Title: A New New York

I read a poem in this collection for a class and really enjoyed it, so I went to the library and checked it out. Lorca must be a hard poet to translate. Both the cacophony of the language and the startling, illogical images are essential to his poems. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to translate both of these elements of Lorca’s poetry without sacrificing one to the other at least a small amount.

The translation I read is from the ’50s and errs on the side of cacophony. The concrete, almost architectural of sound of the Spanish gets translated into a garish and at times incomprehensible English. The brilliance of the original poems is hidden in the English. I can pick it out, but it’s difficult. This translation left me feeling a bit cold and confused. Comparing the translated poem that made me want to read the book with its translation in the book was very illustrative. The images, the essential factor of his poetry to those I’ve spoken to about it, are disjointed in the second translation. They lack the emotional coherence that is essential to their success.

Reading this translation was fairly alienating. The hallmarks of Lorca are there, but in a distorted, unattractive configuration that, well, bummed me out.

We the Animals by Justin Torres A few days in late...

ourcenturyofugh — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 23:07:00 -0500

We the Animals by Justin Torres

A few days in late November

Alternate Title: How to Become an I

This is a small book. It is written in lean, expressive language. It seems to be, at first, about three brothers growing up in a poor home. This set up is rather generic, but is tempered because there is such tenderness and sadness. It’s well written enough and smart enough to bring you into its world by degrees, to break down your cynicism.

But the book is really about something else. It’s about self discovery. It’s about asserting a singular identity inside a family. For most of the book, the narrator tells the story from a near collective point of view. The structure is compact episodes that build in an emotional, though not always narrative way. This works to the book’s benefit until the end. The last chapter jumps into the future. The characters we spent so much time with now have to be reintroduced. This is a gamble Torres takes and I’m not sure if it pays off. It hinges on a plot point that happens entirely between chapters. The little boy who begins to assert his individuality (in probably the best written and most effective part of the book) at the end of the last chapter, is suddenly a bitter young man exploring his sexuality and writing a very angry journal. But we don’t know this character anymore. We care about him because of who he was, but this is someone new and Torres doesn’t build up the sympathy that I think is necessary to make this choice fully work.

That’s my major reservation with the book and what stops me just short of loving it. I think it’s a beautifully written book, but the end still nags. The journey there is emotionally complex and does an admirable job of balancing brutality with tenderness. I just wish there’d been a more consistant build to the end.

Tremble by C.D Wright One day in late November Alternate...

ourcenturyofugh — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 22:53:00 -0500

Tremble by C.D Wright

One day in late November

Alternate Title: Dust Tracks on a Road

This book is very good. Wright is an inventive poet with a strong sense of structure and composition. She knows how to tell just the slightest details of a story that create a real emotional resonance. It’s a book that is haunting and spare. It pushes language to dark places, uncomfortable places. It finds a lot of variations in the domestic to crawl into and brood. It’s engrossing and one of the most engrossing things about it is the atmosphere of the book. I want to say it’s dusty, but that’s not a mood.

There’s a spareness to the diction that enhances the poems’ emotional immediacy. I thought the girl friend poems did a particularly good job of using that diction that lends a darkness to the other poems in the collection, but to a lighter end without sacrificing any of the interpersonal complexity that marks the collection. The starkness of the language does not mean that Wright doesn’t engage in tricky sentence structures––there’s a great twistiness to some of these poems. There’s a real, tangible quality to the images. The word “sensuous” seems wrong, though it’s not. “Visceral” seems better. It’s a word that definitely marks these poems.

I will be reading more Wright soon.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie a week in early...

ourcenturyofugh — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 22:45:00 -0500

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

a week in early November

Alternate Title: Everything Is Terrifying, So Here’s a Fantasy

This book was a lot of fun. I bought it for my niece. It’s a story about censorship and free speech and the ineffectiveness of binary thinking. I liked that as opposed to a lot of books about free speech pitched to children, this one acknowledged that there’s downsides to letting people just run their mouths off all the time.

I liked how imaginative and concise the novel was. Rushdie packs in a lot of references and tricks in a short time. He also plays around with Joseph Cambell and rather bare archetypical characterization. The characters recede into the background––it’s the symbols that are the stars here. However, there are some inventive fantasy elements and the emphasis on illogic was really cool.

This all comes from a rather painful place. Rushdie wrote this for his son following the fallout from The Satanic Verses. The retreat from reality and downplaying of inventive plotting and characters seem like a conscious decision to move away from the fear and anxiety his last book led to. It reads as a father explaining a terrifying situation to a son who is too young to understand. This adds an urgency to the book, though that seems rather callous to type.

Hip Logic by Terrance Hayes 2 days in early Nov Alternate...

ourcenturyofugh — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 22:35:00 -0500

Hip Logic by Terrance Hayes

2 days in early Nov

Alternate Title: Word Games & the ’80s

I went into this book expecting to like it more than I did. The first section had some interesting poems, but mostly felt a little flat. Hayes’s poetry is deliberate and moderately paced, but holds that in tension with visceral imagery and his emotional and social concerns. However, the first couple of sections seem a little too measured and stuffy. There’s an overly self-conscious attention to form that I find off-putting. The second section especially seems more interested formal fussiness than with connecting with the reader.

However, the third and fifth sections of the book contain poems that are both formally well composed and emotionally engaging. The pop-culture references get less lead-footed and the concepts become more interesting. These are the poems that show where his work would go in his great next book. There’s the acute attention to line composition formal structure that obsessed the earlier parts of the book, but these are put more into the service of engagingly written poems. The book, at times, seems to play it a little safe, but there are some really good, really well written poems here.

The American Wax Museum by Jed Rasula early October-early...

ourcenturyofugh — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 22:24:00 -0500

The American Wax Museum by Jed Rasula

early October-early November

Alternate Title: You’re Doing It Wrong

Has this book changed my life? I don’t know. But it came pretty damn near it. Rasula focuses on modern poetry, anthologies, and museums to figure out what’s going on with poetry. His ideas are pretty intricate and they only come together fully near the end. I’m still not sure if I understood even half of it.

The book mainly focuses on the generations immediately following the Modernists (though never really mentioning the Objectivist poets). He claims that as poetry in America became tied to the academy (and New Criticism) that it became regressive and uninterested in real talk of poetics or formal innovation. It became a controllable commodity, an organ for disseminating cultural norms and not a voice for questioning them.

Anthologies, like museums, act as a way to declare a narrative out of fragments––a national “representative” story out of non-representative (what anthology isn’t looking for the “best” or most “exceptional” work?) parts. Anthologies became all rage in canon formation in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Rasula interprets this as a fight to define what the future of American poetry would become: the poets yearning for a pre-Eliot world, or those who push invention. Except, a lot of the ideas and even people from the Beats and Language Poetry groups become part of the national infrastructure. Nothing cannot be absorbed. Ginsberg becomes Lowell’s Life Studies.

One of the most interesting of his arguments is that the Romantic myth of the frail poet begins dominating such academic poetry stars as Lowell, Plath, and Berryman because that makes poets easier to control. It seems to make sense, except when you think of them as real people with real illnesses. Rasula views them as the casualties of society’s ideological war.

Another interesting section is where Rasula looks early American poetry anthologies. They included songs, good poetry, bad poetry, and other, basically random things. That’s what representative means. It’s not about putting the best poems together, it’s about showing the breath of American skill and concerns. Of course, this, too, is an agenda, but an admirable one, maybe.

Exit Island by Terri Witek Oct 25-26 Alternate Title: Message In...

ourcenturyofugh — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 18:33:00 -0500

Exit Island by Terri Witek

Oct 25-26

Alternate Title: Message In a Bottle

Reread. This book takes poetic elements and narrative concepts Witek introduced in her last book, The Shipwreck Dress, and confidently stretches them in new and fascinating directions as well adding more obvert interest in finding new physical forms for the poem. The experimentation of the book serves the fractured narrative which revolves around (and at times updates) the myth of Ariadne, Fernando Pessoa, and a sailor cult dedicated to bottles.

I’ve met Witek a couple of times. She is very cool. So is her work. I couldn’t put the book down. I feel like it expands what a poem is a little bit and that’s always a good thing. It takes chances and succeeds admirably. The narrative circles and wanders, brings in new elements, floats characters to unexpected places and states––each poem acts like its own narrative island. Witek weaves reoccurring images and linguistic concerns in a way that accurately depict a mind set adrift, in crisis).

I think the thing that really strikes me is how fearless and confident this book is. I’ve enjoyed Witek’s earlier work, but this book is more ambitious with its mixture of her career-long interests in ekphrasis, formalism, experimentation, and mythology. It takes these elements and binds them seamlessly to a narrative about love and art and loneliness and it is great to behold.

Six Characters In Search Of an Author by Luigi Pirandello Oct...

ourcenturyofugh — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 01:13:00 -0400

Six Characters In Search Of an Author by Luigi Pirandello

Oct 21-3

Alternate Title: Baby, I’m For Real

I read this for the undergrad class I assist. I’d wanted to read it since high school, but I just never put in the effort to find it. But now I’ve read it. And guess what, I liked it. No surprises.

I spent my high school years hiding in plays. I did theatre a little bit in college, but I mostly stayed away from it, focused on other, smaller scale pursuits. My time focusing on theatre coincided with four years where I was desperately lonely and sad. Most of my memories of theatre in high school are of me sitting somewhere alone and brooding. However, the people who are closest to me are still some of those same people I spent many hours with in rehearsal. What I’m getting at is that this play made me miss being involved in theatre. It made me feel a small ache. It made me wish I were still involved with theatre. Maybe it’s because I read so many plays in high school with an intention to perform them, but I can’t read a play without thinking about wich role I would/could play (the producer if you’re interested). So beyond however I felt about the play while reading it, there was this other emotional dimension that is an individual part of my response to the work.

I’ve got a soft spot for works that play around with genre conventions. Maybe that soft spot is caused, in part, by the fact that stuff like this makes you feel smart because you have to know a lot about stuff. Whatever, I like to think about things a lot. It makes you think about the nature of identity and reality and artifice and successfully makes you feel sad for every fictional character.

The play-within-a-play is well defined through its use of melodramatic tropes, but it remains, to an extent, elusive and unfinished in an appealing way. Pirandello approaches the material in a way that makes the fantastical plot seem completely rooted in reality. I never felt that the play couldn’t support the strangeness it introduced. Part of this is accomplished through the intense, fixed nature of the titular characters.

The Game of Boxes by Catherine Barnett Oct. 9-16 Alternate...

ourcenturyofugh — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 19:01:00 -0400

The Game of Boxes by Catherine Barnett

Oct. 9-16

Alternate Title: Watching Ghosts with My Son in the City

Most of these poems are about the compromises we make for comfort in the “modern world.” There’s an economy to Barnett’s work—an economy of diction, image, and line. This economy can both superficially obscure and highlight the often inventive jumps in logic found in the poems. It’s like this: I was reading some of these poems on the bus and I was like “these are pretty good”—completely missing some of the more interesting flights because the poems seem outwardly modest. Rereading them, I was impressed by these overlooked elements as well as with the obvious craft used in their creation.

The book is seperated into three parts. The first includes many poems called “Chorus” that deals with a collective of tumbleweed children concerned with the, at times amorphous, entity “the mothers.” These poems are sad and desperate. This section is the only one to feature clunker like “Prima Materia” (which seems rather stock in image and execution).

The second section is made up of solely of the long “Sweet Double Talk-Talk.” This poem is erotic, but mostly dealing in the before and after of sex. It’s more concerned with the emotional oscillation surrounding sexual relationships. It is an extremely successful poem. It may give you a boner and then immediately make that boner sad.

The last section returns to and focuses on the aspects of motherhood and city life that appeared in the first section. It’s the shortest section, seems almost like a postscript. I enjoyed all the poems in this section. They do seem, like the title of the section implies, to interact most directly with the outward aspects of “The Modern Period.” I’m curious as to why some of the poems in the first section that seem to share a speaker with the third are not included in this latter section.

I mean, I’ve written all of this, and I liked it, but I’m honestly left wanting after the momentary pleasure of the poems leaves me—except for the poems below.

Favorite poems: “Inventory ii,” “The Game of Boxes,” “Chorus [So who mothers the mothers],” and “Sweet Double Talk-Talk.”

Action, Figure by Frank Hinton mid September Alternate...

ourcenturyofugh — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 03:28:00 -0400

Action, Figure by Frank Hinton

mid September

Alternate Title: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

[Somehow I forgot to blog about this book in my mad dash of blogging nine other books today. I read it before The Cherry Orchard.]

Action, Figure is the bifurcated story of adult-children roommates Lili and Frank and a unnamed narrator in a possibly post-apocalyptic land.

The book alternates perspectives with its chapters. Lili and the third narrator (dubbed Rapunzel in the chapter headings) are presented in first person, Frank in third. Both Lili and Frank have appeared in other of Hinton’s works, including the very good chapbook I Don’t Respect Female Expression. Knowledge of these stories is mostly unnecessary, though Frank’s gendered identity is vaguely alluded to.

I’m not really sure why the Lili/Frank story is juxtaposed with Rapunzel’s. Yes, the themes of desire/alienation/inability to figure out how the world works are present in both and other little bits pop up in both narratives, but the Rapunzel narrative never comes together in a completely satisfactory way and really throws the low stakes of the Lili/Frank narrative into stark relief. Neither of these narratives can (nor should be made to) stand on their own, but together they seem content to merely gesturing towards true connectedness.

Considering the strange places Hinton has taken the Frank character (not to mention the vaguely meta interplay between the female-writing-as-male author and male-to-female character who shares her/his name) in her short fiction, it’s odd to me that the Lili/Frank story is so banal. However, the flatness of this plane is interesting. The emotionally stunted characters of Lili and Frank become ideas of people like the action figures they play with to desperately stave off adulthood.

Part of this due to the hyper-minimalist prose which reads almost like a pointed parody of the last 30 years of minimalist writing. I find this to be in the benefit of the novel, it guards it from unearned sentiment. The hyperbare style also help the fantasies of the characters (and the very good club scene with Lili) to read as vividly as they do. Hinton lays her story on a level deeper than reality. Or maybe shallower—the inability to distinguish the two seems important to the book. Action, Figure reads like stage directions. This isn’t a city, this isn’t a house, this isn’t a person. This is ritual.

Confusion by Stefan Zweig Late Sept.-Oct. 12 Alternate Title:...

ourcenturyofugh — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 01:48:00 -0400

Confusion by Stefan Zweig

Late Sept.-Oct. 12

Alternate Title: He’s Very Into You, Dogg

Holy crap. This book is great. There’s like two pages worth of plot in the 150 pages of this novel(a), but the rest is a sustained and masterful meditation on the desire of love and knowledge. I read this book exclusively on bus rides to campus. They were very intense bus rides.

The story concerns a young rake, Roland, who’s father sends him to a provincial university because he’s wasting his time on drink and women in Berlin. When he gets there, he falls under the spell of a professor who is a masterful orator. Roland quickly insinuates himself into the professor’s life: he takes a room in the same house, eats with him and his wife, and takes dictation for the professor’s long-awaited master work about Elizabethan drama.

The aging professor is only sometimes able to capture his rhetorical gift. Sometimes he’s too tired to work. Other times he leaves town for days at a time for no reason. Sometimes he is very intimate with Roland, other times overly harsh. The professor’s erratic behavior deeply upsets Roland. The professors emotionally distant younger wife begins to sympathize with him.

Roland slowly becomes involved in a sublimated love triangle that only comes to a head near the end of the book. Zweig handles the depiction of these lonely people with a lot of respect and care. He treats the professor’s climactic confession of love for Roland with a great deal of tenderness and empathy. That section, and the description of the kiss that follows, rivals the sections on Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama in the sheer vigor and sublimity of its prose.

This is such a well written, economic, and interesting novel. I care a great deal for this book.

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov Sept. 30-Oct. 3 Alternate...

ourcenturyofugh — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 01:26:00 -0400

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov

Sept. 30-Oct. 3

Alternate Title: I guess we should maybe do something or whatever.

I’ve read The Cherry Orchard before. This time I read it for the undergraduate class I’m assisting this semester. The first time I read it was during the summer after my sophomore year of college. I remember reading it on a friend’s floor in my sleeping bag. I liked the play. I found parts of it kind of confusing. However, I thought its elliptical nature was beautifully tragic. I was too serious, y’all.

This time I definitely got more out of the work. The Cherry Orchard is very funny. At this point, the dialogue kind of reminds me of Apatow movies, except they always chicken out with real climaxes and resolutions. Boo. There is the structure of a tragedy underneath, but every character is very funny, most in a sad way. What makes these characters (mostly the aristocrats and their close servants/friends) funny is also their tragic flaw: their lack of self-awareness which impedes them from seeing the larger social change happening around them.

It’s impossible to read this play without thinking of the Russian Revolution. Chekhov really tapped into the social fabric of the age. He was, in a way, uniquely positioned. Coming from serfs, he’d become part of the upwardly mobile middle class that was upsetting the equilibrium of Russian culture. The play definitely reflects this point of view.

This is the second translation I’ve read by Paul Schmidt this year. I think this translation is mostly smooth and has a really great quality to the dialogue. However, Schmidt glosses over some of the culturally specific details that make the work richer in order to make the work more accessible.

Candide by Voltaire Sept. 13-17 Alternate Title: You Are Stupid....

ourcenturyofugh — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 01:14:47 -0400

Candide by Voltaire

Sept. 13-17

Alternate Title: You Are Stupid. Here, Let Me Prove It.

How did I get to 23 without reading this? Aren’t you supposed to read it in high school? College at least. But here I am, assisting a world lit class and I’ve never read Candide. It’s a fun book and I’m glad I read it.

Voltaire packs a lot of thought into a very small, fast paced narrative. I think it’s interesting to note that Voltaire doesn’t seem to feel the need to actively dwell on a topic to express it the way almost every other European writer has for the last 120 years.

But that’s not fair. Different times.

Candide is a ridiculous book that revels in its ridiculousness. The preposterousness of the plot makes its barbed attacks sting all the more. I particularly like how he contrasts the native peoples of the Americas with Europeans by riffing on the “noble savage” and the very idea of “civilization.” I also found Voltaire’s comments on the dynamics between power and sex contextually interesting.

The Light the Dead See: Selected Poems by Frank Stanford the end...

ourcenturyofugh — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 01:02:51 -0400

The Light the Dead See: Selected Poems by Frank Stanford

the end of August? the first week of September?

Alternate Title: I sat down. I wrote some poems. I published them. Here is a scary image.

Frank Stanford has become a legend. I’m inclined to believe he didn’t exist. From 22 to 29 he published eight books. His prodigious output was subject to an extreme discipline of vision. Given the small sampling of poems in this collection, Stanford continued to develop and modulate his singular poetic vision until his death.

Stanford’s poetry uses spare diction and made up almost exclusively of declarations. Every line is a new image that bleeds into everything before and after. In this way it is both bone thin and glutted. His poems often have a moment of real terror surrounded by a stuporous mist, like in a dream when someone pulls a gun on you.

There is a ruthless id that flickers through each line of the early poems, the poems of his first two books that I find the most intriguing. His middle poems seem to test new, fractured points of view and compositional techniques until he blows the whole thing up with his epic The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You which is featured in a gripping, rambling excerpt here.

Many of his poems recall the rural South and his childhood. There’s the oddly oppressive cloud of bored mortality that seems to hang around the South. Maybe it’s just the humidity he learned to stitch into his poems like lining. His later poems begin to move away from these subjects and are more subtle, more directly obsessed with death—to the point of invoking it. His steady writing always gives one the impression that the uncanny is right in the corner of your eye. All you have to do is turn your head and not blink.

Standout poems: “The Pump,” “Wind Blowing on a Sick Man,” “The Snake Doctors,” “Blue Yodel of the Desperado,” “The Lies.”

Ride a Cockhorse by Raymond Kennedy mid June-late...

ourcenturyofugh — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 23:09:00 -0400

Ride a Cockhorse by Raymond Kennedy

mid June-late August

Alternate Title: A Long Conversation with a Hideous Woman

Francis Fitzgibbon’s mania is a cockhorse and she is the lady with bells on her feet. One day, the meek widow wakes up and she’s a warrior queen. A leering, barking dervish of lipstick and hair bent on conquering the small bank she works at and then dominating the banking of the North East. In her frenzied state, Frankie sees her victory as preordained, but she also sees enemies plotting at office lunch she’s not a part of.

Though this is ostensibly a comic novel, it’s biggest asset is the jagged, nervous edge given to the plot by the instability of the main character and her cabal of idolizing grotesqueries. In the great opening scene of the novel, Frankie seduces the high school drummajor for the hell of it. She then gets her superior fired and then half-flatters-half-seduces her way into his job. That’s when she calls the news crew to profile her. From there she begins to amass her disciples and to systematically fire anyone who seems suspect in her fevered mind.

While the point of view stays close to Frankie or one of her cohorts, the unfussy prose gains an almost dangerous charge. However, when, near the end of the novel, the point of view becomes more removed, the prose becomes a bit soggy, a bit sentimental. It does seem to make sense that the point of view would shift away from Frankie as her mania dissipates but it doesn’t really make up for the total lack of motion at the end of the novel, especially after the extremely tense and unnerving climax.

There have been some charges of misogyny upon the book’s rerelease. The book is a comic novel and all the characters are exaggerated. However, Frankie’s shrewish daughter comes too close to gross feminist stereotypes to be completely excused by this reasoning. Sometimes, especially near the end, just a thin, stock character. She does serve a purpose as the foil for her mother. Frankie’s sudden physical transformation, increased sexuality, and newfound public prominence, scare her daughter. She becomes enraged and can’t even talk to her mother. This depiction does go beyond stereotype, to some inner-dynamic in the relationship that is never elaborated on. But take how she views her mother, judging her physical looks. One could make the argument that Kennedy is calling out a hypocrisy.

Frankie herself is a more complicated character. She is the personification of unbound, wild-eyed avarice. The novel, from its first scene to the explicit climax, makes sure that the reader knows that Frankie’s mania has roots in sexuality. Is this a clue as to the cause of her sickness? Is it just sexism? As outrageous and terrifying as Frankie is, Kennedy’s descriptions of her always show fascination, not revulsion. Kennedy is transfixed by Frankie as a subject and in the mental hospital (one of the best written scenes in the book) and final scenes he shows such a tenderness towards her that one cannot believe that he meant to ridicule. The relationship between her and her first follower Bruce with its utter care and devotion seems to confirm this. Ride a Cockhorse is a portrait of a demagogue and the importance of Frankie’s womanhood to her as a person naturally leads to its importance in the book. Kennedy handles Frankie as a fragile, sick mind. A false prophet who believes unfailingly. The picture was always small, it was she who got big.

Collected Poems by Donald Justice June 12-August 14 Alternate...

ourcenturyofugh — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 18:47:00 -0400

Collected Poems by Donald Justice

June 12-August 14

Alternate Title: I Told You I Was Old Even When I Was Young and Here Are the Pictures to Prove It

I picked this book up at the library I worked at. Justice and I are both from Florida so I thought why the hell not. Also, I was flipping through it to see if I liked it and ran across a poem (in the first book, I believe) about old men that was really good. Justice seems like he was really into quality control. He produced less than 300 pages of poetry, including unpublished work newly included and some random, incomplete early work. Much of his work is really good to great, though his poems can be a bit mannered for my tastes.

His first book is good, but some of the poems seem to hide their lack of depth in a well developed sense of formalism. He, in later books, sheds the difficult syntax of this book which I thought made the book more fun. This first book resides in the context of the formalist revival of the ’50s and you can really tell.

His second and third books (and the poems published in between) loosen up the rigid formal constraints of his earlier work and show a small influence from the various strands of underground American poetry that were gaining prominence at the time. His experiments with process writing in this middle section of his life are among my favorite of his poems. His second book is my favorite. There are some poems from collected editions between the second and third and third and fourth collections that are worth your time. Justice’s third book is technically better than the two that came before it, but begins to lean on nostalgia and form.

Even from his first book, Justice’s poems are often nostalgic, but final book focuses so heavily on childhood memory that it becomes a bit repetitious. How many poems about piano teachers do you need? However, this last book shows him still at the height of his technical power. This man knows how to write a damn poem. I don’t remember any of the new unpublished works catching my eye.

Let me remember, it’s been a couple of months. There was a poem about a map in the first book, the poem about the old men, the one about Lorca, the chance experiments, the one in his last collection where he says his early work was self-consciously sad. Those are some standouts.

The Stray Dog Cabaret translated by Paul Schmidt one day in...

ourcenturyofugh — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 17:34:00 -0400

The Stray Dog Cabaret translated by Paul Schmidt

one day in April, one day in August

Alternate Title: I Love You, I Hate You, I Am Drunk and the Sun Is a Jerk

This is a book of Russian poets who often mingled at the Stray Dog Cabaret before the Bolshevik Revolution translated by the talented Paul Schmidt. The poets in the book are Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Sergei Esenin. I knew nothing about any of them when I started reading. I am glad that I now know more about them.

I picked the book out because of these things in order: the cover, it’s a New York Review of Books Classic title, and I wanted to know more about Russian poetry. It was a slow day at the library and I wanted something to read. I liked it enough to take home and finish before I left for school.

A lot of these poems are really good. Really potent. I especially like Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, and Alexander Blok. Of course, there’s no way to really talk about these poems as a whole, but there’s a sense of motion in a lot of these poems that I really like. There’s an energy and rhetorical spirit that is really fun to read. Some of these poems are really bitter, some are quiet and sad, some are more experimental in either language or symbolism. The book showcases the wide range of exceptional verse written by these poets.

As a translator, Schmidt seems to go beyond the task of curator. He becomes the primary voice of the text. He fuses poems together, excises a large sections, titles unrelated poems by different poets in a way to make them seem to be in communication with each other. He pushes and pulls the poems in a way that makes them make sense as a whole in way more faithful translations might not. The text as a whole feels like it belongs to Schmidt more than any of the individual authors (even Blok and Tsvetaeva who each have long poems included) because of how full it is of his passion. He makes the anthology a cohesive unit. This book seems like a really good way to get into these poets, despite (or, okay, maybe because) of the liberties that Schmidt sometimes takes.

I don’t have the book, so I can’t really give you a selection of my favorite poems, but the aforementioned long poems are spectacular, as are the poems of Akhmatova (especially the very short ones). I also found Mandelstam’s poems to be very interesting.

Men in Space by Tom McCarthy Sometime in May-June 10 Alternate...

ourcenturyofugh — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 17:04:00 -0400

Men in Space by Tom McCarthy

Sometime in May-June 10

Alternate Title: Eastern European Hanky Panky

I got Men in Space from the library I worked at. I’d heard really good things about McCarthy, so I gave it a read.

This book is well written, if a bit too tightly composed. The book plays with different meanings of space and it’s relation to human experience. Time and space become a flat surface on which to lay characters. Moments and and memories and dreams echo, swirl around each other, intermingle.

The main plot concerns the forgery of a possibly malevolent icon painting and is set against the fall of Communism and the Central European art scene. Characters come into the plot and then take the reader off into his or her own world for a while.

The characterization is obsessive in detail, but the plots seem to be unconnected in any meaningful way beyond “this person knows that person.” Only at the end do you see how the characters that have been spinning around each other since the start of the novel all come together in an elliptical, and mostly unseen, way. In this final scene the structuring of the novel like an icon painting becomes a little too explicit. This is what I meant by “too tightly composed”—there’s no room here. Everything is rigid and strictly bound to the theme.

However, this is a good book. The characters are fun to read about, the prose is first rate, and pacing is good. It’s interesting and thought provoking way. At times the plot takes on a really nice thriller feel, which works as a nice counterpoint to the bohemian vibe of the rest of the novel. The elliptical, flat, fetish-geometrical composition is new and makes for a fascinating structure.