Relapsing dream,
nest of flowering gold
and my hands at its center.
Blood leaving the face,
old eyes blind from starstaring.
Those aren’t yellow aspens
on the mountain but fireflies
held at call,
waiting for the song
to resume.
(a ‘translation’ / erasure / repair of a Lorca poem…)
And not to feel bad about dying.
Not to take it so personally—
it is only
the force we exert all our lives
to exclude death from our thoughts
that confronts us, when it does arrive,
as the horror of being excluded— . . .
something like that, the Canadian wind
coming in off Lake Erie
rattling the windows, horizontal snow
appearing out of nowhere
across the black highway and fields like billions of white bees.
(Franz Wright, of course…)
The Coldest Winter on Earth by David Dodd Lee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Lee’s work is unerringly visceral, singularly invested on a deep personal level, and always offering a stark, unflinching display for both the speaker-self as well as the reader-observer. Place and memory are often of the most delineated actors in Lee’s books but perhaps never as much so as in this newest collection. Lee seems unafraid of embracing not only the yearning and regret cultivated by the past but the rich, nostalgic confusion that occurs when it’s mirrored and overlapped by the present. Life whirls around Lee’s standing-still speaker as places and people empty out and refill — this is really all that time is as it cruelly steps on. While textually many of these poems appear spare this is another of the brilliant gestures Lee knows so well, and just as a smell can trigger an entire season full of memories Lee’s poems explode and engulf, shrink down to pinpoints with the weight of dark matter. His lines are full of characteristic leaps of association that can comfort or drunkenly go dizzy. There’s always a deft, natural touch to the mechanical bits, the syntax and vocabulary, but Lee’s unique flavor is in a matured, raw patina of breathlessness, anger, lust; artistry without guise, a performance that’s never just putting you on. These poems are as comfortable throwing you against the wall as letting you quietly sink to the bottom of a pond.
There’s good reason why David Dodd Lee remains a staple in the small group of poets I find I can reliably return to when hitting depressingly long dry spells between books that feel like knockouts. One of my flaws as a reader is my susceptibility to taking such spells in dramatic stride, despairing for no good reason that either there just aren’t any books coming out that will genuinely unsettle me or that for some reason poetry has lost some of its destructive and surprising powers to me. Fortunately enough, these things are never true and Lee is a poet that invariably clarifies to me through absurd bouts of self-obfuscation what I personally value in a collection, or put another way, what gets inside of my head and refuses to leave. This kind of reliability is increasingly remarkable to me when over long careers many poets only oscillate in and out of this startlingly complex kind of efficacy.
For lack of a better term, Lee’s ‘staying power’ when included on any shelf has been almost unparalleled in my experience as a reader of poetry over the years. ‘Coldest Winter on Earth’ not only manages not to be an exception to this rule but an admirably achieved high note.
“You will find yourself among people.
There is no help for this
nor should you want it otherwise.
The passages where no one waits are dark
and hard to navigate.
The wet walls touch your shoulders on each side.
When the trees were there I cared that they were there.
And now they are gone, does it matter?
The passages where no one waits go on
and give no promise of an end.
You will find yourself among people,
Faces, clothing, teeth and hair
and words, and many words
When there was life, I said that life was wrong.
What do I say now? You understand?”
-Paul Bowles
*poof*
Making some small edits & sending this one out, so taking it down from here. Also thanks as always to Vince for his helpful and generous comment.
Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Christopher Hayes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Hayes here produces erudition and insight with his hallmark fervor and tenacity that makes his work on MSNBC both so enjoyable as well as so intense. I often marvel at just how refreshing he is as a personality and an intellectual by way of his enthusiasm–he always manages to genuinely be the most passionate person in the room.
His analysis here not only of the recent failures of the pillar institutions of authority and progress in the United States is really only surpassed, to my mind, by his reflections on the core, painful reverberations that follow such failure in the trust of the citizenry. I’d comfortably hazard that his assessment of the kind of near-nihilistic ‘everything-is-broken-ism’ societal milieu will be terribly familiar to every reader.
One can already predict the hostile responses, both pat and substantive, that will surely follow Hayes’ critique of American meritocratic worship, but his conclusions and welcome suggestions are nuanced and deserve to be digested with openness and care. Meritocracy is still, I think Hayes believes, not only a great and admirable thing but the only conclusion of a modern society. His work here only concludes that in its current state it is not only untenable but hostile to any real civilized existence for our or any other society.
Meritocracy must be balanced by a believable sense of equality to begin with, and must be safeguarded by accountability of the most pristine order. To steal Hayes’ own metaphors, we might be well ensuring that the playing field is level, but too often some are sneaking in extra practice before the big game regardless, and the snowball effect inevitably comes to pass that the ‘winners’ can be counted upon to viciously make sure this continues to be the case. Hayes makes a stunningly effective case for the inevitability that also follows the meritocratic drive: it promotes cheating as much as anything else. Thus equality to begin with, thus safeguarding that is as wide-ranging as it is persistent.
The financial climate that looks to have a Wall Street all too eager to do it all again with the comfort of elite safety nets is all that needs to be said of a need for a new brand of accountability and consequence. A meritocracy is only truly such when those that fail are punished. Hayes’ work here recounts in a readable yet delving manner the price our country has paid for ignoring this problematic series of eruptions, and offers a way forward where we might navigate them more effectively. It might be only a first step, but it’s a hell of a good one.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“Dear stranger, dear anger, dear fantasies of justice, please ferry us to
the lake where the stories are clear.”
-from the poem ‘Fist and After, El Cinzano’
Dostoevsky has provided the enduring idea that it is by observing a society’s prisons that one can most richly decide on that society’s progress; many admirable riffs on the moral notion of ‘What you do unto the least…’ appear in some form or another in most cultures.
The most striking effect of Idra Novey’s newest collection is the collage of voices and emotions she collects so austerely, creating what feels like a very considered mode that reflects the prisons she’s contemplating — ‘critiquing’ seems too simplistic a term. The vocabulary of impressions is detached, observational (one might say the speaker here is in an oscillating place of micro-detail as well as macro-culture surveillance). But, also like prisons, very human, personal, charged with memory, and often subdued to an unsettling extent, aware as we are privy to being of just how much emotional blast and ruin must go on beneath surface appearances.
These small but immensely uncomfortable poems overlay reality with Novey’s inward-facing (face against the wall, citizen) imagination; like Bentham’s Panopticon, she seems to always be looking even when not wanting to, trying to. They manage to work at deconstructing the illusions around how we treat one another (and even think about how we treat one another), the circuitous perimeters we all use.
The unadorned tone throughout the book works against the trappings that can sometimes plague more overt social and political critique; the honest core of this to my mind is Novey’s sense of something like guilt or shame, rooted in a complicity any thoughtful citizen must encounter, hopefully often. Along this line the book is always rooted in the speaker’s own memory and emotion; there are brilliant bits of journalistic artifact and even an occasional dip into something like parable, but these to me seem like working extensions rather than the center.
The words ‘spare’ and ‘stark’ repeat often in conversations about this book, and they are apt, but enough emphasis cannot be given to the quiet but vibrant resonance of these poems. Novey has a touch for imagery that feels gracefully violent — like the polished steel curves of a weapon, her tonal gestures feel so fluid and natural they rarely betray the abrupt effects they will often cause — I’m tempted to describe this frequent encounter in the book, ironically, as disarming.
Novey opens the book with a short series titled ‘The Little Prison’, an inspired taking from Vasko Popa’s ‘The Little Box’, in which she jarringly writes:
“Wind a ribbon around the little prison
And pretend you made a gift
Give it to your neighbors
Or your cousins
Clasp your hands
With excitement”
I cannot help but end with Popa’s ending, from ‘Last News About the Little Box’, which feels remarkably appropriate here:
“But not one of the little boxes
Inside the little box in love with herself
Is the last one
Let’s see you find the world now”
‘Exit, Civilian’ is available now from The University of Georgia Press.
Say, its only a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn’t be make-believe
If you believed in me
Desperate as I always feel after finishing a Murakami novel to write up something profound and properly expressive of what his work seems to always so easily do to me, I never have until now. It always feels futile, foolish–I feel like a three-year-old who has seen a supernova; it’s nearly impossible to really articulate what I’ve encountered, yet perhaps a rich, ambivalent sensory befuddlement is all one can hope for in art. I feel this way more than ever after finishing his most recent and hand-achingly thick masterpiece, but here I am nonetheless.
1Q84 feels like quintessential Murakami, full of surreal moments both dazzling and (to this reader, enjoyably) mundane, cats, sadness, loneliness, death, hope, the ethereal and the grubbily all-too-real. Everyone has lost something, and everyone is looking looking looking. I can’t ever get over the strange and deliriously paced tone of this and his other books, a tone that in my experience is some mixture of both the translation process and Murakami’s indelible presence. It feels comfortable but a bit askew, which of course fits into the Murakami Mode almost too perfectly. If I say that the phrases and paragraphs always seem slightly wary and confused, it isn’t a critique of either of those to aspects; rather, I genuinely enjoy the tentative feeling of almost literally every line in the book. There’s a sad but quiet intensity, anxiety hanging over everything, it’s beautiful but off-putting (not unlike the double moons hanging in the sky of this somehow-but-not-exact-alternate 1984 Tokyo, one normal and one smaller, dented, green).
Many people seem to experience (whether they enjoy it or not) the distinct feeling that Murakami bleeds over into their real world somehow, taints them — this is absolutely the case for myself, it’s always been the hallmark to me of fiction that has a special staying power, has an elusive brilliance. I honestly don’t feel like I’ll ever look at the moon again with remembering this book; even moments of transit seem to draw it quickly back to my memory, as the characters here are always traveling in one form or another. I was struck even by stunning little coincidences while reading that seemed to signify that I, too, had somehow been pulled a little into a strange alternate reality, had become a shade of green. While sitting down to write this my cat suddenly became incessantly noisy and playful as if trying absurdly hard to keep my attention elsewhere. While reading what was to me the most intense moment of the most intense chapter near the end of the book, ‘It’s Only A Paper Moon’ sung by a very young Ella Fitzgerald came onto my Pandora station (I hadn’t even ‘Like’ed the song until then), which very honestly unsettled me for a moment. The ‘moon’ connection aside, the song appears throughout the nove as jazz and classical music one more haunt Murakami’s fiction. I had never liked a single jazz song I had ever heard until some of the music in the book sent me searching out of curiosity, and now I cannot get enough. Haunting and infectious perfectly describe this book.
I’ve seen some criticism of the book’s close, that it offers either not enough or too much closure. I suppose I’m too easy to please, to connected to what I feel is the Murakami experience I so much seek out and enjoy. I felt at peace with the ending; it’s heavily bent and untidy, but that’s one thing I love about this book and the rest of his fiction — it’s never tidy, it’s never polished or feels like, once you’re done, that the book will even fit conveniently back onto the bookshelf. I remember when reading Murakami for the first time, Kafka on the Shore, how struck I was by the duality in these surreal iconic characters and their presences–we first see Johnny Walker, a dashing and menacing presence–but then we get…KFC’s Colonel Sanders!? This absurdity, this refusal towards perhaps easier (to write, and to read) gestures and choices. This isn’t what he ‘does’, and it’s why I’ll always come back to his work. It’s unsettling, imperfect, confused, awkward, brilliant and it will sometimes tarry, sometimes disappear without waiting for you.
No one who might have glanced over back in December at a post on my now defunct political blog, Orwell’s Hanky, about the death of Christopher Hitchens, will labor through this review with any misapprehensions regarding objectivity. I’ve grown to become very comfortable in the position that no review (or even, honestly, rather much journalism of any sort) can or should reach for objectivity. I’m ready to concede there are certain benefits to even pretending about it, but I think the cost is too high. More deserving of emphasis here however is the probability that there hasn’t been anything said about the Hitch in his entire writing and intellectual life (other than the fact of his departure) that has been objective.
While the elegance and emotional intensity apparent in the admiring interviews and essays that came in the wake of his death were often a joy to read, and very expected, equally expected were the vitriolic grandstanding of his more ludicrous detractors who rarely seemed aware of the irony that in attempting to so articulately dismantle the man they only proved to miming him, offering unabashed swings like the kind he was so famous for (if ‘Hitchslap’ doesn’t find a place in the vernacular of debate, we’ll have truly proven ourselves unworthy of the namesake) but never with near as much wit or flourish–they consistently, though loudly, missed the mark repeatedly–drunken duelists putting their rapiers right into their own feet before tripping. You honestly felt you could sense that they had been spending the nearly two years of Hitchens’s affliction saving up what they thought were outlandishly lovely barbs, really working and polishing them up, setting them aside as they awaited the grim release from the gate.
The short pieces collected here, many of which appeared originally in Vanity Fair, felt so sadly strange to me. Having spent most of the last several years reading more or less every printed word from the man, I like many had become so used to the aura of him when he was really on stride–and he nearly always was, another one of his feats as an intellectual and rhetorical superhero–while he too occasionally could fall victim to bad puns, Christopher was admirably sickened by cliche, yet the frequent description that he was ‘larger than life’ seems inescapable. The strange and beautiful sadness of this little book–it’s smallness also feels both appropriate and tortuous, a party ending that no one is ready to leave–is that it shows that while Christopher was larger than life, he was never too large so as to become unreal, truly a superman; he was ‘just’ a man, and shares the same ending we all do. While his memoir Hitch-22 to my mind lacked a bit strangely in that it felt slightly too distant (Hitchens declared several times he refused to make it only about himself, and only wrote it in a way where it was always a way to write about other people, events, historic moments), Mortality is intensely personal, acutely present in its body-ness. Christopher writes with a directness and vulnerability that can only be described as ‘brave’, another cliche, and one of the collected, disjointed notes in the book’s final chapter reveal an unsurprising opinion about this brand of ‘courage’: “Brave? Hah! Save it for a fight you can’t run away from.”
The other notes (and the entire collection) also reveal a mind and personality that rejects many of the shallow criticisms one finds against ‘intellectuals’ (i.e., when one encounters it in the wild being used in a pejorative sense)–his scattered, unfinished personal notes referencing Larkin, Symborska, Alan Lightman, Saul Bellow, Proust…aren’t the flippant conversational parries looking to impress party-goers. They’re the fluent, quiet constructions of a brilliant mind looking to do in its literal final chapter what it has done so many times before: using art and literature and beauty and sadness and fear and pain to make some kind of sense of the brutal but pristine reality of a universe found ever uncaring about our human ends, full as they so often are with unfairness, dullness, banality and days each full of a fresh physical agony and humiliation. A strange and painful rash, hands and feet gone numb, cruelly alternating constipation and its opposite–Christopher details these abusive little passport stamps from ‘Tumortown’ as the engine of his mind continues on seemingly unblemished.
Also unsurprising is Christopher’s refusal to give in to the sometimes overwhelming tempations to solipsism or self-pity; he knows and writes the pointlessness of asking ‘Why me?’ to a universe that’d never even be bothered to reply, ‘Why not?’ Particularly cruel, though, seems to be finding himself ‘in the land of the unwell’ just as he felt he was reaching a pleasant plateau in life. He writes, “…I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by the gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I had worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married?”
And, for a man known so well for his booming voice and the mental acrobatics with which he could fuel it, the paragraphs later on detailing his thankfully temporary loss of his voice, as well as the bouts of cloudy, sluggish ‘chemo-brain’ are inescapably afloat on an aching terror of what cancer might steal from him well before it all ended, and are some of the most poignant and starkly personal he ever wrote.
One certainly feels the sadness and quiet rage (however pointless) in these honest moments, and I’m sure to be in vast and good company with those that feel as sad and angry as only his readers can at the robbery of such a mind and personality at such a young age. As famous to his conservative opponents for his mostly liberal, Marxist ideals and (probably most famously) for his iconic anti-theism as he remains to his liberal comrades for his pro-war stances, it remains a wonder and a testament that those that were most ready to disagree with his political and religious views were ready to defend well past his death his charm, his warm and honest friendship, his generosity of time and spirit to the younger generations, and his humanistic principles towards justice and freedom in all its forms. While he’ll most likely always be famous for his atheistic debates and books, it’s very much more important to remember that God was only the biggest of the tyrants on his to-fight list. Christopher was first and foremost a philosophical soldier on the front line against any brand of totalitarianism; well before his illness he was almost famous simply as someone who knew how to live a broad and full life, and he deeply treasured the importance of allowing all people the chance to find their way to do the same. This final, minimal collection is a quiet, nearly stoic meditation of such a personality coming to a close.
The foreward by longtime friend and editor Graydon Carter speaks even more to the warmth and lasting richness of Christopher’s friendship; the afterward by his wife Carol Blue is heartbreaking and hopeful, cherishing and loving without ever being cloying or sentimental. Her words show Christopher the sweet and witty husband, the ‘impossible act to follow’ as much at home as when he took the stage. Blue’s touching voice to end the book is a generous one, and we’re all lucky to find its inclusion here. Her words will make anyone with a pulse weep.
To let myself be victim to another cliche, for many this book will be a look at the man behind the legend; Christopher says that often the mark of a good writer is that their readers always feel directly addressed, almost preternaturally so–here more than ever will this feel true. Christopher was fond of saying he always knew he had been burning the candle at both ends, but ‘had found it gave off a lovely light’–lovely feels like a word both impossibly accurate and lacking. I feel myself becoming far too saccharine for comfort to simply say this book allows what feels like a few last moments with such a singular and bettering light, but it does.
Mortality will be available in early September from Twelve Books.
