Sunday Poetry Series

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A Hot Minute

by Okla Elliott

-for S.P.

What a strange phrase.
We’ll stop by the bar for a hot minute, you say, or:
Talk with me for a hot minute.
As if what I had to say was so burning
a minute’s explosion would release it all.
Or that the seats at our favorite bar were heated
beyond comfort, guaranteeing a brief stop,
not an elongating evening with a friend’s
friends, whom we can’t stand.
As if time itself suffered a feverish longing.
Or after the bar—as the stop signs
blur by like ambulances—
and I’m facedown on your front lawn,
my eyelids flame-red membranes,
you lean over me, coaxing,
and I paw at your breasts like a blinded bear.


[This poem originally appeared in the International Poetry Review]

Sunday Poetry Series Presents: Andrea Scarpino

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HOVER

by Andrea Scarpino


The research shows that the self can be detached from the body and can live a phantom existence on its own, as in an out-of-body experience, or it can be felt outside of personal space, as in a sense of a presence.

~ Dr. Peter Brugger, quoted in The New York Times


Weeks before you died, you told me you’d been

in the hospital bed when you felt your body rise,

hover near the ceiling lights, heard your name called

again and again. Probably the doctors, I said,

arranged your flowers, get well cards. You shook

your head. You were a scientist, taught me to believe

what could be seen through a microscope lens,

truth in beveled glass. Next day, you seized again.

They’re saying Pasquale, you said as the paramedics

arrived, carried you back to the hospital.

You never spoke your full name, called yourself Pat

instead. I played the scientist, blamed your medication,

seizures, hearing aids. What else could I believe?

Truth like beveled glass: for weeks before you died,

your name was called, your body pulled away.


Andrea Scarpino is the author of the chapbook The Grove Behind (Finishing Line Press). She received an MFA in Creative Writing from The Ohio State University, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is a longtime activist. Her current interests include sijo (an ancient Korean poetic form), elegy, the intersections of art and politics, and the politics of clean water. She currently teaches with the Union Institute and University’s Cohort Ph.D. program in Interdisciplinary Studies and is the West Coast Correspondent for the blog Planet of the Blind. The above poem originally appeared in Prairie Schooner and is included Scarpino’s chapbook, The Grove Behind. It is reprinted here by permission of the author.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: COMMERCIALS?

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Editor’s Note: I will neither say that poetry is a dead nor a dying art. Okay, if you are a dedicated reader of this Saturday Poetry Series, you are able to quote me as saying that today’s is a world in which poetry is nearly as much of a dead language as Latin. Nearly.

There was once a time when poets were revered. Today poets have day jobs. When I read the rich history of poetry in this world, when I hear of the great Ovid, of Shakespeare, of Homer, I wonder what happened? What did Alan Ginsberg do right that the rest of us are doing wrong? How is is that in my life’s fairytale, once upon a time there was a famous poet, and now there is none? Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss aside, save Maya Angelou, what average American reads poetry at all, let alone knows a living, writing poet by name?

What, then, can be done to make poetry viable in the 21st century? What can we learn from other arts that now flourish? Like so much in today’s America, perhaps the answer lies with commercialization.

I make this statement in the wake of Okla Elliot’s profound article, Living in the Dollar-Amount Democracy. The essence of Elliot’s article is that we as consumers can make the world a place we want to live in by speaking in the only language that today’s America understands: money. As consumers, we tell companies that we support or oppose their practices by buying or not buying their products. So if consumerism is our true democracy, if our voices will be heard only in dollars, how does poetry flourish in today’s market?

Levi’s might have an answer for us. With their most recent “Go Forth” campaign, Levi’s is using the poetry of Walt Whitman to sell their product. In its “America” ad, a recording of what some believe to be Whitman’s own voice bellows, reading an excerpt from his poem America, as an artsy black and white film portrays a vision of today’s America. In its “O Pioneers!” ad, a narrator reads an excerpt from Whitman’s poem Pioneers! O Pioneers! (from his famous work, Leaves of Grass), while yet another artsy film shows us images of today’s pioneers – the youth of this country. And while Levi’s jeans are (of course) featured throughout both commercials, in both ads neither the “Go Forth” campaign phrase nor the Levi’s logo are prominently featured until the end, until the art has been given its due spotlight.

I must say, I love poetry getting exposure, in any form. And in both ads I appreciate that the Levis logo flashes only at the end – that the poem is not itself commercialized. I appreciate that art is given its due, that poetry is at the core of this commercial campaign, and that in being used in such a way it is not, in my opinion, being cheapened. At least it is not being cheapened any more than is inherently required for a piece of art to be used to sell a product. And, perhaps most importantly, this campaign is spreading the poetry of Walt Whitman to a whole new generation, a generation which otherwise may never have known him.

I am not saying that the commercialization of poetry is ideal or that in a Utopian society poetry would have to “sell out” to be beloved. I am saying that in a world where money talks, and is often all that can be heard, perhaps we as artists have to adapt and commercialize poetry if we want it to proliferate like any other money-fueled art. Bravo to Levi’s for sharing Walt Whitman with today’s youth. I hope they’re listening.

“Living in the Dollar-Amount Democracy” By Okla Elliott

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Living in the Dollar-Amount Democracy

by Okla Elliott

 

Depending on how cynical we are, we will admit that the US government and American culture as a whole are either mostly or entirely controlled by the heavy influence of corporations. It is no secret that we live in a market economy, and that, as the saying goes, money talks. Considering some alternatives, this is a state of affairs I can begrudgingly support—though, as a so-called ‘market socialist’ or ‘democratic socialist’ (depending on how you define those terms), I believe our system needs massive overhauling. But, in the way of -isms, I prefer (the possibilities of) our form of capitalism to outright fascism or monarchism or any form of communism that has thus far existed, and our multicultural democracy has much praiseworthy about it. I do not, however, mean to suggest that all is well in the state of the republic—not by a far, muffled cry. We have all heard of the dozens of outrages that occur monthly or weekly, to say nothing of the daily atrocities of which we never hear. What I do mean is that there’s hope in America, where there might be none in another society with a different social structure. As America becomes ever more centered around businesses, the methods of voicing our concerns change. It is no longer sufficient just to vote politically. Today, financial votes are the votes that matter most.

Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, and Gore Vidal, among others, have pointed out that there is one party in American politics, the Big Business Party. Corporate interests donate huge sums of money to aid politicians in running for office. Individuals donate money as well, but there is one major difference. Individuals tend to donate to one candidate, while corporations (via PACs, lobbyists, bundlers, etc) make it a habit to donate to both candidates. Why would they do such a thing? We’re supposed to donate money to the candidate we want to win, right? Corporations don’t care who wins so long as the winning candidate owes them a favor; therefore they make both candidates indebted to them (notice, for example, how much Goldman Sachs money went to Obama and McCain in 2008; Obama got much more than McCain, since anyone with half a brainstem and one functioning eyeball knew a Democrat was a shoe-in in ’08, but they gave McCain money too, for just in case). The moral rottenness of this and the question of whether this should even be legal are topics for another day. All we’re currently concerned with is the fact that money plays a major role in the decisions made by our government officials (no matter which party they belong to), and that our government is not entirely (at all?) on the side of small businesses or the common citizenry.

So, why did I say there was hope in such a bleak state of affairs? Because we are free to purchase—and more importantly, free not to purchase—as our hearts and consciences dictate. How many people remember when the supermarkets, which are certainly major corporations, had only one shelf dedicated to organically grown foods? Now there are entire aisles, sometimes multiple aisles, populated with soymilk, vegan cheeses, organic vegetables, and countless other such products. It is not due to kindness and a sense of moral rightness that these corporations have begun harming fewer animals and using fewer toxins in their products (though many well-known problems exist still in the production practices, but every improvement is exactly that, an improvement). These corporations were taught, due to the consistent purchase of such items, that these products would sell. I ask myself: Could we someday see collections of poetry or short stories in the checkout lane? Could we have truly organic foods there? Or clothing produced by workers in third-world countries whose rights were protected just as those of the first-world are?

My point is not that these particular products are somehow better than others (though I personally believe quite strongly that they are), but rather that an engaged demand-side economics can work. Every purchase is a total affirmation of the product purchased. By purchasing any product we are saying that we agree with the methods of production, storage, transport, handling, and sale. Though I harbor hopes that my readers share certain concerns with me, it is ultimately immaterial to my argument what interests they may have. So long as they understand that every purchase is a vote of approval. By purchasing any product ranging from pornographic magazines to McDonald’s burgers to foot powder to books of poetry, the purchaser is saying—and in a language much stronger than words—that she supports the product’s continued production and distribution in the exact ways that product is being produced and distributed. Companies, individual humans, chimpanzees, dogs, and pretty much every organism in existence will be more likely to continue a behavior that is rewarded and will be less likely to continue behavior that is reprimanded. The only reward a purchaser can give manufacturers is a purchase, and the only reprimand—a refusal to buy.

In a (largely) capitalist state like the US, our votes, like everything else, cost money. The aforementioned purchasers of organically grown foods had to pay outrageous prices for these products at first. Now the prices are coming down to a more reasonable level because more people are purchasing them, and it is therefore cost effective to sell more at a lower price. This is also true of hybrid cars, which we see more of every day. The purchase of hybrid cars is more politically charged than ever, considering the current problems in the Middle East. Is it not possible that by reducing our dependency on fossil fuels that we could avoid situations such as the current “war” on terrorism, our continued support of Middle-Eastern military groups, and the eventual need to battle these groups armed with US weapons?

If at first we have to pay extra for a product we believe in, we simply have to tell ourselves that the extra sum is the cost of our vote on this matter. If shopping at a locally owned store or at a farmer’s market is slightly more expensive, or if a small press novel is more expensive than a harlequin romance, then that difference is the cost of the vote. If we want the arts to flourish, then we must support them in the only way our society recognizes, with money. Small presses, art galleries, community theatres, and locally owned businesses of every stripe go under every day in America, and usually not for lack of verbal cheerleading. There are thousands of people who bemoan that loss, but there are too few supporters and too many opportunists who want support without giving any in return. Unless we want to see the total homogenization and commercialization of our culture, then we must, to use the cliché, put our money where our mouths are.

How many nights have I listened as friends and I racked up sizable bar tabs while discussing the sad state of literature or community theatre or what-have-you, and then thought at the end of the night that we could have each subscribed to a literary journal (or three) with the money we’d wasted? Or donated the money to Oxfam? Or to progressive candidates?

Here is an incomplete list of ways we can make our money work for progress in the US and the world:

1)      Invest in green companies.

2)      Buy locally grown food as often as possible, preferably from small farmers.

3)      Refuse to shop at chain stores or to eat at chain restaurants.

4)      Donate to members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which is where the small handful of actually progressive Democrats group together in the House and Senate.

5)      Donate to humanitarian organizations, of which there are many reliable ones, and of which many suffer from constant need of donations.

I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t other ways to effect change—e.g., volunteering time for campaigns or at soup kitchens or with Habitat for Humanity, and of course voting is essential, etc—but I am saying that in the final analysis, money matters so much in every action we take in the current system we have. There is no utility in pretending we don’t live in the society we do. We live in a dollar-amount democracy. We have a freedom and a power that are awesome, but that freedom and power imply a responsibility as well. Our political votes are one way to exercise our will as citizens upon our society, but more powerful, I believe, are our financial votes.

 

[The above piece originally appeared in a different form in Main Street Rag.]

Practical Food for a Practical Future: A Review of Michael M. Bell’s “Farming For Us All.”

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by Liam Hysjulien

Last year Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry—two eminent figures within the environmental and sustainable agricultural movement—wrote that “our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable.” If these authors’ predictions are even remotely correct, the future of food systems in this country is dire. In its current state, the usage of Big Ag practices—heavy reliance on petroleum-based machines, usage of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), accruement of large debt, and the declining median-age of farmers—puts our food systems in a dangerous position. It is easy, when talking to people about a possible future food crisis, to sound overly dramatic about the situation. Still, the weight of current evidence—the continuous erosion of topsoil (a resource as valuable and scarce as potable water), the declining incomes of small farms, and the ever-increasing global population—makes it hard to ignore the warning signs. With a growing awareness towards food production in this country, it seems as if many people are no longer ascribing to a dated Green Revolution adage:  Whatever you want to eat will be available always.

In Michael M. Bell’s book “Farming For Us All”, themes of big agriculture, loss of land, and costs of farming are not merely explored, but seamlessly woven into a story of dedication, community, and the love of farming and the land. Bell orients his book around a series of interviews of members of the sustainable farming organization, Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI). In using the stories and responses of the PFI members, Bell explores how changes in farming practices have moved agriculture away from the romantic (often by people who don’t farm themselves) image of pastoral, green landscapes into a new frontier of monitoring price commodities, heavy machinery, and aggressive undercutting of your neighbor’s acres. It is through the usage of personal narratives that Bell arrives at the crux of his argument: the importance and uniqueness of sustainable farming lies in its dedication towards community and dialogue. The reality of contemporary farming is that community relationships have largely been replaced by the avaricious nature of “treadmill of production” farming.  It is within Bell’s book that we see how members of the PFI use the organization as a means of engaging in dialogues with others and strengthening a sense of self.   Instead of strictly seeing farming within economic terms, PFI members have a more holistic approach towards the idea and practice of farming. For these farmers, being a member of PFI is a process of opening oneself up to feedback, advice and self-reflection. It is through this process that new practices emerge, entrenched ideas become challenged, and cultural ties become forged. It is this need for community that seems to resonate so strongly with our—to use the Weberian term—Protestant Work Ethic. If we are, as some political polls would lead you to believe, moving towards a Libertarian temperament in this country, farming would seem to epitomize those values.  Even so, there is something woefully misleading in idolizing the isolated, rugged individual. We, as a nation, are more than a collection of fearful and jealous capitalists. No money, or land, or crops can fully compete with the need for fellowship, for community, for the importance of dialogue with each other.

It is in this way that Bell sees farming as being a practice that we all can understand. As we seem to be transitioning into a new era of farming, it will become increasingly likely that sustainable farming, community supported agriculture (CSA), and buying direct from the farmer, will become more prevalent.  Unless all predictions are incorrect, the sun seems to be setting on the industrial farming model.  While the future of food and farming in America is impossible to fully predict, it seems that our understanding of food will continue to grow.  In the future, people won’t wander aimlessly through the grocery aisles, being blissfully unaware of where this food came from, how it was grown, and the person who grew it.

Michael Bell’s book offers us insight into both the world and future of sustainable farming. We see how sustainable farming has helped farmers traverse the difficult path from industrial farming into new identities, relationships and perspectives.  Hopefully the seemingly endless year of 2009 will turn out to have helped usher in a new era of reflection in this country.  Instead of valuing individuals who cut tracts of derivatives into complex, meaningless formulas, our support will shift towards the individuals who engage in tangibles—the cutting of wheat, feeding of cattle, the rising of the sun, the feeding of people, the tending of the earth, the growing of knowledge, identities and food. There is a naiveté in this thinking, but sometimes that’s what all of us need.

To learn more about the Practical Farmers of Iowa, visit their website at: http://www.practicalfarmers.org/


Liam Hysjulien is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.  His areas of study are Food Systems Theory, food sustainability, food policies, and urban agricultural projects.

Notes on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666: Part 1

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BOOK REVIEW by Christopher Higgs

(All references are to the First Picador Edition, 2009, trans. Natasha Wimmer)

[Note: This massive book is separated into five parts—not chapters, because, as I understand it, Bolaño intended for them to be published individually as separate books.  My plan is to unpack one part per month here at AIOTB, starting right now.  You will notice that my presentation style is probably more free-form than a traditional review or critique, but will hopefully incorporate both of those elements.]

Part I: The Part About The Critics

Let me begin by establishing some context.  First, I must admit I have until now avoided Bolaño’s work with ferocity because I am skeptical of trends—and Roberto Bolaño is the epitome of literary trendiness.  Critic after critic hails him as the savior of literature.  One looks left, one looks right, and all one sees is a wash of superlatives: brilliant, genius, spellbinder, etc.

“Oh my god, have you read The Savage Detectives?  Oh my god it’s the greatest book ever written!”

“Oh my god, have you read 2666?  Oh my god, it’s the greatest book ever written!”

In fact, to my knowledge no critic has ever said anything negative about Bolaño’s work in any venue, be it digital, print, or conversation.  I’m only halfway kidding, but even so I find the perceived level of unanimity seriously uncomfortable.  It puts me in the position of approaching his work ready – no, eager! – to be the boy who shouts “The emperor has no clothes!”  Obviously, this isn’t the ideal vantage point from which to begin reading a book.

Couple that with my personal affinity for what Gary Lutz calls “a page hugger” versus “a page turner,” which I take to mean a novel that values sentences over stories, and all of a sudden the cards begin to stack up against me reacting positively to 2666.  Yes, I am an aesthete.  (It always feels good to get that out in the open asap so there’ll be no misunderstandings.)  I read for the pleasure of words and word arrangement rather than the pleasure of a good yarn or believable characters.  I read for beauty and spectacle rather than meanings and messages.

With that said, my initial response to 2666 was negative because it seems to work from the opposite assumption: it seems more concerned with telling a story about characters than celebrating language for the sake of language.  By contrast, to offer an example of what I mean, I’ll use Joyce’s Ulysses—which seems appropriate given the comparisons that adorn the back cover of my edition—where the privileging of words, word play, and word arrangements trumps the conveyance of the story.  You can think of it in terms of Jakobsonian dominance: in 2666, story is dominant, while in Ulysses, language is dominant.  For my time and money, I always tend to enjoy a text that is language dominant rather than story dominant.  (For the record, I fully understand the common argument against my position: a work of literature should strive for a balance of both aspects—a position arising from the tenants of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—but I humbly disagree with it.)

Thus, I found the first part of 2666 challenging.  Not because of complexity—there is very little, until the final sixty-some pages—but because of the demand it made on my patience.  With less than five noticeable exceptions, boredom was the predominate emotion I felt as I worked my way through the first hundred pages.  Boredom and longing for something interesting to appear.

What you get in those opening hundred pages is the mundane tale of four academics whose field of focus is the work of an obscure German author named Benno von Archimboldi.  Three of the academics are men and the fourth is a woman with whom all three of the men copulate at one time or another.  And that’s pretty much it for the first hundred pages: the boring lives and sexual tensions of four academics.

The exceptions to the banality are:

*This passage on page 9, which is a poetic anomaly – by which I mean that the majority of the first 100 pages fails to sustain this level of defamiliarized imagery:

“It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like a grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their comprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote.”

*An engaging five-page sentence that begins at the top of page 18 and ends at the bottom of page 22, which rivals any of those beautiful long sentences in Garcia Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch in terms of twists and turns, breath, propulsion, and strangeness.

*This passage on page 40-41, which reminds me of the mathematical, categorical, OCD-like tendencies found in Samuel Beckett’s Watt:

“The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word ‘fate’ used ten times and the word ‘friendship’ twenty-four times. Liz Norton’s name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word ‘Paris’ was said seven times, ‘Madrid’, eight. The word ‘love’ was spoken twice, once by each man. The word ‘horror’ was spoken six times and the word ‘happiness’ once (by Espinoza). The word ‘solution’ was said twelve times. The word ‘solipsism’ once (Pelletier). The word ‘euphemism’ ten times. The word ‘category’, in the singular and plural, nine times. The word ‘structuralism’ once (Pelletier). The term ‘American literature’ three times. The word ‘dinner’ or ‘eating’ or ‘breakfast’ or ‘sandwich’ nineteen times. The word ‘eyes’ or ‘hands’ or ‘hair’ fourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly.”

*Also, there’s an artist who chops off his own hand as a conceptual art performance, which I thought was an interesting and provocative idea.

Aside from those four instances, and maybe the insane scene where two of the critics beat the living shit out of a Pakistani taxi driver (pg. 74), the first hundred pages dragged its slow knuckles across my eyes.

But just as I was on the verge of giving up something very cool happened.  Around page 100 three of the critics go to Mexico in search of Archimboldi, which turns everything around and suddenly the book began to sink its teeth into me.  All of a sudden the sentences began to get stranger.  All of a sudden mystery gets introduced.  Where is Archimboldi?  Who is Archimboldi, really?  Who is Amalfitano?  And what is with the overlap between dreams and reality?

Yes, dreams play a significant role throughout part one, but they seem to really begin to ramp up once the characters get to Mexico.  In fact, I’d argue that dreams threaten to completely replace waking life by the end of this section. (see page 135: “After that moment, reality for Pelletier and Espinoza seemed to tear like paper scenery, and when it was stripped away it revealed what was behind it: a smoking landscape, as if someone, an angel, maybe, was tending hundreds of barbeque pits for a crowd of invisible beings.” – now that’s a freaking badass sentence!)  Characters begin to lose their individuality, seem to become other than themselves, begin to make decisions that are (excuse the pun) uncharacteristic.  I even started to wonder if two of the critics were actually just one person all along, a la Tyler Durden.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder what I would notice about dreams if I were to go back and reread part one?

My hands-down favorite bit in part one is the crazy story Amalfitano tells the three critics from page 120-123, which is maybe worth all the time and energy I put into reading those dull preceding pages.  Won’t spoil it for you, but will share the reaction it engenders from the critics, which pretty much sums up why I loved it:

“I don’t understand a word you’ve said,” said Norton.

“Really I’ve just been talking nonsense,” said Amalfitano.

Brilliant!

So for me, the final sixty pages of 2666 save it from a huge ugly thumbs down.  On one level, I find this terribly annoying: the fact that I had to trudge through 100 pages to get to something interesting.  On the other hand, I recognize my role as an impatient reader: some folks might be willing to give a book 100 pages before giving up on it.  Not me.  In my most generous mood I give a book one page.  If I am not hooked by the end of that page then I set the book aside.  More often than not, I only give a book one paragraph.  By that measure, I would have certainly given up on 2666, which would have been too bad because now that I’m about to enter Part Two: The Part About Amalfitano, it’s finally starting to get good.


Christopher Higgs curates the online arts journal Bright Stupid Confetti, and is a proud member of The Marvin K. Mooney Society.  He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in literature and critical theory at Florida State University, where his research involves theorizing a rhizomatic approach to understanding transnational/transhistorical avant-garde literature.

Sunday Poetry Series Presents: Jason Gray

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CIRCUS CIRCUS


This is the trapeze a dream might make—

Precarious height from which you swing to safety

Or fall into your life, the swollen sea

Of calliope music where no driftnet lays.

Blessed to land on solid ground for once

Instead of sinking deeper into the whirlpool

Where you are phase-shifted to some Middle Europe

With its klaxon angels that scream at you to wake.

Their dissonance overwhelms, like slides

Of all your human failures stacked together.

Try forgetting, and life will send its lions

To ravage the hole you make—so wide,

It is a flaming hoop. See how they leap

Through to the past, that sewer that does not drain?

Photograph what you see to freeze the moments

And watch the way the light betrays

Its very gift by fading. Even the light can’t bear

The repeating, a scratch against the silence, the record

Never getting to where you want it to go,

But always in motion. The Big Top’s shadow stretches

Across the grass and changes every second,

Like a sundial, but you refuse to see it,

Hiding beneath your never-unmade bed.


Jason Gray is the author of Photographing Eden (Ohio UP, 2008), winner of the Hollis Summers Prize, and two chapbooks, How to Paint the Savior Dead (Kent State UP, 2007) and Adam & Eve Go to the Zoo (Dream Horse, 2003). His poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. He co-edits the online journal, Unsplendid.

Book Review: The End of the Circle, by Walter Cummins

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BOOK REVIEW by DUFF BRENNA

Walter Cummins has published more than one hundred short stories in venues such as Kansas Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Confrontation and many, many other journals and magazines. His fourth collection of stories, The End of the Circle, takes place on the run, so to speak, in various places like America and London and Venice and Leiden, the Swiss Alps and Paris and other locations in Europe.

“Oxfords” dips into the lives of Stuart and Winnie and baby Tink; Elaine and Henry and baby Joy. Stuart and Winnie live in Oxford, a tiny farm town in America. They are prosperous and have a very comfortable home. Stuart has a large library that Henry envies. Both Stuart and Henry work at a nearby university, but Stuart is not a teacher. He’s a renowned scholar. A renowned scholar doesn’t need to teach; he does renowned scholar stuff. These contrasting personalities, especially Stuart and Henry, find very little in common. Their wives have babies, Tink and Joy, to help them connect, but Elaine and Winnie would never have formed a friendship otherwise. It’s what the story is about ultimately—connections, how vague and formless and happenstance they are, even those connections between parents and children.  This unlikely foursome never really coalesces. The men are awkward together, having only Stuart’s work to talk about (because he wants to talk, not listen), work which Henry finds only mildly interesting. What Henry notices more than anything other than the renowned scholar’s library is that Stuart can’t stand his son Tink, seems to hate him, actually. We find out the boy was an “accident.”

One day Henry and Stuart are talking and the thread of the conversation leads Henry to think that Stuart is going to explain his aversion to Tink. But instead of an explanation, Stuart wants to discuss Tristram Shandy, and Henry, trying to follow Stuart’s elaborate thesis, ends up “uncertain whether he was in the presence of genius or a bizarre form of madness.” The upshot of Stuart’s problem with his son? He’s a noisy kid, a distraction.  A magnificent mind needs quiet in order to work well. Stuart can’t have a screamer around the house. Too disturbing. Too bothersome. Ultimately, scholarship wins and Stuart leaves Winnie and Tink.

Later, after tragedy strikes Henry and Elaine, the story shifts 20 years into the future and a coincidental meeting in England. A grant has taken Henry to Oxford University. He runs into Stuart who is there doing research. But there’s a large problem for the renowned scholar who needs quiet. His son Tink is there too. Tink is searching for his daddy, who vehemently does not want to be found.

The second story in the collection, “Baggage,” might have been called “The Irritable Traveler.” Or maybe “The Rotten No Good Bastard.” His name is Howard. He’s on a train going from France to Italy. He’s packed into a compartment with five other people of various nationalities. They’re all kind to each other, affable, accommodating; all that is except Howard who decides (capriciously) that he doesn’t like any of his fellow passengers and will not speak for the entire trip no matter what language they use to communicate with him. An old woman in the compartment drops her passport accidently. Howard knows where it is, but he won’t tell her. Let her fret. To hell with her. The passport is found by one of the other passengers and given back to the fretful woman. But Howard’s baggage is on a rack over her head. He sees it is going to fall on her if he doesn’t do something. It is a moment wherein Howard can redeem himself and also spare the old lady from serious harm. Do it, Howard. Come on, man move. You could call this one a cliff-hanger to the last page.

“The Happy Frenchmen” is a story about funny doings. Man. Woman. Love affairs. Let’s get away from it all, darling, away from your wife, away from our colleagues who might rat us out. Let’s go to Italy and call the trip our honeymoon. Sex, good food, wine. And sex and sex, yes lots and lots. Grand idea. Except fate steps in and the couple suddenly have to deal with the man’s dislocated sacroiliac. Sex? What man can have sex when he can hardly get out of bed or dress himself or move other than in a crimped crab sort of way? He’ll find things he doesn’t want to know about his new lover. She’ll be enlightened as well. And there’s that pesky wife waiting back in the States. This story isn’t a belly laugh, but it’s full of irony and knowing chuckles and wise insights into the nature of “lovers” like these two. “Awful Advice,” “Poaching,” and “The End of the Circle” come at the same theme of illicit love in various ways.  All three narratives are little gems and perhaps the most haunting stories in the book.

Other treasures include “Stef,” “What Eamon Did,” “The Beauties of Paris,” and “Missing Venice.” Stef shows us a father visiting his estranged daughter in London. She has a new baby and she’s not married. Her flat is a rundown disgrace. The father has married a younger woman and he doesn’t want to tell her about Stef, but he also wants somehow to connect with his daughter. He is clumsy and awkward. He tells Stef that her baby looks well-behaved. Rapidly, caustically Stef says, “You’ve only seen her for ten seconds.” He asks if the baby gives her problems. With obvious annoyance Stef replies, “She’s a baby, isn’t she.” Then this telling exchange:

“I only meant that some are easier than others.”

“So are some parents.”

And therein hangs a tale of parents and children and everyone going their own way, cutting themselves off from their blood ties and finding how impossible it is to backtrack or start a relationship over. Too many mistakes, heartaches, failures, lapses in caring that turn things so sour nothing can sweeten even an hour when you haven’t been around for years, Daddy. But surprisingly this story concludes on an encouraging note, an ending suggestive of the hopeful possibilities it uncovers.

Carter in “What Eamon Did” is a loner. He saves just enough money at teaching each year to set out for the countryside, living in the woods sometimes, or renting a room when the weather turns bad and he has to. When he stops at a pub for a drink one day some musicians show up to entertain the patrons. One musician who plays a pipe aggressively taunts a man in the audience named Eamon. There is obviously bad blood between them. Carter wants to know what in the world the problem between the two men is. He tries in various ways to find out. By the end of the evening the piper has provoked a fight, not with Eamon, but with Eamon’s overwrought wife. A fight because of something Eamon did, “some crime or sin or stupid error.” Carter knows that the people in town won’t ever let the man forget, not for as long as he lives.

In “The Beauties of Paris” we have another father estranged from his daughter. Her name is Ariel. She has nursed her mother through to a painful death and it is obvious that she, Ariel, is still deeply grieving and angry and emotionally exhausted. The father wants to distract her from her grief by showing her the beauties of Paris. Like the father in “Stef,” he also wants to connect. In an odd way a tentative connection happens when he gets them both lost at night in the middle of a Parisian riot.

“Missing Venice” has David and his son Donny on a train to Venice. David is divorced from Donny’s mother. The fourteen-year-old brat has been making trouble for her. She has remarried and is having another baby and she wants Donny out of her hair, so she guilts David into taking his son on a trip that was originally planned for David and his new wife Virginia.

David and sullen, pissed off Donny meet Maria, a homely woman who doesn’t know when to shut up. She barrages the father and son with her knowledge about Italy and the places the train is passing through. When the three of them reach Venice they can’t find a place to stay, so they end up searching for lodging, wandering the city at night with their cumbersome luggage. It’s very late and very dark and Maria is in an alley crying, David trying to comfort her, Donny standing by angry and bitter at the whole stupid world. When two women and a man they had seen earlier show up and start beating David and Maria, “This is death,” David believes. The sensation of “an absolute emptiness” shudders through him. But finally Donny has somewhere to put his anger. And he does. The result creates one of the most satisfying endings in the entire book.

All of the stories in this latest Cummins’ collection tell us how difficult it is for human beings to really know one another—to really connect—and how unpredictable our futures are. With subtle symbols (trains, unknown streets, crumbling towers to nowhere, dark alleys, claustrophobic hotel rooms) and character insights that only the finest writers have at their command, Cummins reveals another fact over and over: nothing turns out the way you think it will, so don’t create scenarios for your tomorrows. Don’t make inflexible plans, dear traveler—unless you want to hear God laugh.


Duff Brenna is the author of the novels Too Cool (a New York Times Notable Book), The Altar of the Body, and The Book of Mamie (an AWP Best Novel selection).

Toward a Coherent Vision of the 20th Century—Or, Why Jorge Volpi Is My New Favorite Novelist

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Season of Ash

by Jorge Volpi (translated by Alfred MacAdam)

Open Letter / University of Rochester Press

ISBN: 978-1-934824-10-8


Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash is the kind of novel that reminds me why I read novels in the first place, but it’s also the kind that makes me wonder why I bother to write.  Before the end of this review, I am going to try to convince you that Volpi is a genius, that you have to buy this book, and that he’ll end up with the Nobel Prize in Literature if there is any justice in the world (which there might not be…)—but before I attempt all that, you should know who Jorge Volpi is, as he is not yet well-known to North American readers.

Jorge Volpi, born in the internationally tumultuous year of 1968 in Mexico City, has written nine novels, including one other, In Search of Klingsor, that has been translated into English and which has won prizes in Spain and France, as well as Volpi’s native Mexico.  He is one of the founders (along with Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Ángel Palou, et al) of the “Crack Movement” in Mexican literature, a movement attempting to free itself from what its members perceive as the chains of magical realism, hoping to return to the joys found in the work of, for example, Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges.  Volpi studied law at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and holds his PhD in Spanish philology from Universidad de Salamanca in Spain.  He has worked as a lawyer, a political aide, and as a scholar.  The evidence of this political/legal praxis and this scholarly knowledge certainly show up in his work, though never pedantically or gratuitously.  In the world of Spanish-language literature, he is known for his wide-ranging intelligence, the ambition of his work, his intricate plots, and a subtly dark humor.

Okay…that is an inadequate and rushed introduction to the man and his career, now on to an equally inadequate discussion of his marvelous novel.

Season of Ash opens with the infamous 1986 meltdown at Chernobyl.  (So, okay, here I have an admission: I rather disliked the first few paragraphs of the novel—so much so, in fact, I was disappointed I’d agreed to review the book, since I was worried the rest of it would be equally unpleasant.  I mention this for two reasons—to let you know I’m not such a fan of Volpi’s novel that I can’t admit its failings, and to make sure if you pick up a copy of the book, that you force past the first two pages, because after that, while there are occasional lapses of mastery, it borders on perfection.)  Here is Volpi, several pages in, at his lyric finest, personifying the radiation from the reactor’s meltdown as a monster the hopeless Soviet soldiers die trying to fight:

Wind and rain were carrying its humors toward Europe and the Pacific, its dregs were piling up in lakes, and its semen was filtering its way through the geological strata.  The monster was in no hurry.  It was patiently planning its revenge: Every baby born without legs, without a pancreas, every sterile sheep, dying cow, every rusty lung, every malignant tumor, every eaten-away brain would celebrate its revenge.

That wide narrative view—which takes in so much geography, time, and human suffering—is one of the joys throughout the novel.  The various plotlines, however, occasionally focus very closely on certain characters, the POV embedding so deeply into the consciousness of a particular character in the ensemble cast that we forget the novel spans four continents, eight decades, and over a dozen important characters (not to mention such historical figures as Joseph Stalin, Ronald Reagan, and Boris Yeltsin).  Though, now looking over the above excerpt, I see just how intricately Volpi weaves his narrative lines, how flawlessly he modulates his narrative registers; I say this because while I enjoy the excerpt by itself, it loses much (most?) of its power out of context, where we see Soviet soldiers sent to their deaths, ordered to bury the site of the incident with sand, ordered to axe to death all the animals in the region and incinerate them, all the while dying slowly or quickly of radiation poisoning.  We also are worried about the political wellbeing of the scientists involved as we read all this.  And on, and on.

Volpi’s scholarship and knowledge of international law and politics complements his novelistic powers wonderfully.  With only a few well-placed and concisely explained historico-political facts, Volpi creates unimpeachable narrative authority on such wide-ranging topics as Hungarian student movements, the Zairian French dialect, the corruption surrounding IMF funds in Africa, computer technology, mathematics, genetics, war strategy, investment banking, hippie communes in the US during the 60s, abortion procedures, depression, and more.  There seems to be nothing he doesn’t know and nothing he can’t find human tragedy and human comedy in.

This wide of a scope and this many movable parts would likely become a mess in a lesser novelist’s hands.  Volpi has, however, chosen a structure that organizes his materials without constricting them.  The novel is divided into a prelude and three acts, each act containing seven chapters.  The Prelude covers the Chernobyl incident and is set entirely in 1986.  Act I, which covers the years 1929-1985, is not chronologically ordered but rather swims around in time and plotlines, which seems unorganized but is not on closer inspection.  We learn the DNA, so to speak, of the novel in Act I, and the non-linear narrative lends itself to such a huge vision very well.  But had Volpi kept that non-linearity for the entire novel, readers would simply get lost in the wash of time and information.  And so, Act II, which covers the years 1985-1991, is ordered exactly chronologically, with each of its seven chapters covering a single year.  Act III covers 1991-2000 and returns to the non-linear structure, but by this point, we are oriented enough in the world of the novel for this not to be a problem.  And, as you can see, the overall structure of the novel takes us, in its roundabout way, from 1929 to 2000, thus giving the novel an overall sense of progression.

The two novels I was most reminded of while reading Season of Ash were Europe Central, by William T Vollmann, and 2666, by Roberto Bolaño.  Most novels would be reduced to, forgive the pun, ash by such a comparison, but Volpi’s novel not only stands up to these two masterpieces, I daresay it surpasses them.  It shows all the erudition, all the aesthetic sophistication, all the vision of a Europe Central or a 2666, yet it is considerably more readable.  In effect, it accomplishes all they do intellectually and emotionally while also being entertaining.  During the time I carried the book around with me, I was always digging it out my bag on a bus or train, just to get a few pages in; it kept me up past when I should have been asleep; it caused me to ignore invitations to parties (even ones I actually wanted to go to).

Okay…I’ll stop now with the praise.  For those who want a summary, kind of like the ones you get on the back of a book, here is the publisher’s summary from the back of the book:

Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash puts a human face on earth-shaking events of the late twentieth century: the Chernobyl disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Soviet communism and the rise of the Russian oligarchs, the cascading collapsing of developing economies, and the near-miraculous scientific advances of the Human Genome Project. A scientific investigation, a journalistic exposé, a detective novel, and a dark love story, Season of Ash is a thrilling exploration of greed and disillusionment, and a clear-eyed examination of the passions that rule our lives and make history.

So, there you have it.

In the limited space I have, I can’t go into a complete analysis of the translation, but suffice to say that Alfred MacAdam, who has translated many of Latin America’s literary giants (Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and Cortázar), has made a virtuoso performance here (though I do wonder how the Spanish title, No será la Tierra, became Season of Ash—but oddities of title changes happen all the time in translation, so we’ll just have to overlook this).  Translating genius requires itself a certain genius.  He is already well-lauded for his work as a translator, but someone needs to give this man a medal for his current effort.  I hope Volpi’s international reputation coupled with MacAdam’s academic credentials make this book a real contender for the Nobel, which would end the Eurocentrism many (Americans) complain about the prize having had in recent years.  But more importantly, it would celebrate a massive and original talent.

-Okla Elliott

[The above review was originally published, in somewhat different form, in Inside Higher Education.]

“How To” by Aaron Burch

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How To

by Aaron Burch

Remember the myth of looking directly into the sun. The milk cartons cut into a makeshift periscope. Remember your brothers and sisters having to turn away, their eyes too weak. Forget their fall, the push, the fact that that was the last time you saw them. Look up to the sun and ask if your strength is a gift or a curse. Push up, out of your nest, and fly toward it, past the caladrius, feeling for a brief moment a kinship you’ve missed, you’ve thought was gone, you’ve thought wasn’t possible. Feel the heat burn away your outer layer, as if a film had built up over time and you hadn’t even noticed, then tuck and fall. Plummet. Past the caladrius again, past others trying to follow its ascent, and crash into the water. Feel new, cleansed, reborn.

***

Aaron Burch‘s chapbook of short shorts and prose poems, HOW TO TAKE YOURSELF APART, HOW TO MAKE YOURSELF ANEW (from which the above work is taken), is due out in January from PANK. A novella, How to Predict the Weather, is due later in 2010 from Keyhole Books, and he edits HOBART. The work above was originally published in Sleeping Fish and is reprinted by permission of the author.