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What Proust and the Priests Have To Do with the Poem Saint Genet by George Spencer

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What Proust and the Priests Have To Do with the Poem Saint Genet by George Spencer

 

by Robert Mueller

 

This is a response.  Do not turn off your accelerators.

The constitution of the self is a problem that will never go away, and it will never lack in aspects to explore for those great intense pleasures of sentimental creativity.  These pleasures indwelling such intense study are surely what Marcel Proust’s glorious and breathless enfilade through the lengths and depths of the separate novel Albertine disparue (Albertine Is Gone!) is all about.  It is separate because a part of, that is, a part of the series leading the seeking for, and recovering, lost immense interior spaces of previously unrecorded time.  It is crucial, therefore, not to let George Spencer fool you with his spent jadedness when throwing your way the three “weird friends” of Marcel, “Baron de Charlus, Albertine and / Gilberte”.

The concept of time in this milieu of Mr. Spencer’s attributing is that time, strangely, can never be imagined as pure flow.  It is duration, but made up of a very great number of individual snapshots linked together in a forward-moving process, sometimes looking more and more existential, sometimes not.

Because of the awareness of the self in action, because of the action of the self, time becomes a unity of the diverse relations of an agent moving through a diverse and always changing, always moving world.  The self only lives and moves and breathes insofar as it participates in its affairs.  In other words, our experience is not only defined in terms of what is around us; it takes place, it comes into being, again only so, in actions.  Actions are expressions, specified in awareness, and thusly tooled toward a specified environment of situations, contexts and positions to which the self belongs, and in which it attends to its business.  Time seems to flow continuously, we feel it flow continuously, we even give it its duration.  That is how it seems, but it has its formation in terms of these actions — or perhaps better in analogous actions undertaken as aspects of perception — of a self-constituting time experienced and realized in different moments.  It is this character and this application that render movement but not a continuum.  As we endure through our run of experiences, as we continually move forward, we move from this or that position and significant event to this or that other situation; and the movement keeps coming and going, as we live and breath and act, according to the measure of a sequence of cross-sectioned, clearly understood, very much felt and even intended, incidents and reactions and just plain sheer difficult funks.

The foregoing account pertains, with differences, to what Henri Bergson says about a kind of material existence in Matière et mémoire (PUF, 1939, and Quadrige, 2008; see especially pp. 231-38 and the discussion preceding these pages).  Bergson’s writing also catches Proust’s more thorough and more succinct attention.  Yet the successive “moi” [plural] of Proust are themselves, however deeply enthroned in accounts of perception, of a special breed, and they act in bizarre fashion upon the narrator of Albertine disparue.  As actually living this time of his life, one of overwhelming crisis most tellingly referred to as his douleur, Marcel is unable to link them — the moi followed suddenly by a different moi followed again, in line with contingent circumstances, by another moi — unable to connect and coordinate them within a healthy scope of happy existence, but always must confront the moi, the self at that moment of the narrated process, and never grant the continuous succession itself.  The result, early on after confessing to the shipwreck of Albertine’s departure, a departure of obsessive keeping and glowing attachment extending into the inextricable depths, is breakage, is inconsistent sorting out of meaningful private moments, a dissolution cum distillation of heart-felt movement into scattered and transmogrified separate “moi” each casting independently on this or that shard of floating wreckage.  The successive moi thus play out the duration of the self that is its birthright in the time and space of history, but with each moi migrating along in its own thinly attenuated and estranged itinerary.  This is the crisis and this is its swell of complications.  How it will endure and recover, all this experiencing, becomes the final test and beauty.

In this crisis of Albertine’s leaving, foreseen and instigated by the narrator himself but hardly really anticipated, the sequence of self-image constructions produces the following jumble or jangle of defined, that is named and felt, behaviors: First, as his suffering (la souffrance), now in a state of shock “morally” and being drawn through countless transformations (ses innombrables metamorphoses), all with the result of keeping a fresh open wound (de garder sa souffrance franche), receives a second announcement of Albertine’s departure, that of the moi returning to her room and visiting the objects — the chair, the little piano with its foot pedals — that Albertine was in the habit of using; Next, it is now time, Marcel realizes as he sits in the same chair dreaming, remembering, to notify one of the innumerable chastened moi, this one not yet having received the memo (“qui était ignorant encore du départ d’Albertine et à qui il fallait le notifier”), namely the moi of the day Marcel (as a matter of habit) goes to get his hair trimmed: Next, the sobbing that results necessarily brings to mind the image of a long-time faithful servant, now in retirement, when learning of his master’s passing; Next, it being the case that Marcel has been brooding over all the different selves, or moi, who are involved in the experience of Albertine’s leaving, who in different ways carry snapshots of Albertine’s presence in, as well as absence from, Marcel’s life, there appears the imaginary moi who is in need of, and gets, counseling from an imaginary but unaffected friend, who tells Marcel part of what he needs to hear, that he is acting like a fool (“‘Mais vous êtes fou. . . .’”); Next, receiving Albertine’s letter, receiving and awaiting her doom, as when one who has committed a terrible crime, assuring himself he will get away with it, sees the victim’s name in a summons he receives from the judge (“Je m’étais dit, presque avec une satisfaction de perspicacité dans mon désespoir, comme un assassin qui sait ne pouvoir être découvert mais qui a peur et qui tout d’un coup voit le nom de sa victime écrit en tête d’un dossier chez le juge d’instruction qui l’a fait mander…”) [ellipsis in the source].

Successive moi and memory flavor the intimacy of self-existence, of imagining selves and roles and becoming ever more complexly motivated and ever more driven through and inward in the complexities of one’s pain, one’s douleur — these could be George Spencer’s choices, partly because of his capacity to drop names, to remember and name historical and personal characters, to see with their identities by virtue of a facility simply to be able to reach for it.  But it is more than that, and without the interminable strain.  It is secured route taken in living in full awareness of each phase while playing out the fullness of each possible remembered — and educated — self.

That is why Saint Genet, with all that figures guilt, with all of that grand and fierce perturbation aided by a whimsical kathexis of objects that are certainly “unpious,” comes so comfortably into the mix; that is why these many figures of George Spencer’s remembering enter so easily into the fold of the respective book of poetry (Unpious Pilgrim, Fly By Night Press [a subsidiary of a Gathering of the Tribes], 2011).  Because it is so easy, because Mr. Spencer has learned so fully his object lessons and articulates them so completely as if by second nature and not riddled with guilt gone wild but with an unabashed and unafraid particularity for knowledge of it; and because these connections create such lucid formations in the reflecting and moving phases that the poet touches upon, and lucidly in turn accepts; a severe form of anachronism can emerge, penetrating, in accidental fashion almost, into the everpresent mysteries of that out-endured and outlived time.  That is how the poem Saint Genet begins so easily in midst of the before and the after of disaster, and yet arouses no backlash:

 

How we trudge from Sabrett cart to Sabrett cart all

over Manhattan looking for the best sauerkraut just as

we read through small poetry magazines and

never find the perfect poem. Yet we keep on writing,

heroes bailing out the Titanic, although we know

exactly how many survived and we were not among

them. Regardless we carefully rearrange the books in

that aqueous library. This is the same old story and

I’m trapped in the middle of it. Creature of timid

habit, my head’s full of others’ imaginings like

there’s beauty in vegetables and cuteness in puppies. [end of verse paragraph]

 

Method in casualness and accession in madness of it all, heaped large with understanding, lend themselves to an indwelling confidence of faith.  That is to say, they prepare the speaker for exploring then celebrating a general consecration of the desecrated, as in the likes of Genet’s characters “Divine” and “Darling,” candidates among many others for a kind of selfhood, or in the likes of Marcel’s articulation of the “weird” Albertine, appearing that way not as the reality of her and not for long any reliable image of her, but a burgeoning (for Proust) simulacrum of the self-feeding subjective pathologies that kindle devotion.  So Proust is brought into this poem’s fold, joining a rich, assorted company, in terms, perhaps, of this self-glorying self-devouring, this self-realizing even, overall potent and partial to the look-out and expressing itself (for Proust) in the company of its awesome, mighty and, in the final analysis, self-habituating amour.

Like Genet and like Proust in the hottest pitch of crisis, George Spencer is a tale of good and bad selves.  Thus facetiously, but honestly, he trades experience with a criminal element, looks into those “windows” as well, in all those places wherever they may be:

 

Better to send the kids to a private boarding school

where they will have cold showers and open winter

windows. This is how Genet became a writer.  In jail

he met Divine and Darling and the rest of the gang.

There he learned how prisoners are meant to live, that

flourishes, like rhyme and meter, are a part of life

better left to the jailers, that rules are not for those

who love stable boys and as the practical Ben

Franklin said income exceeds expenses, happiness;

the other way, sadness. Genet stole to fund that

deficit. He knew Franklin lied. The King and his

Lords always needed money and they were happy.

From this came rack-rents and other economic

innovations. [end of verse paragraph]

 

It is all made possible because the speaker of the poem approaches the greatest of crises, a signified “Titanic,” an enunciated historic dive plundered into the here and now, without that batting of eyelashes given to a Cassandran piquancy, or titivated and titrated to a prophetic solemnizing of impending disaster by one who is regretfully not one of its survivors.  The poet of the before and after, of two instances of time at once as if it were perfectly natural, is necessarily both inside of and remote from the absorbing filigree of the unseemly paradox of it.  Time is all one, one way to put it, and perceptions register here, there and everywhere, and it matters, and it keeps on turning, all the time and all the while that it ceases or has ceased to matter.

I could explore the final two stanzas, and the sad restfulness that draws the poem to its close, acting on my belief that Saint Genet represents a major statement.  How this poem emerges out of the sequence, in the clearing and still the softening of a succession of selves, is a further subject for living comprehendingly, for holding to connections wherever and whenever.

A maison de passe, for example, functions as the flip side of the royal court where the pomposity of the speech-making grows in Genet’s political drama Le balcon (The Balcony).  George Spencer’s poem, in its own way and as proof of its title (borrowed of course), likewise illustrates this concern about making holy what is encountered in sometimes less presentable experience.  How can a general concern of this kind mean anything?  And yet it does prove engrossing.  And yet it does carry weight and very much sustains our interest as we readers pass through its casual, imprintable itinerary.

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The Real Deal with Eve Packer by Jeff Grunthaner

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The Real Deal with Eve Packer

 

I can’t escape the thought that the title of Eve Packer’s latest poetry collection, new nails, refers to rusting metal, to the accretion of time gathering over old wounds. I recently had the chance to interview Eve, and she assured me that “nails” was meant in a cosmetic sense. Still, the poems in the book decidedly revolve around the theme of time; and due to the social carnage which they document, it makes sense to think about them as “stabs” at a certain kind of hyper-realism. Eve herself told me as much in an email:

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The Greatest Living Poet Many of You May Not Know, by Tom Savage

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Adonis, Selected Poems, translated by Khaled Mattawa.  Yale University Press, 2010.  400 Pages.

Born in Syria in 1930, Adonis, the pen name of Ali Ahmad Esber, has written more than fifty books of poetry, criticism, and translations in his native Arabic.  He has been nominated for a Nobel Prize.  He has been awared prizes in Syria, Belgium and was elected to the Stephane Mallarme academy in 1983.  His adopted name is the Greek name of the god Tammuz, a deity worshipped in the Levant and Mesopotamia in very ancient, pre-Judaeo-Christian times.  ”Doing away with rhyme altogether and opting for syncopated rhythm patterns, and abrupt syntactical transitions, Adonis offers a revolutionary and anarchic poetry reminiscent of Sufi poets such as Rumi and Western poets such as St. John of the Cross “, according to the introduction here written by Khaled Mattawa, the translator and editor of this volume, a poet himself and professor.

On first reading of his Selected Poems, especially the earlier poems in this volume, Adonis’s work reminds one of the shorter poems of William Blake (without the rhyme) filtered through a surrealistic lens.  It is no accident that, although all of his poetry is written in Arabic, Adonis has lived in France for many years, where several generations of Surrealistic writers have thrived.  Although coming from a culture mostly unknown to us in the West before 9/11, Adonis is a world class poet, one of the greatest now writing anywhere.  In her blurb for this book, Marilyn Hacker gets it right.  Hacker says:”Adonis…is one of the most important contemporary poets and poetic tthinks in any language or contexts.”  Some of us learned of Adonis around 9/11.  Suddenly his poems appeared online and on lampposts in New York City.  His great poem “A Grave For New York” appeared in English translation unfortunately in a volume other than this one.  It’s absence from this Selected is one of the few  weaknesses of this book.  Although written many years before 9/11, “Grave” was considered by some to be predictive of that event in some mysterious way.

Another weaker poem called “Concerto for 11th September 2001 B.C.” appears here, drawing comparison between 2001 AD and B.C., referring to Gilgamesh, among other things.  Was this a substitute for the greater poem for copyright reasons or was the translator a different poet?  I have no way of knowing the answer to this question but it has to be asked or at least mentioned.  Adonis has written thousands of pages of poetry, including a 2,000 page epic called “The Book”.  It also is not excerpted here.  Some explanation for this fact is given in the introduction.  Any reservations about the current volume must be tempered by the knowledge that Adonis assisted Khaled Mattawa in its preparation.  Thus, it comes with Adonis’ seal of approval, so to speak.  That also partially speaks to the question of whether this book is an adequate rendering of poems originally in Arabic into English, something which I, who know no Arabic, am unqualified to investigate or to answer.  My interest in this book primarily was: do the poems work as English language poems?  The answer to that is, unequivocally, that they do, although some of the later poems (written in the author’s seventies) appear to be weaker than those produced in his early and middle years, they are still interesting and some of them probably belong here.  They bring to mind the poems Yeats wrote in his old age, without being equal to them in quality.  Influences such as Whitman and Hopkins suggest themselves in these later works as well.

I also found it interesting that there are so many references in all these poems to language, reading, writing, poetry, words, and such.  This reminds one a bit of the so-called Language Poets in the U.S.A.  but Adonis is definitely not one of them, by any means.  His poems have a warmth, a humanity, a depth related to human experience which Language poetry often lacks and which, in fact, some of it shuns.  One of the best poems in this book is “Body”, an excerpt from a much longer poem called “Singular in the Plural Form.”  This great love poem, “Body” is fifty pages long.  I read it twice and couldn’t put it down either time.  It reminded me of WC Williams’ much shorter “Of Asphodel That Greeny Flower” and as one of the most experimental poems in this book, also of the poems of Charles Olson and Stephane Mallarme.  Here, as in many other poems, Adonis advances his obsession with paradoxes and contradictory statements but always with human warmth.  These are not intellectual exercises.  They come from the “heart.”

There is something ancient and eternal as well as innovative simultaneously in Adonis’ poetry as presented here.  Except for Rumi, Khalil Gibran, and Omar Khayyam, the poetry of the Muslim world is almost unknown to many readers in America.  Jami, one of Persia’s greatest poets, is little known here and impossible to find in modern translation. In this “Selected Poems,” Adonis refers to Arabic poets of the past, all of them unknown here. Why is this so?  Muslim culture was largely ignored here before 9/11.  Now it seems to be exploding everywhere.  This is preferrable to bombs and terrorism, no?  Still, it has taken violence to force us into an awareness of the poetrthe culture, the humanity of many millions of our fellow humans, the believers in the teachings of Mohammed.  Adonis’ poetry contains all of this culture somehow.  It also reminds us of the simplicity American poetry has lost as the academy has turned the writing of poetry into another inscrutable discipline looking for a tenure it will never find.  Adonis has no such problems.  His poems will last as long as poems are read and literate humans survive.

Compared often to Eliot for his apparently comparable influence on Arabic poetry, Adonis’s poetry seems more like that of Whitman or Neruda to me, the latter of whom I also read in translation.  Especially since the death of Allen Ginsberg, the concept of a poet as a seer or sage seems dead in American poetry.  It’s wonderful to realize that in the great Adonis, it is alive and well at least in the Arab world.  We can only hope that it will be reborn here as a result of the translation of Adonis’ great poetry along with so much Muslim literature which is lately becoming available to us.  This includes the fine translations of many Turkish poets by Murat Nemet Nejat.  In point of fact, several Turkish poets, including most significantly Nazim Hikmet have been available to us for a long time.  Is this attributable to the proximity of Turkey to the West?  Who can say?

There is also the case of the superb poet Agha Shahid Ali, the poet from Kashmir, an authority on the Muslim poetic form, the ghazal, as well as a fine poet himself.  Sadly, Ali passed away at 50 from a brain tumor several years ago.  His great book in English called Country Without a Post Office (the title refers to Kashmir itself) is a superb and beautiful book, published in 1996.  Also in recent years we have seen translations of Bosnian Muslim poetry by Ammiel Alcalay.  This Selected Poems of Adonis makes a fine and essential addition to our ever growing familiarity with contemporary poetry from the Muslim world.  To conclude, here are in full Adonis’ poem “This is My Name” in full and the beginning of the superb poem “Body.”

This Is My Name

Erasing all wisdom          this is my fire
No sign has remained –My blood is the sign
This is my beginning
I entered your pool     Earth revolving around me, your organs are a Nile
flowing  We drifted  settled you split through my blood and my waves
traversed your chest,  you melted so that we begin.  Love has forgotten the blade-edge
of night.  Shall I cry out that the flood is coming?  Let’s begin.  A scream
scales the city and the people are mirrors on the march.  When salt crosses over
toward…we’ll meet.  Will you be who you are?
–My love is a wound
My body is a rose on the wound, unpluckable except in death  My body is a bough
That gave away its leaves and lay down to rest…
Is stone the answer?  Does your death, that sleeping master, beguile you?  I have
Halos of craving for your breasts, and for your childlike face, a face like it…You?  I did
not find you
It’s my flame that erases now
I entered your pool  I bear a city under my sorrows
I have what turns the green branches into snakes, and the sun into a black lover
I have
Come closer, wretched of the earth, cover this age with your rags and tears,
cover it with a body seeking its own warmth  The city is arcs of madness
I saw revolution bear its own children    I buried millions of songs and I came
(Are you in my grave?)  Let me touch your hands: Follow me

My time has yet to come, but the graveyard of the world is already here.  I bear
Ashes for all the sultans   Give me your hands  Follow me

Body

1.
The earth is not a wound
But a body —             Can one travel between a wound
And a body?

Can one reside?

Physician, herbalists, magicians, diviners
Readers of the unknown
I am working your secret trade
I become an ostrich = I swallow the embers of shock
and grind the embers of murder

I work your secret trade = I witness the unknown of my state
I pant like someone trying to make home of his exile
I scatter — am diffused — my surfaces spread and I own none of them
My insides reduced, no place in them for me to live

Then in an instant
I dry up                                    I dew
I move away                                      approach
I retreat                             attack
I worship                                     shake off belief
Something separates me from me
How do I show myself in my body?

Adonis, the Silk Road, Civilization, and Oblivion by Patrick Kosiewicz

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Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said) comes from a village between jagged blade of Syrian mountains and liquid blade of Mediterranean Sea. Frankincense and myrrh, seers and generals, caravans and armies, prophets and empires, untouchable priestesses and the Queen of Sheba…All passed through that land of cherries, rock, and olives; a place that knew the Hellenistic flourishing of Ptolemaic Egypt, the silk of a distant, ancient China, the bone-crushing march of the Roman Republic, the fierce expansion of Parthian nomads from the steppe…

Approximately 64 BCE: The Romans annex Syria, and Mesopotamia becomes a warzone. As they battle the Parthians, the Euphrates changes hands like an old rope, and heads and limbs are flung into it.

The Euphrates rages,
daggers rising from its banks,
towers of quaking earth and thunder,
and the waves are fortresses.
I see the dawn, its wings clipped,
and water, its floods sharpened, embracing its spears
-from Stage and Mirrors, 1968

Byzantines came later with God, shining purple silk, and blood. The Caliphs came with God, heaping mounds of spoils from conquest, and blood. Crusaders came with God, swords, hunger, arrows, wine, and blood. God’s original tribe came with walls, siege, and blood.

All the while a man speaks to trees, transcribes the speech of stones, relates to us his conversations with lightning, archives the rains, and sings of the beginning of wind.

It is from this tapestry of Earth and Civilization, Creation and Oblivion, that the poetry of Adonis emerges, surges, heaves. He writes in the Arabic language, but to merely confer upon him the title of “major Arab poet” ignores his truly planetary poetics and the universality, the humanity, in his work. With the elements of nature, humankind builds its world. With the elements of time and language, with variations on the themes of love, beginnings, wounds, and death, Adonis seeks to build Another Alphabet.

Nonetheless, when you read Adonis, you traverse the entire span of Arab poetics: the orality of the Bedouin poets of pre-Islamic times (some of whom spoke in numbers) and their pagan, earthian songs; the supreme prophecy and dynamic textuality of the Qu’ran; poetry and philosophy’s rebellion against jurisprudence and theology; Arab poetry’s absorption of the seismic shocks of modernity. All these can be found in a single poem, sometimes even a single line, of Adonis.

Damascus. Florence. Yemen. Paris. Kufa. New York.
The netherworld of the blind poet Al-Ma’ari exploding with visions.
Cadmus. Euclid. Nero. Solomon. Nietzsche. Tamerlane. Plato. Apollinaire. Dante. The Antichrist.
(Some of the places and inhabitants of his vast poetic terrain.)

Surrealism. Nihilism. Feminism. Masochism. Criticism. Heroism. Orgasm. Romanticism. Sufism.
All these pulse through his work.

Many call him infidel. Apostate. He would never admit to being a mystic. His vision takes him beyond most understandings of belief. He cannot even utter the word. He forgot it upon being buried in the Divine’s cosmic dust, upon nakedly touching the Ultimate, upon learning its language. He is among those blessed, damned, to only have language as a home.

Recommended reading:
(in English)
Selected Poems, Yale University Press
An Introduction to Arab Poetics, Saqi Books
Sufism and Surrealism, Saqi Books
(in Arabic)
Musiqa Al-Hut Al-Azraq, Dar al-Adab
Al-Muhit Al-Aswad, Al-Saqi

Generation Restoration

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Sunset Park by Paul Auster (Henry Holt: 2010)

 

As ever, Paul Auster remains heavily indebted to indirect discourse; he favors a style that views his characters at arms’ length, a narration that concentrates more on their inner lives than on their outward actions. His most recent novel, Sunset Park, opens with a description of the occupation and preoccupations of Miles Heller: “For almost a year now, he has been taking photographs of abandoned things.” Miles’ job is to clean out houses abandoned by those who have either defaulted on their loans or in some other way found continued residence impossible. The result of Auster’s distance from Miles’ direct speech and actions translates into a kind of underwater feel which is fitting since Miles as well as every other member of Sunset Park’s ensemble cast is struggling against powerful currents.

 

On the surface, Miles’ predicament appears to be somewhat self-created. Stopping home while still in college, he overhears his father arguing with his step-mother, a fervid conversation in which they shred Miles’ behavior and personality; scorched, he leaves them a note claiming he will be visiting his mother in California, and then he sets off on a private journey refusing to contact any of his parents for seven plus years. Moving from place to place, working odd jobs, he suffers from more than his parents’ supposed disapproval. Miles has never revealed to anyone, including the girlfriend he truly loves, that he believes he is responsible for his step-brother’s death; arguing, Miles had pushed his brother into the street just before a speeding car turned the corner.

 

Yet an interpretation of Miles’ troubles as self-made becomes questionable upon closer inspection of his parents. Miles’ troubles have certainly and inevitably spread to Morris Heller and Mary-Lee Swann, each of whom feels a strong sense of guilt regarding him. This guilt is then complicated by more routine middle-aged discord and disorder caused by general conditions as well as the characters’ own human blunders. Morris is finding the financial downturn greatly challenging within his world of book publishing just as his second marriage enters rough terrain due to his wife’s discovery of a sexual indiscretion on his part. Similarly, Mary-Lee Swann, an actress, has just begun a new role as the novel begins; she is playing Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. To add gravitas to her characterization, Mary-Lee has gained weight and this newfound heaviness both reveals and expresses the burden of her unmitigated guilt toward Miles, whom she left in the care of his father while still a baby.

 

Thus, the themes of abandonment, emotional deficit, and collapse evidenced in Miles’ life are further expressed by Auster within the thoughts and circumstances of his parents’ existences. And along with the family Heller, Auster similarly paints the only slightly less-troubled housemates collected by Bing Nathan, leader of a squat in Sunset Park, the Brooklyn neighborhood to which Miles returns. Through this set of younger characters, Auster communicates the angst of an entire generation. Bing seeks to forge “a new reality from the ruins of a failed world” — “tangibility,” his favorite word, articulates the essence of his crusade. A part-time jazz musician, he is sole proprietor of The Hospital for Broken Things, a storefront enterprise to which customers can bring busted typewriters and faulty radios as well as pictures needing frames (from this latter service, the real money is made). When one member of his squat leaves, Bing invites Miles to take her place. Importantly, Bing has been receiving letters from Miles, his on-the-lam childhood friend, then relaying that information to Morris Heller; in this way, he works to restore one more broken thing, the relationship between father and son.

 

Another of the squatters, Alice Bergstrom, is a graduate student writing her thesis, the subject of which is America in the years just after World War II. Meanwhile she works part-time at PEN (the organization for poets, publishers, essayists, editors, and novelists) on its “Freedom to Write” program. Meanwhile, Ellen Brice, who also lives in the house in Sunset Park, is an emerging artist working as a realtor; during the course of the novel she surfaces from dull depression, rediscovering the sensual identity she abandoned years ago in the aftermath of an abortion.

 

Like Miles, then, each member of the squat is involved in some form of reclamation. Yet Auster does not coddle his readers by clearing a path to redemption for each of his characters by novel’s end; in this way he suggests the separate and uncertain fate that awaits each, he gestures toward the possibility of a failure to repossess what has been ruined, discarded or lost. Most expressly, he has made them squatters, an apt metaphor for the instability of their home, their world.

 

A best-selling as well as an award-winning author, Auster nevertheless stumbles upon a few issues of believability in the course of this novel.  (Spoiler alert!) The most jarring arrives near the end when Alice’s computer comes to harm and therefore her dissertation is lost, years of difficult work gone, “disappeared.” I believe most grad students working on a years-long writing project backs up any necessary files on either a disk or a drive. Other aspects of the novel that strain credulity center around the squat itself — wouldn’t the neighbors greet or question the squatters at least once? Within a house requiring continuous repairs, would relations among the residents remain so untangled, so amiable? And don’t marshalls perform evictions rather than police officers? Finally, Miles’ girlfriend, Pilar Sanchez, is too consistently mature and lacks too many of the trappings — schoolmates, for one — of someone her age.

 

Ultimately, these shortcomings cannot dislodge Auster from the psychological edifice he’s chosen to build and occupy in these pages. Ranking among the most accomplished of American writers, Auster is, as we are frequently told these days about certain financial institutions, “too big to fail.” Whether another reader deems this novel one of his more or less successful efforts — and I would side with the latter opinion — Sunset Park nevertheless offers a compelling vision of contemporary America after economic catastrophe and constitutes a well worthwhile, if not grand, reading experience.

 

by Susan Scutti

Exterminating Angel – a look at the posthumous volume of poems Divina is Divina by Jack Wiler ( Cavankerry Press )

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Exterminating Angel   

- a look at the posthumous volume of poems Divina is Divina  by Jack Wiler ( Cavankerry Press )

 

                                                                               steve dalachinsky

 

 

Even at their darkest, most disparate and desperate levels Jack Wiler’s poetry gives us, through their sheer force and honesty, a sense of hope and relief, albeit through a lens sometimes clouded by the immense pain felt through equally intense, personal experiences filtered through what can only be called true black humor in all its shadings. Life itself as Wiler might put it is a comedy of errors that oft times creates real hardships and tragedy, however through this prism of outright nitty gritty despair these poems manage to fill us up rather than drain us, give to us rather than take from us. They never make us flounder or feel confused and due to their uncanny straight-fowardness rarely need decoding. Wiler’s knack is to un-complicate the complicated making us feel uneasy yet relaxed with such forces as death, love, friendship, loyalty, and vermin. He shows us that it’s ok to experiment with one’s own life as long as one is willing to face the ultimate consequences which, in his case, was contracting AIDS and eventually dying from that ravaging disease after a long battle.

I met Jack quite awhile ago and he looked like death warmed over, something he freely admitted. He struggled for many years managed through all adversity to maintain as normal a life as possible. In his case having a straight job as an exterminator ( if one can call that normal ) even being featured in a major t.v. film about rats while all the time pouring out poems and a play about his life and the lives of those around him. Always reminding us that the world is not a safe place and that we could be exterminated at any time… “We found the body about two hundred feet up the ravine…”  “… the Angel of Death… I know he could come visit me at any moment.” Wiler tells us his life … “is priceless…” and that he’s “paid dearly for it.” And I feel by this he means all our lives.

He talks about rotten teeth and about his beloved city New York (even though he’s a Jersey boy). In the title poem Divina is Divina we hear about Divina, the transsexual whose given name is Hector, brought home one day by Jack’s long time companion Johanna, whose given name is Marko, herself a transsexual and a firm presence in this volume… Divina “fading into the world…” dying anonymously, quietly alone, isolated by his/her choices yet never giving them up.  It’s almost an incantatory when Wyler states “Hector is Divina because the flowers bloom / ….because she is /… we are / … the sun is … / Because we die…/ Because / Because” A recurring theme of this book, the choices we make and how they affect us in positive, negative and most assuredly life – altering ways.

 

In a moment of classical near comical despair Jack intones … “O woe! / O horrible patience. / Give me rest or money. Give me spring. / Let the girl at least glance / back one time on this / terrible ride.”

 

And in moments of absolute tenderness, poignancy, pathos and desolation, he states in “Love Poem at the beginning of Summer” … “ This is a love poem about empty places…/This is a love poem for you… / This is a love poem without you in it. / Like every love poem should be. / … a poem that won’t let me forget./ Everything in the world is asking about you. ”  

As seriously as he took his work, Jack made fun of himself and made light of all the heaviness that life brings down upon us and the stupidity of the risks he took that ultimately killed him something you immediately grasp as you read this last will and testament which may make you too, as Jack might put it, only want to live, live, live until you die and as he so succinctly summed it up it what might be called his poetic epitaph: “The Hardest Poem a Man Can Write” :

 

                                 “Here lies Jack

                                   Dumb as a stick

                                   and flat on his back.

                                   Couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.

                                   Now there’s worms in his mouth.

                                   Thought he’d live forever.

                                    Oops he was wrong.       

 

I’m with you all the way on that one Jack.

 

Living inside this book, hearing and watching Wiler wrestle the demons with an almost righteous indignation, is indeed almost like living in that room in Bunuel’s film, The Exterminating Angel, filled with strangers and friends all waiting for who knows what, only to finally discover they are all waiting for the same thing, good ole Mr. Death or some other angel perhaps, to scoop them up, whisk them away or perhaps play poker with. “… The purpose of angels is to help us deal with another life.” while our purpose, for the most part is, “always hungry” to wait “for the master to bring us food ” as we “Watch, listen, taste, smell, eat, breathe, sleep, rise, work.”, the angels or devils always there, always “hungry for conversation.” And these poems are always reminding us how hungry we are. How some of us think we are invincible. How much we need, want, crave, in order to survive until we succumb.

 

This singular in-your-face voice, a voice of reason ultimately too hard to reason with, will be a difficult act to follow and one that will sorely be missed.   

.   

Haywire by Thaddeus Rutkowski (Starcherone Books, 2010)

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Fractal Identity, Hard-Won Peace

by Susan Scutti

“Who am I?” is the central question of Thaddeus Rutkowski’s latest novel, Haywire. This query is posed within the context of race; the narrator, J. Thaddeus, has a mother who is Chinese, a father who is Polish-American and he and his family, which includes a sister and brother, live in the Appalachian region of Pennsylvania. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, being of mixed race in such a locality is striking to say the least. Yet despite the specificity of the narrator’s issue, any reader who is of ambiguous identity in any respect—religion, gender, class—can relate to his struggles.

An exceptional craftsman, Rutkowski constructs his novel with great deliberation and austerity. Each chapter is titled and composed of separate scenes that follow one another intuitively if not always chronologically. His sentences, which most usually offer precise unemotional observation, flow effortlessly from one to the next creating a collage-like effect. His imperceptible plotting is compelling, his prose is unerring. Reading his novel, I did not skip or stumble over a sentence even once… Rutkowski is that clean, that spare.

Divided into three sections, the novel’s first third focuses on the narrator’s childhood. Thaddeus is often derided by his schoolmates who call him, variously, “toad,” “chink,” “weird,” even “faerie.” For the most part he silently endures these slings and arrows, yet at times he is obliged to react. Witnessing his younger sister fighting with a boy who told her she “looked Chinese,” the narrator hits the boy, tells another to back off, and hurries away with her. “When I got home, I poked at my nose until it started to bleed. I stood with my hand over my face until my mother told me to lie down. ‘What do you think happened to him?’ she asked my father. ‘He got sun poisoning,’ my father said. ‘Either that, or he’s a hemophiliac.’ I lay on the sofa and felt blood dripping down my throat.” In this way Rutkowski subtly acknowledges the inevitable undertow of self-loathing and self-destruction which follows a biased attack (no matter the resistance mounted). And this is Rutkowski’s great strength as a novelist; he presents his truths directly and without embellishment and so his psychological knowledge travels unswervingly to its mark: a reader’s heart.

The father, an unnerving and disturbing character, is an artist and a heavy drinker and very much a man who harbors and possibly acts on his pedophile desires. “My father made a series of paintings of my sister. I didn’t see him working on them; I saw only the finished products.… [in one] the back of her nude body was shown. Two careful brushstrokes defined her buttocks…. I didn’t know if my father had worked from memory, from photos, or from life.” Although Thaddeus does not know what the father has or has not done, he does see that the sister begins “to stay away from our house at night.” Boldly, Rutkowski never portrays the father as anything less complicated than all that he is: a faltering artist; a man at odds with himself, with his wife and with his children; a hunter; a rare intellect withering within the stark landscape of Appalachia; an alcoholic; a man inappropriately acting out with his daughter; a nascent environmentalist; and a teacher. Such commanding restraint is another of Rutkowski’s many gifts as a novelist.

The second section of Haywire focuses on the first years away from home and take place at college then grad school. Thaddeus lives off campus with a white roommate and begins to address the complexity of his own identity through self-mockery; he asks if his roommate wants to eat “flied lice” then serves it up to him. Surprisingly, the presence of Asian students on campus fails to ease the narrator’s self-consciousness. Just as he does not fit with Caucasians, he also does not fit with them; more to the point, to date an Asian girl is as interracial an event as dating a Caucasian. Nevertheless, proximity to Asian students provides meaningful context for Thaddeus. “I wanted to join an Asian fraternity…. I didn’t find anything like an Asian fraternity. I did, however, find a math club that had many Asian members. I found a chess club with a similar composition.” Yet it is only when Thaddeus makes a road trip to Mexico that his interior life seems to transform from black & white to Technicolor, even though to a reader it is unclear whether his resurgence is the result of long hours in a car with a real friend or the result of time spent in a third world country. “At times, the rancheros took breaks to drink from a large puddle beside the road… a man arrived on a motorcycle. In the realm of horses, the man on a bike was king.” Rutkowski suggests these “neighbors,” so different from those of his childhood and also different from his own internal polarities, provide Thaddeus with rich and unseen perspective on his own life.

The final section of the novel centers on the narrator’s life after his school years. During this period, Thaddeus quits smoking marijuana through a recovery program; also his escapist interests and sexuality converge into a full-blown fetish (bondage), which he also will eventually dismantle. It’s rare for an American author to portray sexuality non-puritanically; even the most overt sex scenes within American novels are usually shadowed either by an unconvincing amorality or by some form of negative reprisal (read Phillip Roth, for example). By recounting the psychological groundwork of Thaddeus in the childhood scenes, Rutkowski deftly exposes sexual self-expression as simply a fundamental aspect of character. The sister also communicates her wounded identity via sexuality; visiting her brother in his new city apartment, she does not hide her promiscuity, even sleeps with his roommate. In later years, the narrator learns she has become an abused wife and later, after leaving her husband, she devises a life of subservience to a worthless boyfriend. Different yet somehow still an echo, Thaddeus’ brother, the youngest in the family divorces his own wife then moves in with his mother and ultimately attempts to take over her house while she recovers from a stroke in the hospital. All three siblings, then, responding in individual ways to painful childhoods, remain deeply unhappy in the early years of their adulthood.

Rutkowski, though, does not end his novel there; in concise scenes, he shows his narrator meeting a woman he eventually marries; later he becomes a father of a daughter. This transcendent finale to Thaddeus’ life story shows him achieving, against all odds, the ultimate dream: a fulfilled life. And so Rutkowski ends his novel by recording Thaddeus’ actual dreamlife in a final, lyrical chapter titled, “Night Journeys” — a simple yet exquisite conclusion to a masterful character study.

 

 


Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

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Dying Notes of an Ordinary Songbird?

by Susan Scutti  

The most present character of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom is not so much Patty Berglund as her generation and class. Franzen frames Patty in her choices and her choices are distinctly those that were made, as he would have it, by most everybody. In his first chapter, he declares of Patty, “She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.”  He then makes it clear that he’s speaking to a reader who understands all of this because a reader inevitably lived on that same street; his reader is you and you are middle-class gentrification, no matter who you actually are or what city or town you come from. “The collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else’s children’s sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it.” Eventually, he concludes, “For all queries, Patty Berglund was a resource, a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee.”

And with these words we’ve backed out of the drive and begun our trip with this sunny carrier of  sociocultural pollen. Despite my suspicions that Franzen has created his Everywoman the way  Dr. Frankenstein might, stitching together disparate parts to resonate with each segment of his reading public — she’s originally from New York and now living in St. Paul, she’s half WASP,  half Jewish, her original family was upper middle class yet she married a lower middle class guy, she’s the oldest of four and formerly played sports in college, and now she’s the stay-at-home mom of a daughter who is bright and normal and a son who is exceptional — despite the fact that Franzen labors to hit every single key on his piano, I can’t help but to enjoy and appreciate Patty Berglund. Franzen, after all, is a terrific writer, nimble in his plotting, succinct yet thorough in his characterizations, relentlessly topical and usually fun. Franzen has an unerring instinct for the juice of neighborly relations; describing Patty’s rise and inevitable fall, he stops inside a jealous neighbor’s house so a reader can overhear another woman cut Patty to pieces. Best of all, he repeatedly flogs her for the root trait of her eventual demise: Patty is and always has been competitive and at times she’s inept at hiding that fact. Within the lock-step conformity of the middle class, what could possibly be more damning than this? For that jagged truth alone,  Franzen must be appreciated.

Quoting Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in his epigraph, Franzen foreshadows the adultery at the heart of his own winter’s tale, which presumably is the dying season of American empire. Walter, Patty’s husband, is the environmentally-aware guy who rides to an office job weekday mornings on a bike. Around the time his wife flips out over their son’s affair with the slightly older lower-class girl next door, Walter begins to distance himself from his family by becoming more involved in green politics. Soon he’s shuttling back and forth to Washington D.C. and eventually he accepts a position with a private trust protecting the cerulean warbler, a native American songbird which is rapidly disappearing due to removal of mature hardwood forests as well as the presence of household cats (the cerulean warbler has never evolved proper defenses to this non-native species). After Joey has moved in with his girlfriend’s family, after a distraught Patty has consummated then ended her brief affair with Walter’s former-college-roommate, the Berglund family, minus Joey, sets up house in a Georgetown mansion that doubles as headquarters for the Cerulean Mountain Trust.

With his assistant Lalitha, Walter visits his former roommate, Richard Katz, now a cultish rocker — the songs he wrote after the demise of his affair with Patty have catapulted him to fame. Unaware of his wife’s infidelity and hoping Richard will lend celebrity to his own cause, Walter explains his vision of creating a cerulean warbler preserve in West Virginia by first permitting coal extraction via mountain top removal. Walter believes that reclamation following mountain top removal (MTR) will mitigate much of the damage — what’s best about it is the preserve will be safe as no one will ever rip open the mined-out land again. Walter explains his perspective:

What’s given MTR such a bad name is that most surface-rights owners don’t insist on the right sort of reclamation. Before a coal company can exercise its mineral rights and tear down a mountain, it has to put up a bond that doesn’t get refunded until the land’s been restored. And the problem is, these owners keep settling for these barren, flat, subsidence-prone pastures, in the hope that some developer will come along and build luxury condos on them, in spite of their being in the middle of nowhere. The fact is, you can actually get a very lush and biodiverse forest if you do the reclamation right. … But the environmental mainstream doesn’t want to talk about doing things right, because doing things right would make the coal companies look less villainous and MTR more palatable politically.

Walter outlines his understanding of this confluence of finance, government, corporate interests, private investment and environmental cause then explains that this is merely a preliminary before he tackles the real problem: low-density development, fragmentation, and over-population. Reading the ins and outs of what is, for the well-intentioned Walter, an acceptable solution, glimpsing the compromise and deal-making and taint behind simple preservation of land for an endangered species is enough to smog a reader’s mind for days. Unfortunately, it stinks of the truth and this is Franzen’s horrifying point; this is where it’s at in America now, bloated bureaucracy and innumerable interest groups mean absolutely nothing is simple (or sacred). To create his preserve, Walter ends up making a deal so that displaced homeowners will be given jobs at a factory run by LBI, the oilfield services giant and government contractor that manufactures body armor and also happens to employ Walter’s son, Joey. Father and son, then, are caught in the same web… what will they do? 

Despite the urgency of this environmental plot-line, the lifeblood of Franzen’s novel is Patty’s marriage to Walter. Gracefully, compellingly, Franzen offers a reader his understanding of the crucial psychological underpinnings of their marriage, the emotional counterpoint that creates both consonance and discord: Patty’s high school rape, and Walter’s drunk father’s cruelty. Raped by Ethan Post, the son of wealthy friends of her parents, Patty feels abandoned by her parents. A pragmatic lawyer, her father outlines what he believes will be her humiliation, not her rapist’s: “Patty, the people at the party were all friends of his. They’re going to say they saw you get drunk and be aggressive with him. They’ll say you were behind a shed that wasn’t more than thirty feet from the pool, and they didn’t hear anything untoward.” Disappointed, hurt, Patty notes, “You’re not on my side, are you.” After rape and lack of justice, Patty becomes “a real player, not just talent” on the basketball court, a girl who is “no longer on speaking terms with physical pain.”

Her husband’s childhood has been sculpted by a drunk father who favors his first-born son while doing his ample best to beat down his book-loving son, Walter; one of the father’s favored tactics is to demand Walter perform the most humiliating chores at the family-run motel. In order to support his family in his father’s demise, Walter gives up his dream of becoming a filmmaker so that he can work extra jobs while attending law school. When Walter, a natural caretaker, meets the needy Patty, he falls in love yet his knowledge of her rape makes him too sensitive, too careful, too respectful in bed and ultimately not as exciting as the more self-aware Katz. Thus Franzen animates these psychological portraits of Patty and Walter who blindly enter the inevitable crisis of mid-life in which Walter will choose between Patty and his assistant, Lalitha, an Indian-American raised in Missouri by engineer parents.

First seen through Katz’s eyes, who describes her merely as an “Indian chick,” Lalitha is the notable exception in more ways than one within this comedy of errors (or Mistakes, as Patty would have it) among the middle class. I can’t argue with Franzen’s understanding of the separate fate of the one character of color as compared to the other characters. This is his vision after all, and it may very well be the true state of America in the earliest years of the Twenty-First Century. So, too, he may be correct in his understanding of greed as the natural yet unsavory offspring of a union of upper middle class and lower middle class (as embodied by Joey Berglund and Connie Monaghan). I’m not sure his perceptions are unfounded, so much as I fear them; Franzen unfortunately has done his job too well, seduced and implicated his readers too fully, so that seeing the truth played out in fictional form hits too close to home.  

Finally, mention must be given to the title of this novel. Although at first “Freedom” seems both too serious and too sprawling a word for what transpires on these pages, Franzen’s ironic meaning becomes clear by novel’s end. Hemmed in by government, big business, neighbors and the limitations of our own characters, our American freedom is as endangered as that of the cerulean warbler.

 

Ernest Hemingway (A Review of Tao Lin’s Richard Yates)

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Since I have like three venues to publish it in, and I told Tao I needed a galley, I feel obliged to write a review of Tao Lin’s novel, Richard Yates. I don’t think I will ever read anything by Richard Yates. Reading Tao Lin has a way of erasing any literary knowledge one had. I eagerly anticipated this release after reading Eeeee Eee Eeee and Shoplifting from American Apparel. He sold shares in this novel to publish it and not have to work at a vegan restaurant while he was writing it.

Richard Yates

I feel not conscious enough of how I’m mimicking Tao Lin’s Style. Tao Lin’s Style is infectious and hypnotic. Writing about Tao Lin in Tao Lin’s style, as The Observer, or rather Christian Lorentzen, did, is hard to resist. I think the Observer was lazy. I approve of that laziness. Of course, as with Hemingway, another “bad” writer whose parody comes easy, and whom Tao Lin namechecks as much as Yates, and includes in the index, the style slips in anyway. While reading Tao Lin I find myself becoming much drier and flatter. I lose my obligation to feel strongly about anything, especially about how I feel about anything.

Tao Lin is indeed kind of a hipster writer. He’s easy to hate. I think when people say something is “polarizing” that thing often itself has an intense focus on neutrality. Some of the key phrases to use in a Tao Lin parody are “neutral facial expression” and “I feel neutral” and “said in Gmail Chat”. If you use these phrases you will be immediately parodying Tao Lin, and you don’t need anything else. Everything he writes is autobiography, or so it seems. Everything is exactly as it seems. It’s just one damn thing after another but there are some interesting elisions and refillings of previous story that are perhaps occuring more in Richard Yates.

There are more changes in Richard Yates from his previous style. Someone must have commented on the names of his characters, like how obvious it is that the main character is always Tao Lin but named like Sam or something. So he named the Tao Lin character Haley Joel Osment and the teenage Jersey girl he met on the internet Dakota Fanning. The ages are about right but the great thing about it is you still can’t actually picture the actors as the characters. I now see “Haley Joel Osment” and that represents a Taiwanese-American hipster writer to me. I wonder whether any kind of defamation charges could be brought but it’s too obviously a stunt. I am willing to honestly believe Haley Joel Osment crossed state borders to statutory rape Dakota Fanning, who is variously self-destructive. I do because those are the characters. There’s really a lot of name-dropping in this, which brings up that issue of how much writers have to be literary historians, or just more culturally aware, or whatever.

I’m afraid that it’s almost a homage to the novel’s namesake that Richard Yates has a pretty clear structure and plot, and particularly that it’s about someone simultaneously epitomizing and feeling alienated from contemporary American society. The story is most of the arc of a codependent relationship. In case you don’t know what that is, it’s when someone stays romantically involved because they feel the other person needs them and the other person (who often has some compulsion or addiction the first person enables) does more of that to get more from the first person. Neither person involved is very good and both are very depressed. What I like about depression in Tao Lin is that it’s not necessarily pathological. Halfway through the book I totally thought he’d impregnated her.

At first it seems like he just emotional abuses her and then it turns out Dakota Fanning’s been secretly binging and purging. I don’t think the “spoiler” concept is relevant here. “Haley Joel Osment” comes across as a total dick even though he does sort of know what to do. I like that Tao Lin does that with not-himself. I like the realism about this couple creating their own little world. I want to use the terms “party girl” and “cheese beast” and have someone understand them. I think Tao Lin is a party girl. I am a party girl. It’s easy to say the attitude is immature and neurotic, and I want to shrug that off as harmless and ubiquitous but the impact on “Dakota Fanning” makes it actually more morally conscious than a parody of Tao Lin. But “Shoplifting” already kind of had that underlying moral message. I think a lot of the couple’s professions of need actually sound kind of weird to me because I feel like every time I’ve said anything like that it was very very self-aware.

I don’t know. A lot of what they, and Tao Lin, do say is self-aware, but so dry that there’s no difference. I always feel like the manuscript was written with a lot less capitalization and punctuation, so it’s gone through that transformation already. Tao Lin definitely is being about neutrality in representation as a direction with an impossible goal. That’s too figurative for a Tao Lin parody. I don’t want to tell you what to do with these books but I do think Tao Lin is important to be able to parody.

I wanted to include some quotes from the book but it lost all the highlights I put in before about 2/3 of the way through and I didn’t want to be biased.

Anyway, I guess I like him because he’s familiar. He steals from places near the place where I work, but doesn’t mention stealing from us, which I appreciate. We have a similar social anxiety and detachment, and have our most emotionally intense experiences through internet chatting. He makes me think “I could do that” but this review was my chance to and I don’t think I could, or want to, and neither could that Observer guy.

Just Kids, a Memoir by Patti Smith: “Because of Robert”

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Reviewed by K.A. Sitafalwalla

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Partially a proclamation to the 1970’s, the artists and the derelicts, the rich and poor, the talented and talent-less, “Just Kids” stands as an ode to friendship and love; everything in between. Patti Smith’s memoir is poetic and true with an honesty and straightforwardness that is disguised in her poetry and music. Smith is a sage, a modern day Siddhartha reliving and recounting her experiences with the wisdom only experience and reflection can procure.
Opening the first pages of the stoic purple hardcover book one notices the choice of font, the simplicity of the layout and timelessness of the physicality of a book. The story told is the same: stoic, knowing, and open for a reader to take what he or she needs. The reader finds in the pages a retelling of Patti’s youth, her innocence, drive, ambition and devotion. Although the book is splashed with images of lanky Patti in her 20’s, her voice has slithers of grey and insight. It is as if she had been courting the tale her entire life, rolling it over and over, negotiating, chastising, disbelieving, and when the first words spiraled off her Remington typewriter she finally understood how and why those years of glamorous poverty and community of strangers gave way for the artist within.

We are introduced to young Patti in her home in Chicago and the foundation from which her artistic inclination, intellectual curiosity, and austere simplicity, are rooted. Her father admired the works of Salvador Dali while her mother taught her to kneel down by her bed and pray. Little did Patti, the rebellious punk rocker, know the significance these notions would carry. Years later in the Chelsea Hotel, in the blur of the faceless famous, Dali acknowledged her presence: “You are like a gothic crow.” From Chicago she and her family move to New Jersey; she becomes alienated from the life she was familiar with but this move initiated her bond with literature. Her character deepens, as do her relationships with her siblings; relationships that will keep her grounded and free.

Patti’s steadfast devotion is part of her nature. She never veers too far from poetry, music, or the people whom she loves. Her commitment, inspiration and fortitude are unyielding. Just Kids tells the life and love past of Robert Mapplethorpe. He was a multi faceted artist who showed Patti the life of a true artist. He remains the artist of her life as he continues to be her muse. The memoir fulfills a promise to Mapplethorpe: “Before Robert died, I promised him that I would one day write our story.” The love they shared was unique in that they were kindred spirits, devoted and married to each other by forces beyond explanation. There is a mystical aura to their friendship filled with coincidences and knowing; a kind of trust that comes from beyond the world of matter driven by fate. With their separate artistic visions they complimented each other, challenged each other and depended on each other. They found balance in chaos, a routine of Nescafe, “bad” doughnut shops, and a muse in one another. As a couple they waxed and waned but their foundation for an everlasting friendship had been sealed.

Historical moments – markers in time –ground the story. We hear the artists’ reply to the Son of Sam horrors, the Kent State Massacre, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Smith observes the change in the air, the attitude shift from the peace peddling hippies to the transcendentalist beatnik poets to the defiant, questioning artists who will become the forbearers of Punk and the underground downtown art movement of the early 70’s. The disorder of the changing face of America stood as comrade, instigator, and bystander to Patti and Robert’s own relationship. The reader witnesses their many phases, their hunger and need for each other and mutual understanding of an unyielding bond.

Just Kids is a salute to an uncompromising artistic ethic she and Mapplethorpe pursued. It is a celebration of youth and the peculiar satisfaction of freedom regardless of how many burnt cups of coffee, day old rolls, or second-hand stores one must endure. For it was not a matter of subjectification, it was a matter of being free in New York City, free to board in the Chelsea Hotel, free to sleep in Tompkins Square Park, free to express the vision of the artists’ truth.
Patti Smith’s mythic storytelling might come as a revelation, her references to God and the power of prayer, her religious upbringing, and the faith that embossed her life gave her certain buoyancy –trust in herself and trust in progress: the journey of her life. Her rowdy stage performances of the 70’s and critique of socio-political happenings hardly fit with the geeky bookstore clerk of her youth. Smith shares her excitement in feeling the changed energy in the air when Bob Dylan attended his first Patti Smith performance. She calls it an “initiation,” as if she needed that nod from another poet whom she respected to confirm, validate, and encourage her own artistic quest.

Smith offers an intimate account of a bourgeoning art scene in downtown New York. She is straightforward, honest, and romantic. Her commitment to art is both a dedication and allegiance to the many that inspired her: Rimbaud, Genet, Dubuffet, Piaf; and the many that challenged, protected and collaborated with her: Dylan, Ginsberg, Shepherd, Hamill. But among them all it was Robert Mapplethorpe that taught her to see and practice through the lens of an artist.

I Need That Record Store: Retail as Club Membership

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by Kurt Gottschalk

I first heard about it when I was about 12 — a store where Kiss albums could be procured for about a dollar less than at the mall; a store that, strangely, wasn’t in the mall. It wasn’t far, but it did mean asking my mother to make another trip.

Things seemed different at this new store. It wasn’t as crowded, but people were talking to each other and the guy behind the counter even asked me about what I liked. Before long a relationship had been established — between myself and Danny and John, two of the clerks — but also between myself and the store. I went in every weekend with my $5.86 (almost 25% of the paycheck from my after-school job) and bought what they told me to buy. I might object that things seemed too weird (David Bowie, Devo), but I’d always oblige and ultimately never felt misguided. (On some weeks I’d save a few dollars by perusing the cut-out bin, unknowingly buying into a mob ring by doing so. I didn’t know about that underworld relationship until years later, after reading William Knoedelseder’s highly recommended Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, the Music Business, and the Mafia.)

The difference between the store at the mall and the store down by, well, another shopping plaza became central to my adolescent identity. Danny and John not only crafted my musical development, taking me by the hand and guiding me through art rock and into punk and new wave, but they became the figureheads for what would become my circle of friends in high school. In a small, conservative city in central Illinois, even listening to Elvis Costello or The Clash put one on the outs. Weirdos certainly weren’t heteros (somehow “Devo” even became slang for “gay”). I met other young music obsessives Danny and John had been grooming, and we came to be friends. We taped each other’s records and tried to form bands. The store at the mall no doubt did more business than the one in the plaza. They had all the Top 40 albums on the wall and the latest hits on the sound system. But they weren’t there to have conversations or to tailor recommendations. And they certainly weren’t there to recognize the kids with the burning curiosity and help them along their ways. They were there to move product.

That store at the mall might be something like what Internet record shopping is today. Certainly there are those who would argue that any number of online-community models replicate the brick-and-mortar experience (and in truth my interest here is more in exercising a bit of nostalgia than in proving them wrong). The two worlds are certainly parallel. People who started purchasing recorded music only after the Santana / Matchbox 20 merger have their own ways of learning and acquiring. And they have their ways of begging, borrowing and stealing, if on a larger scale, just as we had ours. (A Buddy Holly cassette held in one hand at JC Penney, a George Jones in the other while the coat is put on, the tapes left midway in the sleeves because I just had to know what they sounded like). But for those who came of age fondling vinyl, the record store was a shrine, a temple for the merchandising of art that cannot be replaced by virtual experience.

I went on to work both sides of the divide, or all three if you count a life spent haunting stores. As a co-founder of the online store Squidco and, currently, a member of the collective operating the ESP Records storefront in Brooklyn, I’ve worked the culture of both Internet and physical stores. Online stores may be more convenient, and are sometimes cheaper, but nothing matches the clubhouse of the actual shop.

That club feeling is a big part of what Gary Calamar and Phil Gallo’s Record Store Days: From Vinyl to Digital (Sterling Publishing) is about. The book is a well deserved glorification of the independently-owned shop, full of photos and stories about record store proprietors. It makes for a bit of a sad celebration: In large part is comes off like being at a wake where no one talks about the cause of death. Avoiding the sad state of record sales until 175 pages in makes the book seem a bit hollow, although the story of the dying industry in the face of Internet file-sharing is discussed and written about so much that it might be just as well. When Calamar and Gallo finally do get to the state of the industry, they handle it succinctly. It’s not an economics textbook, and they do a reasonable job of covering the issue and getting out again. And while the business end of the record business isn’t really the thrust of the book, the authors also include a good and concise discussion of the controversies around Soundscan, the point-of-sale data collection system that replaced the copies-shipped method of charting record sales in the 1990s, causing a major shift in the Billboard charts.

The rest of the colorful volume is full of love letters and mash notes, all torn from the diary of defining cool by commercial means and related by merchants and musicians. Susanna Hoffs remembers naming her band The Bangles so she could be among her favorites in the “B” section. (It’s my favorite section as well, although Hoffs may not have been shopping for Derek Bailey and Anthony Braxton). Robyn Hitchcock reveals the “fetish element” of collecting punk singles for the picture sleeves. And my fellow WFMU DJ Michael Shelley recalls mirroring my JC Penney act, going to the New Rochelle Mall to pocket Nick Lowe and XTC 7”s. (New York clearly had cooler malls than Illinois).

For the most part, the book reads like a bunch of guys hanging out at a record store swapping stories, which in a sense underscores what the local store is all about. A more incisive look at the ins and outs of making and selling records, can be found in the documentary I Need That Record! The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store. Brendan Toller’s film, available on DVD from MVD Visual, is a good history entertainingly told. In 77 minutes, Toller covers the disappearance of local stores and ties that to a corporatization that reaches back to the radio payola scandal of the early 1960s and up to the current day, where Wal-Mart represents 20% of all national record sales.

As succinctly put by Legs McNeil, former editor of both Punk and Spin magazines, “When you’ve got accountants running the record labels, you’re not going to have very good music.” Or, as Glenn Branca says in a boisterous interview, “Criminals, thieves and bastards are attracted to making money.”

As with Record Store Days, I Need That Record does a good job taking a national focus, representing New England to California and the oases in between. Toller is a dynamic storyteller, using cartoon graphics, film and animation clips, and old TV spots (including some vintage MTV) to frame a complicated story where the villains aren’t always apparent and the crimes not completely clear. The case Toller makes against corporate control of distribution of what is, after all, supposed to be art is ultimately quite scathing.

The future of the music industry remains, of course, a gapingly open question. But at least for the generations who didn’t grow up buying and listening to music on a computer, the record-store clubhouse hasn’t been replaced yet. As Rand Foster, proprietor of Long Beach, CA, store Fingerprints, tells Calamar and Gallo, “The important part of retail is the culture you’re selling. It’s the museum element that stimulates people.”