In deference to Independence Day, the New Haven Review has taken this Monday off. It will also take off the Mondays in August, as we know that nearly everyone — well, everyone in publishing, anyway — goes on vacation; and even if they don't, nobody wants to be inside, hunched over a computer, when they could be outside, on the beach, drinking a gin-and-tonic from what is ostensibly a water bottle while three children nearby bury their father up to his neck in the sand. But we will be back next week with more reviews and will resume again, full throttle, in September. Meanwhile, Issue 3 of the New Haven Review, due out in the fall, is shaping up to be a doozy. We have an essay from Jim Knipfel, a piece from Willard Spiegelman (editor of the Southwest Review), an excerpt from Jess Row's new novel, an interview with David Orr, and numerous other essays, poetry, and fiction from people you may not have heard of yet, but will soon. Stay tuned.
Summer Book Group July 2: The Rest is Noise
Just a reminder: The New Haven Review's Summer Book Group at Labyrinth Books continues this Wednesday, July 2, with Tom Gogola leading a discussion of Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise. Quite possibly this discussion will include demonstration, as Tom is an excellent guitar player. Hope to see you there.
Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.
Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Forests
By John Kricher and Roger Tory Peterson, with illustrations by Gordon Morrison (Houghton Mifflin, 1988)
Pity the poor “reference” book — sturdy and uncomplaining, plastic-bound for a dictionary stand or a doctor’s office or, in the case of Peterson Field Guides, a backpack. Need, rather than pleasure, drives us to seek it out. What a shame. Because what pleasures it can give. Take, for instance, the Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Forests. For anyone with ties to a specific rural place — or just drawn to the concept of “place” itself — this is a treasure. As a former Alabama farm kid now living in Iowa, I’m captured by the Field Guide’s wealth of resonant terminology: old field succession (the gradual dissolution of pastures back into forest, seen on so many abandoned farms), windthrow (“an important disturbance factor, creating gaps of various sizes that permit light to enter, churning up the soil and providing new sites where seedlings and saplings can grow”), and forest islands (“as suburbia and agriculture have each claimed ever-increasing amounts of land, forests in many areas have become fragmented”). There are careful descriptions of animals: meadow voles (“husky little rodents”), possums (“gives birth to babies so tiny that a dozen will fit on a tablespoon”), and roadrunners of the Texas savanna (“reminding one of a tiny feathered dinosaur as it races along.”) The tone is quietly humorous, quietly marveling. “Don’t bother looking for Field Sparrows in an Oak-Hickory Forest and forget about finding Hermit Thrushes hopping between ragweed stalks,” it advises. “The factors by which birds recognize and orient themselves to their chosen habitats are poorly known.” Today, rooted in a place eleven hundred miles from my home, I’m reminded of rainy days spent poring through my family’s Peterson guides, and the way the sturdy pages with their color paintings rendered the familiar creatures of my world — rat snakes, mockingbirds, bobwhite quail, fox, and white-tailed deer — miraculous. “With persistence and patience,” the authors promise, “you will see many species and come to understand many facets of their natural history.” This is a patience and persistence we need more than ever. And so we need the Petersen Guide — a handbook of quiet ecstasy, organizing the wonders of the visible world for anyone who cares to look.
A graduate of Auburn University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Amy Weldon is assistant professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.
Nostalgia
By Mircea Cărtărescu (trans. Julian Semilian; New Directions, 2005)
Despite living in a part of the world in which the future is necessarily the most fertile ground, Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu has encamped himself in the past. And not the official past of dull, stultifying life under communism, but the idealized, oneiric past that is childhood. Cărtărescu’s Nostalgia suffers less from its titular malady than from its perversion: “Ostalgie,” a word coined in the former GDR, combining Ost (East) and Nostalgie into a singular longing, for better or worse, for the way things used to be but never were.
If Moscow was the Third Rome, then Bucharest here is the “Paris of the East” — though glitteringly tawdry in skyline, its streets still mired in mud. Into this metropolis, where livestock shrieks and pecks in the courtyards of concrete apartment towers, Cărtărescu (born 1956, pronounced “Curterescue”) ventures in masterful style. Less a novel-in-stories and more a collection, less a collection than an Easterly dictionary of illegal dreams, Nostalgia begins with an assault on the spokesperson for this zeitgeist, Franz Kafka of Prague. “The Roulette Player” marks the endgame of Kafka’s art, its world a purgatory wherein the Hunger Artist fasts on the grubs of the man-ape; the Odradek waits on the breadline with K. According to Cărtărescu, Bucharest’s homeless were often conscripted into games of Russian Roulette (the “Russian” epithet is hardly mentioned). Six men would pass a revolver loaded with a single bullet; spectators, Bucharest’s wealthy demimonde, would place bets on who would survive. Our hero is doubtlessly the greatest: He goes solo rounds with two bullets enchambered, with three, with four, even — with inexorable logic, obligatory to the art of speculation, and speculative fiction — with five. Ladies and gentlemen, fully loaded with six should be next. Each time, as he squeezes the trigger, he faints. As his feats promote him from basement sideshows to sinister dinner-theater (the lights dim, a chink of light appears from behind the Iron Curtain), no bullet is ever fired. As his life falls apart, the roulette player’s head remains on his neck.
After going these rounds with Kafka, the ludic author, like his rouletteist, transcends, as if he had proven his credentials (received his own “European education”), and is only now certified to try his hand at lives closer to home. Updating Poland’s Bruno Schulz, Cărtărescu begins to write about youth not as formative, but as everything. In this world, all experience signifies just as it did at initial encounter: To a boy of the fallen bourgeoisie, mundanity can be nothing but magical. Here, for example, is a first ride in an elevator, as if up to the seat of the Godhead:
Underneath, hundreds of meters below our feet, we saw Bucharest stretching out before us, tortuous as a labyrinth drowning in a vortex of dust. The tallest buildings […] were all wrapped in a variety of fogs, mother-of-pearl, yellowish, pale pink. Bucharest like a spider web, on the strands of which crawled streetcars with their ringing bells and the trucks with their trailers. Bucharest full of scaffoldings and cranes, hospitals and post offices and tiny newspaper stands. With gray lakes shaped like stomachs, opening out into each other. […] Bucharest with its men in white shirts and slicked-back hair. With soccer stadiums invaded by young workers with emaciated faces under their gray workers caps, shouting and standing when a soccer player, slicked-back hair as well and shorts down to his knees in the Moscow Dynamo team style, kicks the leather ball into the torn net. Bucharest resounding with songs whose purpose is to mobilize the people: ‘Dear laggard Comrade Marin, / with you in charge we’ll never win’ […]
Entire pages pass like this — fantastic winged elevators or soccer balls, flitting toward the light of the real, only to be immolated for getting too close. These stylistic fantasies, which change content and fantasist throughout Nostalgia’s five sections, are mated to plots equally strange. In “Mentardy” (Mendebilul in Romanian, a concatenation of “mental” and “debility”), a pure, puny, Christlike child falls victim to friends in the yard of his housing project; in “The Twins,” an account of transvestitism degenerates into the alchemical merging of sexes, in the persons of a young man and woman whose flirtations cause them to lose their identities to love. In “REM,” the longest section of the book’s middle, also titled “Nostalgia” (composed of three sections set between “The Roulette Player” prologue — said to be written by the grown protagonist of “The Twins” — and “The Architect” epilogue), a girl is sent to the outskirts of town, where she is taught to dream under the tutelage of a giant, who might also be the tale’s author except for the fact that all he can write is the word “no” (and “no, no, no, no, no, no […]”). Ignore the preciousness, and such exuberances of language — Cărtărescu’s fluid formalism translates all into some of the most imaginative literature since that of the masters mentioned by name in the text (Borges, García Márquez, and Cortázar, among others).
Nostalgia’s final section is set in the midst of the 1980s, decade of the Blue Jeans Generation. An architect, renowned for his factories that produce sunflower oil, has decided to purchase a Dacia — a wonderful Romanian automobile that often stalled, when it didn’t explode. Amazingly, it has a horn, the siren sound of which obsesses our hero, who, like many architects, feels a kinship with music (Goethe once remarked that architecture was “frozen music”). Soon, he’s had the car stripped of its tires, and a primitive keyboard installed in the dash. All day and night, living in the immobilized Dacia, “The Architect” plays music through the speaker of that horn. Thanks to the support of a young, ambitious musicologist, he becomes famous. His improvisations resound throughout Bucharest; in time, they’re heard in the West. Then, reality ends on a dissonance. Man resolves into machine. Like the universe, the Architect’s talent expands: “The great synthesizer was now an internal element of the immense body.” It’s amid this coda that Cărtărescu’s own transformation is aired: The childlike, he says, instead of growing up, must dissent and do the opposite, becoming always younger, as if returning to a state of terminal youth, which is art. Advocating yet another Revolution, Cărtărescu fictionalizes his manifesto: Art must not merely entertain life, or even affect it; instead, art must dream life itself. “The matter of [the architect’s] body and his arms, having reached in the course of the migration an extreme state of rarefaction, condensed itself during a period of incommensurable time, lost its consistency, and became star crumbs, which ignited suddenly in the darkened and empty universe. A young galaxy revolved now, throbbing, pulsating in place of the old one.”
Joshua Cohen’s review of a Mahler biography appears in the July issue of Harper’s.
Thanks, New York Times!
If you're here because you've followed the link from Rachel Donadio's generous mention of us (thanks!) in the New York Times blog Paper Cuts, welcome. Please have a look around. Our weekly reviews appear right here on this page; you can find the contents of the print editions here.
Despite our fondness for the Greater New Haven area, we really are interested in submissions from anywhere. So if you have an idea, for the print edition or the website, do write us. We'd love to hear from you. And thanks for reading.
Brian Francis Slattery is an editor for the New Haven Review.
Lee Sandlin
Usually, we use this Monday post to recommend an unfairly neglected book. Today we’d like to introduce you to an unfairly neglected writer.
I’m now at that biblical age (New Testament age, anyway) of thirty-three, which is about when many of us decide that we know the names of all the good writers we’ll need to know. Not that we’ve read all the great books, or ever will, but that coming across an entirely new name whose work, upon discovery, instantly seems essential is an increasingly rare phenomenon. The last time it happened was when I found Dave Hickey’s amazing collection of essays, Air Guitar. Or maybe it was when my friend Emily Moore introduced me to the poet David Wagoner. Well, it’s happened again. His name is Lee Sandlin.
For a class I am teaching in the fall, I assigned a terrific collection of journalism, edited by Ira Glass, called The New Kings of Nonfiction. It includes pieces by many of the greats—Susan Orlean, David Foster Wallace, Malcolm Gladwell, Lawrence Weschler--and a couple pieces by people I hadn’t heard of. One such piece is Lee Sandlin's “Losing the War,” which originally appeared in the Chicago Reader. It is a classic essay, easily better than most of what appears in any magazine in the United States.
I won’t do much to summarize the essay, which thankfully is online, except to say that it’s a meditation about our historical memory of World War II: how war fever made it impossible for even great reporters to write accurately about the war then, and how historians have failed to find the language to write about it since. The essay does not read as if it’s written by more scholarly writers on war and memory, like the redoubtable Paul Fussell, whose books are brilliant and clear, but not, well, fun; Fussell is too much the literary critic (except when he’s not, as in the hilarious book Class, which is one of the few books that will actually make you laugh out loud). Lee Sandlin’s essay is accessible and blunt, personal and cerebral at the same time.
Sandlin has written other long, brilliant essays for the Chicago Reader. Most of them seem to be posted at his web page. It’s a cool page, filled with Desert Island lists of favorite books and songs, most of which I have never heard of. The level of obscurity is a bit maddening. This is a man who recommends that we listen to “Night Recordings from Bali” and tells us which is his favorite Icelandic saga (Njal’s, if you care). And don’t even get me started on his list of “Several Movies That Do Not, In Any Way, Shape or Form, Suck.”
I’d raise high the poseur lantern if not for the fact that a) he seems to have a sense of humor about all this (his list of recommended recordings is called “Old, Scratchy and Mostly Unintelligible Spirituals”) and b) Jesus, can the guy write. As a former alt-weekly editor, I am humbled that elsewhere in the country one of my peer publications was publishing stuff like this. As a writer, I envy the man’s gift. As a civic booster in the city of Publishing, I hope some editor will collect this man’s essays into a single volume, fast.
Mark Oppenheimer is an editor of the New Haven Review.
Change of Date for Next Summer Book Group
Attention interested parties: Tom Gogola's discussion of The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross, which was once to transpire on June 25, will now happen on July 2. Thanks again to Labyrinth Books for accommodating our fickle nature. Mark Oppenheimer's and Steven Stoll's discussions of Lush Life and A Brief History of Neoliberalism, respectively, will happen as previously scheduled. So again, for easy reading and marking of calendars:
New Haven Review Summer Book Group
July 2: Tom Gogola discusses The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross.
July 23: Mark Oppenheimer discusses Lush Life by Richard Price.
August 13: Steven Stoll discusses A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey.
All events begin at 6 p.m., at Labyrinth Books, 290 York Street, New Haven, CT. Hope to see you there.
Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.
The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
By Ted Berrigan (Edited by Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan; University of California Press, 2005)
I had a friend at high school called Andy Mitchell (Mitch) who had the knack of befriending anyone he happened to meet and charmingly cadging anything from confidence to cigarettes to sex. No Charles Ryder, he was at the time a slightly overweight boy of fair if unprepossessing features, hair tending to the lank and clothes tending to the untucked. His charm was his vulnerability, as well as his gusto for life and the ideas that glue its disparate parts together. He was a voracious and wonderfully perceptive reader, though, who, courtesy of one of the most favorable offers they could give, headed off from our unfashionable provincial grammar school to read English at Oxford.
Reading The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan is like a journey into an adult American Mitch. Berrigan has the same gregarious vulnerability of the perennial outsider (he came to New York with the so-called Tulsa Group and had a love-hate relationship with Columbia, where he knew students) mixed with the surprisingly sinewy literary mind of a true believer in language. His poems, stretching across the 1960s and 1970s, document a life, a lifestyle, and an attitude to life that is refreshingly different from what’s modeled by some of the circumscribed, corporate, careful artists of today. Along with throwaway lines testifying to his careless promiscuity (“If I fall in love with my friend’s wife, she’s fucked”) from the children’s-book-looking “Bean Spasms,” his oeuvre includes comic poems like “Winter” (“The Moon is Yellow. / My Nose is Red”).
Allowing him the formal leeway for such experiments, perhaps, was his book The Sonnets (1964), for which he received the Poetry Foundation Award. It is a sequence of seventy-seven poems that deal with his daily life, his loves, and the sonnet form itself. The sonnets he uses are a far cry from Donne’s or Shakespeare’s, but this sequence tracing Berrigan’s own poetic education offers treatments of the sonnet more sympathetic than might be expected from an experimental beat poet. Berrigan showed that the sonnet was not necessarily about iambic pentameter, but rather a form dependent upon certain intimate relationships of rhythm and understandings of the world. To effect these relationships he borrows liberally from the world and the poets around him. The sequence contains translated, unattributed verse from Rilke and Rimbaud, snatches of conversations overheard, and recycled lines of his own from earlier in the series. It is, perhaps, the most impressively contemporary book about the sonnet that the twentieth century produced.
I’ve lost touch with Mitch, but I hope he has a better fate than Ted Berrigan, who died on July 4, 1983, of liver complications after years of health problems exacerbated by amphetamine use, long-standing but undiagnosed hepatitis, and inability to afford medical care. If Mitch did die early, he could do worse than be commemorated by a book like this--a comprehensive book lovingly packed full of life and serious daily literary exercise by Berrigan’s poet wife, Alice Notley, and his poet sons, Edmund and Anselm Berrigan. It’s a book to pick up for half an hour every week for the rest of your life, share the experiences of a lifetime lived in and for art, and witness in action the reformulation of poetry for a modern life.
Dan Friedman is an associate editor of Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture. He is the only writer for Da Ali G Show to have a Ph.D. from Yale.
Thanks be to you, Atlantic Monthly!
We got a very nice shout-out in on The Atlantic’s blog from Ross Douthat, who has a piece in our new print issue. Ross, being a New Haven native, is of course a good soul.
Of Kids & Parents
By Emil Hakl (Translated by Marek Tomin; Twisted Spoon Press, 2008)
On page two of Emil Hakl’s Of Kids & Parents, when you find out that for the rest of this novel, a father and son will walk around Prague and talk about life, an ill-advised Ulysses-meets-Tuesdays with Morrie situation might roll camera in your head, as it did mine. Be not afraid. Hakl is a lot of things — poet, dramatist, Czech, Ginsu-sharp dialogue writer — but he is not a sentimentalist. Father, seventy-one, and son, forty-two, drink too much and talk about fried chicken, ugly airplanes, dead friends, communism, and the women who give them “belly-slapping erections.” Yes, it’s awkward. At one point, the father says, “I know father and son shouldn’t be talking to each other like this.” Bingo, and that’s where the novel’s tension comes from — enough to keep us happily flipping pages for several straight hours without ever finding a plot.
Refreshingly, Hakl doesn’t ask us to like these two. They bicker. They pontificate. They talk about women as though women were pulled muscles, to be cared for and then ignored. They’re pathetic, but they love each other just enough to keep us from setting them down.
Something I’m torn about: Father and son are almost identical. On the one hand, this gives the novel a weighty “See? Nothing ever gets any better”-ness that jibes with the tour of a city that seems to get pummeled by the neighbors every fifty years. On the other hand, because the novel is nearly all dialogue with very few I saids or he saids, if the reader loses focus for a split second, it’s virtually impossible to tell who’s talking, which makes both of their voices seem like Hakl’s (though it’s possible that some of the subtleties of their speech patterns got ironed out in the Czech-to-English translation).
That aside, Hakl has given us a fine, dark novel whose simple premise allows us to explore Prague and the elusive relationship between two unsatisfied and inseparable men.
Greg Pierce is a playwright and fiction writer who lives in New York City. This spring he is workshopping his multimedia stage adaptation of the Haruki Murakami novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in New York and Tokyo.
Interfictions
Edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (Small Beer Press, 2007)
It is commonplace to hear that if certain canonical writers were writing today — Herman Melville, say, or James Joyce — they would never be published. Leaving aside the difficulties that such writers faced in getting their books published in their own times, it does seem that major publishing houses are skittish about publishing books that are unlike other books, difficult to classify. Which is why I like to say that if Franz Kafka or Mikhail Bulgakov were writing today, they would be published by Small Beer Press.
Kelly Link, perhaps Small Beer’s most well-known author, is also one of its editors; Link has made her reputation on a series of acclaimed short stories that bend genres and twist tropes in a Borgesian way. Likewise, Small Beer’s roster of authors is rife with writers like John Crowley and Carol Emshwiller, whose works are about as good as books get and also elude description by genre. As literary critics don’t seem to analyze anything until they’ve slapped a hot pink label on it, a host of contending terms have emerged to describe these indescribable books. One is “interstitial,” which Small Beer’s Interfictions, a multiple-author short-story collection edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, seeks not only to define, but demonstrate. The result is a wildly varied cacophony of a book, by turns beautiful, funny, frightening, frustrating, and baffling, but never boring.
Each story in Interfictions is a highwire act, writers writing without a net, and it thus isn’t a perfect collection; while no story falls outright, some are wobblier than others. But it’s telling that previous reviews of the volume have picked different stories to champion; there really is something here for everyone to be blown away by. (For the record, my favorites are Christopher Barzak’s “What We Know about the Lost Families of — House,” a haunted house story that also turns a keen eye on social conventions and the relation of people to their environment in rural Ohio, and Veronica Schanoes’s “Rats,” a story about punk rock told as an extremely self-aware fairy tale, back when fairy tales didn’t shirk from darkness and violence.)
For readers who are more interested in ambitious experiments than modest successes — and the occasional story that leaves them breathless — Interfictions is a wonderful introduction to Small Beer Press’s broader catalog and a group of writers who are widening the publishing landscape’s horizon for what’s possible in fiction.
Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.
New Haven Review Summer Book Group at Labyrinth Books
Thanks to the generosity of Labyrinth Books, the New Haven Review is proudly hosting a summer book group in its New Haven store at 290 York Street. Each of the editors — Mark Oppenheimer, Tom Gogola, and Brian Francis Slattery — and one author from Issue 2 of the Review, Steven Stoll, will lead a discussion of a recent book that they have loved. The books are available at Labyrinth, but of course, having read the book beforehand isn't mandatory to coming to the discussions or taking part in them.
First up is Brian Francis Slattery (i.e., me) on May 28, at 6 p.m., leading a discussion of A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya by Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya; an excellent overview of this slim, excoriating book appears on Labyrinth's website. I chose the book because, in recent memory, I haven't read a book that left me so shaken for so many different reasons, and it's one of a few books that I recommend to anyone who will bend an ear to listen. I hope that you, dear readers, will all come whether you have read the book or not. The discussion is likely to range across freedom of information issues, war correspondence, the swiftly changing face of Russia today, and whether the conflict in Chechnya and the government's massive cover-up of it will come back to haunt it. There is so much to talk about.
The New Haven Review Summer Book Group will continue on July 2 [formerly June 23 — ed.], also at 6 p.m., with Tom Gogola leading a discussion of The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross. On July 23, again at 6 p.m., Mark Oppenheimer will lead a discussion of Lush Life, the new novel by Richard Price. Finally, on August 13 at (surprise!) 6 p.m., Steven Stoll will discuss A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey.
In sum, and for easy reading and marking of calendars:
New Haven Review Summer Book Group
May 28: Brian Francis Slattery discusses A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya by Anna Politkovskaya.
July 2: Tom Gogola discusses The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross. [As above, amended from June 23--ed.]
July 23: Mark Oppenheimer discusses Lush Life by Richard Price.
August 13: Steven Stoll discusses A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey.
All events begin at 6 p.m., at Labyrinth Books, 290 York Street, New Haven, CT. Hope to see you there.
Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.
The Billionaire Who Wasn’t
By Conor O’Clery (PublicAffairs, 2007)
On January 22, 1997, from a payphone in the San Francisco airport, Chuck Feeney gave The New York Times a story for the ages. Although he had appeared regularly on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans, Feeney was not, he revealed, the billionaire everyone presumed. This kid-done-good from Elizabeth, New Jersey—a Horatio Alger boy on steroids—had indeed built a great fortune by mastering the duty-free trade. But the recent sale of his company, Duty Free Shoppers (DFS), had forced Feeney to confess his great secret: he had given this fortune away. In The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Made and Gave Away a Fortune Without Anyone Knowing, Irish journalist Conor O’Clery chronicles how Feeney quietly amassed astonishing wealth, and, with equal stealth, signed it all over to his philanthropic foundations.
O’Clery’s account reads like a spy novel. Feeney and his business partners succeed through cloak and dagger secrecy: closed bids for duty-free concessions (Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, Hong Kong), off-shore havens to shelter their cash profits from U.S. taxation. Feeney’s commercial savvy is also characterized by an uncanny intuition for profitable opportunities, a penchant for shop-floor management (well into his later years, Feeney is coaching the sales force), and remarkable care for employees and their families. These traits also underpin his philanthropy, which is characterized by fierce anonymity, opportunistic giving that seeks to amplify the power of his philanthropic buck (in places ranging from the U.S. to Ireland, South Africa to Australia, Vietnam to Cuba), and extensive vetting (“kicking the tires”) of potential grantees. Ultimately, Feeney says, he is driven by a basic desire to help others, learned at a young age from his parents.
Feeney’s is an extraordinary tale of entrepreneurial dynamism, no doubt—but even more of unusual beneficence. His “outing” presents a number of important challenges. First, Feeney embodies “inter vivos” charity—giving while living. This is significant in an era when, for many, wealth serves as a competitive “scorecard” (Feeney’s words) for success. In offering an equally competitive, alternative yardstick—charitable largesse—Feeney joins Gates, Buffett, and others in harnessing new resources for the disadvantaged. The second challenge Feeney poses is to the philanthropic sector, where foundations typically expend five percent of their assets each year. Feeney has called for a full spend-down of his Atlantic Philanthropies within the decade: inter vivos in extremis. Though to date his foundations have granted nearly $4 billion to “vulnerable” people around the world, nearly $4 billion in assets remain. This means trying to give away—efficiently, effectively, entirely—about one million dollars a day. “Spending it,” he says, “is not a big problem. Spending it meaningfully is.” Understatement, ambition and optimism: vintage Feeney.
Georgia Levenson Keohane is a writer and consultant in the fields of social policy, philanthropy, and non-profit management. She lives in New York City.
Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow
By Anders Nilsen (with Cheryl Weaver) (Drawn & Quarterly, 2006)
This book will wreck you, if there’s a person in the world whom you love.
In March 2005 Cheryl Weaver, an artist and bartender and the fiancée of the cartoonist Anders Nilsen, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. By November she was dead. She was thirty-seven. Don't Go Where I Can’t Follow is Nilsen remembering her, trying to remember everything about her, recounting days they spent together and apart. Those memories are exquisitely banal: bags of chips, the losing and finding of keys, everyday conversations, travel mishaps, ice cream cones. These are what you forget when someone dies. One day you’re fighting about leaving the milk out, and the next day she’s gone.
In the early part of the book, before Weaver gets sick, there are almost no drawings — instead there are photographs, reprinted letters, other artifacts. The first image is a postcard Weaver sent to Nilsen early in their courtship: “I know this boy named Anders. He makes my heart ache and my stomach flutter.” Then come Nilsen‘s journal entries and vacation snapshots, doodles and lists (“Things He Does, in Spite of Which, She Will Probably Marry Him Anyway”). When the book finally switches over to pure drawing, the shift in tone is shocking — appropriately so, because that's when Weaver is first admitted to the hospital, complaining of fatigue. Life never goes back to normal. The book’s pages fill with sketches Nilsen makes and notes he takes while his fiancée sleeps in her hospital bed. There are excruciatingly literal, intensely concrete little portraits of Weaver sleeping, connected to an IV, her head shaved. There’s a diagram of her body, with Nilsen trying to record everything he’s seeing: IV tubes, feeding tube, urinary tube, rectal tube, surgery scars, bruises from past IVs, pulse meter, blood pressure cuff, “bag to collect aceites fluid, leaking from drainage site on abdomen,” etc. You wonder what all this detail is for. Is it so he can show her later, when she's better, what she looked like? Or is this the moment he realized she would never get better? In his journal he writes: “What do you say to someone when they ask you ‘Am I going to die?’ and you kind of think they might, but there’s no way to know, and you don’t want to upset them.”
The last chapter reads like a regular graphic novel, with traditional panels and narrative. Nilsen and his family and friends gather at Promontory Point, the spot along Lake Michigan where he and Weaver had planned to get married. The scene is cinematic—the POV hovers behind Nilsen the whole time, like someone watching without participating. We see that the crowd has grown rather large. Nilsen narrates the scene to Weaver: “There are a lot of them. I don’t know if we could have had that small wedding we talked about.” In these panels she’s the only person he talks to, like he's numb to everything but this receding connection with her in his head. “You are in my arms,” he says, and that’s when we notice that he’s holding a small black box, and figure out that he’s come here to scatter her ashes. And then we come to understand the weird camera angle, too: “I think you wouldn’t have liked this very much, to have been there,” he writes to Weaver. “Everyone fussing over you. It would have driven you nuts. . .. I think you might have liked watching it, though. Hovering above it.”
Nilsen saves a final postcard that he wrote to Weaver before she got sick for the end of the book, just to tear us apart a little bit more: “In sixty years from now, when I’m on my deathbed dying (before you, because you’re a smoker and smokers always outlast people like me with healthy habits) and you come up to our room just before I croak, I’m going to say ‘I told you so.’ Because we’ve been in love all that time and been having great sex (except for the last year because I had been ill) and been happy. And then I’m going to croak and you won’t be sad. Because we had such a good life together.” If that doesn’t utterly destroy you, you do not have a heart beating in your chest. It’s also weirdly reassuring, and ridiculously romantic.
Anaheed Alani is a freelance writer, researcher, and editor.
Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year
By Esmé Raji Codell (Algonquin Books, 2001)
For teachers and the general public alike, Esmé Raji Codell’s Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year, which chronicles Codell’s first year of teaching in an inner-city Chicago charter school, is a refreshing antidote to the fantasy of the inner-city schoolteacher as a dedicated, creative, inspirational miracle worker in the mold of Hilary Swank’s character in Freedom Writers or Edward James Olmos’s in Stand and Deliver. The primary reason for this is that Codell is a dedicated, creative, and inspirational teacher, yet her first year of teaching does not end with a slow clap leading to a standing ovation, students standing on their desks in salute, or state-high marks on standardized exams. Even the goofy craziness, selfless investment of time outside the school day, instructional skill, and personal charisma Esmé brings to her work is sadly, as she discovers, not enough to prevent children from falling through the cracks in the public-education and social-services support networks, to dissolve the blockheadedness of well-meaning but narrow-minded administrators, or to ensure that every student performs at the legally mandated grade level on a standardized test.
As an inner-city teacher who is less creative and wacky, and possibly less instinctively skilled, than Codell, I found her book to be both inspirational and reassuring. It was instructive--and funny, and heartwarming--to see her incorporate elements of physical and imaginative play into her lessons. It was also a relief to see her lose her temper in front of her students; I was reassured to know that this happens to even the most gifted teachers. But anyone who draws pleasure from reading engaging, conversational prose will enjoy Codell’s account of her careen through her first year of teaching. Readers will also experience a firsthand account of the obstacles faced by teachers of disadvantaged children--and by the children themselves.
Codell does not fail as a teacher. It is clear that she uses her creativity successfully to engage struggling children in their schoolwork, as when she constructs a time machine for students to sit in while reading historical fiction, teaches her students the distributive property of multiplication using cha-cha steps, or insists (to her principal’s chagrin) on being called Madame Esmé rather than Ms. Codell. Still, her efforts are not enough to solve the problems at her school, or save every single one of her students.
Nathan Day is a high school English teacher at César Chávez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy, Parkside Campus in Washington, DC. An outrigger canoe enthusiast, he has been teaching for six years.
Sprawling Places
By David Kolb (University of Georgia Press, 2008)
In this polemic, philosopher and place theorist David Kolb deploys unconventional thinking in the service of what turn out to be commonsense ideas. Kolb finds distinctions where others assume homogeneity; his baseline act of discernment is to recognize that suburbs are neither small villages nor large cities, and therefore should be approached as unique phenomena. Kolb rejects the many critics who, because they are looking through the lens of arcadia or the metropolis, find America’s sprawling zones devoid of intricacy—or, worse yet, “nonplaces” unworthy of consideration. Instead, he marshals many theoretical sources to argue that such places have inherent “complexity” worth amplifying. He employs this term in several ways: the structural, which largely encompasses the natural and man-made environments; the social, in which citizens negotiate with each other and the structural backdrop; and what might be called the technological-economic-political, that (mostly) invisible network of links that underpins connected life in the twenty-first century. Acknowledging these forces requires active engagement: “Places should be inhabited with more lived sense of their complex internal multiplicities and linkages, and with more self-consciousness of the multiple forces and pressures at work.” The book seems aimed primarily at the community of thinkers with whom Kolb engages, as well as architects and urban planners, and on occasion it is tough going, particularly in the first two chapters. But Kolb gains momentum as he begins a sustained analysis of themed places and suburban environments. This investigation draws in particular on the work of British sociologist Anthony Giddens, and extends to suburbs some of the claims made by Manuel Castells (for networked societies) and Henri Lefebvre (for cities). Discussing Disney parks, New Urbanist villages, and haphazardly planned suburbs as they currently exist, Kolb puts forth brief suggestions, from creating architectural follies in pocket parks to altering zoning and tax regulations, for “grasp[ing] creatively the possibilities offered by contemporary places, without undue nostalgia or elation.”
A hypertext available at Kolb’s website offers further considerations of the topic.
Brian Sholis, a writer based in Brooklyn, is editor of Artforum.com and coeditor of The Uncertain States of America Reader (Sternberg Press, 2006).
Thanks, New Haven Register...
...and Donna Doherty specifically for the generous profile of our publication that appeared in today's paper. The actual physical newspaper included this snazzy photo of editor Mark Oppenheimer, publisher Bennett Lovett-Graff, and Mark's daughter Rebekah in dramatic lighting:
What the article says is all true too. So, Greater New Haveners: If you're interested in submitting, we're looking forward to hearing from you. If you're interested in subscribing, we thank you in advance. And if you're just here to read what we've published and posted so far, welcome. Take your time and have a look around. We hope you like what you see.
Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.
Hanuman’s Tale: The Messages of a Divine Monkey
By Philip Lutgendorf (Oxford University Press, 2006)
Primates are our animal cousins, but most of us know them only on a photo-album basis. In India, people and monkeys live cheek by jowl, and relations are strained. Monkeys are dirty, aggressive pests, pelting pedestrians with nuts and climbing into open windows to grab anything not nailed down. Yet one of the subcontinent’s most beloved divinities is the monkey-god Hanuman. The hero Rama’s sidekick in the national epic Ramayana, Hanuman is revered in his own right in temples and household shrines throughout India.
Philip Lutgendorf, professor of Indian Studies at the University of Iowa, has written a fascinating study of Hanuman. Unlike traditional scholars of Hinduism who focused on theological texts, Lutgendorf is interested in everyday religious experience, where so-called “minor gods” such as Hanuman often loom larger than major ones (such as Shiva and Vishnu). Lutgendorf pursues the monkey-god through religious practice but also films, television, comics, and the garish Technicolor prints that small businesses distribute as complimentary wall-calendars. (One of these adorns the book’s cover.) He also includes Hanuman’s biography from popular legend, analyzing the many variants of each episode. According to one version, when the infant Hanuman decides to swallow the sun, the earth is cast into darkness until he coughs it up. In another version, he swallows it and is destroyed, but the gods reassemble him from tiny pieces, and in a third he puts it in his mouth but spits it out because it tastes like meat and he is a vegetarian. (His powers extend to his monkey-mother, who destroys a mountain with a jet of breast-milk.) At times, Hanuman seems an Indian version of Godzilla, a fearsome, destructive, but lovable creature, blurring the boundary between animals, humans and gods. Hanuman’s Tale brings him in his many forms to a western audience.
Jeremy Ravi Mumford teaches at the University of Michigan.
Harold Robbins’ The Looters
By Junius Podrug (Forge, 2007)
Harold Robbins' name is still selling books. Unfortunately, he died in 1997 and his name is all he has left to offer. With the blessing of the Robbins estate, the novelist's friend Junius Podrug has now written four Robbins novels. On the shiny covers of these poor substitutes, Podrug's name is dwarfed by Robbins's. The idea of continuing a successful franchise isn't deplorable (some of those Flowers in the Attic sequels are pretty good), but Podrug's complete lack of understanding about what made Robbins's novels great is a true literary crime.
In The Betsy and its sequel The Stallion, or Memories of Another Day or The Raiders or any of a dozen other titles from what I consider his most fertile period--in the 1970s and 1980s, after he'd moved on from his derivative-of-John O'Hara melodramatic page-turners--Robbins created a new class of upper-class hero. His characters were conflicted and engaged in savage confrontations for their entire lives, however cushily they were raised. Their sex drives were as strong as their lusts for power and money. They were always on the verge of being blackmailed or unmasked for closeted sins that ranged from homosexuality to impotence to, in several different novels, closeted Jewish upbringings. (Robbins himself was the Brooklyn-born son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, though he disguised that heritage--he put out that he was a Jew who'd lost his parents and had been raised in a Catholic boy's school. This and many other self-made myths were debunked by Andrew Wilson in his respectful, well-researched, and culturally contextualized biography, Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex, published last fall.)
Robbins was able to pin the needles on all possible megalomaniac meters and make his characters both shameful and pitiable: "Joni sucked on John's penis and wept at the same time. 'We'll never -- why couldn't you have just gone to Harvard?'" (In that passage, from Tycoon, it's worth noting that Joni and John are brother and sister.) Podrug, on the other hand, writes quaint adventure tales grounded in nothing approaching reality. The Looters involves a museum curator searching for the death mask of a legendary Babylonian queen. Worse, he jettisons Robbins' essential omniscient-narrator style for a clunky first-person: "We finally reached the larger boat and I went aboard to meet the band of pirates, smugglers and thieves."
There are many who wrongly considered Harold Robbins, despite his being one of the five biggest-selling novelists in history, to be the dregs of popular fiction. All those naysayers have to do to be proved outrageously wrong is to read his chosen successor.
Christopher Arnott is the managing editor of the New Haven Advocate.
Tales of Woodsman Pete
By Lilli Carré (Top Shelf Productions, 2006)
Strictly speaking, Tales of Woodsman Pete is a comic, and it is funny and action-packed and presented in a series of frames. But it’s also touching and tragic, tender and wrenching—a stellar example of the sheer range of possibilities implicit in this surprisingly expansive medium.
Let there be no doubt: Lilli Carré is an artist. Her words are pure literature: intelligent, economical, unexpected. On the visual side, her line is confident yet simple, resembling a woodcut incision; her figures are unassuming, endearing, and utterly distinctive.
Our hero Pete is a thickly bearded hunter who lives alone in the woods surrounded by things that he has killed: his best friend Philippe (an inanimate bear rug), some mounted deer heads, and the specter of a wife slain accidentally (by buckshot or pollen, we never find out which). Pete monologues endlessly in search of conversation, ever nostalgic for missing companions but cheerfully unaware of his complicity in finding himself alone. When Pete’s house is crushed by a falling tree, the narrative frame shifts to examining the lives of the blue ox Babe and his pal Paul Bunyan (presumably the one who caused the tree to fall on Pete’s house), who is gloomy from reading Proust and depressed that, because of his bulk, it takes so many beers to get sufficiently drunk. We learn of Paul’s problems with women, not a few of whom he has “mistakenly crushed” in the act of attempting intimacy. Paul—like Pete—leaves a heavy footprint, invariably annihilating the things around him without agenda or animus. He just doesn’t fit in this world.
The narrative shuttles back and forth between Pete and Paul, two sides of a coin, united by their full beards, their utter sincerity, their love of skipping stones, and their dogged pursuit of something undefined. They are dreamers both, and both marooned in solitude. We are left wondering whether Pete is dreaming Paul or Paul is dreaming Pete. Ultimately, the pleasure lies in the question itself.
At twenty-four years of age, Carré has loudly crashed the indie comic world, and is particularly well known in her hometown of Chicago. She also makes short animated films, one of which has shown at Sundance. She’s a genius in the comics medium, but would likely be a genius in any medium. Her Pete is a worthy introduction for the curious—an incisive, delightful primer in what’s so exciting about comics these days.
Freelance writer Matthew Swanson makes books with his wife, illustrator Robbi Behr, in a barn in Chestertown, Maryland.