Archive for 2008
It’s tempting to say that this fall marks John Ashbery’s moment. The Library of America recently released “Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956-1987″ ($40), a volume that “inaugurates a collected edition of the works 
of America’s preeminent living poet.” And the poet, long a New Yorker, was honored by the first exhibition of his collages at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, a full-circle sort of gesture since the gallery published Ashbery’s first book, the slim “Turandot and Other Poems” in 1953.
Ashbery is the third living writer to be elevated to the pantheon of the Library of America. First was Eudora Welty, whose two-volume collection was published in 1998, three years before her death; then came Philip Roth, the subject of an eight-volume compilation of his fiction (and one memoir) that debuted in 2005 and has three volumes to go.
Yet Ashbery seems always to have had his moment. He was born, in Rochester, N.Y., in a propitious year for great poets, sharing 1927 with W.S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell and James Wright (who died in 1980, a generation ago). Poetry magazine accepted two of his poems when he was in high school. When he was an editor of The Harvard Advocate his fellow editors were Kenneth Koch, Robert Bly and Donald Hall. His first official book, “Some Trees,” was selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1956. He lived in Europe for five years and wrote brilliant criticism of contemporary art for ArtNews and The New York Herald Tribune. By 1969, he is winning awards and fellowships and his books regularly win prizes. In 1976, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” wins the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is elected a fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1982 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983. In 1985, he is awarded a five-year MacArthur “genius” grant. And so on, including being poet-in-residence for MTV in 2002. His seems a life (or at least a career) blessed with opportunities, accomplishments and rewards.
What is remarkable about Ashbery’s unparalleled success is that it builds upon a foundation of poems that are oblique, hermetic, goofy, surreal and sometimes downright incomprehensible. They can also, with all of that, be deeply moving meditations on the nature of mutability and mortality. “Some Trees” astonished readers at the time, and still astonishes, for its air of supreme self-confidence, a quality that extends to a majestic willingness to mystify and perplex; reading a poem by John Ashbery can be like working a Ouija with a lexicographer afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome. The first stanza of “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” one of the most celebrated poems in “Some Trees” is this:
Darkness falls with a wet sponge
And Dick gives Genevieve a swift punch
In the pajamas. “Aroint thee, witch.”
Her tongue from previous ecstasy
Releases thoughts like little hats.
These lines set the tone for the rest of Ashbery’s life-work: Sentences that are perfect examples of grammar and syntax but whose sense borders on the absurd; pop culture exuberance wedded to oratorical intensity; dream-like leaps in consciousness and juxtaposition of images; the implications of vague menace and paranoia; a kind of dislocating cinematic montage effect. While Ashbery’s work has certainly darkened and deepened over the past 50 years, and his ambition has grown, he remains now much the poet he was at the beginning, a magician whose mantra is not “All will be revealed,” but, as he says wryly (and ominously) in “And the Stars Were Shining,” from 1994: “Soon, all will be hidden.”
”Rebel Island,”By Rick Riordan
Bantam Books ($6.99 paperback, 330 pages)
It’s just a measure of how well endowed the mystery bookshelves are at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library that I am just now getting to read anything by Rick Riordan, a New York Times bestselling mystery author from my old stomping grounds of South Texas.
When the new library opened up, I reveled in the old books — S.S. Van Dine, Brett Halliday — that used to be hidden away in the stacks.
That’s my excuse for not being up on the latest mystery bestsellers, and I’m sticking to it.
But I’ve clearly missed some fun, because this latest Riordan opus has enough twists and action and interesting characters to definitely make me want to go back and peruse his previous work in the Tres Navarre private eye series.
In this case, Tres Navarre has officially given up his private investigation business to work as a full-time faculty member at the University of Texas at San Antonio (whence my nephew graduated — he’s now a Texas State Trooper). And Tres has just married his so-pregnant-she’s-ready-to-pop lawyer girlfriend, Maia, who happens to be a Chinese American.
So, it’s Banned Books Week. I’ll withhold — reluctantly — the Sarah Palin jokes.
According to the Banned Books Week site, more than 400 books were challenged in America in 2007. The top ten?
1. And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
2. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
3. Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes
4. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
7. TTYL by Lauren Myracle
8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
9. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Banned Books Week is set aside at the end of each September as a time to reflect on the importance of the freedom to read.
The University of Memphis’ University Libraries will be getting in on the fun by staging readings from books that have been banned or challenged throughout history. The readings will be Monday (Sept. 29) through Friday (Oct. 3) from noon until 2 p.m. in the rotunda of the Ned. R. McWherter Library.
To volunteer as a reader, contact Tom Mendina at 678-4310 (e-mail tmendina at memphis.edu), or Kay Kroboth at 678-2209 (e-mail kroboth at memphis.edu).
When “Six Feet Under” was alive and well on HBO, it was “my show,” as in, “I can’t leave my television on Sunday night because my show is on.” Once, during a random online search to find out what a bird was doing on Brenda and Nate’s wedding cake (Season 5, Episode 1), I found Television Without Pity, where M. Giant was the casually cruel voice behind SFU recaps. Before M. Giant, I think I had, pathetically, started to suspend disbelief in the characters beyond the hours I was watching the show, and to forget that SFU was just a black comedy about the social psychoses of America, circa 2000. TWP was a bracing slap in the face.
So I was happy to run across “A TV Guide to Life: How I Learned Everything I Needed to Know From Watching Television” (Berkley Books, $14), by Jeff Alexander, aka M. Giant.
The chapter topics give you a good idea of how the book is organized , starting with “Saved by the Bell: School on TV” and “I’ll Be There for You: Friends on TV,” and progressing eventually to “Moving On Up: Unreal Estate” and “To Boldly Go: Outer Space and Science Fiction.” If you’re unfamiliar with Alexander’s work (he also has a Web site, velcrometer.blogspot), the introduction gives you a pretty good idea of Alexander’s tone: “Remember what your parents used to say to you about watching too much television? The exact words? Of course you don’t, because they weren’t spoken by famous actors in a funny way.” Read the rest of this entry »
“Blood Trail,”By C.J. Box
2008, G.P. Putnam’s Sons
$24.95 hardbound, 301 pages
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Here’s a book that probes some of the less-noticed wounds of America’s culture wars with all the delicacy of a 105 mm howitzer.
It’s part of a series of eight detective/mystery novels about a Wyoming game warden, Joe Pickett, who works directly for the governor — a Democrat, oddly enough — named Spencer Rulon.
In this story, someone’s killing hunters and mutilating their bodies in particularly nasty ways. With a state economy that depends so much on the hunting industry, Rulon gets Pickett involved in the hunt for the hunter who hunts hunters.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
“One Woman’s Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story,”
By Janis Karpinski with Steven Strasser (2005, Hyperion, $24.95 hardback, 242 pages.)
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If you’ve ever wanted to know what it would be like to achieve all you ever hoped, then to have it all ruined before your eyes, this book can fill you in.
Janis Karpinski is the ill-starred (ahem) general of the 800th Military Police Brigade, of whom a few soldiers apparently cooperated in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
This past Thursday, Karpinski spoke of these and other events at an event arranged by the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center.
Leading up to the Abu Ghraib scandal, she had a remarkable military career, of which her book supplies a comprehensive precis.
In 1960, during the Eisenhower administration, at the age of seven, she decided she wanted to be a soldier — after finding World War II mementos of her father in the attic of her Rahway, N.J., home.
“I put the the had on my little blonde head and stood up straight, feeling as tall and proud as my father had in the flush of victory after a great European war,” she writes. (P. 1)
Little did that child know how hard it would be for her to achieve anything like the military accomplishments she envisioned.
Mary Roach is my hero. First she wowed me with Stiff, an exploration of dead bodies and what happens to them. Then she gave me goosebumps with Spook, a scientific look at the afterlife.
And now? Now she’s forged into what is, perhaps, science’s true final frontier. No, not space. Sex. (Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, 319 pages, $25, W.W. Norton & Company.) 
Roach, a fearless and often self-deprecatingly klutzy reporter, traces the recorded history of sex research and condenses much of it down into the more entertaining — and unbelievable — bits. She pores over reports, and visits scientists and doctors all over the world to gain insight into their life’s work, which she finds is often done just this side of the brink of financial and cultural peril (take Dr. Ahmed Shafik, who must try to find research subjects in Egypt, a Muslim country that you could fairly describe as sexually repressed). Most governments don’t like to spend a lot of money on sex research, and sex researchers have to contend with the fact that many people just assume that they are voyeuristic pervs just waiting for the chance to observe test subjects going at it.
The writer spends his life in a solitary landscape of desk, typewriter and window through which he gazes out at the world to recharge his creative battery.
At least he used to.
Now, it’s probably more Mac, Starbucks and iPod. Nevertheless, writing is a solo and, mostly, lonesome pursuit. Paul Auster pours this feeling of seclusion out onto paper and into novels populated by rich, though solitary, characters.
In his latest, “Man in the Dark,” (Henry Holt and Co., $23) 72-year-old August Brill has recently moved in with his daughter and granddaughter after an accident that has left him somewhat incapacitated.
The house is one of sadness and loss, his granddaughter Katya having lost her boyfriend less than a year earlier to a horrific crime, the details of which we get in only the last few pages of the book.
Brill and Katya spend hours upon hours each day watching and discussing movies to move the time along and redirect their emotions. Brill spends his sleepless nights lying awake in the dark, creating stories to forget Katya’s pain and the pain he feels at having lost his own wife not long before.
It is one of these stories (which takes up a majority of the novel) that we meet Owen Brick, a man who travels into an alternate world, an America where there is no 9/11 tragedy, yet one where a civil war has broken out after the chaos of the 2000 presidential election. Brick is sent to this alternate America to take his instructions; to be sent back to his own world to kill the man who has developed the story of the civil war in his mind, to kill a man he’s never met, a man named August Brill. The intricate tale touches reality, the author asking for death from his subconscious.
“Man in the Dark” is reminiscent of Auster’s previous book, “Travels in the Scriptorium.” In fact, it almost seems as if the latter was a writing exercise for the former, that was accidentally published.
Both are good reads, though not breezy beach reading. They allow us into the artist’s mind to wrap ourselves in loneliness and despair, and to learn where fiction might find its origin. Reading Paul Auster can be a bit like watching sausage made, though in this instance we can’t help but devour the ingredients as we await the final product.
“The Black Hand: A Barker & Llewelyn Novel,” by Will Thomas
(2008, Touchstone, 289 pages, $14, paperback)
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At last, I find a new story and cast of characters after my own heart — albeit with a Sicilian dagger.
This is the fifth in a series of historical mysteries set in England in the 1880s. The heroes, Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn, would have been contemporaries of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson (no relation to yours truly, although that happens to be the same name as my father, and my grandfather was a doctor — of veterinary medicine). Also, Barker and Llewelyn bear a surface resemblance to the venerable duo.
But while Holmes shows his remarkable mental acumen (e.g., concluding people’s activities from pet hair on a pant-leg) regularly throughout a story, Barker, who plays the lead sleuth in this series, spends much of this story, at least, teaching his apprentice, Llewelyn, about the sociology of London’s underworld.
And that’s just fine with me.
On September 10, the Library of Congress is going to present, for the first time, an award for lifetime achievement in fiction-writing. The award will be presented in a ceremony to –
Well, wait a minute. Before I actually name the lucky author, let’s speculate on whom it could be. Let’s consider the obvious choices for a lifetime achievement award in fiction writing. Of course, one criterion is that the writer be, you know, living.
On with the thinking cap. Here goes.
John Updike
Joyce Carol Oates
Philip Roth
E.L. Doctorow
Toni Morrison
Anne Tyler
Thomas Pynchon
Don DeLillo
Ernest J. Gaines
Richard Ford
Reynolds Price
Cormac McCarthy
J.D. Salinger? (He’s alive. Or aliveish.)
Doubtless my literate readers will have other suggestions. Remember, though, that the award is for a lifetime of writing achievement, not for a few well-known books, so maybe Salinger doesn’t qualify. Don’t forget, Norman Mailer is dead.
So, while you’re placing your bets and trying to slake your anticipation, I’ll tell you that the winner of the first Library of Congress award for lifetime achievement in fiction is –
Herman Wouk. 
You’re all smacking your foreheads and going, “Duh, well, yeah, of course, Herman Wouk. ‘The Caine Mutiny.’ ‘Marjorie Morningstar.’ ‘Youngblood Hawke.’ Those mini-series about WWII.”
Perhaps the intention is to present the award for longevity. Wouk, born May 27, 1915, happens to be 93, which makes him 16 years older than the next oldest possibility, E.L. Doctorow (b. Jan. 6, 1931). In fact, the award could simply be made each year to the next author in the chronological line, eliminating the cheap and petty element of suspense. There wouldn’t even have to be a ceremony. A certificate could be emailed to the winner. In that case, the roster would look like this:
Wouk (May 27, 1915)
Doctorow (Jan. 6, 1931)
Morrison (Feb. 18, 1931)
Updike (March 18, 1932)
Gaines (Jan 15, 1933)
Price (Feb. 1, 1933)
Roth (March 19, 1933)
McCarthy (July 20, 1933, a big year for writers!)
DeLillo (Nov. 20, 1936)
Pynchon (May 8, 1937)
Oates (June 16, 1938)
Tyler (Oct. 25, 1941)
Ford (Feb. 16, 1944)
See, that takes care of the award for the next 12 years, assuming that these authors all live that long. Pesky ol’ Death. The Library of Congress comittee doesn’t even have to have another meeting. They should have called me first.
