Midnight Picnic

By Nick Antosca (Word Riot Press, 2009)

Bram pulls into the parking lot half asleep and the crunch of gravel under his tires becomes the crunch of bone. Something screams.

The old deerhound that lives at the bar—it’s pouring tonight and he didn’t even see her.

That crunch.

He gets out of his dented Pontiac, hunches against the downpour. He doesn't want to look. It's 3:30 A.M. and the bar is dark. No light to see by except the Pontiac's headlights, ghostly cones of white slashed by rain.

He kneels to look under the car.

Nothing.

"Baby!" he yells, getting up. "Where are you?"

Movement off in the darkness, on the other side of the car. The deerhound, dragging herself away. She looks less like a dog than a man in a dog suit, huge, crawling across the gravel. He goes to her side.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,"—his voice splintering—"Hold on, let me look."

The damage is catastrophic; the dog will die.

Not quickly, though.

These are the opening paragraphs to Nick Antosca's Midnight Picnic, a short and terrifying book that I read a few months ago now and just can't get out of my head. The plot follows Bram, an aimless young man living in West Virginia who finds the bones of a murdered child. Hours later, the dead child finds Bram and asks him to help avenge his death. What follows would be, in the outline of the plot, part ghost story, part revenge story, except that the experience of reading it is less like either narrative and more like having a waking nightmare.

I don't use the word terrifying lightly. As anyone who's been to a bad horror movie knows, scaring people is not easy. Do it wrong and it's boring, or maybe just kind of disgusting, or worse, unintentionally funny. (That the line between horror and comedy is so thin and blurry is one of the reasons, I think, that the comedic horror movie has blossomed into such a delightful genre.) Do it right, though, and you tap into the fear that early humans must have felt when the sun went down and it began to rain, and they were huddled in a group under a tree that did not provide shelter, and they knew that predators were coming for them. For me, the first two-thirds of The Shining do that (though not the final third, which becomes boring); perhaps all of 28 Days Later and much of Clive Barker's stuff does, too.

But Midnight Picnic's particular brand of scare reminds me most of David Lynch, who, at his best, pulls horror from simple elements—lighting, sound, costume, a good line, clever camera work—capturing with eerie effectiveness the experience of having a very bad and extremely compelling dream. Antosca's own use of such dream logic is the best I've come across in a long time. There are a few missteps—at one point, about halfway through the book, Bram interrogates the dead child in a way that very nearly breaks the spell—but here I'm just quibbling. I could give you passage after passage of the images and conversations that engrossed and frightened me, but I don't want to ruin them.

Also, and most impressively, Antosca manages to give his story what many horror tales never even reach for: heart. Yes, Midnight Picnic is scary. But it's also, keenly and unexpectedly, touching and tragic; for underneath the ghosts and revenge is another story about a boy looking for his father, but not being quite ready for what he finds.

Seidel'd

One of my more interesting reading experiences last fall was provided by Frederick Seidel's Ooga-Booga (2006). I don't know much about Seidel except he's rich, was born in 1936, published his first book of poems in 1962, and didn't publish another book until 1979. His Collected Poems, 1959-2009 was released a few months ago. I'm hoping to dawdle through it this summer. Whatever we expect a poet to show us, it's rare that he shows us a lifestyle to which only that elusive 5% of the population with 37% of the wealth are accustomed. In Seidel's case, as in "Barbados," there is an outrageous tendency to be as rancid as anything he might witness. Poets with political axes to grind do, of course, give us glimpses of brutal acts and consequences to jar us out of our literary complacency. But Seidel somehow seems to suggest that all he's grinding is his pencil, to make it sharper. Whatever the outcome of the chaos we live in, he seems to shrug, I was there.

But what makes his writing so hard to fathom is its childlike simplicity. Or, rather, its simplicity is so arch, so tongue-in-cheek, so craftily artless, that one always waits to be slapped or jabbed by the inevitable line that arrives with all the specific, precise density -- drowning in acid -- of Robert Lowell or T. S. Eliot when they suddenly drop the right phrase into its inevitable place.

Huntsman indeed is gone from Savile Row, And Mr. Hall, the head cutter. The red hunt coat Hall cut for me was utter Red melton cloth thick as a carpet, cut just so. One time I wore it riding my red Ducati racer -- what a show!-- Matched exotics like a pair of lovely red egrets. London once seemed the epitome of no regrets And the old excellence one used to know Of the chased-down fox bleeding its stink across the snow. --"Kill Poem"

Yeah, and "a savage servility slides by on grease." To me, the echoes of Lowell's "Skunk Hour" dance through a poem that strikes me as a Charles Bukowski poem for an uncannily different demographic. But Bukowski came to mind while reading Seidel, not only for the "fuck you if you can't take me" ethos that these poems exude, but for a sense of the poem as the only possible response to a life of this tenor. Once your lines become this spare, they spare nothing.

But look at how the diction does whatever it wants -- the beautiful balance of line 3 ends with that hanging "utter" that is itself pretty damned utter. And then the "what a show!" interpolation in a flash makes speaker and poem as cartoonish as anything -- or at least as any inconceivable commercial for Ducati racers(!) could be. Then the "matched exotics" of "egrets" and "regrets" so funny and so baldly bad, as we veer into "the old excellence" that ends with a line worthy of Lowell and an image that suddenly brings in the death and blood that lurks so smugly behind all our diversionary tactics. Gee.

What I like about Seidel is the way he plays our banalities back at us, but first subjects them to a sea-change that causes the acrid brine of his own peculiar vision to cling to them:

The young keep getting younger, but the old keep getting younger. But this young woman is young. We kiss. It's almost incest when it gets to this. This is the consensual, national, metrosexual hunger-for-younger. --"Climbing Everest"

What is said is what anyone commenting on how the rich old court the fresh young might say -- but it would be said in a wagging finger way, or at least with mockery of the jaded, fading oldster trying to ignite himself via youth. But Seidel says it with a kind of rueful surprise at being the oldster accepted by youth in his "hunger-for-younger." In other words, it's not jaded at all, but almost charmingly surprised by the mores of "almost incest," where the words "consensual, national" do the job of making both old and young part of a machine that operates simply because it operates. "My dynamite penis / Is totally into Venus" Seidel quips, the intonation of youth appropriated by age to make the sex act partake of "the moment" as, we tend to think, only youth can. The insinuation of the poem -- that such sex acts, like that Ducati racer, are grandiose acts of death-courting -- never stops asserting itself after that first verse of foreplay, and each joke gets a little edgier, stripped of any self-satisfaction, but gripped by the vanity of vanitas, which is to say that being vain is a vain endeavor, that the grave is grave, and that "the train wreck in the tent" is addicted to all the tender mercies he can get.

Judging by Ooga-Booga, Seidel is an acquired taste that I'm on my way to acquiring because his poems confront me in a way that the poets I end up living with for awhile do. Bring on those Collected Poems.

The street where I live . . .

I have been thinking about turning this article I wrote about my street, West Rock Avenue, into a book, and so I have been doing a lot of reading about urbanism, town planning, and architecture. Basically, I am trying to figure out what makes some streets livable and others not. A good deal of the literature — by people including New Havener Philip Langdon, whose A Better Place to Live has given me a whole new outlook on what makes a space a happy one in which to dwell — boils down to this: don't depend on cars. People are happier when they can walk to see neighbors, ride their bicycles, and live close enough to their neighbors that they know them. This small-town mythology is one that I am particularly susceptible to, having grown up in a neighborhood that had many of a small town's virtues. And I find myself, as I read these books, falling prey to an unfortunate smugness, as if growing up on streets laid out on an easily navigated grid, with houses on quarter-acres instead of large lots, is the only way to have a happy childhood.

But that can't be right. For one thing, this mythos runs contrary to another important American mythos, the rural farm. I don't think many of us would want to say that children growing up in the countryside, learning to milk cows by their parents' sides, are unhappy. Nobody thinks that that's an uninspiring or despairing way to grow up. And, to be fair, the writers I'm reading aren't reacting against that way of life, which may be dying out; they are reacting against suburban sprawl, which until recently seemed poised to dominate the American landscape.

But what of that suburban sprawl — especially those cul-de-sac developments that have proved so popular in late-20th-century construction? Can one have a happy childhood where there are no sidewalks, where it's too dangerous to ride a bicycle, where there are no secret passageways behind garages or corner stores at which to buy candy?

I don't know. On the one hand, I don't want to underestimate children's capacity for self-mystification. I suspect that most children, at least most of those who grow up middle-class, and sheltered from anything too abysmal in the family's home life, look back at their early years with a certain sense of awe and wonder. Those lookalike houses in Del Boca Vista Estates are not lookalike to the children inside them, who know which house has the best video-game system, which kid has the dad who makes the best forts with the dining room table and some blankets, whose parents go out late and don't hire a babysitter (all the better for watching verboten TV channels).

On the other hand, there is empirical evidence that suburban life of this kind can lead to bad things: obesity, too much time in the car, fewer friends, less play. And teenagers—forget about it. If they can, they flee to the city. Or at least the curious ones do.

But what I don't have are good sympathetic non-fiction books about life in suburban sprawl. For every book critical of that way of life — Langdon's book, Duany et al.'s Suburban Nation, Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place — there seem to be exactly zero books about why it can be pleasurable to grow up in spaces that are, after all, safe, predictable, and quiet, which are all good things.

I want the other side of the story. Ideas, anyone?

New Haven in the 21st Century...?

Driving through the flooded streets of Long Wharf this wet week, then ditching the car to hike up my skirt and trudge barefooted through filthy knee-high water in front of Union Station – all to catch a Metro-North commuter train to Manhattan -- I flashed on a day when life would seem less at odds with nature. Usually, I’m not a green utopist, but a visually stunning and provocatively written new book, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City (Abrams) is turning me on to the ecological origins and conceivable futures of cities. I’m so taken with this book that I’ve bought several copies as gifts (perfect for Father’s Day) and am planning to present it to my daughter’s grade school to adapt into the curriculum – that’s how important I think the ideas are.

Here’s the premise: even a city as developed as Manhattan began as a natural landscape of forests, trees, rivers and streams. In 1609, when explorer Henry Hudson first came upon Mannahatta -- the “island of many hills” to the Lenape tribe – it teemed with flora and fauna among fifty-five ecosystems that “reused and retained water, soil, and energy, in cycles established over millions of years.” Back then, Mannahatta supported a human population of three hundred to twelve hundred. Today, Manhattan is home to millions of people on a planet of billions. Yet, as author Eric Sanderson argues, it’s a “conceit” to think any city and its inhabitants -- no matter its technological and economic development – “can escape the shackles that bind [us] to our earthly selves, including our dependence on the earth’s bounty and the confines of our native place.”

Scholarship and research aside, Mannahatta is a fun read. Full-page color photos of today’s Manhattan juxtaposed with photographic visualizations of 1609 Mannahatta open up, centerfold-like, throughout the book. Author Sanderson, a landscape ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, is adept at making complex scientific issues accessible to the lay reader. Charts and maps show habitats of species, distribution of fauna, and even the location of beavers in the vicinity of today’s Times Square. City buffs can pore over bathymetry and topography maps. I laughed aloud when I learned that the bronze bull standing at Bowling Green (the New York Stock Exchange) was once a hill twenty feet high.

By 2050, the majority of people on earth will live in cities, and they will have to become greener and more hospitable if they are to continue being the vibrant cultural and business centers they are today, as well as comfortable places to live in. In the last chapter, “Manhattan 2409,” Sanderson addresses basic human needs – food, water, shelter, energy – acknowledging that changes in infrastructure will most likely come piecemeal. Waterways and greenways will slowly replace beltways and avenues. Sanderson proposes new green buildings with lizard-like second skins that can both shade and insulate, open and close depending upon the season.

As to this week’s flooding at the New Haven train station? The next time the city renovates Union Street, they might use permeable paving materials that capture rainwater below the surface. Or perhaps, we can add a “green roof” -- a thin layer of soil planted with grasses and flowers that slows water flow and cools a building -- atop the New Haven Police Station? I can always dream.

Note: This September 12, 2009, celebrates the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Henry Hudson in New York Harbor. See also, the exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, Mannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City.

“My upbringing was pretty weird," says David Bowie's son

I know. You're thinking, "No WAY." But sure enough. Or so Duncan Jones, the artist formerly known as Zowie Bowie, told the New York Times last week.

Jones was recalling the formative years during which his father introduced him to the likes of George Orwell, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, and let him hang around the set on movies such as Labyrinth. The occasion for these revelations was a publicity push for Jones' feature film directorial debut, Moon--an impressive piece of work, not least because its general disposition is so steadfastly down to Earth.

Sam Rockwell stars as a near-future moon base laborer who for three years has spent his days alone mining the lunar soil's rich supply of Helium 3, with which his far-flung corporate overseer claims to be solving Earth's energy crisis. Alone, that is, until an entirely unlikely visitor arrives and turns out not to be good company.

In recent years, Rockwell has been building a fine body of work by wondering how men live with themselves, and Moon is all about that. It’s hard to discuss in detail without giving the whole plot away, and of course the plot--developed by Jones with screenwriter Nathan Parker--is pretty ridiculous. Let’s just say that it takes place on the mysterious frontier between space madness and corporate malfeasance, and that my disbelief was suspended.

I like the movie’s peculiar personality, its way of being a functional assembly of nice touches--like Clint Mansell’s driving score, or the deliberate tactility of the production design, or the obligatory omnipresent talking computer being voiced by Kevin Spacey, whose performances always strike me as facsimiles of humanness anyway.

Most of all, I like that it's not ever too peculiar. As a conscious throwback to the unabashedly philosophical, pre-CGI science fiction of Jones' youth, Moon also has just enough astronomical distance from his famously spaced-out dad. If we want to call Jones' good taste an inheritance, we should allow that so, too, is his discretionary independence.

Marcia Bartusiak and the day we disappeared

Broadly speaking, the history of astronomy reads something like the story about how we humans have discovered our insignificance in the cosmos. In the last two thousand years, major discoveries about the solar system, our galaxy and the universe have shuffled the likelihood of our existence deeper and deeper into the realm of improbable chance and fortuitous coincidence. In the big picture, we're barely a pixel. I suppose it's only unsettling if you start out assuming that human beings are, quite literally, the center of the universe. Two thousand years ago, Aristotle stepped up and said the Earth sits at the center of an unchanging, infinite universe; our planet is surrounded by celestial spheres most easily observed by the movements of the Sun and planets. People believed Aristotle and moved on with their lives. In the 16th century, Copernicus stepped up to the plate, swung, and blasted the Earth out of the center. He explained the motions of the planets by invoking a heliocentric view of the cosmos. The sun, not we, sat in the middle. Earth had officially been displaced as the center of everything—at least in theory. (And Copernicus himself was displaced. Last November, archaeologists finally found his long-lost remains buried under the floor of a cathedral in Poland.) In the 17th century, Galileo improved upon the design of a Dutch engineer to build a telescope, with which he delivered good evidence in support of Copernicus. In this case, good evidence made the Dominicans mad, and Galileo was rewarded by the Catholic Church with house arrest (albeit a very comfortable house arrest) for the rest of his life.

And so on—each new discovery places humanity further from a central position. The greatest decentralizing act of our time may have occurred on New Year’s Day, 1925—the eponymous "day" in the title of science writer Marcia Bartusiak’s latest offering, The Day We Discovered the Universe. Bartusiak is an experienced and award-winning writer, a fellow of the AAAS and a former Knight fellow at MIT. (I feel fortunate to count myself among her former students.)

On that day in 1925, astronomers were gathered in Washington, D.C., for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. On the third day of the meeting, someone stood up, gave a talk, and changed everything. Edwin Hubble, a 35-year-old stargazer working at the Lick Observatory atop Mount Wilson in California, had found conclusive evidence that the Milky Way—our beloved home—was not the only galaxy in the cosmos. (Hubble, fearful of sullying his reputation, didn’t even present his own findings.)

It’s easy to be blasé about the impossible-to-comprehend infinitude of the cosmos now; after all, almost everyone alive today grew up surrounded by the knowledge that the Milky Way is no loner. And we science junkies, with our varying deficits of attention, learn, marvel and move on, looking for the next big thing. Bartusiak, however, writes about that blustery day in the nation’s capital with the infectious excitement of a giddy astrophile:

In one fell swoop, the visible universe was enlarged by an inconceivable factor, eventually trillions of times over. In more familiar terms, it’s as if we had been confined to one square yard of Earth’s surface, only to suddenly realize that there were now vast oceans and continents, cities and villages, mountains and deserts, previously unexplored and unanticipated on that single plug of sod.

Or here:

The Milky Way, once the universe’s lone inhabitant floating in an ocean of darkness, was suddenly joined by billions of other star-filled islands, arranged outward as far as telescopes could peer. Earth turned out to be less than a speck, the cosmic equivalent of a subatomic particle hovering within an immensity still difficult to grasp.

That’s just the beginning: In Day, Bartusiak lovingly and meticulously traces the origins and development of a big idea. Hubble’s name is familiar to most of us mainly because of recent news about the space telescope that bears his name, but he doesn’t really show up in the book until two-thirds of the way through—a structural choice that demonstrates Hubble stood on the shoulders of many, many giants. His name may be forever associated with the discovery of the universe, but his finding was no instantaneous flash of brilliance that launched him from obscurity into the annals of science.

In fact, Bartusiak calmly puts to rest the idea that scientific advancements arrive in discrete packages marked by the word “Eureka!” Despite the legend of Archimedes, scientists aren’t usually struck out of the blue by the clear light of truth: "Answers did not arrive in one eureka moment, but only after years of contentious debates over conjectures and measurements that were fiercely disputed. The avenue of science is more often filled with twists, turns, and detours than unobstructed straightaways."

Her enjoyable book is an exhaustively researched exploration of both major and minor players. She points out that Hubble wasn’t the first person to suspect the great vastness. The Roman poet Lucretius thought it ludicrous to imagine a finite universe; the polymath mystic Emanuel Swedenborg mused that there must be ‘spheres’ beyond our own; Immanuel Kant correctly discerned galactic shape and suggested galaxies were scattered throughout space.

Many unsung heroes get a nod: Vesto Slipher clocked the speeds of distant spiral-shaped nebulae (later identified as other galaxies) and found that most of them were speeding away from the Earth—“a precocious intimation of the cosmic expansion that took many more years to fully recognize.” Henrietta Leavitt’s studies of variable stars made it possible to measure the distance between us and galaxies far, far away. Leavitt, one of many women hired to be a human “computer” at the Harvard College Observatory, died in 1921—four years before the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences tried to nominate her for a Nobel Prize in Physics. (It wasn’t to be—Nobel nominees must be living.)

The book ends with something of a cliffhanger. Hubble and his fellow giants had found that not only is the universe filled with other galaxies, but these galaxies are retreating. Further investigation revealed that these “galaxies are not rushing through space but instead are being carried along as space-time inflates without end.” No matter which way we look in the sky, we see this vast universe rushing away from us. (In a way, that does put us back at the center of things, but only because every point in the universe is the center…)

Modern astronomy continues to tell us how far we are from the center—and that we still can’t comprehend the weirdness of reality. Ninety-six percent of the stuff in the universe barely interacts with the protons, electrons and neutrons that make up our reality. (It’s most likely flowing through you right now, and there’s no way to know.) Planet-hunters are scanning the skies for the telltale spectrographic signature of distant, rocky world that may harbor life. Other astronomers are looking for the “chameleon,” a theoretical entity that adjusts its mass to its environment and may help explain dark energy, the unknown goo that fills most of space. Also unsettling is the idea that our infinite universe is just one of an infinite number of universes that together form the "multiverse.” Is there no limit to enormousness?

(PS: The International Astronomical Union and the United Nations declared this year the “International Year of Astronomy,” an initiative that invites countries and institutions to step up their education of the public in all matters regarding the universe. Bartusiak’s book would be a great way to celebrate. So would a trip to Yale’s new planetarium at the Leitner Family Observatory, which offers free shows on Tuesday nights and, on June 12, a showing of “War of the Worlds.”)

Reviews, Reviews, Reviews

So much to talk about today, it's almost impossible to know where to start, so let's work backwards from what I last read… For years I've known of the achievements of Octavia Butler, who carries the distinction of being one of the few, if not only, African-American, female writers in the otherwise all-too-white and once upon a time all-too-male genre of science fiction. Butler's reputation, moreover, is stellar. She cleaned up in science fiction awards for her novella BloodChild, landed a Nebula for Parable of the Talents, and even had the rare distinction for a science fiction writer of receiving a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant. She died from a stroke at the relatively young age of 58 after authoring some thirteen books in a writing career that spanned nearly 30 years.

Her last work before she died was a science fiction vampire novel, Fledgling, described by her as a "lark." At a minimum, let us say that it is any number of cuts above such fare as Stephanie Meyers' Twilight series, which I only know from DVD since I refuse to plow through the many thousands of pages of teen vampire angst run amok in the halls of our nation's high schools. Indeed, one wonders if Butler was not responding in part to this one of many in a genre that I have lovingly dubbed for my teenage daughter as the "hickeys with holes" brand of fiction.

Fledgling is compelling. A child awakens in a cave, badly injured, in terrible pain, with no memory of her past and struggling to survive. Ravenously hungry, operating only on instinct, Shori discovers that she is a 53-year-old vampire in the body of an 11-year-old child, a member of an ancient, anthropogenetic race known as the "Ina," who live alongside human beings. Shori's amnesia is a literary device that just borders on the trite for pumping up readers' feelings of suspense. But it's also an opportunity, in Butler's deft hands, to reimagine the human-vampire relationship as one of mutual symbiosis instead of formal parasitism. What we get is Butler's latent utopianism in which the idea of the family is reconfigured into a mixture of physical addiction and mutual dependence, open sexual relations and Western ideations of the village family unit.

But there's an added wrinkle: Shori, unlike all of her vampire relations, is black, purposely so, the result of experiments in skin pigmentation and Ina-human gene mixing. Presumably this should raise Fledgling to the level of social novel, a genre I generally favor when done right. But the material seems to get away from Butler, and what appeared so promising at its opening simply doesn't deliver on the possibilities suggested, an unfortunate result for a work that—as vampire novels today go—still surpasses its peers in depth and invention.

…..

If no one objects to my jumping around a bit for today's post, then let me pick up where my colleague left off by discussing a wonderful book by one of our own that has come into New Haven Review's hands.

When George Scialabba's What Are Intellectuals Good For? arrived at the doorstep, I was hooked. Right away I knew Scialabba would be my kind of intellectual, regardless of what intellectuals may or may not be good for. Gathered from the last two decades or so, this collection of essays and reviews raises the question in more ways than one. First and foremost is through the persona of the author himself, who is a public intellectual in perhaps the truest sense of the term. You see, Scialabba is not a professor at a major research university or a policy wonk at a think tank or a Gore Vidal-esque aesthete pontificating from an Italian villa or one of the liquid lunch crowd flowing in and out the Condé Nast building. No, Mr. Scialabba appears to be one of those rarities: a working stiff whose vocation appears to have little to do with his avocation. When he's not busting Christopher Hitchens' chops or assessing Richard Rorty's contributions to American culture, he is presumably working budgets or dressing down contractors in his daylight existence as an assistant building superintendent. OK, I'll grant that even a plant manager at Harvard may have the advantage of proximity to some of the best minds in the country. But Harvard is hardly distinguished for its HVAC systems.

Scialabba, as a public intellectual, is part of a cultural tradition of thinkers who opt to keep their day jobs when none from MFA programs or think tanks are forthcoming. And, to be honest, that's something of a relief to me. It's probably no surprise then that Scialabba most admires those intellectuals whose qualities are defined less by their professional status than the clarity and cogency of their writing, even when on the wrong side of an issue. As a result, What Are Intellectuals Good For? is a veritable who's who of publicly accessible intellectual discourse. Dwight McDonald, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty, Christopher Lasch, Alisdair MacIntyre, Irving Howe, and assorted others are the subjects of essays and reviews that are notable for their force of argument and precision of thought. There is nary a Continental thinker nor an American imitator to be found here.

There is a special fondness for the New York Intellectuals—Howe, Trilling, the rest of the Partisan Review crowd—in part for their achievements, in part for their apparent disdain of specialization and academicization. As a consequence, Scialabba's more recent heroes tend towards the plain-spoken and generally incisive Russell Jacoby, Christopher Lasch, and Richard Rorty. Less admirable are the likes of Martha Nussbaum (too generic), Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer (too conservative), and Christopher Hitchens (too crazy).

And yet whatever Scialabba's verdict, we'd do well to listen. He's often on point, even if you disagree, and quicker than most to get to the root issues in any writer's corpus of thought. But what really distinguishes this collection, especially the reviews, is how Scialabba lets the books and their authors take center stage. Too often in venues such as the London Review of Books and, albeit less frequently, the New York Review of Books, one gets the funny feeling that the reviews are more about the reviewer than the reviewed. Now, it would be mean-spirited to begrudge a reviewer his or her authorial voice: I can assure you Scialabba doesn't conceal his. But 4,000 word essays in which the title under review makes its grand entrance in the last two paragraphs do not always seems worth the price of admission. Reviewers with grand ideas and theories of their own are sometimes better off just writing their own books. Fortunately, Scialabba avoids this species of reviewing hubris.

But already I commit the very sin I deplore, too wrapped up in sound of my own voice and not letting Scialabba's book take over from hereon. But let me shamelessly plead the constraints of space and conclude on this note: What Are Intellectual Good For? is, in a sense, the meditation of one deep-thinking critic on the work of other deep-thinking critics and their views of politics, social justice, and morality. In another sense, it is a reader's roadmap to some of the best cultural criticism written in the last half century. And in both senses taken together, it is a highly recommended starting point for anyone who cares deeply about this much-endangered species of criticism.

…..

So who the hell is Robert Levin? Well, there's always the Wikipedia article, where you can learn that he's a jazz critic, a short story writer, and a writer of music liner notes. He seems to have had his heyday here and there—a critical letter to the Village Voice about the 1963 March on Washington that drew a year's worth of responses; a 2004 recipient of "storySouth Million Writers Award Notable Story."

That story is the title of a collection of Levin's writings, When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot: A Miscellany of Stories & Commentary. Dare I confess that I read this slim 90-page volume over the course of seven dog walks? (Yes, I can walk and read at the same time; I can also chew gum and type.) Let me add that it was one of my more pleasurable dogwalking experiences, which is otherwise a dreadful bore. The reason is simple: Levin is funny. Leaving aside the eponymous lead short story, itself a ribald tale of mistaken identity and the sexual pleasures that can derive therefrom, the miscellany and commentary are laugh-out-loud grotesques, some weirdly Dickensian in their exaggeration of the mundane, others Jamesian in their syntactically elaborate transformations of the bizarre into the clinical or poetic. Only examples will do. In his screed "Recycle This!" on a recycling notice asking residents "to sort and…rinse [their] garbage before leaving it out," he writes: "So while I'll allow that self-immolation would constitute a disproportionate form of protest, I have to say that reacting with less than indignation to so gratuitous an imposition would also be inappropriate." That's a fairly ornate response to a recycling notice. Like I said, pure Dickens.

Or consider "Peggie (or Sex with a Very Large Woman)," a story so wonderfully offensive that it would be impossible not to relish the absurd attempt to poeticize the physical challenges set before Levin's narrator: "…Peggie's particular body could have served as a Special Forces training ground for the field of hazards and challenges its presented. I'm speaking of the twisting climbs and sudden valleys, the crags, the craters and the amazing plenitude of gullies, ravines and bogs that I was, and on my hands and knees, obliged to negotiate and traverse in my search." And don't even ask what he was searching for. You can probably guess.

In some ways, Levin is at his best wringing every drop of qualification from a feeling or thought, an instance of rage or fear, often in one long but densely packed sentence. The bathos of the stories and of some of the miscellany—there are cantankerous whines about cashiers and their stupidity, smoking bans, HMOs, aging, the aforementioned recycling notices—is actually what makes it all worth the reading. Levin, in essence, gets more out of the mundane through an overwrought prose style that is utterly apropos to the sensibility behind it.

But there's no substitute for the man himself, so let's conclude with his thoughts on when one of God's "natural wonders"—in this case a solar eclipse—fails to deliver the goods: "I'll allow that, however disappointing it may be, it's ultimately of small consequence when He mounts a shoddy eclipse. But it's something else again when, for one especially egregious example, He leave you to blow out all your circuits trying to figure just where a mindless inferno of neuroticism like Mia Farrow fits into the notion that everyone's here for a reason." Consider my own circuits blown.

George Scialabba v’Eretz Yisrael

At long last, the critic George Scialabba is getting some love. I only met George once, about ten years ago, and I had forgotten how articulate he was in conversation; I was reminded by listening to an interview with Christopher Lydon on his web show (which is as good as anything on NPR). I did, however, want to take issue with one comment George makes—and I hope that my minor quibble will be taken in the context of the huge respect I have for George, who is an essential writer and whose new book you should buy and read. At one point, George takes a stab at explaining how many Jewish intellectuals moved right-ward politically; his explanation, and it's not his alone, is that the 1967 war, when Israel's survival seemed to be at stake, caused many American Jews to become more attached to Israel, a country that until then had not been a major part of American Jewish consciousness, especially among intellectuals. Since then, he says, many Jews have been unwilling to follow their progressive principles if those principles might put them at odds with (their perception of) what's best for Israel's survival. And so we can understand how, for example, there was no large Jewish outcry about the invasion of Iraq, which they took to be in Israel's interests. (I hope this is a fair representation of George's position; I'm talking about one or two minutes in a 44-minute interview otherwise filled with fascinating discussions of Randolph Bourne, Walter Karp, and other too-forgotten intellectuals. If this is an unfair statement, I hope George will let me know in the comments section—although I understand if he has better things to do!)

On one level, George is of course right; in fact, he does not go far enough. Israel's remarkable victory in the '67 war not only heightened Jewish concern about the survival of their several million co-religionists in Israel, but it also—more important, I think—increased Jewish pride in identification with that state. Even my fervently anti-Zionist, left-wing grandparents were a little astonished at a country that had produced successful Jewish soldiers (or so my mother recalls). (And here I am reminded of the comedian Jackie Mason's line about the difference between Jews and Italians: Jews are wimps on the street corner, while Italians can f— you up; but put them in an army, and Jews are indestructible, whereas Italians can't shoot straight.)

But I think we have to know which Jews we're talking about. The Jews who became the famous neo-conservatives—Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, most famously—were well on their way to the right before 1967, and they were swinging right in a way that was bound to sweep all their opinions to the right. Indeed, I have often marveled at the sheer, improbably drift of their move to the right—how can it be intellectually honest to just happen to move right on labor, foreign policy, economics, etc., at the same time. Such a comprehensive move is more likely to be the result of cynicism or careerism. There is no reason, after all, why becoming more hawkish on foreign policy also entails becoming more hostile to labor unions. But with these guys, so it went, and there you have it.

Anyway, I don't think 1967 had much to do with where Kristol, Podhoretz, and Himmelfarb ended up. Nor did it have much effect on a lot of Jewish New Left types who were pretty irreligious to begin with, and Jewishly uninterested, and who make up one important core of anti-Zionism today. After all, while most Jews are not anti-Zionists, a lot of outspoken anti-Zionists and Israel critics actually are Jews. Jews may, in fact, be more disproportionately anti-Zionist than they are disproportionately Zionist, compared to the American population at large. Pretty much all Americans are, in their unthinking way, supportive of Israel—a goodly number of Jews, in a very thoughtful way, are critical of Israel. Especially among intellectuals, and that's whom Scialabba is talking about.

So who are these Jews whose foreign-policy ideas were warped, or subtly shifted, by the 1967 war? For whom was the war decisive in that way? The best case could be made, I think, by looking at my contemporaries (I am 34), rather than at neo-cons in the sixties and seventies. I would hazard that a lot of New Republic types (to just pick one useful marker), people like Peter Beinart, say (although there is no reason to pick on him, and he's written a lot about how his position on this has changed), were more inclined to support the Iraq invasion because of having grown up in a post-1967 world where the survival of Israel was an issue for young American intellectuals in a way that it wasn't for, say, my dad.

But I think what George was really getting at is a general despair, his and others', that the same people who have been central—indeed, indispensable—to so many other social-justice movements in America have seemed, to him, relatively absent on foreign policy. And that is a shame. But the causation isn't so simple.

Another point about Jews: most American Jews, even those who went Communist or socialist, have, in their own ways, been very supportive of the American project. This is, after all, the land that saved us from what had been happening, and what lay in wait, in Europe. So that deeply felt Americanism has been channeled into certain domestic progressive causes—like Civil Rights—where it is apparent that the United States is not living up to its ideals. And with our long tradition of women being at least moderately educated, and working outside the home (in the shtetl, scholars' wives often worked to support their husbands endless hours in study), Jews were at the forefront of Second Wave feminism. And there was a history of labor radicalism that Jews brought from Europe. But Jews have not historically been pacifists, and we have been enthusiastic soldiers in every American war (including both sides of the Civil War). It may, therefore, be a bit of a mistake to read into that Jewish progressivism a congenital anti-war inclination. Yes, many Jews were at the fore of the anti-Vietnam movement (although perhaps not out of proportion to our representation on liberal college campuses, where the movement was centered). But it's not my sense that the leading pacifists in the Great War or World War II were Jews—they were Protestants, often of the Anabaptist or Radical Reformation stripe: Quakers, Mennonites, etc., with a smattering of Jehovah's Witnesses, and some more mainline Protestants.

So while it would be nice if there were a strong, identifiably Jewish foreign-policy left today, and in the run-up to the Iraq War, I am not sure that that was ever likely, or that there was a historical precedent, and I don't think its absence is as clearly related to the 1967 war as George Scialabba seems to think.

Letter from New Orleans

Thinking about it now, I pause to think about the ramifications of moving from one new place to another over the past five years—from New York to New Haven and now to New Orleans. After years of banging around various locales in and around New York City, it wasn't too long after I moved to the Elm that I was schooled by two locals on the question of emphasis when it comes to how you actually pronounce New Haven. New Yorkers, it seems, tend to put the emphasis on the NEW! and not the York. "I live in New York, not to be confused with Old York." But here, as Ideat Village impresarios Bill Saunders and Nancy Shea counseled one night, repeatedly, the emphasis, generally speaking, is on the Haven. Not NEW! Haven but New HAAAY-VEN. After awhile I got it; you want to linger on the Haven a good long while, since it is a town that will grow on you. So I started emphasizing the Haven part of New Haven and was therefore able to live here for over four years. When it comes to New Orleans, hey, I'm having a hard enough time pronouncing some of these street names without worrying too much about where the emphasis ought to lie. Post-Katrina you could argue for NEW! Orleans, but that sounds like Chamber of Commerce-approved marketing of the most vanilla-cynical variety. Besides, the blessed and endemic lassitude of the Big Easy begs for a lingering over the Orleans. On the other hand, from a fact-checking point of view, there is an Orleans with which one can make a differentiation. So I have been worrying about it, but not too much.

The other day I was walking in the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans, which, I have learned, is not pronounced “ma-RIG-knee,” and came upon one of those those Volvo sub-wagons you see in every town, festooned with an abundance of bumper stickers citing various locales, pols and causes. Amid the Hillary! Stop War! and Peace is Patriotic stickers was one trumpeting the glories of . . . New Haven!—complete with an accompanying icon, a slice of pizza. The nudgenik in me thought, "Hey, that's wrong! None of the legendary places in town sells pizza by the slice! Outrages!"

But seeing that bumper sticker, indeed the whole trove of them, did evoke yet another question of where to put one's emphasis, this time when it comes to the old canard, "Everything in moderation." It's one on the great cautionary aphorisms of all time, but that's only because most of us put the emphasis on the moderation. Embedded within lies the stunning and deeply gratifying notion that if you can swing the moderation, you can have everything!

And so there we were, the winter of 2008, myself and Bill and Nancy, and the writer Todd Lyon. By then I knew how to tell people I lived in New Haaaay-ven and it had stopped bothering me that my friends from New York would always want to know how I was enjoying Hartford. In any case, we had an agenda. Oh, such a one as it was! We would hit four pizzerias in one night. We'd start at Zuppardi's in West Haven, get the double-dose at Sally's and Pepe's, and then grab a capper pie at Modern.

A slice here, a slice there, no gastro-problems would ensue if we paced ourselves; that was the plan. Alas. Immoderation won out in Wooster Square and we never made it to Modern. As for BAR, we kept it off the list. Too new, relatively speaking, to qualify for the tour.

Boston's Neat Graffitist vs. New Haven's.... Random Acts of Text

A Short Tribute to Selected Artiness I Remember from the 1980s, and a Hearty Recommendation of a Novel by Eric Kraft

When I was in high school, someone—I have no idea who—went around town putting up posters that said "New Haven is the Paris of the 1980s."

This was completely untrue, but it just slayed me and my friends. Every few years or so, I end up in a conversation with someone who was around then, and we go, "Remember the 'New Haven is the Paris of the 1980s' guy? Who the hell was that?" and then we laugh and have another beer.

In the 1990s I read all the available work by the sadly underrecognized literary genius Eric Kraft. I'd read his Herb n' Lorna, fallen madly in love with it, and begun to eat my way through the rest of his books. The one I liked best, and which is probably still my second favorite, is called Reservations Recommended. It is a sad comic novel (I know that sounds impossible, but trust me, it isn't) about a guy who lives a boring life working for a big company, but has an alter ego who is a restaurant critic in Boston. A lot of the novel is this guy's observations about Boston in general, and many of those observations focus on someone he calls the Neat Graffitist. The Neat Graffitist, actual identity unknown, goes around Boston neatly magic markering the town with random statements, "in small, precise capital letters," such as:

NEVER FEAR PAIN. TIME DIMINISHES IT. BUT AVOID BOSTON CITY HOSPITAL. NURSES THERE WEAR USED UNIFORMS PURCHASED FROM BURGER KING, TREAT PATIENTS WITH FATALISTIC DETACHMENT.

There are many parts of Reservations Recommended that I reread with deep pleasure, just reveling in the wonderfulness of it, but the words of the Neat Graffitist are some of my favorite parts of the book. My husband and I are especially fond of this one:

TO HERBERT: YOU WERE BORN ONCE AND NOT TWICE AND WHEN YOU ARE DEAD YOU WILL BE DEAD FOREVER. GIVE ME BACK MY WATCHES. THEY WILL NOT MAKE YOU HAPPY. THEY ARE NO DEFENSE AGAINST DEATH.

The Neat Graffitist belongs in a category, I feel, with the "New Haven is the Paris of the 1980s" creator, along with the person who spent time writing pithy little sweet nothings on masking tape and putting them on parking meters around downtown around 1984–85. I vividly remember strolling around downtown with a friend who noticed this and chortled: "Uh-oh—someone's getting arty with the parking meters." It was almost certainly a Yalie, but still pretty entertaining.

So whoever the "New Haven is the Paris of the 1980s" guy (or, okay, girl) is, thanks and hats off to him/her; also to the Masking Tape Artist of 1984. Where are you now? Do you even remember doing these things?

Meanwhile, Eric Kraft's been getting rave reviews for his recent fiction, but it's not likely you've actually acted on your fleeting thought, "Gee, I should pick that up sometime and read it." Listen to me. Start with Herb n' Lorna if you can; if you can't, with Reservations Recommended. Act on the fleeting thought. Fleeting thoughts are our friends.

Summary Observations: The Movie

Aside from intellectual property attorneys, who really knows where to get good movie ideas? Julie & Julia, due in theaters this August, is Nora Ephron's movie of Julie Powell's memoir (originally a blog) of the year she devoted to making every recipe in Julia Child's famous cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Starring Amy Adams as Powell and Meryl Streep as Child, it is said to be the first wide-release movie developed from a book developed from a blog developed from a cookbook. And it just goes to show that potential entertainment properties are lurking everywhere. What most interests me, though, is its implied confidence in the supremacy of storytelling. If this film succeeds, it might inaugurate a whole new cinematic subgenre of movies dramatizing the doing of things described in instructional books.

Is an adaptation of Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why finally at hand? If so, what would it require? Perhaps the enterprising screenwriter might invent some twenty-something everyman, poised on the brink of self-actualization, and cross cut his intellectual development with telling formative vignettes from the life of Bloom?

Already I can picture our young, book-addled hero, sitting in an uncomfortable chair and contemplating “the vagaries of our current counter-Puritanism,” with the camera swirling and the music swelling around him; or standing by his apartment window, gazing out into the dusk and bearing in mind that “Irony will clear your mind of the cant of the ideologues, and help you to blaze forth as the scholar of one candle.” It began with Jason Schwartzman in contention for the part, but now I’m seeing Michael Cera.

So OK, it’s looking like this will be a Ron Howard picture, dumbed down just enough for mainstream safety and perhaps controversial in its casting of Tom Bosley as Bloom (certain members of the blogorati having lobbied in vain for Martin Landau). A box-office success? Maybe. An Oscar magnet? Well, sure, as long as it gets across the notion that “We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.”

And if that doesn’t work out, there must still be a good movie to be made from How to Complain for Fun & Profit: The Best Guide Ever to Writing Complaint Letters, by Bruce Silverman. Or at least from The Garden Primer, by Barbara Damrosch.

Finding the War

It is common to hear that part of what contributed to victory in World War II, and the overwhelming sense that it was the right thing to do, was that nobody at home knew how awful it was for the soldiers fighting it abroad. For many years now, books, essays, and movies have been editing the popular story about the war, revealing its singular brutality and the myriad of motivations that led the powers that be to fight it as they did. This has led to a bit of a crumbling of World War II's image as America's last good war, due to both those hoping to complicate its simple popular moral equation and those hoping to give a clearer picture of just what the soldiers' sacrifice entailed. Yet the idea that, from 1939 to 1945, the people were sheltered from the war's horrors persists—an idea that I found myself questioning when I read Ernie Pyle's Brave Men, a collection of the war correspondent's dispatches from 1943 to 1944, when he covered the war in Italy and then the Allied push through France to Berlin. The 1944 edition of the book is a fascinating artifact of the time period: Along with the copyright, an eagle-emblazoned seal states that this is a Wartime Book: "books are weapons in the war of ideas," the sash fluttering from the eagle's beak proclaims. The seal goes on to state that "this complete edition is produced in full compliance with the government's regulations for conserving paper and other essential materials," and it's easy to see the result: It's printed on very thin paper (that nonetheless has held up remarkably well—even wartime cost-cutting seems to have produced a better-quality book than today's mass-market paperback printers do) and with a clear regard for cramming as much text onto the page as possible without rendering it illegible. For me, a grandchild of those who lived through World War II, the effect of the book is to recall the stories I'd heard of who in my family served in the war, what they did, and where; and also, what the lives of the women who stayed behind were like, waiting for their husbands to come home, raising small children who had no recollection of their fathers.

Pyle, like the cartoonist Bill Mauldin, is celebrated for his honest yet dignifying depictions of the soldiers that he met, and Brave Men certainly gives you a lot of that. But Pyle's vision of the war does more than that: By giving us what he saw in Europe at the height of combat, and by making the soldiers he met human—naming them, talking about the meals he shared and the combat he experienced with them—Pyle undermines the idea of World War II, or any war, as good. Consider his description of an air battle he witnessed from the ground:

Someone shouted that one of the planes was smoking. Yes, we could all see it. A long faint line of black smoke stretched straight for a mile behind one of them. And as we watched there was a gigantic sweep of flame over the plane. From nose to tail it disappeared in flame, and it slanted slowly down and banked around the sky in great wide curves, this way and that way, as rhythmically and gracefully as in a slow-motion waltz. Then suddenly it seemed to change its mind and it swept upward, steeper and steeper and ever slower until finally it seemed poised motionless on its own black pillar of smoke. And then just as slowly it turned over and dived for the earth—a golden spearhead on the straight black shaft of its own creation—and disappeared behind the treetops. But before it was down there were more cries of, "There's another one smoking—and there's a third one now." Chutes came out of some of the planes. Out of some came no chutes at all. One of white silk caught on the tail of a plane. Men with binoculars could see him fighting to get loose until flames swept over him, and then a tiny black dot fell through space, all alone.

Or his description of soldiers approaching a firefight:

The men didn't talk amongst themselves. They just went. They weren't heroic figures as they moved forward one at a time, a few seconds apart. You think of attackers as being savage and bold. These men were hesitant and cautious. They were really the hunters, but they looked like the hunted. There was a confused excitement and a grim anxiety on their faces.

They seemed terribly pathetic to me. They weren't warriors. They were American boys who by mere chance of fate had wound up with guns in their hands, sneaking up a death-laden street in a strange and shattered city in a faraway country in a driving rain. They were afraid, but it was beyond their power to quit. They had no choice. They were good boys. I talked with them all afternoon as we sneaked slowly forward along the mysterious and rubbled street, and I know they were good boys. And even though they weren't warriors born to the kill, they won their battles. That's the point.

He goes on to describe all of them—their names, their addresses, and a epigram about them that makes them suddenly, startlingly real ("his New England accent was so broad I had to have him spell out 'Arthur' and 'Auburn' before I could catch what he said"; "Eddie was thirty, he was married, and used to work in a brewery back home; he was a bazooka man, but his bazooka was broken that day so he was just carrying a rifle."). Always giving them their dignity.

I like to think it was this dignifying impulse, and not the work of censors, that made Pyle use a kind of synecdoche when he described the beaches at Normandy just after the fighting was over. He lets the soldiers tell you what the actual assault was like themselves, the things that happened to them then, but he never pretends he was there with them. And when he takes a walk along the beach himself, he tells us that "men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn't know they were in the water, for they were dead." But he lingers much longer on the mangled machinery, "empty life rafts and soldiers' packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges," and at last, "in a jumbled row for mile on mile were soldiers' packs." He goes on:

There were socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles, hand grenades. There were the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out—one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked.

There were toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. There were pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes. There were broken-handled shovels, and portable radios smashed almost beyond recognition, and mine detectors twisted and ruined.

There were torn pistol belts and canvas water buckets, first-aid kits, and jumbled heaps of life belts. I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier's name in it, and put it in my jacket. I carried it a half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don't know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down again.

There are other things he sees that day, ironic and funny and pitiful and heartbreaking. And though Pyle himself never questions why they fought—if no war is good, fighting against Nazi Germany was certainly just—the overwhelming impression you get from the soldiers is that they're just trying to do their jobs and then get back home. If they believe in the cause, it's not so much for the lofty reasons that came out of the mouths of politicians, but because what they went through damn well better have meant something.

D.A. Powell at Yale

D.A. Powell’s reading late March, at St. Anthony’s Hall in New Haven, was subdued, offering the stringent lyricism of his poems in a quiet, undemonstrative manner. The week before, in a poetry reading group at Yale, we had kicked around a selection of poems culled from all Powell's published volumes; from that brief introduction, I had the impression that the poems in Chronic (2009; Graywolf Press) were the best of his career thus far. After the reading, while getting a copy of the book signed, I mentioned that to Powell and asked if the book had been well-received. A little bemused, he said it had gotten some unfavorable reviews—later, I came across a review on Poetry’s website where Jason Guriel takes Powell to task for "easily attained opacity" and the "fashionable gestures" of contemporary poetry. The enumerated failings that Guriel finds in Powell’s verse might well apply to an entire cohort of poets of our day, but I can’t see the reason in laying that at Powell’s door so specifically. It's as if Guriel simply needed a whipping-boy and Powell, highly praised in other quarters, could sustain the attack better than most. Guriel, it seems, is in search of "stylistic tics" that might still seem "risky," and accuses Powell of stock footage "filmed on modernism's backlot," as though an achieved style were simply something readily available and thus overly familiar.

About Powell’s reading, I’ll just say that I don’t think he presented the best of the book. My feeling was that the poems we read for the group were better chosen than those he elected to read. For instance, the poem "Republic," with its litany of diseases and health issues, seemed to fall a bit flat in the reading. And Powell didn't read the somewhat longish title poem of the collection which struck me as a standout of the selection we read in the group. The best moment of the reading was in the excellent paired poems that conclude the volume, "Corydon & Alexis" and "Corydon & Alexis, Redux." Powell ended his reading with them, and there was a breathless intensity in the room as he finished.

oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god’s own ribs

If you're of Guriel's mind, you might believe the Eliot Waste Land crib is ersatz modernism ("you who are young, consider Phlebis"), that time personified as a banker foreclosing on us is a bit obvious, even if effective, and that the choice of a verb phrase like "deranges itself" is deliberate poeticizing. In fact, what I like about Powell is his willingness to poeticize in this register: using allusions, flippant or witty similes, somewhat off-putting word choice. I found myself having to listen pretty intently, while reading his poems to myself, to catch, again and again, a very deliberate music that, in his reading, was even easier to miss: "forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god’s own ribs"—the course of the o bouncing through the entire line, set-off nicely against short and long i. At his best, Powell’s mastery of such music is woven effortlessly into his poems so that it constantly teases the ear while reading.

In "Chronic," this tendency is pushed to its fullest development. The lines, collected into irregular stanzas, seem almost to float in space, notational, not quite connected to the preceding lines but by a certain intonation, a kind of implied affective relation that sustains interest both as mood and as a train of thought. The poem looks back at a life spent becoming a poet, sketching recollections of sex, spring ("in a spring of misunderstanding, I took the cricket's sound"), loving and sensual details ("sprig of lilac, scent of pine") that are also fused with remorse and foreboding ("daily, I mistake—there was a medication I forgot to take") to create a richly textured portrait held in time—static, and chronic: "light, light, do not go / I sing you this song and I will sing another as well."

I hope Powell will continue to sing songs so well as those collected in this at times difficult, elliptical, but always intriguingly lyrical volume.

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29

Directed by Kevin Rafferty (Kino, 2009)

Let it not be said that 1968 lacked fodder for eventual back-in-the-day documentaries. Even now, it all seems like too much: Vietnam in bloody chaos, King and Kennedy in coffins, Nixon in power, Black Panthers in the Olympics, Beatles in India, and — oh yes — two academically elite yet athletically average college football teams in a tied game just outside of Boston.

This last is the subject of former Michael Moore cameraman Kevin Rafferty’s new film, which, if nothing else, has the chutzpah to suggest that maybe even the most tumultuous years are only as good as their diversions. So if we’re going to go ahead and call this a contender for the Best College Football Game Ever award, in the category of Well, Ivy League, Anyway, we might as well also consider nominating Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 as the Best Football Movie Ever, in the category of Well, Documentary, Anyway.

The title comes from the next day’s Harvard newspaper headline: Both teams went in to this storied game undefeated, but the Bulldogs’ superiority was so unanimous, and the Crimson’s comeback so astounding, that a tie counted as a Harvard victory. And with that in mind, it’s fair to say the movie lives up to the title.

It mostly consists of old game footage and astute not-so-instant replay from the robustly aging players, whose educations clearly inclined them to philosophizing. Rafferty, himself a Harvard man, seems also inclined to characterizing his own tribe as fashionably progressive working-class fellas, and the Yalies as clueless aristocrats, but most of them are too clever and charming — and maybe wised-up from being satirized in the incipient Doonesbury by Yale’s Gary Trudeau — to abide it. After all, the reason they’re here now is to commemorate a common defiance of oversimplification: What began that day as a rote Boomer crucible of solidarity and self-actualization became a dramatic epic of improbable turnovers.

Speaking of which, this was also the first historically significant contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore, in that their respective roommates happened then to be facing off on the gridiron. (Yale cheerleader Bush may or may not be among the lads seen here botching halftime stunts and blasting cannons from the sidelines.) Gore’s roommate was of course Harvard lineman Tommy Lee Jones, today as magnetic a talking head as you could hope for, summoning his memories with pregnant hesitations and much actorly gravitas.

It’s just the extra nudge Harvard Beats Yale needs to secure a place for this apotheosis of recreational rivalry among the most inherently movieish moments of 1968. That’s also the year Kubrick’s 2001 was new in theaters, so why shouldn’t the Crimson pep band strike up the commanding first notes of Thus Spake Zarathustra during the game? If Rafferty doesn’t call attention to it, maybe that’s because the mythology of otherworldly grandeur already has been established.

Jonathan Kiefer, a film critic, writes here.

The King's Last Song

By Geoff Ryman (Small Beer Press, 2006)

In the American popular consciousness, Cambodia is associated with two things: our carpet-bombing of it during the Vietnam War and the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge a few years later. It was interesting for me to learn a few years ago that, apparently, our war with Vietnam doesn’t loom quite as large in the Vietnamese public imagination as it does in ours: To Vietnam, we are participants in just one of a series of overlapping conflicts that it fought from 1947 to 1979. Among foreign invaders, France preceded us and Cambodia and China followed. The Khmer Rouge’s genocidal campaign, however, really was devastating to Cambodia. Somewhere between one in eight and one in five Cambodians were killed during it—we still don’t know exactly how many people died—and the wars that came after, both within Cambodia and between Cambodia and Vietnam, killed more. By the time a peace agreement was reached and Cambodia began to draft its new constitution in 1993, the country had been fighting for twenty years.

For those of us who grew up and still live in the shelter of stable, developed countries, it is very hard to understand how Cambodia’s recent history—not to mention the sadly similar histories of other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—affects the people who are living there now; how each individual has been touched, or bruised, or wounded for life, and how each one responds. It is thus astonishing that Geoff Ryman, a Canadian living in the United Kingdom, had the guts to write a book like The King’s Last Song, though not quite as astonishing as the results, which, at least to this gringo reader, seem as sensitive and humble toward the subject matter as the author could be, yet manage also to tell an unflinching, wrenching story involving some deeply, deeply flawed people who are nonetheless searching for a way out.

The King’s Last Song is actually two stories centering on Cambodia’s most famous ruin, Angkor Wat. In the modern-day Cambodia—2004, to be precise—a UN archeological team uncovers a book engraved on gold plates that, it is immediately believed, was written by King Jayavarman VII, a twelfth-century Buddhist leader who united Cambodia and brought peace to a region riven by war. News spreads quickly about the find, and within a day of the book being fully excavated, both it and its guardian, a French scholar named Luc Andrade, are kidnapped. The plot then follows both Luc’s trials with his kidnappers and the effort to rescue him, led by William, Luc’s Cambodian porter, and Map, an ex-Khmer Rouge soldier, both of whom consider Luc their mentor and benefactor. Interspersed with this harrowing story is the equally tense tale of Jayavarman’s life and rise to power eight hundred years before. It’s not a simple book, but Ryman is such a good, visceral writer that one barely notices its structural complexity, and by the end, the two plots strands resonate so loudly with each other that it’s hard to imagine the book working any other way.

As if that were not enough, thematically Ryman is after big game: Following in the tradition of James Joyce and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, he wants nothing less than to depict a country’s struggle to reconcile itself with its past and move on toward a better future. That Ryman approaches his project with such humility—in the afterword, he’s the first to admit he’s no expert on Cambodia—doesn’t diminish the scope of his ambition. I don’t know nearly enough about Cambodia to say whether he succeeds, but I can say that Ryman has written an engrossing and, in the end, extremely moving story, and one that taught me a lot about a part of the world of which I am shamefully ignorant. Ryman says that he frequently visits the place, and his love for all of it—the land and its people—comes through achingly loud and clear, perhaps because it’s so hard to see something you love in so much pain.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom

By Tiya Miles (University of California Press, 2005)

“Being in possession of a few Black People and being crost in my affections, I debased myself and took one of my black women by the name of Doll, by her I have had these children named as follows...” So begins an 1824 petition by a Cherokee man named Shoe Boots, requesting tribal membership for his and Doll’s Afro-Cherokee children. In this book, Tiya Miles reconstructs Doll’s biography, nothing less than a prism on nineteenth-century America.

Race was complex among the Cherokees. The tribe had mixed-race and full-blood factions, free black members, traditional forms of captivity, and African slaves purchased from slave-traders — like Doll. Shoe Boots, a full-blood Cherokee, bought her as a maid for his first wife (the one who “crost” him in love), a white Kentucky teenager he kidnapped in 1793 and allowed to return home a decade later with their children. Doll, however, remained among the Cherokees, sharing their fortunes during several turbulent decades, and joining their deportation from Georgia in 1838, the Trail of Tears. Outliving both Shoe Boots and a later owner, she died in 1860, a free woman and landowner in Oklahoma.

Miles tells Doll’s story with care and simplicity. Sometimes frustrated by the opaqueness of Doll’s inner life, she reaches for analogies in other slave narratives, as well as (less effectively) in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. She is at her best in close readings of the few available documents, such as an account of Doll sitting next to Shoe Boots at the dinner table, which Miles points out a traditional Cherokee wife would never do. Miles ends the book with Doll’s “Negro” descendents’ frustrated attempts to establish Cherokee citizenship, framing her story in contemporary struggles over authentic Native American identity. Along with a fascinating biography, this book offers an utterly original angle on American history itself.

Jeremy Ravi Mumford teaches at the University of Michigan.

Herbert Hoover

By William E. Leuchtenburg (Times Books, 2009)

As the United States and rest of the world stare the possibility of global depression in the face, it has become common to compare the present day to the late 1920s and early 1930s. But Herbert Hoover, an intense new biography by New Deal historian William E. Leuchtenburg, draws parallels that can take your breath away.

In 1932, the country was facing a credit crisis the likes of which had never been seen. Americans were losing their jobs, their houses, and their life savings as the stock market crashed and banks collapsed. To stymie a plunge that could last years, Hoover OK’d the renewal of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to recapitalize the financial sector, infusing $2 billion—a “staggering amount” at that time, Leuchtenburg reminds us—into banks, insurance firms, railroad companies, and other finance institutions. Will Rogers wrote that the bankers had “the honor of bring the first group to go on the ‘dole’ in America.”

But efforts to save the banks and stimulate the economy from the top down backfired. Banks were still closing, though at a slower rate, and instead of loosening up credit markets, as the bailout was intended to do, banks found a way to use the millions to shore up their own holdings.

New York Senator Robert Wagner, a progressive critic of the Hoover administration, responded to this blank-check strategy by zeroing in on the fatal flaw of Hoover’s economic ideology: Even in extraordinary times, even in the face of starvation, Hoover believed welfare would impair the character of the needy and rob benefactors of the opportunity to exercise voluntarism and civic duty. Wagner, like many others, was stunned by Hoover’s decision to bail out banks. “We did not preach to them rugged individualism,” he said;

We did not sanctimoniously roll out sentences rich with synonyms of self-reliance. We were not carried away with apprehension over what would happen to their independence if we extended them a helping hand.… Must [the individual] alone carry the cross of individual responsibility?

I don’t think Leuchtenburg intended his biography to reflect so acutely our current hardships. His aim was to paint a not unsympathetic portrait of a hard man to have sympathy for. But as I zipped through this lucid book, I kept trying to think of a good word to describe the feeling of my frequently being taken aback. History repeats itself, sure, but how often does it do so with such vengeance?

* * *

No president had ever fallen from such a great height, Leuchtenburg writes. Hoover was a hero after World War I for feeding millions of Europeans as a food administrator. He organized the recovery of the American Midwest after a devastating flood along the Mississippi River. But his name came to be attached to the shantytowns—the Hoovervilles—where millions of poor and out of work ended up. Millions more lived in empty freight cars derisively called Pullman Hoovers. A couple who had named their son Herbert Hoover Jones eventually changed his name to Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones in order to save him future “chagrin and mortification.”

When he lost a bid for a second term to FDR, Hoover lost badly. In 1928, he won forty (of 48) states. In 1932, he won six. “Not for eighty years had there been such avalanche of Democratic ballots,” Leuchtenburg writes; “1932 marked the worst defeat in the history of the GOP.” These superlatives suggest Hoover’s defeat was more than a referendum on his policies. It was a wholesale rebuke of ideologies that had given Republicans a popular majority since 1853 and that calcified under the reign of Big Bert.

These ideologies concerned the role of government.

Though authoritarian and eager to use executive power to bulldoze legislation, or bypass political debate entirely, Hoover was unwilling to expand government’s role in society. The president believed, Leuchtenburg says, “that one should rely not on government but on civic-minded individuals ‘imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice in full measure.’” Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana cited this position last week in his rebuttal to President Obama’s feux State of the Union address. Jindal said the best thing for post-Katrina New Orleans wasn’t government intervention. It was the spirit of community volunteerism.

Before his presidency, Hoover had even written a widely read book called, appropriately enough, American Individualism, in which he warned against the “tyranny” and “timorous mediocrities” of trade unions. But American Individualism, “a jejune screed” that was “little more than pamphlet,” Leuchtenburg says, showed another side of Hoover that was not ideological but pragmatic, a quality likely rooted in his time as food czar during World War I. Private underwriting of America’s effort to feed war refugees, he said, was of an “uncertain quality.” As philanthropy could only go so far, “we must obtain a regular government subsidy.” Pragmatism returned when he wrote that government regulation of capitalism was necessary because “we have learned that the foremost [i.e., the rich] are not always the best and the hindmost [the poor] are not always the worst.… Fair division [of capital] can only be obtained by certain restrictions on the strong and the dominant.”

This Herbert Hoover, however, didn’t show up for the Great Depression. In the end, ideology won out. At the time when something could have been done, Hoover left almost all responsibility to corporations who suggested consumers add sun porches to their houses to stimulate the economy. Then he gave banks millions. Later, as Americans were losing their savings and queueing up in bread lines, Hoover said they were suffering from “frozen confidence” more than “frozen securities.”

If that doesn’t remind you of Phil Gramm, John McCain’s former economics adviser who callously said we were in the middle of a “mental recession,” you haven’t been paying attention. But you’re not alone. Gramm led the 1999 charge against the Glass-Steagall Act, a law put in place during the Roosevelt administration that kept banks from investing on Wall Street. He also won legislation to deregulate derivatives, the financial instruments that brought down AIG and cost us $150 billion. Apparently, all of us keep forgetting our history. And our money, too.

John Stoehr is the arts editor at the Charleston City Paper.

A Heaven of Others

By Joshua Cohen (Starcherone Books, 2008)

A Heaven of Others, Joshua Cohen’s second novel and fourth book of fiction, is a horrifying, terrifying, and instructive account of the wrong heaven in another’s shoes. Real shoes, that is, left forever in a real river of honey following abduction by eagles and a missed tête-à-tête with “the man named Mohammed”—the only one, it turns out, who might be able to bail our narrator, Jonathan Schwarzstein, of 37 Tchernichovsky Street, Jerusalem, out of a surreal and macabre but theologically accurate wasteland of a Muslim afterlife, and restore him to the heaven of his faith or choice. Though he is only ten when a Muslim boy his age explodes him on the street outside of a shoe store in latter-day Israel, by the time we hear him speak, from heaven, he is no longer a child but a child of eternity, “maturing to infinity,” and beyond and beyond, amen:

He hugged me I don’t know why I hug him back in return. Us, we hug tightly. We fall on each other. We feel for one and for others we fall. We feel. And we hug. Their eyes shut, they squeeze — just like lemons. And then they explode. Mind the seeds.

And so, with a bleating of radio goat voices naming the names of the dead and the oink-oink of pigs as heaven-bound traffic (drawn faithfully by painter Michael Hafftka), we are ushered up a shoe store ladder into the heaven of virgins and buffets as promised on the homiletic “Islamofascist” VHS tapes and cassettes you can buy on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn . . . No, not quite. A kind of dramatic escape into suspenseful anti-climax follows as, perhaps, in the Jewish tradition there is really no such thing as heaven and certainly no description, only a hopeful and equally vague notion of olam haba—a later, post-rabbinic introduction to Jewish theology that promised the Jewish Diaspora a messianic future in a perfected “world to come.” Jonathan, who has survived so much already, comes to this heaven to endure, to remember, to doubt, and to gossip; to expound his opinions on prayer, beet salad, tourism, and personhood; and to tell us who he was while he lived: who we are or were. His father is a piano tuner, his mother the Queen. He may or may not have had a brother named David who may or may not live with a “Movieperson,” a male lover in Hollywood, and this brother’s mother—Jonathan’s father’s first wife—may or may not have died of breast cancer; her tumor, in Cohen’s sincerely stupefying description, metastasizing into the K’aba or merely the black stone of secular helplessness, the speechless family all circling and circling around: “In the morning it had lost its roundness, by then it had further dulled off to become this hulking huge big black square As hard as rockstone Aba he was pacing Around and around and glancing at nervously as if it had just fallen through the ozone on down from space . . .”

But if Cohen is not Philip Roth, he is also not Shalom Auslander or Etgar Keret, and this is not yet another voyeuristic novel in which heaven is an excuse for irony, empty parables, amusement parks, or some gratuitous tour of the fantastic in rollercoaster magical-realist prose. A Heaven of Others is closer to Bernard Malamud’s late book God’s Grace or the mythical tales of Amos Tutuola in its treatment of another reality: sincere, serious, tender, American, an allegory maybe, but never merely clever, never a superficial phantasmagoria, and never only a vehicle for something else. In fact, as soon as Jonathan gets to heaven he tries to find his way back. And so would you, if heaven consisted not of milk and honey but trees overripe with musical virgin fruit, camel caravans drawing illegible maps in the sand with their hooves, and a valley of nails in which a snake—instead of the Prophet—offers to be your guide. Having come to some unspeakable realization, exhausted, Jonathan gives up and begins his commentary, at once to explain and atone: “I never entered into the Valley of Nails not even as unshod as I was, and because I never entered into the Valley of Nails between the Two Mountains that might have been clouds after all I never had my Salaam answered, neither did I then truly seek the man named Mohammed [. . .] When it came to the ultimate sacrifice, I demurred. When pain entered into the world, my dream exited, flying. When a single choice was offered me I chose another.” Here the book turns to exegesis and metaphor, Hafftka’s paintings growing darker and wilder as the novel grows tighter and clearer, more humbled, more quiet—as if now it knows what it means to say, and what it means to say it: “[. . .] I cleave to this identity for and only for the memory—mine—of my Aba and the Queen. For them how I loved them. And for the expectations they once had for my own memory. Expectations becoming love in their ripening. A memory to be had by others. Becoming. Others I never made in an image I felt becoming the world.”

Like the doomed atmosphere of Prague’s old Jewish Quarter in Paul Leppin’s short story collection Others’ Paradise, the very boundaries of existence at any stage are the subject of myth, and existential ambivalence a form of theology; life is a kind of prayer; and the Jew is a feverish metaphor that bears the brunt of evolution. Now that Leppin’s seedy and labyrinthine world is gone along with Leppin’s own peculiar syphilitic paranoia and the comfort of personal enemies, we are left—Cohen seems to imply—with a stranger and more relative doubt almost as sure as certainty, much as Jonathan is lost and knows he is lost in a heaven he can only intuit. In this utter awareness Cohen offers us perhaps a pure, holy regret for what seems lost forever, but lost only to us, he reminds—the survivors: as the heart of his book is an idea-as-doctrine he calls Maturing to Infinity, or growing ever and ever, a metamorphosis abandoned by theology and teleology both. (Though as Cohen, a writer so aware of etymology would appreciate, Jonathan’s lack of a telos, or end, simultaneously makes him teleos, or perfect—as horrifying as that perfection might be.) The victim is a sacrifice at once trapped and free in his eternal victimhood, forced to change unrecognized, uncounted, and unaccounted for, while at the same time mourned on earth, consecrated as a martyr, and remembered forever as the 10-year-old boy he no longer resembles or knows.

In this vision of endless change above and beyond tradition, however, we may recognize Cohen as Jonathan as an outsider in Israel, and also Cohen as an outsider among his own in America. A heaven of others: the poem not of militant secularism but individual doubt, agnosticism, or Agnon’s—gnosticism, as S.Y. Agnon, too, wrote of tradition amidst modernity and was influenced by German literature and reflected his heart’s philosophy in a necessarily new language; though in the untranslated epigram, Cohen chooses the Hebrew-language poet Saul Tchernichovsky as his shadow Virgil, and the poem “Levivot,” or “Pancakes,” which tells the story of a boy’s trajectory from unquestioning obedience and acceptance—the untranslatable egel melumad, literally “a learned calf” and also the taunt for a yeshiva student—to freedom and, consequently, sacrilege: “having no weapon in its hands/It will cleave to all its persecutors forbid.” Notice the double meaning of this English translation: cleave in the sense of to split and to separate, as well as to join together—“Cleave, which in American means both To rend and To adhere,” as Cohen does, in his faith and faithlessness, holiness and profanity. “In this heaven as in any heaven I am no longer a Jew. In this heaven as in any heaven I am no more a Jew than I’m not [. . .] To be forever estranged, even amid your own congregation, and to be forever wandering, even within your own encampment, and only because they make me a stranger, and only because they make me a wanderer, they who would be I only if, I who would be they only why [. . .]”

It is poignant and profound to refract one’s religious doubt this way through a religious mirror, brave to structure an epic novella around religious terrorism in which belief interrogates itself, through its own manifestations, which is something like God seeing himself in the passing surface he has created. Cohen engages his own religion in the terms of that religion, in its own language, which he recreates using myths—like wind-up Schulzian toys—cast in Semitic-syncretic mold, bursting with contradiction. Foreshadowed by writers like Kafka and Bruno Schulz, and poets like Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, these myths are fashioned by Cohen out of the baffling vulgarity of modern life in order to make that life personal again and thus open to interpretation: bombs become seeded fruit and foliage a landscape of exploded nails; a pogrom joke in which a fictional shtetl dresses its animals in human clothes and returns to find it repopulated is turned into an allegory for the state of Israel, with Ray-Ban sunglasses. Though we may be far from home, tragedy is never far from humor. Like Beckett, after whose beat much of the rhythm is marching, Cohen manages to be serious and wry at the same time, ironic and sincere: “Remember that the dead cannot sacrifice. Never again! And, too, that it is not for the living to judge the sacrifices they are bound to make [. . .]” Never again is the slogan of Holocaust remembrance, the refrain of Yom Hazikaron, or the official Israeli Day of Remembrance, on which the last page records this book to have been finished.

Indeed, Cohen’s Israel is in part a Jewish literary graveyard: besides Tchernichovsky Street, there is Antschel’s Funeral Home—Antschel being the birth name of Paul Celan, author of the funereal Todesfuge—and references to Kafka, Haim Nahman Bialik, and a selection of Jewish religious sources from the Old Testament to folklore and legend abound. Still, Cohen finds room for Quranic exegetes, Muslim myths of the afterlife—the Jews become pigs as they ascend to heaven—and the composer Richard Barrett, who has set Celan’s poem “von hinter dem Schmerz” to music. Not quite the Western Lands, Cohen discovers Bialik’s desert, Emanuel Swedenborg’s heaven—and also Swedenborg’s desert, Bialik’s heaven—which is to say the book draws its language from the most expressive of Hebrew poetry and baroque Swedish religious philosophy to create in fiction a personal mythology, always attentive, always delimiting and defining, always unorthodox, but so steeped in its traditions that it reads as modern and classic as, say, Kafka’s account in Amerika of America. Only whereas Kafka wrote of one place he had never seen, Cohen, an American Jew, writes of two—making Israel foreign to Israel and heaven foreign to all except those with an intimate knowledge of German poetry, Hebrew scripture via the King James Bible, and 14th-century Muslim religious tracts, in the hope of bringing these loci to light anew and writing intelligently about subjects so familiar to us, at all. (It would be interesting to know, for example, how this book about latter-day terrorism might be received in Israel, where Cohen, though Jewish, would certainly be seen as an outsider in a local debate.) After the intimate and bittersweet homecoming of the virtuoso Laster’s showbiz Yiddish in his first novel, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, in which the aforementioned violin prodigy improvises a novel about his friend—the missing composer, survivor, and misanthrope Schneidermann—from the stage of Carnegie Hall as his cadenza, or solo, Cohen explored his other roots: the Europe and South Jersey of his immediate family, and the unsolved mysteries of the Hebrew alphabet (Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed, again with Hafftka). While both books were departures from his modest first collection of stories, The Quorum, here, in his latest novel, linguistic and symbolic estrangement become a means to enlightenment—a ladder rather than a path, which, once climbed, leads to the dream of a dream, isolating the past, and epitomizing the present. The voice of reportage we trust to guide us through the Paradiso is even more guileless and haunting here, more alive in the memory of an unsuspecting boy, and so therefore more revealing of everything holy and unholy which we hold dear, despite: life, as Stanley Elkin says—death’s alternative.

And yet if A Heaven of Others is Cohen’s most political and topical book, it is also his best effort at pure storytelling, a tale as instructive as it is tall, an allusive novella in the voice of a poem with the power and richness of a full novel—and not the kind with a lot of dialogue in it. Like a sign upon the hand and between the eyes, Jonathan’s post-mortem account of his “Adventures in & Reflections on the Muslim Heaven” serves to remind us of what literature was once like before it was cast out of an amateur’s Eden and banished forever into the marketplace: a commentary, that is, in conversation with other literature, about their mutual meditations on the original Word—a dialogue in the form of a confession less flagellating than the famous self-interrogations of St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo. One of the great joys of this book, and one of its fortunes, is the transparency of its influences, the legibility of its inspiration. As the story of an individual in the modern world and beyond, the book eschews politics for a skeptical ethics based less in an abstract humanism than in the personal desire to choose the face by which society knows us: The only hope we can have in a world in which our very names make us targets is the hope of free expression, in word and deed; and as the state is only a continuous ruin, memory is the property of the one who remembers—though other victims be lost to television and forgotten by the world.

Perhaps nothing written since Kafka quite conveys the arbitrary cruelty and absurdity of a world such as this in the most proximate human terms, and the inner sense, or intuition, of a soul that mediates between. In fact, now that so much Jewish literature has been written and rewritten again in English, now that we have so many authors and classics, it is all the more rare and inspiring that Cohen, scandalously overlooked in America, especially by the Jewish literary community—the novel is timestamped almost four years ago, in 2004—continues to delve deeper and further with each book into an inherited terrain while making of that holy ground these beautifully uncharted territories with their own maps and legends. (It did not come as a surprise that, according to his website, Cohen has just finished an 800-page novel about the last Jew on earth, called, blasphemously: Graven Imaginings.) “How did I get here, if I am still an I” Jonathan asks in the opening sentence, and is mocked in a kind of Yiddish by the narrator, who is himself: “He got here how he got here.” At once terrifying and singular and singularly important, A Heaven of Others repeats and channels the echo of that initial question, forcing us to see ourselves between destinies, between politics and political persuasions, and between answers themselves, to ask in fact who and what we really are: how did we get here, that is, if we are to remain an I?

Daniel Elkind is a writer and translator living in Brooklyn.

Logorrhea

Edited by John Klima (Bantam Spectra, 2007)

Literary genres are blending together these days, as mainstream writers use tried and true genre elements while genre writers break out into the mainstream world. Still, the concept behind the short-story anthology Logorrhea is odd: Each writer in the anthology chose one word that was spelled correctly to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee and wrote a short story based around it, a concept that neither screams out for a genre nor provides an obvious avenue for mainstream writing. Most of the writers in the anthology are familiar to a science-fiction audience, though many of them are also known specifically for treading genre borders, and Logorrhea’s editor, John Klima, edits a science fiction magazine called Electric Velocipede. But there’s work inside to please both genre purists and a wider audience; really, it is only the sheer, dizzying ability of the volume’s writers that make such a strange theme work at all.

Michael Moorcock and Theodora Goss are two of the biggest names in speculative fiction, and may be the reason a lot of people pick up this book. Goss gives us a fable set in China and Moorcock has a slim tale about his most famous creation, Elric of Melniboné; both of these are pleasant enough, but nothing to hang their reputations on. It's the young, hungry writers who provide the book's real meat: Hal Duncan’s “The Chiaroscurist” is a haunting meditation on art and Daniel Abraham’s “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” is delightful. The title tale, by Michelle Richmond, is a weird, heartrending love story between a man covered in hard scales and a woman who can’t shut up. And “The Last Elegy,” by Matthew Cheney [also a New Haven Review contributor—ed.], is somber and beautiful, probably the best work in the book. In short, there’s more than enough here to make the anthology worth reading, praising, and treasuring, even if you find the premise less than eudaemonic (winning Scripps Spelling Bee word, 1960).

Eric Rosenfield was born and raised in New Haven and blogs at Wet Asphalt.