{"id":71636,"date":"2022-08-09T13:29:47","date_gmt":"2022-08-09T17:29:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=71636"},"modified":"2022-08-12T02:29:13","modified_gmt":"2022-08-12T06:29:13","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-31","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2022\/08\/09\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-31\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I arrogantly recommend…by Tom Bowden <\/strong>is a monthly column of small press and books-in-translation reviews by our friend, bibliophile, and retired pavement inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, ‘This platform allows me to exponentially increase the number of people reached who have no use for such things.’<\/p>\n

Links are provided to our Bookshop.org affiliate page<\/a>. Bookshop.org is an alternative to Amazon that benefits indie bookstores nationwide. If titles are unavailable, please call, we’ll try to help. Most of Bowden’s reviewed books are stocked at Book Beat. Thank you for your support! Read more arrogantly recommended reviews at:
\nI arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Paula Regossy<\/a><\/strong>
\nLynn Crawford
\nTrinosophes<\/p>\n

Paula Regossy<\/strong>\u2014an anagram of Pussy Galore, which inspired the book\u2019s conceit regarding spy craft\u2014consists of a series of \u201creports\u201d by characters imagined as agents for a secret organization with obscure aims. Being part of the organization means that what the agents say to others (even within the organization) is not necessarily what the agents think or feel\u2014or how they stay sane, since they have no outlet for sincere expression except for the reports they submit to Regossy, their boss, who in turn presents them to us, the readers.<\/p>\n

Each chapter\u2019s origins owe to Crawford\u2019s response to a place or work of art in the Detroit area. For instance, the book\u2019s cover shows a painting named \u201cPussy Galore.\u201d Quotes from the works of other (real) writers seems to suggest notes left behind by previous \u201cspies\u201d\u2014other who also gather information about people, places, and times and turn it into (artistic) assessments of the spies\u2019 place and time.<\/p>\n

Undercover detection . . . involves interface. Information is gathered through varying degrees of personal dealings. Our undercover agents infiltrate the life of a person, family, or community to gain enough material to solve or stop criminal activity\u2014such as weapons smuggling, drug production and distribution, or sex trafficking.<\/p>\n

Precious little crime stopping is depicted here because Crawford in interested in the mood, temperament, attitude, and filters employed by the agents to do their work\u2014how what they overtly say in a report\u2014what they dare say\u2014may suggest about what they keep to themselves. Thus, Crawford translates the messages found in spaces and works of art into dry bureaucratic reports that readers decode into three-dimensional characters.
\n\"\"<\/a>
\nINTERVIEW WITH LYNN CRAWFORD<\/strong><\/p>\n

You\u2019ve dedicated your novel to Harry Matthews, presumably because of his novel My Life in C.I.A.<\/strong> How did that novel inform your inspiration for looking at and thinking about people and social systems as existing in a duplicitous world? That surface behaviors\u2014what people say and do\u2014serve only to deflect attention from clandestine behaviors and motivations seems to be a proposition that would quickly lead to paranoia, yet Paula Regossy<\/strong> manages to avoid those perils. How did you manage to do that?<\/em><\/p>\n

LC:<\/strong> Here\u2019s a story about my long friendship with Harry, who passed away a few years ago:
\nI had read and loved his novel Cigarettes<\/strong>, and a friend of mine, the writer John Yau, had his address and suggested I send him some of my writing. I sent my very first story, “Solow” (badly typed), to his address (which was long and somewhere in the French Alps). To my surprise he wrote back a glowing response.<\/p>\n

Over time he and his wife Marie became close family friends and attended our wedding in Detroit 30 plus years ago. Because of Harry I became fascinated by the Oulipo, a French group of writers and mathematicians employing literary restraints to explore what literature can be. One of the many methods I learned about from them was the sestina, a medieval poetic form based on six words and six stanzas in a specific order. Paula Regossy<\/strong> reads as a novel, but each section began as a sestina before morphing into narrative.<\/p>\n

So yes, he influenced Paula Regossy<\/strong> in many ways\u2014and, in fact, every book I’ve written.
\nI also like the chance to speak of our friendship, because mentorship\u2014with the right mentor\u2014is a beautiful thing.<\/p>\n

What ends does the spying serve? I ask because, even though your character Dr. Natambu submits a report in which he claims that the ends of spying are to \u201cstop criminal activity\u2014such as weapons smuggling, drug production and distribution, or sex trafficking,\u201d the other submitted reports have little to say about such criminal activity.<\/em><\/p>\n

LC:<\/strong> Paula Regossy\u2014along with other agents working in the agency run by Hoss and advised by Dr. Natambu\u2014exceeds at solving crime. I chose not to include those details in the narrative because so many brilliant crime novels already that do that. I was more interested in odd elements of each agent’s personal stories\u2014the internal dialogues, histories, self-doubt, and so on\u2014that led to their careers in espionage. Those choices all depended on the specific artists and artworks that had inspired them [which are listed in the back of the book]. Each section of the novel responds to the specific artist and\/or artwork named. In my mind, we were collaborating\u2014possibly the closest I’ll ever get to being in a band\u2014a non-musical band!<\/p>\n

Your plain-clothes spies remind me of some of William Burroughs\u2019s agents\u2014say Clem Snide, Private Asshole\u2014whose own work is prone to infiltration from agents of Control. Burroughs seemed interested in exploring personality and systemic types for exploitable weaknesses in human thinking and biology, from which he developed a contemporary mythos. Your spies seem to also take a quasi-anthropological, alienated approach to understanding humanity\u2014and themselves, perhaps\u2014but for different ends, even though both your characters and Burroughs\u2019s struggle with failure. Would you care to comment on, say the similarities and difference between your approach to this book and its characters with those of Mathews, Burroughs, and perhaps other artists whose creations might also include such alienated points of view?<\/em><\/p>\n

LC:<\/strong> In my mind, each agent shares deep personal doubts and thoughts and ideas and plans and narratives. No one can ever tell a “whole” story. We only hear bits and pieces. A good spy’s job is to be secret. So, what information do they decide to share in a public space? What do they leave out? “After all, there is nothing but failure.” This quote by the great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard was in my mind through every step of the book. I’ve thought of that quote for years and have come to understand that “failure” is not a reason to avoid something. The act of trying and trying and trying again nurtures something in our humanity.<\/p>\n

While Paula and Hoss are present through the book, all the other agents have different techniques, histories, skillsets. Maybe I’m also exploring the notion of \u201calienated.\u201d A detective must restrict their life in ways that remove them from the loop. But maybe those restrictions offer fertile forms of engagement in other ways.<\/p>\n

But what your question really makes me think about is a writing voice. The best writers find their specific voice. I would say to new writers something I say to myself daily\u2014especially when facing doubts, which I do constantly: You be You.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nGrey Bees<\/a><\/strong>
\nAndrey Kurkov \/ Boris Dralyuk
\nDeep Vellum<\/p>\n

Taking place roughly about now, Sergey Sergeyich lives by himself in a village abandoned by all but one other person\u2014his childhood enemy. The village has been abandoned because of Russia\u2019s war against Ukraine, which it has been waging since 2014, and the two sides have been exchanging mortar bombs at distances roughly equidistant from Sergey\u2019s village, Little Starhorodivka, set in an area known as the \u201cgrey zone\u201d that no one controls. Sergey, in his early 50s, receives (in a war zone? hah!) a disability pension for silicosis from mining but hasn\u2019t left the village because he wants to keep raising bees, which need quiet rural areas to thrive in.<\/p>\n

Despite the bleak setting, meager food supplies, lack of electricity, unnerving uncertainty of the bombings, and proximity to a life-long \u201cenemy,\u201d Grey Bees<\/strong> is often funny, and Sergey is slowly revealed as the compassionate soul he his. There are literal and metaphorical ways of living in a grey zone, and once he literally leaves Little Starhorodivka to find safer grounds for his bees, both begin to vanish.<\/p>\n

Before and along the trip he meets two husbandless households with children, one Christian the other Islamic, befriending the wives. He meets Russians hostile to and suspicious of Ukraine and Tatars (the Muslims). He suddenly finds himself\u2014his very existence\u2014under varying levels of threat. The road novel is probably an American invention, but Andrey Kurkov does well at transplanting the genre to Ukraine, a nation that has its own North and South, its own ethnic and religious hostilities, its own faulty distinctions between police and military powers. The point of the road novel is to discover oneself in the face of fellow citizens. In Grey Bees<\/strong>, Sergey proves to be a man of principle and quiet action, whose simplicity should not be mistaken for naivete but for wisdom arising from watching and listening. Although Sergey is described as specifically Christian and consistently observant, his actions, which\u2014once the patina of fear is brushed away\u2014are based on universal principles of grace and decency, consistently engaged: the \u201cdo unto others\u201d credo pretty much every faith has some version of.<\/p>\n

Boris Dralyuk\u2019s translation of Grey Bees<\/strong> is excellent, and I strongly recommend it as way into seeing the current conflict from the point of view of those just want to get through life and act as decent people.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise<\/a><\/strong>
\nGary Panter
\nNYR Comics<\/p>\n

In the early 1980s, I went once a week to the Eye of Agamotto, a second-story walk-up comic bookstore in Ann Arbor run by a guy named Norm. His shop was small but eclectically stocked. I was on the lookout for new artists in the Underground Comix tradition, and Norm had them\u2014specifically, the new Raw series edited by Art Spiegelman (a name I respected) and Fran\u00e7oise Mouly (who was then unknown to me). They were oversized, printed on heavy paper, and ugly. Norm moaned that the new Raw One-Shot\u2014Jimbo by Gary Panter\u2014was \u201cpractically begging people, \u2018Please don\u2019t buy me!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The aesthetic of that original printing of Jimbo was brutal in a way I immediately loved: corrugated cardboard covers, black electrical tape for the binding, quickly yellowing newsprint stock, and images seemingly carved onto the page, momentarily incoherent patterns that eventually resolved into animated life. What the new NYR Comics version lacks in cardboard, tape, and newsprint it makes up for in production values and additional images. And Panter\u2019s images remain as disorienting as ever by rendering objects from a variety of viewpoints and in a variety of styles, often at the same time.<\/p>\n

The technique matches the content in Jimbo, which takes place in a post-apocalyptic world\u2014devastation, predation, self-reliance, and vulnerability permeate the afterlife of a planet driven to chaos by consumerism and nuclear weapons. It\u2019s often funny, too, watching Jimbo\u2014spikey haired, skinny tied, thong-wearing punk\u2014bumble his way through bizarre situations, including an escape from a band of human-sized cockroaches whose leader has the head of Donald Duck, on which he wears a beret. The visual climax of the story is created by overlaying two images\u2014one in blue grey, the other fluorescent orange\u2014a double-exposure that destabilizes and energizes the picture, in perfect conjunction with the overall theme: The death of Jimbo\u2019s horse, which is every bit as significant to the book\u2019s theme as the horse in Picasso\u2019s \u201cGuernica.\u201d<\/p>\n

The concerns of 40 years ago remain the concerns of today, and Panter\u2019s art remains as vibrant and aggressively alive as ever.<\/p>\n

I care for all my characters. I don\u2019t like bad things to happen to them. But they get into sticky situations.
\n–Gary Panter<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read an interview with Gary Panter from Artforum<\/a>.<\/p>\n