{"id":71902,"date":"2022-11-25T01:42:20","date_gmt":"2022-11-25T06:42:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=71902"},"modified":"2023-02-13T14:36:48","modified_gmt":"2023-02-13T19:36:48","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-34","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2022\/11\/25\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-34\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Vivian Maier self portrait, Undated<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a> The Feeling Sonnets<\/a><\/strong>
\nEugene Ostashevsky
\nNYRB Poets<\/p>\n

Eugene Ostashevsky\u2014poet, translator and anthologist of modern Russian writers\u2014was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg now, again) but moved with his parents to the U.S., learning English, one would gather from his own works, based on word play and puns. The word play permeating The Feeling Sonnets <\/strong>exists less to arouse a sense the ironic and more to draw out the multiple meanings a single word may have, depending on context, as well as ancillary semantic echoes in punning homophones. The comedic and tragic live together\u2014the two are inseparable, perhaps unhappily\u2014and yet here they are, Groucho Marx and Gertrude Stein, demonstrating the permutations that even the most basic vocabulary is subject to about the vagaries of life, what poetry tries to do, and fatherhood.<\/p>\n

Here are two excerpts from \u201cThe Fooling Sonnets<\/strong>,\u201d the first on music, the second on capitalism, world trade, and national heirarchies:<\/p>\n

If Errato is the muse of poetry, who is the music of music.
\nNo muse is the muse of music. Any muse is the muse of music.
\nA muse is she musing about her meaning with music.
\nTake meaning away from musing and all that remains is music.
\nIt is the music that makes for feeling and not the meaning. . .<\/p>\n

A fire took place here, a conflagration.
\nIt\u2019s called a conflagration because it started with flags.
\nA flag is a mark. If there\u2019s a mark, there\u2019s market.
\nI come from the market, make dinner, and engage in struggle.
\nIt is a struggle to get my daughters to sleep. They sleep on bunk beds.
\nThe bunks beds are contemporary. They come from Ikea.
\nThere were transported by trucks. My daughters are transported.
\nThere is a herd of unicorns on the rug below them. They come from developing markets.
\nIn markets that are already developed, philosophers say that unicorns do not exist.
\nThere\u2019s only one step from the remarkable to the marketable, and the unicorns have taken it.
\nSo say the people of developing markets. But the philosophers do not hear them.<\/p>\n

\u201cDie Screibblockade; or, The Feeding Sonnets,\u201d is dedicated to Polina Barskova, also from Leningrad, and a poet who moved to the U.S. with her parents, a poet to whose Living Pictures<\/strong> Ostashevsky has written an introduction.” The subject of \u201cDie Screibblockade\u201d is ostensibly writer\u2019s block (what the title translates as in English), but in the following passage, Ostashevsky focuses on the linguistic echoes\u2014semantic and phonic\u2014among three European languages, their reverberations throughout modern history:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Die Siege<\/em> in German is the plural of der Sieg<\/em>, which means victory.
\nIn French la siege<\/em> means seat, la chair<\/em> means flesh, and la fleche<\/em> means arrow.
\nOur [i.e., Russian] siege<\/em> means you pull up a chair and wait for the city to eat through its stores and then starve, achieving victory.<\/p>\n

A few other Russian victories include the following items:<\/p>\n

Death by fire and especially death by friendly fire.
\nDeath by state security services, because the state is always feeling insecurity that it\u2019s not providing enough services.
\nDeath by rationing, a rational death, when those with less food die so that those with more food may enjoy more food.
\nPurging the enemy within is a hallmark of every repressive regime, especially those eager to earn bragging rights for the efficiencies of their bureaucratic rationalism in service to the greater ideology.<\/p>\n

Eugene Ostashevsky is a sharp, intelligent writer who grasps the perniciousness of systems designed only to perpetuate themselves at the expense of others, and who can do so poetically with the systems\u2019 own words.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Lucky Breaks<\/a><\/strong>
\nYevgenia Belorusets \/ Eugene Ostashevsky
\nNew Directions<\/p>\n

Yevgenia Belorusets\u2019s Lucky Breaks <\/strong>consists of character sketches of women from Kyiv and Ukraine\u2019s Donbas region, living under the shadow of Russia\u2019s war against Ukraine since 2014. Depictions of everyday lives lived under exceptional circumstances allow inexplicable events (people suddenly go missing) to transform into rational outcomes as a result of that war.<\/p>\n

The women hold low-paying, low-skill jobs requiring only a modicum of training and no university degree. Working as hairdressers, running and owning small shops, and other odd jobs, these sorts of \u201ceverywomen\u201d don\u2019t usually appear in books about war. The women are often past their prime, either single, widowed, or divorced, and thus usually ignored by the larger society as disposable cogs in a service-oriented economy. And yet: The women in Lucky Breaks<\/strong> are all about that \u201cand yet,\u201d since the women are more than statistical abberations.<\/p>\n

Translator Eugene Ostashevsky\u2019s helpful afterword places Belorusets\u2019s work historically, literarily, and linguistically among the divisions and integrations of Ukraine and Russian culture and languages.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Living Pictures<\/a><\/strong>
\nPolina Barskova \/ Catherine Ciepilla
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n

Polina Barskova was born in raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, formerly Leningrad. Eventually settling in the U.S., where she teaches now teaches at Berkeley, only after she moved out did she discover that a mass grave was the bedrock of a park she and her friends played at while children. The mass grave consisted of the bodies of citizens who died during the blockade of Leningrad, in which food and power supplies to the city were cut off by Soviet authorities (presumably on Lenin\u2019s orders), so that if the city fell to the Nazis, the Nazis wouldn\u2019t gain anything in the way of fuel or food.<\/p>\n

Borskova became interested in researching letters and diaries from people forced to endure the blockade. Eugene Ostashevsky tells us, in his introduction to Living Pictures<\/strong>, that during a three-month winter-time period \u201cLeningrad authorities arrested a total of 866 people on charges related to the eating of dead bodies and even to the murder of the living with the intent to eat them. Some of this activity was said to be organized. The overwhelming majority of the accused were refugees from the countryside, largely women.\u201d Thus, many of the letters and diaries cite incidents of cannibalism, and explain how such things could come to be.<\/p>\n

Even 70 years years ago, Soviet citizens knew the amateur status of their national military: Numbers made up for what tactics and technology couldn\u2019t. From Barskova\u2019s story \u201cEastrangement\u201d:  \u201cThere, over-across the ground, lie those whose brief military exertions\u2014the length of a lightning bug\u2019s life\u2014were deprived of any meaning by the monstrosities of Soviet military unprofessionalism. . .: Some made it a hundred meters, some a little more.\u201d<\/p>\n

She also notes how the language of her source material was pared away over time as bodily degradations waxed and bodies waned:<\/p>\n

Word by word, declensions conjugations vanishing like lard and sugar in November. Commas and dashed blanch and collapse, stop making sense, can\u2019t breathe and melt away. Exclamation points were the first to die in blockade diaries, superfluous marks like those superfluous people, refugees without ration cards from Luga and Gatchina.<\/p>\n

In typical Soviet fashion, the horror of the blockade was then compounded by another debacle, after the war: \u201cin the so-called Leningrad Affair, the local bosses who did prevent the city from being taken were killed in a massive purge as Moscow reasserted control.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parallels to today\u2019s Ukraine under attack from Putin\u2019s armies are hard to miss. (At least Ukraine is unlikely to be reduced to Russian-imposed starvation.) One can only sympathize with and admire the sheer tenacity of a besieged populace, attacked by its own government and a formidable foreign military, each as evil as the other.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Some Say Ice<\/strong>
\nAlessandra Sanguinetti
\nMACK Books<\/a><\/p>\n

The first photograph I ever saw by Alessandra Sanguinetti was the cover of Cabinet magazine\u2019s Winter 2009-2010\u2014two young girls, tweenish, clutching each other, while looking away from the camera at an approaching storm. It was Cabinet\u2019s \u201cFriendship\u201d issue, and Sanguinetti\u2019s photograph was evidence enough to encourage me to buy the issue. From that, I discovered that the cover photograph came from her collection The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams<\/strong>, in which Sanuinetti follows the richly imaginative lives of Guille and Belinda, two Argentines we follow from late childhood early adolescence.<\/p>\n

Some Say Ice<\/strong> is Guille and Belinda\u2019s mirror image: B&W photographs of people from small rural towns in Wisconsin, influenced by Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip<\/strong>. Sanguinetti has a great eye and feel for life in isolated places\u2014I\u2019ve been to and lived in places in Michigan much like what she shows here\u2014and Wisconsin seems a far drearier place than the Argentina of Guille and Belinda. Knotty pine paneling; thin, worn carpets; rooms with bad fluorescent lighting; cinderblock, clapboard, and aluminum. Unschooled notions of elegance and fashion, chronic male stolidity, tightly constrained social norms.<\/p>\n

With sympathy, insight, and compassion, Alessandra Sanguinetti captures a disquieting sense of place and beauty throughout the book, giving palpable weight to the lives revealed. Some Say Ice<\/strong> is as strong as her earlier work but one that evokes lives of diminished possibilities. The force of life is revealed to greater degree in her photos depicting animals\u2014alive and dead\u2014whose pelts form whirls of designs and energy.
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\"\"<\/a>Blue in Green<\/a><\/strong>
\nWesley Brown
\nBlank Forms Editions<\/p>\n

Blue in Green<\/strong> begins on a night in August 1959, when Miles Davis, on break between sets at Birdland, is beaten by police, booked, and released. In addition to the humiliation of the attack\u2014hit from behind by a cop he never heard approaching\u2014just weeks after the release of Kind of Blue, is a cauldron of bad feelings: He\u2019s begun beating his wife, Frances Taylor, whom he\u2019s coerced into abandoning her career in ballet and dance, and friends of Davis and Taylor sense something is wrong in the relationship, with Davis as the likely \u201csomething\u201d\u2014a man violently jealous in direct proportion to his many insecurities and self-doubts. With few exceptions, Davis trusts almost no one. Coltrane has left his group, Billie Holiday and Lester Young\u2014people he strongly respected and could talk to\u2014recently died, and he\u2019s dealing with his own set of drug problems.<\/p>\n

The form of the story is a kind of Odyssey, with Davis driving around Manhattan to cool off after the beating, and Taylor at their apartment, waiting for him to come home. Wesley Brown creates a space to lay out the case of what happened, what preceded it, and what came of it. The sympathy doesn\u2019t mean Brown condones brutal acts against others and self-destructive tendencies. Like Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/strong>, Taylor, as Penelope\u2019s stand-in, has the last word, but unlike Joyce\u2019s Ulysses, it ain\u2019t a \u201cyes\u201d for Davis.<\/p>\n

Wesley Brown packs a lot of biographical and cultural information into a tidy 65 pages of compulsively readable prose that provides a complex, sympathetic acknowledgement of the psychic forces Davis, Taylor, and other Black artists of the time had to negotiate, compelling them to act as they did.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Mystery Train<\/strong>
\nCan Xue \/ Natascha Bruce
\nSublunary Editions<\/a><\/p>\n

Can Xue, the pen name of Deng Xiaohua, was born in China in 1953, and by the late \u201950s her family (Communist Party members) began being persecuted by others within the Party, resulting in years of life and work in \u201cre-education\u201d camps, and ending Deng\u2019s formal education by age 13. Nonetheless, she persisted, and her works have been nominated for prestigious international literature awards, including nominations for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for her novel The Last Lover<\/strong>, longlisted for the 2019 Booker International Prize for Love in the New Millennium<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Mystery Train<\/strong> is a novella of a long, strange trip whose subtle but persistent sense of Twilight Zone-like disorientation is well-captured in Natascha Bruce\u2019s English rendering. Its mood and its characters\u2019 behaviors put me in mind of Kafka\u2019s Amerika, in which a number of people with vague purposes meet on a trip, form and break alliances, and inhabit a dream-like haze with a logic of its own that is nonetheless easy to follow and convincingly reasonable in the circumstances. In Mystery Train<\/strong>, the protagonist, named Scratch, is a chicken farm hand whose boss has sent him on a trip to buy feed. But the city Scratch is headed to is not on the map, his employer forgot to give him one of the contracts to take to the feed company, and he increasingly feels that he\u2019s been fired with a thousand-yuan severance package.<\/p>\n

Love interests are quickly struck up and consummated in this book, amid the train shut down, disappearance (!), forced mountainside camping, successful attacks from wolves, tent burnings, and so forth. But as with the violent chaos, the women Scratch finds himself with are repulsive but sexually satisfying. Ultimately, \u201cHe felt sorry for himself, watching as the little door in his heart clicked shut. He didn\u2019t want to be there, probing life\u2019s mysteries with a stinking, birdbrained woman.\u201d The \u201cbirdbrained woman\u201d is the butt of abuse for the first two sections, but at this point, for the third section, the story\u2019s point of view is hers, Birdie\u2019s.<\/p>\n

If, as Can Xue herself has said, her stories and novels are autobiographies of her interior life, could the mysterious train be a stand-in for Mao\u2019s re-education camps? When Birdie recalls her first days on the train, she remembers an older woman, Belle, scolding her:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou keep judging people and things according to the standards you had before coming on board, and this isn\u2019t doing you any good. . . The train has severed our links with anywhere outside it, and we have to relearn everything from scratch. I recently started sewing and it\u2019s done wonders for my self-confidence!\u201d<\/p>\n

Escaping the unsheltered chaos that the refuge has become is difficult, after the train disappears, since the group is prone to attacks from wolves. Scratch and Birdie, finally manage a way out. As they set to rest, the narrative turns to Birdie, whose tale it becomes in the last third of the book\u2014the tale of a woman whose face was disfigured as a child, resulting in an ugliness so profound the father puts her on the mystery train he has heard about.<\/p>\n

What kind of autobiographical life can this possibly represent? What does it mean when something that had the quality of eternity to it\u2014the mystery train\u2014has now disappeared? Well, there\u2019s the sudden wrenching out of one life into another, for reasons out of one\u2019s control. There\u2019s the casual abuse doled out by men against women, presented as just the course of natural events. It was a man who abandoned her as a child; it was a man who put her on the train; it was a man who conducted the train; it was a man who raped her; and it was a man who abandoned her, again, who wanted nothing to do with \u201ca stinking, birdbrained woman.\u201d The train has gone, the men have gone, and Birdie now controls the narrative.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a> Vivian Maier<\/a><\/strong>
\nwith essays by Ann Marks and Christa Bl\u00fcmlinger
\nThames & Hudson<\/p>\n

Based on a recent comprehensive exhibit of Vivian Maier\u2019s film and photography in color and black and white, including two analyses of her work by Ann Marks (photography) and Christa Bl\u00fcmlinger (film). By my count, this makes the seventh volume of Maier\u2019s photography to appear in less than 20 years since the discovery of her profound body of work. Each previous collection has weighed in between 200-300 pages, but with a body of works consisting of an estimated 120,00-150,000 images, much has not yet been shown or developed.<\/p>\n

Vivian Maier<\/strong>, the book, groups her photography by subject\u2014portraits, self-portraits, street life, gestures, children, patterns, and more. These groupings help highlight the wide range of photographic interests that concerned Maier and the fact that Maier consistently expressed these interests over time. They also show more of her photographs from Europe before she settled into her nanny routine in New York and Chicago.<\/p>\n

Bl\u00fcmlinger\u2019s film analysis is particularly helpful and interesting since, as she points out, copyright ownership of Maier\u2019s films has not been established: she left behind no will and some of the films were made as home movies for a family she nannied. Many of the stills have not been published before, so the handful of available clips are welcome, especially in light of Bl\u00fcmlinger\u2019s argument for Maier\u2019s deep familiarity with the avant-garde filmmaking of her time. Maier\u2019s achievement was, at the very least, a triumph of imagination over budget.<\/p>\n

Fans of Maier will find lots of new photography to admire, and people new to Maier will find here a collection as good as the others but more comprehensive in its time span and by introducing film as a subject every bit as important to Maier as her photography. As with previous collections of Maier\u2019s work, Vivian Maier<\/strong> left me wondering, \u201cWas she inherently unable to take a bad picture?\u201d What about the 119,000 other shots waiting to be developed?<\/p>\n

Ann Marks on the Deep Humanity of Vivian Maier, a Book Dreams Podcast<\/a> from LitHub.<\/p>\n

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