{"id":72055,"date":"2023-03-05T23:49:40","date_gmt":"2023-03-06T04:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=72055"},"modified":"2023-03-08T01:00:27","modified_gmt":"2023-03-08T06:00:27","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-37","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2023\/03\/05\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-37\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Woman Who Killed the Fish<\/a><\/strong>
\nClarice Lispector \/ Benjamin Moser
\nNew Directions<\/p>\n

Four children\u2019s stories from the master Brazilian author, who brings a skewed, slightly surrealistic view of her subjects, both menacing and promising, originally written for her sons. Benjamin Moser, Lispector\u2019s translator, captures the cadences and rhythms of real speech (English), specifically the patterns we fall into when addressing children. Thus, the stories also convey to readers the humor of hearing an adult talk to children about the real and ridiculous things she talks about.<\/p>\n

In the eponymous first story, the narrator (usually identified as Clarice) talks to children about different creatures she\u2019s owned and that have invaded her house (cockroaches, lizards). The story is metaphorically a trial case summary to a panel of judges (the listening children) regarding her confession to having allowed three pet fish to die. Clarice\u2019s anecdotes demonstrate her general love for animals, which allows her to beg forgiveness for neglecting to feed her son\u2019s fish for three days:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to tell you a few very important things so you won\u2019t feel sad about my crime. If it were my fault, I\u2019d own up to you, since I don\u2019t lie to boys and girls. I only lie sometimes to a certain type of grownup because there\u2019s no other way. Some grownups are so awful! Don\u2019t you think? They don\u2019t even understand a child\u2019s soul. A child is never awful.<\/p>\n

The three other tales are also about pets and domesticated animals, \u201cThe Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit\u201d (the ability to think is a constant throughout these stories, \u201cAlmost True,\u201d and \u201cLaura\u2019s Intimate Life\u201d (by \u201cintimate,\u201d Clarice quickly clarifies, \u201cwe shouldn\u2019t tell everyone what goes on in our house\u201d). Because these are tales by Lispector, the \u201cthinking\u201d her creatures engage in is a bit odd (including the jealousy of a fig tree for eggs).<\/p>\n

Much fun and\u2014as with all else by Lispector\u2014strongly recommended.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Ancient Night<\/a><\/strong>
\nDavid Alvarez with David Bowles
\nLevine Querido<\/p>\n

David Alvarez illustrates a story written by David Bowles that takes two figures from indigenous Mesoamerican lore\u2014a rabbit and an opossum\u2014and recombine their stories to create a new myth. This new story tells of how night and day came to be. Muted colors, backlighting, and black, starry skies set the story-at-bedtime mood and illuminate the mostly mute and benign rabbit and opossum going about their fated rounds to help shape the world we know. Two pages at the book\u2019s end explain the mythological backgrounds of the tales and the symbols at play. Recommended for ages 4-8.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>The Joy of Quitting<\/a><\/strong>
\nKeiler Roberts
\nDrawn & Quarterly<\/p>\n

Keiler Roberts\u2019 cartoons on young motherhood serve as a counterpart to another cartoonist from Drawn & Quarterly, Guy Delisle\u2019s Neglectful Parenting series: domestic comedy regarding chores, raising a child (two for Delisle), and dealing with a spouse and (for Roberts) one\u2019s own parents. I suppose the cartoonist spirit hovering over both Robert and Delisle is Bil Keene\u2019s \u201cFamily Circus,\u201d but the death of newspaper comics and the need to appeal daily to the mawkish, cutesy sentimentality demanded by a mass audience, has given cartoonists room to deal more honestly with domestic perils and frustrations\u2014and, with Roberts, medications for parental emotional health, visits to the gynecologist, and other intimate matters. Roberts is also able to include innocent scenes of nudity (her own or her child\u2019s), mostly in bathrooms. The humor is typically droll, as in this example, whose dialogue I quote:<\/p>\n

Amie came to visit Chicago and stayed at our house for the first night we were away. I got to see her just long enough to take a walk.<\/p>\n

[Keiler:] You have to take the balloons home with you. They\u2019ll be deflated by the time we get back.<\/p>\n

[Amie:] I will definitely not do that.<\/p>\n

[Keiler:] Why not? Your kids would be so happy.<\/p>\n

[Amie:] I hate balloons. I hate them bouncing around and they last forever.<\/p>\n

[Keiler:] Yeah, I hate them too.
\nWill you take some mangos?<\/p>\n

[Amie:] Yes.<\/p>\n

Think of The Joy of Quitting, then, as a mango.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________________________
\nPublisher Profile: FC2<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1974, six American writers banded together as a Fiction Collective to promote and publish accessible works of narrative prose that are also innovative. The collective now has a hundred members and awards to cash prizes every year for unconventional narration. It\u2019s been a long time now, but I think the first of their books I read was Mark Leyner\u2019s first collection of short stories, I Smell Esther Williams<\/strong>. (If you\u2019re unfamiliar with Leyner, treat yourself to one of his collections or novels.) They\u2019ve published over 200 books so far, with authors ranging from Kim Addonizio to Magdalena Zurawski. Revamped many years ago as FC2, their books are now published by the University of Alabama Press.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Benefit Street<\/a><\/strong>
\nAdria Benardi<\/p>\n

Benefit Street<\/strong> begins with a group of women friends meeting at a teahouse they\u2019ve been frequenting since college, long before they became the various professionals they are now. Told from the points of view each woman through interweaving chapters, we slowly become aware of each woman\u2019s background and current life, the struggles that await them yet.<\/p>\n

Taking place in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, the government is officially secular but there are clues that, while boys and girls are educated together, that practice is recently new, and many citizens fear a return to conservative ways, which may be determined by any number of influential people in politics or religion. This is the women\u2019s greatest overriding fear: that at any moment all the freedoms that make their lives meaningful may suddenly vanish, based on the whims of governmental or religious leaders. And that applies to their daughters too.<\/p>\n

No longer na\u00efve undergraduates, these women painfully endure contradictions within their families, religion, community, and nation that now affect them not just as women but also as wives, mothers, daughters, and employees.<\/p>\n

Those from the women\u2019s circle who come from the countryside\u2014whose memories of the past and duties of the present to family members left behind\u2014highlight the tensions Arab women can feel between the freedoms available to them in cities and the opportunities denied them in the country. But even having \u201cprogressive\u201d parents\u2014those whose household does not segregate eating areas between men and women\u2014does not mean they favor college educations for their daughters. Or for their daughters to marry whomever they choose.<\/p>\n

The differences between country and city are economic, too. One woman\u2019s mother, who lives in the country, has no electricity for anything, whereas, in the city, most people of turn on every light in the house for no reason at all.<\/p>\n

Convincingly depicting women with complex lives and conflicting emotions embedded in a nation run by men hostile to their autonomy, Adria Benardi\u2019s Benefit Street<\/strong> is a generous and moving depiction of sharply circumscribed lives.
\n
\n\"\"<\/a>Shame<\/a><\/strong>
\nGrant Maierhofer<\/p>\n

A series of autofictional musings on the challenges of living with OCD and alcohol \/ drug dependencies while managing a job and the responsibilities of a husband and father of two (one with cerebral palsy) with zero self-esteem.<\/p>\n

I like it when human beings take whatever violence the majority of humanity projects out into the world and direct it inward. Not suicide, not really, but this long slow process of fighting with oneself, remaining at odds with oneself, at war with oneself. That\u2019s what\u2019s important to me. . .<\/p>\n

Maierhofer\u2019s self-hatred includes\u2014but is in no way limited to\u2014swallowing a live coal to produce an injury that will prevent him from speaking and require time for healing that will absolve him of his other responsibilities so that he can ultimately\u2014the goal of the coal-swallowing\u2014spend a month alone writing. Other bad ideas permeate every page of this often squirm-inducing book, shocking both for what the author does to himself and his ability to live through it.<\/p>\n

As the stories go on, however, and certainly by the book\u2019s last section, they become more nuanced\u2014no \u201cAfter all, tomorrow is another day\u201d nonsense\u2014but a view of life more accepting, tolerant, and self-aware of the unreasonableness of his drives coupled with better skills at detaching himself from his self-loathing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>My Haunted Home<\/strong><\/a>
\nVictoria Hood<\/p>\n

Although presented as a short story collection, My Haunted Home can also be read as a novel consisting of snippets of an unhappy, morbid, and claustrophobic life, beginning with the first story, \u201cThe Teeth, the Way I Smile,\u201d which sets the tone for the rest. In \u201cThe Teeth,\u201d the narrator sees her dead mother in various parts of her own body whenever she looks into the mirror. But by turning on the bathroom light, she imagines that the mirror yanks her mother from her grave, bringing her unhappiness with her. From there we go to \u201cI Like It,\u201d whose narrator enjoys (at least fantasizing about) cannibalizing herself (extracting the unhappy spirit of the dead mother?). There are ghosts here, too, reminders of her unhappy history.<\/p>\n

But the stories may also be read as exercises in morbid fantasy\u2014a woman\u2019s arms grow to snake-like lengths, another\u2019s legs refuse to act as her mind commands, another cuts herself to either drain her body of blood and bad spirits or to allow spirits to enter her body. Sex tends to occur in locations that are public and flagrant or private and humiliating.<\/p>\n

Part II of Home consists solely of the short story \u201cYou, Your Fault,\u201d which at 15 pages is also the longest in the book. The narrative voice switches from the first- person singular \u201cI\u201d of Part I (a relief after so much of the emotionally draining effects of its solipsistic \u201cI\u201d) to the second-person singular \u201cyou,\u201d a move which presumably acts to put the reader in the narrator\u2019s position to achieve an emotional immediacy unavailable via, say, omniscient third-person narration. The move to greater immediacy, including use of the present tense, however, is undercut by a lack of narrative describing an emotional reaction to anything described. Emotions are named but not discussed, and actions are listed as matter-of-fact instances of affectless behaviors. Hard to get close to such narrators or feel a compulsion to see what happens next. Is this numbness the literature of autism?<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>The Assassination of Olof Palme: An Anthological Novel, Vol. 1
\nRick Harsch<\/strong>
\ncorona\\samizdat<\/a><\/p>\n

Rick Harsch, author of The Assassination of Olof Palme and publisher of corona\\samizdat, recently posted a video who topic was on a trend in publishing that I have noticed lately: There seems to be a trend now among some U.S. writers for maximalism\u2014writers who produce densely detailed and knowledgeable books on a wide range of subjects among the arts and sciences, books often 500-1,000 pages long, some eager to discuss ideas, others mainly to enjoy the art of oral storytelling, but twisted in ways similar to R. Crumb\u2019s retooling of cartoon icons from the silent era. Rather than the minimalism of, say, Raymond Carver, where 99% of a story\u2019s semantic content is somewhere between, above, and below the words, a maximalist enjoys the shear act of reeling off one anecdote after another, following and reporting diligently on any variety of rabbit holes. For reasons I can\u2019t fathom, the writers most interested in maximalism seem be white men, ages 45-70, published by small, indie presses, sometimes located in, as in the case of corona\/samizdat, foreign countries. Volumes 1 and 2 of Assassination<\/strong> total a little over 700 pages and include contributions from 50 other writers woven into the narrative. It\u2019s creative, innovative, and often funny.<\/p>\n

The following definition of \u201cManippean satire,\u201d largely cribbed from the efforts of Wikipedia\u2019s various editors and writers, concisely defines the labyrinthine digressions comprising Assassination\u2019s<\/strong> volumes: \u201ca form of satire, usually in prose, that is characterized by attacking mental attitudes rather than specific individuals or entities\u201d (well, the specificity stuff is in full force here,) \u201ca mixture of allegory, picaresque narrative, and satirical commentary.\u201d Henry Fielding, then, via William Burroughs, minus the heroin and sodomy\u2014which, in the case of The Assassination of Olof Palme<\/strong>, would pretty much be icing on the cake.<\/p>\n

Although discontinuously veering from one set piece to another, a sense of an overarching theme (i.e., moral outrage) gives the narrative cohesion, despite or because of the fragments. The anecdotes and digressions include long musings on suicide in Slovenia since the fall of the Soviet Empire; how the person who seems to be the primary narrator ended up crashing in a dead man\u2019s apartment under an assumed name\u2014the dean man\u2019s; justified rants against Nazis, Nixon, and North (Oliver); etc., ultimately culminating in a wedding at which a table of multinationals, between conversations on the evil shenanigans of Eastern European leaders during WWI, engage in a farting competition. Yes, a lot of unpleasant behavior and history is covered here but that\u2019s the point of black humor.<\/p>\n

The most important attribute of Harsch\u2019s narration is the voice\u2014a voice which has a long tradition in American letters and popular culture\u2014the voice of the hucksters in Huckleberry Finn, the patter of snake oil salesman, Mr. Marvell and the Wizard of Oz, Mr. Haney from \u201cGreen Acres,\u201d TV evangelists, and of course Mark Twain\u2014the huckster-cum-raconteur who distracts with slight-of-word during poker games, cheating himself to the win but not before first entertaining everyone who eagerly participated in the con, which may turn out to be a shaggy dog story, but endings are hardly the point in disjointed narratives.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve begun Volume 2, which so far hints at an explanation for how the American narrator came to be in Slovenia\u201a\u2014but the explanation, alas, raises even more questions. Stay tuned!<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>The Art of Noises
\nLuigi Russolo \/ Doug Skinner
\nBlack Scat Books<\/a><\/p>\n

The early 20th-century arts movement known as Futurism\u2014fascism\u2019s aesthetic offspring exhorting for, per its founder Filippo Marinetti, \u201cviolence, cruelty, and injustice\u201d\u2014was practiced mainly by writers and painters. Only a few musicians and composers took up Futurism\u2019s mantle, sparked by Luigi Russolo\u2019s \u201cThe Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto.\u201d Russolo himself was not a musician but instead a painter and inspired tinkerer who invented and composed for noise-making devices. The Art of Noises<\/strong> includes the title essay and other essays on noise as music and the instruments he invented\u2014the intonarumori\u2014to achieve the effects he was after.<\/p>\n

What Russolo meant by \u201cnoise\u201d included not just the cacophony of machinery: \u201cwe need only think of the rumble of thunder, the whistling of the wind, the roar of a waterfall, the babbling of a brook, the rustling of leaves, the trot of a retreating horse, the trembling jolts of a cart over cobblestones,\u201d and so forth. The difference between noise and music is illustrated as the difference in sounds produced by a piece of sheet metal that is violently struck versus being bowed: \u201cthe vibration that the sheet received, given the violence of its excitation, was irregular\u201d but the bowing \u201cproduc[ed] a regular and period vibration.\u201d From this difference, Russolo deduces that \u201cA noise is generally much richer in overtones than a sound\u201d (Italics in the original throughout the review).<\/p>\n

Furthermore, Russolo was not content to take unpitched sounds as they are but to \u201ctame\u201d them, set their pitches in a way that would allow for their orchestration. But in standardizing these pitches, Russolo was not interested in developing a bank of machines that merely imitate already-existing sounds. From there, Russolo goes on to tabulate \u201c6 families of noises\u201d and concludes his manifesto with eight proposals and their rationales for creating Futurist music.<\/p>\n

After the manifesto are essays describing audience reactions to performances of his intonarumori, real-life examples of noise symphonies, and developing a notation system for his instruments. Russolo sums up the behavior of some members of the audience at the premiere performance of his noise-making machines who, to his exasperation, paid for tickets and made the trip to the theater solely \u201cin order to refuse to listen to anything!!\u201d The disrupters turned out to be musicians and music professors who, in turn, were accosted by Futurists in the audience, including Marinetti, who saw an opportunity for a brawl. Eleven of the disrupters were allegedly sent to the hospital, whereas the Futurists sent themselves to celebrate at a bar.<\/p>\n

Given the celebration among Futurists of all that is violent, it is no surprise that Russolo comes to effuse about \u201cThe noises of war.\u201d Russolo outlines the sounds, pitches, and timbres of the bullets, rifles, machine guns, grenades exploding, and rockets soaring, landing, and exploding that he heard while serving in the military during WWI. For the violent-minded Futurists, war produces the sounds of tomorrow\u2019s symphonies. The noises symphonies produce should also include, per Russolo, \u201cThe noises of language\u201d; i.e., the production by mouth of onomatopoeia, where \u201cthe consonant . . . represent[ing] noise . . . multipl[ies] the elements of expression and emotion,\u201d examples and explanations of which come from Marinetti.<\/p>\n

Chapters 7 and 8 focus on standardizing the notation of the noises and argue why standard systems of tuning should be abandoned. (His solutions either tend to be inelegant or already in existence but unacknowledged by Russolo.) And Chapter 9 describes the various types of intonarumori he has already invented, how they are operated, and the types of noises they produce, including Howlers, Roarers, and Cracklers, Rumblers, Rubbers, and Bursters, Bubblers, Buzzers, and Whistlers, and Gurglers.<\/p>\n

Neither Igor Stravinsky or Edgar Var\u00e8se were impressed by Russolo\u2019s instruments, perhaps in part because, as audience members complained, they were too quiet (!!) to hear, apart from some humming and buzzing.<\/p>\n