{"id":73245,"date":"2024-06-01T16:07:52","date_gmt":"2024-06-01T20:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=73245"},"modified":"2024-07-11T18:09:10","modified_gmt":"2024-07-11T22:09:10","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-48","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2024\/06\/01\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-48\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I arrogantly recommend…<\/strong> is a monthly column of unusual, overlooked, ephemeral, small press, comics, and books in translation reviews by our friend, bibliophile, and retired ceiling tile 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>, our Backroom gallery page<\/a>, or the book’s publisher. Bookshop.org is an alternative to Amazon that benefits indie bookstores nationwide. If you notice titles unavailable online, please call and we’ll try to help. Read more arrogantly recommended reviews at: I arrogantly recommend…<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems<\/strong>
\nJoyce Mansour \/ C. Francis Fisher
\nWorld Poetry Books<\/a><\/p>\n

Joyce Mansour was born in 1928 in England, the daughter of a Syrian-Jewish couple who soon moved to Cairo, where she grew up. Her second husband was an older banker who spoke only French, and together they circulated among Cairo\u2019s literary salons. (Her first husband died of cancer only six months after they wed, when Mansour was 19.) The installation of Nasser as leader of Egypt, eliminating its monarchial system of government, put the couple at political odds with the new government. They thus moved to Paris where she discovered Surrealism and the Surrealist Andr\u00e9 Breton discovered her\u2014and promoted her work.
\n\u201cThe Breastplate\u201d starts the collection off rudely with a poem told from a bomb\u2019s point of view, from flight to drop, sadistically enjoying the lives it destroys and havoc it wreaks\u2014a poem more contemporary in its descriptions than one would wish:<\/p>\n

When war begins to rain on the swell and on the beaches
\nI will go to meet it with my face
\nCoiffed with a heavy sob
\nI will lie flat on my stomach
\nAtop the wing of a bomber
\nAnd I will wait
\nWhen the cement begins burning the sidewalks
\nI will follow the bombs\u2019 routes amidst the grimaces of the crowd
\nI will stick to the rubble
\nLike a tuft of hair on a nude
\nMy eyes will escort the stretched contours of desolation
\nThe dead blazing with sun and blood
\nWill be silent by my side
\nNurses gloved in skin
\nWill wade in the soft liquid of human life. . .<\/p>\n

Mansour also has her erotic turns, too. Although the following example, \u201cFriends\u2019 Eyes,\u201d is less graphic than her other erotic poems, it also mingles elements of wistful and sentimental nostalgia for a lost lover:<\/p>\n

I was looking for your heart beneath a pile of debris
\nA strange perfume shaggy and prudent
\nWas frisking by my side without putting out its gray cigar
\nWared-up leftovers passed under my nose
\nLigules of llamas feathers of lilac
\nTentacles that bind more tightly than disease
\nInedible memories of naked engravings with full hips
\nFloors of the past eaten away by dementia
\nOthers more conformist painted with rice powder
\nSurrounded their furniture with pomp and ceremonial lace
\nI was looking for your heart under a pile of gray papers
\nBut the perfume of your love put out its cigar on the carpet
\nAnd I was left alone with the ashes of a clever joke<\/p>\n

In addition to their striking imagery, Mansour\u2019s enjammed lines often change the tone, direction, and\/or meaning of the preceding text. That and the poems\u2019 lack of punctuation encourage slow, multiple readings for their fullness to unfurl.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Nancy and Sluggo\u2019s Guide to Life: Comics about Money, Food, and Other Essentials<\/a><\/strong>
\nErnie Bushmiller
\nNYRComics<\/p>\n

The strips in this collection of Nancy cartoons have been culled by comix publisher Denis Kitchen from his five books of Nancy strips, published in the late 1980s. Included here, too, are strips that have never been reprinted before, all on the topic of money (?!). Now that Fantagraphics\u2019 reprint series is moribund (having stopped at Volume 3, which takes us to 1951, when Bushmiller\u2019s career still had decades to go), it\u2019s great to have new (for many of us) Nancy strips in book form and cheering to see that Bushmiller\u2019s knack for a good gag didn\u2019t fade. Denis Kitchen delivers on the request made to him by NYRComics to produce a \u201cbest of\u201d volume, which serves well both Nancy neophytes and old fans\u2014the visual gags (which play with the format of newspaper strips), the puns, and of course Nancy\u2019s eternal spunk and DIY attitude\u2014which probably helps explain Kitchen\u2019s observation in his intro that many young women are now discovering and falling in love with Nancy. Most of the strips are from the \u201860s and \u201870s, and none (I think) repeat any in the Fantagraphics reprint series. Pairs well with Bill Griffith\u2019s new biography of Bushmiller, Three Rocks<\/a> <\/strong>
\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Fuzz Against Smut: The Saga of the Anti-Smut Brigade<\/strong>
\nAngelo Pastormerlo & Derek Pell with collages by Norman Conquest
\nBlack Scat Books<\/a><\/p>\n

A short work of satire and collage about a Sherlock Holmes-like detective, Sir Reginald Fuzz (\u201cforemost moralist, expert on the perils of pornography, and chief of the Anti-Smut Brigade\u201d), and his clueless sidekick, Dr John Twatson. Called out of retirement by Scotland Yard to deal with the perfusion of pornography and pornographic paraphernalia circulating throughout London, Fuzz sets out to determine the identity of the perfidious scoundrel who attached an anonymous note to a large bundle of pornography dropped off at a bookstore, threatening death to anybody who tries to stop the porn\u2019s distribution. After doing research on the street and in businesses of questionable repute and attempting to decode the letter (breaking it into smaller passages he tests for the anagrams they produce), Fuzz determines the source of the pornography to be his old nemesis, Maurice Dildeaux. Fuzz heads to Dildeaux\u2019s home base, France\u2014enemy territory, whose citizens themselves gleefully accept and partake of the vice. Will Fuzz survive the encounter? Amply illustrated with collages based on 19th-century illustrations, simply for reasons of educating na\u00efve readers to help them know porn when they see it and help them steer clear of moral turpitude.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>John Scotus Eriugena at Laon and Other Poems<\/strong>
\nJacques Darras \/ Richard Sieburth
\nWorld Poetry Books<\/a>
\nJohn Scotus Eriugena at Laon collects excerpts from French poet Jacques Darras\u2019s 8-volume, 2,700-page poem called La Maye, which show influences on Darras ranging from Augustine to Wordsworth, including poets Darras has translated, such as Basil Bunting and Ted Hughes. Spiritually, the poetics bias toward the paganism of northern British Isles and less so the Christianity imported there and throughout France from Augustine\u2019s North Africa. Topically, the Darras\u2019s works present philosophical observations of nature via poetry, as in \u201cBeeches,\u201d from early in the book:<\/p>\n

this is no shadow that lies astride the beech trees
\nbeeches being so tall so proximate
\nto the sky as to eliminate every fringe of light
\nfrom their environment yet filtering it through
\nthe canopy at the convergence of their branches
\non high providing a unanimous solar
\nversion of the day on the reverse side
\nof the leaves whose transparency presumes
\na yellow sky, the light decomposing
\nleaving the marks of its origins in the stars
\non the leaf-strewn selvage of the soil
\nwhile the stray oblique rays observe
\nits journey further down to the true earth
\nthe black earth between roots now grown diffuse
\nnow weighted with such gravity of mist that
\nthe transparent body rendering all things visible
\nbecomes a thing glimpsed at the very moment it loses
\nits serve, the light dying in the sky but then occurring
\nto the earth so subtle in its conquest
\nthat it colors it blue and green bathed in ponds
\nclogged with the maceration of faines
\nthe water rising through the scum and us drinking
\nthis luminous humor called shadow
\nfor lack of a better term<\/p>\n

Combining a variety of free-verse forms and prose poetry, the shapes Darras\u2019s poems take reflect the multitude of significant meanings arising from the singularity of the Maye, a long if minor river that flows from northern France into the Atlantic, the thread connecting centuries of various peoples, cultures, and religions. From the prose poem \u201cI Maye\u201d:<\/p>\n

The Somme forgets herself, digging herself further into endless stagnant dreams. Once she has passed by the abortive heights of Amiens, she spreads out into the cultivated market gardens of the marshlands, and even into a number of artificial ponds called tourbi\u00e8res (or peat bogs) where she hides her lowly ambitions. There, around Long and Mareuil, she seems to barely skim along the surface of herself, here and there offering small ear pockets for the catching of fish. Then, suddenly called back on course by a canal from the times of Napoleon where Boucher de Perthes invented archaeology, she steals away in a long straight line toward the sea, her duties now accomplished, her work now hurried toward its end. But the Bay is there to receive her, to invite her to kick up her legs in the dance of its tides.<\/p>\n

The history of a place and its people as revealed through its landscape. One can only hope to see a translation of the complete La Maye, especially from the hands of a translator as exacting as Richard Sieburth is here.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>The Shanghairen<\/a><\/strong>
\nBenoit Petrus and Vicki Jiang (Eds.)
\nZhejiang Photography Publishing House
\nISBN 9787551433075<\/p>\n

Like its predecessors, The Parisianer<\/strong> and The Tokyoiter<\/strong>, The Shanghairen<\/strong> presents mock-cover illustrations, in the mode of The New Yorker<\/em>, that depict discrete moments and amorphous feelings representative of a single city that are both myriad and uniquely distinct to a specific place and the mindset it evokes. For The Shanghairen<\/strong>, over 80 illustrators\u2014many from Shanghai, others who have lived and worked in the city\u2014depict the sprawling megapolis of (currently) 25 million people, their moods and attitudes. The book\u2019s left-hand pages (in dual Mandarin\/English) present a brief bio of each illustrator along with each illustrator\u2019s comments about their cover image, and the right-hand pages present the image across the full page, in full color. The topics range from icons of Shanghai, such as the Oriental Pearl Tower on the Pudong side of Shanghai\u2019s Huangpu River, to quiet moments in older, quickly vanishing neighborhoods, and thus also embody the ongoing tensions between the old and new. (I\u2019ve discovered some new destinations to check out next time I\u2019m in town, places far below the tourist-radar.) And the illustrations are uniformly good (the book also serves as a portfolio of sample work for commercial art directors looking for new talent).<\/p>\n

My sole nit to pick with this book (and, by extension, the other New Yorker<\/em>-style projects related to this one\u2014all but The Parisianer<\/strong> originating in far-eastern cities, including Beijing and Hong Kong) is that The New Yorker<\/em> serves as a type of template used to convey a sense of cosmopolitan sophistication and urbanity, and it is New York that serves as a benchmark for all cities around the world, who turn to New York for determining the conditions that qualify a city for such appellations as \u201csophisticated,\u201d \u201curbane,\u201d \u201ccool,\u201d etc. But if that\u2019s what it takes to attract readers and potential travelers, so be it. The illustrations are personal views and interpretations of a city that means much to those who depict it, and such feelings aren\u2019t conveyed by mere photographs in travel guides.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Tell Me a Mitzi<\/a><\/strong>
\nLore Segal, story \/ Harriet Pincus, pictures
\nNYRB Children\u2019s<\/p>\n

Oranges, browns, purples, and greens dominate Harriet Pincus\u2019s illustrations of downtown New York City tenement neighborhoods, circa 1970, and a family that live in one of them. The three interconnected tales told by the mother and father (which were made for being read aloud) arise as requests from Martha, their daughter, for \u201ca Mitzi.\u201d Mitzi is a character invented by Martha\u2019s parents, with a strong resemblance to Mitzi, as well as a baby brother and mother and father who also bear a strong resemblance to her own. For Martha\u2019s parents, to tell a Mitzi is to tell her a story about herself that reflects the values they\u2019ve been instilling in her as qualities they already see within her\u2014independence tempered with caution, compassion and resilience, and speaking up for yourself in the face of authority.
\nFor the parents, the Mitzis are also a way for them to explain their responsibilities to Martha, illustrating for her good behaviors, based on what she might do or has done. But author Lore Segal endows the parents\u2019 tales with humor, which rhetorical turns that include turns of phrase\u2014<\/p>\n

\u201cTell me a Mitzi,\u201d said Martha.
\n\u201cLater I will, said her mother. \u201cNow I\u2019ve got a headache.\u201d
\nIn a little while Martha asked her mother, \u201cMommy, now is it later?\u201d
\n\u201cNo,\u201d said her mother. \u201cIt\u2019s still now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014and expressions of exasperation at the numerous small details needed to see to when tending a child, as in the 74-word sentence devoted solely to changing her baby brother Jacob\u2019s diaper:
\nJacob said, \u201cChange my diaper.\u201d So Martha climbed into Jacob\u2019s crib and took his pajamas off and took off his rubber pants and took the pins out of his diaper and climbed out of the crib and put the diaper in the diaper pail and took a fresh diaper and climbed into the crib and put the diaper on Jacob and put in the pins and put on a fresh pair of rubber pants and Jacob said, \u201cDress me.\u201d<\/p>\n

There follows another exegesis on dressing Jacob.<\/p>\n

A funny set of stories re-telling common (and one very uncommon) family experiences, from domestic chores to common colds.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Maqroll\u2019s Prayer and Other Poems<\/a><\/strong>
\n\u00c1lvaro Mutis \/ Chris Andrews, Edith Grossman, and Alastair Reid
\nNYRB Poets<\/p>\n

Maqroll, the forlorn sailor of fishing boats and small trade vessels, was the protagonist of \u00c1lvaro Mutis\u2019s stories and poems about travel, loneliness, nature and metaphysics, which Mutis worked on throughout his life. Born in Columbia in 1923 but living in Mexico for the majority of his life, Mutis\u2019s collected Maqroll stories were published some years ago as Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by NYRB Classics. Now, finally, NYRB has brought out the poems and prose poems that formed the basis for the longer stories, translated by some of the best translators of literature in Spanish\u2014Chris Andrews, Edith Grossman, and Alastair Reid.<\/p>\n

I suppose the ideal spot to read Maqroll\u2019s poems would be in a hammock in a small shack with a dirt floor in the tropics\u2014humid, dark and dank with living and rotting vegetation, with a mind perhaps still blurred by a recent attack of malaria: conditions giving rise to such questions as \u201cWhy am I even alive?\u201d From \u201cNocturne in Valdemosa\u201d (Reid\u2019s translation):<\/p>\n

The north wind moves away, the wind falls silent
\nand a stifled cry chokes in his sleepless throat.
\nThe silence is answered by another silence,
\nhis silence, habitual silence, the same silence
\nfrom which will still spill out, for a brief spell,
\nthe graceful wellspring of his music
\nlike no other music, which hands on to us
\nthe piercing nostalgia of an enigma
\nthat must remain unanswered for all time.<\/p>\n

Time, memory, regrets\u2014regrets for abandoning love, for pursuing illusions, for going away from rather than going to\u2014chaos, illusion, and disillusion haunt Mutis\u2019s rueful poems. Here is \u201cSong of the East\u201d in its entirety, translated by Chris Andrews:<\/p>\n

Around the corner
\nan invisible angel is waiting;
\na vague mist, a faded specter
\nwill address you with a few words from the past.
\nWithin you, time, like channel water
\npursues its gentle, hollowing work
\nof days and weeks
\nof nameless, unremembered years.
\nAround the corner,
\nthe one you were not, the one who died
\nof your being so much what you are,
\nwill continue to wait in vain.
\nNot the faintest shadow
\nto intimate what that encounter
\nmight have meant. And yet
\nthere lay the key
\nto your brief happiness on earth.<\/p>\n

Strongly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I arrogantly recommend… is a monthly column of unusual, overlooked, ephemeral, small press, comics, and books in translation reviews by our friend, bibliophile, and retired ceiling tile 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.’ Links are provided […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":73254,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,27,762],"tags":[466,461],"class_list":["post-73245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-comics","category-literature-reviews","tag-i-arrogantly-recommend","tag-tom-bowden"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}