{"id":73274,"date":"2024-07-05T12:16:17","date_gmt":"2024-07-05T16:16:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=73274"},"modified":"2024-07-11T23:01:29","modified_gmt":"2024-07-12T03:01:29","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-49","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2024\/07\/05\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-49\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

John Singer Sargent, Man Reading, 1904<\/p><\/div>\n

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 Yooper pasty pie 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

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\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Abounding Freedom<\/strong>
\nJulien Gracq \/ Alice Yang
\nWorld Poetry Books<\/a><\/p>\n

This translation of Julien Gracq\u2019s collection of prose poetry, Abounding Freedom<\/strong>, is based on the third edition published in France, which included 40 poems he wrote during the two years (1941-1943) after he was released from a German prison camp (based on an incorrect diagnosis of tuberculosis), another eight written about a decade later, and another one, \u201cAubrac,\u201d written in 1963, plus (new to this translated edition) excerpts from his unfinished novel, The Road.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although an acquaintance of Andr\u00e9 Breton, who appreciated Gracq\u2019s novels and poetry, Gracq never formally associated himself with the Surrealists, although his extravagant metaphors, and winding, unpredictable sentences suggest a kindred spirit within him.<\/p>\n

Here is an excerpt from the page-long \u201cTransbaikalia,\u201d which, like almost every prose poem in this collection, teems with metaphoric imagery (Transbaikalia is a region where the far eastern borders of Russia meet the far western borders of China and Mongolia. The names Nonni, Kherlen, and Selenga are rivers in that area):<\/p>\n

Nonni is the name I give her when she softly consoles me, hushed and tender as if behind a convent veil, it\u2019s the stony softness of her dry hands, her little beads of sweat like a child\u2019s, light as a drop of dew after morning\u2019s embrace, it\u2019s the little sister of nights pure as lilies, the little girl of innocent games, of white pillows crisp as a September morning\u2014Kherlen is the red storms of her muscles overcome in a fever, it\u2019s her mouth twisted by that blazing sculptural torque of iron beams after a fire, the great green waves where her jostling legs float among the sea\u2019s fresh muscles when like a plank I sink with her through translucent strata and the blare of trembling bells that follows us to the bed of the depths\u2014Selenga is when her dress floats like a sunlit flock of seagulls amid the morning\u2019s empty streets, it\u2019s in large fluttering veils, ocellated with her eyes like a peacock\u2019s tail, it\u2019s her liquid eyes that swim around her like dancing stars\u2014it\u2019s when she descends into my dreams through December\u2019s calm chimneys, sits near my bed, and timidly takes my hand between her small fingers for the difficult trip across the night\u2019s solemn landscapes, her eyes transparent to all the comets in the sky, open above my eyes till morning.<\/p>\n

The book goes from strength to strength as Gracq\u2019s increasing feel and capacity for writing these poetic sketches develops over time. In the ending to \u201cThe Uplands of Sertalejo,\u201d the narrator is already literally on top of the world, a position that matches the exaltation of his emotions\u2014a position, given its tone, of almost balloon-level heights. But the diction and tone modify slightly, so his euphoric visions become an unmoored craft, floating as it will down a river:<\/p>\n

On those nights when the cold took possession of the earth, my heart reveled in its strength. I lay on the roof of the earth, palms open on the frosty grass, my eyes vanishing like an ink into the balmy depths of the night sky, the heaving of my chest breaking like a tide into the infinitely deepening ether, my gaze burning in the pure air like the pure, wandering gaze of a lookout, my heart pierced by the biting cold that was freedom from the cracked stones. At the heart of the dissolving night, all cables cut, all weights cast off, surrendering to the air and carried on water, I was a pure vessel of exchange and communion. Already half asleep, in the excess of my contentment, I squeezed Jorge\u2019s hand in my fingers, as a sign of farewell and of a new coming.<\/p>\n

Thanks are due to Alice Yang, whose translations uniformly render splendid results, even in seemingly knockoff lines like this tidbit from \u201cSiesta in Dutch Flanders\u201d: \u201ca cyclist\u2019s secluded trail disappears, like a finger pressing into a fur coat.\u201d<\/p>\n

The last work presented in Abounding<\/strong>, \u201cThe Road,\u201d comes from an uncompleted novel by Gracq and suggests an intention by him to test his ability to sustain this method beyond just a few pages. One image that stands out is a long simile in which he likens the road he walks to the spreading lines on the palms of a hand, scarred by the conditions in which it was built:<\/p>\n

the will that had made blood and sap flow into the solitudes cut from this gash [i.e., the road] had been dead for a long time\u2014dead too were the circumstances that had guided this will; there remained an indurated, whitish scar\u2014eaten bit by bit by the earth like a wound being healed by its flesh\u2014whose direction was vaguely outlined still by the horizon, not a route but twilight\u2019s muted sign to go forward, a worn lifeline that continued to sprout across the wilderness, as it might across a palm.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>My Heart Has So Many Flaws: Early Poems<\/strong>
\nRobert Walser \/ Kristofor Minta
\nSublunary Editions<\/a><\/p>\n

Robert Walser (1878-1956), the 20th-century Swiss writer best known\u2014if he\u2019s known at all\u2014as the guy who committed himself to an asylum with the words, \u201cI am not here to write but to be mad,\u201d and as the guy who (in a different asylum) wrote stories and even at least one novel (all discovered after his death) in a tiny microscript small enough fit an entire novel on a single legal-sized sheet of paper (526 pages of microscript have been recovered so far). For Anglophone readers such as myself who look forward to every new batch of translated works to appear in English, Walser\u2019s fiction and poetry comes in frustratingly small drips and drabs of 150 pages or so at a time, every other year or so, whereas his actual output amounted to umpteen thousands of pages. Most works translated into English to date have focused on his fiction, with a smaller number devoted to his dramatic works, and an even smaller amount on his poetry, which provide a new seam for translations in an already rich lode.<\/p>\n

Kristofor Minta has dared to translate some of Walser\u2019s earliest extant works, poems from the beginning of his career before his writing matured into the attitude that marked his works from after WWI until his death. Those works feature narrators whose self-presentation is of a person I imagine smiling through gritted teeth, a man whose front is that of an eager and optimistic person, but one prone to destroying the very opportunities he sought out himself by suddenly feigning insult by others to his dignity and stomping off in high dudgeon. The resulting tone\u2014cheerful yet distraught\u2014and the emotional balancing act it implies requires a subtlety in word choice difficult to achieve. (For Walser\u2019s prose works, my personal standards are reflected in Christopher Middleton\u2019s and Susan Bernofsky\u2019s translations, which successfully capture the narrators\u2019 anxieties and neuroses, which taint and undercut the simultaneous expressions of cheerfulness.)<\/p>\n

Minta, in his excellent Afterword to My Heart<\/strong>, argues\u2014convincingly, I think\u2014that it’s in Walser\u2019s earlier works\u2014these poems, in particular\u2014that the real Walser lies closer to the surface and is admitted to: his fear of shame and embarrassment, his unending anxieties and nervousness, frequent bouts of crying, his need for the solace of walks and nature to distract him from his profound alienation from those around him\u2014the same people he wishes desperately would accept him. Minta describes Walser\u2019s rhetorical moves as \u201chiding,\u201d in which his prose provides a forum for Walser to play hide-and-seek with the audience, hiding his fears, anxieties, and depression\u2014just when the prose might be at its most revealing and insightful about human behavior (Walser\u2019s behavior, at any rate)\u2014he hides behind what I sense is a taught rictus of a smile topped by piercing eyes (that never look directly into your own) outlined in red. Still, the result of that emotional paralysis and catastrophe\u2014how Walser\u2019s narrators describe and apologize for their reactions\u2014shape his narrators as engaging mysteries we are willing to follow wherever they go.<\/p>\n

But before he developed into an enigma, he wrote these poems. Most first appeared in newspapers, and for a few years he was able to make a modest living from having his poems, stories, essays, and sketches published in papers. He apprenticed as a poet from 1897 to 1919 as a writer of verse heavily influenced by German lieder, or songs. Because they were based on a popular song format, they rhymed. Sing-songy rhyming is anathema to most contemporary readers of poetry, and hence the reason, Minta asserts, for translators dismissing Walser\u2019s early poetry. Because Minta is more interested in translating Walser\u2019s poems for their meaning than their aurality, he eschews attempts to force rhymes in English. Oddly enough, while he defends Walser\u2019s lieder-influenced poetry against Modernist sensibilities appalled by rhyme schemes, Minta\u2019s translations end up sounding Modernist just by dint of lacking rhymes. Without the rhymes, Walser\u2019s diction no longer seems simplistic and repetitive\u2014as a song genre might imply\u2014but as a harbinger of writers like Gertrude Stein, whose repetitive monosyllabic prose nobody ever accused of being simplistic. Repetition by Stein and the early poetry of Walser works to affect nuance of connotation, suggest understatement, and, in the case of Walser, ache and yearning.
\nWalser\u2019s \u201cAlways Onward\u201d anticipates Robert Frost\u2019s \u201cStopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening\u201d and their theme of pushing on, despite the need for respite and the narrators\u2019 bedazzlement by nature:<\/p>\n

I wanted to linger.
\nI pushed on again,
\npast black trees,
\nyet promptly wanted
\nto stop awhile under black trees.
\nI pushed on again,
\npast green meadows,
\nyet I only wanted to linger
\nin green meadows.
\nI pushed on again
\npast shabby cottages.
\nBy one of those cottages,
\nthough, I\u2019d like to have lingered,
\nto contemplate its poverty
\nand how its smoke rises
\ninto the sky, the sky\u2014
\nI\u2019d like to stop now
\na good long while.
\nI said this and laughed.
\nThe green of the meadows laughed.
\nThe smoke rose, smokily smiling.
\nI pushed on again.<\/p>\n

The idea of pushing on suggest perseverance and consistency to duty. But in \u201cThe Silence,\u201d the notion of pushing on takes on another cast, one in which duty toward others can also be seen as fleeing from the harpies of one\u2019s own mind:<\/p>\n

How glad I would be
\nif only I could rest
\nquietly somewhere.
\nSatisfaction,
\nlike a warm robe,
\nwould grant me inner silence.
\nHow I\u2019d love
\nif somehow
\nI could find solace in it.
\nWhat\u2019s certain:
\nall strife would
\nfind an end there.<\/p>\n

As one might expect from a novice poet, not every effort meets with success, and some poems betray the hand of a young man with overly romantic notions of the world. Apart from those infelicities, many of these poems bare the seeds of what was to become the Walserian style, and we fans of Walser owe a round of thanks to Minta for his fine translations of Walser\u2019s initial steps into literature.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Elixir<\/strong>
\nLewis Warsh
\nUgly Duckling Presse <\/a><\/p>\n

Elixir<\/strong> is the last collection of poetry from the co-founder of Angel Hair and United Artists Books, Lewis Warsh, who died in 2020. Through poetry, Warsh shapes colloquial speech, with its commonly-used phrases, into poetic observations of everyday life: \u201clying through your teeth,\u201d \u201cships in the night,\u201d \u201csplit the difference,\u201d \u201cit occurs to me,\u201d \u201chold on tight,\u201d and other mundanities lacking precision and originality in naming and describing actions. Warsh\u2019s ability to poeticize trite phrases is akin to transforming a black velvet painting into an artwork that transcends the debased medium it was created in.<\/p>\n

Written usually in stanzas of semi-regular form and blank verse, often using enjambment to change a sentence\u2019s direction, meaning, and\/or nuance, the poems startling and engage with their unpredictable semantic and syntactic flow. From section 13 of \u201cOn the Western Front\u201d:<\/p>\n

Cold brisket waits for no one.
\nIt comes with a baguette.
\nShe leapt to her feet
\nas if someone had summoned her
\nfrom the dead. The feeling
\nis reciprocal.
\nI pull up my fly
\nin mixed company.
\nFull moon at noon.
\nThree songs for a quarter.
\nPut it in writing, just in case
\nI forget. A couple of Sprites
\non tap? My name is Rene.
\nI\u2019ll take your order.<\/p>\n

The tone in much of the poetry is playful; its attitude invites readers to participate in that playfulness.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Hereafter<\/a><\/strong>
\nAlan Felsenthal
\nThe Song Cave<\/p>\n

A meditative series of poems alternately concerning the death of a friend and nature as a symbol of hope and constancy. Composed in spare lines of 3 and 4 feet in the lyric mode, a page or two long, many written as a single stanza. Here is \u201cThe Hawk at Washington Square Park,\u201d with its almost Eastern consolation for the \u201cbitterness\u201d of life while exemplifying its cure:<\/p>\n

Set on a wire, on a breezeless
\nday, his frame was
\na figurine that stared at us.
\nPeople, eyes on each other, pass.
\nThe majestic sentinel sits
\nslightly above our bitterness,
\nhis body its own crutch. He is
\nproving the true nature of his
\ngreatness by being ignored. As
\nif saying, impassively, be noiseless,
\nunseen, not behind or under us\u2014
\nyou belong to your times\u2014
\nbut above, commit to spirit, yours.
\nAnd then a gentle wind comes.<\/p>\n

Sparely punctuated, often using internal rhymes and slant rhymes to cohere the images, Hereafter provides gentle explorations of how to live, the metaphysics of a good existence.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses<\/strong>
\nRonald Johnson
\nThe Song Cave<\/a><\/p>\n

Kansas-born American poet Ronald Johnson (1935-1998) wrote free verse influenced by, for two, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, with a concern for nature and humanity shared with them and the shared history of place and life force that unite them. Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses collects two early and long out-of-print books, A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees and The Different Musics, each from the 1960s. In the latter collection, Johnson makes explicit Whitman\u2019s influence on him in the sequence of poems called \u201cLetters to Walt Whitman,\u201d in which Johnson enters a dialogue with the poet, beginning with Whitman\u2019s own words in italics:<\/p>\n

The press of my foot to the earth<\/em>
\nsprings a hundred affections,<\/em>
\nThey scorn the best I can do to relate them. . .<\/em><\/p>\n

(The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place, The bright<\/em>
\nsuns I see and the dark suns I cannot see<\/em>
\nare in their place. . .)<\/em><\/p>\n

I see a galaxy of gnats,
\nclose-knit, & whirling through the air,
\napparently for the pure joy of the circle, the jocund
\ninter-twinement.<\/p>\n

And through this seethe,
\nI see the trees,
\nthe blue accumulations of the air
\nbeyond,
\nperceived
\nas through a sieve\u2014<\/p>\n

& all, through other, & invisible, convolutions:
\nthose galaxies in a head<\/p>\n

close-packed & wheeling<\/p>\n

I am involved with the palpable
\nas well
\nas the impalpable,<\/p>\n

where I walk, mysteries catch at my heels
\n& cling
\nlike cockle-burrs.
\nMy affinities are infinite, & from moment to moment
\nI propagate new symmetries, new<\/p>\n

hinges, new edges.<\/p>\n

The \u201cgalaxy of gnats\u201d doubles as a reference to William Blake\u2019s universe in a grain of sand\u2014and as acknowledgement of Blake as progenitor to himself, Johnson, and Whitman\u2014while its open-armed incantation of nature seems to, as with Whitman, simultaneously evoke and create its multifarious aspects by naming, witnessing, and participating in its joys and creations, the poem\u2019s internal cohesion brought about by internal rhymes and assonance.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Different Musics,\u201d dedicated to fellow poet Robert Duncan, suggests a duet of sorts between two sensibilities (or two aspects of a single personality) structured, first, as separate stanzas, allowing each voice and sensibility to present itself; second, as two different statements spoken simultaneously but not synchronously; and third, united in word and pace. The two stanzas by the first speaker of the first part are set flush left, the two of the second flush right. In the second part, the lines flush left and down the page form one set of stanzas, on the right another set by the second speaker.<\/p>\n

In the third section of \u201cThe Different Musics,\u201d the text is centered like a scroll unfurling at the beginning of a film, exuberantly announcing the spectacle to be shown:<\/p>\n

And night comes opening its arms like smokes to enfold us:
\nTHE DANCERS!
\nWhere their feet touch the earth
\nan encircling of plume, diaphanous featherings.
\nTHE DANCERS!
\nAnd the dark came
\n\u2014a ring of beasts, with smoldering eyes\u2014
\nto the edges of a grove. .
\nA spreading effulgence!
\nA resplendent \u2018hood\u2019 of light!
\nA choric turbulence, to which the worlds keep time.<\/p>\n

There is genuine joy throughout these poems. Thanks to the folks at The Song Cave for returning that joy to the printed book.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Dummy Zine <\/a><\/p>\n

Dummy<\/strong> is a new quarterly zine written by John Kelly, who has covered comics and creativity for over 30 years. Devoted to, as its subtitle suggests, \u201ccomics and arts,\u201d each issue of Dummy<\/strong> focuses on a specific topic. For the initial issue, the topic is \u201cThe Art of Pee-wee\u2019s Playhouse,\u201d which translates into lots of artwork from its initial theatrical run, then TV series, then product spinoffs.<\/p>\n

Paul Reubens, aka Pee-wee Herman, hired artist Gary Panter as his set designer, and Panter hired additional artists to help him take on all the work designing furniture, puppets, costumes, characters, toys, stickers, and much more. Panter hired fellow artists who appeared alongside him in art spiegelman and Fran\u00e7ois Mouly\u2019s RAW<\/em> comics, Kaz and Mark Newgarden, as well as Wayne White and Ric Heitzman. Reuben\u2019s implicitly trusted Panter\u2019s visual taste, so anything Panter approved of, Reuben was likely to, as well.<\/p>\n

In addition to the artwork are anecdotes from the artists regarding their contributions and working with Reubens. The consensus is that Reubens could have made more money from product endorsements, but stayed away from things or themes he didn\u2019t think were good for kid. Like sugared cereal:<\/p>\n

\u201cSo my cereal was going to be called Pee-wee Chow,\u201d Reubens said in a 2011 episode of NPR\u2019s Wait Wait\u2026 Don\u2019t Tell Me! radio program. \u201cI actually talked the Purina Company into doing my cereal. And it was going to be the first time that they ever allowed the checkerboard to be put on something other than pet food. . . And the commercial for it was going to be a mom, a 1950s mom pouring a bowl and putting it on the floor and kids, like, crawling up [like dogs] and eating it. . . But it turned out, kids didn\u2019t like it. They wanted a sweeter cereal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Issue #2 should be out soon. Twice as big as the first issue, its follow-up will focus on the Air Pirates Funnies, originally published in the early \u201870s, specializing in Disney parodies that were quickly squashed by Disney\u2019s legal team, and their cartoon cousin, Mickey Rat. Number 3 will focus on little-known Nancy-related ephemera, and a future issue may focus on ephemera from the Church of \u201cBob\u201d Dobbs.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Spiral & Other Stories<\/a><\/strong>
\nAidan Koch
\nNYR Comics<\/p>\n

Offering vignettes about history, place, companionship, and love, Aidan Koch uses a spare, elliptical style of verbal and visual narration. Aiming for a haiku-like concision in words that frame Koch\u2019s pastel watercolors, gouache, and pencils, her thin, smooth lines remind me of those drawn by Dash Shaw and CF (Christopher Forgues, soon also to be published by NYR Comics). Any number of her panels could double as abstract paintings; it\u2019s the narration that tells us how to see the streams of colors, with just enough hint from the words and images together to fill in the rest. The aura of place, of nature, and of deep time lend the title story, Spiril, a Zen-like harmony of nondirected, non-purposeful action that is, therefore, natural and essential. In describing and illustrating the formation of two rivers over time that eventually meet, Koch writes, \u201cThe water never thought about what would happen, how it would transform. . . How it would lose the shape of its body.\u201d<\/p>\n

An excellent collection.<\/p>\n

As a sidebar, one of the stories here, \u201cMan Made Lake,\u201d was originally published by the Lithuanian comic book publishers of the ku\u0161! and mini-ku\u0161! series, which I\u2019ve reviewed here<\/a>: (3rd review down). <\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>The Willows<\/strong>
\nRyan Thorpe
\nAethon Books <\/a><\/p>\n

The Willows is the first volume in a YA fantasy trilogy by newcomer Ryan Thorpe. With enough action and interwoven storylines to keep this coming-of-age saga moving at a good, engaging clip, the story begins\u2014as do all stories about good versus evil\u2014when a major figure says to the powers of good, \u201cI shall not serve.\u201d The powers of good in Silverwood Forest are represented by Barnabas, the warden of the magical forest, whose main task is to keep the powers of evil at bay in the forest. Widow Jones is a witch whose amassing of evil to counteract Barnabas must be purged from the forest on a cyclical basis. Her purging consists of being set on fire. From her ashes, she slowly arises again, and again begins developing her magical prowess.<\/p>\n

This cycle through, however, she refuses the burning so she can continue to amass her magical powers unabated and thereby come to outpower Barnabas so she can rule the forest herself. Although Barnabas is aging, he is training his son, Isaac, to take his place. Isaac, a teenager of high-school age, isn\u2019t terribly interested in magic or managing the forest. His study of magic spells has been half-hearted, and he hasn\u2019t committed anything to memory. What the lad needs, Barnabas realizes, is a test of his abilities, a rite of passage that will push Isaac to the edge of his self-confidence and anomie attitude toward his future career, best achieved by kicking Isaac out of the house.<\/p>\n

Enter the Willows. The Willows are a group of teens\u2014Peter, Dionysus, Mae, Ashley, and Stephen\u2014who live in Lutra, the nonmagical town on the other side of the forest. For the citizens of Lutra, Silverwood is a place more talked about than visited, since it is a place of\u2014at best\u2014odd occurrences. They\u2019re good kids, the kind who don\u2019t seem to fit in with others, but not for any discernable reason. (Except for Dionysus, who is a walking dictionary and the group\u2019s logician.) Like most teens, their self-assurance is iffy, and they are routinely set upon by a group of bullies. It is during one of these after-school dust ups that Isaac arrives, which he quickly sees needs to be nipped. The bullies, who are fairly dim after all, receive their first lesson in social etiquette from Isaac and run away, tails between trembling legs. Isaac is then made an honorary member of the Willows.<\/p>\n

Knowing that Isaac is away from his father\u2019s protection, Widow Jones and her assistant, the nattily dressed Lawrence, attempt to capture and kill Isaac and his teenage posse. But Jones\u2019s plans don\u2019t go as smoothly as she hopes: Isaac\u2019s magic skills are beginning to kick in and the other Willows have each been endowed with a modicum of magical abilities, thanks to Barnabas, who knows they will need protection if they insist on helping Isaac through his rite of passage. Nonetheless, just what they can do to protect themselves is unknown territory to all of them (the whole point of a rite of passage), and the variety of spells and battles (against bizarre creatures) they are confronted with keep pulling the rug out from them: Nothing is certain, let alone the assumption that they will win their battles, an uncertainty that increases substantially toward the end of this first book with the appearance of the Dark Warden. His life had been spared by Barnabas some years before, shackling him in prison for life, instead. But now the Dark Warden has managed to escape, setting his eyes on gaining control of the forest.<\/p>\n

However, in addition to his opponent, the good Barnabas, is the evil Widow Jones, who refuses to defer to the Dark Warden, creating a double of herself to attend his command meeting of evil forest entities to act as a distraction while she hones her own powers and rounds up allies in hiding.<\/p>\n

After the climactic battle that ends the first volume, between the Dark Warden and Barnabas, with help from Isaac and the Willows with the serious injury of one member of the group, the Willows vow revenge, their hearts filled with sorry and rage. But the vary hatred that now motivates them will be their greatest weakness: The Dark Warden feeds on hatred and knows how to turn it against those who have it.<\/p>\n

The climactic battle between the Dark Warden and Barnabas that ends the first volume results in the serious injury of a member of the group. The Willows vow revenge, their hearts filled with sorrow and rage. But the vary hatred that now motivates them will be their greatest weakness: The Dark Warden feeds on hatred and knows how to turn it against those who have it.<\/p>\n

The Willows have proven to themselves and each other their bravery, intelligence, and confidence. Now can they master their emotions to defeat the hatred eating at their conscience?<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Sporting Moustaches<\/a><\/strong>
\nAug Stone with illustrations by Allen Crawford
\nSagging Meniscus<\/p>\n

Sporting Moustaches<\/strong> is Aug Stone\u2019s second book, his first collection of short stories following almost immediately on the heels of The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass<\/strong>, his novel about the haphazard fortunes of a haphazard band (reviewed here<\/a>, 13th book down. Sporting <\/strong>collect a baker\u2019s dozen tall tales (think urban legends) illustrating the dramatic role moustaches have played in the history of various sports. No goatees, mutton chops, or beards, just pure \u2018stachety.<\/p>\n

Wrapped around the hand of a hockey stick, a player\u2019s chest-length moustache gives him extra stick-handling prowess. Waxed into wide curls, a baseball player\u2019s moustache increases his confidence and RBI with every inch it grows. There are chess matches and tugs of war (in which moustaches are tied to a rope pulled by the competitors\u2019 faces), badminton, archery, and more. There is love and heartache, vengeance, nefarious plotting, and an awful lot of competitions whose rules say nothing about mustachioed assistance. Stone hasn\u2019t lost his fondness for puns and silly names based on the names of famous people, as shown in Ballad<\/strong>, and his stories\u2019 taut storylines keep the action and dialogue more focused than the relatively baggier Ballad<\/strong>, indicating a quickly developing talent.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>The Answer to Lord Chandos<\/a><\/strong>
\nPascal Quignard \/ St\u00e9phanie Boulard and Timothy Lavenz
\nWakefield Press<\/p>\n

Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote \u201cThe Letter\u201d in 1902, a story written in epistolary form by one Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Dated 1603, the letter comes as a belated response by Chandos to a letter from Bacon two years earlier. Chandos, we come to learn, was an intellectual prodigy who, by age 19, was publishing important philosophical treatises that caught the admiration of such world-renown thinkers as Francis Bacon, who gave us the scientific method. Chandos\u2019s publications and achievements followed in quick succession, only to suddenly cease. Bacon, concerned about the cause of Chandos\u2019s silence, asks Chandos about what has happened. The seriousness of the silence is indicated by the time it takes Chandos to respond, his conscience finally overruling whatever other urges have held him back.<\/p>\n

Chandos tells Bacon that several years ago, he suddenly found himself unable to speak without making himself sick. He noticed of himself that his comments were founded on abstractions, a black and white sense of morality, and a conviction in beliefs upon which there was no factual basis. The principles he once held dear, learned from and espoused by Seneca and Cicero, were self-referential platitudes: they were true because each member of the group said they were true. Instead of looking forward to the deep insights his observations formerly brought him, he now finds himself engaged by the prosaic:<\/p>\n

A watering can, a harrow left in a field, a dog in the sun, a shabby churchyard, a cripple, a small farmhouse\u2014any of these can become the vessel of my revelation. Any of these things and the thousand similar ones past which the eye ordinarily glides with natural indifference can at any moment\u2014which I am completely unable to elicit\u2014suddenly take on for me a sublime and moving aura which words seem too weak to describe.<\/p>\n

(Joel Rotenberg\u2019s translation.) And here I think of William Carlos Williams\u2019s \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow,\u201d first published in 1923, and its contemplative gaze at a rain-washed wheelbarrow. Hofmannsthal in 1902 seems to be anticipating a change in Western cultural mood that snapped into place after the atrocities of WWI, indicated by its rejection of grandiose ideals. Think of Hemingway\u2019s characters casting flies in Spanish streams compared with, say, the social-climbing protagonists of Eliot\u2019s Middlemarch<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Behind everything, Chandos realizes, is death. And death marks the futility of \u201cprogress\u201d and \u201cunderstanding.\u201d His realization has made him both more emotionally distant from and empathetically closer to all entities that live, hurt, and die: \u201cForgive this description, but do not think it was pity that I felt. . . It was much more and much less than pity\u2014a vast empathy, a streaming across into those creatures, or a feeling that a flux of life and death, of dreaming and waking, had streamed into them for an instant (from where?).\u201d<\/p>\n

Chandos is aghast at the impermanence around him\u2014but it is an impermanence shot through with an eternal essence whose paradox he finds difficult to articulate. (In short, it seems that Chandos needs an infusion of Buddhism to help him sort things out.) \u201cI can no more express in rational language [my emphasis] what made up this harmony permeating me and the entire world, or how it made itself perceptible to me, than I can describe with any precision the inner movements of my intestines or the engorgement of my veins.\u201d Instead, he finds that \u201cmy eye is lingering for a long time on the ugly puppies or the cats slinking lithely between flowerpots, and searching among all the shabby and crude objects of a rough life for that one whose unprepossessing form, whose unnoticed presence lying on or leaning against something, whose mute existence can become the source of that mysterious, wordless, infinite rapture.\u201d<\/p>\n

And because of his inability to express himself with rational exactitude, he has chosen silence.<\/p>\n

The assertion that limitations of language and its inability to be infinitely calibrated to specific ideas and moods lead many 20th-century writers and thinkers of a philosophical bent to see the entire enterprise of communication as, well maybe not a hoax, but as exercises in frustration. Certainly, the French deconstructionists did what they could to destabilize notions of meaning and intention. \u201cThe Chandos Letter\u201d anticipates that anxiety and articulates the reasons behind it.<\/p>\n

Some writers\u2014such as Pascal Quinard in the case of the book under review, The Answer to Lord Chandos<\/strong>\u2014find suffocating the supposition that silence is the only proper answer to the paradox Chandos outlines in his letter.<\/p>\n

Beginning with sketches from the lives of Emily Br\u00f6nte and George Frideric Handel and ending with one on one of Bluebeard\u2019s wives, these bookends provide oblique commentary on the letter making up the core of Quignard\u2019s literary-philosophical response to Chandos in the guise of Francis Bacon:<\/p>\n

I think that in beauty itself there is something cowardly that hides, that doesn\u2019t want to aggress, that retreats from the real, and maybe that alone was enough to corrupt your thought. You [Chandos] renounce poetry. How wrong you are! You are a great poet. Your conception of silence comes directly from Epicurus. This \u201cillusion of silence\u201d upstream of the acquisition of language, and even the idea of \u201clanguage at rest\u201d with regard to an artifice that is, however, nothing like an animal that can experience fatigue, are by no means convincing or strong.<\/p>\n

For Quinard\u2019s Bacon, silence as response is a form of false consciousness. \u201cBut never, do you hear, never will you escape the language in whose sound your mother cradled you to the point that she was able to immerge you in it permanently. Never. Even in the other world your soul will not be free of it.\u201d The only true silence is the pre-linguistic silence of the womb; to want that silence is to regress, not progress past. And there is no progressing past language. Language, grammar, syntax, rhetoric\u2014all tools whose refinement of use depends on the person who could communicate. The existence of time allows for refinement to occur.<\/p>\n

You must adore, in the acquired language, the failure of acquisition, which ceaselessly limits everything and yet never restricts language. You must fight with this failure to speak the lost world. Language is the with of our soul. It is a door always. And aways it is a door that opens to whoever pushes it.<\/p>\n

Bacon\u2019s exuberant response to Chandos\u2019s withdrawn nature is of accord with the scientific method, which is, after all, an eternal process of testing, improving, testing again, improving more\u2014a process that, while committed to betterment, admits to the project\u2019s asymptotic nature: The goal will never be achieved. But\u2014<\/p>\n

Your letter is that very first language which draws attention to the accursed share of ordinary things and [their] inconsolable sobs. . . Your language suddenly becomes a poem. Contrary to your arid, dried up, confiscated soul, it has become liquid, flowing, lively once more. . . Silence is what the language we have learned invents as its opposite so that language will emerge.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Fear and Trembling<\/a> and The Sickness unto Death<\/a><\/strong>
\nS\u00f8ren Kierkegaard \/ Bruce H. Kirmmse
\nPrinceton University Press<\/p>\n

The recent publication of two new translations of works by Kierkegaard encouraged me to finally satisfy my curiosity and read him. I\u2019m neither a theologian nor philosopher by training, as was Kierkegaard, just a layman interested in hearing his discussions. Over the decades, I\u2019ve read enough of his aphorisms\u2014deployed by other writers for their incise irony\u2014to sense in him a kindred (exasperated) spirit, despite my dogmatic agnosticism versus his Lutheran Christianity.<\/p>\n

Bruce H. Kirmmse is an ideal translator of and commentator on Kierkegaard\u2019s Fear and Trembling<\/strong> and The Sickness unto Death<\/strong>. As a professor emeritus at Connecticut College and a world-renown scholar of S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard, Kirmmse comes to the task with an ideal set of skills: fluent in Danish and the technical languages of philosophy and theology. As to whether a general reader needs to be a Christian or, more narrowly, a Lutheran to appreciate Kierkegaard\u2019s arguments, I would argue No, based on the sheer quality and insightfulness of the issues he examines in Fear and Sickness<\/strong>, namely, what faith consists of and despair as its lack.<\/p>\n

In Fear and Trembling<\/strong>, Kierkegaard chides his fellow church-going Danes for their sense of faith. For them, he argues, what they call faith is actually a transactional relationship. In such a relationship, people believe that if they follow the Bible\u2019s rules, they will receive eternal life, whether they believed in God or not or meant what they said. For Kierkegaard, this is sheer nonsense. Instead, a true act of faith pits two values against each other, each admirable on its own but together forming\u2014not the disaster a reasonable person might otherwise predict\u2014a transcendent moment in which the elements of the paradox can exist in harmony with each other.<\/p>\n

I think this is where non-believers are tempted to drop Kierkegaard. Whereas contradiction is inconsistent with logic, it is essential to Kierkegaard\u2019s metaphysics. Fear and Trembling <\/strong>takes as its core paradoxical situation God\u2019s commandment to Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. As a father, Kierkegaard argues, Abraham\u2019s greatest duty is to make his son\u2019s life the best, most fulfilled it can be. As God\u2019s subject, Abraham\u2019s greatest duty is to follow his every commandment. Both acts\u2014to count as acts of true faith\u2014must be performed instinctually, without question or hesitation: \u201cfaith begins where thinking stops.\u201d If we can make sense of Abraham\u2019s actions\u2014whether we agree with them or not, then we are not dealing with faith but with rationalization. Kierkegaard is first to insist that Abraham\u2019s unflinching preparation to sacrifice Isaac has not a single rational element to it. Of course Abraham wasn\u2019t going to tell his wife about it! Of course the neighbors didn\u2019t know! Etc.<\/p>\n

While Kierkegaard spends four chapters describing the problems Abraham\u2019s actions raise, he also argues that, for Abraham\u2019s actions to fulfill God\u2019s commands, individual morals have, for a moment, transcended over universal ethics (which include the ethics that apply to all). Between God\u2019s commandment to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and His command to stop the sacrifice, neither individual morality or universal ethics obtain, nor is one superior to the other.<\/p>\n

While he prepares to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham exists in a suspended state in which the spiritual is more important than the universal. It has nothing to do with heroism, just as\u2014to use Kierkegaard\u2019s example\u2014Mary\u2019s pregnancy with Jesus had nothing to do with heroism: God placed her in a position she accepted, and her only concern was with pleasing God, not explaining rationally to other women, for instance, how she became pregnant and with whom she became pregnant.<\/p>\n

Part of the paradox of Abraham\u2019s faith is that he may love Isaac more than God (loving his son more than anything is part of his duties as a father) but to enter heaven, one must love God above all others. God\u2019s requested sacrifice will demonstrate Abraham\u2019s superior love for God, not signal that Abraham \u201chates\u201d his son. (The \u201chates\u201d here taken from \u201cWhoever does not love his mother, father, [etc.] more than me. . .\u201d)<\/p>\n

Kierkegaard openly doubts whether he has within himself that level of faith.<\/p>\n

In The Sickness unto Death<\/strong>, Kierkegaard looks at the relationship of oneself to oneself as it relates to the state of despair. He notes that when we think to ourselves, there is that voice in our head we listen to and engage with. If we forget to acknowledge the third portion of ourselves, we are in a state of despair, which is a sin. The third portion is the God who created us and wants only the best for us (which may have nothing to do with material status). Thus, we must always keep in mind that a participant in talks with ourselves should be God. In a surprising twist, Kierkegaard asserts that the opposite of sin is not virtue\u2014nobody is perfect. The opposite of sin is faith, which recognizes our ongoing struggles to act and think with love and that we have that part of us created by a God we can always turn to.<\/p>\n

As with Fear and Trembling<\/strong>, the faith required to believe that the God-component of our soul is always there has nothing to do with rational behavior justified by rational arguments.<\/p>\n

But this is precisely the way in which Christianity is spoken of\u2014by believing priests: either they \u201cdefend\u201d Christianity, or they transpose it into \u201creason,\u201d to the extent that they do not also dabble in \u201ccomprehending\u201d it speculatively. This is what is called preaching, and in Christendom it is even regarded as something great that there is preaching of this sort and that someone then listens to it. And it is precisely for this reason (this is the proof of it) that Christendom is so far from being what it says it is, that the lives of most people, understood in the Christian sense, are indeed too spiritless even to be called sin in the strictly Christian sense.<\/p>\n

Acts of explaining Biblical texts in scientific jargon to give faith a foothold on rational behavior entirely miss the point of what faith is. Perhaps a material world requires rational systems of logic, but under what basis can it be assumed that metaphysical conditions must follow the rules of physical conditions? Kierkegaard\u2019s is a theology that puts absurdity front and center.<\/p>\n

[B]ut from a Christian point of view (this must be believed, for it is of course a paradox that no human being can comprehend) sin is a position which develops an increasingly positive continuity out of itself.<\/p>\n

The more one distances one\u2019s soul from its divine source via rational discourse, the more sin one perpetuates, wallowing in the joys of material logic, a state of delusion known as despair.<\/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 Yooper pasty pie 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":73291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[762,38,15,65],"tags":[347,466,461],"class_list":["post-73274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literature-reviews","category-philosophy","category-poetry","category-world-lit","tag-book-reviews","tag-i-arrogantly-recommend","tag-tom-bowden"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73274","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=73274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73274\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}