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book reviews from jeremy p. bushnell's raccoon
2008
Full listing of the books I read in 2008
2007
Capsule reviews for most of the books I read in 2007 (58)
Trends in highlights from 2007
2006
Capsule reviews for all books read in 2006 (42)
Highlights and trends from 2006
2005
Complete list of all books read in 2005 (35)
Highlights and trends from 2005
2004
Capsule reviews for all books read in 2004 (60)
Highlights and trends from 2004
2003
Capsule reviews for all books read in 2003 (62)
Highlights and trends from 2003
2002
Highlights from 2002
Friday, April 6, 2007 ::
legs mcneil | the other hollywood: the uncensored oral history of the porn film industry
Legs McNeil's The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry is a book with outsized ambitions: even after doing away with gay porn entirely, claiming, probably rightly, that it's "another book unto itself," there's still at least three major strands operating here: a biography-oriented approach, dealing with major players within the world of porn; a true-crime-ish approach focused on mob involvement, industry murders, high-profile busts, etc; and, finally, an overview of major developments within the industry as an industry (the famous rise of video, for instance).
Although these three strands often overlap, they're distinct enough that the book often struggles to manage the welter of material. (To get a grasp of the magnitude of the topic, remember that the life story of just one figure in this world, porn merchant Reuben Sturman, constitutes an entire third of Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness.) Consequently, the book manages the unenviable trick of both being nearly 600 pages long and feeling like it's barely scratching the surface.
I've never been much of a big reader of true crime, and so that facet of the book is the least interesting to me (although the life story of FBI agent Pat Livingston, and his identity confusion with his undercover alias Pat Salamone is weirdly gripping: another "book unto itself" lies there). In reality, it's the third strand—what seems to me to be the "true" history of the industry—that I was the most interested in, and at times the aversion to this material struck me as frustrating: why two chapters on a porn oddity like John Wayne Bobbit and not even a mention of industry-wide efforts to come into compliance with Section 2257? Why does the discussion of the star system that dominates porn today seem to end with Ginger Lynn? And for that matter, where's the Internet? (The book closes its history in 1998, with the discovery (and swift containment) of HIV in the post-testing industry, but it was published in 2005, so certainly Internet porn could have at least warranted a brief epilogue?)
Quibbling in this way is easy and perhaps a bit cheap: sure, this book isn't definitive, but I'm pretty certain that at this stage of the game it's next to impossible to write the definitive history in a single volume. And so if this ends up being a history—rather than the history—does it matter? What matters more is that the book is consistently fascinating (although the short-sighted lack of an index does make the task of keeping track of the hundreds of recurring figures who crop up somewhat more of a chore than it, strictly speaking, needed to be). So, ultimately, recommended, albeit with reservations.
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Thursday, March 22, 2007 ::
eric schlosser | reefer madness: sex, drugs and cheap labor in the american black market
Three decent essays posing as a coherent book.
There's a broad unifying theme—the premise of examining "what happens in the black market." But the approach that Schlosser takes towards this content—what we could consider his methodology—varies widely from piece to piece, rendering the examination oddly diffuse, short on unifying vision.
Compounding the problem is the fact that each piece comprising the book seems drawn from a different genre: the "drugs" chapter is essentially a persuasive piece, a call for marijuana-law reform, and the goal of examining "what happens" in the drug market is mostly subordinated to the making of that argument. (This isn't to say that growers, dealers and buyers don't make their appearances—but Schlosser's more interested in focusing on the few penalized growers that will help him to make his case rather than trying to draw a larger, richer picture of the market as a whole.) By contrast, the "Sex" chapter is built around the model of the biographical profile, looking at the figure of pornography magnate Reuben Sturman (1924-1997). Sturman was a colorful guy, and Schlosser makes his tale engaging reading, but I'm not convinced that Sturman embodies the vicissitudes of the porn industry so perfectly that one can pass off Sturman's life story as an exploration of the market.
None of this is intended to knock the pieces themselves, which are clear, well-paced, and nicely detailed, essentially bedrock models of good journalism. But as a book it doesn't live up to the promise of its organizing principle.
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Wednesday, February 28, 2007 ::
james paul gee | what video games have to teach us about learning and literacy
Started to write a capsule review on James Paul Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, a book I finished in January, and it quickly sprawled into a longer post. In any case, here it is:
Interesting thesis: Gee identifies thirty-six principles of learning, and argues that playing video games helps to stimulate all thirty-six. The argument that follows is well-written and mostly convincing, although in order to complete this argument, Gee needs to expand out from simply playing video games to becoming a member of the "affinity group" of gamers, which dilutes the focus of the argument somewhat.
For instance, the book seems sharper to me when it discusses a skill like nonlinear exploration preceding movement towards a goal --a skill that Gee convincingly argues that video games develop, as well as one that has an obvious relevance in the classroom. To an educator (like myself) who teaches students who were raised on video games, this information is useful, and it gives me ideas on how I might tailor my assignments accordingly.
By contrast, we have something like learning the rules of a "semiotic domain" or "affinity group." Gee is right to say that gamers learn "to see themselves as the kind of person who can learn, use, and value [a] new semiotic domain" (in this case the "semiotic domain" of the gaming subculture). I also think that Gee is correct to say that a science teacher, for instance, is asking students to do similar work with reference to the semiotic domain of "science," and that students who have learned how to integrate themselves into a domain through gaming might be at a light advantage here. But it seems at this point like we're no longer dealing with "what video games have to teach us," and more dealing with a broader concept of subcultural orientation: certainly a student who belongs to the "affinity group" of, say, Honda aficionados would have had an identical experience and an identical advantage.
Other than this minor quibble (and some other quibbles about the way Gee thinks about narrative in video games, which I may say more about later) the book is an engaging read, one that I'd readily recommend to those interested on the topic.
Note: my notecards on this book (and a few on James Paul Gee more generally) are available as a Dabbledb export, here.
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Thursday, April 06, 2006 ::
geraldine kim | povel
I'm pretty sure the claim that Geraldine Kim's book Povel represents a new form that successfully merges confessional verse poetry and the novel should be taken as tongue-in-cheek, appearing, as it does, in an introduction that claims to be written by Lyn Hejinian and claims to have originally been published in An Exaltation of Forms CXXXVIII, only to turn around to tell us, in a footnote at the very end, that "Lyn Hejinian never wrote this and An Exaltation of Forms CXXXVIII is not an existing text."
This fake introduction, with its sense of pomo gamesmanship and its willingness to cleverly tweak elements of "the book as form" (the author photo, bio, and epigraph are all played for gag effect, too) initially seems to place the book in a tradition staked out by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and later parlayed into a literary career by Dave Eggers, particularly in McSweeney's and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But perhaps Povel's claim to hybridity is not all red herring, as the book does ring akin to Lyn Hejinian's My Life, at least in the way that it makes a sort of biographical narrative by aggregating a set of tenuously-related details.
The main difference is that Kim renounces just about all claim to "poetic"-sounding language. A Hejinian line might say something like "The waves rolled over our stomachs, like spring rain over an orchard slope," a sentence that might contain the somewhat ungainly noun "stomachs" but which also is built around a "nature-y" simile that should sit pretty comfortably with readers of traditional lyric poetry. Contrast this against Kim's "Sarcastic Starbucks Guy runs like a frantic penguin to get tea for the lady in front of me." Still based on a nature-themed simile, but the difference feels pretty stark, even if what exactly distinguishes it is hard to articulate. Is it just the presence of the corporation name? Is it the fact that this image feels, to me, familiar, whereas the "orchard rain" image feels, frankly, exotic?
Whatever the reason, Hejinian's book feels like a poem, whereas Kim's book feels not exactly like a poem or like a novel but a bit like reading straight through the archives of a breezy, funny blog. "It would suck to be a unicorn" (p. 40). "A woman walks in front of me as we climb the stairs and I notice that her ass resembles a pair of tympanis" (p. 86). The whole book is like this, ten thousand bits of random observation, accumulating in various ways, some of which take on some of the features of narrative (the book does have, for instance, characters, some of whom have back-stories, although how much "character development" is happening here is questionable).
The fact that the book piles on these observations and leaves them in free suspension qualifies it as an "Everything Device," although one that's fragmented and trivia-focused in comparison, to, say, Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone With Lungs. One could almost think of Kim as the anti-Spahr: where Spahr's book keeps focusing consciousness outward, broadening it, attempting to see each detail as part of the Big Big Picture, Kim's book seems more focused inward, the sheer massive weight of detail-to-be-collected cramming out any sense of wider connectedness as it overtaxes the very consciousness responsible for collecting it: "Trying to constantly remind myself to write it down before my short-term memory takes it away." I'm not saying that Spahr's book is better—in fact, if you asked me which one works as a better representation of everyday consciousness, I'd say that while we all might wish we had minds like Juliana Spahr's—concentrated on making sense of world atrocity and issues of personal agency—I, for one, feel the shock of recognition much more when confronted with the mind of Geraldine Kim, fixated on TV shows, celebrity trivia, momentary impulses, vaguely narcissitic anxieties, and things said to me by an ex, years ago. This may or may not be lamentable.
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Monday, October 09, 2006 ::
jonathan franzen | the corrections
So I've finally gotten around to reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, a novel which is now five years old. I ended up avoiding the book at the time of its publication, as a result of the now-infamous "Oprah controversy," which made it difficult for me (depite basing my understanding of the controversy completely on second-hand retellings) to think of the book as anything other than a node in a complicated argument about literary elitism, corporate populism, and garden-variety sexism. Eventually I grew less interested in this argument and more interested in the more basic question of whether the book is any good.
Short answer: it is. The world of The Corrections is more keenly and deeply envisioned than any that of any other novel I have read in recent memory. Franzen's great triumph here is to have produced a set of believable characters and built their personalities, histories, and current contexts in extremely fine-grained detail. Furthermore, Franzen routes this information to the reader through channels that feel consistently fresh, proving that there are still artful ways to present exposition in an essentially traditional narrative.
And make no mistake: this novel is, at its core, a traditional dysfunctional-family drama, a book with aspirations that are essentially modest, despite the tendency among some critics to talk about The Corrections as a "big" social-novel-type book.
In fairness, Franzen himself speaks perfectly clearly about the book's true scope: in this Bookpage profile, Franzen says that an earlier draft of the novel "was much more about the stock market, insider trading and prisons. I finally found that the big social picture stuff wasn't working so well, whereas the little crises these characters were involved in interested me a lot." I think Franzen's right to trust his instincts here: in my own reading of the finished novel, I found that the stuff that works best was the attention to the nuances of interpersonal crisis, whereas what works least well, at least for my money, was the stuff that seemed most obviously intended as Important, Relevant Commentary. (I'm thinking specifically of the psychophamaceutical drug Aslan, which enters the book almost exactly at the halfway point and functions, in my opinion, as a glaringly "devicey" plot device in a book that otherwise sticks to more realistic terrain.)
Franzen makes related points in this interview: "[T]he problem with the social novel is that we don't need it anymore. Before TV, people would actually read a book to learn about a subject, and TV does it so much better. The serial dramas like ER and the news do it so well. So, if you have something important to say why would you write a novel? If you are trying to advocate two sides [books] aren't a good way of doing it. But, TV is really good at it."
These claims, which show Franzen moving from personal feelings about his own novel to broader claims about the Novel in general, work a little less happily, in fact, there's almost no sentence here that doesn't make my mind ache. Is the point of the social novel really to "advocate two sides?" Is TV news really that good at helping people "learn about a subject?" Are the people who have "something important to say" really all working as ER scriptwriters? (It's fuzzy thinking like this that helps to justify something like Ben Marcus' hatchet job on Franzen-the-critic that ran last fall in Harper's.) For all its flaws, though, I feel the quote does adequately sketch out the scope of Frazen's ambition.
Which still leaves me feeling puzzled by pieces like this one at N+1 (actually a profile on David Foster Wallace's recent work). In it, critic Chad Harbach makes the claim that The Corrections serves as a worthy follow-up to Wallace's Infinite Jest, a claim which strikes me as frankly bizarre: although the two novels share a degree of thematic overlap, they have radically different ambitions (not to mention broad differences in their respective formal concerns).
So: is The Corrections worth reading? Yes: but you'll need to dig through some misleading hype to discover the excellent (but modest) novel which lies beneath.
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Monday, April 03, 2006 ::
juliana spahr | this connection of everyone with lungs
OK, so for a while now I've been wanting to talk about Juliana Spahr's new book, This Connection of Everyone With Lungs, as an example of what I've been calling an "Everything Device," a structure, framework, or system which positions disparate information into a meaningful relationship.
We can get a sense that the book is going to do this from its title alone, a phrase drawn from the opening poem: "Poem Written After September 11, 2001." This poem's central task is to articulate the model of radical interconnectedness upon which the rest of the book depends. Over its eight pages it performs this task through what essentially amounts to a slow zoom-out, from the microscopic level ("cells, the movement of cells and the division of cells") all the way out to global scope ("the space of the cities and the space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space of the continents and islands"). To call oneself a "global citizen" is slightly pollyanna-ish, but this poem still functions as a lovely vision: the way it is made elegiac by its positioning as a "post-9/11" poem feels slightly predictable, but that makes the elegy no less real. One of the more "important" poems in recent memory (let's set aside, for now, the question of whether poetry should aspire to importance).
More interesting and important still is the book's remainder, a single long poem (broken into discrete chunks), entitled "Poem Written From November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003." (The first bit of it lives over at Shampoo, you can go check it out if you're so inclined.) I think this poem is more interesting because it's doing the thornier work of dealing with the consequences of the first poem: if "everyone with lungs" is connected in a "lovely [and] doomed" global matrix, then what does this mean? If we can successfully expand our consciousness to the point where it encompasses the whole earth as a system, then what does it mean when part of that system (including but not limited to "our part") is attempting to kill another part of that system (including but not limited to "their part")? Is it possible to love humanity all-encompassingly when some of the humans that we're connected to behave so, well, shittily? Is a person killed in the Burij refugee camps important? What about someone killed in the Monoko-Zohi civil war? What about Justin Timberlake? How important is the weather? If you can make your own bed a place of "connected loving" and "pleasure" and "agency," what relevance does this have to the rest of the world, if any? How can you consider these questions seriously in a world at war without going insane or succumbing to crippling grief?
I don't think that the book answers these questions, but I think they're the right ones to be asking, and any book that represents a sustained attempt to address them (lyrically no less!) gets my recommendation.
PS: When I first wrote about Spahr's project I said that the high lyrical voice and the sometimes "newsy" details made it seem like "Walt Whitman doing NPR's Morning Edition," and it still seems possible to say that Spahr's project is to represent the newspaper in the form of a poem. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, and it has its own storied tradition: the avant-garde has been attempting to beat the newspaper as a model for radically discontinuous juxtaposition at least since Mallarme.
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Thursday, January 12, 2006
war in the age of intelligent machines, by manuel delanda
Manuel DeLanda's preeminent virtue as a scholar is the way in which he applies the ideas of complexity theory (emergence, feedback, etc.) to the historical record, and War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991) follows this template, looking at moments where technological developments (the conoidal bullet, wireless technology) spur military systems to evolve (a process which, in turn, triggers other armies to evolve in response).
If you accept this premise (fail to at your peril), it naturally suggests that the militaries of today will one day evolve even further. So in addition to sketching out historical instances of this sort of thing, DeLanda spends a lot of time drawing attention to contemporary developments in technology or military theory that might be putting us on the road to future phase shifts that might spell Bad News for soldiers and civilians alike. Artificial intelligence, RAND-style war game simulators, and predatory machines (of the sort outlined in DARPA's "Strategic Computing Initiative") all come in for an extended critique, although DeLanda seems more optimistic about technological systems that don't take human beings "out of the loop" (the book ends with an appreciation of humanist interface designer Doug Engelbart).
All in all, this book is pretty essential reading for anyone interested in the "machine" part of the war machine, although it could definitely benefit from a little revision and expansion: some of the Cold War anxiety undergirding the book has lost some of its edge in the intervening years, and I could stand to lose some of it in favor of having DeLanda as a guide through past two wars (although War was published in 1991, Desert Storm hardly ranks a mention, a little odd, given the use of Israeli-built Pioneer UAVs in that conflict).
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Thursday, March 3, 2004
the revolution® : quotations from revolution party chairman r. u. sirius
If I were to make a list of books which turned out to have profoundly influenced my sensibilities, one of these books would be the Mondo 2000 book, A User's Guide to the New Edge, edited by Rudy Rucker, R. U. Sirius, and Queen Mu. Packed full of weird ideas at a time when I was hungry for weird ideas (1992), this book's ultimate gift to me was the knowledge that information could be psychedelic and that technology could be used for transcendental ends, lessons which set me on a set of investigations that I will probably never tire of conducting.
Partially out of gratitude, and partially out of genuine interest, I've always kept one eye on whatever Rucker and Sirius have been up to in the post-Mondo era (Queen Mu, alas, appears to have vanished into obscurity). Although they rarely tap into anything which gives me the same "whoa" factor that Mondo 2000 gave me, their current exploits are often pretty interesting (Sirius' Neo-Files site, for instance, is usually worth exploring). So when I saw, a few years back, that Sirius had formed a political party and published a little red book of quotations, I was intrigued. I put it on my Amazon wishlist and it finally came this past Christmas, roughly two months after George Bush won (or possibly stole) the 2004 elections.
Perhaps bad timing. Sirius' plan to run for President may have seemed like a giddy long-shot stunt back in 2000, when this book was published, but today it just makes me nostalgic for a time when we felt optimistic enough to try giddy long-shot stunts—aka the Clinton era. The both-parties-are-the-same argument that undergirds a lot of Sirius' rhetoric here—the same argument, you'll remember, that provided for much of Nader's groundswell—has gotten a serious trial-by-fire over the past four years, and no longer really holds much sway with me: if there were ever a time where lesser-evilism looked like an attractive philosophy, it's now.
All the more disappointing, because I mostly find myself in agreement with Sirius' basic political credo. The book opens with a "Nineteen Point Party Platform for National Politics," which nicely codifies that peculiarly Californian blend of beliefs: part anarcho-libertarian, part old-guard Leftist. (Sirius is enough of an idealist to say "we will repeal five times as many laws as we pass" but enough of a realist to say "you can't have the withering away of the State until you've built other defenses against total rape by the multinationals.")
The book is witty, insightful, and occasionally provocative, but there's no getting around the fact that recent political events have made it feel powerfully dated. Sirius exhorts us to fight the right evils—the National Security State, the prison/industrial complex, the global trashing of civil and human rights—but it seems to me that we're officially past the point where the daffy pranksterism of a faux Presidential campaign might qualify as a viable weapon.
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Sunday, Feburary 6, 2004
the filth by grant morrison
The Filth is Grant Morrison's most recent piece of long-form comics narrative, a thirteen-issue series published by Vertigo and recently collected into a trade paperback. The Filth is a pretty trippy compound of provocative ideas and strange imagery, but it doesn’t really work as a story, and over the past two months I’ve been reading and re-reading the collection trying to figure out where exactly the flaw might be found. (The post that follows will contain minor spoilers (and postmodern theory), so beware.)
In the book-length study Postmodern Fiction, author Brian McHale discusses the concept of "ontological oscillation": the way that postmodern narratives tend to set up two or more incompatible worlds and lets the text "flicker" between the different realities without necessarily establishing one as more-or-less "real" than another within the space of the story (although some may bear a greater degree of resemblance to our own "real" world than others). This model maps neatly onto The Filth: within the first three issues we're introduced to three distinct ontic worlds. The first of these is the world which seems (initially at least) to be fairly congruent with our own: the contemporary urban Britain where everyman Greg Feely works at his office job and buys pornography essentially functions as a stand-in for our own world's contemporary urban Britain. There are some minor inconsistencies—for instance, early on in the series we're introduced to a race of nanotech organisms evolved by a Nobel-Prize-winning scientist—but daily life in this first world seems like it would be more-or-less familiar.
The second world is the one into which Feely is abducted, the world referred to as "the Crack," which houses the headquarters of a secret hygiene organization called the Hand. "Are we on another planet?" Feely asks, bewildered by the funhouse architecture of Hand HQ and the blighted landscape outside. "Am I in the future? Or in virtual reality?" The answer isn't exactly any of the above, but it's clear that the Crack is a kind of para-space where the normal rules of reality don't apply: monkeys speak, giant submarines are powered by cathedral-batteries, time and space operate in unusual fashion. And then we have a third world, the least real, introduced at the beginning of Issue Three: "the Paperverse," a comic-book universe that emulates the look-and-feel of old Marvel and DC comics, featuring cities like "Omnitropolis" and super-powered characters like "Alpha-Sapiens" and "Machine Girl."
Morrison spends a lot of time exploring the permeability of the boundary between these three worlds: Hand agents covertly (and not entirely benignly) manipulate events in the real world; Feely is disoriented and troubled by the high weirdness of the Crack, mostly wanting to return to caring for his sick cat in his normal life; the Superman-like Secret Orginal cripples himself by leaving behind the action-packed but comparatively innocent world of the Paperverse and punching into the perverse, morally-ambiguous universe of the Crack. And for the most part, all of this works effectively as a means of bringing dramatic tension into The Filth (although the events occuring at Paperverse / Crack boundary never really amount to more than a tantalizing digression).
But one of the difficulties with writing a postmodern narrative containing universes that lack a firm ontological basis is that events occurring in those universes begin to lose some of their weight and consequence. Ontological instablity is a condition with its own degree of tragedy, and Morrison has proven himself able to exploit this in the past (see Deus Ex Machina, the volume which collects some of his run on Animal Man, or the unsettling conclusion of his more recent three-issue series Seaguy) but in The Filth the pathos-generating events tend to be more traditional, and when they occur in a space like the Crack they have a tendency to feel featherweight: the death of Hand agent Cameron Jones from time-accelerated lymphatic cancer just doesn't seem to matter that much because the universe where it happens has already been established as a place where nearly anything goes.
Pathos in The Filth functions more effectively in the "real world," at least for a while, but by mid-series the science-fictional elements of that world have begun to ramp up, which violates the terms of that universe: we’re introduced to elements like a floating nation-ship, the Libertania, in Issue Seven and a man who can manifest clouds of "visible thought" above his head in Issue Ten. With no recognizable reality left for the weirdness to orient around, the story begins to feel completely ungrounded, and events which seem intended to carry emotional weight begin to fall flat: it's difficult to feel like the death of a sick cat is "real" when it happens in a universe where events like the destruction of a nation of over 100,000 people and the mutilation and assassination of the President of the United States seem to have no notable consequences.
There’s a lot to like in The Filth, but I’d stop short of claiming (as the Comics Journal claims) that "The Filth is the best thing Morrison has ever written." It strives for a certain degree of dramatic gravity at the same time as it systematically kicks out its own dramatic supports.
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Sunday, December 19, 2004
eros and magic in the renaissance, by ioan couliano
Ioan Couliano's Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (1987) argues that modern science is born after the Renaissance, and represents an entirely new manner of acquring and working with knowledge. As such, Couliano argues, modern science does not represent a linear extension or progression of Renaissance science, but rather a wholesale replacement, which essentially abandons avenues of exploration opened by the Greeks and later re-opened by Italian Neoplatonists, such as Giordano Bruno and Marsilio Ficino. Couliano goes so far as to suggest that our trust in quantitative science is so central to our contemporary worldview that the subjectivity of a Renaissance-era thinker would strike us as fundamentally unrecognizable.
This book works both as a fascinating elaboration of this alien Renaissance mindset and a critique of the modern scientific worldview, with Couliano firmly rejecting the notion that its rise represents a kind of "progress." In Couliano's view, the Renaissance sciences—including astrology, alchemy, the art of memory, and demon-magic—serve as strategies for working with the unconscious or imagination, and that their abandonment serves as a sort of psychological crippling. Actually, as Couliano explains in his final chapters, these methods are less "abandoned" and are more supressed by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, who jointly align these sciences with heresy and persecute the practicioners. (It is interesting to note that this alignment is still with us: see for instance the continued resonance of the Faust legend, which represents a man of knowledge as a servant of the devil, or any of the countless films or other cultural products which have depicted Satan as an erudite Italian.)
This book also makes a compelling case that these suppressed methods of knowledge-work continue to exist today in the form of various sciences and quasi-sciences: advertising, mass media, psychology, cryptography, and what Couliano calls “applied psychosociology.” As these sciences are commonly used in the services of mass control, those of us who want to understand control logics would do well to attempt a more complete understanding of these techniques—which involves understanding their roots in the Renaissance. A difficult task, perhaps, but Couliano's book provides an excellent starting point.
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Sunday, November 14, 2004
collected prose by paul celan
Even when collected, Celan's prose makes for a slim volume—the book contains some speeches, a pair of brief forewords, a letter, a set of epigrammatic fable-ettes, a cryptic short story, and two or three other oddments. That's it. It's enough prose to fill one evening's worth of reading, and given Celan's long committment to minimalism and silence, we should probably feel lucky that we even get that much.
Brevity notwithstanding, the contents here serve as a welcome addendum to Celan's poetry. His entire body of work can be read as an attempt to reconcile two beliefs: a belief in the ability of writing to embody the voice of absolute otherness—original, strange, perhaps ultimately indecipherable—and an equally deeply-held belief in the virtues of communication, of conversation and encounter. This lifelong attempt at reconciliation yields a set of tensions which serve as the animating force behind his poems: the modest stack of writing in this volume, taken collectively, provides additional insight into Celan's attempt to chart these worthy human tensegrities in their full complexity. Recommended.
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