dreamt i shot out ur window
/ twinkled in the wind /
ur reflection in a heap
the sound of absence /
sky’s a buttermilk sorrow /
monotonal air
girded hemlocks central squared
in horizontal absence
What I’m Reading:
“Which is vaster in the night, the desert or the dark?
Which is heavier on the sand, your feet or your fear?”
— Mosab Abu Toha / “Desert And Exile” / The Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
last night i dreamt of gelignite peals
you spoke / my body trembled
your basso profundo
fogging my office
breath swirling in vapor trails
body detonating in 5/8 time
no one believed me
not even you
What I’m Reading:
The rat who came last night scratching
By the door—did you appreciate
He might be wanting to converse?
— Tom Clark / “Splashes”
your black friend wonders if you know that, unlike you, he has to constantly monitor his speech, dress, and affect relative to his enviroment and a misreading could mean the difference between being the black friend and that black guy…
— Ben Passmore / Your Black Friend
I glance at a photograph
of a boy, peeled skin
arms legs suspended
a puppet
next to a lab coat lost
in his clipboard
— Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner / “History Project” / Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter
. . . we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society.
— Martin Luther King Jr. / “Where Do We Go From Here” / from speech delivered at the 11th Annual SCLC Convention, Atlanta, Georgia, August 16, 1967
Every event had the finality of a last judgment . . . that was passed neither by God nor by the devil, but looked rather like the expression of some unredeemably stupid fatality.
— Hannah Arendt / The Origins of Totalitarianism
One function of poetry is to heal the wounds. These ideas in my mind, I don’t really know what they are until I put them on paper. People who are unable to go through this process, of getting rid of things, transferring or transforming them, lose their mental well-being, their psychological balance. If they can’t write, or deal with their nightmares by reading, by putting them on paper, or somehow sharing their feelings with other people, this deepens the wounds. These nightmares will continue to come up, in their dreams and their reality—it’s very hard. One way of dealing with it is just telling it to other people and writing it down so you can know what disturbs you. I often think of writing about all these hideous ideas and these hideous events and just setting them on fire, so that I can burn these nightmares.
— Mosab Abu Toha / “Interview with the Author” / The Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
I have the comfortable feeling of being an inconsequential member of a litter, like a puppy or a kitten. I have a place but am not outstanding in any way. This is a feeling I have always enjoyed enormously. It heals me in some subtle way.
— Anne Truitt / Daybook: The Journal of An Artist
Child choked out, belt at throat. / She returned to me in dreams.
— Allison Adelle Hedge Coke / Look at This Blue
What I’m Listening To:
I quit
My head is lit
A piece of me
This is my stop
This is the end of the trip
— The Smile / “I Quit”
if i jaywalked
would you wax lyric and pornographic?
you never stop writing even when you’re not writing
another temporary stop gap measure to appease blank pages
open carry intelligence instead of caterwauling
the metonymic curve of your indiscriminate hip
torpor to tumult:
/
17 years and 2,494 dim mornings / repressed memories in red velvet capes / the rise and fall of unburied fictions / jactitation down by the river / they come back for blood and betrayal / a steady resurgence of diminished people / myopic they come back / astounding / anonymous / apple-polishing the master’s recordings . . .
/
if i jaywalked
would you verily storm and wane?
What I’m Reading:
“But wherever I went I did not find people but caricatures of people who insisted on being taken seriously as people.
Perhaps I was on the wrong planet.
In the wrong skin.”
— Dambudzo Marechera / Black Sunlight
What I’m Reading:
“Urban tumbleweed, some people call it,
discarded plastic bag we see in every city
blown down the street with vagrant wind.”
— Harryette Mullen / Urban Tumbleweed
(My micro-reviews also appear at goodreads.com)
Noam Chomsky / Requiem for the American Dream
Did not see the documentary this book is based on / companion to—but any Chomsky is essential Chomsky. Spot on dissection of / rumination on our economic-political reality. (2017)
“… concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power, especially as the cost of elections continues to skyrocket. There is the shredding of the democratic system by the rapid increase in the ability to just buy elections.”
José Revueltas / The Hole
Expecting something more on the Camus-Beckett axis, but has more of a Genet feel to me. Good, quick read. Imagine Sartre’s No Exit in a Genet jail which happens to be in Mexico.
Underplayed. Overhyped. Worthwhile. Read the Enrigue “Introduction”— which is quite good, afterward—form your own opinion first. (1968)
“Life was one long not knowing anything at all: not knowing that there they were in their cage, husband and wife, husband and husband, wife and children, father and father, sons and fathers, terrified, universal apes.”
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth / Her Read
Fantastic multilayered artifact that take the “his” out of Art History. Incisive corrective cut-up and erasure poems, and collage. Would love to see the original pages in 3-dimensions. (2021)
“so
we are
made
made
in pain to pose
and shimmer”
Jon Fosse / Aliss at the Fire
My first foray into the work of Jon Fosse, the 2023 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. A house of mirrors conflation of memory, loss and grief—and the transcendent part of the art of being human. Hypnotic. Resonances of the film Last Year at Marienbad. (2003)
“the darkness is as heavy as he is himself, he thinks, and the darkness is dense and thick, now it is one single darkness, a play of blackness”
Sandra Newman / Julia
“The millions of readers who have been brought up with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four will find this a provocative and satisfying companion.”
— Bill Hamilton / Orwell Literary Estate Executor / The Guardian, 7 Dec 2021
No!
DoublePlusNo!!
Newman is a talented writer, no doubt. Why, if she couldn’t imagine her own original dystopic universe (which she can, read: The Men, … Ice Cream Star) — why did she have to meddle with this universe?
The pecuniary interests of the Estate? The desire to flog the cash cow again as the original creeps up on public domain? They were already talking series adaptations and film rights back in 2021/22 (see: The Guardian, Variety).
Hell, there’s a market there Mr. Hamilton—over 7,600,000 “shelvings” on Goodreads! Think of the filthy lucre!
No. Just crass as shit—as a literary ploy.
And Newman almost pulls it off, despite the plentiful eye-rolling moments throughout and the implausible “revolution ex machina” in Cps. 22 & 23—and the ludicrousness of the Crystal Palace scenes those truly sink the book for this Orwell (the author, not flawed human) fan.
I need a visit to O’Brien’s ECT table and a swing through Room 101 to erase some of this experience. Julia is so remarkably good in spots (that’s Newman’s talent & gift) — but remember most of the heavy lifting was done nearly 80 years ago. A familiar table is already set and waiting.
If one comes into this book tabula rasa, or didn’t enjoy being put through this ringer in high school or university, this reimagining may be for you.
I read 1984 for the sixth time, in preparation, before I sat down to Julia. I almost DNF’d this half a dozen times. But Newman often manages to give a new incisive facet to an image or line—or a droll observation on a well know scene. As well as some truly interesting angles on the proles and reformed outer party types. Newman knows how to world build, although this one was already well-known and constructed; she’s is a deft wordsmith.
But im also reminded of how crass commercial grabs from estate agents and family are, and how a talented writer can write god-awful fan fiction at times—because this is what Julia is—a better quality fan fiction; and the most cynical part of post-modernity (and I’m a great fan of postmodernist pastiche).
There are great moments in the SAZ, at Truth, and new facets to Love and the proles, but I found some of the scenes at Women’s 21 and especially the last two chapters (22 & 23) bordering on the worst of YA lit.
Unfortunately Orwell couldn’t write his own sequel, if he were to wish to write one—but his estate and some of his family had no qualms (let’s squeeze every last farthing out!) about giving the go ahead for this. And Newman was game…and sometimes lame.
At least Atwood was able to write The Testaments herself … but wait I hear wings beating and birds circling, biding their time, overhead … soon enough we’ll have The Handmaids Tale from the eyes of the chauffeur. Hold on, Margaret, hold on!
If you think 1984 is a classic, a masterpiece, written by a flawed, all too human, individual and don’t want to have an alternate universe unspool and potentially mar your future readings or memories of 1984 then read Newman’s The Men, et al, instead. Newman can definitely write well.
In my decades on earth I’ve only returned a handful of books…this is one of them.
(Like Johnny Rotten said on stage in Frisco, as the Sex Pistols detonated, in 1978: ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night! (2023)
“This part of the ritual was always a release.
Everyone relaxed and beamed. Another thought had been correctly thought, another feeling rightly felt. One saw how little the Party asked, after all. You needn’t know all the latest Newspeak words or struggle to believe contradictory things. If you hated the enemy, you could be loved. People smiled dopily at each other, and some eyes welled with tears.
They had had a good Hate.”
(P.S. 1/17/24: I just finished reading The Men. Very disappointing too. Wouldn’t recommend that either)
William S. Burroughs / The Cat Inside
Mostly sweet, mostly cat-related anecdotes, and some nightmares (this is Burroughs!) that read like microfictions in this slight collection. Minor Burroughs is good Burroughs, it is “Uncle Bill,” after all. But it’s hard to square this “softy” with the warped visionary who brought us Naked Lunch, Junky, The Ticket that Exploded, et al. (1986)
“We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place.”
Agustina Bazterrica / Nineteen Claws and a Blackbird
“Dishwasher” and “A Light, Swift, & Monstrous Sound” are gems, reminiscent of Bazterrica’s fever dream debut, Tender Is the Flesh, and prove the collection worth reading.
The collection is front-loaded with the better stories. Gothic turns (a la Poe or Lovecraft, that ain’t my cup o’) and some mediocrities—especially in the latter half—and a couple of clunkers there. (2020)
“How can we be sure this ashtray isn’t really alive? I’m afraid of the shadows that things project. The shadows of things impact my face and leave small bruises.”
Dan Eldon / The Journey is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon
Very engaging to look at, visually striking, anthology of Eldon’s journals from roughly ages 14 to 22. Eldon was killed working as a foreign correspondent in Somalia in 1993.
Traces the visual development of a bourgeoning artist / photojournalist—though the lack of contextualizing writing, save his mother’s posthumous introduction, renders this collection at times too impenetrably personal. (1997)
“Greetings to the person reading these words 50 years from now”
Sandra Newman / The Men
Disappointing. Many interesting philosophical and socio-political / cultural ideas engaged, too many maybe. The achilles here—as it was in Julia—is the denouement: a roll-your-eyes mouth agape stunner. Really? That was the catalyst for the disappearance of all the men? (no spoilers here)
Hell, no! It’s like a metaphorical juggler with too many items in the air (balls, a scarf, a chainsaw, etc.) with the inability to control all the elements.
Moments of excellent writing and world building, but again (as in Julia) treacly tendencies toward pat & happier endings, implausibilities (even for speculative fiction), puerile sex (no nuance but the bludgeon) a cataclysmic dystopia, moving toward utopia, ending as a (I won’t reveal the spoiler here) but it’s extremely unsatisfying.
Ugh. Ludicrous catalyst & closure. Ugh, again. No more Newman for me. Luckily it was a library borrow this time around. (2022)
“… she knew that whatever it was had removed every human with a Y chromosome, everyone who’d ever been potentially capable of producing sperm.”
Bertolt Brecht / The Life of Galileo
Reading theater is never quite the same as experiencing it viscerally: with sets, music, movement. Differences in the Laughton v. Hare translations / adaptations, but very worthwhile reading. Without German to help I can only imagine what the original is like—through reportedly Brecht worked with Laughton on the second (American) version. Still relevant and prescient today—maybe more so. (1938)
“GALILEO: Well. This age of ours turned out to be a whore, spattered with blood. Maybe, new ages look like blood-spattered whores. Take care of yourself.”
Maya Binyam / Hangman
Unfolds as the protagonist finds himself travelling back to the country he fled three decades earlier (ostensibly Ethiopia of Eritrea). Great debut novel.
Direct yet circular. Quotidian yet surreal in spots. A Kafkaesque odyssey — and the end that awaits us all. Darkly humorous. (2023)
“I would never be able to find out why my life had been the way it was. Everything was nothing, and that was how it was going to stay. I wanted to cry, but I could not cry. I had no eyes. I wanted to go home. I tried to go home home was inside of me.”
Maira Kalman / Sara Berman’s Closet
Excellent, short, illustrated biography. A 60 year old woman radically uproots her life in Israel and chooses to live her authentic life out in NYC. Nicely rendered freehand drawings, paintings and treated photographs. (2018)
“Everyone Leaves somewhere.
Everyone leaves everyone.
And there you go.”
Jon Fosse / A Shining
Fosse’s first post-Nobel publication in the States. I’m starting to discern Fosse’s circular simplicity…
And now I’ve read this book, and maybe I never read this book. Maybe I only imagined I read this book. Imagined that I saw the pages turning and scanning words. No, that’s totally unthinkable. I read this book. And I finished it not yesterday, but today. Yes, today. It was like the previous Fosse I read. I did read it all right. And I say: Yes, I read it. And it was either good or not. Yes. Anything is possible. Yes. (2023)
“And I’m alone in the darkness again, exactly like I was before.”
Nick Fuller Googins / The Great Transition
This lives in one of my favorite subgenre universes, but this book is far from a favorite.
Ludicrously melodramatic pulp, and set pieces, bordering on the worst YA has to offer. Riffing on Kim Stanley Robinson without the chops or the heft.
Some really dumb characterizations—were the editors asleep at the desk? Felt more like a waste of time the farther I ventured into the narrative. Shoulda DNF’d it—there was nothing fulfilling or illuminating upon reaching the last word (which didn’t come soon enough).
I didn’t know this was YA lit until I read a review after finishing the book—but that’s no excuse—I didn’t feel this way reading E.B. White or Cory Doctrow, et al., as an adult.
If you’re looking for a great “dystopic / climate apocalypse” pick up Debbie Urbanski’s After World instead. (2023)
“Everyone trying to flee, but only one planet. The world scattered and on the move. Unable to rest. Like me.”
Yana Vagner / To The Lake
World wide plague breaks out, and this one is centered in Moscow and its northwestern environs.
A gripping read. Had to read it as straight-through as possible—thee or four sittings. I have no idea how I missed this until now. Engrossing, addictive read, yet lacking the re-readability and philosophical import of The Road or The Plague. It’s a great human dynamic study of pandemic / post-apocalypse times.
(side note: not enjoying the testosterone-laden / action-hero / splatter fest tenor of the Netflix series adaptation, 2 epsisodes in (apparently catering to 16 year old boys?!) Other than the source material I understand Vagner had no hand in this potential mess)
Hoping for an English or Spanish translation of the sequel. (2011)
“Then everything happened at once, as if a curtain had been raised, and information poured over us like churning waters. We were horrified at how complacent we had been: four hundred thousand people were infected.”
Mosab Abu Toha / The Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
Amazing collection of poems, detailing a life—and an arduous experience—of constant existential challenges / thretas.
How does one not only survive, but manage to occasionally find beauty, and continually strive for meaning, in this often hellish landscape.
Drones pervade so many of the poems—before reading Toha I had no conception of what that pervasive intrusion might be like; and those are the least of the threats (F-16s, tanks, missles, nail bombs).
Family, culture, and history prove to be the unguents, and of course the poetry Toha finds and makes amidst these existential challenges. Should be required reading everywhere. (2023)
“Raindrops slip into the frying pan
through a hole in a tin roof . . .
. . . It’s been noisy for a long time
and I’ve been looking for a recording
of silence to play on my old headphones.”
Martín Espada / Imagine the Angels of Bread
Espada, for me, is the poet laureate of the immigrant experience, the working class, and social protest. Being bicultural and first generation American-born myself—I see both my and my parents experience in this tremendously righteous and deeply felt work—and rendered so excellently. Fantástico. Working my way through his entire shelf. (1997)
“Here in the new white neighborhood,
the neighbors kept it pressed
inside dictionaries and Bibles
like a leaf, chewed it for digestion . . .
. . . I saw it
spraypainted on my locker and told no one . . .
. . . watched it spiral into the ear
of a disappointed girl who never sat beside me again. . .”
Haruki Murakami / The Strange Library
Slight, whimsical, Murakami, which is better than most. Not quite a graphic novel, and not quite a novel either, but an engaging short novella about a boy, an old man, a beautiful girl, and a sheep man wandering the bowels of a strange library. Perfectly illustrated. (2005)
“I knocked. It was just a normal, everyday knock, yet it sounded as if someone had whacked the gates of hell with a baseball bat.”
Álvaro Enrigue / You Dreamed of Empires
Absolute tour de force. A trip of a reimagining of the Cortés / Moctezuma conquest story. This man knows his way around a “world-build.”
A dreamlike succubus of a novel that thoroughly sucked me in (but you must allow it).
I loved the handful of expertly placed meta-moments throughout and the anachronisms—magisterially rendered. And that one particular trippy musical moment… (no spoilers here)… wow! WOW!
Just when I thought Enrigue had rushed it to smithereens in the penultimate chapter, he executes a fantastic turn and absolutely nails the come-uppance of a speculative moment in the last sequence.
I’m rushing to get Sudden Death and the rest of AE’s ouvré. Devoured it in 2 sittings. Fan-fook-in-tastic! (2024)
“In the end, the encounter was mostly disappointing, neither memorable nor fruitful. It left no one satisfied. The conquistadores were disappointed by the brevity of the ceremony and Moctezuma’s blatant lack of interest in hearing the message from Charles I, and the Mexica were confused that the huey tlatoani had finally decided to leave his chambers only to meet this pack of clowns. If there’s anything Spaniards and Mexicans have always agreed upon, it’s that nobody is less qualified to govern than the government itself.”
What I’m Reading:
“. . . in Mexico City around the time of the winter solstice, night doesn’t fall, it spills.”
— Álvaro Enrigue / You Dreamed of Empires
Fade In.
Frosty flourishes of flighty fevered filigree:
I’d like to foist something on you. I’d like you to meet my Id: X this is Id. Id meet X. Now what I’d like you to know first is that Id isn’t your run of the mill shallow draft, Johnny-late-comer bimodal sail/oar galley—No! Id is is the fusta of your dreams (but go ahead and say fuste instead, it’s your choice).
This is what I foist upon you. This is your millstone, your frozen albatross, your peaked chinchilla coat—see if I care what the delegation prattles and saddles you with. Meet my sickly wan friend. I foist him upon you. You do what you must.
To which you say: Yeah. K. How often do I have to feed your Id?
It’s insatiable. Never happy. Contentment is impossible. Feed it your compost scraps and it’ll grow ever larger. Feed it food from your table and see it multiply and slither like The Blob. Feed it voraciously and it’ll become a fossil fuel corporation with a continent-sized fleet of SUV’s. You’re plumb-out of luck, as you were so sweet and so cold a plum to me.
You say: I’m not sure I follow you? What you say? I’m just asking.
You know this cat Shaft was a bad mutha—
You: Shut your mouth!
So I’ve foisted this upon you and now I’m in need of a deus ex mechanized division . . .
You: You should live in my interstices.
You mean in Bardot’s bardo? Her career was over before I was even conceived!
You: That’s enough of this.
(Foisted. Full stop.)
Frost heaves . . .
Fade Out.
What I’m Reading:
Now that I am wiser
I find everything confusing
even when I pronounce it perfectly.
A simple statement like “Void where prohibited”—
How shall I read it?
How shall I think it?
I want to take it as an imperative
and pee on the floor of the public library.
— L. L. Zeiger / “Misconceptions”
I’m in a groove with Barry White’s Greatest Hits when I get a preprogrammed hit from SM-N900V. So as the Love Unlimited Orchestra swells to Barry’s “I love you, baby!” the Heliotrope unit beeps and a shot of SM-N900V’s love tincture hits my bloodstream.
I don’t care that it’s only the essence of Clementine coming through my cryoscreen, but Clemmie, as the artificial intelligence known as SM-N900V is referred to, is all I need of my life partner to see me through the next three hours on this sterile dying planet.
As her essence reticulates through my nervous system, I see her inside my retinas; smell her in my temporal lobe; feel her on my fingertips — her chest against mine…
The overseer counts: “one minute to go!” And it’s out the nearest exit in case of emergency—break glass in case . . .
I’ve met the señora with charming daughters. I’m a mustachioed superhero bandido of fritos and fries—a speedy gonzalez typic-stereo imbiber of fire.
Desire.
I’ve got nothing but blues in my jumping bean boxes. Pouring 100 words out of my clenched sphincters—pores clogged and chugging. I’ve got the drudgery groove (mustache optional).
I’ve got the jangly, janky, guitar strum preceding me no matter the room I enter. I’ve got a glitter chain sunk on my sternum tuft. I drift with the dust—on the high plains, with the snaking bassline.
Low—full of goat flakes.
(What could go wrong?)
What I’m Reading:
“My kink is a copless land where no one hoards anything.”
— Jordan Kapono Nakamura / “Interview”
brown desolation /
a land of crusts and bleached bones /
hovercopters drone
like drunken flies over rot /
scavenging spavined corpses•
What I’m Reading:
“However, they won’t say: the times were dark
Rather: why were their poets silent?”
— Bertolt Brecht / “In Dark Times”
“I am not going
to rot. I will not lie down in the ground
with the cauliflower and the eggshell mushroom,
and grow a fungus out of my stomach
like a foetus, my face sluicing off me . . .
. . . I know what happens in the fire closet,
when the elbow tendons shrink in the heat, and I
want it to happen — I want, dead, to
pull up my hands in fists, I want
to go out as a pugilist.”
— Sharon Olds / “By Fire” / Blood, Tin, Straw
“Not everyone is meant to change the world. We let the world change around us. We let it die if it will. We live small lives, constrained by habit and fear.”
— Sandra Newman / The Men
“Partisan clustering has increased even within households. In 1965, Iyengar said, only about 60 percent of married couples had the same party registration. Today, the figure is greater than 85 percent…”
— Joel Achenbach / “Science is revealing why American politics are so intensely polarized” / Washington Post
“… there are no non-radical options left before us … if you’ve got a problem of racism in your society and then you add climate change to it, then it goes crazy. If you’ve got a problem with inequality and then you add climate change to it, then it becomes sci-fi. So what brings me to this is that I’m not just worried about things getting hotter, and this is what I think that I wish more environmentalists would wrap their heads around: This is not just about things getting hotter and wetter, it’s about things getting meaner. And that’s why we have to talk about values and who we want to be in the face of this crisis.”
— Naomi Klein, to Michael Winship / “Naomi Klein: Climate Change ‘Not Just About Things Getting Hotter… It’s About Things Getting Meaner’” / https://billmoyers.com/story/naomi-klein-climate-change-not-just-about-things-getting-hotter-its-about-things-getting-meaner/
“I felt I could relate to his distress. I walked back to the dining area, feeling completely constipated, but closer to the experience of Christ.”
— Maya Binyam / Hangman
“It takes little courage to mutter a general complaint . . . There are many who pretend that cannon are aimed at them when in reality they are the target merely of opera glasses. They shout their generalized demands . . . They insist upon a generalized justice for which they have never done anything; they ask for a generalized freedom and demand a share of the booty which they have long since enjoyed. They think that truth is only what sounds nice . . . The trouble with them is: they do not know the truth.”
— Bertolt Brecht / “Writing The Truth: Five Difficulties”
“Everyone leaves somewhere.
Everyone leaves everyone.
And there you go.”
— Maira Kalman / Sara Berman’s Closet
What I’m Listening To:
“Rumor is you’re trying to save us
Reimagine and rename us
You’re burning all the books in this town
But you can’t destroy the words in our mouths
So do yourself a little favor
No one asked for a crusader”
— Sleater-Kinney / “Crusader”
thee istsfor manity reader 