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Book Rate: August 15, 2006
A
digested book "review": cheap shots, glib commentary,
shameless advocacy of insidious ideology of social and economic
justice and idiosyncratic and totally arbitrary choices of books
that come our way via our gallant and steadfast UPS drivers and
other routes...
Maybe.
Posted: August 15, 2006
Note: The following entries come from Robert
Birnbaum and Matt
Borondy
Books covered this week include:
Book of Longing by Leonard
Cohen
Last Evenings on Earth
by Roberto Bolano
The Poem That
Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later
ed. by Jason Shinder
The Naked Tourist by
Lawrence Osborne
Book
of Longing
by Leonard Cohen (Ecco Press, 231 pages)
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In constructing a spiritual and literary lineage of this website,
it would be impossible to leave out the name of Leonard
Cohen, whose Zenned-out, soulful, compassion-and-sex-filled
poetry and songs have been a source of inspiration for as long as
I've harbored an interest in lyrical matters. Book of Longing,
released this May, is a worthy (and long-awaited) follow up to Cohen's
last two offerings of verse, Book of Mercy (1984) and Stranger
Music (a 1993 anthology). After reading the first 40 pages
of Book of Longing, I felt a renewed appreciation for Cohen's
unique value to the literary world and regretted that it had been
so many years since he had come out with a book. He's the kind of
writer who infuses me with enthusiasm for writing and for publishing
the writing of others, and in that respect it is difficult to say
that Identity Theory would exist without him. Leonard's
new collection chronicles, through poetry, line drawings and song
lyrics (mainly from his 2001 album Ten New Songs), the
Canadian icon's mindset while studying meditation at Mt. Baldy Zen
Center in California with Kyozan Joshu Roshi. It also contains some
older verse written in the Montreal of the 1970's, plus some writing
from Mumbai and Los Angeles. The line drawings often are joined
with jarring little haiku-ish inscriptions, like “I never
found the girl / I never got rich / Follow me” and “my
secret drug is death / I take it whenever I see you / and you don't
see me,” which add a playful tone to the pages. In a recent
article in New
York Magazine, Cohen said the book “treats various
forms of longing—religious, sexual, just expressions of loneliness...I
hoped it would be entertaining. It’s a sweet little book.”
Leonard also is the subject of a recently released concert film,
I'm Your Man, which is next on my list of things to watch
(despite its regrettable association with Mel
Gibson).
-Matt Borondy
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Last
Evenings on Earth
by Roberto Bolaño; translated from the Spanish
by Chris Andrews (New Directions, 219 pages)
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Chilean novelist and poet Roberto
Bolaño lived a nomadic existence in Chile, Mexico, El
Salvador, France and Spain, until he finally settled down in the
early eighties in the small Catalonian beachtown of Blanes, where,
on 15 July 2003, he succumbed to a liver disease he suffered for
10 years. Six weeks before he died, his fellow Latin American novelists
had hailed him as the most important figure of his generation at
an international conference he attended in Seville. Bolaño
had only begun publishing regularly in the late nineties when he
published a widely acclaimed series of masterpieces, the most important
of which are the novel Los Detectives Salvajes (The
Savage Detectives), the novella Nocturno de Chile
(Chile by Night) and, posthumously, the novel 2666.
For devotees of Bolaño, the good news is that New Directions
is planning to continue to publish much of Bolaño’s
work. As they are set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America
and Europe, and peopled by Bolaño's beloved "failed
generation," the fourteen stories in Last Evenings on Earth
in this new collection are haunted, as Bolaño expressed it,
by "the melancholy folklore of exile.” The narrators
are usually writers battling personal demons, speaking in the first
person as if giving testimony. And they tend to take detours and
to narrate unresolved efforts as they are living in the margins,
often shattered, and sometimes, nightmarishly, constantly in flight
from the horrid.
-Robert Birnbaum
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The
Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later
Edited by Jason Shinder (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336
pages)
I would think it might be sufficient to cite the opening passages
of Allen Ginsbergs’ epic poem "Howl" to show how
young people (me) were blown away:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for
an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking
in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats
floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan
angels staggering on tenement roofs
illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating
Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the
scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing
obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money
in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror
through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with
a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley,
death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock
and endless balls…
Maybe not.
City Lights, a small San Francisco bookstore, published Allen Ginsberg’s
Howl and Other Poems with its trademark black-and-white
cover in 1956 for 75 cents—Ginsberg went on to become one
of the most eminent and celebrated writers of the second half of
the twentieth century, and “Howl” arguably “became
the critical axis of the worldwide literary, cultural, and political
movement that would be known as the Beat generation.” For
the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of “Howl,”
editor and scholar Jason Schinder assembled The Poem That Changed
America, an anthology including new essays by Frank Bidart,
Andrei Codrescu, Vivian Gornick, Phillip Lopate, Daphne Merkin,
Rick Moody, Robert Pinsky, and Luc Sante. An inaudible so-called
limited edition CD claiming to be a reading of "Howl"
by Ginsberg is included. And if you are a fan of Marion Ettlinger,
Jason Shinder is suitably embalmed by her in the dust jacket portrait.
-Robert Birnbaum
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The
Naked Tourist
by Lawrence Osborne (North Point Press, 288 pages)
Lawrence Osborne has written for, among others, The New York
Times Magazine, The New York Observer and The
New Yorker and has penned four previous books. Born in England,
he lives in New York. His is the kind of prose that reminds me that
writing in the service of and supported mostly by cleverness is
a barely nutritional repaste and a flimsy fulcrum on which to balance
criticism. He opines much in the manner, for instance, of Walter
Kirn, who is given a long leash at the NYTBR. A few years
back, I noted an Osborne screed on Che Guevera and the Triumphant
Revolution in which he concluded:
“In fact, Bolivians had their own Revolucion Nacional,
which began in 1952. It was one of the few genuinely popular uprisings
in Latin American history (no Hollywood films planned on that
one, though), and, by 1964, it had produced the wily, Quechua-speaking
Bolivian president, René Barrientos. The poster boy from
Rosario and his band of foreigners stood no chance. Besides, the
Bolivian Army spent most of its time building roads in rural areas
and was therefore actually popular with the peasantry. Che was
furious—and dumbfounded—that they actively preferred
the army to his merry band of insurgents. But in the end, perhaps
the most fitting epitaph for Che will not be provided by his cinematic
admirers and pop-culture sycophants. Gen. Jeannot Ruharara served
with Che during the Congo war in 1965; he’s still a member
of a roaming, pointless, gun-toting guerrilla band called the
Mayi-Mayi in Congo. In a recent interview with The Independent
newspaper, General Ruharara remembered Che. "We used to call
him Ernesto," he recalled fondly. 'A giant of a man. Big,
thick hair. Smoked a lot. Guevara taught us a lot. We hope he
can come back to help us someday.'"
Tom Bissell, in a recent laudation of Rory Stewart’s The
Places in Between, notes, “Stewart is a rarity among
travel writers: he's not much interested in telling us about himself.
He says he promised his mother this would be his last journey and
he'd come home if he didn't get killed, and that's about as confessional
as he gets.” No such restraint anyone attaches itself to Lawrence
Osborne:
“It came upon me quite suddenly, like a mental disorder
unknown to psychiatry: the desire to stop everything in normal
life, to uproot and leave. It could be a disease of early middle
age, a premature taste of senility: the need to leave the world
as it is today behind and find somewhere else. You pack your belongings
with a bitter fatalism, as if you know that it is now time to
get moving again, to regress to nomadism. You pack your bags,
but you have nowhere to go. It is like being dressed up for a
ball long after the ballroom has burned down. The desire is there,
but there is no object for it.”
and
“Tourism has also spawned many subsidiary professions.
Not just agents, hoteliers, guides, and resort managers but also
what are lugubriously known as 'travel writers.' A technocratic
culture loves to precede the noun 'writer' with an adjective,
thus assuring itself that the said individual is not a charlatan,
that is, a loner with a voice, and that he is not—horror
of horrors—just a writer. If you publish something only
once about a foreign city, you instantly become a travel writer.
Thus, I have often found myself called a travel writer, whatever
that is, and consequently I have been induced occasionally to
make a living at it. Sadly, this has led to a long collusion with
the forces of global tourism, to long spells of aimless peregrination
across entire continents, to 1,034 hotel rooms in 204 nations.
Passing one’s time in this way is a novel form of dementia.
The hotels all look the same, because they are run by the same
people; the places all look the same, because they are shaped
by the same economic drives. Everywhere resembles everywhere else,
and that is the way it has been designed. One day the whole world
could easily be a giant interconnected resort called Wherever.”
and
“In the twentieth century, the two kinds of places became
deliberately confused. And it is this forced mixing up that has
resulted in what I have called 'whereverness.' It is almost as
if a plurality of different kinds of places—some known,
some unknown, some civilized, some wild—have been flattened
into a single kind of place that tries artificially to maintain
all those qualities at the same time, while achieving none of
them. The impoverishment is catastrophic, yet since tourism is
consensual it is difficult simply to disdain it. All one can do
is record its strange, unprecedented whereverness. This is why
I think it must now be said that travel itself is an outmoded
conceit, that one no longer travels in the sense of voyaging into
cultures that are unknown. Travel has been comprehensively replaced
by tourism. But tourism itself is so improbable, so fantastical,
that this process is almost impossible to grasp unless one takes
a moment to look briefly at its history. For, as I have already
suggested, the modern tourist is the descendant not only of the
pilgrim but also of the Grand Tourist and the organized travelers
of the imperial age. How, then, did this evolution occur?”
Funny, huh?
-Robert Birnbaum
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Want more? See last week's reviews
(actually from a two weeks ago).
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