|
Book Rate
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.
Note: (RB) = Robert
Birnbaum; (RLW) = RL
Whalen; (JT) = Janice Tsai; (AK) = Angie
Kritenbrink; (MB) equals Matt
Borondy; and soon enough there will be other abbreviations to
deal with. Links go to Amazon.com.
Last updated: January 19, 2005
Cuba and Its Music: From the first Drums
to the Mambo – Ned Sublette (Chicago Review Press, 688
pp.)
Ned Sublette,
who is a cofounder of the Qbadisc record label, the first American
record label dedicated to marketing contemporary Cuban music in
the United States and who produced public radio's Afropop Worlwide—which
put out one of my favorite recordings, COWBOY RUMBA, in 1998, a
charming and swinging amalgam of Sublette's Texas roots and Latin
influences (a meringue version of "Ghostriders in the Sky")—has
turned his love for and knowledge of Cuban music into a masterful
and, as far as I can tell, definitive history of that great music
up to 1953. This first volume (I assume the second will take up
from 1953 to the present) makes a bold claim: "The [musical]
traditions that came out of Cuba lurk behind everyday musical concepts
in the United States, passing almost unnoticed because of their
familiarity and long standing presence. By the end of the nineteenth
century they were well embedded, and this influence was reinjected
into every generation in the United States right up through the
Cuban Revolution and after . . . . Cuban music has to be regarded
as the Other Great Tradition, a fundamental music of the New World.
You can hear its influence in classical music, ragtime, tango, jazz,
rhythm and blues, country, rock and roll, funk, hip hop, to say
nothing of salsa. The imprint of Cuban music is everywhere and Cuba
is still a world power in music today." Please note the "and"
in the book's title: "This book will inevitably contain a good
deal of nonmusical history, because music, far from being a universal
language, is made in the spaces created by society and empire and
we have to know what those societies and empires were to understand
the music." Bookend Leonardo Acosta's Cubano Be, Cubano
Bop: One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba (which we noted previously
when it was published) with the Sublette tome and you have two lively
books of musical scholarship that provide comprehensive picture
of the importance and compelling nature of Cuban music. (RB)
Land Grant College Review #2
Ploughshares, Winter 2004–2005, guest edited by Joy
Harjo
The Believer, Dec 04/Jan 05, twentieth issue
Swink #1, Mid-2004
GlimmerTrain # 55, Winter 2005
I recently read
a piece on literary web logs that included the phrase "golden
age of literary magazines." While I recognize the danger of
anointing one's time as a golden age (a designation seemingly only
appropriate in hindsight) there is good evidence that this is such
a fertile time, especially if one looks at these five periodicals.
Ploughshares,
the grandmother of them all (at least of this grouping), continues
to stay fresh in large part through using guest editors. This edition
is, naturally, focused on poetry (53 poems and 6 stories—names
like Martin Espada, Donald Hall, Sandra Cisneros, Rick Bass, Chris
Albani, Gary Soto, and more) with poet Jo Harjo doing a guest stint:
"Maybe the ultimate purpose of literature is to humble us to
our knees, to that know-nothing place. Maybe we here on this planet
are a story gone awry, with the Great Storyteller frantically trying
out different endings. Whatever the outcome, we need new songs,
new stories, to accompany us wherever we are, wherever we go. That’s
the power contained in a book, journal, or magazine that you can
carry in your hands. So, these stories, poems, and songs are offered
as such, as gifts for challenge, for inspiration, for sustenance."
GlimmerTrain
is out of Oregon and edited by Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda
Swanson-Davies, who consistently publish this writer/reader friendly
quarterly. Scan the CVs of up-and-coming writers and more often
than not GlimmerTrain will be there. This issue has an interview
with Daniel
Mason and stories by Ann Harleman, Julie Rose, Amy Karr, Kate
Kasten, Yelizaveta Renfro, Kurt Rheinheimer, George Fahey, Alan
Arthur Drew, Jimmy Olsen, Paul Mandelbaum, Laurence der Looze, and
Doug Crandell.
The Believer (not to be confused with the great Henry
Bean film of the same name) by way of its bloodlines (Dave Eggers)
and editor Heidi
Julavits’ infamous anti-snark manifesto has, since 2003,
published twenty issues, which is pretty impressive in its own right.
Jim Shepard, Tom Bissell, Ben Eherenreich, and Nick Hornby are regularly
found in these pages, along with lengthy and fun interviews with
a broad array of creative types (hey, I've even contributed conversations
with Jamaica Kincaid, Margot Livesey, and Sissela Bok). This issue
includes a seventy minute DVD; pieces by Jim Ruland and David Hockney;
Ed Keinholz interviewed by Lawrence Weschler; and Joan Silber chats
with Sara Stone.
Land
Grant College Review's recent and promising entry into the literary
fray has a second issue including stories by the likes of Jeffery
Renard Allen, Arthur Bradford, Alan Cheuse, Jonathan Goldstein,
Jim Hanas, Roy Kesey, Jeff MacGregor, Nelly Reifler, David Schuman,
and Peter Walpole. Founding editors Dave Koch and Josh Melrod, along
with David Schuman, Tara Wray, Karen Rile, Jennifer Srygley, and
Laurel Synder deserve kudos and support. "We chose the name
Land-Grant College Review as a riff on the many longstanding lit
mags that are operated by big-time universities like Missouri, Iowa,
and on and on and on," says co-editor Josh Melrod. "Even
though we have a lot of respect for those journals they can be kind
of staid and dry. We wanted our magazine to be different."
Which it is.
Swink,
helmed by editor in chief Leelila Strogov and aided and abetted
by Samantha Ketay Marlowe, Tricia Han, and Rigoberto González,
has one issue under its belt, with the second one imminent. Here's
the intention: "Swink is a bi-coastal, biannual print
magazine dedicated to identifying and promoting literary talent
in both established and emerging writers. We're interested in writing
that pushes the boundaries of the traditional—writing that
is new in concept, form or execution; that reflects a diversity
of thought, experience or perspective; that provokes or entertains.
Swink publishes fiction, non-fiction, poetry and interviews,
and sponsors frequent readings and events in New York City and Los
Angeles. Online theme issues of fiction, essays and poetry will
also be available exclusively on our website." #1 includes
fiction by Daniel Alarcón, Steve Almond, Jonathan Ames, Andrew
Foster Altschul, Etgar Keret, Morgan McDemott, Alix Ohlin, Neal
Pollack, Elissa Schappell, Amanda Stern, and Elizabeth Tippens.
Stay tuned. (RB)
Trust – Cynthia Ozick (Houghton Mifflin,
652 pp.)
What could be better than that a septuagenarian writer of serious
fiction and rumination like Ozick
be given serious attention. The news that rocked the literary world
was that Ms.
Ozick had never been asked to go out and tour for her books.
Shame shame. Anyway, her new publisher, in addition to making her
available to hungry fans nationwide, published this, her first novel
(for which Ozick offered a gold medal for anyone who could read
it). The new afterward (which I am told is also available in the
American Scholar) includes this acutely Ozickian insight: "It
is because of the contemporary reader's impatience the old ambition
had reflected back to it readers who were equally covetous—but
as the old ambition has faded, so has readers' craving: recognizable
bookish voluptuaries and print cannibals are rare. Readers nowadays
will hardly tolerate long blocks of print unbroken by dialogue or
action, and if there are to be long blocks of print at all, they
must be in speedy, colloquial undemanding prose. Are cinema and
television to blame? In part. Novelists have learned much from visual
technology, especially the skill of rapid juxtaposition. But film
itself is heir to the more contemplative old ambition: what else
is "panning," whether of a landscape or a human face?
When film is on occasion gazeful, meticulous, attentive to the silent
naming of things seen, its debt to word is keenest." Worth
the price of the ticket, I would say. (RB)
What We Do Now – edited by Dennis
Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians (Melville
House, 201 pp.)
In response to a seemingly widespread depression in progressive
circles after the recent election, Dennis and Valerie put together
what in the biz is called an "instant" book (three weeks
is pretty instant in book publishing). Twenty-four leading cultural
figures contribute to this anthology that is "a passionate
manifesto on what people on the left can do in post-11/2 world."
The all-star cast includes artists, activists, and media types,
such as Howard Dean, Donna Brazile, Lewis Lapham, Nicholas Kristof,
John R. MacArthur, Maud
Newton, Martha Nussbaum, Jamin Raskin, Eric Foner, Robin Morgan,
Danny
Schechter, Jennifer Pozner, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Percival
Everett, George
Saunders, Steve
Almond, Alicia Ostriker and more. Also, we have received word
that a number of counter-inaugural events are going to happen in
New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington DC. Valerie says
the series of events was developed after Democratic organizations
in San Francisco and Washington simultaneously approached the publisher
about staging events based on the book. "We were delighted,"
says Merians, "because this was exactly what the book is about:
getting people together to rally spirits and do something when things
seem bleakest." Amen. (RB)
Polish Memories – Witold Gombrowicz (Yale
University Press, 191 pp.)
A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and 15 Minutes
– Witold Gombrowicz (Yale UP, 109 pp.)
Milan Kundera refers to him as one of the great novelists of the
twentieth century. Unless you were fortunate enough to catch Louis
Begley's recent piece or my recent notice on Archipelago Books'
publication of Barcalay, or you traveled to New Haven to the Beinecke
Library for an exhibition and conference on Gombrowicz, you would
be unaware of this mini-renascence in his work. Polish Memories
is a series of autobiographical sketches that Gombrowicz wrote for
Radio Free Europe during the late fifties, which he spent in exile
in Argentina. Begley dismisses the “course” outline
that serves as the second book, suggesting it would have been better
left in a drawer. I think that's a tough call, as posthumous publications
sometimes serve a different purpose. (RB)
Never Shake Hands with a War Criminal – Barry
Crimmins (Seven Stories, 191 pp.)
The genie is finally out of the bottle. Old friend Crimmer has
published his first but most certainly not his last book. For those
of you unfamiliar with Barry Crimmins, he has, for years, been an
activist/comedian/political commentator, a patriarch of the Boston
comedy scene having helped launch the careers of Steven Wright,
Bobcat Goldthwait, and others; (to his everlasting shame) has written
for Dennis Miller; and is currently a writer and commentator on
Air America Radio. This tome, part memoir and part political lampoon—as
in the reference to his hometown Skaneateles, New York (Skaneateles:
“an Indian name meaning ‘small, beautiful lake surrounded
by fascists’”)—is a splendid addition to the body
of particularly American social commentary that began with Mark
Twain. Unabashedly preaching to the choir, "since the choir
in America really needs a night out now and then," Barry Crimmins
skewers bogeymen like Henry Kissinger and John Ashcroft in this
compendium of one liners and well-turned essays. Happily, as we
noted above, there are more books from Crimmer to follow. (RB)
One Foot in Eden – Ron Rash (Picador, 214
pp.)
This is not Rash's latest novel (Saints in the River is the latest).
However, a quick scan of Saints' first chapter and a serendipitous
discussion at Carrie Frye's Tingle
Alley, which included Dandy
Dan Wickett, led me a little farther afield to South Carolinan
writer Rash's first novel, published in 2002. Sheriff Will Alexander
can't find the body or a witness as five voices tell the story of
the killing of the local thug in a small town in Southern Appalachia
the early fifties. I like North Carolinan Lee Smith's blurb for
this book: "A classic tale of passion and tragedy. Each voice
rings true as the sound of an ax in the cold early morning air."
(RB)
Lux – Maria Flook (Little Brown, 262 pp.)
Maria
Flook had published about a half-dozen well-regarded books before
she was asked to write about an unsolved murder, Invisible Eden,
that took place on her home turf of the outer Cape Cod. Somewhat
controversial, and a best-seller, that book was noteworthy for employment
of various novelists tools. Her new novel, set in the Cape landscape
she knows and describes with vivid lucidity, includes two oddball
characters and an unsolved murder. I can't understand why this book
hasn't gotten much review attention, which confirms my view that
book publishing is a crapshoot. But it certainly deserved notice
as much as any novel that came out in the past few months. Oh well,
don't say I didn't tell you. (RB)
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile by Arundhati
Roy, South End Press, 2004
According to a blurb quote from the San Francisco Chronicle
which appears at the front of The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile,
Arundhati Roy “overflows with Passionate Conviction [sic].”
I’d say that about sums up the thrust of this slim volume,
which contains several interviews that David Barsamian conducted
with Roy over a three year time span both before and after 9/11.
If it’s Passionate Conviction you are looking for, you have
come to the right place, as Roy discusses her conviction on all
kinds of world injustice, focusing mostly on her Indian home state
but branching out to include events around the world, including,
of course, the current administration in Washington. The problem
I had when reading it was that the main point seems to be that people
in power, from India to the White House, are abusing their power
without thinking of the little (brown) guys. Well, I already knew
that, and even though Roy makes poetic statements like “When
human beings don’t respect something that they don’t
understand, they end up with consequences that you cannot possibly
foretell,” I didn’t come to this text looking for poetry.
Ten points for passionate rhetoric; zero for informative discussion.
But if you are looking for passionate rhetoric, it’s pretty
entertaining. (AK)
Dancing with Statues by Sarah McKinstry-Brown,
Morpo Press, 2002
The first time I saw Sarah McKinstry-Brown perform the poem “Suicide,”
which is included in this chapbook, I had to visit the ladies’
room to keep myself from crying. She had recently moved to Omaha,
where I had been involved with the open mic scene for a while, and
I had been looking for a long time for a powerful woman’s
voice in the sea of guy guy guys, wonderful guys but guys nonetheless,
who dominated the scene there. I am not sure if I felt like crying
because the poem was so great (which it is) or because I was jealous
(which I was) that Sarah had so eloquently stated in one poem what
I had been trying to write for years in bits and pieces, that girls
and women, especially women artists, can be strong and lovely and
confident, that we don’t have to be tragic to be memorable,
and that if we look beyond our own tiny traumas we have a responsibility
to share our voices with each other. There are only seven poems
in this chapbook, and you have to write to Sarah (http://midverse.com/)
to get it, but it’s worth it for this one, sister. It’s
worth it. (AK)
Now, Voyager by Olive Higgins Prouty, Feminist
Press, 2004
The Feminist Press has been reissuing early-mid 20th century pulp
fiction written by women, and Now, Voyager is a part of
that series. The novel begins with a woman with a mysterious past
-- which comes to light in bits and pieces, but for right now let’s
just say she’s had a bit of a makeover -- who is embarking
on a cruise ship under an assumed name. She quickly becomes involved
with a married man who is traveling alone, and they frolic around
in lush landscapes for a week or two, tension between them building
until ...
Well, dear reader, I wouldn’t want to give too much away.
But suffice it to say, if the Feminist Press is putting out a novel,
it’s not your garden variety love story, or “love on
vacation” story, for that matter. What makes this novel memorable
is the second half, which is what takes place after the traditional
“love on vacation” story ends with a kiss, and is anything
but traditional. There is a 1942 Bette Davis film adaptation, but
you’ll read the book first, promise? The film gets the story
right, but leaves out what makes the book so interesting, which
magnificently, agonizingly lays bare the internal dialogue of a
woman’s emerging identity. (AK)
Surfacing by Margaret Atwood, Bantam Books, 1972
A young woman is on a road trip with her lover and two friends,
a married couple. Details are slowly revealed about the nature of
their trip: the young woman is looking for a disappeared father,
the seemingly happily married couple is not so happy, the young
woman and her lover aren’t in the greatest place either. Classic
early 70’s stuff, but with Atwood, classic always has a twist.
As the young woman goes deeper and deeper into her search for her
missing father, she gets closer and closer to her past and her connection
to the nearly uninhabited island where she grew up part-time and
where her father has been living out his retirement. Coming early
in her career, this is an Atwood classic not to be missed. (AK)
The Divine Husband by Francisco Goldman, Atlantic
Monthly Press, 2004
Lots of really smart people love this book, including our own
Robert Birnbaum, who interviewed
Goldman recently for Identity Theory. So I tried pretty hard
to love it too, but as you know, one cannot force love. This book,
I am sorry to say, defeated me. I normally finish everything I start,
but alas I could not, and after an epic attempt I had to put it
down unfinished. I am sorry but I think, dear readers, you will
have to go somewhere else for a reasonable review of it. (AK)
|
