Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan), edited by Kevin Killian, Kelly Holt and Daniel Benjamin: A fascinating collection sent from Spicer to his gang of magic circleists, admirers, sycophants, acolytes, and acquaintances. Published in tandem with the reprinting of Spicer's lectures, essential in themselves and never less than fascinating. Like Pound, one admires the the work, but is appalled by the problematic aspects of the person behind the work: specifically, his racism, anti-semitism and misogyny. To his credit Benjamin, in a lengthy and fairly comprehensive introduction, does not shy away from addressing such matters.
ARK by Ronald Johnson (Wesleyan/Flood): Originally published some twenty years ago. As an admirer of his RADIO OS, I've been waiting nearly that long to get my hands on ARK, a book I've long been hearing about. Thankfully it's been reissued by Flood. The great critic, artist, essayist and story writer Guy Davenport would always insist that ARK is every bit as important a serial poem as Zukofsky's A, Pound's Cantos, Olson's Maximus Poems, Reznikoff's Testimony, etc.. And who am I to argue with that assessment. In any case, Johnson's poetry will take you places you could never imagine.
"Over the rim
body of earth rays exit sun
rest to full velocity to eastward pinewheeled in a sparrow's
eye"
Hundred Proof by Scott Wolven (High Frequency): After my first encounter with Wolven- to my shame, he had for too long gone under my noir radar- I said, perhaps somewhat pretentiously, that he was the Isaac Babel of noir fiction. A slight exaggeration, perhaps. Nevertheless these stories, all uniformly excellent, are not only hardboiled and condensed, but as tough and unsentimental as any you are likely to come across. Taking place in post-industrial and rural America, the stories centre on those on the edge or simply on edge, taken to extremes by neo-liberal circumstances- whether loggers, cops, outlaws, poachers, petty criminals, gunsels or gunmen. Accompanied by such memorable lines as "He was sitting in a lawn chair by the picnic table, drinking a glass full of booze with bullets and ice in it." and "Hell is empty and the devil is here." All of which one might expect from someone influenced by Jim Thompson.
The Length of Days by Lynn Kostoff (Stark House): After finishing his 2014 Words to Die For, I remember mind-blurbing the book along the lines of a novel that might well be the product of the bastard child of George V. Higgins and Elmore Leonard. The same could be said so for The Length of Days, with its sharp hardboiled prose, great dialogue, killer plot and a cross-section of characters, whether righteous or sleazy. Set in, and examining, a town on the South Carolina coast during the 2008 economic crisis hit by a fire that has killed a number of prostitutes. The book moves seamlessly from the town's bars, restaurants and massage parlours, to its arenas of personal and political corruption. The Length of Days- Kostoff's first since the aforementioned Words To Die For- is a novel to savour, perhaps with a tumbler of whiskey at one's side.
The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason: Dispatches From the Front, by Don Armstrong (Macmillan). Reading this is like being caught in a time warp, back to San Francisco in the 1960s. Armstrong recounts Gleason's life, interspersing it with extracts from three decades of writing, most of which appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. An ever present figure, Gleason was less a critic than an advocate for whatever was new, interesting, or controversial, whether Miles Davis, Dylan, San Francisco bands, local poets and underground film makers, along with their occasional legal plights (Mime Troupe, McClure's The Beard, Lenore Kandel's Love Poems, etc.). All of which Gleason conveyed in a typically fragmented manner. Not to mention Jazz Casual, featuring an array of important jazz groups. At a Left Coast Crime conference in Monterrey in the early 2000s, someone asked which SF journalist personified the noir aspects of San Francisco. Various names were thrown about, but I was surprised no one mentioned Gleason. The man who, in his trench coat and pipe, clearly patterned himself on Sam Spade, and whose thrice(?) weekly columns, was a must-read for anyone wanting to know what was happening in the city. It's all more or less there in Armstrong's book. Minus, of course, the pipe and trench coat, and column inches,
Everything Is Now- The 1960s New York Avant Garde- Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop, by J. Hoberman. (Verso) An interesting companion to the Gleason book, critic J. Hoberman turns in another one of his excellent cultural history books, this time centring on avant-garde culture in New York in and around the 1960s. West coasters like myself would read the Village Voice, then the East Village Other with avid attention, hungrily devouring columns by the likes of Jonas Mekas, Nat Hentoff, LeRoi Jones/Baraka, for news of what happening in the underground film or jazz scene. Back then we would look on with envy, hoping those films, bands, groups, movies and plays would eventually come west. Eventually they mostly, they did, but often out of context, without the street culture that informed them. In Everything Is Now, Hoberman recreates those days with precision, never missing a beat, a frame, or a column. An excellent piece of research and evocation of what was an exceptionally exciting era.
Service by John Tottenham (Serpent's Tail): A would-be writer nearing his fiftieth year working as a bookstore clerk isn't exactly unexplored territory, but in this case it's the tone that counts, and Tottenham's is as cynical as they get. Then there's its depiction of the more educated side of today's precariat, someone as alienated from his labour as he is from life in general. Made all the worse by the mocking of those around him, many of whom are busy climbing the ladder to success. Even so Tottenham's protagonist, who rails gentrification as much as he does against the cultural idiots who surround him, isn't someone with whom one can easily sympathise. There are moments when Tottenham strains a bit too hard and his protagonist protests a bit too much. On the other hand, it's not a million miles from reality. And no matter how much our protagonist can occasionally get on one's nerves, this novel, which of course is the novel that its protagonist is writing, is as funny as it is political. Yet I couldn't but wonder if the problem was that the British-bornTottenham might actually be an Arsenal fan.
Surrealism, Bugs Bunny and the Blues, Selected Writings on Popular Culture by Franklin Rosemont, edited by Abigail Susik and Paul Buhle. (PM). I first came across Cultural Correspondences back, if my memory serves me right, in the 1980s. I couldn't believe that there was someone with similar interests: politics, surrealism, poetry, the blues, comic books. Franklin Rosemont writes about all these things and more. His writing on and editing of Andre Breton is legendary. Included here are chapters on Krazy Kat and T-Bone Slim (my favourites), Bugs Bunny, Joe Hill, Surrealism, jazz, etc..Though there are moments when one would like Rosemont to dig a bit deeper into his subjects, but the recognition of such might be more than enough. In any case, it's an even to have such a chunk of his writing collected in a single edition.
Saint of the Narrow Streets (Soho/No Exit). The latest in William Boyle's series of evocative Brooklyn-set novels. Dealing with ordinary people, with or without criminal tendencies, and families both functional and dysfunctional (sometimes all of the above at the same time), Boyle's micro world can both heart-breaking and knuckle-crackingly tense. Here deploying cross-cutting narratives and eras, Boyle once again demonstrates his adeptness at creating small-scale noir narratives. This one, set in Gravesend, 1986, takes place over eighteen years, focusing on three people, their secret and its repercussions. Boyle's geographical and cultural depiction of working class culture can sometimes be reminiscent of Daniel Fuchs's Williamsburg novels, albeit from a Italian-Catholic rather than Eastern European Jewish perspective; nevertheless, a neighbourhood that remains more old world than gentrified. For anyone who can't get enough of Larry Brown or Willy Vlautin.
The Complete C Comics by Joe Brainard (NYRB). If any book deserves a mass readership... Subversively funny, and drawn with a hand both adept and mocking of that very adeptness. It's hard to believe that these collaborations with the likes of Kenward Elmslie, Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan, Bill Berkson, and John Ashbery were, for the most part, created more than a half century ago. With an introduction by Padgett and an informative essay by Bill Kartalopoulos, it once again illustrates Brainard's genius in what might well be my book of the year.
No comments:
Post a Comment