|
BIBLIOFILE
Stet:
An Editor's Life
by Diana Athill
(Grove Press, 250 pages, $24)
Make no mistake:
This is a British book. The memoir of editor Diana Athill, who for
half a century worked in the London publishing world, is so steeped
in that world that, reading it, you want to call for an English-American
translator. Without context or explanation, she casually gossips
about the London literati, and when she calls a gentleman investor
"Bertie" after the character in Wodehouse's novels, she expects
one to know exactly what she means. The good news is that
if you do (or are willing to muddle through--stiff upper lip, you
know), you will be rewarded with a humorous and sharply insightful
glimpse of the "golden days" of the publishing industry.
The book is
best in its second half, where Athill abandons the biographical
format and simply tells stories about her writers, including V.S.
Naipaul and Jean Rhys. The chapter on the troubled author of Wide
Sargasso Sea (which begins "Nobody who has read Jean Rhys' first
four novels can suppose that she was good at life; but no one who
never met her can know how very bad she was at it") is particularly
moving, as raw and unflinching as anything Rhys herself ever wrote.
Athill has been
called one of the finest editors in Britain, and at her best, she
indeed seems like an author's dream--both critical and kindly, perceptive
and fair. Still, too often these flashes of brilliance are bogged
down in the clutter of unexplained names and dead-end tangents.
Ironically enough, Stet reads like a book that could use
a good editor. Myrlin A. Hermes
What the
Fuck--The Avant-Porn Anthology
Edited by Michael Hemmingson
(Soft Skull Press, 218 pages, $14)
The avant-porn anthology of erotica What the Fuck promises
stories that are "a new brand of post-pomo sexualized fiction."
Even though the deconstructionist notions of postmodernism have
ironically frozen into their own conventional structures of non
sequitur relativism, this effort to create porn outside a tired
morality of polarities is a worthy one. Shame about the typos, though.
Coy and silly,
the preface is a wacky neo-erotic story of its own, casting editor
Michael Hemmingson in the role of an alien abductee given the mission
to broaden human sexuality. This theme gives way to a composite
picture of a species on the brink of sexual evolution (or extinction),
though many of the stories fall into a nervous copulation between
soft arousal and turgid intellectualism. In "A Brief History of
Condoms," Kim Addonizio describes the life of prophylactics as if
they were worthy of National Geographic treatment, while
Larry McCaffrey mocks the flaccid sexuality of ivory-tower academics
and their more prurient interests. Other stories explore voyeurism,
spontaneous gender transformation, orgies, digital sex, bacon (yes,
bacon) and bloody, bloody love.
Witty and graphic,
the stories are not quite jack- or jilloff material, but they
do a good job of exploring the current state of human sexuality
via stimulating individual fantasies. Physical sadism is largely
metaphorical, and the body a symbol of essential identity. As one
character observes while two men fuck in his lap, "I was caught
in something indefinable. What I was witnessing had nothing to do
with me or my sexual interests but had everything to do with sex
and the way we are all linked by it." Bronwyn Nettles
The Foods of Israel Today
by Joan Nathan
(Knopf, 433 pages, $40)
Americans feel
a special affinity for Israelis as our countries share remarkable
similarities (accompanied by some startling differences). At heart
we're both nations of immigrants following a dream and often escaping
a nightmare. Consequently, our stories are those of people making
a new life in a new world, not often the subject of a cookbook.
It is in Joan Nathan's latest.
In one fell
swoop, Nathan has encompassed the history of Israeli food, from
the first Russian settlers in the 1870s to the most recent immigrants--probably
from Russia, too. But between these two waves are arrivals from
Germany, Yemen, Argentina, Ethiopia, England and America, among
others.
Sure, there's
great food in this book: savory soups from Central Europe, street-cart
kebabs and hummus from the Middle East, homegrown treats from the
garden, and cholents (Sabbath stews) from everywhere. But, if I
were you, I'd head straight to the stories, as they are the core
of this evocative tome. Every page has its tale: the Bedouin Fathima
Salah, who picks her own wheat for her handmade pitas, and Zena
Herman, who arrived from a rationing England in 1940 and recalls
being "allowed one egg every two weeks." Then there's Hadassah Hamdy,
whose family arrived from Yemen in 1880 and "sat in the road all
day; no one came to meet them," until a fellow Yemenite overheard
them and took them in.
You may have
to read this quickly without giving much thought to the fate of
those the immigrants dispossessed; but, after all, we read The
Joy of Cooking without worrying about the Indians. Fair is fair.
Johan Mathiesen
MMallarmé
in Prose
Edited by Mary Ann Caws, translated by Rosemary Lloyd
(New Directions, 114 pages, $14.95)
A hundred and
thirty years ago, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé presided
over Paris' cultural milieu as few have before or since. His was
a benign reign, free of those lapses into avant-garde dilettantism
and ideological tyranny that have marred the regimes of so many
of his successors (André Breton, you know who you are). During
his time Mallarmé espoused an intellectual rigor that served
to save the arts from Romanticism's wayward whimsy. In so doing,
he planted the seed of Modernism in the best minds of his generation
(Manet and Debussy among them) at a time when France was at the
top of the cultural heap.
New Directions
has recently issued a selection of his prose pieces that, though
by no means providing an appropriate introduction to his work, ought
to charm and perplex anyone with an appreciation for extreme erudition
and mastery of language.
The pieces themselves
range from epistles and missives he wrote to such luminaries as
Paul Valéry and Debussy, to short "portraits" of those whom
he admired, to longish essays on art, literature, music and dance.
Finally, there are the pseudonymous articles he wrote for his fashion
magazine, La Derniere Mode, under such names as Miss Satan
and Olympia, the Negress, in which he assumes a pastiche of styles
to humorously cover such frivolous topics as jewelry, toilettes
and female bicycling gear.
In this collection,
Mallarmé's command of subjects, and confident virtuosity
with language (his Byzantine sentences rival Proust's), leads one
to feel nostalgic for a time when a single person could conceivably
lay claim to intellectual dominance over all he or she surveyed.
Jason Chan
Girl
Juice
by Ritah Parrish
(Heavy Flow Books, 42 pages, $5)
Simultaneously
lurid and darkly comic, Ritah Parrish's Girl Juice initially
appears to be an exercise in stereotypes: stories littered with
brutish, alcoholic men and women depicted as hapless victims of
circumstance. When the reader takes a closer look, though, a different
impression emerges. These are tough lives to live, but, at least
where the women are concerned, Parrish manages to offer her characters
transcendence from their victimhood. Nonetheless, these are people
one imagines even Flannery O'Connor might have tried to repress.
The protagonist
in "Hit Me Doing Thirty-Five," Brenda, achieves minor liberation
by learning how to drive, even if she does drive straight into the
arms of another lover who, like her husband, Duane, "doesn't believe
in foreplay, either." In "The Chair," the character, Rose, does
manage to unburden herself of her swinish husband, but only after
she gradually wakes herself from years of selflessness. Within a
space of a few pages, Rose moves from trembling, sexless skeleton
to tipsy, sensual siren--all achieved while sitting in a blue Gentle
Rest recliner. Through this less-than-restful reverie, she finds
the strength to cast off the role that has defined her.
The men don't
fare nearly as well in Parrish's world. Without exception, every
male character is written to be as loathsome and despicable as possible.
Although each story is nimbly drafted, and Parrish is a master at
setting tone and place, a more complicated picture of the men involved
would give the reader a better sense of what drives their sickening
behavior and would make this collection even more fully realized.
Lisa Warner
Halls
of Fame
by
John D'Agata
(Graywolf Press, 246 pages, $24.95
John D'Agata
reads at Powell's on Hawthorne, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 238-1668.
7:30 pm Thursday, April 6. .
To describe
Halls of Fame as a collection of seven essays would fail
to do it justice--something about that word "essay" smacks of either
fusty academic profundity or painful adolescent evenings spent trying
to figure out what the hell a thesis sentence is and whether you
can write one. D'Agata's essays carry none of these trappings or
limits and are, instead, multi-genre explorations of their subjects,
in which D'Agata deploys news stories, academic research, quotes,
lists, interviews, prose, poetry and material somewhere in between
in order to approach his subjects from various directions. Sometimes
he simply creates a collage of material that requires readers to
decide the matter themselves.
The opening
essay and the collection's strongest, "Round Trip" details a bus
tour to the Hoover Dam. D'Agata uses the experience to open an examination
of the idea of wonder: What do humans consider "wonders," and what
drives us (or at least our civil engineers) to try and create even
grander, more impossible constructions? "Flat Earth Map: An Essay"
concerns D'Agata's trip to interview Charles Johnson, late president
of the Flat Earth Society. What at first seems a humorous examination
of stubborn disagreement with accepted fact becomes, by turns, a
moving portrait of a man that the world, whether flat or round,
has left behind.
Other essay
subjects include Martha Graham, various American "halls of fame,"
and the phenomenon that is Las Vegas. The multi-genre format is
a risk, of course: Style sometimes overwhelms substance. The majority
of Halls of Fame, however, is both entertaining and revealing--exactly
the qualities that make for any enjoyable essay. Dan DeWeese
|
