Having immersed myself in contemporary fiction for the last quarter century, intermittently I harbor feelings of regret and despair that I have not made more of an effort to touch base with the books that are frequently ascribed to the literary canon. High School English having discouraged me from the 19th century, I have late in life come to appreciate, Henry James and a few others. And, of course, Mark Twain.

Frequently, in my conversations with living authors, one or another praises the artistry of Proust, or Dickens or Melville or Hardy and extolls the pleasures that have accrued in their readings of such authors. I vow to do better in looking back (If have reread the Great Gatsby and Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy) but it occurs to me that if I did that I might not encounter some of the wonderful new stories that are being written and published today and tomorrow.

In recent weeks I have come across a quartet of novels , three of which are debuts and one a sophomore effort that obliterated the above mentioned despondency and as Jackie Wilson sang, “lifted me higher”:

Southern Cross The Dog by Blll Cheng

Bensonhurst’s Bill Cheng’s Southern Cross The Dog(Ecco) is set in Mississippi commencing with the 1927 Great Flood through 1942. Apparently Cheng is garnering kudos because, among another things, he has never set foot in Mississippi. No one seems to acknowledge that he has never set foot in 1927 either but why quibble—he’s gotten well-deserved recognition. Keep in mind, for future reference, that Bill Cheng is a spawn of the Hunter College Writing Program (mentored byPeter Carey, Colum McCann and Nathan Englander)

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

Anthony “Hal” Marra profile might be a cliche if his debut A Constellation of Vital Phenomenon (Hogarth) was not so skillfully rendered and beautifully taie. Iowa Writer’s Workshop and then Stanford’s Stegner Fellowship program is a common credential in the ranks of young literati that one is tempted to take for granted the splendid work that is associated with these literary hot beds. By the way, Marra took the title from an English medical dictionary’s definition of life.
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Speed records on salt flats, motorcycles, movie making, Manhattan art posturing and Italian revolutionary dilly-dallying are some of the topics that The Flame Throwers(Scribner) elucidates by Rachel Kushner (Telex from Cuba) via incandescent prose and an adventurous heroine. It’s a hectic but plausibly told story which showing the life of a young(woman) artist in great distinction to regnant current narratives such as Lena Dunham’s Girl’s.

Wash by Margaret Wrinkle

Set a story in early 19th century frontier Tennessee, Wash ((Atlantic Monthly Press)) bespeaks of an ambitious mind. Having slaves and frontiersmen (just off the boat)as main characters is exponentially aspirational. Ms Wrinkle renders the story and the characters with a precision that reminds one that what story telling is all about is the employment of imagination—this young woman who hails from Alabama shows in this novel she has an ample amount

By the way, my conversations with Marra and Cheng will be making their way to publication in the forseeable future.

Currently reading Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club: Chicago and the Cubs during the Jazz Age Roberts Ehrgott (University Of Nebraska Press)

Resistance,Rebellion and Death by Albert Camus

“On the poop deck of slave galleys it is possible, at any time and place, as we know, to sing the constellations while the convicts bend over the oars and exhaust themselves in the hold; it is always possible to record the social conversation that takes place on the benches of the amphitheater while the lion is crunching the victim. And it is very hard to make any objections to the art that has known such success in the past. But things have changed somewhat, and the number of convicts and martyrs has increased amazingly over the surface of the globe. In the face of so much suffering, if art insists on being a luxury, it will also be a lie.

Albert Camus (respectfully borrowed from the Internet)

Currently reading The Son by Philipp Meyer (Ecco)

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to came at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick: you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them: you get them wrong while you’re with them and then you get home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on a significance that is ludicrous, so ill equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living id all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we are alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.

Currently reading Children of the Days by Eduardo Galeano (Nation books)

Children of the Days by Eduardo Galeano

Coincident with the publication of esteemed author/activist Eduardo Galeano’s new tome, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History (Nation books), Tom Engelhardt appended an anecdote of his personal connection to Galeano with his broadcast of an excerpt from the new opus:

First, a confession. Whenever I read a new Eduardo Galeano book, I drive my wife crazy. I can’t help myself. I wander out every five minutes, saying, “You’ve got to hear this.” And then I read her some moving, dazzling passage, and disappear, only to reappear five minutes later, saying, “You’ve got to hear this.” The arrival of a new book by one of our great writers is always an event. This is publication day for his latest work, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History. It follows Mirrors, his history of humanity in 366 well-chosen episodes. You might think of his latest volume as a prayer book for our time: a page a day for 365 days focused on what’s most human and beautiful, as well as what’s most grasping and exploitative, on this small, crowded planet of ours. I would be urging all of you to celebrate the event and buy copies under any circumstances. (Confession: once, long ago in another life, I was Galeano’s U.S. editor and when his Memory of Fire trilogy burrowed into our North American landscape and refused to leave, it was among the best moments of my book publishing life.) Today, however, is a double celebration for me, because Galeano, the single most charismatic (and modest) man I’ve ever met, appears at TomDispatch for the first time. I’ve chosen six “days” from his new book, just a taste of the year’s worth of pleasures between its covers. What follows is a little introduction in imitation of his distinctive style. Tom]

Eduardo Galeano with my Rosie (photo: Robert Birnbaum)

My own experience with Eduardo Galeano began when I read about him in a Talk of the Town piece by Lawrence Weschler and later in his book on post dictatorship Argentina and Brazil(A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (Pantheon 1990). In a piece in the New Yorker called The Dept of Amplification, Uruguay Weschler recounts Galeano’s gripping personal story: Galeano is of Argentine-Uruguayan heritage and when he was asked why he chose to live in Montevideo, he responded “if I was murdered in Uruguay it would be by an enemy but if I was murdered in Argentina it could be either an enemy or friend.”*

Eduardo and I have chatted a number of times (2 or 3?), the last coming in 2006, when we sat in my Chrysler rag top, parked on North Avenue Beach in Chicago, on a blustery June day with my hound Rosie in the back seat (they both took a liking to each other) That conversation is reproduced here

EG: … Each language contains its own music and therefore when you are translating you are coming from one music and inventing another one. Which music would be the best in order to get these ideas, emotions, feeling, memories, possibly to be shared by other people from other cultures, from other languages. I don’t believe really in God, nowadays.

RB: Did you ever?

EG: In my childhood, yes, I was very Catholic. And in my childhood I was a fervent reader of the Bible, then there were some stories that I didn’t like too much but I didn’t know why. And as time had gone by, years had passed, I am now able now to understand why for instance the Tower of Babel story was a story I didn’t like at all. This God acting like a universal chief of police, punishing and hating and being—how could he find that giving us the diversity of languages was a punishment? The diversity of languages is one of the best treasures of the human condition, of the fact of being human in this earth. Because diverse is the best thing, I mean, the best of the world is the fact that the world contains so many worlds inside. And so many languages. We have different languages because we have different musics and we are walking musics. As we are walking time.

For years I have been buying up remainders of Eduardo’s The Book of Embraces and giving them away.Patrick Madden efuses:

Sandra Cisneros, in her introduction to the 2000 edition of Eduardo Galeano’s Days and Nights of Love and War, writes, “I believe that certain people, events, and books come to you when they must, at their precise moment in history.” For me, The Book of Embraces, in its Spanish version, El libro de los abrazos, arrived as a gift from my Uruguayan brother- and sister-in-law. My wife told me that it was a well known and beloved book by the most famous of contemporary Uruguayan authors. I flipped through its pages and was ecstatic to find pictures and short fragments. I had been experimenting with fragments in my own writing. Even before I read a word of the book, I felt like I had found a soul brother or a mentor

The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano

* as a leftist activist and journalist Galaeno was at risk for assassination or disappearance

Currently reading Land of the Living by Austin Ratner (Reagan Arthur)

Bedroom Window (photo: Robert Birnbaum)

Robert Birnbaum, a bookish journalist (you might think about that for a moment), was born in Bamberg, Germany, grew up in Chicago (from the Southside to the Northside), and has lived in Brookline, Massachusetts and Exeter, New Hampshire. He is editor-at-large at Identitytheory.com and something or other atThe Morning News and way late to the party, so to speak, expresses himself on a weblog entitled OurManinBoston. He lives with his Cuban Retriever, Beny, in West Newton, Massachusetts. E-mail: duendepublishing@gmail.com

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A man whose 6-year-old son was among those killed in the Newtown, Conn., elementary school massacre was scheduled to appear in Connecticut Superior Court Wednesday on larceny and other charges. Neil Heslin, who has lobbied Congress and the Connecticut legislature for increased gun control in the wake of the shooting, had five separate cases listed on the docket in Milford Superior Court. The News-Times of Danbury reports Heslin faces charges that date back to July 2011, three of which involve allegations he issued bad checks to purchase building materials for his construction company.

The two other cases involve checks on closed accounts that Heslin allegedly used to pay for just over $1,000 worth of home heating oil in June 2012 and a check for $102.35 worth of repairs to his vehicle at an Ansonia tire shop six months earlier, the newspaper reported. Heslin, who has pleaded not guilty to all the charges, referred questions about the case to his attorneys, who did not immediately return calls seeking comment. Heslin’s son, Jesse Lewis, was among 26 people shot to death inside Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14. Since then, Heslin has been among the most visible of the Sandy Hook parents lobbying for gun restrictions, including an appearance in Washington that apparently resulted in him missing a recent court date.

Superior Court Judge Frank Iannotti has ordered Heslin to explain Wednesday why he was not in court on April 15.
Heslin was part of a contingent from Newtown that was meeting with U.S. senators that week, asking them to pass legislation that would have included universal background checks for gun purchases.

Heslin was asked by the News-Times if he thought his legal troubles might undermine his advocacy efforts.”I never gave it much thought. I guess you can look at it either way,” he told the newspaper. “If there’s something to talk about, people are going to talk about it, good or bad, no matter what.”

WTF?

Currently reading ‘A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,’ by Anthony Marra (Hogarth)

For The Republic by George
Scialabba

That the flames of ambition have turned to fading embers did not prevent me from attending what will be (ostensibly) my only book party of the year.That the fete was hosted by the inimitable Katherine Powers (whose tome Suitable Accommodations is forthcoming later this summer)was,of course, an encouraging sign. In my past, larger life I was a diligent and ubiquitous attendent of all manner of festivities: commercial, artistic , personal, cultural, callow networking and so on.Now, recognizing the low value of most of those events and having calmed down significantly, I have a preference for remaining within the confines of my somnambulistic zip code. In this instance trekking over to Cambridge for the celebration of George Scailabba’s latest and 4th opus. For the Republic: Political Essays (Pressed Wafer books) balanced out the ordeal of battling traffic as I crossed the Charles River.

The affair turned out to be attended by a lively and congenial gaggle of George’s admirers. Among the illustrious attendees were John Summers, editor of the Baffler; Susan Faludi, a Baffler contributor and well-known social critic; novelists Russ Reimer, Leslie Lawrence, Monica Hileman, and Jane Unrue; George Kovach and Cat Parnell of Consequence Magazine; Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press; and too many other literary eminences to mention.

For a number of not very good reasons you probably have not heard of George. This is partially explained by Scott McLemee in his 2006 profile:

George Scialabba is an essayist and critic working at Harvard University who has just published a volume of selected pieces under the title Divided Mind, issued by a small press in Boston called Arrowsmith. The publisher does not have a Web site. You cannot, as yet, get Divided Mind through Amazon, though it is said to be available in a few Cambridge bookstores. This may be the future of underground publishing: Small editions, zero publicity, and you have to know the secret password to get a copy. [contact information for Pressed Wafer Press is at the bottom of this page —for anyone inclined to put a check in the mail.*)

When interviewed for his 2009 tome What Are Intellectuals Good For?(Pressed Wafer) George was asked his preference "bad writers who are politically congenial or good writers whose politics he dislikes?"

"

It's a complex question," he says, "leading in all sorts of directions. I'm going to offer a simplified and peremptory answer. Better good writers with bad politics than bad writers with good politics. The former teach us how to think (and feel and imagine); the latter merely what to think. Knowing how to think is incomparably more important. Unless most people know how to think, there can't be genuine democracy."

In 2012 with the publication of his (then)most recent collection of essays, The Modern Predicament(Pressed Wafer), here's his answer to the query," What, in brief, is the modern predicament? Which authors, and what lived experience in history, most shaped your understanding of it?":

Modernity is the ensemble of changes – intellectual, political, economic, social, cultural, technological, aesthetic – that have altered the world drastically since roughly the 17th century, until which time the world was, in the above respects, far less different from the world of any previous epoch of recorded history than it is from the world of today. The modern predicament is the set of problems these changes have bequeathed us.

One problem is our loss of ontological, social, and psychological embeddedness. Formerly, the meaning and purposes of life were, to a far greater extent, simply given for most people by the religious, family, and societal structures in which they were born and grew up. Very few people, and even those people to a limited extent, were expected or encouraged to become individuals, free to make fundamental choices about love, religion, occupation, political allegiance, even location. Only a tiny elite could aspire to an individual identity and an individual history.

Nowadays everyone, or at least most people in the rich countries – I realize that this still leaves out most of humankind – can be an individual. But that turns out to be difficult. Over millions of years, we evolved characters and psyches that needed to be held in and held up by intense bonds, usually provided by strong families and local communities. For many reasons – economic development, geographical mobility, religious tolerance, the rise of nation-states, the emancipation of women – those bonds have weakened over the last few centuries. The resulting freedom obviously has enormous benefits for the previously unindividuated. But for many people it also has costs: isolation, loneliness, purposelessness, powerlessness, and hyperstimulation.

The modern predicament, then, is the difficulty of finding a sane, harmonious balance among all the vast and various consequences of science, technology, democracy, mass literacy, feminism, and the other forms of modern progress.

My own involvement with these questions began in college, when the devout Catholicism in which I was brought up – I was actually a member of the traditionalist religious order Opus Dei – met and was vanquished by the 18th- and 19th-century secular critique of religion. For some years after that I was not only a passionate anti-clericalist and philosophical materialist (as I still am), but also a fervent believer in progress as a fairly linear process, a smooth upward slope in which all that was necessary was to complete the long march through all the orthodoxies, religious, political, and sexual, which the Enlightenment had begun.

Then, in my thirties, I encountered the two most important (for me) critics of modernity, D.H. Lawrence and Christopher Lasch. Lawrence was a kind of Hebrew prophet, not of righteousness but of the body, and against what he perceived (at least in early-20th-century-England) as a disastrous over-valuing of the mental, the conceptual, the explicit – what used to be called, roughly from Kant to G.E. Moore, the Ideal. He was a pagan, reasserting the importance of all the wisdom that had been forgotten in the course of the (necessary) rejection of traditional religion and metaphysics. He was also the finest prose stylist I had ever encountered, so I was (and still am) blown away. His essays, collected in the two volumes of Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers are one of the great neglected resources of European culture. I try to say why in the essay “Shipwrecked” in The Modern Predicament.

Lawrence was a bit archaic and exotic; Christopher Lasch was as American as apple pie or Walt Whitman. With different materials and a completely different intellectual and verbal style from Lawrence, he made a subtly parallel argument about the forgotten wisdom of pre-modernity, in particular of the producerist, or yeoman, or civic republican tradition. I’ve written about him at length in both What Are Intellectuals Good For? and The Modern Predicament, but I’m still coming to terms with him.

Morten Høi Jensen has an accurate, succinct take on George Scialabba

... Scialabba’s eloquent prose and boundless literary-intellectual reserves shrug off these claims to redundancy. He is a natural heir to the critics whose lives, works, and careers he explicated so sympathetically in What Are Intellectuals Good For?: Dwight Macdonald, Nicola Chiaromonte, Lionel Trilling, Randolph Bourne, Irving Howe. He is a counterargument to his own claims about generalists. Reading George Scialabba emphasizes the need for more George Scialabbas.

For the Republic is divided into 4 sections: Theories, Thinkers, Plutocratic Vistas and Rant which include ruminations on a wide array of sages and savants—IF STone, Gore Vidal.the Christophers(Lasch and Hitchens),Tony Judt, Thomas Friedman, Edmund Wilson, George Orwell,Victor Serge and Ed Hirsch.In his Introduction to For the Republic Rutgers History mentor Jackson Lears concludes:

But if the forces of inevitability triumph (as their prophets claim they inevitably will), it will not be George Scialabba's fault. Through the dark decades of Reaganism and neoliberalism, he helped us sort through the portentous trivia and see (against all odds) what really matters...One is reminded of William James, who (according to John Jay Chapman)always seemed as if "he stepped out this sadness in order to meet you." Sometimes even everyday acts require a quiet heroism. We can only be grateful that Scialabba, like James, has continued to summon it.

George Scialabba (photo: Robert Birnbaum

*McClemee writes “the publisher seems to be avoiding crass commercialism (not to mention convenience to the reader) by keeping Divided Mind out of the usual online bookselling venues. You can order it from the address below for $13, however. That price includes shipping and handling:Arrowsmith, 11 Chestnut Street, Medford, MA 02155″
And For the Republic can be gotten at Harvard Bookstore or from Pressed Wafer, 375 Parkside Ave, Brooklyn NY 11226. Or from Amazon.

Currently reading Snapper by Brian Kimberling (Pantheon)

The Terror of Living by Urban Waite

The Carrion Birds by Urban Waite

Upon its arrival via my stalwart treasure bearing UPS man, I expeditiously concluded the text I was currently reading and eagerly set aside the provisional reading sequence I had had in mind before the arrival of new the Waite opus. You may easily conclude that Carrion Birds did not disappoint(else why would I bother with this notice).

Urban Waite (photo: Robert Birnbaum)

As there are currently no media reviews of The Carrion Birds(Wm Morrow) except for Entertainment Weekly’s grade (which if it aspired to be a review would be disqualified for intoning Cormac MacCarthy’s name),which I liberally quote from:

I’ve never been a huge fan of noir novels, which tend to leave me a little cold. Urban Waite’s, The Carrion Birds, a tale of a Vietnam vet–slash–criminal enforcer is as muscular and laconic as anything by Cormac McCarthy, yet it crackles with humanity. The vet, Ray, has only ever been good at one thing — expertly handling the dull black Ruger he keeps hidden in a Ritz cracker box. Now he wants to retire and return to the New Mexico town where his young son lives. But then his last gig, the brazen theft of a rival’s stash, goes sour. As the spiraling violence plays out against the creosote-studded mesas, it’s clear it isn’t just the characters who are doomed: So is the desolate swath of the American Southwest ruled by the drug cartels. A-

Somewhere in the middle of the story. Ray, fleeing drug cartel assasins, leaves his gut-shot partner, Sanchez during a torrential rain storm in the middle of the desert. When he returns to him this is how Waite writes the scene:

Ray reached in through the open door and closed Sanchez’s eyes. The man half his age, a boy anyway Ray looked at him.Boasting about all the things he had done in life, trying to live beyond his years. All that over now, all Sanchez would ever be at an end, and Ray just there in the rain outside the Bronco looking in on him like a man looking in on something long since passed into the annals of time. He took back the Ruger from where it sat on the boy’s lap. The rain falling. The radio playing. The boy long since dead.

Urban Waite is of a group of what I will provisionally label “the New American Shakers”: Bonnie Jo Campbell, Philip Meyer,Daniel Woodrell, Frank Bill, Donald Ray, Mark Spragg, Pollock, Brad Watson and William Gay. Some of these writers also fall into another niche I have have given the working title “New American grit” That writing displays fully what Clyde Edgerton describes:

…you’ll find some needed and necessary cutting to the bone, some ass kicking, drooling, yelling, and shooting up the house and refrigerator, some use of tools from a toolshed, not a toolbar. Some hurt and love.” And incest, meth freaks and purveyors, far flung immigrants, sexual abuse, pandamonium and foxfired mayhem.

Tom Franklin and Brian Carpenter all ready share my sense of rich tributary of literature being tricking out from far flung places in their useful array of writers they identify as standard bearers in their anthology Grit Lit
A Rough South Reader Edited by Brian Carpenter and Tom Franklin (University of South Carolina)

Grit Lit edited by Brian Carpenter and Tom Franklin

Currently reading The Innocence Game By Michael Harvey (Knopf)

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