2009′s Book of the Year

by Weston Cutter

            There’s this great live Big Stardisc (I think it’s actually just called Live) and on it there’s one interview track where the host is talking with Alex Chilton and the host starts things with this quote that goes “Here it is, only January, and we already have the album of the year.” (the disc is worth getting for all sorts of reasons, but one of those reasons’s got to be the interview, which Chilton’s so clearly honest and uncomfortable with it’s just hilarious—after that line, when the host says the thing about album of the year? Chilton goes “Yeah, that’s uh…that’s nice. We’ve had critical acclaim before. Hope it sells.” It’s amazing). I bring all that up just to say that, dorky as it may sound, there’s a good precedent for calling something, even in January, the ____ of the year.

            And so let’s just get it out of the way here and now, before things get complicated by other releases: the book of the year for 2009 is Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. Yes, yes, I know: there are great books coming this year (Powers’s got one coming late in the year), but please believe me—no other book will come close to this one. Not even remotely close. (for the record: you’ve seen Shapton’s work as a designer all over the place.)

            What the book is is a story of a relationship, about a guy and a woman (named, yes, Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris) meeting and falling in love and moving in and eventually moving away and falling apart and etc. It is, in short, a story we all know and have either read or lived a couple dozen times. What Shapton does to this story, though, is actually, in the most Pound-ian way, Makes It New: Important Artifacts…is an auction catalog, and the various stuff up for sale literally tell Lenore’s and Harold’s story.

            Please be appraised that no matter what you believe you’re capable of re: getting excited about a fake auction catalog, I’d submit that you’ll be just knocked over by this book, will be gasping with awe, and here’s why: relationships are typically shit to write about because all the whooshy/abstract stuff gets balanced against the nickel-and-dime stuff. We all love the abstractions, but the guts of love, the real stuff, is about stuff, about how cute our beloved is when she stretches, or how funny he is when he whistles as he’s making eggs, whatever. We all know this (see, for instance, why L. Cohen’s best songs are so resonant: specificity=universality).

            Shapton knows this too, and she’s written, basically, a book that’s the rawest (in good and bad ways) record of a relationship possible. Without abstraction, without what most of us would understand as ‘narration,’ we get Lenore’s and Harold’s relationship strictly through stuff (more exactly: pictures of the ‘lots’ of stuff on sale [yes, everything's priced]): the invitation to the party they met at, the napkin Harold first wrote his email address on for Lenore, the Valentine’s Day mix CD. Maybe the greatest accomplishment of the book is that it doesn’t at all feel gimmicky, doesn’t feel like it’s a long-ish thing that began as nothing more than some merely clever idea: for its playfulness and form-breaking (or at least form-expanding) nature, Important Artifacts…is very very much a story and offers all the richness you’d want from a book.

            Because there is narrative, though, if not outright narration: the stuff itself speaks to and of the relationship it’s all part of. Time passes, gifts get nicer/pricier. Lenore has a baking column in the NYTimes (called Cakewalk), and clippings of her column are included for sale (though never pictured), and her headlines alone give what are probably the most direct and straightforward chapter headings for Lenore’s and Harold’s romance: there’s “Doughnuts for Mid-Winter’s Evil Spirits,” when things aren’t going too smoothly between the lovers; there’s, heartbreakingly, “A Cake of Bits and Pieces,” which comes toward the end of the book and the relationship.

            Because here’s the thing, here’s the real majesty that Shapton’s somehow lassoed: stuff doesn’t lie. We can claim happiness as loudly as we like, but seeing this relationship’s stuff laid out chronologically, it’s impossible not to see things along a scale. You get, without even trying (or maybe even wanting), devastated when gifts wane, or when Harold (he’s not a bad guy, but he’s the less likable of the two in here, at least according to this reader) misses Lenore’s birthday. Toward the end there’s a moment involving an email exchange, and it just about made me cry: something as simple and seemingly benign as exchanging an email can be, we know, a Huge Deal, can be the unsayable harbinger of a relationship’s darkening.

            It’s worth pointing out clearly, too, how much this book is a made thing. To talk about it just as a collection of stuff misses out on the story that Shapton’s clearly working mightily to tell: she’s curated this stuff, and the fact of the book’s emotional impact has everything to do with her skill as an organizer, as a story teller. For instance, I could not, before having read this book, have imagined that I’d've been so heartened and touched by a picture of four wooden birds (which of course means I wasn’t just moved by the picture, but by the way those four wooden birds fit into H+L’s relationship). For instance, there are a few items in the auction which have been removed—by whom we don’t know, and what those items were is never clarified—and their absence is just haunting in ways I can’t really articulate.

            And of course, because it’s such an amazing book, this review can’t possibly do it any justice at all. Maybe the coolest structural metaphor used in a book in the last decade or so was the house in Danielewski’s House Of Leaves, a house bigger on the inside than the outside. In ways that are not at all surprising once you’ve read it, Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts… feels weirdly thin, as an actual book: you can’t believe, sitting there and holding this slim, 130 page thing, that it can possibly contain the overwhelming hugeness of the story within. Maybe that’s the best, highest praise that can be said of this book: using nothing more than pictures of stuff, Leanne Shapton’s made a book and story of an entire relationship—feelings, (arti)facts, everything. It’s a monumentally great book, and it comes out February 11th from Sarah Crichton Books (who also published Shapton’s Was She Pretty), and it’s release sets the bar for 2009. Buy and read it as soon as you possibly can.

There’s An Overwhelming Amount of Music and Books Coming Out Soon

by Weston Cutter

(Before we even begin: apologies for this place being quiet for 10 days. Too many books, too much music: there’s new stuff either our or coming soon from J. Ball and J. Lehrer and W. Tower and C.E. Morgan and M. Gaitskill and, no joke, the book of the year’s coming on February 11th: L. Shapton’s Important Artifacts…, about which I will go into much great length later but about which I can do little at the moment aside from just urge you to prepare for what may be the coolest book I’ve seen since…well, maybe since J. Boully’s last one. Plus music: A. Bird, N. Case, M. Ward, the Thermals, Mos Def, plus that absolutely stunning new one from Bon Iver…it’s just gonna be a phenomenal spring. Also, did everybody see that great article on Graywolf recently? Also, if anyone who reads this is in publishing: why is everyone publishing so many books the second week of February? Why? Okay, onward.)

DOWNLOAD:

Mos Def’s “Quiet Dog”

the National’s “So Far Around the Bend”

Neko Case’s “People Got a Lotta Nerve”

 

            I am uncomfortably implicated all the time by the website Stuff White People Like, and the worst thing about that site’s how it basically declaws affronted white people (at least this one), because when he writes about something you really, really like, you want to say no, but I really like that, it’s not just because I’m a caricature…but of course it’s impossible, and it makes you (or me, anyway), really uncomfortable, and etc.

            All of which is not about bicycles, or group dinner nights, or sea salt, or any of the other damning things on that site. No, this is about Mos Def, a rapper I’ve loved since I first got into hip hop (meaning: 1998), and whose first two solo albums are, I think a one-two punch of huge impact (True Magic‘s alright, but it’s got absolutely nothing on either of the first two). He’s finally got a new one (supposedly) coming at the end of February, called The Ecstatic, and I’m as nervously excited about it as everybody else, I suppose. “Quiet Dog,” the first single, is just hopelessly addictive: I’m not kidding at all when I say you should not download and listen to this if you’re uncomfortable with the prospect of listening to it twenty times in the next few days. I’m not kidding.

 

            Who doesn’t love the National? Dudes are phenomenal, and if you’re just reading about them now, here, for the first time, the cool news is that they’re still shaping themselves into whatever they are (there’s a long discussion possible, about how much Boxer sounds like it’s predecessor, but I think it’s safe to argue the National’s nowhere near fixing themselves on some spectrum of sound). If you don’t have 2007′s Boxer, please, seriously, buy it: the thing’s astonishing from start to finish.

            Their “So Far Around the Bend,” from the recently-released compilation Dark Was The Night, has been the track I’ve found myself wanting more and more to listen to, day after day. It’s like a taste, some food you’ve tried and enjoyed, this track: you’ll find yrself humming parts of it, or sitting in transit and wondering again about the line about Pavement, or laughing at the woman in the bathtub “getting high through an apple.” It’s that sort of song.

 

 

            There’s no argument about Neko Case, right? She’s a master, and she’s fierce and interesting as hell, and every single one of her discs are absolutely the sorts of things you rush out and buy the very first thing on the Tuesday’s they come out. Right? Right.

            I don’t even know what to add, really: she’s got a new disc coming soon, and of course it’s gonna be amazing, and the first single, “People Got a Lotta Nerve,” is stunning and wild fun, and it’s worth its weight simply because it’ll get whole legions of straight dudes to walk around singing, maybe only quietly + underneath their breath, “I’m a man a man a man, man a man a man, eater…”

Bergmann’s Getting Ghost

by Weston Cutter

            I was probably as excited to read Luke Bergmann’s Getting Ghost as I’ve been to read any book recently, and of course excitement translates easily into expectations, and so now, a week after finishing the book, I’m still not totally sure how I feel about it.

            Simple stuff first: imagine Random Family except in Detroit, and centered around two young men (one aged 16, one aged 19), and less about the continual, generational struggle to make it out of a swamped sort of life and more about how Detroit’s become something like an incubator for the lives these young men end up living (and stress that ‘end up living’: the feel all through Getting Ghost is not one of agency or choice but entrapment, the feeling of decisions-made-with-backs-against-walls [which is obviously why people are gonna set this next to Random Family so quick and easily]). What Bergmann does incredibly well—best, really—is detail how Detroit has become this place in which lives such as the ones herein examined (the 16 year old’s named Dude Freeman; the 19 year old’s named Rodney Phelps) are not just lived but created and made inevitable. Bergmann panoramically casts throughout Detroit, offering glimpses of the ingredients (dissolving neighborhoods, plus a startling lack of African American agency among+in A.American neighborhoods, plus no jobs elsewhere, plus a city that tears down city blocks and then erects sports facilities with ease but which lets inner-city lots go vacant for decades) that make this soup.

            The troubling part of Bergmann’s book, for me, has to do with his self-consciousness, his self-awareness. To some degree, he’s got to include aspects of that self-awareness and self-consciousness (and, in fact, a friend told me that one of the reasons she didn’t like RFamily was because, at the outset, ANLeBlanc seemed almost voyeuristic by not being upfront with her own complicity+presence in the lives she was tracking): he’s writing this book not as some strictly anthropological unblinking eye, but as someone looking to fit the pieces together to try to understand things. It’s just that, well…here, p. 218, top left:

            “Where prevailing sociological preoccupations with young urban drug dealers in the inner city emphasize spatial circumscription, the Dexter Boys’ sense for the parameters of their community is fundamentally tied to a spatial transgression not simply of the policed order of their neighborhood but of the broader cultural and political divisions between city and suburb in the Detroit metro are. For the Dexter Boys, community identity is connected to a geography that is at once bound by four discrete corners and that crosses and flaunts well-worn social spatial boundaries and borders across metro Detroit.”

            So maybe it’s not even strictly self-awareness/-consciousness that’s troubling; maybe it’s better/smarter to just talk about language, and bemoan Bergmann’s relatively consistent use of phrases that all but beg to be cited in sociology journals. But the problem’s weirder and dicier and harder than that: Bergmann’s making sentences that you know, as you read the book, that the folks he’s documenting couldn’t understand. There’s almost this classist vibe coming off in waves from certain paragraphs and sections, and the feelings it engenders are both frustration and confusion. I’ll fully submit that the frustration might just be my own feeling (I really, really don’t like grad. school writing), but the confusion part seems inescapable.

            One gets confused reading sentences like those because, despite the weird sort of classist and nerdy/grad-school vibe of the sentence, not for a single sentence throughout this book does it seem for a minute that Mr. Luke Bergmann doesn’t completely, deep down, conflictedly love his subjects. Rodney and Dude both clearly try LBergmann’s patience and push credulity sometimes re: stories of incarceration and future plans, but never ever does LB himself seem like anything other than maybe the most patient human you can imagine.

            Aside from the language issue, the book’s a bracing and ravishing and sometimes terrifying read: Bergmann does well fitting the seemingly disconnected variables of turn-of-the-century Detroit into one staggering, damning equation, an equation that seems almost destined to, with its brutal math, keep churning out young, fraught, freakishly-circumscribed lives, lives balanced between stretches lived in shitty houses dealing drugs and stretches in juvenile (and then adult) detention. Bergmann’s done a tremendous and tremendously sad service: he’s been honest and clear about a city’s failures and, most achingly, he’s given those failures voice, name, and story.

Reaper Beatings and Considerations of Voice

by Weston Cutter

            Josh Bazell‘s Beat The Reaper is a quick hit of big fun, an almost startlingly addictive read that, I’m not joking, I began at like midnight, thinking to read just a bit before bed, and instead I just read through to the finish and fell asleep at 5 instead.

            (There’s a whole separate essay-ish thing I’ll never write, about how, for those of us who don’t read mystery books, there’s something deeply disturbing about reading one, because they function like candy—it feels as if you simply pop the book in yr mouth and it dissolves—but there’s [at least for me] this guilt that’s associated with reading them, because I ‘know’ they’re not as ‘serious’ or ‘heavy-duty’ or whatever as, say, whatever the most recent E. Hobsbawm is, but the Hobsbawm makes me yawn and books like Bazell’s induce like a literal opposite of a yawn, they make me unyawn, so it’s all real weird and dicey and best probably just left alone).

            Beat the Reaper‘s protagonist is one Peter Brown, a former mafia hitman (New Jersey) who is now under the Witness Protection agency and who is now a doctor working in the shittiest hospital in Manhattan and who, in the book’s first 50 pages, runs into an old, um, associate, which associate ID’s him, which sets in motion the running Brown spends the rest of the book doing. Of course, there’s actually a way thick backstory, too, about how Brown’s (who used to be Pietro Brnwa) grandparents were shot, which shooting introduced him to the world of mafia shootings, but even Brown’s grandparents are multi-valent and varied: their story gets complicated about two thirds of the way through, a complication that works crazily well, academically, but which slows the story a bit,  think.

            All of this doesn’t even get at the key aspect of the book, which is the first-person narration, the voice of Brown. Because I don’t read enough mysteries to know, I just sort of assume that voice-y stuff is what makes the big-selling books such big-sellers—I presume real stand-outs of mystery like Mosley and Leonard and etc. have just as fleshed-out and recognizable narrators as hard core lit. fiction has, it’s just that the mystery narrator solves stuff instead of just sitting around thinking about stuff. But the hard part about voice-y stuff in any subgenre of fiction (and in nonfiction, too) is that there’s a real, real fine line between charismatically loose and insouciant and gratingly flippant, and I here report that Peter Brown’s narrative voice slips sometimes into the latter territoriy.

            This is all dicey because it’s so, so much a matter of taste, but the thing with Peter Brown is that he talks like an asshole, basically: he’s obviously cut from the tough-guy/great-heart cloth, but he’s so, so much more tough guy that it’s hard to notice any of the subtler colors. Again, this is likely just taste. Why, though, would anyone maybe think Brown’s such an asshole? Aside from treating just about everyone he runs into as if they’re nothing more than potentially useful or potentially energy-sucking elements, and aside from a level of almost snarkily over-the-top condescension (for sure toward the people in the story but also, I’d argue, at times, toward the reader), Brown curses like a motherfucker. Which may seem like a pesky point to argue or make, but 230+ pages of a dude saying ‘shit’ or ‘fuck’ three or more times a page gets just tiring. Again, maybe it’s just me.

            Still, even considering the voice problem (which may or may not be a real ‘problem,’ for people who know this stuff better, plus let me here point out that Mr. Josh Bazell wrote this book while he was a medical intern, meaning the dude was busier and [I'm guessing] more in need/want of over-the-top stimulus [meaning: a narrator with a sailor mouth to beat all sailor mouths] than most of us would ever be able to claim, plus it should be just mentioned that Brown’s aware of his own asshole tendencies, and the novel gets a pretty tremendous boost from the self-awareness running throughout [how self-aware? Dude uses footnotes, which, whatever else they do in fiction, they let any In-The-Know reader know that the narrator's nodding toward dear old departed DFW][though some people—M. Ruff at the NYTimes Sunday Book Review—have sort of different takes]), Beat the Reaper‘s a hell of a lot of good and fast fun, and well worth the lost night of sleep it’ll undoubtedly cause when you’re forced to keep reading way, way passed what you promised yourself.

(Holy crap update: L. DiCaprio + partners have apparently just purchased the rights to the book, meaning you should read this now and then gloat in a year and a half when the movie’s released.)

A Correct Sort of Trespass

by Weston Cutter

            There are so many cool aspects to Jill Bialosky‘s Intruder that it’s sort of tough to know where to begin (yes, there are seven sections, one of which is made of ten ‘sonnets’ [ten beats + 14 lines, but not rhyming and not iambic]; yes most of the poems feature really gorgeous and precise language; yes, just about every poem within’s narrative, and I don’t think there’s a male narrator/subject in the book [not at all a bad thing]; yes, there are bunches of poems in here that feature “the poet” as in “The Poet Contemplates her Calling”). All that said, the coolest aspect is also the most over-arching and most difficult to explicate, and it’s also the one that seems most promising re: understanding the book.

            To some degree, the collection’s title nods a little toward the thematic consideration: the poems in Intruder deal with (or sort of emotionally center around) the idea/sense/feel of intrusion and the feeling of being intruded upon (reading that sounds awfully flat, and the phrase doesn’t come remotely close to capturing the complexity at work throughout). But what’s so, so cool and beautiful about what Bialosky does with these intrusions is that she takes these moments or aspects of instability, of emotional (or geographic, or mental) repositionings, and then, with a deftness and emotional directness that’s goose-bump inducing, the poem examines the new place that the intrusion’s pushed the intruded to. This is all getting way too fraught and theoretical; let’s get concrete. Here’s “The Figure,” the book’s second poem:

 

From a blank canvas sprang a swirl of color and emotion:

a mysterious figure emerging from a dark thicket.

 

Was he beautiful? Did it matter?

For once ugliness could be a form of beauty: an equivalent

 

to prove the soul’s existence.

Dried paint like a second skin on our hands, its oily smells—

 

was it possible to replicate love?

The paintbrush unleashed a river of blood.

 

The day darkened in the room. Time lost track.

We forgot our mothers still in bed, the failure of fathers,

 

secret lives of our sisters. Is it the figure’s mystery

that enthralls or the shock of seeing manifest the passion

 

we longed to hide? Is he our stillborn twin or a lost love

buried under the debris of daily existence? Or the terror

 

of loss itself? Brutal hands, a slash of red.

 

For now, appreciate but ignore (for our purposes here) the beauty of the langauge, or the knock-yr-socks-off dazzle of how seemingly associative lines resonate emotionally (I’m talking here specifically about the fourth stanza), and just get at what’s actually happening in the poem: to horrifically oversimplify, the poem focuses on making out/’seeing’ an image/figure, this “swirl of color and emotion.” Track the ambiguity throughout: is it a person, this emerging thing? Good or bad? Something fundamentally of ‘us’ (our split selves? old lovers?) or ‘other’? And will this figure, if s/he/it is seen clearly, clarify things or muddy them?

            What seems so rad to me is that Bialosky’s taken a moment that seems charged with and headed toward deciphering confusion, and has then in the poem’s middle made something like a fugue of consideration, a space in which possibilities are questioned, an area of associative reaching, and then at the end lets the poem curl back to the initial confusion with new hints/complexity added/woven in. In the best ways, the poem doesn’t ‘do’ or ‘go’ anywhere: there’s no revelatory path offered, no cutely satisfactory ah-hah moment at the end. What Bialosky’s doing, far as I can tell, is enriching confusion: she’s taking moments or experiences of confusion, investigating them, then letting the confusion return, but the confusion that returns at the end has been shifted, enlarged (there’s a  hint of some of what Robert Hass does in these poems).

            Of course, saying that someone’s ‘enriching confusion,’ might not seem like the highest praise, but I’d like to here submit that there’s not all that much more that poetry could—or maybe even should want to—do. In Intruder, the drama that’s most often enacted in the poems is spare, small and quiet. The narrator or subject of the poems is, in some fundamental way, disrupted—she’s interrupted, she’s considering something and thinks of something else—and the poems gain their momentum and heat by how these disruptions color/shift/alter whatever held the narrator’s/subject’s attention initially (again, that’s almost sloppily dumb to write out like that, and I apologize).

            The Intruder of the book’s title is an actual thing/force, too, be appraised. Bialosky, in an interview (or at least in a Q and A that came with the press materials), refuses to name or clarify exactly who or what this Intruder is, but he (it seems a he) seems akin to the Trickster that Hyde wrote a whole book about (for those who haven’t read it, Trickster’s an old myth/image: he’s the figure dancing on the edge between organized, structured culture and chaotic, mapwild Beyond). Bialosky’s done something just resoundingly cool by creating a nebulous character onto whom she can adhere the elements of disruption and intrusion, because if it were a real, fleshed-out character who interrupted her, the narrative flow would almost demand that that character be plumbed and ID’d; there’d be poems that’d look into why this Intruder became the way he is. As is, Bialosky’s let the Intruder be a sense, an echoey and forceful Unknowable: the Intruder is whatever pushes us just off the course of our day-to-day lives, whatever unsettles us enough to have to look anew at our own selves and lives.

            Because that, in the end, is the coolest thing the book offers: this Intruder and his intrusions may not help the subjects in these poems understand things differently, but you can’t read three poems in here without grasping that these intrusions help the subjects of the poems see things differently. In the most basic, complex way, Intruder features subjects who, startled and intruded upon, are forced to see old confusions anew. If that sounds simplistic or elemental, I think the best remedy is probably a two+ hour jag with Jill Bialosky’s Intruder.