forty-two: may 2005

5.30.2005 monday
 John XXIII by Thomas Cahill “He was a real Christian, that one. How did they ever let a man like that get to be pope?” I’ve always been told that there’d been a good pope. Too bad the last few’ve been indifferent or hostile to his ideas.
-Brian
 5.29.2005 sunday
 Don’t Point That Thing at Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli What a great idea to combine Bertie Wooster and Tom Ripley: What’s missing from P.G. Wodehouse is danger and what’s missing from Patricia Highsmith is humor. These adventures of Charlie Mortdecai, a debauched and felonious art dealer, are lighthearted, brutal and poignant.
-Brian
 5.28.2005 saturday
 The Beneficiary by Barbara Konig Absurd predicament: a dull, unassuming man is saved from execution by a martyred priest; the survivor can neither live up to his gift nor return it. Absurder: spare novella begins to lumber, finding its hero just as indigestible as everyone else does.
-Diana
 5.27.2005 friday
 The Gift of Death by Jacques Derrida, Translated by David Wills Derrida tackles religion (without religion) and (again) death to intermittent success. The first half, concerning Patocka's heresies, is as brilliant as anything he's ever done; the second, in which he discusses Kierkegaardian responsibility and the Gospel of Matthew, is a bit lackluster.
-Timothy
 5.26.2005 thursday
 Another Smashed Pinecone by Bernadette Mayer For travel reading, instead of trash, try books that bridge here and there, like life support keeping the body strong-active in space. This is a good one; read “I’m Sorry I Wasn’t Present Really” beside “The Period of the Delaware Water Gap.”
-Jen
 5.25.2005 wednesday
 The Robber Bridegroom by Eudora Welty Welty recasts a Grimm fairytale in a mythical South. Bandits, slaves, treachery, rape and song, combine for a surprisingly funny read; even as Welty appears to argue that it is impossible to write honestly about the South, she crafts a supreme entertainment.
-Timothy
 5.24.2005 tuesday
 A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes A queer book. Unarmed, down-at-heel pirates dress as innocuous ladies ("the faeries"), the better to lure ships to their doom. A ship's monkey nearly dies of ennui; other deaths come harsher. Left to her own devices, little captive Emily makes "narrative noises."
-Diana
 5.23.2005 monday
 Silence in the Snowy Fields by Robert Bly Drenched in silences, slow dark, this praising of human motions and emotions, World registering our presence, World-presence we should register better. Striving for self, for companionship, with constant reevaluation: “What shall we find when we return? […] Trees perhaps, with new leaves.”
-Nate
 5.22.2005 sunday
 Winter Stars by Larry Levis Not as self-fueling as Elegy, mid-career discursive careens that comfortably pinball through insight and observation, an impetuous impetus toward the human, verbal facility and intellectual dexterity in service to something real, poems “so like us” in their “desolation” and “eventual, brief triumph.”
-Nate
 5.20.2005 friday
 Indivisible by Fanny Howe Wouldn’t have imagined a book which begins “I locked my husband in a closet one fine winter morning” would be so humane and attentive to what it means to be living. It takes time figuring out the God-part. The movement is ideal.
-Jen
 5.19.2005 thursday
 Radios by Ronald Johnson After cross outs, this linguistic epic: a struggle-to-knowledge of Man-in-the-Universe nestled in Milton’s Paradise Lost. “My word, my/desires” the same in this recasting, “the proof, invented with design” that man is “of all things made,” that creation is, finally, a human province.
-Nate
 5.17.2005 tuesday
 Landscape with Figures: Nature & Culture in New England by Kent C. Ryden It's tricky: Fall foliage (New England icon) resulted from deforestation. Farmers cleared land. Then farms were abandoned for mill work; pines grew in the fields, then were logged; broadleaf trees they'd shaded and dwarfed now grew tall, grew autumnally, attracted nature lovers.
-Erika
 5.16.2005 monday
 Lovers in the Used World by Gillian Conoley Why, despite hysterical grandiloquence ("talk of a god") does it fascinate? The present moment--hued, sick, interwoven with itself--is, here, bright as a spyglass, and language is precious floatsam, on or above the surface, way out there in a ruminating sea.
-Erika
 5.11.2005 wednesday
 The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers McCullers writes of the grotesque, the estranged, the known outsider, but does so in order to illuminate the despair, entwined with beauty, at the center of all human experience. The title novella is masterful, the other stories less so, but altogether engaging.
-Tim
 5.2.2005 monday
 School of the Arts by Mark Doty As in his previous two volumes, Doty writes almost entirely of sex and retrievers. There is less of the natural world here, and a deeper insistence of the ambiguities of time and loss. "Heaven for Beau/Arden" made me weep in public.
-Tim
 5.1.2005 sunday
 The Bark Tree by Raymond Queneau, Barbara Wright, translator A linguistically brilliant novel, 20 years ahead of its time, abrupt time shifts, puns, deliberately incorrect grammar, mayhem! Cartesian certainty versus absurd discontinuity in a raucous slugfest guaranteed to crosschop your perceptions!
-Mark






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