forty-two: september 2004

9.30.2004 thursday
 The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David Shipler This book breaks my heart. A cross-section of U.S. citizens living in difficult-to-overcome poverty - getting nowhere, operating without a safety net - this socio-economic ethnography should be read by anyone who ever ignorantly griped that all welfare recipients are lazy and deservedly poor.
-Eve
 9.29.2004 wednesday
 Nonconformity by Nelson Algren 1) A love letter to Simone: “I swear I’m smarter than Sartre.”
2) A ransom note to America: “I have your soul. If you want it back, Sinatra must die.”
3) An essay on the guild fellowship of writers and safe crackers.
-Brian
Paradise by A.L. Kennedy Not lovable but intriguing, a Scottish 'Good Morning, Midnight.' Kennedy writes about drink and sex (traditionally boy-book topics) better than most, and if her latest somewhat faulters, there are still gorgeous episodes of disorientation and loss in which the reader is immersed.
-Timothy
 9.28.2004 tuesday
 Oracle Night by Paul Auster Effortless, pure, disappointing in the perfection with which it strings together recognizable phrases thereby maintaining a consistent level of abstraction. The use of long footnotes, while logical, undermines the melody. Doesn't answer what it asks, instead substitutes contrived violence for an ending.
-William
 9.27.2004 monday
 All Around What Empties Out by Linh Dinh A compilation of three chapbooks, poems often hinge on one or many brutal moments. How does language deliver it? Often dumbly—in the smartest sense of the word. Between the need and the inability (both psychic and political) to say, something erupts.
-Jen
 9.26.2004 sunday
 The Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri A lucid, applied Deleuzian-ism. How singularities can act in common. What if you re-thought the analogy between individual body and body politic, along the lines of Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs”? You’d have this book about “our common flesh,” that’s what.
-Diana
 9.25.2004 saturday
 In Our Hearts We Were Giants: The Remarkable Story of the Lilliput Troupe – A Dwarf Family's Survival of the Holocaust by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev The seven Ovitz dwarfs were special "pets" of the dreaded Dr. Mengele. Though the writing falters, this book is unique enough to stand with the best Holocaust nonfiction. The Ovitzes would be worth reading about even if they were of normal stature.
-Becky
Scrapbook by Adrian Tomine Ah, the innocent sexism, commercial illustrations, and discarded unfinished comic strips of an artist too young to publish a scrapbook. Isn't getting paid once for a Coke ad sufficient? Rounded die-cut corners ensure this volume will survive any lingering interest in it.
-William
 9.24.2004 friday
 A Geometry by Anne-Marie Albiach translated by Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop Vertical Effort in White: Memory complicates synaesthesia. Emotion as homonym. A "she" that fades behind a hued skeleton. Symbols that sink into their sufaces. Incantation: Blood, milk, the push-pull of what is between two lovers, or two accounts. Injury's blooming heat.
-Erika
 9.23.2004 thursday
 Véra by Stacy Schiff A lovely biography of Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov. It outlines their remarkable union's history, from affairs to university, Lolita to Ada, shedding light on her roles: secretary, audience, muse, editor, and protector. Schiff's writing is on par with Nabokov's Pnin - delightful.
- Eve
 9.22.2004 wednesday
 Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 by Linda Colley A self-consciously revisionistic account of the rise of everyday nationalistic fervor in Great Britain between the Union of the Parliaments and the Napoleonic Wars. Readable and engrossing, richly illustrated, filled with the stories of people of whom you've never heard. Out-Zinns Zinn.
-Timothy
 9.21.2004 tuesday
 Excelsior! : The Amazing Life of Stan Lee by Stan Lee, George Mair One of the great hacks of the 20th century, as immortal as Edward Stratemeyer. A collection of anecdotes rather than an autobiography. Without supervillains, the story is dull. But the voice is worth recalling: not subtle, but clever; not profound, but humane.
-Brian
 9.20.2004 monday
 The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint by Edward Tufte Reading this book is like breathing air. It made me weep, laugh, and want to send my old boss a copy of Get Your War On, at the time my Dilbert. Powerpoint makes you stupider: now it has finally been mathematically proven.
-William
 9.19.2004 sunday
 A Grammar of the Multitude by Paolo Virno Many current theorists rehabilitate the long de-valued term “multitude” in the conceptual pair the people/the multitude. Among these, Virno is tonic: sober, even grim. He’s best at historicizing Heidegger, showing how post-Fordist labor conditions have changed existential states like fear and anguish.
-Diana
 9.18.2004 saturday
 Da Da Da by Catherine Daly This collection charts a world where coincidences are few and overdetermination the norm. Daly’s poems tease out connotations in everyday language through associational connections that play like musical melodies both familiar yet changed. Your Palm Pilot won’t look the same after this book.
-Jim
Late Empire (Poems) by David Wojahn who lends motion to static scenes, combines the historical with the personal, the scientific with the moving. A Xerox of Bergen-Belsen body piles in a lecture hall of limp students. Every poem beckoning third and fourth reads, calling out to be devoured.
-Stevie
 9.17.2004 friday
 In the Middle of Nowhere by Fanny Howe Compare to Howe's poetry: a familiar mix of hard-as-day, American details and the universals they gloss. Religion, here, smokes cigarettes and shifts uneasily; the most self-assured character is a teenage girl. Bleak, briskly readable, terrifying as any bare tree.
-Erika
 9.16.2004 thursday
 War With the Newts by Karel Capek A dryish alternative history novel posits that mankind discovers an island of outsized amphibians. Newts are captured, bred, and enslaved, but deservedly and eventually rebel. The book storytells via "primary sources." Although certain plot elements made me think, I didn’t finish it.
-Eve
 9.15.2004 wednesday
 Christ on the Rue Jacob by Severo Sarduy Musings on art, sex, scarrification and memory by an alcoholic Cuban Genet. Overwritten and impossible to read at length, yet I found myself wanting to quote every other paragraph. As familiar and distancing as a deceased relative's dream journal. A directionless manifesto.
-Timothy
 9.14.2004 tuesday
 Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood Despite the witty humor and engaging story, this scarecrow, placed in the field of gene-gineering, is ineffective. She clearly shows that playing with the building blocks of life has dire consequences, but by ignoring any discussion of inevitability, the discussion is inert.
-Kenn
Brooklyn Dreams by J.M. DeMatteis & Glenn Barr What a collaboration between Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner might have looked like: DeMatteis’ story of adolescent trauma and cosmic revelation is pompous and bathetic (like Eisner’s work since 1945), but Barr’s art is in the glorious Brooklyn tradition of Mad Magazine.
-Brian
 9.13.2004 monday
 Din of Celestial Birds by Brian Evenson Magical realism gone dark. It’s a rare story in this collection that does not involve some violence or butchery, but with a sharp edge of psychological intent, accumulated history. As the narratives explore human gratuity and senselessness, their prose is stunningly exact.
-Jen
 9.12.2004 sunday
 Room Behavior by Rob Kovitz Roughly 200 unnumbered pages: photos on even pages, citations on odd. Most thematic collections of citations are insipid redactions of Bartlett’s. This one’s erudite, Canadian, and not limited to “great literature.” Will make you want to find Barcus’s Romper Room: An Analysis.
-Diana
 9.11.2004 saturday
 Better Than Sane, by Alison Rose. Oh, Alo, how chic you made tripping around in nightgowns seem. Holed up with your cigarettes and ennui, blithely sleeping through your twenties. Then, poof! A half-cracked "girl" of forty, lurking with New Yorker literati who find you uncanny and brilliant. Why?
-Caroline
 9.10.2004 friday
 The Activist by Rene Gladman Most important book of last year? Irreducible as Beckett. The language expresses alienation from alienation. Precisely vague dreams push against white space, meditative newspaper, meaning laps at its edges. Lucid hallucination, reasonable syntax assures us. Not a book, finally, about the activist.
-William
The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf Woolf’s debut novel, written before her style had broken from the box. English people in South America; a play of perspectives. Certain brilliant moments, but not as wholly moving as her other novels— a better introduction to her work would be Orlando.
-Stevie
 9.9.2004 thursday
 Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite Early cyberfiction meets slash erotica in this dark horror novel. The sole survivor of a family double murder/suicide struggles with his past and father’s legacy. Main characters are richly fleshed-out, but paraded amid two-dimensional personifications of homophobia and other Bible Belt-ish sins.
-Eve
 9.8.2004 wednesday
 Timoleon Vieta Come Home by Dan Rhodes Somewhere between a short-story collection, an album of someone-else's photos and a profane Stations of the Cross, Rhodes's first novel is tragic without ever being unfamiliar. Crisp writing, clear observation and a lovable (mutt) hero make this not unlike a neighbour's death.
-Timothy
 9.7.2004 tuesday
 The Beggar’s Shore by Zak Mucha Algren 40 years later and 30 blocks north. A homeless kid drifts through Uptown, and ends up in a Chicago limbo between gray lake and gray sky. No redemption, not even for McKnuckle. “I never thought I’d get to be 21 anyway.”
-Brian
 9.6.2004 monday
 Vanishing Point by David Markson
Evidence supporting the following missing claims:
Artists die.
Artists know each other.
Artists get unfair reviews, often from one another.
Artists go to war, are antisemites.
Beethoven was deaf.
Artists get institutionalized.
Scientists too. Philosophers, Greeks and Romans.
But not necessarily filmmakers.
-William
 9.5.2004 sunday
 The Museum of Love by Steve Weiner Weiner studied animation with the Brothers Quay; it shows. Each chapter ends in a grotesque, gimcrack "museum." Weiner's black humor's been lauded, but he excels as technician of the sentence. Short sentences that mean simply in a narrative that might skid anywhere,
-Diana
 9.4.2004 saturday
 The Physiognomy by Jeffrey Ford In this dystopia, one’s face determines one’s worth. The Physiognomist surgically makes a woman’s face a weapon. He’s sentenced to die, but the Master needs an ally and rescues him. Plot twists. Brilliant writing. More than I can discuss here. Read it!
-Becky
 9.3.2004 friday
 The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan Ted Berrigan wrote The Sonnets as though following the same recipe again and again, never being able to read all the ingredients at once. Lines and their contexts—stolen, invented, recycled—are a rag rug woven of ladyfriends, dreams, art, and occasionally “pills."
-Erika
 9.2.2004 thursday
 Lewis and Clark: Doctors in the Wilderness by Bruce C. Paton, MD Released and wistfully promoted by the publisher for the bicentennial, this book describes treatments for diseases and injuries germane to the era and journey. It ends all too abruptly, though, and the information seems somewhat disorganized, thrown at the reader in clumps.
- Eve
 9.1.2004 wednesday
 The Scar by China Mieville Modern fantasy novels are derivative and irritatingly boring. This is not. Mieville's Bas-Lag is without precedent, an wholly new world which he never explains but lets develop in unexpected ways. Nightmare-inducing, stomach-churning and intoxicating, without sentimentality. Wins points for being entirely unfilmable.
-Timothy


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